Tag Archives: Writing

Jan 02

Creative writing, progress report

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The current novel is at 22,000 words. I think it’s going to end up at 50,000 words, which is wicked short for a print novel, but feels like a good length for an e-novel. It’s going to be the first of a continuing series.

I have a backlog of existing work to revise and post: Three shorts stories and two novel drafts. I really need to be working on those. But I hate to let a day go by without doing a little original creative writing, and that seems to be all that I have the energy or time to do some days. I need to be more patient about this, just chip away at things a little a day. That’s how creative writing works. It’s much slower than blogging or journalism, which is what I’ve done professionally my whole career.

“The Biggest Man in Lilliput” is selling all right all things considered. Two reviews on Amazon, one five-star and one four-star. Fifteen sales to date on Amazon. One sale on Barnes & Noble. It’s a decent start. It’s $5.65 in royalties. Journey of a thousand miles, single step, and all that.

Many ebooks don’t sell any copies at all, so I’m already ahead of the game there. My sales are good for a first ebook from someone unknown at creative writing who doesn’t have a popular blog or other social media platform to promote it. I mean, my number of Twitter followers, Google+ and Facebook friends is good, but it’s not spectacular. My personal blog doesn’t get many readers. And it just wouldn’t be right for me to use The CMO Site to promote my creative writing — not right, and disastrous professionally. The CMO Site and my creative writing are two different things; one is my career and the other is my hobby and a side-business.

I need to get the ebook posted to Smashwords so it’ll be available on iBooks, Sony, and other stores, as well as available for download. Then I can start the real marketing; writing some background posts for my blog, Google+, and Facebook, and also sending review copies to other people’s blogs.

Flagrant self-promotion:

Buy “The Biggest Man in Lilliput” here for $0.99:

“The Biggest Man in Lilliput” on Kindle

“The Biggest Man in Lilliput” on Nook

Dec 14

My first ebook: Getting closer

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Julie did a bang-up first pass at creating a cover for my ebook short story. It looks sharp and professional, playful and a little bit serious, capturing the tone of the story nicely. It uses a gorgeous cover photo too; it’s the one titled San Francisco Cityscape With Cookware on this page. I love the photo — I love all the photos on that page — but I don’t think they’re quite right for this particular story. And I don’t have permission to use them. So we’ll have to find another photo. That’s OK, there are plenty of public-domain cityscapes available on the Internet.

The story, by the way, is called “The Biggest Man in Lilliput.” It takes the premise that a colony of Lilliputians built a city on North America, and now it’s survived to the present day, with Internet access and political blogs and all the other accoutrements of modern life. I guess you could say it’s a fantasy-comedy-thriller. It’s short. I’ll be selling it for $0.99. Or maybe $1.09, because apparently $0.99 is a red flag that says crappy shovelware just dumped into an ebook file without even being proofread.

No, I think I’ll just go for $0.99. Pricing for electronic goods, where the cost of reproduction and distribution is near zero, is hard.

I want to have the story for sale by Christmas. E-reader sales are going to be huge for Christmas, and all the people with empty new e-readers will want something to read right away. So that’s an opportunity to make some sales.

I will be using ZappTek LegendMaker software to handle the conversion, which is supposed to be automatic and easy. But I vaguely remember little quirks of ebook formatting that don’t appear to be covered by the LegendMaker documentation. For example: Covers for epub-formatted ebooks, which is the format used by most ebook readers, need to have opaque backgrounds. But the Amazon Kindle requires a transparent background. Or maybe I’m misremembering. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I need to look into this.

I don’t just want the book available in one place, though. After the Kindle store, I’ll put it up on the Barnes & Noble Nook store. Then here, adding a storefront page to this Web site. This blog runs on WordPress, and I understand it’s not difficult to set up a cash register on a WordPress site. I’ll also want to put the book up on as many other ebook sites as I can find; I understand SmashWords is good for that.

Now here’s a fun idea: Con-Dor, a local science fiction convention, is March 2-4. I’d like to print up postcards with the book cover and promotional materials to give out at the conference. Better yet: Postcards to sell, with redemption codes for the ebook. Buy the postcard, come to the Web site later, enter the unique redemption code on the postcard, and claim your copy of the book, prepaid. As if that’s not nerdy enough, I’d like to get a Square credit card reader so I can take credit card payments when I’m just walking around. But only if the convention rules allow it; I don’t want to be a dick about it.

Also: Writing. The most important part. At this point, I have a lot of material in the pipeline — several short stories written and abandoned that need shaves and haircuts, two novel drafts requiring revising, and a third novel in progress. Lots to do.

2012 is going to be a fun year.

Nov 07

Creative writing: What I’m working on

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I started work on another novel this weekend. This means I’m currently working on:

  • Two novels and two short stories in various stages of revision.
  • One novel, newly under way.
  • One more story waiting to be revised.
  • Another story which I’m seriously considering trunking, while maybe cannibalizing the characters and situations for some future work.

Yes, I know this sounds like I have become the guy who’s always starting things and never finishing. But I was eager to get started n the new novel. And I have a plan: I want to always be working on something new, while also revising, publishing, or promoting something else. So really I’m only working on two things currently — the new novel and one story I’m actively revising — while the other work is waiting.

I’m really enthusiastic about self-publishing and e-publishing right now. I’ve talked to some professional novelists and book editors and they support it as well. That’s important, because as little as five years ago, these same people viewed self-publishing as a massive con job (with certain narrow exceptions).

What’s changed? E-book readers, of course, like the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook and their iPad apps. Also, Amazon CreateSpace for self-publishing print books, along with the collapse of Borders making traditional publishing less attractive by removing a huge percentage of the nation’s retail shelf space at the stroke of a lawyer’s pen. I’ve been reading blogs by Mike Stackpole, Dean Wesley Smith, and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, as well as James Macdonald, all of whom have had successful careers at traditional publishing, all of whom are now exploring self-publishing. And I’m thinking: I can do this. Publishing on the Internet has been my sole source of income for eight years now. I know how this works.

I got to talk with Mike Stackpole a bit at World Fantasy Con a bit more than a week ago (actually, more like I was allowed to be a fly on the wall while he talked with another pro), and came away with the insight that the sweet spot for e-books is likely to be series of 50,000-word short novels with recurring characters and situations. And that’s the new novel. It’ll stand on its own as a short adventure novel, and also serve as the beginning of an open-ended series.