Christopher D. Schmitz's Blog, page 57

Thursday Recommendations: The Right Way to be Wrong

So romance has popularized the “love triangle” to a huge degree (thanks, Stephanie Meyers.) It’s always been a big deal, of course and was a plot point in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with Elizabeth Bennet’s choice between Wickham and Darcy layered upon Wickham’s pursuit of both Elizabeth and Kitty Bennet.

Today I thought I’d share a book that is way outside my genre norm: it’s a romance (and doesn’t feature the undead). Honestly, sometimes books are just a good escape into a fun adventure, and one person’s sci-fi is another person’s romance… I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve escaped the doldrums of my life with a good (or even not-so good) space adventure or epic quest of adventurers. This isn’t my kind of story–but I’m not everybody and I know this will click with many of you and the premise is interesting, especially given the well-rounded nature of the author, Tracy Ball who knows people who have committed murder and knows people who have dined with the Pope.

The Right Way To Be Wrong, Tracy Ball’s 2nd novel, is a feisty tale about a bad boy trying to do better versus a good girl who isn’t. Being in love with Holden, one of the notorious Latche twins, has freed Cherry from her ghosts. Now, she wants to help everyone -with or without their consent. Her unyielding opinions influence every relationship on the Latche family farm. While her involvement may not always be welcome, at least her intentions are pure. And that’s a problem. Purity doesn’t work for Holden. Abstinence is not a part of his womanizing agenda. Besides, Cherry has two secrets too many as far as he is concerned. The lack of information about her family, and her intimate exchanges with Eric– the other notorious Latche twin.

Check out this book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Right-Way-Be-Wrong-ebook/dp/B0189YRC04

Book Review: We Journey No More

I got a copy of We Journey No More by Sahara Foley. I read some of the other reviews and it’s been a while since I read anything targeting the YA age group (which pretty typically features protagonists 17-19 years old with a reader base a year or two on either side.) I heeded the warnings about the regular sexual content and kept the earbuds in while listening on Audible.

At first, I wondered about what seemed like plot holes, like the young ages of the characters. I kept thinking, “A sixteen year old can’t move across the country with her boyfriend!” Don’t worry… those things are addressed by the end of the book.

I was glad for the headphones. My second thought was, “Dang! don’t these kids do anything other than have sex?” It did seem over the top… but then I remembered being seventeen and thought, wellllllll, maybe this is pretty accurate after all–I mean, if I was in this kids shoes, then I suppose this might be more true to life than I’d care to admit.

The only thing that I really do think Foley missed is in the end battle (which I really did enjoy, this point aside). She wrote about a couple kills made by very specific weapons. I’ve probably been here, too, and made similar gaffs, but the main characters kill some enemies with a .22 and a shotgun at over 100 feet. If you’re a gun enthusiast you see the problem with this statement (a .22 is not likely to be lethal accept at point blank range while firing into vitals, and a shotgun blast is about as effective as an angry sunburn.) They also had to manually remove the .22 casings as if it were a revolver–I actually own the .22 rifle the characters used (it was my grandfather’s) and a similar shotgun. Buuuuuuut… for a regular person who is not a gun enthusiast, not a big deal and the pacing of the story would completely overlook a technical error.

Over all, it was a good story with many interesting moments and it has a nice Mad Max feel to it while they are in the future. While I didn’t really care so much for the horny teenagers (probably because I work with teenagers and I’m beyond that target audience) I did really connect with the Ganu tribe and their leaders as they struggled against those who meant to displace their people. Heck, I’d love to read a whole new sequel just to spend more time among them as they try to defend their home from the evils of the wasteland.

I’d read more from Sahara Foley in the future and recommend checking this book out here: http://www.amazon.com/We-Journey-No-More-Adventure-ebook/dp/B013H4FC8A

List of Indie Author Awards

Self-published/indie authors get a lot of discrimination, often justly so. One of the areas they are often shut out of is the ability to win any publishing awards of any significance. On the one hand, it might not be that big of a deal. On the other hand, studies show that “Award Winning” books sell about 7% more units than their peers, probably because of the perception of added value.

Anyhow, I wanted to share a list of Fifty Book Awards open to self-published authors:

http://selfpublishingadvice.org/50-book-awards

Free Fiction Tuesday

Burning the God of Thunder is a short story that I wrote about ten years ago. It reads like Sons of Anarchy Vs Touched by an Angel.

It got accepted to be published if I made some changes to the length. The publisher and I worked on it for a few months, but never came together and so I let it sit in the dusty backlogs of my hard-drive. A decade later I’ve rewritten and redrafted it. It is currently entered into a contest over at Freeditorial Publishing. Give it a click and page through it (it’s an online kindle-like software).

Read the story here: https://freeditorial.com/en/books/burning-the-god-of-thunder/readonline

State of Writing

Okay. Slight format change. I thought I’d shift my blogging schedule so that this weekly update (which is mainly for my own targets/deadlines/goals/ and accountability) comes on Monday when nobody is awake anyhow. I didn’t want to leave my last regular post of the week as something that very few people will care about. I’ll swap recommendations/reviews to Thursdays, now.

This week I did connect with my editor who is working through my sci-fi and discovering my rampant abuse of the semi-colon. I finished my chapter (and wrote most of a second one) for my new horror. I did not complete any devotional story entries, though. But for this coming week I will write two and complete my chapter.

Oh yeah. I gained over a thousand followers on Wattpad and had over 1.6k reads in the last 10 days or so on Dekker’s Dozen (and oddly, half of my hits come from Japan–but the nifty data parsing tools at Watt shows that the story is actually being read, not just spidered by Japanese hackers or spam bots… time to brush up on my cross cultural stuff) while a third come from USA.

 

Myths Indie Writers Hear

SO I read a great article called “Real Writers Don’t Self Publish” which was a response to a piece in The Guardian about that very topic. While there are some truths to the myths the author points out (such as an increased time spent marketing instead of writing) some of those myths are complete fabrications. For example, Myth#8 is Traditional Publishing Creates a Far Superior Product.

Myth#8 is just flat-out untrue. Not only, as the article points out, some books have horrendous covers, I would argue the content is a factor. Look at the music industry: we have had Nickleback and Nicki Minaj forced into our ears for so long that many people don’t even know what good music is and complain if you put in something with real substance. Compare a guy like Israel Kamakawiwo’Ole with Beyonce–or heck, anybody ARTIST who had success like Bob Seger or Johnny Cash, with Beyonce who plays no instruments and uses autotune which casts even her ability to sing in shades of doubt. Here’s the rub: the big industry is concerned with following a formula and selling the specific brand of “stuff” that they have artificially created a market for (you know, like “Chinese” buffets and MSG.) This model actually stifles creativity and shrinks the breadth of work that we have available and limits the kind of stories that we see produced.

While there is always some nugget of truth in a mythos, here is the relevant truth here: traditional pieces typically have better editing and more concise/refined language because the content has been more thoroughly reviewed. It’s not that “traditional house” stories are better, it’s that they’ve had more professionals refine a work because they have a system in place to move a product–even if it’s otherwise mediocre. I’m not saying traditional houses have less talent or less imagination–I’m saying that sometimes it’s the case (just as with the indie world) but when it happens, traditional publishers can get away with it and still move units, make money, and look golden.

Free Fiction Tuesday

I’m finally catching some traction over at Wattpad. Dekker’s Dozen went featured and shot up by 600 reads over the weekend. I went from about 30 followers to 400! This is all very good news for the impending launch of Dekker’s Dozen: The Last Watchmen… growing an audience is always a good thing.

In order to get featured I had to get the story completed and fully available online. That means you can now read the story (it’s the second-to-last draft… final form coming to print soon) in its entirety if you so choose.

Click through here:

https://www.wattpad.com/story/62450449-dekker%27s-dozen-the-last-watchmen

and don’t forget to follow and click the star to vote it up!

Monday Recommendation: Iron Mike

I stumbled onto Iron Mike through a facebook advert. I’m glad I did… I had two thoughts right away. 1. This book looks really good. 2. I don’t see any publisher info listed—if this is an independent book, it’s some of the best promo I’ve ever seen. In fact, I was curious enough to ferret out the information and discovered that it was, in fact, an indie. I also discovered that the quality and attention to detail went far beyond just the surface promo work.

Iron Mike is definitely in the top three indie books I’ve read. Right off the bat the characters are gripping. They are each so varied and unique that one wonders exactly what will bring them all together… but a good apocalypse always has a way of doing just that.

I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but the book will definitely connect with you, tug on a few heart strings, and then keep moving forward with a gripping and relentless story that’s something like The Walking Dead meets Independence Day sprinkled with the direct inverse of Avatar. It’s a good book (but fair warning, there’s a few graphic moments, in case you are listening on audible and have kids around) and definitely worth a buy.

How Hackers Skim the Till at Amazon and Steal From Authors

I’m not a big fan of Bernie Sanders. I think he’s a cool guy and means well… but socialism? ugh. It’ll never happen. I’m not against helping the less fortunate or the needy (cripes, I give away over 10% of my income every year ad have statements to prove it–benevolence giving brings my income below the poverty line if it wasn’t there already, so don’t attack my politics; that’s not what this is about.) This isn’t even a political issue for me, it’s a human nature issue. Because we are unique individuals, we will never be satisfied with every person getting an equal share/percentage take of a communal pot. Mankind is fundamentally flawed and someone will always try to skew the system in their favor so that they get more.

So that was perhaps a risky segue into this great article I read recently about how there are people scamming authors (the majority of them self-published) out of the money due to them from the Kindle Unlimited program. Essentially, scammers have successfully pulled of the Superman 3 money hack, only they didn’t target banks who have fiduciary responsibility to deal with the problem: the target of the theft has been authors, and so nobody has really cared until enough people have learned of the scam because (like in the movie Officespace) it has risen to such large proportions that it can no longer go undiscovered.

It was crafty how these scammers figured out how to steal a portion of the community pool which is distributed each month to participating KU authors. This article (below) is worth the read, and I echo Ann Christy’s sentiments: this is “probably only of interest to indie authors, but it does impact readers who shop Amazon… though readers sure are noticing the impacts of the scams.”

Her article is here:

http://www.annchristy.com/ku-scammers-on-amazon-what-you-need-to-know/

Here’s the long and short of it until the problems are resolved: if you use KU to read unlimited books, make sure you jump to the last page before you are completed with the book. It supports the author and helps him or her reclaim lost “reads/money” from “KU click farmers” and helps them continue their efforts.

Author Interview: Michael J Sullivan

I had a chance to interview Michael Sullivan recently. He’s a super cool guy who also happens to be a well-known fantasy author. Of all places, I met him at a Wattpad online forum, proving that you’re never too big of an author to hang out social writing sites that are want to churning out sparkly vampire fan fiction and written in aggressively passive verb tenses. Picking his brain about writing and promotion was great and he’s got some amazing things to share with writers of all stripes.

What are your books about?

Because I write the kind of books I want to read, there are some common elements across all fifteen of my novels. Each are about people I would like to have as friends, doing deeds and going on adventures I find exciting, and taking place in worlds I’d enjoy visiting.  So in general my books are light-hearted, witty, and fun rather than grim and dark. I wouldn’t want to escape to a post-apocalyptic hell scape nor would I want to be surrounded by rainbows and butterflies. There has to be challenges and setbacks but any setting that would require Prozac before reading isn’t for me. My characters have less than ideal pasts, and a lot of excess baggage, but they are generally on a path of redemption—striving to be better men and women. They are also the types that rise to the occasion when needed rather than sinking to the depths of depravity. A common aspect about my books is that you feel good when reading them and are sad when finished because you miss the time you spent with your new-found friends.

How would you describe your writing?

My books are like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid set in a fantasy world like Game of Thrones. I like writing about duos where the bonds of friendship are forged through years of watching each other’s back.

What project(s) are you working on now, what specials/sales/etc. are upcoming on your works, and where can readers go for more?

 The first book in a new series will be coming out on June 28th. I’m still doing final review of printer’s proofs and listening to the final recording of the audio book for that title. It’s called Age of Myth and it’s being released by Del Rey (fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House). All five books of this series (Legends of the First Empire) have been written, and I’m currently working on a last-pass edit to the final book. I hope to have that done by the end of April or mid-May, and then I’ll be able to start a new project while those four books go through the various post-writing phases (cover design, beta testing, publisher structural editing, etc.).  What that new project will be, I just don’t know yet. I’m trying not to think about it until I’m done editing Age of Empire. I don’t want to distract myself.

As for sales & specials, I’m going to be joining eight other authors in a joint promotion from April 15th – 20th. I’ll be significantly discounting the ebook version of The Death of Dulgath and selling it for $2.99 rather than $9.99. We haven’t officially announced that sale, but if you go to any of the major retail ebook sites on tax day you’ll see the discount.

Also, my publisher and I are going to be doing a big pre-order promotion for the book coming out in June. For it we’ll be giving away signed bookmarks and bookplates as well as a bunch of digital material including an extended preview of Age of Myth, access to high-resolution maps, screen savers featuring the amazing cover artwork (created by famed fantasy-artist Marc Simonetti), an extensive author Q&A, and character profiles to show people what inspiration I was drawing from. I’m not entirely sure when we will be announcing that promotion, I’m waiting for bookmark and bookplate designs from my publisher, but I think by the end of the month.

Can you tell us about your early writing career and what things you did/are doing that help you get your books in front of readers?

New or aspiring authors often lament about not having a following and how hard it is to establish one. The thing to remember is we’ve all started from that exact same place. When I began writing, Twitter and Facebook weren’t around, and I didn’t even have a blog or a website. The hard truth is a lot of the heavy lifting to get a book noticed is going to be done by the author. Even someone like myself (who has the marketing backing of big-five publishers) only get the spotlight shined for a few months. The publisher will always have a “next batch” of books to promote. So authors are going to have to pick up the slack when it comes to marketing, and it’s much easier than when I started out.

In the early days, you really are getting readers one at a time. For me, I utilized bloggers on goodreads—a logical choice since those sites are where readers congregate to find out about new books. Sometimes it’s a matter of reaching out to someone who likes a book similar to yours and offering them a free copy in the hopes they’ll post a review. Once they do, then others start hearing about the book, and if you keep “priming the pump” with new readers, the word will start to spread. Now, of course that requires that you’ve written a book that is so good that people WANT to tell others about it, and that is the hard part.

In many ways, you need a “body of work” so in the early days concentrate on writing mor books than promoting the first book. Once you have three books released, then you can start thinking about marketing, and before you market, make sure you have a good number of reviews…at least 12 on Amazon and 50 on goodreads. Once you have those, then you can think about spreading the word and there are whole books written on the subject, many by some great authors who have done well. I highly recommend Joanna Penn (both her blog and her books) as well as David Gaughran. For those consider going the self-publishing route I would definitely check out Guy Kawaski’s book: APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. How to Publish a book. It has a wealth of really great information in it.

If you had to start over right now with no established name and three rough draft novels on your hard drive–what are the first things you would do to pursue a life as a writer?

The “writing gig” is so much easier now than when I started out. Heck, e-books weren’t even a thing back in 2008. But one thing hasn’t changed, and that is you have to write a really good book…then do it again, and again, and again. As I mentioned before, until you have three books out, it doesn’t make much sense to do a lot of marketing. Think about it, if you “hook a reader” through constant promotion, they’ll read one book, like it, but then have nothing else to buy. But, if you have three books out, then they’ll move right in to your next one and you’ll get more money from a single customer.  So my suggestion is to concentrate on polishing the three rough drafts until you have the best possible books you can. If you start out with a quality product, then the marketing efforts are going to go so much better, so that is where I would suggest concentrating your efforts.