Meet Lady Reine, my new personality

The 19 Dragons is a remarkable novella. It's completely unlike anything I've ever written before.

Not only was it my first serious foray into steampunk, I had no idea what it was about before I started writing it. In fact, I didn't have any idea where it was going until I was already two thirds of the way through. It wasn't even meant to be a single project until I had already written the first four "chapters" of it and realized that everything was happening in the same place.

It's also unusual in that I did zero marketing for The 19 Dragons. I sent it to a few bloggers that had been nice to me in the past in case they might want to review it, and I linked to it a couple times on Twitter, and that was it. I've completely ignored it since it was released. I didn't even put it on Smashwords for my international friends.

Everyone told me that novellas don't sell well. I had fun writing and designing it, but I didn't think it was worth any effort beyond that. By all means, it should have vanished into the ether as soon as I let it loose on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

The 19 Dragons is consistently my bestselling book.

What makes The 19 Dragons special? Is it the intense artistic style? Every section is marked with an illustration. Line and page breaks are utilized to help tell the story. The prose is lyrical and surreal.

Is it the fact that steampunk has become fairly popular in the last few years? Is it that it's an amazing, rollicking adventure unburdened by the trappings of a traditional plot? Is it the mysterious fantasy quality to it that people have compared to Neil Gaiman? Or is it a total fluke?

I can't determine what makes the book so popular, but when you've found something magic, it's something you want to hang onto. In the last month or so, however, The 19 Dragons has languished somewhat (I've been focusing on other projects). It doesn't seem fair that my lone steampunk book should have to compete for attention against my normal dark fantasy fare.

Kindle
Nook
Everything else

Since I'm working on another steampunk project, I've decided to unite The 19 Dragons and its future sibling under a new pseudonym. "Lady Reine" isn't a distinct penname -- I do have some overlap in fans -- but I've established a separate social media presence for her so that I can focus on developing her reputation in steampunk without diluting SM Reine's dark fantasy brand. SM Reine will continue to be my primary presence for writing and publishing online.

How does this affect you? If you're following me for steampunk, you probably want to start following Lady Reine so you catch all the action I have planned for the next year. If you're following me because you dig my dark fantasy, then you don't have to do anything at all. Easy peasy.

The 19 Dragons is still available during this transition. If you haven't already gotten it, you can even receive a free copy by following the instructions on Lady Reine's blog. You can also find her on Twitter and Facebook.

What do you think? Is this a logical move, or will it just split my following?

3 Reasons Why We’re Not Bored of Zombies Yet

I'm super duper busy and having an awesome time on my book tour! But it's making me neglect my own blog. Fortunately, I have awesome friends happy to fill in for me when I'm busy partying with book bloggers and giving away loads of cool free stuff, so instead of sharing another ridiculous story about the time I performed an exorcism on a possessed pair of underpants or something (you never know with me), my friend Stant Litore has dropped by to talk about zombies.

I'm a huge zombie fan, and I've exhausted countless hours planning what I'll do in the zombie apocalypse. They even make a small appearance in Death's Hand. Most of my personal exposure is from playing way too much Left 4 Dead ("pills here!"), but they've become ingrained in pop culture, and you'll see them popping up in movies, books, and everywhere in between.

Yet somehow, it's still exciting (and horrifying!) every time we see corpses shambling in the streets. They're still awesome. Stant Litore has three reasons why we're not sick of them. Take it away!

---

Do a search on Amazon.com for “zombie.” Go ahead. I dare you.

I just did. I got 8,764 results under “Books” alone.

You can find hundreds -- and hundreds -- of zombie novels, novellas, and anthologies. They’re everywhere. They’re swarming the bookshelves like a moaning crowd of ravenous dead. And many of them have the same plot: zombie virus hits world, world dies, survivors pull together courageously or get eaten, one by one.

So why do we keep asking for more? Why do we keep looking for more zombie stories, more zombie movies, more zombies on TV? There’s even zombie poetry and zombie T-shirts. Why do we readers keep lifting our arms and moaning in our deep, unanswerable hunger for everything zombified?

Why aren’t we bored yet?

Stant Litore, author of The Zombie Bible series

Zombie stories speak to us because we’re increasingly worried that in this rapidly overpopulated society, we’re surrounded by vast and uncountable hordes of brainless people who do nothing but feed. They turn to the TV or the Internet with hungry, desperate eyes and get spoonfed whatever a few richer, more cunning people want to feed them. Then they vote as they’re told, live as they’re told, and they buy, buy, buy, and then they die. And this growing suspicion that we’re surrounded by all these nameless hungry faces is starting to freak us out a little. Just saying. This may or may not reflect actual reality, but it reflects what a lot of us are afraid reality looks like. Zombie stories bring that fear out of the dark.

Reason # 2. You’d think that after millions of years of being born, growing up, growing old, and dying, we’d be used to death – that as a species, we’d be able to deal with it. I mean, we’ve had a lot of practice. But this just isn’t the case – death still scares the bejeezus out of us. We spend a lot of our time not thinking about it, but the reality is, at some point each of us comes face to face with the terrible realization that someone – a living, breathing human being with hopes, loves, fears, and dreams, and a name – can be snuffed out like a candle. Gone. Never see them again. That’s the saddest thing I can think of. And sooner or later, we have to realize it will happen to us, too. If we go too long without realizing it, it eventually catches up with us in some especially uncomfortable way, and then you get a midlife crisis (fun). Some of us find out early; we lose someone we love deeply, and we grieve. You may believe in heaven. You may believe that you’ll be reunited with your loved ones. I hope you do. But let’s face it, here on this earth, today, death still sucks.

Available at Amazon and Smashwords

We live in a world that has cancer, starvation, and serial killers. A world in which people who matter to us sometimes die in horrible ways. Zombie stories give us a way to start dealing with this -- because when you get right down to it, every good zombie story is partly about watching someone you love die in a horrible way and not being able to help them or save them, and then having to find some way to say goodbye. This is what makes AMC’s The Walking Dead so poignant – think of the scene with the two sisters in Season 1. The Walking Dead is all about how hard it is (and how unfair, and how necessary it is) to say goodbye.

Reason # 3. Zombies demand that we ask really tough questions about how we treat and use each other. Zombies are hunger incarnate. They see everyone living as food, and their imperative is to feed, to use and consume other beings to sate a hunger that cannot ever be satisfied. You don’t have to look too deep to see that they’re an exaggeration of us. Too often, other people are either a threat to us, or food (for our desires, our ambitions, etc.). In my series The Zombie Bible(which retells stories from the Bible as tales of humanity’s enduring struggle with its dead), many of the characters believe that when you look into a human face, into any human face, you see God’s face. But the zombies don’t see anything but food; they look in a human face, and they see something to attack and eat.

When you look in your neighbor’s or coworker’s face, what do you see? A threat? Someone who can help you get something you need? Or a living, breathing human being, with fears and dreams, whose face is a mirror of God?

This is Stant Litore. Thank you for listening – I look forward to hearing from you.

Death's Hand is out!

Okay, it's actually been out for a few days now. I've been lazy about posting on my blog. So sue me! (Um... actually... don't do that. I'm so poor that you couldn't get anything out of me anyway.) (Except maybe cookies, but you don't have to sue me to get those.)

For Kindle

For Nook

For Everything Else

Paperback

Goodreads

Policing relations between Heaven, Hell, and Earth is messy and violent, but Elise Kavanagh and James Faulkner excelled at it-- until coming across a job so brutal that even they couldn't stand to see one more dead body. Now they've been pretending to be normal for five years, leaving their horrific history a dark secret. Elise works in an office. James owns a business. None of their friends realize they used to be one of the world's best killing teams.

After years of hiding, something stirs. Bodies are vanishing. Demons scurry in the shadows of the night. A child has been possessed. Some enemies aren't willing to let the secrets of the past stay dead...

This book is very special to me. Most authors who have decided to circumnavigate the treacherous waters of indie publishing had a rough experience with traditional publishing first, and Death's Hand is my personal sob story. It's a great book-- lots of agents liked it. A couple even loved it. Unfortunately, this economy has forced everyone in the industry to be careful with new writers, so it never found a home. Getting to release it into the wild after so many years is gratifying. Talk about your big sighs of relief.

If you follow me on Facebook (which you should!), you've probably seen that I'm on tour for the next couple of weeks to promote Death's Hand. I stopped by Tynga's Reviews yesterday with a guest post about my favorite teams in fantasy, and I'm at Anna's Book Blog today talking about Alexander the Great. You'll find me at Red Hot Books tomorrow with a goofy blog about fictional boyfriends, and things just keep getting wackier from there. If you want to keep up with my tour and win some cool swag, you can check out the other dates on the calendar over at Red Iris Books.

You know you want these awesome charms.
You can get them if you follow my tour!
(But I'm keeping the skull.)

I have to say, the paperback for Death's Hand is extra gorgeous. It's definitely the most beautiful book I've ever produced, and Six Moon Summer and All Hallows' Moon are pretty stiff competition! I promised myself I would stop doing giveaways with paperbacks (it's so expensive, and I'm so poor), but I've decided I can't resist giving away JUST ONE paperback of Death's Hand. Just one! This is the only copy of Death's Hand you'll see me giving away, I swear. You can enter over at Goodreads:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Death's Hand

by S.M. Reine

Giveaway ends December 01, 2011.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

And as a last reminder, the Amazon Kindle is awesome. Super awesome. I bet you'd like to win one of those too, huh? You can get one if you follow Red Iris Books. Just sayin'.

Evil teen masterminds extort candy from unsuspecting neighbors

I didn't go trick or treating as a child, although I couldn't tell you why. My parents weren't terribly over-protective. They didn't hate Halloween, either. In fact, my mom made me wonderful (and terrible) costumes every year, ranging from clowns to zombies to sorceresses, which I wore to school with pride. But we never made it outside to extort candy from the neighbors.

This didn't strike me as odd until I hit high school, at which point I was no longer cute enough to get oodles of candy, but had become old enough to realize what a sweet deal Halloween is. I mean, all you have to do is walk around from door to door, smile a dumb smile, and get free candy! Nothing is better to high schoolers than free candy (except maybe free Red Bull, which I drank in such volumes that hearing the name still makes me sick).

Fortunately (or not?), high schoolers are inventive, to say the least. We couldn't compete with the adorable toddler fairies and children taking their puppies around to win candy. (Puppies! Those cheaters!) But we had brainpower the neighborhood kids didn't, and we put it to good use.

My friends and I mapped our town using markers stolen from the student store (such rebels!). We marked each neighborhood by what we knew of the candy output from previous years -- some neighborhoods didn't have kids, and didn't do candy; others were rich neighborhoods that gave out full size candy bars -- and we estimated what time the adorable trick or treaters would start going to bed.

Then we split into teams, and like candy ninjas, we moved in.

We worked in teams of two. We hit the neighborhoods with a medium child population first. They had a lot of candy, but the kids finished early. We aggressively swept each house, where families found themselves with tons of candy bags and no trick-or-treaters, and pretty much took what everyone had left over. We filled a few bags, threw them in the backseat of my friend's hand-me-down Ford Pinto, and moved onto the rich neighborhoods next.

One by one, we methodically struck the neighborhoods, and then we convened back at my house to pile up what we had won.

Let me just say, cute kids might get lots of candy-- but it's nothing in comparison to six teenage masterminds who have canvassed an entire town. We had filled three trash bags to the top. Three huge trash bags. Rationally speaking, we probably could have bought that amount of candy at Costco for $50. But to jobless teens, it was sweet, sweet victory.

We had finished eating all the candy by the time school came back on Monday.

Victory is sweet... and kinda nauseating.

It's been a few years since the Great Halloween Barfing of '04, but I can feel change in the air. I have a son of my own now. He's just barely not old enough to walk, but he kind of toddles sometimes, and he has a big flirty grin with just four teeth. In other words, he's a total candy magnet.

So now I'm planning. The time is coming soon.

The mastermind (and her new minion) will strike again.

Book Trailer Production Tips (plus my newest book trailer)

This is currently the only place you can see the book covers for the next two books in the series. I'm going to fiddle with them a bit more and do an "official announcement" with them in a couple weeks. :) Check it out!

Book trailers are a lot of fun, so naturally, most books have one at this point. They're mostly for the enjoyment of the author, though. Unless you have a kick-ass distribution method planned (or if you're a popular presence on YouTube), a book trailer won't do much for you on its own. It's a nice way to augment your page on Goodreads and Amazon, though, so if you have an itch for a trailer, you might as well get one.

Since a book trailer is unlikely to garner you a bajillion sales, I don't recommend spending much money on one. Do it yourself! Have fun! But here's a few tips to make a better trailer.*

1. Do not use copyrighted material in your book trailers.
This is one of the biggest problems I see, so let me reiterate: DO NOT USE COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL IN YOUR BOOK TRAILERS. This means that you can't use footage from movies, TV shows, video games, or anything else like that. This also means you can't use your favorite Rihanna groove or the score to The Fountain. Even though "O Death" would have been amazing for this book trailer, I did not use it, because IT IS ILLEGAL. You know how writers moan and complain about pirates infringing on their copyright? You're just as bad if you use another artist's work in your book trailer without compensating them. You can probably slip under the radar and avoid litigation, but you're putting yourself at risk, and you're still doing something highly unethical.

If you MUST have a song you love in the trailer, you MUST buy the rights to it. Or-- you can use royalty free resources! (This is your best option.) I get all my music from this guy, who is awesome. There's no one great resource for free stock footage online, so Google "free stock footage" and enjoy all the little sites out there. The keywords you're looking for are ROYALTY FREE.

2. Keep it short.
Book trailers appeal to us because they are a fast way to get around the attention span required by reading. I know that's totally counterintuitive, given that you're trying to sell a book, but who has the time to read a synopsis when everything else is zooming around on the internet these days?

As tempting as it is to tell your entire story in the trailer, you don't need more than 30 - 60 seconds to pitch your book. I write very simple scripts to help me with this. I'll generally take the back blurb of my books, and then make them even shorter. I chop them up into bitty pieces so they're easy to swallow. You can get away with losing some of your "mood" in the text because you have the video and music to back you up.

Cut your video tight, too. Tight, tight, tight. Don't leave unnecessary negative space.

3. Be tasteful.
There are cool video editing programs out there that can add all kinds of sparkles, goofy transitions, and text effects to your book trailer. You can even record video of yourself talking and make it look like you're a giant teddy bear. These effects are really neat and easily available to anyone these days.

Don't use them.

This goes doubly for people who are using Windows Movie Maker or another free video editing program. Those effects are distinctive. People will see them in your trailer and KNOW what program you're using, and it distracts from your message. Anything that makes the viewer question your presentation makes you less likely to have them click through to your "buy" page. (I do use Windows Movie Maker, by the way. I'm cheap.)

I mostly limit myself to unobtrusive panning/zooming and crossfades. You can do a lot with just these effects. Trust me.

4. If you don't have access to a quality resource, substitute something else.
I don't do voice overs in my trailers because I don't have high quality recording equipment. The most obvious sign of a cheap production is crummy audio. (Point in case: any of my vlogs.) I could dig up my old shotgun mic and do the voice over on my mini DV camera (which I would also have to dig up, actually), but I don't have any voice talent either. Using simple text is my best bet.

Likewise, you probably shouldn't shoot your own video, either. Leave that to the professionals who have invested the time and money into good equipment to produce stock footage. Your job is to be a great writer. Nobody expects you to be Stephen Spielberg. Alternatively (if you can't find the right video), you can use good photos or illustrations. That's mostly what I did for the Six Moon Summer trailer, and it turned out nicely.

5. Have fun!
Ignore all my other advice. Go make trailers. Produce lots of them! Do ridiculous, wacky, oh-my-gosh-this-is-so-horrible things in your trailers. Be experimental. You'll get better with practice and develop your own style and techniques. Nobody does something expertly on the first try, after all! (But if you ignore #1, don't post the trailers online. It's still illegal, even when it's fun.

What are your favorite book trailers? Post links in the comments! I'd love to see them!

* Believe it or not, I actually have real experience in video production. Yep. Writing, shooting, editing, preparing packages, the whole deal. So for once I'm not talking completely out of my posterior.

Amazon attacks books with typos

Crime Fiction Collective reports that Amazon has begun removing titles with typos and formatting errors without warning. This is likely a response to customers complaining about many books, since the prevailing feeling seems to be that self-published books are poorly edited and of low quality.

Initially, it seems like a great idea. I've bought a few novels to find they're disappointingly incoherent, and encouraging authors to thoroughly edit their books is in everyone's favor. But it does raise a few concerns.

In The 19 Dragons, I make creative use of formatting, blank pages, and incomplete sentences as a method of storytelling. There's a precedence this kind of thing. Bella's comatose months after Jacob leaves in "New Moon" comes to mind, as does the somewhat more obscure "I, Q" by John de Lancie and Peter David. Most readers have understood and appreciated this. I do have one review complaining of "formatting errors," though, and now I'm concerned it might get removed by an automated bot.

As distributors of content, Amazon feels responsible for making sure customers are happy and get the best experience possible. I understand and agree. That said, I think adding this gatekeeper is unnecessary. Readers are an adequate gatekeeper all their own. If a book is intolerable, the reviews will reflect it, and astute readers won't buy bad books regardless of action on Amazon's part. Word of mouth always prevails.

One or two typos isn't a big deal, nor are a couple minor formatting errors. They're inescapable. You can edit a book a dozen times (which I do) and still find a couple lurking in the dark depths of its pages. Even best-selling books from big publishing houses make mistakes. Heck, if Amazon wants to remove books with problems, they'll have to go in and take down half of Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series, which dissolves into nothing but typo-ridden sex scenes in the latter books, and I hardly see that happening.

This has the air of being a step toward ostracizing or barring independent authors. We should definitely encourage everyone to only publish their best-- but I don't think this is the way to do it.

What do you think? Is this good or bad news for authors and readers?

Halloween, Red Iris Books, and cover design (new vlog!)

So consider this your friendly reminder to follow Red Iris Books on Facebook and enter to win a Kindle (if you haven't already), and enjoy the Halloween season at least half as much as I do. But not the candy corn. That's all mine. BACK OFF.