Jon Chaisson's Blog

The Persistence of Memories is available tomorrow at numerous e-book sites for $4.99!

Here are but two:
Smashwords: http://bit.ly/1MqYxyb
B & N: http://bit.ly/1WtXDDp

The Kindle version should be up and running soon!


**A DIVISION OF SOULS STILL FREE!**
Yes folks, the first book in the series can be yours for exactly zero dollars and zero cents! Buy Book 2 and catch up with Book 1 with no strings attached!

If you haven't seen it on my other blogs, the next book in the series, The Persistence of Memories, will be available NEXT FRIDAY! That's right, Book 2 drops in e-book form on 15 April!

Here's the Good Reads page:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

And as always, it'll be for sale at Smashwords for a nifty $4.99!

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE

Haven't gotten around to reading the first book yet? THAT'S OKAY TOO because right now A Division of Souls is available for FREE! at the same site! Two books for the price of one! Not too shabby!


Thanks for stopping by, I hope you enjoy this second book as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Yes! I have made the move and as of about an hour ago I've dropped the price for A Division of Souls down to just 99 cents! Woo!

And in other news, another HUGE thanks to my recent downloaders over at NoiseTrade Books, who have just made my count hit over 250! Man, that just blows my mind that I've gotten that many downloads in just two months. I'm absolutely thrilled. Thank you one and all! :D

And on last update: I am STILL working on the final edit for The Persistence of Memories, and the projected drop date is still early 2016, hopefully in January. I will of course keep everyone updated. BUT! If you're curious now, I may have posted the first chapter over at Welcome to Bridgetown. Go ahead adn take a look if you like!

Till then, thanks once more!

Hey all!

Some nifty news to share: As of today, A Division of Souls is now a featured New and Notable book on NoiseTrade Books! It's a pay-what-you-want site for a lot of excellent music and e-books, and I'm so glad the fine people at NTB asked if I'd like to be featured.

And a huge THANK YOU to everyone who's already gone over and downloaded it! Here I was, expecting maybe 15 or 20 people at most, but at end of day today, I've hit 114 downloads!! That's SO much more than I expected for one day. Again, I thank all of you. I you're all awesome. :)

And one last bit of side news as well...I FINALLY finished the galley edit of the physical version of the book! I now need to spend a few days making final fixes and reuploading it, and at that point the trade paperback will be available to buy at Amazon. W00T!

Till next time...!

Trust me, I'm getting there!!

I'm going page by page with my galley copy right now, and it seems there were a lot more wonky errors in the text than I thought. There are a few embarrassing typos and a line or two I think I could tighten, but for the most part, the really bad errors are in the formatting. Most often it's been the Recurring Case of the Vanishing Pilcrow (which by far has been the weirdest error, as I wouldn't have knowingly deleted any). It's a long process, but I'm getting there.

I'm hoping to have the physical version available by early November. Thanks for waiting!

The physical book version of A Division of Souls is coming along, and let me tell you, formatting the text for physical consumption is a LOT different from ebook formatting.

Put it this way: With e-books, the text is a little more elastic. The book can be X number of pages long, but when the reader looks at it on their own hardware, that may change depending on a few things such as font style and size. While flipping pages, you may see "Page 3 of 500" three or four times before it finally ticks over to "Page 4."

Physical books are different, and here's why, especially if you plan on doing it DIY through something like CreateSpace: WYSIWYG. The text you format is the text you're going to see on the printed page. It might be simplistic, in Times New Roman double-spaced and left-aligned with the page number in the top right corner, when you save the file, and that's what will show up on the printed page.

Which is kinda not what you want in a print book.

You want the following:
--Page numbers on the outside of each page (left side for the left pages, right side for the right pages, natch), and starting at the right time
--Interesting and readable font and line spacing (I chose Garamond 12pt, 1.05-spaced and justified)
--Any text tweaking (size, shape, justification, etc) done correctly
--Any hyperlinks in the ebook taken out for the print version

...and so many more little fiddly things that can easily get forgotten.

This is why it's taken me longer to get the physical book out. I've lost count how many times I've uploaded the file to the CreateSpace platform, only to find yet another formatting error that needs fixing.

So where am I now? Well, I'm currently awaiting a UPS box that should contain a few galley copies of the novel. Having that in my hands, aside from the excitement of it being MY FIRST PUBLISHED BOOK OMG, I'll be red-penning it for any last minute fixes that I'll need to make, if any. And only then will I finally hit that "Publish" button and it'll be available to everyone.

So yeah, I'm getting there. Slowly but surely. :)

As of tonight I have finally taken the step of publishing ADoS at Amazon. I'm awaiting review as we speak, so I shall update the sales links as soon as it's cleared!

Yet another hurdle cleared.

Next up: Physical copies at CreateSpace!

Because I'm such a nice guy, I'm offering A Division of Souls at NoiseTrade Books for a limited time.

You name the price!

[Yes folks, that does include free, but tips are nice, as it'll let me buy coffee. And you don't want to get between a writer and his coffee. It's not pretty.]

YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO.

http://books.noisetrade.com/jonchaiss...

Not gonna lie, I've been giddy all day. A Division of Souls had its debut today, and I've been resisting temptation to look at my first-day stats like you wouldn't believe.

Suffice it to say, I finally took a good look, and I'm pretty happy with them:

Full downloads: 3
Sample (20%) downloads: 3
Page views: 100+

Actually, it's the page views that are pleasing me the most! I'd expected a reasonably low purchase rate for a first day, especially for a n00b like me, but I'm very happy that I got that many hits.

Here's to hoping it only heads up from there!

Back when I first started taking my writing seriously — I mean, as in thinking “Hey, I kinda like doing this, I could see myself doing it professionally” and setting out a goal to actually finish a full novel, way back before I actually knew how to do it — was in the mid to late 80s when I was in my mid-teens. Out of that came the Infamous War Book (basically a Red Dawn pastiche), which took me three years to finish, in between false starts, obsessive planning, revisions, homework, and hanging out with friends. On the one hand it was kind of expected I’d be a writer, considering my dad was a local reporter and historian, and well known in the area; many adults would not have been surprised if I followed in his footsteps. On the other hand, though, I was following a path I didn’t think any other kids my age would have followed. I knew a handful of kids who wrote stories alongside me, but I think their interest was more on what many nowadays would consider the fanfic level. A fun thing to do as a hobby, but their career paths lay elsewhere.


Around the same time, I’d discovered college radio (which I still go on about to this day, as you can tell from my other blog). After years of listening to commercial radio and being fed a cross section of classic rock and pop hits, the college radio thing hit me like a revelation: you don’t have to be commercial, you know. I was completely drawn to the DIY aspect of it all; they weren’t exactly writing and recording music for the fame, they were writing and recording because they wanted to. And I had a real respect for that. It was a real inspiration on multiple levels for me, from my clothes to the way I thought and acted. It also inspired my writing quite a bit — in the latter half of the IWN, you can really see a change to a much darker mood and style. I may not have been the leather-and-mohawk punk; I was more the Morrissey, hiding in my bedroom with my books and my music and writing the most brilliant things. I eventually grew out of the self-important lifestyle, but the thirst for creativity remained.

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Read the rest at:

http://welcometobridgetown.com/2015/0...