New Year, New Cover for THE THING IN THE WOODS

The first cover for The Thing in the Woods, originally published by Canadian small press Digital Fiction Publishing, was assembled from two pieces of Adobe stock art I found for the publisher. However, the cover for its independently-published sequel The Atlanta Incursion was illustrated by artist Matt Cowdery and laid out by designer Mikio Murikami. Although the fonts are the same, the illustrative style is very different and this is something that has been remarked upon.

Well, since Cowdery's art has been highly praised by pretty much everybody I run into at in-person events and he has done the cover for the planned third novel The Walking Worm, it's time to make the whole "Long War" series consistent. Furthermore, according to some writing podcasts I listen to, a new cover is a good way to spike sales for an older book.

So here's Cowdery's cover for Thing, featuring male lead James Daly and female lead Amber Webb (her first canonical image) confronting the titular horror.

Both the e-book and print book are now live with the new cover. Enjoy!

Productivity Update 7/13/21

It's been awhile since I've posted an update on my current projects. However, I saw that Chris Nuttall had done that and that reminded me. So let's start with my current primary focus...

Serpent Sword: Battle for the Wastelands #2-There are ten completed chapters, and between those and the partial chapters later on, I have a total word count of 53,694. I think the finish product will be somewhat longer than the original Battle for the Wastelands' 89,000 words, so I'm about halfway through perhaps? I already have the cover art (see below) and have written the book copy, but even if I complete the manuscript in, say, October or November, tasks like hiring a professional editor, revising, formatting, finding another author to blurb it, etc. will take time and then releasing it in December might not be a wise idea. It might be better to hold off until early 2022.

I've noticed that at conventions and on Amazon (especially after the BookBub featured deal), the "Long War" novels The Thing in the Woods and The Atlanta Incursion sell significantly better than Battle and its prequel novella "Son of Grendel." Consequently, once I have Serpent Sword out the door, it is my plan to swing back to that series and put out the third novel The Walking Worm (book copy here) and then the fourth novel, Shadowmen before returning to the Wastelands world with the third book, tentatively titled Escape.

(Once Serpent Sword is published, I'm going to try for a BookBub featured deal for Battle on the grounds that an available sequel would make it more likely to get approval and ultimately more profitable--people might get Battle for $0.99 and then pay full price for Serpent Sword and "SOG." If BookBub does for the Wastelands series what it did for Thing and TAI, I might do Escape before Shadowmen, but the Wastelands world is weird--it's secondary-world fantasy without magic, it's steampunk and post-apocalyptic but it's not in our world, etc. And generally horror sells better than steampunk.)

I have already started writing TWW and Shadowmen, although I don't think I have any completed chapters. TWW's current word count is 16,504 and Shadowmen's word count is 11,236. I can definitely complete TWW in 2022 and I could potentially complete Shadowmen in 2022 as well, given how the "Long War" series is less research-heavy than Wastelands and in particular Shadowmen takes place in the same town as Thing.

Like Serpent Sword, I already have the cover for The Walking Worm made. Here you go. That's MJ-12 agent Thomas Bolton (who first appears briefly in Thing but is in TAI a lot more) on the left and our hero James Daly on the right.

Finally, in April I completed the short story "Run, Hide, Feed" and submitted it to a modern-monster collection. They chose not to include it and it was rejected by an online horror magazine soon after. There are still some pro-rate horror publications I haven't submitted to, although the subject matter (it was written to comment on U.S. mass shootings, in particular the amount of media attention paid to the shooters) makes it a bit of a hot potato. We shall see.

Two THE ATLANTA INCURSION #BookTube Reviews In Two Days

One strategy I've been using to promote my work is seeking out booktubers to discuss my books on their channels. Early-mid May has been, to quote the great Borat, "Very nice." I have gotten two largely positive video reviews on YouTube for my novel The Atlanta Incursion, the sequel to The Thing In The Woods.

Here's the one posted May 9 from Jeremy Fee, a Texan who liked the small-town feel of the original Thing and followed the survivors to the big city for the sequel:

And here's the one posted May 10 from Lady Jane Books, who got very excited about it:

This was a very nice couple of days. If you're interested after watching these videos, you can find both The Thing in the Woods and The Atlanta Incursion on Amazon. They're both in Kindle Unlimited. And if you're not, check out their YouTube channels--they might have books you would enjoy.

The Cover and Book Copy For THE WALKING WORM

Over the last few months I haven't been writing as much as I'd like to and spending a lot of time on writing-adjacent activities like marketing. One of those activities is arranging for cover art, since getting a good cover, getting it designed and laid out, etc. is dependent on other people in a way that actually writing isn't. I'd actually finished The Atlanta Incursion well before the publication date, but I had to get all this other stuff taken care of.

So I decided to get the cover for The Walking Worm, the second sequel to The Thing In The Woods, done well in advance of actually finishing the manuscript. Considering my tendencies to dawdle, the fact I'd shelled out for a high-end cover gives me a strong incentive to actually finish the manuscript and start paying that cover off.

So here's the cover by the mighty Matt Cowdery:

This is the first canonical image of series protagonist James Daly (right) and MJ-12 agent Thomas Bolton (left), who briefly appears in Thing and plays a much larger role in TAI. James is a college freshman in TAI, while Bolton is probably in his early 40s.

(In some back-story I've written for Bolton he was an early 20s rookie MIB in 1993. If the series goes well, young Bolton will have his own prequel novel, The Battle of Dulce Base.)

And here's the current draft of the back-cover copy. The book includes the mythology introduced in TAI, but is a small-town creature feature more in the vein of Thing. Spoilers for TAI if you haven't read it yet..

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At long last James Daly has finally gotten to UNC Chapel Hill , but every dream comes with a cost. James works for MJ-12, a covert agency that has fought extraterrestrial colonization since the 1940s, and now faces a threat much closer to home…

Now a junior, James is part of UNC Chapel Hill’s ROTC program, a disguise for his real role serving in the secret war against the murderous alien Grays and, since the defeat of the Thing in the Woods and the battle beneath Atlanta a year ago, keeping watch for the predatory Kraken. And although he’s achieved his childhood dream, there’s trouble in paradise. His girlfriend Amber Webb won’t move in with him and, more dangerously, a fellow MJ-12 agent has disappeared in a nearby town.

James’ investigation alongside senior MJ-12 agent Thomas Bolton, whom he blames for the death of his best friend Eli Schwartz, results in an awful revelation. A creature spawned from the last underground nuclear tests has taken root, its telepathic powers a match for James’ own strange talents. To find its missing agent, MJ-12 must do battle against fellow Americans infested with deadly parasites, a battle that could stretch the secret agency’s capability to its very limits.

Right now I've completed about 16,000 words in TWW. Since Thing is 56,000 words and TAI around 60,000, I would expect this to be around the same length. At the rate things are going and given how I want to run the entire manuscript through writing group and then have it professionally edited, I would expect this sometime late next year.

Facebook Ads *Avoiding* Kindle Unlimited

In the past I've posted here extensively about my various Facebook ad campaigns. Although Facebook ads moved copies in ways that Amazon ads generally didn't, none of my earlier campaigns made a profit. The closest I ever came was making $43 royalties on $50 spend. Although there were times money from con sales or random hand sales could cover those costs, COVID-19 means a lot fewer conventions and those remaining are a lot smaller.

However, in early August I wondered if my ads might've been flawed--in order to make it clear that I was selling e-books (i.e. I didn't want people thinking the book I was selling was a video game, then costing me money by clicking and deciding not to buy) and attracting people with the magical word "free," I emphasized the book was "free on Kindle Unlimited." This meant thousands of Kindle Unlimited page-views per month, but at slightly under half a cent per page read, this came out to $4.80 per 1,000 pages read--aka not much even if I got thousands of page-reads (and believe me I did). Even though I made outright sales, no combination of sales and KU page-reads covered the costs. This applied even when I released The Atlanta Incursion, the sequel to The Thing in the Woods and advertised Thing in hopes people would buy it and then move onto the next book. Furthermore, based on my experience KU readers seem less likely to review than people who made full purchases and I was in severe need of reviews, especially for TAI.

So I created a new $100 Facebook ad for Thing with ad copy stating it was "available in e-book and print" rather than "free on Kindle Unlimited." Based on advice from a Facebook ad consultant (buy enough ads and they'll start wanting to call you to chat), I was also sure to include "engaged shoppers" as a behavioral characteristic--per the consultant these were people who are more likely to buy things. I also made sure to max out the spend at $5 per day, which is a recommendation I got from Help My Facebook Ads Suck, meaning an ad campaign running from 8/8 to 8/28.

The first day went pretty well. I sold two e-books of Thing and one e-book of TAI for a $6.18 royalties gross on $3.91 ad spend for a net of $2.27. There were also a few Kindle Unlimited page-reads, but we're talking less than a dollar. The sale of TAI took a little effort on my part--one person who commented on the Thing ad said he'd like to see the back-story for the titular monstrosity and I told him it would be in TAI, which was now available. He was glad to see it and bought it. I made another such sale on 8/10 (in which I suggested making a two-for-one series buy), so let that be a lesson--engage your fans on the Facebook posts. :)

Of course, one good day doesn't make a profitable campaign or a wise strategy, so I watched and I waited. Even after the campaign formally ended, I held off on commenting for a few days in order for the last Kindle Unlimited reads to come in and see if any sales came off the shares of the boosted post (there were 12 shares).

As of morning 8/29 when the post was no longer boosted, Thing and TAI between them had nine e-book sales and one paperback sale for Thing (per Amazon for royalties of $21.28) and five e-book sales for TAI ($10.30 royalties) during the advertising period. No additional sales were made for either book on 8/29, but the day did feature nearly 400 KU pages read for Thing. The Kindle Unlimited revenue for Thing in this period as $21.83 (a little over 4,500 page-views) and for TAI was approximately $3.55 (739 page-views). Overall, the ad campaign generated $56.96, $59.02 if one counts a Thing sale made 9/1 that might've been from a shared post. There's actually a decent amount of read-through from Thing to TAI in terms of purchases, but not nearly as much in KU. Also got one new review for Thing from one of the people I engaged with on Facebook, but no TAI--that's later on her reading list.

Ironically in July I had 19 Thing sales and 3,167 KU pages read, with a Facebook ad emphasizing Kindle Unlimited. There were nine TAI sales and 1,071 KU pages read (although this is skewed by the fact the book premiered in July), but even with those the ad didn't cover its costs. And this new ad ran for much longer at a lower cost per-day. I'm thinking that emphasizing free on KU might be a good idea, not a bad one. However, I also suspect I'm reaching the point of diminishing returns, even if one treats advertising as a loss-leader rather than something that should pay for itself each and every time.

(Bad idea--Samhain Publishing at one point had a banner ad in Times Square advertising to millions who'd never buy their books when that same money advertising in genre magazines would've been much more useful.)

However, before I decide on no more Facebook ads (at least until the third and perhaps fourth "Long War" books are done for more series read-through), there are more avenues I have yet to explore.

Firstly, as part of a multi-author promotion, I have set Thing to $0.99 from 9/2 to 9/7. I could advertise that on Facebook, hoping that the fact there's a sale generates more interest and that KU reads and read-through into TAI compensates for the greatly reduced royalties (35% on anything below $2.99 but 67% on $2.99 to $9.99). After all, I advertised Battle For The Wastelands when it was free as a COVID morale-booster and moved not only 250 free copies but at least some KU reads from people who didn't want to have the book permanently. And I got some reviews on Goodreads and perhaps on Amazon, something that TAI in particular needs. With the Augusta Toy and Comic Show coming up this weekend (Sept. 5-6) and the Next Chapter Con Sept. 19, I can afford another loss-leading ad.

Secondly, one of my reviewers (I can't remember whom) suggested that one really didn't need to read Thing to enjoy TAI. In late July after the presumed premiere boost wore out, I'd spent $100 on a Facebook ad selling TAI to fans of the Lovecraftian role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, horror fiction, and e-books (that didn't cover its costs and didn't even generate that many clicks for that matter), but blogger Matt Stienberg explicitly compared TAI to the X-Com game series. Given the focus on the Gray aliens on the cover art and throughout the book, X-Com fans might be a better target market for TAI on its own. Thing is, so long as TAI doesn't have any Amazon reviews, that might be quite a risk even if I emphasize that magical word "free" and use the KU ad copy.

Thirdly, I could send people to the Amazon series page showing off Thing and TAI together. That might be better to wait until I have more books, since a two-book series isn't exactly impressive.

Another alternative is to continue advertising but not spend so much money. Although the longer ad campaigns made more sales and grossed more, they also lost more money. Meanwhile, the $50 ad buy came within $7 of breaking even, and that was pushing Thing without TAI.

We'll see. I'll need to make a quick decision if I want to push the $0.99 campaign.

My First #Booktube Videos

One of my strategies for promoting my "Long War" science fiction/horror series--The Thing in the Woods and The Atlanta Incursion thus far--was querying #booktube for people to do review videos about the books. I queried several YouTube book enthusiasts and the first to agree was Books of Blood.

Here's the video he did on Thing:



Here's the review he did on The Atlanta Incursion, which he liked better.



I also queried about my "Dark Tower meets Game of Thrones" indie novel Battle for the Wastelands. The #booktuber Mindy's Book Journey agreed to take a look, and here it is.



I've queried a lot more #booktubers since then, so let's hope this strategy continues to bear fruit.

THE ATLANTA INCURSION, Sequel to THE THING IN THE WOODS, Is Here!

Nearly two years after I completed and submitted it for publication, The Atlanta Incursion, the more science fiction-oriented sequel to my debut horror novel The Thing in the Woods, is now available for purchase. As of the time of this writing, the e-book and paperback have not yet linked--if you prefer your books physical, here is the paperback version.

Thing stood on its own, but the way my imagination works, I soon started devising new adventures for the characters that survived what went down in small-town Edington, GA. Before the cult of the ancient tentacle god got involved, male lead James Daly was planning on going to Georgia State University to get his core curriculum done in preparation to transfer to his parents' alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, while female lead Amber Webb was heading for Valdosta State University to double major in PR and theater.

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Although both survived, neither survived unscathed. James in particular is afflicted by insomnia and post-traumatic stress, while Amber, though less overtly traumatized, blames herself for the death of her distant in-law Sam Dixon. Furthermore, both of them are now dating--Amber had been crushing on him before and although James would grudgingly admit liking her too, he'd thought he could do better in college. Owing to their shared battle against the titular monster and its worshipers, things changed. Although Atlanta-Valdosta is not much as far as long-distance relationships go, things are going to get interesting when James finishes his core curriculum.

And this new adventure brings us additional characters. We'll meet James' close friend Eli, who's mentioned in Thing, as well as completely new Javion Jackson. When I wrote the book in 2016-2018, #Occupy and #BLM were things that had apparently come and gone (Thing and TAI both take place in 2010), but recent events dramatically revived the latter and the concerns raised by the former never really went away. As the book takes place during the lead-up to these social movements, those two characters in particular reflect them.

And shout-out to Armand Rosamilia. Not only did he produce a podcast episode discussing Thing, but he also provided an author blurb for TAI.

"Another topnotch monstrous tale. I loved the first one and this is even better!"

THE ATLANTA INCURSION Cover Art Phase #1 and Phase #2

Although my first novel The Thing in the Woods stands on its own, most of my ideas for standalone stories tend to sprout sequels. Thing is no different. I've been working on its sequel, The Atlanta Incursion, for several years now and I intend to independently publish it in the next few weeks. The complicating factors are that I'm independently republishing Thing due to changes at the publisher and waiting for the cover art to be done so I can have a full cover designed. Only after that can the print and e-book be created.

In the meantime, here's the first phase of the cover by Matthew Cowdery:

And here's the second:

I sent him some clarifications about what the Grays' eyes, guns, stargate, and other technologies should look like and he's working on them now. If you want an idea of what the finished cover will look like, here's some previous work he's done for me:

Battle for the Wastelands

"Son of Grendel" (forthcoming)

Second full novel (tentative title "Serpent Sword")

Digital Fiction Publishing's Great December 2018 Publishing Binge

As most of you all know, I have a Lovecraftian horror novel out called The Thing in the Woods through a small press called Digital Fiction Publishing, which has also published (or re-published) many of my short stories. Late last year I sent them the sequel, The Atlanta Incursion. Although I haven't gotten an official yes or no on it, the boss did like the stock art I sent him to use for the cover, so I'm optimistic. There's not really a regular release schedule, but last December the company went on a binge. Six books, more if you count the fact that a whole series got released (or re-released).

(In the interest of full disclosure, the company operates on a revenue-sharing pool, so I benefit whenever somebody purchases one of these. That said, I haven't read any of them yet, so I'm not slanting things one way or the other.)

The Invisible City by Brian K. Lowe: This is the first in a series of three books--the whole series was ultimately released by DFP and you can get the whole box set here. Basically in a future where humanity has been conquered by aliens, a man ends up getting transported one million years into the future. As one might expect, trouble ensues. Several of the reviews compare it to the John Carter books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, although I haven't had the chance to read it.

Home by Carson Buckingham: A woman inherits a farmhouse and upon taking possession of it, begins to mutate. And things seem to get weirder from there. I haven't read it, but based on the reviews there's a good bit of Irish mythology in there (perhaps in the vein of Raymond Feist's Faerie Tale, which is a pretty good book) and one of the reviewers even puts it on the same level as Stephen King.

Disappearance by Trevor Zaple: The Rapture (or something very similar) happens, but instead of a Christian end-times scenario coming to pass, instead we end up with the remaining powerful people o the pre-apocalypse world fighting over the remains. Shades of Avengers Endgame perhaps? It looks a bit more like Dean Koontz's The Taking, if the aftermath was the main focus rather than the apocalypse itself.

Invasion at Bald Eagle by Kris Ashton: Hippies! A sex cult! An alien invasion! This book has it all, and it sounds like a comedy. Once I clear out my KU library (more on that below), I think I'll definitely check this one out.

The Evil in the Tower by Debra Robinson: Ghost stories, possessions, and a lengthy feud between two families. Haunted-house stories aren't my cup of tea usually, but it does have a good-looking cover. I'm getting a bit of a Crimson Peak vibe off the whole thing.

Samurai by Timothy Manley: I've read the beginning of this one. It looks begins like an alien-invasion novel from the perspective of a Native American-level civilization encountering a spacefaring society, but based on the cover art and broader description it seems like a space opera. I'm reminded of the novel Scythian Dawn, which features extraterrestrials deliberately preventing the development of urban civilization on Earth...until some steppe hordes manage to steal one of their ships. :)

I've got a Kindle Unlimited account so I can read these novels without buying them outright, but KU only lets you borrow ten books at a time and I've got 10 already. One of the ten is Powerlines, another monster-in-the-woods story that's also from DFP. I'll definitely check some of these out when I have more time, especially Invasion at Bald Eagle.

Giving Gun Shows Another Spin This April

Last May, I attended one of the Eastman gun shows in Gwinnett County to sell books. Although I sold fourteen print copies of The Thing in the Woods and seven print copies of The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Vol. 2 (and likely sold at least some e-books with my cards), I didn't make too much profit owing to the high costs of the table, underpricing the books for lack of small bills, and not yet knowing how to best attract people to my table. I also wasn't yet aware of the importance of getting e-mails for the mailing list, reducing my long-term profit opportunities from the event. I decided to lay off gun shows until Little People, Big Guns (more obviously a "gun book" with the cover and repeated reference to "Stand Your Ground" laws) or The Atlanta Incursion (the sequel to Thing that people might buy with it) was published and focus on science fiction conventions in the meantime based on the $160 profit I made at The Atlanta Sci-Fi and Fantasy Expo the previous March.

However, after ordering a lot of books to ensure I was adequately stocked for a planned summer of sales, I found myself with many books and a lot fewer venues than I'd anticipated. Although I'm definitely going to the Northwest Georgia Comic Book and Collectible Toy Expo, I'm on the waiting list for Augusta Toy and Comic Show and the "standby list" for the Atlanta Comic-Con (where I made an absolute killing last year and was hoping to sell lots this year) and I don't know when the next Atlanta Comic Convention (where I made a decent profit last December splitting the table with Robert Jeffrey) will be. I intend to work shifts with the Atlanta Horror Writers of America chapter and the Atlanta Writers Club at the Decatur Book Festival Labor Day weekend and I've queried MultiverseCon and am considering Monsterama, but those are farther out. Based on how people at this year's Atlanta Sci-Fi and Fantasy Expo remembered me from the last convention and how I didn't make as much money as I anticipated, I'm worried that I might be "tapping out" the Atlanta SF/F/H crowd with Thing and HFQ.

(Little People, Big Guns won't be released by Deadite Press until November 15 and I doubt I'll get Blood on the Border done over the summer like I planned. And only two books doesn't really justify out of state travel--I lost money on last year's Lizard-Man Festival and that was with convenient relatives to crash with. Although I'd probably have better luck with events in big cities like Charleston and Columbia, I'm a high school teacher and most of the South Carolina events seem to be during the school year. The Soda City Comic-Con might work, since it's close to relatives I can stay with and it's before the school year starts and it seems to be a much bigger deal attendance-wise than the Lizard-Man Festival.)

So I've decided to give gun shows another spin, taking into account the reasons I didn't make much money the last time. I'm going to the Gem Capitol show in the last weekend in April that's got cheaper tables than the Gwinnett show. I'm also splitting the already lower cost with T.S. Dann, who is a gun enthusiast and an artist with lots to display in addition to being a writer. I'm going to make sure to have lots of small bills to make change and try to be more engaging with passers-by like I was at Atlanta Comic-Con. I'm also going to collect e-mail addresses this time, to build my fan-base much like Larry Correia did. Even if I sell the exact same number of books as last time, I'll make significantly more profit due to lower costs and a higher per-unit price. I'm feeling a bit more optimistic and less naive this time. :)

If this works out, there are plenty more gun shows in metro Atlanta and Georgia this year. Eastman is having events in Marietta/Cobb in later June, July, and December. And if it doesn't work out, then it's back to the original plan of waiting for LPBG and TAI so I've got more to sell.

After-Action Report: Days of the Dead Atlanta, 2019

The weekend of January 25 to January 27, I attended the Days of the Dead Atlanta horror convention at the Sheraton Atlanta Hotel in Atlanta, GA, splitting a table with fellow dark fiction author T.S. Dann. I sold 24 copies of The Thing in the Woods and six copies of The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Vol. 2. After running all of my expenses (costs of the table, per-unit book costs, snacks, a Lyft ride) and gross revenue, I made around $180 profit. In terms of single-event profitability, this one places second to the Atlanta Comic-Con in July 2017 and ahead of the Atlanta Sci-Fi and Fantasy Expo I attended in March 2017. This one is a definite go-back, especially once my upcoming horror-comedy Little People, Big Guns is released by Deadite Press in November 2019.

(Considering how there aren't a lot of conventions in December and I've got a lot of RL obligations that month, if Days of the Dead Atlanta 2020 is in January that might be the first event where I sell LBPG.)

In addition to earning money, I also got 31 e-mails for my mailing list, which will come in handy when my military sci-fi novel Blood on the Border, the slightly more science-fiction oriented Thing sequel The Atlanta Incursion, and LPBG come out.

(Only LPBG has a definite release date--Blood will be published independently hopefully sometime over the summer and I haven't heard back from the publisher yet on TAI. However, I've got high hopes for them all.)

Based on attending this convention and previous events, here's my advice for aspiring authors:

*Always split the table at a convention if you can. One reason that I made so much profit (as opposed to just gross revenue, although that too was pretty high) at Atlanta Comic-Con was because I split the table with C.S. Johnson. The table cost at Days of the Dead was high, but fortunately Dann was able to shoulder half of it. If he hadn't been able to attend, I would have barely recovered my expenses--and that doesn't take it into account that some people who came over to check his stuff out ultimately bought some of my stuff instead or as well.

*Take the time to network. I met Jeff Strand and his wife artist Lynne Hansen as well as John Wayne Comunale there. The Strands informed me there's a Horror Writers Association chapter that just formed in Atlanta that, in addition to networking opportunities at meetings, intends to set up a table members can sell from at the Decatur Book Festival. Considering how I sold a fair number of copies at the DBF at the Atlanta Writers' Club booth, another table someone else is paying for that I can put shifts in sounds awesome.

*Have more than one product to sell if possible. 20% of my profit for the event came from the Heroic Fantasy Quarterly anthology, which wasn't yet published when I had my first book signings and convention appearances. As I publish more and more books, I anticipate my revenues will rise. Someone who isn't interested in the Lovecraft-type horror of Thing might like the Dungeons and Dragons and/or Conan the Barbarian type stories in the Heroic Fantasy Quarterly anthology or the ridiculousness and Crosses The Line Twice of LPBG.

*Always bring your lunch. Leaving the table to get food will not only cost you potential sales (since you're not at the table to sell to passers-by), but you'll spend money on the food. Getting a sandwich from the hotel Starbucks at the Atlanta Comic Convention in December 2017 cost me $6.50, equivalent to the profit of selling one copy of The Best of Fantasy Quarterly Vol. 2. I'm not recommending being a total cheapskate, especially if there's something new and good to eat at the convention, but remember everything has a cost.

*Always have lots of bookmarks and other swag to hand out. I handed out hundreds of VistaPrint large-size cards (that can be used as bookmarks) that Digital Fiction Publishing designed for me. This cards have a QR Code linking to a page with links to the various places my fiction is available online. People who weren't able to purchase my books at the convention will be able to do so using the QR code on the card--and be able to purchase other short stories, novellas, etc. that simply don't exist in print form. Even if they don't know how to use QR codes or simply don't bother with them, the card has the title, author, publisher, etc. and can remind them to look it up. Handing out the cards could generate additional sales for me for days, possibly weeks, afterward.

2018 Accomplishments and 2019 Goals

I've taken a page from fellow blogger and writer Matt Stienberg and decided to post about what I accomplished in 2018 and what I intend to do during 2019.

So let's start with what I've done:

*I sold my bizarro comedy-horror novella Little People, Big Guns, which is slated for publication sometime in 2019. I owe the success for this one to my father Terry Quinn, who through a client learned that the 2015 World Horror Convention in Atlanta needed volunteers, and Anya Martin, who actually arranged for me to become a volunteer. Volunteering gained me access to a pitch session, where I pitched the concept to Jeff Burk, who thought it was hilarious. Once I expanded and revised the novella, I sent it to Mr. Burk when Deadite Press re-opened to submissions and voila!

*I learned more deeply the importance of conventions and what the most profitable ones would be. I sold an entire print run of thirty copies of The Thing in the Woods at the Atlanta Sci-Fi and Fantasy Expo in March for a little over $155 profit, in July profited nearly $400 thanks to splitting a table at The Atlanta Comic-Con with C.S. Johnson, and made roughly $100 profit splitting a table at the quarterly Atlanta Comic Convention in December with Robert Jeffrey. In contrast, I straight-up lost money on a fall festival in Snellville, the emerging authors' tent at the Decatur Book Festival, and a twofer book signing and small-town comic-con in Augusta, GA and Bishopville, SC respectively over the summer and made only a nominal profit on a gun show in May.

(I would have probably made more money at the gun show if I had more cash to make change--many patrons of the gun show didn't want to use their credit cards, I'm assuming for privacy reasons, and so I had to underprice--and if I had a more explicitly gun-focused product. Given the success of Larry Correia selling books on the gun circuit, I'll probably give gun shows another spin once Little People, Big Guns is ready and especially once Thing sequel The Atlanta Incursion is available.)

*Speaking of The Atlanta Incursion, I finished that and submitted it at the end of September. Hopefully that'll be accepted and published sometime in 2019. I can't speak for the publisher, but he did seem interested and I'm one of his more aggressive sellers.

*I started writing Blood on the Border, the first work of fiction set in my Federated Worlds universe. This is a project I intend to go full independent on, and it'll hopefully open the door to making lots of money at more explicitly science-fiction conventions like Treklanta and SphinxCon.

Now, onto my goals for 2019:

*Make a killing (heh) at the Atlanta Days of the Dead, which I will be attending with T.S. Dann at the end of January. I still have between 60 and 100 copies of Thing and a few copies of The Best of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Vol. 2 and this is a horror-focused event, so this has the potential to be extremely lucrative.

*Finish Blood, run it through writing group, and get paperback editions available for Treklanta and SphinxCon. Assuming SphinxCon is the same time as it was last year (early November) that won't be a problem, but Treklanta is Memorial Day Weekend. That could be the tricky part. Treklanta might not be as lucrative as I'm hoping because FW is intended to be a critique of Star Trek in some ways--rather than "we don't have money in the 24th Century," it's an automated economy where most people don't need to work and one species' equivalent to Surak is more like Josef Stalin than Jesus Christ--but SphinxCon is a general military SF/fantasy convention.

*Continue with the comic conventions. The Atlanta Comic Convention is quarterly, while the big Atlanta Comic-Con is slated to return as well. I've done pretty well at these and once I have a greater variety of products to sell, I anticipate things will be even better. Having a table partner is particularly important, especially for the pricey conventions like Atlanta Comic-Con and Days of the Dead.

*The Decatur Book Festival has many other options besides the emerging-author tent, such as the Atlanta Writers' Club booth. I'll definitely sign up for a slot there with the AWC again.

*Assuming TAI is accepted and published sometime this year, I will begin working more intensely on the third book, The Walking Worm, which is more akin to the small-town Southern horror of Thing as opposed to the MIB/UFO stuff that TAI introduces. To make an X-Files analogy, TWW is more "monster of the week" while TAI introduces an overarching mythos. Not sure if I can get that manuscript done and submitted in 2019 given how I don't even have a full outline, but if I can keep my focus anything's possible.

*Battle for the Wastelands has been under consideration by a major publisher for some time, but they don't want it, it's time to self-publish. I have a prequel novella "Son of Grendel" centered on the villain's son already written and a prequel novella "Ruled in Rage" focused on the villain himself as a youth partially written. If I finish "Rage" I could put out Battle first and on the 90 and 180 day mark after that put out a novella. I don't have a lot of the second Wastelands book Escape written yet, which could be a problem.

Visit Where Your Story Takes Place, Or Why Google Maps Isn't Everything

I spent most of Saturday 12/26 (Boxing Day for you Commonwealth types) taking MARTA around Atlanta to do some research for two of my writing projects.

The first project is a short story entitled "Actions Have Consequences," which will feature my supervillain protagonist Andrew Patel. It will be part of a collection featuring "Ubermensch," which introduces him and his nemesis Silverbolt, the second story "Needs Must," and a fourth, "New Friends, Old Enemies."  The second is a novel entitled The Atlanta Incursion, the sequel to the teen Lovecraftian novel The Thing in the Woods I'm currently shopping around.

"Actions" features some gang members pursuing Patel around Atlanta. The action starts in East Point, so I took the train down after eating lunch at Peachtree Center. I soon realized the limitations of Google Maps--although I had used it to map out some buildings, I soon realized I'd gotten a lot of the detail wrong. Downtown East Point is more spread out, much more like Griffin, the town where I had my first newspaper job, than Atlanta or another larger city. It would be difficult for Patel to run down an would-be assassin without too many inconvenient witnesses. Fortunately there's an area that's built up enough for the scene to work, so I was able to get away with just tweaking it a bit. I also discovered the big pedestrian bridge over the railroad tracks connecting downtown to an industrial or ex-industrial site, which I'll work in there somehow.

I later took the train over to the East Lake MARTA station, where I planned to have Patel and a friend make a long run down Howard Avenue for downtown Decatur after the train is delayed. I found the station sat squarely in the middle of a bunch of single-family homes and was well-attended by MARTA police. It's also right by the city of Decatur's water tower. That whole area is not going to be having gang shoot-outs, at least not ones that don't get squashed immediately. I thought about having the final confrontation take place around the King Memorial MARTA station instead, but the whole area is surrounded by lots of brand-new apartments. That's not the kind of place where gun battles are going to be allowed to happen either. I'll need to think about how to deal with that.

For The Atlanta Incursion, the protagonist is a student at Georgia State University. I found via Google Maps there was an apartment complex near the Garnett MARTA station one stop south of Five Points, the station I got off at when I was a student at GSU. So I (briefly) stopped at Garnett. The station is jammed down amid taller buildings and I couldn't find any apartments. There's the Atlanta jail, some courthouses and police buildings, and a lot of people loitering around. I don't think anybody actually lives there. And a lot of the buildings are run down. Probably most students--especially my protagonist--wouldn't really want to live there even if there were student housing available.

As a result, I needed to make some fixes. One fix was pretty simple--just change where the character was going when he had a PTSD episode. The other fix required changing a scene more substantially--instead of taking the train from Five Points to Garnett, he's walking through campus.

So let this be a lesson in writing research for you. If you're writing about real-life places and you're able to visit them, do so. You might avoid some obvious missteps.

January 2015 Writing Contest Results

January 2015 was another iteration of my writing contest. I ended up writing 3,230 words on various fictional projects. Now that I'm starting the last phase of graduate school (the last classes and various exams), I doubt I'll be doing any more writing bets with friends until possibly this summer. So this'll be your last monthly update as to what I'm working on for awhile.

*Most of the words went into bringing The Thing in the Woods up to 56,000 words. That's at the low end of the right length for a young-adult novel. I've begun querying agents again, since it turns out there won't be an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest this year. Mostly just dribs and drabs of content, since the really big stuff went into the text in December.

*I also added a few hundred words to The Atlanta Incursion, the more UFO-centric sequel to The Thing in the Woods. I basically went through the entire text as written and added a little bit here and there. In the near future I'll need to do some research and go to the Videodrome in Virginia Highlands--the last in-town video rental store. A pity I don't live near it. :(

*I added a few hundred words to my near-future hard(ish) SF space-war tale The Cybele Incident. It's still around a third finished approximately.

*Also added a few hundred words to my two additional short stories featuring supervillain protagonist Andrew Patel (who has appeared in two earlier stories, Übermensch and Needs Must).The plan at present is to release an omnibus on Amazon containing all four stories--Alex Claw has already done a cover--that will be the only place one will be able to get the two remaining tales.

*Finally added a little bit to Battle for the Wastelands based on my reading of the history book River of Dark Dreams about the settlement of the antebellum Mississippi Valley. The Flesh-Eater regime just got a little bit more dystopian, although we won't actually see the details under the second book.

December 2014 Writing Contest: The Results

The revival of my earlier writing bets with a couple friends is now in its second month, so it's time to update you on how the first month went.

In the first month, I wrote 3,838 words of fiction. This doesn't compare well with a previous December in which I wrote just under 12,000 words, but I can plead extenuating circumstances. I was editing a novel for a client, which will be available on Amazon sometime soon. Between that and the end of an editorial internship I had with a magazine company, I had significantly less writing time than in 2013, but I made more money. :)

Here is what I did accomplish:

*Although I only finished bulking up The Thing in the Woods in preparation for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award this morning, I got much of the work done over December. One of the better critiques I'd received from my writing group is that a character introduced at the end of the novel in the first draft should have been introduced earlier. The technical term for this is a Chekhov's Gun--if you see a gun in the first act, it had better be fired in the third, or don't include it. In this case, it was the reverse. I plugged the scene introducing him (part of which I wrote in November and part in December) around two-thirds into the book and had his earlier appearance play a role in driving events toward their climax. He's going to play a much bigger role in the sequel, The Atlanta Incursion, so this will help set him up for that.

*I finished and then after writing-group critique heavily revised a chapter in my new novel project. I'm keeping this one more quiet until it's finished so I won't go into a lot of detail but now I've got four complete chapters. I've plotted out a fair bit more and this project plays to my strengths (imaginative situations, world-building) rather than my weaknesses (characterization), so I have high hopes for it.

*Little People, Big Guns got the short end of the stick, I'm afraid. Just under 200 words written. This is something I thought I'd be able to finish quickly. I start class again Monday, but maybe I'll be able to do more this month.

*Added a link to the sequel Needs Must to the "back matter" of Übermensch, my supervillain-protagonist short story. For independently-published authors, "back matter" is something quite useful to have. That's your chance to link people to related projects, encourage them to leave reviews, etc. Hopefully this will lead to more sales for "Needs Must," especially during periods where I give "Ubermensch" away for free.

May 2014 Writing Contest Results

Here're the results of my writing bet with my friend Robert for May 2014:

*For The Atlanta Incursion, the sequel to The Thing in the Woods, 3,740 words. I imagine I wrote somewhat more, since I'd thought the bet had lapsed and wasn't careful during the first week. I ended up accounting for this by putting 2,500 words under "various." I took the prologue to my writing group that meets in Lawrenceville and got some good feedback there, including advice on how to expand the section to make it more action-packed. The expanded prologue gave me some direction on the military technology of the antagonists, so that was very helpful. I'm bringing the first chapter before the Lawrenceville group today

*For The Thing in the Woods, 3,357 words at least. The goal is to get it as close to 60,000 words as possible, since many publishers will only put out a print edition if it's that long at minimum. My friend Nick suggested that if Thing and The Atlanta Incursion were both short, they could be combined into a single print edition. There's precedent for this--the Warhammer 40,000 Space Wolf and Chaos Marine omnibuses consist of several short novels glued together into one larger one, and of course there's The Lord of the Rings. Still, if each can be a standalone print novel (albeit a shorter one), that'd be even better than two short e-books and one long print book. My plan is to have it ready for sending to agents before I start taking summer classes at Georgia State and since these classes don't start until the second week of June, that's still doable. The plan is to write three new scenes--all of which have useful character-development purposes--early this week and then send it to the first four prospective agents I've picked out.

*Nick also put together a summer writing bet with the goal of writing a short story per week. Between work on my novels and graduate school participating every single week is going to be tricky, but I used the bet to light a fire under myself to write the first new short story in months if not over a year. I was inspired by this anthology call to write a dieselpunk story, in particular one set outside the Western world. And so in around five days I wrote a 3,230-word story entitled "Man of Iron, Rising Sun" set in the aftermath of the Battle of Nanking involving diesel-fueled powered armor. Nick might want to do something with the different stories at the end of the summer and the anthology won't send out acceptances and rejections until after the August deadline. In the meantime I'll cycle the story through my writing groups and send it to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (noted for its weeklong response time).

*For The War of 2512, 1,372 words. In an earlier blog post I referenced consolidating a short story into the novel and ending up with a new POV character, so now I've got more things for him to do. I have long-run plans for the character (a very long-lived genetically-engineered starship pilot), so I've gotten him involved in a bit of political intrigue.

*The rest of the word count comprises various other projects, including one I'm rewriting from the ground up. Life lesson: Don't delete an entire project unless you're absolutely certain you won't go back to it--and then think carefully, because even if you're absolutely certain, you can change your mind. The current version has a somewhat different emphasis that makes for a better work, but I had to rewrite many scenes I'd have been better off keeping in the first place. I also made a bunch of edits to Battle for the Wastelands before sending it out to several agents over the last month, which accounted for just under 500 words.

Writing Update (Some Very Good News)

Here's an update on my writing:

*I submitted an anthology of ten stories to my friend James R. Tuck, who is going to help me make it into a Kindle (and CreateSpace, for print) collection. In particular he's going to do the cover art and given his day job as a tattoo artist (and the good art he did for the cover of his Special Features collection), it's going to be good. Not sure when it's going to be available, but when it is, believe me you'll hear about it. Most of the stories in it have been previously published in print or online, but there are three all-new stories for your enjoyment. The title is Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire: Ten Tales of Valor and Imagination and I could easily imagine a future collection with a title like Flashing Steel 2 if this does well. :)

*An agent who rejected Battle for the Wastelands said she'd take another look at if I "tightened" it. At the time I thought she meant it had to be shorter, but a mutual friend clarified that there were characters that were interchangeable and scenes that were "dead." I didn't know how to handle the latter, but I knew from experience revising and finally selling "Nicor" how to differentiate secondary characters. I did this with some characters in the first three chapters and I'll go over the rest of the manuscript with an eye for this soon. I sent the updated submission package last night. Fingers crossed.

*Speaking of Battle for the Wastelands, I had the idea for some major changes for the storyline of Catalina Merrill, the major female POV character. The changes that had to be made for Battle weren't significant, but the events of Battle for the Wastelands: Escape (the second book) through the fourth book are going to look rather different.

*I started a short story entitled "Packmaster" set in the space-opera universe of The War of 2512, which will be the first in a multi-generational saga I've called "James Michener IN SPAACE." I wrote 3,000-odd words of it before it suddenly mutated into the second, fourth, and possibly fifth chapters of War. Originally protagonist Captain Aldo Singh was the sole POV character, but now Arban Andreas Macrynikola, pilot of a frigate and commander of a squadron of ten armed drones in service of the warlike Khaganate, gets to tell his side of the story. And I have plans for Mr. Macrynikola, believe me...

*I'd planned to submit "Packmaster" to my writing group this Sunday for critique next Sunday, but that's obviously not going to happen now. It looks like I'll be submitting the prologue of The Atlanta Incursion, the sequel to The Thing in the Woods, since it's the only thing I've got that's ready.

*Speaking of The Thing in the Woods, now I need to revise it based on the suggestions of my writing group. One group member seemed to like it pretty much as it was, but another had major issues with it. Some of his critiques had merit and so I anticipate some major work. The good news is that implementing some of them (he had some "show don't tell" issues) might get it to 60,000 words, the minimum length for some publishers to do a print book.

I don't have class until the first week of June. Let the games begin. :)