Status: Just produced an eBook for Tanith Lee. That was cool. (1 year ago)

TimCTaylor

Name	Tim C. Taylor
Location	not specified
Member Since	May 03, 2011
Votes Received	24
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I'm an author of science fiction, born in Colchester, England in 1970.

When I first thought of writing a story in the early naughties, I got a bit ahead of myself and searched Amazon for authors sharing my name. To find so many Tim Taylors already published was a crushing blow. Luckily my parents had foreseen this and provided me with a middle name. Now girded with a 'Middle C', I had some early success at getting published in print and online magazines before concentrating on writing novels. Recently I've been published in the Newcon Press anthologies: 'Shoes, Ships and Cadavers' and 'Further Conflicts' alongside cool people like Dan Abnett (the UK's top selling Sci Fi author), Lauren Beukes (who's just won the Arthur C. Clarke Award), and Alan Moore (A comic guy. I enjoyed his 2000AD stories when I was younger. He's a nice guy with excellent taste in shoes!).

When I was made redundant in February 2011, a consequence of the global recession, my co-workers gave me a Kindle as a parting gift. "Oh," I thought. "E-books have finally arrived." So I started up an indie e-publishing business. After twenty years writing and managing software releases for a FTSE 100 company, I now do much the same thing with fiction as a writer, publisher, and freelance e-book designer.

In the real world, I'm a husband, Dad, sometime-brewer, and oftentime-builder of Lego constructs to my son's designs. I'm on a sabbatical from the software industry so I expect to be very busy with the reading, writing and publishing. As part of that, I hope to enjoy your stories on Wattpad and vice versa.

Tim

Works

Remade in Your Image

11 parts / 11 pages, updated Jun 17, 2011 PG-13

Remade in Your Image is the story of a pleasurebot who escapes into the dangerous colony city of New Amsterdam, and of the man who tries to save her. But does she real... read more

1,042 reads

Future Speculation (or How I Burst the Greatest Stock Market Bubble of All Time)

9 pages, updated May 05, 2011 PG-13

"Joel thought briefly about turning and letting off a snapshot but then his feet found the factory floor and he needed to move. Fast. Bu... read more

383 reads

TimCTaylor's Reading ListTBR

898 reads

1,082 reads

3,891 reads

1,685,881 reads

Message Board

TimCTaylor
1 year ago

@voif1d Glad I cheered you up a while back (I’ve been away...) You asked about the difference between e-publishing and traditional. Well, I’ve been involved in both and the biggest differences are that (1) you can choose to price e-books  much lower (because the incremental cost of making and distributing each new book is essentially zero), and (2) you can release books much more quickly. For example, my agent’s pitching to get Solaris Books to publish one of my novels. But that wouldn’t be in the shops until 2013. If I wanted to e-publish then I could have it on Amazon by next week (although I’d want to commission professional cover art, which wouldn’t be that quick).

voif1d
1 year ago

Hey Tim 
Thanks for becoming a fan and the comment you left behind on 'Dragon of Legend; Destiny'. To tell the truth I was beginning to wonder about the similarity to Eragon people kept mentioning and your comment cheered me right up so thanks:)
I'm just curious, as above you mentioned you are in the e-publishing business, just how different is it from traditional publishing?

TheOrangutan
1 year ago

@TimCTaylor - thanks Tim, looks like I've still got some work to do on working things out. Thanks for all the info. Cheers, Gav

TimCTaylor
1 year ago

@TheOrangutan Pricing? Not so easy as that, I'm afraid. The major retailers won't let you set a price less that 99 cents. Some let you put it out for free (you might want to put a sampler out for free but charge for the collection). smashwords let you do a 'reader sets the price' but some of the retailers won't take on your book at that price. Amazon also puts a minimum of 99 cents. You can set the UK price to be slaved to the US price and calculated by exchange rate. That puts a UK minimum price at Amazon to be about 70 pence.

Price expectations are all over the place at present. I set my Greyhart Press things at 99 cents, but have felt the need to go in for longer stories (up into novelette territory) because others are selling whole collections or packs of 2-3 stories for 99cents. If I could, I would sell shorts for 49 cents. But I can't, so I regularly give some away for free instead!

Good luck, Gav.
Tim

TheOrangutan
1 year ago

@TimCTaylor - thanks Tim, that's really useful, I'll have a look at the Smashwords thing, I've been re-editing stuff and need to get things together so that I can do it properly. I must admit that I'm a bit like that with anthologies, I'd read the whole thing, but always in order of which stories tickled my fancy first. 
Here's a question, what do you think is a reasonable price for a collection of say 10 short stories? Should I put a price on it at all? 49p?
Was thinking of getting it up onto Amazon too, have you any experience with that side of things? 
Thanks for all the tips, please feel free to tell me to bog off if I'm asking too much . Cheers, Gav

TimCTaylor
1 year ago

@TheOrangutan Sounds like you've exciting times ahead, Gav. My little publishing effort is at www.greyhartpress.com and I'm doing epublishing conversion services for a few small publishers, notably www.newconpress.co.uk (notable because they get the coolest authors - like that Gaiman chap). 

If you're going to do a short story collection for the Kindle, I suggest you have an active table of contents (in that it has hyperlinks to the chapters), which you can get by setting bookmarks as per the latest Smashwords style guide (which is an ebook you can get for free on Smashwords). For the Kindle, you ought to set a 'guide' to the table of contents so that you can access it by clicking on Menu - goto - table of contents. If you don't know how to do that, just ask as it's quite easy when you know how.
The reason I suggest all that is because, in my experience, unlike novels, readers of collections and anthologies don't always like to start at the beginning and read all the way through in a linear way.

BTW: how long until they bring out a Lego eReader?

Cheers, Tim

TheOrangutan
1 year ago

@TimCTaylor - I've been toying with the idea of publishing a collection of my short stories, but have been watching the conversation started by David (Hachebrown) in The Pub at the moment, trying to get a little more info on things. One of my shorts is being included in an anthology via Spinetinglers but they seem to be taking their time to publish. I don't mind too much, they've paid me, but it'd be nice to see it on Amazon. 

Just need to get the formatting sorted out for Smashwords which seems fairly straightforward, but working on some other stuff at the moment and trying to get that complete before I take the next step. Edit, re-edit and edit again...

It was my twin boys' birthday party  last weekend too. I have to say I was delighted to see some lego in their presents, they had some particularly cool car kit things too which are rather good. 

Do you have a website address for your publishing business I'd be interested to see it. Cheers, Gav

TimCTaylor
1 year ago

@TheOrangutan Give a shout if you want any help starting the e-publishing. I'm sure there are plenty happy to help out and I'm one of them. 

It was my lad's fifth birthday last weekened. His favourite present was an old book of Lego instructions for building things out of generic blocks. This was my wife's when she built Lego in the 70s. My boy just sat there reading this thing for an hour. So more Lego action coming! Tim

TheOrangutan
1 year ago

Hi Tim, thanks for chucking those in your library, hope you enjoy them when you have 5 mins spare. 
Just noticed you mention Neil Gaiman in your status there. He was the reason I started writing, a colleague leant me one of his short story collections and I was utterly hooked. My missus got me a kindle for my birthday earlier this year, so I too am suddenly coming to terms with the idea of e-publishing along with Mr Brown below me.
Nice to meet someone else who plays with lego. Cheers, Gav

LostDMBFiles
1 year ago

Nice to meet you at the Pub Tim. Hope to see you around on the WP more. And a belated welcome.

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TimCTaylor

Works

Remade in Your Image

Future Speculation (or How I Burst the Greatest Stock Market Bubble of All Time)

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