Archive for the 'Publishing' Category
April 16th, 2011 by jdsawyer
It’s tax weekend, and if you’re like most 
Americans you’re madly rushing to get your forms (or extensions) filed. Of course, if you’re not American, you’ll have to deal with taxes sooner or later anyway. In either case, chances are you’ll hit the end of your weekend and be forced from the gorgeous spring weather to the inside of an office, or a warehouse, or a truck–and that’s when you’ll really need a bit of a vacation.
As your fantasy travel agent, allow me to offer you a guided tour of the San Francisco Bay Area like you’ve never seen it before: through the eyes of detective Clarke Lantham, sentenced to the hell of the suburbs in his quest to find a missing teenage girl. For the first time in paperback from AWP Mystery comes And Then She Was Gone, the adventure described by Gail Carriger as “full of snappy one-liners I’m dying to quote” and by Seth Harwood as “a mystery so dark and complex that you could lose a molar biting into it.”
Now available from AWP Mystery in paperback, And Then She Was Gone is a tense, funny, action packed adventure that sticks its fingers just under edge in order to flip it over. The handsome new edition rings in at 214 pages contains the full text of the ebook edition, plus a map detailing the geography that plays such an integral role in the story, along with a sample of the second Clarke Lantham novel, A Ghostly Christmas Present.
Now, it’s true that you can buy the novel at Amazon now, and you’ll be able to find it in bookstores this fall, but for you loyal folk that read my blog, it’s available for a special rate. Until May 15, buy your copy by clicking here and using the coupon code Q38WV4AS, and you’ll receive $1.50 off the $9.99 cover price.
Finally, for those of you who run vending booths at conventions (or who work in bookstores) and would like to carry And Then She Was Gone, shoot me an email from the Contact Form and I will send you the AWP Books wholesale pricing schedule.
I’ll see you between the pages!
April 7th, 2011 by jdsawyer
Time for a new short story–this one is called 
Angels Unawares. It first appeared as part of the Sculpting God series, which is currently re-podcasting from this blog. It later appeared as part of The Podthology, last year’s anthology of the best of podcast short fiction (along with Cold Duty, available at right, and The Man In The Rain, which which will release in a few days).
Now, to brighten your e-book reader, I give you one of my favorite bed-time stories, complete with a new afterword that tells the story behind the story.
In 1898, a woman’s body was discovered broken and battered at the bottom of a tall sea bluff in Southern Scotland. and the small town she lived in began locking the doors at night. Only one man saw what happened, but he carried the secret of her death to his death bed. Wounded in the trenches on the Western Front, he gives his last confession…
Get it now, DRM free, from Amazon or Smashwords.
—Story Sample Below the Cut—
Continue reading ‘Released: Angels Unawares’
April 6th, 2011 by jdsawyer
I am pleased to announce the ebook availability of my 
acclaimed Steampunk story Cold Duty: Selected Readings from the Diary of a Gelusian Repairman, which Steampunk Scholar Mike Perschon reviewed a couple years ago, and has since described as “Probably the best steampunk short story I’ve read.”
In 1860s Manchester, young Jamie Broadman wasn’t much to look at, and he was even less to talk to. His wealthy industrialist father wasn’t impressed with him, his brother was a prodigy engineer, so they both allowed him to drift into a life in the stables. It was a life he wanted–working with horses, keeping company with servants, living in the country far from the concerns of education, business, culture, and politics.
But when he mends the track’s generator without spare parts or instructions, his brother recognizes an innate mechanical genius and inducts him into the family business, forever changing the face of the Broadman Royal Materials Corporation, the Empire, and—when he discovers the ghastly royal secret behind a Mason’s door in the factory—the shape of world history.
With the kind cooperation of the British Museum and the Broadman Estate, these are the edited diaries of the man who single-handedly created the modern world…by accident.
The story is now available at Amazon and Smashwords, and is coming soon to other retailers.
And now, a sample to whet your appetite:
Continue reading ‘Released: Cold Duty’
April 4th, 2011 by jdsawyer
So, I’ve never been quite happy with the cover art for DF10. What I saw in my head never quite came through on the screen, and I wound up with a collection of images that, while possibly intriguing, felt…confusing. It was too dark in the wrong places, you couldn’t tell what the elements were, and all in all it just didn’t quite work.
With the paper version of DF10 coming out late in May, AWP Books decided that it needed to redo the cover art from scratch. Yesterday they sent me the prelims. A few minor tweaks may happen (mostly centered around font choice), but on the whole, I think I like it–so I wanted to share it with all of you:
Continue reading ‘Down From Ten cover art’
April 1st, 2011 by jdsawyer
There’s a black art to titles. Some of them have it, some of them don’t. “What’s ‘It’–aside from a Stephen King novel?” you ask. “It” is that thing that makes you notice. The thing that makes you pick up a book and look at the back cover. The thing that makes a title to a book you’ve never read or a movie you’ve never seen stick in your mind, even though you don’t care at all about the thing it’s attached to.
There’s a word for “it.”
Resonance.
Emotional resonance is that thing that makes us look at a book title and go “oh!” (or “oh?” or “ah” or “huh?”). A title with immediate resonance requires no thought–it jumps down below our conscious minds and evokes something before we know what it’s doing. Here are some titles that tap into something specific in our cultural atmosphere:
Continue reading ‘What’s in a Name? (Creating Kickass Titles)’
April 1st, 2011 by jdsawyer
Preface:
Despite the date, this is not an April Fool’s joke. With that out of the way, here goes…
Ladies, Gentlemen, and those of you who are anything but, I am pleased to announce this spring’s publishing schedule (well, for my books anyway) from AWP Books. In no particular order, here’s what’s coming:
The Clarke Lantham Mysteries
#1 And Then She Was Gone Ebook: Already Available. Paperback: April 15
#2 A Ghostly Christmas Present Ebook: Already Available. Paperback: July 21
The Antithesis Progression
#0 The Man In The Rain Ebook: April 10
#1 Predestination Ebook: April 20. Paperback: June 20
#2 Free Will Ebook and Paperback: July 4
Down From Ten
Ebook: August 1. Paperback: August 1 (see poll in sidebar)
Short Stories
Cold Duty Ebook: April 10
Angels Unawares Ebook: April 10
We Create Worlds Ebook: April 20
The Coffee Service Ebook: May 10
Train Time Ebook: May 10
It should be a great spring!
March 31st, 2011 by jdsawyer
The good folks at AWP Books and I have a decision to make: What order do we publish things in? In the process of discussions, it occurred to us that you all might have an opinion, so here’s your chance to vote:
[poll id="2"]
You may vote for two of the three options (this is to let you voice your desire for hardbacks, as well as priority). Let us know what you want!
March 30th, 2011 by jdsawyer
Smashwords, for all its good points (and they are many), suffers from a singular lack of support for open formats where their Meatgrinder software is concerned. This has caused a hue and cry from those of us who prefer to author our own epub and mobi files, and from those of us using OpenOffice and attempting to translate the style guide from MS Word to OpenOffice.
After much experimentation, I’ve come up with a template that works very reliably for passing muster both with the Autovetter and with the Premium Distribution channel. As the other templates I discovered online are not especially helpful for creating a book with pretty titles and extra front/back matter, I’ve decided to offer my own for the use of anyone who likes it.
So, I’m releasing my template into the public domain (here’s a version for MS Word). Download and use with OpenOffice, then save the properly formatted book in .doc format, and it should get you through the process painlessly. Needless to say, I make no warranties beyond saying “it’s worked very well for me,” but I hope all of you that wish to use it find it useful.
January 10th, 2011 by jdsawyer
It’s mid January, and time for your vegetables. This year’s first link salad is here–I hope you enjoy this sampling of my weidrness and wanderings from around the web!
Continue reading ‘Link Salad, Jan 10, 2011′
December 27th, 2010 by jdsawyer
Time for your vegetables again — these are some of the highlights of my research journeys hither and yon in the great wasteland of cyberspace. Hope you enjoy!
Continue reading ‘Link Salad 12/27/10′
December 19th, 2010 by jdsawyer
The new Clarke Lantham Mystery is here. Explore the true meaning of Christmas with murder, mayhem, ghosts, and unfortunate accidents of physics!
It’s hard to beat being thrown in an out-of-state jail on a trumped up charge 
as a Christmas present, but detective Clarke Lantham loves a challenge. So when he calls up his brother for help with bail, he thinks he’s prepared for the ordeal of spending a holiday weekend with relatives who put the “strange” back in “estranged.”
That was his first mistake. Unfortunately, with 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’s unlikely to be his last.
Currently available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.
December 3rd, 2010 by jdsawyer
Time for your vegetables again. Here’s some of the fun stuff that’s flitted across my desk in the last few weeks.
Crazy Silly Creative Things
To start off with our garnish, you could do no better than watching this 3 minute video about what Welshmen really do with sheep. Don’t worry, it’s work safe–but you won’t be while watchign it. This is seriously, amazingly cool.
Johnny Carson presents The Great Flydini, an utterly silly and borderline obscene magic act that will leave you in stitches. Don’t let obscene put you off — it’s work safe.
While you’re at it, put down your drink before reading this story about the trials of moving house with a pair of neurotic dogs.
Continue reading ‘Link Salad, Dec. 3, 2010′
November 15th, 2010 by jdsawyer
Portland in the fog has all the charm and beauty of Los Angeles of 2029 in Blade Runner, but without quaint charm of suffocating corporatism. Instead, it defaults to a decidedly more Stalinist aesthetic: gray and oppressive during the day, moody and hazy at night. It’s skyline is punctuated by the occasional train yard and industrial complex on the one hand, and the very occasional example of exquisitely gaudy hyper-modernist architecture on the other. Driving through on a drizzly night (and, in Portland, most nights are drizzly), I’m often taken by the fancy that Paris, France and the Southern Pacific Railway crept into Soviet Moscow on a cold winter’s night to birth their love child and stow it safely in the city’s forgotten historic sections, so that they wouldn’t be publicly shamed by the rest of Europe.
On the other hand, there is Powell’s. And The Montage. And the other things about Portland that keep me coming back for a visit every now and then even though the weather is appalling and the streets are paved with potholes and designed according to arcane 1950s theories of traffic control that bear as much resemblance to the patterns of human travel as does spontaneous human combustion to real-world thermodynamics.
Continue reading ‘Live, from Portland’
October 22nd, 2010 by jdsawyer
And, from the kitchen this weekend we have for you a lovely Link Salad, with leaves of history and science, garnished with a healthy dose of whimsy.
But first, I begin with a special treat for my free-wheeling brewer friends. Beer has always been a problem in space — not because of drunk piloting, but because weightlessness does weird things to the sense of taste. There’s also the question of what the bubbles will do to the body, and how drinkable beer will be in zero G anyway. Fortunately, someone is officially working on these problems so that we can take into space with us the drink that made civilization possible in the first place: Click here for Space Beer!
Now, on to the main courses:
Continue reading ‘Link Salad, Oct 22 2010′
October 13th, 2010 by jdsawyer
In the “should have done this a long time ago” department, I’m going to start offering up a semi-regular link salad digest. These are links to articles, books, lectures, and other cool stuff that I’ve run across in the course of my ill-fated attempt to grok the universe. They also tend to feed my creative churn, both in fine details (i.e. research) and in gross grist (i.e. ideas). Whether for that reason or because of the “cool stuff” factor, I hope you’ll find things you enjoy here.
This week’s Link Salad contains elements of science, sex, publishing market reports, book reviews, and is garnished with interesting cultural tidbits. Here you go:
Continue reading ‘Link Salad, Oct 13 2010′
