Michael Selden

I added a draft version (rev 3) of Chapter 7 to the sample chapters PDF file.  The chapter is entitled,  The Promise.

This far,  a rev 2 version of the Introduction is pasted into the web page and the sample file contains the prologue and seven chapters now.

The chapter titles are:

Prologue

1 Is This Real?

2 Burnt Toast

3 The Steel Tower

4 Classes

5 Lunch with Sarah

6 Al Sutton

7 The Promise

There are 50 sections total for the book. Intro, Prologue, 47 numbered chapters , and an epilogue.  The book should be published in it totality by Christmas.

Please feel free to comment or criticize (constructively) the web site or any of the works posted.

Of course all ideas, stories, and characters are copyrighted

Chapter 7, entitled “The Promise” will be posted at the beginning of August.

Chapter 8, called “The Sister’s Eyes” will appear on the web site in early September.

By October 1, I plan to have bound galleys out to potential reviewers. The book should be out for purchase by the end of Fall.

During the daytime, I’ve been working on a landscaping project in my yard, in much the same way my editor, Ben, works at Little, Brown during the day. At night we’ve each been making progress on about 2 chapters / night.  I just went through chapter 12, which I’ll send to him for criticism while I push into chapters 13 and 14.  The objective is to bring all chapters up to level 3 with this pass.  After this, I’ll push toward level 5, then do a full up copy edit and then layout, then proof edit, then  . . . well, that’s when the book comes out.

I’m targeting December.

What I’ve been up to lately, and a brief summary of THE BALANCE

I’ve been busy working, and collaborating with Benjamin, on the editing of The Balance. I made a few plot adjustments that shortened the book by 2 chapters, but without losing any of the best parts of the story.

The main character is Phoebe, a seventeen year old girl who was the last product of the Order’s Sensitives Program. She is unaware of why she feels like a freak—she didn’t know that both her long lost mother and her were both genetically engineered and then further engineered in the womb using other technologies—they were created using both biological and physics (manufacturing) techniques. This latter was to amplify the characteristics created genetically and to control how the genes expressed themselves.

The story will, ultimately span 3 volumes. This first volume is a Young Adult story. It contains almost 50 chapters and will probably be bout 500 pages. To understand the look and feel of the Land (the place where Phoebe lives) and what it’s like to live under the rule of the Council of God, I’ve posted a rough draft introduction and less rough (but still draft) sample chapters on my web at this address:

https://michaelselden.com/the-balance/

Phoebe lives with her adopted father, Daniel, who was like a spouse to her mother, although the Order (the organization that created both Phoebe and her mother) determined who Phoebe’s “father” would be and manipulated her genes.

Together, they’ve worked hard to hide who and what Phoebe is, which is difficult because she doesn’t always have control over the things that happen to her. This is brought out in the early chapters (the one’s posted). The Land has gone through changes. Both the Council and God and the Order ruled the land together for over a century after a global thermonuclear war that kill over 8 billion people and rendered most of the world uninhabitable. However, the Order had kept their genetics programs (a part of the Future Man project) a secret since it’s inception (before the war). But it was heresy and, when revealed, caused an uprising that resulted in members of the order and the engineered humans to be killed or driven into hiding. Since that time, most technology has been banned. Certainly anyone who might have been engineered, like Phoebe, would be subject to immediate execution if they are discovered.

Story concepts and characters are copyright Michael Selden 2011 – 2014

I added a rev 3 version of chapter 6 to the PDF download of the excerpt from The Balance.

This chapter picks up with Daniel as he leaves the house for work the morning after having slept in the rocking chair.

Copies of The Boy Who Ran are now available in a few Colorado Independent Bookstores. I hope to grow the list.  Here is where you can find it now:

Old Firehouse Books, Fort Collins, Colorado—on Walnut Street

Boulder Bookstore, Boulder Colorado, —on Perl Street in the mall

Poor Richards Books, Colorado Springs —on Tejon St.

Brenda’s Boutiques, Woodland Park, on Rt. 24.

At the Rampart Range public Library, Woodland Park—on Rt. 24

It’s also available for order as a POD in virtually any bookstore in the world that is served by Ingram books, and on

Any Amazon.com site worldwide (in both paperback and Kindle formats)

and on

KOBO and SmashWords (in e-pub format)

I plan to add more distributors over time.

The big 5 are floundering, in a time when more books than ever are being sold, their share of the market is dwindling and they don’t know what to do, or—more likely—are too afraid to do what’s needed.

1) Independent publishers today use the very same people to do things like editing, layout and design, production, and distribution that the big 5 do, but independents only pay for the hours used, the books sold, and have little in the way of costly infrastructure to maintain.

2) The big 5 have become cautious—always a sign that a business is on the way out, since you’re either growing or dying. They’ve narrowed what they publish, dreaming—somehow—that they can predict what people will want and offering fewer and fewer real innovations. You want action and killing and sex, go to them, but don’t expect anything out of the ordinary beyond that.

3) While the content and sales are increasing, one player is rapidly trying to assert a near monopoly on book sales, and people are letting them do it.  There is nothing special about Amazon. They’re middlemen with a few innovations here and there, but they are becoming more heavy handed and less customer focused as they get big. There are competitors out there: Kobo, Smashwords, Barnes & Nobel, but they don’t have Amazon’s size.  We publishers could just as easily direct our works to them first. Amazon wants to dictate price and with their select program, they want to shut off the competition’s ability to offer the product.

IMO, what the big 5 and Apple and the distributors should do is to form an alliance to compete. What the big 5 still retain is the machine to get the word out on which books to read—they have a stranglehold on some of the most important reviewing organizations. They could form partnerships with hundreds or even thousands of independent publishers and in exchange for a percentage of the sales and the ability to check quality (not content or plot) , they could throw their weight behind quality books of all different sorts.  The indies would still be bearing the cost of creation, editing, production and at least half of (and maybe all of)  the marketing, while the big publisher verifies quality and pushes the best products through.  It would gain them sales and almost pure profit, which they could focus on increasing the competition for sales outlets, even buying or leveraging sites like Wattpad for reviews  and sampling of product.

Amazon is trying to dictate terms, but they create no content and offer only a few products of their own. Publishers (especially groups of competing publisher networks) have the ability to compete and to do so very effectively.  At the same time, Amazon still has a great platform and can continue to compete and offer new solutions to counter-balance any shift in power.  I like Amazon, too, but I like competition better.

From the beginning, I had an idea of what I wanted the cover to look like. The Boy Who Ran contains light allegorical content, related to what has recently been learned about the spiritual beliefs of the people living in the mid-archaic period. I note this on my web site in the section which discusses History and The Boy Who Ran.  I used these concepts when writing the book—there is more to the Boy / White Flank relationship than I reveal in the book—and I wanted to capture the idea in the cover image.  I discussed this in detail with my long-time close friend Paola when I was in Italy. Like myself, her training is as a physicist, but she also has an excellent eye for how to relate things in an artistic way and the talent to create what I was envisioning, although less crisply than she could.  She agreed to draw what I described and submitted more than one candidate sketch before I saw that she had settled on a perfect idea of what I wanted.

I’m attaching a series of pictures as that chosen sketch turned into the cover of the book.

Jamie at Belle Etoile added the green color and then wrapped the image around the book a bit. Later, after winning the IPPY medal, she added the badge for me.

After you have a decent, well formatted book, it’s time to set up the print and e-book distribution. Before we get to that step, you may well have elected to use a multi-service company to get to the formatted stage. There are two main companies (probably more) that help you get there. I-Universe and Create Space. I-Universe is a bundled service—editing, design, and such and Create space is an alla Carte service.  I personally don’t use either. I hire people who work in the industry, often they work for the big 5 during the day and for me at night. I only pay for the hours I use.

Changes in Print on Demand (POD) has changed the whole business model for publishing. Today, you can print and mail a single copy of a book for not much more than the per-book cost of printing and mailing thousands—no more need to make big runs. Together with the freelance expertise available the independent publisher can turn out books every bit as good, and often better than the big 5 for less cost. I say better because indies aren’t constrained to only pursue a narrow spectrum of books (the big 5 hate to take chances and will mostly push things that they think are guaranteed to sell) this means that great book that doesn’t have an action sequence and cliff hanger in every chapter may never make it. To Kill a Mockingbird would probably never be published by the big 5 today—but it would by an Indie.

Lightning Source is the #1 POD service, it’s owned by Ingram Books which is the largest distributor in the world. Lightning source only does business with publishers, so you need to be a publisher, with a company and an Employer ID to use it. Alternatively you can go through Create Space OR I-Universe, or Lightning Spark (set up for authors to use with Ingram).  Bowker is where you go to buy the ISBN’s needed for every edition of every book. This is a code that ID’s the publisher and the book and the edition. You can buy 1 or 10 or 100 or more to assign to your books and you need to update the Bowker  database as you issue them. (This applies to E-Books as well)

E-Book distribution is a big space still, although Amazon has been strong-arming the competition. Ultimately, there is no real material cost, just labor involved.

You set up contracts with each distributor and they take care of the accounting and pay you as books are sold. They also issue W-9’s.  As a publisher, you also need to issue w-9’s to people you hire. Its best to start an LLC comapny, with may cost 50 dollars to set up, but you’ll need accounting help as well—again, freelance.

There are still obstacles to overcome for Indies.  many reviewers haven’t caught on yet that the days of the big 5 and the dependent publishers are numbered and may refused to review your books. The book publishing industry is following the path that the music industry followed. I doubt that the big 5 will be there ten years from now.  They can morph into something else, but you can’t fight the tide of an inferior business model.

Obviously, this is a fairly simplified process diagram and I’ve either glossed over or barely touched many details, but it provides a basic understanding of getting the book out there.  Next will come publicizing what you’ve published.  I’m still learning this and have learned more of the mistakes I’ve made even as I go on.

There are basically 3-parts to publishing a book as an independent publisher. These are :

• Preparing the book to make it acceptable to publish
• The actual publishing process itself
• The marketing of the book you’ve published

Each of these three elements are as important as the other, to make sure you’re doing things right.  As someone still learning this, I’d thought that I’d offer a little of what I’ve learned so far in three charts with explanations as necessary.

First, writing the first draft of your story is about 5% of the work. I won’t even get into the conceptual phase, because everyone is very different.  Just having a good idea, then plotting and writing the story is the smallest part of the effort. Again, as everyone’s creative process is different., I won’t go into how one layers the story; it’s implicit in the revision process.

I published the E-Pub Version of The Boy Who Ran on the site Smashwords.com yesterday

They published an interview, done electronically—where they submit questions and I answer them. Here is the link to that interview:

SmashWords Interview

The E-Pub version of The Boy Who Ran was released May 24, 2014.

I is currently available through Smashwords at

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/441289

and will soon be available on Kobo.com

I’ll post that link when they put it online

My select period is ending at Amazon, so I plan to release the already prepped e-pub version as soon as possible.

It’ll be available by June 1 for Nook and other tablets in e-pub format.

I posted the fifth section of The Balance today, Chapter 4: Classes

The Chapters of The Balance can be accessed at my web site by clicking on the following link, which brings up The Balance main page and its links.

https://michaelselden.com/?page_id=7

Of by navigating to

https://michaelselden.com

and using the tab menu at the top of the page.

The GoodReads contest to win copies of The Boy Who Ran ended at midnight May 1.

631 people entered to win one of 5 signed copies.  The list of winners was given to me this morning. I plan to mail the copies out today or tomorrow. Winners included two people in the UK, one person in Australia, one in Canada, and one in the US. Congratulations to the winners!

The winners of the Independent Publisher Book Awards were announced today. The Boy Who Ran was awarded the national gold medal for juvenile fiction for 2014.

From their web site:

The “IPPY” Awards were conceived as a broad-based, unaffiliated awards program open to all members of the independent publishing industry, and are open to authors and publishers worldwide who produce books written in English and intended for the North American market.

A Summary of The Boy Who Ran, as well as sample chapters and two unpublished chapters can be found at https://michaelselden.com

I added a kind of philosophical statement for why I write and how I choose what to write. It appears as a page on my web site:

This page:

https://michaelselden.com/?page_id=645

This video was made back in January by the National Writing for Children Center.

I’ve askedAmazon to reduce the price of the Kindle version of The Boy Who Ran to $2.99 US from $4.99 US for the next several weeks.  I also reduced the match price— the price you pay for the kindle version add-on if you bought the paperback version through  Amazon  to $0.99 US.

It will take approximately 12 hours before the price change takes effect.

Happy Easter—

Ill be giving away,and mailing, 5 copies of The Boy Who Ran on GoodReads.

You can enter starting midnight April 15 and the GoodReads team will select winners on May 1.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Boy Who Ran

by Michael Selden

Giveaway ends May 01, 2014.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win