The people asking were new readers who were looking to support my work and my life as much as they possibly could. It’s a lovely sentiment and it makes me warm all over whenever it’s expressed, but here’s the deal. At the volume of sales that I’m working with right now, the whole publishing thing is a losing proposition financially.

I’m a start-up company. A research project. The quest for a shipping route to India. However you want to think about it, doesn’t matter, the point is that there is only one thing you need to worry about if you want to support me and my work, and it isn’t money. Money comes later.

Right now? Right now it’s a review.

I need reviews and I need them posted on my book’s pages at the largest book store in the world, Amazon.com.

If you use GoodReads or Shelfari or one of those services, reviews there are good. If you have a blog, reviews there are good.

But the absolute most bang you can get for your support is to post a review on Amazon. And it doesn’t need to be a lengthy discourse on my books, or an in depth discussion on their literary merits. Those are awesome and if you want to do that go nuts, but I feel like too many people don’t leave reviews because they feel like they don’t have anything important to say.

Well, whatever, so maybe your review won’t become voted the most helpful review of my book. But it will provide data for the Amazon algorithm. It will link my book up with other books. It will mark my book as a book with a readership, and this in turn will get it recommended to other readers.

So I’m begging you, and not just for me but for any up-and-coming author whose work you love, if you want to support them throw them some stars and a few sentences on Amazon primarily, and anywhere else you happen to post reviews as well.

That’s how you can help me. That’s how you can help other authors. That’s how you can help other readers find new authors. And, gosh darn it, that’s how you can help save publishing as a whole.

Please. If you want to back me, go to Amazon right now and write me a review.

I thank you in advance for your time.

But recently I’ve started to actually do reading research to prepare for the upcoming books. I need to learn about ancient Rome, clothes, Australian penal colonies, and a few other tidbits.

A lot of people, when I tell them that I write fiction, get a mad gleam in their eye and say something like, “I’ll bet the best part about that job is doing the research.”

In their minds, if I have to research criminal under-lords or whatever, then I actually join some criminal society and rise up through the ranks, participating in dazzling jewel thefts and midnight gunfights aboard a zeppelin somewhere or god knows what.

In reality I purchase or download an absurd number of books and I sit and I read, and I read, and I read.

Yeah. It’s awesome.

Here is the book I read to research Isaac Newton for Probability Angels:

It was a thrill-a-minute page-turner full of explosions and sexy international intrigue.

Oh. Wait. No it wasn’t. It was the most boring book in the world and a good third of it was FILLED WITH MATH EQUATIONS.

But there were some good, invaluable even, nuggets hidden in this tome of boredom and the read was well worth it for my work. That’s what research really is for me, not an attempt to learn the topic I’m researching backwards and forwards, but a sifting process where I pluck out striking images, quotes, moments, and mindsets to graft onto my writing and give it the flavor of reality.

And, to be fair, not all of it is boring. The ancient Rome stuff has been full of goodies.

My favorite thus far? The Greek general Pyrrhus once attempted to intimidate a Roman ambassador by inviting him into a room where he had an elephant hidden behind a curtain and then, in mid-conversation, dropping the curtain.

Oddly the ol’ elephant behind the curtain trick didn’t work. The visiting diplomat didn’t even flinch when a fucking elephant appeared behind him out of nowhere.

Which is sad.

I really wish that trick had caught on.

I know I’m so using it if I ever hold office anywhere.

“So, you think there should be a stop sign on the corner of Main and Oak streets? Well have you ever thought to consider LOOKATTHISITSAGIANTFUCKINGELEPHANT!!!!!!”

First, I want to thank, @celeloriel, @daniel14159, @TheUniverseGM, @cadorette, and @nezumi_hebereke for agreeing to be guinea pigs. Helpful, fun, witty, and intelligent, they proved to be most able guinea pigs indeed. Please give them a hand, ladies and gentlemen.

Their play test was recorded and I finally got a chance to listen to it this morning. There was a lot more good than bad, in my opinion, but clearly lots of things need work.

For starters, there’s a ton of information to get across before the players can dive in and actually start playing. This is normal for any game, you have to get a sense of the rules before you can play, but briefly explaining a new dice system and the world of Probability Angels is quite a challenge. @Rolling20s had his hands full. I mean I cant even explain my world.

We’re attempting to build this so it can be run at conventions, so I think some front loading of information is to be expected, but a much quicker and cleaner version needs to be worked out. One of the players came up with: “You’re immortal justice ghosts! Now start rolling dice!”

Which isn’t too bad.

I’ve learned from writing synopsis after synopsis until I want to barf that the urge to put in every cool little detail you’ve come up with has to be quashed. You have to know that you can’t cover everything. You should put in enough to hook the reader, even if it’s somewhat misleading or glosses over some big details, and then trust them to catch up. Same concept needs to be implemented here.

Secondly, some of the mechanics on the dice side of things need to be tweaked. That is something that happens on into infinity for games like this, you can always tweak things. So that wasn’t a surprise.

The worst thing to come out of this experiment, though, was that @Rolling20s has decided that he can’t represent me, with the attention that a sponsor deserves, at future conventions. He is currently working on two other games of his own design, Shadows of the Collegium and School Daze, not to mention anything else he comes up with (most of which is quite awesome), and he came to the conclusion that his attention was too split to run the PARPG as per our current arrangement.  He still wants to shape this into a workable game and run it, but as a fan not as a marketer. This wasn’t a big shock to me as his to-do list has been growing and growing recently and I’m glad that we both realized it.

That being said, in my mind @Rolling20s is still the guy, even if he doesn’t think he can be the guy. He’s just the guy. I have no other guy in the wings, for starters, but, also…he’s just the guy. So I’m calling this a hiatus. I don’t know what word he is using.

Anyway, the plus side of the play test was listening to all of these strangers have fun in my world. And I think they were having fun. Interruptions and confusion and gaffs aside, there were some moments of pure awesome buried in this gaming session (not to mention a reference to one of my favorite shows, Archer).

There is meat here. Succulent, delicious meat. Currently, how best to prepare and serve this meat is a mystery. But there is meat. Do not doubt it.

I’ll put it like this. @Rolling20s and I have managed to put a game together where people were laughing and having fun for an hour and a half while their characters wrestled with the notion of whether or not a dragon running amok inside of an iceberg was real.

I consider that quite an achievement.

Chalk that up to poor time management on my part. I forgot what day of the week it was due to the three day weekend. That counts as poor time management, right?

Anyway, I do have some information. One play test was undertaken at the convention and the few players involved had a ton of fun. However, we appeared to have picked a convention that wasn’t ideal, it was difficult for @Rolling20s to get players for our particular type of game, and the first session had to be outright cancelled. So he bailed and headed north to meet up with some friends in the Baltimore area. These friends were definitely the right kind of gamers and he was guaranteed a good play test with a full table (there were only two players at the session he was able to run).

I feel like I should have a map on the site with a “Where’s @Rolling20s?” pin on it or something.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve heard except for some tweets here and there. I’ll do a full breakdown next post.

In other news, I will be undertaking another book tour in a couple of months.

I did a book tour back in the fall and was, frankly, underwhelmed. I was confused most of the time, did not feel like my hostess was promoting my book as much as she was cramming it into any site that would take it, I answered a humongous set of questions that have yet to appear anywhere and, well, it didn’t do much for me sales-wise.

This was, again, mostly my fault. I wanted to see what these book tours were all about and I tried a very very cheap one. I got what I paid for, but I did learn how they work and that I really enjoy answering interview questions.

For awhile now I’ve been toying with the idea of doing another one if I could find the right host, but that was an absolute nightmare.

I’m not sure if you’re aware of this but people on the internet are insane. When I contacted book tour sites people were writing back in all caps, people were writing back in gibberish, people were writing six emails in one day and then not responding to me ever again. One lady seemed okay, but then she promised me that if I hired her I would get the number one spot on Google for the search term “urban fantasy author.” That’s a big red flag. It says, over and over again, in Google’s how-to pages and webmaster pages that no one can ever guarantee a top slot. Ever. I asked this lady what she had meant by her email, giving her a chance to explain herself, and she replied, “It’s a secret,” and then used some emoticon I’ve never seen before.

However, just as I was about to give up, I tried one more site that offers internet book tours and was completely blown away. I was contacted professionally and promptly, and when I did manage to set some time aside for a phone call all of my trick questions were answered correctly. The woman who runs the business was smart, kind, and, most importantly maybe, wildly enthusiastic about marketing books.

So I have that little adventure to look forward to in the coming months.

Otherwise my life has been boring and cold with a few showers of postseason football.

Your foot taps nervously on the ice, a light crunch sounding from the ever-present frost sucking onto the floor of the Fortress of Solitude. You’ve spent the last three months of your afterlife inside of this iceberg, but you still haven’t gotten used to it and the cold air molests the back of your neck, your wrists, your face, trying to slither its way into your clothes and freeze you to death.

Jonathan’s cavernous voice is echoing all throughout the huge ice chamber and even as your back grows cold from an errant draft of air your stomach churns like boiling lead.

Graduation. This is it. Three months of training and your final test is about to take place before you can become a true member of the Guardathings.

So that’s how it starts.

This weekend @Rolling20s is headed to his second gaming convention,  SCARAB in South Carolina, as a marketer for Joseph Devon Industries. You may remember our first attempt at this back in October. I sent @Rolling20s to a smaller convention with a table set up in the sales hall and no business cards. It was not a rousing success, sales-wise, but we learned a lot and decided on a new course of action. Instead of manning a table with minimal passing foot traffic, it might be a lot more effective to design a tabletop RPG based on The Matthew and Epp Stories and have @Rolling20s run said game at the next convention.

Which is exactly what we did. And what the opening paragraphs of this post are about.

We didn’t work out every detail of the game we developed, but we did put together a hell of a one-off adventure using the FATE dice system which stars you as a Guardathing about to graduate to active duty inside Jonathan’s ice fortress. Just one final test left and then you can start your first detail!

Guarding Kyo!

Yeah. Then things continue to get worse from there. Hee-hee.

I’m rather proud of what we’ve put together and I really think it’ll be a lot of fun, draw people in, and hopefully sell some books.

Results will be reported next week as well as, hopefully, some recordings of game play.

Now get out there and get to work; those testers aren’t going to guard themselves.

Why $.99? Well for starters that’s the lowest you can go. There’s also a lot of allure in those double digits to the right of the decimal point. Something priced at $1 seems, somehow to our brains, to be much more expensive than something priced $.99.

iTunes and the iStore probably have a lot to do with it, too. $.99 has been their reigning price point for awhile now (though individual songs are creeping back up) and I think it just makes sense to people that digital whatzimahoos should be $.99.

As I mentioned, there’s been a lot of dicussion about this. Some people think it’s good idea, there’s a nice breakdown from earlier last year over at CNET.

Some people think it’s a horrible idea, this article from the Huffington Post thinks $.99 cent books are going to undermine the market and cause a price war that will never end.

I’m not here to discuss the ins and outs of this too much. I’m just here to say that no matter what people think, or write, or preach, or argue, or believe, the fact is simply that $.99 IS the price point for Kindle books.

How do I know?

Because I dropped the price of Probability Angels to $.99 a few weeks ago and I’ve sold more copies since then than I did all of last year. I do have a new ad campaign running based on this price drop, but I’ve run ad campaigns before and never seen results like this.

Is this good? Is this bad?

How should I know? But it is what it is and reality can never be ignored, no matter how pretty your arguments are.

Frankly, I’m of the opinion that future authors will generate revenue from a wide variety of sources, and not just on royalties from book sales, so I’m not particularly worried.

Plus, as I mentioned, the price of music is creeping back up so I don’t entirely think $.99 is the permanent price for an e-book.

But it IS the price of e-books right now.

Full stop.

In light of the breaking news this week that North Korea’s weirdly androgynous leader has passed away, I thought I would do everyone a public service and put together ten key facts about Korea so you can seem smart without having to wade through all those newspaper articles.

1. Korea is believed to have been written between the years 610 and 632.
2. Contrary to popular belief, Muhammad is not believed to have written Korea, instead it is believed that he dictated Korea to his companions, who then transcribed it.
3. Scholars of Korea believe that it contains prophesies that can exist in no other book written by humans.
4. Korea…what? What do you mean I researched the wrong word?
5. Look, just shut up, I’m doing my thing here.
6. Korea is divided into 114 chapters, known as suras, which…wait that doesn’t sound right.
7. What the fuck is a Koran?
8. Where is Korea again? It’s up by Russia, right?
9. I don’t know…they probably eat fish or something.
10. Stop looking at me! What am I, the tour guide?! For the love of god I try and do something nice for you people and this is the thanks I get…just forget it!

I have a handy guide to help me keep my sanity through these times..there might be some secondary benefit for you as well but that isn’t really the point:

I have lived on the island of Manhattan for ten years now and every year there is a massive influx of tourists and visitors and merry-makers during the holidays.  People come for many reasons and to enjoy a wide variety of activities and so I’ve decided to put together some of my thoughts in order to help out all these weary pilgrims who make the journey to my fair city.

1.  STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM THE TREE:

Seriously.  Please. It’s a tree.  Yes it’s actually quite pretty and yes it’s very large but you don’t understand what you’re doing when you go visit the stupid thing. The foot traffic around Rockefeller Center creates a chain reaction that snarls traffic up in all directions. I don’t want a bus ride across the park to take two hours just because you want to see some lights.

Look.  Here is the location of the tree:

Now here is my estimation of the area that becomes affected by congestion due to tree traffic:

Please don’t go near the tree. I’m sick of telling my cab drivers to take the long way through Nicaragua to avoid traffic when I’m trying to get across town.

2. STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM CHINATOWN:

Chinatown isn’t known for it’s fast moving foot traffic under the best of circumstances but during this time of year it becomes another thing entirely. Somehow all of humanity stopping and pointing at the little shops that sell weird toys and disgusting fruits manages to bend time or something so that I seriously think the foot traffic actually starts to move backwards. And if you’re in a car just forget about it.

You think I’m kidding?

Here is a shot of Chinatown in June:

Just try to imagine it when it’s crowded with holiday traffic. Occasionally I like to go there and get dumplings with family this time of year. Off limits.

3. STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM ANYWHERE I MIGHT WANT TO GO DRINKING:

There is a bar in Murray Hill called Rolf’s. This is what Rolf’s looks like (this was taken with my phone so sorry for the quality):

You’re waiting for a punchline, aren’t you?

There isn’t one. Rolf’s is its own punchline. Around the holidays the owners go completely out of their minds and put up more decorations than, to be honest, the actual tree probably has. Rolf’s is known far and wide as the bar where Christmas goes to projectile vomit then die.

You may go to Rolf’s. The heat from the lights and the general creepiness of the dolls they hang up make it hard to last more than two beers there during the holidays.

Oh. Here are some of the dolls:

One year some of the dolls had mustaches.

Maybe lasting two beers would be stretching it.

Feel free to crowd into this place as, even if I do go there, I won’t be staying long.

Otherwise the rest of the bars are off limits.

4. NOW THAT I THINK ABOUT IT, JUST STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM NEW YORK ENTIRELY:

Honestly. It’s closed or something. And they built a wall around the tree this year. Here look:

It’s bedlam.

Stay away.

If you want to you can gaze at this picture of the tree. That should satisfy:

It really is pretty, isn’t it? And when you catch a glimpse of it as you turn the corner and look down that long alley of evergreens and statues and then walk in close to where the skating rink is and smell the chestnut vendors…

God damn it.

Okay. You can come to see the tree.

Just, you know, try and keep it down while you’re here.

It was during this text conversation that we realized that all of the movies would be trotted out, once again, starting this spring…only now in 3-D!

My friend had one thing to say: “I hate George Lucas.”

I agreed.

But over the past few days I’ve come to realize what a strong phrase that is, “I hate George Lucas,” and I began to wonder why a guy obsessed with puppets and magic could bring such strong emotion out of me. Oh, I know there are plenty of reason to hate the prequels (ChefElf covers those far better than I ever could). I have long since downgraded all of them to “Crap.”

But it wasn’t the prequels my friend and I were watching when our issuance of hatred arose. It was the originals. The new originals. The ones packed full of just utterly absurd changes that serve no purpose. In A New Hope we get to see Jabba! Hooray! And he’s presented in a way that makes absolutely no sense and as if fucking up his physical appearance wasn’t enough, we now get a scene where Han Solo steps on the tail of the most feared crime leader in the system and nobody cares. It’s played for laughs in fact. Ha. Ha.

In Empire, R2 gets eaten by a swamp monster and spat back out. Luke, in the original, wipes mud off of R2 and says: “You’re lucky you don’t taste very good.” Now, through the magic of editing, he says: “You were lucky to get out of there.” Awesome!

And this goes on. And on. And on. It’s like a madman is at the wheel of my childhood, and instead of passing by all my favorite memories he’s randomly making right-hand turns to see things no one cares about and tell fart jokes.

And yet still, I’m not sure that’s where my hate comes from, though mucking about in my childhood memories is not a good thing, to be sure.

No. I think I hate George Lucas because the prequels manage to make THE ENTIRE FIRST THREE MOVIES MAKE NO SENSE. Obie-Wan ages forty years in the time it takes Luke to grow into a teenager. Chewbacca, who fought at Yoda’s side during the Clone Wars (apparently), never once pipes up with the slightest bit of information. Vader doesn’t bother to look for his children or old master in his hometown. Oh, and also, nobody remembers or cares or believes in the Jedi, who less than twenty years ago were a major part of the Imperial whatever the hell it was called.

And I know, these things are somehow explained in the books. I get told that a lot.

But I don’t care about the books. People are constantly plugging up plot holes using a jury-rigged explanation from material that doesn’t exist in the movies. I get angry when fans defend the existence of cities that make zero sense by conjuring up some bizarre native cultural belief that is not addressed in the films. Or how I get assured that scenes of complete nonsense are actually perfectly explainable if I know the back-stories of the characters that got made up to explain the nonsensical scenes in question. In short, I get angry when anything outside of the movies needs to be brought in to explain the movies.

Because that is crap.

Pure and utter crap. You don’t get to have legions of fans and gh0st writers scramble to cover up the mistakes you were too lazy or too blind to see, Mister Lucas. You are not a writer, if you do so. You are not a creator. You are not giving anything to your art and you are not respecting your craft.

And that is why I hate you.

Look. Here. These are some notes I wrote trying to piece together one set of scenes for Persistent Illusions (warning: there might be spoilers in here assuming you can read my handwriting):

That’s a sequence of maybe four scenes. I wanted to make sure that my time-lines made sense. I wanted to make sure, since my characters are all over the world, that I had sunrises and sunsets occurring at the right time in the right places. I wanted to make sure that I didn’t accidentally skip too far ahead or give a character knowledge they couldn’t possibly have. I wanted to make sure that emotional responses had time to build, that fights had back stories, that breakdowns had build-ups.

I wanted to put together the best possible product I could for my readers.

I’m sure I made mistakes. And I know I fudged some things. Artists do that. But I thought long and hard about everything I fudged, everything I did that pushed the unspoken agreement between me and my readers that I’m going to be a good guide for them. And I tried as hard as I could to dim those down and I tried my damnedest to eliminate all my mistakes.

I’m not sure when George Lucas stopped caring, or if he ever did. Maybe he just got lucky in the originals. But I know that the minute you stop caring, the second you shrug and give no thought to putting your name on something you haven’t sweat for, that’s when you stop being an artist.

And to do that with your biggest project? To do that and manage to ruin your previous projects in the same motion?

No.

Just no.

I’ll never join you, Lucas.

Never.

I think I spotted a ray of hope for self-publishers this morning.

A lot of days I sit at my computer doing nothing more than trying to get people to pay attention to me. And not in a fun, “Look at me I’m wearing a lampshade on my head!” sort of way. In a repetative, mindless, grind known as cold-emailing.

I have numerous Google Alerts set up for terms that have something to do with my books: “Urban Fantasy,” “Independent Reviewers,” “Genre Tweaking Novels Where a Ronin Saves a Roman Slave From Being Burned to Death by Isaac Newton.”

Surprisingly that last one doesn’t prompt a lot of responses.

What I do get a lot of, though, are blogs and sites which review books or interview authors. And I sit here and send off email after email asking for reviews or an interview or a write-up. And then nothing happens.

It’s awesome. Really. Tons of fun.

This seemed like a great idea to me when I started, and it still seems like a necessary panning for gold sort of task, but very quickly the sites I was coming across began to fall into three categories.

They were either:

1. Tiny blogs with few readers who were happy to promote any book that anyone emailed to them.

2. Gibberish spewed by lunatics and organized by a somewhat artistically inclined orangutan.

3. A large, well-established blog that would take review requests but *would never review self-published titles.*

This last category always killed me. I mean, I know why they don’t review self-published books. Self-published books suck for the most part. I stand proudly in a class of authors that could be out-written by a somewhat artistically inclined orangutan if he wasn’t so swamped with requests to design new websites.

Except…except there are also authors like me. Authors who are self-published by choice. Authors who have a growing base of loyal fans because we take our work seriously, know what we’re doing, and are simply a natural offshoot of a massively flooded book market. Some of us with talent were bound to try out this self-publishing thing.

But the fact that this choice automatically shuts me out from some of the larger reviewing blogs is irritating and I always think that it would be nice if there were some caveats to their review requirements. Go read my reviews on Amazon; those are real and barely any are from people I know. But no amount of stars, no number of quotes, nothing gets past that wall of *we do not review self-published titles.*

And that’s not good for anyone. These rules have to change because more and more of us authors are trying end-arounds behind traditional publishers and, while much of the resulting pile will likely remain crap, some of that pile is going to be quality work published in a manner that will be commonplace in a decade.

So, basically the world needs to change in order to make me right. No problem.

But then, this morning, DUN DUN DUNNNN…I came across this site:

The Book Pushers

Their review policy reads as follows: “Previously we had a policy of not reviewing any self published books on the blog. This has now changed. We will be reviewing self published books, but we will only be reviewing copies that we have solicited or bought ourselves. This is due to the vast number of self published titles that are out there.”

So I still can’t technically approach them with my book, but they do review self-published novels!

Victory?

Not even close.

Hope?

Smells a bit like it, yes.