My 2019 Writing in Review

My usual disclaimer: It is time once again to put forward my writing summary for the past year. As always, the facts and figures I provide here aren't meant to be boastful - I provide the information so that others can have an understanding of what I've done, what works, what doesn't work, and everything in between. I sell more books than some, and fewer books than others, and that's that.

In 2019 I sold 1,167 eBooks and tracked 471,533 Kindle Unlimited eBook pages read of my material (that converts to almost 1,900 Commando novel-length reads). This is almost a thousand fewer eBook sales than last year, and about 230,000 fewer KU pages. Interestingly, when I look at my royalties for this year as compared to last, I'm only down about $1,100, but of course, there is a two-month sales/royalty overlap (meaning, the money I received in January 2019 was for books sold in November 2018), and indeed the monthly royalties I received in the first quarter of 2019 are much, much higher than what I received at the end of the year. So you can see what my sales trends look like visually, here's January through November, 2019:

And here is the title-by-title sales for December 2019:

So, why the big downturn at the end of the year?

Well, a couple of reasons. First off, I only put out one title in 2019. That was my WW2 novella The Butcher of Calais, one of the "Commando Short Bursts" titles. While it was well-received by those who read it, it wasn't read by all that many, and I am not sure if that was because it was part of the Short Bursts series, or if it was genuinely not interesting to my Commando readers. Only time will tell, but it is true that this was the only title I released all year. I will say that this past year I did more reading and research for future books than I have in a long time, but frankly, the motivation to write has been pretty weak this year, and I am fighting hard to get past that wall, but so far, I have been unsuccessful. I'll come up with a great idea, do some good plotting work, a bunch of research, get several thousand words on the page...and then it just fizzles out.

The second reason my KDP sales have been so low, especially in the last quarter of 2019, is that I made the decision to partner with an independent press, Wolfpack Publishing, and give them the rights to publish my six Commando novels, as well as Killer Instincts and San Francisco Slaughter. The Commando books were released in two three-book omnibus editions, while KI and SFS were released on their own. Since all my previous "Writing in Review" posts have shown that roughly 90% of my sales and income is driven by the Commando titles, this effectively puts the whole of my financial future as an author in the hands of Wolfpack Publishing. For those of you who have always handed your books off to a publisher, that might just be business as usual for you, but for someone who did it all on their own for eight years, that is a big, BIG step, and I did not take that step lightly. However, as life the last couple of years had meant less time and energy for writing, and definitely less energy for marketing, I decided that giving my books to a publishing house that was well known among my fellow authors for a strong record in marketing and sales, I felt they would be able to do the one thing I could not - find readers for my books.

The ultimate question is, of course, did I make the right decision? Wolfpack's strategy for selling books is to rely extremely heavily on Kindle Unlimited page reads, and almost completely ignore sales revenue. Everything they put out is listed at $0.99, even multi-volume omnibuses like my Commando series. This means that while Amazon paid me $6.18 for every three Commando titles sold, Amazon is now giving out only $.35 for those same three books, and that's before Wolfpack takes their cut. Of course, they target Kindle Unlimited readers and make most of their money from them, and a page is still a page no matter who publishes it, but I made a significant amount of my money from sales, not KU reads, so Wolfpack needs to not only make up what they are taking as their cut of the KU royalties, but all the money I made from sales as well. This means that now, in order for me to make the kind of money I was making on my own, Wolfpack is going to have to sell a lot more copies of my books - especially the Commando series. And I do mean A LOT, like, an order of magnitude more.

Can my new publisher come through on those kinds of numbers? We will have to see. The US sales of the Commando titles aren't very promising. They're still in the six-figure rankings, which is...well it's terrible. In the UK the rankings are much better, but the UK eBook market is different, much smaller, meaning you don't have to sell as much in order to get those better numbers, so while the numbers in the UK are "good", that doesn't necessarily translate to sales being great. On the other hand, Killer Instincts and San Francisco Slaughter are now, after all these years, actually selling fairly well. It was always highly frustrating to me that those two books were well-liked by pretty much everyone who read them, and yet these was so little cross-popularity from Commando readers. So, while I will probably not be rolling around in large piles of KI and SFS cash, those books are finally going to be earning the kind of money I always hoped they'd earn.

I think that's all for this post. Perhaps next week I'll do a post on 2020 projects, but for now, it's fingers crossed.

Media Monday: Death Kiss

A bit of a brief post today, as I'm in what's typically the busiest week of the year at work. If you've been around this blog for any amount of time, you know my fascination with the DEATH WISH series, both the two books written by Brian Garfield, as well as the *five* movies made starring Charles Bronson. And of course, it's no secret that much of my fiction writing is inspired by the notion of the urban vigilante.

So I was definitely curious when the micro-budget crime movie DEATH KISS came onto the scene. Basically, you can treat it as an unauthorized, unofficial follow-up to the Death Wish film franchise, although that is never truly acknowledged. Death Kiss is available on Amazon Prime Video, and you can check out the trailer here:

 

Just as interesting as the movie (and perhaps for some people, even more so), pulp aficionado Bill Cunningham of Pulp 2.0 Press has written a book that does a great job of breaking down the production and marketing of Death Kiss from a business perspective.  Allow me to quote my review of his book Death Kiss - the Book of the Movie, here:

To preface, I have seen DEATH KISS and read through Cunningham's dissection of the film, and I write this review from the point of view of a novelist and storyteller, as well as someone who went through film school in the late 1990s, when low-budget independent film-making was on the mind of many of my fellow classmates. I am also a huge fan of Brian Garfield's original DEATH WISH novel, as well as the 1974 adaptation by Michael Winner. I've put out articles about vigilante storytelling, and have written a bit of it myself.

I say all this because the idea of an indie project designed specifically to tap into that Garfield/Bronson/Winner-inspired vigilante crime story market was immediately appealing to me. I watched the film DEATH KISS before reading the "Cinexploits!" case study, and while there were portions of the film that I might have criticisms about, I think overall, with the resources available to the director, the overall final product was entertaining - I honestly enjoyed it more than the 2018 remake with Bruce Willis!

And so, having seen the film, I decided to read the DEATH KISS case study. It is an excellent breakdown of the idea behind the film, and how so often in the entertainment industry, the people you know and the connections you make - both "above the line" and below - can make or break the project before it even goes into production. The relationship between Rene Perez and Robert Kovacs - a man with, shall we say, a particular set of skills - allowed the idea of a DEATH WISH-styled independent film to grow from the seed of an idea into a full-bloomed production.

Further, and this is something I especially take to heart as a novelist, Cunningham takes a lot of time to discuss the pragmatic, commercial, *business* of film-making - about making sure that your idea isn't just a good story, but that it is a story you can *sell*, and knowing what markets would be best for your idea, and making sure that you are delivering a product that fits with those markets. Artistic storytelling for the sake of storytelling is a noble concept, but it doesn't pay the rent or the talent. If you are in the *business* of film-making, you must understand first and foremost that your business is commercial in nature, and that you must, above all else, make money from the sale of your product. Period.

Of special note is the breakdown of the ARKOFF Formula. I won't go into the details here, but it is a point-by-point process epitomized by the methodology of Samuel Z. Arkoff, who did great business during the second half of the 20th century producing and distributing commercial theatrical films. I find the ARKOFF Formula worth studying by anyone who has an interest in storytelling designed to - first and foremost - get people to part with their money.

As this review is already fairly lengthy, I will end it by pointing out that the book also includes the DEATH KISS script, as well as a lot of great details about low-budget film production. As part of my day job I regularly interact with faculty and staff that support student film-making, and I have been in many a meeting where people argue for the best film cameras and the best lenses and the most expensive NLE hardware builds and finishing spaces. While more money and resources usually doesn't *hurt*, it often puts people in the mindset that more money is the answer to the practical problems they face during production. However, you don't tell a better story because you don't have the most expensive lens, or because you're only shooting in 1080 vs. 4K. Good stories are still good stories, even if they are produced on non-Hollywood grade production equipment. It is skill, talent, and ingenuity that tells great stories, not the most expensive ARRI rig you can get from a rental house.

If you have an interest in independent film-making, commercial storytelling, or even just the idea of taking a 1970s cult hit and using its gravity to slingshot an idea forty years later, I highly recommend you get your hands on DEATH KISS: The Book of the Movie.

So if you are a fan of low-budget film-making, a fan of vigilante action, or a blend of both, check out both the movie and the book.

Revisiting Brian Garfield's DEATH WISH

More than seven years ago, while I was writing KILLER INSTINCTS, I read Brian Garfield's 1972 crime novel DEATH WISH for the first time. I'd seen the Charles Bronson film a couple of times before, but I wanted to read the novel because I'd been told it was significantly different from the film adaptation, and indeed, that is the case. Now, with a remake coming out this weekend starring Bruce Willis (no comment...), I've gone back and read the original novel again.

So I don't repeat myself, you can go here and read my original review of the novel.

Reading the novel now, I am struck by how, forty-six years after it was first released, the conversations that take place about crime and punishment, liberal and conservative politics, the role of the judicial system in criminal reform, the right of the individual to defend themselves versus the role of law enforcement to protect the public - basically every conversation we're having now, in 2018, they were having in 1972.

In fact, although it is closing in on being a half-century old, the novel is an incredible fictional exploration of walking through the transformation of a pacifistic, liberal, "bleeding heart", into a bloody-minded vigilante with a compulsion to stalk the streets, looking for just about any excuse to kill. Paul Benjamin is certainly the sort of guy who, if he was living in 2018, would be donating to GoFundMe campaigns for spree shooting victims, and changing his Facebook profile photo to "stand with" victims of the latest public tragedy. He would certainly vote for gun control, and insist that it is the role of law enforcement to deal with crime, not the private citizen, and he believes, to a degree, that a lot of violent crime in NYC is hyped up, that it is exaggerated by the media and by the conservatives demanding tougher laws - that it is, essentially, "fake news".

But of course, when the violence happens to him, Paul discovers that the system fails him at almost every turn. The police can't find the attackers, have essentially no leads at all, and it is immediately clear that Paul's personal nightmare is just one more file folder in a large stack sitting on the desk of a tired and over-worked police detective. Paul is overcome with helplessness and rage, incredulous at the notion that he's now just another statistic, that his friends and co-workers express just enough shock and sadness to fulfill their social obligation to him, but no more, because his tragedy makes them just too uncomfortable. Those scenes are almost textbook examples of "compassion fatigue", and when viewed from Paul's perspective, you can see how it just makes him even more angry at the situation he's in, and society's inability to, quite simply, do something about crime.

Of course, even more important in his transformation into a vigilante is Paul's all-consuming fear. He is nearly paralyzed by fear every time he leaves his apartment. A perfectly normal stroll down the street to get a newspaper turns into a terrifying experience - every rowdy youth or minority Paul passes by is a potential assailant, ready to turn and attack him at a moment's notice. At one point, Paul crosses the street and discovers himself a few steps from a black man just casually leaning against the side of a building, just chilling out, and Paul becomes a sweating, petrified mess expecting an attack. Only after running in fear from the man, who he later realizes was probably just minding his own business and laughing at the scared white guy, does Paul realize how deep the terror has taken hold of him.

Paul eventually arms himself with a roll of quarters in a sock for self-defense, and when he scares off a youth making a half-assed attempt at robbing him, the sense of power at being able to defend himself is almost a narcotic. Paul winds up buying a gun while on a business trip to Arizona (where all the locals tell him they can roam the streets safely at night because everyone has a gun), and he starts carrying it once back in NYC. Of course, with the gun in his pocket, Paul isn't unafraid - far from it. He is terrified of someone bumping against him and finding the gun. He's terrified of dropping the gun, or being stopped by a cop and having the gun discovered. He carries a wad of cash with the gun that he hops he can bribe the cop with if the gun is ever found, since he doesn't have a permit for it.

In fact, Paul only leaves his fear behind once he starts killing. The first murder is, ostensibly, self-defense, although he does begin wandering the streets and going into areas where he knows there is a high chance he might get mugged. His intentions the first time around aren't necessarily to kill a mugger, but a combination of determination to not let the criminals dictate where he can and cannot go, and a sort of symbolic "whistling past the graveyard". But, after the first shooting, and after he recovers from the initial emotional and psychological shock of shooting and killing another person, he loses his fear, and begins to actively "stalk" and go after criminals.

All in all, Paul kills eight people over the course of the book, and really, the action doesn't even take up eight pages. One of the victims is killed in only a couple of short sentences. All of the violence takes place in the second half of the book, most of it in the last third, really. And, once you reach the end of the novel, it is clear that the book is in no way about the shootings, but rather, Paul's vigilantism is used as the lens through which the author is addressing crime in the modern society. I can't say for sure if an answer to the problem is ever really reached, because while in the novel the police admit that crime is down, the reader can tell that Paul is not really in a mentally stable condition - his drive to punish criminals compels him to go out night after night, and he becomes a sort of junkie seeking a fix, so to speak.

After the success of the novel - and its adaptation into a film that addresses the problematic nature of Paul's vengeance to a much lesser degree than the novel - Brian Garfield wrote DEATH SENTENCE as, according to him, "penance" for the first book and the film, which he didn't really like. I will address the second novel in another post, but it does go a long way towards mitigating the direction that Death Wish seems to be driving us at the story's end.

My 2017 Writing in Review

It is time once again to put forward my writing summary for the past year. As I always mention, the facts and figure I provide here aren't meant to be boastful - I provide the information so that others can have an understanding of what I've done, what works, what doesn't work, and everything in between. I sell more books than some, and fewer books than others, and that's about that.

In 2017, I sold 2,557 ebooks, and had 709,267 Kindle Unlimited page reads. This is significantly less than last year's totals of 5,921 and 849,081 (my numbers in this post might be a little different than last years' numbers, as KDP is providing better tracking tools that make adding all these numbers up easier, so the numbers in today's post are probably more accurate). Percentage-wise, book sales dropped 57%, while KU reads dropped 16.5%. Overall revenue dropped 43.5% this year, which is pretty damn significant - although thankfully, 2016 was by several thousand dollars my best year to date. For those of you who are wondering, paperback sales were too insignificant to even bother including in the above calculations. 

This was the first year since I started publishing in 2011 where technically, I didn't release a new title of any kind (Assault on Abbeville was published on New Year's Eve, 2016). This means as of right now, there hasn't been a new Commando title in two years, which, I am certain, is the reason for the poor sales this year. Historically, every new Commando title has given my sales a huge boost for several months, and kept things at relatively high sales points for the first six months of the book's release. While AoA did pretty well its first few months, it quickly tapered off, probably as a result of it being the only book in the series. Overall, however, its sales figures were reasonably strong, competing with any one individual Commando title. Numbers-wise, AoA made up 18% of my overall ebook sales, and 13% of all KU pages reads. This is highly encouraging, because it means there's definitely an audience for this series, and I am in the process of plotting out the second Revenants book.

Takeaways from all this? It was interesting to see the very large disparity between my sales and KU figures. While sales dropped over fifty percent, KU page reads dropped less than twenty percent. I don't know how that plays out in terms of money, since the value of each KU page read shifts from month to month based on the KU Fund and how many overall page reads there are in all of the KU titles (okay, I could probably figure it out...but I'm not going to bother), it's interesting to see that the the dip was relatively small. Also, as always, my non-WW2 titles sold like garbage. Killer Instincts sold a whopping 18 copies and had about 11,000 pages read in the ebook market this past year, earning me less than $150 for 2017. San Francisco slaughter was about a third of that total. All my other short fiction? A Sergeant's Duty did okay for a short story, pulling in about a hundred dollars. The Train to Calais earned about fifty. Renegade's Revenge? About twelve bucks. Nanok? Two dollars.

So, what happened? Life happened.

I don't want to get into the details, but in the past year, there have been a series of serious problems with multiple members of my family - health, finances, life in general - and the chronic nature of these problems has really thrown me for a loop. I've been anxious, depressed, angry, distracted, annoyed, scared, frustrated...basically every emotion that can grind away at the focus and dedication I need in order to write, I've had those emotions repeatedly over the last year. It is ugly, it is unfortunate, and it is really, really hard to dig out of and get back to the place where I need to be in order to...you guessed it...Always Be Closing.

For 2018, my primary goal is to finish and publish the sixth Commando novel, Operation Elysium. I'm about halfway through writing it, and I think it's going to be a great addition to the series. After that? As mentioned above, there is definitely a market for a second Revenants novel, so that's going to take priority, but I also want to start a new series, focusing on German Panzer warfare. I've got a bunch of research and some substantial plotting done for the first book in the series, so that's also good.

But ultimately, the hardest part will be overcoming the emotional obstacles I've thrown up in my way that prevent me from getting the work done. I find myself actively avoiding writing, which isn't good, and I need to get around that fear and embrace the process as something positive and encouraging, rather than something that I don't want to do, but feel I have to. As I have a full-time job with good pay and benefits, I am under no immediate financial threat if I don't publish, so for me, writing should be a fulfilling, emotionally positive act. I need to find that place again, and if I can, I know I can bounce back.

As always, many many thanks to those people who have sent me messages of encouragement over the past year. I greatly appreciate it, and it is genuinely heart-warming to know that both readers and fellow authors want to see me continue to write and publish. I honestly couldn't do it without that kind of support.

My 2016 Writing in Review

Hello all, and happy New Year. I've written one of these "writing in review" posts every year for the past several years, and wanted to get this one out as soon as possible (I realize I don't have a tag for these posts, so I'll be creating one now if you would like to go back and read the others). Although I did not actually publish anything in the calendar year of 2015, I sort of only book-ended this year with a major release in January and one with just hours left on New Year's Eve. And, as always, just to preface, I give my sales numbers only for the purposes of providing information for folks, not as some measure of my subjective success or failure. I do better than some authors sales-wise, but many others do better than I do, and that's a-OK.

This was easily my best year by a considerable margin. While last year I was down, money-wise, this year I beat last year by several thousand dollars. I had over 5,100 sales of all ebook titles, and I cleared over 840,000 Kindle Unlimited pages read (which works out to roughly 4,000 of my titles read through, on average). While that sales figure is down compared to last year by about 500 sales (and keep in mind that for the first half of 2015, I was counting KU "borrows" as sales), my average daily KU page read counts have skyrocketed. Between July and December of 2015, I had 170,000 KU page reads, which averages out to around 944 pages a day. This year's daily average is about 2,311 pages a day, nearly a 150% gain. In addition, starting in April of this year (when I received royalties for February, the first full month after Operation Archery was released), my monthly royalties were higher - sometimes double - every single month this year.

That is, of course, the good news. The bad news is that the percentage of books sold that aren't associated with my Commando series is, basically, almost non-existent. I sold twenty-five copies of San Francisco Slaughter this year, as well as thirty-two KU reads. Now, looking at my overall yearly sales figure, we see that SFS was less than one-half of one percent of all my sales this year. Killer Instincts sold 225 copies, about 80% of them over a two-month period during which I ran a large sales promotion after it received the new cover. There were also 96 KU reads, about half of those very clearly due to the visibility of the promotion. Both ebook and KU sales come out to about 4 1/2 percent of my totals for the year. As for all the other non-Commando shorter works, barely anything moved. Twenty-three copies of Renegade's Revenge were sold. Eight copies of Spiders & Flies (each moved a few hundred KU pages, a mere handful of reads). The rest are even more pitiful.

Last year the Commando series accounted for around 90% of my totals, but this year that number has nudged up to probably around 93-94%. While some of that growth can be attributed to having a new title in the series that sold quite well, it is clear that everything else I've written is just ignored. Keep in mind that without that KI promotion, that percentage would go from about 4.5 to barely 1 percent of my sales, so without those extra 180 or so sales, Commando titles would probably be...97-98% of my income this year.

Which is a little disconcerting, especially as I have just released Assault on Abbeville, the first in a new WW2 series, REVENANTS. This series is set in the same "universe" as my Commando books, so they are indirectly related, but that is no guarantee that the readers of one will be interested in the other - I may very well have another San Francisco Slaughter on my hands. I also want to push and get a Panzer-focused series out the door this year, after the publication of Operation Elysium, and my biggest worry is that title dying as well. As much as I enjoy writing the Commando books and short stories, I fear the notion that such are the ONLY things I can write which will earn me any kind of appreciable income.

And, of course, all of this comes back to productivity. This year after releasing Operation Archery in late January, I began work on Operation Elysium, but got side-tracked and wrote Assault on Abbeville, as well as polishing up and publishing A Sergeant's Duty, the second "Short Bursts" story. As of right now, about 15% of Elysium has been written, and the rest extensively outlined. In the next couple of days, while my day job is still quiet, I'll be making an effort to push forward on the first draft, with a great determination to have the book done by the spring, which will hopefully leave me with more than half a year to write and publish the first Panzer book, which also have some extensive outlining right now.

So now, it is just a matter of getting my shoulder against the wheel. I know I can do it - in 2014, I was actually surprisingly productive, releasing Operation Dervish, SFS, Renegade's Revenge, and Spiders & Flies - It is just a matter of sitting down, writing, and repeating that process as frequently as possible.

Anatomy of a Kindle Promotion

A month ago I ran a seven-day sale on my novel KILLER INSTINCTS, reducing the price from $5.99 to $0.99. I promoted the book through three different eBook sales mailing lists: BookGorilla, The Fussy Librarian, and eBookSoda. All three emails went out on the same day - Sunday, May 29th. The book was listed as a "Thriller" in terms of category, one of the largest population bases in terms of the subscribers of these mailing lists, meaning the book likely found its way into a couple hundred thousand email inboxes.

KILLER INSTINCTS, despite being one of my better-reviewed novels, just doesn't sell well. In the twelve months before the sale, I'd only managed to sell 28 copies, along with a few thousand Kindle Unlimited page reads, probably amounting to another half-dozen or so "sales" of the book. I was curious as to how well the new cover would affect sales, since I'd just put it on the book a few weeks prior, without any appreciable rise in sales. Below, I've provided the KDP sales chart for the whole month of May, through to today (June 27th). The top chart is sales, the bottom chart is Kindle Unlimited page reads.

Click the image to view at a larger size

All told, between today and May 29th, I sold 187 copies of the book, only 13 of which were after the sales period. While those 13 extra sales were nice, and more sales per length of time than I was seeing before the promotion, it isn't really that exciting. What is much more interesting, though, is the Kindle Unlimited activity. I had about 16,000 page reads (about 37 book reads) between May and June, and only about 1,500 of those were before the sale. About 5,500 were during the sale, leaving about ~9,000 in the weeks after the sale's conclusion. That's about 23 copies of the book read since the sale is over, a little less than double the number of sales during that time period.

But sales is one thing - what about the money? The cost of the promotional emails through the three companies ran about $75, so I needed to break that amount in order for this to have been worth it. Running the numbers, in the last 30 days, I've earned about $175 in sales, plus roughly $65 in Kindle Unlimited page read royalties (estimated), for a total of around $240. That means $165 in profit after deducting the cost of the promotion emails. Since I'm estimating my royalties for the prior twelve months at just about $130 (just under $11 a month), we're looking at a period of profitability roughly fourteen times higher than usual.

So, was the promotion a success? In terms of sales and royalties, it certainly was successful. I sold twice as many books in the first day as I'd sold in the past year, and the money was certainly far better than usual. What's more, looking at that Kindle Unlimited chart, I'm going to guess that a lot of folks who saw the promotional emails decided to add the book to their KU reading queues, and they've been reading the book over the last few weeks, a trend which will probably continue for some time. As for regular sales, I think I'm going to take the price down, probably to $3.99, at least for a few months. I think the new cover will help it sell better at a slightly lower, more attractive price point.

I hope the above information is helpful for any authors out there who are considering the use of promotional email lists in getting visibility and sales for their titles. Good luck!

New Covers for Old Novels

Apologies for the lack of posting over the last couple of months - Real Life has been rather distracting, and I haven't gotten around to providing the usual semi-regular content here. Hopefully that will turn around as the summer gets into full swing!

Recently, after talking to author Mark Allen about the cover for his new novel, The Assassin's Betrayal, I was rather impressed with his experiences in finding and working with a new cover designer, Rebecca Frank. After some consideration, and looking at her website and portfolio, I contacted Rebecca and discussed her re-doing the covers for Killer Instincts and San Francisco Slaughter. After some back-and-forth over cover concepts and several drafts of each, I received the following covers, which I think are fantastic, and a massive improvement over the originals, both of which were designed by yours truly.

Below I've placed each of the new covers to the right of the old cover.

I don't think either of my covers is *awful*, but as you can see, there are certain benefits to paying a professional to do the work for you. Not only do you get what is simply a better, more professional-looking cover, but it adds a layer of professionalism to your book as well. Everyone I've shown Rebecca Frank's covers to has said something to the tune of "I can totally imagine that on a book in a bookstore", which is an excellent metric, if you ask me.

My 2015 Writing in Review

For the past several years now, I've been writing a year-end post about how my various books have performed, and although I haven't published anything in 2015 (more on that later), I wanted to give a rundown of the year's sales, as much for my own analysis as anything else. As always with such things, I provide these numbers not to boast, or to whine, but merely to inform. Some folks out there are doing much worse than I am, while others are doing much better. This is just the way it is, so take the following as provided for information purposes only.

In 2015, I sold roughly 5600 books, about 90% of those in ebook form. This is down about 2,000 sales from last year. A portion of that loss is, without a doubt, due to the new Kindle Unlimited payment method of calculating royalties based on pages read, not on 10%+ "borrows" as before, and in the past, I have been factoring any "borrow" as a sale to keep the bookkeeping simple. Since July of this year, when KU 2.0 went into effect, I've had about 170,000 pages read, which if divided by an average of 200 pages (the shortest of my Commando books, just for the sake of rough calculation), gives me another 835 sales, bringing me to around 6400 books sold. Of course, not everyone who started one of my books finished it, and it is impossible now to track such things.

In terms of what percentage of my sales went to each book, the total is overwhelmingly my Commando series. While last year I sold some 700+ copies of my western, Renegade's Revenge, This year I sold less than a hundred copies, with some modest few hundred pages borrowed. I was actually rather amazed at how RR sold very strongly for months, and then sales dried up almost overnight. While there were months where I'd sell over a hundred copies, now I am shocked if the title sells more than 4-6 copies in a month. Since RR was about 9% of my sales last year, losing it as a sales stream had a significant impact on my numbers this year as compared to last.

As for all my other titles, the numbers are minimal, at best. Killer Instincts sold about 300 copies and had a couple thousand KU pages read, but the bulk of that was due to a very successful promotion in March. San Francisco Slaughter didn't hit a hundred sales, and all of my short stories totaled together don't even break 100 sales for the year. That means the Commando series accounted for more than 90% of all my books sold in 2015.

The good news is, in terms of royalties, I ended the year only about $1,000 under what I made in 2014. Again, I think some of this discrepancy is due to difficulties in calculating sales vs. royalties because of KU 2.0, combined with much softer sales of my shorter works like RR, which paid out less than the longer works. In addition, more of the sales in 2014 were from countdown deals and other discounted sales, while most of the 2015 sales - especially the Commando titles - were at full price, making my average royalty per sale much higher overall.

And now we come to the fact that in 2015, I didn't publish anything. The year in general was frustrating for me, both in terms of my day job (I am firmly burned out there) and in terms of getting past my writer's block and completing Operation Archery, the fifth Commando novel. Archery deals with the Vaagso Raid of December 1941, and there is a lot of very detailed information out there about the events of that raid. I found myself frustrated at many points, often trying to figure out how to weave my fictional characters into the historical timeline in a way that gave them something to do, while not stealing the thunder from historical characters. It was a really good learning experience for me, because it taught me that, while I enjoy writing historical fiction, I am not great at writing about specific historical events. Thankfully, at the end of the year I was able to press on and finish the manuscript, and Archery is now in the editing stage, with a hopeful release in the next week or so for the ebook version.

So, what does 2016 look like? At this point, I dare not speculate, because I had extraordinarily high hopes for 2015, none of which came to fruition. Archery will be published this month, and I am already working on Operation Elysium, the sixth book in the Commando series. Beyond that, I really don't want to make any promises, although I have some ideas for what I want to accomplish. As with 2014, the vast bulk of my success as an author last year was tied to the Commando books, so that is where I need to focus my energy, but as we also saw, that comes with the risk of hitting a wall, and not being able or willing to step around it and carry on with something else. At what point does exploiting success at the expense of diversification mean you burn out on what you love? Let's hope we don't find out any time soon.

As always, please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section.

My 2014 Writing in Review

Two years ago, I wrote a piece called "In 2013, Always be Closing". The year after that, I laid down a 2014 Short Story Challenge. This year, I want to take a look at the past twelve months, where it has brought me, and where I'm going from here.

In 2014, I sold a little over 7,600 copies of my various works, roughly half of everything I've ever sold in the past 3 1/2 years, and 800 more than in 2013. That figure averages out to a little under 21 sales a day over the course of the year. Granted, in the third quarter of the year my daily averages dropped to significantly less than that, but I had a strong opening to the year with the release of Operation Cannibal around Thanksgiving of 2013, as well as a couple of really strong Kindle Countdown Sales during the first quarter. In addition, I'm finishing off the year with a very strong past six weeks, thanks to the release of Operation Dervish, which has sold over 460 copies so far.

I lay out all of the above so that people can decide for themselves how successful I am, and do some comparative analysis with their own and others' sales figures. I was glad to see overall sales increase substantially, and royalties increase as well (I made about a thousand dollars more this year than last year), but it certainly wasn't a bowl-me-over sales year. Let's break it down...

The COMMANDO series made up about 81 percent of my total sales this year, utterly dominating all my other titles. With four novels and a short story, that's certainly understandable, but it is important to point out how much my sales figures depend on this series. Without it, I wouldn't be breaking a hundred sales a month on average. In addition, while I used to sell at least twice as many copies in the UK as in the US every month, the ratio is now mostly even, and with my new title in the series so far, I'm selling far more US copies. There are probably a variety of factors at play here, from the much larger Amazon customer base in the US, to what might be a more saturated genre market in the UK (there are several UK-based WW2 series that aren't available as ebooks in the US), the dominance of the UK sales region is now firmly over.

RENEGADE'S REVENGE was a surprise hit for me this year. I sold a little over 700 copies of this title in eight months, accounting for roughly nine percent of my total sales this year. Since a significant number of these were Kindle Unlimited borrows, I actually made pretty good money off of this title, especially given that it was originally written as a project that failed to launch. For many years, publishers and critics considered the Western genre one of the worst-selling, but there seems to be a resurgence in the last few years, both in re-releasing old titles as ebooks, as well as original content. I fully intend to write a sequel to RR at some point in the next year, and maybe a few other standalone Westerns as time goes on - it is certainly a fun genre to write in, with a great blend of action, adventure, and history.

SPIDERS & FLIES was released at the beginning of the year, and has gone nowhere since. It sold 28 copies in 12 months, 18 of those in the first month of its release. The few reviews it received were positive, and people seemed to like the cover art, but the title simply doesn't sell, even when I have tried free giveaways. Considering its poor performance, and that of NANOK, while I'm glad I finally got around to finishing and publishing this piece, I think even if I can write decent fantasy stories, it isn't worth my time or energy. I doubt I'd even write a sequel to this title, but while I do have several NANOK stories in mind, that's where they're going to stay for the foreseeable future, until I have enough "legroom" to take a chance on writing them.

HANGMAN #1: SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER was also well received by both beta readers and those who've written reviews. However, it did not take off like I'd hoped it would. I sold about 130 copies in the six months it's been out, better than S&F but terrible even compared to RR. I have a number of sequels in mind for this series, and perhaps with an additional couple of titles it'll have more appeal, but so far, I'm not that hopeful. Still, I really enjoyed writing the book, especially since it allowed me to ramp up the "mature content" compared to the COMMANDO titles. SFS contains a lot of swearing, a little sex, and some very cruel violence. It is definitely a darker work, and getting out of my morally-cleaner mindspace was definitely interesting.

KILLER INSTINCTS continues to perform terribly. More than a few people still feel my first novel is the best thing I've written, and I certainly believe it is a good, solid story. I did a cover change for the ebook mid-year, and a couple of promotions helped bring in more sales, but of the roughly 350 copies sold in 2014 (~4.5% of my total sales), at least half were during promotions, meaning I made nowhere near the money I could have with those numbers. Next year I would like to get the title into a BookBub promotion, which would be amazing, but I don't have high hopes. In a market choked with thrillers of all stripes, KI goes largely unnoticed. I would still love to write a sequel to this book, but at this point in time, I feel it would fail to thrive just as KI did, a pointless gesture.

In conclusion, I face some tough choices. It is clear that my niche genre titles (WW2 and Westerns) sell much more than my more mainstream genre works (thrillers, crime, fantasy). COMMANDO titles and RENEGADE'S REVENGE make up ninety percent of my sales this year. Clearly, this is where my focus should lie, but on the other hand, I don't want to limit myself in terms of what to write. Writing is not my full-time job, nor will it be for the foreseeable future, meaning I am not as much a slave to the market as I could be were it my only income. And, in addition, I might stumble upon another genre with a title that's more popular than I'd imagined. Certainly, when I wrote both the first COMMANDO title, as well as RR, I never anticipated their degree of success.

In a few days, I hope to follow this column with one discussing my hopes for 2015. Until then, Happy New Year!

Chasing the Rabbit of Success

Believe me, he's faster than he looks.

Yesterday, I had conversations with three writer friends of mine. We discussed pricing, promotions, writing our product descriptions, cover art and design, tracking sales, royalties, and other writing business minutia. Some good discussions with nice guys, talented writers all of them.

It wasn't until this morning that I realized, the one thing we didn't really discuss was the writing itself. We didn't talk about plot hooks, or character concepts, or cool scenes we were working out in our heads. We didn't bounce ideas for new stories off each other, or ask questions about the progress of current projects. In short, all we focused on was the business side of writing, and we all but ignored the writing itself.

In the movie Pacific Rim, a new Jaeger pilot can find themselves caught up in the memories that flood their minds when they enter "the drift" and join consciousnesses with their co-pilot. The pilot "chases the rabbit" and pursues a fleeting memory, getting lost in the conjoined memories and becoming distracted, disoriented, helpless, or even a danger to themselves and others. When I realized this morning how much time and energy I spend on scrutinizing and micro-managing the business side of writing and publishing, I know part of it is because I can see that rabbit ahead of me, that dream of becoming financially self-sufficient off of my royalties, quitting my day job (which, by the way, I loathe) and becoming a Full-Time Writer. I want to catch that rabbit more than I care to admit, and there are times when that feeling of wanting becomes akin to desperation.

When a new title goes live, I'm checking the sales page fifty times a day. When it starts to sell, I'm still checking the page while thinking of what I can do to spread the word and all but click the "buy" button for people. When a title flops, I look at it like a houseplant that's slowly withering and dying, no matter how much water and light and plant food I give it. Tweaking the cover, re-writing the description, playing with pricing, hitting the social media marketing pavement, launching promos - I'll do anything I can think of to get the word out there and sell sell sell. The only thing that keeps my promotional drum-beating in check is the fear of being "that guy" - the jerk on Twitter or Facebook who does nothing but spam followers with links to buy their books over and over again.

And the problem is, of course, that the rabbit is real. Becoming a financially successful author isn't some fantasy no one achieves except the luckiest of a lucky few. This post over at the Passive Voice Blog is filled with people who've either gone full-time or are anticipating doing so in the foreseeable future. The new publishing paradigms of the last few years have made it possible for more people than ever before to make a living - or at least, create an appreciable second income stream - from their writing. And the harsh reality of it is, you do have to pay attention to things like your cover design, your pricing strategies, your marketing, your product description, and so forth. If you don't, even the best book will languish in the doldrums, and you'll get discouraged, perhaps giving up the idea that you're any good, that you should keep at it despite a poor start.

What makes matters worse, of course, is seeing the real A-listers crushing it time and time again, and hearing the "Coffee is for Closers Only!" speeches they throw around. This Passive Voice Blog post discussing an article by powerhouse author Russell Blake became so incendiary, the blog owner had to turn off comments, because once Blake showed up and began kicking people in the junk over their own wishy-washy definitions of "effectiveness" and 'success", the knives came out. That's not the only example of such advice, of course - plenty of the more successful indie authors have thrown down the gauntlet, inadvertently or not, and made less successful writers question everything they're doing. Can't write for two hours every single day? You're a slacker. Can't get a new "book" out every month? Slacker. Your book can't stay above the "dreaded" 10,000 marker on the Amazon best-sellers list? It's a failure. Not willing to pay out $500+ for a book cover? You're just not taking this seriously, go wade in the kiddie pool with the other wannabes. And, oh, by the way - this business is only getting more cut-throat by the minute as the "tsunami of swill" covers the world, so if you're not selling a hundred copies a day right now, just give up, because the next new dino-porn craze will mean your novel will go unnoticed forever.

Chuckle at that last paragraph if you will, but I've seen all of those statements, and many more, over the last year or two, and no matter how hard you try to ignore the negativity, it's going to eat into your soul a little bit every day. You're going to start thinking to yourself, "Hmmm...maybe writing Bigfoot erotica isn't that hard...I can just use another pen name...", or paying out to professional marketers in the hopes that your poorly-selling book will finally find its audience, and some journalist will be interviewing you to ask about the secret of your success, and your story will cause other writers to furiously jot down notes, because hey - you caught that rabbit! That means it's possible after all!

Ultimately, I have to come to terms with the fact that I may never become a Full-Time Writer. Right now, my royalty stream is roughly equivalent to working a part-time job for 20 or so hours a week at a coffee shop or grocery store. It is definitely a solid, substantial source of income, and I appreciate every dollar. Over time, as I write and publish more, I hope that income stream grows, but there's no guarantee. My latest book has pretty much performed a face-plant a yard from the starting line, And I can already feel the first twinges of despair over it joining the pile of "failures" in my portfolio. That despair, of course, fuels the drive to figure out what I can do next to write something more profitable - the rabbit has gained more of a lead, and I'm pushing myself harder trying to catch up.

But what about the joys of writing? I actually love writing my Commando novels. Hanging out with Lynch, Bowen, McTeague, and the rest is a blast for me. I had a great deal of fun writing Renegade's Revenge, as well, and despite its abysmal performance over the years, I do want to write another Nanok short because I had a ton of fun writing the first story, and I want to get back to that goofy pastiche-y world I created. And of course, there's the sequel to Killer Instincts, which I do, in fact, want to write, but so many other projects come along and push themselves to the front of the line because I've decided to put success first.

This article on writing has gone on so long, it's becoming a book in its own right, so I'll conclude by saying that although someday I hope to write for a living, I never want to care more about promotions and marketing and price points than I do about my characters and their stories. Those two forces - the urge to create something I love to write, and the urge to create something I hope will make me money - will need to find a point of balance if I'm going to continue down this road without driving myself (and everyone around me) crazy.

HANGMAN #1: San Francisco Slaughter - Available Now

Click the Cover to See on Amazon

My '70s-era Men's Adventure novel SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER is now available on Amazon for the Kindle, with a trade paperback format to follow later this month. I'm copying the Amazon product description below. Thank you again to everyone who gave feedback and support to this project - I couldn't have done it without you!

Amazon Book Description:

California, 1973. Back home after three years in the jungles of Southeast Asia, former Green Beret Jamie “Hangman” Lynch is enjoying the good life, drinking beer and chasing skirts along San Diego’s Mission Beach. But Lynch finds himself growing increasingly restless, and dreaming of getting back into the fight again.
Lynch asks his former commanding officer for guidance, and is offered a chance at some excitement: a private sector job working for the CEO of a San Francisco tech company in need of a man who’s not afraid to get his hands dirty. The assignment? Hunt down a man named Roth, a whiz-kid engineer in debt to the Vegas mob. Roth has stolen an advanced military prototype and is looking to sell it to the highest bidder.
Lynch accepts the job and finds himself working with Richard, an enigmatic Texan mercenary, and Blake, the company’s head of security. The three men face off against Cranston, a murderous ex-cop turned enforcer-for-hire, who’s got an army of ruthless thugs turning San Francisco upside down looking for Roth. If Cranston gets to Roth before Lynch and his partners do, Roth can kiss the prototype - and his life - goodbye.
SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER is a hard-edged action-adventure novel. There's drinking, profanity, and sex. There's fast cars and big guns, sharp knives and loose women. Arson, torture, and murder are just tools in the hands of men who’ll do whatever it takes to get the job done. And while the good guys aren't so great, the bad guys are even worse.

Meet My Main Character - Jamie "Hangman" Lynch

My friend and fellow author Justin Aucoin has asked me to carry the torch for another leg in a great "Meet My Main Character" blog-hop. This is an opportunity for writers to introduce to readers the main character of a work in progress or soon-to-be-published work. So, I'm picking Jamie Lynch, the MC of my current work in progress.

Before reading more, be sure to check out Justin's blog post, where we meet his main character, Jake Hawking.

1) What is the name of your character? Is he/she fictional or a historic person?

My character's name is Jamie "Hangman" Lynch. He's a fictional character, part of my "Lynch Family Legacy" of characters featured in my other books, such as KILLER INSTINCTS and my COMMANDO series of WW2 novels. Jamie is the son of COMMANDO's Tommy Lynch and uncle to KI's William Lynch.

2) When and where is the story set?

The story is set in 1973, and starts in San Diego, California. The story quickly moves up the coast to San Francisco, where events take place all over the Bay area, from Palo Alto to Bodega Bay.

3) What should we know about him/her?
 
Jamie's 24 years old in 1973. He's a former sergeant in the United States Army, 5th Special Forces Group, and from 1970-72, served in the top-secret Military Assistance Command, Vietnam - Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG). Previous to that, he was a corporal in the 101st Airborne Division, and fought in the Battle of Hamburger Hill in 1969, where he was wounded. In 1973, Jamie has been out of the military for about nine months, living above a surf shop along Mission Beach in San Diego.

4) What is the main conflict? What messes up his/her life?

Jamie made it back from Vietnam in fairly good shape, both physically and mentally. He suffered a few minor wounds, but he's in prime physical condition. Mentally he's doing okay, although he has recurring dreams and nightmares about the war. Most recently, his dreams have involved going back to the war, and even though in some of his dreams he gets killed, the overall sense in his dreams is that Jamie is happy to be back "home" in the war. He's self-aware enough to realize that the hum-drum civilian life isn't for him; he's spent his entire adult life so far in the military, training for and fighting in a war, and now he's basically a beach bum, living off some money set aside and working a part-time job in the surf shop he lives above.  Jamie begins to feel like "a tiger in a cage, restless and confined", and worries that one day he'll channel that aggression and confined feeling in a way that will wind up with him in jail, dead, or some other unfortunate outcome.

So, Jamie gets in touch with General Carson, an officer who used to be Jamie's CO back in Vietnam. He confesses his problems and asks Carson for help. Carson tells Jamie he knows of a businessman up in San Francisco, the head of a tech company with strong ties to military technology research, who is in need of someone with Jamie's skill set to "solve a problem". Jamie, not caring much what the problem is and only knowing it'd give him an escape from his cage of inactivity and boredom, accepts the job. A great deal of violent conflict ensues shortly thereafter.

5) What is the personal goal of the character?

Jamie's primary motivation throughout the story is to find purpose in his civilian life. Like many veterans, he's come back to the "real world" after being in the military for over five years, and the Army is the only adult life he's ever known, and his skills-set is, at the very least, pretty specific. He can't picture himself living the life of a 9-to-5 office dweller, driving to work every morning in a station wagon, typing up reports and sitting in meetings, then going home at the end of the day to a house surrounded by a white picket fence, containing a darling wife and two perfect children. Even at the young age of 24, Jamie firmly believes there's no way that kind of life is his destiny.

On the other hand, Jamie understands that selling his lethal skills in the private sector is a dangerous game. As the story unfolds, and the events begin to spiral out of control, with more and more collateral damage and unforeseen consequences, Jamie realizes he's essentially a murderous criminal, and there's a good chance his actions might get him killed or sent to prison for the rest of his life - exactly the sort of outcome he was trying to avoid in the first place. On the other hand, he's got several other characters in the story, especially the mysterious gun-for-hire named Richard, affirming that this is the life for him. It becomes a tug-of-war between Jamie's moral character, and his belief in his ultimate place in the world outside of the Army.

6) Is there a working title for this novel, and can we read more about it?
 
The book is titled HANGMAN: SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER. I hope this will be the first in a series of short novels featuring Jamie as he goes on further adventures, all under the HANGMAN series title. I wrote a teaser blog post regarding the book here.

7) When can we expect the book to be published?

I hope to have the first draft completed by the beginning of May, and off to a small cadre of interested Beta readers. Depending on their feedback, and the amount of rewriting I have to do nor not do, I hope to have the novel out on Amazon for the Kindle and Trade Paperback formats some time in June.

UPDATE: Author Mark Allen is the next stop on this blog-hop - you can meet his main character, Travis Kain, here on his page.

Teaser Post: HANGMAN: SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER

I just wanted to take a moment and update readers on one of my current projects. I'm working on a new novel, tentatively titled HANGMAN: SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER. Those of you who've read KILLER INSTINCTS might get the reference, but for those of you who missed it, "Hangman" was Jamie Lynch's call-sign while a member of SOG during the Vietnam war. Jamie is the uncle of William Lynch, the protagonist in KILLER INSTINCTS. Jamie is also the older son of Thomas Lynch, the main character in my COMMANDO series.

This (first) HANGMAN novel is being written for two reasons. First, to bridge the generation gap between Thomas and William Lynch. When I originally began writing KILLER INSTINCTS, my intent was to go back through the generations and write about each of the Lynch men who went to war, what I'd called at the time the Lynch Legacy. The first COMMANDO novel was the first completed volume in this idea, but I'd actually written the first thousand words of HANGMAN while writing KILLER INSTINCTS. Only now, over two years later, am I finally going back and writing the rest of the story.

The second reason for writing this book is to try and write a kick-ass '70s-style Men's Adventure novel. In 1973, Jamie Lynch has been out of the Army for a little less than a year, and he's going stir-crazy living the life of a beach bum in San Diego. After getting in touch with his old commanding officer, Jamie is given a job working for Steiger, a Silicon Valley CEO. One of Steiger's top engineers has gone missing after stealing a prototype for an ordnance guidance system, and Steiger fears the prototype will fall into the hands of one of his competitors. Lynch teams up with Blake, Steiger's chief of security, as well as an enigmatic mercenary gunslinger named Richard...

SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER is going to be violent. It's going to be crass. It's going to get ugly. People are going to get killed in not-very-nice ways. There's a lot of drinking and swearing and even a little sex. There's cars and guns and arson and torture. The good guys aren't so great, but the bad guys are even worse.

I'll probably have the first draft of the manuscript finished by the first week of April. I'll be looking for some beta readers, so if you're interested, shoot me an email and I'll put you on the list. My target date for publication is June 1st.

The Commando Series - One Year Later

As of this weekend, COMMANDO: Operation Arrowhead has been published for a year. My short story The Train to Calais has been available for a little over nine months, and Operation Bedlam has been out for four months. As I type this, I'm currently halfway through writing the third book in the series, Operation Cannibal. I thought I'd share some observations and data with my readers, to give them an idea of how the series has been doing commercially.

As of today, I've sold a little over 3,400 ebook copies of the two novels. Arrowhead is in the lead (as can be expected), but the lead isn't all that great - about 1,900 to 1,500. At the time I released Bedlam four months ago, Arrowhead had sold about 750 copies in 8 months. As you can see, not only did Bedlam sales almost immediately explode to exceed Arrowhead on a monthly basis, the first book's sales also immediately increased. I don't want to get into the dangerous territory of making causative guesses, but I feel that having a second title in the series made the books look a lot more attractive to prospective readers, giving them a sense of legitimacy.

As can be expected with a series featuring British Commandos, I sell more books in the UK than in the US - it's about 2/3rds of my sales. There is a small, but strong, market right now in the UK for WW2 "men's adventure" style fiction, with a handful of traditionally published authors selling their own series of books, each of them centering around a singular heroic Tommy in a regular line regiment. In fact, I find it rather interesting that almost all of the series follow this pattern. Some folks I've seen reviewing the books refer to this as "Richard Sharpe Syndrome" after Bernard Cornwell's Napoleonic-era fighting officer of the same name. Some use the term with mild scorn, but considering that Cornwell has done extraordinarily well for himself over the last few decades as a historical novelist, I don't really see it as a criticism. If it is a formula, it is one that works.

One of the more interesting phenomena of the Commando series venture has been the relative success of my short story, The Train to Calais. Although it received its first 1-star review this past weekend (from a reader who, apparently, didn't notice "short story" in the book description), The short story is averaging over a hundred sales a month. While this isn't crazy money, an extra $30-40 a month isn't bad, either. And many readers and reviewers commented favorably on the way it serves as a tie-in between the first and second novels, while at the same time spotlighting characters who are normally more in the background compared to the Commandos. I actually hope to publish another, similar short detailing the origin story of Andre Bouchard, the "Butcher of Calais".

It is also worth pointing out that while I have done a copule of free promotion days using KDP Select, they usually didn't result in that many downloads; I've probably only given away less than two thousand copies of Arrowhead and half that for Calais. Bedlam has never been given away for free. I'll probably arrange a special promotion when Cannibal is published, but so far, I haven't needed to rely on promotions to get the series out there. I sold more copies of Arrowhead in the first month it was available than I sold of Killer Instincts in the first three months.

Reviews-wise, the response to the series has been largely positive. There have been a few cranky Brits who questioned the series' authenticity, but like J.A. Konrath often says, if your book is actually well-written, the majority of the bad reviews you'll get will largely consist of people for whom the material really wasn't written.  The Commando series is essentially, as one reader put it, a "Commando Comic" in prose form. If that works for you, then I think you'll like them. If you need something more realistic or historically truthful, it's probably not for you. My strategy has been to keep the little details as authentic as I can, and use a fairly accurate depiction of the war as a backdrop for (mostly) fictional plotlines. I do intend to break this pattern at the end of the year, when I hope to write Operation Archery, a fictionalization of an actual Commando mission, launched at the end of 1941. I don't think it'll be a full-blown novel, however - it'll probably be a longish short story.

So, all in all, I'm extremely impressed and elated over the success of this series. When I wrote Operation Arrowhead as a break from finishing Killer Instincts, it was written more on a lark than any serious attempt at breaking into the military historical fiction genre. I wrote Arrowhead in little more than a month, and although I feel the writing could be a bit tighter, and I know I made a few mistakes here and there, I do think the series is fun, entertaining, and a real pleasure to write. I hope to keep 'em coming for many years.

KILLER INSTINCTS - One Year Later

The one year anniversary of publishing my debut novel, KILLER INSTINCTS, came and went earlier this month without me even realizing it. However, I wanted to take a moment and reflect on the last twelve months, and provide a few observations.

• In 12 1/2 months I've sold a little over 600 copies - roughly an average of 2 a day. However, 60% of those sales occurred in the last three weeks of April, after BookGorilla caught on to my free Ebook promotion of the title and passed it along to their subscribers, resulting in almost 12,000 free copies going out the door in 3 days. In May sales dropped VERY quickly down to 50 copies sold that month, and I'm estimating about two dozen sales for June. In the months leading up to April, the best I've ever managed was 30 sales in one month, and that was right around the time I started with Amazon Select and doing free promotions. So, essentially the only way this title has been able to stay active has been through the use of promotion "bumps" in visibility, which have to be constantly repeated to get any continuous sales figures. Doing some vague napkin math, I've had to give away about two dozen copies of KI for every sale.
• On the more positive side, the book has gotten some really solid reviews. The lone two-star Amazon review is so insubstantial as to really give no more than a "Meh...", and I'm fully aware that the book isn't going to appeal to everyone. Beyond that, even the 3-star reviews are generally positive and expressed enjoyment, with a few quibbles here or there. In general, people seem to like the writing, enjoy the action sequences, and dig the characters, even when the whole plot seems a little "unrealistic". I'll take that as a win overall. I've also had strong support for a sequel, something I hope to begin working on at the end of 2013.
• I think there's an interesting balance between niche and visibility. KILLER INSTINCTS is clearly a "vigilante revenge" novel and falls into the "thriller" category, as well as "crime". When I do a search in All Departments for "vigilante revenge", KI shows up as the 19th result (which isn't actually that bad...). In contrast, when I do an All Departments search for "British Commandos", Operation Arrowhead shows up as #3. Although KI has a much broader marketing base as a crime thriller than COA has as a niche WW2 action novel, COA began to outsell KI by a very wide margin within a few weeks of its release, even in the US (where sales were about 1/3rd of my total sales, the majority being in the UK). It makes me suspect that it can actually help your sales to aim for a small niche market where the competition is scarce, rather than aiming to be a small fish in a very big pond. Operation Bedlam, a title that's been out less than 3 months, and has never had a single free promotion day, has twice the sales KI managed over 12 1/2 months...
• It helps to have friends. When the novel came out, I'd already had a strong support base from people on Twitter and Facebook, as well as other bloggers and writers, both amateur and professional. Guys like James Reasoner, Brian Drake, Mark Allen, and Stan Mitchell - writers who have their own fan bases who both read their books and their blogs - helped spread the word and provide me with some great reviews. On the other hand, Operation Arrowhead was very quickly outselling KI without any of that exposure, so great reviews by guys who see substantial blog traffic don't always equate directly to sales figures, except perhaps as a temporary "bump".
• Ultimately, I see KILLER INSTINCTS as a sort of art-house project of mine, something that gets critical acclaim, but without any real financial success. I think it is a "better" book than either of my Commando novels, but clearly it is not carrying a proportionate degree of financial success. If time "on the shelf", as well as the number and quality of reviews was a direct indicator of sales, KI should be blowing both my Commando novels out of the water, while the opposite is true - heck, my short story "The Train to Calais" vastly outsells KILLER INSTINCTS these days. If $0.99 titles had the same royalty percentages as $3.99 titles, I'd make more off that one short story than I do from KI in every month save April.

And so, that's where we are. I am certainly glad I wrote KILLER INSTINCTS - I felt it was a story I had to tell, and the characters and "world" it created not only influence the Commando novels, but will influence many other stories to come. However, its mediocre success compared to my other works did cool my enthusiasm for writing a sequel, which is why I have a number of projects I want to write first, before I return to work alongside William Lynch again.

New Killer Instincts Review: Badelaire 1, Patterson 0

Ever since my mega-promotion back in April, the reviews for Killer Instincts have been steadily trickling in, and this morning I saw my 30th review, a 5-star from Amazon reviewer Doris Nester. The review is short but very positive, and I'll quote it here:

I loved this book and would recommend it to anyone who likes James Patterson books. It was just as good if not better than any of Patterson's books. So well written and exciting. Thank you Jack Badelaire for a great book.

 Given all the recent discussion over James Patterson's appeal to the federal government to "bail out" Traditional Publishing, I can't help but feel a sense of vindication while reading this review. That an unknown reader who has no stake in my success or failure would take the time to leave me a review, where she states she enjoyed my book as much or more than those "written" by a guy who makes tens of millions of dollars a year off his books, is amazing.

I'll also take the opportunity to point out that Doris is only one of many female readers who has either written a review of Killer Instincts or added it to their Goodreads listings. For a novel filled with a lot of pretty shocking violence, lengthy and detailed passages of "gun talk", and female characters appearing in only 4 out of 24 chapters, you might this this book falls outside the normal range of what would appeal to female readers. Clearly, however, that is not the case, and I think it is further evidence that an author should never write off a demographic as uninterested in their work because of preconceived notions of their target audience.

An Interview With Yours Truly

My friend Justin Aucoin, co-owner of the award-winning Boston Bruins blog Days of Y'Orr, is also a long-time fan and writer of swashbuckling historical adventure fiction. He's recently finished the draft of a novel set in 17th century France, and has a number of short stories under his belt. Over on his personal writing blog, Justin was kind enough to hit me up with a pretty hefty Q&A session.

You can read the interview here.

Never having done an interview before, I discovered you really do find yourself examining your writing, your likes and dislikes, and what it is that drives you as a creative person. Being able to put all of that into words that (hopefully) doesn't make you look like a complete idiot is harder that it seems.

If you have some time (It's 3,500 words...) check it out. Also, stay tuned for more updates on Justin's fiction, and if you like hockey, be sure to check out Days of Y'Orr.

Killer Instincts is Free Today - For the Last Time!

Click Above to go to the Amazon Page

For various reasons, I'm opting out of my next round of Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing Select for both my Commando novel and Killer Instincts. While this means I'll be able to sell digital copies of my novels in other venues, it also means I won't be able to do free promotion days through Amazon as easily (you have to do weird price-matching games via outlets that let you do free books on an indefinite basis).

So if you're curious about my debut novel, described by one reviewer as "Death Wish for the Twenty-Teens", head on over to Amazon today and pick it up for free. And, if you don't have an ereader or have no interest in ebooks, you can still buy the trade paperback for $9.99, which is a pretty good deal as far as trade paperbacks go.

From Amazon's Product Description:

While on spring break in Paris, 21-year old William Lynch learns that his family has been murdered and his home burned to the ground, the brutal act of a Boston crime syndicate.

William vows to seek revenge and hires Richard, a grizzled, mysterious ex-mercenary. For a hundred thousand dollars, Richard offers to train the college student in the ways of the killer-for-hire, giving him the skills he needs to seek vengeance on his own terms.

As William matures under Richard's tutelage, he never counts on what happens when he awakens the killer within him...

KILLER INSTINCTS is a story of revenge and retribution in the style of Brian Garfield's vigilante killer novel DEATH WISH, mixed with Charles Bronson's classic assassin-in-training thriller film, THE MECHANIC.

A Quick Writing Update

September was a great month. I keep a spreadsheet to track all my sales and tally totals by month and by book, as well as adding up royalties. The last two months have made up almost half of all my sales in the last fifteen months, and in September I made three times more in royalties than I did in all of 2011. Now, while that's not even all that much money, at least compared to a "real job", it is enough money for me to feel at least somewhat legitimized as a writer. Before, when I was making perhaps $10 a month in royalties, writing and self-publishing felt more like an experiment than a second job. Now, making ten or twenty times that in a month, I can say something like "my writing pays my utility bills every month". Someday it might be enough to pay my rent - who knows?

The trends are interesting to see. COMMANDO is easily outselling KILLER INSTINCTS, at a ratio of roughly two to one. COMMANDO is also selling twice as well in the UK as it is in the US, a pattern that started almost as soon as it went on sale and has continued ever since. I'm also seeing more sales in general in the UK, and I'm attributing that to both COMMANDO and my book promotions.

Speaking of which, in September I switched all my titles over to Kindle Select. It means I can't sell the ebooks anywhere other than Amazon, but since I hadn't been doing that anyhow, I didn't really care. Honestly, I think it's worth it to have those free promotion days. Being able to get hundreds of copies of your work into people's hands for free might seem foolish because you don't make any money off of it, but the potential word of mouth, plus the way that those "purchases" populate Amazon's "also bought" algorithms, makes it worthwhile in my book.

The biggest thing I've learned in the last two months is that my next project needs to be a second COMMANDO novel. Not only will this mean that those people who read the first book (and liked it) will hopefully buy the second, but I think it will lend legitimacy to the series to actually have, you know, more than one book, and I think that will help attract new readers. Right now my tentative schedule is to have the second book, Operation Bedlam, out in January. Gotta earn off of all those holiday Kindle reader gifts and Amazon gift cards...

Book Review: The Sten Machine Carbine

The most amusing thing about writing military and violent fiction is, to be honest, the Amazon referrals you start to get when you're buying books for research purposes. I've been buying a bunch of materials about World War Two and the British Commandos, as well s various aspects of the war. I came across this little pamphlet on the Sten, and picked it up on a lark. As soon as I clicked to buy it, Amazon started recommending all sorts of do-it-yourself gun manufacturing guides, as well as old standbys like The Anarchist's Cookbook and other anti-establishment texts.

The Sten "machine carbine" as it was called, although we would call it a submachine gun, is an extremely simple weapon. There's only forty some-odd parts, and all of them could be manufactured with the equipment found in any semi-professional metal-working shop. If over a million Stens could be manufactured in a couple of years in cottage smithies all over England, making one using the machines found in even a modest shop today would be trivial. Because of this, blueprints and design specifications for the weapon are commonly found among militant "off-the-grid"-ers and the like.

Interestingly enough, because of this, when I was writing Killer Instincts, originally William was going to train and use a black-market Sten, manufactured by some anonymous underground gunsmithing shop and sold to Richard and other clients, who were looking for untraceable automatic weapons. There were a couple of pages where Richard talks to William about illegal arms manufacturing, and the world of "gun runners" who traffic in untraceable weapons. At the time, I thought it would be an interesting way to start introducing William to the "shadow world" that Richard lived in. However, I decided that while this was interesting, I'd rather use a weapon more iconic for the action-adventure genre, which is why I switched to using an Uzi. There's still some of the black market aspect of the story when they talk about the weapon suppressors, but it's not quite as extensive.

Anyhow, back to the Sten Machine Carbine. This handy little pamphlet is a reproduction of a vintage British military manual on the weapon, and shows each of the weapon's parts in fair detail, as well as explaining precisely how to field strip and even totally disassemble the Sten into each of its constituent parts. It is one thing to be able to guess at the process, and another to know exactly how it is done. For example, the tubular stock of the Sten can be removed so the weapon can be stowed in a satchel or other small area, but I was never sure exactly how it was done, or if it was a quick process or if it required a tool. Thanks to this booklet, I know just how it would be done.

The booklet also goes into details such as "official" positions and stances to use when firing the weapon, as well as immediate action drills for clearing jams and so forth. Even if some of the stances or techniques are "dated", it is great information to know as it is how your characters have been trained, and how they would act in certain situations.

While most of the information here might be available in some form or another scattered across the internet, I think for a few bucks it is worth picking up if you have a serious interest in the mechanical workings of this famous weapon.