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R-Day Plus One Week: Site Changes and Reviews

R-Day Plus One Week: Site Changes and Reviews

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Well, The Curse of Steel has been on the market for about a week now. Sales have not been overwhelming, but I didn’t expect them to be. In any case, the book has already earned me more in royalties than my last two ventures into self-publishing put together. This is a slow business, which doesn’t reward you for obsessively checking your KDP reports.

(Have I been obsessively checking my KDP reports? Yes, yes I have.)

So, on to next steps.

I’ve started work on the first draft of the next novel in the series, The Sunlit Lands. Progress on that can be tracked in the sidebar.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on promotion for The Curse of Steel. One thing I’ve become aware of is that there’s a whole ecology of reviewers for new books, and especially for self-published books. New books that don’t have many professional or customer reviews don’t do as well, but as you might expect there are always more new books coming out than there are available reviewers.

After thinking about that problem for a while, I’ve decided to add a new thread to this blog: reviews of new self-published fiction.

I’m going to try to have at least one substantive review of an indie novel or series per month. Those reviews will be posted as blog entries here, and if the book(s) being reviewed are being published on Amazon I’ll cross-post the reviews there too. Look for the first of these by the end of October – I’ve already found a very promising novel series that will almost certainly get a review.

This is something of a departure for me; this blog has never done many reviews in the past. It will involve some formal work over the next few days as I set things up. I’ll have to develop and post a review policy, and I’ll also be advertising this blog on some of the review-clearinghouse sites to attract more attention to the project.

As another point, I’ve just taken some steps to (hopefully) make this site a little easier to navigate. You’ll notice the white top-bar now provides several menu options. These links will take you to some of the most important (or popular) pages on the site, notably the Architect of Worlds landing page. I’ll be expanding that menu a bit over the next few days, possibly converting a couple of the items into drop-downs to further improve navigation. There may be some tweaks and additions to some of the pages as well. Feedback is welcome as to ways to improve all of this functionality.

The Curse of Steel is Released!

The Curse of Steel is Released!

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As of this evening, The Curse of Steel is available as an e-book for Amazon Kindle. Here’s a link to the book’s page on Amazon US, but it’s also available on all of the overseas Amazon sites.

The catalog description:

A woman who shares the blood of the gods. A cursed sword that has ruined kingdoms.

In a single fateful day, Krava the Swift learns of her divine ancestry and gains possession of a weapon of formidable power. Suddenly raised to prominence among her Iron Age tribe, at first she enjoys her new life as a god-touched hero. She quickly learns that a hero’s life may be glorious but it’s also complicated – and possibly quite short.

Krava and her friends soon find themselves caught up in a deadly game of gods and kings. If she refuses to be a pawn, she may be forced to become a queen . . . or a curse upon all her people.

Time for some celebration: this is my first original published novel, after twenty-plus years of being a freelance writer. Hopefully not my last!

My patrons at the $2 level and up will soon be getting a code for a free copy in email.

Publication Eve

Publication Eve

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As of this evening, The Curse of Steel has been fully prepared as a KPF-format e-book and is about three steps short of being released.

I’m not going to try to publish it tonight. I want to review the whole e-book one final time to make sure there are no last-minute errors, and that may take me a little while. Especially since I have a pile of telework to get done for my office over the next couple of days.

Still. Everything has been loaded into the Kindle Create app, and it looks very nice indeed. This is starting to feel like a real event. The book will almost certainly be released by Wednesday of this week.

Status Report (28 November 2019)

Status Report (28 November 2019)

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It’s been a while since I posted here, but there hasn’t been that much new to report. I’ve been making steady progress on the first draft of The Curse of Steel, and I strongly suspect I’ll be finished sometime this holiday weekend. At that point, I’ll be taking a short break, and then launching myself right into the second-draft rewrite.

Oddly enough, I’ve been thinking about reviving my Patreon account. The main reason I let that lapse, a few years ago, was that I wasn’t producing content consistently enough to warrant asking anyone to pay me for it. I was mostly writing fan-fiction (which I can’t legally accept payment for), or doing research for the Architect of Worlds project (which didn’t give rise to useful content on a consistent basis), or generally messing around with one-off world-building or writing projects. Why should anyone want to support that kind of desultory work?

On the other hand, now I have this novel I’m working on, and world-building and constructed-language material to support that. Since I’m going to be self-publishing the finished work, patronage could help me gather an audience, and might also help offset some of the costs of professional support. That might be a thing in the new year.

One odd thing did come up over the past few days.

Apparently, about a year ago, someone downloaded the complete text of one of my fan-fiction novels (Memoirs: The Reaper War), reformatted it as an e-book, slapped a cover image on it (also stolen), and published it to Amazon UK under their own byline. They even stole my blurb for the novel! Naturally, this did not work out well for them. Within a few days, someone noticed that the e-book was fan-fiction, with no sign of consent from the Mass Effect IP owners. The violation of Terms of Service was reported to Amazon, and the e-book was taken down in short order.

(It still appears to have a Goodreads entry, though. I wonder if Goodreads has any mechanism for taking those down, if the book turns out to be fraudulent?)

One annoying part is that I didn’t hear anything about the incident at the time. Several people apparently looked closely enough at the plagiarized e-book to recognize that I was the original author, but none of them thought to let me know what was going on. I only came across the discussion on Reddit by accident, earlier this week while I was searching for something else entirely.

More annoying is the thought that this could put me in a very bad position someday. Suppose Amazon puts two and two together and concludes I was the idiot who tried this in the first place. The last thing I need is for them to decide to pull the original work I’ve actually published with them!

No news is good news, I suppose – if I didn’t notice this situation in over a year, it’s probably not going to blow up in my face. Still. I’ve dropped a note to the Organization for Transformative Works, to see if this kind of thing has ever come up before and if they have any advice for how I should handle the situation.

Meanwhile, if I ever find out who “Cole Price” or “C. P. Price” is, we are going to have words.