And here... we... go.

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Gooood afternoon AW!

Had a pretty spiffy day yesterday. Going to tell ya about it in a bit.

But first, the two month(ish) status check.

(Edited to reflect reports, and proper accounting for KENP)

The Thin Black Line Between Infernal and Divine went out on Kindle two months ago in July. It didn't go into the Kindle Select Program. It's sold 49 units since then, a few of those purchased from Great Britain, Denmark, Australia, and Canada. It has received 2 four-star reviews.

Keep an Ace In the Hole dropped a month ago. I put it in the Kindle Select program, and used 3 of the 5 available free days up front. It's netted 169 free downloads, and 344 KENP read. It's sold 43 copies so far It has recieved 7 reviews, 4 Four star, and 3 Five star.

All told, my efforts have cost me $0, and netted me $59-60.

Not bad for two months, that's about a buck a day.

If I were following pattern I'd be releasing something now... but the only thing I've got right now is my novel, and it's not done yet. Still need the final cover art, still need to finish the final draft, still need to okay that with my awesome volunteer editor. Time, time, time, no way around it.

Time and money. The novel's going to cost me money. We settled on the cover art price for $100, which is pretty fair for the awesome picture I'm getting and unambiguous rights. I'm going to get a custom ISBN through Createspace... The $10 option. As pointed out by folks above, and in other threads, I can always pick up a standard ISBN if I publish a new edition elsewhere.
Fortunately, it'll be a moot point for three months. Going by the exposure and reviews gained from choosing KS for "Ace", I should definitely enter the novel into Select right from the get-go. I'll use the opportunity to put "Thin Black Line" in there as well.

I need to learn how to do a package deal, book + PDF through Amazon. Is that even doable? Hrm.

All told though, things are humming along to plan. Finishing the novel and getting her rolling in Createspace will cost $110 plus the cost of a couple of early galleys to make sure that the formatting is correct. So my prior efforts with my smaller works has covered 50% of that cost, roughly. I have no doubt I'll make it back, if the pattern holds roughly the same.

Status: 85% Slower than I'd like, but progressing and within expectations.

Recommendation: Stay the course, Seiple!

Now then, on to my day!

So, a friend of mine's married to a local high school teacher. She runs the literature club there, and they put out a yearly journal. This year they've been looking at doing an e-book version, along with the print version.

My friend said "Hey, want to come in and tell them about your publishing experiences on Amazon?"

I said "Sounds fun, but I've only been doing this for a couple of months."

"Eh, it's more than they've done."

"Fair enough."

So I got to go in and meet with the club after school, and tell them about the research I'd done, and what I'd found, and what my experience had been like so far. Didn't present Amazon as the only option, also mentioned Nook Press, and Smashwords, and Lulu and the various pros and cons of each as I saw it. (There's others out there, I know, but I hadn't done much research on them and I admitted it.)

I gave them a toolkit, pretty much a bunch of URLs of the various useful and free websites and services that I'd used to get here. AbsoluteWrite was at the top of the list, natch. Critique Circle was a close second, and a free file conversion site (for making ebook files to check your work before publishing) was a third. Had a few more, but they didn't really apply to what the class was doing.

I did warn them before getting started that this was a volatile market. Yeah, right now, Amazon's on top. But a year or even a month down the road, that could all change. And that they shouldn't take my word on anything, and do their own research.

It was a good talk. Got to draw a fun analogy between self-publishing and the San Francisco gold rush. Basically, you've got an unending stream of prospectors coming in with hope and money to blow in pursuit of their dream, and the folks REALLY getting rich are usually the ones who are selling the buckets, the beer, laundry services, and other things. Just basically reminded them to realize that there are a lot of people wanting to make money off of their work, and trying to sell them things that they might not need, or could get way cheaper if they just looked around and took the right precautions. If they wanted to walk out of there with a pocket of gold, they had to be careful about what they bought along the way.

Not a public speaker, but I tried to keep it lively. Seemed to work, for the most part. Afterwards, the kids had a fair amount of questions. They seemed impressed by my sales numbers, and were eager to hear about marketing ebooks... Had to caveat most of the advice I gave them, that I hadn't yet done a lot of the methods I told them about due to the work and time involved, but that I knew many offers who swore by'em, and research indicated that they were good methods.

They probably will go with Amazon, or at least take a harder look at it, and that shouldn't be a problem. It's a small community project type zine, that they usually don't even bother getting an ISBN for. Worst case, they'll be able to market it to their friends and families, and rake in 35% or 70% pure profit to help affray the costs of the print run. (Which goes through a local printer, and usually nets them a 20% profit.) Really the biggest obstacle is going to be learning the right format to get their stuff into a working .MOBI (I also passed on a recommendation for Calibre, though I've not used it myself. Between that and the file converter website in the toolkit, and the Amazon Kindle previewer, they should be good with time and practice.)

I tried to nudge them to take a look at Smashwords as a good alternative, but they weren't as interested there. Eh, fair enough.
It was a good 45 minute talk. Would've been an hour, but I hit some road construction on the way in. >.< Should've mapped a better route. Ah well, lesson learned if there's a next time.

I liked that.

I liked having the chance to talk with interested parties, pass on some experience and tips.

I may have to start looking into local events, finding panels to help with.

...

I probably need a lot more experience, though. Need to get more credentials, and more hands-on with some of the things I've learned about.

Well.

Only one way to fix that.

Back to writing!

Minor update

Draft three of my novel is DONE. Took about six hours over two frantic days, and added about 6K words to the end product, but it's better for it.

That's what I think. But I know enough not to trust my opinion on the matter without running it past less-biased eyes.

It's been fed out to the beta readers who were interested, and to my awesome freelance editor. We'll see what she thinks, when she gets to it in a couple of weeks.

Honestly, the waiting is the hardest part. I finished the first draft in March, more or less, and it's been about 6 months of give and take, back and forth, and constant polishing.

Still, I've spent no money doing it, and I count that a victory. If everything aligns at this point, and my reviewers have no major changes, then I'll have it out by the end of October.

I decided to celebrate by shifting my novella over to Kindle Select. It was designed to head there anyway, and this might get me a few more Kindle checkouts. I really regret not having something small to drop this month, to keep my momentum going. As it is, I just had the first week pass with no sales at all. It's a little disheartening to see that, no lie. I'd gotten used to checking KDP when I was feeling down, and enjoying the simple joy that seeing a new sale or KS checkout brought me.

I think the lesson I'm learning here is one I already knew... I'll need marketing to get much further. But I don't have money to pay someone else to do it, and unlike the other steps of this process, the free stuff will only get me so far.

I dunno.

Is now the time for a marketing push, or should I wait until I've got more stuff out there to make marketing worthwhile?

I'm open to suggestions. This part of the process is very new to me.

I apologize if I'm putting out too many updates over relatively minor stuff. All I can say is that it doesn't feel minor to me, and it helps me keep my head straight, as it were.

At any rate, I just got my first royalty payment from Amazon, for July's sales.
It's a hair under $20. If it was a check instead of a digital transfer, I'd have it framed.

Guess I'm officially a writer now!

Thank you. Yeah, after consideration, I think you're both right. I COULD try to push my existing stuff with marketing, but my available products just aren't much in the grand scheme of things, yet. I'm better off finishing and releasing a few actual novels and building up a body of work before I start dabbling into things that might cost me money for uncertain return.

Patience. Agh, harder than I thought it'd be. Ah well, I have a path. I can follow it. Nothing I wouldn't be doing anyway...

...speaking of that, life took a weird turn lately.

Something I don't think I've mentioned before, but I've been a major roleplaying and gamer geek for decades. Board games, tabletop RPGs, minis, LARPs, I've dabbled in 'em all. Way before I started formally writing, I was dabbling in designing my own games. Nothing that ever got published, of course. They either ended up being unfinished works, or the roleplaying equivalent of fanfiction, games using established settings that I'd never get permission to do from the copyright holders, that sort of thing.

Anyway, recently one of my gaming group members has had her business really start to take off. She makes little dragon statues out of sculpey, and she's crazy good. As in some of her larger pieces go for $50-100 crazy good.
I made the joke one day that her smaller dragons would work great in a minis skirmish game, and we just sort of stopped and looked at each other. And the simultaneous thought was "Hey. That sounds pretty awesome..."

So right now we're sorting out packaging, production costs, and I'm writing up a ruleset for that game. It'll be modular, customizable, and so sugary-cute that you risk diabetes from reading the rules. But if we do it right, it'll be fun as hell. And that's the important part.

Best of all, if we can keep prices down, we lose practically nothing if the game fails to catch on. We shrug, ditch the packaging, and she sells the dragons separately. They already sell like hotcakes as-is.

About the trickiest part of this is figuring how to set her up with an LLC, a website, and maybe a trademark. Still crunching through that, but I've done
an LLC before. From what I recall, they're pretty simple.

But.

That's not the only news.

Got contacted by ANOTHER friend, this one I know from mutual LARP acquaintance.

He wants me to write some fluff for a gamebook that he's printing, in-house.

He's strapped for cash so I'll sell him the manuscript for free, and only charge royalties on the finished product. Won't even be much royalties there, he doesn't need even a novella's worth of stuff.

So yeah. While I'm waiting for the stars to align to the point where I can get my novel out, I'm going to be busy with "non-standard" writing.

I call it non-standard because Writing and explaining RPG and miniatures rules is a weird subset of the usual process. You're kind of giving "how-to" directions, but there's an art to it. You have to make it fun or entertaining, and match the tone of the game you're explaining. It has to hold the interest AND get the point across, simply enough that the person who reads it doesn't have to check back too often during the course of a game.

And it matters. Do it right, and there are people who will buy or look at your game just to read it and enjoy the daydreams it evokes. Do it wrong, and you drive potential customers off.

What an interesting time it's been...

And so I pass the third month of sales.

(Edited to reflect reports and proper calculation of KENP)

The Thin Black Line sold 8 more copies, including my first sale in Italy! Running total there is 55 copies sold.

Ace in the Hole sold 6 more copies. Running total there is 51 copies sold. It also got three more reviews, splitting the 5 and 4 star ratings at five and five.

Oh, and there was one Kindle unlimited checkout of Thin Black Line. That's 108 KENP, so pretty happy there.

My editor got my novel back to me a week or so ago. Unfortunately, it's been a busy week. My 9-5 job's been wiping me out, so I have to push to get editing done, and stuff at home has tied up a lot of my usable downtime. I'm only about 18% done with editing.

So we missed the Halloween planned release date. Had a feeling this might happen, so I'm glad I didn't do any pre-release stuff.

Still, I'm not concerned. The e-book will be out before November's done... unless...

Well, Hodderscape had a call for submissions back in August. I threw my novel into their slush pile, though my expectations were low there. Hodderscape said they'd be done with reviewing submissions by 31 October, but they just blew threw that date. And I haven't gotten any response back, after the initial "Hey, we got your sample" email.

So... hm. I hate to send them a retraction, but realistically I'm giving myself a 2% chance that they won't reject my submission. I'm up against some pretty stiff competition there, and my novel... well, it's weird. Not a high-demand subgenre, not very mainstream.

Well. It'll take me a week or so to finish up all the little editing touches and improvements. After that, if they still haven't gotten back to me, then we'll see.

Hopefully they send me back a rejection soon. Or if I somehow beat the odds, we'll see how traditional publishing stacks up against the progress I've been making here.

And now, the time has come!

Acting upon the advice of wiser heads than mine, I sent an email to Hodderscape. I explained that I'd really like to get my ebook out there before the holiday shopping rush, and if I could pretty please self-publish my novel without retracting it from the slush pile.

Gods bless'em, they said sure.

It's OUT! Right here...

I'll give figures at the end of the month. I fired off word via my social media networks, and over the forums I haunt. Now to sit back, see how the reviews go, and watch sales rack up.

I have no regrets, and only hopes for the future. *Sniff* My first... My first novel is finally, finally out.

Well.

A day or two of celebration, methinks, then it's time to go check out this Createspace thing I've heard so much about...

Haha, thanks! I'm giddy with joy over here, it's going so well... Not quite at the point where I'm shaking the pillars of heaven, but it's going better than I thought, all around. I've already recouped the price of the cover art, and that's a good feeling.

Oh! Before I forget... if anyone's interested, my other two e-books are free today, as part of the KNEEL BEFORE DIRE holiday special. I think that'll be a thing whenever I release a novel, it seems to be working pretty well.

So.

This monthly report just got a hell of a lot more interesting, now that my novel's debuted. I'll collect my thoughts on it after I update the numbers. (Final count for November is done.)

(NOTE: Edited to reflect reports, and count KENP properly)

The Thin Black Line sold 17 copies, bringing the running total to 73. During the day it was free, it had 112 downloads.

Keep an Ace in the Hole sold 21 copies, bringing the running total to 57. During the free day, it had 83 downloads.

Dire : Born sold 188 copies to date.

KENP read during November totals... 17732 pages. Most of that from Dire : Born, naturally.

Most of the sales are in the US, which I expected. Didn't expect the large (well, comparitvely large) surge from the UK, though, It's about 15% of sales. Amazon's Canada, Australia, and Denmark sales pages are also doing pretty good business, and I even sold a copy in France. France!

I don't know why, but that feels like a milestone. Maybe because I've never sold anything through that hub before.

So Yeah. Things are going pretty good.

Objectively, I knew I'd built up a bit of an audience with my fanfiction writing ways, but to see that actually translated into money for original content is something else. Seeing it in action is breathtaking... though the encouraging thing, is that it's not accounting for all of the sales. Friends and family took their usual share, the Fanfic readers are the lion's share of it, but there still seems to be a small amount unaccounted for, particularly in the Kindle Unlimited reads.

I think I'm getting noticed. I think I'm getting new readers.

It's a slow trickle, mind you, but it's there. Perhaps some of it was the holiday rush? Hard to say. Time will tell if it dries up or keeps growing.

This book MIGHT be the breakthrough I was looking for. If not now, then down the road.

If not, then no loss. It's a fun read, and about as solid as bedrock. I can build me a mighty house of words on its base. And thanks to the way I'm constructing this literary universe, it'll support the others around it.

This is the strategy, with any long-term project I do. Lay down a rock-solid base, and once it's sturdy you can build to your heart's content.

And in about two months, I'll get a nice chunk of royalty money showing up that I can play with. I resolved not to put more into this than I got out of it, but now... Now I'll have enough that I can start looking at marketing. More importantly, I've got a product that I can market. Couldn't do that with the others... they helped soften up my demographic, attract new readers, and get me some seed money, but they were too short to make ads worthwhile. This one's different.

Ah... I'm counting chickens before hatching again. Need to wait and see how the reviews go, need to get through the holiday season, need to see if Hodderscape ends up rejecting me, need to get cracking on the other minor projects I've been racking up. Need to get the POD copy going (probably through Createspace,) and the Audiobook version going. (probably through ACX.)

Oh. And I need to write the next chapter in my fanfic, can't forget that. The community's given so much to me, I need to keep on doing my part.

Yeah. It's humbling. It's a feeling I can turn into incentive to write more and do better.

I was so afraid before, and now I wonder why? Even if it had flopped, I would have lost nothing but pride. Come what may, come what might after this, I've written a good book, and people are out there enjoying it. Might not be perfect, but it's mine, and nothing can change that.

Of course... I've got a long way to go before I catch up with you kind folks. Got a lot of tricks and techniques to learn, to file off the rough edges and make sure I can match or exceed this again, and again after that.

Thank you Cathleen. You've been helping me since the day I showed up, you and most others here. I'll not forget that.

Interesting...

Sitting here a week and a half after the launch, sales have finally started to slack. Down to about 1-3 a day now, which is fine by me. I'm in this for the long-haul, and I'm not expecting miracles at this stage.

But a still more pleasant surprise, is that while paid sales have slacked, Kindle Unlimited checkouts are still going strong! I've been seeing double digit checkouts throughout this, from the launch on, and they haven't slackened one bit.

If the common rubric of half a cent per page holds true, the folks who are checking out my book are basically paying me 33% royalties. This is pretty awesome! I'm cool with folks getting a good discount on my work. Way I see it, it's tempting people in who might not grab it otherwise. Money on top of that is icing on the cake.

And some few of the checkouts, and a couple of the paids here and there are my older work. That's a sign of new readers liking what they see...

Small gains, thus far. But I don't mind that one bit. It's a month for small gains, and quiet little victories.

Who knows? If my fiddling with Createspace goes well, I might even get the print version of Dire : Born out before Christmas. Be cutting it REAL close, but it miiiiiiiight be possible...

Yeah, I went into Createspace thinking "Oh, no problem! Learning how to format for .mobi files wasn't a big thing, I'm sure this won't be a hassle to convert my file over!"

Heh heh wow. Oh my sweet summer child...

Two hours later, I decided to stop cussing up a storm and hunt down a template. That went much better, and they're not too hard to find, actually. You just have to be walking a book through the process, they show up during the interior section of the ordeal. Except that the template had its own issues... it's Word, and I use OpenOffice. Most of that didn't matter so much, but it took fiddling to copy it without destroying the template's formatting, and every time I closed and reopened the file, some glaring spacing errors would show up. No idea why, and nothing I did fixed them permanently.

Finally I just threw up my hands and exported the file to a .pdf without closing it, and that worked perfectly. It loaded into Createspace and looks fiiiiiiiine in the previewer. There's a tiny header error in like two spots, but unless you're looking for it it's hard to spot, so I'm not going to worry about it at this juncture.

I will say this. For all the fuss the template put me through, it ends up in a very sweet little previewer tool. There's no confusion at all in my mind, as to how my book's supposed to look.

Anyway, the next part up is the cover. That's probably going to be more of a headache. I've got full rights to use the image I procured for the ebook cover, but I'll have to fit the image into the template and probably do some editing with GIMP. That's not my strong suit.

Worst case I can talk to the original artist and chuck some money at him to do it, probably. But that's time and money, and I REALLY want this out before the end of the year. It's a personal goal.

I'll have about 270-290 pages in a 6 X 9 trade paperback, so the cost is somewhere around $4.25 or so. I'm planning a cover price of $15, so my profit margins won't be huge. I could go higher, but $15 is about comparable to my "peers". (I've been using Marion Harmon's "Wearing the Cape" as a benchmark. He's about where I want to be in a few years.) Besides, money's not my goal. That's the goal for the Ebooks, the print version is just there because I want a physical copy, and because I know the market's there. I've already had a few people tell me they're down for a print version, so I figure I'll recoup the $10 I spent for a custom Createspace ISBN at least. Beyond that... eh, I'll have the option to print up copies for conventions and the like.

More importantly, I'll be able to donate a few copies to the local library chains, and maybe try some placement with the local indy bookstores. Between the Cincinnati, Dayton and Columbus areas, I've got quite a few to play with. While I don't expect much return at this juncture, this will let me test the waters, get my name and face out there to the physical distributors, and maybe bring in a few more fans from a different vector than the online one.

WriterBN said:

I actually enjoy the formatting process, but I'm strange that way It does make a huge difference if you use tools that are built for the task, though (Adobe InDesign, in my case, with Photoshop and Illustrator for the cover).

Click to expand...

That makes sense. Mm... if things keep going this way, I may actually be able to drop money on tools like InDesign, Photoshop, and the other packages. Thing is, then I'd need to learn how to use them. That's time spent on things which don't interest me as much as writing does, and risk discouraging me. Losing morale mid-project would be disastrous.

For the near future I'll be sticking with GIMP. It's free, and widely-used enough that there's a fair amount of how-to's out there.

I'm very pleased to report that Createspace's cover creator is a freaking dream to work with. Much easier than I thought!

It didn't come out perfectly, but it'll do. I only had to do some minimal fuss with GIMP, which is good. The more I dig into GIMP, the more its limitations and idiosyncracies bug me. Don't get me wrong, it does a good job for the price, but... I'll probably have to bite the bullet and get Photoshop before the year's out.

On the downside, a reader alerted me to the fact that there are a fair amount of typos in my novel. I went back to confirm, and... sweet Jesus. I don't know how the hell that happened. Only thing I can think of is that I got a couple of different versions mixed up.

Well. That's embarassing. Thank gods for the digital age, and the ability to revise on the fly. I'm fixing all of them now, then I'll figure out how to initiate an update to outstanding ebooks through Kindle.

It also means a full edit before I finalize the print version. Should be able to finish knocking that out tonight.
I am sad to have contributed to the stereotype that self-published novels have lots of typos. But eh, it's my first novel. I had a lot to learn. Figured SOMETHING was going to go wrong.

I'll do better next time, and better still the time after that. And so on, for as long as my fingers work.

Oh! In other news, I attended a local convention, and ran into another local author. We talked shop a bit, and he invited me out to a convention called "Imaginarium" that'll be in Louisville, Kentucky next year. Networking, hoooooo!

Anyone ever been? I've checked it out on the web, and it looks small but nifty.

@Akaria: Thanks! I'll check that out when I get a chance.

WriterBN said:

I wouldn't recommend investing in those apps just to format a book or design a cover. I use them pretty much every day, because I earn a living with them. My point was that if you have the tools and can use them, formatting and layout is actually pretty easy.

You'd be better off spending your money to pay someone else, IMO. As for covers, there are some decent premade ones out there.

Click to expand...

Ah, okay. That's good advice, thanks. Now that my seed money gained from writing is looking pretty good, I think I can do that...

I'm sitting here, with my first printed copy in my hands. Dire : Born is now a physical book, thanks to Createspace and the miracle of POD.

I'm honestly a little choked up. Haven't felt this way since I held my daughter for the first time. (Maybe not that intense, mind you.)

Looks like it'll take a few days to get into Amazon.com, but the Createspace store has it already. Time to go let my die-hard fans know...