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.

I saw three great blog posts this week on writers and publishing.

First, Tobias Buckell explains why writers are crazy, and makes a few suggestions on how to hold on to what sanity remains to us.

This failure to pay attention to what we can control as authors and what we can’t leads to a form of Cargo Cult neuroses in writers out of a desire to recreate milestone successes that were never in their primary power to recreate.

If you’re a struggling writer (and how many of us aren’t struggling?), read this post. It will give you an entirely new way to look at things.

Second, Chuck Wendig has some very useful thoughts on social media.

You are not a brand. Social media is not your platform… see it instead as a place where you can bring all the crazy and compelling facets of your personality to bear on an unsuspecting populace your audience. People want to follow other people. People don’t want to follow brands.

I’ve come to this conclusion too, mostly because there’s no way I can “act” as a “brand” no matter what social media gurus tell us we should do. Read the rest of the post if you have a chance. We all need to do self-promotion, and Chuck has a lot of suggestions that make sense to me.

And finally…

A few people have asked what I think about the “agency model.” This refers to a requirement by certain large publishers that their ebooks shall not be discounted by retailers such as Amazon. So if a publisher specifies that a new ebook by a big name author shall be priced at $14.99, that ebook will be sold for $14.99 and not a penny less.

So what do I think of the agency model? I love it! Because it’s surely helping to keep ebook prices from dropping through the floor. Mike Shatzkin feels the same way. Here’s part of what he has to say on the subject:

All writers, whether they’re among the fortunate ones that have a publisher pushing them or whether they’re trying to do it themselves, should be grateful that publishers are doing their damnedest to maintain prices and the perception of value for writers’ work.

Very, very few writers will ever make a living selling 99-cent ebooks. Personally, I want to make a living writing so I can keep writing–and the agency model makes my books a really good deal, while still allowing me a reasonable profit on each sale, as well as “a perception of value.”

Publishing my own books has made me a lot more conscious of book covers and forced me to think more about what book buyers like–though I’ll admit this continues to be a deep mystery to me!

At any rate, Tor.com has a post on this year’s winners of the Chesley Awards for science fiction and fantasy artists, just announced at WorldCon. Go on over to Tor.com to check it out. Once you’re there, don’t forget to click on the category header to see all the nominees.

There are a lot of impressive illustrations, but the winner of the “unpublished color” category is one of my favorites, Julie Dillon’s “Planetary Alignment; digital” which is the second image when you click this link.

I’d love to show you the work-in-progress for the new book cover for Limit of Vision, but since I haven’t cleared it with the artist, I suppose I’d better wait.