Barnes and Nobles launches print-on-demand business

Someone on Twitter posted a link to this recent article about Barnes and Noble entering the print-on-demand business:

Barnes & Noble announced today the launch of a new print feature for its self-publishing platform, Nook Press, which will allow authors to turn their ebooks into print versions that can be sold in B&N stores and online at BN.com

BN.com already sold print-on-demand books from Amazon’s Createspace, though perhaps your royalties will be greater if you go with their Nook Press? I haven’t checked out their prices yet. They do offer hardback, which Createspace does not, though I’m guessing prices won’t make it worth the cost for most books, unless you have a large audience or want to release a special edition of something.

As for indie books being stocked in their physical stores, the article says:

Through the program, authors who have sold 1,000 copies of a single ebook in the past year will be able to sell their print books on the local, regional or national level through B&N.

I can’t tell if they mean ebooks sold in total, or only ebooks sold through their Nook platform. Most ebook sales that happen at all happen through Amazon, so if you’re selling at least 1K books through Nook, you’re probably doing quite well. Otherwise, the limit does nothing for an author like me, who has nowhere near those sale levels, even on Amazon. Still, this bit of gate-keeping makes sense, as they wouldn’t want their store shelves to be filled with crappy-looking indie books that aren’t likely to sell.

Although I wonder if indie authors can’t already ask the managers of their local B&N stores to stock a book or two of theirs; I’ve seen at least one crappy-looking self-published paperback sitting on the shelf in our local B&N, prominently enough that I’m sure the author didn’t just sneak it in himself. Not sure what the deal with that was.

Anyway, it’s just one more opportunity for indie-authors, which is always a good thing; I still love browsing physical book stores, so it’s great that indie-authors may have an easier path to getting their books on physical shelves. It’s also another nail in the slowly-forming coffin of traditional publishers; when writers don’t even need them to get into physical bookstores, that’s one less incentive for a successful author to sign a deal with them. Although I suppose physical bookstores are battling their own slowly-forming coffins, so there’s really no telling what will happen…

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Episode 1 of Insane Fantasy is out now!

This morning, I released episode one of my serialized novel, Insane Fantasy: The Crater Lands, exclusively on Amazon Kindle! Check it out!

Insane Fantasy: The Crater Lands

I wanted to do two things with Insane Fantasy.

Firstly, I wanted to try releasing a story in “episodes”, similar to how authors of yesteryear would serialize their novels in magazines. This has, of course, gone out of style, but it’s seeing a small resurgence with the rise of ebooks.

Secondly, I strove to create the sort of ever-expandable fantasy world in which completely outlandish phenomena, such as talking owls and colorful storms, would seem acceptable. Granted, making outlandish phenomena seem acceptable is the goal of any fantasy author, but I wanted to create that sort of bizarre childish fairy-tale world in which I could continually introduce new fantastical elements both without breaking some predefined magic system yet without making the world seem like the meaningless random visions of some fever dream. That is, I sought to create a fantasy world that was both cohesive and logical enough to host engaging stories, yet broad enough to allow for infinite expansion. This is perhaps nothing new in the vast world of stories, but a fun exercise for a storyteller nonetheless.

I’m working on the second episode now!

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Insane Fantasy begins July 7th

Insane Fantasy: The Crater Lands

I recently finished creating the cover for the first episode of Insane Fantasy. Considering my lack of artistic skills, I think it turned out pretty well. I would of course have preferred to commission an experienced artist, but couldn’t afford that. Also, it took me a little over two weeks to create, which feels like too long to me. But a good chunk of that time was spent just learning how to use Krita to draw vector art, figuring layers and masking and the art of Bézier curve editing. So hopefully the next cover won’t take so long, but who knows?

Assuming nothing drastic interrupts my editing over the next few days, I plan to release Insane Fantasy: The Crater Lands exclusively on Kindle this Thursday, July 7th!

As stated before, this is a 29,000-word episode, an installment of a larger serialized story. I’ve already started work on the next episode, and it will be my focus of attention after this first episode is released.

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Moonblessed, update 3

I have finally finished the first draft of part one of my next novel. I wrote in my last post that I was hoping to release the novel in parts, each part being between 20K and 30K words, before releasing it as a full novel. Part one comes in at 29,300 words. Granted, it’s a first draft, but I don’t expect it to change drastically. I’ve been calling the novel Moonblessed, but I think I’m going to change that now. Moonblessed doesn’t really work for what’s going on in part one, nor is it general enough to work as the series name. I plan to call the series Insane Fantasy, and part one will be Episode 1: The Crater Lands.

The description for this first episode goes something like this:

Thirteen year old Coptivon lives a dull life growing up in a crater in the Crater Lands, apprenticed to a lazy innkeeper. So when a strange owl appears half-dead near a crater’s edge, Coptivon is more than happy to take him in. But he soon learns that the owl is a Spirited one, and he’s on an outlandish quest of his own to end the Storms of Insanity that have been ravaging the lands, stealing people’s sanity and turning them into empty-eyed airheads. Though the owl is adamant about rushing off on his own, Coptivon sees this as an opportunity to escape the doldrums of the Crater Lands once and for all.

Episode one actually follows three characters, but I think it helps to keep story descriptions to the main protagonist. For the sake of this blog post, however, there’s no harm in revealing a bit more, I suppose. Aside from Coptivon, the other two characters are Moonwing the owl (mentioned but unnamed in the description) and Krockallatus, another thirteen year old boy in another part of the world.

Moonwing is an old owl who’s found “the Moonblessed”, a legendary sorceress who he believes has the power to restore sanity to all who lost it. He’s also trying to refound the Night Sages, a small group of people dedicated to finding and fighting the Stormgiver, a mysterious sorcerer thought to be conjuring the Storms of Insanity. Moonwing feels responsible for the deaths of a number of children twelve years ago, after which the Night Sages disbanded, so when Coptivon begins asking questions about his mission, he’s very reluctant to say anything.

Krockallatus is a sort of evil version of Coptivon. He too is an orphan growing up in a dull place he loathes, working in a tavern in the slums of a city called Paraville. But rather than being grateful for any companionship he can find, he kicks puppies. When Krockallatus finds a parchment dropped from the pocket of a mysterious traveler, he becomes convinced that it’s a recipe for a potion that will give him the power to turn into a dragon. Seeing this as a ticket out of his directionless Paravillian life, he sets out to steal the necessary ingredients to make the potion.

I still need to work on a second draft while I create a Kindle cover for the episode. I’m too broke to hire an artist at the moment, so I’m going to try to come up with something myself. I’m not much of an artist, and most self-drawn covers on indie-published books look atrocious, but financial necessity necessitates that this is the road I must take, so we’ll just have to see how it goes.

I hope to have the episode released sometime in the next week or so… but, as I was writing this post, our dishwasher broke and sent hot water spewing across our kitchen floor and raining into the basement. So that’s nice. The great dishwasher disaster of 2016. And our air conditioning is still broken.

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Moonblessed, update 2

It’s been some time since I’ve updated this blog; my job has weird hours which prevent me from getting into a regular writing routine, and so I just haven’t been writing very much at all. (I’ll also admit that I have an addiction to watching movies in my free time, which isn’t helping.) But I’m slowly making progress on my next fantasy novel, tentatively titled Moonblessed. Just yesterday I finished the rough draft of the fifth chapter, bringing the overall word count to about 16,600 words. The pace of the story is certainly slower than that of Son of a Dark Wizard, but I’m having fun with it, and I hope the slower pacing won’t translate into less fun reading.

Because I’m only about a tenth of the way through my list of planned scenes, I’ve been thinking about serializing the novel, releasing it in parts of about 20K to 30K words each. Serializing a longer work of fiction of course has a rich tradition in the novel’s history, with its advantages for both readers and writers, and I’ve been wanting to try it for a while now. My hope is to price each installment at $0.99 for Kindle, but the real purpose would be to try to attract readers on Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, which is a bit like Spotify for books, where subscribers could read each installment at no extra cost. (Writers are paid a small amount for each page read.) At the very least, I’m hoping it will help me stay motivated to write as I look forward to being able to release new installments much quicker than having to wait until I finish an entire novel.

So if I do this, I only have a few more scenes to finish before releasing the first installment and seeing if anyone actually checks it out, or if I only get demotivated by the sounds of crickets…

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Moonblessed, update 1

So the novel I’m working on (which is the start of a new series, probably a trilogy) is tentatively titled Moonblessed. There’s at least one other title I’m considering, but for now I prefer Moonblessed. I’m not sure what I’ll call the series itself yet. I finished the first draft of the opening chapter today, so that’s one chapter down and forty-seven to go! The wordcount is currently at 3,300 words. I hope I can keep at least some momentum going this week. Balancing my bizarre sleep schedule with my bizarre work hours can sometimes be a hassle, but I should still have free time if I can be disciplined enough to use it wisely.

This will be another middle grade sort of book. (Though, like Son of a Dark Wizard, I hope it will appeal to older readers as well.) Though there is some violence, there’s also a healthy dose of humor, at least if my corny sense of humor counts as humor. It makes it fun to write anyway, and I just have to get through a first draft. If I go too far with the humor, I can always reign it in with the second draft. I sometimes go out of my way to setup a stupid joke that doesn’t move the story forward and only clutters things up. On the other hand, I usually enjoy my own stupid humor a lot when I read back over my work.

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Writing update

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been having lots of trouble getting another writing project started for a variety of reasons. (New job, time management issues, insanity.) 23 Dragon Teeth is on hold for now due to plotting problems. And I’m now cancelling the epic fantasy for which I had only written 6,000 words because I just finished completely re-plotting it (which took a few weeks). Changes are quite drastic. It’s now no longer anywhere near the scope of the previously estimated 400,000 wordcount. It’s 48 scenes. I’m guessing it will end up somewhere between 70,000 and 80,000 words, though that’s tentative. I am not yet sure what the title will be, but definitely not Death of Ash, as the main arc of that plot-line is completely out the window. Anyway, this will be my next writing project. I should start writing sometime this week. Since it’s all plotted and I know where everything is going, only work, fatigue, and the random elements of life itself can get in the way (all of which can be formidable foes). There are only a few little details in the outline that need to be filled in first, but that shouldn’t be too hard.

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How prolific would I have to be to fill a CD with stories?

How prolific would I have to be to fill a CD with stories?

Just yesterday, I was thinking to myself how efficiently text (and the language it symbolizes) can store information. Entire novels can take many hours to read, yet take up so little digital space in computer memory when converted to 1’s and 0’s. High-quality images, movies, and music, by contrast, can take up significant amounts of digital space. But then, the point of these sorts of digital files is to recreate reality, in a sense, whether with an image on a screen or sound through speakers, or both. In other words, the digital information stored in image and sound files is converted into another medium meant to be sensed with the eyes or ears. But text remains a symbolized medium; letters represent a code (symbols to sound to words to language) even before they’re converted to binary. So, in a sense, the compression is innate.

Anyway, I thought it rather wondrous that a writer’s life work could potentially be stored on one CD, or one little thumb drive. So I wondered how prolific I would have to be as a writer to write enough text to fill an entire CD with writing?

To estimate the answer, let us first estimate the ratio of words per byte of computer memory. For this, I shall use the wordcount of my last novel, SON OF A DARK WIZARD, along with how much memory it takes up as a TXT file: (41,920 words : 241,096 bytes) = around 0.1739 words per byte, or around 5.7513 bytes per word.

According to Wikipedia: “A standard 120 mm, 700 MB CD-ROM can actually hold about 737 MB (703 MiB) of data with error correction (or 847 MB total).”

Let us assume 737 MB = 737,000,000 bytes.

So a CD should be able to hold (41,920 word / 241,096 bytes) * 737,000,000 bytes = about 128,144,142 words.

So if I only wrote novels that had the wordcount of SON OF A DARK WIZARD, I’d have to write 128,144,142 words / 41,920 words per book = 3,057 books.

Pffshh! That should be easy! (Granted, SON OF A DARK WIZARD is shorter than the average book, so the book calculations may be skewed slightly higher than usual. But if you imagine an epic fantasy to be roughly ten times as long at, say, 419,200 words, then you only need to divide the results by ten to obtain the number of this epic fantasy books you’d have to write.)

But what about this 8 GB thumb drive I have sitting here next me? If 8 GB = 8,000,000,000 bytes, then (41,920 word / 241,096 bytes) * 8,000,000,000 bytes = 1,390,981,186 words or 33,182 books.

What about if I had a 128 GB thumb drive? 22,255,698,975 words or 530,909 books.

What about a 2 TB hard drive? 347,745,296,479 words or 8,295,451 books.

I think I can write that many books if I put my mind to it and believe in myself…

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Starting an epic fantasy

So my first draft of 23 Dragon Teeth currently sits at about 7,500 words, but this week I couldn’t resist starting on the epic fantasy idea I mentioned I’d been plotting in my last post. My outline for this epic fantasy is over ten times as long as my outline was for the 40K-word Son of a Dark Wizard, which means I estimate this epic fantasy will wind up reaching at least 400,000 words. Big word counts aren’t really that hard to reach, though; it’s very easy to write loads of bloated crap, it just takes time. The pacing is what’s difficult to get right. I’ve never tried something on this scale before, so we’ll see how it goes. I at least want to see how far into it I can get before my excitement for it fades. I’m currently only 2,000 words in. Not sure what I’ll call it yet, but for now I’ll call it Death of Ash.

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23 Dragon Teeth, update 2

My first draft of 23 Dragon Teeth is now at around 5,800 words, and I’ve just started the catalyst scene. I’m not yet sure if I’m on track for the 45K-ish-word wordcount I’m aiming for or not, but I’m guessing I’ll go over it. Which is fine, I guess. I’m still writing slower than I’d like to be, but my creative energy has, for the last week, been partly stolen by interest in an idea for a long epic fantasy saga, so I spent quite a few hours daydreaming and plotting that out. Still a lot of planning to do on that project, but I may start writing it later this year; it’s been giving me the new-idea-excited-obsession-feel lately.

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