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.

The Grand Experiment: A Brief Musing on Numbers

I've been continuing to noodle the numbers on Soulwoven over the last few days, keeping an eye on things like how many new people have looked at Chapter One (started the book) versus read up through the furthest chapter along ("finished it" even though it's not finished), monitoring my reads, experimenting with posting chapters at different times of the day, and generally starting to engage the marketing part of my brain as I get ready to launch this thing.

I have been mostly successful in pushing this thinking to the ends of the day, after I'm done with the writing, which is what matters most.

But this morning, as I logged into Wattpad to jot down some numbers, I noticed two wonderful, astonishing things: First, I got 170 reads over the last 24 hours (a new record! Hooray!). Second, I got 70 reads overnight (again, hooray!) Third, I think I converted (a word I'm using to designate what happens when a person who starts reading continues reading past the first chapter) every single person who started it last night.

There are 18 chapters up on Soulwoven at the moment. This morning, Chapter One had only 7 new reads. This leads me to believe that those 7 people read multiple chapters (they at least went on to Chapter Two, because it had 8 new reads).

So my writing, I think, is doing its job. People are enjoying the book. My ratio of reads from Chapter One to Chapter Two is as good as any of the highest ranked books on Wattpad, and my ratio of reads to votes is actually significantly higher.

I just need to get more people to open the book up.

And I'm working on that. :-)

Craft Breakdown! Soulwoven Ch. 6

It's been far too long since I posted one of these, but I'm nose deep in revisions right now and finding the time to blog has been difficult. Soulwoven's sudden burst of popularity died off last week, which was a little disappointing, but I'm doing my best to just shrug my shoulders and keep working and hoping for the best. Readers are inscrutable, even on Wattpad. :-)

So! Chapter 6 of Soulwoven. Spoilers below, so read it here first.

Chapter 6 of Soulwoven introduces a new point-of-view character in Quay Eldani, Prince of Eldan. We join him as he's packing for a journey, we learn where he's going and why, and we get a hint that someone is going to go with him.

Almost all of of that takes place in a discussion between him and a five-year-old child.

This chapter was hard, for many reasons. First of all, it's a chapter that's primarily dialogue and exposition, and I've always felt that those are the most difficult scenes to pull off. The meat of the scene lies in the information being passed along through the dialogue, but there has to be something else that's interesting going on at the same time to pull the characters along. And there's a fine balance between giving enough information to inform and titillate and so much that the reader gets bored. 

I also have to introduce and build sympathy for Quay, particularly in light of some of his actions later in the novel. It's important that the reader understands at the outset that he's not a bastard. He's just---driven. I'm doing more worldbuilding as well.

In order to accomplish the exposition I need to, I make use of a small, inquisitive child who can ask questions of his older cousin. It helps that Quay is a thoughtful person who is trying to hide something, because when Colin asks a question, Quay responds one way while often thinking about something different. The tension between the two responses helps move the scene along while conveying information about Quay and the world at the same time.

The tension comes from other areas as well. You might recall that I end Chapter 5 with the sentence "Because if the Temple wasn’t going to take the destruction of the heart dragons seriously, she had no idea who would."

The reader then flips the page and finds a new character.

The idea is that the reader will make the assumption that this character must be the person who's going to take the destruction of the heart dragons seriously, because otherwise there doesn't seem to be any reason for him to be in the story. So point of tension #1 is: Who is this guy, and what's he going to do about the heart dragons?

Point of tension #2 is what he's doing. When the chapter opens, he's filling a pack with things that do not belong to him. That is a strange thing to do. One wonders, I hope, why he's doing it.

From there we're off to the races. Quay's cousin keeps asking him what he's going to do, and Quay is evasive, which makes the answer to the question all the more interesting. The heart dragons make an appearance on the second page, and even as Quay tells his cousin that Sherduan must not be real, we see through the book on his shelf, the drawing, and his actions in preparing for a journey that he doesn't believe what he's saying. There's an implication that the only people who wouldn't see that the dragon is real are children (or at least behaving like children). 

Halfway through, we find out that that there is some serious political tension going on in Eldan that's going to complicate things. Close to the end of the chapter, we learn that Quay has seen the dragon, too. And at the very end of the chapter, we get the basic setup for the whole rest of the novel ("Then the journey would begin") and how Quay sees his role in it ("He would do what no one else could"). Hopefully, it's got a bit of an epic feeling to it.

To develop sympathy for Quay, I'm leaning in large part on his relationship with his cousin. He's nice to Colin. He humors him. He takes care of him. These are qualities that we will not see from him often in the rest of the book, so it's important to know that  they're there. There's also a bit of his backstory---he's lost family and been thrust into a very difficult position, and he bears it without complaining. Finally, there's a sense of sacrifice. He and his father are both in life-threatening situations, and they're going to stick them out because they want what's best for the people they're responsible for.

I'm always nervous about how well dialogue-and-exposition chapters work, but I feel pretty good about this one. I like the atmosphere and I like the descriptions, and I think there's enough going on in terms of character development that some readers will just fasten on that and passively absorb the exposition, while others will be interested in the exposition and skim more lightly over the character building.

And hopefully, in the end, it all works.

I'm up through Chapter 17 on Wattpad right now. Go check it out! :-)

The Grand Experiment: Analytics!

Well, sort of, anyway. I've been taking a look at the statistics of Soulwoven as it stands on Wattpad and want to share a couple of things.

First off, my rankings have dropped off significantly since last week, and I've seen a corresponding drop in reads. I'm averaging more like 40 per day at this point. So it's clear that a lot of people find new stories to read on Wattpad through the rankings.

Beyond that, because Wattpad tracks reads for each chapter individually, I can note the following.

The first chapter of Soulwoven has been viewed 314 times.

About half of those people (156) made it to Chapter 2.

Everyone who read Chapter Two made it to Chapter 3.

134 people made it to Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, 123 reached Chapter 6, 104 reached Chapter 7, and only 69 made it to Chapter 8. Chapter 9 has 64 reads, and by Chapter 10 I'm down to 48. Chapter Eleven has 40 reads.

Chapter 12 just went up yesterday, and it has 29 reads, and in the two hours since Chapter 13 went up, it has 18.

I'm making the major assumption here that my own and other people's views of the chapters mostly cancel each other out (i.e. nobody is repeatedly viewing Chapter Seven and only viewing Chapter Eight once).

I can also see that I've got around 30 or 40 readers keeping pretty on top of the book as it updates. I have a suspicion that that may be mostly traffic from my Facebook links, which would help explain why many of the latest chapters only have votes and comments from people I know.

And, maybe most importantly, these numbers give me a great opportunity to look at where I'm losing people's attention. They're skewed right now because not every chapter has been up for a similar amount of time, but after six months or so that should be much less of a factor, and I may be able to identify problematic chapters (right now it's looking like I may be losing people at Chapter 7, for instance).

In order to see how I'm stacking up, I decided to take a look at the stats on Aaron Kite's A Touch of Poison, which has held the #1 spot in Fantasy on Wattpad for most of the summer. Its stats are as follows: 136,544 reads on the first chapter. 87,910 on the second. 82,017 on the third. 67,771 made it halfway through, and 36,355 finished it.

So viewing things in those terms, I guess I'm doing alright keeping the attention of my readers, though I find the 50% read-through rate of the first chapter a little discouraging. It will be interesting to see how things change when the full book goes up and people have the option of reading all the way through as quickly as they want.

You'll note I've stopped talking about Authonomy. That's because I've been offered a pretty fantastic promotional opportunity on Wattpad, and I want to focus on getting through a heavy-duty revision of Soulwoven in preparation for it. Once that's all in place, I'm going to turn my attention back to Authonomy, and possibly get involved with Figment (a smaller, Wattpad-esque community) as well.

Auf wiedersehen, friendly readers. I hope you're enjoying Soulwoven. :-)