One Thousand And One Parsecs

Thoughts on serials and ebook pricing

I’m going to do something potentially dangerous and discuss pricing strategies in a rather candid way. I may risk turning off some of my potential readers, especially the ones who don’t like shorter works, but I want to be as open and transparent as I can, since I figure it’s only fair, especially to someone who’s just getting started with my books.

First of all, let me just say that if I could, I would make all my books free and write for love instead of money. The trouble, though, is that I have to eat, and at some point in the (hopefully) not too distant future I’m going to have to feed a wife and children as well. If I made all my books free right now, I would have to spend all my time and energy doing something other than writing, and as a result there would be far fewer books for you to read.

In the last year, I’ve discovered that the best way to make money self-publishing is to write in series, preferably at a short enough length that you can release a new installment every other month. A lot of other writers are discovering this, which is why there is such an explosion of series and serials.

I know a lot of readers don’t like this. And when a writer takes a perfectly good novel and splits it arbitrarily into parts, each one without a solid arc or story structure to hold it together, I get a little bit ticked as well. But the reality is that if you can tell a story in a series of short, self-contained novellas rather than a single novel, it will probably meet with better commercial success.

The price points for novellas are kind of tricky, though. For anything priced below $2.99, Amazon takes 65%, whereas from $2.99 to $9.99, the self-publisher takes 70%. To give that some perspective, you would have to sell 10x the number of copies at $.99 to earn as much on one sale of a book at $4.99, and 6x for a book at $2.99.

The trouble, of course, is that for a series where each installment is priced at $2.99, the readers may end up paying a lot more, depending on the lengths of the story arcs and the size of each installment. Novellas are kind of in a gray area, where $.99 seems kind of cheap for that much story, but three or four installments at $2.99 really add up–especially with so many other ebooks priced at $5 or below.

Now, I’d like to believe that most readers judge the value of a story by its quality and not by its word count, or by how much they have to pay per word. There are books like City of the Saints that I don’t mind buying in $2.99 increments at all. At the same time, though, I think there’s something to be said about keeping prices fair.

This is all on my mind right now because I’m getting ready to release the first Star Wanderers omnibus and expand that series considerably over the next year. It’s the series that sells best out of any of my books, and the one with the most potential to make it so that I can go full time. Plus, I really love writing in this universe, and have a lot more stories in it to tell.

Right now, this is the pricing structure I’m following:

Outworlder — free (15,000 words)
Fidelity — $.99 (17,000 words)
Sacrifice — $2.99 (19,000 words)
Homeworld — $2.99 (20,000 words)
Dreamweaver — $2.99 (19,000 words)

Parts I through IV make a complete story arc, though of course each individual novella is a self-contained story on its own. With Part I at free and Part II at $.99, I figure readers have a good way to figure out if these are the kinds of stories that they’ll want to read. But if I keep pricing the stories at $2.99, at some point this series is going to get really expensive.

So here’s what I plan to do to alleviate that:

1) Make new releases free to newsletter subscribers.

For every Star Wanderers story up to this point, I’ve made it free for the first two weeks on Smashwords and given that code out through my email newsletter. I did that originally as an incentive to get people to sign up for my newsletter, but I think it’s a good series strategy as well. This way, if someone discovers Star Wanderers now, they can buy all the previous installments at the higher $2.99 price point and look forward to receiving any future installments for free.

Some may question the business sense of giving away free books to readers who are willing to buy them, but the way I see it, the fans are the ones who are selling these books, not me. I’m willing to put a free book in the hands of someone who already loves the series, and is more likely to write a glowing review or to share it with a friend. And since sales of this series continue to grow, that strategy would seem to be paying off (or at the very least, it’s not biting me in the ass).

2) Try to put more story into each individual installment.

If $2.99 seems a lot for a short novella, then maybe I need to expand on them, with things like extra subplots and viewpoint characters. Of course I don’t want the stories to feel like they’re padded, but if I can enrich the story in a way that really adds to it, then that’s certainly something that I should do.

For all of the Star Wanderers series so far, each novella is told from the point of view of just one character. This sort of focus can be good, because it really gets me into the head of that character. However, sometimes it’s also good to play things off of another character’s story, both to act as a foil and to provide contrast.

That’s what I’m doing with Reproach (Part VII) right now. It’s not just from Mariya’s point of view, but Noemi’s as well, and that adds a lot to the tension as you see their competing motives and the way their views of the world really clash. It’s delicious. Benefactor (Part VI) is just from Jakob’s viewpoint, just because I wanted the story to really focus on his character, but most of the other stories kicking around in my head have room for at least another viewpoint character without taking away from the spirit of the series itself.

3) Price the omnibus editions less than the sum of their parts.

For someone who is just getting started with Star Wanderers, $2.99 might seem like a lot to pay to get caught up. That’s only going to get more daunting as the series gets longer. For that reason, I’m inclined to price the omnibus editions much lower–at least $4.95, which is the price of one of my novels. At 70,000 words or so for Parts I-IV, that seems only fair.

I am a bit worried that sales of the individual novellas will drop off once I release the omnibus, but I figure if I’m constantly releasing new ones, those should cover the slack. Since Dreamweaver (Part V) is already out, and Benefactor (Part VI) will be out in another month or so, new readers who come in through the omnibus will have more than enough to keep them coming back.

The other benefit of doing it this way is that it reduces the chance that readers will drop out midway through the story arc. It seems that a few of them are doing that, or at least taking a while to get from Part II to Part III to Part IV, etc. By having them all in one omnibus and encouraging readers to buy that instead of the individual parts, hopefully they’ll have more of a chance to get hooked, making it all the more likely that they’ll keep coming back.

So that’s my plan, at least for now. When The Jeremiah Chronicles comes out next week, I’ll price it on parity with my other novels, even though that’s somewhat less than all the individual parts. I’ll make all new Star Wanderers novellas free for my newsletter subscribers, and do what I can to enrich them with extra viewpoints and subplots (without just padding them, of course). This way, I hope my readers won’t feel like I’m ripping them off, and I’ll still have a good shot of making a decent living at this.

With the way things have been going, I’m actually really excited. The slow build approach is working, and if it keeps up then I think I may be making enough to go full-time by this time next year. I’ll be sure to keep you posted as things come along.

In the meantime, if you have any thoughts or comments, please don’t hesitate to share. I’m still thinking this issue through, and there’s a lot I have left to learn. In fact, I feel like I’m only just starting to figure it out, so any other perspectives on this topic would be much appreciated!

Update on STAR WANDERERS and a sneak peek at some cover art

So in case you didn’t know, I’ve been getting an omnibus edition ready for Star Wanderers. It’s subtitled The Jeremiah Chronicles, and contains parts I-IV (Outworlder, Fidelity, Sacrifice, and Homeworld). This covers the first major series arc, with all of the stories from Jeremiah’s point of view–hence the title.

I commissioned Ina Wong from Deviant Art for the cover, and this the result:

I must say, I’m rather pleased. It’s got a very different feel from the current space photography covers, but I think this is a lot truer to the actual story. I can’t commission art like this for the individual installments, of course, but for an omnibus edition, I figure it’s alright to go all out.

The only content in the omnibus that isn’t already in parts I-IV will be the author’s note, which I’ll either post here or include as a PDF to my newsletter subscribers. In other words, don’t worry about missing out on anything if you’ve already read the individual installments.

I’m getting feedback from my alpha readers for Benefactor, the next part in the series, so I’ll probably release that one in the next six weeks. In the meantime, I’ve picked up work on Reproach again (Part VII), and hope to finish the first draft before the end of the month.

Just as Dreamweaver is a parallel novella to Outworlder (from Noemi’s POV), Benefactor is a parallel novella to Fidelity (from Jakob’s POV) and Reproach is a parallel novella to Sacrifice (from Noemi and Mariya’s POVs). After that, I’ll do a parallel novella to Homeworld with Lucca and Mariya as the main POV characters, and then branch out into some other characters and storylines.

The fun part about writing this series is that each new story seeds at least two or three others. I just wish I could keep up!

I haven’t abandoned Lifewalker, but I did reach a point where I figured it would be good to take a short break just to keep things fresh. My creative process seems to work that way. As much as I’d like to train myself to stay on project until it was finished, creativity can’t be trained so much as fostered. I set myself a deadline to finish something by May 31st, so now it looks like that’s going to be Reproach.

As for The Jeremiah Chronicles, all I have left is to write the author’s note and book description. It should be out on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords by this time next week. In the meantime, I’ll keep working on Reproach so you guys can have plenty more stories to read!

Chance to win GENESIS EARTH and SW-II: FIDELITY

In case you didn’t know, my fellow indie author and KBoards member Elle Casey has put together a book giveaway, and she was kind enough to include a couple of my books in it. If you would like a chance to win a free ebook copy of Genesis Earth or Star Wanderers: Fidelity (Part II), head over to her blog and check it out. I’m giving away 10 electronic copies of each title, but I’m only one author of many so if you sign up for my books there’s a very good chance you’ll win one.

The giveaway has a lot of different kinds of books, but they trend more toward YA and New Adult (a recently coined categorization that eludes me). Out of all my books, Genesis Earth and Star Wanderers seemed like the titles that fit best, so those were the ones I chose. But there are a lot of others to choose from, with no limit on how many you sign up for, so feel free to take your pick!

Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the last day of the promotion, so be sure to act quick!

Chris Hadfield is my commander

And he always will be.

That is all.

Cooking adventures and an awesome webcomic

So I have a bunch of ideas for blog posts I’d like to write, and I’ll probably get around to them eventually, but I thought I’d drop a line now just to let you all know what I’ve been up to. It’s been a pretty good week, with some decent progress on the current WIP (Lifewalker) and some other random stuff that may be of some interest.

First, Lifewalker. It’s coming along quite well. I’m averaging around 2k words a day, so more of a leisurely pace than a white-hot creative heat, but not too bad. It’s kind of turned into a post-apocalyptic Western, mostly because I can’t write about southern Utah without the landscape taking over. This video should give you an idea why:

At the same time, the character’s voice really seems to be taking shape in a way that I like. He’s kind of drifting right now, but the way he writes about it is very much like an old man reminiscing on the course of his life, lingering on the regrets as well as the triumphs, with some rather wistful commentary on each. This is really a character that I can just pick up and run with–the story is practically writing itself.

It’s not just the voice, either. Random stuff is just finding it in–powerful stuff that makes the story awesome. For example, just in the last chapter, the characters were holding a meeting to see what they should do to rescue some of their friends who had been kidnapped. Out of nowhere, one of them pulls out a skull from a human baby, with beads and feathers dangling from it like some sort of totem. He brought it out to show that the people who’d attacked them were not just normal bandits, but cannibals from the Nevadan wastelands, which put them in a whole new category of badassery. Stuff like that comes out of nowhere every time I write, and it’s awesome.

I’ve had a lot of time to write, though I don’t feel I’ve been using it all productively. Still, I’m on track to finish this thing by the end of the month, which will be extremely gratifying.

In the meantime, I’ve been experimenting a lot with cooking and gardening. Just planted some tomatoes in 3-gallon ice cream buckets (with dirt instead of ice cream, of course), and those are growing nicely. It’s fun to have something to water in the morning, and when they start to yield fruit, I’m sure it will be awesome as well.

But I’ve also been experimenting with the old Egyptian kushari recipe I picked up after the 2008 study abroad. It always seemed to be missing that one thing that would make the other ingredients come together and achieve that delicious synergy. Well, I think I’ve found it: chickpeas and cumin, with maybe a touch of vinegar. It might not be 100% authentic, but when I cooked it this time with that stuff, it tasted heavenly.

So this weekend, I’m going to try to perfect the recipe, something I’ve been wanting to do for years. I’ll try cooking the rice in chicken broth, and adding more onions and garlic with maybe a little tomato. Also, coriander–I know that coriander and cilantro are basically the same plant, but I think the coriander will go with this better than cilantro. Also, it helps to fry it with a little oil after taking it out of the refrigerator, rather than sticking it in the microwave. I haven’t had a microwave for over a year, and I think I actually prefer cooking without it.

Speaking of food, my roommate’s sister’s roommates dropped off a bag full of crap from their kitchen, since they’re moving out for the summer. We’ve been having an interesting time combing through it–found some pretty good stuff, actually. One of the more useful things is a bag full of buckwheat, which is AWESOME because kasha was one of my favorite dishes in Georgia. Kasha and lobio–delicious!

So yeah, I’ve had food on my mind a lot this week. If things work out, maybe I’ll post a recipe or two. Kushari is delicious, cheap, filling, and healthy–a winning combination if ever there was one. Kasha is pretty simple, but that’s what makes it so great–a simple, hearty food that leaves you feeling warm and whole.

Besides cooking exotic foods, I’ve also been reading a lot of Freefall. I discovered it just last week, and I have to say, it is awesome. One of the better webcomics I think I’ve ever read. Like Schlock Mercenary, it’s a space opera comedy romp, but where Schlock kind of turned dark in recent years (which I’m not complaining about, don’t get me wrong), Freefall has still stuck to its happy-go-lucky roots. And just like Schlock Mercenary, the humor is not only entertaining, but often wonderfully insightful.

But by far, the best part of the story is how compelling the characters are. My favorite is Florence Ambrose, an artificially bred Bowman’s Wolf who is kind of a human-wolf hybrid. She’s one of only 14 members of her species, and the corporation that created her considers her more as property than an individual. She’s got all these biologically programmed safeguards that force her to obey direct human orders, no matter how ludicrous–but the only way for her species to survive is to convince the corporation that Bowman Wolves are profitable, so that they’ll make more (the whole 50-500 rule and all that).

Somehow, she becomes the engineer of the Savage Chicken, a down-and-out starship captained by the infamous Sam Starfall. Sam is basically a lazy, larcenous alien squid who wants nothing more than to steal everyone’s wallet and become famous doing it. At first, it seems like a horrible combination–Florence is basically a good, honest person, who wants to do good work and please everyone. But as the story goes on, the two develop quite a rapport, and start to rub off on each other.

Florence helps Sam to clean up and get his act together, and Sam helps Florence to learn ways to get around her difficult situation vis-a-vis her safeguards and lack of free will. More importantly, Sam helps her to stop feeling guilty long enough to recognize that doing the right thing sometimes means breaking (or at least twisting) the law.

As if that weren’t enough, there’s the whole cross-species romance angle between Florence and the biologist who rescues her back in one of the earlier subplots. As you might expect, it gets really lonely being the only Bowman’s Wolf on the planet–especially when the other 13 are frozen in cryo, on their way to a world several light-years away. Florence knows that she needs to do what she can to propagate the species, but she’s also got some emotional needs that demand to be satisfied now. Winston is kind of similar, a lonely parasitic biologist on a frontier terraforming project with only 40,000 humans and a 40-60 male-female ratio. Except for the whole cross-species issue, they make a really good couple. I’m riveted to find out what happens next!

So yeah, if I had to sum it up: good, honest, likeable person + insecure future + social limbo + unsatisfied emotional needs = really compelling story. Plus, she’s half wolf–how cool is that? What I would give for her incredible sense of smell…

In any case, it’s getting late, and even though tomorrow is Saturday, there’s a bunch of stuff I want to do tomorrow so I’d better cut this short for now. See you later!

Trope Tuesday: After the End

It’s the end of the world as we know it … so why do we feel fine?

On the apocalyptic scale of world destruction, when the thing that wipes out civilization doesn’t quite kill everyone, we’re left with an After the End type setting. Depending on where the writers fall on the sliding scale of idealism vs. cynicism, this may range from a futuristic Arcadia to a crapsack post- hell on Earth.

Whatever the case, expect to see lots of modern ruins and schizo tech mashups (horse-driven cars? Wood-wheeled bicycles?). If anarchism reigns, expect to see lots of punks roaming the wastelands in muscle cars and motorcycles. If Ragnarok Proofing is in effect and the ruins of civilization haven’t quite decayed yet, expect some variation of a scavenger world. And if someone from our modern era finds himself lost in this bizarre post-apocalyptic future, expect him to find some sort of constant to reinforce that he’s not in Kansas anymore.

Unlike dystopian settings, where society evolves (or is deliberately turned) into a horrible, hellish place, a post-apocalyptic setting represents a reboot of civilization itself, where one society has passed away and a new one is slowly picking itself up from the ashes. It has the potential to be a lot more hopeful, and to give the reader a lot more wish fulfillment. After all, who wouldn’t want to be one of the lucky survivors tasked with rebuilding civilization? Sure there may be zombies or nuclear nasties wandering about, but on the plus side, you don’t have to worry about your bills or your deadbeat job anymore.

Douglas Rushkoff has some interesting ideas about why this type of story is becoming more and more popular nowadays. In his new book Present Shock which he’s been promoting recently, he argues that many of us are so overwhelmed by a world where everything happens now that we wish we could end it all and start over. When we live in an ever-changing present without a coherent narrative to reference our past or our future, we long for something to restore that sense that we’re part of a larger story, even if that story is racing towards a horrible, tragic end.

But every ending is a new beginning, and that’s what lies at the very core of this trope. When our world passes away, what will the new world look like that takes its place? Will we learn from our mistakes, or are we doomed to repeat our worst atrocities? Will we eat each other like dogs, or will we tap into some deeper part of human nature where mercy and compassion lie?

This is all on my mind right now, because I’m writing a post-apocalyptic novel (with the working title Lifewalker) that takes place in Utah 200 years after the end. Humanity was hit by a plague that kills everyone over the age of 25, so that the only people left are orphans, teenage adults, and their babies. It’s fascinating to wonder what from our era would fall apart and what would remain, or what would be preserved and how the new society will take shape.

But it’s not the apocalypse itself that I’m interested in, so much as what happens after things stabilize. The main character is one of the few people who’s immune to the plague, so naturally he feels like a complete outcast. He’s walking the Earth, riding down the ruins of I-15 with a copy of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn in his saddlebag. And the people he meets … well, let’s just say I wasn’t very kind to Las Vegas.

I think that’s another part of the appeal of this trope: it takes our own world and twists it into something fantastic, so that instead of having to wrap our minds around a whole new set of history and physics, we can build on the familiar in wild and interesting ways. A Canticle for Leibowitz did this very well, with another post-apocalyptic tale set in Utah. However, the most famous popular example is probably the movie I Am Legend. I love those long panoramic shots with Will Smith hunting deer in Times Square, or hitting golf balls off the wing of a fighter jet. Stuff like that really sparks the imagination because it combines something familiar with something wild and different.

Believe it or not, this trope has actually happened in real life. After the bubonic plague swept across Europe, whole cities were depopulated, with as much as 60% casualties in some places. When the Pilgrims settled at Plymouth, they were actually building over the ruins of a large Indian settlement that had been wiped out by smallpox just a few years before. And using DNA evidence, scientists now believe that all of modern humanity is descended from a small group of just 50 females who survived a global volcanic eruption some 70,000 years ago.

So yeah, this is definitely a trope I like playing with. I’m on track to finish Lifewalker by the end of May, so you can definitely expect to hear more about it in the weeks and months to come.

Also, for those of you looking for resources to help you visualize what the world will look like after the end of human civilization, here are a couple of excellent resources I’ve found. First, check out The World Without Us, an excellent book written by an environmentalist that poses a basic thought experiment: what would happen if all humans everywhere magically vanished, and all that was left was the stuff that we’ve built? What, if anything, would remain? (spoilers: not much) If you want to explore that idea but you don’t want to read the whole book, check out this wiki on Life After People, a series of History Channel documentaries that basically posed the same question. The answers may surprise you.

Thoughts on making a living as a writer

As many of you know, my biggest life goal (besides obtaining a signed first-edition copy of David Gemmell’s Legend) is to make a living telling stories that I love. Accomplishing that goal is no small task. For the last five years, I’ve been focused on that goal like a hellfire missile, and as of right now it continues to elude me.

I’m getting closer, though. I’ve got 14 ebooks out, hopefully 18 by the end of the summer, and they’re actually selling. I won’t go too much into specifics, but my gross income is about 30% to 40% of what I’d need to cover all my expenses without another job.

Granted, I’m a young single guy with good health and no dependents, living on a shoestring budget in the cheapest housing in one of the cheapest states in the US, but that’s not an insignificant accomplishment.

Right now, I’m reinvesting all of that into the business, in order to boost sales and to avoid self-employment tax. But if I have a difficult month and need something to fall back on, my books are generating a fair amount of passive income, and that income is growing. If I keep doing what I’m doing, and things stay on more or less the same trajectory, I expect that I’ll be making enough to support myself in one or two years.

That’s actually a little better than the timetable I set a year ago, where I determined to go full-time by 2016. Then again, I also set a goal to be married by then, and I have no idea how that will change things. I suppose my spouse’s income would be able to supplement my own, but then there’s insurance and taxes and all sorts of other expenses that I can expect to go way up.

(At the same time, I have this wild dream of running off with my wife to some remote part of the world and spending a couple of years on some crazy-insane adventure, like trekking across Mongolia, or joining a Bedouin tribe, or couchsurfing across Europe. The world is a very different place outside of the US, and the cost of living in much of the world is significantly lower. Especially in the developing world, people know how to make do and be happy with much, much less.)

Even if I suffer a major setback, like an irreversible drop in sales or a technological shift that made my current business model obsolete, making a living is no longer a pie-in-the-sky sort of dream. It’s within reach, and I think I have a pretty good idea how I’ll get there.

First of all, it’s probably not going to be a sudden, earth-shaking event. It’s much more likely that I’ll ease into it gradually, first as a fallback for months when work is slow, and then as a way to pay off my bills while I keep a part-time job for spending money. One day, I’ll wake up and realize that it’s been five or six weeks since I’ve done anything but write, and then I’ll open up my budget and realize that I’ve arrived.

As I get married and start a family, my expenses will no doubt rise, and I or my wife may have to take another job for a while to make ends meet. Then again, if book sales continue to snowball with each new release, then we might be able to time it so that the kids start arriving just as the writing income really starts to take off. Even then, book sales fluctuate so much from month to month that until we have a significant amount of money in savings, we’re always going to feel like we’re a couple of weeks away from having to find another job.

And then, with the writing bringing in a comfortable six-figure income, we might finally be able to afford a house. It’s almost impossible to get a mortgage as a self-employed freelancer, so I fully expect to pay for most of the house up front. Good thing I don’t want to live in a city.

Of course, it’s also possible that the writing will never bring in a six-figure income. Science fiction is a relatively small genre, and the only stories I really care to tell are the ones that take place on other worlds. But that’s okay–as long as I’m able to support myself and my family, I’ll be happy. Anything above that, and it’s not about the money. In fact, it’s really not about the money right now.

The point of all this is that I don’t expect there to be a moment where I’ve suddenly “arrived.” If anything, it’s just going to be a continuation of what I’m doing right now, scaled up to meet life’s changing demands.

And you know what? I’m okay with that.

My resume might look a bit checkered, and job interviewers may raise their eyebrows when they see that I’m a college graduate, but these odd jobs give me a lot more flexibility than a stable “day job” with insurance and all that. I like being able to take a week or two off to do nothing but write, even if the off-time is unintentional on my part. I know how to be flexible, and I’m quite comfortable living a lifestyle where I don’t know where I’ll be getting my next paycheck.

And to friends and family who are concerned because I’m almost thirty and don’t have a full-time job … don’t be. I’m following my dream, and my dream is within reach. Everything else is just a stepping stone. I have a career, I’ve taken full responsibility for it, and I’ve turned it into something profitable. If making a living as a writer is a bit like making grizzly bear soup, I’ve already killed the bear.

In related news, I learned this week that I’ve been pirated in Japan. I’m not sure whether to be flattered or alarmed, but since my books are 1) available from multiple retailers 2) relatively inexpensive, and 3) DRM-free (on all the sites that allow it, anyway), I’m not too concerned about it cutting into my income. I am worried about people downloading my books from an unsafe site that might give them a virus or something, but people will be people and there’s not much I can do about that.

If anything, it’s just another sign that I’ve arrived–or rather, that I’m exactly where I’ve wanted to be all along, and it’s just a matter of making things work.

Post A to Z update

So, the A to Z challenge is over, and it’s back to things as usual. I hope you guys enjoyed it–I’ll probably compile the posts at some point, update them to add some more examples and references, and put it out as a $2.99 ebook. When I get around to it, that is. If that’s something that interests any of you, let me know and I’ll get it up sooner.

As far as writing goes, I just went back to work on Lifewalker yesterday, and the story is coming along swimmingly. This is the post-apocalyptic story about a guy wandering down the ruins of I-15 with a copy of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn. I checked with Peter and Brandon about that, and they said it’s okay. In fact, they think it’s hilarious. And it is, I suppose, though the book takes itself fairly seriously.

Just to give you an idea what I’m talking about, here’s an excerpt:

The first night, I stayed in a small village known as Sannakin. The people there were surprisingly friendly, though they assured me that they would have been more cautious if I had come from the south.

“What’s south of here?” I asked the village patriarch over dinner.

He shrugged. “Don’t know—never been that way. Get a lot of tinkers, though, and a merchant ever now and again. There’s people out there, that’s for sure—but it’s a wild and a dangerous country.”

I paid them for their hospitality by reading from Mistborn: The Final Empire. The story confused many of them, especially those who had never seen the ruins of a city. I explained to them that the forefathers used to live in great communes of thousands, or even tens of thousands of people. This sparked a vigorous discussion over how such a large community could possibly provide enough food for itself, and how it would handle the waste. Some people asked me if in the days before the Blight, ash covered the sky as it did in my book. I answered that it probably had, though doubtless the author had exaggerated it somewhat for the purposes of the story. This led to an even more vigorous discussion about the merits of fantasy stories in general, with most of the villagers forming a decidedly negative opinion of the genre. I strongly disagreed, of course, but held my tongue so as not to offend my hosts.

Today, I wrote a passage where the main character had to mediate an argument between two scholars over who was the primary god in the forefather’s pantheon: Batman or Superman. In a few chapters, he’ll rescue a girl from a band of bloodthirsty cannibal slavers infesting in the ruins of Las Vegas.

As you can tell, this book is a lot of fun. 🙂

As for the publishing side of things, I’m working with an illustrator to get the cover ready for the first Star Wanderers omnibus. It’s going to be for Parts I through IV, but don’t worry–if you’ve already bought the parts individually, there won’t be any new content except the author’s note. I’ll either publish that here or send my newspaper subscribers a link for where they can read it.

I’m not sure if anyone really reads the author’s notes at the ends of my books, but I enjoy telling the story behind the story, so I’ll keep doing them. Besides, I figure some of you have read them, since you’re signing up for my email newsletter and sending me an occasional fan emails. I really enjoy those, by the way, so thanks for sending them!

That’s just about it for things over here. In unrelated news, I recently discovered an excellent sci-fi webcomic. It’s called Freefall, and the archives stretch waaaaay back to 1998 (!!!). So yeah, I’m going to be busy for a while.

But don’t worry, I’ll still ~~find~~ make time for writing. I’m doing about 2k words per day right now, so at that rate, the first draft of Lifewalker should be finished before the end of May.

Aaand my roommate wants to sleep, so I’d better get off the computer now. Later!

Z is for Zenith

Has space opera passed its zenith?

Sometimes, it certainly looks that way. All the major stuff seems to be reprints of past series and reboots of decades-old franchises. Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, Ender’s Game, Dune, Babylon 5–all the big names seem to have had their start at least a generation ago. At any science fiction convention, you’re likely to see more gray-haired men than kids in their teens and twenties. And if you go to a publishing conference, new adult, urban fantasy, and paranormal romance are ascendant.

I’ve noticed that people are using the term “science fiction” increasingly to describe stories that don’t have anything to do with space. Dystopian, post-apocalyptic, steampunk, even time travel–all of these subgenres are certainly part of the fold, but they’re very different from the stories about starships and alien worlds. And then you have all the markets for short fiction that have been forced out of business–and even a few larger publishers, like Night Shade Books which is now selling off all its assets (read: authors) to avoid bankruptcy.

I remember going to World Fantasy 2010 in Columbus, Ohio, and feeling dismayed at the complete lack of science fiction. World Fantasy is (or was, at least) the premier professional conference for speculative fiction literature, but all of the attention was going to urban fantasy and steampunk. On the freebie table where publishers often dumped ARCs and review copies of their books, the only space opera stuff I really saw were a couple of titles by Glen Cook and one other guy–and I watched that table hawkishly for the full three days of the conference.

Sometimes, it seems as if it would be so much better if I had grown up in the 80s. That’s when science fiction really had its heyday. But all through the 90s, the genre seems to have been on the decline, much like NASA and the US space program.

So is space-centered science fiction on the way out? Have we passed the glory days, and it’s now just a long decline until it becomes an obscure niche, beloved by some, but enigmatic to others?

In spite of everything I said above, I actually don’t think so. In fact, I think we’re on the cusp of a science fiction renaissance, and that sci-fi geeks like myself will look back twenty years from now and wish that they were born in our era. Here’s why:

1) Scientific discoveries are transforming the way we see the universe.

The day I posted P is for Planets, NASA’s Kepler mission announced the discovery of three Earth-like worlds orbiting in the habitable zones of their stars. The existence of alien Earths is not conjecture–it’s a confirmed fact. As our ability to study these worlds improves, it’s only a matter of time, IMO, before we find a world that has life.

We’ve discovered the Higgs-Boson. We’re unraveling the fundamental building blocks of the universe. We’ve built telescopes to look back to the dawn of time itself, and we’re learning more about the cosmology of the universe every year. Perhaps even more remarkably, we understand now how little it is that we actually know–that the entirety of the observable universe is only about 5% of it, and even that’s optimistic.

All of this will take time to trickle down to the popular consciousness, but with all the new discoveries that are happening, I think that’s already in the process of happening. In particular, I think the recent discoveries in the realm of exoplanets and astrobiology are going to shake things up in a major way in the next five or ten years.

2) The privatization of space travel is paving the way for a rapid expansion into space.

The US space program has been plagued with funding problems since at least the end of the Cold War space race. Since the space shuttle program was retired just last year, the only way for our astronauts to get into space is through the Russian Soyuz spacecraft at Baikonur. If NASA had to put a man on the moon, they do not currently have the knowledge or technology necessary to do it.

In the private sector, though, it’s been a very different story. SpaceX has had a number of successful launches recently, most notably sending the first unmanned resupply capsule up to the International Space Station. And just a couple days ago, Virgin Galactic had the first successful test flight of its rocket-powered spacecraft.

It’s sad to see the space shuttle go, but there are a lot of reasons why the program was flawed and inefficient to begin with. By handing things off to the private sector and turning space exploration into a viable business venture, we can hopefully overcome those inefficiencies and eventually make space accessible to the general public.

And then you have the organizations like Mars One that are looking even further ahead to the colonization of Mars. There’s a groundswell of excitement for Martian colonization that is starting to get some real money behind it. Will it go anywhere? It’s hard to say right now, but even if it suffers another decade or two of setbacks, it’s getting public attention, especially from the younger generation.

3) Video games are bringing a fresh new look and feel to the genre.

Not all of the big sci-fi series hail from 70s and 80s. Halo started up as recently as 2001, and it’s a multi-billion dollar franchise with games, books–even Legos. In fact, there are lots of sci-fi video game franchises right now, many of them right on par with other classic space opera. Just look at Starcraft, for example, or Mass Effect, or Eve Online and Sins of a Solar Empire. The number of sci-fi games has been exploding.

In fact, this explosion has been happening for some time. While literary science fiction may have suffered something of a decline back in the 90s, that was the heyday of games like Master of Orion and Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Flight simulators like Flight Commander and X-wing proliferated like crazy, while even some of the classic RPGs like Final Fantasy borrowed heavily from science fiction tropes. And those are just a few of the games that I can list off the top of my head!

Whether or not literary sf is on the decline, a whole new generation has been introduced to the genre through the medium of video gaming. This is not just a small niche audience playing this stuff, either–in the US at least, Halo is as mainstream as Monopoly or Settlers of Catan. In fact, you could say that science fiction is more mainstream now than it ever has been, and a lot of that is due to sci-fi video games.

4) The e-publishing golden age is giving us thousands of new voices.

But what about the world of literary sf? Are we in a decline? Do people just not read science fiction anymore? How bright is the future for science fiction literature?

Actually, this is the area where I’m the most optimistic of all.

The publishing industry is changing at the speed of light, much in the same way that the music industry changed about a decade ago. Just as the MP3 revolution allowed all sorts of eclectic yet entrepreneurial artists to thrive without the oversight of record labels, the epublishing revolution is opening all sorts of doors for the enterprising author. And while the changes are driving publishers (such as NSB) out of business, they are enabling authors who only sell in the mid-list range to make a respectable living.

At Worldcon 2011, Ginger Buchanan (senior editor at Tor) asserted that there has never been a runaway science fiction bestseller. In the eyes of New York publishing, that may be true–but New York has a notorious record for missing the catch in pursuit of one big fish. Because of epublishing, whole new genres like New Adult that publishers thought would never sell are now going mainstream.

And even the niches that stay niches are becoming quite lucrative for the authors who can build a decent following. When author cuts out the middlemen and develops a direct relationship with the readership, it only takes a thousand true fans or so become a financial success. As Kris Rusch pointed out so aptly, those numbers may bring only scorn from New York, but for the writers who actually produce the content, that’s a vein of pure gold.

I can’t tell you how many success stories I’ve heard from fellow sci-fi writers over on the Kindle Boards, who started just for the grocery money and ended up quitting their day jobs. But as Hugh Howey pointed out, the runaway bestsellers are not the true story of the epublishing revolution–it’s the little guys who only sell a few hundred copies a month but are earning enough to support themselves writing what they love.

Indeed, we’re already starting to see an explosion of new science fiction, thanks largely to the ease of electronic self-publishing. I’ve only read a few of them so far, but Nathan Lowell stands out among them, as well as my good friend Kindal Debenham. These guys and so many others are bringing a fresh new voice to space opera, revitalizing the genre in ways that simply weren’t economical back in the days of Big Publishing.

So even if space opera as a literary genre isn’t quite large enough to go mainstream, it is large enough to support a wide range of new voices under the emerging business models. And as the epublishing revolution continues to mature, I think we’re going to see a new golden age comparable to the era of the pulp adventure stories.

I’ve been publishing my own work since 2011, and I can attest that there’s never been a better time to be a writer. I’m not quite making enough to go full-time yet, but at the rate things are going, it will only be a year or two before I realize my dream of making a living telling stories that I love. And if they’re the kind of stories that you love too, then that’s great news for all of us!

So has science fiction reached its zenith? I don’t think so. It went mainstream about a generation ago, which was definitely a huge moment, but for the last few decades it’s been in the process of branching out and rediscovering itself. Right now, I think we’re on the verge of a wonderful new renaissance that is going to blow us all away. As a lifelong reader and writer of science fiction, I certainly hope that’s the case. And because of the reasons listed above, I sincerely believe that it is.

Y is for Yesteryear

They say that the golden age of science fiction is about twelve years old. That’s definitely true for me.

My first exposure to the genre was Star Wars: A New Hope. I saw it when I was seven, right around the height of my dinosaur phase. Everything about the movie completely blew me away, from the Jawas and Sand People of Tatooine to the stormtrooper gunfights and lightsaber duels. After watching Luke blow up the Death Star, I spent the next few hours running around the yard pretending to fly my own starfighter.

In a lot of ways, I’ve never really stopped.

My parents made me wait until I was nine to watch The Empire Strikes back, because it was rated PG. Without any exaggeration, I can say that those were the longest two years of my life. I was literally counting down days by the end, and to pass the time without going crazy, I read up on all the books about space that I could possibly find.

My father bought the original X-wing flight simulator game somewhere around then, and I soon became totally engrossed in it. Since the 386 was our only entertainment system (no Super Nintendo–I had to visit a friend’s house for that), X-wing became the defining game of my childhood. I spent hours and hours on that game, to the point where I knew exactly which simulated missions the characters from the books were flying and how to complete them faster and easier.

I thought The Empire Strikes Back was a little slow the first time I saw it, but it’s since grown on me, to the point where now it’s my favorite film in the whole series. Thankfully, my parents let me watch Return of the Jedi the next day, and for the next few months my life felt utterly complete.

Around this time I discovered the Star Wars novels and soon immersed myself in them. The Courtship of Princess Leia by Dave Wolverton soon became one of my favorites, as well as the Heir to the Empire trilogy by Timothy Zahn and the X-wing series by Michael A. Stackpole.

But it was Roger Allen McBride who first introduced me to a different flavor of science fiction with his Corellia trilogy. As I mentioned in V is for Vast, those books had just enough of a touch of hard science to intrigue me about the other possibilities of the genre. That was the last Star Wars series that I read before branching out into other works of science fiction.

The Tripod trilogy by John Christopher was my first introduction to the dystopian / post-apocalyptic genre, depicting an enslaved humanity after an alien invasion. Those books really captured my imagination for a while. The Giver was also quite interesting and thought provoking, though since it didn’t involve spaceships or aliens it wasn’t nearly as compelling.

I read a lot of fantasy in my early high school years, including Tracy Hickman, Lloyd Alexander, and (of course) J.R.R. Tolkien. While I enjoyed those books and immersed myself in them for a while, my true love was still science fiction. For almost a year, I watched Star Trek: Voyager religiously with my dad. And every now and again, I’d pick out a science fiction book from the local town library and give it a try. That’s how I discovered Frank Herbert’s Dune.

In eleventh grade, my English teacher had us choose an author and focus our term papers solely on their books for the entire year. She suggested I choose Orson Scott Card, but I chose Cormac McCarthy instead. I’m not sure if that was the worst decision of my high school career, or the best decision, since assigned high school reading tends to make any book feel like it sucks. I discovered Ender’s Game the following summer, and finished it in a delirious rush at 3am the morning after checking it out from the local library.

More than any other book, Ender’s Game cemented my love for the genre, and showed me just how powerful and moving the genre could be. It opened so many insights into the world and human nature, reading that book made me feel like I’d opened a pair of eyes that I didn’t even know I’d had. Looking back, that was probably the moment when I knew I would be a science fiction writer. I’d known I was going to be a writer ever since I read A Wrinkle in Time at age eight, but to be a science fiction writer specifically, that goal was probably cemented by reading Orson Scott Card.

After high school, I served a two year mission for my church, during which I didn’t read any novels or watch any TV or movies. When I came back, though, Orson Scott Card and Madeline L’Engle helped me to ease through the awkwardness of adjusting back to normal civilian life. When I left for college, I expanded my horizons even further, starting with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Edgar Rice Burrough’s Princess of Mars.

When I discovered Pioneer Books in downtown Provo, I knew I’d found my favorite bookstore in Utah Valley. I have so many fond memories sitting cross-legged on the floor in the science fiction section, browsing through the musty used books for hours at a time. That’s where I discovered C.J. Cherryh, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, and numerous other authors who are among my favorites today.

When I discovered Spin, Robert Charles Wilson soon became one of my favorites. I picked up that novel as a free PDF from Tor, and read it over the summer while studying abroad in Jordan. Once again, that same hard sf sensibility I’d gotten from Roger Allen McBride touched me in an unforgettable way. But it was the human element of that book that really moved me–in fact, it’s always been about the human element. The world building in Downbelow Station was great and all, but the romance of Merchanter’s Luck had a much more lasting impact. Starship Troopers had some good ideas, but it was Mandella’s personal journey in The Forever War that moved me almost to tears. The intrigue of the Ender’s Shadow series was quite entertaining, but it was Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead that really taught me what it means to be human.

I finished my first novel, Genesis Earth, shortly after returning from that study abroad, and tried to capture the same sensibility from Spin as well as the intimately human element. Since then, I’ve written several more sci-fi novels, some of them tragic, some triumphant, but in all of them I’ve tried to get as close as I can to the personal lives of the characters. I don’t know if I’ll ever write a character portrait so intimate as Shevek’s in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but I certainly hope to someday.

For me, science fiction started out as a wonderfully exciting entertainment and turned into something much more meaningful. If there’s anything the genre has taught me, though, it’s that the two aren’t mutually exclusive–that you can have your adventure and learn what it means to be human as well. Indeed, the more imaginative the adventure, the greater the truths I’ve taken from it.

Because of that, even though I’m almost in my thirties now, I can’t possibly foresee a time when science fiction isn’t a major part of my life. It’s a love affair that’s grown just as much as I have, and continues to grow with each new author I discover and each new book I write. When I’m old and grizzled and pushing eighty, I’m sure there will still be a part of that twelve year old boy in me, still running around the yard flying his starship.