Shattered Prophesies, and other tragedies…

Book 3 of the Collins Family trilogy. Amy’s ascension to leadership of the Collins family starts a revolution in the McCulloughs, and Elliot McCullough seeks a truce to mend the centuries-old rift between clans. Even the paranoid magi are coming to regard her as a worthy ally. But when the daemon Lucien comes courting and Amy spurns him, it begins a tragic downward spiral for the halflings.

Buy Shattered Prophesies for $2.99 @ Smashwords. (Amazon & other vendors TBA later)
Or get more information on the book at my site.
And you may want to read Little Monsters and In the Grasp of the Devil first. (Just FYI.)

I’m really happy to have this book out on time, but I’m afraid there’s also some bad news to deliver. Visitors to my web site will notice that some of the story archive and free PDFs are missing. The missing files are all the stories which have been converted into ebooks, and later today, folks will notice the same stories missing from my blog archives.

As I raise prices, it doesn’t make sense to have free files on my site, so I’m taking them down. There are still free stories to read, and there are still a few free PDF files left. But now once you work through the shorter pile of free samples, you’ll have to pay for the ebooks. I’m sorry to go all mercenary on you like this, but the “try before you buy” model just isn’t panning out for me.

In more positive writing news, I seem to be on schedule to release my next ebook, Confessions of a Zombie Lover, which is a sequel to Zombie Punter. I’m handling cover duties, so they’ll be a bit simplistic, something in the spirit of the Zombie Punter cover art style. The story inside follows G as he joins the Army and recruits another two “kids,” Reggie and Cal. His research yields smarter and emotionally stable zombies, but G begins to doubt he can make the undead smart enough to avoid them becoming second-class citizens. So in addition to subtle themes of sexuality and tolerance explored in the first book, this second volume also looks at classism and slavery. It’s a lot to pack into a novella, but I think readers of G’s first story will find this second book just as entertaining.

After G’s story is out, I have to worry about how to pimp my upcoming releases with Belfire Press, and with Skullvines/KHP. It should be an interesting year for my readers. I’ll be bringing y’all zombies, sex dolls, ninjas octopuses versus pirate ants, magi, werecats versus witches, a werekin porno, more vampire novelettes, more shapeshifters and yes, more musical numbers!

Stick with me, and things are bound to get interesting. (*^_^)

A modest proposal for shared investment…

Today, I want to pick up the topic from yesterday, but having a few hours to calm down and think about things. I took the morning off for a temper tantrum and a nap, and now I want to get back to the topic of editors, and the problems we indie writers face in working with them. Number one is, the flat fee full edit at pro rates. The editor wants to charge pro rates, whether they’re working for New York or new guy. After all, you’re buying their expertise, and that training remains the same no matter who they serve.

Great, and I’m not disputing that logic. But can’t editors do something less…strenuous, for new guy and cut them a discount? Perhaps instead of full rewrites, you can go with a line edit? Maybe the work doesn’t need more than few suggestions to put the writer on the right trail. How about just charging them for that advice at a lower consulting fee? If they’re a really poor writer (financially) and the writing isn’t awful in your educated opinion, maybe you could just do a skimming typo hunt and charge them on a sliding scale. Or offer a critique and charge a small reading fee.

The key point here is, you only do the work on the work you feel has merit, and you try to tailor your efforts to the available budget. You don’t have to feel obligated to work on every little thing that comes in, or on work that falls outside your favored genres. In theory, you could be getting enough incoming proposals that you would need to be discriminating anyway.

Can we stay on topic?

So, I’m chilling out on Twitter when I saw @angelajames comment how they’d read a self-pubbed book that had potential, but still needed an editor. I commented back that if editors were willing to work for royalties instead of taking a huge up-front fee, we might be able to work something out.

This briefly led to a discussion between the two of us about the hurdles that make it so hard for independent writers to work with editors, whether on royalties or on flat fees. In fact, I was just starting to think about how this might work into a blog post about the barriers that we still needed to work out to create a truly level playing field for writers at all level of the market.

But then I was broad-sided by a complete stranger who decided that since self-pubbed work=no editing, none of it was worth her time. She derailed the conversation, and she dismissed all of my work with a few sweeping broad brush comments. And then @angelajames didn’t want to talk about editors any more. She wanted to quote the reader about how price points and packaging are so important. So much for the discussion about independent writers finding ways of hiring editors without going bankrupt.

A pitch for The Collins Family trilogy and Shattered Prophesies

Despite spending all my time writing, it’s hard to sum up my feelings as I near the release of Shattered Prophesies, the third and final book of the Collins Family trilogy. I think I do a terrible job of pitching stories, so I dread this like normal people dread visits to the dentist. (I don’t go to the dentist cause I gots dentures.) Nevertheless, I need to sell you the book, or the rest of the trilogy if you haven’t already read it. If you haven’t, I’ve dubbed this is a fantastic tragedy series, and it’s based on the idea that a prophesy could be misread by both sides, allowing it to come true through everyone’s best efforts to prevent it.

In this modern day, alternate-Earth with fantasy elements, I chose to tell a three-act tragedy from the losers’ side. Why? Because almost all fantasy, whether light or dark, high or common, follows the hero. Not many people look at the story from the other side and follow a bad guy unless it’s to flip the script and show the villain winning. This isn’t the same thing as what I’m depicting, which is the “villain’s side” of the story, even though you know they’re going to lose. My point isn’t to give sympathy to bad characters, but rather to demonstrate that they also have compelling stories. Their tales aren’t as noble, but with an objective narrator, the right broken characters can be just as interesting as heroes.

Note: I’m not knocking how other people write dark fantasy. I’m setting myself apart as different, not better. But, having said that, in a lot of fantasy settings, I find the villain exists only as a prop, and they have the weakest character development, perhaps weaker even than friendly bit characters. They have no jobs, no friends, no personal lives. They don’t have parents, or normal backgrounds. They show up fully formed after years of plotting and spawn armies. They just dig their forces out of the ground, I guess. Like potatoes, but with more aggressive personalities. All these character details that the hero has, the writers spend weeks lovingly crafting. But the villain is often denied the same traits because it’s not like they’re real people, right?

Whose definition are we using?

Today, I’m writing about “professional behavior” because it’s been coming up on other writer’s blogs in all kinds of ways. I’ve seen writers talk about whether it’s professional to write too negative reviews, or too positive reviews, or any reviews at all. I’ve seen writers talk about whether we should talk about our health, our finances or sales numbers, our political opinions, religious beliefs (or lack thereof), or our thoughts on publishers or other writers. All of these topics revolve around the notion that writers ought to behave according to a stricter code of conduct than other people do online.

Why? For the love of God, we’re writers, not middle managers! We have more in common with musicians and artists than we do with desk jockeys. When other people dream of fleeing their cubicle hell jobs, they daydream of being writers, free to write and say whatever they want. Writers have acted as the critics of society and industry, and as the advocates of reading and critical thinking, from the beginning of the written word. It’s part of our job description to be blabbermouths, and not everything we say will be positive puffs of sunshine. By now, people should have learned to deal with it. Instead, they’re still suggesting that maybe writers should “tone it down with all that negativity.” Not possible. It’s part of the job description to be critical.

I’m not suggesting that writers should get away with murder, but I find it sad that in this modern era of open communication, one of the topics of discussion among writers this year is what we should or shouldn’t say in front of our readers. Part of the problem is, we’re never seen as being off the clock. Every blog post we write is taken as part of our “branding effort,” and every status update we send on Facebook becomes a matter of public record, even if we restrict our list to “real friends.” Writers have no off-time in the online world, and so that builds the public expectation of us behaving “professionally.”

Price increases going into effect in March!

Starting next month, my self-published stories will be going up in price in accordance with their word counts. Larger books like Little Monsters, In the Grasp of the Devil, and Changeling: An Urban Musical Crime Fantasy will be going up to $2.99, while novels like Blind Rage and novellas like Zombie Punter will be $1.99.This will be the new pricing model for upcoming releases, and 0.99 will be used only for novelettes, or for collections of reprinted short fiction.

I would love to keep the 0.99 price for all releases, but I’m not making enough to fund marketing drives, print runs, or even my enormous crack habit. But seriously, there are still expenses associated with releasing ebooks, and with my other forms of income drying up, I need to get more out of each sale to help pay off more of these debts.

If you want to pick up any or all of my e-books at their introductory prices of 0.99 cents you need to hustle over to Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/zoewhitten and pick up whatever catches your eye before the end of February.