Post #210 April 20, 2020

“Ebook Marketing”

I’m dedicating this post to ongoing marketing efforts.  When you write books that are available as ebooks on web sites such as Smashwords.com or other ebook retailers like Barnes and Noble and Apple ibooks, you have to be aware that ebooks are marketed somewhat differently from print books.

In ebooks, downloads are key.  Full or partial downloads are the ebook equivalent of browsing in a bookstore.  Since many of my ebooks are set to free in price (more on that in a moment), downloads are the best barometer of interest from readers. 

Now back to marketing.  Why set an ebook to free?  There are many reasons but one is simply this: some of my titles weren’t being downloaded that much.  Smashwords offers all kind of tools and advice on ebook marketing.  If your ebook isn’t moving, you’re not making any sales.  If it’s dead in the water, make it free.  I tried this myself and it works.  I saw an immediate spike in the affected ebooks.  I think it has to do with readers being willing to take a chance on an unknown author…they’re intrigued enough to read the description and peruse the cover image, and being free may just push them to click on ‘download’ and take a chance.

It’s all about building an audience.  Of course, it goes without saying that your book needs to be well-written enough to keep them coming back…in fact, your book needs to grab the reader by the lapel and smack them upside the head, then knock their socks off.  But then that’s true of any book, print or ebook.

Last year, I had over 24,000 downloads across all titles.  Due to these numbers, many of my writer friends suggested I started putting small prices back on some of my titles.  Toward that end, I have priced episodes of my new series Quantum Troopers Return at $0.99 per episode.   So far, downloads have been disappointingly minimal.  I’ve left all other titles free for now.  What does this mean?  There are several possibilities I’ll have to face.  One, maybe the stories just aren’t that interesting.  Two, with so much of my work free, potential readers are balking at putting out anything (even 99 cents) for new titles.  Three, there is more I could do to jazz up downloads of these new titles.  More on that later.  

In previous posts, I have mentioned perusing covers.  Don’t let anyone kid you: covers matter…a lot.  Whether on a web site or in a bookstore, covers grab attention and direct reader eyes to your book.  There are plenty of authors whose ebooks were wallowing in the doldrums and who sprang for snazzy professional covers and found big spikes in their sales and downloads.  You can’t afford not to do that.

Having said that, I plan on doing the very same thing.  Six of my early titles (the Johnny Winger books) are part of a series called Tales of the Quantum Corps.  My next step to rev up downloads in this series (note that all books in the series have been priced at FREE) is to spring for a professional ebook cover designer to work with me and come up with a series of themed covers for the series…covers that have a consistent, eye-popping look with minor variations to distinguish the different titles. 

I’ll probably try this with the Quantum Troopers Return series too, once I get further into it and possibly with other titles as well as potential follow-ons to that story series.  And I’ll let you know what happens.

There are plenty of other ebook marketing techniques offered by Smashwords, such as preorders, but I’ll cover those in later posts.

Next post will come on April 27.  In that post, I’ll go back to the world of The Farpool Stories and let you know what I am thinking regarding future titles over the next few years.

See you then.

Phil B.

 

 

Post #209 April 13 2020

“Showing and Telling”

There is a long tradition in storytelling that says something like this: Show, don’t tell.  This means that, all else being equal, it’s better to show how much Johnny loves Katie rather than tell us that Johnny loves Katie.  This dictum is saying that, for maximum impact on the reader, to engage the reader in your story, dramatize what Johnny does to illustrate how much he loves Katie.  Maybe he buys roses (if he has enough money and works two jobs).  Maybe he stands outside her window and throws rocks late at night to get her attention (though nowadays that would be considered creepy and probably trespassing, if not stalking).  Maybe he Instagrams cute little love-grams starring him and his cat.

Whatever.  The point is that your reader will engage with the story and its characters more completely if he can ‘experience’ loving Katie through what Johnny does.  It’s supposed to be more engaging than having you as the author just say Johnny loves Katie and leaving it at that.

Except this isn’t always true.  To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there is a time to show and there is a time to tell.

1.  When to show
    
   You show when you want to move the story forward, which should pretty much be all the time.  If a scene or an encounter is important to the story and the plot, dramatize it.  Show the reader what happens, who does what, who says what, how Johnny shaved off his hair out of love for Katie. 
    
   You show when your scene involves the main character, when you want to illuminate something about this character.  Why is Johnny so smitten with Katie?  You could tell the reader.  But it’s more powerful if you show Johnny doing something that leads the reader to make his own conclusions about the depth of Johnny’s infatuation with this girl.
    
   You show when you need to illustrate or demonstrate or elaborate critical points in the plot.  I am working on a science fiction novel called Monument these days, which involves two architects of the future and how their efforts to build a legacy project (in this story of the future, architects can build whole worlds) conflict with each other.  There are people violently opposed to their work.  I could just tell you what these opponents do but, in most cases, I’ve elected to show you what they do to oppose these architects.
    
   You show scenes when you really want to capture the reader’s immediate attention.  Remember, readers read your story to be entertained and to identify and live vicariously through your characters.
    
2. When to tell
    
   You tell, which means narrate, if by showing a scene that’s not critical to the story line, the story seems in danger of bogging down in details.  Storytelling is about pace and timing as much as character and setting.  You can’t show everything and you shouldn’t.
    
   You tell when what is happening isn’t that relevant to the main story line but needs to be included for continuity or clarity.  It’s like when movies of old used flashing newspaper headlines or spinning clocks to give the viewer the impression of passing time…kind of the cinematic equivalent of literary ‘telling.’  Or the filmmaker may use voice-over narration to achieve the same thing.
    
   You show when you need to advance the story’s internal clock by a significant period of time (see above).
    
   In many of my novels, I tell and speed up the timeline of the story by using ‘news reports’ from reporters of a fictitious news organization called SolNet.  The reporters interview key people or just report to you, the reader, what has been happening.  By doing this, I can telescope time and advance the story without having to dramatize or show every little detail.
    
3. You can mix both showing and telling

You could do what many storytellers do by showing a little and telling a little.  This kind of variety is good in that keeps the reader interested in seeing what happens next.  It also allows the author, as narrator, to insert commentary and shape reader reactions directly.

 

In general, it is better to show rather than tell, but in this post, I wanted to make the case that there is room for both and provide reasons for when to use each one.  Both have a role to play in telling a story.  The real choice to be made is when you decide what moves the story along best.  The needs of the story should drive every decision you make. 

The next post to The Word Shed comes on April 20.  Have a happy Easter and we’ll see you then.

Phil B.

 

 

 

Post #208 April 6 2020

“Plagues and Writers”

Plague stories have a long tradition in the world of literature.  To my way of thinking, such stories are a part of the larger apocalyptic tradition…stories of the end times.  Stephen King’s The Stand comes to mind, when we speak of plague stories.  In fact, I just finished reading Stephen Baxter’s Ark, about a world that has been totally flooded and the few survivors escape the ensuing chaos in a starship headed for a distant world…not specifically a plague story but very much in the same vein.

 What makes for a good plague story?  Below, I’ve come up with a few ideas.

1. Plague stories are thick with a sense of fear, ultimate doom, and the end times.  Apocalypse is the word that comes to mind.  We get this word from the Greek word for revelation.  Plague stories often deal with implacable, invisible enemies.
2. To be successful, plague stories must provoke a sense of empathy for the main characters.  This kind of story is usually done with a broad brush, so it’s better to dramatize things by experiencing it through the eyes of a selected few characters.  There are often lots of people in these stories, the poor souls.  Many of them are essentially cannon fodder for the storyteller, dying in grotesque ways, often in great numbers.
3. Many plague stories are known for sweeping settings and ghoulish depictions of the horror, made worse because you can’t see the enemy and no amount of money or resources can hold it off.  One of the delights that readers get from these stories is seeing the upper strata of society get the same treatment as the little people…a cruel sense of justice prevails as everybody suffers equally.
4. As mentioned, plague stories are very much in the tradition of most apocalyptic stories.  Today, we see stories of this type often dealing with environmental or climatic disasters.  Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 comes to mind and there are many others. 
5. Many plague stories offer some kind of redemptive resolution at the end.  The characters heal and learn new things about themselves, their families and neighbors and society.  Plague stories sometimes resolve themselves with a kind of ‘love overcomes all’ theme, even overcoming gruesome disease and death.  Also, we see how critical togetherness is for the main characters, as misery loves company.
    
   Many years ago, I began my series of sf novels Tales of the Quantum Corps, with a book called Johnny Winger and the Serengeti Factor (still available online at Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers).  In this story and the ensuing titles in Tales, I describe the development and employment of a nano-scale robotic entity which has some of the characteristics of a programmable virus.  I called it ANAD, for Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler.  Though technically a very small robot, ANAD has a processor architecture based in part on the discovered genome of an ancient virus, a virus left on Earth by ancient extraterrestrial visitors, who had planned that Evolution would make their virus the dominant lifeform on this planet.  Of course, that didn’t work out (so far), so much of the series deals with the growing understanding that the Old Ones are coming back to fix this ‘mistake.’
   There are, of course, many well-known plague stories: The Plague (Albert Camus); Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe); The Andromeda Strain (Michael Crichton); The Last Man (Mary Shelley); and Mask of the Red Death (Edgar Allan Poe) are just some that come to mind.
    
   Face it: we love plague stories.   Why should this be such an enduring storytelling tradition? 

1. There but for the grace of God go I.  We can live vicariously in a dangerous time through these stories. 
2. We like to see memorable characters overcome great odds.
3. We like to believe that humanity can prevail even against great odds.  We seek resolution to problems that seem too big to have a resolution.

Perhaps there is no better example of this than a story from real life.  In 1665/66, Sir Isaac Newton fled London to escape the effects of the Black Death (aka, the bubonic plague).  Hunkering down at his family estate Woolsthorpe Manor, ripped from his career as an academic at Cambridge University, Newton was left with little to occupy his restless mind.  Yet out of this experience and during his enforced isolation, he developed the initial ideas for something he called “a method of fluxions,’ which today we know as modern Calculus.  There are even apocryphal stories that it was at this time that Newton witnessed an apple falling from a tree and began pondering something he would later call a Law of Universal Gravitation.

Done well, plague stories emphasize many aspects of human nature and society.  They give us a chance to live in another world, one which we wouldn’t normally chose to live in, and experience a full range of emotions and incidents, fear, love, togetherness, redemption, social justice, compassion and selfishness.  Plagues and plague stories seem to bring out both the best and worse in us.  In some ways, plague stories are a mirror in which we see ourselves for what we are: complicated moral beings simultaneously capable of both surpassing heights of compassion and devotion and unimaginable depths of depravity and greed, often at the same time.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on April 13, 2020.

See you then

Phil B.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Post #207 March 16 2020

‘Where the Hell Are We?  How Details of Setting and Sense of Place Can Help (or Hurt) a Story

Remember when Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, mutters to Toto: “Toto, somehow I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore?”  Dorothy was actually identifying one of the most important attributes of a good story…a strong sense of place.

Writer’s Digest lists 12 elements of setting for writers to consider.  To wit:

1. Locale. This relates to broad categories such as a country, state, region, city, and town, as well as to more specific locales, such as a neighborhood, street, house or school. Other locales can include shorelines, islands, farms, rural areas, etc.
2. Time of year. The time of year is richly evocative and influential in fiction. Time of year includes the seasons, but also encompasses holidays, such as Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and Halloween. Significant dates can also be used, such as the anniversary of a death of a character or real person, or the anniversary of a battle, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor.
3. Time of day. Scenes need to play out during various times or periods during a day or night, such as dawn or dusk. Readers have clear associations with different periods of the day, making an easy way to create a visual orientation in a scene.
4. Elapsed time. The minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months a story encompasses must be somehow accounted for or the reader will feel confused and the story will suffer from a lack of authenticity. While scenes unfold moment by moment, there is also time to account for between scenes, when a flashback is inserted, and when a character travels a long distance.
5. Mood and atmosphere. Characters and events are influenced by weather, temperature, lighting, and other tangible factors, which in turn influence the emotional timbre, mood, and atmosphere of a scene.
6. Climate. Climate is linked to the geography and topography of a place, and, as in our real world, can influence events and people. Ocean currents, prevailing winds and air masses, latitude, altitude, mountains, land masses, and large bodies of water all influence climate. It’s especially important when you write about a real setting to understand climatic influences. Harsh climates can make for grim lives, while tropical climates can create more carefree lifestyles.
7. Geography. This refers to specific aspects of water, landforms, ecosystems, and topography in your setting. Geography also includes climate, soil, plants, trees, rocks and minerals, and soils. Geography can create obvious influences in a story like a mountain a character must climb, a swift-running river he must cross, or a boreal forest he must traverse to reach safety. No matter where a story is set, whether it’s a mountain village in the Swiss Alps or an opulent resort on the Florida coast, the natural world with all its geographic variations and influences must permeate the story.
8. Man-made geography. There are few corners of the planet that have not been influenced by the hand of humankind. It is in our man-made influences that our creativity and the destructiveness of civilization can be seen. Readers want visual evidence in a story world, and man-made geography is easily included to provide it. With this in mind, make certain that your stories contain proof of the many footprints that people have left in its setting. Use the influences of humankind on geography to lend authenticity to stories set in a real or famous locale. These landmarks include dams, bridges, ports, towns and cities, monuments, burial grounds, cemeteries, and famous buildings. Consider too the influences of mankind using the land, and the effects of mines, deforestation, agriculture, irrigation, vineyards, cattle grazing, and coffee plantations.
9. Eras of historical importance. Important events, wars, or historical periods linked to the plot and theme might include the Civil war, World War II, medieval times, the Bubonic Plague, the gold rush in the 1800s, or the era of slavery in the South.
10. Social/political/cultural environment. Cultural, political, and social influences can range widely and affect characters in many ways. The social era of a story often influences characters’ values, social and family roles, and sensibilities.
11. Population. Some places are densely populated, such as Hong Kong, while others are lonely places with only a few hardy souls. Your stories need a specific, yet varied population that accurately reflects the place.
12. Ancestral influences. In many regions of the United States, the ancestral influences of European countries such as Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland are prominent. The cities and bayous of Louisiana are populated with distinctive groups influenced by their Native American, French-Canadian, and African American forebears. Ancestral influences can be depicted in cuisine, dialogue, values, attitudes, and general outlook.

Anybody writing science fiction or fantasy has to spend some time thinking about details of setting, since much sf is set in times and places (and planets) other than this one.  For example, my new Quantum Troopers Return series is set largely in near future times, mostly (but not entirely) on Earth.  This series is a continuation of an earlier series (Quantum Troopers) so I didn’t want to veer off too sharply from what has gone before. 

One of my goals in this new series was to set the stories in exotic places that my average readers might not have visited.  In this age of Internet and with global distribution of ebooks, this is harder than it seems.  The series has settings that range from Indonesia to the Forbidden City, from the Moon to the surface of Venus, and from the Indian Ocean seabed to the deserts of Saudi Arabia and inner Mongolia.  All episodes are steeped in lots of action and mostly involve continuing characters from the original series, just a little later in time.

Using setting properly (in such a way that the nuts and bolts don’t show) can enhance any story, from atmospherics to provoking the proverbial sense of wonder, something that science fiction writers do all the time.  The key is to keep the setting descriptions embedded in the context of the story and not to dump an encyclopedia of facts and maps on the reader. 

Some writers spend so much time on their setting and world-building that they feel it essential to drop all this into the story.  Sometimes, the setting is the story, like Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama.  But most of the time, a good, believable setting is just one part of the greater story, like plot and character and it should be woven together into a seamless whole. 

Spend time on your setting details but don’t do it at the expense of telling a good story. 

The Word Shed will take a two-week hiatus for spring break.  The next post to The Word Shed comes on April 6, 2020.

See you then.

Phil B.

Post #206  March 9, 2020

Character, Action and Tom Swift, Jr.

One of my great joys as a teenager was Tom Swift, Jr. books.  In the early and mid-1960s, they were produced as trade-sized hardcovers, priced at $1.25 and came out every four months.  I’d buy the latest one on a Saturday morning and be finished with it that evening.

I loved them for the science adventures and for the fact that there was lots of action.  And story action is the subject of this post.

Action should be thought of as what the main characters do to solve their problems.  Some stories are marketed as action-adventures, where the action is all there is…continuous action, without the characters spending a lot of time contemplating their navels or expounding on deep philosophical matters. 

One of my goals in writing Quantum Troopers and Quantum Troopers Return was to involve the reader in lots of action, right from the start.  To make this happen, the main character(s)…in this case Johnny Winger…has to be an action-oriented person, or a person in an action-oriented position.  Winger is a trooper with Quantum Corps so he’s always fighting off bad guys and spies and trying to keep the peace in the world of atoms and molecules that is Quantum Corps’ theater of operation.  Keeping Winger involved in some kind of action hasn’t been too much of a stretch.

But action for the sake of action actually gets old, after a few chapters.  The action has to be in the service of the story, it has to advance the story.  Which means that in addition to fighting off bad guys, Johnny Winger has to occasionally run into roadblocks, problems he can’t resolve in his usual head-banging, slam-‘em- up- side-the-head fashion.  The action has to have a purpose.  In these cases, the purpose is to show Johnny Winger as a person and how he reacts to different situations and scenarios, in other words to reveal and develop character.

Action doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  It happens or is caused by character.  I found this on Wikipedia concerning adventure stories and the role of action:

Critic Don D'Ammassa, in the Introduction to the Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction defines the genre as follows:

.. An adventure is an event or series of events that happens outside the course of the protagonist's ordinary life, usually accompanied by danger, often by physical action. Adventure stories almost always move quickly, and the pace of the plot is at least as important as characterization, setting and other elements of a creative work.^[1]

D'Ammassa argues that adventure stories make the element of danger the focus; hence he argues that Charles Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities is an adventure novel because the protagonists are in constant danger of being imprisoned or killed, whereas Dickens' Great Expectations is not because "Pip's encounter with the convict is an adventure, but that scene is only a device to advance the main plot, which is not truly an adventure."^[1]



So danger is an important element of action adventure stories.  In Quantum Troopers, there are several sources of danger.  Johnny Winger is often at risk to life and limb from Quantum Corps’ principal enemy Red Hammer (now Red Harmony in Quantum Troopers Return).  Sometimes, the autonomous assembler technology at the heart of the series comes back to bite him, and his fellow troopers.  Sometimes his own actions and headstrong impulses cause bad things to happen.  And ideally, as this latest serial story advances through its planned 12 episodes, Winger learns his lesson from being in all this danger and approaches future conflicts and problems with a smarter approach.  In other words, the main character is changed somehow as he encounters problems, conflicts and dangers. 



This is one of the reasons, though we don’t always like to admit it, that so many readers like action adventure stories.  They can live and experience vicariously the action and dangers of the main character and still live to read another day.  In fact when you get right down to it, this is one of the key reasons why we like stories period. 



Another aspect of any good action-adventure story is the pace, the speed of the action.  Our hero is constantly in and out of hot water, one close escape after another.  How do you keep the reader from going numb or zoning out through all this?  Vary the action.  Vary what happens.  Make the reader care about the character.  This means that the pot-boiler action sequences should be interspersed with quieter moments…the character reflects on what he has just escaped,  tells his buddies what just happened, gets laid or goes to the grocery store…things that can endear the character to the reader…hey, he’s just like one of us…I’ve done that very same thing.  An interlude between rock-‘em, sock-‘em action is necessary for the reader to take a breath, for the character to recoil and reset before the next escapade, and most importantly, for the character to gain some perspective on what is happening…in other words, to grow and change.



If this doesn’t happen, the reader won’t buy it and will find your character just a cardboard cutout to which things happen.  The story won’t be very satisfying.  Even furious action becomes tiresome if the character lets the same damn things happen to him again and again and doesn’t learn from the experience.  Different things have to happen, or the character’s own actions to resolve a problem cause a new problem…that’s real and your readers will experience it as real.



Action and character are closely intertwined in any fictional story and particularly so in action-adventure.   But the action has to have a purpose and the main purpose is to lead the character to growth, change or valiant defeat…not just fighting off the same monster day after day.

Just ask Tom Swift Jr. and his Super-Duper Electrohydraulic Flamajing.  He couldn’t have defeated those pesky Brungarians without it.



The next post to The Word Shed will focus on more details from the Quantum Troopers Return series, especially details of fictional settings.



See you on March 16.

Phil B.

 

 

Post #205 March 2 2020

“Editing Your Own Work…It’s Like Flossing Your Teeth”

Recently I finished the first draft of Forbidden City, the third episode in my new series Quantum Troopers Return.  Now it’s time to review and edit my own work…something akin to flossing your teeth.

The story came in at about 65 pages.  That surprised me a bit, from the outline.  I thought it might be closer to 45-50 pages.  I’m trying to run these episodes at about 40-60 pages, averaging about 50.

First order of business in editing your own work: take off the rose-colored glasses.  You have to learn to read the story like a first time reader and be ruthless with your precious words and delicious turns of phrase.

Ask yourself this:

1. Does the story flow?  Does it move along?  Why or why not?  Maybe you linger too long describing some place or scene.  Cut out useless descriptions and get the story going again.  What happens next?  In all my stories in QTR, I wanted to have a lot of action.
2. Are you interested in knowing more about the main character(s) and finding out what happens to them?  If so, great.  Keep going.  If not, why not?  Maybe the reader needs to know a little more background about these people…a brief flashback.  Why do they act this way?  Was it a drunken father who abandoned the family?  Was it the death of a brother?  A sadistic math teacher?  Lay this on thinly but it might give your character more to hook readers.
3. Do the twists and turns of the plot surprise you?  As the author, real surprise in the story may be hard to achieve.  But take a reader’s point of view, if you can.  Surprises and unexpected plot twists can really grab a reader if done right.
    
   Of course, it stands to reason that you’ll always be correcting misspelling, awkward phrases, etc as you read.  And please do Spellcheck at the end, because you’ll never catch everything.  Sometimes, when doing Spellcheck, I find myself intentionally leaving a misspelled word for a reason and that’s okay.  Just make sure you have a story-telling reason to do that. 
    
   One of the challenges of writing and editing this series is the fact that it is a series.  I’m somewhat constrained by what has gone before.  I’m trying to make sure the story stands on its own as a story, but I don’t want to explain or recapitulate everything done in the previous two episodes (Quantum Troopers Return is a continuation of the original series Quantum Troopers).  It’s a juggling act.
    
   Another challenge to authoring a series is making sure to wrap up all the loose ends of the plot in the final tale.  To do that, you sort of have to keep score.  In my final story in Tales of the Quantum Corps, I had additional challenges in that my main character, Johnny Winger, had actually changed physical form and is not a normal human being like you and me, but rather a swarm of nanoscale robots configured to resemble a human being…or anything else he wants.  It’s been fun and hard work to imagine what life would be like living this way.  Somehow, in this final story, I had to convey what life is like as an angel (my term for a para-human swarm entity), advance the story of what happens with this as a key fact, and close out the story of what happens to him in the end. 
    
   In my review and editing, I’m trying to be as critical as possible as to whether I have achieved these ends.  I’m finding that I may need to add more to the story to bring this character, who has been a continuing character, to life in all of his predicaments.   I want the end to be a satisfying conclusion to all the adventures Johnny Winger has gone through before and perhaps even to show some change or growth in Winger as a result.
    
   The Muse.com has some good tips on editing your own work.  Here are five (from Caroline McMillan):
    

1. Print out your work (this helps simulate a fresh or ‘outsider’ perspective, which should help you edit)
2. Take a break (put some emotional distance between creating words and editing them)
3. Read it out loud (this is a really good idea)
4. Pretend you’re the audience (already covered above)
5. Be ruthless (ditto)
    
   On first read of Forbidden City: Episode 3, I have a little more work to do.  That’s normal.  That’s why we edit. 
    
   With any luck, I’ll be done by the end of February and you can look for this story to be uploaded to Smashwords.com and other fine ebook retailers in April 2020.
    
   The next post to The Word Shed comes on March 9.

      Phil B.

 

Post #204 February 24 2020

“Pricing Your Work in Today’s Market”

The year 2020 has proven to be an interesting year for me as an online author.  Last year, with all my works available through Smashwords and other fine ebook retailers set to free, my total net downloads were 24,042.  Not bad for a relative unknown.  This year, I have continued to maintain all titles that have been free as free downloads.  Seems only fair.

However, I have been persuaded by some of my writer friends to start putting prices on my new work.  I uploaded the first ‘priced’ title on February 7.  The price is set to $0.99…in other words ninety-nine cents.  The title is Quantum Troopers Return Episode 1: Fab Lords and it is episode 1 of a proposed 10-episode series for this year.

Total downloads for all titles in 2020 so far? 1020.  Total downloads for my one priced title?  A grand total of two.  That’s right.  2.

Aside from the obvious fact that people don’t want to pay for something they think they can get for free, what causes this buying behavior?  More particularly, why put a price now on my work?  Some thoughts….

1.  Many friends (including some writer friends) have told me I have the download numbers to justify pricing at least my new work.  I happen to agree.  The numbers are what they are.
2. Writing stories is hard work.  If you don’t think so, try it.  In my case, some of my work are multiple episodes of a series, with a public upload schedule that I am loath to ignore.  So, there’s time pressure.
3. Readers value what they download more when there’s a price.  I feel that way when I pay $30 for a hardcover book, which admittedly isn’t often these days.  If they really want to read the work, they’ll buy it.  Which leads me to this…
4. Do they really want to read my work?  Judging from the response to the one priced title, I’d have to say, no…not really.  But then how to explain the 24,000 downloads last year?

When I first joined the Smashwords community, I did have prices on my initial uploaded work.  Downloads were respectable but eventually plateaued off.  I checked with Smashwords for recommendations on how to boost your downloads and one of their recommendations was to lower the price or try setting your work to free, just to see what happens.  So, I did that.

Lo and behold, my downloads took off.  Really spiked and they’ve stayed high ever since.  Why did I keep setting my uploads to free?  I told myself I was trying to build a readership and since I was an unknown author, when you uploaded my work and it was free, you really weren’t taking much of a chance.  My total downloads since I went online with Smashwords and other retailers is now at 43,656.  Other things I’m doing to connect with potential readers is writing and hosting this Word Shed blog.

So that is the situation today.  I’m keeping all titles that have been free before free for now.  New titles that I upload this year will have a price, something between 99 cents and $1.99 or thereabouts.  I’m confident enough of my work and my small readership to feel that I can encourage downloads even of titles with prices.  And as Smashwords always reminds their authors, write the best damn book you can and don’t upload it until you’ve made it your best work. 

I’ll keep you posted on further developments in this area.  In the meantime, many thanks to the 2 brave downloaders who paid 99 cents each for Quantum Troopers Return: Episode 1: Fab Lords.  My payout from this is now up to $1.12.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on March 2, 2020.  See you then.

Phil B.