trying out a new cover

The first book I put up on Kindle, a hardboiled sci-fi novelette called The ElectroLive Murders, has been available for over a year now. I think around 30 copies have been purchased, and more than 500 copies have been downloaded for free, but I still feel like the book hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. A lot of the successful self-publishers I read about emphasize the importance of changing things around with books, and trying new ideas, even after those books have been released to the public. So, in the spirit of experimentation, I'm trying out a new cover.

Here's the old cover:

And here's the new one:

It should be showing up in the Kindle store within the next 24 hours. I'll be sure to follow up with details if the new cover impacts sales in any significant way.

Also, I feel it's worth noting that the images used on the new cover were found through an image search of files marked as Creative Commons material. The Creative Commons website is a pretty incredible resource, grouping millions of photographs, songs, drawings, and other stuff together--all of which have been labelled as free to use (with certain restrictions) by their creators. The photos I used, of the monkey and the circuitry, were taken by Antony Grossy and Dom Pates, respectively.

P.S. Today and tomorrow my horror novelette Cool Blue is available for free download on Kindle.

reassessing self-publishing

I've kicked into a higher gear with the fantasy novel, trying to finish the first draft before mid-August, when I'll be leaving the country for a few months. I'm currently at 76K words (about 250 pages), still hoping to wrap up somewhere around 100K, though throughout the process of writing this book it's taken more words than I'd predicted to carry out certain events. Maybe it'll take 120K to tie off the plot, in the end. If it does, I'm not sure how I'll manage to write that many words before my mid-August deadline.

Anyway, assuming I do, somehow, manage to finish the first draft, the plan is to let it rest for the months when I'll be out of country, and then come back to revise and polish it into a more-final draft. After that... I don't know.

When I started this blog on February 24, I'd just taken a heavy dose of J.A. Konrath's cool-aid. Read his blog and you'll feel like the money starts raining down the moment you self-publish on Kindle. The guy's had incredible success with his own self-publishing efforts, and he preaches that the eBook revolution is Shangri-La for authors.

There are several other high-profile cases of self-publishing success to bolster Konrath's position--it was Amanda Hocking's story that initially got me all excited--but even the idea of several dozen authors earning a living from self-publishing seems a bit less impressive when you start to consider the hundreds of thousands of other authors who have thrown their hats in the ring. And research is starting to emerge showing that 50% of all self-published authors never even earn $500. Furthermore, a lot of the people who are benefiting most from self-publishing already have a fan-base developed from previous books that were traditionally published--J.A. Konrath himself being a good example.

But traditional publishing still seems like a pretty shitty deal, too. The average advance for a debut novel in the fantasy genre is supposedly about $5K, and advances aren't always a good thing, anyway, as you can be held liable if you fail to earn out. If you're earning 6-8% percent of the cover price on a book that sells for $6.99, earning out that advance might take a while (you'd need to sell 10,000 copies, at 50 cents a copy, to do so; and keep in mind that if you do sell those 10K copies, the book has made as much as $70K, and you've only been given $5K of that money). Worse still, traditional contracts usually compromise authors to the point where they no longer even own the book they've written. If the publishing house fumbles your book and you want it back, you'll probably need to lawyer-up and prepare to go to war to get it.

So, while I'm working away at the novel, I'm also wondering what I'll try to do with it when I'm finished. I don't imagine that I'll find Shangri-La by publishing the book with a traditional press--assuming I'd even find one interested in taking it--but the experiences I've had with self-publishing, and the more-balanced view of it I think I'm getting now that I've looked beyond Konrath's blog, make me wonder if pursuing the traditional publishing venue might be worth considering.

poor returns

So far I've made my novelette THE ELECTROLIVE MURDERS available for free on 5 days, and a total of 576 free copies have been downloaded. Since the first free day, 11 copies have sold, and two new reviews have been posted. While I'm happy to think that more than 500 people thought my novelette looked interesting enough to download, I wish more of those downloads resulted in reviews.

How do you get the ball rolling with a kindle book? How do you pull lightning toward it, and make it catch fire? I'm still trying to find out.

The free downloads seem to be the most effective thing I've found so far, but they're still not especially effective. And trying to get bloggers to review the book has resulted in a lot of work with virtually no payback (of the 15 blogs contacted, only one blog wrote a review).

zombies

Still at work on the fantasy novel. About 67K words/217 pages in, thinking the first draft will finish at 100K words/320 pages--so I'm guessing I'm 2/3 done with the first draft. Hope to finish by mid August, then let it rest for a few months before revision.

Already imagining the next project. I'm thinking zombie apocalypse. Lurchers, not runners. Zombie condition provoked by stimulant-use to deal with chronic overwork amongst upwardly bound young professionals--tainted caffeine pills, or energy drinks, or something. So: yuppie zombies. Looking forward to a chance to splatter some yuppies.

The two novelettes I've currently got up on Kindle both have zombie-elements, though neither is a classic zombie-style story. The idea of dead or brain-dead people cursed to continue walking the earth, unable to rest, has deep resonance for me. And not just for me. Lots of people are fascinated by zombies.

Lots of horror ideas relate to zombies, or un-death, too. Vampires are sort of like zombies. Robots can also be like zombies--moving and acting without life.

Recently, in the news, a story of zombie-like behavior in our world. Horrific, scary stuff.

Grant Morrison and uninhibited imagination

About a month ago I put up a post about a book I like called Writers on Comics Scriptwriting. The book is a collection of interviews with people who write for comics, and it brings together perspectives from a lot of really great writers. One of the most entertaining interviews in the book is Grant Morrison's, who wrote The Invisibles and We3 and All-Star Superman. Like the other writers, Morrison's got a lot of useful info about the peculiarities of writing for the comic book medium, the challenges and rewards of working with artists, etc., but the interview gets really interesting when he starts talking about how he was abducted by aliens, how he uses the comics he creates as magic sigils to affect his real life, and other far out stuff like that. The guys an interesting character, to be sure.

He's so interesting, in fact, that some guys made a movie about him called Talking With Gods. Here's the trailer.



I watched the movie a few weeks back (you can watch it free on Hulu), and then I checked a whole bunch of his comics out from the library, and I've been reading Grant Morrison like crazy since then.

Not all of his stuff is perfect, but at his best Morrison's stories are exhilarating and intriguing and--to put it plainly--a whole lot of fun. Probably the work I liked best was All-Star Superman, which is all the more significant because I normally am not interested in the Superman character at all--he's just too boring-ly perfect and omnipotent to interest me. Morrison's story, though, manages to take the omnipotent, uber-grand scale of Superman, and frame a story to meet those dimensions. What I mean is: Morrison deals with Superman as an archetype, as an idea more than a person. The world Superman exists in, consequently, is a fantasy world, a place to explore ideas about our reality--and about the values and perspectives we develop to help us deal with that reality--without attempting to recreate something that feels authentically real. The story becomes a parable, but a parable of epic scale. And, partly because of that, Morrison captures some of the wonder and optimism we feel as kids, but he does it with a story that has no taint of immaturity.

Reading All-Star Superman, and watching the Grant Morrison movie, has helped remind me of how much fun it can be to just dream big dreams, to let my imagination run wild. It's easy to feel obligated to write stories that try to stay true to reality, but that can be inhibiting, too. Why not go all in for fantasy? There's joy to be found there, sometimes.

free download days

I'm not sure if it's solely due to the day of the week, but last Wednesdays free-downloads of The ElectroLive Murders only reached 23 in number, which is less than ten percent of the download numbers from the Friday and Saturday before. Maybe putting it that close to the first day hurt the numbers, too.

update: still ain't paid

Last month, after finally making some sales on the Kindle titles I've got up, I finally reached the sum of $10, which means I've finally earned enough to get paid. Unfortunately, Amazon is no longer issuing paper checks for any amount less than $100, so in order to receive my earnings I'll have to give them direct access to my bank account for a transfer. And then it'll take 60 additional days before their system disburses on the monies earned earned thus far.

I haven't entered my bank info onto their system yet, though I probably will despite my unease with having one more hackable place with my private information on it. Or maybe I'll just keep waiting, and hope that in another couple of years I'll actually reach the $100 mark, and be able to request a paper check.

I'm not overly cynical about any of this, though. I've had stories and poems published by more than a half-dozen other groups, and haven't seen money from any of them either. Obviously, I know that writing isn't the best way to use your energy if making money is the goal.

But I do wonder how much money Amazon has made through selling titles on Kindle, and never had to pay any portion of it out, either because the author never reached $10, or wasn't willing to add account info to the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing site. I've heard that over a million titles have been published on the Kindle. If even 10% of those titles never sell enough copies to earn $10 (and I bet the percentage of sub-$10 sellers is a lot higher than that), that's 100,000 titles that have earned money that Amazon gets to keep all for itself.

Other news: despite having 350 copies of ElectroLive Murders downloaded during last week's two free days, the end result has been just one review and 10 additional sales. I've also logged 2 sales of Cool Blue since that drive, so possibly those are the result of people wanting more after having read ElectroLive, but in the end it hasn't started the snowball rolling downhill after all.

I figured I'd put ElectroLive up for free again today, to see how it'd do on a Wednesday. We're 75% done with the day, and there've been less than a dozen downloads so far.

Oh well. None of this is a particularly big surprise, and none of it will put a significant damper on my mood. I'm used to it.