Not wanting to be left behind, Amazon has now made Replica free for the Kindle.
It is my considered opinion that people like free stuff. Replica is currently #236 among all free ebooks on Amazon. It is #4 among Technothrillers, which is how my publisher classifies the novel, although I’d tend to call it a science fiction thriller. Anyway, grab your copy now before they run out, and please write a customer review when you’ve read the thing.
For a limited time, we’re making my novel Replica available for the low low price of free. It’s currently free on Barnes & Noble, and Amazon will presumably follow suit when it gets wind of what’s afoot.
Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about Replica:
“While maintaining a highly readable pulp-fiction style, Bowker takes the narrative through a gripping array of turnabouts, doublecrosses and twists. Readers will be guessing the story’s outcome until the very end.”
As usual, I would be forever grateful if you left a customer review after downloading and reading the book. Reviews matter.
I am a sucker for jigsaw puzzles. My wonderful family got me a couple for Father’s Day, and they have been sucking up my time ever since. I really should be helping humanity by liking Facebook pages and retweeting hashtags. I really should be finishing my novel. But no, I have to be working on this.
Here are the ways that working on a jigsaw puzzle is better than writing fiction:
Here are the ways that writing fiction is better than working on a jigsaw puzzle:
I’d say it’s about a tie.
. . . I woke up on Thursday with An Idea. But that was OK — the Idea was limited to one section of the novel, and it wouldn’t require much rejiggering.
Then today I squinted at the novel from another angle, and that resulted in Another Idea. This one would involve changing the motivation of a major character, with consequences through the story.
I think I need to follow up on both of these ideas.
But what will happen when I actually read through my draft?
John Steinbeck famously wrote The Grapes of Wrath in a few months. Where did I go wrong?
The BookBub promotion for Dover Beach expired yesterday, I think. I just have the Amazon numbers at this point. I’ve sold about 600 copies there, plus a bunch of copies of its very fine sequel, The Distance Beacons. That doesn’t quite give me a profit, but the returns from Barnes & Noble and lesser markets probably will. At Barnes & Noble, Dover Beach peaked in the 100’s in sales rank and has now dropped back to about #1100; on Kobo, it’s still in the top 100 for Science Fiction Adventure and at #188 overall for Science Fiction.
Regardless of whether I end up in the black for the investment, I’m going to consider this a success. Anyway, because this is my blog, I’m going to mention that Dover Beach is still available for $0.99, and while I’m at it, I’ll subject you to a customer review. This one is from B&N and is titled “Excellent story!”:
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. The writing style was easy to relate to and the characters had a realness to them that was very refreshing. I love books written about how a society survives after war and the author did a great job explaining the mood of the aftermath. I also appreciate that he didn’t have people being held as prisoners by some thrown together street gangs, that seems to be a plot that comes up way too frequently. It makes more sense that most people would go out on their own or team up with one or two other people. I will be buying more of his books.
As I hoped, the second draft of my novel went a lot faster than the first. By the time I had finished the first draft, I had pages of notes about what I needed to change, and I came up with lots of new ideas before beginning the second draft. New characters showed up! Old characters disappeared! Motivations got rejiggered! New plot twists got twisted!
There’s more to be done, but at least now the thing feels like a completed novel. It exists; before it was more or less a jumble in my mind.
Here’s the kind of thing I’m going to have to do now: the last words of the novel used to be “Gwen repeated.” But this morning I decided they should be: “Gwen said again.” But as I say the words over in my mind, I’m not entirely happy with the internal rhyme. Will anyone care? No. But I think I better change them back. Or maybe not.
A note on the authoring process: somewhere on this blog I’ve talked about rewriting on a computer. Computers make it easy to use your original draft as the basis for the rewrite, but that lessens the incentive to re-imagine your content. This time around I started with a blank document, but I copied the first draft into it chapter by chapter. Often I would use a sentence from the original; occasionally an entire paragraph. But mostly the text was there to remind me of what was going on, and most of it got deleted as I completed its replacement. Overall, I managed to reduce the books length by about seven percent, which was one of my goals. The first draft didn’t feel quite streamlined enough for a private eye novel.
Now on to the tweaking!
My novel Dover Beach is now featured on the BookBub website, and it’s in the email BookBub sent out to 400,000 science fiction readers. The book is on sale for the ridiculously low price of $0.99. Here’s where I discuss the economics of a BookBub promotion. (If you want to buy the book, click the link on the BookBub page — they’ll get some revenue, and if they get enough click-through sales, this may help convince them to feature another one of my books.)
My publisher came up with this blurb for the book–there is presumably a word limit:
A Philip K. Dick Award finalist set in a harrowing world devastated by war: Believing himself a clone, Dr. Charles Winfield enlists the help of Wally Sands to expose a top-secret government project. But in his pursuit of answers, Wally uncovers truths about himself — and crosses paths with a killer…
This manages to get two or three things wrong, but whatever; I probably couldn’t have done any better. Here’s a customer review, titled “A Different but Wonderful Private Eye Story”, that does a better job of capturing what the book is about:
Walter is a quirky private eye like none you’ve ever experienced! The poor fellow stumbles into one disaster after another, making you laugh, cringe, and pity the lovable, determined character. By the way, Walter is a survivor of the downfall of America so he’s familiar with overcoming challenges. As the story unfolds, tidbits are revealed toward understanding what happened. To assist Walter is an eclectic and interesting collection of friends who assist him along the way. They will become like friends to you also. This book has twists and turns, great wit and humor, and very colorful characters. I loved book so much that I ordered the next novel in the series (A Distance Beacon) right away. Great job!
This reviewer gets everything right, except the name of the sequel. But it’s close!
By the way, there has never been a better time to get one of my books. Senator is also available for $0.99, and The Portal continues to be free. Here’s a recent five-star review of The Portal, titled “A Lot of Heart”:
I thought at first this was going to be another YA gimmicky novel with kids complaining about their lives and using the device of dimension travel just to come up with random quirky things, but this book is much more than that. You really get to know and care about the characters, and things move along quite well and not predictably. The really surprising part is the life lessons learned by the characters – they really leave you with something more than just a fun little read. Glad I read it!
We’re going to run a promo for Dover Beach on BookBub June 28th. BookBub appears to be the 800-pound gorilla of online ebook advertising. And it has raised a bunch of venture capital to get even bigger.
The startup is nearing 3 million members, drives more than 1 million e-book sales every month and generates revenue in the “seven figures” from commissions on sales and fees paid by publishers and authors to be included in the newsletter. What makes all that even more impressive is BookBub has been bootstrapped — until now.
BookBub announced Thursday that it has raised a $3.8 million Series A round of funding from NextView Ventures, Founder Collective and others. Much of the funding is intended to help the startup ramp up its staff of 20, build out the web experience and develop for mobile and eventually expand internationally. But part of the funding is also intended to help BookBub expand from ebook deals to ebook discovery.
The economics of this for an author or publisher are pretty interesting, and a bit scary. Bookbub charges based on genre and sale price. Dover Beach will be priced at $0.99 and slotted as science fiction. The cost for the placement is $240, which is about an order of magnitude more than other ebook discovery sites such as eReader News Today (where will also be running a Dover Beach promotion at about the same time). The 35% ebook royalty on $0.99 books means that we’ll have to sell around a thousand copies to break even. (Of course, the calculations are a bit different for a series book like Dover Beach, since the hope is that some percentage of Dover Beach readers will go on to read its very fine sequel, The Distance Beacons.)
BookBub claims their SF mailing list contains 400,000 names, so if just half a percent of those folks buy the book, I’ll be doing fine. My publisher says some promos they’ve done with BookBub haven paid off, although my friends Jeff Carver and Craig Shaw Gardner did really well with their BookBub promotions. So we’ll see.
My publisher is actually a bit worried that BookBub will become so successful that they’ll crowd out the competition a la Amazon. What’s so special about it? I’m not entirely sure. It has a very clean interface compared to eReader News Today — no ads for JetBlue or Audible Com. That counts for something. They seem to have a smattering of mainstream books (today they’re offering Katherine Hepburn’s autobiography), but mainly they offer high-end indie books of the sort you see at other ebook sites, and the deals are pretty much the same. So I’m a bit baffled.
I let you know how we do.
This article makes a couple of interesting points.
First, mainstream publishers are screwing authors on e-book royalties:
“Look at Harper’s own numbers,” DeFiore wrote. “$27.99 hardcover generates $5.67 profit to publisher and $4.20 royalty to author. $14.99 agency priced e-book generates $7.87 profit to publisher and $2.62 royalty to author.”
Looks fishy, doesn’t it? And the same basic math holds throughout the industry, including at Hachette.
The 15% royalty on hardcovers has always been justified by the costs of manufacturing, storing, and shipping the physical object. Those costs disappear with an e-book. But apparently the publishers are not passing much of that savings to the author. And Amazon knows this.
By leaving royalty rates where they are, publishers have left their nice digital margins hanging out there for everyone to see. And when Amazon sees someone else’s healthy profits, it’s like a dog smelling a steak. As Jeff Bezos has said, “Your margin is my opportunity.”
The other point the author makes is that reduced profits for publishers means a brain drain as fewer people decide to write books:
If publishers make less money on every book, they are going to pay people less to write and edit them, and talented people will decide to do something else with their time. Consider that it takes at least five years, and usually more, to write a definitive presidential biography. If an advance of $100,000 exceeds the budget that an Amazon-dominated world will allow, then the only author who can write such a biography must be either independently wealthy or subsidized by a full-time job, probably teaching at a university.
Do you buy this argument? I suppose it could be true for mainstream non-fiction. It certainly seems untrue for fiction — or, at least, it would be balanced off by an influx of talented writers who are simply bypassing the barriers put up by mainstream publishers. If I earned more from my writing I could quit my day job and write more, but that’s fundamentally a function of success in the marketplace, not advances from a publisher.
The other day I heard a story about a brilliant young novelist who had a brain aneurysm that left her unable to write. The next morning I listened to a podcast about Jacqueline Du Pre, the brilliant British cellist who came down with multiple sclerosis at the age of 27, subsequently had to give up performing, and died from the disease at the age of 42.
It’s good to be reminded every once in a while that life sucks; so create beauty while you can. Here is Du Pre playing the first movement of the Elgar Cello Concerto; you could just watch her emote for eight minutes without bothering to listen to the music. The orchestra is conducted by her husband, Daniel Barenboim. She was 22 at the time; he was 25. They were on top of the world then; she’s been dead for 30 years now, and he is still going strong. (The movie Hillary and Jackie recounts the story of Du Pre, her sister, and their husbands. It’s a harrowing story, although apparently its accuracy is in dispute.)
Richard Bowker 