S.K.S. Perry's Blog, page 18

Proposed Book Title

Heroes of the Way: The Moonlight War Book 1

Thoughts?

Nothing is easy anymore.

It used to be simple: You wrote a (good?) book; you found an agent; your agent found you a publisher.

Well, not exactly easy. If you messed up any of those three, chances are you'd never see your book on the shelves. (Although it was possible to perform those tasks out of order, or occasionally skip a step.)

But now?

I have a few people (people in the know; people I trust) telling me to skip those last two steps and self-publish.

I know, I know. I've already self-published, and it hasn't exactly made me a fortune, or a household name.

Darkside and Waking the Dead have been available at Amazon for almost a year now. So far my royalties have amounted to about $380. Of course, Darkside only sells for 99 cents, which means I only see 35 cents a book. And you can find them both for free. One site alone has downloaded over 800 copies of Darkside and 600 of Waking the Dead. I know downloads don't necessarily mean people read my books. People will download anything if it's free. Still, I can't help but wonder what kind of sales I would've had if Darkside hadn't been offered for free for the last 3 years.

And then there's the fact that self-pubbed authors get no respect. No one wants to review your book, or the people that do don't have enough clout to make a difference. My books have been reviewed on several different sites, and I've never noticed a bump in sales following. Self-pubbed books aren't up for awards, no matter how well written or how well they sell.

What about marketing? People can't buy your book if they don't know about it. As of posting this, Amazon currently lists 27,601 fantasy eBooks alone, a lot of them by traditional publishers whose authors already have a following and name recognition. They're a proven commodity. How does a self-pubbed author compete with that?

So why would I want to self-publish?

I don't know.

What I do know is the traditional market is broken.

Get a lawyer, they say. Don't bother with an agent. Why pay an agent 15% of what you make, when you can pay a lawyer a one time fee to negotiate your contract? Makes sense, I guess. Are there lawyers who specialise in literary contracts? That know about electronic rights and movie rights and serial rights and all those rights I've never heard of? Where do I find one?

But wait, without an agent how am I supposed to get my book in front of a publisher? Believe it or not they don't like you showing up on their doorstep, or walking up to them at conventions (especially when they're in the bathroom stalls) manuscript in hand. For a long while now the agents have been their gatekeepers. (Ooh, that suddenly sounded all Matrix-like!). And I doubt agents are very willing to give up that role.

Traditional publishers are panicking, trying to grab up all the rights they can, and if a writer isn't careful they can get screwed over, which is why you need an agent, or a lawyer, to protect yourself.

And the traditional publisher may not do much more in the way of marketing than you can accomplish yourself, especially if they're paying you a small advance.

When I dreamt of being a writer, I dreamt of seeing my books in the bookstores, of doing the writer signings and conventions. There's that sense of legitimacy from being traditionally published. I'm hoping that's still a viable dream, but I don't know.

Traditional publishing is definitely the more difficult route. Self-publishing used to be the thing you did when you couldn't get a traditional publisher interested in your work. Now, apparently, not so much.

So I'm confused.

A Revelation!

So let me get this straight - all I have to do to write young adult is change the age of everyone who's killing people in my books to 16?

I didn't have this much trouble naming my kids!!

I can't believe coming up with a book title is giving me such a hard time! I mean I know that should it get published the publisher will probably change it anyway, but still, I can't just submit it as "A book by S.K.S. Perry". (No matter what retrobabble
says.)

I have a title for the next Darkside book, and I'm only on chapter one. Heck, I have titles for the next two Darkside books, should I choose to write them. But this one? Nadda.

I spent all day yesterday scoping out the fantasy titles on Amazon and I came to this conclusion: Heroic/Epic Fantasy novels have the cheesiest titles. Everything I think of sounds either too melodramatic, is too generic, doesn't fit, is a word from the book I made up, or would give away the plot in the title.

I even tried random title generators. Now I know where all those cheesy titles came from.

And my friends are no help. I mean Dark Darkness: The Darkening? (Okay, that one amuses me, but no.)

Seriously, why do I do this to myself???

Finished.

So the rewrites are done to the best of my ability, although it still doesn't have a title. I suppose I should celebrate, but meh.

Now for the dreaded agent search. I have no idea which agents are interested in heroic fantasy right now, if any. And the query letter? Don't get me started. Oh well, here goes nothing.

I had a sudden moment of panic when I thought that someon...

I had a sudden moment of panic when I thought that someone might have taken my last post seriously, the I remembered - no one reads my blog. *whew*

I'm just about finished the rewrites on my current WIP. I...

I'm just about finished the rewrites on my current WIP. I've added a Jar Jar Binks-like character for the kiddies, and now all the monsters sparkle! :p~~~

I haven't been posting because pretty much everything suc...

I haven't been posting because pretty much everything sucks lately, and who wants to read about that?

Adapt and Overcome

A good friend bought me a Kobo e-reader for Christmas, and while at first I was adverse to the idea of electronic books (which is odd considering my own are only available in that format) I have to admit the format has grown on me.

I think my main former objection to e-readers was that I like to collect books. I like to have them on my shelf, in my library--but the truth is I have boxes of books in my basement that I haven't unpacked since the move before the last move before this move!

So what I've decided to do is to only buy hard copies of books by friends, and ebooks for everything else. (I have enough writer friends that I'm pretty sure that will still amount to a rather substantial library.)

Hopefully this will satisfy both my need to read, and collect, and clear out a little space in the basement for...um...a music room?

At least the don't sparkle.

We saw Underworld Awakening on the weekend. Not bad. Not great, but definitely not a waste of Pen's my money.

I think what struck me the most is the human conceit that should we ever go to war with the vampires we would easily eradicate them. Really? They move so fast that it might as well be teleportation, they can bench press an Escalade, and you have to kill them just right or it doesn't take. Not only that, but they can jump like Roos on crack!

Most military people I know have enough trouble hitting a stationary target at 100 meters, never mind one that can move faster than you can blink. And so what if vampires have to hole up during the day? It's not like you can tell them apart from us at a glance--at least not the Underworld vampires. I'm pretty sure once we started offing them during the daylight they would quickly bring the war to us at night, and not go to ground and try to hide. One night of a full-on vamp attack would probably decimate most of our military.

Of course this is the movies, so apparently the vampires are only superhuman when it suits the plot.