Implosions Making Slow But Steady Progress: Reader’s Draft Available

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment
CRT Implosion – Source: Niels Noordhoek, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CRT_implosion.JPG

I have Implosions of America out now in Reader’s Draft form. I am looking for readers who are interested in giving me review, copy-editing, and consistency advice. The book is available in any form your ereader wants. Just email me and I can forward a copy. You will likely pay up to $7.99 for the book in final form this fall.

This week I’ve been working carefully with my Reader’s Draft making changes and catching shit that shouldn’t have ever slipped through but did. I’m surprised, Continue reading →

Expanded Horizons and Raising the Price: More Adventures on the New Frontier of Publishing

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Economic and technology revolutions happen in the unlikeliest places…

This week Beyond the Will of God has jumped the Amazon Shark and arrived at two additional ebook sales sites — Nook and Only Indie. I have also raised the price of the ebook. The $2.99 price was an introductory offering. The book will now be $4.99 at both the Amazon Kindle site and the Barnes & Noble Nook site. Continue reading →

Awesome Indies Reviews My Novel BEYOND THE WILL OF GOD

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My little novel about really big issues has been reviewed by Awesome Indies. I’m pleased to announce it made the cut to be posted at their site. Check out the review…

http://awesomeindies.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/review-beyond-the-will-of-god-by-david-biddle-speculative-fictionmystery/

Shifting Gears: From Psychedelia to Reality

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

My first novel, Beyond the Will of God: A Jill Simpson Mystery, is a psychedelic mystery that I’m very proud of. The original idea for the story came to me in the mid-1970s. Six years later, on New Years Day, 1981, I wrote the first scene (where Cecil Miller gets off the bus in the middle of Missouri farm country and meets Coral McGrey). I didn’t really know what I was doing then. It took another 12 years for me to actually feel like I needed to get serious about turning that scene into a novel. But what a stupid thing, to write a novel. Continue reading →

More Thoughts on Fake Reviews and Other Stupid Writer Tricks

~ David Biddle ~ 6 Comments

ImageI published an opinion piece at Talking Writing called, simply enough, “Can You Trust Online Reviews.” This piece identifies a small component of a much bigger phenomenon in the writing world today. Yes, there are loads of fake and biased reviews to be found at Amazon and on other book sites throughout the worldwide web. But writers are doing all sorts of other things to try to get noticed. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking so-called indie writers here or them that’s been dunned by a publishing house (Big Six or small independent). I for one don’t see a distinction between the self-published and Continue reading →

Real Romance: Implosions of America

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

My fellow Americans, we are all so stupid and wishy-washy about love. Those of us in our 50s and beyond are also faced almost daily with the weird little gremlin of loss — loss of parents, loss of friends, loss of libido, loss of joy, loss of sanity, loss of things to hide beyond.

I shake my head here. So many people I know, my fellow parents, have spent their best years lying to themselves and driving their cars. We stop these games long enough to watch TV and drink. Haven’t we been confused? Continue reading →

On Beauty, Genius, and Paying Attention: Tim Williams Got Me Through So Much

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment
“Morning of the Magicians”Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shitao/3197160727/in/set-72157625031441773

From about 1993 through 2000 I worked as best I could on my first novel. I am deeply indebted to nearly 20 friends and colleagues who read various drafts over that period.

From 2000 through 2005 I tried to get agents and publishers to pay attention to my insane story — best described as a psychedelic mystery about music and consciousness. I came close a couple times, but no one took me on. After over 100 Continue reading →

Results of My Experiment in Publishing

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Source: Shitao, “Don’t ever let go of my hand…….”

Last week I reported that I was doing an experiment on the Kindle Direct Publishing promo system. I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t use the multi-pronged marketing apparatus that’s set up around KDP free books. See the blog entry for that HERE.

The results are in and not so happy. Over a two day period, Saturday and Sunday, I received 230 downloads of my novel, Beyond the Will of God. Two weeks earlier, I’d pushed on the marketing apparatus hard and received over 10,000 downloads in three days. 
This was not a controlled experiment. The biggest wild card in it is that the poor showing last weekend may have been because those fishing for free books were saturated from my offering just two weeks earlier. If that’s so, it makes me doubly wonder about readers in search of freebies. Maybe it’s a smaller group than we realize. Or maybe they don’t use Amazon’s standard Kindle Free listings that pair with the Kindle Bestsellers list. Maybe they use places like Pixel of Ink and Ereader News Today. 
Whatever the case, I know a little more firsthand now. It pays to put on the dog if you’re going to optimize the KDP system. For what it’s worth, though, I’ve only sold about 60 copies of my novel since that initial free weekend with 10,000+ giveaways. It’s not making a lot of sense to me to give Amazon an exclusive deal for my book through their KDP program. I can offer it free directly from my website. In fact, that may well be the next experiment I do in electronic publishing. 
We’ll see…in the mean time, click on the cover image to the right and buy yourself a copy of the weirdest and funkiest novel you’ll read this year. Where else are you gonna find Jimi Hendrix, Jesse James, Elvis, John Lennon, the CIA, Deadheads, wanton sex, experimental drugs, questions about consciousness, and a full-tilt argument for the spiritual and intellectual magic of loud guitar music? 
-dcb

To see more amazing art work by Shitao, go here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shitao/sets/ 

Experiments in Independent Publishing

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

Several weeks ago I used three of my Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) free days and watched 10,110 people download my novel, Beyond the Will of God. The book is currently priced at $2.99 (that will change in the fall and go up to $4.99). By most accounts that’s a fairly successful KDP promo. Unfortunately, Amazon has changed their algorithms around in the past few months. Whereas once my successful free days would give a novel lift in the Amazon ranking system that would extend past the promo, now their calculations give my book very meager support. Within a few days Beyond the Will of God had dropped from being in the top 20 popularity list for mysteries out of the Top 100. 

I’m not complaining. There are many benefits to getting exposure to 10,000 ereaders in a three-day period. The main one, obviously, is that my book is out there. When people like it, they’ll let others know. Amazon’s networking approach to sales is also impacted. My book will show up on lists like “Customers Who Bought…” and “What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?”. I’m still receiving 2-3 purchases a day. 
What’s most intriguing to me here, though, is that in order to achieve that huge number of downloads I followed the advice of another author and went to town promoting my free days through Twitter, Google+, and nearly a dozen websites that promote “free” books. One thing I found in this whole process was that there were a number of what I call “robot sites” that manage to track down free stuff for listing online. See HERE for an example. I don’t know how they come up with their data. Many of them aren’t even book oriented. And there are dozens of them. 
I have two promo days left on my KDP account and my agreement with Amazon for exclusive rights to Beyond the Will of God ends on September 9th. I don’t know if I will extend that agreement. I’d like to promote the ebook at Barnes and Noble (they do carry the paperback already), Smashwords, iTunes and other sites. Although, I’m not sure at all whether they will provide me any further sales edge (Amazon is freaking awesome, to tell the truth, in their reach). 
At any rate, I’m using my last two promo days this weekend (September 1-2) but being quite laissez faire about the whole thing. I’m not going to post to Twitter and I’ve only posted to one indie website with free listings. I will likely post to several FaceBook sites because they’re easy and I think a lot of folks pay attention to them. But I’m basically just going to let it ride and see what happens. 
I will document what I do, but the point here is to see what happens just modestly getting worked up about the promotion. My hypothesis is that I’ll get over 1,000 downloads with very little work.
This all came to me because of two insights: 
1) As I watched my account rack up 10,000 downloads, I realized that people who go for “free” stuff are possibly not the same as those who are truly interested in books and that there are dozens of sites online appealing to these Free Folk. (You can read an article I posted this week at A Knife and a Quill  called “The Challenge With Free”).
2) Earlier this year I posted my collection of short stories, Trying to Care, without any networking at all. It got 500 or so downloads in two days. I have no idea where anyone found out about that book. It may just be that folks page through the Free Kindle listings on Amazon and pick out what they want. 
So this is an experiment. I’m also using up my free days because I was completely non-strategic and rather haphazard in my planning. Partly, what I want to do here is give Amazon one more opportunity to show me why KDP has any value. We’ll see, I guess. I know this isn’t a controlled experiment. You can’t really do that in the world of books. They don’t give you enough meaningful data. That’s okay. I don’t need to report to a board of directors. I’ll report back here next week. You know what they say, “It’s good enough for blogging.”
In the mean time, I don’t care if you read my book, just read somebody’s book. It’s the best form of ESP I know of and it’s very good for you. 
Happy Labor Day!
-David