Just got in some of the updated sales figures from Smashwords. Looks like The Coppersmith is taking off in the Apple I-books store. In June I sold 38 copies there (and 4 Spirit of Resistance). Wow!

This means that in a single year, coming from behind, I sold almost 200 books. If I lay it out by quarters, it looks something like this:

Q1 –  15, Q2 – 18, Q3 – 45, Q4 – 118.

I observed this phenomenon in an earlier post, that my third quarter numbers are more than twice my first two, and my fourth quarter numbers are more than the first three combined. Exponential growth, baby!

This still doesn’t reflect the full sales figures, as I haven’t seen updates yet for Kobo and Sony books, and I only have the first two weeks from Barnes and Noble.

Ahem. Therefore, I am more determined than ever – just as soon as I finish Eye of Darkness – to get cracking on Topheth and try to finish it as quickly as possible. It also reconfirms that releasing more books is definitely a key to success in Indie publishing.

Gets me outta my funk from yesterday, that’s for sure!

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The good news is that I’ve finally broken through the log-jam I’ve been experiencing with Eye of Darkness. I admit that I was stuck right around 50K words or so for a few weeks there. I suppose we could chalk it up to vacation or my folks visiting (not that I’m complaining), but I think the reality is that I ran out of steam sometime around the end of May. Regardless, I’ve broken through, and we’re steaming ahead toward the finish line.

In the meantime, I’ve released The Coppersmith in paperback form through Createspace. It’s a dollar more than The Spirit of Resistance because of it’s size. I priced it as low as possible, and I haven’t paid the $39 charge to get it listed in the premium catalog – which I probably won’t do unless it starts selling like hotcakes or something. But it’s there if anyone wants to snag a physical copy.

I’ve almost got the sales figures in to wrap up my first year. Three days more will represent a full year of selling books, and I’ll report the final tally once I have it. The good news is that Smashwords updates their sales figures on the fifteenth, so I’ll be able to incorporate those numbers as well.

I received a very nice note from a reader the other day. I’ve asked her to post a review on Amazon, but this is what she had to say:

Finished Jefferson’s Road last night….wow!  Can’t wait til the next installment!

Now if that isn’t short and to the point, I don’t know what is. But now, I’ve got to get a shower in (yes, I’m writing this in my bathrobe. Sigh.).

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I have to admit, I’m a little torn right now. Been looking at the sales figures for May so far (yeah, I know. It’s early in the month), and naturally there’s been a bit of a drop-off in interest for The Coppersmith. Jefferson’s Road: The Spirit of Resistance continues to plod along in the single digits, as it has been doing for some time now.

Thing is, everytime I release a new book, I get a sales bump. It’s only been a few weeks since I released The Coppersmith, and I am tempted to release Patriots and Tyrants ahead of schedule, if only to kick that sales bump into gear. 

I’ve told myself to wait till the end of the month, but I’m questioning that wisdom. Wouldn’t it be better to release the books I have available a little closer together, say two to three weeks apart instead of four or five?

The downside of that is not having any real feedback yet from some of the people I’ve offered it to. I don’t know how significant that will be, and in all fairness, I have gotten positive reviews on it from my Wednesday Night Writer’s group as it is, so it’s not as though I’m tossing something half-baked out there.

Of course, what I really should be doing is knuckling down on Eye of Darkness. I have been working on it, of course, but I’m nowhere’s near done. Right now I’ve got slightly less than 34K words, so not quite to the halfway mark. But I have to do better if I’m going to have it ready by June.

I dunno. Maybe I should just stop looking at sales figures…

Sales of The Coppersmith took off after releasing it at the end of April. In a week I’d sold seventeen copies. All in all, very exciting news. Of course, at such a low price ($.99), I only receive about $.35 of that, so it adds up to a little more than $5 (one of them is through Smashwords, which means I won’t see it for a while.). But as I’d suspected, I think it’s having a positive effect on the sales of The Spirit of Resistance as well, though whether or not this holds true throughout the month remains to be seen.

In the meantime, I’m slated to release Patriots and Tyrants later this month, but today I’m working on Eye of Darkness. The story has capped 28,600 words so far (yeah, I’m a little behind the 1,200 mark, but I’ll make that up today I’m sure), with no sign of stopping. Twice now, I’ve hit a roadblock (I’m doing this sans outline, which is fun!), but each time I’ve found a way around it.

All I know is that today I’m going to try and get them through the mountain pass to the Ronami village on the other side… okay, okay. No context. You’ll have to find out what that means once it’s done. Believe me though: this one is worth waiting for.

The Coppersmith now available on Amazon.com for $.99

Here’s the back cover blurb for  The Coppersmith:

He calls himself the Coppersmith…

A religious fanatic bent on murder, he begins systematically eliminating pastors in Upstate New York. From small towns to large cities he selects his victims, seemingly at random, and subjects them to a torturous death.

Janelle Becker is the agent with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit charged with solving the crimes. But even with the Bureau’s resources, she finds herself ill-prepared to unravel the Coppersmith’s message. Why do his methods keep changing? How can they know where he’ll strike next? And can she escape her own dark past before it’s too late?

As she and her fellow agents track down the clues of the Coppersmith, they find themselves following an ancient itinerary that hearkens back to the steps of the apostle Paul. It becomes a race against this faceless killer as they struggle to predict his movements and get ahead of his deadly message of judgment. Can they stop him in time?

The Coppersmith is finally available through Smashwords, and coming soon to Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Sony, Apple, I-Tunes, Diesel, and any other e-reader I can think of. Also, I’ll have the paperback version available through Createspace just as soon as I can afford the $39 it takes to buy the premium purchase.

Anyway, it feels good to have it out there. I’ve made an update on Mobile reads, and I’ll do the same on Kindleboards just as soon as it appears on Amazon. Still waiting for the final approval on that one, though.

And now, on to bigger and better things!

Oh, here’s the link to find it!

The Coppersmith

And This Is Why I Seek Critiques…

Real tough critique of Patriots and Tyrants today at my writer’s group. I’m grateful for it. Still reeling, of course, but grateful. Thing is, I knew this going in. I knew this chapter was an info dump, but rather than do something about it, I delayed and chose to let the critique group tear into it.

In all fairness, I’ve received nothing but praise from this group for the last fifty to sixty chapters. I’m deliberately including the chapters from Spirit of Resistance because they were loving the story that far back. So I’m certainly due for a criticism.

Of course, all that previous praise went to my head, and now I’ve got the emotional gunk that comes with a tough review. Not a big problem, though. I’m a big boy. I can handle it (cries into coffee).

The real problem, of course, is figuring out how to fix this chapter. It’s integral to the whole narrative of Jefferson’s Road. Naturally, it’s the chapter on Cultural Marxism, the one that explains the whole justification for the coming war. It’s central to the entire series – if readers don’t understand Cultural Marxism, they won’t understand why the Civil War is necessary (I’m speaking fictionally, of course).  But now I have to find a new way to tell the story of Cultural Marxism without resorting to an annoying info dump.

I’m toying with a prolonged dialogue between Peter Baird and the members of the militia campground he’s just met, which means that not only do I have to rewrite the chapter, I also have to expand  and probably add a new one as well. That’s okay, of course. Patriots and Tyrants feels a little lean right now anyway.

My natural instinct is to cut away what doesn’t work, but this time I genuinely can’t do that. I want this information out there. And the story isn’t quite long enough as it is. So adding is the solution, not cutting. Changing the lecture Peter gives to a dialogue will do that, certainly, but I also have the arduous task of keeping it interesting and active-less cerebral than it is now.

I can do this, but I do feel a little depressed about it right now. Oh well. I’ve got two weeks before the next group. That’s time enough to fix it and print out a new set of chapters.

On a related note, I finished the edits to The Coppersmith yesterday, and I spent the bulk of my morning typing them in. I’d hoped to get the rest of the changes in before the end of today, but it doesn’t look like I’ll make it. Frustrating. Once I finally get all the changes in, I have to find someone willing to give it a read and give me honest feedback. ‘Course, I need the same thing for Patriots and Tyrants, and I can only take two chapters at a time to my crit group. Just not sure who I can go to.

And in my heart, I really just want to spend more time exploring this new world I’ve created and the characters who inhabit it. Editing and rewriting is boring! Oh well. I’ll man up and get it done.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written fantasy – a couple of decades, to be precise – and I’ve forgotten how much I love it. This new series I’m working on is a bit of a psychological breather for me from the darkness of Jefferson’s Road, which is kinda crazy because it’s got a darkness all its own.

I came up with the idea about a month ago, driving back to the house I work at after dropping off one of my guys at his parents’ house. I took Lake Road back, and was treated to a beautiful full moon glistening on the water. I have to say again how marvelous it is to live where I do. Just being able to see the incredible blues and greens and whitecaps on the water from my front window is a daily blessing. Anyway, as I enjoyed this scenic respite, I began thinking of the different kinds of stories I’d developed over the years. Writing a psychothriller like The Coppersmith is very different from writing fantasies about elves and wizards and dragons, etc.

That’s when it hit me: why not combine the two? Imagine a Sheriff in some fantasy land (think “Sheriff of Nottingham” type Sheriff) who uses a skill set resembling forensics to solve crimes while being surrounded by magical creatures. His forensic skills would be a magic all their own to those used to relying on incantations and spells.

So I’ve started the book – as yet untitled – and my lead character, Lucas, is an ex-Sheriff with one eye. His other eye he keeps hidden behind a patch, because it has been enchanted. He can scry with it, but only if he uses the blood of a victim. Moreover, he is no longer Sheriff because of it, for the king in the land issued an edict banning all sorcery from the realm (for political reasons, etc.). He still serves his king, and has to resist the urge to use an ability others might crave, because of the personal cost to his soul every time he does so.

Now imagine this Sheriff is tasked to finding a serial killer in this magic land, while all around him the townsfolk are blaming the magical creatures, such as faeries or witches or what-not. That’ll give you an idea of what I’m putting together.

I’ll post a suitable excerpt as soon as I come up with one. At the moment, I’m near the end of chapter three and still loving it.

And, of course, I’m still editing Patriots and Tyrants as well as preparing The Coppersmith for release this month. And writing The Tree of Liberty, too. And finishing The Elixir of Life. Yes, I really do intend to get all this done!

This is going to take a little longer than I thought. Editing The Coppersmith, that is. My big frustration – going as far back as 2006 when I first finished the book, is that my characters just don’t come off strong enough. The main problem is with the main character – Janelle Becker. She’s just not compelling, I’m afraid.

I’ve started giving her a problem – hinting at something dark within her past that gives her panic attacks now, but the problem is that I haven’t fully told her story within the novel – and in order to do so, I’m going to have to radically rewrite these parts of the narrative.

Anyway, based on a dream I had just before waking up this morning (Hey, it’s when I do my best thinking!), I’ve decided to remove her from being an FBI agent, and just have her be an FBI consultant. This will give me the option of removing her from the investigative “heavy lifting,” and allow me to explore the more darker aspects of her personality – which all center around fear of abandonment, etc., something that will hamstring her from really being able to solve this investigation. It will still pivot on being able to identify the killer through the Bible, which is a wonderful device in the story, but her fears need to get worse as she gets closer to catching the killer.

So I’m going to continue with the basic edits I’ve been doing right along, and then I’m going to have to go back through the story, identify all the parts where Janelle is actively interacting or reacting, and rewrite those to reflect her darker character.

This isn’t going to be easy.

Oh I’ve been busy lately. Last night I found two additional e-book reader forums, and I’ve been actively posting on both, as well as breathing new life into my presence on Kindleboards.com.

The two other forums are mobilereads.com and booksummit.com. Also, I’ve posted a pair of adds on Bookbarista.com for both the e-book and the print book.

In the meantime, I’ve collected a list of some 275 book review blogs that I have to start culling through – ’cause not all of them will read my genres, of course – before contacting them about doing a tour. That’ll be fun! Of course, I’m hoping to have The Coppersmith finished and uploaded before then, and maybe Patriots and Tyrants as well (if possible). I don’t want to wait too long, but I know I have to have more material available.

As of April 1, I will check again to see how the sales of The Spirit of Resistance are coming along, and then we’ll have a better sense how this is all taking off. It’s quite a bit of work though, I gotta tell ya! (Still, I’m loving it!)