C. Litka's Blog, page 54

The Prisoner of Cimlye - Coming Soon!

The Prisoner of Cimlye
C. Litka

The best laid plans “gang aft agley” as Robert Burns noted.
As did the hopes of Sella, Lessie, the Meys, and Taef Lang once they went their separate ways to reveal the secret of Redoubt Island to their respective nations.
Was Lieutenant Taef Lang able to explain to his commanding officer that duty required him to sail the Tropic Sea for several months with two beautiful girls? Did Sella and Lessie manage to convince their Grandfather to forgive them, and welcome the new age Redoubt Island promised? How did the Meys fare with their government? And what about that powerful premonition Taef experienced, when Lessie tentatively waved goodbye? Discover the answers to these questions and more in The Prisoner of Cimlye, A Romance of the Tropic Sea.
The Prisoner of Cimlye is a short novel of some 52,600 words which serves as an epilogue to Sailing to Redoubt. It takes up the story six months later and ties up the many loose threads left dangling at the end of Sailing to Redoubt. And then looks ahead to their lives after Redoubt Island.
C. Litka writes old fashioned novels with modern sensibilities, humor, and romance. He spins tales of adventure, mystery, and travel set in richly imagined worlds, featuring casts of colorful, fully realized characters. If you seek to escape your everyday life for a few hours, you will not find better company, nor more wonderful worlds to travel and explore, than in the novels of C. Litka.
Look for the release of The Prisoner of Cimlye in mid to late April 2020, exact date to be determined. The ebook version will be free*, as always!
*Except, perhaps on Amazon. $.99 if they choose not to price match their competitors 

Free Books for these Pandemic Days

I write lighthearted adventure stories. My stories feature characters that are deeper than cardboard cutouts, friendships, romance, and shared adventures set in rich, exotic worlds. And most of them are long stories, making them perfect stories for these science-fiction, pandemic times that finds many of us confined to our homes. And my ebooks are always free, world wide, at the ebook stores of Smashwords (which offers a mobi version that can be sideloaded and read on kindles), Apple, B & N, Kobo, and the Google Play Store. I must put a price on them for Amazon, but Amazon has been (mostly) good in price matching my free price in its US store. In its non-US stores they may offer one of my ebooks for free, but as I said, the mobi versions for kindles are free from Smashwords.

I expect to get paid for any work I do. (Though I avoid work for many years.) But daydreaming up my stories and setting them down in words is fun. And since writing is its own reward for me, I am more than happy just to share my fun with any reader with a taste in books similar to mine. That is why my ebooks are free, every day, in good times and bad.

My 2020 novel, The Prisoner of Cimlye is an epilogue to Sailing to Redoubt. In this short novel we return to Taef Lang the Raah twins, Sella and Liessie, six months after the end of Sailing to Redoubt. We learn what happened to Taef and the girls upon their return, and follow them as they find their way into their post Redoubt Island lives. The ebook is on track for a release in the early part of May 2020, if all continues to go well. I will post the exact date once the book nears the end of its proofreading process. Stay tuned.

And to everyone - take care!

The Prisoner of Cimlye Cover

This is the cover for my 2020 novel, The Prisoner of Cimlye. The story is an epilogue, rather than a full sequel, to my last novel, Sailing To Redoubt. Though I left a lot of threads dangling at the end of that story, I had hoped tie them up one day with a sequel since I had a great deal of fun with those characters. But the more I thought about a sequel, the more I came to realized that I could not write a realistic story that would  rival their adventures in Sailing to Redoubt. However, there remained a small story that I could, and needed to tell. This is that story. It is a shortish novel at around 51,000 words in its second draft. I expect to release it in May 2020. Stay turned for further updates.

The Prisoner of Cimlye

I am happy, and much relieved, to be able to announce that I have in hand the first draft of my next story, The Prisoner of Cimlye.
I set out on 1 February to get the first draft written by 29 February, and I made my deadline with more than an hour to spare. As I have noted in this blog, it has been a struggle for me to come up with a story that I liked enough to finish, so I am happy to have actually finished one.
I was able to achieve this remarkable feat of writing a story in a short month, not by some superhuman effort, but by the fact that I had set out to write a novella length story – of some 30,000 to 40,000 words in length. The current word count of the first draft is a little under 42,000 words, which actually puts it into the novel category. Be that as it may, it is a short novel, less than half the usual length of my stand alone stories, though I expect the word count will grow to around 45,000 words before it is all finished. Instead of cut, cut, cut like you’re supposed to do, I flesh out the scenes with the stage dressing that I don’t bother with the first pass through.
The Prisoner of Cimlye is an epilogue to Sailing To Redoubt. It is not ambitious enough to be called a sequel. It is just a story that ties up most of those loose ends that I left dangling at the end of Sailing to Redoubt.
I tell stories about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary adventures. I draw the story to a close when those extraordinary adventures reach their conclusion, and the characters move on to a more ordinary life. While I leave the possibility open for another set of adventures, they are optional. I would’ve liked to write a full sequel to Sailing To Redoubt someday, since I loved the characters. However, I came to feel that it would be impossible to write a story that would even equal what they discovered in Sailing To Redoubt. And since I like to keep my stories grounded in reality, I couldn’t bring myself to have Taef Lang find a lost civilization every time he turned around, like his hero Zar Lada. Plus, when I looked to the sisters Raah and Lang’s future, I didn’t see more sweeping adventures. Which is not to say their lives would be uneventful, but I would not be able to make them into an adventure story.
Still, I had all those loose ends that I had hoped to tie up some day. So I decided just to write a story that did just that. No pirates, storms, or impossible villains, just a story that takes up their lives six months after the end of Sailing to Redoubt. In it I recount what had happened to them since the end of that story, and what needs to be done to start their new lives. It is a quiet story, far closer to the literary end of the scale than to the adventure book end. I rather doubt that this is the sequel most readers would have chosen, but it is the one you’ll get, if all continues to go well. And if it does, expect to see it out sometime in May, 2020. Stay tuned for more updates.

The Pirates of Amazon

As I noted in the previous post, a week or so ago at this posting, I discovered that someone had decided to try to make money with two of my books on Amazon (good luck with that!) in a very strange and silly way. Here is that story in full. I hope.
I would have never known about this person’s piracy except that for some reason that I can’t explain, they kept my name and title on the two books, A Summer in Amber and The Lost Star’s Sea. Because they did, on 22 Feb. they appeared alongside my legitimate books on my Author Page on Amazon. Going to the pirated books product pages, I found that they had been uploaded to Amazon on 19 Feb.
The pirates, however, had put on new, and bad, covers on the books, which annoyed me greatly. Using the “look inside” feature on the product page, one could see that this new cover was simply added on over the original cover, so that there were now two covers, and everything else about my book was the same, including the copyright info that identified the book as the Obooko (a free book site) version of the book. They even used my Amazon blurb for their own listing. I contacted Amazon, who, the next day, directed me to a special page for copyright violations.I filed my complaint.
I waited patiently for action or a response. At some point during the week, the pirated A Summer in Amber version disappeared from Amazon, whether by the actions of Amazon or by the pirates, I can't say. Perhaps the first person I had contacted at Amazon had acted without informing me of it, though that sounds unlikely. During this week, The Lost Star’s Sea price varied – it had no sales – and then went to free.
The affair came to a head on Friday, 28 Feb. Friday morning, The Lost Star’s Seanow had another new cover, a new title The Lost Star, and a new “author.” However, if you used the “look inside” feature, this new cover was just added on to the two covers it had before, making it a third cover, and nothing else on the inside was changed. Nothing, except the blurb, which was now just a random section of the story cut and pasted onto the blurb section of the listing. The Lost Star was still on the inside, The Lost Star’s Sea by C. Litka. One really has to wonder just what they were thinking.
Later Friday morning Amazon contacted me again for more information, which I provided. But when I looked again at the now The Lost Star, I found that the pirates had finally eliminated all but the new cover, and all the identifying information, adding only some nonsense page about legal limitations or some such thing – the same page they had added to a second, nonfiction business book that they had apparently pirated as well. I updated this information to Amazon.
I received two emails from Amazon on Friday afternoon. The first said that I would need to supply them with examples of the offending text, and that they would supply my email address to the pirates in order for them to respond, which annoyed me greatly, since what was going on was obvious – at least up to the final alteration which eliminated the clearly identifying information. However a second email had been sent, luckily before I read both, which said that the offending version had been pulled from the store, which was, indeed, the case. They did not, however, remove the other book these pirates had listed. Crime seems to go unpunished on Amazon. 
I should add that Goodreads, which is owned by Amazon picked up both of these pirate versions and listed with my legitimate books. I am trying to get them removed. We’ll see.
My take away from this affair is that anything goes on Amazon. The fact that the pirates could put up such a half-ass product with two covers, an ill formatted book – it showed hard page breaks from the likely PDF version of the book they used – of a book and blurb that was word for word what was already on sale on Amazon is pretty telling. If these pirates had simply uploaded their final version first – the one with a different title and author – I would never have known that they had done so. The fact is that if one posts a digital version of anything on the web, it will be pirated, and you might as well not lose any sleep over it. However, Amazon is not the web, it is a store owned by one of the richest people on the planet, and he’s seems to be simply unwilling to spend the money to keep his store clean. 
There could be dozens of pirates trying to make money off of my work, and, as I said, good luck with that. But what really annoyed me about this affair is that these pirates were putting out an inferior version of my product that had my name on it. I might loose sleep over that.
Hopefully the affair is at an end.

Fraud Alert

Lo! When I went to look at my listings on Amazon this morning, what should I find, but that two extra editions of my books, A Summer in Amber, and The Lost Star's Sea, are somehow available. Books that I did not upload or authorize. And they're enrolled in Kindle Unlimited as well, which, seeing that I'm not exclusively on Amazon would get me into trouble with Amazon. I have contacted Amazon and we'll see what results.

Now, I have no problem with people posting my books without obtaining my permission, as long as they are not trying to make money off of the books. There are plenty of sites that offer my books for free and I'm cool with that. It is only when someone tries to make money off of my work, that I object.

New Covers for 2020

Just for shits and giggles, and with time on my hand, I decided to work up new covers for my books. Last time around I was looking to create a consistent look for branding, and since my stories are pretty old fashioned, I wanted to give the covers a rather old fashioned look. And, well, I should also mention that I didn't want to spend any money on them, so I use my own artwork and work them up in Gimp, using Gimp provided fonts.


This time around, I'm looking to give the books a more contemporary, literary, and print published look with bolder text and brighter colors. They are not the type of covers best selling genre ebooks boast. In the fast lane of ebook sales one wants one's covers to look just like all the covers of all the other best selling books. I didn't care to do this for, well, as I mentioned, I don't care to spend money on them.That said, I also really don't like the stock photo montages that constitute a lot of the most popular books in their genres. As I said, I'm shooting for a more literary look to my books.


These are the current versions of the new covers. They are subject to change, and depending on sales, may be dropped after a month or so. In any event, I will be changing the covers over on the 1st of February 2020. These changes will apply only to the ebooks, though I could, depending upon results, develop a back cover and change the paper covers as well. But given their sales, it would be a lot of work that would simply make my paper books even more collectible than they already are.


I used the same artwork for A Summer in Amber, though without the people that were added in Gimp for the cover. I also used the same artwork for The Bright Black Sea, though I made fairly significant modifications. I eliminated the planet, changed colors of some of the nebula, and smoothed things out, adding a lot more glow to get that black and bright sea look. I used new artwork for Some Day Days -- mostly for its bright colors and rather graphic look.


For The Lost Star's Sea I used different art work. I had done a series of paintings depicting something like the Pella, some years ago, and I decided to use one of those paintings instead, adding a bit of black outline to it. I also changed the cover for Beneath The Lanterns. It really has nothing to do with the story, but I think it works for creating the mood I want. Lanterns imply darkness, and though this is not strictly true in the story, I think it works for the cover -- dark and light.


And, as you can see, I also changed the artwork for Sailing to Redoubt. This was a rather sketchy painting of a sailing ship, that I photographed, and ended up painting over. However, I still have the photo I took of it, and by tilting it and adding some black outline in Gimp, ended up with a fairly nice, if abstract image of a ship. Again, it does not really correspond to any ship in the story, but it works to set a nautical mood.

Covers are not a science. There is a general belief that covers sell books -- and to some extent this is certainly true. But what covers sell? For some readers who are looking for stories just like the last one they read, a cover that looks just like the last one they read may well make them more willing to give the new books a try. I don't sell to those readers, so that isn't a concern for me. I sell books to people who try one of my books, like what the find, and try the rest of my stories. I think that by casting a wide net -- writing books in a variety of genre and now, using a set of different covers to attract a wider spectrum of readers, these covers might work for me. Or not. As I said, it's not a science. But I'll give them a few months to see if there will be any significant change in sales. Truthfully, I rather doubt it. But, as I said, I had time on my hands.

However, 1 February I am starting my 2020 story (yet again). This time I'm only shooting for a novella -- 30K to 50K words that will be a sequel of sorts, well, more of an epilogue, to one of my existing stories. I hope to have the first draft written by the end of the month, and the book out by May 2020. But as I have found out, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. So we'll see.

The Whimsy of Algorithms

Self-published authors are hostages of algorithms. Who and how many potential readers get to see one’s book in any online bookstore is determined by a secret cabal of algorithms operating mysteriously in the darkness behind the bright digital storefront of these online bookstores. There are books written that purport to teach self-published authors how to beguile these algorithms to favor them. And, of course, you can bribe them with folding money in the form of advertising.
Now, I can’t say how well, if at all, these methods of manipulation work, since I am content to let them work their magic however they care to. But since I do nothing to manipulate them, I can show them in operation.
Let’s start with the Case of the Mysterious Abrupt Slump in my Smashwords sales, as illustrated in the chart below. I wish I had taken a screen shot of it last year so you could see how the release of Beneath the Lanterns affected my sales, and then the redesign of the Smashwords bookstore affected them, but both those events are now off the chart. I’ll use sales figures instead, but first the chart.



 The chart below is of monthly sales that extends beyond the daily sales chart above.
Sales July 2018 -- Dec 2019

From the chart you can see that we were plugging along at about 140 - 150 copies a month until September 2018 when the release of Beneath the Lanterns goosed sales, though by November that boost as fading. The January 1st update on Smashwords reversed that slide, and the release in March 2019 of Sailing to Redoubt more than doubled my previous sales all the way to October, when it was abruptly halved once again – as illustrated by the chart. Sales boosts across the board with a new release is explainable. The difference between my July 2018 sales and my Oct 2019 sales may be explained by having two extra books to sell. But the large and lasting boost following the publication of Sailing to Redoubt is much harder to explain. Two extra books would account for some of the rise, but not all. And the sales of Sailing to Redoubt are nowhere near explaining the elevated sales, since The Bright Black Sea continued to be my best seller. But the most mysterious workings of algorithms is the abrupt drop in sales on the 6th of October 2019. I can't explain that. I have to believe that it was a change in Smashwords' algorithms in how they listed books in their store.
My second example of the whimsy of algorithms is, The Mysterious Affair of December 30th, which occurred on Amazon at the end of December, as illustrated by the chart below.

That first jump in sales was on Boxing Day (Dec 26th) of 59 copies sold, no doubt because the proud new owners of Kindles and Fire Tabs were looking to fill their new devices with inexpensive content. Sales then, naturally, tapered off until, for some mysterious reason, we have that big sales jump, of some 264 books sold on the 30th of Dec. The bulk of those sales came from the sale of The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star’s Sea. At that point The Bright Black Sea was the #5 best seller on the free space opera bestseller chart and in the low 600's in all of the free books on Amazon. Since I did nothing to boost sales, whatever caused that jump in sales was Amazon’s doing. And since I have no friends in Amazon, it must have been the work of those mysterious algorithms.  

Since I'm not writing...

...What am I doing to pass the time? Well, I’m touring the world – virtually – from the cab of trains. There are many, many ways of wasting time, and I suppose watching videos taken from the driver’s cab of trains on YouTube is one rather strange way. But I think it is better than playing solitaire on the computer. That, at any rate, is my story, and I’m sticking with it.
I’ve only discovered the joys of train driving, oh, about three months ago or so. And yet, I can’t remember how I came to discover the addictive joy of watching the countryside – or the embankments, trees, or tunnels, flow by. I think I watched a video on British steam trains, and that led to another, and eventually to train rides across Great Britain. You might be amazed at how many such rides have been recorded, and in these days, in 4K by GoPro cameras.
As I said, it is strangely addictive – the rails always stretching on ahead, and you never know what the next bend will reveal. I’ve also be come quite the expert at reading the signals that control the trains that run so frequently.
As I said, I started in Britain, and below is the map of the British Rail System, with the routes in yellow being the ones that I have traveled in the driver’s cab. I have to say that some parts of England are rather murky… But perhaps that is due to the age of the video and the cameras used…
(Map credit: https://www.thetrainline.com/train-companies/national-rail/national-rail-map)
I think that I may have traveled every route currently available to be viewed. But you never know what might turn up on my YouTube home page..
If you are interested in seeing Britain by train, the YouTube channel to start with is Don Coffey’s:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8LH7xMAyCSqpClAvTHwJRw/videos
There are others that cover more than the English midlands, but his are high quality and include a lot of interesting information on the Victorian Engineering that went into making the British rail system, and how it works.
After covering all of Britain that I could, I moved on to Switzerland. As you can see from the map below, I’ve seen a lot of Switzerland. Even without taking into account the Alps, Switzerland and its rail system is very different than Britain’s. It is a much smaller system, and without all the Victorian era overhead that British rail has to deal with, it seems a much more modern system. And some of the videos of trains in the Alps are breathtaking, even if you’re not addicted to cab ride videos.
(Map credit: http://bueker.net/trainspotting/map.php?file=maps/switzerland/switzerland.gif )
There are two very good, high quality sources for cab ride videos through Switzerland:https://www.youtube.com/user/lorirocks777/videoshttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRYl1C12IXPs2Uo_25OdrPA/videosI highly recommend both of them.
I did ride on several French and German high speed trains and one Swedish train. There do not seem to be many German train rides, but I will have to return to France some day. 
There are a lot of cab ride videos on Norwegian trains, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/user/HinduCowGirl/videosI have only briefly sampled one. The reason I have not explored Norway more is that because of all the mountains, there are many, many, tunnels needed to run trains through that breathtaking countryside. At least that was my impression based on my one trip that there. It seemed that there were more tunnels than breathtaking views. (Tunnels are pretty boring.) I’ll have to return some day to see it that is true on all the trips.
Anyway, now I’ve move on to a very different country: Japan. Japan has plenty of mountains and breathtaking views, but it is also very different as well. At least in the south of Japan, you are rarely out of a city/town/village unless you are in some narrow mountain pass. It is interesting to see all the cultural differences between these countries that you can note even from the front window of a train.
I’m currently exploring the videos from these channels: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCikfKNNx-Poh6N_m6WJ2O3Q/videoshttps://www.youtube.com/user/HKASAMA/videoshttps://www.youtube.com/user/ato5kgyasetaito/videos
I have a lot of places yet to visit, as you can see from my map below. Many of them are on slow commuter trains, but you get to enjoy the cherry blossoms that abound in the spring. I don't think there are any videos from the cabs of Japan's highspeed trains, but I have a feeling they's be pretty boring, as they generally run straight -- through hills and over valleys and have walls on each side. Luckily I can cut and paste the Japanese descriptions into Google Translate to get an idea of where I’m going.
(Map credit: https://www.japan-experience.com/taking-the-train-japan )

It Seems that...

...Sailing to Redoubt is now $.99 in Amazon.com's store. Apparently they have decided to stop price matching Sailing to Redoubt's $.00 price in all the other ebook stores. I need to put a list price on my books in Amazon, and they then have the option to match their competitor's prices, or not. I guess they're trying to see if they can make a little money off of my work. Good luck with that! We'll see how long this lasts.