Category: Kindle

A funny thing happened…

A funny thread happened over on Kindleboards this week.

A very legitimate fellow signed up and posted a thread about how hard literary agents are looking through the self-pubbed ranks of indie authors for their next big signing. He encouraged people who’d sold healthy numbers of their books to contact him, and he’d put them in touch if they were interested in “a traditional publishing deal.”

Even a year ago, this might have generated more excitement, but the “Oh, okay” response was the best he was able to generate this week. And hey, it’s not a scam; the guy checked out. He is who he says he is and a couple writers have been hooked up.

But among a wide and very diverse group of writers, many were not that excited by this “huge opportunity.” I think this is reflective of the way in which eBook have changed market dynamics today. Even a year or two ago, such an announcement would have afforded the poster the royal treatment. Now he’s regarded like an orderly wearing Marcus scrub tops; a person of interest, but not intense interest.

Funny how a little thing like eReaders can change everything, isn’t it?

REVIEW: Coexist by Julia Crane

Coexist, the first novel in a planned series, and an outright first novel ever by Julia Crane, is a paranormal romance with an Irish flair. It’s a tale of elves and love and destiny, the struggle between light and dark, and the consequences of war. And yes, part of the novel – a very important part, by the way – does take place in Ireland, though the main setting is the US.

The main characters Coexist is concerned with are Keegan, a sixteen-year-old elf, and her intended mate, Rourk, who’s a bit older than her. Emphasizing romance, Julia Crane’s elves are more human-like than one might expect, appearing normal enough to blend in with human society. Sure, they are shorter than other humans, but they don’t have a green skin-tone or twelve-inch-tall pointed ears or anything like that.

Crane’s conceit is that elves are unusually attractive, which makes great fodder for a romance novel, of course. And also, Crane’s elves share a trait in common with some old-world cultures: their mates are pre-selected for them, almost from birth, and are guaranteed to invoke in each other the proper amount of love and romantic chemistry.

But they aren’t allowed to meet until they are eighteen.

Different elves handle this sense of destiny in slightly different ways. Keegan has decided to use her youth to date a few human boys, though never seriously, just for fun and as a way to kill time waiting to meet her intended mate.

Rourk, on the other hand, has done no such dating, preferring to focus himself entirely on waiting for his intended mate. Given that he is a warrior, he uses a fair amount of his “spare energy” in combat training.

An interesting supporting character is Thaddeus, Keegan’s young brother, who despite being very, very young, is the most gifted elven seer of the current elven generation. And there’s a need for him because… a great battle is coming between the light elves and the dark elves.

And it’s coming sooner than anyone can imagine.

Tossing complications into the mix are a couple interesting twists: first, for reasons that are murky, Thaddeus has told Keegan the name of her intended. This complicates the natural flow of elven mating because whenever an elf thinks of the name of his or her intended, the other notices… to the point that they can track them down if it seems they are in danger. And like any teenage elven girl with the opportunity, she turns over the name of her intended, Rourk, in her mind quite often, a disconcerting situation for him.

The other complication is that Thaddeus has had a vision of the coming war, and it’s set to happen on Keegan’s birthday … and to end with her death.

Interested yet?

I know I was.

Rising above the average level of most entries in the paranormal romance series genre, Crane’s novel stands out because, although part of a series, the tale she weaves has a clear and satisfying sense of a complete tale; it has a beginning, an intriguing middle, and a clear sense of resolution to the current circumstances.

While the novel leaves room for new adventures to take place, there’s a clear sense that something big happened, there was a cost to it, and the status quo has been affected, by the end of the novel.

Too many novels, especially first novels in general, and particularly first novels in a series, lack that sense of a complete story being told; they spend time setting things up, then end the novel at a certain word length leaving readers hanging… and sometimes frustrated.

But that is not the case with Coexist; Crane’s tale is well crafted and delivers a solid standalone story even though it exists as the initial entry in a promised series.

Crane’s skill at plotting and character development are admirable, and honestly not as common as one might wish among first novelists. Crane has those things down … in spades.

Yet there are flaws to Coexist as well. The most notable is the book’s uneven editing. While none of the mistakes are big deals, there are enough of them that it can become distracting. The book’s credited editor, Cheryl Bradshaw, needed to spend a bit more time nabbing typos, as well as looking for missed words, wrong words, and punctuation use; the simple, copy-editing stuff.

Aside from the state of the proofing job, however, the book only had one other, rather minor, weakness. While the book bubbles along for the first three-quarters of the way, toward then end, and especially when the climactic war sequence between the light and dark elves take place, Crane seems to rush the pace of the novel’s most important scenes.

Clocking in at approximately 41,500 words, Coexist veers closer to “novella/short novel” length than to the length of a standard novel. Had the author slowed the pace down and handled the climactic scenes by letting them play out more dramatically and less in summary, the book could easily have swelled to 50,000 words or more and been even more satisfying than it already is.

While a deeply satisfying read with engaging characters and an excellent plot, all of which draw me toward looking forward to the second installment, those are my only areas of hesitation on Coexist. The proofing element is easily fixable; the brevity and summary nature of the climactic scenes, well… those aren’t bad, they’re just not living up to potential because they’re a bit rushed.

Overall, none of this puts me off Crane or the Keegan Chronicles series, which I’ll be looking foreword to more installments of. There’s more strong points than weak points, and considering it’s a first novel, represents a decent, if not quite spectacular, debut.

Considering her strong sense of story and plotting ability, I’ll be back for Book 2 when it’s released.

Moving into short novels for a while

Now that MOST LIKELY is out, I have one book at $2.99, but no high-demand books at the $0.99 price point, so rather than going back to EMBER immediately, I’m going to side-track a bit and work on a couple short novels, between 20,000 and 30,000 words, that I can feel good about pricing at $0.99.

One of them will be an EMBER prequel, so that when EMBER comes out at $2.99, there will be a built-in audience for the novel. The other short novel will be a straight-on suspense novel for older readers, and has a working title of IDEA WAREHOUSE.

From a marketing standpoint, this makes barska sense. Many readers like to test a new writer out through a lower price point; once they know a writer is good, $2.99 doesn’t bother them anymore. Plus, in the same time it would take to finish EMBER, I can finish both of these short novels and have three books out under my name, rather than only two.

Since $0.99 novels are in high demand, I see no reason not to provide prospective readers with at least a couple of works at that price. Plus, these are stories that just fit that size, that length. So why not?

REVIEW: Jenny Pox by J.L. Bryan

JENNY POX takes on the challenge of making a heroine out of a young girl gifted with supernatural powers of a solely destructive nature. Fitting nicely into the paranormal romance/paranormal suspense genre, the only drawback is a potential parental concern.

Although focused on high-school-age main characters, the book will not fit the tastes of all parents of children 17 and under. The sexual content of the novel, while not the main focus, gets explicit enough that parents will need to exercise personal judgement on whether their children are old enough to read the book. Some parents may not mind it; others might want their younger children to wait for a while. The novel also contains some rough language.

Parental concerns aside, the story told is quite compelling. Byran shows off skill at character building and development, and his work on allowing the plot to flow from the characters is notable.

The edition I read, however, did display some formatting problems in the Kindle edition, though more recent purchasers may find these problems have been dealt with; but since Amazon doesn’t permit version-updating, those with the older edition, like me, will be stuck with the formatting glitches.

The good, however, definitely outweighs the bad; the scale of the story ramps up in gradual, believable steps so that by the time the action breaks out and grows to dramatic proportions, the reader has bought into the fates of the characters and has achieved buy-in to the premise.

About the only time when the storyline itself goes off the rails is when, for one brief passage late in the book, an unforeshadowed, unexpected spiritual element (reincarnation concepts) is introduced into the narrative out of left field. It doesn’t damage the book as a whole, but might catch some readers off guard.

The good news is that a sequel has already been released; TOMMY NIGHTMARE has been out for a few weeks now and the action basically picks up where JENNY POX left off.

Special kudos should be awarded to Bryan, however, for telling a story in the YA paranormal romance-suspense genre that has a clear beginning, middle and an end, despite being part of a series. More authors in this genre would do well to crib that lesson from Bryan’s bag of tricks. Well done!

Nearing mid-point

As I’m working away on EMBER, I’m now approaching the mid-point of my novel. Characters are established and in place. Threats are out there, establishing their “threatiness.” Interesting stuff has been going down, but now, soon, the action is going to ramp up in a big way.

This is where a novel can either rise or fall. If it rises, the story will build suspense as the action escalates and none of the characters will really violate who they’ve been established to be. Their believability will be maintained, even as they choose actions beyond the norm.

Alternatively, if the characters don’t drive the story developments, this is where everything could unravel, unwind and unsettle readers enough to decide that the journey’s just not worth the ride.

It’s a delicate time, so I’m trying to proceed with a mixture of confidence and caution. If I get the mix right, things will go well for EMBER and the book will indeed spark interest in sequels. If not, well… let’s not go there, save to say I may need to find a safe fat burner for all the excesses in my manuscript.

But hopefully my plot matches the characters well enough that that won’t be necessary. It’s an exciting time.

EMBER progressing well

As you might know if you’ve visited my author blog, my novel EMBER is coming along quite well. Last week I blew my weekly forward progress goal away, and I’ve already just about done the same this week. EMBER is over 27K words at this point, and 30K could be a realistic goal by Sunday.

I’m throwing everything I can into the effort to get EMBER done, including a couple kitchen pedestal sinks. Because it’s time to get something polished, finished and available for public consumption. At age 44, it’s just time.

Legible covers

One of the key ingredients to success in eBooks is to take a whole new approach to eBook cover design. One must focus beyond what looks good on hardcover or paperback. One must consider and reconsider cover design for the digital format.

Book covers for eBooks can be made in color, but most eReaders display only black and white, although that is slowly changing. Even those that display color, however, are still susceptible to a market dynamic that has their covers displayed in a 200-pixel tall thumbnail on eReaders and on eBookstore Web sites like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Therefore, it is more important than ever for eBooks to have covers that look legible in thumbnail – and in black-and-white.

If someone is browsing Amazon.com via their Kindle instead of a desktop or laptop, and looking through books to potentially purchase, an illegible cover can cost an author potential sales.

Now, I’ve been preaching this in cover feedback topics on the Kindleboard Writer’s Cafe for some time now. I’ve even gone so far as to mock up covers for some writers, to show them how big, bold fonts “look better small” than a more subtle, skinny font does.

Some book titles and authors names simply disappear in a muddled mess when shrunk down to thumbnail size. This is a point a blog called The Book Designer made recently, too. But instead of doing it in Kindleboards discussions, he posted examples of good and bad eBook cover design on his blog.

It drove the point home. I’ll admit, I got a little frustrated over all the fuss made over his article, though, because it was identical to advice I’d given Kindleboards authors for months, without the “public” humiliation aspect of it. I’ve helped some folks veer in the right direction, but others didn’t listen as closely.

In the end, though, whether authors hear it from me, or from The Book Designer, or from Joe Konrath or whoever, doesn’t really matter. Getting the point across is what matters; covers in the eBook era must be designed for eBook market dynamics… and that means looking as good and legible in thumbnail as it looks in full 600×800-pixel glory.

So remember these basics, folks: Make sure the book title and your name as author are legible at 200 pixels high. That’s thumbnail size. If it’s not, you’re losing potential sales, no matter how pretty the rest of your book cover design may be. And them you might as well be tending to a fig tree in your back yard.

A cold has a way of sapping NaNoWriMo momentum

I’ve been struggling with a nasty cold since Thursday and it’s really sapped my energy and drained all the momentum from me in my enthusiasm for completing my NaNoWriMo novel on time. EMBER is making good progress, but it’s starting to look doubtful that I’ll complete it in November. Not even 50,000 words of it.

I suppose that’s to be expected. This was my first NaNoWriMo, and I guess it’s more of a challenge than I took it to be. I’m not counting myself out just yet, mind you, and I’m completely grateful for the progress the event has helped inspire in me. But it won’t be the end of the world if I don’t finish on time, or the end of EMBER. It just might take longer than a month to complete the first draft.

Frankly, I do most of my writing at night and for the first couple weeks, I hit a decent pace. But as this cold sneaked up on me, I started getting tired in the evening; too tired to write. And the more I pushed myself to write anyway, the more the cold took hold, because my body needed rest and wasn’t receiving it.

So if I don’t quite make it to 50,000 words by November 30, I’m OK with that… as long as I keep on pushing and make it there and beyond, to the natural end of the EMBER novel, at a decent pace that doesn’t endanger my health.

I imagine I’ll sign up for NaNoWriMo next year once again; once you’ve tried it, it’s a good discipline to maintain. And perhaps because I tried it this year, even if I don’t win, I’ll probably have the first novel in the EMBER series that I’m planning out on Kindle by the time I sign up for NaNoWriMo 2011. And that’s a better deal than even the best Cyber Monday special you can find!

Price considerations

There’s a lot of talk over price at Kindleboards, as it relates to eBooks.

Kindle authors who write fiction instead of about, say, the best acne treatments, have a Catch-22. To please bargain-minded readers, there’s pressure to price our books low… $2.99 or even as low as $0.99. That’s because people say at $2.99, we get as much as the best royalty payments as are available in traditional publishing contracts.

That’s true, as far as it goes. But to fails to take in the fact that, when we self-publish, we bear expenses we don’t normally have to bear. A manuscript needs a professional copy-edit? We have to pay for it. Promotional campaigns? Again, it’s our expense.

To break even at a level of sales that’s not unrealistic, one must simply have the ability to charge a bit more. Not much more, mind you, and still well below the Big Six publishers in New York. Maybe $3.99 or $4.99 at most.

It’s still a bargain price; but you’d be surprised how loud some folks can be who oppose anything more than “free.”

Market your story, not your price

I’ve been a record over at Kindleboards.com later, in the Writer’s Cafe, and there’s been a lot of talk there lately about how to price eBooks appropriately “as part of a successful marketing plan,” especially as it relates to new and unknown authors.

I’m going to suggest that making price the major concern of a marketing plan, even for new, unknown authors, is the wrong approach. You can’t treat books like wholesale appliances and market them based on price. Here’s why:

In any successful marketing plan for a novel, price should be mostly an afterthought. What you want to sell someone on is the STORY. That’s how you market an unknown author… you sell the STORY they are telling… later on, when that story has won people over, then you start selling the AUTHOR…

For example… no one knew Stephen King when CARRIE was first published. What the book was sold on was the raw power of his story… a girl has the WORST PROM NIGHT EVER… and has the power to strike back!

Once CARRIE was a hit, ‘SALEM’S LOT was sold as… “From the author of CARRIE comes a new kind of vampire tale…” The strategy is to start building the author’s brand by association with a great story people already loved… “Remember that novel CARRIE that you liked so much? The same schmuck is back with an all-new novel, so you’ll probably like ‘SALEM’S LOT, too!”

By the time THE SHINING hit, King was a brand name and his name started appearing at the top of the books, rather than the title from then on, because they’d built his brand… not on the price charged, but on the power of his stories… Mission accomplished.

Price never played into it. Doubleday’s job at that time was to sell the power of King’s first story… “a put-upon girl has the worst prom night ever and has the power to strike back and get revenge” … not, “New author Stephen King has a tale about a girl with telekenisis available for only $8.99 in hardcover!” (1974 prices, remember, with CARRIE…)

Market the story, not the price, and most readers will pay any REASONABLE price to get that story.

MobiPocket works great

I decided to test out MobiPocket this weekend so that I can gain experience and confidence with it as a tool when it comes time to ePublish my first book; I used it to transform my MS Word document, a Torah commentary for the dual parashah of Nitsavim and VaYelech, into a Kindle-compatible format.

Why would I do that? To see if Kindle 3 would work as a display device for me as I delivered my Torah commentary; and the good news is, MobiPocket worked great converting all my formatting, and the K3 was quite easy to read and do page turns on … far better, in fact, than dragging twelve printed pages of text up front with me.

You know how, when you hear the words, “life insurance no medical exam” together you think, “Too good to be true!”? Well, that’s how I’m feeling about my Kindle 3 right now.

Finally rolling on my novel and more

I’m finally making progress on my new novel; not Thirty Minutes or Less, my long-suffering, re-started many times because of hard drive crashes supernatural mystery, but my newer one. It’s starting to flow, which is good.

Plus I have all my material pulled together for my theological books on the Messianic movement. It was a huge task just to gather together everything I’ve written over the past couple years. Even so, I’ll have a few chapters that need to be written from scratch even so. And of course, the commentaries and sermons are just a starting point; I want what I deliver in eBook form to be deeper and more complete than the messages upon which they were based.

Also, it’s been occurring to me that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to start off with a book explaining the Messianic movement to begin with; so many misconceptions are out there, it’d be nice to have a handy reference book that answers all the basics.

Of course, all this writing is keeping me too busy to explore motorhomes and motorhome insurance, which my wife has often mentioned as a “maybe someday” thought. But I guess it’d be better to wait on that until we can afford it, anyway… which won’t be for a while! That’d be a LOT of eBook sales!