We have ignition! A successful launch! The payload is on its way!
No, this isn’t announcing the most recent NASA satellite or Space-X endeavor. It’s the upload of my newest novel to Amazon/Kindle, Black Jack: Behind the Waves, the first book of the Behind the World trilogy (series). After years or writing/rewriting, months of editing, and weeks of preparation, the book is finally available for sale…and of course, nobody is buying it. We are going all out for a big free download of the eBook, but we have had – at best – mixed results with this approach in the past. But we have learned a lot of marketing tricks over the years, and we plan to bring them all to play now: to stand out amidst the book-choked pages of Amazon.
I mean, SOMEBODY is buying books. On-line retailers (most particularly Amazon) are now outpacing traditional publishing houses in total book sales, and there is an endless stream of new offerings with strange titles and intriguing covers, all competing for clicks and those ever-elusive dollars. The problem is, no one is screening the quality of the works showing up on Amazon. Traditional publishers have a whole cadre of proofreaders who vet every manuscript, and while, frankly, quality is not their sole criteria, they reject the worst offerings and have editors that work with authors to improve their works before they go to press. At Amazon, all you need are an idea, a word processor, and a modicum of cash that is invested like buying a big lottery ticket in the hopes of hitting the big one. Quality is an uncontrolled variable.
So, how do you stand out from this endless mob of brightly colored thumbnails all competing for attention? Well, that’s the real question. We’ve come up with three factors that we believe will make a difference. First (but not primarily) is quality. You need to write a thumping good story that the reader devours page after page and chapter after chapter. If it’s not good, it’s not going to sell. Second, you need to be willing to spend money on promotion. Authors hate this, since the whole point is to make money, not spend it. But big publishing houses recognize that any project needs an advertising budget to get it launched. You need to prime the pump. And finally – and probably most importantly – you need to push your project. Just as you put fire and dedication into the writing and the painful publication process, you need to rally that same intensity to push the book now that it’s been published. The work needs a champion, and that champion has to be you.
The bottom line is you need to love the job. As I’ve said repeatedly, if you are writing to get rich or even to get a steady income, you are likely wasting your time. And that applies now more than ever. So, why do I love it?
Black Jack is a fast-paced, fun-read whose original working title was Beach Book, both for its location and for being the perfect read for a summer vacation. It inspired the entire Behind the World series with Mortimer: Behind the Walls and Long Tom: Behind the Woods following quickly in its wake. I’ve kept the length of all three books under control (in the 65,000 to 75,000 word count range), and the most intriguing part of the series is the gradual development of the main character, Father Homer, and to a lesser extent his friend and bodyguard, Francisco Stampa. I met these two fellows in an aborted horror novel written decades ago, and while that book was a disaster, I never lost my love of these characters. Seeing them not only brought to life but watching them develop and grow over the course of the series is one of the most rewarding aspects of the entire experience.
So, I leave you with Black Jack: Behind the Waves, and I wish you as much joy in the reading as I had in the writing. Mortimer and Long Tom are both completed and in the publication process, and they will both be available over the course of the next few months. I’m currently working on a fourth book in the series, though that is very much early days. But one distinction from the traditional publishing houses is that the completion of this fourth work isn’t dependent on the success of the first three. These are works of love that constantly nag at my consciousness, demanding to be written. And if by luck or skill, a little money should follow in their train, well, that wouldn’t be a bad thing!
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