News Update, Round 2: The next Goodreads Giveaway (Queen of the Pirates) starts Tuesday 11/10 and runs for a week. After that, a set of giveaways for Last of the Immortals that will begin just after the book itself comes out on Nov 17. As usual, available for pre-order everywhere that allows, plus everywhere after that.

I looked at the pre-order numbers last night for Immortals.

Thank you.

Just that. When Auberon came out, I got a couple dozen pre-orders, which shocked me. Queen was good for over one hundred, which I found amazing. Immortals is very close to three hundred last I checked.

I get to write it, but I couldn’t really do this without you. I have fans that buy my books. Who leave me nice reviews places telling me how much they enjoyed the book and look forward to the next one. That actually leave me nice notes here on my boards, encouraging me. And you do.

So thank you.

In other news: Words.

It’s been on my mind for the last few days because I woke up with a touch of a cold and sore throat last Friday. Called in sick to work. Went back to bed. Let my body sweat it out and then did laundry and put down new sheets. By mid-day was feeling mostly human. Weak and brainless, but human.

Didn’t get any words done.

Saturday, headed into town to the Starbucks, because my laptop was not liking to connect via (really, freaking slow) tether to the interwebs. (Remember, I live WAY out in the boonies.) Couldn’t connect at Starbucks either.

I’m a fairly nerdy IT guy, and I was stumped. Knew what it felt like, but not how to undo it.

Fortunately, was having some friends over for a Guy Fawkes dinner and (would have had had it not been raining) bonfire. One of them, Steve, is my go-to-nerd for computer issues. (I have wonderful friends who can probably solve any problem across the group, or they know a girl who can.)

He was stumped. Tried everything he knew, and hit the same wall that had left my head bloody.

Eventually, he forced it to revert to “last known good state” which was middle of last week. (I keep all my writing on a thumbnail that I frequently back up to a NAS, and not on the laptop, so utterly safe to do that.)

That did it. Apparently, the hardware maker and Microsoft both pushed critical updates that stomped on each other and everything else in their way. It was a Godzilla kind of weekend.

Did finally manage to get back to zero on Sunday (it’s Monday as I write this). Between being kinda yucky and kinda computer-yucky, got only a few words done over the whole weekend. (Did other things that did not require brain, like burn the scrap for the bonfire, and unpack several more boxes of books and arrange them, and make the new house generally more livable.)

But I got to thinking about Words. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) asked if I wanted something like a FitBit(tm) for Christmas to track daily exercise. I said no, thank you, because I don’t track that on a daily basis. It is the same with my words. I don’t track those daily, or even weekly. And in this month of NaNoWriMo, where everyone is supposed to write a novel in a month, I don’t bother to participate that way.

I count my words across an annual basis. That way, when I have a bad, brainless weekend, I don’t feel bad that I got nothing much done. What matters is this: How am I doing against the year target? (Slightly ahead of target, possibly within striking distance of Second Stretch Goal, having made #1 already.)

My feeling is this: Why save up for NaNoWriMo and blow it all in a 30 day stretch? Why aren’t you that committed EVERY day? I’m not sprinting here. I’m on a super-mega-ultra-marathon that will finally defeat me when I die of old age, hopefully in fifty or sixty years. If I never had another original idea, I’m pretty sure I’d never get to the bottom of the current list of ideas I have written down, even then.

So write, write daily, count them, tally the words against all the words you’ve ever written, and not against everybody else.

Like I said at the top: Lots of Words.

And not all of my words are going to be for all of my readers. And I mean that in a good way.

I’m 20k into the next novel. It is a lovely, little New Adult-type story about a young woman who sets out to get revenge on the man who killed her sister, by becoming a costumed super-villain. And it is very literary. Single Point of View. Slow to build in the way that literary is, rather than slow to get to the story. (You know right at the top who, what, where, and why. How is the only piece yet to come, by the end of Chapter One.)

Fans who love action might not like this story. It is not car chases and gun fights every page. And that’s okay with me. I hope I communicate well enough to people with cover and blurb and notes NOT to expect another Jessica Keller action piece. There will be more of those. I have 10k words of planning encyclopedia for Jessica Book 4 (Goddess of War) and figure I’ll go after that early next year, when I finish the first draft of Miss Kai Di Peng and her adventures. (She’s got a trilogy coming, eventually.)

So Words. Lots of Words.

The third Javier Aritza story is coming out in December. The Gilded Cage picks up pretty much at the end of The Mind Field.  It technically makes a trilogy for Javier, but I expect Season One to run eight or maybe twelve episodes. (I did discover last week that I can do a special “Boxed Set” edition of books from one of the printing companies I work with, so I’ll probably do a mega box of Javier when I hit the end of Season One. Jessica will have to wait until I finish ALL of them, which will be nine novels, at current planned arc.)

Hopefully, you enjoy the words. And continue to come along with me for the ride. As always, I enjoy the comments. If you have questions, drop me a line or comment on something. I’ll get to it fairly quickly, presuming no more Godzilla events.

See you at OryCon, or Powell’s Books shortly.

bd

Side Note: As a race into publishing Last of the Immortals, I am doing a set of Goodreads giveaways. Auberon is going on now, and will end on 11/3. After that, we’ll do a set for Queen of the Pirates, and finally Last of the Immortals. This is your chance to own a hard-copy version, sure to be a collector’s item because I will revise all three when Book 4 comes out, hopefully sometime next year, Good Lord and Muse willing.

Also: Thank you to everyone for the comments. It really makes my day when I log in and see a lot of comments in the spam queue that I actually get to approve and display, as opposed to the bots I have to contend with on a daily basis, wanting to sell me crap, services, or ED medicine. The interwebs are really stupid that way.  (Do me a favor and update your anti-virus checkers?  Most of this crap comes from machines that have been hijacked. And if you are still running Windows XP, upgrade.  It’s faster, more stable, and less prone to crap. A good internet is your responsibility.)

🙂

I don’t have firm dates yet, but the third Javier Aritza novella is coming out in December. The Gilded Cage.  There is also a craft book I have been working on in the background for the better part of a year, when I could carve out time to put my thoughts on paper. It is something for the beginning writer, to help them understand the technical aspects of good story-telling that they need in order to  look more like a professional. They are certainly not things I learned in my creative writing classes. (Granted I never went MFA, being too much of a numbers nerd, but I have shown drafts to two people wanting to make the jump from non-fiction/journalism to genre fiction, and they both seemed to get something out of it.)

—————————————————————-

I got an email from a friend of a friend last night. She’s a big-time writer who was on a panel and got asked a question about the “usual path to publication.” They discovered that in the last 3-5 years, there is no such thing.

Times were, you wrote a novel, found an agent, got rejected 10-15 times, and then finally either gave up or got published. If you were lucky, you wrote something that sold and your next novel got picked up. Quite a few were, then less and less.

Some folks made a living as mid-list writers, earning as much as they would have at a desk job, but getting to write all day instead of labor.

Those days are mostly gone now. If you don’t capture lightning, if you don’t sell millions of copies world-over, you get dropped.

Such is the fate of many traditionally published novelists.

Other folks write short fiction and submit it to various genre magazines and anthologies. There is less money here, as a single story will net you somewhere between $200US and $500US. I.E. not enough to live on, unless you have a spouse who can support your dreams. Many people do this, and are quite happy, if not wealthy.

And then there is Jeff Bezos. He invented the future.

I married my publisher, a successful novelist who once had several books traditionally published by one of the big houses, and who still sells into the periodical space with mysteries and stuff.

She also  indie publishes. Her nineteenth(?) novel is due out in December. She is about halfway through re-publishing a baker’s dozen of short pieces, from all across the genre, one per week.  Go look.

I don’t do traditional publishing. Everyone I know who has (and I know a bunch of nice folks through her), universally tell me horror stories about it. You have one chance in a million to make it to the big time.

I don’t need the fame. I’d rather have money.

I  indie publish. (While I technically have submitted two stories to The New Yorker, that was because they do literary Science Fiction there, and both of the Hive stories are kinda literary. After this, every Hive story goes to them first for quick rejection, because I like their rejection policy and approve of it.)

When I publish, my works are passed through a couple of first readers who catch mistakes and holes in my logic, plus a copy editor who finds missing words, bad tense, and lost periods. (She’s amazing that way.)

Then it gets a cover, a blurb, maybe some internals like an Author’s note. And then it goes up for sale on the usual sites.  We do post them on Kobo, iTunes, and Barnes & Noble, but the vast majority of my sales come from Amazon.  As in, ninety-seven percent plus.

Jeff made that possible. And he’s going to win the 21st Century. Period.

The Traditional Manhattan Model of publishing (see above) was all about being gate-keepers to what was “Good Literature.” They decided if you were good enough. Over the last generation, they’ve devolved into a useless money and marketing grab. I will point out that Kim Kardassian and Snooki are both New York Times Best Selling Authors.

Yes, you read that right. Quality literature, right?

Because of Jeff Bezos, I get to publish novels and novellas and short stories. You get to decide if they are any good. You get to log in and give the story a rating and a review, so the next person who comes along can read it and determine if they want to give me money. It’s not much money, but one of these days it might be enough for me to no longer have a day job.

I get to do what I love most in this world, which is to tell stories. And I seem to have fans, as weird as that is to someone like me. People send me notes telling me how much they like Suvi, and how much they enjoyed a particular piece. That energizes me to go at it again tomorrow.

To give you an understanding of how much I want this: I get up at 4:30 AM. Wake up, mind you. My alarm actually goes off about once per month. I’m generally awake before the alarm. Shower and out the door with breakfast in hand by 4:55. Listen to NPR for the news until I get over the pass, and then turn it off and let the story unfold in my head for the last half hour or so. Get to work, park, head up to the office, and set up my machine in the kitchen/break room at 6:00 AM. Eat breakfast, read the news, pay bills, catch up. Around 6:30, start writing. Head down, keys banging furiously, snarl at anyone who comes over to bother me. (They’ve learned to wait until I surface, unless the building is on fire.) At 8:00, fix my second coffee, pack up, and head to my desk, where I go at it in t-sql until 17:00, with a long walk at lunch to think more story thoughts. Most nights, home and ready to start working again around 19:00 (I live way out in the boonies.) Put in a couple of hours of work. Go to bed around 21:00. Rinse. Repeat. On the weekend, I live for the times when I can spend hours and hours writing.

There is a motivational poster at work that sums it up. “There is a difference between wanting and committing.”

I don’t want an editor or Traditional publisher telling me what I can write, or when, or how. I will live or die on my own merits, my own strengths and weaknesses, on my own story-telling.

Because of Jeff, I get that chance.

One of the hardest tasks for a writer is to find someone who can read what you have written with a critical-enough eye to help, while not being a complete ass about things. Being a First Reader is a skill set, one that takes time to learn.

It is necessary to be able to read something, and respond to it. (A copy editor and a line editor are technical tasks that take place later in the writing cycle.) When I look for a potential new First Reader, I want someone who can tell me they don’t understand a particular paragraph, without telling me how to fix it. (If a reader tells you a sentence is wrong, they are almost always right. If a writer tells you how to fix that sentence, they are almost always wrong.)

When I do first readings for my wife, I simply say awkward, or I want more here, or frequently, things in your head didn’t make it onto the page. Nothing more. My job is to point out the rough patches, so she can fix it. She does the same for me. The job of a First Reader is thus.

Where it gets messy is in the metaphor we call the Chairmaker. As a First Reader, the job is to comment on the quality of the chair. Is it even? Balanced? Stable? Pretty? The trap that many writers fall into when reading other people’s work is to begin to critique the chairmaker, and not just the chair. I can fix the chair. I can’t really fix the chairmaker. And I’m likely to get personally offended by literary assaults on the chairmaker.

It happens. I used to have a fantastic First Reader, once upon a time. She caught all manner of things, as a result of an English Lit background. As she was mostly a musician, rather than a writer, so she wasn’t planning to compete with me to see who could be a better writer.

And then one day, something bad happened. I never did figure out what. She went from happily marking up a document with two or three comments per page, to two or three comments per paragraph. And I was still writing like I did. And all her complaints were about Voice.

Voice is the style of telling a story, so that you hear in your head in the voice of the character talking. Voice is not just what they see, but how they feel about what they see.

If you have read any of my fiction, you know that I write in what is called Third Person Close (as opposed to First Person, like hard-boiled detective novels; or Third Person Universal, which was a style in the mid-century, where you knew what everyone thought at all times, as a universal narrator.)

She suddenly decided that what she wanted was for me to move everything to third universal, by pulling out all of the Voice, all of the opinions, and simply state things in a dry, journalistic narrative. I showed her marked-up document to other writers, and they whistled. It was red with blood.

She had mentioned to me that her mother was an English teacher, so I suppose she decided that she needed to grade my work like something I had turned in for one of her class assignments.

It was not an assignment I suspect that I would have gotten a passing grade on.

And that was that. I wasn’t interested in the level of personal invective she was throwing at me on paper, regardless of whether her intentions were innocent or malevolent.

She had stopped judging the chair, and started judging the chairmaker.

It was a shame. She had been good. But I never used her as a First Reader again.

And I drew an important lesson from this. Whenever someone asks me to be a First Reader for them (and writers commonly trade that sort of thing), I always make sure I only react to what’s on the page, and never to the person behind it. It is not my story, it is not my world. My job is to help them understand how to make it better, not all the things they are doing wrong. That would be to overstep my bounds.

Ultimately, the reader will judge the final work. If I tell good stories, they will come back for more. That’s a matter of style and voice. The role of the First Reader is to help understand where the story-telling broke down. (The Copy Editor and Line Editor come next, and are something for a later tale.)

And each of us have a job in how we help others get to where they want to be.

——–

And before I forget (again): Tell your friends. I have another goodreads giveaway of Auberon that starts 10/26 and runs for a week, followed by a giveaway of Queen of the Pirates for a week, and finally I will give away several copies of Last of the Immortals that last week when it goes live.  Ping me for more details.

Recently, I got into an interesting discussion with an (visual) artist friend of mine about some of the differences between so-called modern entertainment and genre science fiction. One thing that has always struck me as interesting is the prevalence of what we would today call “product placement.”

It’s not a recent thing, as far as popular media goes. We were talking about the new James Bond movie coming out shortly, which is the 24th in the series. For the previous movie, a certain Latin American beer company had paid a tremendous amount of money for their product to appear in Bond’s hands in an important way, and they milked that for a major global advertising campaign. But that is not a new thing. Anyone who has read the early Bond novels by Fleming will recognize the long list of products that encompass Bond’s breakfast each morning, or his wardrobe, etc.

In those cases, Fleming appeared to be specifically placing Bond in a particular stratum of British society (a carefully striated civilization to begin with). We know what jam he prefers, what shirts he wears, etc. Even his personal variant on a martini says a lot about him (and frequently spurs wonderful flame wars on the interwebs over whether or not he’s doing it right. I have no opinion, not being a martini drinker.)

But when you look at things outside the twentieth century, wandering into the realms of distant science fiction, the amount of name dropping falls off. I could talk about Koensayr Corporation, but only the most devoted nerds would be able to understand the reference without first consulting the googles. And that just tells you what my favorite starship is. (And only the truly nerdy will understand the importance of when Lex Luthor steals forty cakes.)

And granted, it may just be me, or I’m not reading the right books, or something. I think back to Doc Smith’s Lensman books and he was wonderful about dropping names everywhere. I can’t be the only kid who wanted to own a Lewiston or a DeLameter growing up.

So here’s the question we were ruminating upon over beers: When the writer goes to that level of detail, to inject the name of the factory that built the spaceship, or the name of the soda pop that the hero pulls from his fridge at the end of a hot, busy day, does that add to the story for you or distract?

I can’t be an impartial judge in this one, because I’ve done it. In my story Moscow Gold, I wanted to include the make and model of the car that the villains are driving. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) quietly suggested that I not use the name of a real car maker from the day, even in my alternate diesel-punk universe. Did you know that there is a wiki page listing EVERY known defunct car maker, ever?  Seriously, it’s huge. You want to lose a day? Go wander down that rabbit hole sometime. I did.

But I had a reason. The chances are extremely slim, but north of zero, however far north, that I might manage to run into a troll who happened to own the rights to the car manufacturer I picked blindly from a hat, and that person would come after me with a bitch and DMCA. After all, nobody would mind Bond suddenly wearing their shirt in a book, or imbibing their soft drink, but they’re going to be less than enthusiastic if that same item suddenly pops up in the hands of the bad guy. Unless they specifically paid you money for it. (At that point, there is no such thing as bad publicity if you can control the narrative.  Because when people get to arguing over the topic, a much wider audience will become exposed to it and suddenly wonder what the fuss is. That means sales.)

But will you still be able to eat a whopper in a distopian future where all restaurants are Taco Bell? Will Coca-Cola still be the pause that refreshes, say, one thousand years into the future?

This is on my mind because I am about to publish a new Jessica Keller novel that takes place in 13,441 CE. And I just finished the first draft on the third Javier Aritza story, and it takes place in 7,548 CE. We’re still human, but what the hell would we order when we walk into a bar? What would we grab from a convenience store at 3 in the morning?

Do you, the reader, want to know what brand of burritos keeps Javier going? Or what brand of distilled spirit Jessica Keller consumes when she’s between assignments and doesn’t have to be ON constantly?

I’ll be starting to work on a new novel (series) shortly, set in a variant modern era. As in, last Tuesday, but with POWER. Would Kai Di’s choice of handbag maker influence your thinking? Do you want to know what kind of car she drives, if it doesn’t factor centrally to the story? (Everybody knows Bond drives an Astin-Martin. I suspect they’ve stayed in business as long as they have in part on the strength of that association, which once upon a time conveyed posh to the right folks.)

I don’t have answers. I have questions.

But I would like you to think about the next few books you read and see what level of product placement they contain. And let me know how it made you feel. I do read all comments, and respond. I get direct emails with questions as well and try to jump on those directly.

So let me know, okay?

shade and sweet water

bd

west of the mountains, WA

There are several ways to approach fiction writing. None of them are better than any other, as far as I can tell. They are just tools in the toolbox. As you advance in your craft, you learn to make use of them as you go, depending on the needs of the story.

1. You can work out every element of the story ahead of time, including every twist and turn. You’ll end up spending a great deal of time on the outline for the story, but the writing can go full speed, because you have it all worked out at that point.
2. Write into what I call “darkened hallways.” I have a tendency to be there most of the time. You’ll have the characters, the overall plot, and the opening scene. You’ll have a pretty good idea how it ends. Everything in the middle will be guesswork, because you know roughly where you are going, but not when you’ll get there. Think of a long hallway with occasional light bulbs that are far too inadequate to the task.
3. Writing into darkness. You start similar to the path of darkened hallways. But you get derailed. Or rather, you have a character, and she has a problem, and you (the writer/reader) are simply along for the ride, with no idea where it will all end up.

This is all fresh in my mind this morning because it happened to me last night. I’ve been working on the the third Javier Aritza story. I thought I knew how it ended. Turns out I had the exact ending (call it the last four lines of the epilogue).  Javier had been lying to me about how we get there. He finally explained it to me last night.

I can’t say I blame him. It was not what I had planned. Or where. And it was a LOT darker than I had expected.

Let me back up here and share a confession. In my head, Javier Aritza is kind of a goofball. He’s snarky and sarcastic, mouthy, but generally harmless.

To prepare for the third volume, I went back and re-read the first two (The Science Officer and The Mind Field). Up until that moment, I hadn’t really been paying attention to how dark and gritty he really was. Or the stories. Writer-brain put those things in when I wasn’t looking. They make the story better, but it wasn’t the story I had expected. Or rather, it was, but nowhere near as dark as I had remembered.

Javier did that to me last night.  When he finally revealed the ending to volume three.

For comparison’s sake, all three Jessica Keller books were darkened hallways. I knew where they went, and how they ended, and happily trusted writer-brain to carry me there. And it worked. I like all three novels.

I like all three Science Officer tales, too, but volume three (The Gilded Cage) is much darker than Jessica. And it was jarring to see what secrets writer-brain was hiding from me, right up to the end. (And no, no spoilers here.) This had been a slow write, because life kept intruding, and because I rarely knew what the scene after next was. I would sit down, and writer-brain would say “here’s the next scene.” “But that about the one after that?” “Shut up and write.”

And now I know why. Javier can be a cold, vicious bastard when you push him into a corner.

I’ll have the first draft done and ready for first readers this week. Dunno when it is coming out at this point. I’ve been pushing deadlines all year, and this one doesn’t have one. I’m guessing that mid-December is the publishing date, barring unforeseen complications.  (Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) talked to Matt and he’s all set to do the audio book again. We’re going to try to get paper, ebook, and audio all done together. Watch this space for more news.) So that will make a nice Xmas present for everyone to round out the year.

I’m writing into darkness here. And it’s fun. The strangest part is that once I finish this story, I don’t have anything NEXT on my list. Got the anthology story done. Got the third Javier out. Jessica’s first trilogy is rounded off and I’m doing research for what will be book 4 next year.

What would y’all like to see next? I mean, I only have fifty things I could pick from.  What would make your day?

shade and sweet water

bd

It still amazes me when I look at sales numbers and actually see people buying my books. I mean, I’ve been a story teller for as long as I have had language, but I was never in a position to actually make any money at it until very, very recently. I know I tell good stories, but…

Today’s topic is the voracious reader, and their place in the ecosystem. I’m not TradPub(tm). Those are the writers who have an agent, and an editor, and a contract with a major publishing house, generally out of Manhattan but also out of Seattle, like my buddy Scott James Magner. Their books are the kind you will walk into a Barnes & Noble and see displayed on the shelf, or an end cap (depending on how much money the publisher paid for the space). Big time.

I won’t say that you will never see one of my books on a shelf at B&N, because my novels are now in the big distributor catalogs, so you could order paper copies for yourself. I’m just not holding my breath. I’m also a little bit too much of a control freak to sell my soul to TradPub just so I could see myself in the book store. TradPub writers generally get screwed for royalties. (As The Passive Voice asks: What part of 70% royalties confused you?) But they also have a different target audience. For TradPub writers, they are generally going after the Casual Reader or the Social Reader.

Social Readers only buy this year’s major breakout hit. A few years ago, they all discovered light BDSM, because everyone went gray. Before that, it was Suzanne Collins’s wonderfully dystopian olympic games. Before that, everyone’s favorite boy wizard. The big houses make big money by moving millions of copies of a single book. If you happened to have written that book, you get slobberingly wealthy overnight.

Most authors never write that book.

The Casual Reader reads a book or two per month, and used to keep the mid-list writers in rent money. Because TradPub is all about the block-buster these days, there are far fewer mid-list authors these days, and all of them are pressured to write bigger and more exciting monster books that can be turned into franchise hits. You’ll see them on the shelf, a whole series of books with the same cover and a number on the side. (I do that too, but for reasons we’ll discuss in a moment.) They are slowly starving.

My target audience is the Voracious Reader. They read 50-200 books per year. (I used to do that, before I committed to writing that much instead of reading that much.) They ask all their friends for recommendations about new authors, and then go read a book by that person. If they like the voice and the genre and the style, they’ll buy ALL of the books that writer has available.

I have some voracious readers out there. I can see that when my more obscure titles sell. I mean, really, I write mostly science fiction, with some low-end fantasy (as opposed to EPIC FANTASY!!!), but I have also published several books of poetry (I suppose you could call it epic fantasy and urban fantasy) and people buy them.

My approach from day one was to have a number of titles available for readers who wanted to explore these worlds with me. Fabulous Publisher Babe (TM) calls it the bakery model. Someone walks into your bakery with a want. You might have the greatest cheese danish the world has ever seen, but they wanted coffee. Or a bagel. Or a scone. Something. I try to have a little everything available. It might not be the greatest scone, but once you read it, you might decide you like my cooking, so you’ll try the cheese danish, and the coffee, and the juice, and…

You get the point. Voracious readers read a lot of books. TradPub thinks that ebooks are going away, because they have priced their own higher than the cost of a hard-cover version of the same book. Mind you, it costs them about a tenth or less, when you factor in pitiful royalties to the author and minimal distribution costs. Usually, they end up losing money because Jeff rewards authors with a 70% royalty, if the price of the ebook is between $2.99 US and $9.99. Outside that band, the royalties drops to 35%. (And I would have some for free, but he won’t let me charge anything less than $0.99 and gets upset if I have something for free anywhere else. But I diverge from my task.)

For a voracious reader, they have a book budget, like other people have a coffee budget or a clothing budget. Whatever it is you do with your mad money. And I’m competing with TradPub for those dollars, as well as every other hybrid/indie writer out there.  I have to have a product that looks good (awesome covers, clean interior, friendly layout, etc.) Fabulous Publisher Babe handles that aspect of things. My job is making sure that after someone has liked the cover and read the blurb, that they read the first 10% and say “OMG, Must have!”

I can do that. I’m even pretty good at it on a good day. But it is a competition for money. Nothing more, nothing less. I exist because there are a lot of people out there with money who want to be entertained. If I’m on, they’re happy and come back for more books. They’ll come back for Queen of the Pirates because they liked Auberon. They will come back for Last of the Immortals (coming soon for pre-order) because I have entertained them.

I won’t (probably) ever see my books on a shelf in a Barnes & Noble. I probably won’t ever compete for major publishing awards. I’m not trying to. I want to make enough of a living telling stories that I can walk away from the day job, or at least go find something easier and part-time that I can ramp down from as I write more books and make more fans.

I doubt that I’ll ever write that book that bottles lightning. (Seriously, my best-ever single-day-sales just barely cracked 100 units moved. The big hitters move 50,000 units when that monster block-buster Gotta Have hits the bookstores. However, I’m not going to say never.) if I can sustain three digits per day in terms of selling spines, I can make enough to be happy. And every time I publish something, I do have that one chance in a million to bottle lightning.

With your help, we just might get there, too. But I’d rather have a bunch of happy fans telling their friends that I write good stuff. It warms me, and keeps me motivated to go home from here (where I have no access to the interwebs), and crawl down into a world that need telling.

Thank you for being fans, for being friends, for trusting me with your money.

shade and sweet water

bd

west of the mountains, WA