Guts

So, I intended to make my next post about the results I had from my big book giveaway last month. I'm still going to do that when I get my sales report on the fifteenth, but a very interesting experience came my way a few days ago, and I want to talk about it.

My appendix decided to part ways with me. It was not an amicable split.

I'd been feeling crappy for about a week before Saturday morning. I called into work during that time, which I very rarely do--that was the previous Sunday, I think. When I woke up Friday night I felt a little off. By the morning I knew something was very wrong. My wife and I went to the hospital around noon.

Following some bloodwork, a battery of tests on my urine, and a deeply personal physical examination, I got my first CAT scan. If you've never had the pleasure, let me assure you it's an...interesting experience. The scan plus the contrast material they injected into me made my body heat up by about twenty degrees for a few seconds. I was told that's a normal thing.

Not for me.

My appendix, the scan showed, was so inflamed that it actually started to curl around on itself. I'm not a doctor, but that sounds pretty terrible. So, off to surgery I went. The delay between being told I was going to surgery and it actually happening was less than half an hour. The people at my local hospital were on the ball, not wanting my useless little appendix to rupture and cause all manner of problems.

I didn't really have time to get worried or scared before the Nurse Anesthetist said, "You're going to sleep now," and I did. Not before throwing my eyes open in defiance of that statement, to which he commented that I was "a funny kid." Then, darkness.

Lemme tell ya, waking up from that surgery sucked worse than anything in my life. I felt god-freaking-awful. When the nurse asked if I was in any pain, I mumbled yes, and she said the best five words in the English language: Let's get you some medicine.

Honestly, I didn't have much of an opinion about the surgery. Once the necessity of the thing became clear I just went with the flow. It was afterward, when I was admitted to the hospital and knew I would have to stay there alone, that I began to feel off. My wife Jess and my best friend Patrick were there when I got out of recovery, but I told them to go home and get some rest when I realized how deeply I was about to sleep.

Next morning, I found out my second round of labs were still bad and I had to stay another day to get my white count up. The infection in my appendix had been pretty hardy, and probably had spread. Jess was there by the time I heard that news, and she spent the morning with me. She had to leave to get sleep for work around noon, and I was left alone.

Except for you guys.

Many fans and friends (and some of you are both) sent me messages and well-wishes on Facebook. I spent several hours chatting and commenting back and forth with people, and it was really awesome. I mean that word in its original sense. You filled me with awe. As an adult, I've only had oral surgery before, nothing this big. I've never been in a situation where I had no control. I was in that room, private and nice as it was, and I was poked with needles, trailing an IV, feeling so out of my element that I was sort of lost.

Which is ironic, since full-time job is working in a nursing home. Other side of the coin and all that.

Patrick ended up coming to the hospital that afternoon and hanging out with me, but during the early hours of the morning and in the empty spaces between, I realized how lucky I am to have you. My family, my friends, my digital companions on various social networks, and my fans (who exist among all those groups). You kept me from thinking about the pain in my stomach, the worries over how much all this is going to cost me, and how bad the complications could be if something went wrong.

I don't know if I'm coming across as overly emotional here, but it was really a humbling experience for me. I'm so glad to be home, and I'll be off work for at least another week, so I'll be writing in that time. As thanks for everyone's support, I'm going to do a piece or two of short fiction while I'm off and give it away on this blog. It's not much, but I hope you enjoy it. You all did what you could to keep me sane while I was in the hospital, the least I can do in return is try to entertain you for a while.

It may not seem to you that you did much, but believe me, you did. I'm a creature of habit. When I'm thrown out of my routine I go crazy. I get stressed out, my blood pressure goes up, I can't sleep or relax. It's a serious problem for me. Imagine my surprise that while I read your messages and made snarky comments with many of you, I felt better. And not just felt it--I was measurably better. My blood pressure, along with my anxiety, dropped significantly while I chatted with all of you. I felt at ease during a time that should have nearly driven me insane.

So, I guess what I'm saying is thanks. Thank you for being a friend.

Yeah, I just quoted the Golden Girls theme song at you. You're gonna have to deal with that.

Free Books! (And a Book Release!)

Okay, so here's the deal: Today I released the fourth book of Living With the Dead. I'm ludicrously happy with this volume, and I want people to read it.

The Wild Country, Living With the Dead book four. But read on. There's a test later.

Fourth in a series, you say. Yes, that would normally mean buying three other books to get there. Logic, that inescapable bastard.

AHA! I have a solution! How about I just GIVE AWAY the first three (well, sort of three) books in the series, so you get the best possible deal? Yeah. Let's do that.

So, starting Saturday morning and running through Wednesday, every Living With the Dead book (except the new one) will be free on the Kindle store. That includes:

With Spring Comes The Fall, book one.

The Bitter Seasons, book two.

Year One, which collects book one and two, plus has a TON of bonus material, including five short stories, a behind the scenes look at LWtD, and a whole novella set in the LWtD universe. It's a deal. Especially because it's free.

And The Hungry Land, book three.

Yes, Year One duplicates the material of the first two books. But hey, it's not like your kindle is gonna get full off that. It has all that juicy bonus material in it. So why not just download every freaking one of them?!

No good reason not to. Unless you already own them, in which case you should pat yourself on the back.

Then you can buy The Wild Country, book 4. I'm not telling you to by any means. But hey, it's four bucks. You get all those other books for free, so really if you bought this one you'd be averaging a dollar a book. I'm not telling you to buy it, but I *do* need a new pair of shoes.

I'm just sayin'. You don't want me to write with cold, unsupported arches, do you? That makes for terrible prose.

And hey, if you decide you want free stuff and don't want to buy the fourth book, that's okay too. I'm sure no kittens will suffer terrible mishaps because of it. No baby otters will be orphaned. You'll just be three books richer, and that makes me a happy camper.

Confession: I'm secretly a woman

Not in the "I have a vagina and am capable of gestating a fetus inside me" kind of way. I'm a male in all the important ways, but there is a part of me that's actually female. She's a pen name. And no, I'm absolutely not going to tell you what it is.

Let me explain.

I've wanted to branch out and write some short fiction for a while now, mostly in the erotica category. I'm not ashamed of that fact, but I decided to create a female identity for myself for what were initially very practical reasons.

One: people seem to read female erotica authors way more than men.

Two: Given that erotica is definitely *not* my genre, if they got negative attention my main works and reputation wouldn't suffer because of it.

Three: I figured it would be a nice stream of extra income.

Now, those three things remain true, but I've come to see the whole thing as a kind of experiment. Living With the Dead has a small but dedicated fan base, and that's awesome. I've got this blog as well, and facebook, and twitter, and many outlets to expand my readership. Again, good stuff. But with this new identity, I have a chance to see how I can do without all of that. No web pages, no author profile, not a damn thing except my work and Amazon.

So far, it's not bad. The first short story I wrote is on the Kindle Lending Library, and I gave it away for all five of my free days. Almost a thousand downloads of it, and since the promotion ended I've sold ten copies. That's three dollars and fifty cents in royalties. Not much, true, but that's with zero marketing or promotions in any way except making it free for five days.

I expect that once I have a few more stories out there I'll do even better. Many, many authors put their book or story out on the Kindle and get a few sales a month. I'm happy with ten in five days. I'm always trying to figure out ways to boost sales (and thus my income) but the truth is that J.A. Konrath is right--writing and indie publishing on the Kindle is a marathon, not a sprint. Building a catalog of quality work is much more likely to make you money in the long term.

Which is what I've been trying to do. Now I'm just doing it as an imaginary woman also. It's tons of fun.

I'll update off and on down the road as this experiment unfolds. I don't have any illusions that I'll get rich selling short stories at ninety-nine cents, but the potential for a nice stream of extra income is there. I'm cautiously optimistic.

Which is the best kind of optimistic to be, really.

Thoughts?

How to be a successful writer in a few easy steps

I did my taxes yesterday, and in so doing I saw on paper (well, on laptop) how much I made in royalties from sales of my eBooks in 2011. It was slightly more than the amount my wife made from the part-time job she took on for the first half of the year, and a thought struck me pretty hard right then. 

I need to track my income more closely. I'm a lazy bastard. 

Another thought hit me along with that: I'm a professional author. Not full-time and certainly not an expert, but I made a pretty nice chunk of change from putting words on paper (again with the laptop) and selling them to people. It's a little strange for me. Being an author always seemed like a dream I could never quite make into a reality, yet here I am with a moderate level of success. 

I've learned many things since I've been self-publishing, the most important of which is that no success of any size happens alone. I've been very lucky to have a close group of friends online who are also writers--Annetta Ribken, Lori Whitwam, Joseph Paul Haines, and others--who have given me the benefits of their experience. I can say for certain that without them, my work would be of much lower quality. They have been a treasure trove of knowledge, support, and encouragement every bit as much as my family and friends in the offline world. 

I make no claims to greatness, please understand. I'm not saying my work is amazing and world-changing, but it's better now than it was a few months ago, and it will be better still a short way down the road. There are a lot of authors out there who will tell you what they've done to get their books into the hands of readers, and I've been one of them. There are some big-name folks like J.A. Konrath who will tell you the general steps on how to better your chances at selling copies by self-pubbing. I've done that too. 

Not right now, though. I just want to list out some things I've learned about writing over the last few years, as much to help me remember and focus on them as it is to maybe make someone out there who's writing their first novel taking a crack at a short story think as they tap away at their keyboard. 

1) Always remember to learn. 

This one is hard for me. I've spent a lot of time doing revisions, going over the structure of sentences and usage of words, trying to make everything flow well. There are people who will tell you to write with passion, and you should definitely do that. But writing isn't all love letters and pain, it's a structured art that has infinite variations. I've learned the hard way that spewing out words because you feel them is a good way to do revisions for longer than it took to write the work. Learning what works for you structurally and working with that in mind, always revising in your head as you write, is absolutely key to improving the quality of your writing. It's very hard for me to do this, and it's an ongoing process. 

2) Don't just write yourself. 

This is one I'm bad at. I tend to write lead male characters that are about my age and similar to me in personality. I've experimented a lot with writing very different characters, and those tend to be reader favorites. Writing what you know is a good thing, and should always be a starting point. It is for me (and hey, if Stephen King can write thirty books set in Maine, then we're all okay!) and is probably where most people begin a story from. I guess the key for me to this one is to research and expand my knowledge so I can write what I know and still have it be something new. There's a lot to be said for experimentation in your work. Personal experience, good old trial and error, shows me that sometimes it works and sometimes it fails like Rick Perry trying to count to three. But taking yourself in new directions stretches your mental muscles and makes you grow. 

3) DO NOT STRESS OVER PLOT.

While it's very important to me to write in a way that has structure on a small scale, I've had a hard time keeping my focus when I'm worried about the overall plot of my story. On a strictly personal level, I think it's kind of a bum deal that so-called "Literary Fiction" gets a pass on plot because it focuses so heavily on prose and character. There's a lot of popular genre fiction out there that does a fantastic job of both, but gets panned because the plot is "weak". That's in quotations because I'm a firm believer that you should keep a general idea of where the story is going, but to write it a section at a time. Worrying over whether or not you'll get to the main villain's big reveal on page two fifty is a great way to end up counting the number of squirrels trying to steal your mustache collection. It'll drive you nuts. 

My method is to keep a looses timeline in my head as I write, but to find as much joy in telling the actual story as I can. Plot holes and inconsistencies pale in importance when you've written twenty pages of rushed story trying to get to a certain point. I've dropped work on three whole novels for this very reason. 

4) When you revise, STRESS OVER EVERYTHING

Don't beat yourself over the head or anything, but for me the two parts of the job are starkly different. I write fast when I'm not being lazy, and I've developed a decent level of ability to get out the story I want to tell while having fun doing it. Revising, however, is the beast that cannot be slain. When the fun part is over and I've got a rough draft, I obsess over every word. Then every sentence. Then every section, chapter, and so on. I might read through my work two or three times when I'm actively working on it, but during the revision process I read it at least six or seven. *That* is when I worry about holes in the story, logical inconsistencies, and of course the more boring stuff like typos and misspellings. 

5) Know when to stop. 

This one is simple. For example, last night the SuperBowl happened. I worked the night before, and stayed up all day so I'd be sure not to sleep through the game. I tried to get some work done on the sequel to my last novel, but the words were shit. I couldn't make it flow, and it was an effort to get anything typed at all. So, after a few hundred words, I stopped. Better to lose some word count than write trash that I'd have to heavily edit or outright delete (or both). I do this because I'm OCD about a lot of things. I would have had a hard time sleeping if I'd have had to lay there knowing those badly written paragraphs or pages needed my attention. Almost as if my laptop were silently judging me for storing such things upon its sacred hard drive. 

Also, know when your story is done. The reason my last novel, Beautiful, is the first book in a trilogy is due to the huge amount of canon and the dozen or so plot lines I worked out for it. It was going to be a one-off until I realized just how huge an effort it would be. The thing would have been somewhere around four hundred thousand words (about a thousand pages long) and that was the condensed version. I'm happier knowing that I ended the first book at a natural stopping point, and that I can write the subsequent five sequels at a length that gives the story room to grow. Call it 100,000 words for each book. 

Again, I know the internet is vast and populated by people who (no pun intended) read into things too deeply. This isn't meant to make me sound like I'm better than you. You might be the next Steinbeck, with a natural talent that beats me by a country mile. I don't think writing is a competition. What writing actually is? An art and a science all at once. Which makes it very hard to do. Managing to follow the important rules that go along with writing while trying to make something that's all at once original, interesting, emotionally satisfying, and marketable, is like trying to balance a dozen spinning plates while hopping. 

My aim here is only to give you tips to help keep your balance. You may not need it, and that's great. You might glean something helpful from this post, and I hope if you do need it that I've done a small good. I'm convinced now that I'll never stop learning about this craft, and I don't just mean improving my skills. Writing is so hugely complex that I could (and hopefully will) spend the rest of my life doing it and never grasp all the intricacies. 

Please feel free to comment, question, or add anything to this list in the comments section below. I'm always thrilled to hear what other people have to say about my (someday full-time) dream job. Any thoughts that might help me or others are welcome. Go nuts!

Kindle Select Program (an update)

You may remember that last month I decided to join the Kindle Select program. If you're fuzzy on what that is, I'll give you the quick tour: I have the option to add any or all of my books to the Kindle Lending Library, where they can be borrowed by people with Amazon Prime memberships. Each borrow gives me a certain amount of money from a fund set aside for this purpose. In December, I had 73 total borrows, making me an extra $124.10 in income. Not a ton considering the fund was set at $500,000 but it's a nice bit of extra income. The fund is evenly divided among all borrows in the lending library. This month looks to be better than last. Mainly because my borrows are on track to do better than last month, and because Amazon kicked in an extra 200k into the fund.

The downside is that each title I put in the library has to be exclusive to the Kindle while it's in the program. That's okay with me, because I make the overwhelming majority of my writing income from Amazon. The best part of the program is the ability to give away my books for five days for each ninety-day period of enrollment in the Select Program.

I've seen some bumps in sales with the Living With the Dead books by doing this, but the interesting thing I've seen recently is what's going on with my urban fantasy novel, Beautiful. I put it up for free, all five days in a row, and it was downloaded more than 1800 times. Again, that may not seem like much to some people. For me, that's a hell of a lot of copies out there on people's devices. That's a lot of people who know my name that didn't a week ago.

What those 1800 downloads translate to is why I'm writing this. Before I put Beautiful up for free, I'd sold exactly one copy in the first nine days of this month. Since it went back to being $4.99 yesterday, I've sold eight more. So far I've got just one borrow of Beautiful, but a snafu in the Lending Library led to it not being available to borrow until yesterday morning. I'm hoping to see that number go up.

Beautiful now has a TON of metadata to go with it. Those 1800 downloads helped populate the "Customers who bought this item also bought..." section of Beautiful's Amazon page. In real terms, that means that my novel is now being suggested on the pages of dozens of other books, leading to sales. This is exactly what I was hoping for. No, it isn't a tsunami of sales and a vault of money for me to swim in, but it's progress. I'm happy about that.

I included links to my facebook pages in this novel, and I've been seeing a small but steady increase in new Likes of my fan page. I've got links in there to the blogs of several of my friends who are also writers, and I sincerely hope that I'm driving some sales their way. I've wanted for a long time to establish a network of support between all of our works, but we're all so busy with writing, working, and dealing with our daily lives that it's been difficult to coordinate anything. Maybe down the road, if I make that Amanda Hocking money...

Basically I just wanted to report that I'm happy with Select. I don't see Amazon as a place full of happy little bunnies by any stretch, and I know that the Select program is an attempt on their part to pressure the competition, but it also works for authors. At least, it works for me. I know a lot of other folks with way more name recognition have had amazing luck with it. That's about it.

Oh, one more thing. Tomorrow morning I'll be setting up a mailing list. I'll have links to it on this blog, on Living With the Dead, and I'll post them on facebook for anyone who wants to sign up. I won't spam your inbox (that sounds really dirty, doesn't it) but being on the mailing list will give you the heads-up on my new projects, release dates, and many other tidbits you may find interesting. I'll only send out mail when I have something important to say, so no worries that you'll get an email a day from me. I'm wayyyyyyy to lazy for that.

I'm feeling positive right now. You guys are the best fans anyone could have. Thanks for your support!

Lessons from 2011

It's the second of January, the year 2012. I've had time to reflect on the last year of my life and now that my liver has recovered from the truly horrendous amount of rum it had to deal with on new year's eve, I want to share those thoughts.

I learned a lot over this last year. In no particular order, I'll toss them at you.

I learned how to be a better writer. I'm not talking about simply honing my basic skills here, but actually realizing that every moment of my day can teach me something about the craft. It's as if I've learned a new way to think. Every time I read anything now, I look at the structure of it, see the parts as well as the whole for what they are: examples I can learn from.

I've learned not to expect too much from my writing. Late in 2010 and into early 2011, I was having a lot of success very quickly on the Kindle store. For the first few months I was selling my books, I was making more money in each of them than the month previous. It gave me a heady, solid sense of satisfaction, but then came April. That was when sales began to slump, and I saw my income dwindle accordingly. That's how the market works, unfortunately--there are variations and no book is fresh and popular forever.

I got a very good piece of understanding from that situation. If my sales had continued picking up, I might have grown overconfident. I might have quit my job, or been less humble when writing. When the eventual slump did happen, I'd have been utterly destroyed. So I'm happy it came early. Now I know never to count my chickens, and to always strive to make everything I write the best thing I've ever written.

I've learned not to take on too much at once. At the height of my efforts this year, there were weeks where I was managing five or six thousand words a day. I wrote the majority of Beautiful during this time, as well as continuing work on Living With the Dead. I took two days off after I finished the final edit of Beautiful, and went on to start on the sequel.

The blunt truth is that I wrote thirty thousand words on the sequel while dealing with numerous personal issues and trying to make Living With the Dead as good as possible. That's not mentioning promoting my work and managing all the other aspects of my budding career that go on in the background. I wasn't just burning the candle at both ends, I was also putting a blowtorch to the middle.

I've learned that sometimes you have to relax. I originally planned to release Monster, the sequel to Beautiful, in early December. That would have meant in four months, I would have had to write 100,000 words that continued the story in a logical and interesting way, done a rough edit, sent it to the betas, gotten it back, done 1-2 more serious revisions, and a final meticulous edit. That, along with all my other projects and getting the cover and associated other parts of releasing a book done was just too much.

So, Monster isn't coming out soon. The first book is well-loved by the people that read it for the most part, but it isn't a big seller. I've finally reached a place where I feel as though I can work on the sequel and make it into the story I want to tell, but it's been a long way getting here. I estimate at least four months until I can put out the second book. Maybe as many as six. I'll endeavor to get it done.

I've learned not to ignore my own ideas because I feel like I can't work on anything other than what's on my plate. If I didn't have to work a full-time job, I would be able to put out six to eight books a year. That's no joke, though it seems like an insane number. If I worked eight hours a day, I would split it into three sections of writing for three different books. I write fast. It would be easy with all that extra time and energy. But where I used to focus like a laser on my current projects, now I make time to shake things up a little and work on fresh ideas. One of those has blossomed into an idea for a series that I'm really excited about. Don't know that I'll have time to work on it in the near future, but I can't help tinkering.

More than anything over the last 365 days, I've learned to trust my fans. Not just my friends and family, who are always very honest with their criticisms and supportive of my work, but all of you. I don't quite have legions yet, but your support through all the lean months has been crucially important to me. I've had great interactions with many of you on Facebook, in comments on book reviews, and in threads on forums. I put out the latest Living With the Dead book a few months ago, and sales have been good. It made my heart sing to know that so many of you were waiting to get the new book even though most of you read the blog already.

If I ever doubted you, my deepest apologies. You all have, again, my deepest thanks.

2011 was really the first year of my writing career. Though much of my work began in 2010, most of the actual movement in my career started after. I feel like a different person now, someone who has had to deal with some hard realities, but I think I'm better for it.

Business Decisions

As many of you know, I'm a pretty devoted reader of J.A. Konrath's blog. He's the writer whose experimentation with e-publishing drove me to try it myself. What success I've had, I attribute to the things I learned from him. I know how to read my sales, know to change things when needed, and a hundred little things. Most important, I know how to learn from my mistakes and keep my eyes open.

Writing is a process, and it's also a business. Today I'm beginning a path that is unfamiliar but exciting. I may be making a mistake, but if so I'll treat it like any other experience and grow because of it.

Two important changes will be going on. The first is that very soon, the prices on all my work will be going up. I'm not one to gouge, and I will never charge anything like $9.99 for my work, but the available evidence right now suggests that my price point of $2.99 for my books (and $3.99 for the combined first two LWtD books that make up Year One) is too low. The facts and research seem to suggest that a higher price will bring more sales than I currently make, and the higher royalty means extra income.

This is a business decision. As is the second portion of my news: I'm taking Year One and the two individual books that comprise it, With Spring Comes the Fall and The Bitter Seasons, off sale on the Nook. Those books will be gone from the Barnes and Noble store within the next several days.

The reason is simple: Amazon is offering publishers a chance to enroll in an exclusivity deal that will give us a chance to do more with our work. I will, for example, be able to offer my work for free for up to five days during a 90-day period. I'll also have my books available as part of the Kindle lending library. It's a complicated situation to explain, but what you need to know as my readers is pretty simple.

I'm not abandoning you! I simply have some options with Amazon that I want to explore. Powerful tools to get my name out there. I don't like having to pull my work from the Nook, not that all of it will be gone, but the math is pretty simple. I make about 95% of my income from the Kindle. This new program will give me the chance to get my name into more people's reading lists, which will help me toward my goal of writing full time.

I'm trying it for the initial 90 day period. If it works out, I may continue my enrollment. If it doesn't, I won't. I'm not keen on leaving the small but dedicated group of readers on the Nook high and dry, but the good news is that it's only my old stuff that is being pulled. Newer works will still be available, including Beautiful and book three of LWtD, The Hungry Land. And it's likely this won't be a permanent thing.

If I get to the point where I've built a self-sustaining following and can write full time, I'll probably drop the program. I'm not holding my breath for that.

Basically, that's the deal. I'm sorry for any of my fans who use the Nook and promote me heavily there. Your support means the world to me, it really does. I hope none of you are upset by this. I have a chance to use some new tricks to market myself, and I think you're all reasonable enough to understand that I have to consider the long term here.

I'll probably be doing many updates over the next weeks and months once I get into the program and see how it does. I'll certainly be doing promotions once I can set up days where my work will be free. Come on back and check me out to see how it's working. Readers may be interested to see inside my world a bit. Writers may find some of their curiosity about how the new Kindle Select program works sated.

It's bound to be interesting.

If you have questions, comments, or concerns, consider this an open thread. The comments are open to you!