Jim C. Hines
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June 28, 2011 /

One Week to Snow Queen! (And a Book Giveaway)

With one week until the release of The Snow Queen’s Shadow [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], a new review rolled in from SciFiChick, who says, “As before, the action and adventure are non-stop with plenty of drama, magic, and inspired characters. Don’t miss this brilliant, action-packed fantasy series.”

I’ll take it!

One thing that intrigues me … of the three reviews I’ve seen so far (four if you count Klausner), not one has talked about the fairy tale I’m using this time around. If you’re not familiar with The Snow Queen, you can check it out on the SurLaLune site.

The first time I used a Hans Christian Anderson tale for one of these books, it was The Little Mermaid. I read the fairy tale, and my initial response was “Oh hell no.” Thus was born The Mermaid’s Madness.

When I read The Snow Queen, I had the opposite reaction. Oh hell, yes! This was exactly the framework I needed for this book. I definitely took some liberties in order to write my story and my characters, but the story Anderson wrote fit very well with what I wanted to do in the last book.

Do you have to read the fairy tale to appreciate the book? Not at all. Is the fairy tale a spoiler for the book? Not really … if you know the tale, you’ll recognize elements in the story, but I don’t think you’ll be able to predict what’s going to happen. Though if you prefer to avoid anything with even the slightest hint of spoilers, you could always wait and read the fairy tale afterward.

I don’t know where else to go with this, so I’m going to jump straight to the giveaway. What’s your favorite fairy tale or fairy tale adaptation, and why? Leave your answer in the comments, and I’ll pick a winner at random to receive an autographed copy of one of my books — your choice.

We’re heading up north on Friday, so you’ve got 24 hours to get your entry in. Anyone can enter; there are no regional restrictions on this one.

June 27, 2011 /

On Genre Diversity

I spent Saturday at the Ann Arbor Book Festival, where I presented a workshop on Research and Writing What You Know Knowing What You Write, talked briefly about social networking, ate good food, crashed a few other workshops, and participated in a sampler-style reading.

The reading was interesting. There were ten or so people who each read for five minutes. I was scheduled to go between two intense, passionate, powerful poets, at which point I got up on stage … and read a scene from my muppet werewolf story.

That moment summarizes my day pretty well. The two workshops I attended were poetry-oriented. Most of the guest authors were introduced with an impressive list of literary and poetry credits. And then there was me, who made his first professional sale with “Blade of the Bunny.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt insecure about my writing, or about reading one of my stories in front of people.

Many of these poets were reading performing incredibly personal, energizing works. Quite a few focused on race. Most of the poems blew my mind. And then there was me, reading a scene in which a muppet freaks out and blows away Tommy the Tuba.

For the record, my muppet werewolf story kicks ass … but in a totally different way than the poems from Angel Nafis or Roger Bonair-Agard or francine j. harris or Karrie Waarala.

When I posted on Facebook, a few people were quick to reassure me that they’d rather hear muppet werewolves than poetry any day. Which is nice, I guess … I mean, I’m glad my friends and fans prefer the kind of stuff I write, right?

Most of the events I do are with “my own kind,” things like SF/F conventions where we’re all there to celebrate the same genre. Or signings/readings where it’s just me and my fans. From a promotional standpoint, this makes sense — these are the people who are most likely to buy and enjoy my work, after all.

But having my fantasy-writing ass dropped into the intersection of Literary Ave and Poet St, Ann Arbor, was a damn good thing. Those workshops I mentioned? I wrote a half-page piece that’s somewhere between prose and poetry that almost made me cry to read. (Can’t share it here, because it’s about the kids.) I wrote a bit for Libriomancer that, if I can remember and repeat the lesson I learned, should help me accomplish exactly what I’ve been trying to do for six months now.

Was Saturday uncomfortable at times? Hell, yes. But it was powerful and eye-opening and awesome, too.

I’m told people enjoyed my reading, and my workshop went over quite well. (I totally packed that room!) What I didn’t expect was how much I’d get out of the day, and out of the diversity of writers and writing I got to experience. My thanks to Jeff Kass and Margaret Yang for letting me be a part of it, and to everyone else who participated and made it such a great day.

June 26, 2011 /

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Reviewed by my Son

My six-year-old and I just finished reading the fourth Oz book: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. He’s still enjoying the series, and we did our review together about ten minutes after we closed the book.

As with his previous reviews, I asked Jackson some questions, but everything that follows is his own words (except for my italicized comments, which will be in parentheses).

#

First Dorothy was at Hugson’s Ranch, but then the earthquake brought them inside of the world. It’s a good thing that they didn’t fall to the core! Then they would die. So they fell a little , and while they were there they were trapped in a mountain and it had glass rocks because everything was glass there. And they have a bunch of colored suns. And there’s a trick that the Wizard performed to make two suns that they’d never seen before, with lanterns!

Then they went to a higher layer because they were climbing the mountain, where everything but them was invisible, and the wizard killed an invisible bear! And then they got into the buggy and rowed up the river away from the bears to where the wooden gargoyles lived, and everything was wooden! And then when they were locked up they saw another rock so they went in there and met some dragonettes. They should be called dragons, but they say that they’re too young. And then they went the wrong way, but Dorothy made the signal, and then they were in Oz. And a couple of chapters later, everybody went home. (Plotwise, the ending of this one did not impress me. -Jim)

But when Zeb was home, his uncle asked where in the world he’s been, and Zeb said he was in the world!  That was funny, wasn’t it?

The best part was when they saw the dragonettes. I thought it was funny when the eyes were flashing yellow. I think it was silly.

I didn’t like the part when they were saying that Eureka (Dorothy’s kitten) ate the piggy. Well, she tried to actually, but she couldn’t because it fell into a vase. And then the Tin Woodman had to open the vase. I didn’t like it because they said Eureka was going to die. I don’t like it when people say other people are going to die.

I think my favorite character was the piggies. They were the ones who were safe from the bears. They were invisible, so the bears couldn’t see them! When I pictured them in my head with my mind’s eye, they looked cute! Teeny tiny pigs.

I think the best Oz book is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. And by the way, how many of you read that book from my first interview? I want to know!

June 24, 2011 /

Kittenmaster

The internet is for cat pics, right? Well, this is for everyone who misread the title of my next e-book collection…

This was made from the final artwork, so I’ll be working in Photoshop to get the real cover put together and ready to go. I’ll probably post it here to get one last round of feedback, ’cause y’all are just too darn helpful.

June 23, 2011 /

Goblins vs. Goldfish (Another E-book Update)

Spoiler: the goblins win.

Author John Locke recently became the first self-published author to sell more than one million e-books via Amazon. With most of his books at the impulse-buy price of $.99, this means he’s earned probably around $400,000 by my estimation through Amazon. Impressive. Most impressive.

(Is it worth pointing out that this is less than a “traditionally” published author would have earned for the same number of sales, or will that just stir things up?)

Anyway, I figured this was a good time to check in and see how I’ve been doing with my own self-published e-books. Let’s just say I’m not quite ready to join Locke in the million-sales club.

Goldfish Dreams [B&N | Amazon] came out in October of 2010. Goblin Tales [Amazon | B&N | Lulu] was released in March of this year. Both are priced at $2.99, and are DRM-free. Both are available at Amazon and B&N. Goblin Tales is also up at iBooks, Kobo, Wizard’s Tower, and Lulu.

 

As of yesterday, I’ve sold a total of ~430 self-published books. 72 of those (17%) were Goldfish Dreams, and the rest were Goblin Tales. Here’s the breakdown through May, the last full month I have sales figures for. (A refers to Amazon, BN is Barnes and Noble.)

Lulu sales aren’t included on the graph, ’cause I don’t have a nice month-to-month breakdown. To date, I’ve sold 3 PDF downloads and 28 print copies through Lulu, for a grand total of $19.95. By comparison, the ~400 books sold through other venues come to roughly $800 in royalties.

Some thoughts:

  • Amazon and B&N are the two big sellers. E-book sales through other venues have been minuscule.
  • Amazon sold almost four times as many copies of Goldfish Dreams as B&N did, and 2-3 times as many copies of Goblin Tales.
  • Months ago, I was told there’s no reason sales should decrease over time, since it’s not like books are being taken off the shelves, right? But while sales of Goldfish Dreams are too low to draw any real conclusions, sales of Goblin Tales seem to follow a very similar dropping-off curve to sales of my print books. (The June numbers look like they’ll continue in this pattern.)
  • I have no idea whether releasing Kitemaster & Other Stories will have any effect on sales of my other e-books, but I look forward to finding out!
  • Goldfish Dreams is a mainstream novel. Goblin Tales is fantasy. I’ve built a name as a fantasy author, not mainstream. This matters.

Would I have sold better at $.99 like Locke? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they’d sell better at $4.99. It’s impossible to say. I’m satisfied enough that I’m continuing to move forward with Kitemaster.

Comments and discussion are welcome, as always.

June 21, 2011 /

Princess Trivia: Deleted/Changed Ideas

Only two weeks until The Snow Queen’s Shadow [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] comes out! I’m marking the occasion with random deleted and changed bits from the series. For example, did you know I once jotted notes for a 5th princess book in which Danielle would have a second child (a daughter), and Jakob would be revealed as a fairy changeling?

More beyond the cut, as there are a few potential spoilers for the earlier books.

More

June 20, 2011 /

Monday Misc.

Working on a deadline to get a submission package polished up and mailed off, so today I’m doing bullet-point blogging.

  • Attention reviewers: if you’re interested in a copy of The Snow Queen’s Shadow [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], please let me know and I’ll hook you up with my publicist. (U.S. only, I’m afraid. And per Penguin’s guidelines, reviewing for Amazon, Goodreads, and such don’t count.)
  • When the Hero Comes Home is out, and includes my goblins vs. zombies story “The Blue Corpse Corps.” Trade paperback is $19.99, and the e-book is $3.99.
  • The Ann Arbor Book Festival is this weekend. I’ll be there all day, doing the author breakfast, a workshop, chatting about social networking, signing books, and generally being both bookish and festive.

Finally, check out this LEGO Sandcrawler by marshal-banana. Built of more than 10,000 pieces, this thing weighs about 20 kilograms, and includes 22 different lights and nine motors. There’s a YouTube video if you want to see it in action.

June 18, 2011 /

Zahrah the Windseeker, by Nnedi Okorafor

Zahrah the Windseeker [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] is Nnedi Okorafor‘s first published novel. I’ve wanted to read Nnedi’s work for several years now, and having finally done so, I’m cranky at myself for taking so long. (Fortunately, I’ve already got another of her books waiting for me on the shelf.)

This is a YA novel which, in some respects, follows a very familiar storyline. Zahrah is different from the other kids. She’s picked on by her peers at school. She’s shy, but destined for greatness. She has a popular friend named Dari who encourages her to be more daring and explore with him. When something happens to Dari, this provides Zahrah with the push she needs to overcome her timidness and set out on her own to try to save him…

Sound like something you’ve read before? Now try this.

Zahrah was born dada, with vines growing within her thick locks, vines that twined themselves to her hair while she was still in the womb. She lives on a planet colonized ages ago and developed with biological technology, a world rooted in African culture and folklore. Zahrah grew her own computer from a seed. Shots are given using insects, and the patient is swabbed with sugar water so the insect will bite and inject the medicine. And oh yes — Zahrah can fly.

I loved it. I loved the animals, the talking gorillas and the trickster frog and even the poor, confused war snake. I loved the details, from the mirror-adorned fashion to the glitchy electronic guidebook to the background history of the library to the underlying theme of rebellion against ignorance. I loved Papa Grip and his pink caftans, and the rhythm beetles who were drawn to the music.

There were times during her quest in the forbidden jungle when it felt like Zahrah was a little too lucky (such as her encounter the whip scorpion), when other animals and characters conveniently arrived to help her. I definitely noticed these points, but they didn’t throw me out of the book. It felt right for this kind of story, which blends the flavors of science fiction and folklore and fairy tale and makes it work.

Random side note: the day after I finished this book, I dreamed about flying. (I also dreamed my car fell into a lake, but I don’t think that had anything to do with the book.)

I’d recommend this one to pretty much anyone.

June 17, 2011 /

First Book Friday: Kat Richardson

Welcome to First Book Friday! Click for submission guidelines and the index of previous authors.

Kat Richardson (LJ, Twitter) have a fair amount in common. We both wrote three books before landing a deal for our fourth. We both ended up represented by Steve Mancino, former junior agent at JABberwocky. We both started writing at least in part because a friend of ours was doing it…  The big difference is that she sells much better than I do 🙂

Read on to learn more about Kat Richardson, urban fantasy author and defender of all ferretkind.

#

First, I’d like to thank Jim for letting me ramble around in his virtual space. Thank you, Jim!

OK, so… about this first book. Technically I’d written three prior novel-length manuscripts (and a lot of what I call “junk” short stories) before finally getting published with Greywalker [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], but those other stories were, frankly, so bad even I—proud literary parent that I can be—could tell they just weren’t “ready for prime time.” In fact, if you were to open the Rubbermaid container they’re stored in, the smell of bad prose would form a cloud from Seattle to Miami.

I’d been toying with the idea of a detective who worked for ghosts for quite a while, but the idea never quite gelled into something exciting until my husband and I moved to Seattle in 1994. Here I found an atmosphere and geography that just seemed to pump new life into the idea and connect disparate elements I hadn’t thought of before. Now the story actually had a shape, but I didn’t get it on paper until Fall of 2000. (yeah, we all still printed everything out back then….)

At the time I was unemployed, but my husband was commuting from Seattle to Central California every Monday morning and coming home every Friday night. This went on for more than a year. We were living on our first boat and… it leaked badly when it rained—which it does a lot in Seattle. So I spent a lot of my time alone, fixing the decks and wondering what to do with myself. I played a lot of Thief: the Dark Project and was seriously bored otherwise.

One of the other players I met online through a Thief fan forum was writing an astrology book and he expressed that he was far more likely to finish and sell his book than I was. That, naturally, got my dander up, so I thought, “Oh yeah? I’ll show you!”

So I started writing every night and I outlined, re-outlined, revised again, and cranked out the entire first draft—137,000 words—in about six weeks.

Did I mention I was also an insomniac at the time? Yeah. Due to my lack of anything interesting to do, my sleep schedule had turned into a pile of doo-doo and I slept about four hours a week. It’s really amazing how much you can get done when you have all those extra hours in a day. Though I can’t say it’s the best thing for your health….

Now, I don’t recommend this method, but the challenge of working against someone else—as a personal test—really motivated me to get the darned thing done. And I finished well ahead of my competitor. So far as I know, he’s never published his book, but… we kind of stopped speaking anyhow, so I’m not sure.

Once I was done, naturally, I then took four years off, tinkering with the book and being a lazy twit before I decided that if I was going to call myself a “writer” I really ought to get something published or give up and go back to the corporate grind.

By this time I’d gotten a comfortable contract as a technical editor for Microsoft and I had a long commute on top of long days, but I still managed to put a lot of time and research—and letters—out trying to find an agent and, after about two dozen rejections and a lot of non-responses, false starts, and offers that were too bad to consider, I finally got an agent (and a damned good one, to boot).

It took another year of working on the manuscript with my agent to get it into saleable condition and, once it sold, another eighteen months working with my new editor to get the book revised, copyedited, proofed, into covers and onto the bookstore shelves—which is actually very fast, but what did I know? But there it was and it did pretty well—not New York Times Bestseller well, but good enough to keep me in the business.

So this is the moral of my tale: if you want to be a successful writer, get pissed, work your ass off, don’t sleep, and don’t let anyone tell you you’re not good enough. Because getting published is the best revenge.

June 16, 2011 /

Getting Past the Plateau

I received the following question by e-mail earlier this week:

It’s been a couple of years since I got serious about writing, and I feel a little stuck. I was wondering if you have any insights on how to improve as a writer. I write pretty much every day, as much as I can … But I feel like I’m not getting much better. I think at a certain point, I might need some guidance. Do you have any suggestions? What helped you? A class? A teacher? Any particular con that has great workshops? A book?

Yep, I’ve been there more than once. There were years I was writing away, submitting to every paying market I could find and getting nowhere. I felt stuck, like I had become a pretty good writer, just not good enough … whatever that meant.

It’s frustrating, it’s discouraging, and it’s normal. It’s not limited to writing, either. I’ve hit plateaus in everything from karate to yo-yo tricks. Here are a few of my thoughts on getting past them…

1. There’s a difference between “I feel like I’m not getting much better” and “I’m not getting better.” It’s hard to see improvement, especially when it’s gradual. But read one of your trunked stories from five years ago. You might be shocked at the contrast. (You might not, too. All of this is individual, and my experience is mine alone.)

2. Writing groups. In 2001, I started workshopping with four other local writers, and it helped a lot. I think the things that made the group work for me were:

  • We were all in roughly the same point in our careers, with one or two professional sales each.
  • We had similar goals: we wanted to sell fiction. (As opposed to wanting warm fuzzies or a mutual lovefest.)
  • We met regularly, giving me built-in deadlines.
  • I submitted work regularly, meaning they were able to see and point out trends in my writing.

The writing group eventually dissolved, and I don’t think a group would be as helpful to me today. But one way or another, most of us need feedback from people who know what they’re talking about.

2b. Other feedback. These days, I get that feedback from my agent, my editor, and a handful of other professionally published authors. It helps. How-to-write books can be useful (I started reading Maass’ book a while back), but I think in-person feedback helps more. And one-time feedback (such as a convention workshop) wasn’t as helpful to me as longer-term, ongoing feedback from someone who could see the patterns in my work.

3. Write something different. Challenge yourself. A few things I tried include:

  • Collaborating with a friend on a SF story
  • Writing a research-intensive historical fantasy
  • Trying to write tear-jerkers (I was most comfortable with humor)

The downside of these experiments is that sometimes you’re going to fail hard. But you’ll also learn from them.

4. Take risks. Avoid the “safe” stories. Write what scares you. Write what you’re passionate about. Write what you love. Rip open your heart and smear it all over the page. Heck, Goblin Quest might be humorous fantasy fluff, but I love that little goblin, and I’ve got an awful lot of empathy for the runt who gets tormented by the crowd. The story meant a lot to me, and I think that strengthened the book.

5. Other suggestions include reading widely, hanging out with other authors (for the energy, if nothing else), and remembering to think of it as a marathon, not a sprint. It can take ten years or more to sell that first novel. Be patient with yourself.

I hope this is helpful, and folks are more than welcome to chime in with other ideas and suggestions.

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New Books in 2025

Kitemaster:
Amazon | B&N | Bookshop
Read the First Chapter: PDF | EPUB

Slayers of Old, Coming Oct. 21:
Amazon | B&N | Bookshop

Blog Archives

Free Fiction

  • Stranger vs. the Malevolent Malignancy, at Podcastle
  • The Creature in Your Neighborhood at Apex Magazine
  • How Isaac Met Smudge at Literary Escapism
  • Gift of the Kites at Clarkesworld
  • Original Gangster at Fantasy Magazine
  • Goblin Lullaby (audio) at PodCastle
  • Spell of the Sparrow (audio) at PodCastle

Banner artwork by Katy Shuttleworth.



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Jim C. Hines