Jessica A. Scott's Blog

I don’t know if it is because I am getting older (I hit the big 3-0 this year!), if it is because of the commercial nature of the holiday, or if it is because the celebrating starts in September now and goes on for way too long, but for the last few years, I haven’t really been able to get into the Christmas spirit. Sure, the decorations are pretty and it’s nice to spend time with the family and eat cookies and open presents, but I feel like a lot of people (me included) have lost sight of what the holiday season is really about. So this year I had to make a choice: give up and become a Grinch, or try to find a way to make the holiday more meaningful.

As much as I love the Grinch, I don’t really want to be one myself. So I started looking for a way to give back to my community for the holiday, and to use my author platform for a good cause. I went in search of local charities that I could contribute to, and the one that made the biggest impact on me was My Dog Eats First. This charity does some incredible work, providing the homeless and less fortunate members of the Louisville, Kentucky community with a way to keep and care for their pets even if they don’t have much money. So many people have to give up their dogs because they can’t afford to feed them or keep them healthy because of their own financial situation, but My Dog Eats First strives to make it so that no one has to be separated from their best friend. In their own words:

Our mission is to provide pet food, supplies, basic vaccinations and spay/neuter services for the pets of the homeless and underserved within our community. We provide this support in a judgement free environment for individuals and families in who are committed to the health and wellness of their pets and desire to keep them. In doing so, we believe we are:

Keeping the homeless united with what in most cases is the only living thing that provides with them with companionship, protection and unconditional love
Reducing the amount of healthy pets surrendered to shelters because of financial burden
Saving healthy pets from unnecessary euthanasia by keeping them with their families.

We believe in the love and companionship that companion animals bring to their underserved and homeless owners. Everyone deserves someone that makes them look forward to tomorrow.

As anyone who has ever met me can tell you, my best friends in life have always been my dogs. Just the thought of being separated from them, or of not being able to help them when they needed it, breaks my heart. I don’t want anyone to have to face this terrible situation, so I am going to do my best to help the cause by contributing 50 percent of the proceeds from every copy of Love and Squalor sold from December 15, 2019 to January 31, 2020 to My Dog Eats First.

If you haven’t checked out the rest of the site, Love and Squalor is a novel about the struggles faced by the people in an underserved community and, while fictional, it parallels a lot of the issues faced in some areas of my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, making it a great book to help bring awareness to this issue. Even if it isn’t about dogs, it is about people who want more out of life, but feel as if they can’t get anywhere due to their lack of resources and power. No one should have to feel this way, and no one should have to miss out on the unconditional love of a pet because of monetary reasons.

Whether you prefer ebooks or print books, your purchase matters, and half of the royalties from every sale of Love and Squalor (including money earned from affiliate links) will go to this important program. I will be posting updates as they come in, as well as the grand total donated at the end of January. In the meantime, every share of this post or of my posts about it on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram will help to increase its visibility and the number of people who can see it and donate.

You can find Love and Squalor on Amazon here. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments or via my Contact page.

I would really appreciate your help and support in this cause, and I hope that it will help all of us feel the true spirit of the season.

And if you aren’t into books but still want to help make a brighter new year for Louisville’s dogs and their owners, you can donate directly at http://www.mydogeatsfirst.org/donate/.

Merry Christmas, everyone, and have a very happy and healthy and fulfilling New Year! :)

 

 

The post ‘Tis the Season for Giving: 50% of Every Love and Squalor Sale Goes to My Dog Eats First appeared first on Jessica A. Scott.

Last year I wrote a blog about how a book promotion with The Fussy Librarian was not a good use of your marketing budget, and I got a lot of feedback from readers who had had similar, lackluster results. I also explored other book promotion websites, but was unable to find one that had consistent, worthwhile results worth mentioning here. So I did some more research on different ways to get more book sales, and found that by far and away the most fervently recommended path was to set your book for free. The theory is that offering one free book will inspire your potential audience to take a chance on a new author, and then leave reviews or buy the other books you have for sale.

In this post, I will discuss a few ways you can go about doing this… as well as why I have found this to be an extremely ineffective way to sell books.

How to Set Your Book to Free on Various Platforms

Your first thought after reading that header is probably “Can’t I just set the price to $0?” Unfortunately, on websites like Amazon, setting your book to free is much more complicated. While some websites like Smashwords allow you to set a book for free any time you want, Amazon only allows free books under certain conditions. Here are a few of your options:

Free Promotions – Amazon offers authors the opportunity to set their books to free for a limited number of days in each quarter. In order to take advantage of this, though, you must enroll your book in Kindle Unlimited, which means that any readers with a paid subscription to this service can already read the book for free. There are upsides and downsides to this which I will discuss in a future post, but if you want to be able to promote your book for free on Amazon, this is the only way to do it. Once you have enrolled your book in this program, you can list your book as free for five days out of each three-month period. The book may become more visible then, and may appear on the daily lists of free books on Amazon itself.
Kindle Unlimited – As I just mentioned, the book isn’t truly “free” in Kindle Unlimited, but readers can read it for free if they have a subscription. The author gets a small payment per page read (the amount changes all the time, but we’re talking pennies or less), which some authors say is better than gaining no royalties from it at all.
Permafree – I have to be honest: the process for making my book permafree (meaning “permanently free”) nearly drove me crazy. Amazon does not ordinarily allow books to be listed for free ad infinitum, so its acceptance of your free book depends on price matching. First, you have to unenroll your book from Kindle Unlimited (if it was enrolled), and wait for the current three-month enrollment period to end. Then you must list the book for free on another retailer’s website (I used Smashwords), and send Amazon Customer Service an email asking them to match the price. For me, this took weeks of back and forth, because the price listing didn’t “take” the first time. Eventually, though, it worked, and one of my books written under a pen name has been listed as permafree for the last year. For a more in-depth description of this process, you can check out this tutorial.
Other Options – As mentioned previously, there are several websites that will allow you to mark your book as free whenever and for however long you want. But if you would rather just get your content out there for free without any rigamarole at all, you can post free chapters on your website (or put a free PDF of the whole book there if you want) or publish the book on a website like Wattpad. These options may not be as successful in funneling people to your other books, however, but as you will see in the next section, this may or may not matter.

Why Free Books Don’t Sell Books

If you do a quick internet search, you will find hundreds of websites and authors who declare that the best way to sell books is to list one of your books for free. This is especially effective for the first book in a series, they say. What you will not find are any websites or blog posts that will tell you what I am about to tell you: in the large majority of cases, this kind of promotion does not work.

Last year, I listed my first novel, Chase and Charlie, for free for three days around Halloween to capitalize on its thriller/horror theme. Without promoting it on any other websites, I got 312 downloads, which equals 312 new readers, right? Wrong.

Later on, I listed Portrait of a Sunset for free for just two days and got nearly 1000 downloads… and one sale of Love and Squalor. The goal of setting books to free is to give people a sample of your style so they will get hooked and buy your other books, leave a review or at least to make you show up higher on the Amazon listings. In my experience, the chances of either of these things actually happening are extremely slim. While I did see one sale of Love and Squalor as a result of my free promotion of Portrait, these results are not worth all of the potential earnings I lost in giving away so many books for free. One book sold per thousand free downloads is not a great percentage.

But, since so many people claim to have had success with this method, I tried again. I have a series of Young Adult books written under a pen name, and I listed the first book in the series as permafree. This is said to be the standard method of gaining readers (and this is a very hot genre), so I expected a huge increase in sales. On paper, I have sold close to two thousand copies… but you have to put that “sold” in quotation marks. While there were maybe two or three downloads of the other books in the series when I first published them (on Smashwords, not Amazon), overall, the only book in this series that is being downloaded is the first one, the free one. And before you say (like I did) that maybe people just didn’t like the story and didn’t want to read more, I can say for a fact from looking at some analytics that the large majority of people who downloaded the book did not even read it.

People like free books, this is a fact. It is understandable (I myself am guilty of downloading books just because they were free), but the problem with this is that readers just indiscriminately download tons and tons of free books without any real intention of reading them. So their libraries are filled with books… and the authors’ royalty accounts are empty. And so are those all-powerful review sections of their Amazon page. If readers never actually read the books they download, this marketing idea of getting them hooked on the book so they will buy more or leave a review is completely useless.

As the old saying goes, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

Why It Matters and What We Can Do About It

If you are an author, you might think that any download is a good download, and once upon a time, I was inclined to agree with you. After giving away thousands of books and getting basically no royalties in return, though, I realized something. Authors are conditioning readers to expect to get something for nothing. We authors spend months, maybe even years, writing and perfecting these books, only to give them away to people who don’t always appreciate them or even read them. Already, readers think that $2.99 is too high a price for a book of 400 words that took someone whose name isn’t Stephen King the better part of a decade to write, so self-published authors feel pressured to list their book at a price point that is much too low for the amount of effort they put into it. Now they are given the advice to list their books for free to gain a wider audience, but this method just does not work.

You may think that I am speaking just from my own experience, but I have spoken to several other authors who have gotten the same results. The problem is, this reality never shows up on the ubiquitous “101 Ways to Market Your Book” lists.

Perhaps setting the first book in a series as free works for some authors, especially the ones who are already experiencing a high level of success. But for the authors who are still searching for an audience and looking to really break out, it is an exercise in futility. You feel very pumped at first when you see how many people have your book in their hands, but the crushing blow comes when you realize that it is not going to lead to more sales of your other books (or at least not any significant sales) in the end, and that you have just given away something that wasn’t really earned, but just expected.

I am not naive enough to think that one small blog from an author who is still trying to make a name for herself is going to change anything in the grand scheme of things, but I truly believe that this is just a small part of a bigger problem. Readers are expecting more and more from authors for less and less, and if we all keep giving this to them in the form of permafree or ultra-cheap books, we will never get the respect and royalties we deserve. Making your book free for a few days might be worthwhile, but giving away thousands of copies over the span of years probably won’t get you where you want to be.

So my advice is to not give away the milk for free: have the readers buy the cow. True fans will not have a problem paying you for your hard work because they support and appreciate you.

 

Do you have any experience with offering free book downloads? What were your results? Let me know in the comments!

The post Why Free Books Don’t Sell eBooks appeared first on Jessica A. Scott.

In today’s post, I want to do something a bit different than usual. I want to address one of the main problems indie authors have with book marketing by telling you about my own experience, and answering the question: “Is a Fussy Librarian promotion worth it?”

As every indie author soon learns, being a successful writer is less about how good your book is and more about how good you are at promoting it. I have to admit that this is an area in which I find myself constantly struggling. For years I was under the impression that good, clean, hard work speaks for itself and that after a great editing job, a good cover design, and a little bit of marketing here and there, readers will find you.

While this may still happen for some authors at some point, in the large majority of cases, I have found that books (especially self-published books) are too easily lost in the flood of other books that are out there on the market. You publish a novel and it is immediately swallowed up by the ocean of other novels in your genre (the fact that I write in some of the overly saturated romance subgenres doesn’t help), and ends up all but hidden from the view of a potential buyer.

I have spent months trying to figure out how to make my books float to the top, and from now on, I am going to start sharing what I learn during this ongioing process in the hopes that my experiences can help someone else.

Free Promotion versus Paid Promotion

One of the first routes people take when they want to get exposure for a book is to have a sale and book various promotions to get the word out about said sale. A quick internet search will turn up dozens of free book promotion sites, such as Bookangel, eBookLister, and BookoftheDay.org, and these are fairly easy to register for. Most of them don’t have many restrictions, and many of them have multiple spots open per day, so there is little chance of being rejected. Each site usually sends out an email blast to readers every day full of the free or discounted books being advertised by authors. Most of them also put your book on the front page of their website so visitors can easily see it.

This is all well and good (and I will go into more detail about it in a future post), but there is one problem with these free promotional sites: nine out of ten times, they don’t work.

Over the past few years, I have booked multiple promotions with these free websites, and the results have been pretty dismal. I have heard of some people having success, but for the most part, the general consensus seems to be that you get what you pay for, which is nothing.

I struggled with this for a long time, because like many others in my chosen career field, I just don’t have the money to create a big book marketing budget. I kept thinking that there has to be a worthwhile way to promote a book for free, and I will continue to search for one. In the meantime, though, I decided to break down and try spending a little bit of cash on a site that I have heard some great things about: The Fussy Librarian.

Why The Fussy Librarian?

The Fussy Librarian is a website that offers some fantastic resources for both authors and readers. I have been subscribed to their weekly author email for several months, and they send out some great tips and links to articles that are useful to writers in all genres. The “head librarian,” Jeffrey Bruner, is extremely knowledgeable, and this gave me great hope for advertising with his site.

The Fussy Librarian is mainly geared toward sending avid readers/subscribers daily emails featuring the best book deals (including both free and bargain books) in whichever genres they choose. You can sign up to recieve emails containing historical fiction novels, contrmporary romance, or even non-fiction books, or you can just sign up to recieve a list of all the books they are promoting that day. The emails look fresh and clean, and overall it seems like a great site.

The Fussy Librarian Pricing and Requirements

As I said, I was looking to throw a bit of money at my book promotion problem, and The Fussy Librarian seemed to be the most cost-effective option for my nearly non-existent budget. The price of a book promotion varies based on genre and whether your book is totally free or just on sale, but the highest price on the list is $35. Here is a breakdown of the pricing from the website:

My latest novel, Love and Squalor, is in the contemporary romance genre, and I was putting it on sale for 99 cents, so my cost was $18.

When it comes to requirements, The Fussy Librarian is a bit “fussier” than its free counterparts. Here is a quote from the website:

In order for your book to be accepted for promotion, “you need to have at least one book with 10 reviews from Amazon. If you’ve got 10 to 19 reviews, the average rating must be 4.0; if you have more than 20 reviews, the average can be 3.5 (to account for how having an abundance of reviews can sometimes drag your average down). It doesn’t have to be the book you want to promote.”

In other words, even if you are promoting a book that has just been released, you can still do it, as long as one of your other books has 10 reviews.

This part was a bit tricky for me, as I had had quite a few people read that book (as well as Chase and Charlie and Portrait of a Sunset), but not many of them had left reviews. Over the course of a few months, I managed to get ten honest reviews (more on that in yet another post), and I was able to secure the promotion, which lasts one day.

My Experience

I had heard several authors rave about The Fussy Librarian, so I have to say that I was feeling pretty excited when the day of my promotion came. I was certain that this would be the thing that shot Love and Squalor up the charts – or at least put it under the eyeballs of a few hundred more people. I didn’t schedule any other promotions that day so that I could get a pure result, then I waited for the sales to roll in.

The email blast went out in the late morning, and I opened it with anticipation… only to have my spirits plummet.

My first thought was that my book wasn’t on the list, that they had accidentally left it out. Further scrolling, though, revealed that my book had not been forgotten, but that The Fussy Librarian truncates their emails. There were around 25 book slots in the email I recieved, but they hid all but the first 9-10. The rest could only be accessed by a link in small font that says “[message clipped] View entire message,” which, as all of us frequent email-readers know, hardly anyone ever does. When you read an email (especially a promotional email or a list), you read it fast, skimming for pictures or titles that jump out at you. If you get the same type of email every day, you don’t take the time to click “read more,” you just read what is right in front of you and move on.

As disappointed as I was by this unfair and (I assume) arbitrary placement, I decided to go to The Fussy Librarian website itself to see if my book was there. And what did I find? This:

Coming soon? This website has been in operation for years!

So, at the end of the day, my book was just as invisible with the promotion as it had been without it.

So, Is a Fussy Librarian Promotion Worth It?

At the end of my promotion, I had sold two copies of Love and Squalor, and only one I can directly and unequivocably attribute to the Fussy Librarian promo. So, my answer to this question is a loud and resounding NO. A promotion with The Fussy Librarian is not worth it.

The $18 I spent on this promotion could have been saved to put toward a different, more useful promotion in the future, and I walked away from this experience extremely disappointed. I am sure that the people whose books were higher on the list in the email came away with better results, but for those of us that got hit by the truncation, the money spent on this promotion was good money down the drain. Since the placement of your book depends on your genre and the rotation they choose to use that day (I assume), my opinion is that it is better to save your money and try for something with a better return on investment.

Have you run a promotion with The Fussy Librarian? Do you agree with my assessment or did you have better luck? Let me know in the comments!

The post Is a Fussy Librarian Promotion Worth It? appeared first on Jessica A. Scott.

The big day is finally here!

The paperback version of Love and Squalor is now live, and you can preorder the ebook version for just 99 cents until its release date on Saturday. Thank you to everyone who helped make this possible, I hope you all enjoy the book!

 

The post Love and Squalor Book Launch appeared first on Jessica A. Scott.

There are just two weeks to go until the April 24th release of Love and Squalor!

To tide everyone over until then, I am sharing a preview of the book: the first chapter in its entirety. Hopefully it will leave you wanting more! (And don’t worry about the formatting – WordPress is a bit finicky about these things, but I promise it looks perfect in the print and ebook versions!) Let me know what you think in the comments, and feel free to share this post with your friends! :)

Love and Squalor

By Jessica A. Scott
Chapter 1

“Hey, White Girl!”

“Hey, DeAndre…” I said with a sigh. Marcus giggled as I locked the rusty door behind us and we stepped out into the small alley behind the YMCA building. I had been working there for six months, but everyone I met refused to learn my real name. I was twenty-six years old – hardly a “girl” anymore – and I was certainly not the only white person in the (admittedly predominately black) neighborhood, but something about me seemed to scream “STEREOTYPE!” to the locals.

“How the kids treatin’ ya today?” asked DeAndre, rearranging his nest of old newspapers and ratty blankets. He was homeless, and had been for fifteen years, but every time I offered to help him carry his things to the shelter a few blocks away, he just laughed and said “white girls…” like I was a grown woman believing in fairy tales.

“The kids are treating me fine. It’s the parents that are giving me trouble,” I replied, and Marcus giggled again. He was a chubby little guy; just six years old and already almost as heavy as I was. He looked like a little Buddha statue, with squinted eyes and an enormous smile full of missing baby teeth, and his skin was as dark as crude oil. He hardly spoke a word – he just giggled, as if everything in the world was delightful, and I couldn’t help but love him.

What I didn’t love was his mother. In the past six months, she had come to pick him up from my after school care class twelve times. I had offered to walk him home once, when she had called to tell me she had company at her house and “just couldn’t get away,” and ever since then, regardless of how many notes I sent Marcus in the house with, or how many voicemails I left her saying otherwise, she seemed to think it had become an established routine.

So, once again, I was holding Marcus’ plump little hand as we made our way to Woodlawn Avenue, the spooky, halogen-lit street in the center of what many of the borough’s residents called “The Wasteland.”

Although it was 7:00 p.m. and twilight was quickly fading to full, early October darkness, the area was buzzing with activity. There was a strange mixture of “day people” and “night people” milling around: tired-looking Indian men selling the last of the day’s smelly fish from the trunks of their cars, scantily clad prostitutes taking their places near the gas station and Lowman’s Hotel on 6th Street, and a junkie on every corner, each in various stages of dead-eyed euphoria.

To be honest, I didn’t mind a little company as I traversed the minefield of ethnic and moral diversity. I had been living in Luthertown Heights for almost half a year, but I didn’t think I would ever get used to the aggressiveness of the squalor. Everyone I saw seemed to be crying out for help in some way. Some, like DeAndre, were homeless. Others were destitute, and had turned to hooking and dealing to find money to live on. Some were addicted to drugs ranging from heroin to crystal meth to some combination of both (Luthertown Heights had more strains of drugs than I had names for), and yet still others were just weary, down-on-their-luck miners or fishermen or fruit vendors who had long ago given up on any dreams they might have once had for doing better.

It was depressing, to be frank. It was a cesspool of the forsaken, and my heart cried out for each and every one of them. There was no hope to be found in Luthertown Heights – except in the faces of the children.

Back in my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, forty minutes away and twenty years into the future, I had been a sixth grade teacher at a private school. I had worked there for four years, right out of college… and had hated every single second of it. I had had so much love and knowledge and enthusiasm to share with my students, but they hadn’t wanted any of it. Aside from six or seven boys and girls, they had been spoiled, pretentious, irredeemable little brats, all of them. They had cared more about lipstick and money and gossip and sticking their hands up girls’ skirts than they had about learning anything. Humiliating each other was the one and only subject they were interested in, and they all excelled at it. By the time I left St. Regis Academy, I had seen twenty seven girls burst into tears in the middle of class, and intercepted fifty-six cruel, coldhearted text messages – several of which had referenced their “carrot-top virgin” teacher, and guessed at either a) how many cats I must own or b) whether my carpet matched my drapes.

After six hundred and eighty-two endless school days, I had had enough. I had seen an ad for the after school care teacher position at the Y in the local newspaper, and I had packed up my things, turned in my resignation letter, and left town, praying that I was headed for somewhere where I would be needed.

The position paid half of what my old job had, so I had had to take on a side job cleaning house for a woman named Carmella Jones on the weekends, but seeing the light and innocence in the eyes of Marcus and the other neighborhood kids made it all worth it. There, in the middle of that broken-down town, I was making a difference. My life finally had meaning.

“Hey, White Girl!” shouted a chorus of grizzled, grey-haired men standing around a barrel fire outside of a liquor store.

“Hey, fellas!” I called back, waving. “I stick out like a sore thumb here, Marcus,” I whispered to my escort. “Maybe I should dye my hair…”

He giggled in response.

It wasn’t far from the Y to Marcus’ house, just three blocks. One day, he would be old enough to walk it himself, but the thought of that made me nervous.

“Well, here we are!” I said, as we came to a large, lopsided brick apartment complex at the corner of Woodlawn and 44th Street. “You got your key?”

Marcus dug in the front pocket of his puffy red coat and came out with a chipped silver key. He held it up and grinned, his crooked baby teeth shining in the street lamp above us.

“Great! Now you’ve got it from here. I’ll see you tomorrow!” He giggled again and gave my hand a quick squeeze before letting go and running up the steps of the building. “Oh! And don’t forget to bring your backpack to school tomorrow!” I called after him, knowing he’d probably forget it anyway.

He threw me a wave and went in the front door, slamming it behind him with a bang like a gunshot.

I put my now-empty hands in the pockets of my own long, brown coat and waited. We had an agreement – if everything was alright when he got inside, Marcus would give me a wave from his bedroom window on the second floor. If it wasn’t, I’d wait two minutes, and then come in to check on him. On the twelve occasions that his mother had come to pick him up, she had been high as a kite and almost as thin, so I worried a bit every time I had to turn him back over to her. I had no idea what went on in that apartment, and I didn’t have the authority to check. And even if I did check and find something off, there was no real police force in Luthertown Heights to report it to, only a satellite office of the police from the next town over, and they rarely had someone on staff with the training to deal with a real-life crisis that didn’t involve computer coding or taking messages.

After about ninety seconds, a pudgy little face appeared in the third window from the left on the second floor of the apartment building, and I grinned as we waved goodnight to each other.

I sighed, feeling a bit wistful, and began my long trek home.

There were twelve blocks between Marcus’ home and mine – twelve street corners to pass, seven intersections to skirt, hoping not to get hit by a cloud of noxious exhaust fumes from someone’s broken down old Chevrolet Cavalier, twelve different roads all marked with numbers I could never memorize in an order that didn’t make sense, and all lined with houses in varying shades of grey.

As night fell over 27th Street, three blocks from my apartment building on 7th, I couldn’t help but to admit that there was a strange sort of beauty in the shadowy wasteland in spite of all its flaws. The street lamps cast a fiery orange glow on the pavement beneath them, all dancing to different pulsating rhythms, but no matter how much they might flicker, they never went out. Full dark never came to Luthertown Heights, not even at midnight. Not even in the dead of winter. That city would not be claimed by the darkness, no matter how thick and insistent it became.

There was graffiti on several of the storefronts in town, but my own neighborhood looked like a Renoir art gallery. Every building, every fire hydrant, every tree, brick, and roof shingle was the canvas for some unknown artist to express himself on. Most people grumbled about it to each other on their way home from work, but I secretly enjoyed it. It never ceased to amaze me when I found a new face in the sea of neon-bright caricatures on the side of the mechanic’s garage next door to my apartment, and I couldn’t help but smile at the rainbow of pain and humor and pure, unadulterated expression splattered across the concrete. It was another, stronger light in the darkness that haunted the Wasteland, and I loved basking in it.

“Ay, it’s our White Girl!” whooped a loud, booming voice that carried the entire length of 7th Street.

I felt my stomach clench.

For the most part, I wasn’t afraid of anyone in Luthertown Heights. Sure, there were some people I wouldn’t like to meet in a dark alley, and I probably wouldn’t intentionally seek out the company of one of the hookers or junkies on 6th or 2nd Street, but usually, I felt as if I could handle myself around any person I came across.

The Uewatsu, though, were another story.

There were seven gangs in Luthertown Heights: the Sixes, a crew of burly, black factory workers who all miraculously had six fingers on one hand for some reason; the Dirty Dozen, a white gang whose uniform was comprised of scraggly, crotch-length beards and Confederate flag bandanas; the Creepers, whose turf consisted pretty much exclusively of the run-down cemetery on 8th Street; the XXX Runners, made up of former prostitutes who (according to town scuttlebutt) spent their Friday nights chopping off the testicles of men who had wronged them; a small Mexican crew who called themselves Los Caballos; an offshoot of the Crips; and the Uewatsu, an exclusively Native American gang whose name meant “death” in Cherokee.

Due to some sort of shake-up in the gang community, the Uewatsu had lost their former territory near Luthertown Park on 19th Street, and now apparently owned the rights to the patch of sidewalk right outside my apartment building.

Every night for the past four and a half months, they had gathered there, staying up until dawn, plotting or planning or scheming or whatever gangs did, laughing at the tops of their lungs and shouting at passersby every time I was right on the verge of falling asleep.

I usually managed to make it home before they began their nightly vigil, but Darrel McCaid had drunk three juice boxes that day and ralphed all over my classroom set of foam blocks, so Marcus and I had been late leaving that evening.

“Hey… guys,” I said, giving them an uncertain wave as I fell into my carefully practiced walking pace that was slow enough to make me appear casual and unthreatened, but also quick enough to discourage lengthy conversations.

There were seven of them there tonight, all wearing black, all bearing the tell-tale dreamcatcher tattoo on their bare, muscular arms (in spite of the forty degree weather), and all standing directly in front of the gate that led to my front yard.

“Long day at school, teach?” asked Lars, whose long, shiny black hair hung to his waist, and who, my landlord had told me, had once killed a man with a tree branch.

“Yeah, one of the kids lost his lunch.”

“Where did he leave it?” asked the one they called Goon because, well, because of questions like that. He had short, messy hair and a blank expression that made me wonder just what (if anything), went on in that curly head of his. My landlord had told me that he and his twin brother, River, had once hung a man by his ankles above a pen full of starving Rottweilers just because he had called them something racist.

The entire gang laughed uproariously at Goon’s idiocy, and I smiled, uncomfortable, as I tried to look past them to the gate.

Aside from Lars, Goon, and River, there was Strongbow, who allegedly shot enemies of the gang with arrows coated in acid, and the gang’s arrogant leader, an enormous seven foot tall man-mountain suitably named Bear.

He smiled back at me in silence as I stopped a respectful distance away from them, hoping they would move.

“Goon is a moron,” he said finally, in a smooth, sultry sort of voice that made my skin crawl. “Don’t listen to him.”

“Hey!” shouted Goon, offended.

“It’s okay.” I shrugged, still smiling politely.

I saw movement out of the corner of my eye as someone on the edge of the group shifted his feet.

My smile faltered as I caught sight of the tall, lean, muscular Uewatsu referred to only as Slipknot – the most fearful member of the tribe. He wore a length of frayed brown rope around his throat like a sick sort of turtleneck, and had a long, jagged purple scar under his left eye that looked like dripping blood. They said he’d been to jail four times, and that they kept letting him out because he kept killing his cellmates.

He was a Luthertown Heights legend, and it was said that he had killed twenty men to earn his nickname – strangling them all with a noose fashioned out of the same rope he wore around his neck.

He was watching me as I took another tentative step toward the gate, and I realized then that I had never heard him speak before. I had also never noticed how his bright, emerald green eyes seemed to glow with a mysterious inner light in the falling darkness.

“How are you tonight, White Girl?” Bear continued, uncrossing his arms and advancing on me. The rest of the group followed suit.

“And how bout ‘dem tittaays?” Goon shouted, before erupting into shrill, hyena-like laughter that was soon drowned out by the (much lower-pitched) laughter of the rest of the gang.

“They’re…uh…hangin’ in there,” I replied, feeling the color rush to my face.

“Maybe we should check and see,” suggested River, uncrossing his arms too, and licking his lips.

I instinctively crossed my own arms over my chest, then quickly let them fall as they all howled with laughter again. I was thoroughly embarrassed now, and had lost any sense of stability I might have had. My only option was to get past them and get into my apartment building as quickly as possible… but without seeming like I was in a hurry to get away.

“Well, it was nice seeing you all,” I said, with another stupid wave, as I made to skirt past them.

Bear cut me off at the last second, stepping over to block my path to the gate. Just as he was opening his mouth to say something else suggestive and unnerving, though, Slipknot appeared on my left and jerked his head at something up the road.

“Well I’ll be damned…” Bear muttered, stepping away from the gate.

I looked back the way I had come, and saw a young man limping up the street.

I glanced back at Slipknot, feeling oddly grateful to him for clearing me an escape route, but he swung open the gate without meeting my eyes.

Once I was inside the small, weed-pocked front yard, he nodded at the apartment building and closed the gate behind me.

With sweaty palms, I walked up the sidewalk and opened the front door.

I didn’t look back.

 

The post Sneak Peek at Love and Squalor appeared first on Jessica A. Scott.

If you decide to take the leap and become a self-published author instead of going the traditional publishing route, your first question will most likely be “where do I start?”

The obvious answer is that you start by finishing your book (writing, editing and polishing included), but what comes after that? What kind of options do you have for publishing your book? Although most authors think of Amazon’s Createspace or Kindle Direct Publishing services when they think about self-publishing, Amazon is actually not the only game in town. In fact, there are many great self-publishing platforms out there for authors to consider, and all of them provide different services for different prices.

Here is a look at the top five self-publishing platforms, along with the pros and cons of using each one.

1. Ingram Spark

Ingram Spark is Amazon’s most formidable competitor when it comes to self-publishing. This company publishes both paper- and hardback books and prints them on-demand, meaning that it will only ever print as many books as you sell (so you don’t have to order hundreds of books and let them sit in your garage until someone buys them like in the old days). With Ingram Spark, you get books that are impressively high-quality – in fact, many traditional publishers use this company to print their books too! Ingram also offers an ebook service, as well as high-level marketing opportunities that could potentially give you the same reach as a traditionally published author. Oh, and I forgot to mention: by publishing with Ingram Spark, your book could become available at over 39,000 retailers all at once.

While this may sound like a bit of a no-brainer, there is always a catch. Publishing with Ingram Spark, unlike some other services, is not free. Publishing an ebook is $25, and publishing a print book (or a print book and ebook together) is $49. This amount is said to be refunded to you with an order of 50 or more books. While this doesn’t seem like a big price tag, one must also take into account that for every book sold, Ingram Spark also takes a sizeable chunk of the money earned from the sale in order to pay printing and shipping costs, meaning that one might make less money selling books via Ingram Spark than via other avenues.

2. Lulu

Lulu is another extremely popular publishing platform. It offers print book publishing, ebook publishing, global distribution, and even access to professional marketing and publishing services (for an added fee). Unlike Ingram Spark, setting up and publishing a book on this platform is completely free. It offers a wide variety of ebook formats that enable your audience to read your book on nearly any device, and the LuLu website itself is a fantastic resource for indie authors who want to learn more about the trade. According to Lulu’s pricing chart, one can also make more money from the books they sell here than on other platforms, but this may be slightly skewed due to the fact that Lulu doesn’t include any distribution costs in this equation (more on that in a second).

Some of the drawbacks to publishing with Lulu include fewer sizing options for print books (there are really only five, and most of them are larger and more awkwardly shaped than a typical trade paperback one would find in a store), and the fact that “Not every print book size and format qualifies for distribution.” This could mean that you could spend hours and hours readying your book for publication, only to find that it won’t be distributed to online stores (or real-life stores) like Amazon and Barnes and Noble. This is definitely something you should look into before publishing your book with Lulu.

3. Smashwords

Smashwords is rapidly becoming one of the most well-known places to self-publish ebooks. Their services are completely free, and their royalties are very high in comparison to other sites. Plus, you don’t have to reach a certain threshold to get paid – you get paid your royalties once a month regardless of whether you made a thousand dollars or fifty cents in that time frame. Smashwords has global retail distribution, global library distribution, and free ebook conversion to every format imaginable. You only have to upload your manuscript once, and Smashwords makes it available in a myriad of different ebook formats so that it can be read and distributed in nearly every form from .PDF to .epub to .mobi.

Unfortunately, this makes everything sound a lot easier than it really is. In order to get a book published on Smashwords and have it available for sale on other sites like Kobo and Barnes and Noble, one has to go through the nearly impossible, hopelessly time-consuming process of stripping their manuscript of all of its formatting. To give you an idea of how invasive and terrible this is (and I would know, as I republished Portrait of a Sunset on this platform last year), this process is lovingly referred to as “preparing the manuscript for the Meatgrinder.” This can take the author hours or even days, although Smashwords does offer a service to do this, which, as one can guess, is not free. A few other cons to this website are the fact that so many books get published here each day that yours can easily be lost in the shuffle. Smashwords also offers a lot of sales, which means that readers come to expect that a book should be priced at an extremely low price point, or should be free, which means less revenue for the writer. Smashwords also only publishes ebooks, so print book lovers would be out of luck here.

4. Createspace

Okay, I know I said that it’s not all about Amazon, but some of it is! Createspace is the world’s largest self-publishing platform, and is popular for a good reason. Publishing via Createspace automatically puts your book on Amazon, which just so happens to be the world’s number one place to buy books. It is a print-on-demand service, meaning that you don’t have to buy books that you haven’t sold, and the royalty rate is great compared to many other platforms. You can create a book in nearly every size imaginable, and you can control every single aspect of the cover, the paper inside, and the format – not to mention that your finished book will be distributed around the world. And if you need help formatting your book or creating your book cover, Createspace has experts on hand to help you (for a fee, of course).

As great as Createspace looks on paper, there are always a few downsides to consider. One is that Createspace only publishes print books, and (sadly) these are not selling as well in today’s market as they once were. You also earn fewer royalties than you might think you deserve due to the printing costs of your book. These printing costs aren’t the worst in the field, but they vary based on the number of pages your book contains (as well as several other factors), so the longer your book is, the more it will cost to produce. These costs must be factored in to your pricing calculations, so you may end up having to list your book at a higher price point than you would like in order to make any money from its sales.

5. Kindle Direct Publishing

Kindle Direct Publishing has been a game-changer in the self-publishing industry. Not only can you publish an ebook in as little as five minutes, but you can now also publish your book as a paperback as well! This is definitely one of the quickest ways to get a book to market, and can easily earn you the highest revenues. Royalties are very respectable at KDP, depending on which royalty model you choose: you can earn 35% royalties on ebooks that sell for up to 99 cents, and 70% royalties on ebooks priced higher than this. Once a book is finished and approved, it can hit the worldwide market in less than 48 hours (usually much less). You can also enroll your book in the Kindle Select Program, which allows readers with a monthly subscription to read your book for free (more on that below), which helps you gain a much bigger audience.

With every ray of sun comes a shadow, though, and it is worth mentioning that KDP is another platform that is currently flooded with books. Just like with Smashwords, authors are pricing their ebooks so low that authors who are not Stephen King or John Green often find it difficult to sell a book unless they price it at 99 cents or free, which doesn’t bring them much of a return on investment. In addition to this, the Kindle Select Program has recently undergone some changes that have been reported as being extremely unfavorable to authors. Readers read your book for free… which means that you don’t get paid for it either. There is a global fund that used to pay writers a few pennies per a certain amount of pages read, but now this would take a massive amount of pages to add up to anything. However, this program is optional – it offers several benefits from a marketing standpoint, but most authors these days are saying that the benefits don’t outweigh the costs.

 

No matter which self-publishing platform you choose to use, be sure to weigh all of your options first. It is easy to focus on just the pros of a certain company, but as you can see from this list, even the best companies have their potential downsides. If you are going to become a self-published author, you are the one in charge of all of the decision-making. You may make some mistakes along the way, but taking the time to consider everything objectively before you jump in is a great way to ensure that you have as much success as possible.

 

Jessica A. Scott is a published novelist, and can be found on Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads. Her latest novel, Love and Squalor , will be published in May 2018.

The post It’s Not All About Amazon: Here are 5 of the Best Places to Self-Publish Your Novel appeared first on Jessica A. Scott.

Today I am interviewing fellow Indie Eden member Victoria Perkins. Her novel, Star Riders: The Twelve, is about a teenaged girl who has lived a hard life, but soon discovers that she is a part of something much bigger than she could have ever imagined. Let’s see what Victoria has to say about her book, and about her writing process.

Hi Victoria! First things first: What is the one question that you wish people would ask you about Star Riders: The Twelve? (And what is the answer?)

“Will characters from the standalone books pop up in the series?” Yes. :)

On the other hand, which typical author interview question do you hate the most?

“Which book is your favorite?” I can’t choose favorites from other people’s books. I definitely can’t do it with mine!

Can you give us a short description of your book?

Star Riders: The Twelve is the first in what I’m planning to be a six-book series. The Twelve introduces us to Tempest Black and Bram Grimm. Tempest is a jaded, cynical seventeen year-old orphan who’s spent her entire life being bounced from home to home, some good but others horrific. As the story begins, she’s running away from Wycliffe, Ohio, and heading West for a reason she doesn’t quite understand. Bram is a nineteen year-old Star Rider (also called Qaniss), a warrior with wings bred and raised to be a demon slayer. Descended from some of the greatest literary minds, the Star Riders travel between parallel worlds, with their own world being the original. After a mission on another world, eleven Star Riders – including Bram – are told by an angel that their world is gone, and they have another mission. They’re to find the missing Star Rider to complete their group, and continue the fight against demonkind.

Is there any famous author that inspires you, or that you admire?

I have a lot of authors who I love, and whose works are among my favorites, but probably the two of the biggest inspirations have been Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. I came to both when I was in college. As an already avid reader and writer, with plans to become an author, reading their stories and seeing how two people with vastly different lives shared a lot of the same principles when it came to writing really helped me understand what parts of the process were personality and style, and which parts were necessary to succeed. Also, both of them have faced a lot of controversy over their books, and I’ve always been the sort of person who doesn’t follow the crowd.

Great choices! Your own book is in the supernatural/paranormal and young adult fantasy genres. What drew you to these genres? Do you also like to read books in these genres?

I read in pretty much any genre, which is why I tend to write in any genre, but the fantastical world has always captured my imagination the easiest, whether science fiction, fantasy, or supernatural / paranormal. The Chronicles of Narnia have been among my all-time favorites since I was a child, and I continue to read them over and over as an adult. I even taught them for several years.

Who is your target audience for Star Riders: The Twelve? What do you think will appeal to them about your book?

Primarily, my audience is young adult, though I’ve had plenty of adults who enjoy my books. I think the book will appeal on different levels. Tempest and Bram are flawed characters who have rough edges, so they’re relatable. There’s action and romance. I also tend to lean toward snarky sarcasm when it comes to humor, so there’s a bit of that as well.

I think everyone love snarky sarcasm! When you write a book, do you plan out everything beforehand, or do you let the story follow its own course?

Over the last five years, I’ve been working as a ghostwriter, and to do that, I’ve had to become even more organized than in the past, part of which includes outlining. Before, I’d have a general idea, character notes, and go from there. If there was something specific I wanted to have happen, I’d maybe make a note so I didn’t forget. The Star Riders series has been my first clearly outlined plot. I do, however, keep the outline fluid, because I’m a strong believer in following a character, even if they go off from the plot.

Do you have any quirky writing habits?

I don’t know if it’s quirky or not, but I can’t write in total silence. I have to have music playing or the TV on if I’m working.

Any writing tips for other writers?

Stephen King’s book On Writing is amazing, and his advice to “read a lot and write a lot” is my mantra. Read outside your genre, as well as mixing up indie and traditionally published book. Read classics and popular books. And don’t give up. It’s going to be an insane amount of hard work, with rejection and bouts of “why am I doing this again,” but if it’s what you were born to do, stick with it.

Great advice! How did your book come to be published? What was your journey to publication like? Did you get a lot of rejection letters before you finally saw your name in print?

I’ve gone the vanity publishing route, the small publisher route, and now I’m self-published. Up until a few years ago, even though I had books self-published, I was still sending out query letters to various publishers. A small press accepted my book The Dragon Three, but the press closed after less than a year, leaving me with the whole querying process all over again. The responses I’d gotten to that particular book, however, had made me start thinking about whether or not I even wanted to bother with a publisher. Christian publishers said the book wasn’t Christian enough (magic, of course), but secular publishers said it was too Christian (all that God talk). Finally, I decided that being true to the story was more important to me than being traditionally published, and I haven’t sent in a query letter since.

I think that was a great decision. :) Thank you for sharing your story with us!

About the Author:

Victoria Perkins has a BA in English from Kent State University, and is currently employed as a freelance writer and ghostwriter, contributing to hundreds of short stories, novellas and full-length novels for clients all over the world, including ones that have made various best seller lists. She makes her home in Northeastern Ohio near her family. She can be found on Goodreads, Facebook, Amazon, and Instagram, as well as on her official website www.vpbooks.com.

About the Book:

Tempest Black is nobody special. Orphaned as a baby, the only thing she has from her past is her unusual name. Now, at seventeen, she’s willing to give it up if it means she can disappear. What she doesn’t know is that, in the West, eleven have been sent to find her, and when they do, her whole world will change. They are the Star Riders, those chosen by Adonai to protect the worlds from the forces of darkness. All alone, they search for the one prophesied to be at their side at the end of days. A special child with unknown powers who will change everything.

The post Author Interview: Victoria Perkins on Star Riders: The Twelve appeared first on Jessica A. Scott.

“Make it extremely squalid and moving,” she suggested.

“Are you at all acquainted with squalor?”

I said not exactly, but that I was getting better acquainted with it, in one form or another,

all the time.
-J.D. Salinger, “For Esmé – With Love and Squalor”

If you keep up with my blog, you know that I always have a lot of plans to expand what I write here, and to write more long-form features. You will also know that I am not always able to do as many of those things as I plan to… and today I am going to tell you why.

Over the past two years, I have been working hard on a brand new contemporary romance novel titled Love and Squalor. It is a story about a teacher who wants nothing more than to make a difference in the lives of the children in her care. This proves nearly impossible, though, as their city is full of crime, violence, and several lethal, warring gangs. Through no fault of her own, she is soon pulled into the bloody battle raging on, and the only light in the darkness turns out to be someone she never would have expected: one of the most notorious gang members in town.

This novel has been something I have been working on for a long time, and now, finally, it is almost ready to share with the world. I will announce the release date soon, but for now, I can share with you the full paperback cover:

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(I am especially proud of this cover, because I designed and created it all myself. :))

Over the coming weeks I will be updating the website with more information about Love and Squalor, and perhaps even releasing a sample chapter or two. Stay tuned for more novel news, and let me know what you think about the cover in the comments!

The post Cover Reveal: Love and Squalor appeared first on Jessica A. Scott.

On January 12, we kicked off the Show Me Your Best Portrait of a Sunset Contest. Last week, the winner was announced on Facebook, but I still wanted to make a post to highlight the runners-up as well. There were a lot of beautiful sunsets, but these three took the cake! The first place winner received a paperback copy of Portrait of a Sunset, and the runners-up received an ebook copy.

 

Here are the best sunset portraits I received, along with the winner’s names.

 

1st Place – Mary Nell Snyder Greer

 

2nd Place – Patti Liszkay

 

 

Third Place – Kevin L.

 

Thank you to everyone who entered! Your sunsets are all gorgeous.

And if you didn’t win this time, you can still check out Portrait of a Sunset on Amazon or Smashwords anytime you like. :)

The post Show Me Your Best Portrait of a Sunset Contest Winners appeared first on Jessica A. Scott.

 

 

Today I am chatting with indie author (and Indie Eden Book Club member), Gustavo Bondoni. His book, Siege, is a science fiction novel about a human colony that tries to remain undetected in space, but soon finds that this is harder than it seems. Let’s see what he has to say about his book, and about his journey as a writer.

 

 

Welcome, Gustavo! First of all, what is the one question that you wish people would ask you about Siege? (And what is the answer?)

How does one go about keeping events, characters and timeline straight in a novel with so many moving parts? The reason I wish people would ask me that is that this is the kind of situation in which even science fiction writers can pretend to be virtuosos.  We can say things like “that is why writers are different from other mortals.”

The truth is much more prosaic.  Copious notes, several rewritings and hours of sweating over every detail.  Even after the book was edited and published, I’m still afraid that a reading group like Indie Eden will find some horrible mistake!

But I still like that question – it lets me pretend that I know what I’m doing!

I was actually wondering that myself while I was reading! But don’t worry – even after reading the answer, I am still impressed. :)

Next up, which typical author interview question do you hate the most?

I hate being asked how a guy from Argentina writes English-language novels because the answer is simply – I grew up in the US and in Europe and went exclusively to English-language schools until age 12.  I couldn’t write a novel in Spanish if my life depended on it.  Of course, if my life  actually depended on it, I would try… but it would be really bad.

That’s really interesting! Can you give us a short description of your book, Siege?

The best one of those is the cover blurb!  So here it is:

Threatened on all sides by enemies they can’t fight and often can’t even comprehend, the human race has taken refuge in an inhospitable corner of the galaxy. A tiny pocket of habitable space concealed by black holes and dust clouds, hiding a cluster of colonies where the last humans in the galaxy reside, preparing themselves for a war of annihilation against all comers.

Crystallia is a hidden military base that guards the access route to the colonies. The main mission of the soldiers there is to remain undetected for as long as possible, to spot any incursions from the outside and to hit them with everything in humanity’s arsenal.

No one is quite convinced that this strategy will be enough to save the colonies or even to create enough of a delay for some of the colonists to escape. The best bet for the human race is to remain concealed.

Unfortunately, something has found them.

Is there any famous author that inspires you, or that you admire?

Several.  Probably too many to list, but the writers who top the list are Isaac Asimov, PG Wodehouse and Douglas Adams.  Yes, two are humorists, but Wodehouse is likely one of the greatest craftsmen of the English sentence – the problem is that when we read him, we’re so drawn in by the situations he creates that we forget to look at his sentences!

I thought I sensed some influence from Asimov in your book! Siege is in the sci-fi/fantasy genre. What drew you to this genre? Do you also like to read books in this genre?

I suppose, like many writers my age (42), Star Wars is to blame.  I had the action figures and some of the spaceships and it was all over.  Then I discovered that I could get even more SF if I read it, so Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke came into the picture.  The Golden Age of SF – though long gone when I started reading – was my entry into that wonderful world of “What if?”

Who is your target audience for this book? What do you think will appeal to them about your book?

This is a book for people who like a good story of humans taken to the brink, whether they are SF readers or not.  If you enjoy a good story of going beyond one’s own limitations against great odds, this one is for you.  Yes, its set far in the future, but the people that populate this story aren’t that different from you or I – with all the wrinkles that involves.

When you write a book, do you plan out everything beforehand, or do you let the story follow its own course?

I try to plan a few chapters in advance, but two things inevitably happen.  The first is that I think of a new, better ending.  The second is that the characters take over and take the story in an unexpected direction.  That second one is a writerly cliché, so let me explain it a little further: what actually happens is, as the writing advances, you come to know the character better, and to flesh him or her out.  Then you reach a point where your outline says that Character A needs to take Action B and you realize that, in that situation, that character would never do that.  So he takes Action Z and the rest of the book falls apart on you…

Haha I know that struggle! So, do you have any quirky writing habits?

Not really.  I try to write at least a thousand words, Monday-Friday.  For quirky writing habits, I recommend Eric S Brown.  He writes in his car…  and is a bestseller in his genres.

Maybe I should start writing in my car then… Aside from that, do you have any writing tips for other writers?

Write every day.  Submit what you write.  Submit it again if it gets rejected.  Know ALL the rules well enough to quote them, and then ignore the ones that don’t make your story better.  Passive tense is fine if you know what you’re doing!

What would you say is the best way to market your book? With which method have you had the most success so far?

Tricky question.  The most important part is to make certain that the cover is the best you can make it.  I work with indie presses, so giving them feedback is essential, but the same is true for self-published work.  After that, it’s a question of getting the word out through social media and hoping that lightning will strike.

How did your book come to be published? What was your journey to publication like? Did you get a lot of rejection letters before you finally saw your name in print?

I am a bit of an anomaly.  I sold the first short story I ever wrote.  It was written in 2005 and continues to be reprinted to this day.  Having said that, I didn’t sell it to the first market I sent it to.  Asimov’s rejected it and so did a lot of others.  But, eventually it sold.  It’s called “Tenth Orbit” if anyone is curious.

But other than that blip, I’m pretty much following the normal writing path.  I see a lot more rejections than sales.  I’ve had a couple of books that didn’t sell all that well (Siege, fortunately, did much better) which means that there are publishers who don’t want me now…  And I’m still looking for the right agent to get some non-SF books into a huge publisher.

So, in a nutshell:  I sold a story to a mag.  Then I sold another to an anthology.  Eventually, I had enough stories and momentum for a collection and then another (you have no idea how many rejections I managed to accrue along the way).  Some years later, I sold a novel (Siege, actually), to an indie press, and then another to a different indie press.  Then another novel to the guys who bought Siege.  And there were more rejections in this process, too!

But there’s always another challenge ahead. As I mentioned above, now that I’ve managed all the above, I would love to sell a novel to Penguin or to MacMillan.  And that means getting a major NY agent.  So I’m querying a novel right now, and still racking up rejections!

We all wish you the best of luck! Even if it sounds like you’re doing pretty great already. :) Before we say goodbye, I have one last question: Is being a published author everything you dreamed it would be? If not, how is it different? Is there anything you would change about it?

It’s everything I wanted and more.  While I’m still some way from being able to quit the day job (let’s hope that agent comes through for me!) I love the fact that there are complete strangers out there, in the US, in Romania, in Greece and in South Africa who are reading my words, rooting for my characters and maybe even shedding a tear or two because of my writing.

That is a great attitude. Thank you so much or sharing your story with us!

 

You can find Gustavo on Amazon, Goodreads, and his website at www.gustavobondoni.com.

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