Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 81

DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS progress update

Ten chapters of DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS down, ten to go. Halfway there.

I’m starting the week at 55,000 words of DRAGONSKULL, and I’m hoping to be at 80,000 by the time we reach Labor Day Weekend. We’ll see if I get there!

I’m also 4700 words into CLOAK OF MASKS and 2200 words into SILENT ORDER: WRECK HAND.

-JM

Kindle Unlimited and Indie Authors

If you’ve glanced at the world of publishing news, you know that the US Department of Justice is suing to stop the merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. I haven’t paid close attention to it, since I’m not published by either company and nor is that likely to happen, but it’s been amusing to watch various unsavory facts about traditional publishing bubble to the surface in the depositions.

What was interesting to me was that someone worked out that Amazon paid over $250 million dollars in Kindle Unlimited page reads to authors for the first half of 2022.

People have interpreted this fact in numerous ways, but I think this proves my favorite interpretation – that it’s better to self-publish than to waste years trying to find a traditional publisher only to get screwed.

A while back there was one of those interminably tedious Twitter threads where an author claimed that traditional publishing was biased against her identity group the most. As you might guess, nearly all the replies were arguments saying “no, traditional publishing is the most biased against MY identity group, you insensitive clod!” and an endless circular argument about which group was the most disfavored by traditional publishing. As I glanced at this thread, I realized I was watching the parable of the blind men describing the elephant play out in real time. Everyone on that thread was, essentially, correct. They were all describing – from their perspective – a system that wasn’t fair to writers, regardless of their identity groups.

In some ways, traditional publishing is basically a zombie legacy industry. It used to be more vibrant and distributed, with hundreds of different publishers in the US back in the 70s and the 80s, but then they all got bought up. For a while there were the Big Six publishers, now there are only the Big Five, and one of them is trying to buy the others to become the Big Four. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the Big Five aren’t independent companies, but subsidiaries owned by massive international conglomerates. The conglomerates don’t really care what their publishing divisions do, so long as they turn a profit and don’t break the law in such a way that they end up in federal court, like the price-fixing lawsuit from about twelve years ago. In such a massive organization, the concerns of an individual writer are basically meaningless and more profitable to simply ignore. Indeed, you occasionally see stories about big sellers like Dean Koontz writing for one of Amazon’s imprints because he was unhappy with his publisher, and Jim Butcher recently self-published a Dresden Files novella on Kindle Unlimited (it was excellent, in my opinion.) If big sellers like Dean Koontz and Jim Butcher aren’t happy with the way things are going in traditional publishing, think how dissatisfied writers with less clout must be.

Like this recent article about Barnes & Noble cutting back on the amount of middle-grade hardcovers it will orders. Critics said it would hit underrepresented authors the most. The CEO of B&N pointed out that the store winds up returning about 80% of its middle grade hardcovers, so the decision is a necessary business one since there’s no point in ordering a bunch of hardcovers that aren’t going to sell. This seems to be one of those arguments where both sides are correct and have a point. The authors are right to be worried that B&N is cutting back on hardcovers, but the CEO of B&N is also right to point out that ordering a bunch of hardcovers that won’t sell anyway won’t do the authors very much good.

It’s not fair to the writers, though.

There is no such thing as perfect fairness in this fallen world, and nor will there ever be.

But here’s the thing – Kindle Unlimited is a lot closer to actual fairness than anything traditional publishing ever did. Like, there are valid criticisms to be made of Kindle Unlimited. But you don’t need to network to use it. You don’t need to convince an editor or an agent to like you. You don’t have to deal with the creaking decrepit infrastructure of legacy publishing. And Kindle Unlimited doesn’t care about your identity group. You can use it to publish your book, and then you’re on a level playing field with every other writer.

Granted, this can lead to discovering a hard truth – that no one actually wants to buy or read your book – but this in itself can be a valuable education. If you want your book to sell, you also have to learn digital entrepreneurship – how to set up a website, a mailing list, and how to contract with freelancers to make book covers, how to format your book, and so forth. This can be scary and hard for many people (indeed, it can be scary and hard sometimes even with experience), and that’s probably why many writers want to get traditionally published – they want someone to take care off all that business stuff for them. But life doesn’t work that way. And think of all the professional athletes, actors, and musicians who had someone to Take Care off all the business stuff for them only to wind up penniless.

No, it’s better to have your hands on the wheel.

If you don’t want to mess with Kindle Unlimited and don’t like Amazon, there are still lots of ways to self-publish now – all the other storefronts like Apple Books and Google Play, Kickstarter, Patreon, or the various reading and serialization apps like Radish. There are lots of different ways to do it, depending on what you want and what you are comfortable doing.

Either way, traditional publishing or self-publishing, it’s a lot of hard work. The different, the vital difference, is that when you self-publish you’re working for yourself. You also learn useful skills in the realm of digital entrepreneurship that are applicable to other areas. If you traditionally publish, you mostly learn how to write query letters to agents who will probably ignore them. And even if you succeed, you’re basically working for your agent and a giant international conglomerate, and they own your book for the life of the copyright. (Or you’ll be like Chuck Palahniuk, and your agent will steal all your money.)

So, I bluntly think self-publishing is much better for writers than traditionally publishing, and if you’re unhappy with traditional publishing, you should stop writing query letters to agents and start learning to self-publish. David Gaughran’s LET’S GET DIGITAL and Joanna Penn’s SUCCESSFUL SELF PUBLISHING are both free in ebook and excellent places to start.

-JM

Top Gun Maverick

I missed TOP GUN MAVERICK when it came out in theaters because I was busy, like, that entire month, but it looks like Paramount re-released the movie for Labor Day Weekend. Since I was disappointed I missed it the first time around, I went to see it today.

I’m glad I did! It was a perfect movie – the right mix of visual spectacle, action, character development, and stakes. The only thing I can say that’s even remotely critical is that Ethan Hunt from MISSION IMPOSSIBLE started to bleed in a little towards the end, but since I like the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movies, is that really a criticism?

And given how economic gravity caught up with Netflix and HBOMax this year, Tom Cruise seems downright prescient for insisting that the movie get a theatrical release. Paramount can probably think of 1.4 billion reasons they’re glad they listened to him.

Highly recommended.

The funniest part was at the beginning of the movie when Cruise had that brief message thanking the cast and crew (which I thought was classy), the couple sitting next to me said “oh crap this isn’t WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING!” and hastily exited the theater.

-JM

Listen to MALISON: DRAGON CURSE for free (with ads)!

We’re trying something new today!

You can listen to MALISON: DRAGON CURSE for free (with ads) on YouTube, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills. It will be available on YouTube until roughly September 9th, 2022, after which it will disappear from YouTube and make its way to Audible, Amazon, Apple, Google Play, Kobo, Chirp, and the various other audio stores.

You might recall that I got into the YouTube Partners program back at the end of June, so I can now run ads on videos. I got good results with the AI-narrated SILENT ORDER books, so I expect an audiobook narrated by an actual human will go even better.

The reason it’s only on YouTube until September 9th is that YouTube is persnickety about exclusivity for content that has ads. YouTube also has a strong immediacy bias and stuff tends to get less views after a week or so, which is why it’s only going to be there until September 9th.

If all goes well, by the end of the year we hope to have an audiobook bundle of MALISON: THE COMPLETE SERIES that will be available on all the stores.

-JM

The SILENT ORDER cover journey

The SILENT ORDER series is now five years old and eleven books long, and in that time I’ve gone through five major iterations of the cover design.

I thought it would be interesting to go through those five iterations and explain my thinking behind each one.

The first version was in 2017 when the series came out. I thought long and hard about what I wanted, and I made the covers in GIMP, settling for the “spaceship flying towards planet” look. I couldn’t find a font I liked for free, so I licensed the font Gunrunner from designer Daniel Zadorozny. I liked the font, but in retrospect, it wasn’t the greatest choice, since it was hard to read in thumbnail. In fact, the original title of SILENT ORDER book seven was going to be MORPH HAND, but that looked bad with that particular font, so I changed it to MASTER HAND. These were all right to begin with, but I wanted something better.

2018 rolled around, and I thought it was time for a cover refresh. Maybe covers with figures on them instead of spaceships? And maybe something that had more of a “secret agent” vibe to it, since the Silent Order is an intelligence agency? For a while, there was a trend in cover design to have figures on covers with the heads out of frame. This was part of the problem of finding decent stock photos. For example, if you wanted to have the same character image on the front cover, you either needed a whole sequence of stock photos of the same character in different poses, or accept that you would have to use a different sequence of stock photos. Having the heads out of frame was a way around it. (The original CLOAK GAMES covers were like that as well.) This sort of worked for a while, but eventually people turned against it, and the conventions for science fiction books really require planets and spaceships.

I didn’t think the 2018 covers worked really well, so I decided to switch back to spaceships and planets. Rather than trying to assemble them myself in GIMP, I looked for good stock scenes on Dreamstime and used those. A digital artist named Luca Oleastri had (and still has) a bunch of good SF scenes on Dreamstime, so I picked several promising ones from his Dreamstime portfolio and used those for the 2019 covers for SILENT ORDER.

Then, of course, we arrived at 2020, the Year Of The Rona. Like many people, I found myself with more free time than I had previously, and I thought the time had come to use some of that free time to upskill. I had become frustrated with the limitations of GIMP and my own limitations of knowledge in using the program, and I also felt the I had reached the limits of what I could teach myself. It was time to take a class! I took Dean Samed’s Neostock Photoshop course and also read the official Adobe 2020 Photoshop guide, and I started using Photoshop for the first time. I also started experimenting with DAZ 3d modeling, which is basically like having your own stock photo factory once you’ve figured it out. The combination led to a quantum leap forward in terms of what I was able to do with graphics and cover design.

So at the end of 2021, I decided to redo the SILENT ORDER covers yet again! This time I would use a combination of DAZ figures and space backgrounds. I was pretty happy with how they turned out, especially the covers for FIRE HAND, MASTER HAND, and ROYAL HAND. That said, as with the 2018 covers, I don’t think I quite hit the genre expectations for science fiction spaceships. As the comic strip said, a lot of SF readers were looking for “planets, and spaceships, in close proximity!” So the covers didn’t convey the genre to the extent that I wanted.

When 2022 rolled around, before SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND came out, I decided to redo the covers once more! This time I leaned in heavily with the “planet and spaceship” theme, and it was actually quite a bit easier to do it in Photoshop than it was in GIMP. It was worth the effort, since SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND sold as many copies in 11 days as ROYAL HAND did in 30. (Thanks for reading, everyone!)

Have I learned anything? Yes, this. A truth: if you want to get better at something, you must first accept being bad at it for some time.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 127: Multiverses Everywhere!

In this week’s episode, I offer my opinions of the movies and television shows I watched this summer, and we discuss reader comments on the last few episodes.

As always, you can listen to the show on Libsyn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music.

-JM

DRAGONSKULL and other updates

It’s Friday! Let’s see where I’m at with my current writing projects.

DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS – 24,000 words.

CLOAK OF MASKS – 2,000 words.

SILENT ORDER: WRECK HAND – 1,000 words.

-JM

Silent Order vs Technology

-Andrew writes to ask:

“Working my way through Rust Hand (10-15%), Shouldn’t the characters have something more science fictiony than phones.  Like Personal Data Units or some such?  Phones just don’t seem to fit. I guess there could be quantum cell towers or something.”

I dunno, I’m old enough that a handheld phone seems futuristic to me.

Of course, what we call “phones” nowadays really are Personal Data Units – handheld personal computers that happen to include telephony functions as a small subset of their overall capabilities. A smartphone has as much relation to Alexander Graham Bell’s original telephone as a Lamborghini Aventador has to an Egyptian nobleman’s horse-drawn chariot. Both the sports car and the chariot fill broadly the same niche – transportation for a wealthy person – but are wildly different from one another. A modern handheld smartphone is as distant from a 1940s party line as the sports car is from the Egyptian chariot, but we still use the same word “phone” to refer to both the iPhone and the 1940s party line.

Granted, the problem of “zeerust” is one that all science fiction writers face. Zeerust is a term coined by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd to describe something that used to seem futuristic, but now only seems anachronistic and dated. (Apparently they took the name from a town called Zeerust in South Africa.) One of the more famous examples is the book NEUROMANCER by William Gibson, which was written in 1984 by set (according to the author) sometime in the 2030s. Telephone booths aren’t really around any more, but they’re still a vital plot point in NEUROMANCER. A more famous example is from STAR WARS in 1977. The Imperials spend a lot of time talking about the “stolen data tapes” holding the Death Star plans.

Data tapes? Given how big CAD data files are, if the Death Star plans were stored on magnetic tape the collection of tapes may have been the size of the actual Death Star.*

So zeerust is a fine science fiction tradition that I have joined.

Then again, having “phones” in SILENT ORDER might not be zeerust.

One of the other occasional complaints I get about the series is that the characters still use chemically-propelled kinetic firearms (ie, modern guns) in a setting that includes lasers, plasma cannons and other futuristic weaponry. Why use a handgun if you can get a laser pistol?

Of course, nowadays we have technology that can produce thousands of perfectly printed pages in an hour, and yet still something like 1.5 billion pencils were sold in 2021. For the specific niche that it fills, the pencil is more efficient than a laser printer. On a more serious note, we have much better weapons than knives, but soldiers still carry heavy-duty knives, as they have for thousands of years. The knife is essentially the absolute pinnacle of technology for its specific niche. When you really, really need a knife, a handgun, a mortar shell, or a tank just won’t fit the need. Even more advanced cutting technology like a plasma torch is more difficult, more complicated, and more easily damaged than a knife.

Chemically propelled firearms, I suspect, fill something of a similar niche. Gunpowder weapons were first used in China sometime in the 1100s, and first showed up in Europe in the 1300s, which means they’ve been in continual use for centuries. (According to some accounts, gunpowder was discovered by Chinese alchemists seeking for the elixir of immortality, which may have been one of the biggest examples of unintended consequences in human history.) Even in a setting with plasma guns and laser cannons, I don’t think chemically-propelled firearms will go away because they’re just too useful and they don’t have some of the drawbacks of more advanced weaponry. They don’t require electricity, they can’t be hacked, they can’t be disabled by an EMP weapon or a power surge, and they would be more rugged than a more advanced weapon. You could famously drag an AK-47 through a river and still have it fire, though it might not be super-accurate. For that matter, they’re comparatively easy to make, too. For all the talking heads on TV panicking about “ghost guns” produced by 3D printers, this is hardly a new phenomenon – if you know what you’re doing, it’s possible to build a lethal firearm using some tools and parts from the home improvement store. Remember that mass production as a concept didn’t really come around until the first half of the 19th century, which means that all the guns used in all the wars before that were made by hand by craftsmen.

So for all those reasons, I don’t think traditional guns will be obsolete in a setting like SILENT ORDER.

The concept of a “phone”, likewise, I don’t think will be obsolete. I know the Galaxy Brain Energy people nowadays like to talk about Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, but I suspect that those won’t be as popular as their proponents think. Look at how Google Glass failed, after all. The fact that you have to strap something to your face really cuts down on the usability of VR stuff. Modern filmmakers might spend millions on flashy effects, but people still watch a lot of movies on tiny phone screens. So I suspect the concept of “phone” as “handheld communication/computer” is going to stick around for a while.

Maybe it’s zeerust, but for all those reasons, Jack March carries a phone. Even if it would be vastly more advanced than a 2022-era phone.

-JM

*Granted, IBM and Oracle still sell heavy-duty tape backup stuff, but if you’re an IBM or Oracle customer, your computing needs are probably somewhat more esoteric and more strenuous than commonly found in the mainstream.

Elven nobles vs Elven commoners

-Simone asks:

“Hi Jonathan, I have a question about world of Cloak Mage. Is made clear that elven commoners intensely dislike nobles and live separately in their own cities. Does that mean that every elf in say Duke household is of noble birth? What about Elven Inquisition? Are they of noble birth too?”

Nadia’s only just started to interact with commoner Elves on a regular basis, so let’s fill in a bit of the background!

(I should note that this has spoilers for CLOAK GAMES: MAGE FALL in it.)

The relationship between the Elven nobles and the Elven commoners is, overall, very bad. Obviously there are exceptions to this, but the general relationship is not good. The nobles blame the commoners since so many of them sided with the Archons during the start of the war, and the commoners blame the nobles for losing Kalvarion to the Archons. However, like any hostile relationship between two groups, there are gradients and variants within it.

Overall, there are about 250 million Elven commoners living on Earth in about six hundred separate free cities, and just under a billion on Kalvarion. (By contrast, there are about 2.5 million Elves on Earth who are noble to some degree or another. All the nobles on Kalvarion were either slaughtered or joined the Archons.) Tarlia is organizing the commoners of Kalvarion into self-governing cities similar to the arrangement she has with the Elven commoners on Earth. On Earth, the Elven commoners all live in individual self-governing free cities that are sworn directly to the High Queen, a lot like how Imperial Free Cities were sworn directly to the Holy Roman Emperor in medieval Germany to avoid interference from the local nobles. In practice, that meant the Imperial Free Cities were mostly self-governing since the Emperor was usually far away and busy fighting with the nobles. For the Elven free cities, they’re mostly self-governing, but the High Queen takes a levy of taxes and soldiers from them. Each male citizen of a free city is required to put in twenty-five years in the High Queen’s army (some like the military life and reenlist) and each female citizen is required to spend twenty-five years in some sort of military support position in the city – usually medical or logistics or clerical. It’s more common for women to get married and have children instead of re-enlisting, but it does happen. The High Queen also has an unending need for talent, so exceptionally talented commoners (like Tythrilandria) tend to end up working for her.

The free cities are governed by an elected assembly and a Consul, who acts as sort of the chief executive officer and the face of the city for negotiations. The Consul appoints Councilors in charge of various departments – the Councilor of Roads, the Councilor of Public Safety, and so forth. The assembly appoints magistrates to handle criminal matters, but really serious cases can get tried before the entire assembly. As Nadia has already learned, every free city has a Master of Thieves in charge of organized crime and making sure crime remains orderly, since all the Elves love order. The High Queen can dismiss a Consul or any other officeholder of a free city, though she rarely does so unless there is a problem.

The citizens of Elven free cities can travel freely between the cities, though they need a passport and a visa to do so. Obviously they have to travel through human areas to do that, but the Elven commoners are strongly encouraged to maintain Mask spells while they do and interact with humans as little as possible. In fact, interacting with humans too much while outside of a free city can potentially lead to prosecution, since Tarlia wants the humans, the Elven commoners, and the Elven nobles to all have their own spheres and mostly stay away from each other.

What Tarlia would like for each Elven free city (and each human nation, for that matter) is to be completely economically independent and have no need of trade. Reality doesn’t work that way, of course, and so the Elven free cities frequently trade with one another. They also trade with the humans around them, both legally and illegally (Masters of Thieves are responsible for making sure the smuggling remains orderly, tidy, and out of sight.) Frequently an Elven free city will find itself needing skilled human workers or human products. Humans generally aren’t allowed to visit Elven cities, but they can get work visas to take jobs there. Some human companies also have special licenses to operate in Elven cities – Regency Trucking, for example, carries Elven fruit from Moran Imports to the various Elven free cities in North America.

But, generally, humans aren’t allowed in Elven cities unless they have a very good reason to be there. Tarlia really wants the Elven commoners and the humans to have separate societies that don’t interact except on the fringes and don’t really pay all that much attention to one another, and for the most part, she has succeeded. The average human and the average Elven commoner knows very little about one another, and likely will never meet. Most humans will see far more of their local Elven noble than they will ever see of Elven commoners. Essentially, Tarlia took the Elven commoners away from the nobles and set them to serve as symbolic figureheads over the humans instead.

Some of the nobles, like Vashtyr, Carothrace, Curantar, Nerastia, and Tamirlas, have figured this out. Curantar, Carothrace, Nerastia, and Tamirlas think it’s a good idea. (Curantar dislikes Tarlia personally, but he despises Vashtyr, and otherwise agrees with Tarlia’s policy.) Vashtyr absolutely hates it and wants to change things.

Elven nobles are not allowed to visit free cities for any reason, save for an invitation, and they’re almost never invited. When a free city and a noble have a dispute, the High Queen or one of the Marshals usually has to arbitrate it. If an Elven noble did visit a free city without an invitation, it would be a massive political crisis, something on the level of a US governor sending his state police to arrest members of a neighboring state’s legislature. It would be a big deal that would require the High Queen to calm the situation, perhaps forcibly.

Commoners can get visas that let them work in a noble’s household, but it’s very uncommon. Most noble households are staffed entirely with either humans or lower-ranking Elven nobles. It usually only happens if the noble and the commoner strike up a friendship on the battlefield, like if the commoner saved the noble’s life in the Shadowlands at some point, that kind of thing.

The biggest advantage that the nobles always had over the commoners, other than legal privileges, was magical ability – through a combination of genetics and better training, the nobles were usually more powerful wizards than the commoners. All the Elves can use magic, but there are wide variants in ability – most people can run or do pushups, but some people are a lot better at it than others. This was sufficient to help the nobles to maintain their dominance on Kalvarion before the Archons, but now that they’re living on Earth with modern technology and post-feudal economics, if the nobles tried to assert themselves over the commoners they would be in for a rude awakening. (The wiser nobles have figured this out.)

One thing that both the Elven commoners of Earth and Kalvarion share is both a strong respect for royal authority as a check against the nobles and a massive reverence for Kaethran Morvilind. Morvilind, in their opinion, is the greatest hero in Elven history. When he was alive, Morvilind was feared but respected by the Elven commoners of Earth. Unlike most nobles, he did not care a whit for birth or bloodline, and he got results when he went on campaign in the Shadowlands, usually by annihilating the enemy to the last man. But after the Mage Fall, the commoners absolutely reverse Morvilind for destroying the Archons in a single day. A large number of them think that after three hundred years of suffering, God sent Kaethran Morvilind to liberate the commoners from their oppression by destroying the Archons, assisted by his two chosen Champions, Tythrilandria and Nadia MacCormac.

Nadia hates, hates, hates that opinion when it comes up. For one thing, even though she came to respect Morvilind as much as she could manage, she knew him better than the commoners and still hated his guts because he was a ruthless jerk who used up people and discarded them. Like Rosalyn Madero, who didn’t end up in the legend. Nadia is also annoyed that Riordan’s part in the Mage Fall never gets mentioned, but Riordan is a Shadow Hunter so he prefers his role events to remain anonymous. But it seriously grates on Nadia that Morvilind is remembered as this self-sacrificing ultimate hero and all of his negative traits get forgotten, and it’s even more annoying that she can never point this out to the Elven commoners because they love Morvilind’s memory so much.

Of course, as we so often see in Real Life, the gulf in history between what actually happened and what people think happened is often quite wide.

So that is a summary of the relationship between the Elven nobles and the Elven commoners. As you can imagine, this is going to cause problems for Nadia at some point.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 126: Marketing Failure For Writers

In this week’s episode, we examine a badly-written marketing email, and reminder writers to be wary of scams. We also discuss the merits of technical writing and the dangers of the Nirvana Fallacy for writers.

As always, you can listen to the show on Libsyn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music.

-JM