Indy Author Jamie McGuire has landed a book deal with Simon & Schuster. She has previously done quite well self-publishing her books and this is a real trend of indy authors being discovered by publishers. Hopefully this will mark a great career move for her.
Part of what stories like this indicate is that the old model of the publisher as the gatekeeper is broken– resulting in way too few new Shakespeares and way too many new Snookies. Way to wake up Simon & Schuster.
The idea for Tesla’s Stepdaughters came while I was playing Rock Band 2. I was playing it a lot over the summer in 2009. As part of the game, you create your band, and the band I created became The Ladybugs. The original band name was actually Tesla’s Stepdaughters, but when I got around to writing the story, it just seemed to make more sense that the band standing in historically for The Beatles would have a similar name.
I am really pleased with Tesla’s Stepdaughters. I think I was successful in creating a setting for the story, without delving too deeply into it. I’m really happy with my mystery. I never really thought I would be able to write a mystery story, and while some might point out that the mystery is the weakest part of the story (and I wouldn’t argue that), for me, I’m pretty pleased.
After two whole weeks of not doing any writing at all, I’m finally back to work. I’m working on Astrid Maxxim 2, and I think I should be able to knock it out pretty quickly. Actually, I know I can knock it out pretty quickly. The real question is whether I will.
I like Astrid and when I’m having a rough time getting motivated, writing about her and her friends can put me back in the groove. Right now, I’m about 2/3 of the way through the draft.
On a related topic, I’ve just contacted Shaed Studios to solicit the cover for Astrid Maxxim 3. Of course I haven’t started writing it, because I’m still working on book 2, but I have it all plotted out. The idea for the cover is unusual enough that I thought Matthew over at Shaed would need more time to do it. But he’ll probably surprise me and have it perfectly crafted well before I expect it. He did a great job on the previous two covers.
I don’t know what happened to my original post, but here it is basically.
I had finished Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Elven Princess and had a lot of fun writing it. I decided a second Eaglethorpe book was in order. A few years ealier, I had written a little play, which was performed by the Brown Junior High Drama Club to great success, and I decided that this play had been written by Eaglethorpe. The play involves characters from his world– specifically the parents of the Queen of Aerithraine, so it fit.
I was watching lots of Shakespeare at the time and you will see a lot of not so subtle nods to the Bard. The third part of Eaglethorpe (which is coming in The Many Adventures of Eaglethorpe Buxton) is really a continuation of the story in Sorceress.
It was 2009 and His Robot Girlfriend was being dowloaded by the tens of thousands. I had just finished editing The Voyage of the Minotaur and was entering it into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest. (It made it to round two.) So what to write next?
I wanted to do something short and fun and I decided on a fantasy comedy. I had read an enjoyed Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events, particularly the character of Lemony Snicket who is narrator and somehow involved with the characters and frequently hints at things outsidet the story. I decided that my hero would be a story-teller who changed the story to suit himself. Eaglethorpe Buxton was born.
I set the story in (sort of) the world I had created for my D&D campaign. My kids still have fond memories of some of the settings in which the stories take place and even met some of the characters when they played– notably Queen Elleena of Aerithraine. I had a lot of fun writing EBEP and many people have written to tell me that they like him. I’ve heard a few negative comments too, but that’s okay.
The Voyage of the Minotaur was actually the second novel that I wrote– sort of. As I mentioned the other day, it was originally the first part of a very long novel– almost 400,00 words, about 850 pages. I was almost done with this book before I even had a working title, but settled on The Steel Dragon, and this of course later became Senta and the Steel Dragon. The three parts were originally called– Expedition, Colony, Dominion.
After the book was done and had gone through editing, I decided that it was just too big and had to be split into three parts. So part one became The Voyage of the Minotaur.
Several things influenced me to devise this story. A friend had encouraged me to self-publish Princess of Amathar, and the success of that book, minor though it was, encouraged me to write a second. Lord of the Rings had just come out and so I was already thinking of a three part fantasy story. I had also just read Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and remembered his notes about it being his Lord of the Rings. Finally, I had recently watched James Michener’s Hawaii. Putting this all together with several non-fiction books I had recently read about colonial imperialism (particularly Britain in Africa), and I came up with the story outline for Senta and the Steel Dragon.
I wanted a story that told about colonialism over a long period– in this case about ten years. I had thought about how badly native people were treated by the colonial powers and wondered just how much worse it would have been if those natives were an entirely different species. I already had a world map that I had created a few years earlier when I had toyed with the idea of writing a role-playing setting. All of this went into the mix. I also used the setting I had created twenty years before for a few fantasy vignettes I had written– the otherworldly place that people visit when they use the magic drug opthalium. Throwing all this into the mix, I just started writing. It took 14 months to write the drafts for what became three books.
It was 2008, and I had just finished writing the first draft of a massive fantasy novel that I was calling The Steel Dragon. This would eventually become The Voyage of the Minotaur, The Drache Girl, and The Two Dragons. I printed up 10 copies and handed them out to friends to read and edit over the summer. Each one was a 4″ thick notebook. I had also just self-published Princess of Amathar.
While I was waiting for the editing to be completed, I thought I needed something to post to Feedbooks and Manybooks to get my name out there. I had written some sci-fi flash fiction a few years earlier and thought I could piece them together to make a novel. This became the first half of His Robot Girlfriend and I wrote the other half over the summer (while teaching summer school). I published it online and was astounded at the interest. At one time, it was the third most downloaded book on Feedbooks (It’s since dropped to number 7).
His Robot Girlfriend succeeded in getting my name out there. It’s been downloaded almost 500,000 times, has been reviewed numerous times, and I get many emails and notes from people that enjoy it. That being said, I think it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. Someday… soon, I plan to make a serious revision to the book. There are some errors, but mostly, I think I can write much better than I did. It has to keep the same plot and same major elements, but I’d like to smooth it out, fix the ending (which is weak), and maybe add a bit to it. We’ll see.
One comment that detractors frequently make about His Robot Girlfriend (feedback is overwhelmingly positive) is that Patience has no will of her own. She is a robot, duh! But this gave me an idea for the new book– His Robot Wife: Patience is a Virtue. It will show a bit more from her point of view and we will find out that not everything is as Mike thinks it is.
I began writing Princess of Amathar so long ago, it’s really difficult to remember what I was thinking at the time. It was about 1980 and I was just about two years out of high school. I began writing several stories in short chapters, rotating between them. One was a fantasy story about an alternate world, one was a fantasy story set in a dream world (which I later used as the white opthalium drug-induced world for Senta and the Steel Dragon), but most of them were fan fiction sequels to Edgar Rice Burroughs Books. Finally there was Amathar.
My idea behind Amathar was to write a book that ERB might write if he was still around at the time. In that way, Princess of Amathar more than any of my other books, was written as a book I would really want to read. As the years passed and the story was revised, it became more of a love-letter to the fond memories I had reading John Carter of Mars, Pellucidar, and Carson of Venus as a kid.
I still have the original first chapter draft and the story is quite different than the final version. Our earth hero arrives mysteriously in Ecos, though he doesn’t have the same name and he doesn’t meet Malagor. Instead he immediately finds a family of neo-luddite Amatharians whose daughter has been captured by Zoasians. The book changed again and again over the years. Alexander got his first name after I wrote a college paper on Alexander the Great, and his last name from a girl I worked with at Kmart.
By 1992, when I started teaching, the book was only half done. I worked really hard to finish it and did so about 1997. Many of the characters and alien races were named after kids in school, though in revision they were usually changed. It went through many revisions after that and it got many rejection letters from publishers, before I finally published it in 2007. The ebook came out in 2009.
This month, Princess of Amathar should pass the 800 copies sold mark. That means I’ve made about $240.00 in royalties. Considering I suspect I worked on it about 3,269 man-hours, that’s 7.34 cents per hour. Of course thats assuming all the publishing and promotion as free, Still, I cannot regret my time spent on this book. It was a real endeavor of love and I still enjoy reading it.
I thought over the next few weeks I would write a little series about my motivations for each of my books– what I was thinking about and what I was trying to do when I was writing them.
On a side note, somebody I was talking to referred to my writing as “your other job”. I actually thought that was kind of cool. It is my other job now. That doesn’t mean that I love writing any less than I did when it was just my hobby though.
And don’t forget to stop by Smashwords and check out the Summer/Winter sale. Here is a link.
Time to reveal the secret project I’m working on: Coming in 2013.
82 Eridani is a seven book science fiction series, the first volume of which is entitled Journey. The other volumes will be: Arrival, War, Conquest, Siege, Duel, and Destiny.
82 Eridani: Journey
The three mile-long interstellar spacecraft Constellation was designed to explore and colonized the Sirius Star System. The problem is, that it isn’t going to Sirius. The $14 Trillion spaceship has been hijacked by its commander and is flying toward the 82 Eridani star system, and none of the 7,000 crew and colonists know why. Officer Freya Johannson, despite being the commander’s lover, has no more idea than anyone else, but she is determined to find out. Officer James Moore might be curious, but he has more pressing concerns of his own. His wife may be having an affair, so he turns to a group of others to find out for sure, including robotics expert Robert Stivers. Stivers builds robots of all types, include ant-sized surveillance robots which he uses primarily to stalk hard-bodied security officer January Sarbanes. What the tiny robitic eyes have yet to notice is that a serial killer stalks the corridors of the ship. None of these crew members, nor any of the others including the commander, are ready for the shock of what they will find when they finally reach 82 Eridani.
Warning: Adult Content
City of Amathar 