gamila – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Ebook update

As many of you know, I epublished my first novel two weeks ago, and three short stories a few months before that. How has it been going?

First, let me point out that I have another guest post out as part of the Genesis Earth blog tour, this one on my friend Gamila’s blog. Gamila reviews YA and LDS fiction, and is a big proponent of clean reads. For my post, I wrote about the place of LDS writers in science fiction and fantasy and the unique things we have to offer these genres. Fun stuff; you should check it out.

So now that that’s out of the way, how do the numbers look for my epublishing venture? Not bad, actually. In two weeks, I’ve sold twenty copies of Genesis Earth and gotten two five star reviews on Amazon, only one of which was from someone I know. Not bad–I’m looking to get at least $50 from Amazon come September, which should be very nice.

The short stories have not sold nearly as well, however. Part of it probably has to do with the fact that I’m not a super stellar short story writer, but another part probably has to do with the lack of promotion. The review of “From the Ice Incarnate” by Red Adept Reviews did lead to a few extra sales for all my stories, but only about half a dozen or so. Nothing spectacular.

Part of it also has to do with the sampling system, I think. With ebooks, you can download a free sample (usually the first 10% of the text) and decide whether you want to buy it or not. For Genesis Earth, that amounts to the first three chapters and then some; for the short stories, maybe a couple of paragraphs and that’s it.

So what’s the takeaway? I think that novels work out much better as ebooks than short stories. For one, you can justify charging more for them (I haven’t seen anyone selling short stories for more than $.99), and thus get the higher royalty rate. For another, they work much better with the sampling system; readers are much more likely to get hooked on the first 10% of a novel than the first 10% of a short story. And lastly, I’d say that you need to figure out some kind of way to promote yourself and get your work out there. Still working on that.

All in all, not too bad. But here’s the really cool part (and I mean really cool): at my current cost of living, I estimate that I need to sell only 15 ebooks per day to break even financially. At a consistent average of 25 books per day, I could justify quitting my “day job” (150% of all monthly expenses).

How is that exciting? Well, get this: starting out the gate with very little platform or exposure, I’m averaging a little over 1 ebook sale per day. If I could boost that up to 3 sales per day for 5 books, I’d be breaking even. At 5 sales per day for 5 $2.99 books (~800 total ebook sales per month), I’ll be making a living.

See why I’m excited?

My goal now is to get up to 5 full length novels / novellas out before the end of the year. Believe it or not, that’s very achievable.

First, I’ll be epublishing Bringing Stella Home sometime this summer, hopefully in time for worldcon. Shortly thereafter, I hope to publish Sholplan as a $.99 novella.

My current WIP is the third draft of Desert Stars, and I bet I can have that ready before Christmas. While I’ll put the whole thing out as its own novel, I like Emma’s idea of splitting it into two books as well. I’ll probably title them Dome and Desert and Sand and Stars, and make the first one available for free just to get more exposure.

And at some point in between all that, I’ll finish compiling all my travel journals from the 2008 BYU Jordan study abroad and put that out as its own work. That one should be fun, and a good way to experiment with in-text photos and illustrations.

That’s my plan. The more I put my work out there, the better my chances at making it big. And even if I don’t, if I have enough titles out and they all sell more or less consistently, I can still leverage that to make a full-time living. And that’s my dream.

So yeah, I’m extremely excited.

Blog buttons!

So I was reading my friend Gamila’s blog, and she mentioned that she made some blog buttons. Immediately, I thought: “Cool! I should do something like that.”

So, without further ado, I give you…blog buttons!

Post them to your blog! Put them on your sidebar! Attach them to your message board forum signature! Use them as your avatar! Write a spam virus that will…okay, don’t do that. But seriously, if you love me, go crazy nuts and post these EVERYWHERE!

And just in case you don’t know how to put these onto your sidebar, here are some basic html instructions:

Fly, my pretties! FLY!

The end of an era

Today was my last writing meeting as Quark writing vp. :'(

It’s been a good run, two years as leader of the Quark Writing Group at BYU. I remember how it was when I started–I was still just a hobby writer, with a nebulous interest in getting published someday but without any real goals or plans. I heard about the group from some friends, but didn’t really start going until winter of ’07, as Reigheena and Aneeka were graduating. One day, I showed up after the meeting was finished (but everyone was still hanging around chatting) and Reigheena was like “so, you want to be writing vp next year?”

I was kind of nervous but really excited that first semester, with lots of ideas to try out. We posted our fliers around all the freshman dorms the first couple days of class (most of the members were graduating and/or moving on), and we got quite a few new members, as well as curious English majors who came for a couple of times before moving on.

Those first days, meetings were two hours long, the submissions were up to 4,500 words, and we did four of them every meeting. We met in the basement of the BYU library, in one of the study rooms, and we crammed between ten and fifteen people down there each meeting. Pretty intense! Two hours was not enough time to comfortably cover everyone’s story, and we always felt rushed. We held meetings every other week (or, more accurately, every 1.5 weeks) on a weird schedule that only I really had figured out.

Well, after that first semester, we made a few changes. Reduced the submissions length to 2,500 words, the number of submissions to 3, and the length of the meetings to one hour instead of two. I think we also started meeting weekly, instead of the weird Tuesday–Saturday–Tuesday schedule. We also got a real room, over in the Talmadge building.

Things have definitely changed. This past year, we didn’t really do much to get new members, but we have started to bring in people from the other sections of Quark. A lot of other old timers have moved on–Drek moved up to Draper, so I doubt we’ll see much of him, and Jakeson and Gamila have been coming less and less as they move on to the next stage of their lives. Still, it’s been fun, holding our weekly writing meetings each Saturday.

While I always tried to encourage everyone to be frank and honest with their criticism, we’ve also done a good job diffusing that tension with humor. Here are some of my favorite quotes from my time as writing vp:

“He has two guns in the office and he wants to give Autumn a talking-too for having a knife in her boots?”
“She’s an intern.”

“Other than that, I thought it was just good ol’ fashioned fantasy violence.”

“I don’t remember anything about your characters right now, but I remember when I was reading your story that they were very distinct and I knew who they were.”

“I’m trying to think of something I can say that doesn’t sound like a critique.”
“Your writing is…legible”

“I have a friend that had a way to hide a knife in her hair.”
“I want a wife like that!”

“Some books don’t have chapters, they have acts.”
“We have a name for those. We call them… ‘plays’.”

“As always, your writing was legible.”
“No, wait, it wasn’t! It was courier!”

“If this was meant as a short story and not the beginning of a novel, “defenestration” will suddenly become a useful word in your vocabulary.”

“Maybe I should write a prologue about a writer who’s writing a prologue and realizes that nobody ever reads them.”

“It doesn’t have to be functional, it can just be like ‘hey, we make gears.'”

“The love in Twilight is all based on scent: he smells nice and she smells delicious.”

“The goatee gives me programming x2.”

“Missions…”
“The first six months…”
“The first two years…”

“I like getting to the exciting event within a page of the story.”
“Frodo, see this ring? Destroy it!”

“I loved how flat your characters were!”
“You’re so good at poor writing!”

“Maybe ‘MacBeth’ could be a title. Like, the leader is known as ‘The Macbeth.'”
“Yeah! And all the lower downs would be ‘the Duncans.'”

“Wait… I did write something good… at the very end!”
“Like, ‘Oh good, it ended!”
“You are putting words into my criticism!”

“Then I thought, what would my characters be like if they were alive? And then I was afraid.”

Ah, the good times. It’s so sad to log onto the Quark forums now and not have moderator privileges, to know that I won’t be sending out those weekly emails, moderating things, doing all that other stuff. It’s the end of an era for me. My duties as writing vp for Quark have been a major part of my college experience here at BYU, and I won’t forget it.

…and they all lived evily ever after.

Today we had a quark writing group party, and it was lots of fun! We all went up to drek‘s new house, up in Draper, and read some of our really old, really bad first attempts at writing stories. Good times!

Drek, Nick, lexish, slipperyjim, jakeson, gamila, aneeka, and one of my friends from the FLSR writing group all came up. Jakeson and his crew got lost on the way, but we had a good time hanging out, chatting, eating the pita bread and hummous that I’d cooked (I figured everyone else would bring sugar-heavy treats, so I cooked something a little more on the healthy side–still delicious, as evidenced by how much everyone ate!), and talking about how we’d gotten started writing.

I think a lot of us had similar stories–while we all wrote for different reasons, we all tried to do something big in high school, something that marked a turning point of some sort. The other common thread that ran through our stories was…how laughably bad they were! There were gradations, of course (Nick’s story that started with the word “Gandalf” and only got worse was pretty ridiculously crazy), but all of our stuff was pretty bad.

It can be both fun and painful to look back on past stuff, especially the stuff you wrote back in high school. It’s like, all the painful awkwardness of high school is not limited to your social life, it seeps into your writing as well, especially if that’s when you first try out your hand at the craft. So many cliches, so much bad grammar, so many viewpoint errors and info dumps…ARGH!!!

Of course, that is precisely what made it so entertaining. The awkward, emo, immature teenage grasp of the universe, combined with dozens of stale cliches and atrocious grammar–brilliant! I’m glad we were all at a point where we could look back on this stuff and laugh. It can do you good to air out your closet and let go of some of the old stuff you are sure would destroy you if you ever let it saw the light of day.

My first writing attempt was a novel that has since been entirely lost. I printed up a hard copy, once a long time ago, but I’ve lost that one and really have no desire to try and dreg it up. Of course, all the digital copies haven’t survived. My second novel attempt, however, I have in both digital and hard copy. That’s the one that I dipped back into for this writing party.

I actually sent out a copy of this to my aunt in Washington DC, who is/was an editor for a magazine. She read about the first twenty or thirty pages and sent me this letter, which I will use to finish off this post. The only places I’ve used ellipses are when my aunt described problems specific to certain passages and quoted them.

October 14, 1999

Dear onelowerlight [name, obviously, has been changed 😛 ]

The manuscript your mom sent home with Evan has proven to be an interesting read in many ways. It is wonderful to see people take an interest in writing. This pastime has given me many hours of satisfaction. I find that the joy is in the journey and that the process is as important to me as the finished job. However, it is always satisfying to have a finished product that I feel good about.

What it looks like you have is a wonderful outline for a novel. Your language is colorful and descriptive. The battle scene held my interest and made me want to know what was going to happen next. My intent was to read the manuscript from beginning to end purely for the joy of reading it. The urge to edit, an urge that often gets in my way as I write a first draft, got in my way as I read. Hence I was not able to follow through. I have written on some of the pages. What follows are a few other observations.

A really good writer named John Gardner said that a piece of fiction opens up a dream to the reader. Anything that causes the reader to become aware of the author or that jolts him out of the fictive dream does not belong. It is always helpful to let a manuscript cool for several days and then begin to read it. This will help you be more objective. Sometimes the things that seem marvelous turn out to be less enchanting than one thought during the rapture of creation.

Titles are difficult. Would anyone have read Catch 22 by another name? Some people don’t think so. It has been postulated that the reason the story about The Man Who Went Up A Hill And Came Down A Mountain didn’t do better as a movie–and presumable a book–was because of the length of the title. For many authors the title is the last thing to be written.

Your first two or three pages contain a good deal of “throat clearing.” An opening needs to grab the reader so he will continue. There needs to be a problem, action and change. It should be action that is vital to the story. Someone is going on a trip. Someone is going into battle. someone is getting married. Someone is being born. Unless you want to write erotic literature it would be better not to start with conception. Work the background in later. In The Gospel of John the first few verses talk about the Word. Immediately the Word is identified with the Son of God and the story of his baptism. The problem of establishing himself as a teacher is presented. In episode IV of Star Wars the force is not explained to us at the beginning, rather we see what it can do. It isn’t until Solo talks about fools who believe in an ancient religion that we begin to have some idea th at the force is more than magic. The characters give all this information to us.

Point of view is the perspective that the story is told from. T he most difficult and therefore least used these days is the omniscient narrator. A good rule of thumb is to see the story through the eyes of the person with the problem. Many authors write in first person. One can also use second or third person. Third person is similar to first person except the pronoun I isn’t used as much. (Actually it is more complicated than that, but that will suffice for now.) Sometimes a narrator who doesn’t see into anyone’s mind tells a story. Most fiction that looks like omniscient narrator is actually being told from the point of view of one of the characters. The narrator can then see into the mind of one person and all the other action is viewed through his eyes. Sometimes a novel will contain oone person’s point of view in one chapter and that of another character in another. This seems to work. It is confusing when shifts occur without warning.

Psychic distance has to do with how close you want your reader to be to the story. Stephen King wants to inspire terror. He gets his readers as close as he can. You hear breathing, feel sweat, hearts race. Jane Austin keeps her readers at a great distance. You see the lights, you hear the conversation, it is all very proper–no sweat, no breathing, no racing hearts. Just as with the point of view, the important thing is that the narrative remains consistent. It must not switch in the middle of a sentence, paragraph, or chapter.

Write in active voice as much as possible. Your English teacher will tell you all about this. Be aware that verbs ending in “ing” do not help your story. (Running up the hill after Jill and tripping over a rock Jack stumbled.) This slows the action of the story down but when used sparingly can add emphasis. The following construction works better (Jack ran up the hill after Jill. He tripped over a rock and stumbled. “D___!” he grumbled. Jill took water from her bucket and soap from her pocket and washed his mouth out.)…

…You have many long sentences. Your writing will be tighter and stronger with shorter sentences and fewer prepositional phrases…

…There are lots of ways to deal with dialogue. You can put the dialogue first and description second…you can put the dialogue at the end…you can break it up the way you have in your manuscript or you can put description on either sie of it…Like every other element of your story, you don’t want it to call attention to itself.

I believe you changed fonts to show a change in viewpoint or in who is speaking. For me this is very distracting. There are other good ways that work. Also it is easier for me to read when it is double-spaced.

Two books that I have found most helpful are John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. It is out in paperback. John Gardner also wrote a wonderful fantasy called Grendal. It is not very long. It is told from the point of view of the monster. The other book is The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.

Thank you for sharing your manuscript with me. It takes great courage to share one’s work. I admire you for starting out early. Remember free advice is worth what you pay for and don’t let anybody discourage you. You learn to write by writinig. You have a good start.

Your’s truly,

Aunt Yvonne