52 Short Stories in a Year Challenge - Month Two Update

Two months since I started the challenge of writing 52 short stories in a year, and here's my current progress -

Writing since June 21, including 52 short stories challenge

	Writing since June 21, including 52 short stories challenge
	Name	Type	Word Count	Status	52 Short Stories Tally
1	The Ship	Short Story	3793	Finished - to edit	1
2	Take me Back with You	Short Story	2528	WIP
3	Take me Back with You	Novelisation	14553	WIP
4	The Lost Train	Short Story	4032	WIP
5	The Other Set of Feet	Short Story	3749	Finished - to edit	2
6	The Hunter	Novella	10248	WIP
7	Once We Were Children	Short Story	2513	Finished - to edit	3
8	The Assignment	Short Story	8802	Finished - to edit	5
9	Never Give Up	Short Story	5111	Finished - to edit	6
10	Clones	Short Story	1323	Finished - to edit	4
11	Beat Down 1 - Clones	Serial Novella	5082	WIP
12	Sunfall	Short Story	483	WIP
	Started June 21st	Word Count	62217
	Target for Aug 20th	Pages (300w/pg)	207
	61 days	Target	61000
		Ahead	1217

As you can see, I have six completed short stories, although none have been edited.  I'm looking to sit on everything at least three months.  Being overeager to edit and publish/submit tends to result in stories that either have all the good stuff cut out or are riddled with errors.  It's always been my experience that editing is far easier once you have left your writing so long it looks like it was written by someone else.

I actually wrote less than last month, but then I did spend five days in Korea, and in this summer heat ... well.  My big production months have always been October through January, so I'll be looking for some serious bumps there.  Still, more than 60k or 200 pages in two months is a solid effort.

Now, in true garrulous writer style, I'll say a couple of things about the work I've started/finished since last time.

Take Me Back With You is turning into contemporary romance novel.  I think.  I'm not sure because I don't read them and I've never written one before.  There are no cyborgs or UFOs though.  Romance seems to sell well though so if I can maintain my interest long enough to get it up to a book of about 60k, I'll put it out under some cheesy pen name like Christina W. Ard.  Something like that ...!

Got a few more words done on The Lost Train, but its a bit stalled.  Should be able to finish it.  The good thing about having a spreadsheet is that I haven't forgotten its there yet.

The Hunter is starting to think its a novel.  It's set in the world of the Tube Riders, after the Tube Riders have fled London.  It's dark.  The characters are interesting.  Not sure what to do with it.  It's certainly not a sequel but its running parallel at the moment.

The Assignment is finished, and ran way over my 7k target.  It's probably the best of the lot so far, but its a bit long-winded.  Will have to chop it down.

Never Give Up is a story about cricket.  I like cricket, and I reckon I write cricket action sequences well.  My second pro published story was a story about a cricket match featuring a cyborg as a stand in player.  I'm thinking to write a bunch of short stories about cricket in the hope that Amazon gets popular in India.

Clones was something I whipped out in an evening in an attempt to mimic the sparse style of Ray Bradbury's The Lake.  It is a short literary piece about childhood loss and personality changes, hence the "clones" of the title.  Not sure if its any good or not.  Haven't looked at it since I wrote it.

Beat Down 1 - Clones has nothing to do with the story Clones above.  This my attempt to crack into the serial market.  This is a manga-style, dumb entertainment thing.  Its central character is a borderline immortal pro wrestler called Russell who has to save the world for various reasons in a silly comic way.   Yesterday I introduced a new character, Cap'n Nerv, who is half pirate, half chav.  Should be interesting.  I've already planned out perhaps six "episodes" of about 15-20k each.  I've already decided on a pen name but its a secret.

Sunfall is a story about a man called Richard who wakes up to hear that the sun has died and that the earth has three days before it becomes too cold for humans to survive.  He needs to find his girlfriend and tell her something important.  I don't know what yet because I only started it yesterday while I was waiting for some files to transfer from one USB to another before I could open up one of the other documents.

Anyway, enough talking, time for some action.

CW

South Korea trip part 1 - the DMZ

At the end of the July I took a short five day trip to South (and briefly North) Korea.  It is the closest foreign country from where I live in Japan but strangely enough I had never been there (except to change planes) in the eight years I've lived in this part of the world.

The first day we took a tour to the Demilitarized Zone, that is the area along the border with North Korea, stretching approximately 2km on either side.  No idea why they call it "demilitarized" when it is clearly packed full of firepower on both sides.

First stop on the tour was at a kind of visitor centre with lots of interesting artifacts kicking around, including this bridge, which had a wall at the far end symbolizing the closed border with the North, which was adorned with messages of hope from those people on the South side who had relatives in the North.

This bullet-riddled train was destroyed when the train line between the North and the South was bombed during the war.  This train has been left as a monument to that time.

Near the train above, this bridge is known as the Freedom Bridge, and is part of the train line between the North and the South.

This is the last train station on the South Korean side of the border that is still in use.  Note the sign to Pyongyang.  Hopefully one day you'll be able to take a train from one capital city to the other.

This viewing point is just a kilometer or so from the border.  Those hills you can see in the distance are actually in North Korea.  However, you weren't allowed to take photos any closer than this.  There was a line painted on the floor.  However, you were allowed to look through the viewing machines.  There wasn't a lot to see, though, except a few hills and some buildings that might have been factories in the distance.

This is the Joint Security Area, originally a village called Panmunjeom, on the actual border.  The blue huts actually straddle the border and are used for negotiations.  The soldiers in the middle are South Koreans, and stand in a kind of Taekwondo pose, some of them partially hidden behind the huts, as a defensive technique, so our guide said.  The soldiers at the front of the picture are from the UN, and appeared decidedly more relaxed.  The building in the background is in North Korea, and when we visited there was one guard outside.  Occasionally you can see North Korean tour groups on that side too.

The whole area was very tense, with our guides very strict on us walking in two rows, only taking pictures where they said, and not looking back when we left.  How much of it was necessary, and how much of it was for show, I couldn't tell.

Inside the middle of the negotiation rooms seen above, here I am on the North Korean side of the border, marked by a strip of concrete.

This monument harks back to an incident in the mid-70s when the area of Panmunjom was actually open and both groups of soldiers could walk around freely.  Two US soldiers went to supervise the cutting down of a tree that was obstructing the view from one checkpoint to another.  A group of North Korean soldiers appeared and the two Americans were axed to death.  After the incident the border was  set down and neither side was allowed to cross it.  This monument is at the site of the tree.  You can read a better account of the incident here.

This bridge, not far from the monument above, crosses the border, and is known as the Bridge of No Return.  At the far end is a wall now, but at the end of the Korean War several thousand POWs from both sides were brought here and told to cross the bridge to the Korean they wanted to live in.  Once their choice was made, there was no turning back, hence the name.  Incidentally, only about 1/6 people chose to go to the North Korean side.

52 Short Stories in a Year - 1 month update

After deciding to take up the challenge of writing 52 short stories in a year, here is my update after finishing the first month on 21st July.

Name	Type	Word Count	Status
The Ship	Short Story	3793	Finished - to edit
Take me Back with You	Short Story	2528	WIP
Take me Back with You	Novelisation	9373	WIP
The Lost Train	Short Story	3362	WIP
The Other Set of Feet	Short Story	3749	Finished - to edit
The Hunter	Novella	5543	WIP
Once We Were Children	Short Story	2513	Finished - to edit
The Assignment	Short Story	2737	WIP
		33598

I'm actually one story behind on getting one per week, but I've averaging out at a little over 1000 words a day, and considering I'm also fitting editing a novel into the tiny window of free time I have each day I'm pretty happy with my progress.

The Ship is a short story about a boy obsessed with supertankers who falls foul of a school bully.  I did a ton of research on supertankers and stuff and then ended up cutting most of it out as my attempt at writing literary fiction ended up more action-based.

Take me Back with You is a kind of romance, which is a little strange because I've never written anything like that before.  The short story is pretty much a summary of the story which I decided to make into a novel of perhaps 60k or so, and now the main plot line is mapped out in my head I probably won't bother finishing it as a short story.

The Lost Train is about a pair of kids who find a train sticking out of the ground and discover it is one that went missing thirty years before.  I wanted to write a story about the now closed North Cornwall Railway, and this is it.  I'm a little stalled on the plot at the moment but I'll get to it eventually.

The Other set of Feet is a weird little story about a man trapped in his bedroom by a supposed murderer hiding under his bedsheets.  It's kind of comical, kind of just plain weird.

The Hunter (provisional title) is a novella set in the world of my novel, The Tube Riders, and introduces a few characters who may or may not make it into the second part of the story.  Still thinking about it.

Once we were Children is an attempt at writing a nostalgic story about an old man thinking back on good family times as he faces his death.  I tried to write in the style of a movie me and the wife watched recently about a man who went off on a last journey with his dog after his family fell apart and they ended up dying together.  My story is nowhere near as good, though.

The Assignment is what I think is the ace in the pack, a short story about a young man working for a travel guidebook who is sent to an island never before visited by people in order to write a tourist guide.  There he will discover all sorts of strange things.  I got the initial idea from a dream I had of a giant aquamarine blue factory sitting on a an island beside a massive towering cliff.  It's going to have strange beings, action and crazy discoveries about the human race before its done, and the only one of the lot so far that I'll probably bother subbing to pro magazines.


Overall, I'm pretty happy with my progress.  It might not be the 10k a day that some stay-at-home-type writers churn out, but its actually more by word count than I've written in the last 18 months combined, and I feel connected with my words in a way I haven't in a long time.  The old turns of phrase are starting to come back and the plots are getting more and more intricate with each new idea.  To say I had been stagnating is an understatement, but in the wake of failing to get an agent for Tube Riders back in 2010 my writing basically fell of a cliff.

I'm still struggling to find more than an hour a day to write which is a worry, but that's life.  I'm not in a financial position to quit any of the work I do and I'm not about to give up my other hobbies.  Variety is the spice of life and all that, I just wish it was easier to stay awake from 10pm to midnight after working a fourteen hour day.

Still, progress is progress.  If only a few more people would buy my book then things would be great.

CW.

Castles Made of Sand & The Tree

I wanted to write a little bit about the two most recent stories I'm publishing on Amazon, Castles Made of Sand, and The Tree.  Both contain a moral message of sorts.

The first of these, Castles Made of Sand, is a space exploration story set on an alien world.  Two explorers, Randall and Boyd, come across a number of giant sandcastles on a beach and set about trying to find out who made them and why.  The message in this story is very much about the care humans must take when they interact with other living beings, be them animals or perhaps one day creatures from another world.

This story is especially important to me because it kick started my writing career back in 2006, and was the first significant story I had written in four years.  2002/3 was a golden period for me, and some of my best stories, including Joyriders, The Ageless, Benny’s Harem and the original short story from which my novel Tube Riders came, were written around that time.  However, I failed to sell anything, got disillusioned and gave up for a while.  Then, in 2006, I wrote Castles Made of Sand, discovered the ease of submitting via the internet, and it quickly became my first paid sale, after a couple of earlier ones had fallen through in the way that they so often do in the small press.  It has since been sold as a reprint to the magazine Aoife’s Kiss, and was published in 2009.  Now the rights are mine again, it’s taking its turn on Amazon.

The Tree is a dystopian story set in the future.  It was a bit of an experiment, written as it is in the form of a diary by a girl called Cybil, whose father works somewhere off-world, and one day returns home bringing with him a gift that Cybil and her brothers and sisters have never seen before – a little oak tree in a pot.  The story focuses on the reaction of the children and the fate of the little tree.

In school I remember reading what I thought was a short story but on investigating (thanks, Google) it seems to have been a poem, called We are Going to See the Rabbit, by an English poet called Alan Brownjohn.  The Tree is heavily influenced by this poem.  I found the poem on the net here, but have pasted it below for your interest (no copyright infringement intended).

we are going to see the rabbit

We are going to see the rabbit,
We are going to see the rabbit,
Which rabbit, people say?
Which rabbit, ask the children?
Which rabbit?
The only rabbit,
The only rabbit in England,
Sitting behind a barbed wire fence
Under the floodlights, neon lights,
Sodium lights,
Nibbling grass
On the only patch of grass
In England, in England
(Except the grass by the hoardings
Which doesn’t count.)
We are going to see the rabbit,
And we must be there on time.

First we shall go by escalator,
Then we shall go by underground,
And then we shall go by motorway
And then by helicopterway,
And the last ten yards we shall have to go
On foot.

And now we are going
All the way to see the rabbit.
We are nearly there,
We are longing to see it,
And so is the crowd
Which is here in thousands
With mounted policemen
And big loudspeakers
And bands and banners,
And everyone has come a long way.
But soon we shall see it
Sitting and nibbling
The blades of grass
On the only patch of grass
In- but something has gone wrong!
Why is everyone so angry,
Why is everyone jostling
and slanging and complaining?

The rabbit has gone,
Yes, the rabbit has gone.
He has actually burrowed down into the earth
And made himself a warren, under the earth.
Despite all these people,
And what shall we do?
What can we do?

It is all a pity, you must be disappointed.
Go home and do something else for today,
Go home again, go home for today.
For you cannot hear the rabbit, under the earth,
Remarking rather sadly to himself, by himself,
As he rests in his warren, under the earth:
“It won’t be long, they are bound to come,
They are bound to come and find me, even here.”

ALAN BROWNJOHN

It's a pretty interesting thought to have no grass, rabbits or trees left, and while we might look around us now and think that such a situation might never happen, it's important for all of us to make an effort to look after the world we live in just to ensure that a world like that in the poem above or in The Tree never happens.

CW

How Much is a Short Story Worth?

How much is a short story worth?

I recently ran a free promotion for my short story, The Cold Pools, giving away 2041 copies in three days after it was picked up by the popular free ebook website Ereader News Today.

A couple of days later I received this comment as part of a generally positive 4-star review:

“This little story is very good and certainly worth borrowing, but not I think given its brevity, paying 99 cents for...”

Don't get me wrong, I was happy to receive the review and pleased that the reader took the time to write it, but it got me thinking.  So, this reviewer doesn’t think my story is worth 99 cents.  In that case, what is it worth? And what is 99 cents worth?

There seems to be a growing attitude that just because something is digital and can't be held in your hand then it has no value.  Hence the proliferation of music/movie/ebook piracy, which is effectively theft from the comfort of one's own home.  I have no problem at all with listening or watching something on Youtube, which I consider to be a form of borrowing, but downloading pirated music or movies is stealing, so I don't do it.  I don't care what other people do, but I know I'd be mighty pissed off if there were 30,000 copies of my writing being passed around without my authorization.


Anyway, back to the main thread, the value of a short story.

At the time of writing, The Cold Pools has sold 8 copies, for each of which I made 35 cents. In addition to this it was originally published in 2009 in an online magazine which paid me $15. I paid $3 for the cover image for the ebook, so currently it breaks down like this –

Paid sales + $15

Amazon sales 8 at 35c = + $2.80

Cover art - $3

Equals $14.80 total profit.

So, not counting the ezine sale, I’m currently making a loss on Cold Pools.

However. 

The reviewer’s concern was that the story wasn’t worth paying 99 cents for. Cold Pools is 3500 words long, which is admittedly short for an ebook, although it was packaged with the first chapter of a novel as a bonus (and not a shameless form of self-promotion, honest ... ;-) ). I write at roughly 1000 words an hour, plus these things always take a couple of hours to edit and format. Even saying it took me six total hours to write Cold Pools (which is probably pretty conservative, it’s likely double that at least) it still works out at a pretty measly hourly wage.

Currently, assuming it took just six hours, I’ve made $2.46 per hour from Cold Pools. I’ve sold 8 copies in three months. Let’s say I sell 1000, which at this stage looks pretty unlikely to happen within twenty years. That would be $350, or $58/hour. Much better, although considering I can easily earn $50/hour teaching English it really isn’t that much.

Moving on, I’d like to consider just what 99 cents is worth. I live in Japan, so I’ve done a conversion in order to investigate. 99 cents is 78 yen, which, frankly, is hardly anything.  We have 100 yen shops for a reason, and that is because very little is valued at less.  With this knowledge in hand, I decided to visit my local 7Eleven to see just what was worth less than my story, and what was worth more.

Here it is, the winner.  My story is worth exactly the same amount as this boiled egg, which comes in a kind of soy sauce and is designed to be put into a bowl of ramen noodles.  Now, I know you get a physical product, whereas my story is just a bunch of words on a screen, but its not like the egg and the packaging it comes in is designed fresh each time - it is just replicated on the production line, just like my story.  You see what I'm getting at?  78 yen is probably worth it for the hours it took someone to design that product, even if the number of potential sales is as many as there are chickens.

This packet of sliced, processed ham is worth slightly less, at 75yen.  It was one of only perhaps four items that actually cost less than my story.  Among the others were a cheap single meal tub of catfood and a single disposable razor.  There wasn't a single chocolate bar that was cheaper than my story.  Believe me, 99 cents is not a lot.

And this bottle of Pom orange juice, at 157yen, is worth almost exactly twice as much as my short story.

Interesting.

I guess it all comes down to how you perceive value.  I welcome all reviews on my work and if people think my writing sucks, then so be it.  It's all up to you.  What does concern me is that a lot of readers don't consider our work to have any value at all.  Do plumbers put in pipes for free?  Do bank managers hand out free mortgages?  Do teachers give free lessons?  Only if they're idiots.

Of course services are products aren't free.  Generally, when something is free it falls into two categories - charity or promotional.  It is the second that directly effects me so I'll focus on that.  Incidentally, on my visit to the 7Eleven I was given this bottle for Lemon Volvic as a service, because I'm pretty much in there every day spending money.

It was a nice gesture, and it was appreciated.  But does it mean that I now expect to get all my bottles of water free every time I go into 7Eleven?  Of course not.  The only point of giving me a free bottle of water was to encourage me to go back and shop there again.  Which of course I will, not just because it is the closest shop to my house but because the staff are nice to me and they stock stuff that I want.  It's no different to when I give my short stories away on Amazon, it's not out of the kindness of my heart, it is with the hope that readers will enjoy them and want to visit my "shop" again.

There are many, many writers out there who are nowhere near as good as me who are making far more money, and there are many far better making even less.  A lot of it comes down to marketing and how good you are at it.  I suck at marketing.  I'm not good at networking.  I'm not particularly prolific at making friends, let alone charismatic enough to make people I meet buy stuff I have written.  I have one novel out at the moment, The Tube Riders.  Everyone who has read it and reviewed it has said it's exciting, original, a great read.  These are not people I have paid or people I know, these are complete strangers.  It's got to the semi-final shortlist of a minor award, and I'm pretty confident it'll make the final five.  It took me three months just to write the first draft, and its currently priced at $2.99, which is less than a 500ml can of beer in my local 7Eleven (beer is pricey in Japan...!).  It's the cost of three boiled eggs, and about half the price of a Starbucks Coffee.  I've sold about 20 copies.  Is it worth this price?  Personally I think it's worth a lot more, but potential customers don't seem to agree.

It is a dangerous world we live in where creative media is considered of less and less value.  Art enriches life, especially good art, and while Amazon in particular is clogged with junk passing itself off as literature, there is still a lot of great writing to be found.  The famous indie writer Joe Konrath talks about a future where the only revenue from ebooks comes from internal advertising, but this is something that fills me with dread.  How far will we go to devalue something that so many people consider an enriching experience?  Something that entertains you or makes you think should have a value, be it music, art, film, literature.  People should be happy to pay for an experience that makes them happy, the same way that they'd pay to go on a rollercoaster or take a parachute jump.

So criticise all you like, but never say my work or the work of all the thousands of other writers, artists, film-makers, musicians and other creative types has no value, because you're wrong, it does.

CW

The Challenge - 52 Short Stories in a Year

Recently I read this blog post by Dean Wesley Smith on how it was possible to earn a living writing short fiction.  Until then I had never heard of Dean, but it seems he's a pretty well-respected speculative fiction writer with a huge number of credits to his name, both traditionally published and indie-published.

His blog caused a huge backlash, particularly on Kindleboards, with numerous indie-writers churning out several thousand words arguing whether he was right or wrong.  I've never been a big one for forums (to be honest, the less time I spend on forums the better – while they can be a great place to learn and make friends they can also suck valuable hours out of a busy day) so I ducked out of that conversation early in order to try to find out for myself.

I know for a fact that you can make good money selling short stories to magazines.  Twice I've cashed checks for well over a hundred dollars for short stories I’ve sold, and of course the possibilities of indie-publishing are infinite.

For me, the biggest problem has always been the work ethic.  I know I can write – I have eight novels, eighty-odd short stories and perhaps twice as much unfinished work sitting on my hard-drive.  I’ve just never been that prolific.  I've never written more than one novel in a year and perhaps 20 short stories in a year is my best effort.

There are many examples from history of writers who've experienced huge success on the back of one book, some even on one short story.  Those people, while highly skilled, had huge elements of luck behind them, as well as the old case of right place, right time.  I've read wonderful books by writers who died unknown, so just writing a good book is not enough.  For the vast majority of us mortals, a high rate of productivity is the key to getting noticed and gradually becoming successful.  I have been trying to sell my writing for fifteen years, so if it takes a few more before I make any money out of it then so be it.

So for me, taking up the challenge of trying to write 52 short stories in a year is more about giving myself a reason to write than trying to prove anyone else right or wrong.  What I am going to do, though, is attempt to sell them.  The good ones at least.

In Dean's post he's very strict on sales channels and pricing.  He says to submit only to magazines offering 5c/word, which is considered by the SFWA to be a professional payment level.  These magazines are very hard to crack (believe me, I've been trying), so I'm going to lower my standards just a little to 3c/word.  I sold to Weird Tales at 3/c a word in 2008 and made a perfectly acceptable amount.  However, I'm done with token payment and for-the-luv markets.  Sorry guys, I ran with you for a while, but with Amazon around now those $5 payments are not worth the months of subbing and waiting for a response.

As for the big gun itself, Amazon, I'll be indie-publishing short stories there if I feel they meet my own standards.  Another writer has set up a website called 52 Shades of Short Stories for writers like me who are taking up the challenge.  I'll be following it closely, mostly as a motivator.  However, I won't be rushing to publish on Amazon and would advise others against it.  I have fifty short stories I could put on Amazon tomorrow, but the reason I haven't is because I don't think they're good enough.  Unless I feel that a story is good enough to make a reader want to read my other stories or novels then it'll stay in the logbook for now.  Perhaps if I put out a few anthologies I'll slip a few of these stories in, but within the limits of my own ability I have pretty high standards.  It's the same reason most of my novels will never see the light of day.

As for Amazon pricing, Dean Wesley Smith recommends a minimum of $2.99 for a short story.  In principle I agree with him, however, I don't have a following or a name or even any major credits.  In short, I'm an unknown.  Since my first short story went up on Amazon in January, I've squeezed out 98 total sales.  Perhaps 30 of those are to friends/family, but even 68 sales to strangers is hardly setting the world alight.  My novel, The Tube Riders, will be staying at $4.99 for the time being, but the short stories will move up and down, looking for their best price point.  I don't like selling stories at .99c, but it's better than selling nothing at all.

So, to the challenge.  I sat down on Thursday, 21^st of June to start.  So far, this is what I've written –

              The Ship (short story) – 3850 words (finished)

              Take Me Back With You (short story) – 2500 words (WIP)

              Take me Back with You (novel version of the ss) –2300 words (WIP)

              The Lost Train (short story) – 3400 words (WIP)

                            Total – 12050 total words, one completed work.

Not bad for a week, considering some days I'm out of the house for fourteen hours.

I'll be posting regular updates along the way, to see if I can keep up my progress.  My target is 52 new, completed short stories of at least 2000 words by June 21^st, 2013.  Anything else that I come up with is a bonus.

Wish me luck.  It's probably going to break my back, but to be honest it's about time I pulled my finger out and got down to business.  I've been flattering myself that I'm a future bestselling author for the last 15 years, so now it's time to start proving it.

CW

My latest marketing attempt - Tube Riders in three parts

It was on my original list of marketing possibilities, but I've finally got around to trying it.  Tube Riders is now available in three parts, London, Bristol, and Cornwall.  You can see the covers below.  I used the same photograph and just changed the colour tint.  Its not the best, I know, but I did it with the express purpose of giving away part one for free.  I did that last week, and got some 330 downloads.  I've since sold six copies of the books, two of each version.  It's not much, but its a start.

Did I like doing this?  Not really.  In some senses I feel it's cheating the reader, because, while the novel does split neatly into three parts, they are part of the same novel.  However, there are dozens of indies out there who claim to have a 'trilogy' when each novel is barely the same length of one of these parts.  I wrote Tube Riders with an eye on getting professionally published, not as a marketing ploy.  However, I'm making almost no sales and I'm getting almost no exposure, when far, far worse writers are making a living.  I'm no Dickens but just from what I've read of other indies I'd say with all modesty I'm easily in the top 10%.  I glanced at a Look Inside section of a novel of a guy constantly whining on the KDP forums about not making any sales, and he had a simple spelling error in his first sentence.  I mean, come on.

I don't want to cheat anyone, and I want to offer the best product that I can.  But I really want Tube Riders (and my other novels) to sell, because, compared to so much of the other self-published stuff I've seen, they deserve to.

CW.