News for the week of 12.12.12: Head injuries and subsequent lack of production

Greetings friends and readers!

Less to relate this week than usual, unfortunately. Last week, not too long after I sent out my last newsletter to you all, I went to kickboxing training, as is my wont. During said training, I was struck in the head several times, not particularly hard. Later that night, I developed a headache, dizziness, and nausea.

After several worried phone calls in the middle of the night to ascertain that my brain was not going to swell up and kill me in my sleep, I went to the doctor the next day. He told me that I have suffered a “head injury” (not a concussion, though it sure feels like one). I discovered on my own that that meant that trying to read or write for long periods made my brain think it had gotten on an amusement park ride.

So my last week has been very unproductive, as I’ve been reduced to working in 10-minute stints for a few hours a day while I recover. Trying to push the envelope on that, which I have done several times, has proven unwise.

In short, everything’s on hold except for paid work, until my brain sorts itself out.

Which is too bad, because there are still a lot of exciting things on the horizon. I’ve almost finished the first bit of Soulwoven bonus content for you (an Aleani language primer) and am pondering how best to launch it, and revisions on Nadya and design work on Three Dances were going very well until my injury.

Next week, I travel to the East Coast of the U.S. to spend the Christmas holidays with my girlfriend’s family. Hopefully, by then, I will be back to writing again.

Until then, dear friends, I remain,

Your wounded, dizzy writer,

Jeff

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News for the week of 12.5.12: Falling off the Front Page, Switching Gears on Revisions, and Trying New Things on Wattpad

I've started writing weekly newsletters to my fans on Wattpad, of whom there are now 92. So that those of you without Wattpad accounts can get in on the action, I'm also going post similar updates on my blog. You can also sign up to receive them via e-mail here.

Evening all!

Less than three weeks to the solstice, and in my part of the world, you can sure tell. But the Christmas tree is cut and put up, and I only broke one bulb when putting out the lights this year, and eggnog and peppermint ice cream are freely available in the grocery store, so I figure on the whole, it’s all worthwhile. :-)

Right. News.

I wrote a blog post on NaNoWriMo for the publisher I work for this week. You can find it here. I also put up some advice for college writers on my blog.

Soulwoven notched another 19,000 reads and 60 votes last week, but yesterday, it fell off the front page of Wattpad’s Featured books, where a lot of my readers were finding it. There was a corresponding massive drop-off in the number of reads it’s getting.

So to keep things moving with it, I need some help.

Right now it’s ranked #127 in Fantasy. I think it can hang in the Top 25. Maybe even the Top 10. If those of you with Wattpad accounts can take the time go to through and vote for every chapter you liked, and you share the book with your friends and fans and get them to do the same, I bet we can get it there.

Thanks in advance. :-)

In other news, I experimented this week with doing first-page critiques for people in the Share Your Story club on Wattpad. It was fun, and people seemed to enjoy it, so I plan to do it again. In the future, I’ll reserve some critiques for my Wattpad fans, so if you're interested, fan me there and stay tuned for messages from me announcing upcoming opportunities.

Finally, sequel talk! If you got last week’s newsletter, you know that I finished my NaNoWriMo book, Nadya Skylung and the Cloud Pirates. And despite my advice on the Carina Press blog, I can’t tear myself away from it. I’m going to revise it before I revise Soulwoven: Exile. It’s short, so it shouldn’t take too long, and I’ll still do my best to get up the first chapter of Exile sooner rather than later, but I wanted to be upfront with you guys about what I’m working on.

Thanks for reading, dear friends. Until next week!

-Jeff

Letter to a Younger Me

Lately, I've been trying to respond to as many Wattpad readers of mine as possible about Soulwoven, and to interact with them however I can. I do it in part because it's "best practice," whatever that means, and in larger part because I genuinely enjoying connecting with readers. It's the first time in my career I've had a chance to do so, and I'm really having a good time with it.

Yesterday, I ran across a reader of mine who's a college student. He was asking for advice on writing from the Wattpad community. There are several things I would really like to be able to go back in time and say to my college self on the subject, so I told him so and let him know what they were.

It occurred to me later that the advice might be useful to more college writers than just him, so I am now posting it here:

Write every day. Make it a priority. You may have a lot of excuses not to, like classes and college life and trying to remain sane in a high stress environment. You may even tell yourself it will be better to wait until after college to start writing seriously, because you'll be better then. You would be wrong to do so. Write now. Write often. Write whenever you can, on top of everything else you're doing. It will never get any easier to do it, and you will kick yourself down the road if you don't.

Signed,
An Older Jeff

Guested! Flash Fic on Chris Devlin's Blog

So my friend Chris Devlin is doing a guest blog thing in honor of Halloween, for which she has collected pieces of creepy, very short fiction from other writers to be displayed on her blog. I contributed a little chunk of a dark fantasy story I'm working on in a boundless, formless fantasy universe I'm quite coming to enjoy. I think, eventually, it will become my Dark Tower.

Anyway, the little chunk is from a story called The Chirugeon, and it can be found here.

There is formatting that has been stripped from it by her website, but it looks almost like poetry in the form in which she has posted it, and that's interesting, too. ;-)

Sorry for not updating on The Grand Experiment in a while. Quick stats rundown:

Soulwoven has just over 15,000 reads on Wattpad. It goes featured in a little less than a month. I have learned from reading the success stories of others that there's really a great deal of luck involved in cracking the tops of the rankings. For now, I feel good about the success I've had, and I'm still focusing on making the manuscript as amazing as my hands can make it. It has been difficult, because I have run out of money and had to begin writing part-time and late at night again. It feels like working through touch and muscle memory alone, because my brain is not at its best by then. I am hoping very much that it doesn't show in the final product.

Three Dances is progressing as well. The manuscript is in and I am waiting for copy edits and artwork so that we can move on to the layout stage. I am hoping to have it done by Christmas, but I fear it's going to be a close thing. Everything will have to move as quickly as possible and nothing will be allowed to go wrong, and I'm not betting on that happening.

For the Locker: Making Money in the Digital World

Today I read an article about making money in the digital world, where everything is available for free via BitTorrent. The article didn't say that out loud, but I think that's what it meant. You can read it for yourself below:

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php

As a body who intends to make money selling ebooks at some point, a body who is frequently angry at movie companies (Disney!) who refuse to make their movies available via Netflix, and a body who has always found it interesting at what point he was willing to pay for things, I found it a very, very interesting read.

So into the locker it goes!

The Grand Experiment: Week 14(!)

Holy cow, I can't believe it's been 14 weeks since I started up The Grand Experiment. Results so far:

Book Country: Never got off the ground. Their terms of service smelled rotten to me.

Authonomy: Rank 5,584. Five chapters up. Tabled while I concentrate on Wattpad.

Wattpad: 5,546 reads. 144 votes. 49 comments. 34 chapters up. Ranked #42 in Fantasy and #643 in Teen Fiction. Has been ranked as high as #25 in Fantasy and #15 in Adventure (before I switched its genres). Also, I got an invitation to participate in the site's Writer Partner Program.

So as you can see by the statistics, I've been focusing on Wattpad, in large part because of the promotional opportunity they've extended to me and in large part because it's got the most readers in the audience I want to reach (teenagers and young adults), and also because I just like the community feeling the best.

Also important is that I've accelerated my revision timetable by about 6x in order to get the full manuscript in shape and get it up on Wattpad before it gets promoted. That has severely limited the time I have to do anything that is not either writing or related to paying bills (like keeping up with this blog. Sorry!).

I've been tracking several statistics on Wattpad with the help of a handy spreadsheet, which I will share with you below:

Click on it to make the words and numbers readable sized.

I share it with you because it's an example of a benefit to posting on Wattpad that I absolutely did not expect. I can collect a ton of remarkably granular data on how my book is doing day by day (really, I could track it more often than that, too, and perhaps I should...but that would mean a lot more work and less time for...drumroll...writing). And because I'm collecting all this information, I can track some interesting things. Like, for instance, I can see that my reads are showing exponential growth.

Or I can investigate the relationships between my genre rankings and how many new reads I get every day.

(There's a bad data point on 9/4 that screws that graph up a bit, but I still think it's interesting).

Or I can look at any number of other things. When I change covers or cover copy, I can see if it has a statistically significant effect on my reads. I can see the same for my ranks or my posting patterns. And once I've finished writing the book itself (which is still the most important thing, no matter how many bells and whistles and numbers I put into orbit around it), I'll be able to take a look at all these numbers and see if I can't figure out how to goose them.

And at the very least, that's a new, fun kind of problem to play with.

Speaking of cover changes, I'm playing around with an idea for a new cover for Soulwoven, and I'd love to get some opinions on it. It adds the subtitle of volume one (I am, after all, writing one story in four parts) and a tagline, which I rather like. I've almost made it live on Wattpad several times, but after the horrible, fall-on-its-face failure of cover variant #2 during my last vote-a-thon, I think it wise to consult my readers before doing so.

Said cover to follow. Let me know what you think. I hope to have Soulwoven up on Wattpad in its entirety by the end of the month, at which point I will become a more active blogger once more and begin playing around with all kinds of markety type ideas which should make for interesting blog posts. Thanks for bearing with me, and if you're jonesing to hear from me, I'd suggest you follow me on Facebook, or Twitter, or Wattpad, because it's easier to post tiny things on those sites than sit down and compose blog posts for me right now.

And in the meantime, go read the book! It's more than halfway up, and it won't be online for free forever :-).

New cover here:

Look! A domain name!

So if I've done this switch over properly, none of you will notice that the domain name of the blog has changed until I tell you, which I'm doing now. This is part of the run-up to the launch of my debut short story collection, Three Dances, which is looking like it will probably be ready in October(!).

Anyway, I make mention of this in case the blog suddenly begins to exhibit strange behavior. If it does, let me know, and I will do my best to fix it.

Update on The Grand Experiment coming soon! There has been much experimentation and data collection, and there continues to be more.