9/10/2014

September 10, 2014 Eimear Fallon

First, some housekeeping.

Both Dystopolis and Tales from the End are now available on Gumroad, Smashwords, and hopefully a bunch of other places soon. If you’re into owning digital files, I really recommend Gumroad - they have a slick interface, and make it incredibly simple to buy and download digital stuff. Reflecting this, they’re now $6.99 and $5.99 respectively, but that’s still pretty cheap. A Fireball and Coke at the Paradise Rock Club is $8, and that didn’t kill me, so I doubt this will either.

(Don’t buy drinks at the Paradise Rock Club. Good God.)

Also, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about the audiobook. Turns out that audio fidelity on my current microphone isn’t exactly perfect, so either I’ll figure out a way to tune things up, or delegate it to someone who has a recording studio in their bedroom, or just not do it. (Do you know someone who has a recording studio in their bedroom? Let me know.)

I have an essay in the latest issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room, about Monsters University. You can subscribe or buy the single issue here (if you go for the latter, you’re looking for School), and I absolutely recommend you do - BW/DR still showcases some of the best film writing out there, and I promise I’m not just saying that because I somehow swindled them into including me among their ranks.

Everything below this is about stuff I’ve been consuming, media-wise, so for the sake of brevity I’ll throw in a cut here. But please, do finish this if you feel like it. I think my taste is okay.

I have been playing and watching and listening to so much stuff, you guys. Tonight I watched Heathers, and while I absolutely now believe the hype (that film has one of the best endings to a high school comedy I’ve ever seen, and had me silently punching the air while wiping away tears, which is a surprisingly complex gestural act), I am utterly unconvinced of Christian Slater’s ability to act. He seems to think that squinting and channelling Nag from The Jungle Book makes him seem interesting and imposing. Really, it makes him look silly. Winona Ryder is incredible, though. She’s also one of those people who I see in films and loudly exclaim “come on, that’s just not fair” at.

I also watched The Great Gatsby. I’m of two minds about it - I think that when the film is consumed by the headiness of the twenties, it really excels - there’s a spellbinding soundtrack, and a very snappy visual style, and Leonardo DiCaprio is pretty much perfect casting as a former sparkling youth who’s desperately trying to hide his age. The problems come when the film slows down and gets serious, which Baz Luhrmann really isn’t very good at - he tries, bless him, but it never quite comes together. Where Luhrmann excels is in finding beauty and melancholy through chaos, but the way that Gatsby is structured is almost as two films - one that shows the chaos upfront, and one that attempts and fails to grasp some distance. But it was fun. And my God, that soundtrack.

I also played A Story About My Uncle for the first time and Dragon Age Origins for the third. The former is a beautiful first-person platformer. Here’s a screenshot:

Right? Look at that nonsense.

Dragon Age: Origins is a 60-hour RPG that I can’t even begin to explain, for fear that I won’t do it justice - at its core is a very simple “assemble an army and beat the bad guys” story, but what with it being sixty hours long there’s quite a lot more than that going on. It’s very good, though. The third in the (presumed) trilogy comes out this November, and I am anxiously awaiting to see if it’ll run on this laptop or not.

Okay. I think I’m just about done. I’ve been listening to a lot of Porter Robinson and the soundtrack to Purgateus. They do not go well together, but apart they’re great.

Get Dystopolis for $4 for the next week! →

September 2, 2014 Eimear Fallon

A quick reminder: my latest book will go up by two American dollars and ninety-nine cents in a week, so this is your last chance to get it at the current price. $4 is a steal for any book, really, even a bad one. And I don’t think it’s bad. I’m a little biased, though.

August 21, 2014 Eimear Fallon

Let’s keep this first part brief:
THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO GET DYSTOPOLIS FOR BASICALLY NO MONEY
On Monday September 8th, the ebook price of Dystopolis, my short story collection about six humans trying to figure out their place in a future… — Let’s keep this first part brief:

**THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO GET DYSTOPOLIS FOR BASICALLY NO MONEY**

On Monday September 8th, the ebook price of *Dystopolis*, my short story collection about six humans trying to figure out their place in a future society that has a veiled and incoherent agenda, will be going up to **$6.99** - that’s $2.99 more than the current price. I’m doing this for two reasons:

There is a trend with self-publishing nowadays that says you have to aggressively undercut the prices of other authors to sell books. It’s why I set *Dystopolis* at $4 when I published it in March - one way of approaching the Kindle store is to seek out the cheapest stuff available, and it sucks for the people who worked to make the things you read.

Here’s the more exciting thing: **on September 8th, *Dystopolis* will no longer be a Kindle** **exclusive, so there’s no motive to keep it cheap.** It’s had to be both cheap and exclusive up until this point so it can share in profits from the Prime lenders’ library, as well as Kindle unlimited, but I’m jettisoning that approach in favour of spreading things further. So, on the 8th, *Dystopolis* will be available DRM-free on Gumroad, and I’ll also be submitting it to the ebook stores where you can currently find *Tales From The End -* so by the end of September, you should see it popping up on iBooks, the Nook store, Kobo, and a few others. This might take a little while - the distributor I’m planning to use submits stuff in batches - but it’ll spread things out a little more.

I’ll also be increasing the price of *Tales From The End* around that time from $3 to $4.99.

*Finally,* I’ve mentioned the *Dystopolis* audiobook once or twice in the last few weeks. I’ll be doubling down on that soon, and I’m hoping to have something polished and ready by the end of September. The key thing here is that you have either the paperback or ebook of Dystopolis, **you’ll get the audiobook for free.** I’m still not sure how to manage this when the time comes, but I’m determined to make it so people aren’t paying twice for cross-platform releases where possible. If you bought the paperback, you should already have access to the ebook (check the back page) - this will continue that trend.

But anyway: the key thing for now is that *Dystopolis* will stay at four tiny dollars (or the equivalent regional price) until the first week in September, and you can buy it at this price here. While you still can.

June 24, 2014 Eimear Fallon

HEY. From now until June 29th, the DYSTOPOLIS ebook is considerably cheaper than usual. If you haven’t already got it, then this is a really good opportunity to pick it up here. It’s also going to be cheap on Amazon UK, too, though the pricing structure is a little different.

Dystopolis takes place in a city that emerges centuries after a disaster that drives humanity underground. There’s an exiled assassin, a sex robot, a murderous farmer, and a vampiric journalist. You will probably find something to like.

Other people have said these things about Dystopolis: "a fascinating ecosystem of stories that both satisfy and somehow leave you wanting to delve deeper", “seems like it could’ve been ripped from the pages of spec scripts from The Twilight Zone’s writers’ room”, and “the infuriating sort of brilliant that makes one jealous they didn’t think of it first”. See, I could have made up quotes there, but didn’t.

So. Buy it, if you like putting your eyes on words. You will not be disappointed. Hopefully.

Leave a review of Dystopolis →

April 12, 2014 Eimear Fallon

Hey! If you’ve read Dystopolis, I’d appreciate it immensely if you’d leave a review over on Amazon about it. I’m not just saying this to massage my ego (though there’s always that) - the more positive reviews there are of my work, the more it boosts Amazon search rankings, the more I sell, the more I buy chocolate to stuff into my stupid body.

Of course, if you hated it, um. Probably keep it to yourself. I’m not telling you that you can’t yell about how awful it was, but it’d be pretty depressing for everyone involved.

Numbers

April 11, 2014 Eimear Fallon

First: if you haven’t already bought Dystopolis, you can do so here. It’s currently $8.99 in paperback, and $4.00 as an ebook. Quite a few people seem to like it. What follows is a breakdown of sorts of the first month-and-a-bit of sales, which probably won’t interest anyone who isn’t interested in the publishing side of all of this, but I’m guessing there might be one or two who are. So. Here we are.

In the last five weeks, I’ve sold 44 books. This includes 8 print copies (18%), 13 full price digital copies (30%), and 23 discounted digital copies (52%). When it comes down to royalty breakdown, however, I’ve earned by far the most from full-price digital copies (46%), followed by the copies sold during the recent discount (28%), followed very closely by print copies sold (26%).

The reasons behind this are fairly straightforward, of course - I make the most from digital sales, despite the fact that the retail price of Dystopolis in ebook form is less than half of its print counterpart - ignoring the fact that the Kindle publishing program allows for 70% royalties, it actually costs a substantial amount of money to produce and ship a print book in the first instance. Additionally, Amazon (as a third-party seller, despite owning Createspace, where the book was originally published) takes a decent cut even after the costs of production are taken away. Not that you should be discouraged from buying a paperback if that takes your fancy. It’s nice to hold something in your hand, after all, and I spent quite a lot of time on the typesetting.

The thing that maybe surprised me the most was the surge in interest over the last week, helped mostly by the fact that the book was being sold for a fraction of its original price (99 cents for two days, followed by $1.99 for another two, and so on) and possibly also helped by the fact that I was pushing it fairly aggressively.

Promotion has to be factored into all of this, actually. Most of the original batch of sales came from the few who know me well enough to trust this blog, and then a small sampling of the large number of people who follow Arden’s online presence. With the recent sale, I have no doubt that quite a few sales came from Ashton Raze, the lead writer of Starbound, retweeting this fairly desperate plea to over 3,500 people. The flip-side of this, of course, is that even ignoring the various other fronts on which people were highlighting the promotion, that creates a ratio of one sale for every 163 people.

I suspect the message of this is that only so much comes from exposure; initially, you need to nurture an audience. Which I sort of do - of all of the people I interact with on the interact with on the internet, I think most of them have bought my book (and if you haven’t, shame on you), but at the same time don’t. There’s an element of dialogue in the way I interact with computers, but it isn’t quite as two-way as it could be; this whole medium, for me, is still fairly one-way.

There are no grand conclusions, here. This is more of a data-dump, and I’ll need some time to figure out what it all means. But it’s interesting. And gratifying. Holy hell. The final point of all of this is that forty-four people have bought Dystopolis, and that’s pretty damn lovely. I hope you’re enjoying it.

March 23, 2014 Eimear Fallon

“No outrage is mustered here on behalf of anyone in particular; nobody is precisely to blame for the way things have turned out. And the writing is never less than thoughtful, understated, philosophical.”

— Another review of Dystopolis. Goodness me. You’re all so lovely.

March 21, 2014 Eimear Fallon

Okay, one last round: if you’ve still been dithering about whether or not to buy my latest book, Dystopolis, you can find everything you need to know at the above link or here. There are retail links, testimonials, a blurb, the book cover, and… — Okay, one last round: if you’ve still been dithering about whether or not to buy my latest book, *Dystopolis*, you can find everything you need to know at the above link or here. There are retail links, testimonials, a blurb, the book cover, and it’s not going anywhere - so if you want to share that link amongst your friends (or, better - your arch-nemesis), please feel free to.

That’s it. There is more stuff related to this coming in April, so I’m not saying that I’m done with the self-promotion, but in terms of an announcement as simple as “hey, I just wrote a book”, I’m done.

Probably.

March 13, 2014 Eimear Fallon

Reminder: Dystopolis is still a book what I wrote, and you can still buy that from an assortment of Amazonian retailers: in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia (as well as all the non-English speaking ones too). It should be up on other sites like… — **Reminder:** *Dystopolis* is still a book what I wrote, and you can still buy that from an assortment of Amazonian retailers: in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia (as well as all the non-English speaking ones too). It should be up on other sites like Barnes and Noble in a couple of weeks.

**Also!** If you can’t afford the print edition (or it isn’t currently available in your region), and don’t have a Kindle (buy a Kindle), the **Kindle reading app**is available for just about anything: iOS, Android, PC, Mac, and probably some even weirder ones I don’t know about. And if one of your friends has bought *Dystopolis*, they can send you the file without facing any issues: the digital edition is 100% DRM-free, albeit encoded in Amazon’s weird proprietary format. The key thing, though, is that if someone sends you the ebook and you only have a computer, you can still read it.

Here’s what a real live human being said about *Dystopolis* recently:

“I picked up Dystopolis in the early afternoon. I read the last page in the evening of the same day. At no point in between was I able to tear myself away. Fraser’s created a fascinating ecosystem of stories that both satisfy and somehow leave you wanting to delve deeper.” (via)

All this, about a book that contains a nightclub called the Scarlet Sturgeon and a police chief who looks like Bill Nye the Science Guy. (I never actually said he looked like Bill Nye, but that was my visual reference. Sorry if you’ve read it and thought of someone else.)

Again - if it isn’t too painful, please share and reblog this as much as you can. Or, if you don’t have a blog, go to your nearest village square with a megaphone and start screaming in a shrill guttural monotone. Thank you.

March 8, 2014 Eimear Fallon

Was developing a portfolio site today, then got bored, then wasn’t developing a portfolio site anymore. Still like this photo, though. It’s almost like I’m a real author.

March 8, 2014 Eimear Fallon

Well, crap. There’s an issue with the print edition of Dystopolis (not an error - those who have already purchased it won’t notice the difference) which means that for the next 24 hours or so, it won’t be available for sale as it goes through another round of revisions. Sorry about that. I’m my own worst enemy sometimes, honestly.

March 5, 2014 Eimear Fallon

Hi. Over the last three years, I’ve been writing a book. It’s about a post-apocalyptic city in the future, aggressively guided by the ideology that a meaningful life is always better than longevity, or happiness, or a crude moral framewo… — Hi. Over the last three years, I’ve been writing a book. It’s about a post-apocalyptic city in the future, aggressively guided by the ideology that a meaningful life is always better than longevity, or happiness, or a crude moral framework. It has a sex robot in it, a vampiric journalist, and a love story about an exiled assassin, amongst other things.

If you’re sold already, you can buy the **paperback here** for $8.54 and the **Kindle edition here** for $4 (UK: **print**, **ebook**, CA: **ebook**, print arriving soon). If you buy the print edition, you can get the ebook for free, DRM-free. Which is neat.

If you need a little more persuading, here’s the blurb:

*Two hundred years after a catastrophe that ruined the planet, humanity re-emerges with a whole new purpose and ideology.*

In the newly-built city of Stopfordia, a traffic cop is embroiled in a murder mystery. A chef at a diner on the edge of town turns to androids to satisfy his basest desires. An assassin, facing exile, finds her whole life transformed. A farmer finds himself on trial in front of a jury of thousands for a crime of horrific proportions. A journalist, facing unemployment, turns to a life of crime to keep the stories bleeding in. And a sex worker peers behind the curtain, only to discover that life in Stopfordia is not as it seems.

*This is the world of Dystopolis: where the pursuit of a perfect life can take you to places you’d never expect to end up.*

And here are a couple of things that good people have said about it:

“With Dystopolis, Fraser has imagined something that walks in with a scifi badge on, then sneaks up on you with a pitcher-full of vulnerable, tragic, real life.”

**Josh Gaines**, author of *Clara’s Quilt and Michigan, Ten Cents*

“Dystopolis is like what Rod Serling would’ve written at the peak of his career – incisive, insightful, optimistic, and gleefully terrifying all the same.”

**Casey Morell**, author of *Halcyon*

If this all sounds interesting to you but you don’t have any money, consider sharing this with people you know by clicking that little reblog button. You’d be surprised by how much it helps. Oh, and if you do have money, conside reblogging this anyway.

In advance, and maybe a little hopefully: I hope you enjoy it.

Sign up for Dystopolis release updates →

February 25, 2014 Eimear Fallon

Hi. You can sign up for non-spammy email updates (maybe update singular) about my next book, Dystopolis, by going here. It would be nice if you did this thing. You don’t even have to buy the book - I mean, it’d be nice if you do, when the time comes - but it’s good to stay in the loop, right? If you like this sort of thing. Or me. If you like me, give me your email address so I can sell you things. Oh dear.

Check your lapel

February 21, 2014 Eimear Fallon

So hard to articulate everything happening to me at the moment. In a little over a week, I will be married. That’s such an insane and beautiful concept that part of my brain has decided to shut down rather than fully process it. I feel like I’m floating, still.

Starting with the creative front, because that’s easy to talk about: Dystopolis is finished. You can find a synopsis here (along with the lovely opinions of a couple of lovely people) and sign up for release updates here, and I absolutely, definitely recommend that you do. I’ll also apologise in advance, because I intend to plug the hell out of this book. It’s the culmination of nearly three years of work, and I want as many people as possible to read it. On which note, if you’re a person who makes things and has released them into the wild (preferably writing, not industrial machinery, but creative things in general are good), I’m happy to give out review copies for free to anyone who’s willing to volunteer one.

Comments - positive or otherwise - are my bread and butter in terms of promoting this book. I’ve been doing all of this without the backing of an industry - no publishers, no agents, just my own know-how and a core team of wonderful editors - and as such I don’t have the same marketing machine that other books have. Every reblog helps. Or something like that.

Also, a quick note on release schedules - I’m hoping to publish it early in March, in both print and digital formats. It’ll start on Amazon, and spread from there to people who have other devices. You’ll also get a free digital copy if you buy the paperback, because fuck publishers who try to make you pay for the same product twice. (In the interest of exclusivity-related promotions on Amazon, I might wait a little while before openly publishing a multi-platform ebook edition à la this one, but it’ll be available on everything eventually.)

I’m also aiming to record an audiobook version of this one, and that’ll be distributed through Bandcamp; I have no idea what the ETA is on that, though, because it involves recording a 153-page manuscript. That sort of thing takes time. But no doubt I’ll be screaming about it at the time.

This barely touches my life at the moment, though. I’ve been planning a wedding, and that involves so much more than you initially think. Last night, we decided on our entrance music (Interlude - Gymnopedie No. 1 by Anamanaguchi), but there have also been decisions about food (New England clam chowder; butter poached lobster served with biscuits and asparagus tips; turkey pot pies; roasted chicken in a porcini cream sauce with fetuccine, peas and corn; a fucking tier of cupcakes), decorations (purple), flowers (also purple), guests (mostly family and Arden’s friends), playlists (as yet undecided), vows (sentimental), the justice of the peace (a very intuitive lady) and an ever-growing catalogue of things to take care of.

There’s also the fact that in the moments in between, I’ve been trying to settle in this new country; I have a bank account now, but no debit card or means of looking at my balance short of visiting a branch (though I should add that this isn’t a problem; I’m just impatient). I have a state ID, where my pre-haircut head looks twice its usual size. I have a social security number, albeit on a card that has the words VALID FOR WORK ONLY WITH DHS AUTHORIZATION stamped above it, because god forbid I actually be considered a viable taxpayer. I even registered with Selective Service, effectively consenting to conscription, even though something like that is meaningless; if the US ever tried to bring in a draft, the first thing I’d do is flee the country. Unless it was a war made entirely of donut bullets. Or the sort of fight where it’s over when you pull a flag out of your opponent’s pants. I’d go for that.

This all sounds overwhelming, and it is, but I’m also wonderfully, ecstatically happy. Being constantly alert to new things, as I have been, brings with it a certain level of stress that I’m unaccustomed to, but it’s all surface-level chatter. At the root, I’m smiling. I feel ready to face anything, and that’s a relief - because I have so much more to face.

February 21, 2014 Eimear Fallon

This arrived today.
Nearly there. — This arrived today.

Nearly there.

February 11, 2014 Eimear Fallon

So. Progress on this thing. There has been quite a lot.

This book’s now at a point where I’m ready to publish, and the only thing that remains is to check over the proof copy that’s on its way to me and to add a couple of cover qu… — So. Progress on this thing. There has been quite a lot.

This book’s now at a point where I’m ready to publish, and the only thing that remains is to check over the proof copy that’s on its way to me and to add a couple of cover quotes from other writers. That’s it. It still likely won’t be out until mid-March - I have the small matter of my own wedding to get through, and I’ll talk about that soon - but for now, this feels good.

December 9, 2013 Eimear Fallon

I finished the third draft of Dystopolis on Friday. It’s a little over 41,000 words, which seems short when I state it like that, but I’m hoping that it’s satisfying to read. I’ve retitled all but one story. A couple of character names and traits have changed. Everything is now as consistent as I think it’ll get without extra oversight, which is why a couple of people have agreed to give the whole book a few extra passes before it’s released out into the world.

Giving something like this up is intensely nerve-wracking. I haven’t shared my writing with anyone for a very long time, and I’m scared of disappointing others; this is quite unlike the stuff I’ve done before. It’s a little less weird, and attemps to stab at something resembling profundity, and when you stop using bizarre events as a crutch it can expose you.

So. This is all longhand for “I’ll be hiding in bed for the next couple of months”. I hope that’s okay.