Preserving the "Nicor" Cover for Posterity...

This past weekend I signed a contract to have my short Viking horror story "Nicor" included in anthology. Part of the contract was that it be exclusive to them for two years. That meant removing the Kindle edition from Amazon. Since the story is available for free online it wasn't really a great seller, so this was not something I had a problem with. I don't anticipate putting it back up.

That said, I would like to preserve the "Nicor" cover, created by Alex Claw, for posterity. So here you go...

By the way, if you want to get this story and a bunch of others, you can chip in on the Kickstarter. Not only can you get cool prizes, but you will also make sure the collection will be well-advertised and that there will be plenty of resources available for the third anthology.

FREE Supervillain-Protagonist Story on Thanksgiving and Black Friday

For Thanksgiving and Black Friday 2016, I've made my short story "Ubermensch" FREE. Those of you interested in superheroes, supervillains, villain-protagonist stories, and diversity in speculative fiction (lead character Andrew Patel is Indian-American) should take a look.

(Alex Claw has illustrated many of my Amazon stories, which can be found here. I think "Ubermensch" is the best cover. Here's his DeviantArt account if you're looking for an artist.)

And now for some background you might find interesting. I first started writing "Ubermensch" sometime in 2011. I published it independently on Amazon in early August 2013, with the sequel "Needs Must" appearing just under two weeks later. I've got a lot of potential stories to tell with this character, as the fact I've made it a series on Amazon indicates.

If you read the story, please leave an honest review, good or bad. I've got a cover made and a fourth (but not a third) story written for a four-story Andrew Patel collection. If and when it goes up, it will tie Andrew Patel and his world in with my Lovecraftian novel The Thing in the Woods. But I'd like to know if there's sufficient interest first.

Here's the cover for the planned collection for those who'd like to know more:

Alex did this one too.

My Andrew Patel Plan...

Lately I've been listening to the Sell More Books Show, a podcast focusing on independent writers/publishers. Podcast member Bryan Cohen has a book series starting with Ted Saves the World and continuing with Mind Over Easy, Portal Combat, and The Light, the Dark, and the Ugly. Mr. Cohen apparently has set the first book for free and that has spurred many sales. I remember hearing that Robert Jordan had done something similar with the Wheel of Time series--the first book, The Eye of the World, was free to pick up at Waldenbooks (anybody remember that wonderful place?) and spurred sales significantly for the second book, The Great Hunt.

So here's how this applies to my Andrew Patel supervillain protagonist series. At some point I'm going to set the first story "Ubermensch" permanently free, remove the second story "Needs Must," and then then post a four-story collection entitled Consequences. The combined tale follows Patel as he deals with the consequences of the events of "Ubermensch" and "Needs Must." Since collections sell better than individual stories, this will hopefully be more economically lucrative as well.

And here's the probable cover, courtesy of Alex Claw.

I'm finishing up coursework for my masters degree right now and I'll need to study for comprehensive exams in June, so this might not be for some time. So get the individual stories while you can. :)

January 2015 Writing Contest Results

January 2015 was another iteration of my writing contest. I ended up writing 3,230 words on various fictional projects. Now that I'm starting the last phase of graduate school (the last classes and various exams), I doubt I'll be doing any more writing bets with friends until possibly this summer. So this'll be your last monthly update as to what I'm working on for awhile.

*Most of the words went into bringing The Thing in the Woods up to 56,000 words. That's at the low end of the right length for a young-adult novel. I've begun querying agents again, since it turns out there won't be an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest this year. Mostly just dribs and drabs of content, since the really big stuff went into the text in December.

*I also added a few hundred words to The Atlanta Incursion, the more UFO-centric sequel to The Thing in the Woods. I basically went through the entire text as written and added a little bit here and there. In the near future I'll need to do some research and go to the Videodrome in Virginia Highlands--the last in-town video rental store. A pity I don't live near it. :(

*I added a few hundred words to my near-future hard(ish) SF space-war tale The Cybele Incident. It's still around a third finished approximately.

*Also added a few hundred words to my two additional short stories featuring supervillain protagonist Andrew Patel (who has appeared in two earlier stories, Übermensch and Needs Must).The plan at present is to release an omnibus on Amazon containing all four stories--Alex Claw has already done a cover--that will be the only place one will be able to get the two remaining tales.

*Finally added a little bit to Battle for the Wastelands based on my reading of the history book River of Dark Dreams about the settlement of the antebellum Mississippi Valley. The Flesh-Eater regime just got a little bit more dystopian, although we won't actually see the details under the second book.

New "Beast of the Bosporus" Cover

Based on advice from James R. Tuck and J.H. Glaze, I have decided to revamp at least some of my Kindle stories' covers. In particular, Glaze said to prepare for the long run--should I have a "real" novel available for purchase, there'll suddenly be a lot more interest in my short stories and I want to be able to capitalize on that. Although I didn't want to make any investments that wouldn't pay off for a long time (I think I've only just now paid off the cover for "Illegal Alien"), the long run is the long run.

So I decided to replace the cover of "The Beast of the Bosporus," since it was one of my illustrator's first projects as a freelance artist and he's had just under two years to improve his craft. Here's the new cover:

You like? It's a lot more detailed and colorful than the original. The covers for "Melon Heads" and "I am the Wendigo" are going to stay the same, as are "Ubermensch" and "Needs Must." I might consider an upgraded cover for "Picking Up Plans in Palma," but that might not be necessary--it's still a pretty good cover and it's got the most reviews of any of my Kindle projects (and they're good ones).

And "the long run" might come sooner than you think. I'm pretty sure the collection Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire James is helping me with will be available sometime this month and my friend Jeff Baker said (based on something he heard at LibertyCon) that one needs many items (20-25) available on Amazon for your sales to really start feeding off each other. And The Thing In The Woods is almost ready for submission to agents...

"Beast of the Bosporus" Covers: What Might Have Been

One of the major hurdles facing would-be self-publishers is that they're responsible for all their own editing, marketing, cover art, etc. Between my own grammar-fascist tendencies and different writing groups I'm in, editing isn't a problem, and given my skill at networking, marketing isn't a problem either.

Cover art, however, is a different. I do like to draw with colored pencils, but other people can do it so much better. To put it in economics terms, comparative advantage.

For my third e-book, "The Beast of the Bosporus" I reached out to Alex Claw, who I know from my alternate-history message-board. He's done covers for former board member Christopher Nuttall and although his style is more cartoon-like than I prefer, he has been taking lessons to paint more realistically.

Since I believe in giving artists creative freedom, I sent him the text of the story and told him to come up with a cover based on what he read. Here's what he came up with:

I sent him back some suggestions, including removing Cthulhu (who is only incidentally related to the story), adjusting Sokullu Mehmed Pasha's face and fingernails a bit, and giving him a turban. After receiving my suggestions, Alex came up with this:

This cover is based on an actual scene from the story and the pasha is more distinctively Middle Eastern in look. I wrote "Beast" because I wanted to take Lovecraftian horror out of its typical rural New England setting and put it somewhere a bit more exotic.

(At the time, I'd forgotten about Robert E. Howard's short story "The Black Stone," which is set in the Balkans and includes Ottoman soldiers fighting an alien horror and its cult of rural inbred degenerates. It's a really good story, so if you want to read it, I recommend getting your hands on Nameless Cults: The Cthulhu Mythos Fiction of Robert E. Howard.It's awesome.)