Archive for the 'Publishing' Category
March 19th, 2013 by jdsawyer
At long last, 
Volumes 2 and 3 of The Clarke Lantham Mysteries are available in paperback! The story which began with the cutting-edge biotech noir of And Then She Was Gone continues in Book 2 with hauntings, lawsuits, car crashes, and holiday relatives in the dark and friendly little cozy A Ghostly Christmas Present, featuring new cover art and line drawings by Kitty NicIaian.
When it comes to raw-deal Christmas presents, you can’t beat being thrown in an out-of-state jail on a trumped up charge—but detective Clarke Lantham can’t resist a morbid challenge. So when he calls up his brother for help with bail, he steels himself for the ordeal of spending a holiday weekend with relatives who put the “strange” back in “estranged.”
That was his first mistake. But with only two days to clear his name before he gets thrown back in the slammer—and an old client gumming up the works, a ten-year-old niece with a ghost problem, and the occasional murder competing for his attention—it probably won’t be his last.
Book 2 of The Clarke Lantham Mysteries
Now, you can read the book View from Valhalla calls “A creepy and clever dose of Christmas cheer from the maniac in cell three” from the comfort of your armchair without the bother of a screen.
Get a taste of A Ghostly Christmas Present here, or buy it in Paperback, or as an ebook for Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iPad, or any other e-reader.
And then the adventure continues a week later on New Year’s Eve, with the romantic skin-of-your-teeth manhunt Smoke Rings.
Every detective deserves a second chance…
Holidays make Clarke Lantham squirm–not even New Year’s Eve escapes his scorn. With his space cramped, his personal life on the skids, and his business under assault from lawyers and bill collectors, he holes up in his office, counting his blessings that the year from hell ends tonight.
So when an old girlfriend shows up with a chance for a $50,000 reward and a New Year’s Eve reconciliation, he jumps at the chance. After all, things can only get better, right?
Yeah, right.
Book 3 of The Clarke Lantham Mysteries
Ginnie Dare author Scott Roche says “Sawyer hits it out of the park…a sexy, emotional, dangerous story I couldn’t put down.” Find out for yourself what he means: whet your appetite for Smoke Rings here, or buy it in Paperback, or as an ebook for Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iPad, or any other e-reader.
There’s a lot more coming for Lantham in the next few weeks, so load up on books and keep your eyes on this blog.
April 3rd, 2012 by jdsawyer
So, as many of you might have noticed, we occasionally produce audiobooks through ArtisticWhispers Productions. Those of you that have may have also noticed that we haven’t put a new one out (or, at least, anything resembling a complete one) in about two years.
The hiatus is over. As of this past weekend, the following books have all moved out of the pre-production stage and into the production stage.
The books currently in production are:
Throwing Lead
And Then She Was Gone
A Ghostly Christmas Present
Smoke Rings
Free Will
Being In Production
Being “In Production” means that the project is currently being recorded. Some bits of pre-production might go on concurrently, for example…
Casting
All of the fiction books will be full-cast productions in the classic AWP style. Here are the numbers on the roles available for each book (bearing in mind that, since this is audio, actors can double, triple, or quintiple up on roles):
And Then She Was Gone needs 27 roles filled. 9 of these have five lines or fewer.
A Ghostly Christmas Present needs 14 roles filled, 4 of these have five lines or fewer
Smoke Rings needs 21 roles filled. About half of these are roles with fewer than five lines.
Free Will needs 118 roles filled. About half of these are roles with fewer than five lines.
What Happens Now
Starting later this week, I will spool out the open casting calls. These books will be available commercially, so if you wish to participate, in addition to having the ability to record clean audio and (for the more involved roles) the willingness to take live-direction, you must be willing to sign a contract detailing the release of your voice for commercial purposes and entitling you to payment.
Payment for these books, because they’re the first commercial round, will be on a deferred fee basis + royalties. Because payment is involved, you will need to include your Tax ID number on the contract and, when payment comes due, fill out the relevant tax forms.
Watch This Space
These are the first five of an anticipated 9 productions this year, and there will be a similar number next year. I’m looking to build a stable of actors I can work with medium-to-long term.
What Does This Mean for the Podcast?
The podcast returns with Free Will (rebooted) in late spring/early summer. I’m aiming for Balticon, but might overshoot or undershoot by as much as three weeks, depending on how briskly casting goes.
Free Will will be approximately 60 episodes long, and will start out as a bi-weekly podcast, ramping to weekly once the entire production is wrapped. As such, it will run for 13-19 months before we reach the end. Since such a long story full of cliffhangers will drive some of you around the bend, the full audiobook will be available for purchase by DragonCon, if not before.
Additionally, the initial chapters of the other books will drop in the feed so that you who subscribe can hear what’s going on in the productions that aren’t delivered to you on the feed.
And, of course, Dealing In will return, as I sense we’ll have quite a lot to talk about as the story unfolds.
Future novels will podcast after Free Will wraps, but there will always be more content available than what’s going through the ‘cast. You all have spoken loudly, and we here around the Bay have heard your cries.
Stay tuned! More in a couple days.
Update: Free Will casting call has posted. Find it here
March 5th, 2012 by jdsawyer
You heard about
it here eighteen months ago when the project first started, now it’s done. I am pleased at long last to announce the release of Throwing Lead: A Writer’s Guide to Firearms (and the People Who Use Them).
Here’s the back-of-book copy:
While they may be an indispensable tool of drama, firearms aren’t something you see everyday in real life. If you write fiction, you have to know about them–but what if you don’t have any formal training, or a job that brings you into regular contact with firearms?
Sure, you could watch a lot of CSI, but as you’ll quickly discover upon cracking open this volume, you can’t trust everything you see on TV.
Entertaining and humorous in style, Throwing Lead shows you the gestalt of guns, showing you the history of small arms in one readable, accessible, graphics-rich and easy-to-reference volume. Packed full of revealing research shortcuts to help you find accurate information on your book’s period and culture, and cut through the jargon to get you the information you need with a minimum of fuss, it’ll leave you chuckling and get your creative juices flowing with tips on underexploited plot devices and hidden opportunities for comedy and drama that firearms present, but that authors often miss.
This unique tour of the history, technology, and cultural development of firearms, examines how they’ve shaped our language and idiom, influenced manufacturing technology, and created warrior cultures in different professions. More than just a “how to write about it” manual or a technical glossary, this rigorously non-political guide reveals the common myths about firearms foisted upon us by filmmakers while using those mistakes as springboards for deeper discussion.
Topics covered include:
Terminology
Safety practices
Handguns
Long guns
Concealed carry
Ballistics and Forensics
The visceral experience of shooting a gun
Home defense
Police tactics and psychology
Criminal cultures
Snipers and spies
Gunfighters and PTSD
Ammunition construction and the handloading culture
Situational awareness and threat assessment
Science Fiction weaponry
Space combat
Historical weaponry
Urban warfare
Weapons maintenance
Gun handling training drills
Gunshot wounds and medical science
Stupid criminal tricks
Crazy movie gun tricks that sometimes work in real life
Selecting the gun that best fits your character
And much, much more…
Buy it now for your Kindle, Nook, or grab it in all formats from Smashwords.
December 1st, 2011 by jdsawyer
I’ve been waiting for this day 
a long time. When I first wrote Down From Ten as a screenplay, a production company in Canada was going to be handling rights clearances for the Alan Jay Lerner music incorporated into one of the scenes. When I did the podcast, ASCAP was very helpful. But as a print book, I had to wade into a rights clearance arena I’d never worked with before.
It was worth it. And the folks at the company that manages the Lerner estate were very helpful. Because of their kind work, I can now proudly present you with the ebook version of Down From Ten, a novel uniquely close to my heart.
In early January, a group of friends gather for an annual retreat: eight artists, scientists, and authors cloistered together in a mansion in California’s high country for ten days of games, conversation, exhibition, and hedonism while isolated from the outside world.
The biggest Sierra snowstorm in over twenty years, however, is not part of their plans.
When the house is buried in an avalanche, leaving our heroes with no way to hike out, they must somehow survive and stay sane while waiting for rescue—which becomes difficult when they all start having the same dream.
“Down From Ten is a brilliant, sometimes creepy take on a bohemian cozy with surreal underpinnings and an irrepressibly touching ending.” –Gail Carriger, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Parasol Protectorate series
For the first time in text, read the story that View from Valhalla calls “Unique, lavish, and challenging…amazing in its scope and its detail…with THE most surprising ending I’ve EVER experienced.”
Get it now in Paperback or for your Kindle, Nook, or any other reader.
Or, read the first three chapters here.
Enjoy!
October 5th, 2011 by jdsawyer
We all know that adventurous types like Joe Konrath, and established types like Kris Rusch, and insanely successful types like J.K. Rowling have been having a ball publishing ebooks on their own–and we know that weirdos like me are going to do it because we’re maverick by nature and like tickling the envelope in ways that could get you arrested for molesting post office property, but what about other authors? What’s in it for them?
Why on earth would a youngish author (less than 20 years publishing) with ongoing publishing contracts ever even think about cheating on their publisher with Amazon, Smashwords, PubIt, et. al.? After all, isn’t it a lot of work? Who’s going to do the marketing? And if he’s getting checks from the big boys, why bother with the small-potatoes in ebookland? Why not just leave that stuff to the old guys with a backlist, and the newbies who aren’t good enough to land a New York Deal?
Continue reading ‘But I Already Have a Publisher…’
September 13th, 2011 by jdsawyer
So, the latest-and-greatest panic rumor is that Amazon is going to create a “Netflix for books,” where any Amazon Prime member can download (presumably) any ebook they want for nothing more than the cost of their Prime membership.
People on the net–particularly paranoid authors and lugubrious tech writers–have been speculating about something like this for a while now, and now, according to an article in Wired, Amazon’s actually putting out feelers to see if they can make it work.
Authors, needless to say, are in a lather, because they see the potential that a) their miniscule royalty share from publishers decreasing as more people effectively use the Amazon equivalent of a library instead of paying for books, and b) Amazon might use the sea change as an opportunity to give their e-publishers a big royalty cut (which has been the paranoid topic du jour ever since they bumped it from 35 to 70 percent).
Me? I think it’s bullshit, for several reasons:
Continue reading ‘Netflix for Books? Riiiiiight.’
August 30th, 2011 by jdsawyer
I’m going way out on a limb here. I’m only a lay enthusiast in the field of economics, not an expert in the field, but I’ve got a middling amount of business experience in a variety of different fields, and a strange notion has been growing on my mind lately:
What if the ebook revolution isn’t about ebooks? What if, instead, it’s a symptom of a fundamental restructuring of most of the nature of market economies?
Continue reading ‘The Ebook Revolution Isn’t about Ebooks’
July 11th, 2011 by jdsawyer
Apologies to those who are already tired of this–it’s threatening to become a hobby horse. Looks like with Google+, Google is going where every stupid lawyer has gone before: claiming “a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”
Ugh. I can tell you where my photo gallery WON’T be moving. I’m beginning to think that the phrase “Don’t Be Evil” is one of the more inventive demonstrations of the elastic nature of the English language.
Photofocus has full coverage. Check it out (because I’m frankly too annoyed to go through this all again). For those interested in my extended thoughts on the matter, read this post on the Dropbox mess, this post on how the economics of free online services actually work, and this post on perpetual licenses.
Meanwhile, I’m beginning to think we need a real test case for this kind of bullshit to either rule it out of order and illegal once and for all (in which case we can ignore these kinds of licensing terms), or make it clear that such clauses are enforceable (and under what circumstances) so that we know exactly what to avoid.
EFF? ACLU? Are you listening?
July 8th, 2011 by jdsawyer
Dropbox keeps trying. They’ve changed their TOS again–if you’re watching and waiting for them to get their act in order, check the link and see where they’re at now.
Meanwhile, Gigacom has posted an interesting analysis about what the public reaction to Dropbox might mean for the future of online privacy.
Finally, a reader wrote in privately to recommend the iTwin as a potential alternative to Dropbox. From my once-over, it looks to me like i’ll be very useful for a limited subsection of Dropbox users, and fairly idiot-proof, and it certainly does get around the disadvantages of the cloud services. It’s relatively inexpensive, so if you’re looking for an alternative it’s worth checking out.
July 6th, 2011 by jdsawyer
ECtimes posts an excellent analysis of why Dropbox’s TOS situation continues to be a problem for its users–and compares the current (revised several times since Friday) wording to the wording of some other, similar services. Worth a gander.
—addendum—
There are more updates on the Dropbox situation at my new blog post here.
