Matter of the Heart, Followup

After a couple weeks of poking, puncturing, and scanning, the diagnosis is finally in thanks to an event monitor: Premature Ventricular Contractions (PVCs). While certainly annoying and distressful, they are not dangerous.

Normally, pretty much everyone gets the occasional PVC. Drinking too much caffeine, stopping after intense physical activity or just being startled can trigger the occasional extra thump that people feel from a PVC. In my case, the PVCs were going on all day. My heart was throwing in extra beats where there shouldn't be any and not resetting back to normal rhythm. The resulting inefficiency was leaving me breathless and fatigued, and was giving me symptoms of a mild heart attack. 

For now, I'm on a low-dosage medication to keep the PVCs from happening and to see if that manages the situation. While only on my second day, I think the medication is working. It's nice to be able to get through the day without feeling that double thump or fluttering sensation in my chest.

Of course, the fallout is that I'm a couple of weeks behind schedule now. Kind of hard to write when the computer is at home and you're laying in a hospital bed. I think what I will do is once I begin the final edits, I'll make Nobody available for pre-ordering.
Pricing for Nobody will be $4.99 for the ebook, but will be on sale 20% off for the first few weeks at $3.99. My way of saying thanks to all the people who purchased Nobody (The Pirate Arc) over the past couple of months.

A Matter of the Heart

One thing that really gets your attention is when your doctor calls you at 9:20PM and says, “Go to the emergency room NOW. Do not drive yourself, have someone else do it!”

I’m a writer. Therefore, I sit in front of my computer a lot, tapping away at the keys. Mindful that this is not exactly a healthy activity, I make it a point to get up periodically and move around. I go for daily walks which I jokingly refer to as “my commute.”

Everyone gets an occasional heart palpitation, when your heart skips a beat or gives a double thump. Some people it hits a little more often than others. I happen to fall in that category. Over the years, I learned to ignore it. Ignoring it came back to bite me on Wednesday.

I had noticed that I was experiencing these palpitations more frequently the past couple of months, but my conditioned response to ignore them made me push them to the back of my mind. It wasn’t all that concerning. I was pretty healthy. I only drink lightly, I don’t do drugs, overeat, or have an unhealthy diet. I exercise regularly, walk a couple of miles each day. I wasn’t all that worried.

There were a couple of odd episodes in the past several weeks where I noticed I was a bit short of breath. It was easy to dismiss: I just walked up the stairs, was moving things around, etc. But with that in mind, there were a couple of situations that were not easy to dismiss. I was bowling a couple weeks ago, and found myself a bit breathless while we were all chatting. Another when I was driving around with my father, and for a while all I could do was give short quick answers.

The incident when bowling was really the only indication I had that something was wrong. It did make me think. The problem was, I didn’t have much time to mull over it.

Wednesday morning I noticed I was a bit short of breath. Sometimes when you get up in the morning and get moving right away, you might be a tad winded for a moment while the body ramps up to meet your activity level. Only, this time it didn’t stop.

And I noticed I was getting heart palpitations. And they didn’t stop. For the rest of the morning, all I kept feeling was “thump…thump…………thumpTHUMP………………th-thump.”

Through all this, I was short of breath, a tad light headed, and I was getting a slight headache. It is important to point out, at no time did I ever have any chest pain.

And on it went.

I spent an hour-and-a-half cleaning the Lodge building for the meeting that night, and felt a bit winded.

I got home, sat in front of the computer and relaxed a bit and got to writing.

And still I felt winded.

I checked my blood pressure—hypertension runs in my family so I do watch it—and it was normal.

I still had the palpitations and felt winded.

By the afternoon, it finally began to occur to me that something was not right. I called my doctor, who pointed out that palpitations were not worrisome, but suggested I set an appointment for the next day to for a check.

I sat and relaxed and tried to ignore the palpitations as they were really annoying me by that point. I decided something wasn’t right and I wanted to get hooked up to an EKG so I could catch whatever was going on.

I checked my blood pressure, and now it was 165/114.

NOT GOOD!

I called my father and asked him to drive me to the emergency room.

In the end, the palpitations were starting to subside. My blood pressure, was amplified by my stressing over the symptoms I was feeling. The decision to do something about this was a great stress reliever, and I’m sure that took a lot out of the system that was causing my distress.

At the ER, when someone walks in complaining about a potential cardiac issue, they don’t play around. I was hooked up to an EKG as quickly as possible and they drew blood for a number of tests.

The EKG reported that my heart was healthy—it did spot one or two of the palpitations which had really subsided by that point—and the blood tests came back negative.

Deciding that the episode was over, and all indications showing that I was fine, I was sent home. The next day, I went in on the scheduled visit with my doctor.

He noted the results from the emergency room that he had received and decided it might be wise to do another blood test to double check. He also noted there were a couple of tests that were not selected, due to the lack of symptoms that warrant such tests, and added those. Another EKG in his office showed no abnormalities and I was sent home with the suggestion that we arrange for a more complete test with a cardiologist, just to be sure that there wasn’t something going on.

It was that extra blood test that was the key. In that test, the enzyme troponin showed up. Troponin is an indicator of heart damage caused by a heart attack. Because I didn’t complain of having any chest or other pain associated with a heart attack, they didn’t bother to look for that result in the first round of tests. Basically, I had a very atypical presentation for a heart attack, showing no pain.

So, several hours after my appointment with my doctor, my phone began to ring very late at night. I ignored the call. I just don’t answer the phone after a certain point at night. Especially if it is a number I don’t recognize. It was 9:20PM.

Then the phone rang again.

I ignored it, but then I noted it was the same number that rang my phone the minute before.

Then my email chimed in with a phone message from the previous call.

It was from my doctor.

I immediately called back the number.

“Go to the emergency room immediately. Don’t drive yourself, have someone else drive you over. I’ve already called them and they are expecting you,” said my doctor.

Now that’s a wakeup call!

The extra blood test he wanted to do and considered a long shot came back positive. It showed a potential false positive of troponin, indicating that there may have been heart damage.

Several minutes later, I was on my way to the hospital.

All the tests that were going to be done over the next few weeks were all crammed into one morning: blood tests, stress test, echocardiogram, high definition EKGs.

§ § §

In the end, it was determined that I did not have a full blown heart attack. But something did happen that caused my heart enough stress that it leaked out a trace amount of troponin, which was caught in that blood test.

What exactly caused the arrhythmia has not yet been located. I still have more testing to do to find it. So I’m wired up to a small heart monitor that I’m going to wear for the next month in the hope it will catch the next arrhythmia event.

By catching the erroneous signal causing the arrhythmia, they can better determine where it it being generated from in the heart. Once that is determined, they can then use more precise and invasive means to locate the exact spot using a catheter. And then, they can short out the node that is causing the problem, curing it.
One thing to remember: the number one reason heart attacks are so deadly? Denial. Often people try to dismiss the discomfort as indigestion, a light cramp

The good news in all this is my heart is actually in pretty good condition. So, all that walking has certainly done me good.

Now, I just need to stay healthy and catch this arrhythmia so we can move on to the next step.

…And get caught up on the writing I have missed over four days because of this. I’m trying to keep to this last deadline.

Little Milestones

A Writer’s Chronicles hit a little milestone two weeks ago when it passed 5,000 views. To put that in perspective, it took about 15 months for my blog to gather that many visits. Some blogs get that count in less than five minutes. It does make one wonder, why bother?

I touched on this before, when I began the whole process. It serves as a mental warmup for writing. It also serves as a place to dump out any extraneous thoughts may be percolating in my mind. I don’t blog as frequently as I should, and sometimes not as much as I want to. In a way, that is a good thing, because I turn to write in the blog when I need a break from creative writing. So, when I am not blogging, it means I am cranking away at writing the story.

A more personal reason for blogging is it gives people a window into my mind. Many times over the years, I’ve read a book and wondered what kind of person was the author. More often than not, the image I had in my mind of one author or another was off the mark. Way off the mark. It is always fun being able to meet the author and see what they are like compared to the characters they create. How much of the writer do you actually see in a given author’s writing?

Just looking at the list of posts in my blog will make it pretty obvious to everyone that the primary focus in my mind for the past year—outside of actually writing the story—has been learning how to self-publish. Looking a little deeper, people will realize that I like to teach people how to do things. Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

My web site has had only 832 visits since I put a counter on it—set in place before I started my blog. That says a great deal about just how important the blog has become as a vehicle of promotion for my writing. It also points out that I need to put some serious work into my web site, which has suffered for want of attention while my focus has been on writing and blogging. It is looking a little thin.

I have tried allowing advertisements on both my blog and web site. I wanted to see if the ads would bring in enough money to offset the hosting costs. After 15 months, only $8 was earned. To be fair, over 60% of that was earned in the past three months, since Nobody (The Pirate Arc) went live.

The way the ads work is you get a small credit whenever someone visits the page the ads are on. If they actually click on an ad, then you receive a significantly larger credit.

I decided to pull advertisements from my main web site. I’m still allowing them on my blog, for now. It was a worthy experiment, but fell short of the desired results. Also, I felt it “diluted the brand” of my writing. Basically, things were being advertised that had nothing to do with me or my stories. Let’s face it, a web site is essentially an infomercial for your product. That product could be an actual item for sale, or just be an idea that you want to push. The ads were placing promotions for someone else’s products, and I was not benefitting from this. I spend all the money on registering my domains and hosting the sites, spend time and effort in building the various web pages and content, and I was not getting a good return on investment of my time and effort.

The blog is hosted for free by Google via their Blogger service. So, with the idea of fair exchange, the ads will remain there for now.

Why all this focus on the numbers?

When I started this blog, one of the titles I considered giving it was The Business of Writing. I decided against it, because it placed too much focus on one subject and more importantly, I am not exactly a wizened expert on the writing business. There are writers out there who have far more experience and better, clearer advice to give. I decided on A Writer’s Chronicles, because the title far better suited my purpose behind the blog, and that was to give the stories behind the stories. What I was doing, what I was learning, what I was experiencing at any given time that lent itself to my writing.

If and when you decide you are going to self-publish your stories, you are accepting the responsibility of assuming the business functions of selling your stories. In light of that, you have to look at the numbers.

Many times in the movies, I’ve seen them portray a successful writer as being obnoxiously obsessed with the sales numbers of his latest titles, brushing off fans and other people as annoyances. I hate the cliché obnoxiousness. But, I have to say that paying attention to the sales numbers, visits to web sites, where are people coming from to see your book, are all very important.

If you want to succeed as a professional writer, you have to pay attention to your audience and where they are coming from.

What do all these numbers mean? What do they represent?

The numbers tell you first how many copies you have sold of a given book. On that, you know how much you will eventually make in income when the royalty checks come in.

If you look a little harder, and a little closer, you can see something else. Maybe something more important. You begin to see just who your audience is.

Where are they coming from? Where did they hear about your book?

A lot of traffic to my blog comes from Facebook connections. To my surprise, a fairly strong percentage comes from Twitter. I didn’t expect that at all.

Another surprise was that one-third of the people who have come to my web site are in Europe. The vast majority are in the United States. But China?! Hits to my blog from China ranked third on the list! Looking through the web logs, it appears that most of the traffic is due to bots and spiders crawling through my web pages gleaning search information.

It’s important to know these things about the people who are reading your book. Do you want to reach more readers? Then you have to find out where people are learning about your book!

Why?

If you write a story that you have targeted to young women, does it make sense to spend almost $300,000 to advertise your book in a major men’s magazine? (Yes, people, it really does cost that much for a ⅓-page, four-color ad in a national magazine for three months!) And the opposite can be true. If you find that most of the people reading your story are men, would you advertise in a women’s magazine?

Actually, the answer to that second question can be rather tricky. It could be argued that if your story has appeal to both sexes, it might be worth publishing in media that cater to the smaller demographic of your readers to bring your story to their attention. It’s a tough call, and requires deeper studying on your part to determine if the return on investment would be worth the expense. Is there really an untapped market on that side? Or would you be throwing good money after bad to chase after that demographic?

And then there is the most important milestone of all: the number of copies sold. To date, the total has reached 997 copies of Nobody (The Pirate Arc). Just shy of 1,000. Just 9.9% of the total number of copies I need to sell of Nobody when it is released to declare this a success. I view that as pretty damned good! It was significantly more copies than I expected to sell over this time period.

It suggests, that there are nearly 1,000 people out there that are looking forward to buying the complete book when it is released next month.

This is the kind of ugly stuff that most writers don’t want to dirty their hands with. We all hate the attitude where someone views everyone as a number. Many will complain, there is more to writing than numbers.

The answer is, yes, writing is about writing a story and connecting that story to other people. Connecting the imagination in your mind with that of another person through simple leaves of paper. This connection can span across all time and space. It simply takes that one other person to pick up your book and begin reading it.

But to get your book into the hands of that other person goes beyond the art of writing. It requires printing it and delivering it to the place where that other person will pick it up and read it.

That takes money. And to make money, you have to sell your book. And to sell your book as effectively as possible, you have to find your audience. If you don’t do this, then you probably won’t be making your living as an author for very long.

Do not forget the business side of writing. Writing a story is art. Selling that story is business. To make the business a success, you have to pay attention to how, where, and to whom your book is selling. That means watching the numbers. It is very easy for a writer to get lost in the effort of writing and ignore all else. Even a business with an excellent product can fail if it is not managed well.

Print vs. Digital

One question I get asked a lot: “Will you be signing copies of your book?”

The answer is, “Heck yes!”

Unfortunately, there is some fine print with that yes. The fine print being, “When I can afford it.”

Nobody is being released first as an ebook. In fact, it is likely that all my books will first be released as ebooks. When I’ve made enough sales that I can put food on the table, pay the bills and utilities, keep my car running, fix things that break around the house, and still have enough money for a print run—and if there is demand enough to justify it—I will print up copies to sell for those who want a physical book.

The key phrase here is demand enough to justify it.

Everyone tends to think of the artistic side of writing, the craft of honing a story into a form that delivers enjoyment to many readers. But we cannot forget the other side of writing: the business of writing. When you decide to sell a story, you are making a business transaction with a reader, trading your hard-wrought story for their hard-earned cash. In this way, you can make a living as a writer and produce more stories for people to enjoy.

But if it costs you more money to produce the books than you make in income, you aren’t going to be in business for long.

Printing a book has costs involved that go far and above the production of an ebook. Paper, ink, glues, electricity consumed during production, storage, shipping, distribution… Yeah, it’s all money that has to be spent.

A print book and an ebook are structured differently.

A print book is structured so the story is presented across a number of paper pages. An ebook is structured so the story is actually presented in one continuous stream of text. Where we tend to think of a book as a series of pages, an ebook is actually one continuous page like a web page. In fact, in an ebook file, each chapter is a unique web page. An EPUB file is merely a self-contained website.

Go to Project Gutenberg and download an ebook in the EPUB format. Change the file suffix from .epub to .zip and then open that zip archive. Open the newly revealed directory called OPS, and you will see each chapter of the book as a single HTML file. Don’t like the way an ebook is being rendered on your ebook reader? Mess around with the CSS file in the OPS/css directory and fix it. Zip up the files back into a zip archive, change the suffix back to .epub, and voila! Your ebook looks better. I’ve done this with almost every ebook I’ve purchased, with a few exceptions.

So, when I create the epub file for an ebook, I am essentially outputting the chapters as HTML files.

But, a print book requires a different setup.

Again, we tend to think of a book as a series of pages. The key printing technology we are all exposed to is a printer in the office, which prints a document page by page. So, people tend to think of a book as being printed page-by-page and then slipped and glued into a cover.

Not quite.

A series of pages from a book is printed on two sides of a large sheet of paper called a signature. The signature is then folded and the folds are trimmed off, leaving a series of pages in sequence. The image shows a signature I made by folding a 8.5”x11” paper, numbering the pages in sequence and then unfolding it to reveal the signature structure. Notice in the image when folded, you can see page 2 on the other side of page 1. When unfolded, you can see how scattered the page distribution is on the face of the paper. The other pages of my signature are similarly scattered on the obverse of the paper.

In the last image, you see an actual hardcover book up close, showing the folds of the various signatures where they were glued together against the spine of the book. 

A folded signature

The signature unfolded. The arrows indicate the top of the page

You can see the folds of the signatures along the spine.
They show up as U-shapes in the glue.

All this structure must be predetermined before a story can go to press and be printed as a book. As you can imagine, that takes serious organization and planning to get it right, even with a computer doing the setup automatically. Just grab the signatures out of sequence when assembling them, a reader could find the book going from page 32 to page 64, and then from page 96 to page 33!

Once the layout has been determined, then the printing plates must be created, then loaded into the printing press along with ink and paper for the actual printing. Only then can the operator press the “Go!” button on the press and the signatures containing the story come spitting out the other end.

Then, the signatures go into another machine where they are folded and stacked with the other signatures containing the story. These stacks are pressed together, cut, and glued into the spine of the book cover.

NOW it’s a book!

It takes a lot of skill and expertise, materials, energy and time to just set up a document to be printed into a book. That’s just the set up. Running the press to print the book is going to require paper, ink, and electricity. And don’t forget the salaries of the people the company needs to accomplish all this.

As you can guess, it isn’t cheap.

The setup costs for creating a printed book are going to be the same, regardless of whether the print run is going to be for 1,000 books or 10,000 books. So, the more books generated in a given run then the cheaper it will be per book. If it costs $8 per book to print a 6x9 hardcover book, then 1,000 copies will cost me $8,000. Let’s say the printer gives me a 50% discount from that price for doing 10,000 copies. It will still cost me  $40,000 to print that number of books.

Now, if I had actual commitment from X-number of people to buy the hardcover versions of my book, then I could go out on a limb and have the printer print up X-number of books. It would be a safe investment to put out that cash, knowing that I would make it back in a fairly short time. But without knowing how many people might be willing to pay for my book, I could be left with a lot of stock to sell, but no buyers, and therefore no way to pay off the cost of printing.

Ever wonder why an author charges $20–$25 for a signed copy of their book when you can buy the same book for $13.95 on Amazon? It isn’t for the signature, as most would assume. It is because the author had to pay wholesale for each of those books from his or her publisher, and then they may only sell a couple dozen at a time here and there. There is the cost of gas or tickets traveling to a book signing, hotel and food costs. It adds up pretty quickly. And to sell just a few dozen per sitting? The author will pretty much break even, if lucky.

There have been more than a few authors who have nearly bankrupt themselves by doing too many book signings.

The safe way for now is to sell my story as an ebook and generate income for a while until I have enough money stashed away to pay for a print run. It might be a while before that happens.

It does cost a lot of money to print up even a small number of books. I would need some serious commitments from a lot of people to buy a print version of my book for me to be able to justify the expense of doing so. I’ve already taken enough of a gamble going full time into writing, I don’t think I could afford to gamble again on printing up even a 1,000 copies of my book without having a good idea of how well it would sell.

How do the numbers look for that matter?

To date, I’ve sold over 800 copies of the short story and the response has been overwhelmingly positive! That is incredibly encouraging!

According to Pew Research, about 20% of Americans own an ebook reader. About 75% of all Americans over the age of 16 read at least one book during 2012. So, very roughly, about 25% of the readers in America own an ebook reader.

Keep in mind, I am ignoring tablet computers such as the iPad, because they have other uses, such as playing Angry Birds. An ebook reader has only one purpose: to read a book.

So, if 800 people liked my short story so much, they want to buy the full story as an ebook when released, then it might suggest that four times more people would want to buy my book if printed in a hardcover book. (For those of you bad at math, that’s 3,200.)

To print 3,200 books at $8 apiece, that would cost me $25,600. If I sold them at $22 apiece, that would bring in $70,400. I would make a profit of $44,800. Still a pretty damned good number! Oops! Don’t forget taxes! Take $18,000 off that for taxes. Now I’m down to $26,800. Um, okay, that’s still not too bad. But just remember, that is my total income for the year!

Now, let’s take travel expenses into account. Traveling around the country on business to sell my book, food, hotels, etc. For just ten weeks of travel, it could run me more than $1,000 per week! How many of you make $27K per year in wages are willing to take ten weeks of vacation in various expensive-to-visit cities around the US?

Suddenly, that number has been whittled down to $16,800. Living expenses for the year. Now, factor in rent at $1,100 per month, food, electricity, water, car payments… There’s not much left.

Remember how above I said more than a few authors have or nearly have bankrupt themselves? Now you see the numbers. Now you can understand how it is possible.

Of course, some of the travel costs can be taken off taxes as cost of doing business. There are ways to cut costs during travel. Staying in some cities is still pretty damned expensive, but often hotel chains offer frequent guest discounts. By carefully choosing venues to sell my books, such as science fiction conventions, I could reduce the number of times I have to travel and maximize sales.

But the whole example demonstrates the costs of doing business, and gives you an idea of what it takes to make money selling books. It gives you an idea, for that matter, of just how much you can make selling a limited number of books. It also reveals how many books I would need to sell in order to make a living as an author.

I have stated many times to people, that my goal is to try and sell 10,000 copies of Nobody as an ebook in the first year. I didn’t choose that number arbitrarily. It reflects the minimum I need to sell in order to make enough money to live on and pay back those have supported me in this endeavor.

By odd coincidence, I later discovered that in the publishing industry, a book is considered a hit if it sells at least 10,000 copies! So, I seem to have hit upon the right number.

What are my chances of meeting with that success?

There are 315 million people in the US. At least 63 million (20%) of them own an ebook reader. I just need to reach .02% of 63 million people to reach my minimum goal of 10,000 copies sold.

I thought it would be a stretch to sell 100 copies of Nobody (The Pirate Arc) in just one month—I passed 800! It is still selling at a pretty steady clip! I think the odds are pretty much in my favor that I’m going to make it.

To fund a print version of Nobody, obviously I am going to have to sell a lot more copies of the ebook version than just 10,000. I do fully intend to do print run in the future, if for no other purpose than to be able to have something for signing autographs. Yeah, I’ve gotten requests!

If you want to write a book, you cannot ignore the business of writing! Remember that in any business, there are costs that must be covered. There are costs in selling a book. Heck, there are costs in writing the book. Remember, you have to feed the author so he has enough energy to write.

Keep those costs in sight and plan accordingly. Don’t take a chance and go for broke, because that might be where you end up.

The View So Far…

When I launched Nobody (The Pirate Arc) on Thanksgiving, I took a look at how well successful books did during their initial launch. The numbers were anecdotal, drawn from interviews the various authors did about their successes. Based on their experiences, I created an estimate of where I thought the numbers would be at the end of the month, if everything was going well. I figured if things were going decently, I should have a couple of dozen copies sold by the end of December.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, the ultimate goal would be to reach 110 copies sold by the end of the month. This was based on how many friends said they would be willing to buy my book when it came out. Somewhere at the low end of the difference I figured would be the conservative estimate.

Another key point about the number 110, is I figured any number higher than that would guarantee that many people buying it would be complete strangers to me.

The popular titles I referenced had rather inauspicious beginnings, selling only tens to dozens of copies during their first month or two. These two titles went on to sell tens and hundreds of thousands of copies within the year following. I can only hope I get so lucky!

So, my shoot for the moon figure for the end of December is 110. While past performance is no indicator of future successes, I figured reaching 110 would be a pretty damned good indicator of future potential!

As of a few minutes ago, my sales count for December so far is 702.  

No More Peer Reviews on Amazon

Amazon has quietly banned authors from reviewing the work of other authors in the same genre. In the process, they deleted reviews written by authors about other authors’ books.

This was partially in response to the confession of author R.J. Ellory, admitting that he had been posting fake reviews expounding on how good were his own books and posting scathing criticisms about the books of competitive authors. He would create fake accounts and post his false comments through those accounts.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. The web is rampant with fake reviews. The practice of creating fake accounts to in turn write glowing reviews about one’s own work is called “sock puppeting.” Worse, there are companies that can be hired to write fake reviews promoting a book. This is called “astro-turfing.”

The result is, a reader goes online looking for a new book to read and comes across a new title that has dozens of glowing reviews. Upon purchasing the book, the reader finds instead that the story is a piece of crap and the writing is terrible and rife with mistakes. If you come across such a situation and find yourself thinking that what you are reading doesn’t live up to all the reviews, it might not be just you. The story might actually suck, and all those reviews were either sock-puppet fakes posted by the author or astro-turfed by some business hired by the author.

Essentially, you just got ripped off.

I strongly urge anyone, before buying any ebook—including my own—to read the free sample that is offered. The sample should be enough to show you what to expect what you will really find in the story. I bought a couple of books because of the sample. I also avoided quite a few books because of the sample.

Caveat Emptor.

I’ve told family and friends not to post any reviews or comments unless they have actually read my story and actually liked it. For those who wanted to say something but hadn’t yet read my story yet, I asked them simply to state that they knew me and wanted to spread the word that their friend had written a book.

Keep it honest.

I tell people to go to my web site to find the links to buy my book. There is says very clearly that Nobody (The Pirate Arc) is a short story excerpt from the full book, being the first six chapters.

I know one reader on Amazon was quite angry that the story ended at the sixth chapter in one helluva cliff hanger, and thusly gave me a negative review. Hugh Howey’s, Wool, is an excellent example of an excerpt release. It was released as a standalone short, but is actually the first of several stories. Similarly to myself, a small number of people chimed in about Wool and complained. Also, many of the negative reviews were: “It wasn’t to my taste…”

I would like to point out that those people who complained that Wool was “not to their taste” did actually read the story to the end. Well, if the story compelled them to read it to the end, then obviously the writing was pretty damned good, whether it was to their taste or not. If I didn’t like a story, but was still compelled to read it to the end, that says something and demands that I give the story a higher ranking than just one star.

The story I would absolutely have this reaction to was Donald R. Stevenson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. I hated that series! Or rather, I hated the lead character, Thomas Covenant. He was a perfect antihero. As much as I say I disliked the story and would complain about Covenant, keep in mind that I read the entire series! I couldn’t put those damned books down! And the moment a new one came out, I would buy it so I could see what happened next in the story.

THAT is the real critique! The story was so compelling and had pulled me in so deep, that even though I absolutely loathed the lead character, I had to buy each book and read it!

It was well written and compelling. That is the real review! That would be worth four stars at least.

For the record: I strongly recommend Wool. I thought it was an excellent short story in the Dystopian Science-fiction genre. It didn’t reach #1 on Amazon’s Bestsellers List for nothing! It’s currently available for free, so you won’t lose anything trying it out.

And yes, I would also recommend Stevenson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Regardless of how I felt about the story and the protagonist, good writing is good writing. Stevenson does good work in these books.

So now at Amazon, there will be no peer reviews for the foreseeable future.

Too many unscrupulous people trying to game the system.

Now what? How can Amazon fix it?

I have my own ideas on this.

Currently, there are two ways to rank a book: by the number of sales and the recommendations of readers.

The number of sales is very objective. Regardless of what people feel about a book, you cannot deny the number of copies that have been sold, minus any that have been returned for a refund. If a title is very popular, it will be selling large numbers of copies in a very short period of time. If not, sales might lag for a long time. But it doesn’t tell you anything about the story inside. A story could be really good, but just not catch on right away. Sales numbers can be a bit too objective in a way.

At the other extreme is the ranking set by readers. Reader reviews are highly subjective. People will either love a story or hate it. As a result, the reviews will either glorify or pan the story. There is rarely anything in between. A quick hop around several titles in the Fantasy genre on Amazon, and the rankings that are used most are one and five stars. (Four scores third, and two and three almost never show up.)

People like what they like. It is a matter of individual taste. I have read books that were raved about by friends and found that I just couldn’t get into them. And I love some books that my friends just don’t find interesting at all. 

Between the two, sales numbers and reader reviews, is a solution. One that can solve the problem of false reviews being entered and forcing reviewers to be as balanced as possible.

When people really like something, they want to tell their friends. Similarly, if they don't like something, they are going to want to warn their friends away from it. Both sides tend to become polarized, and are willing to go as far as it takes to prove their point, including lying or posting false reviews.

So perhaps Amazon should rank the rankers.

A popular book is going to sell like crazy. The sales numbers will reflect this over a period of time. If a book sells wildly at first and then the numbers fall off fairly early and quickly, it could be assumed that the sales were mainly out of curiosity. But if the numbers continue to climb steadily over a longer period of time, it might be indicating that the book is popular and selling steadily.

If someone posts a negative comment about a book that is enormously popular, then that would certainly bring the credibility, if not the veracity, of the critic into question. Especially if the positive reviews on the same title greatly outnumber the negative reviews. In such a case, lower the score on that negative reviewer. The lower the score a reviewer has, the less weight the reviewer’s vote has on a given title’s rank in the lists. The same idea works in the other direction where someone has posted a glorious review on a title that just plain sucks.

List reviews according to rank. Someone with a low rank will always end up at the end of a list of reviews, where their trolling comments will probably never be seen.

People who want to be taken seriously as a critic won’t want to risk their rank by being snarky because of some personal grudge against the author or the world in general. This will force them to be more balanced and careful in their critiques.

Second, have other people judge the critiques posted. If people who have read the book agree with what the poster had to say—positive or negative—then the reviewer’s rank score goes up. If people think the reviewer was full of crap and wondered what the hell book it was the reviewer read, then they can click on disagree and vote the reviewer down.

Those people who judge the reviewers must have earned a reviewer’s score above a certain point to be allowed to judge another reviewer. This means that an author acting as a sock-puppet, wishing to force the rankings is going to have to work at it.

This is gamification. People will play a game endlessly for no other reason than to attain the next level or have a higher score than other people. People who like to critique writing and books will want to be taken as seriously as possible and be seen as an authority. Knowing that if they post a review that doesn’t pass muster could cost them seriously in their ranking, that will pretty much guarantee they will be careful to post only accurate, truthful reviews.

Sure, some new guy can still post a review, but because that guy has no rank, his review will always be at the end of the list. If he posts early enough after the release of a book, his list will show up for a while until it gets pushed off the page by higher ranked reviews. If his review reflects the trends of the book’s popularity and/or other reviewers feel that his review was an accurate assessment of the book, his score goes up faster.

Sales numbers, the number of positive vs. negative reviews, done by reviewers vetted by other people, could then be used to tabulate the rank of a book in the bestsellers list.

Another vector to affect a book’s rank is the number of reviews. If a book’s sales are lackluster, and there are few or no reviews, then it might be a pretty good indication that the book is not that good.

A book whose sales jump at the get go and then tapers off, gathering few reviews, might indicate that people were curious but not moved enough by the story to find it worth mentioning. That would give the book a low rank.

A book with steady and growing sales, positive reviews, and continues to do so over a period of months, would indicate that it is a popular book and should rank it high.

The higher score a reviewer has, then the more weight their vote has when reviewing books and other reviewers. It would take a lot of work and dedication to earn and maintain that high score. That gives an individual with a high score a lot of authority and social status. They will NOT want to jeopardize their standing by getting snarky about one or two books.

Sure, I can think of flaws in my idea, but it does make it harder for trolls, astro-turfers and puppeteers to manipulate the system.

Post-Launch Telemetry

To everyone who has purchased Nobody (The Pirate Arc), I would like to extend my heartfelt Thank you!

The process of writing a book takes a long time. Much longer than most people expect. Life’s other events have a way of getting in the way of the schedule you expected to follow, making it go even longer. Some things you see coming a ways off. Others, you never see until they hit you broadside.

I did a fairly good estimate on how long it would take me to complete Nobody. Based on this, I set up a budget that I figured would give me a year’s worth of money to pay the bills after the book was published. With a year of being able to pay the bills, that gave me flexibility to get the book published and selling, and enough time to go out and find a job in case the book flopped.

With that, I rolled up my sleeves, took off my watch, and started writing.

Well, life happens…

I’m nearing the completion of Nobody, finding myself more than a year behind my schedule due to such life events. And if you read the above paragraph, you will recall that I left myself only enough money to get me a year past publication.

Yes, it takes a long time. The more time it takes, the more there is opportunity for those awful moments when you find yourself at a loss, stuck on a certain part of the story, and you stare at the words and begin to wonder if this is really going to work. Am I just spinning my tires? Is this really going to succeed? Or am I wasting my dwindling savings on a pipe dream when I should be going out and getting a job?

I’ve had a number of those episodes. Two that were admittedly really bad—one when I knew money was starting to run out. I knew it would run out as I finished the book, and that left me almost three months before I would even see the first check from any sales that occurred once it was released.

I realized I had gone past my time limit. It was now do or die.

The editing process on the first six chapters went fairly smoothly. It was as I was finishing the last couple rounds of edits that it occurred to me that the first six chapters could stand on their own, and left enough of an open ending that would leave the reader wanting more.

There hatched the idea to release the first six chapters as a short story. I figured it would be an entertaining read and for less than a cup of coffee. At 99¢, it wouldn’t make much money, but it would at least bring in a little income to allow me to make token payments on the bills when needed. Banks are so much happier to work with you when you can at least pay something instead of nothing.

It took me time to convince myself that it was a good idea.

Baen Books has a program called “eARC”. An eARC (Advance Reader Copy) is essentially an ebook of the raw manuscript as submitted by the author for publishing. They charge a premium price for these and there is a market for them. They are full of errors, misspellings, apocryphal story arcs, because they haven’t been through the editing process to produce the final product. But the reader gets a rare opportunity to see just what the story looked like as it came pouring out of the author’s mind. Would you pay three times the price for the final book for just such a document? Many would say, yes. Imagine if you could get your hands on a prototype manuscript of Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy, Romero and Julia? Or Tolstoy’s 1805?

Many books in the past were originally published serially in monthly periodicals. The practice is beginning to make a comeback, thanks to ebook publishing.

It is not my intent to publish the Aggadeh Chronicles serially.

So, I pulled the six chapters of Nobody and packaged them together and published them as a short story excerpt.

Thanksgiving morning—as I was preparing to head over to my sister’s place for the holiday dinner—I gave a quick check of my email and discovered that my book had gone live on Amazon about an hour before midnight. Delaying my departure, I quickly jumped online and into my account with Amazon and much to my surprise, discovered two copies had already sold. Even before I myself knew that the book was available for sale!

That made for a very happy Thanksgiving dinner!

It is a bit of a mystery to me about those first two copies that sold. I didn’t even publish the links to the book until the weekend—by which point five copies had sold. Until Amazon’s databases were fully updated, my father had a helluva time trying to find my ebook online. As my book debuted at the lofty ranking of 103,000+ in their bestsellers list, one would have to dig awfully deep to actually find it.

Unless one of the people who bought it on Thanksgiving actually sends me an email explaining, I’ll never really know. I think one of the more plausible explanations is the early purchasers are publishing agents trawling for new talent among the self-publishing writers. If it is a good read, sit quietly for a month or two and if the book really starts to sell, they give the new author a call and an offer.

Based on sales figures presented for fairly successful authors, I figured I would probably sell a dozen copies in the first month before interest in my story would begin to catch on and spread. Also based on previous examples, I knew that if my book was a success, it might still be a few months before I reached 1,000 copies sold. Such numbers mean I’ll still be behind the eight ball financially, but my prospects will be strong when the full book is out. (My target date is hopefully in February.)

It was my fervent hope that I would at least sell 110 copies by the end of 2012. I figured that would be a good signal that my book would succeed.

By November 30^th, I had sold 30 copies. This guarantees that I’ll be paid $10 on February 1^st. (Sixty-day delay before royalties are paid.) As far as selling 12 copies in a month, I sold 30 copies in the first week!

As of today, I have now sold more than 300 copies! (These numbers change on an hourly basis, so it may be different to those who decide to take a look for themselves.)

My book is now ranked at #71 on Amazon’s Bestsellers List for Epic Fantasies. (To keep things realistic, this is a sub-sub-category. Small fish. Small pond.)

It's a safe bet that this is going to be printed,
framed, and hung on the wall!

My overall rank was #2,988 on Amazon’s Alltime Bestsellers List!

And this morning, I received the weekly email from Amazon promoting various books for sale, and discovered my book was the first one listed!

The icing on the cake is people have actually been leaving reviews about my story, and the reviews have been good!

To say the least, this is significantly better than what I was expecting. Sales are growing much faster than I could have imagined. It is in no small part to friends helping promote my book. Just simply saying, “Hey, my friend wrote this–,” has resulted in the majority of these sales. I can only reach so many people. But when my friends share with their friends, that number increases exponentially. And now, people who have no connection to me other than they have read my book are starting to spread the word. This is where these sales are coming from.

For the first time, my own strained faith in myself to write successfully is finally reaching fruition. I now have a possible answer for those frightening moments of self-doubt wondering if this was really going to work.

The answer looks like it's going to be: Hell yeah!

Launch!

At last! Something I’ve written is finally available for sale!

Actually, it has been available since Thanksgiving (11/22), but only now am I getting around to actually posting the links. Amazingly, already a dozen copies have sold, even without me promoting its existence.

The short story excerpt, Aggadeh Chronicles Book 1: Nobody (The Pirate Arc) is now available for purchase at 99¢ from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Because of the holiday, it is not yet available on Apple’s iTunes Book Store, yet.

When the full novel is completed in a few months, I’ll pull The Pirate Arc from the sales venues. Of those twelve people who have already bought the short, I advise you to consider it a collector’s item, as one of my editors picked out a typo that got through everything and made it into the release. The correction was made last night. The typo was the use of an incorrect word in Chapter 4. It was my father who caught it. One of those, “Holy crap! How’d I miss that?” kind of errors.

This is why I waited for so long to announce where to buy my book. I wanted to make sure all the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed before I started pushing it out there. I wanted to make sure that everything was working right, before I had a field a thousand questions such as, “Why can’t I find it?” The answer being, because the database hadn’t been updated, yet. (As of now, my book has just started appearing in the sales lists.)

Another reason I sat quiet on it was curiosity. What would happen if I just put it out there, like sticking a note into a bottle and throwing into the ocean? The answer: at least a dozen people bought it! How on earth they found it is beyond me. I do strongly suspect it may have either been staff purchases for review or possibly publishers and agents buying new titles in an effort to find promising writers to sign. Who knows? (Well– the twelve who bought know…)

So now it’s out there. Buy it! It’s only 99¢!

The full novel will be ready in a few months, after editing is complete. Yes, it does take that long. If you like the excerpt, then you only have to wait a little longer to find out what happens after the Island Dancer leaves Gulagh and where Nem winds up next. (Hint: there’s a reason the title of the series is Aggadeh Chronicles.)

If you didn’t like it… Well– Thank you for taking the chance and trying my book. Remember you’re only out 99¢, less than a cup of coffee. I don’t expect everyone is going to like my story. I’ve read books that I found my reaction was less than entertained, even though I liked other stories by the author. I do have other stories coming…

AT LAST!

Aggadeh Chronicles Book 1: Nobody (The Pirate Arc) has now been officially published!

This is the short version of the book, featuring the first six chapters. This short version of the book serves several functions, not the least of which is to generate income for me so I can afford to continue writing and finish the rest of the book.

It will be available on Amazon.com, Apple iTunes and Barnes & Noble Nook Books over the next few days—unless something went wrong with the submission process, of which I'm sure due notice will be given at a later date.

As soon as it is available, I'll have the links posted on my web site, www.williamdrichards.com.

This isn't the end of the process, merely a step in the right direction. I still have a lot more work to complete.

Apple Maps—Is It Really That Bad?

It seems the target du-jour of late is the Maps program in Apple’s newest release of iOS. Blogs, news articles, forum threads, and social sites seemed to light up with malicious glee over how bad Apple’s Maps was compared to Google Maps, the program Apple replaced. The negative reviews began right out of the gate with the release of iOS6.

I was excited to see iOS 6 come out. After all the hype, I was looking forward to seeing how Apple was going to out-Google Google Maps. Then I began reading about the criticisms people had for the program, which certainly had an effect on my expectations. When I finally loaded iOS 6 onto my iPhone 3Gs, I must admit I was fairly disappointed with what I found in the offering from Apple.

The hype about the technology Apple employed for their Maps program had me excited to see it in action. Pundits comment endlessly how Apple is a company that has an excellent practice at maintaining its secrets. My opinion is that Apple keeping secrets is a distant second to their other marketing talent of generating hype for new products to be released. In this case, the hype really set Apple up to disappoint their customers.

When Apple released the iPhone 4S, everyone knew this was just to tide them over until the release of the iPhone 5. Back in the spring, Apple warned investors that they expected sales of iPhones to dry up. Over the summer, market analysts noted that sales of smart phones in general were dropping in anticipation of the release of the iPhone 5.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall and expectations for the iPhone 5 were huge. Love or hate Apple, one cannot deny they put out excellent, high quality products. So the slightest flaw is something that almost everyone will pounce upon.

The flaw in iOS 6 is Apple Maps.

The backlash was enormous! People were saying they couldn’t find various locations (such as restaurants nearby) when they did a search. Some government officials in the UK complained that it was showing an airport where there was none. (More about this in a couple of paragraphs.) Compared to Google Maps, everyone complained it fell way short.

Considering that Google Maps was arguably the most heavily used application in iOS, Apple Maps had to really perform.

Everyone is used to Apple hitting it out of the ballpark whenever they release something new. We are used to seeing Apple create a product that outdoes what a competitor’s product had been doing for years (iPod and then the iPhone). So much so, many people don’t recall just how often Apple doesn’t get it out of the infield, or even strikes out.

So when Apple’s Maps program failed to out-Google Google’s Maps program, everyone jumped on the wagon and declared it a spectacular failure. So loud was the din from the public, that Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, even issued an apology for Apple Maps falling short of expectations.

Is Apple Maps really that bad?

Let’s look at the errors.

The fantasy airport reported?

Over the summer, a good two months before Apple released iOS 6 with their Maps program, I found Google Maps listing an airport where there was none. A few months prior to that, I found an airport that was listed as a public restroom. I found a primary road in Springfield, Massachusetts that had the wrong name applied to it. Roads that didn’t exist. In back rural roads in Vermont, there are a few places where the map data doesn’t line up with the path the actual road follows in the satellite imagery.

In each of these cases, I filed an error report with Google and the errors were reviewed and fixed in fairly short order.

Is Apple Maps reporting improper locations so shocking? Not in the least! I have found a few errors in Apple Maps by looking at locations near where I live. I merely dropped on pin [in the program] on the location and reported it as a problem.

Functionally, Apple Maps works fine. A couple short drives showed that it was doing its job in directing me to where I was going. I used Google Maps heavily when driving cross-country and I don’t expect to be led astray by Apple’s offering. Routing information in both programs produce the same result.

The turn-by-turn navigation mode impressed me. When I deviated from the course suggested by Maps, it adjusted the new course almost instantly. It was already offering a suggested route change even before I had finished the turn onto the new road and it wasn’t trying to steer me back to the original course like some other GPS navigation devices would do.

After playing with Apple Maps for the past couple weeks, I can say with certainty that it works just fine.

I will say that Apple Maps is not as matured as Google Maps. Let’s face it, Google has been working at this for well over seven years now. Apple? Just a couple of months. Google has rolled many excellent features into their mapping product. The ability to do a search for a given business in the map? Data search is Google’s core competency. I don’t see Apple beating Google in that arena anytime soon. Other companies have tried and failed miserably.

About two years ago, Google began a program encouraging users to enter extra data into their map database and to report any inaccuracies. I have sent in many such reports and found them to be corrected within a month or so. This is the sort of activity that Apple must encourage of their users. This is what will greatly flesh out their offerings in the maps. Yeah, I’ve found a few errors in location positions in Apple’s Maps program and I’ve sent in bug reports about them. As I said above, I find errors in Google Maps as well.

My biggest complaint about Apple Maps (and Apple’s earlier implementation of Google Maps, too)? The blue dot that shows your current position on the map is the same blue color as the line that shows your route information. When driving, I cannot differentiate between the two with a quick glance. It requires a longer look, which takes my attention off the road. Wake up call to Apple: the human eye needs CONTRAST to work optimally! Change the color of one or the other!

Now, complaints aside, the technophile (aka “geek”) in me can see the foundations of future greatness that Apple has created with their Maps program. The key feature being that the program uses vector information to construct the maps, where Google uses image tiles to construct their maps.

On an old and very well worn 3Gs, the Apple vector maps load much faster than the Google JPEG map tiles. The Apple Maps program can load vastly more map data that Google can in the same amount of available memory. When driving around a region where cellphone coverage may be spotty, this is important. There are several places I drive through where signal is lost, and my Google map was reduced to a blue dot floating on an empty grid. I look forward to when I can put Apple’s map to the test and see if it properly preloads enough map data to carry me through these zones.

I think the primary flaw in Apple Maps is that people expected far more from Apple than was delivered. Think of it as getting a glass of 12-year-old scotch instead of a glass of 25-year-old scotch. Both may be excellent distillations, but one is certainly better than the other. Apple Maps functions excellently now. It just lacks the extra smoothness and polish of its counterpart, Google Maps. It also has a number of flaws in its locations data. Ultimately, these errors will be vetted out and fixed.

Considering the underlying technologies Apple has used as the foundation for their map program, given time I think it is safe to expect it will mature into an outstanding tool. For now, consumers will have to accept that Apple is a few years behind the competition in this arena. If history is any indication, Apple might eventually turn Maps into a product that sets the standard rather than following it.