A couple quick items, if I may. I’m blogging at the Night Bazaar today, discussing ideas around how to write action, specifically melee and battles and other kinds of assorted mayhem. A Martian sand beast may be involved.
Also, just a reminder that The Daedalus Incident giveaway over on Goodreads is still going strong. You have until March 28 to sign up to win a signed galley copy of the book. As of last night, there were 140 people signed up for it, which warms a debut author’s heart considerably.
Finally, if you stumbled upon this blog via the SFWA Authors Twitter feed, welcome! Feel free to click around and make yourself at home. Just don’t put your feet on the furniture. If you’re not following said feed, give it a shot. There are plenty of awesome authors blogging about plenty of awesome things. It’s…awesome.
Big deal, you say. Well, yeah, my excitement is probably out of proportion to the actual thing. But you know, I don’t care. Here’s why.
One, I’m qualified to join an organization that includes several New York Times bestselling authors, plenty of Hugo and Nebula award nominees and winners, and writers I’ve read since I was a lad. Know that bit about the company you keep? I’m in fine company indeed. And many folks within this group are quite generous with their time and advice, which is quite valuable to a n00b like me.
Two, I just voted for the Nebula Awards. That’s just cool, you know?
So it seems guest blogging is a popular pastime among authors. After last Thursday’s guest post by writer, raconteur and man-about-town Steve Vera, I’ve gotten interest from other authors about guest blogging here. Since Steve’s post generated some increased traffic for both him and I, let it be known that I will offer a regular series of guest posts for selected authors. Cue the fanfare.
I consider this a win-win. With my own blog subscribers and Twitter followers, along with my auto-linking elsewhere, I can potentially reach quite a large number of people with each post. So it’s good for you. And you’ll be pointing your fans and followers toward my site, where they will come face to face with my writing as well. So it’s good for me.
That means, of course, I need to figure out how to do this. You know, rules and stuff. Damn.
I’ve been sitting on two copies of The Daedalus Incident for a little while now, and I figured it was time to spread the wealth a bit. Thus, it’s time for a giveaway!
For folks who don’t know, Goodreads is a great social media site for folks who like books. Daedalus has a page there, and I have an author profile as well. Now, if you’re a member — and if you aren’t you can totally join up quite easily — you can enter the giveaway and possibly win a galley copy of the novel more than a month before it hits stores.
Just log in and click on this link, which will take you to the giveaway page. (You can also enter directly from the book’s page.)
The giveaway ends March 28, so you best get cracking!
There’s been lots of good, righteous anger aimed at Random House for the contract terms offered by their e-book only imprints, namely Alibi (crime fiction) and Hydra (SF/F). Long story short, they are bad terms indeed. The author doesn’t get paid squat until the publisher recoups every last dime of cost for getting the book out. For more, I suggest reading John Scalzi’s screeds on the topic, both for the information and the entertainment value.
Why are these contracts such a problem? Because authors and publishers have a partnership in both product and the risks associated with selling it. The author has already risked a great deal of time and energy in writing the book — a book that, sadly, may not sell enough to justify said time and energy. The author must also rely on the publisher to — at the very least — ensure that the book shows up at all major retailers and in all agreed-upon formats, online and off. The author typically has little control over whether this is done adequately or not, and likewise has little say in how the publisher will spend its marketing dollars on the book.
Of course, publishers carry risk as well, in terms of the investments necessary to produce the and distribute the work, which are often substantial. That’s why most contracts leave the bulk of gross sales money to the publisher. The author typically gets an advance against royalties, and then gets a relatively small piece of each book once the advance is earned out. (In other words, the book needs to sell a certain number of copies before the author sees additional money.)
With all that said, should we be surprised that publishers like Random House are trying to shove more risk off their books and onto authors? Absolutely not. And here’s why.
We’re trying something different here on the blog. While I don’t have thousands upon thousands of minions…er, readers…yet, I want to do my part to help my fellow authors talk about their brilliant ideas and hard work. Since I’ve had others offer spots on their blogs to help promote The Daedalus Incident, I figured I could do the same here. I’d love to come up with a catchy name for the guest blog series, but all I got so far is, “What makes you so special?” Probably not awesome.
Today, I’m giving over some digital real estate to fellow scribe Steve Vera, author of the just-released novel Drynn, the first book in the soon-to-be wildly successful Last of the Shardyn series. Below, Steve talks about what makes his take on urban fantasy something to remember.
Not many folks have read The Daedalus Incident yet, but those that have, including a couple of extraordinarily talented authors, have liked it — so much so, they’ve even said nice things about it. To wit:
“The Daedalus Incident is Master & Commander by way of Spelljammer smashed into an effortlessly believable 22nd century Martian mining project. Tremendous fun.” — Michael R. Underwood, author of Geekomancyand Celebromancy
Naturally, I find this amazingly cool and quite humbling. Thank you both, gentlemen, for the kind words and encouragement!
In other news, I’m back on The Night Bazaar today, and since we didn’t get a preassigned topic, I took on an article discussing the difficulties men have writing compelling female characters. Check out the post here.
Also, my SupaFi64 interview is now up on iTunes, and I expect the podcast archive online to be updated soon.
I must’ve done a decent job my first time out, because Jay and the SupaFi64 guys are having me back on the podcast. In fact, this is a live show that starts at 10 p.m. Eastern on Monday night; you can listen in live at www.BlogTalkRadio.com/SupaFi64. If for whatever reason you have something better to do on a Monday night (but really, what would that even be?), you can download the podcast via iTunes as usual, or check out the archives on their site.
I’ll obviously be talking about The Daedalus Incident, and may have some hits about another project in the works. This is a great show with smart and enthusiastic hosts, so tune in or download!
More than two years into my authorial and blogging career, I’ve seen a few blog posts on here continue to get a steady stream of readers, often months after the fact. Most of my most-visited blog posts have to do with writing, which is pretty understandable. But there are a few in there that kind of leave me wondering.
The following is a list of the most highly trafficked “evergreen” blog posts — unrelated to newsier items like getting my book published. Note that in some of the earlier posts, The Daedalus Incident went by the working title Spacebuckler before Night Shade Books wisely encouraged me to revisit the name.
Anyway, these are the ten most popular items based on visits by you, the readers. Because, hey, everbody likes a clip show, right?
Got a couple of guest blogs to point you to today. First up, I’m participating in another Mind Meld over at SFSignal. This time, we’re talking about food in science fiction and fantasy. While the question posits that fantasy treats food better than sci-fi, I think neither really does a great job of developing unique foods, and cultures around food, as part of their settings. Think I’m wrong? Post a comment! And many thanks to everyone at SFSignal for asking me back. It’s a great site. You should totally read it.
Also, I’m back on the Night Bazaar, Night Shade Books’ author blog. This week, we’re tackling politics because, you know, they don’t like to make it easy on us. When can we debate the merits of Internet cat videos? (John Scalzi found this one, which my entire family can’t stop watching.)
While I’m at it, I want to thank to Con or Bust auction winner Daryl Maxwell, who paid a whopping $40 for a signed galley of The Daedalus Incident. I say whopping because it lists for $15.99, nobody’s read or reviewed it yet, and I’m a debut author with zero track record. So that was a lovely leap of faith on Daryl’s part, and it’s for a good cause. Plus, I got to sign my first-ever copy of the book, which was a pretty cool thing to do.