A Fatal Error Released on Amazon

It's been almost a year since I published "Write Every Day" and during that time I haven't released anything new for the Kindle. As of yesterday, that changed with the release of the first of my Chip Rawley baseball mysteries, "A Fatal Error." This is a novelette, just under 9000 words or about 30 pages if you prefer to think of lengths in those terms.

Chip Rawley is a former professional baseball player who never quite made it to the big leagues. Staying close to the game, he became a trusted confidant of Branson Waters, the owner of a major league team. In "A Fatal Error" Rawley investigates the death of Mark Feist, whose botched catch kept his team out of the World Series.

If you read "A Fatal Error", I hope that you enjoy it!

Free eBooks! (Mine and Other Folks')

You may have seen the little badge on the right hand side of my blog the past few weeks advertising the Codex Writers Promo today and tomorrow.

What this consists of is a total of 12 Kindle eBooks which will be available completely free of charge from the 26th at 3:00 AM EDT until the 28th at 3:00 AM EDT. One of these is my short story "Gravity's Pull." The others are short stories, collections, and novels from other writers who are part of the Codex Writers' Group. Codex is specifically oriented toward "neo-pro" speculative fiction writers, those who have had some professional sales but are still early in their writing careers. (If that description fits you -- if you have one or more SFWA-qualifying sales or have attended one of the major workshops such as Clarion -- it's worth applying to join Codex. If you have any questions about this, let me know.)

The easiest way to snag all of these freebies is to go to this handy Amazon list of all 12 titles. You could also go to a site where each of the titles is described in greater detail.

I hope that you find some things you really enjoy reading from these free eBooks!

DIY: Creating My Own eBook, Part One

One of the major things that has changed between the first time I explored the world of fiction publication (early 1990s) and today is the nature of self-publishing. Back then, it typically involved laying out hundreds or thousands of dollars upfront and was very much considered the last refuge of a writer who had failed to find a market. There was the occasional self-published item that went on to have some certain degree of success, particularly in niche markets, but most self-publishing left authors with boxes of unsold books in their garage or basement.

To say there has been a sea change would be an understatement. The growing acceptance of eBooks by readers has led to a whole new marketplace for digital titles. Turnaround times are miniscule, overhead is small to nonexistent. It's literally possible to take an existing work and turn it into an eBook ready for sale in an evening. In fact, that's exactly what I did one night last week with my science fiction story "Gravity's Pull" and my experience is what I'll be discussing in this series of posts.

Here are the steps I followed:

Thoughts on Publishing

The publishing world has changed dramatically in the twenty years since I first took any serious interest in it. That shouldn't be surprising; lots of "worlds" have changed dramatically in that time but I've had reason to think some about those changes recently.

That first period of taking writing seriously would have been in the very early '90s. Most of what I tried to write then (as now) was genre fiction, almost entirely SF/F/H. I was also working completely in the short fiction world. There were a handful of "big" magazines (Analog, Asimov's, F&SF being the biggest) and a lot of small press magazines which paid anywhere from a few cents a word to not a cent. Those small press magazines also tended to come and go with some regularity.  There were occasional themed original anthologies which took unsolicited submissions.

Though I didn't attempt anything novel-length at that time, I was aware of the fact that there were Publishers (big and small) and Vanity Presses/self-publishing. The general impression I got was that no one who seriously considered being a potential professional Writer would be going the self-published/Vanity Press route.

Fast-forward to 2011 and some things look the same, others look a lot different. In the short-fiction world, most of the "big" magazines of 1991 are still around, though circulation numbers continue to drop and F&SF switched to bi-monthly larger-size issues a while back. Small press magazines still exist, but a large percentage of them are electronic.

In terms of electronic publication, the huge change has been the rise of the e-reader and eBooks. No longer does self-publishing necessarily mean throwing a bunch of money at someone to print copies of your books and then hope you can sell them so you aren't losing money on the deal. Sites like Smashwords and Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing have been game-changers; you upload your "book" (which could be non-fiction, a novel, or even a single short story) in the proper format and its made available in their marketplace. When people buy it, you get a (typically hefty) percentage of the sale price.

Now, the trick of course is that people have to buy it. Otherwise, you've burned your first publication rights and haven't gotten paid for it. Still, I suspect in the Twitter/Facebook/Google+ world, it's a lot easier to drum up interest in a book by someone nobody has ever heard of than it was 20 years ago if you were driving around on a tour of independent bookstores with a couple crates of books in the back of a van. John Locke has sold over a million books that way, and even with the reduced percentage of the sale price he's received by pricing his books at 99 cents, that still represents a lot more money than many authors ever make. Obviously one example doesn't mean "Oh my gosh, everyone should be self publishing novels at 99 cents -- it's a gold rush!"

For me at least, there's still something ephemeral-feeling about eBooks. If you publish an eBook, even one that sells well, you can't give signed copies to your friends and your grandchildren won't one day run across a copy in a used bookstore or library.

But it does give one reason to think, especially since we're still clearly in the dawn of the eBook age. Being flexible and keeping your eyes open for changes will be valuable skills for writers new and old.