* Amazon now sells ebooks directly in India, but the terms to the writer/publisher are much better if you buy from Book View Café

* I offer print-on-demand versions of eight books. The other day a reader was surprised to discover on receipt that these are not “mass market” paperbacks, not the small “pocket books” that used to be so common. Instead, they are the larger “trade” paperbacks, 5.5 x 8.5 inches–basically the size of a hardcover. Just wanted to clarify that for anyone wondering at the cost.

* Kobo took over fifteen days to publish the first ebook I uploaded to their store. (Uploaded July 20; published August 5.) The second book, uploaded a few days ago, was published within an hour or two. The third book, uploaded yesterday, has still not published. I realize it’s a new system. Hopefully, consistency will come with time.

Update: The Bohr Maker went live on Kobo sometime overnight, and is available for purchase as of August 23.

When I was in traditional publishing, my books were essentially available only in the USA. I had only one UK edition — Vast — and while a few titles were translated into other languages, distribution of the American editions was extremely limited.

In these days of ebooks and indie publishing, all that’s changed. While Barnes & Noble only sells in the United States, Amazon offers the books in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. That’s a decent list of countries, and Amazon will still sell you a book if you don’t live in one of them — but a hefty charge will be attached to your purchase, and if your e-reader doesn’t handle files in mobi format, too bad.

Of course there’s a great alternative for anyone, anywhere: Book View Café — offering ebooks worldwide with no extra charges, in both epub and mobi formats.

BVC is a great site, with a good selection of genre books, but compared to the big sites out there, traffic is limited.

So I’ve just begun to offer my books through another international retailer, Kobo Books. If you’re a reader in the USA, you might never have heard of Kobo. I think they have a small presence here, but they’re well known around the world.

Until recently, the only way for a small publisher like myself to get into Kobo Books was to publish through a third party, Smashwords, which would then push the books out to Kobo. But I’ve never liked the way Smashwords handles books, so I held back — and last month Kobo finally opened their door to indie publishers like myself, and I uploaded a test book.

That book is Memory, and it’s now live on the site, available in epub format. Other books will soon be going up as well.

Do I recommend Kobo Books to other indie publishers? It’s too soon to say. Do read the contract terms carefully (you always do, don’t you?), know what you’re signing, and good luck!

It’s 8:30 AM and I’m sitting in my antique-filled room at a quaint little hotel in Lincoln City, Oregon. I’ve spent the weekend attending a workshop put on by Dean Wesley Smith. This morning will be the last session and then I’ll head north for the next leg of my trip. This is the first chance I’ve had to write something other than assignments for the workshop.

It’s been a great weekend. The subject of study was “Pitches & Blurbs”—basically, how to describe a book in a way that will encourage browsing book-buyers to give it serious consideration. Was it worthwhile coming all this way just to learn how to describe a book? Yes, indeed! Not only have I picked up ideas entirely new to me and had a chance to practice them, with feedback, but there is an invigorating pleasure in meeting with other writers who are enthusiastic about their craft and their business.

Because writing is a business. My fiction is what produces my income—not anywhere near enough to live on at present, but I’m hoping for better, because I’d like to stay in this business for a long, long time.

For most of my career I have not treated writing as a business. That changed when I got into indie publishing, but despite the forward progress, I still have a lot to learn. Learning is fun though. Challenging myself to do new things keeps it all fresh.

And yes, I hope to come back to Lincoln City before too long, to try out another workshop.

You’ve all been there…that point when you really begin to believe that computers were invented to drive us all mad.

As I’ve mentioned before, I recently upgraded to a blazing fast and entirely delightful new Mac. I worried that my old version of Creative Suite (CS3) wouldn’t be compatible, but lo, it works fine on the new operating system — or almost fine.

Yesterday I put together a print version of my story collection Goddesses & Other Stories using Adobe InDesign. I had one strange issue with fonts — Times New Roman, the most common human-developed font in the Universe, was not compatible between my old InDesign files and my new computer. I had to substitute Times New Roman for Times New Roman. I don’t know enough about fonts to explain why that was the case, but I forged on and put the new book together.

Toward the end of the process I decided to print out a couple of sample pages to make sure I liked the look. That’s when I stumbled on a critical bug. The moment I clicked “print,” InDesign “closed unexpectedly.” The first time it happened, I thought it was a fluke. After the third time I turned to the Great Google for advice and found this very useful post. I removed the files according to the instructions, and had no problem printing the sample pages. “Victory!” I cheered. Or so I thought.

Lightning Source is my usual print-on-demand company and they have a very specific procedure for creating the PDF file from which a book is printed. The first step is to convert the InDesign file to a postscript file. To do this, you “print” to postscript — and Lightning Source provides a four-page document detailing every setting that must be used to do this correctly. All well and good, except one of those settings requires the use of the files which I deleted to fix the initial print problem. So what looked like a fix just pushed the problem off into a different sphere.

“Don’t panic!” I told myself. I still have my old Mac. I’ll just fire that up and use it to create the postscript file.

Except the new version of Times New Roman doesn’t exist on the old Mac.

So I copied the font from New Mac and put it on Old Mac. But Old Mac still insists I’m missing Times New Roman. (The other fonts are cross-compatible. It’s just TNR that has issues.)

So I went through the InDesign files and substituted the old TNR font, hoping that nothing would change in the layout–and I finally made my postscript file, and then I used the postscript file to create a PDF via Adobe Distiller. This is how Lightning Source wants it done, so this is how I do it. Now I have to go through the PDF file and if I find mistakes I have to correct them…in both versions? Old Mac and New Mac?

The ultimate solution of course is to upgrade Creative Suite to a newer version, but that’s a big investment and not one that I want to make right now. And besides, why can’t it just all work?

Oh — the final punchline. I’m not actually preparing this book for Lightning Source. I want to use this book to experiment with Amazon’s Create Space print-on-demand service — and Amazon is not nearly as fussy about files as Lightning Source. But at this point, Lightning Source has me well trained.

Dreamsnake is the classic novel by Vonda N. McIntyre that won the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, and Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and is presently available in ebook form at Book View Café.

Recently Vonda asked if someone wanted to re-do the text on the ebook cover. She was very happy with the cover photo of a cobra by Tanith Tyrr, but wanted an update on the font.

It had been a while since I’d played with Photoshop, so I volunteered. The first image at right is the cover as it was, at the size used for display at Book View Café’s website. The text is silver/gray. The font is Mistral. Vonda wanted an easier-to-read text in white to increase the contrast.

Being literal-minded, I started out doing exactly what was requested: changing the font face and color, but leaving everything else the same. I also added a tiny line of color between the image and the black panel. The result can be seen at right. The title font is “Matura MT Script Capitals”. I don’t have a big selection of fonts on my computer. I chose this one because it was big, thick, sharp-edged and interesting. The font used for the author name is Mona Lisa Solid ITC TT, which I chose because it uses very tall letters that can be packed close together. I thought the result was interesting, but I wasn’t happy with it. I felt the text was too crowded. To fit everything in one vertical line, I had to make Vonda’s name too small to truly read.

So I decided to try a half-frame: put the title across the top and let the author’s name have the left column. Of course this left less room for the image of the snake. I decided to keep the image the same width and just crop off the bottom. In doing so I had to eliminate the curve of the snake’s body. I had some doubts about that, but I did it anyway, and I was pleased with the result. The title font was dramatic, the author’s font, “Trajan Pro,” was distinctly different but complementary, and both were very easy to read even at small size.

I sent both versions to Vonda.

She agreed with me that the second version was better, but she really wanted that beautiful, curvy snake’s back to be part of the picture. To get the full height of the snake photo, we had to sacrifice width, so the left-hand black panel became wider.

Vonda also wanted something lighter for the title font and gave me a list of suggestions. I’d already tried almost all of them and thought they were too light in weight to make effective title fonts. But then I plugged “Handwriting – Dakota” in, played with it a bit, and really liked the result. The “D” is of course a much larger font size than the other letters. It’s at normal weight, while all the smaller letters are set in a faux-bold that Photoshop allows you to do. Strangely enough, the weights balanced quite nicely. And with their bright white against black, the fonts are very legible, even at small size. This was the final version of the cover, at least for this round!

Dreamsnake is available in epub, mobi, and PDF formats at Book View Café.

The print edition of my latest novel, Hepen the Watcher: Stories of the Puzzle Lands – Book 2 can now be ordered from Amazon US and UK, and Barnes & Noble. In the next few weeks it should also be listed at Booktopia.com in Australia, and at Powell’s Books’ online store in the USA.

Here are the links so far:

Barnes & Noble

Amazon USA

Amazon UK

I don’t pay close attention to new releases, but lately I’ve had the feeling that the price of ebooks from traditional publishers is going up–or maybe it’s just the prices of particular books? I presume this is the result of agency pricing, but I’m okay with that.

I think I’ve mentioned here and there that I’m not averse to paying $7.99 for a novel that I really want to read and I’ve bought several in this price range. I even bought one or two for $9.99 when I first got my Kindle in the fall of 2010. I think prices dropped for a time after that, and I didn’t think I’d ever be lured into paying more than $9.99 for a novel.

But I was wrong.

Yesterday I set aside my principles on ebook pricing and paid $10.99 for the third Sandman Slim novel, Aloha From Hell, because I really wanted to read this book now. And you know what? The author, Richard Kadrey, deserves to make some real money on this series. I hope he’s doing just that.

I would have felt better paying less, and I suspect there aren’t very many books that I have to have right now — but as I’ve said before, when it comes to reading, it’s my time that’s the limiting factor. If I have to pay more to read the books I really want to read in the time I have available, well, evidently I will.

The ebook version of Hepen the Watcher is now available at Book View Café, so if you’ve been waiting to get a copy, now’s your chance! It’s available in both epub and mobi formats.

Special note for those of you outside the “Amazon countries”: there is no download fee if you buy from BVC. You pay a straight $4.99 USD like everyone else.

And to everyone, if you want to wade in cautiously, BVC also offers free sample chapters in epub and mobi formats.

Today though is not just about my book. It’s mostly dedicated to BVC’s newest member, Lois Gresh, the New York Times Best-Selling Author of 27 books and 45 short stories. Her books have been published in approximately 20 languages. Lois has received the Bram Stoker Award, Nebula Award, Theodore Sturgeon Award, and International Horror Guild Award nominations for her work. She debuts at BVC with her collection Eldritch Evolutions, her first short story collection.

And that’s not all! Also debuting today at BVC is a fantasy novel, Swords Over Fireshore by Pati Nagle. Pati’s stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Cricket, and others. She was a Writers of the Future and Theodore Sturgeon Award finalist. Her novels include the Blood of the Kindred series (The Betrayal, Heart of the Exiled), and urban fantasy Immortal.

Please stop by and visit us at Book View Café.

CLICK THE IMAGE TO VIEW A LARGER VERSION

It’s been longer than I’d hoped, but the ebook edition of Hepen the Watcher: Stories of the Puzzle Lands – Book 2 is now out and available at Amazon.com (USA), Amazon UK, and Barnes & Noble. It’ll be out at Book View Café next Tuesday, March 20.

Stories of the Puzzle Lands began with The Dread Hammer and continues with Hepen the Watcher. Here’s the back cover description:

The demon Dismay’s murderous nature has earned him the ire of his beloved wife, who has sent him away in a fit of temper. In his exile he ventures south into the land of Lutawa, drawn there by the prayers of abused and desperate women who beg him to grant them vengeance against the men who cruelly rule their lives–and Dismay is pleased to do it.

Still, murder is hard and dirty work.

When an avid desire for a bath brings him to a fine Lutawan estate, he meets two beautiful young women. Ui and Eleanor are well-acquainted with the whispered tales of the demon Dismay, who slays men but never women, and they’re delighted to entertain their fearsome guest, but they warn him to beware.

Lutawa is ruled by an immortal king, who punishes treason with the terrible weapon of infernal fire. Believing this king to be the same cruel deity known in the north as Hepen the Watcher, Dismay resolves to kill him–and accidentally draws Ui and Eleanor into his schemes.

Those who help Dismay risk a fiery death, those who hinder him risk the demon’s bloody retribution, while Dismay, still yearning for his wife’s forgiveness, discovers that love can be as hazardous as the wrath of Hepen the Watcher.

Read Sample Chapters Here

Digital painting by Sarah Adams
Cover art ©2012 Mythic Island Press LLC

Just had to share this detail illustration from the print cover of Hepen the Watcher. On the front cover, the ax is clutched in the hands of my anti-hero protagonist. I like to include a decorative element on the back cover, and the ax seemed ideal, so I tried to separate the layers in the Photoshop master file, and pull the ax out. That didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, so I went back to the artist, Sarah Adams, and asked if she could pull out the detail of the ax, and isolate it for use on the back cover–which is exactly what she did, and overnight too.

The shame is that I can’t show you the full-resolution image because the file is too big. But trust me, it’s awesome. And if you ever need some illustration work, give Sarah Adams a tweet at @sarahadams23