Cover reveal: The Guardian's Wyrd

It's one of our favourite days here at the Wordsmack office: Cover Reveal Day. The other favourites include publishing day and Friday...

Now, check out the gorgeous illustration by artist Colwyn Thomas for Nerine Dorman's fantasy novel The Guardian's Wyrd:

Lovely. And in case you're wondering, that's a rampant unicorn. They come with fangs and attitude. But, before you go away, check out what this book is about:

Sometimes having a fairytale prince as a best friend can be a real pain.

Jay didn't realise that sticking up for Rowan, the gangly new kid at school, would plunge him into the dangers and politics of the magical realm of Sunthyst. But if anyone is up for the challenge it's Jay September. With his trusty dog, Shadow, at his side, he braves the Watcher in the dark that guards the tunnels between the worlds, and undertakes a dangerous quest to rescue the prince.

It's a race against time - can he sneak Prince Rowan away from under King Lessian's nose and bring him safely back home - all before the prince's sixteenth birthday? Or is Rowan's mother, the exiled Queen Persia, secretly trying to hold onto her power by denying her son his birthright?

Jay is ready for anything, except, perhaps, the suffocating darkness of the tunnels. And that howling…

Sign up here to be notified when the book has gone live on Amazon and other digital platforms: http://www.word-smack.com/#!newsletter/c152j 

AND add it to your To Read list on Goodreads here.

Books for the price of a cup of coffee

Publishers have been vocal recently about the fact that you can now buy a book for the same price as a cup of coffee. Isn't that sad, they lament? How will it last? Well, of course we'd also like to make big profits and pay rent and eat something other than 2 Minute Noodles. But for now, we need to get more people with those eyeballs of theirs onto our books so that their minds can also be blown by how incredible (and sometimes a little scary) our authors' minds are.

To do list:
#1: blow people's minds
#2: make money when Hollywood comes a-knocking
#3: eat something other than 2 Minute Noodles

So therefore, the point, dearies, of this rant: Look at what you get for a measly R20 these days. It's not much. OR you can spend R20 on a book which will blow your mind, broaden your horizons and leave you looking down at your old school friends who clearly are not as impressive as you are.

Below shows: you can buy a Woolies smoothie, a cup of coffee (not even a double shot anymore), a song on iTunes, a cheapass app or ten diapers. OR you can do better.

This price is only available on the awesome Kobo: http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/the-folds 

We were generous and thought we'd even look at what R40 can give you. It includes a Woolies meal, better apps, or a movie on box office movie and some homemade popcorn (no easy popping for you). OR the brain explosion thing.

This price is only available on the awesome Kobo: http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/idea-war

Be good, but if you can't, you may as well enjoy.

Leani

New sci-fi horror short story series coming soon!

Get your comfy armchair and ereader ready, Wordsmack Publishers is publishing Mico Pisanti's The Folds, this week on Amazon. 

About the book:

After a devastating chemical war, the scarred survivors of Earth are subjects of global corporations that keep their beer spiked with Prozac and free speech a distant memory. At the most glamorous event of the post-war world, Miss Universe, celebrities and the beautiful strut around as if there is no secret resistance, no mysterious movement called The Folds, and most importantly, no horrific once-aborted army of children being created by the current powers-in-command. In the first book of the The Folds series, Mico Pisanti horrifies us with a future scarred by chemical warfare and too-powerful corporations.

When The Folds calls, will you answer?

About the author:

Mico Pisanti lives and works in Johannesburg and believes every word he writes. The inspiration behind The Folds is the everyday mundane juxtaposed with a vision of the future which isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem.

He is such a boring person, that the only way he gets excitement in his life is by imagining the things he writes about in his head.

His previous work has been pubished in Something Wicked and Bloody Parchment.

Be sure to buy The Folds on Amazon.

Thank you to Louisa Pieters of Fool Moon Design for the great cover design. 

A Grain of Sand - where can you get it?

Where can you buy our new short story and for how much?

Wordsmack's first short story, A Grain of Sand is out. You can read my review on Goodreads here.

For some reason this is still cheaper on Amazon.co.uk than on Amazon.com - something to do with us being in South Africa. The cheapest option, however, is to buy it on Kobo, because Amazon makes the book more expensive because we are in South Africa.

Self-publishing vs traditional publishing

Self-publishing versus traditional publishing

The blogosphere is full of articles about self-publishing versus traditional publishing. And I love how self-publishing has shaken up the (very) cobwebby industry, so here are my two cents worth:

Firstly, let me quickly explain what I mean by traditional publishing. Traditional publishing is done by either a large publishing house (think Penguin, Pearson, Pan Macmillan, etc.) or a smaller independent publisher (like Wordsmack). These publishers pay authors a royalty. The royalty percentage differs from publisher to publisher, but most pay 10%-15% although this is changing with the advent of epublishing. There are also vanity publishers who publish your books for a fee – this is a completely different form of publishing that is not being discussed here.

So, what exactly does a publisher do for you? 

Firstly, you get a brutally honest answer about whether your story is worth publishing or saving. Fear of rejection, I guess, is why a lot of people self-publish … I had a long conversation with an author who said that all authors should self-publish because publishers take too big a cut.  A few weeks later, I see she has found a publisher …

Secondly, if your book is accepted, you have a company who backs you, who believes in you and who wants to make you the best writer you can be.  A lot of very big publishers might not cultivate young talent, but there are small publishers, like us, whose goal in life is to develop new authors and a writing community in Africa. That, and winning the lottery, the European lottery.

Thirdly, and this is the most important, there are all the costs that the publisher carries: editing, proofreading, cover design, typesetting, illustrations/photos, marketing, etc. You don’t pay for anything and if you do, you are with a vanity publisher. Therefore, publishers have a vested interest, they want your book to sell and sell well. If your book doesn’t sell, the publisher makes a loss.

This article on one of my favourite websites explains it quite well: http://io9.com/the-7-most-common-misconceptions-about-science-fiction-1189361443

So, marketing, how hard can it be? There seems to be a lot of self-published authors who do really well. Every day there is at least one author who comes out and says how well they’ve done, how easy it was, what worked for them and tells everyone that they should do it too. However, I am sure that for every successful author, there are at least ten who aren’t successful. This could also be because their writing sucks, but often that has nothing to do with it. Some people are born self-marketers. They write blogs, are extremely active on social media, have time in the evenings to punt their books and they have connections. Most authors aren’t like this though – they love to write in their little corners at night after a long day of work, but they don’t have time or the energy for all the rest.