January Recap

It’s been a busy, busy month. I finished a major WIP, published a new bundle, started a new job at the local bookstore, and made a bunch of changes and adjustments behind the scenes. And that’s just my writing life!

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First, I published a new Star Wanderers bundle, containing the complete series. This replaces The Jeremiah Chronicles and Tales of the Far Outworlds, the two previous series bundles that have been up for the last several years.

Eventually, I plan to release Star Wanderers: The Complete Series as an audiobook. That’s one of my big projects for the year. I want to narrate it myself, but I also want to do a damn good job of it, which means I have to learn how to properly record and produce a quality audiobook. That’s going to take time.

I will probably release Star Wanderers: The Complete Series in print too, once I’ve gotten set up for that. As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve pulled all my books from KDP Paperback and plan to go with a different print-on-demand publisher in the not too distant future. But again, that’s going to take time to do properly.

Gunslinger to Earth

Phase:1.0 Draft

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MyBookProgress by Author Media

Second, I finished Gunslinger to Earth! At this point, I’m just waiting to send it out to my editor. Another few weeks, and it will finally be up for preorder!

There’s a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes, too. I’ve sent out more than 60 short story submissions this month, sold one to The New Accelerator, and hope to sell a lot more in the next few months.

I’ve also been rethinking my email newsletter. Until now, I’ve been using it mostly just to share free and 99¢ stories, and tons of links to giveaways. But now, I think that might not be the best way to provide value.

From what I can tell, there are basically two approaches to newsletters: as a vehicle to convert casual readers into fans, or as something much more personal to keep the existing fanbase active and motivated. Obviously, there is some overlap.

With the way I’ve structured things, I lean a lot more to the first approach. However, I do think there’s a lot more that I can share to add value, even to casual readers. Here are some things I’m thinking about sharing:

More detailed updates about my writing, current WIPs, and what I’ve been up to.
Recommendations of other books that I’ve read and reviewed. To do this properly, I plan to set up a separate book site.
Extended descriptions and background information about my books, kind of like what I’ve got in the author’s notes, but with links and detailed by series.
Stories from my personal life tha readers might find interesting, such as experiences from working in a bookstore.
Better curation of the group promos that I participate in. Until now, my approach has basically been to spam InstaFreebie / Prolific Works, but I think it will be better to participate in a smaller number of group promos that more closely match the kind of books that I write.
I still plan to do free and 99¢ book deals, but not necessarily with every email. A book deal is still more of a take (“read my book!”) than a genuine give.

Those are a few of my current ideas. Do you have any of your own? If so, I would very much like to hear about it!

The other big change to my newsletter is that I’m branching out to other sites, like Story Origin, Book Cave, and Bookfunnel, to build my email list. I’ll probably also add preview editions of my books to Prolific Works and put more emphasis on those. It’s something to experiment with.

Still trying to figure out how this blog fits in to everything else. At this point, I’m just doing my best to keep it updated. I have lots of ideas for blog posts, but not a whole lot of time to write them.

There’s a ton of books that I’m reading or want to read, and at some point I really need to revamp my Goodreads profile and get all of my book reviews up there. Probably after I set up the new book site, which will mostly just be a repository of affiliate links for all of the books that I review. I can’t put them up on this site without commingling them with my own books, and I don’t want to do that.

That’s most of the big stuff, at least for now. The main focus for the next couple of months will be growing my email list and figuring out my newsletter. My girlfriend is a programmer, so this weekend we’ll fix up the newsletter template I’ve been using and hopefully make it cleaner. If you have any other ideas for that, please share!

Reconsidering my newsletter

One of my writer friends made an interesting comment the other day. We were talking about email newsletters, and he pointed out that Jordan Peterson’s 5th rule, “don’t let your children do anything that makes you dislike them,” also applies to newsletter subscribers.

Obviously, I don’t think that my newsletter subscribers are my children. But the principle is the same. We tend to care more about people that we like, and are more willing to spend time and energy on them. When we dislike people, we either try to avoid them or we end up harboring resentment in some fashion.

My goal for my author newsletter is to attract casual readers who have read, at most, only one or two of my books, and convert them into loyal fans who eagerly await my next book. Until now, one of the things I’ve advertised is that I have a free and a 99¢ book with every newsletter. I have enough books out that I’ve been able to keep that up for the last two years or so, although most of the freebies have been short stories.

But I worry that I’ve been training my newsletter subscribers to only pick up the free books, or to wait until the book goes free. That’s a problem. I don’t mind giving away free books from time to time, but I’m not going to give away the store, and if readers come to expect that then I run the risk of breaking Jordan Peterson’s 5th rule.

So I’ve decided to make a change to my email newsletter, or at least to how I advertise it. Instead of giving away a free and 99¢ book in every newsletter, I’m going to look into other ways to provide value and convert casual readers into fans. Don’t get me wrong—I still intend to share free books from time to time. Just not with every newsletter, or not a different selection with each one.

I do want to share more book recommendations, especially since one of my new year’s resolutions is to read a novel every week. What I’ll probably do is set up another blog using MyBookTable with all of the book links, so as not to mix my own books with the ones I’m recommending, and include those in a newsletter every one or two months.

In the last few months, I’ve also been sharing updates on my writing with each newsletter. That may be a better place to share that stuff than here on my blog. What do you think? Blogs are better for public discussions, since they’re indexed by search engines and usually have a comment section with each post.

Either way, I definitely need to update my newsletter templates. I cranked those out way back in 2015, and they’re not too pretty. My girlfriend is a programmer, so maybe I could persuade her to help me out with that. But first, I should probably figure out all what I want to put in them.

What do you think? Are there things you’ve seen in other author newsletters that you’d like to see in mine? Any other interesting ideas or approaches? I’m open to anything that adds value without giving away the store.

Should I submit to non-paying markets?

I’ve recently gotten back into writing and submitting short stories, and this is one of the questions on my mind.

Don’t get me wrong: I still believe in the top-down approach to short stories, where you start with the highest paying markets and work your way down. And I’m not going to write anything specifically for a non-paying market, unless it’s a charity anthology. That just doesn’t make any sense.

But what about a story that you’ve already sold somewhere, already self-published, and the non-paying market only wants non-exclusive reprint rights? I understand the pay-the-writer argument, and that’s certainly one approach, but there’s also the Jonathan Coulton, song-a-day, be prolific and fill the world with your work approach.

As far as I can tell, here are the pros and cons of publishing a short story with a non-paying market after it’s already been published:

Pros:

Improved chances of winning an award
Improved chances of appearing in a “best of” anthology
Networking opportunities with other publishing professionals
More readers will find you
More publishing credentials
Makes you part of a community

Cons:

Could damage author brand if publisher is non-reputable
Violates Kant’s categorical imperative
Costs too much in time and effort

What sayest thou?

Trying out some pop ups

I just set up a pop up with a subscribe form for my email newsletter. It should only pop up once every two weeks, and only on the first page you visit. If you think it’s too intrusive or have strong opinions on the matter, let me know.

I’ll be experimenting with a few things in the near future, including pop ups. I may also change the layout here to the new WordPress Twenty-Nineteen theme. It looks interesting. Again, if you have opinions, I’d appreciate your feedback!

So for the last month, I’ve been blogging every day except Sundays. What do you guys think? I haven’t seen much of an uptick in views or comments, but I haven’t seen much of a decline either.

Also, what do you think of the stuff I’ve been blogging about? It’s all stuff that’s been on my mind lately, but not all of it is writing or book related. Should I tone it down a bit and focus more on books, or do you guys enjoy reading about that stuff too?

One thing I definitely need to do is engage with other bloggers. There’s a lot of blogs I follow, but I almost never comment on them (probably like many of you!) That’s something I could definitely do more of, and probably should.

I dunno. What do you guys think?

Some crazy ideas for 2017

So it’s the end of another year. I’ve spent the last week or so taking stock of my writing career, figuring out what I did in 2016 that worked and what really didn’t.

Writing is a career where you have to periodically reinvent yourself. My goal from the beginning has been to make a living telling stories that I love, and until 2015, I was doing pretty well. I tried out a lot of new things in 2016, but it was still a tough year, so there’s still a lot left to do.

Here are some of the things I tried out in 2016:

Dropping perma-free for a free-pulsing strategy: This actually worked out fairly well. From a pure numbers point of view, I managed to give out more free books by free pulsing in 2016 than I did with my old perma-free books in 2015.
Unpublishing my novellas in favor of more novel-length works: This was really stupid. It made my free books less effective, and seriously undermined my earnngs. The goal was to give more prominent placement to my novel-length works, but sales didn’t increase accordingly.
Moral of the story: so long as a book is selling, don’t unpublish it.
Submitting short stories to traditional markets: Worked pretty well. I got a handful of semi-pro sales and made a little north of $120. Not a huge boost, but not insubstantial either. And most of those were reprint sales.
Proactively building my mailing list: Probably the best thing I did all year. Instead of waiting for people to organically sign up, I started using InstaFreebie to get my name out. Now, I have a list that is just shy of 2,700 subscribers. It’s not enough to push a new release up to the top of the charts, but it is enough to noticeably boost sales and reviews.
Using my mailing list for more than just new releases: I was a bit worried about this at first, but it’s worked out quite well. So long as I’ve got something of value like an author cross-promotion, a free book, or book recommendations, the response has been quite positive.
Publish more short story singles: The jury’s still out on this one. Short stories definitely arent money-makers, and the response from free-pulsing has been rather tepid, but I have been able to use them effectively as incentives to subscribe to my mailing list. I will probably keep the ones that still sell after six months and unpublish the rest, opting instead to publish them in bundles.

Which brings me to my crazy ideas for 2017:

Release a new title each month

I went through all my WIPs and short story submission logs, and it looks like this is something I can actually do. Right now, the schedule consists of five short story bundles, four short story singles, one novella and two novels. Everything except the novella and two of the short stories are already written.

This would be fantastic. They say that nothing is better for book sales than publishing a new release, so this would really put that to the test.

Release a series in Kindle Unlimited

I’ve made it very clear that I’m against exclusivity, something that the Kindle Unlimited program requires. However, not having any of your books in Kindle Unlimited is also kind of exclusive, just in the opposite direction. Probably the craziest thing I’m considering right now is putting a series in Kindle Unlimited, just to see how it does.

However, unless I can try this with a new series, I probably won’t do it. At first, I considered putting Sons of the Starfarers in KU, but then I realized that this wouldn’t be fair to my non-Amazon readers who are waiting for the last four books.

Then there’s all the reporting anomalies with KU that numerous readers are reporting. Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Combine that with the low payouts and the relatively high probability that KU readers won’t try out my non-KU books, and I’m loathe to do this.

But enough readers pester me about it enough, I may give KU a try.

Raise book prices

By far, the biggest mistake I made in 2015 was underpricing my Star Wanderers books. Now, I’m starting to wonder if all my other books are underpriced.

There are a couple of ways to figure this out. One of them is to jack up all my book prices as high as I’m willing to price them (in this case, $9.99), then gradually lower them over the course of several weeks to see where sales reach an equilibrium. My gut tells me that this is a bad idea, though, at least for now.

The other way is to run a survey, which is what I’m doing below. There are only two questions. If you could, I’d greatly appreciate it.

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Republish all single Star Wanderers novellas

This one goes back to what was probably my biggest mistake in 2016: unpublishing all the individual Star Wanderers novellas. It’s great to have them available in the omnibus editions, but the singles were still selling, and unpublishing them really didn’t accomplish anything useful. So you can expect them to make a comeback soon.

What I will probably do is price all the novellas at $2.99 and the omnibuses at $6.99. I’m also toying with the idea of free-pulsing them all over the course of the next year. But that would be really crazy.

Be a more active blogger

I’ve really neglected this blog, especially over the last few months. I’ve also been really bad about connecting with other bloggers, checking them out, leaving comments, and sending readers their way. So in 2017, I’d really like to be better about that.

That’s just about all for now. I’m not quite sure how many of these ideas I’m going to run with, but if you’ve any thoughts of your own, I’d like to hear them. Thanks!

What’s up with Asimov’s?

Way back in June, I submitted a short story to Asimov’s. Normally, it takes them four to six weeks to come back with a response. However, it’s been almost five months and I haven’t heard anything.

I’m not the only one, either. According to The Submission Grinder, their slushpile is backed up to the end of May. The average wait time for stories currently on submission is 100 days:

Clearly, something weird is going on. In the last 30 days, only seven responses are logged. Seven.

What’s going on?

I queried the editors six weeks ago, and they confirmed that my story was still under consideration. So it’s not like they’ve dropped off the face of the Earth completely. Still, that was six weeks ago, and there hasn’t been much movement since then.

Maybe there was a personal tragedy or family emergency? If so, that’s completely understandable. But I can’t find anything online to indicate that that’s the case, and my friends in the industry haven’t heard anything either.

I really hope this isn’t the new normal for Asimov’s. I stopped submitting to Analog because their average response time is more than 150 days. In an age where self-publishing is the new normal, it really doesn’t make sense to have a story sitting on an editor’s desk for that long.

This particular story takes place in the same universe as Gunslinger to the Stars, which I hope to publish in a few months. I would really like to get this story out sometime next year, either in one of the magazines or by publishing it myself.

If anyone knows anything about this, please let me know.

New blog design

So perhaps this wasn’t the best thing to do at 2:00 am this morning, but I downloaded the new Twenty Sixteen WordPress template and tried it out. As you can probably tell, I liked what I saw.

Specifically, I like this one because it’s a lot less busy, which probably translates well to mobile devices and tablets. Also, it makes the landing pages for my books look much cleaner. The sidebar is a lot wider, but the design is less distracting. It really puts the focus on the images, which is good, because that lets my book covers really shine.

This blog has evolved a lot over the years. It started in 2007 as just a space for me to gush as I wrote my first novel. From there, it turned into something of a public journal. When I graduated from college and started publishing, it gradually turned into something for my friends to something for my fans.

Nowadays, it’s as much of a book site as it is a blog. All of my books and stories have their own pages, complete with buy links, and connected by series and genre. The teasers in the backs of my books all link to these pages, as well as the subscription page for my email lists.

All of this has necessitated making some changes in the site’s design. I like this template, but I’ll probably play around with a couple of others before I settle on one for the long-term.

What do you guys think? Twenty Sixteen: yea or nay?

What do you guys want me to blog about?

I’ve been around the blogosphere (is that still a word?) long enough to know that when a blogger says “wow, it’s been a long time since my last post,” or “I’m going to start posting more often!” it’s often a sign that the blog is about to fade. Plenty of my secondary blogs have met a similar fate. But I’ve been blogging here on One Thousand and One Parsecs for the last eight years, dammit, and I’m not going anywhere.

That said, I’ve totally been neglecting this place, and that needs to change. One blog post every couple of weeks is not enough.

But I’m wondering: what kind of stuff do you guys want to read? Discussions of story tropes? Thoughts on reading and publishing? General geekiness and just-for-fun weirdness? Politics and controversy? Or general updates on my current WIPs? Also, do you guys generally like reading longer, more thoughtful posts, or shorter, more concise posts?

When I started this blog back in 2007, it was mostly just for me. That gave it a more authentic voice, I think, because I wasn’t trying to please anyone except myself. However, now that I have something of a readership, I want to write for you guys too. Ideally, I’d like to keep that authentic voice while sharing something of value, not only to myself, but to you guys as well.

Either way, I need to be more consistent about blogging. I’ve installed a plugin that will help to schedule posts, and plan to post something every Monday and Thursday at a minimum. I’ll try posting mornings, see how that works out.

Some things I’d like to blog about:

Reviewing some of the books I’ve read, especially indie sci-fi books.
More Self-Sufficient Writer posts (don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten those).
Some tvtropes stuff, kind of like the old Trope Tuesday posts.

What do you guys think?

To publish or submit?

Man, I am so sick right now. Caught a stomach flu from my neice, and it has been going through me like a chainsaw through butter.

In any case, things are going fairly well aside from that. Heart of the Nebula is now up for pre-order through November 21st, so you can expect to hear a lot more about that in the coming weeks. Captives in Obscurity (Sons of the Starfarers: Book V) is nearly ready to send off to my test readers, and should be published sometime in January or February. Besides that, I’m working on a couple of other big projects that should come out next year.

Right now, though, I have something of a dilemma. Do you guys remember Starship Lachoneus? It’s that completely unmarketable story idea I had a while back: the one where Jesus Christ organizes the construction of a generation ship to take humanity to the stars, because after His millenial reign, the Earth will be rendered uninhabitable. Well, I wrote the prologue, and it actually stands well enough on its own to be a short story. The dilemma is whether I should publish it now, or submit it to a short story market.

From what I can tell, the market for Mormon sci-fi short fiction is somewhere between small to non-existent. Irreantum closed a few years ago, Sunstone is limited to an annual contest, and Dialogue only pays in contributor copies. The Mormon Lit Blitz would be awesome, except that the story is more than 2k words long. Another option would be an anthology like Monsters and Mormons, but I’m not aware of any new ones.

I could try to submit it to the mainstream sci-fi markets, but I don’t think it would be a good fit for any of them. It’s written for a Mormon audience, with cultural and religious references that only people familiar with Mormonism would get. That said, the religious elements aren’t all that different from any other sci-fi world-building element, and the story isn’t overtly preachy or moral, so I suppose you don’t have to be a believing Mormon to enjoy it.

What do you guys think? Should I submit it elsewhere first, or publish it myself?