Michael Hiebert's Blog

Just announced! My first short story collection since Sometimes the Angels Weep will be coming out in 2017 in both trade paperback and ebook editions. This is a huge deal for me and I hope for you, too. And yes, you’re reading the cover right—unlike Weep, this collection actually has a theme. Speculative fiction. All of it. Science fiction and fantasy from cover to cover.

Speaking of covers, what do you think? I adore it, but then, I suppose I’m a little biased

Some months I’m late (usually I’m late), sometimes I’m early (I think this is the one and only time I’ve been early). Anyway, here it is, book five of The Rose Garden Arena Incident, a creepy little volume called STALKER FAN.

Preorders should be available on Amazon in the coming week. Stalker Fan will be released January 22, 2017.

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Now that Michael Hiebert's Official Website.

In just four days, the second book the seven-part serial thriller, The Rose Garden Arena Incident will hit online booksellers everywhere. Monday, October 17.

It’s called Media Frenzy, and pre-reviews are sitting at a solid five stars! It’s a good book, if I do say so myself and, at ninety-nine cents, it’s a bargain. Scoop up this one and the first one, Mosh Pit now. It’s a good time to do so because, as I said previously, Mosh Pit is now free!

 

Michael Out

 

The post Rose Garden Book 2: Media Frenzy Release appeared first on Michael Hiebert's Official Website.

After some serious thought and consultation with Eric, we’ve decided to completely reconfigure the price plan for the entire eBook series that makes up The Rose Garden Arena Incident.

Effective immediately, or whenever Amazon decides to price match in their case, the first book, Mosh Pit will be available for free. The second and third books, Media Frenzy and 80 Proof will be ninety-nine cents a pop. We think this makes far more sense from a marketing point of view.

So now, there’s no holding you back. At the very least, read Mosh Pit and see what you think. And if you do us a huge favor and review it somewhere?

The following sites have already have Mosh Pit available for free: Apple iTunes, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, 24 Symbols, Inktera, Scribd, and Smashwords.

Hopefully, Amazon won’t be too far behind.

Thank you for your time. Now back to regular programming.

 

Michael out.

 

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National Novel Writing Month is coming up again and, as always, my thoughts about it are generally split as to whether or not this is a good thing. In some ways, NaNo reflects my personal beliefs about how books should be written. But in many more ways, I fear that, ultimately, NaNo may not just be a bad idea, I think it could actually do harm to participants’ craft.

On the surface, NaNo would appear to be an awesome opportunity for writers to get inspired, and push out more words than they normally would. I love their system of “virtual” rewards (Audible does the same thing, and I can contest personally that it works. Before I managed to achieve every single reward available, I listened to far more audiobooks than I do now). All this is great. I think the people behind NaNo have extremely good intentions and I love the professionalism, structure, and sense of community they’ve managed to wrap around something that is so abstract and, for the most part, a very solitary and lonely job. That’s the one thing about writing. Normally, there are no cheerleaders. No coaches. Not even a guaranteed blue ribbon (or any color ribbon) at the end of the race. Even worse, for the most part, any community of supporters you do find, don’t really understand the writing process enough to offer the sort of encouragement that a writer (especially in their early years) needs. They just don’t get it. To most people, at least in my experience, writing is a very esoteric process, completely foreign to most other crafts.vEven other writers can fall short in this regard. They are too busy struggling with their own work or they will offer advice full of good intentions, not knowing it’s bad advice coming from their own lack of experience. And of course, there are some that simply won’t acknowledge or will negatively acknowledge others’ success out of vanity or jealousy. Whatever. That doesn’t matter. My point here is, in this regard, NaNo rocks (there are a few other places where a burgeoning writer can find that kind of support, too, and I will get to that in a moment.

So yeah, NaNo is full of all that chocolatey goodness. So what’s the problem?

The problem lies in NaNo’s mission statement. To quote directly from their homepage: “Write a novel in a month!” And, from their FAQ: “You win NaNoWriMo by writing 50,000 words of your novel between November 1 and November 30.”

This is fine and dandy if you are an accomplished novelist. If you’ve already got two or three novels under your belt, then I would completely advise you to throw yourself at NaNo if that’s what you want to do. Problem is, if you’ve already got two or three novels done, you probably don’t need Nano. I don’t have any figures to back this up, but I am willing to bet that by far the majority of entrants haven’t completed a novel before in their life.

Why is this bad?

First there is a flaw in the entire premise. Unless you are writing a YA novel, 50,000 words is not going to give you a book. At least probably not one that is publishable. The word counts that publishers are looking for when it comes to novels (especially for first-time authors), generally ranges from 70,000 to 120,000, with fantasies claiming the high range, mysteries and mainstream the mid to lower range and science fiction right across the board. So let’s be clear about this. Even if you “win” NaNo, you probably won’t have written a novel.

Not only that, 50,000 words in a month is hard. In fact, if you look at the map of word counts across the map that NaNo have posted on their site, it becomes clear that by far the majority of participants don’t even make half their targeted account.

So what?

If you go into something publicly announcing you’re “going to pump out 50,000 words in thirty days and write a novel” and then wind up with, say, 20,000 words and no finished novel in sight, you will become nothing but discouraged. And I’ll tell you right now, the biggest thing early writers struggle against is discouragement. Becoming a good writer, in my experience, requires a lot of patience and tenacity. For me, the drive to continue throughout those early tenuous years, was through experiencing one small win at a time. You need to feel you are accomplishing something to push forward. The “I’m a failure” feeling that constantly plagues even well-established writers is so prevalent in the industry that the last thing it needs is another source.

“Okay,” you say, “but I am thinking about this differently. I am thinking I will participate in NaNo, use all their support systems, and come away with a good start on a book that I will finish in the months following.”

Not a bad stance if you can do it. Problem is, even if you manage to make those 50,000 words, you’re still really barely halfway through your book (most books, at least). Congratulations! You wrote half a book in thirty days. Except I have to be honest with you, that first half? It’s a cakewalk compared to the second half. I’ve written twenty-two novels now in about fifteen years. I don’t say this to impress you or to brag, simply to illustrate that I have credentials to back up what I’m saying. Winning NaNo is going to put you right in a place many authors know well. It even has a name, “The Muddle in the Middle.”vIt’s a bad place, probably the toughest to handle. I still continually struggle with even after having written so many books. I have developed ways of tackling it and I always eventually manage to push through, but if you’re a beginner writer or even if this is your second or third book, you may not have what’s needed to just slam your way through to the end.

Again, I have no hard evidence to back this up, but I am betting that NaNo is probably responsible for many, many half-finished manuscripts now lying dead in drawers or on hard drives today, left untouched since their word count was posted on that thirtieth day.

In this way, NaNo teaches you bad habits.

The only way to get good at anything is to practice. In this regard, writing as many words as possible and aiming for 50,000 in one month is a good thing. Every word you write is a practice word until it’s published, and that’s fine. Practice is great. And I certainly am not trying to dissuade you from doing something that will result in you throwing down words at astronomical speeds. Problem is, that’s not all you’re practicing with NaNo. The big thing NaNo is teaching you is how to write the first half of a book. When, what you really need to practice if you’re trying to be a successful writer is how to start and finish a book. Finishing is important. I try to finish everything I start. It’s in finishing where you really learn how to be not just a good author, but a great one.

Before I go any further, let me explain something. On the surface, NaNo and I share one basic philosophy: your first draft should be written fast. As fast as possible. I don’t care if you’re a planner or a pantser or even a penguin (I just made that last one up as a joke, don’t go off Googling what a penguin is when it comes to writing ), writing fast works really well for so many reasons, there’s a psychological advantage to it, there are creative reasons for it, there are continuity issues around it, but the main thing it does is that it keeps the right side of your brain (the creative, imaginative side of dreams) running fast enough to avoid being tackled by the “internal editor” sitting at the desk in the left side of the brain. I’ve heard that ninety-five percent of would-be writers fail to ever finish a novel. It’s that guy, that editor, who’s responsible for this. He throws up roadblocks. Questions every word. Tells you they are terrible. Tells you that you are terrible. Don’t let him. Keep him back as far away as possible. To do that, write fast, write sloppily, write everything you can and finish your book as quickly as you can. Then, once it’s done, throw it in a drawer for at least three weeks before you go back and second-draft it. That’s when you can let the internal editor catch up for a while.

So if not NaNo, then what?

The reason for this post came from a conversation I had yesterday with a good writer friend of mine. They’ve written a few short stories and want to write a novel. “I think I’m going to do NaNo,” they said. And I replied with basically everything I just said.

Then I replied with: “There is a way to replicate the Nano experience in, what I would consider, a much healthier manner.” Now when I say “healthier,” I mean, less likely to teach you bad habits or discourage you. And the way to do it is to run your own little NaNo.

Let me explain.

First off, 50,000 words in one month is a crazy number to expect from any writer. That extends outward to 600,000 words in one year. I am a very prolific writer. I used to track all my words. For two years running, my count managed to hit the million mark. But I was completely insane (still am, just in different ways

Okay, so I’m coming in a little late. Technological problems and all that. Anyway, it’s past the first of the month, so high time for the cover and title reveal of the next book in The Rose Garden Arena Incident series! The fourth book, called Ballads Will be available for preorder tomorrow! It’s a good book. Judging from reviews, they’re all not too bad

Okay, this might sound like a weird blog post from the title, but apparently, some people are having problems figuring out how to acquire and read my newest work, The Rose Garden Arena Incident. I’m guessing the confusion comes from the fact that there is no actual “paper” book for you to walk into the bookstore and buy.

Fair enough. It wasn’t really until a couple of years ago that I started reading books electronically. Took a bit of time to get used to, but now I read probably ninety-nine percent of my books on my iPhone, either reading them with the Kindle app, or listening to them with the Audible app.

So, those are your options for Rose Garden. The book is actually (technically) available in three formats: as an audiobook, as a Kindle, or as an ebook. You might think that Kindle is an ebook, but there’s actually two completely different formats, the format Amazon uses for Kindle and the format every single other ebook manufacturer and publishing website uses.

My book is a serial thriller being published in seven parts, which means there will be seven individual books. Obviously, each book is shorter than a normal novel, but not by as much as you would think. The final word count for The Rose Garden Arena Incident will be an estimated one hundred and eighty thousand words, putting it at a size just a hair under being three times the length of my debut novel, Dream with Little Angels.

Because the books are short, they aren’t priced very high. The first one, Mosh Pit which came out September 19 is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and everywhere else you might buy ebooks online, for a buck ninety-nine. The second one, Media Frenzy (coming out October 21) will be priced the same. How short are they? Well, a proper novel is usually around seventy-thousand to ninety thousand words. The first five Rose Garden books should come in between twenty and twenty-five thousand words (about ninety-five pages or so). So, yeah, they’re each a sort of “mini-novel.” If all goes as planned, the final two books—books six and seven—will be almost double that, coming in somewhere between forty and forty-five thousand words. If you opt to listen to the audiobooks instead of reading the Kindle or ebook edition, Eric’s narration for the first two installments takes two to three hours a book. That is if you listen at normal speed. I never do. But I’ll get to that in a moment.

So, how does one go about reading a Kindle or an ebook? It’s really simple. You can do one of two things. You can buy yourself a Kindle from Amazon or a Kobo from Kobo or whatever from whoever, but you certainly don’t have to. In fact, I would almost advise not doing that. I actually purchased a Kindle Fire from Amazon a few years ago for a couple hundred dollars and, once I got my iPhone, discovered I never used it. So I gave it to my ex-wife. Thing is, if you have any sort of smart phone, or tablet, or even a desktop or laptop PC or Mac, you can download the Kindle app for free. Completely free. Once you’ve done that, you just log into Amazon.com (or, if you happen to live in my country, Amazon.ca (or .uk, or … I know. You get it.) Once you’re there, do a search for my name or the title of any of my books, and you should be taken right to them. Even easier? Click on the book cover at the top of this article, or just click right here.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll find yourself at the sell page for the book. Then it’s simply a matter of throwing it into your cart, going to the checkout, using your credit card to pay the dollar ninety-nine, and then the book will magically appear (within seconds, usually) on your Kindle device or iPhone or iPad or iPod or Android or PC or Mac or whatever it is you’ve decided to do your reading on (I actually prefer my phone to my iPad—I find I read faster on my phone. I think it’s because my eyes can take in each horizontal line of text in one look. Just a guess, though). If you decide to get really crazy with your Kindle spending, you can turn on “one-click” in your Amazon account. Then all you need to do is just click a button on the sale page and everything magically happens behind the scenes and your book appears thirty seconds later on your phone. This is not always a good thing.

Of course, if you’re using a different ebook device, odds are, you already know where to go and what to do to buy books for it.

And that’s it for the electronic version. Easy peasy.

But what if you want to listen to Eric’s mellifluous voice rendering my prose in perfect eloquence with his low, docal tones? Well, there’s a few different ways you can do that, too. The audiobook is available at numerous places, such as the iTunes store, Audible.com, and, I believe Google Play (maybe I’m wrong), among others. I use Audible. And, just like with the Kindle app, the Audible app is free to install on any of your devices or computers and, once you do, the process of going to Audible.com and buying the book is exactly the same as I described it for the Kindle edition on Amazon. In fact, Amazon owns Audible, so this makes pretty good sense. Of course, it’s not as easy as clicking on the book cover at the top of this post, but you could just click this link right here.

Once you’ve purchased the audiobook and it magically appears on your device less than a minute later, you’ll find you have a few cool options, the best one probably being to listen to the book at speeds other than those Eric read it at. I usually listen to most of my fiction at 1.25 speed. Sometimes I manage to crank it up to 1.5, but usually this is a wee bit fast. I listen to a lot of audiobooks. I mean, I haven’t done the math, but I think I have somewhere around, I dunno, a hundred and sixty still-waiting-to-be-heard Audible books in my cloud (oh, that’s another thing. When you buy a book, either as an ebook or an audiobook, that book is yours forever; well—with a few exceptions … Amazon actually has different promotions, some of which allow you to borrow books or pay a monthly fee to read all the books you want and things like that, but normally, the book is yours. Now, you’re probably thinking, “Gee, I really don’t want to have all them books taking up room on my phone. I mean, I need somewhere to store them Pokemon I’ve been catching.” And it’s true, the books can become big users of space if you buy them like I do. Luckily, though, you only have to store whatever books you’re currently reading. When you open an account with Amazon (or their competitors), you are given free “cloud” space. It’s basically just a computer somewhere with a partition of one of it’s hard drives dedicated to you and your books. You can keep your books there forever and erase them from your devices and, if you ever want to read them again, just grab them off of you cloud. It’s really simple. I just made it sound even more complicated than it had to be. It’s like, one button.

Just in case you’re wondering, to the best of my knowledge there is no “real bookstore” you can walk into (at this point, anyway) to buy a Kindle or ebook or audiobook version of any of the Rose Garden installments. You do have lots of choices online, though. I believe between all the different versions, you can find them at almost two dozen different booksellers. If you’re at a loss to find one, please do not hesitate to contact me using the icon at the bottom of my website.

One last thing. You may notice that audiobook covers and Kindle/ebook covers are different. This is because Kindle/ebooks use the same sort of proportions as regular books—they’re taller than they are wide. For some weird reason, audiobook covers are always square. This may not seem like such a big deal—and probably usually it’s really not—but t;but usually people don’t have to have seven completely different covers created when they release their newest work. So, yeah … I needed fourteen separate covers.

Anyway, that’s it. So, please don’t feel intimidated by technology! Buy my books. Buy my friends’ books, too. We’re all pretty good writers. Oh, and one last thing. After you finish reading them I would really appreciate it if you could take the time to post a review on whatever site you bought them on. The place you do that, is right at that same page you searched for when you bought it. I’m sure other authors would also appreciate this gesture.

Thank you very much. I hope y’all have a wonderful rest of the weekend!

 

Michael out.

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Full length trailer for The Rose Garden Arena. The first book, Mosh Pit, is now live for sale everywhere ebooks are sold, and the audiobook version can be found wherever you find those sorts of things

Tomorrow, The Rose Garden Arena Incident Book 1, Mosh Pit will be available as an ebook on Amazon, Kobo, Nook, Apple, etc. The audiobook version will be available on Amazon, Audible, iTunes, etc.

Remember, you don’t need an actual Kindle device to read Kindle books. You can download the Kindle app for free and it will work on pretty much anything. Smartphones to tablets to laptops to desktops.

 

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