Sarah Scheele's Blog, page 5

Knowledge is So Precious

​This month Ryan and Essie is available for free as part of a giveaway of children’s and young adult books. You'll find lots of books about young people of all ages from preschool to high school. This is the first time in years that I’ve made Ryan and Essie free except for review copies—and it will be the last time for the foreseeable future. So now is your chance to get a rare free copy of this book. Follow this link to see it in addition to books by many other authors.

I have given away some books over the last few months because I have a specific goal in mind—to get readers who came because they were interested in these books that I made free. That sounds obvious, but it’s really important. I spoke once before about some of my books receiving disproportionate attention. You might think “well, weren’t those more popular, isn’t that good?” But actually, I felt the situation was a little trickier than that. I have only so much I plan to spend on marketing, so I need to know which books are likely to be smart investments. I didn't know for certain that the books receiving more attention were really the viable ones. Perhaps some of the smaller books had a quiet audience I wasn't hearing about. So while I of course wanted to sell my books, I also felt it was crucial to learn how big a draw each book would actually be if it was easily available (free, for instance) and presented to readers in a way that would draw attention (as free always does.)

I've gone through the majority of the books now using this method. There were no winners and losers, just truthfulness. I didn’t find a book to be inferior or less valid just because it drew smaller initial downloads, if it attracted more active subscribers and fewer freeloaders who never opened even one email. Some books with seemingly successful giveaway campaigns actually gave me a lot of unengaged readers who opened and then quickly stopped reading my messages, which left me with a guess as to how they were doing with the book they downloaded. Then there were promotions in the middle, with some of both. The numbers game wasn’t about aiming for lots of downloads. It was about trying to find a trajectory for both the more talked-about and the less-noticed books on my publication list. And I learned a lot of fantastic things.

Using various books as entry points helped my newsletter to become more balanced. I felt as if I had “voices” for most of my books now whereas that had been lacking before. And yes, some of the ones that had always received more attention continued to get it. But I certainly haven’t committed to free as a promotion strategy instead of sales. In fact, as I also ran paid promotions throughout last year, the books started to develop some interesting demographics based on both free and paid events that helped give me concepts like “people would download this for free, but not buy it,” “this has a small, but sincerely dedicated audience,” “this book is JUST small,” “this one is surprisingly popular,” and so on. I put Ryan and Essie through a sale last year, but haven’t cross-matched it with a free event, which is why I’m doing one now. It needs full representation on my list.

And there will be more updates.

Snow, Grow, and Know

Well, snow is a part of winter for many of you, depending on where you live. But for me in central Texas, it’s rarely a factor. The last snow that covered the ground enough to make snowballs or a bit of a snowman was 16 years ago. Many winters go by with essentially no snow at all—perhaps a little ice or freezing rain. But this month we got a little miracle. Snow all day on a Sunday, white blanketing the ground and dusting trees with silver. Snowflakes fell on our faces as we made the biggest snowman we’ve ever had (okay, so it was small because we’re not used to making them) and made snow angels. Carved our dog’s name in huge snow letters on the front yard that actually lasted into the next day— P. U. F. F. Snow remained on people’s roofs and snowmen lingered in their yards for a couple of days even though temps were above freezing. It’s been almost 40 years (1982) since we had that much snow!

You should know that This Merry Summertime has review copies on BookSprout. They will be available over the next two weeks. Reviews can be put up anytime once you have downloaded the book, but new download copies will no longer be available after two weeks. I plan to start building a street team this year so I have reviewers lined up for when the third Palladia book releases. I'll give you a head's-up when I have a signup form, as this will give you a chance to advance read and give feedback on my first entirely new, never-before-seen work of fiction in 4 years. But prior to getting a street team together I've got MerrySummer on BookSprout because I can painlessly keep it there whenever convenient and I wouldn't mind getting a few reviews on this book. Feel free to be one of those reviewers--just follow the link to get started.

The Palladia Trilogy is gaining more detail since I want to fit the third Palladia book into the others in a way that develops a solid vision. I don’t want to use ideas that are very similar to the first books, so with #3 on the way I’m going down pretty deep into the subtleties of this future world to draw out a new protagonist who will synchronize well with ones from the earlier books and possibly interact with them. But I have to give her something to do that makes Palladia 3 not only a unique story in itself but also a link that unifies the first two Palladia books together and determines what the overall purpose of the series is. At first, it never seemed that this book would be necessary, but when stories evolve and grow to meet an audience, good things start to happen and now it is beyond essential. I’m excited for it.

Description focus this week: The Test of Devotion. I used to think of this as a rugged story with an American western setting. I thought it was all action. And it also easily came across as dry as dust and mildly unfocused when I described it. From High Noon to The Magnificent Seven to childhood favorites like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and today’s space spinoff The Mandalorian, there’s a western for everyone. But while there are many kinds of western stories, they are not all alike, and turns out mine isn't really a simple action-adventure, although it looked that way when the description was so flat. After I upped the emotion and initial pull of the way the book is presented just a bit, what emerged instead was a focus on compassion and trust. It's a two-way conversation about respect that the characters gain through both their own effort and the changed feelings of those they know. The development of the story changed a while back to make Viajero more of a caring person than he’d been shown initially and since he carries a lot of the book's POV that really paid off in strengthening the overall theme into something about human integrity and reparation of divisive relationships.

And there will be more updates.

The Best Is Yet to Come

As we enter the new year, everyone has resolutions for 2021. Losing weight, managing money better, renovating your home, volunteering with youth—all of us have priorities. For myself on the writing front, I plan to finish The Palladia Trilogy this year. That’s a broader goal, thinking more globally. During this month I have just two goals. One is to get back to normal after last month, which was really busy because the holidays intersected with my uncle’s passing away—he died of carbon monoxide poisoning when his furnace malfunctioned and we were told about it on the 26th—and with disastrous plumbing that struck on a chilly New Year’s Eve and left us managing busted pipes and broken faucets for days over the weekend. My sister came on Jan. 2nd for a delayed Christmas party, and while this was nice because I hadn’t seen her in a while, it left me feeling a little bit with a full plate the week after Christmas.

The other is to redo my book descriptions so they sound less like slices of stale bread. I wanted to equalize all of my books last year because some got disproportionately more attention and others had gone unpublished—so I cut down to the basics and did a bare-bones description for each book. All pretty similar and detailing just what’s in the book’s plot components, nothing more. But now I think they are pretty much stabilized, so I’m looking for more of an emotional connection coming out of the blurbs.

A Year with the Harrisons got a makeover last month for market-oriented purposes. It felt complete as a story, but it had always wavered between YA and Women’s fiction--kind of an all-ages sort of thing. The original serial version had Letty as a college girl, but I kicked it down to high-schooler when I published the print in 2018 because the book’s homeschool focus was still big at that time and it made more sense to show a girl who was actually still learning at home. Education turned out not to be an important factor in this book at all, though, and the homeschool component has dwindled to just a couple of mentions here and there. Rather, it’s about an extended family of people who are proudly different from others and can easily get a little full of themselves about it—but isn’t everyone’s family like that? So I moved the book to New Adult, which a writing editorial I subscribe to defined as about women ages 18-30 going through still-youthful life experiences. This held an umbrella over plots with both the protagonists (Letty who is now 18 and Betty who is 28.)

Ryan and Essie also got some definition as I removed the brief mention (unlike in Harrisons it was always very brief) of the Essie character as homeschooled. The idea hadn’t been to explore education, but to polarize the kids even further so they were opposed in every way and couldn't relate to each other at first. But their antagonism isn’t what drives the story. Much more it’s what brings them together as they make moral choices for the first time. Digging into the description to draw out more emotion—since readers who aren’t on my newsletter don’t have the luxury of getting details sent their way twice a month—has been fun since the world of Caricanus has an angle as a creepy kind of place. It’s in ruins, but not abandoned and the followers of Trisagion are quite as questionable as they are austere and tough. So these two kids explore this place with a very deep history and decide what to do about the world, not about each other since they aren’t really a problem.

And there will be more updates.

Eyes on the Horizon

For the last 3 years, I’ve blogged pretty much every week. At times I posted more than once a week and I actually can’t remember if I ever skipped posting during some of those busy months in 2018 and 2019! But for a long time, it's been steady at one post per week, shared in the newsletter on Saturdays. I have been putting a lot of attention into my blog posts, but blog activity and promotional activity to market older books are both taking a lot of my time. I really want to start writing new books and since I'm also busy with other things, I have to prioritize where my writing time goes. So I will be cutting the blog posting down to about twice a month, which means you’ll be getting a newsletter update every other week instead of weekly. I know I will miss talking to each of you every week!

I kept a few sporadic blogs in the past when my posting was much less consistent. But this blog has been a steady place for me to discuss my work and my artistic vision over the last few years and I’ve been very blessed and grateful for that. The continuity of this blog has been a product of the stable newsletter following I’ve had during that time and writers are beings who want their words to be read by a public audience. Having my ideas discussed through this blog has been beyond meaningful and kept me feeling so encouraged during a time when I wasn’t producing any new material and was instead contemplating my journey forward and how to become an author who truly helps readers.

However, it’s also true that many writers only send newsletters occasionally and keep their blog (or podcast) as a separate stream people can also subscribe to. I’ll do whatever feels right at the time when I am able to produce weekly blog content again. I will still post weekly images on FB and Instagram (there are follow buttons at the top of the newsletter or in the sidebar if you've clicked through to the blog) and in the next few months I plan to do a little more video content. I will continue to connect with you every other week via email during this exciting upcoming new year. I have three WIP now—two are more fleshed-out ideas and one is just lurking around the corner—and I am so eager for you to see all of them. To do that, I must write more on my manuscripts and less on my blog. And in any case, twice a month is still pretty often to get an email from me.

A Christmas Fiction Playlist

I mentioned that I have been collecting Christmas songs. And when I was listening to them, I noticed the people that each song represents. The songs are the echoes of real people in life, people who find their place in the Christmas narrative year after year. Those people read books too. So I started to feel some songs were closer to particular stories of mine than others were. I could almost imagine the characters singing these songs, although Christmas has actually never been mentioned in any of my books to date. (I’d like to do a Christmas-themed book. On the bucket list. On the bucket list.)

It's true that some of the carols I gave each book weren't written in the historical era the book is set in (or they were from another culture so the characters probably wouldn't have used the song) and that my fantasy characters don't celebrate Christmas because their worlds are imaginary and I never included a Christmas-type idea in them. But if these characters lived here and now in December they might sing these songs. The people who have such and such carol as their favorite—they are the people who I wrote about in those exact books.

Just for fun, I put together a playlist for you of some of these carols. Because these songs are likely so familiar to you, they might literally ring a bell. The arrangements are choral, vocal soloist, piano soloist, even Celtic. The last two are representative of several songs I associate with my two WIP. I trust by next Christmas that one of them will be published. And after that there are always Christmases to come.

Always.

Coordinating the Mutants

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been given quite a few clothes that I’ve never or rarely worn. So last month I looked at them and thought, “you know, you never wear these because you’re not sure if they coordinate together and what goes with what. That means you most likely WILL never wear them unless you start trying them on and putting them into outfits.” I started putting stray pieces into sets. I assigned a dedicated blouse/poncho/something to wear on top for each skirt or pair of pants. And I went on until, eventually, I turned a pile of random things into something less random, something with a purpose. For clothes, since being worn is their purpose, I guess they now have one.
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Millhaven Castle and The Birthday Present used to be random little strays too. While people liked Millhaven Castle, it didn’t belong with the semi-epic fantasy mood of Facets of Fantasy, so to improve Facets of Fantasy I took MC out. It was too short to stand alone, so it went to The Birthday Present. These two stories didn't fit with anything else I'd written, but they didn’t seem to go together either. Presenting them as a contrast was my initial idea, but that’s like wearing bright green with bright red. It only works sometimes, like at Christmas, and other times it’s just silly.

A sci-fi story about how mutants almost wiped out humans just had nothing to do with Millhaven’s little spinoff of period drama. Until I noticed (and my readers probably saw it before I did!) that Millhaven's setting needn’t actually be viewed as historical. In fact, while castles are from an older culture they still exist and can even be inhabited. Farming, socializing through dancing, and people holding a position of wealth or importance over others happen today and could certainly exist in the future. So gradually the visualization of Millhaven Castle moved from a separate world into another story about the Birthday Present world. The Birthday Present is about the old conflict between humans and mutants being ended. Millhaven Castle is a little episode that takes place within the society of the mutants themselves. Typical, middle-class people who aren’t connected to the royalty or the military that appear in TBP. The different regions of the country have a lot of autonomy and their regional leaders almost have a position of minor kings, like Lord Timson.

So the people in these two stories are in such different spheres that they have never interacted with each other, keeping their episodes distinct. I have already added a new introduction to the book, called "The World of Aure's Dominion," in which the connection between the two stories is clarified, plus I have assigned regional tags to the story locations. The Birthday Present mostly occurs in the Kaline district, of which Arnea is the capital, and Millhaven Castle takes place in the Milland district, of which Flangost is the capital. And the book's description now elaborates that GMFs are like superheroes gone bad and they tried to crush normal humans instead of saving them. Although that's not the end of the story, of course. 

And there will be more updates.

Carols and Popcorn

With Christmas coming up later this month, shopping and gift-giving (a tradition that for some people seems to preempt the holiday’s Christian significance) are probably on everyone’s minds. I’m not a kid anymore and in any case I view giving and receiving material objects as hardly the real reason for the season. But I do like to see people happy when they get a token of personal affection, especially from family members and it’s nice to hum Christmas songs as I go through the store, surrounded by tins of caramel popcorn and displays of fudge brownie mix. Yes, I do like Christmas carols!

In fact, I have been collecting old CDs of Christmas music that I found very, very cheap at resale stores. Most are 10-25 years old, but Christmas is a lot older than that. And every so often I find a lovely recording. We’ve had traditional Christmas music in our home for decades—songs we plug into the TV or computer’s USB port and listen to every year. But after so long I felt some refreshing would be good. Some new arrangements. So I’ve been working on getting some new renditions to join the ones we always listen to. Most likely many people have a favorite version of a Christmas carol, by a particular artist or orchestra, that they feel just really captures the mood of that song. The Christmas emotions.

There are so many Christmas songs written through over a millennium of Christmases and they are much more than just different variations on the same thing—different flavors of holiday popcorn. I will add that I love holiday popcorn. But as I listened to so much Christmas music recently, I’ve noticed how different ones speak to different people. Almost all of them are reiterations of the same idea: Jesus was a baby in a manger, angels praised his birth, all should rejoice, the holidays are here, Christmas is a meaningful season, bells and other religious emblems are important, etc. But every one holds different emotions about this event. Some express people to whom Christmas is a cultural winter holiday, a time of peace, while others celebrate the religious theology or reflect on bittersweet personal feelings. Many tunes with far from spiritual origins, such as Greensleeves, are recycled to include Christmas messages, while some carols seem to have little point at all. (We Wish You a Merry Christmas was the original carol for those people who were just showing up for the holiday food!)

Then There Was Ed

Edmund Bertram was not the reason I did Mansfield Park. I'd never quite liked him--although I didn't care much and that was a good thing. I actually took Mansfield because its characters annoyed me the least. I preferred some of Austen's other novels as overall stories, but each of them had at least one major character that irritated me to pieces. Writing about those characters would be a problem, so I bypassed those books. Only two of them were options, but I would also have skipped the other three if they had been on the table. Edmund was the one character I didn't completely like in Mansfield Park, but he didn't drive me crazy.

The tricky thing was that he was a primary male character, so I couldn't minimize him. I planned for him to be an obligatory reference at first and early on I wrote more of a trite romance between Ed and Fanny (Faye) than currently appears in Bellevere because I felt he wasn't good for much else. But he sprang up large because he has a quite real, unexpected entertainment factor. In fact, his faults are what I began to enjoy about him. He doesn't have to be perfect or anywhere close to that in order to be a good character. He just has to be real--something that applies to Bellevere House as a whole. Its characters aren't whitewashed role models or even entirely rational, but from being a skeptic who had always had Austen in my face (not that I hated her, but my friends and family were way bigger fans) I've grown into loving her work. Bellevere is now my personal favorite of my books for plot and storyline. Not for characters, because that's Victoria: A Tale of Spain. But for narrative and that of course means I've put it above any of my own creative plots. To paraphrase John Dryden "I hope that in wrecking Jane Austen I have created an above-average self-published novel."

When I was evaluating my books, I began to reconsider Bellevere and Ed. Though he's unattractive at times, his absolute foolishness keeps him from being a boring character. He might even be funny as he drifts around trying to up his market value by being rude to the woman he actually likes and flirting with someone else. After all, what I've always tried to avoid was writing a boring book, not a bad one. And, thanks to Austen's vivid story arcs, this one will be worth reading no matter what I do with it. My first blurbs for the book, which feel almost cute since they were so long ago, said Ed was the one Faye would never admit she was in love with. I've discovered it's the opposite. Faye is the one Ed will never admit he's in love with. But since he is actually quite fond of her, it makes sense that he now spends most of the last chapter apologizing to her.

In a Nutshell: Viltan and Kalvarina

Ryan and Essie’s plot involves a twist where the two children turn out to have parallel siblings living on the planet Caricanus. Ryan’s parallel sibling is a twin sister named Rianna and Essie’s is a brother who’s two years older than she is, named Ethan. The initial way the story was written had Ethan also being Essie’s twin, but by the time the story was finished it had changed to being a brother only. Maybe two sets of twins running around on this planet just felt like overkill or maybe it was some other reason. Anyway, Ethan looks very similar to his sister and fills the exact same role in the story as Ryan’s twin sister does.
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Caricanus is like a mirror world to ours where these kids go to learn about some of the relationships in their lives. So two characters to look at are ones who are closely involved with the twins plot—Viltan and Kalvarina. They are the only two characters who really seem to know Ethan and Rianna before the secret of their identities as related to Ryan and Essie is revealed.

Viltan is someone we don’t know a lot about. He seems to be in his late teens, but could easily be older and just look young because he is not fully human. He is part Kinari, a race that appears in Facets of Fantasy’s story “Jurant,” so he has weird purple eyes. This purple color reflects a lot of his inner ambivalence since it is a blend of two opposing colors, red and blue. Because half-Kinari are rare, Viltan never fit in anywhere and ended up on Caricanus. While he’s not loyal or admirable, to the extent we get to know him through Ryan’s POV, Viltan is close friends with Ethan. He knows that Ethan is human (a secret at the time) though he does not know the significance of this, and he always protects Ethan’s identity.

Kalvarina is the princess of the last castle that the kids visit in the story. Because there is a battle happening and Essie ends up destroying the castle through a mistake, we don’t see much of this castle compared to the lengthy time spent in some of the others. It is in a cold climate and the people there have a harsh warrior culture. Rianna lives alone a little to the north of the castle, in an observatory where she watches the stars. This mirrors her brother Ryan, who is in an observatory when Essie first meets him. Rianna mostly tames Vlagtaffs, a mysterious bird race, and keeps to herself, but Kalvarina seems to know where she lives and comes to ask for her help. She’s the only person shown aware of Rianna’s existence before the end of the book, though it’s possible Kalvarina’s parents might have known.

And there will be more updates.

My Books in Libraries

This Merry Summertime is now available for sale on several retailers besides Amazon. It joins the 9 other books already distributed via Draft2Digital. You can find it listed at B&N, iBooks, Kobo, and more. Click this link to see some of the stores where the book can be found. It will actually be available in more places, but some of them have longer publishing times (meaning the book takes longer to list there) or they don't have easily accessible links because you have to plug into their system to view content.

Library distributors like Overdrive and Bibliotheca are among the outlets that take an additional week or two to publish content, so I'll notify you when MerrySummer hits library ebook shelves. Meanwhile, all of my other books have been library-accessible for over a year. Reading ebooks at the library is really easy. You can check them out just like regular books except you read them on your phone. You return them by clicking a button—or they will return into the system automatically when their time is up. Audiobooks are also available to check out through library systems, if you like audiobooks, along with loads of ebooks. My library uses the Bibliotheca system—many others use Overdrive or a different system. Bibliotheca doesn’t have a browsable website of titles (that I could find anyway), but if your library uses Bibliotheca just log into its app with your library card.

Having my books available in library systems doesn’t mean you can automatically borrow them. The library has to purchase them first. But they are available for the library to buy because I’ve listed them in some of the sites that libraries use to buy books. If you’d like to check out one of my ebooks through the library, you can search for it using your library ebook app and then hit a button that requests for the library to buy it. There’s not a guarantee it will be bought, but libraries often fulfill requests from their patrons, and then you and others can enjoy the book for free through the library.

And there will be more updates.