Story Behind The Story: The Flood Lily

Helloooo internet land.

This is the next installment in a series of blogs about the stories behind the stories. This one, in particular, is about the second book in the Grace & Witherbloom series, The Flood Lily.

Fair warning, SPOILERS WILL FOLLOW. Please don't read on until you've read the second book. It's worth it, I promise!

Now, onto the second book. As I (somewhat ominously) mentioned in my last blog, this is the story that almost caused me to abandon the book altogether. It all started off promisingly enough. As soon as I completed The Girl Who Died Backwards, I dived right into the next book. I wanted an exciting opening for the book, so I set it high up in an unspecified mountain range. Two brave explorers risked life and limb to retrieve a strange artifact. I had been writing this scene in my head for a while before I typed it out as I was finishing up The Girl Who Died Backwards. I was very happy with the way it ended up, and the introduction of Henrietta Durand. So, the action moves to the home of Grace and Witherbloom. We get a little time to catch up with them before they are bounding out on their next adventure...

And this is where I stopped. I just stopped. You see, I made a very amateur mistake. I am always thinking a bit ahead of where I'm writing. I, of course, had a basic notion of what the artifact was and what it was going to do when I started. But now that I was inching closer to revealing the "villain" of the piece, I began to question myself. You see, the story idea for this one actually came from the title. Sometimes a title that appeals to me will just pop into my head. The Flood Lily was one of those. So then I construct a story around it. The basic premise of this story involves (though they are never actually named as such) vampires. I was writing this around the end of 2008. Twilight was a big deal, and it seemed like vampires were every where. And it got me thinking... does the world really need another vampire story?

True, I was going to put a sci-fi twist on it that I thought was kind of interesting and novel. Basically, the vampires were created through nanotechnology. The basic idea of the tech was to turn creatures into the perfect soldiers - undying creatures who fed on the blood of those they killed in battle. I'm sure something like this has been used in some book, film or TV show somewhere along the line. As much as I'd like to think it was a wholly original idea, there doesn't seem to be very many of those. But that didn't matter to me much at first. I figured as long as it was entertainingly done and felt fresh that's all I needed. But I spooked myself. I was so sick of vampires myself. If I had known better, I would have just kept writing. It might have taken a little bit, but I'd either have become comfortable with the idea or I would have figured out a new way to approach it.

Instead, I stopped. And I stopped for over a year and a half. Seriously, I did not write a sentence. It was an incredibly large amount of wasted time. I worked on a few things here and there, but for all intents and purposes I was no longer writing the book. Thankfully, I eventually came back to it. I just remember finding the file for the first book on my computer, and reading through it and thinking how much I enjoyed it and what a shame it was that I hadn't kept going. So I wrote the rest of the scene in the carriage before they reach the Durand Supplies building. But I was still afraid of the basic premise of the book. So I put the book away again until the end of the 2011. Another year down the tubes.

Of course, in the end it all worked out. I found the spark again. I realized that I would enjoy the story, and that was a good start. And you know what? It works. The story really works. I enjoy the initial mystery that is set-up. I like the introduction of Varias and his children. I like the sidetrip (via journal) to Tibet. I like the strange intermingling of vampires, tibetan monks and Victorian London. It's just a lot of fun to me, and I feel a bit silly that I ever worried about it.

As soon as this book was done, I dove right into writing the next book, where I had to fend off the dreaded spectre of... technobabble!

Don't Watch The Scale or The Psychology of A Sales Ranking

So, today I reached another milestone in my venture into self-publishing. My books are no longer free. Both Books 1 & 2 in the Grace & Witherbloom series—The Girl Who Died Backwards and The Flood Lily—will now set people back a whopping $.99 each (or the equivalent in other countries.)

Now, I was fully aware of what was coming next. After a surge of downloads of well over a thousand books for the first story and hundreds and hundreds of downloads for the second book, things would slow down. Also, the books would go from being listed in Amazon's free book rankings (where they sat comfortably around #1,000 of all the millions of Kindle books and occupied the top 10 and top 20 of their subgenres, reaching #1 a couple of times) to being listed in the paid section. In the paid section, all of those downloads would no longer be counted.

What I wasn't quite ready for was the psychological effect of going from about #1,000 or so to #280,000 in the rankings. Kindle provides this little graph of your sales rank, and there was a VERY long red line indicating the plummet in rank of the books. It felt as if Amazon had cast my books out into a deep and dark pit.

I had been obsessively checking the downloads, reveling in shock at the huge number of people snapping them up. Now, things have gone quite a bit slower. But I realized something. When you are trying to lose weight they tell you to not check the scale every day. With weight, this is because your weight can fluctuate a lot from day to day due to water weight. It's better to only check your weight once and week so some of these fluctuations are smoothed out and you can concentrate on the accomplishment of the full week. I realized that by checking the sales of the book constantly I was really only driving myself crazy in the same way as someone jumping on a scale every day. And I was letting the heady (and artificially inflated) rush of free book downloads get in the way of enjoying my REAL accomplishment.

As of today, about 12 or so copies of my book have sold for money. Now, that's small potatoes compared to the numbers I was getting, but they are no less special and important than the hundreds and hundreds of downloads that came before. They mean that someone saw the description and perhaps read the sample on Amazon and decided they were worth spending real, hard-earned money on them. And that's an amazing feeling.

Now, I should point out that this doesn't mean I'm not eternally grateful for the people who downloaded the first or second book for free. Quite the opposite. They helped get the book exposure. They are reading them now. They are writing lovely reviews on Amazon and rating it highly on Goodreads.com. They are all wonderful people who saw something completely new and gave it a go. And now hopefully they'll keep wanting to read the books. And they'll tell their friends. But all of these benefits take time to sink it. It's a long game.

So it's time to step off the scale. Sales ranking be damned, I say! I want these books to be successful. I'd love to be a writer full time, and I'm committed to making it happen. So sales are important. They are critical, in fact. But I think it's good to keep them in the proper perspective and really enjoy even these early days, no matter how many red arrows and plunging graph lines Amazon might show me. Oh, and it should be pointed out that it only took a few sales and now the books have shot up to around #40,000 or so in the rankings. So a little goes a long way, and that all happened in a day.

To conclude with, I have posted the synopsis and title for Book 3, due out February 21st on Facebook. I thought I'd share it here too.

Grace & Witherbloom: The Village That Sleeps, Book 3 in the continuing series. What happened to the residents of the picturesque Welsh village of Ddubryn? And why have the authorities closed it off to the rest of the world? Josiah Witherbloom must enter the village alone to uncover its secrets, but finding answers to the mysteries of the village that sleeps will become—quite literally—a matter of life and death.

Schedule Change! Two Weeks is Just Too Long...

So, I had a realization today. Two weeks is just too long between book releases. There are a couple factors involved in this, but part of it is the way that Amazon handles the Kindle releases. I'm fast approaching 1000 downloads for the first book (which is great!) but I found out that once that book switches over to a paid book, all of those sales just disappear ranking-wise. So the visibility of the book will drop down again from the heights it reached when it was free. Of course, the free promo is still great to get readers to try the book, but I think two weeks is just too long to go for a new book series just starting out. So... I'm changing the schedule!

The new schedule is:

Book 2: Tomorrow, February 14! Just in time for Valentines. You know what your loved one might like? An e-book, of course. (Hey, you can't blame me for trying.)

Book 3: February 21

Book 4: February 28

Book 5: March 3

Book 6: March 13

Book 7: March 20

So now the books will be coming out weekly and available on Tuesdays! Thanks for everyone who has supported the book so far... and I can't wait for you to read the rest.

855 and Counting...

855... that's the number of book downloads of The Girl Who Died Backward that have occurred so far at the moment I write this. The free promo period for the first book has been a big hit so far. The bulk of those were on Friday and Saturday. Sunday seems to have slowed down a bit but that only seems natural. There are two more days to go, but I have to say I'm already excited. The book placed in the top 10 of the two sub-genres it's listed in (even making it to #1 on the chart for a while) in the US, UK and Germany. I'm intrigued to see what happens once it's no longer free and starts to sell at the list price of $.99 (or the equivalent in non-US countries) and I'm also interested to see if people will start reviewing it.

There has been a lot of talk about free (or even $.99) Kindle books and whether people actually read them or just end up collecting them, despite their intention to read them eventually. It's an interesting question, and one I probably won't be able to answer in terms of my own experience for a while yet. I think with this sort of thing it's a marathon and not a sprint. Most people have a big reading list piled up (I know I do!) and a new book by an untested author might not jump to the top of the pile. So I'll have to be patient. But I have to say—at the end of the day—I'm delighted that 855 people (so far) could potentially be reading my book. I would love to make a living at writing and hope people will buy this book and the future installments... but I've got to admit, just getting the book out there is really exciting for me.

I just "locked down" Book 2. If you've got Book 1 you already know the title, but I'll announce it on the website (along with the synopsis) on February 17. Having read it several times again in the last couple of days while making final edits, I realized that although I think Book 1 is a great introduction to the characters, Book 2 actually feels a bit more representative of the series in both its tone and execution. I'm really happy with the way it turned out because writing Book 2 ended up being the hardest of all of them, with the possible exception of Book 7. But I'm exceptionally happy with the way it turned out and can't wait to share it with everyone February 24.

Now, I'm off to watch the return of The Walking Dead... I hope they get off that farm soon!