The Lunar Gambit - free promotion

Benjamin Douglas's The Lunar Gambit is temporarily free.  Click here to get it.

Here's the blurb:

His ship is wrecked. His missiles are gone. And he's been thrust into command on his first tour. What could go wrong?

Lucas Odin seems like a qualified first officer--on paper. But his only battles so far have been simulations, each one a miserable failure. He just isn't a "take charge" kind of guy. To be honest, he'd rather spend his first tour gaming on the ship's modded sims than dealing with real people. But when the Starship Fairfax is waylaid by pirates, Lucas inherits a mission already doomed to fail. If he wants to keep the ship flying, keep his crew alive, and take back what was stolen, there's only one way:

By taking charge.

I've read both Totaled, the prequel, and The Lunar Gambit, book 1 in the series.  My impressions:

The series is sort of like Star Trek crossed with The Expanse.  The hero is the ship captain--not by rank, but in a de facto sense--and the action takes place in the outer part of the solar system.  There are space pirates, and competing governments, and seedy underworlds full of mafia-style figures. The hero is more of a shy nerdy sort than the bombastic James Kirk from Star Trek, and I think that's a good thing.

Tone: there are no cuss words, nor is there any graphic content.  It's family-friendly.

Cool factor: inhabited asteroids.

The books are short, which means you don't have to invest a lot of time, so give them a try.  The promotion for the first book is only for a few days, so get it while it's free.

Hitler... in 1955?

As part of the recent JFK-related document dump, this little nugget turned up:

I'm not convinced that Hitler was alive in Columbia in 1955, but still... crazier things have turned out to be true.

And once again, I'm reminded of the old saying: The difference between fiction and real life is that fiction has to be believable.

Progress report

I'm currently working on Mind Games, the second book of the Wheel of Fire series.  I'm about a third of the way through the second draft, though I still want to go back and do some major changes to chapter 1.  My hope is to finish this second draft before, say, mid-November, and then put it aside until after Christmas.  Then I'll use the second half of November and all of December to start on the first draft of the third book, Fever Pitch.  Then I'll return to Mind Games in January, try to polish it up, and hopefully publish it that month.  I'm sure something will happen to interrupt this plan.  Life tends to do stuff like that to me.  But I'm attempting it anyway.

I've submitted The Lattice to Alasdair Shaw in the hopes he'll include it in his next anthology.  I hope he does, since it was his call for submissions that inspired the story in the first place.  *fingers crossed*

I'm getting a steady stream of sales of books 2 and 3 of the Free Space trilogy.  Amazon and Apple are both delivering, but Apple is still leading.  Thanks for your support, Apple readers.  :)

For the Wheel of Fire, I've tried to keep the world-building at a minimum.  I simply can't handle a Robert Jordan-esque cast of characters and places and whatnot.  Even so, my lists of characters, ships, and planets is bigger than I thought it would be.  There's a lesson there: aim small, because "scope creep" is a thing.

I've been thinking about what I want to do after the Wheel of Fire is complete.  I'm still undecided.  Options include another SF series, perhaps with aliens this time; an urban fantasy series; or an epic fantasy series.  The epic fantasy is the least likely, since that requires extensive world-building.  I've also got an idea for a standalone SF novel, so I may go with that.  Anyway, nothing's decided.

Now, back to Mind Games...

Just hit publish

Just published The Lattice, a 6300-word short story.  Should start appearing on all retailers over the next few days.

Mysteries of space

The more we learn about the universe, the more questions arise.  There is, quite simply, a lot of weird stuff out there.

For example, Jupiter has auroras, but they don't behave in the same way as Earth's auroras.

Jupiter has the most powerful auroras in the solar system, so the team was not surprised that electric potentials play a role in their generation. What’s puzzling the researchers, Mauk said, is that despite the magnitudes of these potentials at Jupiter, they are observed only sometimes and are not the source of the most intense auroras, as they are at Earth.

Saturn has a big hexagon on its north pole.

There's the infamous Tabby's Star.

Astronomers have hypothesized that the objects eclipsing KIC 8462852 could be parts of a megastructure made by an alien civilization, such as a Dyson swarm, a hypothetical structure that an advanced civilization might build around a star to intercept some of its light for their energy needs. According to Steinn Sigurðsson, the megastructure hypothesis is implausible and disfavored by Occam's razor and fails to sufficiently explain the dimming. However, he says that it remains a valid subject for scientific investigation because it is a falsifiable hypothesis. Due to extensive media coverage on this matter, KIC 8462852 has been compared by Kepler's Steve Howell to KIC 4150611, another star with an odd light curve that was shown, after years of research, to be a part of a five-star system. The likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence being the cause of the dimming is very low; however, the star remains an outstanding SETI target because natural explanations have yet to fully explain the dimming phenomenon.

And, most relevant to me, is the mysterious Hoag's Object:

I say "most relevant" because Hoag's Object was the inspiration for the Wheel of Fire galaxy.  I saw the photo, and then I started to wonder about it, and, well, the rest is history.  Or the future, I guess, since most of the series has yet to be written.

Added Hostile Planet to the sidebar

It hasn't gone live at all retailers yet.  I'll add those links when they are active.

Just hit publish

Hostile Planet has been sent into the aether.

Free Space trilogy readability scores

I ran the texts of all three books through this site.  Here are the results.

For Clouds of Venus:

For Caverns of Mercury:

For Cities of Mars:

None of those results are surprising.  I already knew Buddy was written at the fifth-grade level and Mr. Wilson was written at the fourth-grade level.  Basically, I write at about a fifth-grade level with some minor fluctuation.

I consider this a feature of my writing, by the way, not a flaw.  People read genre fiction for pleasure, not pain, so it's in the writer's best interest to make the reading experience as effortless as possible.  My goal is to write in such a way that the reader forgets he's even reading a book.

Free advice for authors:  Impressing the reader isn't about writing big words and convoluted sentences.  It's about the story behind those words and sentences.  Come up with an awesome story first, and then write that story in the most easily readable way you can.

Promotion results

On Tuesday, October 3, I ran two promotions: Freebooksy and eBookBetty.  I got the spike in free downloads I wanted for Clouds of Venus.

The horizontal line represents a thousand units.  I had 1400 downloads on Tuesday and nearly two hundred on Wednesday.

I also received 140 downloads across all D2D retailers on Tuesday.

Sell-through has been a little disappointing, but not surprising; lots of people download free books but don't get around to reading them soon, if at all.  A few sales of books 2 and 3 are trickling in, though.  Apple and Amazon are neck-and-neck as far as income is concerned.  I've had a slightly higher number of sales via Apple, but D2D takes its cut, so the money is basically even.  I'm still "in the red" as far as this trilogy goes, but I'm making progress.  If momentum holds up, I'll be in the black in a matter of weeks.

(FYI: Expenditures = $120 for covers, $105 for copyright registrations, and $94 for promotions.)

So that's where I'm at after two weeks.  For my first real "planned" launch, I think I've done pretty well, considering.  I plan to publish Hostile Planet this month.  I may publish a short, too; we'll see.

Clouds of Venus on The Book Speaks Podcast

Benjamin Douglas was gracious enough to read a chapter from Clouds of Venus for his podcast. 

Check it out.