C. Litka's Blog, page 21

New Writing vs Old Writing

I have plenty of old books to choose from

Last week I picked up two books by an author that a blogger had highly recommended. From their titles they sounded right up my alley, and both were available as ebooks from the library. Cutting to the chase, I was disappointed in them. I got to thinking about what it was that didn't click with me.

The actual reviews will be posted in a month or so, so rather than spoil those, I'll keep the books nameless and talk in generalities, which is really what my complaints are all about.

Both books sounded like the small stories type of books that I like. Think of D E Stevenson and Molly Clavering, and both were set in England, which is why I picked them up, more or less  sight unseen. Now, at least part of my disappointment can be written off to not being the target audience for the stories. Still, the same could be said for either Stevenson or Clavering's books as well, and I like most of their books. Instead, I think it comes down to modern writing vs last century writing.

Broadly speaking, I think that one characteristic of modern is its wordiness. I think this is due to the ease of writing words on a computer which is so much easier and faster than pounding words out (and correcting typos) on a typewriter. That is very clear to me, having written a novel and a novella on a manual typewriter. Of course there were long novels written both by hand and with a typewriter before computers, but it's an order of magnitude easier and faster to do so with a computer. And for that matter its far easier and faster to typeset it at the publisher making long novels more acceptable. 

So to return to the two books in question. The first book clocked in at over 500 pages. This for a small story (little saga?) that covers the events of a single year. The second novel came in a 380 plus pages, which is pretty typical these days. Both books, however, seemed too long, too slow and used too many words for the story in hand - for my taste. We're just talking about my tastes here. Both were best selling books, so, as usual, what do I know?

Now I would've said that I like to be immersed in long novels, and maybe I did, once. But these days, I may no longer have the patience I once had, and that could be a factor in my dislike of modern work. Still, if it is written the way I like stories, their length would probably not have been an issue, though at 500 pages it would've had to have been a true saga, not a little story. What all these words allow the author to do is to delve into the trivia of a scene and every thought of the characters at a level not usually found in most of the earlier genre fiction. I find that modern writing that tells me things I don't care to know about. I like well rounded characters, so complaining about too much character seems rather ingenious, but I guess it comes down to the fact that I don't need or want to know every thought that runs through a character's mind. I don't need all elaborate details of the settings - since in my case - I can't picture them in my mind anyway. All these words tend to bog the story down, making it seem like the story-train is never going to arrive at the station.

It seems to me that the way authors wrote - especially English authors in the first half of the 20th century - often achieve the balance of characters that I could get to know and plots that I could follow without getting into the weeds and ditches. That and of did so with bright, clever writing. 

My taste in reading is what informs my own writing. I try to write interesting characters, but I don't delve deeply into the mind of even my first person narrator. I write it like he would tell the story, saying only what he would want to share. And since I can't really picture scenes, I try to invent a few key descriptive  elements to set a mood, and leave it at that. The same goes for all my characters. I don't really picture them in my mind, I merely sketch in a few features of each, and leave it to the reader to picture them as they will. The result is that I think I write stories that come off as old-fashioned. I hope so anyway.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 50)

As I said in my last post, the only books I have on hand that I've not read are the Cadfael mysteries and old P G Wodehouse books. I am writing at this time, so I don't have as much time to read, nor as much of a desire to do so, when I have my own story in my head. A P G Wodehouse story is the perfect type of reading for me at times like this - light, breezy, and funny. So without further ado.

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.

Divots by P G Wodehouse   B+

This is a short story collection featuring golf as the central theme. All of the stories are told by "The Oldest Member" of the golf club. The format is that one of the young members sits down next to him in his favorite chair and mentions some problem of his - usually involving romance - and that brings to the Oldest Member's mind a similar event, which proceeds to tell, despite the fruitless efforts of the young person to escape hearing the Oldest Member's long winded tale.
The running gag through all these stories is that golf is the most important thing in the characters' lives. All the most important lessons in life that one needs can be learned by playing golf, including humility and fortitude as well as providing a reason for living - getting to be a scratch player. The stories involve a variety of characters - we have millionaires who earned their graduated degree in doing widows and orphans out of their money at Sing Sing (A famous New York prison) who have problems with their wives and butlers, as well as young people - who don't seem to have to work and so can play a round or two of golf everyday - in love, but too shy to tell the woman of their dreams so. In short, the full range of Wodehouse characters.
While I'm not a golfer, I really enjoyed these stories. Lots of laughs based on that running gag that for every problem in life, the solution can be found in playing golf. Wodehouse was at his best brisk level of quips and toss away lines in these stories. And while I am not the greatest fan of short stories, the fact that the situations and stories are the slight typical Wodehouse fare, make the short story format work well.
I've been watching some YouTube videos on literary appreciation, and I have to admit that I don't seem to apply too many lessons so far to these stories. I suppose that I could mention that the narrator, the Oldest Member, in all these stories is the common element in these stories, drawing from his vast experiences. The plot - the way the author tells the story - is, as I mentioned, the Oldest Member relating in first person, a reminiscence of his concerning a golfer he know in a similar situation to the one at hand. As for the theme, well I guess that would be that the lessons learned by golfing - and indeed, golf itself, reveals the true meaning of life. Though from the golfers I knew, it also revealed the futility of it as well.

Looking at Stories with a Critical Eye

 

I've started watching/listening to a YouTube video series put on by two English Lit professors, Dr Philip Chase and Dr A P Canavan, with the purpose of teaching readers, and perhaps authors, how to appreciate stories in a college English Lit class way. The series is ongoing, alternating between their two YouTube fantasy-focused channels, with three episodes released at the time I'm writing this post. You can view the first introductory episode in the series here. 

So what does literary appreciation involve? Well...

"During the series, we will cover various topics, including story versus plot, narrative perspective, characters, setting and world building, symbols, tone and style, and themes. It is our hope that the tools and techniques we discuss will add enjoyment to people’s storytelling journeys."

While I am curious as to what literary appreciation involves, I have no interest in viewing stories in this way for my own enjoyment. I read stories to take me to times and places that I'll never be able to visit, in the company of friends I'll never have. I do not read fiction to learn lessons, ponder deep questions, or solve puzzles which is what literary appreciation seems to be all about. That's just me.

In the second episode they talk of identifying the "narration," which, as I understand it, is technical term for the themes, and subject matter the story may be exploring. While story and plot are often interchangeable terms in general conversation, the academic meaning of "story" is the incidents of the story in chronological order, while the "plot" is the way the author chooses to tell the story. Authors can take their story and slice and dice it as they choose, with the aim of increasing a reader's interest by using flashbacks, multiple points of view, unreliable narrators, and any other technique in order to make a nondescript story into a puzzle to be solved. And who doesn't like puzzles?

Come to think of it, literary appreciation is also a way of turning a story into a puzzle to solve. You can ferret out the reasons why the author wrote the plot the way they did, sniff out all the hidden meanings that they slipped into the story and plot just for eagle eyed readers to discover. In short the literary detective can discover what the author is doing behind the curtain of words they have constructed and in doing so, come to a greater appreciation of the genius of the author.

If you detect, as a literary detective, a little cynicism in my view of literary appreciation, you can be forgiven in wondering why would I then spend my time even learning about literary appreciation? For one reason - I'm taking the course as "The Art of Being a Literary Critic 101," for, as you know, when given the opportunity, I love playing the critic as long as the risk of hurting an author's feelings are extremely unlikely to none. I don't like being mean, but I also don't like what I see as bad or lazy writing. I'm thinking that if I'm going to be a critic, adding a dash of literary appreciation slang to a critical review might increase the authenticity of my criticism. It can't hurt.

The only problem is that I have to read bad books to use it. That sucks.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 49)

Another Cadfael Mystery this week, for two simple reasons - I really enjoy these stories, and I have them on hand, and unread. As you recall, I purchased the entire set of seven omnibus editions. Currently, I have only one book on hold from the library and it will only become available months down the road. The other not -yet-read books I have on hand are the old, public domain P G Wodehouse books I downloaded from the Gutenberg Project. The next one of those will be coming next 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 Pilgrim of Hate by Ellis Peters  A

As I have mentioned, these stories are set within a very specific time frame - during a civil war in England, in this case the early summer of 1141. King Stephen is now a prisoner in the north of England, and the other contender, Empress Maud is preparing to crown herself Queen of England outside of London. The momentous events of the time play a role in all of these books and in this one, Empress Maud is attempting to gain the support of London, with the King's brother, a powerful churchman, seeking a way to end the strife, even at the cost of his brother's thrown. Within this volatile situation a knight of the Empress who had come to the aid of one of the King's followers being attacked by a gang of thugs, is murdered, seemingly by one of the Empress's party, and the prime suspect has gone missing, said to have fled north.

In the meanwhile, in Shrewsbury, Cadfael's monastery is celebrating the fourth year of the arrival of their pet saint, Winifred whose bones they had gone to Wales to collect - the story of which is recounted in the first book of the series, A Morbid Taste for Bones, so I'll say no more about that. In this story the monastery and city are filled with pilgrims, people seeking cures for their ailments, as well as thieves and conmen, one of whom may be the murder on the run. We also have the arrival of another character we'd met in a past book tied to Cadfael's crusading past. He is on a diplomatic mission for Empress Maude, though Shrewsbury and its sheriff Hugh are loyal to the imprisoned king.

As in all these books, there is a mystery to solve, but the charm of them, at least for me, is the rich flavor of history Peters weaves in her stories. This is another well done story, with all the usual elements - mystery, a murder to be solved, young people in love, and another glimpse into the character of Brother Cadfael.

Translating Imaginary Languages

Recently I listened to an hour and forty minute YouTube discussion between three experts in fantasy. You can listen to it here if you are interested. The topic was to define the differences between classic fantasy and modern fantasy. Spoiler - they didn't get very far. They had different definitions of "Classic" right off the bat, and even settling on "traditional" vs "modern" was pretty much impossible, since it was pointed out that many fantasy stories written in the last twenty years - so-called modern - have prototypes dating back fifty or more years ago. And while there are general characteristics that can define an era - for example modern fantasy is more focused on the characters, their thoughts and emotions, whereas the more traditional fantasy was written from a more remote, third-person perspective - nevertheless, examples of any style can be found in any era. The best description is that fantasy is cyclical - with lots of authors jumping on a popular bandwagon, and then lots of other ones reacting against it, until the reaction becomes the new bandwagon that is reacted against. Around it goes. Thus, the characteristics associated with one period or another can actually be found in any period. Still, I learned a lot - for example how much Dungeons and Dragons influenced fantasy during the 80's & 90's so that today's popular progressive and RPG Lit fantasy is not new at all.

The one other aspect I found very interesting as a writer, was subject of translation. Not the translation of the book into another language, but the translation of a story that is supposedly set in a secondary world, which is to say, an imaginary world, where English is not spoke, but the story is written in English. The question was how does a writer use English to portray that different language and that different world of their fictional characters? And how much does their use of language color their imaginary world? 

One example brought up is the very popular romance-fantasy book The Fourth Wing. Though a fantasy set in something like medieval times, the story is told in the language of teens today - the teens in the internet era - which is the language of its target audience - despite the fact that much of the language it uses could not have been relevant, or even meaningful, in the time period the story is set in. Its language is not used to build the imaginary world and society. Instead it speaks to its readers in their own language to tell them the story.

The flip side of that coin is Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings books. In his books he uses the English language to serve a different purpose. It is archaic, flowery, and unfamiliar to most modern readers of English - used precisely to give a sense of strangeness and remoteness, as well as the depth and color to his imaginary world. He uses the language to make his imaginary world different from the world of his readers. While his characters speak a style of English that is deliberately not the readers' everyday English, as in The Fourth Wing. It is meant to sound more like a literal translation of the characters' and narrator's imaginary language in order to convey to the readers that this world is not theirs. His use of language may be beautiful, and evocative, but it requires the reader to learn and adopt the style to read and enjoy the story.

As a reader, I've DNFed both The Fellowship of the Rings and the Kings of the Wyld. The first because Tolkien's language didn't speak to me, and in the second book, because the language was too commonplace - its use took me out of the imaginary world and back into this one. Not being a huge reader of fantasy, I don't encounter this problem much, but for me, it has to be somewhere in the middle between archaic and modern, or perhaps more accurately, a skillful mix of the modern and archaic. A good example this is Ellis Peter's Cadfael historical fiction stories. She does an excellent job in my opinion of creating a sense of the time and place of twelfth century England by using the terms of that period for specific things, and describing places, actions and attitudes of the period, with a more modern writing style. 

As a writer, I've not written stories set in archaic times. All of my stories, SF and fantasy, this world or another, have an Edwardian air about them, i.e. an early 20th century type of setting no matter what I write. Plus, all of the people are descendants of Earth. I try, however, not to assume that they speak English. At times I try to imply in my "translation" that their language may be something closer to Chinese than English - though this can be awkward at times. And in The Bright Black Sea, I had fun trying to imply that they did not use a 10 based math system, but a 12 based one. But for the most part, what I mainly try to do is to avoid using popular phrases, curse words, and names of things that sound too much of our time. For example, a I might call something a "ball and net" court rather than a tennis court, since "tennis" feels too specific for a game played 10,000 years from now on another planet, even if that planet was once colonized by people from earth. 

So while I don't deal with the issue to any great extent, it is something I've thought about.

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.