Welcome to Swan Tower 3.0!

If you’ve visited my website in the last twenty-four hours, you may have noticed . . . a few changes.

For the last month or so I’ve been deeply in the throes of a major, major redesign. As in, the entire thing now runs on WordPress — because I finally got convinced that it’s way more powerful and effective than I thought, provided you get somebody to tailor it to your needs (rather than just running with an off-the-shelf install). This beauty is the work of Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios, who has done a number of author sites; I recommend him wholeheartedly. It’s thanks to him that I not only have the usual stuff of blogs and pages and so forth, but a lovely setup that allows me to easily manage all kinds of material for books — buy buttons for different formats, auto-generated links to the rest of the series, cover galleries, “DVD extra”-type pages, and so forth. And photos! A whole gallery setup for photos!

Seriously, this thing is amazing. You guys get to see the pretty front end; me, I’m over here marveling at the dashboard, at how much easier maintenance is going to be in this iteration. So please, go admire it. Say nice things about Jeremiah’s work. There’s a lot to explore. 🙂

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Hunt bugs, win a book!

Ladies! Gentlemen! Polite and helpful people of all types!

I need your assistance. Specifically, I need you to hunt bugs and errors on my shiny new website. I will bait you into doing this by offering your pick from my collection of author copies, and I’ll run it sort of like a raffle: for every bug or error you notify me of, you get one “ticket” to win a book. Send in seventeen corrections, get seventeen chances to win. If at least ten different people submit corrections, I’ll pick two winners; if at least twenty people, three winners; and so on. (It doesn’t matter whether you report an error somebody else already sent in; if it was there when you looked at the site, that’s good enough for me. Otherwise I have to do a lot of really annoying bookkeeping.)

Here’s the kinds of corrections I’m looking for:

1) Text errors. Misspellings, grammatical errors, wrong punctuation, etc. I proofread carefully, but there are a lot of pages on my site; odds are quite good that I’ve screwed up here and there.

2) Broken links. I scrubbed out a lot of dead links when I ported stuff over, but I probably missed some. Also, we’ve set up redirects for the old URLs, so when you click on a website-internal link in the middle of text, it should go to the correct new location — but if it doesn’t, I need to know about it.

3) Bad code. This could be anything from images displaying in the wrong place (like over text) to me forgetting to close a tag to munged escape character sequences. If the site displays badly on any particular platform, also let me know that, and I’ll pass it along to my site designer.

You can send these to me by email, via my contact form or in the comments. Please include a link to the page in question, and enough context for me to know where the error is — don’t just say “missing comma” or “broken link,” let me know where in the page that is. It will also help me if you separate the errors in your reply, just so I give you enough raffle tickets!

You have until the end of the month to send in your feedback; I’ll pick winners once I’m home again in early June. Thank you all in advance for your help!

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Onyx Court 1 and 2 soon to be out as ebooks

I’ve been holding off on a whole lot of news while I waited for the new site to go live; now that it has, you should expect a number of things in quick succession. 🙂

Since Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie have reverted to me in the U.S., I’m putting out ebook editions of them through Book View Cafe. If you click on those title links, you’ll find you can pre-order the ebooks at a number of sites, including Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, and Kobo; or if you would prefer to buy from Book View Cafe, Barnes and Noble, or Waterstones, those will be available soon. Midnight will be out on the 17th (that is, next Tuesday), and Ashes the week after.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Explore a Tiny Frontier!

This one is for all the RPG fans out there. Gallant Knight Games are Kickstarting Tiny Frontiers — an authorized SFnal port of the Tiny Dungeons system.

Why do I bring this up? Because I’ll be contributing a micro-setting to Tiny Frontiers — a place and a situation, with a few hooks for plots you could run in it. I’m still in the process of writing that up, but as a teaser, I’ll give you two words: alien. god.

The Kickstarter has five days to go, with several stretch goals of various types: funding goals, social media goals, and so forth. My setting will be included in the core book, regardless of whether those goals are reached, but there are plenty of other goodies to be had! So if this kind of thing sounds fun, do head on over and take a look. It may be tiny, but it’s a giant pile of fun. 🙂

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.