At last! My newest book THE PONO WAY is fully live on Amazon in both paper and ebook formats! Click the link below to pick up a copy. And if you like it (or even if you didn’t) please leave a quick review at the Zon – it’s the best way to help an indie author.
Hurricane Comin’
Hurricane Ida, right on the anniversary of Katrina. I hate how that happens. The end of August is cursed.
I live in New Orleans and went through Katrina, if you didn’t know. (It affected the drafting of The Pono Way, but that’s another story.)
That is going to affect my rather desultory book launch. As I will shortly run out of power, and possibly have to evacuate. Thank goodness for cloud computing.
I’ll do what I can before the power goes out. We think we can hunker down and ride it out. Where could we go, anyway? Every relative we could go to is in the storm track, some worse than us.
I’f you’re of a spiritual bent, prayers to Our Lady of Prompt Succor, the divine protectress of New Orleans, are welcome.
Otherwise, happy thoughts.
I’ll check in tomorrow. The storm is predicted to make landfall Sunday night.
It’s ALIVE!
My new book is live in paper on Amazon! Check it out!
Still working on the ebook.
If you want to help me with it, the best thing you can do now is buy a copy. Or, if you’ve already read it, write a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Even just a couple lines greatly improves the book’s rep in the eyes of the almighty Algorithm. Especially now that it is new and fresh.
Incredible feeling. The one thing I actually wanted to accomplish this year is publish this book. And now I have!
Cover Reveal!
Today’s the day! I said I would do it and I am. So happy to be able to reveal the cover for my next novel, THE PONO WAY!
I’m very happy with this cover. I got it pre-made from The Book Cover Zone, with a couple tweaks. Both of my covers so far are pre-made, and I’m very happy with both of them.
For an indie author, a cover needs to signify your genre/subgenre of fiction clearly in a small thumbnail, and I think this cover does that well. If you Google “solarpunk” in Image Search, you quickly understand the aesthetic — futuristic white cities with lots of greenery tumbling everywhere. I think his cover captures that very well.
The PONO WAY should be live early next week! Publishing this book was the one thing I actually wanted to accomplish this year. So I feel PRETTY DAMN PLEASED with myself right now.
Have a great weekend, everybody!
Inching Closer
Still a couple fiddly layout bits to fix with my manuscript, and then it will be ready to publish! I’m so stoked! Publishing THE PONO WAY was the one thing I actually wanted to accomplish this year.
This picture is much what I imagine my island-state, Pono, to look like, although this is a coastal city and my Pono is in the deep ocean. This is an architectural concept of a floating city called Oceanix. It’s synchronistic how it popped up in the news as I was drafting my novel.
Tomorrow I will share the cover reveal! Meanwhile, here is the blurb for Amazon. What do you think?
A refugee crisis tests a utopian island community to its limits.
In 2050, the United States of America finally crumbled. Jake Weintraub’s family fled the burned-out ruins of Chicago for the safety of the artificial island steading of Pono. Now grown, Jake works as an independent journalist, but the horrors of the Chicago River Riots still haunt him.
As Pono watches, safe in the Pacific Ocean, the successor West Coast state of Cascadia collapses under a further series of catastrophes. Thousands of desperate refugees arrive on Pono’s shores – homeless, stateless, and hungry.
Jake throws himself into covering their story, even as their plight evokes memories of his own trauma and flight. Can Pono, a carefully constructed island society, accept this influx of strangers? Or will this crisis tear Ponoan society apart?
THE PONO WAY is a solarpunk science fiction novel in the vein of Kim Stanley Robinson’s THREE CALIFORNIAS or THE FIFTH SACRED THING by Starhawk. Find out what happens by buying your copy today!
Solarpunk Links
Here, as promised, are some links where you can learn more about solarpunk, as a sci-fi genre and as a social movement.
Read this Notes toward a Solarpunk Manifesto from Project Hieroglyph for a better sense of the genre, and the art and politics that arise from it.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry.
A introductory article on Ozy.com.
A reading list on Goodreads.com. (And here’s me on Goodreads while I’m at it, wink wink.)
An image gallery from Deviant Art
And finally I have a Solarpunk Pinterest board you can check out here.
What is Solarpunk?
My new book, The Pono Way, is coming along well. I am preparing the manuscript for publication. It should come in the next couple weeks. It does take a while.
The book is subtitled, A Solarpunk Novel (mostly for the Amazon algorithm.). So what does that mean? What is solarpunk?
Solarpunk is an emerging subgenre of science fiction. You can think of it a a 21st-century evolution of cyberpunk, except hopeful and positive instead of depressive and dystopian. That’s on purpose. Solarpunk focuses on near-future, Earth-based sci-fi, about ways the human race comes to grip with climate change and learns how to work together to live sustainably on this Earth. It is a variety of “cli-fi,” or climate fiction: narratives about confronting, or falling to, the challenge of global climate change. Solarpunk is notable because it insists on presenting workable solutions to the manifold problems the human race faces as the world heats up. It is intended to inspire optimism and give people hope for the future.
If you’re like me, a lifelong fan, you probably love The Expanse, the book and TV series. Imagine solarpunk as between here and there. Humanity struggling to fix its mistakes. In The Expanse, history tells that we didn’t do a very good job. Solarpunk represents a time and place when all is not yet lost.
I was inspired to write this by an essay by the noted SF author David Brin on IO9.com, stating that it was time for sci-fi to be optimistic again, to give people hope and a vision for the future.And then a close friend of mine said the exact same thing to me just a couple days later, “I’m tired of dystopia. Where’s the hope?” That’s what I’ve tried to do in The Pono Way. It’s hard won, but I do think it shines a ray of hope.
Solarpunk’s aesthetic is both multicultural and nature-based, inspired by Art Nouveau and indigenous cultures around the world. It politics is generally communitarian and anti-capitalist. Here is a cool summation from the clever entry at TV Tropes:
Solar punk works look toward a brighter future (“solar”) while deliberately subverting the systems that keep that brighter future from happening (“punk”).
People quibble about how “punk” — anti-authoritarian and subversive — solarpunk really is..”Punk” is often just used as a tag for a subgenre of science fiction these days, the way “-gate “indicates a political scandal. I guess that’s up to the individual authors. I happen to think The Pono Way is pretty subversive. Growing up in the Watergate era, it was my childhood ambition to get on a government “enemies” list. Because I had heard about Nixon’s “enemies” list (he was famously paranoid), and I figured if you were an enemy of Richard Nixon, you were on the side of right.
That was back when people could still have some privacy, long before the Internet, before total information awareness. I wouldn’t be so sanguine now.
The Pono Way is also informed by my experience as a Hurricane Katrina survivor. I think about things like climate disaster and mitigation A LOT. About failures of government, and how they can be fixed or avoided. And it comes out in my fiction, whether I intend it to or not.
This is getting kind of long, so I will cut it short, and shoot some links in the next post so you can learn more. . In the meantime, Aloha. (Pono’s culture has many Polynesian influences, it being a Pacific island-state.). Thanks for reading!
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Indie Author Day Report
Indie Author Day at my library was a success! Ten people attended, just the right amount for our small meeting room. Most of them were indies who had already published a book or two, or were working on one. So we had a very collegial discussion.
Author Rob Cerio presented on “How to Know When Your Manuscript Is Ready” – technically as well as artistically.
Romance Author Farrah Rochon spoke about being a “hybrid author,” one who publishes both with a traditional publisher and independently. When the rights to her early novels for Harlequin Romance reverted back to her, she re-published them independently, while continuing to work with other New York publishers.
One thing Farrah said which I found very interesting, is that she feels her trad-published books provide her with discovery — marketing, being in brick and mortar bookstores — but her indie books are where she earns more money these days. That seems like a sound strategy, I wonder how many authors are trying that.
Author Zach Bartlett, who is also one of my librarian coworkers, presented on working with a small press, which is kind of in between indie and trad: you can get into bookstores, get professional book production, but you usually don’t earn an advance, and have to do a lot of marketing yourself.
I also want to thank my workshop partner, Xavier DeSoto, who came by to help me set up for the event, and took the pictures. Thanks, Xavier, that support meant a great deal to me!
We also watched several education videos from the Indie Author day website, on topics like designing a book cover and marketing. They had good information.
There is some other useful stuff on that website, which we didn’t get to, or wasn’t appropriate for the venue. Ingram Spark, the POD publishing arm of the book distributor Ingram, has a podcast about indie publishing, and there are a couple episodes of it there, on Print on Demand publishing, and on using ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers, the UPC code for a paper book that allows it to be ordered and moved through the various retail systems, including library purchasing.)
There are two videos about leveraging Wattpad for your writing platform, which I found very interesting. Wattpad has always gotten very mixed reviews, but it obviously works for some people. It even has its own publishing imprint now, and a development arm that shops Wattpadder’s stories to Hollywood for film and TV. Are Wattpadders being fairly compensated for that? I don’t know, you would certainly have to do your research.
There is a PDF “Guide to Self Publishing” from Elite Authors, which has some solid information in it, if you can hack your way through the hard, hard sell on the first five or so pages.
You can also see what went on at other libraries across the country on social media by using the hashtag #indieauthorday2019 on Twitter and Instagram.
All in all, my day went very well and I hope to do the same next year. Next year, Indie Author Day is on November 7, and it is being co-marketed with Nanowrimo. So we have to think of some way of combining the two. Maybe a day-long write-in, with breaks for workshops, games, and food.
Attendees, stay in touch. Let’s work together over the course of the year. I hope to see you all next year!
Indie Author Day
I will be hosting Indie Author Day at my library tomorrow from 11:00 AM — 3:00 PM. Please stop in if you are interested in self or independent publishing, and to get an idea of what’s involved.
Local authors Farrah Rochon, Rob Cerio, Zach Bartlett and myself will be presenting.
Robert E. Smith Library, 6301 Canal Blvd, corner of Harrison Avenue.
Happy #indieauthorday to all!
You Just Have to Do It, Part the Second
When I was shouldering my way into Geek Fest, April, one of my colleagues, encouraged me to donate a few copies of my book to the library, so that attendees could check them out. Which is something I always intended to do, but never got around to, because of my shyness. Another way I just “had to do it,” as Alys Arden said, but didn’t.
But with April’s encouragement, I did, and the cataloging department kindly had them ready in time for Geek Fest.
Of course, I earmarked a copy for my own branch that I manage.
That’s it above. One of my staff members put it on display. They were excited to finally see it.
“They could make a movie out of this!” my coworker Belami said.
(I think so too, but find the possibility unlikely.)
And now, all three copies of my book are checked out and there is even a waiting list! I have to tell you, that makes you feel like a real author.
It was lovely to receive this support from my coworkers. It’s encouraging.
That’s the thing about “just having to do it,” — it’s not all nerves and anguish. It can be good too. You get support. There are rewards. (Besides, you know, selling books.)  This is what I learned from this.
And the more you do it, the easier it gets.
So, if you are an indie author like me, you might look into donating a few copies of a book to your local library. Particularly the first book in a series, if you have one. It’s another way for people to discover your work. If they like it well enough, they may be moved to buy your subsequent books.
If you work exclusively with e-books, you might look into the SELF-e platform libraries use. Again, it’s a donation, but it’s a way to get noticed.
It’s up to the inclinations of individual libraries and librarians whether they collect indie authors or not. Some libraries are very supportive of their local authors. Some are not. But it can’t hurt to offer.
DON’T, however, try to sneak in a purchase request for your books as if you were just a regular patron. We librarians can always tell, it smacks of desperation, and it just pisses us off. Be above board and donate a few copies if you can. If nothing else, they will go to the library book sale. You will get noticed and help the library earn a couple dollars.
Atlantis Fallen 