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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.

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).

My thoughts on NaNoWriMo.org’s recent troubles

September 3, 2024 / Dave / 0 Comments

So, I’ve done NaNoWriMo for the past five years, and I’ve written a whole bunch during these Novembers, the majority of four books and a good chunk of Daros (my college was trying to illegitimately sack me during November 2020, so writing suffered that year).

The official NaNoWriMo organization has screwed up some things pretty hard recently. One of those was keeping creepy teen community forum leaders in place despite complaints, squelching some complaints, and then not really being open about any of it. Another was promoting a predatory fake publishing company to their users. Today, they posted a policy saying that it’s fine to use AI for your writing project, which is the opposite of the point of the event. You can write 50,000 words in seconds (at the expense of a chunk of global warming) with ChatGPT, and that isn’t special at all. They also asserted that it’s ableist and classist to criticize the use of ChatGPT, which convoluted argument has further pissed off a bunch of economically disadvantaged disabled writers who have been doing just fine.

A bunch of people are abandoning the organization for these and other issues, which is appropriate – people get to respond however they want, and there’s more than enough to justify some action.

Some others are promising to block/ban/cancel anybody who still tries to do a lot of writing in November and gets excited about doing so, which, like many overheated cancellation attempts, strikes me as an overreach. I wish we could point out the wrong in something these days without also self-righteously threatening the choices and needs of other people just trying to get by.

For my part, I’m going to leave behind the official NaNo site and no longer enter my projects or progress there. I never used it much for community or anything else, although it was fun to hit the achievements as I wrote each year. But there are plenty of word-counting sites available elsewhere. I’m still going to do a bunch of writing in November. It’s fun for me, and a good annual habit, and it’s been rewarding each year I’ve done it.

I want to read stories by people, not computers. Having an algorithm cobble together a miasma of stolen sources, math, and bullshit creates soulless fakery. It bears no resemblance to the long tradition of storytellers, from those sitting around a fire in the Stone Age to those with fingers flying over keys today, sharing their experiences and imagination with other humans.

Writing past your headlights

July 16, 2024 / Dave / 0 Comments

This article on my writing process was posted as part of a blog tour for What Grows From the Dead. It was originally posted here.

Writing past your headlights

It’s late, and your trip’s been long and difficult. You’re off the main road, trying to follow directions, but they aren’t detailed enough. You’ve never been here, you’re not familiar with the territory, and nothing looks familiar in the dark – just shadows, hints, only coming into focus for an instant as your lights cross them. There’s paint on the road to show the lanes, but some of it is worn away, and the intersections and turns aren’t marked.You’re going too fast for your lights, and if something’s in the road, you’re in for a few moments of either terror or panic as you try not to run headlong into it.

That’s my writing process. I’m what writers call a “pantser,” somebody who writes by the seat of their pants. That’s in contrast to a “plotter,” somebody who has reams of backstory, character profiles, recipes, history, and a massive, detailed plot outline, somebody who knows what’s happening in each chapter, what beats they need to hit, as they progress towards the plot’s conclusion, along the route they’ve already worked out and carefully crafted step by step.

Those two styles are wonderful in that they both can lead to terrific work. J.R.R. Tolkien was clearly a plotter, almost more excited about creating the details his world’s history and language and legend than he was in the story on which the book rests. Donald Westlake, author of countless mysteries, legendarily hated outlines and just wanted as he wrote to find “what’s next?”

How it works for me is I just start writing, page one, and usually I just write until the first draft of book is finished. I usually have no more than a couple sentences of concept, not a plot, just a setup. I often don’t know who my characters are, or even how many they will be, until I begin to discover them on the page. A pattern I often follow is to write for a bit and then throw myself a curve at the end of a chapter – a twist in the plot, an unexpected appearance, a secret revealed. I certainly don’t try to make every chapter end on a cliffhanger, but those seem to me to be natural moments of heightened interest, nice punctuation marks in the narrative. Often I don’t know what they are or even when they’re coming until I write them. If I’m doing my job right, they also serve as little nudges to keep reading – the reader saying “what’s next?” right along with me.

In What Grows from the Dead, one of those moments that turned out to be central to the story was a “what’s in the box?” moment, one that readers of the book will surely remember. I had no idea starting the chapter what was in the box. I hadn’t even known there was going to be a box until I threw it in as another twist a couple chapters earlier. I certainly didn’t know that the contents of the box would be critical to how the story played out. I did know it had to be something important and maybe a little unexpected given that I’d kind of hyped it up some, but beyond that, I didn’t know until I wrote the last sentences of the chapter what was in there.

I’m sure that sounds chaotic, and it is, but I have a good bit of background in thinking this way. I’ve been doing improv comedy for the past 18 years with a group at a local comedy club, and my love for that feeds perfectly into my writing style. With improv, you start a scene without knowing what it’s about, without knowing where you are, who you’re with, or even who you are. All of that gets solidified as you go, ideally early on in the scene so you can build the relationships and the drama that make the scene get moving and have a more appealing (and if you do it well, amazing and funny) plotline. You’re doing all the elements of storytelling there in the moment, while people are watching you, without a chance to edit or go back or rethink, and it’s just magical when it works. The basic tenet of improv is “yes, and” – meaning I accept what you’ve just added to our world, and here is something else I’m giving back, something that hopefully expands and defines the world, our characters, our relationships, our desires.

When improv succeeds, it’s absolutely enchanting. In part, that’s because the expectations the audience has are so low – they know you’re making up a scene and a story and a world on the spot, and if you pull it off, even halfway, they’re with you, impressed or even amazed. If you fail, you can just go on to the next scene, and you’ve only wasted a few minutes of people’s time. With books, however, it’s totally different. You’re asking people to spend hours in your world, and there’s a strong expectation going in that the book will be good, that it will be polished, tight, meaningful, lyrical. You don’t get the grace that an improv audience will give you, and you shouldn’t get it. Even if you write a book using the principles from improv, the book still needs to be just as good as what you’d get from somebody with fifteen notebooks full of outlines, backstory, and character sketches.

That’s where editing and rewriting come in for me. I can improv a first draft, see what happens, get to know my characters, come up with a plot and world, emotional beats and a satisfying ending. Once I’ve done that, I get right back in my car and drive that route again, this time in daylight, where I can see appreciate the colors and the leaves and see everything coming. That’s when the world truly takes full shape.

Writing to genre

July 16, 2024 / Dave / 0 Comments

This article on my writing process was posted as part of a blog tour for What Grows From the Dead. It was originally posted here.

Writing to genre – challenges and shortcuts

I’m here to talk about my mystery book, but I have been publishing books for about five years now, and I’ve branched out from fantasy, where I started, to sci fi, and more recently, to mysteries and thrillers. I love to read in all these genres, but writing them really reveals what different ingredients are needed for each.

With my fantasy novels, most of which are actually also mysteries, I feel like I have the most freedom. I can create new worlds, new cultures, new populations. I can mess with reality using magic and weird forces. I can create people who are very different from people in the real world, and give them all kinds of interesting skills and quirks. I do a lot of research to try to understand how people lived with less technology and in a feudal society, and I try to represent that to the extent that it fits into the story. Medicine and laundry are two areas where I’ve done a deep dive, along with different styles of fighting, because fighting is central to lots of stories.

Sci-fi has a bit more constraint. You need to respect the rules of physics and reality, or at least most of them, and, more than with fantasy, you need to justify where you’re breaking these rules and how. Sci-fi readers can be more unhappy when your worlds don’t make sense or violate basic laws. With the sci-fi books, and with the scientific elements of my thriller, I’ve enlisted physicist and biologist friends to check my work and make sure what I’m saying is at least in the neighborhood of plausibility. There’s also a kind of common lingo with sci-fi that fans know and accept, some of it real, some of it sci-fi – nanites, wormholes, that kind of thing.

With my novels set in the real world, there is, paradoxically, a sense of relief but also a sense of even more responsibility to get things right. The relief comes from not having to invent or explain everything about the world. Readers understand cars and cell phones and cultural references and how people in the modern world live their lives, so you don’t have to explain the society your characters live in at the same time as you’re trying to tell a story. That can make the storytelling much more focused, because you don’t have to digress to explain who the Knights of the Imperial Boot are, or how mineral magic works, or how space warp travel works and is possible. These mysteries and thrillers can be leaner, more efficient, and hopefully more relatable right at the start.

The responsibility part of writing in the modern world is that people can almost instantly tell if you’re getting something wrong. You can’t just make up how something like a hospital or a police station works, because your readers, or at least some of them, will find your errors and be unhappy about them. I should know – as a geologist, I am often annoyed when shows get things like lava and quicksand and Earth history wrong.

That responsibility is a duty, but it’s also an opportunity. When starting to write Got Trouble, I made my main character, Glynnis, knowledgeable about guns, something that I wasn’t at all. That meant I had to learn and research to get that stuff right. I read up whatever I could find, and I watched a ton of videos, which helped not only with factual stuff like loading and unloading and effective range and all that, but also with a culture of gun owners that I hadn’t had much contact with. I also have a friend (and reader) who gave me some great feedback both on how the guns would work but also how somebody comfortable around them would think of them and act. I also had some friends who work in emergency departments help me with how the intake of a patient with gunshot wounds would work. When I wrote a story set on an old sailing ship, I consulted with sailors to make sure I was getting the sail names, the equipment, and the basic operation correct.

With What Grows From the Dead, I made the main character somebody who had worked as a professor, a life I know very well. But the stuff that happens to him and the things he chooses to do were not familiar at all. I needed to research how police procedure works with search warrants, arrests, defense counsel, and a county jail. I also spent a whole evening learning how to run a meth lab, something that will raise concerns if anybody’s watching my search history. With all the poisons, swords, and other questions I’ve done with the fantasy stuff (e.g. how long would it take somebody to die if stabbed in the gut?), I’m sure I must look like a seriously troubled Google user.

There is a lot that’s common to books no matter whatever genre you’re in. You need relatable characters who act believably, who make choices that fit their situation and their personality. You need the words they say to make sense, to mesh with their values and background, and to be what actual humans say. You need excitement, secrets, humor, longing, adventure, sorrow. Those are the fundamental elements to any human story, going back to tales around campfires long ago. If I do my job, then my readers will find something to relate to as they sit there in the firelight, imagining other lives and keeping warm.