Glynn Stewart's Blog, page 30
April 25, 2016
Kindle Unlimited & The Scammers
As I’m pretty sure everyone reading this knows, Faolan’s Pen Publishing Inc. started as me self-publishing, and our catalog is fully enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.
There has been a growing amount of media coverage lately of the current issues with scammy books moving into Kindle Unlimited. (Sample article at The Observer).
There are two components to this mess that haven’t really made it into the general kerfuffle:
1) The situation has dramatically improved from the perspective of the authors drawing from the pot and degraded from the perspective of the reader. Why? Prior to February, there was a) no cap on pages and b) no enforcement of the rules against linking to the back of the book. So what we had was 20,000 to 50,000 or even more page books with a link at the front. Luring even a few readers into this made a lot of money.
With the 3,000 page cap and Amazon now using an algorithm to pick up the links to the back, the impact on the pot has been visibly reduced. (The payment per page read in January was .41 cents. In February and March it was .48 cents)
The cost has been that the scammers have moved on to putting out dozens of 3,000 page books where before they’d do one utterly immense one. This has overwhelmed the new release lists in several genres.
Amazon appears to be moving on these, but with their usual ‘clumsy giant with a flamethrower’ grace.
2) These scammers don’t need to snare legitimate readers anymore. As David Gaughran and Phoenix Sullivan cover in their excellent summary of the issue here the hardcore scammers have moved on to utilizing clickfarms and co-operatives and have effectively created a closed ecosystem.
That doesn’t mean the books don’t show up in searches and genre lists – they are burying legitimate books in multiple genres – but that they don’t NEED to fool legitimate readers anymore.
I find the fixed pot payment scheme problematic from my side, but I can see how it controls risks for Amazon and seems to be one of the few ways to run a subscription service without going bankrupt.
All of that said… FPPI’s catalog will remain enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. We ARE seeing improvement, and even at the worst in January we were still doing better in Kindle Unlimited than we ever did outside of Amazon.
My biggest concern here is this: with these issues, Kindle Unlimited remains one of the best options for an independent author or micro-press out there (and I love it as a reader). If we’d managed to keep the scammers out of the pool, think how much better it could have been!
Happy Reading,
Glynn Stewart
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April 9, 2016
Audiobook Update
Tantor Media has Voice of Mars listed for an audiobook release on August 30, 2016.
April 1, 2016
Battle Group Avalon Complete
In the middle of February, having just finished the first round edits on Voice of Mars, I started into the third Castle Federation Book: Battle Group Avalon.
It was intended to be a 90,000 word novel, and I gave myself 45 days to finish it – until the end of March. 2,000 words a day is a pretty sustainable pace for me at this point, so this seemed a reasonable target.
About ten PM on March 31, I finished the book. It is… not 90,000 words. Battle Group Avalon ended up being just over 102,000 words, with the last 30,000 words being written in a mind-boggling (for me, anyway) seven days.
I think it’s a pretty good book XD It will go through my first pass edits and then out to editors in the next week or so and is scheduled for release May 1, 2016.
Happy reading,
Glynn Stewart
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March 23, 2016
SF&F Marketing Podcast
I appeared on Lindsay Buroker’s Marketing SF&F podcast on Tuesday, talking about science fiction and crossing genres.
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March 19, 2016
Voice of Mars Paperback Released
Fashionably late, the paperback version of Voice of Mars is now out! Currently available on Createspace and should be available on Amazon shortly.
Two weeks in is also a good time to speak to how well Voice of Mars has done, and the simple description is spectacularly. Voice peaked at #180 on Amazon.com, making it my highest ranked book to date. It has exploded to a level I find almost unbelievable, and dragged Starship’s Mage and Hand of Mars along with it.
I am… humbled and grateful for its success. (I’ll admit to hoping that Battle Group Avalon duplicates it, though!).
Thank you all.
Happy reading!
Glynn Stewart
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March 4, 2016
Voice of Mars is out Now!
YOU CAN NEVER GO HOME
When accusations of piracy and mass murder are laid against his homeworld, Damien Montgomery is sent to resolve the crisis.
As counter-accusations fly and an old flame re-enters his life, the newest Hand of the Mage-King of Mars finds himself in the midst of a bloody interstellar shadow war. With the death toll mounting, Damien must decide whether he should trust the world he came from – or the world that asked for his help.
The wrong choice will trigger a civil war that could shatter human civilization.
No pressure.
Voice of Mars is book 3 of the Starship’s Mage series
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February 4, 2016
Amazon Exclusivity
Over the course of the first month of 2016, I experimented with removing the Amazon exclusivity from Hand of Mars (Starship’s Mage Omnibus had never been exclusive with Amazon) and running promotions to see if I could get the non-Amazon retailer sales of both books to equal, at least, the December Kindle Unlimited royalties for Hand of Mars alone.
I won’t go into exact numbers here, but the final number for both books in January 2016 outside of Amazon was a little over 50% of the December Kindle Unlimited number for December 2015. Those royalties only barely covered the cost of the promotions I ran in January.
While this experiment has left me with some confidence that I have the tools and catalog to move outside of Amazon if their KDP Select requirements grow too onerous, it also shows that doing so would be expensive and time-consuming… and would, in the current environment, make me less money than Kindle Unlimited does.
Therefore, as of this writing, Starship’s Mage Omnibus and Hand of Mars have been taken down from all retailers other than Amazon and placed in KDP Select.
To be in full compliance with KDP Select’s Terms of Services, I could not have Episode 1 available elsewhere, which made it impossible to keep it free. Therefore, I have taken Starship’s Mage: Episode 1 down completely. The individual episodes of the Omnibus are no longer available in any form, however, please note that the Kindle Sample of Starship’s Mage Omnibus covers a significant portion of Episode 1.
This also means, sadly, that Voice of Mars (Starship’s Mage Book 3) will likely not see a release outside of Amazon. However, I can confirm that Voice of Mars will be released on schedule in March, most likely in the first half of the month.
Happy reading!
Glynn Stewart
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January 3, 2016
Starship’s Mage: Episodes come down
One year and eighteen days ago, the Omnibus of all five Episodes of the original Starship’s Mage went up.
Since then, I’ve been wondering at what point to take the individual episodes down. Someone buying all five of them actually paid me less than someone buying the cheaper Omnibus.
We went through a number of hoops trying to make clear the distinction between the ‘Episodes’ and the ‘Books’ on Amazon, but I’d worried that it was confusing people.
I got a message today from a reader who was very confused by the transition from Episode 1 to Book 2 to Episode 3. They’d lost track of the timeline, because they’d ended up reading a large chunk of the story out of order.
This is… not the optimal reading order for the Starship’s Mage books, and I wouldn’t want any of my readers to go through it that way! Since my best efforts have clearly failed to avoid confusion, I took the individual episodes 2 through 5 down this afternoon from Amazon (the only place they were still available).
Episode 1 will remain available as a free promotion for the series, and, of course, the Starship’s Mage Omnibus remains available.
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December 31, 2015
Looking Forward – 2016
As I mentioned previously in my post Looking Backwards, 2015 was a mind-boggling year for me. I released four novels (City in the Sky, Space Carrier Avalon, Hand of Mars and Stellar Fox), made a deal with Tantor Media to release audiobooks of my main-line books (Space Carrier Avalon, Starship’s Mage, and Hand of Mars have all been released as of this blog post), and in general have watched my mostly forsaken dream of being an author explode into reality.
So what’s coming in 2016?
My target is 50,000 words a month, totaling 600,000 words for 2016. Those words include outlines and worldbuilding documents, so you won’t see all of those words. We have some plans that may see some world-building content cleaned up and released as bonus content to the mailing list, but that will be late 2016 if it manifests.
In terms of release schedule, the following are all-but set in stone (though titles are subject to change)
March 2015:
Voice of Mars (Starship’s Mage 3)
June 2015:
Battle Group Avalon (Castle Federation 3)
September 2015:
Alien Arcana (SM4)
December 2015:
Still untitled CF Novel 4
Current working title of CF4 is To the Touch, but I don’t like that a lot more than I liked Deep Strike or Shadow Raid (both earlier working titles)
Those four books in my two main series will be written, though names and plots may change as time progresses. Including attached outlines and world-building, though, those books will probably total 400,000 words.
The other 200,000 words I intend to ‘play’ with – and by ‘play’ I mean ‘throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.’ While my two series are both Space Opera, they’re different enough to require different ideas and mind-sets to write, which helps keep my brain fresh. Nonetheless, I’d like to branch out into other genres.
I haven’t completely made up my mind on just what I’m doing yet. I have two Urban Fantasy settings I’d worked on when I was trying to get traditionally published. Either of those could be polished up, have a sequel added, and get me two novels for the price of one… but UF is a hard genre to work in. While the type of UF I like and write is hard to find, the genre itself is over-saturated (mostly with books I can’t tell apart from paranormal romance), so breaking out is hard.
I also have ideas wandering around the back of my mind, with outlines already written, for a western gunslinger style fantasy and a steampunk-esque dark fantasy (the final days of an empire built on golems and magical armor). My brain is also known to regularly ambush me with ideas for urban fantasy stories… and also for further Space Opera stories.
The most I can say at this exact moment is that I will release at least one non-mainline-series book in 2016. Right now, it’s planned to be the The Last Iron Legion (that steampunk dark fantasy) but may end up being urban fantasy or even a stand-alone Space Opera novel. Given that it will probably be June or so before I’ll touch anything that isn’t Starship’s Mage or Castle Federation, I could easily change my mind XD
But there will be two Starship’s Mage and two Castle Federation books in 2016, and I will be releasing a novel in one of those series every three months.
Speaking of which, Stellar Fox came out ten days ago and the Hand of Mars audiobook came out Tuesday. Do you have your copies yet?
Happy reading!
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December 25, 2015
Merry Christmas
A Blessed Solstice, Happy Hannukah, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours.
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