YA Indie Carnival: Smashwords and other e-books—Are they worth it?

Hi Indies,

The question of the week is a hot topic among both indie authors, small publishers, and big publishing houses: Are e-books worth it? And more specifically, are e-book publishing sites worth it?

As an indie author having both self-published short story anthologies, Into The Ruins, and Beyond The Veil, and having my novel Pazuzu’s Girl published by a small genre publishing house, I would emphatically say, YES, they are worth it!

As a self-published author, I have had a huge amount of fun designing covers, and the rush of clicking on the Finish buttons of both Smashwords and Kindle to finish publishing the books were nerve-tingling. Avenues such as Smashwords has afforded authors of all genres a tremendous amount of creativity and freedom to govern their works in whatever way their spirits take them, on their own timetable.

If I delve into particular publishing engines, I do find that there were different advantages to Kindle versus Smashwords. Smashwords gives you the most leeway as to how you do things like giveaways. Any giveaways you want to do are free to you, and all you have to do is include a coupon code in your giveaway. With Kindle, you have to pay as the author to gift copies of the book, and you have to deal with the whole morass of digital publishing rights which is Amazon’s proprietary hook that has booksellers everywhere fuming, understandably so.

However, that said, I am a tech moron. Smashwords does seem to take a higher degree of savvy to format successfully. Kindle is Self-Publishing and Formatting for Dummies, which gave me a measure of relief from heartburn after wrestling with Word.

As a traditionally published author also, I think that the world is moving toward electronic media. There is no turning back. As a reader, there will always be sappy old cranksters like me regaling my tech-conscious seven-year old about the days before remote control, the days when you had to spin a wheel to dial a phone, and yelling ‘You can pry my paper books from my cold dead hands, now get off my lawn!’ I love the smell of a book, I love the feel of the pages in my hand. However, we are currently being buried in good old paper books at our house. It’s starting to look like an episode of Hoarders in terms of the sheer number of books. Electronic media is elegant and efficient. It means that I don’t have to use up all of my carry-on space hauling all of the books I think I might read on the plane. I can stick my tiny little tablet with the library of books contained in it, in my purse with plenty of room for a bunch of other useless things that I imagine I’m going to use on the flight and never do. Electronic media is not going away, ever. It will only become more elegant and compact. Someday maybe, we’ll all carry data crystals that we plug into jacks in our heads. So for authors, publishing mediums like Smashwords and Kindle are an opportunity, whether self- or traditionally published, to get our work out to millions of people in the speed of an internet connection.

See what other author’s takes are on e-books!

1.	Laura A. H. Elliott	2.	Bryna Butler, author Midnight Guardian series
3.	T. R. Graves, Author of The Warrior Series	4.	Suzy Turner, author of The Raven Saga
5.	Rachel Coles, author of Into The Ruins, geek mom blog	6.	K. C. Blake, author of Vampires Rule and Crushed
7.	Gwenn Wright, author of Filter	8.	Liz Long | Just another writer on the loose.
9.	Ella James	10.	Maureen Murrish
11.	YA Sci Fi Author’s Ramblings	12.	A Little Bit of R&R
13.	Melissa Pearl	14.	Terah Edun – YA Fantasy
15.	Heather Sutherlin – YA Fantasy

And here’s What’s New and Upcoming at the YA Author Blog!

Life After National Novel Writing Month—Not Losing Your Go

So, time for the final nag: Well, NaNoWriMo is finally over, did you get your 50,000 words, didja, didja, didja?

My answer: Not even close.

And while some people understandably feel like they want to throw their pens in the air in despair, (or much more expensively, their computers), I’m not feeling bad at all. No, I didn’t win a t-shirt, or a bag of candy. But my daughter’s still sharing her Halloween candy with me, and since Thanksgiving is over and I’m staring down the barrel at the holidays, the last thing I need is candy. And ThinkGeek.com is going to suck all of my drawer space for t-shirts anyway.

So what now? What does the universe look like after NaNoWriMo, after the latest greatest writing revolution. For some people, there are a bunch of new exciting novels to work on editing. For other slow-pokes like me, what was the value of NaNoWriMo?

Well, I’m 20,000 words ahead of where I would have been otherwise. For a full-time public health professional, mom, and daydreaming sci-fi watching goof-off, that’s a lot. Like most people who try to cram way too much into their day without the benefit of Hermione Granger’s Time Turner or Doctor Who’s Tardis, my typical day is that when I finally get time to pull out my story and write, instead I find myself staring into space drooling, or watching TV, or discovering twenty other things I need to do. And so for me, showing up at a restaurant with a bunch of other people who are studiously ticking away at their keyboards and urging me to join their writing sprint, is really inspiring. It gets me to focus by giving me sanctioned time to write, and taking away most of my excuses for goofing around instead. There’s only so many times I can go to get brownies at the counter, or refill my soda, or run to the bathroom. Sooner or later, I sit and I write. I start to relax and words start pouring out, and at the end of the night, I’m happy.

The other great thing about NaNoWriMo is that I have ‘permission to suck’. So I don’t need to obsess over whether or not what I wrote was ‘good’. Who cares, for now? That’s what copy and paste are for, that’s what editing is for. I was thrilled to get a book published, but one thing that I didn’t count on was the paralysis afterwards of ‘what do I do now, what if the second one’s no good?’ So while I love writing and telling stories, it started to become more about whether someone else would like it than whether or not I would. In short, I started worrying too much, the way I worry about everything else. I didn’t even realize the transition until I realized that I was getting nervous about writing. The last time I got nervous about writing was when I was preparing to defend my master’s thesis in front of a committee. While that was buckets of fun, I’m not interested in doing that again.

So the benefits of NaNoWriMo were for me:

1. I wrote more than I would have.
2. I really enjoyed writing again.

Where do we go from here? Well, the great thing about writing is that sometimes it’s kind of like trying on the jeans you kept from high school, when you’re trying to lose weight and seeing that your hard work paid off and you went down two sizes. If you were having trouble starting a novel idea, and you see that you suddenly wrote seven chapters in four weeks, you want to finish it. Good stuff picks up momentum, and so NaNoWriMo is a great creative feeding frenzy that can suck you in if you let it, and propel you through the rest of the novel you want to write. At least, that’s what I hope it will do for me. I am now in the middle of Chapter 12 of the sequel to Pazuzu’s Girl. Wish me luck, and good luck finishing up your own NaNo novels!

Ereshkigal and the Persephone Myth

One of the most fascinating characters to me in myth, Sumerian or otherwise, is Ereshkigal. For people who know me, this might seem obvious. Queen of the Underworld, zombies, dead people, ghosts. I have make-believe zombie preparedness posters in my office at work. However, my love of all things morbid and creepy is not the key reason I’m interested in Ereshkigal.

Many people do not see her as a sympathetic character. Like most other gods in mythology everywhere, she is vicious, cunning, vengeful, all of the delightful qualities of ancient gods. But if you know her whole story, suddenly, the reasons for her ruthlessness take on a different tone.

She did not begin as a dark frightening goddess of the dead. By all accounts, her story began very much like Persephone’s. She began as a young beautiful maiden sun goddess. Until she was raped, abducted, and dragged to the Underworld by a dragon named Kur, at least in one version he is a dragon. In others he is a mountain. At one point, the Underworld is referred to as Kur…Until, unlike the demure Persephone, she kicked her rapist’s ass and took over the Underworld. From this point on, the Underworld is referred to by one of her other names, Irkalla. This seemed to mark the shift in dominance. If Persephone had been depicted differently than she was, rather in the same way as Ereshkigal, it would have ended with her kicking Hades’ ass, and renaming the Greek Underworld Persephone. Ereshkigal was not going to be content with becoming the consort of some controlling jerk. She was going to take his stuff and kick him to the curb.

So basically, she starts as a rape victim, and instead of succumbing to the fate someone else was forcing upon her, decides somehow to use her circumstances to her advantage and create her own future. I don’t know about anyone else, but that is much more interesting to me than just her label as the goddess of the Underworld, it was how she got there. Like Thelma and Louise, told the Addams Family way, and with a happy ending.

Though I didn’t go into her backstory in Pazuzu’s Girl, I made a reference to it, when she told JD that she would look after his abused mother when the woman died, because she ‘understood what it was to feel powerless’.

I’m now writing a sequel to Pazuzu’s Girl, in which Ereshkigal’s origin story will be told from her point of view.

I can’t help but wonder if she were a real woman today, she would probably be jailed for doing the things she does, and then there would be protests for her by feminist groups, Facebook campaigns with her face representing women’s rights. Interesting to think of the tropes we see throughout history showing up in different ways, perceived differently in different ages.

Review of Pazuzu’s Girl by The Horror Zine

I’ve been off and on the site recently, due to life getting a little nuts. I have been really thrilled to have the YA Indie Carnival, because it made me sit down and post, and discuss things that I thought about while I was running around during the day and never sat down to talk about. Writing discipline is one of the things that I think a lot of people struggle with, especially as people get more and more drawn into all kinds of distractions. Pretty soon, I look up and the whole year has gone by, when I wasn’t looking. I am very disorganized, and so making a set time to sit down and write has been crucial for me.

Everyone loves good reviews. It’s a huge boost in so many ways. If I’m having a bad day, it makes me realize that most of the things I’m obsessing about aren’t that big a deal. If I’m having a good day, well, that’s just the hot fudge on the sundae, and also a great excuse to go out and get ice cream for real. But it is also great for encouragement to keep doing what I’m doing. I think a lot of times writers feel like we work hard on something and then it goes off into ether world and gets lost. So when a source that we are fans of notices our work, it really renews determination, especially if we are embroiled in writing another one.

So, I am sitting with a huge grin on my face that will only change long enough to stuff a hot fudge sundae in it. Here is the review of Pazuzu’s Girl by The Horror Zine.

http://www.thehorrorzine.com/ReviewFolder/PazuzusGirl/Girl.html

And here is the main link, because you should really check out this zine f you love horror. It is a wealth of scary stories and terrific authors.

And here is a quote from the review: “Although technically a Young Adult novel, it is sophisticated enough to be enjoyed by adults as well. I recommend Pazuzu’s Girl for any fan of fantasy or Dungeons and Dragons; for that matter, any fan of a walloping good read.”

Pazuzu’s Girl Giveaway and Blog Tour

Pazuzu’s Girl went to print last night! It will be released February 10! There’s a giveaway for it on Goodreads that will close on February 2,so join and be one of the first to read it! I’m doing an official blog tour from February 13-March 15, courtesy of my very cool fellow authors and reviewers in the YA Indie Carnival. It’s been a long haul and I’ve learned a lot about being published, thanks to the awesome folks at Journalstone. Their sites, all worth visiting on a regular basis to see what they’re doing are listed in this blog, and at our Members site. More news as we get closer to February 10!