Louis Shalako: pen names

Showing posts with label pen names. Show all posts

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Kai Zen: Overhauling My Publishing System.

A reader.

Louis Shalako

No true adventure can ever happen without sacrifice.

Nothing good in life comes easily.

You get out of it what you put into it.

***

While we talk some, we listen as well.

Having learned quite a bit, we’ve set aside April 2014 for an overhaul of our publishing system. For one thing, not all titles appeared in all stores. Looking at that brought up other questions.

One thing that needed to be addressed was our blurbs.

***

Time Storm (What I have now.)

Short blurb

Althea is the source of piezo-temporal crystals, which distort time and make interstellar space-flight possible. The Company has a monopoly. The planet is uninhabited. Everyone has a secret. With a small wintering party, life's pretty boring until everything goes terribly wrong. On Althea, staying alive is half the battle.

Long Blurb

Althea is the source of piezo-temporal crystals, which distort time and make interstellar space-flight possible. The Company has a monopoly, and the planet is uninhabited. McNulty dies unexpectedly and Freddie Smith is acting strangely. Everyone has a secret and it's only a small wintering party looking after the Complex. Life 's pretty boring, when everything goes terribly wrong. Mickey Greenwood and his friends must race against time to save the others, on a planet where just staying alive is half the battle.

***

That was the first pro marketing image I ever bought, yet another issue that needs to be addressed.

***

On the Nature of the Gods

(Short)

Before (And this only part of what was probably the worst blurb ever written.)

Jeb is one of the toughest men alive, and he demands respect. After a personal humiliation at the hands of the New York City cops, he sets out on a trail of vengeance. In company with his intuitive horse Rooster, it leads him to the evil Dr. Schmitt-Rottluff, the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending manipulation of the human genome.

After

If there’s one thing the evil Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff can’t get enough of, it’s samples of your precious bodily fluids. He’s the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending manipulation of the human genome. Right now he’s got his eye on Jeb Snead, one of the toughest men who ever lived, undefeated in over a hundred bare-knuckle bouts. Hope Ng, her nefarious rescuer Rufe, and the sexy mutant Miss Kitty are all under his watchful evil eye. Luckily for them, the ghost of Tecumseh takes an indulgent interest.

After that, even

If there’s one thing the evil Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff can’t get enough of, it’s samples of your precious bodily fluids. He’s the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending manipulation of the human genome. He’s got his eye on Jeb Snead, one of the toughest men who ever lived, undefeated in over a hundred bare-knuckle bouts. He's also got the hots for Jeb's girlfriend, Miss Kitty. Hope Ng, her nefarious rescuer Rufe, and the sexy mutant Miss Kitty are all under his watchful, evil eye. Luckily for them, the ghost of Tecumseh takes an indulgent interest. Rife with the bizarre juxtaposition of psycho-sexual elements, On the Nature of the Gods is simply unforgettable.

***

The only rational claim we can make is that the new blurbs are somehow better than the old blurbs. What we are trying to achieve is ‘sales copy’ rather than just giving the whole plot away in the product description.

That’s not to say that they are good, and they are almost certainly not great. But they are better.

All of this has to do with passive discoverability, where a better blurb will do a better job of speaking to a customer who is browsing one online bookstore or another. Assuming that one does tweet or post a book link once in a while, a better blurb still does a better job with more active marketing.

Here’s the pain-in-the-butt aspect of all this: once we have a new blurb up on Smashwords, our job is not done. Then we get to stick it up on Amazon, and then Createspace, assuming we have paperbacks. We must also remember Google Books and OmniLit, and Kobo or Lulu, or any other platform we are using. It doesn’t stop there. Assuming we have image/link type ads on our blog, we had better update our blurbs there, and in my own case, in the past I have forgotten or even neglected my website. All those blurbs will have to be fixed up as well. Admittedly this is only copy/paste work but it has to be done and it has to be done thoroughly.

Bear in mind this author has five pen-names and seven or eight blogs. That's why I set aside a whole frickin' month.

Also, speaking in terms of continuous improvement programs, 'Kai-Zen,' a new, more professional author bio must be posted all over the place, including at the end of each book. A newer, cleaner-looking front matter design must go into all back titles.

If a Table of Contents is now required for iTunes, then old stories aren’t going to make it in. If they are already in iTunes, any kind of update can blow them out of there again as they’re one of the more stringent retailers in terms of internal review processes.

Now, imagine if you will, a universe where some guy has at least 73 English-language titles…plus a few French and one Spanish. Imagine rewriting all them frickin’ blurbs and loading them up on all channels…and going through every .doc file, trying to get them all to look nice.

In one brief note, when I clean up a file—a title, I put Apr14 in the file name, that’s April 2014. I’m using the original .doc file as downloaded from Smashwords.

The next time I go looking for something in my files, I can lay my hands on the most recent one. For all intents and purposes, virtually all other file versions can now be eliminated except POD files and anything that’s exceptional for any other reason, say an unpublished work/WIP.

***

Here’s my old front matter design, it’s kind of centered and arrowhead or diamond shaped. It was also all squashed together. The first few titles were really bad.

The Case of the Curious Killers

by Louis Bertrand Shalako

Cover art copyright by Louis Bertrand Shalako 2010

ISBN 978-0-9866871-2-9

http://shalakopublishing.weebly.com

This Smashwords Edition is published by Shalako Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or deceased; or to any places or events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination.

***

Not very good, in some ways.

Now it looks more like this, bearing in mind the title is black and linkless:

The Case of the Curious Killers

Louis Shalako

Design; J. Thornton

ISBN 978-0-9866871-2-9

***

My new bio looks like this:

Louis Shalako began writing for community newspapers and industrial magazines. His stories appear in publications including Perihelion Science Fiction, Bewildering Stories, Aurora Wolf, Ennea, Wonderwaan, Algernon, Nova Fantasia, and Danse Macabre. He lives in southern Ontario and writes full time.

This was the old one.

Louis Bertrand Shalako began his career writing for community newspapers and industrial magazines, such as The Delhi News-Record, Brant News, The Nanticoke Times, Ontario Tobacco Grower, and the Fire and Safety Equipment Quarterly. A notable writer of darkly humourous speculative fiction, his works have appeared in six languages. His stories appear in publications as diverse as Bewildering Stories, Aurora Wolf, Ennea, Wonderwaan, Algernon, Nova Fantasia, and Danse Macabre. With a unique voice and gifted story-telling across genres, Louis takes the reader on a magic carpet ride and a compelling read. He lives in southern Ontario and writes full time.

***

Looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us.

Luckily, hard work is something we understand.

No honest effort is truly wasted.

A dollar earned is a dollar earned.

It’s all about showing the reader a good time.

***

Here we is on Scribd.

Someday I really ought to consider a professional mug shot.

Oh, well.

Them’s the breaks.

***

See you laters, alligators.

And there's plenty more work where that came from.

END

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Humble Gifts.

Louis Shalako

Ladies and gentlemen,

Come one, come all,

One size fits all.

We have something for everyone.

***

If you have a goal, and someone might be able to help you with it, by all means share that goal with them. If the goal is a positive one, or even just a reasonable one, good people will do what they can to assist you.

That’s an important and fundamental truth of human nature.

If someone can’t help you achieve your goal, then there’s not much point in sharing your goal with them.

If nothing else, it will merely bore them, or convince them you are a fool, and in the worser cases, they will even act to impede your progress and prevent you from achieving anything. To a person without a dream, after all, there is nothing worse than a person that has one.

Especially if you’re willing to take your risks and work your ass off trying to get there. This is more than some folks can abide. You know this to be true.

And so do they.

***

On the internet, sharing personal information has its limits, but in order to share my goals, and some readers may be in a position to help me achieve those goals, you sort of have to understand why.

First of all, I’m a writer and have been since about 1984.

I’ve also been on disability for seventeen years, the result of a fall from a scaffolding.

Now, there’s not much you can do, to help me become a better writer. That’s all up to me and I work very hard to achieve that end of it.

But the real problem is of course finding readers as an independent and unknown author.

Any success I have, goes towards the ultimate goal of getting off of disability, which is 40 % below the poverty line, and living independently, with some level of dignity, in what I would call working class prosperity.

My needs are simple and I keep my costs low.

I just want to have a better life, ladies and gentlemen.

During Read an Ebook Week at Smashwords, I have set the prices at free, using checkout coupons, for four pen-names. Louis Shalako has some free stuff as well. The codes are listed on the product pages.

These are my pen-names, and in some crazy way, they are also fictional characters in their own right. Each of them is a unique person, and I’m very proud of them. These are my children, after all.

Louis Shalako (There’s an interview there too.)

These are my humble gifts, and my only wealth, which is why it pleases me to give so many of them away for free. They are the result of long hours of blood, toil, tears and sweat.

I would not say that I give them away for nothing.

Finding you, the reader, is enough.

END

Sunday, May 5, 2013

My Sexual Memoir.

Spring is in the air and a young man's fancy turns to you-know-what. Even though I'm getting older now, I ain't exactly immune.

Right now I am putting off writing another science fiction novel. I know that I want to do more, but I have reasons not to do it right now.

One thing I really ought to write is another mystery novel. ‘Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery’ sells each and every month in a number of stores, including Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Sony, all of them really. I have one novella, set at free, and two mysteries involving Inspector Gilles Maintenon, i.e. ‘the series,’ which is known for selling long-term better than stand-alone works.

I need to do another one of those this year just to support those readers and build up the brand, in other words Inspector Maintenon.

I write what grabs me at the time. I need a plot. If I had a good science fiction plot I would be more enthusiastic about writing another science fiction book. The mystery is easier, (maybe) as I already know it must be a murder plot and the Inspector will be involved, it will happen in the thirties and all that sort of thing.

Much of the visualization work is done in a sense, and I learn more about the genre, the themes, the era, with every story I write in terms of mysteries. Theoretically that should get easier.

Pen names divide up the works by genre, so readers find it easier to get the books they think they are getting from authors they know and like.

So when I wrote some erotica, I assigned that work to a pen name. When a few books sold, much to my surprise, naturally I wrote more stuff. Now after a time it all starts to catch up. Each and every pen name needs to produce new works on some regular basis—just as I must produce another mystery within the year.

And yet I must write what grabs me, what I have the ideas for, and what I have a plot/no plot for…the reasons are obscure for writing any one thing. But they all add up.

All of a sudden I’m in a bit of a bind. I started something I first conceived of as erotica. It turns out it’s not so much erotica as literary erotic fiction, and it’s also kind of a memoir, and the whole consideration of what pen name to assign the work to or publish it under eventually came up. And maybe the thing isn’t really appropriate to Louis Shalako. And yet who knows? Maybe that’s what I should do. It does bear some thinking about. The problem is that it’s not really in keeping with my thriller/crime guy, nor my erotica girl, etc. It doesn’t fit with any of the existing pen names.

And if I do another pen name, it sort of begs further support if the book sells in any sort of manner (or at all.) How many freakin' sexual memoirs can I possibly make up? (That sounds like a lot of work.) I don’t have all the answers, but I won’t have the story done for a while yet either.

Hopefully it will come out around 25,000 words and then I’ll have my first literary erotica novelette. That would be so cool.

The protagonist is a guy called Devlin and he gets an anonymous note.

As for a title, I simply have no idea, but something will suggest itself.

It usually does.