New Release: THEY KILL FOR GOLD

So, my first new book is out, a fantasy novella that plays heavily into the 80's style, tabletop fantasy role-playing games media tie-in novel fiction vibe. I'll cut-and-paste in here the Author's Note I wrote for the end of the book: 

I discovered tabletop role-playing games in 1993, when two of my friends acquired the “Big Black Box” edition of a certain “Basic” fantasy RPG which will remain nameless. My enthusiasm for tabletop gaming quickly outgrew theirs, and since I lived in a very rural part of Maine and didn’t have many friends who lived close by, I turned my interest in writing - which was very strong in me even as a teenager - towards an interest in gaming, specifically the world-building and character-creating aspects of it. I didn’t have much of an opportunity for playing adventures, so I filled my time by creating adventure stories.

Fast-forward a quarter of a century. I still play that certain role-playing game in its current edition, although now in the winter of 2021 my friends and I play it over video chat, because the COVID-19 pandemic is keeping us from hanging out together as we always did, laughing and teasing and bringing meals and having drinks. I’m a big nerd and most of my friends are big nerds as well, and this is one of the pastimes that keeps us together, some of us since the late-’90s. We’ve gotten older, some of us a little rounder, all of us a little greyer up top, but when the books and the dice and the character sheets come out, we’re all still kinda kids again.

This past year has been terrible on a global scale. The pandemic is far from over, all our lives have been on hold in one way or another for a year. We still try to get together online a couple of times a month to fight bad guys and go exploring, discover hidden places and earn fame and fortune in imaginary lands. It’s an old-fashioned style of play, and I try as the Game-Master to make sure the more problematic aspects are left out of the adventures. Still, we’re traditionalists in many ways. 

And so, this is what THEY KILL FOR GOLD is about. It’s a story of old-school fantasy adventure, hearkening back to those memories of a more “Basic” kind of game and gameplay. The plot isn’t fancy, the world isn’t unique or exceptional, the character motivations aren’t all that complicated. And yet, I enjoyed writing the story and bringing these characters to life. Hopefully, you enjoyed reading it. Maybe it’ll inspire you to go dig around in a drawer, find your dice, dust off your old rulebook and some graph paper, and go on an adventure.

So far, I've seen a slow but steady trickle of sales, and more interestingly, Kindle Unlimited "borrows" and reads. Very encouraging, as I haven't released anything in two years and this has gone out with very little fanfare. I already have an outline for the second book, and I am developing the story for the third. All in all, I think the idea of simple, fast-paced novellas that draw really heavily on old-school fantasy gaming tropes, but with a modern touch, may in fact find an audience with readers. I've gotten some really positive feedback from a couple of readers already, folks who know the genre I'm trying to fit into and whose opinions I definitely respect, and so that is extremely encouraging.

That's it for now, If you think this sounds interesting, you can click here to find the ebook on Amazon. A paperback edition should be along in a few weeks.

It's Been 84 Years

Well, okay, not exactly that long. But it's been a while. 14 months since our last blog post. If you haven't been living under a rock for the last year, you know that the COVID-19 pandemic turned the planet upside down, and especially for those of us in the US, where things, shall we say, have been a little tumultuous.

Back in Mid-March of 2020, my work went remote until August. I worked from home for 5 months, with only very rare, clandestine operation-style trips into work in order to pick up something or drop something off in another person's office. Since then, I've been on a 3 days a week schedule since September. Overall, it has been okay. My commute, which is via public transit, isn't so bad, mostly because there are very few people on the train going in either direction. At work, I interact with almost no one. There are days where over the course of 8 hours, the person I interact with most is the nice person handing me my Starbucks through a pickup window. I have become the Maytag repairman, sitting and waiting for a problem to happen, and it rarely occurs.

Well, most of you must be waving your arms around and saying, "Wait, that should be perfect for a novelist, right? You should be able to get all sorts of things done, right? Why haven't you written three or four novels by now?" Well, nah, not exactly. I'm sure it was great for some folks, but it was hard for me. Constant mental distraction between the pandemic news and worry, trouble with family (especially elder care stuff), troubles with friends and loved ones, national political crisis, and the stress of working-but-not-really working, in an environment that's both dull and stressful at the same time, it all became conditions that aren't great for the flow state necessary to write and complete long-form storytelling.

On the other hand, I wasn't idle. I did work on a number of projects, although some only made small amounts of progress. All in all, I think I wrote about 60,000 words over the course of 2020, which for me, isn't terrible. And the good news in all of that, is I did write a novella - 32,000 words - called THEY KILL FOR GOLD. I'll drop another post about it tomorrow, but in short, it is a fantasy novella that asks the question: Everyone wants to be the hero, but what if you're just the hireling? It's a story idea I've had for years, but never got around to writing it because there was always some greater, higher-stakes project that took precedence. Well, this year, I was just too stressed to work on the high-stakes stuff, so I finally settled down and wrote this novella, which will, I hope, be the first of many quick-read adventures.

Beyond that? I picked away at a few other ideas, but nothing I want to talk about here just yet. And I do owe you all my 2020 writing in review, which is usually a breakdown of sales and writing progress. It'll take a little more time this year, as my move to publish six of my novels through Wolfpack Publishing means I've got to consult two sets of spreadsheets, rather than one, but I do want to get you some numbers eventually. In short, it was...an okay decision. KILLER INSTINCTS and SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER sold better in 2020 than they ever did before, but my Commando titles actually lost money with the move, and overall I think I either broke even or made less this past year than I did in 2019. Granted, given the situation over the past year, making a good estimate as to what my sales should have been is a little pointless, but I think the long and the short of it is, I should have held onto my Commando titles, and only given Wolfpack the other two novels. Live and learn.

That's going to be it for now - just a quick update. Now that THEY KILL FOR GOLD is out (link for those who are interested) I'm going to focus this spring on finally writing the second Hangman novel, BATTLE FOR THE BLACKTOP. I've had this idea half-formed in my mind for years, and I think now's the time to get it finished. On that note, I'll catch you all later, and thank you for dropping by.

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.

Wargaming Wednesday: Nine Novels, Zero RPGs

Old Cover Draft from Wayyyy Back When

Going to cut and paste in a series of posts from Twitter that I wrote this weekend. Every year or so, I get this notion of "finally" finishing a small role-playing game product that I can let out into the wild. I don't think I'd sell it, just create a PDF that's available for download, perhaps put a print-on-demand version on Amazon for as cheaply as they'll let me. But year after year, it doesn't happen, and I got thinking about why recently:

I've blogged about it in the past, but it is very strange for me to face that I have written nine novels and many shorter works of fiction, but the thought of putting out a short role-playing game product is vastly more nerve-wracking. 

I've been gaming since '93 and writing for profit since 2011. I ran campaigns with several homebrew RPG systems over the years, and tinkered with probably a dozen more system ideas. Yet, I have never had the nerve to finish a gaming product, package it, and put it out there.

At first I thought it was fear of criticism, but being a novelist beats that out of you pretty quickly. Maybe it's knowing that most readers just consume your product and move on, but so many gamers I know are system-tinkerers. It's like running a restaurant where half your customers are also running their own restaurants. Every single person who buys it is going to be deciding whether they could have done this better than you, and how.

Because that's the nature of RPGs. And that's fine, except that means not just criticism, but active, in-depth critique. No 4* reviews on Amazon "Fun read but the action was a little confusing". You have to defend every rule and every wording against everyone who reads it.

And to have that level of exhausting engagement, and so much of my time dedicated to a project that'd probably earn me 1% of what a novel would (if I even put it out at a price, which I probably wouldn't) just seems...not worth it.

Which kind if sucks, because I love role-playing games, and I have been a tinkering game designer for 25+ years. But the meat grinder which is that middle-aged person's algorithm of time, money, and energy vs reward is difficult to overcome.

I wrote a post about this back in 2015 on my Tankards and Broadswords blog (click to go there and read it, it's still relevant). It's funny that in the last four years, despite continued tinkering, I still don't have any kind of RPG product to share. I'm fully aware that the skill set of "Game Designer" and "Novelist" only partially overlap, but I think that is only a small portion of the problem. So, we shall see. I've got a few ideas, and I feel like if I can start small enough, I can build on a little idea incrementally. Only time will tell.
   

Fiction Friday: The Stonehaven League LitRPG Series

The "LitRPG" genre of fiction is...a weird one. It's not actually that new, however. The premise is that these stories revolve around characters who exist within a "game world", i.e., a world that is artificial and created as part of a game. The degree of artificiality in LitRPG stories can be very obvious, or the world can feel completely real, but still exist only as a result of some kind of game.

The first novel that I know of which seems to fall into this kind of genre, although it wasn't called LitRPG at the time, was Andre Norton's 1978 novel Quag Keep, a story about a bunch of adventurers in a medieval-type world who are actually people from Earth who were playing a role-playing game. Given that Dungeons and Dragons was roughly four years old at the time Quag Keep was published, Norton got on the bandwagon fairly early. Many others have followed over the years, one of the most notable being Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series, which started in 1983 with The Sleeping Dragon. Beyond the written word, one would consider the '80s Dungeons and Dragons cartoon series to be a form of this kind of genre, as would, I feel, the movie TRON.

But the modern form of the LitRPG novel is more commonly based around computer games, and more specifically, not people transported to worlds, but rather, immersed in them through play. As virtual reality is more common these days in gaming (and is growing bigger every day), the idea of putting on VR gear and submerging yourself as your character in a game world is very real. In fact, Ready Player One  is a perfect example of this.

Enough background, though. Author and former (?) game developer Carrie Summers has written an engaging series of LitRPG / GameLit novels, which in the "real world" are set a few decades in the future, where virtual reality gaming has extended all the way to cybernetic implants that dump the virtual reality of the game right into our brain's perception of reality. In her first book, Temple of Sorrows, a young woman named Devon leaves her crappy job to work as a kind of "super-tester" for a gaming company, Relic Online, in order to push the game and it's artificial intelligence to the limits of what a capable, creative player can do.

Devon logs into the game, stunned at how the direct neural connection to the game world seems so incredibly real - she can feel the wind and the sun, the grass under her feet and the cloth of her clothing. Yet, the world still acts as a Computer Role-Playing Game. She has skills and abilities and she gains experience and levels up. When she kills a monster, the touch of a blade turns the monster's body into "loot" that can be used for other things. Anyone who has played a computer RPG in the last...twenty years or so will be familiar with the tropes of the world and its setting.

I don't want to give the plot away, but suffice to say, there is plenty going on in both the real world and the in-game world. This leads to dangers on both sides for Devon, something that I found interesting as it kept the story from being completely about her adventures in-game, and raised the stakes a little. And while this book is probably perfectly fine for a YA audience, there is a good deal of violence going on, so those who want action will get that, while those who like the puzzle-solving and "game-ness" of a game world will also have something to look forward to.

Overall, this is an enjoyable series. If I remember right, I've read the first three books, and I am just starting the fourth. with six books currently in the series. These books are all available in Kindle (for purchase or Kindle Unlimited) and paperback, and the first four are currently available as audiobooks. If this seems in any way interesting to you, I definitely recommend checking them out.

Fiction Friday: THE LAST WISH: Introducing the Witcher

If you follow video gaming at all, you've likely heard of The Witcher series of open-world RPG video games. They feature the monster-hunting Witcher, Geralt of Rivia, wandering the world and killing that which goes bump in the night. The world of the Witcher is based around Slavic folklore, a flavor of Western monster mythology that is a little removed from what most of us are used to unless you are really into the subject of bestiary folklore.

But fewer people realize that the Witcher and his world started out as a series of short stories and novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. Most of the stories were written in the 1990s, but it wasn't until the mid-oughts and later that they were given English translations. Coming at the end of this year, Netflix is releasing a television series based around the stories, and of course both fans of the books and the video games are howling over how the details shown in the trailer don't do the series justice.

Curious about both such a popular video game character and what might drive Netflix to pick up the IP, I grabbed the first (chronologically) anthology of short stories, THE LAST WISH. I was immediately hooked. For a book translated from a different language, the prose is evocative and pulls you right into the world, a very dark, late medieval-era feeling fantasy realm, very similar to the Ravenloft setting of Dungeons & Dragons. If you aren't familiar with Slavic folklore, some of the creatures might seem unusual to you, but that slightly alien nature just adds to the creepiness of the setting - this isn't some adventurer going after your usual orcs and goblins, this is a true monster hunter, for whom a blend of swords, sorcery, and dark knowledge is needed to take on the evils lurking in the deep forests and crumbling towers.

So if you like dark fairy-tale fantasy with an Eastern European bent to it, do yourself a favor and check out Sapkowski's fiction. I'll definitely find time this fall to work my way through more of Geralt's adventures.

Media Monday: The Kindle eBook Reader

I'm not sure when I bought my first eBook. It was probably around 2010, and I think I would have bought it using the Kindle app on a work-provided iPad. Not much later, or perhaps around the same time, I had the app on an iPod Touch (I didn't have a smartphone). This was around the time that I was starting to connect with other authors, and I was beginning work on my first novel, as well as tinkering with short story concepts. Many of the older authors I was talking to were reclaiming rights to their backlists, while newer authors were experimenting with self-publishing, so I bought a few eBooks and began to read.

Reading on an iPod Touch was OK, especially since the device was small and easy to carry around. Reading on a 1st Generation iPad was more cumbersome, since the tablet is large and comparatively heavy. It is also quite bright if the screen is turned up, but when the brightness is lowered, it is much harder to use. The irritation of having a bright screen shining in my face at close range made reading for extended periods of time rather uncomfortable. Still, I liked the various features the Kindle app provided - the ability to "whispersync" your place in an eBook across multiple devices, and of course, the ability to instantly buy and download a new book. It did not take long for me to see the many benefits in eBook technology.

My 2011 Kindle (left) and 2013 Kindle Paperwhite (right)

Shortly after publishing my first pieces of short fiction in 2011, I decided it was time to get a Kindle. I bought it in December of 2011, and was immediately impressed. While the keyboard might make it a little intimidating or "retro" at first, and the e-ink contrast isn't as sharp as later models, I immediately found the e-ink technology extremely comfortable to read. There was no light shining directly into my face, the side buttons turning the page allowed one to keep reading with a brief twitch of my thumb, and the ability to adjust font size, line spacing, and character density made reading very easy on my eyes, which is especially important for me, as my eyesight isn't great, and paperback fonts tend to be small and cramped.

A little more than a year later, I did buy a 7" Samsung tablet, and while it was so much better to read on than my tiny smartphone or the large, cumbersome iPad, it still shined a bright light in my face, and once I purchased a larger LG smartphone, I found the tablet redundant. A few months later, addressing the one major flaw in my Kindle (the lack of a reading light), I bought a Kindle Paperwhite in 2013. While I missed the buttons - and it was harder to take notes with the touch keyboard vs the actual physical button keyboard - the Paperwhite was smaller, lighter, and the adjustable light, which shown across the page, rather than out from behind it, made reading in low light extremely easy.

Way to be an elitist shitbag!

There are a lot of people out there who speak derisively of eBooks and Kindles. Some complain that Amazon doesn't use the EPUB file format, which means Amazon eBooks don't work on other e-readers. They complain that eBooks purchased on other platforms don't work on the Kindle. Neither of these arguments really bother me, since the only two e-ink competitors are the Nook and the Kobo, and frankly, if you tied your line to either of those brands, I'm sorry to say, you've got problems. Beyond that, apps from other booksellers can install on most phones and mobile devices, regardless of file type. Other people complain about DRM (Digital Rights Management - aka, anti-piracy technology), but frankly, that's put in place at the request of the publisher, not the distributor, so if you have a problem with an Amazon eBook having DRM, write the publisher, not Mr. Bezos.

And of course, there's the "I just love books" argument. People love the feel of a book, the smell of paper, the act of turning pages, blah blah blah. Look, no one is forcing a Kindle into your hands and dragging your books out of your house to throw into the back of a dump truck. Contrary to popular opinion, Marie Kondo isn't telling you to ONLY keep 30 books in your house (I have her book - in paper no less - and she says no such thing). For some reason, people seem to think that proponents of eBooks live some weird minimalist, digital-only lifestyle. I own two e-readers, and I've got sixteen bookcases filled to the damn brim with books. There's books everywhere you turn in my home, and you know what - that's one of the reasons I like the Kindle. I don't have to go digging through piles and bookcases looking for a book, it's right there in the Kindle inventory. I don't need to worry about packing "backup" books when I go on a trip, because I've already got several hundred right there with me.

Mmmm, smells like mold, cigarette smoke, and cat piss.

Does it need to be recharged? Sure, maybe every couple of weeks it needs to be plugged in for a couple of hours. My phone needs to be recharged every day, sometimes twice a day depending on how much I use it. A laptop might need to be recharged every few hours. Compared to most of the electronic devices you use every day, the Kindle, comparatively, lasts an order of magnitude longer. Both of mine are 6+ years old, and I can still read 2-3 novels on them before the battery runs out. It takes the barest minimum of device power management to make this a non-issue. And, other than that, I don't see many drawbacks to these devices. The Paperwhite weights about the same as a paperback novel, and the newer versions of the Kindle line are even lighter.

In conclusion, eBooks and the e-reader have completely changed the way I buy and read books, making it a much more immediate experience. I still buy used, vintage paperbacks for my collections, and I still buy paper books for research because it is easier to find a specific page or diagram in a paper book, but for casual, leisure reading, it's almost exclusively done via eBooks.

Fiction Friday: The Original Dragonlance Chronicles Trilogy

Just a quick post today as I wrap up a busy work week. I cribbed this off of my Facebook feed in response to a Tor Books post about the original "Chronicles" Dragonlance tie-in novels, and how formative those novels were to a generation of role-playing gamers and fantasy enthusiasts. For many folks (myself included) we read these books before Conan or Lord of the Rings.

You can read the Tor.com article here.

No joke, I think the author stole the memories of my early teenage years and used them to write this piece. Until maybe my sophomore year of high school, I'd always eschewed fantasy and science fiction in favor of shoot 'em up men's adventure and espionage thrillers, until one day a classmate of mine loaned me these three books. This was at least a year before I first played Dungeons & Dragons, and long before I tried reading The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. I still have my original three paperbacks, bought after reading this for the first time almost 30 years ago.

After getting into D&D, I did buy the second edition "Tales of the Lance" boxed set, although I never did play it. Frankly, I feel like it isn't really superior to the Dragonlance Adventures hardcover for 1E that came out in the '80s. I remember seeing this advertised in the back of comic books, before I got into D&D or really understood what it was or how it played. I remember staring at this all the time, thinking it seemed like the most badass thing I could imagine. When I got into D&D later on, I did buy the 2nd edition Tales of the Lance boxed set, but just didn't appreciate it as much as the 1E Dragonlance Adventures hardcover, which I acquired in a used book store my freshman year of college.

It has been years since I re-read the original trilogy. I started re-reading Kindle editions, and while it didn't disappoint, I had read them so many times, knowing what was about to happen meant I eventually started reading something else and didn't get back to it, but yeah, I do want to give 'em another go, although I am a little nervous as to whether they'll hold up or not. It is simply a matter of remembering that they represent fantasy and RPGs at a certain particular point in time, and appreciate them for what they are, instead of criticizing them for what they are not.
 

Media Monday: People Read Less - So What?

Now that we've gotten that no doubt controversial post title out of the way - yes, according to this article on The Passive Voice Blog, a recent study on how Americans use their leisure time showed that in the last fifteen years, the amount of time we spend in leisure reading has dropped about 30 percent.

Now, before you run off and claim this is a sign of the fall of Western civilization, feel free to head over to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and take a look at the Time Use Survey data. Unless there's a more select breakdown of this data, their categories are pretty broad, and if I may say so, kind of antiquated. They refer to "computer use", but don't seem to indicate if that also includes mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. They also list "socializing and communicating", but I'm not sure if that includes communicating digitally via messaging or other social media. Further, they refer to "watching TV", but as there are so many people these days who almost exclusively stream their TV content via a computer, what if I am watching television via my laptop? Or I'm watching YouTube or Twitch, but on my television?

The crux of the worry here, for this blog post at least, is that people are reading less. And I think the above paragraph might shed a little light on why. Although claims have been made that we've been reading less since the 1980s, I would wager the decline has been more rapid in the last 10-15 years, and for obvious reasons. People these days simply have more ways in which to spend their leisure time, and although I don't know if people have more or less leisure time these days, We all have only so many hours in the day, period. Looking back at the 1980s as the starting point for this decline, we have the arrival of cable television and computer video gaming as two major time sinks. Cable is especially important when you look at that time use survey and see that by far, "watching TV" is still considered the largest leisure activity. Once the average person's TV content went from a handful of channels to dozens, including channels that showed theatrical movies, there was a lot more content for the TV viewer to consume. Also consider that this would have been a boom time for cassette tapes, VHS tapes, and then as time went on, CDs and DVDs. "Home entertainment" exploded in the '80s and '90s, even if you set aside home computing and console gaming, which you really can't.

But what about the books? Someone on the Internet told me that Men stopped reading because [insert awkward and sexist bullshit here]. Well, it is true that a lot of "Men's Fiction" dried up during this time period, but I believe it had less to do with the lack of testosterone in the Publishing World, and more to do with a lack of profit, both for the authors and for the publishers. Most of the serial fiction writing was done on a write-for-hire basis, without any royalty structure, which meant you got one paycheck for your novel, regardless of how good or bad it was. This, along with rapid turnaround times for getting books out the door, and the steady merge-merge-merge of smaller houses being bought up by larger ones, and little imprints being abandoned because they weren't profitable enough, caused a lot of venues for "Men's fiction" to simply dry up. Why should a major publishing house pump out skinny little dimestore novels when it could put out a doorstopper hardcover, then sell the same book six months to a year later as a mass market paperback?

This article about veteran novelist David Morrell is pretty telling in this regard. His iconic character, John Rambo, first came to live in a novel where (spoiler alert) he's killed off at the end. But Morrell was lucky enough to sell the rights to the novel as a movie deal, and in that film, FIRST BLOOD, Rambo doesn't die in the end. In fact, he goes on to make multiple blockbuster movies, including one coming out this very month. Even the author himself notices that he has a moment of disconnect when he sees his character in its screen persona, so far removed from that character he penned decades ago. Morrell lived through this transformation in the publishing business, where the question stopped being whether it was a good book that would sell, into just how marketable is the book - how far can you carry it into possible TV or film options. What about streaming venues? Video games? A book is no longer just a good story, it is precious intellectual property that can be branded and milked for every possible drop of profit.

And to circle back to advancements in media for a moment, while traditional publishing houses might have failed not only their authors but their readers, leaving their leisure time to be consumed by TV and video game entertainment, now multimedia entertainment means anyone carrying a smartphone has in their pocket access to whatever form of entertainment they desire - from books, to music, to movies and television, to video games and instructional videos, newspapers, magazine articles, interpersonal and social media communication channels, and much more.

We have access to more information - reference and entertainment - right now in our pockets than anyone before us in the history of the world. It is only natural that we make use of that access, and such use eats into time that, in decades past, was used to read a novel. And you know what? That's okay. I have always been an avid reader, and I would never tell anyone to not read for pleasure, but there are so many other venues for entertainment these days, and there's nothing wrong with partaking in them, because at the end of the day, if you gain enjoyment out of doing it, that's what's most important.

Now, does not reading mean we are negatively impacting our vocabulary, our own literacy, our very imagination? Maybe yes, maybe no. I know a lot of early Gen-Xers and Boomers who bemoan that "kids these days" are illiterate and can't write a proper sentence or spelling...and then you see these people post on Facebook, and in my mind, their arguments become invalid. If someone wants to better their vocabulary or educate themselves, the online and digital resources available to them now make the resources available to me when I was growing up pale in comparison. I regularly turn to YouTube or some other online resource for information on a wide variety of topics, and these digital resources can provide information in a way that no written text ever could.

So at the end of the day, yes, people might be reading less, but does that mean they are learning less? Are they using their imaginations less? Are we simply shifting where we are dedicating our time and changing the way we learn? Is watching a YouTube channel on history worse than reading a history book? Is watching a Netflix series about bank robbers worse than reading a series of novels about bank robbers? Is watching someone stream a video game over Twitch really that different from going to an arcade and watching someone play Pac-Man?

Fiction Friday: Matthew Phillion's THE INDESTRUCTIBLES Series

Although I have, over the years, dabbled in reading comics and following along with various comic book characters, I was never really particularly drawn to the super-hero genre specifically. I preferred characters like The Punisher or Conan the Barbarian, or comic book stories that weren't really super-hero focused, at least in the traditional sense, like the PREACHER series, or WATCHMEN (which has super-heroes, but wow, not so super or so heroic).

All that having been said, with the meteoric rise in Young Adult fiction over the last twenty years, especially as it touches on sub-genres like Urban Fantasy, I've seen several authors out there who tie in YA fiction with more traditional super-hero tropes (Percy Jackson kinda feels like this, although the characters are technically Greek demi-gods, but whatever). Again, this really isn't my cup of tea, so for the most part, I've ignored this genre, feeling it's not really something I find interesting.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to give Matthew Phillion's THE INDESTRUCTIBLES a shot. I've been social media pen pals with Matt for a few years, and I've read his DUNGEON CRAWLERS novellas (also highly recommended). I knew he was a skilled storyteller, so I took the plunge, and I read Book 1 of his YA supers series.

To say that I was pleasantly surprised at how good it was is a bit of a slight to Matt, so I will say instead that I was surprised how easy it was for me to slide into the YA superhero genre with this first book. The characters were fun and engaging, and his writing style is clean and evocative, without feeling simplistic or dumbed-down for a younger audience. I have since read books 2 and 3, and I am currently well into book 4. The series currently extends to a fifth book, as well as several associated short stories, and there is a separate two-volume book series that exists in the same world and timeline as the Indestructibles characters.

If you enjoy super-hero fiction, or if you have or know a young adult reader who enjoys this kind of fiction, please go check out Matt's work on Amazon. His books are available in Kindle and paperback formats, and he's also made them available via Kindle Unlimited.

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.

Fiction Friday: Paul Bishop Presents Anthologies

Astonishingly, the third post of the week! I'm reserving Fridays for fiction posts, and today's post will be a little shorter than the posts on Monday and Wednesday. I wanted to highlight a series of fiction anthologies being put out by Wolfpack Publishing, and curated/edited by Paul Bishop, a retired LAPD detective and venerable novelist. The first anthology, Pattern of Behavior I read as soon as it was released, and while not every one of the stories was entirely my bag, so to speak, all of them were well-crafted tales from highly-talented authors.

There is a second book in the series out now, Criminal Tendencies, and although I have yet to start reading it, I must humbly mention that I have a story in that volume, one featuring my character Jamie "Hangman" Lynch, the protagonist from my novel SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER. If you liked that novel and want to read some more of the Hangman dealing out some bloody vigilante vengeance, look no further (for now) than Criminal Tendencies.

I do believe there is one more entry forthcoming in Paul's series of crime anthologies, and after that, there is at least one Western anthology on the horizon. All of these are (or will be) available in eBook and trade paperback form, and not only are they priced to move at $0.99 apiece, they are available through Kindle Unlimited as well.

Lastly, I highly encourage anyone interested in crime and mystery fiction to go to Paul's Amazon page and check out the full range of his published works. Paul was one of the authors I connected with early on in my blogging and writing journey, and I am more than happy to promote his publishing ventures whenever and wherever I can.

THE BUTCHER OF CALAIS is Available Now

The best description of THE BUTCHER OF CALAIS is "Death Wish meets World War Two". Andre Bouchard is a mild-mannered teacher of mathematics living with his wife and daughter in Calais, France. The Bouchards survive the siege of Calais and the fall of the city to German forces in May, 1940, but several weeks later, Bouchard's wife and daughter are murdered by German soldiers.

Driven by grief and rage into a wine bottle, Bouchard's fate is changed by a deadly encounter with a German officer late one night, leaving the German dead and a Luger in Bouchard's hands. With the means and the motive to strike back against those who killed his family, Bouchard prowls the dark streets of Calais, stalking and killing German soldiers. Driven towards more and more acts of violence, Bouchard turns Calais into a battlefield once more, littered with the bodies of the guilty and innocent alike.

Those of you who've read my first two Commando novels, Operation Arrowhead and Operation Bedlam, and the short story The Train to Calais, know Bouchard as "the Butcher of Calais", but the events that set Bouchard on his path were only hinted at in those works. Here, we see the Butcher as he takes those first steps on the road to revenge for his family, and ultimately, freedom for France - at any cost.

THE BUTCHER OF CALAIS is a novella, of approximately 27,000 words. It is currently only available as an eBook, but I plan on eventually releasing it as a slim paperback volume as well.

My 2018 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 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 that.

In 2018, I sold 2,149 ebooks and tracked 700,444 Kindle Unlimited ebook pages read of my material. This is down a little more than 400 ebook sales and 9,000 KU pages from last year. As mentioned in 2017's WiR, I didn't put out anything new last year, so going into 2018, I saw my sales continue to steadily decline. I ran a small freebie promotion of my non-WW2 short story material over the summer, which resulted in a minor boost to my KU numbers for short fiction during that time, but overall, non WW-2 material still continued to sell terribly all year long.

In late July, I finally published Book 6 of the Commando series, Operation Eisen. The book has actually sold pretty well, despite some mixed reviews. I was called out by several reviewers for the book's ending, which they didn't like, and this was a major wake-up moment for me, because I had fallen (I feel) into something of a trap, thinking that by this point, as long as I wrote about the same characters and put into the book the same sorts of elements, readers would carry along as usual. To some degree, this was the case, but the book's ending (which was something of a cliff-hanger) was hated by several reviewers, who thrashed me quite severely over it. Lesson very much learned.

Despite all that, the book has so far sold over 600 ebook copies, and tallied 126,000 KU page reads (equivalent to another 500 or so full read-throughs). Not only that, but the addition of another book in the series significantly boosted the sales of all books in the series. That is something very important to remember - even the first Commando book, published six years ago, saw very significant increases in sales and reads with the addition of a new book in the series. Series sells.

In addition to writing, I've continued to teach adult/continuing education classes on self-publishing, and I recently got to speak about writing historical fiction at a small writer's workshop. These might be low-level gigs, but it makes me feel good to be able to educate others based on my experiences over the past seven years. 

My goals for 2019 come down to two interconnected points - keeping myself writing, even if it is only a small amount every day, and putting out new material on a regular basis. 18 months between titles was way, wayyyyy too long a wait. Hopefully, in the next month or so, I will release a new Commando: Short Bursts novella, and after that, I'm going to dive back into several larger, novel-sized projects. I've made myself a daily word-count spreadsheet in order to help track my productivity, because I need some kind of accountability. I'll follow up with how that's going in a month or two.

Well, there you have it. Sales were slow in the first few months - slower than they have been for a long, long time - but my mid-year release helped me bounce back, and I just need to...wait for it...

Always be closing.

COMMANDO Book 6 Title Change

This is a brief post to inform anyone who is confused, that the sixth book in the Commando series is now titled OPERATION EISEN. The former title, which was fine to use when I started writing the book, became the name of a police action against a sex crime ring. Since the last thing I want when people google things related to my book is to stumble across articles related to sex crimes, I made the immediate decision to re-title my book. Thus, Book 6 now has a new title.

Now Available: COMMANDO Operation Elysium

Although it has been a long time since the last COMMANDO novel, Operation Archery, I've finally released the sixth volume of the series, Operation Elysium. The book is currently live in eBook format on the Amazon store (link in the sidebar). The book's description is as follows:

March, 1942. Lance-Sergeant Thomas Lynch and his fellow Commando raiders once again infiltrate Occupied France. Their mission: to carry out a surprise assault on the Chateau de Lorieux, a French estate where heroes of the Waffen-SS enjoy rest and relaxation away from the horrors of war. Unbeknownst to the Germans, Lynch and his comrades bring their own brand of horror, striking in the night with bullets and blades.

But when three of Germany's deadliest and most diabolical SS veterans escape the slaughter, Lynch and the other Commandos find themselves in a race against time. Can they retreat to the French coast and evade the German search parties until salvation arrives, or must they turn their backs to the cold waters of the Atlantic, and fight to the last against impossible odds?

COMMANDO: Operation Elysium is the sixth in a series of military action - adventure novels written in the spirit of classic war movies and wartime adventure pulp fiction.

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.

REVENANTS: ASSAULT ON ABBEVILLE is on Sale Now!

Although it was mentioned in last week's 2016 Writing in Review post, I wanted to formally announce the release of the first book in a new series: REVENANTS #1: Assault on Abbeville. The Amazon product description is as follows:

As the Third Reich stands triumphant upon the ashes of Western Europe, five men sneak into France under the cover of night. During the German blitzkrieg, each of them had been left for dead by their comrades. Now, these once-dead men, these revenants, have come together to infiltrate Hitler’s Fortress Europe on a mission of murder. Their assignment: hunt down and assassinate the deadliest German in France.

Outnumbered and outgunned, the Revenants must rely on their cunning, their skill, and their cold brutality to do the impossible and survive. The odds are overwhelmingly against them, and there are enemies at every turn, but when everyone thinks you’re already dead, you’ve got nothing left to lose.

REVENANTS: Assault on Abbeville is the first in a series of military action - adventure novels written in the spirit of classic war movies and wartime adventure pulp fiction. It is related to the author's COMMANDO series, but can be read and enjoyed on its own.

 Unlike the Commando series, Revenants features five men who once served in different Allied armies: France, Belgium, Norway, Poland, and the Netherlands. Each of these men was left for dead on the battlefield during the 1940 invasion of Western Europe, and through one method or another, found their way to England. There, these five men were recruited to carry out assignments that no Allied government would officially sanction.

In contrast my Commando series, I intend for Revenants to be darker, both in tone and in moral outlook. These men aren't bound by any "rules of warfare", and while the Commandos aren't ones to favor a fair fight, the Revenants live to fight dirty - it's the only way five men can survive any battle against the Nazi war machine.

If you are a fan of the Commando series, I think you'll enjoy the Revenants series as well. They are both in the same "universe", meaning references to characters and events may cross over between the two series, much like my fellow author Dan Eldredge's Ranger series, but you in no way have to read one of my Commando stories in order to enjoy Assault on Abbeville.

Currently, only the eBook edition is available on Amazon, but I hope to get the paperback edition published before the end of the month. There is a link to the book on the right-hand sidebar, but if you are viewing this on a mobile device, you can go to the Amazon page by clicking on this link.

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!