Ebook Launch and Giveaway

At long last, I am pleased to announce the publication of two ebooks, “My Morning Glory and other flashes of absurd science fiction” and “The Wedding Album.” The first is a collection of three flash fiction stories first published in the British science journal Nature, and I’m giving it away for free. The second is a novella first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction and probably my most popular and widely translated work to date.

In order to make a splash, I’m giving away the “My Morning Glory” mini-collection for free, along with a bonus short story (see below). Because of Amazon’s proprietary exclusivity rules, I’ll have to do this in two phases. First comes Nook. Download for free until Monday, February 20. And then from Thursday, February 23 through Monday, February 27, download them from Amazon for free.

Not to make too big a deal about it, but this is more than just a book launch. It’s also the launching of my new role as e-publisher. The synergistic, skill-extension effect of the personal computer and the Internet has finally caught up with authorship, and all hell is breaking loose. With the introduction of the Kindle only three years ago, the traditional barriers to book manufacture and distribution have been battered down. Tens of thousands of aspiring authors have rushed in where only traditional publishers used to tread. Now, literally, anyone who’s ever wanted to publish a real book (in both digital and POD editions) and sell it around the world can do so at minimal cost and fuss. (Grammer, speling & punctuation is optional ;)

Suddenly there are channels to put books into the hands of the reading public that do not involve traditional publishing. Trailblazing authors have already racked up digital bestsellers without NYC’s input. Traditional publishing is reeling with the changes and trying to adapt, and someday it may figure out a new business model (transmedia novels, anyone?). In the meantime, we mid-list authors of the old regime are scrambling to stay afloat in the new. One thing many authors are doing, now that we’ve been given the tools, is to bring out our backlists in ebook format. I’m giving that a try; in my case I only own the ebook rights to my short stories, and I’m only planning on e-publishing these few. (You can already buy “MMG” and “TWA” along with 8 other stories in my Del Rey collection, Getting to Know You.) If all goes well, I may self-pub my next novel, Camp Tribulation, (partly because I’m doubtful any legacy publisher will touch it--it’s that good!--or, maybe it’s no good at all; I don’t know; still too early to tell; it’s about two years away from completion).

One may wonder why I am e-publishing “TWA.” After all, it’s been reprinted about a dozen times and translated into five foreign languages and is easily found on pirate sites. Hasn’t everyone already read it who’s going to read it? I hope not. The fact that it has done so well for so long suggests that, given a little nudge, it might have the right stuff to find new readers on its own who may become new fans.

A literary agent once said that in order to make a living by writing fiction these days, an author needs 20,000 fans. (I think the agent was Donald Maass.) I don’t know how accurate the figure is, but it sounds about right. If it is, I still have a lot of recruitment to do.

I expect that anyone who regularly checks this blog has already read “TWA,” but maybe you know someone who hasn’t. Maybe someone who received a Kindle or Nook for Christmas or Valentine’s Day and is searching for something good to read on it. If so, please do me the fannish favor of passing this link to them.

On the other hand, unless you have a subscription to Nature (or belong to an institution that does), you may not have read the flash fiction stories. Please download “My Morning Glory” at no cost, with my compliments.

But wait, there’s more! For a limited time I’m also giving my Playboy story away for free, “She Was Good—She Was Funny.” It’s not SF, but it’s kick-in-the-pants fun, and if you read it, you’ll have a little taste of what it’s like to live (and love) in the sub-Arctic.

So, Nookies, get your complimentary copies now! And Kindlers, go to Amazon beginning February 23. (I'll post a reminder.)

The New Cover

It's minus 40 degrees F in Fairbanks right now. It was supposed to "warm up" to minus 19, warm enough for my 1992 Mazda pickup to bounce and slide down the road to the grocery store. But it didn't warm up, and I'm literally tossing one log after another into the wood stove. The temp hasn't risen above minus 30 degrees outside my door for 3 days now.

That's the reason for this rare Sunday post. I believe I have finished, at long long last, the cover for my ebook version of "The Wedding Album." I wanted to share it with you (and to give anyone a last chance to send me feedback). I'm liking this one a lot. It seems to have enough science fictional ambiance to telegraph its genre. IMO, it's visually intriguing. And it does the job (remain legible/iconic) at all sizes from 100 pixels wide to full-sized ebook cover (590 x 750).

I modified two images from Wikimedia Commons for the cover illustration. The kissing couple is from "backlight-wedding" by David Ball. The background is from "Have Your Cake - wedding cake with red swirls" by Terry Johnston.

I don't know why I took so long with this damn cover. I was starting to think I'd never get it done. Now that it is, the new ebooks won't be far behind.

An Illustrated Account of the Last 6 Weeks

The novel burbles along. The deeper I get the deeper it gets. Hope I can pull it off. I'm getting pretty sure of the title and I feel like I can divulge it. My novel in progress is called Tribulation Camp. Also, my main protagonist is now named Hadrian Haden. We'll see how long that sticks.

Here in Interior Alaska we got a head start on winter. The last two weeks of November took a nose dive, and we got down to minus 41. We broke six all-time record lows, five of them on consecutive nights. The photo above is of my wood yard. I'm having to buy firewood this winter, and what you see represents a two-cord delivery of 8-foot logs.

Last I heard, the Occupy Fairbanks diehards are still camped in the park and have maintained a continuous presence through the two weeks of extreme cold. In my last post I incorrectly identified the park as being a city park. It's actually a borough park (our boroughs are like your counties) and the official dealing with them is the borough mayor. The campers have two arctic tents with stoves. So far the mayor has resisted calls to clear the park and says the campers have 1st Amendment rights to assemble. Good for him.

I'm still working on the cover to "The Wedding Album" ebook. I started to feel like I was over-thinking it, and I'm still open to hiring a real illustrator when I can. In the meantime, I've spent countless hours browsing the sites with Creative Commons, public domain, or reasonably priced images including: Wikimedia, Flikr, Deviant Art. This last one, Deviant Art, is an amazing community of incredibly talented artists, many of whom I'd like to hire someday.



The last I posted, this was the stage the cover was at. (click on photos for larger size) I asked for and got valuable feedback from some of you. My main problem with it was that nothing about the image was science fictional. I did locate some Photoshop tools and filters I had been unaware of and spent some time sexing up the rings.


But in the end, the objection was the same, not SFnal enough. I kept browsing.


I found this wedding cake topper featuring elegant robots. I fell in love with it and tried to make it work as a cover image. But it's just too whimsical for the story, and I had to let it go. If I ever get married again, I'm sure to have a robot cake topper. I encourage you to visit the online store of the artist, Pete, and see all the other robotic accessories he sells.


I took another tack and the image above is the current iteration of the cover image. I'm liking it a lot. It evokes the story quite nicely. And I think it says science fiction. What do y'all think?

Occupy Fairbanks

Just returned from the Occupy Fairbanks march. I wasn’t dressed for the weather, a clear, relatively mild day (13 °F), and had to bail before all the speeches were done. About 40 people marched, pretty much the same crowd I saw when I protested the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike those protests, this time I didn’t see any passers-by flipping us off or screaming insults. There are a few people camping out in a city park in solidarity with other protesters around the world, but they are having problems with the city and police. Nothing major yet. I've read in the news how other cities are holding their fire against Occupy protesters because they think the coming winter weather will do the job for them. It seems to me that Fairbanks protesters might have some cold weather expertise to share.

Though the Occupy movement has no generally accepted list of demands yet, I agree with most of the ones I’ve heard: breaking up financial institutions that are too big to fail, bringing criminal charges against the managers and executives of institutions that caused the recession with illegal activities, ending the wars, ending corporate welfare, and so on.

My biggest beef is with the Supreme Court that, beginning with the 14th amendment in the 19th century, declared corporations to be persons with civil rights. I’m concerned about the political power that major corporations are able to muster with large amount of money, of course, but being a science fiction writer, I can’t help projecting my worries beyond the current situation to the not-to-distant future when science has invented true Artificial Intelligence.

Corporations are cleverly crafted machines, and machines do not have to be sentient to have an agenda and the means to pursue it. Their ultimate purpose is profit, not providing products or services. Products and services are merely the means to that profit. They have no inherent interest in human affairs, the planet, justice, or any other issue insofar as it doesn’t turn a profit. They are eternal entities but not very good at looking at the long-term consequences of their actions. A corporation will catch and sell the last fish in the ocean before it wonders where all the fish have gone. Supposedly people drive corporations, but it seems clear to me that the bigger and more successful a corporation becomes the more the corporation drives its board of directors and executives. If they do not serve its purposes (profit), they are discharged.

Thus the corporate model is a perfect, ready made immortal “body” for an immortal AI to move into. When AIs arrive on the scene, I imagine they may have a hard time winning their own civil rights at first. The same people who give corporations a pass on social issues will object to conferring equal rights to soulless, unchristian AIs. However, enterprising AIs will be able to incorporate themselves and step right into personhood. In this sense the coming Singularity may look something like a hostile takeover.

Steve Jobs

Of all the tributes I've heard this week, I was most moved by people who told how the works of this man changed their lives. I must raise my hand and declare myself one of these.

Back in 1986 I was in bad need of a job. Both my private business and marriage had just failed. Counter intuitively, I felt that it was a great opportunity to finally quit stalling and begin to work on my dream of becoming a published author. But I needed income, something to get by with while I took the time to write.

I interviewed around town for a job. My most marketable skill in those days was as a graphic designer. I had worked at the local paper for a few years. They had turned my boyhood training in fine art into a rough and ready commercial art skill. I sold and laid out auto and real estate ads, a lot of them full-page ads during those boom times. The newspaper taught me the skills to manually lay out a mechanical, a blueprint of sorts in different colored inks on tissue paper. The typesetters, compositors, camera, and others in production used them to build the ads, Within the confines of the medium, I grew to feel quite proficient, if not artful.

So in 1986, I was lucky to interview with the owner of Express Copy & Graphics for a job. She had a full time designer position to fill, one of the earliest Mac computers, laser printers, and version 1.2 of PageMaker.

Thus I arrived at the ground floor of the digital revolution in printing. Desktop publishing, launched on Apple's machines, eventually brought down an entrenched giant of an industry--traditional printing. And I was not only witness to the complete upheaval, but served as a grave digger. It took me almost a year to translate my manual layout skills onto the Mac, and I never looked back. What with practicing, teaching, and free-lancing, I earned my bread and butter for over 20 years in graphic design on ever-improving models of Macs.

The fall of traditional printing was followed by the fall of traditional publishing, a revolution we are witnessing these days with ebooks. In this the iPad, revolutionary in so many other areas, is running a distant third (I'm only guessin) behind Kindle. The Kindle Fire, just released, could be the final nail in the coffin of print books as big business.

But by far the newest technological revolution Steve Jobs cast upon the world has been largely unnoticed in the press. I'm talking about Siri, the personal assistant on the new iPhone 4S, which was released on the day before Jobs died. I wonder if he had any free attention in those last hours to marvel at the little wonder he had just tossed into the world. I've heard that people were expecting Apple to announce the iPhone 5 and were disappointed when it didn't. Don't they know that the lucky owners of the iPhone 4S will hold in their hands the first iteration of . . . wait for it . . . the first iteration of the belt valet? Trust me, boys and girls, this is major. Even if Siri flops, like the Newton tablet did, the AI assistant cat is out of the bag. Thank you, Steve Jobs. We won't soon forget you.

The New Book Cover

I've gotten some helpful feedback on the cover in the comments section. It provides gist for a few blog entries starting with this one. Renelle (one of my first readers) asks:

It's a nice cover, David. Do ebook covers serve the same purpose as (real books? meatbooks? what the heck do I call them?) printed book covers? Does it need to stand out in a crowd? Pique your interest?

She also says: How many sizes is it going to be viewed at? How small will it be on, say, an iPhone?

These are all great questions because they reflect the revolution going on in media, with the rise of the phones and tablets (the fifth and fourth screens, respectively, in the life of the modern consumer). If paper books are truly going away and ebooks springing up to replace them, then what of the cover? Is the ebook cover the same or is it different from the paper book cover? (I don't know what else to call them either--traditional books, hard copy books, eventually POD books.)

It seems to me that all commercial covers, whether traditional or digital, must stand out on the crowded rack. Their purpose is mainly to sell the book. The method they employ is usually to be somehow evocative of the subject of the book while piquing the reader's interest. In this the digital book cover is no different than the traditional one, except the crowd it needs to outshine is digital. That is, the ebooks I'm doing will have no POD incarnation and will only be sold online. The online racks belong to Amazon, B&N, and others, and they display covers in sizes ranging from about 60 pixels to about 200 pixels in width, depending where on the site they are displayed. A 60-px cover is really tiny. Here's an early attempt at the cover for My Morning Glory at 60 px. You generally can't read any of the text at this size, not even the title. Objects are hard to distinguish. You may have only a shape and a color. But if you've already looked at the cover in a larger size, then this one acts like a little icon or trademark (a glyph).


Here's an intermediate size that appears on some Amazon pages. (I'm basing these on the Amazon site. Other sites have own sizes. And I have no idea how they appear on a tablet or smart phone.)It's 100 px wide, and at this size you should be able to read something, probably the title, maybe the author name. Object should be discernible.

And finally the size on an individual book's main page. As far as the buying experience goes, this 200 px size cover is the largest that will appear. Sometimes, you can click on a cover and see a larger size, or you can click on "Inside this Book" and see a larger version of the cover, but I would guess that most people don't. So this size has to do all the work.

You should be able to identify objects portrayed and read the title, author's name, and maybe the pitch line (subhead). IMO, there is no place for sub-sub heads.

That's on the sales side. On the reader's side, e-readers also display the cover at about the size of a paperback book. The older Kindles displayed in B&W, but the iPad and Nook are color, and now with the introduction of the Kindle Fire, it seems to me that color will rule on the cover as well as inside the book. The insides of print books have only been shy of color in the past because of the cost of extra print runs that color entailed. But e-color is free, and I believe that ebook designers will embrace it.

More discussion later.

Still here

I seem to have missed a week or two of posting. No excuses except that I have been mightily distracted by the Rat Race. Anyway, I have been plugging away at trying to come up with the cover for my next ebook. The image above is the current candidate. I'm not too jazzed by it because the background is brown, a no-no in graphic design, and because it looks so mundane. I'd much prefer a SFnal image that evokes the future, the Singularity, AIs or almost anything else. But I'm at the end of my rope. I've spent weeks browsing wedding images online and in bridal magazines, and this is the best I have come up with, given my limited illustration skills.

So, how about some feedback. Anyone like this cover?

Also, is there anyone out there who's read "The Wedding Album" and has a better idea? I'm all ears.

I recommend this book

I am totally engrossed in a book of SF theory called The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence, by Alexei and Cory Panshin. What the authors lay out in this tome (of 685 pages) has provided me insight into what I am doing with my life. So it’s an important book to me, and I’d like to tell you about it.

Chapter one begins: “Science fiction is a literature of the mythic imagination. In science fiction stories, spaceships and time machines carry us outside ourselves, outside our world, outside everything we know, to distant realms that none of us has ever seen . . .” Here is outlined the two chief themes of the book, myth and transcendence.

Transcendence can be defined as moving beyond the range of normal human experience to realms that are irrational, elusive, wonderful, and never completely to be known. The label used throughout the book to denote normalcy is “the Village,” the place we spend our daily lives. Transcendent reality, the land of mystery and wonder, is denoted by the title, “The World Beyond the Hill.” Most humans throughout history have been content to live out their lives in the relative safety of the Village while yearning to glimpse the World beyond the Hill. For most of human history, that outer world was occupied by supernatural forces, gods, and demons. Direct experience of that world was never a good idea, was mediated by shamans and priests, and required sacrifice and prayer.

A myth, by popular definition, is a false idea or belief, such as the myth that corporations are people or that lowering taxes can spur employment. In popular usage, mythology is the study of a belief system that is as ancient and dead as the gods of Greek mythology.

A more scholarly definition of myth is a little more complicated. A myth is a set of principles (or collection of stories) that, using the best, most reliable knowledge of the day, explains transcendent mysteries: who made us? where did we come from? what does it all mean? where do we go when we die?

Because there is a tendency for people to not recognize the tenuous nature of their own belief systems, they tend to call their view of reality the truth and everyone else’s a myth. It’s easy today to dismiss Mount Olympus and its cast of titans, gods, and mortals--Zeus, Cassandra, Achilles--no one believes that stuff anymore. It’s myth. What we too often forget is that, during its own time, Greek mythology represented the cutting edge of knowledge and helped explain everything from lightning bolts to love. We also forget that our own era’s myth of science, no matter how rational it seems to us today, may well be supplanted tomorrow by a whole new set of operating principles and that our truths may then seem just as quaint and dead.

This book, then, follows the rise of the myth of science through the lens of fiction. From the Ages of Reason and Romanticism, through the Age of Technology, to the Atomic Age, the authors trace the decline of the myth of spirit in the West in favor of the new myth of science. Part world history, part chronicle of seminal works of fiction, this book creates a framework for understanding the genesis and effect of major works of science fiction (and proto-SF) such as Frankenstein; The Time Machine; War of the Worlds; Looking Backward, 2000-1887; “Who Goes There;” I, Robot; and hundreds more.

Through this book, I have been able to view my own scribbling as part of a grand tradition of myth-making. Now I see why I am drawn to writing SF and not your everyday, Village-centric, mainstream fiction. My only disappointment is that the authors stopped their critique of history at the year 1945, the dawn of the Atomic Age. How I wish they’d take up their pens and resume their analysis to include our current era, the Information Age.

I have only one quibble with the book: the authors seem to presume that the myth of science reins supreme everywhere in the West, that everyone agrees that spiritualism and supernaturalism are as archaic as the Greek gods. I don’t know where the authors live--in Europe?-- but here in the U.S. the vast majority of people still have at least one foot firmly planted in the Dark Ages. When leading presidential candidates refudiate the “theory” of evolution, claim Jesus as their personal savior, or believe a guy named Smith dug up heavenly golden plates that only an angel could interpret, science gets short shrift. It occurs to me that the sustaining force motivating me to write my current novel is the desire to finally and fully bust the myth of the supernatural.

Good luck with that, dude.

That's Hadrian, not Adrian, if you please

Another hour before the library closes, and since I'm in an updating mood, I'll spill the latest news on the novel-in-progress. When I posted a couple of weeks ago that I was about halfway through the first draft, something happened, and I couldn't seem to make any forward progress. So I did something long overdue; I did a synopsis of what I had written so far. This entailed skimming the several hundred pages of manuscript and summing up each scene in a line or two, adding notes, and rearranging scenes. Gave me a good idea of what's what and what's missing. It took about a week and a half to do, and by the end I was able to continue pushing the story forward with a better clue as to what I was writing. Am pretty pleased with it too, if I can risk tempting Fate.

A few posts ago I mentioned that one of my main protagonists was still going by the acronym HAD (Hunky Alaskan Dude). I found myself writing HAD so many times that I got to like the sound of it. So I'm auditioning the name Hadrian for this character. A Roman emperor, the name suits him. Hadrian Hudson, maybe, the attempt by his parents for alliteration. There's the bonus twist that everyone keeps wanting to call him Adrian and how he responds to it. Imagine going your entire life having to correct how people pronounce your name. Wait a minute, that's what I have to do. Looking up Hadrian on a baby name site, I find that it's not and "never was" in the top 1000 popular baby boy names in the U.S., whereas, Adrian is in the top 100. So, if this hunky dude character catches on with future readers, it can be a distinctive name.

The photo at the top is from my McCarthy trip of last month. It's the ruins of the mill at the Kennecott copper mine. The ore came down from the mine, another 5000 ft straight up, by tramway. The ore underwent processing by four different methods that extracted 98% of the copper. The mill today is owned by the National Park Service, which is stabilizing and renovating it for future tours. Click on the photo for a larger size.

Ebook Update

The image above is the cover of my upcoming ebook. It has taken me an inordinate amount of time to create it, the cover, that is. The content was quick, a matter of reformatting a word processing file. This ebook contains my three "flash fiction" stories that appeared in the British science journal, Nature, on their "Futures" page. When it's ready to go, I'm going to publish it for the Kindle and Nook, and it will be free. (I'll also offer it for free on this blog.) It will point the reader to my novella, also upcoming, "The Wedding Album." But before I can finish the first, I have to have the cover of the second ready to go, and that's what's holding me up.

I have worked as a graphic designer, not an illustrator, and so I generally need a photo or image to get started. The one above is a photoshop melding of two images in the public domain I found on Wikimedia. The execution was simple, once I had the concept and images, but that took me about six weeks to develop. Too long. Now with "The Wedding Album," which is a more important work, I'm in the same boat. Concept, images, integration, layout--my head hurts.

If any of you have read and liked "TWA" and have ideas or images (plus the rights to use them) to put on the cover, I would most ardently appreciate it if you contacted me. I can't offer you a lot of money, but you'd get an acknowledgement and, if you're a professional artist, an ad at the end of the ebook to advertise your business. In any case, stay tuned for the release of these two ebooks.