GUEST POST: Messing with a Good Thing, by Adam Dreece

On March 20, 2016March 15, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

Sunday. I am likely tired and crabby by now, and it’s the last day of the con. I cannot emphasize enough how much you need to drive to Chicago and come see me RIGHT NOW. Do it. I have to drive home tonight and I need entertaining stories to keep me awake.

Today: Indie author extraordinaire Adam Dreece!

Firstly, thanks to Luther for letting me guest post today. We’ve been friends for going on two years thanks to Twitter, and I hope we get to meet in person sooner rather than later.

Now, how about some “Messing with a good thing.”

When I told a friend of mine that I was writing The Man of Cloud 9, and how it wasn’t for the same audience as my series, The Yellow Hoods, he shook his head.

Phil has written a lot of books, and a few of his books have sold over 100,000 copies. He’s traditionally published for the most part, though he has some indie things, like an anthology with a few other authors, which has sold ‘only’ about 30,000 copies or so. Compared to him, when it comes to sales, I’m still thinking about writing.

So when I told him that I was writing a science-fiction novel that didn’t have any young characters, that it was ‘classic science-fiction’, he asked me, “Why? You already have an audience. You’re at an early point in your writing career, you should build that, not divide it.”

Since April 2014, I’ve released four novels and a novelette in my steampunk-meets-fairy tale world. The layered style of writing has been a hit with kids 9-15 and adults (usually over age 28). I’ve been building up my newsletter, and sharing goodies there that give me a very high open rate. So why-why-why-why, why would I not just keep feeding that group? Well, from my perspective, I sort of am.

I don’t want to be known as only “The Steampunk Fairy Tale Guy.” I want to be known as “A Great YA author.” An author you can trust for a great read that won’t leave you feeling like an emotional train-wreck, or bring graphic violence or sex into the story. I’ll bring you right up to the border of YA, I’ll make reference to things, I’ll infer things, but there’s a line that I won’t cross. I’ll be the ‘mature adult’ author who stepped over the line to YA, rather than someone who writes children’s stories with an edge or two.

Along this line of thinking, I started writing The Wizard Killer several months ago. It’s a serial that I publish every week (while it’s in preview, i.e. unedited and unrevised). It’s gritty and intense, a very different feel from The Yellow Hoods. And when my daughter, who’s 11, read it and loved it, it reinforced the idea for me that I can tell a great tale while still within the realm of “YA.”

So when I wrote The Man of Cloud 9, I wanted to bring to the table my life in technology, my experience in Silicon Valley and with startups, I wanted to tell a tale that a fourteen-year-old me would probably love to get into, and the thirty-year-old me would have been able to connect with. As for my younger audience? Well, they have Book 5 of The Yellow Hoods that’ll be coming out at the end of the year.

This all said, my friend had a really good point. I could end up with people buying the book for their kid, without reading the back, without seeing the recommended age we put on it, and the kid hates the book and the parent never buys another Adam Dreece book again. It is a risk. Also, people could look at the back of the book, not like it and decide not to give any of my other books a passing glance. But there’s an upside I’m willing to risk it for.

Suppose for a minute that I release The Man of Cloud 9 and it is a run-away success. Suppose I discover that I wasn’t meant to be known as the “Steampunk-Fairy tale guy,” but rather as an author of science-fiction? Would that be terrible? Nope.

And what if the adult audience that I’ve already built up loves the book and feels that this was for them? Something that reinforces their support and love of my work even more, by allowing them to have a different take on it, similar to how different Wizard Killer is?

As authors, we shouldn’t just write things in all sorts of genres and leave the burden to the reader to feel like there’s a dozen different people writing under the same name. In my case, I’m being consistent with my writing style, with my view on people and humanity, and how I capture the story, it’s just a more mature story than the other series I write. And guess what? That’s what a brand is about. You have different product lines (Cloud 9, Wizard Killer, The Yellow Hoods) but they are all unified by some base characteristics: Great stories, solid female characters, no real swears (what do I look like, a flaring pargo? Yig.), etc.

Will the experiment in branching out work? Sure. How much? That’s yet to be seen.

– Adam

Adam Dreece is an indie author and speaker. He’s one of the founders of ADZO Publishing, and has 4 novels in his series The Yellow Hoods, and has been published by Sudden Insight in its anthology, Paw for a Tale. His serial, The Wizard Killer, and blog posts can be found at AdamDreece.com. He’s also very engaged on Twitter @AdamDreece and on Facebook AdamDreeceAuthor.

His books are available as eBooks and in print at Amazon, Indigo, Kobo, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, and elsewhere.

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REVIEW: ALL THE KING’S-MEN, by Adam Dreece

On July 7, 2015July 7, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn ReviewsLeave a comment

71iL99WEEvL This one’s gonna be a bit tricky, so bear with me. The tl;dr version is this: if you’ve enjoyed the previous Yellow Hoods books (and you should have!) you’ll enjoy Adam Dreece’s ALL THE KING’S-MEN. I have a couple of gripes about this particular volume, and I’ll fill you in on them, but I think they’re less problems with the book itself and more an issue of the author zigging when I wanted him to zag. In general, you should be reading this.

Let’s address an elephant in the room, too: see that hyphen in King’s-Men? Did your eye twitch just a little bit when you saw that hyphen? Did you, perhaps, think oh, God, he didn’t put a typo right into the title of the book, did he?

Worry not. They actually address it in the story, and it ends up being relevant, believe it or not. Pay more attention to the awesome King’s-Horse (yep, another hyphen) and the Yellow Hood with the mechanical horse riding it.(*) Dreece has always called his series emergent steampunk, meaning a world that is not quite a steampunk world but is on its way, and Book 3 takes some large strides in that direction. The biggest difference between ATK-M and the previous volumes in the series is Dreece’s willingness to broaden his story. This book begins with a map, and while I think the map has appeared in at least one of the previous volumes this has been the first one where I thought it was necessary. What started as a story about a young girl named Tee and the cool club she and a few of her friends were in has gotten much larger and much, much more complicated.

Which is either a weakness or a strength, depending on how you look at it. If you enjoy Dreece’s worldbuilding, you’ll see much more of that here. I found, unfortunately, that I missed the titular Hoods, who are in the story, but aren’t really the focus of the story as much as they have been in previous books. Tee herself isn’t remotely as present as she has been, and spends most of her time on-page being pissed off. Is this automatically a weakness? Not necessarily; again, Dreece is going a different direction from maybe where I wanted him to, but that’s his prerogative as an author. The worldbuilding is unique and cohesive, the villains dastardly, and the backstory is interesting and well-integrated into the rest of the story. It’s just not quite what I wanted. And while the book is still YA, it’s an order more complicated than the previous books, and at least one character’s arc ends up dark by the end of the book. So maybe be prepared for that.

All in all, though? I’ll be back for Book Four, which I believe has just finished first-draft status and is moving into editing now. I’m going to make sure to reread the previous volumes before it comes out, too. Go check it out.

(*) I said this in my review of Book One (I appear to not have reviewed Book Two, which surprises me,) but Dreece’s cover artist is spectacular, and I want to steal her for a project in the future. Just not sure which one.

Review: ALONG CAME A WOLF, by Adam Dreece

On January 17, 2015January 19, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading3 Comments

Book-1-COVER-Sept2014-Along-Came-a-Wolf-by-Adam-Dreece-196x300 I promised at least three reviews of books by fellow independent authors, and this would be the third. I’ve owned a copy of Adam Dreece’s Along Came A Wolf for nearly as long as I’ve owned my Kindle, and based on (finally!) finishing the first book recently, I’ve ordered both it and its sequel in print form. As I’ve said repeatedly, print books sit on my unread shelf and stare at me until I get them read. My Kindle can’t do that, so print books always get read faster.

Dreece calls Along Came A Wolf and its sequels “Emergent Steampunk” (Breadcrumb Trail is available now at the same link above, and the third volume, All the King’s Men, is forthcoming,) which is an interesting choice, because I suspect most people aren’t going to know what the hell an emergent steampunk is until after they’ve read the book. The idea is this: technology is pretty highly variable depending on where you are and what you’re trying to do in Dreece’s world, but the world is almost at a point where steampunk-style technology is becoming available. One of the main characters in the book is an inventor, and there are hints everywhere that the things he’s working on are going to change the world.

Wolf is also YA, but it’s the kind of YA that adults won’t have any problems with, other than a few little references here and there that kids might not pick up on and grown-ups at least ought to, like the fact that the book is called Along Came a Wolf and the villain is named LeLoup. Or the Cochon brothers. (I’m not sure what part of Canada Dreece resides in, but I’m guessing it’s one of the Frenchier sections. EDIT: Calgary. Is that Frenchy? I don’t know Canada.) The inventor character I alluded to earlier is, in Dreece’s own words, a combination of Santa Claus and Nikola Tesla, which somehow works out super awesome.

I haven’t actually mentioned the titular Yellow Hoods. The three characters that make up this… group? Club? Organization? are Tee, a twelve-year-old girl who is the book’s main character, and her friends Elly and Richy. Elly and Richy aren’t nearly as well-drawn as Tee is, but watching the trio work together to solve their problems is fun. I won’t spoil the plot (Bad happens! They try and fix it!) but it’s a genuinely fun adventure and, well, like I said, I paid for it twice and have already bought the sequel.

~~One unfortunate criticism: the book does have some minor editing issues here and there, mostly coming in the form of slightly misused serial commas.~~ (EDIT: See here.) If you’re not a grammar purist it’s not something that’s going to bother you, and Dreece’s writing itself is of high quality, but… former Language Arts teacher. I’m a grammar purist. 🙂

A final note: I want to steal Dreece’s cover artist from him. I know the books have been through at least a couple of cover changes (the cover image on my version of the book is not the same as the one above) and the character work on his current set of covers is fantastic. Chain this person to a table so that he or she can’t get away. This is great work.