Introduction
Good afternoon and welcome to the live question and answer session to go along with the launch of Raven’s Peace, Book One of the Peacekeepers of Sol series. I see I managed to type out the description [for the Facebook Live Video]. That’s what happens when you’re rushing because you’re watching this late and you are an anxious wreck.
We’ve got a bunch of things to get through today. I’m basically dragging this section out, as always, to see who pops on to watch the live stream. I’ve got a reading from Raven’s Peace I want to do. I’ve got some announcements to make, but you’ve probably already seen them if you’re seeing this, but I want to talk in a bit more detail. And of course, I have, I think it’s seven questions up, submitted through the Q&A form. If you want to throw more in the comments, I will get to those as well.
But to give a chance, as always, for everyone to show up, get on, and catch on with stuff that isn’t necessarily the most urgent, I’m going to kick off the reading from Raven’s Peace. I went back and forth on this a bunch, but I’m just going to read straight from Chapter One because it’s one of the more interesting parts of the book to start with. All right.
Reading
Raven’s Peace, Chapter One…
The battlecruiser shook around him and Henry Wong recognized the dream. It was a familiar nightmare now, which helped rob it of the strength it had had months before.
“We have a grav-shield blowthrough,” a seemingly faceless noncom reported across the warship’s bridge. “That dreadnought hit us dead-on.”
Theme of Raven’s Peace
“Henry didn’t need to look. He already knew that both the version of him in the dream and the version of him watching the dream had hands covered in blood…” That kind of plays out the beginning and the fundamental underlying theme of Raven’s Peace, that Henry Wong’s the man who wiped out a species and is not in the greatest of head spaces over that. Raven’s Peace is about how that man… let’s try to get that in the camera a bit better. That’s a brilliant, gorgeous cover in my opinion.
It’s a story about what that man and that government and military behind him, how they deal with the guilt of being genocides, and then what you do? And also what does an alliance of rebels and outside factions and all the components that go into overthrowing a galactic empire… what do they do afterwards? We tell the story of the hardscrabble band of rebels, and the plucky underdogs, and how they win a lot, but we don’t tell the story of what happens after the galactic empire falls. It has been done before. There are no new ideas, but I found that military SF (science fiction), especially modern military SF, didn’t delve into that consequence very well. It didn’t delve into the consequence well AND tended to be a little cavalier around the concept of genocide, especially.
The alien race was… “We flagged them as evil. We decided they’re evil. We’ll prove they’re evil in text and, therefore, we can just genocide them. Our readers should accept that; we, as authors, we should accept that; and our characters will be fine with it.” I don’t really agree with that as an assumption… several [inaudible 00:07:56], to a large extent. In some of the questions I have here, we’ll get into a bit more around where Raven’s Peace came from and what it is about, what it’s setting up to do.
But that’s the reading, which brings me into my announcements.
Patreon and Kindle Unlimited
If you’re seeing this, you probably know that we have a Patreon live for the first time ever. The Patreon is… we talk about Patreon and we always talk about supporting the authors and “Support the Patreon!” and there’s a certain degree of moral weight applied to that and the feeling that you’re supporting the authors, but I kind of want to throw out there that, for us, it’s a pre-order platform.
It’s there to sell electronic advanced reader’s copies. We’re not relying on that income stream by any stretch of the imagination. If it’s convenient for you to support the book there and you want the book two weeks early, please support us there. If it’s more convenient for you to buy it on Amazon when it comes out or buy it in paperback or read it in Kindle Unlimited or wait for the audiobook, do that. Whatever is the best way for you to get the books is perfectly fine by us, especially by me. I am the one who does all the bookkeeping. I know where the money comes from. But if you can’t wait and you want to get an electronic advance reader’s copy early (we have a lot of people asking how they can do that… if they can get on the advanced readers team and all that), the Patreon is the option for you.
The other thing, the other place [where Patreon is] going to be your best and, soon, only option is if you don’t want to read on Amazon. We’ve done at this point, I think it’s a roughly-18 month experiment, with moving portions of our catalog out of Kindle Unlimited onto other platforms. The sad truth of the matter is, it’s cost us well over $100,000 in lost sales. To have books off of Amazon, out of Kindle Unlimited… Amazon is 85% of the market for eBooks. The rest of the market combined is about 15%. What doesn’t get factored into a lot of people’s discussions around that is that Kindle Unlimited itself is 15 to 20% of the ebook market… potentially growing. It’s hard to be sure. The source I used to use for this data is now defunct, which sucks, but that inevitably happens when you’re looking at volunteer projects that cost money.
So to be outside of Amazon, we were giving up 20% of the ebook market to access 10%…the max is 15%. It’s not a sound business decision. Much as I don’t like being entirely in bed with a monopsony; it’s not a monopoly… it’s just close. It’s an oligopoly. I could get into the exact economic terms better if I’d done a bit more research. I understand the concepts, but explaining them I don’t always remember the terms when it comes to economics. And this works when we’re in Kindle Unlimited, there’s a visibility feedback loop between Kindle Unlimited and Amazon sales. They very much feed into each other. We do much better when our books are in Kindle Unlimited than we do when we’ve got even a portion of the catalog wide. Every book-wide is basically money we’re throwing away for a moral point, and while I’m attached to that moral point, I am more attached to the moral point of “I will pay my staff.” So, unfortunately, without a solid plan or without a solid competitor to Amazon, it’s not justifiable to us from a business perspective to have as much of our catalog distributed wide as we have had.
The books are going to start coming down from the wide retailers this Friday. If you are a Kobo, Google Play, Barnes & Noble reader, unfortunately as of next week, you will not be able to purchase the books on those platforms. This is why we moved forward with the Patreon at this point in time. If you’ve read the Exile series to date on a non-Amazon platform, please realize that Crusade will not be released on that platform. Crusade will only be released on Amazon. So if you’re not an Amazon reader and you want to read Crusade, unfortunately the Patreon is your only method.
You need to buy onto the Patreon before the book comes out on Kindle Unlimited. Once it’s out on Kindle Unlimited, it can no longer be on the Patreon. The links on there will only be valid for about two weeks, just because of the exclusivity agreements we have with Amazon. I don’t necessarily like needing to tell people that you need to do it this way, this is the only way. But that is, unfortunately, the best way for us from a business perspective.
And I looked at the numbers. There are… there bluntly aren’t that many people reading the Exile series off of Amazon. They’re… they just aren’t. So the Patreon is available as an option for you if you’re one of those people, but otherwise, all of our stuff going forward is going to be Amazon exclusive. That may change again as competitors experiment and potentially someone might manage to build a platform that’s worth me exiting Amazon for. But right now, that is the nature of the game, and I have to play by the rules that exist. I’m not a big enough player to change the rules of the game. That’s just the nature of the thing, unfortunately.
Q&A
I believe those were the only announcements I had, which brings me to the first questions that this Q&A session is all about. Like I said, I have seven questions. If you want to throw up any more questions, if you want to put them in the comments, you can ask questions about the Patreon, about Raven’s Peace, about the other books. Feel free. Excuse me, drink here. If you have questions about my coffee. I don’t know.
Q1: Will there be cyborgs in Raven’s Peace?
The first question that I’ve got here is from a gentleman with a user handle of Big Shadow. He asked, “Will there be any augments in the Raven’s Peace books?” Augments are a particular term in [the Starship’s Mage] setting for cyborgs, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it. In that sense, no. There will be no cyborg mage killers in a book that doesn’t have mages and definitely doesn’t have cyborg mages. But Raven’s Peace is built with a certain degree of transhumanism in its bones. There’s a lot of people running around with computers in their heads, and there are people running around with physical augmentations. They haven’t shown up in Raven’s Peace in the sense of combat cyborgs, which I suspect is what Big Shadow means.
There aren’t any in Raven’s Peace, and there may not be any in the series, certainly not to the degree that it’s called out. As with Castle Federation, the Marine Forces or [in Raven’s Peace] the United Planets Space Force Ground Division, in this case, are augmented beyond regular human norms. They have physical upgrades and so forth, but again it wouldn’t be as much. The augments in Starships’s Mage serve a specific cultural purpose as well as military purpose, and you won’t find anything of a similar weight culturally elsewhere.
Q2: Will Raven’s Peace have its own distinctive FTL travel and communication technology?
Next question, also from Big Shadow, is “Will the series have its own signature FTL (faster than light) drive as well as quantum communication?” Raven’s Peace is working with the “Icosa Dimensional Skip Drive.” I’d have to actually go look at the text to remember what the technical name for the skip drive is.
It uses the metaphor of, there’s three-dimensional space and there’s a twenty-dimensional space. And so it’s the equivalent of: if you’ve got river, the surface of the river is a two-dimensional space. If you skip a rock off of it, that rock is moving in 3D, but from the perspective of the surface of the river, it only exists when it hits the water. The skip drive is doing that with a twenty-dimensional space and a three-dimensional surface. It provides a twenty-dimensional kick that skips the ship out into a different layer of those twenty-dimension spaces and moves it through three-dimensional space. There’s a bunch of things in there around… it only works along certain lines. It has to go between stars. There’s some sections to that, but that’s the main rule is that if you’re traveling long distances, you need to go between stars to give yourself that extra momentum once you’re outside the standard three-dimensional space.
As for quantum communication, there is an instantaneous long distance communicator in the setting. The United Planets Alliance does have access to it in the opening… in the first book. To say much more than that is a spoiler.
Q3: Will we see novella collections in audiobook format?
And the next question I have here is from Daniel. He is asking, “Will Fae, Flames & Fedoras or the entire Spaceships and Spellcasters collection be coming to audiobook?” Complicated! The Spaceships and Spellcasters collection, which is now only available in print, contains the Fae, Flames & Fedoras (Changeling Blood) novella, the Murdered by Magic (ONSET) novella, the Ashen Stars (Exile) novella, and the first episode of Starship’s Mage, which is, obviously, included in the Starship’s Mage novel.
So the first episode of Starship’s Mage’s audio with Starship’s Mage. That book is available on audio, so on and so forth.
Ashen Stars and Murder by Magic are both available through Podium’s Audfans platform. I believe you can stream them for free. I’m not 100% sure, and I don’t have the links to hand. I probably should’ve looked them up in advance, now that I think about it, but it’s easy to realize that when you’re sitting here looking at the question. Fae, Flames & Fedoras is not in audio and is not going to be in audio. The only way for me to put it in audio will be through the ACX platform and then that’s available as a full title in Audible and I’m not quite comfortable… In my understanding of what Audible is, it’s a one price platform. I’m not quite comfortable asking people to pay the same price for a 14,000-word novella as I am asking them to pay for an 85,000-word novel. So I’m not going to, currently not planning on doing anything with Fae, Flames & Fedoras in the audio space.
Q4: What were the inspirations for Raven’s Peace?
Next question I have is from Kate. I’m pretty sure that’s the Kate who works for me. Hi, Kate.
And the question here is, “What were the inspirations for this universe? How does it compare to the other universes?” I delved a bit with the inspirations and the concepts of it a while back. Well, this one is a bit more directly inspired by ’90s sci-fi television, which had a bad habit of, “Okay, if we’ve beaten the bad guy, let’s move on.” Or “We beat the bad guy!” “Well, what does the world look like in the consequences of everything that’s happened?” “No, no, no. We’re moving to another galaxy. We don’t have, we don’t want to talk about that.” Stargate, I’m looking at you. So some of the concepts of this were things I was bouncing around as a response to the direction Stargate took after SG-1. I felt like there should have been more going on with… I liked the concept that they had of the battle cruisers in that setting and what they were doing with them for a bit.
And the idea of running kind of Stargate: Enterprise, where you’re running around with one of those X-303 battle cruisers visiting the Planet of the Week and dealing with the Problem of the Week. It stuck with me.
Obviously, Raven’s Peace is a long way from Stargate fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off. I think the core concept of it was rattling around my head in 2010. It got layered in with a bunch of other things. My concern around the degree to which we’re cavalier with genocide in military SF kind of folded into there, and at some point the concept of wanting to write a story that was about PTSD in a way that, again, we don’t see very often. Raven’s Peace is very much centered on Colonel Henry Wong’s PTSD in a way that I don’t think I was intending even when I wrote the book, even when I started writing the book. That kind of took me by surprise. I am definitely a plotter. I have an outline and I work from it, but it was still kind of a surprise to me how much, both in the outline and then in the actual book, that became central to the story.
In many ways, the climax of Raven’s Peace doesn’t take place on a battle ship. It takes place in a conference room. And that kind of ties into how Raven’s Peace compares to my other universes. One of the ways that’s interesting to me is the universe in Raven’s Peace is a far more unknown place, especially for humanity, but also in general that in a lot of my settings… Like in Duchy of Terra, humanity starts out not knowing what’s going on, is floundering around in the dark. But a bunch of other people… but everyone else knows what’s going on. They’re just watching the idiots be idiots.
In Raven’s Peace, humanity is not unique in the degree to which they don’t have a clue. Nobody except the Kenmiri have a clue, and the Kenmiri are gone. So suddenly, it’s like, “Okay, well what happens next?” We don’t… we know… I think I said in there, that there’s ten Kenmiri provinces or twelve Kenmiri provinces. I don’t remember how many off the top of my head. I think it’s actually sixteen, wow. And humanity has visited, on average, eight star systems in each one. The closest province to them, they’ve visited maybe fifty.
They don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know what’s out there. They’re seeking, they’re out there trying to help, and they don’t even know who’s out there to help. It’s a far more unknown setting than a lot of my other books. Other than that, I mean I tend to come up with a new FTL system… I’m often working with a new FTL system or in similar odd structures every time I put together a book, like a lot of the reasons why I put together a new setting is to play with a different set of assumptions around what the technology does. Cause the technology informs the war. It informs how wars are fought and informs how governments are structured. It informs how economies work, and I try to pull on all of those strings when I’m putting together a setting. And so we end up with each setting being quite distinct. Raven’s Peace, well, we’ll see how the Peacekeepers of Sol setting unfolds. I have met concepts that I’ve kind of set up and we’ll see how the dominoes fall.
Q5: Where can we find out what the audiobook release dates are?
Next question I have is from Bobby C from Texas. He says that he loves listening to the books on audio, but he hasn’t been able to find a way to know what the delay is between the book’s initial release and the audiobook releases. “Is there somewhere I could find that or are the dates too variable for ETAs?” The dates are too variable for ETAs. I usually know when the audiobook is coming out about a week before. I am given a rough heads up, usually, about a month in advance and given a date I can give people about two to three weeks in advance. And when I’m given that date, that’s the day Podium uploads the files. They don’t even know with certainty prior to that. There’s no way. I can’t give you a solid ETA because nobody knows. Just nobody.
So yeah, sorry, the audiobooks, the best thing to do is to either watch the Facebook page, or watch the [Facebook] Readers Group, or watch the mailing list. We will usually announce it in both of those places. We’ll announce on the Facebook page once I know the date. We announce it to the mailing list once it’s out. We don’t have, we’re not as on the ball with those as we are with ebook releases because we do have less control. Even more doing them ourselves through ACX, we have very little control over the release dates, unfortunately. So the audiobook releases are just, I wish I could give you a better answer. We just, we don’t have any control or visibility there, and we don’t even when we’re doing it ourselves.
Q6: In Raven’s Peace, is Henry Wong going to continue to be our POV character?
The next question I have is, again, from Big Shadow asking, “Will Peacekeepers of Sol have different protagonists per book, or is Wong our point of view character?” Wong is intended to be the point of view character for the series at this point. That may change over time, if the series runs [for a really long time]. This is intended to be a longer series, so that may change. Most likely what’ll happen is I will write six to eight books with Henry Wong and then we’ll shift to someone else. Potentially O’Flannigan. Potentially Todorovich. Potentially someone we haven’t met yet. I don’t have, I really only have a “next couple of books” plan for Peacekeepers of Sol.
Q7: Will you ever write sci-fi in first person POV?
Next question is, “Will you ever do a sci-fi book with a first-person narrator?” Maybe, I don’t know. Currently, I don’t know. Currently, I don’t have any new properties planned where the first book hasn’t already been written. So, it is what it is. Currently, Conviction, which is coming out in January, is written in third-person and that’s my next new property.
It’s certainly not something I would say, “It will never happen.” But I’m not entirely comfortable writing in first person. I did it for a change… I wrote Changeling’s Fealty in first person as a NaNoWriMo project to push my limits back when I thought I was never going to get published. And then, of course, I finished the trilogy in first person because, well, I started it in first person.
Q8: How do you use random name generators?
The next question is from Daniel. He says, “I know you’ve mentioned that your characters names come from a random name generator to keep people very diverse. Is this also true of the main or primary characters, or is there more involved with the creating the main characters in the various series? And do I do the same for gender?” The main characters get a bit more thought consciously put into them, but often it is still very much I’ll pick an ethnicity and, then I’ll run the random name generator for that ethnicity, and I’ll just hit regenerate until I find one that fits.
Sometimes I’ll pick a character’s gender in advance. Sometimes I won’t. The random name generator I use will give me male, female, ambiguous. Those are my choices. I can run… get me a random name and gender, I can run. Give me a random ambiguous person if I want an NB character, give me random male or female name as well. Certainly, there’s a good deal of randomization built into those. There was a good deal of intentional thought also layered in, as well, but especially moreso with main characters than with random characters. If someone shows up on the page for one screen, the odds are I opened up BehindTheName.com and hit “generate”, and then kind of poked at what the name I got was and maybe adjusted a bit if it was long and messy. Long is more of a problem than anything else.
So that is the last of the questions that I have from the Q&A form. Anyone wants to throw anything else in, that would be great. I do see one from Steven in the comments that I will get to in a second, but I am flagging that we’re working. We’ve been chatting for 30 minutes now. I’ve been chatting for 30 minutes now. The system doesn’t really lend itself to people talking back, which is probably for the best. We’d go on forever if we didn’t.
Q9: The Castle Federation series (and future novellas)
Steven’s question is, “Have you ever thought of returning to the Castle Federation series?” There are a few problems with the Castle Federation series as it was written, a couple of things I did wrong that I can’t undo. I am actually, I will be starting a Castle Federation novella on Monday, I think. I’m currently between projects at the moment. I finished Conviction earlier this week. My current plan is to write a short novella around the foundation of the Castle Federation Coraline Imperium Alliance.
We’ll see how all that goes. I don’t like to announce my novella projects in advance because they’re very fraught for me. It’s not a form I’m super comfortable in, but there are also some stories I want to tell that aren’t full-on novels, and I only have so much time in my life. I like to breathe, sleep, eat, those things. So yeah, keep your eyes peeled. There may be a Castle Federation piece coming in the near [future], in early 2020 at this point, but it won’t be a long piece. It’ll be a short throw away novella. No, not throw away, but it’ll be a short novella, probably around 25,000 words if it, if everything works the way I’m hoping. And it might not and it might never get written just because my brain decides to go, “No, no. You don’t get to write a novella.” I have… Yeah.
I work with, I do work with outlines and I have plans and I know at this point roughly what I’m writing through early 2021. So a novella like this gets dropped into the gaps as they come up and those are very random, whether or not they even come up. So we’ll see what happens. I’m testing with this one. If it works well, we’ll have a Castle Federation novella. It seems like that would make people very happy.
Q10: What’s your ideal length for the Starship’s Mage and Duchy of Terra series?
Our next question here is in the comments from John Yuen. I am sure I mispronounced that. Wow. “What would you consider an optimal length for a long series of Starship’s Mage and Duchy?” Uh… [laughs.] Duchy is being written in trilogies for a reason. I know that I hit, there is a couple of series I follow that went up to 25 books and honestly I burned out on them around book twenty. 15 to 20 books as a reader is too many for me.
So Duchy of Terra’s being written in trilogies and those trilogies are being kept quite distinctly separate. I think I’m looking at a five-year time gap between Imperium Defiant and Relics of Eternity, possibly longer. I haven’t decided yet. Starship’s Mage is looking at something similar, after… not the next book, but the book after that. I’m probably going to jump some time, and also I’m going to jump characters in Starship’s Mage. There’s only one more Damien Montgomery book left. There will probably one more book that is technically, there will be one more book released under the Starship’s Mage mainline series banner, and then there will be a second mainline series, but it will not be anchored on Damien Montgomery. You’ll see why. There’s a reason why it’s not that he’s dead, and it’s not that he’s even more crippled, but my current plan is that the Starship’s Mage series will end at Book Nine.
There will be more Starship’s Mage books, but they will be a very distinctly separate series, currently tentatively entitled “Mage Officer of Mars.” That may change. Again, anything that I say here that is not attached to a book that’s being published is subject to change without notice. The only thing I commit to is that the books that have been written will come out on the days we say they will or the months we say they will. Otherwise, that’s the last question I’ve got, and I’ve been chuntering on here for 33 minutes.
Closing Announcements
So yeah, Raven’s Peace came out last week. If you haven’t read it, please go read it. I really like it. I really like it. It turned out to be, it turned out to be a far deeper book than it was intended to be, which keeps happening to me. I write, I try to write flashy bang explosion books and, hello, there’s the theme and meaning. Dammit!
So, like I said, so I’m quite fond of Raven’s Peace. I’m quite fond of a lot of my books, but this is a first in series, so it needs a little bit of help. If you guys wanna, I would appreciate it. I appreciate everyone who buys it and reads it. I’d appreciate it if you happen to share it to your various followers, wherever on whatever. I’m not, I’m not going to say, “You must be an influencer and sell my books!” But if you’re an influencer and want to go sell my books, that would be great.
In any case, yeah, so Patreon is live. Again, it’s one method of many for getting our book, getting my books, but it is going to be the only non-Amazon method of getting my [ebooks] going forward. If you are a Barnes & Noble or if you’re a non-Amazon reader, the Patreon is going to be your only tool going forward.
I will note that we will also be utilizing BookFunnel in there, and BookFunnel is genuinely really good about walking you through getting the ebook onto your device, whatever that device happens to be. That’ll be the other partner involved there. But I do want to kind of push back. On the one hand, I want everyone to sign up for the Patreon, but I don’t want you to feel obligated to sign up for the Patreon to support US. Read the books the way that works best for you. We get the “What’s the best way to read the books to compensate us” question every so often and it’s like, I really don’t care.
If you’re reading the book, so long as you’re not pirating it, I’m getting paid. If you’re reading it on Kindle Unlimited, I’m getting paid. If you’re buying it on Amazon, I’m getting paid. If you’re special ordering it through your local independent bookstore, not only am I getting paid, I fucking love you. Please, the degree to which the independent bookstore is an amazing thing that I don’t interact with enough the way I operate. But you can order my books through your local bookstore and I would encourage you to do so. If you want to pay me back. I get paid slightly better if you order it through Amazon. Not enough better that I can’t support your local bookstores. They can order my books.
But yeah, the Patreon is there to enable another chain of people’s access to books. It exists as a pre-order platform to sell the electronic advance reader copies. We are going to have some goodies in there, but they’ll usually be early access items, not exclusive items. So there’ll be a short story going up early next week that’s free to the people who have backed us on Patreon. If I do end up writing this novella, it will probably be available in Patreon about a month before it goes up on Amazon. That’s kind of what we’re looking at there. Nothing on there is intended to ever be exclusive, but it does get you early access to stuff and potentially cheaper access, depending on what we do with pricing on the novellas.
We won’t be charging for anything except the novels that gets posted to the Patreon too, that’s probably relevant. But I have now managed to chunter on for five minutes after I said I was done, so I am going to call it there. I hope you all have a fantastic day. I hope you find, I hope you go read Raven’s Peace. I’ll be that selfish in my hoping, and I hope you enjoy it. Oh, apparently I’m required to warn that my books have gay characters.
Yeah, that’s… Someone left that in a one star review of Raven’s Peace. I’m not impressed. But yeah, if you care, Henry Wong is gay. Technically pansexual/bi. Sorry. Henry Wong is pansexual, demisexual. He is not gay. It’s important. It is actually important, and that’s why I want to make that point. But yeah, people are adorable. In that case, everyone have a fantastic day and I hope, well I’ll probably see you all when I do the next one of these, literally in a month. Woohoo! Take care.
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