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The Day After Publishing

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As you’ll remember in our last exciting episode of The Rogue Scholar, I pushed the Publish button on Article 9, my first proper SciFi novel.

Since then, I’ve pushed the button on the Print-On-Demand version of the book as well, so if you shun electronics in favor of printed copy, you now have an option.

As you can imagine, the last few days have been most instructive.What have I learned so far from my experiment in self-publishing? Let’s make a list:

1. You do not know who your readers are. I have a reader in France, another in Canada, and two more in Denmark. The rest are from the US. I know who a few of them are  because they basically told me, “Dude, I bought your book.” I can make an educated guess about a few more. Who are the rest? No idea. But I hope they enjoy the book.

2. Your followers are not your readers. Between all my social media accounts and my blog I have around 700 followers. I do not have 700 readers. Ironically, I have many more tools available to figure out who my followers are. This is a problem from a sales point of view.

3. Amazon reports sales numbers in real time. This is incredibly useful, but I can see how this can become an addiction, as one hits all the rounds of social media and then comes back to the reports portion of the Kindle Direct Publishing site. Each sale gets instantly translated to a new value, so it’s no hard thing to keep hitting that report button: how many have I sold now? How about now? How about now?

4. As vendors go, Amazon.com can be a royal pain. As publishers go, they can be a nightmare to deal with. Amazon is indeed a one-stop shopping site for self-publishers. But they don’t make it easy. The Kindle Direct Publishing account and CreateSpace accounts are different animals. They are not connected to one’s Amazon.com Author Central account unless you go through the process of making them that way. The good news is that there are plenty of resources available to walk you through the steps needed. But don’t think it’s just matter of hitting that publishing button and watching the machine roll on. You need to be a hands-on manager.

5. Amazon sets prices. The POD is sizable–about 500 pages worth of sizable–and while I wanted to set the price around $10 Amazon flat-out refused to do that. The price tag for the print book is a hefty $17.99, above the minimum but way more than I’d like. The truth is that I don’t foresee selling more than a handful of these items, but I thought the option should exist for folks who just don’t want an electronic version.

Those are the immediate lessons. There will be more. Stay tuned . . .

Next hurdle: review copies!

Get Article 9!

[book size=”150″ slug=”article-9″ purchase=”0″]

Article 9 is Live on Kindle

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Okay, folks. You remember way back, when I made these cryptic references to a book I was writing? And then completing? And then trying to get published?

Well, it’s done. The book is titled Article 9, and it’s the first in a planned series called The Blockade Trilogy, and it’s now available for $3.99 on Kindle platforms in the Amazon store. A Print-on-Demand paperback version will be available in a few days, and I’ll make versions for Nook and Kobo available later this year.

In Book One we are introduced to the Sol System of the year 2020. The Geosynch Electric Corporation has become the world’s dominant mega-conglomerate, a global monopoly on precious electricity only months from its grasp. The world is grateful; only the United States, which still relies on aging natural gas and nuclear power plants, resists. But the U.S. government wants to gain access to Geosynch’s facilities for its Air Force, and some are willing to kill to have it.

Into this intrigue arrives reporter Jack Hastings. Accompanied by Air Force officer Minnie Korson, the unlikely duo realize that while the military is indeed pushing hard, the corporate officers of Geosynch are far from innocent. Their space colony, Prometheus-3, is filled with secrets, lies, and a pair of frightening truths: Geosynch is now in the process of weaponizing space with the goal of becoming a sovereign entity, capable of asserting control over planet Earth. And even stranger and more terrifying: a massive and potentially deadly alien intelligence lies dormant at the edge of the solar system, and it is about to awaken…

And there’s a few space laser battles, plus a nuclear explosion or two.

I’ll post more on this topic as things happen, but in the meantime: BUY MY BOOK . . .

 

Article 9

[book size=”150″ slug=”article-9″ purchase=”0″]

Dear FCC . . .

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Yes, it’s a bit of slacktivism, but my concern about Net Neutrality is real enough. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has made sending a comment to the Federal Communication Commission as easy as possible.

Librarians should pay attention to this issue (and they are). We rely more than ever on internet resources for our livelihoods. As it is, we have regular down times and slow-downs of connection times on our public PCs. Being told to pay more for that level of intermittent service is just obnoxious.

But don’t listen to me. Lynne Bradley of the ALA says it better than I can:

Net neutrality is really important for libraries because we are, first of all, in the information business. Our business now is not just increasingly, but dramatically, online, using digital information and providing services in this digital environment. That means that we need to have solid and ubiquitous Internet services.

We’re interested in network neutrality for consumers at the home end, but also because it’s key to serving our public. And that means the public libraries, the academic libraries from two-year community colleges to advanced research institutions, as well as school librarians in the K-12 community.

Network neutrality issues must be resolved, and we hope to preserve as much of an open Internet policy as we possibly can. The public cannot risk losing access to important services provided by our libraries, our schools and other public institutions.

The point is that only by creating a flood of public commentary on this issue will the FCC even notice us. That’s fair and proper, condisering that what we call the Internet as developed with public money for an essentially public use. You don’t have to agree with me (or anyone) but please take five minutes and send the regulators the message that public resources should stay public.

My Books

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Coming Soon: A Floating Library

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On reading this, I immediately had two questions. First, why has this never been a thing in NYC? The second is, how do I apply for a job there?

From the Gothamist:

The announcement of a floating library makes us wonder why there has never been a library on a boat in one of our city’s rivers before. Seems like Heaven! And finally, after decades of not even realizing we were waiting for this magic vessel, it’s almost here. The Lilac Museum Steamship will host a pop-up floating library at Pier 25 on the Hudson River starting September 6th (through October 3rd).

“The ship’s main deck will be transformed into an outdoor reading lounge to offer library visitors a range of reading materials from underrepresented authors, artist books, poetry, manifestoes, as well as book collection, that, at the end of the lifecycle of the project, will be donated to local high school students with demonstrated need.”There will also be roundtables, performances, a listening room, and rope swings. ROPE SWINGS. ON A BOAT. IN A LIBRARY. Throw in a hammock and we’re never leaving.

I expect they’ll need to hire a bouncer to enforce closing times. This sounds far too awesome to ever want to leave.

METRO Digitization Docs Released to Commons

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From the Metropolitan Library Council (METRO):

Two library-related publications written and edited within the METRO community have been released under Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution licenses.

Digitization in the Real World (2010) and The Global Librarian (2013) are now freely available for download and Internet Archive and unglue.it.

digitizationintherealworld.pngBoth books highlight the innovative work our colleagues are doing to provide online access to digital materials, ensure communities remote and local receive equal access to information, and provide a global context for learning in our increasingly interconnected information environment.

“I’m thrilled that we’re able to reflect the excellent work being done in our community by opening these books to the commons,” says Jason Kucsma, METRO’s Executive Director. “It is our hope that releasing these titles under a Creative Commons license furthers the knowledge- and experience-sharing these publications were intended to foster.”

Considering that one of my own digital projects for the New York Academy of Medicine (The Resurrectionists) was made possible by a METRO digitization grant, I can only wish that we’d had these resources available to back then. We made do with what we had, but still . . . more information on best practices is always useful, as technology changes and application development bring new tools to the efforts of digital librarianship everywhere.

These items are free for the downloading, so read them and keep them around . . . something tells me we’ll be needing them for a long time.

My Books

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Dingo Librarian

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Dave Mauzy and I made a thing. Dave is my backboard for nearly everything I come up with because he’s good at poking holes in the sillier ideas and offers useful observation on the stuff that has potential. He was instrumental in helping me through the rough patches while writing Article 9. But sometimes we get stupid (all right, I get stupid) and Dave is usually good enough to go along with it. This was one of those times.

Thus, I present you with Dingo Librarian.

dingo librarian

I’ll post more as I think of them.

Share this one, around folks. Let’s see if we can make it into a thing!

A New Book Cover

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I’ve been pontificating about a project of mine here for years. I’ve called it the Blockade series because it is a planned hard Sci-fi series about a ring of thingies surrounding the solar system. The first book is titled Article 9, and I’m almost ready to hit the publish button on it.

I’m going through my final pass of the manuscript, managing tiny but important details like chapter length, proper quotation marks, making sure details make sense, etc. The good news is that I fully expect to upload this monster to the world in the next week or so.

And because a picture is worth a thousand words, here is the book cover we got for Article 9. Look at it . . .

article 9 cover
 
The artwork was created by the enormously talented Chrysoula Artemis and it was worth every penny. Chrys is a joy to work with and had ideas rolling around her brain even before she’d gotten more than a fraction into the book itself. The title font is all kinds of awesome, to say nothing of the detail that went into that 9. The rivets, the scoring on the metal, the lines where the plates join . . . brilliant.

And if you’re really ambitious, take a look at the red tipped nose cone and the fins on that missile that’s about to slam into the moon.

We go live very soon. In the mean time, I haz cover!

My Books

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Digital Book Day

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Something that should absolutely, positively concern you–besides the fact that I am trying to do my job on only three hours’ sleep, and the fact that German sports fans will likely be insufferable for the next four years after their team’s crushing defeat of Argentina in the world Cup finals yesterday, and besides the incredible fact that the Griffon Pub in Niagra Falls, NY, has a multi-blend beer named Quadro Triticale which is amazing–is that today, July 14, is (besides being Bastille Day) Digital Book Day.

Unlike that ridiculous opening sentence, Digital Book Day is a surprisingly efficient way of saying that today, hundreds of worthwhile e-books are available free for the downloading in a variety of formats. Two of these books are from HDWP Books, namely Tiago and the Masterless, which I reviewed a few weeks back, and the first of their Theme-Thology Books, titled Invasion. I can vouch for both titles, not because I contributed in any way (beyond the review) but because I paid money for them and was not disappointed with my purchase. Click on the links and download the titles. For free!

But do it today, because at midnight tonight, all those links to free stuff expire.

Why should you be concerned about this? Well, besides receiving the gift of reading (for free!), there’s another consideration. Namely that this particular event is something that cannot be done with print books. Yes, I can give them away for free. I can declare an entire library of print volumes free for the taking, and make no mistake, those books will disappear. But it will take days or weeks to happen at the rate of a few books a day. I know this because we’ve done print book giveaways at the MCNY Library before. The pattern is consistent.  It’s understandable. People who are rushed (and who isn’t) will not really want to have to schlep to a library and pick up a book and maybe browse a cart that looks more and more like a smile with missing teeth as time goes by.

Well, you say, we could print lists of the available titles and salt a few social media accounts with them. Well . . . yes and no. Twitter doesn’t really lend itself to that, although you could use it to link to a web page that had the titles already listed and linked. Neither does Facebook or Linked In. E-mail does, but it presumes that only people whose e-mail address you already have would be interested in your effort, which is at best a limited concept of media outreach.

On the other hand, all it takes is a link posted on each of your social media platforms to send a crowd of people a chance to download free books. That is something that Twitter et al, can do very effectively. (And hey, I have Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus buttons on this blog. Click and share, folks. I cannot make this any simpler.)

Or, you just click on the website of digital books, click on a category or two–or do a basic title and author search–and then click on numerous links to download titles. (For free!)

Fair warning: this is a big deal and a popular website, so you may have to try a few times to get suitable traction. Additionally, the free books are made free by the authors, not the DBD website per se. Some authors may have underestimated the demand for thier work, and some websites may be temporarily unavailable.

But it beats carrying free print books.

(You can haz free! Hurry!)

 

Update 7/15/14: From the DBD website:

Due to popular demand (which crashed the website several times yesterday) we’ll be leaving the site open an extra day.
Please check ALL prices since not all authors will be able to keep their books for free.

One more day, folks. I just nabbed a few promising bits for my own use. (For free!)

My Books

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Book Announcement

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theme theologyAnd now, another book announcement.

You may remember my plug for Theme-Thology: New Myths I shared a few weeks ago. That was a cool book. Even better, I’m actually in this one. It’s the fourth book in HDWP Books’ Theme-Thology series of anthologies, titled Real Worlds Unreal, where each story takes place in a real location, but something weird takes place.

The book is due for a July 1 release, and I will link to sites where you can purchase it once it’s available.

 

 
 

My Books

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Hachette Discovers DRM Is A Bad Idea

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Hachette insisted that Amazon sell its books with “Digital Rights Management” that only Amazon is allowed to remove, and now Hachette can’t afford to pull its books from Amazon, because its customers can only read their books with Amazon’s technology. So now, Hachette has reduced itself to a commodity supplier to Amazon, and has frittered away all its market power. The other four major publishers are headed into the same place with Amazon, and unless they dump DRM quick, they’re going to suffer the same fate.

The subject is more fully covered in Doctorow’s article for The Guardian. (You can read the entire thing here.) But the point he makes is valid, and will remain valid for the foreseeable future: the only beneficiaries of DRM are the ones selling the e-readers.

 

My Books

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Inaugural Poem

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A Rock, A River, A Tree

Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon.

The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.

I will give you no more hiding place down here.

You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.

Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.

The Rock cries out today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your face.

Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.

Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.

Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.

Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,

Clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the stone were one.

Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.

The River sings and sings on.

There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.

So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.

Today, the first and last of every Tree
Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the River.

Plant yourself beside me, here beside the River.

Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, has been paid for.

You, who gave me my first name, you
Pawnee, Apache and Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet, left me to the employment of
Other seekers–desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.

You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot …
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought
Sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.

Here, root yourselves beside me.

I am the Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.

I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours–your Passages have been paid.

Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.

History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.

Give birth again
To the dream.

Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.

Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.

Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.

The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.

No less to Midas than the mendicant.

No less to you now than the mastodon then.

Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.

–Maya Angelou, January 20, 1993