Tag Archives: Author

The Dragon of Borvoli – new Historical Fantasy Short Story Published

The Dragon of Borvoli coverI’m really excited to tell you about a new short story that I have just published as an eBook on Kindle.

The Dragon of Borvoli is all about a young boy who’s the only inhabitant of his village to fight the ‘dragon’ that has been terrorising his village. The story is set in a Dark Ages world – probably something similar to Cornwall – St Michael’s Mount certainly features for instance, but the setting isn’t very specific. What I was going for was more the atmosphere of the Dark Ages where belief in monsters – think Beowulf – was still strong.

Here’s the blurb for the book:

It takes a lot of bravery to fight a dragon. So imagine how brave the nine year old Boult is when he takes his father’s sword and enters the barrow near his home where tales say the dragon lives—the dragon that has been terrorising their village.

Yet not all is as it seems in this atmospheric historical fantasy short story. Boult meets Gustinus, a Christian priest, who promises to help him in his quest to slay the dragon. But Boult discovers that men can be worse monsters than creatures of legend.

Its currently available for just £0.99/$0.99 or 0.99 Euros from Amazon:

Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de

I hope you like it – let me know what you think!

Chivalry – the first Jake Savage Adventure – eBook Now Free

Chivalry Cover - NewYou can now grab a copy of the short story Chivalry: A Jake Savage Adventure for free from most major eBook stores.

Chivalry is the first story I wrote featuring the character Jake Savage. Jake goes onto feature as one of the main characters in my novel Hell has its Demons and also in two other short stories: Bring on the Night and The King of Britain’s Head. I have another short story featuring him in the works and more to come.

Get Chivalry for free from:

Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | iBooks | Nook | Smashwords

Naked Writer #15: But the Rent

Still at the research for the next volume of Stonehearted! Nothing much to report other than that.

Not much done over the weekend, but otherwise I have made some progress on getting ready to read through the source material references I have gathered for the Pontvallain campaign. That includes matching up events with each of the footnotes in Divided Houses by Sumption, and also gathering copies of the source material. Nearly finished on getting the source material, much of it has come from archive.org – which is the historical writer’s friend! (more on that site another time). When that’s compiled I will be starting to translate some of it – most of it is in Latin or French, so the plan is to use the Sumption footnotes to make sure I just translate the few pages I need from each source.

Other than that I am gearing up to produce the next issue of Alt Hist – I have gathered all the author manuscripts together and will be typesetting these this week.

Reading

I am listening to Robyn Young’s Brethren – it’s OK, but I wish it was a bit faster paced. Just started reading an ebook from my local library of People’s Queen by Vanora Bennett, which is based on the life of Alice Perrers, Edward III’s mistress. This is right on the money in terms of the time period that I write about, so its fascinating to see how the author portrays things. As with much of historical fiction a lot of the characterisation and interpretation of what actually happens is speculative. I think the author is doing a great job on this at the moment!

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Amazon Author Central – possible improvements

I use Amazon and other ebook distribution services to self-publish some of my short stories (I am planning
to use a traditional publisher though for novels if what I am writing is good enough), and also for publishing issues of Alt Hist and Fantasy Short Stories.

Amazon has a service called Author Central, which allows you to provide more information about yourself (here’s my humble page), feeds from your blog or twitter profile, and also check on details of your books, their sales rankings and reviews by customers. That’s all quite interesting and sometimes useful, but I do find myself wondering about how readers interact with this information.

I would like to know:

    How many views my Author page gets
    What happens after people view the page?
    How many people see something compelling enough to click through to a title and which titles do they look at
    On a related note, I would love to know number of kindle ebook sample downloads for my titles, or the number of clicks on the search inside feature. Again I’m interested in knowing what sort of engagement there is with my titles.

If you’re an author using Amazon Author Central, what would you like to see added?

My One Year Writing Plan

Full speed ahead for the fourth and final year...
Full speed ahead for the fourth and final year of the Five Year Plan! (Photo credit: IISG)

I was inspired to write a one year plan of writing goals after skimming through Jeff Vandermeer‘s Booklife. Booklife is a guide to for authors keeping your sanity in today’s world! It gives you tips on how to cope with social media, blogging and generally building your public persona as an author, as well as how to build strategies for developing your career, finding time to write etc. I haven’t read the whole thing, just glanced at it in the library so far, but it looks like it has some good tips for any author.

The section on goals caught my eye as I realized that I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do in the future, but no concrete lists or targets to measure success against. Like any business, an author’s career I think could benefit from having targets – not sales targets in the case of an author, but targets on what you produce or where you are published. Jeff recommends having a shorter-term one year plan and a longer term five year plan. Here’s my one year plan (I’m keeping my five year plan private for now):

  • Have 40+ short stories finished and available for purchase (eBooks or printed collections) – in various pen-names. I currently have 11 available, so that means publishing another 29 in the next twelve months.
  • Finish editing the two novels I have completed in draft format: Hell has its Demons and Return of the Free. Approach agents/publishers about these novels.
  • Complete one non-fiction title and self-publish it.
  • Gain one sale at a fiction magazine with professional rates (over 5 cents  a word and recognized as a professional market by SFWA).

For me I think these goals are challenging, but achievable at a stretch. I’ll keep readers of this blog updated on how I get on.

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Self-publishing Pros and Cons – Revenue

I’m going to split this analysis into two sections and a conclusion. First I will look at the evidence for revenues from Traditional Publishing, and secondly from Self-Publishing. What I am trying to do is find an average figure. Of course if you are J. K. Rowling or one of the new breed of million selling self-published authors, the figures will be much higher. But what I’m trying to achieve is a comparison tool for a newbie writer who doesn’t know which path to choose. Don’t shoot me if you don’t like the answer, I’m just presenting the evidence as I see it!

 The Evidence for Traditional Publishing Revenues

If you Google publisher or novel advances then you get quite a few different bits of evidence. But in summary these are my findings:

The Wall Street Journal claims that $15,000 is a mediocre advance, but also states that advances from Independent Publishers average between $1,000 to $5,000 advance.

About That Book Advance … is an essay in NY Times from 2009 suggests $30,000 as an average advance.

Author Advance Survey by Tobias Buckelll

Tobias Buckell surveyed 108 science fiction and fantasy writers back in 2005. There’s quite a bit of data available, but the main finding that I think is relevant for this post is that the median first novel advance was $5,000. This is probably enough information for this pros and cons comparison. He has done a more recent survey I think, but I can’t see the data from it on his blog – maybe not enough responses yet? But let’s go with his $5,000 figure.

Traditional Publisher Revenues – Conclusion

If we err on the side of caution then perhaps we can take Tobias’s figure of $5,000 per novel as a starting point. We should also remember that advances aren’t the only potential source of money. Hopefully of course one’s novel should outsell it’s advance and bring in further funds. There is also the potential sale of other rights – film/TV and foreign-language publishing rights. Again Tobias Buckell has some useful information on multiple income streams.

But let’s assume that we make as a minimum $5,000 per novel publishing via Traditional means.

Evidence for Self-Publishing Revenues

Despite the number of self-published authors blogging out there and talking about their sales figures, in a way getting an average for this is quite difficult. There are of course the success stories, like Joe Konrath and Amanda Hocking, but I can’t see their revenue stats as anything other than outliers, which is not what we want for this analysis.

So what evidence can we use? Well I decided to take some information from a well-known self-published author who doesn’t have mega-sales. I won’t name him, but he blogs quite a bit and seems to be well-known, so I would say that he would be a good example of a self-published author who has got his marketing right, seems to right popular books and knows what he is doing. But he hasn’t broken out yet to bestseller status. His figures in general seem to indicate sales of about $800/month, but this is across 4 titles. So looking at a whole year, he might be making $9,600. I’m not sure if one title makes up most of these sales, but the figure does seem to be similar to the survey mentioned below in the Guardian for average self-published revenue.

survey posted on the Guardian website states that the average income of self-published authors was $6,375 in 2011. Half of those surveyed made less than $500. It’s interesting that those who were more successful were the ones who got more help – they engaged editorial services etc. So effectively employing the same services that a publisher would provide, but on a freelance basis. It is worth noting that most of these writers will have several titles on sale – the most successful ones planned to release 5 or more titles in the next year. So average revenue/book must be $1,000 I would guess?

Another piece of evidence I found was on Mike Cooper’s blog. This presents Amazon’s own figures that the average book makes less than $500. What’s the average book? Does this includes rafts of Public Domain stuff and short stories. Difficult to say. But it’s a stat so worth including in our evidence.

Self-Publishing Revenues – Conclusion

I think from the evidence I have read for self-published authors its all about volume – if you can churn out a lot of decent quality material then you can make an average of $6-10,000 per year. If you get successful then you could make a lot more.

Self-Publishing Revenues – Pros and Cons – A conclusion of sorts

The problem with statistics is that is difficult to compare between different sets of data. However, I think it is possible to draw some general conclusions from what I have presented above. Here they are:

  1. Traditional Publishing can provide a better per title revenue with advances of around $5,000 vs average per title self-published title revenue of $1,000 (even for successful authors). And remember I am underestimating the traditionally published revenue stream by not taking into account any other sources of revenue other than an advance.
  2. Self-published authors have to produce quite a lot of material – 4-5 books a year – to make what a traditionally published author could get from their first novel advances.
  3. Self-published authors have to invest in editorial services to make their book more marketable. These costs for traditionally published authors will be covered by the publisher.
  4. Self-published authors will find it harder to access sources of other revenue, such as foreign rights.
From this evidence I have to say that the traditionally published route looks more attractive. The problem though is getting your work signed up.
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Amazon Author Central – possible improvements

I use Amazon and other ebook distribution services to self-publish some of my short stories (I am planning
to use a traditional publisher though for novels if what I am writing is good enough), and also for publishing issues of Alt Hist and Fantasy Short Stories.

Amazon has a service called Author Central, which allows you to provide more information about yourself (here’s my humble page), feeds from your blog or twitter profile, and also check on details of your books, their sales rankings and reviews by customers. That’s all quite interesting and sometimes useful, but I do find myself wondering about how readers interact with this information.

I would like to know:

    How many views my Author page gets
    What happens after people view the page?
    How many people see something compelling enough to click through to a title and which titles do they look at
    On a related note, I would love to know number of kindle ebook sample downloads for my titles, or the number of clicks on the search inside feature. Again I’m interested in knowing what sort of engagement there is with my titles.

If you’re an author using Amazon Author Central, what would you like to see added?

I now have a Goodreads Author Profile!

You can see my Goodreads author profile here: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1353250.Mark_Lord

Not sure if it will help much, but was quite fun to set-up! It’s interesting to see that Goodreads are also allowing you to now sell eBooks via their website. I wonder how many sales they are getting though? Most of mine so far seem to be coming via companies that have their own physical reader – i.e. Kindle, Nook or iPad/iPhone.

Anyway if you have read any of my writing, and would like to connect then feel free to do so over at Goodreads.

 

 

 

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