I always get a huge thrill out of holding a copy of a book of mine which has been translated into another language. The Grand Crusade is a September release in France through Milady. Marc Simonetti again provided a gorgeous cover, and Sebastien Baert did the translation. Translating me not a task I’d envy anyone. English is a fairly slippery language, and I tend to make up words here and there—sometimes even intentionally. I find it hard to imagine the thoughts that might run through someone’s had when they discover a word that doesn’t exist in their vocabulary or any dictionary.

Actually I don’t. It’s the same thoughts that run through my mind when I discover one of my made up words in one of my own manuscripts. *blush*

Books in translation are a curious phenomenon. For many Americans, or me at least, Europe and Asia are exotic places. I’ve done a little bit of traveling and am often at the mercy of people who are tolerant willing to accept my complete ignorance of their native tongue. The idea that a saga that I created has been translated into another language so that all sorts of people I can’t understand can actually get into the book and enjoy it is rather mind-boggling.

A question usually comes up when you mention that you had a book translated is “How do you know they got it right?” The fact is you don’t always know. Realistically, the publishers want to hire translators who are going to turn out text that’s accurate and faithful to the original. I’ve actually had readers tell me that they’ve read some of my books in English and then in translation, and have been somewhat critical of the job the translators did. That’s not true with any of the French translations of the DragonCrown War books, nor the German volumes translated by Reinhold Mai. I have to assume that these same readers who are willing to complain to me are willing to complain to the publishers. And since the translators sometimes get paid a royalty, it’s in their best interest to turn out the best book they possibly can.

When I get a translation I like flipping through and seeing what I can recognize. Because I grew up in Vermont, the closest thing I have to a second language is, in fact, French. I can remember just enough to be able to figure out what’s going on and make a rough translation back into English. One of the cooler things in this volume is that the character crow has had his name translated into the French word for Crow, Corbeau. This means I can read along pretty easily and recognize most of the characters, and then I run into this new name for Crow and have to stop and think and translate.

None of that diminishes the thrill of seeing a book in translation. I do wonder however when I read books translated from another language into English if I’m getting all the little nuances. My German translator, Reinhold Mai, and I exchange e-mails or talk on the phone about some of these finer points. Some of the things I try to do with English can’t be done in other languages, yet other languages have conventions that allow a similar thing to actually work. For example, in the novel Once a Hero, and the Aelves speaking with a lot of Latin words and the humans using mostly Germanic words. It created a subtle division between them. English is kind of unique in that we have stolen a lot of words from other languages so this kind of division is possible. Other languages might not have that sort of convenience but might for example, have high caste to lower caste variations which create a similar effect.

This is the thing I love about writing: I get to play with language. It to make things up. I get these ponds. I get to create pictures with words and give substance to emotions and punch little buttons that we all have installed somewhere. Guess that’s the best part about writing. Finding those universal truths that unite everyone on the planet, and using them to communicate. Good stories are good stories and it’s very cool that I get to share them with the world.

A WIRED story coming out of Book Expo America once again reveals the gap between reality and what some of the leaders in publishing think.

Susan Petersen Kennedy, president of Penguin Group USA, said publishers will not make the same mistakes as the music industry, which had an epic struggle over electronic distribution and piracy and lost huge market share.

“It’s always treated as if the publishers are the Luddites,” she told Reuters in an interview. “The devices have not caught up with the content. Contrary to popular opinion, the book is actually so far more flexible.”

[Emphasis mine.]

Take a look at that last pair of sentences. What do they mean? Let’s break that first one down: The devices have not caught up with the content. The two readers I have (Sony Touch and iPad) allow me to read, to adjust the type size, to highlight passages, to make notes and to double-tap a word, immediately bringing up a dictionary to tell me what that word means. In addition, if the device is hooked into the internet, hotlinks become live, so I can immediately go to the net and purchase the next volume, or learn more about the book. So, the way I see it, the devices do everything a print book does, and more.

The second sentence, however, is the one that I find even more puzzling. What does she mean by flexible? Moreover, is flexibility even a quality that makes any difference in this battle? I don’t think so. Print books are heavy and bulky. In the space of a single thin paperback or less (a smart phone or iPod Touch) a reader can carry thousands of books. And, sure, print books won’t run out of power, but battery life is a silly measurement. After all, it’s not how long your battery will last, it’s how long are you going to be between chances to recharge your device? In the last three years of hauling a iPod Touch around, that’s been absolutely never for me.

Right now, the only edge your mass market paperback has over an ebook reader is that you can’t use it between the ground and 10,000 feet on a flight. Might be the longest 20 minutes of your life going up and down, but that’s what the inflight magazines are for.

Jim Lowder pointed me to another article coming out of BEA that illustrates more problems with publishers and the way they address ebooks.

Dominique Raccah, of Sourcebooks, agreed that the new technology was a great way to connect authors with readers. However, she refuted Defiore’s argument that eBooks made life easier for publishers. Through a series of slides, Raccah stressed that making digital books is complicated for publishers because formatting them is so complicated. “We have thirty new steps to format the book to be an eBook and that is before production and meta-data,” she said.

[Emphasis mine.]

Thirty steps? I wish I had seen the slides. When I went from text file to ebook for Talion: Revenant it took exactly seven steps:

1) Get a cover made.
2) Get a spacer illo made
3) Insert Bookmark breaks (insert a line at each chapter head and four other places: a search operation for 30 lines)
4) Insert spacer illo tags (insert a line at each 3 line break: a search operation for two dozen lines)
5) Insert hotlinks (cut and paste from a file)
6) Gather illos and text file into a folder
7) Run Michael Zapp’s Legend Maker software to create the epub and Kindle file.

Total time for those seven steps less than two hours. In a week or so, I’ll be taking my novel Eyes of Silver and prepping it from scan to epub. I’ll track my time and let you know how long it took. The real question is that if I can do things in less time and with fewer steps than traditional publishers, what’s going on in New York? While Susan Petersen Kennedy protests that publishers are not Luddites, their understanding of technology and their use of it really casts that statement in doubt. And the usual retort of “Well, Mike, you understand this stuff and are comfortable with it,” just doesn’t wash. If you and your staff are not comfortable with things, hire someone who is!

And here’s the real dark side of things for traditional publishers. They’re looking at their ebook sales and using their growth to calculate how much time they have to get their ebook business squared away. But they’re not the only folks selling ebooks. In the last two months I’ve sold more copies of Talion: Revenant as an ebook than Bantam has sold of The Grand Crusade as an ebook since 2003. Sure those numbers show the surge of ebook sales that has been growing sharply, and TR sales benefit from it, no doubt at all. But traditional publishers are not tracking data on my sales, or on the sales of any other self-published electronic publication. Traditional publishers numbers are as reliable as the data on tomato sales a farmer gathers when he only counts the sales from his roadside stand. The numbers do not measure supply or demand, so are good only in relation to other numbers he’s gathered.

While my ebook sales may not amount to much in the world of traditional publishing, they’re important for two reasons. First, someone buying a book from me isn’t buying a book from them. Second, since I don’t have their overhead, I can sell for less. This means I am shaping what folks see as a reasonable price for ebooks. This means my sales, and the sales of other authors who are offering books for $5 or less are shaping perceptions that traditional publishers are going to have to deal with.

Ultimately it’s not a question of publishers being Luddites or not. It’s a question of their being in touch with reality. Right now, not looking very good on that front. As far as they’re concerned, it’s not raining where they are, just up in the mountains. So there shouldn’t be a problem pitching a tent in that dry river bed, should there?

First and foremost, they point you to characters who are strong or weak. For example, most of my heroes have names with begin with a hard sound in English: K or T. They’ll have one somewhere in their name if it doesn’t begin with it. Corran, Hawkins, Crow, Resolute, Victor, Kai… I could go on. I also, for a reason unknown to me, also favor the letter N for hero names: Nolan, Neal and, in the current books, Nathaniel. (Even Corran ended up with an N, since he was Rogue Nine…)

Often a character will have his true name, and then a call name, or the name I used most often in the book. Nolan, from Talion: Revenant, got called Talion a bunch, so his call name had a T in it. Owen Strake (who has a twofer in his last name) is often called Captain Strake, so he picks up that K sound. That hard sound suggests toughness for a character, and I like that. Helps me fix the character in my mind.

There are other bits of name games that can be played. One thing I don’t like in a lot of novels, especially fantasy novels, is that names are just a mishmosh, drawn from every culture haphazardly. I like them to be grouped the way, um, gosh, they are in life. In At the Queen’s Command I made a couple choices in this regard. The Mystrian colonies are populated by people from Norisle. In Norisle, most folks have a family name that is a place name of some sort: Langford, Rivendell, Harrington. The folks shipped off to the colonies were often rebels and criminals, so they adopted new names in the new world. Hence they have last names like Woods, Bone, Strake, Baker, Branch and Cask. I decided to name them largely after nouns, sometimes after occupations and occasionally a bit more exotic, but just by reading a character’s name, you’ll know the side of the ocean he comes from.

I also get to have fun with the names. Seth Plant is a simple man on the edge of civilization. He has a small farm. He also supplements his income by being a grave digger. (Yes, the pun was quite intentional. These are things writers do to amuse themselves.)

At other times names are symbolic. Nolan means, “no land,” and the character was one whose nation was destroyed and whose family perished along with it. Victor Davion was conceived on the eve of his father’s greatest victory, hence his name. Also from the BattleTech novels, Kai Allard-Liao got his name from John Steinbeck’s spelling of the name of King Arthur’s brother, Kay (Cay, Cai, etc). This is why I pronounce it Kay, when most folks use the Asian pronunciation of Kye. I named him that because, like Sir Kay, he’s stalwart and reliable.

The use of names can be a very strong technique in projecting a sense of order into your world. When you’re putting together a setting, take some time to group names so they are familiar. Think about honorifics that can elevate a person in class. Think about how you change a name from male (Steve) to female (Stephanie) or child (Davy) to adult (David) to familiar (D or Dave or Big Dave or the D-man). Just by using different names you can suggest a whole world of relations in a very subtle way that most readers will miss consciously, but will pick up subconsciously. It gives your work more depth, more layers, and will make readers come back for more.

Just got back from the Post Office, picking up a package. The clerk asked if I’d ordered cigarettes from France! (Do they get a lot of that, I wonder?)

What I got was copies of Fortress Draconis en francais. My French is pretty rusty, but the translation looks quite faithful to me. The translator is Noemie Saint-Gal and the gorgeous cover was done by Marc Simonetti. The publisher is Milady and the book itself is this wonderful trade paperback about twice the width of the American edition.

Very cool stuff. Made my day!

Perchance to Dream is the first piece of stand alone fiction from the DragonCrown War world. It chronicles Princess Alexia’s Dream Raid. The exiles from Okrannel determined that as their children came of age, they should spend one night on their native soil. The dreams they had that night were thought to be prophetic, and the key to their nation’s liberation. Since Alexia is supposed to be the instrument of that liberation, her dream is very important.

And some people want to make sure it’s her last.

I did the story for the Five Star anthology that came out in 2005, and it’s been reprinted no where else (save in the German translation of the same anthology).

The story is 10,900 words and is presented in Adobe .pdf format. That should work on your Sony ebook readers and “experimentally” on the Kindles you got for Christmas. I’ll try to bring things out in other formats as they are made available.

Okay, so I’ve been remiss in updating the blog here. I’ve been on the road and, even as I am typing this, I’m in Orlando at AssimilationCon. In the dealer’s room. In the corner.

And having a lot of fun.

I’ve been uploading chapters all the way along, with the links below. Chapter Twenty is a turning point, as we introduce our last main character: Kerrigan Reese. From this point forward we’ll be alternating between Will, Alyx and Kerrigan. Well, and a few more folks. But they’re further down the line. We’re roughly a third of the way through the book—and that section will culminate in the coming siege of Vilwan!

Chapter Seventeen is available with a click.
Chapter Eighteen will cost you another click.
Chapter Nineteen is available with a click.
Chapter Twenty will cost you another click.

You’ll be able to stream (play directly through a media player such as Winamp, Windows Media Player or iTunes) Fortress Draconis. You also have the option of downloading the .mp3 files directly to your computer. To save a file to your PC computer: right click the above link and choose “Save target As.” To save a file on a Mac: click and hold the mouse button on any above link and choose “Save File As.” If you are using OS X, simply Option-Click on the link and the file will be automatically downloaded.

The initial post in this thread has a great rundown on what a podcast is and how to download the files through software like iTunes or other aggregators. To subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, simply click on the button above.

Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen of Fortress Draconis: The Podcast are now live. In Fifteen, Will, Crow and Resolute are on the run and find a new friend. In Sixteen, Princess Alexia brings her troops east to help raise the siege on the town of Porasena.

Chapter Fifteen is available with a click.
Chapter Sixteen will cost you another cli ck.

You’ll be able to stream (play directly through a media player such as Winamp, Windows Media Player or iTunes) Fortress Draconis. You also have the option of downloading the .mp3 files directly to your computer. To save a file to your PC computer: right click the above link and choose “Save target As.” To save a file on a Mac: click and hold the mouse button on any above link and choose “Save File As.” If you are using OS X, simply Option-Click on the link and the file will be automatically downloaded.

The initial post in this thread has a great rundown on what a podcast is and how to download the files through software like iTunes or other aggregators. To subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, simply click on the button above.

Chapter Fourteen of Fortress Draconis: The Podcast went live today. Princess Alexia of Okrannel makes her debut. She’s smart, beautiful and wonderful in a fight. What more could you want?

Chapter Fourteen is but a click away.

You’ll be able to stream (play directly through a media player such as Winamp, Windows Media Player or iTunes) Fortress Draconis. You also have the option of downloading the .mp3 files directly to your computer. To save a file to your PC computer: right click the above link and choose “Save target As.” To save a file on a Mac: click and hold the mouse button on any above link and choose “Save File As.” If you are using OS X, simply Option-Click on the link and the file will be automatically downloaded.

The initial post in this thread has a great rundown on what a podcast is and how to download the files through software like iTunes or other aggregators. To subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, simply click on the button above.

Chapter Thirteen of Fortress Draconis: The Podcast went live today. Will, Crow and Resolute have been sent to the stable to save themselves from marauding Aurolani bands of gibberers and vylaens. They do a lot of killing and make a startling discovery.

Chapter Thirteen is but a click away.

You’ll be able to stream (play directly through a media player such as Winamp, Windows Media Player or iTunes) Fortress Draconis. You also have the option of downloading the .mp3 files directly to your computer. To save a file to your PC computer: right click the above link and choose “Save target As.” To save a file on a Mac: click and hold the mouse button on any above link and choose “Save File As.” If you are using OS X, simply Option-Click on the link and the file will be automatically downloaded.

The initial post in this thread has a great rundown on what a podcast is and how to download the files through software like iTunes or other aggregators. To subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, simply click on the button above.

Chapter Twelve of Fortress Draconis: The Podcast went live Wednesday. Will, Crow, Resolute and Sephi return to Stellin. That happy little town is no longer happy, and folks are not happy to see them.

Chapter Twelve is but a click away.

You’ll be able to stream (play directly through a media player such as Winamp, Windows Media Player or iTunes) Fortress Draconis. You also have the option of downloading the .mp3 files directly to your computer. To save a file to your PC computer: right click the above link and choose “Save target As.” To save a file on a Mac: click and hold the mouse button on any above link and choose “Save File As.” If you are using OS X, simply Option-Click on the link and the file will be automatically downloaded.

The initial post in this thread has a great rundown on what a podcast is and how to download the files through software like iTunes or other aggregators. To subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, simply click on the button above.