Andrew Gates's Blog, page 19

The Post-Launch Lull

Experienced novelists know what to expect shortly after a book release. But as a brand new author, I couldn’t be more out-of-the-loop. As Iris’s release date turns two weeks old today, sales have slowed down drastically, with only one book sold this past week alone.

It’s not all bad news. Facebook likes have gone up tremendously, which means more eyes are on the content. Now if only those eyes could translate to sales.

Despite the rise in likes, which would indicate an increased level of online visibility, I’m going to have to get creative in the next few days if I am to maintain my sales levels. Reaching new customers will be a challenge, but I have a few ideas in mind which may help in the process. I don’t want to give too much away right now though, as nothing has been fully solidified.

In other news, progress on the second book continues. I’m 55,220 words into it, which is good. Progress has been faster than anticipated. Consider that the average novel has between 80,000 – 90,000 words. That means book two is already over halfway what an average book should look like. With a vague deadline of releasing sometime in 2017, the second book seems to be right on track, if not ahead of schedule.

When writing the previous book, I recruited the assistance of a friend to read through the story as I wrote it. I am considering employing this technique again. It was helpful to have a second set of eyes on the pages as I wrote it. I got a lot of big-picture feedback from this process. If I decide to do this again, I first need to find someone willing to do it. I guess that’s the hard part.

In other, other news, I am thinking about being the T-800 for Halloween this year. That should be fun (and really easy to do with stuff I have lying around in the closet already).

A Week After Release

One week after the big release and business has not stopped. In fact, business is only just getting started.

Iris, the first book in the Color of Water and Sky series, was released to the world on September 27th, just last Tuesday. Sales came rushing in right away.

At this point in time, exactly 2/3 of sales  have been paperback editions sold over CreateSpace, the largest profit margin for authors. Another 1/6 of sales have been digital editions sold over Kindle Market, the second largest profit margin. The final 1/6 of sales have been paperback editions sold over Amazon.com, which provides the lowest royalty rate per book sold of the three.

Overall sales numbers have not been as high as anticipated. It seems many people who have promised purchases have either provided false information or are holding off to purchase the book at a later time.

Despite the big release, work has not stopped for this busy author. In fact, the work only gets more tedious. Some customers have complained about bad cover art, which resulted in a lengthy call to the printer’s office. Files needed to be resubmitted, covers needed to be reformatted and Iris was temporarily unavailable for sale for a brief window of time.

With every success comes a few hurdles. But it’s a good thing problems like these are resolved early on.

The next step? Get the second book out as soon as possible. When it comes to books in a series, sales of the first book generally lead to sales of the second. Marketing the series and generating profit will only get easier the more books are released.

Iris took over two years to publish. Ideally the second book will be out before 2018. This seems like a reasonable and achievable goal.

Still have yet to purchase your own copy? Click the following link:

https://www.createspace.com/6492841

Iris Now Available for Purchase

It’s here!

I am pleased to share some exciting news. If you want your copy of Iris before anyone else, you can order it now through CreateSpace.com (link below)

https://www.createspace.com/6492841

Right now it’s exclusively available on CreateSpace. It will soon be available on Amazon and Kindle Marketplace.

I’d like to thank all the people who’ve helped me along the way (here is my Oscar speech). Thanks to Karen Thom and Dawn Chapman for your editing help and my uncle Ron Gates for your publishing advice. Thanks to Erica “E-Rock” Chandler, Joe Knotts and my mom Kelly Gates for your beta-reading. The biggest thanks of all goes to my friend Sarah Anderson. You had your hand in every aspect of Iris’s creation. This book would not be what it is without you (how about that awesome cover, guys?).

So what are you waiting for? Get your copy now!

https://www.createspace.com/6492841

Meanwhile, I have to get back to writing.

Formatting for Digital is the Worst

Iris comes out in six days, but everything is basically ready to go. Right now I’m waiting for the final proof copy to arrive in the mail. It should be fine, but I just want to physically see it just to verify that everything looks alright. Once I do, that’s the final step.

There are a few things I’ve discovered over the last few days. The main thing being: formatting to digital is the most annoying thing in the world. I’ve heard from some people about how difficult it is, but I never realized just how obnoxious this process would be. Every single device requires a completely different format, yet we can only upload ONE FILE. So it has to be ONE FILE that works for like 10 different platforms. There’s Kindle platforms, Android platforms and Apple platforms. Apple seems to be the worst. Nothing looks good on the Apple stuff.

So if I build my file specifically for one platform, it looks awful on the others. So what did I do? I decided to do my best to balance it. That way it only looks sort-of-awful on all platforms instead of great on one and terrible on everything else. Does that make sense? The result: weird sizing, weird fonts and bizarre indents in strange places. That’s the closest to perfect I can get on all platforms.

So if you’re reading Iris on Kindle or iPhone or Android and you think, wow, these indents are strange. That’s why.

My advice: DON’T BUY THE DIGITAL VERSION

The paperback looks better anyway.

In other news, I had a lot of free time yesterday (a rare day off). I spent some of my time making a spontaneous commercial for the book. You can see it below:

 

Have a great day, everyone! Iris should finally be out soon. If you haven’t already done so, click “going” on the Iris Release Date event page to receive a Facebook notification when the book has been released: https://www.facebook.com/events/16395...

Delayed Release Date

Greetings!

Unsurprisingly, I have some unfortunate news to disclose.

Due to some delays, the release date for Iris has been pushed back from September 15th to September 27th.

As much as I’d love to get this book out to the public soon, I want to make sure it is in top quality. Rushing things and taking short-cuts to meet deadlines do not always lead to the best outcomes. In this case, though it is not an ideal situation, I have decided to hold off a few more days to make sure a few things are finalized first. I apologize to all those waiting for their copy. But rest assured, Iris shall still be made available very soon.

In the meantime, an exciting new interview with READCOMMENDATIONS has made its way onto the internet. You can read my exclusive interview here:

IRIS – Interview with ANDREW GATES

Final Week Update

It’s been long overdue that I’ve given my fans an update. The reason: I’ve been busy. As you can imagine, the final days of Iris involve a lot of work. There’s proofreading, editing, promoting and plus my regular workweek, which has also been busier than normal, PLUS I have a half marathon this weekend, so skipping out on a run is not in the cards.

Now that I’ve gotten my busy schedule out of the way, let me tell you what’s going on with Iris.

Tentatively the release date is still September 15th, though it is possible this may change. If so, you will hear so in the next two days.

Right now I’m waiting on some beta copies to get back to me. I’m also waiting for the new changes to the cover to come in so I can see what those look like. There’s also an interview on the way, which should come out really soon. Plus, I have to finish proofreading my own copy and apply edits that others have made for me. So there’s a lot to do.

In other news, writing on the second book has temporarily stopped, just because I need to get all these changes to Iris done first. Once I get all these changes out of the way, I can pick up with the second book again. I’ve written five chapters so far, plus a prologue. I’m working on the sixth right now (or, I will work on it again soon). I anticipate this book will be shorter than Iris.

Stay tuned on this site and also on the Color of Water and Sky Facebook page for more updates. I will have a lot of news soon in the upcoming days. As I said, an interview is coming out, which will be exciting. Plus, it is possible the release date may change.

Thanks for reading!

Beta Copies and Facebook Page

For those of you who do not know what beta copies are, neither did I (until a few months ago). Essentially it’s an early version of the book prior to publishing. Who knew?

Iris is almost finished and that means lots of proofing. I received my first physical copies of the book in the mail yesterday. Having a physical copy is helpful in many ways. It’s great to see if something wasn’t formatted correctly and you can catch some of the things that look differently on screen vs on paper. I’ve already noticed a few things I want to change about how the cover looks, but those changes are minor.

My next step is to get copies of the book out to people for proofreading. I’ve got a couple of people lined up to help search for bad punctuation, formatting or spelling problems that somehow I and my editors have all missed (believe me, problems are there). I’ve been told from friends that finding these problems is way easier in a physical book than on digital. So the plan is to mail out the copies, get the proofreading done, and have it sent back to me.

In other news, Iris now has its own Facebook page! The cover art for the book has already been revealed on that page as well as the September 15th release date. Check it out: The Color of Water and Sky Facebook Link

There will be lots of new posts coming out on the Facebook page so check there for additional content.

It’s an exciting time! September 15th is soon approaching.

 

 

Eight Hours of Editing

Heeeeey folks!

Iris is so close to being done, I can nearly smell it (what do books smell like?).

Today was a big day. Having finally received all the stuff back from my editors, I decided to take a crack at finalizing this thing.

Step one was to combine both Word documents into one. There’s a way to combine two Word edits into one, so long as they’re edits of the same document (I had to google how to do it). So basically I did that. I had both editors’ edits on one big document and then I hashed it out. I made MOST of the changes the editors suggested, though there were some things I decided to keep the way they were. I spent three hours doing that and got about 50% of the way through. I briefly stopped to make a delicious taco lunch and then finished the second half, which took another three hours.

One of the biggest notes I got from one of the editors was something I never expected. Apparently my use of the word “looked” is off the charts. One of my editors literally highlighted every single time I used the word “looked”. Visually having it highlighted like that really helped. Before editing it, Iris had 458 uses of the word “looked”. Now, after having edited it, there are 294 uses of the word “looked”. So that tells you how productive the editing process was.

Step two involved going through and looking for keywords. During my editing process, there were certain inconsistent spellings or capitalized words I’d picked up on. For example a character was sometimes spelled Georgopolis and sometimes Georgopolos. A lot of these were pointed out to me by my editors. Some of them I caught on my own. In any case, as I was doing step one of the editing, I simply recorded it on a paper (literally writing it down with a pen the old fashioned way). Then I went back and searched for each of those words to make sure they were consistent. This process took about 40 minutes.

Step three is the most difficult step to describe. Essentially I formatted by book wrong when I was writing it in Word. I had it set to “Normal Spacing” instead of “No Spacing” so every time I clicked ENTER, the next line would start lower than if I had simply just continued writing and the sentence spilled over to the next line. So my way around that was to click SHIFT whenever I wanted to start a new line. The result: Word considers it a whole new block of text, which doesn’t need to be formatted the same way as the text above it. What does that mean for me, you ask? It means when I change the text from left of        the       page       to       justified,       it       looks       like       this       sentence       here.

The way I get around this problem is really annoying. I selected all, I changed it to “No Spacing” and now I have to go through every single time there’s a new paragraph and click delete + enter.

That’s right. Page by page. Whenever there is new dialog or a new paragraph delete + enter. My wrists get sore. Plus, I’m paranoid that I’m going to miss one or do one incorrectly.

Aaaaaaaaanyway, I spent about an hour and 20 minutes doing that and I’ve gotten 1/3 of the way through this process. I wanted to get it all done today, but it will take me probably about three more hours to finish doing all the delete + enter. Then I’ll want to do a quick skim or something just to make sure it looks good. I might have someone else look over it for me to help catch things I’ve missed (let me know if you’re interested).

So all in all, I spent basically my entire day working on this. I should have at least some sort of physical draft in my hands soon.

I’m tired of writing now.

Potential Back Cover Blurb

Hello all!

Now that I am in the finishing stages of Iris, most of what I’ve been doing lately has been non-writing things. Yet there was one piece of writing I still had to do: the back cover.

I wanted to get some opinions on what you thought of my back cover blurb. I’d love any comments you have!

Here it is:

 

Year 200, Atlantic Federation Calendar.

It’s been two full centuries since the surface of the Earth was destroyed and humanity retreated to the bottom of the ocean. No one is old enough to remember the world outside the station they now call home. Life is peaceful in this artificial world. There is no war. Crime is low.

But everything will change when an experimental submarine goes missing during a routine test mission.

A city will prepare for a looming threat. A former soldier will fight to find the truth about his lost brother. A forensic scientist will play the game of politics and take matters into her own hands. And a simple teacher will become a hero.

Welcome to the Atlantic Station.

My Editing Solution

Alas, for those of you who read my previous post, you know that I was debating how to go about the editing process for my book. I’d already edited it three times on my own. Did I need a copy editor? If so, how would I afford one?

I have a solution!

My friend, cover artist and general publishing consultant Sarah Anderson has directed me to a site which can solve all my problems without paying any money. It’s called Creative Services Trading. It’s an online community of writers who exchange editing services for fictitious monopoly currency. The more you edit, the more credits you get. The more credits you get, the more you can have other people edit your work.

Creative Services Trading seems to be an excellent solution. I can access high quality, well recommended editors, yet don’t have to put down thousands of dollars for it. Thanks to this site, I’ve gotten in contact with not one, but two editors. Both of them are currently tackling my story right now.

In addition to the two editors going through right now, I’ve also started moving ahead with cover designs. Though I’m really acting as an adviser in this capacity, I’ve been discussing ideas (still in the early stage) with the artist.

Last bit of news: I started moving ahead on writing the next installment to the series, which is no longer going to tentatively be named The New World. My working title is now Kholvaria. Anyway, I’m up to Chapter Two in Kholvaria, so that’s exciting. The new book is going to be much faster paced than the first one. The writing style is a bit different too, so it’s fun for me to tackle.

Lots of things going on right now. I expect this project will be complete VERY soon.