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!"

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!