No Money Changed Hands

I still want to find out where the story goes after City on Fire, and would be happy to support a Kickstarter for the next book. And if you can get the first two books out as ebooks, I will happily tout them to all my friends.

I need to pull these out and reread them. I remember not being as wowed by them on my first reading as so many others were, but I’m sure the fault lay with me. I had just come off of reading (and being wowed by) Aristoi and wanted more of the same. A commenter at Tor said something similar. I wonder how many others had trouble with these due to pushing their expectations on this totally original book. Must remember to approach with a more open mind…

Of all of WJW’s books these two are my favorites. I like Aiah as a character because although she’s good at working her way through the problems she faces, she occasionally makes dumb mistakes or bumps into an obstacle that she just can’t work around. It makes her triumphs meaningful. And the way the revolution in Caraqui develops in the second book, where one group of players winds up creating problems leading to their replacement by a different group of players who wind up creating further problems, etc., rings very true with how that sort of upheaval plays out in our own world. I also like the whole “baroque efflorescence” aspect of it all, with hundreds of metropolises with different systems and quality of government, the wacky pop culture, the religions with their gods and spirits and Ascended Ones and theories about what’s beyond the Shield and why it’s there. I mourn the lack of the third volume in the same way I mourn the lack of the sequel to Delany’s “Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand”.

Yes please to more Aiah.

Seriously, is there any way we could crowdsource you the patronage you’d need to write the third volume? They are wonderful books. And if a thousand frustrated persons all ante’d up $50 each…

I’m in. Let me know how mate, and I will contribute. Daniel Keys Moran finally published (the first half of) AI War thanks to e-publishing, and so this has become the book I most want to get done…

I want to get through that window in the sky dammit!

If $50 is what it takes to get us a third Aiah/Constantine story then I consider that an entirely acceptable price, particularly considering that it’s all going to the author.

Albeit it won’t all be direct income the way that advances and royalties might; it’ll be business income for WJW I.G. and have to be spent on editors, proofreaders, cover artists, etcetera.

But then, cover art for “Metropolitan” is a picture of a city with the words “Walter Jon Williams – Metropolitan” on it.

I’d love a third part too. I seem to recall much the same discussion on Usenet way way back. I’d love to have another hardcover to complete the set, but that’s probably not the practical way to do it.

Here’s my view: it will probably be pretty tough to get to $50,000 of contributions as a starting goal, simply because you will have to reach perhaps 100,000 people, or more, to get 1000 of them to pay $50 each. Take a look at Kickstarter for a cheap way to try this, but note that most of those projects go for far less funding.

IMO it’s easier not to try to boil the ocean. As part of the project, you will probably also have to rekindle interest in the series, gain some buzz, and so on. So combine those goals.

I’d thus instead recommend starting out betting small with some new Metropolitan short stories to first gain some momentum. $0.99 each on Kindle, say, and the equivalent on the other platforms. Write guest posts on some of the bigger SF/F blogs to remind everyone how interesting SF can be. After a while, collect the short stories into a volume, price it at $3.99 or so. Keep some good free material in the Kindle store to get readers started. Keep some track of sales and what’s working, but don’t overinterpret the data since the random variation can be big. Perhaps write a longer story in $0.99 installments if there’s interest. The primary hurdle is probably not pricing but finding the ebook readers, getting attention and building a loyal ebook fan base.

Build interest, bootstrap, get the sales flowing, fund the bigger projects with the new money. The key seems to be having a solid backlist, since readers who like one of your stories will want more of them. (And I’d say you’re in a good position in this respect.) This is basically the conventional “new publishing” dictum.

Also, don’t build your own ebook store, it’s unlikely to be worth it. (Sorry Moran, Cherryh.) Spend the money on better ebook covers instead. And if you’re not reading it already, have a look at J.A. Konrath’s blog where most of this came from.

(Coming to this late, and I don’t know what the policy here is for comments on old entries, but hey, you can always delete this.)

I, like so many other people, would love a third book. City On Fire had a major impact on me, bringing me back into reading SF/fantasy again. I could easily write thousands of words on why I love the book so much, but Jo Walton touched on many of those, and anyway, comment fields are the wrong place for essays. Suffice to say that when I moved across the country for grad school, my ex-boyfriend gave me his battered paperback copy, saying, “I love this book, but it doesn’t mean as much to me as it does to you.” And while I read CoF first and love it best, I ended up buying a copy of Metropolitan when I realized that I’d checked out the library copy three times in one year. Anyway, enough gushing.

My actual point was to say that I would love a third book, but don’t think it’s necessary. Even with the Shield unexplained, the ending is satisfying in a way that many books aren’t. Write a third book if you have more to say, and if you can figure out the rights and the finances, and I will be right there putting the scrapings of my graduate student stipend into the Kickstarter pool. But in the meantime, I am content to let Aiah continue her much-needed and well-deserved nap.

That said, if it does end up being an e-book, please consider those of us who don’t own e-readers and have trouble reading on screens for whatever reasons. Maybe you could add a Lulu or similar Print on Demand option to order a physical copy of the ebook? Otherwise I’ll end up having to print the darn thing out and comb-binding it, which is fine for course readers but a hassle for novels.