The Dark Citadel

I just released the first two books of my new epic fantasy series. I'm excited to finally bring these books to a reading audience. The first book is on sale for 99 cents and the second is only $3.97. Six hundred pages of wizards, dragons, griffins, knights, and magic for only five bucks. Did I mention that I was excited? :)

From the description:

A slave boy named Darik falls in with a pair of spies as the great city of Balsalom comes under siege by the armies of a dark wizard. They flee west to enlist the aid of griffin riders, an order of wizards, and a band of ascetic knights to come to the city's defense.

Meanwhile, a young queen named Kallia leads a heroic struggle to keep both her city and body free from the dark wizard's cruel embrace. After a treacherous attack opens Balsalom to the armies of the enemy, Kallia assembles an unlikely alliance of palace servants, barbarians, and jealous merchants to retake her city before its people are led away in chains.

Indie vs. Trad Pub

Someone recently asked why, if indie publishing is so great, you "have [never] heard of any big-selling indie that has stayed indie?"

My name was mentioned in the thread as someone who had bailed on the indie publishing model. Yes, it's true that I signed with Thomas & Mercer for books that had previously been indie only. The deal was a little different than with a traditional publisher, in that I'm able to keep selling my versions of the first three books of the Righteous Series until the T&M versions come online in February, but it's legitimate to ask why, if I were doing so well as an indie, would I sign over my rights? There is certainly the assumption that indie is a weak second place to a traditional contract, like Triple-A baseball instead of the Major League.

Maybe there's some truth to that, but for me the question is what will allow me to get my books the widest possible exposure and what will give me control over what I write. I wouldn't sign a contract that limited how much I could write or publish, or a contract that forbid me from continuing to publish indie books. Ideally, I would have a career that included both indie books and traditional contracts as I think this would give me the best possible chance for being able to do what I love for as long as possible.

Dark Canyon

I'm headed to southeastern Utah next week to do some research for book #4 of The Righteous series. San Juan County, Utah occupies a huge swath of southeastern Utah, an area bigger than Massachusetts, but with only fifteen thousand people. I've driven through Monticello on my way into Colorado, and spent a lot of time on the northern edges of the county, but have never penetrated the wilderness interior.

The place I'm visiting is called Dark Canyon Primitive Area, a forbidding, mountainous region of about a hundred square miles with no roads and only a few trails. There are still undiscovered cliff dwellings in the area, hidden in seldom-visited canyons. While I'm in the area, I hope to see Goblin Valley and Natural Bridges National Monument, and perhaps even slip quietly through Colorado City.

If you are a member of a conservative polygamist group and are offended by my books, please do not kill me when I pass through your town.

A Conversation With James Scott Bell

I recently sent a rather fan-like letter to Jame Scott Bell, the author of numerous thrillers, as well as the author of one of the best books about writing I've ever read. I told him that some of the techniques in his book had helped me get over the hump as a writer. Because he also has a book with writing advice that he has published as an ebook, only, we had an interesting discussion about my success with ebooks. You might find the exchange helpful.

Bell: Your books did spectacularly back in March. What do you attribute the success to? I know they had to be well written, so that's a given.

As you point out in your ebook, you can't just throw anything online and expect it to be successful. I hadn't had a book contract, but I'd come close on more than one occasion. I'd had agents, gone through multiple rounds of revisions, etc. Editors had a hard time getting my books past the ed board because of the unusual subject matter, but I knew I wasn't deluding myself. In addition, I had a few smaller, but still prestigious sales, including a sale to F&SF and another to The Atlantic. This told me I had developed some level of talent that made the whole endeavor plausible.

It didn't come easily, though. I wrote a dozen novels and over a hundred short stories before I decided to self publish the books.

Bell:. How many books did you have up there then? (I've checked your Amazon page). What was the price point? The John Locke 99¢ strategy seems apt.

I started with State of Siege, The Devil's Deep, The Righteous, and Mighty and Strong (the sequel to The Righteous). All but State of Siege did respectably well, but The Righteous sold about forty thousand copies between March and June, which is when sales started to trail off. I priced it at .99 during its run. Mighty and Strong and Devil's Deep each sold about 5,000 copies at 2.99 during that time period, largely drafting off the success of The Righteous. I also put up a children's fantasy (which is a good book, IMO, but hasn't done anything), and a WWII thriller. I published book #3 of The Righteous series in June and a sequel to The Devil's Deep in August. Those last three books plus State of Siege have combined for several thousand sales, plus I've had several thousand sales of the other books in July, August, and September, although overall sales have declined from a high of 20,000 in April and May to about 1,500 a month now. It's no longer what it was, but it's still a couple thousand bucks a month. I'll be interested to see if these other books catch a second wind when Thomas & Mercer releases their versions of The Righteous series in February.

One other thing to note is that I've had no difference in sales when I've bumped a few of the books to $3.99. 99 cents is a great strategy for introducing readers to a series, but if you've done your job, they're not going to balk at an extra buck or two, in my opinion. Long term, I might even try $4.99, which seems to be a sweet spot between value for the reader and income for the writer. Note that if you can sell 2,000 copies a month at $4.99, you'll make $7,000, which isn't a bad living for a writer. If you sell 2,000 copies a month with SMP or Harpers, they'll decline to pick up your option.

Bell: What did you do to market them?

Not much. I gifted some copies on the Amazon forums before they stopped allowing that. Most of those early reviews of The Devil's Deep and The Righteous came from those gift copies, but when I tried the same thing with The Red Rooster, the tactic had already spent itself thanks to a glut of free books. Beyond that, I've done some limited advertising with Pixel of Ink, Ereader Review, and some Goodreads advertising.

Bell: We're getting to a point of overwhelming content available. Do you think someone can replicate what you did now? 

The marketing? No. I can't even replicate it. I lowered the price of The Righteous to 99 cents and within a couple of weeks it was caught in a virtuous cycle of recommendations on the Amazon algorithms. It spent about six weeks in the top 100 of the overall Kindle store and briefly touched as high as the top 20. I tried the same tactic later with The Devil's Deep, which has the best and most reviews of any of my books and it just didn't happen the same way. Amazon keeps tweaking their algorithms and what caused you to get "lucky" at one point doesn't work the same way anymore. Not that there isn't something that will, I just don't know what that is.

But yes on duplicating my success with the craft. I just kept writing and submitting and improving my writing. It was an unconventional path to success, but I rarely lost faith in myself. I would read other thrillers or suspense novels and know that I was a better writer than some of these people. When I read someone who was better than I was, however, I tried to study their work instead of growing discouraged.

Why 99 Cents? $2.99? $3.99?

Pricing is a strange thing in the digital world, whether you're talking traditionally published or indie books. The per-book costs are negligible, so you don't have to start with a baseline of printing + distribution for anything beyond the initial expenses. Thomas & Mercer, for example is talking about leaving the price for The Righteous at $2.99 or $3.99 and then pricing the subsequent books at $7.99. This is cheaper than a paperback, but significantly higher than what indies typically charge.

The two prices I see for the vast majority of indies are 99 cents and 2.99. I don't want to debate the 99 cent price because that has been rehashed a million times. The argument against 99 cents is that it is just a gamble to try to climb the rankings and that it undervalues all the work involved in writing a novel. There is some truth to both of these arguments, and yet I've used the 99 cent model myself on several occasions. Both The Devil's Deep and The Righteous have sold thousands of copies at this price.

But what about the subsequent books in a series? I don't see any reason why they should be $2.99. If someone likes the first book enough to seek out the second, will they balk at $3.99 or $4.99 or even $7.99? Maybe, but I'm guessing not. If a writer is hoping to make a living at writing, there is surely a point on the pricing spectrum that is the sweet spot between giving away one's work and getting greedy? My goal is to offer my work at a fair price, but not to undervalue it.

And so my current price point is $3.99. Of my thrillers I've got three books at that price right now, two books at $2.99 and three books at $.99. I'm planning to raise the price of Implant and State of Siege from $.99 and $2.99 to $3.99 as soon as I release the audio versions on podiobooks.com. That would leave all of my books either at an introductory price for a series of $.99 or at $3.99.

Respect Your Characters

I made a decision when I started writing The Righteous that I would take my religious characters seriously. That meant they weren't deluded fools or brainwashed or any of the other tropes that you frequently see in writing about religion (as opposed to religious writing, which has its own issues). That meant that even my evil characters must have clear justification, that they had to frame their actions in terms of their religious background. These people did not consider themselves mustache-twirling (beard-twisting?) villains, they were serving God's purpose. Never mind that other characters thought they were serving God's purpose or looked at these people as clear villains. In their own mind, they were the heroes of the story.

This last line bears repeating. Every person considers himself the hero of the story. There's a great line in Shakespeare in Love where Shakespeare has turned the nasty financial backer into a true patron by giving him a minor part in the play. Someone asks this guy what Romeo and Juliet is about and he says, "There's this apothecary..."

Remember, too, that no person is merely part of a group. She isn't Chinese, or a paraplegic, or a doctor, or, in my Righteous series, a polygamist. These things may shape her view of the world, but she is smart or stupid, kind or cruel, thoughtful or careless, or anything else largely independent of her surroundings. In fact, I sometimes find it interesting to write characters in direct opposition to what they should be. A thoughtful, but patriotic German living under the Nazi regime is much more interesting than yet another cruel Gestapo agent. Now pit him against a cruel Gestapo agent, but work like hell to justify that agent's behavior. What is the story our antagonist tells himself? How does he frame the narrative to make him the hero of the story? There are numerous ways, all of them more interesting than the guy who says "Ve have vays of making you talk..."

If you take every character seriously, you can write about all sorts of people without making them sound either like stereotypes or--almost as bad--politically correct reversals of stereotype. I love writing from the POV of people very different than myself. My four favorite characters are the aforementioned patriotic German (The Red Rooster), the favorite son of a cult leader and his bright, believing younger sister (The Righteous), and a guy whose only means of communicating with the outside world is a single, blinking eye (The Devil's Deep). Of these four, Jacob from The Righteous resembles me quite a bit, assuming I were smarter, better looking, and more charismatic, but the other three are very different from me.

I guess you could say that I ignore the advice to write what you know, but that's another post entirely.

An Online Interview

Fellow author R.E. McDermott interviews me today about my path to success as an indie writer. I'm no marketing genius, but I discuss four elements that are often overlooked as an indie writer looks to build a successful career.