Running weekly from May 2014 to May 2015, The Canister X Transmission was sent via email to readers worldwide.
Serving as a source of inspiration for writers and artists everywhere, its impact was made known by the replies sent to A.P. Fuchs’s inbox week-to-week.
The newsletter covered four main topics:
The Creative Thought of the Week, in which Fuchs added his two cents on the ups and downs of being a writer, staying motivated, advice and encouragement, and other topics that were part and parcel of making up stories for a living.
Work Updates, in which readers were informed of works-in-progress and where what stood on the publishing schedule.
Fanboy News, in which was relayed something of interest from the world of pop culture.
Marketing/Publishing Tip of the Week, in which ideas and strategies were conveyed to further one’s reach with their books and comics, and were also advised of some of the traps to avoid.
Exclusive to this collection is a special Issue Zero newsletter unavailable anywhere else.
Bigfoot Terror Tales Vol. 1: Scary Stories of Sasquatch Horror
He is Mysterious. He is Legend. He is Bigfoot.
Enter the world of the Sasquatch through fourteen stories of Bigfoot Terror by writers with a deep love for this legendary creature that has captured the imagination of millions around the world, has inspired thousands of expeditions, and has been the substance of campfire stories for generations.
From small towns with a big problem, to a filmmaker aiming to shoot the ultimate Bigfoot flick, to even Ronald Reagan taking on a Sasquatch, and much more–these hairy tales that are sure to make your skin crawl, cause you to shiver with fright and think twice about the next time you want to go into the woods alone.
Featuring scary stories by: Janice Gable Bashman, David Bernstein, Tonia Brown, Francesco Collia, Eric Dimbleby, Bruce Durham, Eric J. Guignard, Jason Hughes, Giovanna Lagana, E.M. MacCallum, Christine Morgan, Suzanne Robb, R.J. Sevin & Rosalind Sevin, Franklin E. Wales, with an introduction by Eric S. Brown, author of the popular Bigfoot War series, Bigfoot Terror Tales is a dream come true for Sasquatch and monster enthusiasts everywhere.
Mech Apocalypse: A Military Science Fiction Thriller
A Stolen Weapon.
A Rising Enemy.
A Change to History.
Riley Connor was one of the best skilled mech-pilots in the war between the Expherions and the Supremechs. Now, with the war over, he serves as a Peacemaker, part military, part law enforcement. When a secret weapon is stolen from the abandoned base Stake 47, he is suddenly thrust into a battle not just for the future security of the planet, but of the war he thought over with.
Teamed with Sophie Jones, another highly trained officer and someone he is close to, they seek to discover precisely what this weapon is and what it can do. Also paired with them is Nick Fox, a seasoned war vet, and Grayson Wilder, a rookie exo-suit warrior. Together, the four must not only locate the weapon, but bring the thieves to justice.
All goes haywire when the weapon is activated and an evil thought vanquished returns. Soon, Riley and Sophie find themselves in a place different from the world they left yet also familiar.
From high flying exo-suit battles to giant mech-bots exchanging missile fire, Mech Apocalypse is an action-packed military science fiction adventure that will leave you on the edge of your seat!
Note: This post was originally published on Jeffrey Allen Davis’s blog
The Axiom-man Saga at the C4 Comic Con 2013
The Axiom-man Origin and Why I Write Superhero Fiction by A.P. Fuchs
The Axiom-man Saga is an old story. A couple decades, in fact, as it was around then that I started to daydream about a similar hero while walking my paper route each morning. I’d get so lost in this story about a hero caught in a cosmic war between Good and Evil that I’d be done my route before I knew it and would often run house-to-house to double check and make sure I delivered the paper to the right places.
In that fantasy, of course, I played the hero. As the story grew and I got older, I ended up transferring the honor of being that character to someone else, a fictitious someone else who would one day go by the name of Gabriel Garrison.
Axiom-man began to take shape in concept throughout all my years of delivering the paper—and went by a different name, which was featured in my novel, April, written as Peter Fox (for that secret name, you’ll just have to read the book to find out). In 1995, Axiom-man received his new costume, the one he wears today. At the time, Axiom-man—originally called Trinity—and this concept character of mine were two different people. Trinity was more of a supernatural hero ala Spawn and fought demons, whereas my other hero was more down-to-Earth in nature and had very Superman-like powers. Yes, I know: Superman isn’t very down-to-Earth, but he does deal with things on this plane of existence 9 times out of 10. Anyway, as time went on, Trinity became Axiom—who was yet another character at the time—and as even more time went on and after being inspired by the likes of Frank Dirscherl and his Wraith character—who back in 2005 had one novel, a comic and a movie in the works—I decided it was time to put my long-thought-about superhero to paper. I merged my paper route fantasy character with Axiom because I always had an affinity for him, and after doing a quick web search on the Axiom name and finding a company out there with the same name, I went and made it my own by adding “man” to the end of it, hyphenated, of course, because that’s who Axiom-man really is: a self-evident truth embodied in a single person, in his case the self-evident truth of being one to do good rather than evil. From there it was an issue of scaling his powers waaaay back and settling upon three of them: strength, flight and eye beams. And when I say I scaled his powers way back, I mean way, way back. When Axiom-man debuted, he could only lift around 1000 pounds, could fly at about 60 kilometers an hour, and his energy beams only carried so much force. I didn’t want to make him too powerful thus making him always the winner and, because of his great strength, have no choice but to always pit him against ultra powerful foes. My story was to take place in our world under the idea of, “If this happened in our reality tomorrow, how would it most likely play out?” Making him with that kind of power set helped keep him grounded in reality and gave me plenty of options for enemies he could fight to sometimes win and sometimes lose against.
His backstory and mythology were left unaltered and kept the same as the character I thought about growing up, still the product of a nameless messenger having visited him and granting him his abilities without explanation. As the story goes on, Axiom-man finds out why he received his powers and how he is caught in a cosmic war that has raged since time immemorial.
The reason Axiom-man made his debut in books rather than comics was because, at the time I brought him to market, I knew of superhero fiction but didn’t think to do it independently. Frank Dirscherl’s The Wraith and Knight Seeker by Eric Cooper showed me otherwise. Axiom-man was originally a comic book character and I even drew a 21- or 22-page comic with him when he was called Trinity back in high school. I still have it somewhere and might publish it one day as a kind of behind-the-scenes thing. Anyway . . .
By doing superheroes in prose, I was able to work alone, could tell the story exactly how I wanted it, and because I was already self-publishing other fiction at the time, had the system in place to get Axiom-man out there.
You know, even though Axiom-man was my first official superhero release, I look over my fiction and every book I’ve written is a superhero novel in some way. Take A Red Dark Night, for example. It’s about a summer camp under siege by blood creatures. One of the protagonists, Tarek, is superheroic in nature, wears an otherworldly outfit complete with a cape, and shoots blue fire from a gauntlet on his forearm.
My epic fantasy book, some quarter million words long, called The Way of the Fog, is about a group of people who get superpowers in a medieval/fantasy-style setting.
My zombie trilogy, Undead World, deals with the supernatural, time travel, and each character is superheroic in how they act, even archetypical in some cases, with comic book-like good vs evil action.
Zombie Fight Night—aside from an aged Axiom-man making an appearance in there, is full of comic book characters monster-wise, everything from werewolves to vampires; to robots to pirates; to ninjas to samurai; and beyond, all battling the undead.
The Metahumans vs anthology series is, obviously, about Metahumans aka superheroes fighting a themed foe throughout each book.
As mentioned, my love story, April, is about a comic book writer who’s fallen in love, and what does he write? Superhero comics.
I think it’s only fitting that superhero fiction in its truest form—an actual superhero storyline—became a part of my repertoire. It seemed inevitable considering my love for the genre. Ever since I knew what a superhero was—at three years old, I think—I’ve been hooked, and not a day in my life has gone by where I haven’t thought about them, theorized about them, fantasized about them, pretended to be them and more. I even wear Superman and Batman onesies to bed for crying out loud!
Calling me a geek is an understatement, but I don’t care. Geeks make the world go round and fanboys are the ones providing people with entertainment. Superhero fiction just happens to be my main venue for doing so.
And where is Axiom-man going from here? Well, thus far, 7 prose books have been released along with a few comics and short stories. The whole saga is planned to be 50 books long, so I’m coming up on being 20 percent finished. The good part is the story is pretty much all mentally written. I had 9 years or so of delivering papers to get the story right, after all.
What I’m enjoying about the superhero fiction format is I’m able to do things with my characters that comic books don’t allow, at least, current superhero comics don’t allow. I’ve long advocated—and still do—that the comic book is the greatest storytelling medium to ever come down the pike, with books being a close second. Why? Because it’s the one-two punch of pictures combined with narration, whereas prose is a text-only medium. I still believe that, but being that at this stage in my career I’m primarily a writer versus a writer/artist, I’m sticking to books and the book medium is capable of telling superhero stories in a way comics haven’t as yet, namely getting inside a character’s head. Very few comic writers have succeeded in that in the past. Superhero comics are far too picture-heavy these days, with flashy computer coloring jobs, flimsy stories and scant dialogue. I miss the old days where there were almost equal amounts of text and pictures. At least with The Axiom-man Saga as it stands now, I can bring the reader dense characters where every thought and feeling is brought to the fore and, hopefully, pull the reader into the characters’ shoes in a way that superhero comics don’t. That’s my main goal with this: bring the reader in so that they feel they are experiencing my fiction versus just reading it. I’ve yet to read a superhero comic where this has happened. I have, however, read superhero books where this has occurred, Batman: Knightfall by Dennis O’Neil being a major favorite of mine and my first foray into the superhero fiction world.
What also sets The Axiom-man Saga apart from any of the current superhero offerings is that it’s a cross-medium superhero story that encompasses books, comics and short stories, all part of the same continuity. This has never been done before, and putting new spins on old things is one of the things I’ve always striven for in my fiction, especially in this industry where things are pretty copycat and cookie-cutter (we all know of certain authors that seem to turn out the same book over and over again just under a different title, right?).
Whether Axiom-man becomes this wild success or remains under the radar, for me it’s about writing the superhero story I always wanted to read, the one I’ve always thought about, and the one that, when my time on Earth is done, is the one I’ll be remembered by. It’s meant to be a career piece, a giant story with a beginning, middle and end, the story of a superhero, his life, and what that means to the world around us.
I invite you to come along for the ride.
Hope you enjoyed this little insight into the Axiom-man origin.
Raising Capital for Your Book by A.P. Fuchs (from Getting Down and Digital: How to Self-publish Your Book)
Publishing books costs money. Like the saying goes, you’ve got to spend money to make money. There’s no way around this. Thankfully, desktop publishing has dramatically cut that cost down and instead of having to spend thousands of dollars up front like in the old days, you can publish your book for less than a couple hundred on the low end, or a thousand or more on the high end.
This book shows you how to publish your book for around $200, give or take a little depending on what you hire out when producing your book and where you live.
Keeping up with the spirit of this book, which is starting out with little to no money like I did, let me make a few suggestions as to how to raise that $200 if you don’t have it saved already.
– set aside a set amount every payday so you can publish your book in a timely manner
– if things are indeed tight and nothing can be spared, then consider getting a temporary part-time job to cover the expenses of book publishing
– if your book is complete, write up a synopsis of your book and take pre-orders from family and friends. This may be tricky, however, if you don’t know how to price your book. See the section on pricing for more info
Comics and graphic novels are super important me, and they molded my storytelling and writing-style very early on in my career. There’s so much you can do with comics that you can’t do in any other medium.
Nowadays, the comic book industry in general is in a state of flux, with eComics and webcomics pushing the standard periodical comic book to the wayside. Graphic novels are a big thing now, with comic companies like DC and Marvel tailoring their story arcs to be collected later. To a point, they’re kind of shooting themselves in the foot in that if the reader knows the periodicals will be collected later for a cheaper price anyway, why buy the more expensive single issues and wait 30 days between each installment? At the same time, graphic novels are a fast-growing market last I checked so if they weren’t profitable, the comic companies wouldn’t do them and only provide one option.
In Europe, it’s mostly graphic novels in terms of publication, and I personally think this is where the overall comics industry is headed.
For me, as much as I enjoy the single issues–especially in the world of minicomics–creating book-length comics adds a level of prestige to the literature that their single-issue version can’t offer even though, technically, each single issue is, nowadays, a chapter in a book-length work. At the same time, these “collected editions of story arcs,” aren’t really graphic novels per se, but collections, and there’s a difference. That’s another discussion altogether so perhaps we’ll do it another time.
I usually have a graphic novel on the go reading-wise and add more to my collection when funds permit. Lately, I’ve been getting more and more into alternative comics as they carry more life, soul and authenticity than the current mainstream comics.
Anyway, here’s my collection. A couple of them are my wife’s, and some are not in these pics because they are by our bedside or elsewhere in the room (remember I said I usually have one on the go? So does the Mrs.).
I thought about taking them all out and arranging them for you, or clearing up the mess around them, but since I’ve always advocated writing should be about honesty, so should what I put on this blog so unlike my showcase pics of my own published books and comics, these are true bookshelf pics as per what Fridays on this blog is for.
For years I used to sit down at the computer desk and write my books, and only once have I written an entire book longhand–never again, by the way–but there came a time where I would be sitting on the couch and be inspired and would want to write, but couldn’t immediately/conveniently do so because the computer was all the way upstairs, I’d have to wait for it to boot up, get myself settled, etc. So, a few years ago I bought a laptop and have since done all my writing on it. Now I can write anywhere in the house. For a while it was on the couch in our rec room, then I took a liking to sitting in bed and writing, but these days I’m on the big comfy chair in our front room. What you see above is my current office as I work on Secret Project No. 1. I’m getting a lot done in this space and, so far anyway, plan on using it for Secret Projects Nos. 2 and 3.
Production work for these books will be done on the desktop in the studio, but the editing will be done anywhere, most likely in bed as I like to lay down and do my edits. Don’t ask me why. I might go the coffee shop route and do my edits there. Not sure. For each round of edits, I always type them up on the desktop computer as that’s where the printer is and that’s what I’m used to.
In the corner of the studio is my shelf of books. These are for conventions, book signings, direct sales, and any other venue I can sell paperbacks at. Selling direct to the reader is a market that most modern self-publishers don’t take advantage of and is one I highly recommend as I’ve been doing direct-market sales for eleven years, and convention sales for eight. Save for the occasional bad book signing, it’s always been a good method for me to move copies. Typically, I’ll order in a bunch of books in moderate quantities, anywhere from 25-100. Only once have I gone way over and got in 300 copies of a title. By doing it this way, I know I have stock for all my shows for a year, possibly two, depending on quantity ordered. By all means, there’s a small financial outlay at the start, but as discussed in my book, Getting Down and Digital: How to Self-publish Your Book, this cost is quickly recovered and everything above that is profit. Likewise, the more you get in, the cheaper your per-unit cost is thus making it fewer copies to recoup your investment and also increasing your per-unit profit.
Here are pics of the big bookshelf in the corner. Some book and comic stock also pepper the studio in other places, but this is the main go-to shelf, which is stocked two books deep and as high as is possible. Click the pics below for a closer look. Recognize the titles?
By taking on the role of a publisher, the one who fronts the cost to turn a manuscript into a published book, the self-publisher takes all the risk—but also reaps all the reward as a result. Think of it as an investment. Folks go to the bank all the time and dump in fifty dollars, a hundred dollars, a thousand or more into RRSPs or GICs, money they’ll never touch for years, but while it’s sitting there, it’ll earn them much more than they originally invested given enough time. Self-publishing is the same way. Even if your up-front costs are a thousand dollars, you start selling your books and, depending on format, make $3-10 profit, once you’ve sold 100-333 copies, you’ve made your money back. Everything above that is your return on your investment. And instead of making a dollar or even two dollars a book sold as per the traditional royalty system with the rest going to your publisher—and to be fair, they deserve to make money for bringing the book to market for you and taking care of you during your contract with them—you get to keep all the profits for yourself.
There’s huge potential to make a lot of money self-publishing. Like I said, if you set up your system to ensure you make $3-10 profit per book (i.e. $3 minimum on an eBook sale and $10 or so on the high end for a paperback sale), you could come away with a very secure future assuming the market is kind to you. To sell 50 eBooks would pay my water bill for three months. I could do the same if I sold 15 paperbacks at a convention as I average around $10 profit per sale through those direct-to-reader venues.
Before, a writer would have to sell thousands of copies of their book just to stay afloat because they made anywhere from 80 cents to a couple bucks a book depending on format. Sometimes less. And while it’s great that they sold those thousands of copies so they could pay their bills, imagine how much more they could’ve made had they been able to do the same volume of sales on their own? If they sold 2000 books total and made the aforementioned 80 cents to two dollars, that would be around $1600-4000 in their pocket. If they self-published and averaged $3-10 per sale, that’s a range of $6000-20,000 to their credit. A huge, huge difference, and for some, enough of a difference between having a bed to sleep in and food on the table.
The beauty of self-publishing is the ability to produce a book for a niche market, something that you don’t typically find in the mainstream, if at all. For example, I write superhero fiction. Back when I started doing it in 2006, my series, The Axiom-man Saga, was one of a handful of other independent superhero fiction books. There was no way I could take my manuscript and sell it to a publishing house because no one would take the risk on a completely unknown superhero with no proven track record. Well, guess what? By self-publishing the series, I’ve been able to find an audience for it and every time a new installment in The Axiom-man Saga comes out for a convention or on-line, people buy copies. And when I’m behind on getting a new book out because I’m committed to other projects, people start asking me when the next book in The Axiom-man Saga is coming out.
Self-publishing is also great for those who can’t keep their hands to themselves. Some writers need to be involved with their book every step of the way, and while this goes back to self-publishing enabling the writer complete control of the project, it also lends itself to writers who are also entrepreneurs, who are business people by nature.
There are two types of people in the world: those who take risks and those who don’t. Entrepreneurs are risk-takers. They see the potential for a business and are willing to spend the money—sometimes money they don’t have—to make it happen even though there’s the possibility it might not work out. And that’s their mindset when it comes to self-publishing: it’s a business. And what do businesses do? They manufacture a product and market it to people. Even service-providing businesses do the same because a service is a product. The entrepreneurial self-publisher is someone who isn’t just a creative individual, but also one with a business-oriented mindset, someone who has a vision for their book beyond simply writing it and are willing to take the risk(s) involved to make that vision a reality. While I personally don’t view books as “products” but works of art, from the outside looking in that’s what a publisher does: sells a product.
The other advantage to self-publishing is to take a book and prove to a traditional publisher there is a market for it. There are many stories of writers self-publishing rejected manuscripts—which weren’t necessarily rejected for quality reasons—and turning them into bestsellers. There are also those who have self-published, had major success, and then were picked up by a traditional publisher who took on the publishing duties of the same book. Often, these publishers paid a lot of money to have these books in their catalog because the writer showed them there’s an audience for their book(s) out there. You need to sell several thousand copies to catch a traditional publisher’s interest, something to the tune of 5000 copies-plus, but self-publishing is an excellent way to give a chance at life to a book that otherwise would’ve been sitting in a rejection pile somewhere.
By self-publishing, you are also the sole rights holder to the book. And while true even if you sold the book to a traditional publisher you’d still be the sole author and copyright holder, the traditional publisher would be the one who holds the print and electronic rights to it, meaning they could be the only ones to publish the book in the language they represent. Depending, some traditional publishers take additional rights when taking on a book: audio, film, even foreign translation rights if they are connected in that way. The first two are the most common. By going it alone, you decide who gets what, so if some guy from Hollywood wants to make a movie out of your book, you don’t need to share the monies offered with anyone if you negotiate the deal yourself. You’d also get to decide how much influence you’ll have on the movie, though, of course, if you want too much influence—and how much influence is “too much” is up to Joe Hollywood—then the deal might not happen at all. Regardless, to be the one in charge of deciding what other ways people can experience your story is up to you if you self-publish.
If you’re a salesman or are good with people, then the marketing of self-publishing should excite you. For some, sales are a thrill-of-the-chase thing and for every sale they land, they get a high off it. And to know that for every hour of effort you put into selling your book will reap you and you alone the financial reward of doing so should make you even more excited. Books usually don’t sell themselves, but if marketing and creating campaigns is an area of interest for you, self-publishing is an excellent field to do it in.
As you can see, there are numerous advantages to self-publishing your book, the main ones being control and the potential to make more money. You also get to bypass anyone who might reject publishing your book and just take it directly to the reader themselves and let them decide.
But most importantly, self-publishing is a ton of fun and I love every minute of it. Unless a traditional publisher comes along and can do something for me I can’t do on my own, then I plan on self-publishing for the remainder of my writing career.
