|
A NEW SEGMENT FOR JUNE 2005: IT'S PRETTY EXCITING, STARTING TO WORK IN A NEW MEDIUM ... E-BOOKS! WHERE DID THIS IDEA COME FROM? It has two origins; one is pure frustration, the other is admittedly a bit mercenary. I have a huge reservoir of pieces Dave calls "Mel's shorts." These stories might be anything from 10,000 to 60,000 words, and we can't do anything with them, which is massively frustrating to me because some of my best stories and characters are locked into a fairly unplublishable format. The only other thing to do with them would be to run an anthology, but if there is one thing I've learned over the years, dabbling knee-deep in the book and magazine industry, it's that's anthologies tend to sell quite poorly, esp. if you compare sales with the numbers generated by novels. Now, DreamCraft would be able to weather these difficulties better than a "general" or "conventional" publisher, since we work on a POD, or Print On Demand basis. But I actually don't want to send DreamCraft down that road because (and this has a duh factor of about 9.7) the pre-press investment of TIME and EFFORT is the same, no matter how many or how few copies end up shipping out the door. Because of this, POD books are usually very, very expensive, up to double the price (!) you would expect to pay for a similar book on the shelves at a regular book store. (If you're interested, there's a couple of webpages you can look at and check out the revolting printing prices charged for POD books. Put it this way: DreamCraft's price, including their profit and my royalties, is about the same as the manufacture price alone of a regular POD publisher! I'm pretty sure the URL is www.booksurge.com. Check it out, and you'll start really appreciating the job DreamCraft do, and the price. So... since they already have their prices chopped back so low that Keegan's POD books land in your hands for the same price as a store-bought trade-size paperback, I can't (and won't) ask them to get into anthologies, which will sell one heck of a lot less (ie., earn us all a heck of a lot less), for the same pre-press investment of TBS&T (time, blood, sweat and tears)! All of which leaves me with scores of problematical short pieces. We looked at ChapBooks, which are slender volumes (could be 50 to 120pp), but there is a down-side to ChapBooks, in the form of a postage penalty. It costs, proportionately, a lot more to mail a shrimp than to mail a whale! To give you an example ... the cost to ship a 180,000 word novel like "Rabelais" is US$12 or so (insured airmail, obviously). The cost to ship a 22,000 novella like CALLISTO SWITCH is about US$5. Does this sound ridiculous to anyone but me??? Don't ask me how the post office works out its schedules. I do not pretend to understand. The idea occurred to all of us here more or less simultaneously ... wouldn't it be great if we could just email out the stories? The word "e-book" followed along on the shirt-tails of this idea, and we started kicking around some serious ideas. The ONLY downside to ebooks that we can see is, a lot of people don't have a use for them! A very high prercentage of readers like solid, tangible books. Palm viewers (screen readers) and so forth are still in their infancy; they're too expensive, too heavy, the screens are too small to be properly functional, and they guzzle battery power. So everyone here was immediately *very* much aware of, and concerned about, the fact that a significant number of readers might believe themselves deliberately short-changed or left out. Well, guys, you oughtta know us better than that! Would we do this to you? No way. We sat down and kept thinking, and I have to say, problems galore came up. For instance: my "shorts" are spread right across the spectrum from hard SF to flights of pure fantasy, from structured historicals to wild speculations, some extremely erotic, some in the positively PG bracket, while some are no-brainers and some get serious with the tech stuff ... in short, any one reader might only want a percentage of the list. If they're happy to pay a fiddling small sum for the instant gratification of a download, fine. But if they're looking for paper volumes, the postage penalty smarts. The solution is this, guys: PATIENCE. We'll be uploading the ebooks 2 and 3 at a time for the forseeable future. If you want paper copies, hang on, and wait till you can put together ChapBooks to the total of about 250pp combined. Then, grab the whole stack, choosing whatever's your fancy from a long list of titles. You get what you want, and the shipping cost for a 250pp stack will be (!) US$12. We're online right now (June of '05) with the reissue of BREAKHEART and a new SF one, CALLISTO SWITCH, plus a collection of my ballads. We'll be back in about July with TWILIGHT (short-novel sequel to NOCTURNE), plus MINDSPACE (which is a cross between hard SF and fantasy), and WINDRAGE (think Shane and High Noon, on thousand-cc street-racer roadbikes, after the fall of civilization), and then a little while later it will be DRAGANAD (sword and sorcery fantasy), then probably a "first" for me: a comedy. So, if e-books are not your thing, and you're not worried about saving a few bucks, patience is the answer. Let the list get long, and then pick the cherries you want, leave the rest behind! THE VERSION OF BREAKHEART YOU'RE PUBLISHING HERE IS A BIT DIFFERENT (AND 1,500 WORDS LONGER) THAN THE VERSION DONE BY ALYSON A WHILE BACK. WHY IS THAT? When I was invited to participate in the SWORDS OF THE RAINBOW anthology I was given guidelines to produce something about 7500 words. BREAKHEART came in at about 15,000 on its first draft and I hacked it back to 10,000 words and then sent it in with a sigh, thinking it would be rejected because it was too long. It was accepted, in fact, and I breathed a sigh of relief! I wish I still had a copy of the 15,000 word version, but the file vanished with an old computer, years ago. I can recall what was in that version, but the truth is, the material was ancillary to the situation in BREAKHEART. It backstoried Richard Leon, and I pretty soon realized all this material belonged in another story. It wasn't part of Fendel's tale at all. So when I came to look at the old version of BREAKHEART, I was able to restore what *should* be there (albeit from memory ... thank gods I have one of those "trick" memories at least where words are concerned). The text grew back about 1,500 words. It's richer and more filled out to the tune of 15%, without digressing. I was happy to leave it there, and maybe think about Richard Leon's story later on.  Incidentally, I was really pleased with the new
cover art. I've had a face in mind for years ... it had to be young,
vulnerable, touching, yet tough at the same time. This is it. Amazing.
 BREAKHEART had some pretty good reviews when SWORDS OF THE RAINBOW
came out (though there's also some pretty stupid ones, too. The dumbest
of them all is online at Amazon.com, where my piece, which is the
longest in the whole book by a good wedge, is dismissed as 'erotica with
plot.' Anyone who has actually read BREAKHEART would have to be
dumbfounded by that remark; it just means the reviewer hadn't read the
story, and figured, 'it's Keegan, so it has to be just like the only other
thing of Keegan's I've ever read, ICE, WIND AND FIRE, so I know just how
to review it here.' There is *nothing* wrong with "erotica with plot!"
But that label describes ICE, WIND AND FIRE ... not BREAKHEART. Sigh.
One odd comment about the story remarks that my character has the (and
I quote) "unfortunate name" of Fendel. I've been trying to work that
one out for yonks. Is "Fendel" a regionalism in some other part of the
world, and, for instance, means "dungheap" in South Dakota or North Korea??
Fortunately, one of the good reviews of SWORDS OF THE RAINBOW at Amazon.com
goes as far as to say BREAKHEART is worth the price of the book ... and I,
uh, choose to stay focused on this.
CALLISTO SWITCH IS A SURPRISE FROM WAY OUT IN LEFT FIELD! WHEN WAS THIS
ONE WRITTEN? WHAT DOES THE TITLE MEAN?
I was actually in Fairbanks, AK, when I wrote this one. It would have to be something like 1998 or maybe the year after. The title uses a term drawn from long-distance truck driving. A "switch driver" is one of a pair of drivers who "switch" loads at the halfway point of a run. One driver takes a load to a specific point, the other driver comes out with a tractor, couples up the load and completes the journey. The reasons for doing this are many and varied, but most often economic. In Alaska, freight which goes by road from Anchorage (where the container ships unload) to Fairbanks (the 'Golden Heart' of the interior) is "switched" at a landmark called The Igloo, which is just about on the halfway mark between the two cities. (Just in case you're in any doubts, Athabascans do not build igloos! The Igloo is a massive concrete edifice, a tourist thing, and it's the only igloo in Alaska. Hence, The Igloo). And of course since the story is called CALLISTO SWITCH, you know that it won't be drivers, it'll be pilots, and the action is in the Jupiter system. All this is the tip of a very large iceberg, folks. CALLISTO is a monster story in a small space. |