“Roger Mantis” available for pre-order on Amazon

Amazon Page for Roger Mantis

The publication date is still April 2.

Createspace to move book projects over to Kindle Direct Publishing

Just a reminder for anyone publishing using Amazon’s Createspace: they will be automatically moving your Createspace account over to Kindle Direct Publishing in the near future as the two services merge.

More info here:

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GSJULX3WGP36HQ3R

This probably won’t affect me much since it just moves a completed book, but if you are in the middle of the publishing process, pay close attention.

Zorya is out on submission again. Also, I Aten’t Dead.

My last post was over a year ago. I’m not proud of it.

I have been dithering with self-publishing my third book, Zorya. That last post long ago involved the leap of faith needed to purchase the expensive stock image I wanted in order to build a cover image on my own.

I did make that purchase some time later (at least it’s deductable), and I did do some work on a cover. Mostly I procrastinated. My biggest obstacle to self-publishing, other than cover art, is marketing. It’s the thing I’ve seen most self-published authors stumble over, and I am no exception.

This past March, I attended the 2018 SCBWI Golden Gate Conference, which gives attendees the opportunity to submit to agents and publishers also in attendance. They pay special attention to submissions from attendees, and the opportunity was too good to miss.

So I sent several Zorya submissions out after the conference, the latest this evening (she didn’t want to see submissions until after the middle of July.) I have gotten one rejection so far. Some response times are as long as six months (not uncommon with submissions directly to publishers).

So. Here I am.

In other updates, the conventional publication of my second book, Roger Mantis, is proceeding, although the publication date was postponed twice. I’m still okay with the process, even the editing, but it’s an education.

Leap of Faith

When you are dithering over finally self-publishing that finished book, and find out that the cover idea you really like would cost you over five hundred bucks for the proper stock photo license …

Ebooks from the library

Just checked out my first Kindle book from my local library!

It works through a site called Overdrive.com, and you link your public library account to it so you can borrow e-books. It works on many devices, and was easier to set up than I thought.

I plan on using this a lot, and it’s embarrassing that it took me this long.

The Typo Half-Life Rule and the Quantum Typo

I wrote a post a while back on the physics of “Editing Half-Lives and the Decay of Typographical Particles”

Basically the theory goes, if you’re editing a manuscript and find half the typos in the first edit, the next time around you won’t get them all, just around half the ones that are left. Third time, half again. And so on.

At some point you think you’ve reached the end of this, since of course you can’t have half a typo, and so it’s off to the publisher.

But theoretical writing physics has advanced!

It turns out that at the end of the editing sequence, there will always be one typo left that nobody at all will find.

It can’t be observed, but the new equations say it’s in there somewhere. It’s a quantum thing.

The joy of anthologies

I’ve been picking up some Kindle anthologies that were recommended to me based on one of my favorite authors being a contributor.

One plus, of course, is that I usually get a new short story by a favorite author. This is particularly nice since my favorite authors can’t seem to turn out the number of books I need to handle my reading requirements.

What do you mean, a new novel every month is unrealistic? I have quite a few favorite authors to pick up the load, so it’s not like they’d have to write one every four days or something!

Another plus is that I get introduced to writers who can become new favorite authors. I’m kind of fussy about my reading tastes, but it’s happened more than once.

There’s nothing like finding a new author in an anthology (or anywhere) and discovering they’ve written a whole pile of books. It’s like fishing for change in a couch and finding a hundred-dollar bill. It’s particularly great if they have one or two completed series, and you can binge-read it like a Netflix show.

Thank God I discovered Tolkien long after all three books of Lord of the Rings had been published. It was almost a year between the last two books. Imagine closing The Two Towers back then on “Frodo was alive but taken by the enemy.” The wait probably would have killed me.

Kindle’s Direct Publishing’s new paperback option

Up until now, self-publishers who went with Amazon usually used Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to produce Kindle books, and Createspace to produce paperbacks.

I did this with Castle Falcon, and it worked quite well.

Now Amazon is pushing an option to produce a paperback from the KDP interface, bypassing Createspace.

I’m quite happy with my Createspace edition, and too many of the KDP paperback features fall under the “not yet” category. That, and I never, ever, use the “beta” version of anything. I think it’s likely that Amazon will eventually phase out Createspace in favor of an integrated e-book/paperback KDP, but I’ll deal with that when the time comes.

Persistence

When you realize that most of the agents you originally submitted your novel to have died of old age, and you can start on a whole new generation.

“I want an advance of … one MILLION dollars!”

The new “Castle Falcon” map

In the last post I mentioned the new map in the most recent edition of my book Castle Falcon. The map can be found on the Castle Falcon website, but what the heck, here it is.