No Clicks
As you know, I run ads every Friday-Sunday through BookBub. The promos for First and Next Time have consistently drained their daily budget (BookBub charges through clicks or impressions - I set it up for clicks) while First Step has been good but not great in clicks, and last week my ad for The Drop got zero clicks. Not a single one. It’s weird to be shut out like that and clearly I need to do something different for the coming weekend. Two things could be wrong and I have a feeling it’s both. The first is the ad itself. Last week I put the covers of all three books (so far) in the series in the ad. I’m going to go back to putting only the first book’s cover and see how that goes. The other thing to change is the author targeting. I don’t think I’ve found the right mix of readers to focus on based on the authors they read. That’s the good thing about the BookBub service, though. You can experiment until you find an ad that “clicks” with users (see what I did there?). It certainly took awhile for First and Next Time and I went through a lot of trial and error. It’s easy to forget that now when they do well every weekend, but it wasn’t always like that. The trial continues for The Drop, but hopefully not the error.
Box It
When I put out The Drop: Season Four in a few months, one of my tasks will be to make a boxed set of the books in the series for Kindle Unlimited. I was thinking about doing it when the fifth book comes out, but it makes sense to go ahead and do it with four. In the first place, that should generate more readers. And second, if I decide to change it and do a five-book boxed set later, then I certainly can. All it costs is time. I don’t anticipate a boxed set in the print version, mainly because so few people buy physical books these days. I’ve read many a Kindle boxed set, though, and that’s how people binge-read. I’ll have to learn a few things, like how to do the artwork and how to format it (one table of contents? I think so), among other things. This is a task for later in the summer although it’s good to start thinking through some of these details.
Almost Halfway
The title for this post has a double meaning: we’re almost halfway through the year and I’m almost halfway done with the draft for The Drop: Season Four. The year’s midpoint means revisiting the goals I set at the beginning and seeing how things have progressed. It’s tempting to mark off some items, but I’ll wait until we hit that date at the end of the month. As far the book goes, I don’t usually set a goal for number of pages in a book, other than the normal novel length. First weighed in at 125k words, a lot for a novel. My subsequent releases are more in line with the 75-90k range. For calculation purposes, I assume 80k on average, and hence the notion that I’m almost halfway there with what I’m writing since it stands at 36k words before I add more this morning. Even though being to this point doesn’t really mean anything, it’s still a fleeting mile-marker on the way to completing the book.
P.S. Regarding my last post, First hit 1,000 ratings that same day, just in case you were wondering. The tally stands at 1,002 as of now. Woo hoo!
999
First is on the threshold of a thousand ratings on Amazon. I was going to wait until that milestone, but then I thought, hey, hitting 999 is pretty cool and makes for a nice blog post title. In addition to that monumental threshold where the odometer rolls over to 1000, the book still has a 4.4 rating. When I published First in October 2023, I hoped a good number of people would read it, but I honestly had no idea how to get it into so many hands. Of course, 999 is a portion of the overall readers since many people don’t leave ratings (for shame!) and I’m grateful for every person who spent time with my book. Through ads and contests and the Amazon algorithms, First has found its audience and I hope it finds even more in the years ahead. This was my first “real” book after self-publishing three novels a decade earlier that were basically for friends and family to read. It took some work and money and a whole lot of time, but First has done better than I would’ve thought. And we’re not done yet.
Terrain
A feature of The Drop series is that the stories cover a variety of terrains on alien planets. As you might be aware, Earth has its own variety. Trying to keep the terrain in my stories different yet believable is an ongoing lesson in creativity. On our recent vacation to southwest Texas, it struck me how the terrain there is what you see for a very long time when you’re driving. The scenery on the drive through the Big Bend region looks exactly like the desert where I grew up in southern New Mexico. I was thinking of how far in each direction that desert must stretch and I had to look it up - the Chihuahuan desert covers about 194,000 square miles in Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Wow. No wonder everything looks the same. That won’t do for The Drop, though. From the scenery to the smell, the worlds need to show their differences and what makes them alien. And sometimes dangerous. It’s a fun part of world-building and creating challenges for the players.
In Audio
Yesterday I put out The Drop: Season Three in audio format. I’d started the day before to make sure Amazon Virtual Voice could say the names right - it actually did great. If you go back a few months, you’ll find my post on how that didn’t work with First Step and the name of one of the main characters. Maybe I can go back and revisit that. Anyway, this time around the process seemed much smoother, probably because I’ve done it more than once now. The only real gotcha in the process was that when I first looked, Amazon said I couldn’t create an audiobook from the ebook (which is the basis for the audio version) since it didn’t have a table of contents. It most certainly did. I found the instructions on the Amazon web site, deleted the old table of contents, followed their directions (again), and inserted a new TOC. It worked and a couple of hours later I had the ability to start the audiobook process. Again, other than that, it went just fine and that version is now available for your listening pleasure.
Non-Fiction
I’m in awe of writers who create great works of non-fiction. I say this because I don’t think I could do it. I like to read history and biographies and the amount of research that goes into them is off the charts. I know, they have assistants who do a lot of the work, but still, the writer has to put it into prose that’s accurate and interesting. Case in point is the book I’m reading now, Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts. It’s a doorstopper of a book and a quarter of the way into it, I’m in for the long haul. This isn’t my first Churchill biography so I already know much about his life, but the amount of detail in this book, well, my goodness. The whole thing would’ve taken me a lifetime to write. Good thing I stick with fiction. I read non-fiction because in many cases real life is crazier than fiction. I believe that reading a variety of topics is worthwhile and helps build a strong foundation for a writer. For instance, reading classical authors isn’t required if you want to write, but it certainly helps. Likewise, non-fiction has helped me brainstorm ideas, among other things, but more than all that is learning the human condition. I’ve learned of courage, heroism, cowardice, cruelty, and sacrifice, not just in the current book I’m reading but in all I’ve consumed over the years. Thanks to the authors who do what I couldn’t and create beautiful written works of non-fiction art.
In the Works
What’s in the works? A couple of things in The Drop universe. The fourth season is still in progress and going quite nicely, thank you. I like the story so far and as always, the characters surprise me. Spoiler alert: I was going to have ten players quit on the first day and follow the remaining two for the rest of the book. To be clear, that’s not what happened once I actually started writing the story. It makes for an interesting and focused narrative to drill down to two characters, but as I found, it leaves out possibilities I hadn’t considered until I found myself needing more characters to make things happen. Anyway, that’s one thing in the works. The other, that I haven’t started yet, is the audiobook for Season Three. I just haven’t had time to get it going yet and quite honestly, I’m a little hesitant even though it needs to be done. The reason is my experience when I worked on the audio version of First Step, which as you might recall, I abandoned because the AI voice couldn’t get the name of some characters correct, no matter how hard I tried. The Drop definitely contains characters with non-English names and I’m either going to have to struggle a lot with the AI or I’m going to have to change the eBook (off which the audiobook is based) to utilize easier-to-pronounce names. Maybe I’ll start on that over the upcoming long weekend.
Another First?
I’ve been asked a few times if I’m going to write another book in the First universe and I mentioned this before in other posts and the interview I did with Literary Titan. The quick answer if you want to stop reading and get back to normal life: I don’t know. Right now I’m focused on adding to The Drop with more books in the series, and believe it or not, that takes creative energy I don’t get to use on other things. Does that mean I never think about it? Of course I think about it, usually at those random times when I should be thinking about something else. I like the characters in First and First Step, a natural consequence of spending so much time with them, and I suspect they have more stories in them. The problem with writing another book in the First world is that I have to be sure it’s a story worth telling. As an aside, I wish more Hollywood writers had that philosophy. That little dig now behind us, I’m not going to write a book just to write a book. I want the storyline to have meaning and to make the reader feel they’re glad they’re reading it. In First, Lewis was the first person to leave our solar system and return. In First Step, Eve was the first person to set foot on an extrasolar planet. After those two signature events, what’s the next first? I don’t know right now. Maybe in time I will and maybe it’ll be worth writing a book about.
What’s Up
Seems like a lot’s been going on so far this year. I’ve put out two books and it’s only mid-May. Somebody asked me last week when my next book is coming out, and I said I have to write it first. Which is true. The Drop: Season Three is in process and I’m only about 20k words in, meaning I have three-quarters of the way to go. That one should be finished sometime late summer. In the meantime, First Step has received numerous awards and reviews since its release at the end of January. First is closing in on a thousand ratings on Amazon, a big mile-marker, at least to me. In my downtime, usually when I’m falling asleep at night, I’ve tried to brainstorm another book in the First universe, but nothing has grabbed my interest yet. I’ll keep letting that one percolate. Assignment Day lurks, finished and ready to go other than a cover, and I really just need to get that one out the door instead of sitting in a virtual drawer. Maybe I’ll publish it this summer and put out a few more seasons of The Drop in Q4. Idk, lots of runway left this year and we’ll see where the plane takes us.
Another Five
We drove home all day Tuesday from vacation and I found a nice surprise waiting in my inbox that afternoon - another 5-star review for First Step! This one is from Reader Views and was done by the same reviewer who’d reviewed First several years ago. This new review was easily the best I’ve ever received and I wish I could pick out singular quotes, but the whole thing is full of quotable lines. Seriously. I want to use something for the BookBub ad for First Step, but I’m having trouble deciding what to highlight. Anyway, the review ends by directly addressing and encouraging me with comparisons to other authors who started as independents, and another instruction to Netflix to get my books on screen. I love it! I’m grateful and blessed to have my book received so well by someone who reads hundreds of books a year.
Season Three!
The Drop: Season Three is officially out! I spent a lot of time on Saturday formatting both the eBook and print versions. I count today as the real release date since I usually give the system a few days to sync up and allow me to link to the series and book pages. Plus, it’s more fun to give people a bit of a sneak peek if they follow my author’s page on Facebook. I’m proud of this story and how I was able to weave in a lot of bits from children’s adventure books over the past few centuries. I think it made the narrative more interesting. Wait ‘til you see what I do with the next book. Anyway, it’s available on Amazon for purchase as well as Kindle Unlimited. Get it and enjoy!
Top 10 SF?
For some reason I’d never thought of this. I was scrolling through YouTube a couple of nights ago and came across a video by some previously unknown guy who listed his top ten science fiction books. Again, not sure why this idea of ranking SF never crossed my mind. I won’t go into details on his list, but it caused me to stop and think a little. What would be in my top ten? And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I might not have enough SF books to populate such a list. I write quite a bit of SF, but I don’t necessarily read a lot of it. As a percentage of what I read, that number was higher when I was younger. And a lot of that consisted of SF that wouldn’t crack the top ten, like Star Trek and Star Wars books. You remember those, right? Branded offerings by a variety of authors, inconsistent storylines, some good, some horrible, some in the middle. “Real“ SF? I suppose there was plenty of that mixed in there, too. Classics by Heinlein, Clarke, Herbert, etc., some of which I thought good and some over my head. All that to say: what would be on my list? Good question. I’ll have to think about it some more.
Independent
The website Independent Book Review posted their take on First Step over the weekend. I’d seen a preview last month and it’s another great write-up of the book. This is the site where Next Time was one of their must-read books in the first half of 2024. Seems so long ago. Anyway, I’m incredibly appreciative of the review and the people who promote indie books. I keep seeing more articles about the state of the publishing industry, why men supposedly don’t read, and the plight of bookstores vs. Amazon, etc. All these, plus more, makes me thankful we live in a time where independent publishing is an option. If it wasn’t for being able to basically self-publish, my books would never have seen the light of day or been read by more than a dozen people, at most. So, thank you to everyone who promotes indie authors like me, and to all the readers unafraid to try out books by some unknown guy hunched over a laptop who has a penchant for getting up every morning to write a little before the rest of the day revs up.
Aloud
Once again, I’m in the reading aloud phase of editing my upcoming book, The Drop: Season Three. I’ve talked about this technique before, where you use one of your passes of going through the draft and reading the book out loud to yourself. I can’t emphasize how useful this technique is. Narrating is different from reading, when your eye betrays you and skips over errors, like a missing word, which your brain is more than happy to insert for you so you can keep on reading. I had to laugh at one error yesterday. My wife is from Minnesota and our kids make fun of her for pronouncing the word “bag” as “beg.” When reading the draft yesterday, I found a typo where I’d done the same with the word “bag.” An innocent mistake, but also kind of funny in the context of our family. Anyway, I’m only about a quarter of the way through this edit and already I’ve found at least a half-dozen mistakes I wouldn’t have found otherwise. Like I said: highly recommended editing technique if you’re a writer.
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.