Shameless Plug - My New Novel
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@Zecc It's still confusing. I'd just say "After losing its war of independence, Ailon went back to being a colony" or similar.
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@Jaloopa said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
@mott555 said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
Once a former colony of the nearby Avennia system, Ailon lost its war of independence several years ago
Is it just me or is that a very confusing statement? Was it independent then lost a second independence war, did they declare independence and then lose?
It probably could be reworded a bit. My brain doesn't words quite like other people's brains, sometimes...
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@lolwhat said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
@mott555 said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
southern border
A southern border? In space?
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@HardwareGeek said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
@Jaloopa My take from reading it again:
Colony
Declared independence (former colony), but lost the war
No longer independent nor colony, but conquered and enslavedThis.
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@mott555 Take two on the blurb:
Ailon is a resource-rich, low-population world in the galaxy's Independent Regions. Originally a mining colony of the nearby Avennia system, Ailon once tried to break free, resulting in a brutal war which they lost after Thaddeus Marcell pirated a convoy of badly-needed weapons and matĆ©riel that was en-route to the Rebels of Ailon. Now, itās an oppressed and enslaved world, its conquered population forced to work at gunpoint for their Avennian overlords.
Still reeling from the wounds he sustained at Cadria Minor during his disastrous mission to Waverly, Thaddeus travels undercover to Ailon to see the fruits of his own evils firsthand. There, he volunteers for an organization that ostensibly works to provide medical care to the enslaved population, only to discover a brand-new secret rebellion, one thatās poised to start another war to try to free their world. But this new rebellion is naive, ill-equipped, and poorly-trained, sure to lose any battle they begin. Thaddeus, struggling with his new-found sense of guilt, must face a difficult and dangerous choice: Does he get involved and try to set things right? Because if the new Rebels of Ailon discover who he really is, they just might kill himā¦
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Our (anti?)hero has a face now...
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Yay, more Amazon WTFs! I'm finalizing my manuscript and working on formatting issues for the paperback on Book 2. And my first attempt was rejected because it had "too many blank pages in a row, which can confuse readers and appear like a printing error." And it helpfully shows me the blank pages in the online previewer, and yep, there are a bunch of blank pages there.
But my document I uploaded does not have those blank pages. Amazon inserted them themselves during post-processing, and somehow expects me to fix them.
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Well I guess the ebook is available for pre-order now.
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@mott555 Preordered. And in the "Customers Who Bought This Also Bought" carousel, right next to each other,
- That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (series)
- I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level (series)
- Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon (series)
- Didn't I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?! (series)
- Lazy Dungeon Master, vol. 2
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@TwelveBaud said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (series)
I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level (series)
Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon (series)
Didn't I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?! (series)
Lazy Dungeon Master, vol. 2That is really weird, because as far as I can tell, you must be the second pre-order (I was the first...lol). And I've never heard of any of those, much less bought them...
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I wonder if they're somehow including people who bought the first book too?
(They're all isekai, so I can see why people who bought any one of those would buy the other four. Just not sure how they got connected to yours! I've only read two of them - and haven't preordered your second book yet, just the first - so it can't be my fault!
)
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Pre-ordered. (I should really finish the first one.)
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
I wonder if they're somehow including people who bought the first book too?
Could be. I think I've had a couple hundred sales so far, and as a nobody who hasn't really figured out the proper ways of advertising and marketing it, I wouldn't be surprised if many of the buyers have some really strange tastes in writing. (inb4 of course they have strange tastes because they bought yours.)
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I got my first paperback proof. I need to nudge the cover around a bit because the spine overlaps the front slightly, and I've made manuscript fixes since this anyway, so this one's going to the shredder at some point.
Although I'm still making some minor edits to improve clarity or shuffle sentence structure around, most of the errors I'm finding at this point are really stupid. Like quote characters in the middle of words. Who does that?
About 470 pages now. It's quite hefty in the 6" x 9" format!
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Hmm...
Just got it - haven't had the chance to start reading yet.
So ... what does one have to do to get it signed?
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@cvi said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
So ... what does one have to do to get it signed?
I suppose you could mail me yours and I'll mail you a signed one in return. I guess I should look up what people do when they sign books? This is all very new to me still.
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@mott555 I think they typically sign it before shipping it out. Or show up at conventions to sign existing copies.
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Another voice to say that I'd also love a signed copy by whatever method, I was really pleasantly surprised by the first book. I was worried it was going to be Zap-Brannigan-as-the-protagonist-sci-fi and I was, thankfully, totally wrong. I really enjoyed number 1.
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Silly origin story here:
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@mott555 said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
I guess I should look up what people do when they sign books?
I think the common procedure is to write your name on the book and send bundles of cash to an unrelated third party.
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So, when's book 3 coming out?
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@TwelveBaud At this pace, beginning of 2020 I suppose.
Book 2 just went live (US links, you non-US-ians should be smart enough to find the right ones):
Ebook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KWHD3B5
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1728694019The downside to the length on this one is the paperback is expensive and I'll get basically nothing unless a billion of them sell...oh well.
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@mott555 said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
unless a billion of them sell
Have you considered translating it to Chinese and/or Hindi?
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@HardwareGeek said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
Hindi
Mildly amusing fact: I have so far earned $0.01 in royalties from India. Someone in India with a Kindle Unlimited account read one single page.
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My phone just dinged and said it was downloading the book. I guess that means it's released.
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@pie_flavor Weird. It's been out since the 1st.
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So far, sales seem to scale linearly with book count. So I guess the trick isn't to write an amazing bestseller that gets put on 15 million bookshelves, the trick is to write 15 million books instead. Of course, I only have two data points, so who knows.
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I just finished reading the first one the other day, and have to say I found it an enjoyable book ā enough to also order a copy of the second, now Iāve just read that itās out (I wasnāt keeping up, I admit).
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@mott555 said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
So far, sales seem to scale linearly with book count. So I guess the trick isn't to write an amazing bestseller that gets put on 15 million bookshelves, the trick is to write 15 million books instead. Of course, I only have two data points, so who knows.
Here is the truly beautiful part. For each new work you produce, it has the potential to reach a whole new group of fans. A portion of each new group you find has the potential to go back and purchase your other works. It keeps building and building. To put this in perspective, my 13th novel (1st book of my 4th series) is coming out in October, but all my earlier novels are still being purchased by people who just found my work through something else. On my last royalty check for the 6 month period ending in December 2014, my first novel, which has been sitting out there since 2009, still earned enough to pay my mortgage for the entire year.
That same royalty statement had 9 other items where I was still getting paid for work Iād done years before, so it is pretty sweet. You canāt reach that unless you keep producing books. Years ago Kevin J. Andersonāwho has never won any prestigious literary awardsāgave me the single best piece of professional writing advice Iāve ever heard. BE PROLIFIC. Iāve tried my best to do so. Iām on 13, thatās why I live in a nice house and my neighbors are doctors. Heās on 125. Thatās why he lives in a castle and his neighbors are all Denver Broncos. You see where Iām going with this?
But read the whole thing (and some other posts he links to).
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@boomzilla said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
Kevin J. Andersonāwho has never won any prestigious literary awards
Completely off-topic, but this amused me because I'm familiar with him as one of the worst Star Wars authors out there.
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@mott555
To be fair, he mostly wrote in the very tightly controlled "off the shelf series" - I don't think he ever really wrote in the EU before the publishing treadmill started churning out Star Wars: Hardy Boys Edition novels.
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@boomzilla said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
his neighbors are all Denver Broncos.
Eww; I don't think I'd want to be that successful.
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@mott555 said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
So far, sales seem to scale linearly with book count. So I guess the trick isn't to write an amazing bestseller that gets put on 15 million bookshelves, the trick is to write 15 million books instead. Of course, I only have two data points, so who knows.
This does seem to fit with writers like Barbara Cartland and Georges Simenon ā IIRC Simenon wrote a novel every two weeks pretty much on the clock, for example.
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So I've got a question or request for any British readers here. I'm going to have a small subplot in Book 3 regarding Earth, and I need a plausible name for a British starship. To be more specific, some kind of patrol craft/corvette/small frigate or something. I'd like to use a name that's currently in-service by the Royal Navy and would be somewhat recognizable as such. But the name also needs to be generic-enough that it wouldn't seem odd for an outside civilization to have a starship with the exact same name. Basically I want conflation between a British starship and one commissioned by the Norma Empire, which has absolutely no knowledge that a nation called Britain ever existed.
So I'm open to suggestions on this. Otherwise I may just pick a name at random from whatever list of RN ships I can find.
I was originally thinking HMS Victory, but on further investigation that seems to fit the same role as our own USS Constitution. It's just an ancient museum sailship from hundreds of years ago and it seems unlikely for the name to ever be pressed into service again for a modern (or, in my case, future) vessel. So I don't think that one would work even though it's very recognizable and also pretty generic.
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@mott555 Minor spoiler/overview of that subplot because why not. It shouldn't really spoil much, but it will indicate to the reader that Earth is more than just a figment of the protagonist's imagination.
An intelligence agent in Marcell's force briefly encounters a crazy old homeless man who claims he is from Britain and was stationed on a starship named HMS *Placeholder* when it was lost. The agent initially dismisses the story, but later he runs a query on the HMS *Placeholder*. The first hit is a warship currently in use by the Norma Empire, the largest spacefaring nation in my universe, and was never lost in action.But a second result that he almost misses comes from Thaddeus Marcell's own private notes regarding Earth, where a British starship with the same name was found damaged and completely abandoned after all contact was lost with it on a routine patrol. It happened some 40 years ago and was a big enough story to be common knowledge to anyone from Earth, which is how it made it into Marcell's own info dumps on Earth that he maintains to help his forces search for it.
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@mott555
Boaty Mcboatface ... I couldn't recommend any other name
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@Luhmann said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
@mott555
Boaty Mcboatface ... I couldn't recommend any other nameStarry McStarface. Sheesh, it's a star ship not a water ship.
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@Luhmann said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
@mott555
Boaty Mcboatface ... I couldn't recommend any other name
I really should have seen this one coming.
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@mott555 said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
So I'm open to suggestions on this. Otherwise I may just pick a name at random from whatever list of RN ships I can find.
That's probably your best bet.
None of the in service Navy ships would really be recognisable as such, as they're not really "famous" unless (presumably) you're some sort of military boat nerd.You might get away with HMS Victory because I'd wager you'd find more people who recognised it as a Naval ship than people who knew it was some ancient ship that's been in dry dock for nearly a century.
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@loopback0 Yeah, I see several in that list that would work fine. But as a non-Brit I didn't know if any were well-known or not.
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@boomzilla
But there is no historical reference for Starry!
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@Placeholder said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
@mott555 said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
HMS Placeholder
I am fine with this
This place is the worst of the worst.
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@mott555 You could actually weave something like that into a joke.
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@pie_flavor said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
weave something like that into a joke.
Like the tapistry from Bayeux?
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@mott555 said in Shameless Plug - My New Novel:
@loopback0 Yeah, I see several in that list that would work fine. But as a non-Brit I didn't know if any were well-known or not.
Other than Victory, none jump out at me anyway.
Based on the spoiler, maybe Erebus works? Itās not an obviously famous name as such, but it has been used for several warships in the 19th and 20th centuries. OTOH, the name refers to Greek mythology, which may not be plausible for your setting.
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Status: Feeling unusually inspired, but about the wrong story. I should be working on Book 3 of the Thaddeus Marcell Chronicles. Instead, I've written about 20,000 words1 for Book 3 of the sequel series instead. All since Thursday. I think I like the characters in the sequel series better.
1For comparison, my first book was around 85,000 words, second book was around 140,000.
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PSA: Both of my released works are on sale for this week for $0.99 US and Ā£0.99 in the UK (Kindle e-book edition only).
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Random blog about maps and geography and such.
A Short Geography Lesson - TJ Mott
Iām doing some planning and mapping while I detail out some parts for my upcoming third novel, The Princeās Revenge, and part of that involves adding some areas to my map of the āgalaxyā. I decided to share a terrible cell phone picture of the map and go over a couple points, just for fun. [ā¦]
If you only want to see the map and not read, here's a shrunk version (NodeBB won't let me upload the full sized one and I'd rather not hotlink in case something goes wrong with my site.
Galactic coordinate system - Wikipedia
How Authors Get Paid, part 2
