Saga Press — the new publisher of The Red: First Light — is a new imprint of Simon and Schuster. Their first books won’t be out until next spring, but today they made this announcement:

New York, New York, October 8—Saga Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, announced today that all e-books from the forthcoming science fiction and fantasy line will be sold without DRM.

“The science fiction and fantasy community were early adopters of electronic formats, and have enthusiastically embraced DRM-free content while showing great respect for authors’ works under copyright. In launching our imprint, we are pleased to offer this convenience to our readers and test the waters of DRM-free publishing,” said Joe Monti, executive editor of Saga.

This is terrific news. My ebooks have always been DRM-free for the convenience of readers who might change devices, or need to make back-up copies. So I’m very pleased to know that my novels to be published by Saga Press will be DRM-free as well.

Here’s more on the topic, from Joe Monti, my editor at Saga Press.

And here’s another post in which Joe talks about the start-up process behind Saga Press.

Over the past few months, many of you have asked Whatever happened to The Red: Trials? This was the sequel to my 2013 self-published novel The Red: First Light and had been scheduled to publish last May. It has not been published (yet) and now I’m finally free to say why. So here’s the story:

Last spring I got to talking with my long-time agent. Naturally, we hadn’t had much business with each other since I started self-publishing, but one thing led to another, he read The Red: First Light, loved it, and asked if he could auction that book along with Trials, and an as-yet-unwritten final novel in the trilogy.

I thought about it. I talked the idea over with my husband. I added up what First Light had already earned, and I estimated what I might expect to earn in the next year or two. The finances convinced me: an auction was worth trying, so long as it was a walk-away deal. My agent agreed: if I didn’t get an offer I liked, I would continue on my own.

In fact, I planned to continue as before, publishing The Red: Trials according to the original schedule, but during the auction period I was asked to hold off on releasing it. On reflection that seemed a reasonable request, so I agreed. It was a gamble though, because I was giving up a wonderful publicity opportunity. Fortunately, the gamble proved worthwhile.

The big news: Now that the contract has been signed, I am very pleased to announce that The Red series has been acquired by Joe Monti, Executive Editor at Saga Press, which is an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Joe has been very enthusiastic, and I am all approving of the marketing direction he has in mind. I see this deal as a fantastic opportunity to get my name out in the world and more widely known, which should help push sales of my backlist, which might lead to me earning a reasonable income from writing for, essentially, the first time ever. My husband has always been the primary breadwinner around here, so the opportunity to give back to him means a lot to me.

For now, The Red: First Light has been withdrawn from sale pending the release of the forthcoming Saga Press edition.

I’m not turning my back on self-publishing, but after almost five years at this game, it felt like the time had come to try something different. I think that’s the key, to keep trying new things, and this is the right thing for me, and for my family, at this time.

I do have one regret: I know I’m disappointing several of you who’ve let me know that you’re eagerly awaiting Trials. Be assured that it will be published, just a little later than initially planned and under the slightly modified title The Trials. I hope you’ll stick with me until then. And I do want to thank all the readers and reviewers who supported the original edition, and made this step forward possible for me.

I’ll be sending out my newsletter at rare intervals, as always, so if you’d like a notification of the publication date of the Saga Press edition of the series—or occasional news on my other books and writing—please sign up using the form in the right column of this page.

And in the meantime, I have a lot of other novels! If you haven’t read them yet, check out Memory or The Bohr Maker. Both are good places to start if you’d like to get to know my work.

More good news for The Red: First Light! The novel has been honored as a finalist for The John W. Campbell Memorial Award. This must have been a good year for science fiction, because there are fifteen finalists — more than in any other recent year.

The Campbell Memorial Award is a juried award presented for the best science-fiction novel of the year. It’s considered one of the three major annual awards for science fiction, and is generally limited to science fiction — in other words, it does not consider fantasy novels. The award is administered by Christopher McKitterick, Director of the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas.

The winner has not been announced yet, though no doubt it will be soon. Again, I have no expectation of winning, but as with the Nebulas, it truly is an honor just to be nominated.

This is actually my second Campbell nomination. My novel Memory was nominated back in 2004 — something I never knew at the time. It was only in the last year or so that I discovered it on the list of nominees — a rather ironic surprise.

The full list of finalists can be found here.

And more information on the award itself can be found here.

NO WAY OUT BUT FORWARD

Back-cover copy:
Lieutenant James Shelley and his squad of US Army soldiers were on a quest for justice when they carried out the unauthorized mission known as First Light. They returned home to America to face a court-martial, determined to expose the corruption in the chain of command that compelled their actions. But in a country still reeling from the nuclear terrorism of Coma Day, the courtroom is only one battlefield. A new cycle of violence ignites when rumors of the elusive, rogue AI known as the Red go public—and Shelley is, once again, pulled into the fray.

Challenged by his enemies, driven by ideals, Shelley feels compelled to act—but are the harrowing choices he makes really his own, or are they made for him, by the Red? With millions of lives at stake in a game of nuclear cat-and-mouse, does it even matter?

Digital painting by Dallas Nagata White
Cover design by Emily Irwin

Dallas also did the cover painting for The Red: First Light.

Emily did the cover painting and cover design for Memory.

Here’s a blog post on the Maui artists I’ve worked with.

I am DONE WITH THIS NOVEL.

Or … I am done pending feedback from my copyeditor, Chaz Brenchley.

What does a copyeditor do?
A good copyeditor will read through the manuscript, attending to the nitty-gritty details of grammar, spelling, capitalization, and consistency of story elements.

Some examples:

* look for typos, missing words, missing punctuation, misspelled words

* look for incorrect punctuation

* make sure there is consistency in the way words are spelled and capitalized. For example, I always use “nightvision” instead of “night vision.” And where abbreviations and acronyms are used, I tend to skip the periods, so “US Army” or “Washington DC.”

* make sure that characters’ names and physical attributes are consistent throughout (except of course where those physical attributes change).

* make sure characters are where they are supposed to be and have not magically transported elsewhere.

Copyediting is a tough, demanding job. Part of the skill set is to know when an author has deliberately and effectively violated the rules of grammar. For example, I might use a comma splice on occasion to rush the action forward. Is it an effective use? The copyeditor might have an opinion on that.
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I love the digital painting my daughter, Dallas Nagata White, did for the cover of The Red: First Light, but the layout of the text on the cover was done by me, and I’ve never been happy with it. I wanted to hire a graphic designer to re-do the layout, but there wasn’t time before publication, so I went with what I had.

But the sequel, The Red: Trials, will be coming out in a of couple months. Ahead of that release I wanted to “rebrand” First Light, giving it a better look that could be re-used on the cover of Trials to clearly indicate that they are a series.

So I turned to Emily Irwin, who is a working graphic artist, and who created the new cover for Memory. Here’s the result–and I think it’s gorgeous:

Expect to see this cover soon on both the ebook and print editions.

Today, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) announced the nominees for the 2013 Nebula Awards, to be presented in 2014. I don’t mind saying that I was a bit stunned but very pleased to learn that the The Red: First Light was on the novel shortlist.

Thank you to everyone who took time out to read the novel and recommend it to others, and who helped to get the word out! This was the first science fiction novel I wrote in over ten years. Given that span of time, it was really gratifying to know that readers were still interested in my work.

I haven’t done the research, but the consensus on twitter is that this is the first self-published novel to make the Nebula shortlist, which is kind of interesting. If you’d like to know why I chose to self-publish, here’s a post from last fall.

For SFWA members who’d like to read TRFL, ebook copies are available in the forum.

Congratulations to all the other 2013 Nebula nominees. To see the complete list, visit Locus Online.

The Locus Recommended Reading List was posted yesterday, and I’m very pleased to report that The Red: First Light was included as one of only twenty science fiction novels.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that The Red: First Light is an indie-published novel. Many venues will not even consider reviewing a novel unless it’s from a traditional publisher. Ironically, it was only some of the bigger review venues that paid attention to TRFL — specifically, Russell Letson at Locus and Stefan Raets at Tor.com, as well as UK reviewer Paul Kincaid. At any rate, I’m very grateful to the staff at Locus for including The Red: First Light on their list.

And also…

Among the many Locus recommended short stories is my Nightmare Magazine story “Halfway Home.” If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, you can find it online here.

In my last post, Why I Self-Published The Red: First Light, I talked about why I decided to independently publish my newest science fiction novel. This time I want to talk about the process.

In the spring of 2012 I wrote a short story called “Through Your Eyes.” I intended it as a stand-alone piece, but I couldn’t get the protagonist out of my head. I wanted to know what became of him, and The Red: First Light is the result.

From the start I knew the novel would be problematical from a marketing perspective, for the reasons noted in my last post, but I wanted and needed to write this book.

I started working on the novel in early June 2012—a week or so after sending the short story off to market—and finished a very rough draft at the end of September, ironically, about two days before the short story sold to Asimov’s.
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There is no best path in this business of writing fiction and every author’s career is different. I started in the usual way, with traditional publishing, and had six science fiction novels published by New York houses between ’95 and 2003. My work garnered good reviews and there were a couple of awards, but despite my best efforts no meaningful amount of money was going into the family coffers. Economically, I was wasting my time. Emotionally I was inhabited by a deep, dark sense of failure, with no viable means to turn things around. So circa 2000 I more or less walked away from the field for almost ten years. I did not stop writing entirely, but it was close.

In 2009 I woke up to the ebook revolution.

My background and situation let me jump right into self-publishing. I’d worked in web development for nine years, so I knew how to handle the HTML behind ebooks, I was familiar with Photoshop, I’d learned the basics of InDesign, I had the rights back to all my novels, and I had time to devote, since the recession had ended my programming job. So I became my own publisher and reissued the novels, first as ebooks and then in print-on-demand editions.

I found that I loved this new business, because I was in control.

In traditional publishing, after a book is sold, the important decisions are made by the publisher—format, cover art, cover copy, sales date, pricing, promotional budget (if any)—and once those decisions are made they can rarely be changed. So my near-future bio-thriller Limit of Vision was released with a pulp cover featuring giant bugs, while my far-future novel, Memory, was released with a back cover description that got the basic facts of the story world wrong.

As my own publisher, I make mistakes too, but because my business model—low upfront costs and no warehoused inventory—is radically different from that of traditional publishing, I’m in a position to correct those mistakes. I can—and I have—changed cover art, cover copy, and pricing after publishing a book.

Of course these days, self-publishing out-of-print backlist isn’t controversial. The question writers debate is what to do with original fiction. I looked at it from a business perspective, asking What’s best for me? And I couldn’t justify trying New York again.
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