Last week I was still flying high on the reviews I had received for The Deep Dark Well (8 Five Star and 2 Four Star). Also received three five star reviews for The Shadows of the Multiverse. Most of the reviews were detailed, and some let me know what fault the reader found with my work, despite the praise. That seems to be the thing about good reviews. They point to particulars in the story that they liked, as well as what didn’t work for them. Some things are easily correctable, typos, formatting, misspelling a character’s name half the time (which can happen with made up names). Some are not so easy, like changing a book from a multicharacter, multiviewpoint work to one with a single strong focus. I got one of those the other day, a three star which complimented me on my science and the descriptions of hyperspatial dimensions, but came down hard on the use of so many different characters in different scenes stretched across an Interstellar Empire. I knew that was a risk with that kind of story, but I have always loved Harry Turtledove, who makes a living with such works. Another review loved that approach, so it seemed to work for some people, which is all I can ask. The guy who left the three star later wrote a glowing, detailed five star for The Deep Dark Well, and also communicated with me on Amazon to let me know that he was reading The Shadows of the Multiverse and loving it.
Then I received a pair of two star reviews back to back on The Deep Dark Well, which was really ego deflating. The first review stated that the novel was not polished, and made a crack about self publishing, stating that the best reason to be published by traditional firms was that the writer received constructive criticism. And of course none of this constructive criticism was offered. I am still not sure what the reviewer meant by polished. Did he get an earlier version of the work before I learned how to format, and started more rigorous quality control procedures? Or did he mean the writing style itself was not “polished’. The second one was just as enlightening. The reviewing mentioned a few books by masters scifi writers and said that I was not there yet. Remarks were also made about poor writing, but nothing that gave me any useful information. The most painful remark was how the book might be a good story for young readers (children?) Then I received the five star review which talked about how intelligent and thought provoking The Deep Dark Well was, and how I treated the reader like he had some intelligence of his own. I guess what I came away with from this is most negative reviews, even though they hurt, are pretty much useless, except to tell you that they thought you sucked as a writer. While many good reviews actually tell the writer something about perceived strengths and weaknesses. I corresponded with a friend who is a best selling scifi author on Amazon, and he pretty much had the same assessment. And I guess that I have arrived as a writer when I am getting attacked in the minority of reviews.
Today is the last day of my free KDP Select Promotion of The Shadows of the Multiverse. It was not doing well through Sunday, and I had only given away a little less than five hundred books. Yesterday it picked up, and by this morning I had given away 2,500 of them, and this evening is sitting at 2,828, and was ranked #84 on Kindle Free Books for some of the afternoon. Just hope I will get some reviews out of them, and the book will pick up in sales in the coming month. I haven’t tracked the other books like this, but since I learned how to use Amazon Reports I will do so in the future. Are Mondays and Tuesdays really the best days for giveaways, and the weekends not worth anything? Or was it just a statistical blip. I was trained in graduate level statistics, and know better than to put much emphasis on a One N study, unlike the people I work for. I will track again on my next promotion in three weeks and see if there is a trend there, then report it to all of you out there.
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As I have said in the last couple of Blog posts, my Urban Fantasy Novel The Hunger is free on KDP Select for this weekend. It will continue to be offered free until midnight on October 9th, after which it will be on sale for $2.99 on ebook, or $12.95 for paperback. I called The Hunger a different kind of vampire novel. This is the middle of the promotion, and so far 575 copies have been given away. Not bad. Not in the same ballpark as The Deep Dark Well, of which 3,800 copies were downloaded. But I think Urban Fantasy is just a different beast, and Vampire lovers can be divided into several different camps. I invite those who have grabbed a free copy to read the novel and write a review. If you want a sequel I need to know the book is well received, and the only way I will know that is if I see reviews posted. No reviews, no sequel, simple as that. The Heroine, Lucinda Taylor, is an Avenging Vampire who only kills evil men and women. She is still a killer, one who will mercilessly put down a victim and make sure he stays down. While actually doing service to society by cleaning out the scum on the streets, Lucinda knows she is not a permanent solution. There will always be people willing to step into the shoes of the last guy. Her only hope is that some will think twice, and all will look over their shoulders at the dark should they choose the life of a hard core criminal.
I developed the character of Monsignor John O’Connor using a variety of sources. Even though there is scandal in the Catholic Church on an almost daily basis, there are still, in my opinion, some very devout priests who are holy men. Monsignor George Cummings was both our Parish Priest at Epiphany Catholic Church in Venice Florida and the director of Good Council Camp in Inverness, both of which I attended as a child. Father Cummings was a good man, but also a rugged outdoorsman who used to hunt in Alaska every year. I always wondered why he didn’t make Bishop. So I made my priest someone who had been a Bishop and stepped down to become a vampire hunter. In my opinion anyone in the clergy who turns their back on power to follow a calling is holy, not just in the trappings of the church they carry with them, but their very persons. The priest seeks to destroy the woman who is a mockery of his savior, having come back from the dead after three days in the Earth. DeFalco, the FBI agent, is of course modeled after Fox Mulder from the X-files, and in fact there is a reference in the book to that agent. He has seen something he cannot really believe, and has developed unshakable convictions because of it. The agency also knows something supernatural is afoot, but cannot afford to be seen as one of those crazy UFO believing agencies. DeFalco gives them both the agent they need on the spot and the crazy fall guy if needed. One learns and changes during the novel, the other doesn’t. To find out which, read the novel.
And now for the excerpt:
Monsignor John O’Connor could smell the telltale odor of the lair from down the tunnel. He had been walking through the miles of accessible storm drains for many hours, starting before the sun had disappeared. The priest had some trepidation at going underground in search of a creature that made the night her home. But, as he put his hand on the large, ornate cross hanging from his neck, the cross that had been personally blessed by the Pope, he felt armored in his faith. The vampire that touched him would be a creature of Satan struck down by the power of the almighty.
O’Connor was dressed in his normal short-sleeved black shirt and white collar, but wore a thick set of black denim jeans and black high top athletic shoes. The better to work his way through the close confined of the tunnels. A holstered PPK was attached to his belt, his untucked shirt over the top of the pistol. The concealed weapon’s license the Papal legate had arranged for him sat in his wallet. He took comfort in the pistol, and in the seven bullets that sat in the magazine. Each round was tipped with an inlaid silver cross, and the leads had soaked overnight in holy water and then blessed by O’Connor himself.
His other weapons and equipment were in the common student’s backpack he carried over his right shoulder. O’Connor knew that he was as well-equipped as a man could be to hunt the undead. Whether that was equipped enough remained to be seen, but the Monsignor was sure that the Papal Authority would not have sent him into a situation where his soul would be imperiled beyond his ability to protect it.
O’Connor switched off the powerful police flashlight as he pulled the night vision goggles from where they sat on his brow to back over his eyes. A flip of a switch powered up the Starlight lenses. A slightly grainy image appeared to his view, as the glasses amplified the tiny amount of ambient light in the tunnel ten thousand times. The flashlight would have given a clearer picture, but also would have given him away to anyone waiting in the tunnel.
The sickly sweet smell hit his nostrils again. He had smelled it many times before. It had permeated the lairs of the dozen vampires who had fallen to him. And it had lain like a miasma of death over the lairs he had reached too late, after its occupant had already moved on.
O’Connor stopped and listened for a moment at the small entrance to the service chamber that led off of the tunnel. He pulled the PPK from the holster and made sure the safety was on, then hunched over and shuffled the couple of feet into the chamber. As he made it through the entrance he stood and raised the pistol in front of him, sweeping it back and forth to cover the chamber.
When nothing moved he let out the breath he had been holding, taking in a deep breath that almost gagged him on the odor. He walked slowly to the coffin, and breathed another sigh as he saw that it was empty. He reached his left hand into the box and felt the thin layer of soil within. He scanned the room one more time, feeling a bit of disappointment come over him, even though he had known that she would be out and about her evil tasks.
With his left hand O’Connor pushed the Starlight glasses up to his forehead and turned them off, then pulled the flashlight from his belt and flipped it on. He swept it around the chamber, wondering yet again why there were never any bodies in her lair. Every other vampire home he had been in had at least a body or two hanging from the ceiling or lying in a corner. But her lairs were always well ordered, clean even, with none of the detritus normally found among the undead.
If she’s out then she is going for another victim, thought the priest. He said a quick prayer for the soul of the man she was going to kill tonight, wondering how much good it would do. Unlike other vampires this one didn’t allow her victims to rise. And the people she killed tended to be the ones that were on their way to hell in the first place. Which didn’t make her any less the evil spawn of Satan, and his sworn enemy.
O’Connor pulled the backpack off of his shoulder and placed it against the coffin, unzipping it open. After digging around for a second he pulled a small flat metal container from the bag and twisted it open, revealing a number of small discs of unleavened bread. The hosts he had blessed himself after an all-night vigil mass he had said for no one.
He took a couple of the wafers out of the container and twisted it shut, placing it carefully back into the pack. Standing back over the coffin, O’Connor began to break one of the wafers into small pieces and place them on top of the soil in the box. When one was gone he started to break the other one, until both wafers were spread among the soil, sterilizing it against the undead and making it useless as a resting place.
Next O’Connor pulled a spray bottle from the backpack and walked over to the large chest that sat against the wall. The priest opened the chest, cringing for a moment as the hinges squealed. He looked around the chamber, which was still empty, then turned his attention back to the chest, which was filled with women’s clothing. He pulled some of the clothing from the chest and aimed the spray bottle at the remaining clothes, squirting liquid over the clothes. The fabric absorbed the holy water quickly. O’Connor then put some of the clothing on the floor back into the chest and sprayed it, repeating the procedure until it had all been treated. When the vampire returned she would find nothing in the chamber of use to her.
Again, thanks to all my Author friends at the Independent Authors Network (#IAN1) for retweeting, as well as all the wonderful free book sites that also tweeted, and my friend at Indie Author Anonymous (#IndieAuthorAnon). I could not have done it without you.
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.
When I self-published my first eBook, The Deep Dark Well, I was a little fearful of getting reviews. You know, the kind that tell you that you are nothing as a writer, and how dare you darken their page with your lack of ability. I thought I had a good book. The long rejection letters I had received from two big name publishers gave me reason to believe that it was better than most of the submissions they received. The same from friends or members of critique groups who had read some of the book. There is still that fear, and I went to Amazon to look at my first review with a sense of dread. And surprise, he liked it. He only gave me a three, since I had a lot of formatting problems on Kindle, which I have since learned to correct before putting something out, but the book itself was praised. Then I got two five star reviews. And since then, nothing. The book has sold, some, as have the other nine I have put out online. But the reviews are not coming in. And from what I have read, an author lives or dies on his or her reviews. I have also recently read that many writers get every friend and family member they can use their influence on to write a review, and have also heard that people are starting to discount those reviews, unless they are accompanied by a Top Reviewer tag. I have avoided asking friends to write reviews, feeling that it would be better to have actual readers review the work. But when only about one in thirty buying the book write a review I wonder if that is a workable strategy.
Recently I have put two of my books into the KDP Select program, more as an experiment to see if it works than anything else. For those who don’t know, KDP Select makes the author pull that particular work from any other outlet that might sell it, including their own website, and sell exclusively on Amazon for a 90 day period. The author can then renew, or take the book out of the select program. One of the benefits of the program is the ability to promote it for free on Amazon for five days during that 90 day period. So, on September 7 through 11 The Deep Dark Well will be offered for free on Amazon. I hope a lot of people go there and download this labor of love for free. And I hope more than one in thirty of them write a review, or at least click the write button on the book page. I have no control over that part of it, I can only hope that enough will comment to send it over the top. Go over to Amazon at The Deep Dark Well Page and get yours during that five day period. It’s science fiction as written by the old masters, with science.
On 08/24/2012 I will be featured on a book blog, in fact the book blog of IndieAuthorAnonymous.
One piece of advice I have been hearing for awhile is to get in with the book bloggers if you want to get your work publicized. Good advice, and like so much such advice, it is easier said than done. Many of the sites I have checked out have required an ungodly number of reviews with an average of at least four stars. Kind of defeats the purpose of getting on their blog when your book already has to be doing well to get publicized. So far I have avoided the common strategy of asking friends and family to write reviews whether they actually read the books or not. I wanted reviews from readers, and though the books I write have sold some copies, probably sixty or so for The Deep Dark Well, most buyers do not return to the seller to post reviews. And reviews are the lifeblood of the independent publishing business. Other blogs are open to submissions, until you actually get on them and see that all the reviewers in your genre are too busy for more submissions. I’ve had one blogger contact me in the recent past with an offer to do a blog and review. I sent him a free copy of one of my books and answered his questionnaire, and haven’t heard anything since. Hopefully that just means he is backlogged and will work his way to me. But I really don’t know.
Just the other day was contacted on Twitter by IndieAuthorAnonymous, who offered to put one of my books on his blog. He stated that it was a new blog and didn’t have a lot of coverage yet. I replied that I was willing to take my publicity in small chunks at this time. Tomorrow (08/24/2012) he will feature The Deep Dark Well on his blog. I am very thankful and grateful for this opportunity. Getting a message out through the general background noise is difficult these days. I am in it for the long haul, and know that baby steps forward are at least steps forward. I am hoping that this exposure on IndieAuthorAnonymous’ blog will be another one of those steps, and this his following will also grow to his benefit and that of the authors he covers. Please follow his blog if you can. It will only take a few minutes, and maybe you will find a new favorite author out there, one who is writing and publishing books for the love of the genre they write in. So remember to check out the blog of IndieAuthorAnonymous
Doug BrotherofCats Dandridge 