Goddesses is my Nebula Award winning novella originally published at SciFi.com. It’s now available at a nominal price for reading on the Kindle. Please have a look and let me know what you think!
Announcing the fifth ebook by Mythic Island Press LLC!
Skye Object 3270a is a young adult novel set in the same story world as Deception Well, but with its own set of characters and its own set of challenges.
The cover concept is mine, but the digital painting of Skye and the final polish is by Sarah Adams.
What’s the book about? Well…
In an isolated star system far from any other human outposts, a space-faring “lifeboat” was discovered by a scientist from the city of Silk. Inside the lifeboat was a two-year-old girl in frozen sleep. She had no name and no history. The people of Silk believed her to be the only survivor of a star-faring great ship attacked in the void and destroyed by the automated warships of the alien Chenzeme. They rescued and revived the child, and named her “Skye.”
But the people of Silk face dangers of their own. Their city is in space, built around the column of a space elevator that rises from the planet’s surface into high orbit. Three-hundred kilometers below is the wild, plague-ridden planet called Deception Well. Far-above, a dusty nebula shrouds the star system. The nebula is made of drifting dust, gas, and tiny nanomachines left behind by an ancient and mysterious race. The microscopic nanomachines were made to attack and destroy any Chenzeme ship that enters the system . . . but they will defend against other threats too, and they have no loyalty to human life.
Still, life in Silk is comfortable, and the dangers of their world mean little to the city’s youth. Skye has grown into an adventurous, independent teen–but more and more she wonders about her mysterious past. Where did she come from? Who were her parents? And, most importantly, was she really the only survivor? When evidence of her past begins to awaken within her own body, Skye finds herself driven to explore both the dangerous surface of Deception Well and the airless reaches of outer space.
She is not alone in her quest. Her best friend Zia Adovna, the handsome young astronomer Devi Hand, and the adventurous Buyu Mkolu join her as she seeks to prove that other survivors of the great ship might still be found.
If you know any young readers who love adventure stories and are equipped with Kindle or Nook, please encourage them to download a sample!
Skye Object 3270a is available at:
Yesterday I announced that I’ll be self-publishing my fantasy novel, The Wild through my own imprint, Mythic Island Press LLC. This isn’t as frightening as it might seem at first. Book publishing is changing rapidly, and it’s much easier for a small press to bring out a book than it used to be.
Also, I’m lucky enough to have a few advantages. I’ve got a track record—six novels published by either Bantam Spectra or Tor, and a couple of awards that will help with promotion. This venture would be a lot harder if I were a first-time novelist.
I’ve also got family behind me, ready to help with finance and promotion. With luck, I’ve got other people behind me too—yes, I mean you who are reading this. You’ve been very patient with me through a long, dry spell and I truly appreciate it.
For you, I’ve got an offer and a request. We’ll be printing up twenty-five to thirty pre-publication (advance reader copies or ARCs) of The Wild. With luck, they’ll be ready to go out in early January.
We’d like to send them to a diverse set of interested readers: some who read mostly fantasy, some who don’t, some who like challenging books, some who prefer simpler fare, eclectic readers, occasional readers, writers, non-writers, men, women, different ages, different geographies . . . you get the idea.
What we ask in return is that you read the ARC within two to three weeks and answer a questionnaire on it, and on you, as a reader. Our goal is to discover and address potential problems with the story, and to determine how best to market it (and if we can harvest a few marketable quotes on the side, even better).
ARCs are expensive, so this is going to be a very limited list. Please don’t be offended if we don’t have a copy for you. But if you’re interested in being on the list, don’t be shy! Step right up and email me at linda at mythicisland dot com, and tell me a little bit about yourself and your reading interests.
As always, thank you for your interest in my work, and thanks for stopping by!
I’ve been wonderfully busy lately. Most of my focus has been on getting The Nanotech Succession ebooks off to market, which involved a big learning curve. And lest all that effort should go to waste, I’ve started spending more time promoting the books.
But this doesn’t mean I’ve been neglecting my upcoming fantasy novel, The Wild.
In mid-November we made the decision to publish The Wild ourselves, through my own imprint, Mythic Island Press LLC. I’m really excited about it. I love the idea that–for better or worse–the book is in my hands. I get to pick the cover, the release date, the promotion strategy. If it all fails badly, I will have only myself to blame, but I can handle that . . . better to rule in hell perhaps? Well . . . we’ll see!
Tomorrow: an announcement and an offer . . .
I’m old enough that I feel a bit of a blush when I say that, but yeah. I now have a professional presence on facebook. These are my pages:
The Wild — a novel, coming in 2011.
So if you’ve got a facebook account, like me! Please! There’s not a lot of activity there yet, but you’re more than welcome to stop by and say hello.
If you’ve been reading my blog you know that I’ve been converting my first four novels–Tech-Heaven, The Bohr Maker, Deception Well, and Vast–into ebook format.
The books are not a series but they all share the same story world, so I’ve wrapped them in the collective name The Nanotech Succession, and ordered them according to their place on the timeline, rather than by publishing order. Here’s where to find them:
Amazon Kindle Edition
Barnes & Noble Nook Edition
If you’ve never read the books before, why not give them a try? Free samples can be downloaded at both B&N and Amazon.
If you have read them and enjoyed them, please consider writing a review, or giving them a shout out on whatever social media or real life reading groups you’re part of. I would truly appreciate it. And if you do, please let me know!
For a number of years I’ve been selling my out-of-print books via my website. I had a large initial stock – at least of the Bantam books – because my former editor moved her office to a different floor, and in the process she discovered several cases of my books in a storeroom and was nice enough to send them to me.
Selling these books is not exactly a lucrative enterprise given the time, trouble and postage it takes to mail them – especially from Hawaii – but I would much rather the books were read than not, and it’s really gratifying that people will seek me out.
I’ve also found that as time goes by more and more of my orders are from Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand. This is really flattering, because these buyers are willing to pay additional postage of $22 or more. But the paperwork!
Generally I am not one to bash the US Postal Service. In my experience they almost always do a great job, and generally speaking it’s just as efficient and far cheaper to send something to or from Hawaii by Priority Mail than by one of the delivery services.
But with international packages a customs form needs to be filled out. Recently the USPS decided that this should be done online. If I don’t fill it out online, then the clerk at the post office will have to take my hand-filled form and enter it into the computer there. But the online form requires a phone number, both mine and the recipient’s. Well, mine is an unlisted home number not for distribution, and I may or may not have the recipient’s via PayPal. However, I have to enter something or the form won’t submit, so a string of zeroes has to do. Naturally it turns out the final form says “phone number if available.†Maybe the website and form should get on the same page?
But here is my primary complaint: the form is 4.75 inches high, there are five copies, and each copy prints out on a separate sheet of letter-size paper! Two forms could easily fit on one sheet of paper, but no. Apparently a decision was made to waste resources. So instead of the post office paying to produce a five-sheet form of very thin paper of the correct size, everyone using this form must now waste 2.5 pages of much heavier, letter-size paper.
I will be very interested to hear what our postal clerks have to say about this when I go to mail my package tomorrow.
Thanks again for all the input on what to do with my young-adult novel Skye Object 3270a. After considerable thought, and looking at the rather long timeline for revising The Wild and getting it into print, I’ve decided to go back to my initial plan of charging a small amount for this e-book edition of Skye Object 3270a.
So I am happy to announce that Skye Object 3270a is now available at my publishing website MythicIsland.com, priced at $5 for the PDF file.
So what’s it about? It’s a young-adult novel, aimed at an advanced middle school audience. Those of you familiar with my work will recognize the setting from the Deception Well story world, but Skye Object 3270a is otherwise independent of that book and its characters. It’s high action science fiction designed to be fun, exciting, and maybe a little scary. If you are fortunate enough to know avid young readers, why not buy them a copy?
In 1998 I wrote a young-adult novel entitled Skye Object 3270a. It was set in the Deception Well story world, but was otherwise independent of that book and its characters. The novel didn’t find a publisher – no one knew quite what to make of it, I suspect – and it has been sitting ever since, until this spring when I decided I would offer it as an e-book. My first plan was to charge a nominal $5 for the PDF, and I already wrote most of the script to automatically email a copy when a purchase is made… but now I am reconsidering. Is it better to follow instead the model of most open source software, and make the novel available for anonymous download? Certainly it should get much higher circulation that way, and then those who enjoy it can make a small payment if they wish, or return to the website to purchase other books.
So what is the best business model? To make a few dollars upfront? Or to try to get my name out to a wider audience? At the moment, I am definitely leaning toward Plan B. If anyone has thoughts on this, I’d be interested to hear them.
Thanks!
The name of this website comes from a place name in the fantasy novel that I finished last fall, and which went to market in January. Long after I had started writing this novel, but long before it was done, my agent called to say he was concerned – the market for heroic fantasy had collapsed, and almost nothing was selling anymore. I wasn’t too bothered. This was typical of my career – the collapse of science fiction arguably began around the time I started breaking into the market – and anyway, I was writing the book I wanted to write. I hoped to have it published – I thought it would be published – but if not, at least I would have written it.
So I kept at it, through some very stressful years.
When my agent read it last fall, he was… shall we say ‘concerned’ again? ‘Finely crafted, but doesn’t draw the reader in until well-along in the story.’ I was surprised, and none too pleased, but after some discussion it went off to market anyway. His premonitions proved accurate, for the novel did not find a home among the last of the major fantasy publishers. The general reaction was very similar to my agent’s, “Doesn’t grab me enough; Doesn’t draw me in.†Well, okay.
Strangely enough, I am not depressed. I still think there is a market for this book, but now I will have to find it without the involvement of New York publishers. This is not a horrible fate. Truthfully, I have had such awful experiences with the publication of the last two books that it’s not hard to look at this positively.
So unless I am struck by a bolt of good sense and persuaded otherwise, it’s my plan to self-publish the novel. Not as it is, of course. The book did not garner the reaction I expected, and I want to try to understand why, and re-write it, if I can see a better way to do things. So now the book – and all the risk of publishing it – belongs to me alone, which is frightening and pleasant all at once. Since no one else can tell me what to title it, or what cover image to use, I would like to finally introduce it to you, at least by name. It’s called The Wild. I look forward to working on it again, and I will do my best to make it a better book by the time it sees print.