Digital Delta: Charting a course through the changing world of publishing.
Star Trek FREE for Amazon Prime members (Amazon Tablet thoughts)
Sep 23rd
I’ve been an Amazon Prime subscriber for a couple of years now. It’s been a huge money saver for the family. Free two day shipping on books and many other items is an absolute life-saver sometimes. It also means I don’t have to fret – or wait long! – on a print book I want. Love it. Two days isn’t the two minutes it takes to grab an ebook, but it’s pretty good. And some books, you just want the print version, you know?
Amazon’s been stepping up Prime benefits, though. They recently started adding free video to the membership. Lots of TV series, buckets of films. My wife tore through a couple of seasons of Torchwood using Amazon video – free. She’s watching Dr. Who right now. Stargate SG-1 is up for free as well.
And they’ve just added Star Trek. Not some of them, but every live actor televised episode of every series. The original is there, Next Gen is there, DS9 is there, Voyager is there, Enterprise is there… Wow.
I’m sure this is all part of the prep for the release of Amazon’s Android Tablet later this year. The idea is simple: tablets are not computers. Tablets are media consumption devices. Tablets are for listening to music, watching video, surfing the internet, reading books, etc. Amazon already dominates the ebook market. They have a Cloud Music player with free storage, and often cheaper prices than iTunes on the same tracks. They have an Android App store which is easier to navigate than the Apple one, and head and shoulders above the Google one. And now they have a video arsenal which seems to rival Netflicks. In short, Amazon is building the infrastructure they need to go toe to toe with the iPad.
But there’s a critical difference. Apple built the infrastructure for media consumption, but their focus is still on sales of the device, which costs $500-800. Amazon is building an equivalent media consumption system, but seems intent on making that their money-maker – with a device cost predicted to be $249 that includes free Prime membership (a $79 value), so the tablet effectively costs only $170. That’s remarkable for a color tablet. The low price coupled with the strong set of offerings makes Amazon’s entry into the tablet market a potent one.
And it’s good for the rest of us, too. 
Even if you’re not planning to buy their tablet, having access to thousands of hours of popular TV shows and films is pretty amazing!
What’s the future for print books?
Sep 5th
I’ve participated in a number of interesting discussions on LinkedIn of late. One which stood out was a group of people chatting about the future of the print book in an increasingly ebook world. Is there a future for print books? What would that future look like? The opinions, suggestions, and predictions ranged the entire field of possible answers, and the discussion has been well thought out. Posts ranged from “ebooks are here, get with the future!” to “you can pry my print books from my cold, dead fingers!”
One fascinating thing about that discussion is that, being something of a history buff, I happen to know that almost the same talks were had back when the printing press was first introduced.
That’s NOT a slam on the arguments against ebooks, though! My wife, among many other things, creates beautiful recreations of medieval manuscript pages, and new works in the same style. The calligraphy and illumination (artwork done in the margins, painted by hand, often unique to each copy of a book) that were part of most pre-press manuscripts were simply amazing!
And they’re gone, now. It’s an art form practiced by a diminishing few.
There are *enormous* benefits to be had from ebooks. Ease of access. Ease of storage of our beloved works of literature. The ability for those who have trouble reading small text print books to access literally any written work. Ease of transportation of the books. Lower costs for production of books. The ability for anyone to publish, to try to have their voice heard. Access to books which might have too small an audience to warrant print publication. The surety that no work of literature we own will be lost to the ravages of disasters. Increased ability to interact with other readers and even the writers of beloved books through the increasingly interactive networking available between readers. And buckets more.
But there’s something to be said for holding a physical object, as well. We’re physical creatures. We value having a possession, owning a thing. It’s built into us over millions of years of evolution, made much more intense over the last couple hundred thousand years. Humans like to have *stuff*. There is a visceral pleasure in it; scientists can even tell you precisely what chemical compounds are released in the brain upon acquiring a new possession to make us feel good. Acquiring more stuff is a survival trait.
And the only “stuff” we get to physically acquire regarding ebooks is newer, better, faster, cooler looking readers. Yes, we get to read the books – we can collect them, ephemerally. But the *physical* object – the thing our DNA is coded to make us want – is the reader, not the ebook. I think there’s significance to this.
Think about being given a gift from someone – which would you prefer? A little card saying “here’s the code, go download Book X”? Or an actual physical copy of Book X? We’re hard-coded to prefer the latter. It’s in our genes.
It’ll be very interesting to see how this change affects our species moving forward. I, for one, think that while ebooks will take over the vast majority of all publishing, there will still be a place for special books, for special gifts of print editions – which perhaps we’ll finally treasure again the same way we once viewed the hand-copied medieval manuscripts, because like those books, the future print books will be rare and memorable items.
Making Magic Work: Cost of Magic
Sep 4th
One challenge in fantasy writing is the craft of designing a magic system that makes sense – that’s believable for the reader – but which is flexible enough that you can continue to toss out new curves over the course of a series.
Often, writers will fall back on some set of tropes that they’re familiar with. The opening to Eragon, for instance, reads a lot like a write-up of a Dungeons and Dragons game. The writer seemed to quickly realize that wasn’t going to work for the long haul, however, and crafts a magic system which is fairly unique for the rest of the books.
Jim Butcher’s Dresden novels have their own fairly unique tropes. Wizards can’t be near technological devices without messing them up, for instance. Wizards have a pool of inner power which they can use up, and replenish by resting. Wizards have varying levels of power. But as the series rolls on, we see those tropes shift somewhat – we learn, for instance, that the “tech restraint” was true even hundreds of years ago – that magic interferes with different things in different times, but always has “issues” with something common to the non-wizard. We learn that stimulants can temporarily boost magical power (at some cost!). And Butcher gives us a much better idea, as the series goes along, what that variation in power level is like.
Getting to classics, Tolkien hardly uses wizardry at all. Actual spell casting is something he brings to the fore only rarely in his Middle Earth books. But when he does, he focuses on one particular element of magic common to almost all excellent fantasy: cost. In his case, there are deep veins regarding the price of power and the corruption power can bring with it, using the Rings of Power as the tool to discuss the issue.
Orson Scott Card’s Hart’s Hope creates a world where magic is created by killing something. The larger the creature, stronger its life force, and closer to the magician the being is, the more magic you derive from the killing. And Card takes that thinking to its logical and fairly frightening conclusion.
It seems obvious on the surface: magic must have limits. If it didn’t, wizards would use magic for everything, and writers would have a hard time crafting interesting stories about someone who had so much power with no cost. It’s possible, of course to create stories where magic has no cost – you CAN create a fun story about magic without price. But at that point you need some other limit instead. Someone who could only create a 10-watt light in their hand could have no cost involved in the process and probably not unbalance a story. Someone who can create any size light of any intensity should probably have a price involved which grows larger as the light gets bigger and/or brighter.
In the Ryan Blackwell novels, I’ve fallen back on the familiar trope of magic wearing out the spellcaster. Use magic too much, and you won’t have anything left for later. Ryan, however, has a couple of twists. His story takes place on top of a huge ley line nexus. This gives him a well from which he can draw extra magic – at some risk (cost!). That same well has a tendency to attract dangerous elements of the magical world, though (cost!). And in fact, as Ryan learns, the more magic one uses, the more likely one is to attract the attention of certain parties who move against powerful new magicians. Sometimes just to eliminate future rivals. Sometimes as food. Sometimes a little of both.
That’s not really a cost, exactly, but it definitely creates a “threat” around the use of magic!
In the end, part of what will make a magical story memorable and interesting will be the way you set up the magical system, and the unique/creative elements you invent for your magical milieu. The less you rely on “standard tropes”, or at least create strong twists on those tropes, the more unique the magical element of your story will become. Creating interesting costs can be a challenge, but having some twist which differentiates your story from others will lend it strength, interest, and memorability.
Literature, past, present, and future.
Sep 2nd
Spotted an article by way of the Passive Voice blog which tweaked a few thoughts in my head.
Some of the pertinent bits:
Reading an old fashioned novel seems to be dying out, with people increasingly too busy or too stressed to sit down and actually read. On the rare occasion people do sit down to read, it is often a magazine, a newspaper, a celebrity autobiography or with recent technological developments, a Kindle. For many people this is not an issue, the human race moves on as technology moves on, but will the book be forgotten? Will the Kindle have the same effect on books as MP3 players did on CDs? Or will those who appreciate the value of an actual book continue to do so?
You can read the entire article here.
I read this sort of thing often – people scared about changes in culture, about ebooks eroding print book sales, about bookstores moving from the building down the road into online stores. It’s change. Change makes folks nervous. But I’ve never like the whole “sky is falling” routine. The only constant in human history is that things have always changed.
I don’t understand the assertion that “reading an old fashioned novel seems to be dying out”. We’re living in a time when last year, despite global financial issues, more novels were sold than in any other previous year in human history.
Dying out? Hmmm.
Yes, there are many things out there which compete with reading for our time. But there always have been; there have always been other entertainment options available. The form these various activities take vary from era to era, but their existence is nothing new.
I think the author is confused about the nature of the ebook, as well. Once, most books were hand copied, with gorgeous illumination works embedded on each page. Every page of your average book was a work of art in itself. With the advent of the printing press, these unique books went away.
But I think most would agree that the printing press was a wonderful invention.
So too with ebooks. With a distribution cost approaching zero, the ability to send and receive virtually any book instantly, almost anywhere on the planet, ebooks are changing the function of books more completely than anything since Gutenburg’s press. Yes, the pressed paper pages are on their way out in favor of electron-based digital work. Much like the printing press replaced the illuminated manuscript, there are some elements of grace and beauty which will be lost in this transition.
But when all is said and done, the printing press opened new doors for literature – and the digital book is doing the same. And like the printing press, I think we’ll all look back in hindsight and agree that this has been a good thing.
There is no try.
Aug 25th
I was scanning LinkedIn the other day, and saw one new person introduce himself as an “aspiring writer”.
That struck me immediately, but I wasn’t sure why right away. It took a little thinking about it.
My wife talks to me about how it’s nice sometimes to be a human “being” instead of a human “doing”. By that, she means sometimes you just have to sit back and BE, rather than constantly be running around DOing things.
But writing? Writing is a DO. (It’s also a BE, but I’ll get to that.) You are a writer when you put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and write. You’re an aspiring writer when…I don’t know, perhaps when you’re daydreaming about someday putting pen to paper? But that doesn’t sound very productive to me.
I hear this all the time though. Someone is working hard on their writing. Taking it seriously. Maybe getting some writing in every single day, pounding those keys. That person reads books on writing, follows writers’ blogs, works to learn the craft and business, and is producing new material.
And then he or she goes and undermines all of that hard work by self-identifying as an “aspiring writer”.
I call BS. If you are writing, you are not an aspiring writer. You are a writer. Is that so hard to say? If you’ve been identifying as an “aspiring writer” or say you’re “trying to write”, then right now, while you’re sitting there, give something a shot. Say “I am a writer.”
I usually don’t go in for the whole “positive affirmations” line of stuff. But there’s some facts under the fluff. What we call ourselves does impact our sense of who we are, which can undermine or uplift our ability to accomplish things. When we say we will try something, we give ourselves room to fail. When we say we aspire to something, we leave wiggle room for ourselves to not reach that goal.
If you say you’re aspiring to be a bestselling author, OK – I’ll buy that. It’s not something you really have a lot of control over, so you might be disappointed. Generally, I find the best goals are the ones over which you have a very high level of control, like “I want to finish this book by next month, and immediately begin working on the next”. But it’s a goal, something you want to work toward.
It’s not a statement of who and what you are. “I am an aspiring writer” is a statement of intent about an action, a “DO”. Writer, in other words, is something you become by doing. There’s no special rigamarole, no secret handshake, no velvet carpet. It’s just pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, write.
Writers DO. To BE a writer, you write.
To write, you put pen to paper, you don’t aspire to do so.
As Yoda would say, “do, or do not – there is no try”.
Don’t aspire.
DO.
And then BE.
By Darkness Revealed Sample – Chapter Two
Aug 23rd
And as promised, here’s Chapter Two!
If you’ve missed the first chapter, you can read it here. If you’re curious about the (no) marketing experiment I did regarding the book, you can check that out here.
So what have I been up to? Setting up a Goodreads account, for one. I can’t believe I’ve never done that before – what a great site! Fun place, millions of readers talking about books they like. Pretty amazing. I can see it being a horrible time-suck for me if I’m not careful.
And I’ve been hard at work on the sequel, of course. Ashes Ascendant will pick up shortly after the place where By Darkness Revealed leaves off. Each is a complete story – think of the books as a sequence of episodes, not as one big story sliced up into chunks. Ashes was actually going to be a short story before it sort of exploded into a novella. Then my biggest struggle was figuring out if I wanted “book two” to be a much shorter work, or if I wanted to somehow bring it up to the length of the first one. Adding another 30k words to the outline of a 20k novella was a bit of a struggle, and I had to set the work aside for a while.
But the plot twists I needed finally showed up. And Ashes has a nicely layered complexity to it as a result.
Back to work for me! I hope you enjoy reading By Darkness Revealed!
Oh – and if you like Ryan Blackwell stories, there’s a short story about him in the charity anthology ebook, Twelve Worlds. All author proceeds from the book go to RIF, so it’s a good cause. And the Ryan story is in the sample of the book. On Amazon, Nook, and Smashwords.
Chapter Two
I MADE MY WAY over to the library, the Drill Sergeant’s orders weighing heavily on my mind. If I wanted to really be of use to Fletcher, I needed more information. Maybe I could find some references there – some resources, something. I could hit the internet, too. Recruits weren’t allowed to have computers in our rooms until second semester, but we had computer and ‘net access in the library and labs all over campus.
As I walked, I carefully reached out with my perceptions, trying to get a better feel for the ley nexus. I realized that I’d been avoiding it. Intentionally not Looking, intentionally not exploring the thing. Frankly, it scared the heck out of me. I’d never seen that much raw power in one place before, like a coming together of many great rivers of magic. I’d gotten used to the faint hum in my head, but not to the leys themselves. It was time to see what they were. If anything was the cause of all the extra supernatural activity in the area, it was most likely to be the nexus.
I squinted my eyes a bit, and…there. Right in the middle of the field, smack between all the dorms. Twelve major lines, which I Saw as thick beams of yellow fire. As I walked, I was coming close to one. I’d pass right under it. I’d done so hundreds of times since arriving on campus, but this time, I stretched out my will and curled mental fingers into the stuff that made up the ley.
A tendril of that yellow light broke off from the main ley, writhed vinelike down my projected thought, and before I could even take a breath reached for me like I was a glass of water in the desert.
Yellow fire slipped into me, flowed through me. I gasped. I felt the ley energy as heat, saw it as light, and felt more alive than I ever had before. I turned my hand over, marveling at the traces of yellow dancing within my veins.
Then I realized I was getting uncomfortably hot. I glanced skyward and Looked at the ley. I was still tapped in, and the energy seemed to be pouring down at an increasing pace. I staggered, yellow flashes crossing in front of my vision. With a thrust of will, I cut the link. The tendril roiled back into the ley and vanished. Leaving me with muscles, blood, and bone feeling like they were aflame from the energy it left behind.
Ground and center, I thought. Release the flow into the Earth. But I couldn’t focus. The burning was too much. I staggered off the road, came up against one of the buildings. Cool bricks brought me back to myself for a moment.
I laid both hands against the brick, and pushed – with my mind, with my will, I shoved all that liquid fire out of me and into the wall. It roared out with an energy that sent brilliant tracks of light scattering all over the wall to my Sight, but was completely invisible to my normal vision. I could see both views, the magical atop the mundane one like an overlay. I closed my eyes as the last bits of ley fire left me.
I opened them again and stepped back from the wall, bringing my hands down to my sides. And stared blankly at the wall. There were two black, burned looking patches in the brick. Each was about the size of my palm. I blinked, making sure I had shut off my Sight. I had. All I was seeing was what was there. I touched the brick with a finger, found it warm. A little of the black rubbed off on my fingertip. The ley energy had scorched the brick.
That wasn’t possible, though! Or, I hadn’t thought it was, anyway. I’d seen magical energy in a number of forms, and I’d read about people lighting candles with magic and such. But although I’d tried a bunch of times to perform the feat myself, I’d never managed it. I figured getting magic to really impact a physical object was just a myth, something that couldn’t really happen.
I looked at the scorched brick again. And I thought about the water spirits, holding Thomas down in the water this morning.
Maybe I needed to revise that opinion. Continue Reading
By Darkness Revealed – Chapter One
Aug 19th
I’m a huge Jim Butcher fan. When I first ran across his Dreden Files novels, I tried one out. Read it in about a day. Went out and bought a few more. Read those in 1-2 days each. I worked my way through the first eleven books in something like two weeks. Harry Dresden is an amazing character, and I’ve enjoyed Jim’s writing immensely.
Ryan Blackwell isn’t Harry Dresden.
The voice character of “By Darkness Revealed”, and the upcoming sequels “Ashes Ascendant” and “Dead in Winter” is young. He’s a freshman at college. He’s gone away to a military school, following a family tradition of service despite his father’s anger about the subject. Partly, Ryan wants to do something to annoy his father. Partly, he wants to be something like his grandfather. But partly, he’s hoping to escape from his magic.
Because Ryan’s had the Sight – ability to see the magic and magical creatures which lie outside most folks’ view – for years. It drove him near crazy in high school, and all he wants to do is go someplace normal, mundane, where he hopes he can somehow leave it behind.
He picked the wrong place when he went to Northshield University.
Because Northshield has a secret that most folks don’t know. It’s sitting on top of an enormously powerful nexus of ley lines, a confluence of incredible magical energy.
And all that energy attracts a lot of attention from precisely the sort of folks – and things – Ryan was trying to stay away from.
Before long, bad things start happening. And Ryan discovers that he’s the only person in the neighborhood with even a prayer of standing up to the dark forces building around the campus. And all he has is a prayer – his will – and the magic he once hoped to escape from.
Below is the first chapter. I’ll be posting chapters two and three over the next couple of days. If you enjoy these samples, consider checking them out – the book is available on Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, and Smashwords. Apple, Sony, Kobo, and trade paperback versions are coming soon.
And drop me a line. I’ll respond to every comment. I’d be glad to hear from readers.
Chapter One
A COLD RAIN drizzled down as I slogged through mountain-chilled knee deep water. The river bed was slimy ooze with slick rocks scattered about on top. The mud sucked at my combat boots with every step, but it was still steadier going than the rocks. Every slip off one of those rocks risked another dunking in the water, which was unpleasant for more reasons than just the temperature.
I kept my eyes open as I ran, carefully scanning the water with my Sight. I’d been able to see things most people couldn’t since I was thirteen. That wasn’t always a pleasant thing. Right now, I was being followed by a small swarm of little magical motes, some sort of water spirits. I wasn’t sure what they were up to, but I was feeling a little like a large tuna in a shark tank. Or maybe more like a piranha tank. Their sharp, darting movements had a hungry, predatory look to them.
I’d learned the hard way that while things of the spirit world couldn’t generally touch the physical, that didn’t mean they couldn’t make themselves felt. I’d also learned a little bit about defending myself, and I was tired of being followed. When I saw one particularly daring mote dart in at my leg, I’d had enough.
With an effort of will, I channeled some of my own self, my spirit-energy, outward into a bubble around me. The bubble popped into my Sight, translucent blue to my vision, swirling eddies of force whirling slowly in a chaotic pattern.
The little mote kept on coming, and slammed into the shield. I felt the impact like a blow in my mind, but the shield held, flashing magical light. The mote turned and made a beeline for some rocks near the shore, hiding underneath. The rest of the little critters scattered, all rushing away from me to hide somewhere. I nodded, satisfied.
“Go find something else to eat,” I muttered.
I stood in the freezing water, panting, and let the shield drop. Holding it up would have taken more concentration than I had handy right now. My legs were already mostly numb from the cold.
Running in a Vermont river during the last week of October was stupid. I’d been here at Northshield University for two months, and thought I was used to life as a freshman at a private military college – tough, but bearable. And then every so often, our cadre would get bored and come up with something that raised the crazy bar just one notch higher. Today’s run was pretty much top of the list.
I stood shivering in my sodden uniform for a bit longer, until the wind picked up just enough to remind me it was time to get moving again. Camouflage ripstop cotton didn’t do much to cut wind chill, especially soaking wet. I was in pretty good shape, so I’d managed to get out ahead of the pack. At a guess, my recruit platoon was strung out over a quarter mile of river behind me by now, and I didn’t want to spend any more time in this water than I had to. It took a real effort to pick up my feet and start jogging again, but I managed.
Voices carried on the wind from behind me. The little delay had cost me some of my lead. I peeked back over my shoulder to see two guys in the same camo I wore splashing into view, coming up on the spot I’d stopped to rest. They reached it as I watched.
And then one of them went down, hard, going completely under the water.
I Looked, and saw them immediately – dozens of those little motes, darting around the form of the recruit who’d gone under. They ignored his buddy, who was trying to haul him out of the water. I watched as they wreathed bands of magic around the fallen recruit. That was going to make it tough to haul him up – I could see the magic bonding him to the water around him.
I stood frozen with indecision, the chill of the wind feeling like it cut right to my heart.
For two months, I’d managed to not let a single person know about my Sight. For two months, I’d been able to keep my magical workings small, secret. Most people didn’t believe in magic anyway, so that wasn’t hard. Mostly just a matter of not acting like an oddball, not startling every time I Saw something that no one else could.
Despite the fact that Northshield seemed to have more supernatural critters per square mile than anyplace else I’d ever been, I’d managed it for two months. It was a fresh start. For the first time in years, I’d felt almost normal.
If I helped, it was the end of all that.
I relaxed as a tall cadet wearing a drill sergeant’s brown round came running up and started to help pull the downed recruit up. Drill Sergeant Fletcher was a wiry man, tall and slim, but I’d seen him knock out a couple hundred pushups without breathing hard. He’d get the recruit up.
I turned away to keep running, but looked back once more. Both men were still struggling, trying to get a good grip on the fallen recruit’s body and failing. Every time they pulled, their grip just slid away. And while he was still flailing about in the water, he was moving a little less than before. I could see those little motes crowded around him, feeding on little bits of his life force while he drowned.
That was all I could take. Continue Reading
How do readers find books?
Aug 18th
It’s something of a mystery for us all – writers, publishers, even as readers, it’s not something we always understand. We readers do find books – all the time, we’re discovering new writers, or new books by writers we’ve loved. But how, precisely, does this happen? What’s the process?
This is something which has confounded publishing houses for…well, longer than I’ve been around, anyway! They still don’t know. But indie writers are out there self publishing today, and relearning the same Dread Secret.
That there is no secret.
Some books just get an audience right away. Others get readers after a certain period of time. Others get ignored by the public. And telling which is which, or why one succeeds immediately and another does not, isn’t a science. It’s something more human than that, because storytelling is something which touches our hearts and souls more than our minds.
I hear constantly from writers who desperately flog their one book as many places as they can. They tweet about it, post about it, strive for review blogs to read and review their book, get Facebook and Google+ pages running… In short, they end up spending hundreds of hours of effort – maybe even thousands of hours – working hard to get just another handful of readers to pick up their book.
I have a theory on this. My theory is based on the idea that I’d like many people to read and enjoy my work – let’s say 5000 or more. It’s also based on the fact that I simply don’t know 5000 people – and I am betting most other folks don’t, either. Sure, writers who’ve spent years building fan bases have their core “10,000 fans” – which is a great goal. But for the beginner, unless you’re famous in some other manner, I don’t think you can count on reaching out and individually contacting those 5000 people.
But I am more and more sure that you don’t need to, either.
Dean Wesley Smith has said many times that your best marketing tool is the next book. Barry Eisler said the same. Write more books – each is another draw which will pull in a few more readers, who will go on to read your other books if they like what you wrote.
So I did a little experiment.
I released a new book. I put it up on Amazon only, as ebook only (it’s now available on Nook and Smashwords as well, and will be on Apple, Sony, and Kobo soon). Then I kept it completely silent. No friends and family sales. No tweets. No Facebook mention. No talking about it on any blog, or anywhere on the internet. It was a completely silent launch for two weeks.
And during that time, something interesting happened. That book averaged a sale a day, usually exactly one new book sold every day, even though I never once did *anything* to encourage anyone to buy the book.
Which means people were finding it without blog mentions. Without tweets. Without friends buying copies. Without reviews. Without anything at all.
A reader a day isn’t a blockbuster. But it’s not bad, either. And it demonstrates to me clearly that good books will find readers. Yes, you might speed up the process a bit by blogging about it (which I am here, my experiment done). But I’m more convinced than ever that all the social networking and advertising in the world is not as important as simply working hard to write well, working hard to produce a quality book, and then getting back to the task of creating the next good book right away.
I’m already hard at work on the next. How about you?
For now though, you can read the first of a new contemporary fantasy series, “By Darkness Revealed”, which follows the adventures of Ryan Blackwell as he comes into his full magical powers in our modern world, while attending the military college of Northshield University. Something dark is stirring there, and Ryan will have to rise to meet the threat – if he can – in this short novel.
The blurb: “Ryan Blackwell thought to escape his magic by burying himself in the military college at Northshield, Vermont.
Instead, he finds himself in the midst of a deeper and more dangerous sorcery than he has ever encountered before.
Suddenly, only Ryan’s wit, will, and the talent he once hoped to leave behind stand between a nightmarish creature and everything he cares for.”
And the cover:
Available on Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, and Smashwords. Apple, Sony, Kobo, and trade paperback versions coming soon!
Writers: A few things you need…
Aug 4th
There’s a few key things you MUST HAVE to sell your book, based on my research of the marketplace and careful chatting with other writers.
1. You must have a great cover.
Your readers will be scanning a page full of twenty or so little postage stamp size books. They will then click “next page” unless a book cover & title interest them. That’s all you have for advertising – just your cover and title. That is your initial hook. Cruddy covers are generally instant death for ebooks.
2. You must have a great blurb.
Learn to write the blurb. Study the blurb. The blurb is not a review – you do not tell the reader “this is the hottest novel since…” or “this is just like so-and-so’s books”. SHOW, don’t tell. Read the backs of some paperback novels, if you’re writing a novel. Once your cover hooks someone to the book page, only your blurb will hook them to take the next step. Just like writing a query letter is a different skill from writing a book, writing a blurb is its own skill. Learn it.
3. You must have an outstanding sample.
Ditch as much front matter as you can. Shrink your image to take up as little file space as you can. Only the first X% of an ebook is in the sample, and it’s by file size, so cover seems to count (please correct me if I’m wrong there, that’s my observation, concurred with by a few other Kindle authors). Small file size JPG for the cover (reduce quality a little in Photoshop when saving), put as much front matter at the back of the book as you can, and give them the biggest sample you can. The sample must be interesting. The sample must be great writing. The sample must grab the reader so well that they immediately buy the book when finishing the sample.
Cover to blurb to sample to purchase.
4. You must have a good price.
That doesn’t mean 99 cents, unless it’s a short story or a loss-leader story, say the first of a trilogy. I’d stay in the “money range” for most books, which means $2.99 and up. No higher than $6, I think, since I’ve noticed sales seem to take a hit in that range for many writers. Keep it high enough to make a good profit on sales, and low enough that it’s *easy* for the reader to click that “Buy” button after finishing the sample. You don’t want to make them think about it. You want them to click.
5. You must have a compelling book.
The rest of the book has to be as good as the sample. Remember, they can return the book if the sample is stunning and the rest of the book is your grocery list. You want them to walk away from reading with a feeling of deep satisfaction in the purchase.
6. You must write other books.
If you want to sell, and keep selling, you should be writing more books. Your next book is your best form of marketing. The more books you have up, the more each tends to sell. Short stories are great ads for your other writing, too, but books are best. Continuing to write new books keeps recent releases of yours in the spotlight – in an ideal world, you want to produce at least one every three months, to stay in the “released in the last 90 days” category. Realistically, most writers can’t do that: jobs, family, and lack of experience stand in the way. So we do what we can. Produce quality each time, but continue producing. I suspect – but can’t prove – that ebook publishing is a bit like the old shark swimming myth; if you stop moving, you’re dead.
Every book you have up compounds the chances that a reader will see the cover, like the blurb, download the sample, buy the book, have a great reading experience – and then go buy another book you wrote. Get them to buy a few of your books in a row, and you have a fan. That reader will remember your name, maybe for years. They will look for your new releases, and grab them. If you have just one book up, your name will likely be forgotten shortly after the book is done. You need to reinforce the brand recognition by getting readers to read more than one book.
Some folks like Bob Mayer and John Locke have even gone so far as to suggest you not begin doing any marketing – or even not bother publishing at all! – until you have 3-5 books ready to roll. Lots of indie writers burn themselves out marketing away, spending hours on that process which they could be using to write the next book. Which remember, is the primary form of marketing for all your work. Stay on task, keep getting your books out and up and rolling. I favor the publish right away, and publicize later option. It’s not like the books are going to vanish if you don’t market them. They’ll still be there a few months later. Get the other books up, then market the lot of them. With three books up, every tweet, every blog post, every ad, every review becomes three times as effective. With five books, it’s even better.
Even if you do all these things, it doesn’t guarantee success. But failing to do these things invites failure.
An Example of Change.
Jul 10th
Yesterday as I was driving to work, I had NPR on the radio. An interview was on – some writer with a new book out, so I listened to the writer describe this novel, and how it came about. I was intrigued by the story, and the part he read aloud sounded like solid writing. So when I pulled into the lot at work, I yanked out my Kindle from my bag.
I still recalled the name of the book: “The Passage”. So I searched for a Kindle book by that name. There it was, top billing – I recalled the author’s name when I saw it. Justin Cronin. I downloaded the sample and being a little early, sat and read the first few pages.
I could already tell, before I put the book down ten minutes later, that I’d buy the book after reading the sample – the writing was delightfully well crafted, the story compelling. And I did buy it, last night after work.
From radio interview to *instant* sample for the listener, to purchase the same day from my house to my hand in under two minutes.
I sat and thought about that a little bit, last night. It’s a gamechanger. See, I talked about the book at work last night, too. And at least one co-worker yanked her iphone out and downloaded the sample right there while we were chatting about it.
That’s remarkable.
It’s a dramatic change in how books are being sold, how they’re being viewed by readers, and how they are being passed via word of mouth. You don’t have to try to remember the name of that good book a friend mentioned two weeks ago, when you go to the book store. Now, the moment someone tells you a good book is out there, you can immediately download the sample. Bang. Done.
The implications of this are deeper than I’ve had time to think through completely, but they seem enormous to me. How about you? Have you experienced any changes in how you select and read books?
