Shannon Phillips

I wrote a new short story just before Sol was born, and I tried submitting it to Tor.com, which is aiming high—they’re currently the best-paying fantasy market that I know of. Today I got a rejection note, but it was a nice rejection note: “Thanks so much for submitting to Tor.com, and for your patience while we evaluated your story. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that ‘The Fairy
Midwife’ isn’t quite right for us. It’s always hard to reject a good story, and this is fun and inventive. I think it hasn’t lived up to its potential—there are tools here for a deeper emotional impact than I felt—and so I wish you the best of luck placing it elsewhere. Please send us more of your stories in the future!”

This is indubitably a “good” rejection. Good rejections are when you get personalized feedback (as opposed to the generic “does not meet our needs at this time”) and the editors express a desire to see more of your work. I think I went through like a dozen rejections before I made my first short fiction sale (to Dragon magazine back in 1994), and they got progressively nicer and nicer until I finally sent something they actually bought. First it was just the printed slip; then it was the printed slip with a handwritten note on it; then it was an actual letter from an actual editor with detailed and specific feedback; and finally it was an offer letter with contracts to sign. So there’s definitely a hierarchy of rejections. And a good one can kind of make my day.

I don’t actually have anything else to send to Tor.com right now—before this story, I hadn’t written any short fiction for a long time—but I’ll send “The Fairy Midwife” somewhere else. It’s fun and inventive, after all!

So I went slinking back to Amazon with my tail between my legs. Six weeks after leaving the KDP Select program my Amazon sales have not recovered, and I only sold a couple books through Barnes & Noble and Apple. Suspicious as I am of Amazon’s monopolistic market position, I’ve been forced to conclude that for me right now they’re the only meaningful game in town. And I need the extra exposure that the Select program offers.

Anyway, as an extra bit of promotion, I packaged up a previously-published short story as an e-file (sneaking in an ad for my novel at the back) and stuck it up on Amazon. It’ll be free for the next few days and 99 cents thereafter.

So if you want a free short story, go on and grab it!

Final promo stats: 1314 free copies of my book given away over the past four days. I briefly cracked the top ten in Amazon’s list of most popular free e-books in the Contemporary Fantasy category, peaking (I believe) at #9:

It’s even possible that I climbed a spot or two after I went to bed—there seemed to be a surge of last-minute interest in the book, which I think is an excellent sign, as it suggests that people were sharing the link with their friends. On the list of all free e-books The Millennial Sword was at #373. Now it’s switched over to the paid e-books ranking, starting out near the very bottom: #162,077 with a bullet, baby. Woooo!

It’s the last day of my free launch promotion for The Millennial Sword. As of right now 933 copies of the book have been downloaded; I’m very confident that it’ll cross a thousand downloads before the end of the day. It’s also currently listed at #14 on Amazon’s list of Top 100 Free Books in the “Contemporary Fantasy” genre. This is the kind of thing that authors get excited about even though it doesn’t particularly mean much. The real test of whether or not the launch promotion was a success will be if I start seeing reviews crop up on Amazon, Goodreads, and other sites.

I have some details that I can share about the paperback version. It will probably be available next week, and it will be priced at $12.99. This is on the expensive side because I’m doing print-on-demand; I don’t benefit from the economies of scale that are involved in a large print run. To be honest, I don’t expect to sell many paperbacks. What I have heard is that having a paperback version available tends to boost e-book sales: that $2.99 digital price looks even better when it’s next to a $12.99 paperback. Plus, I can get copies for my family members and give them away at Christmas.

Over the next few weeks, what I really need to do is stop obsessively refreshing my Amazon sales stats and my book’s Goodreads page, and get back to working on my second novel. As I think I mentioned before, e-book authors almost never make huge sales on a single title—instead, they earn income by building a solid backlist of titles that each sell in modest but steady numbers. I would like to have a second novel to publish by the end of next year. But doing that will require closing down my web browser, and putting in some actual work!

On the first day of my launch promotion, The Millennial Sword was downloaded 369 times. If the numbers continue at this rate, I’ll get over a thousand downloads before the free period ends on Friday. If even half of those people (500) actually read it—and half of those (250) like it—and half of the ones who like it (125) tell their friends…then I will consider the promotion a great success.

Most of what I’ve read about indie publishing suggests that books with 15 or more Amazon reviews get a lot more traffic. I think this has to do with Amazon’s search algorithms and the way that they promote material on their site. But I have to remind myself not to be impatient for Amazon reviews: people need time to actually read the thing, after all!

A couple of technical notes: some people in the UK had trouble getting the download. The link for our cousins across the pond is: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Millennial-Sword-ebook/dp/B009JW9K4M/. That should let you grab the book without any problems.

ALSO, while the Nook version of the book won’t be out for a few months, I wanted to let Nook owners know that there are free programs that can convert between e-book formats. Calibre seems to be one of the most popular. I would expect the formatting might not be perfect after an automated conversion, but if folks with the various non-Kindle e-readers want to grab the novel while it’s free, Calibre might be a good option for you.

The Millennial Sword is now free to download from Amazon! Feel free to spread the link around; the launch promotion will run through Friday, after which the e-book will return to its normal price of $2.99.

Some of my early readers have been posting their reviews, which is lovely. Dom Camus called the novel a “vivid, elegant remix of a classic theme…a cleverly arranged story involving some classic themes from English mythology blended with some well-observed writing concerning the heroine’s life in modern day America.” And Jessie Bennett described it as “a love song to San Francisco, a San Francisco where there are goblins in the subway and were-panthers at cocktail parties,” which I think sums it up perfectly.

Reviews are going to be the lifeblood of this book, so I am very grateful to everyone who takes the time to spread word about it. Thanks so much!

Big news! My first novel, The Millennial Sword, is now available from Amazon!

Isn’t the cover art amazing? It’s by my friend Jessie Bennett. She did such an incredible job, really, I can’t even begin to describe how much I love this. To my eyes Morgan le Fay has a gorgeous pre-Raphaelite quality to her face, and the way she’s rising out of the water is somehow both sinister and compelling. Hey Jessie, have you thought about taking the text off and selling prints?

Clicking the art will take you to the Amazon page for the book. It’s currently only available for the Kindle, although I’m working on putting up a paperback version, and there will also be other e-reader editions to follow. In the meantime, though, even if you don’t have a Kindle, you can read the book on your computer, iPad, or smartphone by using this app.

The e-book is priced at $2.99. But! Starting tomorrow, and continuing through Friday, I’m going to make it available as a free download. The reason I’m doing this is that e-published books rely on word of mouth and good reviews—that’s really the only way for a first-time author to build sales. So my four-day FREE launch promotion is designed to get some attention and pull in reviews. There’s no strings, but I would ask that if you read the book and like it, that you leave me a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or whatever social media networks you use. I really can’t overstate the importance of Amazon reviews—it’s the main sales driver for indie publishers.

I’ll put up another announcement when the free promotion begins! I am just about vibrating with excitement, if you can’t tell!

More sketches from The Big Booger Bubble:

http://thefrabjousversipel.wordpress.com/2012/06/23/introducing-charlotte/

How great? So great.

So this article is making quite a splash in the indie-publishing circles:

Publishers pay terribly and infrequently. They are shockingly dumb when it comes to pricing, and if I see one more friend’s NY-pubbed ebook priced at $12.99, I’m going to scream. They do minimal marketing and leave the vast majority of work up to the author. Unless, of course, you are already a big name author. Then they fly you around the country for signings and treat you like the precious moneymaking gem that you are. The rest of us get next to nothing in terms of promotion. If your book takes off, they get the credit. If it tanks, you get the blame.

No, thank you. I’m all set with that.

You know who I do like, though? Amazon. Well, all online ebook sites that let me self-publish, but Amazon is the true powerhouse right now. Say what you want about this company, but it’s because of them that I can continue writing.

…

Because of Amazon and other sites, I’m making enough money that I can continue writing. I’m averaging sales of 3,500 books a month, not including the month that Amazon featured Flat-Out Love in a list of books for $3.99 and under. That month I sold 45,000 Kindle copies, and sold over 10,000 the next month. Those numbers are insane to me. Absolutely insane. The fact that I continue to sell well a year after the book’s release is humbling.

There are more and more stories like this one, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that anyone who stands between author and reader—specifically the agent, and the publisher, who between them have traditionally taken the vast majority of any book’s profits—are now irrelevant. If you can write a book that people want to read—and if you can do that with some frequency—you can make a living as a writer. For a long time, this wasn’t the case. The ability for writers to connect with readers in an unmediated fashion is one of the great gifts the Internet has given us.

Although I still rank the Internet slightly under epidurals, as far as the achievements of civilization go.

Anyway, I’m still working on my second novel. My first should be coming out on Amazon soon (I’m waiting on the cover art, which is coming along great and is going to be amazing). Meanwhile, I’ve contracted with another wonderful artist to do illustrations for The Big Booger Bubble: I just got the first sketches today, and, oh man, I laughed and laughed.

Look, here’s the sketch for the “nose fruit”:

Ha ha ha ha ha!

This short story is fantastic.

The first time she saw the boy across the classroom, Ah Lee knew she was in love because she tasted durian on her tongue. That was what happened–no poetry about it. She looked at a human boy one day and the creamy rank richness of durian filled her mouth. For a moment the ghost of its stench staggered on the edge of her teeth, and then it vanished.

She had not tasted fruit since before the baby came. Since before she was dead.

More from the author, Zen Cho, here. Thanks to Karen Healey for the link!