Looking at Stories with a Critical Eye

 

I've started watching/listening to a YouTube video series put on by two English Lit professors, Dr Philip Chase and Dr A P Canavan, with the purpose of teaching readers, and perhaps authors, how to appreciate stories in a college English Lit class way. The series is ongoing, alternating between their two YouTube fantasy-focused channels, with three episodes released at the time I'm writing this post. You can view the first introductory episode in the series here. 

So what does literary appreciation involve? Well...

"During the series, we will cover various topics, including story versus plot, narrative perspective, characters, setting and world building, symbols, tone and style, and themes. It is our hope that the tools and techniques we discuss will add enjoyment to people’s storytelling journeys."

While I am curious as to what literary appreciation involves, I have no interest in viewing stories in this way for my own enjoyment. I read stories to take me to times and places that I'll never be able to visit, in the company of friends I'll never have. I do not read fiction to learn lessons, ponder deep questions, or solve puzzles which is what literary appreciation seems to be all about. That's just me.

In the second episode they talk of identifying the "narration," which, as I understand it, is technical term for the themes, and subject matter the story may be exploring. While story and plot are often interchangeable terms in general conversation, the academic meaning of "story" is the incidents of the story in chronological order, while the "plot" is the way the author chooses to tell the story. Authors can take their story and slice and dice it as they choose, with the aim of increasing a reader's interest by using flashbacks, multiple points of view, unreliable narrators, and any other technique in order to make a nondescript story into a puzzle to be solved. And who doesn't like puzzles?

Come to think of it, literary appreciation is also a way of turning a story into a puzzle to solve. You can ferret out the reasons why the author wrote the plot the way they did, sniff out all the hidden meanings that they slipped into the story and plot just for eagle eyed readers to discover. In short the literary detective can discover what the author is doing behind the curtain of words they have constructed and in doing so, come to a greater appreciation of the genius of the author.

If you detect, as a literary detective, a little cynicism in my view of literary appreciation, you can be forgiven in wondering why would I then spend my time even learning about literary appreciation? For one reason - I'm taking the course as "The Art of Being a Literary Critic 101," for, as you know, when given the opportunity, I love playing the critic as long as the risk of hurting an author's feelings are extremely unlikely to none. I don't like being mean, but I also don't like what I see as bad or lazy writing. I'm thinking that if I'm going to be a critic, adding a dash of literary appreciation slang to a critical review might increase the authenticity of my criticism. It can't hurt.

The only problem is that I have to read bad books to use it. That sucks.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 49)

Another Cadfael Mystery this week, for two simple reasons - I really enjoy these stories, and I have them on hand, and unread. As you recall, I purchased the entire set of seven omnibus editions. Currently, I have only one book on hold from the library and it will only become available months down the road. The other not -yet-read books I have on hand are the old, public domain P G Wodehouse books I downloaded from the Gutenberg Project. The next one of those will be coming next week.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

The Pilgrim of Hate by Ellis Peters  A

As I have mentioned, these stories are set within a very specific time frame - during a civil war in England, in this case the early summer of 1141. King Stephen is now a prisoner in the north of England, and the other contender, Empress Maud is preparing to crown herself Queen of England outside of London. The momentous events of the time play a role in all of these books and in this one, Empress Maud is attempting to gain the support of London, with the King's brother, a powerful churchman, seeking a way to end the strife, even at the cost of his brother's thrown. Within this volatile situation a knight of the Empress who had come to the aid of one of the King's followers being attacked by a gang of thugs, is murdered, seemingly by one of the Empress's party, and the prime suspect has gone missing, said to have fled north.

In the meanwhile, in Shrewsbury, Cadfael's monastery is celebrating the fourth year of the arrival of their pet saint, Winifred whose bones they had gone to Wales to collect - the story of which is recounted in the first book of the series, A Morbid Taste for Bones, so I'll say no more about that. In this story the monastery and city are filled with pilgrims, people seeking cures for their ailments, as well as thieves and conmen, one of whom may be the murder on the run. We also have the arrival of another character we'd met in a past book tied to Cadfael's crusading past. He is on a diplomatic mission for Empress Maude, though Shrewsbury and its sheriff Hugh are loyal to the imprisoned king.

As in all these books, there is a mystery to solve, but the charm of them, at least for me, is the rich flavor of history Peters weaves in her stories. This is another well done story, with all the usual elements - mystery, a murder to be solved, young people in love, and another glimpse into the character of Brother Cadfael.

Translating Imaginary Languages

Recently I listened to an hour and forty minute YouTube discussion between three experts in fantasy. You can listen to it here if you are interested. The topic was to define the differences between classic fantasy and modern fantasy. Spoiler - they didn't get very far. They had different definitions of "Classic" right off the bat, and even settling on "traditional" vs "modern" was pretty much impossible, since it was pointed out that many fantasy stories written in the last twenty years - so-called modern - have prototypes dating back fifty or more years ago. And while there are general characteristics that can define an era - for example modern fantasy is more focused on the characters, their thoughts and emotions, whereas the more traditional fantasy was written from a more remote, third-person perspective - nevertheless, examples of any style can be found in any era. The best description is that fantasy is cyclical - with lots of authors jumping on a popular bandwagon, and then lots of other ones reacting against it, until the reaction becomes the new bandwagon that is reacted against. Around it goes. Thus, the characteristics associated with one period or another can actually be found in any period. Still, I learned a lot - for example how much Dungeons and Dragons influenced fantasy during the 80's & 90's so that today's popular progressive and RPG Lit fantasy is not new at all.

The one other aspect I found very interesting as a writer, was subject of translation. Not the translation of the book into another language, but the translation of a story that is supposedly set in a secondary world, which is to say, an imaginary world, where English is not spoke, but the story is written in English. The question was how does a writer use English to portray that different language and that different world of their fictional characters? And how much does their use of language color their imaginary world? 

One example brought up is the very popular romance-fantasy book The Fourth Wing. Though a fantasy set in something like medieval times, the story is told in the language of teens today - the teens in the internet era - which is the language of its target audience - despite the fact that much of the language it uses could not have been relevant, or even meaningful, in the time period the story is set in. Its language is not used to build the imaginary world and society. Instead it speaks to its readers in their own language to tell them the story.

The flip side of that coin is Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings books. In his books he uses the English language to serve a different purpose. It is archaic, flowery, and unfamiliar to most modern readers of English - used precisely to give a sense of strangeness and remoteness, as well as the depth and color to his imaginary world. He uses the language to make his imaginary world different from the world of his readers. While his characters speak a style of English that is deliberately not the readers' everyday English, as in The Fourth Wing. It is meant to sound more like a literal translation of the characters' and narrator's imaginary language in order to convey to the readers that this world is not theirs. His use of language may be beautiful, and evocative, but it requires the reader to learn and adopt the style to read and enjoy the story.

As a reader, I've DNFed both The Fellowship of the Rings and the Kings of the Wyld. The first because Tolkien's language didn't speak to me, and in the second book, because the language was too commonplace - its use took me out of the imaginary world and back into this one. Not being a huge reader of fantasy, I don't encounter this problem much, but for me, it has to be somewhere in the middle between archaic and modern, or perhaps more accurately, a skillful mix of the modern and archaic. A good example this is Ellis Peter's Cadfael historical fiction stories. She does an excellent job in my opinion of creating a sense of the time and place of twelfth century England by using the terms of that period for specific things, and describing places, actions and attitudes of the period, with a more modern writing style. 

As a writer, I've not written stories set in archaic times. All of my stories, SF and fantasy, this world or another, have an Edwardian air about them, i.e. an early 20th century type of setting no matter what I write. Plus, all of the people are descendants of Earth. I try, however, not to assume that they speak English. At times I try to imply in my "translation" that their language may be something closer to Chinese than English - though this can be awkward at times. And in The Bright Black Sea, I had fun trying to imply that they did not use a 10 based math system, but a 12 based one. But for the most part, what I mainly try to do is to avoid using popular phrases, curse words, and names of things that sound too much of our time. For example, a I might call something a "ball and net" court rather than a tennis court, since "tennis" feels too specific for a game played 10,000 years from now on another planet, even if that planet was once colonized by people from earth. 

So while I don't deal with the issue to any great extent, it is something I've thought about.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 48)

 

Wow! This blog is at 99,997 views at the time of posting! You might be the 100,000th! So exciting! Thank you, dear readers, and thanks all you bots! With out you - and I'm talking to all you bots here - we would've never reached this landmark. (100,000 at 9AM CDST)

I don't have a TBR pile of books to read this year. Last year I had an informal one consisting of books that various blogs and YouTube presenters had praised. I've worked my way through that slim stack, so that now, when I finish one book, I have to scramble to find another one to read. Luckily, I have 16 Cadfael novels to fall back on. And fall back on them we did this week.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

The Devil's Novice by Ellis Peters  A

This is the 8th novel in the series.

Note to myself: write your reviews shortly after you read the books. Don't put it off. Which is what I've done for this review.

Right. It's slowly coming back to me. (Without even having to get up, walk over to the book shelf behind me, pull out and bring the book to my desk, and renew my acquaintance with it.) I have in now. This story starts with a young man who is handed off by his father to the Abbey to become a monk - the devil's novice of the title. This young man is very eager to become a monk as quickly as possible. Too eager, thinks Cadfael. Why? The novice is, however troubled by the sight of blood, and by nightmares which disturbs the other novices and students. He also manages to get himself into trouble as well, so that it is felt by some in the abbey that he is somehow possessed by the devil at times.

The second plotline consists of a church courier sent by King Stephen with a message to some nobles in the north of England, who has gone missing. This plot is tied into the novice and his family, when the courier's horse is found, suggesting that courier has been murdered only a day after staying at the novice's family manor. Is the novice somehow involved in the murder of this courier? And if so, how?

Like all of Peters' Cadfael stories, the story is more of character study, and historic fiction, than a murder mystery, but murder mysteries they are and it is. And murders have to be solved, as they are, with the keen eye and long experience in the outside world that Cadfael brings to the cloistered life of the abbey. Once again, I enjoyed this book without reservations.

SPFBO X

 

I am happy to say that Sailing to Redoubt made it into the tenth Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off,  known as SPFBO X This is a contest that has been run by fantasy author Mark Lawrence for the last ten years to highlight the quality of self-published fantasy books. There are ten judges, or teams of judges, each of who each read, or at least sample 30 books, for a total of 300 books, selecting 5 or 6 as semi-finalists and then settling on a single finalist for the final judging round of 10 books that all the judges read and rate. The book with the highest score on a 1 to 10 scale wins. A number of winning and finalist books and authors have gone on to fame and fortune. The first contest attracted 276 entries, last year's contest filled its 300 slots in 44 minutes after the entry form went live. As a result of its popularity, this year the entry form was live for 24 hours, with 300 books selected at random from all the entries.

I had  expected that there would be a thousand or more entries, but as it turned out there were only* 595. So the odds were 50-50 and I got lucky.

The asterisk for "only" is to highlight the fact that all of those 595 entries were author/publishers of fantasy novels with novels that had not been entered before. While there may be some better known authors amongst the pack - one entry has 4,700 Goodreads ratings, and five others have more than 1,300, most of them are writers who have yet to find a mass indie market for their work. And when you consider how many authors did not enter for one reason or another, you can see the scale of competition for readers in the author/publisher book space.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I don't expect to see any sales jump as a result of being in the contest, based on entering books in three other similar contests - two of which were the science fiction knock-off, and last year's SPFBO 9. I do it simply for, the excitement/disappointment, and for the chance to hear or read what a reader has to say, one who did not select one of my books to read because it appealed to them. In other words, an unbiased view of my work. 

This year my book is in the pool of a new judge for the contest Captured in Words, which is a YouTube channel focusing on fantasy books. He has 106K subscribers, making it a pretty big BookTube channel. His videos tend to get 5 to 50 thousand views, so any mention of my book will likely reach more potential readers - for better or worse- than the blogs that judged my previous entries. It will be interesting to see how he handles this task. Judges need only read 10% -20% of the book before deciding pass on it. Still, he has 30 books to sample in the next three months or so. Another BookTuber, Philip Chase, did this last year, and this year decided to add a team of other people to help him. They divide the slush pile and he reads only the books they chose to make his final decision. Despite the potential for a wider audience, the downside with video judges is that unless they really like your book, the book might be little more than a mention, and no book gets written reviews. We'll see how it goes this year, but I'm going in with no expectations. That keeps the bar pretty low.

And in the wider sense, I believe that art awards and contests are meaningless. Art - be it painting, writing, music, dance, etc. is a one-on-one experience. What it means to you is all that counts. Counting votes, tabulating scores don't mean a thing. If you want an objective scale, look at sales figures, if the art is commercial. And anyone entering this contest, or viewing the results, needs to know that the most critical factor in it is luck. It doesn't matter how good your book is if it doesn't find an appreciative reader. Take, for example, the person who judged Beneath the Lanterns last year. She wrote a nice review for my book and gave it 5 stars, but here is her opening line for another book she had to judge in my group:

Sometimes, and it doesn’t happen often, you start reading a book and it just works. Everything is exactly the way you like. The story flows, the writing is smooth, the pacing is perfectly unhealthy for your heart rate but this is what we want! Every word, every bit of dialogue, every scene has captured you and before you know it, the book is finished.

This is what art is all about. The only valid basis she or anyone else can judge art as art on is how it affects them. You can knock points off for grammar, or typos, or what have you, but when something speaks to you, none of that matters. So you have to go into contests knowing that luck needs to be on your side to have any chance at all, and that luck is beyond your control. And that whatever the results are, they represent no more than one or several people's opinion of you work. And that you've given them permission make public their opinions, good or bad, and have to accept the consequences. 

It's a gamble. But as Bobby Dylan sings in Like a Rolling Stone, "If you ain't got nothing, you've got nothing to lose."

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 47)

 

This week, yet another early P G Wodehouse Story - without a TBR list, I have to read what I have on hand. And right now, its old Wodehouse books on my ebook reader, and the Brother Cadfael mysteries on my book shelf.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Damsel in Distress by P G Wodehouse  B

A fairly typical Wodehouse story this time around. It has the show business angle that many of his early novels had, this time the main character is the composer of music for musical comedies - a show playing in London. The female romantic lead in the story is the daughter of an aristocrat dominated by his widowed sister-in-law. The widow does not approve of the romantic lead's boyfriend and has confined her to the country home. One day, with the sister-in-law away for a day, she escapes to London to look up her lover who's been abroad for a year. She fails at that, but is spied by her pompous brother and to avoid detection, hops into the taxi of the composer. He, of course, falls in love with her, defeats her inquisitive brother by knocking off  his top hat and saves her from detection. He ends up taking a house near her father's estate in order to meet her again. Assorted misunderstandings and entanglements typical of a Wodehouse novel ensue. 

I should've written this review shortly after I read it, not now - a month later, but oh well. The fact that I wasn't motivated to write it up until I had to, speaks a lot to what I thought of this story. It was fine, typical Wodehouse with a cast of his usual characters - butlers, snobs, hard-boiled kids, domineering women, a carefree Bertie Wooster type character, along with a bit of London and the English countryside tossed in. In short, it was a nice way to pass a few hours, but I think it's safe to say that you can die without regrets, if you don't get around to reading it.

Nine Years as an Author/Publisher Part 2 - The Numbers

The mission of Celanda House is to publish the fiction of C. Litka as widely as possible - without having to work at doing so. Celanda House has no mandate to make money - only not to lose money. To accomplish its stated mission within the assigned parameters, Celanda House prices ebooks and audiobooks at its cost, whenever possible. In most instances this price free. So, after nine years in business, how successful has Celanda House been in getting the novels of C. Litka out to the eager public?

Below are the sales numbers for each book for last year, this year, and nine years. Audiobook sales in parentheses, total sales in bold. Numbers are somewhat approximate. You don't want me doing your accounting.

Sales for the year from May 2023 to April 2024

Book Title / Release Date	Year 8 Sales May 2022-April 2023	Year 9 Sales (xx) audio Bold Total	Total Sales To date ebook & audiobooks total sales
A Summer in Amber 23 April 2015	452 (488) 940	524 (400) 924	Total 10,103
Some Day Days 9 July 2015	468      (598) 1,066	578 (320) 898	Total 6,575
The Bright Black Sea 17 Sept 2015	1,360   (895) 2,255	703 (478) 1,181	Total 18,231
Castaways of the Lost Star 4 Aug 2016	Withdrawn	Withdrawn	Total 2,176
The Lost Star’s Sea 13 July 2017	783      (780) 1,563	705 (458) 1,163	Total 10,642
Beneath the Lanterns 13 Sept 2018	431      (672) 1,103	500 (273) 773	Total 5,422
Sailing to Redoubt 15 March 2019	625     (543) 1,168	303 (325) 628	Total 4,986
Prisoner of Cimlye 2 April 2020	581      (678) 1,259	512 (359) 871	Total 3,735
Lines in the Lawn 8 June 2020	32	29	Total 174
Keiree 18 Sept 2020	637      (583) 1,220	538 (371) 909	Total 3,323
The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon 11 Nov 2020	782      (634) 1,416	548 (363) 911	Total 4,483
The Secrets of Valsummer House 18 March 2021	894      (692) 1,586	533 (392) 925	Total 3,634
Shadows of an Iron Kingdom 15 July 2021	894      (692) 1,586	583 (465) 1,048	Total 4,329
A Night on Isvalar 15 July 2021/27 April 2024 wide	23	43 (4) 47	Total 93
The Aerie of a Pirate Prince 29 Sept 2022	737      (291) 1,028	613 (427)  1,040	Total 2,068
The Girl on the Kerb 6 April 2023 _________________ Passage to Jarpara 21 March 2024 -------------------------Omnibus editions ________________	2,745     (45) 2,790 ___________ n/a n/a ____________ 2022-2023  Total Sales 19,524 of which  8,198 were audio	2,561 (353) 2,914 104 (73) 177 30 (withdrawn) __________ 2023-2024 Total Sales  14,468 of which 5,061 were audio	Total 5,704 Total 177 Total 30 _______________ Grand Total  85,855 Grand total as of  this date in; 2023: 71,396 2022: 60,879 2021: 47,550

Revenue:  2023-2024 Amazon: $174.74   Expenses: $74.74 (estimate.) net approx. $100

A Table of Yearly Sales Results

6,537 Year One, 2015/16 (3 novels released)

6,137 Year Two, 2016/17 (1 novel released)

6,385 Year Three, 2017/18 (1 novel released)

8,225* Year Four, 2018/19: (2 novels released) * includes a strange 1950 books sold in one day on Amazon that they say is correct. It would be 6,275 without that strange day's sales.

8,530 Year Five, 2019/20 (1 novel released)

7,484 Year Six, 2020/21 (2 novels released, 1 novella, 1 children's short story)

8,853 Year Seven 2021/22 (1 novel, 1 novella)

19,524 Year Eight 2022/23 (1 short novel, 1 novel)

14,468 Year Nine 2023/24 (1 sequel novel, 1 novella release wide in late April)

The Complete Yearly Reports on this Blog

Year 1: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2016/05/a-window-to-self-publishing.html

Year 2: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2017/05/two-years-of-free-books.html

Year 3: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2018/05/3-years-in-self-publishing.html

Year 4: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2019/05/four-years-in-self-publishing.html

Year 5: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2020/05/five-years-in-self-publishing.html

Year 6:https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2021/05/six-years-in-self-publishing.html

Year 7: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2022/05/7-years-in-self-publishing-report.html

Year 8: https://clitkabooks.blogspot.com/2023/05/eight-years-as-authorpublisher-report.html

Sales percentages by Venue

Comparing the sales split between Amazon, Google, and Smashwords (including Apple and B & N and of 2024, Draft2Digital ) Most books are not distributed by D2D except for my original Smashwords releases. I combine Smashword with D2D

                      Year 5      Year 6      Year 7         Year 8        Year 9 

Amazon            40%        35%        21.5%        24%            23%

Draft2 Digital    40%        39%        18%            9%             11% 

Google             20%         26%       60.5%         67%            66%

Year Nine Results

As you can see from the table above, my the previous year in publishing was a record breaking year with sales of 19,524 books, blowing past my seventh year total of 8,853 copies. That jump in sales was fueled by the introduction of audiobook sales, and the breakout success of The Girl on the Kerb, with 2,790 copies sold in the last than six weeks of that fiscal year. This year continued those sales trends, but without a breakout release and at a more moderate pace across the board. In the previous post, I mentioned that I hadn't expected my year nine sales to be as good year eight, and this proved to be the case. Just about every book sold less copies this year than last year, as both ebooks and audiobooks and as a result, my sales were down significantly - by about 25%, with audiobooks declining more like 40%. This year audiobooks comprised 35% of my sales vs 42% last year. Declines for sure, but coming off a record year, these declines still allowed for a very good year, with sales averaging more than a thousand books a month.

Looking ahead, I don't see much changing drastically. Sales of my existing titles will likely continue to decline slightly as they usually do. Amazon now offered only two of my books for free which will contribute slightly to that decline as well. It is impossible to say how much, if any, the nearly 6,000 sales of The Girl on the Kerb led to new readers. This year's release, Passage to Japara, as the third book in a modestly successful series will not move the sales needle very much. We'll have to wait to see how a theoretical 2025 novel does. I do not expect any significant sales from audiobooks on Amazon/Audible.

On a more positive note, I'm hoping that my sales on Draft2Digital will ramp up with the addition of audiobooks on Apple. However, with the release of only 7 of the 12 books I uploaded to Apple Audio, and those released at random, it is hard to estimate what sort of sales range they're going to settle into. However, since sales are still increasing, I have hopes. I was selling a lot more ebooks on Google when I released the audiobooks on Google, so I don't expect Apple audiobooks to do as well as my Google Audiobooks, but it would be nice if they could do as well in proportion to their Apple ebook sales.

I don't see any other audiobook markets for auto-narrated books that would move the needle, and probably wouldn't bother if any other audiobook market would take them.

I hope to write and publish another novel - a mundane fantasy - within the next 12 months. Another novella, likely a sequel, might also be possible. But nothing promised.

I'll enter Sailing to Redoubt in the next SPFBO X contest, but the odds are against it even being selected - selection is by lottery this year -with the odds likely 3 to 1. And even if it makes it, experience has taught me not to expect any bump in sales. I just do it to hear what reviewers have to say about my books, a book they likely would've never found otherwise.

As for plans for my tenth year as an author/publisher, well, they boil down to staying the course.

In the end, I feel that the ebook market has matured to a point where it is fairly easy to say what will sell, what it takes to sell it, and where to sell. If you do that, all you then need is folding money to spend and luck. I'm not writing what sells, I'm not doing what is needed to sell my books for more than free, I'm not spending money to try to sell them, plus, I'm not offering my books where they generate the most money - Kindle Unlimited. What I am doing is serving a relatively small market -  a market made up of readers, like myself, who read library books, free ebooks, and sometimes will even buy second hand books, if they're cheap enough. With 15 books in my catalog now, I'm hoping  that every new reader who happens upon one of my books will eventually read all of them - one sale leading to 14 more.

My prediction for my tenth year as an author/publisher? Well, I'm going to be optimistic this year, and say that I'm hoping that it will be pretty much like this year.  

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 46)

 

I had tracked down the ebook version of last week's Jill the Reckless on Gutenberg, and since I was on the P. G. Wodehouse page, I got out the Sunset at Blandings which listed all his books, and on which I had noted the ones I had or read, and compared the two lists, downloading the Gutenberg books that I hadn't read. The book below was one of those.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

The Girl on the Boat (AKA Three Men and a Maid) by P G Wodehouse  A-

This book appeared a year after Jill the Reckless, and it has some of the funniest lines Wodehouse ever wrote. It is a story where Wodehouse is front and center as the teller of the tale, breezily interjecting comments, opinions about the characters and his issues with telling this story as he goes along. Now I generally prefer that the writer remains behind the curtain, but if they decide to peek out, I prefer that they would just step out and make a performance of it. And that is what Wodehouse did here. He's telling you the story, make no mistake about that. And as I said above, he was at his peak for breezy, toss-away lines.

And yet, it took me several days to finish this story. As entertaining as his story was, I found it easy to put down after a chapter or two. I think I can place the blame for this on two factors. The first is that there are no engaging characters. Most, but not all, are not in any way unpleasant, they're just, perhaps a shade too much more caricatures than characters. There's little depth to any of them. Not that you expect great depths in any Wodehouse characters, but they all have their endearing features. But those enduring features seemed to be lacking in the characters in this book. And the second factor is that the story is pretty silly. No sillier than most Wodehouse stories, mind you, but it lacks a bit of the tightness in storytelling characteristic of his later works. And while the same could be said for the previous story, Jill the Reckless, there were much more real characters in that story.

Still, as I said, there were so many funny asides and toss away lines in this story, that I still have to give it an A- just for all the laughs. The story itself is only a B grade story.

Nine Years as an Author/Publisher Part 1

 

In last year's Eight Year in Publishing post I predicted - "I don’t expect my ninth year to come close to equaling it. Sales will certainly fade. They always do. In any event, I expect audiobooks will make up close to half of my sales, whatever it is." So How did Year Nine turn out?

Well, it was a good year. Not as good as Year Eight, as I predicted, but I can't complain. However, since this is going up on 1 May and I don't have the final sales figures yet, I will post all the numbers next week. This week I'll just talk about my publishing experience in the my last fiscal year - May 2023-April 2024.

I released one novel this year, Passage to Jarpara, on the 21st of March, the third and final sequel to Sailing to Redoubt and The Prisoner of Cimlye.  I am happy that it seems to have been well received, as it was a story that need not have been written, since The Prisoner of Cimlye was a natural conclusion to Sailing to Redoubt. It was, however, a story I wanted to write, and a story that I had more or less in mind, when I didn't have another story in mind, which is to say, it was a bird in the hand at the time. Thankfully, readers of that series seem to like it, but then again, I am preaching to the choir with the book - appealing only to readers who have read and enjoyed the proceeding stories. It will sell mostly to that pool of readers, which pretty much precludes a breakout hit like the stand alone success of The Girl on the Kerb. The very nature of sequels limit them, but I knew that going in. It was just a book that I had started back in 2022, and wanted it finished. 

I entered Beneath the Lanterns into the Self Published Blog Off 9 last May. I earned a nice review, but that was about all. I do enjoy discovering what people think of my books, especially ones who likely wouldn't have found and/or picked it up. Last year the contest was first come, first serve, but this year it will be a lottery, so that while I am considering entering Sailing to Redoubt, I likely would only have a one in three chance of getting it in. And I doubt it is the type of story that will greatly appeal to many hard-core readers of fantasy. We'll see what I feel like in two weeks.

I also conducted some experiments this year as a publisher without any outstanding successes.

The first experiment I tried was making boxed sets of my books, or omnibus versions as I called them, since I didn't want to fool around making an image of a boxed set. Eventually, I offered omnibus versions of most of my books. The idea was to make them affordable to non-US customers who did not have access to the free versions on Amazon.com. They did not really reach these customers in any great numbers, sales were under 25 for the year combined. And then, in January, Amazon stopped price-matching the free price in other stores for all but two of my books so the rest reverted to retail price. Now these omnibuses would've made them great deals in the US as well, but even so sales did not pick up. That being the case, I decided that there was no point in offering my books at a bargain price without it leading to an increase in sales volume to make it worthwhile to do so, I have withdrawn them as of today, 1 May 2024. 

I made one other minor change to my catalog. On the 27 April, I withdrew the one book I had in the Kindle Unlimited program the stand alone novella, A Night on Isvalar. I had that story in that program as a "signpost" to my other free books not in that program. However, with less than 50 copies sold in three years, I decided it too wasn't doing the job I had hoped it might, so I've now  pulled it from Kindle Unlimited and released wide and free like all my other books with a new cover. With any luck, it will act like a new release, and give me a second bump in sales this coming year, coming quickly on the heels of Passage to Jarpara.

A second experiment I tried this year, was getting my books converted to audiobooks for the Apple Book Store. At least trying to. This is done through Draft2Digital, and since I had to move my books from Smashwords to 2D2 to do this for Apple, I went ahead and moved all of them to D2D distribution as well. I didn't see this as a big deal, since D2D acquired Smashwords several years ago. However, this switch cost me all my reviews and ratings on Apple and Kobo, even though D2D was listed as the publisher on Apple. That sucked. It will, however, give me a chance to quantify how much reviews and ratings matter, since I made the move on 1 January, and I will be able to compare sales before and after, Apple to apple so to speak -reviews vs no reviews this coming January, using yearly sales totals for Apple on Smashwords. Early results suggest that the lack of reviews may not be significant, since ebook sales in the March and April averaged about 73 books vs a 2023 Apple sales total of 775. Of course, this is a small sample, but that figure doesn't include audiobooks, and early audiobook sales suggest that they will more than make up any sales drop.

However, what sucks even more, has been my the experience in converting my ebooks on D2D into auto-narrated audiobooks for Apple. While the process is simple - too simple, in fact - it has been a very poor experience. First of all, Apple offers no ability to choose narrators, to hear how the narration sounds and adjust how words are pronounced, unlike every other such program. And, while both Amazon and Google will produce an audiobook ready for sale in hours, it has been five months since I submitted my twelve books and five of them have still not been converted to audiobooks, with no explanation why this is so. The other seven were converted randomly over the course of four months. There is ready no explanation for this. If there were problems with the books, I should've been notified so that they could be fixed. It certainly can't be any technological hurdle that has Apple stumped, since other tech companies can do in hours and with more options. It seems to me that Apple is just being Apple - a company known for less than ideal treatment of its developers and suppliers. Moreover, unlike Google where audiobooks immediately exploded, my sales of audiobooks on Apple have been modest so far, though perhaps it is fairer to say, they've been in line with my level of ebook sales on Apple. Figures next week.

My third experiment was another audiobook opportunity, this time taking Amazon up on their offer to create virtual voice audiobooks for free, just as Google and Apple have done. In this case the process was just as simple as that with D2D, but you're given more options. You have a choice of 3 male and 4 female voices, with the promise of more and better voices coming down the pike this summer, including different narrators for different chapters - and the ability to change narrators when we care to. We can listen to our audiobooks before publishing them unlike Apple, and alter the pronunciation of words, as well as the speed how the word is spoken, and how the narrator treats dashes, unlike Apple. While this fall short of what can be done for audiobooks on Google, it is far better than what D2D/ Apple offers. One big plus for this program is that the audiobooks will appear in the Audible catalog, the largest audiobooks store.

There are, however, several limits to this program. It's an invite only beta program. Audiobooks in this program are limited to 27 hours run time - about 240K words, which means that my two most popular books, The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star's Sea are too long to be converted into audiobooks. The second requirement is that the ebooks have a table of content. That was a problem for me until I downloaded their Kindle Create app, and uploaded my books using that app. It automatically creates a table of contents. Having done that, all my books but those two long ones are now available as audiobooks on Amazon and Audible. The other downside, for me, is that the minimum price is $3.99, which I think is cheap for audiobooks, but will limit the number of audiobooks I sell. Numbers to come next week as well.

Clearly, I'm bullish on audiobooks, as I think they will continue to grow, and producing them now, even with AI generated voices, is future proofing them. I'm also bullish on the technology behind AI generated narration - it will continue to improve over the next few years to a point where it will be indistinguishable from all but the most dramatic, and highly paid, human narrators and the narration of my books will keep pace with those improvements.

My big takeaway from this year is that in publishing, like in real estate, there are three most important elements for success. In real estate they are location, location, and location, while in publishing they are visibility, visibility, and visibility. Sales of The Girl on the Kerb exploded when Amazon began to promote it. And it has remained visible in the top 50 titles on Amazon's list of Free Espionage Thrillers since its release, and in the top 100 on its other list. And in a wider sense, my sales are driven by readers searching for "Free science fiction" or some such search term, with "Free" being the key. Out of the millions of books available, my books can be found by random readers searching for free books to read within the first 10 -20 search result pages. Enough to keep sales ticking along at more than a thousand copies a month. 

My other takeaway is that far more people than I realized read books on their phones, so that offering books to be read on phones, conveniently from stores on their phones, is the way to go for both ebooks and audiobooks. That seems to me to be the main reason for my success on the Google Play Store, and my hopes for Apple audiobooks.

I think that petty much covers looking back on my ninth year in the business. Next week I'll have all the numbers, and perhaps talk about what I'm expecting for my tenth year. Stay tuned!