New Gold City

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 lik...

Somewhere in this photo is an envelope containing over 100 rejections. You will find below an actual query sent earlier this year to a book publisher for my novel Beyond the Will of God . I sent out over 200 query letters for this novel -- mostly in the early nawts. This is the very last one. I have an envelope, conveniently lost in my office now, with over 100 rejections of Beyond the Will stuffed into it. Yes, only about half the folks I reached out to actually made the effort to get back to me. That's the way it is. (So it goes). My manuscript was rejected outright by one agent because "I don't do religious fiction." Beyond the Will of God is not exactly a religious story (see the query below to learn where the title came from if you don't already know). Another publisher wrote that they felt the novel had potential and was well-written (aw), but they weren't publishing mysteries. A year later their catalog contained a mystery and crime section that is now...

I recently received two reader reviews on stories of mine available at Amazon's Kindle Store. Both reviewers were rather unhappy. That's fine. I know that fiction, like most everything else, is a matter of taste. Not everyone is going to like everything they encounter in life -- from movies to food to music. The experience of bad (sad?) reviews got me thinking about the Indie Author Experience and how different it is from the status quo, old school legacy publisher experience. As an indie writer I can edit and change my stories in a matter of a few hours and have them re-posted by the next day. Writers beholden to old school publishing houses (even small independent ones) are locked into their published content -- even electronically -- for a very long time. The process of bringing a novel or memoir or whatever to publication requires the extended efforts of many different people (a team, really) over a year to eighteen months...or more. Once a product is deemed complete, it g...