Chris Howard's Writing & Art

Does FREE work?

To narrow that down a bit, does the posting of stories, novels, and art for free downloading, reading, viewing, and even sharing, make any difference in print book sales, in attracting more traffic to an author's or illustrator's blog, in doing anything to help that artist's career?

I give away a lot.  I have a whole blog dedicated to some of my Creative Commons licensed content.  I post my art regularly here on theophrast.us, on Flickr, deviantArt, and other art forums and presentation sites.  I posted an SF novel Nanowhere almost four years ago under Creative Commons license.  I post 3 to 5 panels for my web comic Saltwater Witch every week. 

Free, all of it.  Free to download, to read, to share, some of it out there for years. 

Does it work, giving all of this away if you're just starting out?  (I know it works if you're an established author, celeb, marketing guru, so I don't need the Doctorow, Scalzi, Anderson, Godin, etc. cases). 

I'm curious to hear what other writers, illustrators, and readers think.  Maybe you can guess what I think by what's on my blog or the Saltwater Witch site.  I'm considering posting my entire novel Seaborn, which came out last July.  And I'm wondering about the effectiveness of free.  I completely get Tim O'Reilly's aphorism that the problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity.  Maybe my real question is does giving things away solve that problem?

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ChrisCommons
Saltwater Witch Web Comic.

Nanowhere feedback

Nanowhere...it's a love story with all the usual elements: rogue soldiers, computer hacking, tyranny, cryptography, frustrated hit-men with an affinity for rolled adhesives, rebellious skateboarders, and sentient billion-node self-organizing nanotech ghosts.

I just updated my SF novel Nanowhere--mostly tweaking, corrected some typos, added a link to Seaborn, a little editing.  I'm looking for feedback on anything--but especially structure, what you think of the two plotlines and how I've handled them.  It's free to download and read and share--so please share it, email the link or the complete novel to your friends who like science fiction.  (everything's licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license).

Available in a variety of formats (Word, RTF, PDF, txt, HTML) here:

http://www.lykeionbooks.com/nanowhere/

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Nanowhere scene 3

Still tweaking, but here's a scan of the latest for Nanowhere, watercolor and ink on 100lb Bristol smooth.  These are my two main characters, Kaffia and Alex.  See my prior post for the first scene. (BTW, Alex is wearing a Ladytron t-shirt)

Click the pic for the large view.

Here's a detail crop of Kaffia--the hacker, one of my main characters:

Nanowhere update and illustrated version

FINALLY!  I'm so late on this.   (For Illustration Friday, it's that guy in the middle, arms folded, waiting not very patient because everything's always late).  I spent a couple hours last night on an edit pass of Nanowhere, long overdue.  Then this morning, I woke with the idea of doing an illustrated version of the story.  (This afternoon I painted the scene below, watercolors and ink on 140lb paper).  I've been struggling with a graphic version of Saltwater Witch, doing pretty well, but not as far along as I'd hoped to be by now.  One thing that's preventing me from showing more pages is that the manuscript for Saltwater Witch is with an editor at a major publisher--not yet accepted, and I don't want to jeopardize any deal by giving away something I shouldn't have. Also, as cool as a graphic version of Saltwater Witch would be, I think there's a bit wider audience for Nanowhere.  I mean, guys with guns, nanotechnology, computer hacking, a love story, it's all there.  Age range, teen and up (my teenage daughter Chloe's read Nanowhere many times).  There's some violence, some language, but nothing too crazy.

Posting illustrations isn't a problem with Nanowhere.  It's already free to download and read in several formats (HTML, txt, RTF, PDF, etc.).  I wrote the novel in 2004, posted it online in 2006, and I've had over 10,000 downloads of the ebook since, much of this is due to Cory Doctorow's post and comments about Nanowhere on BoingBoing. 

Read NANOWHERE

Okay, without holding things up anymore, here's the opening scene, illustration and text below.  Click the pic for the large view.

NANOWHERE

 

1

Joe and Al

 

DR. ERNEST STRAFF wasn’t surprised when the jumptroopers tackled him in his dining room, stuffed his head in a bag, zip-tied his wrists and ankles, dragged him into a clearing in the forest next to his house, and cabled him up into a hovering gunship. He just thought or hoped or wished he had had more time.

     In seven hundred and sixteen seconds—Straff was counting—his captors had him over the New Hampshire line, crossing western Mass at a shallow angle that would take him into upstate New York. He knew their direction because he heard a voice through the backroar of the engines, deep with round tones and a slight Minnesota lilt, curiously pointing out the Mass Pike to one of his squadmates. I-90 ran east-west across Massachusetts, dipped south a bit in the middle before it headed into Boston. The ex-Minnesotan was on Straff’s left, so they must be just north of the Pike, heading west. Nothing but cold Atlantic east. If the pilot kept a fairly straight heading they’d cross into New York south of the capital toward the Catskill’s.

     Straff caught all of this in the space of a few seconds.  As soon as the trooper started speaking, he stopped, having seen another of his team give him a finger drawn across the throat.    

     This left another few hundred seconds for Dr. Straff to blindly think over his fate. The black fabric bag rubbed his nose and ears. The gunship’s engines threw off a steady high-throttled chainsaw whine with an accompanying fuselage-vibrating rumble, and his ears hurt trying to listen for distinguishable sounds out of the dense storm of noise.