David Mark Brown's Blog, page 2

Can a Kickstarter Create Something Entirely New?

As so often is the case these days, a Kickstarter campaign marks the pivot point from tinkering in the garage to hitting the streets. This time, the project is Fiction Vortex, an experimental effort to allow digital, written storytelling to discover its native format.

Ebooks were a first step. What next?

I don’t believe electronic books will be the final say. Ebooks were the natural first step. Where to next? Fiction Vortex is betting on some form of serial, episodic, collaborative content. Here is why.

Collaborative

The demand to keep a reader’s attention is no longer tenable by a single author. No matter how prolific the writer, readers will move on and forget about all but their very favorite authors unless that author is able to keep pushing new content into the market month after month after month. This takes a team. This takes collaboration.

Serial

Discovering new storyworlds and new authors takes time and energy. Good characters demand investment. Curation is the nightmare of the 21st century when it comes to written content. When (most) readers find a story and characters they love, they want to be able to keep going back to the well. For the last decades, this has meant creating content in “series.” Those days are now transitioning to creating content in “serial.” But I’m not a fan of serial just for serial sake (taking a finished product and chopping it into pieces for practical reasons beyond the story). That leads us to my third bullet point.

Episodic

Collaborative serial fiction allows a group of authors to publish new stories on a weekly basis–never allowing readers to forget about the story. While that system could work in and of itself, I think episodic story structure will be critical to success. Television is a good source to look for proof. The weekly episode has become ubiquitous. Can such a model work with the written word? I believe so. This means readers could enjoy a new, complete story from beloved storyworlds every week.

What exactly does such a combination look like?

What length will prove viable for these episodes? I’m not sure. I prefer to work with around 10,000 words (40 pages). Most readers will read a story of that length in 30 to 50 minutes. Seems about right for digital reading attention spans these days. And if a reader chooses to binge read several episodes, there is nothing to prevent them from doing so. A long commute to work? Just put the kids to bed? Lunch break? Our lives are divided into 30-50 minute chunks.

Will readers frequent fiction platforms not named Amazon? Because selling such serial fiction would never work on the established retailers. There are many questions left to answer. I’d love to hear from you. What questions pop into your mind?

Fiction Vortex is pushing off into these waters with a kickstarter that we hope will help us gather a community of folk who want to answer these questions and enjoy some great collaborative, serial, episodic fiction along the way.

 

Fiction Vortex to Commence Sucking

If there is one thing the movie Spaceballs has taught us (and there probably isn’t), it is when you need to suck the atmosphere out of a planet sphere, a space-station-sized Megamaid with a vacuum cleaner is the way to go.

But when it comes to getting sucked into exciting new sci-fi and fantasy storyworlds, Viction Fortex is your best bet. (Like how I made that connection? Thought I couldn’t do it, didn’t you?)

(*Jump to Fiction Vortex and sign up for FREE EBOOK EPISODES.)

What’s Fiction Vortex?

Myself and six other writing buddies have been hard at work for the last nine months developing what has evolved into Fiction Vortex–a digital, serial fiction platform designed to harness on-going collaborative efforts from multiple authors in order to generate weekly episodes of fiction for readers.

The brainchild of a ragtag, vanguard of indie authors, Fiction Vortex emphasizes imagination and fun. Tired of industry standards, we’ve decided to no longer take crap, so you don’t have to read it. We are creating collaborative universes doled out via weekly episodes–each a jam-packed story boiled down to its juiciest goodness. Multiple authors and multiple serials means constant content pouring from lavish, continually-evolving story worlds.

These collaborative storyworlds are known as serial boxes. Multiple serials exist within each serial box, and the only rules for each serial is that they take place within the shared storyworld of the serial box and that they be predominately science fiction or fantasy in genre. The only rule for each serial box is that it publish a new episode (from one of its serials) at least once a week!

Now envision multiple serial boxes each publishing one or more episodes a week. That’s the power of the vortex to suck you in. Our initial boxes are the Hiberverse and Schism 8, but we’ll be launching more throughout 2016 based on reader feedback.

How can I buy FV episodes?

Fiction Vortex will open with the ability for readers to buy each individual episode ala cart for $1. (The first episode of each serial is free.) Soon, we plan on creating a subscription option that will allow readers to subscribe for an entire serial, and most serials will run around 10 episodes. That will give the reader the ability to read the first episode for free, decide they like it and subscribe to the rest for a discount of around 50% when compared to the $1 an episode price tag.

What do I do now?

The best thing to do now is jump over to www.FictionVortex.com, sign up for a free account, and start reading the free episodes available in our catalog. Make sure you click the option to receive email updates if you want to be kept in the loop with our upcoming specials, geeky swag offers, etc. (Word on the street is that we’ll be offering hand-crafted, etched, steel “Commander Jaeger Survival Swords during a promo.)

As always, I love to hear from you guys. Let me know what you think. Is serial fiction the wave of the future, or something that should die with Dickens? Are genre subscription platforms piquing your interest? Will you give Fiction Vortex a try?

Publishing Disruption has Only Just Begun

Posted in eBook revolution

For those of you who haven’t heard, ebook sales leveled off during 2014. (Hear the collective sigh of relief over New York.) Some industry insiders see this as the end of an electronic fad. (http://www.idealog.com/blog/the-publishing-business-as-we-have-known-it-is-not-going-away-anytime-soon/) Others see it as the eye of the storm. (http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2015/how-to-survive-the-death-of-the-book/)

As a full time author and entrepreneur, I think storytelling will inevitably rediscover its natural, digital form. This form will look nothing like the two-year long process the publishing industry clings to today. Honestly, I don’t believe written storytelling in five years will closely resemble the ebook of today either. (And I’m currently making my living off of such packets of information.)

For my part, I tend to agree with Gareth Cuddy (http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2015/publishings-digital-disruption-hasnt-even-started/) when he says the true disruption hasn’t yet begun.

Fiction Vortex (http://www.fictionvortex.com) is my prediction on how that disruption will take place.

The brainchild of a ragtag, vanguard of indie authors (me included), Fiction Vortex emphasizes imagination and fun. Tired of industry standards, we’ve decided to no longer take crap, so readers don’t have to read it.

We’re creating serial fiction in collaborative story worlds called “serial boxes” (like sandboxes but for serial fiction. Eh? Eh?) These serial boxes each contain multiple serials that enable authors to push out weekly episodes through the Fiction Vortex platform. With every serial box creating at least one episode a week, readers will have no shortage of content taking place within story worlds they already know and love.

Will it work? The next 12 months will tell. If we can prove the model, the only ceiling is the number of digital readers willing to find their content somewhere other than Amazon.

Antiheroes and the Reefer Ranger

Posted in Sustainable Storytelling

I’ve had several people ask me about the Reefer Ranger. More specifically, why is he a racist, self-righteous SOB? On that note, I’d like to ask all of you kind readers a similar question, but just a bit more generalized.

Can an antihero be a self-righteous, racist SOB?

Of course, the answer is yes. It is easy to fall in love with more reasonable and cuddly antiheros. You know the types. The Dukes of Hazzard and Malcolm Reynolds. But let’s face it. Those guys are barely antiheroes at all. In the world we live in today, they’re borderline, straight up heroic. An antihero, by definition, is supposed to be:

a main character in a story who lacks conventional heroic qualities such as idealism, courage, and morality.

So let’s take a closer look at the Reefer Ranger as a black hat, antihero. He has courage a plenty. And boy howdy does he have idealism. But his ideals and his morality would be recognized by the vast majority of us (including me) as prejudice, to say the least. He is hypocritical, self-righteous and downright cruel at times. I can hear the violent protests from my home state of Texas as I type. “But he’s a Texas Ranger, for criminy sakes!”

Yes, J.T. McCutchen is a Texas Ranger. It is not widely known, but a good number of Texas Rangers around the turn of the century were horribly violent and racist individuals. Don’t get me wrong. Many of them were indeed heroic figures. But many of them were anything but. Historical accounts reveal examples of Rangers teaming up with wealthy Anglo landowners to dispossess Tejano and Mexican neighbors of their property. After extended periods of violence along the Mexico-Texas border, some Rangers began to see Mexicans as the problem. They dispatched them with extreme prejudice.

Plenty of fiction has been written around the heroic Texas Rangers. But very little has focused on the ones that routinely crossed the line by summarily deporting and killing Mexicans. I chose to latter. The Reefer Ranger is a racist, Mexican-hating, reefer-smoking, reefer-hating, self-righteous, hypocritical officer of the law.

Why isn’t the Reefer Ranger a straight up bad guy, if he is such a jerk?

Another good question. This requires us to inspect the flip side of the coin. We know why the Reefer Ranger isn’t a hero. Why isn’t he a bad guy? The simplest answer is that he still saves the day…sometimes. While misguided, his ideals are unfailing. His morals are ironclad. He does what it takes to protect and preserve his version of Texas (and later on the country of Texicas). He proves he is cable of growth. He learns and changes. He accepts the truth that not all Mexicans are wicked. While he lacks compassion in many areas. He doesn’t lack dedication to justice. A better modern day comparison for J.T. McCutchen would be Jack Bauer from television’s 24. The guy eventually sells off his soul piecemeal until there is nothing left. But Jack gets crap done. So does J.T. They give up any and all thought of a normal life for the greater good.

The problem with characters like this? Everyone around them dies. When they are wrong about something, people die for the wrong reasons. Sometimes people die for no reason at all. But when it comes to the law of averages, antiheroes of this sort are okay with collateral damage. They are cold, calculating SOBs.

While the Reefer Ranger is an extreme example, I think we all know people like this. We all have an element of this sort of cold, calculation in us. When we screw up, our first thought is usually a desire to make it right. We want our overall actions to tip toward the positive. If we destroy a few people along the way, so be it. At least we aren’t all bad, right? But as some of us have discovered, this lifestyle ends with being chased by demons. Every mistake becomes a demon pushing us to do more good in order to tip the scales. So we push faster and harder. As a result we step on others with increasing frequency and the demons start to pile up. It’s a real dilemma. We can feel the Reefer Ranger’s pain. The agony of being driven by our past deeds.

The Reefer Ranger represents a common human reality.

That’s why I’ve written him the way I have. It’s not that I applaud his identity or his choices. But I wrestle with demons too. I do crappy things out of good intentions. Exploring those types of dynamics in fictional characters is what makes stories compelling in the first place. It’s why we read. It’s why I write. Hopefully that answers the question about why I’ve spent so much time focusing on a racist jerk in my writing.

Book Marketing InfoGraphic from DBD

Posted in eBook revolution

Presented by Discount Books Daily

How to Cultivate a Quality Email List

Posted in eBook revolutionUncategorized

Despite some folk predicting the demise of email, the email list is growing in importance (especially for indie authors). I’ve blogged before about Amazon’s changes over the last year and a half that have been gradually throttling indies. The price gap between tradition and indie has closed. Free as a temporary promotional tool (pulse) has lost its potency. And now Kindle Unlimited is choking indies further.

All of this should have succeeded in convincing the indie author of the importance of owning direct access to readers. It should be evident that Amazon blitzes and Bookbub bursts are no longer the panacea many made them out to be (the horror).

I’ll be the first to admit my idiocy. I’ve blogged steadily for eight years, and I’ve only collected emails via my blog for the last three. I resisted forever, mainly out of laziness and lack of direction. The focus of my blog has meandered from Industrial Hemp, to humor, to wine, science fiction, the Simpsons and now mostly subjects of writing, publishing and geek culture. Until just recently, my email list languished around 500 subscribers.

Over the last several months, I’ve retooled my indie author business to grow sales via my own website. I still sell stuff on Amazon and Kobo, and I hope I always will. But I no longer drive traffic there. If the connection to my stories is made by me, I want the buy to happen directly. If Amazon and Kobo bring me new readers, then they can have a cut. If they do nothing to get the business, then why should I pay them 30% royalty?

Due to this new focus on my personal website, I’ve put renewed efforts into the old email list. In the last few weeks, I’ve grown it to 1,500. I hope to forge it into a *solid 2,500 by the end of the year. (*40% open rate and 10% action rate.) Here is how I’ve done it so far.

Cultivating an eMail List Requires Gathering Emails First

There are lots of ways to grab emails, some less ethical than others. For clarity, I’m talking about growing a list of people that actually care about what I’m doing and creating. An email list that provides somewhere in the neighborhood of a 30% to 40% open rate and a 5% to 10% response rate (clicking through links, downloading stuff, etc.) is tough to cultivate and maintain. But that’s what I’m talking about–quality emails from real fans. The good news is that new platforms are rolling out all the time. Out of my two current favorites, one has been around for a couple years and two others are brand new.

NoiseTrade

NoiseTrade has been around for indie musicians for what seems like forever. NoiseTrade for books started (I believe) in 2013. Although I monitored NT for over a year, I didn’t create my first products on the site until this past December. At first, all I did was throw up a couple of shorts and a novel from my Lost DMB Files series. No promotion. No nothing. Just created the product pages, uploaded and published. That effort got me 12 emails over a few months.

A few weeks ago, I began communicating with NoiseTrade about paying for a feature spot in their email newsletter and on their site. They are a little selective about who is eligible, but they must not be too strict, because they seem fine with me. The newsletter spot went out on May 8th. After 48 hours, I’ve collected 855 emails. Granted, these emails are brand new, and I have no data on how many of them will prove to be genuine fans. All I know so far is that they claim to be consumers of digital content and that they were willing to gamble an email address in exchange for my free DMB Primar Library.

I’ll report back in a few months once I have a better idea of how many of these folks will convert into action taking fans.

BitTorrent Bundles

Pirates ho! I can hear the concern oozing out of some of you before you even voice it. But BitTorrent has grown up. For those of you who don’t know anything about BitTorrent, congratulations, you’ve probably never pirated content. But back in the day, BitTorrent massively disrupted several content industries by providing a revolutionary manner of sharing digital stuff via the webs. The fact that some people used this new capability unscrupulously can hardly be blamed on BitTorrent!

Anywho, now a days, BitTorrent still maintains a massive gathering of faithful techies and geeks despite going more legit. BitTorrent Bundles appears to be their latest effort to convince Indie artists that we can all share the internet in harmonious beauty. Now Indies can create bundles of content (video, audio, textual, etc.) that fans can download directly from the artist in exchange for an email or some money.

I created a couple of bundles on a Saturday a few weeks ago to see what would happen. Initially, the traction seemed pretty good. As one of only a dozen recent bundles in the “Books” genre, I received 69 downloads, but only 5 emails. The action quickly trailed out to almost nothing after the genre tabs disappeared. As of May 8th, it hasn’t reappeared. Without them, my discoverability is next to nothing. There are still keywords people can use to search with, but not very many people seem to use them.

BitTorrent does have a highlight slider at the top of the page, but I’m not sure if it is open for paid placements. I haven’t pursued it yet, but would certainly be open to paying for a feature if it becomes available. As far as a platform for gathering new emails, it seems to currently be limited to 1-5 new emails a month at this point. Continuing to post new bundles every month or so could keep the emails trickling in.

Discount Books Daily

Not all book email list services are created equal. While BookBub drives traffic only to retailers such as Amazon, B&N and Kobo, some services are willing to drive traffic directly to the author’s website. I recently ran a promo with Discount Books Daily that did just that. The result was 72 new emails for a $75 weekend spotlight. I thought it was a satisfying result that I plan on repeating at some point in the future. While DBD is still much smaller than BookBub, I think they understand several key insights that BookBub seems less attuned to.

Next Comes the Cultivation

My next steps will be to continue following up these new people with a combination of personal messages and insider content in order to win them over as true fans. That will be one of my next posts! If any of you have platforms you’ve recently used to grow your email list, please share!

Best Email

Schism 8, Ep 4: The Green Ones

Posted in podcast

In today’s episode, I continue to narrate the first episode of The Green Ones. Boom shizzle.

Calli has attempted to kill Centavo. Unfortunately, this plan was ill conceived, and his telekinetic abilities easily thwarted her. Now, she and Neca have undergone a crazy plan to help save Olin. One mad step at a time, Calli will do whatever she has to in order to give her brother a fighting chance. At the moment, that means fetching a special plant from her mother’s garden and taking it to a connection of Centavo’s…inside Immortal City… dumdumdum.

Thanks for listening, and enjoy the show.

Schism 8, Ep 3: The Green Ones

Posted in podcast

On this episode of Schism 8, I narrate scenes 4, 5, and 6 of the first episode of The Green Ones. Does it get any better?

Calli finally meets the infamous gangster and kingpin, Centavo. Is he all he is made out to be? In fact he is much more. Calli discovers connections between the old man and herself that she could have never dreamed. Will those connections help her efforts to save her brother or hinder them? Tune in to find out as the exciting story continues!

And above all, enjoy the show!

Schism 8, Ep 2: The Green Ones

Posted in podcast

On this episode of Schism 8, I narrate scenes two and three of the first episode of The Green Ones. Good stuff.

Calli and Olin have survived the attack on the perimeter defenses, but Olin is slipping into a coma (his second in the past two years). Calli has been told that if her brothers suffers a second coma he won’t wake up. Neca, a chadzitzin psych-fighter stumbles onto the scene and offers to help them escape detection by authorities. Now they have to find a place to lie low while Calli tries to brew up more medicine for her brother. But will Calli be willing to risk the repercussions for seeking shelter with one of the most nefarious criminals of Worker City?

Find out, as the exciting story continues! And above all, enjoy the show!

Schism 8, Ep 1: The Green Ones

Posted in podcast

In this episode, I read the opening scene of the first episode of The Green Ones. Buckle your belts, ladies and gents.

For the telekinetic youth of New Teotihuacan’s Worker City there are two choices: an enslaved life or a free death. By sixteen, everyone must choose.

On an earth rampant with telekinesis, Calli Bluehair’s only hope of escaping a violent death in the self indulgent underground of New Teotihuacan’s Worker City is the government run Masa academy. Choosing to ignore the rumors that the Academy is an option worse than death, Calli determines to claw her and her little brother’s way onto the registry, no matter the personal cost.

Brown’s page-turning, dystopian adventure revolves around a heroine who picks up where the Hunger Game’s Katniss leaves off. His vivid rendering of telekinesis births a complex, mysterious and provocative world that reveals itself to the reader in a kaleidoscope of detail the longer one chooses to stare through his fractured lens.

The rest of Episode 1 still to come via podcast. Or you can download Episode 1 for FREE using the button below (includes PDF, MOBI and EPUB formats).

Free – Download Ep 1 (ZIP) Checkout


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