David W. Robinson's Blog: Always Writing, page 63
May 13, 2011
Christmas Is Coming
There are 227 days left to Christmas. Oh my god! And I haven’t bought a single present or card!
According to Tennyson, in the spring, a young man’s fancy turns to love (yes I know it’s a misquote) but according to me, in the spring an old novelist’s thoughts turn to Yuletide, and with good reason.
In a couple of months the freelancers will be digging into their stock of articles and anecdotes and polishing them up for submission to the Christmas glossies. If you want to earn, you have to get in early.
For me the problem is slightly different. I run three series of novels: Stasis Center, Spookies and The Sanford Third Age Club Investigates, STAC for short. I can forget about Stasis Center. I don’t know whether they’ll still celebrate Christmas in 3010, and anyway, that series is more of a serial. For the other two, I want to put out Christmas issues.
Spookies are full length tales, STAC tend to be what I describe as one-hit reads: short whodunits that can be read in paperback or on your browser or phone all at one sitting. For both series, I intend to put out Christmas specials. (The TV companies do it with Dr Who and The Celebrity Ice Dancing X-Factor, so why shouldn’t I?)
Both will be short: 25,000-30,000 words, and economically priced, but don’t ask how much cos I don’t know.
So what’s the problem with all this?
As of two days ago, I hadn’t written a single word of either.
In order to get them on sale by, say, mid-November at the latest, I have to write 60,000 words (2x30,000) between now and the end of September. Those of you who tackle Nanowrimo will say, “easy-peasy” but these 60,000 words are over and above my other commitments, which include at least one additional title in the Stasis Center and STAC series and a full length novel. And unlike the Nanowrimo-ers, I’m not doing this for the joy of pinning a certificate to my website. This is for real. The things need to be written, revised, polished, re-revised, edited, re-revised, and packaged.
I’ve made a start. Over the last 48 hours, the STAC mystery has acquired 3,000+ words and the Spookies tale will be an adaptation of short that is 5 years old and never appeared anywhere other than an old blog. But there’s a hell of a long way to go yet.
It’s gonna be an interesting back half of the year.
According to Tennyson, in the spring, a young man’s fancy turns to love (yes I know it’s a misquote) but according to me, in the spring an old novelist’s thoughts turn to Yuletide, and with good reason.
In a couple of months the freelancers will be digging into their stock of articles and anecdotes and polishing them up for submission to the Christmas glossies. If you want to earn, you have to get in early.
For me the problem is slightly different. I run three series of novels: Stasis Center, Spookies and The Sanford Third Age Club Investigates, STAC for short. I can forget about Stasis Center. I don’t know whether they’ll still celebrate Christmas in 3010, and anyway, that series is more of a serial. For the other two, I want to put out Christmas issues.
Spookies are full length tales, STAC tend to be what I describe as one-hit reads: short whodunits that can be read in paperback or on your browser or phone all at one sitting. For both series, I intend to put out Christmas specials. (The TV companies do it with Dr Who and The Celebrity Ice Dancing X-Factor, so why shouldn’t I?)
Both will be short: 25,000-30,000 words, and economically priced, but don’t ask how much cos I don’t know.
So what’s the problem with all this?
As of two days ago, I hadn’t written a single word of either.
In order to get them on sale by, say, mid-November at the latest, I have to write 60,000 words (2x30,000) between now and the end of September. Those of you who tackle Nanowrimo will say, “easy-peasy” but these 60,000 words are over and above my other commitments, which include at least one additional title in the Stasis Center and STAC series and a full length novel. And unlike the Nanowrimo-ers, I’m not doing this for the joy of pinning a certificate to my website. This is for real. The things need to be written, revised, polished, re-revised, edited, re-revised, and packaged.
I’ve made a start. Over the last 48 hours, the STAC mystery has acquired 3,000+ words and the Spookies tale will be an adaptation of short that is 5 years old and never appeared anywhere other than an old blog. But there’s a hell of a long way to go yet.
It’s gonna be an interesting back half of the year.
April 21, 2011
Easter Sale 20% off paperbacks
Fancy saving 20%?
There are conditions attached to this offer, the first of which is you actually have to buy something, and right now it’s a good time to pick up my titles in paperback because they’re on sale at 20% discount.
I have to confess it’s not my doing. It’s those people over at Lulu. All I’ve done is decide to hop on the bandwagon as it rolls by.
Lulu attach conditions to the deal. It can only be used once per account and it can’t be used in conjunction with any other code, but it’s a genuine saving, and I have five, yes FIVE titles in my store.
VOICES: a psycho-sci-fi-thriller-horror which begins with a terrorist attack and ends with a threat to the world.
COLDMOOR: (Stasis Center Book 1) where we meet Special Agents Mia Nellis and Nick Holt and their nemesis the evil zombie master, Flix.
THE DEAD WEB: (Stasis Center Book 2) and Flix is free, travelling through time back to the 21st century where Nellis and Holt must confront him again.
THE HAUNTING AT MELMERBY MANOR: (Spookies 1) introducing the ghost busting team of Sceptre Rand, Pete Brennan and Kevin Keeley… not forgetting the ghost of Sceptre’s butler, Fishwick, and their efforts to calm a violent spirit at Melmerby Manor.
THE MAN IN BLACK: (Spookies 2) Sceptre and her chums are back solving the hauntings at the Ashdalean School for boys and the problems besetting pop divas, The Wicked Witches.
In order to claim your 20% discount, order your titles and use the coupon code HOPUK305 at the check out.
Offer ends at midnight on April 26th, so get on over to MY STORE and grab some money off your Easter reading.
There are conditions attached to this offer, the first of which is you actually have to buy something, and right now it’s a good time to pick up my titles in paperback because they’re on sale at 20% discount.
I have to confess it’s not my doing. It’s those people over at Lulu. All I’ve done is decide to hop on the bandwagon as it rolls by.
Lulu attach conditions to the deal. It can only be used once per account and it can’t be used in conjunction with any other code, but it’s a genuine saving, and I have five, yes FIVE titles in my store.
VOICES: a psycho-sci-fi-thriller-horror which begins with a terrorist attack and ends with a threat to the world.
COLDMOOR: (Stasis Center Book 1) where we meet Special Agents Mia Nellis and Nick Holt and their nemesis the evil zombie master, Flix.
THE DEAD WEB: (Stasis Center Book 2) and Flix is free, travelling through time back to the 21st century where Nellis and Holt must confront him again.
THE HAUNTING AT MELMERBY MANOR: (Spookies 1) introducing the ghost busting team of Sceptre Rand, Pete Brennan and Kevin Keeley… not forgetting the ghost of Sceptre’s butler, Fishwick, and their efforts to calm a violent spirit at Melmerby Manor.
THE MAN IN BLACK: (Spookies 2) Sceptre and her chums are back solving the hauntings at the Ashdalean School for boys and the problems besetting pop divas, The Wicked Witches.
In order to claim your 20% discount, order your titles and use the coupon code HOPUK305 at the check out.
Offer ends at midnight on April 26th, so get on over to MY STORE and grab some money off your Easter reading.
March 7, 2011
Read An E-book Week
It’s “Read an e-book week” over at Smashwords, and for the time being, you can read all of my published titles there, FREE. Yes, free, gratis, for nothing, and not just a 20% sample download, the full burn.
I’m a Yorkshireman and we’re not known for our generosity. To me every sixpence is valuable. So have I suddenly lost whatever sense I had?
And here’s another poser for you. Why has this blog been dormant so long?
The two questions are inextricably linked.
Coming up to the New Year I was working on a series of novels under the umbrella title Old Nick & The Countess. Halfway through Book 1 it occurred to me that they were wrong. The theme and format were not working and I had no wish to carry on with them… at least for the time being.
I gave the matter some considerable thought while working on the 100 Stores for Queensland project and eventually I came up with a different idea. Once again, it went through a number of theoretical incarnations before I finally got it right(ish) and the Stasis Center books were born.
Writers are strange creatures and none is stranger than me. Book 1, working title The Dead Web, was already written and stored on the hard drive. Simple enough job to pull it out, reorganise it, and knock it into shape. That took up a good part of January/February and it was only when I’d finished it that I realised it wasn’t Book 1 but Book 2. I needed another title to lay the foundation. I spent most of February writing that, again drawing from older material.
I won’t go into the premise of Stasis Center here. There’s a link to the web page further down. To summarise, they’re time–travelling, zombie filled, sci-fi/horror tales with a single, central enemy and a couple of goodies chasing him. They’re not specifically YA, but they can be read by anyone from the age of about 13 upwards.
My original plan was for short, sharp action-packed reads, and the first title, Coldmoor, is exactly that. Less than 45,000 words long, it is all action, choc full of zombies, ghosts, evil doers, good guys trying to sort it out, served with a soupcon of suspicion. It’s already been described as a cracking little read and the price is unbelievably cheap: $1.14 (it should have been 99cents but we Europeans have to fork out 15% VAT on the cover price.)
With Book 1 safely uploaded and beginning to sell, I turned my attention back to what had become book 2: The Dead Web.
By this time, I’d been reading up on successful e-novels and I learned that the longer works actually do better. This was a surprise to both me and my editor, the incredibly accurate and reasonably tolerant Maureen Vincent-Northam. We’re both fans of print, and we thought that short, punchy reads would do better on e-readers. Not so, say the big sellers, and their sales figures back them up.
The result is that The Dead Web, which is coming close to completion, has expanded from its original 40,000 words, to 60,000. None of the action has been sacrificed. In fact, it’s been added to. Characterisation has been strengthened and there is more background material.
Book 2 will be followed by Book 3 as is the tendency. Little work has been done on Book 3 (working title Layla’s Moon) but it should be with you by the late spring.
For now, if you’re a sci-fi/horror reader, click the link below where you can learn more about Stasis Center, the theme, the novels, and then follow the links to Smashwords where you can pick up Coldmoor and get a taste of what is to come. And if you do that before the end of the week, you can get it for FREE.
The Stasis Center web page is here
Stasis Center also has its own Facebook page, where you can keep up to date with events and forthcoming titles. When you visit the page, click “like” and updates will post to your Facebook wall. You can find the page here
The Stasis Center novels are not the only titles you can get for free over at Smashwords. My latest major novel, Voices can be found on my Smashwords page, and that’s free for the coming week (normal price $3.99) and so, too, can my Spookies mystery, The Man In Black (usually on sale at $2.99).
All the titles can be found by following my page at Smashwords here
When purchasing the books, don’t worry that the system is telling you the price. There’s a coupon code in the top corner of each book’s page. Just look for the “sitewide promotion” link.
Enjoy!
I’m a Yorkshireman and we’re not known for our generosity. To me every sixpence is valuable. So have I suddenly lost whatever sense I had?
And here’s another poser for you. Why has this blog been dormant so long?
The two questions are inextricably linked.
Coming up to the New Year I was working on a series of novels under the umbrella title Old Nick & The Countess. Halfway through Book 1 it occurred to me that they were wrong. The theme and format were not working and I had no wish to carry on with them… at least for the time being.
I gave the matter some considerable thought while working on the 100 Stores for Queensland project and eventually I came up with a different idea. Once again, it went through a number of theoretical incarnations before I finally got it right(ish) and the Stasis Center books were born.
Writers are strange creatures and none is stranger than me. Book 1, working title The Dead Web, was already written and stored on the hard drive. Simple enough job to pull it out, reorganise it, and knock it into shape. That took up a good part of January/February and it was only when I’d finished it that I realised it wasn’t Book 1 but Book 2. I needed another title to lay the foundation. I spent most of February writing that, again drawing from older material.
I won’t go into the premise of Stasis Center here. There’s a link to the web page further down. To summarise, they’re time–travelling, zombie filled, sci-fi/horror tales with a single, central enemy and a couple of goodies chasing him. They’re not specifically YA, but they can be read by anyone from the age of about 13 upwards.
My original plan was for short, sharp action-packed reads, and the first title, Coldmoor, is exactly that. Less than 45,000 words long, it is all action, choc full of zombies, ghosts, evil doers, good guys trying to sort it out, served with a soupcon of suspicion. It’s already been described as a cracking little read and the price is unbelievably cheap: $1.14 (it should have been 99cents but we Europeans have to fork out 15% VAT on the cover price.)
With Book 1 safely uploaded and beginning to sell, I turned my attention back to what had become book 2: The Dead Web.
By this time, I’d been reading up on successful e-novels and I learned that the longer works actually do better. This was a surprise to both me and my editor, the incredibly accurate and reasonably tolerant Maureen Vincent-Northam. We’re both fans of print, and we thought that short, punchy reads would do better on e-readers. Not so, say the big sellers, and their sales figures back them up.
The result is that The Dead Web, which is coming close to completion, has expanded from its original 40,000 words, to 60,000. None of the action has been sacrificed. In fact, it’s been added to. Characterisation has been strengthened and there is more background material.
Book 2 will be followed by Book 3 as is the tendency. Little work has been done on Book 3 (working title Layla’s Moon) but it should be with you by the late spring.
For now, if you’re a sci-fi/horror reader, click the link below where you can learn more about Stasis Center, the theme, the novels, and then follow the links to Smashwords where you can pick up Coldmoor and get a taste of what is to come. And if you do that before the end of the week, you can get it for FREE.
The Stasis Center web page is here
Stasis Center also has its own Facebook page, where you can keep up to date with events and forthcoming titles. When you visit the page, click “like” and updates will post to your Facebook wall. You can find the page here
The Stasis Center novels are not the only titles you can get for free over at Smashwords. My latest major novel, Voices can be found on my Smashwords page, and that’s free for the coming week (normal price $3.99) and so, too, can my Spookies mystery, The Man In Black (usually on sale at $2.99).
All the titles can be found by following my page at Smashwords here
When purchasing the books, don’t worry that the system is telling you the price. There’s a coupon code in the top corner of each book’s page. Just look for the “sitewide promotion” link.
Enjoy!
Always Writing
The trials and tribulations of life in the slow lane as an author
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