Surprise!
Things moved along last month. After attending the Smarter Artists Summit in February, I found the ending I needed for Suicide Run. I lucked into a slot with my editor and she turned it around in record time. I got it back from her a few days ago and managed to get it published Saturday night.
In other news, I participated in a write-a-thon with my local Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers group at the end of March. I’d already started Home Run and added 35,000 words over the four days of the event. It’s about half done now and I’ve reserved an editorial slot for it. Fingers crossed for a speedy conclusion.
More news, I’ve heard from Artistic Whispers about the Tanyth Fairport series. They’re in post-production for Ravenwood now. I’ll get it as soon as they’re done — which should be a matter of weeks rather than months. I’m really looking forward to hearing this and I hope you are too.
What’s next?
I still owe everybody By Darkness Forged. It’s the last book in the Seeker’s Tales and the last book I have contracted to Podium.
So recap:
Working on: Home Run – Book 3 (and last) Smugglers’ Tale
Next up: By Darkness Forged – Book 3 (and last) Seekers’ Tale
In Production
Paperback for South Coast
Audio for Ravenwood
After that?
I’ll ignore new books until I get caught up on paperbacks. I hate doing it. My end of year numbers reinforced just how few paperbacks I actually sell, but having them hanging over my head is untenable.
Artistic Whispers will continue to work through the Tanyth Fairport adventures.
My plan most likely path forward is to finish Cape Grace, then go back to the land of Korlay to catch up with Tanyth and her friends, and then begin to look at what new adventures Ishmael and Pip might be going on sometime in 2018.
And I just bought the book. Many thanks to you Cap’n, best wishes and good health to you! Thank you so much for the escape!
I admit I love paperbacks and I’ll buy each one of them 🙂 Can’t wait!!
Goals you can live with. One at a time in sequence. To me this sounds motivational rather than overwhelming. I love seeing Tanyth and Cape Grace in the plan. I’m thrilled to see the new book out, too, btw! That must feel great.
Another sprinkle of sunshine on a sunny (albeit cool and breezy) spring day. Thanks Nathan!
Loved your second seeker book cant wait for the next and of course all your space books which to me include cape 🙂 not a fan of printed books :/ but glad to hear you are planning more solar clipper tales after you clear the forest destroying dust collecters lol 🙂 i did say im not a fan of printed books . but thank you for your latest book i do enjoy your characters and the way you wright. looking forward to many new books in the future.
Received, read and thoroughly enjoyed Suicide Run. I like the story and the characters as much as I like Ismael and Pip. Waiting and hoping for more on both series. I like the space novels the best. I think it’s the problem solving by competent persons. It never gets old. I like the economic aspects, also. Wishing you a clear path in your future aspirations.
Have to Agree, was hooked on selfless Ish and his early friends and was glad to see ANY continuation of them. Of course I am biased and would wish for several stories a year for next 40 years
Nathan,
Just finished Sucide Run and liked the ending. Gets you moving to the next adventure. Keep pounding on the key pad we will be waiting. Safe voyage captain.
Warning! Don’t open Suicide Run on a week night. Im living on 3 hours of sleep.
You have several novels issued as Kindle ebooks, but seam to ignore inquiries as to when paper copies will become available to us Luddite readers. Just saying you have lost sales.
I can’t tell you what I don’t know, Doug.
Every action I take costs me sales somewhere. If I give a date and miss it, readers are – understandably – peeved. I have zero confidence that I can actually deliver on a schedule. The only thing I can do is the best I can do and – for some – my best is lacking.
Right now I have four books without paper editions.
South Coast
Milk Run
Suicide Run
To Fire Called
With the exception of South Coast, each will take a month. Which one do you want?
About the only thing I can tell you truthfully is that the paperbacks will be out eventually. I hope sooner rather than later because not having them out means I can’t move on with the new books beyond the next two until I catch up.
Doug, that’s why he’s working on paperbacks. The logistics are much more of a pain, I have to believe…and honestly, the clear trends are in place showing that for 99.9% of all writers, physical books are not the way to go.
Anyway, now I have a pretty massive backlog to get through. 🙂 I wasn’t paying attention during Monday’s podcast, clearly. Have to see if any of my suggestions made it in.
Nathan thanks again for all your amazing stories just read your Suicide Run. I hope the girls some day cross paths with Ishmael too…. Thanks for all your hard work on these stories.
I’ve been thinking about your writing time math and I think you’re too hard on yourself. If it were possible to write 1000 words before lunch and 1000 words after lunch every weekday, you’d crank out 4 books a year with time for vacations. 100K words every 10 weeks. I think I heard you say 4 per year as a goal.
You often seem upset with a slow pace from yourself but I wonder about a more modest pacing. Maybe you’d even say plodding, but steady, would be another word, would ease the writing.
You cranked out half a book in a week but it seems like it has hidden costs. Maybe bursts are better for the process? If so, maybe a time budget for bursting then instead? But know you won’t be bursting again for awhile maybe say a full week off, or more. I think if you plan the burst and rest after perhaps you will feel more at ease. Hard for a New England Yankee to ever really be at ease with rest I realize…
Just downloaded Suicide Run. Thank you for what looks to be a great read. Don’t worry about deadlines- we readers just appreciate what we know is creative but hard work. Thank you so much.
Well worth the wait. Amazon didn’t notify me of Suicide Run until after I had finished it though. I’m glad I had started checking here on a weekly basis.
Thank you Cap’n
This is not a complaint but a request for enlightenment.
Why does it take any of your time at all for a print version? It seems obvious to me that the ebook would just be poured into a book format by a not very intelligent program.
Good question. Here’s my process.
1. Format the full wrap around cover with ISBN and barcode.
2. Translate the ebook into the form used for page layout (LaTeX)
3. Use the LaTeX file to create the layout
4. Add the full front- and backmatter to the layout.
5. Add the markup for chapter breaks and tag them as chapters
5. Do a quick proof of the PDF
6. Upload to CreateSpace.
That usually takes a day depending on how long its been since I’ve done one and how many chapters need to be tagged. I could farm this out. I need to see how much it would cost, but this part is really the easiest and fastest step. If it’s cheap, I may do that. Paperbacks only make economic sense because ebooks subsidize the covers and editing.
1. Once the book is approved at CreateSpace, I order 2 copies of the physical proofs. (This takes no time at all when I remember to do it.)
2. Waiting time – I can do other things here until the proof arrives. What I’ll probably do is get the next outstanding book formatted and uploaded. Generally this takes a week for them to ship me the book. I could ask for expedited shipping, but – again – I hate adding cash expenses to a product that returns so little revenue.
3. Markup time. When I get the book back I go through it with a red pen and markup the pages that have errors. This can take upwards of a week. The task is finicky and I hate doing it. This is the step that takes the most time and I can’t farm it out because – too often – the error is one that I need to determine.
4. Transfer the markup to the actual file and re-render it. This is any where from a day to a week depending on how many pages have red marks. (South Coast is sitting beside my keyboard right now, all marked up. I just need to gut-up and put the changes into the files. It’s been sitting there for three months.)
5. Upload and wait again. Another day.
6. Once the file is approved I can publish it. Very little time.
7. Go back to the ebook file and make all the changes there and republish that. Same as Step 4.
If there are a lot of changes, I’ll make the changes once in the epub file and start the process over rather than doing the data entry twice.
So, I allow a month of elapsed time to put out a paperback. In actual labor hours it’s anything from 40 to 120 hours depending on how many mistakes I find and what I have to do to repair them. Once I start markup, I can’t work on another story. I need to keep that one book in front brain. Trying to write another novel while I’m thinking about the mark-up just results in two story lines screwed up.
I also fight to find the motivation. Re-reading a book I’ve already read a couple of dozen times is tedious at best and soul-sucking at worst. It’s especially difficult because I know the time will never pay off. Paper never sells enough to compensate those hours spent. The only reason I can do them at all is that the ebooks pay the cost of editing and covers.
It’s true, I could just dump the files and upload the books. It would take a day or two at the most. That’s not going to satisfy me in terms of quality control and it’s certainly not going to satisfy readers when the margins get pooched or the words are wrong. The reality is that the ebooks are the best I can make them but there are always errors that creep in – even after beta readers and editorial passes and reading the damn thing myself again and again. Seeing the words printed on the page is very different from seeing them on the screen. Errors none of us saw before become glaring and that’s my last shot at cleaning them up.
The truth is that I’d love to stop producing paper all together. Realistically I can’t. So the balance is I have to write enough new books fast enough to keep my bills paid – which means publishing the ebooks as fast as I can while producing the paper when I’ve got enough in the bank to cover my expenses while I work on paper. Generally that’s when I’m between series or completely burned out on writing.
Ebooks are 80% and take a day from the time I have a final manuscript. Audio is 11% and I have no production time – this should go up a lot when I’m releasing my own audio versions but I’ll have a longer break-even period because I’m paying to have them produced. Paper is 8% of my revenue and carries the lion’s share of production time.
So that’s the down and dirty on what happens behind the curtain.
Thanks, Andrew. That’s actually quite informative and transparent. Personally, I’ve abandoned any new paper books, and am trying to find homes for my old ones. Ebooks and audio books are what I read now, and that won’t change. Apparently, I’m not alone, given your revenue numbers.
What else was I doing when I posted that? Nathan, of course. And more coffee first next time.
Spent a day reading it. Great!! Thanks.
Great news about Suicide Run. Can’t wait to get it and read it this coming weekend. I just started re-listening to your podcasts again (for the umteenth time) after finishing off a Peter Hamilton book. It’s always refreshing to revisit your universe, and other than Anne McCaffrey’s books I rarely ever re-read or re-listen to a book or series on a regular basis (though I will re-read Tolkien every decade or so).
Having been around your universe for a long, long time now, I’ve wondered why you haven’t done any additional short stories since “A Light in the Dark”. Stories like that add depth to a story setting, and can often get the creative juices flowing without the huge weight of a full novel pulling you down. Look at how many times Odin’s Outpost has taken a roll in your books since you released that story. So I was just wondering if you consider a walk on that lighter (workload) side to give yourself a break, while giving fans a tasty morsel that also takes us places your novels might not.
Simple reason.
I don’t like to read them which means I don’t like to write them. It took five solid months of writing – something over 300,000 words – to find the 20,000 that went into Light in the Dark.
That’s not something I see as giving myself a break. 🙂
Ouch. Didn’t realize you didn’t get along with them.
The key statement there is “I don’t like to read them”
In large part it’s because I read so fast. At 1000wpm, I read a full 100k novel in about 2 hours. A short story is a potato chip. A 20k novella isn’t even half an hour.
Since I don’t like to read them, it’s not a form I’m really comfortable with which makes it stupidly difficult for me to write.
I recognize that I’m an outlier on that curve and kudos to those who can do it. I’m just not in that company. 🙂
Decided to re-read Milk Run again before Suicide Run, and I thought I’d ask about something that I forgot to ask about the first time around…
Is the Mallory in the academy shuttle in Milk Run Steven Mallory, or is it just a coincidence of name? Milk Run takes place 5 years after Double Share, so the timing would be right if he got into the academy and was 3rd year.
Just finished Suicide Run, liked it a lot! I started reading your e-books with Quarter Share, and figure I have re-read the series from the beginning at least 6 times, plus however many times I have gone back to one or more of the books to read favorite passages. I am really glad you continued the stories of Ishmael and Pip in the Seeker’s Tales, I like the characters in your stories. I have been burnt out on superheroes for some time, so the context of “ordinary people getting through the day” is very appealing.
Thanks also for laying out, explicitly, your process in writing and publishing in answer to the question by Martin Burkle above. I have been reading SciFi for some 56 or so years, starting with Heinlein in Junior High, and have always marveled and wondered what it took to actually produce a good book. I thought of writing SciFi myself at one point, but I don’t really have the patience and drive to do it. I used to buy paperbacks all the time, and even bought the entire Wheel of Time series in hardcover as they came out, but now I almost always only buy ebooks for my Kindle. I guess that is the predominant book publishing format now, though I can still go into a Barnes & Noble and find the SciFi shelves well stocked. I more or less inhale my SciFi reading, and finished Suicide Run in about 3 hours with interruptions. When I started traveling more, I went entirely to Kindle books, it is just the only real choice for long trips with limited ability to carry much of anything.
I look forward to the last Seeker’s book, and hope that Ishmael and Pip will have a future after that!
Thanks for all your hard work!
Wow! Thanks for your detailed answer about editing for a print book. Transferring the mark-up twice sound especially painful. Looks to me like you need to find that special someone who can do all the steps except 3 for you. Your pain would be reduced from one month to one week.
You are my favorite author but that comes with me wanting you to do the best job of writing you can. So, this is my first post to an author about writing.
All through Suicide Run I had trouble keeping Natalya and Zoya apart. Maybe I should have reread book 1 again first. However, I never had any trouble keeping Ish and Pip apart. So, I searched Chapter 1 for missing clues as to who Zoya is. Is Zoya tall like Brill, intimidating like Bev, or cute like Diane. I guess Zoya and Natalya are both 5 foot 6, both have brown hair, both could be mistaken for a man from afar, and both are described as nice. It’s hard for me to see the difference.
Suicide run, It was awesome Nathan, well done again!
I was hooked on selfless Ish and his early friends from book oneand was glad to see ANY continuation of them. Of course I am biased and would wish for several stories a year for next 40 years about them. will continue to keep electronic and paper copies(paper needs no power and wont crash, great unless you have westie pups like me.