I’ve had a few requests for an omnibus edition of The Nanotech Succession, so here it is. The ebook is available in epub and mobi formats, at a cost of $15.00 USD, which is a savings of 25% over the cost of the books purchased separately.

Right now it’s only available at my website. It’ll eventually go up at Book View Café, but it won’t be at Amazon, where books priced over $9.99 pay only a 35% royalty to the publisher, as opposed to 70% for books under that price. It’s a similar deal at Barnes & Noble.

More details here if you’re interested.

I’m in a quandary. Book View Café makes use of a promotional book-giveaway offered by the website LibraryThing.com, in which a hundred ebooks are given away to early reviewers. The hope is, early readers will post reviews which will encourage other readers to try the book, who will in turn post reviews, resulting in a rapidly expanding pyramid of appreciation that will, via exponential growth, soon take over the world!

Or at least sell a handful more books.

I’d like to include my upcoming novel Hepen the Watcher in the program, but to do so I need to come up with five fairly well-known novels that could be seen as “similar” to HtW, particularly in the sense of “If you liked Book-X, then you’d probably like Hepen the Watcher.”

So I’m looking for suggestions of books to swap in for the Book-X variable.

It’s a bit awkward, because at this point none of you reading this have actually read HtW. So how would you know? But I’m hoping some of you have read the first book of this series, The Dread Hammer. And if so, are there any fairly well-known novels you might suggest on that basis? Books that are similar in attitude, whether from the same genre or not?

Help?

I’ve got an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) of Hepen the Watcher with a placeholder cover that looks like this:

The final cover art by Sarah Adams is getting closer to completion. Thanks for your patience!

Find a synopsis and sample chapters here on my website.

In The Tide is an older story of mine, and the first short that I put out in ebook form. The idea was to sell it for the minimum price allowed at Amazon: 99-cents, which would earn me 35%, or 35-cents on every sale. I note that John Locke managed to get rich on that same margin! Unfortunately, I can’t yet say the same.

I would have priced the story at “free” if it were an easy thing to do. It’s not. Various backdoor machinations are required to accomplish it, and I don’t want to play. So I’ve taken the story down from Amazon and am now offering it free on my website, in both epub and mobi versions. The package includes a five-chapter sample from my novel The Bohr Maker. So if you’ve never read a short story of mine, or want an easy, no-commitment way to sample The Bohr Maker, please snag a copy. And if you know anyone else who might be interested, I urge you, please, PLEASE send them over to MythicIsland.com.

Find the link to the free story in the upper right of the landing page, in that box that says “Free Fiction” 😉

…evidently the price goes WAY up. 🙂

Yes, clearly, just an odd way of handling a book on its way out. No worries! The updated edition with new cover art is, or soon will be, available at Barnes & Noble.

In the last stages of pulling a book together for publication there comes a point when final decisions must be made for each step. In my case, having revisited decisions I made nine months ago, I’m preparing The Dread Hammer for re-publication, and its sequel Hepen the Watcher for original publication. So the process seems doubly complex, with each step full of commitment. And if I make the wrong decision? If I approve something that I later regret? Well, some things, especially with the ebook, might be easily “fixable,” but others, not so much.

Will anybody besides me give a damn?

Probably not, but that knowledge doesn’t stop me from tying myself into knots. That’s just my personality.

At any rate, I’m trying to be methodical, dealing first with The Dread Hammer’s checklist:

• The manuscript: any more changes? No?

• The cover art and title fonts: okay? Yes?

Then there is the back cover description and the layout of the book’s interior, which I’m carrying over from the first edition. The copyright page gets updated though, since this will be a second edition. And for the ebook, I need to add sample chapters from Hepen the Watcher, and since I’m adding sample chapters, I also need to include the back cover description for Hepen the Watcher…

…which is the point I’ve reached. I wrote a back cover description and then bothered various people with it. I’ve received feedback, though not quite what I expected, and the implications aren’t limited to the back cover copy.

For example, one suggestion was to change the tagline from “A fairytale of…” to “A tale of…” I liked this suggestion, I had even considered doing this before and indeed, I decided to do it. But that meant I had to go back and revise the cover art for The Dread Hammer, which was supposedly final, changing the tagline there to read “tale” instead of “fairytale.” Fortunately I could still do this because I hadn’t yet uploaded the new cover art to the printer, but then I also had to update the book description and all the web-ready cover images of different sizes that I’d already prepared.

So is the cover art for The Dread Hammer now done for real? Dare I move on? Shrug. I don’t know. Sometimes I think it would be very nice to have a dedicated cheering committee to say, “Yes, that looks good! Yes, that sounds good! Go for it!” But I only have me, with my palms pressed to my cheeks as I desperately contemplate what I might have forgotten.

Yes, I am very good at stressing myself out. Oh yes, very good indeed.

Back in late November I wrote a post titled Re-Thinking Cover Art: The Dread Hammer with the subtitle:

The option to change your mind is one of the great advantages of indie publishing.

I had changed my mind about both the cover style that I wanted for the book, and the use of a pen name. See the earlier post for my reasoning, but in the meantime, take a look at the new cover, with art by Sarah Adams:

I’m pleased.

The last question remaining before I re-issue the book goes to copyright. Since I originally published under an open pseudonym, I’m trying to understand what to put on the copyright page. I haven’t been able to find any resources on the web or in The Copyright Handbook. The writers I’ve seen who have re-published under a different name tend to do it as “Author Name 1 publishing as Author Name 2,” which I don’t want to do. I have a query in to the US copyright office, and will try again today to call them. But if anyone out there has experienced this or can point me toward a useful resource, I’d appreciate it.

Hawaii is big on regional books. Books about Hawaii are generally stocked at bookstores and convenience stores, and they’re given a big section on the book tables at Costco. I was never able to take advantage of this because — despite that I am a Hawaii author — my books aren’t about Hawaii, and besides they’re that weird science fiction and fantasy stuff…

(Exception: the staff at the former Borders Superstore in Honolulu used to be terrific about stocking my books. If y’all ever read this, thank you!)

But what about Toby Neal’s Blood Orchids? (Full disclosure: Toby’s a friend of mine, and I created the ebook and did the interior layout for the print version.)

Blood Orchids is a first novel that came out at the end of November and has been doing quite well on Amazon with twenty-six customer reviews so far. The story is a police procedural set in the city of Hilo on the Big Island, and it’s loaded with local culture — which should make the paper version an ideal candidate for stocking on the rack of “Hawaii books” found at brick & mortar stores here. Not only would local people see it, but visitors on vacation could pick it up for a Hawaii read.

But you aren’t going to see the paper version of Blood Orchids if you’re on vacation in Hawaii. Here’s why:

A traditionally published book is sold as “returnable,” meaning that if the store that stocks it can’t sell the book, the book is sent back to the publisher. This is a huge liability for a publisher. The book must be printed, and the printing must be paid for, and then most publishers make the assumption that only one in two books will sell anyway.

Blood Orchids is an indie-published book, and print-on-demand — meaning that copies are only printed when they are ordered. This in itself isn’t a problem. Toby called up a rep from our only remaining bookstore chain and asked about getting the book stocked. The rep was helpful and enthusiastic, but when she looked up the book, she advised Toby that the store could only carry returnable books.

Right now the print version of Blood Orchids has a very affordable list price of $11.99 and is being sold at Amazon discounted slightly to $11.58. To make the book work in a brick & mortar store the price would have to be raised considerably, both to provide a fair return to the bookstore that sells it, and to cover the “loss” involved in selling only one of two books that are printed. This is why traditionally published trade paperbacks are generally far more expensive than indie-published books intended for online sale. It also points out the difficulty and risk of getting those indie-published books into stores. With print-on-demand books that don’t allow returns — which is the way I handle my print versions — potential losses are limited to the set-up cost of the book, a fixed amount that’s pre-invested.

But once returns are allowed, potential losses are completely unknowable. Not only are you at-risk for the printing cost, but also for the shipping on returns. For most of us with indie books, the loss risk combined with an expectation of reduced sales online when the cost of the book goes up by 30% or more, makes the struggle to break into the bookstore chains a struggle not worth having.

This all feels a little unfair, but in all honesty, it’s not. Publishing is a business, and someone has to take the risk. The story might be different if we had independent bookstores here in Hawaii, with an owner willing to try a few copies on spec, but that’s not the case. I sincerely hope this changes. Here on Maui we have one remaining bookstore, and that’s on the opposite side of the island from our primary population center, and an hour’s drive for me.

But for the immediate future, you won’t be seeing Blood Orchids in any Hawaii stores, even though it’s an ideal fit for the usual rack of Hawaii books and deserves to be there. And that’s a shame for both readers and writers.

Last spring (for those who haven’t been following this blog) I self-published a short, quirky fantasy novel called The Dread Hammer, putting it out in both ebook and print versions. I had three main reasons for self-pubbing: the book didn’t slot well into any typical subgenre category, it was short for a traditionally published novel, and it had been so long since I’d had anything original published that I didn’t want to wait years to get this book out, which would have been the case if I’d taken it to the traditional market.

Sales were slow, and in hindsight I think I made a mistake publishing it under a pen name. (That mistake will be corrected shortly, when I re-issue the book under my own name.) At any rate, by August I was finishing up the first draft of a sequel, titled Hepen the Watcher, just as talk in the indie publishing community was shifting to the idea of a hybrid career that takes advantage of both traditional and indie publishing. I love indie publishing, but I’m willing to try different approaches. So I started thinking seriously about taking both The Dread Hammer and Hepen the Watcher to market.

In the end I decided against it. The two main reasons: Everything I’ve read and heard indicates that most advances are very low, and that contract terms are often horrible.

I write novels, it’s my nature to tell myself stories, and here’s the story I told myself on what would happen if I took these two books to market:

Months will pass before you hear anything. Maybe you will eventually get requests for the complete manuscripts. If so, more months will pass before you get a decision. Maybe you’ll get an offer. It will be low. Maybe you’ll consider it. Then the contract will come. It will have terms you cannot accept. Months of negotiations will ensue. In the end, neither you nor the publisher can agree on terms. You will walk away, and publish the book yourself.

During this time I knew I’d be feeling frustrated, angry, and resentful. I won’t argue if that’s appropriate; I just know it’s true. I like being in control of my books, and I’m not in control if I’m waiting desperately on a publisher to tell me if I have a future. As I told my husband, Why should I make myself miserable?

The other blow against taking these two books to market is my past experience that books do not earn out. This isn’t true for all writers at all times of course, but it’s been my experience, and it’s the same for many, many other traditionally published writers. Publishers are in the business of selling books, and sometimes they manage spectacularly, but quite often, they don’t. So I would have to be okay with giving up these books, possibly in perpetuity, for whatever small advance I might be offered. In contrast, if I published them myself there would be no advance, but if my work ever “hits” with readers, the potential upside is big. This is important to me. I’m far less concerned with having an “immediate” advance in my pocket (and “immediate” is a relative term in publishing), than with having a steady income over the long term, and the only way I see to have that steady income is to keep writing and keep control over my work, and hope that I eventually “hit.”

And that’s why neither book has gone to the traditional market. At this point, indie publishing looks like the best option to me.

I was feeling good about my choice, but I’m feeling even better now. Kris Rusch has a blog post just up titled “Writers: Will Work For Cheap” that confirms my rationale for staying indie, at least for now. Of course it makes perfect sense that my thought processes reflect what Kris has to say in her business blog, given that I’m an avid reader. (Yes, I’ve donated, and yes, I’ve bought The Freelancers Survival Guide.) I find The Business Rusch to be one of the most useful sites on the web for writers interested in a career. If you’re a writer and you’re not reading it . . . well, why not?

The title of this post pretty much says it: my short fiction collection is now at Book View Café. There’s also a sample story up, “Spectral Expectations,” which is the first piece of fiction I ever sold.

Both EPUB and MOBI versions are available at a cost of $3.95.

Included stories:
Spectral Expectations (Analog 1987)
Career Decision (Analog 1988)
In the Tide (Analog 1989)
Small Victories (Analog 1993)
Liberator (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1993)
Old Mother (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1995)
The Bird Catcher’s Children (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1997)
Hooks, Nets, and Time (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1997)
The Flood (More Amazing Stories 1998)
Goddesses (Sci-Fi.com 2000)