Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 326

The Defiler of Tombs, by William King

I previously wrote about THE STEALER OF FLESH, the first full-length novel in William King’s series of sword-and-sorcery novels about Kormak, the Guardian of the Dawn. The Guardians are an order devoted to defending mankind from various supernatural threats. In THE DEFILER OF TOMBS, Kormak is on the trail of a renegade necromancer named Morghael. Morghael has fled in the hilly country of the north, once ruled by a empire of powerful necromancers called the Death Lords of Kharon. When Kharon disintegrated, it left all kinds of nasty goodies buried in the hills…and Morghael wants to get his hands on them.

One of my favorite parts of the previous Kormak book was the worldbuilding, and THE DEFILER OF TOMBS keeps up the same high level. Unlike the last book, Kormak travels through only a relatively small part of the world, but all the worldbuilding depth is there – the religions of Sun and Moon, Kharon’s long, occasionally myth-clouded history, and the competing versions of history, such as when the characters of Aisha and Sir Brandon have very different takes on what happened.

The worldbuilding also lends to the atmosphere of the book, which perfectly describes the grim, silent hills, the constant rain, and the secretive and unfriendly people who live in the hills in fear of the things buried in the tombs of Kharon. It reminded me a bit of traveling through the hillier parts of western Wisconsin. The supporting characters are also strongly drawn, and Sir Brandon’s need to prove himself is an interesting contrast to Kormak’s grim fatalism.

My only complaint is that I wish the book had been longer, and I think it easily could have been another 10,000 words or so longer without seeming at all padded. But they say the best time to end a book is when the audience is still wanting more, and I want more. I recommend the book, and hope for further books in the series.

-JM

Reader Question Day #53 – how to give away free ebooks

LJL asks, concerning self-publishing:

My main question is: You mention giving books away…where do you give them away? How do you let people know they are available?

Thanks for all your help!!

It is a multi-step process. Here’s what I do.

First, the actual mechanics.

Amazon and Barnes & Noble do not let you set the price of a book as free through Kindle Direct Publishing and PubIt. Smashwords and Kobo do, and if you make a free book on Smashwords and use all their distribution channels, eventually it will show up as a free book on Barnes & Noble and iTunes. Then you can use the price matching link on Amazon (where is says “let us know about a lower price”) to report the free price on Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Kobo, and iTunes. Amazon will usually, but not always, match the price to free.

Smashwords also lets you generate coupon codes for individual books. You can use this to keep the book as a paid book while giving a discount (or making it free entirely) for people who use the coupon code. When I released SOUL OF SKULLS, I also gave away to my newsletter subscribers a time-sensitive coupon code for a free tie-in short story on Smashwords. That worked really well, so I’m going to make it a regular practice.

Second, letting people know it is available. This is largely beyond your control, but you can do several things to make it easier.

The most important point is this: do not make a book free unless you have paid sequels ready! The only reason to make a book free is to get people interested in the series. So releasing one book and making it free is a waste of time for the writer – it’s like giving away free samples of cheese, and having no cheese available for sale. This annoys the reader who liked the sample, because he would like to purchase additional cheese, and this annoys the writer, who has no additional cheese for sale. So I would recommend not making the first book free until you have three or four books of the series up.

When you have a free book, it’s also a good idea to include the first chapter of the next book at the end of the book as a sample, along with a link to a place where people can purchase the book. It’s best to have the link go to your own website – Apple gets annoyed if you include links to Amazon pages, and vice versa.

Also, make sure the cover looks good. Generally, I’ve found there are two key rules of thumb for an ebook cover:

1.) The cover must feature attractive people doing something, however vaguely, related to the book’s contents. Note that by “attractive” I don’t mean “scantily dressed or sexually provocative” (though that is indeed an option) but people that are at least pleasant to look at it.

2.) The cover absolutely, positively has to look good as a thumbnail image, which means the book’s name should be big enough to be read as a thumbnail. This is especially important if the first book in the series is free.

Free books, generally, tend to do well, by which I mean a lot of people download them. The more attractive the cover, the more likely someone will download the book. Whether they read to the end, and like the book enough to buy the sequel, depends on the book.

But this strategy can work. In 2012, I gave away about 39,000 copies of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, and sold just under 4,000 copies of its sequel, GHOST IN THE FLAMES. Additionally,  I gave away about 36,000 copies of DEMONSOULED, and sold 5,976 of its sequel SOUL OF TYRANTS.

Also, I should mention Kindle Direct Publishing Select, which is another way to do a free ebook. The way it works is that you agree to put your book on Amazon, and no other retailer, for a period of 90 days. That gives you the ability to set five of those 90 days as free days, when your book will be available as a free book. Additionally, Amazon Prime members gain the ability to check out your book for free as a rental (you get paid for every rental), in much the same way that Prime members can watch Amazon Instant Videos for free. However, you cannot have your book available for sale at any other retailer for that 90-day period.

To be honest, I don’t think KDP Select is a useful tool for most writers. Granted, I think it can be useful in specific situations. For example, there’s a writer who apparently made a killing writing a book about Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD tablet, and in that case, it absolutely makes sense to turn it into a KDP Select book. How many people are going buy a book about the Kindle Fire HD and read it on a Nook or an iPad? Or I can see how it would be useful in other situations – like, you write a tie-in novella to your series, and release it as a KDP Select book as a bonus for your regular readers (whom you then notify of the free days via your newsletter).

However, I should point out that in 2012, fully 1/3 of my ebook sales came from places other than Amazon. Amazon is the big fish, but it’s not the only fish, and 1/3 of my 2012 book sales (which would be about 16,300 books out of 51,000) is quite a lot to leave on the table. I think a better long-term strategy is to have as many of your books available on as many platforms as possible.

-JM

60k

Sometime this month I sold my 60,000th ebook since I started self-publishing (or indie publishing, if you prefer) back in April of 2011. The Lord has been good to me.

Thank you, everyone! It is definitely my goal to keep the momentum going for 2013!

-JM

coffee and GHOST IN THE FORGE

I’ve never been a coffee drinker, but I started this month. It’s cheaper than diet soda, and healthier, too.

I’m already up to four cups a day.

And in what I’m sure is an entirely unrelated coincidence, in the last two weeks I have written 60,000 words of GHOST IN THE FORGE’s rough draft.

-JM

further proof that “Star Trek” is actually a Communist Space Tyranny – the dictatorship of Kathryn Janeway

A while back, I wrote a post that postulated that the Federation in “Star Trek” is actually a brutal interstellar Communist dictatorship, and that the “Star Trek” show is in fact a propaganda broadcast put out by the Federation to glorify itself. Like, you know how the old Soviet Union used to crank out terrible movies and novels where the clean-cut Communist hero would outwit and defeat the terrible capitalists and reactionaries, and everyone would live happily ever after? Those films and novels in no way, shape, or form reflected life in the real Soviet Union – the brutal secret police, the constant material shortages, the pervasive censorship, the economic stagnation, and the constant repetition of lies that buttressed the entire structure. I wonder if, on a meta level, that’s what STAR TREK really is – propaganda films put out by a tyrannical Federation and a brutal Starfleet to promote themselves.

Lately, I’ve been watching episodes of STAR TREK VOYAGER, and it occurs to me that certain internal inconsistencies of the show further support my theory that the Federation is actually a brutal Communist dictatorship. Additionally, I strongly suspect that by the end of VOYAGER, Captain Kathryn Janeway actually returned in wrath and took over the Federation and installed herself as dictator. VOYAGER, therefore, is a propaganda effort by the Federation to disguise what really happened.

I offer four points in support of this hypothesis.

First, there is the fact that slavish devotion to Federation principles stranded Voyager in the Delta Quadrant. In the first episode, Voyager has a clear way back home to the Alpha Quadrant, but Janeway orders it destroyed, rather than risking it falling into the hands of the Kazon. At this point, it appears Janeway was a true believer in the Federation government, to the point where she was willing to strand herself and her crew 70,000 light years from home.

Subsequent events, I suspect, would change her mind. More on that below.

Second, Voyager was curiously resilient. Fans nicknamed the ship “the HMS Reset Button”, due to the show’s knack of returning to the status quo at the end of every episode.  And Voyager did not have an easy trip. The ship was almost under constant attack, got shot up on numerous occasions, was stolen and boarded on multiple occasions, and underwent years of constant stress and damage without proper maintenance. And yet, at the start of every episode, Voyager was new and pristine once more. Where did the new parts come from? They were 70,000 light years from the nearest point of resupply, after all. Shouldn’t the ship start to look a bit…well, dilapidated  rather than a clean, shiny Starfleet vessel? Yet at the beginning of every episode, Voyager looked as new and as fresh as the day it left the Starfleet shipyards.

Third, at the end of season three, Janeway went nuts.

You can see the exact moment it happens, too. In the finale of Season 3, Janeway contemplates the fact that her ship will have to cross Borg space to get back home. As she sits in the holodeck, contemplating what to do, she gazes at the shadows upon the wall…and a strange expression comes over her face. In that moment, she decides to try and make a deal with the Borg. Which is remarkable, because a.) the Borg are the most powerful enemies of the Federation, and b.) in the previous two seasons, Janeway remained devoted to the Prime Directive, often at great inconvenience and cost. I suspect that Janeway finally realized that her devotion to the Prime Directive would sooner or later lead to the destruction of the ship and the crew. After the encounter with the Borg, Janeway became much more willing to engage with alien species and use alien technology – and she also became substantially more reckless and ruthless. This explains why Voyager was able to repair and sustain itself. In violation of the Federation’s communistic ethos, Janeway had become willing to bargain, barter, and trade to keep her ship running and her crew alive.

It’s not hard to see why she became a harder captain – her crew and ship were under constant attack, and the nearest help was 70,000 light years away. And Janeway died a lot. Between parallel universes, time travel, clones, and other negative space wedgies, Janeway dies something like 17 times over the course of the series. That much broken temporal causality cannot be good for one’s mental health or overall risk-aversion.

Because of Janeway’s changes in attitude, Voyager acquired a lot of new technology during its adventures. The slipstream drive, the transwarp drive, the transphasic torpedoes, ablative armor, the gravitic catapult, enhanced communications technology, a whole bunch of Borg toys, and a bunch of other stuff. And this is only the stuff that made it into the official show – one can imagine what other technologies and weapons Voyager found that the Federation’s Ministry of Information edited out of the propaganda broadcasts. By the end of the show, Voyager had the sort of weaponry that let the ship fight its way through a Borg fleet and blow up a Borg transwarp hub.

Fourth, when Voyager returns to Earth at the end of the series, it has weapons and technology unlike anything in the Federation. It’s also commanded by a woman who has become much harder and ruthless, and manned by a crew that has literally been to hell and back. Additionally, the Federation is something of a wreck at the time – the Dominion War had just finished, much of Starfleet has been destroyed, and a lot of the Federation’s core worlds had been devastated in the fighting. And Janeway had her own grudges to settle, as her orders had put her and her crew through seven years of hell (in once case, a literal Year of Hell).*

Which means when Voyager rode the collapsing Borg transwarp conduit back to Earth, the Federation fleet at earth wasn’t there to stop the Borg – it was there to stop Janeway from taking over the tottering Federation.

But I suspect the fleet, rather than stopping Voyager, took stock of the situation and decided to throw their lot in with Janeway. The Jem’Hadar had almost destroyed the Federation during the Dominion War, and Starfleet had been contemptuous of the civilian government for some time, given how an admiral almost overthrew the government and installed a military dictatorship during DEEP SPACE NINE. So when Voyager arrived back in the Alpha Quadrant, the commanders of the fleet took stock of the situation – and decided to throw their lot in with Janeway and her new weapons.

The final shot of the series, Starfleet escorting Voyager back to Earth, is in fact the beginning of Janeway’s coup.

The success of Janeway’s coup is seen in STAR TREK: NEMESIS, when Captain Picard receives orders from “Vice Admiral” Janeway. Of course, if Janeway was the dictator of the Federation, she could have taken any title she wanted, but its common for dictators to assume less grandiose titles than their actual power. Many Communist dictators have only been the “Secretary” or whatever.

All this is supposition, of course. I don’t think STAR TREK is actually a secret Communist plot, and I doubt it adheres to any ideological viewpoint other than generic mid-20th century American liberalism. That said, if the Federation really is a Communist space tyranny, it is interesting to speculate what Janeway’s dictatorship might do to it. I suspect she would transition the Federation from a Communist state to something like 21st century China – a country that says it is Communist, but in reality has become this weird fusion of a free market and a heavy-handed authoritarian state.

-JM

*In my opinion, one of the best episodes of VOYAGER.

Reader Question Day #52 – why only seven DEMONSOULED books?

Joseph asks, concerning the final DEMONSOULED book:

I also thought #6 was going to be the last one but in regards to the post above, I’m looking forward to a confirmed 7th as well.

The seventh book will be the final one. I had planned originally for six books, with the final book called SOUL OF SHADOWS. However, by the end of the fifth book, I quickly realized that this meant the sixth book would be this 350,000 word monster. So I split it into two, SOUL OF SKULLS and the forthcoming SOUL OF SWORDS and even then, the seventh book is going to be quite long and a bit of a challenge to write. But the only way to grow as a writer (and, more importantly, to provide a satisfying ending for the reader) is to challenge oneself. 

Beverly asks:

My only disappointment so far has been the direction you took Lucan. I liked his character and hoped he would be Mazael’s right hand wizard and go to guy when things got really tough, perfecting his skill while still battling his own dark side. Since you didn’t write him that way, I’m hoping that Lucan will somehow have an epiphany and will help Mazael defeat The Old Demon.

Concerning Lucan, the direction his character took surprised me. I expected him to be, like you said, Mazael’s right-hand wizard. Except Mazael kept resisting his dark side, while Lucan was always willing to go just a *little* further and ignore the consequences. Finally that caught up to him.

Several different people ask (related to above):

Why only 7 DEMONSOULED books?

Actually, I wanted only six DEMONSOULED books, but it turned into seven.

But the main question is, I think, why only seven? Why not eight? Why not fifteen, like THE WHEEL OF TIME? Well, the temptation is there, to extend the story indefinitely to sell more books. And logistically, I could do it, too. But I don’t think that would be a good thing. Seven books is enough to tell the story, and so seven books it will be.

Also, I’m ready to do something new. DEMONSOULED’s first edition was published in 2005, and I’d been working on what would become the book since 2001 or so. I don’t want to be forever reworking the same characters and the same setting, or spinning off endless prequels and side stories. It’s time to do something new.

(That isn’t to say I won’t return to the world of DEMONSOULED or some of the characters in the future, just that the main story will be done.)

I wrote most of this post on Wednesday, but then on Friday Tom Simon (author of THE END OF EARTH AND SKY and other books) post an excellent essay on the matter. Key quotes:

The cumulative effect of all this is to make it seem that epic fantasy writers are by nature sprawling, slovenly, and self-indulgent. Some are, no doubt, but most are defeated by the nature of the medium — and of human experience. You set out to write an epic, and figure out what the story will be about, and who the heroes are, and what kinds of places you want to visit along the way; and you divide your outline into roughly equal thirds, and expect to write a trilogy. But the story has an exasperating way of growing bigger as you go along. The mountain that you chose for your destination turns out to be twice the size you originally thought, and consequently, twice as far away; and having travelled two-thirds of the distance you planned for, you find you are only one-third of the way there. Then, if your series has been a commercial success so far, you may find your publisher happily playing along, encouraging you to spin it out into as many books as they can profitably sell. If not, you are liable to be dropped in mid-series and never reach the destination at all…

The wisdom that could solve the paradox of epic fantasy may likewise be a matter of mathematics. What we want is a formula that will tell us, as a general rule, how much longer the actual story is likely to be compared to the outlined or projected story. Tad Williams worked out a solution for his own special case: if it looks like three books, it will actually take four. Extrapolating this to cover other situations is the tricky part, and that problem has not yet been solved. Of course, even with a general solution, we would still need the wisdom and the will to do what it prescribes. That is, I think, largely a matter of courage: it means having the guts to wrap up a successful series while the readers are still calling for more, instead of spinning it out to greater and greater lengths for easy profit. It means trusting our talent and our skill — knowing that if we can finish this one tale, the Muse will not desert us; there will be other tales to tell, and if we choose the best one available, our audience will follow us there.

So for DEMONSOULED, it’s time to reach the destination. One more book, and then the series will be done.

(Though I do plan to continue THE GHOSTS for some time yet, since they’re a completely different kind of books than DEMONSOULED.)

-JM

the print edition of DEMONSOULED…

…is now available at Amazon and Amazon UK.

Eventually, you’ll be able to get it at places other than Amazon, but in all candor it will be the cheapest at Amazon.

Over the next year, I’m going to be very gradually bringing some of my books into print editions. My goal is to have at least 6 print books available by the holiday season of 2013. Next, I’m going to do a print edition of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS. After that, I will do SOUL OF TYRANTS, and then switch back and forth between DEMONSOULED and THE GHOSTS.

-JM

GHOST IN THE FORGE progress update

I wrote 4,500 words today, and I’m currently on Chapter 7 of 27.

Caina’s about to met some old friends, who naturally want to kill her.

-JM

SOUL OF SKULLS – now on iBookstore!

SOUL OF SKULLS, the sixth book in the DEMONSOULED series, is now available on the iBookstore! So if you’re an iBooks user, follow the link to get it for your iPad, iPad Mini, iPhone, and iPod Touch.

-JM

The Tales of Sand & Sorcery, by Marsheila Rockwell

I’m very fond of short stories. I like reading them, and I like writing them. I particularly enjoy linked short stories using the same character, like Conan of Cimmeria and Solomon Kane, or Sherlock Holmes and the Shadow. This used to be a more common mode of storytelling in the days of pulp magazines, but it went away as the publishing industry ossified over the years and it became non-viable for most writers to write a series of short stories. Now, however, the pulp magazines (and quite a few other media formats) have been replaced by a new, enhanced medium – the smartphone. Smartphones need access to infinite content to provide a good value proposition to their manufacturers and users, which means it is once again viable for writers to write a series of short stories.

Pulp fiction has been reborn in a new and better form.

THE TALES OF SAND & SORCERY series by Marsheila Rockwell is an excellent example of what I have in mind. It revolves around two women, Shaala and Kij. Shaala was the daughter of a sultan who spurned the advances of the sultan’s pet wizard-priest, and in retribution, the wizard cursed her to feel neither pleasure nor pain until she died, and Shaala wanders the earth looking for a way to lift her curse. Kij has the ability to shapechange into a tiger, and is consequently regarded as sort of a semi-divine figure to whom judicial cases are submitted, with the judgment delivered by Kij’s tiger form feasting upon the criminal. (One imagine this approach saves on both the prison and catering bills.) Naturally, there are unpleasant consequences, and Kij is exiled and forced to flee, and eventually meets up with Shaala.

These are good sword & sorcery stories, with lots of fighting, keen characterizations, and an  interesting setting, a fantasy version of the Arabian Nights. Of the six stories so far, SHAALA AND THE SEA OF DRIED TEARS is my favorite, but they’re all good. Eventually, this is going to make for a heck of a fix-up novel.

-JM

The series (so far):

“Shaala, Made of Stone”

“The Jade and Honey Harlot”

“Both”

“Shaala and the Sea of Dried Tears”

“Unmade”

“Shaala and the Tiger’s Daughter”