Michael R. Hicks's Blog, page 28
June 26, 2011
June 2011 Giveaway Winners!
And now, my friend, it's time to announce the winners for this month's giveaway! If you recall (and if you don't, you can pretend you did, because I'm going to tell you right now, anyway), I've started to give away one or more goodies each month. For June I decided it would be three $20 gift certificates to Amazon or B&N, whichever you like. Next month it'll be something different, maybe some autographed underwear. I don't know yet.
However, this month was also another milestone: the 100th reader review on Amazon U.S. for IN HER NAME! And for that, which for me was a pretty big deal, . And guess what? As of today, the book has 101 reader reviews, so I'll be picking a total of six lucky stiffs (or stiff-ettes) to win a prize this month.
So, here we go! Paws UP for the lucky winners, whom I'll be contacting via email later this evening:
abgold
Martin W.
Pyfon
Claudiu
Matt L.
Dave C.
If you're reading this and wondering how you can get in on the action, all you have to do is sign up for my newsletter. No buying anything, and you even get a free copy of my novel IN HER NAME: EMPIRE along with it. So sign up, would ya?
The Latest Six-Week Royalty Figures From Amazon
When I got up this morning, I figured that I would just do a quick tweet about this, but after picking my jaw back up off the floor after seeing the royalty figures from the Amazon Kindle store, I decided it was worth a quick blog post. First, let's make a quick recap of the previous royalties that I posted earlier, updating the May figures with the final numbers from Amazon:
Month
Copies Sold
Royalties
Comments
April
288
$762.68
Prices were set high, at $7.99 for IHN Omnibus and $4.99 or so for other books…
May
311
$825.17
June
270
$619.88
July
210
$518.38
August
208
$538.13
September
157
$389.45
October
181
$466.43
November
161
$349.30
December
217
$445.07
January
165
$342.38
February
798
$619.80
SEASON OF THE HARVEST released; prices on all books dropped to $0.99 – $4.99 for IHN Omnibus
March
3,581
$2,365.36
April
7,009
$6,792.57
May
8,814
$15,415.29
June
33,000*
$24,000.00*
*Figures estimated based on ongoing average sales and royalties
This morning when I got up, I checked the six week royalty report from Amazon, which is updated every Sunday around 3 a.m. EST. Last Sunday (19 June) it was a whopping $26,000 and change. Today, 26 June, my eyeballs popped out: in the last six weeks, I've earned $31,700.32. And that's just from the Kindle store (US, UK, and DE), not including other ebook formats or print.
Holy crap.
I suspect that the estimates for June actually may be low, because Amazon sent promotional emails around featuring SEASON OF THE HARVEST twice in the last week or so, once for folks who are on the list for thrillers, and again for folks who are on the list for science fiction, which really spiked the sales. And please don't ask me how that happened: if I knew, I'd tell you. It's not like my sales weren't doing great before, but HARVEST at the moment (and this will change, obviously) is at #2 in the horror category, right behind Stephen King's latest book. Even for a fleeting moment of glory, that's kinda hard to beat. Well, except that IN HER NAME (omnibus) is in the #1 spot in fantasy, futuristic & ghost romance, and #6 in the epic fantasy category, with only books by George R.R. Martin and J.R.R. Tolkien ahead of me. Hmm. Maybe I should make my pen name M.R.R. Hicksen…No, no, never mind!
The bottom line is that self-published authors, take hope: you stand a reasonable chance at making a living writing. I'll be the first to say that it isn't easy, as I've put in a huge amount of work over and above my day job for the last three years (plus the four years that it took me to write IN HER NAME in the first place) and made a lot of mistakes (Oh, wait! Those are called "learning opportunities" – LOL!) along the way, and here is a certain unavoidable element of luck involved in the process. But your chances of hitting that lucky strike through self-publishing is certainly a lot more likely than going through the traditional publishing lottery, and I believe – looking at what I'm making now – that the potential rewards are most likely greater, as well. The purpose of posts like this is to help other authors by telling you what I've done that seems to have worked and those that didn't. Hopefully that'll help you avoid some of the pitfalls and accelerate your own success.
And, most importantly, I want to thank you if you're one of my readers. You have no idea how important it is to me that you took the plunge to spend a few bucks on this unknown author. You have literally transformed my life. Thank you!
June 25, 2011
Calling All Graphic Artists!
Yes, calling all graphic artists! Have I got a deal for you!
I'm looking for artists who'd be willing to take a shot at depicting the IN HER NAME universe and the Kreelans, in particular. If you think of this as an audition, I'm looking for an artist who can capture the vision from the books in visual form. And the "prize"? Hopefully a long-term professional relationship with you creating the art for the book covers, web site, promotional materials, and even such wild ideas as an illustrated novel or coffee table art book. You get the idea.
And yes, the artist(s?) that "wins" the audition will be paid for their work on what I hope will be a competitive and reasonable basis, which we'll negotiate/discuss with the artist or artists whose work we want to go with.
Right now I'm going to be in the market for someone to do a minimum of four (and perhaps as many as seven) more IN HER NAME covers (and I may decide to revise the covers on the existing six books). There will also be other books not in that series coming down the road, and additional opportunities like those I mentioned above.
So, here's the deal if you'd like to give it a whirl:
Grab a free ebook copy of IN HER NAME: EMPIRE and read it, focusing your attention on how the Kreelans and their world appear. In particular, read closely about the character Tesh-Dar, who's sort of the ultimate Kreelan warrior. I'm not going to try and give anybody anecdotal descriptions of her – I want you to picture her in your mind's eye from what you read and draw what you see. I'd also like a concept of a cityscape or planetscape of the Homeworld or Empress Moon.
When you've got your concept ready to show, contact me and I'll send you an email address for you to send the image(s) to. Sorry to not include an email address here, but that always attracts the spambots…
I'm going to set 31 July as the closing date for the "audition" – that's when we'll take a look at the submissions and make our decision, then get in touch with everybody. I figure we'll also maybe have an open house sort of thing on my Facebook page, if that's okay with the submitting artists.
And that's basically it. So, if you're a graphic artist (or you know someone who might be interested – feel free to send this on!) interested in making what I hope will be good money for you and good artwork for my books, download EMPIRE and start getting those visual images in your head!
June 22, 2011
Why I Became A Self-Published Author
Someone on Twitter asked me this morning why I decided to self-publish. I think I've touched on that here and there in my ramblings, but never dedicated a post to it. So, here goes…
First, a little background: I actually began writing my first novel, , back in 1991 and finished the manuscript in 1994. I shopped it around a bit to various publishers, but needless to say got the typical rejection letters. Now, I perhaps could have been more persistent, but my life was a bit chaotic at the time and I finally gave up on the idea. And I've worked in a big bureaucracy my entire adult life, and wasn't enamored with becoming involved with another one.
The manuscript sat in a box under my desk and was used as a footrest for the next fourteen years, when I found out about this newfangled gadget called the Amazon Kindle. Then I found out that you could publish books for it. Anybody could publish books. Even a normal (well, relatively speaking) person like me. You didn't have to be a previously published author, a publisher, or anything else. Joe Blow could publish his Great American Novel without having to win a lottery into the Big 6, where he would then get a paltry sum for his toil.
So I published in May of 2008 for the Kindle, and followed it up later with a print edition through Lightning Source, which is a print-on-demand (POD) company that distributes to Amazon, , etc. I was published! Woo-hoo!
For me, self-publishing was the only real option. I had lost patience (what little I had) trying to get into the traditional houses, and I doubt my book would have ever been accepted, anyway, because it doesn't fit into any well-defined marketing niches. Vanity publishing, where you pay someone to print a bunch of books that then sit in your garage until you unload them, wasn't an option because I didn't have a bunch of money, and didn't have the time or motivation to go around selling books from the trunk of my car. So that's why I didn't do anything with during that long fourteen year spell when the manuscript propped up my feet.
Now, however, the self-publishing opportunities are amazing. It's like Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey, when he says, "My God, it's full of stars!" Not only is it fairly easy to publish your book in technical terms (read: you don't have to be Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius to figure it out), but the potential for making real money – and potentially REAL money – is more than a pipe dream. I'm a case in point: I've gone from making several hundred dollars a month from late 2008 through January of this year to making what will probably be over twenty thousand dollars this month (June). My dream boat has arrived, and I'm climbing aboard and plan to leave my day job behind come August.
Self-publishing is also ideal for me because, when you get right down to it, I'm a storyteller. I'm not a literary whiz, I'm not a super-duper writer (although having done technical writing for the last twenty-five years has helped a bit), and I'm not a marketing genius. I'm just a guy who gets these stories in his head and has a compulsion to get them down on virtual paper. Because I publish my own work, I get to tell my stories the way I want, and readers seem to like it.
As it turned out with , a few people started buying it, and then people started telling me they really enjoyed it (which came as a pleasant shock!). So I've continued writing, telling my stories, telling them my way.
By contrast, when you buy a book from a Big 6 publisher, you may be getting a book of higher technical quality (although that's increasingly debatable, based on how many bloopers I've seen in some of the things I've read), but you're only getting a spoonful of the potential choices allowed by their marketing departments. In the self-publishing world, there are no limits, there are no bounds on the author's creativity. People can argue "quality" all they want, but the bottom line is that readers want to be entertained, and they're perfectly capable of determining for themselves if they like something.
Another thing is that while authors who get picked up by a traditional publisher are generally considered to have "made it," the vast majority don't make enough to write for a living. I know of two authors who are traditionally published, but whose royalties amount only to supplemental income, and all of my books are currently doing a lot better than theirs on Amazon. I'm not crowing about it, simply pointing out the paradox that so many authors run into: being picked up by a publisher, but never being able to make a real living from it.
With self-publishing, I believe your chances of making at least some money (even if it's only enough for a Starbuck's now and then) is almost guaranteed, and your chances of making enough money to live on are far, far greater than in the Big 6 world.
