The Saga of Beowulf - Review #7

I missed this one when it came out last week. I don't generally check my listings on the Canadian Amazon site very often, but for some reason I decided to do so today, and was surprised to find there was a review posted there. Technically this would be review #6, since it came out last Saturday, the 24th, two days before Lupa's review. As with the others, it brings up some interesting points, which I will address in a minute. But first, the review...

A 'Massively' Good Read!
By Cassiopia Jan 24 2009
**** 4 Stars out of 5

What an incredible epic story. I received this book sometime in November and it rested in my TBR pile throughout the Christmas break. I have spoken of my difficulty in reading and reviewing over the break due to my state of mind and frankly this book is a tome...not exactly conducive to light reading. A daunting 600 page novelization of the story of the Norse hero Beowulf. It is absolutely accurate to the Old English poem written in the tenth century and R. Scot Johns has completely adapted this tale from the Old English to a modern retelling as a piece of fiction.

I have really enjoyed it but it took forever to read. The size of the font is small and my eyes are getting quite bad so I could only concentrate on the pages for about 50 at a time. This is NOT the way that I prefer to read. I love to completely submerge myself in a story and inhale it as if enjoying the most delicious spaghetti supper. This is not a book for the fainthearted either...once you begin the story it is hard to put down. Beowulf becomes this flesh and blood man who seeks out challenges that will befit his role as a hero for his people the Geats and ensure his place in Valhalla for all eternity.

R. Scot Johns writes with great detail and describes the settings and characters as if he was setting the stage for a movie. He originally visualized and wrote the tale as a screenplay but rethought his decision to tell the story as a novel when two other movie screenplays were sold for production at the same time. I would liked to have read the screenplay. I loved the story and it is an easy read but it is too darn long. Sometimes there is just too much story to contain it within one volume so it might be more appealing if it was divided logically into a multi-volume tale.

This is a 'massively' good read!

This brings up a point that I've been discussing lately with some writer friends of mine, which concerns the length of fantasy novels. How long is "too long?"

When I was submitting queries to agents last year I got a lot of flack about the length of this book, and this really took me by surprise. After all, I grew up reading Dickens and Cervantes. Many of the classic works of literature, from Tolstoy to Melville, are massive works indeed. War & Peace in its unabridged edition is well over twice the length of mine (at roughly 1400 pages in translation). I read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1168 pages) at the age of fourteen. Even the wildly popular Gone With the Wind (at 960 pages) surpasses The Saga of Beowulf by several hundred pages. Victor Hugo's epic Les Misérables weighs in at a hefty 1779 pages!

And what of more contemporary classics, such as The Mists of Avalon (at 876 pages) or Tad Williams' acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Dragonbone Chair (at 766, plus appendices)? Williams' To Green Angel Tower was published in two parts at over 800 pages each! In fact, I don't think Tad Williams ever wrote a book much under 700 pages. One of my all-time favorite works, and the all-time classic of epic fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, comes in at nearly 1200 pages all told (although, of course, it was published in three parts).

One of the more interesting responses I received from an agent said simply this: "364,000 words, are you kidding?" I wrote back: "Have you never heard of Robert Jordan?" That was the last letter I bothered to send to an agent.

But this is not the first mention of the "daunting" length of my book in one of its reviews. And still it surprises me. I get that it's big. I wrote it, so I'm more aware of that than they might imagine. You should have seen some of the earlier drafts. Part of this, I suspect, is due to an issue reviewers have in common with agents and editors, which is simply the sheer bulk of material they must wade through every day. The pressures of the steady influx through their mail slot precludes the leisurely appreciation of a longer work such as an average reader would enjoy. I like long books. I seek them out. I savor them, and take my time while I do so.

But I will say this: The Saga of Beowulf is dense. It's a heavy tome, indeed. And this is due not only to its length, but also the fact that those 640 pages are literally packed with words. This is the third time, I believe, that a reviewer has made note of the "small type" that I employed. However, a comparison with other books will quickly show this is not true. In fact, if you look at the typeface that The Lord of the Rings is set in, you will see that my text size is much larger. The Saga of Beowulf is, in fact, set in the very font you're reading now, which is called Georgia, and I set it in the standard 10-point type. This particular font, you will notice if you look at the single-spaced block above, has very little white space between each line when compared to something like Times New Roman or Baskerville. It's also a very "fat" font, more squat and rounded than Times is, and so the letters sit very close to one another, rendering each line very dark and solid. This makes it easier to scan the line from left to right, but can be harder on the eyes with no white space to break it up. Many books have line spacing set much closer to this section that that above.

But you will also notice in the book that my margins on the edges of the page are small, so that the amount of text that fits onto each page is greater than the average book. I did this intentionally to cut the cost of production. By narrowing the margins, and eliminating the footer that originally contained the page numbers, the book dropped from its initial length of around 720 pages to 640 without removing a single word. It just wouldn't have been cost-effective to make it longer, and in fact, is barely profitable to do so now. As it is, I can only offer a 20% discount to retailers, and at $14.95 I only make a couple bucks. But these are the kind of decisions you have to make as a publisher.

As far as breaking the book in two, I will say again, as I believe I have mentioned before, that I originally had planned to put this book out in two parts (it divides quite nicely in the middle), but changed my mind for several reasons, which I still maintain. The foremost of these is that as a debut author I can't imagine anyone would want to buy just half a story, or be forced to buy two books when they could buy just one. I was, in fact, thinking of the reader in this respect. I wanted to give the consumer the best value for their money. And yet they whine about its length? Go figure. I would make more profit if I could sell two smaller books instead of a single larger one. And perhaps I should have done that. In fact, it's not too late. With print-on-demand I can alter my book at any time, so I might just do it yet. But I would also have to create another piece of cover art, and frankly, after the work I put into the last one, I'm really not up for undertaking another just yet.

With regard to this review, I can only say that again I am pleased to hear a reader has enjoyed my work, minor gripes aside. But once more I find the paradox of statements like "an incredible epic story" and "too darn long" to be confusing and contradictory. Is the book "an easy read" and "hard to put down," or is the font so small that it's impossible to read more than 50 pages at a time? With a book this long, I suppose it can be both. And at least her 4-star rating reflected these difficulties.

The Virtual Book Tour, Part 2

I apologize for being absent this past week, but I've been busy prepping for my blog tour. After working on it on my own for quite awhile, creating ad media and other promotional materials, it came time to determine which book blogs to approach. And that's where I simply bogged down. I've spent weeks now searching through blogs, researching those blogs, sorting through them to determine which ones would best suit my purpose, based on genre, format, page ranking and traffic interaction. But in the end I got blogged out.

If you've been following this blog awhile you've probably begun to sense that I'm getting burned out a bit on this marketing business. I've said as much in several posts. The truth is I really just want to get back to writing. But I feel I have an obligation to give my best effort to this book I've worked so long and hard on. I'm finding it difficult to let it go and just move on. But since I've done all this preparation for the proposed promotional blitz, I can't just give up on it now.

So I decided to bring in outside help at last and hired a PR firm to do it for me. Not the tour itself, of course, but setting it up. This way I can continue to promote The Saga of Beowulf and still get on with writing The Jester's Quest.

As I'd done so much work myself, I really only needed a basic package, which I found for a couple hundred bucks from the good folks over at Pump Up Your Book Promotion. Their basic Bronze package includes 15 blog stops, interviews and guest posts, as well a pre-tour buzz campaign and press release. I've been working for several days now to fill out questionnaires and write up posts about my book and how I came to write and publish it, the links to which I will post here as soon as they go live. So stay tuned for that.

For now you can click on the image above or follow this link to check out their site: Virtual Book Tours For Authors.

The Saga of Beowulf - Review #6

Lupa over at Pagan Book Reviews finally posted up her comments on my debut novel at her site today. I sent her a review copy back around the first week of November 2008, after coming across her Amazon review for Wealtheow, a retelling of the early Danish portion of Beowulf from the point of view of Hrothgar's wife, the Danish queen (which I must admit I have not read, although I intend to do so). It seemed to me that if she liked that one she might like mine as well, so I approached her with the query, which she accepted readily. However, she told me up front that she wouldn't be able to read it for some time, due to her current study schedule. After I sent my prompt last week she said she picked it up and read it in a week.

Unfortunately, Lupa says she no longer posts her reviews on Amazon, due to their policy of claiming copyright on anything posted on their site. I informed her that this is not entirely accurate, since copyright law specifies that full ownership remains with the author unless the rights are sold or transferred. But it is probable that you will only be able to read this review here or on her blog.

Pagan Book Reviews, 1-26-09
Reviewed by Lupa of Green Wolf Books

I enjoy creative retellings of older tales–and Beowulf is one of my favorites. Having enjoyed Wealtheow by Ashley Crownover, I was curious as to what angle R. Scot Johns would take with his Saga of Beowulf. It’s a very different retelling, yet one that I still enjoyed a great deal. The original tale of Beowulf serves as a basic outline for this richly developed story; all the elements are there, woven into a thick tapestry of prose. I’ve read some retellings of myths and legends that took entirely too many liberties with the material–this isn’t one of those.

Johns has done a remarkable job of essentially writing a good piece of historical fiction. He’s done research on the cultures contemporary to the original Beowulf–Danes, Geats, and others, exploring the interrelationships among these peoples to a great degree. This gives the story a lot more context, and fleshes it out nicely. Similarly, his characterization remains true to the original legend, but gives the characters a lot more dimension. I enjoyed how realistically they interacted with each other while dealing not only with Grendel, but with intercultural politics and disputes, and all-too-human interpersonal relationships and concerns. The troubles with Grendel, his mother, and the dragon are just one of several threads of story throughout this read.

Johns is a very detail-oriented writer; he takes four paragraphs [to say] what other writers might describe in a quarter of that space. This sometimes works to his advantage in giving a solid foundation to his story. Unfortunately, there are also places where the descriptions are too wordy, and the story drags to the point where I started skimming just to get to the next conversation or event. This is pretty much my only complaint with the book overall–for the most part I found myself immersed in the book enough that I managed to finish it a lot faster than I expected (which gave me a nice break from schoolwork!).

This is an awesome book if you want a good, solid read that will last longer than a single plane flight, but will keep your attention even through 600+ pages. Whether you take it as a retelling of Beowulf and are interested in how true it remains to that tale, or whether you approach it as its own unique work, there’s a lot to like here.

Five pawprints out of five.

Now, given some of the comments concerning the pacing it seems to me this really should have been a 4/5 "pawprint" rating (the name Lupa, by the way, derives from "lupine," i.e. "wolf," hence the rating system). On her blog she defines a "5 pawprint" rating as "a must-have for the library, can’t say enough good about it." I, of course, appreciate the higher rating, and realize it reflects her overall enjoyment of the story, if not precisely her evaluation of my writing (I like the phrase "thick tapestry of prose"). In our followup correspondence she clarified that she found the narrative to be "eloquent and rich," rather than "wordy," and given that she goes on in the review to say the book "will keep your attention," (even though she had to skim a bit), I'd like to think that overall she found the characters compelling.

This does, however, bring to light what might be considered a weakness of my writing. There's no doubt at all that I do tend to be wordy, that in fact I will say more than likely needs to be said, and use a lot of words to say it. But this, as I said to Lupa, is my style. It's what I like. I enjoy books that are big and lush and intricately complex. I like to delve into those worlds, and probe the psychology of their inhabitants. I wrote The Saga of Beowulf with the intention that it would need to be read more than once, that in fact re-reading it would reward you with a deeper understanding and appreciation of its riches. I do this not to intentionally obscure or render it impenetrable, but because it's the type of book I like. But I will take this advice, and the earlier mention of that same fault in the Popin's Lair review, as valid criticism offered honestly, and seek to improve it in my future writing.

Author Direct Sales

A response to my last post gave me reason to consider further this matter of authors selling directly to their readers. In replying to the question posed I began to realize the issue deserved further attention, and a post of its own. The question asked, for those who have not read the comment, was:

"...if there will be a difference in price, the gross price including shipping between the Amazon order vs. an order from the website and whether it would cause any competitive angst with any of your online retailers."

At first this seemed a fairly simple query, with an equally straight-forward answer. However, it quickly brought up other questions, each of which I will try here to address in the order they occurred to me, that you might understand my train of thought.

To answer the question directly, as to whether my website price will be competitive with Amazon, the answer initially was "no." Nor did I intend for it to be. At first I had only thought to offer signed copies of the book for anyone who might be willing to pay a slightly higher price for the privilege of obtaining what might one day become a somewhat rare collector's edition, or for a gift, or whatever other reason they might want one. I didn't expect this to be a significant source of sales, but merely a supplemental service. Just a simple PayPal button, nothing more.

But in the process it occurred to me that if I was going to all the effort of setting up a direct sales network, with its inherent requirement of keeping stock and shipping supplies on hand, collecting tax for local sales, and all the time and trouble it entails, I may as well offer unsigned copies from the site as well to make it worth the effort. This, however, brought up a host of other issues, two of which are contained in the query above.

The first question was, as I have said, whether I could compete with Amazon, but of more import was if I should. In truth, the answer to the former is really "yes" I can, because of course, as the publisher I set the price that Amazon and every other retailer must buy the product for, by setting the retail price and discount they are given. I could easily set the retail at a price of, say, twenty bucks with a short discount of 20% and sell the book myself for sixteen bucks, since I get my copies at wholesale (plus shipping and a small handling fee). I could set the retail price at thirty bucks, for that matter, effectively eliminating Amazon as a potential outlet. But what point would that serve that removing it from Amazon altogether might not?

That brought up the real issue of whether this was wise or not. While I might gain a slightly higher profit through direct sales it would also mean more work for me, and more importantly, less visibility were I to remove my book from other sites. In addition, a large part of the Amazon sales strategy revolves around improving an item's ranking. Because the highest selling books gain the greatest visibility, it becomes a self-fulfilling cycle to some degree, due not only to the fact that popular books rank higher in searches, but they also show up more frequently in Amazon's own "Better Together" and "Buyers Also Bought" promotions, to mention just a few. Thus, taking sales away from Amazon would be somewhat self-defeating.

Were this all the issue came to it would matter little, seemingly, particularly because of Amazon's free shipping offer on orders over $25, which would be difficult at best for me to match. Where the issue really came to the fore, however, was when I began to consider how to sell my digital editions directly from my site. This was, of course, my primary reason for going through e-Junkie, who offer a file hosting/processing service for a minimal fee. Direct sales of the print edition I could do simply enough via PayPal, but for the secure transfer of digital files I required an external service.

Thus far my eBook editions have been posted up on quite a number of sites in a variety of formats, including Adobe PDF, MS Reader and Word, Mobipocket, Lulu Digital, and Amazon's own Kindle. Once I had a way to sell the eBook version myself I had to consider what to charge for it. Given that I didn't have to share any of the profits, save for a pittance to e-Junkie, what I made was virtually 100% profit. At first I figured I would leave it at the same price point at which the others listed it, $9.95, not wanting to undercut their market. But why should I not?

After all - and here I came at last to the real matter at hand - I wrote the book, edited it, illustrated it, did the layout and typography, bought the ISBN's and set up as a publisher with all its intrinsic difficulties, produced the book from start to finish, and have since promoted it alone by my own efforts. Why, then, should I share a portion of the profits of my labor with a site that does nothing but list the book for sale, when I can do the same myself? In this day of global visibility through worldwide network integration, I have just as much chance of being found in Google searches as any other book outlet. Not only that, but I have actively promoted my work, whereas other sites just post the listing and leave it at that. What customers might come their way were very likely prompted to do so by my ads and interviews, my website, and this blog.

This ties in with the second portion of the question posed above, which is whether other sites might not disapprove of my competitive meddling, drawing potential customers away. First of all, it is highly unlikely they would ever know one way or the other, since none of them will likely ever visit my site. If, say, I was J. K. Rowling and I decided to only sell my books directly from my own website, I can see that Amazon and others might find this irksome, and seek some way to work around it. But an author of that stature would really have no good reason to do so. After all, it's not as if she needs the extra income (or the headache). It would prove far more advantageous for lesser known authors who might otherwise not earn enough from the sale of their work to make a living.

But the real issue is this: what sales these sites do make are due not to any effort of their own, but that of the authors who provide them with the products that they sell. Any customers they do get for my books are there because of the work I did, and so in selling my own work I take nothing from them that they did not have already. Rather than "competitive angst" they should, in fact, be thankful. Were all authors to sell their books themselves they would have no business at all. And that is something to seriously consider.

What this all boils down to is the issue of the author's changing place in the cycle of production. Much like what is now occurring in the music industry, with artists selling their own music through their websites and social networks like MySpace, authors can now do the same. This is not to undermine the value of these online retailers where it comes to providing additional exposure, but frankly this is now the only merit they possess. If an author or artist can create, produce, and market their own work, what need have they to share the benefits of that labor with others not involved in its creation? Already I have removed the agents, editors, and corporate stockholders from the picture. Why should I stop there? Cutting out these "middle-men" can effectively lower the final price, resulting in greater profits for the author and, more importantly, increased interaction with their readers.

Better still is the sense of "ownership" that true self-publishing provides.

Direct Sales Now Available

You gotta love these guys' logo. Not a bad company name either. We're definitely seeing the influence of younger blood in our commerce trends these days.

I spent the better part of yesterday and tonight setting up my direct sale system, both here - as you can see in the column to the left - and on my website. Initially I had thought to put a PayPal button up just to sell autographed copies as a specialty item for those willing to pay the extra cost. Then I thought I may as well sell regular unsigned copies as well, since Lightning Source offers what amounts to a drop ship service, where you simply insert the destination address into your order and the book is shipped directly after printing. A nice hands-off feature of the service.

Then I started thinking about how to sell my ebook editions direct as well, and I remembered hearing or seeing something somewhere about these guys. They host the file and handle all the web encryption and download links, all for five bucks a month for the starter level service. Payments are still handled through PayPal (plus your choice of a few others as well), and they can therefore also deal with tangible product, making them my ideal one-stop shopping cart. And they have a cool logo!

You'll note here that I've slightly raised the price, although this might change. I'm currently reconsidering my pricing strategy, given several recent comments saying basically that my book is a steal. And I agree. I had lowered the price after the first of the year to see how it affected sales, figuring if I could increase my volume it might make up for the slight decrease in profits.

That, however, has not proven to be the case, and not surprisingly. We are, after all, in the midst of a deep recession which has caused consumers to hesitate on such frivolous purchases as this, particularly if it might otherwise have been an impulse buy. Add to that the fact that I'm not well known enough yet to command the level of volume such a sales strategy would require, and it quickly became clear that earlier line of reasoning was faulty. Therefore I intend to raise my price back up as of the first of February, to $17.95 for a standard print edition, one dollar higher than my initial price: just enough to satisfy my sense that the book does merit a higher value, but not so much as to be unreasonable. I do still want to provide value both in cost as well as content. But you'll have to pay a higher premium for an autographed edition.

So if you've been wanting to get a copy, but have held off for some reason, now you can get it from the source! That is, unless you want it for your Kindle.

The Saga of Beowulf - Review #5

I had been getting a bit discouraged of late with the scarcity of results garnered from the effort and expense of sending out copies of my novel for review. And though I know the holiday season invariably wreaks havoc on everyone's best intentions ("I'll read it over the break"), still, after waiting for many of these since late October, as of this morning I was batting less than 1 in 5 on follow-through, increasing my frustration with the entire process. The fact that the reviews I have received have been nothing short of glowing has kept my hopes from failing altogether.

In fact, on Saturday I began to send out follow-up queries to the earliest of those review submissions, asking simply how the book was coming as a not-so-subtle reminder of their promised obligation. By this morning I had received three or four replies professing illness or some other reasonable excuse, and proffering their humble apologies and further promises that a review would be forthcoming. I wrote back to say there was no rush, that I just wanted to check up. And there really is no rush, but still I'm anxious.

So I was more than pleased when this evening I received at long last the fifth review for my debut work of fiction. Ironically, this reviewer was not one to whom I gave a nudge, but rather one of the last to whom I had sent a copy out, on the 1st of December in fact, just six weeks ago. And, as it turns out, this particular review was the one I was most anxious about, in that it comes from a retired linguistics professor, and therefore, from someone who would review my work not on the storytelling only, but also on my skill in composing it. Thus it was with great relief that I read the following...

Great Entertainment at a Great Price
Reviewed by Dr. Al Past
for POD Book Reviews & More
5 Stars *****

It would be hard to find anyone in the English speaking world who has never heard of Beowulf. Most could tell you he was the hero of "some old poem" who killed "that monster, Grendel." Some younger people might have seen the comic book-like movie flaunting its digitalized special effects, but most of the population will have had to have read parts of it in school, in translation.

Not many will remember why they had to read it in school, but there's a good reason: it's the first identifiable work of literature written in English. The problem is it must be read in translation (unless one is a graduate student in English, perhaps) because it was the language spoken when part of the Germanic languages split off and became modern English. We call that founding language Anglo-Saxon, or Old English. Supposedly, the verses in which the Beowulf story is told constitute very powerful poetry, but very few are able to appreciate it today. It takes work to pick out a single understandable word in two or three lines of verse, and a semester or two of college-level study to get comfortable with it.

The story itself, of the hero Beowulf saving a neighboring tribe of Danes from the horrible Grendel, and later from his equally horrible mother, ultimately becoming king of his own tribe, the Geats, and dying while saving them from a ferocious fire dragon, is a dramatic one. But in addition to the language problem, the tale is made even harder to appreciate by virtue of apparently being written down by two different people hundreds of years after Beowulf lived, by the fragments of the manuscript which have disappeared, and by its being compressed possibly for purposes of recitation.

All this is by way of saying that there is a terrific story here, but how to make it accessible to today's typical readers? Author R. Scot Johns has the answer: spend ten years researching the poem and the historical documents of the era, and weave it all into a novel, a novel of 630 pages. The result of this impressive scholarship is a labor of love: an astoundingly readable, satisfyingly meaty historical tale of fierce battles, of intricate clan ties and loyalty, of Norse folklore, and of characters who develop over time to stand as distinct personalities that were only dimly glimpsed in the ancient version.

As to how Mr. Johns managed all this, he has a website (http://www.fantasycastlebooks.com/) with extensive and interesting author's notes laying out the documents and the manner of stitching them into one continuous narrative. The book itself has glossaries of names and places, and a map of ancient Scandinavia, but these are helpful only when needed and do not intrude on the continuity of the story. There are no footnotes, for example.

One might reasonably ask, "What possible prose style would suit ancient poetry rendered into a modern novel?" Mr. Johns' solution seems to be rather a hybrid: in places he uses what feels like Old Norse hyperbole, and in others a more sensitively observed, human-scaled style. Since the original story featured heroic deeds of strong, brave men with large swords, chain mail, and horns on their helmets fighting monsters with mythic abilities, exaggeration is only fitting, and faithful to the original. In other places, when warranted, the style eases into a more comfortable, conventional narrative, with few flights of bellicose elaboration. It retains the feel of an ancient story, yet can be enjoyed comfortably and without rescanning the lines.

As a reviewer of books, I'm inclined to want to march right through a text. At the same time, I found myself enjoying the story and wishing to slow down and immerse myself in it. Torn between these two desires, I noted that Grendel and his mother had been dealt with by the halfway point. What, I asked myself, could possibly fill the rest of the pages?

To my surprise, I found I enjoyed the second half even more than the first, with accounts of battles with normal humans (well, ancient Swedes, anyway), an ill-advised raid into Frankish territory, sea voyages, Frankish politics and military maneuvers, the puzzle of Roman ruins, struggles over kingly succession and tribal politics, courtship, and more small doses of mythology: stone-eating trolls, fearsome dwarfs, and, overseeing all, the three Fates of Norse mythology, spinning out the threads of lives, measuring and cutting them when the time comes. It's all cleanly written and edited, a few errant apostrophes notwithstanding.

Mr. Johns' version of Beowulf is a terrific bargain at its current selling price. It should appeal to, and delight, those who like the original poem, those who enjoy the sword and sorcerer/dungeons and dragons type of yarn, lovers of historical fiction, and the many readers who are tired of the same old formulas and wish for something completely different. It would be an excellent choice to read the summer before signing up for an Old English course. If only I had had it back then!

The review speaks for itself, so I'll refrain from further commentary and go to bed. And tonight I am sure to sleep deep and well.

The Virtual Book Tour, Part 1

Over the past several days since completing my promotional book trailer I've been working on putting together a "Virtual Book Tour." This is intended as something of a way for me to wind down my efforts - and particularly my investment of time - in promoting The Saga of Beowulf, while still keeping it out there in the public eye.

In truth, I've been having some difficulty in shifting gears from this project, which has occupied so many years of my life, to a wholly new one which will no doubt absorb the next few years to come. I suppose this must be an ongoing issue for authors who, like actors, must spend a great deal of time promoting their past accomplishments while attempting to immerse themselves in their current work. I can see more clearly now how difficult that prospect is.

Over the course of the past three months my time has been almost entirely occupied with matters of publicity and ways to get my work out there where potential readers might find it. Everything from a hefty web presence to tools like media and book excerpts in several formats for readers to download or view online have been the province of my ad campaign. I've done interviews and giveaways and built two websites that are linked to Amazon and several dozen other online outlets, as well as running GoogleAds and MySpaceAds and printing up a ton of bookmarks and cutting them by hand. Thus far I've done all this (and more) myself, from writing to layout to publishing and marketing, with no outside help at all. It's been a virtual one-man show to make this book.

But now it's time for that to change.

The idea behind a "virtual book tour" is similar in many ways to that of its real world equivalent, where an author travels from one book store - or web site, in this case - to another, interacting with potential fans and readers. Here, the author generally makes a guest post on the hosting blog and spends the day responding to comments and questions left by readers, returning each day for a week or so to update their replies. I thought this might be an effective way to keep a presence for my book out there that wouldn't take a lot of time once I had it all set up.

But, having constructed all the media tools that I could manage and therefore feeling more than ready, I was faced with the daunting task of querying a seemingly endless list of potential bloggers, each of whom I would have to research to some degree in order to determine if the site and its readership might be compatible with my type of book, or if they even did guest posts. Some of these were clear and easy choices, review sites specializing in the fantasy genre, many of whom I had already approached (successfully or otherwise) during the review-gathering phase. I was hoping to set up somewere around a dozen or more tour stops, and given a likely low rate of acceptance I had planned to send out something like a hundred queries to achieve my hoped for twelve.

Then, during my initial research, I began to run across ads and banners with mentions of virtual book tour promoters, companies who offered pre-made packages featuring a range of options, from a basic 12-15 stop blog tour with press release and essential promotion to a full-blown multimedia presentation, complete with custom-made video trailer and media fanfare. These latter, of course, were well beyond even my most liberal budget limitations, and even some of the lower end packages from some promoters ran in the thousands of dollars. But there was one company that I came across who offered just what I was looking for, a basic package costing just two hundred bucks.

Even so, I thought that since so far I had done all the work myself I may as well keep on with it and save myself some needed funds. For two hundred bucks I could buy some thirty or more copies of my book and sell them on my website (something I'm still working on). But the more work I did in setting up my tour, the more I came to feel it would be money well spent to let someone else do the footwork who had more contacts than I. That, combined with the pressing feeling that I need to get on with my next book and a growing weariness with the relatively non-creative aspect of publicity, were enough to convince me to break down and bring in some outside help at last. Ideally, I would like to spend my time writing, and let a PR agent deal with all the marketing - save, of course, the part where I get to interact with the readers. But until such time as I can pay said PR agent from the proceeds of my book sales, this must needs suffice.

So stayed tuned for further details concerning the dates and places I will stop along the Virtual Book Tour being planned for March!

Last Book Giveaway Winner

Congratulations to Rebecca Bradeen of Dorchester MA, who was the winner of the drawing on Crystal's Interviewing Authors blog. The interview drew sixteen entrants, so not an overwhelming response, but there were some good comments among them. Rebecca had actually entered one of my earlier drawings, so here's proof that persistence does sometimes pay off. Way to go Becca! Enjoy your winnings. As I said, this will likely be the last one.

Embedding A Flash Video Player

As you can see, I finally got this video player issue figured out. After several days of mostly wasted effort, eventually I found what I was after. That's the blessing and curse that is the internet: pretty much whatever you're after is out there somewhere, but you'll probably have to dig through a lot of garbage first before you find it. I feel a bit like a web bum, a digital hobo if you will, looking for a bit of Old McDonald's farm in a landscape of binary high-rises.

In my searching I came across a lot of code that didn't work, or required all kinds of manipulation of the website header code or insertion of a bunch of extraneous support files, or more often than not, embedded a watermark of their logo over my video and wanted a lot of money so that I might get rid of it. So instead of paying for something that I wanted, I would in fact be paying to get rid of something that I didn't. What kind of capitalism is that?

In the end it turned out to be quite simple, as I knew it must be.

So for those of you who'd like to know how to embed a Flash Video Player with controls into a web site, without going through the hassles that I have for the past few days, here follows a brief rundown on the process. Also, for anyone wanting to put the above video trailer for The Saga of Beowulf up on a site somewhere, I'll give the code below. You can also now go to the Fantasy Castle Books website and download the video in a number of different formats if you'd like to save a copy of it.

The first thing you need, or course, is a video. I made mine using Flash 5 - a bit outdated I know, but then, so am I. It still works well, though. Where it's probably limited compared to newer versions is in its file format conversion. What I ended up with was the SWF file that I put in the last post, and which is also what I used for that skyscraper ad that's in the margin on the right.

Now, you can embed an SWF file into a website easily enough, and make it play automatically or not, but controlling it is a bit cumbersome at best, and why Macromedia hasn't integrated a default set of player controls that can be used I can't fathom - except, of course, that a lot of Flash video is not intended to be used that way. What I wanted was a player to control the movie, like the one above. Using Dreamweaver I could easily do this while building my page, but not here on Blogger. And, of course, if you've been following along, you'll see the trouble I had with YouTube's weak-ass excuse for video compression. Virtually worthless as far as I'm concerned. But that's another issue.

There are a lot a video formats, obviously, but the one you want to save or convert your file to is FLV. There are as many video conversion programs out there as there are formats to convert to, but the one I used is Moyea's Video4Web Converter, a freeware package that will convert to FLV, MPEG-4, MOV, 3GP/3G2, and a few others. What I liked about this software was that it has the option to retain all the original elements such as aspect ratio and frame rate, whereas other that I tried, like Any Video Converter only offer a selection of pre-defined choices. I did use Any Video, however, to convert the file to WMV for anyone that wanted a copy in that format (which is much smaller in file size than any of the others). But what you'll ultimately need is a video file in FLV format.

Once you have that, you need a player for it that you can then embed or link to. And here's the nice thing about the one I found: it works either way. You don't even need to install it on your server. All you need to know is where one lives. The player is dubbed the JW-FLV-Player, put out by Longtail Video (there's also a WMV version, but I haven't messed with it, as it apparently requires some header code and support files like many of the others). You can download the player and upload it to your server if you want to be assured of a ready source, but you can also link to it - from my site, for example, or another, as I'll show you in a minute.

Now, the instructions given on the JWPlayer website are a bit misleading, so I'll give you the easy version here. All you have to do is paste the following code into the HTML of your web page at the appropriate insertion spot, where you want the video to appear, and format the parameters to suit your needs, as I'll show you.

NOTE: The code is given here in a series of graphic images to keep it from running an instance of the player. However, you can right-click on any of these three images and choose "Save Target As" to download a text file containing the complete HTML code, to save you from having to manually copy it.

This first part is the Shockwave source codebase. This is where the browser redirects to download the necessary Shockwave files if they're not installed on the viewer's computer.

At the end of that part are the first set of variables, for the dimensions of the player window. Set these to the size of your video, plus 20 pixels on the height for the player controls. My movie is 550x400, so I set the height to 420.



After this you have some additional variables, called "flashvars" in the code. The first of these is the location of the video file you want to play, and here it's followed it by an additional, optional, variable which adds a still image to the movie window when it's not playing. Replace the first URL for my movie here with your own, as well as the URL for the image file. If you don't want an image, delete everything from the ampersand (&) to - but not including - the final quotation mark. Make sure you leave the space before the forward slash.



The last part is the code for the source of the video player itself, confusingly enough named the "movie" in the code (this apparently confused a lot of would-be code-creators out there). The first two URLs supply the location of the player file. You can keep my version as the source if you choose to, or download your own copy from the JW folks and upload it to your own server. This is the better choice, since that way you can always be assured the player will be accessible. But it will work either way (so long as I keep my site active). If you provide your own copy, you will of course need to change the URL reference in this section of the code.

Another copy of the player is available for you to link to here if you choose:
http://walkernewsdownload.googlepages.com/mediaplayer.swf.

The two instances of the player URL here seem redundant to me, and probably you only need the file name (i.e. "player.swf") as the value, and only the URL as the "embed src" - but this is how I found the code, and I haven't bothered to test my theory. This is followed by a second instance of the player dimensions, again seemingly redundant, but possibly these are the dimensions for the player itself, while the prior ones are for the video. Again, I'm only guessing.

Finally, there is a bit of code that tells the browser to get the flash plug-in application from the macromedia website. Not being a programmer, I have no idea how all this functions, only that it does, and that's all I really care to know. You may know much more about it than I, but then you probably wouldn't be reading this. Just follow these instructions and it will work just fine.

By the way, you can download a copy of this video trailer for The Saga of Beowulf on the Fantasy Castle Books website in FLV, MOV, MP4 and WMV formats.

The Saga of Beowulf - Promo Video - Higher Quality Version

RIGHT-CLICK TO PLAY / PAUSE / REWIND

This is my original Flash video version in the SWF format, in its original size and quality. You can readily see the difference between this and the YouTube version below. Because it's a streaming video, however, there might be slight stutters and irregularities in the playback speed, depending on your bandwidth. This version also has a functioning link to the Fantasy Castle Books website at the end.

I'm still working on finding a Flash video player with controls to embed, so for now you'll have to right-click to play or pause the video.

The Saga of Beowulf - Promo Video

After several weeks of fairly steady work I've finally finished the first promotional video trailer for my debut novel, The Saga of Beowulf. I had actually started working on this project some months back - gathering together all the odds and ends of art that I would need, compiling and arranging them into something vaguely resembling a concept - but kept getting sidetracked with other, less time-intensive marketing efforts to promote this book. But I promised myself I would finish this over my holiday break before I returned work on the 12th, so over the past few weeks I've been putting in a lot of hours on this monster, beating it slowly into shape.

The idea was to string together in overlapping sequences a series of images that would give a rough impression of the story and its setting, mostly through the use of iconic Viking art and other Norse elements like swords and ships to set up a dark and brooding mood. I found the piece of music, after several days of searching, on the Shockwave-Sound website, and paid $30 for full rights to its use. The composition, by Pierre Gerwig Langer, is entitled "Morpheus Calls," and I think it's tense and awe-inspiring. Just the rousing orchestration I was looking for.

I wish I could say my video composition lived up to it, but it was really all that I could do to make it all fit together in some rough semblance of shape. I had a script of sorts that I was working from, with sketched out ideas of the visual sequence, but the dictates of the media quickly did away with all but the most rudimentary outline of my original idea. I did have both the beginning and endings visualized essentially as they are, particularly where the ship sails into the scene that becomes the cover of the book, as well as a few of the combinations of layers that I used; but the remainder was pretty much done by the seat of my pants, with the movement and color scheme of one image series leading inexhorably into the next. The timing was the most difficult part to work out, causing me no end of headache, as everything kept unfolding either too slow or too erratic, and changing one element meant I had to shift everything else around it. It's a very tedious process.

Overall I'm happy with it, for a first attempt. I might try another later on, if I find the time, but don't count on it.

By the way, YouTube compressed the crap out of the video, so the quality is much lower than how it looks in the original. I'll try to get a better version up as soon as I can figure out how.

Amazon Sales Rank Tracker

For several weeks now I've been searching for a way to track and analyze the sales history and progress of my book on Amazon that would be less burdensome than physically clicking through to each listing every day, let alone every hour. I'm not sure exactly what I'm hoping to gain from this, other than a more efficient way to see how my book is doing, and particularly how effective my promotions are.

As it is I've been checking in on Amazon and Barnes & Noble's sales ranks each morning, and when sales are strong, more often than that. But this is tedious and time consuming, and ultimately impractical. For one thing, sales ranks on Amazon are calculated every hour, so that by the time I check each listing in the morning as much as 23 hours might have passed since my rank increased, meaning that my #4 on AmazonUK might well have been higher several hours before. But Amazon doesn't make their sales history public, so you're on your own in tracking it.

From what I've found there seem to be essentially three service-based methods available that have the history-tracking feature I was after. Two of these are fee-based and one is free, although one of the fee-based services provides a basic account for free, albeit with severe restrictions in its functionality.

Of the two pay-based services, RankTracer and RankForest, it's the latter that offers the free account, which tracks a single title on Amazon.com alone, with updates only every four hours, and it's ad-based as well. Fees for upgraded accounts begin at $3/month, but if you want the major features or better you're looking at anywhere from $9-$59/month. However, compared to RankTracer's $6 per title and site this is actually a decent deal. To track the two editions of my book (print and Kindle) on Amazon's six foremost sites would cost $72/month. And while RankForest only gives you Amazon's US & UK sites, they do track book sales at B&N.com, and for the $9/month rate you can track 5 titles.

Compared to these, the free site TitleZ is a fairly scaled-down version, tracking only Amazon.com, but seemingly with no other restrictions on its use. This was apparently intended as the precursor of a fuller version which never appeared, as the title still says BETA and the copyright date in the page footer is 2007. However, it seems to function well enough, with a single caveat which, unfortunately for me, the others have as well - they cannot find the print edition of my book on Amazon.com! They find the Kindle edition readily enough, and RankTracer even finds my print edition on the UK, Canadian, and Japanese Amazon outlets, but not on Amazon.com, rendering all three unusable for me. Why this might be I cannot fathom, since the print edition was listed nearly two months before the Kindle version came out. But such it is, and it seems there isn't anything that I can do about it, since I've used their search functions for title, author, ASIN and even publisher, to no avail.

So my search went on.

Until just yesterday I came across a small publisher's website that offers a downloadable software version that does all this for free (or some of it at least). The company is Paradoxical Press in Redmond, Washington, and the program is called - cleverly enough - the "Amazon Sales Rank Watcher." It does, unfortunately, only track Amazon.com, but since this is the major online outlet for most books, including mine, it covers the data I most need to follow. B&N only updates daily anyway, and though my sales on AmazonUK have been good at times, if sporadic, I'll either have to keep tracking those sales manually, or pay RankTracer to track that site alone. I've never sold a book on any other Amazon outlet, so no point tracking that!

So if you're looking for a way to chart the progress of your novel's life (or any other Amazon product for that matter), this nifty little program will do the job. It updates at any rate you choose, with increments from 1 minute to every four hours, and a fully customizable chart that can be set to display spans ranging from hourly to yearly for as many titles as you want to add. On top of that it has an auto notify icon for your system tray which pops up with a little balloon containing your current stats every time it checks them (at the rate you set). And of course, it charts the sales trajectory from the time you tell it to start tracking until you tell it to stop, giving you a visual history of your novel's life.

One thing it won't do is calculate your average ranking for a given period, which the others do. But this isn't really criticial, since a glance will tell you more or less what you need to know. The exact average number is pretty much irrelevant, unless you plan to use it somehow in your marketing, but peak rankings are what you want to know. Why would anyone care that my book's average rank for December was 429,383? (I'm just making up a likely number there, by the way). What you want to tell them is that it reached #4!

However, the other thing this program won't do is track the rankings of an item's subcategories - it only tracks the overall status in its major category: "books" in this case, for example. So my #4 in Historical Fantasy or #10 in Norse Sagas is still up to me to track. But then, none of the other programs do this either, so if you know of one please let me know.

Already this useful little worker has done me service in informing me this morning that at 3 a.m. last night my Kindle edition broke its record with a rank of #7447, beating its former peak of #8255. And this time, at least, I know for certain that's as high as it went!

Giveaways & Review Copies

Today I had verification of exactly what I was bemoaning in my prior post: three copies of my novel were listed on Amazon.com as "New" under their "New & Used" heading - each purportedly bearing the inscription "To Eric" and signed by the author. The price was $10.85 each. Ironically, adding insult to injury, the company that listed them, Authority Communications, is located here in Idaho, my home state.

To further appreciate this you should know that my first book "giveaway" (as opposed to review copies I've sent out, none of which were signed) was held on Popin's Lair - the same from which I received my most recent review - and the winner of that contest asked me to autograph the book "To Eric" as she intended to give it as a Christmas gift. The fact that this copy showed up as "new" on Amazon barely a week later testifies to the appreciation that gift received. The fact that there were three copies listed says something else entirely.

What this prompts me to is a complete and immediate cessation of free book offerings. From this point forward there will be no more giveaways for this or any other book I write, and any review copies I choose to send out will be done so with the covers removed, or in password-secured ebook format only. I know that many reviewers offer their services essentially in exchange for a copy of the book, but from my point of view it's given in exchange for being allowed to read the story at no cost to themselves. If a good story is what they're after, I'm more than happy to oblige them. But if all they want is a source of easy income by selling off those copies, I'm less than inclined to assist.

Authority Communications now lists my book along with 88 others on their Amazon Marketplace storefront, and I can only suppose they paid as much for those others as they did for mine - that is, nothing. In my effort to counter this I have informed Amazon of their actions, and contacted the company itself, who say the listing of three editions was a "mistake," and have changed the one remaining copy to "Used - Like New" status. Clearly, since this is a business rather than an individual ("Eric," I presume), this highly questionable practice is a fundamental aspect of their business plan.

It's their right to sell what they now own, but in doing so they've only hurt those who would accept that gift in the spirit in which it is intended, as well as infringing on my business model as an independent book producer. And unfortunately, so far as I can see, my only recourse in preventing it in the future is to deny all requests for free copies - free, that is, only to them: each one costs me $10.50 plus shipping to send out ($2.93 at media mail rate, plus $1.24 per bubble wrap mailer, brings my cost per "free" book to $14.67 for those within the U.S - although a number of these were sent to Canada and elsewhere at a substantially higher shipping cost).

Now, if this seems slightly bitter, or even trivial to some, consider that I must sell at least four new books to make up the cost of each one I send out for free, and that each free copy that shows up "Used" on Amazon results in one less sale of a new copy (since that buyer will purchase the used copy instead). Thus, the 27 review and giveaway copies I have now sent out (at a total estimated cost of $396.09 using the U.S. shipping rate) means that I must sell (calculator buzzing) 91.26 books just to make back the cost of my "complimentary" copies and break even. That, of course, doesn't begin to cover the cost of my ad campaigns, the total cost of which I won't even attempt to estimate here.

All this means that the chances of my ever making a dime from my ten-plus years of effort to bring this story to the reading public have crept into the negative percentile, and the chances of undertaking it a second time are even less. My only consolation is that the book has been well-received by those who have actually bothered to read it. And that, I'd like to believe, makes it all worthwhile. But don't expect to see me handing out any copies of the next one.

Interview + Giveaway

I know I said I wouldn't be giving away any more copies of my book, but my friend Crystal over at Interviewing Authors (and Book Reviews by Crystal and Author Virtual Book Tours) posted up an interview with me today, for which I said that would offer up a copy of my book to her readers. So head on over there and leave a comment on the post at this link to be included in the drawing, which is one week from today.

Contests always cause a slump in my sales as people hold off buying it to see if they'll win. I haven't determined in any scientific way if this is worth doing or not. On the one hand, it gives the book exposure, which is what you need - people can't buy what they don't know about, and you hope that it will intrigue enough people that at least you'll make up for the cost of the book and shipping.

Yet on the other hand I haven't ever seen a big rebound in numbers after the drawing's over. I tend to think most people just forget about it in the meantime and find something else to read. There are no shortage of books out there these days, and aside from books with huge promotion and mass support, I tend to think the rest of us are simply at the mercy of readers' whims on any given day. I hear a lot of comments from people saying that they want to or plan to read the book some day (even some of my closest friends), but most of them probably never will.

There are too many Twilights and Harry Potters out there with billion dollar budgets I just can't compete with. I'm almost tempted just to give up on promotion altogether and let the whims of fate determine who my books are found by. All this sales and marketing stuff is just distracting me from what I should be doing, and I'd rather focus on my writing. That's why I didn't really want to bother with another giveaway. But then if no one reads your book I guess there's not much point in writing it.

Departure Delay

Due to unforeseen circumstances there will be a slight delay in beginning The Jester's Quest. For one thing, my furnace fan has gone out and my house is freezing! It's very difficult to write when you're shivering. Then on top of it, my main computer went down, causing me to scramble a bit to get its hard drives moved over to my secondary machine so I can get back to work. This computer is much slower, but at least it's working. So bear with me a minute and we'll see if we can get this train underway.

The Jester's Quest - Introduction

This will be the first in what will hopefully become a regular series of posts in which I undertake to a write a complete fantasy novel here online on this blog.

By that I don't mean that I intend to actually sit here and write using this weak excuse for a word processor that Blogger offers, but rather that I'll post up each day's writing session here so that you can follow along as it progresses from a first rough draft all the way to publication in a year or so (hopefully), chiming in and offering whatever ideas and criticisms you might have along the way. In that way it will be more like a writers' group, with your feedback very likely affecting how the final tale turns out.

Since this is a work-in-progress, I thought it only appropriate to post up an early unfinished concept sketch for the cover here at the beginning as well. This was just a color test using quick watercolor washes to give me an idea of light and dark area balance, over which I comped some titles using Photoshop. I realized in doing this that the gray stone-like title area at the bottom was going to run into the cliff rock and lose any contrast it would otherwise have had, so I stopped painting. I'll have to rethink the color scheme before I have another go at it.

As I mentioned earlier, I had intended to start this post-as-I-go thing yesterday, but it took me much longer to get my act together than I had planned. Nothing new or surprising there really. But if by chance anyone was waiting for this to begin, I apologize for the temporary delay. I know I don't have a great many followers on this blog as yet, but I very much appreciate those of you who do read it. And whether you're one or a hundred, each of your opinions are valid and important to me, and I fully intend to take them seriously if you choose to join in with this. And I do hope you will.

At any rate, I needed to go over the notes I had for this story idea and decide how best to go about approaching it. As it turned out, it was much more difficult to decide than I had imagined.

First of all, I have the story concept already in my mind, and have done a fair amount of the pre-planning and outlining that are required when attempting something on the magnitude of a full-length novel. But how much of that I should tell you right up front I'm just not sure. For one thing, I doubt my notes and outlines would be interesting reading, or even comprehensible, since they're in part just short-hand for what's brewing in my head. Also, if I let you in on the ending it will spoil it for anyone who just wants the enjoyment of reading along. I imagine there will have to be a great many spoilers as we go, if you're to understand my reasoning for certain things, or add your own thoughts in, but I think we'll just have to play that as we go. In addition, the nature of this story is such that I was able to leave a large amount of it open to development as it progresses, probably more so than many stories would allow. This is a road-trip style adventure tale, so we'll be off into the great unknown for much of it. Who knows where it will lead or what might happen as we travel?

Still, you should have a rough idea of what you're getting into, so that you can decide if it sounds like something you're even interested in. After all, with any book you're looking at you get a jacket blurb to read at least.

So the basic story premise is this: There's this young kid who's a jester to the Crimson King, and he falls in love with the old king's only daughter, and she thinks he's quite fun as well, being a jester and all, you know. But of course, being a jester makes him roughly the equivalent of a hunting dog in terms of property - although the king thinks far more highly of his dogs than any of the several dozen orphaned kids that live down in the dungeons and make up his merry troop of entertainers, quirky as they are. There's sort of a Dickensian theme going on here, the gist of which is that this jester kid eventually sets off across the Seven Kingdoms to seek his fame and fortune, and to somehow prove his worth. It's a pretty simple idea, really. But of course, I've got more plot twists planned that I know what to do with just yet.

One of these that I will mention, because it will come up right away, even though the concept is not yet settled, is that this world is split in two - not physically, mind you, but metaphysically - with two worlds occupying the same space, just on different planes, so to speak. This isn't actually as bizarre and sci-fi like as it might sound, but is in fact based more on old Celtic folklore and British myths of elves and hobgoblins and whatnot lurking in the unseen world about us. The first writing sessions will have to do with this, because I tend to want to feel out the world that I'll be writing in before I start to populate it, even if what I write doesn't end up being used. With pure fantasy you have to invent everything, and although you can start with a character and work outward from there, this world I think will take some tweaking before I get it right. I may not even use this idea in the end, but it's something I've had in mind for quite a while now, so I feel I should pursue it.

Now, as far as the practical aspect of this project is concerned, there are two ways I could go about this, the simplest being to just post up every little bit of nonsense that I write and make you suffer through the entire process with me. That's only fair, as far as I'm concerned, since I don't have any choice in the matter, and you at least can choose to skip over the parts that seem like crap (and probably are). Some days I write a lot and some days hardly anything at all, and some days I throw away everything I came up with.

So then it occurred to me that if I post up all this garbage that I'll likely throw out later it might become too easy for you to just stop reading and bail out on the whole thing altogether, which would defeat the whole point for me. After all, half the reason I'm doing this is to keep myself from bailing out. So that means editing to at least some degree what I put up every day, which is a bit more work, and not really how the process is supposed to go when you're in the creative free-writing phase. So that seemed to defeat the whole idea, too.

Therefore, what I've decided to do is to sort of filter what I post and only put up what I think is at least half decent, and leave myself the luxury of tossing out what's not (and thereby save you the trouble of having to read it and tell me so). Probably a lot of what I post will be crap, I just won't realize it right off. But then, a lot of gems look pretty rough at first.

So I've actually got some stuff written already, which is kind of cheating at bit, because I'm going to post up some of it first before I really get down to writing new stuff. But that's because I started this story a long time ago and never finished it. Because of that I need to sort through what I've got and figure out just what to do with it. Also, I'm still working on my promotion for The Saga of Beowulf, and that's taking up some of my time. Fortunately, I'm off work from my day job for another week yet, so that will give me some time to put this all in order and get my brain in gear.

Tomorrow, then, the first part of this road trip will begin.

The Saga of Beowulf - Popin's Lair Review

This is my fifth review of The Saga of Beowulf, and the first not to receive a full five stars, netting only four instead. However, I will say up front that I feel this is deserved and fair, given what is said in the review. I'm frankly surprised that this lengthy tome has received such high praise thus far, and have been waiting anxiously for someone to come along and knock it down a peg (or star, as the case may be).

Some months ago I did an interview on Popin's Lair, where I also held one of my first drawings for a copy of the book. I gave the author of the blog a copy to read as well, and have been waiting for her review, especially given it's been listed on her "currently reading" panel for almost a month, and several other books have come and gone on that list meanwhile. But it's a long book, I know, and the holidays as well. But at long last here it is (slightly doctored for grammar):

Great Read ****
By Popin (Canada)

Beowulf is one of the oldest stories known to man, an epic that has captivated many generations. Many of us had to read some of Beowulf in school. I think in one of my classes we had to take a small section of the poem and translate the Old English into the English that we know today. It was hard...and it took me away from the story. I did my job, handed it in, and promptly forgot about it.

When the CGI movie of Beowulf came out, my interest in Beowulf peaked. The graphics were nicely done and while the story strayed from the original poem, I liked it well enough. So when I heard about The Saga of Beowulf, I knew I had to read it. That, and I wanted to see how someone would fare translating the long, long, LONG poem into today's English. I got bored and I only did a small paragraph, so I thought it would be interesting to read the book and find out.

I expected the book to be big, and at a massive 640 pages of small print, I wasn't disappointed. I was a little nervous in reading the book, but found that once you got into it, the story flowed very nicely. That doesn't mean that there weren't times when I was hit with a dry spot, because that does happen. The beginning and ending of the novel were fast paced and had a lot of action, but there were times in the middle portion, after Beowulf defeated Grendel and the story goes into politics, is where I felt the story started to slow down. The politics between the nations, while interesting, didn't have the same pace as the other parts of the novel, so it was a little hard to read.

Another problem that I had was the ending. I know I just said I liked it and I did, it was an awesome ending to the story of Beowulf, I just wish there was more of it. The events leading up to Beowulf's last battle were interesting, but when the actual battle happened, I was left with a feeling of, "That was it?" I wanted a little bit more description of what Beowulf was going through and how it was affecting Hæreth, Beowulf's lover. I know how this sounds - I wanted the book to be even longer. But for this particular scene, I felt like it was crucial to find out more. There is one scene where it shows what Hæreth is going through, but I just wanted more.

One thing that I did love about this story was the character of Beowulf. I liked the CGI movie but their Beowulf there, is completely different from the Beowulf here. In the movie, Beowulf is shown to be an arrogant, brass, thickheaded, brute, if you will; but in the book, he's compassionate, kind, strong. He's more human and doesn't let his achievements get to his head, which is great, since he has a pretty crappy life. If he wasn't portrayed as such, I don't think I would have felt as bad as I did for all the depressing things that happened to him.

If you are a Beowulf fan, I think you'd like The Saga of Beowulf, and if you are not a Beowulf fan, then I think you might like this as well. I had a fun time reading this.

So you'll like it one way or the other, fan or not. That's my kind of review. Buy the book already! You can't lose.

I thought this was a particularly insightful review, not least of all due to it's honesty. Don't get me wrong, I love my five star reviewers to death, and want to take them all out to dinner; but as a writer it's almost more useful to discover where your weaknesses lie than your strengths. You already use your strengths - what you need to work on is the rest.

But this review brought up another interesting point for me, apart from what was said of the book itself, which is that with the print-on-demand technology that I'm using to produce this book, I can make any changes that I want to at anytime without a hassle and for little cost. So if the reader wants more story at the ending, I can give it to them.

This particular comment struck me most profoundly due to my own inherent sense that I hadn't really fleshed out the final chapters as well as I would have liked. And this was due to nothing else but that I frankly ran right out of steam after working on it for so long. I also felt that the ending came too soon and that the final scenes could have had a bit more depth. But I didn't listen to my instinct and let it go, if for no other reason than the page count had already grown unwieldy by that point. This, of course, brings up the notion that perhaps I should also go back in and trim some of those "dry spots" out while I'm at it.

But I think before I do I'll wait a bit until a few more of those pending reviews pour in, so that I can add their thoughts to the process. So here's your chance to be a part of the next revision. If you've read the book and have some ideas that you'd like to share, please feel free to send them in. I'd be more than happy to take them into consideration.

Pacing is probably one the hardest things to handle in a lengthy novel, or any work of fiction for that matter, because the writer is completely incapable of being objective about it, knowing from the first how the story will all turn out, which the reader does not, even in an adaptation such as this. Wanting to know "what happens next" - and finding out - is what keeps you turning pages. But when you already know the answer there's no real way to tell if that equation is being fulfilled, except by guessing. The best you can do plot the trajectory of your story carefully, so that hopefully there is always something interesting going on. But then, as Popin points out, even "interesting" isn't always enough to keep the story flowing. Action, it seems is also necessary.

Now, this is a pretty action-intensive tale, I have to say, with seemingly (to me) nonstop battles start to finish, including multiple wars and fights both with men and demons. But there is also a great deal of dialogue and static content - what they call in movies "talking heads" more or less. And there are a lot of heads, too. Some hundred or more "speaking roles" and scenes with upwards of thirty or more of these involved at any given time. A lot of talking for such men of action. Maybe I should just cut out their tongues and have done with it.

Still, it's an encouraging thing to have a reader, after 640 pages of gruelling narrative, come away still wanting more. And that says more to me than all the rest of the review.

#4 in the UK!

A sudden spurt in sales on Amazon UK has pushed The Saga of Beowulf to #4 in the Historical Fantasy category, as well as #36 in Historical Adventure Stories and #45 in Epic Fantasy. Interestingly, Amazon UK doesn't list my book under Norse Sagas or Mythology as its US branch does.

The book's overall ranking in Amazon UK's Books category is now #24,960, still a long way from #1, but steadily increasing. So a big thanks to all you readers out there in the UK! It's my highest ranking yet, well above any equivalent US position, and a great way to start the New Year. Cheers to that!

Drawing Winner Announced

Happy New Year to all, and congratulations to Bridget who was the winner of the drawing for an autographed copy of my debut novel, The Saga of Beowulf.

To all who entered but did not win, if you send me your address I will send you an autographed bookmark featuring artwork from the book cover as a consolation prize.

Thanks to Random.org for use of their handy randomizer, and to all who left a comment on my blog.