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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 / 2 Comments

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.

Vampire Steve

July 11, 2024 / Dave / 0 Comments

Vampire Steve is a character in What Grows From the Dead. This was a character guest post as part of that book’s blog tour, originally posted here.

Transcript of Taped Interview: Stephen Janewicz, session #2

Date: November 3, 10:45am

Background on the Drummond case

Interviewer: Det. Gerald Palmer, NCSBI

Palmer: Mr. Janewicz–

Janewicz: You may call me Steve, mortal.

Palmer: Sorry, Steve. We’ve covered the facts of the case in our conversation earlier this morning, so now I want to turn to what you know about Morris Drummond. I’m trying to get a sense of who the guy is.

Janewicz: To what end?

Palmer: [breath noises] He’s not in trouble. At least, not yet. I’m just trying to corroborate the things he’s said while we unwind what’s going on in Baxter County.

Janewicz: Very well. You may continue.

Palmer: So, you’ve known him a while?

Janewicz: The fleeting lives of your kind do not always impinge upon my memory.

Palmer: Right. But you know Morris better than that?

Janewicz: He has served as my chariot-master these past six moons.

Palmer: The chariot in question being his mom’s Chevy?

Janewicz: [no reply]

Palmer: How often did he drive you?

Janewicz: When the sun was at its height, and at its most dangerous to me, and again when the gloom of night reigned.

Palmer: Can you put that in, er, mortal terms? With hours?

Janewicz: My shop opens at noon and closes at midnight.

Palmer: So he drove you there and back?

Janewicz: And sometimes other places, when I was in need of sustenance.

Palmer: What’s a guy like you eat?

Janewicz: I favor pork rinds. And other foods darker and more mysterious.

Palmer: Right. So, you and Morris are friends?

Janewicz: I sensed there were none closer to him than I during his time of darkness, though others became entangled. I hope his curtain of shadow may yet lift.

Palmer: That was kind of a yes or no question, you know.

Janewicz: [no reply]

Palmer: This curtain of shadow thing. You mean the business with the Baxter County sheriff’s department?

Janewicz: In part. But the pall cast over Morris began well before that. He dwelt in shadow, sucked dry by his employer and then by the loss of one he loved.

Palmer: Who’s that? That he loved?

Janewicz: The one who cast him forth into this sorry world.

Palmer: His mom, you mean?

Janewicz: [no reply]

Palmer: So, he was, what, depressed?

Janewicz: His soul shed tears of blood from a wound that would not close.

Palmer: Right. [Breath noises. Papers shuffling.] Do I have this right that you were in the military?

Janewicz: I served in the ranks of blood and strife, once. It was a time long ago, before I became as I am now. I almost feel that was a different man.

Palmer: [chuckling] I bet. Can’t see you pulling off this, uh, whatever this is, in basic training.

Janewicz: [no reply]

Palmer: Did you ever know Morris to be violent? Use guns?

Janewicz: Morris is a man of peace. Weapons of war and violence were alien to him.

Palmer: How do you know this? Did you talk about it?

Janewicz: He told me he had to watch YouTube videos to even figure out if a gun was loaded.

Palmer: Right.

Janewicz: I must needs depart? My place of business opens anon.

Palmer: Sure, just one more question. When did Morris get agitated about all this… this situation he found himself in?

Janewicz: I think it grew with each new insult to his honor, each new threat to his life and safety.

Palmer: Right. Can you maybe put a date on that?

Janewicz: It was when he found that which his mother preferred buried.

Mindy

July 11, 2024 / Dave / 0 Comments

Mindy is a character in What Grows From the Dead. This was a character guest post as part of that book’s blog tour, originally posted here.

An essay about a family member? Are you kidding? That’s soooo sixth grade. No, I don’t think I’m special. No, I don’t want detention. Duh.

Ugh.

OK, here you go.

Mindy Drummond
AP English 
3rd Period Mr. Jones

My Beloved Father

(Of course I’m going to give it a stupid title if you make me write a stupid essay)

My dad, Morris, is a college professor. Well, sort of. He’s on a leave of absence now because of the business-ification of higher education administration. That all happened last year. Well, last academic year, in like February. Well, I think some of it was going on before that, but that’s when he told me, during one of our weekly phone calls. He doesn’t usually say much during those calls because I talk so much, but I could tell he was unhappy, so I asked. I think talking about it made him more unhappy, maybe, but it also seemed like he felt better telling somebody. I wish he’d find a girlfriend, but I think he needs to get through this stuff first.

Anyway, it sounds like the college where he works, Riggson, was a bunch of XXXXs (fill in strongest insult that won’t get me detention). Well, the administration, anyway. They closed his department and fired him, even though he has tenure, and even though he’s worked there for years. It sounds really sketch. He said he’s protesting, going through an appeal, and that he can sue them for breach of contract and improper termination. Maybe that will work, I don’t know. Do I look like a lawyer? No, I do not, is the right answer to that question.

That all was hard on him. Like, really hard. I don’t remember too much from when he and Mom divorced, because I was little, but I think it might be like that. Like, he pledged himself to this stupid institution, gave it the best years of his life (well, so far), and then they cheated on him and fired him, and now he’s left feeling hurt and betrayed and angry and sad. I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve been divorced. I’m sixteen. But it seems like that might be what it’s like.

I go out to see him summers, and I convinced Mom to let me stay a little longer last summer. It wasn’t fun, because Grandma (his mom) was sick. Serious sick, stage 4. With dad just terminated from the college and dealing with all that, and Grandma dying, he was pretty much a wreck. I mean, we all were. Grandma physically, him emotionally, and me too, trying to help, even though there wasn’t much to be done. I mean, Dad was cool even with all that going on. He’s funny, and nice, and he really cares about me, unlike certain other supposed father figures who live in Alpharetta I might mention. He’s really dorky too, but in that kind of cool way dads can sometimes be. He also buys me milkshakes all the time, which is nice – the divorce dividend, you know? They destroy your home life and fracture your family and your identity, and you get delicious ice cream.

Anyway, Dad took Grandma’s death even harder than I thought he might. I think it’s because of the job thing, like everything being stripped from him at once. He’s pretty strong, usually, and stays happy, but this was as dark as I’ve seen him go. He put on a brave show at the end of the summer, when I had to go back, and he acts like things are OK when we talk, but I can tell he’s not really holding it all together. I really don’t know what he’s going to do next, and I worry about him.

In conclusion, this is my essay about my dad. More than 500 words, which is what was required. If you find it boring, remember that if you let us do cooler stuff, like multimedia or TikToks, you would have more interesting things to grade than this dead-tree old-school drivel, so it’s kind of your own fault. Get with the 21st century, Mr. Jones. We are the youth of tomorrow, not the youth of 1960 or whenever you went to school.