David A. Tatum's Blog, page 6

A Brief Intermission, As We Have Some News….

You were probably expecting the next “This Book Cannot Make Any Money” post, today, but I haven’t been able to work on it much this week. That’ll have to be pushed to next week.

The REASON I haven’t been able to work on it, however, is pretty big news, and if you’re here for ‘self-publishing tutorials,’ some of the background information might still be informative.

I was hoping to be able to be able to talk about this news in specifics when it came out, but a change of plans means I need to wait before I can mention a few details. In the meantime, however, here’s what’s been going on the past couple weeks:

Thanks, I’m guessing, to the success of The Merrimack Event, I was approached by a literary agent (this is USUALLY the wrong way around; if you are going this route, you usually should be approaching the agent, instead; however, a quick investigation proved this agency was legitimate and well respected). This agent mostly works with already published authors (often independent authors, though not always) to sell subsidiary right — namely, audiobook and foreign translation rights.

Now, I have long WANTED to produce an audiobook format for my books, but the process for self-publishers is more daunting and\or expensive and\or time consuming than I’ve been able to manage:

First, I understand you need to turn your manuscript into a ‘script’ for the narrator (I’ve never done this before, and I’m not entirely sure what’s involved), and then you need to have your narrator read, record, and edit their recording at a high enough quality to work as an audiobook.  Actually, there’s more to it than that, but the details aren’t all that relevant.  Suffice it to say, each of those things take time.

Now, you can hire someone to do all this for you. I got an estimate for that a few years ago (even before In Treachery Forged was released). From a NON-Union voice performer (union would have cost double), it would have cost me about $1650. Yikes!  There’s also a profit-sharing model, however — you give up half of your profits, and the narrator will handle the script and editing for you.  Probably will do some marketing, too, since they earn money from it as well.  But nowadays most of the good, competent narrators will only do that if you have a good enough reputation that they can be sure they’ll earn money from it (which often means, they won’t do it at all).

Now, I still Had A Plan for getting an audiobook off the ground.  I wasn’t about to spend thousands of dollars for an experiment in audio, and I wasn’t thrilled with the profit sharing model, but I could still work things out.  My local library has a (free to use!) recording studio as part of their “MILL” (Makers In Loudoun Libraries) Program.  My mother, though retired, had many years of training as a vocalist, and was studying to do this.  I’ve been trying to teach myself sound editing using open-source Audacity freeware.

So an audiobook format was coming… but it would take time, and one thing I never seem to have enough of, nowadays, is time.  MAYBE, as an experiment, I could have gotten the tiny little “To the Rink of War” out some time over the course of the next year, but it would take me years to get even one book out, this way.

And along comes this agent, offering to try and get me an audiobook deal.  So, after a little hesitation (I am against the very concept of literary agents, and one of the big reasons I decided to self-publish was that it meant I wouldn’t have to work with one, so I had this “am I really thinking about working with an AGENT?” moment), I opened negotiations with an agent, intending to have them work out an audiobook deal for me.

Things we going slowly, but steadily.  I was going over their contract and had found a few things that needed changing — no deal-breakers, just a few elements that I (or rather, my cousin the Intellectual Property lawyer) felt needed more clarity.  The agent was agreeable to making the amendments, once their own lawyers had a chance to look over them, and I was waiting to hear back from them.  And then a Big-Name Audiobook Publisher contacted me directly, wanting to buy the rights to “The Merrimack Event.”

I considered seeing if the agent was still interested in my other books, or in negotiating the foreign-translation rights, but… well, again, I really didn’t want to deal with agents to begin with.  So I told the agency I didn’t need their services, and (*gulp*) started direct negotiations with the audiobook publisher.

I’ve… I think the correct way of putting it is “agreed to terms, in principle” with the publisher; I still have to go over or sign the actual contract (so things could still fall apart, but let’s hope not), so I’m not going to say who that publisher is, yet, but just getting this sort of interest feels like an accomplishment.

And if you think the work that I had already done setting up for future audiobook production has been wasted… well, this will only be a one book deal (their initial offer was for two books, but I kept it to one for now).  They haven’t (yet) asked for the rights to the Law of Swords books, nor for The Kitsune Stratagem.  If this works out, I might see if I can sell the audiobook rights for those other books to this publisher, too, but there are no guarantees; I Had a Plan, but now it’s a back-up plan.

And there’s still “To the Rink of War.”  That one I might still do by myself, some time over the next year or so, regardless of what happens with this publisher.  We’ll see.

Oh — an a couple smaller pieces of news.  Despite its success, there have been a number of complaints about the “then-than” issue in The Merrimack Event.  I scoured the text and found five instances where then-than were mixed up (I do know the rule, but 13 years ago I had real trouble with it).

I made these corrections in the print edition before sending it out, but I hadn’t updated the e-book because I anticipated more corrections being needed.  I kept asking people to help me find specific examples of this error, because it sounds like a more serious problem than just the five instances I found, but so far I haven’t heard of any from anyone on the specifics.  So I finally uploaded the corrected file today.  It may take a couple days for Amazon to approve the files (the old file is still available for sale), but if the then-than issue REALLY bothers you, you may want to wait a few days before then collecting the update.  (This is such a minor correction you’ll probably have to do this manually, even if you have it set for automatic updates; see here for instructions)

Oh, one last thing:  I’ll be experimenting with a couple new plug-ins for this blog this week.  I’ve had spambots hitting the comment sections of all of my posts by the hundred, lately (which is why I have to approve your comments, if you’ve ever tried to comment on this blog, before. That’s been the only defense I’ve found which actually works); I’ve already downloaded and installed one plug-in that claims it will handle that problem non-intrusively, and it works so far, but I’m still testing it.  We’ll see if I need to try another one.

While I’m fussing around with the plug-ins, I might as well look to correct some of the other problems I’ve had with this blog.  For example, the button I used to have that allowed me to “justify” the text vanished, and that’s something I might actually need for my next post.  If possible, I’ll also look for some way to disable the horrid auto-hyphenation my theme insists I use.  Hopefully things will work the first time, but starting Tuesday there may be occasional (brief) outages as I try things out.

Next week, hopefully, I’ll have the next part of the “This Book Cannot Make Any Money” series, which will be a short story (or at least a fragment of a short story) that will be the “before” example to demonstrate editing techniques on.  And maybe I’ll be following up on some of today’s news… if things reach the point that I can safely mention the NAME of that audiobook publisher.

This Book Cannot Make Any Money — Getting Started: Content

In the first part of this series, I set up my computer with a bunch of free software for the production of a book without any budget. Today, I deal with the book’s content.

Now, if you’ve been following this blog long enough to remember the original post on this concept, you’ll recall that I planned the publication of “This Book Cannot Make Any Money” as a sort of tutorial (or, rather, to borrow a term from the Youtube gaming industry, a sort of “Let’s Play“) for self-publishing a book.

But I have more than one reason for pursuing this blog series:  I want something I can use to test out the KDP Print service, and I don’t want to use one of my more substantive books.  I need something new, something unconnected with my larger series, but I don’t have time to write an entirely new novel.

I do have time, however, to compile a bunch of material from my past writing can’t be used elsewhere. Things like poetry (much of it written in high school), a short story (nearly a short-short) that doesn’t fit with anything else I’ve ever written, fragments of other stories which I’ve rejected, myself, for one reason or another, etc.  Maybe even a few of my past (or future!) blog entries to add a little more to it.  Anything I can find, from my old material, that wouldn’t be a COMPLETE embarrassment to publish (though some of those bits of high school poetry are pushing it).

And many of them have one thing in common:  Someone (and in some cases, it was me), somewhere along the way, said these bits and pieces can’t make any money.

So why am I bothering with a blog on this book’s content, if the content is already taken care of?  Well, there’s more than one thing to mention, here.  For one, once you’re done writing your book, even before editing it, you need to evaluate the content and judge whether you’ve done a good enough job to actually publish your work.

Writers have a reputation for being neurotic.  No wonder!  We have to be egotistical enough to believe that our writing will interest others while still being humble enough to allow constructive criticism.  A lot of would-be professional writers lack the confidence to believe that what they’re writing is worth publishing, and so never get published.  A lot of writers grow an ego so large that they never accept criticism, and therefore produce low-quality work.  That sort of dichotomy is a veritable breeding ground for Imposter Syndrome.

When you’re self-publishing, it can get even worse.  You need to believe that your writing is good enough to sell, but you need to keep your ego in check enough to maintain quality control.  Now, I have occasionally had quality control issues (as all of the reviews for The Merrimack Event warning about my “then-than” issue might suggest; I’m working on that, people, but so far I’ve only found five.  From the reviews, I would think I had a lot more than that, so I’m still looking for more before uploading a revised version.  If you could point specific instances out for me instead of just spouting that I have “lots” of then-than errors for the hundredth time, I’d be grateful), but mostly of the mild and technical variety.

That sort of error should be found and cleaned up, preferably (sigh) before publication, but that’s not a substantive issue that would prevent the work from being published.  What you need to look for is:

 Do you have a proper beginning, middle, and end?
 Do you have enough story and character development to support the plot?
 Do you have enough conflict to create dramatic tension?  (This is needed EVEN IN COMEDY, if you are producing comedy-with-plot)
 Is your plot premised on bad research?  If so, are your readers likely to call you out on that?
 Opposite problem:  Have you added so much conflict that your plot is becoming convoluted?  Must your characters rely solely on luck to succeed?

If you’re capable of giving truthful answers to the above questions, you can evaluate your own work to determine whether it’s acceptable for publication.  (If you can’t, you need to find someone who can to read your manuscripts for you)

All of these problems can be fixed; the question becomes how much time will it take to fix them.  If you figure you’ve got the time to fix it, go ahead and FIX the darned thing and then publish it.  If you figure the amount of time needed to fix it is more than its worth, you need to be able to reject your own work.

Much of the (non-poetic) material intended for “This Book Cannot Make Any Money” comes from my older work that I rejected for one or more of the reasons, above.  Which doesn’t meant the writing is horrible; just that it would take me far too long to revise the whole manuscript into something I could publish.

What I’m going to do is add the parts of each manuscript which aren’t going to require too much time to fix up, leaving the rest behind.

But, as I said, I had something else to cover in the content portion of this blog series:  Not all of the content has been compiled, yet.  There’s still more that has to be written.

Even with a collection of previously written material like this, I still need to add enough structure to turn it from a loose collection of random writings into, well, an actual book.  Some of the material is handwritten, and needs to be typed up.  Some of it will need to be cut and trimmed down to just the acceptable portions.

But to start with, I need to make the content fit into some sort of structure; that turns it from a random collection of my outtakes into an actual book.  That may include writing some (small) bits of content to make things fit.

For example, I’m going to need to split the poetry into three sections.  It naturally fits into two — High School poetry, and haiku.  So, reluctantly, I’m going to spend some of what is normally my blog-writing time over the next few weeks writing poetry.  Bleh.  Maybe I can make it something silly, like limericks.  If I can come up with limericks connected to my existing writing, that might even be fun.

Of course, that’s not all of the “extra” writing I need to do.  It may only be a couple paragraphs here or there, but I still need to write introductory pieces for each section.  And an introduction to the book itself, which may be lengthier.  And, well, there’s one other thing that I know hasn’t been written, yet (but we’ll cover that later).

So, even though the bulk of the content of “This Book Cannot Make Any Money” is already complete, I still need to fire up that LibreOffice suite I installed last week and get to typing.  Fortunately that’s pretty straightforward — no-one here needs me to demonstrate typing, do they?  (I’ll note that I would be a terrible typing tutor; while I don’t quite use a “hunt-and-peck” style of typing, I never learned touch typing, either.  My method works for me, but that’s after more than thirty years of experience in typing “wrong.”).  The only note I think needs to be made here, for those following along at home, is that I recommend saving any files created under the old .doc extension (often called the Word 97-2003 format); I’ve found it to be more universally compatible than the newer .docx format.  I’ve encountered the weirdest glitches when trying to work with a document copied and pasted from a .docx file.

Another thing:  A lot of self-published writers recommend using Microsoft Office’s styles extensively.  I can see why — much of the software designed to automatically convert your eBook from .doc (or .docx) to .epub uses elements from those styles to determine things like chapter separations and the like.  Since I’ll be building the .epub file manually, however, I won’t bother with that.  I stick to the default style and worry about formatting the book later.

There should be at least one more piece of content I need to write that hasn’t been mentioned yet, however:  I need something unedited to use as material for a before-and-after type demonstration for a future “This Book Cannot Make Any Money” post:  The Editing process.

So, next week should be… well, whatever I come up with for that unedited material (I’m still not sure what that’s going to be; it should be short, however —  a thousand words or so, at most).  Then we’ll talk about editing your work without having the budget to hire an editor.

As a note, I am hoping to have something to announce in the next few weeks (possibly, though not likely, as early as next weekend).  If I do make that announcement, I’ll be bumping that week’s blog forward a bit.  Again, this PROBABLY won’t bump next weekends blog, but I figured I’d mention the possibility in case it did.

This Book Cannot Possibly Make Any Money — Getting Started: Software

As was in my “Future Plans” post, I’m currently working on three writing projects simultaneously:  The third Law of Swords book, the Fennec Fox Press House Style Guide (which is typically added to only as issues come up) and — in those times when I NORMALLY work on this blog — a book entitled “This Book Cannot Make Any Money.”

Work on “This Book Cannot Make Any Money” won’t prevent this blog from being written, however.  Instead, it is intended as its own blog series, allowing me to go through the process of self-publishing a book in a tutorial form, or (since I intend to actually publish the end-product of this series) maybe more like a “lets play” (to borrow from the Gamer vernacular) of self-publishing a book for my blog readers.  This is my second try at this kind of project; the first time it got bogged down and eventually swallowed by the need to deal with other things, but this time I have a more developed plan for how to handle this.

So let’s begin.

Once you’ve completed your first draft, I recommend setting a budget based on your projected worst-case-scenario projection for sales. I should add the caveat that I mean REALISTIC (not optimistic, not pessimistic) worst-case scenario.  If you mishandle things, yes, it is possible to never sell a single copy of a book, but that’s a pessimistic projection.  From past performance, I would project the worst case scenario for any of my sci-fi\fantasy genre novels as two hundred fifty ebook sales.  At $4 profit per sale (when I set the eBook price at $5.99), that means I could set a budget of $1000 and realistically expect to break even in a worst-case scenario.

But this isn’t one of my genre novels; this is a collection of material that I’ve read, or for which I’ve been told, or which I’ve even decided for myself “Cannot Possibly Make Any Money.”  With that as the premise for this project, I (at least for purposes of this blog series) project earning… no money from this book.  So my total budget is zero dollars, of which I can spend zero dollars on software, zero dollars on the cover, zero dollars on the editing, zero dollars on the book design, and zero dollars on marketing.  Okay, that was easy!

The rest of this blog series is going to be on overcoming the obstacle of having zero budget when self-publishing; how, with no budget, I can acquire the necessary software, create an original cover, get the book edited, and (easiest of all, though you might not believe it) market that book without spending one penny.

I have, or can and have borrowed from my mother:

1.  Microsoft Office Suite 2007 (IIRC, it was bought at an extreme discount through a program my workplace at the time was offering)

2.  Adobe InDesign v.6 (received as a gift; the last non-cloud version of InDesign.  I recommend sinking the costs of any software you buy in a purchase rather than creating a recurring cost by leasing it over the cloud)

3.  Scrivener, purchased during one of their half-price sales.  (I think that, with NaNoWriMo just around the corner, that’s about to come up)

4.  Photoshop Elements v. 10 or v.15 (I may be purchasing Photoshop Elements 2018 soon; v.10 came packaged for free with other software, and v.15 is borrowed from my mother)

5.  Corel Draw (whatever the latest version is; it’s on my mothers computer)

…and probably a few other pieces of software I’ve bought for my writing business (or my mother has bought for her quilting business) that I’m not thinking of right now.

But, since we’re maintaining the rule that I have zero budget for this project, I’m going to pretend I haven’t bought ANY of this, yet, and find substitutes.

I do have to make certain concessions for the series as a whole before we begin:  I have a blog, access to the internet, etc.  My blog is on a paid-for site, but its using a resource that is free and can provide a free host if necessary (WordPress).  These things I could manage to access from my local library, but the library usually won’t allow you to install software on their computers.  They might, if they’re equipped well enough, have some similar software installed on their computers you can borrow, but you can’t count on that.

So, it is a bit of an assumption that — even with zero budget to produce your book — you own or have access to a computer on which you can access the internet and are permitted to install software.  If you don’t, well, I’m sorry, I’m not sure what to suggest.

So, with the limitations of zero budget (minus that concession), what options in the software department are there?

In place of Microsoft Office:  Anything that I would normally do with Microsoft Office, I will instead — for this project only — do with the LibreOffice suite.  Now, both Microsoft Office and LibreOffice are suites of tools, but to replace the ones I actually use for my publishing work, I only need LibreOffice Writer (for word processing, replacing Microsoft Word) and LibreOffice Base (simple database software replacing Microsoft Access.  I use Access to maintain some of my notes, such as character records, which need to be kept across books of a series; due to the nature of “This Book Cannot Possibly Make Any Money,” however, I won’t be using it for this book).  LibreOffice is available for free (it better be, or I’m already breaking the rules), and will work with Windows, Macintosh, or even Linux.  (You do need to download the correct version for your operating system, of course).

An alternative to LibreOffice is Apache OpenOffice.  LibreOffice was, in fact, originally OpenOffice, but (skipping one long, complex, boring story to explain why) they split up into two organizations developing similar suites of software from a common ancestor.  LibreOffice is generally considered to be the better option, containing much of the original design team, but some people still prefer OpenOffice

To replace InDesign I’ll choose Scribus.  Scribus is also free, open-source software designed specifically to do, well, the same things InDesign does.  It’s been going strong for many years, now, and most of the bugs are already worked out!  (A word of warning:  They recommend that you install ‘Ghostscript‘ first.  I made the mistake of not doing this the first time I installed Scribus, and it caused several problems with my initial set-up.

Outside of Scribus, the only other free software I can think of that works as a replacement for InDesign is… InDesign.  A couple years back, Adobe offered a free download of a no-longer-supported earlier version of InDesign (in fact, a whole suite of programs InDesign was part of a package of), version 2.0.  It’s a bit hard to track down, and requires a software key (they provided one for the public domain at the time) which may no longer be listed anywhere, but if you can find it you can get the entire Adobe CS software suite for free.  Because of its obscurity, however, I’ll stick with Scribus.  (Scribus has a few more modern features, anyway).  If you do have the budget to BUY this sort of software, however, I wouldn’t recommend the current, cloud-only version of InDesign; instead, I would go with QuarkXPress.  A bit expensive, but it has a lifetime license (and thus is a sunken cost).

Scrivener is an odd one.  It’s a word processor designed specifically for creating books, but the Windows version (which is the only one I have) is missing several key features available on the Mac version.  Scrivener has promised a new, updated version soon (Scrivener 3.0) which should EVENTUALLY bring them up to near identical versions, but even with that the Mac version will be the first release.

The long and the short of it is that I only use Scrivener for eBook building, after the book has been edited.  Since that’s all I use it for, I will compare it not with other word processors but rather with other eBook-making utilities.  I’m at least somewhat familiar with Sigil, so that’s what I’ll be using, but I understand Calibre is popularly thought to be more intuitive and will likely have more tutorials for its use.  Nevertheless, I’ll be using Sigil to produce an ePub, which I will then convert to .mobi for uploading to Amazon.  (Calibre can do the conversion itself; Since Sigil can’t — at least not as of the latest version I’ve downloaded — I’ll instead be using a simple tool called ePub to Mobi).

The graphics suites are all that we still need to worry about.  As a substitute for Photoshop I’ll be using the popular (though a bit tricky-to-use) GIMP.  As a substitute for Corel Draw, I’ll try Inkscape (an open-source vector-based graphics utility I first saw in a package of “best open-sourced software” back in 2009.  I’ve often installed it but never used it, so this will be a bit of an adventure).  Not sure if I’ll need both of these programs, but at least I’m set up if I do.

Okay, software is taken care of.  Next time on “This Book Cannot Possibly Make Any Money,” I’ll start using these bits of software to ‘create’ the book’s content (which is already written… or is it?).  See you then.

The Print Edition is OUT!

I had a blog all written out for this weekend (the first post in the revamped “This Book Cannot Make Any Money” series), but I’m bumping that to next weekend. Why?

The print edition for The Merrimack Event is FINALLY out!

This closes the books on the most difficult book release of my career (so far, but hopefully that record will last for a long, long time). It’s been a rewarding one, but I am so relieved that its finally complete that I don’t know what to do.

Well, not complete. Amazon still hasn’t associated the print edition with the eBook edition. This SHOULDN’T be a difficult issue to resolve — Amazon needed a push to do that with two of my three previous books, too, and it was a simple (though hardly “quick”) fix — but with all the issues The Merrimack Event has had in its release, I’m crossing my fingers while knocking on wood that nothing happens to complicate the process.

In other news, I’ve finally resumed work on the third book in the Law of Swords series. Well, I’ve tried to — between various “real life” events (nothing serious; as an example, I had to make an unexpected trip out to get a watch battery replaced. No big deal, but it means a special trip out and time taken out of my work day) I’ve found myself working on this blog (well, what will turn out to be next week’s post) more than I have on the book.

Hopefully that’s not a sign of things to come.  At any rate, that’s it for this week.

A Quick Blog on… Uh…

Okay, so I don’t really have a topic for this week’s blog. I have a few things to cover, but nothing really to focus it around, so I guess it’s a status report, sort of?

The Merrimack Event, Print Edition:  Still in progress.  I just had to order my (personal record-breaking) fourth print proof, though I would have approved the version I got from the third if Createspace had let me (long story as to why they won’t, but it’s boring and will provide no real insights into the printing process, so why bother?)
My great-uncle passed away last week.  I didn’t know him well (I’d seen him a few times, but it was hard to visit him), but he and my mother were very close.  He was the last of my grandmother’s eleven brothers and sisters (they had a big family in those years) and the family patriarch.  We weren’t able to attend the funeral because we couldn’t make travel arrangements in time.
KDP Print service is improving.  While they still don’t have expanded distribution (they note that this should be available at some point), they are now offering print proof and author copies.  That actually makes them a viable POD printer IF you don’t care for expanded distribution.  Maybe I’ll finally put together “This Book Cannot POSSIBLY Make Any Money” and test it out through them.  (I’m pretty busy with things, but again — putting that book together shouldn’t take any time away from writing my other books.  It might take time away from writing this blog, however. *sigh*
It’s sounding more and more as if I’ll need both a new editor and a new cover artist for the Law of Swords series.  I hope to find an artist who can match Alex Kolesar‘s art style for the cover, but I’ll also need to focus on getting my House Style Guide ready to send to whoever the new editor turns out to be.  Again, I’m hoping to complete this without taking time away from my novel writing, but I’m still trying to figure out how to do that.
By the way, speaking of Law of Swords, I’m FINALLY able to start working on the next book in that series again.  I had to set the book aside half-finished to work on A Gun for Shalla (my contribution to the Worlds Enough: Fantastic Defenders anthology).  Right after that, I got tied up working on The Merrimack Event.  In Division Imperiled (working title) is half-finished; maybe I’ll be able to at least get it out to the editor (whoever it is) by the end of the year?
By the way, my aStore replacement was a bit buggy when I mentioned it during my last blog post (it was timed to go live at the same moment as the blog post did; unfortunately, the actual site didn’t look anything like the preview did, and some of the items couldn’t be clicked on or ordered).  The bugs have been largely ironed out, and a few more books were added in since then.  I’ll note it, here, whenever I add new books.  (it seems the new page is already more successful than the aStore was; not a huge feat, as I only ever sold two things through the old aStore and it was horribly out-of-date, but notable).
I recently received an interesting book-related offer in my e-mail.  Nothing as exciting as a TV\Movie deal offer (I wish!), but intriguing nonetheless.  I’m currently running a few background checks to ensure the outfit contacting me is legitimate and not a scam, but I certainly need to consider it if they pass.  I’m being vague because I haven’t agreed to anything, yet, but I’ll probably talk about it more, whatever decision I make.

And that seems to be it (or at least all of the things I can think of before this blog goes live).  Until next time….

Books and Sundry

First, some updates. The second print proof of The Merrimack Event finally arrived and… well, they did a better job with the cover, but the more I look at it the more problems I have with it — I plan to call the printer on Monday and see if I can somehow get things straightened out.  I think the cover should fit as planned according to their documentation, and they keep saying the dimensions are wrong and changing them on me in ways that sends everything wonky.  I also still need to go through the inside text, again, and make sure that none of the changes I made last time have messed anything up.

Incidentally, I uploaded some corrections to the eBook based on my first run-through of the print proof (I did this a couple weeks ago, but never said anything); if you’re still seeing missing words and typos, try updating your copy. I need to figure out how to prevent these errors from going out the first time, but I think I caught them all. If you find anything else after updating, PLEASE let me know — don’t just leave a comment on Amazon about typos or dropped words; I can’t fix these errors unless I know where they are.

Despite all the complaints about the typos that I can’t find, the book is doing well.  Final numbers for the month of September were 51 reviews, 1,400 books sold, even (er… with five returns, making the real number 1,395) and 1,730,229 KENP-sized Page Reads.  (The book was 737 KENP pages — very different from what the print book will be — which means I had at least 2,348 people read the book at least part-way through using the Kindle Unlimited program).  I think that qualifies as a successful first month of publication.

Oh, and it’s raised the sale totals of In Treachery Forged and In Forgery Divided significantly… and if you go back to those three days in August that it was released, it seems to have inspired To the Rink of War‘s sales to DOUBLE its lifetime totals!  (This is not really that great of a feat.  To the Rink of War was an unmitigated disaster on first release, and has yet to receive its first review more than three years after publication)

But that’s not what this blog is, uh, SUPPOSED to be about.  I learned, recently. that Amazon is discontinuing the aStore program.  I do have an aStore (I won’t bother linking to it, because I think Amazon will be closing them before most of my blog readers trickle in), but it’s been neglected for a long time (precisely for the reasons Amazon is saying they’re discontinuing it — it’s nearly impossible for affiliates to push people through to the aStore sales with the way it’s set up).  So, I set about replacing my aStore with a very similar (but hopefully better trafficked and more frequently updated) page on the Fennec Fox Press site, which you can find here.  I’ve still got a few things to add to it, but there you go.  Edit:  And there appears to be a bug in the website clipping several of the link graphics.  I’ll be calling tech support tomorrow to try and get it fixed.  *sigh*  (Stupid website software that DOESN’T show the website correctly in the preview; I don’t even know how to fix it at this point)

…yeah, I don’t think this blog post is about what I intended it to be about at all.

Oh, and if you’ve been following my cell phone misadventures on Facebook and other social media hangouts, I do seem to have the problem fixed, so (assuming you have the number) you can start phoning my cell phone again.

Until next time, where maybe I’ll actually talk about what I intended to talk about instead of overshadowing it all with a status update.

Future Plans

I had hoped I would be able to say “the print edition for The Merrimack Event has been released!” by now… but I’m still waiting on a second proof copy (hopefully one without a mangled spine, this time). I do have several milestones to note: I reached over one thousand sales and one MILLION page reads (actually, it’s about one and a quarter million page reads, at last check). In less than a month.

Uh… okay, that was a little unexpected.

So, my original plan, as far as future book releases go, hadn’t factored in The Merrimack Event. As fed up with it as I was by the time it was released, I was convinced it wouldn’t sell, well, anything. I was publishing it to get it out of the way, so I could move on to my other books.  I spent more to get it out the door than my other books, so my expectations could be summed up as “I hope it will break even or something.  And it won’t be holding up my other books, any more!”

Well, it did that… and a lot more.  And now I have to figure out where to slip a (still untitled) sequel into the “to do” list.  I have a plan for a sequel… uh, somewhere (it’s been thirteen years since I last looked at it, but I do remember that I’ve preserved it across several computer moves).  Even if I can’t find that outline, however, I can come up with a new one; I’ve just got to figure out when to get it started.

The original plan was to finish In Division Imperiled (or whatever I call the 3rd book of the Law of Swords series), and then move on to By Claw and Arrow (the sequel to The Kitsune Stratagem.  I need to re-launch this book; it doesn’t seem right that my best-written book (both my opinion and by several objective standards) should also be my worst-selling book.  Getting the sequel out there would be an opportunity to do that).  After that, I was going to polish off To the Rink of War, turn it (and the unpublished serialized short sequels) and re-publish it as a novel.

I also had the idea of putting together a couple shared-world anthologies for a couple of my books, but that would have required some changes to Fennec Fox Press‘s business model (I’d be going from a sole proprietorship to a LLC, I’d have to change my accounting system so I can preserve money to pay other authors, etc.), so they were in a more nebulous “later.”  And, some day in the middle of all that, I was thinking of putting together that “This Book Can’t Make Any Money” blog project as part of a self-publishing tutorial on the side.  There were also a couple supplementary works planned that would slot in as they were ready — for example, the Fennec Fox Press House Style Guide, which is currently (in software parlance) in an Alpha version, but would need to be completed before I could even consider an anthology, and would be nice to complete before I send ANYTHING out for editing, again.

But now… all of that is out the window.  Oh, I’m still doing all of that, but now I need to slot in a sequel for The Merrimack Event.  And if I slot in a sequel for The Merrimack Event, I’ll have enough books in the list to need to account for book four of Law of Swords.  And as urgent as keeping those two series going is, maybe I’ll have to set aside those anthology plans until I’ve cleared up some other parts of my schedule.  And…

Well, anyway, I revamped my “order of production” schedule; see what you think.

 In Division Imperiled (working title):

The manuscript for this is already half-way done (or, well, I’m somewhere in the middle of it.  It’s gone pretty far off the trail set by the original outline, so I’m not sure exactly where I am in the story).
The Fennec Fox Press House Style Guide

The editor for In Division Imperiled has become overwhelmed with work, and may not be available for that book, so I might need to find another one.  If so, I’m going to need to have this ready for them.  This is a small thing, and can be worked on concurrently with In Division Imperiled.  It may wind up being completed first.  If released to the public (instead of just sent to the new editor with the manuscript), it would be a free download off the Fennec Fox Press website.
By Claw and Arrow (Inari’s Children, Book 2)

I still want to re-launch The Kitsune Stratagem, and getting this book out there is a big part of the plan for doing so.  So, while I’m anxious to get The Merrimack Event’s sequel out there, I’m still planning to get this out as quickly as possible, too.  If I start working on this and it gets bogged down, however, I’ll swap this with the next book in the queue.
Shieldclads # 2

Um, since I don’t even know where I put the outline for this, yet, I haven’t worked out a title for it.  But here is where I hope to slot it in.  Here is also where my original scheduled plan starts to diverge from the new one.
This Book Cannot Make Any Money

Another side project that can be done alongside other books (since most of the work will actually be done in the time allotted for working on this blog).  This could actually be ready any time before or after this point, but I’m guessing that I’ll have it done by this point.
Law of Swords, Book # 4

This was GOING to be The Rink of War, the novel-length version of the short story\novelette, To The Rink of War.  Instead, I have to juggle in the sequels to my more popular series, so here’s where Law of Swords 4 goes in.
ONE OF:  Rink of War OR Nine Tales of the Kitsune

Nine Tales of the Kitsune is the first of my planned Anthology projects.  IF I think I can generate the interest from other authors without too much trouble (one of the things I hope to do at my upcoming convention appearances is network with other writers), I may get this set up for this slot.  Otherwise, Rink of War (mentioned above) will be bumped here.
Shieldclads #3

Juggling two successful series is going to be difficult, especially with my other projects included.  This project and the next might wind up flipped, depending on how things work out.
Law of Swords, Book # 5

This should CONCLUDE the Law of Swords series.  I may revisit this world again, but with the series ended the schedule will be freed up for more “new” projects.
Inari’s Children, Book # 3

Current plans have this as the concluding book, but I’m not happy with the outline for this one.  If the relaunch of The Kitsune Stratagem is successful, I’ll rewrite the outline spreading the story into at least four books; otherwise, I’ll revamp it to conclude the series here.

And that’s all I can queue up at this point.  I still have more books planned outside of what you see here (including more Shieldclads, an anthology and possible sequels to Rink of War, some supplementary material for all of my series, and another sci-fi series dealing with a chubby pilot, his mind-reading girlfriend, and a space racing jalopy), and it’s possible one of those won’t let me go until I slip it in somewhere, but for the moment that’s as far as I have planned.

Observations From My First Experience with Kindle Select

We’ll get to a discussion of The Merrimack Event in a moment, but first I have a bit of news:  I must not have embarrassed myself too badly, because Ravencon wants me back.  That makes TWO conventions (both in the same Williamsburg hotel, oddly enough) willing to let a self-published hack (whose newly released book has been in the top-500 for much of this week, and was tagged as  Amazon’s number one hot new release in certain subgenre) appear as a guest speaker.

I haven’t yet requested a reading, book signing, table, or similar opportunity for hand-selling my books at either Ravencon or Marscon.  I’ve certainly considered it, but I haven’t had the technical capabilities nor (consequently) have I bothered to fill out the sales tax forms needed to hand-sell books.

I’m not sure I’ll have everything I need done by either convention, but I recently took the first step towards being able to (legally) hand-sell my books:  I upgraded my (old-fashioned flip-style) cell phone to a new (albeit inexpensive, starting-level) Android-powered Smartphone, with which I should be able to add a credit card reader of some sort (such as Square or Paypal. I want to talk to the bank (specifically, a financial advisor working for my credit union) before I decide on which one, just in case the bank has a special deal with one or another, as some do).  There’s been a bit of a a transition period (my new phone, uh, doesn’t actually work as a phone.  It makes calls okay, and I can hear people just fine, but they can’t hear me beyond a buzzing sound.  The microphone has been tested and works, and tech support says it’s something on their end… but they haven’t figured out what, yet, and they want me to wait “three business days” to see if they can fix it.  If I can get everything working in time (not just the phone, but the card reader and the tax forms), I might approach the conventions and request one of those hand-selling opportunities, after all.

Also, I completed the book block and cover for the print edition and sent them to the printer.  Ordered a proof copy… and got back a minor disaster.  Createspace somehow decided that my cover wasn’t conforming to their standards (even though it was set up to match their stated standards to the pixel) and “adjusted the size” of the text of the spine.  I… well, maybe I’ll let this photo show you just why that seems to be such a problem.

I’ll have to be making corrections for that.  I’ll also be fixing some minor typos in the manuscript of The Merrimack Event that were discovered post-ebook-publication, shortly.  I’ve already had one person e-mail me a set of typos they found, and my mother (heh) found another set.

Those corrections will be uploaded to KDP roughly around the same time I approve of the final print proof, to give myself (and any other fans who want to let me know of anything they find) a chance to discover any other possible issues.  While I try to put out the best quality book I can the first time, the final proof is done by just one person (me) and I do miss things, on occasion, and inevitably will have to issue corrections, so I do appreciate those people who point things out to me even after publication.

Now, for the post I’ve been working on for the past couple weeks:  As I mentioned at the time I first published it, I used the publication of The Merrimack Event as my first exploration of the Kindle Select Program. Now a few weeks in, I have some observations:

Reviews do appear to come faster from the book on Kindle Select than they have with any other book I’ve published.  I don’t know if that’s solely from the book itself or from the Select program.
For whatever reason, the charts on my KDP dashboard seem to update the “Page Reads” figure (based on the Kindle Edition Normalized Pages, or KENP; how it calculates the size of a KENP, I’m not certain) much faster than the sales figures.  There was one day when I went to bed (after midnight) with thirty-eight sales for the day and 50,757 page reads.  I woke up the next morning, and that day’s totals instead said I had sixty-five sales… and 50,757 page reads.  I noticed that happen more than once, in fact.  Incidentally, Amazon calculates The Merrimack Event as being 737 KENP long.
It is possible to increase your sales rank when your sales total drops, thanks to page reads.
In Treachery Forged had been my highest-ranking book ever, hitting the top-20 sales ranking in the SciFi-Fantasy categories and the top-2000 in overall Amazon sales ranking.  Strangely, at the time I’m writing this (I’ve been composing this post for weeks, now; I started it well before the post announcing my Marscon invite went up), I’ve overwhelmingly beaten it in the overall Amazon sales ranking (the highest I’ve seen, so far, was around top-500; I’m hoping it gets better before I post), but I’ve yet to even make the top-100 list for the overall SciFi-Fantasy categories.  I did break the top 100 of the Scifi-Fantasy\SciFi subcategory, however.  Probably has nothing to do with KDP Select, but worth noting.
In Treachery Forged sold about the same number of copies per day, if not more, at a top-2000 sales ranking (it’s first month’s release) as The Merrimack Event has at a top-500… but I’m guessing The Merrimack Event topped it thanks to page reads.  So if you were wondering if page reads factor into the rankings, it appears they do.
Speaking of In Treachery Forged, the success of The Merrimack Event has helped spark new sales for that and my other books as well.  The boost for my other books hasn’t been NEARLY as large as the boost that In Forgery Divided provided.  The other books are in a different genre (Fantasy vs. Science Fiction, which despite the effort of some people to convince people otherwise ARE different genre with different fanbases, even if those fanbases overlap and co-mingle), so that’s probably the difference.
If the page read totals remain high, I may decide to renew my KDP Select for another 90 day period.  Reviewing many of the KDP select horror stories, I intend to minimize my risks by never taking a book OUT of wide distribution to put it into Select, so for me that’ll be a one-way trip.  So, while I still intend to EVENTUALLY send it wide, it won’t be until the page reads drop to the point that sending it wide makes viable economic sense.

And… that’s it, so far.  I’m sure I’ll have more to say on the subject, sooner or later.  In the meantime… my Birthday is this Wednesday (September 20th), and adding a little signal boost pushing for more sales and reviews of any or all of my books would be a really good birthday present.

So… I’ve Got Some News…

I’ll be giving a bit of an update on The Merrimack Event below, but first I have a couple bits of news.

First of all, I’ve mentioned several times in the past few weeks that I’d been accepted at a guest at another convention. I haven’t said which convention that was, however, because it wasn’t posted to their website until recently. Well, if you’ve been keeping an eye on that convention’s website, you’ll have seen my name added several weeks ago, but I was FAR too busy getting The Merrimack Event out to talk about it here.

From January 12-14th, I will be appearing at Marscon in Williamsburg.  As an interesting side-note, the editor for The Kitsune Stratagem, Keith R.A. Decandido (who has written more than a few books of his own), announced today that he would also be at Marscon.  The panel list hasn’t been compiled yet (I’m not even sure the guest list is complete, yet), but I imagine we’ll be on a panel or two together.  That will be interesting, to say the least.

I haven’t heard back, yet, from one other convention I’ve applied to be a guest for, and there are a few other book-related events I’m trying to get involved with in 2018… but I’m starting to feel like a “real” career author after these guest spots.

Another bit of news:  As this blog goes live, so should a complete revamp of my Fennec Fox Press website, with a cleaner, less cluttered, more professional design.  Originally, I’d hoped to merge this blog and that website into one site, but that’s proven to be technically unfeasible.  At least this update will make updating that site a lot easier; the last straw for the old design was when I couldn’t add The Merrimack Event to my Book listing.  While its mostly a re-design, there is a lot of new content if you dig through it enough.

Speaking of The Merrimack Event, you might be interested to know how things have gone in the (slightly less than) two weeks since it’s been released.

First of all, I’ve been working on getting the Print Edition out.  It often feels like I have to relearn Adobe InDesign every time I put a new book out, but I’ve already finished the initial version of it.  I’ve ordered a proof copy, and I’m already aware there are a few minor fixes I’ll have to make once I get it.  Shipping is slow for proofs, so it will probably be a few weeks, still, before I get it ready.

As far as sales are concerned… well, it’s well into the top thousand best-selling books (on the overall list) at Amazon, and it has been in the top 100 sci-fi books on the Kindle, and it’s been in the top 10 in several of the smaller categories I have it listed in.  So… sales have been fairly good, so far.  It’s already broken even and is into profit.  Now I just have to sit back and see how far it goes.

For my next blog, assuming I have no more pressing news, I’ll be going into some of the observations and adjustments I’ve had to make following my decision to put The Merrimack Event in the KDP Select program.  And some day, maybe I’ll return to the “Ravencon Panels” blog series… (it’s been MONTHS; I don’t even remember what the next blog in that series is supposed to be)

BOOK RELEASE: The Merrimack Event

So, it’s not Sunday… or even Monday.  I’m a little late, but what’s a couple days after two years?  Or rather, thirteen years.  But The Merrimack Event has FINALLY been released.  Below I’ll copy the blurb and the acknowledgments (which tells a bit about this book’s history), but here is the book on Amazon.  If you’re using Nook or Kobo, you’ll have to wait 90 days; I’m trying out Amazon Select for the first time.

Blurb:

Once every four years, the Earth Alliance Naval Academy is included in a war game… or rather the Wargame: On a distant frontier colony, cadets must repair, recommission, and crew a fleet of old, mothballed warships for a simulated fleet action against a group of seasoned veterans using top-of-the-line warships.

After some meddling on the part of the Admiralty, many of the Academy’s best are assigned to the oldest, smallest hulk in the Wargame, the unfortunately named corvette Chihuahua. Thanks to a genius engineer, an Army veteran loaned to the Navy for the war game, and an unconventional captain, they make a new discovery which turns her into the most valuable warship in the fleet: The first ever Shieldclad warship.

The crew abruptly finds itself center stage in a real combat action, however, when Earth is attacked by an unknown foe, and a lone squadron of these once-mothballed ships is the Alliance’s only hope to respond…

 

Acknowledgments:

This book was an absolute nightmare to put together. For those of you who have not been visiting my blog or any of my social media accounts, you probably haven’t heard, but this book has been in the self-publishing equivalent of “development hell” for over two years. Editors vanishing on me, non-responsive cover artists followed by a cover artist I had to fire (and finally the one who produced the magnificent cover art you now see), the loss of one fully-edited version of the manuscript while attempting to make a back-up (resulting in my having to completely re-edit it from a much older version), and more.

However, even if you had been following my blog and social media, you probably were unaware that the original version of this manuscript was completed thirteen years ago – even before my debut novel, “In Treachery Forged.” And it was a horrible manuscript. After becoming a self-publisher, when going through my “older” work to decide what to try and publish and what to ultimately reject, this manuscript was the most borderline of the bunch. But I saw a diamond in the (really, really) rough, here, and I’ve been working to polish it ever since. If I were writing this book today there might be a few stylistic choices I might have made differently, but after all of the work that’s been done on it I think it came out pretty good. Of course, that’s for you readers to decide.

By the time I decided to be a self-publisher (even before the “development hell” situation), the manuscript had been checked over by several people, all of whom added touches to it. There were problems with this (I think, ultimately, people were trying to selectively edit certain sections to conform to six different style guides, but no-one in the process applied the same style guide to the whole text. Sorting that out was just one of the things that caused that development hell pain), but they all helped make it better in the end.

As usual, I would like to thank my family for all their help with this book. My late father inspired my love of books and, in a sense, taught me how to write. My mother and brother have both done everything they could to help, including acting as beta readers for a time.

I also want to thank Joel Christopher Payne for finally resolving the whole cover art mess. After having had to fire my previous cover artist, I was about to give up entirely on this book, but then he stepped up to the plate.

I also want to express my appreciation to the Society for Creative Anachronisms, for the use of their name, and Boosey & Hawkes, who let me know in e-mail that Sir Henry Newbolt’s “Old Superb” would be falling into the public domain before this book was to be published. (That was years ago, back when this thirteen-year-old book was still fairly new). Also, I would like to thank the anonymous person who provided OpenClipArt.org the free-for-commercial-use chess graphic I included.

Finally, as mentioned above, this book has been touched by numerous hands over its thirteen years of pre-publication existence. Some of these people may not even remember working on it, it’s been so long ago (a few I lost touch with before I’d even settled on a title for this book), but I would like to thank everyone who helped: Andrew “MageOhki” Norris, Ed “Kickaha” Beccera, June “KaraOhki” Geraci, all those people in chat whose real names I never learned (including the programmer of Akane “the Magic 8-Ball” Bot, who I’m not sure I ever met but whose chat bot provided a lot of laughs and even a bit of inspiration), Sarah Myers (if you ever see this, and remember designing that uniform, PLEASE contact me! I’d like to hire you again, but my old e-mail for you doesn’t seem to work any more), certain fellow members of the Washington Capitals message boards that I can no longer get in touch with, and anyone else who I’ve forgotten from across that thirteen year gap.

Oh, and a big “thank you” to everyone reading this book. Enjoy!