The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
SEARCHING FOR MALUMBA is done in print and as an ebook, ready to go. I’m waiting on my proof copy of the print version, which could screw up my timing, but it’s all done.
Two short stories to write in what’s left of October, then back to STARLIGHT. Or maybe it’s called SUNLIGHT now. I’m not sure.
My Author portal tells me that Skylights’ overall peak yesterday was at #486, which is the best ranking any of my books have ever had, but this was the best screenshot I caught:
Subgenre peaks appear to be #5 in Space Exploration and #8 in Science Fiction Adventure. That’s 293 downloads in a day to get those ranks, with no advertising other than my social media. My best day ever, and the best month of the year all by itself. Once I have a day for Sanctum (next week) to get a baseline, I may experiment with ads. Or maybe not.
Thank you, everyone. I genuinely appreciate it.
My Mars novel Skylights is free all day today! Go download it!
I suspect that this one’s subgenres will be a trifle harder to crack than Benevolence Archives’ were, but this book has also never been free, so presumably I’ll get more people from my social networks downloading it. We’ll see.
This is my 1500th post. The blog came into existence in June of 2013, so that’s a rather ridiculous number. Clearly the place was appropriately named. I’m closing in on my 200,000th pageview, so I probably ought to start thanking people every day for bothering to pay attention to me at all.So Katherine Lampe tagged me with a Twitter meme. It entertains me. So why not? I gave you seven paragraphs, not seven lines, because this happened to be a conversation and they’re short. And I don’t think I’m tagging anybody. But have fun with a quick glimpse of STARLIGHT anyway.
There’s a Twitter game going around, #7Lines. The rules: Go to page 7 of your current WIP (page 7 of chapter 1, for those of you who, like me, start a new document for each chapter). Count down seven lines and post the NEXT seven lines (i.e., lines 8-15). Then tag seven writers to do the same.
“None of them know yet,” I pointed out. “The only people who were in the room when he said it were Dr. Rosansky and I.”
“We can’t keep something like that secret,” Celeste said.
“I think at the very least we ought to talk about it,” I said.
“No, I don’t mean shouldn’t, I mean can’t,” she replied. “Think about it. This ship isn’t that big. There are eight of us. Unless we’re talking about keeping these people confined to quarters for the entire way back home there is no way that the five of us can keep a secret that big from the other three for the entire trip home. If we’re even blowing orbit, which I’m not convinced is a good idea anyway.”
“We’re not going home?” Kathryn said.
“Later,” Celeste said. “The math is…complicated. I want to talk things over with Zub and Haipeng before we make any decisions about that. We should be safe in orbit.”
“That’s what the Tycho thought,” I said. “And no doubt the Shenzhou XIV, too.”
Spreadsheet of dooooom! Clicky for legible, if you’re so inclined.
So, for perspective’s sake, July 2014 had thirteen sales. So 240 is better. Best month ever, in fact; first one to break 200 downloads, and that by a decent margin. And that’s even with my first 0 day in, like, two months! It’s even still a record if I completely discount the sales from during InConJunction, which is kind of insane. Hell, even if I don’t count the vaguely ridiculous 170 I got from openbooks.com, there’s still 70 spread out everywhere else. At this rate I should break 1000 for the year sometime in August unless I crater next month. Which hopefully won’t happen.
If I’ve got a complaint (and “complaint” isn’t really the right word) it’s that the lion’s share of my downloads are still not making me anything. I had 170 from OB and another 38 (which also represents a record) from Smashwords, all of which were from Benevolence Archives. Meaning that of the 240 only 32 actually involved money changing hands– not even fifteen percent. The plan has always been that eventually the folks downloading BA for free will come looking for my other books– and the other big thing this month is that everything is available on Smashwords now, so it’s easier to find my nonfree books than it was in June. (Sanctum still hasn’t popped on the other sites; I’m still trying to iron out some issues with the table of contents, but that should be fixed in the next couple of days.)
It’ll be interesting to see if I get some sales through Smashwords this month; historically that hasn’t worked very well. Amazon’s been basically a dead zone all month, with a total of eight sales.
Actually, one more minor disappointment; I figured putting BA 1 into print would pick up at least a handful of sales and it hasn’t. That one sale was to me. But it’s in print so that I have it available at conventions, so… whatever. I’ll live.
Oh: as an experiment, I dropped $30 or $35 into a Twitter promotion on my birthday and it got me nothing. Lesson learned: never do that again.
Onward and upward, y’all. We’ll see if I can beat some more records in August.
SKYLIGHTS is live on Smashwords again, if you’re into that.
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