CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

Yay! A Planet's Ransom written under my young-adult fiction pen-name, Carlie Simonsen is now out in the wild in both ebook and paperbook. You can get it from Smashwords , Amazon, and DriveThruFiction or via Draft2Digital distribution. So excited!!! Made hostages for a world whose international leaders didn’t know how to behave, we ended up on a new world, one we have to make our own, where every step of civilisation has to be earned, all over again. It’s meant to be a world to hide the secret of our survival—but not all the aliens believe we have a right to survive. Torn between two rival factions of an alien race, we have to save our keepers, defeat our hunters, and get a message to the stars. And that’s just if we want to live. Making a place for humanity, is another task altogether. A Planet’s Ransom is the second book in the Space Adventures series, a series of science fiction adventures set in space, or on the colonies of newly discovered worlds. Each

I spent most of this week trying to get a handle on how to approach the year of publishing ahead. It wasn’t until I set some goals, and added in a couple of challenges that I even got a clue. Now, as the last day of that week closes, I think I’ve got a fair grip on how to approach the year ahead. My guess is that it will last as long as the first curve ball, and then I’ll have to reassess and rejig, but that’s life in general. Here’s hoping I’ve got things somewhere near about right.   Progress: January 1-6, 2018 New words produced: 3,356 Outlines and Notes: 1,558 Words compiled : 112,273 Works completed: 0 Works edited: 0 Covers created: 0 Works published: 0 Works submitted: 0 Competitions Entered: 0 Bloggery: 4,090 Goal Progress Publish Fortnightly: Fortnightly pre-releases have already been uploaded to the end of January, 2017. Stories have been written to cover the release schedule to the first week of February 2017. This goal is currently on track.

Over the last, few days, I’ve been reviewing my pricing, and I decided to make a few changes: In preparation for bundling my existing chapter books into collections, I have repriced all individual chapter book titles from $3.99 to $2.99 U.S. This will allow existing readers to choose whether or not they want to buy individual titles, or wait the two years for the first bundle of any series to come out. It will also give new readers a way to catch up, more easily, on an existing series. Collections will be priced at $4.99, and will contain a minimum of 4 individual chapter book titles. I also repriced all my novels to $5.99 U.S., and all collections and anthologies to $4.99. And, finally, all pre-orders will be priced at $2.99 until the day of their release, when they will be repriced to their usual sales price, whatever it may be. This means that A Planet’s Ransom is currently priced at $2.99, but will go back up to $4.99 on, or shortly after January 13th (U.S. EST). And th

This year, I have introduced two challenges to give myself some direction in my writing and publishing: The Anthology Challenge , and The Chapter-Book-Collection Challenge . The aim of The Chapter-Book-Collection Challenge is to complete, to pre-release readiness, one collection of chapter books, by the end of 2019, for release each month in 2020. All of these collections will contain previously published work, but, as of the beginning of this challenge, I have not completed any of the proposed collections, and will need to write new material for each. This new work will be released as individual volumes prior to the release of the collection in which it is contained, and some of these volumes will be releasing in 2020. This gives readers the option of buying books singly, as they become available, or as a group. Rules: Each collection must contain at least 4 volumes from each series. New volumes must be released prior to the release of the collection. A collection