Welcome to Biting-Edge, a blog shared by authors and vampire experts, Mario Acevedo and Jeanne Stein. We’ll cover urban fantasy, vampires, pop culture, and all things Joss Whedon. Unlike other fantasy blogs, we don’t insist on body cavity searches (unless you ask politely). Snarkiness is most welcome...though we won't promise not to bite back!
Sunday, December 23, 2012
For Xmas--My Next Big Thing
Mario here:
What I'm reading now:
Factotum by Charles Bukowski
I got tagged a couple of weeks back by Scott Browne who was trolling for victims for The Next Big Thing blog meme. I mean, this multi-level marketing approach to pimping our books was certain to go viral and get us scads of publicity. Yes!
My Next Big Thing? The University of Doom.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
Am not sure. Like most of my ideas, it materialized from the fog of a hang-over. Or while I was speaking in tongues.
What genre does your book fall under?
YA.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie
rendition?
A cross between an adolescent Boris Karloff and a young Cantinflas.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Young Alfonso Frankenstein battles the evil James Moriarty to save his middle-school ass. And his dad's.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
The gods will decide.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Much too long.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Frankenstein (duh!), Lord of the Flies, and anything by Tim Dorsey and Tolstoy.
Who or What inspired you to write this book?
Utter and complete desperation. That and the voices in my head.
What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
If you love robots, monsters, and middle-schoolers reanimating the dead, this is the book for you.
Below are the people I tagged. All great writers and worthy of gold-plated pimpage.
Aaron Michael Ritchey is a writer and inspirational speaker from Littleton, Colorado. He belongs to several writers organizations and will be the emcee of the Pikes Peak Writers Conference in April 2013. Thank you for letting him share his stories.
About Jaye Wells. After several years as a magazine editor and freelance writer, USA TODAY Bestselling author Jaye Wells finally decided to leave the facts behind and make up her own reality. Her overactive imagination and life-long fascination with the arcane and freakish blended nicely with this new career path. Her Sabina Kane urban fantasy series is a blend of dark themes, grave stakes and wicked humor. Jaye lives in Texas with her saintly husband and devilish son.
Rudy Ch. Garcia’s noir detective story LAX Confidential appeared in Latinos in Lotusland, Bilingual Press (’08). His Southwest fantasy, Memorabilia (honorable mention in Writers Digest competition) appeared in Needles & Bones, Drollerie Press. A SF-fantasy flash fiction piece A Grain of Life is viewable at AntiqueChildren.com (’09), and a humor-fantasy-horror, Weird Ronnie, took first place in an AlternateSpecies.com competition in Britain. The fantasy story Mr. Sumac published in AQC’s journal Kingdom Freaks & Other Divine Wonders, Spring 2012. His SF short Last Call for Ice Cream was accepted by Rudy Rucker, Sr., for his Flurb webzine #13, 3/12. Garcia is a quasi-ex-member of the Northern Colorado Writers Workshop, holds a B.A. in writing from the University of Colo.-Denver and works as a Denver-area bilingual elementary teacher. He is a founder-contributor to LaBloga.blogspot.com, a Chicano literary website.
Feliz Navidad, amigos!
What I'm reading now:
Factotum by Charles Bukowski
I got tagged a couple of weeks back by Scott Browne who was trolling for victims for The Next Big Thing blog meme. I mean, this multi-level marketing approach to pimping our books was certain to go viral and get us scads of publicity. Yes!
My Next Big Thing? The University of Doom.
Am not sure. Like most of my ideas, it materialized from the fog of a hang-over. Or while I was speaking in tongues.
What genre does your book fall under?
YA.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie
rendition?
A cross between an adolescent Boris Karloff and a young Cantinflas.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Young Alfonso Frankenstein battles the evil James Moriarty to save his middle-school ass. And his dad's.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
The gods will decide.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Much too long.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Frankenstein (duh!), Lord of the Flies, and anything by Tim Dorsey and Tolstoy.
Who or What inspired you to write this book?
Utter and complete desperation. That and the voices in my head.
What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?
If you love robots, monsters, and middle-schoolers reanimating the dead, this is the book for you.
Below are the people I tagged. All great writers and worthy of gold-plated pimpage.
Aaron Michael Ritchey is a writer and inspirational speaker from Littleton, Colorado. He belongs to several writers organizations and will be the emcee of the Pikes Peak Writers Conference in April 2013. Thank you for letting him share his stories.
About Jaye Wells. After several years as a magazine editor and freelance writer, USA TODAY Bestselling author Jaye Wells finally decided to leave the facts behind and make up her own reality. Her overactive imagination and life-long fascination with the arcane and freakish blended nicely with this new career path. Her Sabina Kane urban fantasy series is a blend of dark themes, grave stakes and wicked humor. Jaye lives in Texas with her saintly husband and devilish son.
Rudy Ch. Garcia’s noir detective story LAX Confidential appeared in Latinos in Lotusland, Bilingual Press (’08). His Southwest fantasy, Memorabilia (honorable mention in Writers Digest competition) appeared in Needles & Bones, Drollerie Press. A SF-fantasy flash fiction piece A Grain of Life is viewable at AntiqueChildren.com (’09), and a humor-fantasy-horror, Weird Ronnie, took first place in an AlternateSpecies.com competition in Britain. The fantasy story Mr. Sumac published in AQC’s journal Kingdom Freaks & Other Divine Wonders, Spring 2012. His SF short Last Call for Ice Cream was accepted by Rudy Rucker, Sr., for his Flurb webzine #13, 3/12. Garcia is a quasi-ex-member of the Northern Colorado Writers Workshop, holds a B.A. in writing from the University of Colo.-Denver and works as a Denver-area bilingual elementary teacher. He is a founder-contributor to LaBloga.blogspot.com, a Chicano literary website.
Feliz Navidad, amigos!
Labels: Aaron Michael Ritchey, Charles Bukowski, Frankenstein, Jaye Wells, Rudy Ch. Garcia, Santa Claus, Scott Browne, University of Doom
¶ posted by Mario Acevedo @ 8:18 PM 0 comments
Sunday, September 23, 2012
It's about the numbers
Mario here:
If you're a writer, you are about deafened by all the shouting and caterwauling regarding ebooks and the future of publishing (always expressed in Apocalyptic simpering). There's no doubt that publishing has definitely changed, both bad and good for us writers.
On the bad side: For most novelists, the multiple book contract is dead, and a series limps along based on the sales of the last book. Advances for even established, bestselling authors are shrinking, often to half or a quarter of what they were five years ago.
On the plus side: The continuing growth of ebooks allows the writer to circumvent the previous roadblock for self-publishing--the distributor. Before ebooks, if you self-published you had to fork over tens of thousands for hard copies of the books and then find a distributor to market them (and a bookstore willing to shelf them). Now you don't need any hard copies and through Amazon, Barnes & Noble's Nook, etc., your book has the potential to reach a huge and growing audience.
The big however for self-published ebooks remains that you still have to market them.
One golden marketing tactic was Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing Select program. The premise behind this tactic was that you'd offer free downloads of your book for a day or two to build buzz, and thousands of free downloads later, you'd put the book back on sale, then Ka-Ching! those thousands of freebies would translate into thousands of sales. But the ease of self-publishing means there's a glut of manuscripts available that should have never gone further than the trash folder. Now offering free downloads doesn't always work, and with the glut of bad free books, seems to work even less.
Forbes provides a welcome and factual analysis of how well free downloads have worked to market a book. Read the article here.
The most sobering statistic?
Weekly average a book sold before free loads--5. Weekly average AFTER free downloads--49.
Hardly day job quitting money.
But not so fast. I personally know two writers who have earned enough from ebooks to quit their day jobs. And several others who have rejuvenated their careers after getting jerked around in traditional publishing.
So what works? Marketing is governed by several proven principles, but applying marketing is an art, not a science. What worked yesterday may not work today. What works now may not work tomorrow. Elle Lothlorien shares her experience pimping ebooks and the need to remain nimble in your approach.
One commonly repeated tenet is that the best marketing tool is to write a good book. But what does that mean? I have writer friends who have written splendid books, and those books simply not have gained the attention and sales they deserve.
And so to pimp two deserving writer pals we have:
From Publishers Lunch:
"New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author CJ Lyons's BROKEN, where a critically ill teenage girl discovers that other teens are coming down with the same sickness, and the illness may not be what it seems to Leah Hultenschmidt at Sourcebooks by Barbara Poelle at Irene Goodman Agency. (world English) Foreign Rights: Heather Shapiro at Baror International."
Plus this very nice article about YA and mystery writer Jess Lourey. Like, or better yet, buy The Toadhouse Trilogy, Book One.
Lastly! Sound the alarm!
The University of Doom website is finally up. Mad science. Evil genius. Schemes and inventions gone very wrong. Plus awesome Lego videos.
If you're a writer, you are about deafened by all the shouting and caterwauling regarding ebooks and the future of publishing (always expressed in Apocalyptic simpering). There's no doubt that publishing has definitely changed, both bad and good for us writers.
On the bad side: For most novelists, the multiple book contract is dead, and a series limps along based on the sales of the last book. Advances for even established, bestselling authors are shrinking, often to half or a quarter of what they were five years ago.
On the plus side: The continuing growth of ebooks allows the writer to circumvent the previous roadblock for self-publishing--the distributor. Before ebooks, if you self-published you had to fork over tens of thousands for hard copies of the books and then find a distributor to market them (and a bookstore willing to shelf them). Now you don't need any hard copies and through Amazon, Barnes & Noble's Nook, etc., your book has the potential to reach a huge and growing audience.
The big however for self-published ebooks remains that you still have to market them.
One golden marketing tactic was Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing Select program. The premise behind this tactic was that you'd offer free downloads of your book for a day or two to build buzz, and thousands of free downloads later, you'd put the book back on sale, then Ka-Ching! those thousands of freebies would translate into thousands of sales. But the ease of self-publishing means there's a glut of manuscripts available that should have never gone further than the trash folder. Now offering free downloads doesn't always work, and with the glut of bad free books, seems to work even less.
Forbes provides a welcome and factual analysis of how well free downloads have worked to market a book. Read the article here.
The most sobering statistic?
Weekly average a book sold before free loads--5. Weekly average AFTER free downloads--49.
Hardly day job quitting money.
But not so fast. I personally know two writers who have earned enough from ebooks to quit their day jobs. And several others who have rejuvenated their careers after getting jerked around in traditional publishing.
So what works? Marketing is governed by several proven principles, but applying marketing is an art, not a science. What worked yesterday may not work today. What works now may not work tomorrow. Elle Lothlorien shares her experience pimping ebooks and the need to remain nimble in your approach.
One commonly repeated tenet is that the best marketing tool is to write a good book. But what does that mean? I have writer friends who have written splendid books, and those books simply not have gained the attention and sales they deserve.
And so to pimp two deserving writer pals we have:
From Publishers Lunch:
"New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author CJ Lyons's BROKEN, where a critically ill teenage girl discovers that other teens are coming down with the same sickness, and the illness may not be what it seems to Leah Hultenschmidt at Sourcebooks by Barbara Poelle at Irene Goodman Agency. (world English) Foreign Rights: Heather Shapiro at Baror International."
Plus this very nice article about YA and mystery writer Jess Lourey. Like, or better yet, buy The Toadhouse Trilogy, Book One.Lastly! Sound the alarm!
The University of Doom website is finally up. Mad science. Evil genius. Schemes and inventions gone very wrong. Plus awesome Lego videos.
Labels: Amazon. Elle Lothlorien, eBooks, Forbes, Jess Lourey, University of Doom
¶ posted by Mario Acevedo @ 9:02 PM 7 comments
