Updates

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything of substance here, so let’s take a moment to chat. Well, not chat–I’m a-gonna spiel for a bit, and you’re welcome to add your two cents after I’m done.

It’s been a little over two months since ALL WE HAVE and LORD BOBBINS AND THE DOME OF LIGHT came into this world officially. AWH made it to 14 reviews on Amazon. LB&tDoL got its first review yesterday. Not quite the awe-inspiring numbers one hopes for, but that’s life.

As much as readers love books in a series, there’s a strange fact about how sequels never perform as well as the first book, and this is painfully true. You want to know why books series have to end? It’s because each additional book tends to do more poorly than the book that preceded it.

Nowhere is this more evident than the promotional weekends that Amazon allows you to do: For a short period, once in a book’s life, Amazon allows you to chuck it up for free downloads. It can really help get a series noticed. I did this with AFTER EVERYONE DIED when it first came out, and it really helped me launch the series. In five days, it was downloaded more than five-thousand times, and from that five-thousand, I managed to scrape out fifty reviews. I’ve mentioned before that fifty is the magic number for reviews on Amazon. Those reviews got AED put into marketing mailers that Amazon sent out, and put it into suggestion lists for people who like post-apoc fiction. It helped a ton.

When LONG EMPTY ROADS came out, and I did the free downloads, it only managed to get to about 1,300 downloads. It took a lot longer for it to get to fifty reviews, too. I think right now, it’s somewhere around 55-60 reviews. It helps, but people like to start a series at the beginning, so when people see “Book 2” in a marketing mailer, they’re not quite as quick to jump on it as they are when something says “Book 1.”

ALL WE HAVE was tossed out for free downloads this past weekend. It only got about 700 downloads. Not great. Better than some books, but still not anywhere close to what I hoped. You have to figure that only about one out of every 100-500 people actually take the time to review a book they like.

It’s hard to continue a series. I get emails on occasion for people looking for another book in the series, and I do hope to write one at some point, but I don’t know if it will be any time soon. I can guarantee that there won’t be a fourth book in that series in 2019, though. Between working full-time and trying to write other books I’m interested in doing, I just don’t have a ton of time. I have so many ideas for stories, it’s hard to pin down exactly which ones I want to write.

I’m working on a few different stories right now:
-A fourth Teslacon novel. (The third one is already written.)
-A sci-fi book
-A fantasy novel
-A literary mystery novel
-A classic detective novel (which isn’t any good at this point…)
-And, I have a YA mystery/romance kicking around in my head that I’d like to start writing at some point.

In addition, I do have a fourth Survivor Journals book in my head, but that’s on a back-burner for now.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep firing on the TeslaCon novels, either. They’re not selling (outside of TeslaCon itself), and they’re not generating reviews. Steampunk is pretty niche. It’s hard to build an audience in that realm. I’m hoping the launch of TeslaCon West in 2020 does something for the series, but we’ll have to see.

Publishing is something you really have to be driven to do, especially without any sort of press support. I always think of Mr. Miyagi’s parable about grapes from “The Karate Kid”: Publishing yes–safe. Publishing no–safe. Publishing maybe so–squish like grape.

It is a grind. It’s a grind I love–but it is a grind.

As always, if anyone has any writing they want me to take a look at, feel free to email me a sample chapter or two. I’d be happy to read it and make some comments.

If anyone has any brilliant ideas for generating sales or traffic to my books, let me know that, too.

Thanks for reading!
-s