Introducing - Morgan's Misfits II

After a very long hiatus I've started on a new story set in the Morgan Selwood universe. This will be book two of the Morgan's Misfits spin-off, where four women take on the patriarchs and the rigid social structures of Manesai society. It has been a long time coming, even if I had a little over eight thousand words down already. I couldn't see a plausible way forward, no matter what I tried. So the story was abandoned and I moved on.

I've often said the best way to get over "writer's block" is to write. I suppose that's what happened. I'd finished "The Stuff of Legend" and found myself fidgeting. I have another small project to finish by September, but as I was digging around in the discarded DNF's in the manuscripts file, I realised I could do something with one of them.

Right now I'm past ten thousand words. They might not be great words, but they're down. And eventually, there will be editing. I'm pleased to have an idea of the plot - and interested to find out what's happening with my new character as she tells her story. Who knew? Not me, that's for sure.

He's a short taste.

A big, expensive skimmer drifted down onto the apron outside the Celestial Palace hotel. Marisa had been in that limo more than once. The back door of the vehicle slid up. Her hand crept to the pistol in the bag hung over her right shoulder, her fingers sliding around the butt. A figure alighted from the vehicle. A bodyguard, all muscle and no neck. A second man followed. Her pulse pounded. Soldar. At last. You're going to die, bastard. She'd practiced the shot a hundred times, leaning against a wall, firing without taking the pistol out of her bag. Then she would walk away, just another houri on her way to work in Minka.

A red-coated security guard lumbered between her and Soldar, who was running up the shallow steps beside the bodyguard. Damn it, move your great, hulking carcass. But the woman was walking toward her, coming here.

Marisa backed away, rage boiling in her gut. Damn her. Damn her to all the hells in the black abyss. She'd have to wait, try another day, another way. The towering security guard began to run. Marisa turned, ready to kick off her high-heeled shoes. A hand gripped her arm, hard. She tried to twist away. "What in blazes do you think you're doing?"

Watch this space

Stopping to Smell the Roses--Excerpt and More

While in the midst of revising, re-working and re-plotting my next full-length novel, The Outer Planets, I often had to look at a passage and ask, "But what about the roses?"

In what amounted to disassembling the entire story and then deciding which of Humpty Dumpty's pieces needed to be pieced back together again, it required writing some pretty major chunks of the manuscript from scratch to serve as the glue. And that led to some issues. The contrast between the original, highly-polished scenes and the newly penned material was "in-your-face" evident. The "roses" were missing.

"Stopping to smell the roses" is my analogy for layering-in sensory detail, emotions and mental processing to every scene. Being a total pantser, getting the bare bones down and then fleshing in these elements during a later pass seems to be the process that works best.

The subject of The Outer Planets and stopping to smell the roses makes a great segway into this excerpt, where the heroine taps into her deep appreciation for nature.

Imagine being aboard a planetary research vessel while orbiting Jupiter. The year is 2040 and more than a year has passed since you've enjoyed anything as sensory as a quiet walk in the park. You spend your days enclosed in a finite artificial environment of metals, carbons and plastics, breathing scrubbed oxygen and drinking recycled water. And then one day, you walk into the ship's Biodeck research lab...

Lissa took the TL lift to main deck and walked to the Biodeck entrance, stepping through the huge, transparent doors into the botanical realm. It took time for her eyes and senses to adjust to the dense mist and high humidity. She drew in a deep, invigorating breath. The air hung heavy with oxygen and the heady smells of nature.

Brushing droplets of water from the surface of a heart-shaped leaf, Lissa rubbed the moisture between her fingers. Cool. Wet. Organic. She closed her eyes and tipped her head back, absorbing the garden through her pores. Nowhere else on the Bradley could she feel so near to Earth, so close to the memory of nature. Nowhere else could she delight in the aroma of blossoms and pungent tang of herbal perfumes.

 

She walked between the stark hydroponic cubes of vegetables growing in rock wool and past the hazy green of algae tanks to stare spellbound at the jungle ecosystem that occupied one section of the huge lab. Tall trees stretched toward the high ceiling, clothed in vines and slippered with ferns and creepers. Vibrant red and orange blooms exploded in the dense green backdrop.

Heaven. Lissa sighed. Heaven in space.

The characters in The Outer Planets develop a deep appreciation for Earth and nature during their long voyage, but these sentiments also have a much darker side--and that behavior is expressed through the villain's POV.

Inherit the Stars to be featured on Backlist to the Future

Ever wonder if there are some really great SFR books out there that you may have missed in the years and months gone by? That became the basis for bestselling author Cara Bristol's new Thursday blog series, Backlist to the Future.

Each week, Cara will highlight a SFR book that has been out for at least six months. The blog includes the usual content like blurb, excerpt, author bio and sales links, but it will also have a special section written by the author where they talk a little about the book's background, backstory or special notes about the story.

You can read more on Cara Bristol's Backlist to the Future info page.

Catching you up to date, featured books have included:

Prophecy by Lea Kirk (Feb 2) where Lea reveals the double double trouble that pushed back the debut of her author career by many years.

Cerelia's Choice by D.A. Hill (Jan 26) where the author dishes on why they wrote the book without even realizing sci-fi romance was a genre.

On Thursday, February 9th, my 2015 novel, Inherit the Stars will be featured, and in the author's section I describe two of the things that make this novel a little different from other science fiction romance stories. Cara created a beautiful graphic for my book's appearance, and here it is:

Pets in Space Wins Two SFR Galaxy Awards

As Donna mentioned in her blog on Friday, we had four--count 'em, four!--SFR Galaxy Award winners associated with Spacefreighters Lounge.

Wow! What an honor. It was especially cool to have winners because this is the 5th Anniversary of the awards. (Check out the special banner below that was created by my--and Pippa's-- fabulous cover artist, Danielle Fine, for the occasion.

Donna's Fools Rush In and Pippa's Quickshot both scored an award, and the Pets in Space collection (which includes my story StarDog) pulled in two more--for Best Anthology and Best Interstellar Menagerie.

Pets in Space has had a wonderful run since its debut in October, previously being named one of the Best Books of 2016 in E-Originals Fiction by LibraryJournal.com.

Here's what the SFR Galaxy Award judges had to say about Pets in Space:

Here's a reminder that this collection of terrific science fiction romance stories -- *with pets* -- will only be available as a complete set until April and then the book will go out of e-print forever. You can read more on Amazon > Pets in Space.

Have a great week!

SPACEFREIGHTERS AUTHORS SNAG AWARDS!

Last week was a big one for Spacefreighters Lounge authors Laurie A. Green, Pippa Jay and Donna S. Frelick as they swooped in and snapped up not just one or two, but FOUR SFR Galaxy Awards!

Laurie's multi-author Pets in Space anthology won recognition twice as two different judges awarded the book "Best Anthology" and "Best Interstellar Menagerie."

Pippa's short story "Quick Shot" won the award for "Grittiest Hot and Fast Story."

Donna's third novel in the Interstellar Rescue series, Fools Rush In, was  awarded the "Series That Just keeps Getting Better" title.

Wowzer!

The SFR Galaxy Awards were established five years ago by blogger, author and all-around SFR cheerleader Heather Massey as a means of advocating for our diverse, unique genre. They are meant to recognize excellence in the field of science fiction romance, without forcing judges (themselves authors, bloggers and reviewers) to stick to arbitrary, unwieldy categories. 

Abducted by tentacled aliens from Orion and somehow missed these great reads? Check out the buy links on the Novels Tab above!
 
WINNERS!--WINNERS!---WINNERS!

The winners of my Fools Rush In audiobook giveaway are: Ilona Fenton, Effie Kattalakis and Sarah Ulfers! Congrats, y'all! Contact me on my Facebook Author page with your email addresses so I can send you your prizes! 

Cheers, Donna

Let's take a look at Pronoun

Pronoun is a new entrant into the Indie publishing market, a similar product to Smashwords and Draft 2 Digital, which formats ebooks and distributes them to retail sites. I've been very happy with D2D, but Pronoun can load books to Amazon, and what's more Pronoun doesn't charge authors a fee, AND offers a better return, especially on books priced at under $2.99. Amazon pays 35% - but Pronoun pays 70%. How can that work? Pronoun is owned by Macmillan, which obviously has a deal with Amazon.

Pronoun retails to Amazon, B&N, Kobo, iBooks, and Google, and it pays to Paypal. I've not yet been asked for my EIN, but I expect that will happen when payments are due. This is their author agreement, written in English (not legalise).

D2D and Smashwords distribute to a number of additional sites, such as Tolino, and there is no reason why I can't still distribute to those sites via D2D or Smashwords. But (understandably) Pronoun doesn't want authors duplicating books from different distributors at one site. Which is, dumb, anyway.

Pronoun has an easy to use workflow for authors to follow when creating a book file.

Author details

First, you enter your name and contact information (website, Twitter, Facebook, mailing list). At the moment, you have to enter the data manually for each book. Perhaps at some stage the system will recognise a default, and fill it all in for you. Time will tell. Then you add any contributors such as cover designers, editors and the like.

Cover

You load your cover if you have one (jpg, pdf, tiff, png), or you can create a cover via Canva. Once your cover is loaded, you can elect to compare your masterpiece with those in a category you select (eg paranormal romance) This will give you a visual clue if what you're putting up is in the ballpark.

Book file

Your book file must be either an epub you already created, or a docx. Note: a docx. Not a doc, rtf, txt, pdf. It has to be a docx. The docx must adhere to the formatting guidelines. In summary, you must use Word's styles. You leave off the title page (which Pronoun will create for you) and you can elect (a little later) for the program to create your copyright page. For my Dryden Universe books the copyright isn't standard, so I used my own copyright page for those books.

I always use Word's styles anyway, so the formatting guidelines were no drama. For those not so confident, there are good instructions in the formatting guidelines. The only issue that I encountered was that while Word has no problem with me changing Heading 1 from numbered to not numbered here and there, Pronoun wasn't happy.

To explain further, I had chapters numbered from 1 to (say) 10, then I had 'About the author', which was given number 11. In Word I took the number off, which didn't affect the table of contents. But Pronoun ignored the chapters and only showed the non-numbered items. For me, the work-around was to remove the numbering and type in a manual header for each chapter. These days, with Amazon insisting on a TOC, I'm going to use chapter headings (eg. Whispers in the dark) rather than 'chapter 2'.

You'll need to add your 'about the author' section, and 'also by this author'. D2D does these things extremely well, even setting up links with a retailer's site for each title. Pronoun doesn't. But… it's early days.

Processing

Once the document has been saved, Pronoun can create a mobi and an epub. You're given a choice of six layouts to choose from – all very classy IMO.

When the conversion is complete, you're sent an email telling you the proof is ready for checking. If you're not happy, make your changes in your docx and try again.

If you load an epub it is checked for compliance. Mine was fine. If not, I expect you'll be told to go and fix it.

Marketing

Next, you select two categories. Mine are obvious – romance > science fiction, and science fiction > space opera. But the system helps you to choose. Type in 'romance' and it will show you a list of options for you to choose from.

After that, you pick seven search terms. You can type in your own, but Pronoun will use what you type to find commonly used terms on Amazon, with an idea of how high on that list your book might appear. This is very, very nifty, and gives you a chance to get to a high ranking in a smaller category.

Now enter your blurb. I found I had to refresh the page before I could paste the pre-written blurb in another document.

From there you put in your price, which must end in .99. You're not given an option here. Pronoun will show you a graphic of how your price compares with other books in the same category – another very useful tool. You can set the price to FREE. Simple.

Pronoun will give you an ISBN, or you can enter your own.

Set your release date (so you can do pre-orders).

Sign the author agreement.

Select which of the five retailers you want to send your book to…

And you're good to go. Pronoun will produce final proofs for you to review. If you're happy – launch your new creation into the internet sea.

Observations

I've only been using Pronoun for a couple of weeks. When I put the first book up (Ella and the Admiral) within a couple of days I was informed I'd sold 13 copies in one day! That was huge for me. I put up the rest of my Dryden books, and I've loaded my latest book, The Stuff of Legend. But I'm not getting the hourly confirmation of success one gets from a direct input to KDP. I KNOW the book has sold, because I can see the ranking. I'm certain I've sold more than 1 on Amazon. But there is a delay in receiving the information on Pronoun. Mind you, it's probably not a bad thing. One can become obsessed with checking numbers on Amazon.

The system does inform you about rankings, and sales, in emails you can elect to turn off. The 'your books' page shows at a glance how many you sold where, and what you earned. And it will also suggest categories where your book might rank higher. Along with the help in selecting key words, comparisons with book covers, and the graph comparing sales price, there's a lot to like about Pronoun. 

That said, I haven't switched everything. You know the story about eggs and baskets.