Jacob Stanley's Blog

Wide and Free

This is just a quick update with some news regarding my Titan’s Song horror-fantasy series.

Previously, the whole series has been exclusive to Amazon so that I could enroll all the books in their Kindle Unlimited program. I like the program, but I’ve always toyed with the idea of putting the books out there on all the other platforms where the demographics are very different, and where books can have a much greater international reach.

Over the last week I finally decided to take the plunge. I’ve pulled the series out of KDP Select (Amazon’s exclusivity program) so that I can put the books wherever I want. And I’ve made book 1 free everywhere so that readers can sample the series and see if it’s to their liking without spending any upfront money.

I know many of you already own the first book in some form or another, but perhaps you’d rather have an epub that you can read on any device instead of a kindle-specific mobi ebook file, or maybe you mostly use Apple devices to read and you’d rather not deal with Amazon.  

In any case, for those who haven’t read it yet, here are the links to get Dark Gifts, book 1 of my series, FREE on all the major online book stores:

Amazon - Kobo - iBooks - Google Play - Barnes & Noble

Also, for those of you who’ve been reading the books via Kindle Unlimited, fear not. I intend to put every new book in this series into Kindle Unlimited for at least a 3-month period before moving it out to the other platforms, which should give everyone plenty of time to download and read each new release.

It’s also possible that this wide release strategy will be a short term experiment. I plan to give it a decent run and see how things go,  but I don’t rule out the possibility of putting the books back into Kindle Unlimited at some point in the future.

Anyway, that’s really all I needed to tell you. Thanks to all of you for your continued interest in my work, and I hope you have a great week. 

Two New Omnibus Collections

Hello everyone, hope all of you in the USA had a good thanksgiving, and I hope everyone else is enjoying their weekend.

This week I decided it was finally time to make a new Titan’s Song omnibus collection containing the latest books. In order to do so, I had to redo my first omnibus, and change the name of one book for reasons I will explain below.

My initial omnibus collected the first four books together, and they all had a similar naming convention to signify that they were part of a group. Over time I’ve come to realize that book 4 really doesn’t fit well with books 1 - 3. It has much more in common with books 5 and 6. Putting it at the end of the first omnibus creates a weird uneven feeling and doesn’t work from a storytelling standpoint. So I renamed it from Dark Realms to Land of Illusion, which puts it into a grouping with the later books -  Land of Night and Land of Phantoms.

Doing so gave me the opportunity to go ahead and make a couple of new omnibus collections, both trilogies. All the books in each trilogy are thematically connected, and feel like they belong together. This is especially important because book 7 and the books after it are gong to be significantly different, with characters finally coming together, lots of big moments, and the culmination of several story arcs that started as early as book 1. So those books will have a new naming convention (haven’t quite decided what yet) and will ultimately be gathered into third omnibus at some point down the line.

For those of you who’ve already read all the books, there’s nothing new here. I think the covers are pretty snazzy, and each collection contains latest revision of each book, but if you’ve already got these, you certainly don’t need to buy them again. In fact, one of the main reasons for this post is to make it absolutely clear to everyone that these are not new books so nobody buys them again by accident.

For those who are new to the series, or if you’ve only read a few books, this is a good chance to buy all the books at a discounted price, and I really think this is the ideal way to read the series, especially for people who prefer longer works.

If you’re interested, you can grab a copy of The DARK Trilogy HERE, and you can get The LAND Trilogy HERE. Both books are also available to read for free through the Kindle Unlimited program.

And… that’s pretty much all I had to say, so I’ll stop here. Enjoy the upcoming holidays, and hopefully I’ll be able to post another new release announcement shortly.

Hello everyone, I’m happy to (finally) announce the...

Hello everyone, I’m happy to (finally) announce the release of the latest book in my Titan’s Song horror-fantasy series - Land of Phantoms.

You can get the book here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071ZNB6KG

Currently I’m listing it at the discount price of $0.99, and I’ll leave it there for the next 7 days. After that I’ll raise it to the regular price of $2.99. Kindle Unlimited subscribers can, of course, read it for free.

This book is the longest in the series by a pretty good margin, and was by far the most difficult to write. Most of the other volumes are long novellas, but this is a full length novel with room to spare. Because I tend to write out of order and build my stories in an organic, jigsaw fashion, the next two books are both already partially written, though some bits that were originally intended to be in those books were gradually folded into this one as the story grew.

I hope you all enjoy the book. It includes some very big moments, and quite a bit of character growth. It also sets up several major events that will begin to unfold in the next two books.

As to my upcoming release schedule, I’m still hoping to get books 7 and 8 out before the end of the year, and there’s also a good chance I’ll launch a new series in that time frame.

Anyway, I’ll go ahead and keep this post relatively short. Best wishes to everyone, have a great week, and thank you very much for your interest in my work.

Kindle Unlimited Horror Promotion

This week I’m participating in a big cross-promotion with a bunch of other horror and dark fantasy writers. All the books are available in the Kindle Unlimited program, which is basically like Netflix for books: a subscription service that lets you read as many books as you want for a low monthly fee. Almost all my books are in the program, and a lot of other Indie authors use it as well because it’s a great way to get exposure for your work.  Kindle Unlimited is a pretty good deal if you’re the sort of person who reads more than 4 books a month. I use it myself, and it saves me quite a bit of money. 

There are lots of other cool books involved in the promo, with a pretty wide variety of tones and styles. Check them out here. 

Alphasmart Update

I had a few free minutes, and decided to post a short update about my new Alphasmart word processor.

Short version: I love the thing.

I got it on Thursday and I’ve been using it exclusively for all my first-draft writing since then. As a result, last week ended up being my most productive week since early January. I wasn’t quite back to my normal weekly word count, but I was very close, and I only had the Alphasmart for a few days. 

I really feel like I’m getting back into the swing of things finally, and I’m very excited to see how much I manage to get done this week. 

If you’re a writer and you need to increase your productivity, you should probably give these things a look. There are a few reasons why they’re particularly effective, and I could probably go on for thousands of words explaining, but there are dozens of great articles out there already that cover all the bases. I particularly enjoy this one by non-fiction author and podcaster David Kadavy. 

Alphasmart Incoming

I just placed an order for an Alphasmart Neo, which is a simple old-school word processor, very popular among writers of all kinds because of its minimalistic design. It lacks an internet connection, so there’s no temptation to check emails or facebook or twitter, and you can only see a small amount of text at any given time, which makes it a bit harder to go back and edit while you’re still working on your first draft. It runs for 700 hours on three AA batteries, has a display that works just fine in the glaring sun, and it’s built like a tank so you can toss it around without too much concern. When you get ready to move your work onto your computer for editing, there are a couple of different ways to transfer the text, both of them very simple. 

Because of the recent changes to my schedule, my writing rhythm is all fucked up. Still haven’t got it right yet. And part of the problem is that I’m having to write away from my desk quite often. Right now I really need to find a new way of doing the work that’s more portable - something tough and simple that I can take with me anywhere with plenty of battery life. A laptop would work okay, but I hate typing on the shitty little keyboards, and I’d really rather have something made purely for writing. 

Hopefully this gadget will get the job done. 

If it works as well as people say, I might make it my default tool for first drafts. 

The lack of an Internet connection, and the glare-resistant display are very appealing features, and I also like the fact that all the basic operating instructions are so simple that they’re literally printed out on the back of the device. Even without a manual, you can still see exactly how to do all the most important stuff. 

They don’t even make these anymore - I think they originally debuted right around 2000. They were marketed, at least partially, as a basic device for teaching typing in schools, which is why they’re so simple and made so tough. They’re very easy to get used on Ebay for about 20 bucks, and apparently they last for years. Some writers love theirs so much that they’ve bought several backups just in case they get hard to find at some point in the future.

I’ve been hearing about these for ages, and I’ve always found them interesting. Now my process has evolved in such a way that I really think a small portable keyboard like this will be a pretty good fit for the way I do a first draft. And with my current screwed up work schedule, this should help simplify everything so I can more easily get down to business when I have free time. 

Writing Extra

In the Scrivener document for the book I’m currently working on (book 6 in my Titan’s Song Series) I have one folder labeled ORPHANS, and another labeled JUNK. The orphans folder contains scenes and fragments that I plan to include in the final story, but I’m not sure how I’m going to fit them in. Based on my previous experience, it’s a good bet that some of these will find their way into this book, while others will show up in some later book in the series. A few will never see the light of day. 

The Junk folder is just what it sounds like - scenes and fragments that I currently don’t plan to use at all. Based on previous experience, I’ll almost certainly change my mind about quite a few of these and they’ll find their way back into the book in some way or another, but a good portion really are junk, and I’ll never publish them. 

Currently the Orphans folder contains 7 documents totaling 9,075 words.

The Junk folder contains 16 documents totaling 22,651 words. 

Which, combined together, is a hell of a lot. 

What makes it worse is that I actually just moved a bunch of stuff out of the junk folder back into the main book because I changed my mind and decided it was good enough for prime-time. Which means it was a lot bigger than that yesterday. Like, maybe, 5,000 words bigger. 

I always expect to write a certain amount of extra stuff while finding my way through a story, but this is definitely excessive. Some of it comes from losing confidence in my initial impulses, and waffling back and forth between ideas. 

I’ve written some sections 3 or 4 different ways now. And generally I’ve found that my first ideas were usually the best ones, so if I’d trusted my gut more, things would’ve been a lot easier. 

Live and learn. 

Formatting Is a PITA

Just realized that some of the archived posts from the old blog didn’t format properly in the migration, so I tried to fix one and made it much worse… The pictures are gone. I think there are broken links now. It’s pretty much wrecked.

Since there aren’t many posts from the old blog anyway, and since most are just minor updates or promotion announcements, I’m probably going to leave them alone for now. 

Move to Tumblr

So, I’m moving my blog to tumblr…  

In the future I’m going to be using my blog more to keep readers updated and to talk about things that interest me, rather than as a catalog site for my books, which means that blogger isn’t really an ideal platform for me anymore. I need something simpler and easier to work with. The less hassle the better. 

All the content from my old blogger site has been moved here already, and I’ll probably be deleting the blogger site altogether pretty soon. 

Back to Work

I had a few free minutes, and I thought I’d post another quick update on my works in progress and all that…

The non-writing related work that I mentioned a few weeks ago is finally winding down a little, at least for now, and so I have more time to write. Unfortunately, there were long stretches during the last three weeks where I had zero time to write, so I haven’t made much substantial progress.

It’s really tough to get back in the swing of things after a big disruption like this, so I’m having a little trouble getting in the proper headspace. I’ve dealt with this kind of thing plenty of times in the past, and I’ll deal with it this time, but it’s always tough.

Today I focused on Titan’s Song book 6. I took a bunch of scene fragments I’d written several months ago, filled in the gaps between them, and assembled them into an actual chapter.  In the final book it will be the first chapter of the section that deals with Myra’s continuing story.

Doing this kind of work (assembling scenes from fragments) is my version of writing a second draft, and I often start working on the second draft long before I finish writing the first. It helps me keep my head in the story and keeps me from writing a bunch of useless materiel that I have to scrap. In this case, I had way too much written before I started working on the second draft, and that’s one of the reasons I’m going to have to do a lot of redrafting. I always have to throw a few scenes away and redo them when assembling a book, but this time there are more than I’m comfortable with.

With every book I learn something new, and one of the big lessons with this current “season” of my Titan’s Song books is that I need to spend a few days every week just assembling scenes and chapters, even during the early-going, Because the way I write the first draft is basically to create a huge mess of snippets, after a while it’s hard to even remember what I’ve written or how it fits together. If I’d been more diligent with this kind of work, I wouldn’t have wasted nearly as much time.

Anyway, I’m going to focus on assembling pieces of the second draft over the next few days, and that should help me get back in touch with the material, which is always one of the biggest difficulties when you haven’t been writing regularly. I also find that the assembly process tends to get me excited about finishing a book, which always makes the writing of brand new material go much faster.

Hopefully I’ll be able to make some substantial progress and get a release ready fairly soon. In the meantime, I’ll try to keep you all posted here on the blog