Results of an Amazon Ebook Giveaway

As I mentioned in my last post, last week I had a giveaway for my ebook Warpath into Sonora, a Western from the Apache point of view. This book came out last September and while it moved a couple of hundred units in its first two months, after that sales plummeted. It seemed that no one was much interested in Westerns. Sales got so bad that novellas I wrote five years ago were outselling it.

I decided to do one of Amazon's five-day giveaways to try to drum up some readership. I took an ad out on the Fussy Librarian's newsletter for free ebooks, which set me back five bucks. The ad went live on Thursday, July 27, the first day of the giveaway. Here are the numbers, broken down by country:

Thursday, July 27: US (296) UK (10) Germany (1) Total: 307

Friday, July 28: US (281) UK (4) Canada (4) Australia (1) Total: 290

Saturday, July 29: US (49) UK (3) Australia (5) Total: 57

Sunday, July 30: US (46) UK (3) Australia (1) Total: 50

Monday, July 31: US (41) UK (3) Canada (1) Total: 45

Grand Total by Country:  US (713) UK (23) Canada (5) Australia (7) Germany (1)

Grand Total: 749

What's most apparent is the big jump the newsletter gave me. It put Warpath into Sonora into the top five in free Native American (at times it was number one) and top 20 in free Western, where it remained for the rest of the giveaway. This, of course, added visibility and led to more downloads after the initial rush from the newsletter faded. I'll be using Fussy Librarian again.

One thing that annoyed me about those lists were the number of off-topic titles. In Native American, the Collected Stories of Conan vied for position with my book. The Western section was dominated by Western Romance, which is a different category. For a time there was also a romance featuring a muscular fellow with a kilt on the cover. I didn't realize my Scottish ancestors were actually Native American! 

What is also noticeable is the weak showing in the UK and other countries, lower than giveaways and discounts and even my regular full price sales figures. Generally the UK makes up about 10 percent of my overall sales, with the rest of the world being another five percent. This was not the case with this title.

So was the $5 expenditure worth it to give away so many books? I would say yes. First off, it got my book (and ads for my other books) in front of 749 sets of eyeballs. Also, it put my book into the Amazon algorithms so that it would show up in the "customers also bought" section. Since my sales had faded so many months ago, I was slipping out of that.

There was also an unforseen benefit. My Kindle Lending Library units went way up for that title, from almost nothing to the low hundreds of pages in the last couple of days of the giveaway and from then on. I suppose this was because people on Kindle Prime saw it and downloaded it. With these customers, while they get it for free like the regular customers who donated it, I get paid for page views. My ad has already paid for itself in real dollar terms. 

Warpath into Sonora out now!

My new novel, a Western from the Apache point of view, is now available on Amazon. Warpath into Sonora is my first Western novel so I'd love to hear from readers about how well I did. This is my second book to come out this week. The Last Hotel Room was released by Kindle Press on Tuesday.

Both books were on preorder and The Last Hotel Room sold much better, both in the US and UK. Warpath into Sonora didn't sell any preorders at all in the UK. I'm not sure why one did better than the other, since this is the first time I've tried preorders. The Last Hotel Room is more of a general interest novel than Warpath into Sonora, so that might be it. Thoughts?

A blurb for Warpath into Sonora is below:

Arizona 1846
Nantan, a young Apache warrior, is building a name for himself by leading raids against Mexican ranches to impress his war chief, and the chief’s lovely daughter.
But there is one thing he and all other Apaches fear—a ruthless band of Mexican scalp hunters who slaughter entire villages.
Nantan and his friends have sworn to fight back, but they are inexperienced, and led by a war chief driven mad with a thirst for revenge. Can they track their tribe’s worst enemy into unknown territory and defeat them?

My new novel Warpath into Sonora is available for preorder!

My new novel, a Western from the Apache point of view, is available for preorder on Amazon. Warpath into Sonora uses a lot of the research I did for my latest military history book, Apache Warrior vs US Cavalryman: 1846–86. I spent two years studying the Apache way of war and had so much left over that couldn't fit into the history book that I decided to write a novel. It even includes a recipe for making poison out of a rotting deer spleen! What more could you want? The blurb is below.

Arizona 1846
Nantan, a young Apache warrior, is building a name for himself by leading raids against Mexican ranches to impress his war chief, and the chief’s lovely daughter.
But there is one thing he and all other Apaches fear—a ruthless band of Mexican scalp hunters who slaughter entire villages.
Nantan and his friends have sworn to fight back, but they are inexperienced, and led by a war chief driven mad with a thirst for revenge. Can they track their tribe’s worst enemy into unknown territory and defeat them?

Blurb and cover help please!

Hey all! Getting ready to release my next novel, Warpath into Sonora, a Western from the Apache point of view. My brother-in-law has come up with a couple of covers. I prefer the one with the photo.  I was thinking of having the subtitle "An Apache Adventure". He left it out and I'm thinking I might leave it that way. What do you think?
Also, I could use some help with the blurb, because blurbs are hard!

Arizona 1846
Nantan, a young Apache warrior just into manhood, is building a name for himself by leading raids against Mexican ranches to impress his war chief, and the chief’s lovely daughter.

But there is one thing he and all other Apaches fear—a ruthless band of Mexican scalp hunters who slaughter entire villages.
Nantan and his friends have sworn to fight back, but they are young and inexperienced, and led by a war chief driven mad with a thirst for revenge. Can they track their tribe’s worst enemy into unknown territory and defeat them?

Military History Photo Friday: Images of the Mexican-American War

I'm currently taking a break from book four of my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series to write Warpath Into Sonora, a Western about a group of Apaches getting caught up in the Mexican-American War. So here are a couple of images from that conflict.

The top image is a daguerreotype of the Virginia regiment and Webster's battalion in Saltillo, Mexico, courtesy of the Yale Collection of Western Americana. It was taken in 1847 or 1848, making it one of the earliest military photographs ever taken. The men are formed up in front of a row of buildings while a couple of people on the right stare at the camera, probably wondering how that strange box on legs worked.

Below is a painting commissioned by the U.S. Army. It shows a fight in Resaca de la Palma, Texas, 9 May 1846. Captain Charles A. May's squadron of the 2d Dragoons (now 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment) slashed through the enemy lines in an attack that climaxed the opening campaigns of the war. A force of 2,500 American soldiers under Zachary Taylor shattered the Mexican force of 6,000 and ejected it from Texas

Warpath Into Sonora is proceeding well and I should have it to my beta readers by early July. Then it's back to the apocalypse!

Book Review: Iron Heart

Iron Heart by Jory Sherman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A short and rather routine western about a teenager whose family is slaughtered by the Arapaho. He's saved by a mountain man and sets out to take vengeance on the entire tribe. The story takes place earlier than most westerns, sometime in the 1850s I think. Colorado is still called the Jefferson Territory, which is was until 1859. The descriptions of life at the time and the vast countryside are well done as one would expect from an experienced Western author like Sherman, who has some 200 books under his belt.
Our young hero goes through various adventures, becoming a deadly killer before eventually going after the chief of the Arapaho. The finale is rather perfunctory, as if the author was on deadline, and there are too many typos in the ebook edition. There was also something strange about the Native American dialog. When they are speaking English it comes out broken in B-movie Indian style. Fair enough, my Spanish can sound like that, but sometimes they talk like that even when speaking their own language to each other! Um, no.
If you're a fan of Westerns and see this on the shelf, it's worth grabbing, but there are heaps of other Westerns out there just as good.

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Book Review: Pulp Writer: Twenty Years in the American Grub Street

Pulp Writer: Twenty Years in the American Grub Street by Paul S. Powers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As a writer, I've always been interested in the pulp magazine era. It was a time when writers could make a living on short stories by writing for the myriad of pulp titles available on the newsstands. Some writers were massively prolific, often churning out millions of words a year.
Paul Powers, the author of this memoir, was one of those writers. He wrote hundreds of short stories and novellas and lived through the golden age of the pulps.
His tale is a sad one, however. He wrote almost exclusively for the Western magazines, a genre that was dwindling as early as the 1930s. Yet Powers forged on well into the 1950s, making less and less money as he succumbed to exhaustion, lack of inspiration, and alcoholism. This provdes a doubly cautionary tale for writers--don't be a one-trick pony and don't get sucked into the bottle.
Besides this important bit of wisdom, the book is less than useful for someone interested in the writing of the period. Much of the memoir is about Powers' various moves throughout the West, and is padded out with a long intorduction and conculsion by his granddaughter, who discovered the manuscript, researched Powers, and finally got it published. A large amount of her writing is only of personal interest to members of the family and I found myself skimming these parts.
If you're going to read only one book on the era, I would suggest The Pulp Jungle by Frank Gruber, which is far more informative about the lives of writers and editors and the business of pulp magazine publishing. I've reviewed it here. If you want some more detail about the Western pulps, and the sad tale of how the pulp era ground down writers, give the Powers memoir a try.

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Book Review: How to Write a Western in 30 Days

Write a Western in 30 Days: With Plenty of Bullet-Points! by Nik Morton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Want to write a western? This book will tell you how, more or less.

Much of the advice long-time western author Nik Morton gives is good, standard fare for any beginning writer. More experienced writers will find many pages not giving them anything they haven't seen in plenty of other how-to books and will end up skimming some sections.

Really only the research and theme chapters are specific to westerns, and they go over a huge topic too quickly. There are even occasional lapses, such as the list of Confederate states that doesn't include North Carolina, Alabama, and Florida! The border states that fought on both sides are also not mentioned, even though these provide the most grist for the writer's mill. There's also a handy appendix of western publishers which is still up to date, although of course it soon will be.

So what about the "30 days" part? Morton does, indeed, give a good overview of how to write a western novel (or indeed any novel) in a month. He relies a bit too heavily on planning and outlining for this author's taste, but all writers work differently and "plotters" will like his technique.

Books on specifically writing westerns are rare, so anyone interested in dipping into the genre should check this book out. Just don't expect to get a thorough treatment.

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Underrated Treasures Blogfest: The Coolest Western You Probably Haven't Seen

Today I'm participating in the Underrated Treasures Blogfest, where bloggers are picking their favorite movie, book, or album that nobody else has heard of. For me, it has to be the 1969 western MacKenna's Gold. This move had everything--stars, a clever plot, hidden treasure, Apaches, heaps of character actors, and plenty of twists and turns. Sadly, even many fans of the genre are unfamiliar with it.

MacKenna's Gold follows the attempts by Marshal MacKenna (played by Gregory Peck) to arrest the bandit Colorado (Omar Sharif). Unfortunately, Colorado captures MacKenna and forces him to lead his banditos to a hidden valley full of Apache gold. McKenna had recently found a treasure map, you see, but in his quest for justice he was too busy hunting down banditos to look for it himself.

It turns out that everyone else has heard the rumors too, and soon the banditos and their unwilling lawman ally have to contend with a corrupt cavalry officer (Telly Savalas) and his equally corrupt soldiers, as well as a horde of gold-hungry townies. And then, of course, there are the Apaches. . .

What I like about this film, besides all the fun characters, is how society totally breaks down at the first hint of gold fever. Gregory Peck's character is the only one who maintains his civilized role, reminding me of Gary Cooper's character in High Noon. This hokey Western ends up being a biting social commentary.

This is not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination. The original was supposed to be three hours and was cut to two, and the director bridged the gaps with bad narration. There are also some crummy shots thanks to changing the film stock halfway through production. These problems might account for why this film is so poorly remembered, but that's a shame. It's heaps of fun and well worth hunting down.

Guest article: researching a Western horror detective novel

Today we have a guest post from fellow midlist author Lincoln Crisler. Crisler’s debut novella, WILD, has just come out from Damnation Books. He has also authored two short story collections, Magick & Misery (2009, Black Bed Sheet) and Despairs & Delights (2008, Arctic Wolf). A United States Army combat veteran and non-commissioned officer, Lincoln lives in Augusta, Georgia, with his wife and two of his three children. You can visit his website at www.lincolncrisler.info.

WILD is my third published book, but my first long-form story. Of course, I couldn’t pick something easy. No, I had to write a Western-style horror/detective novella based on a real missing-persons case from the Old West, and set it in the actual geographic location. While deployed to the Middle East. Granted, this was the easiest I’ve ever had it of my three deployments, but beer is easier to get than a fully-stocked reference library!

Obviously, the Internet was my friend. Wikipedia in particular saved my ass; it was, in fact, how I discovered the story of Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain. When the idea of writing a detective-horror-western popped into my head, that’s all I started with. Only after my friends and readers selected it from a pair of options did I search for historical inspiration. I found the information on Mexican mythology and ritual spellcraft on a couple of other sites. I also had to look for a few Spanish words (such as tesquino, a period-specific form of local beer, and several swear words).

The rest of my research consisted entirely of making sure I had my geography in order. This should have been a little more difficult than it was, but luckily the real-life story I fell in love with just happened to take place in the El Paso, Texas area. I’d been living in El Paso since 2007 and was, in fact, deployed from Fort Bliss when I wrote WILD. I still had to get a feel for Mesilla and Las Cruces, and particularly for that exact time period, but the Internet helped again, and my own knowledge informed my descriptions of the landscape. I had originally envisioned the magician’s lair in El Paso’s Franklin Mountains, but after research and consideration, the Organ Mountains were a better choice, for instance (even though only about ten miles separate the two ranges!).

The only part of my research not to bear fruit was my attempt to procure an intern from a local college; someone interested in writing and/or history, whose professor would be willing to give them extra credit for a couple hours of work. A little fact-checking and fine-tuning of my Spanish, more or less. I tried putting this together when I got home from Qatar (I finished drafting WILD a week before coming home) and I honestly don’t remember why it fell through, but I just don’t have much luck with the academic types. Phooey. Even then, the Force was with me. When the manuscript was accepted, I was able to have the book copy-edited by a fellow author and El Paso resident, Tim Marquitz.

Researching the history and culture behind WILD was easily as enjoyable an experience as writing the book itself, and probably consumed at least as much time by itself. I read a long time ago that more work goes into a book than the reader ever knows, and I’m glad I got a chance to share some of that with you today. Working within a historical framework can definitely be as satisfying as making everything up from scratch!

Books for the bus

I just finished a very enjoyable book from one of my favorite authors, and it only took me a year to do it!

Why so long? Because it was my bus book. My son's school is a 15-minute ride away. When I take him to school I don't read, of course. Plus when I'm going to pick him up or coming back after dropping him off, I generally walk. So I should say my book was my "taking the bus because I'm feeling lazy and/or it's raining" book. That's why it took a year to read 204 pages.

As you can see from the illustration, the book was Ghost Towns of the American West by Robert Silverberg. Better known as a science fiction author, Silverberg has written it all, from fantasy to erotica to history. I enjoyed this book and found it to be a perfect bus companion. It follows the development of boom-and-bust mining towns in the West. Since it hops from town to town, from amusing anecdote to amusing anecdote, it's very easy to read in short bursts without losing the overall thread. A perfect bus book, in other words.

As writers we need to think about all the ways people may use our work. Not everyone sits down for an hour or two to get through a big chunk of text. I used to do that a lot more than I do now, but work and fatherhood has limited that. I bet I'm not the only one!

Historical research in Missouri

As you might have guessed from my previous post, I'm back in Missouri researching my next book for Osprey Publishing. It's for the new Raid series and will be about Confederate General J.O. Shelby's 1863 raid into Missouri. This was one of the longest raids of the war and an important chapter in the history of the war west of the Mississippi.

Osprey is one publisher doing well in the recession thanks to its strong hold on the military history niche and its willingness to expand into new territory. Another new series, Weapons of War, includes my latest book.

I'm based in Columbia, a city in the center of the state that has the State Historical Society of Missouri and the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, two great sources of information with very helpful staff. They're used to me and my endless questions by now! The two institutions are on the University of Missouri campus, where I took this shot of Thomas Jefferson thinking great thoughts. His leg warmers are courtesy of a local underground knitters group that likes decorating telephone poles, parking meters, and anything else they fancy. They haven't yet been named a terrorist group, but in this political climate that might be coming soon. I was surprised Jefferson's leg warmers actually lasted a whole two days before being removed!

Besides working on the book I'll also be going on a Jesse James roadtrip for Gadling. That should go online near the end of the month. My first stop will be this weekend when I visit the site of the Centralia Massacre, one of the bloodiest episodes of Frank and Jesse's war years.

My next book contract

Osprey Publishing has just sent me a signed contract for my next book.

It's another military history--that's what Osprey specializes in--and it's for a new series called Raid. This series focuses on important raids, examining how they were planned, what their goals were, and what could have been done better. The editor is a big fan of the Wild West and so I'm doing the Northfield Raid by the James-Younger gang. This ill-fated attempt to rob the First National Bank of Northfield, Minnesota, left all the robbers dead or in jail, except for Frank and Jesse James of course.

OK, so this isn't really military history. Osprey has been doing good business in the recession by playing to their strengths while not being afraid to break into new territory. The Wild West is one of them. Plus there are some military aspects. Most of the robbers were former Confederate bushwhackers and used their hit-and-run tactics to rob trains and banks and elude the law. I mention the James brothers in my previous Osprey title American Civil War Guerrilla Tactics.

Frank and Jesse James have cropped up in my fiction too. In an earlier post I talked about my Missouri Civil War horror novel and how because it was set in that time and place I couldn't avoid have the James brothers as characters. They've crept into the plot of the sequels too!

Here in Midlist land we're pretty busy, so we try to save time as much as possible. Writing novels set in periods you're already researching for paid work is an efficient expenditure of time. Now if I could only get those novels published!

Review: A Book of Tongues

When I met Brett Savory, co-publisher of ChiZine Publications, at Odyssey 2010, he described Gemma Files' A Book of Tongues as, "if Quentin Tarantino directed Brokeback Mountain."

That's not fair. Tarantino never created anything as original as this.

The Civil War has ended and in the Wild West a band of ex-Confederates resort to outlawry. A common enough theme both on the page and in real life, but this isn't your typical Wild West. Hexslingers have powerful magical forces at their beck and call, yet cannot unite forces because of their vampiric influence on one another. Hexslingers are natural enemies, which causes problems for our band of outlaws because their leader, Reverend Asher Rook, is a hexslinger wanted both by the law and by other hexslingers. The law, of course, is the lesser danger.

The story revolves around the troubled relationship between Rook and his gay lover Chess Pargeter, who will make your angstiest high school obsession look well adjusted by comparison. Throw in some bloodthirsty Aztec gods and you have a lot of trouble brewing.

Gemma Files has already made a name for herself with her short horror fiction, winning the International Horror Guild award for Best Short Fiction in 1999. She has two collections of stories out by Prime Books. This is her first novel and it shows she can maintain her gory lyricism through a book-length narrative. This is not a book for the fainthearted, with raunchy sex and almost continuous bloodletting, but the quality of writing is high throughout. The only off note was the occasional historical inaccuracy detectable only by obsessive students of the Civil War such as myself, and even I didn't care much. This is history turned on its head with its chest ripped open and its heart offered to the gods. I look forward to the sequel.

Zane Grey: A Great Western Writer

Yesterday I and a fellow writer were rummaging through a new bookshop here in Oxford called the Albion Beatnik (love the name!) and I picked up The Heritage of the Desert by Zane Grey. I've only read one of Grey's westerns before and I'd forgotten how good of a writer he was. His descriptions are fluid and vivid and really give the flavor of the Old West. Despite having been written in 1910, it doesn't feel very dated, only authentic. Grey was writing at a time when wagons were more common on the streets than cars, many people raised animals, and everyone had country cousins. It must be hard for a city-bound Western writer of today to get so close to the feel of the range.

I highly recommend Zane Grey to any writer who wants to learn more about how to write scenery. His prose manages to be rich without being purple, exact without being lengthy, and vivid without distracting the reader from the plot.

I'd love to learn more about his life, but I'm skipping his Wikipedia entry. It claims he was an usher in a movie theater in the early 1890s, before the invention of motion pictures, and in the section on Riders of the Purple Sage, it claims this 1912 novel was one of the earliest works of Western fiction. I've read Westerns from the 1880s and I suspect the genre goes back well before that!