Books

I’ve had a few people ask me recently if I’ve finished a new book (or two) and when will it be published? My usual response is that yes, I have three books ready to release into the wild and a fourth on the way, but they likely won’t be out this year due to other issues. I can’t remember if I’ve gone into them here previously, but let’s just say we’ve had some unexpected expenses in the first three months of 2025. Since publishing costs money, I likely won’t have the resources to put out anything other than a few books in my new series on Kindle Unlimited, which costs nothing. Other than covers, but that’s not much compared to the whole publishing package. My response to the question asked at the beginning of this post is usually met with the nod of a head and some sympathy when it comes to the aforementioned expenses. This is the Year of Writing, as I call it. Given that there are eight months left in the year, I could conceivably finish three more books, including the one in progress. That’d leave me with a half-dozen ready to unleash on the world. In theory, that would mean 2026 becomes the Year of Publishing. Let’s hope.

Progress

How is the new book progressing, you ask? I’m right at 14k words in, which means it’s almost 20% done. I’m aiming for 75k words again, which seems a good length for books of this type. I’ve already noted a few things I’ll need to go back and change in the first book of the series, but that’s expected. It’s why I’m not publishing these books until I have at least three done. That way I can make sure the series arcs stay consistent and don’t go off track. At least too far. I would say that this one isn’t going as fast as the first one, mainly because I’m making up a lot of stuff as I go. But isn’t that what writers do? Yes, but this time I have even less thought out beforehand and the characters are undefined until they appear in the story and I flesh them out. It’s probably a horrible way to do it and anybody who teaches writing is shaking their head. I should be doing character sketches up front instead of building them on the fly. I should have at least some sort of outline. I’m not going to argue those points. I’m just saying that the creative process with these books is a bit different than my others and we’ll see if they turn out okay or end up as a big, flaming mess.

Signing

Did a signing event at the fabulous Neighbor Books in Downtown McKinney this past weekend. It’s funny being on this side of the table and watching people try to avoid eye contact. Hey, I’ve been there. Fortunately, a few extroverts also showed up that day to the store and I sold a few copies of both First and Next Time. For the latter, I only had two copies left from the original box I received last summer when it was published, and sold both of them. I gave away plenty of bookmarks as well. I was there for a couple of hours and was afraid it’d rain and foot traffic would be impacted, but instead it remained nice and plenty of people came through. It ended up being a good outing and I’m grateful the owners support local authors and I’m glad for the opportunity to support them as well. If you’re in the McKinney area, go check them out.

More Covers

I concluded my last post with a thought about how authors should follow the monumental effort of writing a book with a good cover. This is an area that can be a little sensitive, and I get it. Self-publishing is not cheap. Even the cost of having a professional produce a book cover is enough to be more than a blip on the budget. As I was talking about in the previous post, people can tell when a cover looks cheap. If a writer is on a shoestring budget and only publishing on Amazon since anybody can do it at no cost, then it doesn’t make sense to spend hundreds of dollars on a cover. I published my first three books that way and two of the covers were made from photographs I’d taken of the New Mexico desert. Were they good covers? Gosh, no. Did I have money to pay for an actual artist to design them? An even more emphatic no. I guess that brings up the question some of us face: is it better to publish a book with a second-rate cover or to wait until I have the money to pay for a good one? You know how I answered that one with those three novels. Will I go back and get better packaging on those books? Maybe. When I wrote First and wanted to publish it, I’d put a lot of effort into making it as good as possible, much more so than the first three books. I felt the effort deserved professional packaging and distribution and fortunately, I was in a place where I could afford to do so. Even though it’s my fourth published book, I refer to First as my first professionally-printed book. The cover looks great when I pull up the page for the book on Amazon and B&N and Apple. It looks good on review sites. And it looks fantastic when I hold the book in my hands. All this to say that it’s clear when someone pays for a $60 fiverr gig for their cover as opposed to investing in their book’s success with a professional. And trust me, people do judge a book by its cover.

Covers

I was trying to think of a topic for today’s post and came up with covers. No, not the kind where your band plays a song from another band. Book covers. This is a book blog. Maybe someday I’ll have a music blog, too, but for now we’re going to talk about book covers. There’s a fantasy writer who has their own site and is also a contributing blogger on another site. Weekly they’ll tout new SF&F books and I scroll through the list to see what’s new and exciting. I made the remark to someone the other day that I don’t like most of the covers in those weekly posts. Granted, I try to be flexible when it comes to self-publishing. I know it costs money to make a professional-looking cover. And then I thought to myself, self, why don’t you like those covers? What is it about them? A couple of things. First, the fonts are horrible. In many cases, the fonts don’t match the style of the book or even the picture on the cover. It’s like when Microsoft Word first came out and people could format their cover sheets and documents with any font in the world and it was chaos. That’s what these covers look like. The second reason I don’t like them is the art. Let’s be clear, I’m not an artist or an expert on art, but as with most people, even though I can’t define what art I like, I know what I don’t. Many of the covers just look…amateurish. No depth, or looks like someone cobbled together bits and pieces to make a cover that reminds me of trying to make a car out of spare parts. It might work, but it sure ain’t going to be pretty. I don’t want to pick on just SF&F books, either. I’ve looked through sites for Romance books, the category for Next Time, and there are plenty of horrendous covers there as well. I’ll talk about this more in my next post, but really, if we as authors put all that effort and time into writing a book, we should put the additional effort into making it look good.

Beginning

I’m off and running with the beginning of the second book in my new series. I recorded a few notes about plot points I intentionally left open from the first book, as well as a couple of general ideas about the new one. It’s funny, because I’ve not scoped out the characters or their journeys yet, but I’ve written a couple of chapters already and so far the characters are developing themselves. Is it the best way to write a book with over a dozen characters? Maybe, maybe not. It’s similar to how I wrote the first book in the series and that turned out okay. One thing I learned from that first book is giving more personable, relatable traits to the characters earlier. In books like this you end up getting to know three or four characters well, but that doesn’t mean the others can’t have something that clicks with the reader. It doesn’t have to be much and anything is better than putting an automaton in the book for a chapter or two. It also doesn’t mean that I can’t create a character sketch with details I want to use before I write about him or her. That’s the beauty of writing. I can use several different methods of creating characters within the same universe. And on that note, it’s time to write.

Algorithms

The past four weeks my book sales have been consistent and slightly higher than in previous months, unless of course I happened to be running promotions in said time periods. That must mean the books have been selling during the weeks as well as the weekends, the latter of which is when I advertise. I run ads on BookBub Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and that’s been it for a while now. It made me wonder if the higher volume is a result of reaching some threshold on Amazon for number of ratings, mainly since the change occurred around the time First crossed the 200-rating mark. If you do a search about the topic, people say the ratings don’t matter to the Amazon algorithms. But who really knows? Amazon isn’t saying. All I can go by is my own experience, and something seems to have changed. Don’t know if it’s our computer overlords running things behind the scenes, if the occasional weekend ads are cumulatively having an effect, or if something else is going on. Regardless, as always I’m grateful to everyone who buys my books, however they find out about them.

First Step

I’ll finish my read-aloud of First Step today, meaning it’s done and ready to publish. Like I said in my previous post, the finances need to be available for that to happen and I’m not sure when that’ll be. Rest assured, Dedicated Reader, that I’ll get it out there as soon as I can. Yes, I’ll likely do one or two more proofreads at publishing time, but I can safely say this one’s in the can. No further changes to story, plot, or details. I like it and think it turned out quite well, especially after so many false starts. Writing half the story from the narrative POV of an AI was a change of pace and fun, and the other half from a female POV was new and different for me to write. A different challenge popped up in the fact that the reader knows all the characters survive for several decades due to the epilogue of First, so any life-threatening danger isn’t really that life-threatening. I feel like I still made it engaging enough. Overall, it’s a good story for both narrators and engaging, at times funny, and plenty of action. Looking forward to getting it into readers’ hands when the opportunity arrives.

Q1

We’re already a quarter of a way into 2025 and my, hasn’t it gone by fast? That means it’s time to take stock, to evaluate the state of the union, track my progress, and so on. Going into the year, you might remember that I made a list of goals, like I’ve done the past couple of years. This time I deliberately set achievable goals, knowing it might be tough to get a few things done due to the money required. One thing I wanted to do was publish First as an audiobook, but that looks unlikely in 2025. Between lower bonuses and helping to fund an upcoming wedding, finances are tighter than expected. I also wanted to publish Assignment Day, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen, either. It’s not all bad news, though. I finished the first book in my new series and will start writing the second one within a week. Once that’s done, I’ll publish both to Kindle Unlimited and the only expenses will be for professional cover design. Heck, given the state of funding for publishing my other books, I might end up putting out three in the series before the end of the year. Ninety days in so far, and it’s looking like this is going to be the year of writing, writing, writing.

Aloud

I’m currently in the midst of my read-aloud for First Step. Other than the usual typos or missing words, I’m also finding instances of word repeats. Those are the cases where I use a word and then within a sentence or two, use it again. You’d think something like that would be obvious, but in reality it’s only when I read the story aloud that I find those. Why? Because they break the flow of the spoken word more than the written. Saying the words aloud should mean a nice narrative rhythm. It’s when there’s a break or even a falter that I find something that needs to be reworded or rephrased. The flow of the language should be natural. I’m about a quarter of the way through the book, and as always, it’s a very useful and instructive exercise.

Habit

I thought I’d outgrown this habit. Especially with the rise of eBooks or being able to order a book at a time online and have it delivered the next day. But no, when I go into the local bookstore on Sunday, intending to just look around, I walked out with three more books than zero. And it’s not like I need more at the moment. I have another book ready to go when I finish my current read, although I’ll probably go back and read a Dickens novel before I read that. So, that’s two books in waiting. Plus, the series I’m reading on my Kindle at the same time, but that doesn’t really count since I always have something else going concurrently. Adding three from my recent purchase brings the total of books up to five. I know, there are plenty of people out there with a lot more TBR stacks than mine. It’s just funny that I haven’t experienced this in quite some time. It’s a good problem to have.

Second Step

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I disagreed with some of the suggestions Grok made about my draft of First Step. Specifically, that one of the narrators uses an avatar when communicating with others, one character in particular. It’s part of what makes their relationship interesting. Grok said that having the narrator use an avatar in some of the later encounters in the book is distracting and doesn’t work. Remember that? Well, I thought about it over the course of a couple of days and decided to give it a try. After all, it’s not like a movie set for eternity in its current form on film. I can delete, add, and move stuff around to my heart’s content until the book is published. Wouldn’t you know? It turns out Grok was right. The avatar inclusion in those scenes didn’t really do much in the way of advancing the story or adding to the characters’ interaction. Taking it out intensified the back-and-forth between the two characters without that trivial distraction and now I think those couple of scenes were good enough without the attempted humor. It’s interesting how the Grok feedback made me think about it, and even though I didn’t agree, just putting the thought in my head was enough for me to eventually consider trying the edits. And in the end, that made the book better.

Ready

I’m about to run into a problem. A good problem, I think, but a problem nonetheless. Assignment Day is polished and ready to publish. First Step is almost there, just needing a read-aloud and final proofreading. And I’ll be done by early next week with the edits on the first book in the series I’m writing. If you’re counting along at home, that means three books ready or darn-near-ready to publish. And by summer it’ll be four because I’ll have the second book in the series finished. That’s a lot of books. So, what’s the problem, you ask? It’s the age-old problem of money. Putting out books takes money, whether you’re one of the big publishing houses or a solitary dude sitting in his home office at 6:30 a.m. pounding away on the laptop keyboard. I plan on releasing the first two books in the series at the same time on Kindle Unlimited, so those books won’t take a lot of investment, just some professional covers. Assignment Day and First Step? They’ll take a bit more cash to get out the door. I just have to budget ahead and be ready to go when I have the chance. I know, you’re wondering if this is a veiled fundraising request. It’s not. I don’t want investors and I don’t want to crowdfund. These books might be ready to go, but they’ll come out when the time is right.

First Step

Today I’ll finish my edits on First Step, the sequel to First. I’ve rearranged some things based on the suggestions from Grok and firmed up other minor points that seemed reasonable. I ignored several of the items Grok pointed out, not because the AI was in error, but because I thought my way was better. That’s incredibly vague, you say. Fair point. Let me give an example. One of the characters thinks it’s funny to use an avatar when communicating with others, and Grok said that didn’t work in some of the later, serious scenes. I disagree. That’s part of the storyline and character, and to me it’d be out of character for him not to use an avatar. So I kept it in. There were other things Grok listed in the developmental edit feedback that made sense, such as how one of the characters survives. Yeah, it would’ve stretched belief if I’d left it as originally written, so the change ended up being a good one. That’s also one of those nagging thoughts you have about a manuscript but can’t quite put your finger on. Overall, I’m pleased with how this one turned out after so many false starts. It’s proof that you just have to keep writing and at some point inspiration strikes or things coalesce into a coherent story. Maybe I’ll write more on that in another post.

200

I checked the Amazon page for First today and it reached a milestone - 200 ratings. It maintains a 4.5 rating, which is very exciting. When you have a pool of that many people giving their opinion, it evens out the highs and lows. It’s also exciting because 200 is a nice number. By way of explanation, a very small percentage of people give ratings on the books they read. I’m not talking about reviews, which are the written opinions you see in even fewer cases. These ratings are the number of stars, from one to five, that people can leave quite easily on their Kindle when they finish the book. Would be nice if everyone did it, but it’s a voluntary activity. It’s interesting to click into the ratings and realize four people gave the book one star, while 124 have rated First as a five-star read. Sorry those four people didn’t like the book, but really happy that so many people did. It’s a nice little marker on the road for this book, which has now been out for almost 18 months. TBH, I didn’t really know what to expect with the number of ratings. I thought a few dozen were great, but the total continues to grow steadily. Thanks to all who left a rating.

AI - Part III

I’d finished the first draft of my sequel to First and felt pretty happy with it. I knew it needed at least one more pass and I remember seeing somewhere that Grok could do a developmental edit. For those who don’t know, that’s where an editor looks at continuity, consistency, storyline, loose ends, pacing, and just overall how the book fits together. What works and what doesn’t? I paid an editor to do this for First and it was well worth the money. With (currently) free access to Grok and the chance to see what it could do, I decided to give it a whirl.

I started off by asking if it could do a developmental edit, and Grok replied affirmatively and asked if there were any areas I wanted it to concentrate on. I gave a few suggestions like the ones mentioned above, and it told me it could look at the first chapter, a portion of the manuscript, or the whole thing. I uploaded a Word document with all 75k words. Here’s the part that blew my mind: within seconds it started responding with observations about the story, the characters, and things that didn’t work quite right. Seriously, in 15 seconds I had three pages of feedback. Wow.

I know what the next question is: how accurate was it? Incredibly so. I’d say in the range of 95%. For example, it named a date for the story and told me there needed to be a few indicators of time passage for readers to keep track. Well, that date was exactly that particular day in February 2025, which is not when the story is set. It had an instance where it misinterpreted a character and their actions in a couple of paragraphs, but other than that I was completely amazed at its output. And that 95%? Spot on. Grok asked what I thought and I responded that it was good, at which point it poured out another three pages with an action plan for addressing the issues. It offered to make suggested changes, but I prefer to do those myself. As much as I liked it, I don’t trust anyone or anything else with my story. And I’m not going to be one of those writers who uses AI to write books. I’ll take suggestions and decide if I want to use them or not. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks going through those bullet points, picking the ones I agree with, and improving the book.

Overall? Absolutely incredible. No knock on editors, but getting feedback in seconds instead of weeks was amazing. I hope there’s still a place for editors because the people I’ve worked with are great. I kind of did this as a lark but found it to be really useful. Will I use it going forward? I’ll let you know. I’m going to let Grok take a stab at the manuscript I mentioned in the previous post, the first in a series, and see what I get back. I’ll report back on that experience soon.

To sum up, we’re currently rewatching the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series, one of my favorite shows and one of the best so far this century, and there are scenes in the first couple of seasons where the characters talk about a mystery and the shape of things to come. I can honestly say that with this little exercise I’ve seen the shape of things to come.

AI - PART II

Okay, let’s back up a minute. I made a comment last post about AI being unreliable, but what has two thumbs and made an unreliable statement? This guy. I mentioned ChatGPT but what I meant to say was Copilot. I had written most of the first draft of the first book of a new series and thought, hey, let’s see what this new feature in Microsoft Word can do. So, I fired up the side panel and asked it for a summary, which was decent enough but got a few things wrong. Just for fun, since I still had several chapters left to write, I asked it for possible story endings. It gave me three or so, which were decent enough as far as being in-line with the story, but also rote, like these are lazy endings. I used none of them, not that I would have anyway since I already knew how I wanted the book to end. What percentage did Copilot get right? I’d say probably 70%. It overly emphasized minor characters and misunderstood major ones, and also didn’t get some of the supplemental storylines and characters. Given where we are with AI, I guess it wasn’t horrible. The book has a lot of chapters and is all third-person narration, making it complex for me to keep track of on my own. Was the AI output useful? Not really. Maybe when I go back and ask for an outline or a marketing summary. Then again, I had a much better experience last week with the first draft of another book and a different AI. Next time we’ll talk Grok.

AI - Part I

I’ve now written a couple of books, one published and one in editing, that include major characters and plot points related to Artificial Intelligence. In real life, though, I’ve been slow to adopt the new technology. Not sure why, because I’ve always been interested in the latest and greatest. I stood in line at a Best Buy in Kansas City to get one of the first iPads. The store had only five, and I got the fourth one. I still remember watching Raiders of the Lost Ark on a plane flight and seeing the reflection on the screen of a guy in the row behind me craning his neck over the seatback to see the sleek new device. Even further back, I enjoyed video games and wanted to have the newest consoles and games. And before that, I bought into new tech like compact discs. I have a history, as you can see. Which adds weight to the question: why wait to adopt AI?

Maybe because so far its implementation has been done in a way that’s not natural for me to use. Take Siri, for example. I’m a reader and typer, not a talker and listener. Reading is my preferred method of learning, and I’d much rather type a phrase into a Google search page and quickly read the results than to have to speak what I want and have the nice Irish lady give me the results. Yes, my Siri has an Irish accent. Anyway, I can type almost as fast as people talk, and I can read faster than someone can recite a list of bullet points. I know, there are other forms of AI besides Siri. I’ve given a little bit of a look at ChatGPT and asked it some questions about writing and my books, but the results weren’t very consistent. For example, I copied in the text of a book and requested a summary. It listed some of the very minor characters as major ones, confused some of the settings, and so on. Not very reliable. Why do I bring up that example? Well, mainly because it relates to writing and AI. And to the story I’m going to tell you next. Hang on ‘til Tuesday to find out more.

Winning

Started off yesterday with a nice email notifying me that Next Time won in the Romance - Love Stories category for the International Impact Book Awards. They pass out awards every month and Next Time won for February 2025. Their winners’ page is a long scroll with a lot of categories, but worth it. For each category, they note how many entries there were and sometimes have more than one winner. Well, I’m happy to say my category had ten entries and Next Time was the sole winner. I’m not so conceited that I don’t want to share the podium, and no slight on the other entries, but it’s certainly a nice validation to say that Next Time came out as the undisputed first place book in that category. The book has been out for eight months now, and I’m happy that it’s still winning awards. If you’re interested, the link to the awardxs list is on the book page for Next Time here on my site.

Edit Mode

Still in edit mode for the sequel to First. I’ve shored up a couple of things and might delete a scene today. I like that particular scene, but I don’t think it does much in pushing the plot forward. I’ll reread and see if it’s as I fear. No worries, though, the book is coming in just over 75k words, which seems about right. The next thing I’m going to do is read it out of order. What does that mean? This book has two narrators who switch chapters. I’m going to read one narrator all the way through and then go back and do the same with the other, alternating chapters for each. That’ll give me the chance to view each as a continuous narrative and make sure I haven’t accidentally created gaps in their particular stories. Other than that, the editing is going well and hoping to be done by next week with the majority of it. Then it’ll be time to read the book aloud to myself as one of the final steps in getting it ready to publish. When will that be? Not sure yet, but you’ll be the first to know.