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.