Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 347

a review for THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS

Miguel Guhlin has nice things to say about THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS. He also likes the essay I wrote about writing the books. 

And if all this makes you curious, you can read the book for free via Smashwords. (I’m hoping to have it free on the various Amazons and B&N, but that takes time. In the meantime, you can get it in the format of your choice on Smashwords.)

-JM

a writer writing about a writer writing about writing

There comes a time, if a writer has been a writer long enough, that he starts to remember nothing else but writing, and then writes a book about a writer having difficulties writing.

Don’t do this. It’s almost always dreadfully boring.

-JM

Reader Question Day #27 – scheduling and the Roman Empire

Rohaya asks:

Wow, thanks so much for writing the Ghost series. Completed all 4 books in the series in one week. Can’t wait for the next one…if there is one?

Thanks! There is indeed going to be a next one – GHOST IN THE STONE. I’m hoping to start writing it toward the end of September or the beginning of October, depending on when I get done with SOUL OF SORCERY.

I might do a short GHOSTS novella after I finish the rough draft of SOUL OF SORCERY. I’ve been thinking about this for a while – I’ve got a couple different series that I’m juggling, and I suppose it’s annoying to wait for a new book to come out. Once I finish a new book, it might be nice to do a short novella in a different series – to tide people over until the next book in that series comes out, and to clear my head.

But we’ll see how my schedule works out.

Nimbus asks:

Is the world of the Caina/Ghost books explicitly based on the Roman Empire?

Not explicitly. Caina’s Empire, to sum it up roughly, is sort of what the Western Roman Empire would have looked like if it had survived into the Renaissance. So there are some elements like that of ancient Rome – an Emperor, provincial governors, the Legions, and so forth. Then there are things that had no parallel in imperial Rome, like the ban on slavery, of the Ghosts themselves, the fact that the Emperor is elected by the nobles (this will come up in a future novel).

And since they’re fantasy books, there are elements that have no parallel in the real world, like the Imperial Magisterium, or the fact that several of the enemies of Caina’s Empire are ruled by cabals of powerful sorcerers.

So I borrow elements from ancient Rome as it suits the books, but I don’t go for a hard reenactment.

Which is appropriate, really, since I used to be a history major, but I eventually realized that I was less interested in history and more interested in plundering bits of history for fantasy novels.

Manwe asks, concerning SOUL OF SORCERY:

And this comes out in….August, was it? September?

I’m hoping it will come out in late September or early October. The end of August is a possibility, if everything goes flawlessly, but that never happens. So, later September or early October.

-JM

POV characters in SOUL OF SORCERY.

I am 31,000 words into the rough draft of SOUL OF SORCERY, on chapter 9 of 36.

Someone asked who the point-of-view characters would be in SOUL OF SORCERY. There are four returning POV characters:

Mazael Cravenlock

Lucan Mandragon

Molly Cravenlock

Romaria Greenshield

Additionally, there are five new POV characters:

Riothamus of the Tervingi

Tymaen Highgate

Aegidia, Guardian of the Tervingi

Ragnachar, a hrould of the Tervingi

The Old Demon

So SOUL OF SORCERY will have a total of nine point-of-view characters. By contrast, SOUL OF SERPENTS had six, and SOUL OF DRAGONS had four. So SOUL OF SORCERY is a somewhat larger novel in scope, though a few of the characters listed above have only one or two scenes from their point of view.

But, still, Nine POV characters. I’d better get to work.

-JM

Writers are the vermin of publishing

Or, at least, they were.

It was Kobo that got me thinking along these lines.

Recently Kobo announced the impending launch of its own self-publishing ebook portal for writers. The announcement touted the enhancements Kobo’s platform would offer that other self-publishing sites did not – geographical sales data, greater price controls, and so forth. Reading the web articles and blog posts on the topic, I had a growing sense of unreality, and the reason for it finally struck me.

Kobo is actively competing to attract writers.

This might seem obvious, but it is a startling paradigm shift.

Most publishers have simply never exerted themselves to attract writers.

If you’ve been writing long enough, you know what I mean. Sooner or later you ran into submission guidelines like this:

Send first three chapters of manuscript. Expect nine to eighteen months for response. If you receive no response after two years, assume we have declined.

Or numerous agents had submission guidelines like this:

Query letter must be one page, double space. Include a single-spaced synopsis, detailed marketing plan, and demographic write-up. Our standard response time is nine to twelve months. If you do not receive a response after two years, assume we have declined. Do not write before two years have passed, or we will delete your query unread.

These are not the kind of submission guidelines written by people who want to do business with you – these are the sort of submission guidelines written by people who are actively trying to scare away submissions. The unwritten meaning of these submission guidelines is: go away and stop bothering us. It’s essentially the same attitude as the mechanic or the doctor who doesn’t really want to figure out your problem – he just wants you to stop talking and go away.

Publishing likes to call itself an industry, and it is – it produces physical objects called books (or magazines). The books are manufactured, warehoused, sold, and then shipped. Just like any other physical product, from tampons to iPods.

For publishing as an industry, the fact that all those books had to be filled with written words was a necessary economic evil, a chore to be dealt with as quickly, cheaply, and efficiently as possible. And that was why publishers did not need to attract writers – the writers would come to them because the publishers only had the physical (and financial) capacity to manufacture a certain number of books in a given year. Only so many words would fit into those books, after all, so publishers could pick and choose which writers they wanted (the ones whose words were most likely to attract people into buying the physical book object), and simply ignore all the others.

This worked excellently for the manufacture and sale of physical books, but then a new paradigm came along.

And that paradigm is the device.

Rather than buying many physical books or magazines, you instead buy one device that can, for all practical purposes, access and display a virtually unlimited number of books. It doesn’t matter whether this device is a PC, a Kindle, an iPad, or whatever. It can connect to the Internet and access unlimited quantities of content. Pretty cool, right?

But access to unlimited quantities of content means that someone has to write all that content.

If you read the blogs of any bloggers who make a profit using Google Adsense or BlogAds or Amazon Affiliates or whatever, you’ll notice they all same the same thing: content is king. To be a successful blogger, you need content, lots of content, and new content coming in all the time, whether you write it yourself or subcontract it out.

The same rules apply to device manufacturers. An iPad or Kindle without access to content is useless. Device manufacturers need, very badly, a constant stream of new content, otherwise their devices are useless.

And that is why Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Apple are competing to attract writers to their self-publishing platforms. (It’s also why tablet/smartphone manufacturers include the YouTube app on their devices, despite the occasional questionable legality of YouTube videos.) Dealing with publishers (or TV/movie studios) is expensive and a tremendous headache. Much easier and cheaper to let people self-publish stuff.

In fact, it’s something of a stroke of genius. If you’re a device manufacturer, and you let people work for themselves by self-publishing their content, they’ll work much harder than they would ever work for you. You just take a minor cut off the sale, they’ll fill your device’s ecosystem with content, and you’ll sell more devices – all without lifting a finger. They will literally build your ecosystem for you, and you can even take a cut of the money. Apple and Google figured this out a while ago for smartphones (hence the iTunes App Store and Google Play), and the same principles work for ebooks. Why do you think Apple lets third-party developers sell apps via the App Store? The generosity of its shiny aluminum and glass heart? If people can make money writing iOS apps, they will write iOS apps, and if people buy those iOS apps, they’ll come to like them and buy even more iPods, iPhones, and iPads, and Apple can add another billion or two to its cash reserves.

People will occasionally complain that self-publishing “floods” the market with crap, but so what? From the perspective of the device manufacturers, it’s a win. Let’s say Barnes & Noble has 1 million crappy Nook Books for sale, each for $2.99, and each one sells only five copies (as many self-published books do). Since B&N takes 35% of the sale, that means B&N just made over one million dollars by doing nothing more than maintaining some server space. (Given that Amazon, Apple, and B&N all deal with countless terabytes of data on a regular basis, hosting 1 million 500k ebook files – about 500 gigabytes of data – is positively trivial. You can buy desktop computers with 2,000 gigabytes of storage space for about $500 to $650.)

And the thing is, not all of those 1 million self-published books will be crappy, or even objectively crappy. One man’s “crap” is another man’s “OMG I MUST BUY THE SEQUEL RIGHT NOW!” So quite a few of those 1 million crappy self-published books will sell quite a few more than five copies. And some of the writers of those crappy books will continue to practice and improve, and write books that will sell more than five copies. Or a writer will write a really good new book that takes off, and the readers will go back and buy all of his previous book.

All of which generates money for the device manufacturer.

Some have also argued that self-published ebooks ruin the “browsing” experience that a good bookstore offers, that readers will lose the ability to find good books. This is a specious argument. Both books and ebooks cost money, and you are more likely to buy a book based on a recommendation from a friend, a good review, or previous experience with the writer’s work, than to simply wander through a bookstore buying books at random. And finding those books your friends recommended is infinitely easier via the Internet.

Therefore, this new “device” model needs writers, a lot of writers, in the way that old-style book publishing simply did not. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple are all making a lot of money off their devices, and to keep this money-making engine going, they need content, a lot of content.

And that is why the device manufacturers want to attract writers. They need writers to supply content for their devices in a way that old-style publishing did not, and the economies of scale dictate that they need as many writers as possible to do it for them. Letting the writers self-publish is easier, cheaper, and less legally perilous than dealing with the international conglomerates that own most major book publishers.

There has never been a better time to be a writer. Granted, we live in an era of wrenching and tremendous technological and social change, and for all I know, the world economy could melt down or the US government could collapse tomorrow (hopefully this will not happen). But for now, it’s a splendid time to be a writer. Even if you don’t want to self-publishing, you could start a blog today and potentially gain a larger audience than 90% of the writers throughout human history.

How to attract that audience, of course, is another story. But that’s up to you.

-JM

one week of SOUL OF SORCERY

I’ve been writing SOUL OF SORCERY for one week now, and I’ve managed to get 21,000 words into the first draft. So six chapters down, thirty to go. Don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up this pace (life sometimes happens), but I’ve made a good start.

-JM

A one-sentence review of “Snow White and the Hunstman.”

This contained many pieces of an excellent movie, and it’s a pity no one managed to assemble them.

-JM

Reader Question Day #26 – Maps, Paperbacks, and Book Sales

Ivy asks:

I am a fan I love everything I have read of yours.  I am a Kindle user; my dad is a little more old fashioned but he would love your stuff.  So is there any of your work in hard copy?

Thanks for the kind words about my books!

As for a paper edition, I would like to do some, but I don’t have plans to do any for the immediate future. I don’t think the demand for paper copies would justify the amount of work it would take to set it up – I only have a few hours to write (or work on writing-related stuff) every day, and I think it would be better to spend that time writing new books than putting out new editions of old books.

That said, if I can free up the time to do it, I definitely will.

Also there is a bible study type book written with a woman on the amazon store by a person with your name.  Is this you? 

That would be this book:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Bible-Minute-ebook/dp/B003VD21HI

I didn’t write (or illustrate) it, though I am mildly curious to know if that Jonathan Moeller ever a.) searches for himself on Amazon, and b.) what he thinks when he comes across my books – fantasy novels and Ubuntu Linux make for something of an peculiar combination.

Joe asks:

I would like to make one request. As I have read each of the books and the worlds within them have evolved, it has occurred to me that a map would greatly help in putting the geography into perspective. I would love to see that added to future books in both these series. I believe it would be an enriching addition, but even without it the books have been an excellent read. Thank you and I look forward to many more books in both series.

Thanks for the kind words about the books!

I’ve never really drawn a map for any of the books, since I’m not terribly good at drawing. And to be frank a map is somewhat limiting when writing, since you get locked into whatever the map says. So generally instead of a map, I’ll write up a few pages that describes the setting – Knightcastle is west of Castle Cravenlock, Swordgrim is north, Deepforest Keep is far to the south, and Arylkrad is far to the northeast.

Or for THE GHOSTS, Malarae is in the center of the Empire, Marsis is on the western coast, and Rasadda is southeast of Malarae, on the northern coast of the Alqaarin Sea.

Still, enough people have asked for maps that I might start including these geographic write-ups with the books.

John C. Wright asks:

May I link to this article from my page? I am so impressed with your persistence, I would not mind telling more people about your books. My wife is also thinking of following in your footsteps with her latest.

Link away! (The article in question is here.)

Marvell asks:

Why do you post about your book sales? Don’t you think that is bragging and makes people who haven’t had as many book sales (like me) feel bad?

I don’t do it to brag – there are people who sell as many books in a single day as I do in a month.

The reason I do it is because we live in a time of tremendous and far-reaching change, not just in publishing, but in everything. But writing and computer repair is what I know how to do, so that’s what I write about. Additionally, writers are the natural prey for all kinds of fraudsters, charlatans, and scam artists. I regularly get emails from this guy who will take your book and upload it to Amazon for $599. He won’t do the cover art or design, and he won’t edit it, but he’ll convert it to a MOBI file and upload it to Amazon for the low, low price of $599.

I’m sure he’s making an excellent living.

So the more information writers have, the better. Plus, there are people who argue that self-publishing is the path to riches (it’s not), or that self-publishing is destroying the fabric of literature (it’s definitely not). Hopefully my numbers will help people make informed decisions about ebooks and self-publishing.

-JM

ebook sales for May 2012

3,886.

My best month ever. Which is pleasantly surprising, since I expected a drop. I think there were two reasons for the sales uptick.

-Ubuntu 12.04 came out in April, and that meant my Ubuntu book had a big surge in sales. It also gave my other two computer books (THE WINDOWS COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE and THE LINUX COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S Guide) a boost as well.

-May was the first full month for GHOST IN THE STORM, and it did very well.

So, thank you to everyone who bought a book (or books) this month.

One other point – I got an email from someone arguing that it was unseemly to post sales numbers every month. I disagree. I don’t do this to boast (lots of people sell more than I do), but to share information. Writers are the natural prey for all sorts of con artists and charlatans, so the more information out there, the better. Plus, there are people who argue that self-publishing is the path to riches (it’s not), or that self-publishing is destroying the fabric of literature (it’s definitely not). Hopefully my numbers will help people make informed decisions about ebooks and self-publishing.

So, for historical progression, here are my sales numbers since I started in April of 2011:

April 2011: 22

May 2011: 105

June 2011: 236

July 2011: 366

August 2011: 489

September 2011: 1335

October 2011: 1607

November 2011: 2142

December 2011: 2340

January 2012: 3261

February 2012: 3750

March 2012: 3644

April 2012: 3521

May 2012: 3886

-JM

I quest for the Tower

It has taken me just about ten years to write this post.

In 2002, I took a class on the History of Rome. One part that stuck keenly in my mind was the account of the Roman Civil War. Of course, ancient Rome went through any number of civil wars, but this was THE Roman Civil War, the big one that turned Rome from a decaying Republic to an Empire ruled by the Caesar Augustus who issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. It is a fascinating and dramatic historical period, and so it is not hard to see why so many works of fiction are set in the period – William Shakespeare’s plays about Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra, HBO’s graphic ROME series, and innumerable historical novels.

Inspired by that class, I bought a book by Stephen Dando-Collins called CAESAR’S LEGION, about Caesar’s elite 10th Legion. I was reading it when I came home to my parents for the summer, and I had gotten to the chapter on the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC, specifically the part when Caesar’s army almost starved to death due to want of supplies before facing Pompey’s legions.

While I had been gone, the local town’s Wal-Mart had been upgraded to a Super Wal-Mart, the kind that carries groceries and food in additional to the usual dry goods. I remember, very distinctly, walking into that Super Wal-Mart for the first time and being stunned at the sheer quantity of food available. What would Caesar have done, I wondered, if he had had access to that kind of food? Or to canned food – he needn’t have worried about spoilage on the march, and he could have fed all his men.

Then I wandered past the sporting goods section, and wondered half-jokingly what Caesar would have done with a shotgun. Or with fifty shotguns. Or AK-47s. With fifty AK-47s, his men could have mowed down all of Pompey’s army.

The idea percolated.

That weekend one of my brothers had a graduation party, and as the festivities wound down, I slipped away to my computer and wrote a story about the idea. In the story, a Chicago politician running for Congress makes a pact with a renegade from another world, a world with a medieval level of technology. The politician will provide guns the renegade can use to take over his world. And what would the politician get in return? Well, I like fantasy novels, so the medieval world had magic, and the renegade was actually an evil wizard. And in exchange for the guns, the wizard taught the politician magic he could use to win his Congressional race, and maybe use to reach even higher office.

So Lord Marugon, the last of the Warlocks, and Thomas Wycliffe, Congressman from Illinois, were born.

At the time, I belonged to an online writers’ group, and they really liked the story. So I began to write more short stories using the setting and the characters, and by the end of 2002, I had a chain of them coming to about 30,000 words or so.

I decided I would turn those short stories into a novel. I realized it would be a really, really big novel. But that it was okay – it would be a huge epic story, and wouldn’t that be easier to sell? I started writing it on January 1st, 2003, confident I would finish by early summer or so.

I typed the final sentence on September 1, 2003, finishing this huge monster book of 339,000 words. Now, of course, writing 70,000 or 80,000 words in a month seems trivial, but back then it was the most I had ever written in so short a time, and it had been such an effort that I didn’t write anything new for almost four and a half months after.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the thing – most publishers wanted books around the 100,000 word range. After thinking it over, I realized that there was a natural stopping point at about 95,000 words in. I would edit, revise, and proofread that section and submit it as a book. Then I could sell the rest of it as one or more books to the same publisher. And if that first 95,000 words sold well on their own, well, that would make it all the easier to sell the rest, wouldn’t it?

Though I didn’t know it at the time, this was remarkably naive.

But the first part of the plan went well, and the first 95,000 words, which I had entitled WORLDS TO CONQUER, found a small publisher in August of 2004. Triumph! I sold DEMONSOULED in April of 2004, and it came out in May of 2005, so I figured I could expect roughly the same turnaround with WORLDS TO CONQUER.

Time passed. From time to time I emailed the publisher, wondering when I should plan to do edits.

Soon, they said.

More time passed. I wrote a sequel to DEMONSOULED, called SOUL OF TYRANTS, and abjectly failed to sell it. I quit graduate school, moved to a different state, and got a different job. I kept writing novels, but none of them sold. Eventually I realized I could make more money blogging about computers than by writing fiction, so I started to do that.

Then, out of the blue in May of 2008, a galley proof arrived for WORLDS TO CONQUER. Sweet! I dutifully filled out the proofs and sent them in, and the book appeared for sale on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in August of 2008. I did my best to promote it. I gave away review copies and babbled about it incessantly on my blog for weeks.

And it sold…well, let’s just say it sold well enough that I could afford a Whopper and fries. Specifically, one Whopper. With cheese.

It was delicious.

And after I ate it, that was that. That was all the money I saw from WORLDS TO CONQUER. The book faded away, and I moved on.

More time passed. I wrote other books, and did other things. I sold short stories every year to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s SWORD & SORCERESS anthology, occasional short stories to small presses, and had some success tech blogging, but that was it. I never again sold a novel or got another book contract. Bit by bit, I began to reconsider writing books. If I couldn’t sell them to publishers, was I wasting my time? Had I been wasting time, all those years, trying to write and sell novels? Maybe it was time to let go, to move on to other things.

Then in November of 2010, I got a third-generation Kindle ereader.

“There has got to be a way to make money using this thing,” I thought to myself.

Accurately, as it turned out.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but 2010 was the year that ebooks started to make their way into the mainstream, and I was in the right place at the right time with all these unpublished novels I could turn into ebooks. In April of 2011, I came across a post by thriller writer Lee Goldberg, describing his experiences self-publishing one of his books as an ebook. What caught my attention was that his book (THE WALK) had originally be published by Five Star, which had published DEMONSOULED back in 2005. Following Mr. Goldberg’s advice, I got the rights to DEMONSOULED back and turned it into an ebook in April of 2011.

Just as an experiment.

To see what would happen.

Fast forward to April of 2012, and I had sold just under 23,000 copies of 19 different ebook titles. I realized that a whole new paradigm for writing and reading had been created. No longer was it necessary to find a publisher to sell a printed book. Now, with ebooks, I could write as many books as I wanted. The readers, not the publishers, would be the final judge of quality.

I pulled out my old contract (now 8 years old) for WORLDS TO CONQUER from my file cabinet, and saw that I could claim the rights back to the book, allowing me to self-publish it as an ebook.

And in 2012, I got the rights to WORLDS TO CONQUER back from the publisher.

So I buckled down to work doing massive edits and revisions, both of the 95,000 words that had been published, and the remaining 250,000 or so that had never been seen by anyone else. It was a strange experience to return to those familiar characters after so long – Simon and his fears and doubts, Thomas Wycliffe and his imperial ambitions, Liam Mastere’s desperate effort to save King Lithon, and Arran Belphon’s long quest to reach the Tower of Endless Worlds, crossing a continent (twice) in order to reach it. (Needless to say, after ten years of trying to find a home for this book, I rather emphasized with Arran’s quest!)

In the end, I divided the book into four full-length novels: THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS, A KNIGHT OF THE SACRED BLADE, A WIZARD OF THE WHITE COUNCIL, and THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS. Together they total about 315,000 words, and I put them up for sale in the first week of June 2012.

It is very strange to think that the books are now available using technologies that did not exist when I began writing what would become the first chapter of THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS in May of 2002.

So it has been a long journey, but the destination has been reached at last. And if you should chance to try THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS (it’s free on Smashwords), then I hope you have enjoy these books.

-JM