Nathan Brindle

I have not one, but two books (a novel and a novella) nearly ready for the ceremonial pushing of the “Publish” button.

First, the long-awaited (by me, anyway, because I had to sweat blood to get this one done, but it was worth it) sequel novel to The Lion of God:  The Lion and the Lizard.

Thirty years ago, Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., AKA The Lion of God, had a pretty exhausting week.

Her world was invaded by time-traveling soldiers, she was nearly turned into human toothpaste by an experimental dimension jumper when she went to find her parallel “Dad,” who just happens to be able to borrow a Space Force fleet to come and take out her world’s invaders . . . and then she found out she was considered by those same invaders to be a saint in their odd religion, and one of the targets of their invasion.  If that wasn’t enough, she nearly fell completely out of the universe into a time rift, being saved only by the skin of her teeth by her parallel “Dad”.

After all that, learning she was going to be the one to bring universal healing and long life to the human race in her particular timeline was just the icing on the proverbial cake.

Anybody else would go home, turn off their phone, pull all the blinds, lock all the doors, and take the rest of their life off.  But Ari isn’t “anybody else”.  And her cult of admirers across two timelines won’t take “nobody home” for an answer.

Fast-forward thirty years.  Scientists have detected radio transmissions in an unknown language from several hundred light years away.  And now she’s been asked to use her special “saintly” skills as demonstrated on her last “mission” to make first contact with whoever they are.

And that’s only the beginning.

Looks like Ambassador Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., is going to have another pretty exhausting week.  Or six.

This book really needs to be read before the novella A Fox in the Henhouse.  Mea culpa; I finished Fox way back in December and didn’t feel like waiting on The Lion and the Lizard, which at the time was in the throes of writer’s block.  BUT, as a bonus for those who may have been scratching their heads over stuff I wrote in Fox, you now have its sequel, to wit:

A Dragon in the Foie Gras is a novella, the next story in the continuing saga of Captain Delaney Wolff Fox (the daughter of Ariela Rivers Wolff, the Lion of God; you may have heard of her).  And it should definitely not be read until after you read The Lion and The Lizard.

Captain Delaney Wolff Fox is back.

She’s just led her team on a months-long hunt through the penal world al-Saḥra’ (known otherwise by its semi-satirical name “Sanddoom”), looking for an industrial-sized illegal drug “kitchen” that’s been supplying colony worlds with various illegal substances via a network of involuntary migrant “mules”.  That hunt ended satisfactorily, and rather explosively, with the destruction of the “kitchen” and hundreds if not thousands of personnel associated with it.

Now the team is heading back to Earth, hoping for some well-deserved shore leave . . .

 . . . but it’s not to be.  A long-sleeping foreign agent has been found in a stasis chamber in an abandoned Chicago warehouse, and it’s up to Delaney and crew to investigate the mystery, by traveling back to the year 2017 to find out why the agent was placed in stasis then, and why the stasis seems originally to have been planned to end in late 2020.

And when the sleeper wakes, asks for and consumes an entire pound of goose liver pâté, and asks for more, it’s pretty obvious they’ve got

A Dragon In The Foie Gras

Yeah, OK, yuk yuk yuk.  Sorry; I couldn’t help myself.

As soon as they’re published, I’ll post links.

With Amazon.

It’s not about Jeff Bezos being a rich commie, or about him suddenly discovering that mail-in balloting is rife with possibilities for error and fraud.  It’s about Amazon Logistics and their crowd-sourced delivery scheme, and some weird shit that seems to be going on with their print-on-demand service.  But also about what they think is important and what isn’t.

As those of you who know me know (and if you’re reading this blog, of course you know), I dabble a bit in Science Fiction.  We take this moment for self-promotion (as if this whole blog isn’t about self-promotion):

I published this novel as a Kindle e-book last July, but because of time constraints and issues with putting it together, I didn’t create a paperback edition at the same time.  I finished the paperback edition in December, uploaded it, ordered a proof copy, fixed some issues I found in the proof, re-uploaded, and let it go live.  It’s sold two copies.  Which is not a big deal because I make only 34 cents/copy in royalties for the paperback vs. $2.03 for e-books.  So definitely buy the e-book.  Or read it on Kindle Unlimited; I get a fraction of a cent for every page you read on KU, so I’m good with that.

Bottom line, the paperback, for me, is mainly a vanity issue.

Amazon will sell authors as many copies of their print-on-demand books as they want, at Amazon’s cost.  (Well, within reason; there’s an upper limit and I don’t recall what it is, but I’m way, way south of it.)  In my case, that’s $4.44 per copy.  Plus $1.11 shipping, even though I’m a Prime member (which is another nitpick).  So that’s $5.55.  Which means if I sell them at the cover price of $7.97 (plus s&h if I have to mail them), I actually make $2.43 — a little more than I get for the e-books.  So yeah, if you want a print copy, and you want me to autograph it, please don’t order it from Amazon – email me or message me (I’m on MeWe and Signal) and we’ll work something out.

So I ordered ten author copies on December 31, so I’d have some available to autograph for people who’ve said they want autographed copies.  (Yes, there are a few of them out there.)

First (big) nit:  Three weeks for delivery!  No, I can’t afford to pay you for faster service.  So yes, I’ll wait till “January 22-24”.  WTF, assholes, I have Prime.  (Yeah, yeah.)

Second (big) nit:  They charged my card on the 20th for the entire 10 copies.  I’ll get to why I’m annoyed at that in a moment.

Third (big) nit:  They delivered one copy before we woke up this morning.  The other nine copies are currently in limbo somewhere between the printer and us.  This is the reason for nit #2.  Where are the rest of my copies?  Still in Monee, IL, for all I know, and possibly not even printed yet.  But still, supposed to be here by 10PM today!  Pardon me while I snort, politely.

Fourth (medium) nit:  The Amazon Logistics driver left the package in our mailbox at 7:57AM (I didn’t even roll out of bed till nearly 9AM; it’s Sunday), then had the balls to report “Your package was delivered.  It was handed directly to a resident.”

Fifth (small) nit:  Amazon drivers are not authorized to leave packages in USPS mailboxes.  It is in fact a federal crime for anyone but the USPS or the resident to place items in the box.  But Amazon drivers do it all the time, anyway.  I guess that beats leaving it sitting on the driveway in the snow.  (Why, yes, one driver did that once.  Another driver left a (paper, not Tyvek) envelope on the uncovered part of the porch in the rain.  Luckily it was one of those heavy, almost waxy brown paper envelopes, so the inside was perfectly dry.)

So now WTF are they going to do?  Dribble the rest of the books out to me, onesee-twosee?  That’s pretty poor service, regardless of how small a fish I am in their great big author pool.

Anyway, it looks like I’m finally going to have a few copies to autograph and mail, so there’s that.

EDIT, 25 Jan 2021:  They finally got here this morning.  And were left just off the porch, in the dirt, behind a bush, where they would have gotten soaked had I not seen them and brought them inside before the rain hit.  Sigh.  And apparently packed by a group of mentally-deficient chimpanzees, but thankfully undamaged.

Probably interesting only to myself, given sales reports, but I’m waiting on a paperback proof copy of The Lion of God to show up next Wednesday; if the proof is satisfactory, the paperback edition (6″x9″ trade paperback) will go on sale on Amazon for $7.97.

Interjection before I start to pontificate:  The paperback version will have the corrected errata mentioned in this post.  I am also going to update the Kindle version today, so if the errata bother you, you’ll be able to re-download it at some point later this weekend, that is, assuming the review process goes quickly on a holiday weekend.

Before anyone thinks I’m overpricing what they may consider a half-crap debut novel, I get a whopping 34 cents of that.  And the minimum cover price would be worse if I clicked the “Expanded Distribution” box — close to $12 when I experimented last night.  Those are Amazon’s minimums (well, the minimum for standard distribution is actually $7.40, a price point at which I get $0.00 royalty).

I honestly don’t know how anyone makes a living at this shit.  I’m personally damned hard-pressed to spend $10 for a book (frankly, I’ll only do that to buy the latest in C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series, which I’ve been reading since the first book came out in 1994, and maybe a couple of other things), but so many “pro” releases — even in Kindle, with what really amount to tiny production costs, most of which are on the author’s side — are $9.99 these days.

When I sell The Lion of God as a Kindle download, I get (for my $2.99 cover price, which is the minimum if you want in on the 70% royalty scheme, which has certain benefits the 35% scheme doesn’t) a $2.03 royalty.  This makes sense, because it costs Amazon a pittance to make the book available as a download (dirty little secret:  This is how they can afford KU).  Unless you use their crappy cover designer, ALL production costs are ultimately borne by the author (and even their cover designer doesn’t cost them much, since it’s extremely limited).

I would estimate in covers alone I have close to $3,000 invested.  $1,600 of that was to buy a new computer that could handle a high-resolution DAZ3D render in a couple of hours vs. a couple of days — but that computer was bought with at least one other use in mind, so the cost is “distributed”, as it were.  Could I buy covers, like, find a cover artist whose work I admire and commission them?  Sure.  Do I want to deal with an artist?  No.  I have an artist friend who does covers (he has made some absolutely gorgeous retro Star Trek covers and even “movie posters” for TOS episodes) and evinced little or no interest in making mine, though to his credit he did mentor me through the process of getting DAZ3D up and running, and we continue to share tidbits back and forth as I get better with the program — and he admits he’s glad I got into it because my questions stimulated him to get off his butt and work with it again.

The bottom line of all of this is, unless something happens and I suddenly start selling hundreds of copies of my books a year, I will never get my investment back.  But I don’t care.  It’s a hobby, not a job.  I already have a job and I want to retire from it in about five years 🙂  I didn’t write at all for 20+ years because writing was already my day job, and it wasn’t fun to jump from writing technical materials all day to writing fiction at night, which is known as taking a “busman’s holiday.”

As it turned out, our idiot governor shutting down half the state (and our equally idiot mayor shutting down the rest of the city) because of the WuFlu meant I had a lot of time on my hands starting in March that used to be taken up with going out to dinner with friends and participating in fraternal activities.  Not to mention vacation travel, and going to see the kids and grandkids in Fort Wayne once a month.

So you got what I did to break the monotony.  My contribution to “what if?”

Thanks for indulging my imagination. 🙂