I'm still alive!

Just a short update letting you know I'm still here. The holidays have been sort of nuts, and I haven't been able to post on here. Now that the craziness is over, I will be doing a few posts a week starting in January. I'm working on a new novel, a vampire story, and it's going very well.

I'm waiting until January to post because I want to see how sales end up for this month before I make my next big post. This is a blog sort of chronicling my journey as a self-published writer during the age of the eBook, and the December sales report will be important.

So please, just wait a few more days, and I promise you won't be bored.

The Debut

So, the linky picture here is for my debut novel, Bound to silence. I'm very interested to see how it does, and I will be giving a running account of how it fares on the Kindle store over the next...forever.

I learned so much about the craft of writing while working on this book. Writing Living With the Dead was a big help, and I could clearly see its influence on my work as I edited and revised. What I ended up with was a novel that is good, but not one of the greats. I'm new at this, I know I won't be compared with Tolkien.

It is pretty good though, and that's important to me.

A big part of what I learned during the process of writing this book was as much what not to do as what to do. My writing improved a lot over the last nine months or so, and that made it harder and harder to edit my novel. I could see, especially early on, where I had tried to hard. It was the last 70% of my book where I started to relax and speak in my own voice. It helped me a lot to see what mistakes I had made, and I realized over the last month or so that there has to be a balance to your work.

Some authors will revise for years before putting out a novel. Most of them are established names or hobbyists who can afford the time to do that. I discovered I am not one of them. This process has taught me so much about how to write, that my future novels will each be better than the last. This one is good, but in the end I realized that if I went through and addressed everything that I wanted to polish and change, so many nitpicky details, that I would have been at it for another year.

I'm so worn out from working full time, and stressed about so many things that spending another year on this book simply wasn't an option. It was starting to not be fun anymore, and that's not a good sign for the writer. Then I had to ask myself--ok, if not a year, then how long? Ten months? Six months? Two weeks? How long should I spend in additional edits now that I have finished months of major revisions?

Think about it. I have grown as a writer, and I will keep growing. It seems to me that I would continue to expand my ability while working on that book, and would ALWAYS be able to find something else wrong, some reason to edit just a bit longer.

So, I decided to publish. I've put in a lot of work, time, and precise effort into it, and I knew that if I didn't do it, I probably never would.

It isn't the book it could have been. But then, I would have been fifty before it was done. But it is a good book, with good cannon and story, an adventurous pace, and epic consequences. It's well worth the price, and a fun read.

Try it out.

Income Streams

November was an interesting month for me, at least from the perspective of watching my Kindle sales.

I published my  six month collection of my fictional blog right at the end of October, and on the first day it was up sold eleven copies, which was on Halloween. The first day of November kind of showed me the tail end of that first small burst of sales, with another four copies sold. Then, for three days, nothing.

I started to get sales again, averaging somewhere around one a day. Not much if I was trying to make a living on my Kindle sales, of course, but interesting and frankly encouraging from an independent writer with virtually no advertising. By the end of the month, I had sold thirty-three copies of my collection, and ten copies of my $.99 collection of the first month of the blog. All told I took in almost exactly what I predicted: $70.

That's several tanks of gas for my car. It's a month's worth of my favorite comics. More importantly, it's also extra money that I can use to pay off bills and keep the lights on here if I get to a point where money is that tight. To me, this is essentially money for nothing. I don't count the hours I spend writing the blog--for me that is fun all on its own for the most part, as much a hobby pursued for enjoyment as someone else would go to the park and play basketball with his friends. So you'll understand how psyched I am to get paid for something I enjoy doing, even if it's less than a hundred dollars.

Enough with me beating that particular dead horse, I know.

So, on to the month of December so far. The first few days were very slow on the Kindle, I sold not one copy anywhere (and still haven't on the UK Kindle store, not that I'm all that fussed about it). What was really strange was a very fast and strange uptick in sales starting on Dec 4th. In the last four days, I have sold twelve copies of my six month collection and four copies of the collection that just has the first month in it. The numbers keep trending up, though I'm not counting on this to continue. Not because I don't think they will, only due to a fairly deep streak of realism that doesn't let me hope for the best...

But the fun doesn't stop there.

I also put the six month collection, Living With the Dead: With Spring comes The Fall, on the Barnes and Noble eBook store for the Nook eReader. I've sold five copies there so far this month, and think that I'll maybe get another five to ten more by the end of the month. If I don't sell any more than I already have, I won't count them for my sales for this month, as I won't be able to get paid for them. The minimum threshold for getting funds sent is ten bucks.

Lastly, I am very excited about starting to also publish with Google Editions, the eBook publishing arm of Google Books. The partner program seems decent, and you essentially get a ton of advertising for free just by putting your books on there. That would make it worth it to me if I never sold one copy through the actual Google eBook store--because they sell to third party vendors, advertise your book wherever you may have it, all kinds of sweet fringe benefits. Sadly, despite the fact that this service launched Monday, It still isn't allowing new partners to upload anything. And the user interface is needlessly complicated, which is pretty jarring to someone who is used to the simplicity and ease of use of Amazon's system.

That's all I've got for today, but check back soon, because I have a few bits of news to share for fans of Living With the Dead that will make purchasing the next few big collections an easy decision to make.

On Self Publishing So Far

I promised that this blog would partly be a running account of what it's like to be an indie writer, trying to build an audience and get to a point where I can live from the income from my self published books. I'm not going into this with my eyes closed. I know it's going to take a long time and a lot of work to manage it, but for everyone out there who writes as a hobby, let me say a few things.

I'm getting some encouraging signs. My zombie blog, Living With the Dead, is doing fairly well as far as readership goes. At least, as I personally judge it, she's doing well. I get between fifty and two hundred or so page views a day, usually spread among twenty to fifty readers. Those are averages, of course, but come pretty close to what I can expect any given day. I have a link to the first six months of the blog in eBook form on the amazon Kindle store at the upper right of LWtD's page, and I think this is helping me sell some of that collection, titled Living With the Dead: With Spring comes The Fall.

I'm certainly not making a living from these sales. As of today, I have sold thirty copies of this collection this month, and I am pretty happy about that. Remember that I published it at the end of October, and that on the first day of it being live I sold eleven, mostly to friends and family. I saw a bit of a pickup the first few days of November, selling about two copies a day. From then, though, sales became erratic. I would sell two in one day, then none for a day. Interestingly, I have sold three each of the last two days. I think this has to do with how Amazon ranks and connects sales.

It's pretty neat, really. If someone looks at my book, Amazon tracks that. If they buy it, they obviously track that too. About 88% of the people that look at this collection on amazon end up purchasing it, which is a pretty high rate. I expect it to go down eventually, but now that enough people have bought my book, it will start getting a little more exposure. Now it shows up in the nifty little bar in the middle of other people's amazon pages as a suggested read. See, when people buy one book and then another, it starts to build the suggested reading bar. So when a person buys "World War Z" by Max Brooks along with my blog collection, both pages will start to recommend the other work for sale.

If you have something you are thinking about putting on the Kindle store, I say go for it, with one or two provisos. One is that you need a good cover, or at least not a bad one. I made my own for the six month collection as well as the 99 cent march collection, but they are obviously not that complex. I think they look good, and I have some graphics experience. Not to mention that I can't afford what it costs to hire a cover artist. So keep that in mind.

Two, make sure your formatting is consistent if not professional. Having to pull everything from the blog and reformat it took a long time, and the process wasn't perfect, but it worked. Make sure that you search around for some formatting guides to make sure that what you are uploading for conversion will end up looking good on a screen.

Third, and last...

Keep in mind that you probably won't be making big money right off the bat. If the pattern of the last few days holds through to the end of this month, I will make about seventy bucks. Of course, I won't get paid that money until the beginning of February, keep that delay in mind as well...but it's seventy dollars that I don't have to do anything for. Nor will I next month, or the month after that...

I work a full time job, and my wife does as well (plus a part time job) to try and save up some money. Any extra income I get is just bonus points right now, and the idea of making essentially free money every month is awesome. Yes, I spent a lot of time writing the blog. But I did that as writing practice, never expecting to make any money from it. If you discount the forty minutes or so a day I spent writing, the total amount of time I put into making the cover and formatting was about four hours. Seventy dollars this month for four hours of effort?

That's a win.

And as I write and publish more (including my debut fantasy novel sometime before the end of the year) I will hopefully make more each month. And hey-- Joe Konrath points out on his blog that sales of each new book he puts out increases sales for his other books. What it boils down to is that it can only get better from here.

So publish away!

An Introduction

Hi there.

My name is Joshua Guess, and man, do I like to write. I've had the bug to tell stories for as long as I can recall, but I reached a critical point about a year ago. That was when I buckled down and started working on a fantasy novel. The idea had been in my brain for a long time, and writing it was hard. Very hard.

So, to sort of loosen up my brain and for daily practice, I started writing a fictional blog, livingwiththedead.net. It's a serialized story, told in real time, set in the zombie apocalypse. Funny that what began as an experiment in writing evolved into an almost obsessive passion. Now, because of my experiences writing both my blog and my fantasy novel (which will be released next month), I write all the time. I have dozens of ideas for books.

I am not a full-time writer. I work a regular job, hoping that one day my hobby will become my full-time occupation. Toward that end, let me say a few things that are important...

I sell two collections of my happy little zombie blog on the Kindle store. This one is the first month, for 99 cents. I put it on there first, thinking that it would be a great idea to offer each month in the series so that people who wanted to help support my efforts could do so without too heavy an investment.

Not too long after, though, I started really studying the trends in eBook sales, and learning about the publishing industry. I truly believe that if I am to make a living doing this, electronic media will be the key. People like getting more bang for their buck, which led me to collect six months of story into one handy unit, for $2.99, which is half off. That one is located right here.

I am planning to donate 10% of all my royalties to charity, pretty much forever. Initially I was going to give that percentage from Oct. 31 of this year until Oct. 31 or next year to Patrick Rothfuss's Worldbuilders, which drives for donations to Heifer International. I am actually going to extend that. It looks something like this:

Oct 31 2010-Jan 15, 2011 (I think that's the last day of worldbuilders)--10% of all royalties during this time will go to this year's Worldbuilders.

Jan 16, 2011-Jan 15 2012--one full year of saving one penny in ten to go toward Mr. Rothfuss's wonderful charity drive for next year.

Now, that's for anything and everything I publish on ANY platform over that time. Ten percent of everything I make from writing will go to Heifer. After next year's drive is finished, I will donate money to different charities for each book or series I publish. For example--one novel that is in the outline stage right now has a major character named after and designed from a friend of mine. She is getting to pick what charity I donate to after this time time frame is over for that book.

I think it's a decent idea. Not only will buying what I write help me to get closer to my goal, but in the process you will be donating money to help people in need all over the world, both at home and abroad.

This blog is going to be a work in progress for a while. I have been fiddling with Living With the Dead for most of a year, tweaking this and that until I have it set up the way I want.

JoshuaGuess.com is going to eventually house many things, from my works in progress and published stories to actual numbers on sales and donations. Not to mention being a nice window into the world of the indie writer trying to make a living. I will be writing often about my successes and failures in e-publishing, and I hope that many of you will join me for the ride.

It's going to be interesting.