I've finally finished writing The Unbent Curve, book two in the sci-fi time travel trilogy that began with The Gap Year. It follows the further adventures of Anna and Indy in ancient Greece, as the technological and societal changes they set in motion last time—with the best of intentions!—begin to careen forward, out of their control.

Maybe this will sound weird, coming from a sci-fi author. But I refuse to use AI in any form, for writing or for any other creative endeavor. Look at the creepy, humanoid fingers that an AI put on the “border collie author” image that I generated for this post. It’s a crime against art, right? And every time I log into Amazon and browse through the AI-generated wasteland that is my “sponsored results”, I’m reading the literary equivalent of this.

Spoiler: No. No, you can’t.

Even before I finished writing The Gap Year, I knew I wanted to offer a hardcover edition. They feel great in your hands, and look great on the shelf, even if they’re pricier than paperback and Kindle editions. But I had no idea how little financial sense it makes to do this as a self-published, print-on-demand author.

If someone’s gonna recommend just one book by classic sci-fi author James P. Hogan to you, it’ll usually be 1978’s Inherit the Stars.

I’ll admit it—I’m too lazy to properly scan and shelve each of my books as I finish reading them. Instead, they pile up on my “done” shelf, and every so often I do a “harvest” to put them all in their places. Well, it’s been a shameful three years since the last harvest, so I had 42 books piled up!

How does the print quality of Amazon KDP and IngramSpark compare with the decades-old printers I have sitting on my desk? Not as well as you might expect!

There are a lot of famous sci-fi books where our heroes explore an enigmatic alien megastructure…

This week, I finished reading Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen. It’s a lively and fun story set in an Expanse-like future, but this isn’t a book review :) Rather, I’m asking a question of Amazon: what’s up with the variation in print quality between Kindle Direct Publishing books printed at the same facility, within just a few months of each other?

For the last few years, I’ve been going back and re-reading sci-fi books that I loved long ago, to see what I think of them decades later. And one series that held up very well is Julian May’s Pliocene Exile series.

There are plenty of videos out there that show you what hardcover print-on-demand books look like, at least at a superficial level. But readers see these books from only a few inches away. How does the quality compare to books printed by the big publishers?

If you’re like me, you may have read hundreds of books, without ever giving a second thought to the font that all that text was set in. But as a self-published author, you have to choose that font. Which turns out to be surprisingly hard!

After a long and careful search, you’ve finally found the cover artist of your dreams. How do you work with them to produce a great cover that will help sell your book?

All right, so you’ve decided to commission a custom illustration for your book cover. With a bit of luck and a truckload of hard work, your book’s gonna come out looking great! But what should you expect from this process, in practical terms?

There are plenty of fantastic post-apocalyptic sci-fi books out there, like David Brin’s The Postman or Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Liebowitz. But usually these apocalypses are caused by something like a nuclear war, where society could at least theoretically come back from it. But what about an apocalypse where technology itself stops working?

In my previous blog post about the purpose of book covers, my examples all had custom cover illustrations. And to get one of those, you need a cover artist! But there have been plenty of very successful science fiction and fantasy books whose covers don’t feature custom illustrations.

There are loads of artificially intelligent ships in sci-fi, like Breq (formerly the giant military ship Justice of Toren) in Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, or the General Contact Unit Of Course I Still Love You in Iain M. Bank’s The Player of Games. But what about naturally intelligent ships, star- or otherwise?

Everyone knows you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover. But we all do it anyway.

Hello, and welcome!