Anthony Dean's Blog: The Voided Man - Posts Tagged "the-voided-man"

Greetings, everyone. This is my beginning of the month update on everything going on with my two series.

The Clock and the Candles

Book 2 – The Clock and the Talisman – is out today. I will be running a Goodreads Giveaway with a chance to win autographed copies starting October 10.

Everybody is back in this one, and the conspiracy is joined by an imprisoned miner, an elderly prospector, a pair of new elves (one thin and mild mannered, the other enormously musclebound and heavily tattooed), and a young woman who has crossed an evil Brotherhood in the Northlands. I will be running a Goodreads Giveaway for autographed copies starting October 10.

There are three problems for the good guys in these tales, and each book in the trilogy mostly focuses on one of them.

Problem 1: Gwen is held in the Prison Maximus. The conspirators see what they can do about that in book 1 – The Clock and the Candles.

Problem 2: The Ebony Clock presents all kinds of trouble, both for members of the conspiracy and for everyone else in the Lands. The Clock and the Talisman is about two quests to get the clock under control, and they're tough.

Problem 3: King Adolphus. If there is to be peace in the Lands, The Usurper has to go. The last book in the trilogy – The Clock and the Crown – details the conspiracy's conflict with him and how it turns out, and maybe how they deal with a few new problems presented by the Ebony Clock. It will be out December 1, and it will be available for preorder later today.

The love stories feature in all three books, of course.


The Voided Man

Book 4 – Navigating Yesterday – releases on October 27. In the book, we learn a great deal about Jack's quest to learn enough medicine to save Laura in an age of very primitive technology, about Alexis' time at the Valkyrie School, about Maestro, and about Lord Jeffrey, a new villain who is causing all kinds of problems in the 30th Century. And that's just in the first hundred pages.

I've got book 5 just about done, and I'll be able to get it out by the end of the year – probably around mid December. That one will be called The Valkyrie-200.

That's my update for early October. Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.

Greetings, all.

Book 4 in the Voided Man series - Navigating Yesterday - comes out on Sunday.

If you are someone who has read the others, you'll get new backstory on the Last King of the West, and how the Realm originated, and more on Jack and Laura's unusual romance and what happens with Alexis as she grows up during the years that Banner is adrift in the Valkyrie-98.

If you are new to my fiction, this is actually a good book to use to start the Voided Man series. You'll catch more of the references if you've read the other books, but you won't be unable to enjoy Navigating Yesterday if you haven't.

The question I explore in the new book is this: in the aftermath of an apocalypse, what does it look like when pockets of civilization start to return and stabilize? I've spent a lot of time thinking about how technology and commerce and governance might work in that scenario, and also about the threats that might arise from places where civilization has not returned.

The Potato isn't finished as a setting by any means, but Number One and the others will be spending a lot of time on Earth in the forthcoming books in the series, and so Navigating Yesterday reveals what things are like in 30th Century America.

Also in the mix are two good love stories, one old and one brand new. Two new villains – Chancellor Bain and Lord Jeffrey – arise as well and cause trouble. And Bucky is back. Everybody loves that horse, including me.

Half of my advance readers rated Navigating Yesterday as their favorite book in the series so far. Small sample size, true, but encouraging nonetheless.

For my fantasy fans, the conclusion of the Clock and the Candles trilogy will be out December 1, and it's all hands on deck for the conspirators as they make a real run at ousting Adolphus from power. There's much more on the elves in book 3 as well.

And I call it a trilogy, but I'm sure that the Lands and the Clock and the characters who survive book 3 will be back. I just haven't decided whether their series will run straight ahead like the Voided Man, or whether I'll end up breaking their adventures into discrete trilogies. That could go either way.

Last note for now: I'll release one more Voided Man book before the end of the year. Book 5, The Valkyrie-200, will be out on December 15.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.

Greetings, everyone.

I released my first book (The Voided Man) in May, and so November marks six months for me in the world of self publishing. I’ve learned a great deal in half a year, and I’m going to create a few posts this month to share some of it. In a few weeks I’ll resume talking about books that I’m working on or that will soon be released.

In my first post back in June, I characterized myself as the last man on the bench on a single-A minor league baseball team. At that time, I’d sold about 40 books, and almost all of those sales were to people I know personally. Six months in, I would rate myself as a starter on a double-A team. I’m a long way from the majors, but I’ve sold a couple of thousand books now, and I feel like I understand the KDP game much better.

But on to specific things I’ve learned. I have a top ten list, which will be divided over three blog posts.

1. You can write more than you think you can.

I have found writing output to be no different than running. If you haven’t been to the track for a long time and you show up with fresh-out-of-the-box shoes, you will probably get winded fairly quickly. But if you get back up there night after night, you can build up stamina in a surprisingly short amount of time.

Writing is the same, I’ve found. I’m turning out more than twice as many words per day than I did in the beginning, and it doesn’t seem burdensome. It doesn’t feel like I’m sacrificing anything that matters or burning out my brain or anything negative. It feels like I’ve been going to the track regularly and I can turn out easy quarter miles and a lot of them.

2. Reviewers are generally nice.

I read all of my reviews, and they’re very helpful. The ones that are most enjoyable to read, of course, are from people who loved one of my books. But even the reviewers who didn’t particularly like a story usually have constructive comments that I can get something out of. If you think of writing, or if you’ve written something but are reluctant to put it out there because of a fear of the public square, my experience has been that it is generally a supportive place.

3. You have to build a schedule.

Writing needs to be a habit, and your brain needs to know when it’s “writing time”. Part of getting more productive for me has been establishing that morning writing time is 8:00 and that evening writing time is 7:00.

It doesn’t matter what your schedule looks like specifically, I don’t think. It just needs to be consistent. And the schedule I’m talking about is for the creation of new material for the books you are working on. I edit and blog and work on ad campaigns and all sorts of things related to the books at random times, but building the new content happens at set times, and that seems to make a meaningful positive difference.

That’s it for this week. More of my top ten list of what I’ve learned in my first six months of self publishing in a week or so.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.

This is the second installment in a three part series on what I’ve learned in my first six months of self-publishing on KDP. Last time, I talked about the first three things on my list of ten items. Picking up where I left off...

4. You will go nuts if you check your numbers all the time.

It’s tempting to do so. You can track sales, and royalties, and ranking in genres and subgenres and on Amazon overall in the US or the UK or anywhere else. You can take a deep dive into ad campaigns and pre orders and average customer ratings anytime you want.

And if you go down that rabbit hole, it takes away time from writing. If numbers are up, it tempts one to take the foot off the gas for the rest of the day. “What I have out already is doing great, so I’ll do something else.” If numbers are down, the amygdala wakes up and says, “What’s going on?! We’ve got to figure this out right away!!”

But you can’t figure it out, not over short lengths of time. Book sales are like stocks, to my eye. A good book will sell more over time just like shares of a good company will go up over time. But how will they do hour to hour? No one knows. At all.

I check sales numbers once a day in the evening when I’m not going to write anymore that day and try to keep it to 15 minutes. I do a deeper dive once a week and look at trends a little bit. That’s it.

My advice to anyone new to the game is to spend as much time as possible writing and as little time as is reasonable checking the background stuff.

5. Writing fiction is difficult.

I’ve written and ghost written a fair number of textbooks over the years, and while those are much longer than novels (at least on average), they are easier to put down on paper because they’re tied to specific things. If you want a textbook chapter on law or ethics or government or public policy I can probably turn it around in a few days, because I probably already know a lot about the issues you want to cover with your students, and I can research the rest.

But fiction? Different deal. There’s no opening blueprint, there is no obvious starting point, and there are no rules. There’s nothing. You have to build it all, and sometimes, the blinking cursor seems to taunt you. Sometimes, it makes me think, “You know, if I were a smarter man, I would have settled on how the next part goes by now.”

But then sometimes, that blinking cursor dances and simply glides across the screen, which leads me to my next point.

6. Writing fiction is marvelous.

I am not aware of any professional activity that is as fulfilling as creating a story out of nothing and having it mean something to someone else.

I’ve gotten tastes of it lecturing over the last twenty nine years. I always figure that if you give students a definition, they’ll memorize it for your next exam and then forget it, but if you tell them a story, they might actually remember it. So I’m a storyteller in the classroom when it is reasonable.

But writing novels is 100% storytelling, all the time. It’s amazing.

I bet I’ll teach for a long time yet, but I’m pretty clearly more than halfway through my teaching career. I can’t imagine I’ll still be at the podium when I’m 81. But I bet I’ll still be writing fiction at 81, and if everything holds together, longer still. Some authors do that.

Now that I see how it is writing everyday, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to not doing so. I really don’t.

I’ll finish this series off in my next post mid-month, and then I’ll have one more post at the end of the month that will preview my December releases.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.

This is the last in a series of three posts that cover ten things I’ve learned during my first six months of self-publishing on Kindle Direct. To finish off the list...

7. There is more to it than I thought.

I had not anticipated running a lot of ad campaigns, or Goodreads Giveaways, or writing a blog, or emailing with readers. But those things are all part of building a series, and they have all become part of the rotation. And I don’t mind doing them; they are just things I hadn’t expected at the beginning.

8. There is also actually less to it than with alternate paths.

Publishing through traditional publishers often requires getting an agent, and that seems a difficult trick. There are writers in a group I have joined who spend a lot of time trying to win that part of the game. Agents aren’t really a feature of the world of academic publishing that I’m familiar with, but once a contract is signed to write a textbook, I can say from experience that there are a LOT of moving parts before a final manuscript is accepted that aren’t part of the KDP world.

9. If you are thinking of making a go of self-publishing, be prepared to lose money initially.

You have to advertise, in my opinion. There are several million books on Amazon, and if you are new, you have to create visibility for your book or not very many people are likely to find it.

You also need covers that are interesting if you want people to take a first look at your work. If you have the knack for designing them, that’s great, but I don’t, and so covers are the other main expense I’ve had with my books. Lindsey Cousins is my cover designer - https://www.behance.net/gallery/21047... - and she does a great job. Wait until you see the cover for Voided Man 6.

But even with expenses, my experience has been that you can get to the break even point and beyond reasonably quickly, just not right away.

10. The KDP world is user friendly.

I’m not tech savvy, but I’m almost never frustrated with the KDP ecosystem. And on the few occasions I’ve hit a roadblock, I’ve been able to get a call back from someone who can help within five minutes.

That’s my report on my first six months of self publishing. Next time I’ll have a synopsis of my two December releases.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.

Greetings, friends.

This will probably be my last post for 2024, and it has been some kind of year. I launched The Voided Man on May 29, and three days ago, the original book hit #1 on Amazon’s “Humorous Science Fiction” bestseller list. I’m not quitting my day job (I’ve been working there forever, and honestly, it’s part of my identity), but writing fiction has definitely become something more than a hobby. Thanks to everyone who has read any of my books or given me feedback or encouragement this year.

The Voided Man 5 (The Valkyrie-200) comes out on Sunday, and it picks up where Navigating Yesterday left off. Alexis narrates this episode, and we get a lot on her rise through the ranks at the Valkyrie School, and then we see what kinds of things the Independent Order of Valkyries does in a combat situation. Lord Jeffrey is causing problems in the Borderlands, and someone has to confront him...

The new book also picks up to some degree where Beyond the Lemon Tree Moon left off. Banner rejoins the story, as do Number One and many of the rest of the residents of the Potato, and they begin the process of integrating themselves into the low tech Realm.

What else? More on Jack and Laura’s romance, more Farmer Michael and Molly, more Bucky. And a lot on the long-lost Valkyrie-200 and on Floyd, the ship’s command AI.

It’s a good tale.

Coming up in 2025, I’m hoping to release another seven Voided Man books. I seem to be able to keep up with releasing a new one every seven or eight weeks, and so that’s my tentative plan. Book 6 is called A Frozen Equilibrium. It will be available for preorder as soon as book 5 releases on Sunday.

Happy Holidays, everyone.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.

Greetings, all.

The next Voided Man book comes out on Sunday. It is called A Frozen Equilibrium, and Al is the narrator.

Al has turned out to be one of my most popular characters, and I've taken a deep dive into his inner world in the book. There is also a great new adventure - Al and Number One return to deep space, this time with Annabelle along. If you've enjoyed the series so far, I'm confident you'll like the story.

I'm kind of settling into a seven week cycle with this series, and I'm always two or three books ahead. So, to give a few details on the next books with their projected release dates and status.

March 23 - Book 7 - The Override System - Jack narrates. This one is completely finished and will be available for preorder on Sunday as soon as Book 6 launches.

May 11 - Book 8 - The Eight Colors of the Moonbow - Maestro narrates. I'm editing this one now, and the draft is complete.

June 29 - Book 9 - Title to be Determined - Annabelle narrates. The draft is about half finished, and there is a new kind of villain in this one. Really. I'm having a lot of fun with him. It, actually. You'll see.

I hope your 2025 is off to a good start.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.

Greetings, everyone.

The Voided Man #7 – The Override System – comes out a week from Sunday. When the Valkyrie Program was established in the 22nd and 23rd Centuries, a back door may or may not have been created that allows control of all of the starships, wherever they may be. If such a system exists, it might open up all kinds of possibilities, or problems, or both. Jack narrates the story.

Book 8 – The Eight Colors of the Moonbow - will be out on May 11. It’s finished, and it will be available for pre-order as soon as Book 7 launches. Maestro narrates, and it’s back to the Potato for a significant part of that story.

Book 9 is drafted, and I’m about halfway through editing. It will be out in late June, and to reveal the title for the first time outside of my family and my writing group, it will be called The Fields of Glass Next Door. Annabelle narrates, and there is a lot of backstory on John and Annabelle in the days before John became Prisoner Number One, and then the book turns to a new adventure.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time writing about the distant future lately, and Book 10 will look at the universe’s distant past. That’s what I’m working on now, and I just finished a good chapter that features a strange bicycle race on a strange planet yesterday.

Before I go, a quick note for fans of The Clock and the Candles. I haven’t retired that series, but I will probably not expand it in 2025. My current plan is to work on a new story for Gwen, Roland, Xerx, and all the rest sometime in ’26 or ’27.

That’s it for this time.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.

Tomorrow will be one year since I launched The Voided Man. Last May 29, I liked the story of Prisoner Number One, but I had no idea whether an independent new author could find an audience.

It turns out that you can.

I can’t thank you enough if you’ve offered feedback or been a regular reader, and I want to take a moment to talk to any of you who are like I was a year ago and who think of self-publishing a novel. I suspect that most people who read a lot at least harbor the thought they could write a good book. I certainly had the notion in the back of my head for decades.

If you feel that way, I would encourage you to sit down at a keyboard and just get started. I have found it more than surprising how a series has come out of a six page science article I read about cosmic voids in deep space (which are real things) and my own follow up question, “Good grief – what would you do if you found yourself in the middle of something like that?!”

I figured that if you had an internet connection, you might try to start a bank. That’s the first thing Prisoner Number One did as I thought him up while taking walks around my neighborhood early last year. The Valkyrie-84, and Al, and Annabelle’s letters, and the Potato, and the Thirty Families, and the locket, and everything else in the series has flowed from very simple beginnings. You don’t need to have the whole story in mind to get started; I think it’s actually better if you don’t.

If you decide to go for it, the other novel-writing thing I’m absolutely certain about after the last year is this: write every day. My sessions are sometimes as short as a single hour, but I write every day.

Anyway, as for the Voided Man, the plan is to be publishing book 15 or so by this time next year. Between now and then, I hope you’ll stay a fan of the series, and that the books allow you to pass a pleasant hour from time to time.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.

Greetings, everyone.

‘Tis almost time for the next installment of the Voided Man to go out into the world and play. Book 9 - The Fields of Glass Next Door - comes out on Sunday.

The first third of the book goes back to the beginning and tells the story of how John and Annabelle Dawson got together in the first place. It starts on the night they met, goes through the speech and the arrest that started the series, and continues from Annabelle’s point of view through the years she is incarcerated, gives birth to Cassie, and ultimately escapes the Kinetic War in the Valkyrie-198.

The last two thirds of the book pick up with the discovery I won’t name (no spoilers here for anyone who hasn’t read as far in the series as book 8) that ended the last installment. I kind of cliff-hangered everyone with that, I know, but book 9 fully resolves that storyline and uses it to start a new adventure featuring a new villain and much on probabilities and parallel universes and unusual intelligences.

Book 10 – The Signal and the Ribbon - will be available for preorder on Sunday as well, and even if you don’t usually preorder, you can still see the debut of the new cover on Amazon. It’s a space station in the vicinity of a pulsar, and it turned out great.

Here at Voided Man headquarters, I’ve just finished the draft of Book 11, and I’m taking most of a week off from writing new material to do editing and also to sketch out the basic plan for book 12. Those will both be out before Christmas.

A last note – Amazon selected the original book to be featured in an online event on July 8. It will be $0.99 in the US that day, and if you know anyone who might enjoy the series but hasn’t started it yet, please consider letting them know about the discount on the 8th.

I hope your summer is going well.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.