Austen Chronicles
- Alaskan Totems Billionaire Shapeshifters, Austen Chronicles, CEMurphy, Murphy Lawless, Take A Chance
2016 Round-Up
2016 in review is a work related round-up, because it’s been an absolutely awful year personally. The other day somebody sent around a “some good things must have happened at least on a personal level in 2016, please post them!” and I honestly couldn’t think of anything actively good enough to stand out.
So, this year in publication review: startingly good, actually. I had 5 books come out, including the graphic novel of TAKE A CHANCE, which we’ve all been waiting for forever. :)
To wit:
MAGIC & MANNERS
An Austen Chronicle
A retelling of Pride & Prejudice, where the sisters have too much magic instead of too little money!
Kobo || Kindle || Nook || Amazon (print) || Audible & at bookstores near you! (ask them to order you a copy!)ATLANTIS FALLEN
The Heartstrike Chronicles: Book One
Immortality, ancient grudges, powers beyond the ordinary…familiar grounds, but I hope you’ll like what I’ve done with them. :)
iBooks || Kindle || Kobo || Nook || AudibleRAVEN HEART
Alaskan Totems Billionaire Shifters
A sudden fun delve into writing billionaire shapeshifter romance, which turns out to be a thing!
iBooks || Kindle || Kobo || NookTAKE A CHANCE
A vigilante without superpowers in a world that now has supers! My 2009 comic book in long-awaited graphic novel form!
Amazon || Nook || Comixology
(& at nearly any comic shop or bookstore, just ask them to order it in! ISBN 978-1909276628!)YEAR OF MIRACLES
Collected Tales of the Old Races
A return to the Old Races universe with the titular novella plus a dozen new and republished short stories!
iBooks ||Kobo || Kindle || NookTo my intense dismay, due to year-end postal slowness, neither YEAR OF MIRACLES nor ATLANTIS FALLEN has a print edition yet, but they should both be available early next year.
I have two books lined up for next year: the 1945 urban fantasy REDEEMER, and a Regency romance called BEWITCHING BENEDICT, which, despite the title, has no magic in it. :) It’s charming, though, and I’m looking forward to finally getting it out to readers.
Tentative plans for other books include PROMETHEUS BOUND (the next Heartstrike Chronicle), at least one Murphy Lawless novella, and, with any luck, a second Regency to follow BENEDICT. The second Austen Chronicle, SORCERY & SOCIETY, is slated for 2018, and we’ll see what else I manage over the next year. ♥
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The Magic & Manners Project: Publication Process
Part two of my series on all-out self publishing, a project I’ve taken on with MAGIC & MANNERS, a Jane Austen pastiche in which I wondered what would happen if the Bennet sisters had too much magic rather than too little cash. Part One, which focuses on finding and working with a production team as well as developing a work flow (including a Helpful Check List) is here.
This week I’m going to look at the actual publication process. I’ve been working through Amazon and Ingram, who are both doing what’s called Print On Demand (POD), which means the book is printed when you order a copy, rather than having copies sitting around a warehouse waiting for someone to order them.
I assume you know about Amazon. :) They have a couple of self-publishing arms, one for print books (CreateSpace) and one for ebooks (KDP). Bookstores, very reasonably, don’t want to buy print books from Amazon, and Amazon has a captive audience for its ebooks, as they’re the largest distributor of them and have the lion’s share of the market with their Kindle e-readers. I am, largely, not going to talk about Amazon, because it’s such a closed ecosystem the whole process is somewhat different.
Ingram is one of the two largest book distributors in the world; they are, in other words, the people from whom the bookstores buy their books. They have a self-publishing arm, IngramSpark, and it used to be that in their listings (where bookstores order from) they listed the self-published books separately, in an area where they wouldn’t come up for a bookstore unless the store went in there specifically looking for it…which bookstores had no reason to do. A while ago, though, I read that Ingram had changed that policy and that Spark books were now available broadly throughout their system, and I’ve been very interested in pursuing a self-published book with them since, because the theory here was that a self-published CE Murphy book could now turn up in (say, the Barnes & Noble) system and cause them to say “oh sure we’ll order that.”
It’s not actually that easy, because without a reason to look for a new CE Murphy book there’s no reason they would, but in theory, it *allows* them to, at least. I’ll get to promotion in a later post, because it’s going to be too big to bite off here, but in short, right now that’s why it’s really fantastic for readers to go into their local bookstores and ask if they can have a copy ordered in, and suggest short-ordering (which means just ordering a couple of them) some for the shelves.
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The Magic & Manners Project (Part 1)
About four years ago I got it into my head to wonder what PRIDE & PREJUDICE would be like if the Bennet sisters were plagued by an excess of magic rather than a dearth of cash. In a fit of inspiration, I wrote a first chapter, and then over the next year, a second and a third. By then, Patreon was a thing, and I decided to write MAGIC & MANNERS as a serialized crowdfunding project.
It took longer than I expected and brought me to the conclusion that serializing a novel wasn’t a good fit for Patreon, or at least, not the way I did it (but you can read about that here), but I got the book done and had great visions of turning it around swiftly and getting it out into the public realm.
That was ten months ago, and MAGIC & MANNERS launched last week. @.@
I now pause to drop in links, before getting to the bulk of the post. :)
MAGIC AND MANNERS for Kobo!
MAGIC AND MANNERS for Kindle!
MAGIC AND MANNERS print edition on Amazon!
MAGIC AND MANNERS audio book on Audible!MAGIC AND MANNERS is the first project I’ve really gone full-out self-publisher on, with the full production team in place to do everything right. It’s been fascinating, frustrating, and fun, not just for the alliteration, but in actual fact. I’m planning to do a number of posts, probably over several months as I collect more data, about the whole process, and I hope they’ll be of use and interest to people going forward.
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Launch Day: MAGIC & MANNERS
MAGIC & MANNERS is FINALLY! OFFICIALLY! LAUNCHING! TODAY!
MAGIC AND MANNERS for Kobo!
MAGIC AND MANNERS for Kindle!
MAGIC AND MANNERS for Nook!
MAGIC AND MANNERS for iTunes!
MAGIC AND MANNERS print edition on Amazon!
MAGIC AND MANNERS audio book on Audible!Besides the above links, you should also be able to go into almost any bookstore and order a print edition in. It may be helpful to have the ISBN (9781613171059), and possibly the information that it’s available through Ingram (which is a book distributor and basically one of two companies that bookstores get the actual books from), but I know for sure bookstores in Canada and Ireland have been able to order copies in, and that it’s available if you go in to Waterstones in the UK/Ireland.
People often ask if it’s better for me if they go into a bookstore and order a book or buy it from Amazon or what. Most of the time it really doesn’t matter, but in this case, it does!
If you’re a person who buys print editions and have the ability/opportunity to go in to a bookstore and order MAGIC & MANNERS, it will notify the bookstores that I have a book out. Because this isn’t traditionally published, word of mouth is essentially my only publicity. My sales are pretty good in a lot of stores, and it’s possible that if people go in and say “CE Murphy has a new book out, can you order me a copy and consider short-ordering a few for the shelves,” that it could do a *lot* of good for this book.
This is the first book I’ve published in almost two years, and I’m really trying to get my feet back under me to re-ignite writing as a viable career. My readers–you–have kept me going, and this is a wonderful amazing step toward that.
(that sounded really professional and cool and stuff and totally fails to convey my OH MY GOD BOOK NEW BOOK SHINY PRETTY BOOK I WANT EVERYBODY TO READ IT OMG OMG AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH YOU GUYS KEEP HELPING ME MAKE THE MOST AMAZING STUFF HAPPEN OMG OMG OMG THANK YOU I WOULDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITHOUT YOU aspect of all of this. because holy carp, people, you make this happen!)
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the week got away from me
I have these plans, man. Plans to blog daily, or at least week-daily. They’re good plans! But they’re apparently not reality-based plans. :)
It’s been a busy week that doesn’t necessarily feel like I’ve gotten a lot done, but last time I said that someone said she couldn’t imagine doing as much as I do, so I’m probably wrong.
*Most* of my work time the past several days has been getting MAGIC & MANNERS soft-launched (you can buy it on Kobo! and Kindle! and Audible!), and in the next day or two as it finishes propagating through the system there’ll be a big excited launch post. That’s taken up a lot of time and brain power, but it’s WORKING, bookstores, ACTUAL BOOKSTORES are starting to be able to put orders in! AAAAHHH!!! SO EXCITING!!!
And almost as excitingly, that means all the Thinks To Do for MAGIC & MANNERS have been crossed off the To Do List, and it’s been moved to the tail end of the page where it can rest on its laurels while I…don’t. :)
We had a wee little bit of snow on Friday before school, which was very exciting indeed. We went out to play in it, because it was obviously going to be gone before school got out.
And although it took me ALL WEEK, I got the first page of my Elfquest ‘coloring book’ done, which pleases me greatly.
Ted said, “Are you going to send it to (the friend) who bought it for you, when you have it finished?” I was like, “It’s SEVEN HUNDRED PAGES, I’m going to be coloring this FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE!” :)
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