This week, I finished lettering the next chapter of the Legends of the Dracorex graphic novel. Here is the first of six pages of “The Colony” to whet your appetite.
Artist Eliseu Gouveia once again did an amazing job bringing my original script and rough page layouts to life. He’s an outstanding collaborator who not only came up with ingeniuous visual solutions to some problems that had me stumped on page one, but also found inspiration in the recent solar eclipse and took the intitiative to add a darkened sun to a ritual sacrifice scene.
My original script did not call for an eclipse, but the darkened sun was so perfect for the scene that I altered the final script to fit. The completion of this chapter leaves us with one more episode to finish this summer, plus a full-color cover illustration, then I’ll be ready to publish the 48-page graphic novel.
Addicted to action and beholden to no one, a hell-raising space pirate and her indestructible calico cat confront the horrors of the asteroid-mining frontier, from massive monsters to revolting robots, and much, much more.
Join Meteor Mags and her criminal crew of rock-and-roll rebels in a series of reckless adventures including hand-to-hand combat with a murderous cyborg, traveling through time, and uncovering the gruesome mystery of an abandoned space station.
Discover new forms of life, an alternate universe, and all-new thrills in this novel-length collection of stories where science fiction and crime collide with irreverent satire and several pints of Anarchy Ale.
Portuguese artist Eliseu Gouveia took my rough script and turned it into these beautiful pages of sci-fi dinosaur savagery. This story is one episode of a five-part graphic novel that will be a prehistoric prequel to the Meteor Mags series.
As for why I chose to tell this story in six-page episodes, I got the idea from vintage comic books of the 1970s that often featured six-page “backup” stories — specifically, the Space Voyagers backups in DC’s Rima the Jungle Girl. I like the way those stories compress potentially novel-length sci-fi concepts into fast-paced adventure tales that waste little time on exposition and set-up in the pursuit of action-packed mayhem. In an age of “decompressed” storytelling that often takes a one-issue idea and stretches it into six issues to fill a trade paperback collection, I went the opposite way.
Update: This mini-comic now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan and Other Tales, for sale on Amazon in paperback and ebook.Customers outside of the USA, please see https://mybook.to/godsoftitan.
Author’s Note: This is an irreverent homage to Spider Robinson’s famous series of short stories about Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, which I thoroughly enjoyed as a teenager and which occasionally dealt with the fates of time travelers telling their tragic tales in the titular pub.
Episode 46 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.
Donny discovers how to send information back in time—or does he?
🏴☠️
Update: The complete story now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan and Other Tales, for sale on Amazon in paperback and ebook. Customers outside of the USA, please see https://mybook.to/godsoftitan. Thanks to everyone who dropped by to enjoy the pre-publication draft!
In 2023, I connected with Portuguese artist Eliseu Gouveia to work on a six-page comic-book story about the prehistoric lives of the evil space lizards that appear in many of the Meteor Mags stories. Eliseu—Zeu to his friends—did an amazing job of taking my rough script and crudely sketched mock-ups of the pages and bringing them to life. I will eventually be lettering them, but I am excited about the inked artwork and want to share a couple of pages with you.
page two of six
I intend for this six-page episode to be part of a collection of five stories about the Dracorexes’ rise to power in the late Cretaceous and their eventual escape from Earth before the asteroid impact that ended the reign of dinosaurs. This episode is based on the myth of Prometheus and features a benevolent Quetzalcoatlus who befriends a dinosaur tribe and educates them about fire, agriculture, and written language, helping them become more technologically and socially advanced. But the nasty Dracos want to keep technology to themselves, so they confront Quetzal and his peaceful friends.
page three of six
The final three pages are deliciously violent and horrifying. These tales of saurian savagery take place millions of years before the Meteor Mags series begins. One episode—drawn by my old friend Brian Bowhay—appears in The Second Omnibus. Brian and I worked on it before I conceived of Mags and her adventures; in fact, the evil space lizards Mags fights were repurposed from my earlier ideas for villainous sci-fi dinos.
As author Tony Padegimas once asked me in a workshop, “Are there any space lizards who are not evil?” Tony had a point, but I just think it’s fun to say “evil space lizards”. Even more fun than that is seeing them come to life on the page thanks to Zeu! Our collaboration inspired me to take my rough ideas for the remaining stories and refine them into proper comic-book scripts. Zeu and I plan to produce another episode this Spring, taking us one step closer to a complete graphic novel.
Update: The completed mini-comic now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan and Other Tales, for sale on Amazon in paperback and ebook.Customers outside of the USA, please see https://mybook.to/godsoftitan.
From December 15 to January 1, hundreds of thousands of ebooks on Smashwords are available for free or at steeply discounted prices, including many of mine. This annual sale is a great way to stock up on reading material for the winter season, try out some new authors without spending a dime, or send a free gift copy of The Battle of Vesta 4 to everyone you know.
I admit I was worried last year about the merger of Smashwords with Draft2Digital, but it has been a painless and seamless transition clearly carried out by people who genuinely care about self-publishing authors. Everything I loved about the old Smashwords platform has been preserved, and all my experiences with helping other authors set up new books on the Draft2Digital platform have been positive, both in terms of the user experience for setting up a book and the additional distribution opportunities available to authors.
I’ve weathered countless changes in this industry in the past twelve years, and it can feel like a part-time unpaid job just to keep up with all of them, so it’s especially nice to see changes that keep the benefits to authors at the forefront rather than some corporate bottom-line.
In other news, I’m pleased to be working with a professional comic-book artist who is currently bringing one of my story ideas to life. We connected on the Reddit forum ComicBookCollabs, where I quickly got dozens of responses to my story pitch but one in particular that really stood out from all the others as being perfect for what I had in mind.
Speaking of collaborations, any long-time reader of this blog knows that one of the greatest contributors to its early success was author Paul O’Connor of Longbox Graveyard fame. Paul is closing down the Longbox at the end of this year, but he has moved on to writing crime fiction, recently got a story published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and is chronicling his latest writing adventures and noir obsessions at PaulRyanOConnor.com. I can’t thank Paul enough for his support and kind-hearted enthusiasm over the past decade, so please go check him out!
Long live the free and independent republic of Ceres.
Images like this almost make me think the Bing robot has a sense of humor.
This post-writing analysis will discuss my recent short-story draft in light of the concept I used AI to help me brainstorm, and in the process explore the difference between AI-assisted and AI-generated work. This has now become an important distinction for authors using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform which will require authors to make this distinction when setting up their books. We’ll also look at what “AI-assisted” means to KDP, and whether it needs to be reported.
Identifying a purely AI-generated work is easy. You give a prompt to the robot, and the robot cranks out a response—an image or text, or maybe an animation. Google Bard’s short story “The Space Station”, which I posted in unedited form, is a perfect example. I don’t claim any credit for it and, as I’ve discussed before, it would be lunacy to think I have any copyright claim to it—and equally ridiculous to think our legal system should grant the robot any ownership claim. (I do, however, think it entirely reasonable to claim ownership of my characters used in Bard’s version; so if you want to plagiarize Bard’s text for your own nefarious purposes, you’d best change the character names.)
In my take on a similar premise, “Falling Objects”, my blog post of the drafted text uses some illustrations for visual appeal. They were all generated by Bing AI, except for the animated explosion gif which was done by a different robot. With the Bing images, I digitally edited them to remove the Bing logo from the bottom left corners. (This was easily accomplished with color sampling and a paint brush, or a clone-stamp tool. I’m no Photoshop genius.) In my opinion, and in the opinion of KDP’s new guidelines, this minor editing does nothing to change the images’ status as AI-generated.
But how much editing and re-painting or re-writing do we need to do before the work is considered AI-assisted instead of AI-generated? That is a question I believe will eventually become the subject of debate in the courts and at the Copyright Office. But as we will see in a minute, KDP currently has a clear opinion on the matter.
As an example, my post of the “Space Station” text has a Bing-generated image of Patches gnawing on an alien skull, but I did more digital re-painting to it than simply removing the Bing logo. I painted out some of the extra toes on Patches’ paws—since AI apparently is still as confused about paws as it is human hands—and I painted over an area of Patches’ face where the AI seemed confused over whether an eye or her fur was appearing. But fixing these minor problems doesn’t make the image “mine”, any more than fixing another writer’s grammatical errors and typos as an editor makes me the author of their work. A mechanic who repairs a car cannot claim to have manufactured the car. Sure, the labor was meaningful—and I now have that repaired image of Patches on a custom-printed t-shirt—but I believe the work still counts as AI-generated, and KDP’s new standards agree. Taking an AI work and editing it, even if the edits were “substantial”, does not change the work’s status as AI-generated.
This is what happens when you ask Bing for “realistic human hands”.
A more pressing question for me is whether the story itself counts as AI-assisted or not according to KDP’s new guidelines. I am convinced it does—with one notable exception—because using AI to brainstorm ideas but creating the final product entirely on your own is, according to KDP, “AI-assisted” and does not need to be reported to them. Here is KDP’s current thinking in their own words:
AI-generated: We define AI-generated content as text, images, or translations created by an AI-based tool. If you used an AI-based tool to create the actual content (whether text, images, or translations), it is considered “AI-generated,” even if you applied substantial edits afterwards.
AI-assisted: If you created the content yourself, and used AI-based tools to edit, refine, error-check, or otherwise improve that content (whether text or images), then it is considered “AI-assisted” and not “AI-generated.” Similarly, if you used an AI-based tool to brainstorm and generate ideas, but ultimately created the text or images yourself, this is also considered “AI-assisted” and not “AI-generated.” It is not necessary to inform us of the use of such tools or processes.
As far as AI editing is concerned, KDP is talking about things like Grammarly or even Microsoft Word’s “Editor” tool (formerly known as spell-check). In my story, the scope of AI assistance is that I did indeed give a prompt to a robot to see what it would do with my concept, and seeing the robot’s response did get me thinking about ways in which I would handle the same concept. In fact, seeing the robot’s clumsy attempt inspired me with the confidence that I could take an un-used story idea that’s been on my mind for years and actually do something interesting with it, something relevant to the overall flow of my series.
To me—and, apparently, to KDP—this was no different than discussing story ideas with my old critique group, or seeing how someone else in the group was handling an idea and wanting to do my own completely different treatment of it. I’ve had numerous conversations about Mags and Patches with other writers—from discussing where I felt stuck with an insurmountable obstacle or an impossible scope, to asking for an expert’s help in depicting some technical details. Sure, I got “assistance” from those kind people, but none of them would expect me to list them as a co-author. Giving each other a shout-out in the Dedication or Acknowledgments would be more than sufficient, and I certainly don’t need public credit for every suggestion, correction, or plot idea I gave someone else in a workshop. Acting as sounding boards and support for each other is just what people do in a good group. I see my use of Bard the same way.
However, “Falling Objects” does include an Emergency Bulletin I asked Bard to help me write, and I took several responses, drastically condensed them, then re-wrote the language. What survived were the four main points of advice given in the bulletin, such as staying away from windows. Now, KDP has language that states even very heavily edited AI material is considered AI-generated, and the bulletin falls in that category, regardless of the human work I put into it.
I don’t believe anything else about the story qualifies as AI-generated. “Falling Objects” does preserve some plot ideas from Bard’s “Space Station”, but they are either generic genre tropes or ideas that already occur naturally in my series. The generic ideas are fighting a monster/alien in a labyrinthine space station or spaceship and blowing up that vessel. You don’t need my help thinking of dozens of examples of films and books with those exact situations. They are common events in sci-fi.
At the end of “Falling Objects,” like Bard’s “Space Station”, Mags and Patches achieve some fame for their adventure. But their receiving honors—and specifically, works of art made in their honor—is a recurring event in the series. Back on Vesta, Mags’ girls painted a mural depicting her and her ancestors. After that mural was destroyed, they created a new set of paintings of Mags and Patches on Ceres. The statue at the end of “Falling Objects” is a natural continuation of my ongoing exploration of how Mags, who began the series as an unrepentant criminal on the fringes of society, changes over time into a character who leads social change and achieves widespread renown, respect, and even love—at least in some circles.
While I admit Bard might have planted the creative seed to end my own space-station adventure with a scene exploring Mags’ expanding fame, Bard’s attempt was nothing like mine and had absolutely nothing connecting it to the ongoing series development and character interactions. Bard offered something pointless and generic that came out of nowhere, and I did something meaningful with it. The same idea appears at the end of the original Star Wars movie, where the characters receive medals for their accomplishments. It isn’t a new idea, whether you’re a robot or George Lucas.
So, when I eventually upload this story as part of a new collection to KDP, what do I do? Do I say the text was partially AI-generated? Unless I replace the Emergency Bulletin in the final, published version with something entirely original, then I do. And if I decide to include the illustrations I’ve been using the robots for, then I’ll need to say the artwork was AI-generated, too. My other option, if I want to claim more originality, would be to keep the AI images here on my blog, but not use them in the published version.
On a final and unrelated note, I want to address something about Mags that happens in this story. We have seen her in previous episodes giving interviews and being a show-off who enjoys the spotlight when performing on stage, with or without her clothes. She has been emotionally touched by her girls’ efforts to express their love and gratitude for her through art. But in “Falling Objects”, she initially declines an opportunity for interviews, and she avoids public attention in the final scene. Is this out-of-character for her? At first, it might seem so. But a couple of things about the situation in “Falling Objects” are different from before. I considered mentioning them in more obvious dialogue, but I ended up thinking that approach would be bashing the reader in the head with a point better served by allowing readers to reach their own conclusions.
I’m a big fan of subtext in fiction when it comes to dialogue and a character’s actions. I hate having things so over-explained to me that I have no room to draw my own interpretation and meaning, which is a crucial aspect of feeling involved in a story. But I also learned in my years with critique groups that what might be obvious to an author—who is always closer to the work than anyone else—might need one or more additional clues to help the reader reach the desired understanding of what’s happening internally with the characters beneath the surface level. It’s a difficult thing for a writer to get “just right”. So, I’ll let my draft simmer for a bit while I work on other things, and maybe I’ll decide to add a couple details before publishing it in the next book.
Episode 45 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.
Mags and Patches investigate a space station that’s fallen into disrepair since the earliest days of Martian colonization, only to trigger a disaster that threatens millions of lives.
🏴☠️
Update: The complete story now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan and Other Tales, for sale on Amazon in paperback and ebook. Readers outside of the USA, please see https://mybook.to/godsoftitan. Thanks to everyone who dropped by to enjoy the pre-publication draft!
The definition of “science fiction” has often been discussed and debated but never convincingly achieved, and my current opinion is that we can’t precisely define it because it doesn’t really exist. Maybe that sounds odd coming from a guy who’s been devouring sci-fi books, comics, and films for more than four decades, blogging about them since 2010, and writing an ostensibly SF series for ten years. I love science fiction, so how can I also believe it doesn’t exist?
The label “science fiction” is a lot like the label “vegetables”. What is a vegetable, really? It isn’t a scientific term for any actual taxonomical category of plants. Many things we call vegetables are really something else. A tomato is a fruit—or, more precisely, an edible berry of a plant that botanists group with nightshades. Botanists also consider a banana to be a berry, and the plant it grows on is categorized as an herb. A potato is a tuber, commonly considered a “root vegetable”. That label simply means we humans eat the underground part of the plant. A carrot is also called a root vegetable, though the orange part we eat is not a tuber but a taproot. Broccoli is considered part of the cabbage family, but that family (brassicaceae) includes both herbaceous plants (herbs) and shrubs (perennial woody plants that can be either evergreen or deciduous). Then we have spinach (a leafy green flowering plant), corn (a flowering plant often considered a “grain crop”), and squash (a specific type of fruit called a gourd that grows on a vine).
We haven’t even touched on the confusing categories of beans, legumes, seeds, and nuts. Is a bean a vegetable? Is a peanut? Is a pea? Is a walnut? Exactly what is a vegetable?
The truth is that “vegetable” is a term of convenience, not a precise definition. “Vegetable” is a section in the grocery store where you know you can find plants or parts of plants you can eat. Would your shopping experience be improved if all berries were grouped together, then you could proceed to the tuber aisle, and then the taproot bins? Not really. You’ve been trained to expect that plants with a sweeter taste are in the fruit section, and everything else is in the vegetable section, except for nuts that might be shelved with the snacks, and dry beans that might be shelved with grains. And if you want to find them all in the same aisle, you can head over to the canned-goods section where canned pineapple (a bromeliad) is just a few steps away from the pinto beans (a legume) and some tasty crushed nightshades (tomatoes).
To me, science fiction is like the canned goods aisle. The science-fiction shelves at the public library are where I can find, all in one place, stories about time travel, space travel, aliens, mutants, and robots. The SF aisle has evil scientists who want to destroy the world right next to rugged adventure junkies who use fantastical pseudo-science powers to explore new realms and rescue people. The styles and flavors of these tales vary wildly from one to the next, just like turnips and kale have very little in common but are adjacent in the store. But the people selling these things know that if you buy one, then you are likely to buy another—so they all get grouped together.
The caveat is that if these stories are told in the illustrated form of sequential narration, then you’ll need to go to the graphic novels and comic bookshelves where stories are grouped not by content but by form. I don’t imagine that anyone’s perusal of the comics and manga shelves would be improved by sub-dividing them according to genre.
In this sense, science fiction is purely a marketing term. Leaving behind the vegetable comparison, the most obviously comparable marketing term is one I came to loathe in my twenties in the 1990s: “grunge”. It’s an absolutely garbage term created for the sole purpose of selling stuff. None of the pioneers of so-called grunge rock would have used that label to define themselves. Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Mudhoney, Screaming Trees, and Melvins were in no way grunge bands—until somebody in a marketing department decided they were, because that could help the record labels sell a bunch of other bands.
The film 1991: The Year Punk Broke is probably the best place to start for those of you who didn’t live through those years and might also love those bands. The result of the marketing mania is that now, if kids want to get into “grunge music” of the 90s, they will encounter all kinds of bands that have about as much in common stylistically as pineapples and kidney beans. Or Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and the indie time-travel film Primer. Grunge, like vegetables and science fiction, has never existed—except in a marketing plan.
So despite my lifelong love for science fiction, I don’t think it really exists. Like vegetables and grunge, it’s inconsistent and impossible to define. By brute force—like the questionable label “jazz” before it—”science fiction” groups together too many things that are vastly different in meaningful ways and which deserve their own categories if we want to really understand them.
But when we deepen our understanding beyond a superficial level, we learn that all categories are inherently artificial and simply convenient shortcuts. Is the egg-laying platypus a mammal? Or does it defy our longing to categorize it?
In the disciplines of biology, genetics, and evolutionary research, we see an increasing understanding of complexity that defies our old categories of the so-called “kingdoms” of living beings I learned in the 1980s. When I was in elementary school, there were five kingdoms. Now, thanks to more detailed genetic analysis, we are realizing that our earlier classification system was too simple.
Maybe you don’t care about all this, but it’s a meaningful question for me because when I make my books available for sale, one of the first things I need to do is choose categories. Like it or not, I need to label and categorize my books for marketing and sales purposes.
I’m totally fine with my biographical, alternate history of the universe of Meteor Mags and Patches being labeled as science fiction. But the number-two category I prefer is Action and Adventure. My felonious felines are action junkies who embrace the tropes of both the action girl and the dark action girl while being ready to subvert those tropes at a moment’s notice.
But as a writer (as opposed to a seller), I’ve never had any interest in limiting myself to the expectations of a genre, any more than I ever did as a musician exploring every possible form of the art. Some of my supposed sci-fi stories incorporate historical fiction while exploring Mags’ life and the lives of her ancestors. And despite presenting the series as interconnected short stories, I love using novelistic techniques such as multiple points of view and multiple narrators, epistolary writing in the form of letters and articles and essays, non-linear storytelling, and plenty of satire.
Despite writing an ostensibly science-fiction series replete with all the tropes of the ill-defined genre, including giant insects, I’m way more focused on telling interesting stories about characters I’ve increasingly come to care about over the years. Genre be damned. Character is everything. Full speed ahead.
I wrote my second story when I was seventeen, in 1990. Every copy of it has long been deleted, though I recall my friend Dave was impressed by it. He also had aspirations of being a writer and had cranked out a couple of short tales that were heavily influenced by the transgressive aspects of Charles Bukowski’s stories, which he discovered by way of Henry Rollins, who remains one of my favorite performers both for his music and his spoken word, and for his dedication to self-publishing.
Dave circa 1990.
We were just suburban kids discovering punk rock in the mid-1980s and early 90s, when wearing all-black clothing was considered edgy or freaky instead of being the default uniform at Safeway and the Hard Rock Café. We weren’t smart enough to know what life was all about, but we understood that most of what adults told us was complete bullshit.
Some of my punk friends from those days ended up merging back into the mainstream, and I can’t really hold it against them. The pressure to conform in order to make a living and not end up on the streets is massive and all-pervasive. Hell, I even had some jobs where I wore a tie. One of my friends told me several times that the scariest thing about me was how I could pretend to be totally normal when I needed to. It took decades to carve out a different life for myself where I could be honest about who I am while still getting along with people and not starving.
My second story has been forgotten by everyone, and no manuscript has survived. But I recall the premise. A man built a machine he could plug into, and it would stimulate his mind and senses. His goal was to gain access to all kinds of fantastical imaginings that would inspire him to create great fiction. But at the story’s climactic moment, when he plugged in, the plan went awry. Instead of being inspired, he slipped into his fantasies and became so detached from reality that he never again wrote a single word.
The point was that we need to be in touch with real-life experiences to find inspiration and create great art. The execution was amateurish, as one might expect from a seventeen-year-old.
Looking back on it now, I feel ambivalent about that message. I still believe that any decent fiction writer needs a wealth of real-life experiences to draw on for emotional truth, but I’ve also experienced the power of plugging into fantasy worlds to set free one’s imagination.
Like many of my once-teenage friends who aspired to be writers and artists, I had this idea that we needed to go out into the “real world” and live lives that were worth telling a story about or expressing though music, painting, and other art forms. I suppose I still believe that, but I also know that approach will lead you into times that absolutely suck. It isn’t always romantic. Sometimes, it’s bloody awful.
Plus, real life rarely makes sense, at least in terms of a narrative. In good fiction, everything happens for a reason and is unified by themes and motifs. In real life, shit happens unexpectedly in the most senseless, absurd, and incomprehensible ways.
So, to young people who set out on a course of adventure to seek inspiration, I would never say, “Don’t do that,” but I would advise keeping in mind that the people and events you encounter along the way will not be what you expect, and you will eventually need to take the interesting parts and craft them into something that actually makes sense. Because on their own, they won’t.
Age might have something to do with it, though every writer moves through stages of life at a different pace. I’ve seen brilliant stories from people half my age. But I found I wasn’t ready to start with fiction until I was forty. It wasn’t until I had a massive backlog of real events and stories that I could begin incorporating and crafting them into something imaginary. As much as I tried in my early to mid-twenties, I was stuck in a mode of trying to take my real-life experiences and fictionalize them, and the results were lackluster.
Oddly enough, the events that made it possible for me to start writing fiction were contradictory to the story I wrote at age seventeen. It wasn’t until I plugged into a fantasy world that I experienced events that would become the particles of sand around which the pearls of my fiction series could form. But the layers of those pearls were often constructed from highly emotional real-world events I’d lived through and people I’d met along the way.
I understand now what I did not understand at age seventeen. Inspiration for fiction is not an either/or proposition. Writers need a mix of both real-world experience and fantastic imagination. Authors need a wealth of experience to draw on for expressing emotional truths about the human condition, but they also need flights of fancy—and unifying those two dimensions into coherent narratives requires a study of the craft of writing. Any one of those things will not be enough, but putting all three together just might get you where you want to go.
Episode 44 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.
On the way home, Mags and Patches are waylaid by a solar flare and crash-land in the midst of chaos on Mars, where the robots are killing everyone.
🏴☠️
Update:The complete story now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan and Other Tales, for sale on Amazon in paperback and ebook. Readers outside of the USA, please see https://mybook.to/godsoftitan. Thanks to everyone who dropped by to enjoy the pre-publication draft!
At this point, I have about 26,000 words of six new short stories about Meteor Mags and Patches plus three thousand words of notes on the next phase of their adventures. July 2023 marked the ten-year anniversary of beginning the series. For most of those years, I published a new collection every time I hit about 20,000 words. But I really liked that the most recent book, Permanent Crescent, weighed in at about 60,000 words and felt more substantial. The hardcover edition looks especially awesome on the bookshelf, and two more volumes like it would make a lovely third omnibus when combined.
Plus, waiting to publish a longer work made Permanent Crescent feel more novelistic and less chaotic than the deluge of novella-length collections that came before. As a result, I plan to wait until I hit a similar word count—and in the meantime, I can scratch my itch to publish new stories by posting the drafts on this blog. I’m not getting any younger, and I’m occasionally haunted by the idea that I might suddenly die with unpublished episodes existing nowhere else but on my hard drive. So, I gain quite a bit of peace of mind by posting new episodes here for sharing, feedback, and tracking my progress.
The most recent six episodes, under the working title Gods of Titan and Other Tales, develop the years of Mags’ life where she works to create a utopia on Ceres in the aftermath of the destruction of her old home on Vesta and the subsequent revolution on Mars. The stories continue several ongoing subplots that began so long ago in Red Metal at Dawn: the fate of her telepathic mutant octopuses, what she’s learned from the genetic research tools she discovered on the day she met the octos, and the lives of the young people she also rescued on that day. The stories also advance the social and technogical progress Mags and her friends make on Ceres, the deeper meaning of something they discovered in the Ceresian oceans in Permanent Crescent, and how all this ties into Mags’ large-scale dreams about the future of the solar system.
But it’s been going slower than I anticipated. After the publication of Permanent Crescent, I had a mysterious—and as-yet unsolved—medical problem that laid me low for about four months at the end of 2022. I had only begun to recover by the time I left Arizona in December 2022 to relocate to Georgia to be closer to my mother and sister. While the transition went fairly smoothly, it was still a big upheaval after twenty years in the desert, and it took a lot longer than I expected to find a new place of my own—several months instead of several weeks, along with the adjustment period it takes to find a new groove after leaving behind everything you’re accustomed to for something new, and the loss of the collaborative support networks that helped me advance the series since I first realized I needed help getting to the next level as a fiction writer back in 2016.
I can’t complain, though. Everything in life is a trade-off. As Shondra said in The Martian Revolution, “I’m a firm believer that you can have it all in life. You just can’t have it all at the same time.” Sometimes my fantasy world needs to take a backseat to sorting out real life—and I am far from the first fiction writer to face that fact. Heck, Stephen King was horrifically injured and almost killed by a motor vehicle while taking an afternoon walk in June 1999, and he’s still cranking out novels. While I am nowhere near as prolific as King, I like to feel I am continually moving forward and making progress, even when it’s slow.
Meteor Mags returns to Isla Salida to engage her interspecies army, but she discovers her forces are under new leadership.
🏴☠️
Update: The complete story now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan and Other Tales, for sale on Amazon in paperback and ebook. Readers outside of the USA, please see https://mybook.to/godsoftitan. Thanks to everyone who dropped by to enjoy the pre-publication draft!
Meteor Mags returns to the subterranean oceans on Ceres, only to hear her own voice telling her about the destruction of everything she’s ever loved.
🏴☠️
Update:The complete story now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan and Other Tales, for sale on Amazon in paperback and ebook. Readers outside of the USA, please see https://mybook.to/godsoftitan. Thanks to everyone who dropped by to enjoy the pre-publication draft!
UPDATE:This post is no longer relevant due to the way KDP changed their handling of categories in June 2023, just one month after I put all this information together for you in one place. What incredible timing! Now that KDP allows three categories during set-up, their customer service department is declining all email requests to add your book to more categories.
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If you’ve ever set up your own book through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), then you know you can only select a maximum of two categories from a list that is not really complete. You might have noticed that your book’s listing page shows it ranking in categories you never picked during set-up, and you might have noticed that books similar to yours are ranking in categories that were never even available to you during set-up.
This post will explain, with screenshots, how you can find new categories and submit a request to be added to them. At the end of the post, I will talk about why authors want to do this, but for now, let’s assume you already know the why and just want the how. Let’s go!
PART 1: The How
One easy way to discover potential niche categories that might suit your book requires no technical skills, money, or specialized software. Just search Amazon for your topics or genres, click on any books that seem similar to yours, and look at their categories — which are shown in the Product Details of the listing.
Go deeper by clicking on the categories in those books’ listings and see the top 100 bestsellers in those categories, then explore what other categories those bestselling books are ranking in. You can pretty quickly build a list of niche categories relevant to your book. As I write this, the current limit is ten.
As you build your list, you need to be aware of two things. First, the categories for Kindle eBooks in the Kindle Store are not always the exact same categories available for print Books. They are two different “departments” at Amazon, so you need to treat them separately, both when you are researching and when you are requesting additions. For simplicity’s sake, I will limit my examples to ebooks. In the screenshot below, you can see how I went to a page that only shows me the bestselling ebooks (https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/digital-text/154606011) so I can see a hierarchy of ebook categories in the left sidebar.
Second, to avoid confusion about your request, you need to get the precise, accurate names of the categories. For example, see the screenshot below for the subtly different wording of the same category: “Biographies & Memoirs of Authors”. If you submit that category in your request, you might run into problems. Because as you can see in the hierarchy in the left sidebar, Amazon thinks the actual, precise, complete category here is “Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Authors”. If you take the time to correctly map out that hierachy for your chosen categories, your requests have a better chance of going smoothly and correctly.
Once you have a list of up to ten categories that seem like a good fit, go to Amazon Author Central (https://author.amazon.com/home) and log in. If you don’t yet have an Author Central account, set one up! On the Author Central home page, scroll all the way down to the very bottom of the page and find the super-tiny link to “Contact Us”. Click it.
You will arrive on a page that has a list of reasons for contacting Author Central. Click the button for “Amazon Book Page”, which will then expand to show a more specific list, including “Update Amazon categories”. Click it.
The result will be a form that has some instructions in it. You will need to give your book’s ISBN (or ASIN for ebooks), the marketplace (.com in the USA), its format (ebook, paperback, or hardcover), and its current category. Then you provide your list of “Categories to Be Added”, with each category on its own numbered line. (The instructions in the form tell you all this.)
I won’t get into it here, but if your book is selling in other countries’ versions of Amazon — for example, at amazon.co.uk for the United Kingdom — then you can also request category adds in those regions, but you will need to research what categories are available in those specific regions. For now, let’s just keep it simple and complete the process for the USA.
The screenshot below is an example of a request I made, so you can see how I filled it out with accurate categories to avoid any confusion.
Once you’ve provided all the information, click the bright yellow “Send Message” button. That’s it! Author Central Customer Support will contact you soon by email to confirm the new additions, or communicate if there was any problem fulfilling your request.
PART 2: The Why
What is the point of adding more categories? The goal usually involves increasing sales or achieving bestseller status, or both. If you can rank higher on the list of bestsellers in one category, then you potentially increase how many people will see your book. The first page of Amazon’s bestseller lists in any category currently shows the top 20, so if someone is looking for good books on a specific topic or in a specific genre, they might consult that page — or any of the next pages that cover the top 100.
Some of the niche categories have relatively low competition to get on that first page or even get to number one. For example, one tool I’m trying out told me today that if I only sold 23 copies of a poetry ebook in 24 hours in the “American Poetry” category, then I would be number one. Even in hotter markets than poetry, some niches are easier to top than others. Broad categories such as “science fiction” and “horror” are insanely competetive, but what about more specific sub-categories such as “Space Fleet Science Fiction” or “Werewolf and Shapeshifter Thrillers”? Did you even know those categories existed?
Some people have criticized Amazon’s bestseller status as being meaningless because an author can “game the system” by putting a book in some utterly obscure and even irrelevant category. Other authors are paying thousands of dollars to marketers who promise to get that coveted bestseller status for them, no matter how briefly. But my example of “American Poetry” is a truly meaningful category for some of my books to be in, and if my software is correct, I wouldn’t need to pay thousands of dollars to be number one for a day. I could probably find 23 friends who would all buy the book for a dollar on the same day, and even if I paid them to do it, it would cost a lot less than three or four grand. (If your conscience is telling you that paying people to buy a book is shady, then it will be horrified to learn about Mike Pence’s bestseller. Or these other politicans. Or these ones.)
It might make sense for you to hire a professional marketer if you are aiming to rank in a highly competitive category where you’ll need to sell upwards of five hundred or a thousand books in a single day to hit number one. But with a little time for research and some inexpensive tools, you can easily find less-competitive niche categories that are still meaningful and appropriate for your book.
Shout out to author Jeffrey Cooper for doing the preliminary research on this one. I contributed layout and design for Jeffrey’s debut ebook and paperback this year, Foot Soldier in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Memoir. The memoir recounts Jeffrey’s life and work in the tech sector that made possible many of the current advancements in computing and artificial intelligence, and it’s been getting stellar reviews both on and off Amazon.
But what do you do if someone like the New York Times or Stephen King says something nice about your book, but didn’t post the review on Amazon? This is yet another time when it comes in handy to have an Amazon Author Page set up through Author Central at https://author.amazon.com/. Thanks to Author Central, you can now add these “external” reviews to your book’s listing. Here are the steps:
1. Log in to Author Central.
2. Click on the “Books” tab at the top of the page.
3. Click on the book you want to add reviews to.
4. Click “Edit book details”.
5. In “Your Editorial Reviews”, click the button for “Add Review”.
6. In the text box, type or paste the book review(s) you want to add. Make sure to attribute the review to the source. Some basic formatting options are available.
7. Click “Preview” to see how your entry looks.
8. When you’re satisfied, click “Save” to add the review.
Author Central also has a few guidelines you will see above the box where you add the review. They are good to know:
1. Reviews should consist of transcribed text from reputable sources. The name of the source should be credited after the quotation. For example, “A fantastic read.” —The New York Times.
2. Quotes from outside reviews should follow “fair use” copyright guidelines and be limited to 1–2 sentences.
3. We recommend you limit your reviews to 3000 characters. Customers might miss other critical information if your reviews are too long.
Ordering Author Copies for your paperback or hardback edition with KDP is a very quick and easy process that will only seem mysterious the first time you do it. I will show you how to get it done. First, your book needs to be LIVE on Amazon — not In Review by KDP, but fully Live. Second, you will be ordering at your wholesale cost — what KDP might call the printing cost — not the retail price listed on Amazon.
To begin, sign into your KDP Account at https://kdp.amazon.com/. Once you are signed in, the first screen you see should be your “Bookshelf“, as shown below.
This might be unfamiliar territory if someone else set up your book for you like I do for my clients. So, let’s zoom in a little and see exactly where you click to Order Author Copies.
Clicking the Order Author Copies button will take you to the next screen where you will input how many copies you want. You can see this screen below.
Notice that you can order just one copy, or any other number you want, up to 999 copies. If you need more than that, then you are one fortunate author and also might need to contact KDP Support directly for help with that.
The only thing that sometimes confuses people here is the dropdown menu to select the “Marketplace of Your Order.” But it’s an easy decision. If you are in the USA, then choose “Amazon.com”. If you are in another country, pick the version of Amazon for your country. In the UK, for example, Amazon is “Amazon.co.uk”. Below, I have zoomed in to show you how easy this is.
Finally, click the big yellow Submit Order button in the bottom right corner. Then you are done with this part!
The final step is that you will soon get an email notice from KDP/Amazon that your order now appears in your Amazon Shopping Cart — the same cart where anything else you might buy on Amazon would go. Your cart is where you will pay for the order. You can also choose your shipping rate, if you want to pay more for faster delivery.
And, you can choose a delivery address. For example, if I order a book this way to send to a friend or reviewer instead of to me, I just give their address. You can also select the “Gift” option so you can add a short note to your friend, which will be printed and included in the shipment. That way, you don’t need to get books shipped to you and then re-ship them yourself; you can just “drop ship” from your cart if you want to.
This post is an excerpt from my book about writing and workshopping, My Life As an Armadillo, available in ebook, paperback, and hardcover editions around the world.
When we begin our writing journey, other writers invariably advise us to “Show, Don’t Tell.” It’s easier said than done, and the terminology is to blame. After all, aren’t writers engaged in the art of storytelling, not story showing? How can we tell stories if we can’t tell anything? What does this advice really mean?
In January 2018, I took a writing course from Australian author, coach, and publisher Joanne Fedler, and she put her finger on the heart of this matter. Joanne challenged the class to stop writing about a feeling and instead write from a feeling. One of her methods involved identifying how an emotion can be communicated in sensory, physical terms. In other words, what does a given emotion look like? What does it taste, sound, and smell like? What would it feel like if we could touch it?
By describing an intangible emotion in tangible terms, we create a story where readers experience the feeling for themselves instead of simply reading a report about it. Joanne used the word “report” in her discussion about this method, and it was an eye-opening moment for me.
Consider sentences such as “He felt sad” or “Susan was annoyed”. These are reports about a character’s emotional state. They tell us information, but they don’t generate any feeling inside us. If we don’t experience a feeling, we don’t engage with the story.
Readers want to take an emotional journey, not read a report about someone else’s journey. This is the central idea behind “Show, Don’t Tell.” Telling means reporting about feelings instead of communicating them in a way the reader experiences first-hand.
Rather than “Show, Don’t Tell”, I suggest we say, “Immerse, Don’t Report.” We want to immerse our readers in a world they feel and emotionally respond to. We have several tools in our writing toolbox to achieve that goal: appealing to the senses, describing body language, and eliminating adverbs.
Joanne’s method of appealing to the senses forces us to consider how an emotion colors our physical experience of the world. Two people can observe the same event but draw totally different interpretations based on their emotional states.
Films achieve a version of this effect using soundtracks. For example, a simple shot of a sunset can elicit completely different emotions depending on the music in the scene. The musical score can make the sunset appear joyous or foreboding, triumphant or tragic.
Our emotional state affects the physical world in the same way. One person might view a bustling sidewalk full of people as an exciting opportunity to mingle with others and make friends while navigating the boundless adventure of an unfamiliar city. Another person might view the same scene with crippling anxiety about jostling shoulders with strangers in potentially dangerous territory. Based on our character’s emotional state, we can describe the same scene in totally different ways.
To practice writing about this difference, take a photograph and write about it from opposing emotional perspectives. For example, take a photo of the Grand Canyon and write about it from the perspective of a character who is excited to explore it. Then write from the point of view of a character who is terrified of being lost inside it.
In each case, refuse to report these feelings. Instead, focus on how the character’s emotional states color her perceptions of the physical environment. Do the rock formations rise triumphantly toward the sunlit sky, or do they loom like a menacing maze of stone? Do clouds grace the edges of the landscape like puffs of cotton, or do they smother the horizon in obscurity? It depends on what emotional state our character brings to the scene.
Sensation refers to the immediate response of our sensory receptors (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, fingers, skin) to basic stimuli such as light, color, sound, odor, and texture.
Perception is the process by which people select, organize, and interpret these sensations. The study of perception, then, focuses on what we add to these raw sensations to give them meaning.
—Michael R. Solomon; Consumer Behavior, 12th Ed., 2016.
Let’s consider another tool: body language. Again, we are rooting the emotional world in the physical world, but here we examine how characters move their bodies and interact with their immediate environment. To illustrate the point, let’s discuss cats.
We can infer all kinds of things about a cat’s emotional state from observing her body language. A hunched back, fur standing on end, and a snarling face show us the cat senses a threat and has adopted a defensive posture. Rolling on her back with her belly exposed and her paws curled shows us the cat trusts us to give affection without harming her. Even the way a cat wags or flicks her tail shows us whether she is calm or agitated.
Now, let’s consider how a cat interacts with her environment. When she leaps onto a narrow ledge, we sense her confidence in her own agility and power. When she stretches out on a high tree branch for a nap, we understand she feels safe from enemies or predators in her chosen spot. When she bats her paws at bugs or streams of water, we sense her curiosity about the world, and her willingness to mess with things just to find out what they do.
Regardless of our characters’ species, we need to find ways to communicate feeling through physical action. Many writers are stuck in a rut of boring actions such as sighing, head nodding, head shaking, eye widening, and eye rolling. These have been done to death, and I am sick of reading about them. We need to find more ways to communicate emotions.
As an exercise, take a single emotion and come up with ten ways a character’s body language communicates it. Embarrassment, for example, might involve a character’s fixing her attention on the floor, shrinking away from other characters, stuttering, blushing, having watery eyes, suddenly being silent, running away, shoving her hands in her pockets, kicking something on the ground, or fidgeting with something in her hands. Which one best fits your character?
The way you choose body language immerses readers because they see an action and must derive meaning from it. This is why I don’t much care for the advice “Show, Don’t Tell.” What is most important is how we choose what to tell. If we tell the reader the facts about body language and interaction with the environment, then we trust the reader to understand character emotions without our needing to report on them.
This brings us back to the union of style and substance. If the substance of our story is emotional, we don’t want to undermine it by using stylistic choices that make it a mere report. We need to trust readers to draw their own conclusions, and I feel that treating narration like a camera is the best way to go: Use the camera to observe action, and let readers bring themselves to the story to understand the emotional landscape.
This is why experienced writers advise us to avoid using adverbs. Adverbs are a shortcut that allow the writer to indulge in a lazy lack of description. For example, consider the sentence “Susan nervously handed him the keys to the car.” What’s missing here?
We’re missing details that communicate Susan’s nervousness. Did her hands shake? Did she fumble with the keys or drop them? Did her palms sweat? Did her heart race? Any of these descriptive facts communicate nervousness and paint a more vivid picture than an adverb that reports Susan’s emotion.
By adding action and description instead of using shortcuts, we create a rich and emotion-laden world readers can enter with our characters, a world where they experience emotion for themselves instead of reading a report.
The Secret History of Empress M tells two action-packed stories that eventually intersect on the interstellar frontier. The first story concerns a ten-year-old girl named Em who starts out held in isolation from humanity due to her telepathic powers. Her only human contact is with some friends who visit her for tea parties using a technology that allows them to communicate from a distance through mechanical bodies. But Em’s secret location is breached by a mercenary hired to kidnap her, kicking off a star-spanning saga of conspiracy and conflicting agendas. And as you might suspect, a telepath is not so easy to kidnap.
The second interwoven story begins by gathering an interesting set of characters one-by-one to become the first members of The 64, a new police force meant to patrol the politically complex “landscape” of space where many different civilizations coexist—and not always peacefully. A war hero, a detective, a killer, and a futuristic samurai combine forces with a sentient spaceship and gain extra powers by submerging in a “grey goo” of nanobots. Soon, the team crosses the chaotic path of Em and her would-be captors, and the results are anything but predictable.
The Secret History is full of twists and turns made even more complex by the same consciousness-projecting technology Em’s tea-time friends employed, and by various means of exchanging consciousness between two people. You’ll need to pay close attention to follow who is who they appear to be, and who isn’t. But the reward for staying sharp is a one-of-a-kind adventure that will keep you turning pages until the very end.
Author Tony Padegimas has a knack for mining the humor from serious situations and finding a way to make us laugh by juxtaposing characters who all have radically different personalities and perspectives. The novel could easily be marketed as “young adult” science fiction, but I’m almost fifty and thought it was a great read. Tony covers so much ground and deftly juggles so many plot threads and characters that I never knew what was coming next, despite a lifetime of reading and watching science fiction and space opera. And yes, there is a sequel in the works!
Buyer’s Guide: The Kindle ebook edition of The Secret History of Empress M is currently available for $4.99 on Amazon, a bargain price for an epic of its length. If you are more into fantasy, you should check out Tony’s two novels about the continuing adventures of Jack the Giant Killer from the classic Jack and the Beanstalk fairy tale, both wild, fast-paced rides much like Secret History: Beanstalk and Beyond and Taliesin’s Last Apprentice.
Mags, Patches, and Alonso travel to Titan to check on her errant octopus babies, only to discover their eight-armed friends have other plans.
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Update: The complete story now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan and Other Tales, for sale on Amazon in paperback and ebook. Readers outside of the USA, please see https://mybook.to/godsoftitan. Thanks to everyone who dropped by to enjoy the pre-publication draft!
Update: The complete story now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan and Other Tales, for sale on Amazon in paperback and ebook. Readers outside of the USA, please see https://mybook.to/godsoftitan. Thanks to everyone who dropped by to enjoy the pre-publication draft!
Congratulations! Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) has approved your new ebook, and it is live on Amazon! What next? What can you do now to promote your book and spread the word? Here are five easy, low-cost actions to get you started.
Disclaimer:I am not an employee of Amazon or KDP, and no one is paying me to write this. I am a freelance editor, designer, and self-publishing consultant who has explained this stuff so many times that I thought I might as well put it all in one handy reference for my customers, friends, and every other writer on the Internet. Let’s rock.
1. Get the correct link to your book. You can get the URL for your book from inside your KDP account—not just the URL for the listing in the States but in other countries, too. But many authors end up searching for their book on Amazon like a customer and copying the entire URL they get. The result is uglier than sin and full of garbage you don’t need. The actual URL is much simpler.
Help! It’s making my eyes bleed!!! But everything from “ref=” to the very end is just garbage. If you look closely, you can see it shows the search terms I used, and other data that is useful to Amazon but is pointless to share with other people when promoting your book. The only meaningful part is this first part: https://www.amazon.com/Meteor-Mags-Permanent-Crescent-Other/dp/B0B6XSNMV6/
2. Set up an Amazon Affiliate Account. This one isn’t exactly simple, but since it involves linking to your book, we’ll cover it now. I’m not giving a full tutorial on how to set up this account, but it’s pretty easy to get started here: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/
When you are an Amazon Affiliate, you can get short links to any product page—including the one for your book—and those links identify your affiliate account to Amazon. That means if people buy your book after clicking through the affiliate link, then you don’t just make your royalty on the book sale; you also make a small commission as an affiliate. And if you share that link with people, and they share it with other people, and those people share it again… Do you see where this is going? Every time anyone in that chain clicks through that link and makes a purchase, you get a little commission.
Once you’re an Affiliate, you get a special toolbar when you are logged into Amazon, and you can use that toolbar to make short links to your book (or anything else Amazon sells). At the time of this writing, it is called the “Amazon Associates Site Stripe”, and it looks like this in an Internet browser:
Using “Get Link” and “Text”, it only takes a second to create a short and simple affiliate link to the same book I shared in Step One above: https://amzn.to/3ShU30g
Isn’t that much nicer and simpler than the others? Isn’t it nice that it earns me a little extra commission that goes on an Amazon gift certificate to fund my graphic novel addiction?
If you want something more visual for your website, you can also generate a clickable image of your book (or any other product) using the same affiliate toolbar. I would show you here, but WordPress.com doesn’t allow “iframe” code in these posts, which is what Amazon will give you to embed in your website. (If you are no stranger to website design, then you are probably already thinking, “I could just put the book cover image on my website and hyperlink that image using the affiliate URL.” And you are right.)
3. Set up an Amazon Author Page. Using your KDP/Amazon login credentials, go to Author Central and create your own Amazon Author Page: https://author.amazon.com/
You can upload a profile photo, add your bio, and add your book to that page. If you have multiple books, you can add them all so that readers can find all your work in one place. You can also add editorial reviews to your book listing, and more. [2023 UPDATE: In December 2022, Amazon discontinued photos, videos, and blog feeds from Author Pages in the U.S.A.Yes, I agree with you that this decision totally sucks.)
4. Promote Your Book by Buying It as a Gift for Other People. Just about every successful author you meet has done many book giveaways and sent out tons of free copies. That can be a major expense of both money and time with printed books. With ebooks, it’s much easier and less expensive.
Just go to your ebook’s listing like any other customer and click “Buy for Others”. All you need is a valid email address for the recipient, and you will be able to add a short, personalized message to the email that gets sent to them with a link to claim the gift.
If your book is 99 cents and you are on a 30% royalty plan, then you will get back 30 cents of the 99 you spend. Sure, it will take two months for that 30 cents to hit your bank account via direct deposit, but your net cost is reduced to 69 cents. (For simplicity’s sake, I have not included sales tax in these calculations.) If you are on the 70% royalty plan and your book is, for example, $9.95, then you will earn back $6.48 of your cost, reducing your net expense to $3.47.
And guess what? Your ebook gift expenses are now tax-deductible marketing expenses for your publishing business. Keep track of them and claim them at tax time on your Schedule C.
If you really want to be thrifty and ultra-low budget, you can first reduce the price from inside your KDP account to the lowest allowable price, buy a bunch of gifts at reduced cost, then change the price back to your normal retail price when you are done. Just keep in mind that each of those changes require about a day to update through KDP.
5. Consider Enrolling the Book in KDP Select for More Marketing Options. You can do this by checking a box during the initial set-up, but you can also add your book to this program later through your Marketing Manager page: https://kdp.amazon.com/marketing/manager. Enrolling in KDP Select opens up several marketing possibilities for you.
KDP Select is related to the Kindle Unlimited subscription that allows customers to read KDP Select books at no additional cost beyond their monthly subscription fee. Select pays authors for these readings out of a general fund, and how much you get paid depends on both the size of the fund and how much of the book gets read. (It’s complicated.) It probably won’t make you a ton of money, but it is a zero-cost way to gain potential readers who might tell their friends, write a nice review, or buy your other books.
Plus, once you are enrolled in KDP Select for 30 days, you can run Price Promotions as part of your marketing efforts. You can, for a limited time, make the book available for free, or make a Countdown Deal. With a Countdown, the discount starts at the maximum discount and decreases over time until the last day of the Countdown. This is an incentive for people to buy sooner rather than later to get the best deal. Currently, you can run these promotions multiple times per year.
The Marketing Manager page also allows you to nominate up to two of your books at a time as being free to read for Amazon Prime subscribers — another nice way to potentially expand your readership without spending any money. Since I have an ongoing fiction series, I like to have a couple books that make good “jumping-on points” for new readers available for free on Prime. If someone tries out one of those books for free and likes it, then they can buy more books to get the complete series or find out what happens next.
Finally, being part of KDP Select allows you to enter your book in various Amazon Literary Contests. Winning an award would certainly be a good thing for your book, wouldn’t it?
Bonus Action: If the five things I’ve discussed were easy, basic stuff for you, then maybe you are ready to take it to the next level by running an Ad Campaign for your book on Amazon. The main site for setting up an Amazon Ads account is https://advertising.amazon.com/ but if you already have a KDP account, you can skip that. Instead, just log in to KDP and find your ebook on your “Bookshelf”. There will be a button for “Promote and Advertise” that takes you to a page where you can begin setting up an Ad Campaign. (Alternately, go directly to Marketing Manager.) A basic Sponsored Product campaign for one book takes about five minutes to set up. You determine your daily budget and how much you bid for clicks, plus the duration of the campaign, so you completely control your cost.
Controlling your ad budget is especially important if you don’t have any prior experience or training with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and using Keywords for online marketing and advertising. Start with a small, limited budget so you can get some preliminary data on what works and what doesn’t. You can run multiple small campaigns at the same time, and use different keyword strategies to see what leads to sales and what doesn’t. The reporting feature of Amazon Ads is fairly robust and detailed to help you develop and refine a strategy. I’ve seen some surprising results, such as the campaign I spent more money on would generate the most clicks but the fewest sales, while a more modest campaign with different keyword targeting generated fewer clicks but the most sales. So, don’t just haphazardly throw money at your ad campaigns. Start small, get some data, and refine what works best.
Conclusion: If you’re serious about promoting your self-published book, you have so many options available through Amazon and KDP—and most of them are free or cost next to nothing. Some authors can do all this on their own, while others need to hire someone like me to handle the technical details. Either way, they are useful tools available to all KDP authors, so take advantage of them!
Shout out to everyone who picked up free copies of my books at Smashwords during this July’s Summer Sale. Giving away hundreds of free copies of printed books can be a major marketing expense for self-publishing authors, but ebook giveaways are a low-cost alternative for those of us whose pockets are not as deep as those of the big boys at Penguin or Random House. This year, Smashwords made a deal to be acquired by another ebook provider, Draft2Digital, but many authors I talk to are not even aware Smashwords exists.
Just to be clear: I don’t work for Smashwords, and they don’t pay me to talk to about them. But I have been using them for years as an additional distribution channel for several reasons. I also want to cover some technical aspects of using Smashwords that authors should know before they dive right in and try it for themselves.
Increasing Your Distribution
First: While I like giving away free books in July and December using Smashwords, you don’t need to make them free. You can also set discount prices at a certain percentage of the list price, and you can use Smashwords to generate “coupon codes” to distribute to anyone you want. Although I don’t, it’s a handy tool for authors with an email marketing list or social media presence. I go with the “totally free” option because it gets dozens or even hundreds of books into the hands of new readers at no cost to me. Some of them write lovely four- and five-star reviews.
Second: While I am a big fan of Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), they’ve always had gaps in their distribution. Amazon would—for obvious reasons—prefer that ebook readers stay within the Kindle environment rather than spend money elsewhere. Many years ago, I started using Smashwords because my friend in Australia preferred getting ebooks in the Apple/iTunes environment, and she could not get my books there. I did a little research and discovered Smashwords distributed to the Apple bookstore, so I set about learning how to use them. At the time, getting distribution through additional global retail outlets was, to me, icing on the cake. I really just wanted my friend to find the book!
Since then, I’ve realized that while KDP gets my paperback books into the catalogs that libraries can use, they don’t appear to be doing the same with ebooks. Amazon wants sales money for every single copy, and they don’t seem to care about people who check out free ebooks from public libraries and the increasing network of partner sites libraries use. (For example, Hoopla partners with the Pima County library system for ebooks, including graphic novels and comics. It’s just an app you download for free and log into with your library card credentials.)
Smashwords, on the other hand, distributes to ebook outlets such as OverDrive where libraries can buy ebooks. The Phoenix Public Library, for example, now has several of my ebooks available to check out because they buy through OverDrive. While readers can check them out for free, the library does buy them, so I got paid for those sales.
Plus, Smashwords allows you to set a different price for libraries than the retail price. Some authors might feel they should jack up the price for libraries, since a single library purchase can reach a theoretically unlimited number of readers. I take the opposite approach and lower my price for libraries, because not only do I love libraries and want to support them, but I am also a relatively unknown author who wants to make it easy for libraries to take a chance on my books without risking an arm and a leg.
One final bonus is that Smashwords will create an EPUB file that you as the author can download for free. So, if you want an ebook you can send for free to friends, family, reviewers, or contests, you can just get that file and email it to them. Anyone can get a free EPUB reader from Adobe, called Adobe Digital Editions.
Technical Difficulties
While the sales, giveaways, and added distribution are great reasons to use Smashwords, you do need some technical knowledge to work with them. If you are still using Microsoft Word like it’s a fancy electric typewriter, then you don’t yet have the skills required to work with Smashwords—unless you hire someone like me to deal with it for you. Here are some of the major things I’ve encountered and overcome in my years of working with them.
First, Smashwords will accept two kinds of files. One is a completely and properly formatted EPUB file, and if you don’t know how to create EPUBs on your own, that will be a challenge. Programs such as Calibre can help, but most authors I work with lack the technical skills to deal with it—and good luck finding any classes on it. Adobe’s InDesign program can create EPUBs, but it is most often used by professional graphic designers and is about as challenging to master as Photoshop or Illustrator, for which most authors don’t have any training.
For those who aren’t Adobe experts, Smashwords will also accept a .doc file. That’s not the current version of MS Word files, which are .docx, but the backwards-compatible and increasingly outdated version of Word files from a simpler, bygone era. Current versions of Word can absolutely save files as .doc, and that’s how I do it. I work on all my manuscripts in the current version of Word, but when it’s time to make a Smashwords edition, I save them as .doc files. That process causes some changes; for example, if you formatted anything in Small Caps, it will become All Caps in .doc. So, this requires some formatting expertise to make sure everything looks right on the virtual page.
The process becomes more complex if you have images and illustrations in your books. I have run into so many problems with images not being displayed correctly after Smashwords crunches my .doc file through their converter. The only solution that ever reliably works the first time for me is to delete every single image, save the file, then re-insert every image from scratch and make sure all of them are formatted as being positioned “In Line With Text”.
Probably the weirdest image problem I ever encountered—and it only happened once—was when the converter robots kept renaming embedded image files in a .doc to something even they didn’t recognize, so then they couldn’t find them in the converted file. Eventually, I fixed it by downloading Smashwords’ resultant EPUB file, opening it in Calibre, and using a repair function in Calibre to fix the EPUB. Then I uploaded that version instead of my .doc file and, magically, it solved the problem. I’ve never seen that happen before or since.
But there are even more time-consuming design challenges with .doc files for Smashwords. I think they boil down to the fact that the robotic Smashwords converter has even stricter demands than Kindle, because you can get away with all kinds of things that make for perfectly readable Kindle ebooks but which are total failures at Smashwords.
A common challenge is the hyperlinked Table of Contents (TOC). If you have an intermediate skill level with MS Word, then you know how to link something in your TOC to a specific place in your document. That’s easy stuff. But what you might not realize is that MS Word has a tendency to fill your document with all kinds of bookmarks you don’t know about. These Hidden Bookmarks confuse the Smashwords robots and wreck your TOC, preventing Premium Distribution to other outlets. (Note: Smashwords will not tell you the TOC is broken, but instead say that the “NCX file” is bad. The NCX file is, in simplest terms, a separate TOC generated for EPUB files. But in all cases where my NCX was broken, my own TOC links got corrupted, too.)
I am not a noob when it comes to Word. I have been working with it at an expert level for more than twenty years, taken advanced college classes and corporate training on it, and taught other people how to use it. I have done things with Word that professional graphic designers have assured me are impossible—until I showed them how it was done. So, hidden bookmarks were not a mystery to me, and whenever I work with bookmarks, I make sure there is a checkmark in the little box that says, “Show Hidden Bookmarks”.
But what I did not initially realize is that the checkbox is useless if you don’t uncheck it first, then check it again. MS Word apparently needs to reset its brain with the uncheck/check process before it displays all the actual bookmarks so you can delete the garbage bookmarks one-by-one. My failure to realize this resulted in many of my more complex books being rejected for Premium Distribution, which is how you get into places like Apple and library platforms. After struggling, I contacted Smashwords support, and they helped me get a clue. These days, I know about the problem and how to eliminate it, and my books are all approved for Premium Distribution on the first try.
Bookmarks in Word are also crucially important if your book has footnotes. When I upload a compressed HTML file with footnotes to KDP, their robots automatically convert them to hyperlinked endnotes that appear at the end of the book. It’s super convenient. (How I make compressed HTML files for KDP would require its own tutorial.)
But the robots at Smashwords hate footnotes. If you’re pretty good with MS Word, then you already know that it only takes a couple of clicks to convert all your footnotes to endnotes using the References tool bar. But guess what? Smashwords’ robots don’t like that either.
It took me years to figure out a solution—even after reading all of Smashwords’ formatting documentation and watching multiple, useless YouTube tutorials about it. The solution to getting workable endnotes with Smashwords is—in the simplest terms I can put it—to create a bookmark at every place where you have a numbered note in the text, then create a bookmark at every specific endnote, then create individual hyperlinks from the note number in the text to the specific endnote, and finally create another link from the note itself back to the place in the text.
The bookmarks also need to be named with the prefix “ref_”. (Don’t ask me why; it just keeps the robots from getting confused.) So, my first note in the text is named “ref_001”, and the corresponding endnote is named “ref_ftn_001”. If you only have a couple of notes, this is child’s play. If you have, like I sometimes do, upwards of 100 notes, it’s a time-consuming, brain-numbing clerical task—especially since the pop-up window MS Word gives you to work in is roughly the size of a couple of postage stamps.
Anyway, this four-step process of bookmarking and hyperlinking will allow readers to click on a note in the text so they can see the endnote, then click on that to get back to the original spot in the text.
But what if your document already has linked endnotes because you made it in Word? Sorry, but it’s now full of junk that will confuse the robots. The actual first step that I discovered is to remove every single hyperlink in the document.
I started out doing that manually. But when I got to books with copious notes, I suspected there must be an easier way, and I searched for it online. The “easy” way turns out to be running a Visual Basic script to remove all hyperlinks. Even as a Word expert, I don’t find writing Visual Basic to be easy. Fortunately, I copied the script from someone else who was kind enough to post it on their blog. It was a lifesaver.
Now, you might not need to get that technical to remove a handful of links and insert a couple of bookmarks manually. As far as I’m concerned, that is simple stuff. But one of my books had more than 200 footnotes, and doing this manually just to get approved by Smashwords and have a viable ebook that readers could use reliably was a massive project that took hours of my time, research, and so much mouse-clicking that I’ll probably end up with carpal tunnel syndrome.
The things we do for art.
Conclusion
Do I love Smashwords? Absolutely. They got me into libraries, ebook outlets around the world, and the hands of many readers who would have never discovered me otherwise. But because I often publish books with massive amounts of images, footnotes, and complex Tables of Contents, I had serious technical challenges to overcome to achieve my vision.
Fortunately, I solved those problems. Now, I can help other authors get past them and distribute their ebooks on a global scale through channels that KDP alone cannot or will not handle.
The Moon is about to die, and it’s all Mags’ fault. Join a hell-raising space pirate and her indestructible calico cat as they confront a lunar death cult whose alien leader plans to take vengeance on humanity by destroying Earth’s ancient satellite.
In this exciting follow-up to The Second Omnibus, Meteor Mags and her hard-rocking crew confront new enemies, old rivals, and the final fate of the interspecies band, Small Flowers. Permanent Crescent continues Mags’ evolution from a rogue pirate to a leader with far-reaching plans. This collection contains six all-new episodes totaling 57,000 words.
Literary Titan Silver Award Winner.
Might be unsuitable for children and other forms of carbon-based life.
On the last night of Gramma’s life, Mags takes her drinking at a west-coast bar to shoot pool and have fun. Between games of billiards, they discuss the future of the solar system and reminisce about their past, revealing details about Gramma’s childhood, her relationship with her piratical mother, and the development of GravGen technology.
July 2022 Update: The story is now collected in Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent and Other Tales. For sale on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and hardback editions. The ebook is also available on Smashwords and other major retailers.
About seven years ago, I started compiling notes for a Meteor Mags story that would take place on the last night of Gramma’s life and, through flashbacks, fill in a lot of details about Gramma’s history and how they relate to the main narrative in the series. While the series is ostensibly science-fiction, this tale was more like historical fiction.
If you’ve ever written historical fiction, you know it takes an incredible amount of research into historical fact. Otherwise, you end up with unintended anachronisms, inaccuracies, and all kinds of things any expert in your chosen time period will absolutely tear apart.
This problem almost killed my story.
Since it involves the history of billiards, I got involved in the history of France and a man named Francois Mingaud. He invented the leather tip we all now take for granted on a cue stick.
The first indication that I had serious problems was that my research turned out to be contradictory about when and where Mingaud was held prisoner, and the inaccuracy of him being imprisoned at the Bastille years after it was demolished was repeated in dozens of billiards-related websites where I sought information about his life.
I solved the discrepancy by emailing Mike Shamos, author of The New Illustrated Encyclopedia of Billiards (an excellent resource rivaled only by the work of his friends Victor Stein and Paul Rubino in the massive Billiard Encyclopedia). Dr. Shamos was kind enough to provide historical documents that set the record straight about Mingaud’s imprisonment. I am such a Wikipedia nerd that I corrected the mistakes in Mingaud’s article and included a note about why the widespread inaccuracy about his imprisonment was impossible.
That’s just one of the complications of the history I was trying to construct. Eventually, it all became so overwhelming that I relegated my story to being one of those ideas I would never get around to writing.
But last month, one of the authors from my old workshop group was kind enough to listen for a few minutes to all the reasons I had never written the story I wanted to. In the days that followed, I thought about those reasons; the chief of which was that I simply did not want to invest another year of my life researching the time period to write the novella I had planned.
As I have said many times before, being able to articulate our problems often leads to them solving themselves. I’m indebted to the author who took a few minutes to listen, because thinking about my so-called “reasons” led me to trying some narrative solutions to those problems.
I played with a few ideas, cut some scenes that were too involved and slowed the pacing, engaged a few characters to summarize events that could have filled a novel, and ended up with a short, fast-paced tale that accomplished damn near everything I ever wanted from the “sweeping historical epic” I would never get around to writing.
You can judge for yourself whether it succeeds or not.
I’ve written before about my love for various games of pool, so I have only one more thing to say about the title of this story. Years ago, I saw an infographic about the most-used words in book titles. People online ripped this thing apart as an example of the most cliché and crappy book titles.
But to me, they looked like damn good words, so I came up with several fun titles based on that silly infographic and decided to use “One Last Night on Death World” as the name of a pinball/videogame Mags would have distributed on the west coast of the USA in the 1990s as a cover for her smuggling operations. (It’s introduced in a flashback in the previous story, Farewell Tour, which fills in the early years of the friendship between Mags and Alonso.) The name also fit the idea of Gramma Margareta’s last night on Earth, so I ran with it.
What did I learn from all this? First, it helps to have other writers to talk to when you are having problems with a story. Second, you can get a lot of mileage from emailing an expert on a subject. Third, the problems you encounter when telling a story can often be solved by taking a different approach to narration and engaging the characters to solve your problems for you.
I’m tempted to add a fourth lesson about “Stop making excuses and write the damn thing”, but I can’t help but feel that compiling notes for all these years until I had a chance to bend a sympathetic ear was the right decision. It was like I had been dissolving minerals in a solution for seven years and then all of a sudden—Boom! All it took was one little grain for them to gather around and become a crystal.
In addition to borrowing Francois Mingaud from real life, this tale guest-stars Scott Safran, a young man history also remembers for his accomplishments in a game. Both of their lives play out a bit differently due to meeting Mags and her ancestors. The hotelier Jonathan Hathaway is a complete fabrication.