Random April updates

So, I know blog posts are slowing down, and you’re all wondering, “Bitch, what are you plotting now?” Well I’ve been kind of busy. Last week I finished a new novel, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. It’s the first book in a spin-off series that will follow up on what happens to Alice Culpepper after the events in the final Peter the Wolf novel, Thicker Than Blood. (Which releases in June, by the way.) I’m working on the edits for Thicker Than Blood, and I’m also writing a non-paranormal romance novel, Third Wheel Romance Blues. Once I finish editing one book, I have to start editing the sequel to A Boy and His Dawg, a much darker story called Fangs, Humans, and Other Perils of Night Life, which will be released in July.

I also got interviewed by Rebecca Scarberry. So if you haven’t seen that yet on Twitter, go ahead and take a look.

I’m taking a two month break from promotions on Twitter, but it’s not done much for my nightmares problem. I’m now going on two straight months with no relief, and nothing I do seems to help get rid of the nightmares. Dropping promotions has helped to reduce my stress levels, and while my sales are kind of suffering for it, they didn’t die off completely. So there is that.

Plus, I sold copies of my flops, Bran of Greenwood and the Scary Fairy Princess, A Bard’s Tale, and Mmmm…Crunchy! And even more shocking, no one asked for refunds…on those titles, that is. Almost everything I sold in the UK Kindle store this month was returned. Which is a little depressing. I haven’t had this many refund requests before, and it’s not even the offensive books being returned. So I don’t know what went wrong. Maybe the straight readers got offended reading about trans and gay main characters. *Shrug*

Anyway, despite the slower sales and there being no improvement with my nightmare problem, I’m still not going to do any promotions for May. I really do need a break, and June will be hard enough on me when I have to start promoting Thicker Than Blood and the rest of the Peter the Wolf series. I just hope to have enough other projects done so I can devote most of my energy to the promotion push instead of dividing my time between writing, editing and selling.

And…I think that’s it for now. Along with everything else I’m doing, I’m also trying to catch up on my reading, and I’m starting my balcony garden again. I want to do another another video game review, but the last 3 Vita games I bought, I hated so bad, I dropped them too early to give a fair assessment of the games. But at least I’ll have some new book reviews relatively soonish.

Oh, right, thank you to everyone who bought books this month and didn’t get a refund. Really appreciate your continued support.

Campaigns to think about…

So, after making a rambling comment on Twitter about not being sure how to meet our first stretch goal of $600 to pay my editor Tara for her work on Thicker Than Blood, we got ANOTHER $100 contribution. That’s 3 so far, for those not keeping score at home. Because of these ultra-generous fans, all backers will be getting a new ARC in their incentive packages, Fangs, Humans, and Other Perils of Night Life. This is a sequel to A Boy and His Dawg, which has been getting some good reviews over on Amazon after being free for a week. (Have I said woot yet? No? WOOT!)

I’m not 100% sure if the ARC will have a cover or not, but I have already contacted the artist who worked on the first book, D.B. Harris, and he’s willing to do the second cover too. Which is good, cause that way they’ll have a consistent style. I have all of April and part of June to scrape together funds to pay D.B. So I want to say that of course I’ll have a proper cover on the ARC for you. But I won’t promise this because I don’t want to lie to you if things don’t work out. But, for sure, I will be using a lot of this extra time to edit the book, and as ARCs go, it should be a relatively clean copy. (I edit because I love you.)

I said on Twitter that I’d have the incentive package out in April, but this is a math mistake on my part. Our campaign still has 36 days left, and so the packages won’t get out to you lovely peeps until May. The book will release in June, and this is another way of me saying thanks to you for preordering. I had plans to release other books before Fangs, but since I’ll already have it finished with a cover, I suspect it will be my July release. One of the joys of being an indie punk is, I never met a schedule I didn’t ignore to do what I wanted. (^_^)

Anywho, have I said recently how awesome my fans are? Because they really are. I may not have as many as the bigger authors, but da-yum, my fans know how to show the love. <3

Instead of signing off with butt smooching, I want to bring a couple of other campaigns to your attention, which I have no affiliation with, but which I still think you should check out. The first is a new party card game called Widget. The game maker asked me to check out last night. I did, and the word nerd in me went “Oooh! This has potential!” So I retweeted the link they sent, and then I chipped in a $10 to help nudge the game closer the stretch goals for expansion packs. The game has already met the minimum goal of $4,000, but if they can make $4,500, we’ll get vampires and zombies added to the mix.

Science just pulled off a double miracle

Today’s post may mark a new era for me, and an end of an old one. I can’t say it will cure me of my mood swings or my bitchy phases, but I think I’ve found the keys to defeating my depressions because I’ve been given my hope back.

Earlier this month the news brought the announcements that 3D printing was able to make organs, cartilage, or even stem cells, and I started to feel a tingle of hope in my future. Last night researchers at Lund University announced that they could encourage the brain to build new nerves and cells without surgery.

You cannot fully appreciate this without understanding that my MS plaque scares are all in my head. I have holes in my brain that make me act weird randomly. Even as people showed me stories of potential MS cures, all those article made it clear there was no way to repair damaged or dead nerves. So no promise of a future cure could give me hope. But this does. If this were put into practice, it could patch the whole in my head, and I could be freed of my MS relapses.

That’s one thing I had to give up on after being diagnosed. I was told I wouldn’t live to see 55. I couldn’t hope to be an old lady. I couldn’t even pretend I had the potential for a long happy life like healthy people. I had a countdown clock put over my head, a definite date for when I would die, and it counted down faster and faster with every birthday. It was one of my two main sources of depression, and now, it looks like I might be able to drop-kick the clock and get back to the happy delusion that I can live to be 100, just like everyone else.

What we’ve been told about book marketing may be a lie…

I’ve done a lot of crabby posts lately, haven’t I? Well I want to take this one down a notch on the cranky vibe and talk about something that’s been bugging me, but not making me mad. It’s something I think us writers have been avoiding talking about, because nobody wants to question what sounds like…like sound advice. I certainly didn’t want to question it, because in some cases it’s worked out well. Some…it’s worked out well in a few rare cases, and that’s the problem with it. This method is casting a wide net, and it’s only retrieving a few results in return

This thing we’ve been told about making friends first, and then selling our books isn’t a very good idea. It sounds good in theory, but the problem in a nutshell is, authors shouldn’t require real friends to read their books. I know I don’t. I’m pretty sure most writers don’t, although some shallow authors may use their friends to manipulate their initial rankings by having friends buy books. The key word is buy, not read. I think most of the friends who buy those books shelve it and go on reading what they really like instead, assuming they like to read. And that to me is a tragedy, a book bought, but never read. Art is meant to be absorbed and reflected upon, and the profit margin is just gravy on the side.

So if someone buys my book but never reads it, I feel it’s kind of pointless. I’m not really making a connection to that person with my art. I’m using them for financial gain. What kind of shitty friend would I be if I let that be my goal in our relationship? Very shitty, y’all. The burning shit variety, the kind that leaves your butthole sore and swollen. I don’t want to be that kind of shitty friend. I don’t want to be a wham bam, thank you ma’am friend, or a shitty shitty bang bang friend. Ahem, I’ll just drop this joke here before I run it into the gutter…with the shit.

But look, there’s two problems with this line of advice bugging me, one that I’ll cover as a writer, and one that I’ll cover as a reader, and then as a writer, since it really is a bit of a double-edged sword.

The first is, friends of mine probably don’t read my niche, but I won’t know that until broaching the sales topic a few months down the road. I have attracted a lot of followers to my Twitter account, and I’ve talked to a lot of people. I talk about my hobbies, but I also talk about stuff that matters to me, and while it seems unfathomable to some social media gurus who insist on false politeness at all times, I draw in a crowd with my angry “you people” rants. Amazingly, people still talk to me after those rants.

We socialize, and I uphold every part of the social contract as it’s required of me. You want to chat until I end up in Twitter jail for treating Twitter like an IM client? Sure, let’s gab for an hour. You have a book link? Sure, I’ll share it. You have a cause that you need help promoting? Let me know, and I’ll help out. If you’ve got a charity and I’ve got the cash, I’ll send you $10-$20 to help out. You’re out of grocery money or need a bus pass? Same thing. I’ll PayPal you the funds, and you won’t find me hounding your ass about repaying me.

But when it’s all said and done, I might later mention, “If you’re in the mood for a new book, I just put this out.” And people go, “Gosh, Zoe, I don’t know if I want to read your kind of fiction.” Well by that point they’re a friend, and I won’t push the issue. But that’s why this method of marketing kind of blows chunks. I invest time and emotion into a person, and 9 times out of 10, they don’t want my books. They like me. They like my rants, and they like talking to me. And I like talking to them, so I see value in the social networks for the connections I make with others.

Another writing update already?

I’ve got two projects completed this week already, having completed the third Zombie Era novella (tentatively titled Raising the Undead), and having FINALLY finished the rough draft for Revival of the Magi. The novella took only a couple of weeks to finish, but Revival of the Magi had sat in limbo for the better part of a year and a half because of missing cast members. It’s one of my longer stories, and the larger cast made it hard for me to remember everyone in the first pass. So I left some notes on what I thought those characters should be doing, and every time I came back to the project, the muse went, “Eh, maybe later.” (And of course sometimes the characters went “No, I’m not feeling that.”)

But at long last, I have the cast assembled, and I can call this a finished rough draft. The book’s at 101K, but after I add details here and there, it’s sure to be a little bigger. But I promise, it’s one of the few door stoppers I’ll put out this year.

Today, I have plans to do some cover work to get ready for the Wattpad beta reading of Sandy Morrison and the Pixie Prohibition, Sandy’s second book in what I hope to make an open-ended series. The events in book two are mostly self-contained, but their resolutions leave open the door to at least five books in the series, and that’s just what the muse has to start with.

Then next week I plan to start the last Zombie Era novella, which should take 2-3 weeks to finish. So for sure, this year, I’ll conclude two of my series and free my schedule to work on more Mystical World Wars books.

Writing this winter has not been easy, and has involved a lot of crashing on the couch from fatigue attacks. But despite this lack of energy, I don’t appear to have any motivation problems. I have new releases nearing completion for almost every month this year, and if I keep this pace up, by Spring I’ll be drafting stuff for the 2014 schedule.

Lots of new stuff coming! And in between releases, I’ve got some book and game reviews to write, even a possible new indie music CD to review. Going to be a fun year, y’all.

Monthly sales report…

I’ve been very busy in January to try and sell copies of Saving Gabriel, with many evenings spent posting promotions on Twitter every hour or so. If you’ll recall, my original hope was to get sales from 10% of my Twitter followers. My hopes were buoyed by the initial success I had on Wattpad, and I’d hoped that the larger reader base might convert to a vocal fandom.

That didn’t work out. Only one Wattpad reader posted a review, and most of my sales for the month could be accounted for from direct Twitter promotions. Even then, I got just slightly over 1% of my followers to buy the book. Here at the end of the month, I’ve got 15 sales across three vendors, with Amazon predictably making up the bulk of those sales. Amazon had 10 sales of Saving Gabriel, while Kobo had 3, and my blog store had 2. While this sounds incredibly negative, I need to point out that this is my first double digit sales figure for any book in opening month, or indeed in any month. My typical pattern is to sell 1-2 copies of a book per month, and my large back catalog adds up to double digits most months.

Aside from Saving Gabriel, this single digit pattern has held firm, and I’ve sold 1-2 copies of my older titles on all vendors, again with Amazon taking the lead. At midnight, I had 32 sales for all books, with 22 of those sales coming from Amazon. This is also a record-breaking month for me, and I’ve never done this well before. So while my hopes for a larger opening month weren’t met, I can’t really complain about the sales I did get. And I got reviews too.

Gad, what a week…

Ever since returning from Lucca, I’ve been having every possible health problem known to me; fatigue, vertigo, nausea, stomach pains, joint pains, muscle cramps, and of course, mood swings. (Because what month would be complete without those?)

Despite the constant and chronic problems, I’ve been working hard on writing. I’ve been able to build a buffer of episodes for All Maid Up, and now that I’ve moved past the stumbling blocks from the prior season, I have a relatively clear path for the next 2-3 seasons. This has also given me a bit of free brain space to start another novella WIP, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

I want to talk about how All Maid Up has been an ongoing experiment for me in several ways. I don’t normally show my rough drafts, and even when I was posting serial fiction online, I’d already written the books and had been through them many times for revisions. But a lot of WebLit people write stuff on the fly and post it rough, going back to refine after the story is done and maybe releasing an edited ebook afterward. I’d often said, “I can’t do that,” and after a while, I guess I took it as a personal challenge that maybe I could.

Progress report: Saving Gabriel

I’m past the halfway point in posting chapters for Saving Gabriel, though I changed very quickly from a post every two days to two chapters every night at midnight in an effort to get more votes. This strategy seems to be working, as I’m up to 166 votes for 3,792 views. I’ve already passed my best numbers with all my previous stories, and the votes-to-readers ratio is higher than I’ve normally seen. Comments are almost all positive (setting aside typo comments, which are good, but in a different way) and the chapters where I cover the alternate history of heaven seemed to go over well.

I still would like to reach the top 10, but to do that I’d need at least 10 regular voters hitting both chapters each night to make it. Much as I’d like to go all utlra-beggy to reach that peak, my gut instinct says I don’t have enough reach to get there from here. But where I’m at now, I can still make another run into the top 20, and that’s not too shabby.

If you haven’t yet tried the story, please give it a chance. You can make a Wattpad account using your Facebook sign-in, and it takes all of two seconds to get set-up. Very easy, and no fussing with new names or passwords.

Since it’s been pointed out a few times that folk can’t find the vote button, it’s because the button is at the top of the page. So when you finish reading a chapter, to vote on it, you have to scroll back up to the top. It’s a little squirrely, I know, and if it were my site, I’d add a second vote button at the bottom of the story.

Report of the week

Well, this week was a study in contrasts. When it comes to health and mood, I had a pretty shitty week. The weather was partly to blame, but I also had some momentary temper tantrums over little shit that isn’t worth recapping here.

And yet, the week was mostly good in other ways. I had a job with the glass web site for one more week, meaning my invoice this time will be for four weeks. So that good paycheck will allow me to make some charitable donations and to pay some artists for covers, and even to buy some geeky stuff for myself.

I got a 5-star review on Amazon for NINJAWORLD, the very first review for my bizzaro adventure story. On the same day, I also made four sales on Amazon for other titles. AND most of those were in the UK, where I have had a hard time making sales.

Also, there’s Saving Gabriel and its rising popularity. I began posting the story on my account at Wattpad this week, and I’ve been diligently begging people on Twitter and Facebook to please give it a try and vote for it or leave comments. People are doing both, and many of the comments are typo corrections like I was asking for. So the story is getting fixed as we go along, and it’s quickly climbing the charts at the same time. As of 9 AM this morning, I took a screen cap to show my progress:

Post-project report…

Yesterday, I got up and put butt in seat to crank out 8K and complete my fallen angel WIP. It felt good…for all of two minutes. This one isn’t really my fault, though. It was more a combination of twitter news about kids. Strike one was reading about a little boy whose cat was killed by bureaucrats because they couldn’t be bothered to leave a note on the cage at the shelter. Then I read a story of how a baby in the UK starved to death because the social services agencies had tossed the kid off in the paper sea. And strike three was reading a report about the rise of child slavery and sex trafficking in America, where fully 80% of the victims are American kids pimped out by their parents.

This of course led me to think that this story is the very reason why I wrote Peter the Wolf. Because, wanting to say something about my friend Cherry and the way she’d been pimped by her grandmother, I felt that I would have trouble getting people to believe a girl that badly abused would grow into a sex-obsessed nymphomaniac. (Cherry had a HUGE porn collection, and people were always telling the guys she lived with “good job” for it. They got confused to learn a woman collected all this porn.) So I made Peter male, and was still told “that’s unrealistic, having someone think of sex all the time.” Well, seeing as how I lived with the real wolf, and she liked sex 3 times a day or she wasn’t happy, I thought my toned-down male version of her was pretty tame.

The muse kicked me in the gut by declaring that the new story “betrays all our goals.” I don’t know what to say to her. I have lots of stories that aren’t like Peter the Wolf, and my goal at this point is, I just want a story that people will read.

Until she decided to kick this story for being too mainstream, she was LOVING it. It has a heroine who’s a big girl, a weightlifter who doesn’t need to be rescued. It has a great mystery plot about fallen angels, and it has a nice amount of romance without the guy being too stalkery or controlling. It even has Lucifer in a surprising side role as…a hero? Well a temporary hero, at least, and that was certainly intriguing enough to the muse to want to share it. It was a damn good story, one so good my inner editor’s only ongoing comment was “shut up and keep typing! I want to know how this ends!”