Publishing on Kindle: thoughts and experiences
I published the first two Apocalypse Blog books (Book 1 and the prequel, Book 0) through Kindle Direct Publishing back in September last year. In March and April this year, I managed to get Books 2 and 3 out (respectively).
My sales weren’t great at first. I sold a few handful books every month and the Amazon ranking was around 500,000 (out of more than a million books). It was slow and I figured it would take me forever to earn enough royalties for a payout. I don’t have the time or money for a lot of marketing, so my chances of climbing the ranks were down to luck.
Then something unexpected happened. In March, my sales spiked significantly – I noticed that the rankings were at 200,000 and rising. At first, I thought it was the release of Book 2, even though I had done little promotion to warrant such a change. Also, all of the books were selling well, not just the new one. Bewildered, I looked into it further, curious about what might have caused it.
What I found was that Book 0 was now available for free. Amazon doesn’t allow authors to offer books for free (outside of the KDP Select program, which I haven’t tried yet); the only way for it to happen is through price-matching. It seems that they had noticed that I have Book 0 available for free through other stores such as Smashwords, Apple, and Barnes & Noble, and matched the Amazon price to it.
Mystery solved! As hundreds of copies were downloaded, I bewilderedly watched the Book 0 rankings soar, dropping digits off until it was hovering between 1,500 and 4,000. It even made it into triple digits a few times.
Not only that: Book 0 made it into Amazon’s top 100! In the Science Fiction chart, it has been as high as the top 30, and usually appears in the top 100 listing somewhere.
Better yet, books 1 and 2 also started doing well as a result (the ones that are not free!). I believe it was a mixture of knock-on sales from Book 0 and the increased visibility of the series as a whole. When Book 3 was released, it galloped up the charts to sit with the rest of the (paid-for books in) the series.
The paid-for books have had pretty steady sales over the months since Book 0 went free. It wasn’t a temporary bump of sales; if it was, it hasn’t ended yet! The paid-for books are all currently sitting around 50,000 in the rankings (there’s some variation, but that’s where I usually see them). That’s in the top 5% of all the books on Amazon!
I’m so proud. Self-publishing feels like a shot in the dark to me, putting my work out there because I want it, with little idea about how worthy it really is of taking up space on people’s shelves (virtual or otherwise). But it’s selling and people like it. I can’t say how happy that makes me!
I can see why the publishing houses are leaning towards preferring series rather than standalone books these days. The knock-on sales are fantastic.
Now I’m looking forward to the next ebooks I might release – Starwalker – and I’m wondering how I can make this work again. I need a free first book to pull people into the main series. I don’t have a prequel for that series! Not yet, anyway. It something to think about!
Rejuvenation
A few weeks ago, I took a little time off work. When you book vacation time, people always ask ‘where are you going?’. My answer was the same as usual: ‘nowhere in particular’. I haven’t been away on holiday in a very long time; the last time I did anything like that, it was a one-way trip to Australia.
No, I just wanted a break. I’ve posted several times about how stressful the past year or so has been for me. My day job has been a big factor in that. I have a tendency to care about my work and, honestly, that’s not a healthy attitude. Stepping back and letting go is hard for me.
So I took a break. A week away from the office and the job and everything that makes up that part of my life. I spent time at home. I played games. I opened my mind to other projects and ideas, because I had time and space to let them in. I sorted out the terrifying Writer’s Retreat. I caught up with friends and let my hair down.
It was fantastic. It was what I needed. It wasn’t the rest I got (I wound up doing so much that I got little physical rest at all, and the first night’s bad sleep undid all that anyway); it was the mental side that made the difference. I was able to catch my breath and truly relax.
Now, weeks later, I’m still feeling it. I started posting on this blog again, and thinking about other projects. (I’m trying to keep up the momentum on this blog, but as always, results may vary.) I’ve got ideas crawling out of the woodwork and waving at me. I signed up to write for a couple of anthologies. I’ve started writing Starwalker shorts. I’m getting stuff done.
I feel like my focus has shifted, but in a good way. I even got the urge to write while I was at work the other day, because I was itching to get an idea down, and that’s something I haven’t done in a very long time. It’s a good sign. My attention is shifting towards where my heart has always been: my creative writing.
They say a change is as good as a rest. I completely agree. Now excuse me, I have something to go write.
Starwalker merchandise is here!
After much toil, mostly on the part of the lovely and talented Svenja Liv, Starwalker merchandise is now available! Here are the images of our favourite ship and her avatar that Svenja Liv created for me, along with a supercool image showing Starry’s special perspective:
-
- Starry: she go ‘zoom!’ (Picture: mine)
Those images (and more!) are now available on a variety of items, such as t-shirts, mousemats, keyrings, and more! Check out the new Starwalker CafePress store for the full list of items.
Don’t see something you want? Then please tell me! You can add a comment here or send me an email, and I’ll see what I can do.
If you want to check out more of Svenja’s work, you can find her on Facebook and Deviantart.
Hope you all enjoy them as much as I do!
(Cross-posted on the Starwalker site)
Paper dreams and virtual legitimacy
I’ve had this one dream since I was little. I don’t mean the kind that happens when you’re sleeping; I mean the kind that you have when you’re awake. The kind you hold in your hands and turn over and over; a beautiful, warm idea that your imagination tells you would be so wonderful if you could only touch it.
I want to be a published author. I want to see books on shelves with my name on the spine. I want to see them in bookstores, catch glimpses of people reading them on the train. I want them to be tucked under people’s beds and dog-eared. I want them rippled from reading in the bath and crumpled from being stuffed into handbags.
I want to be able to point to them and say: those are mine; that was me.
It’s not about money or fame; it’s for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with either of those things. I’ve loved stories since I was a child and I can’t think of a better thing than sharing my own. Spreading some of the joy and inspiration that books and stories have given me.
It’s also about being recognised for it. Not in the street or the media; a name on a book on a shelf is what I mean. And a contract from a professional that says, ‘this is worth publishing’. Writing is a big part of who I am and I want people to know that.
I have self-published and it’s not the same. Don’t get me wrong: self-publishing is fantastic and I’m glad that I’ve done it for many reasons. But it’s only a small step towards that dream I have.
It’s not a publisher saying that they want to make my book happen. It doesn’t carry the same kudos.
Talented self-published author M.C.A. Hogarth has an interesting post on her view of this predicament.
These days, that view is falling out of fashion. Self-publishing is becoming more respectable and more recognised. People – including established writers – are moving away from traditional publishers (I have my own reservations about them, too, but that’s a different post). And self-published authors are able to make a decent living now, as a recent post on Indie Reader shows in glorious detail. The market is moving on.
But the kudos isn’t keeping up. I look at the published authors around me, I look at the industry, and there’s still a gap between self-published writers – particularly those who self-publish e-books – and traditionally published authors. It’s the type of writers who are on panels at writing festivals. It’s the books that are nominated for awards. It’s the books that bookstores hold launches for. It’s the books that authors hold signings for and with.
I’m not even sure that I disagree with that gap. After all, it is easy to self-publish these days (and getting easier all the time), while landing a traditional publishing deal is still hard. The easier it is, the more crap that comes through. There’s no stamp of quality or standard of writing, often not even an indication of an editor’s input. (Note: I’m not saying that the quality or standard of writing is bad in self-published books; I’m saying there’s no way to tell quality work from bad.)
In self-publishing, there’s no independent party that has declared they think the work should be published. That makes a difference to me, most especially in terms of my own work. I want to feel that I deserve to be on people’s shelves.
So where does legitimacy in self-publishing come from? Can it? You hear about break-out authors who sell huge amounts of books despite not having a traditional publisher behind them, but they’re the exception. What about the mid-list self-published author? Will there be a day when they can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with traditionally published authors?
I don’t have all the answers. I think the market is moving that way and the walls are coming down. Perhaps I’m just impatient, caught in the stickiness of an incomplete transition.
I still have this dream of seeing my books on the shelf of a bookstore, in a library, in a commuter’s purse. I want to sell and sign books at conventions. I want that publishing contract and an agent to manage it for me. I want a book launch that takes over an entire bookstore.
One day, maybe I’ll get there. But it won’t happen if I don’t send manuscripts out for consideration. Do I hold off self-publishing more books in the meantime? How long do I wait? Or should I forge ahead on my own as I’ve always done, and damn the rest?
This is what I ask myself every time I finish a book and have to decide what I want to do with it. And I’ll keep asking, because that dream is still there, shining and warm. After all, you never know, right?
Paid author!
Last week, I got an envelope in the mail. Inside was a cheque from Amazon: my first payment for ebook sales! Whoo-hoo!
I can now feel justified in calling myself a successful author. I’ve not only sold books, but managed to actually get some money out of it! Not a huge amount, but it’s a start!
I won’t be stopping my day job any time soon, but this certainly helps.
It feels like a step. It feels like a move in the right direction. It feels warm and cuddly.
People like my work enough to pay money for it. Enough people like my work for me to reach the payment threshold. Colour me happy!
Foreshadowing in discovery writing
Or, I always meant to do that
I recently wrote a guest post about plotting web serials, and I quickly realised that there was a lot that I didn’t have space to squeeze in. One of those things was foreshadowing.
I’ve had many comments about things that I’ve foreshadowed in my stories, from readers who guess what’s going to happen in advance and those who only saw it coming in hindsight. They all love it.
What is it?
Let’s get this out of the way first. Foreshadowing is dropping hints about an upcoming plot element. The element could be an event, a character, a secret, a fact, an object. It could be anything that the reader isn’t told explicitly is coming, as well as something they are told about.
The hints can be anything from subtle to overt. It could be a throwaway phrase, a twist of a descriptive wording, a reference a character makes that could be read several different ways. It could be a poster lying on the ground, a news report in the background of a scene. It could be something that characters actively avoid talking about (gaps can be as useful as fillers!).
What’s it for?
Foreshadowing can be used to warn the readers that something big is coming. This can have a couple of effects. The most obvious is building tension (foreshadowing can often be about hinting at the unseen; think about thrillers and horror stories).
Another is preparing the reader for a major switch in plot, focus, or expectation. Surprising the reader can have wonderful effects: plot twists, sudden revelations, ‘I am your father’. These moments can make up the most memorable points of the story for the reader.
But moments that come out of the blue can also bewilder the reader and push them out of the story. You don’t want them to say ‘hold on, that doesn’t fit’.
Foreshadowing is a way of smoothing the edges of a big-bang surprise like that into the rest of the story, and making it less jarring for the reader; more ‘oh, wow’ and less ‘wait, what?’.
Does that mean you can’t have big secrets? Of course not. You don’t have to tell them everything in advance! Sometimes, hints and clues only make sense in retrospect. This is where using double meanings, subtleties of phrasing, and other easily-misinterpreted lines can work wonders.
Foreshadowing can also add another layer to your narrative (this is one of the ways that I enjoy using it). Crime and mystery writing might be a genre on its own, but in many ways, we’re all mystery writers. Or rather, a lot of readers are mystery readers. They love untangling mysteries, unpicking the hints and clues and trying to work out the puzzle of the story before them.
I like to accommodate those kinds of readers. I like dropping hints, planting subtle clues, so that those readers who are looking for them have something to play with. For those readers who don’t analyse the story too deeply, the narrative is pitched so that they get what they’re looking for too; picking up on the hints is purely optional and missing them doesn’t detract from the story.
But how do you do it in discovery writing?
In order to effectively foreshadow something, you have to have an idea of what it is in advance. When you are discovery writing (writing by the seat of your pants or ‘pantsing’, as some call it), you may not have this! And if you’re a web serial writer like me, writing and posting in a continuous, organic manner, you don’t have the luxury of going back and working them into the narrative retrospectively. There’s no editing and no retcons in web serials like mine!
So how is it possible? For starters, I usually have a good idea of where my plot is going at a high level. The details and the exact path to that destination are determined by my characters, and in many ways it develops as I go, but with that idea in mind, I can start dropping hints fairly early on. They’ll be general at first and become more refined as I build a clearer idea in my mind of exactly what I’m heading towards. And that’s fine: they are, after all, just hints.
That’s not the only way to do it, though. I’m going to let you in on a secret: you can use foreshadowing to make you look smarter and far more prepared than you are. This is because you can do it retrospectively without editing. (Yes, I’ve done this. Shh, don’t tell anyone.)
Think about all those elements that you can use as a foreshadowing element. A phrase, a word. A character quirk. An object out of place. A news story in the background. Something out of the focus of the scene, but put in for another reason – flavour, perhaps, or to illustrate setting or character. They could be completely unrelated to each other. They’re all over the place, and you can put them to use.
Sometimes it takes a little massaging of the idea you’re building up to. Alter a detail of it here, tweak the perspective slightly there, and suddenly, you’ve got something with hints already built into your narrative. Add in a few more clues (on purpose!) to smooth the edges if you need to, but sometimes even this isn’t necessary.
I do love when a plan comes together, whether you made it in advance or after the fact. Often, it surprises me how easy it is to do this retrospectively. Perhaps it’s my subconscious helping me shape the story before my conscious mind knows what’s coming! But it works, and sometimes, if you’re very lucky, you can tie together a number of elements into a neat, plot-tingling package and make it look as if you’d planned to do that all along.
Foreshadowing is fun. So go forth and enjoy it!
NaNoWriMo 2012: ambitions ahoy!
It’s that time again: NaNoWriMo is fast approaching, and the ML train is already full steam ahead. And it’s only June.
(For those who are unfamiliar with National Novel Writing Month, it’s a challenge to write a novel (50,000 words) in November. It happens every year, and this will be the 6th year I have participated. Municipal Liaisons organise events in their local areas, and this will be my 6th year MLing as well. It’s crazy, you say? Why yes, yes it is.)
This year, I have a bunch of people eager to help with the MLing load (I’ve had co-MLs before and they were awesome; this year I’ve got three times as many hands to help out!). The Brisbane region is over 2,400 people now, and while we don’t get anything like that many to any of our events (holy crap no – even 10% is terrifying to contemplate), we still have a lot of people to cater for. We haven’t even got this year’s influx of new writers yet!
And, me being me, I want it to be bigger and better than last year. Why the hell not? It’s no fun if you do the same things over and over again, and while we keep doing what works, I like to spice things up by trying at least one new thing every year.
So me and my team of ML helpers and potential co-MLs have been working at the plans already. We’ve set the calendar of write-ins (where we get together to write in the cafe we’ve tamed into hosting a bunch of nutters on laptops) and write-outs (where we go someplace outside to remember what the sky looks like… with our laptops to write). We’ve made up lists of games and competitions we can do for our Kick-off Party, and lists of prizes and things to give away (writers love party bags, apparently).
And we decided to try something I’ve been pondering and talking with various people about for a while now, probably over a year. It’s one of those ideas that makes people go ‘oooo’ and makes me go ‘ahhhhh’.
When you’ve done as many write-ins as I have and you start to think about what could be more awesome, having an all-weekend write-in on an island in the sun is a natural step, right? Especially when the island in question is a ferry-ride away from the port down the road from your house.
But would anyone come? I’ve asked people, done surveys, and the resounding answer was: yes. With a group of willing helpers to ease the terrifying load of logistics and organisation, it seemed like time to try it.
And thus, the NaNoWriMo 2012 Writer’s Retreat was born.
Over the last few weeks, the groundwork has been laid. We’ve got a venue, dates, and a whole stack of cool ideas. To get things moving, bookings opened up for the Retreat on Sunday, and most of the initial set of places have been booked already. We haven’t even got the influx of newbies yet!
There’s still a lot to sort out, but the back of it’s broken. Now we’re careening downhill towards stepping onto the ferry and throwing my bag down on the bed in a villa on an island. When I think about it, I get excited and exhausted all at once.
It’s going to be awesome. We will kick ass. And amongst it all, we’ll be writing novels. What more could we want?
Also, how the hell am I going to top it next year?
Pushing on
As I recently splurged all over this blog about, writing has been a bit of a struggle lately. I haven’t been able to plan and smooth things out as much as I like to, and the write-and-post fervour of getting Starwalker up each week has been a challenge to push through sometimes.
Part of what I love about web serial writing is the discipline of it: it would be easy to let myself slip and slip and wind up not writing at all. Also, I’m stubborn, and not going to let the fact that it’s hard stop me from doing it. If that was the case, I never would have started in the first place.
I’ve got a long history of pushing through the things that try to hold me back. I’ve had many reasons to give up in the past, all health-related. I’ve had arthritis and other joint issues my whole life, and I could have let it stop me from doing all kinds of things. Sports, trips, playing in the snow. I was a district high jump champion when I was 13. I’ve been skiing (I sucked at it, but I went!). I learned karate at uni. The issues were always there, but I dealt with them.
Nowadays, my biggest challenge is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I could have let it stop me doing all kinds of things: things around the house; going out; working. I could have let it stop me writing. I’ve had to make many compromises to live with this condition – and I still do, every day – but I’m stubborn too. I manage it. I work around it. Sometimes, I accept my failings and flagging energy, and I have to deal with that, too.
But I refuse to let it be an excuse. If I had, I never would have succeeded with the Apocalypse Blog and written a post every day for a year. I wound up writing three novels that year while working full time and doing everything else that fills up my time. (Sometimes, I still wonder how I pulled it off!)
If I had let CFS be an excuse, I wouldn’t be writing my current web serial either. It is a struggle, every week, to get the posts out at the moment. It’s harder work than I like. But I push on.
I still love it. It still works, even when I don’t think it will. I’m mentally drained this week, and I only had a vague idea of what I wanted the post to be about the day before I was due to start writing it, so I was facing this week’s writing with a note of despair. Then, just before I went to bed, an idea popped into my head. It was one of those lightbulb moments and I knew exactly what the scene needed to be.
It fought me. The two characters talking in the scene don’t rebound off each other well and they took some convincing to play nice. It was a hard conversation, for me and for my main character, but that’s part of the point of it (it’s no fun if it’s easy, after all). And at the end of the scene, Starry turned an unexpected corner. It blossomed out into an unexpected realisation for her, one that fits perfectly with the kind of emotional journey she has been moving through lately. It was more than worth the fight.
Sometimes, things just work. The post ended on the kind of note I wanted, and the ship is swooping in towards the next post, which I can’t wait to get to. (It’s one I’ve had in mind for a while.) I love it when a vague, half-formed plan works itself out right in front of you.
So here I am, pushing forward. I aim high, knowing that I’ll at least achieve some of what I want, maybe even most of it. Aiming for the stars is a good way to fly, even if you only clear mountains.
Featured Post: Plotting a Web Serial
Not-so-recently, I was asked to do a guest post by the lovely Khaalidah, a web serial and indie author. I was greatly flattered and pleased to agree! Recently, I managed to actually put fingers to keyboard and write something.
Thanks for your patience, Khaalidah, and for hosting my guest post. It was fun to write! I managed to get my thoughts about how to write a web serial by the seat of your pants down in text, which is one of those exercises I always find interesting and illuminating for myself. I hope others enjoy reading it!
Go check it out, everyone!
Riding natural disasters
I wrote this post in the early months of last year, and for some reason, never posted it. I can’t remember why! I suspect I got sick or distracted, and just never came back to it. So I thought I’d share it with you all now, because the sentiment is still true, even if a year has passed since it was originally penned.
People are amazing. It’s good to remember this.
****
Those of you who have seen the news lately will know that Queensland, Australia has had a rough start to the year (2011). La Nina is apparently to blame, bringing violent and wet weather to batter the eastern coast of the country.
First, there were the floods. After several months of rain (note: when I moved here in 2008, everyone was complaining about the 7-year-long drought), a whole heap of rain piled on at once, and most of the state flooded.
I was lucky. My home was untouched – the flood waters didn’t come anywhere near my suburb. I was evacuated out of the office, though, and wound up working from home until the office lost all power. It was two weeks before we were back in the building again, due to the basement parking levels being filled with water (and spilled diesel and who knows what other nasties).
It was a frustrating time. The coverage was heartbreaking, with so many people in the area affected, but nowhere near me. I wanted to go help but we were being told to stay at home and stay off the roads. Being so far from everything, it would have been crazy to try driving all that way, so I stayed where I was (plus I still wasn’t recovered from being sick the week before).
A lot of people were far more determined than me. When I say ‘a lot’, what I mean is not just hundreds, but thousands. That’s how many turned out to help – with moving people’s stuff to higher ground, the evacuation centres, and later the cleanup. A friend of mine went to try to volunteer, and she was turned away every time, along with hundreds or even thousands of others. On the news coverage, there was an image of an old lady helping to clean up the mud in a brand new pair of wellies/rubber boots, bought specially so she could volunteer.
The sheer wealth of goodwill and giving that came out of that disaster is stunning. People drove for hours from unaffected areas to offer whatever they could. Those who were turned away were disappointed and frustrated that they couldn’t do more. I know how they felt – I wanted to be out there, even if my health wouldn’t have stood up to much.
We offered the spare rooms in our house up to anyone who was out of their homes due to flood damage – the best we could do, though we’re too far from the city and flood damage for anyone to take us up on the offer (we assume that’s the reason!). Every place we registered had hundreds of rooms on offer – again, the generosity is astounding.
Having lived in a few different places, I can’t honestly say that that would have happened everywhere. Australia isn’t particularly known for a culture of cooperative community (that I know of), but what I saw over the past few weeks shows that the spirit of helping out neighbours in need is alive and thriving here on this inhospitable island. I’ve become more jaded about people than I like over the past few years, and recent events have done a lot to restore my faith in human nature.
No-one forced those people to help out, psychologically, physically, or otherwise. They were there helping because “How can we not?” As if there was no other right, logical thing to be doing.
I used to share a house with someone who didn’t believe in altruism, as if it was a myth like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. I wonder what she would have thought about this.
Then, just as things were calming down after the floods, the cyclone warning came in. Not for this area, thank goodness, but for the northern part of the state. A cyclone worse than any storm in the last century or so, and more powerful than the hurricane Katrina that flattened New Orleans. It hit an area that was nearly wiped out five years ago by a much smaller cyclone.
The destruction is awful, but the people were amazing. They were sensible, even though they were scared. They did what they were supposed to do, got to safety, and rode it out. Entire towns were flattened, and I think only one person died. One. And that’s because he was in a cyclone on a boat.
Now, those people are picking up the shattered remnants of homes and businesses, and working out how to rebuild. Some only just got finished rebuilding after the last big cyclone blew through. I saw one woman on the news saying, “Oh, we’ll build it again. We did it before and we’ll do it now.” She was crying as she looked at the wreck of her son’s room, missing its roof, covered in rainwater, and knowing just how much work was waiting for her. But she’d just heard a storm tearing the house apart over her head, so I’ll forgive her for being somewhat emotional.
I have great admiration for these people. Perhaps some of them have no choice – their lives are in tatters and they have to rebuild. But they approach it with such calmness and strength. I respect that. And I appreciate them for restoring my faith that people can do the right, good thing when it’s needed. In the current world climate, I think we all need reminders like this.