Niall Teasdale's Blog, page 28
August 21, 2015
This Weak and Vague Posting
…is brought to you by a need to write something down.
I’ve been quiet, I know. I’ve got this fairly long post planned, probably for this weekend now. I was planning to do it today, but It’s going to be a little while before I write anything else after what I just wrote in the book I’m working on.
You’ll be happy to know that the reason for my silence is that I’m being productive. I don’t think my writing has gone quite this well since the early days of the Thaumatology books, so I really, really hope you guys are going to like Fox, because I really like writing her.
Except just now. I’ve been working up to this bit of the book for a while and I knew what was coming. It’s part of the plot, and it’s part of real life for some people, and I am beyond thankful that I cannot say I’m writing from personal experience. And I’m being vague to avoid giving away the plot, but I’ll say I’m going somewhere with this story that is maybe a little more serious than some of the stuff I write.
When you write, or when I do, you put yourself in there with your characters. To me, who started role-playing at thirteen, it’s like a roleplaying exercise. You put yourself in the story and you become that character for the time you’re writing them. I’ve just spent a good couple of hours writing something that upset my character, and I don’t think I was quite ready for my reaction to it. I really hope this comes over when you read this.
For right now, though, I’m going to have to do something else until I can get my head out of character-space. Otherwise going back in is going to be bad.
Have a good weekend, folks.
July 20, 2015
Best Laid Preorders
So I’ve just had to drop the release date for Fox Hunt back a week, to the 8th of September, due to some scheduling conflicts. And this is why I usually don’t announce release dates until they are bolted down and sealed with superglue.
July 4, 2015
A Foxy Experiment
Pre-orders are the new black. At least that’s what Mark Coker at Smashwords keeps telling me. Not just any preorders though, it has to be pre-orders with Smashwords. I’ll give his reasoning in a bit, but some new changes in the rules mean I am able to put Fox Hunt out for pre-order, thought Smashwords to Apple iBooks, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.
If you buy my stuff from any of the above, here’s your chance to get in an early order. You’ve got two months, there’s no hurry. Any orders placed before the release date (August 31st) will be counted as sales on release day, plus the book will be available on those stores on release day, which is a plus since there’s usually a delay. That could mean the book pops into the top sales lists on those retailers, and that could mean more people see it and buy it. That’s the logic behind pre-order system.
Here the logic behind me never doing this before. Essentially, to do a pre-order on any retailer up to this point, I had to write the book, edit the book, have the book proofread and edited, do the cover, and make all the final edits. I needed to have a finished book which I could hand to Smashwords/Amazon months before my intended release date. That might make sense to a large publisher who has an entire anticipatory marketing machine to get up to speed, and has lots of money to keep them going while they aren’t selling books to anyone. It might make sense to an author with a bestselling back-catalogue who’s still living off their last advance payment. To those of us who self-publish it’s downright dumb.
Smashwords have apparently worked out that this is kind of silly for most of the people who actually publish material through their service, and they now have what’s called “assetless per-orders.” It means that I can cut out the need for a finished manuscript, and even a cover, and still make a pre-order available for sale. They’d like me to do it a lot further in advance of the release date, but I still want to have a finished first draft (my first drafts are maybe more finished than some people’s, who will go through a dozen drafts before release) before I commit to a release date, so I’m not going to do pre-orders more than 3 months ahead, at maximum (2 months is far more likely).
So, if you read on an IPad or IPhone, or you try to avoid buying from Amazon, go take a look on your favourite retailer and consider a pre-order of Fox Hunt. And just remember, watch out for the fox.
July 3, 2015
Reality Hack – It’s Out There
Someone’s noticed that Reality Hack is available on Smashwords, so I guess the secret’s out.
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/556141
Amazon US: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010VJECGC?*Version*=1&*entries*=0
Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B010VJECGC?*Version*=1&*entries*=0
Amazon DE: http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B010VJECGC?*Version*=1&*entries*=0
Amazon CA: http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B010VJECGC?*Version*=1&*entries*=0
Amazon AU: http://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B010VJECGC?*Version*=1&*entries*=0
As an aside, for those checking out the Smashwords pages, you may see an indication of the next book too…
July 2, 2015
Reality Hack – Cover Reveal
I’m just going to drop this here and let you wonder about it.
June 30, 2015
Reality Hack Update
https://witchesandrayguns.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/reality-hack-still-not-sure-about-the-genre/
Check the link for the latest news on Reality Hack, and maybe shift any subscription you have over to Witches and Ray-guns.
Reality Hack – Still Not Sure About the Genre
So, Reality Hack is due out on the 4th of July and I’m still not sure which genre it sits in. I hate genre classifications and it’s always been clear to me that those responsible for such classifications know not what they are talking about. Please allow me to vent…
If I go to Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, and I go looking for a science -fiction movie, I am going to find myself looking at a load of fantasy, some horror, quite a bit of romance that has a vague hint of sci-fi about it. (Well, with Netflix’s idea of classification, looking for a sci-fi movie is an exercise in frustration anyway, but the general idea is the same.) These companies classify everything with any form of fantastic basis as the same genre. I can’t help but wonder whether this general lack of clarity bothers other people as much as it does me? I mean, if they have to split things into groups, could they not do the job properly?
Meanwhile, the book publishers are worse. They want their books classified into increasingly narrow bands of genre, but they haven’t a clue what the genres mean. The Game of Thrones books are not science fiction. Twilight is not science fiction, but of course that august work more or less defined a genre which spawned from some publisher’s desire to corner a market, the ‘Young Adult’ genre. (I believe that YA actually stands for ‘Youthful Angst,’ but that may be just me.)
The genres they create usually don’t work for real books. You take the series I’ve been reading a lot of recently, J.D. Robb’s In Death books. These are police procedurals, set in a high-sci-fi near-future, with a fairly high romance/erotic content. Well they don’t get classed as erotica, or ‘adult,’ but they do get a load of other categories lumped on them. The aforementioned Game of Thrones: is that political thriller or grim, ultra-low fantasy?
So, I’m having difficulty with Reality Hack. It’s clearly urban/contemporary fantasy, being to do with magic and the supernatural in a modern setting, but I’m inclined to avoid that area since there’s no romance involving vampires. It has some distinct horror elements (and if it gets a sequel there will be more of that). The actual setting has some heavy science fiction elements to it as one might expect of a book called Reality Hack. There is romance and sex, yes, but there’s also some twisted psychology, and drama, and questions about the nature of reality, and I have to pick a couple of narrow slots to drop this complex tin of worms into.
Don’t get me wrong: without those tight little boxes I doubt anyone would have noticed Steel Beneath the Skin and most of you would not be reading this blog. It’s just that around the time when I have to decide what box to put a book in, I sort of long for the time when it was just ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction.’
