The best and worst of Bruce Blake

Bruce Blake is having a significant impact on the independent author scene. In addition to writing some innovative fantasy and horror novels, he has founded the Guild of Dreams fantasy writers’ collective, which has a Facebook group page as well as a blog, where members take turns posting very interesting ideas, opinions, interviews, excerpts and lots of other stuff. Check it out — AFTER reading Bruce’s addition to the confessionals series, “The best and the worst I’ve ever done — as a writer.”

When Scott asked me to write a few words about the best and worst things I've done as a writer, it took me a while to come up with something that didn't sound cliché and lazy. How easy would it have been to say the best thing I ever did was to self-publish and the worst was to wait so long to self-publish? Both of those answers are valid, but I'm aware of the quality of Scott's writing and blogging, so I thought, “No, Bruce. That's not good enough. Scott's readers will demand more.”

 

So here's the real deal.

The best thing I ever did was to keep working on, reading about and learning my craft. Too broad? Let me narrow it down to a single incident. I took a writing course by mail through a major writing publication some years ago, which included one-on-one instruction from a published author in my genre. Part of the deal was that I could ask the instructor questions when I submitted my exercises, so I asked this gentleman about how much editing an author typically does. His response? “Most of the published authors I know have their first drafts published almost as-is.”

A book that changed Bruce's
writing life.

I was devastated. I hadn't been writing seriously for long at that point and was still pretty new to the idea of writing to be published, but I knew enough to realize my first drafts weren't good enough to go to print. Not by a long shot (and they still aren't). But I didn't let that deter me. I kept writing and, more importantly, kept learning. Soon after, I came across a book that changed my writing life: James A. Michener's Writer's Handbook: Explorations in Writing and Publishing.

The book included his first draft for a novel and you know what?

It sucked.

Photo of Stephen King
from Wikipedia
Commons



Photo of Ray Bradbury  from Wikipedia
Commons



Mr. Michener, author of dozens of bestsellers, proclaimed that writing really came together during the editing process. (An amusing side note: Mr. Michener wrote by hand. An assistant typed the manuscript, which the author would then edit by literally cutting and pasting with scissors and scotch tape). He said that a first draft is just about getting words down on paper, no matter whether they are good or not, and that editing and rewriting are where a writer breathes life into his work. Since that moment, I've read interviews and books by other writers who say the same thing. You know, hacks like Stephen King and Ray Bradbury.

By the way, years later, I finally tracked down a copy of one of my instructor’s books ... I couldn't get through it.

Ah, sweet vindication.

Other “best things” I've done would have to include realizing that any good writer needs the assistance of others in the form of professional editors, proofreaders and cover artists; exposing myself to other writers (though the other writers might not like it so much when I expose myself, wink wink nudge nudge); and taking it seriously enough to lose sleep and skip social functions to just get it done.

A matter of timing

The worst thing I have ever done as a writer, on the other hand, is more difficult to nail down. If I had to pick one, I think it would involve timing.

I published my first novel, On Unfaithful Wings, to Kindle in December 2011, but resisted enrolling in Amazon's KDP Select program until April (to be part of the program, your novel has to be exclusive on Kindle. I struggled with that concept, despite the fact I've sold a grand total of five copies through other venues). Doesn't sound like such a bad thing, does it? Not until you know that something changed significantly about the program around the end of March. Up until that time, copies given away during KDP free promos counted as sales. That meant independent authors could give their book away to thousands of people (my first free promo, I gave away just shy of 10,000 copies) and end up on the Kindle bestsellers list...the list paying customers see and often use to determine what books they are going to buy.

Around the end of March, the giveaways stopped counting as sales. I did my first promo two weeks later. That hesitation cost me hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of dollars. That would have to be the worst thing I've done as a writer.

Unless you include the time I killed a man in Reno just to watch him die.

Bruce Blake lives on Vancouver Island, which the rest of us Canadians know as the tropical part of Canada. When pressing issues like shovelling snow and building igloos don’t take up his spare time, Bruce can be found taking the dog sled to the nearest coffee shop to work on his short stories and novels.

His first novel is On Unfaithful Wings: An Icarus Fell Novel. He released his newest, Blood of the King, on Amazon in October. A promotional preview excerpt appeared in Written Words on October 1.

Follow his blog, The Thoughts and Opinions of a Writer on the Rise.

Follow him on Twitter @bruceablake.

What do free giveaways on Amazon lead to? Lots of people getting your book for free.

Through the Labour Day long weekend, I used three of the five days out of ninety in which Amazon lets me set my book’s price to zero as a promotion. As best as I can figure it, over 1,400 people downloaded a full e-book copy of The Bones of the Earth gratis.

Of course, it’s done very little for my bank account.

Downloads versus rankings

As a member of Independent Authors International, a writers’ cooperative group, I participated in the group’s first Labor Day Free Reads event. Seven of us (see last week’s post) all set September 1 to 3 as “free days” on our Amazon Kindle Select accounts. We joined and/or notified I don’t know how many bloggers, portals, reviewers and Facebook groups to publicize it; we wrote and shared updates for our own Facebook pages and scheduled hundreds of tweets.

The giveaway began at midnight on September 1. While some participants thought progress was slow, for my own part, I was happy. I had over 300 downloads by Saturday evening, and when I got up the next morning, some 30 hours or so into the program, Amazon US was showing over 600 downloads. The UK site showed 39 downloads, plus one sale of The Bones of the Earth, Part One: Initiation Rites.

Some of the other participants noted that there were no downloads from the UK site after sometime on Saturday afternoon, September 1. It turned out there was some kind of glitch in Amazon.co.uk’s tallying system. I experienced it, too: while downloads from the US site climbed fairly steadily all weekend, the UK site was stuck at 39.

More exciting to watch were the rankings. By the end of Saturday, The Bones of the Earth had advanced to no. 1,300 or so in the Free lists, and by Sunday afternoon, September 2, it was number 2 in Historical Fantasy in Amazon.com’s US Free lists, and number 5 in Epic Fantasy; in the UK, despite only showing 39 downloads, it reached number 1 in Historical Fantasy!

After that, it started falling in the rankings, to number 3 and finally settling at number 5 in historical fantasy, and number 451 overall, by the end of the event, even though total downloads kept advancing.

Image: Creative Commons

Why did I give my book away for free after trying to sell it for so many months?

Good question. I’m glad I asked it.

Many other indie authors who have tried the Kindle Select giveaway program since it became available at the beginning of this year reported a sales spike immediately following the end of the giveaway period. For example, Russell Blake made his Geronimo Breach free for three days in January and saw about 12,000 downloads. “Then, when it went back to paid, a funny thing happened. After languishing for the first day, it shot like a rocket, finally hitting #165 in the paid Kindle store,” he reported in his blog.

Russell wasn’t the only one. I read similar stories from several other indie authors. But as time went on and more and more independent writers used the program, the results were less and less striking.

Still, I was hopeful. Writers I respected for both their writing and marketing ability kept using the program. In the summer, I participated as a supporter of the Book Pushalooza for Derek Blass, Elise Stokes, Robert Guthrie, Shannon Mayer and a few others. The planning and organization in that group effort was amazing.

Lessons learned

How did iAi Labor Day Free Reads go? For me, 1,400 downloads is great — it’s many times more copies than I have sold in the past 8 months, even if it was a small number compared to Russell Blake’s results.

Still, I have to keep that in perspective. Russell was already selling thousands of copies of his book before he had the giveaway.

Another lesson: maybe next time, I won’t do this over a long weekend. People, and readers are people, often go away from their computers during holidays.

Yet another lesson: I will participate for a longer period in the Facebook and other groups that I want to promote my book before asking them to do that.

And there are still more bloggers and reviewers to contact.

As far as sales go: strangely enough, I have sold 12 copies of The Bones of the Earth, Part 1: Initiation Rites at 99 cents through the weekend. I don’t understand this, because Part 1 is, as the title implies, the first part of the full novel. Part 1 came with parts 2 and 3 for free last weekend. I’m not complaining — four bucks is enough for two cups of good coffee. But it seems strange to me. I guess the fact that Part 1 is the first part of the full book is not that clear to some people. Anyway, I’m glad people bought the story, and I hope it makes them want to read the rest of it.

As for the hoped-for sales spike: I’m writing this during that first day after the end of the event, during which Russell Blake reported “languishing” sales. So I’ll watch my reports from Amazon. And I’ll let you know how it’s going.

ON NOW! The first Independent Authors International Labor Day Free Reads Giveaway!

September 1 – 3:
3 days
7 free authors
7 great books

ALL FREE!

Independent Authors International’s Labor Day Free Reads giveaway is on NOW.

Don't miss your chance to end your summer with spectacular reading!

From September 1 to 3, anyone can download up to seven great titles from seven great, free-thinking independent authors — all for free!

I’m proud to be included in this group. Take a look at what will be available for you this coming weekend:

The Five Fortunes of Fulano — one of the Sketches from the Spanish Mustang, by Benjamin X. Wretlind. From a reviewer: “Mr. Wretlind has penned a tale of such emotional and literary depth that it will haunt the reader long after the last page is turned.”

Cassidy Jones and Vulcan’s Gift — described by a reviewer as “both the Superman 2 and Wrath of Khan to the first book,” Cassidy Jones and the Secret Formula. Both are great, esteem-building reads for the middle-grade and young adult set.

At Road’s End — the first in Zoe Saadia’s literary adventure series set in pre-Columbian America, this book has been reviewed as “a book to have on your MUST READ list.”

American Goddesses — Gary Henry’s paranormal/science-fiction yarn that makes you think, and think again.

Gray Justice — the first in Alan McDermott’s series about ex-commando Tom Gray, a man who doesn’t so much take justice into his own hands and thrust it into all of ours.

Lost — the second installment in Rob Guthrie’s thriller-horror crossover featuring one of the most interesting cops of all, Bobby Mac, and the book that established Guthrie as a truly talented and visionary writer.

And of course, my own offering: The Bones of the Earth — a tale that combines epic fantasy and historical research with a story about a young man who is trying to find his own place in a confusing and often chaotic world.

Don’t miss out. If you’re looking for some great reading material for your e-reader this fall, you could not do better than this mix from thought-provoking, truly independent authors.

To download them for free, simply type the titles into the search field in Amazon. Or watch this space and my Twitter feed for the link to the iAi Labor Day Free Reads landing page.

As if you needed another reason to celebrate a long weekend:
3 days
7 free-thinking writers
7 free books.

 



Plunging The Bones of the Earth into Kindle Select

I’ve decided to take the plunge.

Creative Commons. No, this is not me.
Thanks for asking, though.

I’ve enrolled my novel, The Bones of the Earth, into Amazon’s Kindle Digital Publishing (KDP) Select program.

I’ve resisted this for some time. In fact, the first time I heard of Kindle Select, I objected to it. At the same time, though, I understood why Amazon structured it the way it did.

KDP Select is a marketing program, as well as a method for Amazon to reinforce its dominance of the digital book market. An author or a publisher who has published a book on Amazon’s Kindle store can choose to enroll it in the KDP Select program, which gets the book included in Amazon’s Kindle Lending Library. This allows member of Amazon Prime to borrow the book, free of charge. The author/publisher gets a share of the fund that Amazon sets aside to reimburse them for these free book loans. Lately, that fund has been around $600,000 per month, divided among all authors in the program according to how many times their books get borrowed.

Authors can also set five days out of every 90 during which their books can be downloaded for free. Otherwise, you cannot set your book for a free download on Amazon, unless you go through some tricks by setting your book for free on other sites (like Smashwords, Apple’s iBookstore,Kobo, Barnes & Noble’s Nook Book Store, the Sony e-bookstore or Diesel, to name the few that I know of) and hoping that Amazon matches their price. This has not always worked for me.

The catch

The downside to KDP Select is that Amazon demands exclusivity. If you enroll your e-book in Select and the Lending Library, you cannot distribute it through any other retailer, paid or not. If you do, and Amazon finds out, they’ll not only refuse to pay you any royalties on that book, they may withhold your royalties on all your other title sold through Amazon. They may even bar you from the Kindle digital publishing system entirely.


Creative Commons


This exclusivity applies only the digital books. Authors and publishers that have joined Select can still sell printed books any way they wish — or can.

I can understand why Amazon did this. It dominates the e-book market, and it’s not a charity. It’s a business. I’m not a lawyer, but I doubt this qualifies as an anticompetitive tactic. No one has to join the Select program. You can still sell books through the KDP system as well as every other digital channel you can find, and Amazon will still sell your e-books for you. And Amazon still provides lots of free tools for making e-books in the first place.

A large number of authors have signed up for KDP Select, including several that I know through social media and some that have even written guest posts on this blog. Obviously, they’re not that worried about the exclusivity clause — or they feel that the benefits of lending royalties plus increased sales more than offset the downside.

Many have written that the majority of their sales have been through Amazon, anyway, so they weren’t really losing much.

For my part, Amazon accounts for about half my sales; the other half is mostly through Smashwords, with a few other sales from the other e-retailers.

Select results




Rob Guthrie's magnumopus is now out!

 Some authors have found Kindle Select works. Those were RS Guthrie’s words on his blog, Rob on Writing. “Each of the past three or four times I have run one or both of my books free on Amazon, I have seen a nice increase in sales post-freebie,” he wrote in April.
In February, author Russell Blake (who guested here in December) reported on his blog:

Last month, I dipped my toe in the water by making The Geronimo Breach free for three days. During that time, I saw about 12K downloads. Not too shabby. Then, when it went back to paid, a funny thing happened. After languishing for the first day, it shot like a rocket, finally hitting #165 in the paid Kindle store.

So, it does work. Of course, both Guthrie and Blake outsell me by orders of magnitude. But the potential is there.



At time of writing,
number 6,554 Paid in
Kindle Store  — not shabby at all.



Do I really want to give my books away for free?

Of course not. I put a lot of work into them: planning, writing, re-writing, editing, re-writing again, throwing parts out, filling in plot and characterization holes. I engaged editors and designers, and I had to pay them. So no, I don’t want to just give them away.

But we all appreciate that free promos and cut-rate special offers help drive up sales, too. Free is a promotional tool that I’d like to be able to use.

Also, there are some multi-author book giveaway promotions that I’d like to participate in — but again, you have to be a member of Kindle Select.

Mostly, I want to experience that paid sales spike after the free promos. I understand that it’s only a temporary spike. At this point, I’ll take temporary.

As of July 12, ##431,700 Paid in Kindle Store. Let's see if we can boost that to the low hundred thousands, at least.

I promise to blog about my experiences regularly. I’ll keep you all up to date on my progress.

Guest blogger: Martin Crosbie, author of My Temporary Life

This guest post is from Martin Crosbie, the Kindle Select sensation whose excellent My Temporary Life (I'm reading it now) hit number 1 on Amazon a couple of months ago. Below, Martin explains how he did it.
Martin also interviewed me about my first novel. That interview is on his blog—but read Martin's tale of hitting number one first.

PIRATES, KARMA, AND MY UNLIKELY RISE TO #1

In early February, I enrolled my ebook in KDP Select. Did much happen because of it? Yeppers, in three weeks I experienced more personal accomplishments than I ever could have imagined. First of all, “My Temporary Life,” became available as a free download in an Amazon promotion. The idea is that folks download it for free and with the momentum that builds, when it becomes a paid download, it sells. Well—IT WORKED! It became the most downloaded ebook in North America for one day, a few Sundays ago.

My Temporary Life, built up momentum like a rocket taking off. There was nothing gradual about it at all. By the second day, it was second overall in free downloads. On the third day, well you know what happened, because you heard me. Yep, doesn’t matter where you were, you probably heard me. We hit #1 overall.

So, then, “paid” day happened. It changed over at midnight on Sunday and paid sales slowly started to trickle in. The next morning I expected to see 15 or 20 sales. We had over 200. Over 200 folks pulled out their credit cards and took a chance on my self-published book, which over 120 publishers and agents had turned down. (Oh, did I forget to mention that part?)

Sales continued all day, and the days after. We peaked in the overall rankings at #9, but it didn’t stop there. An independent website emailed to tell us that we were the #7 most downloaded independent ebook of the week; we did a bunch of online interviews, emails and reviews stacked up like crazy, the momentum was deafening.

We hit 60,000 downloads, 51,500 of which were free. There were so many requests for information that we issued a press release. Yep, we issued a press release talking about the book that I wrote in the spare bedroom of my house. A Dallas, Texas television station ran the story. They were interested in the fact that over 120 agents and publishers rejected “My Temporary Life,” yet all these folks were downloading it. We were on the Movers and Shakers list. We were one of the top 10 self-published ebooks on Amazon. We were #2 in Romance/Suspense. We were #2 in Mystery/Thriller. And more 5-star reviews came in every day. 

 

At dinner one night, Jacquie and I sat and read the newest reviews. Two of them made us cry. It’s an amazing experience to read about how your work can touch another person. The sales figures really are amazing, but the almost overwhelming part is that you have an opportunity to touch so many people. 

Helping things along

Now, while all this momentum was happening, it was also getting a little help: I was spreading the word. You see, although I do trust in Amazon, I was helping it along. I was posting interviews, sales figures, anything I could. I was on Amazon discussion boards, Kindleboards, KDP’s Community site, Facebook, Twitter, even Craigslist! All I wanted to do was tell people about my book. And, in doing all of this, not a lot of other things were happening, including writing. And, you see, there are a couple of things that I have to do in my life to function. One of them is sleeping, and the other is writing. I was sleeping a little bit-four or five hours a night, but not writing at all. That was the first problem. The second problem was the pirates.

“My Temporary Life” showed up on a piracy site. Someone had taken my work, changed some things, and was giving it away. So, we quickly sent a letter to them, and the owners of the site were kind enough to take it down right away. I remember years ago, sitting in front of my computer and playing with Napster, and I felt karma kicking me solidly on my rear end.

The next thing that happened was we started receiving a lot of emails from other authors asking me what I’d done, or more specifically what I did differently. There are two things that I can definitely recommend. One is Bob Mayer and Jen Talty’s The Shelfless Book. This is it: https://whodareswinspublishing.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=164

The book is actually the contents of their course that I took just before my epbublishing adventure began. 

 

My other recommendation is to do everything you can think of to spread the word. I can tell you that it truly does make a difference when you have a Facebook event or tweet it, or come up with some other novel and original way to reach readers.

Currently, over 90,000 people have downloaded My Temporary Life. Our sales have tapered off a little bit lately, but we are still high in the rankings and we have over 80 five-star reviews now, too, and, oh yes, the sequel has been started. My Name Is Hardly is underway. I’m aiming for a December release (gulp). So, thank you everybody for Facebooking, and Tweeting, and emailing your friends. Every time you’ve told someone about my book it made a huge difference, and the book that over 120 agents and, oh never mind, that doesn’t matter now, the word is out there, and people are enjoying the book. Thank you all, it’s truly appreciated!

Martin's interview of me is on his blog, here.

My Temporary Life is excellent. I recommend it. You can find it on Amazon, of course.