Villi Asgeirsson

Drafting ideas...

blood and rain

Paperback Writer – how to get them?

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Late in 2022, I “remastered” my two existing novels, Under the Black Sand, and Blood and Rain. I made slight changes to the contents and redesigned the books. The cover of Black Sand is now completely different. Blood and Rain is now available in a hardcover for the first time. Both paperbacks are now larger, a digest format rather than a pocketbook.

I haven’t revisited my catalogue like this before, but then I’m not sure if two books can be called a catalogue. Now that Mont Noir is coming and we have three books, maybe we can speak of a small catalogue.

It’s all nice and fluffy to read eBooks, but what if you want physical books? That’s possible now. You can go to Lulu and get them, but if you subscribe to the newsletter, you can reply to it and state what you’re interested in.

Books I sell directly cost less and are autographed.

I do have a limited stock of hardcover books that retail for €25 plus shipping, but the paperbacks seem to be most people’s favourites. Therefore I’m creating bundles of those.

Any paperback is €15
Get two for €25
Get all three for €30

That last offer is as close to cost price as can be.

I have calculated shipping at:
Netherlands: €5
EU €15
UK €20
Iceland €25
USA + rest €30

All the shipping prices are for packages up to 2kg, so you’ll just pay that once.

Obviously, if you are close to me, I’ll be happy to bring them.

Go ahead and sign up for the newsletter and you’ll be able to get any of these deals.

End of Year Sale!

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My eBooks are distributed through Smashwords. It takes the work out of having to individually publish them on the multiple platforms. Only Amazon and the physical books are published separately.

Smashwords has a end-of-year sale and they offer authors to participate. As I have three books there, I was more than happy to take part.

If you go to my Smashwords profile, you will see Under the Black Sand, Blood and Rain and the Icelandic Undir Svörtum Sandi at 50% discount. This offer is valid from today until the end of the year. They are priced at $1.49, or the corresponding price in your preferred currency.

This is a lovely time to treat yourself to a Nordic Noir with a paranormal touch, a story of a young journalist stuck in the middle of the Spanish Civil War or if you read Icelandic, grab that unique novel that isn’t the same that everyone is reading.

A Book and a Cover

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We shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but we do. If it looks bad, nobody will give it a chance. If the cover doesn’t say anything about the story, it leaves the potential reader confused. I have tried to have a professional designer create a cover for one of my novels. It didn’t work. I wasn’t happy with the results. Granted, it was a low budget job, but the problem was that they didn’t understand the project like I did. Perfectly understandable, as I wrote the thing. I’m sure big name authors have larger budgets, the designers probably read the manuscripts and have physical meetings with the author and publisher, but that isn’t realistic when you’re self-publishing.

So, I create my own.

When I designed the original cover for Under the Black Sand, I used stills from the short film that inspired the novel. I suppose it was part loyalty and part convience. I loved the actors, they did a great job and I wanted them to be… immortalised? On the cover? And they were the characters. I imagined them as I wrote the story. Also, the typeface is the same as the one I used in the film.

At the beginning of November, I put the finishing touches to Mont Noir and finalised the cover. As I was working on that, I opened the Blood and Rain design next to it. They do partially follow the same characters and I wanted them to have a visual connection. Since I was busy anyway, I opened the Black Sand cover. It didn’t work for me. I guess too much time has passed, the short film is decades in the past and I felt the cover didn’t do the story justice. Obviously, no slight on the actors, they are still awesome, but the story had grown beyond the short film. (If this thing ever gets filmed, they will still be my first choice.)

That’s when I got a designer to create a new one. As I mentioned, it didn’t work. I tried it myself. Grabbed a photo I’d shot in the Icelandic highlands last summer and worked with that. It received positive feedback, so I decided to republish the book.

The Under the Black Sand cover shows a desolate road in Iceland. You see a car and something that appears to be a ghost. The cover depicts a core scene in the book, shows where it all goes wrong. It is just one scene, but it reverberates throughout the story. The old cover crammed at least three scenes in and it was cluttered. This is more clean and hopefully does the story more justice.

As I was writing Blood and Rain, I experimented with different designs. It was always going to be red and black, the anarchist colours. Oh, I actually started with a 1950s style 5 cent paperback design, but it’s a 1930s story and I think most books back then were some kind of canvas designs. Back to red and black. I had a full body female silhouette with a gun, but it was too James Bond. Settled on a face. The diagonal line is the anarchist flag. The typeface from the 1950s design survived, as I used a kind of Film Noir type. The pattern coming out of her eye represents that even if she isn’t the protagonist, everything that happens radiates from her.

Blood and Rain

Mont Noir is just around the corner. It follows some of the same characters. Anarchism has been abandoned by most of them, at least in their daily life, so the red colour is gone. Instead, we have the blue of the Dutch skies and water. You see the plane and the danger. Interestingly, the typeface I chose for Blood and Rain is more pronounced here, as the title of the book uses it.

Lastly, and this is kind of a bonus feature, I published a book of poetry and odd bits in 2018. I had seven copies printed and have given away two of them. I will never have more printed and may or may not give more away. Some of the poetry are song lyrics I wrote while playing with the guitar. I never recorded any of them and they are forgotten, but the words remain. Silent songs, a book that nobody will read. A very personal work. Book of Silence. The cover represents this, as it is me, in relative darkness, facing away.

Book of Silence

Designing covers is something I love doing. As I’m working on a story, they are a great distraction when I don’t feel like writing but want to be close to the project. If I had a large budget, I would probably get someone more skilled to design them, but I would always be very involved.

It’s (not) All About the Money

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I have decided to stop charging for my books.

Writing is a passion. Certainly in the beginning, before you build an audience. You write because there are voices, people and stories in your head that want to get out into the world.

If you’re lucky, you sell a million books and can make a living from your passion. I never reached that. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or not. I remember when I started making films and videos for a living, my hobby became a source of income and I was forced to make more videos and films. The magic was gone.

Would that have happened in writing? I’m not sure. Writing involves less people and I can do whatever I please. This probably changes as you hit a nerve and build an audience and have to please them in some way. But as a hobby writer without an audience to speak of, I could write whatever I wanted. It remained fun up until the end.

My first novel dealt with an Icelandic business man entangled in seemingly supernatural events. It was a story that just came into being, I was just there to write it. My second dealt with the Spanish Civil War because I was interested in that at the time. My third (unpublished) took a look at life in Amsterdam in the final year before World War Two broke out.

Recently, I created a medeaval world where the gods interfere with the lives of the people, where the church and king try to retain power and the kids try to break out of their routine lives, either by joining the army or planning a revolt against the gods and king. I never finished that.

Those are all wildly different projects. I’m not sure if it’s because my interests are all over the place (they are) or if I haven’t found my voice or niche. Knowing myself, once I’d found my niche, I would try to break out of it.

There is a problem. I don’t have the time to explore my voice, my audience or thoughts in general. A full time job, family and the usual stuff leaves little time to write. That’s why it takes three years to write novels, why I don’t have time to properly publish them. It is the reason why I finish a draft and then leave it for a year or more until looking at it again. Blood and Rain was as good as ready in early 2016 but was published a year later. Mont Noir, the Amsterdam based novel, could have been published in 2018, but… you get it.

Up until now, I have sold my books at low prices. I’m not in it for the money and they don’t sell enough to make a difference to my finances. So, I came to a conclusion.

From today, all my books will be free. They will cost you nothing. I don’t care if I earn €2.99 per book or nothing at all. My job pays me, so my books don’t have to.

If you always wanted to read my novels but never had the money, now is the chance. The price has been implemented at Smashwords and should trickle to other retailers in the coming hours.

Thanks for your support.

Reviews – What are they Good For?

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Nothing is more rewarding to an author than seeing their book reviewed. It doesn’t really matter all that much whether it’s positive or negative. The fact that someone took the time and effort to read your novel and write a review is humbling. Positive rewiews are better, of course. They stroke our ego and make us feel good about ourselves. Still, nobody has managed to write only stellar fiction and critical reviews help us grow as writers and create better future work for you, the reader. We must expect criticism as much as we hope for compliments.

Thankfully, Under the Black Sand enjoyed favourable reviews, only getting four or five stars. There weren’t many, but each one encouraged me to keep going. I never received any reviews for my second novel, Blood and Rain. There may be all kinds of reasons for that.
– The genre may be less popular. Everyone was mad about Nordic and Icelandic things.
– The book may be less interesting, but then, it is being translated into two languages, unlike the Black Sand.
– I didn’t push it like the first.

Maybe I should have. I love the setting and some of my favourite characters are in it. Celestina definitely has the best character introduction in any of my stories.

Here is hoping Undir Svörtum Sandi will be reviewed when it comes out in just under two weeks. It will encourage me to write more, maybe in my native language, and it will tell me if I’m doing things well or need to improve in certain areas.

Below are some of the reviews placed for Under the Black Sand.

★★★★★ – Amazon
A unique story in a unique environment.
21 January 2015 – A story unlike other love stories. Contains all the aspects that makes you want to keep on reading (power, lust, love and well described feelings and sceneries). Movie material.

★★★★★ – Amazon UK
Unusual fast moving story
28 May 2014 – I bought this book as I like stories based in Iceland. It sat in my ‘wish list’ for ages as I was unsure whether or not to buy. There were no reviews to guide me. However I am so happy that I did in the end purchase it.

This fast moving story is about a forceful businessman, set in todays post 2008 bank collapse Iceland, trying to get a large project passed a political and environmental resistance to his plan. As the story develops you get flashbacks to the past, his past, which eventually consumes his time. It is a story of love over the centuries, of struggle against hard times and also of murder. I cannot give to much away as this will ruin your enjoyment. If you like a slightly supernatural story this is for you. Very good.

★★★★ – Amazon
Gripping story
6 February 2015 – Very good story; starts a bit slow, but if you keep going it will eventually grip you. It made me want to watch the short movie in which the book is based. I very much enjoyed the way the history of Iceland is used as a backdrop for the story, that works very well. The pronunciation guide was a nice touch, by the way.

★★★★ – Goodreads
Nordic spirits and a Nordic Tiger
11 May 2015 – This crime novel swings from standard mystery to very different mythology. Very pleasing story that is tied up well. Most of the characters are very real but not sympathetic. No sweethearts traipsing through this tundra. Great melding of ancient and co temporary conflict.

★★★★ – Bol (translated from Dutch)
Intriguing
29 September 2019 – An intriguing, non-linear, dark and moody book. Well written but no easy meal. The experienced reader will be rewarded with a beautiful and powerful story.

Free Books! Happy New Year!

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HAPPY NEW YEAR!

To celebrate the arrival of 2019 and the fact that I’m obsessively working on my third novel, and planning to publish it in 2019, I have created coupons that allow anyone to buy my novels for nothing.

The two first novels, Under the Black Sand and Blood and Rain are absolutely free at Smashwords for a short period of time.

If you don’t have them yet, jump over there and get them. Time is short.

And see you later in the year when Mont Noir becomes a thing.

The free novels can be found here.