Writing About Ancient Urban Environments

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One interesting thing about writing historical fiction is the challenges you face in describing urban areas.

In the course of working on The Last Days of Jericho, I have discovered that those challenges are magnified when trying to describe an urban area with a pre-monetary economic system.

When writing a scene set in, say, Rome during the Republican era, you can entertain the reader by focusing on the things about Republican Rome that are familiar. You can stress the similarity to modern experience. John Maddox Roberts has a neat little trick he employs a couple of times in his SPQR series: the narrator will walk down the street and stop at a sidewalk vendor to buy a sausage on a roll. The reader reads this and thinks, "A hot dog cart! He just stopped at a hot dog cart!" It's a neat little point of reference that stresses the ways in which some prosaic activities in that urban environment are very similar to the reader's own experience.

The problem I encountered while working on The Last Days of Jericho is that the economy of Bronze Age Canaan was pre-monetary. Money had not yet been invented as a medium of exchange. How do you describe an urban area where no one is using money? When your narrator walks through it, what does he see? It doesn't sound that tough until you sit down and actually try to do it.

The preliminary research I did revealed that the scholarly consensus is that the Canaanite cities had what are known as Redistributive Economies on a model similar to that of Ancient Egypt. All products effectively belonged to the king or the city and would be collected and stored centrally, and then distributed by the primitive state apparatus to the population. Readers familiar with the Old Testament story of Joseph and his sojourn in Egypt can see traces of this economic system in the tale of Joseph's interpretation of Pharaoh's dreams. Joseph sees the years of famine coming, and the Pharaoh increases the amount held back in storage as a result; he is then able to distribute the stored-up produce when the famine arrives.

In terms of coming up with a way to work this economic system into a novel, the first obvious modern equivalent would be the Soviet system. The obvious imagery would be to depict the Canaanites as the Bronze Age equivalent of Russian shoppers standing in long queues to receive their ration of borscht. But the problem is that Canaanite society was class-based - their Redistributive Economy was not a communist economy, despite its centralization. There was a professional warrior class, a merchant class, a class of craftsmen, etc. - all of whom appear from the archaeological and limited literary evidence to have been on different economic levels. So I needed a way to combine the diversity of Canaanite society with its economic centralization. I think I found a good way to do that - and I hope that readers will like my solution.

What did I do? You'll have to read the book when it comes out to see the answer to that question.

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Cover Concepts for The Last Days of Jericho

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Just playing around with cover concepts right now. The writing is a little ahead of schedule, so I'm thinking about promotion today.

Let me know which one you prefer!

Between the two, I think that I personally like the second one better. But the first one's basic image is available on a Creative Commons basis, and the second one's basic image would have to be licensed. So I'm going back and forth.

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De Bello Lemures Reaches 500 Sales

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I had a funny feeling while I was checking out my Kindle sales total for March - I think my subconscious was doing some math on its own again.

So I decided to calculate the sales total across both the Kindle and paperback versions since De Bello Lemures was released on 10/24/2009.

I was pleased to see that as of this afternoon, we have reached the 500 total sales mark.

I'll need to pick that pace up a little to meet my first-year goal of 1500 copies for this title. Sales growth has been fairly steady, though, so I still think it's eminently doable.

Thank you to everyone who purchased a copy, either in paperback or for the Kindle. And thank you to everyone who has written an Amazon review, or been kind enough to mention it or me on their blog.

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Last Days of Jericho Back Cover Text

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I've been making decent progress on The Last Days of Jericho recently. I've managed to get into a routine where 1000 words a day is pretty much the norm.

To reward myself, I took a few minutes and indulged in a little "back cover blurb" writing. I hate writing loglines, but I love playing with back cover text. Here's the general concept so far:

"A monster is approaching the city of Yarich.

"It cannot be stopped. It cannot be turned aside.

"It's getting closer every day.

"And the monster is...God Himself."

I need more explanatory text below this, so that it won't appear to be a Left Behind book. But this is what I'm looking at right now.

Comments?

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Yes, You SHOULD Self-Publish - Follow-Up

Shockingly, yesterday's blog post actually generated both readers and responses.

I'd like to address some of those responses here.

Kirstin Morrell was angered by the fact that I quoted her and did not alert her.

I carefully qualified my argument with the phrases "To me" and "That's success as I would define it." Then you decided to throw a little party with my name without even having the courtesy to invite me.

So the question is, then, would you like to have a discussion of this topic, or was this a private party I interrupted, only to find a straw man dressed up to look like me?

First, let me say that since this is a blog no one reads, it would no more occur to me to email Ms. Morrell to let her know that I quoted her than it would occur to me to, say, email Sarah Palin if I blogged about Sarah Palin. I'll try to figure out how to alert her to this post, since it's not my intention to personally offend her.

I'd be happy to talk about the issue of self-publishing with Ms. Morrell or with anyone else, but I'd like to point out that I didn't set up a straw man of her argument for the simple reason that I was not arguing with her. I was disputing a point made by Mr. Sawyer. Ms. Morrell's definition was only tangentially involved. She may have quite a different opinion of self-publishing overall than he does. My post only says, "Mr. Sawyer should not employ this particular definition of 'success' for a self-publishing venture, and here's why." It does not say, "Kirstin Morrell's opinion of self-publishing is wrong."

There were also some Anonymous responses that I would like to address. Two posters referred back to an earlier post I made about lowering the price of the paperback edition of my book to try to increase sales, to try to show that I was, in fact, a failure. And the numbers just don't bare that out, boys, sorry. You're quite right - I am currently only selling about 20 copies a month of the paperback edition of this book. But if you'll check the sales rank of the Kindle edition, you'll see that it's performing much better. I am selling from 100-150 copies of the Kindle edition a month. This means that, between the two editions, I can reasonably expect to sell at least 1500 copies this year.

Anyone who tells you that a first-time novel selling 1500 copies in its first year is a failure does not know what they're talking about. It's that simple. Many, many traditionally-published first novels fail to sell 1500 copies. So if you want me to feel like a failure for selling that many copies, I'm just not going to do so. I can browse the genre lists at Amazon and see where my sales rank stands compared to people published by small presses in my genre - or by not-so-small presses in my genre - and I know who's outselling me and whom I'm outselling. So tell me, if I sell 1500 copies of my book this year using Amazon's tools, and would have sold 0 copies by pursuing traditional publishing, by what crack-brained ratiocination can the decision to self-publish possibly have been the wrong one?

If the Nook or the Sony Reader supported footnotes, I'd probably do even better. But they don't, so I can't sell at B&N or in the other ebook stores, or for the upcoming iBooks store; Amazon is it for me right now. But that won't happen to my next book, so I hope to do even better next time.

It's not a lot of money. It just pays my cable and internet bill. But the advance a first-time novelist would receive wouldn't do much more. It might even do less.

I'd also like to respond to one last comment of Ms. Morrell's. She was obviously a little annoyed when she wrote her post, and decided to get a little snide. I'm not taking it personally, though, because it gives me the opportunity to make another point that I think is important:

And of course your mother will buy your book. That doesn't make success.

No, my mother won't buy my book. Thomas Brookside is a pseudonym. My family has no idea that the book even exists. I realize that the stereotype about self-published authors is that all their sales come from their mom, but that's just not true in my case.

So I'd like to amend my earlier advice telling everyone to self-publish:

My full advice is to self-publish, using only CreateSpace and free ebook tools, and do so under a pen name. The contempt that the traditional publishing world has for independent authors flows from two sources: the notion that you're going to print a lot of books using PublishAmerica or some scam outfit and then nag your family members to buy them, and the notion that the reason you're publishing is so you can show up at cocktail parties and crow, "I'm Joe Blow, published writer." You can take the satisfaction of that contempt away by publishing under a pseudonym, and then leaving your family alone and never, ever, ever being that guy at a party.

Yes, You SHOULD Self-Publish

In a recent blog post, author Robert Sawyer advises everyone not to self-publish, because he says it's impossible to be successful at it.

He then cross-posts Kirstin Morrell's definition of success:

Now, let's define success. To me, it would be someone who makes a full-time living from writing SF novels, novellas, and/or short stories, without living below the poverty line. That's success as I would define it. And I don't know one SF author who self-publishes who would meet my criteria for success.

I really don't see how this can possibly be an appropriate definition, for two reasons.

First, according to this definition every author everywhere who has a day job is a failure. Poof! There went basically the entire literary fiction genre. Every last one of those people has a day job. Failures all?

Second, the standard of comparison being employed is absurd. To judge whether or not a self-publishing venture is a success, all you have to do is compare your outcome to your likely outcome if you had continued to pursue traditional publishing. Since the overwhelming majority - maybe 99.99% - of people who pursue traditional publishing will never get an agent, never get published, and never sell a single book, any of those people who pursue self-publishing and sell even one copy or net even one dollar made the right decision.

When someone asks, "Should I self-publish?" it's really silly to answer them, "No, because if you self-publish, you won't be as successful as Dean Koontz." The only method of analysis that makes any sense whatsoever is to say, "Ask yourself if you will sell more books, get more readers, and make more money by self-publishing or by traditional publishing."

I would tell everyone considering writing to self-publish. If you don't buy scratch tickets, self-publish. If you don't expect to win the Lotto, self-publish. If you pursue traditional publishing, the odds are overwhelming that you will never sell one single book. If you self-publish using CreateSpace and the Amazon Kindle Store, you at least have a chance to make some sales and get some readers. For every 1000 of you out there who decide you want to write query letters and keep your fingers crossed for a traditional publisher instead, 999 of you will utterly fail and never sell a single book to anyone.

Paperback price lowered to $9.95

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De Bello Lemures has experienced a fairly extreme discrepancy between its Kindle sales performance and its paperback sales performance.

On the Kindle side, it has consistently ranged in the top 1500-9000 or so best sellers in the Amazon Kindle store. It has also been able to hang around in the top 25 or 50 of many of its Kindle store genre categories, with some forays into the top 10. On the paperback side, however, sales have generally been just a trickle, and it has not been uncommon for it to go two or three days between sales. This means its sales rank can never go higher than 100,000 or so, and right now it's floundering in the 700,000 range.

A lot of the difference in sales performance between the two media has to be attributable to price. The Kindle title has been at 99 cents for a while now [and will remain there for the rest of January, at least], while the paperback has been listed at $14.95. There are, not surprisingly, a lot of people who will take a chance on an author they have not read before if it only costs them 99 cents, and fewer people who will do so if it costs them $14.95.

I've decided to lower the price of the paperback to $9.95. I can't really lower it much further than that because of the CreateSpace printing charges. Getting it under $10 will [I hope] be enough of a change to shrink the gap between the two versions a bit. We'll see, I guess.

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