Congrats to Myke Cole for winning the 2013 Compton Crook Award for his debut novel!
I had the good fortune to be on a panel with him at Balticon last year, and he’s a funny, talented, stand-up guy. Control Point is just what you’d expect from a hard-nosed military urban fantasy thriller laced with dark humor. Which is to say it’s a really fun read.
Great job, Myke! Please keep the sweet books coming.
It’s KDP Select time, my droogs! Aloft is free now until Saturday.
Last time this scrappy little tale of workplace romance and terrible bosses climbed the free Fantasy/Futuristic romance bestseller list. I’ve played with categories and the like since then (because why not?) and now it’s #12 in Technothrillers!
A book that can do so well in those two genres? That sounds like something I’d sure want to read! (If I hadn’t written it.)
Please pick up a copy if you don’t have one, and kindly request that your friends do the same! Let’s make this thing the #1 technothriller on Amazon! Take that, Tom Clancy!
Well!
As I mentioned in The Past, my brother and I have been working on an opera together for quite some time. He wrote the music, and I wrote the libretto. We first started planning it out 2010 so it could be his last hurrah before getting his doctorate in composing a few years later
Well shut my mouth, we went and finished it. And with the excellent contributions of the artists, musicians, and good people of New Voices Opera (founded for this production), we put it on!
The opera’s called “Intoxication: America’s Love Affair With Oil.” Here’s what reviewers had to say:
Everything about this project merits praise and opportunity… The libretto is clever; the music, appropriate, varied and attractive.
And
[Ben Rovik’s] libretto is an exemplar of poetic craftsmanship. He draws from historical events, political figures, pop culture, and even mid-century advertising to show the evolution of American culture and its relation to our growing dependence on oil. Without an obtuse agenda, [Rovik] leaves the audience with a heavy message and a lingering sense of discomfort; we’re all dependent on oil, no matter how much we wish to become more “sustainable” and “green”.
Hot cha cha! Maybe a Mechanized Wizardry opera should be in the works one of these days.
Check out New Voices Opera, and my brother Chappell Kingsland’s site for more excellent music.
Dear Overlords,
I had a bowl of canned soup at work a few days ago, and as I was slurping it down I pondered, “Does this soup actually eat like a meal?”
And then I pondered, “What the flap am I saying?”
Soups, of course, don’t eat (unless you go far, far afield from the standard recipes. I’m sure there are some Baba Yaga tales about enchanted soups that eat naughty Slavic children.)
So why does this slogan, which Campbell’s has used for three decades now, make sense at all? Why can I understand that Campbell’s means this soup will fill me up like a meal would, as opposed to other soups, which are dainty liquid amuse-bouches before the plat principal?
I suppose it’s the power of context. I look at that sentence and I can’t imagine what else it what mean for a soup to eat, so I instinctively understand it must really be referring to my perception of what it would be like to eat that soup… and then the ad agency’s in my head and controlling my brain, and suddenly our pantry is full of canned soup like we’re survivalists ready and waiting for a nuclear dust-up.
Well played, Campbell’s. Well played.
Love,
B-Ro
The fine folks at Podioracket took the time to interview me about the free audiobook of The Wizard That Wasn’t. Take a listen when you get a moment– my segment begins a little more than halfway in.
Heads up, fellow travelers!
I was fortunate enough to land a lovely new full-time job this week. It’s casual, creative, and close to home. I’ll be writing dialogue for some very fancy choose-your-own-adventure training videos. The goal is to create simulated characters with whom users can have conversations that feel totally immersive.
This job is a huge step in the right direction, as far as, you know, avoiding the poor house goes. And it’ll allow us to keep buying new clothes for the baby faster than she can outgrow them (which, as you may imagine, is at a considerable rate).
I will still be working on Mechanized Wizardry as much as possible. A large chunk of the draft of The Fate of the Faithful is already done, so wheels are in motion.
Anyway! Onwards and upwards. Thanks for all your support and your interest.
Image credit here
Lots to do, and several meals yet to eat today. (Surprising how hard it is to make time for that sort of thing.)
I wanted to share some self-publishing tips and opportunities that came through my inbox or feeds recently. I hadn’t heard these things anywhere else, so they caught my attention.
- Pricing differently for each country.
I’m an American, so I only think in dollars. I price my ebooks at an $x.99 price, because even though people aren’t actually fooled into rounding down to the number before the decimal, it’s such a common marketing habit that a $3 book looks demonstrably more expensive than a $2.99 one. (Smashwords insists on the .99 price too, because some of its affiliates also do.)
At any rate, Nathan Maharaj at Kobo points out that there’s no reason not to do the same thing for prices in all currencies.
If your $2.99 book auto-prices to 2.25 Euros, why not go ahead and raise the price to 2.99 Euros? Or lower it to 1.99? Either way would be more purposeful, and take into account the fact that readers paying that price are going to be more receptive to something close to a round number than something somewhere in the middle of the decimal range.
An interesting pro-user thought!
- What about Google?
I read Mark Coker’s New Year’s Predictions. Very cool to see what the creator of Smashwords thinks about publishing, since he’s full of info and has his finger on the pulse of the thing.
One of the comments talked about Google, and the rise of the Play store, which made me realize that I’d totally neglected to include my books in those places. I tend to head to books.google.com and remedy that asap. The more places the Mechanized Wizardry books are visible, the more likely they’ll be seen.
- Kindle serials!
As if I needed another project… I saw a guest post on Lindsay Buroker’s blog about the Kindle Serials program, and how it’s open to pitches from indie authors. Do tell, Amazon!
I love the prospective excitement that would be built up around a novel-in-progress, and I think it’d create even more opportunities to engage with readers.
I’ve got an idea for an urban fantasy series that I think would make a page-turningly delicious serial novel. Maybe I’ll be able to get to it by the end of the year.
Read anything interesting in the self-publishing world lately?
There we have it!
The free promo for Aloft has ended, and it’s back up to being a regular ol’ ebook that you can buy on Amazon.
First off, I want to give a huge thank you to everyone who found the book and downloaded it during the three-day promoganza. It was really exciting to watch Aloft rise up the rankings, and to think that there were people on the other side of each of those transactions who would be reading my stuff and (with any luck) enjoying it. Thanks for getting curious and snatching up a book by an indie author like me!
Special thanks, too, to all my friends and supporters who took a moment to share the links around and spread the word.
All told, there were just under 400 copies of Aloft downloaded during this period. The book reached around 1,500 in the overall free rankings, and peaked at #49 on the Romance > Fantasy & Futuristic Top 100 Free list.
I feel great about reaching more readers, and I’m very curious to see how sales of the other three Ben Rovik Books do in the next month, as people finish reading Aloft. There are links in the ebook itself to Arm’s Length and The Wizard That Wasn’t, and a nice exciting sample from the latter. If a percentage of the free readers start buying the other books, and reviewing and recommending them, I’ll be delighted. I’ll keep you updated as the weeks go by.
There are authors who have a bigger impact from their promo days– who give away thousands of books during their promos, not hundreds. I’d like to shoot for that next time. I have another two free days to use in the next couple months, and I have a few thoughts:
- Promo sites are telling the truth when they say they might not post your free listing.
Snickslist, Zwoodlebooks, Author Marketing Club, Free Kindle Fiction and Book Deal Hunter are places where I know my entry for Aloft showed up. There were also a number of other sites where Aloft appeared once it got on a Top 100 romance list. But as for all the forms I filled in, requesting free publicity? Many wound up not having space, just like they said they would.
This might have been a symptom of doing a promo between huge holidays. A great idea on paper, since so many people were getting new Kindles after Xmas, but if I had the idea then everyone else did too. These sites openly declared themselves saturated by promo requests.
- Paying a little money for guaranteed listings, especially on the bigger sites, might be worth it.
Some of these sites ask only $5 to guarantee that your title shows up, and prominently, with a cover image. If it’s a site with tons of visitors, that might actually be meaningful. Jeff Bennington budgets a couple hundred dollars for each of his promos to make them work. Putting in time to request free listings that don’t happen might not be a good use of resources.
Then again, maybe the free listings were just impossible to come by during the holidays, and in another time of year it would work better.
- KDP Select isn’t a deux ex machina.
That’s the final takeaway for me. I wanted to play around with the program, and, again, I’m delighted that it’s helped me reach more people, especially if a few of them leave reviews or buy another book. But one short promo was never going to be the tipping point that set me up with a full-time income from the things I’ve written. I’ve got to keep working on my series, and reaching out to readers and peers whenever I can, and keep putting out more good products. This is a long-term process; my wife says I’m working on our retirement plan with the books here. There are certainly plenty of cases of great authors whose works took that long to catch on and get noticed.
- Watching the rankings was super-fun.
Number-obsessed much? I loved checking how the book was doing, and continued to have fun doing so even after it plateaued. Now climbing the Top 100 Paid books; that’d be really fun to watch.
Gentle readers, thanks again for checking in during all this promotion, and putting up with seeing this link and this cover for, like, a million posts in a row. I’m going to put down my entrepreneur’s silk top hat and put on my writer’s tousled hair and stubble now, and get back to work on The Fate of the Faithful: Mech Wiz Book Three. Writing! What a ‘novel’ thing for a writer to do!
*snickers, stuffs face with butterscotch pie, clicks ‘publish’*
.
Dear Overlords,
What’s the name for the category of words that sound nothing like what they represent? That create an impression directly counter to the associations of the things they define?
Contranyms? Wrongophones? Malalogues?
At any rate, here are a few words on which you completely dropped the proverbial ball:
- Crepuscular. I don’t think Twilight when I hear that, I think Feed. How can a word for a time of day sound like a word H.P. Lovecraft would use to describe one of his slithering horrorbeasts?
- Pulchritude. If I thought someone was beautiful and I called them pulchritudinous, I guarantee I would be slapped and possibly cried at. And I would curse my SAT prep classes for having ever made me think such a defective word could actually work in the real world.
- Xenial. I just don’t associate the letter X with friendliness. And I’m angry at this word in general ever since someone used it against me in Words With Friends.
Please expunge these words from the lexicon forthwith.
Love,
B-Ro
PS Hey readers– any words out there that grind your gears?
Just a quick note to say how the Aloft three-day free promo is going so far.
First, the biggest problem with these KDP promos is that it’s incredibly addictive to keep checking on how it’s going. I could keep refreshing the page endlessly to watch new sales come trickling in moment by moment. Who says numbers can’t buy happiness?
The book began the day at around the 8,000 rank in free books. The only thing I did, in addition to my earlier promotional prep, was to post updates about how the book was doing three times during the day to Facebook, encouraging my friends to share the link and download the book to drive it up the rankings. I got several likes and a number of shares (thanks, everyone!), and quite a few people clicked the link (I can track that sort of stuff through bitly.)
At my last check last night, it was in the 2,000s. That’s in free books overall, all across Amazon.
The more exciting thing was that the book settled into a category: Romance > Fantasy & Futuristic. And in that category, it started doing pretty well. By the end of the night, the book was in the TOP 100 at 68.
There are about 40,000 books on Amazon tagged as Fantasy Romance, and 14,000 tagged as Futuristic. That’s both free and paid; the number that are free at any given time is smaller. But still, that’s a bunch of books, so I was quite happy that Aloft showed up in a place where casual browsers might actually see it.
As of this writing, the book is around 1,600 free overall, and it’s at 52 in the category’s Top 100 Free. CAN IT REACH #1?
Today and tomorrow, the book is still free! Please grab a copy if you haven’t done so already, and enjoy!
"I told you that story so I could tell you this one."
Ben Rovik 