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!

The Bohr Maker is Book 1 of The Nanotech Succession. It’s straight-up science fiction–a fast-paced adventure in a nanotech-saturated world, and also a Locus award winner for best first novel.

If you haven’t read it, now’s a great time to give it a try. For a limited time only the ebook is priced at $2.99 at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

If you’ve already read it and you enjoyed it, I’d really appreciate it if you’d help spread the word about this promotion to anyone you think might be interested. Tweet it, like it on facebook, mention it on G+…whatever works for you.

And there’s more…

Book 2 of The Nanotech Succession, Deception Well is also on special during this time, with the ebook priced at only $3.99.

Find the ebooks here:

Barnes & Noble

Amazon USA

Amazon UK

Amazon DE

Amazon FR

Thanks!

Let the price experiments begin!

Ninety-nine cents is the lowest price allowed by Amazon and Barnes & Noble for an ebook.** For a novel, 99¢ is basically a giveaway price, a means to try to move a lot of copies in the hope that a book’s ranking will improve and that the author will develop a fan base, but–given that the author gets only 35% minus a penny or two for a transaction fee–it’s no way to make a living.

(Full disclosure: ebooks priced at $2.99 and higher pay 70% to the author, which is why you rarely see anything priced between rock bottom and $2.99–you’re either giving it away or you’re not.)

For a short story though, especially a reprint, 99¢ is a reasonable price from a reader’s perspective, and useful to the author if a sample of a higher-priced work is bundled with the short story.

Short stories have a word count up to 7,500, according to standards set by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. My story Goddesses is not short. In fact, it’s a 30,000 word novella, but it still makes a good subject for this price experiment. I’ve had it at $2.99 for most of the year, to take advantage of the 70% royalty, but yesterday I dropped it to 99¢ just to see if it makes any difference at all. Frankly, I’m not expecting much, but if anyone is interested in the statistics let me know and I’ll try to remember to post them here as time goes by.

So if you haven’t seen it yet, check out the Nebula-award-winning novella Goddesses–just 99¢ and available from these vendors:

Barnes & Noble
Amazon USA

Prices may have not filtered through to Amazon’s non-USA markets just yet, but here are the links:
Amazon UK
Amazon DE
Amazon FR

** Yes, there are free ebooks, but an author can’t set the price to free. The only way to do it is to figure out how to sell the ebook for free somewhere else and hope Amazon’s search engines find out. Then Amazon will automatically reduce the price of the book to match.

It was one year ago, October 2010, when I started “indie publishing,” determined to get my backlist out into the world again, and hopefully make a little income on the side to support my writing habit.

That first month began with a stint of designing book covers for The Nanotech Succession novels. I started with the covers because I figured that would be the hardest part of the ebook creation process. I spent a lot of time, had a lot of fun, and then later tossed them all out and replaced them with the vastly superior Bruce Jensen covers that the books now enjoy.

In the year since, I’ve published ebook versions of my six backlist novels, one novella, two short stories, and two original novels. I’ve also done print-on-demand versions of the four Nanotech Succession novels, The Dread Hammer, and my young-adult novel Skye Object 3270a.

Was it worth all the time and effort?

Looking only at return on investment thus far, the answer has to be “No.” Whatever pixie dust it takes to get sales rolling has not been sprinkled on me yet. I could have made far more money putting in the same hours at a minimum wage job.

But looking at it emotionally? Then the answer is “Hell, yes, it was worth it!” I feel like a writer again. I’m proud of the work I’ve done, I’m happy to have it available, and I have a lot more confidence in my future as a writer than I had last year. Confidence is a good thing. I don’t write well when I’m stressed, worried, and unhappy.

If you’re a midlist writer putting up your backlist and you too are feeling underwhelmed by sales, remember this: all this prep work is an investment, and investments don’t necessarily pay off in the first year. Being set up, poised, and ready for the day the buzz starts murmuring your name (or your pen name) is a good position to be in.

My goal now is to write more and try to generate that buzz. Part of that strategy is to knock on the doors of traditional markets and try to get back inside—but with eyes wide open this time. My newly adopted buzzword for the upcoming year: “Hybrid writer”—a combination of indie and traditional publishing with the united goal of making a living wage.

I just wanted to announce that all four books of The Nanotech Succession are now available as trade paperbacks–at least in the USA. Three of the four are presently available in the UK and Australia, while the fourth–Tech-Heaven–will hopefully show up in those markets in a week or two.

The books are print-on-demand, produced by Lightning Source and published under my own imprint, Mythic Island Press LLC.

I was so very lucky with these books to have Bruce Jensen prepare the front covers. They are beautiful!

Here’s the series, all together:

Prices vary by vendor, but here are general links to my print books:
Amazon.com USA
Amazon UK
Booktopia (Australia)
Barnes & Noble (USA)
Powell’s Books (USA)

The new print-on-demand trade paperback of Vast just showed up at Barnes & Noble. Vast was the first book I ever considered reprinting on my own, so this is a long-awaited moment, but it’s puzzling too.

The list price I set for the book in US markets is $13.95, which is on the low end for a book of over 450 pages. I can do this because the printer allows a 20% “discount.” This means the wholesale price is only 20% less than the list price. For most books in bookstores, the discount is 45% to 55%, leaving a lot more room for the bookstore to make a profit–which is why you’ll never see my print-on-demand books in physical bookstores. They simply can’t make a profit on it**.

Anyway, Vast has debuted at BarnesandNoble.com with a 28% discount off the list price, meaning you can buy it for $10.04. Given that B&N will owe the printer $11.18 for every copy they sell, this seems unwise, and I don’t think it will last long.

I’ll admit I’m confused and a little concerned, but you aren’t going to find the book cheaper than this until and unless it makes its way to used book stores.

Find Vast, at BarnesandNoble.com

Books 1 - 3 of The Nanotech Succession now available in new trade paperback editions. With thanks once again to Bruce Jensen for the cover art!

**Some booksellers, like Powell’s Books, get around the low discount by offering the books at a cost higher than the list price. I don’t have the price showing on the book. I think this is why they can do this. Of course this still doesn’t mean the book will actually be in the store.

My novel Limit of Vision is now available at Book View Café. Book View Café is a professional authors cooperative offering DRM free ebooks in multiple formats to readers around the world. You’ll find Limit of Vision available in both epub and mobi formats.

Here’s the book description:
“LOVs” are a tiny artificial lifeform containing bioengineered human neurons. Three young scientists illegally use implanted LOVs to enhance their cognitive abilities–but when the experiment goes wrong, the consequences are bizarre and unforeseeable. A space station module containing the last remnants of the LOVs crashes to Earth in the Mekong Delta, and the sole surviving scientist, Virgil Copeland, finds himself in a race to recover them–and avoid arrest. He meets Ela Suvanatat, an independent journalist infected by LOVs when she arrived first at the crash site. Together, they will ride the whirlwind of a runaway biotechnology leading to the next phase of human evolution.

Grab a sample and check it out!

Hepen the Watcher is the novel I’ve been working on over the summer. It’s the sequel to The Dread Hammer, and Draft 2 is now done.

Here are the statistics:
Started: May 1
1st draft done: July 19
2nd draft done: September 7
Length: 81,000 words

I note the dates because a year ago I would have laughed at the idea of me writing an almost publication-ready novel in a little over four months. This is a new way of writing for me–see my prior post here–and I like it a lot.

For Hepen the Watcher, the first draft included the entire story from beginning to end, but with unpolished text, some incomplete sections, and notes or to-do’s embedded in the manuscript.

Draft 2 is a much cleaner affair, and ready for beta readers to look at. I’m dangerous when I get a nearly finished manuscript in my hands, and left to my own devices it would be a quick re-read away from publication–but I’ll attempt to be grown up and get some feedback on it first.

But it does feel nice to be done.

When I first started re-publishing my backlist of novels, I created new covers myself for all the books. It seemed like the thing to do in those long-ago, pioneering days of winter 2010-2011.

The situation has improved considerably since then. Thanks to Bruce Jensen I was able to re-use the original cover art from The Nanotech Succession books, and Jenn Reese created a new cover for Memory.

Limit of Vision was the last novel to still have a cover by me, but it’s now stepping up in the world. Maui artist Sarah Adams has just finished a digital painting that will soon be on the ebook, and will also appear on the new print version at some future date.

Here it is. Click the image to see a larger version in a new window. And let me know what you think!

Limit of Vision is probably my most obscure science fiction novel, which is too bad. In my admittedly biased opinion, I think it’s a very worthy book.

If you’ve never heard of it and are curious to know more about it (or to see the original Tor cover) visit the Limit of Vision page on my website.

If you’d like to sample the book, you can find it at these vendors:
Amazon.com USA
Amazon UK
Barnes & Noble

For would-be readers outside the USA, UK, or Germany: avoid the hefty international surcharge by buying from Book View Café. Check back here or on twitter/facebook/G+ for an announcement on when Limit of Vision will be available from BVC.