May was a very good month for this self published author, at least in sales. sold 4,539 ebooks and had 149 loans on the KOLL, giving me my sixth consecutive month above 3K sales (actually only one of those was below 4K). I wasn’t as productive as I wanted to be, probably due to falling off my motorcycle near the beginning of the month. I am diabetic, and need to exercise. But I really couldn’t find any exercise to do with my ribs hurting. Walking, pushups, leg iifts, weights, you name it, it hurt, bad. And I get lethargic when I can’t work out. The pain is almost gone, so I see better days ahead. I want to get back on the bike, and at the same time I don’t. We’ll just see.
The other day a fan commented on my facebook page, in response to my post that the success of Exodus surprised me, that it only surprised him that it wasn’t on the best seller list (it is, on Amazon’s Space Opera), and that a big publisher hadn’t picked me up. That got me to thinking. Did I really want to get a publishing contract. I mean, in one way it is the ultimate ego trip, to get books on the bookshelves at stores for people to touch. And to get membership in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, though most people I have talked to recently have agreed that things are going to change and they will eventually let self pubbed authors in. Makes sense, since some indies have more sales than many with contracts. I sent a question to a well known scifi writer I have contacted in the past about the possibility. I was told that my numbers were great, and that I probably could get an agent and a contract with a publisher. Sent an email to another writer I have corresponded with in the past who is also on best seller lists, but is relatively new to the whole thing, to get his take on it. I can already see some pros, like getting an editor as part of the package, getting cover art, etc. There is also the possibility of movie or TV deals, but that is iffy. It took over thirty-five years for Ringworld to get made into a movie, whcih is coming out soon, or so I hear. And some cons. I would probably still have to do my own promotions, unless I hit it lucky and had a bestseller out the gate. I would have little input on those covers. And I would probably not be able to put out as many novels as I want. Most publishers restrict their authors to one novel a year in any series. Some have more than one series going, so that’s a possibility. Then again, the dragon’s share of earnings from any book go to the publisher, while the booksellers of course get the book for half the cover price, and then there’s the agent’s cut. I have heard of bestselling authors who had to keep their day jobs until they got that second series out, and my day job is a bad memory that I don’t want to revisit. The good thing is I don’t have to make an instant decision. I can talk to an agent, talk to other writers, test the waters, and then make a decision. I would like to keep the books I have online going online, if the publisher isn’t interested in that particular book.
On another front, I will be talking about covers with a graphic designer next week, to see if I might be able to improve them, to make them more marketable. And I am going to contract some 3D art of the spaceships in Exodus, as well as some blueprint art. I have sketches of what the ships look like, and their general layout, but nothing I would be proud of displaying. Expect a busy summer, and hopefully a productive fall as well.
editing
All posts tagged editing
As an Independent Published Writer everything is on my table. Writing, rewriting, proofing, cover design, formatting, and of course upload. Sometimes it seems like too much. I still try my hardest to put out a good quality product. Now I know that many people suggest getting every book professionally edited, which is probably good advice. But at $500 to $1,000 a novel, it is just not something within my reach at this time, especially since I have ten books out and more coming, the culmination of fifteen years of writing. And so far it is costing me more than I am making, though that looks to be changing in the near future. I always thought I could do as go a job of it as any professional editor. In fact, in my younger days I was quite skilled at pattern recognition, and was able to go over page after page of numbers in a data set and immediately pick out the anomaly. I still think I do a pretty good job of it, but it seems that with words on a page there is something different. Maybe it’s because our minds fill in what we expect to see when we are reading. Maybe it’s fatigue at reading the same things over and over, trying to find every error. Whatever it is, it seems to be very easy to miss little things that some random reader will pick up. I recently received a review of The Deep Dark Well, which has received seven five star and two four star reviews. This reviewer liked the book as well, and gave it five stars, but commented on misspelled words and typos. I have read this book fifteen times, more than twice as many times as any of my other works, and have also had a beta reader look at it. It has been spellchecked, grammar checked (though I don’t always accept those suggestions) and format checked many times (and I think I can now say that the formatting is as good as it gets). Still, that was the second reviewer who mentioned misspellings (which could be because a word that is actually spelled right is not the right word, or the word they think should go there), so I thought I better do something about it. On a side note, I recently read a short story by the great Robert E Howard and found three typos on one page. And this work has probably been read by millions of people, and maybe scores of editors through the years.
I looked on the internet for a proofing program and found Ginger, which had the added benefit of being free. I downloaded it, installed it, and went to work, starting with a book I was not as sure of as The Deep Dark Well. I was amazed. It showed me each line in fast sequence, stopping whenever there was a proposed error. Not all were errors, and I was able to skip over them quickly with a click of the mouse. Some were glaring errors I must have passed over a half dozen times, and I could either accept Ginger’s suggestion or go to the document and type in my own. I found over sixty typos or misspellings in a 94,000 word novel, way more than I would want in something I put out on the net. Now is it perfect? Probably not, any more than the Howard story was perfect. But at least I’m confident that it is relatively mistake free. And what about The Deep Dark Well. I found seventeen errors with Ginger that I made changes to, and maybe fifteen more that weren’t really errors but were just my style. So now I can put it up as being as error free as I could make it. Ginger was amazing. It took four hours to do the first book (with more errors) and about six to do TDDW. Time that will be well spent on new works before I get into multiple formats, unlike now when I will have to copy and format my already published books to Kindle and Createspace. Ginger is free for now. If they start charging for it I will pay. It is that good. Remember that name, Ginger.
