A few weeks ago, I entered The Roar of the Spheres in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. Today, I learned I’d moved on to the second round, along with 1000 other books in the general fiction category.
I don’t know how this contest looks to industry professionals. One logical perspective is it’s 10,000 people fighting for two seats at the dinner table. There’s not a lot of dignity in that. Of course, the competition to find an agent and a publisher isn’t much different, but at least it’s not so transparent.
I don’t care anymore. If there’s an opportunity out there, I’m going to take a shot at it. I don’t care if it risks looking unprofessional to some people. The ABNA, self-publishing to Kindle, whatever–if it gives me a chance to make money from my fiction, I’m going to do it. I’m trying to build a career. That’s all I care about.
As a tangent, I checked out a couple threads about the ABNA over at Kindleboards. Several authors expressed doubts about it, outright questioning the value of Penguin’s $15,000 advance against the worth of their ebook rights. Here’s some quick math: if you sell 10 copies of your $0.99 book a day, 3650 in a year, you’ve made just over $1250 in royalties from Amazon.
How many indie authors are selling 3650 copies of a single novel every year? How many years do you expect this success to carry on through for this single title? It had better be at least 12. Factoring in some risk-assessment, I think you’d only turn down a $15,000 advance if you have strong reason to believe you can maintain that level of self-published sales for 25 years.
In some circles, self-epublishing is taking on a serious gold-rush mindset. But for every Amanda Hocking, there are 100,000 authors lucky to sell a single copy per week.
No doubt e-rights are becoming a huge deal, huger by the day. But $15,000 and a book published by a giant corporate house is a pretty great deal compared to what tens of thousands of self-published authors are going to end up earning through their ebooks. At the very least, it’s a high and concrete platform from which to promote your other works. You want to turn that down over fears the stone you’ve polished might turn out to be a diamond? To me, that sounds like a good way to stall out right where you are, to end up the same place ten years down the road as you are today.
Available here.
Damn good movie. Before Sunrise serves up dialogue and performances that could have been stolen from your own life. Most impressively of all, for such a formless, free-floating movie, there’s a clear narrative drive swimming beneath the surface: where’s this going? Will there be a tomorrow?
I’m not kidding about that thing about how it’ll affect couples, either. By about halfway in, my girlfriend and I were reminiscing about how we first met, about our first date. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are so convincing it’s hard not to be transported back to that first amazing day.
Unless you’re single. But I’m sure Real Dolls are more affordable by the day.
So I’ve put a couple story collections up for Kindle already. Here’s the first time I’ve listed a book: The White Tree.
The White Tree is a big fat fantasy book. It’s funny and bloody and action-heavy. To summarize 150,000 words of novel, a young sorcerer named Dante and his even younger bodyguard Blays are enlisted to help stop a secret war against their homeland–but the deeper they get, the harder it is for them to know which side is right.
More details and a sample are available at Amazon. It’s a stand-alone work, but I’ve got ideas sketched out for two more–and if enough people pick up The White Tree, I may just have to write its sequels.
Available here.
My take on The Eagle benefited from the perspective of time. When I left the theater, I was thinking, “Well, that was pretty entertaining, wasn’t it? The guys in the paint and all. And yeah, the ending was a little pat, and I was squinting at how hard they tried to conceal Jamie Bell’s motivations from Channing Tatum, but did you see those rivers? They looked prehistoric. And the Romans fought like Romans. Maybe not a ripping good yarn, but at least a fraying one.”
The next day I thought, “Well, it’s probably not going to stand out too much a year from now.”
The day after that, when I prepared to sit down for my review, I thought, “Hey, it had some pretty fat dramatic flaws, right? A fun movie, but not a terribly skillful one.”
Sometimes I have to write about a movie the same day I see it. I suppose there’s something valuable in that, too–my reactions are more raw, my praise more generous. (If I dislike something, on the other hand, I tend to know right away.) But just a couple days’ perspective is all it takes to go from “That was pretty good!” to “Well, no need to see that again!”
Available here.
I was pretty neutral going in to Sanctum; I like James Cameron, who was executive producer on it or something, but aside from the potentially cool business in the trailer about “Never give up. Ever!!” and then sucking oxygen from a cranny in the ceiling, it looked quite bland. That impression turned out to be correct.
Bonus: someone already left a silly comment.
Largely about The Aether Age, partly about me as a writer. The story was written for the Tri-City Herald, and, for reasons that may include a glacial news cycle, Northwest pride, or possibly because they may all be McClatchy papers, also ran in the Tacoma News-Tribune and Bellingham Herald.
I work as a freelance movie critic for the Tri-City Herald, and I have to say I’m somewhat uncomfortable being interviewed on an unrelated aspect of my career by a business that employs me in another field. Not that I think there’s actually anything unethical in this case; the Herald‘s strong local coverage is one of the reasons they’ve continued to do so well in the current newspaper era, and they run pieces on local artists all the time.
But it’s interesting in that, at some point along the continuum of authorial fame/success, the weird thing would be if they didn’t run a story on me. If I wrote a bestseller, or built a strong midlist career, there would be no question of a conflict of interest: that’s serious local news.
On the other end, in a hypothetical where I wrote columns for a paper, was also trying to launch a fiction career, but had no sales yet, it would be pretty dubious if they ran a piece on how I’d like to someday sell short stories, right? So there’s a continuum from “This guy has nothing to show for himself, why on Earth would be okay to run a story on that” to “This guy’s a major author, of course it’s of interest to the community.” Where along that continuum does my career in fiction fall?
I have no actual doubts the paper would’ve done the piece if they had any real reservations about that (and of course they noted the potential conflict at the end of the piece). Integrity is the currency of (non-tabloid) newspapers, and once you start trading that away, you devalue your business and institution. I just think ethical situations like this are the most fascinating because there’s always room for doubt, however small.
I suppose my policy is to keep my head down and work hard, but grab all opportunities that pop up. The Aether Age has some pretty great stories in it. Better yet, the individual visions of its sixteen authors, taken as a whole, build a universe much, much broader than what’s painted in any one story. I’m happy to lend it a little notice.
Traitor
FinnTech has allied with the aliens who once pushed humanity to the brink of extinction. No one knows their next move. In desperation, Rada and Webber...
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