Another one done!

The Sword Keeper

Phase:3.0 Draft

100%

It’s done! Draft 2.0 of The Sword Keeper is finished. Still need to run it by some test readers, but it’s looking very good for a release this year.

In other news, the power cable for my laptop decided to die. I’ll replace it eventually, but in the meantime, I’m going to try turning my phone into a writing device. Just got a K480 bluetooth keyboard and I’m excited to try it out. My phone is a device I’ve always got with me, so adapting it for writing could be really great.

I’m also going to try a new writing technique that should hopefully lead to cleaner (perhaps even publishable) first drafts. If it works, this could significantly increase my writing output. It involves cycling through yesterday’s words before writing any new ones, getting into the flow and making any changes as necessary. This is actually very close to how I used to write back in high school, before all those college English classes. I also get the sense that this is how Dean Wesley Smith writes.

All sorts of experimental new things going on with my next WIP, which is Edenfall. Yes, it’s time to complete the trilogy. But before I jump into it, I’m going to take some time to do some serious prewriting, in the hopes (again) of writing a clean first draft. Which, if it works, means that the book will be published that much sooner.

In the meantime, Gunslinger to the Stars is almost ready for publication. My editor is working on it now, the cover art is just about finished, and besides that all that’s really left is crafting the book description and metadata. If all goes well, it should be up for pre-order on iBooks, Kobo, Smashwords, and Nook before the end of the month.

Also, new short story!

Nothing Found

January update

I had hoped to write a big blog post detailing my goals and plans for the year, but January got off to a rocky start (food poisoning, the flu, massive back-to-back snowstorms, and sub-zero temperatures), and this week I’m working a temp job. The big New Year’s post will have to wait.

I do have plans, however, and they’re already in motion. The main thing for now is to finish the 3.0 draft of Gunslinger to the Stars. The story is pretty much ready to go, so now I’m doing a final draft to tighten it up. I’m hoping to get it down from 66k words to just under 50k. Should make for a rip-roaring adventure.

My original deadline for Gunslinger was the end of this week, but with the job eating up all my time, it looks like I’ll have to push that back to Wednesday. Fortunately, that’s still quite doable. Revision is a pain, but it goes a lot faster for me than drafting, especially if the story is already in place.

After that, I plan to work on The Sword Keeper and finish the 2.0 draft. These are major story revisions, so it’s going to take some time to work them all out. My plan is to publish it in August, and I want to have it finished before it goes out for pre-order.

With luck, both of those projects will be finished by mid-February, freeing me up to really throw myself into Edenfall. You guys have been asking for it, and I plan to deliver. The Genesis Earth trilogy has waited long enough!

There also seems to be a great deal of interest in more J.M. Wight stories. “Worlds Without Number” has been performing exceptionally well, especially without any kind of promotion. I have some great ideas for more stories in that universe, and do hope to finish Starship Lachoneus sometime in 2018. There’s still a lot of work to do before that can happen, but if this is the story you guys want to read, I’ll move it up from the back burner.

I also just came up with a great idea for the next two Gunslinger books. The first one will be Gunslinger to the Stars, the second, Gunslinger to the Galaxy, and the third, Gunslinger to Earth. If the first one does well, I’d love to expand it into a trilogy.

But first! I’ve got to finish book one. The next big step is to find a good cover artist, then send it out for edits and put it up for pre-order. Right now, it’s scheduled to release in May, going up for Amazon pre-order in April and everywhere else in February. Gotta get on that!

TL;DR, things are crazy crazy busy around here (but in a good way). I do have a resolution to blog more frequently this year, especially with these quick update posts. Let me know what you think, or if there’s any particular book you’re looking forward to! In the meantime, thanks for reading!

Well, that rules out time travelers

If there’s one thing that the events of the weekend have proven, it’s that time machines aren’t going to be invented for at least another few hundred years. Because if time travelers from our immediate future were in our midst, I have no doubt that either Hillary or Trump (or both, Godwilling!) would have been assassinated by now.

Of course, it could just be that things are going to collapse so hard that it wouldn’t make a difference which one of them became president, but whatever. No sense in being overly optimistic.

Last week was a total wash after the motorcycle accident, but I’m slowly getting back into the saddle. I’ve got the comments back from my first readers for Gunslinger to the Stars, so that’s the WIP I’m picking up next. Deadline for draft 2.0 is October 29, but I may be able to get it done sooner than that. Hell, I may even get it done this week.

Publishing it is another question. Finances are tight, and it’s been a bad year for sales, so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to produce a quality book. Right now, I’m shooting for an April release date. That may actually be a good thing, though as it gives me time to write and release a few tie-in short stories. But regardless, it’s going to come out early next year.

Between now and then, I’ll probably release a couple of short stories and story collections. The shorts are selling better than I expected, and they make great giveaways for InstaFreebie and my mailing list. I’ve still got a bunch of stories on submission, but some of them are coming off soon, and others (like the tie-ins I want to write) would probably do better as direct to publish anyways.

As far as other WIPs go, my next big project is The Sword Keeper 2.0. I want to do a solid clean-up pass before I hand it off to my first readers, which shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks. It is my first epic fantasy novel, though, so it’s probably going to need a lot of work before I can publish it.

Next one up after that is Edenfall. There’s been a lot of interest in that one from readers of Genesis Earth, so I think it’s time (after so many years) to finish the trilogy.

I have plans for Sons of the Starfarers, but those will have to go on hold for a while as I work on these other projects. I’ll probably write the last four books in a big sprint and publish them all within a month of each other. No idea when, but hopefully before the end of next year.

That pretty much does it. I’ll leave you with some words of Hungarian optimism that showed up in my YouTube feed today:

Quick update on WIPs

Last week, I think I may have written the best scene of any story I’ve written so far in my career. Seriously, I was in tears by the end of it, and that never happens. I’d post it here, but that would spoil the book (The Sword Keeper), so you’ll have to wait until it’s published.

Progress on The Sword Keeper is coming along quite well. My goal is to have it finished before the end of next week. There are only two chapters left, and the really hard stuff is already written, so it should be a straight shot to the end.

I started this book nearly four years ago when I was teaching English in Georgia, and can still remember working on it on my tiny eee PC on the second story of the Leladze farmhouse, with the chickens roosting in the tree by the balcony and a marvelous view of the Caucusus Mountains just outside my bedroom window. Then the electricity would go out, and I’d have to wrap things up in order to conserve battery power.

Point is, I’ve been working on The Sword Keeper for far too long. In fact, I think I’ve taken longer to finish the rough draft for this book than any other. The only WIP that’s been kicking around for longer is Edenfall, but that’s only because it’s been on the back burner this whole time. With The Sword Keeper, I’ve been working on it off and on for the past four years.

It will be very, very good to have it finished. After that, it will probably need a major revision to fix a bunch of plot holes and put all the scenes and chapters in the correct order (for some reason, every novel I’ve written has the scenes out of order in the first draft), but that shouldn’t be too hard. Then it’s off to the first readers.

As for Gunslinger to the Stars, I should be hearing back from my first readers soon. I’ll probably do a revision for that one next, which (with luck) will make it ready to be published. If all goes well, I may be able to publish it in time for Christmas this year.

So that’s the plan. I’ve got another story release coming out in a couple of days, plus the free books for September, so if you aren’t already signed up for my email list, be sure to do that soon.

Thanks for reading!

Next project

So after finishing the rough draft of Gunslinger to the Stars a couple of weeks ago, I took an unofficial summer break to work on other things. But I’m back now, ready to pick up a new WIP. There are quite a few to choose from. Here are the ones I’m leaning towards:

The Sword Keeper — This one has been in progress for quite some time. When I left it off, it was about 3/4ths of the way finished, with a whole bunch of action scenes right up to the very end. I could probably finish it in a couple of weeks.

Edenfall — This is the sequel to Genesis Earth, and it’s been on the back burner for years. There seems to be a lot of growing interest in the first book, though, which makes me wonder if it’s time to finish the trilogy. If this is the book that my readers really want, then that’s the book to write.

Sons of the Starfarers — This series hasn’t really taken off the way I’d hoped it would, which is why I’ve more or less tabled it for now. There are four more books left, and if I’m going to write the next book (Patriots in Retreat), I’m going to finish all the other books as well. This could take a while, though, and I’m not sure now is a good time to pick up that project. If there’s enough demand, though, I’ll see what I can do.

Children of the Starry Sea — This sequel to the Star Wanderers series ties in a bunch of stuff from Sons of the Starfarers that I haven’t written yet, so now is probably not the time to write it.

A Beachhead in Time — This is the first book in a trilogy that I’m cowriting with my friend Scott Bascom. We’ve already started it, so technically it’s already a WIP. Not sure whether to make it my primary project at the current time, though, or to juggle it with a personal WIP.

So those are the options. Personally, I’m leaning a bit toward Edenfall at the moment, but when I’m between projects I tend to vacillate a lot until something really sticks.

Coming right along

I’m making good progress on The Sword Keeper, but I keep having to push it back to help a friend remodel his basement. His wife is having a baby in a couple of weeks, and he needs to get things finished before his mother-in-law comes over. There have been a ton of setbacks and delays, mostly having to do with the shoddy construction work done by the guys who built the place, but we seem to have passed the biggest hurdle which is to install the bathtub. Now, it’s mostly a matter of installing insulation and putting up drywall.

There’s this really fantastic game that I’ve been looking at called Stellaris. It seems like a combination of Masters of Orion and Europa Universalis. Really really tempted to play it, but as of right now, I’m holding back. When I finish this WIP, though, I may just treat myself.

Also, I recently signed up for a 30 day trial of Instafreebie, a site that (among other things) lets authors do ebook giveaways in exchange for readers’ email addresses. I’m running a giveaway for Genesis Earth, which you can pick up here if you haven’t already gotten a copy. Depending on how things go, I may sign up and run a few more campaigns in the future.

I’m really, really itching to get back to work on Gunslinger to the Stars. That will probably be the next full-length novel that I publish. In the meantime, I’ve got a bunch of short stories that should be coming out soon, starting with a Sad Puppies related piece that is sure to make a lot of people smile. Look for that one in June.

That’s pretty much it for now. Thanks for reading!

Breaking down the elephant

I came to a realization about productivity just recently. It’s one that I’ve known for a while now, but never really applied to my own quirks and strengths.

In order to accomplish a massive, multi-stage task (like writing a novel), you have to break it down into manageable chunks first. Otherwise, you’ll just get overwhelmed. If you try to eat an elephant in one sitting, you won’t be able to do it, but if you process the ground elephant meat into meal-sized tupperware containers, put some recipes together, set a meal schedule, and freeze the meat until you need it, then eating an elephant becomes much more doable.

The question is, what’s the best way to break down the elephant? The answer, of course, is that it depends on the person.

Some writers break their WIPs down into chapters. Others prefer raw word count as a measure of progress. Others use story beats, or a timer, or a hard and fast deadline. A lot of writers don’t use much of a system at all, which is probably why so many of them fall behind.

The hardest part of writing is often just getting yourself to sit down and do it. The blank page really is the most intimidating part of the job. If I had to guess, I’d say that about 50% of writer’s block is not having a good way of breaking down the elephant. And by “good system,” I mean one that is personalized to work for you.

I’ve tried out a lot of systems that didn’t really work—for me, that is. I’m sure they work just fine for other people.

For a long time, I used raw word count, but then I found myself cutting corners by dropping a project and going back to revise a half-finished one, just to get a higher word count boost. After that, I started tracking hours worked per day, but again the quality of my work fell as I started looking for busywork just to feel like I’d accomplished something.

I bounced back and forth between unfinished projects, sometimes starting new ones, sometimes making progress on old ones. Every once and a while, the story would hit me in just the right way to compel me to finish it, which is how I’ve finished probably 80% of the books I’ve written over the past three years. But that’s a very unreliable way to write books.

Then I started using a timer to break my work down into short, measurable writing sessions. The main reason I did this was to work my way up to hitting 10k words in a day (something I’m still working on). The idea was to develop more focus and train myself to write faster. What I didn’t realize until now was that this is a great way to break down the elephant.

Before, I would wake up in the morning and think “how am I going to write X,XXX words before the end of the day?” Understandably, this was a bit intimidating, and over time it tended to grind me down. But now when I wake up, the question is “am I ready for the day’s first writing session? Why not—it’s only 20 minutes.” And then I’m off.

Now, I’m not completely in that mindset yet. I still tend to think in terms of daily word count, which can make me fall back into the old habits of procrstination. And if the day starts off with something non-writing related, it can really throw me off. But using this method, I was able to get through 66% of Gunslinger to the Stars in about six weeks. And if I keep working on it, I’ll bet I can accomplish much more.

I do not consider myself a fast writer. Some of my professional writing friends think that I’m fast, but there are tons of indies out there who write much faster (and better) than me. But a lot of it really just comes down to the psychology of breaking down the elephant. And now that I’ve got a system, I just need to be better about using it.

If you guys are interested in keeping track of my writing progress, I’ll go back to using the WIP progress bars. I took them down in order to keep the sidebar from getting too cluttered, but that is a major reason why readers come to an author blog (to see the ongoing progress on the author’s next book), so I’ll redesign things a bit and figure it out. It would certainly help me to get back on the horse, knowing that people are following this sort of thing.

Right now, I’m about 35k words from finishing The Sword Keeper, a project I’ve been working on and off on for the last four years. It’s a fantastic book, perhaps even the best I’ve ever written, and getting it done is going to be huge.

After that, I’ll probably finish Gunslinger to the Stars. Put it on the back burner after LTUE, but it shouldn’t be too hard to finish it up. It’s a rip-roaring adventure that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and I could frankly use the break.

And then? I think it may be time to finish the Genesis Earth trilogy. Book two, Edenfall, has been on the back burner for a looong time (almost five years), but there seems to be a lot more interest in it now, with sales of Genesis Earth increasing and readers posting reviews that say “can’t wait for the next book!” When you guys speak, I listen.

So that’s the plan for the next couple of months. Beyond that, I have a couple of short stories coming out soon, so be sure to keep an eye out for those.

Thanks for reading!

GENESIS EARTH Goodreads giveaway!

I’m getting ready to fly to Texas for the weekend, so before I forget, there’s a Goodreads giveaway running right now for Genesis Earth. If you would like a chance to win a print copy, be sure to enter in the next few days! The giveaway ends April 25th.

Thanks for reading!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Genesis Earth

by Joe Vasicek

Giveaway ends April 25, 2016.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

The timelessness of novels

Every few months, an article about the “death of the novel” makes the rounds on the internet. This subject, the impending doom of one of literature’s most enduring forms, is a perennial favorite for bookish handwringers everywhere. If it isn’t ebooks that’s going to kill the novel, it’s millennials, the internet, our dwindling attention spans, or one of a hundred other things.

As a professional writer, though, I am awestruck by the timelessness of the novel. Think about it:

From its origin with Don Quixote in 1605, the modern novel has endured through social and political upheaval, global pandemics, the collapse of numerous societies, the most devastating war the world has ever seen, genocide and holocaust on an industrial scale, and rise and fall of half a dozen global empires. The world today would be unrecognizable to a person from Cervantes’ time, yet the novel has endured.

Movies didn’t kill the novel. Television didn’t kill the novel. Video games didn’t kill the novel. On the contrary—numerous franchises from Star Trek to Halo have a thriving line of novel tie-ins. When the ebook revolution was just getting started, people thought that so-called “enhanced novels” would dominate the marketplace. They failed to realize that all of the added audio-visual content was a distraction for most readers. Plain text is not a bug, it’s a feature.

It’s important here to make a distinction between novels and other literary forms, such as novellas and short stories. The other forms have endured as well, but not with anything approaching the popularity of the novel. Short stories are great for exploring an idea, but not so good at immersing the reader into another world. Novellas are great for telling an intimate story about two or three characters, but not nearly as good at conveying scope or intrigue.

There’s something about a novel-length story that captures the imagination in a way that other forms just can’t. Whether it’s the large cast of characters, the intricate world-building, or the interplay of numerous subplots, novels are more immersive, and therefore have the capacity to be much more satisfying. Little wonder, then, that the novel has endured.

I’ve seen this in my own books, too. Over the years, I’ve done relatively little to promote my full-length novels, and yet they still chug along with a steady month-to-month trickle of sales. When I do promote them, such as with this month’s free run of Genesis Earth, the results are astounding. My full-length novels also tend to receive much higher reviews.

In my second year of self-publishing, I got impatient and switched to novellas. While I don’t think that was a mistake, it did not provide the foundation for a lasting career. The Star Wanderers novellas did well for a couple of years, but I don’t think they’re going to endure in their current form.

I love writing novellas, but the books that I’m proudest of are all novels. Where novellas entice, novels satisfy. Where novellas tell an intimate story, novels possess greater depth. As such, I think it’s time for a change.

In the next couple of months, I’m going to prune back my catalog a bit. The Star Wanderers series will still all be up there, but I’m going to remove the individual novellas from sale, keeping the omnibus editions instead. This will pave the way for a sequel novel, Children of the Starry Sea, which I’ve already started work on.

I will probably remove most of my older short stories, and some of the derivative works. I don’t want to clutter my book pages with my earlier practice work, or anything that looks too obviously self-published.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with Sons of the Starfarers just yet. I’ll definitely finish the series, but I’m not sure whether to do the other two omnibus editions or to just release each individual book in print. I’m toying with the idea of releasing the last four books in rapid succession, to build some momentum for the series, but it would take some time to write them, which means that Patriots in Retreat (Book VI) would be delayed for maybe a year.

I’m definitely going to turn Genesis Earth into a trilogy. No idea when the next book, Edenfall, is going to come out, but I’m going to do as thorough a job with that book as I did for Genesis Earth, which means it may take a while.

Novels take a lot longer for me to write than shorter books, but the end result is generally worth it. The trouble is that without a busy release schedule, sales tend to dwindle as you fall out of readers’ minds. I’ll try to make up for that by upping my marketing game and running more free and group promotions. In the meantime, anything you guys can do to spread the word would help!

I’ve got a couple of really awesome projects that should be coming out before the end of the year: The Sword Keeper, Gunslinger to the Stars, and a bunch of other stuff that’s really going to branch out my catalog. I’ve also got a couple of short stories that should be appearing in some new markets soon. Be sure to keep an eye out, and let me know what you think!

Thoughts on series and perma-free

For the last five years, the conventional wisdom among most indie writers has been to write short books in sequential series and make the first book permanently free. It’s a strategy that works, to a certain extent. It’s what got me from making pizza money on my book sales to making a humble living at this gig. However, I’m starting to question that wisdom.

I have two books available for free this month: Genesis Earth and Star Wanderers: Outworlder (Part I). Genesis Earth was my first indie published novel, a “standalone with series potential” (specifically, a trilogy) written according to the conventional wisdom for breaking into traditional publishing. Outworlder is a very different book: the first in an eight-book novella series, strong enough to stand alone but short enough to leave the reader wanting more. And for several years, it was perma-free.

Outworlder was the first of my books to make it big. It’s gotten tens of thousands of free downloads and driven thousands of sales (I don’t have the exact numbers because I haven’t yet collated all of my sales reports from the past five years, but that’s something I plan to do). It was largely on the success of Outworlder and the Star Wanderers series that I built my early career.

But over time, downloads of Outworlder slowed to a bare trickle, and sales did as well. I could give it a short-term boost by running a few strategically placed ads, but it would always fall back down to a baseline that was simply unacceptable.

Also, when you have a book that’s permanently free, it tends to accumulate a lot of negative reviews. It’s strange, but some people seem to feel more entitled to XYZ when they get it for free, as opposed to paying for it. Or maybe these are the people who try to go through life without actually paying for anything? Who hoard everything, even the stuff that they hate, so long as they can get it for free? I don’t know.

Certainly, that’s not true of everyone who reads free books. But when you have a perma-free book, it tends to accumulate more of the barely-coherent “dis buk sux” kinds of reviews from people who probably weren’t in the target audience to begin with. And over time, that tends to weigh the book’s overall rating down, which unfortunately can be a turn-off for people who are in the book’s audience.

Contrast that with Genesis Earth. I launched it at full price with a blog tour (which I put together myself, among writer friends whom I knew personally and who had readers who would probably enjoy the book). It sold about a hundred copies in the first ninety days, then slowed to a very low trickle—maybe one or two sales each month, if that. Things continued like this for several years.

Then, back in December, I made it free for one month. Downloads immediately shot up, and continued strong throughout the entire month. Even without any advertising, I was still getting maybe 50 downloads per day on Amazon, plus a constant trickle on the other platforms. For the next couple of months, sales of all my other books grew as well

For April, I decided to make it free again, just to see if I could duplicate that kind of success. I haven’t done any paid advertising for it, but I have submitted it to various sites and newsletters that will promote free books. The result? Thousands of downloads, with a baseline rate of more than a hundred downloads per day.

Genesis Earth has never been perma-free, but every time I set it free for a limited time, it’s like I’ve released the pent-up flood waters. In contrast, Outworlder struggles to get any downloads at all, even when it’s free for only a limited time.

Part of this may have to do with the reviews. Genesis Earth has a much better overall book rating, simply because most of the people who read it over the years were the ones willing to pay full price. This also means that the book has grown into its own niche organically, since the people who have bought Genesis Earth also tend to buy other books similar to it. Retailers like Amazon take note of this, and tend to associate these books with each other in things like also-bought recommendations.

This is all just speculation, but when all of this comes together, it seems to result not only in a higher download rate when the book is free, but more downloads from people who are in the book’s targeted audience.

The mos fascinating result of this is that when the book goes back to full price, sales get a small but long-lasting boost. I’ve seen this with Bringing Stella Home, which was free in March. It’s not a huge boost—maybe only five or six books a month—but it boosts all of the other books in the series as well, and lasts for a couple of months. It’s not just Amazon where this is happening, either—in fact, it may be boosting sales on the non-Amazon platforms even more.

Bringing Stella Home is different, though, because it’s a full-length novel (about 110k words, or +300 pages) in a series that can be read out of order just fine. In other words, more of the “stand-alone with series potential” that was the convential wisdom in the old tradpub world. Like Genesis Earth, it has never been perma-free.

So what’s the takeaway?

That maybe the convential wisdom among indies is all wrong. That perma-free actually taints books and makes it harder for them to stick in the rankings, or to grow into their natural audience. That longer stand-alone books with recurring characters set in the same universe may be better for gaining long-term traction than shorter, more episodic books. Also, that the more books you give away for free—not just first in series—the better that all of your books will sell.

My experience is purely anecdotal, and there’s a lot more analysis I need to do before I can say anything for sure. From what I can tell, though, it seems that the best strategy is to write longer, fuller books that satisfy more than they entice, and to use free as a marketing strategy for only a limited time.

In other words, the collective wisdom of KBoards is completely off the mark, and Kris Rusch (who regularly gets vilified on KBoards) actually knows what she’s talking about most of the time.

Like I said, this is all anecdotal and more analysis is required. But I’m very curious now to make some of my non- first-in-series books free for a month, just to see if it has a similar boost. With Bringing Stella Home, for example, a lot of readers seem to be jumping over books 2 and 3 to read Heart of the Nebula, the direct sequel (but book 4 in the Gaia Nova series order). It would be very interesting to see if Desert Stars has an awesome free run as well, resulting in more sales after it reverts back to full price.

Lots of interesting stuff to consider. It’s definitely going to inform my writing and marketing efforts in the future.