Kevin J. Anderson joins Mike and Mike to talk about his newest novel, The Dark Between the Stars. It’s the first of his new series, “Saga of Shadows”, which takes place 20 years after the events of his “Saga of the Seven Suns” series, with reviewers calling it “Game of Thrones, with planets”.
Kevin talks about the challenge of diving into a universe and picking back up with a series five years after the last time you played in it, and how he managed to write an 800-page manuscript in 47 days (key points: have a recorder to dictate, and an assistant to transcribe).
He also goes into detail about his writing process and how dictating his drafts into a voice recorder as he goes on hikes gives him great inspiration and the flexibility of not having to choose between writing and hiking, and about the direct recorder technology he prefers over voice transcription software.
Kevin also talks about adjusting to the rapid changes in the publishing industry and what inspired him to put up his out-of-print backlist out in electronic format himself, and about turning WordFire Press into a viable outlet to publish and promote ebooks for authors besides himself, including Brian Herbert and Frank Herbert, and the fresh approach that Story Bundle is taking towards helping indie authors and best-selling authors get their ebooks out to the readers who want them, and distributing the books that the publishing houses don’t see as being profitable enough for them to take on.
Michael R. Mennenga: Hey, welcome everyone to another Dragon Page. I am Michael R. Mennenga
Michael Stackpole: and I am Michael Stackpole.
MRM: And we have a real treat today! Joining us on the phone is the one and only Kevin J. Anderson, friend of ours, and we love to have him on the show.
MS: That’s right.
MRM: He’s got a new book out that is called The Dark Between the Stars, and it’s being called a “Game of Thrones with Planets”. And that intrigued the hell out of me. So we’ve got to talk about that.
Thanks for joining us, Kevin.
Kevin J. Anderson: Well good to see you guys again. We’ve known each other for… well, Mike and I have known each other longer than printing press was invented.
MS: That’s true.
KJA: And Mike Mennenga, we’ve known you since…
MRM: Jeez, who knows?
KJA: Who knows.
MRM: Ten? Six years, eight years…
KJA: We’ve been around so long, I don’t wanna make it sound like the old farts club because we’re still young and vivacious…
MS: Yes, we are, absolutely. And hair coloring is not a vice, it’s a virtue.
KJA: Hair, who has hair?
MRM: What’s this hair thing he’s talking about?
MS: I glue mine on every morning (laughing)
KJA: Good thing it’s radio.
MRM: So, talk to us!.
KJA: Well, the last time I was on the Dragon page, Brian Herbert and I had just had, I think it was, Sisterhood of Dune or Hellhole or something out. We remember very clearly because we were on a book tour for it and we were in between like some like a TV show thing, and we had just checked in the hotel and we had a book signing that night and we had a very narrow window of time and trying to figure out how to call in to you guys when we were in two separate hotel rooms
But I remember very clearly that I was sitting on the floor in my hotel room next to the bed with one phone, Brian was off at the desk with the other phone and we had called in and we were doing our interview, and basically it
was, we said we said our stuff and we just sort of rushed you off, because we had to change clothes and run off to our book signing. So we’re a little more relaxed this time.
MRM: A little bit more, yes.
KJA: So, I’ve got my shoes off and everything and hanging around in my own office. So that’s the place to be.
MRM: Well, talk to us about this new book because it sounds fascinating. You’re finally getting back to your series, it looks like.
KJA: Yeah. I did… several years ago, I wrote what I consider like my masterpiece, or my love letter to science fiction. It was a seven volume epic called “The Saga of Seven Suns”. It’s all these planets, all these characters. It’s like War and Peace, and Shogun, and everything with alien races and planets. And somebody compared the whole thing — including this new one, which is a new trilogy — the whole thing to like “A Game of Thrones with planets”, and I was quick to point out that it’s not exactly like a Game of Thrones with Planets, because my books came out every year on time, and the whole series is done.
MRM / MS: (laughing)
KJA: So “The Saga of Seven Suns”, it’s seven volumes, it’s all on paperback, it’s all done, and the story ended. It was a completely finished thing. And I’ve been away from that universe for about five years now, but I had always… when I wrote the first one, I planted seeds to do… not really a sequel trilogy, it’s more like a next generation thing 20 years later with a bunch of new characters. But it’s the universe that I created, and when you spend like eight years of your life creating this huge universe with all these cultures and races and settings, you kind of want to go back and visit it sometimes.
So with The Dark Between the Stars I was able to return with this story that I planted all the seeds in the first seven books. It wasn’t one of those where “Gosh, this was successful. Let’s milk another story out of it.” This was always planned to do another trilogy in it. But wow, the things you forget after five years. And having written seven books in a row, all of that stuff was in my head.
But then I went on and wrote a huge fantasy trilogy with with sailing ships and sea monsters, then I wrote like three or four more Dune books with Brian Herbert and we wrote our entire Hellhole trilogy, and I wrote a steampunk novel with the rock band Rush, and written a bunch of comics, and a whole series of Dan Shambles Zombie PI, humorous horror things, so that all crowded out all of the details that I remembered about the “Saga of Seven Suns”, and I say that they were all crowded out with all this extra stuff but it’s not because I’m getting older just forgetting where I put my car keys. That may be part of it.
So I had to spend almost a year just re-uploading everything from the first series of books. And the strange thing that readers don’t understand is when I’m writing a book, what I remember is what I put down on the paper. But over the course of editing things, that there may have been somebody who changed a character name or an event got rewritten and all I remember is what I originally put down. So the things that are in my head aren’t necessarily the things, it’s not a huge amount of rewriting, but there are lots of little details of, “oh, I forgot we changed the name of that character somewhere along the line”, and just trying to remember all of this stuff and juggling it.
But The Dark Between the Stars, it sets a new trilogy, and if you read the previous series, you’ll find so familiar characters, but I intentionally wrote it so you didn’t have to go back and read or reread seven books just to start page one. It’s like classic Star Trek and next generation Star Trek. If you like Star Trek you like them both, but you don’t have to know one or the other to enjoy both series.
And just starting it… and the odd thing is with this one is because it took so long to ramp up on it, and because I got distracted with lots of other trips and other book deadlines and things, I kind of ran into a wall where I found out that I had to deliver the finished book of this 800-page manuscript in about two months.
And so I buckled down — and I’m a pretty fast writer as both of you guys know — and I had outlined it… there like 138 chapters and I was all all ramped up because I’d re-read everything. I had the outlines, I had the characters, I was ready to go. And I just pushed the retro rockets button and I wrote that entire 800 page book in 47 days.
MS: Wow. Wow.
MRM: That’s amazing.
KJA: I had to go off… I write with a recorder, a digital recorder. So I love to go hiking. I live in Colorado and we’ve got all these great mountain trails and hiking trails. And I took a week to go off to Capitol Reef National Park in Southern Utah, which is all canyons and deserts and weird rock formations… and I just, I got a little lodge room, and I was all by myself, and I would just go out all day long and write chapters, and then I emailed into my typist, and I’d just been all night long editing the ones that she sent me from a couple of days before, then go out the next day and write like six more chapters, and then come back in and edit a bunch more chapters at night. And that’s what we writers do for fun, ’cause we have no social life.
MRM / MS: (laughing)
LJA: But I did get the book done.
MRM: Wow.
MS: That’s cool. Now, I’m facing the same sort of thing that you are. I’ve got a novel that I need to do a sequel to. And I wrote the original novel 26 years ago. When you went back and you said you reread everything and re-uploaded it, how much actual sit-down making notes did you do? I mean, in the past for me, I’ve actually gone through and indexed books. Did you go that deeply or was it literally just uploading and holding it in your mind for the amount of time that took you to write this?
KJA: I discovered when I was in college, but I absolutely totally suck at taking notes. I have no patience for it. I don’t organize them well. I basically just have to stuff it all in my head and hope that it’s there. Although now I have an advantage in that the original series of seven books was so popular that I have a lot of fans of the series. So you can tap into the fan-line if you don’t remember something, you can go: “Hey guys, these two characters ever meet over the course of the seven books?” and post that on Facebook. It can take something like 7.3 seconds before somebody comes back with an answer.
And so whenever I had doubts or I wasn’t sure if something I was able to get an answer for it. But I tried to make it far enough apart that I wasn’t… you know, I don’t want to write this new book and spend all these paragraphs were a character remembers the events from one of the previous novels because you know if you read the previous novels you remember it, and if you didn’t read the previous novels you get annoyed because I’m talking about something that you know. So I try to make it a standalone as possible, but still as the author of the original series, I — you’ve done this, Mike Stacpole — when you write a five book series, and you get these readers who tell you, “yeah, I just read Book Four, and loved it and I’m going to read the other ones”… and you want to tear whatever’s left of your hair out.
(laughter)
We, of course, we of course plan to do all these beautiful seeds and you can’t read them out of order, but readers are much more resilient than I think writers realize and they dive into it and they can write up and if you do make
a mistake, somebody will tell you, usually after publication, but somebody will tell you.
MS: Oh yeah. They’re very good and very generous with their time and explaining to you why you were wrong.
KJA: Yeah. Well, we could start talking Star Wars, but…
MS: Yeah, we won’t go there! (laughs)
MS: So this is going to be a trilogy.
KJA: Yes.
MS: And are you looking at one book a year, or are you going to go to the George Martin route and just kind of goof around for a couple of years, and then play with toy soldiers, and then do the second book and so on and so forth?
KJA: If I did it that way, it’d have to re-upload the thing every time I started writing it. So I just this morning, I finished chapter 87 out of 118 in Book Two, and I expect to finish writing my first draft of it by the end of this month. And then I will blitz through the editing for a couple of months and deliver it, probably in September and Tor will bring it out in… I think this time next year, probably June of next year.
And I do… because each one of these volumes ends on like “Luke, I am your father” — multiple storylines, all on a cliffhanger, all kinds of big explosions and everything — I don’t feel that it’s right for me to make the fans wait for three years. I’m the writer, I have a contract with the reader, not just with the publisher. I’ve got that contract with the reader that if I say “here’s a series that I want you to read”, then I better deliver the next one on time.
And if I get in a car accident, or death in a family or something, there’s legitimate excuses. But if I hired a contractor to redo my kitchen countertops, and he was five years late finishing it up, I wouldn’t hire that contractor again. And if I’m a reader picking up Book One of the series, I believe that it’s my obligation as a writer to deliver the next book on time.
And all writers have their muse who gives them inspiration, and my muse is a union worker who comes in and punches the time clock every day on time. And I get my ideas when I’m supposed to.
MRM: So talk to us a little bit about your writing process. I know we’ve had this conversation in the past, but that’s been a long, long time ago. So let’s revisit it again, because you write a little different
than other writers. You actually dictate most of your books.
KJA: Yes. I have… well, I outline all of my books very heavily. The 118 chapters in Blood of the Cosmos, the second book of this trilogy. And like I said, it was 138 chapters in The Dark Between the Stars. I outlined them very carefully… in fact, my outline for Dark Between the Stars was like 89 pages long. So it’s almost like the length of a novel that some other people might write. (chuckles)
But I have it so that I know exactly what’s going to happen. And my comparison to that is if you’re going to build a big skyscraper and you hire an architect, you kind of want that architect to do blueprint first rather than just digging holes and putting up walls and hoping that they come together somewhere in the end. So I do a detailed outline. And part of that is also because I’ve done a lot of collaborating with Brian Herbert, and with my wife Rebecca Moesta, with Doug Beason and other people.
And if you’re collaborating on a book, you both need to have the same blueprint otherwise, you’re not going to be writing the same story. So that’s the first thing, that I’ll spend a lot of time… and that is where the creativity comes from. They’re called pantser writers. to see to the pancerators that just sit down and write and hope that it works. They claim that that’s the creative part, where they make things up when they’re writing. Well, I do the creative part too. I just do it ahead of time when I’m outlining. That’s when everything’s up in the air. I can do whatever I want. The characters can do whatever they want. And then once we get the pencil sketch done, then we put it in ink and it’s ready to go.
But I will have… my chapters are something like 3,000 words long, which to the the layman is nine pages, something like that. What I’ll do is, in my outline, I have each chapter one… Here’s a paragraph describing this is what happens in chapter one. And I’ll mark what the point of view is, because I use multiple characters. And then chapter two, this happens. And it’s from this person’s point of view. And then chapter three, this happens. And I’ll go out with my digital recorder. And I’ll take those little scraps of paper with me, like each paragraph is on a separate little index card or piece of paper. And I go out walking.
I mean this morning I just walked around. There’s a bike path by our house. So it’s just a local I went out and did that. But two days ago I drove off to a state park and hiked eight miles in the canyons and mountains around here. Tomorrow I’m going to be driving off to a place called Steamboat Springs. It’s a beautiful mountain town. It’s a resort. And I’m going to stay there for five days because I’m falling behind in this book and I want to get it done on time. And it’s like a six hour drive. And what I’m going to be doing — so don’t drive next to me on the freeway — I’ll have my recorder in one hand, and I have the notes. And as I’m driving for six hours, I will probably dictate at least three chapters on the drive up.
MRM: Do we have to put a disclaimer in here, don’t write and drive?
KJA: You know, the little fine print that says: “professional writer, do not try this.”
MS: And you do know that with a Bluetooth headset and your smartphone, you could actually record without having to have it in your hands.
KJA: Yeah, I mean, it’s easy enough to do that. I have my own– it’s a high end Olympus digital recorder that has bells and whistles, that I might want to have on and stuff. And then, or what I’ll be doing up at Steamboat Springs, I’ll be doing one day, probably Sunday. I’ve got it set up that I’m going to be doing what I believe will be a 19-mile hike.
MRM: Wow!
KJA: And on that 19 miles, I’ll probably end up doing four or five chapters as well. And then I get back and I upload the digital files and email them off to my typist. And I live in Colorado, like I said, and I’ve climbed all 54 of the 14,000-foot mountain peaks in the Rockies and dictating while I doing it. So my typist says sometimes when I’m doing a particular difficult mountain, it sounds like she’s transcribing an obscene phone call…
[laughter]
KJA: And when the book comes out, there’s an awful lot of sentences with a bunch of ellipses in the middle of them because there’s so many gaps and gasps.
MS: Sure, sure. Wow.
[more laughter]
KJA: Okay, I love hiking and I love writing so this way I don’t have to choose one or the other. I get to go out and do it. And I find it actually inspirational. It doesn’tt always correlate this way, but I’ve read a bunch of Dune books in the great sand dunes in Colorado. So I’m stomping up the sand dunes while I’m describing Fremen setting up sandworm rides. And I did one of my Star Wars section, one of my Star Wars books, where they’re at the ice caps of Coruscant. And I was writing that while I was up in the snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, crunching along on snow shoes while I was writing about the Han and Leia being on the polar ice caps. So it’s cool when that sort of thing ties together.
My wrote some of my Star Wars Jabba’s palace stuff while I was out in Death Valley where the Jabba’s palace scenes were actually filmed. So sometimes just having that… being surrounded by to someone else’s like you’re commuting to work in that universe. Other times it’s just an excuse to go for really cool hike and get some work done at the same time.
MRM: So the interesting thing is that the technology has really evolved a lot — I mean, the text-to-speech and speech-to-text and Dragon Naturally Speaking and so forth — have you explored any of that stuff, you know, or is this just what your comfort zone is, and you don’t want to deviate from what works?
KJA: Well, for me, there are several drawbacks to the things like Dragon Naturally Speaking because I write Dune books and Seven Suns books. So to retrain… my glossaries are like 30 pages long at the end of the book. So to retrain them with all these weird terms and names and languages, that’s hard. But I use a human typist — it’s not that expensive — and that way the human typist knows where to put the punctuation in. For Dragon you have to say all of the punctuation every time you’re using it.
And you almost get into like a fugue state. If I’m hiking for my 19 miles and I’m in the middle of this, this universe and in my story, I’m just dictating away it’s a space battle or something. And I’ve got characters shouting over the comm systems and little snippets of dialogue back and forth…. my human typist actually knows these are different people talking, and she knows to put a different paragraph return and start a new quotation mark.
MRM: It’s that interpretation.
KJA: Yeah.Dragon or whatever voice word recognition it has, it would just show up as this giant block of text. And I hate doing clean up work. To me, that’s like using a machete trying to carve a patch through the jungle. And the less clean up work that I have to do, the better.
And also, I’ve had a couple of… I use typing services too, but I have a couple of dedicated typists who are fans of mine and they’ve read a bunch of things. And my current typist is a big fan of the Dan Shambles Zombie PI stuff. So she just loves getting new Dan Shambles stories that I send in. And she remembers the other ones and she can make, “Oh, but he did this in this other story”, or she’ll mentioned things, but I don’t remember.
I wrote a book called Enemies and Allies, which was the first meeting of Batman and Superman in the 1950s during the Cold War. And I did my research, but I couldn’t do all of the detailed stuff about life in the 1950s. But my other typist is actually… she does research for game show questions and she does research for a living and she is she knows everything about the 50s and she knows everything about horses — which works great when I’m writing fantasy scenes because I don’t know anything about horses you’re just their animals you jump on and ride. So when I’m doing a horse riding scene in like my Terra Incognita fantasy trilogy, I have my character get on it and I just would say “Mary described the tack and saddles and everything that he’s wearing because you’ll get it right”, and she loves doing that. She puts it in there.
But the thing about Enemies and Allies, the 1950s thing, I had Lex Luthor — who is this weapons merchant secretly selling nuclear arms to Soviets as well as the US — and I’m describing Lex Luthor. And I said, “Mary, you know exactly what kind of watch Lex Luthor would wear in the 1950s. So just put it in there.” And I’ve never heard of the kind of watch, but she did research and she found out exactly the kind of watch that someone like Lex Luthor would wear in 1953. And that’s kind of cool.
MS: That is very cool.
MRM: That is very cool. It’s more than just getting the words down. It’s actually having this support and the interpretation or the interpolation of what’s going on. Yeah, that’s very cool.
MS: That is neat.
Just to shift gears for a second… Why don’t you go ahead and talk a little bit about what you’ve been doing with Wordfire and how that relates to both working with other authors and then doing shows and conventions?
KJA: Sure. I’m sure you’ve talked many times on the show before about the hurricane that’s happening in the publishing world now…
MS: Oh, yeah.
MRM: Oh, yes.
KJA: Everything’s changing. And I had… it was about three years ago, one of these life-changing events, which I don’t know what sparked it. But I remember all night long, I was just lying awake staring at the ceiling, going, “oh my god, what am I going to do now?”
Because Borders had just gone out of business, advances from publishers were collapsing so they were a tenth of what they were years ago. And I was like about to turn 50. I had a couple of multiple book contracts that were
coming to the end, and I was staring at the ceiling thinking, “the whole publishing role is collapsing!”
I felt like I had just invested all of my money in a chain of Blockbuster video franchises. And I thought, well, what’s going to happen here? And I had been talking with you, Mike Stackpole, a couple of years before that, that you were starting to get into doing your own PDF copies of books and uploading some of your old books.
And I had– what had stalled me was that I was looking at my e-book sales on my royalty sheets from my regular publishers, like my– my Dune e-book royalties that’s like, oh boy, in six months, a bestseller like Dune would sell 200 ebook copies. And I was thinking, well, this is just more trouble than it was worth.
And I had one of my writing students who’s a fairly well-known horror writer now, Scott Nicholson, just said, “Kevin, you should just put up some of your old backlist and see what happens.” So he worked like nothing, 25 bucks or something like that. He just put up a couple of my old first novels that were out of print forever and ever. We just put them up on Kindle and then I started getting these checks and I went, “Holy Cow, this is not chump change.” We started adding more books, and my first novel Resurrection, Inc, which came out in 1988… I got paid like $4,000 for it from a major publisher, Signet Books, and it never earned its $4,000 back and it went out of print. I put my version up and it made more than $4,000 in a year.
Yeah, I was like, whoa, this is not what I was told before. So, so we started rapidly, I had my rights back on a whole lot of my old titles, and I started putting them up because all these fans… and I’ve got, I think, 23 million books in print now for my, my estimate of all the things that I’ve got.
So I’ve got a lot of fans out there and they keep telling me that they’ve just found an old battered book of mine in a used bookstore because that’s the only place they could get it. Well heck, if they’re buying it in used bookstores, they might as well buy my version of it. So I started putting up all of my old backlist. And it was doing reasonably well. I mean, we’re not talking millions of dollars, but we’re certainly talking, you know, pay the car payment every once in a while and pay the mortgage every once in a while. And otherwise, it was earning me no money at all. It was just books, gathering dust on the shelf. So why not bring them out there?
And right around that time, we were complaining… Brian Herbert and I were complaining that a lot of Frank Herbert’s old books. He wrote a lot of other books like 21 books and only six of them were Dune books. And everything else was not a print except for Dune. And so we started twisting our publishers arm, Tor, saying, “Well, you’re doing so well with the Dune books, why don’t you reprint some of Frank’s old stuff?” And they picked like five or six of the titles and said, fine, and they published them. So those came back out. But they weren’t interested in the rest of his back list. And Brian Herbert was looking at the books I was publishing of my own, and he said, “well, why don’t you publish them, Kevin?”
So, we have a generous deal with our authors that we split the royalties on way better terms than New York publishers do. And so I printed the old Frank Herbert books, and Brian told me last year that the royalty checks that we’re sending them makes Wordfire Press the fourth, the number four income generating publisher for the Frank Herbert estate worldwide.
MRM: Wow, that’s impressive!
KJA: Yeah we’re like, well these were just sitting there earning nobody any money at all! And then so I re-did a bunch of Brian’s old out-of-print science fiction books, and they’re doing so well, we’ve made him like three times what the old publisher made him in the first place. And then he decided that he doesn’t necessarily like going with big publishers that will keep your rights forever and they won’t necessarily promote it. And so he gave me three of his brand new original never-before-published books that we just published. And he hocks them himself and sells them at conventions. And it’s a whole different, different paradigm.
I’m going on and on, but I’m very enthusiastic about this.
MS: Sure.
MRM: Well, it is, it’s very important. I mean, this is, this is a, this is really a paradigm shift in the way that people are approaching, or authors are approaching, you know, more so than chasing down a publisher, chasing down even self-publish, it’s a, it’s a great new opportunity.
KJA: Well, and we do… all of our stuff, it’s out on Kindle, it’s on Kobo, it’s on Nook, it’s on I-books, it’s on Smashwords, which is sort of a catch-all for all the other formats. And we do print versions of all of our stuff so that you can have a nice copy to hold and show your mom.
But I mean, I’m really getting enthusiastic, but I do want to put a caveat that I have been working in the professional publishing industry for like 30 years. I do have graphic design experience. I do know how to design a book. I do know about typesetting. So we know what we’re doing.
MRM: We do also in established name. let’s not discount that. I mean, yeah, this is not a nobody coming in with no history. You guys have back history.
MS: You have more importantly, the books are professionally produced books.
MRM: Right.
MS: And that’s really the key, whether you have the experience ’cause I had the same type setting experience coming out of the game industry and that’s sort of the thing. Whether you have our level of experience
and do it yourself or you hire a book designer to do it for you. The key is that it is a professionally produced book.
KJA: Yeah, ’cause we’ve all seen truly dreadful looking self-published books.
MRM: We just add that conversation, yes!
KJA: But I keep thinking of myself, Wordfire, as “well we’re just this little press doing some of my other stuff”, but we just did a count. We now have about 160 titles up.
MS: Wow, yeah, that’s great.
KJA: And now, of course, we’re in the flip side, the nightmare side of it, because it’s June, we’re supposed to pay royalties to our authors. And now we’re just like banging our heads because trying to collate all of these numbers from Kindle, and all these numbers from Kobo, and all these numbers from Nook and they don’t,
they’re not all in the same format, and they cover different time periods and some of them report their sales in the foreign currency in a foreign country. So you have to convert that. So it’s now it’s an accounting nightmare which we are trying to train other people.
But I do want to — this will kind of close it because it’s a real — because two of my writing students from Writers of the Future were Jay Lake and Ken Scholes. Both went on to become quite successful authors, selling multiple books to Tor Books. And they collaborated on a big novel together called “METAtropolis”, big future Pacific Northwest City thing.
And Jay, a lot of his name, might be familiar to a lot of your listeners, but Jay was had terminal cancer, and he was very public about blogging and describing to everybody about his long ordeal through chemotherapy and radiation therapy and this treatment and that treatment. And he just kept getting worse and worse, and he knew he was terminal. And he told me… probably like eight months ago or so he said, “I’m not going to live beyond June 2014.” And he and Ken had just written this book, and Ken talked to me this last March and was looking at Wordfire.
And there was no way, and I mean, there was absolutely no way any traditional publisher was going to get this book published before Jay died. And so they gave it to me, I said, “We’ll do it. We can get it out. We’ll make it something you’ll be proud of.” And they gave me the finished manuscript. I got my team together. We put it through production. We had printed finished beautiful copies, in hand and up for sale, 30 days after they gave us the final manuscript. And we got a copy to Jay in hospice, and he got the hold the book in his hand a week and a half before he died.
MRM: Oh, wow.
KJA: And he died on June 1st, and he had told me he wasn’t gonna live beyond June. So when I, you talk about a paradigm shift, if you had gone to anybody, to Pocket, to Bantam, to Simon and Schuster and said, “this is the author, he’s written this book, he’s dying of cancer, he’s only got three months, can we get the book out?” They wouldn’t even get a contract to you in three months.
MS: Right, right.
KJA: And so we’re lean and fast moving, and we have proofing teams, we have cover designers… it kind of makes me frustrated. I’m what they call a hybrid author. I’m still doing lots of books. I’ve still got a bunch of books with Tor Books. They’re putting me on tour. We’re doing all kinds of stuff for The Dark Between the Stars and Mentats of Dune, which was just a New York Times bestseller a couple of months ago from them. We got another one coming out in August. So I’m still got lots of stuff and lots of good things to say about the traditional publishers, because they do things that I can’t.
But there are times when I turn in a book and I know that I could be selling copies of it tomorrow, but it just sits on an editor’s desk and goes through the production for two years in New York, and you’ve got to think I could have been recouping my advance for these two years.
MS: Right. Now the novel by Jay Lake and Ken Scholes, that’s part of the Story Bundle. You may want to talk about that just real quick.
KJA: In fact, that’s also one of the sort of like a guerilla co-op marketing thing that indie authors who control the rights of their books. We’ve been doing these things, I think I’ve done four or five of them, and Mike, you and I’ve been in a couple of them together.
It’s a website or a company called StoryBundle. It’s one word… it’s StoryBundle.com. And it’s a bunch of authors that just put their books together in a bundle. And we have a brand new science fiction one called the Cosmic Science Fiction Bundle… that they all have to have corny names.
The Cosmic Science Fiction Bundle, where there are, it’s like a price line thing. You get all of the books that are there, you name your own price. And it’s a minimum of three bucks. And for three bucks, you can get six novels. And the six novels that are on the basic one are the Jay Lake and Ken Scholes book that I just talked about. A brand new story collection by Mike Resnick, a book that I wrote with Doug Beason called Assemblers of Infinity that was a Nebula nominee, a classic by Frank Herbert called Destination Void, a Retrieval Artist Book by Kristine Kathryn Rusch called Anniversary Day, and a really cool twisted time travel murder mystery called Second Paradigm by Peter Wacks, who’s our managing editor at Wordfire Press, but he’s also pretty well-known in like the collectible card gaming industry.
So that three bucks or more, you get those six books. And if you pay $12, which is the bonus level, then you get three more books, including an Anne McCaffrey and Jody Lynne Nye book called Crisis on Doona… that’s kind of a classic. I remember reading it quite a while ago… A short science fiction novel called Legion by Brandon Sanderson (that’s a little-known name in the industry), and Mike Stackpole’s Perfectly Invisible. So you get nine books for 12 bucks.
MRM: Wow.
(laughing)
KJA: But again, I get enthusiastic about this because this is cool. It’s nine books for 12 bucks or more. I mean, pay what you feel like. And it’s kind of cool to see that a lot of people pay more than they need to, to make up for people that pay as little as possible. But the average donation is fairly generous. And it comes out and you get all these books. And how we all the authors cooperate, and they help promote it.
And the neat thing is, if you’re my fan and you buy it because you want to get Assemblers of Infinity, well, you’re also getting Mike Stackpole’s Perfectly Invisible and Brandon Sanderson’s Legion, and all these other ones that you might not know who these authors are. And it’s a great way for us to co-opt everybody else’s fans and expose our fans to some other authors that’ll do well.
And the kicker on it is a good chunk of the money goes to Jay Lake’s chosen cancer research fund, the Clayton Memorial Medical Fund. And so far, since yesterday, it went live yesterday and in one day, they raised a thousand bucks for the cancer fund, and it runs for three weeks. So you could tell that this is not something that I’m dragging out and don’t want to do.
I just think this is really cool. The previous bundle I was in was a fantasy bundle that had Neil Gaiman and David Farland and Tracy Hickman and a bunch of other well-known fantasy authors. That one sold enough copies of each one of those books in three weeks that it would have put every single book, all nine of those books, on the New York Times bestseller list if the New York Times tracked those sales.
Wow. Yeah, very cool stuff.
KJA: So this is a, this is a way for us indie authors to sell books that just nobody’s figured it out before. That we have, we have ways (that ve have vays). We’ve served options and alternatives for us. I mean, again, I’m still… when I hold The Dark Between the Stars in my hand, I see this gigantic card cover that I see displays of them at Barnes & Noble, and I have cases that it put out on our table at Denver Comic Con or at Dallas Comic Con.
I don’t feel like running away from New York publishing anytime soon, but there are certain books, like the Jay Lake one, that aren’t appropriate for New York publishing. And reprinting all these old Frank Herbert books that… look we tried. We tried to get the regular publisher to print them and they just didn’t were interested because the numbers didn’t work. Well, I don’t have a skyscraper in Manhattan and 7,000 employees. So I could probably produce a book for less upfront investment, and I can make it a viable thing.
MRM: Yeah, it is. It’s all about overhead. I mean, that’s really the piece that makes you, you’re more streamlined, you’re able to do a lot more because of that.
KJA: Well, and I like, I like to be able to say, “yes, I’m the publisher of Wordfire Press”. Even though I’ve had 54 best sellers and I’m in 30 different languages and I’ve, you know, done rather well for myself as a writer.
I compare myself to Ron Howard. I feel like I started out as a little Opie on Mayberry RFD. I became very well known as Richie Cunningham, but now I’m like Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard. And it’s just, when I hold… it’s funny, because I spend more time at these, at Denver Comic Con kind of things, grabbing one of the books that I published and said, “look at this, look what I did!”
It’s just a matter of pride. And I’m just so tickled that it can be done. Because I grew up– I wanted to be a writer since I was five years old, so I always looked at publishing and looked at books as a magical thing, almost that this is… you know, if you’re a kid who wants to throw baseball back and forth, you look at pro baseball players as the gods of the industry. And I still look at at Bantam Books, and Tor Books, and Simon and Schuster as wow, they’re the powerful magical people who make books appear into bookstores and wow I’m doing that now. I mean we’re putting it through the system I’m doing one or two at a time, I’m not doing 10,000 copies that could send out to Barnes & Noble. But still, it’s a book that we produced. I’m the proud father holding up the baby book.
MRM: Yeah. It’s fantastic. I applaud your efforts, and it’s definitely something that needs to be,
you know, it’s sorely needed out there as another avenue, another opportunity.
KJA: But, the thing is you have to do everything. So the promotion and the business, and like I said before, this nightmare of doing the royalty statements. If you… our friends Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith also have a very large indie publishing house, but they have… what they decided was they’re not publishing anybody else’s stuff only their own books, which means that they don’t have to worry about the royalties. They want to track what sells and what doesn’t, but they don’t need to to cut checks at the end of the day. Everything belongs to them.
But I have to figure out… well, Mike Stackpole and I’ve got a series called “5×5”, which is five military science
fiction novellas written by five military science fiction writers. And so that has to be… every six months we have to add up how many copies did that sell on Nook, how many copies did that sell on Kindle, how many copies did that sell on I-books, how many copies did that sell on Kobo, and add up… and they’re not really huge amounts. You add up 30 bucks here in 50 bucks there, whatever, and then we need to cut checks and divide it up among everybody and figure out. And people moved, and they don’t tell you where they moved, and so then the check comes back.
MS: Or unfortunately, authors die.
KJA: Yeah, well, we did. Aaron, Aaron Alston, our friend and fellow Star Wars author was into with the “5×5”. And now I will, and Mike Stackpole has helped me out to know where I send the check now, but that’s another little thing that we need to chase around and figure things out.
But I’m talking so much about the publishing end, but I’m an author first and foremost, and I know what things that annoyed me as an author when I dealt with publishers. And the thing that all authors are now uptight about is just trying to get their rights back, and trying to get out of contracts that don’t like. And I may be kind of stupid and naive here, but I don’t want to publish an author who doesn’t want to be with my publishing house. And all the contracts that we have, it’s got a three-year timeline on it. That after three years, if you don’t like it, then walk away and we shake hands and you’re done. And if you like it then it just rides, but at any point after that then you can have your rights back and good luck to you. And so far nobody’s wanted to.
I mean that’s the thing. If you I don’t I don’t want to have an author and refuse to let them go and make them
all mad at me because they can’t get the rights back and I’m not making much money on them anyway.
MRM: Yeah offer a service that they actually want and they’ll stay around, exactly. I mean, people are fairly sedentary, once they get comfortable with something…
MS: It’s inertia…
MRML Yeah, inertia.
KJA: Well, I figure if I’m sending you checks, I’m making money, you’re making money, and you’re not doing any work, and we’re just basically letting the… once you get… this is the other cool thing. Once you get a book listed up on Kindle or up on Kobo, whatever, it’s there. It’s not like I have to go and restock the egg shelves every day in the grocery store. It’s there and the checks will… who knows how big they’ll be, but it’s still, it’s still earning, it’s kind of… the maintenance that I have to do is the accounting, which is a pain of butt. But it’s not like I have a warehouse full of books that I have to pay taxes on. I don’t have to front the printing cost for $10,000 to print enough copies of the book to make it something we can take to trade shows and stuff so it’s…
As you can tell I’m a crusader on this stuff (laughs) well, Mike Stackpole, this is like back while you were the one who was lecturing me like this three or four years ago.
(laughing)
MS: Yeah, I know and see I’m glad it took, because you’re writing me checks now. So I like this.
(laughing)
MS: But Kevin, this has been great. So I know you’ve got tons of stuff to do, and we’ve got to get this podcast out, hopefully, in time so people can participate in the storybundle.com Cosmic Science Fiction Bundle.
MRM: Absolutely.
MS: But again, thank you very much and look forward to seeing the new book.
KJA: All right, well thank you very much and that’s The Dark Between the Stars and the Dan Shambles Zombie PI…. Well, if I list them all, we’re around for another half an hour.
MRM: Yeah, thanks, I was gonna say, there’s a lot of books. We’ll have a lot of these links on the website.
Kevin, awesome talking to you again. And sure we will catch you at some of the other conventions or see you around somewhere.
MS: We’ll probably see you at Dragon*Con
KJA: See you at Dragon*Con… thanks Mike and Mike!
Links:
Official Kevin J. Anderson website: kevinjanderson.com
WordFire Press: wordfirepress.com
StoryBundle: storybundle.com
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