Here’s Don D’Ammassa, yet another one of these reading forces of nature (about 1 book per day), on Servant of a Dark God.
This first fantasy novel gets kudos from the outset because the setting was sufficiently different from the usual to make me perk up after only a couple of chapters…This series shows a good deal of promise mixing workmanlike writing with some genuinely interesting ideas. More
I just typed the last words of the climax! The last 15,000 words have been a blast to write. Heck, the whole thing has been fun.
If you look at the progress meter, you’ll see I’m at 83,384 words. It’s weird writing something this “short.” I figure I’ll end up around 90,000 words. I did some analysis of the size of some other thrillers. You can see it below. It’s not super rigorous, but BAD PENNY falls well within the range.
| AUTHOR | AVERAGE WORDS | BOOKS |
| Dean Koontz | 93,500 | 2 |
| Harlen Coben | 130,500 | 2 |
| JA Konrath | 77,667 | 3 |
| James Lee Burke | 153,000 | 1 |
| John Grisham | 148,000 | 1 |
| Ken Follett | 140,000 | 1 |
| Lee Child | 149,000 | 4 |
| Michael Connelly | 145,000 | 1 |
| Ridley Pearson | 114,000 | 1 |
| Robert Crais | 80,667 | 3 |
The average of all those books is 117,000.
So I have about two more chapters to go. I’d finish them next week, but we’re taking some vacation for the 4th. This means I expect to type “The End” in the second week of July. Then I’ll set it aside for a few weeks, revise it, and send it out to first readers, including my agent. Here are the characters:
I really think folks are going to enjoy this one.
Finished chapter 5 of CURSE last Saturday. Huzzah!
The writing is a blast, even though it still requires work. Along those lines, I’ve been meaning for some time to write up the techniques and principles I use when drafting. So I think I’m going to do a semi-regular post on a weekly basis where I share these tidbits as I run into them. It will be kind of like director commentary, although I’ll have to be careful not to toss out any spoilers.
This week I’ll talk about using chapter outlines and writing vividly.
Up to this draft, what I’ve done is work from a bullet outline. Each bullet is a short statement of what needs to occur. Sometimes it’s very general about the story arc–presentation of the problem, struggle, and resolution. Sometimes it’s a very specific step. Sometimes it includes cryptic notes. For example, here are some bullets for SERVANT:
As you can see, it gives me a roadmap (which often changes) so I’m not starting from nothing when I open up my chapter document. But it’s very general. When using this, I often have to use a number of takes to get the scene written because those first takes are me imagining the scene. In fact, my first take is usually a sketch of the scene with me blocking out my goals for the scene and how I expect the events to occur. However, in this last go at CURSE I wrote a chapter outline. It took me about 25 hours, and the outline for CURSE ran 32 pages. I’ve pasted the first two chapters below. You can see they’re still mostly in summary, but they represent the initial sketch of what’s going to happen.
1. The Village of Plum – TALEN
It’s past midnight, behind enemy lines. A thin moon hangs in the sky. Talen, Sugar, River, and five of Shim’s best soldiers crouch in the black shadows of the tree line running along the road to the village of Plum (Sugar’s former village), watching for soldiers or a village guard.
Talen jokes with Sugar, telling her he wanted a dance tonight, not a sneak behind enemy lines, even if it was in the dark. He’s more than half serious. As they’ve worked together over the last three months since the battle in the cave, he’s become attracted to her.
Also during those three months, the clans of the New Lands split into two factions. Five clans, led by the Fir-Noy, believed Shim, the leader of the Shoka clan, was being controlled by sleth. The remaining four clans followed Shim. The Fir-Noy faction immediately took up arms, initially to protect themselves, but they soon began talking about ridding the land of the sleth curse. Tensions rose, and in a series of altercations a number of people on both sides were killed. Now both factions have mobilized forces to establish pickets and patrols along a border between them.
A few days ago, Argoth received word from his spies that something was afoot in the Fir-Noy clan, as if they were preparing for a strike. Futhermore, they’ve decided to excavate the grounds about Sugar’s old house. Argoth knows Purity had her own cache of weaves under the hearth of her old home, the location of which she revealed to Sugar just before she died. Argoth has begun to train up an army of dreadmen for Shim. But he’s stretched thin. He needs all the lore he can get. So he’s sent Sugar and the others to retrieve the items before they’re lost. They’ve come on the evening of the annual apple dance festival, hoping the Fir-Noy would be less vigilant. So far, they’ve been right. In fact, Talen begins to feel like it’s been a little too easy.
As Talen and the others prepare to move forward, Sugar puts her hand on Talen’s arm. He can feel Sugar’s Fire and soul, and her touch only enflames his desire for both. He’s alarmed by this intensity, and finds it hard to focus, so he moves his arm away.
“You’re going to give me a boost up,” she says.
Up ahead in front of the Fir-Noy village stands a thick timber pole probably 11 feet high. Fastened to the top of that pole is what looks to be a skull.
“You brought us round the wrong side,” Talen says. Their objective was the ash ruins of Sugar’s burned out house, not this pole.
“You can’t think we’d come all this way, and I’d leave without it.”
It’s her father’s skull. The only thing of his that remains. Talen, not wanting contact, motions at one of the taller soldiers with them. “He’d be taller.”
“Come on,” Sugar says and moves forward in a crouch. They move out of the shadows and into the moonlight, watching the village. Sugar climbs up on Talen’s shoulders and cuts loose the bonds holding her father’s skull. The whole time Talen’s desires make the experience uncomfortable.
Once Sugar has the skull safely in her sack, the group keeps to the deeper night shadows of the tree line and moves around the edges of the village fields until they come to a ditch. Along the way, one of the soldiers touches Talen, and he feels that same overpowering desire. Something is not right inside of him. He knows it. But there’s nothing to do about it now as they follow the ditch to the ash ruins of Sugar’s house.
Sugar and Talen sneak over to the hearth of the burned out home. River and the five Shoka soldiers take up watch. Soon Sugar finds the secret cache, but as she’s removing the items, they hear a sound come from one of the surrounding houses. Talen and the others stop and listen. Suddenly Fir-Noy soldiers burst out of the door. They overwhelm one of Shim’s soldiers and rush straight for the others.
Talen and the others turn to run, but Fir-Noy soldiers begin to pour out of four other houses. Then a Fir-Noy dreadman emerges and shouts it’s the boy that’s wanted. They can slaughter all the rest. It’s clear these soldiers were waiting for them, but there’s no way they could have know Talen and the others were coming, unless they were betrayed.
2. Hue & Cry – SUGAR
Sugar stuffs the last item in the secret cache into her sack and rises. The Fir-Noy are shouting, but River charges a gap in the quickly forming mob. She fights ferociously. The others race after her, Sugar and another soldier bringing up the rear. Sugar and the others are multiplied, but they’re not fast enough to avoid the soldiers completely, and Sugar is forced to fight and kick to break her way through. When she finally does break past the men, she finds she and the last soldier have been separated from the others and there’s no way to immediately join back up.
Sugar and the soldier run, but he’s wounded. He tells Sugar to run on without him. She refuses, then a company of Fir-Noy round the corner of a house. The soldier turns to face them and tells her once again to run. In her mind’s eye, Sugar sees the same situation unfolding before her as when the mob came after her mother and da. She ran then and regretted watching her father get butchered. She isn’t going to run now. Besides, she’s multiplied. So instead of running, she rushes over to the soldier and, with lore-given strength, picks him up, puts him over her shoulders, and, despite his protests, speeds away.
Sugar knows she won’t be able to outdistance her pursuers like this, but she also knows the villager Stout keeps a horse in the barn just ahead. She turns the corner on the barn, puts the soldier down, and tells him to get the horse. Then she darts back out into view of the soldiers following and leads them away. She glances back and sees the soldier slip into the barn. It’s the best she could do for him. If he can get on Stout’s horse, he’ll have a chance to escape.
Sugar looks to see how she might join back up with Talen and the others, but it’s impossible now. And while most of the Fir-Noy soldiers chased after Talen and the others, a good number are chasing her. Furthermore, others in the village are coming out of their homes. She speeds past them. All over the village dogs begin to bark, but she hears one cluster that sends fear down her spine. The villager Solem keeps a pack of prize-winning sight hounds. He emerges from a barn with his pack on a leash.
“There!” a man shouts. The barking of Solem’s dogs rises in pitch.
Sugar increases her speed then hears Solem. “Stu, boys! Take her. Get the wretch!”
The dogs shoot out after her.
So how has it worked?
So far it’s worked very well. Having that initial sketch done means I take a lot less time finishing each chapter. However, it doesn’t change the general drafting process for me:
As you can see, I find the sketch/draft method incredibly helpful. Just like a painter, I sketch out what I’m thinking of painting. That might require a few sketches where I add in more details. Then I switch over and begin to paint.
On another note, I read “Stories are made out of scenes; Scenes are made out of nouns” by author James Maxey again. I really like this essay. Everyone is always talking about verbs, but nouns are such powerhouses.
Speaking of which, here is the opening to Maxey’s “To The East, A Bright Star” which was published in Asimov’s. It has one of my favorite beginnings. And part of the reason is what Maxey talks about with nouns.
TO THE EAST, A BRIGHT STAR
There was a shark in the kitchen. The shark wasn’t huge, maybe four feet long, gliding across the linoleum toward the refrigerator. Tony stood motionless in the knee-deep water of the dining room. The Wolfman said that the only sharks that came in this far were bull sharks, which were highly aggressive. Tony leaned forward cautiously and shut the door to the kitchen. He’d known the exact time and date of his death for most of his adult life. With only hours to go, he wasn’t about to let the shark do something ironic.
Tony waded back to the living room. Here in the coolest part of the house, always shaded, he kept his most valuable possession in an ice-chest stashed beneath the stairs. He pulled away the wooden panel and retrieved the red plastic cooler. Inside was his cigar box, wrapped in plastic bags. He took the box, grabbed one of the jugs of rainwater cooling in the corner, and headed up the stairs to the bathroom. He climbed out the window above the tub onto the low sloping roof over the back porch.
This all reminds me of Swain’s thoughts on bringing the material to life, which I thought Maxey did so well in those paragraphs.
Few of us read voluntarily about the primer-level doings of Dick and Jane. Simplicity is a virtue in writing, true; but never the primary virtue.
What is?
Vividness.
How about brevity?
It’s important too. Within reason.
Within reason?
Who, just learning this business, knows where or when or how to be brief? In the wrong place, brevity can destroy you.
So?
As in the case of simplicity, brevity is never the heart of the issue. Vividness is.
How do you write vividly?
You present the story in terms of things that can be verified by sensory perception. Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch–these are the common denominators of human experience; these are the evidence that men believe.
Describe them precisely, put them forth in terms of action and of movement, and you’re in business.
Your two key tools are nouns and verbs.
(p25 Techniques of the Selling Writer)
Of course, there’s more–the telling detail, metaphor, working memory overload, details from the point of view. But it all plays into being vivid.
Here is the PowerPoint that I used in my presentation for Brandon Sanderson’s class at BYU, March 23, 2017.
2017 Sandersons Class indie vs publisher
And here’s the Excel spreadsheet you can use to compare revenue numbers.
Author earnings as Indie vs working with Publisher
Enjoy!
I’ve just learned that Kroger Food has decided to carry Servant of a Dark God on a trial basis in its Utah Smith’s grocery stores. If it sells well, they will take it nation wide.
Folks, this is a BIG opportunity for SERVANT. To put this in perspective, Barnes & Noble, the biggest book retailer in the nation, currently operates 775 retail bookstores. For first time novelists in my genre, they usually stock 2-6 copies of a hard back book. (BTW, if after eight weeks the book has sold decently, they will model the book for the store which means when they sell out, they order some more. Other books that aren’t modeled are not reordered or are sent back to the publisher.) Kroger, on the other hand, operates 2,500 + grocery stores with book sections in them. That’s more than three times the size of B&N! That gives so many more readers the chance to preview the book. Heck, to even know it exists.
If you know someone in Utah who was thinking of buying SERVANT, let them know now’s a good time to get it at Smith’s. My fingers are crossed.
Also, if you spot the books while shopping at your local Smith’s, please let me know. I’d like to know how widely they’ve been distributed.
Malak and Revan of Dungeon Crawlers Radio will be doing a live interview with me tonight on UtahFM at 6:20 PM Mountain time tonight, Oct 4th (that’s 5:20 pm Pacific, 7:20 pm Central, and 8:20 pm Eastern). You can access the show by going to www.DungeonCrawlersRadio.com and clicking on the listen live link. This is going to be fun. Here’s your chance to show up and ask questions! Or submit them early by contacting them via their site. Maybe I’ll reveal how I almost became a cult leader. If you have an iPhone with a blue tooth adapter you can stream it through the phone with the UtahFM app. Contact Dungeon Crawlers Radio for more details.
On November 24th last year, a little over 13 months ago, I released my first indie title—Servant: The Dark God Book 1. That release was the official rise from the sideways swamp crash I had with Tor Books.
BTW, sideways swamp crashes in publishing, which can be caused by all sorts of reasons, are not uncommon. Most writers will take a hit or three in their career. That’s just part of the writing business. The question is what happens after the swamp crash?
In my case, I got to work. And, boy, was it a lot of work.
The results have been positive. It was not a phoenixian rise from ashes to glory; it was more like a damp crew patching the ship in the jungle with whatever they had at hand and then launching with nothing but a few birds making any noise. We are by no means past the many perils and obstacles on the path–right now a solid hit from just about anything could knock us out of the sky.
But we are airborne.
We are flying.
And by that I mean the business is delighting readers and generating income.
I’ll probably hit close to 23,000 paid sales since that launch. The large majority of them were for Bad Penny. To give you some perspective, a single title will make the official Publishers Weekly bestsellers lists (of traditionally published authors) hardback and paperback categories when the title has sold around 100,000 copies in the year. The top dogs report sales of a few million.
It’s clear the John D. Brown crew has got a ways to go.
But we don’t have to reach that lofty level to be viable. It would be awesome. At the same time, it’s helpful to be realistic. There are somewhere between 300-400 titles on the adult hardback and paperback list combined. The same on the children’s lists. So I estimate there are around 700 traditionally published books, fiction and non-fiction, that sell at those bestseller levels. That’s out of the millions of trade titles available on Amazon.
The good news is that the majority of writers making a living don’t appear there. The fact is that you don’t have to sell 100,000+ copies of a single title in a year to make a living. In the indie world, you can do just fine with what Russell Blake calls base hits and doubles.
So are we making a living?
Those sales have generated enough net profit to purchase us a nice used vehicle and a few other things. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick (as my neighbor Mike Carr used to say), but making $10-20k can’t replace the day job. Not even close. Still, it’s a beginning.
Will our crew make it?
Can they survive the ferocious flying monkeys?
Stay tuned.
In the meantime, I want to summarize a few things I’ve learned about indie publishing and give a few shout-outs.
First, I want to thank all the readers who decided to give one of my books a shot. From the reviews and sales, it appears the majority found just what they were looking for (and there was much rejoicing).
Second, a big thanks goes to Larry Correia. Not only is he generous and enthusiastic, but his audience is as well. The Monster Hunter Nation made a definite difference for me this year.
I want to thank LL Muir and Diane Darcy, two romance writers who have been incredibly generous in sharing their indie insights and support.
Devon Dorrity and Dixon Leavitt spent hours, HOURS, of their time helping me with covers. I can’t thank them enough.
I also need to thank the Codex Writers. There’s a small group of us indies there, and they’ve all be very helpful in sharing insights about what’s worked for them and what hasn’t.
I’ve found other resources helpful as well. The Passive Voice kept me current on the industry. Russell Blake’s blogs gave me a clear-eyed opinion of what it takes to succeed. The Calibre ebook editor has saved me many times. And Anne-Marie Concepcion’s online course on using InDesign to publish ebooks was a very good introduction, as were Dean Wesley Smith’s online courses on interior and cover formatting. I list other resources I found useful in my Resources for Indie Writers post.
Okay, so what have I learned?
This is retail. If your product is not somewhere that people can see it, they won’t buy it.
I was in Wal-Mart the other day. My sister calls it the Evil Empire, but she’s a Tarzjay snob. I myself am a value shopper. I want what I want, and I want to pay as little for it as possible. At the same time, I’m not going to go out of my way to get it because searching around costs time and money. So if I’m looking for something in Wal-Mart and I don’t see it on the shelves, guess what? I buy something similar that will do the job.
Wal-Mart used to stock Marzetti’s Ranch Dip. The best vegetable dip EVAR. But then sometime this year, they stopped stocking it.
Why?! Why do they stop stocking stuff the moment I find it?!
(Hey, maybe that’s why they’re the Evil Empire . . .)
I mourned for a few seconds. And then I purchased the Lighthouse dip. It’s good. If they put Marzetti’s back on the shelves, I’ll switch back immediately. But the point is that if it’s not in front of my eyeballs when I go shopping, I ain’t gonna buy it.
And I’m finding retail is the same with ebooks as it is with everything else. You can have the best product in the world, but you aren’t going anywhere with it until you are visible to your buyers.
The way to make my stuff visible was not by publishing on Amazon, Nook, and the rest.
Publishing means nothing.
Think about it. There are, right now, 3,079,561 books in the Kindle bookstore.
Yes, three million!
If those were physical books, and we lined them up spine-out like we do on a bookshelf, and we assumed the spines average about an inch in width, they would make a line 48.6 miles long.
For us Utahans, that’s a line of books that stretches from the Mormon temple in downtown Salt Lake City, past Provo, and ends in Springville! (Look up your own local distances to get an idea.)
That’s the kind of visibility you get by publishing your book, which is nada.
So if getting it in the store that’s 50 miles long didn’t help, what did?
Getting on a bestseller list.
I sold thousands of copies of Bad Penny on Nook when I was on the Nook’s top 100 list. I rose to #3, in the entire Nook store, then hung out around #50 for about a month. And when that burst of sales that made me #3 fell out of the algorithm (30 days later), I fell off the list. My sales dropped like a stone. Not to nothing. But they were a fraction of what they had been.
How did I get that #3 slot to begin with? The same way I rose to #30 for a few hours in the Kindle store, then slowly dropped to the 1,200s for a few days. I got it by placing an ad with the king of book advertising services, aka BookBub.
How did I get onto BookBub? Here’s their requirements and tips. Please note that the reviews of Bad Penny were part of what made the book appealing to BookBub.
How did I get reviews? By using other ad services to make my book visible and getting mentions on blogs like Larry Correia’s and a few others. And by following recommendations in the book Let’s Get Visible and Your First 1,000 Copies and the suggestions of others who are selling well. And that’s a key thing too–looking to see what folks who are selling well are doing, not those who aren’t.
Of course, readers also liked the books enough create word of mouth. And I can track some of my sales spikes to specific posts or people. The ultimate goal is to have so much word of mouth that everyone’s talking about you. But until that time, I ain’t going to rely on word of mouth alone.
Why not?
Because I’d like to increase my odds of success. I’d like to accelerate them. And thinking that word of mouth alone is going to do that flies in the face of everything I’ve learned about retail. Read what I had to say about books and lemonade and tending your garden for more. Consistent efforts with methods that actually have some track record of success seem to have helped a great deal.
BTW, Bad Penny is currently in the top 10 of three of Amazon’s thriller lists. I guaran-dang-tee you that being on those lists is a big factor in me selling somewhere around 60 copies a day. I saw that with Nook. Being visible starts a virtuous cycle–more people give you a try; if they like the book, they spread the word, which leads to more sales, which keeps you visible, which prompts more new readers to give you a try. Yeah, you’ve got to be good. But you’ve got to be visible first.
When readers purchase a book, they are looking for a certain type of experience. And my book’s experience isn’t so singular that readers can’t get something roughly similar from another book.
I love Lee Child. But Robert Crais provides an experience that’s basically inside the same ballpark. So does Nelson Demille and a whole host of others, including me.
If Lee Child stops writing or slows down his production to one book every four years, I’m not going to stop reading thrillers. There are plenty of other authors that give me the general adrenaline, surprise, action experience I’m looking for. I’ll be sad, but there are a lot of good authors out there. And I’m sure a few will become my new Lee Child.
Of course, we aren’t all exactly the same. I provide a noticeably different tale than Lee Child does even though we’re in the same Lone-Ranger-vigilante-justice action genre. And so, if I produce the best tale I can, I will find some readers will come to prefer me to Child because I line up more with their tastes than he does.
In addition to continue to work on visibility and craft, this means I’ve got to up my production. I’m going to try for 2.5 brand new books in 2015. That’s nothing for some folks. But that’s a good stretch goal for me.
Even though visibility and studying your craft helps, nobody I know who is doing well has a replicable step-by-step program that guarantees success. There are some activities that seem to make the odds better, but there is no guarantee.
For example, from what I wrote above about BookBub, you’d think that’s the brass ring. Nope. I know other authors who have run promos with them and didn’t have near the success Bad Penny did.
Russell Blake’s advice on this seems to square best with my experience. See the links to his blogs here to see what I’m talking about.
The basic concept behind lean startup is that when you’re in a market without a lot of info on what works, the company that wins is the one that learns what works the fastest. And you do that by conducting experiments.
You experiment to see if you’re offering any value to the intended audience. You experiment to see if you’re promo methods are actually feeding your engine of growth. You experiment to see if your audience really is big enough.
The experimental approach taught in the lean startup stuff has freed me from a lot of anxiety. Success or failure is not about me personally. It’s about my techniques. It’s about my craft and business skills. It’s about me learning how to learn quicker.
I’m approaching my thriller and epic fantasy properties as experiments. I’m approaching various visibility methods as experiments. My current state of craft is an experiment. If what I’m doing with my current properties doesn’t work, I can pivot and experiment with something new.
The question is whether I can learn what works–to find an opportunity to add value and provide that value–before I run out of runway.
If you’re interested in these ideas, let me recommend The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, which explains the general principles, and Running Lean: Iterate From Plan A to a Plan That Works by Ash Mayura, which shows you how to start to implement them. These two books have changed how I approach the writing business.
The bottom line is that I love developing stories and sharing them with readers.
I knew this already, of course. But having the ship up and flying again made it hit home in a big way. I enjoy the process of developing a story. I love the research, the story generation, the surprises that come along the way. And I love the emails I get and the discussions I have with readers who have read my books and enjoyed the heck out of them.
So that’s the big summary.
Year two stands before us. Let’s hope John D. Brown and company can learn and produce at higher levels than we ever have before.
Have a wonderful 2015!
Edit 1/14/2015: Here’s John Ellsworth, another indie author, with a similar tale. Although I’m jealous of his seven books in a year. I need to get cracking!
