Christopher D. Schmitz's Blog, page 11

Dinosaurs, Lies, and Christian Bookstores

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I was speaking with another Indie author at a convention over the weekend and she told me of the last panel she had participated at a different con. “I was next to an author who, after I’d answer the moderator’s question, would say the opposite of what I’d said and then insinuate I was somehow lying. He insisted that the traditional model was the only way and that anybody not published by the Big 5 was a no-talent hack.” I was not led to believe that this fellow was printed with said publishers.

His response is indicative of what he is: a dinosaur of the publishing era and someone who refuses to update his thinking based on the modern market and technology. He’s not uncommon, either.

Guys like him are leading the charge towards extinction and there is no easier place to see the fall out of his thinking than in the near-total collapse of the Christian book-selling industry. Within two years we’ve seen the largest two Christian brick-and-mortar book retailers completely close their stores, and the secular publishing world isn’t faring much better. So in the microcosm that is the faith-based publishing industry, what does it mean for Christian authors? The pending changes could be scary…

…or they could be exactly what the industry needs to demonstrate a correction that gives credibility to Indie writers who are changing the landscape of the publishing world.

The major publishers of the past have kept the gates pretty well guarded, but at the expense of many, quality, original writers whose stories are making people step back and ask why such amazing tales were shut out. The Martian is a prime example and so is Wool (and the author even refused to enter the “normal publishing industry” despite being offered a 7-figure book deal after his success. The success of guys like Hugh Howey has lent credibility to Indies. But regardless, a lot of the old guards at those collapsing gates refuse to give any serious thought to those breaching their walls as they collapse around them.

The turmoil within the publishing world is a sign of the times. The way people shop has changed and those who refused to get on board the ship have been left behind to starve in the ports. Companies who refuse to give credibility to the immense talent of Indies (and their capacity as self-promoters) are now rocked back on their heels by the dearth of their success and the impact it has had on their bottom line. The Big 5 are not necessarily starving in their castles yet, but losing a tiny fraction of a majority still translates to a lot of money they have missed out on. The ones who will lose the most in this skirmish are those who claim that Indies aren’t even real authors and insist that they should not be taken seriously. In all honesty, spite is a great motivator and Indies are great networkers and collaborators.

In an era of Trump, Obama, and polarized national politics, I wonder how much of modern thinking has been applied to national economy and business tactics. I don’t really care how people vote or what side of the aisle they root for, but it’s undeniable that the right has gotten further right and the left has gotten further left. In the same way, people no longer engage in business or relationships by seeking partnerships and commonality. I blame social media. How often do you see people post “If you don’t agree with XYZ, unfollow/unfriend me right now?” That’s nonsense, but polarization has taken over the American way of thinking and it needs to stop. Indies are real authors who earn real money. Some of their books suck. A lot of filth flows from the Big 5, too.

Right now, the biggest publishing chaos is in the distribution… the bookstores. As the market corrects to accommodate Indies, brick and mortar stores feel the brunt of it worst. Back to the Faith-based microcosm. In 2017 Family Christian Stores closed all of its stores. All of them. Now, LifeWay bookstores are doing the same. Speculation is that Barnes and Nobles will eventually follow suit and move to a primarily online model. In spite of the loss of chain Brick and Mortars, mom and pop bookstores are doing well and on the rise. The market for books is growing and physical books are on the rise again for the first time since the ebook craze took off in earnest.

Christian writers might be especially fearful thinking that the loss of those chains will lead to a loss of demand for their books. I see the opposite. Book buyers from those environments will finally start looking for other ways to get the content they desire. We have an opportunity to introduce readers to new ways of getting books.

Technology will change again, and wildly within the next decade meaning something new is on the horizon. Indies are the typically the first to innovate. If we keep our finger on the pulse of the market, we stand to gain the most with our books. Basically I’m saying this: it might very well be the best time to be an Indie, especially one with faith-based books. The changes are happening there first and whatever results might be the perfect petri dish for the secular industry to change, refine, and perfect.

One thing is certain, the winds of change are coming on strong and those refusing to bend with the winds are breaking under their pressure.

 

Free Books

I’m part of a huge giveaway program this week with over 50 fantasy books being given away. Go check it out by clicking here. You might find something you like!

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State of Writing

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I’m getting to this report a little late (I was on the road until about 3am driving back from a convention.) Last week I managed to complete the recording for the final installment of the Armageddon Seeds books. It should be available in a week or two via Audible. I also got my new covers uploaded for several of my titles (I’ve been working with a pro cover designer.)

This week I’ve got to prepare a few items for a workshop I’m teaching this weekend. While I’m started on Austicon’s Lockbox (Dekker’s Dozen #3) I have another tiny project I might work on that should only take a couple weeks.

Over the weekend con I got to hang out with some of the folks at the Bard’s Tower, an author collective featuring folks like Mercedes Lackey. All around thumbs up (even if I was sick all weekend and only at about 40%). Brandon Sanderson was there, too… but I didn’t have an opportunity to cross paths with him (though I had a good chat with Keith R.A.  DeCandido who wrote the novelization of the Serenity movie.)

Author Feature: Ryan Smithson

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Ghosts of War: The True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI (HarperCollins, 2009) and 10 Klicks South of Whiskey (Black Rose, 2018) are two books by Ryan Smithson.

“GOW is my memoir of my service in Iraq and has been selling well for several years. 10K is my latest release and about a wayward street magician who gets arrested and given the choice to go the jail or join the Army. He has a reckoning of the soul when he witnesses his leader make a fatal mistake during a mission.”

Tell us about yourself and how you got into writing:

Writing was always something I could do, but I didn’t realize how special it was until I had a reason to bleed onto the page. I was home from Iraq for about a year, had not talked to anyone about anything, when an essay assignment in a college English class changed my life forever. I wrote about one of our engineering missions, and the catharsis was indescribable. The professor asked me to read it to the class, and one of the students, who had no idea I was in the Army before then, raised his hand and said, “You gave me a whole new perspective on this.” That’s when I knew I had to write not only for myself but to share the human experience with others.

That essay began a flood of other essays, which eventually became my memoir, “Ghosts of War: The True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI” (HarperCollins, 2009). My second book, “10 Klicks South of Whiskey,” was published in 2018 and began as a play I wrote for my master’s thesis. I’ll talk more about that below.

Tell us about your stories:

After penning my memoir, I began writing fiction, which has proved to be much more challenging. Like anything difficult, though, it’s also even more rewarding. My favorite moments are when the characters begin to do and say things I never expected. They choose their own conflict, they decide what’s important to them, and they seem to live independently of me. The art of writing is discovery as much as it is creation. Then the challenge becomes wrangling those twists and turns into a cohesive rising-and-falling plot line.

This is exactly what happened with my latest novel, “10 Klicks South of Whiskey.” I had an idea many years ago to write a play about a platoon in Iraq that experiences a single tragic event, but the truth of what happened changes depending on who you ask. The idea was to mess with perspective, create some unreliable narration so the audience isn’t quite sure of the truth. Some of the scenes I wrote instantly worked. The characters leapt off the page and became three-dimensional. Others were okay, but weren’t quite have that snap. After I amassed all these various stories, I worked tirelessly trying to figure out what this story was really about and what I was really trying to say. Characters got cut. Characters got combined with others. Some new ones came into the fray.

Then the hard work paid off, and the story shaped itself into a novel about a charismatic 17-year-old street magician who gets arrested, joins the Army to avoid going to jail, and sees his true test when he witnesses his leader make a fatal mistake during one of their missions. Now the truth can only come through the pathological liar. While the story is still about shifting perspectives and the meaning of truth, it ended up being more about how we define heroism, and what it means to forgive ourselves when we fall short. I couldn’t be prouder of the final product.

What kind of success have you had?

I have a Word document on my computer tracking every project I’ve submitted to literary agents, editors and publishers, plus their responses–“yes,” “let me read it,” and “no.” Last time I hit Ctrl+F and checked, the word “no” appeared 535 times.

Success in writing isn’t about the number of times you get a yes. It’s about getting the no’s, about persevering through them, and about being open to criticism so you can incorporate good feedback into your work.

If we only wrote for the yes’s, we wouldn’t be writers for very long. We write because we love it, because it helps us empathize with our fellow man, because we learn a little more about ourselves with each word, and because we know that, once in a while, somewhere in that endless pile of no’s is a thrilling “let me read it” that promises to share our love of people with the world.

Tell us about your writing process.

I used to freewheel a lot more than I do know. Freewheeling is a blast. It’s the best part of writing, and when you’re in flow, it’s like watching a movie unfold. So like a movie, I used to assume that the twists and turns would lead to a solid climax that wrapped itself up neatly. Roll credits. Ryan’s a bestselling author.

Not so much. I spent years getting pretty frustrated that simply “following the characters” didn’t always work out, especially for something novel-length. Which is where outlining comes into play. I always hated them, even when I was in school, but now I force myself to create them. I don’t marry myself to it, and I don’t set it all out at the beginning like a roadmap. I can’t, really. The characters still need to do the work. But at a certain point, I take the characters and what they’ve done and I write all their scenes on index cards. Then I stand back at a bulletin board in my office and plot them out. Some magic happens there, because when I can visualize it (like a movie), I realize where the holes are. Oh, I need a Resurrection moment. Or oh, the Catalyst doesn’t fit the central conflict. Or oh, this thing that I thought was a Catalyst might actually work better as an All is Lost moment much later in the story. So I move things around, which can change the entire dynamic of the story. A character’s relationship might change. Their motivations could flip. Just like that, I’ve got a whole new perspective on this story. Then I go back and finish the thing.

Give us an insight into a time you wrote a scene with feeling.

— Tap Shoes: An excerpt from “10 Klicks South of Whiskey” —

I don’t cry until we’re back at the barracks. I’m in the shower when it happens. It’s the blood washing off my hands that triggers it. It’s the smell. Earthly, like old, rusted things that are worn out and forgotten.

Through all of it — seeing Boomer, hearing his voice for the last time, his blood turning dark brown in desert sand, his lumpy figure bouncing beneath a blanket in the Humvee, his abandoned tap shoes, my lonely tears in the shower — the hardest part is still his funeral.

After the chaplain gives a sermon and Captain K gives a speech I barely hear, our first sergeant calls us to attention. Standing there as stiff as a gun barrel, I hold back tears while a man with a bugle plays Taps. It’s all I can do to keep my saluting hand still. When it finally ends, a thousand years later, I drop my hand sharply, and for the first time, I feel my true emotion about all this.

Anger.

I am so mad at Boomer.

I look at his empty combat boots and overturned rifle up front, and I picture the plaque that must hang in his high school, the one for his rushing yards record. I wonder if all the teenagers passing by everyday even give it a second glance and, if they do, could they possibly grasp the horror of that boy’s final moments. I want to go to his school and build a shrine for him.

So they’ll remember.

So they’ll understand.

I want them to know the truth: this record setter, this football star, he was a dancer, too, and he was a Soldier.

Then, one row at a time, we walk up to Boomer’s upside down rifle and Kevlar behind his empty combat boots – The Battlefield Cross. Next to them is the 8×10 portrait he took at Fort Bragg before we shipped out. In the picture, he stands tall and proud and unafraid in the same uniform as the rest of us. Tucked in one corner, close to his breast pocket where it says U.S. ARMY, is the picture of his dad that he used to carry in his helmet.

It’s a man who looks eerily like Boomer, except with more years on his face, more tragedy and heartache than Boomer ever had the chance to know. He stands tall. But now I see that it’s not just a picture. It’s a funeral card.

It’s laminated together with a Military Police unit crest and a dried poppy. His father doesn’t wear desert camouflage though. He wears a cop uniform. NYPD.

A single phrase is beneath his picture: “Serve and Protect. 9/11 and Always.”

Do the math and you realize that Boomer must have never known his father. Just like me.

It doesn’t help. I’m still angry. But it does explain things. I salute the portraits, and stand there too long. I washed the blood off my saluting hand a week ago, but I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of that smell.

Check out this book by out FEATURED AUTHOR.

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Why run ads? Pt 1. The Plan.

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Unless you are a household name and automatically sell books based on your name or brand recognition, you’re going to need to purchase some advertising in order to move some books.

The plain and simple fact of the matter is that Indie Authors must make serious attempts to become individual marketing professionals if they want to be successful. Gone are the days when writing a book was a significant accomplishment. Any idiot can write and publish a book. Nowadays, there is a significant qualifier to success: writing a book that gets read. Notice that I didn’t say write a good book, because the success of books like the 50 Shades series has shown that writing quality should be a concern, but gets lost in the shuffle of marketing.

If you can get a handle on how to sell your book, it will make money regardless of the content, in spite of it even. Worry about quality and content! But learn the ropes on how to market and don’t plant your flag that says “I’m a writer and I refuse to learn advertising.” I’m not there, yet, but I recently scored thousands of downloads while toying with some marketing techniques and here were my results…

My cost was $201 to get ads out (I also sent to my newsletter list and social media partners) for a Free giveaway and overlapped book #2 at .99 (countdown deal) during the promo. Over the next month these were the results  (I also ran rotating free novella giveaways at all times before and after—I have like 20 ebooks that I constantly cycle to generate those small KENP blips you can see on my KU results graph before the post-advert readers begin to ramp up.) The graphic gets hard to read because the ad spike nearly hits 4k when my daily numbers are more like 20, which isn’t a big enough to show by comparison.

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$65.29 (13,397 KENP over 30 days)

$77.72 KDP sales

$32.67 ACX

+15 book reviews on amazon

Like an idiot, I ran all of these ads on about the same day, rather than stacking my promos to build a tiered, concentrated effort. I still made back an estimated $175.68 over this period. I also didn’t have everything yet optimized on my page listing (Since then, I have paid for a professional cover redesign for both covers and created a written plan to try and maximize how well the book could do when I give it another go.)

Prior to trying ad stacking, I was running Facebook Ads, but lost money continually with ads—even if I did have a bunch of signups generated for my mailing list because of them. I was hoping that I could generate some read-through and KENP money, but was far from breaking even. While these ads ran I switched off my ads and began pushing mailing list signups through Newsletter Swaps and Story Origin promotions. At only the added cost of elbow grease I began averaging +100 new mailing list signups per week: far better than I was doing with Facebook ads once you factor in the unsubscribes (it seemed like 20-30% dropped off within a few days of my onboarding sequence which is good for list health, but hurts in the wallet when the cost for subscriber kept crawling closer to .80 after the first month of ads).

If you hadn’t read my earlier article about how a friend and I each flushed away fistfuls of Benjamins on an expensive ad package, (we lost about $2,500 between our efforts and sold hardly any books) I’ve been reluctant to trust adverts. I want to wade back in cautiously and stack my ads so that I get the best return, spread my dollars into a few services’ client bases, and draw heavily on recommendations of other writers who have used services with success. I am hoping to both scale up what I recently accomplished and also improve the results so that I do better than break even.

Here is the simple, 90 day market plan I created.:

Day 0 is the promo launch date for the first ad. First, I will run a count-down on my 5-book SF boxset. Overlapping that, I will run a small ad and set my 3-book fantasy series boxset to free. Hopefully these two things will get some hits on my name and get people downloading my content which should boost my KENP numbers. I don’t know that those things factor into amazon’s algorithms, but I know I sometimes get promo emails pitching me books I may be interested in after checking out an author, so I’m hoping this might trigger some of free email promos/publicity from the great Amazon/Skynet as the main promotion ramps up at 0-day. It’s only a $7 gamble and the additional KENP ought to pay for that (each are like 800-1000 pages so 2 complete reads will pay for it.

 

-45 enroll in KU and schedule book ads and select free date

-40 change next book in the series to a reduced price/countdown deal.

-30 schedule NewsLetter swap promos (make it for a day when NL drops)

-22 schedule fantasy boxset giveaway with Arrancat via Fiverr ($7)

-17 boxset kindle countdown deal (SF @.99)

-15 Fantasy boxset free deal (to get 10 day lead time to boost overall KENP numbers)

-13 boxset kindle countdown deal (SF @1.99)

-12 boxset kindle countdown deal (SF @2.99)

-11 boxset kindle countdown deal (SF @3.99)

-7 schedule both free and .99 promo service for book #2 with Arrancat via Fiverr

0 biggest 3 ads run. NL swaps go live. Social Media push with a boosted Video ad ($20). Send schedule Newsletter early that morning. (Arrancat $12, BK Knights $7, Free Booksy $100, Genre Pulse $17)

+1 2 more ads. Social Media push (book barbarian $50, Ignite your book $1)

+2 1 ad. Social Media push (Fussy Librarian $28)

+3 1 ad. Social Media push (Your New Books $124 +books butterfly ad for book #2 $70)

+4 1 ad. Social Media push (ENT $40)

+5 1 ad; book 2 at 1.99. Social Media push (eBook Deals today $5)

+6 book #2 at 2.99

+7 book #2 at 3.99

+30 NewsLetter… follow up with a report on how well your last promo blitz went

+45 tally assoc. $ and KU page reads, plus acx add-ons

TOTAL COST: $481

I’ll come back and link to this article when I have an update in the future once I actually try this plan… stay tuned for part 2 a few months down the road.au

State of Writing

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While I did get some writing done early last week, I worked quite a bit on some other things: a total rebrand of my Dekker’s Dozen series… new graphics/covers. I am just waiting on the final cover for the Last Watchmen, now. I also worked on recording the last installment of Armageddon Seeds for Audible; it’s about 30% completed and I hope to get it done by this weekend. It helps to refresh myself on where the universe left off as I continue to write in it (I’m a couple chapters deep into writing Austicon’s Lockbox.)

I’ll be taking Friday off of work and driving all night on Thursday to get to St. Louis MO. If you’re in that neck of the woods, drop by Planet Comic Con and say hello!

Author Feature: Lee Williams

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Tell us about yourself and how you got into writing:

I am a journalist and writer living in Dorset, UK, with my wife, rampaging toddler And newborn son. I write about technology, innovation, green issues and political commentary for various publications including The Independent, The Guardian, Wired, Private Eye and International Business Times. Skerryvore is my first, and hopefully not last, novel!

Tell us about your stories:

I write fantasy for young teen and YA age groups. I am currently writing the sequel to Skerryvore – the second book in the Dark Net series.

What kind of success have you had?

Skerryvore is my only novel and recently released but has an excellent average review score of 4.8 stars out of 22 reviews on Amazon UK

What traps do you see for young/developing writers?

Getting too excited and telling everyone about your story before it’s written is a big mistake. Your story has an energy that needs to express itself through the writing. If you go around telling everyone about it, you dissipate that energy and dilute the focus from where it should be going – into writing the book!

Give us an insight into a time you wrote a scene with feeling.

The final scene of Skerryvore where all the separate threads of the story come together in an emotional and action packed finale that ends on a killer cliffhanger!

Check out this book by out FEATURED AUTHOR.

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His website is at http://www.leewilliamsjournalism.com/

8 Other Ways to Make Money on your Books In Addition to Sales

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I thought about the title, How to Get Rich & Famous Selling Ebooks, but decided against it. If you read my blog, you’ve probably seen me talk about how this takes actual work to succeed and that you ought to plan to be the rule rather than the exception.

If you’ve looked over the math on things such as targeted Facebook ads, you might be wondering how in the world you can make any money selling books? (If you can manage to get a 2% CTR on a $2.99 ebook, you can’t pay more than 4 cents per impression or you have lost money on the ad [CPC formula: book cost X Click Through Rate X royalty percentage = break-even Cost Per Click]). You’ll go broke selling books at even well-performing figures.

The trick is not to sell just a book. Serious book pros like Mark Dawson will run ads that lose quite a bit of money because they have calculated the cost versus the total income from a sale—that figure includes more than book royalties. Below are eight additional ways that your book could generate additional money.

Here are the primary sources of revenue from books that do not account for the immediate book sale:

Affiliate Account money

For most people, this will be a program such as Amazon Associates which gives a percentage of sales back to advertisers based on how much they purchase. The biggest things you ought to know about are that there are some rules you have to follow and that you don’t only make money on what you advertise. When I first signed up, someone clicked one of my links and did their Christmas shopping—because of the amazon tracking cookie, even though they didn’t buy my book, I made a significant amount of money from the rest of their purchases because I was the door they went to Amazon through. Affiliate programs aren’t limited to Amazon; there are many other companies that have similar programs.
Bounty links

Some companies provide a sign-up bonus if someone uses your link and registers for services. One that I often use is the “Head hunting” links provided by ACX (Audible services). If anyone clicks through my audible link from my website and registers for their subscription services I get a nice bonus in addition to any sales royalty that the visit generates.
Read Through Rates

Your book sale, especially if you have a good backlist, might not be your last. If you have written a series and have many additional books, you will be able to monitor sales records to determine your read-through-rate. People will continue your stories and purchase future books on your own (the rate will likely reduce with each iteration, but it is something that you ought to account for.)
“Tripwires”

A tripwire is a technique where you use your reader magnet, email newsletter, or some other method to give a special incentive to make a purchase right now because the deal looks so good. For instance, my email list onboarding sequence gives away a couple books from different series; during the onboarding, I mention that the first book they received is part of a larger series and that there is a special price for the boxset which they can get now, rather than buying books to read sequentially. (I also use my affiliate link on the series.) Because they are getting all of the books at once I can reduce the price to prompt a sale and still get a higher royalty than the read-through number since customers are buying now rather than cooling down between purchases.
Subscription Services

The biggest ones are Kindle Unlimited, Scribd, Kobo Plus, Bookmate, and the list goes on. Audible is also a form of subscription service, though their royalty scheme is different than KU. Wattpad paid accounts and other knock-off services are also in this group. Readers subscribe to the service and you provide content. If they read yours, you get a commission.
Clients and Fees

Perhaps your expertise allows you to gain speaking engagements or consulting work. I have had both opportunities and get invited to speak, teach workshops, and also do paid consulting work for other people. It’s not super regular, but it could be if I made it my primary business model. This is especially relevant if your book is nonfiction. Many professionals are encouraged to write books as a supplement to their business model—the books typically function as ads or promotions for their main business by either generating leads or acting as credibility builders.
Extras

Do you sell additional items related to your books? If Joss Whedon had an etsy store and sold hand-knitted Jayne Cobb hats from his Firefly stories this could be an example. It is especially relevant for teaching courses and nonfiction where you may choose to sell additional items as supplements. For instance, my Indie Author’s Bible book has a supplemental workbook that can be purchased and is especially important for folks using my book as a guide or who are enrolled in one of my workshops.
Sponsorships

Patreon comes first to mind: users pay an access fee for the creative content you are providing. Also in this category would be things like monetized blog accounts and Youtube ad revenue generating accounts.

Let’s look at our hypothetical book again and add in these numbers.

We will nerf them and aim low, assuming that you get an affiliate click [with some additional revenue from additional purchases], no bounty link money since it can be unpredictable/inconsistent, a read-through that sees a third buying into book 2, and a quarter buying the third. Tripwires are great, but not taken into account since it’s more relevant to a mailing list ad than a sales ad. Subscription services will assume the book is in KU and that you will get about .005 per KENP. This book in mind is part of a fiction trilogy and we’ve priced them each at 3.99 (so that our Tripwire looks like a deal at 9.99,) it also means clients/fees, extras, and sponsorships won’t come into play. I’ll use stats for KU vs. sales based on ads I recently ran: received about .50 in KU money for each book sold as KU subscribers also clicked through and added the book for free rather than purchasing it (roughly 100 pages worth of reads per ebook purchase). I also made about .39 per item sold in affiliate tracking and I made about 1.25 times as many sales as I did books sold, which will add into the final calculation.

2.79 Royalty

2.32Read-Through

.50 KU

.49 Affiliate

——————-

$6.10 estimated income for an advertised $3.99 ebook series starter w/affiliate link in KU

There can be lots of discussion on whether this is high or low, or what aspects to tweak. The conversation could circle for eternity, but suffice to say, there are ways to make your book generate more money than just the standard royalty—but you’ve got to go out and work the system.

Review: Turn Coat (Dresden Files)

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Finally, I got around to reading some Jim Butcher. I’m glad I did.

Turn Coat was my introduction to Harry Dresden. People have been recommending it to me for a while now since I also write some paranormal fiction and one of my series has a detective (though I modeled him more after Constantine as I hadn’t yet read any Dresden.)

I thoroughly enjoyed the story. I thought Butcher’s writing (though in my least favorite POV, 1st person,) was done well enough that I caught most of the context of relevant stories that came before. It didn’t feel like I’d missed half the story and was bumbling around in the dark.  Some of my reader friends have hated on Dresden in the past, but their exposure was in earlier books (Turn Coat was book 11 in the series and I found it at a library book sale and picked it up since I’d been meaning to pick one up anyway to check it out—and I’d much rather own a book than borrow it.)

The thing that amused me most is that Dresden’s inner monologue sounds an awful lot like my own, which made me smile because of the irony. It was a lot of fun, and definitely an adult book (not that it was gratuitous in overt ways [lord knows a lot of those YA books are practically pornographic,] but the book felt more relevant to my adult life than many of the paranormal books on the market whose market skews younger. I appreciate that. It seems like too few writers and publishers view me as a target audience anymore.

If you want to check it out, Click here to check out Turn Coat.

Click here, instead, if you want to check out the full series.

Author Feature: Gustavo Bondoni

[image error]I am an Argentine author who writes primarily in English. My debut novel, Siege was published in 2016, while two others, Outside and Incursion, were published in 2017. On the short fiction side, I have over two hundred short stories published in fourteen countries. They have been translated into seven languages. My writing has appeared in Pearson’s Texas STAAR English Test cycle, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Perihelion SF, The Best of Every Day Fiction and many others.

Tell us about yourself and how you got into writing:

In 2018, my short fiction was a finalist in the Jim Baen Memorial Contest and also received a Judges Commendation (and second place) in The James White Award.

I have also published two reprint collections, Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010) and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011). The Curse of El Bastardo (2010) is a short fantasy novel.

I got into writing because, eventually, the stories I used to torture my younger brother with when I was a kid needed to find some other outlet… so I began to write them down.

Tell us about your stories:

Most people would call me a science fiction writer, and yes, that’s definitely where the majority of my fiction lands. However, my writing–like the reading that inspires it–is all over the map. My latest published book is a thriller about a bestselling book, an enterprising female journalist and a peninsula in Greece so far lost in time that women aren’t allowed to set foot there.

What kind of success have you had?

When I first started, a win was to get published, and that is still the one I celebrated longest and hardest. I was paid a contributor’s copy of Jupiter SF for that one. Later, the objective became to get paid. Then to publish a book with a traditional advance and royalties paying published. Then to sell short fiction to major outlets. Right now, a win would be to sell my next novel to a major New York publisher. I’ve been close, but haven’t quite broken through yet.

Where do you write at?

I write at a table in my living room, except when I’m on vacation. Then, I write at whatever a table at the living room most resembles. Why do I answer this question? Because I want to underline the fact that there is no need for some romantic / inspirational writing location. If you have one, fine, if not, write anywhere you are comfortably seated. Also, writing doesn’t take vacations.

Give us an insight into a time you wrote a scene with feeling.

In Timeless, there’s a scene in a car where my MC is talking to a guy. She’s not sure if he’s a good guy or a bad guy. She’s not sure if the guy means her well or ill, whether she should get out of the car and take her chances with the men chasing her or stay with him and take her chances with him. She’s not sure if she’s scared of him or falling in love with him or both.

Check out this book by out FEATURED AUTHOR.

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His website is at www.gustavobondoni.com.