Signature sheets!

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One down, 999 to go:

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These are the signature sheets for the limited edition Subterranean Press collection of Old Races stories, BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER. You have no doubt already pre-ordered it, but if not that link there will offer you the opportunity to do so. :)

BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER collects three Old Races stories previously released into the wild–”From Russia, with Love”, “Five Card Draw”, and “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”, and offers up seven new tales that complete an arc of hidden stories within the Old Races universe: you could go on to read future books in the Old Races universe without having read these stories, but believe me, you don’t want to.

spacer Ancient rivals, best of friends, best of enemies: dragonlord Janx and master vampire Eliseo Daisani are the threads upon which a tapestry of lives and loves are woven across the centuries. From the coldest Russian nights to the heat of Chicago’s greatest fire, nothing brings the immortal adversaries together—or tears them apart—like a woman.

And there is always a woman.

Vanessa Grey has been at Daisani’s side for decades, but the secrets borne by a witch may be her undoing. Baba Yaga’s daughter has plots that are decades in the hatching, but they may only succeed if Margrit Knight, named “the Negotiator” by Daisani and Janx themselves, will work with her. And there are others: the greatest vampire hunter mankind has ever known, and a woman for whom the Old Races are a wonder to walk away from….

The cover art is by Thomas Canty. (THOMAS. CANTY. *dies of squee* *again*) I am *insanely* excited that SubPress is publishing this collection, and I desperately, desperately want it to do well in order to justify their faith in me and in hopes of, y’know, getting to work with them again. So–because I know you don’t want me to sign a thousand signature sheets for nothing–do pre-order if you can, okay? I will love you forever.

not that i don’t anyway

Posted in collections, cover art, negotiator trilogy, novellas, old races, short stories | Tagged collections, cover art, negotiator trilogy, novellas, old races, short stories | Leave a reply

Redesign done!

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I believe I’ve now converted all the pages on CEMurphy.Net to WordPress, which means the redesign is more or less done. It’s not as done as I want it to be, of course, but if you’d like to go poke at it and see if you can find any pages that don’t match, that would be great.

One thing I’d like feedback on–should I reinstate the right column Out Now material? The header banner covers it now, but that only brings up one item at a time, whereas the right column could have all of it. Maybe below the Twitter feed but above the tags?

While converting IMMORTAL BELOVED (the Highlander novel I wrote about 15 years ago, which is now available in PDF, epub, mobi and HTML versions), I also rediscovered CENTENARIAN, the first chapter of a book that doesn’t exist.

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Guest Blogger: Gabra Zackman!

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Over the years I’ve had lots and lots of people tell me how much they love Gabra Zackman, the reader for most of the Walker Papers audio books. Gabra emailed me around a year ago and we’ve chatted back and forth in email (and in Skype, recently! SO COOL!) a bit, and I thought, hey! I should ask if she’d do a guest blog sometime!

So I did, and she said yes! And so in honor of the audio version of RAVEN CALLS being released today, I’m posting the blog she sent. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

The Life of an Audiobook Narrator

I’ve had the privilege over the years of recording some extraordinary books, and it occurred to me a few years back to contact some of the people who write them. It was with great excitement and awe that I first contacted Catie to say how much I loved her work, and it was with the same great excitement that I responded to her request for an entry for her newsletter.

I’m currently in the midst of prepping RAVEN CALLS, the seventh book in the Walker Series. I adore it. It’s not fair or nice to play favorites, but… this is one of my favorites. The whole series has been an absolute gift to me. But this one has had me laughing even more (if possible!) and has made my imagination and my heart dance around with joy.

I’ve had three series I’ve done that have meant a great deal to me, and I’ve made contact with all of the authors. In the midst of one, I had lunch with the author at a pivotal moment: I had been through a really rough time in life, and wanted to thank her for her work. In that dark stretch, I got to spend days in a booth with her characters, and it brought me such comfort. To my great surprise, she confessed that she had written the first book of the series while going through a divorce… that she had written the characters to bring HER comfort!!! It was amazing to know that a book she had written to bring happiness into her life affected me in the same way, and I hoped it was the same salve to many other women who listened to it. I feel the same with Joanne Walker… she’s the inner shaman/ goof/ klutz/ kick ass chick who I wish I were on the inside, and her antics can always make me laugh on a rainy day.

I got into audiobooks through something of a fluke. The well-known reader Jonathan Davis has been a dear friend of mine since we did a play together, and he invited me to send an audition to a company he worked for. This company happened to have an opening—a reader with a similar voice had just left—and I was the lucky recipient of the best job I’d ever had. Here’s another way to tell the same story: I have the privilege of working a lot as an actress, but it wasn’t always that way. For a long time I waited tables and catered, and I had gotten to the point of no return. So I decided to have a frank conversation with God. “God,” I said, while wearing a tuxedo and serving canapés, “I can’t imagine this is my greatest good on this earth. If you want me to keep being an actress, you need to give me a way to live. If not, I’m throwing in the towel. You choose.” Shortly thereafter I got a call, and my life profoundly changed. Somewhere between God and Jonathan Davis was my salvation.

From the company I initially started with, I made contacts that went off and formed their own companies… and wound up doing this wonderful work in several different studios. I was one of the first people called when Audible started their own production company, and they are still one of my greatest employers today. One of my early books was THUNDERBIRD FALLS, the second in the Walker series, and I fell in love with it immediately. I was so excited for this book… it appealed so deeply to my love of language, folklore, and funny, powerful women. But there was a catch… another reader read the first book, and this is never a fun situation to go into.

Listeners are loyal. It’s something I’ve learned. And to switch horses on them midstream… pisses them off. So it was no surprise that there was much controversy about this. I read the book with great love and passion, but I was a fairly new narrator at the time, and a bit nervous. The listener reviews nearly killed me… there were all these comparisons to the first reader’s take on it, and it was really hard for me to deal with that. Besides which, I thought she was wonderful, and couldn’t understand the change either… my guess is that she moved or something, because they never switch readers on a series if they can avoid it.

So the whole thing was a source of great paranoia to me at first… and there were a ton of reviews that preferred one or the other of us. To be honest, my terror was selfish… it was less about my work, which I was beginning to be confident about, and more about the series… would they take it away from me? If there were more books, would I get them, or not? I was so relieved when I got the next one, and the next one, and the one after that, five in all for me to read over the years. I feel like these characters have become old friends, and I so look forward to taking them with me into the booth again. At the same time, it’s an interesting thing, having read for so long… there are early choices I made, particularly character’s voices, which I wouldn’t choose now [Catie's note: That's okay, as I told Gabra, 'cause if I'd known where they were going, there are some choices I'd have made differently for characters early on, too!]. But what can I do? I’m sorta stuck with them! I tried in one series to switch the voices mid-way, and that was like cooking a stew then deciding to make a consommé. It’s invariably better to stick with the stew.

Reading audiobooks is a strange skill, and a strange experience. I love it, but it’s not for everyone. I typically read about 4-6 hours at a stretch, and it is an extraordinary combination of patience (you can’t move around a lot), stamina (I call it “strapping my Nikes to my vocal chords”) and creativity (we want to hear the characters, but don’t do TOO much!) Usually it’s just me and an engineer, and at this point, we’re all pretty dear friends. It’s an intimate situation, reading a book to someone, and we have all worked together for years. So you can imagine that between long takes, and lots of tea, there are wonderful conversations, all of which occur on either side of insulated glass. Pretty strange? Yes. And pretty awesome. Especially for some of the more graphic romances I’ve read… those tend to be pretty funny nights. Please imagine a bunch of women in their 30s reading graphic romances to mostly male engineers in their 20s! It’s wonderfully fun. I think you need a great sense of humor to be an audiobook narrator. You need to be able to laugh at yourself, and intuitively find the humor of the piece you’re working on, both in equal measure.

There’s often a lot of prep that goes into it as well, depending on the material. For RAVEN CALLS, I’m planning to ask Catie if she knows how to pronounce all the Gaelic words she’s put in there, and if she can help me with it! We often have to ask the authors things like that, particularly if you’re working on sci-fi. I recently completed a sci-fi book that had something like 5 pages of pronunciations, all of which were directly from the author… when you have an entirely self-created world, it’s often like that. But it has cropped up all over the place… I once read a romance that was set in Japan, and had to consult a native speaker about the phrases. And once I read a non-fiction book about an indigenous culture in Alaska and had to make my way through Inuit words. That was a picnic! Again, we all have a good laugh over it, and try our best to do the kind of work we are proud of. At this point, I have recorded over 200 books, so there’s very little that can truly surprise me.

So here I sit, about to prep more of RAVEN CALLS, and I get to look forward to some time with Joanne and her adventures in a dark booth. Likely, an attractive young male friend of mine will be sitting across the glass, and in between Joanne’s tangles with her past and present, my friend and I will talk about our lives. I’ll occasionally say a wrong word, and we’ll laugh. I’ll have to say the Gaelic phrases several times until I’m happy with how they sound. And we’ll drink tea and coffee and listen, together, to all the places this story will go, to all the paths Joanne will walk down, to her irreverent and witty self-effacement. And, frankly, we’ll thank God that this is “one of the good ones” and that we can truly enjoy the evening.

So this is for you, the listeners, who will soon have a chance to read or hear this great new installment… I hope you have as much fun listening to it as I plan to have reading it. Cheers to that!

-Gabra Zackman

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Recent Reads: THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU

Posted on by ce_murphy

I’m afraid that, like with FRANKENSTEIN, my reaction to THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU is “Thank God I’ve read that now, because now I never have to read it again.”

The two books have more in common than I expected, which is silly, since I know what they’re both about. MOREAU is much more bearable as a read, because the protagonist isn’t nearly as sniveling as Frankenstein is, but the descriptions of pain and vivisection did not make me all that happy.

One aspect I did enjoy about both books (and indeed about A PRINCESS OF MARS, which I liked *far* more than either FRANKENSTEIN or MOREAU) is the utter flat-out no-explanation-required pulp science. The categorical statement of This Is How It is (best done in PRINCESS OF MARS, where John Carter absolutely blithely says, “…and over the next weeks I too developed my telepathic abilities,” which are then taken as writ), particularly with those statements flying rabidly in the face of science as we know it, and probably science as we knew it then, too.

*That* is the aspect of pulp fiction–that and the outrageous descriptions–that most draws me to it. I would love to be able to tell a pulp fiction story just that way, though I wonder if you could even get away with it in the modern era. I’d love to try. I don’t think it would be easy to do. I…well. *Can* it be done in a book written today? What if the book is set in the 1890s/1920s/1940s? Would a modern audience forgive it, in a modern book, or do they demand explanations? This is really a question of some interest to me, even if I’m not certain I’ve got the skill set to make it work anyway.

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Crowdfunding: What’s Up Next

Posted on by ce_murphy

(Sorry for the delay in getting this posted, I’ve been busy breaking my website…)

I’ve ended up with some FAQs about what I’ll be doing next for crowdfunding/Kickstarter, so I thought to close this series out with a poll, which I’ll post shortly (ETA: I have posted it! It is here! You should be able to vote by logging in with FB, G+ or OpenID, I think, so if you don’t have an LJ account, fret not!), and a tackling of the FAQs. Surprisingly (or, y’know, not), the most common question is:

So will you be doing this again?

Um, yes. Yes I will. :) The next campaign will be the ElectriCity graphic novel, in fact, and you ought to start seeing some serious squee coming down the line about that in about a month. Because OMG. *OMG*, it’s going to be cool.

Followed by:

Will I eventually be able to buy “No Dominion” even if I didn’t get to participate in the Kickstarter campaign?

Yes. At some point it’ll be made available through Some Other Means. I don’t currently know what those means are, but will keep you posted.

Does this mean you might Kickstart the next book in The Inheritors’ Cycle (THE QUEEN’S BASTARD books)?

…I might. I really don’t know. The idea has obviously crossed my mind, but it’s also already been a loooong time since I wrote those books, so perhaps they’ve cooled off. Also, the price point for a novel would be a lot higher, and the number of copies of THE PRETENDER’S CROWN that sold (about 5,000) do not necessarily convince me that I have access to the right readers to make that particular project work. It’s a lovely idea, but I don’t think it’s reality-based.

How about “Take A Chance”? Is there any chance you might go back and do more of that comic?

Yes. Yes there is. A lot of things have to shake out first, and it’s not going to be a this-year (or possibly even next year) project, but it’s on the really short list of things I’m thinking about doing.

Oooh! What about the Strongbox Chronicles? Could you crowdfund some of those?

I could. I might even love to. There are literally *dozens* of Cate Dermody books I could potentially crowdfund, and the Strongbox Chronicles were huge fun to write. But it makes me utterly crazy that the first books are essentially lying fallow, and I don’t want to do anything with the rest of them until I have a definitive idea of the first 3′s eventual fate.

Okay, and what about HEAVEN CAN WAIT, that YA book you’re writing the first 3 chapters of as part of the “No Dominion” awards?

Do not tempt me. That way lies madness.

Or maybe your climate change trilogy?

See above.

Or perhaps Something Mysterious that is very close to your heart and has been on a back burner for (dear god) twelve or thirteen years now that we don’t actually know about?

*looks shifty*

***

Here’s the thing that’s really striking me about crowdfunding: it opens up the possibility of simply working on whatever I want to next, rather than necessarily working on something I’m absolutely certain is commercially viable.

I mean, don’t get me wrong: I will continue to publish traditionally and will be very happy to launch the projects I’ve got on proposal as commercial, traditional works. But for the side jobs, the things I just really want to do and don’t know if I can sell straight off? The idea of being able to see if I can get support to go ahead and do them is mind-blowing and wonderfully freeing.

Now, whether it’s actually *possible* remains to be seen. “No Dominion” was preposterously successful, but it was the Walker Papers universe, and it was Gary, who is possibly the most beloved character in that universe. (Seriously, my mother threatened to never speak to me again if I ever did anything really bad to Gary.) I have no idea if a new project would meet with such enthusiasm. Obviously it would be nice to *think* so, but I can’t really know without running it up the flagpole.

Still, the idea is pretty compelling, and it’ll be very interesting over the next few years to see how it all plays out. There are things I can’t or won’t do out of concern for pissing off my traditional publishers, but for projects that seem more of a long shot or which are more collaborative, like graphic novels, this is really a hugely exciting time to be a creator.

And to wrap this all up: thank you, everybody, for your patience with this series of blog posts, for your questions and comments, and for your astonishing support.

Posted in crowdfunding | Tagged crowdfunding

On Running Crowdfunding: Commentary From the Crowd

Posted on by ce_murphy

I’ve got at least one more crowdfunding post to do, I think–one that’s more about future projects for me rather than probably being wildly useful in general–but this one is comments from the crowd: things people have said/asked in comments on these posts. I’m not attributing them, but they will perhaps give you (the general “you”) an idea of what other things to think about when launching a crowdfund campaign.

I will add more questions and commentary to this if people have more to say. :)

On excitement/saturation levels, if the question is “So people don’t get frustrated if you keep mentioning a project that’s not available yet? They do this with ebooks, so one learns to not mention them until they can be ordered.

The answer appears to be:
“Having frequent, excited mentions of it helped, because even if I forgot about the open kickstarter tab after first checking it out, it would have reminded me to poke at it again.”

and

I think the biggest reason why you got funded in the first 24 hours is the whole you were way excited before kicking it off and were mentioning it for *ages* here and on twitter. Yes, getting excited before it is even launched is very contagious.

And a piece of advice on that topic, from the person who kept encouraging me to talk about it even when I thought I was probably being really, really obnoxious:

If you are unsure if you are oversaturating your audience with the “All Kickstarter, All The Time” channel, ask. Ask them, ask a friend, ask a neutral party, etc.

From someone who’s supported others of my crowdfunded projects: I’m wondering how No Dominion stacks up to your other crowd funded projects from outside Kick Starter. This time was more exciting [for us] because of that feedback loop of being able to track how excited other readers were by the comments and pledges…

The words “blown out of the water” barely begin to apply. In my first post I talked about the dollar amounts I’d been paid for novellas in the past. The $4K was for “Banshee Cries”, the one ‘official’ novella I’ve done for Luna. The $3K and $3500 novellas were both Old Races stories done via crowdfunding. My Old Races Short Story Project took in about $4K over the entire course of 2011. So we’re talking orders of magnitude here, in terms of comparative successes.

I actually need to do a poll about that, because I’d *really like* to know what made ND get a response on such a phenomenal level. Was it because:

- it was Walker Papers instead of Old Races
- it was *Gary*
- it was Kickstarter
- you didn’t even know I’d ever run any other crowdfunded projects
- of where you heard about it
- because I wouldn’t shut up about it

and probably some other things I should add to that but can’t think of right now (suggestions welcome).

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged crowdfunding, walker papers

On Running Crowdfunding: Boosting the Signal

Posted on by ce_murphy

Okay, I lied. I said I thought probably figuring out the reward tiers is the hardest thing about crowdfunding, but then I thought about advertising it and that’s much worse.

There are people who are really good at shameless self promotion, and getting themselves out there where everybody in the whole world knows about the projects they’re working on. Despite No Dominion’s success, I’m not actually one of those.

What I did learn doing it, though, is that either I have the most tolerant fans, readers, followers and friends on the earth, or the saturation point for reminders, endless discussion, and squeeing over a crowdfunded project is much, much higher than I would have imagined.

Although I clearly have amazing readers, I suspect there is a lot of truth to the second part of that statement.

Honestly, I don’t know how to really truly spread the word. I don’t know how to reach completely new audiences, people who might not have ever heard of you before. Using Kickstarter at all helps that, because there are people there who just check out new projects. But it doesn’t help a *lot*: the pie chart I got after the campaign ended shows that 5% of the final dollar amount came from within Kickstarter. The other 95% came from without.

About 3/5ths of pledges came from my sites or people sharing my links on FB/Twitter/G+. Another 1/5th have no direct referral information. The other fifth came from within Kickstarter and from people independently boosting the signal in their journals, so those *do* make a difference. I just don’t know how to capitalize on any of those things for future projects.

What I *do* know is that unmitigated enthusiasm is your friend. Now, it is true that it’s easy to have unmitigated enthusiasm if the project explodes beyond your wildest dreams, as “No Dominion” did, but here are things that I did which may have helped:

- Start talking the project up before you launch it. Ideally several weeks before you launch it. Let your readers know that you’re really excited about this thing. People get excited about what you’re excited about. It’s a feedback loop. Use it.

- Hold your breath, squee, squeak, peek between your hands, gasp in astonishment, wonder if a magic number can be reached in a magic time in public. It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting there in your computer chair squirming with embarrassment about it. This is the Internet. Nobody knows you’re a dog, as it were. What people *see* is your blog/Twitter/FB/whatever going OMG HOLY CRAP, not you sitting there hiding your face behind one hand while you type OMG HOLY CRAP. They get excited because you are. It’s a feedback loop. Use it.

- I didn’t actually do this on purpose, but offer a reward idea to encourage people to go charging for a finish line. “No Dominion” cracked its goal in the first 24 hours, which I utterly did not expect. Somewhere around hour 18 I said “Holy shit if we do this in the first 24 hours I will write an extra story for everybody!” Be prepared to have something like that waiting. It doesn’t matter if you’re aiming for full funding, 25%, 50%, whatever, in X time. Give people a shiny sparkly reason to fling themselves in headfirst RIGHT NOW. They get excited because you are. It’s a–you get the idea. :)

- Do not be embarrassed to ask people to boost the signal. Some of them will. Some of them won’t. But go ahead and ask.

***

I am *more* than happy to take other suggestions about how to boost the signal, and will post a follow-up to this if there are ideas suggested!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged crowdfunding

On Running Crowdfunding: Rewards

Posted on by ce_murphy

More on crowdfunding:

What sorts of rewards would be attractive?

Rewards are the hardest thing about crowdfunding, I think. (Except for the general nerve-wracking “I’m throwing a party and wonder if anybody will come!” aspect of it.)

Your basic reward for crowdfunded storytelling is the story. $5 gets you the e-book. There’s a real argument to be made for making it a base $10 buy-in because, as someone pointed out to me during the “No Dominion” campaign, if you’re pricing your book at what you’d buy an e-copy for on Amazon or B&N.com, you’re basically just setting up a pre-order system, not crowdfunding per se. But I like a $5 basic buy-in, because it’s a price point almost anybody can afford, and it gives the patron the specific item they presumably most want: the book!

General Reward Thoughts: I said a few days in to the “No Dominion” campaign that I’d already thought I needed to restructure the reward levels, and I still think I shoulda. I should have set it at $5, $10, $25, $50, $100, $250, $500 for the realistic rewards, and I think leaving the $1K, $2500 and $5K for “anybody got silly money?” rewards is fine. It probably should have looked something like this:

$5 : the novella
$10 : the novella & 2 short stories
$25 : novella, 4 short stories, name in acknowledgements (because holy crap, 520 backers, I’m gonna have four pages of thank-yous!)
$50 : the above & a bookmark featuring the NO DOMINION cover art
$100 : the above & a behind-the scenes chapbook of the NO DOMINION cover art photo shoot/9×12″ print of the cover art
$250 : the above & the limited edition print run of NO DOMINION included
$500 : the above & and your name as one of the characters in either NO DOMINION or one of the companion short stories

(Comments & suggestions on t