General writing update, Jan to March 2013

Thought I'd do that egotistical thing and give a brief round up of how things have been going for me in the writing world over the last month, and even back to the start of the year, since we're at the end of the first quarter now.

Not bad.

A few milestones first. Writing-wise, just yesterday I passed 75,000/250 pages for the year, which isn't bad, but should be a lot more. January and February were heavy new words months, but March was taken up mostly with editing, which kind of sucked. I like the end result of editing, but the actual process bores the hell out of me.

Sales-wise, not bad either. I've hit my 100 sales/month target every month this year and earlier this week I made a sale which put me one ahead of my yearly total for 2012. To beat my 2012 tally in three months made me pretty happy, but I'm still not selling anything like what I want to be selling to actually make any money. About 90% of my revenue goes back into advertising and production costs, which rise as my attempts to become increasingly professional also rise, and what little money I make really doesn't equate to a decent wage for the hours I put in. Really, unless you're in the same boat, you have no idea how much time I spend doing this. Don't get me wrong, I love it and I'm having a ball, but we're talking several hours a day, or almost all of my free time.

In terms of new publications, in March so far I've released three mini anthologies in the Five Tales Series.

 

The main reason for these is that they increase my visibility. I want something I can have on promotion or being advertised every single day. The aim is that if people like the stories they'll go and buy my novels; they aren't really about making me money on their own, although Five Tales of Horror has actually sold surprisingly well. Plus, I came late to the game in self-publishing, so I have a lot of backlog. I meet authors pretty regularly now who have either started writing because it's so easy to self-publish or have just one or two novels in the tank. I'm 34. I started writing seriously with the intent to get published at 18, so I have 16 years of material to work with. Of course, I had huge periods of inactivity, but I also had periods of massive productivity. The result of that was some 80 short stories and the same again in various states of completion. Many of them have been published in magazines and have no reprint value so there's no point in leaving them on the hard drive if I can utilize them.

These are good stories, I'm not dredging the barrel by any means. Trust me, I have a lot of stories that are painful to read, but I won't be subjecting the general public to anything I think is junk. However, I don't have a bottomless well so after a couple more collections I'll need to start filling the coffers again with new material, or rework some old ideas.

These three put my total number of published works on Amazon to 25. My year-end target is 40, so I'm well on the way. I have at least two more anthologies to release, another comedy novella which is almost finished and at least two more novels. That will take me to 30, hopefully by mid summer. Then I'll be trying to get out at least one more novel by the end of the year, either an old one or one I'm working on, depending on how things go.

I have a bunch of half-finished stuff that I haven't worked on in a while, such as a romance novel and also a Tube Riders novella/novel featuring different characters. There's also the horror novel I've started writing, titled Dark Days, which is up to about 15,000 words. That too has suffered because of all the editing I've had to do in March. Novels, of course, are my main aim, because they sell better, and get remembered longer. However, I have to work with what I have and I'm in this for the long haul, so clearly up the backlog makes it easier to focus on new material going forward.

Hopefully some or all of this material will eventually see the light of day, but we'll see.

Anyway, back to work ...

Chris Ward
March 30th 2013

Five Tales of Fantasy

While waiting on my next two novels, Head of Words (at the proofreader) and Tube Riders: Exile (editing) I've been going gung ho on releasing a short story anthology series (un)imaginatively titled, Five Tales of ...

Volume #3 was just published this morning and is called Five Tales of Fantasy. For the cover I cheated a little bit - I bought a stock image but I didn't like it because it seemed too sci-fi and more appropriate for Volume #4, Five Tales of Dystopia. So what I did was cheat a little - I took the old stock photo I used for the first version of Cold Pools, resized it and played around with some colours to make it look a bit more interesting. This is the original and the cover -

 

 I liked the cover at first but came to think it looked a bit tacky. The new cover is way better (you can see it in the sidebar) but since I owned the stock photo I figured I'd try to use it.

The stories inside include Ms Ito's Bird, which is of course available in another collection and was my first published story, alongside four others. The middle story, Spruscia's Baby, was also published, but so long ago I can't remember where! Roy is perhaps my favorite in the collection, the story of a giant bug bought as a pet. I have no idea why that story didn't get a decent magazine sale, but I refused to call it something generic like A Bug's Life. I like Roy. Keeping Grandma is about what happens when old wizards begin to go senile, while Dinner with the Family is about zombies. I hate zombies - I think they're boring and cliched, so I decided to do my own take on them. It amused me, that's for sure.

This collection, like all the others in the series, will be priced at $1.49. As often happens when I read over my stories, I had a damn, I'm good, why aren't I famous? ego moment last night when I did a final typo check. They're good stories, enjoy.

Chris Ward
30th March 2013

Five Tales of Loss

The second in my Five Tales series went live today. These are five rather mournful tales of failure, aging, death, etc. No comedy here. I'm rather proud of them, though.

Anyway, here's the cover.

The cover is actually from this stock image of an abandoned house, which I bought from www.pond5.com for $20 or so.

I just cropped it, and used a kind of black and white effect from Picasa Creative Kit. I think it came out rather well. I used the same font as for most of my short stories. I'd love to have all of these covers professionally done but I just can't afford it, so the next best thing I can do is attempt a bit of branding by keeping the fonts the same, even though I tend to change the size and colour. You'll notice how it stands out from the background a bit - that's just two layers of text in different colours, slightly staggered. It's basic stuff, but this time last year I'd have had no idea!

As for the stories, Clones and Once We Were Children were written in 2012, and I consider them to be two of my best stories. Clones is about a man trying to a girl he almost had a short romance with at a holiday camp. It's very loosely based on a holiday romance I didn't have once, although only the situation, not what happens after. I wrote it after reading Ray Bradbury's The Lake, and tried to copy the style.

Once We Were Children is about an old Japanese man looking back on the good times of his life. I wrote it after watching yet another of the melancholy family dramas that the wife loves. I wanted to see if I could write something better. I don't know if I did, but I like it.

Death Depends is the oldest story in this collection and dates back to 2002. It's available elsewhere, which is a feature of these collections - one story that you can read somewhere else and four new ones. It contains my best twist ending. You won't pick it, I guarantee it.

Faster than the Wind is a kind of mundane sci-fi, which is basically sci-fi which doesn't contain any science. In this story, we are in a near future world where some humans are growing significantly taller than others. Larry is a Tall, and reaches almost nine feet. He's also a sprinter, and wants to enter the Olympics. However, there are a few obstacles in his way.

Lost Soul, Waiting by the Port, Brindisi, was written in 2008 and was actually sold to a pro magazine that then went bust. I used to live in Brindisi, Italy, and really wanted to write a few stories set there. I was having such a good time in those days that I didn't have much time for writing, but this story came a few years later. It's not based on anything that happens, but contains a rather strange situation for the central, unnamed character.

And there we have it. The next mini collection is tentatively titled Five Tales of Dystopia. I'll be putting it out in the next couple of weeks.

In other news, I started editing Tube Riders: Exile this morning ...

Chris Ward
March 19th 2013