Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 214
August 31, 2017
publishing!
I just realized that by November 15th I intend to publish a grand total of 375,000 words of new fiction.
Let’s begin!
-JM
August 29, 2017
the last push
Right then. No more Facebook, blogging, or computer games until SEVENFOLD SWORD: SWORDBEARER is done!
(Shouldn’t be too much longer!)
-JM
August 28, 2017
FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT #1
FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT is the number #1 free book in its category on Amazon US. Thanks everyone!
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It wound up in “War Fiction”, but FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT has a siege, so it counts. 
a SEVENFOLD SWORD: SWORDBEARER excerpt
Time for the final editing push on SEVENFOLD SWORD: SWORDBEARER. Let’s have a short excerpt:
“I am pleased that we have managed to avert disaster,” said Ridmark. “At least so far.”
Michael laughed. “So far, aye? I think you’ve seen a battle or two yourself, Lord Ridmark. You have an old soldier’s pessimism.”
“I prefer to think of it as keeping a clear head,” said Ridmark.
-JM
August 27, 2017
19 GHOSTS books and minor characters
Jon F has a GHOSTS question, edited slightly to remove spoilers:
“I think of the Ghosts and Ghost Exile as a rather large set of books to read, and so, I have a question: During your time as an author, and especially for the Ghosts and Ghost Exile series, did you remember the minor characters well enough to include them in the later books, or did you sometimes have to go back to previous books to add them to the protagonist’s recollections?”
Yes. 19 books (and I’m starting #20 in a few days) is rather a large set of books to read.
August 26, 2017
FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT free on Freebooksy!
FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT and the FROSTBORN series is featured on Freebooksy today. It looks nice!
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Of course, there are eight more books after FROSTBORN: THE GORGON SPIRIT.
CLOAK GAMES: HAMMER BREAK now in paperback!
CLOAK GAMES: HAMMER BREAK is now available in paperback at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, and CreateSpace.
It turned out quite nice:
-JM
August 25, 2017
SEVENFOLD SWORD: SWORDBEARER table of contents
I am now far enough along to share the Table of Contents for SEVENFOLD SWORD: SWORDBEARER.
Did I sneak a James Bond reference into the TOC? Yes, yes I did.
a free copy of THE SECRET KINGS
Writer Brian Niemeier asked me to mention that his Dragon award-nominated book THE SECRET KINGS is free today through 8/25 through 8/29 at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Australia, and Amazon Canada.
I haven’t read it yet, but I read the first book in the series and Mr. Niemeier’s novella THE HYMN OF THE PEARL and thought they were pretty good, so get THE SECRET KINGS while it’s free!
-JM
August 24, 2017
defeatism and writing advice
Someone recently asked me for writing advice, and one of the questions was a fear that the self-publishing market had become too saturated for anything to sell.
That’s a fear you see a lot on various writing forums and blogs, especially from younger and newer writers.
You don’t need to worry about it. Why? Well, everything is saturated, and everything has always been saturated! Go to the library and you’ll have more free books than you can read in a lifetime. If you’d prefer ebooks, go to Project Gutenberg and you can spend the next twenty years reading through the classics. Go on YouTube and you’ll have more free videos than you can watch in a lifetime. Get a TV antenna and you’ll have free entertainment for 24 hours a day. If you pay $12 a month for Netflix, you will have more TV shows and movies than you can watch.
So there’s all this free entertainment out here, and people still pay for HBO and buy books. To flip it on its head, there’s all this free entertainment out there, but people keep making more.
Or to use a more practical example, there are thousands of restaurants in the United States. The market is saturated, but people keep opening new ones.
Of course, those restaurants might fail, which I think is the root of “the self-publishing market is saturated” fear. I’m sure there is a fancy psychological term for this, but I think it’s sort of a pre-rationalization of failure before it even occurs. It’s a form of self-defeatism, and it’s best to avoid it.
Granted, there’s a difference between self-defeatism and taking foolish risks. Ruthless self-honest is necessary. If you write a book, self-publish it, and on one reads it…well, so what? No one died. No one was even hurt. A restaurant fails and the owners and the backers can be out hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s hard to to do that with a self-published ebook.
And failure can be valuable too. The things you learn from it can be more important than what you learn from success.
Concrete example: a couple of years ago I had the chance to write a tie-in novel for a game. It seemed like a big opportunity at the time, but I didn’t want to abandon my other self-publishing projects. So I forced myself to squeeze in the game novel, to write it on the side while I finished up other things.
Unfortunately, the game deal was canceled and the project fell apart. The tie-in novel will never see the light of day.
But! I had never before worked on two novels at the same time. With that new skill, I started working on two of my own novels at once, which is why the CLOAK GAMES series exists, and why I’ll be releasing a science fiction series later this year. Both series got their start as things I wrote on the side while my main focus was elsewhere.
In fact, the CLOAK GAMES books at present are some of my more popular books in the US according to Amazon:
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And the CLOAK GAMES series would not exist if not for that failed game tie-in.
If you want to be a writer but are talking yourself out of it, I think THE SUCCESSFUL AUTHOR MINDSET by Joanna Penn is a good book to read. It’s the sort of book I would have found really useful twenty years ago, and addresses a lot of the self-defeating mindsets that plague newer writers.
-JM
