Stuart Thaman's Blog, page 12

First cigar of the season! Noob review inside.

The weather in Cincinnati is finally nice enough to take the chairs out and enjoy the first stick of 2015. OK, it isn't my first cigar this year, but my first one not enjoyed in an indoor lounge away from the snow.

The cigar: Nimish Thunder

Size: Toro - not too big, not too small.

Duration: 45 minutes. Smoked to 1/3(ish) and it went out on its own.

Burn: very even. Lots of smoke production.

Age: sat in my humidor about 9 months. 68% humidity

Paired with:  a huge glass of water.

Price: I don't remember. I think only $3.00 or $3.50.

 

Taste

Light: Very peppery. The first couple puffs were a brutal assault of pure pepper and spice. Not good. I prefer mellow cigars.

First inch: became creamier but still had strong notes of pepper. Some earth and nuts present.

Second inch: Solidly creamy. Coffee, earth, and nuts most abundant, in that order. Some notes of spice still lingered, but they were tasty and not overwhelming.

Third inch: creaminess continued to be pleasant. Flavors overall started to weaken and the smoke production decreased a bit. Creamy coffee flavor was most present. The spice began to return as the cigar got shorter.

Final 10 minutes: dry spice and some hints of earth, overall pretty bland. Smoke production died off drastically until it went out on its own. Since the final flavors were dull and spicy, I did not attempt to get it going again.

Overall thoughts: not bad, especially considering the money. I am a huge fan of Rocky Patel and always saw the Nimish line at the shop so decided to pick one up last year. I wouldn't buy it again, but I wouldn't turn down a free one or something else from the Nimish brand. Great for a short afternoon spent reading a book. If you like coffee and earth cigars, you might consider it.

Starting the interview circuit for the new Goblin Wars

Check it out! TJ Redig, a very talented man, was kind enough to give me a second interview on his podcast, Scrivener's Soapbox. As always, it was a lot of fun. We discuss everything from fantasy and writing to guitars and metal.

Give it a listen by clicking here.

Final cover for Goblin Wars 2 revealed!

Here it is!

Special thanks to Will Olthouse of www.unsilentwill.com for delivering another beautiful work of art!

 

The Goblin Wars: Death of a King will be available March 1st in paperback and eBook. Click here for pre-order details.

Marketing, Marketing, Marketing....

This post is primarily addressed to the good people over at www.reddit.com/r/selfpublish. There have always been lots of posts asking for marketing advice and a lot of the advice is either super obvious or terrible. I'm not incredibly successful by any means, but I've made a good bit more than I've put in.

Here it goes...

Step 1: The Really Obvious Stuff

In case you didn't know, you should use social media. You should also have a professional website. If you need a guy to design your website, shoot me an email and I'll hook you up with my web guy. He will get you set up in about a day for $200. Which social media websites should you use? All of them. GoodReads is the most important.  Do some giveaways and start building reviews.

GoodReads Pro Tip: at the conclusion of your giveaway, message the winners personally and make sure they like your genre. Do it under the guise of confirming their address. You can weed out the bots and people who actually don't like your genre and just want free crap.

Become active on forums and different writing communities. Join a local author group and make friends. Find the people more successful than you and learn from them. There is a subreddit for every genre - use them! If you write fantasy, hang out and interact on /r/fantasy. After people get to know you, dropping a line or two about your own writing (tastefully...) will be welcomed and respected.

 

Step 2: Printing

If you're really serious about making money in the crazy world of books, you need to spend money first. I highly recommend getting a few thousand (~$100) bookmarks printed at UPrinting that describe your book, have a link to your website, and links to Amazon. If you have multiple series or genres, get multiple bookmarks. Give them out at live events and hand them out everywhere you go. Go to bookstores and ask to leave them by the register or in your genre's section. Drop a stack off at a local coffee shop. Always keep a stack in your car and a few in your wallet to hand out to people you meet who might be interested.

The banner: Having a great banner is critical for live events. A great banner can run up to $400. Honestly, an eye catching banner will not only bring people to your booth at an event, it will sell copies for you.

Here is the basic setup I use at most live events. The banner is behind me and I use 1 or 2 stands to show off my books. I have free bookmarks sitting in front and copies for people to pick up and check out. The table is also covered with the Hydra Publications logo and banner to add further legitimacy. This photo is from a local ComiCon at a small library that drew about 3,000 people. I sold out of books.

Step 3: Going Live

I've said it before about a thousand times on reddit, live events are the best way to market. Now that you have beautiful bookmarks and a great banner, find every event you can and book a table. If you want to go to a huge event, get other authors to split the table with you and bring down the cost. The table pictured above cost $30 and I made hundreds.

How to sell in person: I've read plenty of posts from other indie authors about how they feel gross selling in person and they can't do it. They don't have the personality for sales. Guess what? The moment you tried to make money from book sales, you became a lifelong salesman. At my first live event, I only sold 3 books. I still blame the frigid weather and outdoors setting for the most part, but I didn't know how to sell. I sat behind my booth and waited for people to come up and ask a direct question. The event drew about 1,000 people and I only sold to 3 of them. Pathetic.

Find people selling books at your own live events and watch them for 10 or 15 minutes to get the feel of how they do it. Observe them make a cold sale to a disinterested passerby. Get a good 30 second pitch down and stick to it. You'll be pulling people in left and right.

My actual spiel at live events: stranger walks by and A) if they glance at my banner, ask if they like fantasy or B) ask if they like to read. If they like fantasy, give them a Goblin Wars bookmark and pitch them the book. If they like to read, ask them what genre. I'm in 3 genres, so I can usually grab them from that point. Always end your pitch with a price. Don't make the customer ask for it. Offer them a deal on multiple books, especially if you have 2+ out in the same series.Another great strategy: take pictures (with permission) of cos players at live events and post them to your website in a Convention Recap style blog post. After you take a picture, hand them a bookmark with your address and tell them it will be posted soon. You just sent traffic to your website and every click is a potential sale.Step 4: What do I write / how much?

The obvious answer is obvious. Write what you love! And never stop. With only 1 book released, physical promotion and live events are tough. People don't take you seriously and you can only market to fans of 1 genre. The truth is, series sell. Standalone novels are outsold by series novels 2 to 1 or better at live events. An article I read once said that you need to spend 90% of your "book time" writing and only 10% marketing. Every time you release a new novel, bump another 10% into marketing. That's a good formula to follow.

Don't skimp on a cover and good editing. You'll destroy potential fans if they read your first book and find errors or the cover is crap. The upfront cost might hurt, but you're hopeless without it. If you need a cover artist, I can recommend a few, just shoot me an email. If you need an editor, I know a couple of those too.Step 5: Online Marketing

Unless you miraculously get accepted to the shrine of holy book sales known only by whispers (aka BookBub), don't bother paying for advertising. GoodReads ads and other pay-per-click ads generate few sales and almost never pay for themselves. A few services out there look great, but many of them are expensive scams veiled as instant success. To name a few of the well known scams: Reedsy, BookDaily, NetGalley, etc. Stay away.

KDP & Kindle Select - I recommend it. I know a lot of people don't, but I've found the countdown deals to be fantastic.KDP free download days - I sort of recommend it. Only do free days for book 1 of a series that already has book 2 released. You want to gain long term fans. Use those days sparingly.Kindle Unlimited - I recommend it. You still get a cut of the sale price and it encourages people to give it a shot. Plus, there are several websites and subreddits devoted to books on KU and they will advertise you for free. This is especially true for romance / erotica.

Do a blog tour. What's that? Find blogger (like me) and book reviewers and send them free copies of your eBooks to check out. Ask them to interview you for their blog. Run a giveaway contest on their blog. Ask other authors to be interviewed for your own blog so you can share an audience. Offer to write guest posts on other blogs about anything the owner of the blog wants to read. The more places that have your name and a picture of your book, the better.

Step 6: Mad Profits

Be realistic. Don't set out to self-publish or publish through a small press and quit your day job. Especially in the first year, it won't even pay for itself. Your covers and editor fees will rack up and that mountain of book related debt won't start to erode until you have 2+ novels released. Try to only check your sales rankings once a week and you'll avoid most disappointment. Use your sales rank as a reward: every 10,000 words you write on your work in progress earns another peek into Amazon.com's author central. 

 

 

Feel free to comment and add your own advice. And of course, since this is a post on marketing, check out my books!

Indy Wizard World ComiCon Recap

Indianapolis ComiCon this weekend was a blast! I loved getting to meet some awesome fans and hang out with cos players and celebrities alike.

Here are a few pictures from the event:

 

The booth. I shared space with Tony Acree, Violet Patterson, and C. Bryan Brown.

Awesome Pyro (TF2) cosplay

Na'vi is one of my favorite Legend of Zelda characters. Very rarely done as cosplay.

Incredidlbe combo.

Very good zombie.

The best part of the entire event happened on Friday night. A few of us were hanging out in the hotel bar when David Del Rocco and Michael Rooker walked in! Rocco didn't come over or even acknowledge that we exit, but we bought Merle a drink and he gave us half an hour of his time. Getting to hang out and chat with Merle was a once in a lifetime experience. 

Want to see more cos play pictures? Click here!

Giving away 2 copies of Goblin Wars! Book 2 Release Date!

Click here to enter the Goodreads giveaway! Two copies up for grabs!

 

Goodreads Book Giveaway








The Goblin Wars Part One


by Stuart Thaman

Giveaway ends March 01, 2015.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

The Goblin Wars Part Two: Death of a King is set for release on March 1st! 

Interview with Sci-fi author Alex Hansen

Firstly, I noticed a set of The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote in your author photo. Does history influence your writing? Have you ever written anything related to the Civil War?

Good eye!

I've only read maybe 25% of Foote's trilogy.  I do like history, and I'm especially interested by my own country's history, but reading about it is just a hobby.  Those books are beasts, but more and more I keep thinking that finishing them will just have to be one of those things I put off until retirement.

I don't read or write much historical fiction and I'm not sure why.  I guess it's just not really my thing…although The Killer Angels is a notable exception.  That one's definitely among my favorites.
 

Take us through your bibliography. You have several releases on Amazon. Where did your writing begin? What did you think when your first novel was released? How have things changed?
 

The first thing I self-published online was a novel called The Weather Man.  It's presented as the main character's blog transcript, complete with reader comments and the occasional flamewar.  I've been scribbling down stupid little stories and things for as long as I can remember, but this was the first time that I spent so much time and so much energy on a piece of my writing.  Publishing it on Amazon gave me a pretty overwhelming rush.  It's exhilarating to create something that only existed as jumbled ideas in your head, solidify it into a purposeful shape, and then throw it out into the universe like it belongs there.  I got that same kind of rush from my second novel, Tiem Mechine, too, although I have a feeling that the first time will probably remain the most memorable for a good long while.

I also released a pair of short stories called A Vampire's Proposal and The Kill Room between the two novels, but that was mostly because I felt weird going more than a year without a second release on my Amazon resume.  So I threw in a couple of shorts to break the silence.

Starting this year, I'm releasing a series of novellas that are adapted from my fantasy web serial entitled The New Devil.  I have the first three volumes up so far, with at least five more to come.

As I publish more, I'm learning a lot about how to do it.  I've been writing and revising and writing more since I was a little kid, so I was used to learning how to write better.  But when it came to self-publishing, how to format ebooks, where to release them and how to market them, I was completely clueless.  I still feel pretty clueless, but the more I do it, the more I'm forced to learn to do it better.

 

Explain the title of your sci-fi novel "Tiem Mechine" for those of us who still might think its a typo. Where did you get the inspiration for that novel?

Yeah…that title was kind of a gamble for an indie author!

In the opening pages of the novel, the protagonist buys a time travel device from an alien.  The alien was a marketing consultant for a corporation from space that had been attempting to sell advanced technology to humans.  Thinking that humans would freak out if they realized little green men were peddling space-age tech, they intentionally misspelled "Tiem Mechine" on the box so that everybody would just assume it was a bad translation for a Japanese product or something.

The main inspiration for that book was the Back to the Future movies.  Those blend kind of a soft science fiction with comedy and adventure so well, and I personally get a huge kick out of how confusing it all is, especially in the second film, when there are two Marty McFlys running around at his parents' prom.  So I decided I wanted to write a time travel story that was so ridiculously complicated that even most of the characters struggled to figure out what was going on.  It took a lot of planning, and a lot of headaches, but I think I managed to create a really messy series of timelines so that all the events play out with a crazy, circuitous kind of logic.  My hope is that the plot is confusing enough to be funny but just comprehensible enough for my readers to follow it without tearing their hair out.




Have you read the classics of sci-fi or fantasy? Do any authors in particular stand out as "must-reads" for fans of the genres?
 

I greatly prefer sci-fi to fantasy, personally.  I mean, I've read the Lord of the Rings, and it's wonderful story, but after that I don't have much appetite for high fantasy.  I've read some of the Narnia books, I really enjoyed the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, and I used to love those Redwall series when I was a kid.

Sci-fi has a lot more appeal to me.  The Foundation books by Isaac Asimov are a must-read, as far as I'm concerned.  Fantastic Voyage and I, Robot by Asimov are up there too.  For something a little more recent, I love me some Crichton, especially Jurassic Park, Prey, and Timeline.

My favorite sci-fi writer, however, was a young adult author whose books I stumbled across in a Scholastic catalogue when I was maybe twelve or thirteen.  His name was William Sleator, and the book I ordered was called The Boy Who Reversed Himself.  It was about a kid who could travel into to a fourth spatial dimension.  It was a complicated concept to explain in a young adult book, but he did it and he blew my mind…all while telling a pretty great story.

When you write, are you more of a planner and note taker or a write-as-I-go author? 
 

Both.  Neither.

It depends on what I'm writing.  I usually start off with a premise and a general ending in mind, and if the subject matter isn't too complicated, I like to fly by the seat of my pants.  If I'd tried that with something like Tiem Mechine, though, I never would have been able to finish a first draft.  I feel like my stuff is trending a little bit more toward plot complexity lately, and I'm starting to take my planning a lot more seriously.


If your work could be favorably compared to any current main stream author, who would you choose? What about their works makes them a literary icon?
 

Oh, man, that's a tough question.

Gun to my head, I'd probably have to say Dean Koontz, which seems weird.  I don't think we're particularly similar, but I have a lot of respect for his work.  He can craft some creepy, messed-up stories, but he manages to accurately portray a wide spectrum of human emotion in them, and he knows how to keep them light and funny to balance out the less pleasant stuff.  I shed a few tears over Lightning and Odd Thomas, and I laughed my way through them, too.  That's a delicate balance that I'd like to get the hang of someday.  I don't know if he's a literary icon, but Dean Koontz is probably my favorite living novelist.
 

Have you read any other indie authors? Any that you would recommend?

I've read a few.  My favorite indie authors to enter the non-traditional arena of self-publishing mostly started off in the even-less-traditional world of serial web fiction.  There's The Zombie Knight by George M. Frost, which is action-packed and insanely intricate, Hidden, an urban fantasy series by Colleen Vanderlinden, and Hobson & Choi, a quirky detective story by Nick Bryan.



Isaac Asimov once published an article where he outlined the three types of science fiction. He defined them as gadget, adventure, and social. Do you buy into his theory? Which type does your sci-fi fit into?
 

I hate to disagree with Asimov, because I have tons of respect for the guy…and, let's face it, he has approximately 342 times the education that I have.  But I don't think things always break down so cleanly.  I mean, Tiem Mechine probably fits pretty safely inside the adventure sci-fi category, but I'm sure there are plenty of stories that qualify for more than one.  But from where I'm sitting, I think it's safe to say that probably all science fiction can fit into any one or any combination of Asimov's three classifications.

What direction do you see for your writing in the future? When is your next anticipated release? Any big changes on the horizon?

Hopefully my third novel, tentatively titled Their Works Shall Be in the Dark, will be out in March or April.  The next few months should also be peppered with subsequent volumes of The New Devil.  The only big change I'm hoping for is putting out better material at a faster rate!

 

Lastly, where can we find your work?

Amazon

Smashwords

Google Play

Interview with Daniel Kucan - actor, author, badass

Daniel Kucan - Self-published author, Command & Conquer actor, professional martial artist, and renowned carpenter

 

 

Firstly, I think it is fair to say you've had a wild life. Acting, writing, carpentry and more. Have any of those professions felt like a true calling? If you had to pick one job for the rest of your life, what would it be?

 

I think secret agent would be cool, except for the ‘secret’ part. It’s only cool if everyone knows you’re a secret agent, but I guess that sort of defeats the purpose. You can’t really be a ‘famous agent’, and being famous rocks. Guess I better give this some more thought.

 

I'm a huge fan of the Command & Conquer series. What has been your favorite roll for C&C? Were you ever asked to do a part and refused?

 

When my older brother Joe started working on the very first C&C, I was living in New York and Joe brought me out to Vegas to work on it with him. He and I and several other actors had a big discussion about who was gonna be the bad guy and no one wanted to do it. We settled on Joe because he was the scariest, but it wasn’t really his first choice. Ironic because it made him a global superstar, and I ended up getting exploded, slapped, set on fire, ion cannoned, run over, mortared, and killed in various and sundry other ghastly ways. I think my favorite was getting tortured by the blonde supermodel… you know they actually PAID me to do that? Crazy world.

 

What inspired your writing? Was there an exact moment when you sat down to put words onto paper and knew you would be a writer?

 

I’ve written stories since I was very young, probably second grade. But there is a difference, I think, between a writer and a storyteller. I love telling stories. My first novel is a semi-autobiographical series of stories set in the professional fight world. And the thing is, every fighter I know is a GREAT storyteller. I think a lot of guys fight simply so that they have stories to tell. There is a really deep and rich history of pugilism stories that are constrained to oral tradition because they are only told in gyms or BJJ schools or what-have-you. One of my goals in writing Full Contact was to get some of the things I experienced written down.

 

Did you read a lot when you were growing up? If so, what were your favorite authors? Have they influenced your style at all?

 

The first big chunk or reading that I read on my own was The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander when I was about eight. I can’t overstate how they utterly changed my life. I think it’s a crime that we have young kids reading Dick and Jane when they could be reading about Taran kicking the shit out of the forces of darkness.

 

When writing, do any of your characters feel a lot like you? Have you purposely written yourself into any works?

 

Full Contact is certainly based on events of my life, but I wouldn't say that it’s ME.  Some smartypants once said that the characters in our dreams are all aspects of our own personality. I guess I feel the same way about the fiction we create.

 

Do you have any more books planned for after Full Contact? Any works in progress?

 

My next novel is called The Gossamer Prince and is an urban fairy tale with all sorts of dark and sinister turns: you know, goblins and devils running loose among the downtown crowd, vampires and temptress goddesses and renegade dragons eating up the souls of the wicked.  Joe and I are also working on a play for our theater company in Las Vegas. It’s an adaptation of a Fritz Lang film and we are really excited about it.

 

Have you ever considered writing in the style / universe of Command and Conquer?

 

Funny you should ask!  Joe and I tried for several years to acquire the rights to create a C&C movie, but EA wouldn’t even entertain the notion. I’m sure they have their own plans for the franchise and I can say unequivocally that it will suck so hard that the fabric of the universe may actually be damaged by the vacuum created.  

 

What sort of advice would you give to an aspiring writer? How about to an aspiring martial artist?

 

To a writer, I would say, “Write.” To a fighter, I would say, “avoid fighting.”

Seriously though, I really like writing and I really like fighting. But the part about fighting that I could never get over (and that kept me from being truly great) was that I simply didn’t have the fighting instinct. I never liked beating someone up.  I was good at it, at the science of it. But when I lost I felt lousy, and when I won I felt… uh.. lousier. I still fight a lot, probably too much for my wife’s taste. But I’m generally teaching or helping someone out.  When I write, no one ever gets a dislocated jaw or a cracked rib.

 

Lastly, where can we find your books? 

Amazon * Author Bio * Goodreads

The last 3 books I've tried to read have had some serious issues...

I understand that many self published authors have little to no budget for editing and proofing. Many people try to edit their own manuscripts. As you can imagine, editing your own work isn't a great practice. How do you know if you wrote some absolute shit? How can you be sure that you catch every typo and grammatical mistake? I am by no means a flawless editor or writer, but some of these will make you shake your head.

Here are a few examples of things I've read in the past few days. Some of these sentences are worse than others, but all of them should have been flagged by an editor. 

Sentence 1: "Dirt coated the skirts, revealing the age and abuse that this building had survived through."

Where do I begin? Firstly, survived is redundant with through. You could simply chop the last word off and be ok as far as that error is concerned. The second issue with the sentence is one I find in a ton of self published works. The word "this" should be saved for textbooks. It hijacks the reader's attention away from the vivid imagery and reminds them that they are reading a book. I'll probably rant more on that later.

Sentence 2: "He wanted to dip down below and meet this man, ask him several questions."

Not surprisingly, sentence 2 comes from the same book as sentence 1, only a paragraph later. When I was reading, I resolved to keep going after the first glaring sentence, but gave up after the second. Again, "this" could easily be changed to "the" and some sort of connector needs to replace that comma. Perhaps, "He wanted to dive down and meet the man. Maybe he could ask him a few questions."

Sentence 3: "She decided to definitely not mention [character], because any mentions of her always upset [character], and [character] was still considering what to think about what [character] had said."

I took out the character names to somewhat hide the book. A few good rules to follow are such: if a sentences takes longer than 1 breath to read aloud, cut it down. Also, don't repeat large words within the same paragraph, much less the same sentence. Those rules aside, a few other things bother me about this line. Considering what to think about -- so... she is contemplating HOW to contemplate something else? What?

Sentence 4: "As a child, [character] was told about the Bogeyman. It's a fictional monster or entity that laid under the bed. An imaginary creature used by parents to frighten children - to teach them not to suck their thumbs, and generally to deviate from bad behavior."

First of all, you don't need to explain urban legends. You especially don't need to explain the Bogeyman. Saying "monster or entity" is useless. If you really want to make the point that the Bogeyman might not be a *monster*, just say that. Otherwise, you are wasting words. The second half of the section has a redundancy issue as well. Deviating from bad behavior includes thumb sucking. Plus, as mentioned before, you don't need to explain the origins of urban legends!

 

In closing, my advice is to hire a professional editor. Can't afford the $200+ it might cost? Don't publish until you can afford it. Releasing something with glaring mistakes will only make potential readers hate your work and never support you in the future, no matter how skilled you become.  Sacrifice up front and reap the rewards later. 

Rough recording of one of my short stories as audio book

I am currently in the process of getting audio books recorded for my novels. In the meantime, as a way to vet voice actors, I listen to their recordings of my short stories. Here is a really good one that I think will end up winning my vote and get the job. Let me know what you think.