Mistress of Vision by R. D. Ferguson, the first book in my Young Adult New Vision series, is up this morning (October 11, 2012) on Amazon.com. (Edited: this is a new cover designed by Pat R. Steiner) I like Kailin and her adventures. I hope readers do too. The sequel is tentatively titled, Vision Quest. I hope to start writing it early next year. For a variety of reasons, I'm experimenting with an initial for my first name on the cover of Mistress. . . .
Although I've run no publicity, Junak Silverhand continues to sell at a steady rate. I don't know why. Must be the title because the cover isn't all that great. I've also noted that the number of hits on this blog have increased with the release of Junak. . . . Related?
Friday, October 12, 2012 through Saturday, October 13, 2012, I'm running free copies of Wobbling Star on Amazon. Wobbling Star has been available exclusively on Amazon under the KDP Select program. I'm withdrawing Wobbling Star from the program on October 14, so this will be my last opportunity to offer a free copy this way. I've updated the cover, but it lacks pizzazz. Still only one review (5 stars), and sales have slumped, so once I'm out of the KDP Select program, I'll probably release a Kobo version, and one for Barnes and Noble. Publicity is tough, and I haven't got a clue how to stir it. Unless you have at least three reviews averaging 4 stars, you don't qualify for free publicity on Kindle Boards. The other sources of free publicity are iffy and don't appeal to me much.
Be sure to read my blog entry Experiment in Publishing to see how to become a beta reader for my current work in progress Tunnel at the End of the Dark. Tunnel . . . is Book 2 in my Young Adult Possible Magic series and the sequel to The Princess, the Knight, & the Knave. As the transition novel in the series, Tunnel . . . has some darker moments than Princess . . . , but hopefully that will build some impetus to take me to Book 3 in the series, A Stark and Dormy Knight. I only have an outline for A Stark and Dormy Knight, but I'm about 40% through writing Tunnel at the End of the Dark and so now is a good time to solicit beta readers. Because these books are directed towards Young Adults, some readers may wonder whether a teenager can be a beta reviewer of the novel. I have no problem with that, but for legal reasons, I would want parental consent for anyone under the age of 18 who wanted to participate. (
Why am I doing seeking beta reviewers this way?
When I wrote textbooks (for MacMillan, and West), the publisher would seek developmental reviews from other college professors both for the content and the style of the textbook as well as an indicator of possible sales. When these reviews conflicted, my job was to convince the editor that I could revise a section of the book to address the issues raised by the reviewer. Some of my textbooks had as many as fifty reviewers before the book was finished, so this was not always an easy task. However, I now write fiction, and my only goals are to entertain and satisfy my readers, and the good news for readers is that unlike my textbooks there are no massive problem sets for homework in a novel.
In my humble opinion, electronic self-publishing is generating some massive changes in the publishing world. One of those changes is to lessen the filter that a publisher provides between author and reader. The filter provided by publishers has both advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that publishers select books to publish from among thousands of manuscripts they receive. Thus a reader does not have to be quite as discerning when selecting from a familiar publisher. Does this mean the books are the "best?" Best is a relative term. I expect that the books selected by the big publishing houses are chosen as the ones most likely to be commercial successes. Publishers have little other choice. They answer to their stockholders and bet a lot of money that their choices will bring financial rewards. The downside of such a strategy, is that many books selected can end up being "me-too" clones of other books that are already successful.
Personally, the biggest downsides to traditional publishing are the difficulty of getting a foot in the door when your writing tends to be different from current popular fiction and the lag time between writing a novel and the publishing date for a novel can run into years. At this point, I write because I enjoy telling stories, and I don't have the time frame for an extended career.
Another advantage is that the mainstream publisher provides editing so that good stories are not likely to be marred by poorly constructed sentences or bad grammar. We've all seen counterexamples in big publisher books, but not nearly as much as in self-published books. Some self published authors hire a copy editor to catch their errors. Because I'm obsessive about grammar and style, I am constantly rewriting (perhaps too much), but I take a bit of pride in delivering a clean manuscript.
However, potentially worse than grammatical errors are errors in story structure and continuity, plotting errors, etc. Detecting the flaws in a story takes a different kind of an obsession, one that few writers have at their immediate disposal, because they often have background material in their head that never makes the transition to the page. Because of that background material in their head, a writer might not notice the flaw of missing information, but a good reader will. A good agent or an editor at a commercial publisher should be good at finding this kind of flaw, but an independent, self-published writer has no objective feedback unless solicited from readers who enjoy that kind of book. This is where beta readers become important to a writer. A good beta reader offers insight into the story telling of a novel, before it is submitted or published.
How many obsessive StarTrek fans know the number of spare dilithium crystals carried on the Enterprise? Who else knows such details? Such dedication to continuity can make a good beta reader. Do you notice when some loose end in a plot is not tied together at the end of a story. Then you might make a good beta reader too.
What I hope to do with this experiment is to remove another publishing filter between the author and the reader in order to produce a more enjoyable story. That is why I am soliciting beta reviewers from among those who are interested in the Possible Magic series. If the results work well, I might repeat the experiment for some of my other series.
Take care. Read well. Write better.
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