Sons of the Starfarers – Page 15 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Brothers in Exile — excerpt 5

The moment the helmet clamps sealed with a hiss, Isaac felt as if he’d been cut off into his own private universe. The glass faceplate gave a slightly copper color to everything outside, while the indicators in the corner of his vision lit up softly with his vitals. He took a deep breath of the canned oxygen, and the hiss of the airflow filled his ears.

“Need a little help?” he asked, toggling the external speakers by clicking his right thumb and ring finger twice.

“I’ve got it,” said Aaron, his voice coming through a bit tinny. The pickup on the microphones wasn’t all that great, probably because the designers hadn’t considered them an important feature. After all, there was no sound in space.

“Great. I’ll be waiting for you in the airlock.”

Isaac barely lifted his feet as he shuffled through the heavy durasteel door into the starship’s only airlock. Even so, he could hear the clang of the metal grating against his boots through the fibers of his suit. The greenish-yellow LEDs shone down through thick plastiglass, protection from the harsh vacuum. Unlike the rest of the ship, the walls and ceiling were made of the same durasteel plating as the rest of the hull, designed for exposure to the void.

He stopped and stared at the opposite door. The rhythmic hiss of the airflow mingled with the silent pounding of his heart as he wondered what lay on the other side. The sweat pooling against the back of his neck felt strangely cold. He wished his brother would hurry up.

“All right,” came Aaron’s voice, followed by a short burst of static. The suit’s radio sounded a lot clearer than the external microphone.

“Are you ready?”

“I’m right behind you.”

“Great,” said Isaac. “Let’s get started.”

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Brothers in Exile (Sons of the Starfarers, Book I) is coming out later this week–I’m very excited! I think you guys are really going to like this one, and the new series that it’s going to launch. It’s set in the same universe as Star Wanderers with some of the same characters, but takes that story in a much different direction.

To be notified by email when Brothers in Exile is out, be sure to sign up for my mailing list if you haven’t already.

Thanks for reading!

Excerpt 1
Excerpt 2
Excerpt 3
Excerpt 4

Brothers in Exile — excerpt 4

“If anyone’s still alive—”

“They can’t be. If they were, they would have fixed the leak.”

Aaron bristled. “How do you know that? For all we know, the engineers are gone and none of the survivors knows what to do about it.”

“If there are any survivors, why haven’t they hailed us?”

“How should I know? All I know is that it’s possible. You can’t refute that.”

I guess I can’t, Isaac thought. Instead of admitting it, though, he kept silent, peering at the ghostly derelict as if lost in thought.

“We should dock and go in there,” said Aaron. “Peek inside, take a look around. Even if there aren’t any survivors, maybe we can at least find out what happened to them.”

“Are you crazy?” said Isaac, his heart beating a little faster at his brother’s suggestion. “We have no idea what’s in there. For all we know, the place is infested with some sort of disease.”

“So we go in in EVA suits and take a quick sterilizing spacewalk before we come back. No big deal.”

“It’s still a dumb idea. We’re not going.”

Aaron scowled and rolled his eyes. “So what, you just want to turn around and leave? Abandon this place without finding out what happened?”

“That’s right. We know that the station is dead, and that’s enough.”

“But we don’t know that,” said Aaron, raising both of his hands. “We don’t know hardly anything. All we know is that no one has answered our transmissions and there’s a small reactor leak at the hub, but everything else looks fine.”

It does not look fine, Isaac thought to himself. His palms felt clammy, and he was already beginning to regret his decision to come to this system at all.

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Brothers in Exile (Sons of the Starfarers, Book I) is coming out the weekend of May 17th. The cover art should be out soon–I’ll post it as soon as it is! In the meantime, I’ll keep posting these excerpts to give you a taste. If you’ve enjoyed Star Wanderers and the Gaia Nova books, I think you guys are really going to like this new series!

To be updated when it comes out, be sure to sign up for my email newsletter if you haven’t already.

Thanks for reading!

Excerpt 1
Excerpt 2
Excerpt 3

Brothers in Exile — excerpt 3

On the dark side of the horizon, where the ocean of stars met the blackness of night, a tiny point of light gradually grew brighter than all the others. It was the station, reflecting the starlight. As they came closer, the man-made structure gradually took shape: two narrow wheels running at cross-purposes to each other around a fat central cylinder with long antennae on either end. Isaac gripped the flight stick a little tighter and rechecked the nav-computer to make sure that they were still on course. Down below, a flash of pale blue lightning lit up a tiny patch of the planet’s atmosphere, but only for an instant. Whatever tempest swirled in the clouds below them, it preferred to brood in the shadows.

“We’re coming up on the station,” said Aaron. “One klick and dropping.”

“Can you try to contact them as I make the final approach? Be sure to try the shortwave too—if anyone’s still alive in there, chances are better that they’ll have something rigged up on those bands.”

Aaron shrugged, but he went ahead and did it anyway. Isaac kept an eye on the main screen as he made the final maneuvers to put them in a parallel orbit just 500 meters away.

“So this is Alnilam station,” he mused as he peered out the forward window. The station’s hull was a dark gray, the beacons at the ends of the antennae a deep flashing red. The starlight was too dim to give anything more than the basic shape of the structure. On the inside of the wheels where the windows should have been, there was a blackness as dark as the night on the planet below.

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Brothers in Exile (Sons of the Starfarers, Book I) is my latest book, due to come out later this month. It expands the Star Wanderers universe and starts an epic new story arc that will eventually tie in with the Gaia Nova books as well.

To be notified when it comes out, be sure to sign up for my mailing list if you haven’t already.

Thanks for reading!

Excerpt 1
Excerpt 2

Brothers in Exile — excerpt 2

“There,” said Aaron. “Got it.” The main cockpit holoscreen lit up between them, showing an image of the planet with their current trajectory in green. Around the sphere representing the planet itself, a red ellipse traced a separate orbit.

“What’s that?” Isaac asked.

“The station. Since they aren’t responding to our hails, I figure we ought to calculate our own approach vector.”

Isaac frowned. “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. We don’t know what else is down there. For all we know, our approach could put us on a collision course with local traffic.”

“What traffic? We’re picking up nothing but radio silence across all bands—for all we know, the station is dead.”

Dead.The suggestion sent chills down the back of Isaac’s neck. He sighed and shook his head.

“If the station were dead, wouldn’t the colonists have set up some sort of distress beacon?”

“What’s the point in setting up a distress beacon if you’re more than two parsecs from the nearest help?”

What if they are dead? Isaac wondered. What if that’s why they haven’t hailed us?

“Something is definitely wrong,” he said softly. “Maybe we should just cut our losses now and leave.”

“What? You mean turn around and go back to Nova Minitak?”

“That, or move on to Esperanzia. This isn’t right—we’ve been transmitting on every major frequency, with no response. Something about this system is very wrong, and I don’t want to get involved.”

“Involved in what?” asked Aaron, his face incredulous. “If something is wrong, maybe they need our help. How can we turn around and leave them if they need us?”

We can’t help them if they’re already dead.

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Brothers in Exile (Sons of the Starfarers, Book I) is coming out in ebook format later this month. It is the first book in the Sons of the Starfarers series, which takes place in the same universe and timeline as Star Wanderers. To be updated when it comes out, be sure to sign up for my mailing list if you haven’t already.

Thanks for reading!

Excerpt 1

Brothers in Exile — excerpt 1

Something about the Nova Alnilam system felt wrong. Perhaps it was the silence that greeted Isaac and his brother as they exited jumpsace near the fifth planet. The deep blue ice giant world shone pale in the crystalline light of its sun, while all their commscans picked up nothing but empty static. For a planet that was supposed to have a mid-sized orbital colony of more than a thousand people, that was highly unusual.

“Alnilam Station,” he said, transmitting across all the major radio bands. “This is Isaac of the Medea, requesting docking permission. Do you copy?”

Silence. Isaac counted to five and glanced at his younger brother Aaron.

“I don’t think they’re picking us up,” he said. “How’s our orbital trajectory?”

“It’s coming, it’s coming,” said Aaron, his eyes practically fused to his display screen. “Just give me a second.” He brushed his unkempt brown hair out of the way and scratched at the patchy stubble on his chin.

Isaac sat back in his chair and mentally reviewed what they knew about the system. A class F star on the barely inhabited Outworld fringes of the south second quadrant, it lay almost six light-years from the nearest established settlement. The first colonists had arrived about a hundred and twenty standard years ago, but all the records since then were spotty and inconsistent. An obscure astrographical survey in the Gaian Imperial catalog showed that the system was rich in uranium and other radioactives, which if true would make it the perfect third leg in a trade route of the local stars. Few starfarers ever came out this way, though—for all Isaac knew, they were the first people to visit this colony in a generation.

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Brothers in Exile (Sons of the Starfarers, Book I) is coming out later this month. This excerpt is the opening scene, taken from the first chapter.

To be notified by email when it comes out, you can sign up for my mailing list here. Brothers in Exile is also listed on Goodreads, so feel free to add it to your to-read list. It doesn’t have a cover yet, but that should be coming out soon.

Thanks for reading!

Okay, back to work

Well, the Blogging from A to Z challenge was fun, but now that it’s May it’s time to switch gears and focus on other things. I’ve got about a bazillion projects going on, so it’s definitely going to be a full month! Here’s what I hope to accomplish:

Writing

Finish the first draft of Strangers in Flight (Sons of the Starfarers Book III).
Revise Comrades in Hope (Sons of the Starfarers Book II) and get it ready for publication.
Start writing Star Wanderers: Wanderlust (Part IX).

Publishing

Finish redoing the covers for the Star Wanderers ebooks.
Put all the Star Wanderers books on Google Play, All Romance eBooks, and DriveThru Fiction.
Typeset The Jeremiah Chronicles and Tales of the Far Outworlds for print.
Publish Brothers in Exile (Sons of the Starfarers Book I).
Finalize all the print editions for Star Wanderers I-VIII.

That’s pretty much it. Some of it, like redoing the Star Wanderers covers and putting those books up on Google Play and ARe shouldn’t take more than an afternoon. Others are going to take a lot more work to fully realize.

The thing I’m most excited (and nervous!) about is getting Sons of the Starfarers ready for publication. I’ve had an awesome time writing these books so far, and I think you’re really going to love them. Brothers in Exile is with my editor right now, and I’m working with a new cover designer to come up with some awesome cover art. If all goes well, it should be out by May 15th.

In the next few days, I’m going to post some short 250 word excerpts from Brothers in Exile to give you a taste. I’ve never tried something like this before, so let me know what you think! I’ll probably post the first one tonight.

Here’s the book description:

TO WAKE A LOST GIRL FROM THE ICE, TWO BROTHERS MUST FACE AN EMPIRE.

Deep in the Far Outworlds, a derelict space station holds the bones of a long-dead people—and a beautiful young woman locked in cryofreeze. When the star-wandering brothers Isaac and Aaron find the sleeping girl, they soon realize that they are her only hope for rescue. If they don’t take her, then slavers certainly will.

With no way to revive her, they set a course for the New Pleiades in the hopes of finding someone who can help. But a storm is brewing over that region of space. After a series of brutal civil wars, the Gaian Empire has turned its sights outward. A frontier war is on the verge of breaking out, and the brothers are about to be caught in the middle of it.

They both harbor a secret, though. Somewhere else in the Outworlds is another derelict station—one that they used to call home. That secret will either bind them together or draw them apart in

SONS OF THE STARFARERS
BOOK I: BROTHERS IN EXILE

Pretty cool, huh? Keep an eye on this space over the next few days for more!

A few quick updates

So I thought I would post the Y post today for the A to Z challenge, but I didn’t get around to it so it looks like I’ll be doing Y and Z tomorrow. And yes, I know that “expectations” was a cop-out for X, but hey, at least I didn’t spell it “x-pectations.”

As far as other stuff goes, I’m still at work on Sons of the Starfarers, though I’ve been doing a lot more publishing stuff than writing stuff recently, mostly proofing and formatting. Once the second batch of covers for Star Wanderers comes in, I’ll take an afternoon off to update the rest of that series.

It’s nice to have someone else doing the cover art for you, though it’s still very collaborative since you have to approve everything and give feedback for tweaks. Still, these cover designers are doing a much better job than I could on my own.

Speaking of Star Wanderers, I’ve been getting a lot of reviews lately from people saying that they’re disappointed the series is over and wishing that it could continue. Well, be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it! I already mentioned that I’ve been thinking about writing a full-length novel, but I’ve also got some ideas for additional parts with some of the other characters.

Right now, I’m working on Strangers in Flight (Sons of the Starfarers Book III), but I should be finished with that one in May, with an open schedule for a couple months. That should be time enough to write Star Wanderers: Wanderlust (Part IX). I sketched out a couple of scenes for this one last year, but I think I’m going to toss those and start with something new. In particular, I have a great idea for an opening scene with Samson and Heloise (yes, Samson is going to be the star of this one. The title “wanderlust” should have given that away, lol).

Beyond that, it would be interesting to write a story from Captain Elijah’s point of view, and another from Master Korha’s. I suppose it would even be interesting to write a story from Salome’s perspective, though that would be a tough one. If I’m going to expand the Star Wanderers series, I’m going to write at least another four books, so if you guys have suggestions for characters to bring back, let me know.

That’s just about it for now. There are other projects I plan to work on, but Sons of the Starfarers and Star Wanderers should take up most of my focus for the next few months. Hopefully that means I can get the books out to you faster! I’ll certainly do my best.

U is for Uncertainty

There’s a lot of uncertainty that comes with being a working writer. I’m caught up in the middle of it right now as I get ready to launch a new series, and it’s enough to drive me crazy.

First of all, I’m not sure whether this new series, Sons of the Starfarers, will do well or whether it will flop. It’s a spin-off series from my Star Wanderers books, but the story is very different–much more action/adventure, whereas Star Wanderers is more of a sci-fi romance. I hope that my readers will eat up both of them, but until I actually hit “publish,” there’s no way to know.

The uncertainty is harder for me to deal with because the stakes are a lot higher. When I published Star Wanderers, I did so on a shoestring budget as a sort of side project that I didn’t think would take off. For Sons of the Starfarers, though, I’m going all in, commissioning a cover designer and hiring a professional editor. I don’t anticipate the production costs to go much higher than $300 per book, but there’s going to be nine books at least. Those costs add up rather quickly, and at $2.99 it’s may take a while for these books to earn back their costs.

Still, the stakes could be much higher. I’m a young single guy with no dependents, living on his own in a rather inexpensive part of the United States. My health is good and I’m fortunate enough to have graduated college without any debt. At this stage in my life, I’m in a really good position to take some calculated risks. Pursuing this writing career has definitely been one of them, and so far, it’s paid off about as well as I could have hoped.

But things would be very, very different if I had a wife and kids to take care of. If it’s just me that I have to worry about, I’m perfectly fine with taking risks and committing to projects that may fail spectacularly. But if there were a possibility that someone else could be hurt by my failures–someone I care very much about–I’d be a lot more worried.

At least the nice thing about being an indie writer is that you get your royalty checks like clockwork every month. I can look at my sales reports for March and know exactly how much money is going to come in in June. With legacy publishers, I hear it’s not unusual for royalties and advances to come four or five months late, or to be wildly off when they do come. That’s one uncertainty that I don’t have to worry about because I’m an indie.

Another uncertainty that I don’t have to worry about is that something out of my control in the production process will doom my book. I’m totally in control of my book’s production–if the cover art sucks, I may have to scrounge up a couple hundred bucks to hire a new cover designer, but I can do that without having to worry about my publisher ignoring my concerns. There may be a lot of uncertainty, but as an indie there’s also a lot of flexibility and control.

Uncertainty is a fact of life, whether or not you’re a career writer. Generally, though, where there’s more uncertainty, there’s also more opportunity. When I took the plunge and became a self-published writer, I was under no illusion that my success would be guaranteed–but I also knew that the only limitations would be the ones I put on myself. And personally, I like it that way. The uncertainty might be enough to drive you crazy when you’re staring it in the face, but when the risks pay off, they pay off very well.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Follow the path of least regret.

L is for Launch

How important is it to have a massive book launch whenever you release a new book?

I think the answer to this question varies from genre to genre. For the more mainstream genres where word of mouth is driven by general popularity, such as romance or thriller, it’s probably fairly important. For more niche genres like science fiction that are driven mostly by a dedicated core of fans, it’s not as crucial as you might think.

The reason most often cited for doing a big book launch is to try to get onto the rolling 30 day and 90 day new release lists on Amazon. When I published Genesis Earth back in 2011 before the publishing landscape flooded with indie books, I saw decent sales for the first 90 days, probably because that book was on the list. That happened more by accident than design, though, and it would be much harder to replicate now.

In general, I think that indies tend to overemphasize the importance of the new release lists. On forums like KBoards, I’ve even heard some writers go so far as to say a book is dead after the first 90 days. That runs contrary to my own experience–in fact, I doubt that it’s true even in the mainstream genres. Ebooks are forever, and there are all sorts of things that can give a book wings after months or even years from its initial launch.

That said, I do try to do a couple of things whenever I have a new release:

Mention it on social media and here on my blog. I don’t generally send out those annoying “buy my book!” posts, but when I have a new book out, I figure it’s worth a mention since my readers are going to want to know.
Send out an email to my mailing list. That’s the only reason why the list exists–to announce new releases. Typically, though, I wait until the book is up on multiple retail sites, so that I can include most if not all of the links.
Put up the book on the sidebar of my blog. Ever since I got rid of all the typical blogging widgets (like calendars, tag clouds, archive lists etc) and dedicated the sidebar almost exclusively to my books, I’ve sent a small but steady trickle of traffic in that direction. The sidebar links aren’t comprehensive, but most of my books are up there.

That’s about it. As you can see, nothing too fancy. My book launches tend to be fairly quiet, and that works just fine for me.

At the same time, though, I kind of wonder what would happen if I tried for a more aggressive launch. When I was first starting out, it didn’t make much sense because I didn’t have much of a platform or very many books out. Now, though, I wonder if putting a bit more emphasis on a new release will yield measurable results.

When I release Brothers in Exile in May, I’m going to try out a couple of things to give it an initial boost. I already have it listed on Goodreads, and I’ll post a few short excerpts from it here on my blog in the days leading up to and immediately following its release. Beyond that, I don’t have any firm plans, but I would like to do a few guest posts and maybe run a couple of promos.

As you can probably tell, I’m not a huge expert on how to run a massive book launch. What I do know is that in some genres at least, you can succeed without going all out on them. Throwing a massive launch probably isn’t going to hurt you, but it’s not like that’s your only hope for ever breaking out.

New STAR WANDERERS cover art!

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was getting some new cover art for the Star Wanderers books. Well, the art for the first half of the series is in–check it out!

A big thanks to Libbie Hawker, who did the cover art. I’m really pleased with how they’ve come out so far. We’ve been working on the proofs for the next four books, and they’re going to be really awesome as well!

I’ll reformat the ebooks and upload them to Amazon and the other retailers tomorrow. It’s probably going to take all day, but they should be up soon.

In other news, I finished the first draft of Comrades in Hope! The final word count clocked in at a little over 41,000, pushing it from novella-length into short novel territory. I’m fairly pleased with how it turned out, though it probably needs some work before it’s ready to go out. If all goes well, I’ll be publishing it before the end of June–a tight schedule, to be sure, but not an impossible one to keep. I’m totally immersed in the Sons of the Starfarers series right now, so it’s going to be really awesome when the first three books launch!

That’s just about it. A big thanks to everyone who picked up a copy of Star Wanderers: Outworlder on Amazon today! The book hit #203 in the Free Kindle Store, due in large part to an ad on Kindle Books and Tips. Needless to say, I am really shocked.

Take care, and thanks for reading!