I know that many of you loved the Santa Muerte cover. But it was communicating the wrong thing. Alas. I love that tattoo. On another site I polled, everyone leaned towards the road and vanishing point. Then everyone I polled personally liked the initial concept for the one below. I liked the road, but the bullet holes won. Here is the final result.
Sometimes, despite our best efforts, mistakes make their ways into the text. Omissions are common. For example, a missing “the” or “of” can be hard to see; your magical mind just fills these tiny words in.
Some omissions are hilarious. I was editing Raveler a few days ago and ran across a howler that made me laugh and laugh.
In one scene Shim is angry about the Bone Faces. When he sees their ships, I meant to have him exclaim with some indignation that they were “Coming to plunder under our noses while we’re tied up here.”
What I wrote was “Coming to plunder our noses while we’re tied up here,” which is a different type of threat altogether.
And then there are the aaarg! omissions. Like leaving the names of awesome folks who provided valuable input out of your acknowledgements. (Head smack!)
Yes, I’m guilty of such an idiocy.
I’m very recently guilty. Like, today guilty.
The good thing about indie publishing is that I can make changes and upload them immediately. I have already fixed the ebooks. The big paperbacks will be fixed on Monday. But these folks deserve better. To make amends, I’m going to spotlight them here, right now, for all posterity.
For excellent feedback on the full manuscript, I want to thank Stephen and Liesl Nelson.
A few years ago, I posted on this website, asking if anyone would be willing to read and report their response to a beginning I wanted to test. These folks stepped up and responded in grand fashion, helping me make the beginning better.
Adam Teachout
Alexis Cooper
Cameron Wilson
David West
Eric Allen
Hyrum Grissom
Justin Fisher
Krista Hoeppner Leahy
Laurel Amberdine
Lindsey Tolis
Mark Holt
Martin Cahill
Melanie Goldmund
Merrill Nielson
Nick Dianatkhah
Ray Solomon
Wes Amodt
All of you rock. And may the Bone Faces never come to plunder your noses.
Send Frank, Sheriff Hood, and the Knitters of Death club to kick some award patootie!Here’s how: go to: http://whitneyawards.com/ and click “Nominate” at the top.
Enter a bit of info and boom! But this needs to happen before December 31st.
The Whitney Awards are open for the public to nominate books they think are great and which are written by LDS authors (this is where your voice is heard, Faithful Reader). Those books that get at least 5 nominations are read and rated by a panel of judges. The judges then send on the finalists in each category to the Academy for voting.
Servant won an award in 2009. Awful Intent is doing well, and if the reviews piling up are any indication, it could win another.
Please take a few moments to send Frank to kick some award patootie.
It’s time for Frank to bring home a trophy.
Just got back from a wonderful trip with Larry Correia down to Phoenix. We did 2 signings and hit 23 bookstores in 1.5 days. Our new zipcode map GPS method rocks! Have three interesting things to report.
First, we have a great time at The Poisoned Pen, an independent bookstore in Scottsdale. Lori and the other two guys whose names I forgot (doh!) were wonderful hosts. We talked about our books, fielded questions, and then signed. Had a great time. A lot of laughing and good stories shared. If you’re ever in their area, you should stop by and check out the store.
It was also nice meeting Valerie Moore, a reader I met on Twitter, who makes her own beads. Cool thing is–she’s doing a new design inspired by the book called “The Grove.” Can’t wait to see what it looks like.
I also need to comment on Mysterious Galaxy, the store we went to in San Diego. Patrick and his crew were also wonderful hosts. This is also the first bookstore I’ve been into dedicated to science fiction and fantasy. The folks who showed up were hard core fans. We loved it. I hope I get to go back again and again.
BTW, anyone wanting to pick up signed copies can get them at either place while they last. I believe both stores do a lot of mail business as well.
Another comment along these lines. We noticed a dramatic difference between stores. Larry and I both agreed that the Barnes & Noble (Bookstar, which is a B&N store as well) and the independent stores (Poisoned Pen, Mysterious Galaxy) consistently showed the best customer service. They also consistently showed the most business sense. Kudos to them.
Second, Larry had a bunch of gun owner friends show up to the signing and then invite us out to dinner the next night. We had a great time. Polite, good-natured, and fun. Of course, a number of them were carrying concealed weapons. And I’ll tell you what–never felt safer in my life. Now, I know some people are going to say, hey, that’s just an accident waiting to happen and if any bad dudes show up you’re just more likely to get shot or have the gun stolen.
Um.
No.
These guys don’t just carry weapons. These guys live and breathe weapons. They customize guns. They shoot them and train with them in competitions. These guys know guns like I know my keyboard. I wish I could have remembered all their names–Chris, Hiram, Mark, the dude with the Hooters wife, and the other dude who drives for an armored truck company (and wears a kilt!), and about five others.
Thanks to Chris for a great dinner at Famous Dave’s!
I wish I could post pictures. I promised myself I take a camera on this trip. Dang it. Denver. I shall document Denver.
Finally, I have to write about a guy in the Mesa Barnes & Noble where we were holding our informal signing. We were in the cafe. My great sister had brought rum cake muffins and everyone who came was eating them and talking. One of them asked me how I got the idea. So I told them the cow story and about the idea of humans being ranched for their souls. And just after I finished this a guy who had been reading behind us, a B&N customer, stands up and says, “Your book it true! Your book is true!” He had a beard and was all bug-eyed.
At first I thought he was joking.
Nope.
He said lizard men were ranching humans and I needed to read book xyz by author abc. Later he told my sister that the Bible showed they’ve interbred with humans and are taking our souls.
Lizard men… and all this time I thought it was the socialists that were going to get us.
Larry and I had talked earlier in the day about the demographics of our audiences. His audience was easy–red-state conservatives, military folks, & gun nuts. I expressed my trouble finding an easily identifiable demographic tag for my readers. But now I know–I got the crazies. 😛
I’m totally blown away. No way. NO FREAKING WAY. No way.
Servant of a Dark God just won the Whitney award for speculative fiction. Look who the others were in the category–three New York Times best sellers and a book that had something like 11 or 12 printings in Europe before coming to the US. Holy crap. I’m thrilled the academy voters liked it so much.
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| Servant of a Dark God by John Brown |
The Maze Runner by James Dashner |
Wings by Aprilynne Pike |
Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson |
I Am Not A Serial Killer by Dan Wells |
When I informed the academy president, Robinson Wells, I couldn’t come, he asked if I had a speech should I win. There was no way I was winning. So I was like, yeah, whatever. So I wrote him this:
Yeah, like that’s going to happen (grin). But should something go wrong with the chads, you can simply say that “John told me if he won, that would mean the events in Revelations were probably upon us, and he’d be headed to his father-in-law’s underground bunker with his wife who was the brains behind the whole operation. He’s thrilled so many of you liked his story enough to vote for it. Thank you, thank you, thank you. But he’s also sad that you’ll all be toast before Fox News airs at 9 PM.”
Holy, heck. I’d better get to that bunker.
Here are the other categories and winners:
Of course, you had to have read all the books in a category to vote on them. You can see the finalists in each category here. So while Farland’s book didn’t win in his category (I”m assuming with the hard core historical fans), it did win with those who read every finalist. Same with Dan Wells. So what this tells me is that depending on the cross-section of voters a lot of us could have been winners. I’m just happy I got the cross-section I did–ye speculative nut jobs 🙂 Hooray for the Whitneys!!
Devon Dorrity, who helped me put together my covers, just helped me put together some business cards. I’m pretty excited about them. I’m biased, but I think they look awesome.
Servant
Curse
Raveler
You can see here a mockup of how they’ll look. That bit on the back is the Blacksword Books logo.
I’m not sure about the one for Bad Penny. Devon liked it. Any opinions?
James Maxey is a writer I admire. For his work ethic. For the quality of his prose. For his imagination. His story “To Know All Things That Are In The Earth” is one of my favorites. So you can be sure I was pleased to find and read this today.
I will say, in utter candor, that Servant of a Dark God is a work that truly stands out from other fantasy books on the market. What makes this book work so well is that it’s a story about family first, and a fantasy adventure second. Full review.
