Category Archives: writing.

monday morning post-pinkie pie party action report.

By Marko Posted in castle frostbite., parenting., writing. 7 Replies

It’s Monday, and the house is QUIET. The dogs are snoozing in front of the pellet stove, which we had to turn on again last night because the temperature was predicted to dip down to freezing overnight. That marks the first day of the year when we had to run the pellet stove and the window air conditioning unit ON THE SAME DAY.

We had a little shindig for Miss Lyra on Sunday. She turns six on Wednesday, so we pulled the party back just a bit to the one weekend this month where most of our friends were available. There was cake and presents and an inflatable 12-foot pool and ten kids in the 3-9 age bracket running around on the Castle grounds, so you may understand why I emphasized the QUIET in the first sentence of this post.

Now back to work. I have this thing called a “contract” that specifies I have to deliver this here novel by the end of the month, and it still needs a little work, so I should probably get to it. But understand that this is not a Monday gripe. Drinking coffee in a quiet house and making up stories beats the hell out of digging ditches or changing diapers when it comes to ways to make a living.

“terms of enlistment” availability.

By Marko Posted in capitalism., writing. 8 Replies

To abide by the terms of my publishing contract, I can no longer offer Terms of Enlistment directly as of today.

If you want to purchase a copy, you’ll have to wait until May 14th, when 47North releases Terms of Enlistment again on Amazon. The good news is that this time, there will also be a dead tree version available, and an audio version as well. But because I can’t compete with my new publisher when it comes to selling copies, I can’t sell them from the blog or other sources anymore.

To all you people who purchased the first, self-published edition: thank you. The success of the little Space Kablooie novel has exceeded my most optimistic expectations. There aren’t very many novels that sell as many copies as quickly as this one did, especially not in the self-publishing arena. I’m still utterly dazed by what has happened in the last eight weeks.

achievement unlocked: book deal.

By Marko Posted in writing. 27 Replies

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve been more quiet than usual on the blog and the TwitFaceSpaces lately. There’s a reason for that, of course, and I’m free to share it at this point.

My awesome agent Evan Gregory of the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency has sold the publication rights to Terms of Enlistment and its sequel, Lines of Departure, to 47North.

<insert Kermit flail>

What does that mean for the near future of the book series?

I have pulled all my self-published copies of Terms of Enlistment from the online sources where they were available. It is no longer on Kobo, B&N, or iTunes, and I won’t be able to offer any copies directly anymore. It will be available on Amazon’s Kindle store, but temporarily as a pre-order.

On May 14th, Terms of Enlistment will be re-released by 47North in Kindle edition, and at that point it will be available on Amazon.com again; a print and audio version will be produced soon thereafter. Those of you who were kind enough to leave reviews will be happy to hear that the 47North edition will keep all the reviews and star ratings of my self-published version. I will work with the team at 47North to make any changes and edits they find necessary (no matter how hard you think you’ve looked, there are always still typos somehow), but overall it shouldn’t be drastically different from the version that’s currently available.

As a result of the deal, 47North will also publish the sequel, Lines of Departure, this time simultaneously in print, Kindle, and audio formats. I am delivering the final manuscript of Lines of Departure by the end of next month, and I’ve been told they are aiming for a release in early 2014, possibly January.

I realize that some of you may be irritated at the fact that Book #2 will be delayed when I had already announced that I’d bring it out in May. It will, however, be a better book because the team at 47North will provide the editorial guidance, along with the production, marketing, cover design, publicity, and other support that will allow me to fully concentrate on my writing schedule and make sure it’s the best version of the novel it can be. As much as I know my stuff, I’m still just a one-man team, and for Terms of Enlistment, I’ve had to do not only the writing, but also all the editing (and there were many editing passes), cover design, marketing, ebook formatting, direct sales, support, accounting, and everything else that comes with putting out a novel. All the time spent on those things was time that had to be subtracted from my ability to actually write the books! With the novel and its sequel going to 47North, I can now concentrate on the sequel and the next two books in the series, as well as future projects.

To make sure that there’s stuff for you to read while you wait for Lines of Departure, I intend to bridge the gap between releases with short stories and a novella in the Terms of Enlistment universe, which will appear alongside Lucky Thirteen on the Kindle store in (hopefully) regular intervals.

So there’s the big news item of the day. The Terms of Enlistment books finally have a publisher, and I have both the time and the financial security to spend my days writing instead of being my own publishing house. I was getting sick of answering all these different phones and doing different voices for the sales, tech support, marketing, and editing departments.

an announcement.

By Marko Posted in books., writing.

As of today, I have a literary agent. I’ve signed with Evan Gregory of Ethan Ellenberg, who will represent my works from now on. Together, we will make ALL THE MONEY.

I’ve been looking for a literary agent for a few years now (ever since Viable Paradise XII in 2008, in fact), and Ethan Ellenberg has always been at the top of my list based on their client roster and reputation. To say that this is a pretty big deal is a monumental understatement.

Anyway, please excuse me now while I Kermit Flail around the house and mix a celebratory cocktail the size of one of those kiddie pools.

brief update from the desk of yr obdnt srvnt.

By Marko Posted in books., writing.

Chuck Wendig, Jedi Master of Writing Advice, gave me and Terms of Enlistment a shout-out in his latest blog post about self-publishing. Chuck has gone the self-publishing route, but he’s also traditionally published, so he knows both sides of the coin pretty well.

Steven Gould, author of the Jumper series of SF novels and one of my instructors at Viable Paradise XII, had some nice things to say about me as well, particularly concerning the way I use social media like Twitter. (Hint: I don’t use it for marketing.)

I am a little behind on the blog and email stuff because the last few days (hell, weeks) have been a bit wacky around here.

Terms of Enlistment is still climbing the lists, it seems. As of this morning, it’s #1 in Kindle > Science Fiction > Military and Kindle > Science Fiction > Adventure, #2 in all of Amazon’s Science Fiction >Adventure category, and the #3 Science Fiction novel on Amazon. It’s also the #109 paid novel in the Kindle store. (It cracked the Top 100 for a day on the weekend.)

That’s pretty good for any novel, especially a self-published first-time novel by an unknown author. To say that I am pleased would be a massive understatement. I wrote the thing, which took a year or so, and then spent the next three and a half years trying to get a publisher or agent to bite, with no luck at all. It’s really nice to know that I wasn’t just doing finger exercises.

This month, I’ll re-release Lucky Thirteen, a short story in the Terms of Enlistment universe, on the Kindle for free. It’ll be a little bonus for those who have read the novel, and maybe get some people interested who haven’t read it yet. And next month, I’ll release Lines of Departure, the follow-up novel. If it does only half as well as Terms of Enlistment, I’ll still be very pleased. I think it’s a better novel than its predecessor, mainly because I didn’t have to spend half the novel with Basic and Tech School before things start blowing up. It also delves a little more into the situation on Earth and the social issues back home, something I’ll explore in much greater detail in a future novel.

Some reviewers on Amazon have said that the novel feels like two different stories, and that’s true. I did, in fact, have an alternative second half in which Andrew stays on Earth and explores the backstory behind the Detroit riots. It would have been really gritty, but it would have been a narrative dead end for Andrew because in order to get him where he needed to be to go sniffing around in a PRC, he would have had to leave the service and do things that I didn’t want him to do just yet. He’s a cog in a really large and really faulty machine, and his story needed to get him into space before it can get him back to Earth.

Anyway, back to the salt mines for me. More later. And if you’ve bought Terms of Enlistment, reviewed it, recommended it, mentioned it on your blog, or passed it on to a friend or three: thank you, thank you, thank you. 

so i was wrong about the self-publishing thing.

By Marko Posted in capitalism., writing.

I had this long and very clever blog post witten in which present-day Marko rebuts the arguments of 2011 Marko in opposition of self-publishing, but it came across all braggy and smarmy, so I deleted the draft and decided to start over.

Yes, two years ago I wrote a lengthy blog post detailing why I’d never, ever self-publish. Rather than refuting all my points from back then, I’ll make a short list of reasons why I finally decided to put the novel out myself.

Firstly, and most importantly, I was out of patience with the traditional dance of Query > Submit > File Rejection in pursuit of an agent or publisher. I finished the novel in 2009, sent it to a major SF publishing house in the summer of that year, and didn’t hear back at all. No rejection, no “I still haven’t gotten around to looking at it”, no acceptance, nothing. I might as well have put the manuscript into the stacks at the local library, hoping that an editor might stumble across it accidentally while looking for new reading material in our village library by chance. That’s three and a half years waiting for a response. In the meantime, I shopped the manuscript around to half a dozen other publishers and about 30 or 40 agents, and got no bites. I was simply at the end of my rope with patience.

Secondly, the market for self-publishing has changed quite a bit in the last two years. In 2011, ebook readers were still just getting off the ground; now they’re so mainstream that everyone and their grandmother has a Kindle or an iPad with a reading app on it. Sales of Kindle books have gone up accordingly–that awful Fifty Shades of Kink book sold twice as many Kindle copies than print books. While self-published authors are still looked down upon somewhat (and there is a lot of awful self-published shit out there), there are now plenty of self-pubbers whose books have sold well enough to get their authors offers from traditional publishing houses, and quite a few who can actually make a decent living off their self-published books. Economically, the field has become more viable for self-publishing.

Now that I have the novel out there, I must say that I also like the control I have over every aspect of this endeavor. I went with Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), and their control panel lets me track my sales numbers pretty much in real-time. KDP also pays royalties out monthly (traditional publishers pay twice a year), so there’s no guesswork involved in when (or how much) I’ll get paid.

So there you have the reasons why I changed my mind on self-publishing: I was sick of the traditional submission treadmill, Kindle publishing seemed like a good way to get my work in front of a lot of readers, and I very much enjoy the transparency and speed of the sales and royalties model offered by Amazon. Times and circumstances change, and I can admit that I’ve been wrong, and that my fears about self-publishing were (luckily) unfounded in my case. Your mileage may vary, of course.

 

 

a tale of a rejection, and the straw that made the cup run over, or something.

By Marko Posted in books., capitalism., writing.

Somewhere out there is a literary agent (who shall remain unnamed here) who asked for science fiction submissions on Twitter the Friday before last. I was in bed at the time, reading my Twitter feed on the iPad (as one does), so I got out of bed again to send that agent a query letter that followed the requirements of the agency in question.

I woke up the next morning to find a form rejection in my inbox. That agent had rejected the query without having asked for sample pages–without even having read a single word of the novel. And it was a nice, short, courteous, and professional query letter, not two lines of HAY U WANT TO B MY AGENTZ? CHK YES OR NO LULZ.

I said a very naughty word at the computer screen and felt something in my head go SNAP. Then I had Scrivener compile the ebook files for the novel, bought some cover art, made a book cover, uploaded everything to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service, and told people on my blog that the novel is available for sale.

Right now that novel is #245 on the Kindle Store, #2 in Military SF on the Kindle, and #13 in the entire Science Fiction category (all print, Kindle, and audiobooks) on Amazon. Right now that novel has sold an ungodly amount of ebook copies for a self-published first-time novel by an unknown author.

Right now I’d like to kiss that agent square on the mouth for being the catalyst that finally made me decide to take the novel’s fate into my own hands.

it’s the good ramen at castle frostbite tonight.

By Marko Posted in capitalism., writing.

Well, this is a nice thing to wake up to:

SFsales

#4 on the Kindle in Military SF. #32 in the entire SF category. #699 in the Kindle Store. Dang.

All of you who bought the little Space Kablooie novel: you have my thanks. If you liked it enough to review or plug it on Amazon or your blogs or the TwitFaces, I thank you again, and I think you’re uncommonly pretty/handsome and brilliant.

That really takes the sting off having to wait for the school bus in ten-degree weather this morning, packing the kids into the van after 30 minutes of No Bus…and having the bus finally drive by just as I’m pulling out of the driveway to cart the youngins to school myself.

a humble request.

By Marko Posted in capitalism., writing.

My little Space Kablooie novel is finally up on Amazon. People are buying it, which makes me happy. People are liking it, which makes me even happier.

If you’ve read Terms of Enlistment, please consider leaving a review on whatever site you purchased the book. The reviews are not for me (although I can’t deny that I enjoy reading the good ones), they’re for the next person browsing for something decent to read. To those of you who have already left reviews: thank you, thank you. You are wonderful people and quite handsome/beautiful.

Terms of Enlistment will be available on iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and the Sony store very soon. I’ll post links when they are. In the meantime, you can get it from Amazon, Smashwords, or directly from me in whatever DRM-free format suits you best.

For those who asked about when the next one will be out: the second book is already written, and it’ll hit the same outlets probably before you put your first outdoor burgers on the grill this year.

(The second book will be called Lines of Departure.)