Category Archives: Bookselling

Bookselling, Fiction, Publishing

‘The Baldur Game’: the series ends

4 Comments

I’d like to think this is a significant day in literary history. It’s certainly significant in my literary history. The Baldur Game, the final volume in my Saga of Erling Skjalgsson, has gone live on Amazon today.

It’s only the ebook at this point — the paperback is ready to go, but I hit a small glitch in getting the cover together. I hope that’ll be straightened out very soon.

An era in my life is finished. These are the books I dreamed of writing as a boy. Whatever I accomplish or fail to accomplish in my little life, I’ll be able to say that I fulfilled that dream. I set my books before the world; let it judge them as it will .

I hope you enjoy it.

Authors, Bookselling

According to Hoyt

Leave a comment

Sarah A. Hoyt, who blogs at According to Hoyt and who frequents the juggernaut that is Instapundit, was kind enough to include my novel The Year of the Warrior in her final post in her Liberty Book Promo, promoting authors who support freedom. Here’s the link. There are other books there that might interest you too.

Bookselling

Book stuff

4 Comments

Today is a stellar day, a frabjous day – a day I shall much note and long remember.

My endless book translation job is done, done, done. Barring touch-up requests, assuming there are any, it’s over. All but the invoicing. The book was more than 500 pages long, and it wasn’t large print. Footnotes were involved as well.

I once compared translating a book to demolishing a piano, passing each piece through a suspended iron ring, and then reassembling the instrument on the other side. My piano has been reconstituted (Norwegian to English, of course) and I like to think it’s still relatively in tune.

I am limited in what I can tell you about the book (I’ve said this before, but you may have missed it. It’s mathematically possible you might even be interested). It’s a literary biography. I’m doing the work for a scholar in another state. I believe my translation is only for the scholar’s use in a larger project, so I have no expectations of ever seeing it published.

Anyway, it’s done. I am working hard at the moment getting used to the now-alien concept of having free time.

Also, I wanted to mention that I finally (there was a delay) got some copies of the Amazon paperback edition of The Year of the Warrior. This enables me to share the picture above, a family photo of the whole series, except for the baby on the way.

Bookselling, Publishing

The Year of the Paperback

6 Comments

Today the whole world is discussing the fall of Assad in Syria, the arrest of the Brian Thompson killer, and the verdict in the Daniel Penny trial.

It is a busy news day.

Which is rather sad from my point of view, because otherwise I’m confident everybody would be talking about the release, this weekend, of The Year of the Warrior in paperback on Amazon.

You realize what that means, don’t you?

It means that you can now own the whole series of Erling Skjalgsson books, all the same size, lined up on your favorite bookshelf, to the envy and amazement of all your most most sophisticated and insufferable friends.

Just make sure to leave a space for The Baldur Game (coming soon).

I started this business of formatting books for Amazon (if I remember correctly, though I have an idea I may be mistaken on some points) while setting up The Baldur Game. I watched how-to videos on YouTube that took me through the process of making a Microsoft Word document into something you could humbly submit to the gatekeepers of the great publishing leviathan.

I was terrified to do it, frankly. I am an old man, what they call a “digital immigrant,” someone who’ll never be quite at ease with all the ones and zeros. And yet I worked at it to the point where I’m actually relatively at ease uploading books now.

So I figured I might as well go ahead and make all my Erling books manifest. One after the other, I worked my magic, and behold, they did appear, and I held them in my hand, like the treasures of far Cathay.

And I cannot lie – there’s a thrill to holding your book that just doesn’t happen seeing it appear on a Kindle. Like holding your baby rather than looking at his picture. (But with less diaper changing and mineral oil.)

I even think I’ve developed a minor flare for design. I think the paper books I’ve created possess a sort of simple elegance. They look good to me. I am not ashamed of them.

Bookselling, Publishing

Kings and curly quotes

Leave a comment

I forgot to show you a picture of the new, fully realized, paperback version of King of Rogaland. So here it is. That’s a pretty good cover, I think.

I also think I told you I’m working on an Amazon edition of The Year of the Warrior in paperback. At the risk of sounding self-satisfied, I’m actually kind of impressed with it. It’s a good story – grabs the reader and keeps the action going. I’m not sure I’ve improved a whole lot as a writer in the 25-plus years since the thing was published.

I was taken aback to discover that the final draft I’m working with – as well as the privately printed version I’ve been handselling for a few years – features “dumb quotes” rather than “smart quotes.” You probably know what that means – smart quotes are the curly ones, curving forward and backward, that you find in printed material, which MS Word usually creates for you automatically. Somehow (I think it must have been during the text’s brief sojourn as a Google Doc) it lost its smarts. And I’m embarrassed to offer the book to the Amazon public in such a state. It would be a blow to my aforementioned self-satisfaction.

So I did a web search and found a method for converting them back. To my astonishment, it worked. Now I’m trying to figure out how to do the one-slash quotation marks and apostrophes.

I’ll probably mess it up. I need to save backup draft.

I’m hoping I can handle the stress.

Bookselling, Fiction, Publishing

Paperback woes on a rainy day

Leave a comment

The Norwegian word for “busy” is “travelt,” which always makes me thing of a crowded road. Which is pretty much what I feel like right now. I have a) my “novel writing” work, which currently means formatting books for paperback, b), the magazine I’m editing for the Valdres Samband, the ethnic organization that hired me for this purpose, c) my translation work on the Sigrid Undset biography, and d) the monthly newsletter for my Sons of Norway lodge (which won’t take long but should have been finished by now).

This morning it rained. The first rain we’ve had around here in months. It’s been raining all day, except for when it snowed (alas for the trick-or-treaters!). When I was done with my novel writing this morning, I happened to look outside and found that the first four of my cartons of orphaned books had arrived from Nordskog (see last night’s story). I have an idea the mail carrier was unhappy about being made to carry those heavy cartons, because he left them on the very outside edge of the porch, where the drip from the awning would pour straight down on them.

Some of the cartons were soaking wet; all were damp. I brought them in immediately and freed the books from the cartons. They’re air drying in my living room now, as are the cartons.

Most of the books are fine. A few have covers curled. But I’m getting these things for pennies on the dollar, and don’t expect to outlive the supply anyway.

Ten more cartons arrived this afternoon (perfectly dry, I’m happy to say). Also I finally got my paperback copies of The Elder King from Amazon. I’d been looking forward to that – photo above.

And… I got a surprise. Some moron – and there’s no moron but me on this job – accidentally put the wrong title in the page headers. All the right-hand pages in this edition say at the top that the book is Hailstone Mountain, which it is not.

I wouldn’t have this problem if I’d done the prudent thing and ordered a review copy for myself before releasing it. But I lack the patience. Now I have this.

It’s easily fixed. I’ll republish it tomorrow. Which means the book will be briefly unavailable. The few copies already sold will go down in history as errata, no doubt to become sought-after collectors’ items.

Bookselling, Fiction, Publishing

Start the presses! ‘King of Rogaland’ in paper!

1 Comment

The hits just keep on coming – as many people must have said in the radio business, but I don’t think I ever did, back when I was in the game.

I am forging my way through my Viking books, and can herewith announce that the paperback version of King of Rogaland is now obtainable from Amazon.com. This completes the whole set (sort of, details below), except for the final book, The Baldur Game, which still awaits its cover art.

And then there are the first two books, which present complications of their own.

West Oversea, Book 3 of the series, is in an odd limbo at this juncture. Nordskog, its publisher, is – sadly – going out of business. They have kindly returned all rights to me, and are selling me their entire stock of paperbacks at a steep discount. That’s about 20 cartons at last count. I’ll have my little house packed with them, I guess, which is (I think) the final stage of deterioration in a self-published author’s life cycle. I’m working now at formatting the book for an Amazon version of my own. I think selling this stock of Nordskog paperbacks through Amazon would create a distribution challenge for which I’m not equipped. So I’ll just create a fresh one, and sell my Nordskog volumes at Viking events. I expect they should last me another 40 years or so.

And then there’s The Year of the Warrior. I’m currently getting the paper version printed by a private printer, but I’m going to try to get that one out through Amazon too. I think it’ll be cheaper, but the juxtaposition of Baen’s electronic version with my paperback will, I have no doubt, raise unanticipated problems.

We suffer for our art in many ways. This is not one of the worst. Yet.

Bookselling, Fiction

Major publishing news!

Leave a comment

Due to tremendous popular demand, my novel The Elder King is now available in paperback form.

If you order it now, it’ll take a few days to arrive, as the engines of industry must be reconfigured to accommodate the expected sales rush.

But it’s in the system. It’s official.

Bookselling, Uncategorized

Personal appearance alert: The Great Northern Viking Festival

Leave a comment

I’ll be doing a Viking event this weekend, and this time I’m giving you a whole day’s notice to make your plans to attend!

Because I love you and want you to be happy.

The Great Northern Viking Festival will be held Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 19 and 20th, in Mankato, Minnesota. I plan to be there Saturday only, and only for the “family friendly” daytime hours. In the evening, I’m informed, they will let their hair down a little (those who haven’t inflicted History Channel haircuts on themselves). I myself am too old – and too conventional – for such shenanigans.

This is the first year this event has been held. I have no idea what to expect, really. Several Viking groups will be present, each doing its own peculiar thing.

For all I know, it will be a heathen thing, and I’ll have to flee like a monk at Lindisfarne, shaking the dust from my feet as I scamper. But we’ll see. I’ve loaded my car with a substantial supply of good and uplifting books, either written or translated by me, which ought to raise the tone in any case.

Come by if you’re in the area and feel like checking it out.

Bookselling, Publishing

The ‘Mountain’ in my hand

Leave a comment

The package arrived yesterday. At last, after many a year, I can hold a paper version of Hailstone Mountain in my tremblous hand.

The book is thinner than I expected. I suppose that’s because of the 6”x9” format – more words per page. I’m used to thinking in terms of what’s called “mass market paperbacks,” the roughly pocket-sized books you generally see on racks in stores (or used to). For some reason, we self-publishers seem to gravitate toward a larger size. Perhaps we’re compensating.

Maybe the cream paper that I didn’t select would have been a little thicker, too.

In any case, my books are my children, and I’ve known this one only electronically up to now. Like having a kid whose mother took custody and then moved to California – you only know him through Zoom calls. Now at last he’s made his way to my doorstep. He needs money, of course.

I wonder how I should deal with selling these things at Viking events, as one by one they get instantiated in the physical universe. My bestseller at events is Viking Legacy. After that, it’s The Year of the Warrior (the paper version I have printed, not yet available on Amazon). West Oversea comes in third. This one follows in the sequence. I figure demand for each successive book should be smaller than for the previous one. I anticipate carrying a couple cartons of the later books of the saga with me to events, but I don’t imagine I’ll have to stock as many of those. It’s already a lot of cartons to lug around.

At the festival in Green Bay, I was signing somebody’s book and they complimented my handwriting. This surprised me. I’ve always considered my handwriting awful, for the practical reason that it’s hard to read. My writing may possess a certain grace of form, but it’s not pragmatically effective.

I wish my art to be useful as well as aesthetic. But not enough to write slower.