I haven’t done a lot of book promotion in recent months. The bloom is off the rose, and my mind’s been engaged with other things. But in June my steadily declining book sales finally spurred me to do something, and I put the ebook edition of Edges on sale for $2.99.

(It’ll remain on sale for the next day or two, though that’s not the point of this post. I’m assuming most people who visit this blog already have a copy — and thank you for that! My purpose here is simply to share my experience in case that’s of interest to other writers, and maybe to some readers.)

So, the point of a sale like this is to capture the attention of new readers. After all, it’s less of a gamble to sample a new-to-you writer at $2.99 than at $14.99, right? (Not that I ever price my ebooks that high, though some publishers do.) And if the reader likes the book, maybe they’ll go on to buy the rest of the series…

The challenge, of course, is to get news of the sale in front of those hypothetical new readers — and I’ve gotten very lazy about this. The standard procedure is to take out ads in newsletters like BookBub and its lesser imitators, or purchase Facebook ads. I’ve done all that before, but this time I didn’t buy any advertising. I just announced the sale on Twitter and Mastodon, and in my newsletter, and that was it. Lucky for me, lots of people shared the news (THANK YOU!!). Word of mouth is the best.

So what were the results? The price drop went into effect on June 17, and as of a couple of days ago a total of 226 copies had sold: 75% via Amazon, the rest split among Kobo, Apple, and BN, descending shares in that order.

Is that good? Well, clearly the numbers are not life changing, but I’m not unhappy with the result. For a writer like me with an extensive back list (~19 novels), infrequent publications, and a not-very-active online presence, a little sale like this can forge connections with readers who might otherwise never encounter my work — and who might enjoy it enough that they come back for more. So there it is. A simple little sale format.

Now, back to work on the next in the series…

I haven’t been posting much here or on Twitter, in part because things at our home are much the same from day to day, so there’s not a lot to report.

After finishing the first draft of the current novel, I took a little over a week off. Before I went back to work on it, I set up a new daily schedule. I still get up around 5:30 or 6am, as I’ve done for many years. After giving the dog a couple of minutes outside, I get to work on the novel, and continue working on it — in several sessions with breaks between — until the early afternoon. This is where my schedule has changed.

Instead of going back to the novel, I try to shift to a publishing chore — contracting for a new book cover, setting up promotion for a sale, prepping my newsletter, writing a blog post(!), or reading an advance copy of someone’s new novel…

(Wait! Reading is not a chore.)

(Oh — and a belated THANK YOU to everyone who helped spread the word about the recent ebook sale. It’s truly appreciated.)

But back to the schedule…

In the late afternoon, I try to exercise or do yard work. Years ago my daughter bought me the soundtrack from the Broadway play Hamilton — which I never listened to…until now! It’s perfect for jogging on the treadmill† because I focus on understanding the lyrics instead of on how much farther I still have to run. It has also inspired me to start listening to the audiobook edition of Ron Chernow’s biography, Alexander Hamilton, which was supposedly an inspiration for the play.

Once a week, Ron and I will go to the post office to check the mail. Every two weeks, we go all the way into town for a supply run. Masks are now mandatory. Each time we’ve gone to town, I’ve been surprised at how many people are out and about, given the lockdown. The parking lots at Lowes and Home Depot are packed! I guess people have decided they might as well do home improvement projects while they’re at home. It’s also true that landscape and construction companies are considered “essential businesses” here and are still allowed to work.

Hawaii still has a comparatively low rate of COVID-19 infection. The governor essentially closed the border by mandating a 14-day quarantine for anyone arriving in the state, so the visitor industry is on hold. Unfortunately, here on Maui we had a large cluster of infections among hospital staff, which is very troubling.

Ron and I are incredibly lucky because we can stay home, and we’re comfortable here, with room to wander, the means to exercise, and a quiet neighborhood around us. I know almost everyone else out there is facing far greater challenges — and knowing that, it’s tempting to rage on politics — the incompetence, bullying, and malice of the current administration, their don’t-give-a-shit behavior, their determination to roll back environmental regulations, and to siphon off taxpayer money for their own benefit and that of their wealthy friends, and all the rest of it. But you hear about that all the time, don’t you? I know my Twitter feed has become a very dark place.

Here’s hoping we throw out the whole cohort of GOP bums in November.

In the meantime, I find myself a bit worried over all those dogs in America who are going to have separation anxiety when their beloved humans finally go back to work…

Please take care of yourself and take care of each other.

† I suspect this treadmill won’t last much longer, as the electronic dashboard has become intermittently non-responsive. Sigh.

Okay…it’s been a while since I’ve posted here — but that’s because I’ve been busy writing.

In December and early January I focused on developing a detailed outline for my next novel — a near-future thriller. I started writing it on January 8, and spent the next week working on the opening chapter. Openings are always such a challenge, because so much needs to be accomplished and it all needs to be done in an interesting way.

Starting January 17, I resolved to try to add at least 1,000 words to the manuscript every day — and thanks to the outline, I’ve been able to meet that goal for all but one or two days along the way.

Usually I write in the morning, but today my schedule is reversed and I still owe my thousand words. So it’s back to work for me…

In the past, I’ve mostly needed silence to write. The only exception: I’ve sometimes used a “theme song” to focus my mind on a specific project — one song that I’d play on repeat for fifteen or twenty minutes as I settled into a writing session. But I haven’t found an effective theme song for the Inverted Frontier books.

So several weeks ago, I was complaining to a friend that I often had a hard time focusing on the day’s work and she suggested Brain.fm — “Functional Music to Improve Focus.” This friend is a successful nonfiction writer, and she felt that Brain.fm had helped her to be far more productive.

The first five sessions are free, so I tried it.

After those first sessions, I bought a three-month subscription.

Does it help? Yes, I think it does. I don’t listen to it every time I sit down to write, but I’ve listened to it a lot, and I feel like it helped me power through to the end of the first draft of Silver. And I’ve definitely noticed that when my mind goes spiraling off on a sequence of depressing career thoughts, I just have to plug in and it will pull me back into the work.

Real music distracts me. It draws me away from the work. My attention turns to melodies and lyrics. Brain.fm is entirely different. I don’t really listen to it — not with the conscious part of my brain — instead it seems to occupy that part of my mind that likes to fuss and worry over things.

Is it a placebo? Maybe . . . but I’m happy to pay for a placebo that works! 😉

Update: I meant to say that when I use Brain.fm, I generally listen to it for a half hour to an hour at the start of my writing day. That seems to do the trick.

This is a behind-the-scenes look at why it took me so long to finish my newest novel:

Some of you are familiar with my fourth novel, Vast, a far-future, slower-than-light, space-based story that is probably not like most other novels you’ve read. At the time, I felt it was the best thing I’d ever written–basically the fulfillment of the reason I’d started writing science fiction. It took everything I had and then some to write it, and when it was done, I remember thinking Never again! I had no intention of ever writing anything else in that story world. It was just too exhausting, and the market for it wasn’t there.

For years, when people asked about a follow-up to Vast, the easy answer was some version of Nope! But as time passed, I started to think “Well, maybe…”

Oh, the folly of forgetting!

A few years ago, I realized — should I ever want to write a follow-up novel — I knew how to start it and what the basic plot would be.

With that in mind, I suddenly had this great idea, an actual publishing SCHEME…

I decided that before beginning another near-future, high-tech novel along the lines of the Red trilogy or The Last Good Man, I would go “back to the (far)future” and write that novel I said I’d never write.

The structure I had in mind meant this book could become the first of an open-ended series. So with that in mind, I resolved I was going to write two novels, but I would write them fast. After all, I didn’t have to spend time inventing a new story world, and I was planning to keep them short. I wanted both to be around 75,000 words, which is close to the length of my Puzzleland novel Hepen the Watcher. In this business, it’s critical to get new work out, and this scheme would give me a chance to get two books out in 2018.

This was a really good plan, at least on paper. But there was one major drawback — for a long time, my heart just wasn’t in it. In recent years I’ve been far more interested in exploring this world we actually live in, rather than far-future space opera. As a result, book 1 took me ages to write. Hours at the computer often produced only a few hundred words. But I kept at it, and by last March I finally had a first draft and it was close to the 75,000-word length I’d been aiming for! Hooray!

I started on book 2 right away, hoping to get a draft of that done before sending the first volume to my freelance editor. Progress was better on book 2, but I was still only partly done when I sent book 1 out for editing in late May. I wanted to publish the first volume in September 2018, with book 2 following a month or two later, so I contracted for cover art.

The cover art came in on time. Due to a series of truly unfortunate circumstances the editing took longer than expected and when I did get my editorial letter and in-line comments, well… “Harsh, but true” was the phrase I used at the time.

I knew the novel had issues, but this edit forced me to acknowledge how deep those issues ran. My heart hadn’t been in it, and that was quite obvious to my editor.

So I put the partial draft of book 2 aside and went back to work on book 1. I outlined the major changes I wanted to make, and understood that even though the basic plot would stay the same, I needed to do a complete rewrite. The cool part is that the more I wrote, the more my heart was into it. I was eager to get up at five in the morning and get to work, which is a terrific feeling. And I think all that work paid off.

Yes, my plan had failed. Neither novel was published in 2018 and book 1 grew far beyond the 75,000 words I’d planned. In the end, it turned out to be 120,000 words. Oh well! It’s done. The first beta reader to get back to me opened his comments with “Now this is science fiction! …an amazing book.” 🙂

If you’ve never read Vast, hey, now’s a good time! 🙂

That said, it isn’t necessary. The new book is meant as a new entry point into the Nanotech Succession story world.

I’ll be posting title, book description, and cover art later this weekend…

And I’m already back to work on book 2!

I didn’t win a Hugo.
Those of you who follow this blog will know that I had a work on the Hugo ballot for the first and only time in the thirty-one years since my first published story.

“The Martian Obelisk” was on the short story ballot, and enough people went out of their way during the convention to tell me how much they’d liked it (and that they’d voted for it!) that I dared to think just maybe…

Alas for me, it was not to be. The honor went to Rebecca Roanhorse for her story “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” which you can read at Apex Magazine. Huge congratulations to Rebecca, who also won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. What a night! And what a great way to start off a career!

Thank you, thank you, to everyone who read, supported, voted for, or just had good thoughts about “The Martian Obelisk.” You are appreciated!

The Convention
I rarely go to conventions. I attended Worldcon 76 because of the Hugo nomination and because it was an easy distance from home – a nonstop flight direct from Maui to San Jose. (That turned out not quite as planned. Ask me about it sometime.)

I’m not very good at conventions. I’m one of those who has difficulty with facial recognition and it can take me a while to work out the identity of people I’ve met before but haven’t seen in a while – which gets really embarrassing. And I don’t do all that well in crowds.

Nevertheless, there were a lot of positive aspects to Worldcon 76. (more…)

Book sales have been terrible so far this month. Maybe it’s a February thing, but it’s a bit discouraging.

On the positive side, the Locus Recommended Reading list came out on the first of the month and includes The Last Good Man and my short story “The Martian Obelisk.” Unfortunately this hasn’t helped book sales! But you can see the whole list here.

Oh, and you — yes, you — can vote for the Locus awards! You don’t have to be a subscriber. Anyone can vote. Here’s the voting link. Go vote for whatever you feel is worthy.

More good news: “The Martian Obelisk” (much to my delighted surprise) will appear in FIVE best-of-the-year anthologies. So that’s kind of cool. If you haven’t read it yet, you can do so online right here at Tor.com. Oh and if you are eligible to vote for the Hugo or Nebula awards, “The Martian Obelisk” is eligible in the short story category. Just sayin’.

Why do awards matter? I wrote a whole post on that at one point. It’s here if you want to read it, but basically, awards help to sell books. Some writers sell a lot of books regardless of awards, but some of us don’t. And selling books is one of those KEY factors that helps writers stay in business. So hey, we list our eligible work and ask readers to consider it. That’s about it.

I haven’t posted in a while. What with hurricanes, earthquakes, politics, nuclear war, global warming, etc., posting about a new review can seem a bit trivial, and I haven’t been inspired to write about other topics.

I have been keeping busy, though. I’ve been working on a new novel in an existing story world. I’m 44,000 words into it, which is a big enough investment that I feel like I ought to finish it. I had/have an ambition to hammer out an extremely rough draft by the time I head to the mainland in October — four weeks from now. That would be some kind of a miracle for me, but hey, you never know.

I write best when I’m confident. I tend not to write at all when I’m feeling discouraged. Not a tough-survivor trait, I know, but it is what it is. Today I’m feeling discouraged. Tomorrow will probably be better. If I could look at writing as a hobby instead of a career, I think I’d be happier — but I still need to figure out where the money is coming from.

For many years I’ve done all my writing on a Toshiba laptop. A few years ago it started having issues, so I stopped allowing it online. It’s worked great ever since then. I’ve only been using it for writing and coding ebooks, and I back up my files multiple times a day.

Two days ago I finally ordered a new laptop.

Today — a discouraging day — I decided to start my writing session by typing out all the things that are bothering me. This is something like Julia Cameron’s “morning pages” but not in longhand. I was less than two hundred words into this exercise when my old laptop crashed. System dump something or other, scary stuff. Ugh. But at least I hadn’t just written some wonderful artistic passage! And the laptop rebooted.

Being of a paranoid nature, I decided to take a snapshot of everything on the laptop’s hard drive. (I’ve done this before and like I said, I back up files frequently. But extra insurance, right?) I copied almost all the folders onto a USB stick, leaving out only a couple of things I really don’t care about. Everything, all together, came out to slightly over a gigabyte of data. Years of work. One gigabyte.

Easy to tell I never kept photos, movies, or Photoshop files on this computer.

Within a few minutes after I finished copying files, the laptop crashed again. It rebooted again, but I can take a hint. I won’t be doing anymore writing on the dear old Toshiba. Maybe I’ll fire up the old Netbook and use that until the new laptop arrives. Or I’ll use this Mac desktop, though it’s getting on in computer-years too.

Sigh.

Technology.

It’s starting to feel like all I’ve done this year is promotion.

You’ve seen a lot of promotion here on the blog. There’s been more behind the scenes. Partly this is because I’ve got a new novel coming out in June, and if I don’t promote it, no one will. But it’s also because I feel like I’ve reached a do-or-die point in my career.

I returned to writing at the end of 2010/early 2011. My plan was to reissue my backlist and start producing new work. I gave myself two years to make something happen. After two years I thought I detected signs of progress and I extended my deadline to five years. Then six. Now I’m on year seven, but sales on most of my books are still bumping along the bottom of the graph. I’m not exaggerating this. It’s a good month for Limit of Vision if I sell five copies.

I’ve tried to follow the standard advice — “The best promotion you can do is to write the next book” — and yes, I’ve had brief spurts of success, but never sustained success. I think it’s partly because I don’t write fast enough — successful indie writers are able to write and publish several novels a year — and also because I don’t write in the popular subgenres. A look at Amazon shows that classic sci-fi space adventure and sci-fi romance are both HUGELY popular, but my interests are elsewhere.

I do think there are more readers out there who would enjoy my work if they knew about it — so I’m trying to connect with them.

I know all the promotion has to be annoying to my long-time readers and for that I apologize. But I’d like to make this work. I’d like to keep writing. And realistically, I need more readers for that. I need to see decent sales on my forthcoming novel — or what is the point?

So I hope you’ll put up with me through these promotional ventures.

If you’d like to help out, consider posting reviews of the books you’ve enjoyed at Amazon or Goodreads or both. Or suggest them to friends. Many of you already do this. Thank you! Word-of-mouth really does matter.

These days, a lot of writers are trying out Patreon and some are having success with it. I’d really prefer that you just buy my books if you haven’t done so already. That’s the heart of it. And thank you for sticking with me.

“The pursuit of perfection is a cover for massive insecurities.”

I jotted this down in my journal this morning after loading my latest round of corrections into both the print and ebook editions of The Last Good Man. There were three corrections.

One was a spelling issue: “Acknowledgement” vs “Acknowledgment.” Both are acceptable, though supposedly the second is more commonly used in America. I’d used both versions, which is not acceptable, so I settled on the more-popular-in-America spelling.

Throughout the manuscript I’ve set text messages and emails in an alternate font. The second correction was to remove the use of that alternate font in one instance where it didn’t belong.

In the third correction I’d mistakenly typed “NGC” when I meant “NGO” (nongovernmental organization) so I fixed that. This one bugs me, though, because I failed to catch the mistake in all my read-throughs, none of my beta readers noticed, and neither did my line editor or copyeditor. Oops! Ron gets credit for discovering it.

“What’s an NGC?” he asked while reading through what I thought would be the final print version.

NGC?

In my mind I scrambled for an answer. NGC, NGC…that’s from astronomy. New General Catalog. Wait. THAT CAN’T BE RIGHT!

I took a look at the passage and finally worked it out. Oh.

I know I get way too worked up over these tiny issues. Refer back to the first line of this post.

On a more positive note, I’ve gotten some really kind blurbs in support of The Last Good Man, so all is not lost, even if the odd spelling error still awaits discovery.

I’m very grateful to Greg Bear for recently taking the time to read the book. He says: “The Last Good Man pulls us into next month’s headlines with a conviction and energy that makes for an extraordinary tale.”

Steven Gould and Vonda N. McIntyre have also provided advance praise which you can read here. I’m especially grateful for this support, given that I’m putting this novel out on my own.

Preorders Coming Soon
I’m hoping to be able to set up preorders in the next couple of weeks, but bear with me — I’ve never done preorders before and I’m sure there will be snags. The publication date remains June 20.