One of those in-between times

I've been a bit lazy about updating my blog since I finished my last novel, Natalia.  After focusing so hard for so long on one project, I'm now in one of those in-between times, with one project finished and the next yet to fully gel.  In fact, I've actually found myself working on three projects at one time, not sure which I most want to devote my energies to.

One problem that I've never had is coming up with ideas for books I want to write.  I suppose the opposite is true.  I have a long list of things that I want to write and have to find a way to prioritize them.  Currently, the things I've got going include:

1) A memoir that I've been working on off and on for the last ten years.  This one is full of funny stories about the life of an itinerant writer, traipsing around the world on a shoestring.

2) I've begun plotting out the next two Natalia novels and want to write the first few chapters of each.  So far sales on the first one are virtually non-existent.  I'm very happy with the way the book came out and want to write the next two, but it seems that perhaps the "indie" route isn't working this time.  Perhaps if I can present this as a series I might be able to find an agent and go the traditional route.  I figure it can't hurt to try.

3) I've always thought that Sweet Ophelia, currently titled Tinseltown Fairytale, would make a great movie.  I'd previously written a screenplay version, but after seven months of revisions to the novel, I feel like it is time to revise the screenplay to match, and maybe start sending that one out again.

So there you have it.  Plenty to keep me busy as I settle in again to Budapest, where I've just rented a room in an apartment in the center of the city.  With the temperatures falling and plenty of rain, this is definite writing weather.  Hopefully I can take advantage!

Is this party over?

I made the decision to put my books up for sale on Amazon and other e-book retailers in the summer of 2010.  Things were just beginning to take off in this space at that time, with a growing enthusiasm among "Indie" writers for the e-book publishing revolution.  Self-published stars like Amanda Hocking and John Locke were on their way to the million mark in downloads and others like Joe Konrath were trumpeting their own success stories and others.

My first book, No Cure for the Broken Hearted, went up for sale in late November of that year.  To my surprise, it did remarkably well, climbing to #9 on the overall bestseller list at Amazon UK.  The price was a low .49 pence, but I was selling upwards of 300 copies per day across all platforms, ultimately selling 45,000 or so copies and garnering some great reviews.

I had high hopes for my second book, Sweet Ophelia (currently Tinseltown Fairytale).  It also ended up getting mostly good reviews but sold only about a third as many copies.  My latest book, Natalia, came out one month ago.  So far it has sold about eight copies, six of which were to family and friends.

So what happened?  It would be easy to say that people just don't like the sound of my latest book, but I know that there is more to it than that.  I follow the "Indie" writer's forum (Writer's Cafe) over at Kindle Boards, and by the way many of the writers over there are wringing their hands about their sales "going off a cliff," it is clear that something bigger is going on.

I have to say, I never really did trust the system much even when my first book took off.  I always figured that what Amazon gave, Amazon could somehow take away.  Not that it is necessarily Amazon's fault.  The jury is still out on that, but there seemed to be plenty of variables stacked against the long-term potential of this publishing paradigm.  Not that I didn't hope for the best, but always with caution.

Back in 2010 I saw two possible culprits for a crash.  The first was piracy.  Quite a few writers on the boards have the opinion that piracy is actually good for independent writers, since it gets more people reading our books, who might illegally download one but then buy the next, or spread the word about a particular writer.  I never bought into this theory.  To me, piracy is stealing, pure and simple, but I don't think it is having any large scale impact at this point in any case.

Another issue was the huge surge of self-pubbed books going up online all the time.  I've read somewhere that 50,000 new self-published books go up on Amazon every month.  Some are well-written but many are just junk, put up by people hoping for a quick and easy buck.  The bottom line is that this just makes it harder and harder to stand out in this massive sea of material.

A third thing that hurts sales overall is the proliferation of free books.  Authors like myself found that in order to stand out, sometimes it pays to give away a book for free for some period of time.  Free books count towards overall sales rank, so when you go off free you have a lot more visibility than you did before.  The first time I did this, with Sweet Ophelia, I gave away about 50,000 copies in a week and then had $3500 in sales the next week.  Not bad.  But as more and more writers give away more and more free books, I think some readers become inclined not to pay for books at all.  Great for them but bad for us writers.

The last thing, and this one is the hardest to quantify, is the tweaking that Amazon does with their algorithms.  This, I suspect, is what the sales crash for independent writers is mostly caused by at the moment.  Book sales on Amazon are driven to a large degree by the "Also Bought" listings you see on every page.  If enough people buy a certain book and then another, those two books will show up on listings on each others pages.  In this way, they drive each others sales.  The more books a writer sells, the more listings they show up on and sales can grow exponentially.

Amazon has algorithms, or equations, that they use to calculate which books show up where and what a book's ranking is on the bestseller lists.  From time to time they tweak these algorithms to favor one variable or another.  Free books, for example, used to count for a lot on the bestseller lists (after they'd reverted to paid books).  Now those free books don't count for much and the corresponding sales boosts after a free run have dissipated dramatically.

Honestly I don't think that anyone outside of Amazon knows what the reasons are for the huge sales slump amongst independent writers.  All I know for sure is that I did a free run with Tinseltown Fairytale earlier this month that led to three paid sales.  Other than that I only sold one other book in the last two weeks.  That means I've earned $8 in fifteen days.  Not quite the way to make a living.

So it leaves me wondering, is this self-published e-book party really over?  I'd always expected that this day might come, but I'd hoped I could run with my earlier success a little bit longer before it crashed.  I'm not giving up completely yet.  I'm working on a memoir now and have plans for some sequels to Natalia, though with nobody buying the first one it is a little hard to motivate to write the next.

Perhaps when Christmas comes along, all of the new Kindle owners will go on book buying sprees and boost all of our Indie writer's boats.  It isn't like people suddenly stopped reading, in any case.  They are reading now more than ever, according to statistics.  Apparently they just don't seem to be buying independent authors at the moment, for whatever reason.  I'm willing to give it some more time, in any case, but it does seem that there are dark clouds gathering at the moment...

"Natalia" paperback giveaway

Natalia is now available on Amazon as a paperback, and to celebrate I'm giving away a free copy to U.S. residents (sorry international readers!).  To enter, go the the Goodreads page by clicking on the image below, and good luck!

Ok, how about this one?

After some comments from the Kindle Boards community, I decided to change up the title and cover of the former "Sweet Ophelia" yet again.  It seems that people thought the "Tinseltown Blues" version looked too much like a mystery or thriller novel, so I've opted for "Tinseltown Fairytale" instead.  We'll see how that goes.  Here's the image:

I've decided to make it free for the next few days, just to try to generate a little buzz.  So far it is inching it's way up the Amazon free list!

Tinseltown Blues

I've decided to change things up a little bit with my novel Sweet Ophelia.  I'm very proud of that story, though it never did sell quite as well as I'd hoped.  A huge part of the equation is whether or not readers connect with the cover, title and description.  With Sweet Ophelia, I don't think they ever really did.

So, I've created a new title and cover.  This time around I'm trying out Tinseltown Blues.  I honestly don't know if that's any better, but I figure it's worth a try to find out.  Here is the new cover:

I'd be interested to hear what people think of this one.  Maybe it is too late and this ship has already sailed, but we'll see if it does any better this time around...

Natalia: The Story Behind the Story

My latest novel, Natalia, is out this week and this one is quite a departure from my previous two books.  This novel is a suspense set in the dark underworld of sexual exploitation in the former Soviet bloc, and as a writing project it was quite a long time in coming.

I suppose my interest in this part of the world goes all the way back to my childhood, growing up at the height of the cold war.  I was always intrigued by the Soviet Union and wondered what life must be like behind the Iron Curtain.  Our governments were at odds, but surely the citizens in the U.S.S.R. must by and large be good, honest people just like us, right?

I got my first glimpse of this mysterious place when I was on a family vacation in my teens.  On a ferry from Germany to Finland through the Baltic Sea, we went along the coast of Latvia and Estonia.  I remember marveling at this sight of the so-called "Evil Empire."

Many years later, in 2002, I finally made my first visit to these former Soviet republics.  By then the Baltic states had been independent for more than a decade.  They were not yet part of the European Union, but no longer within the Russian sphere of influence either.  It sort of felt like they were their own never-never land, struggling with this communist hangover but not yet fully Westernized.

One day when I was walking into the Old Town section of Riga, I saw a good-looking, sharp-dressed blond man in a brown suit.  He was walking along talking to two attractive girls that he'd just sidled up to.  The girls, it turns out, were foreigners, and I heard snippets of their conversation in English.  It wasn't enough to fully understand what was going on, except that he was trying to convince them of something and wanted their contact information.  They gave him the brush off and he continued on down the street, seemingly unperturbed.

By this point I was intrigued.  I'd heard of criminal elements recruiting girls from these parts to be sex workers in the West, often under false pretenses.  Was that what I'd just witnessed?  I decided to follow the man in an attempt to find out.

Keeping half a block behind, I trailed him through the Old Town.  Sure enough, whenever he saw an attractive young woman, he'd march right up and give them his spiel, whatever it was.  Most of the girls simply ducked their heads and hurried away.  I wanted to get closer, but how?

The man stopped at one point and stayed put in the center of one of the little walking streets, still flagging down any girls who walked past.  Beside him was a little sandwich shop.  I ducked into the shop in an attempt at surveillance.  I ordered a sandwich from a nice girl at the counter and then found a seat to watch the man through the window.

One of the girls that the man approached actually stopped to talk to him.  She was in her early 20's, tall and attractive, with long dark hair.  She nodded her head as she listened to the man, spoke a few words to him, and then took his business card.

The man continued on his way down the street.  I stayed where I was, still full of questions, and ate my sandwich.  A few weeks later I would see the same man in Tallinn, Estonia, up to the same questionable antics.

As it ends up, I spoke a bit to the girl working at the sandwich shop in Riga that day and we ended up becoming fast friends.  Jogita actually owned the shop, and when I asked her about this man I had seen outside of the window, she told me that it was not uncommon for men to come around recruiting like this.  By this time, most of the girls in this part of Eastern Europe knew what to expect from suspicious offers of jobs abroad.

I never did find out if that was what I had witnessed for sure, but a few years later I saw a documentary on public television about girls from some of the poorer countries further east being kidnapped, sold, and smuggled across the Adriatic Sea into Italy and beyond and forced into prostitution.  Later I saw another documentary about girls from Ukraine and elsewhere being sold and smuggled through the Black Sea to Istanbul.

By this point, the kernel of an interest had grown in my mind to the point that I knew I had to write a novel about it.  I decided that my lead character, Natalia, would come from Moldova, known to be the poorest country in Europe and the source of many of these girls.  Later I shifted it to Transnistria, a breakaway republic within Moldova, officially recognized only by Russia.

Following many of the true stories I had researched by this point, I decided that Natalia would be lured away under false pretenses, as so many of these girls are, and sold to a criminal gang in Istanbul.  For research into her life on the farm, I did not go to Transnistria itself.  I'd heard too many horror stories of run-ins with Transnistrian border guards demanding payment or a visa from this country that, to most of the world, didn't even really exist.

Instead I went just across the border to Ukraine and spent a month there getting a feel for what life was like in that part of the world.  I spent most of my time in the small city of Lviv, but I also saw some of the countryside, where horse carts seemed more common than tractors, even in the 21st Century.

To get a feel for Istanbul, I spent a week there soaking in that city as well.  I walked around the neighborhood where most of the Russian ex-pats lived, and where I knew the sex trade flourished behind closed doors.  Aside from a few strip bars and sex shops, the neighborhood itself does not seem particularly seedy, but from my research I knew that some of these apartment blocks hid plenty of secrets.

When I came back to the U.S. I spent a year or so working on the novel until I felt that it was ready to submit.  I sent it around to all of the publishers and agents I could find.  No luck.  I was rejected across the board.  So after all of that work and effort, I buried the novel away and mostly forgot about it.

Then in 2010 I noticed the beginnings of a sea change in the world of publishing.  Writers were actually beginning to make a living self-publishing their works as ebooks.  This looked promising.  I decided to try it out for myself.  First I revised and put up my first novel, No Cure for the Broken Hearted in December 2010.  Next I put up my novel Sweet Ophelia in August, 2011.

When it came time to revise Natalia, beginning last September, I thought it would take about 4-5 months.  It ends up it took me 12 months, but now after a long journey, the book is finally available!  All because some suspicious-looking, well-dressed man caught my attention ten long years ago.

One Tough Business

After finally finishing and posting my latest novel to Amazon and Barnes and Noble last week, I breathed a huge sigh of relief.  The revisions alone took me roughly twelve months to complete.  It's not like it is a long book, either, I'm just a bit on the slow side...

But in any case, Natalia is finally out there!  To let the world know, I posted about it on my personal Facebook page, my author page, the Author's on the Cheap FB page, I tweeted it, created a thread to announce it on the Kindle Boards forum, blogged about it here, updated my website, listed it on Goodreads, added it to some Goodreads group bookshelves, etc., etc., etc.  I also started sending out review requests to some of the book blogs.

So how is it going so far, you ask?  With all of this feverish promotion?  Well, in six days I have now sold three copies.  One to my brother-in-law (thanks Dan!), one to the husband of an old college friend (thanks Andy!), and one to a friend and fellow indie writer (thanks Janice!).

Whew....  That means I've made six dollars in six days, but I also bought a copy myself, so subtract the dollar that cost me and I'm at less than a dollar a day.  Not to bemoan the fact.  I'm proud of the book, and thrilled that I finished it to my satisfaction, but I just thought I'd make a comment about how tough a business this can really be.

When I finished my first book, No Cure for the Broken Hearted, in December 2010, it seems that it was quite a bit easier to get noticed.  I think that has to do with the flood of self-published titles brought on by the stories of success that some authors have had.

Two years ago I was able to contact numerous book blogs and they were often happy to review my book.  This time around I'm finding that many of the blogs are so swamped with requests that they no longer accept self-published titles.  Some don't accept submissions at all.

So what is a budding (not-so-young) author to do at this point?  To be honest, I'm not really sure.  I'll keep on trying to promote it and hope for the best.  I think that once a few people start reading it, good word of mouth might help it move along.  That's what I'll tell myself anyway.  All it takes is one enthusiastic reader to get the ball rolling...