Sons of the Starfarers – Page 18 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Addicted to typesetting

So I just realized it’s been a looong time since I posted anything besides Trope Tuesday posts on this blog. A lot of things have happened, and I’ve got a lot of things I want to blog about, but really all my spare time has been spent happily typesetting for Stars of Blood and Glory and Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I).

I always tell people that if I wasn’t a writer, I’d be a typesetter because I enjoy it so much. I’m not sure if that’s true, because it can get a little mind-numbing after a while, but as an indie writer who only has to do it every now and again, it’s really fun! The best part, of course, is getting to that finished product, a book full of words and paragraphs and chapters that look so beautiful on the page, which you can flip through and say “wow, I wrote that!”

The whole process is great, though, even with the frustrations like computer crashes and formatting struggles. Fortunately, those don’t happen quite as often since I’ve more or less figured out the tools. I use LibreOffice almost exclusively for the interior (yes, I know In Design is awesome but LibreOffice works well too), and The Gimp for the cover art.

Yesterday, I started on the cover art for Stars of Blood and Glory, thinking it would take me a few days to finish it. Well, one thing led to another, and a few hours later I had this:

Not bad. I think I was able to do it so quickly because I followed the same basic pattern as Bringing Stella Home and Desert Stars. Once you know what you’re doing, it doesn’t take very long to do it. It also helped to have such great art (shout-out to Hideyoshi)!

So yeah, the only thing I have to do now is order the proofs and approve them. After that, the print edition of Stars of Blood and Glory should be up on Amazon in just a couple of days, so keep an eye out for that!

Also, I don’t think Amazon has announced this to the general public yet, but this Christmas they’re starting a program where you can get the ebook edition of a participating book bundled with the print edition of the book for an extra $2.99 or less. It’s called Matchbook, and I’m happy to announce that all of my novels will be in the program! They’ll be priced at either $1.99 or $.99, so if you’re looking for a Christmas gift, you can buy one of my print books and get the ebook for yourself for more than 50% of the price. The Star Wanderers books, when I have the print versions up (and I’m working on that now), will bundle the ebooks for free!

So yeah, that’s what’s been taking away from my blogging time. Salt Lake Comic Con was also pretty cool–it was my first Comic Con experience, so I should probably blog about that too. Also, some book reviews, some stuff that exploded on the internet recently that I want to react to … yeah, I’ve fallen a bit behind.

But above and beyond all this blogging / typesetting / publishing stuff, writing is still my #1 priority. I started the first Sons of the Starfarers novella just last week, and have been working on it a little every day since. I’m way excited about this next project–it’s going to be amazing! Like a spinoff of Star Wanderers, but sooo much more. But I’ll wait until tuesday to talk about that.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for the print edition of Stars of Blood and Glory! It should be out in the next week or so. And as for Star Wanderers, the print editions should be coming out this month or next, depending on how effectively (or not) I can manage this typesetting addiction.

Later!

Trope Tuesday: Forbidden Zone

For the next few Trope Tuesday posts, I’m going to pick apart some of the tropes I’m playing with in my latest WIP, Sons of the Starfarers. One of the things I love to do when brainstorming a new story is to use tvtropes like a menu, finding the tropes that best fit my story ideas and combining them with other tropes to get even more ideas.

It’s not often hard to spot the forbidden zone in a fantastical world. Perhaps it has an ominous name (bonus points if it has the word “doom” in it), or perhaps there’s some sort of sign saying “do not enter.” Either way, this is definitely a place where no one goes, and no one is supposed to go.

Of course, you can pretty much guarantee that the main characters are going to go there. It’s like the forbidden fruit: the very fact that it’s off limits makes it more alluring. If genre blindness is in effect, someone will probably make the mistake of saying “what could possibly go wrong?”

There are many reasons why the zone may be forbidden. Perhaps it’s a death world, where the characters will soon find themselves running for their lives. Perhaps it’s not quite so dangerous, but once you go, you can never come back. Or perhaps all the warnings were lies, and the so-called forbidden zone is actually the place that the characters needed to get to all along. If that’s the case, then the mentor was probably a broken pedestal or the Svengali.

In any case, the forbidden zone definitely lies in the realm of adventure. Depending on how soon or how late in the story the characters go there, it may lie just on the other side of the threshold, at the bottom of the belly of the whale, or at the very heart of the character’s nadir.

The Mines of Moria, the Toxic Jungle, Area 51, the Elephant Graveyard, and the Fire Swamp are all classic examples. In C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, Earth itself is a forbidden zone to all the other inhabitants of the solar system, which is why it’s called the silent planet.

In real life, there are plenty of these as well. Just look at the DMZ on the Korean Peninsula, or the fallout zone around Chernobyl. When I was living in Georgia, Abkhazia was off limits to the TLG volunteers, meaning that if you went there (and the Ministry of Education found out about it) it was grounds for immediate firing. Of course, that only encouraged some of my TLG friends to go there even more–remember the forbidden fruit? Others waited until their contracts were over and practically made a tour of the many forbidden zones of the Caucasus, including Nagorny Karabakh, which one friend described as safer than Philadelphia.

I’ve toyed with this trope in my own work, but never too explicitly. The best example is probably the alien ghost ship from Genesis Earth. It’s not exactly forbidden, since there’s no one around to tell Mike not to go there, but Terra definitely doesn’t want him to go. Earlier in the same book, she forbids him from entering her workspace in the observatory, which leads to some complications and a major reveal when he inevitably does. In the Gaia Nova series, the Outer Reaches qualify as a forbidden zone, since the only people who live out there are murderous barbarians like the Hameji.

In my new series, Sons of the Starfarers, the first book starts out with a forbidden zone–a derelict space colony, where everyone has died of an unknown cause. Since the nearest settlement is light-years away (and because Aaron is perhaps too curious for his own good), that’s where Isaac and Aaron go. What they find there propels the rest of the book–and quite possibly the rest of the series.

Check back next week for more!

Things I’ve learned from STAR WANDERERS

When I published the first couple installments of Star Wanderers, it represented both an experiment with a new publishing format and a departure from the more long-form styles that I was used to. Now, a little over a year later, I can say it’s been a success. The series isn’t finished, and I’m still learning as I go, but here are some of the big lessons that I’ve picked up:

Novellas are surprisingly well-suited to series. They read fairly quickly, contain enough focus to sustain an episode of a larger story, and yet at the same time contain enough space to develop a wider arc. Plus, they are a lot quicker to write than novels and generally don’t require as much editing, since it’s easier to get the story right on the first pass. This means that you can put out novellas faster and more regularly than long-form novels, maintaining good momentum for the series as a whole.

It’s hard to write anything shorter than a novella without leaving readers unsatisfied. By far the biggest criticism I’ve received for Outworlder (which is really more of a novelette than a novella) is that the story feels too short. If the novella (17,500 to 40,000 words, or 80 to 150 pages) has all the benefits of the novel and the short story, then it seems that the novelette (7,500 to 17,500 words, or 30 to 80 pages) has all of the drawbacks. Then again, it could just be that I have yet to master the form.

The satisfying element in a series is at least as important as the returnable element. Every successful episodic story has some sort of returnable element–something about the story that makes the audience ravenous for more. Often, this takes the form of a cliffhanger, leaving something unresolved. However, it’s not enough just to string readers along, holding back whatever your story has promised them. In every installment, you have to deliver.

It’s a delicate balance, to be sure, but the advantage of erring on the side of satisfaction is that the satisfaction can actually become a major hook in itself. If readers know that they’re going to be satisfied whenever they pick up one of your books, you don’t have to ratchet up the tension to eleven in order to keep them coming back. Several Star Wanderers reviews mention that it’s more relaxing and not as fast paced as other space opera, but sales of parts III through VI are almost 1:1.

Readers love to revisit a good story from another character’s point of view. Some of the most glowing reviews I’ve received for this series are for Dreamweaver, which is basically a parallel novella to Outworlder but from Noemi’s point of view. In Outworlder’s Amazon also-boughts, it sometimes even appears ahead of Homeworld, which actually comes before it in the series order. This tells me that readers love to revisit a story, or to hear the same story again but from a different point of view. Head-hopping from episode to episode can be a great way to add variety and depth.

Plenty of readers are willing to pay $2.99 per book for a series they enjoy. When I published the omnibus for Star Wanderers I-IV, I wondered if sales of the individual novellas would taper off since I priced the omnibus much lower than their sum. To my surprise, sales for both the omnibus and the individual installments have actually remained about even. Since the omnibus clearly shows up on Amazon’s recommendations, this tells me that $2.99 is not too high of a price, even for a novella.

Perma-free works; however, free and $.99 attract some bad apples. Do not underestimate the power of free, especially perma-free for the first book in a series. I credit that strategy for at least 90% of the Star Wanderers sales, since the series itself has boosted my total sales numbers by more than an order of magnitude. However, there are people out there who never fail to find something to complain about. These are usually the same people who don’t like to pay for anything, and when they realize that the rest of my series is not free, they tend to leave unhelpful and/or incomprehensible reviews.

I priced Fidelity at $.99 to try to give readers more of a hook from part I to part II, but the sales ratio between part II (Fidelity) and part III is about 2.5:1–in other words, pretty bad. Judging from some of the reviews, it seems that a fair number of the people who are dropping out are the bad apples. I haven’t decided whether to raise the price, but if things keep going the way they have been, I probably will.

Series don’t usually take off until the third or fourth installment. Do you know how many sales Outworlder had in the month when I first published it? About 10–and that was actually a surprise. When I published Fidelity, I had even fewer, and Sacrifice hardly sold anything until Outworlder went perma-free. When it did, sales of the other two novellas picked up, but it wasn’t until after I’d published Dreamweaver that the sales of Fidelity started hitting triple digits. The lesson to me is clear: it takes time for a series to pick up steam, so don’t be like Fox. Give it a chance to grow.

Nothing sells a book like writing and publishing more books. This is probably the main driving factor behind the last point. I’ve done almost no promotion for Star Wanderers, other than putting out new books on a fairly consistent basis. Amazon’s algorithms have probably done their part (sales on other outlets haven’t been growing nearly as much), but at the end of the day, there is no substitute to writing more and better books. Any sort of promotional or marketing activity that takes away from my writing time is just not worth it–not when I’ve got stories to tell.

Right now, I’m getting ready to start a new spin-off series, which hopefully will be even more successful. I’ll to try out a few new things (mostly along the lines of better covers and meatier novellas), but mostly, I’m going to try to replicate the success I’ve achieved with Star Wanderers by keeping these lessons in mind. I have no idea how this new series is going to go, but I figure I know enough about the publishing side now that I can focus my attention on writing an awesome story, which is the most important thing after all.

Laying the groundwork for a couple new series

So I just got back from vacation at Cape Cod, which turned out completely different from what I’d expected. When I left, I said that I’d probably just write like I usually do, except in a different place. Instead, I took a break from my WIPs long enough to catch a new vision for my career and come up with a really good idea for a new spin-off series in the same universe as Star Wanderers.

The story idea is really awesome. I don’t want to talk about it too much, since I haven’t even written it yet, but the main characters will be Isaac and Aaron from Benefactor, and the basic premise will start out fairly similar to Outworlder. From there, though, I expect it to take shape in some very different ways, turning into much more of an epic space opera.

I plan to stick with the novella series format, since I’ve had a lot of success with that so far. I know that some readers complain about shorter works, but when doing a series of this type, it’s important to put out new titles regularly, and I can do that much easier with novellas than with novels. Besides, there are a lot of other reasons why I prefer novellas, as I pointed out in this post.

That said, I expect these ones to run a little longer, such as the 30k-40k word (90-140 page) range. But I won’t really know until I’ve written them.

Before that, I’ve got two more Star Wanderers stories to put out: Reproach (Part VII) and Deliverance (Part VIII). Both of those are already written; I just have to run them by my first readers and make some revisions before putting them out. If all goes well, Reproach should be out in September and Deliverance should be out in October.

So that’s the plan. Career-wise, what I really need to do is replicate the success of Star Wanderers by starting some new storylines that follow the same series format. It’s a little unnerving, since I don’t know what will stick, but I don’t want to be dependent on just one series–you’ve got to have multiple entry points. Besides, this new series is a spinoff, so hopefully readers from the first one will carry over.

It’s at this point that I’m hitting myself, because what I really need is to have three books that I can release before Christmas. In general, I’ve found that it’s better to wait until you have three books out before you make the first in a series permanently free. I wish I’d spent a lot more time this summer writing new things, rather than revising old stuff or finishing up old series. But oh well–better to start now than wait until next year. And who knows? Maybe I can still pull it off.

For this new series, I plan to invest a little more in cover art. The NASA images have been good for Star Wanderers, but to really hit the publishing trifecta (title, cover, blurb), I need to commission some original art. I have the money now, and probably the best thing I can do at this point is reinvest it. Expect those covers to be awesome.

Oh, and the other elements of the trifecta? I don’t have a blurb yet, but the working title is Sons of the Starfarers. Pretty cool, eh?

So there’s that. I’m currently revising Reproach, but I think I can finish that on the train and send it out to my beta readers before the end of August. As for The Sword Bearer, I’m going to put that project on hold again, mostly so I can focus on this. I’ve also been running into some problems with that project, mostly having to do with the worldbuilding.

For that reason, I’m thinking of doing a series of prequel novellas in order to flesh out that world and the backstory. If it goes well, that should turn into its own thing, kind of like how Star Wanderers fleshes out the background for my Gaia Nova books. I’m thinking of something along the lines of David Gemmell: heroic fantasy with a real focus on courage, valor, and unlikely heroism. I’ve already got the first scene of the first book in my head, and it’s pretty dang awesome.

So many stories, so little time … I’d better get back to writing!