“Update on Nanotroopers”

Early this year, I embarked on a new venture for me.  Nanotroopers is a serialized story, divided into 22 episodes, each uploaded to Smashwords.com about every 3 weeks.  Each episode is a separate, self-contained story, but each episode also contributes to an overall story arc.  At this juncture, some 7 episodes have been uploaded, on schedule.  Below are 2 tables that show the download history.  The figures shown are cumulative.

Title	Week Starting 2-2-16	Week Ending 2-9-16	Week Ending 2-16-16	Week Ending 2-22-16	Week Ending 3-1-16	Week Ending 3-8-16	Week Ending 3-14-16	Week Ending 3-21-16	Week End  3-28-16	Week End  4-4-16
Nanotroopers Episode 1	174	207	242	257	288	299	314	329	345	349
Nanotroopers Episode 2	0	73	137	156	193	209	226	237	253	258
Nanotroopers Episode 3	0	0	0	0	56	95	112	134	152	160
Nanotroopers Episode 4	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	51	95	109

 

Title	Week Starting 4-11-16	Week Start 4-18-16	Week start 4-25-16	Week  start 5-2-16	Week start 5-10-16	Week start 5-16-16	Week start 5-23-16
Nanotroopers Episode 1	362	378	386	401	416	420	430
Nanotroopers Episode 2	269	284	293	307	319	323	330
Nanotroopers Episode 3	174	193	203	220	234	239	245
Nanotroopers Episode 4	126	148	159	179	197	202	211
Nanotroopers Episode 5	48	97	120	145	168	175	183
Nanotroopers Episode 6				46	96	112	129
Nanotroopers Episode 7							45

 

As you can see, while the episodes haven’t been flying off the digital shelves, there has been a steady rate of uploads from day 1.  I would rate the overall marketing effort as a moderate success, especially since I haven’t done anything special in marketing except to make the episodes available on time, with each one showing the overall schedule and when the next episode is to be available. 

Several aspects of this effort should be pointed out.

1.     I always upload on a Friday.  The weekends seem to be when people like to ‘browse’ and download things of interest.  Smashwords always pushes making your stuff available before a weekend.  I’ve seen spikes in my own downloads over weekends so this appears to be true. 

2.     Once an episode has passed Smashwords initial vetting and is approved for Premium Catalog, downloads really take off.  For Episode 7, the first download occurred less than an hour after I uploaded it.  Now, as I write this (May 25, 2016), this one Episode has accrued 62 downloads (from Friday, May 20 to Wednesday, May 25).  Episode 1, originally uploaded on January 14, 2016 now shows 430 downloads.

3.     I have been writing ahead, working to get one or more episodes ahead of scheduled upload dates.  As of this post, I’ve recently uploaded Episode 7.  But I’ve already finished Episode 8 and I am about a third through Episode 9.  I’d like to keep this margin throughout the year.

4.     I have an aggressive episode upload schedule.  The pressure is on to do 2-3 pages every weekday and I actually like that.  It forces me to focus, to be efficient with writing time, efficient with words and it keeps me in the story mentally and emotionally.  I find that the needs of the serial are never far from my mind…which annoys my wife and family no end, but more on that another time.

5.     One way I have been able to accomplish this is to make liberal use of copy and paste from earlier works in my series Tales of the Quantum Corps.  I’m not into reinventing the wheel, but I do have to massage the pasted text to fit the story and not leave too many gaping plot holes.

6.     Limiting myself to 40-60 pages and about 20,000 words forces me to edit as I write and really think hard about including something.  Note that Episode 8, not yet uploaded, weighs in at 68 pages, but I’m leaving it as is for now.

7.     I continually have to re-visit my overall story arc and outline, to make sure what I am writing in a given Episode contributes to that plot.  Doing a serial over an entire year and a half makes it easy to veer off track. 

8.     From one episode’s downloads to the next, I am presuming that many of these are the same readers downloading further episodes.  I can’t prove that but it makes sense and, if so, it would mean that readers like what they’re reading. 

9.     Though not unexpected, I have found that by Episode 7, my original episode outlines are starting to evolve well beyond my original thinking.  In a sense, I’m having to plot and write on the fly, and keep things consistent with what has been written before.  I expect this will become an ever-greater challenge as the series goes on.

10.  I have to constantly remind myself what this series is about…the adventures of one Johnny Winger and his experiences with a nanoscale robot called ANAD, in the context of fighting off a resilient and resourceful adversary named Red Hammer, who want to steal or eliminate them both, to serve their own criminal cartel ends.

 

So that’s an update on Nanotroopers.  Next post will come on June 6 and should deal with an update on my upcoming sf novel The Farpool, which is approaching an end to its first draft.

 

See you then.

 

Phil B.

“Editing and Flossing: We Do It Because We Should”

Every day, I floss my teeth, like all real Americans.  Twice a day.  I don’t particularly like it but I do it.  The dentist says I should.  That’s how think about editing too.

Wikipedia says this about editing: Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible and film media used to convey information. The editing process can involve correction, condensation, organization, and many other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate and complete work.

I’ve just finished Episode 8 of my Nanotroopers serial.  It’s 68 pages long.  Right after finishing the first draft, I do a thorough read-through.  Does it flow?  Does the story make sense?  Is it believable and consistent?  I take this read-through as a chance to correct awkward grammar, fix typos and misspellings (later I’ll run spellcheck) and generally find out if I have a decent story, with all the proper elements of a story…plot, characters, a problem for the characters, some complications, some kind of resolution in the end, etc. 

Let’s take what Wikipedia says and expand on correction, condensation and organization as major points in the editing process.

Correction

Everybody makes mistakes.  I know that’s hard to believe but it’s true.  Editing gives you the chance to find them and fix them before your readers do.  Nothing destroys the power of a story, the verisimilitude of a story, faster than an obvious factual error.  Typos and awkward grammar can be fixed easily enough.  But when you say Mars is a billion miles from Earth and it’s really only a hundred million miles away, plenty of readers will pounce on that and toss your book, assuming you haven’t taken the time to be a pro and find and fix obvious glitches.  It does not reflect well on your craftsmanship when your story reeks of mistakes.  We don’t build houses that way and we shouldn’t build stories that way either.

Condensation

To condense a story means a lot of things, mostly taking things out.  One of the practices that makes Nanotroopers possible as a serialized story of 20,000-word episodes, uploaded to Smashwords every 3 weeks, is the fact that I freely copy and paste from other stories.  After the chop job, though, I have to smooth things out, condense down the paste job so it will fit my story size and smooth things out so the story flows, the plot makes sense, the story is adequately carried forward, the characters are consistent and believable, in other words, condensation and correction work together, like ham and eggs.  It’s a rare story that can’t stand some enlightened pruning.  For the last thirty years, I have spent much of my life as a professional technical writer.  This turns out to be good discipline for story-telling.  Tech writing is done mainly to instruct.  Story writing is done to tell a story.  But these two things are related.  Moreover, in tech writing, as in any good writing, use only the words needed and no more.  Be spare.  You don’t have to be Ernest Hemingway.  But try to tell the story with the minimum number of effective words.  I interpret condensation as a form of literary distillation, paring down my words to the most essential ones, pruning away all but the essence.  That’s what makes for effective writing, in any genre.

Organization

The editing process also involves organization.  In any story, things should happen and flow logically, for a reason.  Dick did this and then Jane did that.  For me, organization starts with a strong outline.  Outlines are the heart of my writing.  If I don’t have a good outline, I can’t tell a story.  But other authors are different.  Good editing involves understanding what makes a story tick.  Characters are motivated by certain things.  A problem hits them and their motivations drive them to react and deal with it a certain way, hopefully consistent with their nature.  The hard part is making this look natural and keeping the character’s responses both believable and consistent.  The really good storytellers have a way of using plot complications to cause a character to grow in their response, thereby revealing something we can all learn from.  Hey, maybe if that happened to me, I could do what he did.  It makes sense, it’s satisfying at some fundamental level.  Stories that do this are the memorable ones and organization (tightening the story up) is one key part of that.  

Obviously, there’s a lot more to editing than this but I like to keep my posts short and to the point…as we’ve just been discussing.   Corrected, condensed, organized…any writing will benefit from these.  Behind every successful writer is an effective editor and in this day of indie, self-publishing and e-books, those two are often the same person.

Next week’s post will come on Tuesday, May 31, 2016. 

Hope everyone has a nice Memorial Day weekend.

See you then.

Phil B.