KDP Select; 2 genres, 2 outcomes Part 2

In part 1 I discussed how I Wish was doing in the day immediately following coming off the free list. Yesterday marked the end of my second full day of being paid. It was significantly better than the first. At one point my stats looked like this:

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #366 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

• #6 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Children’s Fiction > Literature > Love & Romance
• #9 in Books > Children’s Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy & Magic
• #11 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Children’s eBooks > Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror > Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Magic

They’ve dropped some since then, but not so much that I’d complain. It’s interesting to me to note that the categories change from time to time. I thought you could only be in 3 categories at a time, but it actually appears you can be in several, they’ll just list 3 at once.

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #381 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

• #7 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Children’s Fiction > Literature > Love & Romance
• #8 in Books > Teens > Love & Romance
• #13 in Books > Teens > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy

I’ve noticed that I sell a lot more books in the evening than I do during the day. But then so does everyone else because despite selling as many as 65 books in an hour, I didn’t move at all. Here’s the breakdown so far.

Day 1 – 48 sales, 22 lends

Day 2 – 234 sales, 56 lends

Day 3 (so far) – 223 sales, 19 lends

Total – 505 sales, 97 lends

And I feel like it’s significant enough to mention again, I’m priced at $4.99. I am so glad that I stayed the course on that because if I had dropped my price to $2.99 or $.99 I would have attributed all my sales to the price rather than whatever book mojo I have going on right now and wouldn’t have considered changing it back at all for fear of losing sales. Maybe I would have a higher rank if I dropped my price, but I’d be trading on my belief that a book is worth more than a pack of gum. It’s just reassuring to me that people are still wiling to pay book prices for a book.

I’m not trying to start a pricing debate or anything. I just think it’s interesting enough to bear mentioning. When conducing your own KDP Select experiments, you might consider a higher price point.

Is KDP Select a magic bullet? Well, it certainly was for I Wish, but I don’t think it’s universally true as evidenced by the other book I have in the program.

I put one of my adult titles in Select and immediately started the free days. I let it run last Wednesday and Thursday and then took it down for the weekend because I read somewhere that those are the busiest buying times. It’s free again now and will be until Wednesday night.

To say it’s not doing as well as I Wish would be a gross understatement along the lines of saying that trying to hug it out with an angry grizzly bear while kicking her baby in the face is a good idea.

This title had a lot of early success, selling hundreds of copies a month, but it’s tapered off until recently it’s only been selling between 10-20 copies a month. It’s the first in a series so it seemed like a prime candidate for the program. After 3 full days in the program and including any sales (because I haven’t been tracking it very well), it’s sitting at 607 downloads. It’s enough to put it at #510 in the free store and #61 in the erotica category. I think if I hadn’t already seen what free could be like in ideal circumstances, I’d have been delighted with this progress.

So far I haven’t seen any huge surge in sales. Not of the book itself this weekend and not of the other titles in the series. I’ve still got a couple of days of free left before I can say for sure what might happen, but it just doesn’t appear that it’s going to take off the way I Wish did. I’ll admit that I’m surprised because it’s always sold so much better than I Wish and you always hear how sex sells. At this point I’m having hard time even giving it away.

Conclusions:

• The Select program can launch a book to high sales, but a lot of factors have to align to make that happen. Being picked up by sites like Pixels of Ink is huge.
• Don’t put a book in if you are selling well outside of Amazon. Unless your book takes off, and it might not, you’re going to lose all that income and alienate those reader.
• There are a lot of things to be gained (aside from sales, although that’s an awesome thing too) from going free no matter how you achieve it. I’m on a lot of new Also Bought lists, I’ve gained 6 new reviews, and I have almost 16k new readers who now have the chance to become invested in my series and buy the next two books. If I’m lucky these new readers might blog about me or recommend my book to their friends so the possibility exists now that I could go viral. Realistically I know that won’t happen, but “might” is so much more attractive to me than “never”, which was the case before.
• If you only have one book and know that you’ll be releasing another soon, wait for that before you go free. I’ve had so many hits on my blog from people looking for Your Word is My Bond. If they are willing to go to the trouble to search for it, they were probably also likely to buy the book. Except, surprise! The book isn’t available yet. D’oh! Seriously, wait. You’ll be happier if you do.

It’s too early for me to say what I think about the KDP Select program. It’s been helpful to me and to many others and if you have nothing to lose by enrolling than why not? But it’s a total crap shoot. Nobody knows why some books take off and others don’t and it’s impossible to predict if your book will be one.

I am a little worried about what the influx of free books will mean in the long term. As customers become accustomed to having all they can read for free, they might save their purchases for a few of the heavily hyped traditionally published books that they’ll never get for free. A savvy shopper will be able to figure out that their favorite author has all their books enrolled in the program and will sooner or later have them all available for free and just wait until a free day to pick up their entire backlist.

I do think that in a few months so many books will be in the program that it’ll be next to impossible to get any attention for your titles that way. At that point you’ll be locked into the contract with Amazon and unable to sell anywhere else. When my 90 days is up, I’m planning to pull I Wish from the program and sell at every online retailer available, something I still haven’t done with my shorts even.

Don’t be blinded by my numbers. They are amazing, but they won’t last. It could be a year from now (I wish!) or next week (way more likely), but sooner or later my sales will normalize and I’ll go back to selling at a steady, realistic pace again. Hopefully that pace is significantly higher than it was before, but eventually even the best seller slows down as everyone who cares to read it, already has. It’s so important to plan for the long term.

You can’t live forever on a single book. The only way to have a secure future as a writer is to keep writing. I’ve said it before, but it’s so true, you don’t need to have a bestselling book if you’ve got 20 moderate sellers working for you. However it goes with I Wish, I plan to finish the Witches of Desire trilogy. And then I’ll tackle some of these other projects on my plate. And when those are done, I’ll find something else to do.

I’ve let myself spend the past few days ogling my stats because it’s felt like I’m a poor kid who just won the lottery. I can’t believe it happened to me. But now it’s time to get back to work. I’ve got words to write and an outline to finish so I can start putting words on paper for book 2. It’s tempting to try to market my book to death, but I’m trying to content myself with knowing that I’ve done as much as I can at this point. The best thing I can do for my career now is to let it go and turn my attention to the other books that need to be written and let those books be promotion for the first.

I’m off to write now, but amazing things have been happening to me that I’d love to share so before I go I’ll leave you with these two screen grabs.

Seeing this really excited me. I think it’s that little green arrow telling the world I’ve been hanging out in that list for the past 2 days, but maybe it’s the fact that I’m ranked so high in such a broad category. Do you have any idea how many teen books there are out there? And I’m #22? Freakin’ crazy, man.

Or how about seeing that I Wish is the 4th most popular children’s ebook. The top 3 books above me? Also happen to be the #1, #2, and #3 bestselling books on Amazon right now. And next is me? Hell yeah, I’ll take that.

KDP Select; 2 genres, 2 outcomes Part 1

First of all, let me just tell you all a huge thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you to those of you who downloaded a copy and those who helped to spread the word. I had more success at this experiment than I had any right to hope for. It was truly one of the most magical experiences of my writing career so far (second only to finishing writing my first novel, selling my first copy, and getting those first few reviews/fan letters asking me about the sequel).

As of the time I’m writing this I Wish, these are my stats:

These are by far the best numbers I’ve ever had on I Wish. Prior to this I think the lowest I’ve ever gotten was in the #7k range. So let me give you a quick break down on how this went down.

I joined Select around the end of January. I wasn’t sure what to do about my free days and based purely on the fact that I liked the sound of “Friday Freebie”, I decided to set my first free day for the first Friday in February so that I could see the difference in income from January to February. Obviously I wasn’t expecting huge successes. Actually, let me tell you exactly what I was hoping to get out of the program.

Before I put I Wish into the program, it was bouncing around between lows of the #200k and highs of around #50k. Last month I sold 23 copies of the book in the US store. That’s not even 1 copy a day. I have a screen shot from a little while ago I can add for perspective.

I tried to figure out why people weren’t buying my book. The reviews I’ve gotten have all been very enthusiastic. So I concluded that the story wasn’t the problem. It was getting people to READ the story that was giving me issues. I knew it was the cover holding me back. I made it myself based on a few books that had a wonderful use of white space. They were clean and appealing to me. Oh yeah, and they also looked like an entirely different genre than I was trying to sell. Oops.

I looked at some websites to see what kinds of covers were hot for YA paranormal and came across the “pretty girls in beautiful dresses” trend. Love! I found a photo of my own pretty girl in a beautiful dress at 123rf and my love went to work. A new, more appropriate for the genre cover deserved a chance for some exposure, I thought, and that’s when I started to consider the Select program.

Deciding to pull my book from other stores wasn’t a hard choice. I’d only ever put it in B&N in the first place because when I was getting started we hadn’t ever tried to format per Smashwords’ requirements and it was extremely intimidating. Last month I sold 8 copies of I Wish through B&N. I figured surely my experiment would yield enough exposure to sell an extra 8 copies. The way I thought of it, it was like paying $30 for advertising. Maybe it’d pay off, maybe it wouldn’t. It was a gamble, but I didn’t feel like I had much to lose.

My hopes for this experiment were small. I hoped to increase my sales which shouldn’t be hard since I wasn’t even moving a copy a day. Really my hopes were set on building a loyal fan base who will happily buy the other two books in the Witches of Desire trilogy. That’s it. I’ve heard of great things happening for people who do the program, but that wasn’t what I was expecting by any stretch.

As I said earlier, I put my book free on Friday. When I woke up I’d had a couple of hundred downloads. I was thrilled. I had a second book come off free the day before and it didn’t have these results. I’ll post more on that tomorrow. But suffice it to say that my expectations were extremely low.

Sometime around late morning my sales took a sudden noticeable uptick and I was having books download 30-50 a minute. Every time I hit the refresh button there were more downloads. That’s when I realized that this might be a bigger deal than I hoped. I decided to make some efforts to promote my giveaway.

I posted on Twitter several times, blogged about my free book, made sure to update FB. But my downloads were bigger than all of that could account for. I mean, I’m awesome and all, but c’mon. It turns out that Pixel of Ink found me somehow. I mean, if I’d been more organized or had bigger dreams I might have thought to contact them in advance of my promo, but it never even occurred to me. I can almost surely attribute my amazing showing on the free charts to them.

I was glued to my computer all day. I watched my rank drop to the #2k range and was thrilled. Then it dropped to the top 1000 and I was even more thrilled. Then I made the top 100 best seller list and I thought I might throw up. I was literally so happy that my body thought the appropriate response was to vomit.

Around 7 or 8pm EST I was sitting at #11 and I decided that since it was going so well, I’d go ahead and extend my promotion another day. I was doing well and I figured I’d see if I could get any higher on the list. By midnight I had 8k downloads and was sitting at #9. I broke the top ten.

When I woke up on Saturday I was in the #5 spot and that’s where I spent almost the entire day. I never moved up any higher than that. I started to drop in rank around 6 or so in the evening so I decided to pull my book early so that I could leave on a strong note, hoping that would help my paid rank.

I pulled my book at 8:30 and my rank immediately went to #158k on the paid charts. About 100k places lower than it was before I started. I was a little bit agitated. At this point I’d had 15,853 downloads and spent 24 hours in the top 10 free books, most of that time at #5 and this was what it translated into? I also couldn’t see myself on anybody’s Also Bought list. I tried not to freak out too much, but it was frustrating for sure.

About an hour later my rank fixed itself and I think I was in the #4000s? I can’t remember and I didn’t seem to take a screen cap of it to reference. At any rate, it was a lot more reasonable to me than 150k.

I made 30 sales on Saturday night after coming off free. I also started getting borrows for the first time. I think there were 18 of those. I went to bed excited to see what Sunday would bring.

The answer, I found out, was an extremely slow, frustrating day. My sales from the night before positioned me at in the #1400s, but my sales had slowed down. It was still more than I’d sold before, but nowhere near the velocity of the night before where I’d sold 30 copies in around 4 hours. It was something like 20 copies between midnight on Saturday and 10pm on Sunday. I was really bummed, but still, I’d succeeded in my goal of getting my book into more hands.

I’d started watching a few other books that’d been on the top ten list with me to see how their rank was after going to paid. 2 of the books were priced at $.99 so I figured they were bound to make a lot of sales since it was such a low risk to take on a new author, but the 3rd was priced around $4.50, I think it was. I don’t know because the price dropped to $.99 in the first hour or two. And, predictably, the rank dropped significantly too.

I toyed with the idea of dropping my price at that point too. I hated to lose the momentum I’d built up and all day long my rank was slowly slipping from the #1400s to a heartbeat from #3k. Seriously, I think I was at #2950 by the end.

Basically it came down to the question of whether I was willing to drop my price down to $.99, something I told myself I’d never do again, or lose my rank and fade back to obscurity. I decided that since I’d accomplished the goal of reaching a wider audience, I’d just trust that they’d come back for Your Word is My Bond and I’d take whatever sales came to I Wish on my terms and if that meant that I’ll never see the top #100, I’d live with that.

But then around 10:30pm, like magic, my books started moving. I was up until 2 am last night and I sold 65 copies during that period. It was about 4 copies every 15 minutes. My mind was blown. Did I mention that I sold these copies while maintaining my price of $4.99? As of right now I’ve broken the 16k mark. I’ve sold 162 copies and had 51 lends. Of course, I’ve also had 52 returns. I started getting them while my book was still free. I have no idea why anyone would return a free book, but I’m here to tell you that it happens.

It also had a bit of spillover on my 3 short stories. I’ve sold a combined total of 21 copies of those since Friday. That was unexpected, but nice. I’ve basically sold enough short stories to buy some tacos. That’s a good day.

It’s far too early to draw any conclusions. My sales seem really slow again right now compared to last night. So it could mean that I’ve peaked. Or maybe they are transitioning to work right now. Or maybe the people who love my book the most are night owls. There’s no telling. But if this is it, if I’m done selling, I’ve still accomplished my mission of increasing my exposure and starting a loyal fan base for the rest of my series and made more in 2 days than I have in the entire career of this book. I’m pretty happy about that.

I’ll post part 2 of the great KDP experiment tomorrow, in which we’ll look at another title I put up which is not having anywhere near the same level of success as I Wish has had. In the meant time, I gathered up a bunch of articles about different authors and their perspectives on KDP Select.

Does Amazon’s new KDP Select program work?

How KDP Select saved my book

From Mania to Reality: The results of my Amazon Select experiment

Very early results from KDP Select

KDP Select free promotion results

Results of KDP Select Promotion Yseult 20 in historical fantasy

So [innocent whistling], about that KDP Select…

KDP Select promotion wrap up

KDP Select free promotion discoverability experiment part 1, part 2, part 3

Unintended Consequences

The joys of KDP Select: Patrice Fitzgerald’s story

KDP Select, Amazon rank and the secrett of why Select members have an advantage

David Wisehart’s 9 day experiment

Is KDP Select salvation or damnation for indie authors

Another chance to get free books from Emerson & Abel

Due to the overwhelming success of my time as a free download, which I’ll share in detail in a couple of days, I have decided to extend this promotion through Saturday. I’m sitting at #5 on the free list, which is blowing my mind. So if you didn’t get your free copy of I Wish yesterday, no problem! Feel free to spread the word. I’d love to share my world with as many people as I can.

All she ever wanted was a chance to settle down in one place.

Thistle Nettlebottom knows her life isn’t exactly normal. She travels the country with her secretive mother and bestselling author grandmother in a pink RV going from book signings to crazy research trips. She’s never been to public school or had a boyfriend, but she can pick a lock and hot-wire a car. One day the phone rings and they set a course to a tiny town that’s not on any maps. Suddenly, Thistle finds her whole life changing.

She’s finally found the home she’s been searching for.

Thistle soon realizes that Desire isn’t like other towns and she’s not like other girls. The family she trusted has lied to her about everything her entire life and the things she doesn’t know about herself could cost her everything. Her legacy as one of the most powerful witches the town has ever seen has made her enemies that have been waiting patiently for a chance to destroy her. Thistle needs to learn to use her powers to protect herself before they succeed.

Be careful what you wish for.

Thistle has a power unique even among the magic wielding witches of Desire. She can wish things into existence. At first she enjoys the freedom of having everything her heart desires, but she soon realizes that her power comes at a terrible price. She’s losing her grip on her sanity at a time when she can’t afford any weakness. Her enemies are closing in quickly, but she might not have the strength to save herself.

Amazon US
Amazon UK

Charlotte Abel’s books are also still available so be sure to grab copies of the first two books in her witchy series. When it comes to paranormal, witches are obviously pretty close to my heart. 😉

While other girls are wearing push-up bras, Channie Belks is trying to hide the fact sh’’s a witch.
 
Sorta hard to do after her parents slap a chastity curse on her for flirting with“”dirty-minded, non-magical, city-boys”” She ca’’t even walk by a hot guy without zapping him.
 
Ther’’s a way to break the curse; but one mistake could kill her. I’’s not worth the risk…. until she meets Josh.
 
Suddenly, the threat of death is’’t such a deal-breaker.

Amazon US
Amazon UK

Bound by love and magic. Betrayed by those they trust. Not everyone survives.

Gasp-out-loud action, heart-pounding romance and an OMG ending that leaves you hungry for the next book.

Amazon US
Amazon UK

Friday Freebie: Books by Emerson & Abel

Have you been interested in reading I Wish, but were a little unsure about whether you wanted to pay full price to try it? Now’s your opportunity to try it for free on Amazon. If you don’t have a Kindle, don’t worry. You can download free apps for your computer or phone through Amazon’s site.

All she ever wanted was a chance to settle down in one place.

Thistle Nettlebottom knows her life isn’t exactly normal. She travels the country with her secretive mother and bestselling author grandmother in a pink RV going from book signings to crazy research trips. She’s never been to public school or had a boyfriend, but she can pick a lock and hotwire a car. One day the phone rings and they set a course to a tiny town that’s not on any maps. Suddenly, Thistle finds her whole life changing.

She’s finally found the home she’s been searching for.

Thistle soon realizes that Desire isn’t like other towns and she’s not like other girls. The family she trusted has lied to her about everything her entire life and the things she doesn’t know about herself could cost her everything. Her legacy as one of the most powerful witches the town has ever seen has made her enemies that have been waiting patiently for a chance to destroy her. Thistle needs to learn to use her powers to protect herself before they succeed.

Be careful what you wish for.

Thistle has a power unique even among the magic wielding witches of Desire. She can wish things into existence. At first she enjoys the freedom of having everything her heart desires, but she soon realizes that her power comes at a terrible price. She’s losing her grip on her sanity at a time when she can’t afford any weakness. Her enemies are closing in quickly, but she might not have the strength to save herself.

Amazon US
Amazon UK

Also available for free today are two books by Charlotte Abel. I don’t read a lot of fiction for fun these days, but the premise is so cute I grabbed copies for myself. Check them out if you haven’t already.

While other girls are wearing push-up bras, Channie Belks is trying to hide the fact she’s a witch.
 
Sorta hard to do after her parents slap a chastity curse on her for flirting with “dirty-minded, non-magical, city-boys.” She can’t even walk by a hot guy without zapping him.
 
There’s a way to break the curse; but one mistake could kill her. It’s not worth the risk … until she meets Josh.
 
Suddenly, the threat of death isn’t such a deal-breaker.

Amazon US
Amazon UK

Bound by love and magic. Betrayed by those they trust. Not everyone survives.

Gasp-out-loud action, heart-pounding romance and an OMG ending that leaves you hungry for the next book.

Amazon US
Amazon UK

I Wish gets a new cover

The blog post contains major spoilers. I did finally commission a new cover for I Wish… after months of talking about it. I originally talked to someone a couple of months after I released I Wish… but that fell through. Being that I’m exceptionally lazy, I never pursued it again. What I did do was whine about it. Incessantly.

Finally it happened the other day that I was complaining that with my new price (I raised the price to $4.99 around the first) I really need to get serious about getting a cover that better conveys that my book isn’t a fluff coming of age story, but an edgier, darker YA paranormal.

My love, who is much more patient than I am and has been hiding some amazing photoshop skills like a ninja, offered to take a crack at it. We looked at a bunch of the covers of books in the genre that have been released this year and then he found a blog entry that compared a trend of girls in pretty dresses on covers this year. I know it was more to point out that it was done to death, but instead I said, “Squee! I want a girl in a pretty dress on my cover now too!” Because I’m a sheep.

Unrelated to the proceeding paragraph I thought I’d mention that while I was looking for that link, which I couldn’t suss out via Google and finally had to go through hundreds of entries in my browser history (you’re welcome!), I found a very interesting blog about the literal darkness of YA covers in 2010. You should check it out. It’s really cool, actually.

So anyway, that’s the backstory about how I came up with this particular vision for the cover that has almost nothing to do with my actual story (there are woods in my story and the cover model has long dark hair, at least). But my love gets all the credit for making what I think is a lovely cover. I picked the image and when he wanted to add ornamentation, I asked him to stick with the dandelion-puff-represents-wishing thing I had going in the original version. Other than that, it’s all him. It should go up sometime in the next few days.

Trying a new experiment

I decided to try a pricing experiment this month. As I mentioned yesterday, my total income for all of the last week was only $7. While I’m grateful for every copy I sell, the profit I see on a $.99 is only $.35. I doubt very much I’ll ever be able to be able to make a living at that pace. Those same 20 sales would have netted me $40 at the $2.99 price point. Still not ready to retire on it, but it’d at least fill my gas tank.

So for the next month or until the sequel of I Wish… comes out, I’m pricing at the higher point and seeing what it does to sales. I’d hate to take a hit on sales, but the higher profit might make it worthwhile. As always, I’ll report my numbers openly at the end.

One more bit of book related news. I logged onto my page today and was delighted to see this:

I’m not sure when this happened, but today is the first time I’ve ever seen it on my page. I’ll admit, I get thrilled by the little things so you can imagine how excited I got about it. So there’s another reason to read I Wish… if you haven’t so far. It’s the perfect opportunity to see what all the fuss is about.

Now for my artsy stuff of the day.

This background might look a little familiar. I made about 5 cards at the same time using the same paints. I’d say that’s my biggest time saving tip. Work on 4 or 5 cards every time you have your paints out.

This is the background I was working on for Art Journal Every Day. I’m not sure where I’m going with it, but that yellow is pretty bright. I might tone it down with another layer of color. At the very least a more muted shade of yellow.

I don’t think I’ll be finishing this page just yet though. I told Courtney that I’d attempt to take some step by step photos of how I work in my journal for her. Of course, the helpfulness of such a gesture is questionable given the quality of my photos, but it seems like an interesting challenge so I’ll give it a shot.

How does Freshly Pressed affect sales?

Surely anybody who knows my policy on transparent numbers knew this was coming. Yesterday I was featured on WordPress.com for my post on how I outline (with pictures!) and so I thought I’d tell everyone how that went.

Before yesterday the most hits I’d ever had on my site was less than 300. Something like 285, I think. I was afraid I’d probably never top that day. Then I was “Freshly Pressed” and now the bar has been set ridiculously high. I got 3,497 views yesterday and another 1,024 this morning as of writing this post. Even cooler is that I now have over 60 subscribers (hi, new friends!). I don’t feel so much like I’m talking to myself anymore. But I’m more excited because I feel like now the authors I interview for my Monday Interview and an Excerpt feature will be able to reach a lot more people. Did you guy’s read Courtney’s interview yet? There is a lot of great information coming up in the interviews to come too.

Now for the $64,000 question: Did being featured on WordPress help my sales? Not even a little bit. I sold 1 copy yesterday and I think maybe 2 today. I did, however, get 2 separate hits from people looking for a free copy of my book. My thought is that I’ve got my first pirates. Which I find to be extremely flattering (people care enough to try to steal it? Awww.), but also annoying because seriously, you’d work that hard to find a free copy, but you aren’t willing to just pony up a buck? That $1 won’t buy you much, and if we’re being honest, it certainly won’t change my life since I’ll only see $.35 of it, but it WOULD help my Amazon ranking and give me a shot at being noticed by more people.

If you still can’t be convinced to pay for the book, then at the very least shoot me an email directly. I’ll happily give you a free copy in the hopes that you’ll repay me with a review. Obviously, I can’t force you to pay up, but breaking kneecaps isn’t my style. I have faith that given the opportunity, most people will make good on their word.  So go ahead and tell your friends; Wren Emerson gives out free copies of her book in exchange for reviews. A review is almost as good as a sale.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts about all of this? Let me know. I’d love to open a dialog about this.

A real look at how I outline

I’ve described my outlining process before on the blog, but this time I’m going to show you guys real pictures of my notes. I can not stress strongly enough that these are my actual notes from the book I Wish. If you haven’t read it yet and want to, there WILL be spoilers. Avoid this post at all costs if that will ruin the experience for you.

The program I use is Onenote by Microsoft. I swear by it. It’s about the most amazing notetaking software ever invented. Do yourself a huge favor and get a copy.

The first thing I do is a brain dump on paper. These are some actual crappy cell phone pictures of my actual crappy written notes. Seriously. Nobody can read my handwriting. It’s like a blind gorilla wrote them with his stupid foot. But it’s just an example anyway.

I love bullet points. Some of the notes made it to the final version, some were changed until they didn’t resemble the original note at all, and some I just scrapped completely. I can’t stress enough how important it is to just let yourself go during this part. Sometimes if I piece of information or dialog occurs to me, I’ll write right up the margin or further down the page. I use a lot of arrows and underlines or boxes to link ideas together or emphasize some. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It’s just what makes sense to you later on when you’re reading over it. I’ve also been known to go over sections with a highlighter.

A lot of times I’ll use Xmind for mind mapping (ooh, I’ll take a picture of that too!), but sometimes it’s just faster to grab a sheet of paper and make a quick diagram. This is one I made when I was brainstorming some new scenes to add length to the book. I think really well in this manner. That whole chart took me about 10 minutes to come up with and I had ideas for an extra 6 scenes.

It’s totally unrelated to anything, but don’t my fingertips look fat in that picture? I just got sized for our wedding bands and my ring finger is a size 4, which is pretty small. I had no ideas that fingertips could even look fat, but there we are. Ahem. Done now.

 

So here are a couple of samples of different mind maps I made to get some ideas onto paper. Again, some were used in the stories, some weren’t. The process of brainstorming this way really unlocks a ton of potential ideas in my mind and inspires lines of thinking that I personally feel enrich my writing.

At this point I start plugging the ideas into Onenote.

This is an example of the summary I write before I start breaking my ideas into individual scenes. I write the summary as if I were telling it to a 3rd party. This is where I find out if I’m missing important information. It breaks down roughly to each paragraph = a scene. I leave myself notes on the side to remind myself to add more information to a a section when it becomes a scene or to make sure I don’t forget something that’s coming up. Also if you’re actually reading my notes, you’ll see that this was before I determined that Katie is an overused name and changed her to Krista.

The last thing I do is write out a scene description. For I Wish… I used yWriter. It made formatting a bitch when I added new scenes though so I don’t think I’ll be using it this time around. But you get the idea. I wrote a couple of paragraphs of what was supposed to happen in that scene and then turned it into a 3000 word passage. Not a bad conversion, right?

I filled out each scene in the book before I wrote a word of it. Some descriptions are a lot more detailed than this one is. I included any ideas for dialogue or other phrases I liked and wanted to include. You can’t do yourself any disservice by being really wordy on this part. When I was ready to write every day, I knew exactly what I was planning to work on. I never had to spend any time trying to think of what came next because I already knew before I started writing what happened in what order.

There was one pitfall to the whole thing. My outline was TIGHT. I had every day accounted for, even if it wasn’t specified in the story exactly what day it was. It doesn’t matter if the reader knows as long as I do so that I don’t have my character in two places at one time. So when it came time to add more scenes it was like crap, where the hell can I fit that in? It took a lot of wiggling and a few serious rewrites at the beginning or end of the scene to fight them all in.

But that’s a minor problem and if I had a better handle on how long my average scene length was it wouldn’t have happened. The nice part about yWriter is that it tracks how long each scene is for you so it’s easy to do the math. Now I know that my average scene length is almost exactly 1500 words and I can plan enough scenes in advance to come out to where I need to be by the end.

Hopefully, this clarifies my process for anyone who was confused. Xmind and yWriter are both free programs and a lot of people have Onenote on their computers and don’t even realize it. If you have any questions you can leave it in the comments or hit me up on twitter @wrenem. I’ll be happy to help you out as much as I can.

Edit: Wow guys, totally didn’t expect this to go viral like this. It’s awesome, thanks for stopping by my fine little piece of web real estate. I’d love to have you visit again in the future. If you are interested to see what this outline and 2 weeks of 1st draft writing will net you, please consider buying a copy of I Wish… for only $.99. I’d sure appreciate it.

How I wrote I Wish… in 2 weeks.

The title sounds like a get rich quick scheme, but I swear I’m not peddling anything. The topic came up on Twitter today when we were talking about the benefits of working from an outline. It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of using an outline to work from and I think that it played a huge part in how fast I was able to write I Wish. I’m going to reconstruct my personal timeline as best I can using all dated notes, Onenote, and an excel spreadsheet.

According to my first blog post dated January 7th, 2011 I decided to write and self publish my first novel on January 5th. It looks like I started actually writing on January 13th according to this post. Of course at that point I was thinking that I’d be writing an 80k novel. I had my love write a spread sheet for me to fill in, but he wrote in the wrong formula so I spent the whole time thinking I was just flying along, when in fact it would have taken me probably 2 more weeks at the pace I was writing (2.5k words a day).  Oops.

In this post it says I finished on January 28th. Since I was there, I can verify these dates to all be accurate. That’s 15 days. And on two of those days I didn’t meet my word count goal. So, in theory, I could have been done 2 days earlier.

Don’t ask me how this spreadsheet works anymore. I forget. He had some sort of 3 day projection going on or something. It also adjusted my word count up or down depending on how much over I’d written that day.

At that point I set the ms aside to start on my second project, but found that I’d frozen up. I was trying to work my scenes into a 3 act, 8 sequence story structure, but found that I just can’t do that. My brain doesn’t take kindly to that much structure. So instead I got distracted by shiny things like my new ereaders, my iPhone, and video games and I put writing aside for a couple of months. The truth of the matter was that I was dreading editing. My work came in way short and I knew I was going to have to try to squeeze in more words somewhere, but I had no idea where.

There was a gap between March 5th and April 15th on my blog where I didn’t even *think* about writing. I didn’t even mention editing my book until this post on the 19th where I basically summed up everything I just said in the above paragraph. I can’t nail it down much firmer than that. My handwritten notes all start on the 19th too. All accounts point to the first day of my editing/rewrites starting then.

I finished writing on Friday May 13th. I could pull up panicked tweets because I couldn’t figure out formatting on such short notice, but you’ll have to take my word for it. My love spent pretty much all day on Saturday with that and I was officially published by Sunday May 15th. So about 3 weeks and 3 days of editing? Of course that was with Twitter sucking all my attention so we all KNOW I could have been a lot more productive than I was. During the course of the editing I added another 12k of words and now the finished work is around 60k words. Not the longest book ever written, but it feels more like a novel now than a novella.

The purpose of this post isn’t to brag or anything. I’ve actually got a point.

I believe 100% that I couldn’t have written nearly as fast as I did if I didn’t have an outline. I’m going to set up a post to for tomorrow with screen shots of my outline and working notes. Maybe that will benefit someone to see it in actual practice.

The other thing to note is that I’m home all day. A lot of people have to squeeze writing in between a job or school or both. Me? I just have to deal with the minions. But that’s not really even an obstacle because they tend to follow me upstairs to my room (I like to write in bed, propped up by a pile of pillows). The littlest minion has a toy lap top he bangs away on beside me on his own pile of pillows and the 8 year old minion either plays with my art supplies or writes his own stories. We listen to music and keep each other company.

I’m not here to defend my work as the next big thing. I’ll never call it anything bigger than what it was meant to be: a fun book with commercial appeal. I asked myself what sort of a book would I like to read and then I wrote it. I sincerely hope to repeat the process many times to come. I’m challenging myself to actually write that elusive 80k novel in 2 weeks. That’s 5.5k words a day and change. I’m pretty sure I can do it. I’ll keep you guys posted.

The end of the week numbers

Today is my last day of posting my numbers to the blog. I’ll probably do another check at the end of a month and possible every month after, but equally possible not. If anyone ever has a burning desire to know how I’m selling just ask. I’m not private about it at all.

58 US, 2 UK = #15,281. I think I gave away maybe 2 free copies all day. Now all that’s left is to see if giving away free copies helps me garner more reviews or sells my next book any faster.

It’s been an amazing first week as a published author. I can’t thank you all enough for coming along for the ride with me. It’s been one of the most thrilling things I’ve ever done. I couldn’t even sleep the first night, I was so excited. The fact that I keep selling copies day after day long after all my friends have bought a copy makes me really hopeful about my writing career. Like maybe I’ll actually have one.

Starting tomorrow I’m running a weekly feature on Mondays called Interview and an Excerpt. The questions are all writing and publishing related. I’m hoping to demystify the process and maybe give those of us who have already published a basis for comparison to see how we measure up. Everyone hears the numbers of people like JA Konrath and Amanda Hockings and if you’re anything like me, that can be a little bit discouraging. I’ll be lucky if I see $100 from the entire month and Konrath brags that he clears over $80k every month. I want to hear what real people are selling and how they are doing it.

The first interview is with my favorite writer and critique partner, Courtney Cole. You’ll want to check it out, she’s got some great advice for indies. See ya’ll tomorrow morning!