Kindle Unlimited

 As I have discussed earlier on this blog, self-publishing ("indie" publishing) is a complicated process.  The author has to not only write the book, but themselves do (or hire) the editing, the formatting, the procuring of covers, and the actual publishing, to say nothing of keeping track of royalties.  And of course there's then advertising to make sure anyone knows your book exists.  Indie books almost never show up in stores, so no one is going to stumble across it wandering around Fred's Corner Bookstore.

The publishing platforms on which indie authors publish their books have issues of their own to deal with.  (Amazon's KDP has come to dominate the market, but Apple, B&N, and Kobo still have a decent share of e-readers.)  The whole idea is that there are "no gatekeepers," so they aren't going to check for quality of prose or story line or even basic sentence structure, but they don't want plagiarism or raw pornography or words sliding off the page of a paperback.  The platforms want to keep the best authors, those whose books are selling thousands of copies, and figure out how to maximize their own profits (harder when a number of indie books are, shall we say, a bit on the weak side).

Amazon has hit upon "Kindle Unlimited."  Indie authors can decide to enroll their ebooks in the program, in return for a promise to make sure their ebooks are exclusively on Amazon, no other ebook platform.  Voracious readers can then sign up for Kindle Unlimited, pay their $12 a month fee, and read as many ebooks from the program as they want.

These ebooks are officially borrowed, not bought, and the readers can only have ten of them "checked out" at once (and if they stop paying their $12 a month they all disappear from their Kindle).  The authors get paid, not the royalties they'd get from an outright sale, but a fee based on how many pages the KU borrower read.  (How do the bots know?  They know things.)

Romance readers especially, those who may read four or five books a week, love KU.  Why spend $3 or $4 to buy an ebook when for only $12 a month they can read a new book every day - or even more!  Find an author you like, and blast through their entire list.  Readers of other genres of fiction are often the same.

I've recently started an experiment, making my whole "Royal Wizard of Yurt" series available through Kindle Unlimited.  The series (6 novels, 3 novellas, 3 omnibus volumes) has been out for a while, so at this point my faithful fans have pretty much read them all.  So this is an experiment to see if I can get some new fans.  "A Bad Spell in Yurt," the first book in the series, is the gateway drug to all my fiction.

So far the experiment has been working well.  Even though I've done zero promotion, a number of KU members have found and read their way through the whole series.  An additional, unexpected but welcome result has been a number of people who have bought the whole series outright.  Can't tell if these are people who borrowed and read the books, then decided they wanted to have copies to keep forever, or if they're friends, ones who don't have KU memberships, and were told the books were Really Good by their KU friends (fine friends, there).  Either works for me!

So if you're a KU member who's been reading my blog for years but never got around to reading "Bad Spell," give it a try!  Here's the US link (also available in other countries).

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004S2CPM2

The story is about a young wizard, fresh out of wizards' school, who becomes Royal Wizard in the tiny kingdom of Yurt. He has no idea what he's doing, being just glad to have graduated after all that embarrassment with the frogs, but he cheerfully rises to the challenges.  After all, he's not a very good wizard, but Yurt isn't a very big kingdom.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

Kindle Unlimited

 The rise of the independent author ("indie") has set up a curious dance between the indies, their readers, and Amazon, which leads the world in indie-published books.

It all goes back to a little over fifteen years ago, when Amazon introduced the Kindle.  The idea of an ebook had been around for a while, and business people had long been reading documents on the screen (and often then printing them out), but the Kindle was different.  About the dimensions (width & height) of a small paperback but much thinner, its screen showed what looked like a page in a real book, not like text on a web page.  And the person reading could choose their favorite font to read it, Times or Helvetica or whatever, and make it bigger or smaller for reading ease.

Great!  People loved it!  But wait!  There were hardly any ebooks to read on the Kindle ereader.  Amazon begged traditional publishers to digitize some of their list, quickly digitized a whole lot of out-of-copyright classics (Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, here we come), and launched.

Immediately people bought up Kindles and loved them.  One could have dozens of ebooks ready to read on a device lighter than one paperback.  Half a million were quickly sold.  But there were fewer than 100,000 titles for those half million readers to read.

Enter the indies.  Everyone knew that there were thousands of people out there who imagined they could be great writers if they ever had a chance, or who had been trying to interest traditional publishers for years without success.  Come right on in! cried Amazon.  Give us your Word document, and we'll do the rest!  No more gate-keepers1  Anyone can publish a book!  And so KDP was born (Kindle Direct Publishing).

It was very exciting for the indie authors who got in early.  Pretty much anything would sell, and because the indie books were new, readers snatched them up in preference to the out-of-copyright classics they'd had to read in high school or college.  It quickly became obvious also that there was a great reader hunger for books "just like" popular books, and the indies could provide that.

For example, traditional publishers wouldn't publish a book too similar to one already out there, not even because of plagiarism issues, but just because they thought the market was saturated. But it wasn't. These were the days when the "Twilight" series, teenage romance with vampires and werewolves, was very popular.  Amanda Hocking sold hundreds of thousands of copies of KDP ebooks about teenage romance with vampires and werewolves (different setting, different names, different plot of course).

And traditional publishers rarely let their authors publish more than one or maybe two books a year.  KDP didn't care.  Anyone could crank out a book every couple of months, or put up a whole lot of books that had been written over many years, and KDP was fine with that.  So if someone found a new favorite author, they could count on lots of ebooks by that author on Amazon.

Other companies noticed what Amazon was doing.  Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Borders (with their Kobo branch) all jumped into ebook publishing.  And they started offering 70% royalties, rather than Amazon's 35%.  At the same time, traditional publishers all raced to digitize anything to which they had the publishing rights, and they put their own ebooks up on all platforms.

So Amazon had been first, but others were coming up fast.  KDP quickly raised its ebook royalty rate to 70% (at least for ebooks priced from $2.99 to $9.99) and tried to figure out how to hang onto its indies, who were starting to "go wide," that is publishing on all ebook platforms, not only Amazon (including me by this point).

Once traditional publishers had all their books as ebooks for sale on Amazon, B&N, etc., of course, that spelled the end of the brief golden indie age.  Now readers could choose from a great many ebooks, including new releases from the traditional publishers, often better than the average indie book (once a lot of people who should never have imagined themselves authors saw what Amanda Hocking was doing and thought they too could make big bucks).  Maybe gate-keepers weren't as bad as we thought?

But Amazon's big advantage was its indies, even if the indies quickly found out they weren't going to come anywhere near Amanda Hocking's numbers.  Amazon still had more indies than anyone else.  Even if a lot of bad indie books were flooding the market (by this time most lucky to sell 3 or 4 copies, ever), there were also a lot of good indie books, promising readers lots and lots of titles by their favorite author, not only one a year, and books "just like" some book everyone loved.  So Amazon had to make sure its indies didn't wander off ("go wide").

It did so by promising benefits to indie authors who stayed exclusive to Amazon.  It tried offering various marketing tools to its exclusive indies, but soon it settled on "Kindle Unlimited."  Avid ebook readers could pay $10 a month (it's recently gone up to $12) to "borrow" and read as many exclusive indie ebooks as they wanted.  Given that most indie ebooks are priced around $4 or $5, this was a bargain even if one just read three books a month.  But avid ebook readers, especially in genres like contemporary romance, might read three or more books a week.  They loved it.

Indie authors are paid on the basis of how many pages a KU member has read.  (Your Kindle knows what you're reading, how fast, how far you've gotten...  Does it know what you had for breakfast?)  It's helped a lot of indie authors find readers in today's saturated market, because someone would "borrow" and read an indie book through KU, knowing it cost them nothing extra, even if they might not lay out $5 for an ebook by an unknown.

(Incidentally, KDP has also started publishing paperbacks, and a lot of indie authors like having a physical book, but for almost all KDP authors ebooks far, far outsell paperbacks.)

That brings us to my own current experimentation with KU.  My ebooks are mostly "wide," available on all major ebook platforms.  But fantasy is a genre that can do well with KU members.  So I've made my "Shadow of the Wanderers" exclusive to Amazon for 90 days (one promises exclusivity for 90 days, then can renew if desired).  It's never sold very well, either as an ebook or under its original title of "Voima," when traditionally published.  Yurt fans don't like that it's not Yurt, but it's one of my favorites.

 

So if you are a KU member, you can read it all summer for free, or anyone can buy it.  Here's the link.  It's epic fantasy, in the spirit of Norse legend (though without Thor and Loki).  I've given the opening below to whet your appetite.  Happy reading!

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

______________________________________________

Roric put his sword across his knees and his back to the guesthouse wall.  When they came to kill him in his bed asleep, they would find him neither in bed nor asleep.

Swallows swooped through the twilight air, then disappeared back toward the barns as the sky went from yellow to darkest blue.  He shifted on the hard bench, listening but hearing nothing.  Even the wind was still.  He reached into the pouch at his belt and absently rubbed the charm there with his thumb:  the piece of bone, cut in the shape of a star, that had been tied into his wrappings when he was first found.

It would be good, he thought, to see Karin one more time.  But it did not matter.  They had said their farewells as though they knew they would not meet again short of Hel.

The moon rose slowly above the high hard hills to his left.  His shadow stretched at an angle, dark and liquid, across the rough surface of the courtyard.  He bent to tighten a shoelace and turned his head to be certain the soft peep off to his right was nothing more than a night bird.  There was another shadow next to his.  Someone was sitting beside him.

 

Editing

 One of the challenges for any author is editing.  Traditional publishing houses have full-time editing staffs, but the author had better edit her manuscript pretty thoroughly before submitting or the publishing house won't want the book anyway.  And for indie authors (like me), everything the publishing house would do is up to the author herself:  editing, cover design, layout, marketing....

So what is editing anyway?  And why is it necessary?  Short answer, editing means that the story is told in a way to engage the reader, without sloppy mistakes or contradictions that will pull the reader out of the story.  Here's an example of the opening of a story that could sure use some editing (I've made this up, but unfortunately a lot of indie-published books have the same problems).

-----

Sue was very bootiful. she long hare; and blue eyes.

"One day sue go shoping for booty products on sail, oh look! say Sue its' the rite shade for my brown eye,' And a good prize.  She bouhgt some makup and went home she was so happy!

-----

Okay, you would doubtless stop reading right there, and a story that started like this would be, I'm afraid, beyond redemption.  But even good writers need an editor, at a minimum a well educated friend or family member who will read carefully and be able to make critical comments when needed (the author of course has to be able to take criticism).  A professional editor can also be hired, but plan to spend a lot of money.  Before hiring someone, the author needs to figure out what kind of editing is needed.  There are several kinds.

Content Editor.  This is mostly for non-fiction or fiction set in a real time and/or place where accuracy matters.  You don't want the hero to look up at the Empire State building while walking through Chicago, or have a historical novel about the court of Henry VIII set in the seventeenth century.  Similarly, a non-fiction book about battles of the Civil War should not discuss their use of bazookas.  These are the kind of things that make readers put down a book in disgust.

Developmental Editor.  This can be a very important person, and a friend/family member who reads widely in your genre can work well.  A developmental editor addresses such issues as having the story start with something interesting happening, or suggesting that another scene is needed to make the transition between when the guy and gal meet and when they declare their undying love, or pointing out unnecessary scenes where the characters just stand around having boring conversations, or urging the author, who has been building up to the big climax for 100 pages, have the crisis not resolved so quickly and easily.  Sometimes a developmental editor will get over-excited and suggest major plot changes, which the author is free to reject, but remember that the editor is also a reader, and readers like and expect certain kinds of scenes and events.

Continuity Editor.  This is a variation of a developmental editor, keeping track of the story's continuity.  They watch for things like the hero wondering about something he had explained to him the chapter before, or the heroine's eyes changing color inexplicably, or the scene changing in the middle of a conversation from the characters driving down the highway to eating in a diner without any indication of how they got there (this can happen if the author originally set the scene in a diner, then decided it would be more interesting if they were driving, and didn't entirely follow through).  For a mystery, the continuity editor also makes sure that there are clues throughout but that they are obscure enough that the hero solves the mystery before the reader does.

Line Editor.  Here the editor is looking at sentences, to assure that there is a variation of kinds of sentence, that the same word isn't repeated unnecessarily, and that there are no obvious grammatical mistakes or misused words.

Copy Editor.  A copy editor may be the same person as a line editor, but they are looking mostly for minutiae, for misplaced punctuation (as in the example above), or missing words, or misspelled words (like booty for beauty or sail for sale).  This may seem trivial, and some authors say, "Who cares about a few typos? it's the story that counts."  But there are plenty of readers who will return a book for a refund or decide never to read a particular author again if the typos mount up.  No author wants that.  (And typos are the kiss of death for anyone trying to interest a traditional publisher--they're looking for reasons to reject, so don't make it easy for them).

For those deciding to hire an editor for money, start by having them edit a sample or one chapter.  See how well author and editor can work together.  If you're not satisfied, pay them for what they did and try with someone else.

But at last your book will be finished!  And after editing and polishing you decide to self-publish.  The self-publishing platforms (like KDP for Amazon or Nook Press for Barnes & Noble) give you step by step instructions for formatting and uploading, but what happens next?  I've written a book that gives you tips, available from Amazon, "Know your Self Publishing."

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

A Bad Spell in Yurt

 Although for most of the time here I blog about medieval social history, occasionally I like to discuss my fantasy novels, which are informed by real history even though they are not historical fiction.  So today I'm going to talk about A Bad Spell in Yurt, my first published novel, and comment on publishing in the thirty-plus years since it first appeared.

 It was originally published by Baen as a mass-market (small size) paperback and, after going through three printings, went out of print some time ago.  But it's now available again in a variety of formats:  ebook on all major e-platforms, trade paperback (larger size) that can be ordered through any bookstore, hardcover from Amazon, and audio book from Audible and iTunes.  Here's the link on Amazon.

Sometimes an author will be embarrassed by their first book (especially these days when it's so easy for anyone to self-publish).  Alternately, sometimes an author will pour years of ideas and writing and rewriting into their first book, and it remains their favorite and the readers' favorite, as they throw together later books without the same prolonged attention.  For me, Bad Spell is somewhere in between.  It's my favorite, but I don't think it's my best.

For one thing, it was the first published but by no means the first written.  I've been writing stories since I was five, studying "how to write better" guides since high school, and I'd been intermittently submitting stories to publishers for twenty years before Baen bought the book.  The editors did suggest some changes that I believe strengthened the story.

The title of course is something of a pun, and the book is fairly light-hearted.  Probably this shouldn't be a surprise.  After all, when I lecture about medieval history to my students, there's plenty of humor there.  I think I tend to see the incongruity and humor in a lot of situations.  (I get my sense of humor from my father.  Unfortunately he didn't live to see this book.)

But it's not intended to be a laugh-fest.  In fact, I've gotten some grumpy reviews about how they expected it to be funnier, and what was with all these serious themes?  Because the book does include themes of mortality and redemption and similar knee-slapping topics, and a lot of it concerns people with very different perspectives needing to learn to get along.

My husband persuaded me to make it into a series, our young wizard hero having other adventures over the next 35 years or so of his life, becoming actually decent at magic in the process.  For those of you who like a series, there are six novels, three novellas (short novels, maybe a third the length of the novels), and a three-volume "next generation" series.

After the book went out of print, I got my rights back and published it as an "indie," an independent author/publisher on Amazon, initially as an ebook and then with the other formats.  It's my best-selling ebook (I have about 20 now), in part I think due to Tom Kidd's excellent cover (seen above) which I think captures the flavor of the book, even though it does not illustrate any specific scene (for one thing, no Oriental princess with a princess phone ever appears).  Some people who read the book in the 90s are happy to read it again, and I'm also reaching a new generation of readers, which is very gratifying.

Indie publishing is in something of a wild-west stage right now.  Far more indie books are published each year than traditionally published books.  "Get rid of the gatekeepers!" would-be published authors cry.  The problem is that the "gatekeepers" at the traditional publishing houses do keep some good books from being published, but they also turn away a lot of really really bad books.  This makes it hard for the well-written indie book to emerge from the haystack.  I've done surprisingly well as an indie, in large part I believe because I already had a fan base from before (we love you, fans!).

To whet your appetite for the book, here's the opening of Bad Spell.

_______________________________________________________________________________

I was not a very good wizard.  But it was not a very big kingdom.  I assumed I was the only person to answer their ad, for in a short time I had a letter back from the king's constable, saying the job was mine if I still wanted it, and that I should report to take up the post of Royal Wizard in six weeks.

It took most of the six weeks to grow in my beard, and then I dyed it grey to make myself look older.  Two days before leaving for my kingdom, I went down to the emporium to buy a suitable wardrobe.

Of course at the emporium they knew all about us young wizards from the wizards' school.  They looked at us dubiously, took our money into the next room to make sure it stayed money even when we weren't there, and tended to count the items on the display racks in a rather conspicuous way.  But I knew the manager of the clothing department—he'd even helped me once pick out a Christmas present for my grandmother, which I think endeared me to him as much as to her.

He was on the phone when I came in.  "What do you mean, you won't take it back?  But our buyer never ordered it!"  While waiting for him, I picked out some black velvet trousers, just the thing, I thought, to give me a wizardly flair.

The manager slammed down the phone.  "So what am I supposed to do with this?" he demanded of no one in particular.  "This" was a shapeless red velvet pullover, with some rather tattered white fur at the neck.  It might have been intended to be part of a Father Noel costume.

I was entranced.  "I'll take it!"

"Are you sure?  But what will you do with it?"

"I'm going to be a Royal Wizard.  It will help me strike the right note of authority and mystery."

"Speaking of mystery, what's all the fuzzy stuff on your chin?"

I was proud of my beard, but since he gave me the pullover for almost nothing, I couldn't be irritated.  When I left for my kingdom, I felt resplendent in velvet, red for blood and black for the powers of darkness.

It was only two hundred miles, and probably most of the young wizards would have flown themselves, but I insisted on the air cart.  "I need to make the proper impression of grandeur when I arrive," I said.  Besides—and they all knew it even though I didn't say it—I wasn't sure I could fly that far.

______________________________________________________________________

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

Advertising Indie Books

 One of the biggest challenges for independent author/publishers ("indies") is having their books noticed.  There are probably at least 10 million ebooks on Amazon alone, plus 30 million paperbacks and hardcovers.  Analogies like needles and haystacks come to mind.

So indies have to advertise.  Those authors who are published by traditional publishers (think Random House) have their books advertised by the publishing house's publicity department.  After all, institutions like Random House, which have just given an author several thousand dollars if not more, know that they'll never make that back (much less costs of designing, editing, and printing) unless people buy the book.

So they put ads in places where potential readers will see them, arrange to have the author appear on radio shows or even go on a tour to bookstores, send out free copies to bookstores that they think might push the book if they knew it existed, or pay to have the book prominently featured on Amazon or other on-line sites, where people would see it when looking for something else.

Indies have to do the equivalent themselves.  Now they probably can't afford an ad in the New York Times Book Review, are unlikely to be invited onto a talk show (there are enough really weak indie books out there that their immediate reaction is No Indies Here), and have a limited selection of friends and family who can be browbeaten into buying the book.

So they advertise in other ways.  In the last few years Amazon has started allowing indie authors to advertise their ebooks on the site.  It's a complex system.  My guess is that it was developed for people selling things like socks or cookware on Amazon, and the indie authors were just tossed into the mix, without an accounting department or experienced advertising executives to figure out if it's working.

I've been giving it a try myself to see if I can get some new readers.  I've got great long-time readers, but adding new ones is always good.  Specifically I'm advertising "The Starlight Raven," with the hope that it will lure new readers both into the rest of Antonia's series and into my other books as well.

 It's an odd kind of advertising.  It works through "key words," things someone browsing Amazon might enter into the search bar, things like "fantasy" or "wizards and witches" or the names of other writers in the same genre.  As soon as someone enters a keyword, the Amazon computers begin an "auction."  Authors who want to advertise their books have already decided how much they are willing to bid on that key word (maybe 50 cents).  Highest bids win! and those authors' books get displayed as "sponsored products."

(Except it's also confused by the computers' "algorithms" for "relevance," which also come into play when deciding which books are shown and are Very Secret.)

If the author's book is displayed, it's an "impression."  An impression is free.  If the potential reader searching with that key word actually clicks the ad to learn more about the advertised book, which almost none of them do, that's a "click."  The writer is charged their bid price for an impression that leads to a click.  Experienced advertisers say you can expect maybe 1 click per 1,000 impressions.  Then only one out of 5 or 10 clicks leads directly to a sale.

As you can see, you want a lot of impressions, which means you need to bid high.  If you bid $5, you'll almost certainly get lots of impressions and lots of clicks!  But remember that every click is costing you $5, and the majority of clicks do not result in a sale, and you're only getting $3 royalties from a sale...  Okay, now you see why everyone is not bidding $5.

You can also see why new authors with just one book should not bother trying to advertise.  Let's say each click is 50 cents, 10 clicks would therefore be $5, you're getting $3 per sale...  You're not losing money as fast as on a $5 click, but you're still not breaking even.  This program only works if  a reader reads the book, loves it, and happily buys more of the author's books (ones not advertised).

Readers of course have no idea all of this is going on.  They see (and mostly ignore) books labeled as "sponsored."  They have no idea about bids.  But suppose someone sees a sponsored product book with a weird and messy cover and clicks out of curiosity?  They look at the Look Inside, to see if the interior is as bad as the cover.  Yep, it is!  They don't buy it and never will.  The author is still out 50 cents.

This is why Step One in advertising an indie book (or any other product) is to make sure it's top-notch in every way.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

A Bad Spell in Yurt

 Thirty years ago this summer, I published my first fantasy novel, A Bad Spell in Yurt.  I've been writing stories since I was in kindergarten, and I'd already published two scholarly books and a number of articles, but this was very exciting.  Fiction uses a different part of the brain than scholarship.

Yurt went on to be a national Science fiction/fantasy best-seller and is still my perennial best-seller.  Originally it was published as a mass-market (small size) paperback by Baen, a New York SF specialty publisher.  Its excellent sales meant that Baen was happy to publish the next four books in the series, as well as a couple of non-series books.  I had originally rejected the idea of a series, because the story was (and is) complete in itself, but my husband talked me into it.  I'm glad he did, because Daimbert, the wizard hero, is an excellent character and had lots more adventures ahead of him.  Also, fantasy readers like series.

In spite of Yurt's success, Baen became bored with me when each book did not sell more than the last one (their plan).  So I ended up publishing the sixth book in the series, Is This Apocalypse Necessary? the boffo finale, with a small press (Wooster Book Company).

Fast forward ten years.  The Yurt books were all out of print, so I started bringing them out as ebooks, first on Amazon for their Kindles, then at the other major ebook platforms, iTunes (now renamed iBooks), Nook (for Barnes & Noble), and Kobo.  A gratifyingly large number of new fans appeared!  Because a lot of them, including me, still prefer to read a physical book rather than read on a screen, I started bringing the books out in new editions in trade paperback (large size), mostly in omnibus volumes with more than one book per volume.

In addition, I decided that Daimbert had had a few other adventures I'd never written about, so I wrote three novellas (The Lost Girls and the Kobold, Below the Wizards' Tower, and A Long Way 'Til November) that took place in between the adventures in the six novels.  (They are also available in an omnibus volume of their own, called Third Time's a Charm).

Now I've taken the next step, and in honor of its thirtieth anniversary, I've brought the original Bad Spell out in hardcover!  It's what's sometimes called library binding, sturdy covers with the cover image printed on them, the same great Tom Kidd illustration that's been with the book from the beginning, rather than a monochrome cloth cover with a paper dustjacket.  Here's the link on Amazon.

And here's the opening to whet your appetite:

 

I was not a very good wizard.  But it was not a very big kingdom.  I assumed I was the only person to answer their ad, for in a short time I had a letter back from the king's constable, saying the job was mine if I still wanted it, and that I should report to take up the post of Royal Wizard in six weeks.

It took most of the six weeks to grow in my beard, and then I dyed it grey to make myself look older.  Two days before leaving for my kingdom, I went down to the emporium to buy a suitable wardrobe.

Of course at the emporium they knew all about us young wizards from the wizards' school.  They looked at us dubiously, took our money into the next room to make sure it stayed money even when we weren't there, and tended to count the items on the display racks in a rather conspicuous way.  But I knew the manager of the clothing department—he'd even helped me once pick out a Christmas present for my grandmother, which I think endeared me to him as much as to her.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2021

Book covers

There's an old saying, "You can't tell a book by its cover."  What it means of course is that what something looks like on the surface is not necessarily an indication of what it's really like.

However, when it comes to indie publishing, this isn't really true.

There are something like 7 million ebooks for sale on Amazon, at least half of them written by independent authors.  It's going to be hard to find the book the reader might find most interesting in all those books.  This is where the cover comes in.

A cover is an ad for the book.  It should catch the reader's eye and give a sense of what the book is about.  A look at the cover of my book, "The Starlight Raven," will indicate at a glance that it is teen fantasy.

You may not even have thought about it, but if you go to a regular (physical) bookstore and look around, you will see that the most elaborate, almost-photographic-realism paintings are the covers for fantasy, that horror covers tend toward red and black, that SF has planets and/or spaceships (and rather angular lettering), that mainstream fiction (stories set in the modern world) often show part of a person but not their face, romance has people embracing (or at least standing close), and so on.  (Medieval romance, like my "Sign of the Rose," needs a castle too.)

Non-fiction often is illustrated with a photo, as is my medieval social history book, "Positively Medieval" (see below). Even the font for the title varies with genre.

So a cover doesn't really illustrate the story as much as give you an idea of it.  Its purpose in life is to look intriguing enough that someone who likes that particular genre will read the description (blurb).  (This is what is on the back of a paperback.)  If the description is good, with luck the reader will read the first few pages, whose purpose is to make the reader buy.

But how about physical (print) books?  They need a cover too.  The cover on a paperback wraps all the way around, so if it is laid out flat the back cover is on the left, the front cover is on the right, and there's a strip in between where the spine goes (with title).  You may not even have thought about it.

One of the challenges for indie authors is getting good covers.  You can make your own covers--I made the "Positively Medieval" cover from my own photograph.  But with the explosion in indie ebook publishing, there has also been an explosion in services for the indie author, including providing covers.  My "Starlight Raven" cover is an original painting by Dane of eBookLaunch.  My "Sign of the Rose" cover is from SelfPubBookCovers, where graphic artists with some extra time on their hands create covers that they think would be interesting, using stock photos combined in interesting ways, and authors look through the (extensive) collection to find one that they think would work for their book.  Each of these is sold to someone only once.

Amazon has their own "cover creator" for people who are both unartistic and cheap, where, for free, indie authors can pick an image out of Amazon's collection and put their  own name and title on it.  The problem here is that in a particular genre you may see the same image used again and again for different books.  Better try for something unique.



© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For medieval social history, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

A Bad Spell in Yurt

I've been writing stories since I was five years old.  Being a published author is a more recent development, however.  It's been just twenty-five years since my first book came out from Baen Books, a New York publisher specializing in fantasy and science fiction.  (Cover below.)

In honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of A Bad Spell in Yurt, it has just been reissued in large format (trade) paperback, with the same great Tom Kidd art on the cover (see below).  Tom did a terrific job making Daimbert, my young wizard hero, look like himself.  Daimbert is not nearly as competent a wizard as he would like to be, but he has still managed to become Royal Wizard of Yurt.  On the cover, Daimbert is trying to work out how to work a magic glass telephone.

The new paperback is available directly from the publisher, CreateSpace, as well as from Amazon and Barnes & Noble--or from your own favorite bookstore.

The characters and situations came to me quite literally in a dream, along with the opening lines:  "I was not a very good wizard.  But it was not a very big kingdom."  (I should have more dreams like that....)  I wrote it in about four months, decided it was the best thing I'd ever written, and Baen accepted it with remarkably little fuss.

It was not of course the first thing I'd ever written, or the first time I'd tried to get a book published.  In elementary school I would fold sheets of manila paper so they looked (sort of) like a book and write and illustrate my own children's stories.  By junior high, I was writing chapter-books (as they are now called) on lined paper.  At a certain point I started typing on an old WWI era typewriter.  It was very exciting when, in high school, my parents bought me a (used) electric typewriter and I learned touch-typing.  By then I was reading "how to write" books from the library (something I'd recommend to any would-be writer), and figuring out things like avoiding clichés, ways to develop characterization, description versus action, how to get in background material, and the like.

In high school and college and graduate school I continued writing for fun, in many different genres, though fantasy was probably the most common (I read Lord of the Rings at an impressionable stage).  I had a whole series of 8 or 10 books that now look (sort of) like what George Martin started doing years later, high adventure in an imagined medieval-style world with fairly minimal magic.  The first was about Airnthal Silverblade, daughter of the king, on a secret mission into the enemy's capital.  I tried it on several publishers; it's probably just as well none took it.

So it was extremely exciting to get Daimbert out in the world.  It became a fantasy/science fiction best-seller and went through three printings in mass-market (small size) paperback.  In some ways, however, that early success has defined me.  Bad Spell was followed by five more novels and three novellas about Daimbert.  I've tried publishing other types of fantasy, but my fans just become distraught, feeling I'm wasting my time writing about anything but Daimbert.  I've recently started a new "Yurt, the Next Generation" series, and some fans can't even deal with that.

So for any die-hard Daimbert fans with a disintegrating twenty-five-year-old Baen paperback, now's your chance to get the new edition.  And now that book reading has branched out, you can also get Bad Spell as an ebook from Amazon and other e-tailers, or as an audiobook from Audible.  (The rest of the Daimbert books are also available as ebooks, and most of them as audiobooks.)  Enjoy!

© C. Dale Brittain 2016