Short and sweet today. My epic fantasy novel, The Black God’s War, is currently free at Amazon UK and at iBooks/iTunes. I’m not sure how long it’ll remain free, so if you’re in the UK or if you use iBooks, please my guest and download a full copy of the novel. Reviews are appreciated, but never expected. Enjoy!
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Tags: Amazon.co.uk, Epic Fantasy, Fantasy Books, Free, iBooks, iTunes, The Black God's War, UK

Welllll, not quite. But the Indie Book Podcast did (in an audio review), and they filled in nicely. Spoiler: Two thumbs up. They talked about The Black God’s War for about 7 minutes, and I really loved hearing their thoughts (I especially loved that Jane liked Narayani, Aayu, and Duilio–three of my characters that don’t usually get as much love as the others). I also found their criticisms right on the mark and helpful.

IndieBookPodcast.com is a book review podcast that focuses on indie/self-published books and news about indie publishing. Next week, their episode will also feature a brief interview with me.

Thanks very much, Jane!

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The Black God’s War has arrived, to my sincere surprise, with some very kind reviews from three outstanding book reviewers.

GraceKrispy from MotherLode is a well-respected reviewer who rarely gives out 5 stars (so far, only four other 5-star reviews on her popular blog this year), but she had this to say at the end of her review of The Black God’s War:

If you follow my reviews regularly, you know I don’t give many 5 star reviews. In my way of thinking, there are almost always things I would have changed about a story. Although I’ve listed a few things I’d change about this story (clarify chapter headings and characters’ thoughts), I find that (hours later), I can’t stop thinking about the characters and their journeys. I find myself contemplating the messages that were delivered (whether overtly or veiled). Overall, I find I really can’t stop thinking about this story. Unforgettable story, intriguing characters, compelling journey with unexpected twists- in short, a very satisfying and engaging read. Isn’t that why we read for pleasure?

Then today a review came in from Derek Prior at IndieFantasyReview. Derek wrote a rather critical review of my previously released novella and he’s not the type to blow sunshine, so this was nice to hear:

A third professional review also arrived just today. It’s from Robert Duperre at the Journal of Always. Robert wrote the sort of deep, thoughtful, and thorough review that every author dreams of receiving. Here’s an excerpt from his 4.5 star review:

“… there is a rather brilliant climax that left me grinning from ear to ear …

In conclusion, The Black God’s War is a unique experience. The plot is intricate, the characters even more so, and the message is one of beauty. By the time you flip to the last few pages, I hope you have the shivers just as I did, which is how I know that Moses Siregar is going to be around a long time, and his voice, one of unity, passion, and loving sensibilities, is important – in the world at large as well as literature.

So bravo, Mr. Siregar. You wrote a damn good book. You should be very proud.”

Goodreads:

Use the arrow in the bottom-right to turn the page:

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Tags: D.P. Prior, Derek Prior, GraceKrispy, Indie Fantasy Review, Journal of Always, MotherLode, Redonkulous, Reviews, Robert Duperre, The Black God's War

A really cool thing happened to me last week. John Mierau (one heck of a good interviewer) talked with me about The Black God’s War, my process, and indie publishing. Here’s the interview.

I’ve conducted a lot of interviews with best-selling science fiction and fantasy authors over the last year. So it was terrifying interesting to be on the other end of the Skype connection.

By the way, if you haven’t seen the new map for my novel, here it is. I’ll probably blog about it soon.
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Tags: Indie Publishing, Interview, John Mireau, My Process, The Black God's War

My dearest homeys, if you aren’t following David Gaughran’s truly outstanding blog, Let’s Get Digital, then you probably missed my guest blog post over there, Using “Free” to Generate Pre-Release Buzz. You can also check out the comments for bonus discussion.

David said some nice things about me, all of them lies:

One of the criticisms that self-publishers face is that they rush their work out. Sometimes it’s bad covers, or poor editing, but sometimes the book just wasn’t ready to be published.

Today’s guest poster, Moses Siregar III, understands the importance of making sure your book is the best you can possibly make it before you sent it out into the world.

Rather than be frustrated by seeing other indie writers dive in and rack up sales, Moses never rushed his work, instead taking the time to assiduously build his platform in a number of interesting ways, all building up towards the release of his novel at the start of August.

But seriously, thanks, David!

David recently released a free ebook called Let’s Get Digital: How to Self-Publish and Why You Should. You can get it for free as a pdf from his website, or pick up a version for $2.99 from Amazon or Smashwords.

This guide contains over 60,000 words of essays, articles, and how-to guides, as well as contributions from 33 bestselling indie authors including J Carson Black, Bob Mayer, Victorine Lieske, Mark Edwards, and many more.

Did I mention that I recommend following his outstanding blog? Because it really is that good.
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Tags: David Gaughran, Excerpt, Free, Let's Get Digital, Marketing, Novella, The Black God's War

I’m goofy-excited to announce that my debut novel is scheduled for release on August 1st, a few days before my birthday. (EDIT: The book is out!)

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Against the backdrop of epic warfare and the powers of ten mysterious gods, Lucia struggles to understand The Black One.

Her father-king wants war.

Her messianic brother wants peace.

The black god wants his due.

She suffers all the consequences.

King Vieri is losing his war against the lands of Pawelon. Feeling abandoned by his god, he forces his son Caio, the kingdom’s holy savior, to lead his army. Victory ought to come soon.

To counter Caio’s powers, Pawelon’s prince enters the conflict. Rao is a gifted sage, a master of spiritual laws. He joins the rajah to defend their citadel against the invaders. But Rao’s ideals soon clash with his army’s general.

The Black One tortures Lucia nightly with visions promising another ten years of bloodshed. She can no longer tell the difference between the waking world and her nightmares. Lucia knows the black god too well. He entered her bed and dreams when she was ten.

The Black One watches, waiting to see Lucia confront an impossible decision over the fates of two men—and two lands.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Thank you all for witnessing the journey!

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Free at Amazon! The Black God's War: A Novella Introducing a New Epic Fantasy

Want to win a free kindle e-reader (or a $100 Amazon or B&N gift certificate) just for tweeting or sharing this blog post on Facebook? Or win $100 for your favorite non-profit charity in the U.S.? The details are below.

I’m feeling blessed. Around midnight on Tuesday night, Amazon made my novella free for the US and the UK. It was downloaded about 3,000 times during the first 24 hours after this change. To put that in perspective, that’s nearly half the total downloads I’ve had over the first 9 months since I released the book (across all e-bookstores). In just 24 hours.

I’m a lucky guy.

To celebrate this and to thank the ebook gods, I’m giving away a free Kindle 3 -or- black-and-white Nook (the winner chooses either the Kindle 3 or the B&W Nook). You’re welcome to enter my drawing for this prize. I’m also going to choose another winner, who will be able to choose a registered non-profit US charity; I’ll donate $100 to the charity of that person’s choice. You can enter multiple times, and here’s how:

Kindle 3

1) Share this blog post on Facebook. You can use the “Share on FB” button at the bottom of this post. As long as your FB account has at least 50 friends or fans, this counts for at least one entry. If your FB page has 500-999 friends or fans, this counts as two entries. If your FB page has more than 1,000 friends or fans, this counts as three entries. You can collect double points for posting this twice, as long as your two FB updates are at least 24 hours apart.

Btw, here’s the link to this blog post, in case you need it:

http://bit.ly/kOUmUO

2) Retweet this blog post using the button in the top right, or RT one of my tweets about the contest. If your Twitter account has 25-499 followers, this counts as one entry. If your Twitter account has 500-999 followers, this counts as two entries. If your Twitter account has 1,000+ followers, this counts as three entries. You can collect double points for tweeting this twice, as long as these tweets are at least 24 hours apart.

3) Write a blog post about this giveaway on your own blog. This counts as two entries.

4) Sign up to get email notifications of new blog posts, using the sign up box at the bottom of this post (even though it will give you an error message when you sign up–but if you get that error message you actually signed up correctly). This counts as two entries. If you’ve already signed up for these notifications, then you can state that to get two entries.

5) Digg this blog post using the button at the bottom. This counts as one entry.

6) Share this blog post using Reddit. This counts as one entry.

7) Share this blog post with StumbleUpon. This counts as one entry.

Nook

Many folks tweeted about my free novella earlier on the 11th, before this blog post was written. Each of those kind people will also get a free entry, and these people are welcome to enter again using the methods above (they can also tweet twice more to get extra entries).

Enter as many times as you’d like (following the above guidelines). The only other rule is that you have to add a comment to this blog post to let me know how you got your entries. For example, you could add a comment that says:

“I tweeted this twice to my followers (my account has 300 followers), wrote a blog about it, and shared it via Reddit. I think that counts for 7 entries. Laterz, I’m going square dancing.”

If you don’t add a comment to claim your entries, your entries won’t count in the drawing. I’ll draw for the two winners either a few days after Amazon’s free promotion of my ebook ends or on June 15th, whichever comes first.

You’re also welcome to check out my free novella, The Black God’s War from Amazon US or UK (my upcoming debut novel by the same title, The Black God’s War, should be out sometime between June and August). Of course, the novella is free on Amazon for now (I don’t know how long that will last), and if you’d like another version for a different e-reader, the best place to get the most recent version of my novella is at Smashwords. I wouldn’t recommend getting the current version from B&N or iBooks (or Kobo or Sony or Diesel), because the versions they have are older. Amazon and Smashwords are the best places to get the latest version. If you read it, then of course you’re welcome to write (or not write) an honest review at Amazon, B&N, GoodReads, or anywhere else.

Thanks a lot for reading this and for participating (if you’d like to)!

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Tags: Charitable Giveaway, Epic Fantasy, For the Win, Free Ebook, Kindle Giveaway, Nook Giveaway, The Black God's War

Earlier today I read a question on a message board for writers, the Writer’s Cafe at Kindleboards.com (one of my favorite online haunts). The name of the thread was “Personal Glory or Commercial Success?” and the first post asks this:

Ideally, we’d like to be able to write books that are both meaningful to us as well as popular in the consumer market.  Realistically though, it’s extremely uncommon to have both.  If you had to choose, would you rather write for personal fulfillment even if it doesn’t attract much in the way of sales or write what will more likely appeal to the masses and give you some amount of decent profit?

Definitely both.

But I’ve come to a soul-searching moment with my book. Mine is at a point now where I think it’s finally in good enough shape to publish it, after working on the book for 21 months. If my top goal was to make money, I’d probably release it now and get to work writing another one so that I could try to have a second release before the holidays.

But I’ve found I literally can’t do that. I’m still poring over the book, making every detail as good as I can possibly make it. I’m trying to root out every weak instance of ‘telling’ in the cases where telling isn’t the best choice, and trying to make every sentence concise and clear. I want every piece of dialogue to ring true, and every character to work and feel real. I want every part of the story to be logical and to function with maximum emotional impact. These are some of the goals, anyway. I’m doing the best I can with them.

By doing all this, instead of releasing my book in May like I’d hoped to, I might not be able to release the novel until June at the earliest and probably August at the latest (I’ll guess July). And I know this might cost me some money because it’s slowing down my current and future release schedule (or maybe make me more money in the long run–it’s hard to say).

But when I’ve looked really deeply at it, I’ve decided that if people are going to spend some money on my book and, more importantly, hours of their lives reading it, I can’t feel good about that unless I know that I’ve given everyone my very best effort. That’s what I want from any author I read, so that’s what I have to give.

I’ve realized that my #1 goal, literally, is to write the very best book that I can, however long that takes, still absolutely with an eye toward commercial success–but regardless of whether my release schedule helps or hurts me in terms of generating an income from writing. I’m living off some of my savings to do this, but in the end, I want to know that I gave everyone the very best I had to give, and I think that’s worth more to me than commercial success. Then again, maybe this is the best way to have longterm commercial success. But I’m okay with or without commercial success as long as I know that I didn’t cut any corners just to make more money. That’s not saying anything about anyone who has that goal–it’s just not my top goal.

I want some people who read my book to feel like it’s one of the best reading experiences they’ve ever had. I want my book to be one that stays with some people for years, one that they want to re-read some day. Even if it’s just a small percentage of people that feel that way, that’s what I value most, the qualitative experience that those readers might have, not the numbers in my bank account.

Writing this book (and then hopefully more, similar books) is literally my top personal (selfish) desire, for my life. After this, my top goals are to be the best dad and husband I can be and eventually to focus more on charitable projects. This is why the writing of the book is more important to me than the money. This is just how I feel. I’m not comparing or contrasting myself to anyone else, and I know I’m very lucky to be in a position that allows me to approach writing this way. Then again, I’ve worked hard at other things so that I could do this some day.

Thanks for asking a great question. Sorry if I gave you more than you bargained for  ;)

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Tags: Commercial Success, Goals, The Black God's War, Values

If you don’t subscribe to David Farland’s Daily Kick, a free email service that shares outstanding advice about the business and craft of writing, what are you waiting for? (look for the sign-up box on the right, through that link.)

Here’s today’s installment. I decided to mention it because, well, you’ll see. He mentioned me. This will give you an example of a wonderful free service Dave offers. I may write a blog post later this week to add to some of the points Dave made.

Everything below the following line is from David Farland’s Daily Kick, 2/14/11 (and not written by me):

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David Farland’s Daily Kick in the Pants—The Dangers of Self-Publishing

Friday I wrote about Amanda Hocking’s tremendous rise to becoming a bestseller through self-publishing her e-books. I’ve heard from a lot of fans lately who want to give that a try, and by all means, if you think that you’ve got the chops, give it a try.

But let me warn you of the danger first. Unfortunately, you are not your own best critic. Nor is your spouse or your mother or your neighbor your best critic. As a result, when you think that you’re ready to publish, in most cases you’re not.

Time and time again, I find writers who are almost delusional. They’re like the singers that tried out in Hollywood last week on American Idol. They were by far the worst that the country had seen. For some reason, Hollywood attracts delusional people.

Because writers aren’t their own best critics, we often hear stories like the one told by Raymond Feist recently. He got a knock on his door, and when he answered, the fellow at the door said, “I’ll be you’ve never talked to a real author before!” Ray, who has sold millions and millions of books, just laughed and said, “Buddy, I think you’ve got the wrong house.” But the fellow persisted and showed Ray his two self-published novels. They were printed to a high quality, which showed that the fellow had some taste, and so Raymond bought them and the fellow went off to schlep his works door-to-door. Raymond then read the first few pages of one and said that it was one of the worst novels that he’d ever seen.

I’ve done that same experience on more than one occasion, picked up a self-published novel only to see a dozen horrible mistakes—everything from typos to misspellings and just genuinely terrible prose—all within two pages.

So I’m worried that in the rush of self-published authors this year, we’re going to see a lot of people embarrass themselves. More importantly, you might actually hurt your career.

Let’s say that you put up a book that isn’t quite ready, and it gets twenty reviews on line, and most of them pan your book. How easy do you think it will be to sell your next book, or the one after that? Those negative reviews will never go away, and they’ll dog you. Indeed, they’ll destroy the name that you’re trying to create for yourself.

So don’t rush to publish in e-book format.

Please be aware that I’m not saying “Don’t publish.” I’m just urging you to be careful.

Last year I won the Whitney Award for Best Novel of the Year with a book that I self-published. When I won the award, Howard Tayler, the self-published author of the famous Schlock Mercenary cartoons, said, “You know, Dave, you’ve just done a world of damage. You self-published for all of the wrong reasons: your mother begged you to do it. You didn’t want to take your regular publisher’s advice. Then to top it off, you sold all of your stock, got great reviews, and won a major award. I keep telling people not to self-publish, even though I’m making my own living at it, and now you come along and just reinforce the wrong message.”

Howard is right of course. Both of us were publishing to small market shares, where self-publishing made a little more sense, and we both succeeded, just as Amanda Hocking is succeeding, and some of you are succeeding.

One of my friends and past students, Moses Siregar, I just found out, is at the top of Amazon’s sales charts with his epic fantasy THE BLACK GOD’S WAR. Moses is a fine writer and is deserving of success, and I think that it will follow. But Moses also knows the risks. I recently heard some other New York Times bestselling writers tell him, “Moses, don’t self-publish!” They pointed out the risks. I then told him, “You know, Moses, I hate to say this, but I think you’ll do it. You’re savvy enough to know what you need to do in order to self-publish well, and I think that you should go ahead.” Now, four weeks later, he’s doing great. So go check out his book at:

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Gods-War-Introducing-ebook/dp/B003Z0D2HK

It will only cost a dollar, and if Moses gets the velocity he needs, maybe his project will turn him into the next Amanda Hocking. Personally, I really enjoyed Moses’s work.

Oh, and don’t self-publish! For every one who succeeds, there will be hundreds who will destroy a potential career. Recognize that when you self-publish, you might just be gambling with your career.

Announcing:

Ken Scholes will be speaking to us next on the Farland’s Author’s Advisory Confernce Calls and you are invited to attend at no charge, as always. Mark your calendar, the date is Thursday, February 24th, 9:00 p.m. EST.

Ken is the author of LAMENTATION, and the topic will be “Self-Awareness: an author’s first best tool.”

To get on the call, dial 1-218-862-7200. When the line picks up, dial the calling code, which is 245657. The call is free, long distance charges apply.

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Tags: Dave Wolverton, David Farland, Ebooks, Indie Publishing, Self-Publishing, The Black God's War