by john | Nov 1, 2015 | Business of publishing, Promos/Giveaways, Vampires, Writing
Facebook continues to dwindle as a way to connect with readers and bring new fans into the fold, so I’m going to continue pushing to grow my mailing list so that i can keep folks apprised of all my goings on. So here’s my new offer –
Sign up for my Mailing List and get Three FREE ebooks!
That’s right, all you have to do it follow this signup link, do what it tells you, and then in a few days I’ll send you a link where you can download a free ebook!
Then the next month you’ll get my newsletter, and it’ll have a code in it for another free ebook.
Then for Christmas, I’ll send out another code, and you’ll get another free ebook!
So you get THREE FREE EBOOKS if you sign up now!
The first book you get will be Knight (Un)Life, a collection of Black Knight short stories.
Then you’ll get a Bubba book.
Then you’ll get a Harker book for Christmas!
So if you haven’t joined my email list, sign up now and get THREE FREE EBOOKS! If you’ve already signed up, refer a friend and get my undying gratitude (plus the TWO FREE EBOOKS all my subscribers will get).
Remember, this deal ends after Christmas, and you’ve got a lot of shit to do between now and then, so sign up now!
by john | May 21, 2015 | Business of publishing, Writing
So last week I might have pissed a few people off and maybe opened a few eyes when I listed Five Reasons You Won’t Make it as a Writer. In reality, there are a lot more, including just sheer bad luck, but those five are a good place to start. So this week I figured I’d keep the ball rolling and be a dick about self-publishing on the interwebs. And it’s one word, regardless of what my goddamn autocorrect says.
Now before any of the Disciples of the Church of Konrath’s Beard get all up in arms and storm my house with pitchforks (and seriously kids, I’m a redneck – do not bring a pitchfork to a gunfight. It will fuck up your whole day), let me remind you that I started off self-publishing and continue to self-publish to this day. So I don’t have anything against self-publishing. I plan to continue self-pubbing as a part of my career path until it is no longer viable, which I hope is never. I enjoy a lot of the parts of self-publishing, including the vaunted “control” that self-published authors talk about all the time.
SIDE NOTE – I am not an “indie” author. I am a motherfucking self-published writer. I don’t wear horn-rimmed glasses and skinny jeans. I’m only ironic accidentally, and I don’t ride a fixed-speed bike. I’m not fucking trendy enough to be “indie.” I’m the biggest goddamn sellout you’ve ever met. Anybody in the world wants to write me a check with the appropriate number of zeroes, and I’ll stop self-publishing tomorrow. I have a wife, two cats, a stupid dog and my own fat ass to feed, so my hipster artistic integrity rode off into the sunset before we even started worrying about the Y2K issue. I don’t call myself an author, because I’m a working writer. I throw poop at the page every day and pray some of it sticks. I don’t sit around drinking wine with my pinky extended and discussing Shakespeare. When I discuss Shakespeare, it’s over beer or vodka. I’m self-published and I own that shit. If you want to crow about the control, don’t be fucking ashamed of the label. Own it, with the shitty history of AuthorHouse and every other goddamn thing that comes with it. /RANT
So what am I bitching about now? I’m bitching about the fact that you are making me look bad. I can do that perfectly well on my very fucking own, I don’t need any help from you. So here are some things to fucking stop doing, so you’ll fucking stop making me and the rest of the self-published world look bad.
1) Get your shit edited – I know, I know. It’s expensive. It takes a long time. It’s fucking hard. Wah-wah-wah, my rectum bleeds just fucking listening to you. You can’t write well enough to edit yourself. No one can. I don’t edit myself, Neil Gaiman doesn’t edit himself, Pat Rothfuss doesn’t edit himself, Brandon Sanderson doesn’t edit himself. And you’re not as good as they are. I’m nowhere near as good as they are. I fuck up dialogue tags all the goddamn time. So I pay somebody to fix that shit for me. And she also asks me awesome questions about things that don’t make sense. Because sometimes what’s in my head doesn’t all make it onto the page. And with apologies to a dear friend of mine – YOU MAY NOT HAVE YOUR SHIT EDITED BY A SIBLING, SPOUSE, PARENT OR ANYONE YOU SHARE DNA WITH OR ROUTINELY SWAP FLUIDS WITH. I don’t give a fuck how tough you say your wife is on you, she’s not going to be as tough as somebody who YOU’RE NOT FUCKING. Because she knows you, your husband knows you, there is a set of shortcuts in their understanding of everything you say and do that a stranger LIKE YOUR FUCKING READER doesn’t have. Something that may be crystal clear to the man you’ve banged for the last fifteen years may not make any fucking sense to a reader picking your book up for the first time. Because they don’t know that a fibbertygibbet is your made-up word for a Colt 1911 .45 semi-automatic handgun. And that’s going to matter to a reader. So get your shit edited. It can be a friend. But it cannot be someone who you’ve ever fucked or who you are related to. And we’re not going to discuss the states in which those may be the same people. This isn’t that blog.
2) Learn to lay out your fucking pages – I fucked this up when I published the first edition of The Chosen, and it was Allan Gilbreath who called me on it. I printed the book like it was a blog, with a blank line between paragraphs instead of running them together and indenting shit. You know, the way fucking books look. So I had a book that looked like a printed blog. And my page numbers were jacked up. And my headers and footers were bad. About the only thing I did right with the print edition of that book was I picked a decent font. You can’t go too far wrong with Times New Roman, although there’s apparently a backlash now against Times. So used Garamond. But pick a nice serif font, something that looks classic and clean. A perfect example of this was a book from a couple of guys I met last week. They have a nice looking product, awesome cover, but their typesetting looks like a blog. It doesn’t look like a book that Pyr or Baen or Tor or Roc published. And that’s the point – if you think you’re good enough to compete with the big boys, you’d better present as well as the big boys. And if you don’t think you can run with those big dogs, keep your ass on the porch. If you want to see an example of a self-published book that looks as good as or better than most NY-pubbed books today, go get Matthew Saunders’ new book Daughters of Shadow and Blood Book I: Yasamin. Order the paperback, and you’ll see what an amazing job Matthew did with the layout, the back cover, the front cover, the spine, the whole fucking thing. That’s my current gold standard for what a self-published book should look like. My shit’s not as good as this, but I have a little bit of a following, and they all know I’m a drunk, so I get a little bit of a pass.
3) Get a better cover – For fuck’s sake why am I even still talking about this in 2015? Covers are easy, they’re cheap, and they look good. The covers I got for the Quincy Harker series look awesome, and I paid under $100 for the pair of them. Spend the time to get a good cover done professionally. Here’s the first cover I did for The Chosen.
Now in defense of the artist, this is exactly what I asked her to create for me. It references a specific item in the story, Lucypher’s keychain with an apple on it. It also says not a goddamn thing about the book and doesn’t look anything like a fantasy novel.
This is the revised cover. This has a lot more interesting elements, more engaging typestyle, and a lot of neat things going on there. There’s a fire, an apple, an angel – a lot of fantastical elements that draw a reader in.
One of these covers sells a hell of a lot better than the other. I’ll let you decide which one. No I fucking won’t, that’s the whole point! The second cover is obviously better, but some of you are still putting out half-assed covers. It drives me nuts and drags me down by association.
4) Get better back cover matter – If I read another self-pubbed back cover that tells me everything about the character and their backstory then tells me how much I’ll love the book, I’m going to fucking vomit. Have none of you ever gone to a bookstore and read the back cover material on a book? What the fuck? Do you think this shit just materializes from the word fairies? That they just sprinkle this shit all over the shelves and descriptions appear? Go read back cover copy! Rip off the best ones! Every fucking body else is doing it, why should you be the special goddamn snowflake that has to write some Pulitzer-winning bullshit for the back of their book?
Do you write horror? Read the back cover of Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door. Do you write fantasy? Read the back of some awesome fantasy books. Do you write romance? I got nothing for you. Duh! Read the back of romance novels. But don’t give me this bloated, hyper-descriptive shitball of a back cover with eighteen paragraphs in 8-point Helvetica telling me the entire prologue that you wanted to write but didn’t because some other dickhead on some other blog said that prologues are out this season, like skinny jeans and floral prints.
5) WRITE BETTER – Seriously, goddammit, work on your fucking craft. If I read another opening page that’s a dream sequence I swear to Jebus I’m gonna wipe my ass with it. Don’t tell me every fucking thing about your character’s morning ritual. I don’t give a shit how many squares of TP she uses to wipe after she pisses. I don’t care about how she scratches Mr. Pibbles, her Maine Coon Cat behind the ears as she passes him on the way from taking a piss to putting on clean undies. I care about the fucking zombies coming up the fucking stairs. Get to the point. Tell me the story, no bloat.
And show me the action. Show me the relationships. Do not tell me that your main character loves his sister, even though he picks on her all the time. Build the fucking characters. Show me through their actions, expressions and dialogue that they love each other. You spent so much fucking time describing the wallpaper in the shitter, but you won’t take three paragraphs to develop the character? That tells me you haven’t learned what’s important to the story yet.
Avoiding passive voice is a given. Adverbs weaken your writing is a cliche because it’s true. Avoid filter words is a maxim because it’s something everybody needs to remember. Show me, don’t tell me runs off the lips of every editor because it’s the truth. Polish your craft. Work on getting better every single day. I spent four years and over four thousand articles writing about internet poker before I moved to fiction.
Between five years of blogging almost daily and four years of poker writing, I worked my way through a million shitty words before I ever started work on The Chosen. And I’ve still got a lot shit I work on in my writing. But I’m working on it. Everything I write this year is better than anything I wrote last year, because I’m writing all the time. I’m reading all the time. I’m working on my craft. If you’re not willing to do the same thing, get the fuck out of my profession.
I fuck off a lot. I make wisecracks, joke around a lot, but there is one thing I am deadly serious about – my craft. Do not come in here thinking you’re the next fucking Hemingway and you don’t need to work to get better. Because I’ve got over forty titles out, I’ve sold over 50,000 books since I started this journey five years ago, and I still have a loooong way to go. I’m nowhere near the best I can be, but I write the best I can each day. And I make sure that every single product I put out with my name on is the absolute best I can make it. Because that’s all you get in this world – your name. Your reputation is what you make it, and so is your career. You might judge success differently than I do, and that’s fine. But there are benchmarks for quality, and if you can’t hit those benchmarks for quality – don’t hit “publish.”
But if you’re willing to work hard, and you’re honestly ready to bust your ass and get things done, then jump on. Let’s ride.
If you enjoy this shit, please consider buying something from my Amazon Author Page or becoming a Patron on Patreon.
by john | Feb 6, 2015 | Business of publishing, Literate Liquors
This week on Literate Liquors I talk about SFWA’s new membership rules, and a couple of awesome Kickstarters that I’m backing.
Here’s the link to Queers destroy Science Fiction –
Here’s the link for Worlds of Wonder –
Here’s the whole podcast –
by john | Feb 6, 2015 | Business of publishing, Vampires, Writing
I use Selah Janel’s story in The Big Bad volume 1 as both a cautionary tale on everything NOT to do when submitting to an anthology, as well as a cautionary tale on the benefits of being friends with people in the industry, most notably editors or people who might one day become editors. When Selah and I became friends, I had no intentions of editing anything, much less a series of horror anthologies. But I did, and when it came time to start reading for The Big Bad, I got an email from Selah saying (basically) “I have a story, but I’m running a little late, and a little long. Can I have a couple weeks?” I said “Sure, send it along when it’s ready.” A month later I get another email with a story attached saying (basically) “Here is it, sorry it’s so late, hope you still like me, hope you can use it.”
It was almost exactly 1,000 words OVER the max allowed word count for the anthology. I almost round-filed it immediately, but she was my friend, and that guaranteed her at least one paragraph’s worth of leniency. You can see why I don’t have many friends – it only got her a paragraph. I read it, then waited patiently as Emily (my co-editor and partner in crime on these anthologies) read it. She emailed me and we agreed that the story had done almost every single thing wrong to get included. It was late, it was too long, it was another friggin’ vampire story. We wanted any excuse to hate it.
Sidebar – when you’re accepted into an anthology, after a few acceptances, you stop asking “Really?” and start asking “Where will you put my story?” There are three pieces of prime real estate in an anthology – the first story, which gets read by the most casual readers, the center story, which gets read by a lot of passersby who crack the book open randomly and pick a page, and the final story, which is the closer and wants to be a big finish.
Selah’s story was the closer for Big Bad Vol. 1. It was, quite frankly, one of the best damn vampire stories I’ve ever read. I looked for any excuse not to love it, and she didn’t give me one. I’ve told lots of people at lots of panels at lots of conventions that you can either follow all the rules or be so goddamn amazing that they don’t apply to you. Seals Janel is an amazing writer and I’d read her grocery list. Here’s her story behind the story for Big Bad 2. And no, she didn’t get the closer spot in BB2, we dropped her in the second spot from the beginning, because editors are evil. You see, if you download the free sample from Amazon for the ebook, you’ll get cut off before Selah’s story ends. And that’s going to guarantee a high conversion of samples to sales. 🙂
Plain and simple, I love vampires. There’s a lot of versatility there, a lot of things to explore. One of my favorite vampire movies is The Lost Boys, and admittedly my story in the first Big Bad, “Real Wild Childe” came out of one of the few beefs I have with the original movie: the horrifically lame female characters in cliché roles. While I admire Jami Gertz and Diane Wiest and they’re great in the film, Star and Lucy’s functions are to just kind of be there as love interest and Mom. It’s a shame, because a lot could have been done with those archetypes. The sequels never really bothered to correct the female role issue, either, so it became a mission to write a vampire story where the girls could keep up with the boys and then some. Admittedly, “Real Wild Childe” was also my chance to warp the vampire romance genre beyond recognition, but a lot of it was the chance to have fun with some renegade vampire characters while beefing up the female roles. In a lot of ways, I did a whole reversal with putting Rave at the mercy of all the women in his life, vampire and human.
When the second volume was announced, I was sure I was going to sequel that story. I was excited to keep exploring Rave and Sin’s twisted relationship, as well as Addington’s vampire problem as a whole. Unfortunately, it became evident very quickly that it would be way too much for an anthology story, and I already had the habit of antagonizing the great Hartness with my inflated word counts. I didn’t want to leave that world behind, though, so it occurred to me to go in the other direction and prequel it.
I mention in the original story that Rave and Asha’s sire is their mother, and she’s not a particularly motherly type. Amanda was the perfect character to explore not only the feminine role of mother, but also to mash that up against what a vampire was, and why a typical 1950’s housewife would even want to become one. My research led me on a winding road, and I found the perfect excuse for an underground, mother-centric vampire cult: fear of communism and all-out nuclear war. What if a protective instinct was so great, that you’d do anything to ensure your family line and the wellbeing of your kids, even if it meant killing and drinking blood?
That was a great start at developing the cult of The Family and the character of The Patriarch, but it still didn’t quite mesh up with the Amanda in the original story. What kind of a person would turn into a manipulative, jealous vampire who wanted to clamp down on her kids and rule over them throughout eternity? After all, most parents are more than willing to kick the birds out of the nest at some point, and Amanda had never come across as a loving maternal figure.
As I began writing, I slowly discovered a character who was burnt out, frustrated, and felt overlooked. Her insecurities about her own life fed her jealousy that landed on everyone: her husband’s employees, her friends and fellow cult members, even her own children. She was desperate to be noticed, true, but also desperate for something else. It all made me wonder, what would happen if a mother didn’t necessarily have children because of a great love for them, but because they complemented her idea of what life should be like? What if she looked upon them as accessories that she owned, accessories that weren’t supposed to ever get out of line or go against her thinking? What if that craving for power gave her confidence to try out her powers in increasingly controlling ways, all under the guise of it being in everyone’s best interest? And what would she do if her precious family/accessories dared to try to go against her?
And what would happen if she found out that they may possess the same sort of darkness she did?
Exploring her manipulative nature in “A Family Affair” fascinated me, and I slowly grew to view Amanda as less of a madwoman and more of a complex character. If the story in the first volume was me riffing off my love for the bad boy type vampire in The Lost Boys and an attempt to play with the idea of a human love interest, Amanda became my anti-Lucy in The Big Bad 2. She still loves her children, but for the wrong reasons, and she’s desperate to retain something of herself as she watches the world and her family start to plot on without her. Her evil is more internal, but she still sheds a considerable amount of blood and has no guilt doing it. She freely plays with her family’s minds, and forces them down a dark road that will have significant repercussions decades later. Amanda’s an intense character who will get her way at any cost. She’s dangerous to most of those around her. She’s also a lot of fun to write.
It was also interesting to explore Rave and Asha as humans, to really tinker with who they had been before they became runaway delinquents. Although they’re at the mercy of their mother’s actions, there are also hints that they weren’t innocent from the get go, that maybe they’re more like their mother than they’d ever care to admit. Character relationships and dynamics intrigue me, so it was interesting to put all of that against the workings of a vampire cult and the changing vibe of the 1950’s in general. It’s an odd combination, to be sure, but it’s a fun one, and one that I hope is worth reading.
by john | Feb 4, 2015 | Business of publishing, Writing
Not really. But it kinda has felt like that from the outside. Let’s get my view of the facts out of the way first before I go into my conflicted feelings about this whole SFWA v. self-published authors thing.
Starting March 1, self-published and small press authors who meet a certain earning threshold (I believe it’s $3,000 over a twelve-month period for one novel-length work, or some amount of cents per word equaling some dollar amount for short stories – I didn’t really pay attention to the short story criteria) will be eligible to join Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the professional organization for people who do what I do.
Full disclosure, the Horror Writers Association is also the professional organization for people who do what I do, because nobody can really decide if I write horror or fantasy. But I don’t write romance, which is why I don’t need to worry about joining RWA, which I might anyway, because RWA is a solid organization with a bunch of shrewd businesspeople involved. But I digress.
This is kinda a huge deal. It feels like a much bigger deal than last September, when HWA changed their rules to a very similar structure to allow self-pub and small press authors into the fold. I jumped onto that opportunity, but I’m hesitant about joining SFWA, and I figured I’d use this little corner of the inter webs to explore why as much for me as for anyone.
Let’s start at the beginning, back in 2010 when I published The Chosen (now available on audiobook on iTunes, Audible or Amazon). I didn’t have any real idea what I was doing, I was just trying to get my words out there any way I could. So I researched SFWA, because I was writing fantasy, so I wanted to be able to draw on the knowledge of other people writing fantasy. I read the “Join SFWA” page and quickly realized that there was no method for me to do just that. Self-published authors were not allowed a seat at the table.
That stung. I was new to writing, and new to publishing (still relatively new to both, this being year 5 of my journey), and to be told that I wasn’t good enough to sit at the cool kids’ table (again) because I was following a different path to my readers didn’t feel good. And it has continued to not feel good for five years, through friendships with people on SFWA’s board, through conversations about how stupid the rule is with SFWA members and other excluded parties, and I’ll own my pettiness – this as created in me a sense of bitterness about SFWA.
See, the thing is I’m a joiner. I feel like being a part of the professional organization for your field is just what you do. I got a job designing theatrical lighting systems, I joined IES, the Illuminating Engineering Society. I started working with high schools on their lighting systems, I joined the North Carolina Theatre Conference, then the Southeastern Theatre Conference. I’ve sat on the board of directors of many regional professional societies because I’ve always felt like networking, camaraderie and having the back of your fellows in the field is what you do.
But now I was in a place where I was told that I wasn’t a professional enough writer to join the professional organization for writers in my genre. All because of the way I was publishing my work. That didn’t sit well with me. It certainly didn’t sit well with me once I started earning money as a writer, because I very quickly eclipsed the earnings requirements for membership, and then the ONLY thing keeping me out was a label. And that just felt wrong. I wasn’t excluded at conventions from drinking with writers because I didn’t have a SFWA card. I wasn’t excluded from guest status at a con because I wasn’t a SFWA member. I wasn’t excluded from anything, except membership and that label of “professional.”
So I became bitter. And fairly vocal about it. I may have mentioned more than once that $250 worth of short story sales to magazines could get you into SFWA, but ten grand worth of short story sales to readers wouldn’t get you in.
And I understand that organizational change often comes slowly. God knows I’ve spent enough years in non-profit management to know that. I’ve sat through more board retreats and long-range planning sessions than I care to count, so I know that it takes time to affect change. I also know it doesn’t take five years. And self-publishing had already shifted from being a fringe vanity press swindle to a viable career option before I started with this mess in 2010, so the whole “organizations change slowly” thing lost weight with me about two years ago.
So what do I do now? On the one hand, I want to stand outside the window holding up my sign saying “Screw you, I don’t need you now!” Because I don’t know that I do. I network pretty well on my own. I have con appearances, book deals, friends to blurb my stuff and pretty much everything I need to continue making my career.
On the other hand, I want to be part of the professional organization for my chosen career path. And I do, like a lot of authors, want the affirmation of being labeled a professional by my peers. Because a lot of times I hang with my friends and still feel like a fraud, like no matter what I’ve done, it’s not enough. That’s my issue, not theirs, and certainly no one has ever made me feel that way. But it’s there.
Will a SFWA card make that feeling go away? Do they even give out membership cards? Does HWA? If so, did I lose mine already? I don’t know the answers to any of those questions.
And why did I get my panties in a bunch about SFWA and not HWA? Why did I tweet out congratulatory messages to HWA when they finally pried their collective head out of their collective ass last year and let self-pub and small press authors in? Probably because I didn’t know I wasn’t eligible for HWA membership until I was already eligible. Because I thought I was a fantasy writer, not a horror writer, so I had been focusing on SFWA until somebody nominated me for a horror award, then I started thinking of myself as a horror and fantasy writer.
So I don’t know. Are there benefits to joining SFWA? Certainly. Are any of them useful to me? Probably. Should I just get my head out of my ass and fill out an application? Probably. Would I feel better about this whole issue if any of my emails to a SFWA president a few years ago asking about this issue had ever been answered? Yeah.
What do I want out of this mess? At this point, I think I want to be asked to join. I would like someone affiliated with SFWA to say “Hey, I think you should join SFWA. We’d like to have you, and think it could be good for you and for the organization.”
I don’t expect that to happen, but to be frank, even if I heard about SFWA reaching out to other major self-pub and small press authors to open up membership with open arms instead of begrudgingly, it would probably get the bug out of my butt.
So there are my thoughts on the SFWA self-pub thing, not that anybody asked me. I don’t know if I’ll join. Maybe. At this point it’s not even about the benefits of membership, it’s about whether or not the organization really wants me.
So that’s plenty of word-puking for the morning. I’mma go get a Pop-Tart and get some shit done. Y’all do the same. But stay away from my Pop-Tarts.
by john | Dec 24, 2014 | Business of publishing, Fiction, Writing
So I’ve been on the fence about KDP Select, the tool Amazon offers by which authors make their titles exclusive to Amazon for a period of 90 days and in exchange they get a few perks like being offered for free in the Kindle Unlimited program (think Netflix for books, or a library with a $10 membership fee), the ability to offer your book for free for a promotional time period (you get 5 days that ou can make your book free in each 90-day period) and the ability for Amazon Prime Members to borrow your book from the Kindle Online Lending Library (authors are paid a fee per borrow, and are paid a fee for every time the book is read past 10% in the Kindle Unlimited program).
I’ve had books in KDP Select before Kindle Unlimited (KU) came along, but nothing since the new program happened. When I was in KDP Select, I made one Bubba story free each week through the 90-day cycle, then repeated. So if you wanted to read every Bubba story for free, you could do that. My hope was that people would read the free story, then immediately run out and buy all the rest of them. I don’t know how often either of those things happened, but my sales were pretty steady while I was in the program. But after a while, and with everything that went on in 2014 (well-documented on other posts here and on Facebook), keeping up with the free days just became more than I could managed, and since I hadn’t seen any significant increase in sales I withdrew.
Now the tinfoil hat crowd would tell you that my sales immediately tanked, and I was being punished for leaving the program and Amazon’s mysterious algorithms were skewed to help authors in the program, etc. etc. While all that may be true, my sales didn’t immediately tank – they held steady at about the same level they were when I was in KDP Select. For several months. Then sales did indeed start to taper off, but I don’t think lack of participation in KDP Select had anything to do with it.
I wasn’t writing and publishing new material. Let’s take a look, shall we?
2010 – 2 Publications
2011 – 11 Publications
2012 – 17 Publications
2013 – 2 Publications (there were other things, but I wasn’t necessarily the one publishing them)
2014 – 5 Publications (not counting the 2 this week)
Notice anything about that? Yeah, when I was selling a bunch of books, I was writing a bunch of books. I published more than a book a month in 2012, and not even a book a quarter in the two years following. No wonder my sales declined – my productivity declined. Can’t blame Amazon’s math for that!
So now that I’m writing again, and writing a lot again, why did I enroll the two newest books (Elf Off the Shelf and Raising Hell) in KDP Select? There were a couple of reasons.
1) The Kindle Lending thing and Kindle Unlimited thing suck for novels, but they’re pretty good for short stories. You see, you get paid based on how many things are borrowed, and how much money is in the pool. Lately it’s been a little over a buck. That’s half what I would get from a $2.99 novel if it were sold normally, but it’s TRIPLE what I get from a $.99 short story over it selling normally.
Here’s the math, which most folks already know. If I price a book at $.99-$2.98, I get 35% royalty. If I price it at $2.99-9.99, I get 70%. If I go over $10, it drops back down to 35%. So whenever you buy a Bubba short story, I get $.34. If I get a little over a dollar on the borrows, then I get three times the normal money, and people can read my story for free.
So that’s one reason. The other reason is that I hadn’t tried the program since KU started, and I wanted to see what it was like.
I also wanted to offer Raising Hell for pre-order, and was under the mistaken impression that I had to be in KDP Select to do so. That appears to not be the case, so I was wrong. Oh well, the book is up and available for pre-order and will be released on January 20. I’m pretty excited about this new series, it takes me to a darker place, lets me write in a harder tone, and lets me play with uglier villains. I hope you like it. I was really trying to channel the old Garth Ennis run on Hellblazer, so I hope I did it justice.
Also, if you want more bloggy type things, let me know. I have a bajillion comments to moderate in the queue, but once I get through those I’ll start replying. Until then, you can always find me on Facebook or Twitter. Peace out.
