Evermore: Call of the Nocturne Kindle Edition Release Date
I am happy to announce that typesetting of the Kindle Edition is complete and that I'm ready to finally release the Evermore: Call of the Nocturne to the Kindle Store on Wednesday, September 19th. It took some time to fix all of the little bugs resulting from the conversion process, forcing me to use my rusted HTML skills, but it's finally ready to go. The only thing I couldn't fix was a strange bug with the Kindle Fire that ignores the #start bookmark in the file. Instead, Kindle Fire will start the e-book halfway through the acknowledgements section rather than at the beginning of the prologue. After its release, I'll keep researching ways to remedy this bug but for the most part it's relatively minor. Everything else works just fine.Next steps will include getting the Lulu print edition ready, although it has run into some technical difficulties, and then setting up the official book launch.I hope you enjoy the book. If you want to let me know what you think, please drop me a line in the comment section below.
It's a Wrap! Evermore: Call of the Nocturne is Finally Complete!
After eight years, more than eight drafts, thousands of hours of my life, and three computers later, I have finally finished the manuscript for Evermore: Call of the Nocturne. My god, that took far longer than I ever expected it to. When I started back in 2004 (and this is not considering pre-production planning), I thought that it might take me three or four years. When I finished the first draft by 2007 or 2008, I thought I was nearly done. When I started this blog in 2010, my goal was to publish it that year. Obviously, that was not to be.
That said, the time was not wasted. During that four-year period, I had two professional edits done on my text. A developmental edit by Erin Stropes and a line edit by Amelia Bennett. The suggestions made by those two led to immense improvements in the manuscript. I owe them both a debt of gratitude for their contributions. E:COTN is a much better novel now then it was before their help. Still, it was four years!
Having reached the end of the road, I admit that my feelings are a little bittersweet. On one hand, I feel relief for having finally completed it. One the other hand, I feel a little bit lost. Completing this novel has been one of the driving forces of my life and now that it's over, I feel like I've lost a little bit of the purpose of my life. I have been thinking about this novel constantly for the last eight years, thinking up new plot elements, developing characters, and filling holes and inconsistencies. Now that's it's done, I no longer have to obsess about it. I'm also somewhat overwhelmed but the length of time I've been working on it. I've been working on E:COTN for about a quarter of my life. With its completion, a significant chapter of my life has closed. It will be a time in my life that I will always miss.
In an ironic twist, I started to watch Martin Scorcese's The Aviator to relax after completing the novel. At the beginning, the protagonist Howard Hughes four years and almost every cent who had on a movie called "Hell's Angels". His level of obsession with the project was absurd. He bought or loaned every plan he could find, used no fewer than 26 cameras, and then reshot the film twice: once because he wanted to get clouds into the shots and a second time because he wanted to add sound! It was insane and yet, while I watched, I understood completely. When you commit so much of your life to a project, it can be really difficult to let go. You want to make it perfect, but perfect is impossible. At some point you have to let it go, warts and all.Howard Hughes couldn't let it go and I've difficulty letting go of Evermore. As I came closer and closer to the end, I became more reluctant to finish. I was always finding something that needed to be improved or worked on. But at some point, I came to the conclusion that the novel was about as good as I could ever make. It was time to let it go. I had fixed all the plot holes I could find, I addressed every concern raised by my editors, it was done.There's still more work to do, of course. I still have to get the cover art drawn and arranged, I have to register the copyright and buy an ISBN. I'll need to prepare the epub file, test it and upload it to iBookstore and the Kindle store. I'll probably give the manuscript one more read to be sure but the bulk of the work is done.I'll also have more time to write on my blog. I've been so busy trying to finish E:COTN that I've neglected my blog at a very exciting time for self-publishing. We have new services arising, more direct access to iBookstore and an exciting new tool called iBooks Author that I'm dying to play with. I'll keep all of you posted on all of these developments and keep you appraised of E:COTN's release date as we approach.Thank you again for your patience. I hope that when it is finally published, you will enjoy reading Evermore: Call of the Nocturne as I did writing it.
The 99-cent e-book?
As some of you are aware, my original business plan was to sell my self-published short-stories for 99-cents, my novellas, for $2.99 and my novels for $4.99. I thought that these prices were fair, created differential pricing between three quality products, and were cheap enough to encourage buying. It turns out that I may have been wrong. According to David Carnoy, the standard price for an indie e-book is $2.99 and may be dropping to $2.99 99-cents.I had figured that $4.99 would allow me to differentiate myself from the big-box publishers who were overcharging customers. According to Carnoy, the digital revolution in publishing is, like music before it, pushing a race to 99-cents.
In some sense, what's happening in the Kindle Store is what's already happened in Apple's iPhone App Store, where developers have been forced to lower their prices to 99 cents to compete (recently, Angry Birds' maker Rovio told fellow developers to get used to pricing their apps at 99 cents). The price erosion isn't that great yet on the Kindle; there are still plenty of $9.99 and higher e-books out there from traditional publishers. And many of them still sell very, very well. But with so many more e-readers and iPads out there, the market has grown large enough--like the iPhone market did--that you can actually make decent money at 99 cents, particularly if you crack the Top 100.
Carnoy highlights the experience of Christopher Smith, whose "Fifth Avenue" became an Amazon best-seller, dropped his price from $2.99 to 99-cents and watched his sales soar into six figures. His strategy seems to periodically drop his price to 99-cents every once in a while to spike sales and maintain his Top 100 ranking on the Kindle Store. Then he returns his price to $2.99 and reaps the higher margin from sales attracted by his high ranking. It seems to be working well for him.On the other hand, Jesse Brown of Macleans believes that the Internet is becoming a 99-cent store where everything music to books to movies to videogames is sold at the magic price of 99-cents. According to Brown:
One dollar minus one penny seems to be the magic number when selling virtual goods that can otherwise be easily acquired for free. Self-published authors are discovering that when they drop their sticker price from $2.99 to $.99, sales shoot up, and their titles rapidly climb the charts. Rovio, makers of Angry Birds, have built a multimillion dollar business, a buck at a time, and now preach the gospel of that sweet spot price. Kindle Singles are Amazon’s bargain-priced short e-books, which are breathing new life into long-format journalism. Nine of the 10 best selling apps right now on iTunes are priced under a dollar. As different industries experiment with a range of pricing schemes for their wildly divergent products, they are all arriving at the same conclusion: 99 cents.
So this seems to leave me with two possible business models. The first is where I sell Novellas for 99-cents, Novels for $2.99, and drop the periodically to drive sales. The second option would be to sell everything for 99-cents. Personally, I more inclined to the former option as this would allow drop my price periodically, like Smith, to boost readership and give me something interesting to announce on my website (eg. "It's Canada Day. All books for 99-cents"). However, if Brown is right, then we're all going to end up at 99-cents anyway.One change is for certain. I will have to give away short stories for free. While they involve hard work and dedication to craft, they don't simply have the value proposition that a full-length novel would have. Instead, I can use them as a way to attract readers (who doesn't love free?) and build an audience for my full-length novels and novellas. They will also provide valuable experience in navigating the e-book self-publishing environment, even at a modest loss.Regardless of whether or not the ideal price is $2.99 or 99-cents, the goal remains the same: to publish and sell books. However, the pace of change is shocking in the industry. My life's work, once priceless in my eyes, is now probably worth 99-cents. Would you buy that for a dollar? I'm hoping so.
The Line Edit is Done
Those of you who have been following my blog will remember that I had hired Erin Stropes from kallista.ca to do a line edit of my novel Evermore: Call of the Nocturne. I am happy to announce that she has finished and returned my annotated manuscript to me. Or, I was happy until I found all the (valid) criticisms levelled at my baby. But not to worry, I did what any self-respecting writer would do. I went into the corner and cried.After a couple of hours and a couple of hundred tissues, I pulled myself from my misery and began to focus on what I needed to change. After some thought, I identified three major issues with the plot:
- The ending was too difficult to understand.
- The timelock used during the story fizzles out as it approaches the deadline.
- One of the major characters disappears without reason for half the novel.
The first problem I was able to solve last night with some clever tinkering but the other two will take weeks of work as I read through the manuscript yet again. This will be followed by a second swing through the novel as I address the thousands of small (and yet valid) points that Erin raised. Following these two drafts, I will have to submit it again to Erin for a final line-edit review.So while Erin's editing has levelled a blow to my self-esteem and delayed the novel's release for months, I still find that it was worth the time and the money (about $1200) to have the line edit done. Despite all the aggravation and extra work, the end result will be a manuscript that will be far more fun to read. Thus for those of you that are considering publishing your novel digitally on your own, I would fully recommend hiring an editor. They truly do pick up so many things that you missed. In fact, I would recommend three rules:
- Hire an editor.
- Your editor is always right.
- Your editor is ALWAYS right (it needs to be said twice)
Follow these rules (don't forget to pay her) and you will be able to produce a manuscript that you won't be ashamed of.
Pegasus Book Group Joins iPad Lineup
Macrumours.com (hey, I'm waiting for the mac mini and MacBook Pro upgrades alright!) is reporting that Pegasus Books Group has agreed to bring their entire line of indepndent books to the iPad. The news story can be found online at http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/22/apple-signs-up-independent-publisher-and-distributor-perseus-books-for-ibookstore.To comment, this is definitely the direction that I expected the iPad to go. Its digital distribution network opens up incredible opportunites for small and independent publishers. The only advantage that a large publisher would have in this environment is promotion.But it remains to be seen if Pegasus Group is the right choice for a digital noveliss like myself. While they have three hundred small publishers as clients, I still worry that I would be too small to be accepted into their clientale. I have after not yet published a single novel.There is also a question over what cut Pegasus will take with their deal with Apple. While we know that Apple will take 30% of every sale, we don't know how much of a cut that Pegasus Group will take on behalf of its small publishers. If it's small enough, it may still be worth it if Pegasus improves the visibility of the novel by getting a dedicated section of the iBook Store.While it still may be too large for ultra-small publishers like myself, it definitely deserves investigation. Most likely though I will have to wait for the CDBaby equivalent for digital publishing. Here's hoping that I don't have to wait long.
Building a Blurb - Evermore: Call of the Nocturne
After a long day finishing Bioshock, buying groceries, and making lunch for the work, I finally found some time to work on the web page for my first novel - Evermore: Call of the Nocturne. To start with, I've decided to stick to a simple teaser blurb. Despite its short length, blurb writing is no easy task. In the two years that I've struggled to get COTN published, I have always a challenge summarizing the story. My first synopsis was eight pages. I managed to shorten that to five for my later submissions. For a blurb, on the other hand, you only have 100 words or so. Not very much space.So for help on this task, I turned, as usual, to Google. Google led me to the following link by Marilynn Byerly which helped me a lot in writing my blurb. Marilynn has specific tips for each of different genres in which she writes. Based on her science fiction advice, I wrote the following:
Adam should be a happy man. He is the creator of Evermore, a virtual reality world in which millions of people play, work, and live out their lives. Days away from an initial stock offering that will make him a millionaire, Adam is on top of the world. But there is one secret that Adam must hide. Evermore can kill you.Faced with a sudden and inexplicable murder inside his virtual paradise, Adam must turn to a dangerous mercenary known only by the name Blue. Driven by her insatiable lust for violence, Blue must enter Evermore and hunt down the killer. But once she jacks in, will she be ready for the secrets that await her?Evermore: Call of the Nocturne is a science-fiction digital novel coming to iPhones everything Fall 2010.
All in all, not a bad first try at it. This blurb will of course change as we get closer to publication but to be frank I am pretty happy with my first try.The Evermore: Call of the Nocturne page can be found at http://scottblurton.com/?page_id=23. Stayed tuned to this page for new information about my first digital novel.
The Biggest Apple News Today Was Not the iPad
There was great excitement among tech geeks today as Apple revealed its first-generation iPad. Some people like it, some people hate it, but you can't deny that there is some great potential there. However, the iPad announcement was not the biggest news of the day. This was.That's right. Apple has created their own electronic book store.
Now in their announcement today, Apple boasted the support of five major publishing houses including Penguin, Macmillan, and Simon & Shuster and most likely many more. However, that in itself is not a particularly revolutionary concept for digital publishing.What is revolutionary is Apple's vision for the digital publishing medium as covered in this article by Wired. According to Wired, Apple's goal is not simply to sell mainstream books, but to revolutionize publishing in the same way that they revolutionized music and movies. In a sense, Apple wants to open up content production to everyone, a strategy that they call crowd-sourcing. This was the strategy that propelled the App Store to over a 100,000 apps, 3 billion downloads, and over a billion dollars in revenue.With books, if the Wired story is correct, that means that Apple would allow small publishers to publish content for the iBookstore while only taking a 30% cut.The consequences for our nascent industry are astonishing. The traditional chokepoints to distribution would essentially be annihilated. Through the iBookstore, essentially anybody would be able to sell their content to everyone for the first time and in only one place.So rather than sell self-published digital novels on Amazon, and Smashwords, and numerous other small distributors, you would sell it on iBookstore and reach an already established user base of millions (assuming that they'll bring the iBookstore to iPhone).That's it. No more half-solutions, no more backdoors, just one-stop shopping for everything.When I saw this story this morning, my jaw dropped. My game plan had to change. My goal was not just to get my novel onto iPhones. My goal is now to get my novel onto the iBookstore.How to do that however is left unanswered. If we are to go by the experiences of iTunes, then within a few months we'll have to go through a third-party like CDBaby that has an Apple License. Regardless of how it's done, it is apparent that it will soon be possible to self-publish your stories and sell them directly onto the iPhone and the iPad. This has been the holy grail for self-publishers and now it's within reach.Another interesting choice for Apple's new iBooks service is the adoption of the open source ePub file format. The ePub file format does have some detractors but it has one huge advantage over the "Meat Grinder" option that Smashwords offers: control. Using the ePub file format allows you complete control over how your digital book is displayed. This means that not only will you be able to publish your books on iPhone, you will be able to manage the typesetting of the manuscript. As someone who was discouraged by the Meat-Grinder one-size-fits-all typesetting of Smashwords, today's development enables me to make my manuscript look indistinguishable from the books from the major publishing houses. That is a major improvement.In short, it's a brand new world for digital self-publishing thanks to Apple and more importantly the new iBookstore. It is a world that I and many other prospective digital novelists will have to learn how to navigate. I hope that you will be able to join me.