Gold
Last Friday I learned that First Step had won its first award, a Gold Book Award from Literary Titan! You might recall that one of my previous books, Next Time, also won the same award. It’s nice to be a repeat winner, especially in two radically different genres. Also, I haven’t entered First Step in as many contests so far, so it’s nice to get a win under the belt, as it were. It’s not that I didn’t want to enter more contests, but it’s been a function of the submission window being open as well as a bit about finances and not doing it all at once. All that said, it’s quite an honor to win an award since it provides a nice gold-plated sticker of validation on my book. It lets me know that someone who judges books actually liked mine. I won’t say it makes it worthwhile for all that time I spent, since not much could do that other than having a hit movie made out of it, but it sure is a nice feeling. Links to Literary Titan, including the original review, interview, and awards page, are all on the First Step page on this site.
Editing Tips
If you’re a writer, you might be interested in knowing that I don’t know everything. However, I do have some experience and I’m more than willing to share it so you can learn from my mistakes. Case in point: editing a book with multiple characters and/or narrators. This may seem like common sense or generate a “Duh!” from you, but I have a feeling some authors don’t do this. The easiest way to communicate this tip is by using some examples. For The Drop series every chapter, and oftentimes sections within chapters, are written about different characters. The books are narrated in third person, although that’s not important in this case but comes into play with my next example. These books include well over a dozen people, meaning I have to write about all those characters and keep them straight in my head. The way I write those books is continuous. Meaning I jump from character to character and pretty much write the book in the way you’re going to read it. My editing tip is that on one of your editing reads (I hope you go back and read through your draft multiple times), you should pick each character and read their story continuously. Meaning if I start with Character A in Chapter 1 and the next time I tell more about their story is in Chapter 6 followed by Chapter 10 followed by Chapter 13, I should read 1-6-10-13 and so on until I get to the end of their story.
Another example is my most recent book, First Step, where I alternate chapters between two characters. I told you the POV would make an appearance. Both characters are also first-person narrators of their respective chapters. During one of my read-throughs of the draft involved reading every other chapter for Eve and another pass where I read every other chapter of Ray’s. What’s the point? In this case, I caught inconsistencies that wouldn’t have been fatal to the story, but they would’ve been proof of bad writing. In one case, I had Eve bathing in a river in one chapter. A few chapters later, her story resumes and she’s clothed. An error like that makes the reader pause, taking themselves momentarily out of the flow of the book. Just to be clear, that’s a bad thing. Also, by reading their chapters in order, you make sure their voice is consistent. This is very important when writing in first person. You don’t want their voices to blend or overlap, taking away the distinctiveness of their characters. Another example is from The Drop: Season Three (to be released later this month, I hope), where I have a character who is thankful for safety on the planet and even says a prayer. As I was reading through the chapters in sequence of another character, he says some things that were meant for the first character. In other words, I mixed them up while writing the draft. That’s an egregious error. Would I have caught it reading through the book sequentially? Maybe, but I darn sure caught it using this editing method. If you’re writing a book with these structures, you owe it to yourself and your readers to read through your draft at least once to follow the story of each character in order.
Initial Edit
On Saturday I finished the initial first edit of The Drop: Season Three and I have to say it’s in good shape. Not much in the way of structural or story changes, which means I’ll do a few more passes and then publish the book. That’ll take several more weeks and I think having it out by the end of the month is within the realm of possibility. If not, then certainly by the first part of May. I had more of a plan on this one than I did the first two seasons and I think that shows in the quality of the draft. Not that I didn’t have a plan when I wrote the first two seasons, but let’s just say those plans were a little more…undefined. Yeah, we’ll go with that. Season Three and Season Four both have structures that are more thought out, if you will, because of the underlying themes. Yes, I know that’s incredibly vague. You’ll figure it out when the books are released. Or you won’t. The themes in Season Three are more subtle, whereas the Season Four theme is pretty much shoved in your face. Anyway, I’m making progress already on my second edit of Season Three and intend to keep rolling along so I can release it into the wild as soon as possible.
Interview
Literary Titan posted my author interview this past week about First Step and I enjoyed the chance to answer a few questions in written form. The questions about the inspiration for the story and whose narrative voice came to me first (Eve or Ray) allowed me to encapsulate some of what I’ve written here previously. I didn’t go into all the details of casting Eve adrift on the ocean of Primis for several months or a draft where she and Guion tried to survive while the comatose Colt kept getting washed down a river (really). The last question in the interview asked if there’d be another book in the First Step universe. That’s a good question. The short answer - go read the full interview - is that I don’t have current plans to write another and the question allowed me to pimp The Drop series. I left the door cracked at the end of First Step for another story with those characters, but I don’t have one right now. Inspiration could certainly strike at any time. I obviously have a liking for Lewis and Eve and Ray and Gladys and the supporting cast, so maybe I’ll return to their world someday. Anyway, answering the questions was a nice diversion. And as I mentioned earlier, go read it.
Editing Room
I’m back to the editing room after writing about 20k words of The Drop: Season Four. I think it’s going well so far, but it’s time to edit Season Three and release it into the wild. I felt compelled to do so after seeing the surge in reading of the first two seasons on the Kindle Unlimited dashboard. To me, that means the books are getting more readers and I want to keep them engaged so they’ll continue with subsequent seasons. And to do that, I have to publish those seasons. I started yesterday and so far, so good. I don’t have a ton of editing notes, just a few minor things to fix or add. One of the additions is due to something I wrote in Season Four, which is why I started that before editing Season Three. Also a minor fix: I realized I needed to give the starliner a name, especially since something bad happened to it at the end of the second book. I picked one out for Season Four and now that I’m editing Season Three I can add the ship’s name wherever appropriate. This is just the start of several run-throughs of the draft. I’d like to get the book out in April. We’ll see.
Exception
Written reviews on bookie sites trickle in slowly. I enjoy reading both the good and the bad ones, usually getting a laugh or two from the latter. I don’t usually comment on them and certainly never respond in a comment right on the site. That’s a bad idea. I read one this week on Goodreads about First, a one-star review where the reader clearly did not like the book. He highlighted one passage where Peter, one of the astronauts, gets drunk and takes verbal and physical swings at his teammates. The reviewer’s comment on the passage went like this:
What? An accomplished communications engineer who passed and continues to pass multiple psych evaluations has an obvious tendency for petty jealousy and a clear alcohol problem? This is one of many examples of the characters' explicit immaturity, especially Lewis'.
The reason I highlight this part of the review is because it displays a fundamental ignorance of humans and history. Drunk people say stupid stuff. People lash out when they’re angry and say incredibly petty things. Does that mean they’re characterized by pettiness? Not necessarily, particularly when alcohol fuels the talking. Maybe this reviewer has never been to a bar or around drunk people. The part about ‘a clear alcohol problem’ made me lol. Seriously, it did. Ever been around people in high-pressure situations, like military or law enforcement? The reviewer clearly knows nothing about the history of the space program. The Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, astronauts were notorious for nightly inhabiting the clubs along the east Florida coast and racing their sports cars on the beach. They came from a test pilot culture and the bar where they routinely drank to excess in California became legendary. I guess they were immature, according to this shiny new standard. I’ll keep that in mind the next time I write about astronauts. If you don’t think they went through continuous mental and physical testing, read some stories told from the astronauts’ POV. They got so tired of it all at one point they told the guy in charge that if they had to go through one more test, they would quit. If I recall correctly, the incident involved dropping a urine-filled sample bag on the man’s desk.
Look, I realize people consume books like First based on their own context and experience. And I probably shouldn’t make an exception to responding to comments. I note this review because it makes me wonder if there’s a broader ignorance of people and history. I hope not, and I hope this example of ignorance is the exception and not the rule. Spend a little time around drunk people and watch and listen - it’s not always pretty. And go read some history on the space program and Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. The story of those years is fascinating. In summary, I give this review a half-star.
Reading Pile
What am I reading these days? Lots. My TBR pile was getting pretty tall while I had three books going at one time, two of them on my Kindle Paperwhite. Usually I only read one at a time on the Kindle, but I wanted to re-read Project Hail Mary before seeing the movie. Finished that last week and saw the movie a couple of days ago. Glad I read the book again since I had a better sense of what the writers and editors cut out or compressed. Good movie to see on the big screen, btw, but I digress. The other book I’m still reading on the Kindle is the fourth book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. My oldest daughter clued me in on the chaos of these books and even though I’ve never been into RPG I’m still enjoying them. The third book I’m currently reading is Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. I’m about halfway through and enjoying the tongue-in-cheek tone and how the writer addresses the reader directly. I think one of the front-of-the-book blurbs said to read it first for fun and then again to see how the writer did it. I’m enjoying it so far and unless the book really takes a dive in quality, I’ll probably do exactly as that blurb directed. That’s what’s going on for me in the world of books. What are you reading?
Five More Stars
I received a most excellent 5-star review for First Step yesterday from Literary Titan. The reviewer liked the balance of telling the story through two different perspectives and that it worked well in their respective storylines. They also liked that the story was rooted in the personal and the human rather than clobbering the reader with technology. I enjoy that feedback because that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I’m re-reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir in anticipation of seeing the movie that’s coming out this weekend. Weir writes technical and scientific details that I could never do in my books because I’m just not that person. He does it extremely well, which is why he’s a bestselling author and his books are made into movies. My SF clearly focuses on people and I root the tech in things that are futuristic yet familiar. That way I can tell the story without bogging down myself or the reader. Anyway, I have work to do to socialize the new review. Very exciting!
The Fourth
What am I doing these days? I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the draft of The Drop: Season Three is complete. Now I’m working on Season Four. I’m already written over five thousand words and liking the variety of this story compared to the first three books - er, seasons. Even though each book is based on the same concept, I’m trying to make them different enough to keep readers going through the series. If you’ve read the first two books, you know they’re about a survival contest on an unexplored alien planet. I could repeat the exact same formula each time, with different contestants, but I’m not sure people would stick around for ten seasons of that. I did throw in a backstory about the people on Earth running the show so there’s some sense of consistency between the seasons. In the third book I tried some different themes and a surprise ending, while in this book I have a surprise beginning and a completely different focus about the players. It’s fun to write this one and as always, I hope it turns out well. I’ll probably pause the writing of it in a few weeks so I can edit Season Three and publish it, but for now I’ll just keep writing.
Monday Climb
Not sure what happened this past Monday, but First climbed higher on the US Amazon rankings than it ever has before. In 2024 the book went pretty high on the UK and Canada charts while remaining further down in the US. It was kind of cool to watch the ranking ratchet upward while wondering why. In a good way, of course. As previously mentioned, the Amazon rankings are relative and I won’t know actual sales until next week. The highest it went was 7,692 and #37 in the Space Exploration category. Other authors probably look at that as quite the pedestrian number and shake their head at my naive excitement. That’s fine. For me, it’s realizing that of millions of books on Amazon, mine is ranked near the top. Not bad for someone who does this only a little over an hour a day. As they say, don’t quit your day job. I won’t, but I will certainly bask in the good feeling of a momentary uptick in the rankings.
Must-Read!
The initial review for First Step is in from Reedsy Discovery and it's a good one: five stars and categorized as a must-read! “A most entertaining and exciting read,” is what the reviewer says and a phrase I’ll use in my social media posts. It’s gratifying to get such praise, especially for a book that I labored over so much. I think back on all the iterations I went through trying to find stories that would click for Eve and for Ray, and how much writing ended up unused. One draft ran 45k words before I trashed it. I toyed with the idea of Eve finding a human footprint by a pond on the alien planet Primis at the end of the first chapter, I wrote quite a long draft of Eve and her fellow astronauts getting washed down a gorge by a flood, and I tried a book with only Ray as the main character. When I finally combined the stories and pruned away repetitiveness in Eve’s journey, the story finally came together the way I wanted. Lots of work went into this one, more than normal, and I’m glad to see it being recognized with a great review.
Rolling Past 900
First has reached 900 ratings on Amazon as of this past week and it still maintains 4.4 stars, a significant achievement. I did get a kick out of one recent review that proclaimed “wonderful read,” and “this is your next book,” but only gave it two stars. I appreciate the review, but apparently they don’t understand how the five-star system works. Anyway, those headwinds aside, I like it that the book continues to rack up the ratings. Hitting a thousand in the coming weeks or months will be a moment to celebrate. First won numerous awards and this feels like another. Plus, it’d be fantastic if all the people who read First also read First Step. Come on, people, you know you want to!
That’s a Wrap
Finished the first draft of The Drop: Season Three and that’s a wrap, as they say in the show-biz. Now it’s time to let the manuscript ferment for a few weeks, aka sitting in a virtual drawer while I work on something else. I like the way it turned out, although as I mentioned previously there are things I’ll need to add and fix before publishing. That’s normal and just part of the process. I’m thinking I’ll start on Season Four and see how that goes, since I might need to add or adjust something in Season Three to foreshadow or some literary technique like that. We’re here at the beginning of March so I’d expect to release Season Three sometime in April if things go well, probably the latter part. After marinating, I’ll make changes and then go through the book at least three more times for continuity, flow, copy editing, and proofreading. You think these things just pop out automatically? Ha. Lots of effort still to go, but for now I’m pleased with the initial manuscript.
Discovery
Writing The Drop: Season Three has been an adventure, both writing it and life-wise. I started it back in October and made good progress for three weeks before breaking my collarbone late in the month. That incident caused a diversion since I couldn’t type very well for a number of weeks, which caused me to go into editing mode. That actually turned out to be a blessing since I was able to publish First Step in the new year. I returned to writing Season Three and then spent a few days in the hospital for my appendix. I was able to keep the momentum going, though, and had The Wife bring my laptop to the hospital and I wrote a little. So, why the title of this post? I started the book with a concept about the storyline for each character and executed that as I wrote. It was only later in the book that I discovered a theme that came about unexpectedly. This discovery means I need to take some time and go back in the book to add some clues and hints along the way. Not too much heavy lifting. I do think it’s amazing that this revelation came to me as late as it did and naturally, as part of the writing process. Maybe it would’ve popped up if I’d outlined the whole book beforehand, maybe not. I’m glad it did and it reinforces my approach to writing these books.
Good Ads, Bad Ads
You all know that I run ads every weekend on BookBub. The ads for First and Next Time continue to perform wonderfully, draining their budget every time. The new ones for The Drop and First Step don’t do so well, though. They start off very well on Friday, less so on Saturday, and almost no clicks on Sunday. I think there are a couple of reasons for this lackluster performance. The first is that I haven’t honed in on the right wording yet. I think they’re both pretty good, but obviously the people who see those ads disagree. I also have to tell myself that it took time to get things right with First and Next Time, to the tune of several months’ worth of trying out different approaches. The other factor, one that’ll be easier to fix, is that the audience isn’t right. The setup for each ad lets you target the readers of particular authors and I might have too broad an audience at the moment. I’ll be making some changes before this next weekend with hopefully some better and more consistent results.
Birthday
I have a birthday this week, although I’m not going to tell you which day just so we can keep a little bit of mystery in our relationship. It’s not a milestone birthday, but as usual it gives one a chance to reflect a little. Since November 2021, I’ve written 6 9/10ths books, with the fraction being the almost-finished The Drop: Season Three, and published five of them so far. Not a bad run, if I can pat myself on the back without breaking my arm. I think what’s interesting about this writing stuff is in trying to figure out why I didn’t do this sooner. I’ve talked before at length about how I started getting up earlier each morning and spending time before work in writing activities. Obviously, I didn’t have a book done in a couple of weeks, much less seven whole volumes (I’m rounding up). It was the day-by-day commitment that allowed me to write those books and then get them into the hands of readers. I learned a lot along the way, which is quite an understatement. The morning routine is part of my life now and I can’t imagine it any other way. I’ve seen good ratings and reviews and it makes me happy that people like them. In the writing life, that might be the best birthday gift of all.
Virtual Voice
It’s going to be awhile before First Step gets an audiobook treatment. I spent some time over the past three-day weekend trying to prep an audio version and gave up. Previously, I used the Amazon KDP Virtual Voice option for both seasons of The Drop and they turned out pretty well. Yes, I’d much prefer to hire a professional and have toyed with that idea in the past, especially with First, but it just turned out to be too expensive. Using Virtual Voice costs me nothing except time and I’m sure it’ll get better. I was reminded that Amazon bills Virtual Voice as a “beta,” which makes sense considering my experience.
I ran into three problems that I can’t correct. Likely, someone with more experience than me could figure workarounds and some likely go back to the eBook manuscript, which is what VV uses as the source material. Anyway, in no particular order, here are my three reasons for halting work on an audiobook of First Step:
1) Consistency - one of my characters has an unusual name, Guion, a reference to the first African-American in space, Guion Bluford. The VV pronounces the name differently in different places. I’ve used the feature in VV to change the pronunciation when that occurs, but it still doesn’t nail it even with those changes. I can’t release an audiobook where you never know how a major character’s name will come out
2) Difference between edited pronunciation and what actually comes out - one of the buildings on the SpaceFirst campus is Hangar A-10. VV pronounces “A-10” as “ahten,” with the short vowel sound. I edited the pronunciation multiple ways and in the editing dialog got it right. But when it went back to the manuscript, it didn’t pronounce the words the way it had said them in the edit option. Again, frustrating and I certainly can’t release a book with such glaring errors
3) Chapter Headings - this is the one I could probably fix with some manuscript edits, but given the other two issues it’s not worth it at this point. It started with VV reading the number and subheading wrong for the first chapter, making it sound like the AI had a stutter. On the fourth chapter, it skipped the heading entirely. There’s another chapter where the sound stuttered again, but I couldn’t tell you which one because I’d given up by that point.
So, that’s a little bit of wasted time but at least I gave it a shot. Maybe I’ll try again in a few months.
Breaking 400
I’ve mentioned before that the path to ratings for Next Time is slower than it’s been for First. Probably because Next Time doesn’t sell as many copies. Simple math, right? A couple of days ago, Next Time finally reached the 400 ratings mark on Amazon. It had been teetering on the threshold for over a week, stuck at 398 for several days, up to 399, back down to 398 (I don’t know how it loses a rating - maybe someone deleted it?), and finally reaching 400. This is significant because now I can update my weekend ad for the book with the new quantity of ratings. I’m also glad to report that the overall rating average has stayed steady at 4.4 stars. Thank you to everyone who’s rated and reviewed the book. I appreciate it more than you know.
Top Release
Good news on the release of First Step: yesterday I found that it was #1 in New Releases in its category. That category is “Androids, Robots & Artificial Intelligence,” one of the subcategories in fiction. Let’s be honest here, shall we? There probably aren’t a lot of books in that category, therefore making it easier for my book to rise to that spot. While #1 on the New Releases list, it rose to #23 in the overall category. So yes, it sold some copies Sunday and yesterday (probably thanks to the ads I mentioned last time) and getting to the top of the heap in any game is a good thing. I know I also said it’s a process and takes time to sell a new book for us independent publishers and that’s still true. I’ll take the little wins like this, though. It’s a nice feeling.
Post-Release
It always feels like a bit of a letdown after a book release. Maybe because of the unspoken expectation that everyone is going to love your book and it’s going to shoot to the top of the rankings right away. Yes, there are writers who live that scenario. The rest of us who independently publish don’t really get that kind of rush. We watch as people favorite and heart our social media posts, but then don’t buy the book itself. Sales often stagger from the starting line, weaving in a general direction down the sidewalk like a guy who’s been in the pub from open to close. It takes time to find readers and that’s what my first round of ads will be doing this coming weekend. Building momentum and awareness requires effort, time, and money. Based on my experiences with releasing a new book, to me it’s not really a letdown as much as it’s the start of a longer timeline.