Category Archives: Books

Welp, It’s Official

23 Friday Jun 2023

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I’ve now claimed belaurientpress.com as a domain and redirected it to the Belaurient Press page here. That was necessary because I *ta da* now have a business PayPal account and need to add a business URL in the settings.

I don’t know if I’m going to bother with setting up an actual individual website for Belaurient Press—it’s only my books, Nicola’s books, and the anthos for my writer’s group so a whole separate website seems like overkill. But it’s all another step towards becoming my ultimate small businesswoman self and taking over the world, muwahahahahahaha.

More importantly, now that I have my business PayPal account I can start adding purchase links for all my/Nicola’s print books (I can sell ebooks as well because I have a BookSprout account but I need to do more research into how to fulfill ebook sales) as well as the Belaurient Arts jewelry. Now all I have to do is start recording the audiobooks and set up my Patreon and I’ll be well away.

I Am Considering Something

19 Monday Jun 2023

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As you know, Bob, in addition to writing SF as Melanie Fletcher I also write SF/fantasy/paranormal romance as Nicola M. Cameron. A number of years ago I wrote a SF romance called Degree of Resistance wearing my Nicola hat. It was supposed to be the first novel in an SF romance series I called Pacifica Rising—post-apocalyptic with high-tech dystopian notes, kind of Westworld meets Mad Max.

Except that the book did not sell well at all. Got great reviews, mind you, but it doesn’t fit either the classic SF romance genre (woman falls in love with OTT masculine and protective alien/clone/lab-developed life form, gets railed, they’re torn apart, fight their way back to each other, HEA) or the post-apocalyptic romance genre (against a gritty hellscape of zombies/blood gangs/brutal militia/et al two people—or more, you never know—must fight to survive while they fall in love, are torn apart by Events, fight their way back to each other, HEA).

Instead, Degree follows a cybertech living in the Pacifica Protectorate after the fall of the United States who loses her Defense Forces fiancé when he dies in a crash. Ten years later, she learns that he didn’t die after all, but had stumbled upon a top-secret project of the protectorate and was converted into a mind-controlled cyborg by a sadistic commander to keep him useful and in line (it turns out that there are other reasons for this later in the series). The cybertech now has to rescue him with the help of a shadowy resistance organization—but they have their own demands. And she has no guarantee that her former fiancé will even recognize her anymore.

You see how that doesn’t fit very easily into SF romance tropes. The book had an HEA, but I think I really threw off readers who wanted a romance about a woman getting railed by a cyborg with all the in-depth worldbuilding, tech, and suspense. One of my writing group partners did the editing on the book and told me bluntly that it read more like a Melanie book than a Nicola book precisely because of that.

So I sighed, shunted the series into the back of my mind and continued to work on Nicola’s more successful series. But it occurred to me today that if Degree of Resistance reads more like a Melanie book, then maybe Melanie should write the rest of the series. I already have the series arc roughed out, and while there will be romance in each of the books there’s also going to be a lot of tech, political plots, development of a futuristic world, and everything that SF readers like.

I mean, hey, SF readers enjoyed Lois McMaster Bujold’s A Civil Campaign, Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, and Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, and all three of those books could be classified as SF romance. The ground’s already been broken—I don’t see why I shouldn’t take advantage of that.

 

Man, This Week Is Flying By

07 Wednesday Jun 2023

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Monday was spent trying to recover from that crappy night of pain and no sleep so I wasn’t able to get all the things done that day.

Instead, I went into my bank yesterday and opened a business checking and savings account. The nice thing is that I can access everything online (I’m kind of a fiend for keeping track of my money online), and now that I have those I can go ahead and get the business PayPal account set up. Once that’s done, tra la, I can finally start selling stuff from the website.

I also have a fun business project to tackle—coming up with a pretty design for book boxes. Romance readers in particular really dig having a pretty book box with swag when they order signed copies from an author, and since I have access to Lyndon’s Silhouette I can design and cut out adhesive vinyl stickers that I can put on a box and make it gorgeous. Yeah, there are companies that will do this for you but 1) that costs money I don’t have, and 2) once I get the design finished I can produce a stack of boxes over a Saturday and have them at hand for shipping printed copies of my books.

Onward!

So Did I Actually Relax Today?

29 Monday May 2023

Posted by in Books, Jewelry, Personal

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Hahahahahahahahahahaha. Have you met me?

I did wake up late because I felt like having a lie-in, but after breakfast I got my proof of Random Realities, decided it looked spectacular and went upstairs to put it with my other proof copies in my office, and thought, “Hmm. This room is really dusty. It wouldn’t hurt to give it a good cleaning and vacuum the carpet. Ooh, and I can reorganize the electronics rack at the same time and store all of my print books that I’ll be selling up here.”

So instead of relaxing, watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and generally recharging the way I wanted to, I was climbing on a freaking stepladder to dust and reposition pictures on my office wall and hanging the standing thread spool rack over my sewing machine. Because I am an idiot who does not know when to take a break.

Oh, but it gets even better. When I was putting stuff away in my closet I noticed the non-functional Brother label printer and decided to pull it apart and clean off the leaked battery acid that was fouling the battery terminals because, well, tomorrow I was going to start being a proper small business owner and being able to label my newer files in my filing cabinet would be a goodness (see: I am an idiot).

In the process I managed to detach the wire leading from the terminals to the guts of the machine, so I asked the Brit to solder it back on. He wound up having to replace the entire wire, but even with fresh batteries it wouldn’t turn back on (no big deal—it was a freebie that came with his Brother printer). I put it in the recycling pile and ordered a new one because I’m OCD and it’s a tax write-off since I’ll be using it in my office.

Then I sent off two invoices for custom projects, did laundry, vacuumed the downstairs, fed the cats, and made to-do lists for Belaurient Arts, Belaurient Press, and the pending business stuff in general. It’s 9:37 PM and I haven’t had dinner yet. I clearly need a minder.

And While I’m At It, New Stories

27 Saturday May 2023

Posted by in Anthologies, Random Realities

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I need to preface this post with some info—if you weren’t already aware of this, Amazon announced this month that they were raising print prices for any books printed through KDP. Price increases had already happened at other printing platforms so it didn’t come as a surprise. That being said, it turned out that printing costs for books with a 6″ x 9″ trim size (which is the standard for fiction trade paperbacks) were going to go up rather significantly as compared to books with smaller trim sizes.

Now, almost all of my Nicola books have an 5.25″ x 8″ trim size because that’s the size Evernight used and I liked it. And when I formatted the Future Classics anthologies for print I used that trim size as well because I am OCD and like to have all of my books the same size on the bookshelf.

But Random Realities was my first self-pubbed title and I had used the 6″ x 9″ trim size on it. Since I would actually like people to be able to buy it in print (and buy author copies myself) without breaking the bank, I decided to reduce the trim size to 5.25″ x 8″.

Except that trim size is locked into the ISBN number you use for your book so you can’t change that unless you unpublish the book and republish it with a new ISBN. I thought about it and decided to do it—it wouldn’t affect reviews, and Amazon now provides tools where you can archive old, unused titles and link new print editions to the ebook edition.

And then I thought, “Well, wait. This book is 11 years old and you published a bunch of other stories in the interim. You only had 10 stories in the original edition of Random Realities and were already thinking of releasing a new short story collection. Why not just add those stories to Random Realities and make it a decently sized book?”

See, Random Realities was *touches fingertips* a bit of a vanity publication. I wanted to have some work of mine in print and this was the easiest way to go about doing that, even though the total size was in novella range and kind of short for a print book. But if I added another ten stories written in the intervening eleven years, including my delightfully weird take on how the French would deal with experimental humanoids (“Le Gardien”) and my steampunk novelette “The Lark Ascending,” that would increase the size of Realities to a very respectable 67K. And with a smaller trim size that would result in a decently sized book.

So that’s what I did. Now, if you already bought Random Realities you don’t need to buy this new edition—the bulk of the additional stories were published elsewhere so chances are you’ve already read them. But if you’ve never bought it before and would like to have a collection of my stories on hand, it’s now available in ebook and print versions.

New Covers

26 Friday May 2023

Posted by in Arts and Crafts, Random Realities

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Since I have to reformat Random Realities ANYWAY, I thought it was time for a new cover. And to be frank I needed a break from formatting.

The problem with covering this collection is that it has SF, fantasy, one horror-adjacent story, and a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. How the heck do you represent all those on one cover? Which is why I went with the “girl blowing bubbles with the bubbles representing different realities” on the old cover.

But let’s be honest, my graphics skills have improved mightily in the last ten years, and the SF/fantasy antho market has also changed. Gotta keep up with the times, don’t you know? So this is my new provisional cover—gonna give it a couple of hours to cool, then come back and see if I still like it. If I do, I’ll add it to the Vellum file and upload to the assorted platforms.

What I especially like about this picture is that with all the cool stuff visible through the door, the girl and her teddy are still looking off to the right like something even better is over there. I think it gives a sense of hope and optimism for the future, and God knows we all need that right now.

Let’s Get ‘Er Done

25 Thursday May 2023

Posted by in A Most Malicious Murder, Anthologies, Books

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Since I’m in the process of setting the bulk of Nicola’s books wide I figured I’d do the same for my alt history mystery novel A Most Malicious Murder, my short story collection Random Realities, and the two anthologies I manage for my crit group.

Mind you, the bulk of them were already essentially wide—AMMM was the only one that had ever been in KU. But I realized that neither the short story collection nor the anthos had been uploaded to Google Play. Well, we can’t have that, now, can we?

So AMMM is now fully wide, as is Tales From a Lone Star (A Future Classics Anthology Volume One), and I’ll be creating the Google Play versions of Random Realities and A Lone Star in the Sky (A Future Classics Anthology Volume Two) later today.

Then I get to go back to the nine pending titles that still need to be converted and uploaded. This indie publishing gig isn’t for the weak, I can tell you that.

Editing As Fast As I Can

19 Friday May 2023

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So here I am, busily loading in Nicola’s no-longer-in-KU books into Vellum to prep them for wide release, when I discover that, wahey, apparently formatting does not always transfer over perfectly. So if only part of a paragraph is italicized in the Word doc, there will be instances where the entire paragraph gets italicized in Vellum.

Which means that I now need to go through each damn manuscript and check for formatting weirdnesses. And of course since I’m in there I really should check for any spelling/grammar/punctuation weirdnesses that might have slipped by my editor, my betas, and me.

So instead of popping a Word doc into Vellum, doing a quick pass to make sure the pages have the correct categories, and uploading the results to B&N, Apple, Kobo et al, I now have to play editor for *counts* eleven manuscripts.

Oh, did I mention the hellacious hailstorm that hit my neighborhood this afternoon? All the weather services said that we might get some rain and maybe a thunderstorm, no biggie, so I didn’t bother to put the car into the garage.

We got quarter-sized hail, people. The pool looked like it was boiling, and my car is now ever so lightly dimpled. Hopefully most of them will pop out with the application of hot weather, but the one time I don’t rack the car in the garage…

And people wonder why I drink.

Ah, Saturday

13 Saturday May 2023

Posted by in A Most Malicious Murder, Cons

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Which for me usually means cleaning and catching up on any business paperwork, but hey, it’s still the weekend. I think I’m going to celebrate by rewatching Season 2 of Bridgerton and relaxing once the day’s chores are done. Technically I suppose I should go out and do some fence repairs in the back yard, but we keep having intermittent rain storms and climbing on a metal ladder is probably not the best of all possible ideas in that situation. There’s always next week.

In other news it appears that I will be attending Armadillocon this year, which will be entertaining. I’ll need to order some copies of A Most Malicious Murder in case anyone wants one, tra la. I’m also very happy that Elizabeth Moon (aka Captain of the SFWA Musketeers, aka Ma Capitaine) will also be attending, which means I’ll be able to catch up with her.

A Nice Surprise

12 Friday May 2023

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Not only did I make two jewelry sales, but people are starting to pay for my Vella story (written as Nicola) so I’ve got that going for me. Now if I could just rustle up some contract work and send the Brit home for two weeks things would be magic.

In other news I’ve got a weekend full of business work ahead of me (I need to start a business PayPal account so that I can sell books and jewelry through the website, start reading Zoe York’s books on the business side of indie romance publishing, update all of my income/expenses spreadsheets, and tweak my Amazon ads), plus I really need to do a big stock-up shop and give the bathrooms a deep clean.

I keep thinking that eventually I’ll have a weekend where I can just relax, read, watch TV, that sort of thing. I still remember a Sunday many years ago when the house was clean, I’d gotten all of my tasks done for the week, I didn’t have any jewelry projects on the go, and I spent the afternoon on the couch reading. It was freaking magical. I would like to experience that again.

In the meantime, however, there is work to do. So I’m gonna do it.