Portal of Infinity, Book 1 sales.

Well book 1, Champion for Hire has been selling rather well and gaining good reviews! I have been in the top one hundred for the 'gods & goddesses' sub-category for more than a week now, which I guess isn't that big of a deal because it doesn't get displayed on the page.
However, I did make it into the top one hundred for 'Swords & Sorcery' the other day and stayed there for all of the evening, but sadly I fell out during the overnight. Guess not enough insomniacs bought my book.

But I remain hopeful, I've been seeing good sales spikes on the weekends, so I'm hoping I'll make it back into that category, and then who knows? Maybe I can try to make the top one hundred for Fantasy! THAT would be quite an achievement!

And to all of you that have bought my book, thank you! I do appreciate you taking the time to buy and read my work. For those who have taken the time to write a review, I appreciate that very much, as your words do let others know that my work is worth their time and money. The next book (The God Game) is almost ready to go, just need to format it. I got the cover last night and I'm happy with it, Dane at ebooklaunch.com has been very helpful and I like his work.

It will be released on the 10th of September.

Again, thank you all for your time, and I will be setting up a mailing list here very soon.

-John

Portals of Infinity, Book 1: Champion for Hire

Well the new book is out! I got it released Sunday morning and so far have been very happy with the results. I had been waiting for the final version of the book cover, which due to an email problem was delayed a few days. Will have to make sure that doesn't happen again.

I know I should have written this post a bit sooner, like probably on the day I released the story, but this week has been pretty hectic. Actually the whole month has been pretty busy. I need to get my ebook artist working on the cover for book 2, which will be released on the tenth of next month, the day before I go off to the air races. I also need to sit down and start writing book 3! I've got it plotted, book 4 has a basic outline as well. My goal is to try and release around every 4 to 5 weeks, but I don't know how easy that schedule will be to keep up with. I suspect that by the time I hit book 4 I may have to slow down a little.

But for now, please read the book, and let me know how much you enjoyed it!

And as always, if you liked it, please please please rate and review it! Without ratings Amazon and the other booksellers will push it to the back of the bus, regardless of sales. Four and Five star ratings are key, and the more of those the book gets, the more Amazon will show it to people who are searching for something to read. Like it or not that is the way Amazon plays the game, and so I am forced to ask for your help. So please, if you liked it, rate it highly and say why (no spoilers!) and again, I thank you for your efforts!

So the next book is ready to go but...

So the next book is done. Actually the next two books are done, as they're I and II of a series. I've had my beta readers read them, I've edited and re-edited, cleared up mistakes, etc.

But I'm face with two problems: The first is that I have no idea what to put on the covers. The second is that I don't really have the money to hire someone to do a cover right now.

Now the second problem will soon be corrected, as I just took an assignment in Lost Wages for the next six or so months. However I'm still really at a loss on the cover angle. I do have a suggestion from one reader for the cover for book two, and I'll probably go with that. But I really need to figure out book one, then of course track down a cover artist to do the cover for me.

I'm hopeful at this point that the new book will be live by the end of July. The name of the series is: Portals Of Infinity. The title for Book I is 'Champion for Hire'.

I really need to figure out what I'm going to write next, but I've been sort of focused on the new assignment. However as I'm hoping to have a lot of free time on my hands in the evenings (I don't know anyone in Vegas and I'm not really the gambling type) I'm thinking I should put that to use writing.

An interesting post by Mark Coker

From Mark Coker at Smashwords. Definitely a must read for authors.

http://blog.smashwords.com/2014/05/amazons-hachette-dispute-foreshadows.html

Why I don't use an editor. Or 'How to make a LOT of money?'

Lots of people get after ebook writers for not hiring an editor to edit their stories, but few people understand why. The reason? Because freelance editors charge a lot of money. For example, I just saw an editor today who was advertising their services. The were only charging $0.009 per word.

0.009 per word sure sounds cheap, doesn't it?

Well let's see, the current project is probably going to come in at about 120,000 words. 120,000 times 0.009 and we get $1080.00! That's right! A thousand dollars for a book that at most I can sell for $4.99 if I'm lucky. Well let's say I am lucky and it sells just fine at $4.99. Out of that 4.99 I get to keep about $3.50. So all I have to do is sell three hundred and eight copies and after that everything is profit!!!!

Now if you're a big seller and you sell over 1000 copies a week of each title you write, well then that might be money well spent. Except for the fact that if you are halfway decent at grammar, why bother? NO ONE CARES ABOUT THE GRAMMAR IN BOOKS ANYMORE!

I have read stories with Grammar on a 5th grade level and typo's everywhere, that were selling hundreds of copies a day and people were raving about them. Some of those books even came from major publishers. And let's be honest here, you want someone to pay you a thousand dollars to read their book and make editing markups on it? Editing, if you know how to do it is pretty damn easy. I really don't think it's a hundred dollar an hour job, (and that's assuming it takes you ten hours to read 120K words). Somehow I sort of doubt the editors at the major publishing houses get that kind of a rate. Then again they can probably suck down a 120K word book in half a day.

Now covers, yes I can see spending a lot of money on a cover, and I'm going to start getting a few covers redone and spend some cash on doing them. Because covers help sell your book, grammar these days however does not, as long as it's reasonably decent, no one cares. And if the story is really good? People will buy it no matter how bad the grammar.

So if you want to make good money? Become an editor and offer to edit books at a dollar a page, or even 50 cents a page. You will have authors beating a path to your door.

Does giving your book away for free help sales? And some other analysis stuff

In a word: No.

I spent last night compiling data from 2011 thru 2013 for all of my book sales. I have done several of the Amazon Kindle Select giveaways for a few of my titles over the years, at -best- a giveaway will not hurt your sales. However I see no data at all to suggest that giving away a book will help sales of that title, and quite a bit of data that seems to indicate that it will actually -hurt- your sales of that title.

Note that I am not talking about 'loss leaders', which for example would be the first book in a series sold cheaply or for free in order to entice readers to buy the rest of that series.
I also have noticed that in the majority of cases all titles sold the most number of copies in their first year of release. Only in two cases was the peak year the second year of release. It also is apparent that a new release does impact sales of already existing titles in a positive manner, so the old adage to 'keep writing' is a true one.

Every quarter I transpose all of my sales data for each title and sales channel to a spreadsheet, each year I start a new spreadsheet. It's a pain in the butt at times however it does help put things in perspective. My first year's sales were low, I didn't start publishing until April, and did not publish a lot of titles. My second year I saw my sales increase by a factor of ten, but I also published 12 titles that year, mostly novella's and two short story collections. While I published less in 2013 than 2012 I sustained my sales numbers for that year.

From a 'cost benefit' analysis, novellas and novelettes are the best bang for the buck, you can write them in a week (including editing), while a novel takes months to write and you can not sell it for all that much more than a novella/novelettes - say twice the price for ten times the work. I am giving a lot of thought to changing my approach on novels and writing them as a serial, releasing them in 10K to 12K segments. Current research by booksellers tends to indicate that 70 percent of readers -want- series type books.

What I have also found to be very interesting is that the majority of my readers have actually -left- amazon and moved to B&N or Kobo/Smashwords. Currently ~70 percent of my sales are on B&N, ~20 percent is Kobo/Smashwords, and Amazon accounts for only ~10 percent. This may be because I also write PNR novellas (under a pen name) and B&N has a bigger PNR audience after Amazon's 'erotica purge' which did drive quite a few PNR and Romance writers off of Amazon (and their readers by association), but that's another story.

I hope some may find this information to be useful.

Writing 'the stupid'

'The Stupid' is something that probably has some fancy literary name, which I either don't know, or heard but forgot. But I like calling it 'The Stupid' because it really sums it all up rather nicely. Of course that doesn't tell you what it is, so I'll elaborate: 'The Stupid' is that thing in a book or story that you are reading that is blatantly, obviously, sometimes frustratingly, STUPID.

Sometimes it's done for 'all the right reasons' or even reasons that 'sounded good at the time', but you the reader know its stupid. Sometimes some of the characters know it's stupid and will point it out (and usually one of the stupider or more self-righteous - I know, there isn't much of a diff there - characters will do it anyways), and occasionally sometimes everyone knows it's stupid, but they do it anyway for moral reasons.

I hate writing 'the stupid' because I'm not stupid and I don't like writing characters that are stupid. But you have to admit that writing the stupid is necessary, because so much of human nature and politics embrace the stupid (especially these days). So I'm always impressed when I'm reading an author and he writes the stupid in a way that makes me want to scream, but you can't too much because you kind of understand why some people won't do certain things. I'm impressed more when the stupid, while bad, isn't as bad as it could have been (and the author leaves little teases to make you think he just might go 'The Stupid squared'). I'm even more impressed when 'The Stupid' is brought in rather boldly, and obviously, and they're all kind of stuck with dealing with the consequences.

Then when you think they're going to bring 'The Stupid' back at the end of the book and do it again, they learn their lesson and make 'the hard choice', which of course is always the easy choice because it means you get to live, and keep on living. Freehold, of the Freehold series by Michael Z. Williamson was definitely one of those books. I enjoyed a lot, and right now it's free on the kindle. I'd say pick it up if you haven't already.

SFWA, Stupidity, and Writing

I don't know if anyone reading this is at all familiar with the current bruhaha going on with SFWA, but it has turned into such a group of worthless leftist shrews and political commissars that I honestly can not understand why anyone would join it. Nor why anyone would even want a Hugo anymore.

I myself used to want to be a member, I even applied once. But you see I can't join. Because even though I have sold more books than over half of the members of SFWA, and made more money at writing than probably more than that, I'm not allowed to join. Because I write ebooks and self-publish them. So SFWA is really more like SFWAFPPBMPH (Science Fiction Writers Association For People Published By Major Publishing Houses), which means maybe half of the people selling SF&F are members. But I guess this is to be expected from an organization whose last president was a plagerist (I'm sorry, but his rewrite of H.Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy was plagiarism, you may put lipstick on that pig all you want, but it is still a pig), and which runs people out because of having politically incorrect beliefs, and who ran Jonathan Ross off of the awards ceremony, because people who will never win an award for anything were upset because in their fevered imaginations they believed they were going to not only win, but that they would then be mocked by him when they did.  (sorry for the run on there, but I think you get the point).

And the vast majority of those complaining about all of this probably have less than one book in print, if even that.

And then there is the just pure stupid coming out of places like Tor, which if you are to criticize you are suddenly the worse person on earth. Check out Larry Correia, According to Hoyt, or the Mad Genius Club if you want to know more (and no I'm not giving links, use Google, I'm a lazy ass today). I had always thought that the purpose of SWFA was to support writers, help writers, and be like a trade union for writers - you know giving them access to things like health insurance plans and retirement plans, standing up to writers contract rights. I didn't know it was actually an old woman's garden club that spent all of it's time enforcing political beliefs and vilifying anyone who didn't toe the far left political line, as well as just a shill for the publishing houses (who have more control over SFWA than the writers do).

No wonder SciFi is going out of business, its biggest organization is trying to kill it!

As for me, well I'm still working on a new novel, the one I've been working on since the beginning of the year. I took a few weeks off to spin out a couple of cheap trashy romance novels because I need the money and women romance readers are rather generous with their money, so rather than insult them with politically correct diatribes and message stories I just give them what they want. And guess what? They appreciate the gesture enough to give me money.

I wonder if that's why the Romance industry is booming? Because it caters to the readers and not some 'gender neutral non-binary gender' bullshit? Gee, what a concept!

Still not sure what I'll write next after I finish this modern fantasy, part of me is thinking about writing another Romance novel, not just one of the little trashy fun pulp ones, because Romance readers are a more appreciative audience, and also because my sister just gave me a truly wicked idea about were-chihuahuas. I do worry that science fiction will get harder to write and sell because so many of the books winning Hugo's and being promoted as such are utter drek. The people who are writing the good stuff (like Larry C.) are almost creating their own category of literature because it's hard to look at what they write and then place it in the SF&F field, when so much of that field is going down hill. Hell I see more 'speculative fiction' in the Romance field these days than in all of SF&F, and that's just SAD.

But that's what happens when you let the perpetually offended rabid leftists who don't produce anything but shrillness into your organization. If I was a more motivated person I would start the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Guild. It would not EVER say ANYTHING about what the writers wrote, it probably wouldn't even give out awards. But what it would do would be the things that a guild is supposed to do: Use the strength in numbers that the membership gives it to get better medical plans, retirement plans, and legal advice about contracts to the membership. You know, the kinds of things writers can use.

But hey, that's crazy talk, right?

More Serials

Well the results are in and apparently 74 percent of all readers want serials. This is sort of news to me, because when I grew up, as a reader, there were very few SciFi and Fantasy serials. If you got a duo or trilogy that was a pretty big deal. Most people really weren't all that interested in serials, but apparently today that is the #1 for the vast majority.

So what does this mean for me? Well it means that when I finish the current novel (which is in an unrelated world and genre to the current ones), I'm only going to write sequels to 'The Hammer Commission', the Book currently in progress, or more stories in the 'Children of Steel' universe. The ones in the COS universe may not be serials at first, but you will see existing characters and there will be overlap, so technically those will fall into the 'serial' category, and apparently that is what people want.

I have yet -another- story in the works from yes -another- world, it's actually from the first world I ever created and is fantasy. It's also about half finished, but I'm going to shelve that for now. I may come back to it eventually and finish it, or maybe I'll just release the first half and turn it into a serial/series. Of course that would give me 4 simultaneous series going on, but if they were all selling that might be worthwhile. Hard to say. Then of course there is the PNR I write under a pen name. Most of that is sort of serial, but it's a side project that I only work on occasionally. But apparently some people want to see more of that...

So what I really need to do is develop the fortitude and discipline to write 8 hours a day. Then maybe I could keep up.

On Censorship

As some of you may have heard, about two weeks ago an internet web pundit was shocked! Shocked and stunned to find out that OMG!!! Amazon sells porn!

Well not so much porn as erotica, but to a guy on a small website desperate for hits erotica equals porn equals controversy, so porn it is. Then of course the Daily Mail in the UK picked up on this and had a huge Sunday spread complete with pictures and the outraged 'parent'.

But they didn't go after Amazon, they went after WM Smith, one of the largest book sellers in the UK (Aside: I notice that they DIDN'T complain about all those Fifty Shades of Gray (FSOG) hardcovers in the shop windows - porn in hardcover is AOK apparently). So what did WM Smith do? Why they folded like a cheap suit, and shut down their entire online ebook store. Yup, pulled the whole thing.

But wait! There's more!

Kobo, which rumor claims has been on the verge of bankruptcy for years now, supplied WM Smith with all of its ebooks. Erotica has been very good to Kobo, taking its sales from almost naught to a very large number over the last year. And that's erotica written by independent authors, not erotica being pushed by the publishing houses.

Well obviously the problem here isn't really erotica, it's independent authors! So Kobo unceremoniously pulled all independent authors from its online store in the UK. Not just erotica, all of them. In their next move of blazing stupidity they pulled all erotica authors from the rest of their sites worldwide, but again, not all authors, just those who are indies. So if you wrote something that violates the new rules, as long as it is published by a publishing house, you're okay. But if you have one piece of anything that may be suspect, your entire catalog got dumped.

So yes, a LOT of people are very upset. Understand none of what has been censored is illegal, all of it is 100 percent legal to write, read, and own. As to what was banned? Anything 'abusive', anything depicting rape, incest, and faux-incest. Faux-incest, for those of you who have never heard of it, is consensual sex between adults who are step siblings, or step parents, in short people who are not actually related to each other. In most parts of the world (if not all of it) this isn't even illegal! And in case you haven't noticed, bestiality is actually perfectly fine with Kobo. They didn't pull any of that - not that I care, but I think it shows the hypocrisy of this entire campaign. Especially when books like FSOG are suddenly garnering a lot of competition from indy authors - remember that FSOG started out as an ebook.

So is this censorship? A lot of folks claim it isn't, but in truth it is. Is it illegal? Well actually, yes in most parts of the free world it is, but not because they are refusing to sell works they find 'objectionable', but because they are applying these rules to one group of people (self-published authors) and not another (authors published by publishing companies). There are a number of laws that address that issue, and when this entire act really smells like something one of the publishing houses cooked up in order to cut down on the competition, well I'll be surprised if one of the bigger indies doesn't eventually sue. As there are a lot of indies out there pulling down 6 figure royalties, trust me when I say I suspect one of them is going to sue over this. As I've said before, an average indy author makes way more money that a good, or even great, publishing house author.

What bugs me the most however is the number of people (authors) who are willing to jump on the side of censorship because they don't like erotica. This is censorship, and it is unethical if not illegal. These books are perfectly legal and adults want to buy them. If this stands, what will they censor next? Romance has just as much sex, and I mean highly descriptive XXX sex, as much and as dirty as any erotica novel out there. Don't believe me? Walk into a Barnes & Nobles and pick some up. Women like their porn, and they like it a lot more than men do! And they get to buy theirs in book shops and grocery stores everywhere. That it is as bad or worse than men's porn is the best kept secret in publishing today.

And then of course, after romance, what gets banned next? Books that convey ideas that the establishment doesn't like? You know, books like Gulliver's Travels? Or maybe something by Rush Limbaugh or Jon Stewart? Censorship is a slippery slope and I'm embarrassed that so many people, especially authors, don't know this. Yes they always go after the erotica or porn first, but that is the canary in the coal mine. For people who actually read history, we have seen this before.

Here in the states only Amazon has signed on to this behavior, and it seems they're only banning faux-incest, (real incest, rape, and bestiality are already banned on Amazon). None of the other book stores seem to be getting involved (Apple already is pretty strict on Adult novels, but that seems to be something across the boards with them). Smashwords is trying to do what they can to help the authors, and Barnes & Nobles just seems to be ignoring the whole kerfluffle here in the US.

So support Smashwords, or B&N - go buy a banned book today!

Remember, if you don't stand up to defend the rights of others, no one will be left to help you defend yours when they finally get around to taking them.

New cover!

Well I got a new cover for 'The Hammer Commission' done and it is going live as I type this.
I was never exactly happy with the original cover, and I ended up commissioning Rod Redux (http://coversbyredux.blogspot.com/) to do a new one for me.
I'm hopeful that this will draw in more eyeballs, so far everyone who has read the book seems to have liked it, I really haven't gotten any bad reviews.

But

I noticed that for all the traffic I was drawing in to look at the book's page on Amazon, I wasn't getting many sales. I suspect that the cover just wasn't grabbing them enough for them to read the blurb and maybe the first page or two of the story. In any case, time will tell and I'm hoping for better results now. Sadly I don't think most of my scifi readers will read this story, as it's paranormal/supernatural, but it was a story I really wanted to write. Now it is just wait and see if sales pick up.

Cut/edited scene from my last novel

This is something I had written a while ago, it was part of something larger and was intended to go into the 'Hammer Commission', a little insight into Mark's personal character.

But almost all of it was cut. The basic scene is still there, but the detail was cut back, and the entire thing reduced to about a half page. It didn't really move the story forward to justify that much detail, and was a bit off track. Anyway, here it is for you to judge.

***

            Opening the choke fully he pressed the starter and twisted the throttle slightly, it took a little longer than it should have to start, but the bowls were dry and the twin fuel pumps needed a moment to fill them. He closed the choke slowly, keeping the idle at a grand then put on his helmet. Carburetors were well out of vogue, few if any sport bikes still used them, but the mighty Zed with four of them outperformed most bikes with fuel injection made today, and nearly all of the F.I. bikes made in its day.

            Pulling in the clutch he kicked it down into first and giving a little increase on the throttle he let out the clutch and rolled out onto the street. He took the first block easy, never crap where you sleep after all. Getting out onto the main drag he quickly accelerated and turned the choke all the way off. While the bike still was too cold to idle without it, it wouldn’t be seeing any revs below 3K from this point on.

            Revving the bike once more as he turned onto the highway, he listened for any complaints from the engine, there were none of course, and the temp gauge had come up off the stop a little. Then it was full throttle, shift, shift, shift, shift, all without a clutch, level off at 120 and shift once more. The highway was open and fairly straight. The cars on it might as well be standing still as he arced around them and sped through the night. One joker in a corvette tried to race him, but down two and wide open throttle and the corvette quickly was lost behind him as 160 almost instantly appeared on the speedo. By the time the corvette got up to that kind of speed he’d be miles ahead. He never understood why people in cars wanted to race bikes. Stock his bike did 186mph.

            It was definitely no longer stock.

            After a few more miles he rolled it back down to an even hundred, goosing it up every once in a while. Police weren’t really much of a problem this time of night, they couldn’t really track with a copter in the dark and there were few cars out there to see him anyway. Any he might run into would be miles away before they could even begin a chase. No, the road was open, and it was his. He didn’t get to ride like this as often as he might like to anymore. It had been months since he’d made any kind of real run on the bike at all, being stuck tooling around on the small restricted bikes in Spain. Six hundred cc’s just wasn’t enough for him anymore.

            The miles quickly passed by, he was up in the mountains now, dealing with the long sweepers and having to downshift and occasionally slow for a few of the tighter corners. In another half hour he’d turn around and head back, eventually descending out of the mountains and back into the desert known as Sacramento. But for now it was just him, the bike, and the road. The roar of the engine, the air rushing past, white headlights and red taillights.

            There wasn’t much thinking at speeds like these, you mainly lived in the moment, maybe a song ran through your head, repeating over and over. Pick your line, ride it. Sort each car as a target and assign it a probability of doing something stupid. Avoid those with visible signs of damage as much as possible. Flip off those who hit their brakes when they saw him behind them as he passed. Watch out for bow effects on the big trucks. Find the line, ride it.

            And when all else fails crack the throttle open just a little more. Speed is your life, your life is speed. The more smash, the more control you have over the situation, the faster you can react, the faster you can maneuver. The sad little secret that they don’t teach you in driver’s ed or the official handbooks, on a motorcycle your safety lies in your speed.

            When he finally pulled back off the highway and wound down through the secondary streets, checking his mirrors just to be sure he hadn’t picked up any unwanted company, he felt relaxed. Things were clearer now. Coasting into the driveway, turning the bike off, pushing it into the garage and locking it all back up.

            They all had their little sins, their little vices. This was his.