2021 Publication Plans: SERPENT SWORD (BATTLE FOR THE WASTELANDS #2)

Former member of my writing group Jeff Baker attended the Liberty Con convention a few years ago and brought back word from a self-publishing panel that the best way to self-publish is to "churn and burn"--put work out there quickly. Although independent publishing allows me to put out stuff faster than a traditional publisher (I put out Battle for the Wastelands in December 2019, "Son of Grendel" in May 2020, and The Atlanta Incursion in July 2020), I listen to a lot of writing podcasts and there are indie writers who put stuff out much faster. Heck, closer to home I have the example of current writing group Dave Schroeder, who puts out 1-2 books per year.

("SOG," TAI, and especially Battle had been written years in the past and had been sitting in my file, so 2019-2020 was not my usual production speed.)

Some of my slowness in comparison to others is hard to get around--the Wastelands books in particular are very research-intensive, I run the whole manuscript through my writing group and then heavily revise based on their suggestions, I hire a professional editor/formatter and cover designer rather than do it myself, and I commission illustrated cover art rather than using pre-made covers--but I also tend to dawdle and spend too much time on things like my blog, Twitter, etc. So I'm going to do my level best to make sure that Serpent Sword: Battle for the Wastelands #2 comes out sometime in 2021, the earlier the better. This involves committing in advance to have chapters for my writing group even if they're not finished when I make the reservation, which was a major reason I got The Thing in the Woods, Battle, and Little People, Big Guns finished as quickly as I did.

So far so good--I have the first six chapters completed out of around 33-34, and lots of chunks of future chapters already written. The total word count is around 37,000 words and if the expected final word count is around 90K, that's a great big chunk done. I also have the cover art already made, which will save even more time.

(If you like the cover, check out West Coast artist Matt Cowdery, who's illustrated a lot of my independent projects. The people you meet on the last day of DragonCon when tickets are only $30.)

I'd initially hoped to get it done sometime over the summer and potentially have room to finish and publish The Walking Worm, the second sequel to Thing. However, owing to the need to cycle that through writing group, the whole editing/publishing process, and whatever conventions I can scrounge up for the year, it seems very unlikely that I'd be able to get it out in 2021.

FLASHING STEEL, FLASHING FIRE and "The Long Tail"

This really would have been better as an addendum to my last blog post on my writing and "the long tail," but it was late and I needed to go to bed. I looked over my sales figures for the last few years and saw that the principle of The Long Tail applies to my short-story collection Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire.

When I published Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire in July 2014, I sold 21 copies that month. Over the next five months, I sold eight copies at a rate of zero (August) to three (September) per month. That's over one-third of the premiere month's numbers in five months. In 2015, I sold 14 copies at a rate of zero (three separate months) to four (February) per month. No sales in 2016 so far, but when you combine the non-premiere months of 2014 with all of 2015, the "tail" has already exceeded the "head." And there's still most of 2016 left.

So if you've self-published anything and your numbers have crashed after the first month or two, don't worry. One or two sales per month over the course of years will add up in the long run.

Of course, if you plan on making a living--or at least more than, as Marko Kloos put it, "beer money"--doing this, you'll need to have a lot of product. One book earning $10 in royalties per month is $120 per year, but ten books earning $10 per month is $1,200 per year. And with that many books available, odds are you'll be earning more than $10 per month in royalties anyway. People who buy one book from an author are likely to buy other books, after all. My story "Ubermensch" is a superhero story, but people who bought it also bought Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire despite the complete lack of superhero stories in it. Moving outside of my own work, people who've bought my friend James R. Tuck's supernatural Robin Hood story Mark of the Black Arrow also bought his hollow-earth blaxploitation story Champion of Hollow Earth.

So as my friend Jeff Baker put it (and he learned the phrase from somebody at LibertyCon a couple years ago), if you want to make bank, "churn and burn."

October Writing Contest Results

As October ends and November, the National Novel-Writing Month, begins, here's the update on my writing contest with my friend Lauren. I've written 3,180 words.

The single largest amount of text is for a later book in the Wastelands world. My friend Jeff Baker, at writing group, suggested more intrigue in Grendel's harem. Although Grendel's harem is too small for the kind of shenanigans that went on in the Ottoman harems (or the less-severe sort in that of the Sultan of Oman, which you can read about in Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar, one of the books I'm reading now for graduate school), when the patriarch is away, there's still room for plotting and treachery. And so I wrote the beginnings of an alliance between two concubines forming. The memoirs I read will provide some of the basis--graduate school has been a great research opportunity as well as a potential career boon.

The next largest major block of text is for a political project based on some of my earlier blog posts. I'd checked out Foreign Policy Begins at Home and wrote 1,000 words based on the ideas author Richard N. Haass has in the book. His suggestion that China could someday do to the United States what the U.S. did to Britain during the Suez Crisis is reason alone to fear an overly-large national debt.

I also wrote a few hundred words for another project. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about it because of the uniqueness of the concept, but hopefully it's something I can write fairly quickly. To give away a little bit, it's a faux history rather than a narrative, so it's dominated by world-building (which I'm good at), not characters (where I'm weaker).

However, most of the month's writing time was dedicated to revising Battle for the Wastelands. I spent October cutting it to 100,000 words (without cutting plot, characters, etc--just a matter of things like using "both" instead of "both of them" writ large) to make it easier to sell. Now I've gotten it to 99,000 words and I'm going to try to cut it to 98,000 during the month of November, which my friend Alex Hughes said is a "sweet spot" because some publishers think it can be cut further and others think there's room for expansion.

Kindle Fiction Update: Oct. 2013

I've decided to examine the sales figures for my Kindle short stories now that it's been a little over a year since I self-published the first two, I am the Wendigo and Melon Heads. I went through all the sales spreadsheets Amazon has provided and have totaled them up.

For starters, "Wendigo" has been an unqualified success. I sold fourteen copies in 2012 and nineteen so far in 2013. Thirty-three copies at 35% royalty copies out to $11.55. Considering how I sold it for the first time (in late 2006, to the now-dead webzine Chimaera Serials) for $20, this is a profitable second run indeed. And it's pure profit, considering how Udo Wooten did the cover for free. A lot of paying markets pay $10 or less, so I've made a good business decision self-publishing this one rather than scrounging for a market that would accept a reprint (rare) and pay a decent rate (rarer).

"Melon Heads" came out of the gate strong, selling twenty copies in 2012, sixteen in the release month of September. However, it faltered in 2013, selling only five so far. That's $8.75, which is better than giving it away for free or selling it to one of those $5 magazines. Not as good as I could have gotten if I'd sent it to a $10 magazine, assuming they'd buy it. Unfortunately I tried to promote it using Google Adwords that proved to be an epic fail (no sales whatsoever during the period the ad ran), so this one is still a net money loser despite its stronger sales.

My Lovecraftian tale The Beast of the Bosporus was released later, in November 2012. I sold fourteen copies in 2012 and eleven through September (I've sold one so far this October). Not including the October sale, that's $8.75. Still better than the freebies. This was the first story I've tried to promote with a post on this blog that I managed to get hosted some other places--a faux excerpt from a historical journal implying the story was gleaned from newly discovered Ottoman manuscripts. Fortunately I'd gotten the cover done free as well, so this one has been profitable.

Despite commissioning a beautiful cover, Illegal Alien has proven a disappointment. Only five sales in 2012 and eight sales thus far in 2013 for $4.55. Considering I paid $45 for the cover, this one won't be making a profit for awhile. A pity Kindle publishing didn't exist when I wrote this at the height of the 2006 immigration reform protests or else I could have pulled in some major money due to the timeliness. Life lesson--if you're writing a story to cash in on a current event, Kindle-publish it because by the time a traditional market runs it, it'll be too late. Roger Corman made one of his movies in a month or so to cash in on the Moon landing, but that's not really possible with written fiction.

In August, as sales begin to fall for my original four (only ONE sale in July), I put out three new stories. That spurred sales back to the level they'd been earlier this year, although they never reached the euphoric heights of September 2012. So far the alternate history spy adventure Picking Up Plans In Palma has sold only five copies, all of them in August. Combined my two stories starring superveillain protagonist Andrew Patel, Übermensch and Needs Must, have sold nine copies, with "Ubermensch" selling seven of those. However, it's too early to write them off as failures, since although "Wendigo" started weak (only six sales the first month), it proved to have good staying power.

This year-long experiment in Kindle publishing has led me to reach some conclusions:

*More "mundane" creature horror sells better than more niche Lovecraftian stuff. However, there's a complicating variable--"Wendigo" is explicitly advertised as a reprint of a traditionally-published story, which no doubt makes it more attractive.

*Horror sells better than science fiction.

*Alternate history and superhero/supervillain tales do worse than standard science fiction.

*If you can get good covers for cheap enough rates, self-publishing can be financially more profitable than sending them to markets that pay only a small amount ($5 or $10) and definitely more profitable than giving them away for free.

You may be tempted to write off Kindle publishing short fiction as a waste of time or a poor investment. However, there is such a thing as a tipping point and it'd be a shame to give up just before you get successful (there's a rather sad cartoon showing a miner giving up when, if he'd dug a few more inches, he'd have found a trove of diamonds). My friend Jeff Baker, in the addendum he added to my guest blog post, said that at LibertyCon, the consensus one needed 20-25 items available on Amazon before they started feeding off each other. And I've just bought a Kindle e-book on guerrilla marketing one's self-published fiction, so hopefully I'll get some good advice and my sales figures will go up.

Still, at DragonCon one year some panelists said short fiction isn't worth the amount of time invested in it. Although I'm going to try to sell my unsold stories and Kindle-publish the ones I can't (I have two fantasy stories submitted to traditional markets at the moment), I'm going to focus on my novels Battle for the Wastelands and The Thing in the Woods. If I can sell one of those, hopefully it'll spur sales for the short stories.

A Very Merry Blog Tour Is Beginning

The other day, I was discussing the sales of my Kindle short stories (available here) with Matt Mitrovich. Sales have been declining for some time and he, having reviewed one of my stories, said chances are that the problem is not with the quality of the content, it's with my marketing. He recommended I do a blog tour--for those of you not in the know, that's writing a bunch of guest posts for a bunch of blogs.

I gave the matter some thought and decided to go with it. I'd just published three new stories on Amazon in quick succession, so I had the occasion for it. I posted a request for hosts on my message-board and received some interest, so I'll call this the "Very Merry Blog Tour" based on my board user-name MerryPrankster.

Here's the first post in the tour, a discussion of my experiences Kindle publishing on the blog belonging to my writer friend Jeff Baker.

My Career as a Kindle Direct Author, Thus Far

Sean C.W. Korsgaard, Matt Mitrovich, Alex Shalenko, and Christopher Nuttall have all agreed to host blog posts, as has the member of my message-board whose handle is Talwar. I've also gotten a bite from someone on Blogger Linkup, which arranges for people to guest post on each other's blogs.

So far I've made one sale of "I am the Wendigo," but considering how William Meikle re-tweeted the first post to his 71,000 followers, hopefully that'll only be the beginning.

Writing Contest Update and Summer Goals

These last few days I haven't been able to get any work done on my personal writing projects due to paid writing obligations, leaving my current word count for May at 14,000 words. This will give Nick, who has more time commitments than I do but can write the same amount if not more material when he does have time, a good shot at catching up. Hopefully I won't need to buy him lunch this month, although later in the summer it's looking more likely.

(That being said, I've got a week left and my most severe deadlines have passed, so it's back in the saddle again...)

However, regardless of who wins the contest this month or overall, I'm thinking of setting two goals for the summer.

1. Finish the first draft of The Thing In The Woods. It's getting clearer and clearer this is a young-adult novel, so I don't need to worry about it being so short. If I can get it to 60,000 words or so, that'll be fine with me. That being said, Delilah S. Dawson's upcoming young-adult novel is 80K to 90K and Jeff Baker's recently-completed young-adult horror novel (he described it as Harry Potter meets Lovecraft) is 100,400 words, so maybe I need to be careful. My graduate school classes start in late August and I imagine the reading and paper commitments will be extremely challenging, so let's see if I can get it done by August 26. Delilah and James R. Tuck manage to get whole first drafts completed in months and they have much more familial and other real-life responsibilities than I do, so it's time to crack the whip.

2. Finish the "Coil Gun" script. I'm around 85 pages in and the minimum page count for a script to be taken seriously, according to a friend of mine who lives in Los Angeles and writes for Elementary, is 90. I think I could finish that in a week if I really put my nose to the grindstone, since I once wrote 40 pages in a week and I'm adapting one of my own short stories, not devising entirely new material. Then take it to an Alpharetta group I'm in (that I haven't attended in months) that has a monthly screenwriting meeting and register it with the Writer's Guild of America to be safe.

Stuff I'm Working On Now...

Since I imagine you got sick of seeing every blog post about writing entitled "Productivity Update," I decided on a different title this time.  So here goes...

-Escape from the Wastelands-Three complete, continuous chapters now.  The Lawrenceville group has seen the first two and I'll be sending the third chapter (and hopefully a couple more) their way when the deadline comes July 22.  This novel was originally the last half of a longer novel, but I broke it in half.  So basically a whole lot of the later half of this book is done, but there's not much at the beginning.  In the event I find a buyer for Battle for the Wastelands, I hope to be able to finish this one relatively quickly.

-Battle for the Wastelands-My Kennesaw writing group is going to go over the whole manuscript Aug. 1, around six weeks after I sent out the whole manuscript for their critique.  I've done some tinkering since then, including revamping the climactic airship battle based on learning more about how historical airships operated.  My goal is to start querying agents and publishers, with DragonCon being a big source of the latter.  Hopefully there won't be big revisions to make based on the Aug. 1 meeting.

-"Melon Heads"-Back when I was at student at the University of Georgia (this was in the fall of 2003, I think), I was surfing the Internet for urban legends and came across the tale of the Melon Heads.  I cannot find the original site at the moment, but the gist of it was that back in the 1950s, a doctor opened his home up to children with hydrocephalus.  He abused and experimented on the children, who one day rose up and ate him, then fled into the nearby woods.  They (or their descendants) are supposedly still living out in the woods, killing and eating animals and attacking people.

I wrote a short horror story about the "Melon Heads," thinking they had never been covered before.  Over the last few years, I've been trying to send it to different markets and it's gotten better each time.  The current version is a bit tongue in cheek, on top of the gruesome violence that some of my friends who've read earlier versions have seen.

(I actually brought it to a church writing group once and got some very shocked reactions, including a revelation by one group member that he actually had hydrocephalus and had it remedied surgically.  I was expecting group members to be shocked if not outraged, but I wasn't expecting anything medical to come up.)

Unfortunately, now I'm running out of places to send it.  It's getting to the point that I could either send it to some market that won't pay much if at all, or I self-publish it for the Kindle.  My friend Jeff Baker has done this with his short story "Slip Drive" and made more money than I'd get from the lowest-paying markets.  My friend James R. Tuck has also self-published some crime fiction on Amazon too.

I sent the story out again this morning after the newest version of it got rejected by a new and well-paying market.  If I get rejected again, it might be time to, as I often say on Facebook, "sacrifice it to the Kindle god."  James knows some artists who create e-book covers, so I'll take a look at their work and see what they've got.

"The Past Is Ashes"-This short story is the result of a trope-inversion exercise I came up with and is one of the first new short stories I've written in years.  Basically the hero's quest for revenge is not the result of the villain destroying his hometown (cliched), but the villain instead building a fort there.  This leads to his neighborhood being eminent-domained, his family having to move into the ghetto because house prices have gone up everywhere else, etc.  The actual Word document is called "Gentrification War."  I sent it out last week to a market with a history of getting back to me quickly.

-"Djinn"-In addition to sending this one out to various markets, I'd like to include it in a collection that I'll get into detail about in a bit.  Basically it follows a group of American soldiers into a cave complex in Afghanistan, hunting for al Qaeda.  They find their prey dead, clawed up or burned.  Then the mysterious killer comes after them.  I'll basically describe it as "Jeepers Creepers in Afghanistan."

(Don't laugh.  "Jeepers Creepers" is actually a really good movie.)

I sent a partial to a relative who is a two-time Afghan vet and he took issue with the accuracy of some of it, including some of the weaponry used.  I set it aside after that, but I've done some thinking and I don't think the problems can't be fixed.  I've tinkered with it a little bit, but haven't written much new material.

Now about the collection.  I've noticed a theme in most of my horror fiction that they'll all fit into the real world--the events are not widely known and don't have much impact on the wider world.  That reminded me of the quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet--"There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy."  I pondered an anthology with the title More Things In Heaven and on Earth, but I've found that I've only got three or four stories that are in good enough condition.  "Djinn" would make five.  At minimum, I think I'd need ten.  One collection I enjoy--Nameless Cults: The Cthulhu Mythos Fiction of Robert Howard--includes over twenty stories.

I'm told collections are hard to sell unless there are very famous authors involved, but my friend Nick said there are agents willing to represent them.  Given my writing priorities these days, I'm thinking this will have to wait until after the first Wastelands books are done.  Maybe after that, I'll be a very famous author.  :D

I May Go Kindle...

Jeff Baker, a member of my Lawrenceville writing group, has self-published a story he'd written for an anthology to raise money for earthquake relief in Japan on Amazon.com for Kindle.  He set it to be free for five days, to build up buzz and end up on the "People Who Bought This Also Bought..." lists and ended up moving 400 units.  Then he started charging $0.99.  As of a day or two ago, he'd sold 15 units and made just over $5, since Amazon gives 35% royalties for $0.99 material.  Hopefully this figure has increased since then.

Although he has defended his decision in terms of retaining rights and the story never going out of print, he said the real purpose of this exercise is not to make money.  Instead, it's to pave the way for him to Kindle-publish a young-adult fantasy novel he is working on now by generating an online fan-base.  I've critiqued the first two chapters and although YA is not my cup of tea, it's a good story.  He does not think he can get a good deal from traditional publishers and wants to hop on the train to the future, so to speak.

I admit I'm somewhat prejudiced against self-publishing because it smacks to me of someone taking their ball and going home because their stuff wasn't good enough.  However, this might be somewhat outdated--thanks to E-publishing and E-readers like the Kindle and Nook, the publishing industry has greatly changed.  And the industry's reluctance to take on new writers or invest much in promoting them (so they fail and then are judged not good, never mind that biggies like Stephen King and Dean Koontz get promoted like hell by their publishers) likely means some really good voices are going unheard.

I don't plan on Kindling Battle for the Wastelands and its planned sequels except at extreme need--say, due to major Values Dissonance between prospective publishers and I leading to them wanting unacceptable changes to the characters.

(I wanted to introduce some moral grayness to the world by making the hero rather racist and the villain as someone who has brought peace through conquest a la Aegon the Conqueror from George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, judges his minions on merit rather than ethnicity, and who married a non-white woman to unite his homeland.  However, in some people's moral universes, being a "bigot" is the primary if not the only sin.  Given how many cultural institutions tends to be more socially left-wing, they might assume the book is an endorsement of racism rather than giving the hero a flaw and the villain a virtue.  Plus I have no problems with heroes killing villains.)

However, just because I don't want to take overmuch risk with my soon-to-be-finished first original novel doesn't mean I'm not inclined to give it a try. 

In 2005-2006, I wrote a short story called "Nicor" about a teenage Dane on his first Viking raid who encounters the titular water-monster.  Although it's an action-packed monster story with bloodshed aplenty, there's substance to it as well--it's about disillusionment with war and even a coming of age. 

One of the earlier drafts, although it escaped the slush pile at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and was rejected by none other than the editor himself, wasn't all that good, and so I sent it to various other places, improving it at every rejection.  Although now it's the best it's ever been, I am rapidly running out of markets to submit it.

(I did manage to sell it to the fantasy magazine Flashing Swords and was even paid $0.01 per word for it, but the magazine went under before the story could run.)

It is currently under consideration by Beneath Ceaseless Skies and according to Ralan.com, there's a new professional-level publication called Buzzy Mag (whose web-site was active yesterday but is down now due to server-switching).  However, at present, that's about it.  The number of semi-professional publications that would pay, say, $0.01 per word has dwindled with the economy.  I could send it to a web-site or print publication for free or for a token payment, but these are smaller publications that don't have the same kind of prestige a larger publication will. 

Given the choice between publication by someone else with no prestige and a small payment (sending "I am the Wendigo" to Chimaera Serials got me $20 and the status of a published writer, but I doubt it impressed many editors) and the possibility of making a few dollars a month for years with no prestige, it might make more financial sense to go with option #2 in the long run.  Plus I can build up my Amazon.com author page, which exists only because of "Coil Gun."

However, J.M McDermott, also from the Lawrenceville writing group, has advised I hold onto my assets and wait for new publishers to appear.  He has published some short fiction for Kindle, but the monetary returns have not been stellar.  He has sold several books (including a new one entitled When We Were Executioners that just became available) and many short stories, so I am very inclined to take him seriously.

So here's the plan, all this rambling aside.  If I cannot sell "Nicor" to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, I will seriously consider commissioning some good cover art (one of my beefs with self-published books is they tend to have really awful illustrations) and putting it on Kindle.  Commissioning cover art will be a big cost that will take awhile to pay off, especially if the returns are low ($5-20 per month), but it might be a good long-term investment, since people do judge books by their covers.  If I cannot sell it to Buzzy Mag and no new well-paying markets appear, I'll definitely dip my toe in the Kindle water.  It's a good enough story that I'm not ruining my reputation by putting crap out there, but my options for it are rather limited at this moment.

Jeff says with my blog and it's 39,000 hits, I've got a substantial built-in fan-base.  So what say you?  If I put "Nicor" out on Kindle, would you be interested in reading it?