Marc Nobbs's Blog, page 19

A Tortured Soul–The First 10 Chapter Titles

Okay, as promised yesterday, here’s something a little bit different. Today, I’m posting the titles of the first ten of the twenty-nine chapters of A Tortured Soul. Make of them what you will.

Chapter 1 : Home
Chapter 2 : How Could You?
Chapter 3: Nothing to Lose
Chapter 4 : Best Friends
Chapter 5 : Lisa
Chapter 6 : Wintersmith
Chapter 7 : Neighbours & Friends
Chapter 8 : Amanda
Chapter 9 : A Fresh Start
Chapter 10 : Routine

So, what do you make of that? Does it tell you anything about the story? Any clues as to what might lie in store for our hero, Paul? No? Never mind. Guess you’ll just have to wait until 5th May.

That link on chapter 8 by the way takes you to a short, but sexy, excerpt from that chapter. Not the whole chapter, just an excerpt.

A Tortured Soul is released on 5th May and you can pre-order it on Smashwords right now.

Chapter Title Reveal Tomorrow

As you probably know, A Tortured Soul, will be released on 5th May and you can pre-order it on Smashwords right now. And in the run up to release day, I’ll be adding more content here to whet your appetite for the book.

Tomorrow, Wednesday 23rd April, I’ll be revealing the chapter headings of the first ten chapters of the book. So be sure to pop back tomorrow.

Don’t forget, if you buy the book from Smashwords by 31st May, you can get 25% off with the promo code “GR62L”.

And up to 31st May You can also get 25% of A Good Man, the book you need to have read before you tackle A Tortured Soul if it’s going to make any sense. Just use the promo code “ET63H”. And if you do buy this now, you might well discover a special treat – the whole of the first two chapters of A Tortured Soul!

(p.s., if you have already bought the book from Smashwords previously, you’re entitled to download the latest version, which includes those two chapters)

A Tortured Soul–Release on 5th May

Yep, you read that right, I’ve completed the final review of the book and A Tortured Soul will now be released to the public on 5th May 2014. It will be available through all the usual outlets, Amazon, Barnes & Nobel, iBooks, Google Play and Smashwords.

Indeed, it is already available to ‘pre-order’ on Smashwords and a pre-order page may well pop up on Barnes & Nobel, iBooks or Google Play in advance of 5th May.

In addition to the release date, I can also announce that if you buy the book from Smashwords before 31st May, you can get 25% off with the promo code “GR26L”. And that’s not all, of you haven’t read the first book in the series, you can also get 25% off at Smashwords with the promo code “ET63H”, as long as you buy before 31st May.

“Sophie’s Tutor” removed from Google Play for Violation of Content Policies

Oh Dear.

Back on 13th March, I got notice from Google that Sophie’s Tutor was being removed from the Play bookstore for violation of content policies. Well, at least they let me know, which is more than some companies do.

The e-mail contained the following quote…

Please note that we do not allow books that include graphic sexual images, pornographic text or depictions of extreme sexual acts, including rape, incest and bestiality. Pseudo depictions of these acts are not permitted either.

Please review your book catalog and remove any titles that include this content. Failure to comply with these policies may result in suspension or removal from the program. We appreciate your cooperation.

Okay, fine. I couldn’t see why Sophie’s Tutor violated any of these areas though. Certainly, there are no graphic images and I’d hardly describe the text as pornographic – well, no more pornographic than anything else I’ve written, but’s a debate all of it’s own. In fact from Google’s own content policy page we have this

Sexually explicit material

Permitted
Images of sexually suggestive nudity
Sexually explicit text

Any idea what the difference is or where Google choose to draw the line? No, me neither. Anyway, there are no depictions of what I’d consider ‘extreme sexual acts’ in Sophie’s Tutor (it’s pretty vanilla m/f sex), no rape, no incest an no fucking any damn animals.

So I wrote back and asked Google the following

In order to review my content for compliance with your content policy, please define the difference between “Sexually explicit text” and “Pornographic text” as referenced in the Policy.

I need to know with more clarity what you define as “pornographic” before I can decide if any of my other titles fit this description.

I would point out that I do not believe the title removed fits the description of what’s “not permitted’ but since the description is very much open to interpretation, I would like know your reasoning for its removal. Neither Amazon nor Barnes and Noble have removed this title.

I finally heard back from Google on Friday 4th April, that’s about 4 weeks, give or take. Here’s what they said. The bolding is mine to highlight what I consider to be… well, you’ll see.

Hello,

I am sorry for taking so long to get back to you on this. Although we understand your concern, we’re unable to provide decision details for specific books. Google removes books that we believe violate our content policies, and our review of ISBN:9781301029013 (Sophie’s Tutor) did find content that does not comply with these policies.
We appreciate your understanding.

So, hang on, what you’re saying is that you found the book to violate the policy, but you’re not going to tell me why or give any indication how it could be changed to make it comply. Really? If we aren’t told why something violates the policy, how are we supposed to avoid violating the policy in future? That makes no sense. What this shows is that Google are just as arbitrary and no more helpful than the other large companies that sell e-books.

SO, you’ll no longer be able to get Sophie’s Tutor from Google Play – not that Google Play is a big sales channel for me. It’s not. But it’s the principle, don’t you agree? In the meantime, I suggest if you haven’t read the book and what to try and work out for yourself why it violates Google’s content policy, you’ll have to pick it up from Amazon, Smashwords, iBooks or Barnes& Nobel.

The odd thing is that my link to the book on Google Play still works.

Please share this post so that other can see that google are no better than Amazon, Apple or any of the others when it comes to a pretty vague content policy.

Edit Well Under Way

My ‘Blue Pen & Highlighter” review of A Tortured Soul is well under way. Having the m/s printed means I can pick it up and review a few pages whenever I have a spare moment. I’m currently about half-way through chapter seven (of twenty-nine) and I’ve yet to find any particularly heinous errors. Yes, there are the odd missing bits of punctuation or extra bits of punctuation, some poor word choices and a few lines that really need to be re-written, but nothing that would make me delete whole sections and start again,

So far, so good.

If I keep up this pace, I’ll be on track for my target dates of “Mid-April” to get the book available for pre-order on a “End-of-April” release.

Here’s hoping.

First Draft Completed

Well, on Monday I said I hoped to complete the first draft of A Tortured Soul by the end of the week. Then I was able to get a good run at it and completed the thing later that day.

Yep, you read that right, the first draft of A Tortured Soul is COMPLETE.

It’s only about fifteen months later than my first self-imposed ‘deadline’ but hey, such is life.

It topped out at 121,580 words – making it just about a third longer than anything I’ve written previously. (That’s 517449 characters, or 633819 if you include spaces) Writing time (or at least, time the document has been ‘open’ on my screen) is 8929 minutes, or 148.8 hours, or 6.2 days. Doesn’t seem that long when you put it like that. So why did it take me over two years in real time?

There are twenty-nine chapters and at present there is no prologue or epilogue (and I don’t think I’ll be adding them either).  That’s compared to 49 chapters in A Good Man (inc prologue and epilogue). That’s because the average chapter length in A Good Man is 1960, but the average chapter length in A Tortured Soul is 4190.

Why the change? It just felt right for this book when I was writing it. Of course, this is all subject to the editing process.

So what now? Well, I’ve managed to get a print of the draft manuscript (it’s there, in that picture!) and in a couple of weeks time I’ll start going though it with a blue pen and a highlighter. I’ll try and pick up as many ‘silly errors’ as I can. I’ll make notes about what I can cut.  I’ll highlight places I can add more detail and when all that is done, I’ll check it once more before running it through a consistency checker I’ve been advised to check out.

In the couple of weeks before I do that, I really need to ‘clear my head’ – or at least try and get the story and characters out of my head. So to do that I’ve got one, possibly two, short stories I want to write. Now, I may not finish them in that time. I certainly don’t expect to be able to edit and release them in that time, but it should do the job it’s meant to and give me something to work on after release before I look at starting the next novel.

Yes, I said ‘release’. At this stage, I’m setting myself a goal of getting the manuscript edited and ready for release by the end of April. I’ll firm that up soon. I intend to take advantage of Smashwords ‘pre-release ordering’ (which also filters through to Barnes &Nobel and iBooks given enough time), so we’ll have to see how that works out.

So there we have it. The second book of Paul’s Coming of Age story is getting much, much closer. Excited? I know I am.

So Close I Can Taste It

I’m so, so close to finishing off the first draft of A Tortured Soul. So damn close. I have, quite literally, just one more scene to write. Okay, so it’s a type of scene I’ve not attempted to write before – it’s a ‘first time’ anal sex scene – but that really shouldn’t matter. After all, I’ve done my research.

No, not that kind of research! Get your minds out of the gutters you filthy people.

Seriously though, I’m having one of those really frustrating periods where I know exactly what I want to write – hell, I’ve played the scene over in my head a dozen times, each time adding to it and making it richer in detail – but I can’t seem to find the time to actually sit at a keyboard and write it out.

The sooner they come up with a way to translate thoughts and/or dreams into the written word can’t come soon enough. Why can’t boffins work on this type of thing instead of inventing the butter-stick? (No. 6 on that list. Really?)

That said, it’s my own fault. I’m too easily distracted by stupid social media, aggregator websites, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and boobs.

Yes, boobs. They are very distracting.

Anyhoo….

I’m aiming to get this first draft done and dusted this week. Then I can set the manuscript aside and I’ve got a short story I want to write to “clear my head” of it before coming back to give it a really good edit.

And you know what, we might actually be aiming for a release date of the end of April. Won’t that be cool? I’m starting to get excited.

Sales Talk – Again

A couple of weeks ago, I shared some of my sales stats, pointing out that A Good Man was my best selling book by some distance and that my sales were pretty evenly split between Smashwords and Amazon. But I also said that the Smashwords figures represented a number of different channels, including Banes & Nobel’s Nook store and Apple’s iBooks, and since I had the information in available, I’d really like to break the stats down to reflect those sales channels.

Well, I’ve been able to do that now and it makes interesting reading. Or, at least, I think it does.

First off, let’s just look at how my all-time sales breakdown by channel, shall we.

As you can see, three of the Smashwords channels are pretty small beer, with Sony, Kobo and Diesel accounting for just 4% of all my sales in total. And given that I’m no longer on Kobo after the Great Porn Purge of 2013 and that Sony have announced the closure of their store, it’s probably a good thing I don’t sell in great quantities at either of them.

Sales on the actual Smashwords Website make up nearly a quarter of all my sales, as opposed to two fifths on Amazon’s platform. But I can reveal that most of those sales were A Good Man just after its release and before it got pushed through to the other stores.

The real interesting point here is that Apple and B&N make up nearly 20% of my all times sales, despite not carrying A Good Man until after it initial sales boost of its release had calmed down.

How is that possible?

Well, take a look at this graph. It shows how the share of sales has changed over the past two and a bit years at my four main channels.

The blue line represents sales at the Kindle store and you can see that sales there have actually been on something of a slide.

The purple line is Smashwords and you can see the spike in sale share around Q4-2011 when A Good Man was released, but after that it’s been pretty stable at between five and twenty per cent.

But the interesting lines are the green one, which is Apple, and the red one, which is B&N. Sales at Apple spiked at around 50% in Q2-2012 and have sat at between twenty and thirty per cent ever since. But look at that red line. Sales at B&N took off in 2013, jumping up from an average of between nothing and ten per cent at the start of the year, to in the region of 50% by the end of the year.

If that keeps up, then by the end of 2014, the first graph I showed you will have changed quite a bit.

What’s the point of this? Well, it tells me that I really need to take proper advantage of Smashwords ‘Pre-order’ facility and make sure that my next book is available at two of my major sales channels (Apple and B&N) by release day.

It also tells me that when I’m tweeting links out to world, I’m probably better off tweeting links to the iBooks, Nook and Kindle pages for each book rather than the Smashwords link.

Making Progress

So, it’s been a couple of weeks since my last post. Just shows how quickly real life can get busy, doesn’t it? Anyway, this week I’m on a holiday from work. Just a week over the water in France with the in-laws, nothing fancy. But it’s given me a chance to do more writing that I’ve done in a fair while and to look a bit more in depth at my sales stats.

More on the sales stats in another post.

For today I’m happy to report that I’ve added over 2000 words to A Tortured Soul over the past couple of days. This makes me very happy. Very happy indeed.

And what makes me even happier is that I’m now confident with how I’m going to end this book. It’s pretty much written in my head and I just need to get it onto the page. It’s not how I’ve been envisioning the ending for the past few months, but it came to me quite suddenly and I’m certain it’s a better ending.

Which is why this isn’t a very long post. I’d much rather be working on getting the story out of my head while I’m in the swing of it.

To finish, here’s a picture of the public gardens here in Bethune where I’m staying. In the centre of the picture, in the distance, you can see the church where I got married nearly ten years ago.

Let’s Talk Sales

With Heaven in Leather going live on various websites yesterday, I took the opportunity to do a bit of admin in respect of the information I hold about my e-books such as URLs for the various titles at various stores and sales figures. And it’s sales figures I want to talk about today.

Now, first up, let’s put the cards on the table, I’m a stat hound. Number are in my blood and stats are the ultimate fun tool to play with numbers. I’m a geek that way.

Now, I have spread sheet (naturally) where I keep details of my sales figures on a ‘per quarter, per channel’ basis. It’s not quite as detailed as I’d like it to be mind, because I’ve lumped all the sales that come through Smashwords (i.e. iBooks, B&N, Sony etc) into just one channel and at some point I’d like to break things down further. I have the information to do it, just lack the time.

But anyway, as I was looking over the stats, I realised something – I really need to get my arse in gear and get A Tortured Soul finished and released. Why? Well, take a look at this graph and if that doesn’t answer the question then nothing will.

A Good Man makes up almost half of my all time sales. HALF! That’s bonkers. That one book could outperform all the others so completely. The rest are reasonably evenly distributed, but the sheer dominance of AGM in this chart tells you why I need to finish the second book in the series and the sooner the better.

While I’m on, this is what I mean about wanting to break my sales channel data down a bit more. This graph shows that I get about the same number of sales from ‘Smashwords Channels” as I do from the Kindle Store. But “Smashwords Channels” includes the Smashwords website, Sony eReader Store, Diesel, iBooks, B&N Nook store and Kobo (who no longer stock my books – those Bastards). So I’d really like to find the time to redraft my spread sheet to break this down and see where all those sales are coming from.

Anyway, that’s enough. You’re getting bored now, I can tell. All these graphs and numbers and stuff. I should just bugger off and do some writing.