Maps for My Novel, Inca (Minor Spoilers)

Hello again everyone,

I’ve had a few readers tell me they have some trouble following where my protagonist is in any given chapter. It’s a fair critique. One of my goals with this book was to have the narrator visit all four corners of the known world over the course of his life, and that can get confusing in fairly short order. I wouldn’t expect most people to have a firm grasp of South American geography, let alone pre-Columbian geography before the Spanish renamed everything. Here is the map included in my book:

(Click to enlarge.)

But that doesn’t really make it easy to figure out where things really happened, does it? There are half a dozen landmarks, cities, regions, and tribes to use as way points, but I still left it up to the reader to constantly flip back to the map for reference. That must be especially irritating in the e-book version. Accepting this, I started playing around with the map, trying to track down where Haylli went from chapter to chapter. For my own ease I didn’t line things up exactly with the Royal Road network or the available mountain passes –preferring instead to approximate– but even if I had the overlapping journeys would only have muddied the waters. This is what I came up with:

(Click to enlarge.)

That’s kind of a mess, isn’t it? A problem with drawing lines on a map of an empire 3,000 miles long and up to 500 miles wide based on a 70-plus-year narrative is that there’s a lot of repetition. A simple coloured spaghetti chart isn’t much help to the reader interested in matching up the story to the geography. It occurred to me a chapter by chapter breakdown is the only way to really bring clarity to the situation. I did my best to avoid spoilers, but there are some broad plot points that just can’t be avoided. With that said, here’s the prologue and the first two chapters:

(Click to enlarge.)

If this is an approach that will help you enjoy the book, I’m happy to show you the rest. Just click through the jump for the rest of the breakdown.

Both of My Novels Are Now Available as Trade Paperbacks

Happy Holidays Everyone!

My office was closed this week, so to keep myself busy I set myself a goal: I’ve finally figured out how to get my e-published novels available as print-on-demand trade paperbacks. A copy of Inca and Zulu are in the mail to me as we speak. In the next week or so they’ll be available for sale through the various Amazon websites, but in the meantime they’re already available via CreateSpace directly:

Inca by Geoff Micks

Zulu by Geoff Micks

For any authors out there with e-books, I cannot say enough good things about the CreateSpace process. Formatting for print was a little time-consuming, of course, but if you have any kind of a graphic design background it is also relatively simple and totally free! That’s a far cry from the not-so-distant past.

Once upon a time, physical copies of self-published books were only available via vanity press: You bought a few hundred or thousand copies up front from a publisher, and it was up to you to sell them. There was a stigma to vanity presses, and the costs were prohibitive. Today, the stigma has been replaced with a spirit of entrepreneurialism, and making your books available costs nothing at all. When someone orders a book, CreateSpace prints off one copy and mails it to the reader. They deduct their costs from the price, and send me the rest as a royalty payment at regular intervals.

It’s a brave new world, and for the first time in a long time I feel lucky to live in an age where traditional publishing is gun shy of long works of historical fiction from new authors. This is better –so much better! I have total control over my novels in perpetuity, and I have the freedom to write what I like, format it as  I please, and publish on my own timeline. I even have the option of making the book available to bookstores and libraries, although that’s something I want to research further before taking that step.

This has been and will continue to be a journey, but I’m very happy with how far I’ve already come and the road still stretching out before me. I’d like to thank everyone who helped me set this course. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from a man who finds himself grinning ear to ear lately.

Cheers!

My second e-book, Zulu, is now for sale through Amazon’s Kindle Store

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to say we now have a working link. More importantly, my mother has bought the first copy, so I can now tell everyone else about it. Zulu is currently the 218,622nd most popular e-book for sale in the Kindle Store. I’m pleased to see e-publishing is thriving. With your help, I hope to climb at least an order of magnitude in the rankings. I’m sure there will be a number of updates and additional information in the near future –including a Smashwords link for those of you who do not favour Kindle e-readers– but for the time being I’m just going to say this is a proud moment for me. I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please tell a friend.

Cheers and happy reading!

Now Available at Amazon.com and CreateSpace!

Addendum: As of September 30th, I’ve decided not to publish on Smashwords, focusing all my efforts on Amazon.com. Cheers!

I Will Be E-Publishing My Next Novel, Zulu, Soon

Hello everyone,

As many of you know, I e-published a work of historical fiction, Inca, last summer on Amazon.com and Smashwords.com. It’s been a wonderful experience so far, and  I’m pleased to announce in the next few days I will be publishing my second novel. I’m just waiting for the ISBN number to come through, and then there will be a short delay while Amazon processes the file. I expect I’ll be blogging quite a bit in the next couple of weeks as everything comes online.

When I was fourteen years old I watched a movie called Zulu starring a young Michael Caine in his first major role. The film is an African Western –if that’s a thing– loosely based on the true story of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, a minor siege that saw a hundred and fifty British soldiers defend a mission station against four thousand Zulu warriors for a day and a night. The redcoats won eleven Victoria Crosses for their heroism, but I came away from the experience with a lingering question, “What would make a man get up out of the tall grass and run against a fortress over and over again, armed only with a spear less than four feet long?” The redcoats fought for their lives and only survived thanks to breech-loading rifles and makeshift barricades shoulder-high. What were the Zulu fighting for?

Being a bookish sort, I went to my library in search of answers. Everything I read left me wanting to learn more. The Anglo-Zulu War was not a straight parallel to the Apache or Sioux wars made famous by American westerns: The Zulu were an iron age pastoral society with a strong monarchy, a thriving economy, and a culture that celebrated service to the State. The assault on Rorke’s Drift was fought exclusively by men in their late thirties and early forties who had missed an earlier  battle where their sons and nephews had won a victory that made the Little Big Horn look like a church picnic. The older generation defied the orders of their King and crossed into British territory to attack Rorke’s Drift so as not to go home ashamed at their lack of accomplishment. They threw their lives against the British fortifications because it was better to die than have their children think less of them. The tragedy of that, the stubborn pride involved, humbles me.

The Zulu Kingdom went on to hold off a quarter of the globe for six aching months, and their final defeat saw their whole world collapse into an anarchy of ashes and dust for the hubris of wanting to live free in their own land under their own laws.

Much more so than the Ashante or the Xhosa or the Pashtuns or any other people ground under the Victorian heel in the later half of the 1800s, the Zulu have echoed through history for more than a century for their proud, doomed struggle. It frustrated me as a fan of historical fiction that nothing has ever written from their own perspective: Every story I found was written from the British perspective, and the Zulu were rarely more than a mass of humanity seen over a set of iron gun sights.  They deserve better than that, and I began writing a story at seventeen that I’ve been tinkering with ever since. I hope it does them justice.

Zulu is the story of four young people: Mbeki and Ingonyama, the sons of a blacksmith; the exiled Matabele prince Inyati, and Nandhi, the daughter of a Northern baron. They grow up in a kingdom on the cusp of a golden age. Their lives are far from perfect, but they make friends and enemies at the Royal Court that draw them into the great events of a people with a culture and history as rich and deep as anything medieval Europe can boast of. The abrupt collision of their civilization with an aggressive foreign power armed with the fruits of the Industrial Revolution becomes their highest glory and their deepest tragedy.

If Inca was my attempt to follow in the footsteps of Gary Jennings’ Aztec, Zulu is unabashedly my homage to the early works of Wilbur Smith: There are love triangles, power struggles, boxing matches, elephant hunting, brush fires, and battles. While most of the main characters are fictional, the incredible events they find themselves caught up in really happened.

I’m excited to share that story with you. Best regards and happy reading!

–Geoff Micks

EDIT: As of September 30th, I’ve decided to stop publishing on Smashwords and focus on Amazon.

My e-book, Inca, is now for sale through Amazon’s Kindle Store

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to say we now have a working link. My book is currently the 155,423rd most popular e-book for sale in the Kindle Store. With your help, I hope to reduce that by at least an order of magnitude. There will be tons of updates and additional information in short order, but for the time being I’m just going to say that this is a big day for me. I feel about ten feet tall. I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please tell a friend.

Cheers and happy reading!

Now Available at Amazon.com and CreateSpace!

Update on Inca: Amazon is Processing My E-Book

Hello again everyone,

My book is now in the tender hands of Amazon’s self-publishing department. I’ve been told it will be available for purchase within the next two or three business days. They want to make sure I’m not violating their terms and services, and I’m sure I’ll have a happy announcement to make very soon.

In the meantime, I want to walk back an  earlier statement I made: My original intention was to put this out for 99¢. An e-book is a different animal than a traditionally published work, and I was willing to keep the price down to the minimum above giving it away for free. While going through the process of actually uploading the book I was informed that the 70% royalty that is a major argument in favour of e-publishing is only available to works priced between $2.99 and $9.99. If I price my book at 99¢, I will only receive 35% of the proceeds of my work.

I’ve given up the idea of doing this for the money. There’s no advance in e-publishing, and there isn’t a marketing department at a major publishing house driving sales. My book is not going to pay my rent. If I’m lucky, it’ll keep me in coffee money from month to month. That said, 34¢ a book is a lot less than the 69¢ I was expecting. I have therefore decided to price my book at $2.99: The minimum that gets me the royalty my research told me to expect. I hope this doesn’t come across as overreaching. Some rough math says that every one sale I’m going to make at this new price will net me the equivalent  of six sales at my original intention, and I can’t pass that up.

For anyone who made up their mind to humour me at 99¢, I’d like to make the plug that $2.99 is still a great price. I am an avid reader, and my favourite genre is historical fiction. I’ve weaved a great story through true events that very few people have ever heard of before. There isn’t another novel that covers the Inca this way, and when I’m done no one will lump the Inca in with the Aztecs and the Maya ever again. While it’s not fair to mention another author and say you’ve produced an equivalent work, my heroes are James Clavell, Gary Jennings, Colleen McCullough, Sharon Kay Penman, Bernard Cornwell, James Michener, Gore Vidal, Lindsay Davis, Wallace Breem, and Wilbur Smith for his first three decades of brilliant work. I have done my best to honour their precedent, and I’m proud of the book I’m offering for your enjoyment.

Inca includes a map, two glossaries, a prologue, eighteen chapters, an epilogue, and an historical note. If I had kept better track of my research resources my bibliography would easily exceed a hundred monographs both from the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library and from my own personal collection. I started this book in 2000, and I’ve been working on it in one way or another ever since. In the weeks and months to come you can look forward to essays on this blog that will further enhance the experience of reading this book.

It’s worth $2.99. In a hypothetical world where the publishing industry existed today as it was when I was a kid, my one-time agent would have found my book a home and it would have been available in bookstores for around $30 two years ago.  Instead we find it here, and I’m just as comfortable asking for $2.99 as 99¢.

I look forward to sharing my work with you soon. It will cost a little more than I originally mentioned, but it will be a steal at thrice the price.

Cheers!

–Geoff

Now Available at Amazon.com and CreateSpace!

I will be e-publishing my first novel, Inca, within the next few days

Hello everyone,

As I mentioned back in January, I’ve been researching how to go about e-publishing my manuscripts. I’ve been writing seriously for more than eleven years now, and it is long past time my efforts find an audience beyond a small circle of friends and family. I’ve fought the good fight to find a home with a traditional publisher. I even had a literary agent for a couple of years, but prospects are bleak for new authors who hope to see their efforts sit upon a bookstore shelf next to their heroes.

I have a dozen flattering rejection letters admitting that my work has a readable quality, but economic reality has tied the hands of acquisition editors.  The Jersey Shore’s Snooki can make the New York Times bestsellers’ list, but I am not as safe a bet. So be it. Rather than bemoan the barriers facing my work in the twilight of the old way of doing things, it’s time to embrace the coming dawn. The future is e-publishing, and I’m ready to take the plunge. My first book will be available on Amazon for $.299 within the next few days.

How much do you know about the Inca? Everyone has heard of them, but a sad truth is that most people can do little more than mention them in the same breath as the Aztecs and the Maya. A South American civilization every bit as impressive as the Romans disappeared less than five hundred years ago, and today the true story is all but lost to us: In just three generations the Inca built an empire three thousand miles long and five hundred wide across the second highest mountain range in the world; within forty years of their beginning, rebellions, smallpox, political purges, a civil war, and finally the arrival of the Spaniards left so few of the Inca nobility alive that very little unbiased and coherent information was ever told to their conquerors and recorded for posterity. While working my way through the conflicting histories I found myself wishing that someone had written about the decline and fall of the Inca from their own perspective, as Gary Jennings did in his masterpiece Aztec. After a great deal of research I have written the book I wanted to read.

Inca is the life story of Haylli Yupanki, a man who served three generations of emperors only to watch his whole world shatter and shatter again, leaving nothing behind but his memories and his pride. Hiding in the jungle with the last of the unsubjugated Inca, Haylli transcribes his memoirs from quipus –the Inca’s writing system of knotted string– into Spanish with the help of a captured priest. Beginning with a childhood of privilege and a youth spent as a fugitive from Imperial justice, through a successful career as the Inca’s most powerful bureaucrat, to an old age spent in the ruin of his life’s work, Haylli was present at all the important moments of his people. Through his words he hopes their story will be remembered.

Fans of historical fiction will not be disappointed with this book: It’s a sprawling tale covering more than seventy years to include almost everything we know happened between the zenith and nadir of Inca power. More than two-thirds of the characters are based on real people, and every corner of the empire is visited over the course of the narrator’s life: The plot has court intrigue, forbidden loves, triumphs, tragedies, rivalries, heroes, monsters, coups, prophecies, plagues, treasures, sex and violence –all before the conquistadors arrive to change everything forevermore.

You’re going to be hearing a lot about this in the weeks and months to come. I’ll keep you updated.

Best regards,

–Geoff

Now Available at Amazon.com and Smashwords.com!