The Book of Screed

Originally published at Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer. You can comment here or there.

Self-publishing ebooks, you are much less likely to have an unpleasant experience like this one.

Small publishers are pretty popular among writers, but small presses are a lot like small towns. There are small towns where people keep their doors unlocked at night, where your neighbors will shovel your walk free of charge when you’re out of town, and where everyone gathers for hearty potlucks in the church basement on Easter and Christmas.

And then there are small towns where travelers (preferably attractive virgins) are regularly kidnapped and sacrificed on a bloody altar to Cthulhu or Demogorgon in the secret Temple of the Snake People hidden below the gas station.

So small publishers/presses resemble small towns – how effective, competent, and ethical they are depends very strongly on the people running them.

I’ve written short stories for a bunch of small presses, many of which no longer exist, and I’ve had many good experiences. And some bad ones, and a few downright ugly ones – for a few years, I occasionally got letters from lawyers inviting me to join the case against the bankrupt proprietor of one of those small presses. (I stayed out of it – litigation is a deathtrap.)

It’s understandable why a writer would put a story with a dubious publisher. Writers have this deep, deep psychological need to !!!be PUBLISHED!!!, and even if that means publishing with a publisher of dubious reliability, well, so be it. Especially for newer writers, in whom the need to !!!be PUBLISHED!!! is keen indeed.

However, that paradigm is broken beyond repair. The purpose of publishing is distribution, and technology has turned publishing into a button in a web browser. That means if you have a book, you don’t actually need a publisher to get your work in front of readers. And that means you don’t need to take a risk with a publisher of dubious reputation or reliability.

Granted, you might self-publish your book and sell a grand total of five copies – one to your mom, three to your Livejournal Star Trek fanfiction group, and one to a guy who thought it was a repair manual for a Chevy Corsica. But which is better – to sell five copies yourself, or to sell seven copies with a flaky small publisher that might go out of business when the owner’s cat dies?

The thing is, if a small publisher goes down, it will take your book with it. But if you self-publish, you keep the rights to the book. And you can grow your audience in a way you can’t with a small publisher, who may or may not be inclined to take your next book. If you write a sequel, you could pull in those five people who bought your first book. Building an audience for your work is like assembling a beach one grain of sand at a time – but you can do that with self-published ebooks in a way that you cannot with a small publisher (especially a small publisher that goes out of business when his cat dies).

So should you sign with a small publisher? Sure! But only if the small publisher has a good reputation, an actual business model, and is known for paying his writers on time (this one is important).   But there are only so many competent small presses, and they have room for only so many books. If the choice is between self-publishing or going with a small publisher that’s only been around a year or two and has a bad reputation, go with self-publishing.

I think one of the many benefits of the self-publishing ebook revolution is that incompetent and abusive small publishers are going to get eaten alive – to stay relevant and competitive, a small press will actually have to provide demonstrable value to his writers. Simply providing distribution is not enough – now that distribution is a button in a web browser, mere distribution is not enough of a reason to justify a publisher’s existence.

-JM

Originally published at Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer. You can comment here or there.

When I was a teenager, I watched a lot of Star Trek. But recently I was persuaded to subscribe to Netflix, and I’ve been watching Doctor Who…

…and I have to say, Doctor Who is much better than Star Trek.

-JM

Originally published at Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer. You can comment here or there.

Be sure to congratulate Melissa Mead and Michael H. Payne, who also sold stories to Sword & Sorceress 27.

-JM

Originally published at Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer. You can comment here or there.

I am pleased to report that my short story GHOST PYRES has been accepted into the Sword & Sorceress 27 anthology. This is very exciting, because it’s the sixth story I have sold to the Sword & Sorceress anthologies, all the way back to Sword & Sorceress 22 in 2007.

Hard to believe that it’s been five (5!) years since then.

GHOST PYRES, as you might guess from the title, is another short story of Caina Amalas, Ghost spy and nightfighter. If you haven’t yet encountered her, you can read an entire novel about her, CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, for free on your ereader of choice.

-JM

Originally published at Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer. You can comment here or there.

I got an email arguing that while I self-publish, I would never read a self-published book, because traditionally published books are inherently of a higher quality.

This is simply not true. Ever since I first got a Kindle in 2010, I’ve been reading an increasingly large number of self-published ebooks. So I’m starting a new blog feature: the Ebook of the Month. Once a month (or more, if I happen to have time), I’ll point out a self-published ebook I’ve read and liked.

Look for the first installment later this week.

-JM

Originally published at Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer. You can comment here or there.

dw asks:

If you finished GHOST IN THE STORM in April, and you’re going to start SOUL OF SORCERY in June, what are you working on now? Some secret project?

Currently, I am sitting on my couch, eating Cool Ranch Doritos and watching reruns of “House” on Hulu.

I kid. I never eat Doritos.

Actually, I am working on my urban fantasy series THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS. I wrote it back in 2002 to 2003 and sold the first volume to a publisher in 2004. It came out in 2008, but did not do terribly well. In the end, I made just enough money to buy a double Whopper with cheese and a side order of large fries, which I did, and that was that.

However, I just got the rights back to the first book last month. So I’ve launched on a massive editing and revision of the entire series, and hope to have it available in ebook form in early June.

The series will have four books:

#1 – THE TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS

#2 – A KNIGHT OF THE SACRED BLADE

#3 – A WIZARD OF THE WHITE COUNCIL

#4 – THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS

The entire thing, once I finish editing, will be about 300,000 words long. So I think each book will land in the 75,000 word range or so, depending on where I put certain scenes.

What is it about, you ask? Here’s the one-sentence premise:

What if someone from 21st century Earth brought guns to Middle-earth?

Think about it. If Sauron had 100 orcs equipped with AK-47s, he could probably have wiped out the combined armies of Gondor and Rohan, and given the Elves a run for their money.

I’ll have a sample chapter from the first book up soon.

Maria Jane asks:

I just read GHOST IN THE STORM and loved it (CHILD OF THE GHOSTS is still my favorite though). but all the GHOSTS books seem to be very different from each other – is that something you do on purpose?

Yes. A writer’s analysis of his own work is often useless, but I think each of THE GHOSTS books lands in a slightly different genre.

CHILD OF THE GHOSTS takes place over a period of seven years, and so is a combined epic fantasy and coming-of-age story. Caina is a child at the beginning of the book, and an adult by the end.

GHOST IN THE FLAMES and GHOST IN THE BLOOD are both combined fantasy and mystery stories. In FLAMES, Caina needs to solve a series of strange murders. In BLOOD, she needs to track down a renegade slave trader.

GHOST IN THE STORM is different from the first three books – most of the plot takes place over just two days. If FLAMES and BLOOD were fantasy mystery novels, then STORM is a fantasy thriller. Caina is dropped immediately into an extremely dangerous situation, and must rely on all her cunning and skill just to keep from getting killed in short order.

I haven’t entirely decided what will happen in GHOST IN THE STONE, the fifth book, but I think it will be a combined fantasy mystery and romance.

Marco writes:

you write ebooks but i bet you never read self-published crap you only read real books that are published by real writers.

Actually, that is incorrect. I read an increasingly large number of self-published books – more on that tomorrow.

-JM

Originally published at Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer. You can comment here or there.

Lately I’ve been watching the BBC’s new “Sherlock” series, a reimagining of Sherlock Holmes set in 21st century London. At first I was quite dubious at the idea, but I am pleased to report that my doubts were misplaced. “Sherlock” is an excellent retelling of the Holmes mythos for the 21st century, and remains faithful to the stories without slavishly following the text line-for-line. Holmes is just as acerbic, brilliant, and weirdly chivalrous as in the stories (do not mess with Mrs. Hudson), but he is a master of using texting, webcams, computers, and other 21st century technologies as part of his deductive toolkit.

Though I was darkly amused that in the original 19th century stories, Dr. Watson is a wounded veteran of the war in Afghanistan, but reinvented for the 21st century…

…he is a wounded veteran of the war in Afghanistan.

History, it seems, does indeed go around in circles.

-JM

Originally published at Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer. You can comment here or there.

…and two more to go.

-JM

Originally published at Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer. You can comment here or there.

Let’s Get Digital, David Gaughran’s primer on electronic self-publishing, has gone briefly free on Amazon.

I read it back in August, and it was extremely helpful – it’s no coincidence that I only started seeing 4-digit monthly book sales after I read this book.

So if you’re interested in electronic self-publishing, but don’t know where to start, Gaughran’s book is an excellent introduction to the topic, and I recommend it completely.

-JM

Originally published at Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer. You can comment here or there.

Apropos of our recent discussion on Dragon Age Origins, someone asked what choices I made in my playthrough of the game. Well, here they are – though note that of course this contains massive spoilers for Dragon Age Origins and its DLC if you haven’t played them.

After trying the various origin stories, I settled on the female elf mage with the default name and appearance. This caught my fancy because of the dramatic potential the character arc offered. After all, it’s not surprising that a human or dwarven noble would rise to lead Ferelden against the Blight – it’s what he (or she) was trained and born to do. But in the world of Dragon Age, an elf and a mage is doubly outcast, and the female elf mage looks like a harmless slip of a girl. Yet by the end of the game, this harmless slip of a girl would have defeated demons in their own realm, dared the darkness of the Deep Roads and returned to crown a dwarven king, thrown down a high dragon, rallied ancient enemies to stand united against the Blight, defeated Loghain Mac Tir in single combat, and plunged a sword into the skull of an archdemon.

That was what caught my attention – what kind of experiences would it take to transform a timid elven apprentice mage into the feared and respected Warden-Commander of Ferelden?

(This is partly what I mean by agency – a computer RPG needs to offer both an illusion of control and a sense of ownership in the player characters.)

So what key choices did this female mage make during the game?

-She tried to help Jowan escape from the Circle, since I decided that she would believe him falsely accused of blood magic.

-She refused to kill either Isolde or Connor, and instead saved the mages of the Circle solely so they could send her into the Fade to battle the demon that had control of Connor.

-She talked Zathrien into repenting and freed the werewolves from their curse.

(Needless to say, I put a lot of skill points into Coercion.)

-She destroyed the Anvil of the Void because she thought it evil.

-She crowned Bhelen king of the dwarves becuase she thought the dwarven caste system stupid.

-She fell in love with Alistair.

-She killed Loghain at the Landsmeet and made Alistair king, and managed to continue her relationship with Alistair while marrying him to Anora. (Again, Coercion.)

-She accepted Morrigan’s offer, and had Alistair impregnate Morrigan. This was mostly because I wanted to play “Awakening” with the same character, rather than a new one.

Anyway, I think those were all the major choices I made during the game. At some point I may replay it and make different choices to see what happens, but that probably won’t be for a while. I have books to write first, y’see.

-JM