C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 111

YEAR OF MIRACLES cover reveal!

My head is going to explode of squee. :)

Revisit the world of the Negotiator Trilogy and learn how it all began…

Four hundred years ago, the master vampire Eliseo Daisani and the dragonlord Janx fell in love with a human woman during the Year of Miracles–the year London burned.

This is her story.

Available in fine e-stores everywhere on July 1!

*mutter* I love that cover copy, but it needs more to it. *mutter*

Tara O’Shea has done herself (and me and my collections!) proud with these covers, I think. I’m completely thrilled with all of them and really feel like I’ve gotten a beautiful, cohesive set for my collections. If you need ebook covers, holy beans do I ever recommend working with Tara. O.O

The whole trifecta is behind the cut as one image so you can see them together. I am so happy with how they look, *dances squeefully*!

Seriously, this year is really great for Old Races stuff! Between BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER and the three short story/novella collections, that’s 21 new Old Races stories (at least 9 of which are new even if you’ve been a patron for all my Old Races crowdfunding projects!). And this from a writer who thought she’d never write in that world again. :)

I just gotta figure out how to boost the signal on ORIGINS so it rises in visibility on Amazon (particularly amazon, who are we kidding)’s ranks. It’s not doing badly, but it’s not getting nearly the traction EASY PICKINGS managed in its first week of release. (OTOH, EASY PICKINGS’s sales have picked up visibly this month, very nearly matching the ORIGINS sales, and I don’t think that’s coincidence.) I mean, EP has a lot of things going for it–novella length, two authors, two popular series–that ORIGINS doesn’t (though the wordcount on ORIGINS is at least as long as EP’s), but I’d still like to figure out how to boost that…

Anyway! Happy days. :)

Old Races: Origins release day!

THE OLD RACES: ORIGINS

Before the Negotiator, there were the long-held covenants of the Old Races: Do not mate with humans. Never tell them of our existence. And never kill one of our own. For time immemorial, these laws were adhered to…

…except when they were not. Delve into the secret history of the Old Races and discover the truth behind Saint George and the dragons, the origins of the mysterious selkie race, and the djinn betrayals that shape the world of the Negotiator Trilogy.

These stories and more are revealed in this collection of five Old Races short stories, available now!

Buy at:

Amazon: Old Races ORIGINS

(link will be edited to be live ASAP)

Smashwords: Old Races ORIGINS

Or here at CE Murphy.Net (PDF only):

PLEASE NOTE: you will be given a link that brings you back to cemurphy.net for a download once you’ve completed payment. PLEASE click that link, or you won’t be brought to the download page and then you’ll be terribly sad and without stories and will have to email me and be embarrassed about not following directions and ask me to send you a copy of the stories.

Please use the button below to buy your PDF copy of OLD RACES: ORIGINS!

 

Why PDF only at cemurphy.net, you ask? After all, don’t I get basically ALL the money if you buy it direct? Well, yes, I do. But if you buy it through any of the other retailers, it raises the collection’s profile, making it more likely for *other* people to find it and buy it. I think probably in the long run that’s worth more than the extra dollar I get through a direct sale.

So: if you have an e-reader and really want to give me a birthday present, go ahead and go buy the collection. Write a review of it and give it four or five stars if you like it.

ORSSP patrons: this is a GREAT TIME for you to go write a review and star it heavily! You’ve already read all these stories! Go make it look good! *big hopeful eyes* :)

OLD RACES: ORIGINS cover reveal!

THE OLD RACES: ORIGINS

Before the Negotiator, there were the long-held covenants of the Old Races: Do not mate with humans. Never tell them of our existence. And never kill one of our own. For time immemorial, these laws were adhered to…

…except when they were not. Delve into the secret history of the Old Races and discover the truth behind Saint George and the dragons, the origins of the mysterious selkie race, and the djinn betrayals that shape the world of the Negotiator Trilogy.

These stories and more are revealed in this collection of five Old Races short stories, coming June 1 to an e-store near you!

(This collection contains 5 of the 6 Old Races Short Story Project stories, so if you were a patron of that crowdfunded project, you don’t need to buy this one. I mean, IF YOU WANT TO it’s fine with me, y’know? But there’s no new content. Except the cover. :))

Cover art by Tara O’Shea. My head is just going to explode of excitement when I get to see ALL THREE short story collection covers together. :)

editorial horror stories

I’ve certainly been following the Mandy De Geit Saga, though I don’t know if you have been. Short version: a sorry excuse for a publishing house rewrote the story they’d accepted for an anthology, without telling her about it, then got snitty when she objected. But that doesn’t really do the horrors of it justice, so you should go read the link.

It caused a friend to email me and ask what I thought of the substantive part of the issue, which I take to mean “what do I think of editors rewriting stories,” and my answer got so long I thought I’d make a blog post of it:

I’ve never met anybody published with a major publisher who’s claimed this has happened to them. Editors don’t do that.

Editors say “I think there’s a problem with this book in that it falls too perfectly between romance and fantasy. Would you consider removing the 30,000 words that are the hero’s point of view and revising it to keep the same story only without his POV?”, causing you to cut 30K and rewrite the other 70K and substantially improving the book by doing so. They will also say “If you don’t want to do that, I will give this book to our romance department and see if they think it would work for them instead of in our fantasy line.” (TRUTHSEEKER)

Or they say “I think X Y and Z need some looking at,” causing you to finally grimly accept that the book actually has no plot (which, frankly, you suspected all along and were hoping your editor would not notice) and that XY&Z can be fixed by ripping out 2/3rds of the book and rewriting what’s left (HOUSE OF CARDS).

Or they say “This book is wonderful except I don’t understand why the main character is doing anything. Can you add motivation?” (URBAN SHAMAN. THE CARDINAL RULE. THUNDERBIRD FALLS. HEART OF STONE. I’d started to get the hang of it by COYOTE DREAMS.)

Or they say “I’m concerned that the cruelty of this scene will lose readers for good. Can you make it more clear that it’s the magic pushing this?” (THE QUEEN’S BASTARD, and if you’ve read it you can guess the scene, and it’s the one change I’ve ever made in a book that I understood and agreed with the editor’s reasons, but don’t necessarily feel it was the right thing to do for the story.)

Once in a great, great while, they say “You know what, I think this one hits all the notes we need, no revision letter this time!”, causing you to be paranoid and suspect that really in fact time got too short and the book probably desperately does need revising but it’s going to print anyway and you’ve never been quite brave enough to reread it to see whether it stands up (THE FIREBIRD DECEPTION).

A legitimate editor/publisher would not do what was done to Mandy DeGeit. Vast numbers of people who are unpublished seem to have a hardcore belief that this kind of thing happens all the time. That sex scenes are added to books, that storylines are revised, rewritten, removed, all without the author’s permission or notification.

This does not happen. Not in real publishing. Editors don’t have time to rewrite your book for you. Indeed, if editors wanted to write your book for you, they would be writers, not editors.

The most ungodly rewrites I’ve gotten from editors have been from copyeditors who apparently dislike my style and feel they should improve it. And believe me, if I ever have that happen again I will send the manuscript back as it was originally, with a big fat note on it that says “Don’t waste my time.” (I was too new to the game to do that when it did happen, which is a goddamned shame, because there are paragraphs in HANDS OF FLAME which are nearly incomprehensible because not everything I fixed back got transferred smoothly to the print files. And yes, I’m still pissed.) That is not a CE’s job any more than it’s an editor’s job, and although almost everyone in traditional, legitimate publishing does seem to have a CE horror story, nobody I’ve ever talked to has said an editor rewrote their book.

As for Ms. DeGreit, I hope she’s a terrific writer and is able to parlay this entire fiasco into a relevant and useful career launch.

BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER give-away!

I have just gotten four* advanced reader’s copies for BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER to give away. They’re softcover, uncorrected proofs, and actually if the book itself looked like this I would be quite delighted, but it’s going to be even more gorgeous and splendid, so don’t forget to pre-order your copy. :)

But at $40, it’s also going to be expensive. So here’s how this give-away is going to go:

Everybody reading this post, at whatever site you’re coming from (Facebook, Goodreads, Livejournal, mizkit.com, cemurphy.net (please comment on Facebook or Livejournal if you’re reading this on cemurphy.net, as I’ve got comments turned off there), G+, Twitter) can put in their name once for a random draw. I’ll give two of the books away that way.

The other two I want to give to people who can genuinely not afford the $40 price tag on the book. Obviously this is on the honor system, but generally I find my readers to be extremely good people, so I’m going to trust you on this. Leave a comment or, if you prefer to keep the request private, send an email to cemurphyauthor@gmail.com, saying you’d like to be in for the Budget Giveaway. You don’t have to offer up details; it’s not going to be a Saddest Story Wins scenario, but rather another random draw from the second pool of names.

All I request–and this is of all four winners–is that you write a review of the book and either post it on your own blog & give me a link for it, or provide it to me so I can post it for you. I’ve never had a short story collection before, so I’d like to see it get some traction, and this is how you guys can help give it some.

So. That’s how this works. The contest ends sometime Monday, May 21st, so comment before then. Ready set go!

*technically five but I’M KEEPING ONE because i almost never ever ever get ARCs! also so i can do proofs on it. :)

Baba Yaga’s Daughter : Update!

YAY SQUEE yesterday Subterranean Press said the BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER advanced reader copies were shipping! You’ve pre-ordered your copy, right? ’cause it’s going to be SUPER PRETTY and, er, well, I rather like the stories in it too.

This book is a hidden history of the Old Races, following the stories of Baba Yaga’s Daughter and of Vanessa Grey as they use and are used by the Old Races’ greatest rivals: dragonlord Janx and master vampire Daisani.

Trust me: if I ever write more books in the Old Races universe, you’re going to want to have read these stories. Between them and the Old Races e-collections I’m releasing this summer, everything will be set up to launch into the next Old Races series…

E-book pricing

Getting ready to release the Old Races short stories has got me thinking hard about e-book pricing, so I’m going to talk about it a lot now. :)

First off, where I’m coming from: Amazon, B&N and possibly Smashwords don’t kick in their 70% royalty rate until $2.99, so from where I’m sitting except for an occasional Special Offer, anything below that price seems like wasting my time (because I can’t really imagine selling SO MANY copies of something at $.99 or $1.99 to make up for the loss, though who knows, maybe I’m totally wrong about that).

To my mind, at $2.99 a reader deserves at least a SFWA-standard “novelette”‘s worth of words–around 17.5K. That’s 5 or so 3-5K short stories, or one longer-but-not-novella-length story. We’re talking about, say, 30-50 pages of story.

Novellas, which range from 17.5-40K by SFWA standards–well, we priced “Easy Pickings” at $2.99, but in retrospect I think maybe something in that range ought to be $3.99, perhaps. That would be somewhere in the 50-150 pages of story length.

Novels, by SFWA standards, are 40K+ (150+ pages, more or less). This is where it starts to get hairy for me, because does one price a short novel, say, NO DOMINION, which is 60K, at the same rate one prices a 150K novel? My inclination is no. And this is difficult to determine because in the print world, 60K novels are scarce on the ground except in category romance, where they in fact cost around $5.

So okay. Say I price NO DOMINION at $4.99, which I think is a pretty fair price. Then let’s say I write THE REGENT’S FOOL, which would have been book 3 of the Inheritors’ Cycle. If it stayed in line with the other two Inheritors’ books, it would be 150-170K, which is more than twice the length of NO DOMINION. If you were to get a mass market paperback of that, it would cost either $7.99 or $8.99. So would I (theoretically) price that at $7.99, and a middle-length novel like a Walker Papers, which ranges from 100-115K, at $6.99?

Well, no, actually, I probably wouldn’t. I’d probably set them at $5.99 and $6.99, although in my opinion we’re getting into a hazy grey area here, because while I can hear you protesting that e-books cost less to produce, and that’s true because there’s no physical book to print, the flip side is that the book still requires the same *work* that the printed edition costs. And those are things like this:

- me to write the book

- someone to edit the book

- cover art

- book design

- marketing

With the exception of marketing (which I haven’t properly figured out yet), those same costs are much inherent in any e-book I’d put out, except it’s my own money paying for cover art, editing and possibly book design, rather than my publisher’s money. This is probably in itself reason enough to argue for a further markup of the price to match publishing house prices, but OTOH, the publishing house is also printing books, which costs (as far as I can tell from the invoices I’ve gotten on my own author copies of books over the years) about 20% of the cover price. So okay, for a 100K+ novel I set the price a dollar below what a mass market would cost, and that more or less covers the “bargain rate because there’s no print edition” percentage of the cost.

(Begin digression: books like mine, published by a New York publisher as e-books, do not cost $9.99 or indeed $14.99 to try to screw the reader out of their money: they cost that because they’re paying for all of the above. Furthermore, bookstores pays the publisher $7.50 for that $14.99 book, which means all of the above is coming out of the $7.50 a publishing house is getting paid for that book. Subtract 20% of that $7.50 for printing costs, and appreciate that publishing is *not* a get-rich industry.

And Amazon is buying those books at at least $7.50 and selling them at a loss in order to draw people in and encourage them to buy Kindles. This is not sustainable for Amazon in the long run and it’s certainly not sustainable for the publishing industry, which is why Tor’s decision to release books DRM-free (and Baen’s having always done that) is a big deal.

End digression.)

I suppose the point of all this is that figuring out the e-pricing is tricky, and that I’m actively interested in how writers are approaching it and what readers think is fair. So talk to me! :)

Hip hip hooray!

Tor Books has just announced it’s going DRM-free on all its e-books.

I am so filled with squee over this that I cannot *tell* you. DRM (digital rights management) is one of the things that permits Amazon to have a throttlehold on e-book sales: you can only buy a Kindle book for a Kindle reader, which means if you ever change e-readers you have to either re-buy everything or (realistically) go to the trouble of cracking/converting the DRM, or (even more realistically) pirating the books. But Tor is firing a shot across the bow with this, as far as I’m concerned, and I hope everybody sits up and pays attention. Yay!

And on the second hip hip hooray of the evening, DON’T READ THIS BOOK is available for pre-order! I’m very excited about this one, so quick! Go forth! Buy, and prepare yourself for creepy stories!

(Really. Pre-order the trade paperback & you get to download the e-version immediately. When I say prepare yourself, I mean RIGHT NOW!)

Manners & Magic

With apologies to Jane Austen, I present to you MAGIC & MANNERS, which is what happens when I get it into my head to wonder what PRIDE & PREJUDICE would be like if it was not a lack of wealth that beleaguered the Bennet sisters, but rather an excess of magic…

That each and every one of Mrs Dover’s five daughters was afflicted with an inconvenient magic inherited from their father was no barrier to their impending nuptials: on this, Mrs Dover was determined.

“It has not,” she said to that long-suffering man for perhaps the six hundredth time in their marriage, “been the most desireable situation, but one must make do.”

“One must,” he agreed most aimiably, and into that agreement a silence fell, for one had, in fact, made do, both in Mrs Dover’s case and in Mr Dover’s. She, unmarried at the ancient age of twenty-three, had been obliged to accept the suitor who offered, and he, veritably in the grave at thirty-eight, had been equally obliged to request her hand. There was no scandal attached, much to the dismay of the neighboring gossips: Mrs Dover did not do in seven months what took a cow or countess nine, but instead gave birth to the first of many girls a stately and sedate fourteen months after marriage to Mr Dover.

Mr Dover had been, by all intelligence, an entirely suitable match: he had one thousand pounds a year and a quick humor which his wife had never fully learned to appreciate. He was laconic in spirit and gentle with horses, and had a handsome leg and a fine nose. All in all, he ought to have been married long before Mrs Dover was obliged to accept him. It was the unspeakable question of magic that had forced–or permited–him to remain unwed for so long.

Mrs Dover’s mother, Mrs Hampshire, had willfully seen nor heard anything of such rumors: no one in good society would. Certainly if Mr Dover was of that sort he had kept it quiet enough, with little more than his long-standing bachelorhood to hint at a family taint. Magic was the kind of thing that happened to someone else, to lesser people or those who had fallen from a higher station; it certainly did not appear unexplained in a family of good standing. Mr Dover had no mysterious deaths attached to him; he had never been married to a woman who wasted away in a high tower, nor had his parents disappeared or died under inexplicable circumstances. Certainly, indeed, Mrs Dover the Elder was of exceedingly good breeding and indeed, still alive when Mrs Hampshire oversaw the engagement of two (relatively) young persons to one another, while Mr Dover the Elder had died most respectably, at sea. Nor had Mr Dover the Younger any unexplained wards to care for, no suggestion of impropriety hanging over him in such a way. He was an eminently suitable young man for Mrs Hampshire’s rapidly aging daughter, and the match was made.

That the church walkway was lined with freshly blooming spring flowers, and that the trees were budding new green leaves under a gloriously warm sun on their wedding day was certainly no more than auspicious, and no one dared comment too loudly that it was the third of January, or that two nights earlier snow had fallen deeply enough to swallow horses’s ankles as they trod down frozen winter roads.

Mrs Hampshire had never been certain whether the new Mrs Dover had fully understood the unlikelihood of the blooming weather that graced her wedding day. She was very pretty, with blushing apple cheeks and wide light eyes beneath lemon-yellow hair that was indeed washed with lemon juice as often as possible to retain that soft bright color. Mr Hampshire, her father, was a man of reasonable means, though much of his money had gone to buying the new Mrs Dover’s brother a Captaincy, and so it had been necessary for the youngest Hampshire girl to marry passably well. It ought to have been an easy task, but Miss Hampshire, Mrs-Dover-to-be, possessed what an aunt had charitably called a tongue tied in the middle, and loose at both ends. She meant no harm at all, but it proved very difficult for Mrs Hampshire to seclude any potential bridesgrooms from her daughter long enough for them to fall in love with her mein and fail to notice her chatter. Mr Dover had been a blessing, and if the weather was unseasonably lovely for their marriage, well, the new Mrs Dover had felt it only her due, and Mrs Hampshire had breathed a sigh of relief that her youngest and silliest daughter was safely married.

Nor had Mrs Dover any complaints in a home where the tea remained mysteriously hot even after standing unattended for hours, or where a warm breeze seemed to waft from the kitchen’s roaring fires into all the coldest places in the halls. The laundry dried remarkably quickly, and stains never set in tableclothes; these were the unrealized advantages to marrying a man rumored to have magic of his own. Mr Dover had more money than Mr Hampshire; perhaps it was the greater income which allowed grass to grow more greenly or the dogs to be particularly well-mannered and disinclined to shedding. It was a fantasy upon which Mrs Dover was permitted to dwell until her second daughter’s third birthday, when an explosive sneeze from the child lit the tablecloth on fire, and only the quick calm hands of the oldest daughter kept the entire house from burning down. Even that might have been dismissable–the sneeze might have knocked a candle aside, the tablecloth might have been saved by doubling it and patting the fire out–but for the servants who were in the room at the time, and who most clearly saw what Mrs Dover denied. Rosamund, the eldest, patted the flames out with her bare hands, and left ice drippings on the wood beneath, and Elsabeth, the birthday girl, sneezed a second time for fun and dripped fire as if she was a little dragon, and not a girl at all.

Two of the servants gave notice and a third left in screams. Those who remained did so with forebearance, but the damage was done. By suppertime the story had been put around; by breakfast the following day each of Mrs Dover’s appointments for the next week had returned her calling cards, and by the following Sunday she pled with Mr Dover to allow them to retire to his modest country estate, where they might be forgotten about for a while.

Seventeen years had passed, and they had yet to return to town. Mr Dover found this to be no difficulty at all, and Mrs Dover bore it with good humor, which was to say she spoke of the difficulties of country living with every breath, most particularly the difficulties of finding suitable husbands for five–five!–daughters whose dowrys were modest at best, though certainly they all had lovely faces to make up for such moderate means,

“but,” Mrs Dover burst out, as though they had not fallen into a brief and companionable silence, “but certainly there is no doubt that a single man of good fortune must be in want of a wife, and what can you imagine, Mr Dover, but that Newsbury Manor has been let at last!”

“I am sure I can hardly imagine such a thing,” Mr Dover replied with usual good nature. He had his paper and his tea; nothing much could disturb him from these, and he had long since learned to bend when the wind blew in, as it so often did in the form of Mrs Dover. She, for her part, had barely come through the door before making impetuous statements regarding the desirability or lack thereof of their daughters’ situation, and only now wrested her hat from its perch atop her head to a spot on the table, where later she would scold a servant for having left it.

“Are you not the slightest bit curious about who might have let it?”

“Indeed, I am not, as Newsbury Manor is much too large for my liking and I could never wish to visit it myself, so am of no mind to know who has the poor taste to admire it.”

“Oh! How cruel you are. But I will tell you, as I know that the welfare of your daughters is close to your heart despite your pretenses to the contrary. It is indeed a young man of good fortune, as I have just had it from Mrs Langfield, a young man with at least three thousand pounds a year!–”

& that’s as far as I got before Young Indiana woke up. :)

MOUNTAIN ECHOES

I have just submitted the 2nd to last Walker Papers to my editor. I feel faintly sick now. I’m on the last leg of a 12 year journey now, and…wow. Just wow. Holy beans

I realized a few minutes ago that there’s one mistake in SPIRIT DANCES: the last lines should be “to be continued in RAVEN CALLS”, rather than whatever it says (tune in next time, I think). RAVEN CALLS does say “to be continued”, and MOUNTAIN ECHOES’s last words are “to be concluded in the final book of the Walker Papers.”

Wow. I’m gonna go…yeah. Sit for a while, now, thanks, and just…breathe.