C. Litka's Blog, page 64

Coming 13 July 2017 -- The Lost Star's Sea

I'm delighted to announce that The Lost Star's Sea, The Lost Star Stories Volume Two -- the complete sequel to The Bright Black Sea -- will be released on the evening of Thursday, 13 July 2017 on Smashwords and Amazon. It will be free on Smashwords and $.99 on Amazon. It takes 7 – 10 days for Smashwords to approve and distribute the book to iBook, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and other services, as a free ebook. Once the ebook reaches these stores I will call it to the attention of Amazon. They'll decide whether or not to match the free price of their competitors. So far they have, but it is their choice. As always, a free Kindle compatible version (mobi) is available on Smashwords from day one. 
I will be withdrawing Castaways of the Lost Star from publication, since the story is now the first part of The Lost Star's Sea.
More details about The Lost Star's Sea to follow.

The Mystery of the 22nd

Amazon can work in mysterious ways, it seems. On the 22nd of the last two months, Amazon was working in mysterious ways for me.

When a new book is introduced you usually see a spike of downloads. (Actual sales are a different story unless you already have a built-in audience. Unknown authors and their books often remain unknown without a great deal of promotion and luck.) Anyway, after the initial spike the downloads slowly taper off. For example, by April 2017, some 7-8 months after my last release, I would see downloads in the 1 - 7 books per day range. To put that in perspective, if I were selling these books, sales of 1 copy per day would put that book into the upper 5-6% of books sales on Amazon. A lot of books on Amazon don't sell. A few books sell a lot. So, when I noticed that on May 22nd, I had 96 downloads, I knew that something unusual had to account for that jump, since I'd done nothing to spark such a spike. But what?

I've noticed unexplained spikes like several times this before. At the time I thought perhaps they might have been due to a new review or some sort of mention outside of Amazon. However, I could never find with Google searches any outside reason for the spike. The alternative is that Amazon did something to promote my books, though why and what is a mystery. Perhaps it was featured on the Kindle app or Fire tablets under suggested reading, or something. Strange. On the 23rd of May downloads had dropped of slightly -- to 69, but even so both The Bright Black Sea and Castaways of the Lost Star where in the top 3,000 to 4,000 best "sellers" in the free category out of 100,000. After that downloads dropped off to the 5 - 10 downloads a day rate. Until the 22 of June.

On the 22 of June 211 books of mine downloaded -- 54 A Summer in Amber, 50(!!!) Some Day Days, 54 The Bright Black Sea, and 53 Castaways of the Lost Star. The relatively even spread of download numbers is curious, especially for Some Day Days, which never "sells" well. Again, no obvious explanation for this jump, but what it is interesting that it once again occurred on the 22nd of the month. Unlike the May spike, it dropped off the following day, though I did have an echo of it on the 28th of June with a 60 book download day.

I hadn't been paying attention to my daily downloads last month, so I only discovered the spike when I went to enter my "sales" into my own charts. Again, I can think of no explanation for the spike -- I don't see it reflected in my blog views, and Google searches turn up no evidence of the books being reviewed, or shared, though my Smashwords downloads also showed a minor spike on May 22, though not on June 22nd. My wife says that she's seen what may be ads for Castaways of the Lost Star on her Facebook feed. Which is rather mysterious, but then, I know nothing about how Facebook works, so what they were, is actually an open question, perhaps it simply had to do with the shared "Litka" name. In any event, their appearance seems to bear no relationship to the spikes. All I know is that the spike in downloads happened on Amazon.com, not in any of its other non-US sites. (Though I noticed that Amazon UK now lists the star rating from the US site with the book. In the past, only ratings from the UK store were used, but this change did not account for the spike.)

Amazon offers authors many ways of promoting one's books -- if you pay them. Now I'm not paying them, so if Amazon is promoting my books, it is out of the goodness of its heart. Which seems a bit strange. Perhaps they use open slots on their Kindle apps and Fire tablets to promote as "bargains" free books. I could inquire about this, though i am far from sure I'd get more than a vague explanation, if any, and well, I live my life according to old folk-wisdom, so I let sleeping dogs lie. If they are promoting my books, without mentioning it to me, I  think it's best not rock the boat by inquiring. Besides, I am curious to see what the 22 of July brings.

The Author

I photocopied the cartoon below from a 1933 Nov issue of Punch Magazine from the University of Wisconsin Library many years ago. At the time I dreamed of being an author and I loved this cartoon of an author. I've had this poor black and white photo copy framed for years. The caption reads:


THE STRANGERAuthor in search of local colour spends a convivial evening roystering with the peasants at the local inn.


I get a smile out of it every time I see it. Love the dog. Well, now 40 some years later the Stranger could be me. (Though truth be told, I've never had any desire to royster with the peasants.)

In this modern age you can get buy the color a print of it here: http://punch.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/Vintage-Lifestyle-Cartoons-1921-1961/G0000cKqw3nxQunY/I00005L_VU5C83XQ

Lost Star's Sea Progress Report

I hope to wrap up my revisions of The Lost Star's Sea within the next 10 days. All I have left to do is to polish up the last section of some 25K words or so. Everything else has been, or is now out for proofreading and feedback from my volunteer beta readers.
What remains to be done then, is;1) Finish revising the last section of the book, well under way.2) Get that section proofread and out to my beta readers.3) I probably will make a map of the section of the Archipelago that the story takes place in to post on the this blog. I don't think a list of characters is necessary, though there are a lot of characters. We'll see.4) Need to write the various blurbs for the various listings.5) Make all the corrections my proofreaders and beta readers send back to me.6) Make some minor revisions to The Bright Black Sea to correspond to changes I made for The Lost Star's Sea -- mostly changes in name spelling and terminology.7) When all of the above are done, all that will remain to be done is to upload it to Smashwords and Amazon. If all goes well, it will be a Thursday in the last half of July 2017 or early August 2017 As usual it will be free on Smashwords, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo, and for a while, at least, $.99 on Amazon. Hopefully they will once more match the free price of their competitors, once the book makes its way from Smashwords to those other retailers -- usually about 7 to 10 after it's published on Smashwords.
Castaways of the Lost Star will be unpublished when The Lost Star's Sea is released, since Castaways becomes the first section of The Lost Star's Sea -- about 20-25% of it. The rest is all new. It's another long, episodic adventure novel, about 350K words long, some 30K words longer than The Bright Black Sea.

The Amateur Writer

I happened to come across this blog post on Quartz, and it really sums up my attitude about not only writing but my painting as well.
https://qz.com/990130/in-defense-of-amateurs/

The key takeaway:
Chesterton says as much in his biography of Robert Browning:

The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and reality. A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame or money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.

I think that within the next 10 years, self-published books will be almost entirely written by amateurs, people with stories write and to share with others. 

Two Years of Free Books

It's been two years since I self published my first science fiction novel, A Summer in Amber on 27 April, 2015. I followed that book with Some Day Days on 9 July 2015 and then A Bright Black Sea on 16 Sept 2015. Since I'd been working on those stories for more than five years, I was able to release all three within five months of each other. In 2016, faced with the fact that my next story, the companion volume to The Bright Black Sea would not be finished before the last half of 2017, I published the first, 70K word, “episode” of the book as a stand alone story, Castaways of the Lost Staron 25 July 2016. The complete book, a 340K word long planetary romance, The Lost Star's Sea is on track for release this summer.
My books are targeted at a very small market – me. I have old fashioned tastes in books –  mostly adventure novels from the first half of the last century, give or take a decade or two – so they're not written to be commercial products for today's mass markets. Having no commercial ambitions, or any need for the few dollars they'd likely bring in if I tried selling them, I offer them for free. Amazon requires at least a $.99 price, but they've been kind enough to price-match free in the US store and 2 books in the UK store. Because I hate self-promotion – and work – I'm content to let price, reviews and word of mouth promote my books. And since I value good reviews over downloads, I write my blurbs to attract only the subset of readers who will likely enjoy them. I can publish free books without losing a penny because I can do – almost – everything involved in self publishing in-house. The exception being, as I found out the hard way, proofreading. However, I now have a crew of very kind volunteer proofreaders willing to help me with that.
There are many ways to build a readership. I've chosen the way that suits me best – honest descriptions and the elimination of price as a barrier. So how does it work? Let's take a look.

A Summer in AmberRelease 27 April 20151st year downloads & sales - 2,222 2nd year downloads & sales -1,357 Total to date                       3,579
Rating & Reviews         1stYear 2nd Year Total 5 star 13        12            254 star 16         -             163 star -           4              42 star 4           2             61 star -           -              -Total 33         18            51
Some Day DaysReleased 9 July 20151st year downloads & sales – 1,1392nd year downloads & sales –   511Total                                  1,650
Ratings & Reviews         1st Year 2nd Year Total5 star -           2           24 star 2          1            33 star 1          4            52 star 1           -           11 star -           -            -Total 4           7           11
The Bright Black SeaReleased 16 Sept. 20151st year downloads & sales - 3,1762nd year downloads & sales – 2,569Total to date 5,745
Ratings & Reviews          1st Year 2nd Year Total5 star 59         33            924 star 12           7           193 star 4            4             82 star 1            -             -1 star 2            1             3Total 80          44          124
Notes: Amazon dropped price matching in March of 2016 until Sept. of 2016, so I have no data to determine if and how the release of its sequel affected sales. Downloads in Sept 2016 were twice the highest number recorded for any other month – I suspect that the spike was due to some sort of promotion by Amazon. (I saw a similar unexplained spike in A Summer in Amazon Sales in its first year as well.) I didn't happen to catch it at its peak, but several days later is was still at #20, so it may have well been the #1 free Space Opera for a day. Selling at $3.99, it sold 16 copies during the March – June time period. And in the July – August time period when it was priced at $.99 it sold 15 copies. Foreign sales currently run 1 to 2 copies a month at $.99.
Interesting enough, my downloads on iBooks dropped by more than half once Amazon started offering all my books for free again with the release of Castaways in Sept 2016. That seems to be the only reason for that to happen.
The Castaways of the Lost Star (a sequel to The Bright Black Sea)Released 25 July 20162nd year downloads & sales - 1700Total to date - 1700
Ratings & reviews         2nd Year5 star 64 star 43 star -2 star -1 star -Total 10

Coming this Summer: The Lost Star's Sea. The concluding volume of the Lost Star and the adventures of Captain Wil Litang.


The Complete Totals
First year downloads/sales of all books – 6,537*Total number of ratings/reviews - 117
Second year downloads/sales of all books – 6,137*Total number of ratings/reviews - 79Two year cumulative download/sales – 12,674* Cumulative number of ratings/reviews – 196
*Kobo does not report free downloads to Smashwords so this number is no doubt vastly under reported. Maybe by 100. $ Sales constitute only a small fraction of these totals. And the straight 400 download difference between the two years is just weird.
I release my books through Smashwords and Amazon. Last year Smashwords distributed books including iBooks and B & N but not Kobo outsold Amazon by 2 to 1. The cumulative totals now are about 50-50.
Two calender year profits: (2015 & 2016): slightly under $50 from Amazon sales.
With no data to compare these results to other self publishing authors who entered the science fiction market in 2015, I have no idea how they stack up to the more conventional ways of establishing a self publishing venture. However, I'm very pleased with the results and have enjoyed the whole experience. I've learned a lot, made new friends, and accomplished something I've always wanted to do – write a book or two that are read and appreciated.
I'd like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who helped make this publishing venture both very enjoyable and modestly successful. While my name is on the title page, other people have helped to making the books better than I could've done alone. First off, I'd like to thank my volunteer proofreaders and beta readers. I produce a vast number of typos and have an amazing ability to be blind to them, so a sincere thanks goes out to Sally L., Carlos S., Hannes B., Nicole B., Martin V., Walt, and Stephen B.. I truly appreciate the efforts they've made to make my books better for every reader. I'd also like to thank the readers who took time to write to me. And all the readers who have taken the time to review and/or rate my stories. I'm not writing for money. Reader satisfaction is my benchmark of success, and while I know that I can not please everyone, I am glad that the people who do like my stories seem to truly appreciate them. And finally, I'd like to thank you, dear reader, for selecting my books and spending time alongside the characters and in worlds I've discovered lurking in my imagination. A story without a reader is a pretty sad thing. I'm glad that my stories have found readers, and readers who have enjoyed them.

Two Years!

Two years ago today I published my first novel, A Summer in Amber. On one hand, it seems like a lot of stories ago, and on the other, that summer in the highlands is still fresh in my memory. Next week I will post on this blog my 2nd Annual Report reporting on my "sales" figures for my second year in self publishing. Stay tuned to see what the wages of "free" have earned during the second year!

Done. Sort of.

I'm very happy to report that I've finished the first draft of part 8, The Dragon Kings. This is the last section of The Lost Star's Sea, which means that both the book and the adventures of Captain Wil Litang have, at long last, wound to their way to their appointed end.
Of course we're far from the end of work on it. I still have a lot of hammering of the words, sentences, and paragraphs to get them into shape for publication – especially in the last two or three sections which are more or less first drafts, and my first drafts are often rather pedestrian, sketchy, and rough around the edges. The first three sections, however, should be pretty much ready to go – one last read through, and then proof reading.
So what's next? This week I'll start my last read through of part 2 (part 1 is The Castaways of the Lost Star) and once I'm satisfied with it, I'll print it out and hand it over to Sally, my wife and first proof reader. Once she's done with it, and I'll make the 100's of corrections she'll find. Corrections made, it will then be ready to be read by my volunteer proofreaders and advanced readers – hopefully by the end of April. Episodes 3, & 4 should follow at a similar pace, every three weeks or so. If all goes well, we're looking at a late summer, early fall release date.

I'll be contacting everyone who's signed up to be a volunteer proofreader/advanced reader when I have the first proofed version in hand. Any one interested in reading the not quite final version prior to book publication, can drop me a note at cmlitka@gmail.comand I'll put you on the list.

Island Trails

Another view of the Islands of the Pela. This time we have a vine bridge spanning a gap. The "broad feathered" natives of the island, with their more articulated and clawed feet can easily use these vines to cross the gap. The painting's so-so, but I think the islands in the distance are an improvement. That's the way it works for me -- learn a lesson with every painting -- and hope I don't forget it.

Boat and Branches

Another very casual impressionist painting from the Pela, of a small trader on the wind.