Andrew Gates's Blog, page 9

Three Books to Release in One Month

Since the release of Hive at the end of December, there has been a lot on my plate project-wise. With the splitting up of me and author MD Cooper, rights to a three book series called Vexa’s Legacy has gone completely over to me. That means I now have two books ready to go to be published, with a third about 1/2 written.

Between that series and Battle Planet, I have essentially three fully-written books ready and a fourth with a  lot of work done. My plan is now to work on getting all my current works in progress edited and formatted. Formatting takes a LONG time and is probably my least favorite part of the job, but that’s what I’m working on right now.

In addition to formatting, I am also getting cover artwork made for all the books. So far I have cover art for Battle Planet and the first book in what was once called Vexa’s Legacy, but now I think I want to call the series Pirates of Vexa Prime. The first book in Pirates of Vexa Prime is going to be called Seas of the Red Star.

You can see cover art for Seas of the Red Star below. I just had this made over the weekend by artist Justin Davis.

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Once I have all four of these books ready, or at least the first three, I plan to release them back-to-back-to-back a week apart within a month. It is my hope that repeated releases like that will help boost my author rank on Amazon.

The books will be released in this order:

Battle Planet: The Champion of Earth
Seas of the Red Star (Pirates of Vexa Prime Book 1)
The Daltus Conspiracy (Pirates of Vexa Prime Book 2)
Return to Red One (Pirates of Vexa Prime Book 3)

Should be an exciting month!

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The Partnership that Never Was

I have never publicly written about this up until this point, but for the last two years since early 2017, I have been in contact with an author, MD Cooper. The two of us were working on a science-fiction series together, which we were going to call Vexa’s Legacy.

Since that time, MD Cooper has  helped me in a number of other ways, including helping me be a part of the Pew! Pew! science-fiction short story collections. Those short stories have been a blast to write and I was glad to get my name out there through those collections.

The premise of Vexa’s Legacy is very interesting. Set in Cooper’s Aeon 14 universe, the story is about two space explorers who find themselves on a low-gravity planet with 18th Century pirates. It’s a fun mix of hard-science fiction and old fashioned pirates.

Vexa’s Legacy was originally intended to release as a three-part trilogy at the end of August/start of September 2017. But then that got pushed back to around November/December 2017, then to 2018, then later, then later, then finally February of 2019. That brings us to now.

At present time I have written completed drafts of book one and book two in the Vexa’s Legacy series. Book three is still in progress, about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way finished.

Today, I learned that the project is pushed back once again. Not wanting this project to be stalled for a total of two full years or longer, I have finally come to the decision to break my agreement with Cooper and retain full rights to the Vexa’s Legacy series.

Since I never even publicly announced that we were working together, the news that I am no longer working with Cooper should not come as a shock. However, it does mean that you can expect three new books to come out entirely under my name in the next few months.

Now that I have full rights to the series, there will certainly be several changes made to the draft. For starters, I will eliminate any reference to the Aeon 14 universe, as this is now meant to be a completely stand-alone series. Secondly, the title won’t be Vexa’s Legacy. As for what the title will be, I don’t yet know, but it won’t be Vexa’s Legacy.

The fact that two of the three books are already [mostly] written also means I am in the unique position to release them in rapid succession. I intend to do just that. When they release, I plan to release the entire series in the span of about a month.

Update on Battle Planet Cover Art

Hello again, readers. If you follow this blog regularly, you probably remember my previous post, where I unveiled the new cover art for the upcoming book, Battle Planet.

Little did I know at the time of posting that, that the artist would make a few revisions to the artwork I presented last time. As a result, there have been a few changes made to the cover art since my last post.

Without further ado, check out the final piece below:

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You will notice compared to the previous image I presented, this artwork features an extra monster added in the arena (the one that looks like a pterodactyl), as well as some changes to the arena structure in the background. It is the perfect custom artwork for a cover in my opinion and excellently captures the drama and uniqueness of the story I am trying to tell.

And what exactly is that story? You might be wondering that very question. It’s not an easy question to answer. For one, it is a Cold War story. For two, it is a gladiator story. For three, it is a space epic. So many genres, all packed into one. Battle Planet will truly be a unique and bizarre story unlike anything you have seen before, combining elements from across genres and time-periods.

Though I do not have a release date yet set for this upcoming book, I am working on it and can confidently report that the rough draft is over 50% of the way complete. Hopefully I can have the draft finished by the end of February.

In the meantime, keep checking back on this blog for more updates.

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Hive Finally Available on Paperback + Battle Planet Cover Art Revealed

Hive is FINALLY available in paperback format after nearly a month’s delay. I am pleased to have the book in my hands in a condition that looks great! It’s visually consistent with the others in the series and will look fitting as a set on the wall.

Hive‘s paperback comes out to 619 pages. Compared to other books in the series, that makes it the second-longest book. Iris came out to 651, Kholvaria came out to 537 and Veznek came out to 615. Interestingly, Veznek has the shortest word-count out of the four but has a longer page-count because it features a preview of Cassidy at the end.

The book will be priced at $17.95 USD. By comparison, Iris and Veznek are both currently priced at $16.95, while Kholvaria, being the shortest, is priced at $15.55. Since I am using KDP publishing for this book rather than CreateSpace as I have in the past, they take a higher percentage of the overall sale, so I have to increase the price this time around to make the same amount of money.

I am very glad to see that Hive is finally ready to go in paperback format. This has been something that I have obviously been working on for a long time. The delay has been VERY VERY annoying. Overall, I have little positive to say about my experience with KDP publishing.

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For instance, in the image above, the error message would indicate that there is an issue with my interior. Keep in mind, it takes me about 20 minutes to upload the interior, so when I click “upload” I don’t know if it worked or not until 20 minutes later. After receiving this error message multiple times where I reformatted the interior each time and even tried submitting it in various formats (word, pdf…), this error continued to come up. The process of just uploading, waiting for it to tell me if it worked or not, tweaking it, then reuploading it, took HOURS.

I eventually got on the phone with KDP. They told me my file looked fine. There was no reason this should be happening. Then they said they’d look into it and figure it out.

THREE DAYS LATER I was told the issue is with my cover, not my interior. Yet NOTHING in this error message would indicate that the issue is with the cover. The words literally say “There was an issue processing your interior.”

So I tweaked my cover in a way that it didn’t fit the dimensions of my book, but at least it uploaded now. Also, did I mention that KDP completely screwed with the margins of my interior and would not allow me to upload my manuscript until the margins were squished like a newspaper column? Because that also happened.

All in all, this delay was annoying and KDP staff was difficult to reach. I did NOT have a positive experience using their service and I greatly preferred working with CreateSpace. Alas, since KDP publishing bought out CreateSpace, unfortunately that door has closed. Now I just hope some other company out there can prove to be a suitable alternative.

On some unrelated positive news, I want to share with you all some awesome artwork for the upcoming book, Battle Planet. I commissioned an artist, Justin Davis, for the image below. Justin did a wonderful job getting this put together in just one weekend! I now own this piece of work and can use it for any promotional art or book cover. In fact, I plan for this to be the cover of Battle Planet. See for yourself:

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Hive Post-Release Update

Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

Hive has now been out on the market in Kindle form for five days now, with a Christmas Eve release. And although the book has been on the market in a digital form for a few days, the paperback version is heavily delayed. Its release date is, as of now, a mystery.

Hive‘s Kindle release was not as strong as I anticipated it would be, with a rather insignificant launch day. Despite being available for pre-order for several weeks and despite a big sales push for Iris ahead of time, launch-day sales were the lowest yet for any book in The Color of Water and Sky series.

I attribute this fact to a lower book-to-book retention rate than I initially expected. While people who buy Cassidy are extremely likely to buy Iris and people who buy Iris are likely to buy Kholvaria, the likelihood of the customer buying the next book begins to slip between Kholvaria and Veznek, which are books 2 and 3 in the series. Up until recently, I just figured the drop-off in sales between books 2 and 3 was simply because the customers were taking time to get through all the books and therefore they hadn’t finished reading the book yet before buying the next one. But now I am starting to see that the retention between books 2 and 3 is just plain lower than I originally thought. This fact is likely to blame for book 4’s less-than-anticipated sales numbers on launch day.

I suppose in hindsight it is not surprising that there is a major drop in customer retention between books 2 and 3. While the book does increase in price between 2 and 3, I genuinely don’t think the price is a factor. Instead I attribute the drop-off to the fact that the story changes rather drastically after the second book. After all, the main character of the first two books is killed at the end of book 2, leaving the majority of book 3 to shift the focus on the non-human characters instead of the human ones. It’s certainly a big change. I can see how readers would be put off or intimidated by the story changing so dramatically.

Still, all of this is not to say that there are NO sales of Hive. The book is selling. In fact, the bulk of Hive‘s sales so far have been on the 25th and the 27th, a few days after the book’s official release date. Veznek continues to sell too. And I anticipate both books will continue to sell.

Once Hive comes out in paperback, I do expect sales to pick up then too. The fact that both versions of the book are not ready at the same time may also be hurting my numbers. This is the first time I have released the Kindle and paperback versions so far apart.

The delay in the paperback’s release is incredibly frustrating to me. I would love for it to be finished already, but I have been dealing with a LOT of issues with KDP Publishing, the company that I am using to print and distribute my books.

This is my first time using KDP Publishing to print any of my books in The Color of Water and Sky series, though I did use this company to publish Kangblabla! In the past I have used a company called CreateSpace. This company was incredibly easy to work with and wonderful. Unfortunately CreateSpace was bought out by KDP Publishing earlier in the year and therefore CreateSpace IS more-or-less KDP now.

I will go into more detail on my agonizing frustrations with this company in a later post here on this site, but for now I will summarize my disappointment by declaring that Hive will no doubt be the final paperback book I choose to publish through this company. In the future, I will look to others.

And speaking of future books, I have two projects underway at the moment. The first is Battle Planet, a book I have written about here on this site already. The Cold-War-Era-gladiators-in-space novel is sure to reach new readers and help with my series retention-rate issue. Though I have not had much chance to work on Battle Planet in these last few weeks due to so much of my time being taken up by this KDP Publishing nonsense, I do anticipate that progress on this novel will progress quickly once my current work with Hive is out of the way.

The second project I am working on is a short story that I plan to submit to an upcoming anthology collection for a publishing group called Keystroke Medium. This story will be incredibly short. The submissions call for a story between 6,000 and 8,000 words. By comparison, the submissions for the Pew! Pew! collections called for stories of between 15,000 and 20,000 words.

Despite these other projects, my current focus is still on getting Hive‘s paperback version finished. Just yesterday I received beta-copies in the mail and today I distributed them out to my beta-readers, who will edit the book for formatting and content issues. I will be beta-reading too. This will be fun for me, as it will give me a chance to read through the whole thing all at once, which is something I enjoy.

Hopefully when I get the beta-copies back, I will be able to make the edits rather quickly. It would certainly be great to get the paperback out there as soon as possible.

Those are the main updates for now. My next post on this site will go into more detail about my troubles with KDP Publishing. Stay tuned for that in the coming days.

And if you have not yet downloaded your Kindle copy of Hive, check it out now HERE on Amazon.com!

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Hive Cover Art Reveal + Release Date

Hive officially has its cover art! The Kindle edition is finished, but the spine and back cover for the paperback version have yet to be completed. See the new design below:

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In addition to the new cover release, a date has been set for the release of the Kindle edition: December 24th. In my opinion, this Christmas-Eve release date is the perfect time to release it. With the bump in sales I will get on that day from a Christmas-Eve release, the book will boost in the rankings just in time for Christmas (a day when people will be getting new Kindles or E-Readers).

And in addition to both the new cover and release date announcement, I also have the official description for the book, which you can read below:

The Supreme Chieftain is dead.

Following the assassination of his Majesty Kho Veznek, planet Earth has grown more divided than ever. Factions of rebellion attack cities across Kholvaria. Distrust fills the air.

Meanwhile humankind is scattered and abandoned. Across the planet, the world is in chaos.

With the Kholvari Chiefdom in ruin, the Sorrevahni Empire severed in two, and the Atlantic Federation all but destroyed, Earth is vulnerable to attack.

For the first time in millennia, the Hive has come to kill. And no one is left to stop it.

Hive will be available on Amazon Kindle December 24th.

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Black Friday Sale a Success

I ran a Black Friday promotion this past weekend for Iris and Kholvaria. I made Iris free for November 23rd (Black Friday) and again on November 26th (Cyber Monday), and ran a Kindle Countdown Deal for Kholvaria for four days beginning Friday and ending on Monday.

For those who don’t know, a Kindle Countdown Deal is something that Kindle offers. It is a time-based promotional discount on a book. Customers will see the discount on the Amazon page and the time remaining at that price level represented literally through a countdown timer. I put Kholvaria at two price levels: $0.99 on Friday and Saturday and $1.99 on Sunday and Monday.

And the Countdown Deal was flanked by two days of free Iris.

I have made books free in the past, but rarely have I ever gotten enormous amounts of downloads from it. Typically I have quietly put up books for free without any promotion and just seen how download trends follow. This time however, I really wanted to make this a big deal this time around, so I employed the use of Bknights, a popular discount-book email list, to help promote my sale. Thanks to the extra promotional power, I was able to get a whopping 167 downloads of Iris on Black Friday, compared to 12 downloads of that same book on Cyber Monday with zero advertising.

Thanks to the boost in downloads, Iris‘s rank went up enormously. At one point it was ranked #2 in the Space Fleet subgenre and top 700 in all of Kindle books. This rise in rankings brought some extra attention to my books and even led to three full-priced sales of Iris on Saturday.

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Kholvaria also saw solid sales numbers over the promotion with three downloads on Friday and one on Saturday, both in the first stage of the Kindle Countdown Deal. This number is especially impressive because, unlike the first day of Iris‘s sale, I did zero email blasting with Kholvaria. I had hoped that folks downloading Iris would find Kholvaria‘s discounted price and take advantage of it or that Iris‘s boost in rank would lead more customers to view Kholvaria thanks to Amazon’s algorithm. Obviously in this case, my suspicion proved true.

In the image below, you can see for yourself the massive boost in sales I had on Black Friday.

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Even better news is that I will still see the residual results of this promotion later down the road. While I predict that a LARGE portion of Iris‘s Black Friday customers simply downloaded the book because it was free and have no plans to actually read it, a fair amount likely still will read the book. The good news there is that there is a high rate of customers buying the next book after reading the first one. So therefore, while I do not expect that even the majority of these downloaders will actually read it, I do anticipate that the ones who do read it will purchase the next books in the series.

All in all, I’d say this promotion was a big success.

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Hive is Fully Proofread – Next Step Cover Art

I’ve finished proofing Hive! My first draft came in at 145,764 words and 248 pages in Microsoft Word, but after my proofread, the new draft is 146,329 words and 249 pages. It is just barely slightly longer, but all in all, this is perhaps the smallest amount of change that has happened from draft to draft yet.

Conversations about cover art are now already underway. I am excited to see what the artist comes up with. I have no doubt this will be a very space-oriented cover, closer to the cover art of Veznek in that regard than the others in the series.

During my conversations with the cover artist, I came up with some really crappy designs for the cover that I put together in Powerpoint. You can view my crappy designs here:

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I know what you’re thinking: Award Winning Design!

Just kidding. I know you’re not thinking that.

But now that the cover art duties have been passed off to the professionals (not me), the next step on my end is to format the book for paperback so that I know the proper page count and can therefore get dimensions for the spine to my cover art designer. Adding in a table of contents and the title pages and so forth will obviously add to my page count and my wordcount too.

I am very excited that things seem to be coming together! Hive is going to be an awesome finale to the series and I know people will love it.

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Kangblabla! Now Out and Selling

I quietly released Kangblabla! yesterday, opting to do a small release with no pre-order. I just put the book out once it was ready and didn’t really say anything. As this has been a side-project anyway and a collection of mostly already-written stuff from other books, it didn’t take too long to put together and I’m not banking on it making tons of money. Still, it was fun to do and I genuinely find it really fun and enjoyable and I do hope people will like it.

Right now it is only up on Kindle, but it should be available in paperback very soon. In just one day and only available in one medium and with no press whatsoever, I already have two sales! How cool is that? This just reinforces what I’ve already learned: that the best way to sell books is to release new stuff.

Check out the book for yourself here:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07K4GW9D8?pf_rd_p=c2463b52-1139-4aba-9ac9-26d103f6c586&pf_rd_r=M23E5HDZ58GKQNE96JNF

And below, you can see tons of cool character art made by artist Lloyd Ladera:

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Beta Copies of Kangblabla! Ordered + Writing of New Book, Battle Planet, Underway

Kangblabla! beta copies are traveling across the country right now and should be arriving at my place of residence any day now.  As soon as they are in, it’s editing time!

Beta copies are always fun because it’s my first opportunity to see the book in its physical form. This one should be especially interesting since it not only has an entirely different look to it, but because it is also my first time publishing the book through KDP Services instead of Createspace.

The beta reading process hopefully won’t take too long. Like when I beta-read Cassidy, I’m going to do the whole process myself. While having a lot of eyes is helpful for longer books, I feel like it isn’t quite as needed with shorter books. And in this case, about 50% of the book’s contents have already been published before, so it’s already had a lot of eyes on it.

As soon as I approve the paperback version of the book, I will make it available for sale. Potentially that could mean Kangblabla! could be available to purchase by the end of next week assuming there are no drastic problems to deal with. Then I’ll release it on Kindle shortly thereafter.

All in all, progress is moving quickly.

Speaking of quick progress, I’ve already begun writing my next sci-fi book, Battle Planet. The book is very exciting and it has been a blast to write. I am already 25,000 words into the first draft!

One thing that really excites me about Battle Planet is my ability to advertise it more easily. Iris has proved difficult to advertise to new readers and a lot of that has to do with its vague title and difficult to describe premise. Right now I only have one ad running for Iris that seems to garner any success, but the ad itself contains spoilers about the story’s plot – something I want to avoid.

The good news is that if people can get into Iris, they often return to purchase the next two books in the series. So book 1 sells book 2, which sells book 3. The problem is getting them to book 1.

With Battle Planet: The Champion of Earth, the name already tells the audience a lot about what they’re going to expect. It will obviously take place in space and have some sort of competition. That already tells the reader a LOT. The title Iris on the other hand tells the reader nothing. In addition, the premise to Battle Planet will be really easy to describe: Five humans are chosen at random from across the world to compete in a gladiator-style competition on a faraway planet. Boom! Easy to explain.

It is my hope that folks who read this book might then learn about my other books, which could potentially lead readers from Battle Planet to The Color of Water and Sky. I know I, for one, am always curious to see what other books an author has written if I like something of theirs that I read.

I will let you know more about how Battle Planet comes along, but for right now progress seems to be coming very quickly. All in all, I would say you can expect a great deal of new stuff released in the next several months.

That’s all for now! Have a great day!

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