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SPSFC#4 Finalist Review: Accidental Intelligence by Bryan Chaffin

July 31, 2025 / Dave / 0 Comments

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

The book is Accidental Intelligence by Bryan Chaffin. The book is available from many retailers.

With this review, I’ve now reviewed five of the six finalists. Here are the other four reviews.

The sixth finalist, Whiskey and Warfare, I will review in the coming weeks. It was named as a semifinalist from our judging group back in March and made it to the finals. I missed reading it back then because we divided our allocation among our team members. That meant that once it was named a semifinalist, our team’s rating for it was fixed, and I couldn’t add a score to it. So, I focused on the semifinalists and finalists where my reviews would count in the competition. But, I want to read it – I hear it’s cool! – and now I am done with the other SPSFC reviewing and have some time. There are a couple books from our quarterfinals I also want to get to now, especially Afterburn by D. Andrews.

Blurb

Private detective Mason Truman is being yanked around by invisible strings, and it’s an AI doing the yanking. Miranda. She’s subtle. Crazy. And she thinks she can see the future. It’s enough to drive Mason nuts. Miranda believes her fellow AIs are up to some kind of grand conspiracy against the Terran Republic, and she wants Mason’s help proving it. Conspiracies are above Mason’s pay grade, though, the kind of time-sink that can put a crimp in more serious pursuits. Like drinking coffee. And staying alive.

But Miranda won’t take no for an answer. Mason can help or Miranda will make sure he becomes intimately acquainted with the finer conversational techniques of the secret police. So Mason digs until he uncovers a cache of stolen communications between a cabal of rogue AIs. They’re planning what they call Eschaton—the divinely ordained end of humanity. Unless Mason and Miranda stop the arrogant pricks, the conspirators will destroy Earth.

Mason and Miranda have one chance, a way of bottling up the rogue AIs. All Mason has to do is lure the conspirators to the right spot in a sim world. That’s how Mason learns that when Miranda said she needed help, what she meant was bait.

My Review

I quite enjoyed my time with this book. To me, it was reminiscent of cyberpunk books like William Gibson’s Neuromancer that I read back in college, with a richly imagined near-future world, in this case the mid-2100’s, extrapolated from what’s going on in our world today, and with a sometimes dizzying array of concepts, terminology, subcultures, and tech. The world Chaffin builds here is fascinating, dystopian, and complex, and it will be interesting to see (as it was with William Gibson) how prescient he is about our actual future.

Plot and Characters

The book meshes a bunch of tropes in fun an interesting ways. The main character, Mason Truman, is an old-school private eye who wouldn’t be out of place in a 1930’s noir setting. The world he lives in is filled with technology, some of it really useful, like food generators, robotic doctors, and factotums – smart, connected electronic assistants, kind of like what Apple and Amazon wish Siri and Alexa could be. The fascist-flavored society, which now spans a number of worlds and colonies within the solar system, is governed by an uneasy alliance of human plutocrats and AI personalities. Each of the AIs originated as non-sentient software designed for a purpose and then gained sentience on its own, but they’re now blocking any effort that might lead to more AIs being born. There’s a military also, but it’s largely a pawn of the two major political forces. There’s a rich online virtual reality, the Omninet, which includes games, sims, tourism, socializing, and porn.

Mason is a fun character to follow, with a strong personality, a big mouth, and a fun relationship with his factotum, Sam. He’s got some friends and family who pop in from time to time and help him, and he befriends (fairly involuntarily) a kind of psychic outsider AI, Miranda, that the some of other AIs (a little rebel group) have created as a kind of experiment in reproduction and design. There’s an uberhacker named Peanut, a malicious ex-fiancé, and a military hero cousin who all also get involved.

What starts as a routine missing persons case become ever more complex, and the stakes get higher and higher, and the pace more frenetic, but I’ll leave off talking about plot to avoid spoilers.

My Thoughts

It’s clear why this book is a finalist. The world Chaffin has created has tons of detail, and it’s mostly introduced to us through action and dialogue, not through big info dumps, although sometimes Mason goes off on a topic in his head. That focus on the story is refreshing, although as a reader, you have to be on top of your game to take it all in and get up to speed. I really meant it in a good way when I said this reminds me of Neuromancer – there’s some wonderful extrapolation from what present-day LLMs can do to how they’d behave in a world where they’ve become sentient, and there’s some wonderfully clever thinking and speculation about what society might become when our virtual worlds become ever more of our focus. What’s even better, Chaffin gives us little hints of how we got from 2025 to 2139, with pieces of future history referenced throughout, but also from characters running into older technology which reveals the stepping stones Chaffin imagines humanity might use to get to the future where the book happens. This is great stuff. I wouldn’t say that all of it seemed 100% likely or workable to me, but that doesn’t matter. It was great fun to read about, and it was brilliantly deep and complex. This is the first novel I’ve read about future AI that seems to tie in closely to our current cloud computing and newly-LLM-filled lives, which I found really cool – just like Gibson took a limited Internet and imagined much of what cyberspace would come to be.

The pace of the book gets faster and faster as Mason caroms from clue to clue and plan to plan, facing sinister interference, threats, and calamity. There’s a kind of sci-fi action movie feel to the plot, with much of the last third of the book being a big chase climax spanning the real world and many cyberspace locations. That’s good for keeping up excitement, but it does mean some story elements get dropped or minimized as we go, with major characters sometimes just disappearing from the story with no further explanation or description, and occasionally with big plot elements not fully explained or resolved, at least to my reading.

That focus on pace and plot means the things we were learning about the characters become less relevant, and their actions become more and more constrained by outside forces. I liked the structure of the big plot showdown at the end – the parties involved, some big twists, the threats – but the execution left me a little dissatisfied, with an ambiguity to the ending and epilogue, and with a lack of clarity (at least to me) as to what actually happened in the world or even to the major characters. Despite a lot of scenery chewing from a couple of major villains, the ending felt a little rushed, and it seemed to me that Mason lacked agency for much of the climax and conclusion, merely bouncing like a pinball between various plot targets, aided or hindered by forces he couldn’t control. In the midst of that, though, there was a wonderful scene where he’s multitasking brilliantly – using his factotum to do research, talking an ally through a difficult task, and also trying to accomplish a task on his own, all while the world is falling apart, and it’s just a great image of a distracted, tech-heavy future, all condensed into a single scene.

VAGUE SEMI-SPOILERY BITS HERE: At the end, despite enjoying the book and having a lot of fun with it, I had a lot of questions, like: what is Sam becoming? what happened to Andrew? where does all this leave the AIs? does Mason get to his oft-stated goal of a normal life with abundant expensive coffee? what happens to Miranda, and what was she playing at? did Meredith get what was coming to her? Answering these would have made the book longer and more boring, for sure, so it makes sense that Chaffin wrapped things up. But I felt like I’d missed out on some promises made, and that some interesting and important threads were not tied off. The rush at the end also meant that Mason’s arc wasn’t resolved, at least for me. At times during the story, he felt more like a mouthy gumshoe archetype than a real person, and the ending, which didn’t really share where he’d arrived at or who he had become, didn’t help that feeling. A lot of the other characters seem to start to go on personal journeys, too, but again, many of these don’t really get very far, and we never see where they might lead. I also 100% did not understand what the epilogue was getting at, which may be a me problem.

Summation

If you’re up for a vivid near-future sci-fi story with a strong and capable cyberpunk feel, Accidental Intelligence delivers beautifully. For me, the worldbuilding was the strongest part, and the wide-ranging plot and colorful characters do a great job of painting a luminous, seedy picture of where we might be headed as a species.

SPSFC#4 Finalist Review: Bisection by Sheila Jenné

July 27, 2025 / Dave / 1 Comment

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

The book is Bisection by Sheila Jenné. The book is available from many retailers.

Blurb

Tria and Resa have shared the same body since they were born. Like everyone on their home planet of Kinaru, their mind and body are divided down the middle: the logical right and the emotional left. Tria, the right, has a budding career as a biologist, while Resa dreams of more freedom than their home planet grants her.

When aliens land on Kinaru, Tria and Resa seize the opportunity to be the first of their people to travel to the stars. Karnath, the alien scientist assigned to study them, is convinced there is more to the Kinaru than meets the eye. But only days into the trip, crew members start turning up dead, and a mutiny redirects the ship toward a forbidden, war-torn planet—Earth.

To solve a conspiracy that threatens three planets, Tria must find out the truth of who her people really are, and Resa needs to finally tell Tria the dark secrets she’s been hiding all their lives.

My Review

I quite enjoyed my time with this book. It’s a space opera at heart, but it has some of the big concept what-if pieces central to, say, a classic Star Trek episode, where there’s an alien race who’s like us but different in one or two key ways. There are actually two such races here, and we get to explore both. Where I felt the book really shined was with the unique nature of the Kinaru species, brought to wonderful and touching life by the main character.

Plot and Characters

The book has an ongoing plot that alternates between first-contact, mystery, and thriller, but the real heart of the book are the central characters, Tria il Resa, who are two personalities who share a single body, with Tria being logical, coldly analytical, and a bit aloof, while Resa is emotional, artistic, impulsive, and romantic. It’s a little like if Kirk and Spock were forced to inhabit the same body, except that these two have always been together and are mutually respectful, caring friends.

Most of the first-person narrative is from Tria, who is accustomed to running things, as is tradition on Kinaru. The “rights” – the right-brained analytical types – are dominant over the “lefts,” who have a history of being subjugated, although it is a weird sort of beloved subjugation. We do get some chapters from Resa’s perspective, too, and it’s a real joy to see their different mindsets, motivations, and thought processes. This is the coolest part of the book – an awesome high-concept foundation, where it almost doesn’t matter what storyline you put on top of it – it’s going to be interesting to explore.

There is a storyline, though, and it crosses the galaxy to bring about conflict, betrayal, discovery, action, and even a little romance. Tria and Resa boldly stow away aboard an alien ship visiting their world, Kinaru, and after some initial consternation, they are adopted as guests of a scientific exploration ship sent to their world by the Shatakazans. The Kinaru are highly advanced socially, but they are probably somewhere near early 20th-century Earth levels of technology, so the advanced tech and space travel of the Shatakazans is something very new to Tria and Resa. The Shatakazans are reptillian and have a number of significant biological and social differences to humans, but they breathe the same air and act a lot like humans in a lot of ways, particularly personality-wise and with their wants and desires all feeling pretty human. Each Shatakazan chooses a faction tied to a philosophy, which is a neat concept to explore. Their planet is nominally democratic, or at least parliamentary, but it is more like a one-party democracy as existed in Mexico and Japan for many years, with minor factions not having much power.

We meet a bunch of Shatakazans, but the one who’s most developed is Karnath, a scientist and free soul. I had a little trouble keeping the rest of them straight, as they are numerous and have weird names, but that’s probably a me thing. To avoid spoilers, I’ll probably leave it there, but suffice it to say, there are a bunch of adventures Tria and Resa and their lizard buddies go on as the book winds its way to its conclusion, and we learn a lot more about their two societies as we go.

My Thoughts

It’s clear why this book is a finalist. It’s well-written and engaging, with some great big sci-fi concepts to explore, which it does in interesting and entertaining ways. The two-people-in-one-body concept is done really, really well. I was reminded a little bit of Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil, in which an old man and a young woman share a body, but this book has more to say, and the split between right-brain and left-brain identities, with the social structures that bifurcation forces on Kinaru society, makes it all the more powerful. This elevates this over some of the other books I’ve read for the competition which were simpler space adventures (although some of these are admittedly great space adventures). Bisection is thinky, in a good way, which is really great.

Where the book was a little weaker for me was in the nuts and bolts of the plot. A lot of it was admirably solid and well crafted, but there were a number of head-scratcher moments for me. Many of these surrounded plans, either by the protagonists or their enemies. These plans (both major and minor) often seemed very half-baked, where I felt like real people with the information they had might have chosen better strategies, or where the strategies they chose could well have been completely unworkable. In these moments, the people in the story became less real to me. In some cases, these questionable plans just work because the plot needs them to. In other cases, the questionable plans fail in completely predictable ways. As a repeated example, nobody in this book is any good at all at holding onto prisoners. Like, zero good jailers here. Major failures of basic jailing. There’s also a bad-guy plan at the heart of the adventure plot that is something that seems both ill-fated and poorly conceived, and yet it functions far better than it seems like it should, with the help of a local government acting in in a way I thought was not at all how it would act (or could act) in the situation presented.

There are a couple other minor bits that itched at me while I read. There’s a huge, huge mysterious coincidence the characters discover early on which cannot be anything but deliberate and engineered, but the explanations they float for how it could be (a weird intersystem comet, mostly) are not something serious scientists would entertain, or at least not phrase that way. Another thing that bugged me a little was the communication. Like Star Trek, there’s some universal translation going on here, but once it’s established, it’s basically perfect and almost never commented on, even when I wondered how certain parties would have gotten one of the translators. Of course, Star Trek does this shamelessly, even having the latex lips of the aliens form English words, so it’s not a big deal, and it would make any space opera a lot harder to read. Finally, there’s at one point a pretty major revelation which felt a little like a Greek god interfering in the mortal realm. For me, this took a good bit of agency away from the main characters, but it’s explained pretty well and leads to a few of the book’s absolute best moments, one of them completely, gloriously unexpected, so it’s forgiven.

All of these are minor nitpicks and easily ignored. The story is really about what happens when a race of people has one key difference from our own society, and the beauty of the book is how that plays out in their lives, their relationships, their culture, and their thoughts. The dawning realization of Tria that she has fundamentally misunderstood Resa, her closest friend, and in fact fundamentally misunderstood personhood, society, and basic humanity, is A-plus, gold-medal stuff, written beautifully. I loved it, and while I wished there was a little more of that and a little less of the action plot, I’ll happily take what I was given, and what Jenné chose to write.

Summation

If you’re up for a big-concept sci-fi story, hearkening back to those big concepts that Theodore Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick explored in sci-fi’s classical heyday, Bisection delivers. The beautiful, evolving, respectful conflict between the two main characters, one out of place in the galaxy, one out of place in her own society and her own body, is great, great stuff.

SPSFC#4 Finalist Review: On Impulse by Heather Texle

July 16, 2025 / Dave / 0 Comments

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

The book is On Impulse by Heather Texle. The book is available from many retailers.

Blurb

When the Department trained me to catch criminals, I never dreamed I’d become one.

Agent. Suspect. Intergalactic fugitive.

I was one of them until I shot my partner in self-defense. Even though the Department cleared me of wrongdoing, my co-workers didn’t agree. They turned their backs on me, so I turned my back on them.

My partner’s actions never made sense. After ignoring my gut for a year, I asked my tech-genius best friend to dig into it. Now Jarrett’s gone dark, and I soon discover he’d been brutally murdered. An officer finds me standing over the body, blaster in hand. Even I admit it looks bad.

There’s no way I can trust the Department to investigate further—not if I’m already the prime suspect. My only option is to run. Is it impulsive? Sure. Will having law enforcement dog me across the galaxy make life difficult? Most certainly. I’ll have to stay one step ahead of them if I want to solve Jarrett’s murder and clear my name.

Doing that will require every trick the Department taught me—and a few I learned on my own.

My Review

I really enjoyed my time with this book. It’s a fun space opera romp with elements of police procedural, spy thriller, heist, and corporate villainy. There’s a plucky, engaging heroine (with the badass name of Reliance Sinclair) and a deep cast of secondary characters, even including a bionic guinea pig and a ship AI masquerading as a robotic cat. The AI designer has given the ship the temperament of an actual cat, which is a hoot.

The story is constantly in motion, with Reliance outwitting and evading or falling prey to many factions of enemies on her personal quest to figure out who killed her friend. The setting is some time in the future after Earthlings have spread out and terraformed and colonized many other worlds, although there are still people on Earth and Mars. There are no aliens or alien tech in the story – just a variety of human worlds, sometimes with interesting quirks like gravitational or climate differences or interesting (and violent) planetary histories. The worlds are more Earthlike than in some space operas, with regular Earth foods, animals, and plants.

Plot and Characters

The book happens in several phases, each with a different plot focus, but the first big chunk of the story is Reliance investigating the death of a friend, a fellow officer when she used to be a space cop. It’s an intriguing mystery which quickly gets her deep in the middle of danger from a bunch of directions, and Reliance sneaks and fights and wheedles and lies her way across multiple worlds.

The story is always interesting as Reliance unpacks more of the story and then gets herself emmeshed in what is going on. It’s interesting when she reflects back on her past as a space cop and when she uses skills or contacts from that time to advance her current objectives. She’s a fun character – resourceful, snarky, ass-kicking, and just a good time. The book is entirely within her first-person perspective. The other characters get less screen time, although we do meet a few criminals and spend more time with a set of cops who pursue Reliance through most of the book. I particularly liked a tech specialist cop named DeAjamae when she was hacking things – her constant patter of anger and expletives at the computers and systems she was using was really fun.

The inclusion of migraines in Reliance’s character is an interesting choice that gives her depth, and they play into later developments in a neat way. It was interesting to see a character having to deal with a chronic medical problem, and her coping mechanisms sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.

My Thoughts

It’s clear why this book is a finalist. It’s well-written, fun, action-packed, and a good read, the kind you feel happy about when you’re finished. There’s fighting, action, some sad bits, and a really strong main character. The worlds Reliance visits aren’t always described in detail, but you get a sense of how many of them work and how the human society works overall.

If I were to pick at something, it would probably be some plot developments where characters interacting with Reliance make decisions that seem foolish or out of character but without which either Reliance wouldn’t survive or the plot wouldn’t progress. There were a few moments that reminded me of Scott Evil from Austin Powers lamenting, “Why don’t you just shoot him?” In particular, a decision by a certain bad guy as Reliance starts to figure everything out seems terribly risky and foolish.

It wasn’t just the big decisions – there were also small head-scratcher opponent decisions that let Reliance escape or avoid detection or wiggle out of tight spots. All of these let the story continue, and it’s a fun enough story that it’s not a big deal at all, but I found some of them pulled me out of the story while I thought about smarter things Reliance’s opponents could or should have done. There were also a couple of times where Reliance instantly has a unique answer to a problem, or a contact who can help that we didn’t know about before, and I think it would have helped credulity if those were hinted at earlier rather than popping into the narrative just as they are needed.

One other minor quibble was some lack of clarity on how advanced various technologies are and how they work. Tech seems quite advanced in some ways (terraforming, space travel), while in others it seemed more 21st century than 25th or whatever (e.g. physical drives and servers). Some of the tech didn’t quite seem consistent, either – I was never really sure how stuff like interplanetary communications and networking functioned, or how the blasters worked, or how injured somebody got when they were stunned, or how long the stunning was supposed to last. But those are problems every Star Trek series has run into also and mostly failed at, and only uber-nerds probably care.

All of those are minor nitpicks and easily ignored. The story achieves its main goal very ably, which is to tell an exciting, kick-ass, funny story with a charismatic heroine and a gallery of heroic and/or hilarious sidekicks and vile villains.

Summation

If you’re up for a fun romp with a lot of great futuristic plot elements and a main character who’s really easy to cheer for, then On Impulse is definitely for you. Because of my schedule, I actually ended up listening to this one via a text-to-speech app while driving to DC and back (11 hours or so round trip), and it made the miles fly by (even when the algorithm insisted on saying “spacedock” as “spacey dock”). A good time, and a book I’m glad I had a chance to read.

My Indie Author Business Report for May 2025

June 6, 2025 / Dave / 0 Comments

May was a pretty good month. I had a BookBub Featured Deal for Daros on April 30th, with the book continuing free for five days, and that netted 10,081 downloads the first day and 14,341 over the five day promo. That’s a lot of books in people’s Kindles, although only a fraction of everybody who downloads is going to read it, and they may not read immediately.

The promo did a few different ways, as these free giveaways always do. One is obviously the free downloads, which gives the book to a bunch of folks who might not otherwise have discovered that book, or hopefully, all my books. Another is Kindle Unlimited page reads. When that many people download one of your books, the Amazon algorithm starts to think highly of it, and it pops up more for people to discover. There’s also likely a word-of-mouth boost as well, but that’s hard to quantify or track. You can see the results of the promo in my KU page reads here on a plot of the last 90 days:

Daros is yellow, and you can see that it grew massively after the promo on April 30th. The light blue is my Inquisitors’ Guild box set (three of my fantasy detective novels). They’re still riding high from a BookBub promo in February. Here’s the 90 days before the above graph. Note the axis here is 33% bigger numbers than for the last graph.

Yellow is Kenai here, with Daros in red. It’s clear the BookBub Featured Deals have a huge and lasting impact on KU page reads – I’m four months out from the box set promo and still seeing elevated reads.

A third way the promo helps is in reviews. Daros was at 162 ratings and 38 written reviews on Amazon prior to the promo, and now, a little over a month later, it’s at 315 ratings and 50 written reviews. There’s been similar movement on GoodReads and BookBub. That social testimony is valuable both when people see it and for the algorithm on Amazon to boost my book.

Finally, and this is new for this promo, I saw a big increase in audiobook sales for Daros. I only have audiobooks for four of my nine novels, and I don’t think I’ve had a BookBub for any of them while I’ve had the audio out. I had 107 audiobook sales over the few days surrounding the promo, which was really cool. I got the April payment from ACX just a little bit ago, and the per-book rate was a good bit lower than usual for me, so it may be that these folks were getting the book in a way that costs them less – I’m not quite sure what’s going on there. But it’s great to have people listening.

Revenues

I’m Amazon-exclusive for eight of my nine books, so my revenues are pretty easy to calculate. In terms of sales, I had 64 paid sales:

Daros in light blue was most of them. You can see a slight uptick after May 25, which I think is the Facebook Ads – a couple people bought my whole Inquisitors’ Guild series at once. I also had 47 audiobook sales, most of them at the start of the month from the Daros promo.

For page reads, I had a little over 100,000:

Daros is the big winner here in blue, with the Inquisitors’ Guild box set in yellow.

The Amazon revenue there is $538.77, which is a good month for me – more than double last month. That’s mostly the BookBub bumping up Daros. It’s 88% Kindle Unlimited, 16% ebook sales, and 2% paperback. With 47 audiobook sales, you can probably add about another $70-100 onto that, so let’s call it $610.

Expenses

The BookBub and associated stacked newsletter promotions for Daros were about $650. With the audiobook sales bump last month, I’ve probably broken even on that this month, and Daros sales and page reads should stay elevated for a while longer, so that’s a win. The visibility boost, word of mouth, and additional reviews are on top of that.

One other thing I did this month is that I started advertising my Inquisitors’ Guild series on Facebook. I used my most successful ad to date, one with some custom art I commissioned. I’m running them at $20 a day, and I’m getting a $0.27 per click rate, which I’d like to see higher, but it’s a lot better than my other Facebook ads have been. At that rate, I’d need about one in ten people who follows the link to either buy an ebook or read on KU, but because there are four books in the series, some folks will read the whole series, and if everybody did that, that’s more like 1 in 40, or 2.5%. I don’t think I’m that high in terms of sales, but I am seeing an uptick in paid sales. The KU data are too spotty really to see a signal. I spent about $140 on that in May.

I spent some money on a hotel going to ConCarolinas at the end of the month, where I was a guest and did five different panels. I wasn’t there to sell and didn’t have a vendor table, so I’m not going to count that as a book expense for me – more of a fun weekend, with costs for which I had no expectation of making revenue.

Analysis

If you count the $650 in BookBub and other promos plus $140 in ads, I’m at about $790 in expenses, which is clearly higher than the $610 in revenue I’m predicting. However, I also made $115 in Daros audiobook sales at the very end of last month, which was because of the promo. Adding that in brings revenues and expenses much more into line, and I should see elevated Daros sales and page reads for at least another month or two, so I’d say that’s also a win. Even if we don’t count the future benefits, I’m at $765 in revenues, $790 in expenses, for a loss of $25, one I’ll easily make up this month.

Whether the ads are a good investment remains to be seen. Next month, any impact they have is likely going to be blown away by the upcoming BookBub Featured Deal for The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar, which runs June 10-14. This is the first time that book will be featured, so I expect it will do pretty well. I’m not including the expenses for that in this month, but I will next month, when it goes live.

Links to books mentioned in this post:

Daros
Inquisitors’ Guild box set
The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar
Kenai

SPSFC#4 Semifinalist Review: Yours Celestially by Al Hess

May 31, 2025 / Dave / 1 Comment

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

The book is Yours Celestially by Al Hess. It is available from Itch.Io. Al also wrote Mazarin Blues, which was a semifinalist in SPSFC #1.

Blurb

From the author: Yours Celestially is a cozy, gay, and extra weird sci-fi that I hope you fall madly in love with. There’s a biblically accurate A.I., completely bonkers visuals, and bionic penis jokes. It’s set in a hopeful, queernorm, and diverse city full of plants, cute bakeries, cob houses, and found families.

My Review

This is a warm, funny sci fi story about a few people with challenges, both external and self-imposed, who lean on each other and their friends for help and for hope. Some interesting sci-fi concepts are mixed with heartfelt romance. This was without a doubt the most feel-good book of any I’ve read for this competition, and it is well worth a look.

Plot and Characters

There are two POV characters in the book. One is Sasha, a man who’s recently gone through a paid resurrection. This service, provided by a high-tech company, is pretty readily available, and many people make use of it. For most, it is an insurance policy against an accident death or fatal illness, but in some interesting cases, people with self-destructive habits or behaviors die and come back too. Sasha is one of these, an addict whose life fell apart well before his death. As the book opens, he’s recently back from the dead and trying to do better by his friends and family, but he’s not doing great despite their support.

The other POV character is Metatron, an AI construct created by the resurrection company. Metatron helps people going through the resurrection process. Their minds and personalities are digitally recorded, and when they die, they spend a little time in Limbo, an artificial reality, before new bodies can be grown for them and their psyches can be reimplanted.

The wall between Limbo and the real world should be impregnable, but Metatron is a caring protector and helper, and they sometimes connect the deceased with the real world in special cases. In Sasha’s case, though, he is awash in Metatron’s emotions despite having completed his resurrection. This shouldn’t happen, and it’s significantly affecting his health, both physical and mental, in the real world.

There are a host of other characters, some with major roles, others more secondary, and the little communities each of the main characters inhabits are the real joy of the book.

My Thoughts

The sci fi in this book follows a common trope – a world much like our modern one but with one additional mysterious bit beyond our reality. In this case, that’s resurrection, and the book explores the process, the outcomes, a little of the social controversy, and some of the technology Hess imagines for such a world. The weird futurism isn’t the point here, though. The point is following both of these protagonists as they make parallel journeys towards courage, self-acceptance, and love. The journey for each is different, but both are well-described and made meaningful both by the characters themselves and by the reactions of the people they interact with.

That’s not to say there isn’t tension or setback or betrayal or machinations – there’s some of each – but the focus is really on the two leads becoming whole. In Sasha’s case, that’s fixing what was broken, and in Metatron’s case, that’s discovery of how much more is possible than constraints would seem to allow.

There is real joy here, as both of these people, one damaged, one a victim of circustance, find ways to get to the love they want and need. And the feel-good part of the book comes from the people rooting for each of them to succeed. Both have wonderful found families, and the richness of their relationships with those others is what leaves you smiling when the book is done. Much of the story arc wouldn’t be out of place in a Hallmark movie, but the characterization is deliciously rich and deep here, and of course you don’t see Hallmark movies featuring AI angels or spare bodies grown in vats.

My only criticism of the book isn’t a big one at all – I just found the opening 30% or so to be a little slow, with both characters spending a lot of time wallowing in their problems and not taking much action to resolve them. Not a big deal, and the payoff when they both stepped up was well worth it. Some big twists revealed in the second half keep the story hopping and make you fear for these people you come easily to care about.

There’s some woo-woo stuff here that’s plot-convenient and never really explained. It’s kind of written off as “we don’t really understand the full mechanics of the resurrection process,” but to me, it seemed like you still needed some magic to produce the effects described. Again, no big deal, and explaining it would have diminished the magic of the story, so I think it was a good choice.

Summation

A delightful, well-written, unabashedly feel-good story about love, redemption, and found family. Highly recommended.

SPSFC#4 Semifinalist Review: Eat by Jesse Brown

May 14, 2025 / Dave / 0 Comments

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

The book is Eat by Jesse Brown, sometimes subtitled Sigma: The Sum or ΣΔΤ Book One. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

Welcome back to the food chain…

A chunk of white rested inside the dip of her collarbone. She fished it out and flicked it away, its rattle echoing as it bounced under a display table, alerting her to the silence. The ringing in her ears had finally stopped. The mask and goggles were long gone; fallen off in her haste. Pointless to wear them now, anyway…

Caede wants to complete her master’s degree, refresh her dating profile, and finally join the land of the living. Instead, she wakes up on a cold, wet pavement, surrounded by dead bodies and ferocious monsters. Kai waits anxiously for his sister to return from the world’s longest night shift. Ravi hides under a desk in his office, and Efia lays unconscious in a garage.

Jonathan, recently dumped and drinking himself to death in an empty flat, is waiting for the end to come… until a grizzly attack sends him stumbling into the path of Caede, and all the horrors of an apocalyptic London.

My Review

Note: There are some minor spoilers about the nature of this particular apocalypse in the review below – it’s something that you find out at least in basic terms in the opening chapters, but if you want a clean read, you should probably stop here.

This is a tight, tense story set in a peri-apocalyptic London, covering only a handful of days as survivors struggle to deal with the new, shattered world created by a rogue military virus that has killed most of London’s population. The danger and the action run almost non-stop, with violent animal-human hybrids roaming the streets along with a few other survivors. The small group at the heart of the story often has to fight or flee to stay alive.

Plot and Characters

We see this world through several perspectives, including Jon, a graphic designer who was about ready to give up even before the world went to hell, Caede, a waitress and student trying to take care of her brother Kai, a nurse, a doctor, and a virologist/geneticist. We spend the most time with Jon, but we get chapters or sections from the perspective some of the other characters as well.

For me, the characters were among the strongest parts of the book. Each is different, and each has a distinct attitude and voice and manner of speaking. All are dealing with the trauma of the world ending in different ways – some with despair, some with competence, some with violence. They were an interesting group to spend the apocalypse with. There are a few spots where there’s a little bit of head-hopping or floaty perspective, but those are minor and easily followed.

Because the book is set so close to when the world ends, the characters are all reeling, trying to cope and survive (or not trying very hard), some of them clinging to what they’ve lost, others (like Luna, a side character I’d have liked to get to know a little better) seizing the opportunity to make some big changes and take initiative. In that respect, the book reminded me a little of A Quiet Place: Day One, where you see things fall apart, and there’s plenty of action and drama, but where you’re not going to get much of a sense of what new world will arise from the ashes. This was in contrast to the other post-apocalyptic SPSFC finalist I just read, St. Elspeth, which happens years after the fall, and where the workings of the new world are the point of the story.

This timing and setting means the plot, like the Quiet Place prequel, is mostly jumping from danger to danger, with the main characters having only immediate survival goals and not much of a longer perspective. That’s exciting, with plenty of gory battles and narrow escapes, but also a little limiting – I would have liked to have the characters zoom out for a little bit at least to try to figure out their new context and do some bigger-picture thinking.

My Thoughts

There’s a lot to like here, especially with the characters, who are richly drawn and interesting (although sometimes frustrating – I’m looking at you, Jon). Their relationships and banter are fun and give the story heart. Some of the characters get pushed to the side some as the story progresses – they’re present, because the protagonists wouldn’t abandon them, but they don’t really have much to do, and we stop hearing from their perspectives much. I might have preferred to hear more from them as we went, particularly Luna and Efi. Efi gets more stage time in the middle, but it would have been cool to spend some time in her head towards the end as she starts to cope with what her life has become. There’s also something really interesting going on with Caede and her mind that’s never fully explained. I was curious if that was just her psyche or if she’s been affected by the virus somehow, but it fades away after a big fight she has.

There were some parts of this that strained credulity for me a little, but that could just be me being picky, which I tend to do. The source of the human-animal hybrids is explained, including in a fair bit of detail in an epilogue-like chapter, and the rapidity of the genetic alterations required is addressed, but it still seemed like this is not something that could ever actually happen, particularly with the variety of animals incorporated and the specific traits expressed. Why are there no plant people? I know I should just accept the horror-movie premise and enjoy monstrous animal people, but I took enough biology to make me think about the details.

In addition to the science, I had a little trouble with some of the human nature bits. Nearly all of the animal-human hybrid people we meet are sadistic sociopaths. Some are mute and apparently non-sentient, so that fits, but others have descended into cannibalism and depravity within a week or two of the world ending and have abandoned all semblance of morality despite retaining their minds. Maybe that’s something the virus does to you, but it made the monsters kind of one-note. If they’re smart enough to carry on conversations and strategize, it seems like they might be thinking bigger picture rather than just picking off survivors in the rubble. Also, they don’t seem to fight each other much (with some exceptions), instead banding together on Team Chimera for reasons that aren’t really clear.

The human team we follow, too, never really has any discussion about the long term, except for a little bit on one page about laying in supplies for winter. They also have almost no discussion of the extent of the damage to the world. I know they’re focused on the immediate dangers, but I think it would be human nature to wonder if the whole world has collapsed, or if it’s just London that’s affected. Is the whole planet reduced to savagery, or is it just around the Thames? Can you find a satellite phone anywhere and call somebody? Will the British Army be rolling in once the dust settles? Are there outsiders who can help? How will we feed ourselves sustainably once the shops are looted?

One other quibble, not a big one, is that the rag-tag human survivors seem really, really competent at monster fighting and weapon-improvising, which is not a skill set I’d expect them to have (except maybe Jon, whose rugby background at least includes some physicality). Either that, or the chimeras are vastly overconfident and their danger overrated.

But all of those are nitpicks. The core of the story is a fun one, definitely reminiscent of a scary Saturday afternoon at the movies, with action, romance, loss, heroism, and emotion. There’s no shortage of excitement and drama, and Brown does a great job of providing a steady stream of action and banter and character development.

Summation

If you’re up for a bloody apocalypse book with weird creatures, human struggles, and characters you’ll care about, Eat has got you covered. Just be careful about what you inject, and don’t trust those government blokes.

SPSFC#4 Semifinalist Review: Saint Elspeth by Wick Welker

May 8, 2025 / Dave / 2 Comments

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

The book is Saint Elspeth by Wick Welker. The book is available from Amazon.

Blurb

When they appeared across the sky, speculation wheeled around the world—the aliens were from heaven, the invaders were from hell… or they were proof that neither existed. But when they landed, curiosity gave way to suspicion and the nations reacted with nuclear force, setting off a chain reaction that left the world in ruins.

Twenty years later, instead of nearing her retirement, Dr. Elspeth Darrow struggles to forget the loss of her child and husband by plunging herself into the work of operating the last remaining hospital in San Francisco. With medical supplies running out and working herself to exhaustion, Elspeth must embark on a risky salvage mission into the heart of the Neo California danger zone. Here, she discovers the disturbing truth: the aliens have returned.

As the mystery of the aliens’ purpose on Earth unravels before her, Elspeth must hide what she discovers from reactionary despots, all vying to bring Neo California under their control. Aided by a band of pre-war scientists and new-world medical students, Elspeth races against astronomical odds to reveal the terrifying truth that might save the world—or finally destroy it for good.

My Review

This was a really engaging read for me. It wades deep into fertile sci-fi waters, with elements of post-apocalyptic fiction, alien invasion, and first contact. There are deep mysteries to figure out, but there’s also the unrelenting struggle and pressure of humans trying to survive in the wreckage of 21st century society, greatly diminished.

Plot and Characters

I can’t say much about the plot here, because a lot of what I might get into would be spoilers. The setup, though, is that we’re following a jaded, broken woman, the Elspeth of the title, who runs an understaffed and undersupplied clinic in the ruins of San Francisco. After the appearance of organic alien pod ships in the skies, there was a fairly extensive nuclear exchange as humanity struggled with how to respond and fell to fractious wars. Small groups of humans hunkered down in bunkers until it was safe to emerge, and now they are back above ground trying to make a go of it. The aliens, the Hilamen, never took action against the humans, and nobody can really figure out what their purpose was.

Elspeth has a great voice, and her weariness and cynicism combine with perseverance and compassion to create an engaging and conflicted character, one who you can certainly cheer for. She occasionally drifts towards somewhat frustrating maudlin spells, but those are understandable, even if they don’t necessarily move the story forward. She’s got a past (and present) full of loss, and she thinks she’s going through the motions in her clinic just because she doesn’t have anything better to do.

There are a host of side characters, good and evil (or both), venal and noble (or both), heroic and dissipated (or both). Almost everybody in the book is complex and rich, which is a real treat.

My Thoughts

I mused about halfway through that reading this felt like I was playing Fallout or The Last of Us, which was funny, because Welker says in the author’s note that he was playing The Last of Us while writing. There are some great post-apocalyptic tropes here, with ruined buildings, nature taking over, and people succumbing to bravado and militarism, hoarding salvaged resources, and facing hardships now that society and its laws and comforts have vanished. There are even giraffes from the zoo, which must be a TLoU homage. All of this part works well and seems gritty and believable.

There’s the additional dimension of the mystery of the Hilamen, who initially seem not to be doing anything. They just arrived, inadvertently triggered humanity to tear itself to pieces, landed, and vanished. That mystery is a really fun one, and it has a satisfying answer that’s pieced together as the story unfolds.

There is a ton of very real-sounding medical procedure in here, which makes sense, as Welker is an ICU doctor. There’s also some very interesting xenobiology. That part is left a little mysterious, although it’s partially explained in the plot through scientific observation by people making reasonable guesses based on the information they have. I couldn’t tell you at the end exactly how the Hilamen work in terms of physics and biochemistry, but there’s enough there to be satisfying.

Where I had more questions was with the climate and environment and politics of this post apocalyptic world. The social structure of the various California colonies is well-described, and the future history makes sense. There are occasional references to other parts of the world, but the geoscientist in me wanted to know a little more about the extent and distribution of the fallout, not to mention the climate change that seems to have engulfed parts of California and caused sinkholes and flooding and formation of significant new rivers. The sci-fi fan in me wanted to know better how the rest of the world was functioning too. But what we get is engaging and real enough, and those parts aren’t the focus of the story, and going into more detail wouldn’t really have added anything useful to what’s already a pretty long narrative.

The pace of discovery, the use of the scientific method, the victories and losses, the questions of morality and human nature, and the odd but satisfying way many characters had of changing their own goals and mindset in response to their experiences all contributed to a rip-roaring narrative full of interesting pieces.

The book is very well-written and well edited, with only a handful of typos in what would be a 400-page large-size paperback. Welker’s use of metaphor and imagery is really neat – not overwhelming or flowery, just fun and a little magical when it shows up.

Summation

I greatly enjoyed my time with this. Elspeth is a really engaging character, and her voice and attitude are refreshing even in a world that is mostly going to hell. Amidst the ruin and brutishness, there is some hope (mixed with despair and ambition, to be sure), and the story takes you along a number of unexpected but rewarding turns along a road to a satisfying conclusion. This is a really good book, tightly crafted, full of adventure and humanity, and quite worthy of the SPSFC semifinals.

My Indie Author Business Report for March 2025

April 1, 2025 / Dave / 0 Comments

I’ve taken to summarizing my indie author business each month, so here’s March. This month, unlike many others, I did no new advertising (I have a couple small things that are ongoing). My books benefited from the afterglow from a BookBub featured deal at the start of February, although that’s fading now nearly sixty days later. So, this is a month that’s almost entirely profit for me, with very few expenses, and with a little boost from past marketing.

Revenue

Here’s my Amazon revenue (estimated, because they don’t announce the Kindle Unlimited rate until later).

The majority of this (blue bars) is the three-book box set of Inquisitors’ Guild books, which is what the BookBub feature in February was for. That’s $354 of the $487 total, or about 73%. The next highest is Kenai (in yellow) at $39 or 8%. Kenai has been a consistent leader for me. Third place (in red) at $32 goes to The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar, which may include some spillover from the Inquisitors’ Guild books, since it’s also epic fantasy. Good to see that book reaching some folks.

The $487 in revenue includes about $74 in ebook sales, $5 in print sales, and $409 in Kindle Unlimited revenue, making KU 84% of my revenues. That’s a high ratio for me, but I think it comes from the Inquisitors’ Guild set shooting upwards in the algorithm after the promo. I’m usually between 60-80% KU for revenues.

The story is almost the same as far as page reads go, since page reads were such a high source of revenue for me.

If you want to see the impact of the BookBub featured deal, here’s the 90-day history, which includes some time before it. I’m down from the immediate peak, of course, but the continued effects are nice and staying stronger than some of my promos do.

Added to these revenues, I sold seven audiobooks. Those usually net me about $3 each, although I won’t get confirmation for a few more weeks. So, figure I’m nearing $520 in total revenue for March.

Expenses

I spent a little under $4 on some ongoing Amazon ads with keywords that sometimes work, although I should probably cancel those. They’re very low-bid odd keywords, which are the only kind I’ve been able to make profitable, and they don’t scale well, so it’s kind of a waste of effort and time.

I’m obviously benefitting (or profit-taking) from the $700 or so I spent on the February BookBub and assorted related advertising. I broke even on that sometime in late February or early March, so it’s all profit now. I also have an ongoing year-long advertising buy with Dr. Who Online, which I paid for last fall. It was quite expensive and has done nearly nothing for me, so that was a mistake. They had a money-back guarantee, so I’ll see if I can get any of that returned at the end.

Summary

With $520 in revenues and $4 in expenses, this month saw $516 in profits. That’s pretty good, even if some of the profits come from prior months’ expenses.

Even with that success, this is a below-average revenue month for me. I had about $7400 in revenue in 2024, which would be a monthly pace of about $616. However, I reached that higher revenue with some ad spending that didn’t have positive return.

Is lower revenue with profit better than higher revenue with losses? In business terms, absolutely. In terms of growing my audience and my brand, maybe not. I’m going to try some advertising again in April and see if I can get some of my other books juiced up in the Amazon algorithm so that people see them. I can afford to blow some money on this to see if it helps. Still trying to figure out if the long-term growth impact of ad spending and audience building makes the short-term losses worthwhile.

I should also have a new mystery released in April, and I’ll have some launch expenses for that (cover, editing, promos), but I may also see some good initial sales – I usually sell 10-30 books in the month after a release, more if I put some ad money behind it.

SPSFC#4 Quarterfinalist Review: Da Vinci on the Lam by B.D. Booker

March 7, 2025 / Dave / 1 Comment

This is my fourth 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 Da Vinci on the Lam by B.D. Booker. The book is available from Amazon.

A note on my judging for Peripheral Prospectors: We split up the team’s books between us, because six quarterfinalists was a lot to get through (although one judge did manage to read them all). We made sure each book got a fair shake – all quarterfinalists got at least three full reads and ratings from our six judges. I was not able to get through all six before the deadline as I had hoped, but I intend to read and review the other two quarterfinalists I didn’t get to yet (Whiskey and Warfare and Afterburn) regardless of which of our six progresses to the semifinals.

Blurb

One week. One chance. Earth is dying as a fungal ‘grit’ and dust storms smoother crop lands and destroy the oceans. The rich flee into space, leaving the poor to die off. But if gunslinger Artis Quinn delivers a priceless da Vinci artwork to an offworlder hub on the other side of the country, his family will get tickets off-world. Yet the true end of the world might arrive sooner than expected and Quinn will have to fight his way through the ruthless Onyx Group to succeed.

My Review

This was an exciting, grueling tale, set on a dying Earth, with humanity on the brink of extinction. The near-future mentioned shows a not-too-recognizable America in the midst of a climate collapse, with food supplies failing, technology rusting away, the political system in chaos and corruption, and people living and dying in hardship, although some lucky few have the money to live in domes or still have real food, and a rarefied elite make it off-world to colonies on other planets.

This is the setting. The core of the story, though, is something else, played out across this desolate landscape. At its heart, it’s a very long chase, with our heroes (semiheroes, at least) Artis and Julia trying to spirit away a stolen Da Vinci sketch while the previous owners try to recover it, not because they like art, but because somebody even more important than they are want it.

Plot and Characters

I kind of did the plot above, and there’s actually not too much more to say. The book alternates POV characters from good guys to bad guys to shadowy bosses, but it always returns to showing what the good guys are doing to try to achieve their goals (which turns out to be a huge variety of crafty stuff) and what the bad guys are doing to try to thwart them (which involves a host of spy-ish stuff and advanced tech).

The two leads, Julie and Artis, are a fun pair to follow. They’re both full and realistic (at least in this world) and their backstories get fleshed out as the book progresses. Their motivations are complex and shifting, and they form a bond and partnership together that’s engaging and fun. Artis is an archetype – a world-weary ex-special-forces drifter who’s a complete badass, the kind of character Sylvester Stallone would both act and direct himself in a 1980’s movie that got 2.5 stars. But Artis is deeper than that, with some real charm, some fallibility, and lots of regrets.

Julie’s a little softer focused – she gets less POV time – but her shifting loyalties and her fish-out-of-water experience are interesting and well done. She has crises of conscience that seem real as her basic mission becomes a lot more complicated, and as the costs mount.

The bad guys aren’t as well developed, as they’re kind of locked into being part of the bad guy team, and they don’t have a lot of agency other than to follow orders or die. A couple of them get a lot of POV time, but most of that is them just being fooled or seeing through ruses. We get pretty deep into a kind of middle management bad guy, Big, but to be honest, he’s not that interesting, and he too is basically just doing what he’s told and what he has to. The other baddie we see more of is Aveev, but he gets repetitive rather than deep. There were multiple scenes of him thinking hard, valuing and assessing his soldiers, and regretting that he was lying to them. About the fifth time he has a chapter like that, without much new, it gets a little stale, because his motivations and mission haven’t changed, and he hasn’t developed.

My Thoughts

The big win here is the desolate world, full of people barely hanging on. We gradually learn more about how this happened, but basically the world is covered in “grit,” a fungal dust that ruins crops and foods and infests everything it touches. There are elements of Mad Max and other broken-world futures in here, but this is fresh and told well, with little vignettes and encounters with colorful wasteland folks. I liked this part, seeing how various people were finding work, keeping alive, and dealing with severe hardship. The various adaptations people have made to handle the gritstorms and starvation are interesting, as is the social stratification we sometimes see.

The plot is exciting, too – very action-movie-ish, with escapes and mad dashes and crappy vehicles barely holding together and gun fights and trains and cannibals and cool shenanigans. All of this is good stuff, but the problem I had was that, while this was a cool action movie, it felt like a four-and-a-half-hour action movie, one where the plot didn’t change much at all from start to finish. The characters grew and developed, and some stuff was going on in the world, but the clever-ploy/evil-scheme tennis match went well into extra games, and my neck got tired. There started to be some cheats to increase drama, too – stuff that the characters knew but weren’t telling us, making them unreliable, and cheapening the tension a little when we found out. Also some seemingly uncharacteristic own-goals from the good guys and unrealistic “Aha! I’m here when I couldn’t possibly be” moments frmo the bad guys. But in the end, it was satisfying. The end was maybe a little contrived (and oddly rushed after so much stasis), but I enjoyed the journey, even if I might have preferred a shorter route.

There were occasionally some info-dumpy parts about the world. Booker usually does a good job of revealing these things in the characters’ voices, but sometimes it’s clear he just wants us to know how stuff works and is going to spend a page or two telling us. It’s cool stuff, so that’s forgivable, and it mostly reads fine. There are a few times where an aspect of the world is told over again, even three or four times, when it’s already been detailed earlier, and that can get frustrating, especially in a long book.

In terms of writing, the worldbuilding and the characterization of the leads are great, the dialogue snaps, and the detail is rich and interesting. The editing is a little rough, with more grammar and structure errors than you’d see in a traditionally published book. A fair number of comma splices (though not nearly as many as Transference), some word errors (characters repeatedly pouring over things, riff raft, etc.) and such. Not enough to detract from what is at its heart a good book, but something maybe to work on in a 2nd edition or rerelease.

Summation

I enjoyed my time with this. The fundamental lunacy of two people worrying about a 15th century scrap of art as the world is ending is a lot of fun, and the writing was cinematic in a good way. I really liked the main character throughout – he has a great world-weary badass thing going. I thought it was longer than it should be, and a bit repetitive, but I’ve been known to eat more cake than I should at times, and even where this dragged a bit, it tasted good.

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.