Striking while the iron is hot

My pen name is doing well over at B&N (two books in the top 250, a third in the top thousand), so I want to get my next book up promptly, while readers are hopefully looking for more books by that name. Therefore I spent the morning editing and polishing. I hope to have the next book up in a few days.

This is me griping

I'm starting to get very annoyed with the whole 99 cents debate. I'm fine with people saying, "I prefer to price my books higher." Price your books however you want-- that's not my concern. But I am getting really irritated by people who try to exert pressure on other authors, and imply that 1. those who price at 99 cents are either writing crap (which only sells well because it's low priced) or causing readers to think indie books are crap, and 2. those who price at 99 cents are making it impossible for others to price their books higher. 1. isn't really worth discussing-- it's frankly impossible to confirm or deny. The fact that so many people buy books at 99 cents would tend to suggest people don't think they're crap, but it's impossible to say what readers think as a whole. 2. is clearly not true-- there are plenty of people out there selling at higher prices, so if your books aren't selling at higher prices, you can't blame it on someone else's low prices.

But these threads bashing 99 cent books continue, and get more and more of an adversarial flavor all the time. It's getting to the point where any day now, I expect to go to Kindleboards and see a thread about why 99 cent books are the cause of global warming.

Percentages

There's a good article here on why authors shouldn't let anyone handle their self-published books for a percentage. I agree with her conclusions; if you need to hire people to help you do covers or format or edit or whatever (and you probably will need help on some of this at some point), pay them a flat fee, not a percentage for the life of the book. You don't need someone to "package" your book for you (and she makes really good points about this often being a conflict of interest, I think). I know it all can seem intimidating when you first start out-- but really, it's not that hard.

Another thought occurred to me as I was reading this. If you have an agent, and s/he worked hard shopping your manuscript around before s/he finally gave up, I know it can be tempting to think you owe that awesome, hardworking agent a percentage of your royalties when you self-publish. But you don't. Your agent's job is to sell your book to traditional publishers. If s/he didn't accomplish that, and you wound up going indie, you don't owe him or her a percentage. If you're that grateful to your agent, then go write another book s/he can shop around New York, but don't give up any of your self-publishing royalties!

Organized (or as organized as I get)

I spent the morning sorting through stuff in my office and getting it all organized. Considering I just got my office together a few months ago, it had become a fairly disgraceful mess. It's not perfect yet, but it's much better. I hope to have it finished up by the end of the weekend. It's not really conducive to wriitng to work in a messy area...

Scary events in the life of a mom

Next week, the oldest will be legally able to go to the DMV and get her learners permit. Consider yourselves warned.

Nook news

B&N is apparently phasing out the Nook 3G. As the article says, I guess wireless is everywhere now...

PubIt is fixed

B&N's accounting problems seem to be over-- they're showing sales up to today, though they may not be entirely accurate, given that they're still updating December. Still, it was nice to see a huge amount of sales suddenly materialize. The month's not over, but for the second month in a row, I've paid my mortgage by writing. I'm really happy about this!

Jordan Summers again

Jordan Summers' Paris After Dark is now available on Kindle.

The long and rambling tale of my first novel

Today I was thinking about how I wrote my first novel (saddled with the improbably ludicrous name of A Most Vehement Flame), which, thank God, has been lost to the sands of time. I wrote it in college, where we did have access to computers, of a primitive sort. At the time I did my writing in a sort of mishmash-- I tended to write things down longhand, then type them out and fix them later.

At that point I didn't write in order, so I'd scribble down random scenes in class notebooks (in lieu of taking notes), or napkins at lunch, or whatever came to hand. I'd then sneak into the computer lab (where people were trying to do actual college work like, you know, papers) and type madly away, trying to make a coherent whole out of my randomness (and hoping no one who actually needed a computer would realize I wasn't doing real work).

Then I'd print out what I'd done, because the system had a painfully limited capacity to save your work. The printer, of course, was dot matrix (this was the eighties, when dot matrix was the height of awesomeness), and sometimes the pages would be barely readable. I'd pull off the edges of the pages, then shuffle them into some sort of order (I had scenes from one end of the book to the other, with giant gaps in between) and paper clip them into chapters, which I would later scribble all over while editing. Then I'd slither out of the computer room and start all over again. I was so into writing my novel it's a wonder I ever got any papers written.

After college, the novel was finished, but alas, I no longer had access to a computer, not even one with a dot matrix printer. I pulled out my old IBM Selectric and typed up the whole thing, all 400 pages' worth. I then had it copied several times and sent it out into a highly unappreciative world, where it was summarily and curtly rejected.

Despite the four years of love I poured into it, that manuscript was total crap, but it did help me in various ways:

1. My typing speed increased drastically (from maybe fifteen words a minute to at least eighty) over the course of those four years.

2. Writing 400 pages (even of total crap) can't help but make you a better writer. I learned a lot about putting a story together from that book, bad though it was.

3. I discovered that everything I write is not worth reading. Getting rejected stung, but eventually I realized that this particular book was better off in a box beneath a bed somewhere. Or, better yet, shredded into little bitty pieces, then burned into ashes.

4. The hero was redheaded, and I realized I loved redheaded heroes (a rarity in romance for some reason). I eventually got around to another redheaded hero, in In the Mood.

5. The hero and heroine of Flame wound up as secondary characters in the first novel I actually had published. Readers may not have cared, but I did, because it made them "real" and meant to me that all that time I spent creating them wasn't totally wasted.

6. I finally figured out that A Most Vehement Flame was a ridiculous title, and vowed never to use such an absurd title again.

B&N "reallocates resources"

Pointed out on the Kindleboards, this PW article talks about how B&N is "reallocating resources," which apparently means firing around 50 people working in the buying division and putting more people in the digital division.

"Publishers were shook by the news with the larger publishers wondering who would oversee merchandising, while smaller presses questioned who would be looking out for their interests. The growth in digital is great, one publisher noted, but added 'someone has to be in charge of getting books into the stores.'"

Jordan Summers...

talks on her blog about planning to publish some backlist titles as an indie, and perhaps some new titles as well. Yay!

20,000 books

I've made it past 20,000 indie books in total sold since February 2010. Not bad. (I've presumably sold a bit more than that, since I only have PubIt figures through the sixth.) I also noticed that at two-thirds of the way through the month, every one of my books has sold more copies on Amazon than they sold in all of December (well, except for Farthest Space, which doesn't sell enough copies to matter anyway). So for me, sales are continuing to improve. I hope this is true for everyone else, too!

The inaccurately named Hero

Hero sleeps in my bathroom, while Impulse prefers to sleep in his crate downstairs. There is a light over the shower in my bathroom which I long ago learned not to turn on. The reason it can't be turned on is that it clicks as it cools off, and Hero becomes convinced there is something terrifying lurking in the shower, and has a tizzy. Tonight some child turned on the shower light for some reason, and ever since I turned it off Hero has been barking endlessly-- not his deep "I am a noble guardian protecting my house" bark, but his yappy, high-pitched "please, please save me from the scary thing!" bark. We're talking two hours of annoying, yappy barking.

I tried everything to get him to calm down-- I let him check out the shower to see that there were no intruders, I patted him, I assured him that everything was fine. I even tried to let him sleep in my room, but he kept pacing and yapping. Finally I brought Impulse upstairs to try to console him, and that seems to have worked. Hero and Impy are pretty much joined at the hip, and in moments of stress they comfort one another.

Still, I need to make sure this doesn't happen again, because it's both annoying to the humans in the house and obviously very stressful and scary for poor dumb Hero. I'm going to put duct tape over that damn lightswitch tomorrow.

Hero says: I am the brave guardian of my family... except when there are scary clicking noises.

Projects

The two Ellen Fisher projects I've decided to work on next:

Kindred, Book 2: The Stars of Dawn. This is a paranormal/shapeshifter series I started for Samhain, but never finished due to my personal issues. I'll need to read through book 1 and try to remember where I was going with it before I get started:-). Once it's done, I could submit it to Samhain, but given the length of time it would take to publish it (assuming they accepted it), I think I'll just go ahead and publish it independently.

True Blue: A Fluffy Romance. This is something I've been turning over in my mind for a while-- a short, sweet (no sex) romantic comedy from the viewpoint of the hero's dog. This is obviously something that no publisher would touch, but I think it might be cute. At least it will be different!

Laundry, yay!

I observed that my laundry room countertop had pretty much disappeared under gigantic piles of clean but unsorted laundry, so I sat down this afternoon, folded, and had the kids take most of it upstairs where it belonged. (Notice I didn't say all of it. If I didn't have some piles of laundry sitting around, the apocalypse would be at hand. But there's a difference between reasonable piles and truly terrifying piles.) I feel better now. Sometimes the housework backs up to the point where it really starts to bug me, and this was definitely one of those times:-).

More colleges

The kids and I took off across Virginia this weekend to take a look at the two colleges my oldest hasn't seen yet. We visited James Madison University yesterday, and George Mason University today. On the way, we visited an aunt and uncle we haven't seen for a while. It was a very pleasant trip because the kids were really good. They're becoming terrific travelers.

We left the dogs in a kennel while we traveled, and upon our return they greeted us with as much wiggling, leaping joy as if they hadn't seen us in months. Dogs are sweet that way:-).

Midmonth figures

Sales don't seem to be slowing down, I'm happy to say. All I Ever Wanted and In the Mood have already sold more on Amazon this month than they did all last month, and most of the rest should easily sell more by the end of the month. In half a month, I've sold more books on Amazon than any full month except December. It's hard to say how I'm doing on B&N, thanks to the accounting issues, but under my pen name I have one book in the top 500 and another in the top 1000, so you have to figure I'm selling some books over there.

Overall, it looks like the higher level of sales may continue for a while, at least. I still need to get a new Ellen Fisher book out there, though!

Bella Andre

Jason Chan interviews trad/indie author Bella Andre.

The van

The van has a new battery and new rear brake pads. And it only took three hours. I read my Kindle while waiting, and noticed an older lady (in her sixties, I think) at the table next to me reading her iPad-- with, she told me, a Kindle app. It was the first time she'd used it, and she wasn't sure she liked it... she wanted page numbers. I pointed out the bar at the bottom, and explained what it meant, and I think that helped. I notice on the Amazon boards that some people do get really hung up on the missing page numbers, though!

Sigh

I came across a promotional post on the romance forum, and looked up the author's book. It was published by PublishAmerica, it was a paperback with a generic cover, and it was thirty dollars. No ebook edition was available.

Why? Why on earth is anyone still publishing with PublishAmerica? Don't these newbie writers do a speck of research before they hand their manuscript over to these people? Seriously? Anyway, since she was looking for input on her second book, I posted a very polite response asking her to Google them thoroughly before publishing with them again. I also suggested that thirty dollars was rather too much to expect readers to pay for an unknown author (yeah, that's an understatement, all right) and that she might be better off just self-pubbing on Kindle. She'll probably resent my response, but hopefully she'll take a look at Google and learn something. One may hope.

But it just boggles my mind. PublishAmerica. Thirty dollars. Yeesh.

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!

The older boy has speech therapy on Thursdays, so I raced to the store to grab dinner before he could get home. In unloading the groceries I forgot I'd opened the back hatch of the van, and left it open for a whole ten minutes. When we got into the car to go to therapy, it was dead. Not like clickety-click dead, but like totally dead. My battery's been on the apparent verge of death for a while, and I was thinking about having it replaced tomorrow (when I'm taking the car in for an oil change). But... well... I guess I'm going to go ahead and replace it tonight, just as soon as AAA gets here. Stupid van.

Nora Roberts kicks butt on Kindle

An Amazon press release (pointed out by Monique Martin on Kindleboards): "Amazon.com, Inc., today announced that Nora Roberts has become the third author to sell over 1 million Kindle books, becoming the third member of the 'Kindle Million Club.' As of yesterday, Nora Roberts has sold 1,170,539 Kindle books under her name and her pseudonym J.D. Robb. The Kindle Million Club recognizes authors whose books have sold over 1 million paid copies in the Kindle Store."

Booorrrringggg... thank goodness for my e-reader

Today I have to have my iron infusion. (I am badly anemic and can't tolerate oral iron, so they've finally decided this is the way to go. In a couple of weeks I should have much more energy. Yay!). Unfortunately, they warned me it would take most of the day. So while I'm sitting there, I'm going to do some reading. I loaded up my Kindle with Monique Martin's Out of Time (I've read the sample, and it's excellent), and H.P. Mallory's Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble. Oh, and I added Star Trek: Federation just in case I get in a Star Trek mood, because Star Trek moods do happen *grins*.

Honestly, I don't know how I survived boring days like this before my Kindle. I guess I stuffed my purse full of books. But an e-reader is a much handier thing in these situations-- you can stuff your purse with a thousand books and it doesn't get any heavier!

More amazing indie numbers

H.P. Mallory, whose paranormal romances are selling like crazy (37,000 copies sold! Wow!), does a guest post on J.A. Konrath's blog.

Work completed

Work completed this morning:

-Manuscript read through once more on my Kindle, and minor corrections made
-Cover created
-Book uploaded to Amazon and PubIt

And now... it's time for lunch:-).

That's not snow...

So the big snowstorm petered out as it came across our area. We got a little bit of ice-- enough for them to delay school by two hours, though even that looks to me to have been unnecessary. The result is that I have four kids cluttering up the place for two hours on a day in which I'm trying to review a manuscript one last time and get it up onto Amazon. But at least they'll go off to school before too long, and then I'll be able to get my work done.

B&N's accounting sucks

Barnes and Noble hasn't updated PubIt since the fifth (and the numbers I have up through that day are almost certainly not complete). As of yesterday, they were still updating December's numbers. It's a little frustrating that Amazon can update its numbers in more or less real time, while PubIt seems incapable of keeping up. And yes, I know traditionally published authors don't get to see their numbers for months and months. But as an indie, I've gotten used to seeing my numbers at least once a day or so.

Anyway, they keep assuring us that yes, they ARE keeping track of the numbers, and that it will all catch up eventually. But it's a little aggravating, even so. I can't even make a reasonable guess at how many books I've sold this month through them, which makes it hard to know how I'm doing. Sigh... hopefully it'll be straightened out soon.

Big day

I took the oldest kid, who's considering what colleges she wants to apply to, to walk around the College of William and Mary (the other kids tagged along). I went to college there, so it was kind of fun to play tour guide. I'm still way out of shape due to the Crohn's and anemia, though, so the walk across campus was rather exhausting.

Still, it was fun, and when we were through I discovered the College Delly (yes, that is how they spell it) is still in existence. I used to eat there all the time in college. We had a great lunch there, and then kicked around the shops for a little while (I got the first W&M hoodie I've had in years!). Overall, it was a terrific day.

My son's thoughts on Whispernet

My five (almost six)-year-old:

"Do people buy your books?"

Me: "Yes. Quite a few people do."

Him: "How do you dewiver them?"

Me: "I don't deliver them personally; they just show up on people's Kindles."

Him: "How?"

Me: "Um... through the air, sort of."

Him: "That's cweepy."

Was December a fluke?

The general assumption is that the holidays were a fluke, and that sales will go down this month. However, as of last night I'd sold around 1500 books this month (1008 on Amazon and at least 500 on B&N, whose accounting system is way behind right now). That puts me on track to sell at least as much as last month. Will it last through the month? Who knows? My hot seller on B&N is starting to fade, but I have another one coming out under that name later this month. It's unlikely to do as well, but hopefully I will get some sales from it.

I'm do have to say I'm perplexed because Unwrapped is continuing to sell well, to the point that it's gotten onto the Kindle contemporary romance bestseller list again. It was at #86 there last I checked, so it's not a hugely hot seller, but still... Christmas is over. Why are people buying it? I'm not complaining, just... curious. I assume its sales will trickle to a stop sometime this month, but then again, I'd assumed they'd stop sometime last month. Obviously my assumptions are not always correct.

I do know I need a new Ellen Fisher book-- nothing drives sales like a new release. I'm hoping to get a novella out by March or April. It will be called Summer Breeze.

And yet more amazing indie sales figures

Once again, not mine. Victorine Lieske reports selling 11,162 copies in December... and that's of a single book.

Go win a NookColor

The lovely and talented Bella Andre is raffling off a new NookColor (I love mine!). You can read the details here.

And another link

Amanda Hocking interview in the Huffington post. Link snagged from Tonya Plank on Kindleboards.

Two links

An author interviews Karen McQuestion.

USA Today on the holiday surge in sales of ebooks. This quote jumped out at me: "The e-book surge of the past month isn't a 'sustainable trend,' says Kelly Gallagher of the publishing research firm Bowker, who says sales could flatten this year but still could be twice as high as they were in 2010."

Really, how does anyone know what's a sustainable trend?

Good stuff sells... and bad stuff, too

It's discouraging to take a look at samples from an indie author who's selling well and see that his/her books are frankly atrocious. I'm not talking "could use an edit," but "reads as if it were written by a third-grader for whom English is a second language." I hate to see a book like that being associated with other, better indie books. And yet... well, sometimes stuff like that does sell, for a while, at least. I just try to remind myself that other people's books do not reflect upon my own, or even upon indies as a whole. One person's writing is just that-- one person's writing.

On the flip side, I picked up a book from another indie the other day, and her writing was excellent-- as good as any traditionally published book, in my estimation. And she's selling well, too. I rejoice with the good indie authors who sell, and imagine that the bad ones will fade away eventually.

iPad owners are Kindle owners

Ruth Harris points out this article on Kindleboards: 40% of iPad owners also own a Kindle.

To small press or not?

From this blog entry about whether one should self-pub or not, the following comment interested me:

I always find it interesting that Konrath refuses to discuss the existence of small publishers like Samhain, Double Dragon and Loose Id - small but popular publishers that offer another option between self-pubbing and going after the NYC publishers. You may not get rich going with a small publisher but you'll save yourself a lot of time and money than if you go self-publish.

Hmmm, maybe (and OT, but I'm not sure I'd blame Konrath for not paying much attention to small e-presses; it seems like most of them focus on romance, and he's a thriller/horror/mystery writer). Let me say up front that I loved working with Samhain. Love my covers, loved my editor. However, at the time I was writing for them, there was no Kindle, and so indie publishing wasn't much of an option.

Now that there's an option, I'm still muddling with the thought of submitting something to them later this year, but I hesitated when I saw their last call for anthology submissions, which was at the end of 2010, for an anthology due in November 2011. A year wait... well, that isn't that long when you're used to thinking in traditional publishing terms, but it's a long time in indie terms.

So submitting to a small press means I get a cover (Samhain has good covers, but I can get one of more or less equal quality for about $125, I think), editing (depending on the editor, this can be good or bad), and exposure to their established fanbase. On the flip side, it means I wait a long time to get published, and that I get a lesser percentage in royalties. It's also possible I might not enjoy working with a new editor (the old one's no longer there) and might find myself having to edit stuff I'd rather not edit.

It's a tough call, and I may yet submit to them again. But I think I'll publish my next Ellen Fisher book as an indie, and see how it goes. I don't know that I'd discourage anyone from going the small press route, though, so long as it's a GOOD small press. There are plusses and minuses either way, I think.

Last month's results, amended

PutIt has a tendency to slowly trickle sales into your total (their accounting system is rather slow and quirky compared to Amazon's). As a result, I can now report that I sold over 5000 copies last month across all books. I assume some of that was the holidays, but I will nevertheless hope for good numbers this month, too:-).

How did you become an indie author?

There's an interesting post on J.A. Konrath's blog about how L.J. Sellers switched to indie publishing. It made me think about how I got into indie publishing. I certainly wasn't as deliberate about it, mostly because I'd really never heard of it till I got my Kindle.

After my first, aborted contract with a New York publisher twelve years ago, I eventually drifted into e-publishing. Again, this wasn't really a deliberate decision on my part, because I hadn't really heard of e-publishing. Once I read about it, however, I decided it might be a good way to go, and submitted. I had an overall good experience, although one of my publishers and I eventually parted ways. It didn't do great things for my career monetarily, but it was nice to get my books out there and get paid for them, even if it wasn't a lot. It was nice to final repeatedly in the Eppie Awards, too-- only an ego stroke, to be sure, but all authors need the occasional ego stroke. One of my books also caught the attention of an excellent agent, who eventually took me on. (One of my other books caused another very good agent to approach me, but I could only have one agent, obviously!)

When Vulcan Husband died, I quit writing professionally for several years. This lost me my agent, sadly, which discouraged me from writing even more. I am a writer at heart, however, and I did have a personal deadline for getting back into writing-- I wanted to get back to it by the time my youngest was kindergarten age. By late 2009 I had gotten my rights back from the e-pub who'd had most of my books, and started wondering where I could resell them. Samhain, my other major e-pub, wasn't interested in reissuing them, and I didn't see anyone else out there who was likely to enable me to sell many copies.

At that point I got my Kindle, and started reading the Amazon boards. I was surprised to see that you could self-publish ebooks. A little light dawned in my brain-- why not try that? So I did, putting my first reissued book up on Amazon in February 2010, and it worked surprisingly well. Better, in fact, than e-publishing ever worked for me.

I don't know what 2011 will bring, but now I'm more conscious of what I'm doing. I have a plan for writing and for earning money, and I'm trying to stay more tuned into what's happening with the writing market. I don't want to drift into things any more; I want to map out my career, and hopefully to succeed.

Had a great day

I took the kids to my dad's for lunch. We had lunch at Village Inn (our favorite brunch place), and then decided to drive to downtown Norfolk to see the battleship USS Wisconsin. The kids then clamored to go onto it, so we bought tickets to Nauticus and the battleship, and they ran around the place for a couple of hours. (Fortunately it was nice and warm today, so it was pleasant even on the water.) We then dropped my dad back by his house, had ice cream, and then drove to the Virginia Beach oceanfront to see the Christmas lights show on the Boardwalk. A great time was had by all, and my kids are all happily exhausted!