Keith Robinson's Blog, page 5

Haunted Fortress (Island of Fog Legacies #4) is published!

The fourth book in the Island of Fog Legacies series, Haunted Fortress, is now available at all major stores.

HAUNTED FORTRESS
(Island of Fog Legacies #4)

Young shapeshifters Travis and Melinda are tasked with visiting the infamous Haunted Fortress to uncover its dark secrets. The residents of Hemlock, a small seaside village, have been seeing a phantom figure on and off for the past two hundred years. The phantom has many names -- Screeching Witch, Fiery Goddess, Ghoulish Ghost, and Mechanical Lady for starters -- but she's mostly known as the Snake Lady, a naga who appears out of thin air and then vanishes again.

The fortress is something to behold, floating above the sea just off the coast. And what's with the block of ice in the main chamber? Not only does it refuse to melt despite repeated attempts at thawing, the naga folk in the nearby woods suggest it contains a perfectly preserved corpse and should be left well alone.

Miss Simone disagrees. With Travis as a super-heated cherufe and Melinda as a naga girl, their two-pronged mission is to melt the ice and debunk the phantom...

HAUNTED FORTRESS is the fourth installment in the Island of Fog Legacies series

Buy it now! See the Island of Fog Legacies page for store links.

The book was actually published a few days ago, but I like to give it time to settle in, and for store links to start working. Plus, a post before today would have been eclipsed by the... er... well, the recent Total Solar Eclipse event.

But anyway, that's another job jobbed. I started writing back in 2002, and my first published book was in April 2009 just over eight years ago. Haunted Fortress is my 22nd publication:

17 full-length novels (9 Fog books, 4 Legacies books, 3 Sleep Writer books, and Quincy's Curse)1 novella (Eye of the Manticore)2 shared novels (Fractured and Unearthed)1 omnibus (the first three Fog books)1 short story collection (all Island of Fog related)

I expect to publish a further two books in 2017, namely Tails of a Shapeshifter, which is half new material and half pulled from my archives -- and Warp Giants, containing a handful of novelettes for Sleep Writer Book 5. And 2018 will start with Death Storm, the fifth book in the Island of Fog Legacies series.

Are you keeping up? :-)

Completed book, forthcoming books, audiobooks, book sales, book covers, and... darkness!

This is a round-up of stuff that's been happening in the last month or two. Look, I may not have posted here in a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy!

The Next Book in the Island of Fog Legacies

I asked two regular, eagle-eyed beta readers for their input on Haunted Fortress (Island of Fog Legacies #4), and they offered excellent feedback as usual. After wrestling with the final 6-8 chapters to make events cleaner and clearer, I'm happy to say the book is now complete. I'd also like to ask a couple more beta readers for their opinion, which I'll do privately (though feel free to request a copy if you'd like). I plan to publish the book this month.

And now I'm already thinking about Book 5 in the series. The basic plot is there, but I need to work out some details. I do believe New Earth is about to change, and not in a good way. Imagine if all the characters we know are suddenly different, unfamiliar. That's what happens when the giant brain under the ground decides to shake things up a bit. Only Travis (with Melinda alongside) can fix this mess.

As usual, I'll outline all this and really hammer the thing out. Once the outline is done, I can safely put it aside for now and work on something else...

The Next Book in the Island of Fog Chronicles

Yes, Tails of a Shapeshifter is the next planned publication after Haunted Fortress. It's a series of short stories connected with in-between segments. Many of the stories were previously published here on this website, but I'm adding three new ones plus some other brand new material, so the book should feel pretty fresh and new. And after that...

The Next Book in the Sleep Writer Series

I decided to try something different with the next book in this series, Warp Giants. The first three were full-length novels, but Book 4 will be a number of interconnected novellas of varying length. Think of it like a TV show "season" where each story is independent but perhaps following an arc. In this "season," the characters (Liam, Ant, and Madison) will go off to other worlds to battle aliens while dealing with Ant's new chauffeur, who is nosy and terse. Also, Liam is now living in a temporary residence while his demolished home is rebuilt.

Warp Giants will be one of these novellas, certainly the most epic.

Listening to Audiobooks While Driving, Painting, Feeding Animals, etc

My wife has been listening to books on Audible for years now. She started around the time I published my first three Island of Fog installments as audiobooks. In fact, as a publisher, I get 25 free credits for each book. Well, naturally I gave those to my better and far more deserving half.

Recently, I thought I'd give it a try. Previous attempts to listen to an audiobook resulted in my falling asleep. The sound of a voice in my head always has that effect on me, especially while reclining in my chair after a hard day's work. But since I make a 35-minute journey three mornings a week, I've started listening to Audible... and I'm loving it. I've been listening while painting a room, feeding somebody else's dogs and chickens, and generally running errands (not all at the same time). In fact, since my wife was listening to another book while we were painting the room, the house was oddly silent. Our daughter started listening to YouTube (very quietly and respectfully I might add), and we could hear her tiny laptop speakers through her bedroom door. We told her to stop being so rude and obnoxious and put some earbuds in.

Admittedly, I didn't much care for the first random choice on my wife's book list -- one of Joe Hill's short story horror compilations. I heard two and decided that was enough. Joe Hill's not as wordy as his dad, Stephen King, but he still rambles, at least in my opinion. Maybe I'm just not into adult literature anymore. I seem to prefer young adult or middle grade! And then I listened to Mike Mullin's Ashfall: Darla's Story, and couldn't get enough of it. I went on to the first full Ashfall novel and enjoyed it. Sadly, the second and third books are not out on Audible, so I've had to buy Book 2 on Kindle. Reading while driving doesn't seem safe to me, so I've resorted to reading a few chapters late at night.

I wish I could read my own books and do a half-decent job. But aside from needing a naturally buttery voice (which I don't have), narrating takes an awful lot of skill and practice, not to mention decent recording equipment. The narrator of my books, Fred Wolinsky, told me once that he spends about 10 hours in post-production for every hour of the finished book. There's all the clicks and hisses to tidy up, the volume discrepancies, the pacing, just about everything. If you read a page and then take a quick toilet break and continue, the join is noticeable -- not for any technical reason, just that you might be a fraction closer to the microphone, or you have a slightly faster heartbeat and your voice is more breathy, or you're in a marginally different head space. I picked up a few places in Fred's recordings where the volume of his voice rose just a tiny, tiny amount. All these things need fixing.

So... I don't think I'd have the patience or indeed the skill to be a narrator. Plus, my voice isn't deep and buttery. And then there's the fact that I'm British. I'm self-conscious that I pronounce words a bit different to Americans, and I think it might be off-putting for a primarily American audience. Maybe.

Although, speaking of a primarily American audience, maybe that's not the case anymore...

Amazon US is No Longer the Biggest Egg in my Basket

In the last few months, I've noticed that Amazon UK sales have risen to match and even beat Amazon US sales. Suddenly, the spreadsheet I use to record sales and estimate the current month's profit is no longer very useful, because for years I've only bothered recording Amazon US sales; anything else was just a bonus. I could write up the US sales and, sure enough, that's what I'd make in profit plus a little extra.

Now I've beefed up my spreadsheet to include both US and UK sales, and it's much nicer to look at these days, with double the book sales, double the profits, etc.

Not only that, but Barnes & Noble's Nook sales have greatly improved since about January 2017, with some of the monthly profits getting close to matching Amazon US.

Why the sudden improvement? I don't know, but I'm not complaining. Actually, sales halved a couple of years back for some inexplicable reason, so this sudden jump really just puts me back where I was before.

Fun Designing Book Covers

Recently, I put a cover together for Brian Clopper's newest work-in-progress, Ghost Coast (due out in September). I don't claim to be the best cover designer, but I do have fun with them. Sometimes they click, other times they take forever to get right.

Anyway, he'd already come up with suggestions, so I went with those ideas... and eventually abandoned them. It's easier to read about this and see the various mockup covers on his blog here:

Cover Design Process with Humor

I think this is a pretty powerful cover, and oddly enough reminds me of Haunted Fortress, due out a month earlier. Both have structures standing/floating in the sea, and both are ghost-related.

And on the subject of book covers, I want to revisit an earlier post where I pondered a new design for the Sleep Writer series. I aim to redesign them all before the release of Book 4, Warp Giants.

I'd come to the conclusion that the current cover isn't "sci-fi" enough. It's more teenage romance or something. So I want to change that.

In the end, I decided to go with the version at the foot of this page, in the comments section, the one with the graveyard on the front. It has Madison at the bottom, "dreaming" of the graveyard that will bring her together with Liam and Ant and change their lives forever. I think this cover has everything I need -- a creepy sci-fi/paranormal feel, a title font that fits the middle-grade target audience, and a way to integrate Madison's "sleepy state" with the subject of the book. Madison will be at the foot of each book, tying them all together.

And finally...

Total Solar Eclipse on August 21

This is worth mentioning. I mean, it's a total eclipse of the sun for those who live in a specific "path of totality" across the USA, and a pretty spectacular partial eclipse for the rest of the USA. Here's a detailed map showing the cities that will be plunged into darkness:

Click for larger detailed image

I live in Chickamauga, Georgia, but we're just a short drive from Tennessee, so we might take a ride north of Chattanooga and take our flashlights with us, because it will be very, very dark there for a few minutes. I'm hoping there will be people completely unaware of the impending event, in which case I can stand on the street and wave my arms around and shout "The end is nigh! THE END IS NIGH! Heed my warning!" and watch with glee as darkness descends in the middle of the afternoon and people start running and screaming.

We've taken the day off work. Will you?

Book 4 of the Island of Fog Legacies just about finished

I reached the end of my latest project, Haunted Fortress (Island of Fog Legacies #4), and just need to write an epilogue to wrap things up and then go back and write a chapter and a half to slide into place in the first half of the book. Then it's time for a complete read-thru and edit.

HAUNTED FORTRESS
(Island of Fog Legacies #4

Young shapeshifters Travis and Melinda are tasked with visiting the infamous Haunted Fortress to uncover its dark secrets. The residents of Hemlock, a small seaside village, have been seeing a phantom figure on and off for the past two hundred years. The phantom has many names -- Screeching Witch, Fiery Goddess, Ghoulish Ghost, and Mechanical Lady for starters -- but she's mostly known as the Snake Lady, a naga who appears out of thin air and then vanishes again.

The fortress is something to behold, floating above the sea just off the coast. And what's with the block of ice in the main chamber? Not only does it refuse to melt despite repeated attempts at thawing, the naga folk in the nearby woods suggest it contains a perfectly preserved corpse and should be left well alone.

Miss Simone disagrees. With Travis as a super-heated cherufe and Melinda as a naga girl, their two-pronged mission is to melt the ice and debunk the phantom...

I fully expect to publish this book next month, July 2017.

As usual, reaching the end of the book means I've already started thinking about the next one. The main protagonist will be someone new who tags along with Travis and Melinda. This "someone new" will have an extraordinary power, and the adventure they get embroiled in will be epic! It's an idea I had a few books ago, and it's still there, gnawing at me, so clearly it needs to be written.

I'm having a ball with the Legacies books. I'm often asked why I stopped at nine books for the original series, and there are a few reasons. One was because I'd finished with Hal's story, although to be honest I could easily pick up and carry on with new adventures. Mainly, I felt like I'd learned a lot from writing Hal's books, and I wanted to start over with a fresh series where I could expand in story and also writing style. I'm no longer locked in to a single person's point of view; being able to write from alternative or multiple perspectives is liberating. I couldn't suddenly do that with the original series after nine books in Hal's head. It would have been weird. Also, the Legacies books give me the opportunity to try different shapeshifter talents instead of being stuck with the same ones.

I'm nowhere near finished with this Legacies series. I'm certainly aiming to match the original Fog series with nine books, but at this point it's too early to say whether I'll go beyond that or not. I'd like to. The books are independent enough to be read as standalone adventures, so new readers can pick up at any point in the series. And I don't seem to be short of ideas. Whether those ideas are any good is up to the reader! But until I'm told to pack it in, I plan to keep going for years to come.

Ultimately, I would love to surpass the original series in terms of sales... though that will likely take a good few more years yet! At the current rate of two Legacies books per year, it'll be 2020 before I reach Book 9. Only then will the playing field be level enough to call it a fair game.

But in the meantime, I can't wait to publish Haunted Fortress and get started on the next installment later in the year... after a brief hiatus where I publish the third Chronicles book, Tales of a Shapeshifter, around September.

Cover art, movie theaters, lazy writing, clunky first chapters, and being incredibly successful

Hello all! It's been a while since I last posted, so this is a round-up of what's been happening over the past month or so.

My latest book, Gargoyle Scourge (Island of Fog Legacies #3), has been on sale for two months and is doing well. I'm happy to say reviews have been favorable. And now I'm working on Book 4, Haunted Fortress. I've written over half of it already. This time, just for a change, I wrote a detailed chapter summary and got started with the middle section first. Why? Because it's a fairly complex plot, and it actually made sense to write this book out of order. After completing the middle section, I then filled in most of the opening chapters and am now working on the last third. It's working out nicely.

Haunted Fortress features Travis and Melinda with alternating points of view (chapter by chapter), and it's refreshing to write like this. When they share scenes, I just switch POV and carry on. But they can also go off on their own personal missions, and that's where the alternating POVs really shine.

As usual, this novel will be a complete standalone story as well as being part of the overall series arc.

It's worth noting something about the cover. I've said before that, being a poor nobody-author, I can't afford to hire my own cover artist to paint something that matches the details of the story... so I often write to suit the artwork rather than the other way around. In this case, it had been a while since I looked at the cover, but I went ahead anyway and described the fortress as Travis and Melinda arrived. Big mistake! I finally opened up the artwork and realized I was quite a way off with my description, so I had to adjust my wording. In fact, I ended up adjusting some of the rooms I'd written about as well. I doubt whoever created the original artwork ever guessed he or she would be instrumental in shaping my story.

And with that in mind...

Putting My Book Covers Together

It might be interesting to see all four covers in this series so far alongside the original artwork I purchased:

With Unicorn Hunters, I found a nice unicorn-in-a-forest painting and cropped it to the right shape. Then I added a silhouette of some hunters and faded it out so they look like they're standing in a mist. (I cheated a bit, and the bushes behind the men actually show through, which is wrong -- but it's not very noticeable, and I could argue the bushes are in front of them, not behind.)

Sinister Roots was easy. The artwork was just what I wanted, and I altered the color mainly to set it apart from anyone else who might be using this stock image. Obviously I had to resize and crop slightly.

Gargoyle Scourge was quite difficult because I had to cut out the gargoyle figure and separate her from the background so I could sit her on something more relevant to the story -- like a stone archway, which I also had to remove from its background. Lastly, I added a brand new sky. You may wonder why I removed a sky and then added one back in that's very similar. Well, it's pretty common for stock images to have very little space above the subject for book titles. Look at the next one...

Haunted Fortress was pretty easy except for the lack of space for the titles at the top. Also, the fortress was floating so high that I would have had a lot of dead space below. What I really wanted was to just slide the fortress down so it sat nearer the sea, but that's not quite feasible. So I added some sky above. As it happens, I found a sky that was pretty close in "cloud-texture," and I just had to alter the coloring so it blended in. It's hard to tell the difference. Then I cut out a section below the fortress and above the sea and blended the join. This new version meant I could zoom in a bit and show the fortress in more detail.

With all book covers, I darkened the area around the top corners. This makes the white text stand out more (even with Gargoyle Scourge's dark text and white glow). I usually end up darkening the bottom as well for the same reason.

The covers shown here are the printed versions, which are sightly taller than the ebook versions because I have to allow a bit extra for trimming. With the ebook versions, I just crop a bit off the top and bottom.

So there you go, a quick look at my methods! Now, changing the subject...

A Trip To The Movie Theater

We went to see Beauty and the Beast recently in a new-ish theater that has massive reclining leather chairs and ample room. I'd stopped going to movie theaters a few months ago because of the poor picture quality; we'd watched Rogue One and enjoyed the movie, but the picture was dark and drab, needing more contrast, brightness, and color. Horrible! This wasn't the first time I'd experienced this, and this was the last straw. About $35 for a family of three including popcorn, and we can't even see what's happening in the nighttime scenes? Nope.

But this new theater is brilliant. Plenty of space, excellent picture quality, and only a dollar more than normal theaters. We'll go again -- but only to MUST-SEE movies. Beauty and the Beast was something my wife had been looking forward to, and I enjoyed it as much as she did. Although... Hermione Granger didn't do any magic, and Ron Weasley was nowhere to be seen. Unless Ron was the Beast? I'm not sure. And what was all the singing about? Who breaks into song in the middle of a conversation? Oh wait, my wife does...

Anyway, as usual with family movies like Beauty and the Beast, I found myself hanging onto the dialog and analyzing how screenwriters reveal everything the audience needs to know so deftly in the opening scenes...

How Writers Get You Up To Speed -- Deftly Or Otherwise!

Some movies are terrible at this. This brings to mind the lazy writing of certain TV shows where the main character might look toward the camera, narrow his eyes, and say, "Looks like we need to pay a visit to someone I know..." before putting his sunglasses on and stalking away. And then, the very next scene is this character and his sidekick getting out of a car having traveled for five hours across the state. They're sweaty and tired, and the sidekick is irritable as he asks, "So who's this person we're visiting, anyway?" whereupon the main guy explains everything as he rings the doorbell. Works a treat for the TV audience, right? Gets the information across most expediently! Yet it's utterly ridiculous to imagine driving all that way without discussing where they're going. Maybe the sidekick actually did ask at some point. The reply was, "Can't tell you yet. Wait until we're there on the doorstep when the TV audience is listening. Then I'll explain all."

So I always find it interesting how movies (and TV shows, and also novels) introduce their audience to the world, characters, and current situation. The dialog has to be JUST informative enough to get the audience up to speed without being stuffed full of nonsense real people would never say. Nonsense like: "Say, it's nice of you to look after my ten-year-old boy Simon and my eleven-year-old girl Suzie while I visit my sick sister for three days. Although your house is out in the wilderness with no phone signal, I'm sure the legends of the witch around these parts won't make them feel uneasy. They're just stories, right?"

There's definitely an art to getting it just right. I think your average TV cop show is lazy about this kind of thing. Another thing that's lazy is a novel that dumps a ton of exposition on the reader on page one -- like explaining that the land was once vibrant and full of magic until one day a thousand years ago when an evil warlord rose up and cursed everything, and since then... blah blah blah. Who wants to be told everything secondhand all in one go before you even know the characters and story?

To be fair, I've done this myself to some extent -- I think all authors do it until they wise up -- but it still amazes me how many traditionally published famous authors do it. I gather that fantasy fans are more forgiving. They buy a book, get comfortable, and lap up every detail of this grand new world they're entering. But there are better ways to introduce a new world. Have the character live in it for a while first, and sprinkle explanations as you go along. I think the trick is to weave your story so it's got something interesting going on from the very beginning at the same time as showing the reader around the place. The character has to come first, though. Make a reader care about the character and then talk about where he lives. Don't tell the reader where someone lives and then introduce that someone afterwards.

First Chapters Always Feel Stiff

I think this is especially true of all first-time authors. You try so hard to be poetic and everything, and you're still finding your way around the mechanics of dialog and narrative and so on, and the first one or two chapters are bound to feel stiff and forced. After a while, you get the hang of this writing lark and settle down with smoother, more professional prose. But your first chapter still stinks.

So what's the answer? Simple. Write your first chapter last. It makes sense when you think about it. It's the single most important chapter because it has to hook the reader and get them to read the rest of the book. So treat them to your most professional writing skills and not your clunky early efforts.

I suffered from this problem with an early version of Island of Fog. However, the finished product is not that book. I wrote the first eight chapters, then rewrote them, then ditched the first four chapters, and so on... meaning that my current first chapter is actually a zillionth rewrite. So in that sense, I smoothed out my first chapter simply by ditching it.

And finally for now...

Being Successful Enough To Easily Raise Money For A Good Cause

I'm subscribed to a British author named Mark Dawson. Recently, he sent out an email that made me all wistful. In a nutshell, he took a month off from his ongoing project to write a novella where the proceeds would go to a good cause (in this case a friend of his who needs £40,000 for a new trial drug to combat cancer). With $2.00 from every sale going to this fund, and with 80,000 subscribers on his list, it means that if even half his readership buys a copy, the treatment will be funded for a year and a half.

I would imagine he'll get close to that goal. Imagine having such power at your fingertips! To write a book, put it out there, and generate potentially life-saving funds for a friend. It's all in the numbers, though. You need that fanbase, and 80,000 subscribers would certainly get things done.

Meanwhile, I'll push on with my significantly smaller but equally cherished subscriber list and hope to keep growing my fanbase for years to come.

Thank you, all!

Novel proofreading service

An important part of finishing a novel is all the editing and proofreading. In fact, I do this in stages during the writing process as well as after. I write a chapter, then read and edit it, then write the next chapter, read and edit, and so on. Every five or six chapters I'll usually read and edit that whole section again, which helps me with overall pacing. So by the time I get to the end of the book, I've already edited each chapter two or three times.

Then I read the whole thing again... and AGAIN... before handing over to beta readers. Then I make further edits and fixes based on their comments, and possibly read parts of the book again, and only then is it ready to publish.

The Importance of Beta Readers

Some beta readers are amazing at catching the little things I missed. Having said that, it seems no single person can catch every tiny thing. It takes a village to raise a child. Each beta reader will make their own list, and while there's a lot of overlap with each list, certain things are subtle enough to escape attention and are perhaps only spotted once.

Even after all that, there are often STILL occasional typos that only make themselves known after publication. I fix them immediately, but that doesn't help those who have already bought the book -- whether in print form or electronic, the copy they bought will always contain those few typos. So it's important to get that book as clean as possible before publication.

New Proofreading Service for Authors Who Want Clean Manuscripts

I'm now offering a proofreading service to authors willing to cough up a little cash to ensure their book is 95% free of typos. I won't catch everything; I'm only human after all. But I've written enough books now (20 and counting) to call myself "fairly adept" at producing a clean manuscript. More about this here:

Novel Proofreading Service for Authors

I've always been happy and willing to proofread manuscripts for others... except for the simple problem of time. How can I justify reading novel after novel and writing up long lists of comments when I have so little time in the first place? I have to earn a living, right? Hence why I'm offering the service at a very reasonable rate. It's not a lot of money for the number of hours I'd spend on a read-through, but it's enough to call an extension of my business. So that's website design, writing, proofreading... and construction. Yeah, that last one doesn't really fit, but there you go. As I said, gotta earn a living.

Why an Author Ditched Most of His Book

Recently, I proofread a new novel by Brian Clopper. It had a few problems. His blog post, "How a Novel Collapses In On Itself," explains why my comments caused him to ditch a huge portion of the novel in favor of a new plot, new characters, and probably 50,000 new words! I'm very happy to report that Brian is not the sort of person who descends into a six-month-long despair when faced with a challenge like this. Instead, after a few hours of muttering "Who the heck does Keith Robinson think he is anyway?", he dusted himself off and grew very excited about what promises to be a vastly improved book.

I've been there, too. I wrote Caleb's World many moons ago, and proofreaders disliked the direction it took. I ditched the second half and rewrote it... and readers still didn't like it. Disheartened, I shelved the book for years. Then, finally, I dusted it off and rewrote much of it again, changing a few characters, adding a lot of new material and deleting stuff that didn't work. The book is still named Caleb's World, but now it's Book 3 of my Sleep Writer series. And it works so much better as part of a series with established characters. It's like it was always meant to be.

When writing Valley of Monsters (Island of Fog, Book 7), I came to the conclusion that absolutely nothing happened in the first two chapters. It was all about planning for their trip. So I went through and highlighted sections that I absolutely needed to keep. I ended up with a short list of maybe ten sentences. Pathetic. So I ditched those two opening chapters entirely and started the book at Chapter 3. All I had to do was sprinkle in those highlighted sentences, and that was that. A far more streamlined opening to the book.

That's not to say massive rewrites or dramatic chopping happens often after a proofread. Normally, whether it's my book or someone else's, I'd find around 200 minor typos and errors -- nothing that can't be put right in a couple of hours.

So, if you're an author looking for a final bit of spit and polish, give me a try and see what I can find. There's a cost calculator right there on the page, and I offer a free 1000-word tryout to see if we're a good fit for each other before embarking on the full project.

Thats' all four noow.

Gargoyle Scourge (Island of Fog Legacies #3) is published!

It's true, I tell you! Gargoyle Scourge, the eagerly awaited and slightly overdue third book in the Island of Fog Legacies series, is out now on Amazon, Nook, Apple, and Kobo:

GARGOYLE SCOURGE
(Island of Fog Legacies #3)

Eleven-year-old Melinda Strickland is setting out on her first mission as a shapeshifter -- to save a town from unruly gargoyles. The ugly stone creatures have been perched on the rooftops of Garlen's Well for decades, warding off evil spirits, but lately they've grown mischievous and downright destructive. Somebody needs to talk to them, find out what's going on, and persuade them to be more respectful of private property.

That somebody is Melinda, daughter of famous shapeshifters Robbie the ogre and Lauren the harpy. But what kind of creature will she get to be?

Travis Franklin accompanies her on the trip west, though Melinda is keen to point out she's in charge, not him. He's only a dragon, after all.

Nothing ever goes as planned. What promises to be a fairly routine mission turns into something quite deadly...

GARGOYLE SCOURGE is the third installment in the Island of Fog Legacies series.

Available on Amazon US | Amazon UK | Barnes & Noble | Kobo Books | iBookstore. See also Goodreads.

Price: $3.99

It's also available in paperback for $11.95 on Amazon.

Whenever I finish a book and am in the process of publishing, I'm usually thinking about the next one in the series. That's the case here, too. Book 4 is called Haunted Fortress. It's already planned out, and I expect to start writing shortly. An excerpt can be found in the back of Gargoyle Scourge.

Wait -- an excerpt for a book I haven't written yet? "How is this possible?" you scream. The truth is, once the story has solidified in my head, writing a scene that works as a teaser is surprisingly easy. I write it specifically with "teaser" in mind, so the sample has a natural opening, a suitable hook, and a "cliffhanger" closing. The excerpt gives the reader enough information to understand where the book is headed without giving away major plot details. In other words, it's just right -- because, as I said, I write it specifically to be used as an excerpt.

But I'm also aware that I need to drop this excerpt straight into the novel itself. I pride myself on getting it right first time, in other words not changing a single word when I eventually weave it into place. I'll write the novel as I always do, from start to finish, and somewhere along the way -- fairly early on but not necessarily at the very beginning -- I'll drop the excerpt in and continue on afterward. You won't notice the seams.

This method is working well for me. It gives me a sense of direction going forward, and kind of concretes my plans, like sticking a post in the ground and building from there. Plus, it gives the reader something to think about, and they understand that the next book is definitely on the horizon.

I'll talk more about Book 4 in a future post. For now, though, check out Gargoyle Scourge, available in stores now!

Gargoyle Scourge available from bookstores on March 1st, 2017

The third book in the Island of Fog Legacies series is finished! Get your pennies out of the jar, line up in the streets, and prepare for Gargoyle Scourge, available everywhere on March 1st, 2017.

The above quote is courtesy of an advance beta reader. Here's what some of the others said:

"I have just finished reading Gargoyle Scourge and have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish. Another well written book to add to your collection. It's well written and flows really well."

"I read and thoroughly enjoyed Gargoyle Scourge!"

"I really enjoyed the book. I found the story fascinating and Melinda's character is just adorable, she made me smile all the way. It was very refreshing to find some of the familiar characters involved so much in the story this time and I probably enjoyed it better because of it. I thought the resolution of the story was very cleverly done; I just couldn't stop reading till the end and it certainly left me wanting more."

And a review on Goodreads:

"Gargoyle Scourge, the third book in Keith Robinson's Island of Fog Legacies series is a great read! While the first two books told the tale of Travis Franklin, this one shines the light on Melinda, daughter of Robbie and Lauren from the first nine-book series. It's a wonderful romp where Melinda gets to shine in her first outing as a shapeshifter. Tasked to deal with helping a town where gargoyles have begun to behave badly, she dives right in with the help of Travis. I liked the interaction of the two main characters and especially enjoyed how it was told from Melinda's perspective. This is a team that should definitely reunite for a future adventure.Robinson proves that his Fog series has a rich history and future that he digs into with relish and infinite curiosity."

And reunite they will! Travis and Melinda will be back in Book 4 later this year. I've already roughed out a guideline and am really excited about where the story goes. I'll announce the title and post the cover art shortly after Gargoyle Scourge hits the e-shelves on March 1st.

Watch this space!

Island of Fog translated into Spanish!

Gargoyle Scourge is ready for beta reading

Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce that the third book in my Island of Fog Legacies series, Gargoyle Scourge, is now available for beta reading -- so if you're interested, please email me at keith@unearthlytales.com to request a copy.

GARGOYLE SCOURGE (Island of Fog Legacies #3)

Eleven-year-old Melinda Strickland is setting out on her first mission as a shapeshifter -- to save a town from unruly gargoyles.

The ugly stone creatures have been perched on the rooftops of Garlen's Well for decades, warding off evil spirits. Though known to move about at night, lately they've gotten mischievous and downright destructive. Somebody needs to talk to them, find out what's going on, and persuade them to be more respectful of private property.

That somebody is Melinda, daughter of famous shapeshifters Robbie the ogre and Lauren the harpy. But what kind of creature will she be infused with? Like her cousin Travis, her powers are likely to wear off after a few days, so it doesn't really matter what she ends up transforming into as long as she can help. As it happens, Miss Simone has something very specific in mind for her first experience as a shapeshifter.

Travis Franklin accompanies her on the trip west to Garlen's Well, though Melinda is keen to point out she's in charge, not him. He's only a dragon, after all.

Nothing ever goes as planned. What promises to be an important but generally safe mission turns into something quite deadly...

GARGOYLE SCOURGE is the third installment in the Island of Fog Legacies series.

There are a couple of "rules" if you're interesting in beta reading:

You must be able to read the book in two weeks and get back to me with feedback. Obviously I want an overall opinion and comments about anything that doesn't work or could be improved, but I'm also looking for simple typos. That said, I'm not expecting you to find things for the sake of finding things.Assuming you like the book, you must be able and willing to offer a nice review on Amazon on launch day. This is essential to me. Reviews definitely sell books, and I would go so far as to say that a nice review and rating on launch day is actually more important than beta-reading feedback and typos. (Naturally the same review can be added to Goodreads as well, if you're a Goodreads member.)

That's all. So if you're interested, email me for a copy! I only require a certain number of beta readers, so apply early before all the slots fill up. :-)

Those of you chomping at the bit for this installment in the series might have noticed that it's a little behind schedule. This is partly because of work getting in the way of my writing, but also just because I've been taking it easy and not pushing quite so hard to get things done. I'm pretty sure everyone "burns out" on whatever they like doing the most, and it's best to ease off for a while and come back later a bit fresher. I never actually stopped writing Gargoyle Scourge, but I did slow down and recharge.

In the end, I love this third installment. Travis, the main character from the first two books, takes a back seat and allows Melinda to steal the limelight. The book is written from her point of view, which works out nicely considering what happened to Travis at the end of Sinister Roots.

I expect Book 4 will feature both Travis and Melinda again, perhaps written from alternating points of view.

That's all for now. More soon!

Happy holidays, massive downloads, foggy plans, black comedies, and daft ideas

Happy Holidays, all ye readers out there!

As usual, a warm welcome to new subscribers since my last post. Most of you subscribed via my "Free Fractured" offer, and I'm curious to know how many have actually read that free sci-fi book by now versus putting it aside to read later? Either way is fine with me, I'm just interested.

So what's new this month? Well, I'm VERY close to finishing Gargoyle Scourge, which of course should have been finished already by now. The third book in the Island of Fog Legacies series is (now) set for release early February 2017, a few months later than originally planned due to an unexpectedly busy schedule and some other things that have gotten in the way. Actually, today is the first day in two weeks that I've had time to sit down at my computer and do something that doesn't involve my day job as a website designer. Shocking!

Anyway, on with recent happenings...

The Most Downloads Ever

On October 22nd (my birthday), I ran a promotion for Island of Fog (Book 1) on Bookbub. Before that promotion, free downloads of the book were at a snail's pace, a mere trickle compared with previous years:

Oct 18 -- 54
Oct 19 -- 39
Oct 20 -- 77
Oct 21 -- 65

On the day of the Bookbub promotion, I got a nice boost, though not as many as expected:

Oct 22 -- 3426

These downloads came in over a few hours, a notable climb every time I refreshed the screen. This is all pretty standard stuff. The promo started around 10 AM my time, and the download stats started leaping over the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. By the evening, it had tailed off a bit. But downloads over the next few days were notably higher that in the days prior to the promo, what's known as the tail-end of the promo:

Oct 23 -- 888
Oct 24 -- 395
Oct 25 -- 246
Oct 26 -- 212

I was okay with the results, though not blown away. The most downloads I'd ever experienced in one promo was around 11,600 a few years ago. Many have been 5000+ since. So this one was not all that impressive.

And then something weird happened.

I looked in one day and stared at the screen, thinking there had to be an error. Apparently, I'd just received a massive bump in downloads:

Oct 27 -- 35,418

What struck me as odd was that this number just appeared as if by magic. It wasn't like I checked in at 10 AM and saw a few thousand extra downloads, then checked again every ten minutes and saw that number climbing in increments of a few hundred or a few thousand. No, the jump occurred instantly in the space of a few hours. And there was no tail-end this time, either. Downloads went right back as they had been the day before.

I checked with Amazon to see if was a mistake. They said, "...I looked into the download numbers for "Island of Fog (Book 1)" and can confirm that the number is correct and that the report is working as designed. You did receive 35,418 free downloads on 27 October 2016..."

Well, this is great news, right? Except... where's all the peripheral movement? When you receive a deluge of downloads like this, you expect a whole bunch of new reviews, subscribers, sales of other books, and so on. But not in this case.

Since then, my overall daily downloads have improved, so I guess those 35,000+ downloads counted for something. It just doesn't feel like they were real. A few years ago, when I received 11,600 downloads, I more than quadrupled my sales over the next month or so, and that was for only five books in the series. Now I have nine books in the series, and my sales have not even doubled despite the promo.

Weird!

Anyway, I just thought I'd share. It appears that the conversion of free downloads to other sales is much, much lower than it once was. 11,600 downloads to other sales used to be around 2% (meaning 2% of those readers bought one or more other books in the series). Now it's more like 0.2%. That's really lame.

Foggy Plans for 2017

I scratched my eye the other day, and the screen is a little foggy right now. But that's not what I meant by foggy plans for the new year. You see, it's not escaped my attention that the Island of Fog Legacies series isn't selling anywhere near as many as the original Island of Fog series. And by that, I mean that readers aren't naturally moving on from Book 9, Castle of Spells, to Book 1, Unicorn Hunters. I'd hoped the series would gain a bit more traction since it's so clearly linked to the original books, but I guess not. Maybe if I'd done this instead:

#1 Island of Fog
#2 Labyrinth of Fire
#3 Mountain of Whispers
#4 Lake of Spirits
#5 Roads of Madness
#6 Chamber of Ghosts
#7 Valley of Monsters
#8 Prison of Despair
#9 Castle of Spells
#10 Unicorn Hunters
#11 Sinister Roots
#12 Gargoyle Scourge

This, in theory, would have ensured sales of those Legacies books. But I wanted to be up-front and make a clear distinction between the two series. There are, after all, twenty years between them. And anyway, the format has changed, the characters have changed, and so on. It would have been wrong to just stick the new series on the end of the other.

As a result of being honest, I have dismally low sales of the Legacies series. In fact, I've sold four times more Castle of Spells (at $4.99 each) than I've given away Unicorn Hunters (for free). So obviously not all readers of the original series are moving on. The question is: why?

Is it not clear that the series does in fact continue, albeit twenty years on?
Is it that readers reach Book 9 and feel that's enough of this world?
Is the idea of Fog books without Hal and Abigail in them just not appealing?

I'd love to know. I'm a writer, not a marketing expert. If I were a marketing expert, I might be rich by now :-)

Anyway, the point is, all this gives me pause with regards to Island of Fog and even the Sleep Writer books. I've been wanting to write an adult black comedy (or comedy horror), and maybe 2017 is a good time to do so. I don't mean give up the Fog entirely, but certainly take a step sideways for a few months and try something new.

Black Comedy Horror

I've had an idea for a while now that I'd like to have a stab at. In fact, I've had a few ideas, but one in particular keeps badgering me for attention. Since the idea is a little Syfy Channel-ish, I like the idea of making it a tongue-in-cheek black comedy rather than try to be serious. It would be a trilogy of three short books, each standalone but heavily connected, basically three facets of the same event -- a deadly alien attack on Earth, three different approaches to see what kills humans the most efficiently.

I have another idea I want to explore, a quirky sci-fi comedy, but that one's a bit sketchy on details. I have some random chapters already written in my head. It's the rest of the book I need to fill in.

Ideas Out of Nowhere

I mentioned earlier than I'd scratched my eye. I was just sitting there in my recliner minding my business when, out of the blue, something got in my eye. I did my usual thing trying to get it loose, but it wouldn't budge. I spent the next FIVE HOURS trying to wash it out, all to no avail. Maybe I'd scratched it right away, or maybe it just got lodged too far up and around the back. I don't know. But it drove me nuts. I went to bed early.

The next morning, whatever it was had mysterious gone. So either the foreign object had worked its way out, or the scratch had repaired itself overnight. I spent the day with a puffy, blurred eye, which was fine because it didn't hurt and I could return to normality.

The day after that (yesterday), it was no longer puffy or blurred. Instead, I had very clear double vision.

Today, that double vision is almost gone. I'm typing this now with only mild straining to see the words on the screen.

I'm hoping that, tomorrow, all will be back to normal.

But ideas pop into my head at the daftest times. What if, after you scratch your eye and suffer double vision, you start to see things that you can't normally see? Things that are slightly out of phase and can only be viewed when your vision is altered? How would you persuade others there are aliens among us? Would you go around trying to scratch their eyeballs so they can see too?

I know this is a silly idea and not worthy of any more thought, but it does highlight the way ideas "just happen."

I had another idea while waiting for a concrete truck to show up a few months ago. I was supposed to be getting a yard of concrete after the truck driver was done with a bigger pouring job down the road. The truck arrived, but it had run out of concrete because the other job had needed more than expected. The cheek of it!!

Anyway, it started me thinking. Why can't the concrete mixing company just use wormholes to deliver their aggregate rather than using trucks? Just mix the concrete, then pour it into a wormhole. Imagine a hoopla. Pour the concrete into it. The stuff mysteriously vanishes and appears magically miles away on a job site, where a worker holds a similar hoopla over the forms where the concrete is needed. Simple! An endless supply of concrete as needed, no truck, and no waste.

I'm pretty sure this idea, as daft as it may be, will wind up in my quirky sci-fi novel one day.

That, and a maniac trying to scratch people's eyes out.

More soon. Happy New Year!