Back To The Crusade
My current 40K novel, The Fist of Demetrius, is starting to shape up. I am about 25000 words in. An ominous cloud of intrigue looms over Macharius as he reaches the absolute zenith of his power at the height of the Crusade. The Dark Eldar are moving across the event horizon. Multiple conflicts loom, with the xenos, with ambitious generals and corrupt Imperial politicians. Macharius ,although he does not know it, is about to experience the pivotal event of his life, a confrontation with something that will turn him from the golden reflection of Alexander the Great into the dark, ruthless fanatic Read more…
Create Your Own Ebook Cover, Step By Step, With Pictures
Fair warning, you are about to get advice on creating your cover from a man with all the artistic talent of a slug. Indeed, so small are my gifts in this area that several slugs have written in to complain that my statement is demeaning to their creative abilities. It also has to be said you’re going to be taking PowerPoint advice from a man who is not particularly adept with PowerPoint, especially its Windows variant. So why am I doing this exactly? Because I can, of course, and because I want to make a point; that even a man Read more…
High Elves, Dark Elves, All Elves
Central to the struggle in the Tyrion and Teclis trilogy is the conflict between High Elves and Dark Elves. We all know what that means, don’t we? High Elves are glittering and noble, proud and good. Dark Elves are decadent and wicked, drugged out and crazy, given to torture and malice. They are as different as two peoples can be, aren’t they? Actually, I don’t think so. I think they are exactly the same people. They are just the products of two very different societies. I believe that in every High Elf is a potential Dark Elf, and in every Dark Read more…
The Utility of Free: Some Thoughts on Free EBooks
I was planning on posting my guide to creating ebook covers in PowerPoint today but these posts are quite labour intensive and yesterday was Valentine’s Day and I decided I would rather go out for a nice dinner with my lovely wife than spend the evening making annotated screenshots. Go figure, huh! So it’s next week for the PowerPoint guide unless my monkey brain gets distracted by something else… Over at Terribleminds Chuck Wendig has an excellent and thoughtful post about the costs and uses of going free in ebook publication. Go read it, I will still be here when Read more…
Go Read This…
…if you have any interest in self-publishing your own ebook. Dean Wesley Smith has put up an excellent post on the costs of indie publishing. I can confirm that everything Dean says here is 100% accurate. At some point in the next few weeks I’ll stick up a post about the actual mechanics of doing your own covers with PowerPoint. I am a man with the artistic talent of a slug (and that is probably insulting slugs) and I can do this. If I can, anyone can.
Create Your Own Kindle EBook, Step by Step, With Pictures
Important Note: As of November 2012 Amazon appears to be rejecting some ebooks created using Calibre. More on this subject can be found here. Today I am starting a series on how to publish your own ebook. I have had a fair amount of interest in my posts on this subject over the past few months and I wanted to give some substance to my claim that self-publishing an ebook is not much harder than pushing Save on your word-processor. Important Note 2 : If you own a Mac and a copy of Scrivener you may want to consider reading Read more…
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