Tag: publishing

Quick question

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing6 Comments

Anybody know anything about Kindle Direct Publishing?  Any recommendations?

ANNOUNCEMENT!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Writing5 Comments

SunplusWanna do me a favor?

I’m looking for beta readers– at least a couple, but a few more is fine– for my novel Skylights, due to be self-published in ebook form in June.  It’s already in pretty good shape, but it wants for one more pass before I push it out to the universe and I figure I might as well have a couple of other folks take a critical eye to it before I release it into the world.

Specifically:  Skylights is a roughly 100,000 word novel (over 400 pages in traditional paperback size) about the first few human missions to Mars.  I’m looking for people who enjoy science fiction, but don’t feel like you have to have everything Heinlein wrote memorized or anything.  I’m asking you to commit to getting the novel read and some sort of written critique (a couple of pages, maybe, and if you like more is fine?) back to me within a reasonable time frame– say, by the last week of April.  For this I will thank you in the novel itself; I’m not actually offering any real compensation.  I don’t need line edits or anything like that; my wife is a former editor and the manuscript should still be awfully clean, although if you find something and want to point it out that’s fine; I’m mostly looking for story-level critiques.

I’m planning on sending out .PDF files, but if you’d like it in some other format we can figure that out.

Interested?  Let me know in comments.  I don’t have any particular ideas for who I want but folks whose names I recognize are a bit more likely to be chosen if for some reason I end up with a ton of volunteers.

Thanks!

Ebook panic of the day and some school notes

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, Writing2 Comments

Yesterday I signed up for a Kindle Direct Publishing account at Amazon; when the book goes live it’ll be at Amazon first and then I’ll try and get it up at B&N and iBooks and everywhere else.  Before I do that, though, I need to make a couple of decisions: one relatively inconsequential, and one a pretty big deal.

Inconsequential:  The collection itself is going to be called The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1.  It’s the stories inside that I’m wondering about.  As it stands now, they’re named numerically, and numerically they’re out of chronological order– they’re just numbered in the order I’ve written them.  Two, notably, isn’t finished, and two has the potential to be much longer than the others– it may, in fact, be a novel.  I’m currently thinking that the first volume will contain at least four stories:  BA 1, 3, 4, and 5, possibly also 6 if I’m able to get it written in the next week or two.  1, 3, and 4 together are about the length of 5, so toss in a brief foreword and we’re looking at around 30K words for the entire collection, for, I think, $1.99.

At any rate, I like the numbering scheme for the stories, but it may prove confusing, especially if I envision a world where I continue to write these things, and BA 2 ends up being in volume 4 along with stories 6, 8, and 12, only none of them are in chronological order.  Seems potentially troublesome.  So I need to come up with names for these things.  This isn’t really a problem, I just suck at names.  But it’s fixable.

A bigger problem is the cover.  The cover, for obvious reasons, is huge for casual sales.  I can handle the basic typography bit myself and between me and my former newspaper editor wife I think I can manage to avoid any major rookie mistakes like putting the title of my book in Comic Sans or Papyrus or something like that.

No, the real trouble is the image.  It’s a sci-fi book, so finding something I can just take a picture of is effectively impossible even if I were a talented photographer, which I’m not.  I considered using some sort of public domain nebula picture from NASA or something, but the problem is that while a star field would communicate the idea “science fiction” fairly effectively it’s not going to be an especially striking image, especially when boiled down to a small Amazon thumbnail, and it would be pretty generic, too.

Then I thought about something like this.  Recognize these?

Unknown300px-Rebel_Alliance_logo.svg
Maybe you do, maybe you don’t, but they’re the symbols for the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance, respectively, from Star Wars.  The Benevolence Archives are heavily influenced, by design, by Star Wars; I just hope I’ve differentiated myself enough that we’re clearly in “homage” territory and not “ripoff.”

But I’m thinking if I can come up with a stark-looking, black-and-white symbol for the Benevolence, and put that image on a textured background along with my title and author information… that just might work.  Something simple and instantly memorable, and hopefully not outside my meager skills as an artist.

I just need to, uh, come up with something.  I have an idea in mind but I haven’t tried to actually put it together either on paper or in a graphics program yet.  We’ll see how it goes.

—————-

Quick Jihad note:  I’ll dig up the link later, but you might remember that he came back from his expulsion and promptly got suspended for three days after lunch, not even making it half a day.  He returned on Friday of last week, made it through the entire day, then didn’t even make it to first period on Monday (yesterday) before getting suspended again.  At this point Mom is being strongly encouraged to withdraw him before we expel him again, which will be happening the next time we see him in the office for any reason.  I’d give him one more day, the way things have been going.

In which I demand answers to important questions

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Writing13 Comments

author1-small

I’m going to find out in about three weeks– “by February 21,” the website says– if I got that teacher creativity grant I applied for.  You may remember me talking about this; my grant basically boiled down to “give me money so that I can write this summer instead of working,” except, hopefully, a bit more compelling.

This is no secret– if I could quit my day job and do whatever I wanted, I’d write.  And getting paid ten grand to sit down and write a novel would be amazing.  There have been periods in my life– I’m in the midst of one of them now– where I was writing fairly intensively and periods where I was writing very little, and without exception I have always been happier when I was writing a lot.  I can handle writing nonfiction easily; witness, oh, about 315 of the posts on this blog, daily or damn close to it for the last six months.  Fiction is like pulling teeth.  There’s nothing like the feeling of finishing a story; the process of writing a story is pure pain.  I remember seeing Richard Bach say once that he was only able to write fiction when the pain of not writing fiction became greater than the pain of writing fiction.  Which is a fun way of thinking about it.  Of course, Richard Bach also said this:

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.

…so maybe I ought to shut up and just write fiction instead of complaining about how hard it is.

I don’t know how many of you stuck it out through all eight or nine or however many parts there were of The Benevolence Archives 5.  Maybe starting with the fifth story wasn’t the brightest idea I ever had, but it at least convinced me to finish it, which is why I put the first part up in the first place.  The installments are averaging eight to twelve Likes each, which isn’t as many as I generally pick up on posts, but that doesn’t bug me much; not everybody comes to WordPress to read fiction– I’ve skipped over short stories myself on any number of blog posts, so wtvr– and even those who like to read short stories aren’t always into science fiction.  If those Likes are evidence that anyone at all is reading it, I’m gonna take that as a win.  Then again, there are already (checks) nine Likes on the post previous to this one, which basically just says hey this isn’t a post but maybe there will be one later, so maybe y’all just click on stuff sometimes.  I dunno.

So… (deep breath) serious question:  Let’s say, hypothetically, that I knock BA5 out of first-draft status (which I’m gonna do anyway), bundle it with three of the other four stories (one’s not done, because I realized I needed to write this one first) and then put it up somewhere as an ebook, for, say, like, $2.

If, hypothetically, I were to do that, is there anybody out there who would be willing to buy it?  Hypothetically, of course.

Just wondering.