John R. Phythyon Jr.'s Blog, page 31

“Sleeping Beauty” to be Free Again!

If you missed it the first time around, you’ll get another chance to download “Sleeping Beauty” for free from Amazon.com. Tuesday, 2 October, and Wednesday, 3 October, Kindle users can get it free just by clicking on the purchase button on the “Sleeping Beauty” Amazon page.

“Sleeping Beauty” is free on 10/2 and 10/3!

This 8,000-word short story reimagines the classic fairytale in modern times. Beth Shipman has been a coma for two years. All her friends have abandoned her. Her mother is slowly going insane. Only loyal Carl, who fell in love with her on the first day of Sixth Grade five years ago still visits. Now, Mrs. Shipman has a desperate plan to free her Pretty Princess from eternal slumber, but it won’t be easy. Carl must overcome his doubts and believe in the power of love, and Beth’s father Rex isn’t interested in her waking up. After all, he’s the one who put her to sleep in the first place. Can True Love’s First Kiss really break the curse, or are darkness, insanity, and self-doubt too strong?

Here’s your chance to download for free a creepy retelling of a familiar story reviewers have called “a fast-paced and truly enjoyable short.”

And, if you do, you can help me out too. When you download the story, click the “Like” button an tag the story. Then, when you’re finished reading it, come back and write a review. Amazon only requires 20 words minimum, so you don’t have to spend a lot of time on it.

So don’t miss out on what reviewers have described as “Unnerving, haunting and well worth the purchase price.” For the two days it’s free, that even truer than before!

“Sleeping Beauty” is available for your Kindle here.

Is KDP Select the Right Move?

If you’ve been following my blog for the last two weeks, you know I tried using KDP Select’s free giveaway program for the first time last week. I ran a two-day event in which I made my short story, “Sleeping Beauty”, free. As a result, I saw a bump in paid sales, a huge bump in total downloads, and a meteoric rise in the Amazon Bestseller rankings for both “Sleeping Beauty” and my novel, State of Grace (an excerpt of which appears in the back of “Sleeping Beauty”).

I also saw a falloff in that momentum after only a few days, prompting me to conclude I needed to do some advertising after the next event, which I’ve scheduled for next week. I’m nervous about what the results are going to be.

Should STATE OF GRACE be enrolled in KDP Select?

But, in the interim, there is a larger question I am considering. Should I unpublish State of Grace from Smashwords and B&N, so I can attempt to generate the same spike for it as I did for “Sleeping Beauty”?

Here’s the situation: the sequel, Red Dragon Five, will be out in November. In theory, I could make State of Grace exclusive with Amazon, enroll it in KDP Select, and do some free events with it to boost its rankings and sales. I could also put a sample chapter of Red Dragon Five in the back, to help build excitement/sales.

If SoG were free the day RD5 released, I could make a huge event to get the original for free and then pick up the sequel right away. That would raise the profile of both books.

I could likewise stagger free days, so that RD5 would be free on days SoG wasn’t, effectively creating the same excitement in reverse — buy the original, get the second book free.

But should I?

All of my doubts about whether those freebies really turn into sales are still there. Will it really help expand my brand and start turning sales, so that my career as a novelist becomes more sustainable? Or will it just make this more of a vanity-press situation wherein I can give away a ton of books but not really make any money on them? My goal is to write fiction for a living, so this is a huge question I’m asking.

I suppose it kind of depends on how next week’s event goes. If I see another decent spike in sales and sustained momentum as a result of my advertising efforts, then it probably means KDP Select is the right path to jumpstart my sales. If it falls flat, and I don’t see much of an increase, then maybe that tells me it isn’t worth it.

Unless, of course, what that means is that you only get one shot at a free event — that you have your most success on your first free event for a book and then it falls off from there (and I’ve gotten what I can get from “Sleeping Beauty”). If that’s the case, then it still makes sense to do it but to plan it carefully.

But how would I know which of those is true?

I’m very interested to know what others think. If you’ve got an opinion or you’ve got a KDP Select story to tell, leave a comment below.

Next week, I’ll blog the results of my next free event for “Sleeping Beauty,” and I’ll let you know how that affects the decision I make. Stay tuned.

Examining KDP Select Free Days Part 3: After the Event

“Sleeping Beauty” is just 99 cents for your Kindle!

Last week, I wrote two posts analyzing my experience with a two-day free event for my short story, “Sleeping Beauty,” through KDP Select. If you missed them, you can read them here and here.

They were two of my most popular posts in the past few weeks, which I interpret to mean people are very interested in how KDP Select works for authors, whether it’s worth it, and what they should do if they try it for themselves. Let’s face it, Amazon isn’t exactly forthcoming with its technical numbers. If another author is going to put information up there — whether it’s someone as successful as J.A. Konrath or someone more unknown like me — people are interested in it.

So with that in mind, I’m going to write two more blogs on the subject this week. Today, I will look at what I need to do differently in the future based on the returns last week’s event got me. Thursday, I’ll consider whether I should unpublish State of Grace from B&N and Smashwords and go exclusive with KDP Select for at least 90 days.

Quick Review

STATE OF GRACE is just 99 cents for your favorite e-reader

My methodology for last week’s event was spending several days before the event laying a foundation. I announced it on my blog, on my Facebook page, on Twitter, and on Goodreads. I wrote several content-rich blog posts about “Sleeping Beauty” to help create some interest in the story, and I put the first four scenes up on Goodreads for free, so readers could get a taste.

During the two days the event ran, I posted announcements with links on my personal Facebook page, my fan page, and on the pages of four different Facebook groups of which I’m a member. I also tweeted the event three times a day.

Results

The results were these: I gave away 522 copies of “Sleeping Beauty,” which blows away sales from all of my other books put together. My Amazon rank for “Sleeping Beauty” and State of Grace rocketed up into the mid-60,000′s and -70,000′s. Immediately after the event, I sold three copies of “Sleeping Beauty” and two copies of State of Grace.

But since then not much has happened. “Sleeping Beauty” has fallen back down into the 260,000 range, while State of Grace has fallen into the 108,000 range on the Amazon bestseller list. Both are improvements to be sure, but it’s pretty clear that the momentum from the surge is over.

Lack of Follow-up

I think it’s pretty easy to identify how the drive I built last week fizzled over the weekend. After the event, I didn’t do much. I wrote two blogs discussing the event, and they were both well read. In those blogs, I gave a link to the story, so it would be possible for people to buy it with only a few clicks. And I think it’s reasonable to assume that the State of Grace sales were due to the teaser for the book I put in the back of “Sleeping Beauty,” meaning that tactic probably worked.

But after I temporarily raised my profile with the free event, I did nothing to keep it up there aside from what I had been doing before — blogging and tweeting. What I needed to do was some advertising. I needed to get the word about John R. Phythyon, Jr. out there further, striking while the iron was hot from the free event. That’s what I plan to do with the next event.

Revised Methodology

I’ve set my next free event for next week Tuesday and Wednesday (October 2 and 3). I will be following roughly the same pre-event methods I did for the last one (see “Examining KDP Select Free Days Part 1: Raw Data” for a complete breakdown).

However, I will do some advertising on the back end of the event to try to sustain the momentum it creates. I have purchased a 14-day ad on Digital Book Today (digitalbooktoday.com). It was pretty inexpensive. I got the silver package, which only cost $50. I would like to have spent more for better placement, but I’m on a budget. The ad begins running on October 3 — the second day of the event, so it should dovetail nicely (and, yes, I planned it that way).

I am also looking at several other affordable ad campaigns. World Literary Cafe has a program that lets your book be the featured sponsor for only $40 a day. They have some other promotional opportunities that “Sleeping Beauty” either doesn’t qualify for or falls outside my window, but I have my eye on them for future events.

There is also an inexpensive ad through Kindle Book Review (thekindlebookreview.net) that is pretty affordable at $25 a day (max of three days) that requires a 4.0-star rating, which “Sleeping Beauty” currently has. I am looking at this possibility too.

And Facebook has offered me $50 off an ad for getting to 50 likes on my fan page. An ad targeted to fans of ABC’s Once upon a Time would seem to be an effective tool.

I’ve got to crunch some numbers to see what I can afford and see if dates inside my window are still available, since they often fill up fast. However, in the week since my first free event began I’ve learned two very important things:

Offering your book free through KDP Select is an effective method of raising your profile.
The effects of doing so don’t last long, so you have to do something on the back end to capitalize on the attention you garnered.

I don’t know if paid advertising is the right follow-up, but I haven’t tried advertising yet, and, if Jeff Bennington’s advice in The Indie Author’s Guide to the Universe is sage, immediately following my next free event seems like a good time to take a shot at it.

I’ll be sure to post results here again so you can see if my investment was worth it.

Examining KDP Select Free Days Part 2: Was it a Success?

Yesterday, I posted the methodology and raw numbers from my first KDP Select free event. To summarize, I offered “Sleeping Beauty” for free for two days. In the run-up to the event I blogged regularly about the story, posted free content for it on Goodreads, and announced the event via Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads.

As a result of my promotions, I “sold” 522 copies of “Sleeping Beauty,” and the book has an Amazon Bestseller rank of 287,715 as opposed to State of Grace’s rank of 616,715.

Numerical Analysis

On the surface, those numbers look awesome, and, in general, I’m pleased.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, 522 copies is more units than I’ve sold of all my books combined before the free event. It is a significantly higher number in fact. “Sleeping Beauty” is now the best-selling product I’ve produced in terms of units downloaded since I began this self-publishing adventure in November of last year. It took two days to completely obliterate my previous nine-and-a-half months of sales.

That alone is a significant achievement. Five hundred twenty-two new readers took a chance on me. More on that below.

Likewise, the Amazon Bestseller rank is astounding. I failed to take note of what it was before I began, so I can’t say what the rise is like. But, as I mentioned above,  State of Grace‘s rank is 616,715. “Sleeping Beauty” is 350,000 spots higher. That would seem to suggest the free event is good for increasing visibility.

Now let’s throw a few grains of salt on these achievements. I may have sold 522 units of “Sleeping Beauty” in two days, but I made exactly $0.00 on them. No charge from Amazon to the customer means no royalty payment from Amazon to me.

There is also no guarantee that any of those 522 people will read “Sleeping Beauty” or even that they would have bought it had it not been free. There are people who simply download free books to their Kindles and then never get around to reading them. I myself have three books on my Kindle I haven’t read yet that I downloaded because they were free. I’ve started one of them, but I’m a slow reader, which means it’ll be awhile before I get around to writing any reviews.

Speaking of which, there’s no guarantee that any of the people who read the story will review it. Of those that do, there’s no guarantee they’ll write a good review.

So, as impressive as 522 copies sounds, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything positive for “Sleeping Beauty” or for me as an author.

Likewise, it’s impressive that “Sleeping Beauty” is ranked so much higher than State of Grace now, but being ranked 287,715 isn’t going to cause people to take notice. Nobody reads down 300,000 places on a bestseller list.

So the raw numbers look good, but it’s difficult to say what they mean in terms of how well the event helped the story or my career as an author.

What I Do Know

The thing about giving something away for free is you’re not doing it to make sales. Giving a product away causes you to take a loss on the resource investment that made it.

But marketing is an ephemeral science. Those 522 copies of “Sleeping Beauty” were not units sold. Rather, they were a marketing expense. “Sleeping Beauty” usually retails for 99 cents. At that price, Amazon pays 35 cents in royalties. So at 522 units, I gave up $182.70 in royalties. That’s money I certainly could use, but it’s not going to pay the mortgage. So, effectively, I spent $182.70 on an advertising campaign.

Here’s what the ad contained:

A complete story, showcasing what kind of writer I am
A teaser of about half the first chapter of State of Grace
Links to purchase my other books
Links to my website, Twitter account, and Facebook page
An “About the Author” blurb giving insight into my personality and the kinds of books I write

At 35 cents per impression, that seems like a lot of content for the investment price.

I am supposing that you didn’t download “Sleeping Beauty” if it wasn’t the kind of thing you like to read. Thus, I reached 522 warm leads. So 522 people who like my kind of book got it and might read it. Up to 522 people might write a review or tell their friends to buy it, helping convert more sales. And up to 522 people read an excerpt from State of Grace and may be inclined to buy that.

And here’s something else. In the two days since the event ended, I’ve sold three copies of “Sleeping Beauty” and one copy of State of Grace. “Sleeping Beauty” has now moved up to 76,148 on the Bestseller List, an improvement of 211,000 places.

I can’t know for sure that the free event caused those sales, and it’s worth noting that yesterday’s blog has generated pretty good traffic and been retweeted quite a few times. It’s possible that caused more sales of “Sleeping Beauty.”

But it seems pretty odd that that those sales would occur in a vacuum. It’s fairly likely I earned them by raising my profile.

From that perspective, I have to see the two-day free event as a measured success. Time will tell if those 522 loss-leaders turn intomore sales somewhere else. In terms of expanding my brand and getting my name over, though, I reached a lot more people than I had in the nine-and-half months leading up to this event. I think it’s pretty safe to say I’ll try KDP Select’s Free Days again. I’ll blog more next week about changes to my methodology on future promotions.

If you were one of the people who downloaded “Sleeping Beauty” during the event, thank you for helping make it such a success. You can help more by tagging the book, liking it, and writing a review. Amazon reviews only need to be 20 words long, so don’t feel like you have to write a full book report.

If you missed the free event, well, “Sleeping Beauty” is still only 99 cents. That’s a pretty small risk for a story one reviewer called, “Unnerving, haunting, and well worth the purchase price.”

“Sleeping Beauty” is available here through KDP Select for your Kindle.

Examining KDP Select Free Days Part 1: Raw Data

I recently conducted my first experiment with Kindle Direct Publishing Select’s free promotion. It’s time to assess what I got out of it.

Methodology

I followed a good chunk of Jeff Bennington’s advice that he publishes in The Indie Author’s Guide to the Universe. Some of it I didn’t largely for financial reasons. But, in terms of the shape of the event, here’s what I did.

“Sleeping Beauty” was free for two days — Tuesday, 18 September, and Wednesday, 19 September. In the weeks before the event, I focused on raising the story’s awareness.

4 September: I published a blog, detailing one of the darker aspects of Sleeping Beauty story — the princess is treated like an object and controlled by others.
6 September: I posted a third chapter of State of Grace and the first four scenes of “Sleeping Beauty” to Goodreads. Then I wrote a blog piece advertising the fact that I had lots of free samples on Goodreads for people to have a look at.
8 September: I tweeted the blog again under the #SampleSunday hashtag.
12 September: I published a blog post, announcing the free event, telling people how to get the story, and how to write a review, tag the book, and “like” it on Amazon.com. I also created an event on Goodreads and invited all my Goodreads friends to participate.
13 September: I published another blog entry on the surtext of “Sleeping Beauty,” once again discussing how she isn’t treated like a person. This time, I used the example of her mother in my version of the story. I also announced the free event on my Facebook page.
15 September: I tweeted the blog post about free samples on Goodreads again, using the #SampleSunday hashtag.
17 September: The day before the event, I published another blog about the short story, this time discussing the development of Carl, the Prince Charming character.

Perhaps most importantly, in each blog post, I pasted the image of the cover of the story. I created a visual brand image of “Sleeping Beauty.”

During the event itself, I engaged in a lot of direct marketing.

Twitter: I tweeted the book’s free event three times a day, including a link readers could click on to download the story and a quote from one of its reviews — “. . . a fast-paced and truly enjoyable short.”
Facebook: Not only did I announce the event on my business Facebook page both days, I also did so on my personal page. In addition, I posted notices on the pages of four different groups I’m a member of. Every instance had a link to where it could be downloaded and a copy of the book cover.
Pixel of Ink: I informed PixelofInk.com about my free promotion. “Sleeping Beauty” did not appear in Pixel of Ink’s daily email, although it may have been listed on their site.

Raw Numbers

So with all that pre-work done, I tried not to hold my breath as I waited to see what the results would be.  The raw numbers are these:

I “sold” 522 copies of “Sleeping Beauty” in two days.
My Amazon.com Bestseller Rank for “Sleeping Beauty” is now 287,679.

Those are both really solid numbers. Five hundred twenty-two is more units than all of my books have sold to date. I began this self-publishing journey in November of last year, so in two days I totally obliterated everything I’d done to date.

Likewise, State of Grace has an Amazon bestselling rank of 616,715. I failed to take note of “Sleeping Beauty’s” rank before I started the promotion, but for this short story to be ranked 350,000 places higher than the novel that’s been out for almost a year seems significant.

But do these numbers mean anything? How good is it that I gave away 522 copies of my short story?

Tomorrow, I’ll analyze the numbers and what they might mean to see if this promotion was actually good for my business or just a waste of royalty money.

Making a More Believable Prince Charming

“Sleeping Beauty” is free for your Kindle on September 18 and 19!

Carl wasn’t very interesting. That’s kind of a problem for the guy who’s supposed to be the hero of a story.

It wasn’t exactly his fault. I was more interested in the villains. It’s kind of a weakness of mine. I’ve liked villains almost for as long as I can remember. So when I sat down to create a new version of “Sleeping Beauty” it’s no surprise I focused on the bad guys, especially since Maleficent — the wicked witch in the Disney version — is one of my all-time favorites.

I spent time developing the character of Rex, Sleeping Beauty’s father, who is obsessed with his daughter’s budding sexuality and therefore tracks down a spell to put her into a coma, so she will sleep until the right man comes along to marry her.

And I spent time developing Marie, her mother, who is on the edge of insanity and willing to do anything to get her daughter back.

But poor Carl, the guy who actually is in love with the titular character and who is recruited by Marie to break the spell, got short shrift. Partly that’s because he’s a pawn. Marie manipulates him to bring Beth — her Pretty Princess — back from darkness of Rex’s spell.

But to stay true to the original story’s intent — that only True Love’s First Kiss can wake her — I needed to have Carl have a personality of his own. He had to actually be in love with Beth.

In my original manuscript, Carl mentions another girl at school, Meghan, who has become “a bitch” since Beth succumbed to a coma two years ago. Sitting at Beth’s bedside to talk to her after school, Carl reports:

Today, Jenny Gaines got sick and threw up, and Meghan told everyone it was morning sickness and called her a slut. By the time lunch rolled around, everyone was calling her a slut and wanting to know who the father was.

That’s the first and last we hear of this incident in the original story, which I wrote for a contest back in 2006. I was limited to 4000 words for the whole piece, so I didn’t have a lot of space to develop things.

When I was looking to expand on Carl’s character for the rewrite, though, this little throwaway incident evolved into a much larger portion of the plot. I decided I needed some scenes of Carl at school. I therefore wrote a passage wherein Carl comes across Meghan telling a group of her friends that a car that looked like Jenny’s was seen at the women’s health clinic and that that must she had an abortion. Shocked and angered at Meghan’s largely unmotivated assassination of Jenny’s character, Carl confronts her:

“Your story doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “First of all, all your information comes third-hand. You didn’t see the car. Neither did Stacey or her sister. Second, you don’t know it was her car. You just said it looked like hers. That doesn’t make it hers. Third, you don’t know Jenny is pregnant. She’s never said she is. No one knows whether she’s pregnant or not. Fourth, even if she is, she could have been getting a regular exam or a sonogram or something. They don’t only do abortions there, you know.

“And fifth, and most importantly, it’s none of your damned business whether she’s pregnant or not and whether she has an abortion or not!”

This scene brings Carl’s character into sharper relief. He’s not just a lovesick teenager being manipulated by an insane adult. He has principles. He stands up for people being bullied. He has a soft heart. All of that not only makes him more interesting to read about, but it also validates how he feels about Beth and why he takes the actions he does.

I also needed motivation for Carl to act on Marie’s instructions. Who believes you can wake a woman from a two-year coma with True Love’s First Kiss? Certainly Carl wouldn’t. This scene ends with Meghan telling him, “Better go back to your coma-girl, Carl.” He’s left contemplating what to do about the situation.

That was followed up by a dream sequence wherein Beth tells him what to do. However, that didn’t feel right after I read through it. The story has a lot of flashback scenes, but there hadn’t been any dreams.

So I cut the dream scene, but there still didn’t seem to be enough to motivate Carl to go through with what seems like a mad plan cooked up by Beth’s mother. My editor suggested the Meghan plot didn’t resolve very satisfactorily. I saw the opportunity to fix both problems.

I wrote a new scene wherein Carl runs into Jenny Gaines. The two are embarrassed and don’t quite know what to say to each other. Then Jenny thanks Carl for sticking up for her. She ends the encounter by saying, “You’re pretty cool, Carl. For what it’s worth, I hope your friend Beth wakes up soon. She deserves someone like you.”

That comment gives him what he needs. The idea that Beth deserves him and, by implication, he deserves her convinces him he is desperate enough to believe the ravings of a woman he otherwise believes to be insane.

When I first wrote “Sleeping Beauty,” Carl wasn’t very interesting. He was a generic Prince Charming, and he wasn’t terribly charming. By giving him some scenes of his own away from Beth and the main plot of the story, he gets the opportunity to develop. That makes both him and his actions more believable.

And, in a fairytale, that’s pretty important.

You can get “Sleeping Beauty” for free for your Kindle on September 18 and 19, 2012. Click here to download it!

Why She Slumbers: Recognizing Sleeping Beauty’s Personhood

Last week I discussed how one of the essential elements of the Sleeping Beuaty story seems to be treatment of her as some sort of object a person can possess and treat as he or she will. Whether it’s the evil witch from the Disney film, the handsome but brutish prince from Anne Rice’s novel, or her own father in my version of the story, powerful people seem to think Sleeping Beauty doesn’t get to make any choices for herself.

In my short story, Rex, the father, hunts down a spell that causes his daughter Beth to fall into a coma. Just like in the classic, only True Love’s First Kiss can wake her. He imagines this will keep her safe from the teenage boys he perceives as lusting after her.

As horrible as what Rex does is, though, he’s not the only person in the story who thinks he can possess Beth. Her mother Marie is no better. At first, she appears as a sympathetic character. She just wants to get her “Pretty Princess” back from the spell her husband cast. She wonders if Carl, the teenager who comes to visit Beth a few times a week, is the person who can break it.

As the story progresses, though, we see Marie isn’t admirable either. We discover that Marie has been entering Beth in beauty pageants from the time she was three years old. A flashback scene to when Beth was 12 reveals Marie for whom she really is. After Beth comes in second, Marie is disgusted and tells her she needs to work harder and not be satisfied with second place:

“For God’s sake, Mother, I was first runner-up,” Beth protested as they drove home.

“First runner-up is second place,” Marie scolded.

“That’s pretty good!”

“Stop being satisfied with less than the best. You are talented, Beth. You deserve to wear the crown. If you go through life thinking it’s okay for some other girl to win, that’s what will happen to you.”

“What do you mean?”

Good lord. Beth was sweet, smart, and talented, but sometimes she just didn’t get it. When was the girl going to figure life out? She was twelve, after all.

“I mean, if you think it’s okay to come in second, then you will,” Marie explained. “As long as you think someone else is better than you, as long as you think it is okay for you not to be number one, you will never win anything. You’ll be first runner-up at the pageants, someone else will be captain of the cheer squad, some other kid will be valedictorian of your class, and some other woman will marry the man you want.

“It’s time for you to start being tougher on yourself and on the competition. Beauty pageants aren’t just for fun. They’re training for life.”

From Marie’s perspective, she has Beth’s life all planned out — she’ll be valedictorian, cheer captain, and get happily married — and Beth is messing with her plans by not being competitive enough. It doesn’t occur to Marie that Beth might not want any of the things she has planned. She sees beauty pageants as “training for life,” and Beth needs to get better so she can “win.”

But what if Beth doesn’t want to be a cheerleader or the top of her class or even get married? What if Beth doesn’t even want to compete in beauty pageants? What if Beth has an entirely other destiny in mind for herself?

Like Rex, Marie is unconcerned with her daughter’s individuality. Where Rex sees her as a burgeoning sexual being, and he doesn’t want that to happen to his little girl (in essence, he wants to keep her as a child all her life), Marie sees her as needing to grow up to be a certain kind of person. Marie has no objections to Beth becoming an adult . . . as long as she becomes the person Marie wants her to be. At the end of the scene:

[Beth] didn’t get it yet. That was okay. This was not an easy lesson to learn. But Marie would keep teaching her. She would make sure her Pretty Princess grew up to be a powerful and successful queen.

Marie has no more respect for Beth’s personhood than Rex has. She just treats her as a different kind of object. Rex sees her as a sex toy. Marie sees her as queen. Both of them see reflections of themselves in Beth and try to make her into what they want.

If there’s a lesson we should take away from Sleeping Beauty, it’s that we need to treat women as masters of their own personal destinies. They are not sex objects as Rex or Rice’s Prince see them. They are not tools to make (as Marie sees Beth) or unmake (as Malificent sees Aurora) an empire. They are human beings who get to make their own choices about who they want to be.

I describe my version of “Sleeping Beauty” as a cautionary tale in the marketing blurb, but it seems to me we should view every version of the story in that fashion. Both the heroes and the villains of the various versions of “Sleeping Beauty” forget she is a person. That’s why she slumbers.

It’s time for all of us to wake up.

“Sleeping Beauty” is available for your Kindle here.

“Sleeping Beauty” to be Free and How You Can Help

“Sleeping Beauty” has been doing well of late. A spike in sales a few weeks ago made me happy. I was even happier when it received three four-star reviews. (Read them here.)

My creepy reimagining of the classic fairytale seems to be gaining a little momentum, which makes now a perfect time to take advantage of KDP Select’s free program. Every 90 days a book is enrolled in KDP Select (meaning the eBook version is available exclusively through Amazon), the publisher can choose five days to offer it for free. Amazon helps promote this event.

Next week, I’ll be giving this a try. Tuesday, September 18 and Wednesday, September 19, you can download “Sleeping Beauty” for free. That’s right. I’m offering the whole story for nothing for those two days.

There are several advantages. The idea is to bump up the number of downloads the story gets, thereby moving it up the Amazon sales charts and improving its visibility in Amazon searches. Whenever a customer buys a book (or even examines one on the online retailer’s site), Amazon makes suggestions based on the customer’s likes and other purchases in the same category. The more sales a book garners — at any price, including free — the more likely it is to show up as one of those suggestions. That, in turn, may cause more people to buy.

So, here’s how you can help. First and foremost, get yourself a copy of “Sleeping Beauty.” Buy it now (it’s only 99 cents) or wait for the free days next week. After you’ve read it (it’s a short story, so it won’t take you very long), do three things:

Click the “like” button on its page in the Amazon store. The more likes it has the more it will show up and the better it will look to potential customers.
Tag it. At the bottom of the page in the Amazon store, you can assign tags to “Sleeping Beauty.” Click as many as you think apply. This sort of thing helps Amazon choose what other books to list it with in the suggestions section.
Write a review. Written reviews only have to be 20 words. You don’t have to be a book critic. Just write a few words about why you thought it was good. Customer reviews are the lifeblood of indie authors. The more positive reviews a book has, the more likely it is someone will give it a try.

So here’s your big chance to read a story with characters one reader writes are “well described and sympathetic, each in their own way.” Another reviewer writes, “This isn’t simply a transplant of a fairy tale plot into a modern setting, this is a total reworking of the classic story that makes sense and works in our modern world.” And a third calls it, “Unnerving, haunting and well worth the purchase price.”

It’s free next week or only a buck if you can’t wait. Can you beat a deal like that?

I’m hoping not.

Free Samples on Goodreads

A friend of mine is often quoted as saying, “Where’s there’s free, there’s me.”

With that in mind, I thought I’d point out I’ve got a lot of free stuff available for readers over on my Goodreads page.

You can read the first three chapters of State of Grace, my debut novel, by clicking here. The book opens with an action-packed chase and a murder to get your blood rushing and introduce you to its style before setting up the major conflicts in the next two chapters. Check it out to see if State of Grace’s blend of James Bond-style action and Tolkienesque fantasy is your kind of read.

I’ve also put the first four scenes of my short story, “Sleeping Beauty,” up. You can get a taste of my creepy reimagining of the classic fairytale. Meet Carl, the awkward teenager in love with Beth, who’s been in a coma for two years; her deranged mother Marie, desperate to have her back; and her father Rex, who used magic to put her to sleep for his own twisted reasons. Click here to check it out.

If you want a whole story for free, I’ve got that too. “The Darkline Protocol” features Wolf Dasher, hero of State of Grace, in a short adventure set a few years before the novel. It’s available on Goodreads here. If you prefer having the story on your e-reader, you can download it free in all formats from Smashwords here.

So check ‘em out! There’s nothing like a free sample to see if something is right for you. And let me know what you think. Leave a comment, telling me how you like the material and if it makes you want more.

A Destiny of Her Own: Sleeping Beauty’s Lack of Choice

I’ve been fascinated with the story of Sleeping Beauty for some time. As a child, the moment when Malificent changes into a dragon in the Disney version was one of the most terrifying and exciting for my young mind. The big, black dragon scared the hell out of me, but I couldn’t look away.

Years later, I discovered Anne Rice’s erotic novel, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, which tells a very naughty version of the story after Prince Charming awakens the ensorcelled heroine. Rice’s novel contains a fair degree of S&M and isn’t anything like the Disney movie.

And yet, both images of the classic fairytale stay with me. In the first, a jealous witch casts a spell on the princess, taking her away from her family. In the second, a brutish prince also takes her from her family and subjects her to sexual slavery.

It kind of sucks to be Sleeping Beauty.

Both versions of the tale, which have little in common for the most part, share one very important trait. Sleeping Beauty is some sort of object that is manipulated by others. This woman isn’t allowed her own destiny or her own decisions. Someone else decides it for her and for their own ends. Malificent doesn’t ask Aurora if she wants to run away or hurt her family in some way of her own choosing. She causes her to prick her finger on a spindle.

Rice’s Prince doesn’t ask the woman he’s rescued if she wants to marry him or what she might like to do now that she is free. He takes her away and forces her to submit to kink.

“Sleeping Beauty” available now through Amazon.com’s Kindle Direct Publishing!

All this was working on my mind when I first sat down to write a new version of the story for a contest several years ago. I wanted to bring the fairytale into the 21st Century. It didn’t seem too likely a modern teenager would prick her finger on a spindle. It also seemed odd to have an adult cast a spell on her out of jealousy.

But if that adult instead had a misguided sense of trying to protect her, well, that might be something.

That adult is her father in my version of the tale. Rex is obsessed with the idea of his 14-year-old daughter Beth having sex. Or rather, he’s convinced he has to do something or she will. Thus, he goes in search of the spell that can “preserve” her and meets a witch with a potion that will drop Beth into a coma.

Once again, Sleeping Beauty’s destiny is not her own. Someone else, this time her father, decides she belongs to him . . . until such time as someone marries her, when Rex will presumably believe she belongs to her husband. He tells his wife Marie, when explaining what he’s done, that Beth will “be chaste and pristine until the perfect man comes along to marry her.” When Marie wants to know how she’ll meet the perfect man, Rex replies, “When she is old enough, I’ll choose someone.”

The implication is pretty clear. Rex believes he owns Beth.

In my version of the story, Rex is obviously the villain. I leave no doubt this isn’t how we should treat our daughters, or women at all. He’s not much nicer to his wife.

It’s important to note, though, that Rex believes he is the hero of the story. He thinks he is saving Beth, protecting her from dangers she doesn’t understand or perceive. In his mind, he’s just being a good father.

No matter which version of Sleeping Beauty we’re looking at, there’s a lot of context for discussion of our treatment of women as a society. Somewhere along the way, Sleeping Beauty’s essential personhood gets lost. She becomes just an object for heroes and villains to manipulate. That’s not right. Someone needs to ask her her opinion.

Next week, I’ll discuss another character in the story — Marie. She too objectifies Beth, although in a very different way. I’ll look at that and how it’s wrong too.

“Sleeping Beauty” is available from Amazon.com for your Kindle here.