Dan Thompson's Blog, page 21

Review: Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

This is the sequel to The Hunger Games, and it forms the middle of the Hunger Games trilogy. I would have read it much sooner, but I intentionally put it off so I wouldn’t end up reviewing the same author three weeks in a row.

I have to admit that when I finished the Hunger Games, I wasn’t sure where the author could take us that would be all that interesting. It ended with our protagonist Katniss in relative safely, and it seemed that her biggest concerns were around relationships, not life and death struggles. So I went into this book not really sure what to expect. Fortunately, the author put more thought into it than I had, and she did indeed find an interesting place to take us, and when the jeopardy ramped up, it really ramped up.

The writing is quite good. In fact, the writing is good enough for me to rarely notice a stylistic choice that I sometimes despise. Specifically, these books are written in first person present-tense. Instead of “I ran down the hill,” we have, “I run down the hill.” It does give a bit of immediacy, but many times when I have seen this done, it hasn’t worked well, at least not for me. It often leaves me feeling detached from the story, unsure of how much time is actually passing. However, Collins does it so seamlessly that more than once I found myself thinking, “Of course she’s going to make it. She’s the narrator. But… shit, this is written in present tense. For all I know, it ends in ‘I die.’” So yeah, it’s smooth enough I didn’t notice it.

Often, the middle book in a trilogy suffers the problem of just acting as a bridge between the first novel which introduced the idea and the third novel which ultimately resolves the conflict. In some cases, this leaves the middle book as nothing but a longwinded setup. That’s not the case here. While it does point me towards what’s coming in the third book, I think it’s a legitimate story in its own right.

I think my only complaint was with the climax. It kind of snuck up on me. Yes, I saw the tensions building, but when it happened, it felt like it happened suddenly, and I wasn’t intellectually prepared to recognize it as the actual climax. In that respect, it did fall a little flat, but now that I have some theory as the story for the third novel, I’m eager to get to it.

Just not next week.

Harsh on Beginnings

Lately, I have become a very harsh judge on the opening pages of a novel – for that matter, on the opening line. If it doesn’t grab me early, I’m out of there.

I blame some of this on the Kindle. I’m more than willing to check out a new author or novel on the Kindle simply by downloading the free sample. However, there is a fair amount of crap out there, and I can usually tell within the first few pages. Maybe that’s unfair of me, but I’m not alone. Another author once said, “It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you’re in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you’re dealing with someone who can’t.”

So if that opening doesn’t grab me, and the rest of the first page doesn’t do much to pull me in either, then I’m probably skimming by the second page. And if I’m still skimming by page 5, that’s it. I almost never press on to the end of the sample in that case. I already know. If your opening has turned me off, it’s not worth sticking around to hope you’re going to turn it around by chapter 2.

The other thing I blame it on is Jim Butcher. Okay, that’s an oversimplification, but it’s close. In the last five or ten years, I’ve been exposed to some absolutely fabulous openings, and a number of them were written by Mr. Butcher. Others include Lilith Saintcrow, O.M. Grey, and J.C. Hutchins. There have been others of course, but those are the ones springing to mind right now.

Just to tease you, here are some of the openings from their novels. They may not be exact, because I’m quoting them from memory. (That in itself should be a sign of how good they were.)

My working relationship with Lucifer began on a rainy Wednesday afternoon.

I was to be King.

The building was on fire, but this time it wasn’t my fault.

The president of the United States is dead. He was murdered in the morning sunlight by a four-year-old boy.

These grab my attention. They immediately pull me in and also leave a lot of questions unanswered. Your “working relationship”? Why were you not the King? Ok, whose fault is it? And what kind of four-year-old are we dealing with? I want to keep going to find out what’s going on, and by then these authors have hooked me even more deeply. Forget about skimming to page five. I’ve lost track of time by page five.

So now books without strong openings leave me flat, and if it’s a new author – even one who is good in all things but openings – I often don’t give them a chance. And I feel bad about that. I know that strong openings are something of a niche skill, and it’s a style that has only recently become more common. I look back at the SF/F books from the 70’s and 80’s, and many of them began with long expositions describing the world around us, or heaven forbid… prologues! Any many of them were really good books, but their openings sucked by comparison to some of the eye-grabby stuff we see now.

And the other reason I feel bad about it is that I recognize that my openings probably aren’t up to my own standards. Yes, I’ve tried to use my snap-judgment criteria to pump it up, but I don’t think they’re in the same league as Jim Butcher. (As an aside, Jim Butcher is great for readers… but terrible for writers’ egos. He’s just that much better than the rest of us.) So while I want to give others the same slack I’m hoping for, I’m just not willing to waste my limited reading time on someone who doesn’t grab me by the eyeball and suck me in.

Still, I think there’s hope for me. My openings are getting stronger, and the fact that I am such a harsh judge of openings means that I’m less likely to plop out a turd and hope for the best.

“It was a dark and swirly…” Nope. Gonna stop right there.

What are some of your favorite openings?

Exploring the Final Frontier

You’ve just been given the keys to your own FTL explorer ship… what do you do? This is a thought experiment that borders on wish fulfillment, but the kid in me thinks that’s the best kind. For all the flaws of the Star Trek prequel series Enterprise, it at least had some fun playing around with the “explore new worlds” part of the mission, and I really enjoyed those episodes.

So let’s play around with it some ourselves. Assume we’ve reached the level of space technology where we’ve set up a few permanent outposts throughout the solar system, and we’re able to build some reasonable spacecraft for scooting around the neighborhood. Then suddenly, FTL goes from a surprising theoretical possibility to an even more surprising engineering reality.

The NX-01 Enterprise rolls off the line, then the NX-02, and so on. They go off and take snapshots on Rigel-4 and draw lots to see who gets the next red shirt.

Meanwhile, you get a much more boring assignment on the exciting starship Survey-4. While those dashing captains check out the Top 40, you get to fill in the gaps, and there are some pretty big gaps. Within 100 light years, there are about 15,000 stars. Within 500 light years, there are almost two million. So if we’re going to be jetting around at warp 7, then there’s a lot of stuff between here and Rigel. (Approximately 850 light years, in fact.)

So where do you even start on an assignment like this? Let’s assume we got called in early on the project, so we can help lay out the scope of the mission. That is, what are we looking for? What do we need to find it? Where are we going to look? And just how long is this going to take?

We’re probably looking for life or at least places we could live, and from that we can narrow the scope a little bit, since not all stars are likely to support life as we know it. However, we’re probably also looking for useful resources, points of scientific interest, and staging points for further exploration. As such, we probably want to at least stop off at each star and give a quick look around.

What do we want from that quick look around? Personally, I’d want to know if there were any planets, and if so, how many? And if any of them seemed interesting, i.e. in the habitable zone, have big moons, or simply look pretty, I’d want an orbital survey on them.

Finding the inner planets will be easy enough by their reflected light. We found most of the ones in our solar system without even the aid of a telescope, simply because of the motion of planets against the background of otherwise static stars. The actual motion of the planets may not help us here, since waiting for Uranus or Neptune to move an appreciable fraction of their orbits can take a while.

However, the apparent motion of the planets will help us a lot. When an Earth-bound observer sees Saturn move against the stars, some of that motion is truly the motion of Saturn, but some of it is also the motion of Earth. As the Earth bounces back and forth from one side of the sun to the other, the viewing angle to Saturn swivels back and forth. In many cases, it appears as though it has reversed its orbital course, but it’s really just our own movement around the sun causing that motion. (This is what people mean when they say a planet is “in retrograde”, just that the relative motion of Earth and the planet makes it look like it’s going backwards.)

Well, in our nifty FTL survey ship, we should be able to bounce around in much less than the year Earth takes. The idea is to take a high resolution picture of the stellar system with our camera pointed towards a fixed location, like good old Sol, and when I say high-resolution, I’m thinking about stitching together a few thousand telescopic snapshots. Then move over a billion kilometers to the left, aim this camera array towards Sol, and take another picture. The position of the stars should stay more or less the same. Anything that appears, disappears, or moves from one picture to the next is probably local. (Or maybe some distant pulsar is just dicking with you.) If you do this from two or three directions, you should get a pretty good map of the inner planets.

It might not get you some of the outer planets. Neptune and Pluto were not originally discovered by telescope but by their gravitational interactions with Uranus. However, assuming better telescopes, no atmospheric interference, and better image processing than the eyes of early 20th century astronomers, we would probably find anything down to Pluto’s brightness. Whether or not we’d see something like Eris out in the Kuiper belt is more speculation than I’m willing to make right now.

So, what do we do with these planets once we’ve found them? As much as I’d love to send down some red shirts (and maybe even some people in them) to explore, an initial survey such as this should probably limit itself to space-based observations.

Telescopic observations can tell us a fair amount from a distance, but mostly that information can be used to rule out some planets from a more detailed survey. Spectrum absorption lines can tell us a lot about atmospheric makeup, and we can also measure the temperature to some degree. If it’s 200 degrees (or -200), then we’re probably not going to find life or suitable colony locations on it. I think we can also get a moderate idea of the atmospheric depth via telescope, since we knew of Mars’ minimal atmosphere years before we sent probes. (Though I confess, the science for extracting that info is beyond me.)

But if the atmosphere and temperature look appealing, it might be time for a much closer look. Just how much of a look can we actually take from space? I’ll take a stab at that next week.

Anything else you’d want from your initial system survey?

Review: Double Share, by Nathan Lowell

This is the fourth book in Lowell’s Solar Clipper series, and I’ve been waiting for it for almost a year.

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I wasn’t reviewing books here when I tore through the first three books, so let me first say a few things about those. This is the story of Ishmael Wang, who goes off to space as a bottom rung messmate after his mother dies. As the book titles suggest, he slowly works his way up through the ranks, starting off with only a Quarter Share of a normal crewman’s share of the profits, advancing through Half Share, Full Share and Double Share. Still to come in his career are Captain Share and Owner Share.

What I have really enjoyed about these books is that they paint a vivid (if a tad dull) picture of life aboard an interstellar freighter. He covers everything from the cleaning routines of the mess hall to the maintenance of algae tanks for atmospheric treatment. Honestly, there’s not much excitement in the first two books. I described them to my wife as being about coffee and the flea market, but it’s also a bit like saying the movie Fight Club was about soap. The third book picked up with some excitement and pointed us towards Ishmael’s transition from the lower decks to the upper decks.

Double Share is Ishmael’s first job as an officer as he gets a posting as the third mate on a bulk hauler. What I found particularly good about this was that Lowell shifted Ishmael’s focus from learning how to manage the ship to learning how to manage the crew. And wow… what a crew to get stuck with. It starts off looking like the most dysfunctional set of characters this side of Jerry Springer show, but Ishmael works his way in and finds out who to trust and who to fear.

Strangely, one of my biggest complaints about the series is also one of its best features for me. Specifically, Ishmael Wang is something of a Mary Sue in that he doesn’t really seem to have any significant flaws, handles most challenges with ease, and is more ethical than the Dalai Lama.  He’s about as perfect as he can be while still being human.

But he’s still a sympathetic character, so the stories form a bit of wish fulfillment for me the reader. It’s a great romp through the space freighter world, letting me daydream all kinds of “wouldn’t that be neat” dreams. Maybe it’s a little unrealistic in that regard, but in a world filled with dystopian futures, dark heroes, and settings so gritty you can taste the sand, it’s a nice break to go read something fun and carefree.

One final complaint, though, about the quality of this book in particular. After the first three came out whiz-bang-boom, this one took forever. It’s not really the author’s fault, though, because these are mostly sitting on disk, already written. (They were originally podcast a few years back.) Rather, there was a big delay at his publisher, and while I’d like to think it was time well spent. It wasn’t.

My copy was riddled with typos, missing punctuation, and incorrect word choices, e.g. “relishing” vs. “relinquishing”. As a writer, I know these things leap from my fingers like epileptic monkeys, but proofreaders are supposed to catch them. The first three books were very clean in this regard, but they really dropped the ball on this one. If I weren’t already so in love with the story, I might have just set it aside as an amateur attempt, so I hope Lowell insists on better proofing for the final two books in the series.

But the bottom line I that I really enjoyed it, and I tore through in two or three days.

Watching the Agent Fray

Not many of my readers are following the publishing anti-trust case, but the writing/publishing blogosphere has been pretty active in the last couple of weeks. One of the most interesting developments has been seeing agents taking their positions on the matter. I would like to say I was surprised by what they said, but I can’t. More accurately, it was simply disappointing.

A number of high-ranking members in the Association of Authors’ Representatives (i.e. authors’ agents) as well as some from the rank and file and been writing to the Department of Justice in defense of the five publishers in the suit. They talk a lot about the good of the publishing industry, about the need to save brick and mortar bookstores, and the need to preserve the viability of hardcover book sales. The only point where they talk about the authors they supposedly represent is when they admit that yes, under the current e-book pricing system, their authors get less per book than they would have otherwise, but that this is a necessary sacrifice for the good of the industry.

In another case a romance agent spoke up on behalf of Harlequin’s business practices after an author complained of getting an effective royalty rate of less than 3% compared to Harlequin’s promised 6% rate. The agent was very patronizing and reminding the poor author that she signed the contract, and Harlequin was acting within its rights. In other words, you got what you asked for.

I don’t mean to cast all agents in this light, but it seems to me that these agents are no longer standing up for their authors’ interests. They are fighting instead for their publishers’ interests, or perhaps merely their own interests. They’re promoting the sacrifice of those authors’ interests for the sake of “the publishing industry”. They’re telling their clients to be careful what contracts they sign when they are supposed to be the authors’ advocates in negotiating those contracts. In short, these agents are exercising the ethics of a vulture.

I’m sure there are plenty of ethical agents still out there. I’m just waiting for them to jump into the debate and start arguing for their clients’ interests. Waiting… and waiting…

But for all the agent angst going on out there, I am watching without any personal interest. I saw this conflict of interest coming last year when I saw how some agents were handling their clients’ backlists moving to e-books. It was one of the things that drove me to self-publishing, and as such, I don’t have an agent.

That actually saddens me. It would have been nice to have someone to watch my back, to get the sage advice of an experienced hand. But I saw that I couldn’t do it. I realized that between agent ethics and increasingly harsh publishing contracts, I was probably going to be better off on my own as this settles out in the next two to three years.

In some ways it’s scarier this way. I don’t know what to expect. But sometimes fear of the unknown is less than distaste for the known.

Review: Angelica, by Sharon Shinn

This is the fourth book in Shinn’s “Samaria” series, where almost-honest-to-God angels live among the humans on a distant world:

This one was a step backwards in time for the series, taking place a few generations before the first book, Archangel. Again, there is the regular plot line about the difficult relationship between the archangel and his angelica, and there was also an somewhat twisty plot line about the archangel’s human sister trying to find her place in the world. Against this backdrop, the people face the onslaught of invaders with mysterious powers and an equally mysterious origin.

I liked it, but I don’t think it was as good as the previous ones. I put a lot of that on the romance plot line, which really lacked passion in this book. Admittedly, much of the difficulty they had was coming to terms with them both being quite level-headed and not particularly passionate, so it’s not like the author merely failed to reveal their passion. Rather, she made it clear it wasn’t there to begin with. So, I’ll give her a B+ for realism in that respect, but a C- for invoking the romance. About the only thing that really saved that plot line was just how smart and practical each member of the couple was. It’s rare to see protagonists that don’t plunge deep into that one stupid thing we all know is going to be a disaster.

The plotline with the sister was a lot more interesting to me, because it takes someone who starts off emotionally damaged and leads us through her dark times and trials as she reinvents herself into a better person. I wish I saw more of that kind of story line in my SF/F.

But more than anything, I was disappointed by this step backwards in time. Each of the previous three books revealed something about the world of Samaria and the god who ruled over them. By the end of those three, we know a lot about that god, and I must say that the third one left me wondering, “Well shit… what’s going to happen now?” But the fourth book did not pick that up. Instead, it went back.

I’m not sure what’s going on in the fifth book. I don’t know if it’s merely the fifth or if it’s the final one, but I’m hoping it either goes all the way back to the beginning to the founding of Samaria or picks up where the third book left off. As it is, this one added very little to the world’s canon. Instead, it was more of a filler book, telling us some inconsequential tale. Maybe something happens in book five that will change my mind about this, but I doubt it.

So the bottom line is that I enjoyed reading it, but I was disappointed in what it did for the series.

(And yes, I’m switching my various book links over to Amazon Associate links, so that funky URL means I’m whoring myself out. Whether Amazon is the savior of books or the destroyer of mankind I leave to the reader.)

Un-Marketing My Book

One thing that’s been drilled into my head since I got into writing – long before indie publishing – was that writers are increasingly responsible for their own marketing. The major publishers will do virtually nothing for you unless your name is King, Rowling, or Clancy, and as an indie, it’s all up to me anyway. But while I understand that indie publishing means treating my writing like a business, all this marketing stuff never rang true for me. Why? Because it never seemed to matter to me as a reader.

I think about the last hundred books or so that I bought/read and my reasons for choosing them. The vast majority of these were because I already liked the author’s work, and in many cases the book was the next one in an ongoing series. A few others reached my in-pile because a friend recommended them to me. Some got there because I met the author and became interested in what they had to say. A few got there because one of those authors recommended it. And finally, I grabbed a few simply because the cover caught my eye, and the blurb on the back sounded interesting. Not one book got there because of a Twitter thread, a Facebook page, or a teaser video on YouTube.

I’m not unique in this. I recently read the results of a survey in which they asked people why they purchased their most recent book purchase. Alas, my google skills are not up to the task of finding it again, but I remember the gist of it. The top two answers were 1) because it was the next book in the series, and 2) because they liked the author’s other work. Those two answers accounted for about 70% of the responses for their most recent purchase. The next answer was that the book had been recommended by a friend, and it scored close to 20%. The last 10-15% were a mix of “saw it in the bookstore”, “read a review”, and so on.

One of the lessons to take from that is that the best marketing you can is to get another book out to your existing readers. After all, if 70% of what your readers will buy is going to be from authors they already know, then give them something new of yours to buy.

Of course, that only works once you have readers in the first place. How do you get those readers? That’s what that last 30% of the survey was about. The biggest among them was recommendations by friends, a.k.a. word of mouth. There’s not a lot I can do about that except try to be worthy of a recommendation. The first book is out the door and is as good as it’s ever going to be, so I can’t actively do much more about that. However, I can put out another one. If they didn’t like the first book enough to gush fanatically, maybe the next one will strike the right spot.

As for some of other reasons, “saw it in a bookstore” is a little out of my reach. This is one area where traditional publishers really can flex their marketing muscle. They pay bookstores to place certain titles in prominent locations or arrange them face-out instead of spine-out on the shelves. While you should be able to order my book at a bookstore, it won’t be sitting around in the impulse-buy section.

However, the online stores of Amazon and Barnes & Noble have some programmatic recommendations, i.e. “people who bought this also liked these…” If one of your books pops up there with an eye-catching cover, you can reap same benefit as those bookstore placements. A click-and-scan is about as good as a pick-up-and-gander. But how can I maximize that? How can I have more chances at that kind of thing? Perhaps the most effective way is to have more books out and available, since that puts more covers into the eyeball hunt.

Sensing a pattern?

Yeah, both my gut and my research tells me that the best use of my marketing time and energy is in getting more books out there rather than in trying to promote this first title. Once I have three, five, or even ten titles out, it might make more sense to invest the energy into all those flashy marketing schemes. It would require about the same effort then as it would now, but later on I’ll have a shot at selling them five or ten books instead of just one. Then I can hope to hook them for the long term, while now about all I can hope for is to become that guy who wrote that book… hmmm, I wonder whatever happened to him?

Now, I am going to do some activities that qualify as marketing, but not so much for their supposed marketing power. Instead, I’m going to do them because they’re FUN!

I like to blog, particularly about geeky things like SF/F and even some gaming. That’s going to keep going. In fact, it’s going to be hard to shut me up about it. Ostensibly, it does have a marketing purpose in that it lets readers connect with the author as well as provide a hub for news and sales links. But it also gives me a place to blather on about ray guns and FTL drives. I may do a few “guest blog” spots for other blogs, but that’s about all I’m going to do beyond my original focus.

I like going to SF/F conventions. I have made a lot of friends in those communities, and it’s a great opportunity to geek out with fellow fans face to face. I mean, where else are you going to have a random conversation about who would win the epic Enterprise vs. Galactica showdown? (FWIW, I say it’s the Enterprise for the simple reason that Galactica has no FTL sensors.) But there are valid marketing reasons as well. If I ever end up on a panel, people who’ve never heard of me will get a chance to hear me blather on about Cylon spirituality or the cost of using magic. Plus, there’s also all those people arguing over whether a hockey stick made for a good wizard staff in the TV version of the Dresden files.

I should say, though, that these con folks are not merely my fellow fanatics and… ahem, cult members. They are also what you might call mavens. If you’ve read The Tipping Point, you’ll recognize maven as one of the roles various people play in the viral spread of ideas. In the word of mouth network, mavens are the domain experts. If they like something, their recommendation carries a lot of weight. Getting an idea (or a book) in front of them is worthwhile.

But even without that, I’d still be going. I’ve been attending SF/F cons for twenty years, and with or without my books, I plan on going for twenty more.

And then there’s some stuff that just looks fun.  One final bit of fun marketing I might try is something I saw another author talking about this morning.  The idea is to take snippets of dialog from the book – the lines that really stick – and turn them into little postcard images. She then posts them to a Tumblr blog.

It reminds me a bit of an old Heinlein collection called “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long”, a beautifully illuminated collection of snappy quotes from the various Lazarus Long books. (Note, the original is long-since out of print, and a newer book of the same title is not at all the same thing, but I did see a copy of the original on Ebay just now for less than $40.) Since I often use fictional quotes as chapter heads, I could see this as a fun exercise. Maybe toss in a few bits from SomeECards as well. If I do this, I’ll be sure to link to it from here.

But other than those three things (blogging, cons, and quotes), I’m just going to keep up with the writing. I have two more books going through the edit process. One is in the same universe as Beneath the Sky, but it’s not a sequel. Instead, it’s book one of what feels like a five-book series. It’s tentatively titled Ships of My Fathers. The other is an urban fantasy about a reporter living in a cross-realm version of our own Pittsburgh, dealing with demons, wizards, and the occasional fae. It’s tentatively titled Hell Bent and is the first in an open-ended series. My goal is to get at least one of those out to readers this year, probably starting with Ships of my Fathers. I also hope to write the sequels to both of those to get out the door next year.

So, I’ll see you around, and I hope you enjoy my un-marketing.

Little-in-Big Stories

One of my favorite kinds of stories isn’t identifiable by ray guns, magic wands, or trenchcoats. It’s less about genre and more about structure. Specifically, I like to see the little guy in the big story. We’re used to seeing the President making tough calls or Captain Kirk charging into battle, but I find I’m drawn to the stories of the front-line soldier, the pilot’s wife, or even the young boy.

I still like to see the epic tales of sweeping conflict, but to me they often seem more real when seen from the role of a person not that different from me. But it’s not that these little guys are powerless figures, struggling to stay afloat in the tsunami around them. In a proper little-in-big story, the little guy is somehow drawn to the center of the conflict, and the fate of the world ends up resting on his undersized little-guy shoulders.

The Epic Volunteer

Lots of stories have this element, and they usually show us some of the bits with the big epic characters as well. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a good example of this. The four hobbit adventurers (Frodo, Samwise, Merry, and Pippin) are truly little guys in more than one sense. They’re not kings, wizards, great warriors, or even particularly fierce. They’re simply regular fellows like you are me, who when the weight of the world came down on their shoulders refused to buckle under and collapse.

But in Lord of the Rings and stories like it, our little guy heroes know how much responsibility they’re taking on. Certainly, the reality of their path can get harsher and harsher as the tale goes on, but Frodo had at least some idea what he was signing up for when he said he would carry the ring into Mordor. He didn’t know the way it was going to leech at his soul and nearly cost him his sanity, but when he stepped forward in Rivendell, he knew it was a Big Deal.

Destiny’s Hero

Other little-guy heroes don’t get that much advanced warning. They’re just trying to live their lives, but as events unfold they find their options increasingly cut off until they have no choice but to step forward and save the world or die trying. Harry Potter is a good example of this. He’s just a kid who wants to make friends and have a family, and he’s finding out that this wizardry thing is pretty fun. Yet in each book and over the course of the series, he finds that his fun-and-friends life is less and less of an option, until at the end, it is clear that he and he alone can save the world.

I confess I really enjoyed the slow build and even slower reveal of the Harry Potter series, but Harry didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. He didn’t step forward at age eleven and volunteer to pit his soul against ultimate evil. Then again, at age eleven he didn’t have the strength of character to step up for that. He was scared, meek, and merely hoping to be let out from under the stairs. We got to see him grow into the person that would valiantly step up for that battle, and that was a journey worth watching.

Who Me?

And then there are the little guys who don’t get to have that weight of the world until the very last moment. Certainly, they have struggled through the epic events, and the crucible of their lives has forged their character, but they don’t get to see their true role in the tale until the last moment, when they are forced to act. Only then do they realize that the epic battle has come down to that one moment, and that it’s up to them to save the world or to damn it though inaction.

I can’t think of an example as famous as the other two, but I have run into this kind of little guy often enough. In Babylon 5, Vir Cotto had a number of such little guy moments, rising to the occasion when it became clear he was the only one who could. Asimov’s tale of The Mule features another such little guy hero in the form of Bayta, who little more than the pilots wife and friend to the musician-clown Magnifico, and yet when the critical moment comes, she becomes the hero of the tale. Another is C.J. Cherryh’s “Finity’s End”, where young Fletcher Neihart tracks down and confronts a conspiracy for his own reasons, only to have that action become critical to the larger story going on around him.

I enjoy all three of these kinds of little-in-big tales. Certainly, I like other tales as well – Captain Kirk has some excellent adventures – but these little tales will always hold a special place for me. It’s not just that I can relate to these mundane characters better. It’s that they make me feel better about myself. I’m not a king or a great warrior or even a starship captain, but these little guys step up to their heroic roles just as I like to imagine I would step up. They give me the chance to think about those epic life-and-death moments, and since they always face them bravely, they make me feel like I would too.

I suppose it’s because of that aspect that the third style of these little-in-big tales calls to me the most. I haven’t volunteered to carry the ring to Mordor, nor are events conspiring around me to force me into a legendary battle with forces of evil. But the world is changing around me, perhaps not quite as epically as in most tales, but it is changing, and this kind of story tells me that when push comes to shove, little guys like me CAN make the right decision and save the world.

And who doesn’t want to feel that way?

So, final thought to the readers… what little-in-big stories have caught your eye over the years? Try to keep the spoilers to a minimum, because I may very well want to read them.

Beneath the Sky, Launch Day

I wrote a book, and now everyone needs to rush out and buy it. Now. Really. Links are here!

Ok, no one really needs to go buy it, but if you want to, you can now actually do it. For those of you wondering why on Earth you should even consider buying it, let me tell you a few things about it. It’s a sci-fi tale – space opera specifically – of what happens when the Mayflower meets a 747. Here’s the cover blurb:

Beneath the Sky

Maggie is a young schoolteacher on the multi-generation colony ship, God’s Chariot, bound for their promised world, New Providence. When a faster-than-light freighter crosses their path, a forgotten history catches up with them and puts their future in doubt. Maggie and her father are drawn to the center of the conflict over what will become of their colony, their faith, and even their lives.

It’s the space-opera analog of the Mayflower landing in modern Boston, filled with high technology, different customs, and 747’s cutting their travel time down to hours.

Battling conspiracy, politics, and even pirates, Maggie must rise to the challenge or face her colony’s doom.

If you want more of a teaser than that, I’ve posted the first couple of chapters for your perusal.

Where did this come from?

Well, my brain, but more specifically, it came from the intersection of two thoughts. The first thought was about two styles of interstellar colonization: multi-generation slower-than-light colony ships versus faster-than-light fleets to scout, terraform, and transport colonists.

If you have the choice, you obviously want to go with the faster-than-light option, but as we understand physics today, the slower-than-light option is the only one that will ever be available to us. So, if we do ever start to seed the stars, we will likely be sending out slower-than-light ships. That’s just the way our universe works.

But what would happen if much later on, we discovered that we were wrong about the universe, and that the faster-than-light option really is on the table? That’s great for us back home, but kind of sucks for those guys we sent out a couple of hundred years ago. I bet telling them about it would be a little awkward.

“Sorry about the last two hundred years of making sacrifices for the future of the species. It looks like it wasn’t really necessary after all. So… do you want a lift?”

But what if we forgot one of them? What if there was a very good reason we never knew about them in the first place? What if they kept cruising on, oblivious to all the faster-than-light expansion going on all around them? What happens when we bump into them by chance a thousand years later?

That gave me my premise, and it brought to mind the notion of the Mayflower and the 747. Playing with that led me back to the Puritans/Calvinists, and that added a religious overtone to my setting, along with a richer back story for the colony’s origins.

The second thought that led to this book was my enjoyment of what I call “little in big” stories. In these, Earth-shattering events make up the backdrop of the story, while our protagonists are of relatively minor importance, merely struggling to survive against this onslaught of chaos. And yet, in my favorite little-in-big stories, these little guys get pulled to the center of events, and the fate of their world comes to rest on their little guy shoulders.

I’ll write more about these little-in-big stories in an upcoming entry, but it was that concept that gave me our key protagonists: Margaret (Maggie) Pritchard and her father William Pritchard. While the rest of the cast if filled out by starship captains, politicians, reverends, reporters, admirals, and the occasional pirate, it’s this father-daughter pair that always formed the emotional core of the book to me.

There are enough other plotlines that each reader may come away with a different focus, but to me, this is something of a love letter from a father to his daughter. I may not have realized that until I was done, but that’s what it is. I only hope that when my little girl grows up, she’s as strong as Maggie.

So that’s it for the teasers. If you’re intrigued enough, check out the purchase links, and if you like it, please leave reviews and tell your sci-fi friends.

(e)Book Pricing

If you’ve been paying attention to my various hints, missives, and clue-by-fours, you know that I have a book coming out real-soon-now. Since it will be available in both print and electronic form, I’ve stumbled onto the hot topic of e-book pricing.

Ok… maybe it’s no longer such a hot topic. If anything, it’s been beaten to death. Then again, it’s also been raised from the dead, beaten to death again, and finally animated. To paraphrase an old D&D friend, “Undead topics don’t get tired.” Ultimately, I think we’re two the three years away from a long-term consensus on e-book prices, so the debate rages on.

So where does that leave me today?

When researching this, I ran into three common price-point arguments: the paper discount, the freebie, and the quality.

The paper discount argument is most common among traditional publishers, and it focuses on all the work involved.

We put a lot of investment into each book, the selection process, the editing, the proofing, the cover, the layout, and so on. The prices on our paper editions (hardbacks, trade paperback, and mass-market paperback) reflect this. All of those costs still apply to the electronic edition. So we’re just going to knock off a little to cover for the fact that we didn’t have to print a physical copy.

This leads to hardbacks going at $17 and the e-book editions going for $13. Eventually, the paperback comes out at $8 and the e-book… also coming out at $8. I don’t find too many people complaining about the $8 e-book, except that they still think it ought to be cheaper than the paperback since they only got bits instead of pages. And at $13, I still hear a lot of grumbles, though probably not from people who made it a habit to always buy the hardbacks.

The freebie argument is common among self-publishers.

Sell it for as little as possible – free if feasible. I’m trying to make a splash and get as many sales as I can. The higher up I go on the sales charts, the better my chance of becoming the next Amanda Hocking. So here, 99-cents rules the day, with as many shots at free promotions as you can.

This may work for some – it certainly did for Ms. Hocking – but I think it fails for most. Why? Because inherent to this argument is the readers’ notion that “at 99 cents, I’ll give anything a shot.” It’s not someone who is really interested in the book’s subject. The cover or title caught their eye, and they figured they’d plop down a buck to see if the author actually knows how to write.

The problem is that many of them can’t, and that 99-cent price range has become a cesspool of crappy books. Most readers aren’t willing to risk that dollar, opting for the sample instead. And what’s more, an increasing number of readers are realizing that what they’re really risking is their time, and the 99-cent price tag is a red flag that this one is very likely a waste of their time.

The quality argument is a reaction to that.

If I think I have a quality product, I shouldn’t price it into the bargain bin along with Gigli and Superbabies. Instead, I should set the price for what I’d be happy to pay for a book of similar quality. This tends towards prices in the $4 – $7 range.

Yes, these books tend to sell fewer copies than some of their 99-cent cousins, but in this case the author is not going all out to make an immediate splash. They’re focused on the long term. Selling a thousand copies today is not what matters. Selling twenty thousand copies over the next twenty years is what matters. With e-books and print-on-demand, that book can sit on the virtual shelf for decades, so its profit window is long. This kind of thinking favors the long-tail of sales rather than the initial velocity.

And it’s that last argument that resonates most with me. I think I have a quality product that the right readers will really enjoy. It’s been through multiple beta-readers, and their feedback has gone back into improving the story and the writing. I’ve gone through the text, carefully proofreading. I had a professional copyeditor mark it up as well. I put a lot of care into the layout, both for print and e-book editions.

So I settled on a price of $4.99 for the e-book. I know a few folks who would tell me to go for 99-cents or rely on Amazon’s free promotions in KDP Select, but I don’t think that path is for me. It will take time to grow it, but I think the story can build a fan base without resorting to short-term gimmicks. And of course, there will be other books to come along after it, and that fan base should grow with each new book.

Now comes the question of how to price the print edition. Personally, I’d like to put out a mass-market paperback, because for dead-tree editions, that’s the format that fits my hand the best. Unfortunately, print-on-demand can’t work at the scale economies of the mass-market paperback, so I’m looking at a trade paperback format which is always more expensive.

There’s also the matter of list price vs. retail price. For e-books, I am currently setting the price, and I get 60% – 70% of that money. For print books, however, I set a list price and then discount it heavily to the retailer, and they mark it back up to some percentage off the list price. So, I have to price high enough to still make a profit after the retail discount. In the end, I guess I used the reverse logic of the traditional publishers. I started with my e-book profit, added the cost of printing the book, and then added a buffer to cover the retail discount.

Here I settled on a list price of $14.95, though it looks like the actual retail cost will be closer to $11 or $12, depending on which store/site you shop at. $14.95 might seem like too much, but again that’s the list price. Those hardbacks you buy at $17 actually have a list price of $26.

So that’s where I am: $5 for bits or about $11 or $12 if you want to kill a tree. Either way, I get about the same amount. It might be a touch more for the dead tree, but not much more.