LAUNCH DAY

[Malik]

So here's the deal: It's print-only. No ebooks. If the cost is prohibitive, tell your library to buy a copy. The ISBN is 978-0-9978875-9-4.

You can buy a copy here (cheapest way): https://shop.ingramspark.com/b/084

It's up on Amazon, but since I didn't do ebooks, they haven't yet linked it with my other titles. But you can order it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0997887591

Also available at Barnes and Noble: BN No Results Page

Or at any local bookstore, just give them the ISBN and they'll have it for you in a couple of days.

 

[skip.knox]

Congrats! There actually is a local bookstore here in this small Idaho town. You'll just have to tell me how to resize the text. <smile>

 

[Mad Swede]

If I were you I'd get your wife to send a message (in Swedish) to SF Bokhandeln in Stockholm. They already have some of A. E. Lowan books on the shelves so you may well find they order some copies.

 

[Malik]

Holy crap. #34 in Military Fantasy New Releases and #21 in Norse & Viking Fantasy New Releases this morning.

In paperback.

At $24.99.

This might work.

 

[Malik]

Now at #28 and #17, respectively. Okay, then.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

If I were you I'd get your wife to send a message (in Swedish) to SF Bokhandeln in Stockholm. They already have some of A. E. Lowan books on the shelves so you may well find they order some copies.

Wow! What terrible fate did they intend for entire populations, using the Em-Dash and periods of Pay Attention to Me! Maybe all of these above?

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Now at #28 and #17, respectively. Okay, then.

Screenshot that stuff. And wow! You've got a lot of friends out there.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Great to see! Damn, time flies! I haven't finished the book yet and barely realized it was August. Sheesh.

Between AI and pirating, I'm considering delaying the ebook release on the next several books, and then on the next big release that I blow up, trying out the print-only approach for the first 6 months or so. I'm going to revamp everything in marketing and sales as a couple little contracts end in 2026.

Amazon is getting to the point that I might pull ebooks and audiobooks from their sales, and sell signed print through my own TM'd Amazon store. But, we'll see how things are going

 

[pmmg]

Malik, you make us all proud. Keep up the good work.

 

[ThinkerX]

Great to see! Damn, time flies! I haven't finished the book yet and barely realized it was August. Sheesh.

Between AI and pirating, I'm considering delaying the ebook release on the next several books, and then on the next big release that I blow up, trying out the print-only approach for the first 6 months or so. I'm going to revamp everything in marketing and sales as a couple little contracts end in 2026.

Amazon is getting to the point that I might pull ebooks and audiobooks from their sales, and sell signed print through my own TM'd Amazon store. But, we'll see how things are going

Maybe D2D?

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Been there and done that. I've got books wide and Amazon exclusive (testing ad theories) and I'm going back to all wide as of September. I'll be opening an Amazon store plus I'm revamping my Direct to Consumer website, basically turning my main website into the sales room, while the Wiki handles all of the Maps, synopses, characters, and world info. T-shirt sales surprised me at my first Con and I learned some lessons. I've had decent direct sales in the past, but I can push that harder now, and by the time I launch The War of Seven Lives in a couple of years, I'll be able to blow up its promotion and hopefully have enough street cred to push direct sales to 25-35% of books moved.

All of that assumes AI hasn't terminated book sales by then, heh heh.

Maybe D2D?

 

[ThinkerX]

Been there and done that. I've got books wide and Amazon exclusive (testing ad theories), and I'm going back to all wide as of September. I'll be opening an Amazon store, plus I'm revamping my Direct to Consumer website, basically turning my main website into the sales room, while the Wiki handles all of the Maps, synopses, characters, and world info. T-shirt sales surprised me at my first Con, and I learned some lessons. I've had decent direct sales in the past, but I can push that harder now, and by the time I launch The War of Seven Lives in a couple of years, I'll be able to blow up its promotion and hopefully have enough street cred to push direct sales to 25-35% of books moved.

All of that assumes AI hasn't terminated book sales by then, heh heh.

My books are available on Amazon through D2D, but I seem to have missed out on most of the Amazon drama proper. Then again, I'm a minnow, maybe not worth bothering with.

I signed up for a slew of D2D partner promos with the likes of Kobo, Overdrive, and others, but the only success there was via Smashwords, and then mostly freebies. I attribute this to being a minnow amidst a slew of bigger fish. Maybe you have sufficient recognition to make those partnership promos work.

Facebook? All I see are scammers.

Anymore, I go with the 'cheap lunch' approach to promos. I take out 3-5 spots of $7-10 each (the cost of a cheap lunch) with 3 or 4 outfits that usually result in 5-15 sales each. If they bomb, then I'm out of a bit of pocket money. Sometimes, they'll take off and I'll get 20+ sales. Once every month or three, I drop $40-50 on a promo company, but they don't do much better than the cheap ones. I have noticed an increasing trickle of 'out-of-the-blue' sales, so maybe something is working.

 

[Malik]

Okay, fine; I'm relenting. The Kindle version of STONELANDS will be available on 12 May.

Preorder now for $4.99.

After launch, it'll join my other ebooks at $9.99, because that's where we should all be selling our books.

 

[Prince of Spires]

It still looks epic. What made you relent?

Also, which book of yours is best to start with? Dragon's Trail or this one?

 

[Malik]

It still looks epic.

Thank you. If I may say so myself, it is.

What made you relent?

Money. Not the lack of it; quite the opposite. Between the paperback sales and the film option, I can launch the ebook with a considerable promotional budget and start production on my next novel. When Stonelands gets pirated, I'll be fine. The ebook revenue isn't critical. (Don't get me wrong; I'll take all I can get.)

Also, which book of yours is best to start with? Dragon's Trail or this one?

All three can stand alone. Start wherever you'd like. I'd recommend Stonelands, though. It's the best writing I've ever done. And there's literally nothing else like it out there that I'm aware of. I don't think there could be. At least, I don't think anyone else could have done it. The story's not terribly original: Monster Hunter did it; Stargate did it; to a degree, Stranger Things did it. The trick is the way I did it. The military details are spot-on, down to little things like pay issues when time isn't a constant between the two worlds, and doping in a sniper rifle on a planet where you don't know the curvature, the gravity, or even your latitude. I used these issues as technothriller plot points.

Stonelands is a Sci-fi/Fantasy crossover--it explores a fantasy world through the eyes of pragmatic, science-focused people--and if I did this right, it shows that SF and fantasy can be just a matter of perspective. I leaned hard into old-school thriller writers for the voice: Trevanian, Lustbader, Clavell, Stephen Hunter. I found a line editor who loves those kinds of books, so it reads beautifully. It's still clearly me telling you the story, but it reads very much like an 80s thriller with that type of crisp, taut writing. It's also the most up-to-date--intersectionality issues, identity issues, modern political issues. And it has a couple of sex scenes that are so hot it's like looking through a jet engine. Finally, it's half the price of my other books, so there's that.

Dragon's Trail was my shot at the title; it's funny, action-packed, and quick-reading--think Deadpool dick-punching his way across Westeros. It's a good book. It's not a great book. There's no truly brilliant writing in it, nothing terribly edgy or unique other than the realism of the worldbuilding--and again, using local idiosyncrasies as plot points, same as in Stonelands--but it was exactly good enough to be commercially successful, and I think there's a lot to learn from that.

The New Magic never got a fair shake. It's a second act, it's much darker, there's a main character death, and I did a lot of deep-dives into Russian literature to get the overall feel of helplessness and impending doom. The prose is beautiful, which was a mistake on my part; it didn't land with people who liked the funny, perky style of Dragon's Trail. I happen to love it, but in the same way I imagine you'd still love a child who likes to sneak into your room at 3 AM and stare at you until you wake up.

TL; DR: Start with Stonelands. There are Easter eggs you'll pick up in the other two books. You'll go into the main series knowing more about the world than the characters do.

 

[Malik]

there's literally nothing else like it out there that I'm aware of. I don't think there could be. At least, I don't think anyone else could have done it.

Rereading this, I realize this sounds big-headed. Stick with me for a minute, though.

As a lot of you Old Guard here know, I did all my characters' stunts when I was creating the world for this series. I started my worldbuilding way back before the internet, in the days when if you didn't know how something worked, you either sat down over a beer with someone who did, or you laced up your boots and grabbed a notepad and figured it out. Horsemanship, swordsmanship, blacksmithing, pacing off castles and ruins, building a conlang, mountaineering. If it's in the books, I probably attempted it. I have a trunk full of notebooks laying out the crazy shit I did and what I learned.

This is important because I set Stonelands in the same fantasy world I spent decades researching and building. The world is fully functional, at a level that few fantasy worlds are. This is one of the things that I'm told sets Dragon's Trail apart: little details that other authors miss, or get wrong, because they're things you wouldn't know unless you've done it.

Fast-forward; my wife gets sick when I'm in my 30s, the Army raises its recruiting age to 42, and I join up to secure medical benefits. I do well. I spend years at the level at which an operation like the one in Stonelands--were there one IRL--would happen. I know the ins and outs of these types of units. I know the personality types involved. Most of all, I know the pain points and trip hazards inherent in compartmented operations and I used them as plot points. Unless you've served in these kinds of units, you likely wouldn't know that these were problems. (One of the reasons that Stonelands took so long to clear is that some of the plot points were doctrinal and policy issues that I didn't realize were classified, so I had to keep reworking the story until it made sense without them. At one point, I gave up entirely; you'll see an Author's Note about 2/3 of the way through loosely explaining what happens in a chunk of the book that I had to remove.)

There are plenty of mil-SF authors who served, but the authors I know who served in these types of units write memoirs and go into consulting. None, that I know of, built a fantasy world largely from firsthand experience and then added a Special Missions Unit that they also wrote from firsthand experience.

So that's what I meant by that. Thanks for your time if you're still with me by now.

 

[Prince of Spires]

Thanks for the explanation. I love the idea that "it shows that SF and fantasy can be just a matter of perspective." Definitely going to pick it up and give it a read.