I don’t mean for buying my books, while I’m very thankful for that. But a reader of my latest book noticed a discrepancy that I missed during the rewrite (where I kept one location that had been changed unchanged in another spot in the book). So, I was able to fix that and feel much better about the new novel.
Hopefully, this time the book is exactly what it was meant to be.
Last night, I finished the last touches of The Teddy Bear Conspiracy, and it’s now on sale on Kindle and will be on sale in paperback in the next few days (had one more run through the edit check and had to fix a couple of things before I could let it go one more time). Either way, the book is done, and it is now available for the masses to read, so hopefully you all enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Which brings me to my next projects. Over the next few days, I have some outlining to do for my Haven project, and then I’ll be working on The Tales of Reagul, specifically book one, A Season of Kings. With an aggressive schedule, I’m hoping to have these books released within the next month.
I’m starting to explore new ways of generating reviews, and Library Thing has become my new plaything. I put up ten digital copies of The Ameriad there last week, and then a few days ago, I put 100 copies of Leader of the Losers. Part of what drives a writer’s career these days is reviews, and I can’t even begin to explain how difficult those have been to come by. Which is shocking because the books themselves have sold enough copies that you’d think they’d have lots of positive reviews, but they don’t. It’s like they’re completely overlooked by everyone, mainly because those who write me and say they loved the book never bother to leave a review on Amazon, which would make things so much more beneficial for someone like me. You know, someone who is still trying to get ANYONE to realize he’s actually publishing books.
Well, only two weeks (and one day) of work left in this job before I’m a full-time writer, and I’m really hoping this works out for the best. Right now, I’m not feeling so great about this decision, but it had to be done, which means it was meant to be, whatever that might actually mean in the greater scheme of things.
Let’s hope for the best.
My book The Teddy Bear Conspiracy is in its final day of its giveaway contest on Goodreads.
Giveaway ends December 09, 2013.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
The book goes on sale everywhere starting tomorrow.
I think I mentioned that I decided to quit my job a few weeks ago. I put in my notice, and I have a little over two weeks left. A couple of days, I almost quit on the same day I was working, but I’ve perservered, and my last date of work will be December 24th, Christmas Eve. There’s no significance to that day, but that will be my last day of work.
So far, no other jobs have lined themselves up for me. And I’m anticipating that it’s probably not going to happen either. This means I really need to make it as a writer, or I’m going to starve to death. Simple as that. I won’t even get unemployment benefits. I kind of screwed myself on this one, but I’m trying to move forward with a positive disposition, no matter how many dark thoughts keep overwhelming me about this decision and its process as its being carried out.
Monday, I have a release for one of my new novels, The Teddy Bear Conspiracy.
I ran a 2 month contest on Goodreads for this book, and nearly 600 requested a copy of it. I am giving away 10 copies. There’s still a few more days left in the contest, but I’ve given up hyping the contest. Check one of the older posts, or just go to Goodreads if you’re interested in that. I also listed a giveaway of The Ameriad through Library Thing, which I did this morning, and it has about a month before it will complete its giveaway process. I don’t have an immediate link to that one, but you can definitely find it if you just go to Library Thing’s site and search for it under giveaways.
But anxiety is definitely beginning to emerge for me because so far this month, I haven’t sold a single book on Amazon. I’ve sold a few through Barnes & Noble and Kobo, but Amazon, which is usually the one that does the bulk of the selling, has been dead cold for me this month so far. That is not a comforting feeling. Remember what I was saying about starving? Hunger pains are already starting to emerge, and I’m not even at the no food stage yet.
After the Teddy Bear Conspiracy goes live, my next project involves a romance series I’m writing with a female writing friend of mine, and then I’ll be heading for a “sometime in January” release of the first book of the Tales of Reagul series, A Season of Kings. Actually, it’s not really the first book, as Destiny was the first book, but I did something a little strange with this series that not too many other writers do with a series. The first book, Destiny, starts 3000 years after the Tales of Reagul series begins, which kind of makes it an interesting universe for someone following the saga. To explain:
During the period of the Roman Empire, a small group of villages were snatched up by an alien civilization and placed onto a planet called Reagul, where an experiment was being conducted to see how civilizations handle in different environments (the original Rome being the control group, and Reagul being the experiment group). One of the citizens of the new Reagul is a young man who eventually learns all of the alien technology (to be the shepherd of this planet) and immediately after he learns everything, the aliens are called back to their home system to fight a war that is obliterating their people. The young man becomes the prominent wizard of Reagul, as everyone sees his technology as magic, and with such knowledge, it practically is. This begins the Tales of Reagul. 3000 years later, which is about 1000 years in our future, the human empire has spread across the stars, and a coloony comes under attack from the empire. A survivor of the assault leads a mission to destroy the empire by killing the emperor, which brings her to the planet Reagul, where it is discovered that her abilities (the reason she was chosen for the mission) rival those of the wizards of Reagul, indicating a tie between her planet and the strange alien race that contacted them years before (obviously being the same aliens who started the experiment with Reagul in the first place). That loater story is Destiny.
As you can see, it’s kind of complicated, but it’s a great, fun story. The first of that story (aside from Destiny) is slated for release in January.
The next project is a sequel to Thompson’s Bounty: A Ship Out of Time, my time travel adventure involving pirates and the Coast Guard. The new adventure will take Thompson and his crew into the Greek and Roman eras. That should be a lot of fun to write (and hopefully, read). People have been asking for a sequel to this novel for years now, so I finally started plotting it out.
The other distant project is my Deck Const series, which received a bit of fame from a series of short stories that I published back in the 1990s in some of the pulp magazines of that time. They were often referred to as The Soldier stories, and there was always a hint of something called The Deck Const in every one of them. I’ve finally finished the first draft of three novels that I’m reworkiing for publication. It’s a dystopian suspense series of the last soldier who is trying to rebuild civilization while on the quest to find a mysterious talisman only known as The Deck Const.
That’s kind of an update for now. Not sure if anyone even reads these updates any more, but just in case this is being read by soldiers from the future who are in search of the elusive Deck Const, let this be your clue that it exists and perhaps you are one step closer to finding it and rebuilding civilization again. Until then, sorry life kind of sucks for you right now, but dystopian societies can be that way.
From September 21 to September 25, The Ameriad is available free on Amazon Kindle. This will be the last time it goes free as I will be removing it from Kindle Select after this promotion (so I can sell it on the Nook and other e-readers).
If you like it, please leave an Amazon review. It would be greatly appreciated as reviews seem to be really hard to come by these days.
Get it here: Amazon Kindle Version.
The book giveaway for my science fiction, time traveling novel Thompson’s Bounty is active on Goodreads. Sign up for it, and you can get a free paperback copy of the book.
I recently spent some time analyzing how many sales I’ve had through Amazon. Keep in mind, this doesn’t count sales through other services (just Amazon). But what I discovered was kind of fascinating, because if you haven’t been paying attention to it, the information kind of sneaks up on you and tries to stab you in the back. Or at least jumps out from the shadows and says “boo!”.
For the record, I’ve been selling books on Amazon as ebooks since 2008. Granted, hardly a single one sold back then, but I was trying to sell one book (Thompson’s Bounty) way back then. Shortly after, Innocent Until Proven Guilty came along, and then a few years later, everything else sort of exploded into print. What’s interesting is that if you look at the numbers (and yes, most people know I’m a number crunching kind of guy), you’ll discover that in 2008, combined with 2009, I sold 9 copies of Thompson’s Bounty. And that’s it. In 2010, I sold 7 books, mixed between the first two I mentioned earlier. And then 2011, well, just kind of went nuts. I sold 181 books, spread out over 8 different titles. 2012 was a little less successful with 135 books sold. Strangely enough, 2013, of which we are only in June, has had 110 sales. Not counted were 77 sales that occurred just last month, so you can see that 2013 has already surpassed both 2011 and 2012, and we’re not even halfway through the year.
As for money, that’s increasing as well, which makes sense when you follow the number of sales.
The quandary for me in publishing has always been trying to figure out how to sell to more readers, or at least how to get readers to at least know my books exist. I wish I could say I’ve found the answer to that, but I haven’t yet. But I’m still searching, experimenting and performing ritual sacrifices to The Shania in hopes of figuring that out.
Anyway, not much of a post about the usual stuff, but as I rarely discuss the business side of the craft, I thought I would share this with you all (which by “all”, I obviously mean my two stuffed animals who make up my readership).
Last night, the book giveaway for The Ameriad finished on Goodreads. I’d like to think it was successful as 669 people requested the book, and now I have to send out 10 copies of it to the winners chosen by Goodreads. At the same time, 264 people added the book to their “to read” lists, although some of those people may have already taken that option before the contest, and there’s no guarantee that any of those people are ever going to read the book, as they may have just added it as a part of the contest. The interesting thing so far is that no copies have sold as a result of the contest SO FAR, which leaves me wondering about the usefulness of this marketing opportunity.
My next novel to be given away is Thompson’s Bounty: A Ship Out of Time, and it is at the very beginning of its contest at 50 entries and 16 people wanting to read it. Little by little, I’m wondering if this whole thing is even worth it, as the market seems very sided against a writer trying to make a living.
Let’s face it. There are a lot of writers out there. And with Amazon and the Nook making it that much easier for anyone to hang out a shingle and say he or she is a writer, that means we’re going to see more and more of them out there, even if they’re still struggling to string two sentences together. But that’s not the focus of this post. The focus of this post is that because there are so many of us out there, there are also a lot of people out there who are quite willing to rip us off and separate us from our hard earned dollars.
Of course, it’s always been this way, except in the past it was a lot easier to spot the ones trying to take advantage of us. In the old days, a writer mainly had to worry about a couple of different entities, such as:
1. Vanity Publishers. These guys would tell you your book was great and that they wanted to publish it. Then they’d send you a bill for their trouble. They took advantage of the fact that young writers (meaning ones who haven’t been writing in the business for long…age is irrelevant) didn’t know that legitimate writers got paid by the publisher, not the other way around.
2. Charging Agents. When a writer was ready to get a “real” agent, he or she would query a whole bunch of them and hope something interested someone. Every now and then a lucky hit was made, except you’d then hear from some mid-level agent who you really didn’t know but figured they had to be legit to be in the Writer’s Digest Agent Book. And then they’d say that they’d either have to charge you to read your book (before becoming your agent) or charge you for their services (after becoming your agent). In the end, they’d never sell anything because they made their money fleecing young writers who didn’t know better.
3. Editors. Someone would invest in an ad in the back of Writer’s Digest, claiming to be an editor. They wouldn’t cheat you by not editing your work, but quite often you’d end up with an editor who knew less about grammar and spelling than you did.
So, fast forward a few years and now we’re in an era where writers are self-publishing their stuff, as the legacy publishers have practically imploded on themselves, trying to hold onto a business model that resembles the big music producers trying to hold onto the music industry. This has provided a whole bunch of new entrepreneurs to latch themselves onto the writing community. Here are some ones to keep in mind:
1. Book formatters. Formatting a book for an ebook venture is pretty easy. You just have to fail at it a few times first. These guys promise to do that work for you, and some of them are cheap enough to be worth it. But others charge hundreds of dollars and make it seem like your book will fail if you don’t use their services. Like I said, if you have done it a few times, you’re generally okay. For the lower charging ones, they might be completely worth it as it would save a writer a lot of time not having to worry about the packaging part of the paradigm.
2. Agents Who Pursue You. When you start to make it as a self-published writer, you start to experience these agents who claim they can do wonders for your sales. Yet, they know as much about sales as you do, or even less. Basically, they’re banking on you remembering that agents used to be important and hope you’ll buy into the fantasy that having an agent makes you somehow better off. An agent sells your work to a publisher. If you’ve already published it, chances are pretty good that they don’t have much to offer you. A marketing specialist might be worthwhile, but if that’s what you’re seeking and he calls himself an agent, chances are you’re wasting your time…and money.
3. Bad Cover Artists. I’m being very careful about how I address this one because there are some brilliant cover artists out there, and I have used a few of them because they’re just awesome. The ones to watch out for (and not use) are the ones who have just unwrapped their copy of Photoshop Professional (or Elements) and now thinks he or she can create great covers. A great cover artist works from concept, not from stock photos, which is how a lot of them operate. I use one cover creator who actually asks me a bunch of questions about the novel AND THEN starts to design concepts. She’s great at what she does. That’s what you seek, but they’re rare and hard to find.
4. People Who Claim to Know More Than They Know. This has been one of my pet peeves. There are some authors out there who attempt to gain sales by pretending to know information that they really don’t. A good example is the extremely best selling author Rob Eagar who wrote a book everyone kept recommending to me as “the book that will help you sell more books”. The book is titled, Sell Your Book Like Wildfire, and it is a great book if you write nonfiction. However, because of the realization that the larger market out there is the group of naïve people like me who are writers of fiction, he spends a great deal of time trying to give the impression that this book is JUST AS good for fiction writers. His premise is simple. You have to sell books that are worthwhile to people. In other words, that have value to them, so you have to find what makes your book valuable to them and sell that idea as your premise for your book. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work with fiction. As a matter of fact, the more I read of his book, the more I realized he hasn’t a clue about anything that deals with fiction. He’s a marketer who knows nonfiction, and that’s it. Unfortunately, he’s convinced a lot of writers of fiction out there that his book is worthy, and in MANY conversations I’ve had with other fiction writers, we’ve all pretty much come to the same conclusion. Fiction books are about stories and storytelling, not about finding something useful for a reader. Sure, you can spin that in some way that might pretend to work, but in reality, you aren’t going to interest readers of fiction unless you have a really good story to tell, and you have an engaging way to do it. You’d get a lot more value from someone teaching you how to create a flashy cover for your book than you would from this book. Again, I was fooled by the desire to find an easy way to success.
That’s a general idea of some of the things to watch for in today’s writing environment. Drop me a line (or add a comment) if you come up with any yourself.
