Andrew Leon Hudson's Blog, page 4

Don’t Kickstart what you can’t Kickfinish!

This month the Kickstarter campaign I ran for the new SFFWorld.com anthology succeeded! (You may know this already, I basically don’t have anything else to talk about these days…)

A week from now, Ecotones will be available for purchase and backers’ various rewards will be nestled lovingly in their ebook readers, bringing them warm, fuzzy, seasonal pleasure. Normally at this point in a thinly-disguised promotional spiel, I’d plaster images of the cover art all over the place — and that is still going to happen, sort of, just in a slightly different form.

Two of the project’s backers who happen to know me in the real world have been away on holiday since the summer, courageously leaving their house plants to my tender mercies (all of which survived, by the way, and it would look pretty bad for an eco-anthology editor if not). They have now returned… with a gift intended to say both “thank you” and “congratulations”:

It’s the mark of a good cover that it works well on a t-shirt, right? I’ll spare you all a picture of me actually wearing it, though, I don’t want to ruin the impression!

Thanks for the new threads, Patty and Lee — and, since I have everyone else’s attention (who knows about my blog at least), why not take a look at Patty’s site: her YA novel won an award earlier this year, and she has a cool, colourful children’s book out as well.

Seven days and counting…

99 Cent November

I’m taking a quick break from Kickstarter campaigning to mention a slightly different bargain coming your way. At the prompting of the very Milo James Fowler (whom I once interviewed) I’ve decided to take part in a promotion he’s organised.

#99centnovember demands participants put one or more of their ebooks on sale for, yes, ninety-nine cents (or 99p, if you’re in the UK). Here are the books I’m making available and when they’ll be on the cheap:

End Trails (Nov 8th – 15th)

Dark Matters (Nov 13th – 20th)

DM: Absences (Nov 18th – 25th)

DM: Aftermaths (Nov 23rd – 30th)

You can also see which other authors are participating here – why not take advantage?

ECOTONES: the art!

The last six or so months of my life have been largely entangled with what’s certainly going to be my major project for 2015: SFFWorld.com‘s fourth annual anthology, ECOTONES, of which I am proud to be both editor and one of the fourteen story contributors.

However, in the interests of keeping our costs as low as possible, I’m also handling numerous other minor tasks… like creating the cover art. And here it is:

I’m really happy with how it came out, especially given the prehistoric nature of my computer, and the scratched and dusty copy of Photoshop I just about manage to get working on it. Including covers I’ve designed for other writers I’m into double-figures now, and I’m getting better with each one — certainly I’m learning new things all the time.

I’m less than a week away from launching my first ever Kickstarter campaign too, also on behalf of this project. It’s a surprisingly easy system to use, but the devil is in the details, of course — most devilish of all being the high recommended inclusion of a promotional video. So, as you might guess, I’ve been working on making one of those as well.

As of yesterday, that video is finished and the campaign has been given the green light by Kickstarter’s evaluation team. All that’s left for me to do is press the big green button marked…

 GO

…next Tuesday!

Where Sci-Fi Meets Fantasy

That was a busy summer, wasn’t it? I feel like I never stopped. When I finally went on holiday I still had work on the back of my mind. I was planning on releasing another little ebook right about now, but I couldn’t even find the time for that — and self-publishing little ebooks is basically my only job (if by “job” you mean “the thing that you do the most but which pays the least”, anyway).

There’s a reason for that failure, though, and I think it’s going to be a giant win.

I’ve been a member of the forums of SFFWorld.com for several years, mostly hanging around the writers sub-forum, and since 2012 we’ve been putting out a yearly anthology of members’ work. Editor N. E. White started the ball rolling with The End, a timely collection of apocalyptic tales (given that the world ended that year, maybe you remember), followed it up with the self-explanatory Lucky or Unlucky? in 2013 (geddit?), and for the centenary of the start of World War One drew together a collection of alternate history pieces called Wars to End All Wars.

Thanks to Nila, and to a small, generous group of established authors, we enthusiastic wannabes have had a chance to share our work commercially, with all the potential exposure that can offer — and it’s working. One of last year’s writers was nominated for an award at the World Science Fiction Convention for his piece (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, by Igor Ljubuncic), and a story from the first anthology has given rise to a novel — Drake, by Peter McLean, soon to be published by Angry Robot Books.

This year, however, real life intervened in Nila’s plans, so she asked me to take over the editing role. I snatched it from her hand and ran away hooting in a most uncivilised manner. As a result, all summer I’ve been wrangling authors, reading and feeding(back) on submissions, discovering just how much I need to learn about being an editor (often at the expense of those same poor authors’ peace of mind, for which I apologise), and generally pulling my beard out because I don’t have enough hair left to pull out instead.

But the end result is… magic.

Our fourth anthology has an environmental theme, though being a collection of science fiction and fantasy we received some inventive and flexible interpretations on the prompt. That, specifically, was “ecotones”, a term referring to the point of contact between different ecosystems. The final line up of stories includes comedy, romance, action, horror, with plenty of variety within each of those areas and some genuinely moving writing too. In effect, we’ve created a complex ecotone of our own, which is convenient, since that’s the anthology’s title:

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As with previous years, the anthology also includes a number of established writers of real quality, who are lending their words and names to give a boost to those of us who have plenty of the one but not yet much of the other. We’re delighted to have best-sellers and award winners in Tobias S. Buckell, Lauren Beukes and gracing our cover, but we are lucky enough to have the authors Matthew Hughes and Stephen Palmer amongst SFFWorld‘s membership, both of whom offered work as well.

Yet the real purpose here is to raise the profile of those less celebrated, so allow me to name and acclaim the rest of our participants: Daniel Ausema, Victor Espinosa, Kurt Hunt, Christina Klarenbeek, Jon Laidlow, Igor Ljubuncic, P. J. Richards and Rebecca Schwarz (and, ahem, also myself… this was too good an opportunity to pass up, so I’m glad the rest of the reading team gave my submission the green light!).

The cover art is yet to be finalised (although the graphic above hints at the style), but you can check out the anthology blogsite for teasers of the stories, bios of the authors, and to receive news about what’s coming soon.

And something is. Go find out what.

I’ll say no more here, other than to express my thanks to all the authors and to encourage you to keep tabs on this — there’s a good book coming out for Xmas…

Borrrrrrn Freeeeeee(bie)

Summer is almost over, and my first spell in Amazon’s exclusive stable is coming to an end as well. So, as promised, I’m putting my OTHER collection of short ebooks on discount in the desperate hope of trading free copies for shopper-encouraging reviews!

DARK MATTERS contains two tales mixing humour and horror, as the faces of tragedy and comedy on the cover may suggest. No-One-One is that old story of Guy Loves Girl, Girl Marries Guy, Someone Grabs A Kitchen Knife, Here Come The Crazy Police – you’ve probably lived it yourself. And in The Hungry Dark we sink into the dimly-lit world of the New York comedy circuit, where nothing is worse than dying on stage… well, almost…

Dark Matters is free on Amazon until the end of the month! But that’s not all…

Both of the other books in the series are also on discount, until September 2nd – right now they are available for $1 each, but that will rise to $2 in a couple of days.

ABSENCES is the first of two sets of apocalyptic stories. Here, the end is not yet upon us, but the first signs of it are – in the bizarre loss of key aspects of the natural world. And AFTERMATHS takes us past the end to visit the grim world to come, in which no friend or neighbour can be trusted, and the cost of loyalty and betrayal are terminally high.

So, if you enjoy the stories in the first book I hope you’ll grab a copy of the other two while they’re going cheap – and if you have time to write a review as well, that would be doing me a real favour!

Finally, you might consider this an opportunity to prepare yourself for what is to be the fourth and final title in the series, which will be out next month. There’s still more news to come regarding Dark Matters, but that shall wait for another day…

Live Freebie or Die!

It’s approaching three months since I decided to put all my ebooks into Amazon’s exclusive Kindle Unlimited program, but in all that time I never tested the waters of the promotional options they make available. Therefore, with the days counting down, I’ve decided to do just that.

Starting today, you can pick up my first weird western title End Trails absolutely free, and the offer will continue until Monday. On top of that, the follow-up novella will be discounted right through until a week from today.

So, if you enjoy the stories in the first book I hope you’ll grab a copy of the second while it’s going cheap – and if you have time to write a review as well, that would be doing me a real favour!

UPDATE: This is what happens when you put the book no-one will buy on a freebie deal: it jumps to number one (in the super-niche “western horror” subgenre) overnight!

Of course, there’s a reason why it’s only at thirty-nine in the general free westerns category:

I fear that I and my book are simply not ripped enough to make the grade…

FIVE STEPS FORWARD, THREE STEPS BACK

PUBLISHED!

Five Steps Forward, Three Steps Back is a collection of eight short science fiction and fantasy stories – seven of them first published in the small (but perfectly formed) spec-fic webzine Mythaxis, plus a bonus extra, just because I love you. That’s right: you.

5SF3SB (that’s the book’s cool and trendy social media label, naturally) is available at the filthy cheap price of just one dollar — but I don’t want your money, keep it, I want to give you this for free. So, from now on, everyone who joins my my mailing list will receive a copy as a thank you. And to everyone who’s already on it, the mail’s en route.

Before I leave you to the blurb, I’d like to thank two people. Firstly, Flickr user Georgie Pauwels: for licensing her photography via Creative Commons – just the most recent person whose generosity has made my cover art so much more than it might have been. And secondly, Mythaxis editor Gil Williamson: the first person to publish my work, and who was good enough to write a short foreword for this little collection.

If you read it, and review it, I’ll be thanking you as well…

Blurb

FIVE STEPS FORWARD, THREE STEPS BACK brings together eight stories by not-currently-best-selling author Andrew Leon Hudson – seven of them published in the small (but perfectly formed) spec-fic webzine “Mythaxis”, plus a bonus extra just because he loves you.

Taking FIVE STEPS FORWARD, you’ll discover bizarre transformations, first of the mind, then of the body; see the terrible effect of denying ourselves grief, and witness a workers revolution where the machines do the breaking; but first of all, find that the future promises a whole new way to learn about the world – not through the voice of the media, but by the Word of God… sort of.

Taking THREE STEPS BACK, you’ll rediscover the seedy reality of 50s Suburbia; the true fate of history’s greatest romantic; and, finally, confront what awaits us all, be we human or beast.

Catch a glimpse of what lies ahead, and what lay behind…

Amazon | Smashwords | Apple | Barnes&Noble | Kobo | Scribd | Goodreads

Don Juans & Dragoons

Wow, it’s been ages since I posted anything here, hasn’t it?

Well, I’ll be back again with something to say at the end of the week, but as a preamble to that I thought I’d pop in to let you know that I’ve just had another short story published at, of course, my regular irregular destination, Mythaxis. If you’d like to hear a bit more about the webzine, why not check out my mini-interview with the editor, Gil Williamson.

As you can see from this post’s title, it represents another instalment of my intermittent obsession with puns, sorry. However, you might guess wrong if you assumed you knew what it was about…

Click the picture below to read the story, and while you do, perhaps you’ll wonder what all those heroic soldiers are charging towards…

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…or fleeing from…

Limited to Unlimited

While testing the waters of self-publishing this year, I’ve had my ebooks available through Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, the Apple Store, and Amazon — but for the next three months at least, those options are shrinking to one.

The five books in End Trails and Dark Matters are now in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program, which means that service subscribers can read them for free! Non-participating customers can still buy them too, but since KU demands exclusivity that means sadly they can’t be found anywhere but Amazon for as long as they’re signed up.

 

End Trails – Two Stories of the Weird West features tales of supernatural revenge.

 is a transformative coming-of-age story.

Dark Matters – Two Tales of Crime and Madness mixes murder with black comedy.

Absences – Two Tales of Impending Apocalypse takes away the little things we need.

Aftermaths – Two Post-Apocalyptic Tales shows we’ll fight dirty for what little is left.

 

There will be one more Dark Matters book out right after the summer, and two more End Trails before the end of the year — but before either of those, I’ll be putting out two short books that will be free to all, regardless of whether you’re a Kindle Unlimited reader or not, so I hope you’ll give them all a try when they appear!

AFTERMATHS – Dark Matters: Volume 3

PUBLISHED!

After April’s intrapocalyptic offering,��AFTERMATHS��Dark Matters Vol.3��features two tales set in the wake of different but equally disastrous futures, which offer damning evidence of the depths which the desperate will sink to.

In The Seeding, a frontier farmer battles against ecological adversity and the threat of his rivals and neighbours with the most underhand of tactics.��And in The Diminishing Returns, an isolated survivor and his last, best friend learn that companionship and survival make for untrustworthy bedfellows…

These are stories that step out from the light,

where only the dark matters..

 

Amazon: US��|��CA | MX | BR | AUS | IN | JP

Amazon Europe:��UK��| FR | DE |��ES��| IT | NL

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