VOTE!

 Dear Readers, if you are a US citizen and have not voted in the local, state, and federal elections by mail or early in-person, please, PLEASE, do so today. Mask up. Take a folding chair. Pack snacks. Maybe even wear a disposable diaper.

Whatever you do, VOTE.

VOTE for your school board, your city auditor, your state supreme court justices, your congressional representative, and for the president of the United States. Local elections matter as much--and sometimes more--than federal. 

Your vote matters. Your vote matters. Your vote matters.

How Long Should Your Novel Be?

Apropos of #NaNoWriMo, our topic at the SFF Seven this week is "How long should my book be?" We're exploring the seemingly ever changing definitions of “book” length, novella length, etc.

It seems this question comes up around NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month, where participants attempt to write a 50,000-word "novel" during November - because of that magical 50K word goal. I can tell you all with good authority, because I've heard it straight from the mouth of Chris Baty, founder of NaNoWriMo, that he picked 50,000 words as the month's goal because it seemed like a nice, round number to him. At the time, he had little idea of how long a novel should be.

It can be a bit misleading because, while novels are considered to be more than 40,000 words as defined by organizations sponsoring awards - like SFWA's Nebula Award* - it's rare for a novel to be that short. 

As far as traditional publishing is concerned, very few imprints consider books that are less than 80,000 words. The sweet spot for most publishers seems to be 85,000-100,000 words. Recently, several author friends and I have noted that our editors have asked us to trim our novels to be less than 120,000 words. We think that's a window dictated by printing press limitations. After that benchmark, the cost shoots up. Some imprints, like Harlequin category romances - very slim books - are around 55,000-60,000 words, but that's a very specific brand. Some literary fiction books might come in below 80,000 words, but again, that's a fairly specific genre, so you'd want to target that carefully.

And sure, with self-publishing it doesn't matter - except that readers have expectations. If something isn't clearly labeled as a novella or shorter, they tend to get cranky. Frankly, even if a novella or short is labeled clearly as such, reviews often note that it's too short. 

So: how long should your novel be? Shoot for 85,000-100,000 words and you'll be golden.

*Incidentally, the word-count definitions for the various story lengths as defined by SFWA are:

Short Story: less than 7,500 words;
Novelette: at least 7,500 words but less than 17,500 words;
Novella: at least 17,500 words but less than 40,000 words
Novel: 40,000 words or more.

Ghost of the Nile - Something Different From the Backlist for Halloween

Happy Halloween! This week at the SFF Seven, we're talking about our choice of a backlist book!

In view of the holiday, I’m going to feature GHOST OF THE NILE (GODS OF EGYPT) because it’s a ghost story but it’s an unusual take on the subject…

Ghost of the Nile is one of the standalone stories in my “Gods of Egypt” paranormal series set in ancient Egypt. For quite a while I’d been fascinated with the idea of writing a story set on an estate in the 1550 BCE era. One of the interesting things about Egypt was that for literally hundreds of years the climate and the daily life stayed pretty much the same. Pharaohs came and went but the more ordinary folk had quite an unchanging routine, linked to the Nile’s floods. I felt my hero could return from the Afterlife and fit right into his old home, although as a guest, not a resident. I thought the challenges for him could be intriguing. 

One of my favorite series of novels is The Chronicles of Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters. All the action is set in a small English town circa 1100 CE (Common Era). I love being able to revisit the town and the people over and over. I was hoping I could do that for my readers with stories set on one ancient Egyptian estate. Ironically, I didn’t write that series yet.  But the ideas inspired my setting for Ghost.

 The Egyptians of 3000 years ago believed that unless you were buried in the soil of Egypt and had all the proper rituals recited for you, as well as your name preserved, you couldn’t enter the Afterlife. So my hero Periseneb, who was murdered and didn’t receive the rites at the time of his death, has been condemned to roam the fringes of the Afterlife and wage endless battles against demons and giant snakes. 

I’m always fascinated with the goddess Ma’at, who represented truth, balance, justice…and who happened to be the goddess of second chances. I’m a Libra myself – scales, balance…. She was one of the Judges who weighed the heart of a dead person, to see if they deserved the Afterlife. So I decided she’d need a champion to accomplish some task in Egypt, and selects Periseneb, who she believes deserves a second chance at entry to paradise. A favorite old movie of mine is the 1963 version of “Jason and the Argonauts”. I love how the goddess Hera tells Jason she’ll help him three times along the way. I decided Ma’at would help Periseneb, and you’ll see in the book how he has to call for her assistance.

Author's personal photo

The next intriguing concept this novel allowed me to play with was the ancient Egyptian idea of the terrifying nature of ghosts, or akhs. Periseneb himself is uncomfortable with being an akh returned to Egypt, and worries a lot about inadvertently loosing the evil powers he now possesses on the innocents around him. 

Author's personal collection

And last but not least, there’s the terrifying goddess or demon Ammit the Destroyer, who was part lion, part hippo and part crocodile, and known as Devourer of the Dead. I’ve wanted to find a way to incorporate her into a novel in a meaningful way because she’s so intriguing. 

So there you have my influences which blended together with romance and adventure, to yield my latest novel! 

This was my favorite review, from the ladies at Dear Author: 

“There’s Egypt and gods and magic and strong men and stronger women and love even beyond death and into the Afterlife. The historic details add spice throughout the story and these definitely aren’t 21st C people in linen kilts.”

The story:

Betrayed, murdered, and buried without proper ceremony, Egyptian warrior Periseneb is doomed to roam the gray deserts of the dead as a ghost for all eternity.

But then the goddess of truth offers him a bargain: return to the world of the living as her champion for 30 days. If he completes his mission, he’ll be guaranteed entry into Paradise. Periseneb agrees to the bargain but, when he returns to the living world, two hundred years have passed and nothing is quite as he expected.

Neithamun is a woman fighting to hang onto her family’s estate against an unscrupulous nobleman who desires the land as well as the lady. All seems lost until a mysterious yet appealing ex-soldier, Periseneb, appears out of nowhere to help her fight off the noble’s repeated attacks.

Meanwhile, Periseneb’s thirty days are rushing by, and he’s powerless against the growing attraction between himself and Neithamun. But their love can never be. For his Fate is to return to the Afterlife, and Death cannot wed with Life…

Amazon      Apple Books    Barnes & Noble    Kobo      GooglePlay

Note: This post first appeared on my own author blog.

Author's personal collection

Chameleon Backlist

Back lists are supposed to be where old books go to make an author a steady trickle of income. But sometimes the back list rises from the grave and lives again. IT LIVES. Yeah. That's all the spooky I got. Sorry. 

Enemy Within was the first book published. That qualifies it as back list. So is the second book in the series, Enemy Games. And then the series was orphaned. I had all but given up getting to finish the series, but sometimes, years long procrastination has its benefits. My rights reverted.

I made plans to self-pub the whole kit and kaboodle. But then the lightning struck my monsters. The Wild Rose Press bought the entire series. They reissued Enemy Within and Enemy Games. They then released Enemy Storm. When I finish the current WIP, they'll get book four - which doesn't even have a working title yet because that's how titles and I roll.

So then. If the back list rises from the dead, is it still back list? If it isn't, there's always that UF series with the demon. Maybe that's a better Halloween horror-fest.

When you don't have a backlist...you pick a fave!

 

My frontlist is coming! Yeah, I know, publishing is one big sea of secrets that you can’t talk about…what a crock. But what that really means for this week’s blogpost is—I don’t have a backlist book to share…

Backlist [noun]: books available in print, but are not new releases

My goal, back when I was in the corporate world, was to have 10 backlist books before retiring from the lab to become a full-time author. Heh, chronic disease be damned, but it did give me the opportunity to jump right into stay-at-home writer!

*side note: I’d still suggest having some backlist books before diving into this full time…yikes!

But through it all I’m still reading! And so I’ve picked a backlist book from one of my favorite series to share with you today! I recently read THE FATE OF THE TALA and THE LOST PRINCESS RETURNS, so choosing the one that started it all seemed to fit.  

Queen of the Unknown is the tagline and it absolutely fits THE MARK OF THE TALA. Andi, the middle daughter of the High King, is a bit odd and never feels like she fits in. Until she meets a strange man while out riding…and he becomes a crow. He opens her eyes to a hidden kingdom, one that she has claim to, and to the destruction her own father is wrecking on their world’s magic. 

It’s full of shapeshifting, magic, political intrigue, romance, and a lesson of trust. It’s, IMO, the perfect backlist book because it opens up the world of the Tala and whew is it an entire world! And, if you’re a series devourer like me, you’ll be happy to know that Jeffe ties up all the plot lines and story arcs nicely in THE FATE OF THE TALA. 

Do you have a backlist book, or one that you love? Let me know so I can check it out!

The Mark of the Tala 

The Twelve Kingdoms #1

by Jeffe Kennedy

Queen Of The Unknown

The tales tell of three sisters, daughters of the high king. The eldest, a valiant warrior-woman, heir to the kingdom. The youngest, the sweet beauty with her Prince Charming. No one says much about the middle princess, Andromeda. Andi, the other one.

Andi doesn't mind being invisible. She enjoys the company of her horse more than court, and she has a way of blending into the shadows. Until the day she meets a strange man riding, who keeps company with wolves and ravens, who rules a land of shapeshifters and demons. A country she'd thought was no more than legend--until he claims her as its queen.

In a moment everything changes: Her father, the wise king, becomes a warlord, suspicious and strategic. Whispers call her dead mother a traitor and a witch. Andi doesn't know if her own instincts can be trusted, as visions appear to her and her body begins to rebel.

For Andi, the time to learn her true nature has come. . .

Not an Oops: My Little Backlist

 Very quick funny story...

I started working in publishing about the same time my husband started programming games. (We were babies.) Early on in a biz, you’re learning so much every day, and often we’d come home and exchange knowledge, kind of like kindergarteners bring home their “look what I did!” finger paintings. Most times, hubs was excited about my excitement, but when I started talking about the RR Bowker out-of-print lists — fondly called the “OOP lists”—he’d get this very confused expression on his face. Finally, I asked what was up with that, and he countered with a question: What do old books have to do with object-oriented programming? (Also OOP, apparently.)

This week on SFF Seven, we’re talking about our old stuff: out-of-print books, early books, backlist books. And since I’m sort of new to this whole authoring thing, I don’t have a whole lot to talk about. In an age of ebooks and long-term contracts, none of my books are out of print. Publishers have lots of fun tricks to retain rights long after the first blush has faded from a release. 

In terms of backlist (that is, a book of mine that is not a new release), I guess the book I self-published last summer would count? It’s third in a series, but I challenge folks to read it as a stand-alone. I think/hope it holds up. The book is about a self-aware AI that, instead of deciding to nuke the world aka Skynet, really only wants to find a way to smooch her fella. Title is More Than Stardust, and it begins with a serious oops that has to do with neither publishing nor programming.

The Burned Spy: The Book That Launched an Urban Fantasy Series

As I work through the edits of Book 6 in the Immortal Spy series, it's only fitting that I bring "from the boneyard" Book 1, the story that introduced us to a gatekeeper on a mission from Hel.

THE BURNED SPY
The Immortal Spy: Book 1

Gods. Always ready to screw you.

When Bix the Gatekeeper is summoned from exile a hundred and seventy years early by the goddess of the Norse Under World, the former Dark Ops agent knows there’s a catch. On the surface, the terms of the deal are simple. Someone attacked the pantheon’s ambassador to the Mid Worlds and left the ambassador in a coma. In exchange for early parole, Bix must identify the perpetrator and drag their soul to Hel.

It’d be a sweet contract, if not for the details. The ambassador is Bix’s ex-girlfriend, the lead suspect is the key witness from Bix’s trial, and the organization leading the official investigation is the same intelligence guild that disavowed Bix when a covert op went pear-shaped. Undeterred, Bix returns to her old stomping grounds where clues in the smoldering woods of Centralia, Pennsylvania, lead to the waterfront of Washington, DC, and Worlds beyond.

Once valued for her skills creating passageways as small as a capillary or as large as a continent, Bix’s success now depends on the relationships she was forced to abandon. As she squares off against friends who betrayed her and enemies keen to destroy her, Bix follows a trail of secrets, torture, and treason that leads to the very superpowers who banished her. With her freedom on the line and revenge within reach, this highly-trained operative will take on Fates, dragons, angels, and gods to get exactly what she wants.

Hel hath no fury like a burned spy.

BUY IT NOW (the eBook is 50% off!):

Amazon (affiliate link)

Apple | Kobo | B&N

Overdrive (for Libraries)

Read the Reviews:

GoodReads

Crawling from the Graveyard

 This week we're talking about out of print books, a terrifying subject if ever there was one. 

My Out of Print book is actually, depending on which edition, a trilogy.

Once upon a time, I wrote a 340,000 word monster of a book. Multiple reviews referred to it as a DOORSTOPPER.

That would have been my fourth novel, SERENITY FALLS.

Long story short, I am a pantser. I do not outline very often and even when I do, I can very nearly promise you I'm not staying on track to use that outline for long.  It's just not the way my mind works, so things change, whether I want them to or not.  I never planned to write a book that big, but I did. It just sort of happened. 

When I'm writing my mind does its own thing. I might THINK I know where a book is going, but like as not, it'll change fast and often. The tale evolves. 

I had an idea for a curse that falls on a town, revenge from beyond the grave, and worse than that. But in order for that to work the way I wanted it to, there had to be a mystery or two, and there had to be a lot of history for the town. before it was done I had written a novel with over 180 named characters, that spanned over 300years of town history.  There were good guys, bad guys, murders, damned near every sin you can imagine covered in bloody history. And then there was the guy who had to deal with all of that, my monster hunter Jonathan Crowley. Hell, his history spans centuries, and I wanted a town that could compete for the readers' attention!

The next thing I know I've spent the better part of a year writing this novel. I normally spend around three months on the first draft and I spent four times that long here. It was so big an idea that when it went from trade paperback to mass market the publisher said it needed to be three books. That meant rewriting a lot of stuff, cutting some out and adding in even more. 

Thus was the SERENITY FALLS TRILOGY born: WRIT IN BLOOD, THE PACK, and THE DARK CARNIVAL. There's a lot of story, and probably fifteen or so perspectives.  

I'm happy to say the reviews were favorable. 

Quite possibly the best horror novel since Salem's Lot. -- Jim Brock, Baryon magazine

Moore is perhaps the most talented writer of this genre to date. ...On the surface SERENITY FALLS sounds like Stephen King's Salem's Lot, but there is much Moore to the novel than just the rewriting a classic. The story line is loaded with, and an intensifying terror that is difficult to classify as the audience wonders between the Curse and the newcomers as to who is the focus of this peril. Surprisingly for such a large ensemble the residents ensure the audience believes the small hamlet exists and bring life to the threat.

Harriet Klausner -- Midwest Book Review

Moore is something to watch. -- Bentley Little

I'll take it. :) 

I'm likely putting this back in print myself next year.