My Readers Strut Their Stuff

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*I’m working on the next chapter of Rogue Magic.  Was dismayed to learn as he does final clean up on Witchfinder, the one character my husband wishes would die is arguably the main character of Rogue Magic.  Ah well.  :-P  Meanwhile, fresh from the Lair of Free Range Oyster, in an abandoned volcano (submerged in tropical waters) is: Sarah’s Readers Strut Their Stuff:*

Time to pimp the the work of those who read and write! So let’s get these stories out there to strut their stuff. Dangle that participle for everybody, honey; let me see what you can do with that plot twist! Er… *clears throat* apparently my editor brain has issues. Anyway, go check out some of our fellow readers’ work, and enjoy your weekend. As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!
Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster
Commerce Facilitator, Mercenary Wordsmith, and Retired Chum-Shoveler

Robert DeFrank

Star Winds at Dusk

Star Winds at Dusk
Here there be monsters…

A traveler in antiquity might find that ominous notation on a map, writ across the white space of the unknown, accompanied by fantastical beasts.

A mosaic novel of dark fantasy set in a Lovecraftian world serves up stories of men and women who find they have stepped into that blank space, and the monsters are waiting. A father searches the woods for his missing daughter, and finds demons from his past. A young man is trapped in a witch’s enchanted garden that turns carnivorous with the rising of the moon. A disgraced professor and hunter of the supernatural must solve a series of mysteries while investigating an accursed town where death stalks its victims in their dreams. Each has a choice to make. Each, a part to play.

These are stories of people who find themselves at the borders and discover heroism – or horror.

There is no peace at the gate.

Cyn Bagley

The Green Knight Terraforming Company

The Green Knight Terraforming Company
Most customers are extremely satisfied with the job The Green Knight Terraforming Company does to refurbish their planets. However, when there is a problem and a customer complains, then the human Joe called Tiny by his team is the person who is sent to solve the customer’s problems. Joe’s backup muscle, Donald, is there for those tiny problems like when Joe touches before he looks.

Joe, Donald, the lab animals, and pilot drones are a rolicking bunch of troubleshooters. One hundred percent guaranteed to fix any customer problem or if that doesn’t work– fix the customer.

Also available from Smashwords

Gina Marie Wylie

The Odyssey and the Iliad (Kinsella Universe)

The Odyssey and the Iliad
The start of the war for the Federation had been chaos, with people frantically trying anything to ward off the destruction that was sure to come. The habitat Odyssey began a journey that defied imagination. Day by day the ripples of that journey spread outward until one day the entire Federation had been affected.

Note: The Odyssey and the Iliad is book seven in the series. To help readers get started, book one will be free on 3-1-14:

Kinsella (Kinsella Universe)

Kinsella
Stephanie Kinsella is your run-of-the-mill professor of physics at Caltech. Well, maybe not all that ordinary as she’s a little young, half Jamaican and all attitude. On the other hand, she knows where to aim…

Alma Boykin

Promises and Powers (A Cat Among Dragons)

Promises and Powers
Don’t threaten a HalfDragon’s family: he’ll change the world in order to protect them.

Alien invasions only exist in bad movies. Earth’s militaries know better. That knowledge forces Joschka Graf von Hohen-Drachenburg to make a choice. Will he remain in hiding, or will he risk losing everything in order to protect his family and House Drachenburg? His decision pulls Rada Ni Drako back into his life. She in turn receives an offer she probably should refuse, from a creature as old as Earth itself.

When the Cat and a HalfDragon join forces, everything changes.

Cedar Sanderson

The Eternity Symbiote

The Eternity Symbiote
Earth sits at the center of a galactic power struggle humanity knows nothing about. Then an alien delegation suffers a fatal accident and hidden plans unravel around the wreckage in the Alaskan wilderness. Infectious disease expert Gabrielle McGregor discovers the hidden machinations and what they’ll mean for her and her family.

64 thoughts on “My Readers Strut Their Stuff”

  3. Thanks Sarah– I am in the middle of my second story of Tiny and Donald’s adventures in The Green Knight Terraforming Company. They are (horrors of horrors) working in the call center — not a good place for a complaint team. ;-)

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  4. “…fix the customer.”

    Hahahahahaha. In 20 years in IT, there have been more than a few occasions that was my preferred (though, unfortunately, never approved) solution!

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    1. Hey Bruce– glad for the laugh. I was in electronics from 1988-1998 in a customer service capacity– and yes, I wanted to fix the customer many many many times. (Navy and then civilian). So this is my private fantasy. ;-)

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      1. Electronic Tech. in the Navy 1960-1964. Favorite saying- Remember, this was built by the lowest bidder. It was always fun to get woke up in the middle of the night by a radioman- My transceiver is broke, no power. “Did you check the electrical receptacle to see if it’s still plugged in.” -Of course I did, maybe its a fuse. “It’s fixed” -What did you do? “Plugged it back in.” If it was warm enough (Orient) I usually found an unused portion of deck where they couldn’t find me again to go back to sleep.

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        3. Some techie people tell them to pull out the plug and put it back. That way they didn’t go into a huff rather than actually doing it.

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    2. “User error: replace User and continue.”

      PEBCAK error:Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard.

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      2. I had a call from someone in our building one day (very unusual – most of our customers were not less than a couple hundred miles away), and they talked me into coming over to look at it. Don’t remember the problem, but the caller had written ‘ID10T’ on a piece of paper and laid it on the keyboard of her laptop by the time I got there. End-users with a sense of humor can save a really bad day!

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        1. I called my local tech guy two years ago and it went like this:
          TXRed: I have a problem with my hard drive on my [Mac flavor and volume].
          Tech: Oh? What’s it doing? Or not doing?
          TXRed: It was playing a tango.
          Tech: A tango?
          TXRed: Yup. Instead of whirrrr, it went tick tick TICK tick, tickticktikTIKtik. I shut it down.
          Tech: Turn it back on.
          TXRed: I have a silent grey screen with the original Mac icon and a question mark. GSOD?
          Tech: {laughing} Yes, ma’am, the GSOD*. Do you have back-ups?
          *GSOD – grey screen of Death.

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    3. I have with my own eyes seen an indignant comment that at IBM, it was approved way of closing bug reports, to label the issue WAD — working as designed.

      Must have been someone who never worked with bug reports.

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  6. Man, I had a rotten February. I only sold three copies. But on the plus side, my listing popped over from “Customers also viewed” to “Customers also bought” which ditched all those links from my 8 hour foray into the erotica listings to being in the company of some really fine books. Things by Peter Grant, Cedar Sanderson, John D. Brown, Chuck Dixon, Marko Kloos, Fred Saberhagen, John Ringo, Sabrina Chase, and most surprisingly, Larry Corriea.

    At a guess I’d say being on the tenth page of their “Also boughts” isn’t very effective….

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      1. Working on it. The big problem I’m having with “Pretty Hate Machines” is that the world building in the beginning is coming way too close to being a right wing anti-feminist screed, and I’m having trouble planning the action for the middle.

        (Short form, if you’re going to have female sexbots, there’s got to be a reason. If you’re going to have space be nearly a men-only place while women comfortably run the planets in their own version of a Feminist paradise, there needs to be a reason. If there’s going to be a white slave ship for our space marine hero to liberate, there needs to be a reason for that too. And for someone to re-program some sex-bots to be assassination bots and hide them in the cargo, that also needs a reason. You can see how all of this can get bad really quick. Lots of set-up, how to blend in enough action to make it worth reading?)

        (Oh, and the human wavy aspect is, the hero doesn’t like the system the way it is, he’d rather actually raise a family the traditional way, but he finds out his planned military retirement on Earth won’t be what he thought it would be.)

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        1. Follow the hero– tell the story and don’t preach. If you write with the creative brain, the problems seem to work into the story like it should. Also use try/fail cycles. (look it up)…

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          1. Yeah, I guess part of the problem is “What’s the story?” Once you get to the action, when does the hero have time to ruminate on what a rotten society he’s living in? The opening page is okay, where he’s in a bar celebrating his imminent retirement, and rejects the advances of one of the bots (Called “Fluffers” in the story, which amuses me greatly), and he’s thinking about why it’s not going to be as great as he planned after his skipper told him what it’s really like back “home”. That might be the right situation for some thinking, but it’s not the best place for it structurally.

            Opening it in the middle of the fight and then flashing back kills the current opening scene, and that whole device is overused. Starting with action, plowing into a brick wall, then slowly getting back up to speed and finishing where you started isn’t so satisfying.

            (Still, talking about this stuff is helping me sort it out.)

            But it’s this, or getting back to Dr.Mauser, which is sitting at a point where a movie would have a Training Montage sequence.

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            1. Why does the hero need to ruminate? If the reader can’t see “what a rotten society he’s living in” without the hero chewing his cud, you haven’t done your authorial job.

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                1. I like that idea. I had a beta reader complain about what I thought was vital info and he said was a distracting infodump in a bad place.

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                  1. Yeah, right now I’ve been shuffling paragraphs and changing the glue between them, and one paragraph I palmed. I’m not even sure if it does the story any favors to slip it under the bottom of the deck.

                    (If I’m going to posit a world where men go to space and women enjoy a world without men, introducing self-hating, man-hating women who DO go into space because they rebel against the breeding culture kinda undermines it.)

                    That first page had one hell of a lot of concepts built into it.

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            2. I’m going to meddle, and do it poorly.
              It is possible to look at RA Howard’s Conan stories in two ways: One as a sword and sorcery where the action is the plot — get-the-girl-kill-the-nasties-avoid-the-demon — or it can be the plot is a man of incredible strength, sense of self, honesty and urge for freedom who fights his way through a world where none of that is held in any regard. In a way, Terry Pratchett went through the same sort of thing, from action being the plot to action being a way of carrying the principal idea. The book Small Gods could have been another book like Pyramids, detailing Brutha’s madcap race across Omnia meeting interesting people who are trying to kill him, but it turned into a greater story about what religion is to man, what man is to religion and what means about man to himself…It sounds like this is what you are reaching for. Maybe not exactly God and man, but something basic like that.

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        2. That’s easy. The fluffer that propositions him was one of the assassin-bots that misidentified him and tries to take him out so he has a close brush with mortality, gets to talking and thinking with his drinking buddy while they either pick up the pieces or get out of Dodge. Next problem?

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  7. Oh evil people. My TBR stack just got larger.
    They all sound good, but I think I try to get to The Eternity Symbiote first. (BTW, if any of you folks haven’t yet read Ceder’s Pixie Noir, it’s a total hoot.)

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    1. Oops. That should be “Cedar” not “Ceder”. Sigh … and I’m supposed to be an editor. Must learn to poofread before posting. ;-)

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  8. Those of you who read my short story “The Green Knight Terraforming Company” could you please review the story. I just received a two star because the reviewer thought the story was too expensive even though it was “enjoyable.” I would really appreciate the reviews.

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      1. On the one hand, there are at least two places on the Amazon listing page that indicate the story is 16 pages, so I was ready to ding him for that. But on the other hand, he has a point about the pricing on it. If he’s right about it being that short and full of links to your other works, then perhaps it should be a 99 cent loss leader or free intro.

        Usually it’s only erotica that seems to be able to command $2.99 for a short short.

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        2. Dr– I am thinking of dropping it down to 1.99. The problem is short stories shouldn’t be free– I have already done the free stories and they don’t go any faster than the pay for stories. Plus this is my work– I can’t do free anymore. It costs me too much in time, energy, and money.

          This may be too personal, but I have not been able to work for over a decade because of my disease. I am housebound. Writing takes a lot of energy out of me. If you want to understand this phenomenon look for the article about having a chronic illness called “Spoon Theory.”

          This is the way for me to add to the household income. I can’t do free anymore except as a business transaction i.e. I give a copy and the other person gives a review.

          Thank you for your thoughts on the subject.

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          1. It’s one of those supply and demand curve things. And figuring that out is a bear, especially with little information. The temptation to go $2.99 on everything is obvious because of the 70% royalty, but 70% of nothing is nothing. The question is, At what price point does the increase in sales make up for the lost in per unit profit.

            But it should be obvious that three bucks is a bit much for twelve pages of story.

            I wonder though, can’t you get 70% on lower prices in the KDP Select program? I haven’t been through the details that thoroughly.

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            1. No– anything under 2.99 is 35 percent period.

              Last year kindle singles were going for 2.99 (amazon promoted short stories), but I see they did drop them to 1.99. BTW I did drop to 1.99.

              The problem with going under 2.99 is the noise floor and if you go 99 cents you are just saying to readers that it isn’t any good. Nowadays 99 except for a promotion is assumed to be unreadable.

              blah, blah, blah entertainment dollars
              blah, blah, blah shorts are considered throwaways when they shouldn’t be. It still takes a lot of craft to write shorts.
              blah, blah, blah I had the same problem with trying to sell poetry Every one could write one so it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on–

              (blah, blah, blahs because I wrote this three times and I lost the post three times *sigh)

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              1. Hmmm. What do they think of $1.49?

                Or I may package shorts together from the get go. Which does simplify the cover side. . . .

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                2. I saw an article about this once. 1.49 and 1.99 looks the same to the mind– 1.49 imho hasn’t helped much with some of my older stories although I keep them at that price to keep them off the 99 cent floor. It has something to do with the brain and marketing. I was told that if you put the price at 1.49 you are just losing 50 cents.. 99, 1.99, 2.99– something to do with marketing science and what the brain actually sees. It seems strange to me– but that is why you see 99 as an ending on price in places like walmart and other stores.

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                  1. 99 cents is to force the cashier to ring it up and give you your penny change, which means he can’t just slip your money into his pocket.

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                3. There is another problem with bundling (I do shorts single and bundled). Sometimes readers want to read one story (think of music– one song and albums) before they decide to buy a collection. So it is good to have singles.

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                  1. Yes, this is where I believe the free and even .99 singles really do some good. People look at that book of short stories and wonder if it is really worth 3.99, but hey, here is a single story, basically a sample I can try for free. If they like it then they are likely to buy the bundle, if not, well this is why you should use your best shorts as loss leaders.

                    I don’t see unrelated shorts doing near as much good for selling other stories as shorts that are part of a series, or at least part of a bundle. That being said, Cedar’s free shorts intrigued me enough to sell a copy of Pixie Noir, and with the knowledge that they were unrelated, her shorts showed that she was a good writer that I wanted to read something longer from.

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                    1. I have done free shorts– at a blog and other websites. I don’t mind doing an excerpt or short on my blog– Now you are going to think that my shorts aren’t good because– I have NOT seen any fans reading my collections or even stories because of free shorts– I get the expectation from certain readers to put up free so that these individuals do not have to buy the collection. So I hope you see why I have decided that I needed a line in the sand– (The question I received from a reader was why they had to buy the milk when they could get it for free?)

                      It kind of made me mad and a little bull-headed.

                      I do understand the loss leader concept (see the people handing out samples at grocery stores). But even the stores get a little upset when certain people (yes, I have seen this one) come into the store and have a full meal on the samples. BTW most of the grocery stores here in my area don’t do that anymore.

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                    2. To further explain– I am not saying that Sarah’s fans are like that– btw. sorry if I insulted anyone. It is that I have rammed right into that attitude so many times and not just with stories.

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                    3. I wasn’t meaning to imply that your shorts weren’t any good. The only one I have read was a rather long short, and a pretty good story. (not exactly my preferred style, but I can objectively say it was a well-written good story that a lot of readers would like). That was meant as a generic warning to authors in general, don’t give away your weaker stories that you don’t feel are worth anything, give away your best. Because the freebies are what a lot of readers will see first, and if they aren’t good enough for the reader to think they would have payed good money for, they’ll never look farther.

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                4. I noticed that many times (legacy publishing) a known name will do shorts or novellas with three other writers. Seems to be done a lot in fantasy writing. Anyway, if we do something like that the rights and money (like any collaboration) would be a hard to do with indies. I have thought of this of course as a marketing tool lol.

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            2. The big problem is that writers want to get noticed so they give out shorts for free and then for 99 cents. It doesn’t get them noticed because there is a tendency to have contempt for anything that doesn’t have a price. So what do you do?

              I don’t want to go back to the old model where only novels where bought. All other stories where either sent to magazines (first gateway) or given away to get noticed.

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              1. Here is my take, and remember this is just me personally, I don’t necessarily represent other readers. I’m not going to buy shorts, period. I will buy novelettes or novellas, in fact I find many of the best stories are novellas. But shorts or just to short to waste money on, kind of like buying one bite out of a corndog, it might taste good, but there just isn’t enough there to be worth paying for to me. And I’m cheap, I would think .99 for a short and 1.99 for a novelette or short novella, and 2.99 for a novella or shorter novel. But then I find $5-6 for an ebook a ridiculous price that I won’t pay unless a)I know the author and know I’ll like them, b)I can’t get them in paperback for a reasonable price. If I can get a physical book for the same price or a buck or two more, I figure the ebook is way overpriced.

                Now I do pay more than I want to for e-novels, because most people have passed me by in pricing, and those written by authors I know I’ll bite the bullet and moan and complain but go ahead and buy. That and the fact that I can’t wait a few months and then find them used. I still find $7-8 for a paperback ridiculous, but after fifteen years of not buying a new book after the Clinton Administration made them double in price overnight, I finally broke down and started buying new ones, mainly because Baen simply won’t stay on the shelves of any used book stores. Of course I have a lot of hardbacks because I discovered if you wait until the paperback comes out, you can get the hardbacks in like new, or oftentimes brand new condition for the same or less than the new paperback, simply because the bookstores want to move them, and they need the shelf space.

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                  1. Whenever confronted by the argument that a short story does not justify the expense I am reminded that back in the beginning of the Cliinton regime the Wall Street Journal published Harrison Bergeron, complete, in a single column on their editorial page.

                    Writing a story short requires greater skill and effort. As a reader I appreciate an author who does not pad the dish with excelsior to make it seem more filling. One does not value diamonds by the same standards employed for coal, no matter how similar the basic materials.

                    As a consumer, however, I am mindful of the psychological barriers raised by pricing. While I agree that the hamburger at the fine restaurant is far superior to that McDonalds throws out their drive-through window, the McDonalds burger is adequate to my nutritional needs and doesn’t strain the pocketbook nearly so much. As Mary suggests elsewhere this page, packaging the stories is probably the better route; getting three or five short stories for $4.99 or $5.99 is simply more attractive a purchase.

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                  1. Sent to your goldport address, the second email, the first one I was an idiot and sent my email rather than snail-mail address. Thanks

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