Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 258

MASK OF DRAGONS now available!

I am pleased to report that MASK OF DRAGONS is now available at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, Google Play, and Smashwords.

Click here to read the first chapter of MASK OF DRAGONS. 

MAZAEL CRAVENLOCK is the last of the Demonsouled, and has defeated every enemy who ever challenged him.

Yet in the sinister Prophetess of Marazadra, he faces a subtle foe unlike any other adversary.

And unless Mazael’s masters the Prophetess’s deadly game, the dark goddess Marazadra will rise in blood and terror…

-JM

February 2016

Thanks to FROSTBORN: THE HIGH LORDS and FROSTBORN OMNIBUS ONE, February 2016 was my best month of ebook sales so far. Thanks everyone!

-JM

So you want to self-publish?

Recently, I’ve gotten some questions about self-publishing (or indie publishing, as it’s often known). Rather than answer them myself, I will link to people offering better explanations.

Joanna Penn has written an excellent overview post – How To Self-Publish An Ebook – and has many other useful articles about the topic on her site.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch wrote a blog post about bestseller lists that turned into an excellent explanation of the underlying economics of indie publishing. Many people think that traditionally published writers make more money that self-published writers, but save for the top 1% of traditionally published writers, this is no longer the case. It’s not because publishers and agents are inherently dishonest or abusive (though many are), but indie publishing is more efficient and cost effective, the way a modern solid-state hard drive is more efficient and cost effective than an old 3 1/2 inch 1.44 MB floppy disk. A writer will make more per copy from a $3.99 self-published ebook than a mass market paperback, a trade paperback, and most hardcover sales.

Related to that topic, the Author Earnings website offers a detailed examination of Amazon’s bestseller lists, attempting to ascertain just how many books are sold on Amazon, and how many of those books were sold by traditional publishers and how many by indie publishers. The reports are well worth the read, especially if you enjoy data analysis.

Finally, it’s well worth reading David Gaughran’s excellent LET’S GET DIGITAL, a short introductory book to self-publishing. (It’s also available in print if you prefer to read in paper.) If you read both that book and Joanna Penn’s series of articles above, you will be well-equipped to tackle your own self-publishing projects.

-JM

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS by Agatha Christie

I’d never read any Agatha Christie books before last year, which was a shame, because she’s one of the greats of the mystery genre. So I’ve set out to rectify that. Last year I read AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, which was excellent, and I’ve just finished reading MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS. I wanted to read it because it’s so iconic – it’s inspired numerous imitations, homages, and parodies.

It’s easy to see why. The book is a classic. The premise is simple. Famed investigator Hercule Poirot is on his way home after solving a case aboard the Orient Express, a train heading from the Middle East to Calais. On the way back, the train is snowbound and forced to stop until the tracks can be cleared.

And while the train is stalled, one of the passengers is murdered, an unpleasant American millionaire. Because no one could have left the train – the tracks in the snow would give any escapee away – the murderer has to still remain upon the train. That means Poirot has his best chance to solve the mystery before the train reaches its destination and the murderer escapes.

The book is an elegant, logical puzzle-box of a story, with sharply drawn characters. Highly recommended.

-JM

 

bestselling books of 2015

I finally had the chance to do some math, so I calculated my bestselling books of the year.

First, thank you for a great year! It took a while to calculate it (or to make Excel calculate it), but that is because you bought so many books. Thank you!

My bestselling fiction book was GHOST EXILE OMNIBUS ONE, and my bestselling nonfiction was (yet again) THE LINUX COMMAND LINE BEGINNERS GUIDE. I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people saying that the THE LINUX COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE helped them out, including one from a high school teacher who unexpectedly had to teach a Linux class with only a  few days to prepare having never used Linux before, so I’m glad people continue to find the book helpful four years after I finished it.

My bestselling individual novel was FROSTBORN: THE GORGON SPIRIT, which was also the bestselling FROSTBORN book of 2015.

The bestselling GHOSTS novel was GHOST IN THE RAZOR, and the bestselling DEMONSOULED book was SOUL OF TYRANTS.

My bestselling short story of the year? GHOST NAILS. Which I found really gratifying, because I quite liked that story. Save for self-publishing, the only other market for short stories is to various SF/F magazines, which are notoriously hard to break into, and over the course of 2015 GHOST NAILS made slightly more than I would have been paid if I had sold the story to a top-tier (such as it is) SF/F magazine. So that was really quite gratifying.

Looking forward to seeing what happens in 2016!

-JM

MASK OF DRAGONS table of contents

Here’s the Table of Contents for MASK OF DRAGONS. I used to type it up for these posts, but screenshots are so much easier!

-JM

the description for MASK OF DRAGONS

Here’s the official description for MASK OF DRAGONS:

MAZAEL CRAVENLOCK is the last of the Demonsouled, and has defeated every enemy who ever challenged him.

Yet in the sinister Prophetess of Marazadra, he faces a subtle foe unlike any other enemy.

And unless Mazael’s masters the Prophetess’s deadly game, the dark goddess Marazadra will rise in blood and terror…

###

Also, the third and final book in the MASK OF THE DEMONSOULED trilogy will be called MASK OF SPELLS, and it will be out either in late summer or mid-fall 2016. The first book, MASK OF SWORDS, came out in November 2014, and MASK OF DRAGONS will come out in March of 2016, a gap of nearly sixteen months.

I don’t like to have such a big gap between releases. 2015 was an “interesting” year in a lot of ways, but I came out the end of it with the ability to work on two books at once, which is something I had never been able to do before. Because of that, if all goes well we shall have two new DEMONSOULED books in 2016 – MASK OF DRAGONS and MASK OF SPELLS!

-JM

Leap Day

It was an odd Leap Day. Today I encountered a technical problem I haven’t seen for eight years, but returned in a new form.

Maybe Leap Day is a day for temporal instability.

Though if I go outside and see a blue British police box, or a modified DeLorean car, or some sort of Victorian steampunk contraption with a lot of levers and analog clocks, I am turning around and walking briskly in the other direction.

-JM

CLOAK GAMES and time in fiction

A minor bit of trivia today – I was working on laying out the print version of CLOAK GAMES: REBEL FIST this morning, and I noticed that the entire book has only 3 scene breaks.

Which makes sense, because all but the last scene of the book takes place over a single day (a very bad day for Nadia), and it’s entirely from the perspective of Nadia.

It’s interesting to think about the flexibility of the novel as a storytelling form – it can cover a single day, or thousands of years.

No matter the length of the span of time, the trick, as ever, is to skip the boring parts. People skip those anyway, so it’s more efficient just not to write them.

-JM

FROSTBORN OMNIBUS ONE is a USA Today Bestseller

I am pleased to report that FROSTBORN OMNIBUS ONE has made the USA Today Bestseller list.

Thanks everyone! Didn’t expect that!

-JM