Space Eldritch just in time for Halloween

This blog hasn't recieved some love in quite awhile, I blame the other guys ;} In any case here is what is happening today!

“With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos.”
– H.P. Lovecraft

Startling Stories meets Weird Tales in SPACE ELDRITCH, a volume of seven original novelettes and novellas of Lovecraftian pulp space opera. Featuring work by Brad R. Torgersen (Hugo/Nebula/Campbell nominee), Howard Tayler (multiple Hugo nominee), and Michael R. Collings ( author of over 100 books), plus a foreword by New York Times bestselling author Larry Correia, SPACE ELDRITCH inhabits the intersection between the eternal adventure of the final frontier and the inhuman darkness between the stars.

Can I just say how pleased I am to be a part of this horrifying pulpy collection. I'm honored to be rubbing shoulders with these guys and being able to put my best foot forward with their legions of fans (OK, at least Larry and Howard's legions of fans)
I've been reading these other tales the last few days and WOW am I happy I'm in this.

The Table of Contents 

Foreword – Larry Correia
Arise Thou Niarlat From Thy Rest – D.J. Butler
Space Opera – Michael R. Collings
The Menace Under Mars – Nathan Shumate
Gods in Darkness – David J. West
The Shadows of Titan – Carter Reid and Brad R. Torgersen
The Fury in the Void – Robert J. Defendi
Flight of the Runewright – Howard Tayler

So if mind-shattering Lovecraftian space opera is something your wicked soul needs, grab a copy now on Amazon, or Barnes & Noble or if you are so inclined you can get it from Smashwords

The print edition is soon to follow and I'll of course keep everyone updated on that as well.

All of us are book bombing the Unfathomable Reaches out of this today to get some traction with the rankings, so I'd appreciate some help spreading the word if you're so inclined. Thanks

An Author's Greatest Desire: To Be READ

Today we have a guest post from a friend of ours Daron D. Fraley
***
There are a lot of opinions out there about ebook pricing. Everyone in the publishing industry has an opinion. Some say you have to price your books above $2.99, or you are devaluing the artistic value of the book. Some insist that 99 cents is the price to drive sales. Others think that free is OK. And the big publishers seem to think that $9.99 is the way to go.
So what price do you use? I am still undecided. Here's why:
Let's consider downloads of THE THORN and WATER, my two ebooks. They started out at prices of 2.99 and 99 cents respectively.
Total downloads in 2010, prior to making both of the books free: 9
Yeah. NINE. Granted, it wasn't a full year. The ebooks were first available in August, 2010. But if you extrapolate a yearly number out of that 4 month trend, you still only get 36.
I wasn't very happy about that. And nothing I did to try to change that number seemed to work. I asked for reviews. I posted on facebook. I tweeted. I sent emails to friends and family. I gave out discount codes for a free-download for those who participated in contests. I talked to people on planes. I talked to people at work. I advertised so much online that I felt like I was hurting my relationships with people. Who wants to hear a friend constantly hawking their wares?
I became very self conscious about it. I decided that I had to stop. I would never become a household name, and nobody would ever read my books, and I was OK with that. I knew that ebooks were my last hope because the print edition was only in a few indie stores around the country.
But I am a fighter. I still wanted to change that. But how? If I didn't tell people about them, then how would people discover the books?  I decided to try a bold move. I would make my books free.
My plan: Build readership. Get people interested in my writing, and build a following. Then, sometime in the future, release the second book in my series and another novel as regularly priced novels. Whatever regularly priced means... as I said before, I am still undecided.
Total number of downloads in 2011, from all major sites:  21,446
And that was really only 1/2 a year, because the Amazon Kindle Store didn't pick them up as free until mid-year. Before June, the download numbers were still in the low hundreds.
Amazon made all the difference. How that happened is a long story. Simply put, they saw the books being offered for free on competing sites, and matched the price. Authors can't normally price their books free otherwise.
Besides the number of downloads, here are some interesting stats:
Both of my titles, WATER and THE THORN have been in the top 10 for their genres (Fiction/Genre Fiction/Anthologies, and Fiction/Religious Fiction/Science Fiction & Fantasy) for the last two months straight. And on January 10th, they hit #1 and #2 respectively on the Fiction/Religious Fiction/Science Fiction & Fantasy chart.
Not too shabby with nearly zero advertising. In fact, I have no idea how it happened because I had stopped tweeting and posting about the books months before. I didn't even know the books were being offered for free on Amazon until late summer, and that was two months after Amazon matched the price.
What does it all mean? Is their no easy answer? I submit to you that there IS an answer, even if it isn't easy.
Here are the ingredients for being a successful indie author:
1. Work on your craft. Go to conferences. Read writers blogs and learn about technique, style, voice, etc.
2. READ. Read a lot of books.
3. Write your best book.
4. Get that book professionally edited. PAY to have your book edited!
5. Get help with typesetting and formatting so that the book is a comfortable read.
6. Get a good cover designer to help you create a simple, eye-catching cover. Yeah, you'll probably have to pay for that too.
7. Get the book out there. At what price? I have no idea. Experiment. I don't think there's a silver bullet.
Are you still with me? Except for step 7, which is mostly my opinion, every single one of those steps is touted by those who know what it takes. In fact, we keep quoting each other on those points. Do you think I came up with those? Hah! Nope. I read them somewhere. On the internet. So, they must be true, right?
Don't stop yet, there's one more step:
8. Hang up the horseshoe, rub the rabbit's foot, or whatever else you wish to do for good luck.
Because that is exactly what it is. LUCK. Right place, right time, the right readers downloading your book and getting excited about it and tweeting about it and then they have hundreds or thousands of followers on twitter or facebook who retweet the clever tweet or repost the clever status because it catches their eye and then some of their friends do the same thing and then the book climbs the ranks and it hits the charts and it garners more downloads, and then Amazon sees that trend and marks it as a mover-and-shaker and that brings about even more downloads, and pretty soon you are totally blown away that there are that many people out there reading your book.
Yeah.
What about those who claim free doesn't mean squat? You know what? I have no idea if anyone is actually READING my books. I have no proof. After all, they are FREE, and people forget about free stuff because it has no perceived value. Or so everyone says. It may be true. Probably is.
But here's the rub: I have had some really nice reviews. I know for a fact that I have had at least 50 people read the books. And many of those readers really liked them.
And that is all I really wanted in the first place. To write. And to have someone read my work, and like it. So even if the number is now only TEN, I am no worse off than I was before.
That's how I see it.
Check back with me at the end of the year. After I get my next two books out there.
Question: Will free loss-leaders bring in downloads for the paid novels? I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine. Now, where did I put that horseshoe?
***
Thanks Daron

Tengu Equal Blog Hits

My weird oriental fantasy story "Fistful of Tengu" from the MONK PUNK anthology is posted over at D. Harlan Wilsons The Dream People online journal, current issue #36.

I've been rather pleased that overall, my tale which opens the antho, seems to have been received rather well from most of the reviews I've read. (one didn't mention it-the rest sang the stories praises)

That and my original blog post about the story, something about tengu, the mythological Japanese crow-like creature, is still one of my most visited posts. Seems google must direct a lot of people here who ask what a tengu is.

Good. Kind if like how Marion Jensen still gets lots of the hits on his blog about 'exploding coconuts'.

So lesson for the day-want a  recurring blog post that gets a lot of hits? Post about something rather obscure so that your blog is high on the search list.

Guilty Pleasures

I have noticed that you can make things clear in your own head if you try and explain something to someone else i.e. teaching them = teaching yourself.

I was pondering why do I love books, I'm talking physical hard cover, paperbacks and trade softcover books while I still have yet to embrace e-books. I'll come out and say it, I have almost (not completely, but almost) no interest in e-books.

Why?

Because I'm some kind of Luddite?

I sure don't think so.

A huge portion of what I enjoy about books is the discovery.

I am sitting in my office, same one I have used for almost the last five years and the very office where everything I have had published (or to be published) was written. Forever remembering a Ray Bradbury quote, that I am sure I won't get quite right, he said something to the effect of having his office full of curios and inspiration for his writing. That has always stuck with me, so I fill my office with swords, models, music, art, tokens and fetishes of far away lands and...books.

I have not counted in a year or two but I should have around 2,500 books just in my office. There's plenty more around the rest of the house too. At any given time I 'll have several open for research and interest in whatever subject I want to think about - currently its Celt's.
Maybe you can do something similar with multiple open windows on a kindle, I don't know, but I doubt the musty soul is there. (Tell me if I am wrong kids)

This post wasn't meant so much as my rant against e-books as it was on why I have a guilty pleasure in bookstores (which can't exist without books).

I like to peruse bookstores (or librarys) for hours, picking through whatever strikes me fancy. I may be captured by a cover or eclectic font, a name that sounds interesting or a subject matter that moves me-but it is all about discovery and taking my time and letting myself be guided by the dead tree's ink stained soul.

I have discovered a lot of very fine books that were not on anyones review list or recommendation. Even some of my favorite books were chance discoveries. This would not have happened even close to the same with e-books. You can't look over amazon's pages like you can a multi stacked book shelf. The experience is not the same and I am boiling it all down to my own personal guilty pleasure, perusing and discovering books.

I've heard rumors that with the demise of Borders and B&N scaling back, that perhaps the independentts will return.

I pray they do.

Writing Role Models & Influences

I have written action stories since I was a kid. Back in grade school, most of the stuff was what could fairly be termed fan-fic (I wrote a lot of G.I. JOE adventures) I also began my own "secondary world" epic fantasy. I'd like to think that for someone supremely influenced by J.R.R.Tolkien, I had some pretty cool original ideas.

Twenty five years down the road and a lot more reading under my belt, seems like a lot of other writers have already developed some of those very same ideas. I was going to have a young man be the veritable saviour of an epic worldwide struggle, I came to find that was very similar to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. I was going to have a militaristic city state of werewolves in the mix, similar now to James Enge's The Wolf Age. I had big plans for a cursed warlord/sorcerer to stalk the land waiting for the endtime so incredibly akin to Karl Edward Wagner's Kane (I even wrote a short prequel on how he became cursed for his hubris).

SO

As much as I loved those ideas, I don't know if or when I will ever work on them...

But then again...

We all have our influences, the same as anyone else. I have read Scott Oden, Lion of Cairo, say that his three biggest influences are Tolkien, Robert E. Howard and Karl Edward Wagner.

Guess what = they are mine too.

But is there any real danger of us writing close to the same thing? No, there is isn't.
Why?
Because we all draw on our own experiences in life, our own worldview, our own strengths and weakness's. We are all different.
If any two of us set out to write the exact same story it would still turn out quite different and likewise appeal to different readers. I read a recent post of Dean Wesley Smith where he said, (and I'm somewhat paraphrasin') - "We are not in competition with other writers-but with ourselves to write better stories."

I like that a lot-it makes me not compare myself to my influences and the seeming impossibility of catching up, recreating the foundation they have already lain, but of just learning what I can from them and improving my own craft and writing the best stories I possibly can.

Lately, I am stressing/working on my sequel to Heroes of the Fallen - Blood of Our Fathers and working at making it the best book it can possibly be-that means writing the most awesome book that I would want to read again and again.
On other fronts I have a lot of speculative short stories getting published this year - 9 so far are forthcoming and I have another 4 submitted already, saturating the spec-fic market just like my writing role model, Robert E. Howard.
I'm kinda treating the present day anthology and e-markets like the depression era markets of the pulps. Gotta get my own weird brand out there and be read.

Stay hungry my friends.

David