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SPSFC#4 Quarterfinalist Review: The Ghost Gun by Gareth Lewis

February 24, 2025 / Dave / 0 Comments

This is my second review of a full read for the Peripheral Prospectors judging team for SPSFC#4. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is The Ghost Gun by Gareth Lewis (author site here). The book is available from a wide variety of retailers.

Blurb

The Ghost Gun kills what it hits, its ghost bullets ensnaring the victim’s soul to their killer.

Except that nothing is that simple.

Certainly not an apparently simple theft that leads detectives into a war between secret societies over artifacts which have been around for millennia, their origin unknown, their abilities inexplicable.

Demoted to Vice due to departmental politics, Detective Cassie Kinsala sees an opportunity to restore her career path. But what looks like it might offer a decent arrest soon turns into a quagmire the law might not cover, and might not protect her from.

Jimmy Bancroft used to be a cop. Working for the other side lets him avoid paperwork. Investigating rumours of a competitor moving in on his employer’s interests, he becomes entangled in a war between criminals and a secret society. And someone might be trying to set him up.

My Review

This is an engaging book with a fun central concept, some great buddy-cop dialogue, some hard-core criminal intrigue, and three highly memorable characters.

Plot and Characters

I don’t generally want to spoil stuff when I review, but a lot of the plot setup is in the blurb above, and much of it is revealed in the opening few chapters. There’s a Ghost Gun, a weapon that steals souls. There are shadowy groups – criminals, technologists, cults, splinter cults – all pursuing this gun and the other artifacts like it.

Set against or amongst those shadows, there are three hard-boiled cops, one (Cassie) a battered idealist, one (Harry) who’s mostly given up, and one (Jimmy) who’s come unmoored and switched sides. They each have different approaches to the case of the gun stemming from their own moral codes and from their own history of injury or failure or ambition. As they each learn more about the weird situation they’ve been thrust into, or thrust themselves into, they respond in authentic, logical, deductive ways, as befit detectives.

My Thoughts

This is an exciting book. It is one of our shorter ones in our group, and it is paced well, giving new information into plot, characters, and mysteries in nearly every chapter. The plot feels fresh and follows a central mystery – what this gun is, what it does, how it works, and who the weird groups are who are trying to control and exploit it. There are a LOT of cop-show-style gun battles, some exciting, some tragic, some magic. Even where the book wanders into some tropey places, it maintains a newness and an energy that give life and imagination to those tropes.

The big strength of the book for me is the dialogue between cops (or ex-cops). It’s real, grounded, and a lot of fun. These are characters on various stages of the road toward bitterness and resignation, and they talk with intelligence, sass, and mutual admiration laced with sarcasm. That never stops being fun.

“I’m not dumb enough to shoot a cop.”

“I’m unconvinced as to your level of dumbness.”

For me, the setting was indistinct from the start, despite its familiarity, and it didn’t gel even pretty far into the book. I was imagining a near-future world – not quite Neuromancer, but on the way there. I was wrong, I think. There are mentions of Netflix and Google, which anchor it in the present, and there are cell phones with SIM cards. There’s no technology that seems too far out there (although one character seeming to think something was a complex hologram led me to think such things existed in this world).

The location was fuzzy, too. The cops’ language is often British flavored, with plural verbs for corporations or organizations (e.g. sentences like “Coca-Cola have started a new advertising campaign”) and with some Britishisms, although the police ranks and roles seemed American. The character names were suited to either an American or British setting. For a long time, I knew only that it wasn’t Russia, because there was a reference to a Russian district. I thought it might be some indistinct future city. It wasn’t until 85% of the way through the book that somebody mentions this stuff happening “in an American city.” Still unnamed, but at least I knew it was America for sure for the last few chapters.

There was one big piece of fuzziness in the characters, too. One of the detectives was referred to as Black by another about halfway through the book. Her race is never mentioned before or after, and there’s no discussion of how it’s impacted her life or career. There didn’t need to be such discussion, of course, but it was strange not to know, and I think racism might realistically have been a frame for her troubles at the department – not necessarily one she’d personally put blame on, but one she’d likely consider. I had to reread that part to make sure they were talking about the same person and not a new detective. I guess the surname Kinsala might have been a tip, but not one I picked up on.

There were a small number of editing issues. Nothing major (like, maybe ten instances), and certainly no more than you’d see in a traditionally published book, but my author eye sees these in others’ work while somehow remaining tragically blind to them in my own. The perspective was at times a little floaty. Most of the scenes are squarely in the perspective of a single character, one of the major three, but when they get together, it occasionally pans out to omniscient, and we get inner thoughts from multiple characters in the same scene, sometimes alternating by paragraph. It works here, because we’ve spent time in these characters’ heads and they’re familiar, and it’s a valid choice of construction, but it is something we’re often taught to avoid in writing seminars.

There were a small set of moments that felt info-dumpy, especially a conversation with a lore-rich elder, but that’s hard to avoid in a story where the main characters don’t know how things work. I didn’t have a problem with it even as I saw it happening. There was an experimentation scene that seemed natural, and it had an outcome that was pretty funny and lasted for much of the rest of the book.

There’s a clear story arc here that ends within the book, even though this seems to be a series, with the plucky and intrepid Detective Kinsala carrying on the story in future books. Although the central conflict was resolved, I felt like a lot of things were still in motion, including a not-too-subtle teaser for the next book. That’s the nature of series, I guess, but I might have liked to have more of it nailed down – another scene a week later, maybe, to see how the characters are coping, would have been enough.

This being a sci-fi competition, I should acknowledge that there wasn’t a lot of traditional sci-fi here. It is totally (and gloriously) speculative fiction, but there aren’t many strictly sci-fi parts. That quibble is not at all relevant to the book, which does what it is trying to do very well, but it might be relevant to the competition.

I realize I’ve now done a thing I hate in reviews as an author, where I’ve written two positive paragraphs and then five or six nit-picky ones. I absolutely don’t mean to give an impression I didn’t like this book – I did, and the promise I saw in it in the opening slush read in the competition was paid off in the full book. I really enjoyed the characters – I found them real, flawed, struggling, and entertaining to follow. I’d totally be down to follow Cassie Kinsala through further adventures. The ghostly artifacts were neat, and the rules they followed and the unintended impacts they caused were creative and fun.

Summation

In summary, then, this was a good, creative book that kept me entertained throughout. It has a cynical but realistic-seeming view of the police and what challenges people face during a long and grinding career. It has great, snappy dialogue, both in the banter and in the more serious conversations. It tells you what you need in terms of world-building without wading too deep into it to the point of getting dull or pedantic. Lewis is an imaginative, skilled author. He has a ton of books out, starting over fifteen years ago, so there’s a lot there to dig into.

Movie review: The Gorge

February 17, 2025 / Dave / 0 Comments

The Gorge on Apple TV was OK, maybe a little better than OK, but not great. Let’s give it a B-, graded on a curve for movies about sinister crevasses.

The Good:

— Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy are good, better than this plot deserves. Their growing interactions and relationship is the best part of the movie (until it moves into verse form, which is painful if you pause the video and read it, which I did. She should have just set fire to it and bailed).

— The setup for the plot and the stark sets are suitably weird, with lots of cool little details and events. Then as the action starts taking strides, things stay tense and exciting, although the plausibility takes a huge hit.

— The creepy visual effects were baller, too. Very neat stuff, and a wide variety of it.

The Bad:

— Sigourney Weaver is criminally underused here, given nothing more to do than stock villainhood, playing the Paul Reiser character from the (much better) Aliens movie but with far stupider lines.

— The premise, as eventually didactically explained, is pretty trite and dumber than most movies like this.

— There is occasional painfully clunky dialogue (e.g. an unearned “this place is pure evil”) that you have to kind of shake off like a bad burrito. There are good lines too, but they are frontloaded, and the last half of the movie is less fun and far less well-written than the first half.

— Miles Teller as a bemused, curious, bored guy is fun, while Miles as a guy in love is 100% Anakin Skywalker. Yes, I went there. Yes, it’s accurate.

— There’s also a lot of questionable physics, plans that don’t make sense, and questionable survival of very old equipment, along with a plethora of the kind of poor choices people make in scary movies, augmented by improbable coincidence.

— Those drones couldn’t possibly carry that many bullets, but that doesn’t matter a whit, because they shoot like stormtroopers. I feel like they were maybe designed as soil aerators rather than machine-gun drones. That would explain it.

— There were also probably six better endings they hinted at during the movie than the groan-worthy one they eventually chose.

The Ugly:

— There’s a wretched maybe two solid minutes of solemn spoken-word voice-over exposition explaining why things in the movie are the way they are. The person speaking the words would have no conceivable knowledge of these events, these initiatives, or how it works. The evidence they’ve found is cryptic and very limited. There’s a neat scene with a movie that’s a primary source and quite affecting – they should have just left it there, but the screenwriters seemed to want you to know their full explanation for everything, which would have been more excusable had it been, like, a good explanation, rather than the plot of five thousand video games and B-movies of yore. Let the mystery steep, dude. Show, don’t tell.

SPSFC#4 Quarterfinalist Review: Wakers of the Cryocrypt by Nathan Kuzack

February 9, 2025 / Dave / 1 Comment

This is my first review of a full read for the Peripheral Prospectors judging team for SPSFC#4. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Wakers of the Cryocrypt by Nathan Kuzack (author site here). Nathan is offering this book for free through Google Books here. It’s also available on Amazon and Apple Books.

Blurb

A thought-provoking post-apocalyptic story about an unexpected reunion between humankind and the AIs it created.

In a world full of living machines one man may die… again.

The future. The human race is extinct. Earth is ruled by eltecs, descendants of the AIs humans created before their demise.

While searching for prehistoric cave paintings, two eltec explorers discover a hidden cryogenic crypt containing 23 perfectly preserved human bodies frozen inside crystal columns.

As eltec society argues over who might have built the crypt and what to do with it, one of its occupants is restored to life. Human beings are no longer extinct, but, for reasons of their own, not every eltec wants to see them come back. The only living human on Earth is in terrible danger.

My review

I enjoyed my time with this book. It was creative, exciting, featured a richly-imagined future world, and dealt with moral and ethical issues in an interesting way.

Plot and Characters

The story centers on several main characters, adopting their point of view or an omniscient point of view at various points. The human protagonist is a man given the name Lazarus. He awakes from a mysterious tomb (the cryocrypt) into a far-future, post-human world populated by sentient robots called Eltecs.

The Eltecs, descendants of human robotics and AI technology, live in a low-population utopian society goverened by a set of uber-intelligences. Even in their utopian future, they are factionalists. Some are fans of humanity, adopting human-like form and wearing clothes. Others are anti-humanity, adopting odd and unnatural shapes. All are protected from death by a cloning system that recreates and reloads them if they are destroyed, a la Paranoia.

Humanity has been dead for over ten thousand years, so the discovery of Laz and twenty-two other humans in the crypt, perfectly preserved, is a tremendously significant event. The Eltecs frequently cluck their steely tongues at humanity’s base, self-destructive instincts that led humanity to perish in an environmental and political cataclysm leading to a nuclear war long ago.

Thrust into this odd society, like an 18th-century savage brought back by colonialist explorers, Laz struggles to learn and adjust. He is afflicted by a mysterious amnesia, which prevents him from remembering his past life, although he seems well-versed in 21st century society and customs.

All of the above is established quickly, in the first few chapters, and the rest of the book is a tale, sometimes political, sometimes introspective, sometimes high-octane adventure, of Laz struggling to figure out who he is, why and how he was placed in this crypt, and how he will fit into Eltec society. His Eltec allies are often perspective characters, and their musings on Laz and their own society are interesting and robust. I don’t want to spoil the plot, which is fun, so I will leave the plot summary there.

My thoughts

As I was reading this, I was reminded a great deal of the many original-series Star Trek episodes where Kirk and Bones and Spock discover a planet living with very different social rules, often derived from 20th century America. Our brave Starfleet visitors have to figure out how the society works, and often what is wrong with it, before judging them, punching some people, kissing others, and flying away 43 minutes later. This absolutely isn’t a diss – I loved those episodes – but there’s a parallel there.

I was also reminded of fables or parables, stories told to explore moral issues. There’s a lot of judginess in many of the characters, and moral flaws and collective guilt are frequent concerns. The language of the book fits this style as well, with characters often ruminating about the sins of the past (or present), sometimes in bold declarative sentences.

To me, the main character’s amnesia didn’t seem necessary, although it’s explained and justified as the story progresses. It was a little tropey, and I don’t think the story would have been too different had he known he were a blacksmith or a baker or whatever. It did give him a constant sense of not knowing himself, which worked, but it also made him a limited character. There are books and shows where that trope is used better, The Bourne Identity being a big one, where hidden skills and connections are discovered, but Laz didn’t seem to have any of these. A new TV show I like, Doc, has amnesia as a central theme, and even though it’s a cheesy plot device, they’re deploying it well and capitalizing on the main character’s alienation from her past self as she learns more about it.

The book got more action-packed as it went on, which was fine and exciting, but the main human character lacked agency and control throughout the whole thing, leaving him subject to the manipulations and machinations (get it?) of his tormentors. The ending, in particular, seemed like a place where he and his friends were far more spectators than protagonists, and I wasn’t a big fan of that choice. This was the book’s biggest disappointment for me, although as an author, I certainly know it can be hard to stick the landing. I actually thought the Eltec characters, especially Shulvara, were more both more interesting and more capable characters, and I’d have preferred to spend more time in their chrome crania rather than in Laz’s largely empty one.

One quibble for me was the Eltec society and speech. Despite being robots from the future, they spoke very much like 21st-century humans, even to the point of using “gonna” and “wanna” frequently, which grated. They also used 21st-century idioms frequently (e.g. something up my sleeve) which seemed out of place for sentient robots in the 33rd century. Their culture and personalities were also very human-seeming, which added to the Star Trek/parable feel but which seemed a little jarring to me, who would expect the Eltec society to have evolved into something more different in 12,000 years.

There was also some odd fixation on sex, even from the robots, and some repeated male gaze from Laz towards a fellow crypt resident. Even the robots got into ogling people sometimes, apparently totally on board with a 21st-century standard of Hot-or-Not. I’m not a prude at all, but this seemed out of place. It totally wasn’t a big deal, not frequent, and didn’t detract, but the few mentions of orgasms and cocks and lust and such didn’t (for me) fit the nature or tone of the rest of the story, which was closer to classic sci-fi and focused on other, cooler things.

The POV was not quite fixed, sometimes restricted to one character, sometimes omniscient with thoughts from all of them, sometimes party to observing events none of the main characters could see, and it sometimes floated from one to the other within a paragraph or two. It was a little fuzzy – not bad, but as an author who worries about that stuff, I couldn’t help but take note.

Summation

This was a good book, often exciting, thought-provoking, funny, and emotional, with a creative future world to explore and a lot of moral questions to think about. Kuzack should be proud of what he’s done with it. It well-deserves its quarterfinal spot in the SPSFC. Because it’s the first of our quarterfinalists I’ve read, I don’t have a real sense of how it will stack up against those others, but I recommend it, especially if you liked those old Star Trek morality plays.

My indie author business – Jan 2025

February 1, 2025 / Dave / 0 Comments

I’ve been doing monthly business posts, so here’s my first of 2025.

Revenue

Here’s my revenue from Amazon:

I had nine audiobook sales through ACX, which will be about another $25, and I sold two books in person at an author event at my local library ($30 in revenue). So, put me down for about $315 in revenue.

Kindle Unlimited page reads are in the table, but here’s how it looks in a bar graph. Kenai is the light blue at the bottom of the columns, by far my most-read book, making up more than half of page reads and 1/3 of sales.

Expenses

I turned off my Facebook ads in mid-November and haven’t started them up. I have a few Amazon ads running, but the bids are so low that I seldom get them placed. I invested in a sponsorship for Dr. Who Online that’s still running, but I paid for that back in November, and it’s not doing much. The two books I sold came out of my home stock, which cost me about $6.50 each, although I paid for them back in mid-2024.

All of that is to say, I’m not running many promotions now and haven’t since the middle of November. What that means is that my revenue now is probably my current baseline – what I bring in if I don’t spend anything on promotion or advertising. It’s great that this seems to mean I can still pull 40K page reads and $300 in a month without spending anything, but I’d like to be reaching more readers than that, and some of my books aren’t finding an audience without help from ads.

Upcoming strategies

I have a BookBub promoted free deal hitting in a few days for my three-book box set of Inquisitors’ Guild books. If it works as they have in the past, that will probably lead to thousands of downloads and a whole mess of page reads, and it may lead to read-through on my other books and a bump in the Amazon rankings that lasts for a couple months. That’s what’s happened for most of my other BookBub featured deal promotions, so I’m hopeful it keeps up.

I’ll have some expenses in the next month for new covers in preparation for a mystery book release in February or March and an updated cover for Got Trouble. I’m also probably going to start up some advertising again. I’ve been trying to do some reading on how to make my ad dollars go farther, so we’ll see if I can apply anything I’ve learned.

My 2024 in the indie author business

January 28, 2025 / Dave / 3 Comments

I’ve taken to doing monthly reports of my financials as an indie author. I also started doing an annual report last year, which some people found interesting, so I thought I’d continue with that. If you’re curious, here’s last year’s report.

The Books

Here are my books and their relative sales through Amazon last year. It was good to see my newer releases doing well (What Grows From the Dead and The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar). I also had some good success with Kenai, which won the 2023-24 SPSFC this year (announced June 19th). I have audiobook and paperback sales on top of these figures, but Amazon provides most of my revenue.

All my books are exclusive to Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited except Traitors Unseen, which I use as a reader magnet giveaway on other platforms. Unlike other authors who don’t get much out of KU and prefer the increased sales that come with selling on places like Kobo, Apple, Google, and Barnes and Noble, I have done pretty well in KU, so well that I don’t feel comfortable giving it up. Here is my revenue breakdown for my sales (not counting the relative few paperbacks I sold at conventions or via my web shop).

Revenues

Here are my revenues by category for this past year. A total of about $7,400.

That represents a good improvement over last year, when I made about $4,800. A 54% increase. Yay!

Here’s my year-over-year revenues from regular sources (ebooks, KU, paperbacks, audio) without other minor sources:

So, that growth trend looks pretty good. Some of it is having more books out. Some of it is getting more BookBub features, which provide a huge boost to me. Some of it is getting smarter about how I spend money. And some of it is just spending more money on ads and other promotion.

Expenses

Here are my expenses by category for 2025. A total of about $13,400.

Notes

I only bought one cover this year, the cover for The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar. Usually, that category would be higher. I spent some money getting art for ads this year, and some of that has been useful in creating Facebook ads.
I have a very kind and talented friend, Tami Ryan, who has edited and proofed my last five or six books. She doesn’t like charging me money, although I try to send her payments. One time she asked me to donate to an animal shelter instead. So, my editing costs are unusually low.
I overinvested in giveaways, blog tours, and contest entry fees. I did a ton of giveaways for the Indie Fantasy Addicts Summer Reading Challenge this year which was quite expensive. It’s a great group and fun to be part of, but there’s no way I recoup those costs from the small number of sales and reviews they generate. Blog tours are a lot of fun, and you get some fun reviews and insta pictures, but I’m not convinced they lead to very many sales. With contests, I tried a few new-to-me ones this year that had modest entry fees. That went nowhere, and I doubt I’ll do those again (except for BBNYA, which is very low-cost and run independently). SPFBO and SPSFC are great free alternatives, so I’ll stick with those. There’s no equivalent I can find for mystery/thriller books, which is too bad.
Many of the convention supplies I bought for this year’s Crash City Con will serve me well for as long as I keep doing this, so those are one-time costs.
The advertising I did was mostly through Facebook. I’m not sure I’ll continue that, because Facebook has taken a sharp turn toward bigotry in recent weeks, but it’s the only major advertising platform where I’ve come close to breaking even on my ads.
I was able to get a few Bookbub featured deals this year, and they continue to be great. They’re very expensive, but they’re the only reliably positive-return promotion I’ve found to do. The “New releases for less” Bookbub feature I bought for The Glorious and Epic Tale of ady Isovar, by contrast, was a total bust and a waste of money. Won’t be doing that again.
I also bought up a full inventory of my books (about ten each, a few more of some titles) in my home to sell. I didn’t have nearly that many before this year, and it represents about $600 in inventory value. So, some of that is product I haven’t yet sold – not really a loss, but rather a kind of unrealized profit.

Analysis

Like my revenues, my expenses also made a big jump from last year, when I spent about $7,200. Last year, I had $4,800 in revenue on $7,200 in expenses, meaning I only made back about 2/3 of what I spent.

This year, I made $7,400 on expenses of $13,400, so I only made back about 55% of what I spent, so that’s worse, both in having a $6000 loss and in having a worse return on expenses. Boo.

That’s not a great year-over-year for a business, unless it’s a business that’s still growing, or where there are other factors at work.

If I were going to offer caveats for some of the expenses, here are two big ones:

I already know that audiobooks aren’t a good investment for me. Over the several years I’ve had audiobooks out, I’ve made $988 in revenue on about $6375 in expenses for the four books I’ve done audio for. This year, I made the decision to get two more audio books out there (Kenai and What Grows From the Dead) even though I knew they wouldn’t make financial sense. I was doing them more for fun than for profit. That’s a luxury I have with the money I have available. If I were trying to become profitable as fast as possible, I’d have skipped every audiobook after the second one once the pattern became clear. In a sense, then, the $2600 I spent on audiobooks this year (and the $800 I spent this month finishing up the audio for WGFTD) could maybe lie outside my business model.
I incurred a pretty major advertising expense late in the year, with ads that didn’t go live until December but will last for nearly all of 2025. This is with the Dr. Who Online site. I checked with a friend who had done a sponsorship there, and he said it had gone pretty well for him, so I went ahead and did a big buy there. The ads they created for me are really neat, and there’s some traffic from them, but given how it’s gone for the first couple months, I don’t think there’s any way it’s a good investment for me in terms of return. Live and learn, right? But it also seems like most of the $700 cost should be billed to 2025 rather than 2024.

If I deduct the $2600 in audiobook costs (more vanity/fun on my part than sound business) and maybe $650 of the Dr. Who advertising cost that hits this year, that knocks my expenses down to about $10,150. Kind of fake, yes, but that puts my return for the year at 73% of expenses with a $2,750 loss. Still not profitable, but comparable or a little better than last year.

Here’s how the big picture looks year over year. The shaded areas in the 2024 column at the right are if I take out the audio and 2025 advertising expense like I mentioned above. That’s probably a little bit of BS to make me feel better, but I’m giving both figures, so read it how you want.

2024 Successes

I had some really great developments this year in trying to move my indie author career forward. Here are a few:

My biggest thrill was having Kenai win the SPSFC. That’s an indie sci fi competition founded by Hugh Howey of Silo and Wool fame. This was the third year of it (Daros was a semifinalist in 2021-22). Kenai won out over 221 entries across nine judging teams in an exciting competition over seven months. I also had a great time meeting other authors – we did some fun interviews and hung out together on YouTube for a bit. Kenai sales and page reads make it my strongest book right now.

I got two new books out, the mystery What Grows From the Dead and the silly epic fantasy The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar. I had an absolute blast writing Lady Isovar, and it’s slowly finding its audience, maintaining one of my highest review averages (4.7 on 68 ratings on Amazon). It also reached the semifinals of SPFBO. What Grows From the Dead got a Bookbub promotion mid-year, and during the week or so it was out there for free, it was downloaded an astounding 20,000 times. That led to a long, successful ride on the Amazon algorithm, leading to a bunch of page reads and a huge number of readers. It’s closing in on 600 ratings on Amazon, which is 250 more than any of my other books, nearly all of them coming in about a three month period.

I hit my second million pages read on Kindle Unlimited, hitting 2,000,000 much faster than I did 1,000,000. This is the graph that gives me the most hope that I’m headed somewhere other than obscurity. Of course it’s been helped out hugely by Bookbub promos, which I can’t control, but I didn’t used to get those in my first four years of this, so that’s getting better too.

Thanks for reading! I’m happy to answer questions in the comments. If you’re interested in any of my books, please check them out on my book page here.

Notes on the departing books – SPSFC #4

January 14, 2025 / Dave / 1 Comment

This year, I’m on the Peripheral Prospectors team as a judge for SPSFC. We’ve recently announced our six quarterfinalists, as you can see in this post with more information and previous posts available on the team page here.

I’ve been a participant twice before, in 2021-22 (Daros) and 2023-24 (Kenai). I’ve been in SPFBO four times, I’ve done BBNYA twice, and I’ve entered another couple contests. Although I’ve met with success in some of these contests, I have also at times exited (very) early, and I absolutely know how much that stings.

In that spirit, I thought I’d share what I liked about each of the books I read that didn’t progress beyond this stage. Our judging team of five split our 31 submissions into two groups, with each judge assigned to one group or the other. For each of these books, I read the opening chapters, usually 20 percent or so, which is the expectation for the “scout phase” of the competition. So, these comments (and the quarterfinalist status) aren’t based on the whole book in my case, although some of the books below got full reads by the other judges.

I’m not including any critiques or problems I might have had with the books, because that’s not the point of this post. I’m just looking to celebrate and highlight these books and authors as they depart the competition.

309

This had an exciting opening with definite alien invasion vibes. The characters had strong voices and personalities, and the invasion and mysteries were intriguing. The story has a good old-school sci fi vibe – I was reminded of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, with all the tension and horror that scenario provides.

Battle Calm

This book quickly established a world at war with a merciless foe along with a band of rebels fraught with their own internal conflicts. The dialogue was snappy and emotions were high, with a number of mysteries (both past and future) set out for the narrative to unwind. The nature and behavior of the enemy here was creative and interesting, and the hierarchy and mistrust in the human forces was tense and at the breaking point nearly immediately. The desperate situation of the main character at the opening was a good way to introduce all of this.

Chasing Naomi

I really enjoyed my time with this one. It had a fundamental goofiness and high-concept spirit that worked for me. The main character was plucky and appealing, and the ship and ghost-people picking her up were fun and funny. Because of the scout stage partial read, I didn’t get far enough to see where it was all headed, but it had a bunch of tropes I enjoyed – fish out of water human among advanced non-Earthlings, a la Hitchhiker’s Guide, sassy ship’s computer, space battles, negotiations and laws, superhero-ish main character discovering her powers.

Children of the Fall

This was a hyperviolent, breakneck pace view of a future dystopian world. Some very creepy scenes with artificial people gone bad, and some zombie-flick-style action with hapless humans facing killer beings. The main character’s worries about battery life were a great way to add tension. There was also some really interesting use of language here – words, phrases, and images that were used in ways that were unexpected and thought-provoking.

The Dream of the Forest

The opening scenes here are a quick contrast – a loving couple (actively loving, if you know what I mean) with high status, wealth, and privilege, although in a restrictive society with some draconian rules. Immediately, there’s a bitter, awful betrayal, one impacted by those draconian rules and designed to exploit the high status, throwing everything into turmoil. It’s a raw, emotional opening, promising high stakes throughout.

Eye of Destiny

This was a two-sides story, with one side being young humans whose father is caught up in mysterious research, and the other being an alien menace to all of humanity. The human characters had clear, established relationships, and the growing sense of something wrong on Earth, with exploration and discovery, was engaging, promising higher stakes to come. To me, it kind of read like a dystopian future story targeting the young adult market, maybe like Divergent or Maze Runner, although with an Earth much closer to our real Earth than in those stories.

The First Herald

I liked this one and enjoyed my time with it. There was a strongly hierarchical dystopian future, with a strong undercurrent of family politics and conflicts, with people operating at many different levels in society. The future world was interesting and compelling, clearly having a lot of planning and thought behind it. The dialogue and writing were engaging, and the mystery and conspiracy afoot were intriguing, with hints of an equally complex counter-culture full of rebels (and backstabbing too).

Hauler

This book had a ton of charm, with an everyman protagonist constantly struggling with a system that wants to hold him down and exploit him, not always making the best decisions, but aware that he is not, which is fun. The growing danger and entanglement were handled well, and there’s also a lot of humor and colorful characters as this one progresses. I could totally see this as a goofy sci-fi movie, probably starring a pro wrestler.

Horizon

This book opened with a tremendous space battle full of panic, despair, and violence. Really dramatic beginning. The book moved on to the aftermath of that disaster, and you get a better sense of the setting, the conflict, and the characters involved, all of whom are brimming with emotion and tension. Lots of action here, and squarely in the tradition of a future with warring ships and a bigger universe to explore.

Mushroom Blues

This was a really, really interesting book, very well written, with a complex society reminiscent of colonial powers and resistance struggles on Earth, but set somewhere else, an imagined non-Earth but very Earth-like place. Adding to the weirdness is the fact that the subjugated people are fungal organisms, although they have many human (and relatable) characteristics and emotions and desires. The vibe is 20th-century hard-boiled detective, which works well, and the dialogue is real-seeming and the pace taut and exciting while sometimes taking pauses for some neat imagery and reflection on the gritty world. This one was hard to categorize – it’s doing well in SPFBO, although some of the judges there are wrestling with whether it’s fantasy (see here). Similarly, we wrestled with whether it’s sci-fi – there’s a scientific basis for the mushroom people’s biology and weird powers, but (at least in the opening I read) there’s not advanced human tech or spaceships or that kind of sci-fi staple, nor is there a future setting – just an alternate Earthlike world where mushroom people exist along with humans. Regardless of the categorization, it’s undeniably a good book, well-written and tremendously creative.

Non-Conscious

I liked this one. It was definitely quirky and coarse, with a lot of crass humor, sex, and language you’d never use in front of your grandma. The premise of a vibrant computer game world with real-world corporate workers running it is not new, but it’s fresh and intriguing here, milking the computer game scenario (and the power and control the corporate workers have in it) for all those tasty plot bits and also having a desolate, confining, dysfunctional corporate and workplace structure with pissed off people taking shots at each other. A lot of imagination went into this, and if you can abide the rawness of the sex talk (and sex scenes) and profanity, you’ll find something to chew on inside.

Use of Emergency

I liked this one a lot – it had a great set-up with a plucky heroine bucking an unfair system, finding a way through impassable societal and career barriers even if she has to bend the rules. The sleeper-ship scenario was well-described and seemed real and authentic, and (unlike many of these entries) I found the protagonist relatable, fun, and easy to cheer for, and the mystery that was just getting started in the part I read was engaging and juicy.

The Widow’s Tithe

I enjoyed my time with this one too. It had a very high-concept setup, full of future media celebrities, gunfights, megacorps, and bullets-flying action. You’re quickly aware here that everybody is a bit of a caricature, like in 1980’s sci fi movies, but it works (just as it often did in those). The reality-TV military commando squad might not be realistic, but it’s fun, and the catty, egotistical, self-absorbed main character is fun to watch as she navigates a huge setback and a new life full of trials. You’ll know quickly if you’re going to like it, and if you go for this kind of thing, it seems likely to pay off.

My editing process

December 15, 2024 / Dave / 2 Comments

A Kenai reader who’s also an author wrote me to ask about my editing process. I thought I’d share my answer to him with you all here. For my first book, Flames Over Frosthelm, I hired a developmental editor who was really great, but I haven’t included that step since.

I’m happy to describe my editing process, which I doubt is standard, but it works OK for me. I enjoy writing the first draft much more than editing, and I’m usually more reluctant than I should be to delete things that really need deleting. So, I’m not sure I’m a role model, but here’s what I do:

First Draft – I usually do this straight through without a lot of edits as I go. Most books, I go from start to finish, but with Kenai, interestingly, I wrote right up to where Jess’ ship crashes, and then I got unsure how to finish, so I actually wrote the ending chapters backwards, from the ending I wanted for her, back to how it would be on Kenai with the plants, and then the battle with the ship. I’d never done that before, but it worked well here, and actually, in a book where time goes backwards, it was almost fitting. The book I’m working on now has been a little non-linear too in terms of my writing. Very rarely here, I’ll write a section that I come to think doesn’t fit, and I’ll take that out and rewrite or go in a different direction. If there’s going to be a big change, it usually happens here.

First Editing Pass – When I’m done with the first draft, I usually let it sit for a few days, and then I start at the beginning and go through it. That first edit is a big one, because I write without an outline and usually without a big idea of where the book is going. Because of that, I discover things about the plot and characters as I go which need to be included or at least foreshadowed earlier in the story. So, that first edit is usually full of little changes and adjustments to make the story have a better thread through the plot and to make the characters be more consistent throughout. I also make a set of notes as I write the first draft about plot elements or questions I need to answer, and this first edit is where I try to address those issues.

Reader Number One – Once I’m happy with the book, I print out a paper copy and give it to my wife, who reads the whole thing and makes notes in the margins and on post-its, some good (e.g. jokes she laughed at), some critiques or questions or things that didn’t work for her. She will often catch typos or logic errors or inconsistent personalities, or places where I spend too much time on the characters thinking about what they should do (one of my persistent issues). Or rarely, she just hates something, and I need to figure out how to work around or change that.

Second Editing Pass – with her notes, I go through and make her suggested corrections and adjustments (or most of them – sometimes I’m too excited about something to change it). I’ll also make any other adjustments that seem necessary, but usually these are minor tweaks. Occasionally, I’ll have a recommendation for something that’s a bigger change, and I’ll have to delete or rewrite a section or make a bunch of smaller changes to accommodate the feedback.

Early Reader Team – I have four or five people, friends or relatives of mine, who are usually willing to read an early draft and give feedback. They all respond to different things. One is a physics professor, so I lean on him for science stuff – that’s Don, who I mention in the Author’s Note for Kenai. I get feedback from them, sometimes detailed, sometimes general, sometimes contradictory between the various readers.

Third Editing Pass – with their feedback, I go through the book again, making changes and adjustments based on their comments. This is usually a less-intense edit than the first two, because the book is usually in better shape by now. At this stage, I’ll often run the book through MS Word’s grammar and spelling review, 99% of which is not useful, but a small fraction of which is stuff I still haven’t caught that should be changed.

Copyedit and Proof – I have a high school friend, Tami, who’s offered to do my final proofing and copyediting, so when I think the book is ready for publication, she’s the last step. She reads through and catches any punctuation and grammar issues that remain and gives me some other feedback. She usually doesn’t comment on plot or characters unless I press her, but sometimes she has some comments as she goes.

Fourth and Final Editing Pass – This is my last run-through before publication. I implement Tami’s suggestions and make any other small changes I think the book needs. Then, it’s a bunch of formatting and such to get it ready for ebook and paperback publication, but no further changes to the text.

Six years of page reads

December 14, 2024 / Dave / 0 Comments

I put together a progression of 60 days of my page reads in Kindle Unlimited showing good growth from 2019-2024. I stuck with the same date range each year, Sept 1 to Nov 29. Pretty happy with what I found.

Data Notes:

— I rescaled the default vertical axis for the graphs to be comparable year over year.

— I was advertising my first book pretty heavily the first year (2019) which I assume is why the numbers were stronger than 2020.

— I had a BookBub promotion for Kenai in late October 2024 which shows up on the final slide.

My November Finances as an Indie Author

December 7, 2024 / Dave / 1 Comment

I’ve been doing a monthly review of my finances as what I think of as a middle-range indie author – more successful than some, far less successful than others. See here for my thoughts on the developmental stages of an indie author career.

November revenues

Here are my KU page reads:

The teal here is Kenai, for which I ran a recent BookBub promo. More on that later. That’s a very good month for me.

And here are my sales:

Yellow here is the tail end of the Kenai BookBub, while teal is a free promo for The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar. For both, I stacked a bunch of promo newsletter sites. So, most of those are free books, and this isn’t very helpful other than to see what the shape of an advertised free promo is. If you’re curious about that, this graph of the last 90 days shows how much more intense the downloads are for a BookBub vs. just FreeBooksy and other promo sites.

On this, Kenai (via BookBub) is the teal, and TG&ETOLI (via Freebooksy and a few others) is yellow.

If it’s a financial picture, though, the paid sales are more important. Here they are:

In terms of total revenue, I took in nearly $1000 as follows:

This total is overwhelmingly ebooks – I made $972 off ebooks, $10 off paperbacks. It is also largely from Kindle Unlimited, at $733 from KU, $250 from sales. That’s 75% of my revenue here from KU, which is more than usual, but I think that’s probably from the read-through for Kenai after the promotion.

I also had a very good month (for me) for my audiobooks with 17 sales. I won’t get a financial report from that until later, so I don’t know how much revenue it will be, but it’s historically been small, about $3 a book, so maybe $50 if that holds.

I also sold one book via my new online bookstore, for a revenue of about $15, net after shipping and book cost of about $4.

November Expenses

On my monthly ledger, I have $1365.53 in expenses, which is more than I took in. However, $699 of that was for a year-long future advertising contract with a sci-fi website which wasn’t even set up this month. So, probably not fair to put that one in November set against these revenues. If we take that out, we’re left with $666.53 in expenses, which would leave November with a tidy profit of about $370. Neat!

However, that’s not really true, because some of what went on this month is from the BookBub for Kenai which was $523. The BookBub listing itself happened in late October, but all the impact was this month. There’s no question it has already made back its cost in KU page reads and sales of the book after the giveaway, and its impact isn’t entirely finished, as sales and reads of Kenai are still elevated relative to its pre-promotion levels. But, we should probably set that cost against this month’s revenues, especially because I didn’t count it last month. That gets us to a loss of about $150. Not terrible for revenues totalling $1039, but not profitable.

Other notes

I did a bunch of Facebook advertising in September, October, and November. That had a big impact on sales on the books advertised (mostly The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar and my Inquisitors’ Guild series), but it didn’t make up its cost. You can actually see in the revenues and to a lesser extent the KU page reads graphs above when I turned it off, which was on November 15.

I always see an impact from Facebook ads, and I paid an artist to make a cool image for the Inquisitors’ Guild series. Here’s the ad, which is probably the best, most effective ad I’ve run. It had rotating text, so it wasn’t always with this text, and the format was different on phone vs. PC vs. tablet.

And here’s the TG&ETOLI ad, which got a comparable number of clicks but didn’t result in as may sales or page reads. It’s for a single book rather than the series, so that might have an effect, and it only has 50+ reviews as opposed to Flames Over Frosthelm’s 335.

I am happy that my ads get people to check out the book. That’s terrific, and it’s really neat seeing the sales and reviews come in. I wish that they generated more revenue than they cost. Having done this for five years, I’m closer to that point now than I’ve ever been, getting back maybe 80-90% of the advertising cost in revenues, but it’s still a net loss (except for the BookBub featured deals of all stripes). I’m not sure what will push it over the magical edge to profitability.

If it’s writing more books, I can do that, but it will take time.

If it’s getting better ad art and ad copy, I can work on that, although hiring artists is expensive.

If it’s finding better groups to show the ads to or better placements, that’s tricky. The Facebook ad interface is nightmarish and glitchy, and I have had a lot of trouble figuring out the best strategies there.

There’s another possibility, one that I’m toying with, but I’m not sure if it’s real or not. It could be that I just need to get my books seen enough that people read them and like them and review them and discuss them. If that’s the case, then this advertising money is worthwhile even if it is a net loss in terms of revenue, because it is getting me more eyeballs and more ratings and reviews. It could be that spending this advertising money at a loss is me blowing on the embers of my book sales, and it will take a goodly amount of blowing and care to get the books to catch fire and take off.

That’s a seductive thought, though, and maybe a wrong one. If I’m wrong, then advertising more will just keep losing me money, and I’ll be stupid. But I think I’ll keep trying Facebook ads and other pathways. It may be I just have to blow $10,000 or $20,000 to get to a more voluminous and more sustainable business model. If that’s true, it sucks, but it’s not unique to indie publishing – tons of new business operate that way, from burrito shops to car detailers to ecommerce.

The big picture

This year is shaping up to be another good one, like last year, thanks again mostly to the few BookBub featured deals I’ve landed.

Here’s how this year is looking with most of it done. You can see the two big free BookBub giveaways dwarfing whatever else I’m doing, except for the $2000 or so I dropped on Facebook advertising in late September to mid November. Teal here is What Grows From the Dead, while yellow is Kenai.

The KU pages picture is similar, and even more stark. The BookBubs really feed that KU revenue a lot. Interestingly, the Facebook advertising produces more sales.

Finally, here’s my five-year showing since my first release in June 2019. Closing in on two million pages read, which I may reach this year, and revenues growing year over year.

Developmental stages of an indie author

December 7, 2024 / Dave / 1 Comment

I’ve come up with a (likely imperfect and non-universal) set of stages in the development of an indie author. Here it is:

I’ve been at this five years, and I think I’m probably at the Crossroads stage. A lot of activity under my belt, consistent page reads, nine books out, but not yet making a profit at this (not nearly so).