C. Litka's Blog, page 52

Fraud Alert

Lo! When I went to look at my listings on Amazon this morning, what should I find, but that two extra editions of my books, A Summer in Amber, and The Lost Star's Sea, are somehow available. Books that I did not upload or authorize. And they're enrolled in Kindle Unlimited as well, which, seeing that I'm not exclusively on Amazon would get me into trouble with Amazon. I have contacted Amazon and we'll see what results.

Now, I have no problem with people posting my books without obtaining my permission, as long as they are not trying to make money off of the books. There are plenty of sites that offer my books for free and I'm cool with that. It is only when someone tries to make money off of my work, that I object.

New Covers for 2020

Just for shits and giggles, and with time on my hand, I decided to work up new covers for my books. Last time around I was looking to create a consistent look for branding, and since my stories are pretty old fashioned, I wanted to give the covers a rather old fashioned look. And, well, I should also mention that I didn't want to spend any money on them, so I use my own artwork and work them up in Gimp, using Gimp provided fonts.


This time around, I'm looking to give the books a more contemporary, literary, and print published look with bolder text and brighter colors. They are not the type of covers best selling genre ebooks boast. In the fast lane of ebook sales one wants one's covers to look just like all the covers of all the other best selling books. I didn't care to do this for, well, as I mentioned, I don't care to spend money on them.That said, I also really don't like the stock photo montages that constitute a lot of the most popular books in their genres. As I said, I'm shooting for a more literary look to my books.


These are the current versions of the new covers. They are subject to change, and depending on sales, may be dropped after a month or so. In any event, I will be changing the covers over on the 1st of February 2020. These changes will apply only to the ebooks, though I could, depending upon results, develop a back cover and change the paper covers as well. But given their sales, it would be a lot of work that would simply make my paper books even more collectible than they already are.


I used the same artwork for A Summer in Amber, though without the people that were added in Gimp for the cover. I also used the same artwork for The Bright Black Sea, though I made fairly significant modifications. I eliminated the planet, changed colors of some of the nebula, and smoothed things out, adding a lot more glow to get that black and bright sea look. I used new artwork for Some Day Days -- mostly for its bright colors and rather graphic look.


For The Lost Star's Sea I used different art work. I had done a series of paintings depicting something like the Pella, some years ago, and I decided to use one of those paintings instead, adding a bit of black outline to it. I also changed the cover for Beneath The Lanterns. It really has nothing to do with the story, but I think it works for creating the mood I want. Lanterns imply darkness, and though this is not strictly true in the story, I think it works for the cover -- dark and light.


And, as you can see, I also changed the artwork for Sailing to Redoubt. This was a rather sketchy painting of a sailing ship, that I photographed, and ended up painting over. However, I still have the photo I took of it, and by tilting it and adding some black outline in Gimp, ended up with a fairly nice, if abstract image of a ship. Again, it does not really correspond to any ship in the story, but it works to set a nautical mood.

Covers are not a science. There is a general belief that covers sell books -- and to some extent this is certainly true. But what covers sell? For some readers who are looking for stories just like the last one they read, a cover that looks just like the last one they read may well make them more willing to give the new books a try. I don't sell to those readers, so that isn't a concern for me. I sell books to people who try one of my books, like what the find, and try the rest of my stories. I think that by casting a wide net -- writing books in a variety of genre and now, using a set of different covers to attract a wider spectrum of readers, these covers might work for me. Or not. As I said, it's not a science. But I'll give them a few months to see if there will be any significant change in sales. Truthfully, I rather doubt it. But, as I said, I had time on my hands.

However, 1 February I am starting my 2020 story (yet again). This time I'm only shooting for a novella -- 30K to 50K words that will be a sequel of sorts, well, more of an epilogue, to one of my existing stories. I hope to have the first draft written by the end of the month, and the book out by May 2020. But as I have found out, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. So we'll see.

The Whimsy of Algorithms

Self-published authors are hostages of algorithms. Who and how many potential readers get to see one’s book in any online bookstore is determined by a secret cabal of algorithms operating mysteriously in the darkness behind the bright digital storefront of these online bookstores. There are books written that purport to teach self-published authors how to beguile these algorithms to favor them. And, of course, you can bribe them with folding money in the form of advertising.
Now, I can’t say how well, if at all, these methods of manipulation work, since I am content to let them work their magic however they care to. But since I do nothing to manipulate them, I can show them in operation.
Let’s start with the Case of the Mysterious Abrupt Slump in my Smashwords sales, as illustrated in the chart below. I wish I had taken a screen shot of it last year so you could see how the release of Beneath the Lanterns affected my sales, and then the redesign of the Smashwords bookstore affected them, but both those events are now off the chart. I’ll use sales figures instead, but first the chart.



 The chart below is of monthly sales that extends beyond the daily sales chart above.
Sales July 2018 -- Dec 2019

From the chart you can see that we were plugging along at about 140 - 150 copies a month until September 2018 when the release of Beneath the Lanterns goosed sales, though by November that boost as fading. The January 1st update on Smashwords reversed that slide, and the release in March 2019 of Sailing to Redoubt more than doubled my previous sales all the way to October, when it was abruptly halved once again – as illustrated by the chart. Sales boosts across the board with a new release is explainable. The difference between my July 2018 sales and my Oct 2019 sales may be explained by having two extra books to sell. But the large and lasting boost following the publication of Sailing to Redoubt is much harder to explain. Two extra books would account for some of the rise, but not all. And the sales of Sailing to Redoubt are nowhere near explaining the elevated sales, since The Bright Black Sea continued to be my best seller. But the most mysterious workings of algorithms is the abrupt drop in sales on the 6th of October 2019. I can't explain that. I have to believe that it was a change in Smashwords' algorithms in how they listed books in their store.
My second example of the whimsy of algorithms is, The Mysterious Affair of December 30th, which occurred on Amazon at the end of December, as illustrated by the chart below.

That first jump in sales was on Boxing Day (Dec 26th) of 59 copies sold, no doubt because the proud new owners of Kindles and Fire Tabs were looking to fill their new devices with inexpensive content. Sales then, naturally, tapered off until, for some mysterious reason, we have that big sales jump, of some 264 books sold on the 30th of Dec. The bulk of those sales came from the sale of The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star’s Sea. At that point The Bright Black Sea was the #5 best seller on the free space opera bestseller chart and in the low 600's in all of the free books on Amazon. Since I did nothing to boost sales, whatever caused that jump in sales was Amazon’s doing. And since I have no friends in Amazon, it must have been the work of those mysterious algorithms.  

Since I'm not writing...

...What am I doing to pass the time? Well, I’m touring the world – virtually – from the cab of trains. There are many, many ways of wasting time, and I suppose watching videos taken from the driver’s cab of trains on YouTube is one rather strange way. But I think it is better than playing solitaire on the computer. That, at any rate, is my story, and I’m sticking with it.
I’ve only discovered the joys of train driving, oh, about three months ago or so. And yet, I can’t remember how I came to discover the addictive joy of watching the countryside – or the embankments, trees, or tunnels, flow by. I think I watched a video on British steam trains, and that led to another, and eventually to train rides across Great Britain. You might be amazed at how many such rides have been recorded, and in these days, in 4K by GoPro cameras.
As I said, it is strangely addictive – the rails always stretching on ahead, and you never know what the next bend will reveal. I’ve also be come quite the expert at reading the signals that control the trains that run so frequently.
As I said, I started in Britain, and below is the map of the British Rail System, with the routes in yellow being the ones that I have traveled in the driver’s cab. I have to say that some parts of England are rather murky… But perhaps that is due to the age of the video and the cameras used…
(Map credit: https://www.thetrainline.com/train-companies/national-rail/national-rail-map)
I think that I may have traveled every route currently available to be viewed. But you never know what might turn up on my YouTube home page..
If you are interested in seeing Britain by train, the YouTube channel to start with is Don Coffey’s:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8LH7xMAyCSqpClAvTHwJRw/videos
There are others that cover more than the English midlands, but his are high quality and include a lot of interesting information on the Victorian Engineering that went into making the British rail system, and how it works.
After covering all of Britain that I could, I moved on to Switzerland. As you can see from the map below, I’ve seen a lot of Switzerland. Even without taking into account the Alps, Switzerland and its rail system is very different than Britain’s. It is a much smaller system, and without all the Victorian era overhead that British rail has to deal with, it seems a much more modern system. And some of the videos of trains in the Alps are breathtaking, even if you’re not addicted to cab ride videos.
(Map credit: http://bueker.net/trainspotting/map.php?file=maps/switzerland/switzerland.gif )
There are two very good, high quality sources for cab ride videos through Switzerland:https://www.youtube.com/user/lorirocks777/videoshttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRYl1C12IXPs2Uo_25OdrPA/videosI highly recommend both of them.
I did ride on several French and German high speed trains and one Swedish train. There do not seem to be many German train rides, but I will have to return to France some day. 
There are a lot of cab ride videos on Norwegian trains, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/user/HinduCowGirl/videosI have only briefly sampled one. The reason I have not explored Norway more is that because of all the mountains, there are many, many, tunnels needed to run trains through that breathtaking countryside. At least that was my impression based on my one trip that there. It seemed that there were more tunnels than breathtaking views. (Tunnels are pretty boring.) I’ll have to return some day to see it that is true on all the trips.
Anyway, now I’ve move on to a very different country: Japan. Japan has plenty of mountains and breathtaking views, but it is also very different as well. At least in the south of Japan, you are rarely out of a city/town/village unless you are in some narrow mountain pass. It is interesting to see all the cultural differences between these countries that you can note even from the front window of a train.
I’m currently exploring the videos from these channels: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCikfKNNx-Poh6N_m6WJ2O3Q/videoshttps://www.youtube.com/user/HKASAMA/videoshttps://www.youtube.com/user/ato5kgyasetaito/videos
I have a lot of places yet to visit, as you can see from my map below. Many of them are on slow commuter trains, but you get to enjoy the cherry blossoms that abound in the spring. I don't think there are any videos from the cabs of Japan's highspeed trains, but I have a feeling they's be pretty boring, as they generally run straight -- through hills and over valleys and have walls on each side. Luckily I can cut and paste the Japanese descriptions into Google Translate to get an idea of where I’m going.
(Map credit: https://www.japan-experience.com/taking-the-train-japan )

It Seems that...

...Sailing to Redoubt is now $.99 in Amazon.com's store. Apparently they have decided to stop price matching Sailing to Redoubt's $.00 price in all the other ebook stores. I need to put a list price on my books in Amazon, and they then have the option to match their competitor's prices, or not. I guess they're trying to see if they can make a little money off of my work. Good luck with that! We'll see how long this lasts.

Another Writing Update

This hasn’t gone well…
You know that post, the one two post down, about playing chicken, well, I lost that game. That story petered out… And so did my next promising idea as well. In all these situations, I’d have no problem coming up with the first 30K words. And in each case, I had a series of incidents lined up that promised to carry the story forward. But. But the more I thought about them, the more they did not seem to have the necessary weight, if you will, to drive the story forward. I write episodic novels and you need an overarching story to hold them together. However, the more I thought about these middle episodes, the more they seemed to be just that, episodes that existed only to fill out the middle and carry the story on to a not very consequential end. There are some writers who just write what comes to their head and trust that everything will turn out alright in the end. Perhaps it does. But I hate plot holes, especially my own, so I’m not going to have some character do something just because I need it done. I have to arrange the story so as to allow the character to do what I want done, and this requires planning from the beginning to end. I don’t do extensive outlines, but I do have to have motivations in mind, and I need to place them into the stream of the story from the get-go. All of which means that even though I have solid beginnings, I’m not going put a lot of effort into writing without being fairly certain of a worthwhile payoff. So far, that payoff had eluded me.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not under contract, so that I don’t have to mechanically crank out a good-enough story to fulfill a contractual obligation. And since I can’t generate any enthusiasm for these stories, I can hardly expect my readers will either. I do this for fun, and typing away just to get enough words to call it a book isn’t fun.
I don’t think this is classic writers’ block. I can write, I can come up with something like a story, but I just can’t come up with a story that I think is worth writing. I don’t want to rinse and repeat stories. I have my pirates, my bandits, my storms, my romances, and my familiar characters (under different names), and I don’t want to just drag them out, dust them off, and reuse them again without bringing out something new.
There is this term in Taoism, wu wei, which has several subtle meanings, but can use to mean that by doing nothing something gets done, or that by acting only when something can be done, that thing can be done without (much) effort. I’ve decided to apply that principle to my efforts to write. Clearly I'm not at a point where I can write a good story, so I’ll give up trying for now and wait upon some sort of inspiration to seep in when I’m not looking for them.
In the meanwhile, maybe I’ll read some books. I don’t like reading books when there is one in my head that I’m trying to work out, so that by giving up trying to write one, perhaps I can get some reading done. Or maybe I can start painting again. I haven’t been motivated to paint for some time, so perhaps now is the time to try something new, or something old, just to see if my creative juices are still flowing. Humm, might have to wait upon wu wei for that to happen as well...
The long and short of it, however, is that unless lightning strikes, I’m not going to try to come up with a story until after the first of the year. It takes me 5 or 6 months to get a story ready for my proof readers, so that this hiatus does not rule out a book in 2020. But I can’t promise one either. Indeed, I can’t promise another one ever. With more than a million words in print in the last decade, I can’t complain if the well has run dry.
In the mean time, I may use this space to yell at the clouds. That’s what us old men do. For all the good it does.

4 1/2 Years in Self Publishing Sales Report

Time flies, and once again it is time for my biannual sales report, covering the period, May 2019 through October 2019. As usual, almost all of the sales are free ebooks sold through Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, B & N, and Google. My books are also available on Kobo which does not report free sales to Smashwords, plus on many other sites that offer free books.

Let’s start by looking at the numbers:
Book Title / Release Date
1H 2019 Sales
Total Sale To date
A Summer in Amber
23 April 2015
458
6,856
Some Day Days
9 July 2015
511
3,638
The Bright Black Sea
17 Sept 2015
1,214
11,053
The Lost Star’s Sea
13 July 2017
1,101
5,122
Beneath the Lanterns
13 Sept 2018
669
1,822
Sailing to Redoubt
15 March 2019
638
1,199
Total Six Month Sales
4,590
31,866 w/
Castaways’
2,176 sales


Now, back in May I had written that I did not expect a banner year, for several reasons. While this will probably still be true for the entire year, this first half of the year has been much better than expected. I sold almost as many books in this period as I did last year, which included a strange one day sales on Amazon of 1950 copy in August 2018. If one excludes that inexplicable spike, my sales were actually up 1,819 for the last six months compared to the same period last year. I won’t complain about that.
I have several observations about these last six months. 
First is that despite the fact that Amazon is the market leader, by far in ebooks, I sold more ebooks on Smashwords than I did on Amazon. Here is the breakdown of my sales by stores:


                        
 
  Smashwords 52%  (Smashwords 83%, Apple 15%, B&N 2%)  Amazon 39%    Google 9% 

I think that there are several reasons for this result. On the Amazon side, I think that they have fine tuned their sales algorithms to maximize the sales of their best selling titles and authors who appeal to the avid reading Kindle Unlimited subscribers. These are the authors who can move the most copies and who will return the most money to Amazon via their spending on advertising on Amazon's platform. I have no complaints about this, it is just capitalism at work.  I'm happy with whatever sales I can get from Amazon. And since I see occasional unexplained jumps in my sales on Amazon, (though not 1950 in a day) I assume they are doing a little promotional work for me for free. I can't complain.
A second factor may be a result of  Smashwords redesigning their store front at the beginning of 2019. While my sales were up as a result of the release of Beneath the Lanterns in September, the slow decline reversed itself in January, and continued to rise, especially after the release of Sailing to Redoubt in March. After March I was routinely selling in the mid-400 copy range – until this past month, Oct 2019 when, for no apparent reason, sales crashed to 195 copies. Seeing that I don’t do promotions, it is hard to explain such a sudden fall. Perhaps my books had reached most of their audience. Or perhaps they had somehow become less visible in the Smashwords store. (Though I don't see how.)  We’ll see what happens going forward, but without a new book in the next six months, I don’t expect sales to improve.
And that brings us to the Google Play Store sales. While it constituted only 9% of my sales for the first half of my year, as you can see from the chart below, sales have begun to take off.  In October, with the decline of Smashwords, my Google sales constituted about 22% of my month's sales.


Now, I don't know how high sales will go, or for how long they will continue at the October level, but there seems to be a general trend here, at least for now. And with more sales and more ratings, I believe Google is coming into its own, far outpacing B&N and from the days when I distributed my books to Kobo on my own and saw the sales results, I can say that Google is likely far outpacing Kobo as well.

Looking Ahead
I expect sales to fall over the course of the next six months, as these sales still benefited from the March release of Sailing to Redoubt. I don't expect to release a new book until next summer or early fall. While I am at work on that book, the going is slow, with many false starts, so I am far from certain if and when my 2020 novel will appear. My hope has been to sell 300 books a month. Now, with six books available, I expect to be able to meet that between the three stores. Even with Smashwords' crash, I sold over 500 books in October, so I think it is do-able. But three of those books are now more than four years old, so it will depend on how those hold up. So far, so good. But.
However, when all is said and done, I'm still having fun doing this. And that is what matters. That, and that you, dear readers, are having fun as well.

A Game of Chicken

Okay, let's see how many times I can start a project and publicly bail on it. The new August Avenue story starts: (At least it does tonight.)

 I lifted my summer weight felt hat off the rack by the door and looked about my hot, twilit flat, just to make sure everything was in order should I die before I returned. Not that I was planning on dying. I was merely going home on my annual summer holiday. And though I rather dreaded going home each summer – I had been far too eager to leave the farm behind to attend university for my father to ever forget or completely forgive, making my annual visits a bit tense at times – I had no reason to fear death. This time, however, I had, on several occasions, found a fleeting moment of peace having taken that precaution. But then I couldn’t have known that when I settled my hat on my head, closed the door behind me – checking to be certain that it was locked – and started down the stairs. Had I, I would’ve stayed in bed with the covers over my head. And never opened the wire-note from my chief at the Bureau of Innovation.  
I spent a month or so this summer daydreaming this version of August Avenue before abandoning it, quietly. But I have to write something, and I think I might be able to make it work. But then, I thought that the last time as well... We'll all see how far I get.

"Failed to lift"

Unfortunately, I was unable to get my August Avenue story to lift off the launching pad. It just did not quite come together -- too many disparate ideas that refused to gel. And some of the ideas I did have I couldn't find a way to use without falling back on old, out of fashion, tropes; like having the hero save the heroine, which I make a point not to use, at least not without the reverse as well.  All in all, perhaps it simply failed to lift because it did not quite spark enough enthusiasm in me -- though goodness knows I tried -- running scenes through my head for several months. So the search is on for another story idea -- one that I can get enthusiastic about, and have fun writing. Winter is coming, and I need something to write to get through it.

That said, it is probably a good thing I didn't go through with my original plan, as I have a feeling that it would not have been all that well received, being a mishmash of story ideas plus being rather short on adventure. Not that that alone would've stopped me -- I write to amuse myself -- but hopefully I can come up with a novel that will be both fun to daydream up and write, as well as entertaining you as well. We'll see.

At some point I might post the 13,000 word unedited opening chapters of August Avenue on this blog just for the heck of it, as I have done in the past -- the "noses" of stories that never made it to the wagging tail of the tale.

August Avenue

August Avenue is the working title of my 2020 novel, simply because I want to write a novel using that phrase as a title. Unfortunately, I’ve had no luck coming up with a story to really fit that title. Still, that hasn’t stopped me from using it as my tentative title for my current book project. The title comes from the final lyrics of a song titled Duxton, Melbourne on the Kitel Bjornstad and Anneli Drecker’s A Suite of Poems album. It is an album that puts to music the poems of Lars Saabye Christensen about hotels. “August Avenue” evokes something in me, but I can’t say what. In any event, what the final title of this story will be is an open question, mainly because the story that I envision isn’t about any one thing in particular. Maybe I’ll have the boardinghouse on August Avenue. Or the repair shop. We’ll see.
I’ve spent the last six months trying to come up with a new story. Story ideas don't come easy for me. Getting a story started is pretty easy. Getting it to go someplace, and go someplace different from what I’ve written before, is hard for me. So it seems to take me half a year to settle on some characters and a story. Along the way I considered various sequels to Sailing to Redoubt because I had a lot of fun writing about those characters. And, as I mentioned, I explored ideas on how I could make “August Avenue” a key element of a story. I’ve finally gotten to the point where I have started writing a story by cobbling together elements from a number of abandoned story projects, so it will be a rather different type of a story for me. 
I like writing small stories. Stories were the stakes may be life or death, but only for the characters, not worlds, or galaxies. And this new story is no exception, except that it may be even smaller. And more leisurely. I realize that I tell my adventure/travelogue stories at a rather leisurely pace, so that setting out to deliberately tell a small story leisurely may alarm some readers. As well it should. However, life is too short to write the same story over and over again, so I try to do something a little different each time – within my limited range of talent and imagination. And a small, slice of life story, is what I want to write this time around. 
The good news for some readers it that this story marks a return to an old setting; the Nine Star Nebula of The Bright Black Sea. The opening chapters, which I now have in first draft, concern a small tramp space ship in the Alantzia star system. The Alantzia system is sort of the “Wild West” of the Nine Star Nebula’s Unity. Not quite the “drifts” but close. The rest of the story will be set on a terraformed moon and in a non-Unity-conforming “throwback” society. This will allow me to combine old and new tech together to make an, hopefully, entertaining story. With my opening chapters written (10K words), my ending settled upon, and enough ideas to fill out the middle, I think the story is a go. But nothing is guaranteed, even with all that.
While I started Sailing to Redoubt about this time and had it ready to publish by March, I don’t expect this story will go as fast. I still have a lot of day dreaming to do in order to flesh out the characters and story. And if I write too fast and overrun my daydreams, I risk dreaming up better scenes, or discovering plot holes and so end up having to go back and rewrite it. That's what I do in the second draft. I’m under no deadline, except 2020. If that. Still, it would be nice if I find myself having as much fun day dreaming it up and writing it down as I did the last time around, so who knows?
And with that, I’ll close this post with the first two lines of August Avenue’s first draft:I took my first steps in becoming a toaster repairman aboard the Aphar Hawk, nine days out of Gan Dou orbit. And I don’t believe that I've ever stepped faster in my life.