#354: Aristocrats and Assassins.  The release is a wee bit delayed, but it will happen real soon now.  Someone said that good things are worth waiting for.  As I age, I have more problems with that adage—my patience threshold is worse than before.  But I’ve always been impatient.  I had my entire undergraduate study planned halfway through high school.  The summer I turned thirteen, I wrote my first novel, but I figured even then I would starve as a writer, so I became a scientist, and, PATIENTLY, postponed my writing career.  So, have patience with me, dear reader—your ebook tour of Western Europe with Detectives Chen and Castilblanco will soon be available!

#355: A thorough rewrite.  My next release will probably be the complete rewrite of Solders of God.  It’s only in pbook format right now, my only novel not in ebook format.  The rewrite will be a second edition.  You will recall that it’s a bridge between “The Clones and Mutants Series” and “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” so it plays an important role in my opus.

#356: Other ebooks in the works.  After Soldiers of God, there are several other novels on my to-do list for this year.  I have two stand-alones in progress (i.e. not part of the timeline of my usual fictional universe) and another Chen and Castilblanco mystery (see the excerpt at the end of Aristocrats and Assassins).  Phew!  It’s going to be a busy year.  No guarantees on release dates.  (Yes, I often have parallel projects going on.  I learned to do this as a scientist.  I’ve found it keeps the mind agile, the writing fresh, and facilitates content editing.)

#357: Donating ebooks to libraries.  I’ve been trying to do it for a while.  Joe Konrath is starting up something that looks like a good idea where a library can pay for one ebook and then lend it out multiple times without further charges to them or their borrowers.  Sounds like a way to donate if there’s a mechanism so I can pay for Joe’s one-time charge.  They’re still working out details, though, so stay tuned.  [Apparently, they’re not answering queries, by the way—maybe because I’m not a library?  You’d think they’s want to get both libraries and ebook authors on board…sigh….]

Like Joe, I believe libraries have been shafted in this digital age.  First, from my personal experience, there’s no easy way for an indie author to donate ebooks.  Second, the Big Five limit the number of borrows for ebooks and then require the library to buy a new copy of the same ebook title, something they NEVER do for pbooks (they’d much rather sell expensive hard-bounds to libraries, of course, squandering a library’s vanishing budget).  I’ve had a good experience with my few pbooks, going through several copies as the old become worn and tired.  But most of my opus is now exclusively ebook (after the Soldiers second edition, it will all be ebook), so third, the current policy, dictated by the Big Five, is just another way to shaft indie authors too.

#358: The British are coming!  Actually, I went to them.  I believe, perhaps immodestly, that many of my books can entertain international readers, especially the books that have a lot of globetrotting in the plot.  Moreover, I think the ones with local flavor, where the setting is the NYC or tri-state area, for example, could give UK and European readers entertaining insights into Yankee culture (and I’m not talking baseball).  So, for once, I made use of one of those links on Linked In and discovered Maurice Tudor, who runs a writer’s co-op  and a newsy book blog .  His price is right, too—free!  We’ll see how it goes for me across the pond—can’t hurt to make some noise over there.

#359: No contests.  You might have noticed my contests are gone.  No matter what I do, they seem to land with a big thud.  So be it.  They’ll go on vacation for a while because I need to reevaluate their efficacy yet again.  I’m also halting promos of free books on KDP Select.  There are two ways still to receive freebies: you can offer to read the ebook (and only ebooks from now on, by the way) and write an honest review for Amazon; or, you can join Amazon Prime and borrow the ebook.  The first doesn’t give me any royalties, but I get something in return.  (Sometimes not.  I’ve had people ask for ebooks, and I send them, but then they never write a review.  You know who you are!)  The second does give me reduced royalties, thanks to Amazon’s floating Prime fund.

But it’s never been about selling books for me.  I write to entertain YOU, the reader.  If I didn’t have any costs to recover, I would just give my ebooks away.  While my costs are minimal, and probably less than maintaining a speedboat or skiing hobby (between lift tickets and après-ski, skiers probably spend more much more at Killington in a day than I do producing an ebook), I’m giving away my time.  If you like, I’m feeding an addiction—I love to write and entertain readers with a good tale, whether it’s a short story, novella, or novel.  So, please don’t think my new policies are stingy.  I might be an old curmudgeon, but I’m not stingy!

In libris libertas….        

 

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2014 at 4:00 am and is filed under News and Notices from the Writing Trenches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.