Michael Selden's Blog, page 17
July 16, 2014
Moving forward with The Balance
During the daytime, I’ve been working on a landscaping project in my yard, in much the same way my editor, Ben, works at Little, Brown during the day. At night we’ve each been making progress on about 2 chapters / night. I just went through chapter 12, which I’ll send to him for criticism while I push into chapters 13 and 14. The objective is to bring all chapters up to level 3 with this pass. After this, I’ll push toward level 5, then do a full up copy edit and then layout, then proof edit, then . . . well, that’s when the book comes out.
I’m targeting December.
4 total views, 4 views today
July 15, 2014
Print Edition Timing Hiccup
I sent a revised cover to Ingram’s LSI, adding the IPPY Gold Medal badge. Upon sending it, I was asked to remove the alignment marks—something they hadn’t asked me to do before. I paused, because I was uncertain that the alignment would be right, especially since the cover image wraps around the spine to the back. What I didn’t know was that they stopped production of the book the very instant I started to make a revision. I uploaded the replacement cover today, but for more than a week, maybe 2 they’ve not filled orders—the supply dried up. I saw a copy of my book (used) for sale for almost 75 dollars on Amazon, but couldn’t understand why my book, list priced at 10.99 US was for sale for so much—now I know.
Never upload anything unless you’re prepared to have production stop for a while and don’t pause. It’s not LSI’s fault, just a misunderstanding on my part—I like to approve proofs before we move on to the next stage.
2 total views, no views today
July 12, 2014
The Balance, Still on Track to be Released This Fall
What I’ve been up to lately, and a brief summary of THE BALANCE
I’ve been busy working, and collaborating with Benjamin, on the editing of The Balance. I made a few plot adjustments that shortened the book by 2 chapters, but without losing any of the best parts of the story.
The main character is Phoebe, a seventeen year old girl who was the last product of the Order’s Sensitives Program. She is unaware of why she feels like a freak—she didn’t know that both her long lost mother and her were both genetically engineered and then further engineered in the womb using other technologies—they were created using both biological and physics (manufacturing) techniques. This latter was to amplify the characteristics created genetically and to control how the genes expressed themselves.
The story will, ultimately span 3 volumes. This first volume is a Young Adult story. It contains almost 50 chapters and will probably be bout 500 pages. To understand the look and feel of the Land (the place where Phoebe lives) and what it’s like to live under the rule of the Council of God, I’ve posted a rough draft introduction and less rough (but still draft) sample chapters on my web at this address:
http://michaelselden.com/the-balance/
Phoebe lives with her adopted father, Daniel, who was like a spouse to her mother, although the Order (the organization that created both Phoebe and her mother) determined who Phoebe’s “father” would be and manipulated her genes.
Together, they’ve worked hard to hide who and what Phoebe is, which is difficult because she doesn’t always have control over the things that happen to her. This is brought out in the early chapters (the one’s posted). The Land has gone through changes. Both the Council and God and the Order ruled the land together for over a century after a global thermonuclear war that kill over 8 billion people and rendered most of the world uninhabitable. However, the Order had kept their genetics programs (a part of the Future Man project) a secret since it’s inception (before the war). But it was heresy and, when revealed, caused an uprising that resulted in members of the order and the engineered humans to be killed or driven into hiding. Since that time, most technology has been banned. Certainly anyone who might have been engineered, like Phoebe, would be subject to immediate execution if they are discovered.
Story concepts and characters are copyright Michael Selden 2011 – 2014
2 total views, 2 views today
July 10, 2014
The Balance—Chapter 6 added to the Draft Excerpt
I added a rev 3 version of chapter 6 to the PDF download of the excerpt from The Balance.
This chapter picks up with Daniel as he leaves the house for work the morning after having slept in the rocking chair.
5 total views, 1 views today
July 1, 2014
Contest Books Sent Today
June 30, 2014
The Boy Who Ran, Beginning to be Available in Colorado Indie Bookstores
Copies of The Boy Who Ran are now available in a few Colorado Independent Bookstores. I hope to grow the list. Here is where you can find it now:
Old Firehouse Books, Fort Collins, Colorado—on Walnut Street
Boulder Bookstore, Boulder Colorado, —on Perl Street in the mall
Poor Richards Books, Colorado Springs —on Tejon St.
Brenda’s Boutiques, Woodland Park, on Rt. 24.
At the Rampart Range public Library, Woodland Park—on Rt. 24
It’s also available for order as a POD in virtually any bookstore in the world that is served by Ingram books, and on
Any Amazon.com site worldwide (in both paperback and Kindle formats)
and on
KOBO and SmashWords (in e-pub format)
I plan to add more distributors over time.
14 total views, 14 views today
June 24, 2014
GoodReads Giveaway of The Boy Who Ran, Enter before June 30
GoodReads is conducting a giveaway contest for one of 5 signed and IPPY gold medal sticker afixed copies of The Boy Who Ran.
.goodreadsGiveawayWidget { color: #555; font-family: georgia, serif; font-weight: normal; text-align: left; font-size: 14px;
font-style: normal; background: white; }
.goodreadsGiveawayWidget img { padding: 0 !important; margin: 0 !important; }
.goodreadsGiveawayWidget a { padding: 0 !important; margin: 0; color: #660; text-decoration: none; }
.goodreadsGiveawayWidget a:visted { color: #660; text-decoration: none; }
.goodreadsGiveawayWidget a:hover { color: #660; text-decoration: underline !important; }
.goodreadsGiveawayWidget p { margin: 0 0 .5em !important; padding: 0; }
.goodreadsGiveawayWidgetEnterLink { display: block; width: 150px; margin: 10px auto 0 !important; padding: 0px 5px !important;
text-align: center; line-height: 1.8em; color: #222; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold;
border: 1px solid #6A6454; border-radius: 5px; font-family:arial,verdana,helvetica,sans-serif;
background-image:url(https://www.goodreads.com/images/layo... background-repeat: repeat-x; background-color:#BBB596;
outline: 0; white-space: nowrap;
}
.goodreadsGiveawayWidgetEnterLink:hover { background-image:url(https://www.goodreads.com/images/layo...
color: black; text-decoration: none; cursor: pointer;
}
Goodreads Book Giveaway
The Boy Who Ran
by Michael Selden
Giveaway ends June 30, 2014.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
4 total views, no views today
June 14, 2014
Chapter 5 of The Balance added to the samples today
I’ve added Chapter 5 to the draft samples from the upcoming book, The Balance. I also changed the way that they are presented. Now it is a single pdf file that can be downloaded and read on your computer.
Thus far, the following sections are a part of the sample document:
Introduction: What Came Before— this is background information from the history before the story began and is important to understanding what’s going on. Naturally one can glean this information from the story, but it emerges only slowly and your understanding will be much better if you read this first. Don’t worry, it’s only 2 pages—much less than the original set of background pages.
Prologue: Also important to read, more for tone and to grasp how Sensitives begin to mature.
Chapter 1: Is This Real? This is a key chapter to the immediate story, although why may take a while to see
Chapter 2: Burnt Toast
Chapter 3: The Steel Tower
Chapter 4: Classes
Chapter 5: Lunch With Sarah
The complete book contains more than 50 chapters, although I’ve cut quite a few sections and a lot of backstory content from the full manuscript. This final version of the story is actually the 23rd version of the story, which has evolved since I finished the initial draft Jan 1 2012. At its peak, it was a 150K word book. The current word count (which can change) is around 112K.
I actually plan that The Balance will eventually span 3 volumes, since it is an epic tale and the story encompasses a lot more than the YA story contained in this volume. The other two volumes are plotted to an extent, although I reserve the right to keep changing the story, as I have done with this first volume.
The downloadable file can be found at:
http://michaelselden.com/?page_id=7
4 total views, 1 views today
June 10, 2014
Where is this whole book publishing / book selling and distribution going? Who Knows? But we can see trends.
The big 5 are floundering, in a time when more books than ever are being sold, their share of the market is dwindling and they don’t know what to do, or—more likely—are too afraid to do what’s needed.
1) Independent publishers today use the very same people to do things like editing, layout and design, production, and distribution that the big 5 do, but independents only pay for the hours used, the books sold, and have little in the way of costly infrastructure to maintain.
2) The big 5 have become cautious—always a sign that a business is on the way out, since you’re either growing or dying. They’ve narrowed what they publish, dreaming—somehow—that they can predict what people will want and offering fewer and fewer real innovations. You want action and killing and sex, go to them, but don’t expect anything out of the ordinary beyond that.
3) While the content and sales are increasing, one player is rapidly trying to assert a near monopoly on book sales, and people are letting them do it. There is nothing special about Amazon. They’re middlemen with a few innovations here and there, but they are becoming more heavy handed and less customer focused as they get big. There are competitors out there: Kobo, Smashwords, Barnes & Nobel, but they don’t have Amazon’s size. We publishers could just as easily direct our works to them first. Amazon wants to dictate price and with their select program, they want to shut off the competition’s ability to offer the product.
IMO, what the big 5 and Apple and the distributors should do is to form an alliance to compete. What the big 5 still retain is the machine to get the word out on which books to read—they have a stranglehold on some of the most important reviewing organizations. They could form partnerships with hundreds or even thousands of independent publishers and in exchange for a percentage of the sales and the ability to check quality (not content or plot) , they could throw their weight behind quality books of all different sorts. The indies would still be bearing the cost of creation, editing, production and at least half of (and maybe all of) the marketing, while the big publisher verifies quality and pushes the best products through. It would gain them sales and almost pure profit, which they could focus on increasing the competition for sales outlets, even buying or leveraging sites like Wattpad for reviews and sampling of product.
Amazon is trying to dictate terms, but they create no content and offer only a few products of their own. Publishers (especially groups of competing publisher networks) have the ability to compete and to do so very effectively. At the same time, Amazon still has a great platform and can continue to compete and offer new solutions to counter-balance any shift in power. I like Amazon, too, but I like competition better.
6 total views, 6 views today
June 3, 2014
Evolution of the cover image
From the beginning, I had an idea of what I wanted the cover to look like. The Boy Who Ran contains light allegorical content, related to what has recently been learned about the spiritual beliefs of the people living in the mid-archaic period. I note this on my web site in the section which discusses History and The Boy Who Ran. I used these concepts when writing the book—there is more to the Boy / White Flank relationship than I reveal in the book—and I wanted to capture the idea in the cover image. I discussed this in detail with my long-time close friend Paola when I was in Italy. Like myself, her training is as a physicist, but she also has an excellent eye for how to relate things in an artistic way and the talent to create what I was envisioning, although less crisply than she could. She agreed to draw what I described and submitted more than one candidate sketch before I saw that she had settled on a perfect idea of what I wanted.
I’m attaching a series of pictures as that chosen sketch turned into the cover of the book.
Jamie at Belle Etoile added the green color and then wrapped the image around the book a bit. Later, after winning the IPPY medal, she added the badge for me.
21 total views, 2 views today
