I woke at sunrise this morning, courtesy of the cat attacking my feet and then ruthlessly demanding attention for twenty minutes. She spent a good chunk of last night stalking a gecko, and I suspect she failed to capture it going by this morning’s behaviour. I would be mad at her, but there’s 40 emails in my inbox and things that need editing, so it’s not like getting up early is a bad thing…
I wrote a rough plan for February, because January has been one of those months where I’ve been reacting to deadlines and my brain is doing a very bad job of figuring where my focus needs to be. I love a good whiteboard that takes that decision away from me and says, “Here. Your focus needs to be here.”
As you may have surmised from the posts of the past few days, EXILE is out today. It also ends my first real experiment with a planned, structured series of content heading into the launch cycle. It’s been an experience, and one that I’m glad to have attempted, but I’m glad to be reaching the point where I start talking about other things. For the moment, you can grab your copy at the ‘zon of your choice. AMAZON US: Ebook | Print AMAZON AUS: Ebook AMAZON UK: Ebook |Print Working on Keith Murphy’s adventures again, getting a chance to flense and rework the language, has been a fantastic experience. Now my brain is already hip-deep in the sequel, Frost, which is coming out in a few weeks time, and looking ahead to the third book, Crusade.
In the immortal words of the Ramones, there’s less than twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go before Exile hits shelves, and it’s currently got the strongest pre-orders of any book Brain Jar press has released. Ebooks can be pre-ordered via Amazon, and print books can be ordered at all good bookstores. Today, I’m posting the first chapter as a little taste-test, giving you some insight into how hitman on the run Keith Murphy deals with the demons of the Gold Coast once they detect his presence… PARADISE CITY They found me in the Hard Rock. Thursday night, a little after ten. The bar drew a good crowd for a Thursday, all things considered. Lots of girls with inscrutable, backpacker accents clustered around the counter. Plenty more heading to the Beer Garden upstairs, attracted by the cover band’s caterwaul. Blondes, legitimate and peroxide—a Gold Coast epidemic. Swathes of exposed skin, despite the cool nip in the air. Twenty-dollar cocktails named after natural disasters:
…and I’m slightly geeked out about getting Exile out there. The Admiral, of course, is reacting to my excitement with her customary savoir faire. That said, it’s possible she hasn’t yet made the correlation between book sales and the ability to buy her crunchy food. Keep this in mind when you decide where to put your book-buying dollars this week: every time you purchase a copy of Exile, the Admiral gets her crunchy food 🙂 One of the great things about prepping this book for release and talking it up online? Kathleen Jennings linked to her original reaction tweets when she read the series, complete with watercolour sketches she put together at the time. Which in turn led me back to her write-up about the book over on her blog: You may think I broke my Regency streak with these two, but the main character reads Persuasion on stakeouts. Myth-heavy hardboiled Gold Coast pre-(assorted)-apocalyptic fantasy. It resonates with the parts of my
Yesterday, after uploading all the files for Exile, my partner and I ate fish & chips and settled in to binge watch two seasons of Shrill back-to-back. I loved the entire show, but owe it a particular thanks for ending season two with PJ Harvey’s 50 Ft. Queenie running over the end credits. A very big nostalgia music moment for me, flashing back to 1994 and my final year of high school. Which is appropriate, in a lot of ways, because Exile is very much a novel about nostalgia music. Keith Murphy returns home after sixteen years, somewhat against his wishes. The opening chapter is titled Paradise City and drops multiple Guns’n’Roses references. I wrote the book listening to the Gunners, but also multiple 80s and 90s rock albums like Slippery When Wet from Bon Jovi and Van Halen’s 1984. The first location in the novel is the Hard Rock Cafe Surfers Paradise (albeit a version of the cafe that
The ebook files have all been uploaded and the print proofs have been approved, which means the re-release of Exile is on track for Wednesay. I talked about the secret emotions and work that hides behind the word “re-released” in relation to this book over on the twitters. I won’t repeat the entire thing here, but it starts with this tweet and everything is linked in an easy-to-follow thread: The short version, for those who prefer to avoid the twitter-beast, is that the re-release of Exile and its sequels involves revisiting work written just prior to being diagnosed with a sleep disorder, and therefore a chance to do the kind of rewrites and reshaping of the original text that a falling-asleep-at-the-keyboard Peter wasn’t able to do in 2013. For various personal reasons, I want this launch to go really well, so I’m investing a little more attention into it than my new releases normally get. For now, I’ll just mention
The TLDR version of this post: I’m taking a time-out to rethink the Sunday Circle and how it functions in 2020, which may see it either migrate to a new platform or have the shutters pulled down entirely. I started the Sunday Circle a few years back, inspired by a write-up of the idea in Todd Henry’s The Accidental Creative and an idea that it might be possible to replicate the process online. Over the years we’ve had a number of writers, voice actors, and others drop by on a Sunday to check in with each other, laying out their various projects and inspirations for the coming week. At the time I kicked off the Sunday Circle, it was part of a long-term strategy for the blog. A natural fit for the kinds of topics I blogged about and talked about in the long term. These days, not so much. My focus has shifted away from the long conversations about
Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor crept onto the top 100 free downloads in the Contemporary Fantasy section of Amazon Australia over Christmas, snagging a position at #16. This occurred twelve months after I first republished the story via Brain Jar, on the heels of nearly 300+ downloads in various storefronts. It’s interesting to look at the books that surround it in that section—one of these things is very clearly not like the other ones. Not just in terms of being a short story, but in the choices around cover arts and fonts that position it within the genre. This pleases me. One of my great issues with the indie publishing scene lies in the rush to conformity. The conversations that dominate forums are how do I produce fast and earn some sweet kindle money, and familiarity is a powerful tool for achieving that goal. The advice always boils down to the same core principles: hit the genre tropes, use
I’ve put my weekly newsletter on hold for the holidays season, scheduling a return date in 2020 that just so coincides with the release date of These Strange & Magic Things on January 8. One of the recurring features in my weekly missive is a list of seven interesting things I wanted to share with people. Sometimes they’re round-ups of things I’ve posted here, or capsule reviews of books that I’ve read. Quite often, of late, they’ve been links to Austin Kleon’s blog where he talks about creativity and process in some really nuanced ways. If I were writing a newsletter this week, you can bet that Kleon’s latest post about the new Star Wars film and the Japanese art of Kintsugi would be going front-and-centre. For the record, if you want to subscribe and get the newsletter when it returns (in addition to a starter library of neat ebook swag you see below), head this way.
A year ago, around Xmas time, I released Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor and Black Dog: A Biography as reader magnets for Brain Jar Press. For those not immersed in indie pub terminology, reader magnet is short-hand for books/stories I give away for free, so as to entice readers into paying for other work/signing up for your newsletter. Nick Stephenson has an entire book about the strategy which you can download for free (and I’ll let you put two and two together about the reasons behind his choice). The two stories have served me well since then—Hornets Attack, in particular, has picked up a couple of hundred downloads on various sites—but Amazon has been a sticking point. Unlike every other site, the big river isn’t a fan of letting you upload a book and making it free straight off. They are willing to price-match with other stores, if a book is available for free elsewhere, but it’s at their
Two years ago, when I kicked off Brain Jar Press, I dropped a bunch of cash on tools designed to streamline my processes. It started with a shiny new MacBook Air, breaking years of I-don’t-use-Macs ideology so I could run the mac-only Vellum software. That was something like two grand of expenses right there, coupled with an ongoing Adobe subscription and access to delivery tools like BookFunnel. I knew I’d struggle to earn back that money in the first year, and I was totally fine with that. The point wasn’t making the money back, it was making every project I took on a little cheaper to publish. For instance, there was software that did everything Vellum did, but it was a pay-per-project concern or an ongoing subscription. There are tools that could create covers instead of using Photoshop, but those tools aren’t as advanced or had a steep learning curve. I would be investing time and subscriptions fees to get
