I realized I hadn’t done a sales/progress update in six months, so I figured I’d wrap the first half of 2017 into a single post. Kindle Direct Publishing recently overhauled their author dashboard and made a lot of improvements to the way data is handled and displayed. As a result I’ve all but abandoned the[…]
Things have slowed over the last two months, as expected. My Mage Song series is still selling better than any of my other stuff, so no complaints there. I sold 1,200+ books in November and somewhere between 500-600 books in December. So far January has settled a bit further, but Awakener releases at the end[…]
I have been editing for close to three weeks now, and not a day passes where I can’t wait to get back to writing. I’m outlining a new Urban Fantasy series as I edit, and as a result I’ll have the most detailed scaffolding I’ve ever created for the first three books in the series[…]
I am absolutely terrible at keeping up with my blog. This is known. There’s always so much else to be done, I kind of forget about staying up on my progress posts. That’s what this is about though, so let’s dig in. Since my last sales update in December 2015, I’ve written a serial and[…]
The holidays hit hard and didn’t stop this year, so it’s been a while since I’ve posted an update here. I spent almost all of my “author time” these last few months writing, and virtually none of it on editing or marketing. As a result, I now have three complete novels in three different series[…]
I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the Smashwords ‘meatgrinder’ and the difficulty some people have had with it. I came to the self-publishing world from a web design background, but I figure the layperson might benefit from a simplified explanation. I have now published seven books through Smashwords without encountering a single formatting-related issue.[…]
Things slowed down in September, sales-wise. Although my perma-free book, Driftmetal, hung out in the Top 20 of the Steampunk and Cyberpunk categories on Amazon almost all month, sales settled into a trough. On the positive side, Driftmetal IV comes out tomorrow, and the book’s pre-order sales alone will be enough to eclipse all of September’s[…]
It’s been a busy month around here. Lots of writing and book cover design happening. But before we get into that, let’s talk numbers. In August, I had the highest sales of any month so far where I didn’t release a new book or do any advertising whatsoever. I had an 8% read-through rate on[…]
Lots of things going on in my secret little world around here. I’m working on four books (yes, four) at once. Driftmetal III is going through its final round of edits. Meanwhile, I’m already writing the next in the series, Driftmetal IV, as well as the (much longer) second book in the Aionach Saga, Children[…]
If you’re a fiction writer of any kind and you’ve never studied the five levels of communication, you’re missing out on a key concept that could improve your dialogue sequences. Whenever you see a book’s dialogue described as “awkward” or “stilted,” that might be because the author doesn’t understand the basic qualities of their characters’[…]
I am so smitten with technology. After all, it’s the digital medium that has allowed thousands of authors like myself to write and self-publish their works to a waiting audience. April 2nd saw the release of my fourth book at e-retailers everywhere, and so far it’s been my best sales month in which I haven’t[…]
As soon as the 90-day KDP Select period ended for The Shepherd, I threw it on Smashwords for free and sent Amazon a couple of notifications using the “tell us about a lower price” link on the book’s product page. I had heard that price-matching is often more effective when you contact Amazon directly through[…]