Folks, I’m delighted to announce that CAUSAL NEXUS, the long-awaited third entry in my series THE UNITY SEQUENCE, is out now! It’s available for Kindle at a special launch price of only $2.99/£1.99 (http://getbook.at/Causal-Nexus) and in paperback (http://getbook.at/Causal-Nexus-Paperback).
To celebrate the launch, and welcome new fans, I’m also running a sale on the Kindle editions of the first two books in the series: from now until September 5th you can get ASCENSION POINT for *free* (http://getbook.at/Ascension-Point) and VENUS RISING for just $0.99/£0.99 (http://getbook.at/Venus-Rising).
To my long-suffering fans: thanks for your patience. And to everyone: happy reading!
Great stuff from the Carnegie Institute of Science, via The Guardian:
An extremely distant dwarf planet, named The Goblin, has been discovered in observations that are redefining the outer reaches of the solar system.
Astronomers made the discovery while hunting for a hypothetical massive planet, known as Planet Nine, that is suspected to be in orbit far beyond Pluto in a mysterious region known as the Oort Cloud. Planet Nine has not yet been seen directly, but The Goblin appears to be under the gravitational influence of a giant unseen object, adding to astronomers’ certainty that it is out there.
The newly discovered icy world, estimated to be just 300km across, is in an extremely elongated orbit. At its closest, it gets about two and a half times as far from the sun as Pluto. Then it heads off to the outermost fringes of the solar system, to almost 60 times further out than Pluto, taking an astounding 40,000 years to loop once around the sun. For 99% of its orbit, it would be too faint to see.
Damn, that’s elongated.
‘Planet Nine’? ‘The Goblin’? When did astronomers get so cool with their names?
“Despite centuries of surveys, our understanding of the solar system remains incomplete,” [Konstantin Batygin, assistant professor of planetary science at Caltech] said. “This certainly adds to the growing ledger of … objects that show Planet Nine’s influence.”
Hmm. There’s definitely a book to be written about THE INFLUENCE OF THE MYSTERIOUS PLANET NINE.
Without further ado, here are the results from the Causal Nexus launch week! As a reminder, the launch plan was essentially this:
On launch day, make Ascension Point free for 5 days, run a concurrent 99¢ Countdown deal on Venus Rising, and advertise both on Ereader News Today.
So how did we do? Here are the results–courtesy of the wonderful BookReport app–for August 31st through September 7th, i.e. Launch Week™:
Highlights:
A whopping 1,500+ giveaways of Ascension Point! I’m delighted by this. That’s a huge number of potential new readers for the series, who will (artistic hat) have a chance to fall in love with the story and (business hat) potentially buy Venus Rising and Causal Nexus.
I’m slightly disappointed by the number of sales of Venus Rising, but there are a few mitigating factors that I can learn from in future:
It’s the awkward middle child in the series, and these are always tougher to promote than a book one with no barrier to entry, or a shiny new launch to existing fans.
The promo was priced at $0.99 rather than free, as KDP Select only allows one free promo per 90-day period and I was using that on Ascension Point. Any price is more of a hurdle compared to a freebie.
I didn’t realize when I booked the promo that it would run on Labor Day. Oops! Fewer book buyers are online on holidays (other than Christmas), so fewer eyeballs on my ad. Lesson learned.
I don’t have much of a mailing list at present, so most sales of Causal Nexus would be to friends and family. Given that, 24 sales ain’t bad.
More interesting in some ways is the period after the promo, where I’m seeing a steady, albeit low-level, stream of continuing borrows and page reads for not just Ascension Point–courtesy of its ranking boost–but the later books in the series. Encouraging stuff!
What’s next? Well, back to writing. Book four isn’t going to outline itself, and the sooner I get it done the sooner I can get back to the really fun part of being an author–marketing!
Just a quick one: as I mentioned in my post on marketing a while ago, for the release of Causal Nexus I decided to come up with an actual, honest-to-God Launch Plan™. Namely:
Delist Ascension Point and Venus Rising from the non-Amazon stores.
Enroll both in KDP Select.
Finish Causal Nexus, upload it to Amazon at a discounted launch price of $2.99 and enroll it in KDP Select.
On launch day, make Ascension Point free for 5 days, run a concurrent 99¢ Countdown deal on Venus Rising, and advertise both on Ereader News Today.
See how it goes!
At some point, revert all three to the usual price of $4.99.
…
Profit?
Excitingly, we’re currently in the midst of step 5, ‘seeing how it goes’, and the signs are very promising! So far I’ve had about 650 downloads of Ascension Point via my Ereader News Today promo, and that’s been good enough to launch the book to the upper reaches of the Alien Invasion and Space Opera charts on the Kindle Store:
Number one with a bullet!Number two with a… slightly slower bullet?
I expect the downloads to begin to tail off later today, at which point Ascension Point will start its slow descent back down the rankings. It’s the pace of that descent that’ll be interesting: the more successful the promo, the ‘stickier’ in the charts the book will be, hence more eyeballs, more sales, more follow-through to Venus Rising and Causal Nexus. I’ve been delighted with how the promo is going so far, so fingers crossed for an extended chart-topping stay!
In other promo news, I’ve also recently started experimenting with advertising, both through Amazon’s own AMS platform and through BookBub ads. More to follow on those once I’ve let them bed in for a few weeks, and had time to draw some conclusions.
CBS announced today that Sir Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Jean Luc-Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation, will be reprising his role in a new series that will explore “the new chapter in Picard’s life.”
Hurrah! I’m a big fan of Star Trek: TNG, and for me Picard will always be the quintessential captain. It’s also intriguing to wonder what the creators of the new show–and Patrick Stewart–will do with the character, with such a long time having (presumably) passed. Will he be a Star Fleet Admiral? Jaded and retired, tending a small vineyard in France? Borg again? (He won’t be Borg.)
Unfortunately the show appears to be coming to CBS All Access, the network’s streaming service that approiximately twelve people have signed up for. Hopefully it’ll prove popular and gets at least reruns on the actual CBS network at some point.
Without getting into tedious detail, it’s been a busy time: Mrs. Dan and I have bought our first home, had several house guests to stay, been on a few of our own trips, and finally got our green cards. Hurrah!
All of which meant Misti’s diligent and insightful edit was left untouched until just last week, when I blew off the metaphorical cobwebs and got to work.
After a scrub, a polish, a fine tune, and the addition of a tantalizing prologue, the new draft is in her inbox, meaning we’re looking at an August publication. Double hurrah!
Stay tuned, for I will return–and not in four months.
Season two of the brain-twisting, whiskey-drinking, robot-sexing HBO series arrives in just a few weeks, and the first full trailer has just landed.
How exciting!
If you missed season one last year, there’s still plenty of time to binge the ten episodes. Going through them at pace might actually be the optimum way to watch, as I found the middle part of the season dragged at times as storylines were slowly developed and pieces moved into place. The final few episodes were tremendous, though, and I highly recommend it overall.
…a completely chronological re-edit of the whole show, based on the timeline which was eventually revealed in the final episodes. That’s right, a very troubled member of the staff (we’re getting him help) recut 10 hours of content into one continuous, rearranged masterpiece (we removed intros and credits for the sake of time). So we thought we’d share it with you — or at least, share a remotely digestible version. What you see below is the full cut, with the “normal” parts of Westworld sped up… because honestly who has another 10 hours of their lives to spare?
Madness. But, at a brisk 94-minutes, it’s an efficient way to remind yourself what happened to Bernard and Dolores.
“Everything in this world is magic, except to the magician.”
Gross, right? Well, it depends. Sleazy popup ads using scantily clad women to trick you into downloading a tedious castle building game? Absolutely.
Shameless, I tell you.
But trying to put a product you’re proud of in front of an audience that you think would enjoy it? Seems… reasonable.
Up to now I’ve been treating writing as a hobby, by and large. Don’t get me wrong, I do my very best to produce high-quality novels: I work on my craft, I edit thoroughly, I use beta readers, I employ a professional editor and cover designer, and I use the best available software to produce a well-formatted and professional-looking final product that I can be proud of when I hit the ‘Publish’ button and see my books go live.
Then I squawk happily about it to you–the fine readers of this site–along with my friends and family, and…
That’s about it.
Not so professional.
The reason is pretty simple: right now, I’m not actively trying to be a full-time writer. I’m a full-time customer support manager for a telecoms software company who, in his spare time, channels his wildly overactive imagination into writing action-packed, mildly amusing and not-terribly-scientific science fiction novels.
But long term? Sure, that’s the dream. And I (think I) broadly know how you go about getting there.
Write a lot of good books. The more you have, the more chance readers have of discovering you (then buying all your other books).
‘Do marketing’.
Hmm. Maybe I don’t know. It’s that second part which is a bit of a black art. Luckily, there are a whole bunch of friendly, helpful and successful indie author-publishers who are willing to share their expertise and experience, and chief among these is the author of the excellent Let’s Get Digital: How to Self-Publish, and Why You Should, David Gaughran.
Snazzy.
With the imminent publication of Causal Nexus, I’ve been doing some reading and thinking about the whole launch process, what I might try to achieve, and how there’s no time like the present to start getting the hang of the part of being an indie author-publisher that I’ve been completely ignoring.
All this pondering naturally led me to David’s site, and two articles in particular.
In ‘A Tale of Two Marketing Systems’, David discusses the always contentious (among indies) topic of ‘wide or exclusive’. Which will mean nothing to most readers, but in essence means deciding whether to publish your work at all available retailers–Amazon, B&N, Kobo, iTunes, etc.–or enrolling your work in Amazon’s KDP Select program, which requires you to make the ebook edition exclusive to Amazon in exchange for some tasty benefits:
Every 90 days you can run special promotional deals to either make a book free for five days, or discounted for seven–which, in theory, leads to a boost in downloads, a shot up the charts, and bigger sales when the price reverts to normal.
The obvious downside is that any readers who prefer to get their ebooks from non-Zon retailers are out of luck. At least until you unenroll that book from KDP Select and ‘go wide’ again, which can be done after any 90-day period.
In that post David links back to another article of his, ‘The Visibility Gambit’, which digs into the gritty details of how indies these days might go about maximizing the benefits of being enrolled in KDP Select. The key chunk–for me, at least–of which was this:
A more complex example: let’s say you are launching Book 4 in a KU-enrolled series, and are wondering how to build a decent launch. A good approach might be to make Book 1 free for 5 days, and run a concurrent 99¢ Countdown deal on Book 2, and a $1.99 Countdown on Book 3. Maybe load all the ads on sites like ENT and Robin Reads on that free Book 1 and then give the whole series a push with a carousel ad on Facebook.
That’s already a pretty aggressive launch but further boldness is likely to be rewarded. I’d also suggest launching Book 4 at $2.99, even if you normally price and launch at $3.99 or $4.99, and also throwing all sorts of ads into the mix at places that might normally not give you the best ROI.
Because KU is all about visibility.
Me.
‘That seems straightforward enough,’ I thought. ‘I could do that.’
*scratches nose, frowns*
‘Why don’t I do that?’
*coughs, looks out of the window, distracted by a bird, scratches nose again*
I’m going to do that.
And just like that, I have a Launch Plan™ for Causal Nexus.
Delist Ascension Point and Venus Rising from the non-Amazon stores. (Done.)
Enroll both in KDP Select. (Underway as soon as I’ve confirmed step 1.)
Finish Causal Nexus, upload it to Amazon at a discounted launch price of $2.99 and enroll it in KDP Select.
On launch day, make Ascension Point free for 5 days, run a concurrent 99¢ Countdown deal on Venus Rising, and advertise both on Ereader News Today.
See how it goes!
At some point, revert all three to the usual price of $4.99.
…
Profit?
Who knows. This is all a bit of an experiment to start finding out how it all works, but I’m quite excited now that I have an actual plan. I’m still expecting to have Causal Nexus ready to go in April, so there’s not long to wait.
Longer term, I expect I’ll experiment again and unenroll my books from KDP Select to share them more widely, perhaps dipping back in for launches of new books, or not, as I see fit. The exciting thing is that as an indie author-publisher I have these options at my disposal, and all the time in the world to try different approaches and see what works best.
Nuclear fusion, the always-just-over-the-horizon technology that will solve humanity’s energy needs forever, may be a step closer. Over at Nature:
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge will work with a private firm to develop technology for producing energy from nuclear fusion within the next 15 years. If successful, the multimillion-dollar effort could help to unlock a virtually limitless source of pollution-free energy…
“It’s about scale, and it’s about speed,” says Robert Mumgaard, chief executive officer at CFS. The company — a spin-off from MIT — has attracted $50 million from Italian energy giant ENI, and plans to invest $30 million of that sum in research and development at MIT over the next three years.
Massive public funding for theoretical research such as this would be a hard sell for any government, so attracting private-sector investment has long been thought key in making fusion a reality. The free market showing faith that investing in the science will have a positive return will likely attract further investment in the field.
So how does it work? (Broadly.)
Fusing hydrogen atoms to form helium releases massive amounts of energy, which can be harnessed to produce carbon-free electricity. But sustaining the extreme temperatures that are required for this process in a confined space remains a daunting challenge that has defied most hopes and expectations to date…
The first challenge will be to transform a commercially available superconductor into a large, high-performance electromagnet, which could take around three years. Within the next decade, the team hopes to develop a prototype reactor that can generate more energy than it consumes. Then, they hope to develop a 200-megawatt pilot power plant that can export electricity to the grid.
DAN HARRIS: 10% SCI, 90% FI 