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THE MIND-BENDING POST-APOCALYPTIC SERIALIZED THRILLER YESTERDAY’S GONE CONTINUES WITH EPISODE 9

On October 15, everyone in the world vanished.

Well, almost everyone.

Some were left behind, attempting to piece together what happened, find their loved ones, and survive.

BUT THEY ARE NOT ALONE

Episode 9 picks up after the WTF cliffhanger of Episode 8.

Brent Foster is about to learn the stunning truth about where he is. Are his wife and child still alive?

Led by the enigmatic religious leader known simply as The Prophet, The Sanctuary seemed like a bastion against the bandits and creatures that scour the landscape. However, as one young girl is about to find out, The Sanctuary may be a worse hell than the one out there. Are Mary and Desmond prepared to leave the safety of The Sanctuary?

Charlie Wilkens is desperate to show that he’s not the weak child that others think he is. He’s tired of being bullied and burying his feelings for Callie. He’s determined to do something bold to make his mark. But fate has other plans.

Ryan Olson’s first mistake was becoming a hero. His second one was leaving the enemy alive. Now, injured, he follows Carmine back to his apartment. Are they living on borrowed time as the gunman plans vengeance?

YESTERDAY’S GONE: EPISODE 9 is a mind-blowing and heartbreaking non-stop thriller with another killer cliffhanger!

Buy the book now at Amazon.

Categories: Our Books

Do you like to be left hanging?

Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved cliffhangers. My fascination began with a TV show called Cliffhangers, which ran for less than a season in the 70′s. The show featured three stories every week, one about a vampire, a mystery, and an Indiana Jones sorta adventure. Every segment left the hero hanging and questions lingering with a…

“to be continued…”

I hated having to wait a WHOOOOOOLE week. Yet, as each new episode drew closer, I grew more excited and eager to see what would happen next. And when it comes to serialized stories, it’s always about WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Years later, I loved and hated other shows in a similar way — LOST, X-Files, Carnivale, The Wire, Deadwood, The Walking Dead, Battlestar Gallactica, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and too many more to name without coming off like a guy who never gets off the couch.

Though these shows span different genres, they have a few things in common.

They all have great stories, they all have storylines which stretch across seasons, and they all have flawed but memorable characters. And, of course, they always leave you wondering what happens next?

SERIALIZED BOOKS

While serialization has been around for ages, it wasn’t until Stephen King did it with The Green Mile in the 90′s, that I discovered it.

King managed to do what the best TV shows did – he kept me hanging from book to book, always wanting more.

It was the most awesome reading experience I ever had!

While I’d always dreamed of creating a serialized TV show, King showed me that I could do the same thing with books.

However, that seemed like a faraway dream as you have to be a pretty big name in order for a publisher to take a chance on a serial.

When I met Sean Platt, we decided to try serializing a story I’d been sitting on forever, Available Darkness. While it was a great experiment, our workload was too much at the time to give it its due. And though we had a nice response, most people asked the same question – when will it be available in book form?

Most people, I find, don’t enjoy reading on a website. Neither do I.

And to be honest, though we were serializing Available Darkness, it wasn’t a true serial. It was a book we were putting out in serialized format. A strong distinction, in my opinion.

You can serialize any book, I suppose. But I prefer a book which was meant to be serialized, designed from the outset as such, so it can be enjoyed as both a part and part of a whole. You know, like TV shows.

While we both wanted to do a serialized series, self-publishing print editions seemed too costly to deliver cheaply to readers. And delivering a cheap, but awesome read, is what we wanted to do, even if we weren’t yet sure how.

AND THEN KINDLE HAPPENED…

While Apple revolutionized the music industry, Amazon changed the way books will be sold. Forever.

Readers began adapting to the idea of eBooks, and were buying eBooks in record numbers, outpacing the sales of print books at Amazon.

Authors like John Locke, J.A. Konrath, Amanda Hocking, and a ton of names that will someday be household, found success on their own terms with eBooks. They didn’t have to go through publisher gateways to find readers. They didn’t have to worry about a publisher thinking their work was good enough to publish. They only had to worry whether readers would read their stuff.

And the readers have spoken with their wallets and purses.

Indie authors are celebrating the wall coming down because it gives them a much better chance of getting their books into the hands of readers. But there’s another advantage to this new age of eBooks. Publishers (including indie authors) can now experiment with different and more creative ways to deliver stories.

Two years ago, there weren’t too many publishers that would serialize a book if it wasn’t written by Stephen King or someone with a proven track record. It’s too risky an investment. But with eBooks, the risk is greatly minimized.

Sean and I saw our window to doing what we’ve wanted to do since we started writing together… create a serialized book series.

AND YESTERDAY’S GONE WAS BORN

Serialization is hardly a new idea, it’s been around for hundreds of years. But serialized eBooks is something I surprisingly don’t see too many writers doing.

We considered how some of our existing book ideas could work in the format, but decided against that. We didn’t just want to serialize an existing book, or even a book we are in the process of writing. If we were going to do it, we’d do it right.

Our series would be designed from the outset as a serialized book, paced just like TV episodes, with rising tension and killer cliffhanger endings.

We came up with the concept of Yesterday’s Gone, and then we each came up with our own characters independent of one another and said, “Okay, see what you can do with this premise and let’s see where it goes.”

Then we traded our chapters and began to flesh out the first “episode,” storylines, and then the full “season,” developing Yesterday’s Gone as writers would develop a running TV series. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had writing!

We released the first episode in August, and followed up with Episode 2 in September. Reaction has been great. Readers have emailed us to tell us they love the concept and the books, and also that they hate us for making them wait to find out what happens next.

But, just like me, they admit, they love having something to look forward to in the next episode.

I love email like that!

TWEAKING THE EXPERIMENT

While we originally planned to release new episodes every month, Sean convinced me that a month is too long. Voracious readers can get through our 100 page books in a day or two. Making them wait a full month is just too long.

For one, there’s many storylines to follow. Expecting readers to remember everything a month later is a bit much. And given that I, the co-author, can’t remember every little thing that happens from episode to episode a month after I wrote it, I can’t expect readers to.

So we decided to shake things up a bit — release all six episodes of Season One all at once – right now, along with the full season in one convenient and low-priced download.

Season One came out last week and we couldn’t be more excited to share the news with you.

We’ll be releasing Season Two in January, with episodes released on a weekly schedule, which seems a better fit for the serialized model. While there will still be a few months between seasons, I think the story flows a lot better in weekly installments.

If you like post-apocalyptic stories like The Stand, shows like LOST, or serialized fiction in general, I’d love for you to check out Yesterday’s Gone. You can buy Episode One right now for .99 and see if you like it, or just dive in and buy the full Season One for just $4.99.

We’re also posting the first episode online at SerializedFiction.com starting here, where we’re also posting some behind-the-scenes marketing stuff, our trailers, Yesterday’s Gone-related news, and more in-depth discussion about the story and our experiment.

You can click on the video to watch a larger, HD version at Youtube.

Categories: Self-Publishing, serialized fiction, Yesterday's Gone - Tags: ebooks, serialized fiction, Yesterday's Gone

You know how there’s that book you didn’t get around to reading for way too long of a time even though you knew it was good?

You had reasons, of course.

You were busy, you were reading something else, or maybe you weren’t really in the mood for that particular book. But  when you finally got around to reading it, you asked yourself, why did I wait so long?

That’s kind of what Collective Inkwell has been for far too long to us, that book we were too busy to get to.

What started strong almost two years ago, we set aside as we grew our ghostwriting business and worked hard to bring our own books to print this year. My way of thinking was, we needed to step back a bit from blogging here until we finished a few of our books. Otherwise, we’d still be trying to get our first book out.

We tried to keep the Collective Inkwell engine going with occasional posts and half-assed attempts to cull relevant news about self-publishing.

Big mistake.

Without consistency, what’s the point in blogging? It’s a disservice to the readers and ourselves.

Sean and I got to talking about what we wanted to do with Collective Inkwell. We know it can be a great site… IF we invest it with the passion and love we have for writing and self-publishing. Consistently. That was something I couldn’t commit to until AFTER we had a few books under our belts.

And now those books are under our belts. We released Available Darkness this summer and started publishing our monthly post-apocalyptic serialized fiction series, Yesterday’s Gone in August. We’re now doing what we’d been talking about wanting to do for years.

And it couldn’t feel better.

And there’s never been a better time for us to come back strong.

So that’s what we’re doing in October. We’re bringing back Collective Inkwell and we’re putting our everything into it. We’ve sat on the sidelines too long as self-publishing has exploded. It’s time we get back into the conversation and share some of our experiences with you.

What I’m looking forward to even more than writing about our experiences though, is getting back to one of my favorite things — interviewing other writers about their processes, experiences, and thoughts on self-publishing.

I’ll update here later in the week with exact details on what we’ll be doing and when we’re re-launching.

Thank you for reading,

David Wright

Categories: Uncategorized

In the summer of 2000, I had this genius REVOLUTIONARY idea… I would put a comic strip on the web!

Nobody was doing it (or so I thought) and I’d make a name for myself. Hell, I’d be the next Bill Watterson!

I loved comic strips. As a child, I used to get lost in the world of Peanuts. As a teenager, I loved the satirical wit of Bloom County. And then I discovered the magic that was Calvin and Hobbes.

So I created the comic Todd and Penguin, and waited for the world to take notice.

And not knowing anything about anything, I then spent a few years in relative obscurity. After a glowing review from Eric Burns at Websnark and getting picked up by Keenspot in 2005, the comic started to get some attention and a decent following.

But something interesting happened in that space of five years.

As hosting got cheaper, a handful of companies sprang up offering free webcomic hosting, suddenly ANYBODY could put a comic online. And it seems like almost EVERYBODY did.

Seriously, there were thousands upon thousands of new webcomics!

And HOLY SHIT, the crap floodgates had opened!

It was as if anyone with a scanner and a pen was putting a comic on the web and calling themselves an artist. And there were some awful, AWFUL comics out there. Stuff that made you cringe in embarrassment for the creator and cry just a little bit for the form.

Technology’s blessings are also its biggest curses.

Suddenly, people who never would have thought to draw a comic before suddenly think that they can. They see marginally decent artists getting acclaim without understanding WHY those artists are getting praised.

And they rushed into webcomics thinking they’d be the shit.

But for every 7,000 or so bad webcomics, there were also a few success stories—comic creators who were able to leverage an online audience for print deals. And still others, who said screw syndication, and bypassed the gatekeepers to make their own fortunes.

And their success caught the attention of some traditional cartoonists—the ones in the newspapers who made money. These “real artists” started to see webcomic artists as the enemy, devaluing art by (gasp!) giving it away for free on the web! They were feeling threatened.

Sound familiar?

EBooks are the new webcomics.

Thanks to technology, artists (writers) suddenly have the capability to bypass the gatekeepers (the publishing companies) and directly build and speak to their audiences with very little upfront cost. And some writers and publishers are feeling the heat.

Like webcomics, I’m sure we’ll see an explosion of bad books out there. Embarrassingly bad books.

But that’s okay.

Because good content (if you know your space and can build an audience) will rise to the top. And bad writers will either get good or give up. Just like a lot of the bad cartoonists.

THE ONE BIG DIFFERENCE

The biggest difference between webcomics of the last decade and eBooks now is a significant one. There is finally an infrastructure in place to sell to your readers.

This was not the case 10 years ago when webcomic creators were struggling to find a way to make money for their work. Sure, they could self-publish, create tee shirts, sell ads on their websites, or beg for donations, but those weren’t sustainable methods of making a living for most artists.

Thanks to Amazon, iTunes, and a few other players, readers now have a CONVENIENT way to download eBooks to their devices. And with Print On Demand, writers can also satisfy the diehard print fans.

While there are still some difficulties in easily formatting comics for an eReader, and the quality sucks on some of the devices, technology will change that, I’m sure.

WHEN THE WALLS COME DOWN

Remember how I said that everyone and their sister was suddenly putting out webcomics? And a lot of them were bad?

Well, include me in that number.

My first comics were horrible. Thankfully, I was blissfully unaware of just how bad they were.

But I knew enough to know they weren’t good enough.

(see the proof below)

A Todd and Penguin comic from 2001 - Click to see full size

A comic from 2008 - a bit better

Another from 2008

I didn’t compare my work with other crappy webcomic artists. I compared my work to the best on the web and in print. And I kept working at getting better. I was learning on the job, while also learning how to build an audience and interact with readers.

And eventually, I got good enough to get a job as an editorial cartoonist at a newspaper—remember those things?

ARE YOU READY TO DO WHAT IT TAKES?

So, yes, the competition for writers is going to increase.

And there’s gonna be A LOT of crap out there.

And maybe you (or maybe me) will be writing some of that crap.

But keep at it.

Don’t be afraid to experiment.

Don’t be afraid to learn on the job.

If you’re really new to writing, maybe you can try a pen name so you don’t do long-term damage to your brand.

The most important thing, though, is to keep writing. The competition is gonna be stiff.

Fortunately, a lot of writers will think they can just show up. They can mail it in. That it’s enough to simply throw a book out there, and magic will happen.

We know better, though.

We know if you want to make it as a writer, you treat writing as a job. You bust your ass and put in the hours. And you pay attention to what’s going on in your genre and the publishing industry.

That’s what the successful webcomic artists did. And that’s what successful writers are now doing…

Working. Hard.

Categories: Self-Publishing, Writing - Tags: webcomics

A level playing field?

The “freemium” model has driven the success of many an indie author. J.A. Konrath, Cory Doctorow, Scott Sigler, and many others have proven that readers are willing to pay for content even when the author gives it away.

Whether giving away eBooks, or audio versions, or even in cases of piracy, free content can and does drive sales for authors.

To many, the notion of giving something away to make money seems counterintuitive. You’re a writer, you want people to buy your stuff, right? Why would someone buy something they can get for free? The overwhelming fear is that you are somehow losing a sale for each eBook that you give away for free.

Perhaps that’s an antiquated way to view publishing, though.

Scott Sigler perhaps says it best in this quote:

“People who aren’t going to pay for your stories aren’t going to pay for them, period. But they may download a copy, love the story, then talk to people in their social circle — now I have people who wouldn’t have heard about me getting a positive, word-of-mouth endorsement.”

FREE OR NOT?

A couple years ago, Sean and I decided we’d write the serialized vampire thriller Available Darkness and publish it free right here on this website. This was an experiment to see if people would dig a serialized story, the kind that was “to be continued” week after week.

Just one problem with the experiment – most people, myself included, hate reading on a browser. Many said something along the lines of, “let me know when you come out with a book in print.” Sure, they could have been giving us the polite brush-off. Yet, we actually grew a small audience around the book until we had to put it on hold for outside work.

Less than a year later, a revolution was taking place.

With Print-On-Demand and Kindle ePublishing, Amazon was now allowing writers to bypass big publishers and find and cultivate their own audiences. People were starting to read on Kindles and tablets in record numbers. Suddenly, you could sell books very cheaply and give readers a great experience!

It was, and is, a beautiful moment for writers.

We cursed ourselves for ignoring our book for so long and got back to work finishing it. While we plan to sell the book via Amazon’s Createspace and Kindle platforms, we also wanted to give some copies away, particularly to readers who had emailed us asking when the hell we were gonna finish the book?!

THE ROADBLOCK

While we were finishing the book, I began to hear stories of authors who lost royalties because they gave away copies of their books on their websites. You see, Amazon has a price-matching policy which states that it may match the lowest price your book is available for elsewhere.  So, if you’re giving your book away, Amazon may give your book away for free on its site.

Last week, one of my new favorite writers, David Gaughran, announced that he was writing a book on self-publishing which he plans to give away for free. He estimates the book will cost him around $1,000 to produce. The plan is that the book will be so useful that people will pass it around, serving as an advertisement for the paid book. And in all likelihood, his plan will work  . . .  if Amazon doesn’t ding him for giving his book away.

I hate being alarmist or warning of impending doom that is unlikely to occur. But at the same time, I didn’t want to see him lose money he was investing in his book. So, I warned him about the horror stories I’d heard and the possibility that Amazon could penalize him.

Gaughran is hoping that his free book will be different enough from the paid edition to avoid Amazon’s price-cutting knife.

“My position is that the free book on my website will be both a different edition and a different format, so I don’t think Amazon will (or should) price match,” Gaughran said.

I’m in agreement, particularly if a book is different enough from the one being sold.

However, what about writers who simply want to give away a copy of a book they already made? Who don’t want to create a different version (assuming a different format would protect you)?

I turned to Amazon’s policy for an answer.

From time to time your Digital Book may be made available through other sales channels as part of a free promotion. It is important that Digital Books made available through the Program have promotions that are on par with free promotions of the same book in another sales channel. Therefore, if your Digital Book is available through another sales channel for free, we may also make it available for free. If we match a free promotion of your Digital Book somewhere else, your royalty during that promotion will be zero.

We MAY make it available for free? Or will? The policy being a bit unclear, I decided to email an Amazon representative via my Kindle Direct Publishing Dashboard.

Hi,
I’m trying to find a concrete answer as the policy seems a bit vague. Can authors give away free PDF copies of their eBooks from their website without affecting the price of the same title on Kindle or royalties received?

I’ve seen this described as the freemium model, that giving away the book in another, lesser format has helped to drive sales of eBooks on Kindle, especially when you link to the Kindle version for sale in the PDF.

Additionally, if an author website is allowed to give away free copies in PDF formats, are they allowed in mobi, epub, or other ebook formats? Please be as specific as possible as I’ve seen many varied responses from other writers and there doesn’t seem to be a mutually agreed understanding on this by writers.

This would seem not to be in competition with the more easily accessible Kindle version, but that’s my opinion. I’d like to know Amazon’s take on the matter so I don’t make any mistakes.
Thank you

They responded.

Hello,

We strive to make our Terms and Conditions as easy to read as possible. However, if you have any questions or concerns regarding the Agreement, we suggest you contact an attorney who can provide you legal advice.

Further, if you offer your titles for free in any other website, your title on Amazon website will be price matched with it and will be made available for free.

For more information, please review our pricing policy in the Terms & Conditions found here:

kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=200627430

I hope this helps. Thanks for using Amazon KDP.

So, without consulting an attorney, it seems pretty clear to me — Amazon WILL price match your book down to zero (especially if you send them an email asking them if they will).

So, case closed. You CAN’T give your stuff away for free or Amazon WILL keep your royalties. Right?

Well, maybe.

SELECTIVE ENFORCEMENT?

Several writers routinely give their stuff away for free at their websites. And not just up-and-coming writers you haven’t yet heard of, but big-name writers, the “top of the indie charts” kind of writers.

Yet, so far as I can tell, Amazon isn’t touching their prices or royalties. Or maybe they are, and we’re just not hearing about it yet.

So, how does Amazon determine which authors and books to price match and which to look the other way?

I decided to email Cory Doctorow, perhaps the pioneer of the freemium model among writers today, and asked him about his experience with Amazon, to see if he was being penalized by this policy.

“Well, that’s not what they do for me,” Doctorow said, “My books are free on my site and cost money in the Kindle store.”

Doctorow isn’t the only big-name author to give his work away for free.

J.A. Konrath gave many eBooks away on his blog, and actually endorses piracy of his book, to see how it will affect sales. According to his website, the free book has been downloaded 2,437 times (updated stats can be found here). I asked Konrath for his take on the matter and to see how well his piracy experiment worked. (I didn’t hear back by press time, but I will update if we hear back from him.)

I can understand a publishing house clamping down on free copies of eBooks. They have an investment to protect and while free copies may help sell many books, it might not sell enough, particularly in narrow niches. And it is a publisher’s right as owner of the content to determine if they want it out there for free.

However, when it comes to indie publishers and authors, and it’s OUR WORK on the line, WE should be able to give away samples of our work without being penalized.

And I can even understand Amazon wanting to price-match books, to keep a competitive edge on its rivals. However, the company should distinguish between competition and advertising efforts by the author giving content away.

GIVE IT AWAY, GIVE IT AWAY, GIVE IT AWAY NOW

This isn’t a post about sour grapes.

There is no bigger fan of what Amazon has done for writers than myself. And no bigger fan of the writers mentioned here and what they’ve done for self-publishing. And I certainly don’t want Amazon to start enforcing this seemingly arbitrary policy across the board. But I am looking for something.

Successful indie writers today, such as John Locke, acknowledge why they’ve made it. Amazon has leveled the playing field between them and the big publishing houses. Any writer with good content can go up against any other. May the best stories and authors enjoy success!

What I’m seeking is the same level playing field that these authors enjoy — the ability to give my work away when it makes sense, without being penalized for promoting my books (something which benefits both myself and Amazon.)

Should Amazon let authors give their work away without penalizing them? Have you used the freemium model? If so, what effect did it have on your book sales?

Categories: news, rant - Tags: Amazon, promotion

Anybody that’s paying attention to the self-publishing scene can agree that there’s never been a better time to be a writer.

From Amazon, Smashwords, and other outlets to social media, writers have never had so many tools at their disposal or an ability to find and cultivate their own readership.

If you can write what people want to read, you can make a living doing so.

No, it’s not easy, and being a writer takes as much dedication and hard work as ever. But for the first time in recent history, you have the most impact on your success.

Here’s the Top 5 Reasons It’s F**king Awesome To Be A Writer Now!

(Click the image to see it full-size)

Why do YOU think it’s awesome to be a writer now? Feel free to add your own reasons in the comments.

Categories: infographic - Tags: comic, self-publishing

Is this your brain on cheap eBooks?

Okay, I’ll bite.

Chad Post at Publishing Perspective posted an interesting bit of link bait in a post claiming that cheap eBooks are destroying people’s minds.

While the post doesn’t actually live up to its premise, it does provide some food for thought, essentially saying that cheap books are destroying traditional publishing.

It doesn’t help that the author (a publisher, himself) takes an elitist shot at popular self-publisher John Locke.

At BEA, Keith Gessen introduced me to the works of John Locke (probably not the one you’re thinking of), a best-selling Kindle author whose books are all sold for $0.99. He made over a hundred thousand of dollars in royalties last year — far exceeding the wildest dreams of most every mid-list (if John Locke is even midlist) author in the country. Having read the opening of one of his “Donovan Creed” novels, I can assure you that he’s not selling all these books due to his talent. No offense intended, but let’s be real about this — it leads to a much more interesting conundrum.

Two of my longstanding issues with e-books are: a) how your brain processes texts read on a screen, and b) e-books make books feel like disposable entertainment. I’m going to leave the first for a separate article and/or book, but I think the second objection is valuable here.

Which brings us, of course, to what I suspect is the root of why this post is proving so popular – it’s the whole battle of traditionally published versus self-published.

Self-publishing has a stigma associated with it. Those who had to resort to “vanity” publishing were treated as lepers, deemed as not good enough to get a “real publisher” to buy their work. In many cases, that assessment is accurate.

I’ll be the first to say it, there’s A LOT of self published shit out there.

But here’s the thing – if you can sell thousands of copies of your book, you ARE A SUCCESSFUL WRITER!

You’re entitled to your opinions of what makes a book good, but to knock others who have PROVEN that they can tell and sell a story, strikes me as not only elitist, but also . . .

steeped in jealousy that you haven’t figured out what these “lesser authors” or self-publishers have mastered.

I responded in the comments at the site, but I’ll also post my thoughts below:

I disagree that eBooks cheapen the value of books. Either you like to read or you don’t. We all know people who buy books all the time yet never finish them. Books, for many people, have always been impulse buys. People who enjoy reading will read regardless if they bought a physical book or an eBook. I still avidly read both.

In most cases, I suspect that cheap eBooks likely lead to sales which never would have occurred in the first place, rather than subtract from physical book sales. I’m more likely to check someone out at .99 or $2.99 than I would at $9.99. But I’m still going to buy from the big authors I’ve come to know and love no matter the price.

To your last point, no, not all publishers can thrive in this new market. Nor should they.

You either adapt and provide value or you find enough people to support your business model in some other way. Holding prices artificially high for the sake of propping up a failing business model will never work because the truth is, authors no longer need publishers.

Let me rephrase that – authors are now becoming publishers.

Writers finally have the opportunity to go directly to their audience and build their own fan base/readership. They are no longer held up by production schedules or the interests of the publisher. They don’t have to take a pittance in digital sales royalties or take a back seat to another writer in the stable. In short, writers can now write their own rules (pun intended).

So the question publishers need to be asking themselves isn’t how can we force our will onto others, but rather, how can I provide value to my customers? How can I make the book buying/reading experience more valuable so people will feel compelled to support our efforts?

Not an easy question, I know, but I’m sure the most creative types will find ways to thrive. Or more indie aut