I'm mentioned in the Wall Street Journal

Reporter Jeffrey Trachtenberg called me a couple weeks ago for a short 15 minute interview. I actually survived the editor's scalpel and made it into his article: Secrets of Self-Publishing: Success.

Thanks a lot for giving me the opportunity to be in your article, Jeff!

My first year as a self-publisher!

Way back on September 30, 2010, I published Dead Dwarves, Dirty Deeds to Amazon Kindle. Thus began my adventure into digital self-publishing.

So far, I’ve published a total of 5 books (which you should all go buy, of course ;):

Dead Dwarves, Dirty Deeds – 99 cents, 4-star average rating. A trilogy of gritty cyberpunk stories that lead up to the next book…

Dead Dwarves Don’t Dance – 99 cents, 4-star average rating. A gritty cyberpunk story about a genetically engineered dwarf mercenary seeking redemption in 22^nd century Atlanta. Lots of action, violence, high-tech and low-life. If you like 1980s action movies, you should like this.

Format Your eBook for Kindle in One Hour – 2.99, 4.5 star average rating. A Do It Yourself book to help you format your ebook as quickly as possible so you can publish to Kindle.

Twelve Worlds –$2.99, 4-star average rating. An anthology of science fiction short stories by 14 new authors. A great deal for $2.99, plus the author royalties go to Reading is Fundamental, the nation’s largest literacy charity.

The Elemental Odyssey – 99 cents, 5-star average rating. A fast-paced action/adventure story about four 12-year-olds who are abducted by magical aliens and taken on a perilous quest around the world. Also available in paperback for $14.99.

Over my first year, I’ve sold a combined total of 11,735 copies of my books and earned $10,278 in royalties (not counting $368 for Twelve Worlds).

I’ve spent $4,935 in expenses, for a net revenue of $5,324. A tidy sum!

I’d have to qualify that as a success. It’s certainly a promising start to a writing career.

I’m pleased that I decided to self-publish instead of startup the query letter cycle again. The chances of getting an agent or publisher in this environment are slim and the fate of publishing companies is questionable. Self-publishing was the right choice for me. Is it the right choice for you? That’s your call.

Here are some things I’ve learned in this time:

Sales are inexplicable. Why does one book sell more than another? Is it genre, release date, price, cover, blurb, advertising? All of these impact the sales of course, but how do you optimize each for maximum sales? Good question!

Paid advertising doesn’t seem to work. I’ve conducted numerous experiments with paid advertising, spending more than $500 over the past year. Unfortunately, I have not seen any significant increase in sales from these efforts.

Summer slump? As you’ll see below, I’ve had a decline in sales that seems to coincide with the summer months. I don’t know if this is a recurring seasonal event, but I’ll find out next year.

Genres do not cross sell. My cyberpunk books have sold over 9,200 copies. But when I released my young adult action adventure novel, The Elemental Odyssey, it did not get any boost in initial sales from those fans. It seems that cyberpunk fans are not interested in YA action/adventure. Not terribly surprising.

Write books in a series. My two books in the same series (Dead Dwarves, Dirty Deeds and Dead Dwarves Don’t Dance) account for 9,363 of my 11,735 units sold. There is also a direct correlation between sales spikes and slumps between these books. This tells me that one strategy is to only write books in a series so that you can maximize sales.

Diversify genres? I wrote my young adult action adventure novel, The Elemental Odyssey, to diversify and try to capitalize on the Harry Potter fans out there. I think I may have been premature with this effort, as sales have not progressed as well as my cyberpunk books. This could be because not many kids have ereaders yet. This will probably change this Christmas as Amazon Kindle and B&N Nook are now under $100. Also, the Potter books are releasing soon in e-book format. I expect a LOT of kids to ask for Kindles/Nooks for Christmas, which will greatly increase the e-audience for my YA books. I’ll have the sequel, Where Magic Reigns, published in December, which puts me in a good position for the holiday season. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that this strategy will work.

Write more. Unfortunately, my day job as a technical writer consumes a lot of my brain power. I often do not have the energy to come home and write even more. This is unfortunate, as it is plain that the more books an author has available, the more they cross sell each other. If I wrote fiction full time, I think I could publish 3-4 novels per year. As it is, I expect that I can publish 1-2 novels per year. Unless one of my books really takes off, it’ll take me 5 or so years to build up a portfolio large enough to start considering full-time novel-writing.

Now for my charts:

The rate of my sales decline is slowing, which is a relief. I hope that is an omen of things to come for my other books.

I’m expecting an uptick in sales over the holiday season. Hopefully...

Guest post: Michael Kingswood

I thought I’d give some time to another new author to relate his journey into self-publishing. Michael writes in multiple genres (hard sf, fantasy, post-apoc, horror, etc.). 

Here's Michael:

When Derek asked me to write a guest post on his blog, I was surprised and a bit flattered.  This is the first time I’ve done a guest post, so I’m pretty psyched.

I’m pretty new to the writing scene.  I’ve always been a big reader, but writing?  Not so much.  Don’t get me wrong, even though I’m an Engineer and a Navy guy, I’ve written a lot of things over the years: essays, reports, technical procedures, briefings, letters, blog entries, you name it.  Various people told me I was a good writer through the years, and I once or twice thought about writing fiction, but never did anything about it. 

The closest I came was in online role-playing games called multi-user dungeons, or MUDs.  They were text based, so when the Everquests and Worlds of Warcraft of the world became popular, they lost most of their players.  But I’m a guy who grew up playing Zork and other Infocom text-based games, so I was instantly attracted.  Plus, since they were text-based, the role-playing was very intense and cool, and really was just like writing a story, or to my way of thinking at the time, like playing a D&D game.  My favorite MUD was called A Moment in Tyme, and it was set in the Wheel of Time universe.  I’m a bit of a Robert Jordan fanboy, so that was wicked fun.  I spent many hours over the span of five or six years role-playing swordfights and other things with my warder character, and political intrigue and magic with my Aes Sedai character.  I was disappointed as the number of active users slowly dwindled to virtually zero.  And then I stopped logging in also.  What was the point with no one else there?

I still have the logs of those role-playing sessions.  Looking back at it now, I realize I was writing fan fiction all that time, though I didn’t think of it that way.

A few years passed, and every now and then I’d be reading a good book or something and think something along the lines of, “How cool would it be to be Robert Jordan?”  When he died in 2007, I was saddened for his family’s loss.  But I’ll admit my first thought when I heard the news was, “Oh no, now the story will never be finished.”  I felt bad about thinking that right off the bat, but it’s the truth.

When Brandon Sanderson was tapped to finish the Wheel of Time, my first thought was, “Who the hell is that?”  I quickly found out.  And then a bit later, I discovered his Writing Excuses podcast.  For at least a year, I listened to that podcast, at first to get to know who he was, and then later because their discussions of how the writing process and the writing business works was fascinating.

But still I didn’t do anything.

At some point in this time period my sister finished a book.  Then she got an agent!  Holy cow, I thought, she’s got it made now!  Well maybe not, I’ve since come to learn.  I was proud of her, but also felt a bit shamed, because she’d done something that I’d halfway thought about doing several times, but never had.

So last summer, I sat down and wrote a chapter.  And did nothing with it.

Then, for some reason, over Christmas I blew the dust off, threw out most of what I’d written, and started over.  This time I didn’t stop.  By the end of January, I had 17,000 words or so written.

At some point in January I decided if I was writing a book, I’d better figure out how to get it published.  I recalled a Writing Excuses episode about agents, where they discussed Dean Wesley Smith’s “Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing” post where he took on the general mythology surrounding agents.  That post was one of the first blog posts I ever read about the business of writing.  I devoured the rest of that series.

Then I looked for more, and I found cool indie writers like Derek, Aaron Niz, J E Medrick, and others.  Reading about what they were doing, and in particular seeing Derek’s openness with his process and his numbers, gave me encouragement that I could do this thing.

And so I did. 

It’s been a good first year so far.  I have a bit over 150,000 words written, and more to come.  My novelette, Passing in the Night, got an honorable mention from the L Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest.  It, along with several of my short stories, is for sale in all ebook outlets.  Dean Wesley Smith is letting me come to one of his writing workshops in the spring.  And best of all, I finished my first novel, Masters of the Sun.  It just went live earlier this week.

 

MASTERS OF THE SUN

Ten years after the Troubles that ended civilization as we currently know it, isolated settlements of survivors have resumed trade and are beginning to rebuild. In the small settlement of Glennville, Jack Simmons lives as a hunter and trapper with his friend and mentor. Haunted by and unable to move beyond the lingering pain from his losses during the Troubles, he nevertheless has found a measure of contentment. But when the trade caravan brings word of a mysterious and mystical threat in the west, he finds himself thrust on an unwanted journey to discover the source of this threat and how to counter it.

Fast paced and action-packed, Masters of the Sun is the story of one man's perseverance in the face of adversity and of the rebirth of magic into a crippled world.

Masters of the Sun grew out of a question I debated with one of the other officers on my submarine while we were on deployment a few years ago: if modern society collapsed completely, and no modern tools could be used anymore, how long would it take for humanity to regress to the stone age?  I think it would be very quick, less than a generation.  Depressing, but true, I think.  How many people know how to survive in the wild, let alone run a forge?

Over time, that question morphed, and I began to wonder what if someone during the collapse of civilization learned how to really work magic?  What would happen then?

You can read my vision of what might happen in my book, available on Amazon, Barnesand Noble, and Smashwords (and in a few weeks on the Smashwords premium distribution channels: Apple, Sony, Kobo, and Diesel).  It’s just in ebook for now, but at some point in the near future, once I figure out how to do it, it’ll be out in trade paperback as well.

Thanks, Derek, for what you do here in your blog, and for your hospitality.

***

Thanks for telling us about your journey as a writer, Michael. I, too, spent many hours with roleplaying (Dungeons & Dragons, Twilight 2000, Star Frontiers, Harn, Deadlands, etc.) and I agree that it is a great way to nurture imagination and writing. With several books out you’re well on your way to a good income boost, and probably an eventual writing career.

Now, everyone should go check out Michael’s books!

Amazon Kindle Bestsellers Rank and daily sales

I don’t claim to know how Amazon determines the Bestsellers Rank of my books. Common theories include some algorithm that includes total number of books sold, number of books sold in the past X days, number of books sold in the past y hours, sales of other books, tag activity, page view activity, movement of the asteroid Ceres in relation to the constellation Orion, and so on. Apparently, Amazon also changes their algorithm from time to time. So, if you’re selling 20 books a day and getting into the #4000 range one season, you might sell the same amount next season but barely break #8000.

However, I do keep pretty meticulous sales data for my books and I can try to correlate the number of units I sell to the Amazon Kindle Bestsellers Rank.

Here’s a chart of my best-selling book, Dead Dwarves Don’t Dance. The top graph shows daily unit sales, and the bottom graph shows sales rank.

As you can see, there’s a pretty direct correlation between my spike in sales and my better sales rank. One day in April I sold 126 copies of the book and achieved my best sales rank of #333.

These days, I’m selling between 10 and 20 copies a day, and my sales rank fluctuates around #5000 to #9000.

You can see that around the beginning of March I was also selling around 15 copies a day, and my rank was around #5000.

Even at the current #8000 rank, Dead Dwarves Don’t Dance is showing up in the top #100 for a couple genre lists (Kindle SF High Tech and SF High Tech). Unfortunately, not in the top #20, which is the sweet spot to be in because your book shows up on the first page of the list.

I hope this helps you other writers get a feel for the relationship between daily sales and Amazon Bestsellers Rank.

August 2011 sales report

August was my 11th month selling ebooks.



I sold 877 copies of 4 different titles. That’s a decrease of 27% from July.

My royalties also declined from $1,066.97 to $866.89.

My average sales per day were 38.9 in July and 28.3 in August.

If sales continue like they have for August, I should gross about $12,500 in 2011. Down a couple thousand from my estimates a couple months ago, but still quite nice.



Alas, I don’t like seeing those lines on the charts heading down. However, there is only one thing I can do, and that’s keep writing.



I’m working diligently on Where Magic Reigns, the sequel to The Elemental Odyssey. I'm on the 3rd draft now, should be on 4th this weekend. My plan is to have it published before December so I can take advantage of all the Harry Potter fans getting ereaders.



I’ll probably take December off from writing, as I’m doing a good job of burning myself out on Where Magic Reigns over the past couple months.



Starting in January, I’ll get going on the sequel to Dead Dwarves Don’t Dance. I’ll be very interested to see how the sequel to my bestselling book does in 2012.

Dead Dwarves Don’t Dance: the SONG!!!!!!

In case you haven’t read the book, Dead Dwarves Don’t Dance is set in the year 2134 when a wide variety of neohumans are genetically engineered to serve humanity. One type of neohuman is the dwarf, designed for dangerous, difficult jobs such as mining, volcanic research, Martian colonization, and warfare.



A strong theme running through the books is the prejudice that neohumans (also called gennies) must endure. While gennies free humans from many difficult or dangerous jobs, they are also hated by some. Most humans don’t think they deserve the same rights.



The bigotry in the world has resulted in a song titled Dead Dwarves Don’t Dance. There are a few lyrics of the song in the book, and a reporter even interviews the imprisoned drummer (BangBang Bangster).



I put the song, lyrics, and drummer in the story just to add flavor for the grim and gritty world. I was quite surprised when musician Jeff Shields emailed me a little while ago to say he was creating a song based on my book Dead Dwarves Don’t Dance!



He had a rough cut that he sent me and it sounded cool and appropriately futuristic. I sent him some more of the lyrics that hadn’t made it into the book and he went to work.



Now you can hear what Earless is humming in the first scene of the book! Of course, just like it says in the book, the lyrics are kind of unintelligible, but the song certainly gets across the anger and grit of the fictional universe.




Click here to visit the Dead Dwarves Don’t Dance single website, by Kleptonaut.



If you like the song, why not donate a dollar or two to help out independent musicians? Kleptonaut is an independent band with a couple other songs available. Check them out!



About Kleptonaut


The band Kleptonaut includes Jeff Shields, Wilcox Televance, and Garrett Xian.


I asked them for an interview and they readily accepted:



DJC: How did you guys form Kleptonaut?


Jeff: Kleptonuat has been just me, but this incarnation of the band was assembled just for this song. I haven't seen Wilcox in more than 20 years. I was briefly in a high school band with him.  I briefly was in Wilcox and company's  high school for his high power cover band (Rush, Yes, Metalica, Van Halen, Pat Benatar,).   We won battle of the bands that year, but I'm not sure if it was our playing or as I've only heard recently a rumour of my brother stuffing the ballot boxes. So I just recently got in touch with him via Facebook and approached him with the idea of this crazy song.


Wilcox: I'm a NYC based producer. I'm knee deep in the city's club/dance scene, so 'Dwarves' seemed a good project to collaborate on. I thought the idea for the song was so crazy it just might work. Or fail miserably. I was up for either.


Jeff: Wilcox's stuff is great.  When I heard how clean and frosty his beats were and that he was using the same software as me, I suspected working with him might elevate my often chaotic music into something tasty, even downright delectable. I was in a college band with Garrett. When I decided I needed a vocalist with the powers of David Bowie, I sent Garret this long explanation of what we were up to but interestingly enough he was only able to read a small indecipherable portion of the message as he didn't realize you had to scroll through the message in facebook.


Garrett: When I showed up to his house I had little to no idea what the ju ju bees he was talking about.



DJC: Can you talk about how you created the song? We collaborated a bit on the lyrics, but then you took them and exploded them into a finished song. Who did what for the instrumentals and vocals?


Jeff: I added some to the lyrics you sent me, mostly I wanted some more rhymes, but I tried to take my cue from the world of your book. I originally recorded some rough tracks and sent them to Wilcox, who then worked on it.

Wilcox: It was a Band 2.0 thing, you know collaborating virtually.  We all met while lost in corn maze and found we had mutual love of fields, games and vegetables.

Jeff:  Wilcox made up the bit about the corn maze... Anyways Wilcox magically transformed the song into punk rock disco from hell, but it was a bit too evil (http://soundcloud.com/kleptonaut/utra-evil-2nd-draft-dead). So Wilcox and I decided to dial it back and I recruited Garrett. I added some more music. Garrett came up with the vocal melody and I sent it to Wilcox.

Garrett: This was a musical experiment unlike anything I had ever done before. I walked into Jeff's studio having only listened to the rough mix a few times. He handed me the words and we talked about doing it either in an incongruous, high-toned, Morrisseyesque style or something a bit more toward Peter Murphy. The first take (a la Morrissey) was a little off, so we went dark. I wrote the melody in basically 2 takes, and that's what you hear.


Wilcox: And then I messed with a bit more on the second go round. Dropped in some bass, mixed in some of Jeff's evil vocals, straightened up the chaos and put a few dolops of color splash, you know to keep it properly seasoned. And Voila, DDDD.  Now you have a modern twist on the future-punk/neo-goth sound done with the post-power trio lineup.  Beats, bass, regurgitated vocals, guitars in a blender, with dash of synth to taste.


Jeff: Aren't you glad you asked?




DJC: What advice do you have for other indie musicians?


Jeff: Do it for love, money, or fun.

Garrett: More cowbell.




DJC: Just imagining the grim protagonist of the novel, Noose the genetically engineered dwarf mercenary, dancing disco like John Travolta is a hoot! How did you come up with the idea for the cover?


Jeff: The characters who are singing the song are evil, nasty pieces of work. I didn't want people to take what they are singing seriously. In the book the song is just a backdrop for the hero, Noose, so I wanted to bring the hero to the foreground of the album cover. So, in a sense, Noose is getting the last laugh on these jerks. The jerks on the cover are us.






DJC: Do you have any other creative endeavors you’d like to talk about?


Jeff: I just finished two sci-fi themed albums, which are at www.kleptonaut. com. The song Dead Dwarves Don't Dance, is a departure for all of us, but we tried to make something that fit into the fictional world of your book. I'd like to recruit both of these guys to do something in the future, but who knows what.

Garrett: Whatever's next, I'm in!


I’d like to thank Jeff, Wilcox, and Garrett for creating this awesome song. It’s really cool that my creative efforts inspired other artists to further expand the Dead Dwarves universe!


Now head on over to their music page and buy the song!

Twelve Worlds SF&F anthology report

On April 16^th thirteen other independent authors and I released a science fiction and fantasy anthology titled Twelve Worlds. It has 14 different short stories for a total of 80,000+ words. The author proceeds from sales will be donated to Reading is Fundamental, the largest literacy charity in the US.

It’s available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords for $2.99.

When it was released several contributors blogged about it and found some people to do online reviews.

We didn’t spend any money on advertising.

We’ve sold 158 copies so far.

You can see the initial spike when all us authors bought a copy, but after that it’s been pretty consistent over time at around 1 copy sold a day on average.

I’m surprised that the book isn’t doing a little bit better. With 14 different authors blogging and telling friends I would have thought we’d have more than a couple sales a day.

It’s clear that people are not finding Twelve Worlds. It’s not in any top 100 lists. This is the same problem my YA book, The Elemental Odyssey, is facing. People aren’t finding the book so they can’t buy it, and because people aren’t buying the book others can’t find it.

Starting this month I’m conducting another advertising experiment, this time for The Elemental Odyssey. I’m spending $500 over two months to get 400,000 ad impressions on a website that I believe is pre-disposed to be interested in my book. I’ll give a report on this experiment in a couple weeks.

If the advertising for The Elemental Odyssey works, then it might be worth it to find a similarly targeted advertising venue to market Twelve Worlds. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Stay tuned!

And if you haven’t bought Twelve Worlds yet, why not give it a try? 14 stories for $2.99 is a great deal!