I am officially moving my blog over to my new domain today: DanThompsonWrites.com
While I will no longer be updating the blog here, I’m going to leave the archives up for a year or two just so that any incoming links will still work.
The new site will still have a few cosmetic issues for a few days, but I’ll be updating over there and ironing out the wrinkles in the coming days.
Wow, that week went fast, and I have very little to show for it. The blog move is still in progress, and it was a crap week for writing. It’s day 30 of Oaths of My Fathers, and I’m really only about halfway through it, maybe even a little shy of that.
Home life with the kids has been… well, scatological.
But still, I’m plugging along.
I tried to come up with a more generic and boring title for this and utterly failed. So be it.
Anyway, the blog has been kind of quiet the last week or two. Partly this is because I’ve been putting a lot of writing time into Oaths of My Fathers. It’s currently about 40,000 words long, but I’m behind schedule on it. I want to get it wrapped up in the next couple of weeks as I start getting beta-reader feedback for Debts of My Fathers. For the curious, it’s a continuity thing. Before I do the final edits to a book, I like to draft its sequel. That way, if there’s anything I need to set up beforehand, there’s still a chance to put it in.
Debts of My Fathers is vaguely on track for a May release, but a lot of that depends on the beta reader feedback. My insecure writer’s ego is terrified that the book actually sucks, that the beta readers will confirm it, and that it will require extensive rewrites. But I feel this way pretty much whenever my beta readers are reading one of my books, so it’s probably not a legitimate reason to worry. Still, it’s hard to nail down exact schedules until I get that feedback.
Hell Bent and the draft to Stone Killer are pretty much on hold. I’m focused on getting Debts/Oaths done, but once Debts goes to the copy editor, I’ll pick up on that series again until it’s time to format and publish Debts.
But it’s also been quiet because it’s been a rough couple of weeks with my kids. I don’t talk much about them, but they’re special needs kids, and it’s just been harder than usual lately. There’s some sign of improvement two or three months down the road, but unfortunately, it is predicted to be one of those times where it will likely get worse before it gets better. So, in the meantime I’m trying to look upon it as a plot twist aimed at upping the stakes before our protagonist ultimately emerges victorious.
I’m also taking a little time to move this blog to a new domain. That’s right. As part of my goals for the year, Making It Up As I Go is making way for something with a bit more of a plan. Specifically, I am attempting to migrate the whole thing, archives, comments, and all over to DanThompsonWrites.com. At the moment, that domain simply forwards back over to here, but when I’m all done the reverse will be true. I’m still working out a few kinks, but I’m hoping it will go live in the coming week. In the meantime, I’ve been hesitant to get a bunch of entries queued up – hence the quiet.
Once that’s done, I have a laundry list of little blog improvements to do that have been building up. I didn’t want to do them pre-move, so once that’s done, several of them should show up promptly with a few more dribbling in afterwards. As such, there might be a few bumps along the way, but in the long-run, it should be better.
Also, I do plan on being in Dallas for ConDFW next weekend (Feb 21-23), but I’m not signed up for any programming. I haven’t tried to get on any panels, but the general word is that it’s hard for indies to make that jump. Maybe later in the year when I have another 2-3 titles out. (Crossing my fingers…) Still, if you’re going to be there, look for the long-haired, red-bearded, kilt-wearing Scotsman. We’re only slightly less-common than a Slave Leia at DragonCon.
So, that’s it for now. See you all on the other side of the domain move.
This is one of those posts that I’m mostly doing for my local writers’ group, but if you are doing anything with self/indie-publishing, you might also find them of interest. There’s no grand theme here, just a handful of links I promised.
E-book Formatting
I learned e-book formation from this series of 10 blog posts: Take Pride In Your E-Book Formatting It’s been around for a couple of years, and parts of it are showing its age. In particular, I only use Calibre to produce the EPUB file, and then I use Amazon’s Kindle Preview app to convert that version to the MOBI format.
I have been considering moving to Sigil as my main e-book production tool, and here’s a good article that talks about a few different paths for e-book production: e-Book Creation: A Guide for Writers, by Lisa Cohen. It covers some word-processor-to-Calibre approaches, but it also has a section on going direct with Sigil.
Both of these lay out the simple fact that both E-book formats are essentially simplified HMTL web pages wrapped up in a zip file. Depending on how comfortable you are with HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), you can find a production path that works for you. For me, the key was to work through several iterations of a small file, something with four chapters of a few pages each. That let me work through the errors without dealing with a 90,000-word document.
I know a couple of guys (Jefferson Smith and Nathan Lowell) who seem to have super-streamlined processes for this, but I’m not quite there yet.
Print-book Formatting
I’m the middle of a stalled 3-4 post series on this. The first of which mostly talks about page size and margins and can be found here: Print Formatting: Page Size and Margins
In due time, I mean to write one on paragraph-formatting and font choice, another on some stylistic matters like chapter headers, quotes, etc., a third on header/footer stuff and the magic trick to get MS Word to do that, and finally one more on front and back matter. I’m not sure if I’ll get all those links back into this post or if they’ll just link one to another in a series.
In the meantime, I urge you to check out the archives of The Book Designer and his MS Word templates at Book Design Templates.
Self-publishing Sales Data
There have been several self-publishing surveys and reports lately. Some of them are almost worthless due to bad sampling and faulty conclusions. Some have been better. Here’s a good summary of several of them: All about the Money
But just in the last 24 hours, a new study has come out that has relied on doing some data-mining on the Amazon servers along with other reports that pieced together reasonable conversions from Amazon’s Sales Rank number to the actual rate of sales, i.e. how many books you’re selling.
Early analysis of the report looks fairly good, though it is upfront that it is looking only at Amazon data and only at the top few thousand books. (One set of data looks at the top 7000, while another expanded it to look at the top 50,000.) It was spearheaded and funded by self-pub success story Hugh Howey and can be found here: Author Earnings – The Report.
Book recommendation: I’ve also been recommending a great book on the no-luck strategy for self-publishing success called Write Publish Repeat. My review is here along with a link to the book.
That’s it for now. There may be more of these in the future.
Alas, I fell woefully behind over the weekend. It was a packed weekend, and with my kids, I don’t get a lot of sane time on the weekends. I actually did get some writing done, but it was for a completely different project – I was presenting something of an award on Saturday night and wrote up a couple of pages for it. But other than that, zero new words on Oaths. I did hit the word mines again today, and while my numbers were not earth-shattering, they were almost respectable. Well, no, they weren’t actually, but they were better than the weekend.
However, in a flash of inspiration, I did work out a problem for the end of book 5. I don’t exactly have these planned out in detail, but I knew mostly how I wanted the climax to go down. No spoilers here, but it was of the form: after A happens, we get to do The Big Thing. The only problem was that I had never quite worked out how A was going to happen in such a way that The Big Thing was not only possible but not a leap of incredulity. Well, now I know how it’s going to happen, and I was able to jot down about 750 words to help me remember it when the time comes at last.
It’s time to head for bed, but I might manage a bit more on my laptop before lights-out. I’ve got a plumber coming in the morning, so I might not be in full swing until the afternoon, but I am making progress.
One distraction, though, is that my upper back is really hurting these days. And by “really hurting”, I mean screw-my-eyes-shut-and-cry hurting. I suspect it’s partly from poor sitting posture at my desk, but I think I also strained something wrestling with the eldest boy last week. This isn’t the part of the back that the treadmill seems to help much, but I’ll at least be giving it a shot tomorrow.
I hope to be doing monthly status updates on my big goals throughout the year, both to let folks know how I’m doing and to give myself a good kick in the ass. This is the first of those updates.
First, the numbers. In January, I wrote 42,906 words, of which 10,425 saw the light of day and hence fall into my “published” category. That’s roughly half as many as I should have written and about a quarter as many as I should have published. Hmm, trying to get those to 1,000,000 and 500,000 for the year. Am I worried? Not much. The justification is in the details, so here’s the breakdown:
Email/journaling/other-private: 7344 words. Much of this is just the overhead of being engaged with life and community. Nothing much to see here. Still, that’s only about 70% the rate I predicted in my planning calculations. I don’t plan on trying to increase this artificially. These are words I kind of get for free.
Blogging/Social-Media: 12,072 words. This is split pretty much evenly between my blog here and my activity on Google+. I don’t necessarily publish much original content over there, but I tend to post a lot of long comments. This one hit my original estimates pretty much even, though I’m heavier on the social media than I originally estimated.
Fiction: 23,490 words. The bulk of this was on Oaths of My Fathers during the last week or so, currently at about 17,500, and the rest was some back-and-fill on Debts of My Fathers before it went out to beta readers. Here, I’m only at about 40%, but I knew January was going to be a slow month for new words of fiction. My initial focus was to get Debts of My Fathers out the door to beta readers, and while editing can take a lot of time, it does not add many words. In many cases, it actually cuts them down. So, while I did get to add a few words to the total during my edits to Debts, the words-per-hour was abysmal. Still, I’m ripping along through Oaths at a pretty good clip, and if I can keep to the schedule, I will actually wrap it up late in February, and that will put me pretty much on target for new fiction written.
Published: This is the 10,425 words mentioned up top, and it’s woefully lagging behind the pace at about 25% what it should be. But this one is always going to move in ragged jumps with the publication of books. I’ve pushed Debts of My Fathers one step closer to publication, so I feel pretty good here.
As for the other smaller goals, here’s a quick look…
Meet up with other writers I know online: I haven’t done much here yet, but I have mostly laid out my convention schedule of the year. ConDFW in February is likely but not yet certain. AggieCon is a possibility for the first time in years, though I still have to deal with a conflicting engagement. ApolloCon is proving difficult due to child-care issues, but I think I’ve got that sorted out. ArmadilloCon should be fairly easy, but due to some other conflicts, I may only be able to do one day. FenCon is also pretty much certain but not yet nailed down. I confess that DragonCon is tempting, but I have to wait for a few other things to settle down before I can even seriously contemplate it.
Beef up the website: Nothing is visible yet, but I’ve actually been making good progress here. I will almost certainly be moving the blog within the next month to a new URL. MakingItUpAsIGo.com will forward you to the new one once it’s up and running. I already have the new URL, and I’m looking at a couple of other hosting services to see if I want to switch service providers at the same time as the move.
Improve my health: Meh, this one has gone nowhere. On the other hand, I haven’t exactly backslid either. January was a month of rolling crises here at my house, and I’m afraid to say that self-care like exercise is one of the first things that goes out the door when things get tight. Note to self and others: that’s not a particularly good strategy.
So that’s it for January. Let’s hope the good things continue in February and the bad things disappear like this nasty winter. So someone, please, put a shade structure over that damn groundhog tomorrow. He really needs to not see his shadow.
You’re still here? OK, let me tell you why you should go read this book.
First of all, it lays bare some of the ugly truths about self-publishing. It is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s a lot of hard work. In the beginning, you won’t sell much of anything at all. Friends and family will look at you funny and talk in concerned whispers behind your back. Bills will pile up. You’ll fly in faith of the awful-sounding Yog’s Law. But for some us, it’s the best thing ever.
Their title pretty much sums up the recipe for success. Write. Keep writing. Never stop. Publish that writing. Get it in shape. Make it awesome. Put on a cover that does not look like it was made by your 3-year-old master de crayon. And then do it again, again, again, and once more… again.
The talk a little about productivity techniques, about how writing faster does not mean writing crud, and how a lot of time, it’s just about putting your butt in the chair and writing instead of being out and about talking about how someday soon, you’re going to write.
They also talk about doing the publishing side of. It’s not a step-by-step guide to filling out the forms on Amazon or Kobo. Rather, they talk about the things to look for, the things to watch out for, and how to think about your publishing goals. Ultimately, they encourage you to establish a direct connection to your readers to help you survive any disruption for any particular vendor.
And on the repeat side? It’s more than just a commandment to go at it again. They talk about why it’s important to build up a large collection of books to sell and how to best leverage that growing inventory into increased sales. They give ideas of how to cast a wide net and funnel those readers into successive purchases of your extra books, as well as how those extra books can help you those readers find you in the first place.
Mostly, the book is about strategies that should work for the next five, ten, heck, even twenty years. These are not the latest tricks for gaming the Amazon ranking algorithms. These are plans for the long haul of building a career.
I only have two quibbles, both relatively minor. They push Scrivener as though it’s a must have. It isn’t. It makes something easier. It makes other things harder – at least, for me. Find the tool that works best for you. Second, they are mostly geared towards writing shorter novellas linked into series, i.e. each “book” is about 20-30,000 words long. I find I can’t write that short. That does not invalidate any of their strategies, however. It just means it takes longer to implement them.
So yes, if you’re thinking about self-publishing, read this book.
Just a quick progress report. I’m five days into drafting Oaths of My Fathers, and I’m currently about 11,000 words in, trying to reach 13,500 today. I’m sort of behind because I started by Day 1 at about 9pm and only got a few hundred words in rather than the 3000 words-per-day target. However, each day since then, I’ve hit well over 3000, so I am definitely on track to catch up. Then again, weekends with the kids at home is tough.
But it is underway, and I’ve got a pretty good feel for the plot route I’m taking. The target size is 90,000 to 100,000 words. Ships came out to about 86,000, and Debts is currently much longer at 107,000. My drafts tend to grow during edits as I see things that I left out the first time through, so even if I wrap up at 90,000, Oaths may very well top 100,000 before it goes out the door.
I recently ran across a blog post that pointed out that Tatooine (the Star Wars planet of double-sunset fame) could never exist because of the problems inherent to the 3-body problem. Specifically, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion get all wonky when you are dealing with more than the two bodies: the planet and the sun. In fact, orbital patterns can start to look a little crazy, and yes, in situations like that, Tatooine would not survive long enough to even form, let alone be settled by sand people, Jedi, and various assorted scum and villainy.
Except that this doesn’t have to be the case. There are a variety of cases where a planetary orbit can be quite stable in a binary star system, provided it’s in the right place.
LOCATION LOCATION LOCATION
Yeah, that’s right, it’s all about orbital real estate. The sweet spots seem to be either very close to one of them, or very far away from both.
When the planet is much closer to one star than the other, the distant star does not have much gravitational influence on the planet’s orbit. It can orbit the smaller star in a nice circular orbit, almost as though the other star weren’t there at all. Well, it looks like a circular orbit from the point of view of the nearby star. From the point of view of the system’s center of gravity, it’s more akin to a spirograph. (And yes, I know that this dates me, but spirographs were cool!)
Here, instead of Tatooine’s double-sunset, you’ll have half the year with no night at all. Sure, one sun will set, just as the other one is coming up. I imagine that will be summer, regardless of the planet’s tilt, because overnight lows only come when there is night. It might make for an interesting place to live, but the seasons could be a little intense.
A more Earthlike (or at least Tatooine-like) experience will come if you can get far away from both stars. Put them together in the center of the system, spinning merrily around each other, and stay out in the suburbs where it’s cool and relatively steady.
Here, your orbit is stable, close to circular, and any seasons you have will be due to axial tilt, not varying proximity to the great fiery balls in the sky. Plus, you know… the infamous double-sunset.
But this isn’t just me jerking around with a gravity simulator. Nope, it’s backed up by actual observations. Now that we have a decade’s worth of observations from the Kepler satellite telescope, we have actually found a number of planets orbiting in binary systems. So far, we have found at least five planets orbiting tight binaries, much like Tatooine.
So, don’t throw away your Star Wars travel plans. Tatooine is very likely out there somewhere, possibly in a galaxy very nearby.
Now, there are limits on this. Some of them have to do with the way the magic works, but others are put in place by the ruling society of mages. So, no sentient nanobots, no atomic weapons, and no One True Ring to rule them all. Still, you can be bitten by a vampire or werewolf if you stick your hands into the wrong book, and heaven help you if you spend too much time with the History of the Black Plague. But what happens when mages start going missing, impossible artifacts start appearing, and the folks who are supposed to stop all of this are asleep at the switch?
Here’s where we find Isaac Vainio, a would-be Libriomancer who got kicked out of the order, left with the menial task of checking the latest from sci-fi and fantasy for overpowered weapons and dangerous infections. He’s not merely a nobody. He’s a has-been nobody, forbidden from even using the limited powers he once wielded. But he’s the one who has to pick up the flaming spider and charge forth against the darkness. Yes, a flaming spider… I’m sure I read that somewhere…
Anyway, it starts with this ecstatic-fanboy premise and takes us on an amazing trip, showing us both how it all got started, how it can go terribly wrong, and the actions we have to take to keep us all from being plundered by the Uruk-hai or the battle-droids. This is the most fun I’ve had with urban fantasy in a long time.
