The private independent publisher of science fantasy adventure and nonfiction book and ebooks has added a variety of formats to its catalog of products for selected titles.
Antellus has expanded the number of formats of ebooks available for selected fiction titles in its catalog. Among these are 6 of 7 books of the Children of The Dragon series of SF/vampire books, and its current mystery title. The ebook formats now include, EPUB, LIT, and MOBI. PDF ebooks are still available for all titles. The recent discovery that epub and files supplied to the publisher by an outside agency did not pass the epub validation check, making necessary a search for an alternate source. Finally, the publisher returned to an updated version of Calibre to create new files in accordance with accepted standards.
"We did no know our files were invalid until we tried to upload one to another market and the file was rejected," Antellus CEO and author Theresa M. Moore said. "On a further check the file did not pass. We have dumped the lot and started over. We do not blame the supplier for this problem as it has become harder in the last few months to create adequately coded efiles as software applications keep updating, and with the recent developments between Apple, Sony and Amazon we did not want to get caught in the bind of relying solely on these services for a consistent and reliable supply of our titles to customers."
Details and ordering information for all books in the catalog can be found online at http://www.antellus.com/.
Antellus is a subsidiary of Nagrasanti Enterprises, located in Los Angeles, California. For more information, visit the web site or contact us by email at info@antellus.com.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Friday, October 8, 2010
Antellus Publishes Its Ebooks to Barnes & Noble
Antellus - Science Fantasy Adventure and Nonfiction Books and Ebooks
http://www.antellus.com
The private independent publisher has now listed its published titles in the bookseller's library for sale to Nook and other portable device users.
Antellus, a private independent publisher and seller of books and ebooks by author Theresa M. Moore, has signed with the PubIt online publisher to sell her ebooks in epub format. All the ebooks are priced at $8.99 and $7.99 and are priced according to the price of the printed books. Among the titles listed include those in the Children of The Dragonseries of science fiction, fantasy, historical fantasy and vampire fusion books.The lone exception is an illustrated vampire anthology, which was too large to process. Other titles include one mystery/crime novel and three nonfiction books to date. To see the title details and their respective links to other sellers, visit the Antellus web site.
About the author: Theresa M. Moore has many years of experience as a writer, illustrator and publisher with an avid interest in science fantasy adventure, history, mythology, and science; and a skeptical interest in pseudoscience and paranormal research. She writes in a strong cinematic style with the mission to educate as well as entertain.
Antellus is a subsidiary of Nagrasanti Enterprises, located in Los Angeles, California. For more information, visit the web site or contact us by email at info(at)antellus(dot)com.
http://www.antellus.com
The private independent publisher has now listed its published titles in the bookseller's library for sale to Nook and other portable device users.
Antellus, a private independent publisher and seller of books and ebooks by author Theresa M. Moore, has signed with the PubIt online publisher to sell her ebooks in epub format. All the ebooks are priced at $8.99 and $7.99 and are priced according to the price of the printed books. Among the titles listed include those in the Children of The Dragonseries of science fiction, fantasy, historical fantasy and vampire fusion books.The lone exception is an illustrated vampire anthology, which was too large to process. Other titles include one mystery/crime novel and three nonfiction books to date. To see the title details and their respective links to other sellers, visit the Antellus web site.
About the author: Theresa M. Moore has many years of experience as a writer, illustrator and publisher with an avid interest in science fantasy adventure, history, mythology, and science; and a skeptical interest in pseudoscience and paranormal research. She writes in a strong cinematic style with the mission to educate as well as entertain.
Antellus is a subsidiary of Nagrasanti Enterprises, located in Los Angeles, California. For more information, visit the web site or contact us by email at info(at)antellus(dot)com.
Monday, September 27, 2010
How I Developed the Children of The Dragon Series
by Theresa M. Moore
It was something I was not prepared to do, at first. I had been playing around with several ideas all at once when participating in a fan club/writing group, and while I was working with them the seeds of the series sort of implanted themselves in the back of my mind. They did not germinate until late in 2002, when I was sorting through a bunch of documents I had laid aside in storage.
Let me back up a little. I had joined what started out as a Star Trek fan club back in 1988. It was meant to be a chapter of the International Starfleet fan association, which was formed around the idea of each chapter operating like a starship, with a ship's name. The members of the chapter were supposed to be the ship's "crew". My chapter rapidly grew into a writing group mostly because it happened to be composed of frustrated authors. We formed a newsletter we called "General Quarters", which contained news and announcements, regular ship's minutes and other nonfiction snippets. At some point we all agreed that the newsletter could also support short stories written at intervals. I suggested a "round robin" of chapters, one written by each writer in response to the previous chapter.
Among some the rules we adopted which were uncharacteristic of the other club chapters was that we were not to write "Star Trek" stories; that is, we were not to employ any character, situation or storyline from the original series or the movies. We decided almost unanimously that we would write original stories around new characters we created, and as a result we also designed a completely different starship. It was a dreadnought, something the series'producers never acknowledged to exist. The crew was completely different, and there were a few Vulcans and a couple of Romulan fusions, two Klingons and an insectoid. The immediate effect of this liberal (and some would say radical) departure from the mainstream of the series was a rich new compost of material to draw from. And so we set to work building our little sector of the galaxy.
But I was in a quandary. I did not want to write a Vulcan or a Klingon, but I did not want to write a human either. One of my friends had the audacity to write a half-alien creature from the film "ALIEN", and she was slightly obsessed with the character. I did not want to follow her example. But I was interested in vampires. It took me a week to sit down and have a serious talk with myself, and I happened to be reading "The Sussex Vampire" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the time when a lightbulb went on.
I did a little research into the "Star Trek Conchordance", an amateur catalog of all things Star Trek, and found that apart from the salt vampire in "Man Trap" and the gaseous hemavore in "Obsession", there had been no classical vampires written into the series. I asked myself, "can a vampire actually exist in the Star Trek universe, or is that something people simply pass over as too absurd? Can a vampire be as much a viable being as any other, with a culture and civilization, and can it be an acceptable species in the galaxy Gene Roddenberry envisioned?"
At the time I was placed in an unique position, in that there were several different roles I could have played on the "ship", and when our leader posited that he needed an intelligence officer I jumped at the chance. I sat down and compared all the powers a vampire possessed with the requisites for a good spy, and so Antonia Bellero was born.
Mind you she was a little rough at the edges at first. She was supposed to have paper white skin, intense violet eyes, deep burgundy red hair and the usual canines, which extended at will. I started with that. Then, a super light skeleton born of a light gravity so she could jump higher and faster, lightning fast reflexes, infrared vision and other standard features. But before long two of my friends began to write her as a "friend" character, which gave me the push toward designing her more completely. As she appeared in more and more of the members' stories, she began to take on a life of her own. Even then, I expected her to appear only when needed, to lurk in the background as a minor character.
The stories suddenly shifted to vampires (not my idea), and Antonia was thrust into the middle of an epic tale about another vampire designed by a friend and his involvement with her character. I was to be the loyal confidant, the foil against her hero's excesses and tragic end. The stories became richer and more complex until at some point it seemed like they were writing themselves, and I went blithely on developing Antonia's background, her planet of origin, and so on.
Then there were the inevitable disagreements about plotlines and taking liberties. I did understand from the beginning that when someone wrote another person's character that the manuscripts should be read by the character's owner. I had several people run their stories by me where Antonia was involved and in most cases I approved of them, or discussed the changes to mutual agreement. I also let the other writers read what I wrote about theirs and made adjustments where necessary. That was only fair.
But when my friend began writing her in without consulting me the stories took on what I can only describe as bizarre proportions. She put Antonia into situations that Antonia would never let herself be caught in. She also did not approve of something I wrote which created an impasse neither of us could get past. At some point I had invested some 15 stories to the series already, and one day I decided that the whole thing was getting out of hand. So I stopped writing stories to complement hers and hoped she would get her obsession out of her system.
Later, as some of the members actually married each other and retired from club activity to carry on with their lives, no one was writing anymore and it seemed that people were growing older and more mature. At that time I decided that it was time to move on and do something else. This represented something of a surprise to everyone else, but I was determined to go for my own sanity.
I put the stories and newsletters into storage and started work on some other writing and art ideas I had floating around. Then in 1994 the earthquake in Northridge happened, and everyone was shaken up. We spent a week without power, and two months later I suffered a burst appendix. While I was in convalescence I began to rebuild my jewelry business and went along for a few years just selling jewelry at the local conventions and art fairs, and was doing pretty well until 9/11/2001. The bottom fell out soon after that because of the deep psychological wounds the event inflicted on everyone. It was not just New York, it was everywhere. I stopped selling in 2003 when my regular customers stopped coming, and some of them were from New York.
In the midst of all this ferment I did not know what to do with myself. I decided to clean house just to take my mind off the situation in Iraq for a while and came across the bundles of newsletters and writing I had amassed. I sat down with them and started reading, and came to the conclusion that all my hard work would come to waste; that there was the potential for creating a new and different universe using what came before. My writer's heart began pumping again.
I tinkered with Antonia first. Then I took all the stories I wrote and began extracting the best of each. What I came up with was a hodgepodge at first because some of the storyline was written by my friend, so I had to write new passages to replace those parts. Then I had to redesign the starship and the situations to fit my concept of where the plotline was supposed to go in the first place, and began to write a completely original story using the old stories as a skeleton.
I finished the first draft of Destiny's Forge in 2003, and designed a cover for the book in 2004. I had the kernel of the series already outlined as a group of novels starting from the beginning of the saga forward, but since I had the middle already written I thought it would be more interesting to start in the 23rd century and work backwards from there based on a "chicken and egg" premise. I came up with several different series names, too, but the one which seemed to fit best was Children of The Dragon.
I could not really publish the book in 2004. I did not even have a working computer then. I determined that if I could not find a publisher willing to take my book that I would publish it myself, and if I could not hire a printer to do it I would print it myself even if I had to go to Kinko's (now FedEx Office) to do it. I had the idea for print on demand before it became popular.
Then in 2005 I discovered Lulu.com, an online publishing service which would take digital files and turn them into paperback or hardback books. They seemed reasonable; one could get published for free and then order books via print on demand or bulk order, and they had a marketplace. So, "Destiny's Forge" was first printed in 2006, after starting with a manuscript which ran 396 pages in trade paperback size. Then I trimmed it down a bit, and still more, until I had a smaller, tighter book printed in 2007.
During 2007 I had the idea to write a springoff "prequel" called To Taste The Dragon's Blood, which was based on a few paragraphs in the first book. The plot takes place in 2069, and starts on Mars. I took the title from something Joseph Campbell said during an interview with Bill Moyers, and the phrase stuck in my head. The plot is part "Angry Red Planet" and part "Capricorn One", with a nod toward "Hangar 18" and the ancient astronaut theories, mixed in with a generous dollop of vampire romance and adventure back on Earth. There is also a gentle nod toward the "Indiana Jones" series of films but the actual underpinning to the whole piece is based on the plot from a novel I wrote in 1972 called "Escape to Samarra", about an archaeologist finding an ancient alien city in the desert of Iraq. [Apparently I lost the manuscript between moves from one house to another long ago.]
Then in January of 2008 I was a background actor assigned to do a scene from "Rush Hour III" starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. I was already puzzling what to do with one of my characters, Michael Burton, who had started out to be an old man when he was first conceived. But when I learned what the plot of the film was about the kernel of another idea emerged, and Red Dragon was born, mixed with Bruce Lee and martial arts, mythology, Chinese history and romance.
The Queen's Marksman was inspired by a variety of sources and seemed to materialize out of nowhere, arriving almost whole and complete like Venus from Zeus's mind. A blend of Victorian vampire romance and espionage adventure in the tradition of Ian Fleming, mixed with a host of other British historical events and even a dalliance with Jack The Ripper. The adventure takes place before Conan Doyle and also Bram Stoker.
Then, when I saw "Pirates of The Caribbean" (I could never work on Disney or Universal films; those were union studios), the idea for The Black Witch materialized. My original idea of drafting a strong female captain soon transformed into the travails of a teenaged girl trapped by the circumstances of the time and the way things were, but who still won in the end because a vampire loved her. It is the most romantic of all, but I liked the way the whole plan came together. I followed the history of the period exactly with a few minor alterations, and the story takes place in the Gulf, the Carolinas and Nassau.
After that, I thought that I should flesh out what the dragon's blood was and how it worked, the mythology behind it, and to explain that this was not fantasy or magic but a biological adaptation, so VIRUS took form. It was a slight leap forward, but necessary, since I felt I should also write about what happened after the plot of "Destiny's Forge" concludes. Part of it was to satisfy my own curiosity. By then, my characters were writing the books for me.
You must understand that much of these books was written whole cloth from stream of consciousness, apart from research into the history or facts of the plot's background. I allowed my mind to focus on details brought up from memory; of childhood experiences, or events in history, or impressions inspired by creative works of both writing and film or television. The algorithm of what I knew or appreciated would dictate which way the plot would go. And I, helpless secretary to the mystery of my own mind, would simply type what came into it. Later, I would go back and edit, tighten facts, straighten lopsided ideas, and finally polish.
I held back the four books above to publish Nagrasanti, the third book in the series, and since I was an illustrator I wanted to showcase some of my work, both from the original series and also because someone remarked that illustrated anthologies other than children's books were quite rare. Now I know why, but that is a subject for another article.
Of course the first book was a bit of a struggle, and still is. When Destiny's Forge was published in 2006, I discovered about a month later that Paul Chafe also took the title as the primary part of a title for a novel he wrote based on the Man-Kzin wars written by Larry Niven. I encountered a bit of a problem when I used the author name "T.M. Moore", and found my books on a list with books written by a christian author. Then, thinking that the first book was perhaps a tad too long, I unpublished the whole series and republished under my real name. Then in 2009, I went for months without sales of the print books and thought they were out there too long, so I republished with revised cover designs and even tighter manuscripts. So now they are in their permanent form, and I doubt I will do it again.
For a brief time my stories were also raunchier than they are now. I was always somewhat uncomfortable with erotica, especially when the erotica got in the way of the plot or was not really germane to it. It was not that I could not write it, it was just not important to me, but there is also that tradition that sex sells. I sought advice from others and was told that I should write what makes me happy, and I was always more inclined to read books which got to the point. I gloss briefly over the sex and move on, because that's not usually what the book is about.
Now I am trying to finish Written In BLOOD, a picaresque adventure of epic proportions for the sheer scope of the adventures I am writing into it; a historical travelogue mixed with real historical events, situations and places as no one has read before. It has taken a long time because it is difficult to know which parts are too long and which need more research. So far it is only 340 pages long (a long way from "War and Peace"), but I am only 2/3 of the way to the end, parked on the marshes of Hungary between Oradea and Budapest. I am mindful that I have put off publication several times already, but it is not procrastination. I am eager to write more, but I must promote what has been written already so I have to make time for that. I do say one should not set a firm deadline when writing, but I am hard pressed to follow my own advice as I have been trying to finish this book since April of last year.
So finally, I will repeat what my series is about so that there is no ambiguity: the Children of The Dragon series is a chronicle of the Xosan, living vampires from the planet Antellus who were once human but were transformed by a dragon's blood. They are stories of science fiction, fact and fantasy, myth and history, romance, tragedy and triumph; linked together by the common theme of the vampire as hero. Each book is designed to stand on its own, and to educate as well as entertain. My main goal is to remind the reader that there is so much history which has been lost, so much of the future as yet unmade, and that there are stories yet untold which are rich and fertile beyond imagination. - end.
It was something I was not prepared to do, at first. I had been playing around with several ideas all at once when participating in a fan club/writing group, and while I was working with them the seeds of the series sort of implanted themselves in the back of my mind. They did not germinate until late in 2002, when I was sorting through a bunch of documents I had laid aside in storage.
Let me back up a little. I had joined what started out as a Star Trek fan club back in 1988. It was meant to be a chapter of the International Starfleet fan association, which was formed around the idea of each chapter operating like a starship, with a ship's name. The members of the chapter were supposed to be the ship's "crew". My chapter rapidly grew into a writing group mostly because it happened to be composed of frustrated authors. We formed a newsletter we called "General Quarters", which contained news and announcements, regular ship's minutes and other nonfiction snippets. At some point we all agreed that the newsletter could also support short stories written at intervals. I suggested a "round robin" of chapters, one written by each writer in response to the previous chapter.
Among some the rules we adopted which were uncharacteristic of the other club chapters was that we were not to write "Star Trek" stories; that is, we were not to employ any character, situation or storyline from the original series or the movies. We decided almost unanimously that we would write original stories around new characters we created, and as a result we also designed a completely different starship. It was a dreadnought, something the series'producers never acknowledged to exist. The crew was completely different, and there were a few Vulcans and a couple of Romulan fusions, two Klingons and an insectoid. The immediate effect of this liberal (and some would say radical) departure from the mainstream of the series was a rich new compost of material to draw from. And so we set to work building our little sector of the galaxy.
But I was in a quandary. I did not want to write a Vulcan or a Klingon, but I did not want to write a human either. One of my friends had the audacity to write a half-alien creature from the film "ALIEN", and she was slightly obsessed with the character. I did not want to follow her example. But I was interested in vampires. It took me a week to sit down and have a serious talk with myself, and I happened to be reading "The Sussex Vampire" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the time when a lightbulb went on.
I did a little research into the "Star Trek Conchordance", an amateur catalog of all things Star Trek, and found that apart from the salt vampire in "Man Trap" and the gaseous hemavore in "Obsession", there had been no classical vampires written into the series. I asked myself, "can a vampire actually exist in the Star Trek universe, or is that something people simply pass over as too absurd? Can a vampire be as much a viable being as any other, with a culture and civilization, and can it be an acceptable species in the galaxy Gene Roddenberry envisioned?"
At the time I was placed in an unique position, in that there were several different roles I could have played on the "ship", and when our leader posited that he needed an intelligence officer I jumped at the chance. I sat down and compared all the powers a vampire possessed with the requisites for a good spy, and so Antonia Bellero was born.
Mind you she was a little rough at the edges at first. She was supposed to have paper white skin, intense violet eyes, deep burgundy red hair and the usual canines, which extended at will. I started with that. Then, a super light skeleton born of a light gravity so she could jump higher and faster, lightning fast reflexes, infrared vision and other standard features. But before long two of my friends began to write her as a "friend" character, which gave me the push toward designing her more completely. As she appeared in more and more of the members' stories, she began to take on a life of her own. Even then, I expected her to appear only when needed, to lurk in the background as a minor character.
The stories suddenly shifted to vampires (not my idea), and Antonia was thrust into the middle of an epic tale about another vampire designed by a friend and his involvement with her character. I was to be the loyal confidant, the foil against her hero's excesses and tragic end. The stories became richer and more complex until at some point it seemed like they were writing themselves, and I went blithely on developing Antonia's background, her planet of origin, and so on.
Then there were the inevitable disagreements about plotlines and taking liberties. I did understand from the beginning that when someone wrote another person's character that the manuscripts should be read by the character's owner. I had several people run their stories by me where Antonia was involved and in most cases I approved of them, or discussed the changes to mutual agreement. I also let the other writers read what I wrote about theirs and made adjustments where necessary. That was only fair.
But when my friend began writing her in without consulting me the stories took on what I can only describe as bizarre proportions. She put Antonia into situations that Antonia would never let herself be caught in. She also did not approve of something I wrote which created an impasse neither of us could get past. At some point I had invested some 15 stories to the series already, and one day I decided that the whole thing was getting out of hand. So I stopped writing stories to complement hers and hoped she would get her obsession out of her system.
Later, as some of the members actually married each other and retired from club activity to carry on with their lives, no one was writing anymore and it seemed that people were growing older and more mature. At that time I decided that it was time to move on and do something else. This represented something of a surprise to everyone else, but I was determined to go for my own sanity.
I put the stories and newsletters into storage and started work on some other writing and art ideas I had floating around. Then in 1994 the earthquake in Northridge happened, and everyone was shaken up. We spent a week without power, and two months later I suffered a burst appendix. While I was in convalescence I began to rebuild my jewelry business and went along for a few years just selling jewelry at the local conventions and art fairs, and was doing pretty well until 9/11/2001. The bottom fell out soon after that because of the deep psychological wounds the event inflicted on everyone. It was not just New York, it was everywhere. I stopped selling in 2003 when my regular customers stopped coming, and some of them were from New York.
In the midst of all this ferment I did not know what to do with myself. I decided to clean house just to take my mind off the situation in Iraq for a while and came across the bundles of newsletters and writing I had amassed. I sat down with them and started reading, and came to the conclusion that all my hard work would come to waste; that there was the potential for creating a new and different universe using what came before. My writer's heart began pumping again.
I tinkered with Antonia first. Then I took all the stories I wrote and began extracting the best of each. What I came up with was a hodgepodge at first because some of the storyline was written by my friend, so I had to write new passages to replace those parts. Then I had to redesign the starship and the situations to fit my concept of where the plotline was supposed to go in the first place, and began to write a completely original story using the old stories as a skeleton.
I finished the first draft of Destiny's Forge in 2003, and designed a cover for the book in 2004. I had the kernel of the series already outlined as a group of novels starting from the beginning of the saga forward, but since I had the middle already written I thought it would be more interesting to start in the 23rd century and work backwards from there based on a "chicken and egg" premise. I came up with several different series names, too, but the one which seemed to fit best was Children of The Dragon.
I could not really publish the book in 2004. I did not even have a working computer then. I determined that if I could not find a publisher willing to take my book that I would publish it myself, and if I could not hire a printer to do it I would print it myself even if I had to go to Kinko's (now FedEx Office) to do it. I had the idea for print on demand before it became popular.
Then in 2005 I discovered Lulu.com, an online publishing service which would take digital files and turn them into paperback or hardback books. They seemed reasonable; one could get published for free and then order books via print on demand or bulk order, and they had a marketplace. So, "Destiny's Forge" was first printed in 2006, after starting with a manuscript which ran 396 pages in trade paperback size. Then I trimmed it down a bit, and still more, until I had a smaller, tighter book printed in 2007.
During 2007 I had the idea to write a springoff "prequel" called To Taste The Dragon's Blood, which was based on a few paragraphs in the first book. The plot takes place in 2069, and starts on Mars. I took the title from something Joseph Campbell said during an interview with Bill Moyers, and the phrase stuck in my head. The plot is part "Angry Red Planet" and part "Capricorn One", with a nod toward "Hangar 18" and the ancient astronaut theories, mixed in with a generous dollop of vampire romance and adventure back on Earth. There is also a gentle nod toward the "Indiana Jones" series of films but the actual underpinning to the whole piece is based on the plot from a novel I wrote in 1972 called "Escape to Samarra", about an archaeologist finding an ancient alien city in the desert of Iraq. [Apparently I lost the manuscript between moves from one house to another long ago.]
Then in January of 2008 I was a background actor assigned to do a scene from "Rush Hour III" starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. I was already puzzling what to do with one of my characters, Michael Burton, who had started out to be an old man when he was first conceived. But when I learned what the plot of the film was about the kernel of another idea emerged, and Red Dragon was born, mixed with Bruce Lee and martial arts, mythology, Chinese history and romance.
The Queen's Marksman was inspired by a variety of sources and seemed to materialize out of nowhere, arriving almost whole and complete like Venus from Zeus's mind. A blend of Victorian vampire romance and espionage adventure in the tradition of Ian Fleming, mixed with a host of other British historical events and even a dalliance with Jack The Ripper. The adventure takes place before Conan Doyle and also Bram Stoker.
Then, when I saw "Pirates of The Caribbean" (I could never work on Disney or Universal films; those were union studios), the idea for The Black Witch materialized. My original idea of drafting a strong female captain soon transformed into the travails of a teenaged girl trapped by the circumstances of the time and the way things were, but who still won in the end because a vampire loved her. It is the most romantic of all, but I liked the way the whole plan came together. I followed the history of the period exactly with a few minor alterations, and the story takes place in the Gulf, the Carolinas and Nassau.
After that, I thought that I should flesh out what the dragon's blood was and how it worked, the mythology behind it, and to explain that this was not fantasy or magic but a biological adaptation, so VIRUS took form. It was a slight leap forward, but necessary, since I felt I should also write about what happened after the plot of "Destiny's Forge" concludes. Part of it was to satisfy my own curiosity. By then, my characters were writing the books for me.
You must understand that much of these books was written whole cloth from stream of consciousness, apart from research into the history or facts of the plot's background. I allowed my mind to focus on details brought up from memory; of childhood experiences, or events in history, or impressions inspired by creative works of both writing and film or television. The algorithm of what I knew or appreciated would dictate which way the plot would go. And I, helpless secretary to the mystery of my own mind, would simply type what came into it. Later, I would go back and edit, tighten facts, straighten lopsided ideas, and finally polish.
I held back the four books above to publish Nagrasanti, the third book in the series, and since I was an illustrator I wanted to showcase some of my work, both from the original series and also because someone remarked that illustrated anthologies other than children's books were quite rare. Now I know why, but that is a subject for another article.
Of course the first book was a bit of a struggle, and still is. When Destiny's Forge was published in 2006, I discovered about a month later that Paul Chafe also took the title as the primary part of a title for a novel he wrote based on the Man-Kzin wars written by Larry Niven. I encountered a bit of a problem when I used the author name "T.M. Moore", and found my books on a list with books written by a christian author. Then, thinking that the first book was perhaps a tad too long, I unpublished the whole series and republished under my real name. Then in 2009, I went for months without sales of the print books and thought they were out there too long, so I republished with revised cover designs and even tighter manuscripts. So now they are in their permanent form, and I doubt I will do it again.
For a brief time my stories were also raunchier than they are now. I was always somewhat uncomfortable with erotica, especially when the erotica got in the way of the plot or was not really germane to it. It was not that I could not write it, it was just not important to me, but there is also that tradition that sex sells. I sought advice from others and was told that I should write what makes me happy, and I was always more inclined to read books which got to the point. I gloss briefly over the sex and move on, because that's not usually what the book is about.
Now I am trying to finish Written In BLOOD, a picaresque adventure of epic proportions for the sheer scope of the adventures I am writing into it; a historical travelogue mixed with real historical events, situations and places as no one has read before. It has taken a long time because it is difficult to know which parts are too long and which need more research. So far it is only 340 pages long (a long way from "War and Peace"), but I am only 2/3 of the way to the end, parked on the marshes of Hungary between Oradea and Budapest. I am mindful that I have put off publication several times already, but it is not procrastination. I am eager to write more, but I must promote what has been written already so I have to make time for that. I do say one should not set a firm deadline when writing, but I am hard pressed to follow my own advice as I have been trying to finish this book since April of last year.
So finally, I will repeat what my series is about so that there is no ambiguity: the Children of The Dragon series is a chronicle of the Xosan, living vampires from the planet Antellus who were once human but were transformed by a dragon's blood. They are stories of science fiction, fact and fantasy, myth and history, romance, tragedy and triumph; linked together by the common theme of the vampire as hero. Each book is designed to stand on its own, and to educate as well as entertain. My main goal is to remind the reader that there is so much history which has been lost, so much of the future as yet unmade, and that there are stories yet untold which are rich and fertile beyond imagination. - end.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Antellus Has Published the 2nd Edition of PRINCIPLES OF SELF-PUBLISHING
Antellus - Science Fantasy Adventure & Nonfiction Books and Ebooks
Antellus.comThe privately owned independent publisher has released the updated primer on self-publishing by Theresa M. Moore ahead of its scheduled release date.
PRINCIPLES OF SELF-PUBLISHING: How to Publish and Market A Book or Ebook On a Shoestring Budget is the 2nd edition of the original volume and has been updated to include information about epublishing and distribution as well as recent developments in digital publishing; and discusses the risks and rules of publishing in the context of the value of ebooks as alternate forms of books. It also discusses marketing and promotional media and the emergence of various issues in publishing such as digital piracy, copyright and management controls. It includes current 2010 tax law and principles of accounting as they apply to record keeping for the budding entrepreneur in publishing. The book's principles can be applied to any product on the market today. The book was scheduled to be published June 30, 2010 and released to the marketplace soon after. Due to easing of various obstacles to its completion, the book was published June 23, and is available for sale now.
The book has been published in trade paperback format, PDF, Kindle and is sale on the Antellus web site and online booksellers such as Amazon and Lulu. The printed book retails for $15.95, and the ebook is sold for $6.99.
About the author: Theresa M. Moore has over 30 years of experience in the publishing and advertising industry and has eleven books published, with 4 more in various stages of progress.
Antellus is privately owned and a subsidiary of Nagrasanti Enterprises, located in Sherman Oaks, California. For more information about the book please visit the web site or send an email to info(at)antellus(dot)com.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Antellus Reissues Books for 2010
Antellus - Science Fantasy Adventure and Nonfiction Books and Ebooks www.antellus.com
Antellus Reissues Children of The Dragon series books for 2010
The following books in the series have been resissued in updated print and ebook formats: Destiny's Forge, To Taste The Dragon's Blood, NAGRASANTI, Red Dragon, The Queen's Marksman, The Black Witch, and VIRUS. The 8th book in progress, Written In BLOOD, has been suspended until published sometime this summer of 2010. The delay is due to logistical issues and the decision to add black & white maps and illustrations to the galley. The print version is expected to top off in the high 300s of pages and the ebook version will be issued first about 24 hours after the print book is finalized.
The Children of The Dragon series of science fiction, fantasy, historical fantasy and vampire fusion books is a chronicle of the Xosan, living vampires from the planet Antellus who were once human but were transformed by a dragon's blood. They are stories of fact and fantasy, myth and history, tragedy and triumph, linked together by the common theme of the vampire as hero..
About the author: Theresa M. Moore has 30 years of experience as a writer, illustrator and publisher with an avid interest in science fantasy adventure, history, mythology, and science; and a skeptical interest in pseudoscience and paranormal research. She writes in a strong cinematic style with the mission to educate as well as entertain.
Antellus is a private independent publisher, and is a subsidiary of Nagrasanti Enterprises. For more information about books in its library, visit the web site or contact us by email at info(at)antellus(dot)com.
Antellus Reissues Children of The Dragon series books for 2010
The following books in the series have been resissued in updated print and ebook formats: Destiny's Forge, To Taste The Dragon's Blood, NAGRASANTI, Red Dragon, The Queen's Marksman, The Black Witch, and VIRUS. The 8th book in progress, Written In BLOOD, has been suspended until published sometime this summer of 2010. The delay is due to logistical issues and the decision to add black & white maps and illustrations to the galley. The print version is expected to top off in the high 300s of pages and the ebook version will be issued first about 24 hours after the print book is finalized.
The Children of The Dragon series of science fiction, fantasy, historical fantasy and vampire fusion books is a chronicle of the Xosan, living vampires from the planet Antellus who were once human but were transformed by a dragon's blood. They are stories of fact and fantasy, myth and history, tragedy and triumph, linked together by the common theme of the vampire as hero..
About the author: Theresa M. Moore has 30 years of experience as a writer, illustrator and publisher with an avid interest in science fantasy adventure, history, mythology, and science; and a skeptical interest in pseudoscience and paranormal research. She writes in a strong cinematic style with the mission to educate as well as entertain.
Antellus is a private independent publisher, and is a subsidiary of Nagrasanti Enterprises. For more information about books in its library, visit the web site or contact us by email at info(at)antellus(dot)com.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Written In BLOOD Delayed Into April
Antellus - Science Fantasy Adventure & Nonfiction Books and Ebooks
http://www.antellus.com/
Antellus, a private independent publisher, is forced to delay the publication of the long awaited book into April citing preparation delays.
Written In BLOOD is the 8th book in the Children of The Dragon series by Theresa M. Moore; a chronicle of the Xosan, living vampires from the planet Antellus. It covers a volatile period in history from 1645 to 1789, and is an epic saga of adventure and vampire romance in the spirit of masterworks like "The Three Musketeers", "A Tale of Two Cities", and "Laurence of Arabia". Some last minute changes include a series of maps to trace the route the heroes must take, and illustrations depicting some of the places and people they encounter. The book is expected to top out at almost 400 pages as a result.
The author's comment: "this one is proving a tough egg to hatch. There is so much history to record and the story is so rich and complex. After a year of trying to finish it there is always one more thing to verify, and one more thing to add in or edit out. I cannot shed much of the spice without losing the truly rich flavor of the soup, so I appreciate your patience."
The trade paperback and ebooks will be published in April and simultaneously available from the site. No hardcover book is planned. The Kindle ebook will be appear the same week, then the paperback on Amazon 6 to 8 weeks later. The publisher cannot change this schedule unless it delays releasing the Kindle ebook until the print book listing appears.
For more information, visit the web site or send an email to info(at)antellus.com. Thank you for your attention.
http://www.antellus.com/
Antellus, a private independent publisher, is forced to delay the publication of the long awaited book into April citing preparation delays.
Written In BLOOD is the 8th book in the Children of The Dragon series by Theresa M. Moore; a chronicle of the Xosan, living vampires from the planet Antellus. It covers a volatile period in history from 1645 to 1789, and is an epic saga of adventure and vampire romance in the spirit of masterworks like "The Three Musketeers", "A Tale of Two Cities", and "Laurence of Arabia". Some last minute changes include a series of maps to trace the route the heroes must take, and illustrations depicting some of the places and people they encounter. The book is expected to top out at almost 400 pages as a result.
The author's comment: "this one is proving a tough egg to hatch. There is so much history to record and the story is so rich and complex. After a year of trying to finish it there is always one more thing to verify, and one more thing to add in or edit out. I cannot shed much of the spice without losing the truly rich flavor of the soup, so I appreciate your patience."
The trade paperback and ebooks will be published in April and simultaneously available from the site. No hardcover book is planned. The Kindle ebook will be appear the same week, then the paperback on Amazon 6 to 8 weeks later. The publisher cannot change this schedule unless it delays releasing the Kindle ebook until the print book listing appears.
For more information, visit the web site or send an email to info(at)antellus.com. Thank you for your attention.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Removing Smashwords Links
After some six months of struggling to maintain our distribution channels with Smashwords, we have finally had to bid farewell and removed all our ebooks from their site. Issues arising from their inability to maintain their conversion engine, their program subroutines and the frequent rate at which their site goes down, as well as consistent lack of sales as a result, forced us to make this move. We have replaced their links with links to our book publishing partner in order to provide our epub format ebooks to you direct from our own site.
With the divestiture of Smashwords comes the end of any further efforts to use a third party platform to sell or distribute our ebooks. We have posted our preview downloads to Scribd for review by outside readers, and we still maintain our books and ebooks on Amazon and through their Kindle ereader. But we will continue to maintain the highest quality shopping experience for readers on our own.
After reading of some of the problems associated with the iPad and other reading devices, we are disheartened to know that the bugs were never ironed out (as usual). It is much like what happened with Windows Vista. As our computers are powered by Windows XP, we have had little problems but some security firewall issues, but we have antivirus measures in place to deter spikes and other internet attacks, and we do all the work of creating our pages and internet promotions ourselves. For the last year we have had NO outages, and continue to keep to the same efficiencies and economies of scale we always have. To date our site monitoring people have seen no interruptions of access or download rates. If you have had any problems at all with the shopping cart, any buttons, or other issues involving site access, please email us at webmaster(at)antellus.com. Thank you for your kind attention.
With the divestiture of Smashwords comes the end of any further efforts to use a third party platform to sell or distribute our ebooks. We have posted our preview downloads to Scribd for review by outside readers, and we still maintain our books and ebooks on Amazon and through their Kindle ereader. But we will continue to maintain the highest quality shopping experience for readers on our own.
After reading of some of the problems associated with the iPad and other reading devices, we are disheartened to know that the bugs were never ironed out (as usual). It is much like what happened with Windows Vista. As our computers are powered by Windows XP, we have had little problems but some security firewall issues, but we have antivirus measures in place to deter spikes and other internet attacks, and we do all the work of creating our pages and internet promotions ourselves. For the last year we have had NO outages, and continue to keep to the same efficiencies and economies of scale we always have. To date our site monitoring people have seen no interruptions of access or download rates. If you have had any problems at all with the shopping cart, any buttons, or other issues involving site access, please email us at webmaster(at)antellus.com. Thank you for your kind attention.
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