Reader Question Day #15 – politics, sex, and Kindle Select

Kallinikos writes:

I sometimes send you political questions for Reader Question Day, but you never answer them. Why not?

I’ve come to thoroughly dislike politics, so I don’t write about them on my blog. Sorry.

Looking over your blog archives, I see posts about a THE GHOSTS novel called NIGHTFIGHTER. Is that coming out soon?

Actually, NIGHTFIGHTER was the original title of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, when I wrote it back in 2010. When I discovered ebooks, I changed the title to CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, since it matched well with the titles of the other two books in the series, GHOST IN THE FLAMES and GHOST IN THE BLOOD. And the new title works on a meta level, as well…Caina Amalas really is a child of the Ghosts, a product of their training.

The next THE GHOSTS book will be GHOST IN THE STORM, and I’m currently writing Chapter 14 out of a planned total of 29 in the rough draft.

angel91119 asks:

i love the caina books! but why doesn’t she just seduce people wouldn’t that be an easier way to spy on her enemies? and why can’t poor caina have more sex? 🙂

Actually, I get asked that question more often than you might think. So that’s going to be its own post later in the week.

Manwe asks:

I guess a fantasy society could develop more advanced technology, but I think alot of people would ask “but why should it?”

That might take it into the realm of speculative fiction – a story that a speculates on what a society might do in the face of a fantastical (or science fictional) element. Like, let’s say you were born, and a wizard cast a spell on you that rendered you immune to all disease until your heart finally wore out in your eighties or nineties. Obviously, that would change a society a great deal – the medical profession would have no need to treat infection or cancer, but you’d still need surgeons to deal with falls and injuries. And it’s more interesting if the power comes with a price – like, the wizard can cast the anti-disease spell on a baby, but one in every hundred children develops dangerous magical powers and has to be killed. Would that be worth the price?

So someday I’d like to do what is commonly called an “urban fantasy.” But not a book about teenaged vampires having sex with werewolves or werechickens or whatever. Instead, the story would be about what happens when a fantastical element is introduced into contemporary society…or what happens when 21st century technology is introduced into a society that relies upon magic.

Markus writes:

Will you make any of your books available in Kindle Select?

Probably not.

But first, an explanation. “Kindle Select” is a program Amazon offers writers. If you enroll your book in Kindle Select for a three-month term, you get several benefits – Kindle owners can borrow your book for free from the Kindle Lending Library, and you can set your book to go free any five days out of that three month period. The catch is that your book can only be available on Amazon during that three-month span.

About a third of my book sales come from Nook, iTunes, and the Sony eBookstore, so terminating that to gamble with Kindle Select would be frankly stupid.

That said, I don’t want to say I will never try Kindle Select – the ebook world is too chaotic for that. Two years ago I said I would never get an ereader, and look how that turned out. It also might become necessary for me to have something in Kindle Select, since it’s harder for non-Select books to compete on Amazon, since Select books get an edge in the sales rankings. At some point I might take one of my older stand-alone novels, try it with Kindle Select, and see what happens. (I have a long fantasy novel called THE WITCHMARKED PALADIN that I wrote after SOUL OF TYRANTS that might be the perfect candidate for a Kindle Select book.)

But I have no plans to turn any of my current books into Kindle Select books, or any of the subsequent THE GHOSTS, DEMONSOULED, or COMPUTER BEGINNER’S GUIDE books- there’s just too much of an audience for them on Nook, iTunes, and the Sony eBookstore.

ladysaotome asks:

I’ve got a Reader Question for you – which I think you may have answered previously but I can’t remember for sure or find it – the Caina “choose-your-adventure” stories – are there plans to combine and release them as an ebook?

Actually, I think they’ll be three separate novels a bit further down the road. At the end of GHOST IN THE STORM, Caina will be twenty, while she’s closer to twenty-eight or twenty-nine in the Choose Your Own Adventures. So there’s some room to fill in first. 🙂

And on the same subject – if you had been writing those stories without any votes, just yourself – would they have gone any differently? Would you have preferred different outcomes, routes, etc.?

Oh, yes. I had to improvise many, many times. For both GHOST RAGE and GHOST WOUNDS, I had a very clear idea of how things would go, and they turned out differently. GHOST ASCENSION went fairly close to how I envisioned it, though.

I do want to do another blog-based Choose Your Own Adventure, but I’ve got to get some other real-life stuff out of the way first. Or give up sleep. 🙂

-JM