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“Law and Order” Meets “Minority Report”

By Aaron Pogue on Friday, January 13, 2012

On Tuesday I took a little time to tell you how to submit a manuscript to Amazon imprint 47North. I talked about how it made me feel when I crept carelessly back into that miserable process. But I didn’t tell you why I suddenly wanted to pursue a semi-traditional print publishing deal. I also didn’t mention which title it was for.

In fact, it’s for a title you’ve probably never heard of before. Ghost Targets: Surveillance.

Near-Future Science Fiction Technothriller Cop Drama

You might have heard of my science fiction series, Ghost Targets. It has no ghosts in it. Not the spectral sort, anyway.

No, the series focuses on a world very much like ours, set about thirty years in the future with all the cool techno gadgetry that might come along by then. The most interesting change is the introduction of total universal surveillance.

Cameras and microphones everywhere record every word spoken, every movement, and do their best to map that data to actual identities and store it all in a massive database.  That information is available to the government and law enforcement, but it’s also available to all manner of services–think of the apps you might install on your smartphone–and even available to the general public.

Something like Gods

So the databases know where you are. They know how much money is in your bank account and (statistically) what you like to have for dinner on a day like today (especially given what you had for lunch today and what you’ve had for other dinners this week). They know the nutrition information for every restaurant in town and they know the results of your most recent blood tests and they know how much you care about that sort of thing.

In my back-cover description for the Ghost Targets books, I always start with this:

We abandoned privacy and turned databases into something like gods. They listened to our prayers. They met our needs and blessed us with new riches. They watched over us, protected us, and punished the wicked among us. We almost made a paradise.

And that’s why I called the first book in the Ghost Targets series Gods Tomorrow. It’s a reference to the databases. They’re almost gods, they’ll be gods tomorrow, but for now there are still gaps.

One of the gaps is that it’s still possible for some people to deliberately hide their actions. Little bits of data disappear from the historical record, and they can get away with murder. When the police try to search through the database records to review the scene of the crime, there’s a big hole where the perpetrator ought to be. He’s invisible. He’s a ghost.

And so the FBI established a special high-tech division to track down these special cases. They called them Ghost Targets and tasked them with doing the impossible. That’s a fantastic premise for a long-running sci-fi mystery series.

Missing the Market

They’re good books, too. They’re action-packed and fast-paced and fun. The technology is pretty well researched but also deliberately accessible to the “Law & Order” crowd. The characters are vivid, and their conflicts are consistently entertaining. I love writing them, and I’ve gotten really positive feedback from everyone who’s read them.

Unfortunately, “everyone who’s read them” isn’t that large a number. I’ve sold some frankly astonishing numbers of my fantasy books, but my sci-fi series is barely moving at all. I think I know why, too. I’m convinced the problem is marketing.

The series is called “Ghost Targets,” but it’s not a ghost story–neither horror nor fantasy, despite the distressingly long list of categories it does fit in. That’s a big problem, too. Taming Fire sold a lot of copies on its own, I think, because it was so squarely set in the very heart of a well-established genre. Everything about that book screams epic fantasy.

But you try screaming “near-future science fiction technothriller cop drama for the ‘Law & Order’ crowd” without running out of breath. It’s a challenge, and while I’m prepared to argue in defense of the slightly misleading “ghost” in the series title, I do have to admit that it doesn’t help offset the marketing problem I’m already dealing with.

And then, on top of that, I titled the first book Gods Tomorrow. It’s a terribly poetic title once you know what it means. But then, once you know what it means, I no longer have to convince you to take a chance on the book. If you  don’t know what the series is (and especially if you accidentally read in an apostrophe to make it God’s Tomorrow), the book looks an awful lot like it’s going to be inspirational religious lit.

I’ve got nothing against inspirational religious lit, but it’s a long way from near-future science fiction technothriller cop drama that’s not about ghosts for the ‘Law & Order’ crowd.

In Defense of Outsourcing

I really think I shot myself in the foot with the promotion on God Tomorrow. It’s a story that could be really, really popular if it could find its market, but even with all the success I’ve had with Taming Fire, I just don’t yet have the marketing muscle to make the Ghost Targets series work.

I’m trying, though. I’ve decided to rename the first book from Gods Tomorrow to Surveillance (so it’ll match the other one-word titles in the series). That doesn’t just eliminate the religious-lit confusion, it also better characterizes the central focus of the story.

We’re working on that now, designing a new cover for the new title. But while I was at it, I decided to take a stab at outsourcing the heavy-duty promotion. I decided to see what a (sort of) traditional publisher could do to build a market for the series. And that’s why I went begging to Amazon’s science-fiction and fantasy imprint 47North. I offered them the chance to find an audience for Ghost Targets.

It could be a very interesting partnership. I’ll let you know when I hear back from them.

In the meantime, if you haven’t ever checked it out before, give the series a try. You can get a free sample on the Kindle app or pick up a rare first-edition of the Gods Tomorrow paperback before it gets re-released as Surveillance and sells a million copies.

Either way, you win. And I get my story told, so I win, too. Awesome.

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Amazon Imprint Submission Guidelines

By Aaron Pogue on Tuesday, January 10, 2012

I’m going to start with the punchline today, and then backtrack to tell you where the information came from (and why it’s interesting). I’ll even explain why I told the story in reverse order. But first, the info.

Submission Requirements for the Amazon Imprint 47North

If you want to submit a novel for consideration by one of Amazon’s publishing imprints (not self-publishing), here’s what you should include.

Proposals and manuscripts should only be submitted to one imprint or editor at a time. We will communicate internally to make sure your work finds its best home. For a full list of Amazon Publishing imprints, visit: amazon.com/amazonpublishing

If you are represented by an agent, please have your agent submit your proposal.

  • Submissions should include the following information:
  • Title and author in the subject line
  • Short synopsis of the book
  • Brief bio and bibliography of author
  • Full or partial manuscript (Word file, Times New Roman 12)
  • Comparable authors or titles
  • Any relevant marketing/PR strengths

Info courtesy Amazon Publishing (received via email)

You can follow that link above to descriptions of Amazon’s various imprints, each of which includes an email address for your submissions. The one for 47North (their science fiction and fantasy imprint) is 47north-submissions@amazon.com.

The Story

I had the devil of a time finding that information. Once upon a time, long, long ago, I prepared my share of manuscript submissions. I owned a nearly-current copy of Writer’s Market and maintained a presence on a submissions editor’s website in the hopes of getting noticed.

And as a technical writer, it was easy for me to pick up on the importance of proper manuscript formatting and submission guidelines. It was easy for me to respect the sometimes punitive rules editors and agents laid down when it came to unsolicited manuscripts. Good formatting can convey a whole lot of information before a reader ever starts the first sentence.

So when — for reasons that are a story in their own right — I decided I wanted to submit something for consideration by 47North, the first thing I did was start looking for submission guidelines. Everything kept pointing me back to the Amazon page, which only said:

For proposal submissions or inquiries, please contact 47north-submissions@amazon.com

Helpful, huh? Anyway, I’ve got a fairly compelling case these days, and some unequivocal success has given me a little bit more courage than I might have had in the past. So I sent an email to that address. I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “Hey! I’m famous. If you want to publish one of my books, I’d love to hear your offer.” I put it in more words than that, but not a lot more substance.

I took a deep breath, reminded myself I’d have to wait weeks for a response, and clicked “Send.” I immediately got a reply email from a noreply address saying, “Thanks for your interest in Amazon publishing. Please don’t make multiple submissions. Here are our submission guidelines.” And those are now pasted up above.

Not extremely helpful. It left me wondering if my first email “counted.” I knew it didn’t have the requested information, but if I followed up with the requested information, would that seem like I was badgering? Or was that initial email address really just intended to trigger these responses?

Fear and Trembling

I gave it three days. I heard nothing back, and decided a black mark against me along with a complete submission package would probably score a lot better than a half-hearted submission and polite self-restraint. So I put it on my To Do list: “Send manuscript submission to 47North.”

I should’ve written “Prepare and send.” I should’ve made “prepare” a line of its own. I considered it a trivially simple process, since so many of the items on the list were things I’d already prepared when I uploaded the book to Kindle.

All I had to do was write an intro paragraph for my cover letter, pull a bunch of material together, and then write out my list of comparables. That was the only item on the list I didn’t have ready to hand. It should’ve taken half an hour, right?

It took half a day. And that wasn’t because the comparables were tough. What I hadn’t counted on was the emotion.

As I said, I’ve done this sort of thing before. I used to write unsolicited submissions to some of the biggest publishing houses in the world. And then to some small and pathetic ones. And then to very slick, almost-famous literary agents. And then to shady and pathetic ones.

I didn’t get a ton of rejections. I only got rejections, but I didn’t get nearly as many rejections as I sent submissions. Mostly they didn’t bother to respond. And often I was waiting months on end before giving up on an answer.

It broke me. I stopped writing. And when I came back to it, I came back to it for me, without any real expectation of ever getting published. I had no intention of sending submissions again. I didn’t expect to self-publish, either. I was just writing because I wanted to, and that was fun.

Then the new digital marketplace arrived on the scene, and self-publishing became this wondrous thing. I found the success I’d given up on completely, without having to get approval from anyone.

And half a year later, following the monumentally successful release of my fantasy sequel, I decided purely for strategic/promotional purposes to see if a publisher wanted to team up with me and leverage my digital popularity to sell some paperbacks. If they said no, it cost me nothing. If they sent me a contract I couldn’t agree to, I could easily walk away. I came to this transaction with independence and power….

But even then, I found myself staring at the intro paragraph of my cover letter, trying to figure out how to say, “You don’t know me, but I matter. You’ve heard this from a thousand people who were wrong, but I’m worth your time. Please care about me.”

Even knowing everything I knew, even with hard numbers to back me up, that task left me feeling very small and fragile. It awakened a dark and distant terror that had already mastered me once before. It was miserable. Querying sucks.

I don’t have a better punchline than that. Querying sucks. Thank Heaven for the new self-publishing.

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

By Aaron Pogue on Tuesday, January 3, 2012

It seems I owe you an apology. I’ve been absent. I could offer the frantic bustle of the holiday season as my defense, but that’s not really it.

Honestly…I didn’t realize I had let the blog lapse. I’ve been conscientiously working to improve my presence on social media in general (primarily through Twitter and Facebook), and I’ve been trying to keep our supporters posted through KickStarter. All that has felt like an awful lot of updating, and I only just noticed that my last post here was pre-Christmas.

If I’m regularly posting on Tuesdays and Thursdays (which I still pretend I am), then that’s only a week I’ve missed. But what a week!

Finals Week

As you well know, I spent the first half of the month desperately trying to finish up The Dragonswarm for its mid-December release. It went live the week before Christmas to an immediate position on Amazon’s bestseller list for all Science Fiction and Fantasy.

I spent a heady few days tracking sales and trying really hard not to run any income projections. After all, this was probably just an initial burst of sales from people who’d been waiting desperately for the sequel since they finished Taming Fire, and it would burn itself out, right?

Still, I was pretty excited. For a while there, I had two books in the top 100 for my genre.

Merry Christmas

I woke up Christmas morning, checked my sales numbers, and realized I must have mis-remembered how many I’d had when I went to bed. Because there was no way I’d sold that many overnight.

I went to church and came home to find hundreds more books had sold while I was singing “Silent Night.” Throughout the afternoon, while the family talked and snacked and played games, I just sat staring at my monitor and occasionally calling out numbers. They all had “hundred” in there somewhere.

For most of the day, I was averaging 20 sales per hour of The Dragonswarm. That’s…well, that’s very good.

But even better, Taming Fire was averaging 30 sales/hour. That’s a big deal (and up from a trend around six sales/hour in early December). I’d anticipated it. I’d pointed it out to people, “Good performance by The Dragonswarm should actually drive new sales of Taming Fire, right?”

But it was pretty thrilling to see it happen. That means the success of the sequel is much less likely to be a big spike that quickly drops off. It’s much more likely to have staying power.

And a Happy New Year

That said, Christmas day was a big spike. That was anticipated, too. It was a big spike across the industry, and by Monday morning there was already a significant decline. That decline will continue for several weeks, probably, until it settles at a new plateau (which will still almost certainly be higher than anyone’s pre-Christmas numbers).

But now it’s been more than a week since Christmas, and our sales are still holding strong around 15 sales/hour for both titles. As you can see in the image above, Taming Fire and The Dragonswarm have been keeping each other company on the front page of the Science Fiction and Fantasy list (nervously avoiding eye contact with all the clones of George R. R. Martin).

Amazon sold four million Kindles in December. Apple’s probably about to open up a much simpler (and, with any luck, a much more effective) indie publishing platform for iBooks. Consortium Books is planning to triple our existing library this year, and we’ve got some big exciting projects even apart from that.

2012 is going to be amazing. Stay tuned.

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Notes from a Thief

By Aaron Pogue on Thursday, December 22, 2011

I’ve told the story before, but back when I was 22, just as I was graduating with a writing degree and heading out into the real world, I had a bad experience that left me with a startling insight:

Fantasy is dumb.

That concept rocked my world. I’d spent my whole life devouring fantasy literature (Eddings, LeGuin, McKillip, McCaffrey, Tolkien, and Pratchett), not to mention fantasy games, fantasy movies, fantasy action figures…. Anything I could get my hands on, I fell in love with.

Of course, this was before Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings movies established fantasy as mainstream. But I’d grown up surrounded by fans of the genre.

Then this one experience at a particularly vulnerable time in my life made me reconsider everything. I felt a little bit ashamed that I’d dedicated so much time and energy to…well, kid stuff.

Outgrowing my Own Oeuvre

But I had a finished fantasy novel, so I started shopping it to publishers. I got no response. That was mainly because I was doing it wrong, but I didn’t know that at the time. I took it as proof that I wasn’t meant to be a fantasy writer. I settled into life in my miserable day job and gave up on writing altogether.

I’m a writer, though. It’s in my bones. For several years I didn’t write a word of fiction, but in time I came back. I came back with post-apocalyptic thrillers. I came back with near-future sci-fi cop-drama romances. I came back with a weird story about a sort-of angel/muse who goes around inspiring artists and almost triggers World War III.

But I didn’t write fantasy. And I wasn’t happy. I was learning a lot, and I put everything I had into all those other stories, but I wasn’t really getting anything back from them. Because those really weren’t the kind of stories I loved as a reader.

The stories I loved were the ones I’d stopped writing. I’d mostly stopped reading them, too. I’d cut myself off from one of the happiest things in my life.

Daniel Wood

The story of my life is a character-driven one. It’s made up of the friendships I’ve made (mostly in spite of myself). And one of the oldest and most important friendships in my life is with a dude named Daniel Wood. We met in high school. We played Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons and shared our favorite authors with most of the other fantasy fans out there.

Dan was my best friend in high school. He was in my wedding. We’ve borrowed money from each other to afford lunch at Taco Bell. We’ve crashed on each other’s couches. We’ve shared some exciting experiences and some pretty heavy disappointments. We were friends through it all.

And then one day a couple years back, Dan and I were talking about our futures. I was talking too much about my day job and not enough about my writing career, and he called me on it. So I started talking about my new Ghost Targets series and everything I hoped to do with it, and he said, “What about fantasy?”

I shook my head. “I don’t have any fantasy stories left to tell.”

He hit me with a withering look. He’d been around when I made up all my fantasy stories. Taming Fire was still gathering dust somewhere, but he knew about more than that. He probably could have recited the plot of King Jason’s War or Faithful Jake. He knows the rise and fall of the FirstKing. He helped me design the plot arc of the Brothers War and first suggested the Caleban Knights. He knows what darkness lurks in the heart of Damion Dragonprince (or will lurk, when I get around to that one).

Auric Truefaith and the Godlanders War

But he didn’t talk about any of those. He asked me to help him with a new project he’d dreamed up. He said he wanted to write superhero fantasy–he wanted to get back to the big, exciting fantasy adventures we’d enjoyed so much as kids, instead of the wretchedly stark stuff that’s become so popular since the turn of the century.

So he sketched for me the beginnings of a world. The beginnings of a concept. There would a populist king in rebellion against the tyrant gods. There would be a cloud of superhero-style adventurers who gathered around him–Knights of the Round Table with all the themed branding we’ve come to expect from caped crusaders. And of course there would be villains. Arch-nemeses and super-villains and some of those oh-so-temporary deaths and imprisonments.

And what superhero fantasy would be complete without an origin story? We imagined ourselves a cast of thousands. We made them up and wrote them down. We plotted out a pair of epic trilogies, but decided that before we started on the novels, we should make some short stories to introduce the characters to the world and start generating some reader interest.

Like so many creative projects do, that one burned briefly bright, then slowly faded. We had hundreds of pages of notes, and I even finished rough drafts on several of those short stories and a novella. But they went in the drawer along with Taming Fire, to gather dust for a few more years.

Full Circle

Now Taming Fire is an astonishing success. Now the sequel is already a bestseller. Now I’m writing fantasy again, and discovering all over again how much it beats in time with my own heart.

The world of the FirstKing has an illustrated map! I’m glancing over old outlines and fleshing out new corners of my history. I have fans! I have become the writer I always wanted to be, and I get to do that on my own terms.

And I owe so much of that to Dan Wood, for dragging me back to adventure fantasy. I’m turning a lot of my attention to the world of the FirstKing, but I can never forget the world of Auric and the Godlanders.

In tribute to that, I dusted off one  of those old origin stories, cleaned it up, and published it to Kindle.  “Notes from a Thief” is the first story in the world of Auric, and I dedicate it wholly to my old best friend who knew what I needed far better than I did. I hope there’ll be many more such stories to follow.

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The Dragonswarm Is Live!

By Aaron Pogue on Tuesday, December 20, 2011

In case you didn’t already know, The Dragonswarm is now available!

You can find it at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

These are currently just the digital editions, but the paperback should be available some time next week.  I’ll let you know when that happens.

Status Update

I know a lot of you are personally interested in the success of my writing and of this book in particular. It’s only been live for about 15 hours at this point, and Amazon hasn’t even finished hooking up all the moving parts yet. That’ll take a couple days still.

But I can give you a little bit of information:

  • In the first 15 hours (and prior to any major public announcements), The Dragonswarm sold 168 copies.
  • It’s now being tracked on two category lists, and is ranked #11 in Kindle Fantasy Epics, and #21 in all Fantasy Epics.
  • My current overall sales rank among all Kindle books is 512. (It took months for Taming Fire to get under 1,000.)
  • I also currently already have ten customer reviews up at Amazon, thanks to my incredible fans who requested Advance Reading Copies. So far, they all love it.

These are all very positive numbers. Obviously there’s going to be some launch-day enthusiasm, but I anticipate even better numbers one Amazon gets everything hooked up, and then maybe another big boost from Christmas.

Some Things

I’ve been hearing wonderful things about the book from the people who’ve read it. I’ve been watching sales climb and climb. I’m…ecstatic. I’m at work today, and having to fight very hard not to get up and dance out of my cubicle. It’s my lunch break now, so maybe no one would notice….

I’m also having a hard time concentrating enough to write a coherent blog post. So I’ll just throw some other exciting things at you.

  • The Dragonswarm is my fifth published novel. It’s the seventh novel published by Consortium Books, and the ninth title (we also have a short story collection and an individual short story available).
  • The Dragonswarm features a world map. The map deserves a post all its own. It’s gorgeous. I’m so excited we were able to include that in the book. Huge thanks have to go to Becca J. Campbell and Daniel Lunsford for putting it together in record time.
  • The Dragonswarm was published with the financial backing of our very first KickStarter campaign. We asked $2,000 and were able to raise it in just 20 days. And the next campaign is already running, to fund Joshua Unruh’s young-adult spy-fi adventure TEEN Agents in The Plundered Parent Protocol. Naturally, you’ll be hearing more about that.
  • I finished writing new scenes for The Dragonswarm about 36 hours before publishing it to Amazon. (If you find any typos, that’s why.)
  • One week before The Dragonswarm‘s scheduled release date, a behind-the-scenes change in the code at Google Docs broke the custom publishing tool we use at Consortium Books with no warning. We had to scramble to massively rewrite our program while I was also scrambling to finish rewriting the book. That was an adventure. (In the process, we made a whole lot of things work a lot better than they have in the past.)
  • Because of those improvements, I decided to re-release Taming Fire as well. So while I was scrambling to publish The Dragonswarm, I added another book to the pile. But that means Taming Fire now includes a world map, too! If you already have a copy, you can delete it from your Kindle and redownload it, and you should get the updated version.

I love being a writer. I’m surprised how much I love being a publisher, too. Every project is an adventure.

Of course, it certainly helps to have a ton of sales. I owe so much of that to all of you. Thank you. You’re amazing.

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