Review: ALONG CAME A WOLF, by Adam Dreece

On January 17, 2015January 19, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading3 Comments

Book-1-COVER-Sept2014-Along-Came-a-Wolf-by-Adam-Dreece-196x300 I promised at least three reviews of books by fellow independent authors, and this would be the third. I’ve owned a copy of Adam Dreece’s Along Came A Wolf for nearly as long as I’ve owned my Kindle, and based on (finally!) finishing the first book recently, I’ve ordered both it and its sequel in print form. As I’ve said repeatedly, print books sit on my unread shelf and stare at me until I get them read. My Kindle can’t do that, so print books always get read faster.

Dreece calls Along Came A Wolf and its sequels “Emergent Steampunk” (Breadcrumb Trail is available now at the same link above, and the third volume, All the King’s Men, is forthcoming,) which is an interesting choice, because I suspect most people aren’t going to know what the hell an emergent steampunk is until after they’ve read the book. The idea is this: technology is pretty highly variable depending on where you are and what you’re trying to do in Dreece’s world, but the world is almost at a point where steampunk-style technology is becoming available. One of the main characters in the book is an inventor, and there are hints everywhere that the things he’s working on are going to change the world.

Wolf is also YA, but it’s the kind of YA that adults won’t have any problems with, other than a few little references here and there that kids might not pick up on and grown-ups at least ought to, like the fact that the book is called Along Came a Wolf and the villain is named LeLoup. Or the Cochon brothers. (I’m not sure what part of Canada Dreece resides in, but I’m guessing it’s one of the Frenchier sections. EDIT: Calgary. Is that Frenchy? I don’t know Canada.) The inventor character I alluded to earlier is, in Dreece’s own words, a combination of Santa Claus and Nikola Tesla, which somehow works out super awesome.

I haven’t actually mentioned the titular Yellow Hoods. The three characters that make up this… group? Club? Organization? are Tee, a twelve-year-old girl who is the book’s main character, and her friends Elly and Richy. Elly and Richy aren’t nearly as well-drawn as Tee is, but watching the trio work together to solve their problems is fun. I won’t spoil the plot (Bad happens! They try and fix it!) but it’s a genuinely fun adventure and, well, like I said, I paid for it twice and have already bought the sequel.

~~One unfortunate criticism: the book does have some minor editing issues here and there, mostly coming in the form of slightly misused serial commas.~~ (EDIT: See here.) If you’re not a grammar purist it’s not something that’s going to bother you, and Dreece’s writing itself is of high quality, but… former Language Arts teacher. I’m a grammar purist. 🙂

A final note: I want to steal Dreece’s cover artist from him. I know the books have been through at least a couple of cover changes (the cover image on my version of the book is not the same as the one above) and the character work on his current set of covers is fantastic. Chain this person to a table so that he or she can’t get away. This is great work.

Review: DARKNESS CONCEALED, by D. Emery Bunn

On January 9, 2015January 9, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Darkness_Concealed_cover-1500x940 As I said a couple of days ago, I am a terrible friend to my fellow independent authors. However, I’ve been doing my best to curtail that tendency lately and making myself read on my Kindle. Surprisingly, it hasn’t had the same weird sleep-preventing effects on my wife that it was having when I first bought it. So maybe I can keep this up for a while. At any rate, the second book that I’ll be reviewing (of at least three; there will likely be one more review this weekend) is of D. Emery Bunn’s Darkness Concealed. You’ll have heard Emery’s name around here once or twice before; he’s a Twitter buddy and I interviewed him here when the book first came out.

Bunn bills Darkness Concealed as a dark fantasy, and… well, yeah. Right on the nose, that. This is not for the faint of heart, kids; the book starts with a family being massacred by demons in their house, and while the violence is never gratuitous, at least by my standards, that event sorta sets a bit of a tone for the rest of the book. And seeing as the rest of the book revolves around the four main characters trying to find a) a reason for and b) a way to prevent a recurring near-apocalypse that regularly slaughters a fair chunk of the human populace… so yeah, it’s a bit on the dark side.

Darkness Concealed is book one of a trilogy, and it shows; there are a number of weird little bits here and there that are never explained (one of the characters has somebody else living in her head, for example) and there are plenty of questions and plot points left dangling for the sequels. That would be a weakness in the hands of a less skilled author; here it just makes the world look bigger and avoids the dodge of “self-contained first book then a duology makes a trilogy,” a phenomenon I’ve kinda gotten tired of. There are clearly more answers coming and more story here, so if you’re the type who wants everything tied up nice and neat with a bow on it when you close the book (or, uh, exit the Kindle app?) this may not be the book for you.

Why is this a book for you? Worldbuilding. Bunn has big ideas for how the word of Telthan works, and some of the settings that the characters visit, including a ruined city, a magical library tower and a damn-near-literal castle at the end of the world, really made the book for me. These characters are searching for answers, and they’ll go wherever they need to to get them; the author clearly has no shortage of cool locales for them to visit along the way, and one of the joys of the book for me was seeing what they would encounter next.

Three dolla ninety-nine cent at the Amazon. Check it out, you shall.

In which I die trying: book sales blogwanking

On December 27, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Writing22 Comments

milk-and-heavy-cream (Note: I’ll provide a free copy of the book of your choice to the first person who figures out the terribly clever joke I’m making with the picture on this post.)

I just took a few minutes to sit down and figure out exactly how my books have done this year. I’m going to put the take-away right up at the beginning so you don’t have to wait for it: I have indisputably lost money playing at writer this year. Lost a lot of money, actually. Now, the good news is that most of the money that I’ve lost wasn’t actually mine, since the grant I got last year paid for everything, but that money would still be in my pocket had I not spent it on writing-related stuff. (Well, actually, no, it wouldn’t, because I got the grant specifically so that I could play writer this year.)

Do I care? Actually, no, I don’t, but I won’t be hiring professional artists to do book covers again anytime soon until I figure marketing out. At any rate: here is all the data I can pull together on how my books did this year, and some musing on what works and what doesn’t. The long and short of it is, I think I’m probably pretty good at getting people to download stuff for free. I’m less good at getting people to spend money on my books. That’s the part I ought to work on.

I released two books this year: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 released on Amazon on May 10th and everywhere else a couple of months later, and Skylights released everywhere on September 29th. I have high hopes that the BA novel will release in the first quarter of 2015– I’m hoping for mid- to late March– or very early in the second quarter, and I have a fourth book in the works for later in 2015. Vague plans exist for the next BA installment in early 2016, with a possible follow-up to Skylights coming after that. So I’ve got plans. We’ll see how they work out.

Anyway. We’ll start with pure sales. The Benevolence Archives has, as of today, sold 56 copies, all but two of which were through Amazon. The other two were through the iTunes bookstore. Skylights has sold 36 copies– two through iTunes, ten through Smashwords, and the remainder through Amazon. It is possible that there are sales that I don’t know about through non-Smashwords or Amazon distributors, because of the way they report sales to Smashwords, but it’s unlikely that that amounts to more than one or two. If I include my payment from the story I sold to the World Unknown Review, I’ve made… wait for it… $215.89 from my book sales in 2014. This, as I’ve already said, doesn’t come close to representing profit. Nowhere near it. I’m not telling you how much I’ve spent. I might next year when I’m spending my own money.

Free downloads have been a bit more interesting. I have given away four copies of Skylights, all through Smashwords, and 550 copies of The Benevolence Archives. BA has done well at Smashwords; it’s responsible for 102 of those free downloads. 91 people have downloaded the free chapter of Skylights through Smashwords; that chapter is available just about everywhere but only Smashwords lets me know the number of downloads. I really wish Amazon gave me access to that number but they don’t. My books were downloaded, one way or another, 646 times in 2014.

People go back and forth on the value of having a free book out there. As you can see (and this will surprise no one) my books move a lot more copies when they’re free. It’s possible that BA is just that much better than Skylights, but I think it’s the price. Very soon I will have the novel available, and my hope is that the free novella will drive sales to my other (non-free) books, especially the ones that are sequels. I don’t know if this is a wise decision, but comparing sales of BA 2 to Skylights will be very interesting. For now, I’ll take the exposure over the money– I feel like it’s more valuable in the long run at this time. And considering that Skylights has had four and a half fewer months to sell and costs 166% of what Benevolence Archives does, I think there’s some evidence that I’m on the right track here. It’s hardly conclusive, but it’s evidence.

Here’s my Amazon author rank, by the way. My best day? My first day on the market:

For those of you who don’t know this– a single sale can make the difference between an author rank of #650,000 and the high six figures. Two sales in a day will usually break you into the top 100K. A day of no sales will lose you 30-40K in ranking or so. There’s an enormous amount of volatility built into those rankings, and I suspect most Amazon authors are selling no more than one or two books a week. Remember something: I’ve never had a day of double-digit sales. Not once. Even the day BA launched. And that day was good for #35,792. My high day of free giveaways was 290 downloads, which had me briefly at #1 in the world for free science fiction books.

Here’s the thing: I can easily imagine someone looking at these numbers, particularly that $215.89, and thinking “Man. That was not worth the effort.” And… well, I can understand that. My perspective, on the other hand, is that in April of 2014 I had never convinced anyone in the world ever to pay me money to write words and as of right now there have been ninety-three instances of human beings deliberately giving me their money for my writing. And not at gunpoint or anything! My mom can’t be all of those people. My books have been downloaded six hundred and forty-six times. This is insane! I don’t know 646 people! I cannot pretend that this is bad news. Now, do I hope I do better next year? Yes, definitely. But for my first seven months as an author? I’m not complaining at all.

I was going to muse about marketing a bit, but this sentence is going to push this post over 1000 words already, so maybe I’ll save it for later this week and call it “How to Sell Books Online,” like I know what I’m doing.

Indie authors: how am I doing? How are you doing?

Need something to read?

On September 23, 2014September 21, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading3 Comments

My buddy D. Emery Bunn’s debut novel Darkness Concealed is out today! Head over to Amazon and check it out, and look for an interview with him later this week. I ask stupid questions and he puts up with them! It’s fun!

There may be too many exclamation points in this post.

I’m just gonna start typing if that’s okay

On September 10, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing3 Comments

…and we’ll see if what comes out in any way resembles a blog post worth reading.

So Benevolence Archives hasn’t been selling well lately. And by “hasn’t been selling well,” I mean “has sold one copy in the last thirty days.” Now, if I were to make a list of things that also have not happened in the last thirty days, “took even the slightest step to market Benevolence Archives” would have to be on the list, so this isn’t a waah waah poor me no one loves me type of post. The book’s not selling right now because I’m not putting it in people’s faces and trying to sell it. There are consequences to actions. It’ll be OK.

What’s interesting: a couple of weeks ago, having already noted this trend, I shrugged and set the book to perma-free at Smashwords. I am starting to think that Smashwords isn’t even a real website, by the way, because even that caused it to move no copies, and the site now helpfully informs me that despite making no sales I am owed sixty-one cents by… someone. ‘K. Why did I do this? Because I want the book free at Amazon, and I’ve been informed by numerous reliable people that the way to perma-free your book at Amazon is to make it permanently free at Smashwords, and then their magical Internet goblins notice and match the price.

They, uh, have not matched the price, despite the fact that I specifically ratted myself out to them. Which is part of the reason I haven’t mentioned the book much around here lately, because “SPEND MONEY TO BUY MY BOOK BEFORE IT’S FREE FOREVER!” seems kinda rude, y’know? But they won’t make it free.

So… spend money to buy my book before it’s free forever? Yeah. Go do that. You’ll like it.

(Actually, gonna make this its own post. The rest may wait until tomorrow.)

(Oh. Something that happened today? Actual progress on BA 8! Miraculous!)

Okay, seriously, that’s enough now.

On August 19, 2014August 18, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing4 Comments

This is from the same fuckers who wanted a thousand dollars from me last week to do some shit that I could do for myself for free. This person appears to not be aware that they sent me the previous letter, and holy shit they’re not even trying. I hate this company a lot.

I will not turn the page over. I also will not even open the next letter.