My first novel – historical military fiction – made it to the top 10 of 9 of Amazon's bestseller lists. Via my blog I share what I have learned while writing two more.
Yet again, I was party to a discussion about traditional publishing fiction vs. self-publishing fiction. The question was if self-published authors are any good? And yet again, the discussion had several flawed assumptions:
– If you are traditionally published you write well. If you write well you will be traditionally published.
– If you self-publish, you can’t write and you did a poor job of preparing your manuscript. People who self-publish do so because they are not good enough to traditionally publish.
As in most such discussions, there is some truth to all assumptions, but when the generalizations become gospel thoughtful discussion ends. So what is the truth of the matter?
It is too nice to sit inside and stare at a computer. Took the dog for a walk in a greenbelt near our home in Austin. And one of the challenges of the writer’s life is sitting around too much, so figured I’d get a walk in before it gets too hot.
The first novel — Lonely Hunter — in my upcoming Science Fiction novel has a lot of action in rural settings. I have long enjoyed being outside while I was in the military, to include my time as an infantry officer in the Army. So it feels very comfortable to include such settings where it makes sense.
Though sales of my novel have continued to slow as it is coming up on 3 years since I published it, I’m keeping my promise to donate half of my earnings. Since I made my last donation early in the year, I’ve earned another $400, so I’m donating $200. Because my employer matches my donations, that means another $400. I have again decided to donate to the VFW National Home for Children.
I really like this organization’s focus on families. They seem to understand that it takes a family working together to get back on its feet while you also have to help the children.
This focus on protecting children is also a key theme in Lonely Hunter and the subsequent novels in the series. More on that in a future post.
So in total, with a partial match, I’ve now been able to donate over $2,000 to organizations that help our veterans and their families. That makes me feel good and it is pretty exciting that my first novel has sold so well.
Speaking of book sales… Given that I’m kind of a data geek, I have long been tracking my monthly sales. You can see below in blue the average sales per day on a monthly basis, and the red line is the running average.
You can clearly see in blue how sales fell almost immediately (very typical for a newbie), and then climbed as I figured out to pick keywords that would actually get traffic. Sales peaked at over 7 books per day, and then fell dramatically in September of last year. Amazon clearly made a change that impacted my sales. When I spoke to them, they said they did not know what they could have done, but obviously, something happened. The change before and since has exceeded two standard deviations, which strongly implies something material changed.
In all events, I’m not unhappy. It has been a great run, and with the strong reviews and continuing sales, I’m very proud of how it did and the people who have helped me — my wife, one of my daughters who made the map, and my editor.
It has been a good year. 🙂
Best wishes to you and your family and for all your writing projects for the New Year!
Two and a half years after I published my novel, it is still selling several copies a day.
Earlier today it had a sales rank of 50K (see the above screenshot). Sales have certainly declined from where they peaked about nine months after I published, but sales continue at a steady pace. And my novel is in a pretty small niche, so book sales have only so much upside in this niche.
My book is priced at $1.49, and it has been at that price for almost the entire time it has been for sale on Amazon, so I’m not wracking up sales by selling it at $.99.
Below you can see my Author Rank as tracked by Amazon. Even two and a half years after I launched my book it is still doing better than it did the month after I launched it. Again — see my blog on keywords. That dip the month after I published my book was because I did not know what I was doing (like most indies) with keywords. After that, I got my keywords figured out and my sales did much better.
This afternoon we had a chance to hear the extraordinarily talented Elizabeth Pitcairn play the legendary “Red Mendelssohn” Stradivarius violin of 1720. It is the same “Red Violin” about which the movie was made… Sort of. When asked how accurate the movie was, she smiled and politely assured us that, “The movie is based on history about which we know nothing.”
Another funny story she told was the day as a teenager she answered the phone to be told it was an auction house calling to let them know the violin — which had once been in their family — was coming up for auction, and that if they were interested it would probably go for about $1.2 million. She said she decided to get her mon on the phone at that point.
As to the concert… The sound was amazing. It always fascinates me when I hear master musicians. The sound they can make seems to transcend what the physical device is capable of, and they seem to do it with such ease.
I often spend Sunday afternoons watching football or trying to get some writing done… This was a nice change.
This morning, while I was sitting on the deck doing some writing, our dog (Trevose — named after the street we lived on in Singapore, where we adopted her from the humane society) and a buck had a conversation through our back fence.
Moments before, a huge owl had been sitting on a limb not far above where the buck was standing in this picture. And there used to be a famiy of hawks that lived in a nearby tree, but they seem to have departed about a month ago. We have a couple hummingbird feeders, but there seems only two that frequent them. And we have a squirrel with a black head and a brown body that crosses the deck from time to time. There is a downside…
This book came up in a discussion I was having earlier today. Published in 1968, and an eventual bestseller, The Population Bomb asserted that within 10 – 20 years the world would be wracked by starvation and wars for food.
In my early teens in the ’70s I lived in a small town in western Kansas surrounded by literally an ocean of wheat that farmers were going broke producing because the world had too damn much of it. So I could not reconcile the dire warnings of “The Population Bomb” and the reality around me.
I grew up reading Analog Science Fiction magazine. In fairness, it is more accurately Analog Science Fiction and Fact, but I always did better with the fiction part than I did the fact part.
Later in life, while earning my MA in Creative Writing, I had the chance to study under James Gunn at the University of Kansas. Gunn has published a number of science fiction novels over the last ~50 years, but he is probably better known in the sci fi community as a historian of science fiction and has published a number of books to that end.
I took three or four classes from him, and I spent some time chatting with him in his office, which was as you would imagine it: Stacked high with paperbacks on every flat surface, he was staring into the small screen of his antiquated computer. He eventually chaired my thesis committee.
As luck would have it, he came to our wedding. For a wedding gift — in typical Gunn fashion — he handed me a couple of his most recent paperbacks.
