In case you missed the news, Owner’s Share is now available!
Kobo – still waiting for them to approve it.
Yes, I’ll be publishing the paperbacks as soon as I finish the earlier books in the series.
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- About the Golden Age
- A Traveler’s Guide To Toe-Hold Space
- Fan Forums
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- Spacer’s Handbook
- SC Lois McKendrick
- The Great Diaspora
- Western Annex
- Music Credits
- Shaman’s Tales
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- Ship’s Roster: Agamemnon
- Ship’s Roster: Lois McKendrick
- Ship’s Roster: William Tinker
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Please don't feel obligated but a week doesn't go by without somebody writing to ask where this button is.
Thank you to everybody who supports my work whether it's through donation, reviews, or fan mail. Knowing that I've added something to your life is immensely gratifying.
Yes, I bought the E-book from amazon the night before last. Thank you for your hard work in getting these out.
Please, fix the formatting bug in the Kindle format! All of your ellipses are rendered in ASCII code instead of the intended dot dot dot…..
I just posted a review on Amazon of the book. Loved it, left me sad.
it’s fixed already.
you can get the corrected version by going to the “manage your kindle” page on amazon and getting the new one.
Excellent!
My preferred medium is listening to you read your own works. I am a huge audio book fan anyway but your narration is something that is beyond special. My middle daughter, on the other hand, likes to read books. She had read Quarter Share through Captain”s Share and really enjoyed them. We had a lot of fun discussing the story lines and reliving our favorite parts. But she had not gone very far in Owner’s Share since she couldn’t “read” it. Now she has it on her Kindle, and so do I :)
Thank you!
I’m also seeing the &ellips; format error, but I can’t seem to get Amazon to send me the updated version. In Manage Device, the book is listed, but there is no note of a new version to download. I’ve deleted it from my device and had Amazon send it again, but the error is still there. Is there something I’m missing? FWIW, this is a Kindle Paperwhite.
-Dan
Well, for what it’s worth you have a copy Captain’s and Owners Share sold as soon as the paper version is available. While I love listening to you tell your story in audio, I’m still old fashion enough to want it in paper.
Look for the paperbacks sometime this fall, delbert.
I keep checking the Kobo site every few hours. Grrrrrr. :)
For those who purchased before the formatting fix: just live chat with an Amazon customer service rep and they will push the update to you.
Nathan – again, thank you! Having the whole set to read is wonderful. And a major milestone for you. You’re ahead of where you were when Ridan failed, and I can’t wait to read new material in the coming years. (Yes, Hemit was great – but the Golden Years are my favorite!).
Sean, thanks for the tip on using the live chat at Amazon. I had tried to return and re-purchase, but still had the errors. The live chat was painless and did the job. I did not tell them that I’m going to convert it from their format to epub, because this author doesn’t use DRM. Not essential for the task.
Nate, I also tried buying from B&N, but they didn’t have the revision up yet. No problem–conversion to epub is easy enough.
For those of you wanting the fixed version, this extract of my chat session with Amazon this morning:
Amazon:The content update had not yet been reviewed by our quality team.
So we hadn’t yet released it through the auto update.
Once it is reviewed, it would have been released through the auto update as well.
You can let any other purchasers of the title know that they can contact us for the content update if they want it right away.
Or, for what it’s worth, it’s trivially easy to fix with Calibre’s new Edit Book function, now that it works with AZW3 files. Just do a search and replace on the “&ellips;” and replace it with the special … character from the special characters menu. And delete all those statements in chapter 4. Took me all of 10 minutes to do, and I’d never done anything like it in Calibre before.
Tell: “…the lastline gave it away.”
Please post the article of “The Wanderer”.
Can you please publish the article of “The Wanderer”? I wan to read that last sentence that gave him away. This bugged me al the time after I heard your audi book.
“…the last line gave it away”…?
I don’t recognize the reference
Oh, the travel piece about the Iris? by “The Wanderer” ..?
There is not a complete piece. All there is are the snippets in the book.
At last. Available on Kobo. Not that I’ve been checking every ten minutes or anything.
It too has an ellipse problem. No biggie. Hmm, can’t copy the sample from the Windows desktop app. Wonder why?
Anyhow &ellipse; is in the text.
I have to say all the &ellipse; in the nook version was very distracting. I am going to be hated for this but I did not enjoy the last book at all in fact I am kinda mad that I read it. The end killed it for me and if I have to wait years for the next on well I do not think I am going to wait. I did however love the rest of the series and look forward to rereading them again.
You’re not alone, Donald. When the podcast came out, many people were upset with that ending–about 10% of listeners.
I stand by it.
I’m also guessing you won’t have to wait years for a new Ishmael Wang book.
That’s just a guess and I’ve been wrong before.
I’m kind of with you, Donald, that I didn’t like the ending – at least in part because I was not happy with how the whole thing with Greta was handled. Still, the other 5 were nearly perfect, and this one is pretty darned good, save for how often Ish ends up holding the idiot ball, so I’m more than happy to buy this edition (once I make sure I have enough money), and I’ll be waiting for the next ones! (Though I have to admit I’m one of the apparently few cross-over readers – I’m waiting almost as desperately for new Korlay books!)
What is the real credit value of the Iris?
The end was wrenching, but so is life at times. I love it as written.
Value of the Iris? Hard to say – probably 100+ million.
I gotta tell you Captain, I’m an avid reader in military Sci Fi books like Starship Troopers, Dorsai, Steel world etc.. Your Solar Clipper series is the first and only non military Sci Fi series that has captivated me. The way you wrote this series just drew me into it.
I had some issues with Double Share and Owner’s Share being a former infantryman, I had to keep telling myself “it’s just a book, it’s not real, you’re not there”. Double Share was bad for me, but Owner’s Share was just brutal at the end. I won’t say I hated the ending, I’m not happy with it, but life isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. She likes to knock you down just to see if you’ll get back up again. I truely look forward to more of Ishmael Wang. Very well done Captain!
Nathan, thank you for the journey so far. I very much enjoyed Owner’s Share, perhaps most because the last quarter of the book had such an uncomfortable shift – such with life. Thanks also for the glimpse into the business/financing details driving Ishmael, I felt this was well done. I salute your perseverance through many challenges, thank you again for such a quality series.
I just have to say, Captain, you, sir, suck.
You spent five whole books making us all forget that Ishmael is a tragic character, giving us hope that he could find a measure of hapiness in life. Then you have to go and whack us upside the head at the end of this series by killing off his chance at a happy ending, reinforcing that you’ve been weaving a classic tragedy all along. Brilliantly done, especially playing out some of the bits from the various works that were quoted as part of the opening lines of each book, but tragic endings generally suck. Yes, you might point out that the very last chapter/scene leaves a ray of hope for Ish’s future, but in reality you’ve already laid out the clues to the references of The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. *pift* “…a petrel or some other slinder winged gull.”
*sigh* Ok, I have to give you credit, brilliantly played. You’ve not only brought a different perspective to the space segment of the sci-fi genre, but you’ve managed to incorporate interesting layers to the work. My only major issue with the series as a whole has been continuity problems that have surfaced throughout. The date issues in Double Share alone made me want cringe; I have to ignore then entirely just to be able to re-read the book each time.
Anyway, thank you for finally getting this out, conversion problems and all. Waiting for the text has been hard knowing the audio was out there but not being able to get through even one chapter that way without falling asleep. Not that you put people to sleep with your voice; I just think that for me, listening to someone read is too much like having listened to my grandmother read bedtime stories growing up.
I have listened to you “read” the series twice now. I still rely on the printed/e-book versions as I don’t always hear what is said (hearing loss). Anyway, I never get tired of the Golden Age. It’s a nice departure from the ‘shoot-em-up’, ‘weird ability of the character’ space age science fiction stories that seem to sprout like weeds. I love the ‘back to life’ story in the series and I for one will not get tired of rereading these works. Well done Captain. Oh, did I detect a hint of something developing between Ms. Maloney and Cpt. Wang for a future book? He did notice her assets when she came on board… I can’t wait.
I approve of the way you ended Owner’s Share. Sadly, bad things do happen to people and they have to find the strength to pick up the pieces and carry on.
I loved the fact that Ishmael changed his whelkie; beautiful illustration of him taking control of his life and moving into a new phase. It opens up so many possibilities for you to continue to develop the story of this complex, likable character.
I suspect that you feel you have explored as much of the Solar Clipper milieu as you can from the spacer’s perspective. This gives the opportunity to take Ish, and your readers, into others aspects of that culture.
I just finished chpater 29 of “Owner’s Share” and you JUST SATISFIED THE 1 SCENARIO that i’ve been looking for since starting Solar Sclipper Trader Tales! Thank you Nathan! I’m literally almost in tears, happy for Ish!
Loved the book. Since I’ve listened to the Pod Cast several times, I knew what was coming. I had some difficulty pushing through the attack scene because it was so tragic. Life can be like that though, so I can’t see how anyone could argue with the way the plot twisted.
As long as it took, I was not impressed with the editing. I found at least 25 errors. I’ll be putting them in the web site today.
Please don’t make us wait years for the next Ishmael Wang story!
For what it’s worth, I may be late to the party, but just saw Owner’s Share available at Kobo (it was in my recommended list)
A week ago I got Quarter Share on a lark. Today I finished Owner’s Share.
In a field dominated by Lantern-Jawed Heroes, hip dystopias and 24/7 War Porn it’s nice to see well-written science fiction that deals with people and situations you can believe in. I was enchanted. Here’s hoping that we see Fleet Share or some other continuation of the series and that our Stuart Little eventually finds his Margalo.
One serious complaint about the books:
They are full of misspellings, dropped words and other typos to the point where it is a distraction.
Just finished Owner’s Share and I am devastated.
Many people are. I was while I was writing it.
But I was also hopeful and looking forward to new adventures with Ishmael. It’s why the story doesn’t end there but has a long healing section at the end. It’s not enough because it’s never “enough” but eventually, one moves on.
The measure of a man is not in how he responds to success but how he relates to adversity. We’ll see how Ishmael does in the next few books.
Completed Owner’s Share the day after I purchased it from Amazon. Excellent read. I hope to be able to enjoy many more Tales from the Deep Dark and Ishmael Wang.
Safe voyage Captain.
I just bought the epub from kobo and it has the annoying &ellips; all through it. Will the kobo version be corrected and is there a way to get the corrected version please.
Thanks
You should have the corrected version in your inbox :)
I’ve re-re-uploaded. We’ll see if that one gets thru.
Nothing in my inbox (or junk mail) but hopefully the kobo update will go through and I can get an updated version and others wont have the same problem. Thanks for the great stories.
I emailed it directly to you at the email address on the comment. If that’s not the email you check, that might be why. :)
Bug – Title of Chapter 68 or 69 is off on the year.
Also – Did the auction ever close and settle? It said in the story June ’73 which passed and we never hear a word about it again. I was a bit unclear if I just missed that…or at the end of the book if it’s all still up in the air.
Thanks. I keep thinking I have those pesky dates nailed down and I’m always wrong.
That auction has still not closed. It’s one of the unresolved threads that’ll lead into the next series. :)
You know, the sad part at the point this series left off, the settlement from the auction is going to look like chump change next to what Ish would make if he decides to take the offer to sell his company. It’s just another illustration of what Arellone said about him being a winner…about things not always turning out like he or anyone else thought, but Ish always comes out ahead, even just a little bit. In this case tens of millions of creds ahead, but so much further behind on personal/relationship(s) side. Poor Ish.
God, I hope Ish has a conversation with Alice Giggone in the new series. I’m sure she kept tabs on him, but just a face to face meeting to really get her reaction to his experiences.
The &ellips error is still present in the Nook version that I bought about 10 days ago.
I enjoyed the entire series. While people are generally good, there is evil in life. That seemed to be less obvious in the first books, and more acknowledged as the series progressed. So I think Owner’s Share was the best yet.
There seems to be no mention of religion or really much spiritual life to these characters. Do you see that as our future?
“Unnecessarily cruel” is the way one Amazon reviewer described the ending of Owners Share, and I have to agree. It’s one thing to have something bad happen; it’s quite another to end a book or a series that way. You didn’t just end on a sad note; you left your readers in a deep, dark place with no hope for a brighter tomorrow. You hung them out to dry. In so doing, you left many devestated, and you left yourself with a tarnished reputation as a writer who doesn’t consider the feelings of his readers. Read the Amazon reviews yourself, and you will know this to be true.
My suggestion, for what it’s worth, is an apology and a new chapter that has Ishmael in touch with his former friends who can give him advice and help through this most difficult period in his life. I would add that you should never, never leave your readers in such a place. Alwasys leave some room for hope.
There is a whole new series for Ishmael on the table.
Your patience will be rewarded. ;)
I enjoyed 5 books and recommended the series to many people but at the end of the 6th I felt angry and took back the recommendations. I suspect I will never be able to apprechiate such story twists for drama purpose only. There is no originality in such a twist. So many books and movies do it. It’s a cheap way of creating strong emotions in people. It has become so common that I sometimes even google new movies or books to see who gets what fate, so I can avoid the sucker punch.
I don’t even agree with people who say that bad things happen to good people, like in real life. That’s not entirely true. How common is such an even? 1 in 100 000? So why (in stories) does it always have to happen to exactly the wrong people at the most dramatic moment possible?! Nothing to do with real life. Rather it’s so unrealistic that it’s alienating.
On a positive note, I really like the author’s reading voice and the general tone of the story. Relaxing and motivating at the same time. It has the wisdom of a good person who has figured out many thing in life that I am still learning. At times I have thought that the world would be a better place if more people were like Ishmael. He deserves his happy ending, not some cheap sucker punch for the purpose of drama.
Thank you for writing and reading the Traders Tale books. In my 32 years of reading SciFi you may have written my favorite.
I was trying to picture the Iris. What was the Length, Width ect.