C. Litka's Blog, page 68
May 1, 2016
A Window to Self-Publishing
A Window to Self Publishing or the Wages of Free
One year ago, on 27 April, 2015, I released my first novel, A Summer In Amber followed in July by a second, Some Day Days, and a third, The Bright Black Seain September. All were published on Smashwords and Amazon, all were free on Smashwords and price-matched free on Amazon within a week of their release.
I'd like to share the results of my first year in self-publishing in the hope that my readers will find this window to the world of self-publishing interesting. Fellow authors may also find these results interesting, since I've conducted a pretty pure experiment in the potential and limitations of offering books for free to create or grow readership.
My rational for free was straightforward. As a new writer, I'd forgo royalties in exchange for readers. I had written the stories over the course of five years for the fun of writing with no intention of making money on them – if only because I wrote them to suit my own taste, which is not, as far as I can judge, very mainstream. All three books were released as science fiction, though none of them fit comfortably in any particular sub-genre. My space opera is not military s-f, my post-apocalyptic, steampunk story has neither zombies nor airships, and my little romance is not a conventional commercial romance – though I'm not a reader of popular romances so I can't say that for certain.
Beyond starting this blog, I lifted not a finger to promote them. My business plan was to publish them and let lightning strike. Which is not a business plan. It is, however, all I cared to do. Anything more would have been work and this is all about having fun writing stories, and having fun publishing them. Nothing more. These results can be seen as a test of what pure "free" can achieve.
The Books and Their Numbers
I should make it clear that the numbers reported below are for free downloads, not sales. Anyone who downloads a "sample" gets the whole book. My books have been on sale at list price on Amazon's foreign sites, and for the last 6 weeks, The Bright Black Sea has been at full price on Amazon's US store as well. The total for these actual sales is in the low double digits.
Books published on Smashwords are also distributed to Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and Kobo. Kobo does not report download numbers of free books, so the totals are somewhat under reported.
Rather than reporting exact numbers for each store, I'll report the combined downloads. The ratio of Amazon downloads to the Smashwords versions varies by title, but taken as a whole, the combined Smashwords downloads were something like double Amazon's downloads.
I've also listed the number of review and ratings for each title. Rating and reviews from Amazon (A), Smashwords (S), iBooks (iBK), Barnes & Noble (B&N), Kobo (K) and Goodreads (GR).
A Summer in Amber A mystery/adventure/romance set in a post-apocalyptic Scotland. A mirror-image steampunk story with 19th century tech transposed to the late 21st century after solar storms lay waste to power grids, satellites and digital devices.
Released 27 April 2015 (Free on Smashwords, $.99 on Amazon, price matched in about a week. List price changed to $2.99 in March. Has been free on Amazon UK for several months.)Days on the market: 368 Downloads to 1 May 2016: 2222Average downloads per day: 6 (April average: 2.7)Reviews and/or ratings: 33 Downloads per rating/review: 82 A S iBK B&N K GR Total5 star 9 0 2 1 0 1 134 star 4 4 3 0 3 2 163 star 0 0 0 0 0 0 02 star 1 0 0 0 0 3 41 star 0 0 0 0 0 0 0Total 14 4 5 1 3 6 33
Released in Science Fiction Steampunk & Adventure, changed to Steampunk and post-apocalyptic after Feb 2016. (Amazon rating include 2 at Amazon UK)
Some Day DaysA new adult romance and exploration of technology set in Oxford & Cambridge in the not too distant future. Somewhat experimental in style & structure. A collection of "pieces" that are the start of a never to be written much longer story.
Released 9 July 2015 (Free on Smashwords, $.99 on Amazon before price matching. List price changed to $1.99 1 March 2016 Full price outside of Amazon.com)Days on the market: 296Downloads and sales to 1 May 2016: 1139Average downloads per day: 3.8 (April average: 2 )Reviews and/or ratings; 5 (including one none starred one)Downloads per rating/review 570 A S iBK B&N K GR Total5 star 0 0 0 0 0 0 04 star 0 1 0 0 0 1 23 star 0 0 0 0 0 1 12 star 0 0 0 0 0 1 11 star 0 0 0 0 0 0 0Total 0 1 0 0 0 3 4
Released in Science Fiction romance & Romance, changed to Literature & New Adult Romance after Feb 2016
The Bright Black Sea A long, 325,000 word, old-school inspired space opera/adventure/mystery. Began as a serial, written in three novel-length parts, and released in a single volume since there was no financial incentive to stretch it into a trilogy.
Released 16 Sept 2015 (Free on Smashwords, $.99 Amazon until price matched. List price changed to $3.99 1 March 2016. Full price outside of Amazon.com. Amazon dropped price matching on 9 March so it is now available at list price.)Days on the market: 227Downloads & sales to 1 May 2016: 3176 Average downloads per day: 14 (April average [including Amazon sales]: 5 )Reviews and/or ratings: 80 (The 2 non-starred reviews were positive reviews.) Downloads per rating/review 45 A S iBK B&N K GR Totalnon-starred 2 25 star 11 6 30 3 0 9 594 star 5 2 3 1 1 0 123 star 0 0 4 0 0 0 42 star 0 0 0 0 0 1 11 star 0 0 2 0 0 0 2Total 16 10 39 4 1 10 80
Released as Science Fiction Space Opera & Science Fiction. Since Amazon stopped price matching this book, it sells a copy or so a week. I'll let it ride at $3.99 for now while awaiting that lightning strike.
Total downloads and sales reported for the year: 6,537 copies.
Let's compare this result to the ebook market as a whole.
The ebook Marketplace
In traditional publishing, a book that sells 10,000 copies is considered a successful book. In the past, at least, it would likely earn the author a contract for a second book. Thus, by traditional publishing standards, even overlooking the fact that I was just giving away the books, all failed to make the grade in a traditional publishing in their release year (to date). However, that market includes paper books sold in bookstores as well as online, so those books receive far greater exposure (for a month) with traditional publishing.
So how did my books fare compared to the online only ebook market, and the self-publishing market in particular?
I'll use Amazon's ebook sales as generated by Author Earnings's Feb. 2016 report as my basis for comparison, since they provide hard numbers and data based estimates. You can view their report here:http://authorearnings.com/report/february-2016-author-earnings-report/
Authors provide sales and ranking data to AuthorEarnings who then use this data to reverse engineer how Amazon ranks each book. Once a quarter, on a single day, AuthorEarnings collect the sales rankings from all the books listed on Amazon's many "100 Best Selling Books" lists and use this data to estimate sales volume and the actual sales of each book on those lists on that day. This captures data on 200,000 ebooks.
The information from their Feb 2016 sample is displayed on the graph below. The green and grey dots represent author supplied data.
Note that this is a logarithmic graph. While it nicely displays their data points, it presents a very distorted visual view of actual sales. A linear graph of the same data would look something like this:
Using numbers from these graphs, we can estimate the sales range for ebooks in the various levels of ranking:
Sales Rank number of titles sales per day sales per year at day rate #1 to #10 10 8000 to 3000 2.92 million to 1.10 million#11 to #100 90 3000 to 1000 1.10 million to 365,000#101 to #1000 900 1000 to 200 365,000 to 73,000#1001 to #10,000 9,000 200 to 25 73,000 to 9,125#10,001 to #100,000 90,000 25 to 2 9,125 to 730#100,001 to #150,000 50,000 2 to 1 750 to 365#150,000 to #200,000 90,000 1 or less 365 or less
These 200,000 titles represent about 5% of the 4+ million ebooks Amazon currently offers in the Kindle Store and about 6% to 7% of the ebook authors. To put it in better perspective, 95% of all the ebooks Amazon offers likely sell fewer than 365 copies in a year.
These figures include the ebooks of traditionally published authors as well as self-published ones. Self-published books and single author publishers make up 39% of the top 5% of Amazon bestsellers. Their books account for 47% of the daily sales volume, but only 27% of the sales in dollars, reflecting their generally lower price.
As for the market mix of genres, 77% of Smashwords' top 200 selling fiction titles are Romance (including YA Romance) with YA coming in second at about 11%. Detective stories and Fantasy are around 4% each and science fiction clocks in a 1%. Other categories are less popular. Most of these titles are self-published or small press. I've seen other figures that likely cover a broader sample of books and publishers that put science fiction at about 7% of the ebook market, placing it in 6th place, after Romance (16%) Paranormal (15%), Thriller (12%), Mystery (12%) and Fantasy (8%). Science fiction is a player in the ebook market, but far from a leader.
Amazon offers just under 300,000 science fiction ebooks in the Kindle store with almost 8,000 being released each month. About 4,500 science fiction books are offered for free.
The Money
Author Earnings found that 2.8% of Amazon authors or some 5,643 authors with books in the top 100 lists are making more than $10,000/year from their Amazon ebook sales alone. They estimate that there are "many" more authors earning this much who were not captured with their methods because their books were not in any top 100 list. More than half of the authors captured in this category were traditionally published authors. Less than 800 self-published authors were earning more than $25K per year, and a little more than 400 were earning $50K or more per year. It should be noted, this is gross royalties, not profit. Many self-publishing authors invest significant money producing their books. (More on this in a moment.)
To see how my books fared in this market, I will treat my downloads as "sales". A fantasy, and yet, a book in hand, is a book in hand no matter how it got there. And if building a readership is your primary goal, then distribution matter more than sales.
First, assuming all my books were "sold" exclusively on Amazon, how would they rank overall?A Summer in Amber sales/day 6 -- sales rank #20,000 to #40,000Some Day Days sales/day 4 -- sales rank #30,000 to #60,000The Bright Black Sea sales/day 14 -- sales rank #2,200 to #5,000
Using only books actually downloaded on Amazon we get:A Summer in Amber sales rank -- #50,000 to #100,000 Some Day Days sales rank -- #150,000 to #300,000The Bright Black Sea sales rank -- #27,000 to #55,000
Now lets put a money value to these "sales". I'll use Amazon's royalty rates for simplicity. For my total "sales" of 6537 copies I'd have earned for the year:@ $.99 x .35 $2,288@ $1.99 x .35 $4,553@ $2.99 x .70 $13,682@ $3.99 x .70 $18,258@ $4.99 x .70 $22,834@ $5.99 x .70 $27,410
The real numbers would likely have been far, far less. Smashwords' data suggests that about 41 copies of a free book are downloaded for every one sold. Dividing my total "sales" by 41, gives us a more realistic royalty figure in the range of $55 to $668 with the low figure being the more likely one.
Clearly I left very little money on the table by giving my books away. In return, I achieved a circulation level in the upper 2.5% of all ebooks. If my free downloaded books been sold at $2.99, I would've been one of the elite self-published authors making more than $10,000 a year in ebooks – in, mind you, my first year of publishing, starting from a readership of zero. Outside of romance, how likely would one achieve results like these, and at what financial cost?
Which brings us to the flip side to sales – the expenses involved in publishing professional quality ebooks. A lot of money can be spent on preparing a book to be published. There are all sorts of editors, book coaches, proofreaders, cover artists, and book designers offering services to authors. There are also a great variety of advertising and promotional services available to get a book noticed. Authors travel to book fairs and conventions at their expense to meet readers and promote their book. And they can pay to attend seminars or take classes to improve their skills. Most experts suggests that authors avail themselves of at least some of these services to increase their chance of success.
I did everything in house so my expenses were $0.00, and considering that I actually, sold some books, I made a profit in my first year of self-publishing.
But let's say I followed the experts suggestions and hired professional help. I'll keep it to a minimum, “hiring” only a professional proofreader and a professional cover artist. Professional proof readers charge $.02- $.03 a word. Professional artists, $300 to $500 for a cover. Proofreading Art TotalsA Summer in Amber 115K $2,312/$3,468 $300/$500 $2,600/$3,968 Some Day Days 79K $1,530/$2,285 $300/$500 $1,830/$2,785The Bright Black Sea 326K $6,500/$9,780 $300/$500 $6,800/$10,280 Grand Total: $11,230 to $17,033
Had I hired these professionals, I would had to have sold, at the $.99 price point between 32,000 to 48,700 copies to cover my initial expenses. Or between 5,373 to 8,149 copies at the far more unlikely $2.99 price – to make as much money as I made going it alone and for free. Most likely I would have lost between $11,000 and $17,000 dollars, and since sales tend to fade, future sales would not likely do much cover these losses. Whether additional spending on promotional services would have narrowed the gap any is questionable, especially in the science fiction market.
Risking money on this scale for lightning-strike sales results, is not, in my opinion, a wise business decision. There is, of course, a price to be paid for foregoing these expenses in terms of reviews complaining of typos. However, I believe that with the lessons I've learned and new procedures I've put in place, I'll be able to produce future books with far fewer typos right from the start. But there will likely still be typos. They are the price of free.
Final Thoughts
Clearly, releasing initial books for free, especially without any sort of financial investment or marketing, has definite limitations. It takes you only so far. Still, the results, in terms of distribution, are significant.
From my perspective, I think the results are very positive. I made a profit. Without even trying. I did what was necessary, but avoided all the aspects of self-publishing that I wouldn't care to touch with a bargepole while still placing my books into circulation at a level equal to the top 2.5% of Amazon ebook titles. By publishing my books in all available markets, I tripled my sales over going exclusively with Amazon. Those million plus self-published titles tied up in Amazon's Kindle Unlimited Program may have soaked up a lot of excess inventory from other ebook stores, making discovery a little easier outside of Amazon.
I've seen it said that free books are less likely to be read than purchased ones. I've also read that one can expect a review on Amazon for every 100 to 200 books purchased, with 1 in 150 mentioned several times. Using this measure and only Amazon downloads and reviews, A Summer in Amberwas reviewed once for every 67 downloads and The Bright Black Sea 1 in 63 downloads, suggesting to me that they were read just as often as purchased books. Circulation is circulation.
The path I've chosen suits me. I'm happy that my work has been generally well received. That's a great relief, since there was no guarantee readers would like my stories. I hear of first time authors who can count the sales of their book on the fingers of two hands, and give almost every buyer a name as well, so that my 6,500+ books and 110+ ratings is not a bad beginning.
Now, I've no intention of getting into the business of self-publishing – this is just a hobby for me – so that turning the corner to start actually selling books is not a concern of mine. I would think, however, that I'd be looking at downloads over 10,000 copies before I'd make the move. And that may well take several years and half a dozen free books to achieve, if all goes well.
So this, then, is my first annual report. Next year's report should be interesting as well, since I don't have plans to release a new book in 2016. We'll be able to see how sustainable free is over time. (This, by the way, is also not a good business plan, but I like writing long books, and rather than break them up, I'd rather publish them as complete novels, so the next 300K+ novel won't be out until sometime in 2017.)
So, success or failure? Smart or stupid? Any ideas or suggestions? Let me know in the comments below or via email.
One year ago, on 27 April, 2015, I released my first novel, A Summer In Amber followed in July by a second, Some Day Days, and a third, The Bright Black Seain September. All were published on Smashwords and Amazon, all were free on Smashwords and price-matched free on Amazon within a week of their release.
I'd like to share the results of my first year in self-publishing in the hope that my readers will find this window to the world of self-publishing interesting. Fellow authors may also find these results interesting, since I've conducted a pretty pure experiment in the potential and limitations of offering books for free to create or grow readership.
My rational for free was straightforward. As a new writer, I'd forgo royalties in exchange for readers. I had written the stories over the course of five years for the fun of writing with no intention of making money on them – if only because I wrote them to suit my own taste, which is not, as far as I can judge, very mainstream. All three books were released as science fiction, though none of them fit comfortably in any particular sub-genre. My space opera is not military s-f, my post-apocalyptic, steampunk story has neither zombies nor airships, and my little romance is not a conventional commercial romance – though I'm not a reader of popular romances so I can't say that for certain.
Beyond starting this blog, I lifted not a finger to promote them. My business plan was to publish them and let lightning strike. Which is not a business plan. It is, however, all I cared to do. Anything more would have been work and this is all about having fun writing stories, and having fun publishing them. Nothing more. These results can be seen as a test of what pure "free" can achieve.
The Books and Their Numbers
I should make it clear that the numbers reported below are for free downloads, not sales. Anyone who downloads a "sample" gets the whole book. My books have been on sale at list price on Amazon's foreign sites, and for the last 6 weeks, The Bright Black Sea has been at full price on Amazon's US store as well. The total for these actual sales is in the low double digits.
Books published on Smashwords are also distributed to Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and Kobo. Kobo does not report download numbers of free books, so the totals are somewhat under reported.
Rather than reporting exact numbers for each store, I'll report the combined downloads. The ratio of Amazon downloads to the Smashwords versions varies by title, but taken as a whole, the combined Smashwords downloads were something like double Amazon's downloads.
I've also listed the number of review and ratings for each title. Rating and reviews from Amazon (A), Smashwords (S), iBooks (iBK), Barnes & Noble (B&N), Kobo (K) and Goodreads (GR).
A Summer in Amber A mystery/adventure/romance set in a post-apocalyptic Scotland. A mirror-image steampunk story with 19th century tech transposed to the late 21st century after solar storms lay waste to power grids, satellites and digital devices.
Released 27 April 2015 (Free on Smashwords, $.99 on Amazon, price matched in about a week. List price changed to $2.99 in March. Has been free on Amazon UK for several months.)Days on the market: 368 Downloads to 1 May 2016: 2222Average downloads per day: 6 (April average: 2.7)Reviews and/or ratings: 33 Downloads per rating/review: 82 A S iBK B&N K GR Total5 star 9 0 2 1 0 1 134 star 4 4 3 0 3 2 163 star 0 0 0 0 0 0 02 star 1 0 0 0 0 3 41 star 0 0 0 0 0 0 0Total 14 4 5 1 3 6 33
Released in Science Fiction Steampunk & Adventure, changed to Steampunk and post-apocalyptic after Feb 2016. (Amazon rating include 2 at Amazon UK)
Some Day DaysA new adult romance and exploration of technology set in Oxford & Cambridge in the not too distant future. Somewhat experimental in style & structure. A collection of "pieces" that are the start of a never to be written much longer story.
Released 9 July 2015 (Free on Smashwords, $.99 on Amazon before price matching. List price changed to $1.99 1 March 2016 Full price outside of Amazon.com)Days on the market: 296Downloads and sales to 1 May 2016: 1139Average downloads per day: 3.8 (April average: 2 )Reviews and/or ratings; 5 (including one none starred one)Downloads per rating/review 570 A S iBK B&N K GR Total5 star 0 0 0 0 0 0 04 star 0 1 0 0 0 1 23 star 0 0 0 0 0 1 12 star 0 0 0 0 0 1 11 star 0 0 0 0 0 0 0Total 0 1 0 0 0 3 4
Released in Science Fiction romance & Romance, changed to Literature & New Adult Romance after Feb 2016
The Bright Black Sea A long, 325,000 word, old-school inspired space opera/adventure/mystery. Began as a serial, written in three novel-length parts, and released in a single volume since there was no financial incentive to stretch it into a trilogy.
Released 16 Sept 2015 (Free on Smashwords, $.99 Amazon until price matched. List price changed to $3.99 1 March 2016. Full price outside of Amazon.com. Amazon dropped price matching on 9 March so it is now available at list price.)Days on the market: 227Downloads & sales to 1 May 2016: 3176 Average downloads per day: 14 (April average [including Amazon sales]: 5 )Reviews and/or ratings: 80 (The 2 non-starred reviews were positive reviews.) Downloads per rating/review 45 A S iBK B&N K GR Totalnon-starred 2 25 star 11 6 30 3 0 9 594 star 5 2 3 1 1 0 123 star 0 0 4 0 0 0 42 star 0 0 0 0 0 1 11 star 0 0 2 0 0 0 2Total 16 10 39 4 1 10 80
Released as Science Fiction Space Opera & Science Fiction. Since Amazon stopped price matching this book, it sells a copy or so a week. I'll let it ride at $3.99 for now while awaiting that lightning strike.
Total downloads and sales reported for the year: 6,537 copies.
Let's compare this result to the ebook market as a whole.
The ebook Marketplace
In traditional publishing, a book that sells 10,000 copies is considered a successful book. In the past, at least, it would likely earn the author a contract for a second book. Thus, by traditional publishing standards, even overlooking the fact that I was just giving away the books, all failed to make the grade in a traditional publishing in their release year (to date). However, that market includes paper books sold in bookstores as well as online, so those books receive far greater exposure (for a month) with traditional publishing.
So how did my books fare compared to the online only ebook market, and the self-publishing market in particular?
I'll use Amazon's ebook sales as generated by Author Earnings's Feb. 2016 report as my basis for comparison, since they provide hard numbers and data based estimates. You can view their report here:http://authorearnings.com/report/february-2016-author-earnings-report/
Authors provide sales and ranking data to AuthorEarnings who then use this data to reverse engineer how Amazon ranks each book. Once a quarter, on a single day, AuthorEarnings collect the sales rankings from all the books listed on Amazon's many "100 Best Selling Books" lists and use this data to estimate sales volume and the actual sales of each book on those lists on that day. This captures data on 200,000 ebooks.
The information from their Feb 2016 sample is displayed on the graph below. The green and grey dots represent author supplied data.
Note that this is a logarithmic graph. While it nicely displays their data points, it presents a very distorted visual view of actual sales. A linear graph of the same data would look something like this:
Using numbers from these graphs, we can estimate the sales range for ebooks in the various levels of ranking:
Sales Rank number of titles sales per day sales per year at day rate #1 to #10 10 8000 to 3000 2.92 million to 1.10 million#11 to #100 90 3000 to 1000 1.10 million to 365,000#101 to #1000 900 1000 to 200 365,000 to 73,000#1001 to #10,000 9,000 200 to 25 73,000 to 9,125#10,001 to #100,000 90,000 25 to 2 9,125 to 730#100,001 to #150,000 50,000 2 to 1 750 to 365#150,000 to #200,000 90,000 1 or less 365 or less
These 200,000 titles represent about 5% of the 4+ million ebooks Amazon currently offers in the Kindle Store and about 6% to 7% of the ebook authors. To put it in better perspective, 95% of all the ebooks Amazon offers likely sell fewer than 365 copies in a year.
These figures include the ebooks of traditionally published authors as well as self-published ones. Self-published books and single author publishers make up 39% of the top 5% of Amazon bestsellers. Their books account for 47% of the daily sales volume, but only 27% of the sales in dollars, reflecting their generally lower price.
As for the market mix of genres, 77% of Smashwords' top 200 selling fiction titles are Romance (including YA Romance) with YA coming in second at about 11%. Detective stories and Fantasy are around 4% each and science fiction clocks in a 1%. Other categories are less popular. Most of these titles are self-published or small press. I've seen other figures that likely cover a broader sample of books and publishers that put science fiction at about 7% of the ebook market, placing it in 6th place, after Romance (16%) Paranormal (15%), Thriller (12%), Mystery (12%) and Fantasy (8%). Science fiction is a player in the ebook market, but far from a leader.
Amazon offers just under 300,000 science fiction ebooks in the Kindle store with almost 8,000 being released each month. About 4,500 science fiction books are offered for free.
The Money
Author Earnings found that 2.8% of Amazon authors or some 5,643 authors with books in the top 100 lists are making more than $10,000/year from their Amazon ebook sales alone. They estimate that there are "many" more authors earning this much who were not captured with their methods because their books were not in any top 100 list. More than half of the authors captured in this category were traditionally published authors. Less than 800 self-published authors were earning more than $25K per year, and a little more than 400 were earning $50K or more per year. It should be noted, this is gross royalties, not profit. Many self-publishing authors invest significant money producing their books. (More on this in a moment.)
To see how my books fared in this market, I will treat my downloads as "sales". A fantasy, and yet, a book in hand, is a book in hand no matter how it got there. And if building a readership is your primary goal, then distribution matter more than sales.
First, assuming all my books were "sold" exclusively on Amazon, how would they rank overall?A Summer in Amber sales/day 6 -- sales rank #20,000 to #40,000Some Day Days sales/day 4 -- sales rank #30,000 to #60,000The Bright Black Sea sales/day 14 -- sales rank #2,200 to #5,000
Using only books actually downloaded on Amazon we get:A Summer in Amber sales rank -- #50,000 to #100,000 Some Day Days sales rank -- #150,000 to #300,000The Bright Black Sea sales rank -- #27,000 to #55,000
Now lets put a money value to these "sales". I'll use Amazon's royalty rates for simplicity. For my total "sales" of 6537 copies I'd have earned for the year:@ $.99 x .35 $2,288@ $1.99 x .35 $4,553@ $2.99 x .70 $13,682@ $3.99 x .70 $18,258@ $4.99 x .70 $22,834@ $5.99 x .70 $27,410
The real numbers would likely have been far, far less. Smashwords' data suggests that about 41 copies of a free book are downloaded for every one sold. Dividing my total "sales" by 41, gives us a more realistic royalty figure in the range of $55 to $668 with the low figure being the more likely one.
Clearly I left very little money on the table by giving my books away. In return, I achieved a circulation level in the upper 2.5% of all ebooks. If my free downloaded books been sold at $2.99, I would've been one of the elite self-published authors making more than $10,000 a year in ebooks – in, mind you, my first year of publishing, starting from a readership of zero. Outside of romance, how likely would one achieve results like these, and at what financial cost?
Which brings us to the flip side to sales – the expenses involved in publishing professional quality ebooks. A lot of money can be spent on preparing a book to be published. There are all sorts of editors, book coaches, proofreaders, cover artists, and book designers offering services to authors. There are also a great variety of advertising and promotional services available to get a book noticed. Authors travel to book fairs and conventions at their expense to meet readers and promote their book. And they can pay to attend seminars or take classes to improve their skills. Most experts suggests that authors avail themselves of at least some of these services to increase their chance of success.
I did everything in house so my expenses were $0.00, and considering that I actually, sold some books, I made a profit in my first year of self-publishing.
But let's say I followed the experts suggestions and hired professional help. I'll keep it to a minimum, “hiring” only a professional proofreader and a professional cover artist. Professional proof readers charge $.02- $.03 a word. Professional artists, $300 to $500 for a cover. Proofreading Art TotalsA Summer in Amber 115K $2,312/$3,468 $300/$500 $2,600/$3,968 Some Day Days 79K $1,530/$2,285 $300/$500 $1,830/$2,785The Bright Black Sea 326K $6,500/$9,780 $300/$500 $6,800/$10,280 Grand Total: $11,230 to $17,033
Had I hired these professionals, I would had to have sold, at the $.99 price point between 32,000 to 48,700 copies to cover my initial expenses. Or between 5,373 to 8,149 copies at the far more unlikely $2.99 price – to make as much money as I made going it alone and for free. Most likely I would have lost between $11,000 and $17,000 dollars, and since sales tend to fade, future sales would not likely do much cover these losses. Whether additional spending on promotional services would have narrowed the gap any is questionable, especially in the science fiction market.
Risking money on this scale for lightning-strike sales results, is not, in my opinion, a wise business decision. There is, of course, a price to be paid for foregoing these expenses in terms of reviews complaining of typos. However, I believe that with the lessons I've learned and new procedures I've put in place, I'll be able to produce future books with far fewer typos right from the start. But there will likely still be typos. They are the price of free.
Final Thoughts
Clearly, releasing initial books for free, especially without any sort of financial investment or marketing, has definite limitations. It takes you only so far. Still, the results, in terms of distribution, are significant.
From my perspective, I think the results are very positive. I made a profit. Without even trying. I did what was necessary, but avoided all the aspects of self-publishing that I wouldn't care to touch with a bargepole while still placing my books into circulation at a level equal to the top 2.5% of Amazon ebook titles. By publishing my books in all available markets, I tripled my sales over going exclusively with Amazon. Those million plus self-published titles tied up in Amazon's Kindle Unlimited Program may have soaked up a lot of excess inventory from other ebook stores, making discovery a little easier outside of Amazon.
I've seen it said that free books are less likely to be read than purchased ones. I've also read that one can expect a review on Amazon for every 100 to 200 books purchased, with 1 in 150 mentioned several times. Using this measure and only Amazon downloads and reviews, A Summer in Amberwas reviewed once for every 67 downloads and The Bright Black Sea 1 in 63 downloads, suggesting to me that they were read just as often as purchased books. Circulation is circulation.
The path I've chosen suits me. I'm happy that my work has been generally well received. That's a great relief, since there was no guarantee readers would like my stories. I hear of first time authors who can count the sales of their book on the fingers of two hands, and give almost every buyer a name as well, so that my 6,500+ books and 110+ ratings is not a bad beginning.
Now, I've no intention of getting into the business of self-publishing – this is just a hobby for me – so that turning the corner to start actually selling books is not a concern of mine. I would think, however, that I'd be looking at downloads over 10,000 copies before I'd make the move. And that may well take several years and half a dozen free books to achieve, if all goes well.
So this, then, is my first annual report. Next year's report should be interesting as well, since I don't have plans to release a new book in 2016. We'll be able to see how sustainable free is over time. (This, by the way, is also not a good business plan, but I like writing long books, and rather than break them up, I'd rather publish them as complete novels, so the next 300K+ novel won't be out until sometime in 2017.)
So, success or failure? Smart or stupid? Any ideas or suggestions? Let me know in the comments below or via email.
April 30, 2016
The Lost Star's Sea Update
The bad news: I've decided to push back the release of The Lost Star's Sea until mid-2017.The good news: I've decided to release the complete story instead of only Part One this fall and Part Two at some later date.
This decision came about after finishing the second draft of Part One. I felt disappointed in it after reading through it this last month. It just wasn't “it”. And if I felt this way, I'm pretty sure you'd be disappointed too. Luckily I don't think the reason is what I've written, but what I've not written.
I intended to split The Lost Star's Sea in two parts. The first would cover Wil Litang initial adventures as a shipwrecked spaceer in the endless skies of the Pela, and how he managed to survive and made a new life for himself in the Pela. Part Two would then shake that life up by bringing back the lingering questions and loose threads from The Bright Black Sea and questions raised in Part One. That, however, isn't going to work. I found that only half the story isn't enough, even though I had it ending a inportant story arc. Or maybe because of it, since that ending struck me as trite and cheesy. Too easy.
The thing is, this story continues the episodic pattern from the first volume, which is to say, a series of semi-self-contained stories. Part One has 3 to 5 of them (depending on how you divide them). This works best if each episode builds on the larger story arc. But if that larger story arc is not very evident, as it is in Part One, then it becomes just a flat recital of this adventure ant that adventure. (I'm not known for brevity in my writing, and this book will be no exception, evident by the fact that I'm 180K+ words into the story and am still laying the ground work, so to speak.) While I hope this series of adventures are interesting in themselves, they do not address the questions left hanging at the end of The Bright Black Sea and when I came to the end of my revisions, I felt sort of cheated – I'd been promised a story, but only given half of one. I'm not going to settle for that.
And if I felt that way, I could only imagine how you might feel. This is especially true since I've only come to realize that The Lost Star's Sea might not be the book you're expecting. I knew what I wanted to do with the next book halfway though writing the last one, but I'm not sure that I telegraphed that in the story. (Not that I wanted to.) So that if the story doesn't start out like you expect and then ends before what you expected ever appears, well, I don't think you'd be happy. I'm not going to risk that.
I realize that series writers do this all the time – stringing stories along, book by book for financial reasons. And readers, at least some of them, put up with this. I just came across a new fantasy series, Emperor of the Eight Islands, that is being published in four volumes – at $9.99 each for 270 page book – so that by the time readers reach the length of The Bright Black Sea, they'll have paid $40 for the story. This makes financial sense – assuming you can keep readers interested enough to reach the final volume, but my stories are not commercial endeavors (when I can help it), so I have no incentive to break my long novels into bite size pieces. I can afford to present them in the best way possible, as a complete story.
By deciding to publish the whole story in one volume, I now must begin daydreaming up what happens in the second half of the story, something I'd not ventured to do until now. It can be hard. When you're half a million words into a story, the characters no longer do what you want them to. They have character. And I'm a stickler for avoiding plot holes. Action must flow naturally. Characters may occasionally do ill advised things, but they can't do obviously stupid things just to make a nice scene. So coming up with a story involves a lot of “what-ifs?”. "Would they do that?" and then “Does it make sense?” I'm hoping to release the complete story by next summer, if all goes well. But you never know about that. It's the goal. Hopefully, it will be worth the wait.
April 27, 2016
The Failed Art of The Bright Black Sea
For the last dozen years or so I've been painting landscape paintings. I've pretty much developed an impressionistic landscape style that is fairly unique. Not too popular, but unique. Which is what counts. This style, however, does not translate well into illustrations. It lacks detail and mine, at least often lack people. For A Summer in Amber and Some Day Days, I managed to do two landscapes, that while they're not really good cover illustrations, do at least set a tone for the stories. The Bright Black Sea has so far evaded my attempts to create a cover I like.
There are several reasons for this. First, as I mentioned, is that my style is vague on details, and most s-f book covers are big on details. Secondly, no matter how well designed the Lost Star is for it's environment, it lacks gee-galls and thingamajigs sticking out all over the place to make for an interesting cover illustration. The Lost Star is basically the most boring space ship imaginable, from every angle. It doesn't even have the fins like the old style rockets of s-f. Thirdly, being the author of the story, I know the story too well to just page through the book and find a scene that I care to do, irregardless of how important or unimportant that scene is in the story. A good cover might be one of the battle scenes, which have plenty of space ships and Star Wars type fighters. Throw in a bunch of explosions and you have a typical space opera cover. Except that episode plays only a small part of the story, and would be misleading, since The Bright Black Sea is not a military s-f book. I want to find something that represents the whole story, and that mostly comes back around to the Lost Star/Starry Shore. The boring old Lost Star without any thingamajigs.
Right now, the image I am using for my non-Amazon cover is this one:
You simply need to inverse it, rotate and crop it get rid of that house in the corner and put in a few “nova” effects in Gimp and you have the cover – the Nine Star Nebula and a star or two.
I did, at one time, knock off some small sketches, but none turned out good enough to use:
The four pieces above were all little 6x8" sketches.
I also made several attempts to do a cover with the Lost Star more than a speck in the painting, neither of them made the grade:
In these cases, I used filters in Gimp to give them some additional and some lighting effects as well. As I said, both turned out looking too crude and amateurish. The one I'm using for my Amazon cover is another painting using Gimp filters, but does not have a crude space ship in it.
Recently, I tried one with people instead of the ship -- a scene from the Lost Star's bridge. As you can see below, it did not go well. Still way too amateurish. Not professional looking at all. But there was one other problem, and for me, a greater problem -- I don't want to define how my characters look. I want to leave that up to you, the readers.
In part this reflects a quirk in the way my mind works. I can't picture living people in my mind. I recognize them, at least so far, but I can't picture them. I have a little bit better luck picturing photos of people, but still, it's pretty vague. Not surprisingly then, I have no images of my characters in my head, just vague impressions of them. I'd probably recognize them if I met them, but I can't picture them. So rather than just listing a bunch of characteristics for each that mean nothing to me, I keep my descriptions very sketchy, and you can ignore them if you choose. So by drawing for the cover, I was in some way defining them, which I do't want to do. These stories are set 80,000 years in the future and all the old earth ethnic types have long since been mixed and merged. Who knows what types have evolved in the long settled planets? The characters can look like whatever you want to look like. By making the cover below I felt I was compromising your freedom to imagine the crew of the Lost Star as you see them in your mind. As you can see, I tried to keep everyone as undefined as possible, and well, it didn't work out in any case. This image doesn't look like how I envision things, so it forget it after you look at it. Please.
I haven't given up yet. 'm sure I'll make another effort or two. I might try the more graphical approach you see now days in covers. We'll see.
There are several reasons for this. First, as I mentioned, is that my style is vague on details, and most s-f book covers are big on details. Secondly, no matter how well designed the Lost Star is for it's environment, it lacks gee-galls and thingamajigs sticking out all over the place to make for an interesting cover illustration. The Lost Star is basically the most boring space ship imaginable, from every angle. It doesn't even have the fins like the old style rockets of s-f. Thirdly, being the author of the story, I know the story too well to just page through the book and find a scene that I care to do, irregardless of how important or unimportant that scene is in the story. A good cover might be one of the battle scenes, which have plenty of space ships and Star Wars type fighters. Throw in a bunch of explosions and you have a typical space opera cover. Except that episode plays only a small part of the story, and would be misleading, since The Bright Black Sea is not a military s-f book. I want to find something that represents the whole story, and that mostly comes back around to the Lost Star/Starry Shore. The boring old Lost Star without any thingamajigs.
Right now, the image I am using for my non-Amazon cover is this one:
You simply need to inverse it, rotate and crop it get rid of that house in the corner and put in a few “nova” effects in Gimp and you have the cover – the Nine Star Nebula and a star or two.
I did, at one time, knock off some small sketches, but none turned out good enough to use:
The four pieces above were all little 6x8" sketches.
I also made several attempts to do a cover with the Lost Star more than a speck in the painting, neither of them made the grade:
In these cases, I used filters in Gimp to give them some additional and some lighting effects as well. As I said, both turned out looking too crude and amateurish. The one I'm using for my Amazon cover is another painting using Gimp filters, but does not have a crude space ship in it.
Recently, I tried one with people instead of the ship -- a scene from the Lost Star's bridge. As you can see below, it did not go well. Still way too amateurish. Not professional looking at all. But there was one other problem, and for me, a greater problem -- I don't want to define how my characters look. I want to leave that up to you, the readers.
In part this reflects a quirk in the way my mind works. I can't picture living people in my mind. I recognize them, at least so far, but I can't picture them. I have a little bit better luck picturing photos of people, but still, it's pretty vague. Not surprisingly then, I have no images of my characters in my head, just vague impressions of them. I'd probably recognize them if I met them, but I can't picture them. So rather than just listing a bunch of characteristics for each that mean nothing to me, I keep my descriptions very sketchy, and you can ignore them if you choose. So by drawing for the cover, I was in some way defining them, which I do't want to do. These stories are set 80,000 years in the future and all the old earth ethnic types have long since been mixed and merged. Who knows what types have evolved in the long settled planets? The characters can look like whatever you want to look like. By making the cover below I felt I was compromising your freedom to imagine the crew of the Lost Star as you see them in your mind. As you can see, I tried to keep everyone as undefined as possible, and well, it didn't work out in any case. This image doesn't look like how I envision things, so it forget it after you look at it. Please.
I haven't given up yet. 'm sure I'll make another effort or two. I might try the more graphical approach you see now days in covers. We'll see.
April 21, 2016
New Cover for the Bright Black Sea
This is the new Amazon cover for The Bright Black Sea. Without price matching, I'm going to have to experiment to see what sells. I can't change the story, but I can change the cover. We'll start with this one. Unlike the last cover, this piece of art was something I did especially for the cover. I ended up choosing the other one because I felt that it fit better with The Bright Black Sea title I eventually chose. Both covers are too static, but the one I tried with the Lost Star on it sucked, as did the bridge scene one, so I'm still stuck with a static cover. I added the "Captain Wil Litang's Adventures #1" to the title, anticipating the second volume that will be released in the next four or five months.
In addition to the new cover, I've also re-written its blurb on Amazon. As a free book I didn't (and don't) feel I need to sell the book, if only because it doesn't matter how many copies are downloaded – I make the same amount of money. None. Instead, I wrote my blurbs with the idea of appealing to readers who would likely like the book while steering away people who likely wouldn't. But now I'm in the selling game, like it or not, I'll try selling the book to everyone. To that end I'm dropping the classic, golden age angle, and going with a straight space opera/space adventure pitch. We'll see how that works. Or not. It'll likely be hard to tell. Still, it's fun to experiment.
April 15, 2016
Contact Information Update
It has been brought to my attention that the email address I had set up for this page doesn't work. Sorry about that. It seemed to work at the time I set it up. I have now changed it to one that I know works. cmlitka@gmail.com Please feel free to contact me with your comments or questions. I would like to hear from you.
April 4, 2016
The Long March
It is going on seven years since I started writing The Kiss of the White Witch. More than a half of million words in print later, I've come to the end of this long march with the release, this past weekend, of versions no. 3 of A Summer in Amber and The Bright Black Sea, and version no. 2 of Some Day Days,the definitive versions of these books.
The improvements are extensive enough to warrant updating your current copies if you can.
I wrote my books on what is now, an eight year old Mac mini with a now out of day OS and an out of date version of LibreOffice. It's always pilot error – the old version of LibreOffice didn't type the typos – they're all mine. But somehow, I swear, it seemed to find fewer of them than newer versions did. Anyway, between pilot err and a less capable program, typos got overlooked. I then made the mistake of making revisions after proofreading. Lessons have been learned the hard way.
Last fall I bought a $150 Windows laptop, loaded the newest version of LibreOffice on it and ran A Summer in Amber and The Bright Black Sea through the spell checker of the newer version which picked up many typos that the previous version seemed to have overlooked. At the same time, I also read through and slightly revised The Bright Black Sea. And yet, some typos evaded capture.
Fast forward to this past weekend. My little laptop came with a free 1 year subscription to Microsoft Office. Being familiar and happy with LibreOffice, I hadn't bothered to activate this feature until last weekend. I then spent the weekend running all three books through Word's spelling and grammar features, correcting things like extra spaces, double words, punctuations, adding hyphens to words, correcting correctly spelled words in the wrong places, and a few misspellings. (Or at least it disagrees with the current spelling. For example, Word doesn't like "strongroom", suggesting it should be "strong room" though both seem to be right.) With this review, I've reached the limits of what I can do to make my books as typo-free as possible. These, then, are their final versions, though, as always, I welcome and will correct any mistakes pointed out to me by my readers.
So we've reached the end of the long march. What's next?
At the moment I'm halfway through the second draft of The Lost Star's Sea. This is the draft where I reconcile what I wrote in the beginning with what I wrote later on. Often I don't know where the story's going until I write it, so this second draft is the first time I know how everything works out, and can make any changes necessary to insure everything hangs together in the complete work. In addition, I enhance the dialogue, characters, and descriptions, since I tend to only sketch some of that in the first draft where I'm more concerned about getting the story down than fine tuning it.
When this second draft is done I'll move it over to my laptop and do all the subsequent drafts on that machine with it enhanced spell checker features. Hopefully these drafts will only involve making sentences clearer and sounding right. There' a hundred ways to say anything, and on any given day, one way may sound better than another, so it's sort of a moving target. Eventually, however, you have to settle on one way. When I've settled, I'll run it through MS Office and make all the suggested corrections. Only then will I print it out for my proofreader. And then, after making all the corrections that comeback from proofreading, and only those corrections, the story should be ready for release. I'm currently planning to release it early in Sept. 2016, a year after the first Captain Wil Litang volume.
Looking ahead to 2017's novel, I'm thinking it'll be a stand alone adventure story set in a world much like our own, but differing in details, sort of an an alternate-world/fantasy story. The main characters look to be arcane-archaeologists – folks who dig up and attempt to decipher the fragments of a series of long dead civilizations lost in myth. It will be set in a time period something like the first half of our 20th century. Right now it's looking like a wartime espionage story – has one side discovered an arcane weapon powerful enough to rule them all? – but heaven knows, that may well change a dozen times between now and whenever the next story is written.
A third volume of Captain Wil Litangs adventures is also planned, but I'm in no hurry to write it. Not only do I not have a clue as to how things turn out, but I'd like to hold off and see how many potential readers it might have. It makes more sense to write books that may attract new readers than to write books that only focus on one sub-set of readers. Indeed, I wrote The Lost Star's Sea only because I had the idea for it halfway through writing The Bright Black Sea and steered that story towards it, so it needed to be written.
Coming up next, early in May 2016 I will issue my first annual report on self-publishing. All the numbers, for each of my three books to give everyone an insight into the realities of self-publishing, and the potential and limitations of offering works for free.
The improvements are extensive enough to warrant updating your current copies if you can.
I wrote my books on what is now, an eight year old Mac mini with a now out of day OS and an out of date version of LibreOffice. It's always pilot error – the old version of LibreOffice didn't type the typos – they're all mine. But somehow, I swear, it seemed to find fewer of them than newer versions did. Anyway, between pilot err and a less capable program, typos got overlooked. I then made the mistake of making revisions after proofreading. Lessons have been learned the hard way.
Last fall I bought a $150 Windows laptop, loaded the newest version of LibreOffice on it and ran A Summer in Amber and The Bright Black Sea through the spell checker of the newer version which picked up many typos that the previous version seemed to have overlooked. At the same time, I also read through and slightly revised The Bright Black Sea. And yet, some typos evaded capture.
Fast forward to this past weekend. My little laptop came with a free 1 year subscription to Microsoft Office. Being familiar and happy with LibreOffice, I hadn't bothered to activate this feature until last weekend. I then spent the weekend running all three books through Word's spelling and grammar features, correcting things like extra spaces, double words, punctuations, adding hyphens to words, correcting correctly spelled words in the wrong places, and a few misspellings. (Or at least it disagrees with the current spelling. For example, Word doesn't like "strongroom", suggesting it should be "strong room" though both seem to be right.) With this review, I've reached the limits of what I can do to make my books as typo-free as possible. These, then, are their final versions, though, as always, I welcome and will correct any mistakes pointed out to me by my readers.
So we've reached the end of the long march. What's next?
At the moment I'm halfway through the second draft of The Lost Star's Sea. This is the draft where I reconcile what I wrote in the beginning with what I wrote later on. Often I don't know where the story's going until I write it, so this second draft is the first time I know how everything works out, and can make any changes necessary to insure everything hangs together in the complete work. In addition, I enhance the dialogue, characters, and descriptions, since I tend to only sketch some of that in the first draft where I'm more concerned about getting the story down than fine tuning it.
When this second draft is done I'll move it over to my laptop and do all the subsequent drafts on that machine with it enhanced spell checker features. Hopefully these drafts will only involve making sentences clearer and sounding right. There' a hundred ways to say anything, and on any given day, one way may sound better than another, so it's sort of a moving target. Eventually, however, you have to settle on one way. When I've settled, I'll run it through MS Office and make all the suggested corrections. Only then will I print it out for my proofreader. And then, after making all the corrections that comeback from proofreading, and only those corrections, the story should be ready for release. I'm currently planning to release it early in Sept. 2016, a year after the first Captain Wil Litang volume.
Looking ahead to 2017's novel, I'm thinking it'll be a stand alone adventure story set in a world much like our own, but differing in details, sort of an an alternate-world/fantasy story. The main characters look to be arcane-archaeologists – folks who dig up and attempt to decipher the fragments of a series of long dead civilizations lost in myth. It will be set in a time period something like the first half of our 20th century. Right now it's looking like a wartime espionage story – has one side discovered an arcane weapon powerful enough to rule them all? – but heaven knows, that may well change a dozen times between now and whenever the next story is written.
A third volume of Captain Wil Litangs adventures is also planned, but I'm in no hurry to write it. Not only do I not have a clue as to how things turn out, but I'd like to hold off and see how many potential readers it might have. It makes more sense to write books that may attract new readers than to write books that only focus on one sub-set of readers. Indeed, I wrote The Lost Star's Sea only because I had the idea for it halfway through writing The Bright Black Sea and steered that story towards it, so it needed to be written.
Coming up next, early in May 2016 I will issue my first annual report on self-publishing. All the numbers, for each of my three books to give everyone an insight into the realities of self-publishing, and the potential and limitations of offering works for free.
April 1, 2016
Price Matching Or Not
Wouldn't you know, just as soon as I decide not to obsess about things like sales and reviews, and only check in once a month to record my downloads, Amazon does something unexpected, unexplained, and unannounced. On March 9th it stopped discounting one of my books, The Bright Black Sea so I discovered it listed at its full $3.99 price instead of free.
Unlike Smashwords and the ebook stores it distributes to, I'm unable to list a book on Amazon priced at "Free". It must be $.99 or more. Amazon can, at its discretion, discount the price of a book to match prices with other ebook stores, something they have very kindly done for all my books, once I call this to their attention. (At least in the US – world wide they sell them at list price. Except when they don't. A Summer in Amber is free on Amazon UK, though the other two books are not. I have no idea how this all works.)
I don't know why they decided to stop price matching The Bright Black Sea. My preferred price is free, for many reasons, including my desire, as a new writer to reach a larger readership.
The question now is what should I do? I could contact Amazon again and point out that they're being undersold? Should I reduce my price back to $.99, and see what they do next? Or I should let things ride for a while and see what happens? Well, letting sleeping dogs lie is one of my guiding principles, so I'm just going to leave things as they are for now. When I see authors selling 50 page novellas for $4 or $5, I don't feel bad selling a 800+ page novel for $3.99, even if it has several typos.
I don't like that some people are paying for a book (even at a bargain price) that they could download for free elsewhere. However, I promise that all my royalties from the sale of The Bright Black Sea will go into a mason jar and when it's full enough, I'll use that money to hire a professional proofreader. There's over $10 in it right now. However, since the proofreading bill for The Bright Black Sea would run between $6,500 and $9,800, it may take a while.
Unlike Smashwords and the ebook stores it distributes to, I'm unable to list a book on Amazon priced at "Free". It must be $.99 or more. Amazon can, at its discretion, discount the price of a book to match prices with other ebook stores, something they have very kindly done for all my books, once I call this to their attention. (At least in the US – world wide they sell them at list price. Except when they don't. A Summer in Amber is free on Amazon UK, though the other two books are not. I have no idea how this all works.)
I don't know why they decided to stop price matching The Bright Black Sea. My preferred price is free, for many reasons, including my desire, as a new writer to reach a larger readership.
The question now is what should I do? I could contact Amazon again and point out that they're being undersold? Should I reduce my price back to $.99, and see what they do next? Or I should let things ride for a while and see what happens? Well, letting sleeping dogs lie is one of my guiding principles, so I'm just going to leave things as they are for now. When I see authors selling 50 page novellas for $4 or $5, I don't feel bad selling a 800+ page novel for $3.99, even if it has several typos.
I don't like that some people are paying for a book (even at a bargain price) that they could download for free elsewhere. However, I promise that all my royalties from the sale of The Bright Black Sea will go into a mason jar and when it's full enough, I'll use that money to hire a professional proofreader. There's over $10 in it right now. However, since the proofreading bill for The Bright Black Sea would run between $6,500 and $9,800, it may take a while.
March 1, 2016
The Lost Star's Sea – Vol. 2 of Wil Litang's Adventures (Fall 2016)
The Lost Star's Sea takes up Wil Litang's story directly after his ill considered return to the Pela. In it he finds himself alive, but castaway in the floating islands and the endless sea of the Archipelago of the Tenth Star. Ill luck or good? It could go either way, but one thing seems all but certain – if he can stay alive long enough, he'll likely have to find a new life in the Pela. However, the "if he can stay alive" part looks very iffy indeed, between a deadly foe, fierce dragons, primitive, savage peoples, pirates, bandits, and beings so strange that they defy explanation.
The Bright Black Sea was my riff on the space operas of the golden age of science fiction. The Lost Star's Sea is my riff on the old planetary adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack Vance, and the like. As with The Bright Black Sea, it is rather like a jazz version of an old show tune – familiar, and yet very different, with it's own tempo and style, turning a familiar old standard into something new and unexpected.
Style-wise, it follows the pattern set by The Bright Black Sea – an episodic adventure that takes the reader to new islands of wonder in the company of Wil Litang and the good friends and interesting companions he meets along his way. Once again it is a good long novel, likely ending up 170K to 175K words long and is complete in itself – drawing to a close with no major cliffhangers, but with the promise of more adventures ahead. Ideally it'll eventually have a companion Pela volume, The Endless Sea, but even if all goes well, that title is unlikely to appear for some years down the line. Truth be told, I know exactly one thing you'll not know once you read The Lost Star's Sea, and I don't know what it'll mean. Indeed, I haven't a clue as to what happens to Litang after the ending of this volume.
The complete first draft of this story is complete. The hardest part is astern. Now I'm putting it aside for a month or two before returning with a fresh eye to it to work it into its final form over late spring and the summer. If all goes well, The Lost Star's Sea will be ready to be released late in the summer or early in the fall of 2016.
New Prices on Amazon
A brief note. I've raised the "list price" of my books on Amazon from $.99 to $1.99 for Some Day Days, $2.99 for A Summer in Amber, with The Bright Black Sea is now listed for $3.99. This is merely a marketing experiment, not a change in policy. I publish my books to share, not sell.
Pricing is a business decision. However, some people view prices as the appraised value of the book. So as an experiment, I've raised my list prices to increase the "appraised value" of the stories for anyone with this view.
And just to make my philosophy of writing and publishing clear, I write and publish for fun, not for profit. I publish to share my stories with readers of similar tastes, and enjoy it when they do. I also like the sense of accomplishment that bringing a long project to completion brings. I can assure you that I'm leaving very little money on the table in doing this. I plan to publish on this blog a full report of my first year in the self-publishing world with a complete accounting of how each book performed, so that both readers and any other self-published author can get a glimpse into the rather myth-filled world of indie-publishing.
Pricing is a business decision. However, some people view prices as the appraised value of the book. So as an experiment, I've raised my list prices to increase the "appraised value" of the stories for anyone with this view.
And just to make my philosophy of writing and publishing clear, I write and publish for fun, not for profit. I publish to share my stories with readers of similar tastes, and enjoy it when they do. I also like the sense of accomplishment that bringing a long project to completion brings. I can assure you that I'm leaving very little money on the table in doing this. I plan to publish on this blog a full report of my first year in the self-publishing world with a complete accounting of how each book performed, so that both readers and any other self-published author can get a glimpse into the rather myth-filled world of indie-publishing.
February 23, 2016
Updates
Just a quick note to mention that I've uploaded minor updates to all three books. I'd done this last month for the Kindle editions and have now updated the Smashwords versions as well. Just a few small typos and largely inconsequential changes. I will continue to update any book so as to eliminate any remaining mistakes as I find them or you point them out to me.
In addition, I tinkered with the categories for A Summer in Amber and Some Day Days. I don't write my books "to market", which is to say that I don't identify a specific type of story and then write my story as a close imitation. I write my stories just to please myself, so my books tend to fall between the cracks when it comes to genre. For example, while I've always considered A Summer in Amber to be a steampunk story, even if it's not set in pseudo-Victorian England, it doesn't have clockwork robots, air ship pirates or zombies, and thus lacks many of the cardinal features of the usual steampunk novel. The upside of this is that I can describe my novels in various ways. For A Summer in Amber I've replaced "science fiction adventure" with "science fiction apocalyptic", since it is set in a post-apocalyptic society, even if it also lacks many of the cardinal features of that genre as well. In a similar vein, I've moved Some Day Days to straight up "literature" and "new adult romance" from science fiction and romance, which it probably was a poor fit for anyway. Really, it's a story that's hard to fit it into any specific genre, so I can pick and choose and still justify any I do choose. I'm curious to see what, if any these moves have on downloads.
It's closing in on one year since I started this experiment. I've been very pleased with the result – thank you, dear readers! – but truth be told I didn't have any great expectations, so that bar was modest going in. I am planning to post a complete report of how my books did in their first year – all the numbers and such – early in May (2016) so that my readers and any other indie authors that might look in can see the results of my experiment of releasing three free books in a year with a business plan that solely consisted of releasing them and waiting for lightening to strike. (Which, by the way, isn't a business plan.)
Currently I am working on the last part of The Lost Star's Sea and hope to have the first draft of that novel done within the next several weeks. My fantasy novel idea is slow to take shape and being cooped up in the house by winter is simply too productive of a time for writing to waste trying to come up with a story. It's prime time for writing, so I'm writing the story I do know, though I keep bumping up to what I don't know while I push the story to its ending. It changes several times a day. As usual, I know the ending, it's just getting there that's work. Stay tuned.
In addition, I tinkered with the categories for A Summer in Amber and Some Day Days. I don't write my books "to market", which is to say that I don't identify a specific type of story and then write my story as a close imitation. I write my stories just to please myself, so my books tend to fall between the cracks when it comes to genre. For example, while I've always considered A Summer in Amber to be a steampunk story, even if it's not set in pseudo-Victorian England, it doesn't have clockwork robots, air ship pirates or zombies, and thus lacks many of the cardinal features of the usual steampunk novel. The upside of this is that I can describe my novels in various ways. For A Summer in Amber I've replaced "science fiction adventure" with "science fiction apocalyptic", since it is set in a post-apocalyptic society, even if it also lacks many of the cardinal features of that genre as well. In a similar vein, I've moved Some Day Days to straight up "literature" and "new adult romance" from science fiction and romance, which it probably was a poor fit for anyway. Really, it's a story that's hard to fit it into any specific genre, so I can pick and choose and still justify any I do choose. I'm curious to see what, if any these moves have on downloads.
It's closing in on one year since I started this experiment. I've been very pleased with the result – thank you, dear readers! – but truth be told I didn't have any great expectations, so that bar was modest going in. I am planning to post a complete report of how my books did in their first year – all the numbers and such – early in May (2016) so that my readers and any other indie authors that might look in can see the results of my experiment of releasing three free books in a year with a business plan that solely consisted of releasing them and waiting for lightening to strike. (Which, by the way, isn't a business plan.)
Currently I am working on the last part of The Lost Star's Sea and hope to have the first draft of that novel done within the next several weeks. My fantasy novel idea is slow to take shape and being cooped up in the house by winter is simply too productive of a time for writing to waste trying to come up with a story. It's prime time for writing, so I'm writing the story I do know, though I keep bumping up to what I don't know while I push the story to its ending. It changes several times a day. As usual, I know the ending, it's just getting there that's work. Stay tuned.
