newsletter – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Gearing up for another family road trip

We’ve spent the last couple of days getting ready for another cross-country road trip as a family, this time to Arkansas. My side of the family is going down there, mostly because my youngest sister works at a national park, so it’s more convenient for us to come to her (and it should be fun as well).

The plan is to drive to Omaha, spend a couple of nights with my brother-in-law and his wife, then drive down to Arkansas and spend the week with family. Once we’re done, we’ll just drive straight back to Utah, hopefully in two days, but more likely in three. After all, we’ve got a five year-old and a two year-old with us.

This is the first big road trip we have this summer. The second one is at the end of July, and we’ll be going up to northern Alberta for a reunion with my wife’s side of the family. Her grandmother passed away earlier this year, and this was the soonest everyone could get together (getting passports for the kids was a little tricky).

I’ve already schedule blog posts through the next week and a half, so those should be coming up each day. I’ve also been writing more Fantasy from A to Z posts, and I hope to write the rest of them while I’m out there, though I’m not stressing out too much about that. If they get done, great, if not, I’ll just finish them when I get back.

The big reason why I’m blogging daily now is because of some major problems I’ve been having with my email list. I used to send out a newsletter approximately every week, but over the last couple of years, my open and click-thru rates have been creeping ever lower, until just last month they suddenly dropped by more than 50%. Turns out there’s a whole lot of backend stuff that changed in the last year, most of which I barely understand.

But ChatGPT has been a huge help in figuring out what’s wrong, and how I need to register DMARC and SPF and all the other stuff that I still don’t understand. My wife has also been a huge help in sorting through it all. I think it’s all set up properly, but I haven’t sent out a newsletter yet, and probably won’t until I get back from Arkansas. I also need to update my newsletter template. ChatGPT should be really good for that.

So the email newsletter is turning into a monthly thing, and the blog is turning into a daily thing, at least for the forseeable future. All of that might get thrown out the window when the new baby comes along, at least temporarily.

In the meantime, I’m working on Fantasy from A to Z and the rough AI draft of Lord of the Falconstar, both of which are coming along quite well. I’m going to experiment with having one human WIP and one AI WIP active at the same time, because ChatGPT suggested that this would be the best way to maximize by writing time and productivity.

I fed ChatGPT my accountability spreadsheet and the daily project journals I’ve been keeping for the past year, and it came back with some fascinating insights into my writing process. It’s amazing how you can feed it a bunch of raw, barely-formatted data, and get a genuinely insightful analysis.

Is this taking away jobs from a data analysis / writing coach? Not really, at least in my case, because I doubt I would have hired one. But the results sure are useful. I’m also experimenting with feeding my entire book into ChatGPT and asking it to write a book description or generate a cover. It’s amazing how it can “read” a whole novel in a fraction of a second, and spit back answers that show (or at least simulate) a genuine understanding of the material.

But one thing ChatGPT can’t do is convert a short story into a screenplay—at least, not without significant human input. I tried uploading “What Hard Times Hath Wrought” and told it to turn it into a screenplay, and the results were hilariously bad. Maybe Sudowrite has a plugin, though…

Making some changes

I’m thinking very seriously about changing my email newsletter to a monthly digest, as opposed to the (mostly) weekly thing that it is right now. Last month, I saw a severed drop in my open rate, and I’m not sure why, but I suspect it’s a combination of sending newsletters too frequently, getting too many of them flagged or left unopened (though my spam rates have always been quite low), and not being very careful about what I put in the subject lines, as apparently the ISPs will flag you if you use words like “free” or “sale.” So that’s going to be a joy to figure out.

So that’s why I’m planning to turn my newsletter into a monthly thing, as opposed to a weekly thing. To make up for that, I plan to turn this blog into more of a daily thing, engaging with it more and being more open about my writing and everything else. I’d also like to bring on some guest bloggers from time to time, and I have some interesting ideas for that. Here are just a few of the things I’d like to post more of:

Guest posts & interviews
Book reviews
“Best of” genre tropes
Writing updates
Family/life updates
WIP excerpts
Interesting long-form podcasts
“How I Would Vote Now,” maybe for more than just the Hugos (or Hugo: Best Novel)
SF&F news reactions
Books/games/movies that inspired some of my books

etc etc, as well as the occasional just for fun post.

It’s funny, because I started this blog back in 2007, just as the iphone and social media were really starting to take off. Those technologies led to the “death” of the blogosphere, but I kept on blogging through the social media era, just because I enjoy blogging. Now, it turns out that AI grabs most of its data from blogs, and the best way to improve your AI optimization is to have a prominent blog and post often to it.

So that’s another big reason why I plan to post a lot more. But I don’t plan to churn out any AI slop, though I may use AI for help brainstorming blog topics or breaking down my thoughts for a good blog post. I actually do enjoy keeping this blog, even if only a handful of people read it, so I’m not going to go too crazy with the AI optimization. If anything, that’s more of a side benefit.

What sort of stuff would you like to see me post more of?

Mid-May update

Holy cow, it’s been forever since I’ve written a proper update. For a while there, it seemed to be nothing but more of the same. Then I got caught up with all the other things that come along with writing and publishing, and the blog sort of fell by the wayside.

Don’t worry, I’m still writing. In fact, I’m only a couple of scenes away from finishing Victors in Liberty, the last book in the Sons of the Starfarers series. A couple of days ago, I wrote a scene that I’ve been waiting to write for the last four years. Good times.

I was hoping to have this book up for preorder right now, but I think it will be better for the delay. Still aiming for a release date in July. My editor says he’s got an open slot, so I should be sending it out to him before the end of the week.

The more pressing stuff has all been on the marketing end. The GDPR has half the indie writing community in a tailspin, and I had to do a bit of research and make a few changes, like uploading my email list software. The GDPR, in case you haven’t heard, is the EU’s latest attempt to shoot sparrows with howitzers. It’s a series of data regulations aimed at big corporations like Facebook and Google, but it’s really the small businesses who are feeling the crunch. Let’s just say that my first-generation Czech immigrant ancestors made the right choice when they told the rest of Europe “y’all can go to hell—we’re going to Texas!”

Fortunately, everything is more or less in order as far as GDPR goes, or at least clost enough. The truth is, nobody knows. It’s stuff like this that made me want to write about the Outworld frontier in the first place, where there are no laws or government bureaucrats to control you. But I digress.

On a much lighter note, I’ve taken advantage of this opportunity to reorganize my email list. Specifically, I’ve split it into three lists of approximately 2,000 subscribers each, which I hope to eventually grow into five. The idea is to spread out my email campaigns over the course of four or five days, so that instead of getting a huge sales spike (which the Amazon algorithms tend to push back against), sales will be a bit more even, hopefully leading to better alsobots and other favorable treatment from the algorithms.

Being the eclectic nerd that I am, I have given these lists the following names:

LEGIO I PIA FIDELIS
LEGIO II VICTRIX
LEGIO III FELIX
LEGIO IV FIRMA
LEGIO V FULMINATA

And now I’m going through all my titles, updating the backmatter to add a signup page for my list along with the teaser chapters and other links.

So that’s what I’ve been up to, mostly. I’m also reading a lot more, and will have some book reviews real soon. Also, there’s the secret project, which I anticipate will take the next several months, possibly even years, to come to fruition.

Next WIP: Gunslinger to the Galaxy!

New print proof and an update on Star Wanderers

So the proof for Desert Stars came in the mail today, and it looks great!

No matter how much I do this, it never gets old. 🙂

It’s available now from CreateSpace, if you want to pick up a copy. If you’d rather buy it on Amazon, it should go live there in a few days. And if you want to buy an autographed copy of this one or Genesis Earth, let me know ASAP: I can order author copies and ship them wherever you want me to, but I’m leaving again for Georgia at the end of August, so I can only do that for the next two or three weeks.

As for Star Wanderers: Part II, I finished the major revisions just yesterday, and plan to go through it again this next week before publishing, mostly to fix typos and get it ready for publication. There weren’t too many story issues, but my first readers helped me to see a couple of areas where things were unclear (especially Laura–thanks for the awesome feedback!).

After going through this latest draft, I’ve got to say I am way excited to finish Part III and Part IV. It’s going to take a little more work, and it’ll definitely need some feedback before publishing, but I think I can have the first round of revisions done before the end of August. A couple of scenes are missing, and there are some key elments I need to change, but I definitely know where this story is going and I’m excited to tell it!

That’s about it for now. I’ve gotten some initial feedback from my first readers on Stars of Blood and Glory, and so far it’s been surprisingly positive. I may post the prologue here for you guys, or release it as an extra through the newsletter. The unpublished prologue for Bringing Stella Home would also make good newsletter content too, come to think of it…

Electronic publishing is like playing a really awesome video game. Once things get going and you really start getting into it, you just don’t want to stop!

New upload and thoughts on ebooks

Yesterday, I reformatted Genesis Earth and uploaded the new version to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. Basically, I took everything I’ve learned about ebook formatting in the last few months and brought it up to date.

Here’s the complete list of changes:

Revised author’s note to include Facebook and Goodreads links, mention of newsletter, etc.
Added teasers for BSH and Desert Stars.
Credited my editor on copyright page.
Put table of contents on one screen.
Added nav points using KindleGen.

If you’ve got the old version, the book itself is pretty much the same; basically, I just uploaded a cleaner version, with links to my other works. Genesis Earth continues to sell better than Bringing Stella Home and Sholpan, so I figured it would be good to update it.

As for how sales of my ebooks have been going, to be honest they’ve dropped off quite a bit. At Amazon, my free short stories have more or less equalized at 20-80 downloads per week, and they’re starting to get some traction on the new Amazon FR store, but the paid stuff has slowed down quite a lot.

What this tells me is that I haven’t yet built up enough of a reader base to be self sustaining. It’s not enough just to upload your work to Amazon and the other ebook retailers (though that’s certainly important); you’ve got to find ways to reach new readers and get your name out there.

I’m not too worried; I figure the most important thing right now is to build my list. After all, if you want to get discovered, the most important thing is to have something that people can discover.

Beyond that, though, I’m going to try a variety of strategies, including submitting work to more traditional markets (especially short stories). The biggest breakthrough would probably come from Writers of the Future, so I plan to put a lot more effort into that contest.

I’ll also focus a lot on the email newsletter, since that’s the best direct connection I have with my readers. For those of you who have already signed up, expect to see a lot more free and exclusive content. And for those of you who haven’t–what are you waiting for?? Check out the sidebar and sign up!

In the meantime, I’m going to keep writing novels and indie publishing them. It’s definitely worth it, even if sales are initially slow. Like Howard Tayler says, the first step to making grizzly bear soup is killing the grizzly bear–everything after that is just making soup.