C. Litka's Blog, page 19

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 48)

 

Wow! This blog is at 99,997 views at the time of posting! You might be the 100,000th! So exciting! Thank you, dear readers, and thanks all you bots! With out you - and I'm talking to all you bots here - we would've never reached this landmark. (100,000 at 9AM CDST)

I don't have a TBR pile of books to read this year. Last year I had an informal one consisting of books that various blogs and YouTube presenters had praised. I've worked my way through that slim stack, so that now, when I finish one book, I have to scramble to find another one to read. Luckily, I have 16 Cadfael novels to fall back on. And fall back on them we did this week.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

The Devil's Novice by Ellis Peters  A

This is the 8th novel in the series.

Note to myself: write your reviews shortly after you read the books. Don't put it off. Which is what I've done for this review.

Right. It's slowly coming back to me. (Without even having to get up, walk over to the book shelf behind me, pull out and bring the book to my desk, and renew my acquaintance with it.) I have in now. This story starts with a young man who is handed off by his father to the Abbey to become a monk - the devil's novice of the title. This young man is very eager to become a monk as quickly as possible. Too eager, thinks Cadfael. Why? The novice is, however troubled by the sight of blood, and by nightmares which disturbs the other novices and students. He also manages to get himself into trouble as well, so that it is felt by some in the abbey that he is somehow possessed by the devil at times.

The second plotline consists of a church courier sent by King Stephen with a message to some nobles in the north of England, who has gone missing. This plot is tied into the novice and his family, when the courier's horse is found, suggesting that courier has been murdered only a day after staying at the novice's family manor. Is the novice somehow involved in the murder of this courier? And if so, how?

Like all of Peters' Cadfael stories, the story is more of character study, and historic fiction, than a murder mystery, but murder mysteries they are and it is. And murders have to be solved, as they are, with the keen eye and long experience in the outside world that Cadfael brings to the cloistered life of the abbey. Once again, I enjoyed this book without reservations.

SPFBO X

 

I am happy to say that Sailing to Redoubt made it into the tenth Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off,  known as SPFBO X This is a contest that has been run by fantasy author Mark Lawrence for the last ten years to highlight the quality of self-published fantasy books. There are ten judges, or teams of judges, each of who each read, or at least sample 30 books, for a total of 300 books, selecting 5 or 6 as semi-finalists and then settling on a single finalist for the final judging round of 10 books that all the judges read and rate. The book with the highest score on a 1 to 10 scale wins. A number of winning and finalist books and authors have gone on to fame and fortune. The first contest attracted 276 entries, last year's contest filled its 300 slots in 44 minutes after the entry form went live. As a result of its popularity, this year the entry form was live for 24 hours, with 300 books selected at random from all the entries.

I had  expected that there would be a thousand or more entries, but as it turned out there were only* 595. So the odds were 50-50 and I got lucky.

The asterisk for "only" is to highlight the fact that all of those 595 entries were author/publishers of fantasy novels with novels that had not been entered before. While there may be some better known authors amongst the pack - one entry has 4,700 Goodreads ratings, and five others have more than 1,300, most of them are writers who have yet to find a mass indie market for their work. And when you consider how many authors did not enter for one reason or another, you can see the scale of competition for readers in the author/publisher book space.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I don't expect to see any sales jump as a result of being in the contest, based on entering books in three other similar contests - two of which were the science fiction knock-off, and last year's SPFBO 9. I do it simply for, the excitement/disappointment, and for the chance to hear or read what a reader has to say, one who did not select one of my books to read because it appealed to them. In other words, an unbiased view of my work. 

This year my book is in the pool of a new judge for the contest Captured in Words, which is a YouTube channel focusing on fantasy books. He has 106K subscribers, making it a pretty big BookTube channel. His videos tend to get 5 to 50 thousand views, so any mention of my book will likely reach more potential readers - for better or worse- than the blogs that judged my previous entries. It will be interesting to see how he handles this task. Judges need only read 10% -20% of the book before deciding pass on it. Still, he has 30 books to sample in the next three months or so. Another BookTuber, Philip Chase, did this last year, and this year decided to add a team of other people to help him. They divide the slush pile and he reads only the books they chose to make his final decision. Despite the potential for a wider audience, the downside with video judges is that unless they really like your book, the book might be little more than a mention, and no book gets written reviews. We'll see how it goes this year, but I'm going in with no expectations. That keeps the bar pretty low.

And in the wider sense, I believe that art awards and contests are meaningless. Art - be it painting, writing, music, dance, etc. is a one-on-one experience. What it means to you is all that counts. Counting votes, tabulating scores don't mean a thing. If you want an objective scale, look at sales figures, if the art is commercial. And anyone entering this contest, or viewing the results, needs to know that the most critical factor in it is luck. It doesn't matter how good your book is if it doesn't find an appreciative reader. Take, for example, the person who judged Beneath the Lanterns last year. She wrote a nice review for my book and gave it 5 stars, but here is her opening line for another book she had to judge in my group:

Sometimes, and it doesn’t happen often, you start reading a book and it just works. Everything is exactly the way you like. The story flows, the writing is smooth, the pacing is perfectly unhealthy for your heart rate but this is what we want! Every word, every bit of dialogue, every scene has captured you and before you know it, the book is finished.

This is what art is all about. The only valid basis she or anyone else can judge art as art on is how it affects them. You can knock points off for grammar, or typos, or what have you, but when something speaks to you, none of that matters. So you have to go into contests knowing that luck needs to be on your side to have any chance at all, and that luck is beyond your control. And that whatever the results are, they represent no more than one or several people's opinion of you work. And that you've given them permission make public their opinions, good or bad, and have to accept the consequences. 

It's a gamble. But as Bobby Dylan sings in Like a Rolling Stone, "If you ain't got nothing, you've got nothing to lose."

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 47)

 

This week, yet another early P G Wodehouse Story - without a TBR list, I have to read what I have on hand. And right now, its old Wodehouse books on my ebook reader, and the Brother Cadfael mysteries on my book shelf.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Damsel in Distress by P G Wodehouse  B

A fairly typical Wodehouse story this time around. It has the show business angle that many of his early novels had, this time the main character is the composer of music for musical comedies - a show playing in London. The female romantic lead in the story is the daughter of an aristocrat dominated by his widowed sister-in-law. The widow does not approve of the romantic lead's boyfriend and has confined her to the country home. One day, with the sister-in-law away for a day, she escapes to London to look up her lover who's been abroad for a year. She fails at that, but is spied by her pompous brother and to avoid detection, hops into the taxi of the composer. He, of course, falls in love with her, defeats her inquisitive brother by knocking off  his top hat and saves her from detection. He ends up taking a house near her father's estate in order to meet her again. Assorted misunderstandings and entanglements typical of a Wodehouse novel ensue. 
I should've written this review shortly after I read it, not now - a month later, but oh well. The fact that I wasn't motivated to write it up until I had to, speaks a lot to what I thought of this story. It was fine, typical Wodehouse with a cast of his usual characters - butlers, snobs, hard-boiled kids, domineering women, a carefree Bertie Wooster type character, along with a bit of London and the English countryside tossed in. In short, it was a nice way to pass a few hours, but I think it's safe to say that you can die without regrets, if you don't get around to reading it.

Nine Years as an Author/Publisher Part 2 - The Numbers

The mission of Celanda House is to publish the fiction of C. Litka as widely as possible - without having to work at doing so. Celanda House has no mandate to make money - only not to lose money. To accomplish its stated mission within the assigned parameters, Celanda House prices ebooks and audiobooks at its cost, whenever possible. In most instances this price free. So, after nine years in business, how successful has Celanda House been in getting the novels of C. Litka out to the eager public?

Below are the sales numbers for each book for last year, this year, and nine years. Audiobook sales in parentheses, total sales in bold. Numbers are somewhat approximate. You don't want me doing your accounting.

Sales for the year from May 2023 to April 2024

Book Title / Release Date

Year 8 Sales

May 2022-April 2023

Year 9 Sales

(xx) audio

Bold Total

Total Sales To date ebook & audiobooks total sales

A Summer in Amber

23 April 2015

452 (488)
940

524 (400)

924

  Total 10,103

Some Day Days

9 July 2015

468      (598)
1,066

578 (320)

898

 Total 6,575

The Bright Black Sea

17 Sept 2015

1,360   (895)
2,255

703 (478)

1,181

 Total 18,231

Castaways of the Lost Star

4 Aug 2016

Withdrawn

Withdrawn

 Total 2,176

The Lost Star’s Sea

13 July 2017

783      (780)

1,563

705 (458)

1,163

 Total 10,642

Beneath the Lanterns

13 Sept 2018

431      (672)
1,103

500 (273)

773

Total 5,422

Sailing to Redoubt

15 March 2019

625     (543)
1,168

303 (325)

628

 Total 4,986

Prisoner of Cimlye

2 April 2020

581      (678)

1,259

512 (359)

871

 Total 3,735

Lines in the Lawn

8 June 2020

32

29

Total 174

Keiree

18 Sept 2020

637      (583)

1,220

538 (371)

909

Total 3,323

The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon

11 Nov 2020

782      (634)

1,416

548 (363)

911

Total 4,483

The Secrets of Valsummer House

18 March 2021

894      (692)

1,586

533 (392)

925

 Total 3,634

Shadows of an Iron Kingdom

15 July 2021

894      (692)

1,586

583 (465)

1,048

 

Total 4,329

A Night on Isvalar

15 July 2021/27 April 2024 wide

23 

43 (4)

47

Total 93

The Aerie of a Pirate Prince

29 Sept 2022

737      (291)

1,028

613 (427)

 1,040

Total 2,068

The Girl on the Kerb

6 April 2023

_________________

Passage to Jarpara

21 March 2024

-------------------------Omnibus editions

________________

2,745     (45)

2,790

___________

n/a

n/a

____________

2022-2023  Total Sales

19,524

of which  8,198 were audio

2,561 (353)

2,914

104 (73)

177

30

(withdrawn)

__________

2023-2024 Total Sales 

14,468

of which
5,061 were audio

Total 5,704

Total 177

Total 30

_______________

Grand  Total 

85,855

Grand total as of  this date in;

2023: 71,396

2022: 60,879

2021: 47,550

Revenue:  2023-2024 Amazon: $174.74   Expenses: $74.74 (estimate.) net approx. $100

A Table of Yearly Sales Results

6,537 Year One, 2015/16 (3 novels released)

6,137 Year Two, 2016/17 (1 novel released)

6,385 Year Three, 2017/18 (1 novel released)

8,225* Year Four, 2018/19: (2 novels released) * includes a strange 1950 books sold in one day on Amazon that they say is correct. It would be 6,275 without that strange day's sales.

8,530 Year Five, 2019/20 (1 novel released)

7,484 Year Six, 2020/21 (2 novels released, 1 novella, 1 children's short story)

8,853 Year Seven 2021/22 (1 novel, 1 novella)

19,524 Year Eight 2022/23 (1 short novel, 1 novel)

14,468 Year Nine 2023/24 (1 sequel novel, 1 novella release wide in late April)

The Complete Yearly Reports on this Blog

Year 1: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2016/05/a-window-to-self-publishing.html

Year 2: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2017/05/two-years-of-free-books.html

Year 3: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2018/05/3-years-in-self-publishing.html

Year 4: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2019/05/four-years-in-self-publishing.html

Year 5: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2020/05/five-years-in-self-publishing.html

Year 6:https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2021/05/six-years-in-self-publishing.html

Year 7: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2022/05/7-years-in-self-publishing-report.html

Year 8: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2023/05/eight-years-as-authorpublisher-report.html

Sales percentages by Venue

Comparing the sales split between Amazon, Google, and Smashwords (including Apple and B & N and of 2024, Draft2Digital ) Most books are not distributed by D2D except for my original Smashwords releases. I combine Smashword with D2D

                      Year 5      Year 6      Year 7         Year 8        Year 9 

Amazon            40%        35%        21.5%        24%            23%

Draft2 Digital    40%        39%        18%            9%             11% 

Google             20%         26%       60.5%         67%            66%

Year Nine Results

As you can see from the table above, my the previous year in publishing was a record breaking year with sales of 19,524 books, blowing past my seventh year total of 8,853 copies. That jump in sales was fueled by the introduction of audiobook sales, and the breakout success of The Girl on the Kerb, with 2,790 copies sold in the last than six weeks of that fiscal year. This year continued those sales trends, but without a breakout release and at a more moderate pace across the board. In the previous post, I mentioned that I hadn't expected my year nine sales to be as good year eight, and this proved to be the case. Just about every book sold less copies this year than last year, as both ebooks and audiobooks and as a result, my sales were down significantly - by about 25%, with audiobooks declining more like 40%. This year audiobooks comprised 35% of my sales vs 42% last year. Declines for sure, but coming off a record year, these declines still allowed for a very good year, with sales averaging more than a thousand books a month.

Looking ahead, I don't see much changing drastically. Sales of my existing titles will likely continue to decline slightly as they usually do. Amazon now offered only two of my books for free which will contribute slightly to that decline as well. It is impossible to say how much, if any, the nearly 6,000 sales of The Girl on the Kerb led to new readers. This year's release, Passage to Japara, as the third book in a modestly successful series will not move the sales needle very much. We'll have to wait to see how a theoretical 2025 novel does. I do not expect any significant sales from audiobooks on Amazon/Audible.

On a more positive note, I'm hoping that my sales on Draft2Digital will ramp up with the addition of audiobooks on Apple. However, with the release of only 7 of the 12 books I uploaded to Apple Audio, and those released at random, it is hard to estimate what sort of sales range they're going to settle into. However, since sales are still increasing, I have hopes. I was selling a lot more ebooks on Google when I released the audiobooks on Google, so I don't expect Apple audiobooks to do as well as my Google Audiobooks, but it would be nice if they could do as well in proportion to their Apple ebook sales.

I don't see any other audiobook markets for auto-narrated books that would move the needle, and probably wouldn't bother if any other audiobook market would take them.

I hope to write and publish another novel - a mundane fantasy - within the next 12 months. Another novella, likely a sequel, might also be possible. But nothing promised.

I'll enter Sailing to Redoubt in the next SPFBO X contest, but the odds are against it even being selected - selection is by lottery this year -with the odds likely 3 to 1. And even if it makes it, experience has taught me not to expect any bump in sales. I just do it to hear what reviewers have to say about my books, a book they likely would've never found otherwise.

As for plans for my tenth year as an author/publisher, well, they boil down to staying the course.

In the end, I feel that the ebook market has matured to a point where it is fairly easy to say what will sell, what it takes to sell it, and where to sell. If you do that, all you then need is folding money to spend and luck. I'm not writing what sells, I'm not doing what is needed to sell my books for more than free, I'm not spending money to try to sell them, plus, I'm not offering my books where they generate the most money - Kindle Unlimited. What I am doing is serving a relatively small market -  a market made up of readers, like myself, who read library books, free ebooks, and sometimes will even buy second hand books, if they're cheap enough. With 15 books in my catalog now, I'm hoping  that every new reader who happens upon one of my books will eventually read all of them - one sale leading to 14 more.

My prediction for my tenth year as an author/publisher? Well, I'm going to be optimistic this year, and say that I'm hoping that it will be pretty much like this year.  

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 46)

 

I had tracked down the ebook version of last week's Jill the Reckless on Gutenberg, and since I was on the P. G. Wodehouse page, I got out the Sunset at Blandings which listed all his books, and on which I had noted the ones I had or read, and compared the two lists, downloading the Gutenberg books that I hadn't read. The book below was one of those.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

The Girl on the Boat (AKA Three Men and a Maid) by P G Wodehouse  A-

This book appeared a year after Jill the Reckless, and it has some of the funniest lines Wodehouse ever wrote. It is a story where Wodehouse is front and center as the teller of the tale, breezily interjecting comments, opinions about the characters and his issues with telling this story as he goes along. Now I generally prefer that the writer remains behind the curtain, but if they decide to peek out, I prefer that they would just step out and make a performance of it. And that is what Wodehouse did here. He's telling you the story, make no mistake about that. And as I said above, he was at his peak for breezy, toss-away lines.

And yet, it took me several days to finish this story. As entertaining as his story was, I found it easy to put down after a chapter or two. I think I can place the blame for this on two factors. The first is that there are no engaging characters. Most, but not all, are not in any way unpleasant, they're just, perhaps a shade too much more caricatures than characters. There's little depth to any of them. Not that you expect great depths in any Wodehouse characters, but they all have their endearing features. But those enduring features seemed to be lacking in the characters in this book. And the second factor is that the story is pretty silly. No sillier than most Wodehouse stories, mind you, but it lacks a bit of the tightness in storytelling characteristic of his later works. And while the same could be said for the previous story, Jill the Reckless, there were much more real characters in that story.

Still, as I said, there were so many funny asides and toss away lines in this story, that I still have to give it an A- just for all the laughs. The story itself is only a B grade story.

Nine Years as an Author/Publisher Part 1

 

In last year's Eight Year in Publishing post I predicted - "I don’t expect my ninth year to come close to equaling it. Sales will certainly fade. They always do. In any event, I expect audiobooks will make up close to half of my sales, whatever it is." So How did Year Nine turn out?

Well, it was a good year. Not as good as Year Eight, as I predicted, but I can't complain. However, since this is going up on 1 May and I don't have the final sales figures yet, I will post all the numbers next week. This week I'll just talk about my publishing experience in the my last fiscal year - May 2023-April 2024.

I released one novel this year, Passage to Jarpara, on the 21st of March, the third and final sequel to Sailing to Redoubt and The Prisoner of Cimlye.  I am happy that it seems to have been well received, as it was a story that need not have been written, since The Prisoner of Cimlye was a natural conclusion to Sailing to Redoubt. It was, however, a story I wanted to write, and a story that I had more or less in mind, when I didn't have another story in mind, which is to say, it was a bird in the hand at the time. Thankfully, readers of that series seem to like it, but then again, I am preaching to the choir with the book - appealing only to readers who have read and enjoyed the proceeding stories. It will sell mostly to that pool of readers, which pretty much precludes a breakout hit like the stand alone success of The Girl on the Kerb. The very nature of sequels limit them, but I knew that going in. It was just a book that I had started back in 2022, and wanted it finished. 
I entered Beneath the Lanterns into the Self Published Blog Off 9 last May. I earned a nice review, but that was about all. I do enjoy discovering what people think of my books, especially ones who likely wouldn't have found and/or picked it up. Last year the contest was first come, first serve, but this year it will be a lottery, so that while I am considering entering Sailing to Redoubt, I likely would only have a one in three chance of getting it in. And I doubt it is the type of story that will greatly appeal to many hard-core readers of fantasy. We'll see what I feel like in two weeks.

I also conducted some experiments this year as a publisher without any outstanding successes.

The first experiment I tried was making boxed sets of my books, or omnibus versions as I called them, since I didn't want to fool around making an image of a boxed set. Eventually, I offered omnibus versions of most of my books. The idea was to make them affordable to non-US customers who did not have access to the free versions on Amazon.com. They did not really reach these customers in any great numbers, sales were under 25 for the year combined. And then, in January, Amazon stopped price-matching the free price in other stores for all but two of my books so the rest reverted to retail price. Now these omnibuses would've made them great deals in the US as well, but even so sales did not pick up. That being the case, I decided that there was no point in offering my books at a bargain price without it leading to an increase in sales volume to make it worthwhile to do so, I have withdrawn them as of today, 1 May 2024. 

I made one other minor change to my catalog. On the 27 April, I withdrew the one book I had in the Kindle Unlimited program the stand alone novella, A Night on Isvalar. I had that story in that program as a "signpost" to my other free books not in that program. However, with less than 50 copies sold in three years, I decided it too wasn't doing the job I had hoped it might, so I've now  pulled it from Kindle Unlimited and released wide and free like all my other books with a new cover. With any luck, it will act like a new release, and give me a second bump in sales this coming year, coming quickly on the heels of Passage to Jarpara.

A second experiment I tried this year, was getting my books converted to audiobooks for the Apple Book Store. At least trying to. This is done through Draft2Digital, and since I had to move my books from Smashwords to 2D2 to do this for Apple, I went ahead and moved all of them to D2D distribution as well. I didn't see this as a big deal, since D2D acquired Smashwords several years ago. However, this switch cost me all my reviews and ratings on Apple and Kobo, even though D2D was listed as the publisher on Apple. That sucked. It will, however, give me a chance to quantify how much reviews and ratings matter, since I made the move on 1 January, and I will be able to compare sales before and after, Apple to apple so to speak -reviews vs no reviews this coming January, using yearly sales totals for Apple on Smashwords. Early results suggest that the lack of reviews may not be significant, since ebook sales in the March and April averaged about 73 books vs a 2023 Apple sales total of 775. Of course, this is a small sample, but that figure doesn't include audiobooks, and early audiobook sales suggest that they will more than make up any sales drop.

However, what sucks even more, has been my the experience in converting my ebooks on D2D into auto-narrated audiobooks for Apple. While the process is simple - too simple, in fact - it has been a very poor experience. First of all, Apple offers no ability to choose narrators, to hear how the narration sounds and adjust how words are pronounced, unlike every other such program. And, while both Amazon and Google will produce an audiobook ready for sale in hours, it has been five months since I submitted my twelve books and five of them have still not been converted to audiobooks, with no explanation why this is so. The other seven were converted randomly over the course of four months. There is ready no explanation for this. If there were problems with the books, I should've been notified so that they could be fixed. It certainly can't be any technological hurdle that has Apple stumped, since other tech companies can do in hours and with more options. It seems to me that Apple is just being Apple - a company known for less than ideal treatment of its developers and suppliers. Moreover, unlike Google where audiobooks immediately exploded, my sales of audiobooks on Apple have been modest so far, though perhaps it is fairer to say, they've been in line with my level of ebook sales on Apple. Figures next week.

My third experiment was another audiobook opportunity, this time taking Amazon up on their offer to create virtual voice audiobooks for free, just as Google and Apple have done. In this case the process was just as simple as that with D2D, but you're given more options. You have a choice of 3 male and 4 female voices, with the promise of more and better voices coming down the pike this summer, including different narrators for different chapters - and the ability to change narrators when we care to. We can listen to our audiobooks before publishing them unlike Apple, and alter the pronunciation of words, as well as the speed how the word is spoken, and how the narrator treats dashes, unlike Apple. While this fall short of what can be done for audiobooks on Google, it is far better than what D2D/ Apple offers. One big plus for this program is that the audiobooks will appear in the Audible catalog, the largest audiobooks store.

There are, however, several limits to this program. It's an invite only beta program. Audiobooks in this program are limited to 27 hours run time - about 240K words, which means that my two most popular books, The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star's Sea are too long to be converted into audiobooks. The second requirement is that the ebooks have a table of content. That was a problem for me until I downloaded their Kindle Create app, and uploaded my books using that app. It automatically creates a table of contents. Having done that, all my books but those two long ones are now available as audiobooks on Amazon and Audible. The other downside, for me, is that the minimum price is $3.99, which I think is cheap for audiobooks, but will limit the number of audiobooks I sell. Numbers to come next week as well.

Clearly, I'm bullish on audiobooks, as I think they will continue to grow, and producing them now, even with AI generated voices, is future proofing them. I'm also bullish on the technology behind AI generated narration - it will continue to improve over the next few years to a point where it will be indistinguishable from all but the most dramatic, and highly paid, human narrators and the narration of my books will keep pace with those improvements.

My big takeaway from this year is that in publishing, like in real estate, there are three most important elements for success. In real estate they are location, location, and location, while in publishing they are visibility, visibility, and visibility. Sales of The Girl on the Kerb exploded when Amazon began to promote it. And it has remained visible in the top 50 titles on Amazon's list of Free Espionage Thrillers since its release, and in the top 100 on its other list. And in a wider sense, my sales are driven by readers searching for "Free science fiction" or some such search term, with "Free" being the key. Out of the millions of books available, my books can be found by random readers searching for free books to read within the first 10 -20 search result pages. Enough to keep sales ticking along at more than a thousand copies a month. 

My other takeaway is that far more people than I realized read books on their phones, so that offering books to be read on phones, conveniently from stores on their phones, is the way to go for both ebooks and audiobooks. That seems to me to be the main reason for my success on the Google Play Store, and my hopes for Apple audiobooks.

I think that petty much covers looking back on my ninth year in the business. Next week I'll have all the numbers, and perhaps talk about what I'm expecting for my tenth year. Stay tuned!

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 45)

 

When Berthold Gambrel reviewed a short story by P G Wodehouse - Honeysuckle Cottage on his website, A Ruined Chapel by Moonlight I commented that I didn't think it was one of Wodehouse's best efforts. I wanted something with more of his trademark, witty, slang-filled dialog. He suggested that I try the book below. I did, and he was right, it had everything I love about P G Wodehouse's stories. It was a blast.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Jill the Reckless (AKA The Little Warrior) by P. G. Wodehouse  A-

This is a fairly early novel by Wodehouse, dating from 1921, but hardly the first. He'd been writing for nearly 20 years by this point. But it is early in the sense that it was not written to a formula that became his standard a decade latter. Many of the elements of that formula are floating around in this novel, but they haven't yet been hammered into place. I won't say that this story is a serious story, but it perhaps more realistic than his later Bertie and Jeeves, or Blandings Castle stories. And he throws in a lot more description of scenery and settings than he does in later books. 
And one of the most interesting feature of this book, is that he uses his knowledge of New York and the Broadway musicals of the time to great effect in this story. Between 1915 and 1919 Wodehouse collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton to write Broadway musicals. Wodehouse wrote the lyrics to the songs. He used this firsthand knowledge of the inner workings of the New York theater, and musicals in particular to great effect in this story, having the title character, Jill become a dancer in a Broadway musical. We get to see the life of dancers and singers, managers and directors of the musicals of that the period, from the show's first practice to its first performance. In addition to Jill, we have her pompous fiancée, his domineering mother, along with a Bertie Wooster type fellow, plus a down-to-earth noble male rival to her unpleasant fiancée, and Jill's con-man uncle, as well as an assortment of theater people, from lowly dancers to directors and mighty producers. 
All in all, a very entertaining story. My only criticism is that it relies a lot on coincidences to advance the plot. But, given the type of story it is, that's easy to over look. All in all, this book offers an entertaining window to the New York of a hundred years ago, and the theater in particular. 
The book is in the public domain and the ebook version is a free download from the Gutenberg project website here.

Last Chance For the Omnibus Editions

 

I will be withdrawing my three $.99 omnibus ebook editions of my stories currently on Amazon 30 April 2024. Over the past year I've sold less than 25 of them, and while I had no set expectations to be met, they haven't done what I set out to do, which is to significantly expand my non-US sales by offering my ebooks at as near to the free price as I was selling them at on Amazon.com. More over, in January, of this year, after some 8 plus years, Amazon stopped price-matching the free price of most of my ebooks. So be it. They gave me a chance to find an audience, and now it's time to leave the nest and fly... 

It has been my experience that any reasonable price more than free is not a large factor in determining sales. No matter what price you put on a ebook, it is a hundred times harder to sell than a free ebook. There seems no point selling ebooks at $.99 when you can sell almost as many of them at, say $3.99. Your increased royalties and royalty rate will more than make up the volume difference in sales.

In my case, I've an out of date idea of what things should cost. I used to buy real paperback books for $.40- $.50 back in the day, so that even $.99 seems high to me for a digital file. But the reality is that the paperback books I used to by at those old prices now sell for something like $8 today so that even my most expensive ebook, at $4.99 is a bargain. Less than a cup of coffee, as many author/publishers point out. So be it.

The lesson learned here is that visibility is the primary factor in sales. If potential customers never sees a book, they can't buy it. $.99 doesn't make books more visible. 

You can still download ebook versions of all of my books for free from Smashwords and at least read them for free from a host of other retailers. You can also listen to them for free on the Google Play Store, and (maybe some day) from Apple. 

It was a useful, but not very successful experiment. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. 

So, if you want those ebooks on your kindle, now is the time to buy! May first 2024 will be too late! Act Now!

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 44)

I'm taking a brief break from books this week to review an Amazon Prime TV series. Amazon recently gave me, no doubt out of the kindness of their heart, a free month of Amazon Prime, and with it Prime Video which gave me a chance to view this series.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Fall Out  Amazon Prime 8 part season one C+

First disclaimer - I am not a gamer and I haven't played any of the various Fallout video games, and thus I may not be its prime target viewer.

Second disclaimer - I am not a big fan of gore and violence.

This series is based on a video game franchise with something like half a dozen releases. It is set in a post nuclear war United States, and like many shooter style games, I gather that it has the usual quota of violence, blood, and gore.

The TV show is faithful to the game that inspired it - in that it has a lot of violence, blood, and gore. There are also many references - Easter eggs - to items and visuals in the game, and how the game is played, many of which I no doubt missed.

So why in the hell did I watch it?

The first reason is that I could, with my free month of Amazon Prime and Prime Video. Now, I could've finished watching Good Omens 2. I had watched a number of episodes of that show before Christmas when we paid for a month of Prime. I had stopped because I found that season pretty lame and boring. I didn't feel like continuing on with it.

The second reason is that Fallout looked visually interesting, at least in the show's trailers. The scenery, the look and feel of the world, looked intriguing enough for me to give it a look.

So, not being the intended audience either for the game or the type of story, and interested in it mostly for the scenery, what did I think of it?

It was not bad. Not great, but not bad either. It told a story rather than just patching often violent scenes together. A rather contrived, and incomplete story, but a story nevertheless.

I while generally I wasn't grossed out by the amount of blood, violence, and gore portrayed in the show though there is a lot of it - I assume it's there as a nod to the game play. The show takes a fairly lighthearted approach to the story - at least at times - making the gore and violence mostly of the comic book variety, i.e. nothing to take seriously, and thus, gratuitous. The only thing of consequence that was killed, was time that would've been better used to tell the story better and more cohesively. But hey, I'm not the target audience, so what do I know?

The story does try to get serious and meaningful, at times. Nevertheless, lot of this effort struck me as being rather ham-fisted - with a lot of close-ups of the faces of characters saying nothing, but clearly thinking something - I guess to save writers from having to actually come up with serious dialog, which was not their long suit.

The story starts rather simply with some sex and violence, and settles into a plot driven by two, count them, two McGuffins.

The basic premise is that some people purchased places in great underground fallout shelters, and now, several hundred years after a nuclear war, their descendants are still in them, waiting for the radiation to die down. There is however, all sorts of dystopian life on the surface, a dog-eat-dog/people-eat-people, society with plenty of mutant monsters and such. 

The first McGuffin has the daughter of one of the leaders of the fallout shelters leave the shelter for the surface to search for her father who was taken/kidnapped/tossed out by some gang of outsiders for mysterious reasons. We only learn why in the last couple of minutes of the last installment. Does the reason make a lot of sense? I'm not really sure, hence I consider it a McGuffin, but I suppose who cares? You're along for the ride, not the destination.

The second McGuffin has that some surface scientist injecting himself with a blue light something, (again we only find out what it is in the last episode - tying the two McGuffins together) and then goes on the run, with a number of people searching for him, including a knight & a squire from a surface military order and a ghoul bounty hunter. The girl from the fallout shelter, the knight's squire, and the ghoul repeatedly cross paths or get together throughout the story, stitching the story together.

There are also flashbacks to the time before the war which tie into characters motivations and builds a backstory for the present state of the world.

The show introduced a number of colorful characters along the way- usually they are the humorous parts - but often, annoying, mostly then kills them off. 

As I said above, it was its look that got me to look in on it. It is simply a good looking show. My only complaint on this score is how erratically the scenery seemed to change from story point to story point, so that the locales never seemed to be connected and time and distances between them vague. And often we seemed to be revisiting the same sets over and over again in supposedly different locales. Plus days go by and no one seems to eat. Minor points for sure, but little things like that catch my eye.

I was ready to DNF this after the first two episodes, but decided to push on, and I'm glad I did watch the whole season. Still, it only earned a C+ from me. Its reliance on violence and its rather lame attempts at seriousness lost it points on my report card. I think it would've been far better if it had just embraced the many quirky aspects of the story, characters, and setting. You know, give it the Jasper Fforde treatment. But that's just my opinion. Give it a try if it sounds interesting. It has been received pretty positively by viewers and critics and has been green lighted for a second season. 

A New Wide Release Coming April 27th 2024!

27 April 2024 is the release date for my novella, A Night on Isvalar, as a trade paperback book, a free ebook in all the usual ebook stores, and as a free audio book on the Google Play Store. While this is not a new story, this will be its first release in paper and the first time it will be available outside of Amazon.

I wrote the story as a serial story for the launch of Amazon's Vella platform in 2021, on the off chance that the service would be a massive hit. At the same time, I also decided to enroll a novella version in the Kindle Unlimited program. My thinking was to use it more or less as advertising on those platforms in the hope that if readers found and enjoyed this story on those venues, they would go on to read more of my wide-release books. While this may've occasionally happened, the numbers sold/pages read - under 50 copies in 3 years - suggest that it would do better a better job by being sold wide for free. I had originally planned to make that move this summer, but when I looked into getting it out of the Kindle Unlimited program, I found that it's automatically renew date for another 90 days was on 26 April, and that all I needed to do to unenroll it was unchecked the auto-renew box. I did so, and so soon the ebook  A Night in Isvalar will be free and wide, except Amazon. What makes this release extra special is that the 27th of April will mark the anniversary of the release of my first book, A Summer in Amber, which I published on the 27th of April 2015. So here we are, nine years and fifteen books later. Time flies.

As you can see, I'm taking a slightly different approach to its new cover this time around, going with black and white line art only. This reflects my dislike of its current cover and my desire not to have to paint a new one for it, as well as its long history, which included a comic book treatment of the story.

The setting, and small parts of this story, are lifted directly from the first science fiction story I wrote, The Hybrid Worlder, which I shopped around to magazines back in 1980, without success. Just for fun I returned to the story with a different plot for a comic book treatment some ten or fifteen years later. And then, three years ago, the Vella opportunity arose with only a couple of months lead time. I decided to use the story yet again by rewriting the (unwritten) comic book picture version with major changes in the details, that I reformatted the twenty installments for the novella. While I had penciled in the whole comic book story, I had only inked a few pages, enough, however to be able to adopted a number of the panels to use not only as the cover art, but also as interior illustrations in the paper book, just to make the slim book a little special. The ebook version won't have illustrations as they are too clunky in ebooks.

Long story short - you will shortly have an opportunity to read a newly freed  C. Litka novella. It's a stand alone story set in an entirely different "universe" than any of my other stories - the first one I wrote stories in - which features faster than light starships. It uses a "tea clippers in space" motif as the background to the narrative.(I was into tea and tea clippers at the time.) I doubt that I'll write any sequels, though the story, like all of my stories is open ended.
The A Night on Isvalar blurb;

It was supposed to be a quiet night. It was anything but.

Riel Dunbar grew up and,  for many years,  sailed out of the little moon of Isvalar, the interstellar port of Aeroday. But then the restless life of a starfarer carried him away for decades. Chance had now brought him home with a promised long leave ashore. But, it turned out, that was not to be. Instead he found that he had only a few free hours to spend on Isvalar.

His plan was simple. He’d dine at an old haunt of his youth, and then, after a brief nap, he’d visit the starfarer dives of Isvalar for a real spree before sailing. But Riel hadn’t counted on crossing orbits with Cera Marm, the powermate of a rival ship. Somehow he found himself entangled in her plans – plans that included not paying a gambling debt to a very persistent bookie and his collectors. Riel’s night on Isvalar turned into a hectic series of chases and escapes across the little moon, encountering neuro-blade wielding thugs, a snake obsessed shadow-rat gang, an auton enforcer, and the bookie himself. It didn’t end well.

A Night on Isvalar is a 26,200 word novella.