SciFi books by Jemima Pett
See the feature on Bookgoodies.com for the launch of The Perihelix this week.
http://bookgoodies.com/featured-book-the-perihelix-by-jemima-pett/
You can also read Jemima’s 2013 interview here: interview-with-author-jemima-pett
Tuesday 16th is launch day!
Today you can pre-order it at Amazon, B&N, Apple, and Kobo. Next week it will be for sale on Smashwords too.
So, why should you buy The Perihelix?
The Perihelix by Jemima PettBook 1 of the Viridian System Series
Two asteroid miners, three women, one spacecraft, and five pieces of a legendary weapon scattered around the galaxy.
Big Pete and the Swede are rich, or so they discover after bringing their latest haul of orichalcum in from the asteroid belt. So some well-deserved vacation awaits them. It starts out just fine, with one of the men winning the big flyer-race of the season, but they start to receive odd messages, and despite the attentions from the girls, both realise that someone is trying to drag them back to their pasts, pasts they have tried hard to erase.
As they set out to discover who’s bugging them, they are kidnapped by some particularly nasty aliens, which leaves the girls in a mess – stranded on the spaceship with very little idea how to fly it.
It’s marvellous. I may be biased.
Amazon – Smashwords – B&N – Kobo – iTunes – Book Depository
With effect from a couple of days ago, if you buy the Viridian System Sampler at Smashwords (for 99c), your copy will include a link to the forthcoming Perihelix, together with a coupon code.
When you buy The Perihelix after it is released on February 16th, use the coupon and get your money back on the Sampler. That means your Sampler was free. Or you got two books for the price of one. Or something.
The coupon ends at the end of April. The Perihelix price may change at the end of March, but it will definitely change by the end of April. It’s called promotional pricing, so it depends how long it takes the promotion to work!
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If you have already bought the Sampler, check back at your buying site for the new edition, it should be updated free.
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We’re running a Goodreads Giveaway for TWO copies of The PERIHELIX paperback, open worldwide.
The Giveaway runs from today till February 29th. You have to be a member to take part – but it’s free and it’s a great way to find new books and keep tabs on those you want to read.
Giveaway ends February 29, 2016.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
This is getting very exciting.
Here is the copy of the paperback from Blurb (printed in the UK, so I got it in 3 days). Rebecca is kindly proofing the copy of the Createspace one (printed in the US) which only took 5 days to reach her. I would have to wait at least six weeks for it.
Hopefully the insides will be fine, then I can release them in time for the 16th, which is release day for the ebooks.
Even more exciting: I can’t stop writing book 2 in the series, and after I spotted something when I was browsing around another thing I wanted as the theme, it produced a title. So at the moment, book 2 is provisionally called Autumn Harbour. It’s quite a tortuous path to get to it, and it helps if you speak Japanese, and that’s all I’ll say. Except perhaps that my flash fiction last summer the Alien Among Us immediately became a key part of this story in my head. It’s nearly got to the stage of putting that on paper. And then the fun really begins!
Well, I have The Perihelix back from my editor, and the bad news is: there is an awful lot of work to do on it. An awful lot. I may even have to have it rechecked afterwards. So I’ve put my provisional release date back to February. It might even go to March. You’ll hear first here, so watch this space.
The good news is that as well as the editing, I’m also working on a Christmas story for you, which should go live in Christmas week, maybe the 21st.
It’s a busy time of year, so good luck with everything you’re doing.
I have three versions of the Perihelix cover; there are subtle colour and font differences. My editor and sword designer likes one, I prefer another. The text on the right is from the Kindle cover creator, and I can’t manage to find a match; the left and centre ones were the nearest I got. Maybe the centre one would be better semi-bold or normal from the current bold.
This is your chance to express a preference – just comment below!
Yes, books.
I’ve nothing much to say about The Perihelix, except my editor is working on it and I have a provisional launch date of January 12th. If I don’t get the edited copy back in the first week of December, I think the launch date will slip. I want to set up a blog tour, but I can’t find a tour provider with a good record of managing scifi books. I looked at the blogs involved with a couple of scifi books toured by a reputable outfit, and most of the blogs involved had very few followers. I’m hoping my Goodreads groups will provide a better platform – or I may put together my own blog after the hard work of the launch is done.
I have done some work on the cover, though. I’d like to play with it a little more before a formal reveal, although I did put the current version in my graphic for my Blogoversary over on Jemima Pett. The eagle-eyed may have spotted it already!
Book 2 has got about 3000 words in the file – a combination of the first chapter and a half which I carried on writing straight after finishing the Perihelix (in August! How time flies), and notes and snippets, which occur to me as I go. Basically, the plan for the book is coming together, and I came up with the title Casualties of Warp the other day. Better than my last idea, but I think titles have to wait for the book to be finished. I haven’t checked whether there’s anything out there with that title either.
So, if you’ve got any ideas to help me on blog tours, or thoughts on the second book title, or would just like to say hi, pop a comment below.
Thanks to super-fast feedback from some of my beta readers, I’m already working on the revisions to the Perihelix.
Naturally I saved a copy of the last file I was working on as a new version to make these changes. About halfway I noticed something. I thought I’d changed that, I thought. Oh, darn, don’t tell me I saved it into the beta version with new edits…. I haven’t found a way of comparing versions on the iMac, so I’ll convert it to Word and compare it with the beta I sent out from the PC laptop.
Well, in response to the feedback I’d put in a new section giving the girls some more background – not their life history, of course, just a bit more to show who they really were under their working image. It’s a discussion point, really. These women are escorts, so of course they are going to do what pleases the men. However, since they get to do things on their own, I can give them full rein to develop in their own personalities rather than their work personas as the story progresses. What? You haven’t got a work persona? I certainly had. I’m not sure whether I have now or not.
There was also desire for more background on the Imperium and the Federation. Part of that fits with the girls’ backgrounds, but I hit on an idea which I hope you’ll like, by giving a snippet from the ‘Universal Word Usage, 2822 edition’ at the start of each chapter. My aim is to make that reference book wholly biased towards the Imperium, and very sanitised (so reading between the lines is useful), and then let the characters flesh it out in their own sweet way, sometimes in the same chapter.
I’m also examining the role of women (and other sexes) in the book. Farsight is the best place to promote gender equality, since it’s an academic planet. Unfortunately the Imperium is very much alpha male territory, and Viridian itself is Wild West, not that there’s any barrier to women asteroid miners, they just don’t tend to get that far; I already have women visitors and inter-sex and non-sexual aliens there, though! The Federation is interesting, since it definitely has reptoids as well as humanoids in its personnel profile.
I hope the beta2 version will be ready at the end of the week, if anyone’s ready to give it a reading for me. Should that be beta2 or gamma?
I’ve just about finished the edit of The Perihelix and will send it to my editor tomorrow. So if you asked for a beta copy to comment on, that will be sent to you within the next day or so, too, if you haven’t already received it.
If you forgot to put yourself forward for this honour (!) then complete the form here to send to me and I’ll be in touch by email.
I threatened you with a free sample of Viridian stories – well, you’ve already seen them, but I’ve collected together eight stories that are part of the Viridian System (including Paradisio, Ghostgum Creek and Hell Hath No Fury, which kind of derive from Paradisio). The plan is to send them out as an ebook, free, via Smashwords, as a teaser for The Perihelix. I am also adding three other scifi short stories – Pilgrimage and Homing Instinct, which are two sides of one story, the Last Ice-cream – and also Traveller’s Return, which is more of a ghost story (but then, so is Ghostgum Creek). Do you think that would put readers off the Perihelix, having other work in the sampler? Should I stick to Viridian-connected stories, or is more better? The twelve stories add up to about 17,000 words, which is a nice sort of sampler, novella-sized, which is why I included the extras.
I already have a lot of short stories which belong after the Perihelix. With a little time to spare at the end of camp, I wrote a few chapters to start the next book in the series!
Your thoughts are welcome, as always!