THE QUEEN OF MAGES now available!

After more than a year of blood, sweat, and tears (admittedly, not much blood), THE QUEEN OF MAGES is now available for purchase on Amazon for only $3.99! I guarantee that that's the best deal you'll find all day. (Guarantee not guaranteed.)

Certainly I'm biased, but I think this is my best writing yet: 190,494 words of what I hope readers will find an exciting, entertaining, moving adventure.

I'll write more later today, but for now, go buy it!

Final cover art for THE QUEEN OF MAGES

Welp, here it is:

The ebook will be published on Amazon in the next couple of days.

The Coming Review Food Chain

With the rise of self-publishing, there are now literally hundreds of thousands of ebooks being published each year. In the old days, the quantity of published books was relatively small; if you regularly perused a few of the mainstream review outlets (mainly newspapers/magazines), you could get a line on just about everything that was both 1) probably good and 2) actually available for you to purchase. (We'll ignore for now the hidden gems that you couldn't get because no large-scale publisher would touch them, even though if you did get a chance to read it, you'd love it.)

The perpetual tsunami of self-published works is unlikely to abate. And the overwhelming majority of what's published will never see any substantial success. But naturally there will be some gems in the rough. How will those get identified?

First, individual authors have to promote themselves like mad in order to get any traction. The first tier of readers will be friends and family of the author, or people who the author directly contacted: people at cons, people at bookstores, or even a small handful of people who happened to click on one of the few AdWords spots that the author was able to pay for, as well as an equally small number of people who stumble across the book and buy it just because they like the cover art or the subject matter or the synopsis.

This tier of people all read the book, and if they think it's good, they'll recommend it to other friends and family. The second tier will repeat this process, and the book may continue spreading, as long as new readers keep thinking it's good.

Most works will never get very far. But a few will, and eventually, they may come to the attention of the bottom tier of reviewers.

What exactly is the "bottom tier of reviewers"? This is sort of the critical flipside of self-publishing: independent critical outlets. Little online magazines, or even just blogs, where people review works. (These sites will have their own issues becoming popular, but we're not concerned with that here.)

The very bottom of these sites will have a handful of readers. Some of these sites will prove to be more astute critics, or will be better at recognizing works that are likely to be popular with a larger audience. And occasionally, one of these bottom-tier review sites will end up hearing about a bottom-tier ebook that a friend (or a few friends) recommended.

So they'll review it, and the other independent review sites in nearby tiers (the ones that have a similar but perhaps somewhat larger readership/prestige) will pick up on the ebook. And if they hear enough about it, they'll end up writing their own review.

This process repeats up the chain, until (ideally) the ebook comes to the attention of the large-scale media outlets that have hundreds of thousands or millions of readers.

It's essentially the crowdsourcing of the slush pile. As a reader seeking good books, you can still pay attention to the big-name critical outlets with a long history; but you can also look around and find a few independent outlets that tend to recommend things you end up liking. Nobody really expects individual readers to troll the endless sea of self-published ebooks.

The things we talk about

A sample conversation between me and my wife:

Ben: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dWw9GLcOeA I, for one, welcome our new roof-surfing avian overlords  
Jean: That's completely inaccurate. He's not surfing at all.
Jean: He's snowboarding.
Ben: He's riding something on top of water. Surfing. QED.
Jean: He's riding a single object down a snowy slope. "Water" is flat.
Ben: http://www.hunuwan.com/WAVE1.jpg != flat
Jean: But definitely not shaped like that rooftop, either.
Ben: Not for very long, sure
Jean: Nor does the surfboard follow the "slope" of the water.
Ben: It's cold in Russia, things work different there
Ben: LOOK ARE YOU GOING TO WORSHIP THE BIRD OR NOT
Jean: I'll worship the snowboarding bird, but I will not have this blasphemy that calls it "surfing."
Ben: The New Reformed Church of Water Sports Linguistics accepts definitions expansive enough for all believers.
Jean: They're heretics. They do not understand the TRUE nature of the bird.
Jean: Or of snow.
Ben: I've had enough of this, I'm calling the Crow Pope.
Jean: The Crow Pope is just a jumped-up carrion bird. True understanding of the love of Snowboarding Bird comes from directly viewing the video and understanding its meaning, not from the third-party interpretation of a bird in a silly hat.
Jean: Not exactly what I was looking for, but close enough: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZufJEjcgea14woxM9qJqlF0J13G9kBerv1e0Sgo9myC6NsSyl1MmDgfGBT1i1LCSbiYlSgU0Y7uQp2nmY50Ub0B_y_S_5Es9L6JJo_x1EJmNRB5cnSpEi6R1YUD5Ik26fY5pngsRSCeo/s1600/crow+hat_002.png
Jean: Here's your crow pope: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIjXORK0Yi9yU7cO86aJWhzgK0WOxymGxrPzm64M4cXIlbu1N7Qu4ityq8eu9UBpIO9izfsMuv0rTijt6QxIUT1TF2KUW_IFN_Y59foXxj7k9kZhRgsb2yf6gp_FGJ4QrpOwW6iPYhfVTR/s400/surprise+party+crow.jpg
Jean: And a promotional poster for his US Crowmobile tour: http://images.clipartof.com/small/95375-Black-Over-The-Hill-Crow-Wearing-A-Party-Hat-And-Standing-On-A-Cake-Poster-Art-Print.jpg
Jean: This appears to be him in extra-fancy ceremonial garb, with attendants (or possibly, decoys): http://www.trendytree.com/raz-christmas-decorations/images/h3153361-crowH3153361blackcrows.jpg
Jean: Do you have any idea how much those hats cost? Do you realize how many fledglings Crow Pope could have fed with that birdseed?

To hell with OpenOffice

With only a handful of chapters left in my final revision pass (and mostly I'm just waiting on the final cover art), I've decided that even though I wrote the entirety of THE QUEEN OF MAGES in OpenOffice (later LibreOffice; I upgraded back in March, although the two programs are still nearly identical at this point—LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice), I'm throwing the damn thing away.

(For clarity, I'm just going to call it LO.)

It is nice writing in a traditional word processor program, with its pretty fonts and non-breaking word wrapping and automatic curly quotes and such, but (and it's a but so big that Sir Mix-a-Lot would drool) problems abounded:

• Assembling 40 individual chapter documents, 5 pieces of end matter, and a table of contents into an ebook file turned out to be a kludgy, annoying mess. I was able (despite awful documentation) to figure out how to create a master document, in which I could embed the 45 separate documents... one... by... one...
• You can't edit documents in situ in an LO master document. You have to open each individual linked document separately. Normally this wasn't that big a deal—I tend to work on chapters individually anyway—but occasionally it was annoying, especially when I just wanted to adjust things having to do with layout. After I'd already finished my first draft, I wanted to go back and change how the title of each chapter was written. This meant opening 40 files and editing the header of every. Single. One.
• LO (even after upgrading from OO) was touchy. Doing certain things with the document list in the master document would make LO crash. Sometimes opening too many documents at once would make it crash.
• I kept all the files for the entire novel (chapters, front/end matter, notes, etc.) under source control in Subversion. Each day (sometimes multiple times per day, if I was getting a lot done) I would commit the changes. The problem is that Subversion has no idea how to compare differences between versions of OpenDocument files, so Subversion here was nothing more than a highly incremental backup system. If I accidentally changed something (via fat fingers), it might not be obvious, and there was no easy way to tell if something had changed relative to what was in the repository. You can't do svn diff on binary formats.
• LO has some weird UI issues. Sometimes when scrolling around, a line or two of text will compress by a few pixels. It's just a subtle rendering error, but it's ugly and makes it look weird, but it happens constantly and looks weird.
• OpenDocument files are a lot bigger than text files. Not that I'm low on disk space or memory, but I've been computing since the days of MS-DOS 2.1, and unnecessary bloat always makes my eye twitch.
• I only use spellcheck right before I publish something. However, since you can't edit things in a master document, I would have had to open every single chapter file and run LO's spellcheck (which has a not-great UI) on each of them to see if anything was wrong. Instead I ended up using the command-line tool aspell on the exported HTML file (after I stripped out all the HTML tags) and, whenever I found a typo, opened up the particular chapter file to make the fix.
• LO's HTML exporter is horrible. Not as bad as Microsoft's, but not even close to HTML 4 compliant. Yes, HTML 4, which was finalized in 1997. FONT tags everywhere, badly-formatted CSS, utterly extraneous SPAN tags... ugh.
• The corollary to the HTML exporter's horrificness is that it's sometimes difficult to tell what kind of formatting/layout you need to do inside LO in order to get a given result in the HTML. This is normally not a huge deal, beause LO tries to preserve the look so that if you view the HTML document in a web browser, it will look more or less the same. But when you then have to convert it to MobiPocket, a format that is not particularly forgiving of formatting weirdness, it can be a problem.
• I use vim for virtually all text (and for absolutely all code) that I write, and I'm so used to its convenient editing commands that whenever I want to edit things in LO's old-fashioned insert-mode-only interface, I feel like I've had half my fingers cut off.
• I can SSH to my desktop from my phone, wherever I am, and write using vim. Using LO remotely is far, far more difficult, and (depending on the hardware) sometimes impossible.

As a result of all this, I'm going write the sequel in vim. Yep, good ol' vim, which I've been using for programming for 13 years. (It can do non-breaking word wrapping, too!)

I spent a couple of hours putting together a bash script that uses perl and sed to format the chapter files into MobiPocket-friendly HTML, and then assembles them and the front/end matter files (which are pre-written HTML fragments) into a single master document. It also automatically constructs an HTML table of contents (with links) from whatever files are in the chapters directory.

The only real advantage LO gave me was a little prettiness. But it's not much of an advantage. So I'm kicking it to the curb.

Zeno's Paradox

It seems like for every N hours of writing I do, I only cover half the remaining distance to my goal. I've been ransacking eBay trying to find some sort of mystical amulet or ghostly phial that will allow me to bridge that final gap and complete the damn thing.

But seriously, folks; there's a few passages I need to read over another time or two, and then give the book one final read-through to look for glaring errors. I'm setting the bar pretty high; only if something will legitimately cause confusion will I allow myself to change it. I could tinker forever, but I want the damn thing out the door!

THE QUEEN OF MAGES should be published in the next couple of weeks. Aside from the last little bit of writing, I'm waiting for the final cover art from the lovely and talented Melissa Erickson. I can't wait for you to see the final work; it's going to be fantastic.

Cross-promotion

My good friend Tristan Gregory, a fellow from Mythic Scribes, has just recently published his novel TWIXT HEAVEN AND HELL. It's available on Amazon and I urge you to check it out. Good stuff!

The Marketing Juggernaut Begins

One of the fun things about self-publishing is that there's no such thing as a hard date. Everything's ready when it's ready.

Is the novel ready? No. Not quite. But there is one thing it does have: a title.

THE QUEEN OF MAGES

And even better, it now has a Facebook page! So go check it out, and give it a like! What's the worst that could happen?¹

¹My eventual domination of Earth.

Coverage

I'm inching closer. Right now I'm more or less just doing revision glosses on the work, because I'm waiting on cover art. I've contracted with a lovely and talented illustrator to create the cover for the novel, which should be complete in the next couple of weeks, at which point I'll be ready to publish.

It's funny, because the amount of money I'm spending on the cover is probably going to exceed what I earn from the book for the first several months. But that's okay; I'm in this for the long haul. Eventually, with enough hard work and convincing enough people to Buy It, You'll Like It, I'll make back what it cost.

The book itself is in good shape; I'm very happy with it. Yeah, you can tinker endlessly, but you have to cut the cord sometime. Everything I'm doing to the book now is either tightening up of prose (in this latest pass I've found half a dozen areas that needed to be rewritten slightly for clarity, or, in one case, a minor story inconsistency), or simply to expand and add color: world details, expansion of characterization, more expression of characters' internal states.

I'm looking forward to revealing the cover and the title of the book in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned!

The Girl With the Diamond Age

Am I the only one who thinks that David Fincher needs to direct something written by Neal Stephenson? After having seen/read almost everything by both men, I get a very similar vibe from them. Elaborately detailed worlds with a dark kick; intense, iconoclastic protagonists (or sometimes antagonists, e.g. John Doe from Se7en and Abdallah Jones from REAMDE); an appreciation for complex systems and how ugly things can get when the rubber hits the road.

Failing some sort of entirely new collaboration, I'd settle for Fincher directing an adaptation of The Diamond Age or, better yet, Cryptonomicon. Hell, let's go whole hog and have him direct a Baroque Cycle hexology. Who's with me?