Spreading My Influence

It's been a little over a week since I put Jack Manley up for sale, and it's consuming my life.

I mean this in the most positive sense possible. I spend nearly every waking moment excited about the prospects of being a self-published author.  I am constantly checking my sales reports, and thinking of ways that I can get my book into more people's hands and brains.  It's an obsession, but in a way it's what I always wanted to be.  For the first time in years I feel as though my life is on the right track.

Since I launched the book I have enrolled it in the Kindle Select Program.  This means that for about the next three months the e-book is exclusive to Amazon's Kindle Store.  In exchange for that, the book is available for free to Kindle Prime subscribers.  I also get five days on which I can give away the book for free.  I'm not looking to do this just yet, but maybe in a month or so.  I'm very interested to see how effective the free promo is as a way of getting the book out there.

More importantly, I am preparing to launch Jack Manley and the Warlord of Infinity in print.  I'm using Createspace, which is Amazon's print-on-demand service, and so far it seems very user friendly.  The formatting is a little tricky, but there are plenty of blogs and tutorials that show how it's done.  All I need to do now is prepare the cover (including the back cover and the spine) and I will be good to go.

WHAT ELSE I'M DOING

To be honest, with all the work I've been doing above there hasn't been time for much else, but I have just finished reading Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos by Terrance Dicks.

You may scoff, but for Doctor Who fans in the 1970s and 1980s, the Doctor Who book range was important.  Here in Australia the show was on permanent repeat every week-night, but you never saw anything from earlier than about 1975.  In England I understand that repeats were very few and far between.  For most fans the books were the only way that older stories could be experienced, and so the books are significant in a way that novel spin-offs of other sci-fi shows just aren't.

I bought some of these books out of nostalgia a year or so back, and finally pulled one down from the shelf last week because I was looking for something light to read.  I chose a book by Terrance Dicks, because he wrote probably about 90% of them.  If I was going to sample the style of these books, I might as well go to their most prolific author.

I was instantly struck by how brutally efficient the prose is.  Dicks has to cram almost two hours of television into a 140 page book, and he absolutely does not piss about.  The descriptions are terse, and a lot of things are said up-front in blatant disregard for the "show-don't-tell" rule.  Viewpoint skips from one character to another within a single scene.  A lot of things that various writers and teachers have warned me against are in this book, and yet it works.  Dicks has to be as efficient as possible, to cram as much exposition and plot as he can into the smallest number of words.  I think he does it rather well.  It's an interesting example of form dictating style.

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES

What I'm Reading
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
English Grammar Essentials for Dummies
Marvel Comics circa 1964

What I'm Listening To
Powerslave by Iron Maiden

What I'm Playing
Hot Wheels: Beat That! on the Nintendo Wii (yeah, I know I've been weeks on this one.  My son is obsessed with it, and playing with him is about the only video gaming I do these days.)