Kindle Vella is Live

And I have a book available there: There are 11 episodes available now (there will be 38 total for this run), and the first three are available for free. Since I know many of the people who read this blog are authors or artists themselves, let me run through a few things about Vella, now that is live: First, there is a dissonance between what established authors are already trying to do with the platform, and what the platform was designed/intended to do. Vella is supposed to be a serial fiction platform, not a straight book-reading platform. There are 11…

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The Attention Economy and Alternative Publishing

Great thread here to spark this article: I sell my books a variety of ways – Amazon, all other alternative direct sales, and through patronage on subscribestar. The problem with building alternative platforms or alternative methods of artist support is not, and has never been, the difficulty of actually programming or organizing such a venture. The problem has always been attention. Building alternatives to Amazon to sell your books is largely putting the cart before the horse. In fact, it is more like building a cart while the horse is still being trained in Arabia. Also, there are dozens of…

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From Concept to Published book in 30 days – National Novel Writing Month #NaNoWriMo

I made a decision while making a video the other day on the bootcamp mindset that I was going to do National Novel Writing Month. Of course, being me, I felt I had to up the stakes and the challenge from “writing 50,000 words” to “put out a novel in 30 days.” This process will involve all four phases of book creation (planning, drafting, revising, and publishing) in an extremely condensed and (though limited) intense fashion. NaNoWriMo (as some call it) focuses entirely on phase 2 – drafting, encouraging people to get to that mythical 50k mark in the space…

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The Water of Awakening pre-release – read free EARLY!

My new epic fantasy / heroic fantasy / adventure fantasy novel will be officially released tomorrow (you can actually get the paperback right now, but that is so the physical copy arrives at the same time as the ebook). For a VERY limited time you can get free access to the release copy of the book (including the print pdf, which I designed myself) by joining my mailing list. After this week, you will have to either buy the book (which I very much appreciate) or borrow it from a friend. So grab the book for free while you can…

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The Water of Awakening, Chapter 1-6 “The Farmwife and the Volva”

My latest book, The Water of Awakening is set to be released on July 7 on Amazon. In in, Helga, a young newly-married woman, is put on a quest for a strange artifact in return for a cure to her husband’s mysterious illness. This artifact, the Water of Awakening, is held by a clan of strange creatures on the edge of Fay, where reality and dreams are one and the same, and road is long and dangerous. Helga quickly quickly realizes that she is out of her depth, but persists and finds friends in unexpected places. If this free preview…

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The Water of Awakening, Chapter 1-4 “The Farmwife and the Volva”

My latest book, The Water of Awakening is set to be released on July 7 on Amazon. In in, Helga, a young newly-married woman, is put on a quest for a strange artifact in return for a cure to her husband’s mysterious illness. This artifact, the Water of Awakening, is held by a clan of strange creatures on the edge of Fay, where reality and dreams are one and the same, and road is long and dangerous. Helga quickly quickly realizes that she is out of her depth, but persists and finds friends in unexpected places. If this free preview…

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Stormlight Archive/Way of Kings review and analysis (with Matt Wellman)

Matt and I talk shop about one of our favorite books, The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson, and we also talk about the follow-up Words of Radiance, and some of the technical problems it has compared to the first book in Stormlight Archive. We both agree that The Way of Kings is an excellently well-constructed fantasy novel where Sanderson uses his flashback narrative techniques to create plot points that wouldn’t be possible in a more straightforward style.

Writers of the dawn is:

David V. Stewart – Fantasy and Historical Fiction Author, musician

Matthew J. Wellman – Urban Fantasy author, musician