Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 352

World of THE GHOSTS – the stormsingers of New Kyre

The Imperial Magisterium of the Empire claims sole authority over the practice of sorcery, but there are other sorcerers in the world.

Chief among them are the stormsingers of New Kyre, the chief maritime power (and rival of the Empire) on the western sea. The stormsingers are masters of elemental sorcery, of the arcane sciences of wind and wave. The wind rises at a stormsinger's command, the sea surges at their call, and the most powerful can summon the lightning itself. One stormsinger can destroy a fleet.

The stormdancers are perhaps even more dangerous. Though lacking the raw power of a stormsinger, the stormdancers use their sorcery to augment their martial skills. A stormdancer moves with the speed of a gale, and his blows land with the force of a river spilling over its banks.

Stormdancers have been known to mow their way through hundreds of enemy warriors.

A normal man cannot face a stormdancer and live.

GHOST IN THE STORM – book description

Happy Easter, everyone!

Here is the book description for GHOST IN THE STORM:

CAINA AMALAS is a Ghost nightfighter, one of the Emperor's elite spies and assassins. And though she remains anonymous, already legends grow around her. Whispers speak of the Ghost nightfighter who stopped the fire of the gods from consuming Rasadda, who defeated sorcerers of terrible power, who liberated slaves and threw down cruel lords.

Yet now the storm is coming to claim her…

ARK spent five long years hunting for his missing wife and son. Now, at long last, he has found them again. When the storm comes, he will do anything to save them.

No matter what the cost to himself…

KYLON is a stormdancer of New Kyre, master of the sword, wielder of the sorcery of air and water. The youngest man ever to claim the title of stormdancer, he will fight for the honor of his city and his sister.

Even if he is doomed to fail…

REZIR SHAHAN is an Emir of Istarinmul, a man of cruelty and power, a tyrant who rules over his slaves with a rod of iron. For too long the commoners of the Empire have defied their rightful masters.

When the storm comes, he will teach them to wear a slave's collar…

ANDROMACHE is one of the nine archons of New Kyre, her lineage ancient, her authority vast. For the honor of her city, she will bring the storm of war to the Empire.

And when she does, her true master will reward her with dark power beyond imagining.

-JM

Reader Question Day #18 – should I get an agent?

CW writes:

Jonathan! So, as an acquaintance who has been published, I hope to pick your brain just a bit. I have a writer friend who is looking for an agent. Do you have any suggestions?

Frankly, I am not the person to ask. I spent much of 2004 to 2011 trying to find an agent, and was utterly unsuccessful – I never got anything more than a form response.

So take what I am about to say with a grain of salt. This is also dependent on on what your friend writes and how much he has written – for instance, if he's written two chapters of a novel and wants to get an agent, he's probably not getting anywhere until he actually finishes the book.

Those caveats aside, I think it would be a much better use of your friend's time to look into self-publishing ebooks than to hunt around for an agent.

Why? To put it bluntly, we are in the middle of a major societal paradigm shift that is only just starting to go mainstream – the transition from print books to the domination of ebooks. Print books aren't going away, just like radio didn't go away when television came along, but ebooks are going to dominate.

The primary function of publishers is distribution – they turn your manuscript into a book, and distribute it to various stores. With ebooks, your friend can post his book file on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and the various other sites himself. It's even free, and anyone with even a modicum of technical skill can figure out how to do it. The purpose of a publisher is to distribute your book to an audience, but with ebooks, you don't actually need a publisher to reach an audience. (Of course, attracting an audience is a different matter entirely.)

Your friend could waste years trying to find an agent, waiting for the agent to sell the book, and more years for the publisher to get around to printing the book. There's also an excellent possibility the book would fail to sell through its first print run and go out of print, in which case your friend will probably never get the rights to his book back, and the only money he will ever see is whatever part of the advance he gets to keep. Whereas if your friend self-publishes his book, he can start making money off it immediately. (Probably not a lot of money, at least not at first.) There's a good article on the topic here:

http://kriswrites.com/2011/06/01/the-business-rusch-agents-surviving-the-transition-part-3/

So why go with an agent and a publisher? There's the prestige element, which I understand completely. Writers want to be able to say "I got published", "I've got an agent", and "I've seen my book in a bookstore". It makes us feel special and validated.  However, I will be blunt again – feeling special and validated is not nearly as nice as getting paid actual money.

And I am not blowing smoke this topic. I started self-publishing in April of 2011, and since then I have sold just under 20,000 copies of my ebooks. (That doesn't include the free promotional books – I gave away something like 60,000 of those.) I have made a nontrivial amount of money doing so – enough, in fact, that my taxes for 2011 are massively beyond my ability to do, and as soon as I finish typing this post, I'm going to drive across town to write a check to the CPA I hired to do them (and also to write a check to the IRS). You can see the sales progression here:

http://www.jonathanmoeller.com/writer/?p=1948

That is my opinion on the matter – I think your friend would be better served self-publishing and starting the slow process of building an audience for his work than hunting around for an agent. Again, what worked for me might not worked for your friend. But in the unlikely scenario I received an offer from a publisher, I think I would be better served by an intellectual property attorney and a CPA than an agent.

If your friend decides to look into self-publishing ebooks, I suggest this $3.99 book, LET'S GET DIGITAL, by David Gaughran as a starting point. It is very thorough, and helped me considerably:

http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Get-Digital-Self-Publish-ebook/dp/B005DC68NI

Another good book is THE SECRETS TO EBOOK PUBLISHING SUCCESS , by Mark Coker, the guy who founded Smashwords, a major ebook distributor. It's free:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/145431

Hope this is helps your friend!

angel91119 asks:

if there's a new caina book coming out does this one have any romance?

GHOST IN THE STORM does have a romantic subplot – I'm not going to say which characters are involved, though.

And if I get to continue the series long enough, Caina does (briefly) meet the man who will become her father-in-law a few books. Though telling any more would be an egregious spoiler.

-JM

The Prospero's Daughter Triology, by L. Jagi Lamplighter

I just finished reading the Prospero's Daughter Trilogy by L. Jagi Lamplighter, and it is really an extraordinary set of books – I've never read anything quite like them. I said the first two books were a bit like Warhammer crossed with a detective novel, but in the final volume, the trilogy cross-breeds with Dante's Inferno and C.S. Lewis's Great Divorce to make a wholly remarkable book.

Anyway, I recommend Prospero's Daughter without reservation, and suggest you go read it at once.

-JM

World of THE GHOSTS – the city of Marsis

As we prepare for the release of GHOST IN THE STORM in a few weeks, I'm going to be running a series of posts about the setting of THE GHOSTS as a preview for the book. Enjoy!

There are dark things buried below Marsis.

The largest city of the western Empire, Marsis is a bustling port, its harbor filled with ships from a dozen different nations, while barges laden with goods from the interior provinces of the Empire float to the city on the River Marentine. A quarter of a million people live within the city's walls, and rumor holds you can buy and sell anything in the city's Great Market – silks from Anshan, horses from the Kagarish plains, fine oak from the Ulkaari forests, scrolls from Istarinmul.

And Marsis is old. Once, a school of necromancers called the Red Circle ruled from the city's Citadel. But the stormsingers of Old Kyrace exterminated the necromancers, and the magi of the Imperial Magisterium destroyed Old Kyrace, and now the Empire rules in Marsis. The Red Circle is only a memory, long forgotten by all but historians. The citizens of Marsis go about their daily business, little dreaming of the horrors that once took place within the city.

And of the relics that lie beneath their feet, waiting for those foolish enough to claim them…

-JM

GHOST IN THE STORM – rough draft done

I am pleased to report that I finished the rough draft of GHOST IN THE STORM tonight. 29 chapters, 1(brief) epilogue, and 102,000 words. I started on February 25th, and finished on April 4th. So 40 days and 40 night of writing, with an average of 2,550 words a day.

Now time to start editing.

Look for some cover art to appear here very soon.

-JM

ebook sales for March 2012

3,644 total books.

This was down 106 from February, which was frankly a surprise to me – I expected the dip to be much larger. So that was good news. Especially since I didn't put out anything new in March (though I'm hoping to have GHOST IN THE STORM ready by the end of April or the beginning of May.)

For historical reference, here's what my numbers have looked like since April, when I started experimenting with ebooks:

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

-JM

Soul of Serpents & Soul of Dragons

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The Lord has been good this month. I'll have a post later this week with more details, but March was a pretty good month for ebook sales, almost as good as February.

First, some exciting news – I am pleased to report that SOUL OF SERPENTS, the third book in the DEMONSOULED series, sold its 3000th copy in March. Thanks, everyone!

And in even more exciting news, SOUL OF DRAGONS, which only came out on February 2nd, passed its 1,000th copy sold in March. Specifically, as of March 31st it was at 1,150 copies sold. That's remarkable, given that it's only been out for two months.

So, thank you all. I am hoping to start the fifth book in the DEMONSOULED series, SOUL OF SORCERY, on June 1st, if not sooner.

-JM

GHOST IN THE STORM…

…only four chapters left of the rough draft to write. And an epliogue. But it will be a short epilogue.

-JM

Reader Question Day #17 – American Gods, THE THIRD SOUL, and worldbuilding

Manwe asks:

Would you ever consider doing one (a world guide) for one of your own series? Or perhaps I should phrase that differently…as an author yourself, a creator of worlds, would you like to have done something like those (even if you have no actual plans to ever do any)?

Probably not. My general inclination is to forge ahead with new books, rather than to go back and rework old material endlessly.  Also, I've felt that overbuilding one's world is limiting – this is why the final STAR TREK TV series eventually went off the air, in my opinion. It got crushed by the weight of thirty years of accumulated continuity. J.J. Abrams was wise to reboot, in my opinion.

The closest I'd come is an omnibus edition of the DEMONSOULED or THE GHOSTS series when I've written enough books – I'd most likely write a bonus novella and put it at the back to sweeten the deal.

That said, doing bits and pieces of worldbuilding background might make for good blog material. Like, a "Locations of DEMONSOULED" series, with little 300 to 500 word snippets describing places like Castle Cravenlock or Arylkrad or Mount Tynagis. I may have to think on that…

You compared it to "American Gods", I have heard of the book but never read it myself, any good?

It's a very interesting book, but I don't think you'd like it. It's quite pagan, and I don't mean in the neo-pagan crystals and herbal tea sense (I prefer my tea caffeinated, as God intended), but in the old style "sacrifice children to appease the wrathful supernatural" sense.

It's basically a modern retelling of the Norse myth of Balder. The premise is that when all the immigrants from the Old World came to America, they brought their old gods with them – Odin, Czernbog, Anasasi, and all the rest. Except as the immigrants gradually became American, they started worshiping the new gods of America – radio, television, trains, technology, money, and so forth. So the old gods linger on, scraping out an existence as best they can – Odin becomes a con artist, Thoth an undertaker, Eostre a maker of candied eggs, and so forth.

It's interesting because Gaiman is British, and the book is an outsider's look at the American immigrant experience, and it's not a stretch to say that America worships Sex and Money most zealously. But I don't think it'd be your (to continue the metaphor) cup of tea -it's very graphic, and there is an overabundance of weird sex.

The pseudo-sequel, ANASASI BOYS, is much lighter in tone, and extremely funny.

Septuagint writes:

I really like THE THIRD SOUL series and wanted to read more, but there isn't any. Are you going to write more of it?

THE THIRD SOUL was an experiment in doing a serialized novel, and it turned out pretty well. At some point, I will combine the four parts together (THE TESTING, THE ASSASSINS, THE BLOOD SHAMAN, and THE HIGH DEMON) and sell it as an omnibus edition. I do have an idea for another novel in the series – TOMBS OF THE OLD EMPIRE. But I'm going to spend the rest of 2012 doing DEMONSOULED and THE GHOSTS books, so I don't think I'll get to it until 2013.

AlduinEaterOfWorlds writes:

hey do 1 star reviews bother you?

No. People are entitled to put their opinions on the Internet. (This is in fact the foundation of my writing business model.)

Tip for writer- never, ever respond to a bad review. Not ever. Not for any reason. It can turn into an Internet pile-on faster than you can imagine.

If you feel the urge to do so, locate a hammer and hit yourself briskly on the forehead repeatedly. Eventually you will pass out, which will prevent you from responding to a bad review. A mild concussion is preferable to responding to a bad review – the concussion will eventually heal, but an Internet pile-on will stay on the Internet forever.

-JM