This is a follow-up to my post from yesterday. My newest short story, “Through Your Eyes,” is now out in the April/May double issue of Asimov’s. Find the ebook edition at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Print editions should be on the way.

When I first started writing “Through Your Eyes,” it was meant as a stand-alone short story, but by the time it was done, I felt a novel coming on. The story’s protagonist wasn’t nearly done with his time on-stage, so I took the world created in “Through Your Eyes,” combined it with an idea brewing in the back of my mind that was originally expressed in my Lightspeed Magazine story “Nightside On Callisto” and came up with the near-future novel: The Red: First Light, due out in exactly two weeks.

[Two weeks?? OMG. Copyedit and book cover are on their way, but not done yet. I’ll need to process copyedits, lay out the ebook again (did this once for the eARC, which probably should have gone out to a lot more readers, *sigh*), lay out the print book, upload to vendor sites, send to reviewers . . . ah, indie publishing. But who am I kidding? Indie publishing is fun.]

Anyway, “Through Your Eyes” is a precursor story to The Red: First Light. At first blush they may seem to be wildly different in theme, but sometimes life take us where we least expect to go.

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Emily Irwin has created a new cover for my novel Memory and I love it.

Click the image below to see a larger version in a new window:

Emily is a graphic artist currently working and living in Montreal, but she grew up here on Maui and went to high school with my kids. She first read Memory in high school and has read it several times since. My daughter knew I wanted a new cover, and suggested I connect with Emily–which I did.

Emily listened to my very vague cover ideas, and created a series of thumbnail sketches incorporating my ideas and some of her own, and then, as a whim, she added one more concept, much more abstract and fantastical than the others. That was the image both my daughter and I immediately gravitated toward, and the end result is the cover above. I’m very pleased, and I hope this cover will give new life to the book.

Emily’s cover will be going live on the ebook over the next few days, and will be featured on a new print edition of Memory, coming soon.

For indie publishers, there are several options for creating a print book. Like most of us, I go with print-on-demand, and I’ve used both of the two big players in the field: Lightning Source, an Ingram company, and Createspace, an Amazon company.

I’ve done print versions for seven of my nine novels, all of them through Lightning Source. LS is not nearly as user friendly as Createspace, it’s much more expensive upfront, and it gets extra costly if you have errors in your files and have to re-submit them. But the default distribution at Lightning Source is better than the default at Createspace, and the pricing structure allows me to price the Lightning Source books lower. Also, to be blunt, it’s not-Amazon. While I don’t know this for a fact, I’ve been told that independent bookstores will not stock Createspace books because they are Amazon.

A couple other differences–

First, you can get a matte cover at Lightning Source. If you can do that at Createspace, I haven’t figured out how. And second, in my opinion, the “creme” colored paper at Createspace is too creamy; it has too much color in it, compared to LS. (For novels, creme paper is generally preferred over white. The creme/white option is available at both companies.)

That said, I’ve successfully used Createspace for two books, and if you’ve never done print books before, I recommend it. It’s a much friendlier and more forgiving place to experiment.

The first book I did at Createspace was a collection of all my short stories originally published prior to 2001, called Goddesses & Other Stories. I wanted a print version, but since I didn’t expect to sell very many copies, I decided to keep my upfront investment to a minimum and go with Createspace. It’s worked out fine, but because of the CS pricing structure, it’s my highest-priced print book so far.

My second CS book is pictured above. Two Stories: Nahiku West & Nightside on Callisto and has just gone live at Amazon. It’s a mini-book: fifty-six pages long, and includes two science fiction short stories, both originally published in 2012. I don’t expect to sell many copies of this one either, and despite its size, it took a significant amount of time to put together–so why bother? Primarily because it’s an inexpensive way for me to experiment with a new print layout.

All the other books I’ve done have shared the same font and page layout, varying primarily in title fonts, header fonts, and very slightly, in the margins. But I’ll be publishing two more novels soon, and wanted to try a new layout. Two Stories was the perfect opportunity to experiment. Fifty-six pages was short enough that I could easily re-do it if I needed to, but it was quite long enough to let me know if the layout would work for the novels–and it wouldn’t cost be any cash upfront to run the experiment.

Stage 1 is now complete. I like the new layout. Stage 2 will involve applying the layout to my forthcoming novel The Red: First Light. Having run the experiment, I’ll be far less anxious over that, when it comes time to submit the print files to Lightning Source.

My first adult science fiction novel in ten years is coming in March
from Mythic Island Press LLC

THE RED: FIRST LIGHT

A near-future science fiction thriller

“There Needs To Be A War Going On Somewhere”

Lieutenant James Shelley commands a high-tech squad of soldiers in a rural district within the African Sahel. They hunt insurgents each night on a harrowing patrol, guided by three simple goals: protect civilians, kill the enemy, and stay alive—because in a for-profit war manufactured by the defense industry there can be no cause worth dying for. To keep his soldiers safe, Shelley uses every high-tech asset available to him—but his best weapon is a flawless sense of imminent danger…as if God is with him, whispering warnings in his ear. (Hazard Notice: contains military grade profanity.)

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The Locus Recommended Reading List is out, and I’m very pleased to say that both of my science fiction stories from 2012 are on it.

“Nahiku West” — Analog, October 2012 — is in the novelette category, and “Nightside On Callisto” — Lightspeed Magazine, May 2012, is in the short story category.

Both stories are available in an ebook edition that can be purchased through my own ebook store, as well as through the usual vendors on the web.

Toward the end of December, I spent some time putting together my very own e-bookstore at MythicIslandPress.com, the website I set up for my publishing company. In this blog post, I’m going to talk in general terms about how I put the store together, on the chance that other indie authors are interested.

The Mythic Island Press store is a highly simplified, single-author version of the store I set up for Book View Café. Both stores run on WordPress software, which isn’t something I really recommend from a technical point of view. WordPress is adaptable of course, but it’s blogging software, not e-commerce. Still, it works well enough at a small scale, and my little store is definitely small scale. So I opted to start with a system I already knew well, with the goal of putting up a smoothly functioning store in a very short time span.

BVC uses a paid WordPress plugin called Cart66 for the ecommerce portion. At Mythic Island Press I’m using Cart66 Lite, which so far looks entirely sufficient for my less-demanding needs.

To create the store, I installed WordPress and then Cart66 Lite, created a “child theme” of one of the standard WordPress themes, and then modified that to match my existing website. I grabbed a small portion of the functions I’d developed for BVC and included those in the child theme, along with some directives from the style sheet — again, so I wouldn’t have to re-invent the wheel I’d already invented last spring.

What took a surprising amount of time was figuring out how I wanted to present the books. I settled on a largish cover pic, the book’s description, and quotes, with a link to “read a sample.” (You actually need a function to change the wording of that link.)

I decided to present all the books on one page, but once you click through — either by clicking the book cover, the book title, or the “sample” link — then it’s one book per page, with links to scroll to the next and previous books. In the right-hand column I used a WordPress text widget and hand-coded an index with links to all the books.

For my store, payment is via Paypal. The Cart66 system does support some other options, but I already had PayPal set up and it doesn’t cost me any extra. Once a book is purchased via Paypal, the buyer is returned to a receipt page with a link for immediate download of the ebook. The link is also delivered in an email sent to the buyer. It was this ability to handle digital downloads that led us to use Cart66 in the first place.

So that was the process. Do stop by and check out the result.

There are great aspects to having a store on your own website–complete independence for one. Also, receiving the money at the time of the sale and not months later, as well as receiving nearly all of the sale price instead of yielding a hefty cut to the host store. In my store, prices are the same no matter what country you, the buyer, reside in, which is not always the case with other vendors.

Of course, you need to know how to get the downloaded file onto your e-reader of choice. That’s probably the trickiest part for those who are used to automatic downloads from Amazon. But it’s a fairly easy process. And whether you buy books from me or not, I do encourage you to consider doing at least some of your buying from small vendors. After all, monopolies aren’t good for anyone.

The Bohr Maker is an award-winning novel of nanotechnology, adventure, and high-tech revolution.

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Tech-Heaven is a near-future political thriller that imagines the rise of nanotechnology in our world through the eyes of Katie Kishida, a mother and business woman whose life takes an extraordinary turn when she is widowed, and her husband’s body is cryonically frozen against a time when advancing technology will allow his resurrection.

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Skye Object 3270a is a science fiction adventure novel for advanced-middle-grade to young-adult readers who like high-tech adventure. Oh yeah … and the print edition would make a great gift! 😉

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I just finished reading my first Joe Abercrombie novel, Best Served Cold, including an interview at the end of the book in which the author is asked about the genre of “scoundrel lit”:

“I tend to think of it as ‘unheroic fantasy,’ but certainly there seems to be a real current within epic fantasy lately toward darker, grittier, more morally ambiguous, more character-centered writing.”

Suddenly I have a subgenre in which to place the Puzzle Land books–The Dread Hammer and Hepen the Watcher–with their murderous protagonist, Smoke.

I do have to admit that Smoke is not entirely bereft of qualms and affections. Still, “scoundrel lit” is a pretty good description.