David VanDyke's Blog, page 9

No Transaction Without Rotation

So I’ve been experimenting with ads on some various places, trying to – you guessed it – increase exposure and sell books. I’ve used Blogads.com, which is a pretty good consolidated site where you can purchase ads on dozens of different blogs. I’ve also placed ads on authormarketingclub.com (not worth it) and ereadernewstoday (a bit expensive, but more effective).

The Blogads and Ereadernewstoday ads have something in common – the engines that run the advertising allow you to load several different versions of your ad that will rotate into your space. You can also link each ad differently e.g., to different books. But what does this matter, you may say? Doesn’t it make more sense to just hammer away at the consumer with the same thing in hopes of hardselling him into buying?

You can see where this is going. Consumers have to be wooed, not browbeaten. Unless you are in an automobile showroom, the hard-sell is just not going to work, triply so on the web where relief is just a click away. More to the point, while new site visitors might have the same average response to your ad, repeat visitors will quickly tune it out after they have seen it a few times. If they made that split-second decision not to click it once, they will probably make the same decision again…unless you have something different there this time.

Different things catch different peoples’ eyes. Let’s say you are selling a book series – oh, hey, that’s what I am doing. Let’s say I am selling my book series Plague Wars. I have several covers, with different colors and a related theme but each is a bit different. One has a hunky undershirty gunman that I hope will attract a broad spectrum of genders and types of readers. Another has a modern warrior more suited for those interested in modern military, and a third had a space marine and a planet scene for the sci-fi types. Same series, but since it progresses from Earth eventually to space, it makes sense.

In all cases, I link not to the particular book – I don’t want to get people to buy and be upset by getting a later book in the series – I link to the series page on my web site, which then has links to buy. Then hopefully they will 1) see it’s a series, 2) divine that they should probably read book 1 first (always on sale at lower price from the rest), and 3) buy from that page where I get a few percent extra profit because of Amazon Associates (if they buy from Amazon).

If you have several books that are not a series, it’s just as easy, because each “creative” or “version” of your ad is in essence advertising a different related product. You should get some synergy sales if they like you as an author, but since each book is a standalone work, you don’t have to strategize on how to make sure they go for the first book in the series – just take them to a buy page, either where you have an associates link or straight to the purchase site (Amazon, Kobo, B&N, etc.)

So, you ask (I know you ask), how do you know this, Dave? Are you just spouting conventional wisdom?

Actually, no. Being an intuitive and impatient person, I usually want to try something out before I read the instructions. In this case I was able to do “before-and-after” comparisons. So first I loaded one ad version for the first book in the series, The Eden Plague. Once I had a good baseline for click-thru rates and cost per click, and incidentally now I had the time and motivation to generate more ad versions using PowerPoint and Paint, I then loaded two more version, making three in rotation. This is what the ad sites recommended in their FAQ, but hey, baby steps, right?

Roughly speaking, my click-thru rate doubled, and my sales increased a measurable amount, varying between 10 and 50% per day. All it took was some time and effort to create and load the versions, there was no difference in cost. So clearly, this strategy is more effective than just running the same ad day after day.

Filed under: Writing Blog Tagged: advertising, author, writing, writing science fiction

Up on Holly’s Bargain Ebooks

http://hollysbargainebooks.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/1303/#comment-466

…which is a great site you can find, well, exactly what it says – bargain ebooks. Thanks, Holly!

Filed under: Writing Blog

Shock and Awe…

…is one of the most overused of cliches but it gives a sense of how I am feeling right now.

Many times in life we don’t know why things happen – sometimes there is no specific reason, it’s just the way the universe is made that randomness abounds. Other times we can trace specific causes. I am wondering right now what the cause of my shock and awe is, because I’d sure like to replicate it.

What am I talking about? Well, yesterday I sold over 160 books. I’d never sold more than twenty before in a day, usually about 5-10. So where did this huge spike come from? I don’t know for sure. Here are some possible culprits, all of which arrived on 9 January 2013:

http://ereadernewstoday.com/bargain-and-free-books-for-1-9-13/6724013/

This is a bargain book post for Eden Plague on EReaderNewsToday, a popular site for free and bargain books.

http://noorosha.com/interview-with-david-van-dyke-author-editor-and-trained-killing-machine/

This is an author interview I did that was put up on the same day.

I also started a round of ads on small blogs on the very same day. My wife continued twitter and facebook marketing and said the 9th was a very active day.

And my friend and author BV Larson said he had a book, Technomancer,

Technomancer (Unspeakable Things: Book One)

If you want to be happy for the rest of your life…

…marry a geek girl. At least, if you’re an author trying to make it in the Indie world. Over the last month my wife Beth has done a fabulous job as she has taken on my publicist/marketer role. I’m probably going to miss some of the things she’s done but here are a few:

Twitter – she’s built up a Twitter following that had an obvious and measurable impact on sales. The impact did decline for a bit but has now started to pick back up as (I presume) her net widens.

Facebook – she has updated and kept my author page current, and frequently posts as “me” to free me up to write and do other things.

Web site – she has created a new and better web site for me at http://www.davidvandykeauthor.com, and has linked everything so it all works, as well as getting Amazon Associates to work so we make a little extra for sales through our own site.

CreateSpace – she hasn’t quite cracked the code on this but is determined to learn how to load my books on CreateSpace POD so we can have hardcopies. Physical books can be useful for a lot of things – giving to people that have not gone digital, giveaways, book signings, promos in local brick-and-mortar shops, and just to feel like it’s all real.

Other booksellers than Amazon – we are branching beyond KDP as the books come off Select, and she has loaded onto Bestindiebookstore and Kobo so far, and will be working on B&N and Smashwords next I believe. Losing Select will lose the free promo (which I think has become counterproductive) and the borrows (which amount to about 7% of sales) but I think in the long run will reach far more audience.

Other web sites that do author profiles and reviews the names of which I can’t even remember.

All of that in a month or perhaps five weeks. She’s a keeper!

But what effect, you ask, has all that had on anything? Because as an author that wants to make living doing this, at the end of the day it’s about sales. So you be the judge, here’s my sales stats over the past months (in book numbers, not dollars):

Aug 81

Sept 126

Oct 151

Nov 129

Dec 254

Just by those numbers you can imagine my December elation especially after the drop in November. So Bravo for Beth, she’s done a fabulous job and if ever there was a testimony to the old saw “behind every successful man there’s a woman” then this is it.

But what about writing, Dave? I knew you were going to ask that, so here it is: I’ve got 10K words done for my novella “First Conquest” that will be coming out in March if all goes as planned, as a joint project with the mil-sci-fi authors BV Larson and Vaughn Heppner. I am not sure what the title of the book will be: a similar thing they did before was called “Five by Five,” perhaps this will be “Three by Three,” or perhaps it will be “Five by Five #2″ if Larson gets another couple of guys on board. The “Five by Five” has a military cachet to it, as it’s radio code for “loud and clear” as in “I read you five by five.” The theme for the book will be “Planetary Invasion” and my novella will be set around one hundred years in the Plague Wars future, as humans make their first conquest of a Meme star system. Those who have read Plague Wars will enjoy seeing some familiar characters including Jill and Spooky, and some new ones that are nevertheless related to the old – children of some other characters, for example.

As soon as I finish drafting the novella, I will begin work on the fifth Plague Wars book, though I am beginning to regret that series title since the plagues have more or less been dealt with and we have moved into the realm of the military. This fifth book is tentatively titled “Comes The Destroyer” and will cover the nine years since the end of Orion Plague until the Meme invade the solar system. I am not sure whether there will be a sixth book or if I will just use the novella to launch a new series of pure mil-sci-fi space opera kind of books.

So Happy New Year everyone, let’s hope and pray that all good wishes will come true.

-David VanDyke http://www.davidvandykeauthor.com

Filed under: Writing Blog

Wary Christmas

So I managed to get my fourth novel, The Orion Plague,

http://www.amazon.com/Orion-Plague-Wars-ebook/dp/B00AS5S9O6/

out on time for Christmas, which makes me pretty happy. Thanks to my lovely and talented wife Beth and my erudite and talented friend author Ryan King who both gave me some great feedback and edits, I think it’s pretty good, relatively error-free and one heck of a good read if you like military sci-fi action.

I also put up some ads as the twitter campaign seems to have saturated, or something. When Beth first started on Twitter we saw a big jump, but now sales have settled down to “normal” for me, though we have seen slow growth and will almost certainly break 200 sales this month, which will be a milestone.

I saw an interesting short post on the KDP author boards the other day, to wit, that you “only need one viral hit to retire,” referring to things like “Fifty Shades.” The poster and a lot of other writers there jumped aboard to agree. The upshot seemed that a lot of these guys are hoping to somehow write a hit and win the lottery and retire.

And it is like winning the lottery. It seldom happens, and many times when it does, if the writer “got lucky” by writing the right thing at the right time, it’s often fraught with risks. Like a rock band whose first album is a sensation, following it up becomes a problem.

The obvious thing to do is to continue the series. Vampire Lestat, Harry Potter, Fifty Shades, Hunger Games, Twilight all come to mind. But then what? Despite heavy marketing, none of the authors of the above series have actually continued their meteoric success beyond those series.

Granted, most authors would love to have even one massive hit like these series represent. But I wonder about sustainability when the success comes too early. How do you top a mega-hit? How do you avoid always being compared to your earlier work?

George Lucas lucked onto a megahit with Star Wars. Now I’m not discounting hard work and vision – he did a lot of hard work and had vision – but his success clearly outran his talent. If he had not started Lucasfilm and ILM, essentially reinvesting his profits wisely, he would have crashed and burned as a director because, frankly, he’s not in the same league with the great ones of modern genre film. He’s no Nolan, no Ridley Scott, no Spielberg. He made the mistake of writing, directing and producing the last three Star Wars prequels, and turned monster megahits into mere hits that are universally savaged by every Star Wars fan over 13 years old. E. Gary Gygax hit it big with Dungeons and Dragons, spawning an enduring name and legacy in the experience of geeks everywhere (myself included) but made the mistake of thinking he was supremely talented instead of just really lucky to have started a whole gaming movement.

Don’t get me wrong; popular is great, and few would turn down that viral megahit. But that’s not what real authors write for. Zenlike, those who strive for the megahit will find themselves ever farther from it, and those who try to imitate and jump on the bandwagon (right now the bandwagon is post-ap, just look at the books, TV shows and movies of the past couple of years) might make a few bucks then find themselves still in the “hobbyist” camp and not knowing why.

As a metaphor, the stock market comes to mind. If books are stocks, each writer has a choice. He or she can purchase (write) only a few, and hope for a monster winner, or purchase (write) many, and build a portfolio of dependable performers – and still have a chance of a monster hit.

Where the metaphor diverges from reality is that books, unlike stocks, can never lose all value. They can stop performing and selling, and not pay off, but they will never destroy your nest egg (unless, of course, you spent more marketing than you gained from selling, but that’s another matter). They also remain on a writer’s list/backlist, always available to be updated or reinvigorated. Most will at least yield a trickle,and if enough books trickle, that’s enough to live on. As long as the writer keeps writing, he/she will keep the list freshening and keep those trickles working for him. And as I said, you never know. That lottery hit is always possible.

This is completely separate from the pure satisfaction of writing – interacting with fans, knowing people actually like and value what you do, the indefinable that makes life worth living. This is what I have been missing for many years – perhaps for all my life – an activity, an avocation, that is really fulfilling. And because my wife and family has supported me in this it has brought us all closer. It has reconnected me with friends I should never have drifted from, it has reconnected me to my brother Andrew who is also an aspiring author, and it has connected me to new friends who also love to write and read. Possibly for the first time in my life, work is not work. That is, writing is effortful but it is not drudgery. It’s what I should have been doing all along, I think. Too bad it took me this long to figure it out, but thank God I did not wait any longer.

 

 

http://www.davidvandykeauthor.com/

Filed under: Writing Blog

Twitter blows my mind (and my sales)

After a rather disappointing three-day promo over the Thanksgiving weekend I was feeling a bit down. I had just released The Reaper Plague, my third novel in the Plague Wars series (see earlier posts) and done the promo to hopfully publicize this. I’d also been told that Amazon does some promotion of just-released books in the 30-90 day range, so I was hoping for some synergy. What did I get? More or less nada. Hardly a bump. Not even that many downloads compared to some I’ve done in the past, despite plastering the free book sites with notices.

But then an interesting thing happened. My wonderful wife Beth discovered Twitter. She’s already my marketer on a very steep learning curve – she just took it all on in earnest about a month ago, before that I was doing everything myself. Now she is building me a new website, she set up an author facebook page, and she is doing most of the communication with web sites for the free ads and so on. But I digress.

I suggested she try out Twitter since some indie authors swear by it. Couldn’t hurt, right? Well, I can’t give you definitive proof but anecdotally it has been a real boost. I went from selling around a handful of books a day to over ten. Depending on what period we are sampling, this represents a 2-4-fold increase in sales for me. I was selling in the 120-150 range per month; if sales keep up as they have in the past 9 days, I will sell over 300 this month, all due to her efforts. Wonderful news and a really good feeling for a new author.

The interesting question will be of course whether this is a fluke and will burn itself out, or it will plateau, or will it grow? One surefire way for it to fail is to stop writing, so that’s out! I’m over 45K with my fourth book, The Orion Plague, and it will be released on or before Christmas. Right now I’m averaging about a ratio of about 7/3/2 from the first book on, which means that roughly for every 7 book 1 sold, I sell 3 of book 2 and 2 of book 3. Again, this is data from a very small sample but seems in line with what others have said about series – not everyone goes on to finish a series but it’s always better if they next books are available now so the reader doesn’t have time to forget about it.

Once I get done with the Orion Plague, I will be working on my novella for the Planetary Invasion anthology with B.V. Larson and Vaughn Heppner. I’m stoked about that. For those of you who have ready the Plague Wars series, it will be set some years in the future, and will tell the story of the first invasion of an alien Meme world by humans as we counterattack. You will see some of the same characters, as the Eden Plague has provided long lifespans. I hope this will also provide a linkback effect so that those who read the novella first will be interested in the series.

Bottom line, my wife and I may remember the beginning of December 2012 as a turning point in this author thing, or maybe it will just be another hill before a valley. I’ll keep you posted.

http://www.amazon.com/David-VanDyke/e/B008EZHPC4/

Filed under: Writing Blog

The New Phone Book’s Here! The New Phone Book’s Here!

For those of you who don’t get the reference, google “The Jerk,” Steve Martin’s first movie.

But it concisely expresses my mood as I just published my third novel, The Reaper Plague.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Reaper-Plague-Wars-ebook/dp/B00A94D9IC/

It’s the third book in my mil-sci-fi series.

I’d been struggling with it until my “pilgrimage” (see the post before this one) but refreshed and re-energized and unblocked, I completed the second half of the draft in something like two more weeks, published it in almost exactly four. For those of you who don’t write, those two weeks are a necessary delay for some of my good kind friends to beta-read and give feedback, for my wife to go through and proofread, and for me to do the same.

Plus, it gives me time to cogitate, think about it, fill in holes, and in this case, even come up with another whole chapter suggested by Sharon the Kentucky horse-rancher. http://www.stallionstation.com/kaleidoscopefarm

She’s one of my beta-readers. Who’d a thunk a spry septuagenarian equestrian would like science fiction?

Bottom line, those two weeks made it a lot better book. In the meantime I have been working on the next book, the Orion Plague, which may or may not be the last book in the series. It all depends on how it shakes out. On the one hand I’d like to cap this one off, take a breather and work on something else. On the other hand, there is definitely more material to be written with these characters and this setting.

I wonder what the best strategy is, from a writing standpoint and also from a marketing standpoint: write more than one series one book at a time in rotation, or write one series entire, then the next, etc. Either way I am averaging about a book every two to three months, four to six books a year, when a “book” is defined as about 80K words. I’ve averaged just under 40K words per month, even with almost a month of blockage prior to my pilgrimage. So even if I think I will keep going with Plague Wars, I think I will take a shot at starting another series, or possibly a standalone book, after book 4. Then I can pick the series back up if I feel like it.

Speaking of Plague Wars, I’m tremendously excited about an opportunity my amazingly kind and generous friend Brian (B.V.) Larson (http://bvlarson.com/)  and Vaughn Heppner (http://www.vaughnheppner.com/)  are extending me. These are a couple of great midlist authors who I have known most of my life. They both are professionals, making a genuine living writing a variety of sci-fi, fantasy, historical fiction and thrillers. Read my last post for more info on this. But anyway, they are putting together an anthology of novellas similar to this http://www.amazon.com/Five-by-ebook/dp/B009PN4IRO/ wherein several authors publish novellas on a genre theme, and they are including me! Wow!

This is a great opportunity for me and I am and will be forever grateful for the leg up. My sales crept up for a couple of months but this month have been pretty pitiful for no apparent reason – vagaries of the market, who knows? But I really believe my work is as good as any other mid-lister and better than some, if only I can produce, publish, and gain a following. It’s rather like rock bands, I believe – lots of great talent out there, but it takes luck and persistence to break in. Brian and Vaughn are going to give me a shot.

I’ll do my damnedest to hold up my end. I’ll certainly write a good story, but I freely admit that from a marketing standpoint they are doing me a huge favor that I hope I can repay sometime. Linking my names solidly with theirs in a book that is likely to sell thousands of copies is worth a lot. I’d be perfectly okay with just getting the links and exposure, since I haven’t quit my day job and make a comfortable living right now, but hey, a couple extra bucks is always nice. I also hope it will all be synergistic – their fans will discover me, I’ll make some sales, and my few fans (I’ve given away about 6000 copies, sold almost 400 so far) will hopefully give them a few sales.

It’s even more exciting on another level, in that it fills a kind of spiritual place in my heart to reconnect with these guys. Men normally relate to one another on the basis of shared interests, and these guys and I (and a couple other guys in the group that are not authors) played wargames and roleplaying games and swam and biked and launched model rockets and all that teenager stuff for about ten years or so, until I ran off to the military and came to my hometown of Turlock less and less frequently. They didn’t take up writing until after that, in their twenties, so I wasn’t part of that genesis. In fact, I thought about them from time to time but you know how time can run away from you, especially when you have a wife and family and a career that goes around the world (I spent a total of more than twelve years overseas out of 21).

So my excuses are thin, but at least I have a couple. But in this day and age of internet, e-mail and unlimited talk and text, there was nothing but inertia getting in my way and I am sure glad I did. In a lot of ways I didn’t know what I was missing until I got it back. So for the record, even if as an author I never go beyond hobby status, it will still have all been worth it just to reclaim friendship with these awesome men with whom I should never have lost touch.

Getting to do something fun and exciting as well – that’s just a bonus. Some guys hunt together, fish together, play ball together. Writing together is a dream come true. And if they’re reading this right now, I hope they get all choked up and teary, though they’d never admit it.

But you bet I will.

Filed under: Writing Blog

Pilgrimage

I’m near the end of what can only be called a pilgrimage for me. It’s not epic, not as if I were journeying to the Holy Land for grand spiritual insight, but that’s the word I keep coming back to.

This pilgrimage is back to my hometown, the place I grew up, a dusty little place in central California now grown into a small city. Still as dusty, and in some parts as quaint, but the downtown that used to be just where people went to shop is now the province of sidewalk cafes, gift shops and some very nice tatoo parlors. I can only think that the biker crowd has intersected with the modern tendency toward body art to produce enough customers to support three fancy establishments within four blocks.

Although the town was interesting to me, to see how it has grown and changed – for example my old house in what used to be a decent part of town has somehow moved across the metaphorical tracks into a declining neighborhood, while there are spanking new subdivisions on the edge of town – what I really came back for was the people.

The impetus for crossing the country just for this purpose was two indie author friends of mine, Vaughn Heppner and Brian “B.V.” Larson (shameless plug, check out their books). They have inspired me to begin writing this year, and I wanted to reconnect with them in person. I grew up with these guys, playing wargames and D&D and reading lots of the same stuff, but we never talked about being writers. Writers were like distant gods, handing down scripture from on high. To teenagers, authors seemed impossibly old, mature, imaginative in ways we could never be.

When I left town to join the Army (and subsequently made a career in the military) I carried that feeling with me. I knew I was a good technical writer. I ended up in the intelligence field, writing endless reports and analyses, but never fiction. The bar was set so high that I didn’t feel I could reasonably devote so much time to doing something with so little chance of success. It remained a dream no more real to me than winning the lottery or the World Series of Poker.

From our common twenties, basically the mid-eighties on, these other two guys started writing books – science fiction and fantasy mostly. They got the classic treatment – rejection after rejection. Both of them stayed in our hometown and became teachers to pay the bills. Jump forward twenty years – and then came ebooks. They were both nearly despairing of having any type of success in writing fiction, when the gates suddenly opened and anyone could publish. They were in the rather unique position of each having a score or so of novels in the can. They just had to be cleaned up, edited, formatted and put online.

They both went from nothing to pretty good livings within two years. Wow.

Now I had hardly kept in contact with these guys. Our lives had diverged and frankly I had not made the effort. I had other friends, and a wife and family acquired along the way in my military wanderings and had simply left these guys behind. But one day I just decided to google them and see how they were doing and I found their books online and their author websites and I realized how much I would like to reconnect with them.

Now it’s hard to convince people sometimes that you aren’t crawling out of the woodwork to take advantage of someone’s success. But the fact is, I make a good six figures in the defense industry. This had nothing to do with an urge to get rich quick. I think I’ve convinced them and everyone else of that. But now that I have retired from the military I was looking for soemthing else to do with my life. The nest of children is emptying – the last one is in college – and the government bureaucracy is becoming increasingly ossified and frustrating. So the concept of writing, inspired by these guys’ success, seemed like a good one. It was an opportunity to set new goals and challenge myself in a new field that nevertheless I believed I had some talent and skill already. I’d not be starting from zero, I’d just have to learn the writing game.

So after a good part of a year emailing these guys, and writing two and a half novels. I felt like it was time to go see them in person. So I did.

I don’t think I can fully communicate my feelings about this reunion. I had thought we had worked out any awkwardness over email but the results were interesting. In some ways we were thrown back to adolescence as we reminisced. In other ways I could see so clearly how life had changed them and, by reflection, me. I had gone out into the big wide world and many of my attitudes had changed. These guys had not, not so much anyway. There was a solidity in knowing they had never left my hometown, but also a realization that I could never really communicate what I had seen and done. I’d lived in the Far East, in Europe, in the Middle East, and had been deployed to several war zones. I’d lived in different parts of the US – Alaska, the South, the mid-Atlantic states, and the Midwest. How could I relate to these guys anymore? How could I talk to them without either talking down to them, based on my larger experience set, or seem to be sucking up to them, based on our common interest of authorship, as they were so much further ahead of me in that arena? At the root of it, I found myself yearning simply to be part of our little group of teenage friends again, the ones that had played so many games and shared so many experiences. And I realized that I was the one to be suspicious of, from their point of view. I had run off, now I wanted to come back. Maybe they felt I had betrayed them by leaving.

But as we grew comfortable again with each other I realized that they were letting me back in to their lives based on nothing more than distant memories. This was amazing to me, and puts the lie to naturalistic ideas about the pure selfishness of human beings. They were generous with their time and their thoughts and their lives and I realized how much I had missed. I was the ship, they the harbor.

To bring it back to writing, it was a spiritual and emotional renewal that feels like an infusion of enthusiasm for authorship and the potential of this craft to transform me and my life. From being a consumer of content I’ve become a producer and I find this very satisfying. Having these guys as models and examples is invaluable – the simple idea of “if they can do it, so can I” is so powerful. I move forward with a renewed sense of purpose and hope for my future as an author.

Filed under: Uncategorized

The Honeymoon is Over

For me, there’s always a honeymoon period for any new activity I take up.

I’m admittedly a person of passions and impulses – generally governed by sanity, but not always. I’ve taken up many new pursuits in my life – some stick, some don’t. Generally I get very enthusiatic for a few months, then the novelty wanes and either settles down to normal or fades away entirely.

I should have expected writing to be no different.

In the honeymoon period I wrote about 250,000 words in less than 6 months. That’s averaging about 1400 words a day – two and  a half novels, a novella and four short stories while holding down a middling-stressful office job (which saps mental energy). The newness of it all and my own pent-up creativity sustained me for that time.

I ate up all the blog posts and articles e-publishing, I cruised the boards, I posted pieces for critique, I offered to critique anything – I just wanted to do it all day. I would write, then edit, the read, get some coffee and do it all over again. So that was like the opening of a footrace, using up the initial energy.

There came a point, hinted at in earlier posts, when I was stressing myself out. I saw a certain amount of burnout and felt worried that I couldn’t sustain that level of productivity. I just had to accept the fact that I couldn’t, not at almost 50. When I was younger the honeymoon period would probably have been longer but the results would be the same – eventual burnout.

Now it’s time to settle down and log miles beneath my mental sneakers. Part of that is setting some goals – write a certain number of words per day for example. Be more disciplined, keep chipping away at it, eat the elephant one bite at a time, the journey of a thousand miles etc. – pile up the metaphors.

***

So on a completely different topic, I ran across this site recently http://www.teleread.com/ and was impressed at the range and applicability of the different articles and blog entries about e-publishing. High-quality, well-edited, and relevant.

***

Had some folks over last night for dinner and the watch Inception, which is one of my all-time favorites. But it was the first time I watched it really with a writer’s eye, and I was able to recognize its strengths and flaws much more. It did not diminish the enjoyment for me, though frankly it threatened to, but constantly tempting me to think about the movie instead of experience it – but I did spend some time idly wondering how I could write a book like that – and I don’t think it’s possible. Books and film are different media. Still, I also realized before – I’ve discussed it now and then – that I tend to write in scenes, rather like a movie. Open a scene, kind of a mini-story, then close it out. Sometimes my scenes are tightly interspersed because the threads of plot are getting close to each other; sometimes they are long and relatively deep. In all cases my visual imagination tends to control the action – I’m trying to paint a word picture for the reader.

I don’t know necessarily how others do it. I’ve been reading a lot of OS Card recently and frankly his word pictures are not as good as some others. What he excels at is affective conversation and the interplay of ideas – the reader really viscerally feels for the characters, identifies with them. But his actual descriptions of things like the battle room or the actual battles with the Buggers are very sketchy.

I have met military sci-fi readers who really loved Ender’s Game but hated the sequels because “they were so different.” Yes, in one way they were very different - they weren’t about the struggles of a child in a military academy, about his “natural reactions to an unnatural situation.” And because the sequel Card wrote leaped forward to Ender as a grown man three thousand years in the future, readers felt a disconnctedness with the first, brilliant book.

But I also think they identified with Ender himself and his struggles, that they did not even realize how little of the military sci-fi there was in it at all. When I re-read it for perhaps the seventh time recently, AFTER I had started writing books myself, I realized what a lot of those guys missed – Card was setting them up for the Xenocide punchline. The clues were there, but most people miss them the first time through because of the powerful identification they have with Ender. They want Ender, and Humanity, to win! Woohoo, feel good about ourselves. But Card’s entire purpose was to deliver his punchline, that uncontrolled winning, the total destruction of an enemy, is almost as much a tragedy as losing.

For those of you who hate this reasoning, who want clean and satisfying victories, I suggest that you can have those clean and satisfying victories without xenocide, or genocide, or total destruction of your enemy.

For the Western world, World War II is a clear and simple example. We the Allies battered the Axis to its knees. We could have wiped them out with atomic weapons. Instead we turned them into our future allies. We retained the military and moral victories together and also reaped the economic benefits. All we gave up was a cheap self-indulgent sense of satisfaction – and the tragedy of continuing a slaughter of a defeated population.

Card gave Ender – and the reader – the satisfying military victory – then snatched the satisfaction away at the end in favor of a greater moral point. Extending a hand to a fallen enemy can be the greatest victory of all. But I think that’s why many military sci-fi readers end up feeling betrayed by Ender’s Game. I suggest to you it’s simply a case of mistaken identity. Card counterfeited a military sci-fi novel so well that the readers believe that’s what they are reading. But Ender’s game is no more a military novel than Les Miserables or War and Peace are really about the Napoleonic Wars.

It, and the original sequels, are about power and politics, about emotion and redemption and the complexity of family. They meander, sometimes chasing their own tails and bogging down in conversation, sometimes rising to excruciating heights of insight, laying pain so bare that as a reader I had no choice but to weep.

But at the end of the day, as much as I admire Card’s ability and enjoy those moments, I also would like to see, to have, more of the counterfeit, the illusion of Ender’s Game, with more cheap easy satisfying and morally clear victory and less anguish and angst. I admit it. I read for escape. I don’t reach for great literature to relax me. I’ve read it, and it educates me, but most of the time I’d rather read, and write, something…fun.

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Leveling off

So I’ve been on a definite high since the promo and my sales started, but it didn’t help my writing. I started feeling pressure to get my next book out, and that actually caused a drop in production. I couldn’t get in that zone, kept getting distracted by the thoughts of sales, how I should market next, etc. Add that to some stress at work and then I started worrying about getting the next book done “on time.” But I had set my own deadline, and it was up to me to change it.

So after a certain amount of hemming and hawing with myself, and talking with my best friend, confidant and wife Beth (all those are the same person, although she says there are three of her in there), I just reset my own deadline. I told myself I didn’t need to do it fast, just well.

I immediately felt better and wrote more and better.

Combine that with getting some things off my plate at my day job and I am back on track. A bit over 27K done for “Reaper Plague” and I feel very comfortable now. Note to self- stop checking sales more than once a day. It’s just numbers.

On another, better note I got a nice 5-star review on Eden Plague from a new fan, Sharon. Hi Sharon! What surprises me – in a very good way – is that Sharon is well into middle age (I won’t give you the number she gave me out of respect for my elders) but when I was growing in the 70s up it was quite a surprise to see a woman writing science fiction or a girl reading it. In fact I had a huge crush on a girl named Valerie that I met in the sci-fi section of my local library. At 13 she was the first girl I’d ever talked to that was interested in “boy stuff.” I imagine it was even more so when Sharon was a child. And now she’s reading my books alongside the greats. What a pleasant shock to be here as an author, even though I have a long way to go. The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. Bless you ebooks, bless you Amazon for the Kindle.

 In any case since she was my first completely unrelated and unsolicited 5-star review, I sent her a copy of the second book, The Demon Plagues, for free. I hope she reviews that one as well, and I know she’ll be honest. Praise is like sugar, a little is nice but a lot makes you sick.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: books, writing science fiction