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My Writing Year: A Look Back and A Look Forward

Another year is over, and besides my usual trip to North Africa (more on that in my next post) it's time for my annual roundup of writing.

I had a fairly productive year, writing 930,000 words. While this was shy of my goal of one million words, I'm not unhappy because this year 409,000 of those words were published under my own name, more than in many years. I do a lot of ghostwriting, you see, and while I need the income it does cut down on my own work.

Part of the reason my word count under my own name was so high was a collaboration with British Science fiction author David Ryker. We came out with the first two in the Ark Ship series, about a colony ship that leaves a dying Earth only to get into more trouble than it left. It's done very well in sales, thanks in no small part to Ryker's marketing abilities.

I also came out with three books of my own. Three Passports to Trouble is the second in my Interzone Mystery series. This was followed by Emergency Transmission, Book Four of my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series. At the end of the year I came out with The Case of the Golden Greeks, Book Three of my Masked Man of Cairo mystery series.

Hmmm....I sense a trend. Lots of series! I haven't written a standalone novel in a while. Perhaps I'll remedy that in 2020. I have a Western that's been bubbling in the back of my head. I'm also going to write more in each of my series, including Trench Raiders. Yes, I've been letting that one lapse for far too long, and some of you have grumbled about that. Don't worry, you'll be getting more adventures from Company E in the autumn at the latest.

You can keep track of all my work on the right-hand side of my blog, where I'll be regularly updating the progress of each book.

Now I got to get back to work!
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Honest Numbers about an Amazon Ebook Giveaway

As regular readers of this blog know, I just finished a five-day giveaway of Radio Hope, the first in my Toxic World series of post-apocalyptic novels. The plan was to get more attention for my series, which currently has three novels, a related novelette, and a fourth novel coming out in the late spring.

This post runs through my experience with an Amazon free ebook promotion. It's hard to get honest numbers from indie writers, who tend to exaggerate their success or make wildly ridiculous claims. If you don't believe me, waste an hour of your life on the Kindle Boards. This post will give you honest numbers and my best assessment of what's going on. I want my fellow indies to succeed, and the best way to do that is to cut through the bull and actually communicate.

I've done some giveaways before of The Scavenger, the Toxic World novelette, which I had written as a teaser for the series. My first promotion moved 391 copies. You can read the details here. I did little promotion for that giveaway beyond mentioning it on my blog and several times on my Twitter feed. Several blogger buddies mentioned it. A few nice people tweeted.

Since then I've done two more giveaways of the same book. As an experiment, during one of the giveaways I didn't mention it was free to anyone. Heck, I didn't even tell my wife because I didn't want her mentioning it on Facebook. I still gave away 54 copies. People really go looking for free stuff on Amazon.

For Radio Hope, I got a bit more serious. The giveaway ran from Thursday, March 10, through Monday, March 14. I was heavily on Twitter that entire time and many nice people retweeted me. I also bought places in two newsletters that advertise discount and free books. On Friday, March 11, I was in Ebooksoda. For $15 you go out to more than 14,000 subscribers. For an extra $6, you are mentioned on their Facebook Page, which has 8,900 followers. The next day, I was in the Fussy Librarian, which costs $16, and their science fiction list has more than 100,000 subscribers.

So I laid out $37. Book Two in the series, Refugees from the Righteous Horde, costs $4.99,which means I get $3.44 for every sale. I only need to get eleven people to go on to buy Book Two for the promotion to pay for itself.

NOTE: one thing I learned is that you have to sign up for a place with these newsletters way early. Even trying to sign up weeks ahead of the promotion, I barely got into Fussy Librarian and I didn't get into another newsletter, Book Barbarian. Slots fill up fast!

So now, on to the numbers. I've broken them down for each day and by country.


Thursday, March 10: US (493), UK (34), Germany (2), Canada (6), Mexico (1), Australia (5)

Friday, March 11: US (337), UK (35), Germany (1), Spain (1), Italy (1), Canada (7), Australia (2)

Saturday, March 12: US (277), UK (19), Germany (1), Canada (1), Australia (1)

Sunday, March 13: US (296), UK (19), Germany (1), India (1), Canada (6)

Monday, March 14: US (115), UK (16), Spain (1), Canada (5)

Total by country: US (1518), UK (123), Germany (5), Spain (2), Italy (1), India (1), Canada (25), Mexico (1), Australia (8)

Grand Total: 1684 free copies downloaded.

A few things surprised me about these numbers. The UK accounted for fewer than 10% of the total. My sales to the UK have consistently been about 10% of my total for three years now, and have recently risen to 15%. Also, ebooksoda is a UK based newsletter. I have no idea if they have a disproportionately high percentage of UK subscribers, but it didn't seem to impact my downloads. I'm also surprised by the relatively strong showing in Canada. I've had very few sales through Amazon Canada. Heck, Germany buys more of my books than Canada.

I'm also surprised that Thursday was the best day, followed by Sunday. In my previous giveaways, Thursdays have been strong, Friday and Saturday have been the strongest, followed by lower numbers on Sunday and a slump on Monday. Sales are always bad on Mondays. For some reason people don't go looking for ebooks on Mondays.

Promotions start at midnight West Coast time, something to keep in mind if you are promoting in Europe. One strange thing I noticed was that in the first hour on Thursday, I moved 11 copies in the US. That means that between midnight and 1 am on the West Coast, or 3-4 am on the East Coast, eleven people downloaded my book. On a work day!

The strong showing in Thursday helped me a lot. It got me into the top 20 for the post-apocalyptic and dystopian lists under the free heading for both Amazon US and Amazon UK. Amazon lists its bestsellers by groups of 20, and as many studies of Internet searching has shown, most people will not jump to the second page to see numbers 21-40, or click again to get to 41-60. Getting on the front page is vital and helped my visibility and, therefore, my numbers. By Saturday I was in the top five on Amazon US and stayed there for the rest of the giveaway.

So considering that, did the newsletters help? It's hard to say. I think it may be significant that Sunday was such a good day. Since giveaways almost always stretch over the entire weekend, I suspect newsletter subscribers know this and may put off their downloading until Sunday when they have more time. That's only a hunch, though. Like with all products, marketing ebooks involves a lot of guesswork. I will continue to use newsletters for future promotions. They don't cost much and the extra visibility sure can't hurt.

The real test is whether this increases my sales. Over the course of the giveaway I sold seven copies of other books in the series, a slight rise. I also got a a nice review of Radio Hope. That all might just be a coincidence, but considering how some readers inhale books, maybe not. I'll come back in a month's time with another blog post tracking my sales and looking at what effect, if any, this giveaway has had on sales of this series.

I hope this has been enlightening for fellow authors out there. If you want to thank me, considering buying one of my books! :-)

My Writing Year: A Look Back And A Look Forward

Happy New Year to all of you who use the Gregorian calendar! I just got back from Tangier, where today is just another day except for all the fireworks on the news. I had a nice two-week writing retreat that I'll tell you about in the next post. Right now it seems like a good time to take stock of my writing career and where I'm going.

As I predicted in a year-end post last year, 2014 was my fiction year. I published four novels and two novellas, evenly split between my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series and my World War One Trench Raiders action series. I also wrote some short stories and got a couple accepted.

Nonfiction has been doing OK as well. I'm currently under contract for another military history book with Osprey Publishing, done pretty well with getting writing gigs on Elance, and broke into a couple of new magazine markets. Being a full-time freelancer is always a struggle, though.

So what's in store for this year? I'll be publishing at least two novels in each series, as well as a long-awaited sequel to A Fine Likeness, my Civil War horror novel. There will be a few other goodies coming down the pike too.

I also need to get in gear with promotion. I have yet to figure out how to market my books effectively. This sort of thing doesn't come naturally to me, and I don't want to be "that guy" who's always flogging his books. As a result, I tend to remain more quiet than I probably should. Any advice along those lines would be highly appreciated.

For my writer friends out there, how did your year go? What will you do different in 2015?

Happy New Year!!!

Why I'm not concerned about my ebooks getting pirated

A few days ago a fellow indie publisherwas fuming on Facebook that a Russian ebook pirate site that had put up all her books without her permission. I checked it and found all of my books up there too, both my indie published fiction and the electronic editions of my military history books written for Osprey Publishing.

This isn't the first time. Radio Hope is on at least two other pirate sites, and Osprey titles get pirated all the time. I used to get mad, but I don't anymore. First off, there's no way to stop it. DRM is easily removed and only acts as an inconvenience for honest readers. I don't bother putting DRM on my books. I'm not going to waste my time chasing down pirate sites and threatening them with legal action either. Yeah, like I'm going to win a lawsuit against some dodgy company in Russia!

Some writers, such as Neil Gaiman, have made the point that piracy is actually a form of free advertising. I'm not sure I'm convinced, but really, if someone goes to a pirate site for his reading material, he's probably not going to cough up money for my books anyway, so in effect I haven't lost a customer. So I'm left in the situation of shrugging my shoulders and not worrying about it. I have more important things to do with my time. Writing, for example.

A lot of indie writers don't share my view. My Facebook friend was irate, as were many of the people on her feed. Several said they contacted the site and were either ignored or (gasp!) were treated rudely. Hello, these people just stole your intellectual property, did you think they'd be apologetic? Now several of them are talking about how to take down the site.

I can't be bothered. There will always be pirates, and it isn't clear how much or even if they reduce sales. I'm going to focus on the one thing about my career I can control--the quantity and quality of my writing.

What do you think about piracy? Drop me a line in the comments section!

Image of the flag of pirate Chrisopher Moody courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Refugees from the Righteous Horde out now!

Book Two of my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series is out now! Refugees from the Righteous Horde picks up where Radio Hope left off. Here's the blurb:

When you only have one shot, you better aim true.
In a ravaged world, civilization’s last outpost is reeling after fighting off the fanatical warriors of the Righteous Horde. Sheriff Annette Cruz becomes New City’s long arm of vengeance as she sets off across the wildlands to take out the cult’s leader. All she has is a sniper’s rifle with one bullet and a former cultist with his own agenda.
Meanwhile, one of the cult’s escaped slaves makes a discovery that could tear New City apart. . .

Refugees from the Righteous Horde continues the Toxic World series started in Radio Hope, an ongoing narrative of humanity’s struggle to rebuild the world it ruined.

The book is available on all the Amazons and will soon have a print edition. If you could help me out by tweeting, blogging, and sharing this info, that would be awesome!

Honest Numbers about an Amazon Indie Ebook Giveaway

I recently had an article published at Funds For Writers in which I give honest numbers for my Amazon ebook free promotion. Regular readers of this blog will recall that I had a giveaway of my novelette The Scavenger, set in my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series.

There's a lot of bull spread by indie writers about their numbers, so I decided to post up some honest numbers. Check out how I did here.

Radio Hope now available in print!

I just got my author's copies of Radio Hope from Createspace. They came out looking beautiful thanks to my talent brother-in-law Andrés Alonso-Herrero for the lovely cover!


Photo courtesy my eight-year-old son Julián. He took his first photos when he was three. You can see them here.

Publishing is vast!

When I was in Madrid last week I saw a bunch of fellow writers from my old writers group. I had just finished Hugh Howey's Wool and was raving about it. This post-apocalyptic tale was indie published and went on to become a bestseller. Howey signed a juicy print-only contract with a major publisher, keeping control of the ebook rights himself. Smart man. Now there's talk of a film in the works.

I'll be writing a review later in the week so at the moment let me just say it deserves every bit of its success. I was surprised, though, when two writer friends said they had never heard of it. Both of them are science fiction writers, one of them with several publications under her belt. They're both well-read too, and certainly read a lot more in this genre than I do. Yet they hadn't heard of such a major success story. I bet I'm ignorant of many similar blockbuster science fiction novels.

Publishing has become vast. There was once a day when the majority of well-read people were familiar with any particular bestseller. Those days are long past. Now the market is fragmented, with fan bases that often don't overlap and may be entirely ignorant of each other.

How can a writer cut through this horde of new books out there and get noticed? I have yet to figure that out. The standard practice of blogging, tweeting, and networking only seem to go so far. I'm not sure anyone in this new publishing world has really figured out a magic formula.

I know one of the ingredients, though. An awesome book, like the one Hugh Howey wrote. I'm looking forward to reading the sequels.