Matthew O. Duncan's Blog: Author Updates and Insights

The Warrior's StoneThe Last Flight of the PhoenixThe Prophet's Stone
When I wrote the first book of the Sci-fi/Fantasy series for the New Terra Sagas, The Warrior’s Stone, I felt that I had created an entire universe full of stories. I actually had two more ideas for books before I even finished the first.
The first of these continuing stories has do to with the starship T.S.S. Phoenix which was introduced in the first book. Halfway through the first book, the Phoenix is crippled behind enemy lines and they can only have enough smaller ships with QSG drives to evacuate two-thirds of the crew. I wanted to tell the story of what happened to the crew. Which also gave me an opportunity to tell a new store with different themes in the same universe. To me, that was a sequel, but when my content editor read the first draft, she said it was a spin-off because I hardly mentioned the original main characters. Now I did not want to abandon Roy and Katreena. As a matter of a fact, the next book was going to focus on them and their family. Yet, my editor had a point. I could either call it a spin-off or make it a continuation of the main character's story from the first book.
After considering the options I had an idea that would not just work but improve the story. The power found on New Terra is the prize the new alien threat is after. That gave me all I needed to write several chapters that were Roy and Katreena’s part of the saga.
My biggest concern about writing a sequel is creating original content while staying true to the original story. I love all of my characters, but I don’t want to have them do the same things over and over again. Yet, I may have made a mistake in calling The Last Flight of the Phoenix a sequel. I didn’t account for readers falling so much in love with the main characters in the first books that they would be discourages with them not being the leads in the second. The third book, The Prophet’s Stone, is more of a direct continuation of Roy and Katreena’s story. Yet, I can’t bring myself to change the listing on my books. There is still a direct tie-in between all three books.
My other series, Lt. Reilly, is a spin-off. It takes place in the same universe, but with entirely new characters, locations, and themes. I even place them in a different category. Instead of Sci-fi/Fantasy, these books are Military Sci-fi. They are also told in the first person, whereas the other series is in the third person.
So, in what order should you read these books? Well, you can start with the New Terra Sagas. If you do, read book one, The Warrior’s Stone. From there you can read either book two or book three and you won’t be lost. They are both continuations of the first book, but not linked much to each other. The Lt. Reilly series doesn’t require the other series, but if you like to be in the know of some subtle inside connections, then you might like to have the foundation.
My editor has suggested making more of a cross over between the two series in my next book. I am considering that, but I can’t say if I will until I sit down to write it.

Matthew Duncan

Have you ever chased a dream? Decided you were going to do something and put 100% of yourself into it no matter how hard it was or how many people told you that you could not do it. For most authors, that is how they would describe writing their first book; myself included. But I didn’t just want to write a book. I wanted to be a full-time writer who sold enough books to support myself and my family as an author. A dream I’m still chasing. One of the biggest obstacles to that goal is reviews. Just one, nasty, snarky, insulting review can slow sales down for a book by a lot for days or even weeks. It’s not just because it can discourage people from buying the book, but it also goes into the algorithm Amazon uses for their recommendation list. When you are shopping for a book on Amazon and you see a list like “Readers who bought this book also bought these books,” what you are seeing are books that not only sold but also with higher review ratings. They have to put in data for the computer program to make the selections and with millions of books in their virtual store, they need several metrics to help the program put before the buyer books that they will most likely buy and like. Happy customers will be repeat customers, so the books that get higher reviews get more marketing. The problem with that system is that most people don’t take the time to leave a review or even give a rating unless they have something rude to say. So, a lot of self-published authors have taken to paying underground vendors to post bogus five-star reviews for them. I will not do that. Not just because it’s a fraud, but because it’s simply dishonest. I want to succeed or fail on my own merits. There have been some wonderful people who have written some fantastic reviews for my books and I love them for it. Yet, it’s only been a hand full, so when I do get a few less than glowing reviews, it pulls down my average and my rankings. Even the great reviews that say they love the book but are four out of five stars pull the book down and my sales slow a little. Now I know that there are a lot of people who like my books. I can say that because for every ten copies of the first book in each series sold, I sell on average eight books of book #2 in each series. Who’s going to buy book number two if they didn’t like the first book? Yet, I only get two or three reviews for every 100 books sold. So, please keep this in mind. If you find a book that you really like and you want the writer to continue writing the series, give him or her a five-star review or rating. It could make all the difference in the world.

Lt. Reilly and the Black Bird Offensive!!!Spoiler Alert!!!. I will be discussing my first two Lt. Reilly books and the endings of both. If you have not read them yet, please do not read this blog post as it will spoil the books for you. Thank you.

I’ve gotten some heat about how I ended my second Lt. Reilly book and I would like to explain my reasoning. My hope is that by understanding my motivation and how I felt it was right for the characters, you won’t feel as off-put by the ending.
First, I don’t outline my books. I just sit down and write. I have no idea what is going to happen or even what characters are going to show up. The fact that Reilly had two women interested in him in the first book was just something that happened.
At the end of the second book, Julie Anne Mitchell and Kayla went from being rivals for Reilly’s affections to best friends who are so close they have sleepovers together. Why would I do that? Well, for one thing, it was unexpected. If a writer’s writing is predictable, then why bother reading it? The twist played into the fact that our hero can solve and fix any problem except those in his personal life. This was a curveball that both the reader and the hero wasn’t expecting. But it also plays into the complexities of the characters. It set the groundwork for the next book that explores their relationships even more and how what we think we feel might actually be something else.
In retrospect, I briefly had a time in my life where I had two beautiful but very different women interested in dating me. Like Reilly, I had not had a lot of luck in the relationship department and had been going through a very long dry spell when suddenly I was dating one woman and then met another wonderful and fascinating woman who was as interested in me as I was in her. Yet, I was never one of those guys who could juggle multiple women. I struggled with the choice for a couple of weeks, but eventually, I decided to commit myself to the one whom I loved and not the one I was just infatuated with. I never had any regrets, but a part of me still wondered, ‘what if’. So, subconsciously I put those feelings into these books.
In the second book, Mitchell got a lot more attention then Kayla so in the third book that’s coming out soon I put more of the spotlight on Kayla. I want the reader to understand her more and why Reilly cares for her so much. I also dig more into Mitchell’s past to show more of who she is.
Now the relationship parts of the books are secondary to the stories. These books are mostly action/adventure space dramas. The relationship parts only make up 10% to 15% of the books, yet it’s the relationship stuff that people get hung up on. One person suggested that I leave out the love stories altogether. That’s a no, as characters are people and to understand people you need to understand their relationships, be it with their parents, siblings, friends, enemies, and lovers. It doesn’t need to be the focus, but without some parts of their personal lives, the story wouldn’t be much more than a witness report.
Now the funny thing is I have had people tell me things like, it would be better if – “Reilly ends up with Kayla and Mitchell dies’, ‘Reilly ends up with Mitchell and Kayla goes away’, ‘Kayla and Mitchell run off together and Reilly seeks a new love interest’, and then some even odder suggestions. I’m never going to make everyone happy and I’m not going to write what others tell me to write. I write the books I want to read because no one else has. There are books out there that I love and authors whom I follow, eager for their next release as I love their work. Yet, none of them write the perfect book for me. I don’t expect them to. And I don’t expect that my books will be 100% perfect for any of you. I just hope most people enjoy my work. That really is my goal.

The Warrior's StoneMatthew O. Duncan

I struggled in school. I just didn’t have a brain that could recall names and dates from history, understand math very well and spelling was always an uphill battle. It’s not that I didn’t try and I was smart enough. I could understand any concept, explain the how’s and why’s of politics, science, and history. I was as much into learning about planes, ships and tanks from WWI and WWII as I was into sci-fi shows like Star Wars and Star Trek. All my friends were nerds, but I couldn’t keep up with them academically.
I eventually found my niche in Theater. In my sophomore year in high school, I got a small part in the school play. It wasn’t much, but I had a couple of good lines that got the biggest laughs. To be on stage and have 250 people all explode with sudden laughter at something I said was incredible. I was hooked. Theater became my life and I set my goal on becoming an actor/director/screenwriter.
When I got to college I declared my major right away as Theater. Then I started auditioning for shows. That’s when I realized at five foot six and a less than athletic build, I was never going to get the lead in anything. Yet, the audition monologues I was writing for myself were getting attention. One of the seniors liked the one I did so much he suggested I expand it into a play. So, I did and entered it in the spring playwriting contest. It was meant for the upperclassmen who were taking the playwriting class, but it was open to everyone and I won 2nd place. The prise was to have the play produce the following semester. As thrilled as I was to be a performer on stage, it was ten times as thrilling to see my work that had come directly from my imagination, performed on stage for all the world to see. I had found something that I was good at and loved.
I continued to write plays throughout college and for some years after. Some won awards and some were produced on a local level, but I never made a career out of it and life went on. A part-time job turned into a full-time job, that turned into a career. I fell in love, got married, and had two sons. Writing went from a passion to a hobby. Then the great recession hit. I got laid off and couldn’t find a job. Things got bad financially. I watch the stress get to a lot of people and even tear some families apart. Luckily for me, I married the most wonderful person I have ever known. For my birthday she bought me a book. But not just any book. It was the Writers Market. A book I used to buy myself every year that had lists of publishers, writing contests, literary agents, and tips on how to sell your writing. With it, she gave me a message. “No matter how bad things get, I never want you to give up on your dreams.” That was the spark that made me pick up the pen and get back to work.
There was an idea that I had been playing around with for a long time. Both my wife and I had dreams of acting when we were younger and I had this idea for a movie that would bring together two characters that we each would most like to play. She was very much into medieval romance and I was into future sci-fi. So, I needed a story that would bring a magical princess together with a space fighter pilot. That sounds very cheesy, but the challenge was to come up with a story that seemed possible. At least as much as something like Battlestar Galactica or Brigadoon seems plausible.
I planned on writing it as a screenplay but didn’t have enough of the story in my mind to start writing it. So, I decided to write it out as a short story first, to use it as an outline, and then write the script. But when I had 44 pages and I wasn’t even a fraction through the story, I realized I was writing a book, and I was loving it. So, I kept going. After five months I had a complete first draft. I showed it to my wife who is my biggest fan and critic. She would not encourage me to show it to anyone if she didn’t believe it was any good. She knew my ego couldn’t take that. Better to get a soft rejection from her rather than a rude one from a producer or publisher. But she loved it. Then she pointed out that I needed to write it as a book and not like a play. There is a big difference and I had focused too much on dialogue and not enough on the description. She marked up every page with her suggestions and I went to work to improve my first novel. I also checked out best-selling books from the library in both print and on audio to study how successful writers applied their craft. I would study when my wife was editing my book. When she gave me her notes I would go through them and make revisions based on her suggestions and on the lessons I was learning. Two years and 12 drafts later I was ready to publish.
Now it’s seven years later, I have five published novels with more on the way. I still have to hold down a day job to pay the bills, but I starting to see a good income from my books. With luck, it should be my full-time career within a year or two.

The year I self-published my first book I was able to get onto a couple of panels at the Phoenix Comicon. I thought that was a big deal at the time. I was there as an author of Sci-fi/Fantasy, but the subject matter wasn’t my writing or my book. I was there more for being a fan of the subject with a little notoriety for writing a book. Still, that was nothing to sneeze at. On the last night of the event, I got to go to a “meet the authors” event. I was there as a fan, not an author as I didn’t have a publishing house representing me. While there I met a lovely woman who had published a number of supernatural romance books and she was kind enough to engage me in a lengthy conversation. She told me about her experience getting started and the struggles she went through. When I told her I was self-published she kindly explained to me that was a mistake. She went on to explain how you need a publisher to get your book into the places you need to be to sell them and to be taken seriously.
So, there I was, being told that the choice I had made to self-publish the book that I had spent nearly three years of my life on was a mistake. Yet, it wasn’t like I had a lot of options. I had tried to send my book into publishers, and I couldn’t find any legitimate publishers who would take an unsolicited manuscript. They would only take book submissions through a literary agent. So, I tried to get an agent, but everyone I reached out to either said they were not taking on my new clients or didn’t work in my genera. There were some ‘publishers’ who responded to my inquires who said they would love to publish my work, for a fee. The deals were always ‘we’ll get your book distributed around the world, all you have to do is pay for our editing, art, and other publishing cost and then you’ll earn a percentage of your royalties. Having asked other writers I knew through social media, I was advised to avoid those places because they were usually people running a business off their laptops who were just taking people’s money to run their books through a self-publishing site like KDP. There were a couple that was legitimate but still wanted around $10,000 to publish my book with no guarantee I would sell anything.
The reason I decided to do it myself was that if I was going to pay for everything, I wanted to control everything and keep 100% of the ownership of my book. I ran a contest for my cover art and picked the design I liked the best. I asked my wife, who has a background in English lit and education, to edit my book and I researched how to market. I selected a print-on-demand publisher who only charged me when I needed something printed and I looked for local events to promote.
At the time I didn’t know if I had made the right decision or not. Yes, I would have loved for a big publishing house to offer me a big check as a signing bonus, publish 20,000 copies of my book and distribute it to book stores everywhere, and pay me to travel all around to do book signings. But, that doesn’t happen in the real world. At least I have yet to meet any author who had that happen with their first book. The only ones I’ve met who get to go around on someone else’s dime to promote their own books are people who have written several books, build a following of fans, and made it to the best sellers list, mostly on their own.
I published my first book in 2014. It’s now 2020, I have five books self-published in e-book, print, and as audiobooks. I have book number six coming out in a few months and more projects in the works. Over the years I’m made mistakes and learned a lot along the way. For the first five years, I spend more money on my books than I made. Last year I almost broke even and this year I’m making a profit. A few things happened over the past year that really made a difference. I started a new series that was more popular than the first. I switched to KDP which gave me the ability to market directly to Amazon. I then took a class on how to market in Amazon without spending a lot of money. An oversea publisher contacted me asking for the rights to publish my work in the South Asia market and I was contacted by some podcasters to do interviews. Now a couple of my books are starting to show up on some best sellers list and getting the notice I always hoped they would.
So, if you have a dream of being an author, or you are one and you are struggling, have hope. If I can make it happen, anyone can.

Hello. A few years ago I tried starting a blog but wasn't very happy with it. One of the things about being a writer is that people assume that you have mastered the written word. The truth is, many creative people don't have strong technical skills. For some, it's a difficulty with math, a recall of names and dates, or procedural activities like what you might find in science. For me, it's spelling and grammar. I have an overactive imagination that works great to created characters and stories. Yet, I still stumble on spelling the most basic words and when to use the proper punctuation. Modern writing software works great to catch a lot of my mistakes, but it takes two editors to find about 95% of the errors in my books before I go to publish. So, when I have tried to write a blog like this in the past, it actually discouraged people from reading my books because they expected to find the same oversights in spelling and grammar in my published works. Yet, now that my books have found a measure of success and my fan base is growing, I'm being encouraged to give it a try again. With that in mind, I'm starting with this post. An apology for any mistakes you might find here or in any of my future posts. I will do my best to proofread what I have written before putting it up, but this will be a solo venture. I hope you find what I have to say to be of some interest. I'll keep most to the topics of my work, upcoming events, and tips for writers who want to self publish. Please force on the content and not the typos. Thank you.