Best of 2010

Best Smackdown: No contest. The honor goes to George Takei’s video response to Clint McCance.  “Mister McCance, you are a douchebag.”

Best Book Read: I’m gonna go with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon] by N. K. Jemisin.  I commented briefly on this one here.

Best Family Trip: Windycon.  This was my first convention with my wife and kids, and it was great.  We don’t get much vacation time, so it was wonderful just spending a few days together.  They all enjoyed the con, but I think my favorite part was Friday night before everyone else arrived, just goofing around in the pool together.

Best Random Artwork: Anime Snoopy vs. Ninja Cats, by socchan.

Best Discovery: Doctor Who.  (David Tennant in particular.)  In my 36 years on this Earth, people have introduced me to Monty Python, Red Dwarf, and so much more … so why didn’t anyone tell me about the Doctor?  I blame ALL OF YOU!  Fortunately, we have borrowed several seasons worth of DVDs, and are remedying this oversight as quickly as possible.

Best Convention: World Fantasy Con.  Four whole days, and so many wonderful people to meet and catch up with.

Best Realization in Sanchin-Ryu: Holy crap!  I don’t know anything!!!  (Thank you Master Faught for this lesson.)

Best Moment with my Son (Age 5): Having dinner with friends, and watching him play with their five-year-old for hours without any problems or conflicts.  It eased one of my biggest fears following his ASD diagnosis earlier this year.

Best Moment with my Daughter (Age 10): Seeing her in deliberately mismatched socks, two T-shirts (one tied with scrunchies), & a thin braid of hair clipped back over one year, and realizing she’s exploring how to express herself and who she wants to be.  And that who she’s becoming is pretty darn cool.

Best Writing Moment (Business): Getting the offer from DAW for the Magic ex Libris series.  Book deals are always nice, but this one represents a significant step up in my career.  Plus it’s a series I’m really excited about!

Best Writing Moment (Creative): Figuring out how to end The Snow Queen’s Shadow [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy].  Without spoiling things, it felt right.  It felt honest.  And I’m pretty damn proud.

Best LEGO: Transforming Optimus Prime.

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Feel free to add your own!

First Book Friday: Kelly McCullough

Welcome to the last First Book Friday of 2010.  I’ll be taking a break for the next few weeks, but we’ll hopefully get more author stories next month.  Finishing out the year is Kelly McCullough.

Kelly’s series blends mythology, magic, and hacking, but most importantly, he also writes about webgoblins.  And as we all know, goblins make everything better.  (Click here for my thoughts on some of his books.)

Kelly’s web site doesn’t include much biographical information.  Therefore we are free, nay obligated, to make stuff up.  I’ll start by revealing that Kelly McCullough used to make extra money as a crash test dummy for Go Carts.

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I started writing seriously in 1990, finishing my 1st novel in about four months. I did it mostly because I’d met a wonderful woman who I intended to marry.

I wanted to have something approaching a normal life as well as a successful marriage and for me that meant giving up theater a career trajectory I had been on since the age of 11. Writing a novel was artistic methadone for my theater addiction. It also turned out to be a much more compelling artistic drug, at least for me, but I didn’t know that going in.

The novel was called Uriel and it’s currently trunked. It was a contemporary fantasy written around a mafia hitman/vampire protagonist and the return of magic into the world with the coming of the harmonic convergence. Despite that, it actually didn’t suck and I may some day write it again from scratch since I still love the plot. It even got some moderately hard nibbles from big New York houses. If I’d known then what I know now I might have been able to rewrite it to spec from one of those rejections and sell it to the editor in question.

Not knowing that and having my first-born novel rejected was the best awful thing that ever happened to me because it forced me to keep growing as a writer and to try something different. If I’d sold Uriel straight out of the gate, I might well be into my second decade of a mediocre but possibly quite successful career.

My 2nd novel was a fantasy farce called Swine Prince. It also got serious attention from New York, though it never quite cleared the bar. It’s on its third major incarnation at this point and off seeking a publisher once again. It’s fast, it’s funny, and in its current form it might well sell. Not selling it right of the gate was the 2nd best awful thing that happened to me, for pretty much the same reasons. You might be starting to see a pattern.

My 3rd novel was a traditional fantasy piece, book one of a trilogy. It’s currently trunked, but might well be rewritten and sold since the world and magic system I built it on provides the scaffold for my Kingslayer books, three of which are forthcoming from Ace in 2011 and 2012. Not selling it was the 3rd best awful… Etc.

My 4th novel was a category-defying book called WebMage [B&N |  Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon], call it cyberfantasy with humorous undertones. I wrote it in 1998/1999 after taking a novel hiatus to write short stories. It’s the book that got me an agent. It started being shopped around in 2000, the year I was a Writers of the Future winner but it didn’t sell then, and that was the 4th most…

Somewhere in here, I formulated my basic view of the publishing industry and breaking in. Selling your book is like trying to knock down a brick wall with your forehead. It seems an impossible task until you remember that your forehead heals and the wall doesn’t, so if you’re persistent…

I wrote a 5th book, Winter of Discontent, and a 6th, Numismancer, and a 7th, The Urbana. As I was outlining my 8th, Chalice, I got a call from my agent. It was in the middle of the biggest family mess of my entire life which was an awful thing with no redeeming features.

Because of that, I was pretty distracted when I got the call. So much so that it wasn’t until my knees gave out that I realized my agent was telling me he’d just landed a two book deal for WebMage and a sequel. Then I was sitting down.

The funny thing was that I wasn’t wildly happy, as I’d always expected to be when I got that news. No, I was just profoundly relieved. All of the work and sacrifice and pain wasn’t going to have been for nothing. Later, I was happy and giddy and all those other things, but the first feeling was simple relief. I hadn’t chosen the wrong path.

I wrote two more novels before WebMage hit the shelves, Chalice, and the sequel to WebMage, Cybermancy.

So, how do you get from first book written to first book on the shelves of your local bookstore? In my case, you write a bunch more books. You keep going no matter the disappointment and you keep trying to make each book better than and different from the last one, and someday the wall comes down.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

The House has voted 250 to 175 to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  The repeal was shot down once by the Senate when it was attached to a larger bill, but now it’s going back to the Senate as standalone legislation.[1. Doonesbury is currently doing a series on DADT.]

Can someone please tell me why this is even an issue?  Beyond the fact that certain politicians want to make it an issue, I mean.

One argument I’ve heard is that the presence of homosexuals will be too distracting to our soldiers.  Um.  How’s that again?  Is all that military training and discipline so flimsy that it falls apart the moment Neil Patrick Harris strides into the room?  (Okay, bad example.  NPH disrupts entire nations by sheer force of awesomeness.  But you get the idea.)

If our goal is really to guarantee the comfort and safety of our soldiers, maybe we should stop worrying about homosexuality and instead ban straight men from serving.  You know, given that “a female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire” and all.

John McCain has argued that the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy is working.  He argues, “The military is at its highest point in recruitment, in retention, in professionalism, in capability.”

We’ve been fighting how many wars for how long now?  The military has been working for years to improve recruitment and retention.  Or are you implying that retention is up not because of those recruitment efforts, not because our children are growing up never knowing a United States that wasn’t at war, not because the economy and high unemployment push more people to enlist, but simply because people are eager to join a gay-free club?

Even the Pentagon says:

Based on all we saw and heard, our assessment is that, when coupled with the prompt implementation of the recommendations we offer below, the risk of repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell to overall military effectiveness is low.

This comes after a study which incorporated responses from more than 100,000 active servicemen and women, more than 100,000 family members of those servicemen and women, discussions at 51 different bases and installations, and much more.

Major Alan G. Rogers also researched this issue.  He was killed in January of 2008 in Iraq by an IED, and was buried with full honors at Arlington.  Oh, and he was gay.

From Major Rogers’ Masters thesis:

Current policy on gays in the military seems to rest on many faulty assumptions – namely that homosexuals will jeopardize unit cohesiveness. My research has been unable to justify that position and has found that the opposite is more true. Denying service members the right to serve freely and openly violates basic dignity and respect of the human experience and puts our national security at risk.

For almost a decade, I’ve been hearing how nothing is more vital than our National Security.  I’d expect this to mean we welcome and thank all those who volunteer to serve our country.  That we would want every qualified serviceman and woman we could find.  Yet bewteen 1997 and 2006, more than 11,000 men and women have been kicked out of the military under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.[2. This includes a disproportionate number of women and minoroties, by the way…]

Apparently for for some people, homosexuals are an even greater threat than the terrorists.

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Borders + B&N = Do Not Want!

Last week, GalleyCat reported on the possibility of Borders buying Barnes & Noble.  I don’t give a lot of credence to rumors, and I’m doubtful this one will actually happen.  But the idea scares me.

Let me tell you a story from years ago.  Tobias Buckell and I were in Chicago for Windycon, along with my then-agent Steve Mancino.  When we weren’t conventioning, we headed out to various bookstores to sign stock: Crystal Rain for Toby, and Goblin Quest for me.  Within an hour, we had the routine down:

When we went into a Borders, I would run to grab my goblin books, autographing like a fiend.  Toby got to sit around twiddling his thumbs.

When we went to B&N, it was my turn on thumb-twiddling duty while Toby did his autographing thing.

There were a few exceptions, but we hit a lot of stores, and the pattern was obvious.  Borders liked the goblins, but wasn’t interested in Caribbean steampunk space adventure.  B&N liked Crystal Rain, but wasn’t excited about goblins.

In each case, the chain’s buyer had looked at our books and decided whether or not to stock our books.  How much better would Goblin Quest have sold if the B&N buyer had liked it?  How much worse would I have done if the Borders buyer hadn’t?

These are the two biggest brick & mortar chains in the United States, meaning a good portion of book sales go through these two businesses.

Imagine this hypothetical merger actually goes through.  Now it’s one chain.  One buyer.  One person’s opinion will have an even greater impact on your sales.  One person determines which books you find on the shelves, and which ones you don’t.

It scares me.

I imagine some will see this as yet more proof that brick & mortar stores are dying, and online sales/e-books are the wave of the future.  Amazon has millions of books available, after all.  (Aside from the ones they ban for being too naughty.) But that means your book is one among millions.  I know Amazon is working to help readers find new books/authors they’ll like, but I don’t think they’re there yet.

I believe there is a need for a gatekeeper function.  Physical stores have to rotate stock, emphasizing new releases, popular titles, and books they believe customers will buy.  They go through those millions of titles to find the ones they believe their customers are most interested in.  So if your book gets into the stores, it has a better chance of being seen by random browsers.

Let me put it this way.  Amazon has a listing for every single Publish America title.  Your local bookstore might special order a PA title for you, but you’re not going to find them eating up shelf space.

When you have a lot of bookstores making different choices, I think this model can work.  Particularly when stores have the autonomy to buy and stock books that will be popular in that region.  When only two chains dominate sales, the bookstore-as-gatekeeper model develops problems, but it’s better than a single big chain.  The idea of merging the two, or of Borders simply going out of business . . . either way, you’re left with one giant.  One gatekeeper controlling a frighteningly disproportionate number of books.

My agent has posted his thoughts about the state of Borders and the two big U.S. chains.  NPR recently published an article talking about how the changing nature of bookselling could actually strengthen the independent bookstore.

What do you think?

Monday Miscellany

Thanks to everyone who entered to win a copy of The Secret History of Moscow [B&N | Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] by Ekaterina Sedia.  Of the 37 entries on my various blog mirrors, Random.org has chosen temporaryworlds as the winner.  Congrats, and I’ll be contacting you shortly to get your mailing info.

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I was going to do a separate post about this, but you know what?  Stupid doesn’t deserve a full post.

Last week, another random anonymous commenter popped up on one of my old rape posts. He followed the typical pattern, explaining how only one in a thousand women are really raped.  I guess the rest are just part of the Great Rape Conspiracy. And then, as so many of these guys do, he added the tired old line: I don’t know anyone who’s been raped.

If you think this proves your point — if you can’t distinguish between “Nobody I know has been raped” and “Nobody I know has chosen to tell me they were raped” — then you need to get off the computer and go back to school.  I recommend remedial logic.  Because if you’re the kind of person who goes around commenting anonymously on strangers’ blogs to explain that rape isn’t a problem, that the True numbers are minuscule, and the rest of those women are just making it up for their own misguided or malicious ends … is it any wonder people don’t choose to talk to you about having been raped?

Don’t be that guy.

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Finally, fairy tale in LEGO: scrat_ has done an impressive rendering of Hans Christian Anderson’s tale The Little Match Girl.  Click the pic for the full set.

First Book Friday: Sherwood Smith

Welcome to First Book Friday, with today’s guest star, Sherwood Smith (sartorias on LJ).

How to introduce Sherwood … I’ve never met her in person, but we’ve been chatting online for years.  She’s a delightful person, warm and genuine, and if you’re not reading her blog then you’re missing out.

She’s been a writer pretty much her entire life.  Read on to learn how she went from writer to published writer.  And when you’re done, see here for my review of her book Once a Princess [B&N | Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy].

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I started typed up my novels and sending them out in eighth grade. I knew zip about quality—I was writing the sort of book I liked to read, so they were all kid adventure stories, heavy on the castles, princesses, sword fights, and pie fights . . . kid drama and kid comedy. No romance! There were plenty of boys, but only as friends. Or rivals. But girls got the lead roles.

The very first one was written with a friend. We wrote it in secret code, trading off bits and delivering chapters each day to one another’s locker. It was set in the Netherlands around 1700, so that there were not only castles and princesses but wigs that could be lifted on fish hooks, a comedy plus to thirteen-year-olds. We were so thrilled with our masterpiece that we learned how to type, and typed it up. I illustrated it copiously—still have some of the drawings, and most of that first submission.

We submitted it to the eighth grade writing contest at our junior high. It was 400 pages long. I remember one of the teacher judges turning pages over with her fingertips, and looking down at it with this peculiar expression . . . rather as one might regard a fish long since gone to its reward. We did not win, needless to say—some kid who wrote inspirational poetry did. I bet her poetry was good. Our story was . . . *ahem* . . . enthusiastic.

By that point I’d already been writing about another world for some years, but I knew from my reading that “they” would never publish anything in which kids from Earth went to the world and never came back. Never grew up, either, but had great adventure lives. For hundreds of pages! (In those days, kidzbooks were max 60k words. It was hard to find a good long adventure until I started reading adult historical novels.) So I knew that if I wanted to actually get anything published, I’d have to write “they” books as well as my “me” books.

So, to the first published book. When I was seventeen, a friend said to me, “I wish all the heroines weren’t blond with blue eyes.” So I told another friend that I was going to write about a brown-skinned, brown-haired, brown-eyed heroine, but that friend got quite angry, saying that I ought not dare to write about minorities as I was a WASP and didn’t know how minorities suffered. (We were in high school at the time, remember.) I got the idea for Wren, and blithely began writing it—and I found my way between the wishes of the two friends.

The first line was: “The phone rang.” The title, which I thought so cool at age seventeen, was Tess’s Mess. Since I knew no one would publish my real secondary world, I thought I’d make one that publishers of kids’ books would like. It would have some of the fun stuff that I loved, but it wouldn’t break the “rules” I perceived in children’s literature at the time. I also wouldn’t commit the error of presuming to write about a minority; I might mention Wren’s brown skin, but she would have blue eyes, and the brown and blond striped hair, so she’d be in between.

I submitted the first half, as was (handwritten into a notebook) to a local contest—and won! So I thought, fame and fortune here I come! Finished it, laboriously typed it out on my Mom’s WW II-era typewriter, with its fading ribbon, sent it out . . . and it came back. And back. And back.

So when I turned nineteen, I figured I needed to learn something about writing, and I pretty much stopped trying to send things out for another fifteen years, though I never stopped writing. Every five or six years I’d take out Wren again and try a new rewrite, and in the late eighties, I was lucky enough to catch the eye of Jane Yolen, who taught me a whole lot about rewriting by having me give it three or four more drafts before she published the first one, Wren to the Rescue, at Harcourt, under her own imprint, Jane Yolen Books. By then I’d actually already gotten published, but these were work-for-hire without my name on them. Wren was the first with my name, and one of the first ones I’d tried to get out there.

The last of the Wren books just came out as an e-book. It pretty much stands alone. It’s available at Kindle and Book View Café.

Amazon Now Offering Bookscan Access to Authors

Amber Stults tweeted a link to an article in the L.A. Times, announcing that Amazon is now offering access to Bookscan data through the Amazon Author Central program.

I’ve checked my Author Central page, and what do you know — I’ve got pages and pages of shiny, wonderful sales data.  This appears to be pretty much the full Bookscan data for all of my books, not just the Amazon sales.

ETA: Amazon is providing a four-week window of sales data.  Meaning you’ll be able to see how your books are doing over the past four weeks, but won’t be able to check back to see sales from six months ago.

They’re also providing more information about Amazon ranks tracked over time for your books.

If you need me, I’ll be having a datagasm…

Assange’s Rape Charges

Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, was arrested in Britain on charges of rape and sexual coercion for a warrant issued in Sweden.  Given the timing of the arrest, coming so soon after WikiLeaks posted a large number of U.S. diplomatic cables, combined with the fact that rape charges are so often disbelieved anyway … well, it’s no surprise that the discussion has gotten ugly, and fast.

A Slate article quotes a Washington Post blog, claiming that the actual charge is “for violating an obscure Swedish law against having sex without a condom.”

Right.  In Sweden, it’s illegal to have sex without a condom.  This is why the Swedes died out after a single generation, and their land was immediately colonized by sentient ninja velociraptors.

The Swedes are making it up as they go along, proclaims another news story, describing the charges as “absurd” and talking about how the victims went to the police for advice, “a technique in Sweden enabling citizens to avoid just punishment for making false complaints.”

I’m having a hard time finding many official documents or sources about the case.  It’s getting buried under the conspiracy theories and the attacks against Sweden and/or the alleged victims.  But according to a report by The Press Association:

[T]he first complainant, Miss A, said she was victim of “unlawful coercion” on the night of August 14 in Stockholm … Assange is accused of using his body weight to hold her down in a sexual manner.

The second charge alleged Assange “sexually molested” Miss A by having sex with her without a condom when it was her “express wish” one should be used.  The third charge claimed Assange “deliberately molested” Miss A on August 18 “in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity”. The fourth charge accused Assange of having sex with a second woman, Miss W, on August 17 without a condom while she was asleep at her Stockholm home.

I’m neither judge nor jury, and I can’t say what actually happened.  But it strikes me as rather telling that all this outrage about condoms completely ignores the parts of the charges where he allegedly used force to hold one victim down, and assaulted another in her sleep.

As for the condom issue, let me put this as clearly as I can: consent for one action does not imply consent for another.  If I consent to kissing, it doesn’t mean it’s okay for you to grope me.  If I consent to mutual masturbation, it doesn’t mean I consent to intercourse.  If I consent to intercourse with a condom, it does not mean I consent to intercourse without one.

Meaning, if Miss A did consent to sex with a condom, but Assange didn’t use one, then he was committing a sexual act against her which she had not consented to.  Remind me, what do we call it when one person commits a sexual act against another without the other person’s consent?

There may be other issues here, political and otherwise.  And if I’m understanding the chronology correctly, Sweden didn’t do itself any favors by flipflopping on whether or not to charge Assange with rape.

However, I’m getting awfully damn tired of yet another round of Smear The Rape Victims.  Of the assumption that women lie.  Of the myth that if you tweet about hanging out with cool people at a party, then nothing that follows could possibly be “real” rape. (After all, you went to the party, right?  Doesn’t that equal consent to be assaulted?)[1. A commenter correctly pointed out that I had the chronology backwards here. The party was thrown after the alleged rape. There are any number of reasons a rape victim would go through with a party after an assault (denial, shame, efforts to pretend life is “normal,” pressure from others, etc.), but I wanted to acknowledge my error.]

I don’t know if Assange is guilty or not.  But I’m disgusted with how we so often and so quickly leap to attack and condemn the alleged victims in cases of rape.

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More What You’d Call Guidelines…

Over at Making Light, James MacDonald explains How to Get Published.

Before I go any further, let me state for the record that MacDonald knows his stuff.  He contributes good writing advice at Making Light, Absolute Write, and elsewhere.

That said, I’m gonna argue with a few of his points now, ’cause what fun would it be if we all agreed with each other? 🙂

To be a writer, you must write.  Absolutely, 100%, yes!  However, MacDonald goes on to give the oft-repeated advice, “Write every day.”  Good advice, but not an iron-clad rule.  I write five days a week, but generally don’t write on weekends.  I believe writing every day is a good goal, but ultimately, it’s important to find the schedule that works for you.  The important thing is that you’re writing.

On the day you reach THE END, put the book aside for six weeks.  Let me put it this way: I wrote, revised, and started submitting Goblin Quest [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon] over the course of six weeks, and that seems to have worked out pretty well for me.  Distance can be a very good thing, and these days I usually try to do a short story or something else between drafts/books as a palate-cleanser.  But once again, writing is like the Matrix: some “rules” can be bent, while others can be broken.[1. With most rules, things generally turn out better if you make sure you understand the rule before you break it.]

Now find a publisher.  This is exactly what I did when I finished Goblin Quest, actually.  It’s not the path I’d follow if I had to do it all over again today.  Publishers are slow to respond (2.5 years in one case), and they ask for exclusivity.  Personally, I would go directly to querying agents, and let them submit to the publishers.  Authors have sold books both ways, as you can see in that First Book Survey someone did earlier this year.

I remember being a new author trying to break in, and assuming that Advice = Law.  If a pro said I had to sell short stories before selling a novel, then by Asimov’s Sideburns, that was what I must do!

It messed me up more than once.  So while I think it’s incredibly important to listen to authors who have this sort of knowledge and experience, it’s also important to remember that none of us have the Gospel of Getting Published.  (And I don’t believe MacDonald is trying to preach Publishing Gospel, but I know how easy it is for new writers to take things as such.)

That said, MacDonald gives some good advice, and those working to break in could do much worse than to take a few minutes to read his post.

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E-book Experiment, Part 2

I’ve updated the Reporting Sexual Harassment in SF/F page with a link to the Geek Feminism Wiki’s Sample Convention Anti-Harassment Policy.  I particularly appreciate the internal guidelines for convention staff.

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Months ago, when I was talking about how my e-book sales were about 3-5% of my print sales, a champion of self-publishing said my problem was that my $6.99 e-books were too expensive, and if I dropped the price to $2.99, I’d have better sales.

So in mid-October, I put my mainstream novel Goldfish Dreams [B&N | Amazon] up for sale as a $2.99, DRM-free e-book.

I posted my first week’s results, and said I’d follow up in a month or so.  Well, over the past weekend I came across a post that mentioned the “great success” authors like Jim Hines and others have had putting their own work out through Amazon, which told me it was definitely time for a follow-up.

I’ve got about six weeks worth of data now.  Are you ready to see what my great success looks like?  B&N doesn’t give a nice week-by-week breakdown, but here are my weekly Amazon Kindle sales.

All total, I’ve sold 21 copies through Amazon.  Add in the 4 copies sold through Barnes & Noble, and I’ve made about $70, selling an average of about 4 copies a week.

For those keeping score at home, this would not even cover the conversion costs for having the files prepped.  (You can do this yourself, of course, if you have the time and the know-how.  I suspect I could have taught myself the tech side, but time is another issue…)

I should note that I’ve done nothing to promote this particular book.  I’ve been busy attending cons, working on short stories, revising Snow Queen, and also doing the day job and taking care of the family as my wife recovers from knee surgery.  But it’s pretty clear to me that simply putting a book out there isn’t enough.

By contrast, I haven’t really been promoting my books with DAW very much these past weeks, either.  In those same six weeks, my books with DAW sold around 2000 print copies (averaging about 300/book), which translates to about a thousand dollars in royalties … $850 for me after my agent takes his cut.  (I have no access to the weekly e-book sales for the DAW books.)

I know there are people making self-pubbed e-books work for them.  My friend Sherwood Smith has been successfully selling some books this way.  I suspect that if I released one of my fantasy titles, either a reprint or an original goblin/princess book, I’d do a lot better.  But Goldfish Dreams is a mainstream title, so doesn’t necessarily tap into my preexisting audience.

I also know that an ongoing, persistent sales effort can drive sales.  I have friends who keep up a pretty constant sales push to sell their e-books, and it does seem to help them sell more books.

But I barely have time to keep up with the blog.  I’d rather keep writing new books and the occasional short story, and let my publisher do most of the work to actually get my books into the hands of readers.

I’ll keep checking in with further data, but my conclusions so far?

  1. Simply putting an e-book out there ain’t going to accomplish much.
  2. Having a preexisting audience helps, but may not do much for cross-genre e-books.  Brand new authors with no audience — you’ve got a steep climb ahead of you.
  3. You are your own sales force.  You can improve your sales, but it will take time away from something else.  (I would advise you to make sure you’re not being obnoxious about it, as author self-promotion can get annoying pretty fast.)

Thoughts and comments are welcome, as always!

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