Even though this was a short week I’ve managed to squeeze in several more novels from John Conroe’s Demon Accords. An amazing series btw if you’ve hadn’t checked it out yet. I’ve had a couple friends point this series out. This weekend I’ll be sure to give Mr. Conroe some well deserved reviews for his writing. Since I’ve started writing there is never just a “pleasure read” so to speak.

It’s not that I’m not fully enjoying the writers I talk about in my blog, but there are really important examples of how the writers have done something in particular that I’m also researching. It’s one of the best things about writing. I can research and learn while enjoying great stories. Gotta love that!

What’s really interesting about John’s main characters are that they are so incredibly overpowered. For those of you that have read Flight, then I expect you can understand my interest in how he handles his characters stories. I know some people might instantly think that an overpowering man character would make for a dull story, but that’s entirely not the case. No matter how powerful you are, there are always things that make you vulnerable. Also, I just enjoy the raw power of the main character and how it's welded into an incredible plot line. I take my hat off to John for his amazing stories. As enjoyable as the “Good Intentions” series is, the Demon Accords are just as good. Although not at the same level of eroticness they are definitely worth reading.

Just in case you were wondering, the answer is "yes". I was also researching the different levels of sexual/eroticness between the stories to assist in my own learning/writing of my own stories romantic scenes. My ideas are definitely falling somewhere in-between these two writers flavors.

For those of you wondering how I can write and read in an evening, I tend to finish off most normal sized books in around six hours or less. Yea, we are not talking about Wheel of Time books, those just give me a headache because it takes me like three or four sittings to finish a freaking book, although great stories. So far I’ve been faring better when I read first and write afterword, since the reading will keep me up to 4 in the morning, but the writing I’ll go to bed by 1. It means I get a little more sleep for my work day.

Right now I’m working on the Elven part of my story. All of my characters are there in the middle of it, so it’s like not “ALL” Elvish, if you know what I mean. But there is so much culture involved that it keeps my mind working full time on getting the flavor where I want it to be while bringing the world to life. It would have been easier to just make one species of elf, but in all of my time playing D&D or reading Fantasy. Just having one type of elf didn’t seem right, hence why I have three distinctive Elven cultures in the story.

Anyway, it’s time to get writing tonight, so I’ll blog again another day.          

Larissa Evans is a thirty-two years old Archaeology. She holds a Ph.D. in Archaeology, Anthropology and Linguistics and has spent the majority of her life studying cultural, physical and linguistic anthropology, focusing specifically on ancient and classical civilizations of the Mediterranean. Although she is recognized as a world renowned Archaeology and Linguist, her height and looks has made it nearly impossible for her to be taken seriously among her peers within the male dominated field of Archaeology.

While her model height of one point eighty-seven meters (6' 2"), small waist and large chest has time and again caused her considerable problems throughout her professional career, her sharp mind and extensive knowledge of ancient civilizations has allowed her to excel within field archaeology. At the age of twenty-six she turned down a Professorship of Classical Archaeology at Oxford University, once she learned that Jowettney and Newtonian were the current electors. Larissa adamantly refuses to confine archaeology to the classics, which has put her at odds with her academic peers. Instead she accepted a position as the Keeper of the Ashmoloean Museum.

Her Father, Sir Arthur John Evans, was her motivation for going into the field of archaeology. His death when she was fourteen years old left a hole in her life. Still, even in death her Father’s many professional connections and her in-depth knowledge of ancient civilization has enabled her to succeed.

For those of you interested the audio book for Flight, it can be found
here: http://www.amazon.com/Flight-The-Last-Paladin-Series/dp/B00LIAUVCI/ref=tmm_aud_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1404911218&sr=8-1 
I still need to see if I’m allowed to give out a copy for Christian who
won the Goodreads Book Giveaway contest. I promise I’ll look into that. 
 
Just so that you know, the audio book’s price is set by Amazon since I went with their production process, so it costs as much as any audio book does. For those of you who like audio books, I will say it's definitely worth the price. Alex Edward Trefethen did an unbelievable job with the story.

I hope the audio version does as well as the Ebook, so that Alex will be open to doing the second book in the series. Since honestly I can’t imagine hearing the story with anyone else’s voice.

It seems like life just doesn’t stop at times. I’ve been given the ancient Chinese curse – “May you live in interesting times”. Not that being busy and having lots of things happening is curse, but sometimes I wish events would slow down and give me enough time to recover in-between.

Over the last few weeks I’ve had friends shipping out, my daughter’s return from her exchange program, a wedding in Germany, a wedding in Poland, my audio book release, wife’s nephew’s visit, teaching my daughter how to drive and my first invite into an author meet-in-greet. All while working my normal full time job, preparing for an up and coming move for work, dealing with some personal emergencies that popped up during this same time, while doing my best to squeeze in whatever time leftover to write and work on the plot line of Book Two of the Last Paladin Series. Henceforth the reason I haven’t been to bed before 0200 hours in weeks.

Luckily during my drives heading into work and returning back home on the weekends I get a couple hours to figure out scenes in my head.

Somehow I’ve fit everything into my schedule. This week things are finally getting back somewhat to normal (if you discount Fourth of July weekend), but last night everything finally caught up to me and came down with a cold. A good excuse as any to go to bed at a reasonable time, like midnight =D 

It’s amazing how much better you feel after a decent night’s sleep.

Couple highlights from the Super Strength Speed Reading Event. I met several Amazing writers and interviewers. Most notably were Will Massa, Tina Tame, Starla Huchton and Drew Hayes. Don’t get me wrong, the other authors (P.S. Power, Michael G. Thomas Joshua Guess, March McCarron & Cheree Alsop just to name a few) from the Event are awesome too and I bought all of their books, but for this post I want to talk about the first set.

First off Will Massa is just a great guy and I loved his titles. His Gargoyle Knight and Fear the Light series look awesome. I’ve bought both. The cover Will did on his Gargoyle Knight Series is incredible and I think we both hit it off due to the stories we both like to write. Either way, I had a great time talking with him during the event and look forward to getting to know him better in the future.

Starla Huchton is just an amazing woman. She is savvy and smart about promoting herself and an awesome person with Super Geek Cred in my book. There is a lot any writer could learn just watching how she works. I picked up a copy of her Evolution: ANGEL Series because it sounds like a great story.  

Drew Hayes was a just an amazing wealth of information and a super nice guy. He had some great information in regards to BoolBub & Bookgorilla, The Pen & Cape Society for authors and some incredible creative ideas for Web Series. Over the next several weeks I’m going to have to dig into everything he was talking about, but like I said, a great guy who has no problems sharing from his experiences, which I have nothing but respect for the man.

I’ve put Tina Tame in here due to Fang Tastic and a whole area of Dark Urban (Erotic-Romance) novels I’d never knew about. She invited me to an Event where I ran into some of Isobelle Cate’s work. Let’s just say it’s the perfect read to work on my up and coming romance scenes in my Series. Just plain hot. Tina is super cool and I had a great time chatting with her. Not to mention, she also speaks German of all things. All in all a smart, sexy and amazing woman with some great taste in graphics, so if you get a chance check her out on facebook at Tina Tame or Fang Tastic.

Lastly, I met a writer named Michael G. Thomas and fell in love with his cover for Legions of Orion. I immediately bought his book for two reasons. First, any book with a cover like that is going to grab my attention, and so far I’ve been enjoying the read. I can’t wait to get to the space battle scenes. Second, it partly scared me that the cover looked eerily similar to a Sci-Fi story that’s been bouncing around in my head. Luckily for me the story is different enough that when I write my own it won’t be in conflict with his story line, but when I first saw the cover I truly freaked.  

There were a lot of other incredible people I had a chance to meet. Although everyone was cool and I really enjoyed Geeking Out, I spent most of the Event talking with Kelsea Schafer while trying to keep up the chaos. Who, by the way, is a pretty interesting woman and a fan of Urban Fantasy type novels.

I still need to finish writing up my documentary of the self-publishing processes. Although I have a lot of great information already listed about the process, there are still some important points I’d like to finish up for those writers looking to self-publish their own books.

In the days to come, I will be discussing my exploration into some of the great groups and tools that Drew Hayes gave me information about. Also I want to discuss some of the characters in Book Two.

An Indie Writer’s life is one of striving for balance while writing. 

This is for the Super Strength, Speed Reading Event.

Along with the overall book giveaway, I will be  offering three digital copies of Flight, Book 1 of The Last Paladin Series during my time to meet and greet my fans from 09:00 Est to 12:00 Est on Saturday Morning. I’ll be giving away one per hour. 
 
To win your copy, just ask questions during the hours I will be online for the event. 
 
Looking forward to talking about Flight or my up and coming book two for the series, or whatever you want to talk about. 
 
At the end of the hour I will randomly pick one entry to be the winner.

One quick update, the 99 cent purchases will need to be from Amazon. I have direct control over my book at Amazon, while the other websites my book is sold on via Smashwords takes weeks for the requested changes to go through. Don't worry if you don't have a Kindle. The Kindle App is available for all platforms, so if you have an Iphone or Android the free app will allow you to read Flight on your device.

The link for the event is here: https://www.facebook.com/events/310916962406470

Alex sent me the completed work last Friday, but I was in Poland going to a wedding for my wife’s family. Between the wedding, driving back to Germany on Sunday and then heading in for work on Monday morning, I just hadn’t had a chance to check out the audio book.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t had a chance to start listening to the audio book until tonight. Part of that was because I was chatting with Richard who I met off of Goodreads after he read my book. He’s a cool guy. We were talking about writing and stuff and before I knew it half the evening was gone. I don’t get a chance to Geek-out as much as I’d like since I’ve been writing and not Computer Gaming, even though a friend at work did give me a key for WildStar-Online. For those of you who haven’t heard about it, the link is here: http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/  It looks completely cool though.

The other part of the reason was I was preparing for attending “The Super Strength Speed Reading Event” https://www.facebook.com/events/310916962406470 . I just realized it’s going to be Thursday tomorrow and I haven’t decided how I’m going to do my Ebook giveaways. Ack! I’ll have to figure that out tomorrow.  

I just finished chapter five and all that I can say is “WOW!” I’ve never listed to an audio book before, so this was my first time going through the experience. I can only say Alexander Edward Trefethen has an incredible range of voices. If you’re interested about Alex, his web site is here: http://trefethenvoice.com/

I was a little concerned about having a man do the voice. I tend to love female voices, but I figured since Startüm, the main character, is male that a man’s voice would sound better for the book. I wasn’t sure how he was going to manage the children, demon, werewolf and female voices in the story, but I loved Alex’s voice so much during the sample he sent me. I had to go with him.

Alex’s skill is freaking unbelievable! His voice really brings the characters to life. I just got through the entire Werewolf Shadow Fang battle scene and was blown away. That might sound funny, but you have to understand. I have read through Flight, Book One of the Last Paladin Series over thirty times, seriously at least that amount of times. Every time I’m amazed at how the story pulls me in. This time was the most intense yet with Alex’s voice.    

The reason I’ve gone through the book so many times is because of the editing for mistakes and smoothing out the writing. Since I didn’t have $8,000 for a professional editor to go through the manuscript, I’ve had friends help with getting Flight in the best shape I could given the funds I had. Also, the website grammarly.com and of course help from critics who have pointed out the mistakes I’ve missed after publishing. I just look at it as free editing help, since I know the story is good. Maybe for Book Two I will try getting help from Kickstart.

I’m trying to get through the book this week, but there are a lot of chapters to get through. Either way it will be ready for the end of this month.

I’ve been asked if I could give out a free audio book for some of the contest winners. Right now it’s a huge group of 26 mp3’s that are around 2.5 GB’s in size all together. Also I don’t know how licensing works between Alex and I for promoting the book by contests for free audio book giveaways. Once I know I’ll post what I’ve learned and hopefully be able to send the audio book version out to the few people who asked after winning the Goodreads Book Contest Giveaway.

Bryan Cohen contacted me a couple weeks ago about participating in the Super Strength, Speed Reading Event, which is a one-day sale on superhero and action & adventure books. We will all be dropping the costs of our books down to 99 cents for one day. The event runs on June 28th, 2014 and I’ll be attending in person virtually in the morning, between the hours of 0900 to 1200 U.S. Eastern Standard Time.

Due to my time zone being Central Europe, this will mean the event starts at 1500 hours in the early afternoon for me. I'm looking forward to answering questions about Flight, Book One of the Last Paladin Series, giving tidbits on Book Two's story line, discussing the release of the audio book for Flight at the end of this month and anything else that people want to talk about.

When I’d first heard about this event, I thought it sounded like an awesome idea. A group of Indie Authors coming together for their fans and to support one another in getting the word out about their great novels. After checking out everyone’s books I was really blown away the magnitude of great writers participating in this event.  

After spending most of my life either reading Sci-Fi and Fantasy books or playing numerous computer games. This is one of those “WOW” moments that will stand out in my life. Looking at these fellow author’s works, I can’t say enough how exciting it is to be asked to be a part of such an incredibly talented group of writers.

Truly a dream come true!

Please take the time to stop by and chat with these amazing writers and check out their works.

The invited author list is as follows:

Drew Hayes, author of SuperPowereds: Year 1 & 2 and NPCs just to name a few.

Joshua Guess, author of Dead Will Rise, Victim Zero and Next just to name a few.

March McCarron, author of Division of the Marked.

Kelly Oram, author of Chameleon and Ungifted from the Supernaturals Series just to name a few.

Jason Tesar, author of The Awakened Book Series.

William Massa, author of Silicon Man, Gargole Knight and Fear the Light just to name a few.

Michael G. Thomas, author of the Star Crusades Nexus Series.

R S J Gregory, author of Cosmic Girl.

Nick S. Thomas, author of the Battle Earth Trilogy.

P.S. Power, author of The Young Ancients Series and Demon Bait just to name a few.

Meg Collett, author of The Hunted One and coauthor of The Lost One from the End of Days series.

Cheree Alsop, author The Silver, The Galdoni and Small Town Superhero Series just to name a few.

You can find the link here: 

This was an excellent question brought up from the post I had about Minotaurs being in Book Two’s story line and how will that fit with the current story arc. There are actually going to be a number of races introduced into the story in Book Two. This is because of the story will be focused on Irlendria.

At the end of the First Tuonellian War, the Klavikians were destroyed except for a half-breed child named Startüm Ironwolf who was brought to Earth by his Grandsire Shadowfang. Although the Klavikian civilization has been destroyed, they did not fight the war alone. At the outset of the Great War, the Klavikians brought together the many races of Irlendria forming The Alliance of Aurenko to defend the world.

Book Two will be introducing the world of Irlendria, while following the action on Earth as it continues unfold. Just because Startüm has left Earth doesn’t mean the Tuonellians are finished with Humanity.

I just wanted to congratulate the winners for their autographed copy of Flight:

Natalie of Essex, Great Britain
Christian of South Carolina, USA
Sara of North Dakota, USA
Matthew of North Yorkshire, Great Britain
Carla of Sydney, Australia

The packages went out in today's post. I'm not sure how long they will take to reach their destinations, since the post office I use is a little bit different than most peoples'. You'll understand once you see the "From" address "city" and "state" line.

Please let me know how you like the story when you've finished reading the book and once again thank you for your interest in my novel. 

This was a recent quandary I faced. Partly this was because I didn’t fully understand how being in Amazon KDP affected how Amazon promoted my book. To be honest, I still do not fully know everything about how the KDP Program affects Amazon Marketing, but I can give you the rundown of my experience and what I have researched for moving forward.  

Initially I had planned to make my book available everywhere, but when Amazon asked if I wanted to put my book in their KDP program, I started reading the fine print and realized that meant I couldn’t sell the digital copy anywhere else for a three month time period, which is how long a subscription to KDP lasts. If Amazon discovers your eBook has been sold somewhere else then you do not receive any money from the KDP program for that time period.

Wow, that really gave me a pause, but at the same time I was very new to self-publishing and I figured. “Eh, what could it hurt? I could give it a try and see what happens.” Its three months.

A lot has happened since that time. Luckily I had some fellow authors, K.B Stevens and TCoulter give me great some advice right around the time my KDP program was ending. I ended up leaving Amazon KDP for now, and I will explain why, although realize that leaving Amazon KDP doesn't mean you're leaving Amazon's Market Place.

Just for those of you new to these concepts, you have different sales listed when you’re in Amazon’s KDP select program: Regular book sales, regular eBook sales, Lending Library loaned eBook sales and eBooks given away for free. Each sales channel's numbers are different.

During the time frame of February to the end of May of having my eBook in Amazon’s KDP select program. I only had maybe thirteen eBooks loaned out of the KDP Lending Library. Now the good thing was that for each eBook loaned from KDP’s Lending Library, I received on average two dollars per eBook. Normally I receive fifty-four cents per eBook that people purchase outside of the program, that’s because I took the lowest Royalty option to keep my price down and I priced my book at a dollar ninety-nine. I made this decision because as a new writer I think that’s only fair for the people taking a chance on reading my eBook for the first time to pay a lower price. Basically that equates to around twenty-five regular eBooks sold during that time, which is not very many eBooks for a three month time period.

Do I regret having my eBook in Amazon’s KDP program then? The answer is no and here’s why.

As soon as I put my eBook into Amazon’s KDP select program I had friends of mine and work colleagues tell me that in their weekly emails from Amazon offering books that they might like to read similar to what they were reading now. My eBook was listed in these emails. Hell, I received the same emails too and so did my wife.

For a new writer this kind of marketing presence is seriously huge!

Now this is the part I do not fully understand and is a quandary, so I can only give you my impressions of what happened from my own experiences and from some of the various reading I’ve done Online. It seems like Amazon doesn’t do this for every new writer in the beginning. If you’re not in Amazon’s KDP select program I do not think that Amazon would just send out your eBook as a possible match to people reading similar stories. I imagine that once you have a few sales that Amazon would start adding your eBook to their advertisement emails, but as a new writer I do not feel like this would happen.

Again, let me reiterate that this is only my half formed opinion of the process, because I do not know for sure how Amazon determines this, and unless you’re speaking to the Amazon person who knows this 100% then I would say that if someone tells you something different that they do not know 100% either. Just keep that in the back of your mind when someone is telling you their thoughts on this process.

Once you do get some sales going then you will start showing up automatically on Amazon’s list “Other people who have read this book also bought these titles …”. Once you’ve managed to do this then your sales will start moving, but you have to reach this point.

Now this post isn’t going into all the different ways to promote your self-published book. I will add in what I know and some of the stuff my friend TCoulter has in general done for her own novel. I will add in one additional note of information I discovered

It seems like the best use of Amazon’s KDP select program is to promote your eBook at a reduced price or even free on Amazon. There is a lot of discussion as to the pros and cons of this, but I will distill everything I’ve read and know down to two methods.

The first method is if you have two or more eBooks out. You can use Amazon’s KDP select program to offer your first ebook for free or at a reduced price to build interest in the new eBook you’re releasing of that same series by marketing through the KDP program. Again this is a powerful tool to build interest in your newest novel of the series on Amazon. From what I’ve read, many authors wouldn’t say you shouldn’t be joining the KDP program if you only have one novel. Again, refer back to my thoughts on Amazon marketing your eBook as a new writer through KDP.

The second method is to offer your new novel for free on KDP to get people to download it. Even though you’re not making money by giving away free downloads, you are getting your eBook out to various peoples libraries, which will give you that placement on Amazon “Other people who bought this book also bought this book …”.

Either way, I wouldn’t get down if your eBook/book doesn’t sell much in the first month. Just go about promoting your book wherever you can. If it still isn’t picking up interest then it could be a number of issues, such as the cover needing to be better art or your excerpt in the back not being written correctly to name two of the most common problems that affect building interest in your book.  

In regards to making the jump from Amazon’s KDP Select Program to Smashwords, I would have to say that I don’t see any losing points to doing this. Really you have everything to gain by doing this, although that doesn't mean at times you won't join one of your eBooks into the KDP program once again from time to time. Read my reasoning below.

Smashwords will get your eBook out to their network of partners, which is unbelievably huge. You also can sell directly on Smashwords’ website too. Not to mention, it makes more sense to send your eBook out to various other books sellers like iBooks and Barnes & Noble through Smashwords instead of Amazon’s, because they take a much smaller cut of the profits. This means your eBook’s overall price will be much more competitively priced in comparison to other eBooks being sold of the same genre by other writers using different channels than you.

I had an amazing author named Massimo Marino direct me to the pros of using Smashwords and I have to say he was 100% correct. Currently they have these sales channels to offer your eBook on: Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Amazon, Apple, Diesel, Page Foundry, Baker & Taylor Blio, Txtr, Library Direct, Baker-Taylor Axis360, OverDrive, Flipkart, Oyster and Scribd. I didn’t mention Sony because currently the Sony eBook distribution is no more.

Not to mention on Smashwords you get a lot more for your eBook, that same fifty-four cents increases to a dollar sixty per sales when the eBook is bought directly from Smashwords’ website. Also, your sales through their partners are higher than going through Amazon’s partner program.