I’ve got no idea why, or for how long, but at the moment Amazon has offered a deep discount on my two Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual books.
You can get either Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves or The Lair of the Clockwork Book
Each one’s about 130 full color pages, at some amount I am too weary to calculate per page. But, you know, a bargain. They’ve gotta be CRRRAAAAAZY to offer these deals!
Here’s another preview screenshot of my CreateSpace Shop Manager plugin for WordPress.
So far the config screen lets you add categories, rename them, change their options, change their sort order, and delete them; within the categories you can – this afternoon! – add books.
Adding the books means I have to generate thumbnail images for them. That’s because of the big surprise I found when I added CreateSpace books to the Archonate Bookstore: the thumbnails expire! It must have something to do with Amazon’s cloud hosting.
They generate a thumbnail image dynamically when you visit the page and a few hours later… that image won’t be there any more. So my plugin captures the thumbnail, does some processing on it, and saves off a permanent copy of the image.
Next up is sorting and deleting books within a category. The ‘Refresh’ buttons below the books will capture a new thumbnail image (in case the cover is changed).
I may need to stop working on this tomorrow, at least for a little while, so I’m hoping to have everything in the Admin UI working properly by then.
It’s a busy day here in the Secret Laboratory: I had to wrestle WordPress to the floor and I just had it begging for mercy when my mail carrier arrived with the final proof for Voyage of the Hypatia; that’s the extremely limited edition print from my recent failed Kickstarter campaign. Backers – and even a few strangers – have been ordering their copies from the pre-order page while I’ve been mucking around with the proofs.
It’s a three day weekend here in the US of A, and so I can’t order the prints until Tuesday morning. That makes sometime early on Tuesday the time when the limited edition will close; and as I promised during the bloodbath at Kickstarter, this is the only time this picture will be made available as a large format print.
So sometime Tuesday, it’s all over. But until then… you can still get yours.
A few days ago I put up a working online bookshop for Matthew Hughes’ Archonate web site – actually it’s the second book shop there, since I’ve been feeding his site with eBooks all year long.
This one’s different because it’s stocked with print-on-demand paperback books, printed and shipped by CreateSpace. CreateSpace allows self-publishers to sell through several sales channels; the author gets a different cut of the sales price at each one. You can buy these paperback books at Amazon – in several countries – or direct from CreateSpace. It’s not surprising that an author gets a much better percentage of the sale if it’s made through the CreateSpace “store”.
But the CreateSpace stores are primitive objects. Each one offers just a single book and there’s no way for an author to tie all those individual book pages into one single, unified storefront, which is sort of necessary if you hope to sell your books online without a middleman like Amazon.
The Archonate‘s CreateSpace store is a proof of concept for what I’m working on now – a WordPress plugin that lets you combine any number of books into any number of category pages and host them – all together, all with a single shopping cart – within your WordPress blog. All an author needs to do is to set up the shop and go back to writing promote it.
You can see a screenshot of the admin screen for the plugin below.
It’s going to take me awhile; this is my first WordPress plugin, and the past few days have been made livelier by my creative use of language while I discovered new and exciting things to yell about.
At the moment I’ve managed to create a plugin that WordPress recognizes, set up its configuration screen, and add and retrieve the plugin’s options from the WordPress database. That’s been a heck of a lot of work for a plugin that doesn’t do anything yet, but I have the working proof of concept to look at while I’m, um, swearing.
I like the way the content is pulled in from CreateSpace and modified in ways that the user can extend. So long as the WordPress blog is cached, this adds very little work for the blog’s server or for the CreateSpace server. All in all, I think it’s pretty neat.
Once it’s done I might even do a very similar thing for Amazon affiliate sales, which, of course, aren’t limited to books. I’ve used Amazon’s own AStore system (you can see an implementation right here in my blog) but having used it, I know how cumbersome and unwieldy a thing it is. Surprisingly, it looks like I can do better. So maybe I will.
I think I’ve mentioned from time to time that I built a web site for Matthew Hughes, author of the Archonate novels and stories – and more – like Majestrum, The Spiral Labyrinth, and Hespira.
I may have also mentioned that I’ve been formatting his backlist and new anthologies as eBooks, which he sells on his site.
But because I’m a books-are-made-of-paper kind of guy it’s always been my secret hope that Hughes would try publishing his books as print-on-demand paperbacks.
Why? Because the eBook formats are more crude than web pages are, that’s why, and if I’m going to design a book I want it to look its best.
So you can imagine how happy I am that he’s taken the plunge into self-published paperbacks. I got to lay out the interiors and covers (though the cover illustrations aren’t mine) and I’m very happy with the way they’ve turned out.
I’m still working on the section of his site that will sell the paperbacks directly. But for now I encourage you to have a look at them at Amazon through these links. Nine Tales of Henghis Hapthorn already has its “Look Inside” previews; The Meaning of Luff and Other Stories is a couple of days younger and its previews aren’t yet ready as I write this.
I could tell you how well I like Hughes’ work. I could probably tell you until you started rolling your eyes. But who listens to me?
Listen to this guy:
“Hapthorn’s picaresque adventures, an adroit blend of SF and fantasy, pay homage both to Vance’s Dying Earth fantasies and his classic Demon Princes future history… A tremendous amount of fun.” George R. R. Martin
See?
Some rockets leap up majestically and plunge through the clouds to tear their way free of the Earth’s gravity and out, up and away toward the stars, where they roam in search of their destinies. Some rockets… well, they don’t.
Some other rockets shoot off the launch pad in the traditional, approved manner only to find themselves arcing back toward the planet in a way that, frankly, isn’t reassuring; and then these rockets improvise. This is one of those rockets.
As promised, I’ve put a page up at the Thrilling Tales site where backers (or anyone else) can still get a very small number of these limited edition prints, along with the paperback and hardcover books that made up some of the rewards for the project. I’ll leave that page up until I’ve finished proofing the prints. (I’m just getting ready to go to Round Two on proofing.)
While the page is live anybody at all can (and should!) place a pre-order. But I’ll close out the edition once I’m ready to order the complete run of the Voyage of the Hypatia – which is what the picture’s really called.
Here’s the order page for the prints. Orders can be placed with PayPal only.
I’ve posted a postmortem update to my Retropolis Rocket Ship project page, and in a daring move I have done this before the project has died. It’s here.
The Pulp-O-Mizer‘s latest feature was added for those folks who run Pulp-O-Mizer contests; but it turns out that it’s useful for anybody who wants to move their saved covers from one device (or person) to another. Therefore, we all win!
Now you can export and import your cover settings. This is pretty much like saving and loading, except that when you save a cover’s settings they stay in the local storage of your device. Now by exporting the data you can move it from place to place, exchange it with other users, or store it in a deuterium-lined vault for future, furtive use. It’s all up to you.
The "Export" and "Import" panels appear right below the save and load controls.
For the complete update – including some close-ups of the sort of maybe finished picture – visit the Kickstarter project’s update page.
In the meantime you can click on the image above to embiggenate it.
There have been two rounds of "final" rendering, followed by a few small region renderings to correct problems that weren’t visible until the picture had reached its final, vast, Humongo-Vision size of 6450 by 4651 pixels; then a couple of sessions in Photoshop, and now we are at – or very, very near – the picture’s final state.
Of course we’re also still two-thirds away from funding it, so the fate of the print is in some pretty serious jeopardy. But who said all the news had to be good?
Today’s Retropolis Rocket Ship preview shows us the picture’s final lighting – though it’s still not the final picture. I need to render the two layers at their full resolution and when that’s done there will be quite a bit of retouching in Photoshop. It’s also likely that I’ll re-render some small areas (particularly the windows) in slightly different ways. All that work will get combined in Photoshop into what will be the final picture.
Those windows are a tricky prospect. Although I quite liked the way they were looking earlier I need to ensure that the rendered layers are transparent – or, really, partly transparent – so that I can paint the final space backdrop in Photoshop behind the rocket layers. Since my earlier glass materials came through as opaque (in the rendering), that wouldn’t be possible. That’s why I expect to render out a variant for the window areas.
The alternative would be to create the final backdrop ahead of time. That would work, but I’d have a lot less freedom as I did the retouching and overpainting. So we’ll try it this way and see how it goes.
The lighting phase was every bit as persnickety as I said it would be, what with minor changes and test renderings, after which: rinse and repeat. At this point everything is balanced just about the way I want it and from here on out any changes will take place in Photoshop.
