They be my eyes. I’m dragging a little, it’s been a hell of a few days. They were great, but busy, and I’m a bit wore out, as we say in the country.
Saturday I taught a workshop for Carolina Learning Connection on self-publishing. The small but enthusiastic class was awesome, and we easily used up the four hours allotted. I have another class coming up in two weeks on Self-Promotion and Social Media. If you’re interested in learning how better to promote yourself and your writing online, come on out and see me! Here’s registration info.
Saturday afternoon we went to a baby shower for a couple of friends who are expecting their first. It was cool, and since it was a theatre couple having the baby, I got to see a bunch of my theatre friends.
Then Sunday morning I went over to the Crown Plaza to the Charlotte Comicon, which was awesome! This is a one-day con that happens three times each year, and I’ve been attending for several years now. It used to be a small con, but there were probably 800 people through the doors this weekend! In a six-hour span! I sold a bunch of books, and I am now completely out of Back in Black and Knight Moves. I do not plan to re-order until they are available from Bell Bridge Books, with new cover and new contents.
By the way, I’ve seen the work in progress for the Omnibus cover and it is AWESOME!
And no, I can’t show you yet.
Yes, I’m that guy. I just did that. Sorry. I promise I’ll post it here and all over Facebook and Twitter as soon as it’s finalized and I’m allowed. And you can see it in person at Dragon*Con. Just the cover, though. We’re pretty certain that the omnibus will not be ready for Dragon. And it isn’t the publisher holding things up, they’re moving super-quick. But the revisions to Back in Black took a while, and that’s on me. But I’ll have them for NY Comic Con!
So Sunday after I left Charlotte Comicon, I drove down to my family’s place in South Carolina to celebrate those of us who have August birthdays (you can buy me shit off my Amazon wish list here, or just buy me Magic Cards. Damn you, Sanderson! I blame you for this new addiction!). We were also celebrating the engagement of my youngest niece, which is awesome! We had a great time, had homemade ice cream, hot dogs, burgers, and crap like that.
Then I cam home and worked on line edits for Back in Black, and today I drove my dad to the VA hospital in Columbia for an eye appointment. Which isn’t very far, except instead of going from Charlotte to Columbia and back (3 hours drive), I had to go get my dad, making the trip from Charlotte to Bullock Creek to Columbia to Bullock Creek to Charlotte (5.5 hours). We were both whooped when we got done, but it’s always awesome to spend time with my dad, so that made it more than worth it.
Tomorrow I’m diving in to the revisions for Knight Moves, and I’m reading stories for The Big Bad when I take breaks. Not that I get breaks. It’s a crazy time right now, pretty much from now ’til Dragon Con, but it’s the life I chose, and I love it.
Hope y’all are awesome, and you should totally go buy Blood and Silver, my buddy James’ new book. It released today, so go check it out!
This will be a weak-ass show report, largely because I was mostly focused on living the show and not a whole lot on taking a ton of pictures and recording stuff. I don’t do very well at striking a balance, I either veer to one side or the other. So I either have an awesome post-show report and didn’t really get much done at the con besides take pictures, or I have a great time, get a lot accomplished and don’t have shit for photos.
This con I got a LOT done. There will be two new episodes of Literate Liquors to come out of the con, one featuring the lovely Janice Hardy, who happened to wander through the break room at the Galt House during a shooting and I roped her into the interview. The other is the awesome Richard Kadrey, who I actually scheduled an interview with. Richard is the author of the Sandman Slim series of urban fantasy books, and if you haven’t read those, then for God’s sake get yourself to a bookstore post haste and buy that shit. It’s completely amazing and I’m only proud of myself for managing to be not too much of a fanboy while discussing the books and booze with Richard.
But I had a great time at Fandom Fest/Fright Night Film Fest. As I said on Facebook in a group for us writer types, this is rapidly becoming a con where I get business done. I sell a few books, sure, but the biggest deals were cut at dinner and at bars, and there were quite a few deals struck that I can’t talk about yet because we’re working out the details, but let it suffice to say that after the conversations I had this weekend I plan to be working with my current publisher for at least the next five years on at least two different projects, and I have five projects of varying sizes percolating within the next eighteen months with a completely different publisher. So I got a lot of work accomplished.
I was programmed pretty heavily, which I love. I was on two panels with Deb Dixon, my editor and the publisher at Bell Bridge Books. People like to put the self-pub guy who’s transitioning to trad pub on panels with his publisher just to see if he gets in trouble. So far I’ve been good. Deb and I don’t always agree on every point about the publishing business, but we do see eye-to-eye on most points, and we both can present our arguments relatively cleanly and without getting grumpy, so it’s always good to be on a panel with her.
I also continued my streak of panel-crashing when I suddenly appeared on the Humor in Speculative Fiction Panel. I saw a panel I’d be good on, populated by a host of authors whose work I respect, and moderated by someone I adore, so I crashed.
PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS. It is bad form, and I made a point to get permission from the moderator of the panel AND the lit track organizer before I did it, so it wasn’t really crashing. Unlike ConCarolians, where I really did crash.
But I saw a chance to get on a panel with Laura Resnick, John Scalzi, Jim Hines and Ernest Cline, moderated by Lee Martindale. So I took it. And we had a lot of fun, and I got to meet most of the awesome Guests of Honor at one fell swoop, so it was some good networking. And funny for the audience, too, I believe.
But NOTHING compared to the audience we got for the Book Tasting/Literate Liquor Live! Event. We packed the room and developed some awesome book/tea/booze combos. Jackie Gamber did an amazing job with her tea pairings for the books, including one with Hitchhiker’s Guide that tasted and smelled like gummy bears. Then I broke out the booze and we all got hammered. But for the record, the cinnamon tea that Jackie likes with her books Redheart and Sela, tastes AMAZING with a splash of Disaronno in it. There are pictures on my Facebook. It was a blast, we’ll do it again sometime.
I also met some awesome folks and reconnected with some old friends. I spent the weekend sharing a room with my buddy Sean Taylor, and it’s always great to hang with him. I shared a table with the always-lovely Kalayna Price (she has a new book out TODAY – buy it!), and I shared a lot of meals with my long-lost brother James R. Tuck. I also met some awesome new folks like JH Glaze, with whom I share a couple of initials. It was great getting to know him a bit, along with the beautiful Delilah Dawson, who I’m signing books with on Saturday in Columbia.
As always, there were too many people I spent time with to mention, but there’s always room for Jell-O, and you can’t do a post-show recap in the Mid-South without mentioning Allan Gilbreath. The man with the devious laugh is always great to spend time with, and he’s got a business brain that doesn’t quit. So if you do cons in Tennessee or Kentucky and don’t know Allan, fix that ASAP.
So yeah, I had a great time, made some more good connections, solidified some others, sealed a few deals and started the process on some others. So it was a great con, and I missed the wreck on I-65 South that stranded a bunch of my friends on their way home for six hours, so that was a win for me even if all the hotels in West Virginia were booked and I had to make the whole drive home instead of splitting it up like originally planned.
I have two friends with book releases this week, and I’d like all y’all to go out today (or this week) and buy their books. I’m going to go a little deeper than some of you will like about the publishing business, but that’ll come later in the post. For the first little bit, I’m just going to talk about the books and why you should get your happy ass down to YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE and buy them this week.
Yeah, I make a lot of money off Amazon, but if you’re going to buy print books, go to a bookstore and support a locally owned business. That shit’s important. I’ll be heading out to Park Road Books tomorrow afternoon to pick up a couple of these titles myself.
First off we have Kalayna Price’s Grave Memory. This is the third in the Alex Craft series, and to say I enjoy these books is a huge understatement. This is one of my top 5 urban fantasy series of the last few years. There are some must-buys in my reading life, and Kalayna’s books are definitely among them. They’re witty, with awesome characters that are totally relatable, believable magic systems and world-building, and awesome plots. I don’t have enough good things to say about them, except to say get your ass out there and buy the books!
And if you want to buy them direct from the author, come to Columbia, SC this Saturday and join Kalayna, me, James R. Tuck, Rachel Aaron, Delilah Dawson and A.J. Hartley for the second annual Fantastical Mystery Tour. DB won’t be with us, but he’ll be rolling through the Carolinas in two weeks, so you can get your books signed then. Once again, I am the smallest fish on the lineup, and am so flattered to be with these awesome writers.
DB Jackson’s new book is called Thieftaker and is the first book in its series. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m looking very much forward to it, because DB is also awesome fantasy author David B. Coe, whose work I really enjoy. This is a new venture for him, branching out into Historical Urban Fantasy and giving his advanced degree in history a workout. You can hear more about this in the video below.
Now that you’ve had a giggle, here’s why it’s important to buy these books THIS WEEK. For mid list authors, which is the vast majority of the writers you read about here, and most of my friends, there’s pretty much a two-week window to make a list. And by “make a list” I mean get a book onto the New York Times or USA Today bestseller list. And this means a lot to a writer. Not just because it feels great (I assume, since I have never made a list) to see your name up there in print where you grew up reading the names of your writerly heroes, but because there are some serious economic things behind making a list.
You make a list, you get a little better promotion from your publisher. You make a list consistently, you can negotiate a little better contract next time around. You make a list, your next two or three books will get picked up by that publisher. You make a list, and it becomes easier to make a living as a traditionally published author. It never becomes easy, but making a list helps. And in the way books are sold and marketed in today’s world, the vast majority of lists are hit in the first or second week of release. And if a book doesn’t hit when it first releases, it never will.
So this post is asking you to go out and spend about $35. DB’s book is a hardcover, and lists for $24.99. Maybe your bookstore discounts, maybe it doesn’t. But buy local. And Kalayna’s book is a mass market paperback, an absolute steal at $7.99. It’ll be the best $35 you spend this week. These are incredible writers, and they deserve your support. And if you want to buy for the Kindle, that’s cool, too.
And if you want to buy some of my shit while you’re buying, that’s cool, too. But these books come with my 100% stamp of approval. Check them out, and let me know if you love them.
Last weekend was my first time as a guest at ConCarolinas, and I had an awesome time. Last year I couldn’t attend this con because I had already bought a table space at HeroesCon and couldn’t do both. This year they are not on the same weekend, and I am loving it! I had a great time hanging out with all my friends from Magical Words, as well as some other good friends like Gail Martin and Stuart Jaffe. I also met some new great friends like my brother from another mother, James Tuck, author of the Deacon Chalk urban fantasy series. It’s awesome, you should buy it! I was on several panels, had some great conversations with some fans, and generally had an awesome time.
And I sold a shitload of books. I sold almost completely out of the Bubba print collection, and had to reorder those and Hard Day’s Knight for Fandom Fest and Heroes. I was amazed at how Bubba was flying off the table, but then I realized that you tell folks it’s Larry the Cable Guy meets The Dresden Files, and that’s worth $15 right there. I hope they all enjoy those stories as much as I enjoyed writing them.
And I also corralled a lot of my writerly friends into appearing on Literate Liquors with me. So over the next few weeks you’ll see a bunch of new episodes, and I’ll be taping more at Fandom Fest and Heroes Con. I hope you’ll make it out to one of those shows. In the meantime, here’s the newest Literate Liquors video, featuring James R. Tuck.
UPDATE – OFFER NOW EXTENDED THROUGH WEDNESDAY! Go ahead, get free books if you’re active military, former military or family of military!
This weekend is about more than just barbeque, a long weekend and the opening of summer movie season. This weekend is a time to remember the men and women who laid down their lives to defend our country and our way of life. It’s also another good opportunity to say thanks to those who serve in our country’s military, and to those who have served. I never joined any branch of the military, but I have the utmost respect for those who did, and I understand that without men and women willing to stand on that wall, my way of life would be very different.
So thank you. If you’ve served our country, or are currently serving our country, thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you have lost a family member in any of current or recent conflicts, I am sorry for your loss and grateful for your sacrifice. I sincerely hope that someday we will live in a world where people don’t try to take away the rights and freedoms of other people, but until that time I’m glad we have people who are willing to defend our country, with their lives if necessary.
Here’s my gift to our men and women of the Armed Forces. From now until Midnight Monday (12AM Tuesday) – you can have free ebooks. Anything I’ve written, you can have it. You want one book? It’s yours. You want a copy of all my books? They’re yours. All you have to do is email me and ask. I’ll email you copies of any book I’ve written.
Here are the details –
1) This offer is open to any current or past member of any branch of the US Armed Forces. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard. If you’re a vet, currently serving, or retired – you qualify.
2) This offer is open to the wives, husbands, parents and children of any member of the US Armed Forces that has died in the line of duty. Vietnam, Desert Storm, training accident, Afghanistan – if someone in your immediate family gave their life in service to our country, you qualify.
3) To get your free ebook(s), it’s a really complicated process (I’m lying). Email me – johnhartness AT gmail DOT com – and tell me which books you would like. Tell me if you need a Kindle format (for the kindle) or an ePub format (for everything else). I’ll email you the file. You might have to figure out how to put the books on your e-reader, but in most cases it’s really easy and there are directions available on the Google machine.
4) Please pass the word to other servicemen, servicewomen, veterans and families.
This offer does end at the end of Memorial Day. I’m serious – I don’t care how many books you want. If you want a free copy of every book I’ve ever written, it’s yours. Please don’t be shy about asking.
The Books – Since I should probably let everyone know what I’m giving away.Seriously, you can have any or all of them for free, just tell me what format, and I’ll email them along. Thanks for your service.
The Black Knight Chronicles – A humorous urban fantasy series set in Charlotte, NC where the good guys are vampires. Perfect for fans of Jim Butcher or Joss Whedon.
Book 1 – Hard Day’s Knight
Book 2 – Back in Black
Book 3 – Knight Moves
Collected Shorts – Knight (un)Life
Bubba the Monster Hunter stories – Cross Larry the Cable Guy with the Dresden Files in this hilarious comic horror series. All the stories are available in two collections.
Monsters Beware – Collects Bubba 1-4 (Voodoo Children, Ballet of Blood, Ho-Ho-Homicide, Tassels of Terror)
Monsters Mashed – Collects Bubba 5-8 (Cat Scratch Fever, Love Stinks, Hall & Goats, Footloose)
Genesis – X-Men:First Class meets Mad Max in this apocalyptic teen superhero novel.
Headshot – Meet Cindy O’Shea. She’s a black belt, she’s a sniper, she’s a sophomore. Teenage assassin in New York. What could go wrong?
The Chosen – What do you get when you mix the father of all mankind with a snotty archangel, the Father of Lies, a couple of snarky waitresses from Texas and a tattooed street preacher from Tennessee? A cross-country trip to save the world, of course!
The Christmas Lights – A short sampler of my literary fiction, plus introductory stories for both of my genre fiction series.
Returning the Favor – A collection of poems, essays and short stories by an overeducated redneck. Drinking, comic conventions, breakups, family gatherings, bluegrass and did I mention drinking? No subject is off-limits.
Red Dirt Boy – I write poetry, too. Poetry for people who’d rather listen to Johnny Cash than read Robert Frost.
Literate Liquors is my new video show where I do book and booze pairings. If you’ve ever wondered what’s the best drink to go with Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles, this is the show for you! We talk about books and booze, two of my favorite things.
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