by Travis Williams | Jul 24, 2022 | News & Updates
Stealth: WW 2 historical fiction
Stealth by my friend Robert Stermscheg was released at the end of 2021.
The novel follows the heroic American bomber pilot Jack Swaggart who is forced to ditch his damaged B-26 Marauder in the German countryside. Then he catches a glimpse of a secret aircraft the Germans are flight testing. Now only he can stop the Third Reich from establishing air supremacy with its new bomber.
Stermscheg offers a delightful cast and PG-rated romance in an intelligent thriller with high-stakes spycraft, German resistance, and clever (or sometimes lecherous) Nazis.
Robert is an experienced pilot himself, so he includes just the right amount of detail to put you in the pilot’s seat of both American and German airplanes.
Now, he has launched the audiobook edition of Stealth. The narrator is Canadian author, missionary, narrator, itinerant pastor, and radio guy, Ron Hughes. His rich baritone fills the room with an authentic, casual confidence that fits Stermscheg’s characters and writing style.
I’m a graphic designer, writer, and history buff. I’ve been creating book covers for authors over the last year or so, and I designed the cover of Stealth for Robert. I also had the honor of fact-checking a late draft of the manuscript before the final edit.
You can get the audiobook edition of Stealth for free at Audible if you aren’t a member yet or buy it most anywhere audiobooks are sold. If you listen to (or read) it, Robert would appreciate a review.
Travis
Travis Williams earns sales commissions from qualifying purchases made by following links on this webpage to Apple Books and Amazon.
by Travis Williams | Jun 10, 2022 | News & Updates
The countdown to launch ended.
On Friday, May 27th Uly Quits His Job launched, and suddenly Uly was officially published.
The sound of fans rushing to bookstores was like a distant rumble of raging waters.
Hardcover books my readers had pre-ordered were delivered on launch day. At T-plus 14 days since the launch, Uly reached a milestone:
100 hardcover copies sold.
One-hundred-and-three actually.
This is fantastic. I am extraordinarily grateful.
I can dream big, but I have zero expectations.
I told Colleen McCubbin, my publisher at Siretona Creative, that I would not be satisfied if I only sold twelve books. I definitely wanted to sell at least 12.
Well, as far as I’m concerned, Uly launched in a big way.
So many of you who read my posts must be telling people about my book. If you weren’t, I wouldn’t have gotten such good news after only two weeks.
But sales aren’t everything.
In my book the character of Mrs. Lucy tells Uly, “Trust in the Lord.”
I’m telling you, it ain’t me. I fumbled around and did some stuff to get the word out.
The glory goes to God. May Uly Quits His Job be in the hands of each person who needs to read it.
Authors don’t write books for buyers. We write books for readers.
If you bought the book, I would love for you to pass it along to someone else to read it. I imagine people reading tattered, worn out, coffee-stained copies warped from having been dropped in a mud puddle.
Pass it along with a warning: “Watch out. Don’t sip your coffee while reading this. It’s spit-take funny!”
If you pass your copy along, let me know. I would love to hear from my readers.
“Was it in anger, Lᴏʀᴅ, that you struck the rivers and parted the sea?
Were you displeased with them?
No, you were sending your chariots of salvation!
You brandished your bow and your quiver of arrows.
You split open the earth with flowing rivers.
The mountains watched and trembled.
Onward swept the raging waters.”
—Habakkuk 3:8-10, New Living Translation
Buy Uly Quits His Job
Photo caption: In the cover image above, a hardcover copy of my book is on the side of the road. In the story, Uly rides a bike on the side of the road for part of his journey. Credit: Travis Williams.
by Travis Williams | May 24, 2022 | News & Updates
Movie trailer
An announcer with an enviable voice provides a dramatic intro.
Short clips from the movie play with loud theme music, explosions, and all the best one-liners in the script.
The two-minute-long professional edit of scenes from a movie are meant to make people want to watch the film.
It mostly works. They’re hugely popular. People watch lots of movie trailers online.
Book trailer
A book trailer is a short video promoting a book.
Writers are always looking for ways to get the word out about their work. A book trailer is an author’s attempt to interest readers in their latest release.
The price for a professionally produced book trailer starts around five-thousand dollars. That’s why many authors opt to create one themselves using text and stock photos. Results on those are mixed.
I’ve been imagining a book trailer for Uly, but it probably won’t happen.
Therefore, I invite you to imagine a movie trailer, a preview, with all the short clips described in words.
Sort of like a movie trailer
The music of a gospel choir singing is playing in the background.
“In a world where …” words replace video, here’s my preview of Uly Quits His Job.
Uly and a young man named George are sitting on the tailgate of a truck. Groundskeeping equipment is in the background.
George dug out one of his recycled bottles of water and considered the brown lukewarm water inside. “I could use a nice cold bottled water right about now.”
Uly chuckled. “That reminds me of a story I’ll have to tell you some time.”
Uly walks down a hall in an old house-turned office building and stops at his foreman’s desk.
“Uly, Mr. West has already approved you for the trip next week.”
“Okay, that’s cool.”
“That is if you’re available on Sunday afternoon?”
“You’re driving to Savannah, right?”
After work he is standing next to his truck at a gas station.
To buy gas, he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. The work memo fell on the ground, so he picked it up. He tucked it back into the pocket. Can’t lose that.
Uly is at the ticket window inside a bus station.
The ticket agent’s attitude softened some. “I’m working with you here, sir, because I know you had to make a special run to get that all-important bag of Fritos and then you got yourself bus-left.”
Lightning flashes and thunder claps with a bang! Uly watches a man he just met when he took shelter under a bridge.
The man stood at the top of the berm under the bridge. He squatted back down. He sprang up again and paced. He wasn’t at all used to being around people. He shouted, “Jump back! What do you lack, Umbrella Fella? White Cadillac!”
Uly walks into the parking lot of an old gas station.
He walked by embarrassed, not looking at them, not knowing what had made them laugh so hard. He hurried inside, avoiding eye contact with the cashier. The laughter continued outside.
He went straight back to the deplorable excuse for a men’s restroom. Looking in the mirror, Uly had no idea who was looking back at him.
A woman is standing outside at the door of a small business checking the doorknob.
“Anyway, I’m locking up here. Do you need anything?”
Uly could see the anxiety on her face and knew she was just being nice while hoping he didn’t need anything.
“No. I don’t think I need anything.”
Later that evening
Uly lay there hungry, homeless, jobless, and penniless. He caught himself not breathing, stuck in a long, unblinking stare that accompanies a feeling of numbness.
Buy Uly Quits His Job everywhere books are sold
by Travis Williams | May 7, 2022 | Banner Posts, News & Updates
I read my hardcover proof the way a reader would.
It’s a joy
One unanticipated joy I have experienced as an author is having my book professionally printed.
I’ve seen the digital document on screen as Word docs, PDFs, a Kindle ebook, the manuscript in my writing app, and in the Adobe InDesign layout online as my publisher was prepping it for printing.
But for some reason I hadn’t anticipated what it would be like to have a printed book in hand.
I have printed the manuscript on copier paper, hole-punched it, and dropped it into a binder more than once for proofing, but that wasn’t the same.
The other weekend I read my hardcover proof the way a reader would.
And that was so much fun. It’s a joy to see my book printed. I’m currently letting it simply sit on my desk just because I like looking at it (as in the not-at-all-staged cover photo for this post).
Digital “spirit” made paper “flesh”
If digital versions of a book are incorporeal, the real book is a type of incarnation. The digital “spirit” has been made into paper “flesh” through printing.
I don’t have much appreciation for hardcover or paperback books anymore. First of all, they’re typically too heavy for my liking; much heavier than my Kindle.
The font is usually tiny, I need to turn on more light to read than I want, the dust cover is in the way, and when I touch a word in the text, the dictionary definition doesn’t magically pop-up! A hard-to-break habit like flipping a light switch when the power has gone out.
I’m amazed at my response to the hardcover edition of my own book, though.
It isn’t too heavy, the text is big enough to read easily, the dust cover works nicely as a bookmark, and the size is substantial without being bulky. Since I wrote it, I also don’t need to look up any of the words.
A 6 oz. ton of books
In 2011, my parents gave me a Kindle for Christmas, back before they were backlit. Nevertheless, I easily switched to it for all my reading.
The device was small, the font size was adjustable, it held a ton of books in six ounces, and it allowed me to look up any word with a few button clicks. The first thing I read on my new Kindle was The Hunger Games trilogy.
Except for a few collectibles and reference books, I’ve avoided hardcover and paperback books for over a decade.
Today, I read on a nice, backlit Kindle Voyage my friends gave me as a gift in 2016. Six years later, I still love it.
If you prefer digital books, obviously I get it. Uly looks great in the Apple Books app and is also available on the Nook, Kobo, and Kindle devices.
That said, I hope anyone who buys Uly Quits His Job in the hardcover format enjoys it as much as I have.
Travis
Travis Williams earns sales commissions from qualifying purchases made by following links on this webpage to Apple Books and Amazon.
by Travis Williams | Apr 19, 2022 | News & Updates, Banner Posts
Go forth with your ideas. Be productive. Make more pies.
My friends at Siretona Creative recently mentioned the Slicing Pie company to me. They have a software product that allows business partners to efficiently manage shared dynamic equity in a startup with multiple stakeholders. This idea seemed to have merit to me.
But it’s interesting to reflect on the economic metaphor of the sliced pie
There is no pie of fixed resources that is being sliced into tinier and tinier slices in the market by increasing demand and increasing populations.
At some point you were probably exposed to the idea that the more people there are the thinner we have to slice the pie of finite resources to provide for everyone. That’s not a logical sentiment, however, because people are creative, not dead weight.
However, your slice of the finite resource pie doesn’t have to be forever shrinking thereby decreasing your opportunities. Instead, abundance and prosperity grows when two interdependent dynamics are set free.
These two dynamics:
1) Division of labor, and
2) Freedom of association.
Set ’em free.
First, increasing division of labor is accomplished by increasing population.
Yep, even immigrants. Even illegal immigrants.
Larger, growing populations divide labor so that individuals specialize with greater and greater specificity according to their own choices increasing the quality and quantity of the output of their labor.
The key there is “according to their own choices.”
Division of labor doesn’t divide the pie into smaller units, it provides the people needed to create more pies that didn’t exist before.
People are creative, not dead weight.
It’s legitimate and even honorable to fight against population controls as well as war and tyranny.
Also, don’t try to do everything yourself. Delegate, network, collaborate. Share the burden, share the joy, share the income, and share the victory.
Greed is counterproductive and leads to shrinking pie pieces.
Second, freedom of association allows division of labor to exist. A society that values greater freedom of association leads to individuals interacting with one another in their own self-interest in ways that are win-win for everyone.
For instance, the value a reader places on acquiring a book to read is greater than the value they place on the money they part with to get the book. This is a win-win transaction for both the author and the reader in the free market.
Another example is in the labor market. People who work to provide labor and those who pay for that labor find each other and engage in an employee-employer or contractor-consultant relationship that is an expression of freedom of association.
If it’s not win-win, they have the freedom to part ways.
In society, there is nothing but individuals.
Individuals may choose to act in harmony, but it’s an error to anthropomorphize the collective. Governments, corporations, even families, are collections of individuals having agency and responsibility.
If individuals in a society are free, then people have the liberty to make purchases, live where they choose, read or write and publish what they want, take jobs or hire workers or do anything else. There is no Marxist exploitation of workers in a society that values freedom of association. The opposite is true. Socialism leads to statist coercion, undervaluing individual freedom and, ultimately, the cooking of fewer pies.
Individuals enjoy liberty if they are unencumbered by bureaucracy, central planning of the economy, and geopolitical barriers. Capricious legal restrictions, entrepreneurship licensing, and arbitrary law enforcement, are antithetical to liberty.
Furthermore, travel restrictions, lockdowns, fees, taxes, censorship, compulsory standards, mandates, regulatory compliance, coercion, enforcement, conscription, or anything else that limits individuals stopping them from pursuing their own choices decreases individual freedom of association.
It’s not just governments that encumber freedoms.
There is also a problem when the individuals who have government power—or who have benefited from it—sit idly by allowing others to keep us from acting in ways that are in our individual self-interest.
Finally, markets scale up or down in a way that is fractal—small parts look a lot like the bigger picture. This is the key to shared success and prosperity. Within a market, abundance increases for each individual who chooses to act. The pie doesn’t shrink.
People aren’t mere consumers. They are also creative producers.
Increasing prosperity is enjoyed by each person who chooses to engage in the economy with their own influence and in that way participate in the division of labor. The pie grows each time a person engages their freedom to associate in the market with whomever they choose in whatever way they choose.
Whole countries can grow in a free market environment, or you can experience the extraordinary power of a free market individually. Even if only one person chooses to act in a way that takes these concepts seriously, that person will benefit.
That means you. Go make more pies.
Travis
Travis Williams earns sales commissions from qualifying purchases made by following links on this webpage to Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.com.
by Travis Williams | Apr 16, 2022 | Feature Post, News & Updates
Writing my novel, Uly Quits His Job, is like digging post holes.
For most of his adult life, my father, Paul B. Williams, delighted in having a small farm with garden vegetables, and when I was young, a variety of farm animals.
When I was a kid, we had goats, chickens, ducks, rabbits and pigs for many years. My dad especially liked Nubian goats and rabbits with the long floppy ears.
Before we could have farm animals; however, we needed a fence.
When I was seven, we moved to rural Georgia from rural Alabama. Before too long, my dad had decided to build a fence around three or four acres of land next to our house. This was the fence that would eventually keep all those farm animals from wandering off.
Daddy acquired a truck load of old railroad ties that he was going to use for the fence posts. Railroad ties are huge and heavy and have to be in the ground deep enough to remain upright. It’s a big job to use railroad ties for fence posts.
In addition, south Georgia is notorious for an abundance of red clay in its soil. If it hasn’t rained in a while, the clay packs down hard and becomes slick and thick when it does rain.
Every day Daddy would come home from his day job and start digging post holes until dark. He spent countless hours digging several each day in the hard-baked red dirt.
My dad was tall, strong and athletic but the difficulty of digging holes in the hard red clay was wearing him out. He would never give up on his dream of having farm animals, but something had to give.
For a time he quit working on the fence. Then one day he said to my mom, Linda, “I think I’ll just dig one post hole every day.”
One post hole at a time. One a day.
Before I was eight, we were installing the wire fencing onto the poles. Building the fence might have taken an extra month or two but so what?
To this day, we refer to the sequence of jobs that have to be done to complete a project as “post holes.”
That’s the right attitude to have when writing, publishing and launching a book into the world. It’s a complicated, step-by-step process that takes time.
I had written a book and the draft was done. At that point there was a long checklist of tasks that had to be completed from rounds of edits to marketing efforts. The list in the project management software used by my publisher, Siretona Creative, gave me pause when I first saw it. Then I realized there were sublists. But that was okay. Each task is a “post hole.”
I spent three hours chatting online one day with tech support trying to troubleshoot how to properly set up DNS numbers for my domain name. I have no idea what that means, but I refuse to be overwhelmed.
That task was one post hole.
I took care of another one today. I’ll dig another one tomorrow.
The wonderful part about it, is that I’m not tackling these jobs alone. Many of you reading this have dug your own post holes for me by helping me in one way or another. I’m incredibly grateful for your volunteer help.
Others of you are staff members at Siretona Creative. You have to dig many of your own post holes that will benefit me that I don’t even know about.
Finally, the community of writers that I’ve met through Siretona is remarkable. I would never have guessed—actually I was skeptical—that the community that Colleen McCubbin has put together at Siretona would have value.
I was wrong to be skeptical.
I thought that I just needed to know where to dig the post holes and when to dig them. In fact I need the encouragement of my new friends in Siretona’s “Nestbuilder Community” to keep digging the post holes. It’s a long fence.
As with most things in life that are worth doing, writing a book is not something I can do quickly or easily. First, there is no book without the inspiration that comes to me from the Holy Spirit. The characters don’t exist anywhere except on the page where I wrote them into existence, but it seems like the Creator creates them.
Second, the help, support and encouragement of friends and family is what makes it possible for me to keep pushing this project forward. That, and the good example my Mama and Daddy provided of being undaunted by difficulty.
Before long after we dig the last “post hole,” Uly Quits His Job will be released to the public. Thank you for joining me on this journey.
Travis
