John R. Phythyon Jr.'s Blog, page 27

Is Free the Key to Sustained Sales?

It would be nice if life’s big answers weren’t so elusive. Why can’t there be world peace? Why does the toast always land butter-side down? And why, if other people can do it, does it seem to be so damned hard to create strong, consistent sales from Amazon?

“Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale”: FREE March 18, 19, 20

As you may recall from a previous installments of this blog, I totally revamped “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale’s” SEO language to help it rise up the Amazon charts. My efforts were at least partially successful, but not enough to create sustained sales. After initial small bumps on both changes, I’m sitting on two sales this month. To use a technical term, that sucks. However, I have another idea. “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” is enrolled in Amazon’s KDP Select program, and it’s got a fresh five days for me to offer it free. I’ve run successful free events in the past, and I haven’t run one for SB since before Christmas.

Anecdotal evidence presented by colleagues suggests that, if you have a really good giveaway, it launches you up the charts in the free store, improves visibility, and leads to paid sales shortly after the free event ends, because it gets you in front of more potential buyers through being higher in the popularity charts.

I have evidence of my own in support of this theory. “Sleeping Beauty’s” sales have improved after free events, and it made it onto several bestseller charts during the free event. I’m hoping to repeat that with the new, improved SEO language.

But I’m also hoping to improve on it. My best free event saw 650 downloads. The game-changing ones I’ve read about have downloads in the five figures. A friend just did a giveaway on his techno-thriller and saw 30,000 downloads. Another saw 24,000 downloads for a memoir.

So is free the key? Well, we’ll see.

I’ve got a couple things working against me. First, “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” is a short story. It doesn’t qualify, therefore, for some of the web sites that announce free books, including the biggest one, BookBub. Second, short stories aren’t as popular as full-length novels, so I may be at a disadvantage there.

My goal, which I am not sure is realistic, is to get 10,000 downloads. That’s a third or less of my colleagues’ numbers but would still be a game-changing figure for me. I am advertising with several of the announcement sites, and I’ll be using my own social media network to try to advance the word. I’m also running the event for three days instead of two and one like I’ve done in the past in the hopes that’ll help sustain the momentum and get me to my target number.

You can help. “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” will be free Monday, March 18 through Wednesday, March 20. Click on the link to download it. Tweet the link to your own social network. Pass it on on Facebook. I’ve included some tweets and Facebook updates below you can copy and paste if you want.

I’ll report the results here once I’ve got them fully digested. In the meantime, I’d sure appreciate everyone’s help. “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” has six reviews averaging 4.2 stars on Amazon’s US site and a four-star review on its Canadian page. When people read it, they like it. Now it’s time to get more people reading it.

Thanks for your help!

Click here to download “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale.”

Here are some sample tweets you can copy:

Like #OnceUponATime? Check out “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale”: http://amzn.to/MT0UEn #FREE today! #fantasy #fairytale #RT

A new take on a classic story: “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” #FREE today! http://amzn.to/MT0UEn #fairytale #OnceUponATime #RT

#FREE! He wanted to save her. He got it all wrong. “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” http://amzn.to/MT0UEn #Kindle #fairytale #RT

Here are some Facebook updates you can make if you’re so inclined:

FREE book for your Kindle: “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale.” 4.2 stars! http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008EDP7TO

If you like ONCE UPON A TIME, this book is worth checking out. And it’s FREE today! “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale.” http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008EDP7TO

Rebooted: Will a Makeover Help a Book with Slumping Sales?

Well, it’s live! The completely made-over “Passion Play” is updated and on sale at both Amazon and Smashwords.

Hopefully, the sexier, more dynamic cover and the more provocative title will attract a little more attention to it. To read my thinking on rebranding and repackaging the story formerly known as “The Coronation of King Charles III”, click here.

One of the things I didn’t discuss in last week’s blog was how to place the story in Amazon’s (and, to a lesser extent, Smashwords’s)  marketing machine.

If you read lasty week’s entry, you know I did a search on hot keywords in Google Adwords. “Passion” was a big one, so I included that in the title. Naturally, “sex” was a big winner too (504M hits per month), as were “witch” and “magic.”

The latter two were easy enough to include as keywords. The main character is a witch; she uses magic.

But sex is trickier.

Searching Amazon using the keyword, “sex,” brought up two major sub-search terms: “sex books” and “sex stories.” Given that I wrote a book with sex magic in it, both of those sounded good initially.

But the thing is “sex books” turned up a lot of nonfiction — sex manuals, sexual positions, sexual disorders, etc. That’s not at all a fit for “Passion Play.”

“Sex stories,” on the other hand, was solidly fiction, but it was also mostly erotica. That’s not “Passion Play” either. There is a lot of sex in the story, but it’s not described, and it’s certainly not there to titillate.

The problem was there didn’t seem to be a category I could choose that fit “Passion Play” and its use of sex. But sex is a big part of the story, and, as I noted last week, sex sells.

So I chose “passion,” “sex,” “sex stories,” “magic,” “witches,” and “witch” as my keywords. I’ll be monitoring how the book does in the same way I did “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale,” and it may be some of this needs to change. At the moment, this is my best guess.

Which leads me to categories. That is the even more mysterious, difficult way to target the book. Amazon has a list of categories and subcategories for you to choose, but they don’t always seem to reflect how customers search. Moreover, there appear to be categories customers use, you can’t choose.

Prior to the reboot, I had the story categorized as Fiction>Fantasy>Short Stories. That hasn’t been doing me any good, but there isn’t a fantasy subcategory I can choose that in any way describes the sort of book “Passion Play” is. Worse, there isn’t another subcategory of fiction that seems to fit it. I left that category alone for the moment and went exploring elsewhere.

I landed in Religion>Sexuality & Gender Studies. That seems wrong at first. “Passion Play” isn’t a religion book. But religion is a major theme in the story. So is sexuality and the role of women in society. You get two categories, and I couldn’t find another one in fiction. I decided to roll the dice and see what happens.

Likewise, I came across a category on Smashwords that seemed to say things about the story the standard fantasy fiction categories didn’t: Fiction>Women’s Fiction>Feminist. Again, “Passion Play” isn’t typical of that kind of book, but it features a strong woman struggling to protect herself from persecution. Once again, I decided to roll the dice.

I’ll see how all this goes. Will a sexier cover, bolder title, better book description, and targeted category placement yield higher sales? I wonder. But they can’t have been any worse than what the book was collecting. We’ll see if I transform “Passion Play” into a dynamic seller.

Stay tuned.

And while you’re waiting, why not head over to Amazon.com or Smashwords.com and pick up a copy of “Passion Play”? I think you’ll enjoy the read, and it might just tell me I’m on the right trail.

Resurrecting Dead Sales: How I’m Making over a Slumping Story

I am going to try to raise the dead.

Hey, I write fantasy literature. I’m a specialist in magic (at least of the literary kind). This should be easy, right?

Well, we’ll see.

Over a year ago (January of 2012 to be more precise), I published a short story, “The Coronation of King Charles III.” It’s a wicked little fantasy story about a fundamentalist crown prince ascending the throne and planning to outlaw magic. A witch hatches a plan to either persuade the prince otherwise or make sure he doesn’t becomg king. There are all kinds of faith-vs.-science and the role-of-women-in-society issues bound up in it. I wrote it several years ago, but the underlying themes became really timely during last year’s election.

And yet it did not sell. It sold very poorly indeed. Calling it a commercial failure would be a compliment.

My recent research into and experimentation with SEO language for the marketing of eBooks leads me to believe I may know why. On the surface, the answer is simple:

Basically, I did everything wrong.

Obviously, the truth is a little more complicated than that, and I’ll explain below the mistakes I made and how I intend to correct them. It all boils down to three main things, though:

The title is weak
The cover is bad
The description doesn’t sell the book

Weak Title

“Coronation’s” title is apt and descriptive. The climax of the story is the coronation of the king wherein the central conflict is resolved.

That doesn’t make it good.

It doesn’t tell us anything about the story’s action, themes, or hook. All we can tell is it is about a king ascending a throne, and, because I use a standard Western name — Charles — the prospective buyer has no idea whether this is a fantasy book or an historical one.

So the title already is working against sales.

Can you tell from the title there are significant religious overtones to the story? What about the fact that the witch in the story uses sex magic to steal men’s wills? How about the cultural power struggle caught up in the action? No? None of that is even remotely obvious?

“The Coronation of King Charles III” does not tease the buyer with anything interesting. It says here’s a story about a guy named Charles becoming king. That could mean anything!

So I did some SEO research through Google Adwords to see what sorts of hits I could get. One of the words that recurs frequently in the story is, “passion.” Prince Charles and Juliette, the witch, are both passionate in their beliefs. Juliette uses sexual passion to manipulate people. And passion can have religious overtones as well. An Adwords search revealed “passion” receives 9.14M hits per month.

With it being more evocative of the story and so popular on Google, my editor and I decided it might be a good word to have in the title. We played around with several ideas before hitting on what we believe is a winner: “Passion Play.”

First, it’s got “passion” in it. Second, it’s a play on the phrase, “power play,” which is really what the story is about. Prince Charles intends to change the law to suit his religious beliefs. Juliette is determined to stop him. The other two major characters in the story, a soldier named Gaston and Bishop Gerard, are being manipulated by them. Both the prince and Juliette are engaged in a power play that is both built around passion and passionate beliefs. Finally, “passion play” is a religious phrase, so it evokes the religious themes that permeate the story.

Bad Cover

I like “Coronation’s” cover, but it’s all wrong for this story. The dominant image is of a kiss, and that was done deliberately to try to conjure up the sexual aspects of the story. But set against the title, “The Coronation of King Charles III,” it’s confusing and out of place. The crown above it doesn’t do anything to make things any clearer.

With the new title, the images make a little more sense, but they’re still not doing much to sell the story. “Passion Play” is not about a kiss. It’s about a witch named Juliette fighting to preserve her way of life. She doesn’t have an army. She just has her magic. And the most powerful witchcraft she has is sex.

So the cover needed to feature those things. While I’m not big on cheesecake covers, this story needs one to evoke its themes and attract reader attention. “Passion Play” needs a sexy sorceress/witch on it’s cover to make potential readers sit up and take notice.

Thus, the new cover to the left. As much as we may wish it weren’t true, sex sells and nudity catches the eye. On Amazon and other eBook retail sites, the first look at your cover a reader is likely to get is a small thumbnail. Thus, the image has to stand out even when it’s small. As we experimented with different images, my cover artist and I found that the one at left looks good both big and small. At full size, the model is alluring, sexy, and magical. At thumbnail size, she is lit so that her breasts stand out.

Unlike “The Coronation of King Charles III,” “Passion Play’s” cover catches the eye. If it draws your attention, then I have a chance to give you my pitch. I increase the odds you’ll click on the thumbnail to learn more. When you read the description, the image and the title are evocative of the story. Thus, the cover does its jobs — it catches the buyer’s attention and encapsulates the plot and themes.

A Description that Sells

Speaking of that description, the one for “Coronation” doesn’t do anything to sell the book. Here’s what it is currently:

Charles III is about to ascend the throne of Cotreur, and he plans to outlaw  magic once he is king. After all, it may make crops grow, help families have children, and cure the sick, but it subverts the will of the gods and encourages sex. Worse, it is only practicable by women – a sure sign it comes from The Dark

One – and witches are said to be able to steal a man’s will by bedding him.

But not everyone agrees with Charles’s interpretation. Juliette has no desire to be put to death for practicing her art. She enlists the aid of Bishop Gerard to persuade the crown prince to alter his thinking. But when the bishop’s pleas fall on deaf ears, it may be time for more desperate action.

“The Coronation of King Charles III” is a short story by John R. Phythyon, Jr., author STATE OF GRACE, that examines the consequences of desire and the relationship between politics and religion, asking, “How far will you go to protect your beliefs?”

It’s way too short, and it doesn’t tease the story well at all. We get almost nothing in the way of the action of the plot. We know the prince wants to outlaw magic. We know Juliette is going to enlist the aid of a bishop. That’s it. There needs to be more. The description needs to raise more questions the buyer wants answered.

Worse, I leave the best line of the description off until the end — “How far would you go to protect your beliefs?” That’s one of the central questions of the piece, and I wait until the last line of the third paragraph to introduce it. The average buyer is never going to read it, because he or she has already determined in the first paragraph that this book isn’t for him or her.

I haven’t rewritten the description yet. That’s on my list of things to finish this week.

But it needs a hook, and it needs strong, evocative words. It needs to say this story is about power and sex and religion and corruption and what people will do to get what they want and need. It needs to say this is a fast-paced fantasy story that will make you think while keping you entertained. It needs to actually sell the book, not just describe it.

Because I haven’t finished the description yet, I haven’t relaunched the story. It’s still on Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble as “The Coronation of King Charles III,”  and that’s just fine. It’s sleeping peacefully in the marketing grave I dug for it. It’ll keep.

But next week I plan to have everything in place. I’ll remake “Coronation” into “Passion Play.”

And then I’ll see if I can raise the dead or not.

SEO for Authors Part 2: Measuring the Results

Yesterday, I blogged about my attempts to improve my SEO language for my listings with Amazon. I discussed my basic methodology and how I went about implementing it. You can review that post here. Today I’ll look at the results.

As you may recall, I resolved to make modifications to the listing for my short story, “Sleeping Beauty,” on three fronts — Amazon keywords, the book’s description, and its title. By embedding what I believed to be more effective keywords in those areas, I hoped to raise the book’s profile and, correspondingly, its sales.

I came at this project in three phases. I’ll explore each one in detail below, noting the results.

Metrics

First, let’s look at how I measured things. My goal was to land on the first or second page of Amazon.com whenever someone put in a keyword search that pertained to my novel. I made a list of these terms and set up a spreadsheet, so I could track my progress. I started tracking, “Sleeping Beauty” in all categories, books, and Kindle editions, “fairy tale” in books and Kindle, “fairytale” in books, “once upon a time” in books and Kindle, “true love” in books and Kindle, and “modern fairy tale” in books and Kindle.

I made note of what page I landed on and what my overall position was. I tracked each search term five pages deep. If my book didn’t show up on the first five pages (the top 60 products in the search), I marked it as a 0.

The other, much more important metric was sales. Did making changes to the keywords I was using result in more sales? Was it dramatically more? Did it have any impact at all?

Phase 1: Amazon Keywords

After conducting a lot of research using Google Adwords and Amazon’s leading indicators (see yesterday’s blog for more details), I settled on the following seven keywords:

Sleeping Beauty
fairytale
fairy tale
fairy tale books
once upon a time
true love
first kiss

I entered those in my dashboard and updated the book. Then I started tracking metrics.

I was very pleased to see “Sleeping Beauty” was immediatley successful. I didn’t land on the first five pages in the “all products” search, but I was on page one in the 11th position for “books” and page one in the fourth position in “Kindle Editions.” I didn’t chart on any other categories, but I was pleased with this encouraging start.

I also got an immediate bump in sales. In 24 hours, I sold four books. Since several good months to end 2012, my overall sales had cratered. I had sold one copy of “Sleeping Beauty” this month prior to making the change. A day afterwards, I was up to five. It seemed there was something to this SEO language stuff after all!

Over the course of the next several days, “Sleeping Beauty” moved up to #3 in Kindle Editions and #10 in books. But it failed to chart in any other search category I was tracking. Worse, after the inital spike in sales, it stopped selling again. I was stuck on those same five sales.

Phase 2: Book Description

When I began this process, I had a three-paragraph description of “Sleeping Beauty” that briefly gave the hook and then teased. It was well written, but it wasn’t enough to really sell the book, and it had almost no SEO keywords in it. I’ve changed it to read as follows:

He wanted to save her. He got it all wrong.

Carl is the only one left. All Beth’s friends were sad when she fell into a coma two years ago at the age of fourteen. But life moved on, and so did they. Except Carl. He still comes to see her. He still visits two to three times a week, talking to her and hoping she will wake.

Her mother, Marie, is insane. She stares constantly through a thick haze of cigarette smoke at Carl whenever he visits Beth, watching him, evaluating, plotting.

Marie knows the truth. She knows why Beth is in that coma. She knows it was Rex, Beth’s father, who did it. She knows he hired a witch to cast a spell on her Pretty Princess until she is old enough to marry, until his hand-picked protégé wakes her with True Love‘s First Kiss.

But if whomever Rex chooses can break the curse, then so can Carl. He’s loved Beth since he first met her in Sixth Grade. Marie knows. She has a plan. And maybe she’s not as crazy as everyone thinks.

First, though, she’ll have to convince Carl to believe in magic. Then she’ll have to encourage him to defy Rex. That won’t be easy. Rex hates Carl. He put Beth into that coma to keep Carl away from her. And Rex has a wicked temper.

Marie is determined, though. She’s going to get her Sleeping Beauty back. And Carl is going to help . . . whether he likes it or not.

Can True Love‘s First Kiss really break the curse, or are darkness, insanity, and self-doubt too strong?

Set in modern times, “Sleeping Beauty” is a creepy reimagining of the original fairy tale. Much like ABC‘s Once Upon A Time, it offers a fresh look at an old story. It explores what happens when parents go too far to protect their children. All parents struggle deciding when to hold on tightly to their children and when to let go. Rex and Marie get it all wrong. A cautionary tale, “Sleeping Beauty” reminds us there is a fine line between love and obsession, between care and cruelty.
I’ve underlined the keywords to make them easier to see here.
I got the new description up five days into the experiment. “Sleeping Beauty” improved slightly in the books search, moving up to #9. It held steady at #3 in Kindle Editions. It failed to chart in all other categories.
Worse, it didn’t sell. Despite my change to the language, I didn’t net any more sales.

Phase 3: Title and Cover

The final part of my plan was to change the book’s title, which also necessitated a minor change to the cover. As you’ll recall from yesterday’s blog, I noticed that books with the phrase, “fairy tale,” in the title tended to chart higher in searches under that category. The same was true for “once upon a time,” “true love,” and “first kiss.”
I changed the title of the book to “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” and updated the cover to reflect that. You can see the new cover at left. Yesterday’s blog has the old cover for comparison. I also updated the interior of the book.
Once again, I saw immediate results. The first day, the renamed book landed on page three of the “modern fairy tale” search in Kindle Editions in the 27th overall position. The next day, it was on page two at position #19.

It also improved to #8 on the “Sleeping Beauty” books search, remained in the three-spot for Kindle Editions, and, for the first time, it showed up in the “all products” search for “Sleeping Beauty,” landing on page four at position #52.
Best of all, it started selling again. Once again, I sold four books in the first 24 hours the new title was live.
But just as disappointingly, it has stopped moving since then. “Sleeping Beauty” has made no appreciable gains in where it charts in searches, and it stubbornly remains hung up at the nine total sales for the month. A change to keywords resulted in immediate sales and then nothing.
Conclusion
SEO-rich language is definitely an important part of selling on Amazon. In particular, the keywords you tell Amazon to use on the book’s dashboard and the way you title your book have an appreciable impact on how well your book shows up in a searches and how well it sells.
However, I haven’t fully cracked the code yet. Despite selling initially better each time I make a change, “Sleeping Beauty” hasn’t sold enough to crack the Top 100 of any category it’s listed in. That limits its ability to sell enough books for it to become self-sustaining in its sales.
I have two theories on this, both of which may be true. The first is that I haven’t yet found the right combination of keywords yet. Despite embedding “true love” and “first kiss” into my description, they don’t seem to be helping me. Those are both huge categories (so it may be that I’m getting lost in a sea), and I’m not getting any traction with readers who are presumably searching those terms. I think it’s significant to note that changing my book description did almost nothing to bump my visibility and sales, so it’s possible I need focus my efforts elsewhere.

Second, I may just have to be more patient. Obviously, I would like for this to just take off and have “Sleeping Beauty” sell thousands (or at least hundreds) of books a month. But it’s possible it takes time to build that sort of momentum, and my experiment to date does show steady improvement.

Still, it’s clear that something else needs to change. “Sleeping Beauty” has six reviews averaging 4.2 stars. It’s showing up well on several search terms. It sells every month. All the evidence suggests it is a good book people like and want to buy. But it’s not moving in sustainable numbers yet. Something is blocking it from breaking out. If the other evidence suggests that it is a good book people want to buy, then the logical hypothesis is that enough people aren’t finding it.
And that means there really is something to SEO language. I haven’t figured it all out yet. There’s a piece of the puzzle missing. As soon as I find it, I’ll let you know.

SEO for Authors Part 1: Choosing Keywords

I haven’t been blogging as much in the last few weeks. I’ve had my head down, buried in the mysterious world of Search Engine Optimization.

You might wonder why an artist like me is messing with IT guru stuff like SEO principles. Or maybe if you’re an indie author struggling to make a sustainable living at it, you wouldn’t.

The reason is pretty simple. Search Engine Optimized web pages get more views. Pages that get more views have more opportunity to sell their goods. So the principle was simple. If I could get more people to view my pages on Amazon.com (where they can buy one of my books with a single click), I’d have a better chance of selling more books.

So for the last three weeks, I’ve been studying just how to write SEO-rich language to improve the number of times one of my pages comes up in a search. Below I’ll lay out my methodology and strategy. Tomorrow, I’ll discuss the results. I will say this at the outset, though: there’s something to this SEO stuff. It can make a difference in a lot of different ways.

Methodology

First, let me give credit where it’s due. Most of the methodology I used below I developed from a pretty good book on selling for indie authors. Make a Killing on Kindle by Michael Alvear is a brilliant book that exposes a lot of the ways Amazon’s search engines work, how to take advantage, and explodes a number of myths about selling in the Brave New World of e-publishing. Some of his advice borders on unethical. Practically everything he writes about reviews should not be followed. But his understanding of how to use Amazon’s functionality is must reading for any indie author serious about making this his or her full-time job.

The first thing I did was pick a book to experiment with. One of Alvear’s maxims is to only change one variable at a time. My father the research scientist would no doubt agree. So, despite having four books that are selling at various degrees of Teasing to What Is This Sales Thing You Speak Of, I only wanted to mess with one at a time.

I chose my short story, “Sleeping Beauty,” for several reasons. First, it is my most successful book. “Sleeping Beauty” sells far better than anything else I’ve published, so, given it is my most popular work, it seemed like the right choice to try to push.

Second, it has the best cover of my four eBooks. A good cover is a critical component of selling eBooks, so I elected to go with one I wouldn’t have to redesign.

Third, “Sleeping Beauty,” being based on a fairytale, is the book that can best tap into the cultural zeitgeist of the moment. ABC’s Once Upon a Time is popular, and there have been several films in the past year that have been reinventions of classic fairytales. Thus, “Sleeping Beauty” is predisposed to be more successful than some of my other books.

With all that in mind, I went out to Google Adwords and started doing keyword searches on anything I could think of that sounded like it would relate to my novel. See, Google Adwords will tell you how many times a month a keyword is searched on the web, and it will show you variations on the keyword, so you can see how people are searching it. For example, an Adwords search on “Sleeping Beauty” produced the following results:

Sleeping Beauty — 1,000,000
sleep beauty — 49,500
story of sleeping beauty — 27,100

And those were just the top results. What does it mean? One million times a month, people search the phrase, “Sleeping Beauty” on Google. One million times a month.

I searched phrases like, “fairy tale,” “once upon a time,” “true love’s first kiss,” and others to see what sorts of results I could get. The winners were:

fairy tale (7.48M)
once upon a time (5M)
fairytale (1.5M)
true love (1.222M)
sleeping beauty (1M)
first kiss (450k)
fairytale story (368k)
faerie tale (368k)
fairy tale stories (301k)
once upon a time abc (135k)

Armed with that information, I then started conducting searches on Amazon.com. I plugged in the keywords that had the best results to see what Amazon’s search engine found. Alvear calls these “Amazon’s leading indicators” because the results are ranked according to popularity. I was particularly interested to see what keyword phrases Amazon would finish for me. That is, I start typing something, and Amazon suggests possible finishes. For example, I’d start typing “sleeping” and Amazon would suggest “sleeping bag.”

I’d click on the most popular results for keyword phrases that seemed to pertain to my book, and see what sorts of books I found there. Were my competitors in those categories? If so, that was a good thing, because it meant books similar to “Sleeping Beauty” were in the category, and this was a good place to try to sell my wares.

After comparing the results of the keyword hits from Google Adwords with Alvear’s leading indicators, I drafted a list of what I thought would be the most successful search terms for “Sleeping Beauty.”

Strategy

With my list of keywords assembled, it was time to optimize “Sleeping Beauty’s” Amazon page to make it friendlier to search engines. Alvear posits there are three places to imbed keywords into the book’s page to make it optimal: the book’s title, the product description, and the keywords box on your dashboard, where Amazon allows you to enter up to seven keywords for people to search with.

With that in mind, I developed a three-step plan to overhaul “Sleeping Beauty.”

Change the keywords on the book’s dashboard
Change the product description to include more SEO-rich language
Change the title, cover, and interior of the story

The first phase was pretty easy. All I had to do was change the keywords I had in there (and I had to wonder what I was thinking on some of them) with the new ones.

The second part was harder. I basically had to rewrite the marketing copy. I had a three-paragraph description, but it was really more of a teaser than an actual sales pitch on the book, and, worse, it had very, very few SEO keywords in it.

The trick is to write something that is good copy but still contains the keywords you want search engines — particularly Amazon’s — to find. Based on my research I made sure to use the phrases, “true love’s first kiss,” “fairy tale,” “once upon a time,” and, of course, “Sleeping Beauty” several times. Because all of those have to do with the story or in cross-marketing it, it was easy to embed those phrases into the copy without overdoing. After all, I didn’t want my pitch to just look like it was a bunch of search terms. It needed to read well too.

The third phase came about as a direct result of my searching Amazon. I noticed that when I searched the phrase, “fairy tale,” books with “fairy tale” in the title came up first. The same was true of “modern fairy tale,” “true love,” “first kiss,” and “once upon a time.” Despite being marketed as a fairy tale, “Sleeping Beauty” wasn’t landing very high on searches for those terms. I wasn’t entirely certain this wasn’t just because I hadn’t used those terms very well in the product description, but I remembered Alvear’s contention that your title is one of the three places you can embed keywords. Given that assertion and the evidence of my eyes, I decided a modification here was in order.

I changed the title of the story from “Sleeping Beauty” to “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale.” One of the other things I noticed was a lot of fairy tale retellings used subtitles like that, which seemed to be landing them higher. Since my version of “Sleeping Beauty” is indeed a modern fairytale, the change might improve my rankings without affecting the integrity of the story.

And there was another subtle change in there too. I prefer “fairytale.” It’s correct, and I like the way it looks better. But Google Adwords told me “fairy tale” got 7.48M hits a month, whereas “fairytale” got 1.5M. Since both versions are correct, it made better business sense to go with the version that was getting almost six million more hits a month.

Of course, all that meant I was going to have to change the cover, since the original didn’t have “A Modern Fairy Tale” on it, and I didn’t want to confuse readers or look like I’d been inconsistent. I hadn’t wanted to change the cover of the book, because I think it’s a good, dynamic cover, but I wasn’t planning to change the imagery. I was only going to change some of the words, and that’s a pretty simple fix.

With that plan in hand, I sat down to start making changes that would earn me millions. I’ll discuss the results in tomorrow’s blog.

Why I Write Fantasy Literature Part 7: Magic and Metaphors

When I was in college, I was amazed to discover there was a class on science fiction and fantasy literature. I’d read all kinds of sci-fi and fantasy growing up, but I’d never gotten to read one of those books for a class. The closest I’d ever come was reading 1984 and Brave New World for classes on modern British literature. No professor had ever suggested there was literary merit to The Hobbit or Out of the Silent Planet.

But there it was — a class on the very genre fiction I loved to read for pleasure. And I discovered something amazing: many science fiction and fantasy novels really did have literary merit!

This was another key step on the road to my becoming a fantasy author. As an English major, I dreamed of writing something important that students like me would have to study in college some day. But I figured I could never do that, since I wrote about magic and monsters.

Until I discovered there were actually classes on genre fiction!

(I should take a moment to note that dreaming of writing something college students have to read and study is an exceptionally arrogant desire. What can I say? I was in my 20′s, and that sort of arrogance not only came naturallly to me then, it all seemed very logical.)

Perhaps the most important thing I took away from that class (aside from having read some classics I hadn’t encountered yet) was the importance of metaphor in speculative fiction. In terms of fantasy lit, magic is a key part of the story, because it allows the author to take a step away from whatever he or she really wants to say, so as to express it more safely. In other words, fantasy writers disguise their themes with magic.

I employed this technique in my short story, “Sleeping Beauty.” When I undertook to rewrite the classic fairytale, I wanted to say something about overprotective parents.

The world is full of good people who work hard to raise their children well and help them grow into happy adults. But there is a certain percentage of adults who seem to think children stay children forever, and they think they can and need to be controlled.

Magic gave me the ability to write a cautionary story about people like that. Rex, the father in my fairytale, is afraid of his daughter’s budding sexual maturity. Like many men, he’s uncomfortable about his daughter becoming interested in boys and all of the joys and dangers associated with that.

Because I was writing a fairytale, I was able to use magic to give Rex the ability to do something other men like him might like to do: lock her way. Rex obtains a magic potion from a witch that causes her to fall into a coma from which she cannot awake. That prevents her from engaging in any sort of sexual exploration. Despite her body maturing into womanhood, he keeps her preserved as his “little girl” for all time.

Rex is the most obvious villain in a story that is full of them. He uses magic to steal his daughter’s destiny. He wants her to remain sweet and innocent, so he makes sure she can’t choose something else. But Rex’s attitude towards his daughter Beth, his obsession with her sexual maturity isn’t something unknown in the world today. There are fathers who think like him, and some of them bully their children, impose strict rules to keep them from dating, and obsess about what their kids do when they are alone with members of the opposite sex.

Beth’s mother isn’t any better. Prior to him casting his spell, she is involving Beth in the youth beauty pageant scene. She is the worst kind of stage mom, constantly pressuring Beth to do better and to act in a certain way. She is every bit as controlling as Rex is. She just exerts her control over Beth’s waking self.

Marie uses magic too. Rex casts the spell to put Beth to sleep. Marie uses it to wake her. Rex’s curse may be broken with True Love’s First Kiss. This should be a sweet moment of triumph — of true love conquering all. Instead, Marie figures out that one of the high school boys, Carl, is in love with Beth. So she manipulates Carl into helping her break the spell.

But Marie has no more interest in her daughter’s happiness than Rex does. She plans to get rid of Carl after he’s done what she needs him to. She doesn’t see him as strong enough — worthy enough — for her daughter. He’s just a tool to her.

So just like Rex, she plans to use magic to take her daughter’s destiny away from her. She’ll find someone better for Beth . . . just like Rex planned to.

Both parents see Beth as a toy. They treat their daughter as though she is some sort of doll they get to play with. They completely ignore the fact that she is a human being with a right to make her own choices.

The magic spell and its breaking are the literary tools by which I tell the story, and it allows me to disguise my theme. Instead of writing about how bad Rex and Marie are as parents and people, I have them use magic to demonstrate it themselves. Fantasy literature gives me the distance to say something about parenting in the modern world.

I no longer dream (often) of writing something impressionable college students will have to study to get a degree in English. But I still aspire to write something about the world in which we live, and fantasy is one of the tools I use to get there. Magic, monsters, and other worlds make it possible for me to hold a mirror up to the real world so my readers can pause and consider.

It’s still an arrogant desire, perhaps. But writers are arrogant people by nature. We want to be read. We want to go up to strangers and say, “Hey, look what I made!” And, even when we’re not trying, we usually have something to say about the world we live in.

I write fantasy literature because I’ve got something to say. Fantasy is the vehicle that enables me to do it.

Why I Write Fantasy Literature Part 6: The Sensual Impact of 80′s Fantasy Films

“Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And unto this, Conan, destined to wear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow. It is I, his chronicler, who alone can tell thee of his saga. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!”

So begins John Milius’s CONAN THE BARBARIAN. The 1982 epic based on several Robert E. Howard stories was one of many highly regarded fantasy films of the 1980′s. Particularly early in the decade, movies featuring swords and sorcery seemed to roll out of Hollywood on a monthly basis. Not all of them got (much less deserved) critical love, but a great many of them became cult classics.

To a young teenager, who had developed an interest in fantasy literature as a boy and started playing D&D at 14, they were absolutely entrancing. They offered something that reading a novel or playing a role-playing game didn’t: sensual stimulation.

Seeing is Believing

Many of the fantasy films of the 1980′s were visual feasts. These days, that seems silly to say. The special effects in a Harry Potter film far surpass anything available to the producers and directors of the great fantasy flicks of the 80′s. For movies that featured a lot of magic, it was amazing how little of it you actually saw.

That didn’t keep those films from being any more visually stunning. They were shot on location with elaborate sets. They were costumed exotically. For the first time, I didn’t have to imagine what things really looked like. I could see them.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN and Don Coscarelli’s THE BEASTMASTER (1982) were shot in largely desolate expanses. The earth looked forbidding and inhospitable. The few outposts of civilization seemed to be trying to fight off the creep of the wild.

Meanwhile, John Boorman’s epic adaptation of Arthurian mythology, EXCALIBUR (1981), was rich and lush. There was greenery everywhere. It was gorgeous to look at.

Likewise, the costuming was grand. As ridiculous as it was, Boorman had his Knights of the Round Table walking around in shining, silver armor full-time. It may not have been practical or even historically accurate, but it looked incredible.

Coscarelli and Milius had their characters in supple leather or exotically cut cloth. This was a fantasy film, so the characters were made to look . . . fantastic.

Music to my Ears

The visual component wasn’t the only new experience for my young mind. In the same way John Williams made STAR WARS more exciting with his Modern score, Basil Polidorus, Alex North, and Trevor Jones helped shape the styles of CONAN THE BARBARIAN, DRAGONSLAYER (1981), and EXCALIBUR. What I heard from the musical scores impacted how I saw the movies.

It is nearly impossible to describe. I was five years from becoming a music major in college. I barely understood the basics of musical composition. But those scores lifted me out of my seat in the theater. They brought me closer to these fantastical worlds.

Hear-Say

Music wasn’t the only auditory enhancement to the fantasy experience. Many of the earliest fantasy films featured great actors, whose deliverance of lines made them soar. The opening to “Conan” quoted above is spoken by Mako. He made it seem wizened and epic just by his delivery.

Likewise, the great James Earl Jones — the Voice of Darth Vader! — played Thulsa Doom, the Charles Mansonesque sorcerer Conan must oppose.

“Contemplate this on the Tree of Woe,” he says before ordering Conan to be crucified. Not only is the line itself awesome, its delivery by one of the truly great actors and voices in all of cinema makes it resound with evil and horror.

“When a dragon gets this old, it knows only pain,” says the great Ralph Richardson as the venerable wizard Ulrich in DRAGONSLAYER. He infuses the line with pity and wisdom, so that we feel we know all we need to about Vermithrax, the monstrous beast that haunts Valerian’s kingdom.

Great actors elevated even questionable dialogue to the realm of the sublime.

The Revolution Isn’t Over

All of the films I’m discussing were made before 1984, when AIDS and “safe sex” became household words. They may have come at the very tail end of it, but they were all made during the Sexual Revolution. Hence, there was a strong element of sex in all of them.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN features naked women being sacrificed to giant snakes and Valeria taking Conan as a lover.

THE BEASTMASTER has grautitous nudity wherein Dar spies on Kiri bathing naked in a waterfall with another slave girl.

EXCALIBUR is drenched in sex. Uther Pendragon has Merlin disguise him as the Duke of Cornwall, so he can have sex with the duke’s wife. Lancelot and Guinevere have sex in the forest and are caught by Arthur, thereby bringing the kingdom to ruin. Morgana disguises herself as Guinevere, so she can have sex with Arthur to conceive an heir to his throne.

Even DRAGONSLAYER plays with sexual themes. Valerian disguises herself as a boy, because the king has made a pact to sacrifice female virgins to Vermithrax. But she is found out when Galen catches her swimming naked.

And while there is a certain amount of male, sexual fantasy in the costuming and who has to appear nude on camera, the truth is that the men don’t wear that many clothes either. Marc Singer as Dar spends most of THE BEASTMASTER wearing nothing but boots and a leather loincloth. It makes a certain amount of sense given that the film was made largely in Southern California, where it’s warm. But Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t wear a whole lot of clothing either as Conan, and it’s a lot colder.

The prevailing image through a lot of early-80′s fantasy films seems to be these people fight with swords and magic while going around half-naked. As you might imagine, my 14-year-old mind thought that was awesome.

Girl Power

The funny thing is, despite many of these films being male empowerment fantasies, the women were, by and large, not helpless. To be sure, there are some outmoded ideas of the role of women permeating them, but, often, the women had a strong role to play.

Tanya Roberts may have been cast in THE BEASTMASTER largely for her willingness to appear naked on camera (she did a full spread with PLAYBOY to help sell the film), but her character, Kiri, is more than just eye-candy. We are originally led to believe she is a slave girl, but she is actually part of a secret sect of female warriors every bit as deadly as Dar or the Jun warriors he fights.

Valerian disguises herself as a boy, so she will not be subject to the lottery that could get her sacrificed to Vermithrax in DRAGONSLAYER. But it is she who leads a small band of people to beg Ulrich to kill the dragon. She thinks to make a shield of dragon scales to protect Galen from Vermithrax’s fiery breath. She figures out how to kill the dragon, and has to convince Galen to do it.

But perhaps strongest of all is Sandahl Bergman’s Valeria in CONAN THE BARBARIAN. She is every bit as capable as Conan. Clever, resourceful, tough, and dangerous, she is the perfect complement to him. She is already a successful thief when she meets Conan. Together, they are even better. She is even strong enough to come back from the dead long enough to protect him in the final battle.

Watching the fantasy films of my youth, I saw women as clever, capable, strong, exotic, and every bit the equal of men.

The early-80′s swords-and-sorcery flicks ignited my mind towards fantasy literature in the same way the gentler novels of Tolkien, Alexander, and Lewis did. They fired my imagination in the same way Dungeons & Dragons was just beginning to. Those three major influences are the principle reason I would one day become a fantasy author myself. At the most formative years of my life, fantasy found me and taught me to believe in worlds where average people could become extraordinary and change the face of the world.

But there are other reasons I chose fantasy as my preferred genre. A very important one is the power of metaphor. I’ll discuss that next week.

Why I Write Fantasy Literature Part 5: Creating Ideal Worlds

One of the cool things about writing fantasy literature is the ability to create new worlds. You get to make up new nations, new peoples, and new histories.

That means you have total control over the shape and style of the world. It works the way you want it to.

That gives the author the ability to create an idealized world — one where things work better than they do in real life. One where there is social justice, even if, to get it, there has to be an epic battle pitting a small, unlikely hero against the forces of darkness.

I am a dreamer — What would you expect from a guy who writes fantasy literature? — and I like to create worlds where there is equal opportunity — for heroism, for villainy, for insanity, for mistakes, and for everything that makes us both glorious and hideous as people. In short, I create worlds where my characters have roughly the same chances as everyone else.

For example, in my first novel, State of Grace, my setting features a lot of gender equality. The main character, Wolf Dasher, is male, but his immediate superior in the field, Kenderbrick, is a woman. She is not only competent at her job, she is highly respected by others in the field, particularly her ultimate boss, the head of Shadow Service. She is an expert on the political situation that grips the land in which she works, and she knows how to handle roguish secret agents who like to follow their instincts instead of protocol. She’s very good at her job, and no one questions her abilities on the basis of her being a woman. Everyone, including Wolf, immediately accepts her authority.

The same is true of May Honeyflower, Wolf’s principle love interest in the novel. She is Captain of the Elite Guard — the top military unit in Alfar, the elf nation where most of the book is set. As a result, she is also an advisor to the government, which, incidentally, is headed by another woman. Nowhere in the novel does it ever occur to anyone that it is extraordinary a woman should hold such a prominent position. Everyone assumes she got the job entirely on merit and accepts her credentials.

I know there are a lot of historical reasons for why women have had to battle for equal rights and opportunities in the real world. But I believe women are every bit as capable as men, and that there is no need to restrict someone’s opportunities. And, since this is a fantasy world, I created it to reflect my values that women are equal to men.

In the same way, one of the themes of State of Grace is the role of religion in society. This is a debate we’re having in the real world practically every day. Whether one is discussing the right to an abortion in the U.S. or the prominence of Sharia law in Egypt, we humans struggle to find the right balance between religious belief and secular law in our societies.

It would have been easy to choose one side or the other and make it obvious what the right thing is (in my opinion). I could have made all the devout believers dangerous zealots to show that religion is a bad thing, or I could have made all the bad guys infidels to make the point that we need some form of higher moral compass.

Instead, I went both ways. State of Grace‘s primary villain is a devout believer, and he is something of a zealot. He believes passionately in God and God’s plan. He believes he must orchestrate a coup and start a war to fully execute God’s will properly. One of his allies, is a terrorist in the mold of Osama bin Laden — a madman who believes God wants him to kill as many infidels as possible.

However, the main villain’s intentions are sincere. He truly believes he is doing the right thing, and that God is guiding his actions. Both antagonists are also being corrupted by outside forces that have taken their faiths and perverted them into something dreadful.

Contrast that with May, who also is a devout believer in God. She has a strong faith, but she is utterly repulsed by the beliefs of the villains. To her mind, they have absolutely lost God’s message in their fervor and are on the wrong path.

Wolf, meanwhile, is an atheist. He doesn’t believe in God at all, and he is terribly suspicious of religion in general. But he recognizes something beautiful and pure in May’s faith. He respects her belief and is jealous of it, even while he condemns the villains for using religion as justification for atrocities.

And the true believer (May) and the atheist (Wolf) are comfortable working together and respecting the other’s ideas. They find it is possible to have dialogue and to cooperate.

There’s that ideal world again. I believe people of differing beliefs — in beliefs as seemingly diametrically opposed as a religious devotee and an atheist — can come together and create consensus to make the world a better place to live.

That is the power of fantasy literature. We can make the world as we want it to be. That’s not to say the mileaux we create aren’t beset with troubles of their own. The very basis of all literature is conflict. The dark forces have to be on the march and threatening that idyllic state. But the basic foundation can be idealized. We can have a world that works more like we want it to.

I like writing fantasy literature, because I can model worlds that may one day come to be. Perhaps one day women will not make less money than men, not be considered less qualified just because they’re female, and not have their opportunities restricted by sexist policies. Perhaps one day people can find ways to cooperate and be respectful of each other even if their ideas are disparate and in conflict. If we create these worlds in fiction, we can envision them and bring them into reality.

Next week, I’ll look at the influence of the fantasy films of the 1980′s. Particularly the early half of that decade saw a huge interest in swords-and-sorcery movies. I’ll examine how these were important in my development as a fantasy author.

Why I Write Fantasy Literature Part 4: Escapism

By its very definition, fantasy is an escape from reality. It is the unreal, the fantastic, the imagined.

I’ve yet to meet a reader of fantasy fiction that didn’t yearn for a world where magic is real, where justice triumphs, where the forces of darkness gather and march but are ultimately defeated. Real life is boring. Real life has bills and relationships that don’t work out and unsatisfying jobs. In real life, the wrong person gets elected president or to Congress and someone else wins the lottery.

But in fantasy, life may be hard, but it has some higher purpose. There is a discernible deeper meaning to it all.

To an extent this is true of all fiction. An author makes choices for the characters and plot. He or she adds structure and cohesion. He or she eliminates the randomness of reality. Why? Because it isn’t satisfying to read otherwise. Even a memoir, ostensibly based on real events, is shaped to have a meaningful structure.

Genre fiction takes escapism even further from the realm of ordinary life. The action hero always overcomes incredible odds to defeat the bad guy. Science fiction takes the reader to other times or other worlds, where the only-imagined is now possible. Even romance supposes a world where relationship complications work themselves out neatly and two people who belong together not only find each other but live happily after ever.

Fantasy has magic. It could be a long-lost artifact. It could be the ability to summon fire from thin air. But, somehow, the ability to make use of the supernatural is either good for the protagonist or the weapon of the antagonist. Often, it’s both.

For example, my novel, Red Dragon Five, features two villains with magical powers. One can transform herself into a giant, firebreathing dragon. The other can control the weather and water. Meanwhile, my protagonist has innate magical abilities. He can see magical energy, has postcognitive vision, and can vanish in shadows. The villains’ powers are greater than his, making his path to triumph fraught with peril.

The presence of magic in whatever form it appears is one of the major attractants to fantasy literature. Since I was very young, I’ve believed in magic in one way or another. I like the idea of there being more to this world than we expect. Whether it’s secret dimensions, charms to repel monsters, or a ring that makes one ultra powerful, I like the idea that there is an ethereal means to change the conditions of the world around us.

In my real-life experience, such things don’t exist. There are no magical creatures imparting wisdom. There are no spells that prevent harm.

So I make them. As a fantasy writer, I create worlds where magic exists. I open doors to other dimensions for my readers to slip through. I bring the fantastic to life.

There is another key component to escapism that runs through all genre fiction, particularly fantasy: hope.

Readers of fantasy literature are not just seeking to escape the mundane existence of ordinary life. They also want to believe in a world where things work out the way they should. The brave are rewarded for their courage. The wicked are punished for their evil. Small, unassuming people can step onto the world stage and steer the course of history towards justice and light.

Wolf Dasher, the main character in Red Dragon Five, is an orphan. He was born into a rich family, but he was cast out and disowned when he was just 15, because he developed his strange, magical powers. He went to work for the government, because they took him and trained him, but he was unjustly denied his birthright by the people who were supposed to love him.

Despite this ignominious beginning, though, Wolf fights for the people of a strange land. He battles megalomaniacs and psychotics. And he wins. He is often hurt along the way, and not all of his allies survive. But, in the end, he wins. He preserves lives in the name of good. He is by no means a paragon of virtue. But he’s a decent person who fights like a lion to protect the innocent.

Wolf gives us hope that the forces of evil will not triumph when they inevitably march on us. He gives us hope that even a person with a broken background can do good in the world.

I want a world where there is magic. I want a world where the good guys defeat the bad guys. And real life doesn’t always give me that.

So I write fantasy literature. I create worlds where we can enjoy magic, where we can hope for justice and believe it will happen.

Fantasy literature gives us an escape from drudgery and from darkness. That’s why I like it. That’s why I write it.

I’ll continue this theme next week, when I’ll explore the concept of idealized worlds in fantasy literature.

KDP Select Bonus Funds Offer Chance to Help Indie Authors

If you haven’t been following publishing news in the last few days, Amazon.com just announced last week it is increasing the bonus funding for its KDP Select program by $2.2M for the remainder of January and for February.

Select is a program for publishers that make their eBooks available through Amazon. By agreeing to a 90-day exclusivity period (the digital version of a book can only be sold through Amazon), authors are allowed to offer their books free for up to five days, and the publications are eligible to be borrowed from Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

It’s this latter benefit the bonus money targets. Each month, Amazon allocates a payment pool of cash to pay enrolled authors for borrows. The current number is $700,000 a month. Every time an author’s book is borrowed, he or she gets a piece of that money. The total sum is divided by the total number of borrows that month.

In November, Amazon announced a $1.5M bonus to the pool for December, January, and February. The bonus they committed last week is on top of that money. So Amazon is putting an extra $1M into January’s fund on top of the $1.4M it already had. An additional $1.2M will be added to February’s pot.

So, if you’re an author enrolled, you can get a pretty decent payout for borrows in January and February. November’s number was $1.80 per borrow. With double the money in the pool for December, the payout is likely close to double as well. Let’s assume it’s $3.60 for the sake of argument. That number rises to around $5.12 for January (assuming the number of borrows stays roughly consistent).

Here’s where this is really exciting news for independent authors. Many of us price our books between 99 cents and $4.99. We earn a 35% royalty for anything below $2.99 and a 70% royalty for anything $2.99 to $9.99. So by borrowing a book through the Amazon Prime program, you’re getting an author a royalty that might actually be larger than the retail price of his or her book, and is certainly bigger than the usual royalty for a sale!

If you’re a member of Amazon Prime or you’ve been considering it, now is absolutely the time to take advantage of it. You can help make a difference for your favorite indie author by borrowing on of his or her novels.

I’ve got three books enrolled in KDP Select (and therefore eligible for borrowing) at the moment:

“Sleeping Beauty” is an 8000-word short story that re-imagines the classic fairytale in modern times. A father puts his daughter in a magical coma to protect her. Her mother plots to wake her. Neither is motivated by love. “Sleeping Beauty” is a cautionary tale about parents going too far.

State of Grace is the first novel in the Wolf Dasher series of fantasy-thriller mashups. Blending James Bond-style action with Tolkienesque fantasy, State of Grace sends secret agent Wolf Dasher to the magical land of elves, where he must solve the murder of his colleague and prevent a coup attempt from slaughtering thousands of elves and toppling the balance of power.

Red Dragon Five is the second Wolf Dasher book. This novel, which may be read as a standalone book or as a sequel to State of Grace, sends Wolf deep undercover with no official backup. When he disappears, his new love goes off in search of him as the two race against time to prevent a stolen top-secret weapon from being used by terrorists. As much a love story as an action-adventure yarn, Red Dragon Five is a true genre-bender.

I’d be very pleased if you’d click on the links to borrow one or more of those books. Or if you know someone who might enjoy one of them, pass on the information.

It’s an exciting time to be an indie author, with Amazon committing more resources to help grow the market. It’s also a struggle with so many books out there to muscle out some market space for oneself. Why not take the time to help out your favorite indie author in January and February? He or she will definitely appreciate it.

I know I would.