I was an early adopter when it came to ebooks in more ways than one. I owned a very early dedicated ebook reader, the HieBook, and read a ton of stuff on it. But I was also an early adopter as a writer, publishing my YA fantasy novel Spirit Singer with Awe-Struck Publishing (now owned by Mundania Press LLC) 10 years ago…you know, clever me, before ebooks really took off. As an experiment, it wasn’t entirely a bust, by any means. Spirit Singer won a couple of epublishing awards (the 2002 Dream Realm Award for excellence in epublished young adult science fiction, fantasy and horror and the 2002 EPPIE Award for best electronically published young adult fiction), and more importantly from a monetary point of view, the Regina Book Award for best book by a Regina author, at the 2002 Saskatchewan Book Awards. That award came with $1,500…which is a good thing, because I wouldn’t have made any money off of it otherwise. Those $1.50 royalty cheques just don’t add up very fast. (Technically it wasn’t the ebook version that won the Regina Book Award; it was a print-on-demand paperback, since only printed books are eligible. It may have been the first POD title ever entered.)
Fast forward to the present. Ebooks are finally taking off, and more and more authors are releasing titles as ebook originals (and more and more publishers, like my own, DAW Books, are releasing their books in both print and ebook formats.) And so…I’m experimenting with ebooks again.
I currently have four available through Smashwords and on Kindle.
First, there’s Spirit Singer, reborn as a modern ebook, though it began life in the age when ebooks were sometimes sold on floppy disks. (No, it’s true! You can look it up!). Second, there’s my duology about far-future street musician Kit Murdoch, better known as Andy Nebula. When Roussan Publishers went under, freeing up all rights to my printed YA SF novel Andy Nebula: Interstellar Rock Star, I turned it into an ebook. The sequel, Andy Nebula: Double Trouble was written and ready to go when Roussan failed, and so it had languished until it, too, could be made into an ebook–which it has been.
And then there’s The Chosen. This was a very early novel of mine–in fact, it might have been only the second I wrote as an adult–that came very close to being published by a Saskatchewan publishing house maybe 25 years ago. That never happened, and I was unable to find another home for the book (although I did use it as the basis for the material I worked on in a screenwriting class I took–any movie producers interested, I have a treatment!). Just a few years ago I polished it up a bit (it got a bit longer in the process), and now, at last, it sees the light of day as an ebook. As I like to say, it was dystopian SF before dystopian SF was cool!
Details follow, with links to the books on Smashwords and Amazon. Go forth and read! It would warm the cockles of my heart, and you want me to have warm heart-cockles, don’t you?
Spirit Singer
The Chosen
It’s late in the 21st century, and after economic collapse and a “small” war, civilization is in pretty bad shape. On the Canadian prairies, a religious cult, the Chosen, has dedicated itself to destroying all vestiges of the old technological civilization–but only a few hundred kilometres away, the Technos are just as dedicated to rebuilding it. The two cultures are on a collision course that could mean the first war of the new era, and mutual destruction, unless the teenage daughter of the cult’s leader and a boy from the Technos can overcome their own personal differences and prevent it…no matter what the cost.
Andy Nebula: Interstellar Rock Star
Kit is a tough streetkid from a backwater planet, living hand-to-mouth as a musician. Then he meets Rain, a tentacled alien, and Qualls, a talent scout. Overnight, Kit becomes Andy Nebula, interstellar rock sensation. But as his star starts to fade, Kit and his young fan Meta find themselves caught up in something far less glamorous–and more deadly!–than the galactic music industry.
Andy Nebula: Double Trouble
Kit is no longer Andy Nebula, interstellar rock star. Reduced to playing dingy dives, he agrees to reprise Andy Nebula for a one-time benefit concert…only to discover that someone else is passing himself off as Andy Nebula instead. Soon Kit, Meta and Rain, the alien cop, find themselves caught up in an interstellar assassination plot that endangers not only their lives, but galactic peace.
