Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 46

Free for a limited time only…

Before I ballyhoo the free book, I need to update my sales for February. Between Amazon, Kobo, and my blog bookstore, I racked up 42 sales. Douglas Adams would know why I find this a good and proper number. Besides being a favorite number for nerdy reason, it’s also my highest sales month ever. And yet, I find myself hoping I can break it in March. =^D

But, for the next five days, I have a free book on Amazon, A Boy and His Dawg.

Um…wait, that’s it? Well…

No, there is something else. See it just so happens that the same day that A Boy and His Dawg started this free promotion, I finished writing a sequel for Tobe’s story. The new sequel is tentatively title Fangs, Humans, and Other Perils of Night Life. It’s going to be a short, fast novel, and if you like A Boy and His Dawg and want to see more of Tobe and his wolfish boyfriend Keith, I’m happy to say there will be more coming soon, possibly even this year. =^D

I’ll also have a new release out later this month, some interviews, and a few reviews. If March is as good as January and February were, this could shape up to be one of my best years ever. Good sales, lots of productive writing, decent reviews. Yep, all good stuff.

And though I’ve already said it a few times recently, I couldn’t do this without y’all. So thank you again for buying my books and visiting my blog. Your continued support is what makes it so easy to keep cranking out new books like a woman possessed.

More butt smooching is required here, NAO.

Well, today’s been good. I was still feeling real good about a 5-star review I got on A Boy and His Dawg on Amazon. This felt good because the book just came out. That meant the reviewer had to have read the book in one day, right after they bought it. And okay, it IS a short novel, but they really liked it!

But that’s not all. After I got back from dinner, I found an email from the reviewer, who said they’d bought some of my other books. They bought the books through my blog bookstore. They bought ELEVEN books in the same pass, one day after they read one of my books and posted a 5-star review.

“Whoa, Zoe, that’s awesome!” you say. “How often does that happen?” Once. It’s happened once before that someone read one book from me and opted to buy lots of other books. (Actually, they bought a copy of everything I’d written up to then, AND they added a tip over the amount I quoted.)

“Wow—” you say, but I cut you off, because there’s more. I sold four books on Amazon, including another copy of A Boy and His Dawg in France, my first ever sale in France. (I also got my first sale in Canada this month.) And I sold two more books on Gumroad. That’s seventeen sales, in one day.

But it gets even better! Theses numbers mean I have 34 sales for February, two higher than I had in January. I JUST set that record, and I beat it in a shorter month, with a week left over to nudge the numbers up slightly higher.

I did a post yesterday taking time to kiss butt for the monthly quota I already had, but a day this phenomenal requires that I get on one knee and take some extra time loving your backsides with genuine gratitude. And, may I say, your backside is looking very nice.

Without readers, no writer is complete, no matter what level of the craft they work at or the quality of their writing. My stories are meaningless if no one looked at them, and I get a little charge of motivation every time I check my stats and see another sale. So imagine how I feel when I’ve had a record breaking day, AND a record breaking month, both on the same day.

I cannot convey my gratitude properly for your continued support. You inspire me to keep searching for new ideas, and you keep me going even when I’m drag ass tired. For everything you do, thank you. Y’all are awesome.

A bit early for butt smooching, isn’t it?

It’s been a while since I’ve had a really good rant, you know? Well…it isn’t coming today. Heh.

As I said yesterday, my new ebook, A Boy and His Dawg, went on sale at Amazon. I fully expected to go to bed on a no sales day, but I still went out on Twitter and gave it my all on promotions. I got one sale very early on, and that was enough to keep me going for the rest of the day. But nothing else came in by 3AM, so I wandered off to bed. When I woke up, I’d found three more buyers, giving me four for day one. This is one less than I got for Saving Gabriel, and I didn’t expect this to do nearly as well.

And I have to include my other book sales, which gives me a grand total of fifteen sales this month so far. Roughly half of what I made in January, but still not a bad month. I might be able to pick up a few more before the last week closes, but even if I stall here, these numbers aren’t bad. They included books I didn’t promote, and didn’t think I’d be selling any copies of, and I got my first sale from Amazon’s Canada store. Making little baby steps.

I won’t lie. I could use help with more reviews, and I still have yet to release a book to a huge opening day. I got my bar for a great first day set at ten sales, and I’ve yet to hit it once. But the reviews I am getting are mostly positive, and even a slow sales month is a miracle in its own right. While it’s sometimes frustrating to deal with glacial progress, it is still positive progress, and I’m grateful for the support of both my new and old readers.

I know we have a week left to this month, but just in case I forget in the rush of projects in March, I wanted to say thank you to everyone giving me help. Thank you for the sales, for the reviews, and for the help with promotions. What I have now, I have because of you, and I deeply appreciate it.

So, during my next “you people” rant, you people can safely cross yourself off the list of “you people”. I don’t mean you people, I mean the other you people. I’m glad we cleared that up.

Seriously, though. Thank you. I’m constantly amazed that I sell anything when I’m just one lonely little voice in a sea of voices all screaming “Buy my book!” You’ve got plenty of choices for ways to fill your time, and I appreciate that you still spend some time with a crazy lady like me. It does my beady black heart good to know you’re out there reading my stuff, and I’ll continue putting out more new titles to show my appreciation. I’ll also continue to add my PG-13 stories on Wattpad as beta reads, a kind of freebie preview as my way of saying thanks for the continued support.

I’d say I’ll return to the piss and vinegar soon, but I expect my next three book reviews to be highly positive. I don’t know what to tell you, but I did find a genuine wild hair up my butt last week. So maybe my reaction to wild hairs is a random positive streak.

Anywho, have a good weekend, folks. I know mine is already off to a good start. (^_^)

New release! A Boy and His Dawg

Yes, it’s time once again for a new ebook release, but this one’s going to be a little different. I’m releasing A Boy and His Dawg exclusively on KDP Select to test out the platform and see what I think of it. I can’t say for certain if any future releases will be enrolled in KDP select, but for now this is my only Amazon-exclusive title.

For those that didn’t read the book in beta on Wattpad, A Boy and His Dawg is the story of Tobe White, the son of a church pastor, who falls in love with his best friend Keith Moon only to discover that Keith changes into a wolf during full moons.

This is not a werewolf story in the traditional sense, though, because Keith’s people are wolves who have blessed to take on human forms. For this story I went with a breed of wolves from Africa, and I made up a new mythology around these “moon wolves.”

This a YA paranormal romance, and a gay romance, at that. So I’m not expecting this one to fly off the shelves. But if you’re looking for something really different to read, this will certainly fit the bill.



A Boy and his Dawg is $2.99 on Amazon. If you don’t have a Kindle, remember, you can still read Kindle books on your PC, tablet, or smartphone using Amazon’s free reader apps.

So, that’s it for now. As is typical of release days, I’m a nervous wreck. Good thing I’ve got rum to keep me calm. (>_>)

Game review: Rayman Origins for PS Vita

I’m a little late to the game on Rayman Origins. I don’t even like Rayman, as the last time I played one of his games was way back on the Sega Game Gear, and I hated it. (Actually, I hated most Sega titles. Remind me one day to do a rant on that.) That first portable game was brutal, killing me constantly, and dropping me right back at the start after 3 continues. I never even saw the later levels. Because of that past experience, I met the release of the Vita game with a shrug, and not even the promise that some of the difficulty had been toned down could bring me around to a new Rayman release.

However, the dearth of new Vita releases combined with a sale price on Rayman Origins prompted me to ask, “How bad could it be?”

The answer is, it’s a mixed bag. I should state now that I gave up on the very last level and decided to YouTube the ending. I hung tough through most of the bullshit the game put me through, dying so many times that I kept seeing this annoying message: “It’s really dangerous here! Would you like to leave?” And I had several moments of anger so high, I almost threw my Vita, and damn the cost of a replacement.

But let me start at the beginning. Rayman and friends are cast as lousy neighbors who snore musically and wake the dead. This, has absolutely NOTHING to do with the rest of the game. In fact, there really doesn’t need to be an introduction at all, and Ubisoft could have just called this “Rayman: we need more money from the platformers market.”

The real story is, Rayman is an abusive frat boy who needs an excuse to hit things with his magically levitating fists. Once one has been vaguely established, Rayman beats up anything; small animals, plants, fish, inanimate objects, little old ladies, whatever. The platforming sections are really just there to punish you for liking to hit stuff. So almost everything can hit back. You’ll find spiked fish in underwater levels who can’t be hit, and spiked birds in the air above. There’s dudes who fire homing missiles, robots who shoot electric current, and black blobs who turn into psychotics with spiky teeth. You’ll even find walls and floors that turn into deadly traps on and off, just in case you want to be killed by inanimate objects too. There’s hot, sticky death more than a thousand ways, but they all look the same after dying the first 300 times or so.

Some of the levels are fun, and I suppose I should say that, lest you think I hated the whole thing. All the levels were graphically gorgeous, though the color palettes of some make seeing your character harder, and the music was sometimes fun and catchy. SOMETIMES. Most of the time, though, the level designs alternated between annoying and aggravating, and the music in many levels is downright awful.

You start off by rescuing fairies, working through three levels in a world before moving to the final stage for the rescue. Then once the fairies are freed, they unlock powers which sound cool, but which all kind of suck. Changing size would be great if it made you grow, but it shrinks you down to a speck, and the game screen is already rendered so small that regular-sized characters were hard to see. There IS a pinch to zoom feature, but its limits render it just about useless as well. The power to “fly” is the power to fall slower, although there are levels with a flying mosquito to remind you exactly how lame your “flying” ability is. The ability to walk on walls requires a ramp from the floor to the wall, so it doesn’t really open up new paths in old levels a la Metroid or Castlevania. (There are two other abilities, but I can’t for the life of me remember what they were.) Overall, the add-on powers just make Rayman more like Sonic and Mario, and Rayman has nothing unique to make him stand out.

Once you’ve rescued all five fairies, one of them tells you “You have to rescue our royalty! Sorry, Mario, but our king is in another castle! Er, I mean, Rayman!” So you go back to the same worlds, play through similar levels, but this time you have to fight a giant, infuriating boss instead of doing an aggravating chase sequence. Oy yeas, that’s so much better. Oh wait, no it’s not.

And then there’s the “tribute” levels that resemble the game play of older games. In games, it’s becoming a rule that if you have no original ideas for level design, you steal the designs of famous games and call the theft a tribute. There were tributes to Donkey Kong, Mario, Sonic, Limbo, and several others. These varied in quality from “Hey, this is really fun,” to “Oh my God, I never want to do this again.”

And, the game is glitchy. Enemies sometimes forget to show up, or the boss you were fighting levitates off the screen so you can’t kill him, and never returns. Platforms that are supposed to appear under you sometimes don’t activate. The music and sound effects randomly shut off, and the controls are fiddly whether you use the analogue stick or the D-pad to move. In fact, one of the reasons I died so often was in the places where I needed to punch up or down to activate some switch and have the game interpret my press on the stick or the D-pad as left or right. (While shrunk, this results in the character flying left or right, usually before falling into spiky death.) It got to the point when having the controls actually do what I wanted was a miracle, and most of the times I died was accompanied by the cry, “Couldn’t you just fucking once go UP like I wanted?!”

So, I think I might have been willing to give this a higher score if the glitchy parts hadn’t killed me more often than the actual obstacles of the game. (Not including the chase levels, where everything killed me, all the fucking time.)

SPOILER WARNING: The games ends with you fighting the wizard dude you were sleeping beside at the beginning of the game. You fight some robo-boss versions of things you already fought (which makes no sense. Why would a wizard have steampunk robot clones of monsters just recently mutated by the dead?) and then you confront the wizard and start a chase scene through the falling “debris” of the wizard’s base. (Which makes no sense because nothing was blown up to cause all this falling crap, and because all the falling crap is laid out so precisely, like collections of saw blades all falling in perfect alignment together.)

It was in this ridiculous chase that I said, “Fuck it, I’ma YouTube the rest,” and then learned that I was in the middle third of the last level. So I watched the ending, and then stared for a little while before asking, “What?”

There’s no zombie boss, no required trip to the land of the “Livid Dead.” That part of the game is actually optional, and is based on whether or not you play the bonus levels chasing a treasure chest. I gave each my best shot after unlocking them, but not one of the cases ended with victory for me. They all ended with me going, “Fuck it, I’ll just skip this part.”

But that ending…it reminded me of Lilo and Stitch, where the writers completely forgot what they’d written at the start of the movie, resulting in a major WTF moment when the alien director who had “never” been to Earth suddenly remembers the CPS officer who “used to be CIA.” (Only in products given to kids can you get away with this level of stupid.)

I’m wandering, but my point is, the ending of Rayman Origins has no connection to the start of the game. None of the levels really do anything to advance a story, so all this really is is an excuse to milk another franchise for profits.

And the thing is, I probably still would play this if it were named more honestly as “Rayman: A collection of vaguely related platforms and boss fights.” As I said, some of the levels were really fun, and even the bad levels were nice to look at.

But for all the graphical prettiness, Ubisoft hasn’t got an original idea left to play with. Everything here has been done by older platformers using less buttons, and with fewer glitches.

I didn’t hate Rayman Origins, and so I give it three stars. Despite the addition of medals and time trials and secret items to hunt for, I can’t say I want to play most of these levels over. But it was good for a few hours of diversion while I wait for Sony to start putting out some new games for the Vita. So I recommend Rayman Origins for fans of platform games who like “nostalgia.” Because in this corpse humping game, the only dead you’ll really face are the dead ideas that Ubisoft dug up from more talented developers.

Writing outside the rules is okay…

I don’t often talk about rules of writing, or my methods of writing. I think there’s already plenty of authors and editors talking about the creative process that new writers can already sort out the basics for themselves. Also, I would never imply that my writing habits should be rules, because a lot of my methods are against other peoples’ established rules. I don’t write every day. I stop in the middle of the story and go back to add chapters. I never met an outline I didn’t fuck up by the middle, so I stopped bothering with trying to make a map and just accepted letting my muse lead me through each world.

These are “deadly sins” to some writers, and they insist that you’ll never get anything done if you don’t follow these rules. They back up their views with quotes from famous writers who also expressed similar views in their time. I’ve seen enough new writers talk about quitting on projects that I know these rules are helpful to keep people motivated. So while I don’t use or need the rules to stay productive, I can see how they might be useful to others.

But what bugs me about writing advice is the way some authors try to make their experience into an all-inclusive statement. For instance, some writers insist that there’s no such thing as a muse, and they suggest that such a thing is a myth concocted by eccentric writers to add mystery to the craft. They’re saying, in short, “I don’t have this kind of experience when I write, and therefore, anyone claiming otherwise is lying.”

I have a muse, and we don’t get along well. We produce a lot of work together, but she often ignores my various requests to instead work on something that I know doesn’t have a hope in hell of selling. We fight and argue constantly, and then she leaves, and I can’t do a damn thing right without her. Almost all my trunk novels have come during the times when she left, and I said, “Well screw her! I can write without her!” And I can’t. I reread those trunk pieces, thinking maybe I can salvage something. But dear lord, they’re awful. I feel embarrassed that I ever committed such literary travesties.

So I believe in muses, but I also believe some authors don’t have one, and they just work off their own ideas. I can accept that mine is not the only method of creative assembly of words.

I don’t write every day for many reasons, not the least of which is my muse getting pissy and wandering off to wherever she goes when we need space. During winter, I always imagine she goes to someplace tropical to blow off steam.

But I also don’t write every day because the demands of writing, both physical and mental, are too taxing for me to handle day in and out. On the days when I write a lot, I crash on the couch for half the day. So after a few days of this, I have to take some days off and let my body recover.

I don’t write in outlines because what I think in an outline is me telling the story where it should go, and does not reflect the input of my muse or my characters. What’s more, I might say, “There is a chase on an office building,” only to learn that my chosen location has no such building. I made an outline for Trail of Madness mentioning a murder in a park with a secluded spot in a jogging trail, but then couldn’t find a location that fit the event as the outline suggested. So the muse mapped out a murder in a parking lot that worked much better.

But the worst sin I commit is going back to edit before I finish a rough draft. I see advice pages say over and over “You’ll never finish if you do this.” And it’s rare that I don’t finish a story. When I do drop something, it’s not because I’ve run out of ideas, or because my back-tracking ways have painted me into a corner. The number one reason why I give up is because both I and my muse cannot feel anything for the story. If I’m not feeling it, the reader won’t either.

I guess what bothers me about giving advice is the way it turns an amorphous creative pursuit into a singular formula. It bugs me when writers who give advice dismiss other methods as unproductive for everyone instead of just admitting it doesn’t work for them. I’ve seen enough writing discussions to know certain writer’s habits, and in the case of these folks who write every day using outlines, I can say they still make good books. But I also know their method don’t work for me, and I think the worst part of their writing advice is that they usually cast my methods in a bad light.

Why does it matter? Because new writers can often lose confidence in their abilities by reading some bad advice (for them) and thinking “Maybe I’m doing this wrong.” So they try writing by the rules, and they’re not happy with what they get out of it. With enough failures, they might even decide to quit instead of going back to what was working for them in the first place.

My methods leave a lot of time unused, and I’m not the most efficient or organized person. I never met a schedule I liked, with the possible exceptions of working night shift jobs, something that didn’t happen too often. Despite my sloppy habits, I can sit down and whip out a book in a few weeks. I write so much, I even have time to make intentionally bad books, just to get my worst ideas out of my system. In the first two months of this year, I’ve already plunked out a short novel and a novella, and when I post my word counts, other writers go, “Whoa, that’s a lot.”

But the way I work is a unique thing, a singular experience that I wouldn’t suggest others duplicate. For all my massive word counts and regular releases, I’m still lacking in the all-important sales numbers. So I can tell you how I pump out many words, but I can’t advise you on how to be a successful writer who makes regular paychecks.

My muse doesn’t really care about paychecks, a fact I cannot change about her, and have only rarely won concessions to for a few projects. My compromise is always the same, that I will agree to write a story she likes in exchange for a story that I think will sell. And, it’s worth noting that the books I ask for do sell better than her more radical ideas. That’s about the closest I can get to “I told you so,” with my muse, but that doesn’t mean she won’t come up with some new idea that makes me ask, “Are you fucking serious?”

I don’t hate her crazy ideas. I just don’t think they’ll sell well, and I’m usually right about this. But after writing them down, I can see why she liked the stories and wanted to relay them to me. Her stories get good reviews, and our characters are often praised for “feeling real” even in the most surreal fictional settings. But those books aren’t for everyone. They’re meant for people who wander off the beaten path just to see what else is out there.

If I have a central theme to my writing, both fiction and non-fiction, it’s the idea that there’s always more than one way to look at the world, and sometimes we ought to try looking from the perspective of people we don’t agree with. My muse and I both enjoy taking on these unconventional perspectives in otherwise familiar tropes, and even if I don’t have sales success, I’m still pulling in good reviews from the few people who regularly buy my new books.

I read a lot of authors from every level of the field, and I read their blogs. I’ve seen every work method laid out in step-by-step tutorials, and almost all of the advice is generally useful to get a new writer started. About the only thing I don’t like is when someone suggests, “But don’t do this because it won’t work.”

And maybe this a minor thing to bitch about, because a lot of writers will grow enough to learn that they can ignore the rules and still finish projects. But this same advice could be discouraging new writers from working in a way that’s comfortable for them. I consider it akin to the days when teachers tried to force left-handed people to write with their right hands for the sake on uniformity. It’s pointless, and it only makes the task harder for people who might otherwise be comfortable doing the same thing their own way.

Writing is not a singular experience, and no one formula works for everyone. It is an art form with many branches, and each branch will have a thousand variant work styles and voices. Many styles will be duplicates of earlier branches, but the most noticeable offspring are those who take what came before them and make it their own creation. Those will be the ones who create the most offspring as other writers try to duplicate that success. Seen this way, writing is a living genealogy, a forward moving evolution always borrowing from the past and infusing a part of the present or a speculation of the future. The process of creation for each of us relies on finding our voice and honing it through regular practice, and through constant reading to see how “the other guy” handles the craft.

On a certain level, all writers have to recognize and respect this reality, and I’m sure they do. Which is why it annoys me to see so many of them dissing on certain work methods just because it doesn’t work for them. Writing advice could do with a bit more “here’s what works for me,” and a bit less, “don’t do this unless you want to fail.”

Why I’m okay with Card working for DC

I’ve already done a long ranty ramble about this on Twitter, but some of you may not follow me there. Probably due to the high volume of tweets I produce. A totally valid fear, I assure you. But it seems DC is hiring Orson Scott Card, and it’s got some people pushing a petition to have Card fired without producing any work. You’d think with me not liking Card’s views on gays that I’d be down for this petition, but I’m not.

Here’s my dealio, yo. A boycott of Card’s comics as they come out is one thing. It’s voting with your dollars. But a petition to have him fired for his views outside of his work opens up the possibility that a religious group of equal size and vitriol can have a gay writer removed from any staff position as well. What’s more, it’s kind of douchey to hunt a guy down at every job and deny that he be employed just because you don’t like his views on a given topic.

Let’s say that I one day decided to organize a petition to have Card’s books pulled from Amazon based not on their content, but on Card’s anti-gay views. Word would get around, and a group of religious folks might get together and demand that Saving Gabriel be pulled from the bookstore, because my premise that Christianity is as much fiction as the next myth offends them. That’s not even the most offensive thing I’ve ever written. Soon, I’d have titles being pulled left and right because Amazon had no choice but to heed the collective will of those offended.

Free speech is a two-way street. It means that I can talk about racism and sexism and other social problems even if it offends other people for feeling like I’m calling them out. But it also means that people like Card can hate my guts and wish laws were passed against people like me. If I want to find some way to shut him down, I open up the way for the other side to shut me down too.

And here’s something to ponder. Orson Scott Card has a big audience. People who claim to hate his views will still read his work with an open mind. DC is looking at those numbers of book sales while factoring his position. Do you think DC would want to hire me to write a new queer-friendly book? Not with my sales figures, they won’t. But Card’s got a market pull that makes him look like a safe bet.

Now, if you decide to boycott him, that’s okay so long as you also find queer friendly titles to support at the same time. That’s making your opinion heard, but your opinion will be balanced by the people who choose to buy Card’s stuff anyway. That’s how freedom of speech works with this modern world. You choose not to support people you disagree with, or you choose to support the people you agree with. (Or you choose to ignore their personal views and base your purchases on what interest you. Also a valid option.)

When you write a petition asking DC that Card not be allowed to produce any work, you are practicing a form of job discrimination that you wouldn’t want placed upon your allies. And yet, if DC accepts firing one writer for being anti-gay, the same tactic can remove a gay writer, or even a straight woman. If you practice job discrimination instead of a boycott, you are begging the other side to attack us, and it won’t hurt you. You’ll still keep reading the same titles you like, and one less ally working in the field is no big deal. But to them, it’s a lost paycheck. And believe it or not, writers do still need paychecks to keep doing what they love.

Getting back to my Amazon example, let’s say a group of folks banded together because my being openly trans and bi is offensive to them. They’ve never even read my books, so their whole gripe with me is simply existing without guilt. So they whip up a campaign to pull all my books and deny me a major platform for getting my crazy ideas out to the public.

This is considered a fair tactic already for many books that the public considers offensive, and it’s very much a slippery slope that allows for censorship on all topics under the guise of free speech. I’ve heard before, “They can say what they like, but that doesn’t mean they should be allowed to profit from their views on Amazon. Amazon can decide who they want to stock, and dropping a book from the market is not censorship.”

But, if Amazon, a global market, begins policing content based on the majority rule, a vast array of authors and titles could be removed with only a handful of requests from one community. Then yes, Amazon is actively participating in a censorship campaign, and it doesn’t matter if the writer is gay or anti-gay. If people believe that only certain opinions should be aired in public or profited from, then they do not believe in free speech no matter how loudly they shout that they do. You have the right to complain about someone else’s opinions, but when you actively work to pull the platform out from under the speaker, that’s an effort to censor them. Period.

It sucks that I invariably end up having to defend people I loathe, but it seems like some people believe the religious right is just this little minority, and you can shout them down. But while you’re patting yourselves on the back for being such great allies, the religious right is attacking us, and we’re a real minority, representing a small cross section from every other minority. When the religious right hits us with their vastly superior numbers, we lose. They have much bigger numbers, and they can dismantle most efforts we make at having an equal place on the public platform.

Card and I are both writers, but he sells a few hundred thousand books. I’m still somewhere below my first 5,000 sales after a few years of prolific output. Card writes mainstream stuff, and I write weird shit that’s reflective of the abusive reality I grew up in. Card is popular, and I’m not even a blip on the radar.

I don’t like what he’s said and done, but I don’t wish him to be treated as a pariah, because I already know what that feels like, and I truly would not wish it on my worst enemy.

Freedom of speech is meaningless if you actively work to silence views you don’t agree with. The same tactic could later be used to silence you too. It could very well happen that you could be denied a job over voting a certain party, or for supporting certain organizations. It’s not freedom of speech then. It’s job discrimination, and it’s a slippery slope to allowing the religious right free rein to silence your GLBT allies.

Or put more simply, vote with your dollars, but don’t deny the man a job for his personal views unless you’d also like to see me unemployed for being trans.

When will I be considered famous?

Given that the title of this post could be taken several ways, I think an explanation is in order. See, sometimes when talking to folks online, the topic comes up on fame. Some people claim I’m already a little famous, and I don’t think I am. Fame is kind of tricky to define, since all it means is that people within certain social circles know your name. Steven King is famous with a lot of people, but I can still find people who don’t read who ask, “Who?”

But the thing is, for me, fame means having enough name recognition to start building on past successes. Movie stars are nobodies until that one role makes people remember their name, and then for a few years, they’re in everything. That’s the actor’s definition of fame, suddenly being the go-to actor for many roles, even if they don’t fit you.

For someone like me, the definition is a little more tricky. I have all sorts of measuring metrics at my disposal, allowing me to define what fame is. If I were to define fame simply as people knowing my name, then I can find proof of my fame through my blog’s statistics on search queries used to reach my site. A great number of folks find me using my name, or my name in combination with a topic. I could also use the number of reviews I can find online, or by the number of people on Goodreads who add a book to their virtual shelves as to-read or “have read.” And if I were looking for simple recognition, then I do have some small measure of fame already.

To my mind, these metrics are ego-driven, and they only reflect a small pool of people. It’s the act of comparison that diminishes my definition of fame and pushes me out of consideration for the term famous. I don’t have huge numbers coming to my blog, usually getting less than 1,000 visitors a month. I get perhaps 3-4 reviews in a great month, but some months there’s no reviews at all. It is nice that my average of good to bad reviews is still highly skewered toward the good side, but if there’s some saturation point where all the good reviews convert to better sales, I haven’t yet reached that point.

I think part of my problem is, I often compare myself to writers who have larger and more vocal fan bases. Some of these people are professional writers, so it can be pointed out that in their case, they have some advantages. They have an easier time with reviewers asking for ARCs of their books, with media outlets asking for interviews, or with past fans volunteering to do reviews on their stuff. But a lot of the writers I follow are fellow indies, and their sales numbers and fan bases make mine look like a raindrop next to a small lake. It is hard not to feel a little envy when an indie writer puts out a Kickstarter campaign for their latest project and gets two or three times over their requested goal in a few days when my attempts at fundraising usually go the whole time period without reaching the minimum goal. Comparing my lack of success to their good fortune is a kind of denial of of my fame status.

For me, fame means being able to use my name alone as a credential. It means putting out a fundraiser and meeting my minimum goal. It means doing a bit of ballyhooing for a new book and having that small effort produce a ripple of sales and reviews. Fame means that the vocal enthusiasm of others for my stuff produces their own ripples, sending my name outside my small social circle.

I do have some fans, and there are reviews. The last fundraiser netted $380 before fees, and since we used Indiegogo, my editor got paid without us meeting her minimum goal. I’m getting sales regularly for many titles, and every once in a while, someone ask for an interview or a guest post. To me, this says I’m on the cusp of having fame, but maybe at the level of a good web-comic artist. Which is to say, I am known by folks for my crafting skills, and that my name branding is effective enough to grant me some measure of financial stability. It means a steadily rising level of blog readers as opposed to tsunami-like spikes that come when I’ve posted a rant.

I’m not there yet, but I feel like I could be someday. And where I’m at doesn’t feel so bad. I’m not vain enough to say I’m famous just because someone searches for my name, but it does feel good to check the search query statistics and see that over half of the people who find my blog get here because they were looking for me by name. It feels good to find a new review I didn’t see before. (Although this is always a better feeling if the review isn’t negative.)

But it’s a bit like a drug. What I have is good, and is perhaps more than I should expect given my position in life. I’m a crazy lady who mostly lives in her bedroom. I can’t tour cons or do book signings, and thus far, I seem to be completely incapable of working with any publisher without it ending in some bad way. I step on the toes of other writers by being a loudmouth, and I burn a lot of bridges because I tend to say exactly what I’m thinking without giving consideration to tact or sugar coating. (This is not a good thing, and I’m not saying those other writers are too sensitive. I’m saying, I have a big mouth, and I say mean things sometimes.)

Despite my bad points, I do have this small dose of fame, and it’s never quite big enough. I want to discover a fan club I didn’t organize. I want to find out I’ve been nominated for a book award without asking for nominations. I want to make enough money from sales of my books to pay my editor for future projects instead of having to throw a fundraiser. For that matter, I’d like to send all my books to my editors instead of picking which projects will get extra polish. I’d like to see enough reviews come out on any given title that the combined sentiments result in new sales. And I’d love to put out print titles because there’s a demand for physical copies of my stuff. Put in simpler terms, I need more encouragement now than I did when I first got started pushing my stuff online.

Maybe it is greedy to want these things. I don’t really need them to validate my crafting skills, and even if I had less validation, I would still be a writer. But a writer with no readers or reviews is an unknown quality, even to themselves. I know now that I don’t suck as a writer only because I have spoken to hundreds of people over the years, and the majority sentiment coming from people is “You’ve got skills, so just keep going.”

And that to me is fame. It’s being good enough to earn a moment of encouragement, whether that be a gushing review or simply a blurb of encouragement passed along on Twitter. It’s little doses of validation that in turn make finding my motivation easier. Fame is the drug that makes all those hours with butt in seat and fingers to the keyboard worthwhile. And like most junkies, the little fixes I get aren’t quite enough to keep me bumped up. Will it ever be enough? I don’t know. But when I get a new fix, man, it’s a hell of rush.

Another writing update already?

I’ve got two projects completed this week already, having completed the third Zombie Era novella (tentatively titled Raising the Undead), and having FINALLY finished the rough draft for Revival of the Magi. The novella took only a couple of weeks to finish, but Revival of the Magi had sat in limbo for the better part of a year and a half because of missing cast members. It’s one of my longer stories, and the larger cast made it hard for me to remember everyone in the first pass. So I left some notes on what I thought those characters should be doing, and every time I came back to the project, the muse went, “Eh, maybe later.” (And of course sometimes the characters went “No, I’m not feeling that.”)

But at long last, I have the cast assembled, and I can call this a finished rough draft. The book’s at 101K, but after I add details here and there, it’s sure to be a little bigger. But I promise, it’s one of the few door stoppers I’ll put out this year.

Today, I have plans to do some cover work to get ready for the Wattpad beta reading of Sandy Morrison and the Pixie Prohibition, Sandy’s second book in what I hope to make an open-ended series. The events in book two are mostly self-contained, but their resolutions leave open the door to at least five books in the series, and that’s just what the muse has to start with.

Then next week I plan to start the last Zombie Era novella, which should take 2-3 weeks to finish. So for sure, this year, I’ll conclude two of my series and free my schedule to work on more Mystical World Wars books.

Writing this winter has not been easy, and has involved a lot of crashing on the couch from fatigue attacks. But despite this lack of energy, I don’t appear to have any motivation problems. I have new releases nearing completion for almost every month this year, and if I keep this pace up, by Spring I’ll be drafting stuff for the 2014 schedule.

Lots of new stuff coming! And in between releases, I’ve got some book and game reviews to write, even a possible new indie music CD to review. Going to be a fun year, y’all.

Monthly sales report…

I’ve been very busy in January to try and sell copies of Saving Gabriel, with many evenings spent posting promotions on Twitter every hour or so. If you’ll recall, my original hope was to get sales from 10% of my Twitter followers. My hopes were buoyed by the initial success I had on Wattpad, and I’d hoped that the larger reader base might convert to a vocal fandom.

That didn’t work out. Only one Wattpad reader posted a review, and most of my sales for the month could be accounted for from direct Twitter promotions. Even then, I got just slightly over 1% of my followers to buy the book. Here at the end of the month, I’ve got 15 sales across three vendors, with Amazon predictably making up the bulk of those sales. Amazon had 10 sales of Saving Gabriel, while Kobo had 3, and my blog store had 2. While this sounds incredibly negative, I need to point out that this is my first double digit sales figure for any book in opening month, or indeed in any month. My typical pattern is to sell 1-2 copies of a book per month, and my large back catalog adds up to double digits most months.

Aside from Saving Gabriel, this single digit pattern has held firm, and I’ve sold 1-2 copies of my older titles on all vendors, again with Amazon taking the lead. At midnight, I had 32 sales for all books, with 22 of those sales coming from Amazon. This is also a record-breaking month for me, and I’ve never done this well before. So while my hopes for a larger opening month weren’t met, I can’t really complain about the sales I did get. And I got reviews too.

I am still at a loss about how to capture readers outside of the Kindle market. Kobo doesn’t have any internal promotions like Amazon, and their site design is a bit clunky, to put it in polite terms. I would have thought all the new Kobo ereaders being bought would lead to more sales, but the problem is, if people don’t know me through Twitter or Facebook, they don’t know I exist. You can’t search for an author you don’t know, yanno? There’s as of yet no way to stumble over new authors on Kobo, and there is on Amazon. But at this point, even my sales on my blog store are better than my Kobo sales. I’d love to build up the kind of sales on my other vendors that I have on Amazon, as this month I would have had 66 sales with all things being equal. And those kind of number would be high enough for me to contribute bucks to our monthly budget, something I’m still keen to do one day.

And speaking of my blog bookstore, this month I plan to invest more time promoting it and Gumroad. It’s a very easy system to use and doesn’t require people to sign up for yet another account. It works with PayPal, and the files are DRM-free, so I think many readers might prefer shopping for my books through my blog store, if only I made a little more effort at promoting it. We’ll see how that goes.

My Fall sales numbers were quite low, but I think this had as much to do with my lack of new releases as it did any other factor. Two months of new releases seems to have kicked the pace of sale up a notch or two, so I’m running with this theory, and that’s why I’ll have new releases for February and March before taking a brief break on releases. Then in June, I’ll put out another new book, and again in July and August. It’s going to be a lot of work, but I have hopes that by the end of the year, I’ll be able to boast of 50 sales a month. I feel this is a realistic goal given my slow climbing average sales, but only time will tell if the new releases catch your fancy.

Oh right, you might like to know the titles. So the next new releases are A Boy and His Dawg, Sandy Morrison and the Pixie Prohibition, Thicker Than Blood (Peter the Wolf 4), Revival of the Magi, and Wereporno. So, lots of furry shapeshifter fiction, plus some witchy fairy tales, and some halfling and magi drama thrown in for flavor.

I want to close this post out by thanking all the folks who bought books this month. Your continued support has done a lot to help boost my spirits despite this cold weather bashing my poor widdle body, and I cannot express my appreciation enough. So, until next time, thank you for giving my stuff a chance.