Promotion wrap-up

Okay, the trumpets sounded and my first free promotion is over. I broke through my arbitrary goal of 100 downloads over 5 days, reaching 114. I celebrated by eating a donut. Though if I had failed to reach my goal, I would have consoled myself by eating a donut, so I win either way.

The daily download breakdown was as follows:

Day 1:  43 downloads

Day 2:  30

Day 3:  18

Day 4:  13

Day 5:  6

So a pretty consistent ~40% decline each day until the last, where it dropped 60%. Barbarian fatigue at the end? Or maybe it was just Sunday.

How did I do in the rankings? Amazon separates the charts for free books and paid books. At the peak, A Barbarian for Dinner reached number 83 on the Swords and Sorcery chart, and 48 on the General Humor chart. It was the 4,504 ‘bestselling’ free book at its height.

A number of downloads came from non-US markets:  32

UK led the way with 20. (I wonder if my mention of the popular Brit-show One Foot in the Grave in the summary had anything to do with it).

Germany came in with 9.

Canada had 3.

So the effect? I now have some nice reviews that resulted from the promotion, and spread my memes all over the world.

I did not pay to advertise the promotion, but did list it on a number of free sites and forums, and a few kind peers in my writing group spread the word. Thanks everyone for buying, plugging, and/or reading the book. I appreciate it.

One Foot in the Grave and and A Barbarian for Dinner

The BBC show One Foot in the Grave never hit it big in the States, and, inexplicably, it almost never pops up on any of the 9000 cable channels over here. But somehow I managed to find it, latch onto it, and absorb it into my bloodstream. The ease in which the show's humor runs from absurdity to darkness to rants and to sight gags amazes me. But what I like most is how many episodes set up various threads and ideas that you don't realize are important into they're recalled at some climatic point. It's sort of like 'mystery' humor, where the ideas are clues that you don't realize fit together until the payoff.

It's the sort of humor I tried to use in my book A Barbarian for Dinner. A lot of plotting went into trying to make various ideas work and be funny in the short term, but also come together in larger ways in the long. Writing the book, I kept searching what I had written for even the smallest idea that I could extend and recall and meld with some other idea later on.

I'm in the show's debt for giving me a framework on how to think of humor in 'mystery' terms.

One Foot in the Grave

A Barbarian for Dinner

Han Shot First! -- Revisions after publishing

I just finished re-editing my book Invasive Species. The new version will soon appear on Amazon. Now, yes, the book has already been published and people have already bought it, and so the book has been committed to the public consciousness. But, damn it, more than a few errors had somehow crept into the “final” text, and I felt they needed to be stamped out.

The idea was to only fix the shaky grammar, but to otherwise NOT change the text. I swore to be ultra-conservative about this. After all, everyone knows what happens when you try to change a “final” work of art (or piece of entertainment, as the case may be). It never goes well. Never! It’s like a law of the universe. If your first effort was good enough to “be” something, then, by law of averages, if you try to change it, the changes will most likely make worse. Once a work of art is out there, it becomes a part of the fabric of the universe, and so (hyperbole alert) to revise a “final” work of art is to, in effect, change history itself! And if history can be changed so easily, what will become of our future? Remember -- Han Shot First! Or did he? No, not any longer! Memories have been tampered with, and childhoods have been destroyed.  

Yeah, but what if changing something truly does make it better.

That’s what I asked myself halfway through my revisions. Now I think at least 90% of the book suits me fine and should be set in stone. But due to a fiasco I had with a freelance editor, and my self-imposed publishing timeline, I think, in hindsight, that I rushed the publishing of Invasive Species. I think it needed one more read through. There were some unnecessarily wordy sections, several odd grammar choices, and some confusing text that should have been smoothed out.

So, I rewrote those parts.

Now I didn’t make extensive revisions. Plots were not changed. Characters were not rewritten. But whole sentences have been deleted, rearranged, and replaced to make for smooth “better” reading. Unneeded words have been cast aside, and other words were added. There’s something about looking at a text after letting it sit for many months, after you’ve let it “cool off,” that makes you aware of the weirdness and mistakes you should have corrected the first time through, things seem so obvious now but at the time had seemed perfectly fine.

Objectivity, I guess is the keyword, and sometimes you only get that with the passage of time.

So the book is better now. It’s not exactly the same book, but in this age of digital novels, I’m starting to think that revising should be seen as a feature and not a bug. 

A Barbarian for Dinner -- Cover!

Here's the likely cover to my upcoming comedic fantasy novel:

Invasive Species updated cover

Updated the cover to my Invasive Species book on Amazon. Added a bit of color and a better font choice.

Book Out!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand ... the book is out! Check out Invasive Species on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Invasive-Species-Mike-Mayer-ebook/dp/B00FZ6ZMJS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383109913&sr=8-1&keywords=mike+mayer+invasive

Invasive Species novel

Cover of my upcoming book

The description I'm considering:

Something's wrong with Maggie's swamp. A volatile life form has invaded the ecosystem and compels everything it touches to adopt its bizarre life cycle. The cells of animals, plants, and even people rupture their bonds and unite with other creatures to give birth to conjoined monsters. These newly-made chimeras consume all they catch, but their relentless appetite is only a prelude to the coming horror. The infecting life cycle demands an even greater transformation, and Maggie fights against it. Life as we knows it hangs in the balance.

Invasive Species an electrifying tale of nature's blind and uncaring need to evolve regardless of what any mere human might have to say about it.   

And some excerpts: 

. . . as water trickled around these strange tumors she realized the heads did not belong to separate animals. These heads belonged to the same body. . . .

. . . "When a foreign organism is released into a new environment, strange and unpredictable things can happen." . . .

. . . Oh God, it was happening again. He felt his cells breaking apart and joining with the cells of the beast that was folded around him. There was no resisting it. New memories flooded in. New thoughts. New desires. . . .

. . . "We may be part of its plan," Maggie said, "but only in the sense a sick person might be part of a bacteria's plan."  

. . . The end of the world was nigh, but it wasn't an end prophesied by Revolutions or predicted by anti-nuclear war activists or climate change doomsayers or soft-spoken astronomers searching the heavens for wayward meteors. This end was planned by billions of years of natural selection. Maggie had a plan as well. . . .

INVASIVE SPECIES by MIKE MAYER​

COMING SOON at AMAZON.

Writer's Devil's Dictionary

(Article adapted from my old website)

Everyone loves a cynic. No wait . . . a parade. Everyone loves a parade. Except me, that is. I could go either way when parades are concerned. But give me a good cynic any day. Yeah, that's right, I said "good cynic." There are plenty of bad cynics out there that I have no use for, so many in fact they could form a parade (and no one would love it). A bad cynic only brings you down. A bad cynic disparages attempts at creativity and achievement with the objective of hiding his own lack of creativity and his fear of trying to be anything other than "cool."

Then there's Ambrose Bierce. Everyone loves Ambrose Bierce.

He's cool.

He's dead now, and so he failed at the one true thing that matters, but when he was alive Ambrose Bierce discarded his faith in the human race with such carefree abandon you can't help but wish you could do the same. He ridiculed any enterprise with such creativity you can't help but feel optimistic about your own failings, and even about the parade you've just been invited to. 

He wrote something called the Devil's Dictionary. If you don't know of it yet, you don't deserve to know, and I'm not about to waste my time enlightening the hopelessly ignorant.

See? Cynicism. It works!

And no one needs cynicism more than a writer. So below you'll find my take on his creation. Now I know I should write a better segue, but why should I bother? The work speaks for itself. You'll either "get it" or you won't, and you probably won't, and you'll probably disparage me for having even tried. Well I don't care either way, and you can go off to your parade now.

Writer's Devil's Dictionary

Acknowledgements:  The page where an author thanks the people he hopes will buy his book.

Advance:  Ironic gesture given by a publisher to an author. See:  leaving a quarter tip for a waitress.

Book Contract:  A signed and notarized document detailing the amount of money an author won't be making.

Character:  A fictional entity given a personality by a non-fictional entity that lacks one.

Characters Writing Themselves:  The result of a fictional entity figuring out that the author doesn't know what the hell he's doing and so takes matters into its own hands.

Deadline:  The absolute earliest an editor wants to see your latest catastrophe.

Draft, First:  An author's first opportunity to stop writing his latest pile of junk.

Draft, Second:  An author's second chance to stop writing his latest pile of junk.

Draft, Final:  Junk.

Ebook:  A book that won't burn.

Fiction:  A lie that stinks of truth.

Genre:  Classification scheme that succinctly alerts the prospective buyer to which books he won't ever want to read.

Hardback:  A book that will burn longer.

Literary Agent:  Person willing to work for 15% of nothing.

Main Character:  The character that's easiest for the plot to push around.

Mystery Novel:  A novel where it's a mystery how it ever got published.

Non-Fiction:  Truth that stinks of lies.

Novella:  An unpublishable work made even more unpublishable.

Paperback:  A book that will burn quickest.

Print-On-Demand Novel:  A book no one will ever demand be printed.

Rejection Letter:  Redundant term. All letters coming from publishers are rejections.

Science Fiction Novel:  Book about the future written by a writer who has no future. 

Spell Checker:  Device that promotes the belief the accurate spelling will improve one's writing.

Stream-Of-Consciousness Narration:  A narrative written when the author appears to be unconscious.

Vanity Press:  Redundant term. All publication is vain, and in vain.

Word Count:  The number of words above zero an author should have ever written. 

Writer:  Failure.

Writer's Group:  Concentrated Failure.