2nd novel finished!

So at 5:59 AM, I finished the first draft of my second novel.  Things went differently for this one than the first one; for one, it took a lot less time.  The first one took around four months of actual writing, but this one I completed in under three months.  Also, I wrote this one entirely in order; on the first one I wrote whatever appealed to me at the time, which was nice in a way since if I felt blocked in a certain part I just went and wrote somewhere else.  However, it was much harder to remember where I was in the overall story, so things went more smoothly this time.

I was planning to do a formal update of how January went, but then I saw an email from Amazon this morning indicating that the "prior month" report may not be accurate.  I sure hope it was, because when I looked at it yesterday it showed that I had blown away December and that January was my best month yet by far.  Guess I'll have to wait to find out....

Partial update

So it’s frankly a real pain to try and figure out how well I did on Amazon in January; my monthly update will wait a few more days until they release the reports.  However, I can say with some confidence that January was very, very close to December, and that was my best month ever in terms of royalties.  February has started out more slowly, though still nothing to sneeze at.

Most significantly, however, I am thrilled to report that I sold 35 copies of the romance novel in January, and I’ve continued to see around one a day since then as well.  The followup should be finished in a week, so barring major misfortune I should have my second novel up for sale by March.  The two are standalone novels although they share the same location and some minor characters, so I’ll be selling them as part of a series (which eventually will have 4 books).  I’ll be extremely curious to see how the release of the second book—not to mention pushing them as books in a series—will affect sales.

More to come!

October update

So after a lot of thought, I decided to release a series of short stories in October--things I had thought of doing quite a while ago, but had decided not to do.  Why not?  Because the idea was for an erotica series with a smuttily amusing title, taking some sex scenes that I'd included in my earlier works and remixing them.  Frankly, writing sex is about the most boring thing I've ever done, and I wasn't eager to spend more time doing that when my novel still isn't finished.  However, I came to the conclusion that if I'm really going to treat this as a business--which I am--then I can't afford to pass up an opportunity to publish something that will sell.  And if there's one thing I've seen this year, it's that sex sells.

So I took two weeks and whipped out seven new titles (well, "new" is not exactly correct, but I was at least rearranging what I'd previously written).  The results?  Behold the glory of my first-ever graph:

I now have 22 titles out across Amazon, B&N and Smashwords, ranging from single stories at .99 each to bundled collections of stories (2.99-3.99), novellas (2.99) and bundled novellas (5.98).  At the risk of jinxing it, I can report that November is on a pace to be my best month yet in terms of both sales and royalties.

The novel is still not completed (due in part, of course, to the two-week break I took to write smut) but as of this morning has hit over 65K.  It just won't stop!  I'm expecting it to top out at about 75K, and I still hope to have it finished by Thanksgiving, although that's a lot less sure than it was a month ago.

OK, back to work!

September update: meh

So September's sales continued the downward slope that August started (and frankly, October is starting off to be even worse than that), so no great news there.  One day I'll figure out how to do graphs and put up a fancy jpg showing my sales trend, which will no doubt look like a mountain:  up, up, up and then down, down, down.

Oh well.  The novel is going great, so it's hard to get too worked up over sales of stuff I don't really care about.  I'm at about 56K words as of today, which is kind of amazing, since the longest thing I'd written previously was a 30K novella.  It's so long that I keep coming across stuff I'd even forgotten writing, which makes for an interesting experience.  I expect to have it largely completed in two or three weeks, which will put it at about 65K and three months of work.  Allowing time to edit, rewrite anything needed and so on, I'm still hoping that I can have it up for sale by Thanksgiving.

After that, I'm hoping to resuscitate something I started almost a year ago but haven't touched since.  It would be a shame to let this 5000-word seed just sit there without seeing if it could sprout into something more, however, so ideally I'd have another novel ready to go in late winter.

June/July update

Wow, it's been a while.  I'm posting less than Aaron Niz, for God's sake!  The good news--at least I consider it good news--is that the time I used to spend blogging (occasionally) and reading the blogs of others (frequently) has dropped dramatically over the last few months because I'm trying to do as much writing as possible.

So things have been going pretty well, though August has turned out to be a very slow month so far.  Fortunately, from what I've seen it's pretty slow for everybody, so I'm not too concerned about it.  I am not to the point where I'd be able to go a full day--let alone longer--without checking my sales, but I'm also not to the point where I'm going to spend much time on that outside my morning routine.

I now have 14 titles up on Amazon, B/N and Smashwords, ranging from short stories to novella collections, and I'm now working on my first full-fledged novel.  It's a romance, and I'm totally not kidding.  Not just any type of romance, but a historical "sweet" romance.  You could look at this in a few different ways.  One, of course, would be to view this as an attempt to just cash in on the popularity of romance novels.  To that, I would say, duh.  However, after reading a few (okay, several) of them, I got an idea for one that is turning out to be a hell of a lot of fun to write.

After the horror of April's slow sales, May turned out to be pretty good, but June absolutely rocked with 498 sales.  July's number was quite a bit slower, but I sold more expensive titles and actually made more cash, so I certainly can't complain.  I'm still small potatoes, of course--even compared to authors that, frankly, nobody has ever heard of, but who claim to pull in thousands of dollars a month--but considering that I started all this in January, I'm happy with my progress.

Although I've seen that you can make (a little) money selling stories and novellas, everybody says that the money is in novels, which is why I've decided to focus on that from now on.  Aside from the romance, I have a series of middle grade novels I'm planning; ideally I'll have the romance and one of the middle grade books up and running before the holiday season.

Let's see...a couple of final thoughts.  Dean Wesley Smith's blog has turned into my favorite source of guidance, by far.  Konrath's has really sunk in my opinion not only because he so rarely posts, but because he has shown himself to be kind of an ass sometimes.  Ruth Ann Nordin is also a really interesting example of someone I think should be emulated--from what I've read, she pretty much just keeps her head down and keeps plugging away, writing what she wants to.  That has allowed her to make a pretty good salary--in a recent blog post she said that she'd take in 84K through September--which means that she's on track to make six figures this year.  Pretty cool.

Totally unrelated, but I continue to be astounded by how many indie authors pile everything into promotion for their debut novels, which almost invariably is priced at 99 cents.  I keep forgetting where I saw this first (Kathryn Rusch's site, perhaps?), but promotion is almost always one of the least effective ways to get somebody to buy your book, according to various studies.  It seems to me that the time and effort put into extensive blog tours, swag creation (am I the only one who doesn't get the idea of making promotional bookmarks for the release of an e-book?) and so on would be better served by, you know, writing the next one.

But then, even the basics seem to escape some people.  Just yesterday I read on the Pubit help board from a guy who shared his technique to make an appropriately-sized cover image for Pubit.  It involved finding the cover on Amazon, printing that on paper, then scanning the paper at the appropriate size.  I'm no Amanda Hocking--nor even Ruth Ann Nordin--but even I knew better than that.

Okay, back to work.  I don't expect to post again until the romance is finished.  That one has remarkably little content that could cause trouble on the job, so I may even be able to share the name!

Gmail scare and February update

So, I was one of those 150,000 people affected by the Google glitch that you may have heard about; my Gmail account first appeared entirely empty and then my Google account itself became disabled on Sunday, meaning that I had not only lost access to my e-mail, but my blogs, photos, etc.  Fortunately things are already better and Google appears to have put back almost everything so far, so in the end it looks like no harm was done.

February, my first full month publishing, turned out to be a much better month than I'd anticipated, with 131 sales.  I am still unsure why things are so sluggish on Amazon compared to Barnes and Noble--for the entire month I only had 11 sales on Amazon, a handful on Smashwords, and the vast majority on B/N.

For March, I plan to release another novella in a different genre; more about that later, but in a nutshell I'm curious to see what effect--if any--there is on my sales when releasing work that is not strongly identifiable as "mine".  I know that many writers do quite well working in a variety of genres, but I have to imagine that the bar is set quite a bit higher for self-publishers.  We'll see...