Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 332

Reader Question Day #47 – I interview myself

Manwe asks:

Maybe next week for reader question day, you can use the Sword and Sorceress questionnaire on yourself.

Well…why not?

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1.) Tell us about yourself.

My name is Jonathan Moeller, and I work in educational IT. When I’m not doing that, I write a lot, and I don’t sleep much.

2.) Why do you write?

Fame and glory! Actually, that’s not true, which is good, because writing is a bad way to go about acquiring fame and glory. Also, fame and glory are like candy – they taste good, but they’re actually quite bad for you.

I started writing when I was a teenager because I was bored and I liked telling stories. Later in college, I wanted to try getting published, so I started writing novels, which I eventually did – DEMONSOULED in 2005. Eventually, I got frustrated with the byzantine and archaic world of traditional publishing (of course, back then, it wasn’t traditional publishing, it wast just publishing) and spent more time writing for my tech blog and Choose Your Own Adventure stories on this site than trying to get published.

Then in 2010 I found out about the Kindle and ebooks, and so writing suddenly became profitable, which was certainly a new and novel (ba-da-DUM) proposition!

In the end, I write because I enjoy it.

3.) Sword & Sorceress is known for sword & sorcery centered around a strong female character. Is there any particular trick to writing strong female characters?

Yes. The trick is to understand that women are different than men, but as equally capable of evil as men are. Not less capable of evil or more capable of evil, but just as capable of evil.

This might seem obvious, but it’s not. The 21st century zeitgeist has one big assumption (among others) that usually goes unexamined – that that women are less capable of evil than men are.  You can see this assumption play out in a plethora of fictional scenarios – when a man leaves his wife in a movie, he’s a faithless cad, but when a woman leaves her husband, she needs to discover herself, and have some “me time”, and her husband was probably an abusive jerk anyway. The reverse scenario is only rarely portrayed. (This is why the Julia Roberts movie was entitled “Eat, Pray, Love” and not “The Selfish Woman Who Abandons Her Faithful Husband To Sleep With Strangers While Wasting Large Sums Of Money.”) Anyway, this assumption is pretty much universally agreed upon in 21st century western culture, and colors a lot of fiction. This is why many heroines who are supposed to be “strong, independent women” are instead needy and disagreeable to the audience – they do stupid and selfish things, but those stupid and selfish things are portrayed as not their fault, even when they plainly are.

So the key to writing strong female characters is to ignore this assumption. When writing a character, whether male or female, the key is to give them agency – let them make decision and take actions, good or bad, and then deal with the consequences. In the end, a strong character cannot be passive. A “strong, independent heroine” who makes terrible choices and consistently refuses to take responsibility for them is, in the end, just as patronizing as a female character who spends an entire book waiting for her husband or her father to make her decisions for her, and yet is nonetheless portrayed as a “strong, independent heroine.”

4.) What would you say makes sword & sorcery different from other kinds of fantasy?

Scope. Sword & sorcery tends to be focused on individual characters, while high fantasy tends to deal with the fate of empires and nations and gods and universes and so forth. Granted, the scope can change during a story or even a series of stories.

5.) How do you think ebooks and the Internet will change the way we read & write?

In grand and splendid ways.

I think all the changes, in the end, will be for the better. The previously publishing system was byzantine and archaic, not to mention tremendously wasteful. (Think of how many unread books end up at pulping plants.) So this means it’s a lot better for writers, who (unless they choose to do so) don’t have to deal with the arbitrary demands and restrictive contracts of large publishers, or deal with agents, many of whom were notoriously dishonest. It’s also a lot better for readers, since there is now a limitless supply of reading material, and you can carry around four thousand books on a $99 Android smartphone that weights about 1/10th of a hardback book.

I think we are on the beginning of a renaissance of literature for both readers and writers.

Finally, I think this post by Dean Wesley Smith is a good summary of the changes, but I like this quote:

2012 was a year that started to prove that being able to sit in a chair and produce is a valuable skill in writing once again, just as it was in the first golden age of fiction in the 1930s and 1940s.  Readers want more books and stories from favorite authors and don’t understand the “only one book per year” thinking of traditional publishers.

Granted, if the apparatchiks at the UN manage to get control of the Internet, it could all fall apart, but for now, things are looking good for writers and readers. Less so for publishers, granted, but many of them kind of deserve it. The publishers that survive will be smart and nimble and add value to books, rather than acting as entitled middlemen who deserve a cut simply by existing.

6.) Tell us about your Sword & Sorceress story.

GHOST PYRES is the sixth (!) story I have written for SWORD & SORCERESS about Caina Amalas, a nightfighter of the Ghosts, the spies an assassins of the Emperor of Nighmar. Caina is also the protagonist in my THE GHOSTS series of novels.

(A bit of a note about continuity – the short stories have gotten somewhat separated from the novels. At the end of GHOST IN THE STONE, the latest novel, Caina is only twenty-one. By the time of GHOST PYRES, she’s almost thirty.)

Anyway, in GHOST PYRES, Caina is in a rural town hunting for spies when she comes across a series of murder committed by a pyromancer. Caina hates sorcery, so she’s going to do whatever it takes to stop the pyromancer…which means she will face a particularly dangerous temptation, since her hatred of sorcery makes her willing to do things she would not otherwise consider.

7.) Can you share an excerpt from your Sword & Sorceress story?

Absolutely I can:

“Someone just cast a spell nearby,” said Caina, looking

around. She and Lucan stood in one of the main dockside streets

of Caer Belaen, a small town southwest of the Imperial capital. A

few passing sailors cast odd looks at the nobleman and his

indisposed companion, but no one stopped to offer help.

Sailors had a good eye for trouble.

“You’re sure?” said Lucan.

“Aye,” said Caina. “A powerful one, too.” Another wave of

sharp prickles crawled over her skin. “And it’s still active.”

“No magi live in Caer Belaen,” said Lucan.

Caina nodded. “Then we investigate.”

She would have investigated anyway, even if an entire chapter

of the magi lived in the town. She was a Ghost circlemaster, one

of the leaders of the Emperor’s spies, and she had sworn to

defend the people of the Empire from those who preyed upon

them. And very often, magi and sorcerers were the predators.

Gods, how she hated them.

8.) Recommend one other book or short story you have written that we should read.

CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, the first book about Caina in THE GHOSTS series:

9.) Recommend one non-fiction book that you haven’t written.

Since I wrote the interview questions, I will break my own rules and recommend three.

The first is LET’S GET DIGITAL, by David Gaughran. If you want to start self-publishing your own ebooks, this book is a great primer on the topic.

The second and third books are THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE by Peter Heather and THE DAY OF THE BARBARIANS by Alessandro Barbero – both were direct inspirations for my novel SOUL OF SORCERY.

-JM

join me on Facebook

I have resisted for lo these many years, but I have finally buckled and gotten a Facebook page.

Join me on the dark side! There are cookies! And, apparently, horrible time-wasting games.  But I promise we’ll have none of that.

-JM

GHOST IN THE FORGE update and slight mistake

Recently, an observant reader noticed that I made a slight mistake at the very end of GHOST IN THE STONE. At the end of the book, I said that GHOST IN THE FORGE, the next book in the series, would come out in the first half of 2012.

However, GHOST IN THE STONE actually came out in October of 2012, which as observant readers will note, is the second half of 2012. And since I have access to neither a TARDIS nor a custom-modified DeLorean, it is literally impossible for GHOST IN THE FORGE to come out in the first half of 2012.

So, that was an error. If all goes well, I’m planning on starting GHOST IN THE FORGE in February sometime.

I apologize for the confusion!

-JM

predatory publishers

Simon & Schuster, one of the “Big 6 Publishers”, has opened up its own self-publishing wing. For a minimum of $1,999, they will publish your book for you, and depending upon the services you select, your bill could go up to $14,999.

I will say immediately that, in my opinion, this is a tremendous scam and no writer should go anywhere near it.

To back up this opinion, I offer my books THE UBUNTU BEGINNER’S GUIDE, which has sold 10,000 copies, SOUL OF TYRANTS, which has sold 7,000 copies, and SOUL OF SERPENTS, which has sold 5,000.  I did not pay to have them published – my only expenses were cover art and the computer I used to do the work, which I had purchased long before I used it to make ebooks. In fact, SOUL OF SERPENTS uses a painting from the public domain, so I didn’t even pay for that.

The point of these numbers isn’t to boast, but to point out that to reach an audience, you no longer need to work with a publisher. Technology has improved to the point that “publishing” is no longer an arcane and technical profession, but merely a button in a web browser. 

In further opinion, I think this has shown that one of the core myths of publishing was false all along. We have heard it argued for years that large publishers were curators of writers and guarantors of literary quality. Vanity presses and pay-to-publish outfits were scams and con artists that fed upon gullible writers. And now, once the balance sheets are down, a large publisher has shown itself to be no better than those scammers and con artists. They’re trying to trade on the “prestige” of being a large publisher, while simultaneously using business tactics designed to fleece the gullible.

I’ve heard it said that the digital revolution ravaged the music industry, but was great for individual musicians. Of course, the recording industry and the various record labels were notoriously corrupt – think of all the musicians who found themselves penniless due to coercive contract terms. But now a musician doesn’t need to bother with the recording industry at all – you can upload music directly to Amazon via Createspace and iTunes and sell without the middleman.

Writers and musicians, it seems, are both the natural prey of all sorts of hucksters. But with the new digital tools, there’s no reason to be anyone’s prey – and certainly no reason to pay $1,999 to $14,999 for someone to upload your book to Amazon for you.

-JM

10,000

I started blogging about Ubuntu Linux in 2008, after I happened to mention in passing some troubles I had with Ubuntu 8.04, and noticed the next day that one post got 3x as many hits as the rest of my blog combined. This was pretty cool, so I started a blog devoted exclusively to Ubuntu and other technology topics. At its peak, it pulled down about 110,00 hits a month.

Then in the beginning of 2012, I started experimenting with ebooks. Eventually I had the idea of combining my most popular Ubuntu posts into an ebook, which I did. After I uploaded it, I hemmed and hawed, and finally decided to suspend the book while I thought about it some more. (Self-publishing an ebook is scary the first time. The thirtieth, less so.)

So when I logged in to suspend the book…I saw that it had sold two copies since the last time I had logged in. And I had done nothing to promote it, no links, no blog posts, I hadn’t lifted a finger.

“Huh,” I thought. “There could be something to this.”

So now, 19 months later, I’m pleased to report that THE UBUNTU BEGINNER’S GUIDE has sold its 10,000th copy, and I am planning to update it to a fifth edition sometime in January.

Thank you, all! When you write fiction, you hope that the reader finds the book entertaining. For THE UBUNTU BEGINNER’S GUIDE, I hope all ten thousand of you found the book useful.

-JM

Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition

Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition comes out tomorrow! In 1998, I was playing more computer games than reading novels, so I think it’s safe to say that Baldur’s Gate had a substantial impact on me as a writer. Which is just as well, since those old-style CRPGs had very little spoken dialog, but walls and walls of text – it was like reading a novel, but you still got to blow up orcs and stuff.

This post from Black Gate sums it up nicely:

When Baldur’s Gate was released in November 1998, it quickly became one of the most acclaimed computer role playing games in history. It put those friendly Edmonton developers, an outfit named BioWare, on the road to stardom, and over the next decade they came to dominate the industry with titles like Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Baldur’s Gate, with its splendid story, characters, and revolutionary (for the time) Infinity game engine, still occupies a special place in the hearts of modern gamers. It was released for Windows 95/98 and doesn’t run well on modern machines — so for most of us, Baldur’s Gate is a distant memory, like those late nights playing Dungeon Master on an Amiga.

Needless to say, I’ll be getting it. Not that I’ll have time to play it, but there you go. I should also point out that if you want the game’s excellent soundtrack, you can get it via GOG.com.

-JM

SOUL OF SKULLS – the halfway point!

I have reached the halfway mark for the rough draft of SOUL OF SKULLS. 19 chapters down, 19 to go.

I’m at about 74,700 words right now, so I suspect the final draft will weigh in at 150,000 words or so.

-JM

Thanks, UK!

A screenshot from earlier this morning, showing the Amazon UK page of GHOST IN THE BLOOD:

Thanks, UK readers! That is literally the highest any of my books have ever gotten on Amazon UK.

-JM

Reader Question Day #46 – how to sell 7,000 books, the romantic inclinations of Molly Cravenlock, and more

Note that today’s post contains mild spoilers for SOUL OF DRAGONS and SOUL OF SORCERY.

LJL asks in response to my post that SOUL OF TYRANTS sold 7,000 copies:

What kind of advertising/publicity do you do?

I don’t do much in the way of advertising or promotion. I think the biggest thing I did was make the first book in the series (DEMONSOULED) free, and enough people like it that they continued on to the sequel, SOUL OF TYRANTS. I suspect advertising or publicity is kind of a waste of time, because the only publicity that actually works is a.) someone reads the book and likes it, or b.) someone reads the book and likes it after hearing someone they know read the book and liked it.

Of course, getting those things to happen, that’s the trick.

Also, what do you charge per title and what kind of % of that do you actually take home?

For this book, I charged $2.99 for it. You get 70% on Amazon and Kobo and 65% on Barnes and Noble, so that works out to about $2.09 and $1.94, respectively. Other ebook retailers pay about 60% to 70%, depending on the retailer and the price of the book.

Matthew Fischer states, concerning the ending of SOUL OF SORCERY:

Amazing series. but I think that Molly should marry Lucan.

Molly would have strong opinions about that. Strong, sharp, steel, blade-shaped opinions.

But, to address the question seriously, attraction between men and women is rarely governed by rational concerns. In Molly’s case, she was attracted to Riothamus of the Tervingi because a.) he was brave enough to act as the emissary following the Tervingi defeat at Stone Tower, and b.) he refused to use his magic to kill, even though he easily could have, because he would one day be the Guardian. That combination of bravery and compassion was enough to attract Molly to him. Lucan Mandragon, by contrast, is also quite brave, but by the time Molly meets him for the first time at the end of SOUL OF DRAGONS, all the compassion has been burned out of him…and he gets worse from there.

Additionally, Molly doesn’t like Lucan. And it’s not the kind of dislike that masks sexual tension, but the fact that she thinks he’s dangerous and untrustworthy, and should probably be killed before he does something catastrophically bad.

Lucan, for his part, would have absolutely no inclination to pursue Molly, because a.) he’s still in love with Tymaen Highgate, and b.) by the beginning of SOUL OF SORCERY, he has concluded that the Demonsouled are the cause of the world’s woes, and he’s going to fix that by killing all the Demonsouled – including Molly.

So a Molly/Lucan pairing is unlikely.

Rohaya asks:

Got onto your Demonsouled series after completing the Ghost series. Like the Ghost series, I love your Demonsouled series. Can’t wait for the latest in both…sigh! One question that I have in the Demonsouled series – what happened to the serpent people that still had their limbs?

The Ang-kath, the serpent people who have kept their limbs, are still out there. I haven’t quite figured out how to work them back into the books, though. (One of the reasons is that they mostly live far to the east, further east than even the original Tervingi homeland, and only rarely come to the west, where the Grim Marches and Knightcastle are.) Additionally, there are two branches of the San-keth faith, the western and the eastern. The western San-keth have featured in the DEMONSOULED books so far, but the Ang-kath are mostly concerned with the eastern branch.

-JM

free ebooks for Black Friday

Today is Black Friday, the high feast of the cult of consumerism, and if you’d prefer to stay home and read, I’ve got you covered. Or, if you have to drive relatives to the store, and would rather hide in your car with your phone and an ereader app, I’ve got four free ebooks for you.

DEMONSOULED is the first novel of my DEMONSOULED series, sword-and-sorcery tales chronicling the adventures of the knight Mazael Cravenlock as he wages war against serpent men, inhuman invaders, dragons, and other creatures. I’ve written five books in this series, with a sixth one coming out early in 2013. You can get DEMONSOULED for free at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Nook UK, iTunes, and Smashwords, and also at Amazon.co.uk.

CHILD OF THE GHOSTS is the first book of my THE GHOSTS series, about the adventures of Caina Amalas, an elite spy and assassin who fights rogue sorcerers, slave traders, corrupt lords, and anyone else who threatens to overthrow the Empire of Nighmar.  There are five books in the series, with the sixth book planned for spring 2013. CHILD OF THE GHOSTS is available for free at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Nook UK, iTunes, and Smashwords, and also at Amazon.co.uk.

THE TESTING is the first novella in “The Third Soul” series, about Rachaelis Morulan, an apprentice mage in the corrupt Conclave of Araspan. It’s free at Amazon, Amazon UK,Barnes & Noble, Nook UK, iTunes, and Smashwords.

THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS is the first book in an urban fantasy series about an evil wizard from a high medieval fantasy world and an evil politician from Chicago. The politician gives the wizard guns to conquer his world, and the wizard teaches the politician black magic to dominate the political scene. Get it for free at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Nook UK,  iTunes, and Smashwords.

Happy reading!

-JM