David Alastair Hayden

This post was orig­i­nally com­posed by Lind­say Buro­ker.

As authors, we spend a lot of time try­ing to pro­mote our books. Our biggest obsta­cle is obscu­rity because there are a lot of books out there. No, really. A lot.

We like to think that good sto­ries are all it takes to make it (in author terms “make it” usu­ally means “become well known enough and sell enough books that I can quit my day job and write for a liv­ing”), but you can doubtlessly think of mediocre books that are sell­ing bazil­lions of copies and authors you love who never make it out of the “mid-list” category.

Some­times it’s just the author (or pub­lish­ing house) with the biggest mar­ket­ing bud­get who wins, but you, as a reader, have amaz­ing power. Don’t believe for a sec­ond that you don’t have any­thing to do with whether an author makes it, because you do. A lot. No, really. A lot.

Why does this mat­ter to you? Well, authors who get to quit their day jobs can write faster and put more books out for you!

The fol­low­ing are some lit­tle things you can do that can make a big dif­fer­ence. Some of them only take a few sec­onds. Your favorite authors will appre­ci­ate the effort. Trust me.

Help­ing out on Amazon

Ama­zon is the big kahuna of book sell­ers, espe­cially when it comes to ebooks, so help­ing an author “get found” on there can give them a big boost. You can cer­tainly do these things on other book­store sites as well (noth­ing against copy­ing and past­ing a review, for exam­ple), but Ama­zon tends to have more cool fea­tures to help an author get found.

Here’s the list (any one of these things can help):

• If you do noth­ing else, con­sider writ­ing a review on Ama­zon, even if the book already has quite a few and/or you’ve reviewed it else­where. There’s evi­dence that rat­ings and reviews fac­tor into the Ama­zon algo­rithms that decide which books are pro­moted on the site (i.e. cer­tain books are rec­om­mended to cus­tomers who bought books in sim­i­lar gen­res). If review­ing isn’t your bag, don’t worry about writ­ing paragraphs-long in-depth stud­ies of the book; maybe you could just pen a few sen­tences with a cou­ple of specifics about why you liked the book.

• “Tag” the book with genre-appropriate labels (i.e. thriller, steam­punk, para­nor­mal romance). You don’t have to leave a review to do this; you just need an account at Ama­zon. A com­bi­na­tion of the right tags and a good sales rank­ing can make a book come up when cus­tomers search for that type of story on Amazon.

• Give the book a thumb’s up. This takes less than a sec­ond and prob­a­bly doesn’t do much, but it may play into Amazon’s algo­rithms to a lesser extent than reviews/ratings.

• Make a “List­ma­nia” List and add your favorite authors’ books to it. This cre­ates another avenue for new read­ers to find books. It’s bet­ter to cre­ate lists around sim­i­lar types of books (i.e. gen­res or sub-genres) than to do a smor­gas­bord, and con­sider titling it some­thing descrip­tion so folks will be more inclined to check it out, ie. “Fun heroic fan­tasy ebooks for $5 or less”

• If you have a Kin­dle, high­light some wise or fun quo­ta­tions from the book and share them pub­licly (if enough peo­ple share their high­lights, they’ll show up at the bot­tom of a book’s page).

Help­ing out with Social Media

If you’re involved with Twit­ter, Face­book, Digg, Stum­ble­Upon, etc., you can give your favorite authors a shout-out when they release new books. If they blog, you can fol­low their site (through Google Reader or other RSS read­ers) and share the link when they post some­thing that may be inter­est­ing to your friends. If they’re on Twit­ter, you can fol­low them and retweet their links now and then.

Authors don’t expect you to fol­low them 24/7 and repeat every­thing they say (that might actu­ally alarm some folks…), but a lit­tle pro­mo­tional help now and then is greatly appreciated.

If you like to be social about books, you can join sites such as Goodreads, Shel­fari, or Library­Thing. You can help your favorite authors by post­ing reviews and talk­ing about their books on those sites, or you can just use those places to find online read­ing bud­dies with com­mon interests.

Help­ing out with Your Blog

Do you ever talk about books or what you’re read­ing on your blog? You might con­sider review­ing your favorite authors on your site (you could even make a few dol­lars if you signed up as an Ama­zon affil­i­ate).

Also, if most of your favorites main­tain web­sites, you could add an “author blogroll” list in your menu with links to those sites.

And Lastly…

These days, most authors have web­sites and con­tact forms so you can get in touch. If you enjoyed their work, con­sider send­ing them a short note to let them know. While it won’t help them sell more books, it’ll make their day.

Thanks for read­ing (this post and books in general!).

This post was orig­i­nally com­posed by Lind­say Buro­ker and is shared with permission.

Alter­nate Title: The Sea­son of Famil­ial Obligation

Some of you may be won­der­ing: Where are all the books David promised us in late 2011? I’ve read Wrath of the White Tigress and The Storm Dragon’s Heart and now I want more. More, damn it, more!

I am deeply sorry. Noth­ing would make me hap­pier than hav­ing more books out for you to read.

I am work­ing on the next book, but things are going slowly. And at this point I’m four months behind on my pub­lish­ing sched­ule. It’s likely that I’ll be five months behind once Decem­ber ends.

I’ve been stressed by inter­mit­tent famil­ial oblig­a­tions over the last 16 months. For most of that time I was able to keep pace with my work and so I thought I could get out a num­ber of books late this year in spite of it all. In June, the stress of oblig­a­tions ratch­eted up but then cooled off again. I was a month behind pace then, but fig­ured I could catch up.

Then came September.

I won’t go into details because they would do nei­ther me nor you any good and most of it is pri­vate in nature. Suf­fice to say, my par­ents have been in dire need of my assis­tance. And when my time isn’t directly occu­pied by help­ing them, I find myself unable to work. The stress of the sit­u­a­tion some­times leaves my mind vacant of cre­ativ­ity and I want noth­ing but rest or some mind­less endeavor.

In short, I’m hav­ing to take care of things only I can take care of, things I do out of love and respect for my fam­ily. Things that are not pleas­ant and leave me lit­tle cre­ative time.

But in Jan­u­ary, my time will be my own again. The bits of work I can man­age now will become tor­rents and new work shall appear.

It may not be bla­tantly obvi­ous to you, dear reader, not at this point any­way, but The Storm Dragon’s Heart (SDH) and Wrath of the White Tigress (WWT) are set on the same world: Kai­wen, Kawan, Qawin, and other var­i­ous spellings appro­pri­ate to the respec­tive lan­guages of the planet. I’ve writ­ten six nov­els, and only one of them doesn’t take place on Kaiwen.

Pawan Kor from Wrath of the White Tigress

SDH takes place on the island con­ti­nent of Okoro, which I’d guess is about the size of Aus­tralia. It is on the other side of Kai­wen from Pawan Kor which is the south­ern por­tion of a mas­sive con­ti­nent, the name of which I can­not remem­ber at the moment. (Yeah, I know. Cut me some slack. I came up with all the big pic­ture stuff a decade ago and haven’t needed all of it yet.) Pawan Kor is big­ger than Okoro. Per­haps as big across as Spain to India.

A few clues that show the books share a com­mon world:

• Two moons: Zhura Dark Moon and Avida Bright Moon. You’ll note that their names are the same in both set­tings. An odd but inten­tional choice.

• Magic func­tions the same and a chan­nel­ing stone is gen­er­ally required. The chan­nel­ing stones are called qavra in WWT and kavaru in SDH. Note their names are dif­fer­ent, an odd but inten­tional choice. Qavra are best worked by peo­ple of Zin­darhi descent, or their mys­te­ri­ous, remain­ing ances­tors the Qaiar Zin­darhi. For those beings, use of the stones is nat­ural. I will say no more.

• The nature of deities is the same. Greater deities linked to celes­tial bod­ies and big con­cepts. Such deities are dis­tant and per­haps have no direct impact on the world. Many lesser deities of vary­ing pow­ers, mostly minor spir­its. (The world is pri­mar­ily ani­mistic.) There’s a lot going on in the back­ground that will be revealed in time. I mapped out the source of magic and deities for the world, based on events that took places tens of thou­sands of years before the events of these nov­els. I will say no more.

• White steel which can cut through mag­i­cal ener­gies and beings. Dark iron which is the oppo­site of white steel. It’s able to soak up ener­gies. I’m sure there are other small details that I’m just not think­ing about at the moment. Hell, I’m likely for­get­ting some­thing major. And I may be hold­ing out on some­thing.
  
  

I have included in this post the maps for SDH and WWT, but these are sim­pli­fied views of larger, more detailed maps that I’m not shar­ing yet.

North­ern Okoro from Storm Dragon

Chains of a Dark God­dess should have the larger view of Pawan Kor along with a focused map for the story itself. The big­ger map of Okoro will appear with Legacy of the Lost Gods. Why am I hold­ing out? Because I’m still refin­ing some of the loca­tions and want them to be as accurate.

If you’ve always thought Avatar: The Last Air­ben­der needed a shot of Johnny Quest vibe, this here’s the book for you!

The Storm Dragon’s Heart

Ture­sobei dreamed of adven­ture, a way to prove he was no longer a child.

Wiz­ards should be care­ful what they wish for.

Des­tined to become his clan’s next high wiz­ard, stu­dious Ture­sobei has con­stantly strug­gled to live up to other people’s demands and expec­ta­tions, but now he’s had enough.

When his treasure-hunting father arrives with impor­tant news to dis­cuss with the cur­rent high wiz­ard, Ture­sobei spies on their secret meet­ing and acci­den­tally foils an assas­si­na­tion attempt. As a reward his father invites him on an expe­di­tion to find an arti­fact known as the Storm Dragon’s Heart.

But when dis­as­ter strikes, their quest becomes a race for survival.

Aided by a sassy ninja cat-girl and a mys­te­ri­ous diary that trans­forms into a winged famil­iar, Ture­sobei must face deadly cultists, venge­ful spir­its, and a mad wiz­ard from a rival clan who’s deter­mined to use the arti­fact to destroy Turesobei’s homeland.

The Storm Dragon’s Heart will delight read­ers with a thrilling tale of exotic lands, mys­ti­cal crea­tures, for­bid­den love, and fast-paced adven­ture. (Ages 10 and up)

Pur­chase the ebook at: Ama­zon or Barnes & Noble.

The print book is com­ing later this month!

Galac­tus would never select me. I’m a ter­ri­ble her­ald. Nor­rin Radd I am not, though I, too, seek Shalla-Bal. I have been sit­ting on impor­tant news, fail­ing to alert you, dear reader and friend, that my novel of heroic sword and sor­cery adven­ture, Wrath of the White Tigress, will soon debut as the first novel from Typ­ing Cat Press! [1]

WotWT will be avail­able from Ama­zon, B&N, iBooks, and other fine ebook retail­ers at the highly afford­able price of $4.99. The spe­cific release date is yet unknown (though some­time in the last days of June). I will let you know as soon as I can. (The Kin­dle and Nook ver­sions will appear first.)

The print ver­sion will fol­low in late July, priced around $10–12. Above and to the right, you can see the beau­ti­ful cover art cre­ated for WotWT by San­dara. This same cover will soon appear on the Podi­o­books ver­sion as well. (I’m look­ing into doing an Audi­ble ver­sion of the book for those of you who’d like to pur­chase the entire audio­book with­out interruptions.)

WRATH OF THE WHITE TIGRESS

He thought he was a hero.
She showed him the truth.
Now he’ll do any­thing to stop the man who made him a monster.

For twenty years Jaska Bavadi has faith­fully served the Palym­far Order and its Grand­mas­ter, the pow­er­ful wiz­ard Salahn, but an encounter with Zyrella Anthari, last high priest­ess of the White Tigress, shat­ters the spell that chained Jaska’s mind.

Now faced with the hor­rors he unknow­ingly com­mit­ted against peo­ple he swore to pro­tect, Jaska must put Salahn’s reign of cru­elty to an end. Together, he and Zyrella race to save the White Tigress and stop Salahn from open­ing the Gates of the Under­world. An army of palym­far war­riors stands in their way, but the dan­ger­ous secrets that cloud their des­tinies threaten to doom them first.

In the tra­di­tion of ­­Michael Moor­cock, David Gem­mell, and Glen Cook, Wrath of the White Tigress deliv­ers a thrilling tale sword & sor­cery fans will love.

[1] Full Dis­clo­sure: I am a co-founder of Typ­ing Cat Press.

The power went out here after a storm yes­ter­day after­noon. A small storm. We live deep in the woods. Lots of places where a tree could strike the lines along the way. We were sup­posed to have power back on at 6 pm. Didn’t hap­pen until 12:30 am. Grumble.

Nat­u­rally, the bat­tery went out on my Mac­book, delay­ing com­ple­tion of the ebook I was work­ing on. (I unplugged the Mac­book dur­ing the storm.) And I hadn’t charged my iPod Touch in a few days, so I couldn’t read any books or write on it.

The solu­tion?

Why pull out a type­writer, of course. Specif­i­cally, my gold-speckled Olympia SF from the 1950’s (?). Lap-sized with the sweet action you’d expect from an Olympia. And of the ten type­writ­ers I own, it has my favorite font. (I’m a 12 char­ac­ters per inch kinda guy.)

The rub, of course, is that I’m not work­ing on com­pos­ing any­thing new at the moment. I have two nov­els in first draft state that I’m work­ing on revis­ing. I’m gen­er­at­ing two ebooks. I have new things planned, but I don’t want to start them until I take care of the afore­men­tioned projects.

I could have read by my bright LED Cole­man lantern. (A Hunger Games reread is next up.) But I wasn’t in a read­ing mood. I wanted to work damn it.

So I started a new story: THE BONES OF KAZARDAHL. Novel, short story, nov­el­ette, novella? I don’t know really. Though I’d wage money on novella. It’s adven­ture fan­tasy. Not too seri­ous or grim, though that might change. I have barely an inkling of where it will go. Just the notion of a few char­ac­ters. Should be fun.

How it starts:

With fire and sword and a thirst for some­thing, any­thing but the relent­less cold and howl­ing winds of the North Mark, the reavers descended on the sleep­ing town of Kazardahl. Sleep­ing save for one man who had retired there. One man, but not just any man. Once he had been the great­est wiz­ard in the King­dom of Bregh. And awake this late at night he was because retired or not, it is not the habit of a wiz­ards to sleep at night.

If you are going to offer authors copy­edit­ing or other pub­lish­ing ser­vices, please don’t quote prices in terms of pages.

I have no idea what the page-length is for any of my nov­els. I’m cer­tain I don’t care. I’m cer­tain that if I knew it would tell me noth­ing of value. Yes, if I for­mat the work for a stan­dard sub­mis­sion, I will know how many pages there are, if I bother to look at the total. (Never have before.) Assum­ing every­one uses the same beau­ti­ful Courier font and mar­gins, though…

But if I’m look­ing to pro­duce an ebook myself, I’m never going to use stan­dard sub­mis­sion for­mat­ting. Why would I?

And if you quote your by-page ser­vices along with spe­cific for­mat­ting require­ments, that would work. How­ever, the mes­sage it sends to me is that you’re stuck in the past.

Pages are vari­able in the 21st cen­tury. Stick to word counts.

(Yes, I could tell you how many pages are in any of my new short story drafts because I do those on man­ual type­writ­ers. How­ever, those are only rough drafts, not even close to fin­ished works. Plus, the pitch sizes and line spaces are very dif­fer­ent on the ’29 Royal Portable, the ’56 Olympia SM-3, and the ’55 Her­mes Rocket. So that doesn’t tell you much, either. And really, this bit here is beside the point. I just wanted to talk about typewriters.)

Some peo­ple need to chill out about it. By some peo­ple I’m mostly refer­ring to writ­ers and hard­core readers.

• The world will not end if you write a story in the present tense.
• The world will not end if you read a story in the present tense.
• No story will, in fact, ever end the world.

I’m bring­ing this up because I men­tioned writ­ing in the present tense in my pre­vi­ous post on Fast Writ­ing. I find it easy and nat­ural to write in the present tense. Doesn’t bother me to read it, either. But I have never used it in a story because of all the don’t-do-its I’ve heard over the years, start­ing in cre­ative writ­ing classes at university.

So I thought I’d google it and see how things have changed?

Well, it seems that it is both more accept­able and more vil­i­fied than ever before. Sigh. Life in the mod­ern world. Or is it only mod­ern Amer­ica with our increas­ing love of polarization?

The amount of vit­riol some spew over present tense writ­ing would make you think there is a short­age of past tense books they could pick up for their enjoy­ment. It makes some peo­ple irra­tionally angry. Fine, you don’t like it. It pisses yel­low in your mel­low. Okay, sure. Not your thing. But it is not kick­ing your kit­tens. It won’t hurt you. You don’t have to read it, or attack oth­ers over it.

I also saw numer­ous claims about its use hurt­ing sales. Well, I’m sure it wouldn’t help you get an agent or get your first book con­tract from a pub­lisher. It’s also killing Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Game tril­ogy. No one is buy­ing those books because…

Oh wait, peo­ple ARE buy­ing those books in mass.

Maybe the aver­age reader doesn’t give a shit about tense so long as the book is cap­ti­vat­ing and enter­tain­ing. This is prob­a­bly the case. Your aver­age reader doesn’t go online and bitch about writing.

Maybe she’d sell a few more copies, but I doubt it. First per­son present tense seems nec­es­sary for those books. And yes, one can find plenty of Hunger Games men­tions spread amongst the vit­riol. Often as an exam­ple of a book they liked despite the poor choice of tense. Took them so long to get used to it. Threw them off. Etc.

There are many argu­ments for and against present tense writ­ing. I will not recount them unless asked. I do not find them per­sua­sive in general.

What about you, dear reader?

Have a sane opin­ion on present tense writing?

I present to you, dear read­ers, a short story of dark fan­tasy wherein you will encounter an unholy grail, tor­tured souls, and most hor­ri­fy­ing of all: South Alabama. Also, a whiskey still.

You can down­load the ePub Ver­sion or the Kin­dle Ver­sion, or con­tinue read­ing the story here on the blog.

THE GRAIL OF GADDA BISBY
by David Alas­tair Hayden

Word spread from psy­chics around the coun­try that the Holy Grail resided in the back­woods of Alabama near Mur­der Creek.

For some years, thou­sands drove down the area’s old dirt roads and hiked through its dense stretches of south­ern pines and sweet gums. Accord­ing to con­ven­tional rea­son­ing, if a per­son didn’t find the Grail, it just hadn’t judged them wor­thy. Even­tu­ally the hys­te­ria faded see­ing as how no one seemed worthy.

The Grail did reside in those woods, but only one man could find it.

Gadda Bisby had always lived there, far as any­one, includ­ing him­self, remem­bered. Every time his chest started hurt­ing, every time the night­mares descended onto him, he’d crawl out to the secret hid­ing place. And with moon­light sparkling on the water–he didn’t get the han­ker­ing any­time else–he would drink from the old wooden cup and feel bet­ter. Gadda couldn’t remem­ber fam­ily, friends, noth­ing except the first drink he had taken from the Grail and how the pain in his chest had quit him and how the night­mares had left as well. He hadn’t even called it the Grail until peo­ple got stirred about it. It had just been Old Wooden Cup to him.

Gadda reck­oned he was ninety to a hun­dred years old. He appeared sixty, cleaned up much younger, though he hadn’t done that for quite a while. He hadn’t been into town for at least twenty years, and he didn’t need doc­tors or food or any­thing else but a sip from that spe­cial cup once to a month.

Gadda didn’t tell no one about the Grail. He clung to it and couldn’t bear to think of any­one else hav­ing it. Folks would stroll by his ram­shackle house and poke fun at him and his rusted, burned out ‘42 Ford. Gadda laughed at them in return because he knew where the Grail was.

He grew lonely, but get­ting around too many peo­ple always brought the hurt­ing on worse. The night­mares would haunt him day and night. At the worst times, he would almost remem­ber some event from long ago, some­thing hor­ri­ble he was sure he didn’t want to recall. But the Grail and being alone fixed that prob­lem, and so he lived the way he lived for year after year.

But even in those sleepy south­ern woods, things couldn’t stay the same forever.

» Read the rest of this entry «

I haven’t posted much lately because I’ve been writ­ing furi­ously. And now, the first draft of Chains of a Dark God­dess is com­plete at 96,000 words!

This tale of Dag­gers & Dev­il­try takes place in Pawan Kor*, which is the same set­ting I used for Wrath of the White Tigress. The events in Chains occur approx­i­mately three years later, and one char­ac­ter from Tigress crosses over into this new tale. It is not, how­ever, a sequel.

Per­haps a sta­tis­ti­cal dis­cus­sion of how I wrote this novel would be inter­est­ing. The first chap­ters (about 15,000 words) and the plot were cre­ated in July 2009, then I let it steep for a year (not entirely by design) before return­ing to it in August 2010. I don’t have data from late in the sum­mer or just after Dragon*Con. I do, how­ever, have data from the last 40 days: 34 days of work, 6 days off. In that time, I wrote 68,000 words for an aver­age of 2,000 words per work day. The fewest words writ­ten in a sin­gle day: 200. The most words writ­ten in a sin­gle day: 7,000.

I’m pleased with this, though I’d like to see that aver­age climb to 2,500–3,000 words per day. Hon­estly, I’d pre­fer to do 5,000–10,000 words a day. And I feel I’m per­fectly capa­ble of doing that in a first draft. I sus­pect the more I write, the closer I will get to that goal. If I could write a novel in about a week and then spend two months clean­ing it up, I’d be a happy, happy writer.

I expect the sec­ond draft to add about 10,000 words to the over­all length, though I will be cut­ting as well as adding. My method is to write a sloppy first draft that focuses on get­ting the story told, even if the writ­ing itself stinks. Dur­ing this process I often crudely sketch out descrip­tions of places and char­ac­ters. The sec­ond draft is where I make the prose sing (I hope) and fill out descrip­tions and back­ground details that I left out. Or, cor­rect details that I changed later in the story, some­times adding in new ideas and con­cepts. And, I may add new scenes or shift inter­nal char­ac­ter explo­rations into exter­nal forms. For exam­ple, instead of a char­ac­ter think­ing about whether he can sur­vive a bat­tle, I might rewrite it to have him dis­cussing his wor­ries with a friend.

I have no idea how long it will take me to com­plete the sec­ond draft, but the plan is to do it in less than one month. And I’m already 26,000 words into it!

* Actu­ally, all the nov­els I’ve writ­ten so far take place in dif­fer­ent parts of the same world, which I usu­ally call Kaiwen.