A reminder for folks who might have missed it in other place: Sometime early next year (Q1-ish), the plan is to start selling certain short fiction directly from my website, rather than out on the major distributors. There are lots of reasons, but primarily, I don’t sell a lot of short fiction, even when I bundle it up in Beyond The Mirror collections. (Trust me, I run those numbers and nobody buys them.)
Plus, if I sell it elsewhere for $0.99, I make about 26 cents.
So I plan to make sure people are drawn in to the website to read things that you will not be able to buy anywhere else. That exclusive part is the key. Right now, I’m planning to put up a new story every month on www.blazeward.com. This is in addition to the short fiction and other stuff that goes to my Patreon people long before anybody else sees it. Throw in the Boundary Shock Quarterly stories and the Blaze Ward Presents stuff and I figure to write about 36 short-ish stories next year, in addition to the 14 novels I have planned.
So there will be stuff you can only get here. Right now, I think that we’ll start with Kumiko. You might have read the first Kumiko story in Boundary Shock, but I have a longer story for her, part of a whole series. Along the way, I wrote origins short stories for five people I plan to introduce. Here are the first two covers: Dancer and Shirabyoshi
I already have all seven covers done, so you’ll start seeing them by next summer. I also have Ollie, Yasmin, Farouk, and others that will be coming out.
Why am I doing this? Simple enough. Places that are the heart of social media right now are going to fail. Facebook is declining as more and more people turn off their accounts and move elsewhere. (When was the last time you logged into your MySpace account, anyway?)
For creatives, we’ll lose that central marketplace of ideas and potential fans, so I need to start training people now that they need to come to my website every month in order to find new fiction. That will get them into the habit.
There will be the new novel for sale every month, and if you follow me on places like Amazon they should send you a reminder. You should also sign up for blog posts directly in your email, rather than however you get them now for the same reason.
The world is fragmenting. This is a good thing in general, because some things have gone desperately wrong, and the market turning against bad players will cause them to course-correct.
But Indie artists like me suffer when we lose the ability to reach a number of new fans quickly because one of you shared something I wrote. (Feel free to forward this email to your friends like you did in the old days before social media sharing. It helps.)
So that’s the plan. If you are a cover artist or in need, I am starting a newsletter in january that will deal with all sorts of things in publishing, two of which helped me create those two ebook covers above in under an hour combined, and I don’t use anything by Adobe. Yes, you read that right. No more Adobe. Really cool covers for ebooks done pretty damned quick. And hopefully the folks involved are working on print-book covers as well. Had a chat with them and provided some specifications, so fingers crossed.
But that’s my news today.
Happy Turkey Massacres to all the US folks celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow. I’m going home in a few hours and making blueberry poptarts from scratch for one of the desserts. We also have pumpkin and pecan pie. Homemade dulce d’leche. Spatchcocking a chicken and having scratch-made stuffing. (Handmade cassava root bread. Homemade sausage. Etc.)
Gonna be a nice quiet weekend. Should finish the lastest novel by Saturday, and then on to #20 to round out the year.
What traditions do you have for the holidays?