Reviews, promos and contests, oh my!

by | Apr 4, 2011 | Writing

I’ve got a few posts percolating, but here’s a quickie for a Monday morning. Hard Day’s Knight has gotten a great review over on Grace Krispy’s MotherLode Blog. She enjoyed the book, and lodges some valid critiques about character development and editing. Editing is something that all self-pubbed (indie) authors struggle with, and I’m grateful that for the most part people give me at least a partial pass on a few typos. I try as hard as I can to weed them all out, and use beta readers and freelance editors to try and get the ones that I didn’t see, but some slip through the cracks nonetheless.

I’m not making excuses (yeah, I know I really am) because the ultimate goal is as error-free a product as can be produced, but for me typos are something that are going to fall below writing new material and promoting existing material, at least as long as I’m a one-man band. Once I get to the point where I can hire an assistant to handle some of those things, I’ll be doing everything myself, and thanking all that is holy for Richard Brodie every time I see the red squiggly line (inside joke, I’ll explain it over a drink if you care that much). And frankly, it’s hard and I’m pretty lazy by nature, so I appreciate the folks that read the books and enjoy them anyway, and I’ll take my lumps for the typos that slip past me and my editors.

But let’s be real clear – it’s not just a self-pub issue. I had real problems with a legacy publishing book a few months ago because there was a consistent homonym error. Not once, but every time the word was used, the incorrect homonym was chosen. I don’t remember the book, and I don’t remember the specific words, but it was something as basic as “through” instead of “threw.” And I remember how it jarred me out of the world of the book (and also made me a little schadenfreude – esque to see a major publishing house miss one, too. So I try to weed all the typos out of my work, because I know it’s important to keeping my readers in the world of the book and not disrupt the flow of the story. And thanks to all the readers and critics who cut me a little slack (just a little) for being stuck in a one-person enterprise.

On the promo and contest front – the winner of the Kindle/Nook/Gift Card will be announced this week!

Also on the promo tip I’ll be running a blog tour coming up in the near future, so there will be more coming on that soon.

And I’ve actually gotten rolling on Knight Moves, Book 3 of the Black Knight Chronicles. I’m only at a bout 3,000 words, but I’ve plotted most of it out, as well as a rough story arc for Books 4 & 5, so I should be able to get the first five books out by the end of next year!

Sales are cooking right along for April, so thanks for all the support, I appreciate it!

March by the Numbers

by | Apr 1, 2011 | Writing

To say that things picked up a little in March with regards to books sales would be a pretty significant understatement. I’m happy to say that my revenue rebounded from a dismal February, and that I blew through all hopes of my ebook sales for the month.

February was a good ebook sales month, seeing 88 total units sold, but a terrible revenue month, barely breaking $100 for the month overall. There are a couple of reasons for this – I dropped the price of Hard Day’s Knight to .99 halfway through the month, and I did no personal appearances/signings/cons during the month.

So in March I had high hopes for a 20% increase in units sold, which would be 106 ebooks (these are all Amazon-only numbers, because so far my sales on all other ebook sites are negligible). I chugged along through the month, steadily selling a couple of books each day, and when we got into last week I felt pretty good about my chances of getting there. My revenue also increased pretty strongly because I did a few trade shows and friends from the lighting world bought a few copies off me at those shows (I actually sold 16 books at the two shows, and two more at the Charlotte ComiCon, so 18 books sold face to face in a month is pretty damn good for me).

Then this week happened. And I have no idea what happened, but somewhere a switch got flipped and books started to sell. I had a strong sales night last Sunday night, with 4-5 overnight sales, and then proceeded to average about 10 sales per day for the rest of the week. Now these aren’t Joe Konrath numbers by any stretch, but they resulted in a whopping 43% increase in sales from month to month! That also equated to a minimum of $315 total revenue for the month, the first time I’ve cracked the $300 mark in a single month. I don’t expect for every month to be this good, but I would like to hope that I can get steady growth from month to month. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, according to everyone who sells more books than I do.

So I got started last night working on Book 3 of Black Knight Chronicles, with a hopeful release date of June (yeah, I can do that – write a book in April and release it in June – one of the nice freedoms of being indie). Because the best way for me to keep sales increasing is to keep adding to the list of stuff I have for sale. So there’s my quick update on March, sales like a lion, let’s hope April continues the upward trend!