Author of THE UNITY SEQUENCE. Doing the right thing for Alderaan reasons since 2012.
Quick update: I just finished writing chapter eighteen of the first draft of Venus Rising. One more chapter and the epilogue to do, and I’m done!
I should be able to knock those out before we go away for our New Year’s vacation on the 28th, and then it’s editing time. If all goes well, and stars align with my cover designer and editor, we’re looking at publication in April.
Exciting!
Lindsay has a great post on her blog where she gives her views on how indie author-publishers might want to price their books.
Her rationale for pricing a novel happens to be exactly the same as mine, though I’ve never quite managed to express it this succinctly:
“I personally think about $5 per full-length novel is a fair price all around. It gives you far higher per-book earnings than traditionally published authors are receiving (even those whose ebooks are selling for $10+), it gives the readers a deal when compared to most traditionally published ebooks, and it’s often considered a fair price by those who feel that digital books should cost less than the dead-tree variety since paper, ink, and shipping aren’t a part of the equation.
“Lastly, it separates you from the legions of indie authors charging $0.99, $1.99, and $2.99 for their novels (often on the belief that they won’t be able to sell at a higher price because they’re not established names — I started out at $2.99 for just that reason). A lot of readers still walk warily around self-published books, so it can only help if you’re not giving obvious clues that your book was never vetted by a gatekeeper.”
Yup.
Thanks to everyone who commented and gave your thoughts and suggestions for a title. I’ve given it a lot of careful consideration, and the winning entry is…
VENUS RISING.
I love it. It’s got the obvious SF implication from the word Venus, the ‘rising’ is dynamic and interesting, and the cadence of the two words flows really well.
The book’s coming along very nicely, too. I’ve been quite ill this last week, which has stalled things a bit, but I’m nearly there with the first draft. Midway through chapter seventeen (of twenty), 57.5K words done with only another 12-13K to go. I might even get the draft done before Christmas. We’ll see.
Exciting times!
I don’t always agree with the advice DWS gives on his blog. And that’s fine–he wouldn’t want me to. He wants writers to think for themselves, make informed decisions, and take control of their careers.
Today’s advice, though, I think is absolutely spot-on. It’s ‘an article on the good stuff and the bad stuff you face in getting to a solid career as a fiction writer‘.
Here are some snippets.
‘Examples (not all by a long ways) of some major myths in 2013 are:
And the paragraph that really resonated with me, because it perfectly chimes with how I feel about writing:
‘The solution to [being in a hurry] is take a deep breath, focus on the writing and learning to write better stories and put the books out either indie or to editors or both and leave them alone. If you get a few buyers, great. If not, no big deal. Trust the audience and the editors to decide when you have graduated to professional-level storytelling.‘
I know ASCENSION POINT is a good book. I wouldn’t have published it otherwise. I had a professional editor tell me what was wrong with it–and there were a lot of things wrong with it. We fixed them.
Is it ‘professional-level storytelling’? Maybe. My readers so far have really enjoyed it. And I’ve got a few buyers, which is great.
Is it the best thing I’ll ever write? Not by a long way. And that’s fine. I want the last thing I ever write–at the age of ninety-two while living in a bubble city on Mars–to be that best thing.
But I’m getting there.
December has rolled around, which means I’ve reached the end of my first month as a published author. As many of you who follow this blog are writers as well as readers, and might be considering taking the self-publishing route yourselves in the future, I thought it might be interesting, and maybe useful, if I shared my sales numbers along with info on what promotion I did to get there.
So, without further ado…
Sales and Earnings
(* How much I’ve earned back so far of the cost of producing the book.)
Now for some caveats:
Promotion
Not a huge amount, to be honest. Here’s a breakdown:
So all told, a decent start to my writing career. I’m very happy, and I’m looking forward to seeing what December brings!
I’ve been using the working title ROGUE for my second novel, the sci-fi thriller follow-up to ASCENSION POINT. It’s a nice enough title, sure, but it was pointed out to me today that it’s… well, not very distinctive. And, even worse, it’s already the title of a couple of other novels.
(One’s by Danielle Steele. While having a novel with the same title as one by an author who’s sold 800 million books might work out in my favour, it also really, really might not.)
Which is where you lovely folks come in!
Just a quick one: SF Signal asked a group of sci-fi heavyweights what’s great about Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. (Apart from the obvious answer, ‘everything’.)
Well worth a read, here.
UPDATE: It must have been Culture week on SF Signal, because here is their editor John DeNardo on Kirkus Reviews with a nice newbie’s guide to the Culture universe.
I’m thirteen chapters of twenty into the first draft of my second book, ROGUE. Forty-five thousands words done, probably another twenty-five thousand to go.
It’s a follow-up to ASCENSION POINT, rather than a sequel: it’s set in the same universe, and the events and characters from the first book are referenced–there’s even a cameo or two–but it’s not a direct continuation of the story. (A year has passed between the two books, for one thing.)
The pace of my writing has picked up a bit now that I’m into act three, or ‘the really exciting bit at the end’, as we industry professionals call it. I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to get the draft done before the end of January, even with a couple of weeks off for Christmas and our New Year summer holiday. Then, depending on how long the various edit phases take, I should be ready to publish in April.
Which is only six months after I released ASCENSION POINT, now I think about it. Two books a year? Seems unlikely, but who knows!
This made me laugh. It doesn’t take much to climb the Bestseller Rankings for the Amazon.co.uk Kindle Store, it seems. Yesterday ASCENSION POINT was languishing at #251,110. But then…
SOMEONE BOUGHT A COPY.
Yup–it’s stormed up to #30,554 on the back of that single sale. You have to assume that it takes a few more sales than that to be ranked in the top, I don’t know, ten thousand. But it’s still nice to see the line going upwards 🙂
Early days, folks. Early days.
DAN HARRIS: 10% SCI, 90% FI 