[From last week’s NINC conference, written in real time and then stored to be sent out a week later.]

There is no backlist

The term backlist came up yesterday in conversation. A woman previous tradpubbed talking about how to rejuvenate her backlist. At the time, I wasn’t sure why the term offended me, but last night over dinner, I finally figured it out.

I don’t have a backlist. I have a catalog.

For her, the backlist is every book except the one she is in the process of working on: about to publish, building a launch, or marketing it as new to all her fans.

That was how New York used to work. They had the book currently going through the pipeline, and ignored everything else as irrelevant. If they were selling well, you might get a new edition a few years later, with an updated cover, but in the old days, a book usually just went out of print, never to be seen again.

Those were the old days.

Ebooks never go out of print. If your tradpub contract contains language about rights reversions when something is out of print, you will never get them back. The ebook is “in print” in a catalog somewhere, forever. Or POD.

Forever. Set your clocks for the 35-year mark.

I have a catalog. We run ads on all our books in some sort of rotation. My old book ones continue to sell happily as I find new fans and they walk my entire catalog.

And there’s that term again. Catalog. I’m about halfway through novel #40 right now. The Science Officer isn’t even a novel, but we treat it as one. It and Auberon continue to make me money. At some point, we’ll refresh the covers, because every cover gets stale and dated, with a different timeline largely based on your genre. (Romance needs new covers ever few years, as tastes change. Science Fiction is a longer cycle, because you can just slap a spaceship on the cover and call it good.)

I have ads on a variety of books, without any particular emphasis on the latest.

Hell, I don’t really consider “the latest” to be all that interesting, especially as its #2 of 6, dropping over the winter. It’s not like I’ll only drop one book this year and need to put a big marketing push behind it.

I’m going to publish 14 novels this year. Met a woman yesterday who wrote and published 39 novels last year. (She’s kinda awesome, too.)  That’s part of what makes NINC so fun, to see the wide range and diversity of styles, especially among the Indies.

Backlist is old thinking. You don’t consider those books any good, except as teasers to get people to buy the current book, because you need to have a huge spike of sales in the course of one month, in order to get your “USA Today Bestselling Author” tag.

BTW: USA Today is supposedly about to drop a massive banhammer on some of the recent behavior people have been using to get that tag, based on rumors and side conversations floating around.

But I also don’t need that on my covers, because I’m not trying to be famous. I want to be rich. And Bernie Taupin.

Indie means that you think in new ways. All of your books are equally important. Or unimportant, as you need to market them all.

I don’t have to hit a one-week sales figure in order to get my next publishing contract from some ditz in Manhattan. I’ll just keep publishing. I don’t need to prove that I’m a big-time player with the ego trip of USA Today bestseller.

I understand that people feel that they can’t consider themselves a big-time author without it, but I met a women recently who listed it on her bio. When I went to look at her catalog on Amazon, she had a couple of short pieces, one or two novellas, and a novel that had been bundled up with 20 or 30 others and then pushed hard enough to score her a USA Today best seller status.

She was barely a writer in the first place. I’m pretty sure I made more money last month that she probably had this year, if not career to date. She had almost no catalog to speak of, but sure looks like she’d gamed the system effectively. Good for her, but she’s lost all my respect forever.

Hopefully, some reader newly discovering her isn’t as put off by her lack of output as I was.

But that’s one of the fault lines in the industry. Indie wants the money. There are folks I’ve sat in a room with who are quietly making seven figures every year, and nobody realizes it, because they quietly publish and work their catalog, without ever falling into the trap of thinking they have a backlist that they should ignore until they need to jump-start their career.

You’ll see more and more indies move away from some of the organizations that are entirely geared towards the tradpub lifestyle, because they simply don’t offer my anything.

SFWA is a prime example. Lovely organization. Useful. But they teach you how to get an agent and a book deal with a publisher. I know, because I regularly follow all their educational offerings, and realize that there is nothing they’ve got that would benefit me in any way.

Sad, but an accurate reflection of the thinking that divides the new world of Indie publishing from the dying world of Trad.

But, as always, do you want to be famous, or rich?

[From last week’s NINC conference, written in real time and then stored to be sent out a week later.]

So I’m actually writing this blog post on my computer and storing it for delivery next week, but I wanted to keep things sharp while they were fresh.

It is Wednesday, 9/25. I’m in Florida at the Novelists, Inc. conference.

NINC is an organization for professional novelists, as the name suggests. Membership can be achieved one of two ways, reflecting the origins of the organization itself as it strives to maintain relevance in the modern era. You can either have received an advance of a certain amount of money (I think $2,000 USD from a reputable-enough publisher), or have confirmed Indie sales of at least $5,000 USD on two separate novel-length books (30,000 words or more) in a 12 month period. (Like I said, they started TradPub, about 1990, give or take, and were partly an outgrowth of romance writer organizations.)

The organization doesn’t do enough advertising about itself, as I continually run into Indies who qualify, but don’t even know they exist. If that’s you, reach out and ask questions, or hit their website here (https://ninc.com/)

So I’m here for their national conference, held every year in late September at St. Pete’s Beach, on the Gulf shore of Florida not that far from Tampa/St. Petersburg. The organization has about 800-900 members, and something like 250 will attend. Over the next several days, there will be panels and break-outs with industry people and other experts. There will be lots of networking. Hopefully I will get a better idea of the shape of the publishing industry over the next 1, 2, and 5 years.

The world is changing.

Every day, some new idea takes root. Some new technology comes out that will solve some nasty pain point causing Indie authors grief. A lot of what we identify are all those things that Publishers used to do in the old days, before they got gutted by their corporate overlords and turned into shells, husks of their former selves.

As Indie’s we don’t have marketing departments to rely on to plan and execute advertising plans across various platforms and services. We may not even know how to do some of these things, but the whole process of going Indie means taking over the entire value chain (today’s useful word from un-con meetings).

We are expected to become experts on financial analysis, rights licensing, even estate planning, since our books will stay under copyright for 70 years after we’re dead. (I have a grandson who just started his freshman year in college this month. His eventual grandchildren might be earning income from my books, if I do it right.

If you are a writer, go buy Matt’s book (https://www.amazon.com/Estate-Planning-Authors-Strategies-Success-ebook/dp/B071JKPCLD)

I also get to be a very small shark in a room full of very big sharks. I earn a comfortable living right now, as I work out the things that might take me to the next level. For some of the people I get to hang around next to, they are trying to figure out how to sell their next 100,000 books after the ninety-day-cliff. Think of a witch’s hat or a garden gnome. That sudden spike, then it fall off. But that spite represents half a million dollars in sales, or something equally astonishing. Some of these sharks are making seven figures per year in income.

I wanna learn from them. In turn, some of what I learn needs to be shared with folks who haven’t yet gotten their careers to that point. (Not the parts that I deal in NDAs with, but that’s a small portion.)

We’ll talk marketing with some of the experts. There will be panels from David Gaughran and Mark Dawson. Some of that will be in a future blog. Meetings and chats with Draft2Digital and Findaway Voices. Reedsy is here, and we need to talk about all the things that they can do to help you find people who know things and can do things.

So, as the old saying goes: Get in, sit down, shut up, and hang on. I’m going to try to cover more than you ever wanted to know, because there is a firehose I’m trying to drink from, and you need to hear bits and pieces of it. Not all, because some of these things might actually damage your career, if you aren’t ready for them, but let’s position ourselves for that next big leap.

Assume success, plan for victory.

Had one of those conversations with another writer the other day. You know the ones. When they ask me about my writing goals and I tell them what I’m going to execute this year. The one where their eyes glaze over and fear begins to creep in.

Something about having already crossed one million words for 2019. Sixteen of the twenty novels I plan to write in the can, and today I’m 16,000 words in #17.

This is not a brag. It is a simple statement of fact. Steve Barnes calls me a publishing company, and he’s not wrong.

I write. Everything else comes second or later behind that. On days when I can’t write, like on a recent long drive to Lincoln City, OR from Seattle, I lost two days of words. You probably don’t grasp how irritated that made me.

It took away from my writing. For a DAMNED good reason, or I’d have never done it, but I’ve been behind on my internal goals for the last two weeks, and only now catching up.

Next year, I will set different goals. No idea what they were, but they’ll be just as crazy. And just as achievable.

“How do you do that?” the other writer asked, shocked and awed.

Mind you, this is someone who introduces himself as a writer, rather than one of those cafe dilettantes. You know the ones. Artistés (with a fwaaaaaa on the end).

How could I possibly sustain over 100,000 words written per month, when he might not have gotten that many this year? (Probably half that many this year, if I had to guess, but I don’t really care enough to find out.)

What was the secret handshake to success that made Pulp Speed Three sustainable?

He REALLY didn’t like my answer. (Hint: they never do.)

“Bread and Circuses,” I smiled at him.

It was a rude kind of smile.

I interact with him on social media from time to time. Listen as he argues with other folks about the minutiae of various shows that they all watch with the fervor of the newly-saved. A lot of shows.

“Bread and circuses?” he repeats, deeply confused now.

But he started it.

“Indeed,” I smile. “Huxley called it soma. There are other terms, but they all come down to the same thing.”

“Which is?”

“You are watching your shows and doing all these other things,” I remind him. “I’m writing. How many hours do you spend consuming media each week?”

“They say you have to read and watch,” he grows defensive. “Got to stay on top of things in order to write.”

“Well one, you aren’t writing,” I point out. “And two, I’m not writing to market, so I really don’t give a flying fuck about the latest trends in YA, post-apoc, dystopian Urban Fantasy. Nor about YA sparkly vampires before that. Or YA magic academies before that. I’m writing stories I want to read, because they aren’t those.”

“When was the last show you watched,” he asked, as the implications began to sink in.

That was a good question. I had to go look it up. (And I just did again, because I wanted to get the dates right.)

I never followed it in any great detail. It was on Sunday nights, and I tended to sit in bed while writing longhand, with the television on in the background to keep me company. I needed the company, because my first wife died of breast cancer in 2008 and I was living alone at that point.

The show was Legend of the Seeker. And it went off the air in early 2010. Stopped watching because I didn’t watch TV. Maybe played computer games some in those days, but single-player resource builders, and not first person shooters or MMORPGs.

The last professional sporting event I sat down and watched was the Superbowl before the local Seahawks won, so that would have been 47, I guess. 2014.

I don’t own a television. I watch the occasional movie on my laptop, especially when Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and I snuggle up in bed, like we did for a recent LOTR three-night marathon.

But those things are rare.

I want to write. I don’t want to argue with fans about interpretations of some television show. Or have Korean gamers scream obscenities at me while shooting my gamerbody.

I got better things to do.

Number one on that list is writing. I spend a lot of my hours making shit up. And having fun. And enjoying myself.

So much of the modern world is game of bread and circuses designed to keep the masses from realizing how hollow and pointless their lives are. (Ask Henry Ford about his early support for the NFL, sometime.)

I’m not out there to burn the world down, but I’m also no rotting my brain watching television for however many hours each week. I used to work with a guy that got home from work each night, put dinner on the trays, and watch television for the next four hours.

EVERY WEEK NIGHT.

Followed by about 8-12 hours of sporting events over the weekend, depending on the season.

Yeah, no.

I’m going to write.

Every hour I spend at the keyboard (with breaks thrown in) generates about 1,000 words. Four hours per day is 4,000 words, most of the time.

That’s 120,000 words per month, on average. Which is what I’m doing. I don’t have a day job, so the words happen first thing in the morning, and then I head into town to do stuff, which is what I’m going to do as soon as I publish this blog.

Got errands. Then later going to a friend’s for their birthday party. Still social, but if you spent just one hour per day writing, that would be 350,000 words done in a year. To put that in more interesting terms, that’s eight novels of at least 40,000 words length.

And that’s one hour per day, with two weeks off.

How bad to you really want to be a writer? And how much are you just enjoying bread and circuses?

So Amazon made an interesting change in how they handle pre-orders for ebooks sometime in the recent past. Not sure when exactly, but the news bubbled up to me in the last few weeks.

In the past, you could only put up a book for preorder something like ninety days out . That made sense, as it gave folks time to get organized. Now, the limit appears to be up to a year instead.

For me, this makes the organizing process a little more stressful at the front end, but better down the way. I try to write whole series now, instead of publishing something different every month, like I had been doing. Writing fast lets me do that, where I’m still on plan to write twenty novels in 2019. I was going to publish twelve, but things got a little weird, so I will most likely end up publishing fourteen. Not sure what the 2020 schedule looks like, but I want to produce twelve a year going forward, just so I can.

Still, that got me ahead of schedule. I could put out all five of the Star Dragon novels over the summer (three months instead of of four). Longshot Hypothesis and Hard Bargain are out now, and Outermost will be available on October 10. (That means November, January, February to finish this arc.)

What’s fun, is that Fabulous Publisher Babe ™ can now put the other three up for preorder, without having the final versions, as they are coming back from the copy editor slowly. But she has the covers done and I just took my first hack at all three of the remaining blurbs this week.

With the pre-order set on Amazon, she can go back into the book when she does the final formatting, and include the direct link at the back, to buy the next one as soon as you finish.

No more are you trapped, wandering around trying to find it. Just click the next link and let your kindle take you right to the order page, so you can keep reading in the dead of the night, instead of having to go to sleep.

For the writers out there, I might make one suggestion, though. I’ve known a few people who started the whole process too soon. As in, they had finished the book and sent it off for copy-editing and then set the publication date. And this was when you had only a ninety day window, so the copy editor had to turn it back pretty quickly, so that the comments could be folded in and a final version put up.

If you missed your date, Amazon tended to not let you put anything up for preorder again for a year, so you’d have to put it up directly for sale on a certain date, hoping that it got processed fast enough.

You also lost the ability to build up preorders, which cause the book to pop hard on launch day, going up the charts to hopefully be seen by other readers who maybe don’t know who you are.

(As an aside, I’ve also known people who put the cover up as a way to force themselves to actually write the book in question. Don’t do that. If you aren’t enjoying what you do, why are you doing it? Seriously. If writing is a chore, you won’t have fun and that will come through to your readers, who won’t understand why they don’t finish the book. Find your joy and then write.)

So for me, you will start seeing long lines of preorders available, hopefully going out a ways. The remaining three of the Shadow of the Dominion books. The ninth and final Jessica Keller novel, Petron, will go up shortly.

Hopefully, the Star Tribes books after that. (We’d be into March, 2020 to drop WinterStar/#1 and I’m shortly going to start SwiftStar/#4 of 5. Final would be something like July if I can math.)

My purpose is always to write in series. And to return to series as well. Writer-brain let me know what the next Dominion book might be after Princess Rualoh, but I’ve got a stack of things ahead of it first, so we’re just going to simmer and gumbo on it for now. Plus, got other series in some state of done and need to work on them.

By having a whole series (or major story arc) done ahead of time, like I try to do, we can do these preorders and all will be good.

Thanks for listening to me ramble. For the writers out there, you shouldreview how you publish on Amazon, which might lead to changing everything else. For the readers, you can just order the whole, damned series more or less at once, and then new cookies will show up on your nightstand like magic.

🙂

Counting down to live.

Hard Bargain will drop in a couple of days. If you haven’t already read Longshot Hypothesis, you should do so now. (And by the way, Outermost is available for pre-order most places, but doesn’t come out until October 10.)

So Hard Bargain was not supposed to turn out the way it did. But those of you paying attention also know that I frequently write into the darkness. The original series was supposed to be a set of one-off novels (and will be so again after 6) that just followed the crazy adventures of Valentinian Tarasicodissa and his ship, Longshot Hypothesis, as he adventures, with a new First Mate that has a shady past, and the entire Dominion coming after him. (Silly little things like being party to the assassination of the Dominator himself. Whoops.)

Hard Bargain starts with a poker game. A card game I invented from scratch, just because it is science fiction and I could. (Might publish the rules at some point. Might do a Print-On-Demand deck if enough folks ask. That’s on you, btw.)

It was just supposed to be a game to set up Butler Vidy-Wooders for some righteous payback, but something went a little sideways on me. (Yeah, I know. “You?”)

The card game turned out to be crooked. A set up, where the local sheriff is stacking cards against one of the other players, and Valentinian just happens to be there at the table.

As a result, he ends up literally winning a treasure map in a crooked card game. Honest.

And meeting some interesting people.

And, oh, by the way, Dave’s ex-wife shows up in a Dominion Assault Courier, with Kyriaki Apokapes in tow.

That’s as much as I’m going to tell you now. Y’all have to read it to see where we go.

But at the same time, I just want everyone to know that this stupid treasure map is the reason I ended up with six novels in one long arc, when it was supposed to be one novel at a time.

• Longshot Hypothesis
• Hard Bargain
• Outermost
• Dominion-427
• Phoenix
• Princess Rualoh

The arc from Hard Bargain to Prince Rualoh tells one long story with several stops and one utter cliffhanger. You’ll meet the salvager Bayjy Endon, and later Captain Redtip Windrunner Oedressa Farther Glaxu, who is my favorite Dire Ground Cuckoo of all time. And the deadliest.

So y’all lemme know if you want to know how Arcades is played. And maybe want your own deck, because it has six suits and seventy-two cards, rather than the 4/52 of a Hoyle Deck. I’d have to have one designed for Print-On-Demand, but you can do that these days.

And thanks again for all the support that just lets me write.

shade and sweet water

blaze

West of the Mountains, WA

Some of you have been following along at home with the adventures in food around the farm. I’ve always been allergic to onions (didn’t realize that the symptoms were allergy and not intolerance until just recently) and then developed an allergy to mushrooms about ten years ago.

Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) is allergic to anything derived from a grass: soy, wheat, oats, barley, corn, rice. In addition, nightshades (tomatoes and peppers) are bad except in small amounts. And eggs make her break out in hives.

So we tend to not eat anything with an ingredient list, especially something marked “natural flavors,” whatever that means.

Dead critter. Fresh veggies.

On top of that, I make a trough of stew every week and cut out a bowl for breakfast any morning except Sundays, when I go down to Krain. (If you’re in the mood for good food, join me sometime. 8am)

And then there is the anti-stodgy campaign, where we try to do something new every month. Music, food, places to shop, whatever. New for the sake of new.

So she and a friend took a cooking class on kombucha  and kvass last week. She has a jar of each on the counter across from me as I write this morning, slowly brewing. Or whatever they do.

The other night, we made offal sausage. It goes into the flavor packs that I use as a base for my stew. (Chicken thigh, duck confitt, pork skin, frozen shrimp in the most recent 4 I made).

But she’s decided to try making her own stews now, so we made a bunch of offal. And she doesn’t like hers with as much vinegar or tomato as I do, so they’ll be different flavor profiles and ingredient lists. We still start with offal sausage. Or whatever you want to call it.

I have a kitchen aid stand mixer that belonged to my first wife, Donna. Added a meat grinder years ago. Make sausage regularly around here, including Thanksgiving.

Most Americans do not eat enough offal (heart, liver, tongue, gizzard, etc.). They get meat (shoulder, belly, butt), but not the innards they need to be healthy, which is one of the reasons we’re so much less healthy than our great-grandparents were. (At least the rest of you.)

So we hit the store and loaded up. Ended up with about 6 pounds of stuff. Beef liver. Pork liver. Chicken livers. Chicken hearts. Pork heart. Chicken gizzards. Bacon ends from a pig we got last year.

All that got chopped up and put through the grinder, with a teaspoon of cayenne just on general principles. I grind everything twice through the smaller facing, with the spice being mixed in after the first pass so that we get a smooth flavor and texture.

Broke it into nine individual packs and froze them, so that I can just grab four with my ingredients next time I need to make breakfasts.

She kept back a pound overnight so she could make herself what she calls porcine crack. Liver pate, with one pound of the offal instead of just straight liver, and then another pound of the really fatty Beeler’s bacon, plus fresh herbs from the garden that she walked out and snipped. Instead of onions and butter, the fat from the bacon gets supplemented with coconut oil.

It ends up this lovely, yummy loaf of goodness when you pour it over parchment paper resting in a small bread pan. Cool until it firms. Chop into four chunks, three of which get tossed into the freezer and marked “crack” (she thought I was kidding until she went and looked.) The last one is in the fridge, where she only allows herself a spoonful at a time.

But damn, that’s good stuff.

I’m always surprised that more people don’t know about the concept of the Mastermind Group, so I figured I’d take the time to put down my explanation here, as a way to generating some traffic on the concept and getting people engaged.

So let’s start with the Wikipedia definition (slightly edited for clarity here. emph mine):

“A mastermind group is a peer-to-peer mentoring concept used to help members solve their problems with input and advice from the other group members. The concept was coined in 1925 by author Napoleon Hill in his book The Law of Success, and described in more detail in his 1937 book, Think and Grow Rich. In his books, Hill discussed the idea of the Master Mind, which referred to two or more people coming together in harmony to solve problems.

Cooperation through the use of mastermind groups was one of the laws of success that Hill learned studying successful Americans including Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Theodore Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, and Charles M. Schwab.

Several companies offer mastermind group environments to members.

Organization
There are two types of mastermind groups: one is focused on an individual’s success, and the other is focused on the success of everyone in the group. Research suggests that optimal groups limit their size to 8 to 10 participants that meet regularly with rotating leadership.”

You can download Think and Grow Rich here or google it for other free downloads, as the book is in the public domain and you’re only paying for someone’s cover at this point.

I’m in a couple of mastermind groups with other writers. The goal of such a thing is the peer-to-peer aspect. We’re using the latter model, where everyone is trying to share information freely within the group, with the goal that everyone is able to advance their own career into their own definition of success (whatever it might be, and it will be different for everyone).

You have to be genuinely invested in your compatriots for this thing to work. When you find something useful, you tell others. If you run across a lead that might benefit someone in your mastermind (or wider group) you tell them about it immediately and without reservation.

As an extension, you will frequently see me share all manner of strange and interesting business needs, offers, or calls from people and groups I know on social media, just in case someone else I know could make use of it. I’m not a musician anymore, but I’m friends with many, and signed up with folks who put out calls for acts for various gigs. I share those or tag people so they see it.

Their success is as important as mine. I truly believe in that.

In a mastermind, you meet regularly. I call in to a specific one that is nationwide about every four to six weeks, where we talk about the current state of indie publishing and try to figure out what’s next. At present, we’re on the last legs of what we classify as the 7th Revolution in Indie Press, so we’re identifying the schedule and events and technology that will make up #8, and in many cases #9 as well.

Closer to home, my wife and I are part of a regular Business Lunch that is held about once per month at the north end of Seattle. Not just writers, but artists, musicians, and photographers that get together and talk business. We’re not a critique circle, as we never read your work or ask you to read ours, but an ongoing discussion of marketing plans, publishing ideas, trends and shifts. Whatever might impact us as professional creatives.

(We’re had less success building one at the south end, but still working on it.)

Who do you talk business with?

I’m utterly blessed to have married my partner in life and crime. She’s the reason I write professionally, and can make a living at it. Most writers are doing good to have a supportive spouse, who goes to work and pays the bills while the writer commits art, but a supportive spouse doesn’t really get the art.

That’s why you mastermind. So you surround yourself with professionals who can teach you new things because each of them will bring their unique perspective to the table.

As an aside, these conversations frequently become the topics behind my Business For Breakfast books that my wife or I write. We’re up to #14, because we believe in helping others learn what we’ve found.

And it doesn’t have to be limited to your art. I regularly talk to screenwriters and producers. Graphic artists. Comic books creators (which is a field at least as big and complicated as something like writing science fiction). Even philosophers of science and technology.

“What comes next?” That is the question always on the table. What is the disruption that will fundamentally alter the way we do business? A little over a decade ago, Amazon deployed the first device and ecosystem to make ebooks easy to consume. (As usual, Sony had a generation’s head start, and managed to piss is all away and betamax ebooks, when they could have owned the field. Don’t be Sony.)

So if you are a creative, might I suggest that you set up a regular lunch or call with some others in the field, and talk nothing but business?  Don’t go in expecting that these people will make you money. They are your peers. You’ll share what you know. They’ll do the same.

(If they don’t, don’t keep them around. This only works as peers willing to share what they know. Doesn’t matter if they sell 10 books per month or 100,000. Sharing is the key, because that wheel will eventually turn.)

What are you doing to take advantage of the fact that technology is going to upend your world tomorrow? Who are you asking for help?

Woo-hoo!!!!

So, news update. Some of you have been paying attention to the new series getting ramped up over the rest of the fall and into the winter. Shadow of the Dominion. Fun stuff.

The old discussion in the genre of Science Fiction is whether a series is Space Opera or Space Adventure. Mostly, the distinction is scale. In the 8th Jessica Keller book Winterhome (spoilers, proceed with caution), we see the war taken to nearly impossible levels, as Moirrey and a few special friends take the war to Buran itself and end up slaying a god.

And there’s still a 9th novel coming in December. Petron. And we’ll top everything that happens in Winterhome.

Space Opera. Epic Space Opera. Every novel escalates the crazy and risk and threat to another level.

Contrast that with Shadow of the Dominion. We start with the novel Longshot Hypothesis. I had a silly idea as a world-building exercise, which I’ll share with you here. (Some of you have already heard this, so just smile.)

Imagine if Darth Vader had a mid-life crisis, stripped off the armor (minus the cyborg bits and dueling scars, mind you), and replaced Chewbacca as the First Mate on the Millennium Falcon. And we just had adventures, instead of a rebel alliance, a death star, ancient religions, and freudian angst.

I had a LOT of fun writing these books. Got to practice aliens. There are no aliens in the Alexandria Station universe, with the notable exception of the Sentient warships. (And look how THAT turned out.)

Part of the fun of really big space stories (going beyond Earth and First Contact tales) is that you can create alien creatures. And I don’t mean humans with some body paint and a nasal prosthetic. I mean my friend Glaxu, who is best described as a Dire Ground Cuckoo. (Call him a roadrunner and watch the man open you up with a dewclaw.)

1.3 meters tall. Ground Cuckoo (of which the American Roadrunner is a type, but also a pejorative among his kind and he gets a little testy about that). Long legs. Short arms. Zygodactyl toes. Feathers. Beak. Really twisted sense of humor. Head crest.

How, exactly, does a Mondi’s body language go? Like I said, practicing aliens who are alien.

All this is on my mind this morning because I just logged onto the Amazons and “claimed” the third Shadow of the Dominion book: Outermost.

It’s not obvious to the rest of you yet, but all six of the titles in the series are actually ship names.

• Longshot Hypothesis
• Hard Bargain (Sept 10)
• Outermost (Oct 10)
• Dominion-427 (Nov 10)
• PETRON (Dec 10) – Last Jessica Keller Novel
• Phoenix (Jan 10, 2020)
• Princess Rualoh (Feb 10, 2020)

I have been hard at work, adjusting to some bubbles in the production schedule, but I just sent Princess Rualoh off to the copy-editor last night. And Outermost is up for pre-order as of yesterday.

Getting back to space adventure versus epic space opera. These six novels tell one long arc of a story, but the scope is personal. We’re not deciding the future shape of the galaxy or the human race here. Just Valentinian Tarasicodissa and his ongoing mission to keep his ship flying and himself out of jail.

Honestly, everything that happens is mostly the work of other people maneuvering him into progressively worse places and him using every bit of luck and cunning he’s got to wriggle off the hook.

Better, I was cheering, crying, and planning as I finished a slow-read through Princess Rualoh last night. Seriously emotional story (at least for me). Hopefully, you’ll feel the same way when we all get there in February.

I had so much fun. Seriously. All of book six is one on-going conspiracy as almost every player huddles with someone in the group to work out some deal separate from everyone else, in the middle of an on-going, running firefight, trapped in an abandoned catacomb, being hunted by sex-crazed cannibals. (Spare me your fantasies, please.)

I consciously forget novels after I’m done writing them. It helps with the editorial process, because I’m reading the words for the first time and only then remembering what I was doing, but it was obvious how much fun I was having, keeping all the plates spinning.

Best part, this one has legs. We haven’t saved the galaxy at the end, merely escaped the latest trap. That lets me write a new novel/trilogy/series sometime in the future if folks are that excited about what happens with the gang. And I’ve left a LOT of places they could go at the end of this one.

But that’s in the future. Right now, #1 is out, and #2 and #3 are available for pre-order. Also, my plan at present (this might change) is to send out some chunk of the rules of a new style of poker called Arcades. Had to invent the rules for Hard Bargain, and they became a running metaphor all the way to the very end.

Met a lovely lady the other day who is having a custom tarot deck made for her latest fantasy series, and that got me to thinking about Arcades. You cannot play the game with a standard Hoyle deck, because it requires 72 cards in six suits. (It’s Science Fiction, why the hell should I be limited to what dead people considered poker before we invented indoor plumbing?)

At the same time, you can apparently have custom card decks made in a “Print On Demand” model, meaning I supply the images and they’ll just spit out a deck when you order it.

If you think this sounds like fun, let me know. Until last week, I had no intention of actually turning Arcades into something the rest of you could do at home, but there is NO REASON WHATSOEVER why you could not.

It will cost me time and money to set up, however, so I have to be careful and not just chase that down the rabbit hole. Instead, I’ll take a tally of people interested, and if we ever get to a critical mass, I’ll hire me a graphic artist to do the design work.

So, go get your pre-orders for the novels, and let me know about Arcades, once you’ve had a chance to play the game with Valentinian and the Sheriff of Bohrne Station. (And a few friends.)

• Longshot Hypothesis
• Hard Bargain (Sept 10)
• Outermost (Oct 10)
• Dominion-427 (Nov 10)
• PETRON (Dec 10) – Last Jessica Keller Novel
• Phoenix (Jan 10, 2020)
• Princess Rualoh (Feb 10, 2020)

y’all have fun.

b

So by now some of you have read the CS-405 spin-off trilogy that falls between St. Legier and Winterhome in the Jessica Keller series. Those are also referred to as the Kosnett Trilogy, because Command Centurion Phil Kosnett is the central axis around which everything rotates.

I originally got the name of the character from Star Fleet Battles, which I played a whole bunch of from the early 80’s to the mid 90’s. (Moved out of Los Angeles and lost my group. Never picked it up again after that for other reasons.) The Captains Logs for SFB each contained a short story, the scenario behind the story, and then a bunch of other scenarios you could run in addition.

For a game called Star Fleet Battles, not everything was combat. You could also do science missions, exploration, etc. This was before role playing games got sophisticated, and other companies had the RPG license for the original Star Trek Universe (and mind you, this game dates to the original series and the animated series.)

But there was a character in one of the stories named Phil Kosnett. He was a thinly-veiled version of a notable and famous Star Fleet Captain, without crossing any licensing lines. When I was building out Jessica’s new fleet for The Red Admiral, I grabbed Phil Kosnett on the fly. But I also added some backstory, because he was in a Corvette/Scout, the least armed vessel around, so he had to fly smart as well as dangerous. And become one hell of a successful pirate, as you’ve seen.

When it came time to break off CS-405 for their own adventure, I had a LOT of details about Command Centurion Phil Kosnett. But very few people knew the reference, because you have to have played the game at the time, which dates you pretty solidly to a particular age and demographic.

But I have challenged a few people to let me know if they recognized the name, because anybody who did would also recognize a lot of the technology I used in Jessica’s universe, just because I could. (Again, all the serial numbers filed off so I can can’t get sued, but if you knew, you saw it.)

Fast forward to over the weekend.

I got an email. And had to go total fangirl.

The person identified themselves as Phil Kosnett (as did the email and other info), and explained how he was connected to the gang back at Task Force Games (later Amarillo Design Bureau) and how Steve Cole used the name of a friend of his later as a bad-ass Star Fleet Captain, and later Admiral. Over time, the character has taken on a life beyond the original gentleman.

But this really was him, as you’ll see at the bottom of his own bio.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the man who went on to be Admiral Phil Kosnett in the Star Fleet Universe. When you get a chance to read Petron in December (and there will be a contest earlier), you will also get to meet Fleet Centurion Phil Kosnett, as well as wonder at the future I have laid out for when he becomes First Centurion Kosnett. (And yes, now I kinda have to go ahead and write those stories one of these days.)

But right now, I’d like to sqeeeeee all over the fact that the original Phil Kosnett is the US Ambassador to Kosovo.

How freaking cool is that?

To me, it’s even better because Command Centurion Kosnett is known as “The Professor” and I had no idea how accurate that was for the man he was originally drawn from.

And what a small universe we live in.

Just had to share, because that’s just all sorts of awesome.

cheers,

b

So as I learn things about the business and craft of being a writer, I try to write a new Business For Breakfast book, so that others can take advantage of that. (And pay me some money along the way.) The goal is 2 of these each year, on a variety of topics, because the world keeps changing.

My latest B4B is Series and Continuity for Professional Writers, available for pre-order now and drops Aug 21 (next wednesday as I write this post.)

This grew out of a conversation last year at the Novelists, Inc. annual conference in Florida that I went to, where I was chatting with some folks who were trying to figure out how to make the leap from single novels and trilogies into longer arcs of story.

In the old days, a writer wrote a novel. It went to a publisher. They sold it. If the writer got lucky, fans would clamor for more books about these characters, so the writer would create more stories and novels. Arthur Conan Doyle and Leslie Charteris, for example. None of those were really series, however, so much as returning time and again to the same character. Even Ian Fleming didn’t really work up longer arcs of plot and story telling.

But the modern consumer is more sophisticated. They want those long arcs. They want a meta-story that spreads across seasons and novel series.

Since I already think and write this way, I decided to take a hack at the topic. Jessica Keller will end at fourteen novels and novellas when Petron comes out in December. Javier Aritza has eight novellas published so far, with a ninth in the can and a tenth started. The Star Dragon is five novels and two (so-far) short stories. Shadow of the Dominion comes in at six novels in the first section. Plus several more series that I’ve written at least a book one, including an SF mystery, an urban fantasy, alternate history, and a bunch of space adventure and opera.

I grew up on comic books. My mother liked to shop in fabric stores, and learned that if she bought me two comic books and a 7-Up, I’d happily wait outside for an hour without complaint. (Had a massive collection before I finally gave it to a friend for his kids. That bastard turned around and sold them off for money and didn’t realize someone might tell me. But that’s a different story for another time.)

Comic books in the 70’s and 80’s didn’t do reboots and retcons every 3-8 months. There weren’t collector’s edition #1’s twice a year. Detective Comics was over issue 500. I have Captain America 300. Etc.

So I’m used to thinking in long story series.

You need to do a lot of planning up front. I’m not talking about the usual argument of plotter versus Pantser. (And I prefer Architect and Gardener, anyway.)

If you want to write a series like I do, you can’t just sit down with Lester Dent and a big cup of coffee. There are questions you have to ask yourself.

Will it be space adventure or space opera? (In my case, but every genre has equivalencies you need to pick ahead of time.) I won’t read Glen Cook anymore because he likes to play stupid games with the reader and not deliver a particularly enjoyable reading experience, regardless of how well he writes. (The ONLY Glen Cook books I still own are the Books of the North and The Dragon Never Sleeps. Gave the rest away because I got tired of his shit. Won’t pick up another.)

And there is a lesson there. Cook kept changing his mind about opera or adventure, and so the tone and themes of the books kept changing. And not in ways that brought me along with him. In the “throw the book across the room and sell it at Half-Price Books” way.

Next, you have to have a main character that the reader would want to invite over for a beer. And don’t tell me that this asshole man-child in book one eventually becomes a nice guy by book eight, because I won’t even make it to book two to find out. You need to make them someone a reader will want to spend an evening with, without gritting their teeth.

Plan what kind of story series you will tell. Not just the architecture of the story or the seeds you’ll plant. The meta-design. Adventure/opera. Three-man team or five-man band. Earth-centered or not (Star Trek vs. Star Wars, for example). Aliens or not?

Once you have those sorts of things sorted out, only then should you start your world-building and character notes. Because if this is a series, the goal is readers even more excited by the last novel than they were the first.

Another thing to consider: know when to stop. I know a guy who just dropped book 14 in his ongoing series and is complaining about declining sales. He had gotten bored with this series, and his writing has begun to suffer, I’m guessing. And his fans.

Jessica has 14, but only 9 at the core, with a side trilogy for Kosnett and two novellas to help set up Vo and Yan without detracting from the core novels. We’re still close to one million words of Jessica by now. The others will be shorter (8 novellas for Science Officer Season One, maybe 7-9 short novels for Season Two, but I’m not sure.)

So when you are ready to start writing series, there are a bunch of things you need to know and questions you must answer before you start, or you will pay a terrible price later.

And you need to consider series if you want to make money in the modern era. I know many fans won’t buy a book one until book three or four have come out. They’ve been burned by TradPub and lazy authors. They also want to binge, rather than wait for you to drop a novel every year or three. They might have forgotten about you by this time next year, ya know.

So Series and Continuity. This is a 201-level book. You’re past the “how do I write?” stage and working on your craft as a professional writer. Looking for a way to level yourself up to new heights so you can turn your hobby into a profession and quit the day job.

I did it. Feb 2018. Working for myself now and writing faster than ever before. And having more fun, because I get to tell all these stories, across all these universes.

Are you ready to up your game?