SwiftStar

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The Star Tribes series of books has been something of an anomaly for me. The main character is an Arab of Algerian descent, trained as a French chef. The Mbaysey are an entire tribe of women, and they are 85% female, originally (culturally) Nigerian/Igbo.

The villains are generally Persians from the plateau, culturally evolved forward from a science fiction blend of both Shia and Sunni, without either being all that important, so much as the overarching culture. Its the same way that the United States tends to be generically “Christian” in many ways, without getting deeper into Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, or anything else.

At its heart, Star Tribes is about revolution. That’s high in my mind this morning as we wake up from such a celebrations in the US. For many people, overdrinking and playing with high explosives is their definition, but the original meaning is to escape from an overarching monarchical authority and establish freedom to commit oligarchy.

And we have always been an oligarchy in this country, regardless of whatever fan fiction you might have been taught in your US history class. From 1619 to the present day, white males of Christian background were established at the peak of the social and legal pyramid, with white women only really being allowed to vote in 1920. Minorities of various flavors were not even granted birthright citizenship until the middle of the 20th Century or later. Blacks weren’t guaranteed any rights until the mid 60’s and even that has been an uphill battle for them since then.

When I started out writing Daniel, I had him in mind. And Kathra and Ndidi. Daniel and Ndidi really are the heart and soul of the series. Daniel is an outsider who cannot give away the power he had been given, and cannot trust anyone else with it. He actually loses his agency at the beginning of book one, for those of you paying attention, and does not really get it back until then end of book five (MorningStar, coming in August).

The entire arc of the series will see the odds escalating. The price as well. Its Daniel’s story about how he has to come to grips with being a God. You will wander through a bout of serious depression with the man, as well as the all the other things.

At the same time, Ndidi will always be his sister in the soul, and you are starting to see how much that means to her, to him, and to Kathra. She represents the new generation coming up, unattached to the old ways of thinking, and free to pursue an entirely different way of seeing the world.

There will be a scene talking about her glasses. The Anndaing could fix her eyes. Make them perfect. That they aren’t is a measure of how poor the Mbaysey are. Had her eyes been perfect, Ndidi would have been one of Kathra’s pilots, rather than her cook.

She is asked about retaining the glasses. For her, they are her symbol. She sees herself as a symbol that any child of the Mbaysey can rise and overcome whatever limitations are put in front of her, physical or otherwise.

Erin and the others are exceptional specimens of humanity.

Ndidi is extremely nearsighted and almost blind without her glasses. But she is comitatus. And an officer.

SwiftStar is an Ovanii warship. One of the lost ancients who are something of a metaphor for the Vikings of ancient Earth, seen as horrible reavers by the southerners who set the vision of how history saw them. The Ovanii are also where the Mbaysey might go in the future. A path Kathra could take, but more likely her great grandchildren, if they survive free long enough and prosper sufficient to build vast battlefleets that might wander through the uncharted depths of space.

I planned this series late in 2018, and wrote them over the course of 2019, with no expectation that the themes of black women rebelling against a white authority with religious overtones would hit so hard in the middle of 2020. But the themes themselves are universal, and I learned about Kondratieff Cycles in the 1980’s, so I always expected 2020 to be a cultural dumpster fire. (Ask some folks who’ve heard me talk about it in the WAY old days sometime.)

It is even worse than even I imagined but, science fiction is meant to ask “What if…?” even as it addresses cultural and social issues with a coat of body paint to obscure things. Star Tribes does that.

I’ve had folks pissed that I didn’t follow all the standard tropes of Space Opera, but seriously, have you read me? I’m all about sticking it to the man. This man happens to be a Caucasian with Church authority supposedly the foundation of his reign, even as the social elites wallow in a vast cesspool of debauchery that they deny to anyone else.

Sound familiar?

For those of you all caught up, you should preorder SwiftStar now.

For everyone else, it is long past time to expand your mind look at what it means that we will build space empires in the future, and on whose back those chains might live.

The Firehose

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That’s a term we use when we encounter a writer just making the transition out of the old Traditional Publishing mindset and starting to think about going Indie. There is so much to learn that it ends up being something like trying to drink from a firehose.

And it’s not for everyone. I’m not about to stand up here and say that this is the only way to go about your career. Nope. YOU are responsible for your career.

But there are people willing to help.

And a firehose.

Overwhelming, I know. Requires a lot of patience and note taking early on, because the first step is enormous.

In TradPub, you complete a manuscript and then an agent handles everything until somebody buys it. Then you work with an editor who tells you what to change. Book comes out, you get famous.

Or something like that.

Or maybe you you’re sending in short fiction to bigger and bigger periodicals (in terms of pay and prestige). They’ll either take it or they won’t. If not, you keep trying until finally it finds a home or it finds the trunk.

Done.

In Indie, there is so much more you have to know. To learn. To understand. To keep up on, because it will change at some point and what worked today stops working.

Change. We use that term a lot, because the world goes through periodic revolutions, mostly technology-driven.

Thus, the firehose.

Around the various masterminds in which I participate, the goal is to start learning, so that you can move forward.

To be successful is to be a small business owner, and not just a writer. Not everyone wants to do that. Not everyone can. Sometimes you get lucky and have a spouse that can carry some of the load, or at least support the household financially while you try to do your thing.

But you have to commit to learning. New vocabulary. New technology. New world

Completing your manuscript? That’s the first half of the value chain, and the easier part, because in Indie, you get to write the story you want to read. (We’ll leave off those folks writing to market in a segment that they don’t read for pleasure. Won’t work long.)

I like to remind people that I’m not better at any of this, especially when working with a new writer. Just further along the track. But mine will be a different path up the mountain, anyway.

You can do it. That much you need to understand right at the beginning.

It looks like a lot of work, but none of it is so esoteric as to be unknowable. We’re not talking non-Euclidian Geometry, like Lovecraft loved to describe.

You finish the manuscript, then there is a list of questions for you to answer. Different for every writer. Different for every career. Different sometimes every week, but that’s partly the 2020 pandemic speaking.

Andrew Yang posited that we would see 10 years of social development in 10 weeks.

Been 10 weeks. Not done yet. In fact, just about to get worse. Another 10 weeks puts us at Labor Day, the end of Summer traditionally in the US. Now we’re talking about 20 years social development. That’s a whole generation. That’s the world as it existed in 2000. Remember those days?

But that level of change is going to occur before 2021.

If you thought it was a firehose before, it’s about to get worse. We’re about to enter the ugliest, brutalest presidential election in your lifetime. Whoever you are. 1968 is going to be a distant second. A warm evening roasting marshmellows over an open fire.

Watching the news will just fill you with greater dread, as it seems like the whole world is burning down around you. (And I don’t care what your politics are when I say that. Nobody will be immune.)

So, firehose.

Lots to learn. Information coming at you impossibly fast, and changing sometimes weekly.

You will need to surf this. It is a Kondratiev Wave that can be ridden.

Prepare. And breathe.

Everyone is going to be going through the same thing. Old rules that used to work for years are gone in days. Nobody (and I mean nobody, including me) has God’s Truth about what is coming next, so approach any prophet you encounter with a grain of salt and don’t, as Don Henley sang, end up follow the wrong gods home.

My goal in 2020 was always production, even before pandemic. We expected a messy political situation with the drawn out Impeachment and the aftermath. We expected revenge and payback, however that might play out. We expected the summer of 1848, and got 1968 instead, which was worse and its only barely started.

Come fall, everything will step up a notch as the election gets ugly. And it will get ugly. Memorable. Worst anyone will ever remember until someone tops it later, which might end the Republic. (Assuming we survive this one, mind you.)

But people will want to read. They will NEED that escape, because they’ll be facing a firehose of bad news and worse tomorrows.

They expect unemployment to go from 4% in January to 20% by the end of June and that’s with all the jobs that opened up at groceries and for delivery drivers as people stayed home instead of risking exposure and infection from an unknown killer.

So people will have to balance their reduced budget, if they’ve lost one or both household jobs. Maybe they lost health insurance, because the United States capitalist class has fought to the death to not let people escape their control. (How many people do you know have stayed at shitty jobs because the health insurance was pretty good? How many would skip out tomorrow if they could get it universal instead? Nuff said?)

I expected sales to be down all year. Shit happens, but we budgeted for it. Some folks will hit the right zeitgeist, and make bank, but they’ll be the exceptions, not the rules. Others will suddenly find that everything stopped working. All those little tricks and seams that they’d managed to exploit will close or be overloaded with everyone throwing wet spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

So breathe.

Write. You can’t control the world falling in, but you can control how you react to it. How much it gets to disrupt you.

I’ve put two major projects to one side because they were just wrong and too big for me to handle, on top of just writing. But I’m still writing. You can do the same.

Carve out the time. Writers write. That’s it. If you want to be a writer, you write.

For me (and many others I know) it is the drug itself. The writing high. If you have it, I don’t need to explain. If you don’t, maybe you need to rethink what you want out of life and 2020.

You cannot control the world. Even less so today than you once could, so don’t let it get you down. Understand that all this bad information is a firehose, and go back to when you first looked at Indie writing and decided to jump in.

If you’re at that point of just wanting to dabble, don’t lose heart. Everything everyone tells you will feel wrong, because we suddenly all are. No lies. Shit’s changed and we’re all flailing a little.

But you breathe and you write, because you are an artist, and the world needs your art.

Moreso now that ever, because the world feels like it is falling apart and everyone wants an escape. So commit art.

Understand that you’re facing an firehose of negativity today, like you did information then.

Writing never changes. The tools get easier, is all. The genres that are white hot change, but if you write what you love, you will find your audience. They’ll find you.

Each of you will think of the other as a life preserver in rough seas, and you can make it.

20 weeks. 20 years.

An entire generation of change happening in real time as you watch. A few will exploit it. A bunch will drown under it.

You need to surf it.

Breathe.

Relax.

Focus.

Surf’s up.

On Becoming

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So for as long as I can remember (at least 35 years, probably longer), I have generally sat down in June and reinvented myself. As I explain to others, I become someone else. This keeps me from getting stodgy and set in my ways. (And, mind you, I was doing this long before I met the Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and her Anti-Stodgy Campaign.)

Took several years, back in the 80s, to understand the why of the timing, but I finally realized that it had to do with the end of the spring semester and the start of summer. For example, I graduated high school at the end of my junior year (long story) in mid-May and then immediately turned around two weeks later and started college, taking two classes over the summer. (Speech, which blah, and Intro to Geography, which altered the course of my life. Thanks, Dr. Broadway.)

It was always a time to reassess. I didn’t take summers off in college, taking at least one and maybe two classes. The deal I made with the parents was that I would finish. Not when, not where, not how. Took me 3.5 years, with a double major (Philosophy/Epistemology & PolSci/Intl Relations, plus a minor in Geography). 144 credit hours when I needed 120.

To survive the other insanities in my life, I regularly became someone new. You make a list of all the things you are doing. All the things you are interested in, hobbies, habits, whatever. To add 1-2 new ones, you toss 1-2 out the airlock and be done with them.

It’s a cruel thing, especially when some of the things you get rid of turn out to be toxic. Because then you have to rid yourself of the toxic people that came with it. I did this by consciously forgetting a LOT of things. For everyone’s benefit in the long run, let me tell you.

So it’s June. Had come to a tangle in the road and needed to clear it. Gordian Knot, as it were, was the best approach. Again, brutal, but liberating.

Couple of new things, one of which I’ll talk about now, but not really explain until later (or I’d be here all day talking).

I’m 51. (Well, next week, but you get the picture.) I’m getting old. Need to focus on staying limber and mobile, because that’s really the key to a long life. I do shower yoga every morning. Stretching a variety of ways while standing there, in order to loosen things up.

Recently, I’ve added new stretches as part of the new me. Today, I added a new workout. Old one, but something I have fallen off of.

My usual routine is to get up, fix myself breakfast, check the news online, and the write for several hours. I do that 28+ days per month. It works.

But it’s summer. Time to change somethings up.

English King Richard II (1377-1399) passed a law (cite: “Feasts and fasts, an essay on the laws relating to Sundays and other holidays and days of fasting. Edward Vansittart Neale January 1, 1845″)

“In the reign of Richard the Second a law , which , however , seems to have been more of a political than of a religious character , prescribes to servants of husbandry and artificers the use of bows and arrows on Sundays and holidays ; enjoining such to “leave playing at tennis, or football, cartes, dice, casting of the stone, and other importune. games; ” and an act of Henry the Fourth enforced the observance of this law under the penalty of six days’ imprisonment.”

It was eventually repealed, but was on the books for centuries.

This morning, I got up and went out to breakfast. Only person there when they opened. Seated way off by myself when others got there.

Then I went to the gun range where I belong, with the compound bow. Spent a goodly amount of time just firing arrows at the 20 yard target, getting my muscles loose and and figuring out how far the sites had drifted in the epoch since I last went shooting. Stopped when I started to hurt. Will need time to build up muscles, as well as recover muscle memory.

This will become my Tuesday morning tradition for now. Got home and cleaned up. Put everything away. Started writing this blog post, mostly because in the last two weeks, I had to become someone new. The wife just laughs, but she’s been through this with me several times.

Gets me further down the road.

What are you doing to keep yourself young?

Militant Lesbian Tree Octopus Sorceress

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Akahana (Japanese, Feminine): “Red Rose/Beautiful Flower”

So I had this idea for a character in a fantasy setting based on the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) who had been a familiar summoned by some wizard, but who had somehow managed to survive when he got killed.

I grew up playing D&D in the WAY old days. (Celebrating 40 years in 2021, for example) When a wizard had a familiar, it was always a risk, because they were easy to kill and could seriously hurt the wizard that they were bonded to. (Those rules got made much less painful in 5th ed, in case you were wondering.)

Then we had this running joke about a powerful magic item shaped like a brandy snifter and holding a goldfish. As a familiar. Weird and a little silly, but you get really bored, running the same combat dwarf, archer elf, or paladin human after all while, so you have to branch out and really go for the gusto with crazy roleplay ideas. (Ask my friends about some of the weird shit I’ve pulled over the years and campaign, okay?)

Except that the joke evolved, and the question was if the goldfish was really a god, and the character would become the familiar responsible for carrying him all over the place so he could do things on our world.

Put those two together and you have some serious silliness (not an oxymoron, by the way).

So I wrote about this tree octopus sorceress. Militant lesbian, of course, because when an octopus female mates, she lays eggs, protects them for several months while starving herself, and then dies. Screw that, Akahana was going to live forever.

But she had a problem. Somehow, all the evil had been ripped out of her soul somewhere along the way when her summoner died, and now she was kinda good. Whoops. So the goldfish god sent her on a quest, mostly to learn about herself, but also to help others.

One thing turned into another, and she ends up doing more favors for the guy, and growing in power and understanding about herself. Got three stories so far and thinking about a fourth soon.

———-

The Akahana stories let me explore some of the common tropes of Western European/Tolkienesque fantasy as the 20th Century really shaped it. (Dungeons and Dragons straight up steals whole chapters from JRRT and files off just enough serial numbers so as to not get sued.)

What is magic? What is evil? What things appear innocent on the surface of things, but underneath are really kinda icky, but we don’t talk about it or deal with it in polite company.

But my militant lesbian tree octopus sorceress can have frank conversations in between blasting seagulls and chipmunks on one hand, and saving the world on the other.

It is a radically different take on the genre, but hey, have you met me? Never write straight down the rails, because EVERYBODY does that, and it gets stale.

So I invite everyone to enjoy some silliness. I just put the first three Akahana stories up on my webstore. #3 is otherwise only available in an anthology that came out a while ago, and I know how many people actually bought copies, so most of you haven’t read it.

This is your chance to upend modern sword and sorcery fantasy, and really have some fun, while still dealing with some amazingly deep and complicated questions.

Y’all have fun, and maybe buy some other books while you’re there. Every little bit helps.

Death in fiction

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So I tend to write in a lot of genres, but a common, overall theme is adventure. One of the things about adventure writing is that everybody doesn’t have to be murder-hobos. I watch too many movies where they seem to measure the gravitas of things by the body count. And heroes aren’t really heroes in the classic because they calmly go about killing everybody they run into without mussing their hair or tearing a seam. Or even feeling especially bad for having a running firefight on a crowded street.

“Richard Stark” taught me a much different way to approach things with Parker. (I’ve read a number of those books, but not all, because nobody ever gets rid of them at a used bookstore and I’m WAY too cheap to pay the sorts of prices that TradPub thinks they can get for a series of books that are older than I am. First pub 1968, by the way.)

Parker lived by a different code in a different era, even though he could be a son of a bitch. From Wikipedia: “A ruthless career criminal, Parker has almost no traditional redeeming qualities, aside from efficiency and professionalism. Parker is callous, meticulous, and perfectly willing to commit murder if he deems it necessary. He does, however, live by one ethical principle: he will not double-cross another professional criminal with whom he is working, unless they try to double-cross him. Should that happen, Parker will unhesitatingly undertake to exact a thorough and brutal revenge.”

In one book, he gets the drop on a man who might report him and undo everything that he’s just managed to do to get even with the people who set him up. Parker points the gun at the guy and directs him to drive. In modern books or movies, the driver of course lunges at the hero at some point, they have a fight, and the npc gets killed. Or forces the hero to shoot him in self-defense.

Parker pulls to the side of the road when he gets where he’s going and gets out, telling the guy to keep driving and forget all this. Minor character, completely irrelevant to the overall plot, but neither Parker nor Westlake see the need to kill him casually or callously. The driver just left and that was that.

I have written some bad characters. And some good characters doing bad things. I try to remember that it is not necessary to kill every peon NPC that you run across. They can run away. They can go home at night. They can live.

Similarly, in the movie The Town (Ben Affleck, 2010), there is a scene where Affleck’s gang are getting away, dressed as nuns with masks. They come around a corner and park the getaway car as they are about to escape and there’s a cop, sitting there in his patrol car, eating a sandwich. One man with a pistol, against four guys with assault rifles and the drop.

What does he do?

The cop very obviously turns his head the other way and watches the scenery, pointedly ignoring the criminals.

They don’t kill him. Everyone recognizes what would have happened had the cop gotten stupid, so he doesn’t. Honor among thieves, sort of, but the man got to go home to his family that night, instead of dying pointlessly.

I’m writing a novel now with a villain who’s not a scenery-chewing sadist. Just a dude, doing what he thinks it right within a fairly twisted cultural matrix. (Soviet Central Asia, 1938, Samarkand, Uzbekistan.) The hero and his sidekick would both kill the guy if they had to, but I’m struck by the realization that everyone might actually get out of this one alive, because nobody has gone to that step where everyone has to go murder hobo.

I wonder what we as a culture have lost over the last however long, that just defeating the villain and throwing him in jail is no longer enough, like it was in the comic books when I was a kid. You can no longer just stop the supervillain from poisoning the reservoir. You must execute him in gory detail to keep him from ever trying again.

We have lost the concept of human redemption, in reducing everything to simply black and white.

Parker was all about gray. I try to keep that in mind when writing Finn, Duff, or Rob. Yasmin. Brannon. Any of the others.

I used to say “they can’t beat me, they can only kill me, and that is an admission on their part that they cannot beat me.” We don’t do that.

Batman in the old days never killed, Michael Keaton notwithstanding. Why is it acceptable now?

What do we need to change so that we can return to the Golden Age where we could defeat someone, and then give them the chance to be redeemed?

A dead man is just dead. He cannot be redeemed. Ever.

What have we become?

SeptStar

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In about a week, the third Star Tribes book drops. SeptStar. This one was probably my favorite of the five to write, because you’ll get to meet the Anndaing (“ahn-DAH-ing”). If humans evolved from an arboreal tree shrew, the Anndaing started as hammerhead sharks.

Seriously. Sharkskin. That mobile hammer made of cartilage with eyes at either end. Fins that end in five fingers and a thumb. They count in a base-12 system, so everything is in zwolfs. Crence Miray was a joy because his favorite curse word is some variant of “tunashit.”

Everything about a new species/culture in a space opera should be different. I’ve bitched before about cheap special effects. That’s fine in a television show, where you can’t expect them to spend stupid amounts of money every week. Movies can like that, too, depending.

But you have no excuse to only make a standard model erect biped when writing Space Opera. Doc Smith taught me that one early on, with classifications that started at AAAAA and went down to ZZZZZ to distinguish various species. We’re leave off the specism, because he was writing in a different era, and had non-human heroes that were just as important as the human ones Worzel, Nadrek, and Tregonsee really got me to dreaming about just how weird I could get as a writer. (And when the Lazarus books come out next year, you’ll see just how weird I could get when I challenged myself.)

So when I came up with the Anndaing Merchants Guild and Merchants Bank, I had to get crazy, and fun. New culture. New language. New everything. They aren’t going to be humans with paint or nasal prosthetics. They don’t have to be.

If you’ve ever read any of my books, you’ll also know that sticking it to the man is a central theme. Fiction about chosen ones bores me to tears and book-tossing. I prefer the aesthetic of ‘punk. Any ‘punk. People rising up against an evil (or at least overbearing) empire that thwarts people.

There are no successful empires in human history. Read that again.

All of them fail. Fall. Disappear. The big ones get remembered. The important ones influence the future for good or ill. Think of the Greeks and Romans, and their impact on Western Europe (and thus the world). Or ancient Persian and everything they did. Mohammed and his social descendants. China is a record of new dynasties replacing old ones, time and again, but they have maintained a steady bureaucracy over that time. It’s only the new emperors who decide to erase predecessors, one way or another.

So SeptStar is the middle of the Star Tribes. The turning point. It also lets me introduce the Ovanii as well as the Anndaing. Sharp readers will see the Norse/Vikings in the Ovanii, as they really were, rather than how medieval Irish monks wanted them portrayed. They were culturally advanced compared to the Dark Ages. Socially advanced. Marauders, but they saw much of the world around them as backwards barbarians, rather than the other way around. It was only in the war of press releases that they lost, but even then they formed an important element in European history.

So with this novel we’re going to go meet someone that might be powerful enough to actually argue with the Sept Empire. The Anndaing Merchants Guild. And the Ovanii, but that’s later and even more fun.

The second half of the series lets me also ruminate on those arcs of empire I mentioned above. How do they fail? Why? even When?

Not many of you probably know that my undergraduate work included both political science (mostly military/international theory) and a separate and unrelated major in philosophy (generally epistemology) . Plus I read a crap ton of history even today.

I went on a grad school trip to the Soviet Union in 1991 and took the then-new Fagles translation of The Iliad (in hardcover, still on my shelf) to read, because Professor Anthony Guthyel had such a huge impact on my thinking about such things in my Origins of Western Literature (E101) class as an undergrad.

Empires, including the Sept.

Plus, now that you’ve met Amirin Pasdar and Hadi Rostami I can talk about the nature of evil. Every character is the hero of their own story. Very few set out to be villains, but many end up there.

It is all a matter of perspective. Pasdar and Rostami are going to talk about many things, including evil, because it is a topic worth exploring. When is an action evil and when it is righteous? That’s seriously the theme, starting with SeptStar and running through SwiftStar and finally into MorningStar. Hopefully, I will spur you to thinking deeper thoughts about such things.

So make sure you have your preorders in and I hope you will enjoy this amazing ride. (And yes, MorningStar does leave it open to keep going later if I want, but you have to get there.)

===================

Lemme end by wondering out loud about the one guy who was apparently quite upset that I didn’t kill Daniel and everyone else at the end of book two (of five). Seriously? Apparently, the only way to get a good rating there was to kill my main character. And I quote: “The narrative was entertaining until it moved into an overuse cliche ending. At that point I was hoping the main character would ride his vehicle into the sun. No such luck.”

The hero surviving is cliche? What do you normally read?

Other folks could help out here by adding some nicer reviews. I figure he’s the guy that read every book in the Longshot Hypothesis series and kept leaving bad reviews because he didn’t like them. EVERY BOOK. (shaking my head at some people.)

 

What “verb” is your cover?

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So I’ve been having conversations with a variety of folks recently about covers and cover art. Part of the Milestone Indie Publishing Newsletter going out in a couple of weeks contains some of these thoughts, but that one is largely focused on the art itself, so I wanted to address writers now instead.

My recent complaint has been about covers where the image is a person just standing there. Might be utterly gorgeous art, but it has no verb. Just a collection of nouns.

[What the hell is he babbling about now?]

Six people standing around. Period costume indicating a specific genre. I’m not going to pick on anyone, because I’ve seen it in Alternative History, Steampunk, Fantasy, and 20th Century.

Six people. Standing around. Or three. Whatever. The key is standing around. Not doing anything.

No verb.

Another example I see frequently is something like a woman’s portrait. Gorgeous face in a reasonable close-up. Amazing detail in the hair and skin. Wearing some sort of top that’s either black or dark blue. Gold necklace hanging from a chain. Visible from about the sternum north. Sedate background with no details.

What genre is that? I can never tell. And I look for those sorts of things, with some level of experience picking out the little details like font and color that should tell me.

[Yeah? And?]

So you have to hook a new reader in about a half a second. That’s it. What does your cover convey in that flash of recognition? Six people standing around does not suggest to me an action-packed, car-chase kind of adventure. More like a Tolstoy novel about multi-generational, dystopian families that goes on forever without really accomplishing much except curing insomnia.

Most of your readers do not suffer from insomnia. They want the car chases.

Normally, I’d be fine with the rest of you putting out boring covers, because that increases my odds of selling instead, but too much of a bad thing recently has given me indigestion. They won’t want to buy a book with a boring cover and will gravitate towards one with actions.

With verbs.

What verb is your cover? Nouns are lovely. MFA programs teach you to use them like scalpels, spending years seeking just the perfect word to convey the exact level of navel-gazing ennui involved in the story.

I want car chases. Firefights. X-wings strafing the surface of the Death Star. Tommy guns blazing in a gangster shootout. Cowboys at high noon.

I want a book that grabs me by the lapels and drags me to the bottom of the lake and holds me there until I realize that it’s Two in the morning and I should have probably gone to bed three hours ago.

Your cover is the thing that does that. Or should. Nobody will read the words inside until the cover gets their attention and causes them to look closer. To open a new window (or maybe pull a book down from the shelf) and read the title and then the blurb.

They see the cover out of the corner of their eye somewhere. Maybe scrolling through social media. Or on an also-bought carousel. Or a “you might like” list.

Nobody reads those. They skim them looking for something to jump out at their unconscious mind and snap its fingers.

Covers with verbs. Standing around is technically a verb, but not one you’re going to make much money from. How much excitement does your cover promise?

I don’t care how pretty it is.  Seriously. I know fantastic artists.

Go think about that book that MADE you open up a new window so you could look closer. I’m not talking about the latest media craze that TrabPub has decided you have to read. I mean one you stumbled over accidentally. A new author you’d never read before. (Or the first of my covers that got you to read something I wrote.)

Actiony. Colorful, too, in an era when a lot of SF has gone “sepia realism” in bad ways.

Dramatic.

You writers can learn how to have good covers, but you need to stop and take off your artist hat. Lots of nouns on your cover won’t sell books. Verbs do.

What verb is your cover?

What are you selling me? Excitement so intense I need a cigarette afterwards, or period-accurate boredom? That’s your choice, but the difference will sell a lot of books.

Using the Amazon Pulse

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So it comes up from time to time, but not everyone hears it, or remembers it.

There are regular and generally accepted “rumors” that publishing on Amazon on a regular rate (“The Pulse”) helps with your overall author ranking, as well as your placement of books in “Also bought” and “You might like” as a way to reward regular product. (And books are just another product on Amazon.)

If you publish something in a genre (preferably in a series) every 30 days, you will get rewarded by the robots in control. I drop something on the 10th of every month. Sometimes more than one thing, depending on writing and editing speed. I have seen the rewards.

There also purports to be a slower pulse, running every 60 days, as well as another one ever 90 days, but my understanding is that they step down in effectiveness quite a bit.

How can you take advantage of this?

Some of you write a lot of short fiction, while others are into novels. If you write short, consider putting together a series character and dropping a new mystery/case every month. In my case, I write science fiction, and tend to write shorts that are parts of a much longer novel, but are not just serialized. Instead, I tell each little piece self-contained as a short story and then will assemble them when I have at least 40,000 words and bring some section of a story to rest.

My Patrons got the first seven stories of Yasmin of the Desert in April. (Technically, they were only supposed to get the first three, but I screwed up and sent the wrong file, so when they noticed I sent them a new novella for May and will find something for June.) Those seven stories will be “Volume/Book One” when I get there. I’v already written #8 and will get through a bunch more over the next year.

If you write novels, my suggestion is that you take a few days a month and dedicate them to some short fiction. Seriously. I appreciate that I write at crazy fast speeds compared to many writers, but I also know several folks who make me look like a slacker. 3-5,000 words will reward you, and you should be able to do that, if you really want to be a writer. (I cannot want this more than you do.

Write a short story every month. Put it up for $0.99. Put them into a collection later, or edit them into a whole novel so you can resell the whole thing, or let people have paper copies.

Why?

The pulse will boost you as an author. I don’t do much advertising on Amazon. Instead, I let the machines put me in front of people. If you get on the pulse, Amazon also sends out email reminders to your fans fairly regularly, letting them know you have a new book and “here’s a link to buy it!”

Free advertising, targeting people who are already following you on Amazon. $0.99 short stories won’t make you rich, but as you build your catalog, it will hook new fans. Especially if you are telling a whole long arc of stories about a character or group. They will get invested. And want to give you money.

I hear regular conversations that people tell me that they cannot get any traction unless they spend a lot of money on advertising. It might work. It might not. I built a lot of my success on the pulse instead of the ad spend, so I wanted to give everyone else options they maybe didn’t know about.

It doesn’t have to be a novel every month. In fact, I’m hoping someone sets down to prove me wrong and writes a twelve-short arc and drops them every month for a year. I’d love to hear your results. And hopefully, you end up with more things generating money.

No book is going to make you rich in the modern age of publishing. Traditionally-published books are dropping zeroes of the back of an advance from 20 years ago. Chances are that you will not be the next JK Rowling or Susan Collins.

Instead, you want to create an entire catalog of books, each earning nickels and providing new entry points for people to become fans.

Let Amazon do the work for you, and then find all the ways you can turn a handful of short stories into more revenue streams by collecting them later.

You can beat the machine.

SeekerStar

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Hopefully, everyone enjoyed WinterStar. Just sent the final manuscript for MorningStar to the Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) last night and I believe it is in the publishing process everywhere as we speak.

In between, you got some time.

  1. WinterStar
  2. SeekerStar
  3. SeptStar
  4. SwiftStar
  5. MorningStar

SeekerStar comes out this weekend (technically Mother’s Day so maybe you need to get Mom hooked on some awesome space opera with something other than your NW Euromale protagonists. Next month, we’ll talk about Hammerhead Sharks, so stay tuned.)

I’ve been consciously working in writing fiction that doesn’t follow the standard white northwest European male archetypes, because you know you are in a Blaze Ward novel when someone it sticking it to the Man. Right now, that’s literary publishing. Technically, there are only two Anglos in the entire series, both of who are largely walk-on parts.

In this series, Daniel largely sacrifices his agency at the beginning of WinterStar, and then works hard at not doing things, because he had the power to alter the universe. And a fear of turning to evil, because NOBODY can stop him.

Agency and evil are my themes here, because in my sordid and semi-troubled youth I embraced evil.

I know people say that, but most of them just dye their hair and act tough. I actually destroyed people. Emotionally. Psychologically. Not anything I’m particularly proud of, other than to say it was necessary in one case, because someone I knew was using her power for even more chaotic evil purposes. So I rendered her harmless. What happened after that was her choice, but she’s gone now and the world ended up a better place.

So “I understand evil, Mistress. I’ve been evil.”

Daniel has the power to do anything he wants to the people around him. And he chooses to hand his agency over to someone else (Kathra, Erin, Ndidi, Iruoma) that he believes they will do better with it, because nobody but him can wield the power, but everyone else will do bad things with it.

The series, like most, is about family of choice over family of birth. Blood is thicker than water, after all, if you understand what that phrase really means. It’s also about power and evil.

There’s a good stretch in the middle where it also talks about depression, because I went through a (thankfully-rare-and-relatively-short) depressive stretch when I was writing it, so Daniel could talk about things.

It was cathartic. It was good.

I’m pleased with the arc of the series. I’m a better storyteller now than I was several years ago, so I can tell more complicated stories, with more shaded characters, and still keep it interesting and rush you through the book. My brother in law bitches that he sits down to read “just one more chapter” and suddenly it’s two in the morning.

That’s good.

You should preorder SeekerStar to see how things unfold now that the Sept have decided to do something about Daniel, Kathra, and the Star Turtle. You won’t believe where it goes.

🙂

“Modern” Indie Publishing

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So I have a patreon. And on the second of the month, I send out something to my people. Last month, what I was SUPPOSED to send out was the first three Yasmin of the Desert stories. Then this month I would follow up with 4&5, and in June they would get 6&7. 8 is done, but I needed time to catch up. Plus 1-7 is a novel-length collection that will come out one of these days.

All well and good.

Except that when I uploaded last month to bookfunnel, I grabbed the wrong file. The 7 file and not the 3 file.

Whoops.

Got an email from a confused patron a little while ago asking what he had screwed up. Wasn’t him. Grabbed the file down and opened it and “well, shit…”

Fortunately, I write a lot. So I sent everyone an apology email.

Looked around and flipped a coin in my head for what I would send out instead. Like I said, deep trunk to select things from.

The goal in 2019 was 20 novels. (Novel being single arc of story 40,000+ words). Did that. Most of them have not come out yet. Last December, was in Minneapolis visiting family and staying in a hotel. I write. That’s what I do. Started a story, but damnit this was NOT going to be the 21st novel, so I deliberately chopped it at 18,000 words. Nice solid novella as an origin story for a 1970s hero in a new genre we’re going to call Discopunk.

I had even done a cover for it, back when I was teaching myself such things under the tutelage of the Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) and it’s not half-bad.

So I hopped up from my leisure, grabbed the Mac, and got to work.

I love vellum. Import a word file. Import a front-matter doc that is already set up. Tweak a few things. Fill out the title information. Add the cover file. Tell it to format the document into epub, mobi, kobo, iBooks, and print.

And done. Pretty, too.

Then I uploaded it to Bookfunnel and got a new download link for my patrons.

Sent them a second apology email with the background of the story and the new download link, and looked up at the clock.

The first email had hit my box at 17:02. I hit send on on the replacement email at 17:38.

Raw docx file formatted, generated, uploaded, and delivered to my patrons in just under 45 minutes, and I wasn’t even pushing that hard.

That’s what I’m talking about, when I tell folks that the tools these days are THAT EASY. There is an investment in time, hardware, and prep, but once those are sunks costs, the rest is easy.

That’s how I can afford to do Boundary Shock Quarterly or Blaze Ward Presents. Or just put books up on my website shop for cheap so people can give me money instead of giving it to the 900 pound books gorilla.

So that was how I spent the last hour of my Sunday night. Might yet get around to watching a silly movie, but right now, I’m going back to goofing off.

How are you taking advantage of the tools of modern publishing?

🙂