Nick Bryan

hobson & choi

Thirty-One Year Check-Up – Comics, Hobson & Choi III, Life

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Today is my thirty-first birthday, and after making a giant messy fuss of my thirtieth, I feel like this might end up being a quiet one. Still, it’s been a while since I blogged about what I’m up to in a broader sense, so I figured this was as good a time as any for a check-in.

So, where is the third Hobson & Choi book at? What else am I working on? How am I feeling, y’know, deep down? Some of those questions answered in the following words.

Comics Of Future Now

The biggest new news, as posted on social media yesterday, is that I received a print copy of my first published comics work: a story in The Gathering: Noir from the good folk at GrayHaven Comics. You can see my hand modelling the comics in the nearby picture, and I can confirm it is a lovely, well put-together object with attractive cover art. For more details on this comic and a single solitary panel of art preview from my actual story, see this post from last month.

In previously unspoken news, I also have another short comic story approved and assigned to an artist with an entirely different indie set-up. More details on that when it happens, although we’re probably talking 2016.

Would be nice to advance the comics thing further, but currently all my spare creative-project funds are going into H&C books. If the comics internet has taught me one thing, it’s that asking artists to work for free is not a good look. Speaking of Hobson & Choi…

H&C3 – No wolves, no recruitment agencies

The third Hobson & Choi book, Trapped In The Bargain Basement, is currently being read out loud by me, sitting alone in my house. As discussed in this old post, that’s a dull process but always ends up being worthwhile. I’ve cut 3000 words of needless burble this time, and not even finished yet.

It should be off to an editor in the next two or three weeks, and hopefully out to you, the reading audience, in the latter half of this year. I’m hoping late summer/early autumn, but should probably be a little vague, for reasons I’ll get onto in a minute.

If you want to make me feel good on my birthday, feel free hit the Hobson & Choi homepage and buy one of the books (the first one is very cheap on digital). If you’ve already purchased and read, you can leave a review on Amazon/Goodreads/your own site or tell your friends/social media followers/blog readers/whoever about H&C. All pretty crucial to the whole authoring game.If you’ve already done all that: thanks, I love you, you’re fine.

Thirty-One Life

Alright, I’ll talk a bit about the birthday as well. My feelings about life and the passing of time haven’t changed much since last year’s 30th-marking blog post, to be honest. All is alright. In addition to the self-publishing, I have my urban fantasy novel finally out with agents and we’ll see how that goes.

(I considered blogging about that as it happens, but I’ve yet to come up with amazing new perspectives as I haven’t done much beyond send a few emails. So I figured I’d just not bang on about it, lest I sound like I’m complaining about “literary gatekeepers” or whatever the angry people say.)

It looks like I might be moving back south of the river some time this year. I like Walthamstow a lot, but there’s something weirdly homely about the Peckham/New Cross/Brixton region. And yes, the inevitable disruption involved in moving house is why I’m hedging my predictions for H&C3 release dates.

That’s probably enough from me to keep you going into April. Now, I’m off to hack out another quick chapter on my tentative sci-fi project that probably won’t see the light of day until 2016. Work doesn’t stop for a mere 31st birthday.

How To Be Number One! (In the Dark Comedy category on Amazon US!)

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News that social media followers probably already know! For around a day, dawn to dusk on Thursday 12th March 2015, my self-published crime epic The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf was the most popularest, bestest book in the Dark Comedy category on Amazon US. If you don’t believe me, here’s a screenshot.

BEHOLD THE ORANGE STRIPE OF VALID LITERATURE

Now, much as I’d love to pretend this was an entirely natural spurt of love for me, I did require some advertising to achieve this. For anyone who wants a tiny wee glimpse into the inner workings of the self-publishing DIY promotion world, harnessing the resources available to reach the very top of a fairly uncompetitive Amazon category, this is your moment.

Quite cool, as the bulk of my existing readers are in the United Kingdom, so sales across the Atlantic had been quite modest until now. This is an important step in breaking America. If Doctor Who and Sherlock can do it, then so can Hobson & Choi!

As you can see, I also placed in some more challenging crime-related categories

Also, I was in the mid-80s of the overall humour (or “humor”) category on the site, which I was quite pleased with.

Anyway – long story short, I advertised the book with Fussy Librarian on Tuesday 10th (costing $7) and Ereader News Today on Wednesday 11th (costing $35), and by the morning of Thursday 12th, I was atop my category, so mission accomplished.

If you’re wondering how many book sales this requires, it’s about 85. So for my total $42 investment, that’s about two books per dollar. Not bad, although due to the first book in the series being a cheap hook-them-in deal, I didn’t quite make my initial investment back.

I found the people to advertise with by lurking for a while in the Writer’s Cafe section of KBoards. Although actually posting isn’t mandatory, a lot of people do share their experience, particularly of different promoters. There’s even a spreadsheet here if you just want a big list.

Obviously, the long-term dream is for the book to either sell itself or make a huge profit on advertising. More short-term, it’d be pretty sweet if some of the 85 people who bought the first book just now leave a review and/or pick up the second one.

So yup, this is the ultimate plan. Promote first book, hope it fires through to later books. Ereader News Today is one of the biggest and most reliable promotions, it seems, so future efforts may not be quite as huge.So, in case anyone was interested, that was my achievement this week. We’re still at #12 in Dark Comedy as of this writing, so that’s nice. If you want to help me achieve pleasure via numbers, feel free to buy the Hobson & Choi darkly comic crime books, but no pressure. I blog for love.

“No-one else dies tonight!” – Nick Bryan’s Ongoing Commitment To Making Fewer Mistakes

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It’s been a while since I wrote about writing – in fact, it’s been a while since I wrote a blog which didn’t hinge around the Buy my work! message. So, since it’s late on a Sunday and I’m feeling too tired from last night’s drinking to do any hard labour, I thought I’d break things up on the blog by talking about my current writing obsession: not fucking up.

A couple of months back, I finished drafting a fantasy novel which ended up having the bulk of its middle act and about half its third erased – not after the first draft (which is kinda acceptable) but after I’d finished a beta-readable draft and thought things were going okay.

More recently than that, I went back to the third and final major Hobson & Choi webserial storyline, ready to punch it up for eventual book release. Rather than just chopping and changing a few scenes, adding chapters to flesh stuff out and punching up the writing – as per the first two books – I ended up deleting much of the final third of the story and starting over.

(So yes, H&C serial readers, it might be worth buying the third book, as not only will you get a new bonus story, but also a large chunk of the main storyline entirely reimagined. The new timeline will be used for the books going forward, while the original serial events drift off into non-canon limbo.)

Having been editing these various projects solidly for the best part of six months, my insistent feeling that this level of trashing material must never happen again is getting prohibitive. Don’t get me wrong – it’s obviously quite positive that I’m able to recognise these problems, plan changes and execute them, rather than getting hung up on killing my darlings or whatever. But the more often it happens, the more I start thinking… surely eventually I’ll be able to avert it earlier, right? Eventually I will live in a creative utopia where first drafts sing and dance perfectly in the pasture?

During breaks from editing, I’ve started laying down early scenes for something entirely new, and find myself semi-paralysed by the knowledge that I might eventually have to delete a load of it. Like when Spider-Man feels guilty about not saving someone and makes some weird vow that no-one else will ever die again, I suspect a commitment to total perfection isn’t sustainable.

All that happens is this: you write six-thousand word planning documents, hoping that if you prepare enough, the odds of needing to ditch and rewrite shrink a bit. And then you put off ever starting the first draft, because if you think about a project long enough, there’s always some small problem you can’t quite solve.

Realistically, the metaphorical Green Goblin (I just like comics, okay?) of me fucking up is still going to be out there no matter how much I plan and I’ve just lost the knack of fear-free first drafting after so many months editing.

Regardless of all this introspection, the fact is: once I get the third H&C done, I’ m going to have to get back to scribbling new stuff somehow, as I will simply run out of things to edit. Well, unless I pull out one of my abandoned novels from my early twenties and try to rewrite that instead of doing anything new, but… no, let’s not give me ideas.

Hobson & Choi Blog Tour – WEEK TWO

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It’s all over! Emotions were high, the pace was frantic, but the H&C Blog Tour is at an end. After two weeks of relentless H&C content written by myself and others, the whole damn enterprise is finally at an end. I thought I’d get the retrospective post out there, rather than squeezing it out in a few days, just so you can all feel like it’s really over and move on.

So, what posts did come in our second week? Could there have been… a change in media format?

Me, Myself & Blogging

As with last week, there were a few posts written by myself, the author, and I tried my best to provide a range of content to keep life interesting. First up, over on the K-Books site, I answered a few interview questions – this includes some thoughts on the very concept of writing advise, not to mention an answer to the ultimate self-publishing question: Why self-publish?

A couple of days later, I guest-posted on The Online Novel, with one of the most process-heavy articles of the whole tour. Want to know how I went from webserial to self-published, what I did on the way and exactly why the hell I made the decisions I did? The answers could well be in here somewhere.

Then, for some light relief, I wrote a short, jokey guest post for Nyx Book Reviews about the concept of YA Crossover and whether Hobson & Choi is that or not. I’m not sure if I actually answer that question, but I did make some great conceptual jokes about the “blog tour” idea.

Since H&C is a very serialised series, I worked out my Top Ten Book Series for Winged Reviews. I hear the internet loves lists, so why not go see if your favourite series is in there, then leave your disagreements in the comments if I left it out?

Lastly from me, another swing in mood, I did an in-character Q&A for Kirstyes’ site. Yes, this is me taking a few questions whilst pretending to be my characters from H&C. It’s a new one for me, but it was surprisingly fun, and if you’ve read the books, this does qualify as new material. (Although it does very slightly spoil a plot point in the first third of book one. Fair warning.)

Also, if you desperately want even more new material, remember you can get a free extra short story by subscribing to my mailing list.

Outer Limits Of External Thought

Meanwhile, in the strange world outside my mind, there were a few reviews. First up, Alastair of Nimbus Space penned his considered thoughts on the second book in the series. Did he like it? Did he hate it? Click and find out, I reckon.

Booktuber The Book Moo actually recorded separate videos for each H&C book, which is an impressive level of dedication. You can see her reviewing The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf here and also giving Rush Jobs the treatment here. Or, to save you having to click through and break up this wall of text, I’ll embed the first one here:

After that, there was another review from The Bookish Outsider, covering both books in the series in a single magnificent sweep.

Not to be beaten, Andrew of The Pewter Wolf did the same thing the next day, and that brings us to the end of the tour. Wow, that was a lot of blog posts.

Multimedia Mastery

Oh, and if you missed me talking about it at the time, I was on London’s arts station Resonance FM, chatting about H&C and my favourite London spots on the Daniel Ruiz Tizon Is Available show. You can see more details about that, including ways to listen back to the show, in the blog post I did about it the other day.

And that really is it, I swear. And now, playing us out, because I can, here’s The Book Moo again reviewing the second H&C book. This video includes the exciting spectacle of my face rushing towards the camera. END OF TOUR

Hobson & Choi Blog Tour – WEEK ONE

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The first week of the Hobson & Choi Blog Tour has more or less happened! The good word of H&C spreads far and wide across half a dozen sites, with many more still to come!

In case you haven’t had time to keep track of the latest tweets and so on, I thought I’d come back with a quick summary of what’s happened in the last week. Not to mention, I wrote a few fun posts for this tour myself, and since subscribers to this website are meant to like that sort of thing, I figured it was worth calling attention to them.

Me Me Me

First up in the posts-by-me section, then, we had a good-length interview with fellow indie author and JukePop graduate Virginia McClain. Some good introductory questions about the series, plus a few more in-depth moments about process, serials and whether I would be willing to eat a guinea pig. Virginia’s own post-Jukepop action-fantasy novel Blade’s Edge just came out too, which I thoroughly recommend. More details on Goodreads, including a longer review by me.

I also had a guest post on Music, Books & Tea about how to use the internet in fiction without killing the drama, which might be of use to other writers and funny to everyone else. It’s kinda a jokey post, but I means my jokes.

Last in the all-me section, I also wrote a fairly comprehensive piece of My Influences for YA Yeah Yeah. If you ever want to know what turned me into the writer I am today, or just want some recommendations, I stand by all of those. Although some might be aimed at a quite young demographic.

The Thoughts Of Others

Even more excitingly, some other folk were kind enough to read the H&C books and offer up some thoughts for the blog tour. Writer/craft blogger and long-time friend of both me and whole H&C project Claire Rousseau wrote a review of both books on her site.

If you prefer lists (like they do on the internet, I hear), Faye of A Daydreamer’s Thoughts produced a list of ten reasons why you should read the Hobson & Choi series, and they’re all worth taking heed of, I feel. But I would say that.

Lastly for now, we have another review of both books by Chelley of Tales of Yesterday! Not only are there kind words said about the books, Chelley may also win for tour dedication with her H&C-styled site banner created for her tour date, which I’m reproducing below for posterity.

Excellent. If anyone in the second week of the tour wants to repaint their house in the style of the Hobson & Choi covers, that might be the only way to beat that.

Prizes Prizes Prizes!

I will just mention that if you want a free copy of the first H&C book, I have recently sent five copies to the Books On The Underground scheme, which leaves copies of books around the London Underground – it seemed apt considering our cover. So if you follow me on Twitter, I’ll try and post whenever I hear the location of a copy.

Hobson & Choi Case Two – “Rush Jobs” – out now!

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Today, my friends, the second H&C book goes forth into the world, where it hopes to be received with open arms and warm love. After meeting in the first book, John Hobson and Angelina Choi further explore the world they’ve found themselves in, and find it to be a strange, grim place.

So, here is a picture of the cover – for more details on the actual plot, go to the Hobson & Choi homepage, where you can also find links to buy a copy of Case One – The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf – for a newly super-cheap price.

For the new book, you can add it on Goodreads here if you so wish, and if you feel like leaving a review and/or rating there, on Amazon or on your own blog/social media, that would be pretty sweet of you. Continued growth plays a big part in helping me continue to get these out there.

Speaking of heading on out there, we’re also doing the Hobson & Choi Blog Tour to coincide with the book launch – check out the details here if you want to follow along. If you follow me on Twitter, I’m sure the blog posts will also be retweeted there as they happen.

You can buy Rush Jobs in both print and digital from various venues. I’ll also be dropping off a few copies soon at the Big Green Bookshop, if you’re a fan of buying things in person.