Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 153

GHOST IN THE SURGE audiobook now available!

I was traveling most of this last week so I only had a chance to mention it briefly, but GHOST IN THE SURGE, the ninth book of the GHOSTS series, is now available, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy! You can get it at Audible, iTunes, Amazon US, Amazon UK and Amazon AU.

And with GHOST IN THE SURGE, Caina’s first series is now entirely in audiobook! THE GHOSTS is the first series of mine to entirely be in audiobook, for over 110 hours of high-quality narration. Be sure to start with CHILD OF THE GHOSTS today!

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-JM

 

DRAGONTIARNA: THIEVES table of contents!

It’s Saturday! Let’s kick off the weekend by sharing the Table of Contents for DRAGONTIARNA: THIEVES.

Unless my old nemesis Unexpected Difficulties rears its ugly head, I should be able to publish the book on Monday the 30th.

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-JM

why can’t I finish my book?

Reader Joseph asks:

“I have been working on a series. I haven’t even finish the first book, life and all, hoping for some insight.”

I’ve found that when people can’t finish writing a book, there are usually three potential problems. In order of severity, those problems are: 1.) Not outlining in advance, 2.) Not realizing that some progress is better than no progress, and 3.) Biting off more than you can chew plot-wise.

Fortunately, these problems can be avoided. Let’s see how!

-Not outlining. If you’re writing a novel for the first time, I really think you would benefit from writing an outline beforehand. Not all writers use outlines, but I always do.

That said, I think new writers would gain definite advantages from using an outline. Outlining in advance forces you to work out any potential plot problems in advance. In addition, it gives you a guide when you run out of steam halfway through the book. Everyone always runs out of steam halfway through the book – I’ve published 101 novels, and I still run out of steam halfway through! But the outline gives you a guide to follow when you’re not sure what to do next.

-Any progress is some progress.

Usually, when people set out to write a book, they’ll resolve to write 1,000 words a day or whatever. They’ll manage 1,000 words the first day, 600 the second, have to miss the third day because of work or one of the kids throwing up on the carpet or whatever, and then get discouraged and give up.

I think it’s best to think of writing like exercise – it’s best to build up slowly and try not to bite off more than you can chew.  I’ve heard fitness trainers say you have to be able to walk two miles without fatigue before you’re fit enough to start running. Like, you see this at the gym shortly after New Year’s. Some new people will join the gym, and they’ll get on a treadmill (obviously for the first time in years), sprint at 7.5 MPH for like, two minutes, and then stop wheezing and covered in sweat. They’ll do that for a few days and then never come back to the gym again. This is unfortunate, because it would be smarter to start slower and build up over time – like, run a 1/3 of a mile at 5 MPH the first day, and then 0.4 of a mile the second day, and so on. Or someone who tries to start bench pressing at 250 lbs and hurts themselves, when it would have been much smarter to start at 50 or 75 lbs and build it up over time.

It’s best to take that approach with writing. If you don’t have time to write a thousand words, do 500. 500 is still better than zero, and you can aim for 650 the next day, which is even better than zero. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the possible!

-Start smaller. I sometimes see that new writers have grand plans for a trilogy or a seven book series, but I think that is starting too big. Writing a series is harder than it looks. George RR Martin sold millions of copies of his books, and HBO still had to finish his series for him. Rather, I think it’s smarter to start by writing a stand-alone book first. Writing a self-contained story will teach you a lot.

And if you like it, you can write a sequel then!

-JM

stock art!

When I make my own book covers, I use a lot of stock photographs for the covers (you can see one such example above).

I’m not even remotely the only one who does that.

Found via The Passive Voice, here is a great article about the use of stock images for covers, and how the same images tend to turn up over and over again in book covers.

I have to admit that an infrequent hobby of mine is to walk through a Barnes & Noble and spot all the books whose covers have images I recognize from stock photo sites.

CLOAK OF WOLVES cover image!

CLOAK OF WOLVES editing is underway! You can see the cover image below, which was done by Natasha Snow.

Meanwhile, we are just about done with DRAGONTIARNA: THIEVES! Look for the book sometime next week.

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-JM

CLOAK OF WOLVES rough draft done!

I am pleased to report that the rough draft of CLOAK OF WOLVES is done at 89,500 words, making it the second-longest Nadia novel to date.

In a few days I will start editing and share the cover image.

Meanwhile, I’m going to write a bonus short story that I will give away for free to newsletter subscribers when CLOAK OF WOLVES comes out in November. So be sure to sign up for my newsletter!

Short story preview: Nadia goes to the dollar store. Mayhem ensues.

-JM

GHOST IN THE VAULT now available in print

I am pleased to report that GHOST IN THE VAULT, Caina’s latest adventure, is now available in trade paperback.

You can see it in this picture next to an iPod playing GHOST IN THE MASK, the latest Caina audiobook.

-JM

a book a month?

I recently saw a blog post from a writer expressing horror at the thought of the grim slog of writing a book a month. Which is what I usually do, barring unexpected trouble.

Writing a book a month obviously isn’t for everyone, I’ll grant that. But I like doing it. I like writing books, I get to do it a lot, and the money is usually pretty good. So there’s no downside!

the dangers of vanity publishing – follow-up

My post about the dangers of vanity publishing generated some interesting points on Facebook, which are worth mentioning.

1.) One thing I should have mentioned in the first post was the problem of rights. If you self-publishing your book, you keep all the rights – ebook, paperback, audiobook, game rights, and so forth. If you sign with a vanity publisher, you are probably going to give up all your rights, and pay for the privilege of doing so!

This is the very definition of a bad bargain, and yet another reason to avoid vanity publishers.

2.) On Facebook, Michael asked:

“Suppose you only wanted, or it was only feasible (for some reason) to sell physical books, not ebooks. Do you think that alters whether or not indie publishing is the right route? Does it change the balance of the equation?”

I think the only ways to sell paper books nowadays is to 1.) hand sell a bunch of them at conventions or speaking gigs or whatever, or 2.) be famous enough that your publisher pushes your book to be displayed at Barnes & Noble and Costco. Which means that option one is the realistic one for most people, which means you’d be better off self-publishing, buying a couple of boxes of your own books with the publisher’s discount (I can get a copy of CLOAK OF DRAGONS in print for $4.33 plus shipping & handling) and sell them with a markup at speaking gigs. Like, I’d buy 100 copies of CLOAK OF DRAGONS at $4.33 (and order them far enough in advance that I could pay the lowest shipping rate), and then sell them at $10 or $15.

I think a lot of writers do this, and for nonfiction writers it can be a real winner. Like, you know how sometimes if you go to a lecture or a convention something, and at the end of the lecture the speaker is selling a bunch of his books at the back? That’s a good way to sell paper copies. However, it doesn’t work very well for genre fiction (which is what I write), and I have no interest in going to conventions, so this isn’t a strategy I’ve ever pursued.

3.) On Facebook, Cherise asks:

“I saw the article only factored in on what you paid to publish the book. Do you have a similar article on what you pay to advertise/promote? before and after publishing your books?”

I usually spend about 12% of my monthly gross on advertising, though that can go up or down from month to month. I tend not to advertise new books, but instead focus the ads on the free first books in the various series since that seems to have the best conversion. Advertising is my biggest expense, so I’m always trying to cut that down whenever possible.

4.) Via email, Dennis asks:

“Don’t you pay to publish your audiobooks?” 

Not exactly. What I do is I pay a narrator to produce my audiobook, and then I publish it myself. I also keep the rights for the audio recording for myself. If you listen all the way to the end of the audiobook, the narrator will say “audio recording copyright Jonathan Moeller, 2019 (or appropriate year).”

Basically, it’s no different from paying someone to format an ebook or make a book cover, just on a larger scale.

Now, if I paid someone to make the audiobook, gave them all the rights to it, and trusted them to send the money on time, THAT would be vanity publishing!

-JM

 

 

 

how much did you pay to publish your book?

Sometimes people ask me how much I paid to have my book published, which always makes me wince, because the premise of the question means a bad understanding of publishing.

Short answer – you shouldn’t pay to have your book published. That’s called vanity publishing, which is distinct from indie publishing and traditional publishing. In indie publishing, you publish the book yourself. In traditional publishing, the publisher pays to publish your book and then pays you a royalty. (Unless they’re crooked.) In vanity publishing, though, you pay someone else to publish the book for you.

That said, I do spend some money. So full disclosure, here is how much I spent on CLOAK OF DRAGONS.

I spent $225 on the cover (as designed by the excellent Natasha Snow). Since it was published in April 2019, it’s sold about 2700 copies, of which I get about $2.50 to $2.70 per copy sold. All I spent was $225 for the cover.

I’ve done books more cheaply than that, too. I published SILENT ORDER: ECLIPSE HAND in October 2017, and I made the book entirely with free software to prove a point – the operating system was Ubuntu, word processor was LibreOffice, and so forth. I made the cover art myself, spending about $75 on stock photos before settling on a cover version I like. Since then I’ve sold about 3200 copies of the book, and got about $2 per copy.

(There are other costs like having a computer and an Internet connection and so forth, but most of that stuff I would have anyway since you need it to function in modern society.)

The point is I didn’t pay anyone to publish those books. Any money I spent was on production costs for publishing it myself. Since you can publish books yourself using 1.) free software, and 2.) an Internet connection, it doesn’t make sense to use a vanity publisher. And lots of people do use vanity publishers. This is despite the fact that vanity publishing tends to be very, very scammy. Like, they’ll charge you $3000 for a publishing “package” which consists of putting the book on Kindle and cranking out a paperback edition. Or $2000 for a marketing package that consists of a 30-second book video, a box of bookmarks, and a couple of posts of Twitter.

But lots of people do pay lots of money to vanity publishers, even if they wind up regretting it later. I think a lot of people want the “feeling” of Being Published, which you may not get from indie publishing, especially if you’re inexperienced.

An anecdote might illustrate the point. The other day I wound up watching some old SHARK TANK episodes. SHARK TANK is a show where various entrepreneurs make presentations to investors (the Sharks) and try to get them to invest in the business. I didn’t think I would like the show, but it’s actually fairly entertaining. I thought the Sharks would be cruel and exploitative, but while they ask blunt questions, the questions they ask are usually necessary and reasonable questions. (If you don’t know the difference between gross profit and net profit, you probably shouldn’t be trying to start a business.) What struck me was how many of the female entrepreneurs tried to convince the Sharks to invest by saying something like “as the passionate mother of two amazing kids, I am ready to take on the challenge of this business.” Now, while parenting is indeed one of the most noble tasks a person can do, it doesn’t have any relevance to whether or not the business idea would make money, and being a good parent doesn’t always translate to competence in other fields. For that matter, some of the nastiest people I’ve ever met were passionate mothers who fully supported whatever their nascent little sociopath wanted to do.

But! The emotional appeal works, doesn’t it? A plucky working mother with a big dream! It’s a well-crafted emotional appeal and probably works a lot. I think vanity publishing relies a lot on those emotional arguments. You can be a Published Author! You can see your book on a shelf! Your editor will work with you to craft a masterpiece! Marketing professionals will promote your book to the world! So the writer forks over $3000 or whatever, and in exchange they get a badly formatted Kindle file, a misprinted paperback, and a box of bookmarks. The writer could have done that himself for much, much cheaper.

As with so many areas in life, caveat emptor.

So, to sum up, don’t use a publisher that charges fees. You can do it yourself, or find someone who will do it for you for much cheaper on a one-time fee basis. I was looking at the website of a vanity publisher the other day, and for what they charge to publish one book, I spent to buy the cover images for two dozen books over the course of two years.

-JM