M. Jonathan Jones's Blog: Spilt ink, page 6
May 16, 2017
Kratzenfels is Go!
Phew! My new book, The Outlaws of Kratzenfels, is out on time. Kind of.
The final furlong always feels a good deal 'furlonger' than any of the others, and this has been no exception. A self-publishing ordeal by pixel.
The Kindle version is out and so is the paperback: links here. I even have some positive reviews - thanks so much for those, it's great to know that the book is appreciated. I'll be running a Goodreads Giveaway of 5 signed copies from June 1st-June 15th, along with more Kindle freebies June 1st-June 3rd, so look out for those.
So, it's done. Book number three, and my first foray into the fantasy-steampunk world of Kratzenfels. The book originated as a kind of 'steampunk fairytale', though not a steampunk retelling of an existing fairytale; more the kind of fairytale that people would read or listen to in a steampunk version of our own world (a bit like my Woodcutter and the War-walker short story from May 2016). But The Outlaws of Kratzenfels has become more than that.
There is steampunk in it, of course, and fantasy, the supernatural, but the world of Kratzenfels has grown. Fairytales say little about history or geography - there is just a King or Queen of some land or other, at some time - but to write a book/novella length story, I found I had to have an idea about names, places, and events. So the continent of Elbora was born, a distorted 18th-century exclusively Old World Eurasia. Not a parallel world in any sense, or an alternative history, but a different place entirely.
It's been a lot of fun and I hope that there will be more to come in future. Next stop, Tethys, and Aqua Incognita, the sequel to Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves.
The final furlong always feels a good deal 'furlonger' than any of the others, and this has been no exception. A self-publishing ordeal by pixel.
The Kindle version is out and so is the paperback: links here. I even have some positive reviews - thanks so much for those, it's great to know that the book is appreciated. I'll be running a Goodreads Giveaway of 5 signed copies from June 1st-June 15th, along with more Kindle freebies June 1st-June 3rd, so look out for those.
So, it's done. Book number three, and my first foray into the fantasy-steampunk world of Kratzenfels. The book originated as a kind of 'steampunk fairytale', though not a steampunk retelling of an existing fairytale; more the kind of fairytale that people would read or listen to in a steampunk version of our own world (a bit like my Woodcutter and the War-walker short story from May 2016). But The Outlaws of Kratzenfels has become more than that.
There is steampunk in it, of course, and fantasy, the supernatural, but the world of Kratzenfels has grown. Fairytales say little about history or geography - there is just a King or Queen of some land or other, at some time - but to write a book/novella length story, I found I had to have an idea about names, places, and events. So the continent of Elbora was born, a distorted 18th-century exclusively Old World Eurasia. Not a parallel world in any sense, or an alternative history, but a different place entirely.
It's been a lot of fun and I hope that there will be more to come in future. Next stop, Tethys, and Aqua Incognita, the sequel to Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves.
March 23, 2017
The Outlaws are coming...
Quick preview of possible blurb for my next book*, The Outlaws of Kratzenfels (a steampunk fairtyale):
The Kingdom of Kratzenfels has fallen. King Sigmund is dead, and the Order of the Iron Knights has won the war of machines against magic. War-walkers and spider-wights roam the land, spreading terror wherever they go. The Count von Falkenhorst, the leader of the Iron Knights, needs one thing to make his victory complete: the hand of the Princess Helda in marriage. But Helda, daughter of King Sigmund and the witch-queen Raggana, has other ideas…
Projected publication date: May 16th 2017 (fingers crossed!)
(* Yes, my next book was supposed to be Aqua Incognita, the sequel to Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves, but you know how things are... I will return to Tethys in June)
LATEST NEWS (May 13th 2017)
The Countdown to Kratzenfels has started!
The cover is done and the book is PDFd and just needs one final read-through. I'm hoping to publish it on Tuesday (May 16th).
The Kingdom of Kratzenfels has fallen. King Sigmund is dead, and the Order of the Iron Knights has won the war of machines against magic. War-walkers and spider-wights roam the land, spreading terror wherever they go. The Count von Falkenhorst, the leader of the Iron Knights, needs one thing to make his victory complete: the hand of the Princess Helda in marriage. But Helda, daughter of King Sigmund and the witch-queen Raggana, has other ideas…
Projected publication date: May 16th 2017 (fingers crossed!)
(* Yes, my next book was supposed to be Aqua Incognita, the sequel to Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves, but you know how things are... I will return to Tethys in June)
LATEST NEWS (May 13th 2017)
The Countdown to Kratzenfels has started!
The cover is done and the book is PDFd and just needs one final read-through. I'm hoping to publish it on Tuesday (May 16th).
March 12, 2017
Cause for celebration
On the 13th March 2017, it will be exactly ONE YEAR since my books Race the Red Horizon: the Flight of the Pteronaut and Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves were published!
To celebrate, the prices for print copies will be reduced* until April 8th (or thereabouts: depends when Amazon make the change).
Race the Red Horizon: the Flight of the Pteronaut is now $6.22 (US), £5.17, €5.80 (+tax) (240 pages).
Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves is now $8.62 (US), £7.17, €8.20 (+ tax) (360 pages).
I'm lucky enough to have had a couple of reviews already, all either 5 or 4 stars. If you don't want to risk your hard-earnt cash, Kindle copies will be free for a few days at the beginning of April.
*This is the zero-royalty option.
To celebrate, the prices for print copies will be reduced* until April 8th (or thereabouts: depends when Amazon make the change).
Race the Red Horizon: the Flight of the Pteronaut is now $6.22 (US), £5.17, €5.80 (+tax) (240 pages).
Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves is now $8.62 (US), £7.17, €8.20 (+ tax) (360 pages).
I'm lucky enough to have had a couple of reviews already, all either 5 or 4 stars. If you don't want to risk your hard-earnt cash, Kindle copies will be free for a few days at the beginning of April.
*This is the zero-royalty option.
February 20, 2017
FREE Print Copies of Race the Red Horizon!
First 20 entrants to follow me on Amazon will receive a FREE print copy of Race the Red Horizon: the Flight of the Pteronaut. Link is here.
No purchase necessary. I'm afraid at the present time, Amazon Giveaways are open to US residents aged 18+ only.
Best of luck!
M. Jonathan Jones
No purchase necessary. I'm afraid at the present time, Amazon Giveaways are open to US residents aged 18+ only.
Best of luck!
M. Jonathan Jones
January 16, 2017
Night of the Crawler
I'm running a free giveaway of my book Race the Red Horizon: the Flight of the Pteronaut on Kindle until Jan 18th 2017. This is something of a sample, but it's more than that - it's a previously unpublished prologue that I wrote this very morning. Enjoy.
IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS CHAOS.
A blinding blizzard of red dust, scattered high and wide by the swirling winds. It consumed everything. Sight. Sound. Even space itself, robbing direction and orientation of any meaning. There was nothing else anywhere. An infinity of choking sand.
And then suddenly there was the Crawler.
The blizzard battered its high metal flanks. A billion tiny blows bombarded the storm-shields. Razor-sharp grains scored furrows into the Crawler’s steel hide, each one a mere micron-deep. Gram by gram they tried to carry the Crawler away, polishing its metal body to shining silver. On the lower tiers, gravel rattled, punching pin-prick craters into the Crawler’s armour. Even silver streams of static stung it, whipped out of the buzzing air.
It made no difference. The Crawler shouldered aside every salvo. It flattened the screaming sand beneath its massive tracks, taming it and leaving upon it the mark of its passing. Deep scars branded the deserts deep, and for a few moments they were conquered. But always the deserts rose up again in the Crawler’s wake, as ancient and unstoppable as the Crawler was itself.
The elements raged. Their labours shaped the landscape, but here was one mountain that they could not move aside. The deserts could change the world, but they could not stop the Crawler.
Huddling inside its dark spaces, rocked by the storm’s lullaby, the Crawler’s drones waited. They rested while they could. The Crawler would soon have need of them – it was on the hunt.
The storm was an unpredictable foe. For every dune that it built, another was destroyed. It turned the sands inside-out with its fury, and across the howling wastes there were new treasures to be wrested from the deserts' grip.
Radar was useless. Laser-light flickered through the seething air for a few feet and no more. Microwaves. Ultrasound. Infra-red. All were turned aside. But the Crawler had long ago learnt how to see through the storm. As it prowled through the chaos, its sensors swept from side to side, beating time with the clanking of its tracks. Blurred images from a dozen different sources were collected. Parallax and polarity were shifted. Shapes appeared, drawn indistinctly where the dust-grains slowed or changed direction. Edges glimmered, cut bright as the wind hurried the streaming sand unhindered. This was not the far-sight that the Crawler had on a clear day, but it was enough to hunt by.
Stranded out on the open plains, something else resisted the elements. The Crawler’s attention rested upon it. It saw the stranded shape more clearly as its tracks carried it along. Not the wind-carved remains of some boulder. A smooth and regular shape. A cylinder. Perfectly rounded, its diameter constant along its length.
The Crawler’s tracks slewed around in their sockets and it changed direction.
As the resolution of the Crawler’s sensors sharpened, the cylinder’s outline blurred unexpectedly. The Crawler considered this sudden loss of certainty. The edges were moving. The cylinder was solid but not rigid, its soft sides were vibrating in the wailing wind.
Such an object was unknown to the Crawler. The sands flattened anything that was not rigid as they heaped their weight upon it. This thing, this soft-sided cylinder, had not been uncovered by the shifting deserts – it had settled upon their surface.
Desire flared deep within the Crawler’s circuits. Its fusion furnaces burned bright. The storm could not hold it back, but its drones were weak. They were frail flesh and blood, exquisitely intricate, made for close and careful work. The drones could do things that the Crawler could not, but the toxic air and the wind and the freezing cold of night could kill them. The Crawler must get closer to its prize, as close as it could before it sent them out.
The Crawler thundered to a stop beside the cylinder, and its bulk cast a protective shadow. The storm was held back. The Crawler watched as its steel flanks opened. Gangplanks were lowered. A dozen identical drones, distinguished only by the charms and symbols on their suits, crept out. Their torch-beams cut through the night, and the dancing lights fell upon the cylinder.
The cylinder swayed in what was left of the wind. Dappled black and red, covered with webbed hexagons, its sides were stretched tight to keep it stable.
But what was it? And where had it come from?
M. Jonathan Jones, 16.01.2017
IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS CHAOS.
A blinding blizzard of red dust, scattered high and wide by the swirling winds. It consumed everything. Sight. Sound. Even space itself, robbing direction and orientation of any meaning. There was nothing else anywhere. An infinity of choking sand.
And then suddenly there was the Crawler.
The blizzard battered its high metal flanks. A billion tiny blows bombarded the storm-shields. Razor-sharp grains scored furrows into the Crawler’s steel hide, each one a mere micron-deep. Gram by gram they tried to carry the Crawler away, polishing its metal body to shining silver. On the lower tiers, gravel rattled, punching pin-prick craters into the Crawler’s armour. Even silver streams of static stung it, whipped out of the buzzing air.
It made no difference. The Crawler shouldered aside every salvo. It flattened the screaming sand beneath its massive tracks, taming it and leaving upon it the mark of its passing. Deep scars branded the deserts deep, and for a few moments they were conquered. But always the deserts rose up again in the Crawler’s wake, as ancient and unstoppable as the Crawler was itself.
The elements raged. Their labours shaped the landscape, but here was one mountain that they could not move aside. The deserts could change the world, but they could not stop the Crawler.
Huddling inside its dark spaces, rocked by the storm’s lullaby, the Crawler’s drones waited. They rested while they could. The Crawler would soon have need of them – it was on the hunt.
The storm was an unpredictable foe. For every dune that it built, another was destroyed. It turned the sands inside-out with its fury, and across the howling wastes there were new treasures to be wrested from the deserts' grip.
Radar was useless. Laser-light flickered through the seething air for a few feet and no more. Microwaves. Ultrasound. Infra-red. All were turned aside. But the Crawler had long ago learnt how to see through the storm. As it prowled through the chaos, its sensors swept from side to side, beating time with the clanking of its tracks. Blurred images from a dozen different sources were collected. Parallax and polarity were shifted. Shapes appeared, drawn indistinctly where the dust-grains slowed or changed direction. Edges glimmered, cut bright as the wind hurried the streaming sand unhindered. This was not the far-sight that the Crawler had on a clear day, but it was enough to hunt by.
Stranded out on the open plains, something else resisted the elements. The Crawler’s attention rested upon it. It saw the stranded shape more clearly as its tracks carried it along. Not the wind-carved remains of some boulder. A smooth and regular shape. A cylinder. Perfectly rounded, its diameter constant along its length.
The Crawler’s tracks slewed around in their sockets and it changed direction.
As the resolution of the Crawler’s sensors sharpened, the cylinder’s outline blurred unexpectedly. The Crawler considered this sudden loss of certainty. The edges were moving. The cylinder was solid but not rigid, its soft sides were vibrating in the wailing wind.
Such an object was unknown to the Crawler. The sands flattened anything that was not rigid as they heaped their weight upon it. This thing, this soft-sided cylinder, had not been uncovered by the shifting deserts – it had settled upon their surface.
Desire flared deep within the Crawler’s circuits. Its fusion furnaces burned bright. The storm could not hold it back, but its drones were weak. They were frail flesh and blood, exquisitely intricate, made for close and careful work. The drones could do things that the Crawler could not, but the toxic air and the wind and the freezing cold of night could kill them. The Crawler must get closer to its prize, as close as it could before it sent them out.
The Crawler thundered to a stop beside the cylinder, and its bulk cast a protective shadow. The storm was held back. The Crawler watched as its steel flanks opened. Gangplanks were lowered. A dozen identical drones, distinguished only by the charms and symbols on their suits, crept out. Their torch-beams cut through the night, and the dancing lights fell upon the cylinder.
The cylinder swayed in what was left of the wind. Dappled black and red, covered with webbed hexagons, its sides were stretched tight to keep it stable.
But what was it? And where had it come from?
M. Jonathan Jones, 16.01.2017
January 1, 2017
Groundhog Year
Happy New Year! I didn't like 2016 in many ways, so I've decided to pretend it didn't happen and start over. One highlight was finally getting my books off the hard-drive and into print. So I'll keep that bit and bin most of the rest.
Anyway, it's been a long time since my last post, and the reason is 'It'. Or The Sequel, as I sometimes call it. I don't get much free time, and when I've had any, I've been trying to write Thalassa: Aqua Incognita, the sequel to Thalassa: the world beneath the waves (WBTW for short). It's been - and continues to be - a tough nut to crack. Technically, it's a far more complex book than WBTW: there is the issue of juggling timing and perspective across multiple interlinking plot-strands. Then there is the plot.
Recently, I dipped into The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes. I'm not a great one for self-help. Not because I don't think I need any, but because problem-solving is what I enjoy, and the equivalent of reinventing the wheel is for me not a waste of time, but a fun exercise. Anyway, I was pleased to see that I've made most if not all of the mistakes listed, but also solved a few. One that I haven't solved is plotting and planning.
There is something amazingly liberating about sitting down with a blank sheet of paper (real or virtual) and just writing stuff. Right hemisphere stuff, unbounded and fizzing with novelty. I do this sometimes and it's a great way to stumble over new ideas (or even to solve existing problems, see * below). But then I get so far, and in that 'Lego moment', the weight of the interconnected ideas becomes too much for the links between them, and it all starts to sag a bit. At that point, structure is needed. I was pleased to read recently that Philip Reeve, whose works I very much like, also seems to get to Chapter 6 before things come unspun.
Now normally, I do plot. I always have an idea for at least most of a story (sometimes even all of it) before I start. But what I've found is that - in contradiction to all the best advice from people with far more experience than me - sticking to that plan is sometimes the worst thing to do. You should follow your nose. When I'm up to my eyebrows in the word-world I've made, I see things differently. Sometimes, I'm 'in character' and I realise that so-and-so just would not say X or do Y. Other times, I see a possibility 'at street level' of the actual page that just wasn't apparent 'from the air' of the plot-plan. I have even taken a story down a totally different path because of one word that a character used, one turn of phrase that steered the ship onto a new course.
The plot of Aqua Incognita always creaked a bit. It still creaks, and there are places where I'm not happy with it. *But last week, I solved another plot-knot by writing out an alternative conversation between two characters. Now I have a new connection to bridge what was a gap in time and space. There's a lot to be said for just letting things flow, and keeping things open. Don't stick with that millstone as it drags you down to the depths.
Of course, I've been dabbling in lots of other projects along the way, which also appears to be a bad habit shared by writers that I admire, so not anything I'm likely to change anytime soon. As long as the ideas keep coming, that's the main thing.
So, that was my first post of the New Year. If writing goes well, it may be a while before my second. Until then...
Anyway, it's been a long time since my last post, and the reason is 'It'. Or The Sequel, as I sometimes call it. I don't get much free time, and when I've had any, I've been trying to write Thalassa: Aqua Incognita, the sequel to Thalassa: the world beneath the waves (WBTW for short). It's been - and continues to be - a tough nut to crack. Technically, it's a far more complex book than WBTW: there is the issue of juggling timing and perspective across multiple interlinking plot-strands. Then there is the plot.
Recently, I dipped into The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes. I'm not a great one for self-help. Not because I don't think I need any, but because problem-solving is what I enjoy, and the equivalent of reinventing the wheel is for me not a waste of time, but a fun exercise. Anyway, I was pleased to see that I've made most if not all of the mistakes listed, but also solved a few. One that I haven't solved is plotting and planning.
There is something amazingly liberating about sitting down with a blank sheet of paper (real or virtual) and just writing stuff. Right hemisphere stuff, unbounded and fizzing with novelty. I do this sometimes and it's a great way to stumble over new ideas (or even to solve existing problems, see * below). But then I get so far, and in that 'Lego moment', the weight of the interconnected ideas becomes too much for the links between them, and it all starts to sag a bit. At that point, structure is needed. I was pleased to read recently that Philip Reeve, whose works I very much like, also seems to get to Chapter 6 before things come unspun.
Now normally, I do plot. I always have an idea for at least most of a story (sometimes even all of it) before I start. But what I've found is that - in contradiction to all the best advice from people with far more experience than me - sticking to that plan is sometimes the worst thing to do. You should follow your nose. When I'm up to my eyebrows in the word-world I've made, I see things differently. Sometimes, I'm 'in character' and I realise that so-and-so just would not say X or do Y. Other times, I see a possibility 'at street level' of the actual page that just wasn't apparent 'from the air' of the plot-plan. I have even taken a story down a totally different path because of one word that a character used, one turn of phrase that steered the ship onto a new course.
The plot of Aqua Incognita always creaked a bit. It still creaks, and there are places where I'm not happy with it. *But last week, I solved another plot-knot by writing out an alternative conversation between two characters. Now I have a new connection to bridge what was a gap in time and space. There's a lot to be said for just letting things flow, and keeping things open. Don't stick with that millstone as it drags you down to the depths.
Of course, I've been dabbling in lots of other projects along the way, which also appears to be a bad habit shared by writers that I admire, so not anything I'm likely to change anytime soon. As long as the ideas keep coming, that's the main thing.
So, that was my first post of the New Year. If writing goes well, it may be a while before my second. Until then...
July 26, 2016
The weird and wonderful life of words
Words, eh? To say that any piece of writing is just words put together is like saying that a human being is just skin and bone and various kinds of biological tissue. Something is missing. You can call it personality, or soul, or character, but the total is definitely more than the sum of the parts. For one thing, words have a 'sound-shape' which can add spice to a sentence. Alliteration - of which I am excessively fond - is one case in point. Then there is meaning, which is that most mysteriously malleable of marvels (see above on alliteration). A class of words called 'phonosthemes' combines the two: slush, slip, slide, sluice all suggest something fluid (whether movement or substance or object).
This is going to be a trawl across meaning, and the way that we might bend meanings in different directions, sometimes quite unexpectedly. It starts really with the verb 'to fly'. When I was writing Thalassa: the world beneath the waves, which is set underwater, I needed a verb for the action of piloting a submarine. To pilot sounded too technical and not exciting enough. To drive - nope, you need wheels (or legs, as in oxen) for that; I needed something more nautical. So I tried 'swim' (no, submarines have propellers, not legs or fins). Then 'sail' (no, you need wind for that). I was a bit stuck. And then I thought of 'fly'.
Now, 'flying' normally requires wings and involves the air, although penguins effectively 'fly' with their wings underwater - amazingly well, in fact; so different from the Chaplin-eseque hop n' waddle they adopt on land. My submarines had steering fins, and of course like aeroplanes, they have propellers (impellers, technically). Flying also suggests ease and speed, and living underwater, it wouldn't be used for anything else. So I felt justified in having my Tethyans in their future undersea Colonies using the word 'to fly' for the act of piloting a submarine; a thousand years hence, there are no aeroplanes, and the meaning could easily shift.
But could it? Well, here are some examples of everyday words that don't quite mean what they used to:
to dial a number - most telephones have buttons (real or virtual), not an actual dial.
to turn on - valid for old-fashioned gaslights with their valves (or a dimmer), but not valid for anything that we turn on by pressing a button.
screen - an interesting one. A screen used to - and still sometimes does - mean something to obscure the view. As far as I'm aware, screen with the idea of a display evolved from firescreens or bathscreens, both of which quickly became ornamented or decorated so that they stopped being a simple barrier, and became objects of visual curiosity in their own right.
quad-bike - OK, bit tenuous this one, since this is hardly an everyday word, but quad of course means four, and bike (from bicycle) means two wheels... Now, bike clearly means something you ride.
burger famously from Hamburger, meaning 'something or someone from Hamburg', not a patty (whether made of ham, or anything else).
to rewind - valid for anything that is actually wound, like magnetic-tape for video or audio, not for digital media.
similarly, to scroll - swiping with your finger across a touchscreen is not unravelling a roll of parchment.
And finally, my own favourite, which is not a word but an icon - that small floppy-disc that you click on to save something, in an era when floppies have all but vanished.
So, pedants everywhere, beware. Words are not things that can easily be penned in and held immobile in some semantic straitjacket. They change. Sometimes in the most amazing ways.
This is going to be a trawl across meaning, and the way that we might bend meanings in different directions, sometimes quite unexpectedly. It starts really with the verb 'to fly'. When I was writing Thalassa: the world beneath the waves, which is set underwater, I needed a verb for the action of piloting a submarine. To pilot sounded too technical and not exciting enough. To drive - nope, you need wheels (or legs, as in oxen) for that; I needed something more nautical. So I tried 'swim' (no, submarines have propellers, not legs or fins). Then 'sail' (no, you need wind for that). I was a bit stuck. And then I thought of 'fly'.
Now, 'flying' normally requires wings and involves the air, although penguins effectively 'fly' with their wings underwater - amazingly well, in fact; so different from the Chaplin-eseque hop n' waddle they adopt on land. My submarines had steering fins, and of course like aeroplanes, they have propellers (impellers, technically). Flying also suggests ease and speed, and living underwater, it wouldn't be used for anything else. So I felt justified in having my Tethyans in their future undersea Colonies using the word 'to fly' for the act of piloting a submarine; a thousand years hence, there are no aeroplanes, and the meaning could easily shift.
But could it? Well, here are some examples of everyday words that don't quite mean what they used to:
to dial a number - most telephones have buttons (real or virtual), not an actual dial.
to turn on - valid for old-fashioned gaslights with their valves (or a dimmer), but not valid for anything that we turn on by pressing a button.
screen - an interesting one. A screen used to - and still sometimes does - mean something to obscure the view. As far as I'm aware, screen with the idea of a display evolved from firescreens or bathscreens, both of which quickly became ornamented or decorated so that they stopped being a simple barrier, and became objects of visual curiosity in their own right.
quad-bike - OK, bit tenuous this one, since this is hardly an everyday word, but quad of course means four, and bike (from bicycle) means two wheels... Now, bike clearly means something you ride.
burger famously from Hamburger, meaning 'something or someone from Hamburg', not a patty (whether made of ham, or anything else).
to rewind - valid for anything that is actually wound, like magnetic-tape for video or audio, not for digital media.
similarly, to scroll - swiping with your finger across a touchscreen is not unravelling a roll of parchment.
And finally, my own favourite, which is not a word but an icon - that small floppy-disc that you click on to save something, in an era when floppies have all but vanished.
So, pedants everywhere, beware. Words are not things that can easily be penned in and held immobile in some semantic straitjacket. They change. Sometimes in the most amazing ways.
July 12, 2016
The good, the bad, and the Goodreads Giveaway
Here I am, back again after the Giveaway has ended. I've had another bug which almost landed me in hospital, so I've been putting my feet up and have only just sent off the Giveaway copies. Congratulations and apologies to the lucky 10 people who won! I hope you enjoy the books when they arrive.
But this post is about the Giveaway itself and the free Kindle download I ran July 1st-5th. First, the good bit.
There were 1040 people signing up for a copy of Thalassa: the world beneath the waves and 852 for a copy of Race the Red Horizon: the Flight of the Pteronaut. Those were amazing figures, far in excess of what I'd expected, and I was very pleased with the interest shown in both books, as you can imagine. It made me wish I'd offered more copies - next time I will.
Number-wise, most people either signed up right at the beginning or right at the end. I only really started a spreadsheet* on June 8th, one week in, and by that time there were 321 for Thalassa and 262 for Race the Red Horizon (RTRH). For both books that's a nice neat 31% of the total number of sign-ups in the first week.
*Of course I have a spreadsheet - I write science fiction books...
Then numbers fell. From June 8th-June 28th, there was an average of 5 new sign-ups for Thalassa (mode =4) and 3 for RTRH (mode = 5) per day. That took me to 497 sign-ups and 385, respectively.
Right at the end, things really kicked off. For those last few days, June 28th-July 1st, I had an average of 60 (Thalassa) and 52 (RTRH) sign-ups a day. On July 1st alone I had 381 and 308 new sign-ups respectively, or 37% and 36% of the totals on the last day.
So what do I glean from that? Well, if most people sign up at the beginning and the end, then running the Giveaway for less time doesn't necessarily reduce its impact. I had actually planned to run it for 2 weeks, and next time I'll try that - it means the first to sign up don't have to wait so long to find out if they get a book. Maybe that's an improvement.
Immediately after the Giveaways and partially overlapping with it, I had a 5-day free promotion for both books on Kindle (July 1st-5th). The first time I did that, back in April, I shifted 152 copies of Thalassa and 49 of RTRH. Given the attention both books had received in the Giveaways, I felt justified in expecting to shift at least the same amount again, and maybe even more. After all, 1892 people had wanted a free paper copy.
So, how did I do? Well, this is the bad bit. Over the whole 5 days, 48 free Kindle copies were downloaded. That's it. 26 of Thalassa and 22 of RTRH. I'm a bit baffled by that, so what happened?
Well, maybe like me most people prefer to read print. That I can totally appreciate, and even publishing the books on Kindle in the first place felt like a necessary evil. Beggars can't be choosers, after all. But I can't say that sales of paper copies have shown any change - still a big fat zero (oh, except for the one I bought to replace the Giveaway copy I ruined with a bad signature...). Now of course, the Kindle copies were free and available instantly, but the paper copies cost real actual money, and came by post. So the choice is not as simple as I've made it. And maybe people are waiting for a few more reviews, which is fair enough.
I'll be running another promotion later in the year, so we'll see then. But in the meantime, I'm very pleased that almost 2000 people bothered to enter the Giveaway, and I hope that some of them will turn into actual readers soon.
But this post is about the Giveaway itself and the free Kindle download I ran July 1st-5th. First, the good bit.
There were 1040 people signing up for a copy of Thalassa: the world beneath the waves and 852 for a copy of Race the Red Horizon: the Flight of the Pteronaut. Those were amazing figures, far in excess of what I'd expected, and I was very pleased with the interest shown in both books, as you can imagine. It made me wish I'd offered more copies - next time I will.
Number-wise, most people either signed up right at the beginning or right at the end. I only really started a spreadsheet* on June 8th, one week in, and by that time there were 321 for Thalassa and 262 for Race the Red Horizon (RTRH). For both books that's a nice neat 31% of the total number of sign-ups in the first week.
*Of course I have a spreadsheet - I write science fiction books...
Then numbers fell. From June 8th-June 28th, there was an average of 5 new sign-ups for Thalassa (mode =4) and 3 for RTRH (mode = 5) per day. That took me to 497 sign-ups and 385, respectively.
Right at the end, things really kicked off. For those last few days, June 28th-July 1st, I had an average of 60 (Thalassa) and 52 (RTRH) sign-ups a day. On July 1st alone I had 381 and 308 new sign-ups respectively, or 37% and 36% of the totals on the last day.
So what do I glean from that? Well, if most people sign up at the beginning and the end, then running the Giveaway for less time doesn't necessarily reduce its impact. I had actually planned to run it for 2 weeks, and next time I'll try that - it means the first to sign up don't have to wait so long to find out if they get a book. Maybe that's an improvement.
Immediately after the Giveaways and partially overlapping with it, I had a 5-day free promotion for both books on Kindle (July 1st-5th). The first time I did that, back in April, I shifted 152 copies of Thalassa and 49 of RTRH. Given the attention both books had received in the Giveaways, I felt justified in expecting to shift at least the same amount again, and maybe even more. After all, 1892 people had wanted a free paper copy.
So, how did I do? Well, this is the bad bit. Over the whole 5 days, 48 free Kindle copies were downloaded. That's it. 26 of Thalassa and 22 of RTRH. I'm a bit baffled by that, so what happened?
Well, maybe like me most people prefer to read print. That I can totally appreciate, and even publishing the books on Kindle in the first place felt like a necessary evil. Beggars can't be choosers, after all. But I can't say that sales of paper copies have shown any change - still a big fat zero (oh, except for the one I bought to replace the Giveaway copy I ruined with a bad signature...). Now of course, the Kindle copies were free and available instantly, but the paper copies cost real actual money, and came by post. So the choice is not as simple as I've made it. And maybe people are waiting for a few more reviews, which is fair enough.
I'll be running another promotion later in the year, so we'll see then. But in the meantime, I'm very pleased that almost 2000 people bothered to enter the Giveaway, and I hope that some of them will turn into actual readers soon.
June 23, 2016
A life under the ocean wave...
It's been a while since the last post, and two hundred boxes of tissues and a gazillion coughing-fits later - it's been that kind of summer so far - I thought I would post something about the background and inspiration for Thalassa: the world beneath the waves. As with Race the Red Horizon: the Flight of the Pteronaut, most of the influences lie in the mis-spent hours of my youth, and very few of them are actually literary.
The 1960s and 1970s seem to have been a Golden Age in terms of aspirations for underwater cities and the like. I suspect that much of the motivation for this interest lies at the door of one Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Amazingly for an explorer and scientist, Cousteau was a household name during that time. He was a prolific documentary maker, which probably explains it. There is no modern-day parallel that I can think of, except perhaps the equally amazing Sir David Attenborough, but his career also began in the period when most TVs had a very limited choice of channels. Whatever, however, I grew up on a staple diet of underwater-themed TV shows.
Among the TV addictions of my childhood, there was the Japanese cartoon Marine Boy, one of my earliest TV memories, and something which has never left my head. Then there was of course Gerry Anderson’s Stingray, and Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (TV and film; rebooted as Seaquest DSV). There was also The Man from Atlantis, which quite bizarrely starred Bobby Ewing from Dallas (he was the Man from Atlantis first). Given exposure to those influences, it was probably inevitable that I was going to write a post-apocalyptic-survivors-under-the-sea sci-fi book eventually, and ‘Thalassa – the world beneath the waves’ is it.
The main character is a fifteen year-old girl called Moanna Morgan, and she was the start of the whole idea. That idea was quite simply ‘what if there was a girl who had never seen the sky?’ The reason for that is that the few survivors of humanity live under the sea due to a tectonic apocalypse (the Tectocalypse, in fact; see one of my earlier posts). The Old Earth is no more, and the newly reshaped planet though not quite a waterworld has become 'Thalassa', named after the Greek word for the sea. (In fact, the word Thalassa is not Greek in origin, and nobody really knows where it came from). Not only do the Tethyans live beneath the waves, they never visit the surface. As the book says:
"No-one from the Tethys Colonies had visited the surface for more than a thousand years, and most Tethyans didn’t believe it existed at all. Water all the way up, they said, until you got to Hell itself where the Sun burnt down with its shining rays, peeling the skin from your body, scorching out your eyes, and boiling away the seas to fill what was left with poisonous gasses."
Not exactly the kind of place for a day-trip.
Thalassa is a book that combines that childhood obsession with underwater cities with another idea that fascinates me: the idea of frontiers. Whether it’s the edge of the Wilderland, the Roman Wall that kept some of my ancestors at bay, the Great Wall of China and Asia’s Wild East, or the borderless lands of the American Wild West, frontiers are exciting places. In Thalassa, the explored and inhabited regions – a small part of the American south and mid-west – are called Tethys, another Greek name. Across most of Tethys, the survivors have founded underwater cities – the Colonies – which have banded together into the Tethys Federation. Beyond Tethys lies that part of Thalassa that is known as aqua incognita, unknown water. Aqua incognita is a vast place, and most Tethyan Colonists ignore it. The desire to explore it is left to the Pioneers, another fragment of surviving humanity, who prefer to do things their own way.
Moanna is born into a Pioneer family, but she lives in the up-and-coming Colony of MacGillycuddy’s Reef, north of the Federation Frontier on the edge of aqua incognita. Her identity is split by this background, and through her some of the stresses and strains of Tethyan society become apparent.
But the book isn’t really about any of that. It’s the story of Moanna discovering that the submarine accident that killed her brother didn’t really happen, at least, not as everybody believed. It's a kind of mystery thriller, with a sci-fi background. Of course, in her search for the truth, Moanna makes a discovery that will change not just her life, but the lives of everybody in Tethys forever. The end of the book is just the start of something bigger (if I ever get round to writing the sequel...).
If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can find a few preview chapters on my website. There are Goodreads Giveaways for both Thalassa and Race the Red Horizon throughout June, and after that the Kindle edition will be free from July 1st to July 5th (inclusive). Lid up, and have fun.
The 1960s and 1970s seem to have been a Golden Age in terms of aspirations for underwater cities and the like. I suspect that much of the motivation for this interest lies at the door of one Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Amazingly for an explorer and scientist, Cousteau was a household name during that time. He was a prolific documentary maker, which probably explains it. There is no modern-day parallel that I can think of, except perhaps the equally amazing Sir David Attenborough, but his career also began in the period when most TVs had a very limited choice of channels. Whatever, however, I grew up on a staple diet of underwater-themed TV shows.
Among the TV addictions of my childhood, there was the Japanese cartoon Marine Boy, one of my earliest TV memories, and something which has never left my head. Then there was of course Gerry Anderson’s Stingray, and Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (TV and film; rebooted as Seaquest DSV). There was also The Man from Atlantis, which quite bizarrely starred Bobby Ewing from Dallas (he was the Man from Atlantis first). Given exposure to those influences, it was probably inevitable that I was going to write a post-apocalyptic-survivors-under-the-sea sci-fi book eventually, and ‘Thalassa – the world beneath the waves’ is it.
The main character is a fifteen year-old girl called Moanna Morgan, and she was the start of the whole idea. That idea was quite simply ‘what if there was a girl who had never seen the sky?’ The reason for that is that the few survivors of humanity live under the sea due to a tectonic apocalypse (the Tectocalypse, in fact; see one of my earlier posts). The Old Earth is no more, and the newly reshaped planet though not quite a waterworld has become 'Thalassa', named after the Greek word for the sea. (In fact, the word Thalassa is not Greek in origin, and nobody really knows where it came from). Not only do the Tethyans live beneath the waves, they never visit the surface. As the book says:
"No-one from the Tethys Colonies had visited the surface for more than a thousand years, and most Tethyans didn’t believe it existed at all. Water all the way up, they said, until you got to Hell itself where the Sun burnt down with its shining rays, peeling the skin from your body, scorching out your eyes, and boiling away the seas to fill what was left with poisonous gasses."
Not exactly the kind of place for a day-trip.
Thalassa is a book that combines that childhood obsession with underwater cities with another idea that fascinates me: the idea of frontiers. Whether it’s the edge of the Wilderland, the Roman Wall that kept some of my ancestors at bay, the Great Wall of China and Asia’s Wild East, or the borderless lands of the American Wild West, frontiers are exciting places. In Thalassa, the explored and inhabited regions – a small part of the American south and mid-west – are called Tethys, another Greek name. Across most of Tethys, the survivors have founded underwater cities – the Colonies – which have banded together into the Tethys Federation. Beyond Tethys lies that part of Thalassa that is known as aqua incognita, unknown water. Aqua incognita is a vast place, and most Tethyan Colonists ignore it. The desire to explore it is left to the Pioneers, another fragment of surviving humanity, who prefer to do things their own way.
Moanna is born into a Pioneer family, but she lives in the up-and-coming Colony of MacGillycuddy’s Reef, north of the Federation Frontier on the edge of aqua incognita. Her identity is split by this background, and through her some of the stresses and strains of Tethyan society become apparent.
But the book isn’t really about any of that. It’s the story of Moanna discovering that the submarine accident that killed her brother didn’t really happen, at least, not as everybody believed. It's a kind of mystery thriller, with a sci-fi background. Of course, in her search for the truth, Moanna makes a discovery that will change not just her life, but the lives of everybody in Tethys forever. The end of the book is just the start of something bigger (if I ever get round to writing the sequel...).
If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can find a few preview chapters on my website. There are Goodreads Giveaways for both Thalassa and Race the Red Horizon throughout June, and after that the Kindle edition will be free from July 1st to July 5th (inclusive). Lid up, and have fun.
June 15, 2016
Prologue, or not prologue: that is the question
UPDATE July 1st
I've had some very helpful comments, and have decided to open a poll on this topic to coinicide with the offer of free Kindle editions (July 1st-5th) of my books. The poll is here.
*****Original post:
I was planning to write a chunk of stuff about the background and inspiration for Thalassa: the world beneath the waves, but the lurgi has me in its grip, so this is going to be short and sweet, but still kind of relevant.
Thalassa: the world beneath the waves has a prologue. It didn't use to have one. For most of its virtual existence on my hard-drive, the book started at chapter one. These were the very first lines:
"Moanna sat in her favourite window-seat and pressed her face against the cold, thick glass. She looked right up into the deep blue above, wondering what it would be like if the endless ocean were replaced by empty sky, with clouds drifting past up there instead of shifting shoals of fish."
That has also been reworked, so that the new first lines of chapter one are now:
"Jason Morgan was dead. Had been dead for almost a year, lost out in aqua incognita, and his soul had gone down to the Deepwater Dark where the Blue Lady would look after it. Moanna didn’t believe a word of all that. She didn’t believe in the Blue Lady any more than she believed in Papa Noah, but Jason had done, and it seemed the right thing to do to honour his memory with an offering to her."
So much for chapter one. The real issue here is the prologue.
I wrote the prologue because I wanted to start with the mysterious disappearance of the Syracuse, the submarine that Jason Morgan, Moanna's brother, had been aboard. I wanted the reader to know things that Moanna didn't, and to have a foretaste of what was coming. I also wanted to start with some suspense and some action. And the prologue ends with a wreck, linking nicely (to my mind) with Moanna thinking about Jason's death at the beginning of chapter one.
But it grates. My inner marketing-manager (yep, I never knew I had one either, and I'm not sure I like it) is screaming at me "DITCH THE PROLOGUE! START WITH THE PEOPLE!" And I suspect she (why not?) is right. People like people. Aren't they more likely to read the book if it starts with people? And yet I still like the prologue and what it brings.
So I've decided to ask readers - if I ever get any - to help me to decide whether the second edition of Thalassa: the world beneath the waves gets to keep the prologue, or to ditch it and go straight to chapter one. You can find a PDF sample with a prologue on my website. Who knows, if the prologue goes, then those first edition copies which have it may become valuable collectors' items at some point in the future (yeah, right). Just saying...
I've had some very helpful comments, and have decided to open a poll on this topic to coinicide with the offer of free Kindle editions (July 1st-5th) of my books. The poll is here.
*****Original post:
I was planning to write a chunk of stuff about the background and inspiration for Thalassa: the world beneath the waves, but the lurgi has me in its grip, so this is going to be short and sweet, but still kind of relevant.
Thalassa: the world beneath the waves has a prologue. It didn't use to have one. For most of its virtual existence on my hard-drive, the book started at chapter one. These were the very first lines:
"Moanna sat in her favourite window-seat and pressed her face against the cold, thick glass. She looked right up into the deep blue above, wondering what it would be like if the endless ocean were replaced by empty sky, with clouds drifting past up there instead of shifting shoals of fish."
That has also been reworked, so that the new first lines of chapter one are now:
"Jason Morgan was dead. Had been dead for almost a year, lost out in aqua incognita, and his soul had gone down to the Deepwater Dark where the Blue Lady would look after it. Moanna didn’t believe a word of all that. She didn’t believe in the Blue Lady any more than she believed in Papa Noah, but Jason had done, and it seemed the right thing to do to honour his memory with an offering to her."
So much for chapter one. The real issue here is the prologue.
I wrote the prologue because I wanted to start with the mysterious disappearance of the Syracuse, the submarine that Jason Morgan, Moanna's brother, had been aboard. I wanted the reader to know things that Moanna didn't, and to have a foretaste of what was coming. I also wanted to start with some suspense and some action. And the prologue ends with a wreck, linking nicely (to my mind) with Moanna thinking about Jason's death at the beginning of chapter one.
But it grates. My inner marketing-manager (yep, I never knew I had one either, and I'm not sure I like it) is screaming at me "DITCH THE PROLOGUE! START WITH THE PEOPLE!" And I suspect she (why not?) is right. People like people. Aren't they more likely to read the book if it starts with people? And yet I still like the prologue and what it brings.
So I've decided to ask readers - if I ever get any - to help me to decide whether the second edition of Thalassa: the world beneath the waves gets to keep the prologue, or to ditch it and go straight to chapter one. You can find a PDF sample with a prologue on my website. Who knows, if the prologue goes, then those first edition copies which have it may become valuable collectors' items at some point in the future (yeah, right). Just saying...
