Gmail, italicized text and romance

So around a year ago Google froze my account (along with several hundred thousand other people, if memory serves) for about a week.  Last Sunday my Gmail account froze up and it's still out of order a week later.  Fortunately, last year I got smart and backed everything up on Hotmail, so this has been less of a problem than it might have been, but I think I've pretty much had enough of Gmail.  Too bad; it worked beautifully for years.

March has been fairly blah; sales are down from February although I really can't complain as I'm still headed for several hundred dollars at the end of the month.  Nowhere near many of the indie authors out there, but it's still amazing for me considering what I was pulling in a year ago.  And it's simple economics that things like this only go up, never down, right? :)

My breakthrough for the month--hell, the year--was that yesterday I found out how to set up a macro in Word to go through and replace all my italicized text with html markers.  Previously I had to go through the Word doc page by page and insert the markers myself (truth be told, until very recently I was doing so in a text document until I realized that I could do it much easier working directly in Word), but invariably I would forget to insert an end tag and thus screw up my formattting--something I wouldn't see until I was using the Kindle previewer.  So for my second novel, just this process of formatting my italicized text took hours.  Now, however, I should be able to have it done automatically, error-free, in literally seconds.  Huge improvement.

I released my second novel last month and I can see what Konrath, et al. have said: there's more money in novels than in other lengths of work.  Of course, the majority of my sales have come from my other works simply because I have more of them (I only have two novels up, versus over twenty shorts, novellas and collections), but looking at the income per title, the novels are clearly way ahead.  So far in March I've been selling two per day (not two each yet, unfortunately, but a total of two novels daily) from all channels combined.

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!

2011 in review

Well, it’s been nearly a year since I began self-publishing—I actually started in mid-January 2011, but we’ll call it a full year to make it easy.  Overall I’ve been very happy with how things have been going.  I’ve made some cash and learned a lot and I feel well-prepared to keep moving forward.  Here are some random thoughts:

My experience with KDP Select is mixed—I have one story and one story collection in the program right now.  My sales have been good, but I couldn’t say that they’re a direct result of any exposure I have in KDP Select, since it might just be holiday buying.  Also, I find it maddening that Amazon’s sales reporting is so mushy, lumping in free “sales” with paid sales.  I really prefer B/N’s system.  As I’d said in an earlier blog post, I think that for those with a wide variety of other books, Select may be a useful way to introduce a new title, so I may try it again in the future.

I’m planning to focus almost exclusively on novels in 2012.  I released my romance novel the second week in December and I’ve had 10 sales, which I am thrilled with—no marketing, no ads, nothing, and I still got 10 sales.  I fooled around with the price a bit; it’s currently at 3.29 but I’ve had it as high as 3.95 (and I actually had some sales at that price).  The followup book is well under way and I hope to release it in February or March.

I absolutely love the Kindle Fire I got for Christmas, but I have decided to buy all my new books from Barnes and Noble from now on.  Amazon doesn’t need my help, but I would like to do my part to make sure B/N sticks around for a good long while.

November was my best month all year, and just today I edged past that on Barnes and Noble (and I am guessing that I passed last month’s Amazon total earlier), so December now jumped into the number one spot.  It’s still not a huge amount of money coming in—enough to pay some bills, though, so I’m not complaining.  I’m earning about 3% of what I would need in order to write as a full time job.

My goals for 2012 (keeping in mind Dean Wesley Smith’s recent post about the difference between goals and dreams):  finish and release three more novels (thus a total of four on sale), as well as two stories and a novella I have on the back burner.  Considering that the 2^nd novel is about halfway finished, I think I’m making good time.  And as for dreams?  Well, I have plenty of those too, believe me.

Happy new year!

Today's big, huge, enormous Amazon news

So I'm not going to pretend that I know enough about self-publishing yet to say that I can fully appreciate the announcement of KDP Select this morning.  But in a nutshell, holy shit! :)  So you can put up a title exclusively at Amazon to be lent to Amazon Prime members, yet still get paid a percentage of a monthly pot of a half-million dollars.  AND you can choose 5 days every 90-day period to make that title free--thus stimulating downloads by non-Prime members?  Amazing.  Of course, this will work best for those who have other titles that the above will generate interest in, so it might be a tad early for me.  And I'm sure that even this will not sit right with some authors, based on the never-ending debate about pricing, lending and so on.  But I'm certainly going to be watching this closely, that's for sure.  Once I have a larger backlist available--I'm thinking a year from now--this could be huge.  For others, this will be huge already.

 

About the only downside I see at the moment is that it requires that the titles are not available elsewhere in the same format, though if I remember paper books are okay.  Thus you can't sell from B/N, Smashwords and so on, or even your own website.  For many authors who have books out through other available channels, I suspect it would be more trouble than it's worth to take down titles, but for somebody who's just about to put out a new one, this Christmas gift came early.

 

Very, very interesting day.

82,243

So I finished the first draft of my novel at 6:27 this morning, topping out at a bit over 82K words.  All told it took me about 4 months to write.  Now I'm going to get it to my beta reader (AKA my wife) and make some edits, hopefully finishing everything in time to get it up for sale by Christmas.

After that, I'm planning to begin work on another novel immediately.  I'm coming up on 11 months self-publishing and I've learned a lot from monkeying around with shorter works this year.  By Christmas 2012, however, I hope to have a total of four novels completed.  In other words, I'd like to write three more novels in 13 months, which should be doable given my performance on the first one.  I have one largely plotted out entirely, another roughly sketched out, and the third is still percolating a bit.

I saw a Kindle Fire at Target yesterday; although it looks kind of plain, I have to admit that it is pretty F'ing cool.  My son, of course, recognized it as yet another way to play Angry Birds, so I might skip buying it altogether since I'd never get to use it while he's around.

Getting close now...

I've made good progress on the novel; as of this morning I topped 78K words and I'm down to three chapters that remain unfinished.  I hope to have it entirely completed a week from today, which will give me not much time for editing, etc. before Christmas, but I'm hoping it can be done.

 

Happy Thanksgiving!