The experimenting continues. I’ve put together new ebook covers for my two single short stories. Here are the original versions:

And here are the new versions:

What do you think?

I upgraded the cover on Hooks just to make it match. The real subject of this experiment is In The Tide. Several writers have seen increased book sales by getting the pricing on the first book in a series down to “free.” Personally, I’m not a fan of “free” for a quality novel, but I thought it would be interesting to see if there would be any increase in readership if I could offer a related short story for free. Since In The Tide is something of a precursor story to The Nanotech Succession, (ideas for the series were developed in it, though it’s not part of the series’ story world), it’s my best candidate.

The short story with it’s new cover has been uploaded to both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The next step is to try to figure out how to get the price down to “free.”

Here are a couple of interesting blog posts, the first from David Gaughran on Amazon’s KDP select program and subscription programs in general:

I’m more concerned about how exclusivity could limit my creative promotions. These are the three best things I have done in the last six months to help sales or put money in my pocket:

LibraryThing Giveaways
Making the PDF of Let’s Get Digital a free download on my blog.
Crowdfunding the release of A Storm Hits Valparaiso.

Collectively, those three moves have been directly responsible for more than 50% of my revenue this year, and probably a lot more indirectly. The first two are certainly impermissible under the terms of KDP Select, and the third is up in the air, depending on your interpretation.

And the blog post that sent me to David’s site–Chuck Wendig on The Precarious Portentious Perils of Self-publishing (with all the usual Chuck Wendig profane and over-the-top style / you’ve been warned):

the DIY-slash-indie-slash-micropub-slash-selfpub route is a path fraught with perils all its own — perils different from those encountered by the writer going the “other” way. And I’d like to talk about some of those perils here and now, both in order to make new writers aware of them and, further, to ideate some solutions for the aforementioned perils.

One of those perils is “discoverability”–how does a writer connect with the readers who might like her books? We’re all still looking for the solution to that one, though I continue to strongly suspect that a combination of traditional and indie publishing is the likeliest way forward. That said, I’m going to be ignoring my own advice. I’ll be publishing my next book, Hepen the Watcher, sequel to The Dread Hammer, all on my own again, because I like doing things that way–I like being in control. I might try shopping around the next book after that, but right now I just don’t have the patience for it.

Onward!

I buy almost all my books at Amazon. Odds are good that you do too, and our reasons are probably similar:

1. Been shopping there for years and years
2. Pricing is excellent
3. My account is there
4. Very convenient and easy to use
5. I have a Kindle—purchased books automagically appear on my device with no effort on my part.

I’ll also say that sales at Amazon account for the majority of sales on books I’ve published through my company, Mythic Island Press LLC, and while that doesn’t add up to nearly enough to make a living, without Amazon I would have little hope for future success. Most writers are in the same situation. I wish it weren’t so, because it’s always worrisome when one agency holds most of the power.

If you follow indie publishing, you’ve probably already heard that Amazon has made a new offer to independent publishers. Details are all over the web but in essence, Amazon is asking for the exclusive right to sell an author’s ebooks — meaning the books won’t be available at any other vendor — in exchange for a very uncertain amount of additional money. It’s possible some writers could benefit from this program, but I won’t be one of them. It took a lot of effort to get the rights back on my books and to re-publish them as ebooks, and as print books too. I like being in control of my distribution; I like being able to offer readers alternatives; and I really like the security of not having all my eggs in one basket.

My books are, and will continue to be, available at Amazon—but there are other places to shop for books. Some of the more obvious are Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and Smashwords. I’m not currently selling at all those places, but lots of writers are. One of the less obvious places to look for books is an author’s own website. I’m not selling ebooks from my website, but more and more authors are, with the result that, less transaction fees, every penny paid goes directly and immediately to the writer, with no portion lost to a middleman, and no time spent waiting for the check to arrive. There is no better way to support a writer’s future work, then by buying direct.

And then there is Book View Café. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’ve heard me talk about BVC before. Book View Café is an author’s cooperative of over thirty professionals in several different genres working together to publish and promote DRM-free ebooks in both mobi (Kindle) and epub (Nook) formats. Buying a book from BVC is not quite as convenient as buying from Amazon. You have to download the file and then transfer it to your reader. But you’ll receive a reasonably priced and professionally produced book, along with the knowledge that 95% of the purchase price (less transaction fees) will go to the author. I hope you’ll consider that a worthy result!

Below is a list of names you can find at Book View Café. For more details, look here. And please, stop by and browse!

Bohnhoff
Brenchley
Caselberg
Casil
Clough
Dolley
Donnelly
Frost
Gilman
Harper
Kelso
Kerr
Kimbriel
Lange
Le Guin
McIntyre
Moore
Nagata
Nagle
Piziks
Radford
Rice
Robins
Ross
Shiels
Smith
Stevenson
Tarr
Trent
Wright
Zettel

“Danger! Possibly Infectious to Young Minds!”

So says Randy Stafford in his reader review of Skye Object 3270a posted at Amazon.

I haven’t been paying much attention lately to the book listings, so I was gratified to discover that Skye Object, my young-adult science fiction novel, has garnered some very nice reader reviews at Amazon and Library Thing. It’s a fast-paced adventure aimed at advanced middle-grade readers–and if you know any of those, please consider making the book a holiday gift. It’s available in print as well as ebook versions.

Signed copies of the print book are available at my website, but the best deals are at Barnes & Noble or Amazon. Powell’s carries the book online as well, but prices are higher there.
Here’s the short description:

Skye was found as an infant, adrift in a lifepod in an isolated star system. Now she’s a bold teen who wants to know where she came from. Helping in her search for answers are best friend Zia, handsome young astronomer Devi, and the courageous Buyu Mkolu. Their adventure will take them from their high-tech home to an alien wilderness and then up, to the dangerously fascinating zone of high orbit.

Here are links:

Barnes & Noble (USA)
Amazon USA
Amazon UK
Booktopia (Australia)
Powell’s Books (USA)

And here are some of the nice bits from readers who’ve posted their opinions:

From Library Thing Early Reviewers

“Excellent story… Once you start the book, you will not be able to stop.” — roadway2000

“This reads very quickly and I was through it before I realized… All in all an excellent story.” — Gord.Barker

“Skye Object 3270a is certainly one of the best books I’ve read and I encourage anyone who enjoys an adventurous story to pick this one up.”—KaelebsMomma

“I ended up reading this straight through in one sitting.”—cwallen

From Amazon US

“I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It combined the best of both science fiction and young adult: likeable teenage characters struggling to find their place in a high-tech alien world.”– Joe Vasicek

“An excellent book for the young adult reader.”– Jill from Pgh

“In short, Nagata, I think, has a good chance with this work to accomplish her goal of infecting the next generation with the meme of science fiction, the love of plausible speculation and the wonder of science. And adults like me will be happy to follow along.”—Randy Stafford

A decision to re-think the cover art for my novel The Dread Hammer led to a three-part series on my experiences with cover art, from the point of view of an indie publisher.

Here are links rounding up all three parts:

Re-Thinking Cover Art: The Dread Hammer

Re-Thinking Cover Art: The Cover Concept

Re-Thinking Cover Art: Using Stock Photos

Bonus:
Cover Art Reveal: The Dread Hammer

Stock photos are the cover art solution for many indie publishers.

With royalty free stock photos, you pay a one-time fee for the right to use a proffered image–but you don’t have exclusive use. Anyone else can pay for the right to use the image too, so it’s possible you’ll see your cool cover idea repeated somewhere else. Personally, I think the odds of this are pretty long, so it’s not something I worry about.

Royalty-free stock is traditionally considered cheap—“just a few dollars” is what you’ll usually hear. I’m here to tell you it ain’t necessarily so. If you’re purchasing a standard image at a low-cost agency and you’re only doing an ebook, then yes, you could probably get what you need for $25 or less.

But if you need a photo in print resolution, the price jumps, and if you want to buy rights to a premium photo, the price jumps again, into the $100+ range. From the point-of-view of the photographer selling the rights, this doesn’t sound like much, but for struggling authors gambling that a particular cover design will work, it’s a real investment. And often, just one image won’t do. A good cover might need to combine multiple images, with the cost rising with each addition.

The most expensive image I’ve flirted with was over $400 at Getty Images. Thankfully, the design idea I was toying with didn’t work out.

The great thing about most stock sites is that you can download a low-resolution, watermarked image that can be used to try-out a design idea. The really bad thing about some stock sites is that you can’t make your purchases in cash. You have to buy sets of “credits” and of course you will always end up buying extra credits to cover the required amount . . . and eventually these credits will expire and the stock site will have just taken an extra skim of your money. It’s a very consumer-unfriendly system.

Did I mention that I loathe stock photo websites?

The pricing system is only part of it. The frustration of searching for just the right image is far worse.

I’ve wasted untold hours looking for images to illustrate an idea I’ve got in my head. Often these searches end in complete failure. I know other people who’ve done well with stock photo images, but for all the time invested I’ve had only two real successes: the background image in the cover of my YA science fiction novel Skye Object 3270a was purchased from a stock site, as were the two images I combined for the cover of my story collection Goddesses & Other Stories.

One huge problem with most image searches is that a search might result in 60,000 matches, but many of the same images will then be shown time after time, on page after page, making the effort to browse seem futile.

A second huge problem is that so many of the photos of people feature models so polished they look plastic, mugging for the camera in bizarrely tasteless ways. This might work for the lowest level of advertising, but it’s probably useless for your book cover.

So yes, stock photos can be used to make great covers, but if I have the opportunity of working with an artist, I’ll take that path every time.

Next: cover art reveal >>

In the last post I talked about the current cover for my fantasy novel The Dread Hammer and why I’m now in the process of replacing that cover. This time I wanted to talk a little more about the actual process of coming up with a cover concept.

As the publisher of this book, I feel it’s my responsibility to give the artist some guidance on the cover. Unfortunately, I’m not an artist, but we do what we can, we do what we must.

My strategy is this: I develop some sort of a concept in my head. Sometimes, (rarely), I already know what I want. Other times, I go to Amazon or Goodreads, and look at hundreds of covers, picking out relevant ones with some aspect that appeals to me. This is how I came up with an initial concept for the new Dread Hammer cover.

One option I never consider is a complex, highly detailed scene, such as an alien cityscape. There are three reasons for this. First, it would be impossible for me to visualize such a scene well enough to describe it to the artist, and also, I couldn’t afford to pay her for the amount of work involved. Finally, since my books are primarily sold online, the detail and artistry would be lost within the thumbnail. So I make it a point to use large, fairly simple concepts.

Once I have a concept in mind, I go out on the Internet and try to find images that convey some piece of that concept. Sometimes these images are from stock photo sites, sometimes they’re from Google image searches. All of them are placeholders. Using Photoshop, I cut out the parts I want and paste them together, twisting, bending, stretching, and re-coloring as it strikes my fancy. It’s the electronic version of pasting together magazine photos like kids do in school. I’m not a visual thinker, so I really need to see things laid out to decide if an idea is going to work or not. None of these images will appear in the final product, so copyright is safe.

The huge drawback of this method is finding relevant images to work with. I have abandoned concepts because I can’t find the right images and so have no way of illustrating the idea in my head. But we do what we can.

In the past, I haven’t gone looking for a lot of feedback during this developmental phase, but this time around I’ve been showing these mockups to people, and the feedback has been enlightening–and frightening. Everyone has a different opinion on what works and what doesn’t. Opinions from people who’ve read the book are entirely different from people who haven’t.

Amusingly, the most consistent point of contention is the weapon to show on the cover. Since it’s stated in the back cover copy and in the first few pages of the book, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the Dread Hammer is a god, not a weapon, while our violent protagonist, Smoke, uses a sword by choice. Naturally, I want to include a bloody sword on the cover, but several people want to see a war hammer instead, since it matches the title. Oh, conundrum!

Soon, I’m sure, I’ll come up with an acceptable idea. Then the concept gets handed off to the artist who will take my sorry little mockup as a jumping-off point to create an original piece of art . . . and then we get to do it all over again for the sequel, Hepen the Watcher.

Next time: Using “royalty free” stock photos.

Next: using stock photos >>

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

Of all the steps involved in turning a polished manuscript into a book, the hardest by far is cover design. The purpose of a cover is to catch the attention of people who might read and enjoy the book. To my mind a cover should convey the “flavor” of the story, along with something of the setting and genre in an intriguing fashion that will draw in readers who might like the book but have never heard of you or it.

The Dread Hammer is a fantasy novel, but it’s hard for me to say what sort of fantasy it is. Despite swords and magic, it’s not like traditional heroic fantasy, or sword & sorcery, or a quest novel, or urban fantasy, or any subgenre that I’m aware of. It’s darkly humorous, unconventional, and, at 65,000 words, it’s very short compared to most fantasy novels. I consider it “quirky,” so I decided to put a quirky cover on it.

The image I had in mind was of the main character in an active pose, done in a style of art commonly seen in computer games. I wanted this style because it was different (for a book cover), and a little campy. I hoped it would communicate the quirky nature of the book while being eye-catching enough to pull in the curious.

I can’t draw to save my soul, but I do know enough Photoshop to be dangerous, so my method of developing a cover concept is to scour the web for relevant images, slap them together in Photoshop, and amend until I’m sort-of happy with the layout. In the case of The Dread Hammer I put together an extremely rough guide for my artist Sarah Adams, and she gave me back an entirely original digital painting that was exactly what I was looking for. Click the image to see a larger version. This is an impressive piece of work.

But now, seven months after publication, I’m reassessing my initial concept. This is the great advantage of indie publishing. The book is mine, and if I want to change my mind and try different things, I can. So I’m making two big changes: the cover, and my name.

A number of people have persuaded me that publishing under a pen name was never a good idea, so I’m going to re-issue the book under my own name—easy enough.

But changing the cover—that’s hard. What’s wrong with the existing cover? There’s nothing at all wrong with the art itself. I think Sarah did a wonderful job. But sales are slow. I’m not reaching my potential audience, so I’ve begun to think of new ways to frame and present the book—especially important because the sequel, Hepen the Watcher, will soon be ready to follow.

So what do I think is not working with the existing cover? I have no hard data at all, not even anecdotal data, except this one thing: several people have mentioned that the book looks YA—as if it’s aimed at the young-adult market. It’s not. It has adult themes involving family dynamics, personal choice, and personal obligation. It’s also got some fairly graphic sex and lots of very graphic violence. As the tagline says, it’s a “fairytale of love, war, murder, marriage, and fate.”

Besides the YA issue, I’ve come to feel the current cover makes it hard to take the book seriously. This is a guess on my part. No one has told me this. And yes, the story is darkly humorous—but I want it to be taken seriously as literature that is worth one’s time to read.

So I’ve gone back to Photoshop and started patching together new cover concepts. My current goals:

1. Emphasizing the idea of a classic “fairytale”
2. Establishing a general genre setting
2. Creating a visual tension through the intrusion of graphic violence in an idyllic setting

This still leaves an abundance of questions! Which character, if any, should go on the cover? What style should be used? And believe it or not, the biggest question so far has been what weapon to display!

Next: the cover concept >>

Thanks to some concentrated pressure encouragement from reader Phil Friel I have finally put together a collection of my short stories under the title Goddesses & Other Stories. In the collection you’ll find all of my published short fiction–all ten stories–including the Nebula Award winning novella Goddesses.

Goddesses has been out for a while as a single, but I’ve now replaced that book with the collection, mostly so I could recycle the cover (must be practical).

The new volume contains just over 100,000 words of fiction, with individual pieces varying in length from 3,000 to 32,000 words, all originally published between 1987 and 2000.

So if you’re interested in short fiction–or you just want to have a look at a writer’s early efforts–please consider Goddesses & Other Stories. As of today, the ebook is available at all the Amazon stores and Barnes & Noble. It’ll be available from Book View Café at the imminent launch of the new ebookstore.

Here are links:
Amazon USA
Amazon UK
Amazon DE
Amazon FR
Barnes & Noble

And here is a list of 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)

Just wanted to mention — if you’re interested in a signed copy of the Mythic Island Press LLC edition of the The Nanotech Succession books, I finally have copies of all four available. Christmas presents anyone?

If you’re interested, click here and scroll down a bit.

Thanks!