Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

A new release of my novel Oxygen is finally out in both e-book form and in paper!

My coauthor (John Olson) and I wanted to write a space adventure novel with a strong female lead character and with a fast-paced storyline packed with suspense, humor, and romance.

As I write this blog, Oxygen has the following rankings on various lists on Amazon:

• #141 on the main list for All Kindle Books.
• #3 on the Science Fiction Adventure list.
• #1 in Futuristic Romance.

About OXYGEN:

Valkerie Jansen is tough, beautiful, and has an uncanny knack for survival. But that doesn’t explain why NASA picks her to be part of a two man, two woman crew to Mars — or does it?

Bob Kaganovski, the ship’s chief engineer, is paid to be paranoid — and he’s good at it. After a teeth-rattling launch, Bob realizes that his paranoia hasn’t prepared him for this trip. He can deal with a banged-up ship, but how’s he going to survive the next five months with HER just a flimsy partition away?

Halfway to the Red Planet, an explosion leaves the crew with only enough oxygen for one. All evidence points to sabotage — and Valkerie and Bob are the obvious suspects.

Oxygen is a witty, multi-award-winning roller coaster ride, with a plot that moves at the speed of light.

The authors had hoped to work in some cool controversy on science, faith, the meaning of life, the existence of God, and possibly even the Coke versus Pepsi debate, but they were having so much fun writing the story that they forgot to offend anyone.

About the Authors:

John and Randy have been collaborating on one crazy project after another for the past fifteen years.

Not only are they novelists, Ph.D. scientists, and entrepreneurs who’ve founded four different corporations between them, but rumor has it that they prowl the night wearing steampunk battle gear to rid the streets of vampires, werewolves, and ducks that poop on your front lawn after it rains.

John and Randy deny all such tales as “vicious exaggeration.”

Extra Goodies for Novelists

What’s in it for you, besides a fast-paced story? John and I worked hard to add in some extra goodies that you, my Loyal Blog Readers, will love. We created four appendices totaling more than 21,000 words:

• How We Sold Oxygen In Only 7 Weeks — Without an Agent
• The Proposal for Oxygen
• Randy’s #1 Secret For Writing Fiction, those pesky Motivation-Reaction Units, applied to the entire first scene (which John wrote)
• John Strikes Back — his analysis of the entire second scene (which Randy wrote)

Oh yeah, and there’s an Eternal Coupon in the book, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s good for selected writing products on this site. It’s reusable. It never expires. The discount is 50%. Yes really.

99 Cents? Are We Crazy?

We normally would sell what’s in those appendices for at least $15. But in an e-book, we get incredible economies of scale, so we can include them at no extra cost, right along with the novel.

The everyday cost of Oxygen is $2.99. But for this week, now through midnight on Saturday, October 8, 2011, the price of the e-book is only 99 cents.

Caveats: Amazon may charge a higher price to some customers outside the US, and they may not offer the e-book for sale in all countries. It appears that Barnes & Noble only sells e-books to customers in the US and Canada. We gave both retailers full worldwide distribution rights and we set the price as low as we could, but that’s no guarantee that they’ll sell the e-book everywhere at the same price. This problem is above our pay grade.

Where to Get Oxygen

Grab your e-book copy of Oxygen here on Amazon for 99 cents.

Grab your e-book copy of Oxygen here on Barnes & Noble for 99 cents.

If you don’t have an e-reader, you can get free apps for Macs, PCs, iPads, and most smart phones on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s web sites.

If you prefer paper and you live in the US, you can order a paper copy here at Marcher Lord Press for $16.99.

The paper edition has a different cover than the e-book, but it’s the same content with one difference. The paper edition has an Eternal Coupon worth a 60% discount.

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Author branding is one of the scariest and yet most necessary things an author can do. But how tight should that brand be? Can you have a “broad brand?”

Teddi posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Randy, in the second half of your interview on StoryFix.com you mentioned branding and reader expectations. You said,

“New writers often fail to understand the importance of branding. When you attach your name to a novel and publish it, that’s an implicit contract you’re making with your reader: ‘I promise to produce more fiction like this in the future.’”

I have a dozen stories in various stages of notes-and-development, and they are spread across several genres. I intend to pursue a certain amount of self-publishing, so the choice of branding is going to be in my hands for many of these projects.

Is author name really the key factor in reader expectations?

For example, one of my favorite authors is Lois McMaster Bujold. She writes fantasy, science fiction and things in between. Although I like some of her books more than others, it didn’t really bother me to discover “the hard way” that I like her sci-fi better than most of her fantasy. I’d read anything she wrote, even in other genres outside SFF, because I like her writing.

Just wondering if that’s atypical. Maybe we need new ways of categorizing things.

Lois Bujold: Science Fiction
Lois Bujold: Medieval Fantasy
Lois Bujold: Fantasy Romance

I’d prefer something like the above rather than having her identity obscured behind a totally different author name. Especially if her aliases weren’t easily and publicly available.

Any thoughts on this? Do you think the publishing world is changing enough that this sort of thing will also change? Or should I simply make up a pen name for each genre and then put them somewhere on a website for folks who want to know “what all Teddi’s written”?

Thanks!
Teddi

Randy sez: Imagine this scenario: You’re in Cairo for the first time and feeling way out of your depth. Egypt is a very different world for you, and you’re starting to feel just a wee bit homesick. Then you see the golden arches of a McDonald’s fast food restaurant. Desperate for a taste of home, you walk in … and find that the only thing on the menu is crocodile pancakes.

Question for you: How do you feel about that?

I suspect you’d feel a bit put out. Nothing against eating crocodile. Nothing against eating pancakes. But you don’t go into a McDonald’s looking for either one of those. You go there because you expect exactly the same menu in Cairo as in California.

When somebody violates your expectations, you don’t blame yourself. You blame them.

In the case of Lois McMaster Bujold, I don’t see a problem. Fantasy and science fiction have long been joined at the hip. Whether she’s writing in one sub-category or another really makes little difference.

I think you’d be a bit upset, however, if you bought one of her books and found it to be cowboy erotica. Or an Amish detective story. Or an Ayn Rand-like economic manifesto on the virtues of capitalism.

Any of those could be a fine, fine book. Or not. The quality of the writing is not the issue. The issue is that when you see Lois McMaster Bujold’s name on the cover of a book, you expect a certain kind of story. If you don’t get anything like what you were expecting, you don’t like it.

Treat your readers the way you want to be treated. (This brilliant piece of advice works in many areas of life. I regret that I didn’t invent it.)

This reminds me that my friend James Scott Bell just published a zombie legal thriller. No kidding, a zombie legal thriller. Jim has been writing legal thrillers for quite a while, but this one is out of his normal zone. So he wrote it under a pseudonym, K. Bennett. This is not a secret, so I’m not spilling any confidences here.

The novel, PAY ME IN FLESH, is hysterically funny. I’m tempted to say the novel is “brilliant,” but that term gets thrown around so much that it’s pretty useless. Let’s just say that I haven’t had so much pure fun reading a novel in a long time.

Any time you start a novel with a female lawyer being sexually harrassed by a lecherous judge, and the lawyer’s immediate reaction is to wonder what the judge’s brains would taste like, you’ve got a weird, wacky start to a hilarious book. I loved it.

I’m not a big fan of horror fiction, by the way, so I’d never have guessed that I’d enjoy a zombie legal thriller. But my friend, Susan Meissner, (whom I interviewed on this blog a few years ago), gave such a glowing review that I had to get the book. Susan is a gentle soul who writes literary women’s fiction, and I figured if she could stomach the zombie stuff, then it wouldn’t bother me either. I figured right.

In my view, Jim did the right thing by using a pseudonym here, even though a “zombie legal thriller” doesn’t seem all that different from a “legal thriller.” The fact is that the zombie element plus the humor element make this quite a bit different from Jim’s usual writing. (Jim can be funny, but he doesn’t usually do slapstick comedy, as he does in this book.)

The fact is that Jim’s new pseudonym, K. Bennett, now effectively owns the entire subcategory of “zombie legal thrillers.” So Jim can go on to break new ground in this wacky genre under this name, and if the category eventually fades out, he can walk away from it. Good move, Jim!

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Amazon US is offering an outrageously great deal this week on the Kindle version of my book Writing Fiction for Dummies.

From November 15 to 19, 2010, Amazon is offering Writing Fiction For Dummies Kindle edition as a FREE download.

This is a special collaboration between Amazon US and my publisher (John Wiley).

Why are they running this special? Very simple: To create word of mouth publicity for the book. Free Kindle-edition campaigns are a proven way to generate enormous word of mouth for books.

My publisher believes strongly in Writing Fiction for Dummies, and they’re getting behind it in a big way. To my knowledge, this is the very first book in the Dummies line to have a free Kindle-edition campaign. I’m honored and thrilled to be part of that.

Please note that this free Kindle-edition campaign is for Amazon US only. There is no similar campaign running on Amazon UK or Amazon Canada. I wish there were, but there isn’t. As I’m sure you know, free Kindle-edition campaigns are determined by the publisher and Amazon; authors have no control over these decisions. NOTE ADDED: I’m informed by my fans outside the US that the download is NOT free to folks outside the US. I’m sure there’s some reason for this, so I emailed my marketing director to ask what it is. It might be Amazon policy; it might be some legal thing. Grrrrrrr.

What if you don’t have a Kindle?

Amazon has free software that lets you read Kindle-edition books directly on your Mac or PC. Likewise, there are free Kindle apps that run on the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Blackberry, and Android. You can find a link to any of these software products on this Amazon page.

So you don’t have to own a Kindle in order to take advantage of this free offer. You just need Kindle software running on your computer or mobile device.

Also note that if you ever buy a Kindle in the future, you can download to it any Kindle e-books that you bought in the past. So if you think you might ever want to buy a Kindle in the future, now is a good time to get the Writing Fiction for Dummies Kindle edition.

This offer is especially juicy because anyone who owns a copy of Writing Fiction for Dummies is entitled to a 50% discount on my software, Snowflake Pro, which makes it fast, easy, and fun to work through my widely used Snowflake method for designing a novel.

So go for it, Loyal Blog Readers! Grab a free copy of Writing Fiction for Dummies Kindle edition by Friday, November 19, 2010. Then get your 50% discount on Snowflake Pro.

Tosca Lee, one of my writing buddies, recently resold her first two novels to a new publisher. They’re currently running a promotion on Tosca’s first novel, Demon. For a limited time, you can download a free e-book version of Demon.

I met Tosca about three years ago at a writing conference. She was rooming with my freelance editor, Meredith Efken, and I got to know her a bit during the conference. At the end of the conference, while I was packing up my unsold books from the bookstore, Tosca gave me a copy of Demon.

Demon is about an editor who is accosted by a wannabe writer with a memoir that turns out to be his life story — as a demon. A real, human-tempting, lost-his-immortal-soul, straight-from-the-pits-of-hell demon. A minion of Satan. That kind of demon.

This is the kind of book that could be truly awful in the wrong hands. Or it could be fantastic in the right ones. So I read the first few pages on the plane with plenty of qualms. By the time the plane set down, the qualms had disappeared in a puff of sulfur and I was hooked.

Demon is one of those unforgettable, un-put-down-able books. I can’t guarantee you’ll love it. Different people like different kinds of books. All I can tell you is that I loved it. You can get a free copy right now, in either PDF format or ePub format.

PDF files are readable on any computer using Adobe’s free software. On a Mac, you can also read it using Preview, which is better than Adobe’s software.

ePub files are readable on most of the modern e-book readers EXCEPT the Kindle. (You can read a PDF file on your Kindle, so this isn’t that big of a problem.) Tosca emailed me about this promotion yesterday, so I grabbed both the PDF and the ePub version to see how they work.

They work just fine. To load an ePub file on an iPad, you open iTunes, click on the Books tab, and drag the ePub file into the container that holds your books. Then you plug in your iPad and the book transfers automatically. The book is a real pleasure to read on the iPad.

You might also enjoy Tosca’s second book, Havah, the story of the legendary mother of the human race. Right now, Tosca’s working on a novel titled Iscariot, and I’m pretty sure you can figure out what that’s about. You might think that Tosca is overly concerned with the Dark Side. I don’t agree, but if you don’t want to read about Evil and all that, then there are plenty of books about Amish people you can read. But I bet you’ll find plenty of that pesky Evil hiding under those bonnets.

As a footnote, I’ll add that Tosca is a two-time winner of the Mrs. Nebraska title and she was also first runner-up in the Mrs. United States contest. There are some people who think all beauty queens are brainless vaporware. My Loyal Blog Readers are far too intelligent to put people in a box like that. Tosca has a degree from Smith College and studied at Oxford and is smart enough to be one of my favorite Girl Geeks. So there.