Michael C. Bailey's Blog, page 101

Debut Number Two – And More!

Oy, what a crazy week.

Obviously, the big news is that Action Figures – Issue Two: Black Magic Women dropped last week. The Kindle version and the print edition hit Amazon within hours of each other, and several copies have already gone out.

I’m hoping to see some brisk business later on as a result of the free giveaway campaign last week. I was hoping to hit 1,000 downloads of book one, but I topped out at 850 — which I will not complain about! I’d call that pretty damn good, considering my avenues for promoting this giveaway were social media and an assortment of free e-newsletters and websites that list freebies.

Those results give me hope that I’ll be able to find ways around Facebook’s recent system changes, which suppress how many people organically see posts by business pages (in order to wring a few more advertising bucks out of them). Since I tap a lot of other social media sites, I should be able to continue to effectively promote myself to potential customers, but the Facebook situation is still annoying as hell, since FB is, for now, the premiere social media site.

More reason to stay positive: I recently did an interview with fellow indie author T. Michelle Nelson (the Lily Drake series) — who will get a reciprocal interview with me soon — did a taping for the show Book Talk with Amy Rachiele (the Mobster’s series), and this summer, I’ll be joining an old friend, T.M. Murphy (the Belltown Mysteries series), in my home town for a group book-signing event. Busy busy busy!

The last thing I need to do here is let everyone know that, on top of the new book, I’m be debuting a new Action Figures short story — as in, right now!

If you haven’t finished reading book two yet, take care of that now, then come on back. If you haven’t read either book, don’t worry: you can read the short without getting totally lost (though you’ll enjoy it more if you’re familiar with the characters already).

Debut #1: Action Figures – Issue Two For The Kindle!

Check it out!

That’s right, the Kindle edition of Action Figures – Issue Two: Black Magic Women is now available on Amazon! Just in time to coincide with the final day of the free giveaway for Action Figures – Issue One: Secret Origins!

Want to grab it? Then click the “buy now” link at the top of the page, and it’ll take you to Amazon.

The Final Countdown

This morning’s off to a great start!

It’s been a full day since my Action Figures – Issue One: Secret Origins giveaway kicked in, and in the first day more than 200 copies have gone out. This lovely little streak has succeeded in pushing book one onto the top ten Kindle lists for YA/action-adventure and superhero novels (at positions four and two, respectively, as I write this).

I’m coming for you, Girl in the Box series!

A happy side-note to this: these blog posts auto-cross-post to Twitter, where several people I don’t know re-tweeted my tweet to spread the word. Thanks, perfect strangers!

I thought the day couldn’t get any more exciting, and then I checked my e-mail and found that my cover artist, Tricia Lupien, had finished the back cover. Now, you should understand that my concept was fairly simple: I wanted Missy (Kunoichi) holding the Libris Infernalis, the story’s MacGuffin, while Dr. Enigma loomed behind her ominously, hands glowing with magical energy.

Sounds a little dull, yeah? Well, this is what I got:

Say it with me: Ho. Lee. Shit.

I know from past experience Tricia’s color work is where her pieces really come to life, but this dropped my jaw. She promised me the back cover art would be a grabber, and she delivered in spades. Overall, the book two artwork is, in terms of attention-grabbing potential, leaps and bounds over the book one art. I am muchly pleased.

I am also pleased to announce that, assuming there are no further hiccups or corrections, set-up work on Action Figures – Issue Two: Black Magic Women will be completed within the next 24 hours, then it’s a matter of getting and checking my proof copy. We’re days away, people!

Freebie Frenzy!

Big crazy week ahead!

Today is the start of the week-long giveaway for Action Figures – Issue One: Secret Origins for the Kindle. I submitted the giveaway to a few dozen sites and e-newsletters that promote giveaways, so I’m hoping to see a ton of traffic and lots of copies flying off the metaphorical shelf.

BTW, if you already have the book, now might be a great time to snag a copy for a friend and let him or her try it out, and I’d definitely appreciate the added word-of-mouth.

The timing for this campaign has worked out perfectly; I wanted the giveaway to lead up to the release of Issue Two: Black Magic Women, and as of today, the back cover art — the very last step in the process — is almost finished.

As soon as the cover file is done, all that’s left is to upload the file, get a proof copy to review and, assuming there are no issues, unleash the book onto the unsuspecting public. Mwa ha.

Amy and I at the taping. Well, don’t I look imperious?

Another bit of good timing: over the weekend, I met up with Amy Rachiele, author of the Mobster’s Series and host of Book Talk on Uxbridge Community TV. I was interviewed for a future show, which will hopefully show up online somewhere, for the benefit of those of us who do not live in Uxbridge (which, I suspect, are most of us).

I’d been contacted by another indie writer about doing a podcast with him, but he’s been incommunicado since our first chat. I think he might be hiding out on an island with a couple of people who were supposed to review my book for their respective websites but, two months later, have yet to do so. Disappointing, but self-promotion, I’ve learned, is very much a numbers game.

Cover Me!

The end of the novel creation process is somehow the most anxious, maybe because all the work on my end is done, and I’m left waiting for others to do their jobs — necessary, since my editor Tori and my cover artist Tricia have those…oh, what are they called again? Oh, yeah: lives. They have lives.

But when they start wrapping up their respective jobs? Oh, the thrills, the chills, then non-stop excitement!

Getting the cover art is probably my favorite part of the process. That’s when it really starts to feel like I’m creating something real.

When I conceived of the cover for the first novel, Secret Origins, an idea came to mind right away: I wanted to see Carrie, the main character, in front of her school locker, her superhero costume hanging in the background. I felt it nicely suggested the two main elements of the story, and Tricia nailed my concept right off.

Coming up with a concept for book two, Black Magic Women, proved a lot harder. I wanted the same kind of vibe, a cover that hinted at the story, but was not as vague and abstract as novel covers tend to be. I love the comic book cover vibe, and wanted to stick with that, but every concept I thought up simply didn’t work. The images were too weird, or would have made for a crowded, cluttered image.

Flummoxed with that particular approach, I scrapped it in favor of something a bit more iconic. Comic book covers have a lot of classic images that get recycled, homaged, and parodied over and over — the “hero cradles dead comrade against a background of mourning friends” image, as seen on Uncanny X-Men #136 and Crisis on Infinite Earths #7 come to mind — so I thought, why not try for something like that?

Tricia played around with a close-up shot of Carrie pulling open her shirt to reveal her costume underneath, a la Superman, but rejected that right off. “All it was was a boob shot,” she said, and she’s right, as the lovely and talented and delightfully geeky  (at right, obviously) demonstrates from a promotional appearance for Superman: Unbound.

Tricia moved on to a more generic, but still dynamic in-flight moment, capturing Carrie as she soars above the city. This was her rough:

You know what I really like about this, and it’s a small but significant thing? Carrie’s proportions are realistic. She’s not some skinny, leggy supermodel type; she’s a teenage girl.

Tricia’s plan was to show Carrie soaring over Boston, and that rough with the city backdrop looked like this:

For the next draft, Tricia went back to the main figure, to flesh her out some more.

You can see that in this version, Carrie has a sash around her waist. I asked Tricia to lose that for two reasons: one, it was a little too Captain Marvel-esque, and I didn’t want to draw comparisons (I also did not want to step on Carol Danvers’ fashion toes; the sash is her thing); and two, I refer to Carrie wearing a more practical belt as part of the ensemble, something in which she can keep money and her phone. Besides, I like superhero outfits that embrace practicality. If you were wearing a skintight outfit, you’d want pockets too, right?

Tricia made the tweak, finished the inking, added color, and dropped in the background.

Looking good! The next step was to add the color effects…

And finally, the text, and voila! Behold, the fully finished cover art for Action Figures – Issue Two: Black Magic Women!

 

All that’s left now is for Tricia to finish up the back cover, and this baby is DONE!

A Game Of Questions

My friend and fellow writer J.M. Aucoin recently finished reading Action Figures – Issue One: Secret Origins, and he asked me to participate in a little author Q&A, something he’s done with other indie authors. That Q&A session is now up at his official website.

Not one to let it go at that, I decided to reciprocate, and get Justin chatting about his Jake Hawking shorts, his novel project, writing in general, and personal hygiene. Here’s what he had to say…

Pirates, huh? Why pirates? What makes piratical fiction attractive to you as a writer, and what makes them attractive to readers?

For me it’s the swashbuckling. I grew up on reruns of Guy William’s Zorro and Disney’s 1993 adaption of The Three Musketeers and in both cases it’s good defeating evil at the end of a sword. And for a five-year-old Justin, that was enthralling. I must’ve gone as Zorro for Halloween for five years straight as a kid (not that much has changed in my adulthood).

But I think people enjoy pirate stories and other swashbucklers because it’s a classic form of escapism. It allows readers to go back in time and vicariously live a life of adventure and danger without having to put their own lives on the line. The stories tend to be pretty romanticized – especially pirate tales – and full of fun action. Armed with just a rapier and a dagger, characters in swashbucklers can change the world, and that’s a very tantalizing idea for folks. 

Why did you start out with short stories first? Why not go for a full-length novel?  

It sort of came for two reasons.

I had two novels already written but they weren’t in publishing shape. One of them is still in editing mode and the other is archived for the time being. Editing and revising the novel was going terribly slow last summer – to the point of frustration — so I decided to work on something new. I had just finished reading The Fortunes of Captain Blood, a collection of pirate short-stories by Rafael Sabatini. I was thoroughly inspired to start my own pirate series in Blood tradition – a pirate who out-wits his opponent and not just blows them to pieces with his cannon.

The second reason was I wanted to give self-publishing a try. My writer-friend Jack Badelaire has had great success with his World War II action series, and it inspired me to give it a shot myself. I figured a smaller project would be easier to start off with. Something a little more contained to help me figure out the self-publishing ropes and how to go from a first draft to a final product. But titles sell titles, so I decided three short-stories would perform better than just the one in terms of sales. 

Speaking of novel-length works, what’s going on with that project? Give us your sales pitch, and when do expect to make it available?  

Oh, man. Soon I hope. The first draft was good, but needed a lot of work in some areas, so the first half is being rebuilt from the ground up. I’m hoping once I get to the second half it’ll be more revising and less rewriting. So that’s still on going. If all goes well, I’m hoping to make a deal with the devil to get it out this summer. *fingers crossed*

As for what it’s about… it’s the first in what I hope becomes a long swashbuckling adventure series. First novel is tentatively titled Honor Amongst Thieves. It takes place in France during the early portion of the 17th Century under King Henry IV’s reign. France is still healing from the Wars of Religion and is on the verge of becoming a major political power in Europe. Our hero, a soldier turned highwayman, gets a little more than he bargained for during a midnight hold up in the countryside. Soon he’s pulled into political court conspiracies and finds himself well over his head. I’ve tried mixing the grittiness of the Captain Alatriste series with the high adventure of The Three Musketeers. So folks can expect a lot of swordplay and some political intrigue. 

Back to the Jack Hawking series. You mentioned a possible omnibus edition collecting the three shorts. How’s that coming along?  

Still the plan, but things hit a snag last summer. I hired someone to do the cover art (different artist than who did the solo covers) for the collection as a way to make it stand out from the solo bits. But months went by and the cover never got completed. So now I need to go back and find someone else to do the cover art.

And therein lies one of the great challenges of self-publishing – juggling multiple projects at once. Since I’m editing Honor Amongst Thieves and the Hawking solo shorts are doing well, creating a collection edition is a bit lower on the priority list.

I should probably go and do that soon, eh? 

The character of Little Queen seems to be a favorite, both for you as a writer and among fans? What’s the attraction? And where did the character come from?  

She was a happy mistake in some ways. I originally wrote Little Queen as a male. I wanted to create this large, former-slave turned pirate who was called Little Queen by the slavers and her fellow slaves as a way of further demeaning and emasculating him. He was supposed to be the silent but deadly type who overlooked Hawking’s safety. But I used the pronoun “him” only once in the first draft of A Pirate’s Honor, so a few beta readers read him as a her.

And it was love at first sight…

The character took a whole new level of awesome and became more interesting and compelling to me as a woman. She’s not only a female pirate, but also a former slave, so she’s been through a lot emotionally and physically. She’s also highly feared and respected among the rest of Hawking’s crew and other pirates to the point that buccaneers seek her out to try to prove their own prowess. She’s second in command on the Broad-Wing and the crew recognizes this and has no qualms with it. It may be a bit of a modern sentiment, but I’m writing for a modern audience. And woman pirates are far from being pirate myth, too. Anne Bonny and Mary Read being the most famous lady freebooters known to history, but there’s also William Brown, a black woman sailor who pretended to be a man in the service of the Royal Navy. She had quite the remarkable career, as well.

What I love most about Little Queen, though, is she action-focused. She’s a shoot first, ask questions later type. One reader described her as a pirate version of Xena because of her fighting prowess and the myth that proceeds her wherever she goes, which I love. And her demeanor is a perfect complement to Jake Hawking who prefers to use his wit before his sword. So I think people enjoy the dynamic she and Hawking have, and appreciate the deep and platonic friendship they share. Little Queen’s life as a slave has made her very untrusting of folk, but she’s also extremely loyal to her friends, so she’s a complicated and exciting character to explore as a writer, and as a reader.

I have big plans in store for Little Queen.

We were talking recently about the challenges of writing action sequences. How do you approach action scenes? Do you map them out in advance, or let them happen organically as you write?  

Pretty organically. I’ll know how it’s supposed to end more or less, and any major points in the skirmishes, and sometimes I’ll get ideas for really cool fight sequence as I’m drifting to sleep, but I let the action scenes write themselves for the most part. Of course, sometimes the fights go differently than I first envision it, but that’s part of the fun of writing, right? Watching as your characters take over your story. I try to make each character I write have their own fighting style, their own tendencies, and preferred weapons. And their personalities and emotional state can be seen in the fights – if I’m doing it right, anyways.

Writing ship to ship battles is a bit more challenging, mostly because it’s hard to write naval battles without double entendres creeping onto the page. Editing those out at least make me chuckle as I hit the delete key. 

Follow-up question: when you write swordfights, do your backgrounds in stage combat and fencing – and, what the hell, hockey – come into play?  

Oh yea. Definitely. And it’s a balance between both worlds, too. I study and practice period fencing manuals, so I have a strong knowledge of the technical skills and terminology used in the era. But if I were to just describe a sword fight using strictly that knowledge, the fights would be very dull and too technical for the average reader to enjoy. So I steal the basic idea from stage combat in that the fight needs to tell a story in itself. Even with swashbucklers, where sometimes guys with flashing blades come out of the woodworks, random fights shouldn’t happen – or rarely happen anyways. There needs to be a reason for the fight, and the readers should learn something about the characters in that fight.

At the same time, it’s historical fiction, and die-hard readers of the genre love those tiny details, and some are pretty fluent in the ways of period fighting. You want to quench their thirst, too. So it’s a balance between the two, though I tend to learn heavier on stage combat background because of its entertainment value, and sprinkle in period fencing as a garnish.

Alas, not so much with my hockey background, though maybe I’ll write a fight scene where Little Queen hipchecks someone into a bartop and then she, Hawking, and the Broad-Wing crew drop the gauntlets for a good ol’ fashion donnybrook. 

Best film adaptation of The Three Musketeers, and the worst, and why respectively?  

Do miniseries count? If so, the 1966 BBC adaption is the most accurate book to film adaption. They actually have all the musketeers’ servants in the movie and, hell, Brian Blessed is Porthos. And when I say Brian Blessed is Porthos, I mean that he is Porthos. It’s like Dumas wrote the character knowing that it’d be the perfect role for Blessed.

If we’re disqualifying miniseries because it can do the book in 10 or so segments, than I’d have to go with Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers or Gene Kelly’s The Three Musketeers. Kelly might be my favorite d’Artganan and Oliver Reed my favorite Athos. Those two movies do a great job are translating the book to a two-hour movie without it feeling like huge gaps of the plot are missing.

As for the worst adaption, that might have to be The 4 Musketeers. It’s a French adaption in with a sci-fi/fantasy twist. In that movie, Milady de Winter does die at the hands of Athos, but she made a deal with the devil, literally. So she comes back from the dead and has super natural powers. D’Artagnan also has this white falcon that brings him good luck or something, Richelieu is a crazy catlady (that’s actually historically accurate, though; he had upwards of 14 cats!), and the musketeer cassock looks like a graduation gown. The English voiceovers are also atrocious, as is the sound effects. It’s really just all around awful.

We’ll put it this way. My fiancé isn’t allowed to make me watch Manos: Hands of Fate again and I’m not allowed to make her rewatch The 4 Musketeers.

Also, Asylum’s modern take on the musketeers is downright awful, but with a charm that only Asylum can achieve.

Neither of us shave very often, but I think you shave less frequently than I do. What’s up with that? You know it makes you look like a hobo, right?

Now that you know Justin better, go read A Pirate’s Honor (A Jake Hawking Adventure) on the Kindle — only 99 cents!

Sharing The Love: The East Hartford Public Library

Why, you might ask, am I spotlighting the East Hartford Public Library? Because they’re spotlighting me! Check it out…

That’s right, the EHPL has Action Figures – Issue One: Secret Origins on its official Pinterest page as a staff pick! I don’t care what the context is, I’m thrilled to be featured in the same general vicinity as Stephen King and David Byrne.

Preview! Action Figures – Issue Two: Black Magic Women

Benchmark time, and it’s a great point in the process of putting a new novel together!

I finished work on the second Action Figures novel last month and sent it off to my editor, who last night sent back her first batch of notes. That means it’s time to roll out the first two chapters of Action Figures – Issue Two: Black Magic Women!

Here’s the cover blurb, which gives you a taste of the story:

The world is full of magic…and it wants the Hero Squad dead.
 
Winter in Kingsport heats up when the necromancer Black Betty comes to town, on the hunt for the Libris Infernalis, a legendary book of dark magic with the power to raise hell on Earth…literally.
 
Facing power beyond their understanding, the Hero Squad turns to the Protectorate’s resident sorceress for help, but the mysterious Dr. Enigma seems to have an agenda of her own. Is she on the side of angels, or is she a devil in disguise?

What are you waiting for? Go read the sample chapters now!

Of course, if you haven’t even read Action Figures – Issue One: Secret Origins, you might be a little lost. Easy fix! Go to this page and click on the cover image to jump to Amazon.com to buy book one.

FYI, that specific link comes courtesy of Amazon’s Affiliate Program, to which this website now belongs.

Nice Way To Start The Morning…

…By reading a very nice review indeed of Action Figures – Issue One: Secret Origins, written by my writing buddy — and the guy who inspired me to give self-publishing a try, J.M. Aucoin, author of the Jake Hawking series. Make with the clicky on the image below to check it out.

Google (Com)plex

Google, you kind of suck.

Now, like pretty much everyone in the world, I use Google as my main search engine. I have a GMail account. I use the Chrome browser. I am not anti-Google, but man, they need to brush up on the concept of user-friendliness.

A fellow member of the Kindle Authors Helping Authors Facebook page asked about the Google Books Partner Program, which allows indie authors to post excerpts of their book on Google Books, and links users to whatever site the writer uses to sell his or her work. Authors can also make their e-books available for sale via Google Play.

Since, apparently, none of the other members had tried it, I decided to be the guinea pig. One week ago, I set up my account, downloaded the files, and sat back to wait up to 24 hours for the system to process everything. To make a long story short, whenever some sort of issue arose, the system was frustratingly vague about how to fix it. There was a lot of searching the self-help section, only to find non-answers, and waiting for someone at the help desk to respond — very slowly — to my e-mails, again often to provide a less than helpful answer.

What should have taken a full day to accomplish instead took a week, and that could have been cut down a LOT if Google had simply provided more explicit and detailed instructions, maybe some direct links…maybe, in some cases, the button I needed to click to finish a given process (which the system withheld because I hadn’t fixed the issue in question, which I couldn’t fix until I got the button I needed to click…I suspect this will be Hades’ punishment for me should I go to the Greek underworld after I die).

But, the good news is: Action Figures – Issue One: Secret Origins is now listed on Google Play!

EDIT: I had originally planned to make the e-book available for sale through Google Play, which would have meant people with e-readers such as the Barnes & Noble Nook or the Sony eReader could finally grab the e-book version. However, the book is currently under an exclusivity agreement with Kindle Direct Publishing, which is necessary for me to do the free giveaway at the end of March. This means, at least for a while longer, Action Figures will remain available only on the Kindle (or readable on electronic devices with any of the free Kindle apps).

Sorry for jumping the gun on this, folks, but when the e-book does go fully live on Google, I’ll let you know.