8/14/12 – An Admiral Update
Well its 1:45 in the am.
Admiral Who? just smoked out 62 sales for the day ending at midnight, and I’m up to a total of 697 for the month, as of midnight, or actually 706 as of right now. Woo-hoo! Way to go team.
For the past two weeks I made a total of $250.00 not enough to get rich but more than enough to inspire the Hades out of me. Sweet crying Murphy if that isn’t enough to get the old keyboard a fired up I don’t know what is!
Now for the update on Admiral’s Gambit. The Brother is going through the first editing pass, and is a little over halfway through the book. This is probably what would be called the copy editing pass. We’ll see what he thinks of it when he gets to the end. But so far so good. He’s through the Primarch stuff and getting to meet the Little Admiral’s backstabbing cousin right about now. All I can say is Watch Out!
After he’s done with the first pass, then we need to go over it all together, line by line, and give any of the more marginal areas the puff.
Fingers crossed but I’m thinking September is a really reasonable ETA for the Gambit.
Have a blast guys and remember:
Always follow the dream,
The Deposed King
8 comments
Gary E - August 14, 2012 10:45 pm
I’d pay $7 for the sequel to Admiral Who. I never laughed harder while reading this book. And I’ve been reading scifi for over 50 years. Loved it.
The Deposed King - August 15, 2012 2:30 am
That’s great to hear. Myself I’ve been reading sci-fi for about 20 years and I like the chucklers as well. My brother and I laughed just about the whole time we were reading through the final editing pass.
At the time I wondered if we were just too enamoured of own creation, because we were sure yucking it up.
From the response I’ve been getting so far from Admiral Who?, I couldn’t be any happier. I can only hope that the sequel Admiral’s Gambit comes out somewhere close to the same!
Working on the first editing pass still. Fingers crossed!
The Deposed King
Archit - August 15, 2012 5:05 am
Hi Luke,
I am eagerly awaiting for the next book. A suggestion, if you can release snippets for the next book, this will really build the anticipation for next book. Once of my favorite authors – David Weber also employs this strategy.
Lou - August 15, 2012 12:37 pm
I always had a tradition when going on vacation of buying a hard cover book, paying full price. That would be once or twice a year. All other times its Library, 2nd hand, a few mass market. Of course that tradition changed with electronic readers but I still purchase a full length/full price book “Top Seller” for my vacation on my Kindle.
That said, your first work puts you in the “full length/full price book” level and I would happily pay that to read on my next vacation. Its icing on the cake you are releasing at a lower price so I don’t have to wait for my vacation.
Keep up the great work and thank you.
The Deposed King - August 17, 2012 12:12 pm
I’ll consider it Archit. I did with the first book, posting up to about half or more of the first book on the Baen Bar site after it’d only been through the 1st or 2nd edit. But between working 50-60 hour weeks with day job and struggling to keep putting output on the 2nd and 3rd book, I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it.
Tried handing the decision off to my brother, but he doesn’t have a lot of experience with these things.
Hi there Lou:
I’m pleased you like the first book so well. Its great to hear that other people think so highly of it. Hopefully the 2nd book will pass the same bar set by the first. Let me know once its out there.
Fingers crossed but the brother is powering through the edits right now. If I had nothing but book 2 and writing in my life I’d say it’d be out end of this month. Alas I’m still a wage slave as of right now. So September for sure. As next week its double shifts and extra shifts. Today I’m going to go see a Weird Al concert at the fair but other than that I should be able to focus in on the writing.
My Editor/Brother says my writing has improved from the first book to the second. So there wasn’t ‘as much’ work needed on his first pass. Which is why he’s already on the second pass.
Hopefully you guys won’t have to wait too terribly long for the second… Of course that probably just means you’ll be on me to finish the 3rd. 🙂
Have a blast guys and remember to always follow the dream,
The Deposed King
Gene Rick Maze - August 19, 2012 10:39 am
Joshua Wachter,
Fine job on a first novel. You may not be fully cognizant of this yet, but you’ve already made it. I’m adamantly certain you will be a well-known “star” author in no time, and by definition you’ll only improve as you go. Yes, you need to work on your spelling and grammatical errors and further ensure the editorial reviews are more thorough, but your well crafted story is there.
I should also add that I’ll know you’ve made it when you start giving your first book away for free and your other follow-on books jump in price to $5.99 or greater. Btw, unlike one of the previous posters, I will never pay more than $5.99 for an e-book, so be careful on your pricing as you may alienate your consumer base if you decide to price too highly.
Regardless, I wish you the very best and recognize a future star-author when I see one! Keep at it, and constantly fan the flames of your passion by writing unceasingly. In closing, I’m sincerely looking forward to your next release.
All the very best,
Gene (Rick) Maze
The Deposed King - August 19, 2012 12:09 pm
Well I was planning to follow the B.V. Larson model. 0.99c for the first book and $2.99 for the follow up ones. Then he went a raised his prices through the roof. Jeez. So I’m honestly not sure when or even ‘if’ I’ll ever raise the prices to 5.99. If I ever truly became a ‘star author’ I made no concrete promises, I might ‘play around with it a bit’ just to see but as an avid reader myself I know just how much those high prices can turn off the reader. And being one of you guys for over two decades now that is not something I want to be a part of. When the siren call of ever increasing sales started on Admiral Who? and people started urging me to increase my prices, I held fast to the original plan, $0.99 is the price of the Admiral and so it will remain for the foreseeable future.
Honestly my plan is, was, and shall remain, $2.99 for the next several books in the series. I’ve got to get out of the 35% royalties section with amazon and into the 70% royalties, which necessitates a move to 2.99 as the minimum level to get there. Also that’s the only way I’ll be able to crank out enough books to keep you guys happy and get away from the day job at the same time. One pretty much requires the other.
I’m not like Larson with a great big smoking back list and the ability to do the day job and put out lots of new books at the same time. I mean I’m bound and determined to keep a new book coming every 3 or 4 months on the Spineward Sectors, at least assuming the response for the 2nd is anywhere near that of the 1st. So day job or no day job, that should get done. But give me the ability to really start cranking on my writing again, like I did with the Admiral…
Lets just say that in addition to more Spineward Sectors Novels, I’ve got half of a book about Streptokinase of the House of Kinase and the Ptoron Empire just sitting on the shelf waiting to be picked back up, dusted off and finally finished. The first third of what I already have needs to be totally redone, as this was the very first full length book I ever attempted. But get this, I picked up the Admiral idea and converted it into a full length novel because I basically said if I couldn’t write a book I was officially a looser. And since I was feeling the time crunch at the time, gave myself a one month deadline.
I was ‘afraid’ of doing this with my Military Insect book because I had a massive production deadline to meet every day and didn’t want to risk ‘ruining’ my first book with hasty writing. Well as you can all see I didn’t ruin anything going from playing around at writing a couple k here and a couple 1k there whenever the mood struck me, to pumping out 5k a day every day non-stop with Admiral Who? .
Its been a smashing success!
So I get the free time and I’ll keep up with the Little Admiral tales and also start pumping out a couple other stories that’ve been on the back burner. If there’s anything George Lucas has taught me its that while you can and probably need to put out things other than your ‘Star Wars’ success. You can’t be a fool and just step away from your first Titanic success. As long as there’s an audience for them, I can see putting out Admiral books. I mean I’ve already plotted out 6 books in the first Arc and have ideas for a follow up Trilogy that takes us out of the Spine Ward Sectors.
The Deposed King
Peter - August 20, 2012 9:42 pm
I really enjoyed your book. I won’t buy a first book for more than 2.99 unless I’m really confident it’s good (prefer 0.99 but if the sample is good then 2.99 is fine). If I like it, then 2.99 is great for additional books, but after 4.99 to 5.99 per ebook I start thinking about it. I’d do 2.99 to start and then 2.99 to 4.99 for the later books. Given the change in royalties you mention I really doubt the price elasticity is high enough to make .99 a better option. Anyway, thanks again and my 2 cents. Also once you have some stability for a few weeks in sales test a change in price and run the maths.