I went out of town on a trip this weekend to a yearly event I always attend. Brought my new laptop with me, hoping to get at least a couple of hours of work a day in while I was at Panama City Beach. Rode the motorcycle down, the first long trip on the bike, and the first other than local ride I have taken in many years. Unfortunately, the wifi at the hotel was awful, and my new installation of word didn’t work on my laptop. Was still able to post my tweets for the Aura promo to Hootsuite, and check up on the sales and giveaways on the KDP Report site. I did not have my spreadsheet on the laptop, and so had no firm numbers, but when I got back to my house in Tallahassee today, and pulled up all the numbers on my desktop, I was delighted to see that Exodus: Empires at War: Book 1 has now sold over ten thousand ebooks. Now to me this is a very big deal. Not Stephen King numbers, but still very respectable. And Book 2 of the same series is getting close to eight thousand sales, with book 3 coming out toward the end of May. Books 1 & 2 sold for $2.99 each. Book 3 will sell for $5.99, twice as much as the others, but it is also twice the book. Some of the reviews I received on books 1 & 2 stated that the books were not long enough, though they were the normal 110,000 words novels, about what most novels are if you’re not buying Wheel of Time or some others. Another strange thing about the numbers is I am now selling more of the Exodus series in the United Kingdom than in the United States. That’s cool. I can live with that, developing a fan base in another country. Sales are also pretty good in Canada and Germany, with some sales in Spain, France and Italy as well, and three books to Brazil. Need to figure out how to crack that Japanese market though, LOL.
Received a review on Exodus: Books 1 and 2 that really blew my mind, especially coming from a reader of speculative fiction. It really was the same review, two stars and the same complaints, but posted for both books. Basically, there were three complaints, after the praise for the descriptions and battle scenes. 1.) I had too many women in positions of military authority, and since men and women are really so different (his words, not mine) this was just liberal nonsense. 2.) I had portrayed sex between military superiors and subordinates, which is bad for discipline and is not tolerated. So I guess my own experiences in the Army, seeing a Sergeant Major have an affair with a female 2nd Lieutenant, or a Sergeant receiving oral sex from a female private, were just illusions. Not to say that all the historical precedents of this kind of activity. 3.) I had Muslims, Christians, Wiccans, Jews, Hindus and Atheists all working together for the common good. He did not believe this was possible. The reader finished the review by stating that he would not be buying any more of my books. I wish I could have written him a thank you for that last statement. You see, the way I view the future we will be able to get past our religious and gender issues and work together. And if there is some other, alien or otherwise, that we may have to unite against, our own differences will not seem so vast after all. But we will still be human, and humans don’t always follow the rules, no matter how reasonable they may be from an intellectual stance. If that makes me a liberal, no problem. I think it puts me into the mainstream of science fiction writers who portray the same principles in their books.