Goblin Tales

Happy Goblin Day!

Today marks the official release of Goblin Tales, an electronic collection of five goblin-related short stories, available for $2.99 for Kindle and Nook.

Purchase links: Amazon, Amazon.uk, B&N
Coming soon: Kobo, iBooks, Lulu (print edition)

So why should you rush out RIGHT THIS INSTANT to plunk down your hard-earned lunch money for this book? Here are ten reasons in no particular order.

1. Goblins are stereotyped as one-dimensional villains, low-level obstacles to be slaughtered by so-called heroes on their way to the “real” quest. By buying this book, you help fight harmful anti-goblin rhetoric.

2. In keeping with traditional goblin humor, one of the stories features what can best be described as a “tactical diaper.”

3. Gay Fire Spider Fights to Save Science Fiction Convention! Yes, this is an actual story in the collection.

4. If this one sells well, I’ll be much more likely to do other e-releases.

5. Daniel Ernle’s wonderful cover art.

6. The fifth story was the seed for my current project, Libriomancer, meaning you get a taste of what’s to come in another year or two.

7. Pat Rothfuss has talked about buying the rights to Firefly and putting it back on the air. Well, if I make enough money off of Goblin Tales, I’ll buy the rights to The Muppet Show and bring that back!

8. If both Pat and I succeed? Muppet/Firefly Crossover, baby!

9. Lots of nice people have said lots of nice things about my goblin stuff.

10. The book is DRM-free, and I turned off regional and lending restrictions when I posted it for sale.

If any goblin fans would care to spread the word, I’d be much obliged. Cover art is available in small and large.

I’ll be posting announcements and maybe a contest or two on Twitter and Facebook as well, and will probably be talking more about the book, the process, and the numbers later this week.

Goblin Tales, Coming March 15 (I Hope!)

I’ve tentatively scheduled Goblin Tales for a March 15 release.  Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way for me to set a future publication date via Amazon or B&N.  You click the button to put it on sale, and some time over the next few days, they get it posted.  So it might be more accurate to say the book will be out March 15, give or take a day or two.

This has been quite the learning experience. When I did Goldfish Dreams [B&N | Amazon], Steven Saus did the conversion for me.  This time I wanted to tackle that myself.

Woof.  I started by downloading Sigil, then opened up Goldfish Dreams to do some reverse engineering.  Once I thought I had a handle on the basic files and structure, I copied the goblin stories into a new .epub file and started cleaning up the formatting.  This took several hours, but I eventually got them looking pretty.  I also added an afterword to each story.  Then I started on cover art.

I had two images I was interested in using.  I never got a response from one artist, which simplified that choice.  I gained permission from Daniel Ernle to use his art, and you saw some of the process that followed.  I’d guesstimate that I put in at least four hours of work there, much of which involved small details, trial-and-error-and-backtracking, and tiny changes which were almost invisible.  (Adjusting the kerning between letters in the title, for example.)

Thanks to everyone who chimed in with feedback and suggestions, and a special shout-out to trinker for a lot of good, detailed advice.

At this point, I went back into the story files to check the raw HTML, and discovered that Sigil had inserted some junk code.  Aw, crap.  Add another 1-2 hours to clean that up.

I spoke with other authors and picked up a few more tips, like inserting a character between scene breaks instead of a blank line (since an e-reader’s repagination can result in “hidden” scene breaks), changing the code I used for blank lines at the beginning, details like that.

In the meantime, I was also drafting descriptive text (the equivalent of the back-of-the-book blurb) to be posted on Amazon and B&N, adding front- and back-of-the-book material, and e-mailing myself the work-in-progress to see how my iPhone rendered the file.

All total, we’re probably looking at 10+ hours of work spread over several weeks. I’ve also sent review copies to two potential reviewers.  Normally, I think reviewers should have much more time to read and review a book, but I didn’t want to push the release back another three months.  This may be an example of my impatience getting in my own way.

Looking back, it will have taken just over a month from the time I decided to make an e-book of goblin short stories to the time it goes on sale.  And remember, these are reprints — previously-published (and more importantly, previously-edited) stories.  Original/unpublished material would have required more time, as would a proper window for review copies.

Overall, it’s been a good experience.  A lot of work, but I’d probably do it again.  Who knows … if Goblin Tales does exceptionally well, I might have to take some of my other published stories and repeat the experiment 🙂

Goblin Tales Cover

I’ve been working on cover designs for Goblin Tales, my hopefully-soon-to-be-epublished collection of five goblin-related short stories.  The cover art is by Daniel Ernle.  He created this image for my German short fiction collection Der Goblin-Held, and I contacted him for permission to use it for Goblin Tales.

Some of the things I kept in mind while working on this:

  • It’s important for the cover to work as a thumbnail, since e-book sales happen online.
  • I want this to be recognizable as a goblin-related work (which is why I used a very similar font to what was used in the DAW editions of my goblin books).
  • It has to capture the feel of the book/collection.  (I really like the way Jig looks like he’s setting off on a journey, and his expression is almost inviting you to join him.)

This is what I’ve come up with so far.  I’m not sure whether or not to keep the blurb from Publishers Weekly.  I like both color choices for the title font (though my son and my wife have both voted for the blue).  I zoomed in on Jig a bit more in the second image.

What do you think?  You can click on the pics for a larger view.

 

Tweeting Goblin and Other Stuff

1. Jig now has his own Twitter account at @JigDragonslayer.  I don’t know how often I’ll be updating, but I figure it should be fun.

2. Borders has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  Scalzi writes about it here.  Scrivener’s Error (publishing lawyer) gives his take here.  My agent, who has been following the Borders situation quite closely, weighs in here.

3. I appear to have reached an agreement with an artist for the cover of Goblin Tales.  At this point, barring any random crises, I’m hopeful that the e-book will be finalized and on sale within the next few weeks.

4. Abandoned Victorian house, with tree, in LEGO.  Mike Doyle spent 450 hours putting this together.  Click the pic for photos, or check out Mike’s blog for more on the building of this model.

E-book 2: Electric Jig

For those of you wanting the next update on Goldfish Dreams [B&N | Amazon], I checked the numbers, and it’s selling 1-2 copies per week.  I.e., still not king.  So I figured I’d try something else.  Review copies of an e-book cost me nothing but the time it takes to send an e-mail, right?  If you’re a reviewer and would be interested in a review copy of Goldfish Dreams, (epub or mobi format), please let me know.  I figure I’ll start by giving away a dozen or so copies and we’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, the e-book experiment continues!  I’ve downloaded a copy of Sigil and have been playing around with creating my own epub files, both by working with the software and by reverse engineering the work Steven Saus did for me converting Goldfish Dreams.

I’ve created and uploaded the sample chapter of The Snow Queen’s Shadow as an epub file here.  To those of you with e-book readers who want to check it out, please let me know if you run into any trouble with the file or formatting.  I tested it in iBooks on my phone, and it turned out fairly well, but I’d love to hear how it does on other platforms.

Because you see, once I get all of the bugs worked out, I can take the next step in my e-book journey.  I was thinking that it might be nice to do a little e-pubbed collection of my goblin-related stories.  It would be five short stories, probably priced at either $2.99 or $3.99, called Goblin Tales.

One criticism of my experiment with Goldfish Dreams has been that it’s a mainstream novel, and I haven’t built an audience in that area, so naturally sales aren’t as good.  Short fiction collections don’t tend to sell as well as novels, but Jig and company are in many ways the foundation of my career, so I suspect I’ve got more of an audience for goblin stories.

What do you think?  Goblin Tales: Best Idea Ever, Utter Waste of Time, or Other?

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