Anthony Dean's Blog: The Voided Man - Posts Tagged "fantasy"

First of all, greetings to my new followers. An author's greatest fear may be going unnoticed, and I appreciate anyone who takes the time to read my books or blog posts. Thanks as well to anyone who has reviewed any of my novels - I learn a great deal from reading those.

I have just finished the draft of Voided Man 6. Al narrates that one (for those of you new to The Voided Man, I have a new narrator for each installment in the series) and I have been thinking this evening about how far he has come as a character.

I first thought of Al as a way to let Prisoner Number One engage in dialogue out in the void, but he took on a life of his own early in the drafting of the original book. It seemed to me like he wanted to be a bigger part of the story, and I started beefing up his parts, much to the tale's benefit.

All of the books have one or two characters like that who almost promoted themselves from the role of bit character to lead character. It is the most interesting phenomenon I have encountered so far in my first year of writing a lot of fiction.

Quick updates. There is a Goodreads Giveaway for autographed copies of The Clock and the Candles from now through 9/27. I'll probably do a similar giveaway for The Voided Man next month.

And speaking of October, I'll be releasing two new books then. Clock 2 (The Clock and the Talisman) on 10/5 and then Voided Man 4 (Navigating Yesterday) on 10/27. Both are up for preorders now.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.

Greetings, all.

Book 4 in the Voided Man series - Navigating Yesterday - comes out on Sunday.

If you are someone who has read the others, you'll get new backstory on the Last King of the West, and how the Realm originated, and more on Jack and Laura's unusual romance and what happens with Alexis as she grows up during the years that Banner is adrift in the Valkyrie-98.

If you are new to my fiction, this is actually a good book to use to start the Voided Man series. You'll catch more of the references if you've read the other books, but you won't be unable to enjoy Navigating Yesterday if you haven't.

The question I explore in the new book is this: in the aftermath of an apocalypse, what does it look like when pockets of civilization start to return and stabilize? I've spent a lot of time thinking about how technology and commerce and governance might work in that scenario, and also about the threats that might arise from places where civilization has not returned.

The Potato isn't finished as a setting by any means, but Number One and the others will be spending a lot of time on Earth in the forthcoming books in the series, and so Navigating Yesterday reveals what things are like in 30th Century America.

Also in the mix are two good love stories, one old and one brand new. Two new villains – Chancellor Bain and Lord Jeffrey – arise as well and cause trouble. And Bucky is back. Everybody loves that horse, including me.

Half of my advance readers rated Navigating Yesterday as their favorite book in the series so far. Small sample size, true, but encouraging nonetheless.

For my fantasy fans, the conclusion of the Clock and the Candles trilogy will be out December 1, and it's all hands on deck for the conspirators as they make a real run at ousting Adolphus from power. There's much more on the elves in book 3 as well.

And I call it a trilogy, but I'm sure that the Lands and the Clock and the characters who survive book 3 will be back. I just haven't decided whether their series will run straight ahead like the Voided Man, or whether I'll end up breaking their adventures into discrete trilogies. That could go either way.

Last note for now: I'll release one more Voided Man book before the end of the year. Book 5, The Valkyrie-200, will be out on December 15.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.

Greetings, everyone.

I released my first book (The Voided Man) in May, and so November marks six months for me in the world of self publishing. I’ve learned a great deal in half a year, and I’m going to create a few posts this month to share some of it. In a few weeks I’ll resume talking about books that I’m working on or that will soon be released.

In my first post back in June, I characterized myself as the last man on the bench on a single-A minor league baseball team. At that time, I’d sold about 40 books, and almost all of those sales were to people I know personally. Six months in, I would rate myself as a starter on a double-A team. I’m a long way from the majors, but I’ve sold a couple of thousand books now, and I feel like I understand the KDP game much better.

But on to specific things I’ve learned. I have a top ten list, which will be divided over three blog posts.

1. You can write more than you think you can.

I have found writing output to be no different than running. If you haven’t been to the track for a long time and you show up with fresh-out-of-the-box shoes, you will probably get winded fairly quickly. But if you get back up there night after night, you can build up stamina in a surprisingly short amount of time.

Writing is the same, I’ve found. I’m turning out more than twice as many words per day than I did in the beginning, and it doesn’t seem burdensome. It doesn’t feel like I’m sacrificing anything that matters or burning out my brain or anything negative. It feels like I’ve been going to the track regularly and I can turn out easy quarter miles and a lot of them.

2. Reviewers are generally nice.

I read all of my reviews, and they’re very helpful. The ones that are most enjoyable to read, of course, are from people who loved one of my books. But even the reviewers who didn’t particularly like a story usually have constructive comments that I can get something out of. If you think of writing, or if you’ve written something but are reluctant to put it out there because of a fear of the public square, my experience has been that it is generally a supportive place.

3. You have to build a schedule.

Writing needs to be a habit, and your brain needs to know when it’s “writing time”. Part of getting more productive for me has been establishing that morning writing time is 8:00 and that evening writing time is 7:00.

It doesn’t matter what your schedule looks like specifically, I don’t think. It just needs to be consistent. And the schedule I’m talking about is for the creation of new material for the books you are working on. I edit and blog and work on ad campaigns and all sorts of things related to the books at random times, but building the new content happens at set times, and that seems to make a meaningful positive difference.

That’s it for this week. More of my top ten list of what I’ve learned in my first six months of self publishing in a week or so.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.

This is the second installment in a three part series on what I’ve learned in my first six months of self-publishing on KDP. Last time, I talked about the first three things on my list of ten items. Picking up where I left off...

4. You will go nuts if you check your numbers all the time.

It’s tempting to do so. You can track sales, and royalties, and ranking in genres and subgenres and on Amazon overall in the US or the UK or anywhere else. You can take a deep dive into ad campaigns and pre orders and average customer ratings anytime you want.

And if you go down that rabbit hole, it takes away time from writing. If numbers are up, it tempts one to take the foot off the gas for the rest of the day. “What I have out already is doing great, so I’ll do something else.” If numbers are down, the amygdala wakes up and says, “What’s going on?! We’ve got to figure this out right away!!”

But you can’t figure it out, not over short lengths of time. Book sales are like stocks, to my eye. A good book will sell more over time just like shares of a good company will go up over time. But how will they do hour to hour? No one knows. At all.

I check sales numbers once a day in the evening when I’m not going to write anymore that day and try to keep it to 15 minutes. I do a deeper dive once a week and look at trends a little bit. That’s it.

My advice to anyone new to the game is to spend as much time as possible writing and as little time as is reasonable checking the background stuff.

5. Writing fiction is difficult.

I’ve written and ghost written a fair number of textbooks over the years, and while those are much longer than novels (at least on average), they are easier to put down on paper because they’re tied to specific things. If you want a textbook chapter on law or ethics or government or public policy I can probably turn it around in a few days, because I probably already know a lot about the issues you want to cover with your students, and I can research the rest.

But fiction? Different deal. There’s no opening blueprint, there is no obvious starting point, and there are no rules. There’s nothing. You have to build it all, and sometimes, the blinking cursor seems to taunt you. Sometimes, it makes me think, “You know, if I were a smarter man, I would have settled on how the next part goes by now.”

But then sometimes, that blinking cursor dances and simply glides across the screen, which leads me to my next point.

6. Writing fiction is marvelous.

I am not aware of any professional activity that is as fulfilling as creating a story out of nothing and having it mean something to someone else.

I’ve gotten tastes of it lecturing over the last twenty nine years. I always figure that if you give students a definition, they’ll memorize it for your next exam and then forget it, but if you tell them a story, they might actually remember it. So I’m a storyteller in the classroom when it is reasonable.

But writing novels is 100% storytelling, all the time. It’s amazing.

I bet I’ll teach for a long time yet, but I’m pretty clearly more than halfway through my teaching career. I can’t imagine I’ll still be at the podium when I’m 81. But I bet I’ll still be writing fiction at 81, and if everything holds together, longer still. Some authors do that.

Now that I see how it is writing everyday, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to not doing so. I really don’t.

I’ll finish this series off in my next post mid-month, and then I’ll have one more post at the end of the month that will preview my December releases.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.

This is the last in a series of three posts that cover ten things I’ve learned during my first six months of self-publishing on Kindle Direct. To finish off the list...

7. There is more to it than I thought.

I had not anticipated running a lot of ad campaigns, or Goodreads Giveaways, or writing a blog, or emailing with readers. But those things are all part of building a series, and they have all become part of the rotation. And I don’t mind doing them; they are just things I hadn’t expected at the beginning.

8. There is also actually less to it than with alternate paths.

Publishing through traditional publishers often requires getting an agent, and that seems a difficult trick. There are writers in a group I have joined who spend a lot of time trying to win that part of the game. Agents aren’t really a feature of the world of academic publishing that I’m familiar with, but once a contract is signed to write a textbook, I can say from experience that there are a LOT of moving parts before a final manuscript is accepted that aren’t part of the KDP world.

9. If you are thinking of making a go of self-publishing, be prepared to lose money initially.

You have to advertise, in my opinion. There are several million books on Amazon, and if you are new, you have to create visibility for your book or not very many people are likely to find it.

You also need covers that are interesting if you want people to take a first look at your work. If you have the knack for designing them, that’s great, but I don’t, and so covers are the other main expense I’ve had with my books. Lindsey Cousins is my cover designer - https://www.behance.net/gallery/21047... - and she does a great job. Wait until you see the cover for Voided Man 6.

But even with expenses, my experience has been that you can get to the break even point and beyond reasonably quickly, just not right away.

10. The KDP world is user friendly.

I’m not tech savvy, but I’m almost never frustrated with the KDP ecosystem. And on the few occasions I’ve hit a roadblock, I’ve been able to get a call back from someone who can help within five minutes.

That’s my report on my first six months of self publishing. Next time I’ll have a synopsis of my two December releases.

Thank you for taking an interest in my writing.