Kristin Janz

Category: My published fiction

  • Part Seven of “The Guild of Swordsmen”

    Featuring His Divine Majesty the Emperor Valtseharu Tahevas, Fifteenth of that Name.  Plus more swordfighting action from Lida.

  • Part Six of “The Guild of Swordsmen”

    In which the day of the Imperial Guard contest has, at long last, arrived.

  • Part Five of “The Guild of Swordsmen”

    In which the authorities respond to last night’s tavern brawl.

    But are they genuinely concerned about one more bar fight in a restless city?  Or is Lida being singled out for some other reason?

    Click here to find out.

  • Part Four of “The Guild of Swordsmen”

    In which we learn what some of Merolliay’s “friends” think about the Imperial Guard contest, and what they want him to do about it.

    Again, at Silver Blade.

  • Read “Clear Skies in Pixieland” for free

    For a limited time, I’ve added “Clear Skies in Pixieland” to the Free Fiction page.  Enjoy!  (You can still purchase the Kindle edition here for $1.29 if you prefer that format.)

  • Part Three of “The Guild of Swordsmen”

    Part 3 of “The Guild of Swordsmen” is up at Silver Blade.  Featuring a tavern brawl and a sex scene!

  • Imaginarium 2012

    I finally had a chance to read the other stories in the Imaginarium 2012 anthology, the one that reprinted my story “The Kiss of the Blood-Red Pomegranate” from Aoife’s Kiss.  There are a lot of great stories in here!  I think my favorite was Madeline Ashby’s “The Education of Junior Number 12”, about androids who fall in love with humans (although that simple description fails to convey the wonderful characterizations, and the thoughtful portrayal of the sort of effect this might have on human relationships).

    I also loved Geoffrey W. Cole’s “On the Many Uses of Cedar”, a story reminiscent of Groundhog Day in which the reader’s sense of who the villain is shifts from the easy assumption implied by the opening; Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s “Laikas 1”, about a woman inexplicably followed by a growing pack of feral dogs; Gemma Files’s “Signal to Noise”, about an ex-CIA agent who seems to be sending messages to his former boss from beyond the grave; Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “A Puddle of Blood”, a very unusual vampire romance; Derek Kunsken’s “To Live and Die in Gibbontown”, with its intelligent macaques, bonobos, and gibbons in an apparently post-human world; and Ada Hoffmann’s creepy “Centipede Girl”.

    Imaginarium also includes poetry, and while I don’t know poetry well enough to feel I can speak intelligently about it, I especially liked Peter Chiykowski’s “The Cinder Girl” and Carolyn Clink’s “10 Things to Know About Staplers” (although I’m not sure the latter is actually a poem; I’m not sure what to call it, really).

    Imaginarium 2012 is the first installment in what is expected to be an annual anthology of the best Canadian speculative fiction and poetry (“speculative” being an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, and horror).  For those of you who, like me, grew up in Canada, don’t worry:   it isn’t all slow, meditative work about the bleakness of the vast Canadian landscape.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)  There are stories in the anthology set in the Canadian wilderness, while others take place in South America, Africa, Europe, or the Middle East.  According to the anthology editors, Canadian speculative fiction simply means “speculative fiction written by Canadians”; if there was any other measure of “Canadian-ness” used to select stories, I couldn’t see evidence of it here.

    Imaginarium is still available, either directly from the publisher, or from any of the major online retailers.

  • “Clear Skies in Pixieland” now available in Kindle edition

    I just released my story “Clear Skies in Pixieland”, originally published earlier this year in the first issue of Nine, as a Kindle e-book for $1.29.  I’ve been charging 99 cents for the other individual short stories, but this one’s longer.  I noticed that someone already bought a copy, even though it’s been up less than a week–thank you, whoever you are!

    Here’s a description, lifted from the Amazon page (I wrote it myself, so I’m allowed to do that):

    It didn’t take Chris long to learn the dark side of his summer job: trapping pixies, fairies and other small creatures in a magical forest for sale to wealthy collectors.  He’d have quit if he didn’t need the money.  Now, after a disastrous expedition, only Chris can rescue the man who hired him.  But does his boss deserve to be rescued?  And how can Chris ever pay the terrible price the pixies have demanded?

    I enjoy writing fiction more than I enjoy writing promotional blurbs.

    Unfortunately, the editors of Nine decided to stop publishing the magazine after the 3rd issue.  I was sad to hear this, but I’m glad that they gave it a try and helped some great stories find a good home.

  • The Curious Case of the Shoemaker’s Daughter

    About a year ago, I started making my previously published short stories available on Amazon as individual Kindle e-books.  I’ve already written about my reasons for trying to get my stories published in magazines before self-publishing them, and I still feel the same way.  But, after a story has been published in a print or online magazine, it doesn’t always remain easy for readers to find.  I wanted to ensure that anyone looking for a particular story of mine would be able to purchase and read it for a minimum of effort.

    I haven’t done much to promote these stories beyond occasionally mentioning them on my blog or in my newsletter.  I didn’t even design (or pay someone else to design) covers, instead allowing Amazon to display them with their generic green and black placeholder image.  I felt that the time I would have to spend learning how to design covers would be better spent writing, and that I was unlikely to recoup what it would cost to pay someone else to do them (probably $10 per cover, according to various sources including Dean Wesley Smith’s blog post on traditional vs. self-publishing of short fiction (some of which I agree with and some of which I don’t)).

    Sales are about what I expected.  I have 6 stories available, selling at 99 cents each (this page has a list of all my published stories, and shows which are available in Kindle editions).  Most have sold around 5 copies.  Amazon pays 35% royalties for 99 cent books, so that’s around $1.75 that I’ve made on each one.  Better than nothing, but since I was paid anywhere from $15 to $500 per story by the magazines that originally published them, I’m not about to switch to exclusive self-publishing for my short fiction anytime soon.

    One story is an outlier.  For some reason, “The Shoemaker’s Daughter”, which I published on Amazon on October 30th, has sold 50 copies in just under 2 months, and is still selling 5-10 copies a week.  I don’t know why.  I haven’t seen any reviews of it, and I’ve done practically nothing to promote it.  I mentioned it on a Canadian writers’ mailing list to which I belong, and in my newsletter (which has something like 30 subscribers), but only after it had started selling well.  This is the first time I’ve mentioned it on my blog.  I’m happy that it’s sold so much better than expected, and grateful to everyone who’s purchased a copy.  But I can’t explain it.

    Except.  If you look more closely at the Amazon page for “The Shoemaker’s Daughter”, you’ll see that “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” a novel called The Shoemaker’s Wife, written by Adriana Trigiani and published by HarperCollins.  The Kindle version is, as I write this, #563 on the Kindle bestsellers list (“The Shoemaker’s Daughter” is #80,528, but the rankings are widely variable from hour to hour, even minute to minute, once you get this far down the list).

    Is that the answer?  My short story is selling moderately well (for a short story by an unknown author) because it happens to have a similar title to that of the latest novel from a bestselling author?  Do people go to Amazon planning to buy Trigiani’s book, start typing the title into the Search field, and one of the other titles that comes up is mine, and they decide to give it a chance because, hey, it’s only 99 cents?  If that’s what’s happening, most if not all of these people seem to also be buying The Shoemaker’s Wife, so I can’t feel too badly about it.  I only hope they realize when purchasing it that my story has absolutely nothing to do with Trigiani’s novel (which I’d never heard of before trying to figure out why my story was selling, since it’s not in one of the genres I follow).

    I don’t plan to start picking titles like “Harry Potted” or “Fifty Shades of Blue”.  It’s nice that some new readers might have decided to buy one of my stories (assuming my hypothesis is correct), and I hope they enjoy it.  (If you read and liked “The Shoemaker’s Daughter”, “The Year of the Bear”, also available on Kindle, is set in the same secondary world, so you might like that one too.)

    But … I guess I should work on getting all my old stories up on Kindle, once the rights have reverted to me.  Just in case.

  • Part Two of “The Guild of Swordsmen”

    In which our heroes attend a festival, and discuss excessive government regulation of food production and how dead rats make things taste better.

    Click here to read it.