Happy Thanksgiving!

In a narcissistic, consumption-driven world where social media preening is ubiquitous, it is remarkable that we as a nation still take a day off to spend time with family, enjoy a hearty meal together, and reflect on the meaning of gratitude. Thanksgiving is a holiday that encourages us to think of others more than ourselves, and for that reason alone, it needs to be practiced and preserved.

I am thankful for many things this year.

First, I am thankful that I live in a free and prosperous country, one that still shines as a beacon of hope to the rest of humanity. Could it be more free? Yes. Could it be more prosperous? Certainly. Is the beacon of hope fading? If it is, then we owe it to ourselves and our future posterity to work diligently to keep it burning.

I am more thankful than I can express to my pioneer ancestors: the ones who made the trek to Utah, the ones who came from Czechy to Texas, the ones who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the ones who settled the Old Southwest and the ones who fought in the Civil War and afterward settled in Southern Illinois. The more I research my family history, the more I’ve come to realize that there are pioneers on every branch of my family tree, and that I enjoy the privileges that I do because of the many sacrifices that they made.

I am thankful to the men and women of the armed services who protect this country from the forces seeking to destroy it, not just those who are living today, but those of previous generations who gave their lives in service to their country. Because of them, we won our independence from the colonial forces of Europe, we preserved our Constitution in the face of a bloody civil war, and we quite literally saved the world from the twin evils of Fascism and Communism. There is evil in the world today that cannot be appeased, cannot be ignored, and cannot be defeated by words alone. I am thankful for the brave men and women who put their lives on the line every day to defeat it.

I am thankful for a loving family, for parents who made the commitment of marriage and still honor their vows to each other. I am thankful for my three sisters who still stay in touch with me and are an important part of my life. I’m thankful for nieces and nephews, for cousins and extended family, and for the many strong connections that still bind us together.

Lastly, I’m thankful for the opportunity to pursue a career as a writer. It’s not every person who gets to do this. Until just recently, there were very few opportunities to get published, and even fewer authors who could leverage publication into a full-time career. Even today, the path isn’t easy, so I am grateful to those readers who support me and make this possible.

Thank you!

November’s book recommendations

So I thought it would be fun to start posting some monthly book recommendations on my blog, both of books I personally have enjoyed, and books like mine that I think my readers will enjoy. I’ve seen a lot of other authors do it, and it seems like a good way to pay it forward and invite good karma (and on a purely capitalist note, it also seems like a great way to bring in some affiliate income and spread my books around in the Amazon also-boughts).

For this month, I’ve chosen a novel, a novella, and a short story, all $.99 on Amazon (some of them are $2.99 on iBooks and Kobo). Two of the authors are personal friends of mine (Kindal Debenham and Annaliese Lemmon—we were both in the same college writing group), but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed their books and have no qualms recommending them.

We’ll start with Wolfhound by Kindal Debanham. This is a rip-roaring space adventure, and the first part of a trilogy that I highly recommend. Starship pilots from the frontier regions of space, fighting to defend their beloved home from pirates and invasion. This is exactly the kind of book I used to scour the local library for as a kid.

Nothing Found

I first discovered Date Night on Union Station from the Amazon also-boughts of my own Star Wanderers books, and it did not disappoint. Clean sci-fi romance with a generous helping of comedy. I haven’t read all the other books in the series yet, but I definitely plan to.

Nothing Found

Infant Insomnia is a bit of a departure from the kind of science fiction I usually write, but if you enjoyed Outworlder and Starchild I think you’ll like this one too. Short and tender, the story of a magical seer trying desperately to save her newborn child from the imminent death she sees in every possible branch of her child’s future.

Nothing Found

Thanks for reading!

Dear #ImWithHer and #NotMyPresident

I know we disagree on a lot of things. We live in troubled times, and many of you are scared for the future. I can see it in your eyes. I can hear it in your voices.

There’s a very real temptation now to glory in victory, or to swear vengeance and foment revolution. But that only perpetuates a cycle of hatred. The people who opposed President Bush were not all unpatriotic. The people who opposed President Obama were not all racists.

And so, I offer you this. I mean it sincerely.

Post-Election Predictions

The Good:

James Comey will resign.

Obamacare will collapse and be repealed within the year. We will not move to a single-payer healthcare system. There will be chaos in the short-term, but healthcare costs will go down for most people.

Black Lives Matter, which was always a front for the nationalization of the police, will drift into irrelevance.

Washington will stop backing the so-called “moderate” rebels in Syria, and the proxy war will come to an end. ISIS will be swiftly defeated.

President Trump will appoint a special investigator to the Clinton scandals, and HRC will ultimately face justice.

Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court will be another originalist.

The Bad:

Within three months, we will learn that the United States is officially in a recession. When President Trump takes office in January, we will learn that the economic numbers are far worse than the Obama administration led us to believe.

Not all of President Trump’s protectionist policies will be enacted, but enough of them will pass to depress global trade even more than it has already been depressed. This will be compared to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, and Trump will be blamed for the subsequent collapse.

Unfortunately, the global collapse is unavoidable at this point. It is rooted in our flawed post-Nixon Bretton Woods monetary system, which is already coming apart. However, the Left will use the crisis as an opportunity to pin the blame on Trump, and the Republicans will pay a bitter price politically.

Riding the coattails of Trump’s movement, radical nationalist parties will sweep Europe in the 2017 and 2018 elections. This will lay the groundwork for war.

The Ugly:

Obama will try to pardon Hillary Clinton or otherwise grant her immunity, but will fail. She may attempt to flee the country.

The Clinton scandals will drag on for several years, ultimately surpassing Watergate in sheer breadth and scope. Democrats will circle the wagons for a while, but the insiders and moneyed interests will abandon her, and she will ultimately fall. This will do nothing to unite the country.

With Clinton gone, the civil war within the Republican Party will resume, and expand to include Independents and even some Democrats. There will be a massive political realignment, and individual fortunes will dramatically rise and fall. The current two-party system will pass through it intact, but the parties that emerge on the other end will have little resemblance to what they were only a decade ago.

In the next six months, DeutscheBank will fail and Germany will fall into a recession. Germany will bail them out, but this will sound the death knell for the European Union. There is a very good chance that the EU will collapse before the Brexit negotiations are complete.

The US economy will temporarily rebound as the rest of the world collapses faster than us, sending capital to our shores. However, neither Trump nor the Fed will correctly interpret the indicators, and will not prepare us for the coming storm.

Within 5-10 years, the dollar will collapse and the United States will default on its debt. This may or may not happen on President Trump’s watch, but he will fail to adequately prepare us for it. The middle class will be utterly gutted, paving the way for the resurgence of the radical Left in 2020 and 2024. They are already sharpening their swords for that day.

TL;DR

We have about 1-2 months of schadenfreude/mourning (depending on which side of the aisle you fall), followed by two years of breathtaking political upheaval. After falling briefly into a recession, the economy will temporarily rebound before SHTF in a way that makes the Great Recession look like a walk in the park.

In other words, the election just gave us four more years to buy guns, gold, and food storage. Never say I’m not an optimist.

Election night thoughts

Oh how the mighty have fallen.

That is all.

What’s going on with Sons of the Starfarers?

ssf-i-large-cover ssf-ii-large-cover ssf-iii-large-cover ssf-iv-large-cover ssf-v-large-cover

I don’t know how many people are looking forward to the last four Sons of the Starfarers books, but I feel like I owe you an explanation for what is (or rather, isn’t) going on with the series.

I started the series back in 2014, after publishing the last Star Wanderers novella. Star Wanderers was an experiment with the trendy advice among indie authors at the time, to split up a wider story arc into lots of short books in a linear series, with the first one permanently free.

For the first two years, the experiment paid off—so much so that I decided to write another series using the same trendy publishing advice. That series was Sons of the Starfarers.

But then, things started to go downhill. Amazon introduced Kindle Unlimited, and the algorithms changed in ways that no longer favored the trendy publishing advice. Star Wanderers began to languish, and Sons of the Starfarers never took off in the way I’d hoped that it would. Up to this point, 90% of my sales were on Amazon. Needless to say, my career took an enormous hit.

Most indie authors in my position reacted by going all in with Kindle Unlimited. Essentially, they dumped 2012’s trendy advice for 2014’s trendy advice. I took the opposite tact and went back to basics.

This still left the awkward question of what to do with the unfinished Sons of the Starfarers series. Abandon it? That was unthinkable. But it wasn’t practical to finish it either, seeing as I needed something that would actually pay the bills.

So I kicked it around for a couple of years, working on it between other projects but not making it a huge priority. In this way, I wrote and published Friends in Command and Captives in Obscurity. But as more time passed, it soon became clear that this wouldn’t work. The books were getting harder to write as I became more distanced from the story, and releasing them piecemeal wasn’t exactly boosting sales of the previous books in the series.

A couple of days ago, I wrote up a publishing schedule for 2017. My goal is to have a new release every month. A couple of novels are on the schedule, including Gunslinger to the Stars and The Sword Keeper, but as of now there are no Sons of the Starfarers books.

This is not because I’m abandoning the series, however. Far from it. My goal is to release all of the last four books together, within a month of each other. In order to do this properly, I’m going to write them all together in one big sprint, probably sometime next year.

I haven’t planned out everything yet, but I do have all the titles figured out. They are:

Brothers in Exile
Comrades in Hope
Strangers in Flight
Friends in Command
Captives in Obscurity
Patriots in Retreat
A Queen in Hiding
An Empire in Disarray
Victors in Liberty

If I had the money, I would commission all of the covers right now (my poor cover designer thought this job would be finished a year ago—at least he got an advance!), but what money I have needs to go toward producing Gunslinger to the Stars. No idea how long it will take. And the books themselves probably won’t come out until 2018.

So don’t worry, I have not and will not abandon this series. If you’re waiting, I apologize for taking so long, and also for the fact that you’re probably going to be waiting a while longer. But the good news is that when the last four books do come out, they will come out in quick succession. So there’s only one more big wait. Hopefully that’s good news.

Sorry!

What’s up with Asimov’s?

Way back in June, I submitted a short story to Asimov’s. Normally, it takes them four to six weeks to come back with a response. However, it’s been almost five months and I haven’t heard anything.

I’m not the only one, either. According to The Submission Grinder, their slushpile is backed up to the end of May. The average wait time for stories currently on submission is 100 days:

Clearly, something weird is going on. In the last 30 days, only seven responses are logged. Seven.

What’s going on?

I queried the editors six weeks ago, and they confirmed that my story was still under consideration. So it’s not like they’ve dropped off the face of the Earth completely. Still, that was six weeks ago, and there hasn’t been much movement since then.

Maybe there was a personal tragedy or family emergency? If so, that’s completely understandable. But I can’t find anything online to indicate that that’s the case, and my friends in the industry haven’t heard anything either.

I really hope this isn’t the new normal for Asimov’s. I stopped submitting to Analog because their average response time is more than 150 days. In an age where self-publishing is the new normal, it really doesn’t make sense to have a story sitting on an editor’s desk for that long.

This particular story takes place in the same universe as Gunslinger to the Stars, which I hope to publish in a few months. I would really like to get this story out sometime next year, either in one of the magazines or by publishing it myself.

If anyone knows anything about this, please let me know.

Gunslinger to the Stars Progress Update

The 2.0 draft of Gunslinger to the Stars is now complete—and right on deadline, too!

Gunslinger to the Stars

Phase:2.0 Draft

Due:9 years ago

100%

MyBookProgress by Author Media

This draft ended at about 62k words, 13% less than the first draft. Leaner, tighter writing, with a lot less exposition and a lot more character voice.

Before I publish it, I do want to get some more feedback and do another editing pass. In particular, I want to make sure there aren’t any plot holes or other major problems. But it is at a point where I can write up the book description and commission cover art, so that should be coming in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, I’m gong to celebrate with a half-gallon of ice cream. Take care!

Shifting Strategies

A couple of weeks ago, Kobo came out with some new terms and conditions for their Kobo Writing Life program. Under the new terms, the list price for a book (not the sales price) cannot be higher than it is elsewhere.

This throws a kink in the works, since the only way I’ve ever gotten traction on Kobo is by taking advantage of their promotions, like the half off box set sales or the 30% off monthly sales. The problem, of course, is that Amazon has the same clause in their TOS, and if you undercut the Amazon price they will 1) match the lower price, and 2) send you a nastygram threatening to close your account if you don’t change your prices to comply.

(This is also the reason why my books are not on Google Play Books. Google will arbitrarily drop the prices of your books, sometimes setting the price to free without any prior warning, leading to a loss of income on Amazon when they price match your books.)

Until now, the way I’ve gotten around that is by pricing my books a little higher on Kobo so that I can drop the price for the promotional sales. But it does feel a little weird to have the same product at a different price on different sites. If I were a Kobo reader, that would turn me off (hence the change in their TOS).

At the same time, it’s come to my attention that unless your book has an ISBN, Kobo will not distribute your books to the many local ebookstores that they partner with. You can still publish on Kobo, but your books won’t go any further.

In the United States, ISBNs are insanely expensive. If you buy them one at a time, it costs $125 for each one. You can get them as low as $1.50 each, but you have to buy 1,000 at a time.

Until now, I haven’t really bothered with ISBNs. Most ebook publishing platforms don’t require them, and for those that do, you can publish through a distributor like Draft2Digital who will assign you an ISBN for free. The catch is that the publisher on record for the free ISBN will be D2D, but that doesn’t impact your publishing rights at all.

(Print also requires ISBN, but CreateSpace also gives you an option for a free CreateSpace-assigned ISBN, which is what I’ve been doing for print.)

In short, by publishing my books directly to Kobo without providing my own ISBNs, my reach is greatly limited. I can publish to Kobo via D2D and get the extra reach, but then I’ll lose access to the promotions tab, which is pretty much the only way to get my books in front of Kobo readers. But that doesn’t matter anyway, since I can’t price my books on Kobo higher than they are on Amazon, and if I drop the price on Kobo for a sale, Amazon will start sending nastygrams.

So here’s my new strategy:

I’m going to pull all of my books out of Kobo Writing Life and go through Draft2Digital instead. There really is no advantage to staying all-in with KWL anymore, and the added benefit of the D2D ISBNs is enough to convince me to go through them.
At the same time, I’m going to create some Kobo-exclusive bundles to take advantage of the KWL promotions tab. If the bundle doesn’t appear on Amazon, then it doesn’t matter how I price it on Kobo because there’s nothing for Amazon to match. At the same time, the contents of the bundle are still available as individual books, so my Amazon readers lose nothing.
For my single-title books, the price on Kobo will be the same as the price on Amazon. For the Kobo-exclusive bundles, the list price will be higher, but they’ll also be on sale more often which should bring more attention to my single-title books.

The biggest downside I can see is that my Kobo royalties will be split between D2D and KWL. To offset this, I’ll have to publish a variety of Kobo-exclusive bundles. Here are some of the ones I have in mind:

Bringing Stella Home and Heart of the Nebula, in one double-novel.
Desert Stars and Stars of Blood and Glory, in one double-novel.
The complete Star Wanderers series, with Brothers in Exile.
A first-in-series bundle, with Outworlder, Brothers in Exile, and Bringing Stella Home.
The first Sons of the Starfarers omnibus (I-III). This means I will take it down from Amazon.

So that’s the plan. I probably won’t announce these new bundles to my email list, since most of my subscribers are Kindle readers and I don’t want to be too spammy. But I will announce them here.

Well, that rules out time travelers

If there’s one thing that the events of the weekend have proven, it’s that time machines aren’t going to be invented for at least another few hundred years. Because if time travelers from our immediate future were in our midst, I have no doubt that either Hillary or Trump (or both, Godwilling!) would have been assassinated by now.

Of course, it could just be that things are going to collapse so hard that it wouldn’t make a difference which one of them became president, but whatever. No sense in being overly optimistic.

Last week was a total wash after the motorcycle accident, but I’m slowly getting back into the saddle. I’ve got the comments back from my first readers for Gunslinger to the Stars, so that’s the WIP I’m picking up next. Deadline for draft 2.0 is October 29, but I may be able to get it done sooner than that. Hell, I may even get it done this week.

Publishing it is another question. Finances are tight, and it’s been a bad year for sales, so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to produce a quality book. Right now, I’m shooting for an April release date. That may actually be a good thing, though as it gives me time to write and release a few tie-in short stories. But regardless, it’s going to come out early next year.

Between now and then, I’ll probably release a couple of short stories and story collections. The shorts are selling better than I expected, and they make great giveaways for InstaFreebie and my mailing list. I’ve still got a bunch of stories on submission, but some of them are coming off soon, and others (like the tie-ins I want to write) would probably do better as direct to publish anyways.

As far as other WIPs go, my next big project is The Sword Keeper 2.0. I want to do a solid clean-up pass before I hand it off to my first readers, which shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks. It is my first epic fantasy novel, though, so it’s probably going to need a lot of work before I can publish it.

Next one up after that is Edenfall. There’s been a lot of interest in that one from readers of Genesis Earth, so I think it’s time (after so many years) to finish the trilogy.

I have plans for Sons of the Starfarers, but those will have to go on hold for a while as I work on these other projects. I’ll probably write the last four books in a big sprint and publish them all within a month of each other. No idea when, but hopefully before the end of next year.

That pretty much does it. I’ll leave you with some words of Hungarian optimism that showed up in my YouTube feed today: