Speculative Fiction Anthology Announcement, With Cover

Here it is, my official announcement. I’m going to independently publish a novella-length anthology of my short stories. It will be called Conmergence, and you can see my design for the front cover above.

I’ve given a lot of thought to this. I have, in fact, been considering publishing my epic fantasy (Dindi) series independently, but I’m not sure yet, and I don’t want to screw it up. Certainly, I don’t want to do a shoddy job, so I decided I needed a trial run first. (I may have mentioned this before, here, on Facebook, on Twitter, in an email…I have basically been thinking in public for the past several days, a habit which is a disturbing by-product of imbibing social media too frequently. I apologize if I became boring or tiresome or tried to bully you into beta reading… I was drunk on a new idea.)

One reason I decided to try independent publishing is that several people I respect have tried it and done well with it. I don’t necessarily mean financially, but even more importantly, they’ve created something lovely and worth reading, not just unreadable slush, such as one traditionally associates with self-publishing.

Here are some small, online presses that sell the backlists, and sometimes new works, of established, and, dare I say, utterly kickass authors.

Closed Circle –> Lynn Abbey, C.J. Cherryh and Jane Fancher.

Parsina Press –> Stephen Goldin

Yard Dog Press –> Selina Rosen

And I can’t tell if Jeffrey Carver has an actual store, but you can buy books through links to Amazon on his blog.

Book View Cafe –> C.L. Anderson, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Chaz Brenchley, Jay Caselberg, Brenda Clough, Kate Daniel, Marissa Day, Lori Devoti, Chris Dolley, Laura Anne Gilman, Sylvia Kelso, Katharine Kerr, Katharine Eliska Kimbriel, Sue Lange, Ursula K. Le Guin, Rebecca Lickiss, Seanan McGuire, Vonda N. McIntyre, Nancy Jane Moore, Pati Nagle, Steven Harper Piziks, Steven Popkes, Phyllis Irene Radford, Patricia Rice, Madeleine Robins, Deborah J. Ross, Sarah Smith, Sherwood Smith, Amy Sterling Casil, Jennifer Stevenson, Judith Tarr, Gerald M. Weinberg, Susan Wright, Sarah Zettel.

Of course, all these authors had a platform, an audience, and the proven ability to write engagingly before they turned to epublishing and/or POD. Book View Cafe, for instance, is a cooperative only for previous published authors. Previously published in print, by royalty paying publishers. (It advertises things like Margaret Atwood in conversation with Ursula K. Le Guin, which, wow, makes me wish I lived in Portland.) It’s not for those of us still trying to break in. (Piers Anthony’s press, Mundania, does accept and publish new authors, although last I checked they were closed to submissions for a while).

How Publishing Really Works discusses the usual (and perfectly true) reasons most self-published books sell under 200 copies and also reports one agent who is not interested in a self-published book that sells less than 10,000 copies.

I don’t expect to sell 10,000 copies; I’m not even sure I can sell 200. If response is favorable, I’ll take it as a sign that selling my fantasy series myself is viable. This does not follow, logically, but… *shrug.* If sales are poor, I’ll take it as evidence that my writing still needs improvement. Actually, one’s writing always needs improvement. If you stop trying to better yourself, what’s the point?

What I shall do is document each step of the way, as others have done, to my benefit. Michelle is still running her series on self-publishing on The Literary Lab, and I am following it closely. She was brave enough to post her numbers, and I will too. If they are small, so be it. So far, by the way, I’ve spent $15 on stock photos for the cover. It took me approximately 16 hours of work, about four hours a day for the last four days. If I were better at Photoshop, it might have been faster.

And guess what…

I also made my first book trailer!

I’m planning another one, but for this, I used Animoto. It couldn’t have been simpler. I had one image, a few lines of text, and chose from their templates of movement and music. Voila.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

What goes around comes around, so feel free to critique the book trailer. I guess you may consider this the book trailer of the day. I’ll discuss the making of the book trailer/s in depth more later.

http://www.animecons.com/events/info.shtml/1961

Domey’s Booksigning

Earlier this evening, I had the delightful opportunity to pop over to Skylight Books for the booksigning of Strange Cargo, an anthology of the PEN Center USA’s Emerging Voices, including Davin Malasarn, my friend from The Literary Lab.

They even had wine. It was classy.

Sadly, I missed the readings, but even though I arrived quite late, the bookstore was packed. You have to understand, Domey and I met in cyberspace; this was our first meeting in person. I had a feeling I knew which one Domey was, but the crowd kind of freaked me out, and I hid in the children’s section, hiding behind my toddlers (they’re pretty short, so this is less effective than I’d like) until the mob thinned. Then I edged near the person I thought was Domey. He was talking to someone else, so I did that obnoxious cocktail party trick, where you loiter just close enough to a conversation that you’re no part of that eventually one of the participants nods uncertainly in your direction.

The longer I loitered the more I wondered what I would say if this was some other guy completely.

Fortunately, it was indeed the illustrious Mr. Malasarn, and it was worth all my introvert-angst to attend the soirée and meet him. I now have an autographed copy. Thanks, Domey!

“Are you being sarcastic?” – Zoe Who?

These are made with Xtranormal. I’ve signed up for it and played around with it a bit. It’s a fun service to use. Unfortunately, I have not been able to think of anything nearly half so funny as the Zoe Winters series about self-publishing. Each episode stands alone, but they are all worth watching, and it doesn’t hurt to watch them in order. If you haven’t seen the rest of the series, check it out.

Of all the problems I worry about digital books, them being too clear and easy to read is not the most pressing issue for me. But I still found this interesting.

Stanislas Dehaene, a neuroscientist at the College de France in Paris, has helped illuminate the neural anatomy of reading. It turns out that the literate brain contains two distinct pathways for making sense of words, which are activated in different contexts. One pathway is known as the ventral route, and it’s direct and efficient, accounting for the vast majority of our reading. The process goes like this: We see a group of letters, convert those letters into a word, and then directly grasp the word’s semantic meaning. According to Dehaene, this ventral pathway is turned on by “routinized, familiar passages” of prose, and relies on a bit of cortex known as visual word form area (VWFA). When you are a reading a straightforward sentence, or a paragraph full of tropes and cliches, you’re almost certainly relying on this ventral neural highway. As a result, the act of reading seems effortless and easy. We don’t have to think about the words on the page.

But the ventral route is not the only way to read. The second reading pathway – it’s known as the dorsal stream – is turned on whenever we’re forced to pay conscious attention to a sentence, perhaps because of an obscure word, or an awkward subclause, or bad handwriting. (In his experiments, Dehaene activates this pathway in a variety of ways, such as rotating the letters or filling the prose with errant punctuation.) Although scientists had previously assumed that the dorsal route ceased to be active once we became literate, Deheane’s research demonstrates that even fluent adults are still forced to occasionally make sense of texts. We’re suddenly conscious of the words on the page; the automatic act has lost its automaticity.

This suggests that the act of reading observes a gradient of awareness. Familiar sentences printed in Helvetica and rendered on lucid e-ink screens are read quickly and effortlessly. Meanwhile, unusual sentences with complex clauses and smudged ink tend to require more conscious effort, which leads to more activation in the dorsal pathway. All the extra work – the slight cognitive frisson of having to decipher the words – wakes us up.

Dark Symphony – Book Trailer of the Day

This is a pretty upscale book trailer for a paranormal romance, Dark Symphony by Christine Feehan. I have no idea how much it cost, but I’d guess, $5000 or more. It has elaborate video, of reasonable quality — both the acting and the cinematography — a voiceover, and a good soundtrack. The song was created just for the video.

It’s done by the wonderful folk at Circle of Seven, or “cosproductions.”

They even do wire work I think! Notice the floating at 1:37. On the other hand, the voice over for this should have been low and sexy, whereas this voice as a dead ringer for my gay camp counselor. (He was an actor/waiter, so it’s possible! *waves*) When he said the line (1:47) “But a darkness followed them… something … EVIL!” I snorted my drink. Oh, you were serious. Sorry.

It’s four minutes long. Aiya! But there is an advantage to accumulating a lot of video book trailers (this is just one of many)… fans can do their own remixes:

Sweet.