The publisher who signed me last week is a demanding asshole. He not only wants perfect manuscripts for my series Tales From A Warming Planet, he wants me to manage production and marketing for the entire project. I’m the guy who has to make everything happen, from hiring the cover artist to creating content for the social media accounts.
“Remember what that architect Daniel Burnham said back in 1907: ‘Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.'”
Okay, boss.
Who is this heartless overlord? Me.
What’s the first thing he demanded? A strategic plan.
Here it is, in truncated form to avoid boring you with too much detail. The list is in launch order, first book to last.
The Mother Earth Insurgency – I wrote this 16,000 word novella for submission to magazines and contests to gain visibility for myself and my three novels in the Tales series. I’m still hoping for traditional publication, but it might be a great vanguard for the rest of the series. The story concerns Nick Sorrows, a near-future investigator with the Bureau of Environmental Security, who infiltrates a terrorist cell bent on destroying wind farms and other green energy facilities. The cell’s real target hits Sorrows close to home. I think it’s a good introduction to my imaginary future Earth, which is ravaged by climate change.
What was the first thing demanded by my asshat boss? A strategic plan.
Carbon Run – The first full-length novel in the series is the first novel I completed, and I think it’s the strongest of the three. In the 22nd century, Bill Penn and his daughter Anne run afoul of the BES when an accidental fire at their ranch destroys an endangered species. Bill, now a fugitive accused of a capital crime, is pursued by BES Deputy Inspector Janine Kilel, who takes Anne halfway across the world as bait to draw out her father from hiding.
City of Ice and Dreams – Next in the series is City of Ice and Dreams. Sento, a beautiful, intelligent, tormented young woman with a fragmentary memory of her past, is obsessed by Isorropia, a city in Antarctica half-myth, half-legend, believing it is the key to her identity. Surviving a shipwreck on Antarctica’s shore, Sento resolves to trek south with a group of immigrants on a suicidal one-way journey across the desert left by the melting of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet. Is Isorropia real? Or an illusion? And who is trying to stop her?
Restoration – The final novel in the series is Restoration. Urbane young Junie Wye faces adjustment to rural life in a divided small town as her father, Ed Wye, demolishes the last great dam on the Columbia River. Junie falls in love with the son of a man who opposes the dam’s deconstruction, but a greater, deadly opposition emerges that threatens everything Junie loves.
The Mother Earth Insurgency: More Tales From A Warming Planet – In the final volume of the series, The Mother Earth Insurgency makes another appearance, but as one of a collection of short stories set in the world of Carbon Run and the other novels. Like the novella, I wrote these stories for submission to magazines, and one, Zillah Harmonia, will appear in the January 2018 edition of Bards and Sages Quarterly.
After the ebooks and print volumes are published, I’ll add audiobook versions. More about that later.
At the end of this process, I’ll have fourteen products in inventory: four print books, five ebooks, and five audiobooks. That doesn’t count potential for box sets of each type. With any luck, one or two of these products will perform well and perhaps bring the others along in terms of sales.
Or it could all flop. At least my jerk of a boss can’t accuse me of being timid.
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J.G. Follansbee 