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[…]
One of the hardest things I have to do as an author is hold back on announcing the new shiny. Being excited about a set of manuscripts you’ve been sitting on for the better part of a year and having to keep it to yourself is torture. Therefore it is with effervescent pleasure that I[…]
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[…]
Best. Month. Ever. Literally. After selling fewer than a hundred books per month for the first year and a half of my self-publishing career, my latest series has taken off. Lessons learned: it’s important to write well, but it’s just as important to write stuff people want to read. For the fourth month in a[…]
Thank you. Just… thank you. To the thousands (yes, that’s thousands, plural, and I’m still in disbelief) of readers who have picked up one or more of my books. This month, for the first time ever, it has become unwieldy to count my exact unit sales. Suffice it to say my writing income has tripled[…]
I continue to be amazed, astonished, floored, and [insert myriad other adjectival synonyms] about the direction in which things are moving. Amazon-only sales further increased from 344 units in July to 464 in August across all my titles, and now nearly halfway through September it seems sales will surpass that record yet again. In doing[…]
I could not be more pleased with the way things are going. As I mentioned in my last update, Amazon-only unit sales doubled in June from my previous monthly average (143 books in June, compared with 50-80 books per month over the previous several months). Well, in July, sales doubled again. On Amazon alone, people[…]
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 write every day. I’ve been in the habit for a couple of years now, yet I haven’t had a new release since early October. Lately I’ve been so focused on getting new stories down that I haven’t really wanted to stop and edit for any significant period of time. I’ve finished two novels and[…]
I’m a little late posting this one, but October sort of flew by. It was a month of much rejoicing, as Driftmetal IV came out and provided me with a big spike from pre-order sales. Including those, I sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 books in October. I’m not sure off-hand, but I think[…]
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[…]
I really love Google Drive. I love being able to get on any device anywhere, pull up my latest work, and start writing. It isn’t perfect, but it beats just about everything else I’ve found for its feature set, ease of access, and cloud-based data storage. The longer I use it, though, the more I[…]
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’[…]