Matthew Hughes's Blog: barbarians of the beyond - Posts Tagged "dying-earth"

Here’s something of an experiment: I’ve read the text of the first Henghis Hapthorn story, (Mastermindless, (F&SF, March 2004) aloud while the videocam was running and put the result up on YouTube. The sound quality is not ideal, and the only visual is the homemade title card, plus I’m not a professional voice actor – but anybody who wants to listen is welcome to the experience.

All of the Hapthorn stories are now available as a $2.99 ebook from Amazon and Kobo. I’ll be selling the collection at the same price from my web page in the near future, so those who have a Nook or some other EPUB-format-friendly reader can get them then. And for the truly old-fashioned, there’ll be a PDF file.

The three Henghis Hapthorn novels -- Majestrum, The Spiral Labyrinth, and Hespira -- are now available as ebooks in Kindle and Epub formats on my web page. The price is $2.99 each.

A pdf format file will follow soon. They'll also be for sale on Amazon and Kobo in the near future.

To draw new readers, I'm reduced the price of 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn to 99 cents on Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords, and in my own webstore.

I would have dropped it to a pure freebie, but Amazon makes that difficult.

It's an experiment. The Hapthorn short stories are actually the best-selling of the nine ebooks I've put out so far, so I'm thinking that cutting the already-low price should draw more trade.

We'll see. The cut-price offer will go on for as long as it takes for me to see how it works out, but that will be at least a week as I now have to depart Athens and set up at the next housesit in Cyprus.

Please tell your friends.

Gordon van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, tells me that "Stones and Glass," a novelet featuring my Dying Earth-era thief, Raffalon, will run in the November/December issue.

And now for something completely different: I have a piece in today's online Globe & Mail about a sneaky way to abolish the corrupt and largely unuseful Canadian Senate.

I’ve settled into a seven-week sit in the little village of Tala, just outside Paphos in the Republic of Cyprus. The population is a mixture of Greek Cypriots and British expats. The scenery is stunning, the architecture is generic eastern-Mediterranean, and the climate is hot and relatively humid. They not only grow olives and figs, but little sweet bananas.

I’m looking after two rescue dogs – that is dogs that have been abandoned and rescued, not St Bernards with brandy casks, although one of them is coincidentally named Brandy. The other one, Bailey, had a spinal break late last year that has left her back legs mostly paralyzed. Still, I take them for a walk every morning, before the heat gets too heated. Bailey has a custom-fitted pair of wheels that take the place of her back legs, and she rattles along like Ben Hur.

She also has no bladder or bowel control, so there’s a certain amount of cleaning up to be done – although I’ve learned how to position her over an enamel chamber pot and squeeze her abdomen to express urine before she leaves a puddle.

And you thought being a world-wandering author/housesitter was all beer and skittles. Actually, the beer here is good and cheap, a euro or so for a half-liter bottle and I’m still trying to figure out how they can sell a liter bottle of Jim Beam bourbon for less than it retails for in the States.

In authoring news, before I finished the last sit in Athens – three months in Exarchia, the anarchists’ quarter – I wrote a 15,000-word novelette featuring my Dying Earth-era thief, Raffalon, and sent it to Gordon Van Gelder at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He’s just sent me a note to say that he’s buying it. When it runs, it will be my twenty-fifth appearance in F&SF, which when I think about how I used to buy used copies of the mag to read in the early sixties (couldn’t afford a subscription, and we were always moving house), always amazes me.

During the week since I arrived in Tala, I have done the first draft of the fifth episode of The Kaslo Chronicles, the serialized novel about my hardboiled PI who becomes a wizard’s assistant when the universe’s operating system abruptly switches from rational cause-and-effect to will-powered magic.

The first Kaslo episode, “And Then Some,” originally ran in Asimov’s and is now appearing as a reprint in Lightspeed Magazine. Future episodes will run every two months. I’m going to be very interested to see where the story goes (I can’t outline; I just start and out it comes, a thousand words a day).

A week or so ago, I set the price for my 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn story collection ebook to zero, just to see if it leads to more sales of the other ebooks. If you’d like to pick one up for nothing, check Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords, or the Archonate bookstore.

A couple of sales to report:

"Avianca's Bezel," a 15,000-word novelet, is another in a series of tales about Raffalon, my Dying Earthesque thief, sold to Gordon Van Gelder at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction;

"The Village," the fifth episode in the serialized novel, The Kaslo Chronicles, sold to John Joseph Adams at Lightspeed magazine.

After a month-long experiment of only selling my ebooks through Amazon's Kindle program, I've decided it's not a useful approach. So I've put the four Henghis Hapthorn books -- three novels and a short story collection -- back on sale via Kobo, Smashwords, and the Archonate bookstore.

The novels, Majestrum, The Spiral Labyrinth, and Hespira, are $2.99 each, but the collection 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn is free on Kobo and Smashwords, and only a penny on my own site (because Paypal won't carry a zero-price transaction).

I may put the other books back into the other venues before the month is out. First, I want to try a paid promotion to see if it draws new readers.

As of this morning, Italian time, my self-pubbed ebook, 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn, is ranked as the number-one Amazon free Kindle download in the sf category. In the past fifteen hours, the title has been downloaded 12,782 times. Plus another few hundred on Kobo and Smashwords.

It's as a result of giving BookBub US$80 for a promotion, emailed to their sf subscribers list (240,000 members, they say) as well as posted on their web page for the next week.

I'll now be interested to see what kind of result I get. How many of those free-takers will come back and buy a $2.99 ebook?

I will report as I get more info.

Hespira: A Tale of Henghis Hapthorn, the third novel in the Hapthorn trilogy, is now available as a POD paperback.

Here's the blurb:

Hapthorn decides to leave Old Earth, seeking to solve the mystery of Hespira, an ungainly off-world woman who has lost her memory. The investigation takes him down The Spray to the rank-obsessed world of Ikkibal and the rustic Shannery, where he unravels Hespira's role in a deadly feud between aristocrats. But behind the scenes an unseen antagonist is plotting the discriminator's destruction.

At the moment, the paperback is only available in Amazon's CreateSpace estore, but in a week or so it will work its way through into the whole Amazon system. And at some point, probably weeks from now, you could actually walk into a bricks-and-mortar bookstore and order a copy.

I'd prefer it, though, if you bought it from CreateSpace, since they pay a far better royalty than I would receive after everybody else has taken a cut.

I want to thank my excellent book designer, Bradley W. Schenck, Hero of the Archonate, for producing such a fine piece of work.

I've self-published all of the Guth Bandar stories that ran in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction a few years ago, including the Nebula-nominated novella, "The Helper and his Hero."

The stories were later assembled into a fix-up novel, The Commons, but these are the original texts that appeared in F&SF.

The Compleat Guth Bandar is available as a $2.99 ebook from Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords, and the Archonate bookstore.

Here's the blurb:
In Old Earth’s penultimate age, humanity’s collective unconscious has long since been fully explored and mapped by the noönaut scholars of the Institute for Historical Inquiry. But something is threatening the integrity – perhaps even the very existence – of the noösphere, and aspiring academic Guth Bandar finds his career plans diverted by a collective unconscious that appears to be waking up.

And here's a link to one of the stories for a free read.