Art ∴ Design

Copies of veteran short story author Lawrence C. Connolly’s first novel, VEINS, are now shipping from www.FEBooks.net and www.VeinsTheNovel.com with a wider release in August.

A fast-paced supernatural thriller, VEINS features a visceral plot and engaging characters brought to life through amazing portraits by Star E. Olson. Once you start reading, you won’t be able to stop until the final bullet is fired and the last body falls.

The synopsis:

Fleeing from what should have been a perfect crime, four crooks in a black Mustang race into the Pennsylvania highlands. On the backseat, a briefcase full of cash. On their tail, a tattooed madman who wants them dead.

The driver calls himself Axle. A local boy, he knows the landscape, the coal-hauling roads and steep trails that lead to the perfect hideout: the crater of an abandoned mine. But Axle fears the crater. Terrible things happened there. Things that he has spent years trying to forget.

Enter Kwetis, the nightflyer, a specter from Axle’s ancestral past. Part memory, part nightmare, Kwetis has planned a heist of his own. And soon Axle, his partners in crime, and their pursuer will learn that their arrival at the mine was foretold long ago . . . and that each of them is a piece of a plan devised by the spirits of the Earth.

The Reviews: (more at www.VeinsTheNovel.com)

“This rich, mesmerizing, and darkly wondrous novel held me under its spell for days as I read it, and haunts me even now, weeks later. This is what grand story-telling is all about, regardless of genre. I began the novel as an admirer of Connolly; I finished it as one in awe—and so will you.”—Gary A. Braunbeck, Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild Award winning author of Destinations Unknown and Mr. Hands

“Much like the souped-up vintage Mustang that cuts through the heart of the story, VEINS starts fast, accelerates quickly, and finishes with a flourish, fulfilling all the promise at novel length that Lawrence Connolly has been flashing for years in his outstanding short stories.”—Robert Morrish, fiction editor of Cemetery Dance

A couple weeks ago I discovered that Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword & Sorceress 23 was open for submissions via e-mail . . . for four more days. I’ve been thinking lately that one of my big regrets from the past few years is that with all of the time and energy I’ve put into Fantasist Enterprises, I have done very little writing of my own. Besides that small burst of creativity roughly this time last year, and a short story I wrote in December, I’ve written nothing more than letters, e-mails, marketing materials, and the occasional blog.

I slid into the publishing business thanks to my love of reading and writing. Story is my passion, and I decided that I wanted to spend my time working with it. I knew I had a lot to learn about writing, and was planning on going to Seton Hill’s writing popular fiction program so I decide to focus on learning about publishing by doing it, and allowing my own writing to simmer on the back burner while I worked. I reasoned that after graduating from Seton Hill, I’d been more accomplished at writing, and could then turn my attention more towards getting published.

Even though I completed a draft of a novel in order to graduate, and I wrote a handful of short stories during school, after graduation, writing just faded away. The bug bit every once in awhile, but never so hard that I really accomplished anything. Seeing that call for submissions really made something click. It’s time that I actually make the time to do some writing of my own.

So I gave myself a challenge. I would write a story to submit to the book, which meant coming up with an idea, writing it, getting someone to proof it, make any final edits, and e-mail it . . . in four days, knowing that I would be working on three of those days.

I placed a link to the webpage about the call for submissions in my Firefox toolbar as a subtle reminder, told a few folks that I would not be as responsive as usual over the next few days, and then did my thing. On the days I worked at my part time job, I ran through scenes in my head and then I would jot down notes and rough blocks of prose during my breaks. I only had Thursday all to myself since there was a lot of work to be done for VEINS on Tuesday. So that meant a few very late nights and early mornings.

I managed to do it. I wrote 37 pages, had Meesh proofread it, did some fine-tuning of my own, and sent it out. I did not have high hopes, and I am sure the story is still rough, but the point is, I gave myself a challenge and I pulled it off.

And yes I got a rejection less than 24 hours later, but I saw that I can write and actually finish stories, and rather quickly. If I could survive on three to four hours of sleep a night indefinitely, I’d be able to churn out a novel every month at that rate.

So my next writing challenge is to finish a novella that I started months ago, and actually send it out to Writers of the Future. From there, I’ll just have to watch out for more interesting anthologies to try and write for.

In case you haven’t heard, Amazon is up to something that is going to make things harder for a lot of independent presses and self-published authors.

The long and the short of it is . . . at some point in the not-terribly distant future, if your POD book is not printed through BookSurge, which is owned by Amazon, it will not be available for sale on Amazon, except through their used book dealers. You can still sell them through the Amazon Advantage program, but that adds another layer of fees to the already razor-thin profit margin on many, if not most of these books.

They are not looking for exclusivity, so you could still produce POD books through alternate vendors in order to reach other sales channels (such as through Lightning Source which sells direct to Barnes and Noble and to the trade through Ingram). But this will require multiple setup fees, as well as multiple sets of files, since printers have varying requirements that need to be met in order to print the books.

While it’s certainly easy to just say suck it up and do what Amazon wants, for many small presses and self-published authors, all of those extra fees, and the extra time, is just too much, so some will be forced to choose between being sold at Amazon, or being sold elsewhere.

If you care about these issues at all, please repost this information and make sure that Amazon knows that people are not happy.

For more on the subject, here are some links:

Angela Hoy’s article on WritersWeekly.

The response page to that article (contains lots of links, up-to-date news, and a list of other articles).

SPAN Executive Director Scott Flora’s letter to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

E-Reads’ Richard Curtis’s article on E-Reads (he evidently saw this coming).