Totally Bragging

Ok, I don't want to toot my own horn, but I'm going to out of sheer disbelieving happiness.

Very early this morning, Living With the Dead: With Spring Comes The Fall FINALLY broke into the top 3000 on the Kindle store. This has been a goal for me since day one. I've come so close so many times, and at today it finally happened. I've had a nice rush of sales, and the money is certainly going to be a good thing. There are so many other reasons this makes me happy...

One is that this book is on three top 100 lists. Here's a pic:

Now, this is the one taken this morning. It's pretty awesome. But...not as good as the one I took just after noon. You'll see that the early morning one has me at rank 2,950 or so...at noon, however...

You can see that between noon and one pm, I am at 2,696. I'm so psyched about this there literally aren't words to describe how happy I am. What's more, the two kindle top 100 lists I'm on for categories are great too...

So...on the Sci/fi list I'm up there with Edgar Rice Burroughs, Phillip K. Dick and (I almost had a heart attack) Douglas FREAKING Adams! It's completely surreal to me that I could be listed near those amazingly talented and frankly classic writers. I'm not comparing myself to them, or to anyone on that top 100 list. They are my heroes, and I am shocked but thrilled to be among them. 

On the contemporary fantasy top 100, LWtD is rubbing elbows with the likes of Charlaine Harris, Laurel K. Hamilton, and Jim Butcher. I'm actually higher up on the list at the moment than several of Mr. Butcher's Dresden Files novels, which is amazing to me. I'm a huge fan of Jim Butcher, and I think he's one of the best writers of any kind of fiction out there right now. I am honored to be on the same list with him. I'm also ahead of Laurel K. Hamilton, at least one of her books, which I consider a small but personal triumph. I'm not a big fan of her work, but she IS insanely popular, so I count that an honor as well. 

I hope that in my excitement and zeal, I haven't made you think that I am saying anything especially amazing about my work, or knocking anyone that I mentioned above. I'm just so happy that enough people like my work to make this possible, and shocked at the amount of success I've reached in so short a time. I'm an indie writer. I'm not a professional like those mentioned above. They have years of practice in the craft, and I don't. I have gotten supremely lucky to have the fan base that I do, and in no way am I saying that I am better than anyone. I'm just happy to be among them, for whatever length of time I am lucky enough to be so. 

I wouldn't be making a point of saying any of that about the authors I mentioned, but I'm still working on building a career and I don't want people getting the wrong idea. When I say "I'm beating several of Jim Butcher's novels" I'm not sticking my tongue out and giving him a raspberry. He's making a mint from his books (and justifiably--they're great stuff) and I think every one of his novels is on the top 100 list for contemporary fantasy, and they stay there. I'm just trying to get across how psyched I am to be in his company, much less ahead of a few of his books for a while. 

Ok, done with that whole rant. I'm going to go try and burn off some of the energy this has put into my tired body so I can sleep enough to manage to work tonight. Thanks to every one of you that bought my blog collection, or read the blog, or told a friend about it, or just offered a kind word. This is all on you, not me. YOU made this a reality for me, and I can never thank you enough. In return, I will keep on working, improving my skills in the hope that one day I am as good as Butcher, Hamilton, Harris, Burroughs, Dick, and Adams. It makes me happy that you, my readers, like my work enough to put me past this goal. I'll keep on working for you!

Totally not bragging, though. 

Updates and Planned Releases

Well, so far this month has been simply amazing for me. I'm not selling like Amanda Hocking or anything, but I couldn't be happier with how everything is going.

Sales for all of last month totaled just over $400 dollars between Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I beat that late Saturday of this week, which for those of you keeping score was the fifteenth, or just less than halfway through the month. Sales of LWtD: With Spring Comes The Fall are just short of 200 units for the month, beating the pants off the 149 of them I sold in Dec. I'm very, very happy about this! It's way more than I expected to happen this quickly, and my heartfelt appreciation goes out to every reader and buyer who has supported me.

In other news...I'm on Goodreads now, as an author, so when you review and rate my stuff, I get made aware of it. I'm hoping to make some new friends and readers there, and maybe even get my name out there. I'm also having a discussion with a few other Indie authors about working on a project together...but that's a later post.

I want to let everyone know what's in store over the next few months. Until the end of February, I will be working like a madman trying to keep Living With the Dead going strong while I work on my current book. This book will require very little in the way of editing, I hope. At least, not the massive project that my first novel was. This is due to what kind of novel it is--a fast, fun contemporary fantasy, told in a voice so much like my own that it might as well be. It's easy for me to write, and is at the same time funny, erotic, awkward, exciting, and packed with action. You might even say "action-packed".

It's paranormal romance, I guess, but not your typical story like Twilight. It's more real to me, since so much of t is based on real things in my life. I don't want to tell the whole story here, so I'll stop. Let me just say that it's something I think a LOT of people will love to read. It's super fun and the characters might be some of my best.

So, that book (hereafter simply referred to as my "vampire book" since I haven't decided on a title yet) will hopefully be ready to go by the first week of March, which is good because I'm also putting out...

The next six month installment of Living With the Dead. This one has several tentative titles, but I won't be sharing them just yet. It's going to pick up right where "With Spring Comes The Fall" left off, and continue the story from there. It will also be available for a mere $2.99, so save up the cost of a few cups of coffee for it. That is unless you'd like to splurge on....

Living With the Dead: Year One

Yeah, I am excited about this in a major way. This will collect "With Spring Comes The Fall" and the second (untitled, the one I wrote about above) six month collection in one volume. Each of the six month collections are $2.99 on their own, but YEAR ONE isn't going to be $5.99, to match that. Oh, no. It's going to be priced at 4.99, saving a dollar from the cost of buying each of the six month installments! And wait, THERE'S MORE!

Yes, Year One is going to include some bonus material. Some behind the scenes info about the series and the daily process that goes on to make it. Some facts and canon that can't be found anywhere but in my head, such as how the zombie plague actually works and other neat items. The best part is that there will be a bunch of short stories added in! I wanted to do some stuff set in the LWTD universe but not written in blog form (a nice change of pace, I thought), so I will be writing some short stories for Year One, and a few other people will be contributing as well. I don't want to minimize their work, so I will be doing a whole post on here about the folks contributing short stories to Year One in a week or two. Keep your eyes peeled for that--I really lucked out and got some talented folks to agree to help me out.

So, for right now that's all I got. I'm working on putting out each individual month of LWtD on Kindle and Nook, but I don't know how much time I will have to do that since I'm so busy with other things. If demand spikes, I will put some time aside to do it, but for now I will work on them when I can.

Remember that even sharing links to my work or my sites helps me out, so please do that if you can. I'm doing as well as I am only because of you guys!

My Genre is Fiction

As some of you may know, I write an almost daily fictional blog set in the zombie apocalypse, told in real time. It's called Living With the Dead, and the collection of it I have available on the Kindle store and on the NOOK, which gather the first six months of the blog, are by FAR my best sellers. 

Living With the Dead (LWtD) began as a writing exercise, basically daily practice to strengthen my skills and to make me a better writer in general, as well as helping me get used to writing A) a lot, B) every day and C) multiple projects at once. 

I think it did its job. I managed to buckle down and finish my debut novel, which is available on the Kindle and the NOOK. It's an epic fantasy and the first in a series, totally different than LWtD in style and tone. 

Right now, I'm working on a Vampire novel that can best be described as real life, but with vampires. By that I mean that the only tone I'm going for is how real life is--scary, sometimes very funny, with sex and love peppered throughout. It's a fun project on its own, and writing it comes much more easily than anything I've done yet. 

And there's the point of this post: I have a ton of ideas for stories, many already in the early stages of outlining and development of canon. At least a dozen ideas for novels, ranging from thriller/suspense to more epic fantasy to literary fiction. I mean, look at what I've already done: I write zombie survival fiction, a fantasy story, and vampire erotica/romance/comedy. 

I think a big part of being a writer for me is being totally behind the story. I think too many people focus on where the story itself falls within the confines of how others see it. I just don't care if someone says, "Oh, he writes zombie fiction, so his fantasy must suck out loud." It's just not a part of my makeup to really care about that type of thing. 

For me, it's about having an idea that you just have to work on, developing that into a story to tell. It's about taking that kernel of inspiration and applying liberal amounts of creative heat and watching is spring out into something bigger. 

Something tastier. Damn, but I made myself hungry for popcorn just then. 

So, if you want to check out my work and see if I manage to tell different kinds of stories well, then please check out my books on the Kindle or the Nook. Making money is important to me, as a means of making a better life for my wife and I, but just as important is that you, the reader, genuinely enjoys the experience we share. I build my worlds and tend them with new efforts so that you might find enjoyment from them. 

I just don't see how some authors can stick to one genre. I like the different textures of them too much as a reader to ignore them as a writer. Love, fear, mystery, hope, humor, awe and amazement...I want to try my hand with all of them. 

Cue the Villain laugh!

I meant to post a blog entry before now, but as all the cursed luck would have it, I've been sick. So sick, in fact, that I've basically just been laying in bed or on the couch for the last few days, incapable of much else but...well, laying there. I'm still pretty sick, but looking at the screen of my laptop doesn't make me want to vomit anymore, which I chalk up as a win.

To get right into the meat of it: December was an AWESOME month for me, sales wise. Between my Kindle and Nook sales I pulled in a total of more than four hundred bucks. But Josh, you might ask, confusion in your voice, didn't you only make seventy dollars the month before?

Why, yes I did, faithful reader. Which is why December was AWESOME.

In November I sold a total of 33 copies of my Living With the Dead collection, whereas I managed a whopping 149 in December, almost five times as many. I managed to eke out 18 copies of my novel, but I will get to that in a minute...

Part of why sales picked up in the last two weeks of the month obviously had something to do with the holidays. Also, as more people bought, the more links it gained to other purchases. Sales build that way. At least, on the Kindle store they do. I'm referencing my numbers there for this blog, and ignoring my sales on the Nook, except that I added the total revenues from the Nook into my monthly income. Nook sales are hard to track because of the horrible system Barnes and Noble uses, so it's much easier if I just ignore them for the most part...

My debut novel isn't selling at all, for two reasons. The first is the price. Six dollars is just too steep for most of the eBook buying public, at least for an indie writer who doesn't have name recognition to back up that price point. The second is the cover.

If you were to see the painting the cover is scanned from in person, you would probably be impressed. It's pretty, and well done. It's also pretty much impossible to scan well, it always comes out darker than I want. It just doesn't pop, doesn't look professional, which is one of the things I have been warned about. Hell, I have given warning about that myself.

So, I'm having a new one made. New artist, all digital, and with color. I will likely be dropping the price as well, to see if that helps draw in new readers. I thought I would feel bad about not selling very many copies of my novel, but given how well my sales are going in general, I can't complain.

Oh, and right now, at eight in the morning on the fourth of January, I have sold 31 copies of my LWtD collection. That's a way better daily average than I've had lately...and with my ad going up on Kindleboards on Jan. 11, I see good things in the near future...

As for the title of this post? I can't help but see success over the horizon, and feel this amazing surge of victory inside...which makes my inner Snidely Whiplash go "MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"