fantasy | Meredith Mansfield, Author

Posts Tagged ‘fantasy’

Multitasking

Posted in writing, tagged epublishing, fantasy, marketing, novellas, Romance, series, short stories, writing, Young Adult on February 22, 2017| 2 Comments »

For an indie author, the reality is that you’re never working on just one task. There are always other things that need attention, too. And I’m not just talking about real life things like walking the dog, doing the laundry, or fixing dinner.

One of those tasks is marketing the books that are already out. I likely don’t spend nearly enough time on this. I’m not very good at it and writing new stories is so much more fun. Therefore, this month, along with working on the prequel to BECOME and on improving my time management, I’ve been trying something suggested by a fellow writer.

For the last two weeks, I’ve checked on the Amazon ranking of my books, picked the two lowest (with certain caveats) and made them free for a day. The only promotion I do is to create a tweet and post it in a couple of my Facebook groups for retweets. It costs nothing–at least nothing out of pocket and only a little time to put the tweet together.

Each time, I’ve given away about 250 books. Some of those might be new readers who wouldn’t have tried one of my books otherwise. Some might even leave a review. But the main goal is to inch those books up in the rankings to make them more visible on Amazon.

Over the two weeks, I’ve learned a few things:

First, I’m going to have to revise that schedule. Maybe only do one book a week and possibly skip a week now and then. This is because my catalog currently consists of:

Three stand-alone novels. (THE BARD’S GIFT, FIRE AND EARTH, and DAUGHTER OF THE DISGRACED KING)
Two series. (Chimeria (currently BLOOD WILL TELL and BLOOD IS THICKER) and DUAL MAGICS (THE SHAMAN’S CURSE, THE VOICE OF PROPHECY, BEYOND THE PROPHECY, and WAR OF MAGIC).
Three boxed sets (BY SWORD, TALE, OR MAGIC; CHIMERIA , DUAL MAGICS )
And a handful of shorter works. (“Heart of Oak”, “The Music Box”, “Becoming Lioness”, “Wyreth’s Flame”, and “Modgud Gold”)

I’ve already done a one-day promotion for each of the stand-alones and for BLOOD WILL TELL. THE SHAMAN’S CURSE isn’t eligible until March because I ran a Kindle Countdown deal for it already this period and you can’t do both within the 90-day enrollment period.

I have deep concerns about the utility of running this kind of free promotion for subsequent books in a series or the shorter fiction. And I’m not willing to give away the boxed sets. I might do a one-day discount on them, though.

But the other, perhaps more interesting, thing that I learned is that it mostly worked–with one glaring exception. Three of the four books I’ve tried so far have gone up in the rankings and, while they have slipped back a little over time, they have not gone back to their previous ranking yet.

The fourth book actually ranks lower now than it did before the promotion. That book is DAUGHTER OF THE DISGRACED KING.

And now I have to figure out why. I have some ideas I’m working on. More on that next time.

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Writing Time and Bad Habits

Posted in writing, tagged epublishing, fantasy, first drafts, prequels, rewrites, series, Writer's Block, writing on February 14, 2017| 2 Comments »

I usually post on Sundays and Wednesdays, but tomorrow is going to be . . . well, shall we say, tightly scheduled. Which actually ties in with the theme of this post pretty well.

I have not been making the kind of progress on BECOME

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or its prequel that I think I should be making. Not the kind of progress I’ve made on previous books–even WAR OF MAGIC

which sometimes felt like I was trying to carve the text out of granite.

And, yes, part of that is due to my subconscious nudging me to realize that the brothers’ early story wasn’t the right place to start the main story. That part needs to be the prequel, which I am currently working on.

But, you know, that isn’t the only reason progress has been slow. Part of it is that I just haven’t been writing at all the same times that I used to since last September. In fact, right now, I’m mainly only writing on the weekends. And, sometimes, my time gets taken up for other things on the weekends.

My work location changed in September–which isn’t at all unusual. And, all right, the new post really kicked my *$$ the first couple of weeks. It’s also about twice as far from home–but, you know, the difference between two miles and four miles isn’t that big a deal. Except, that in this case, the route I was originally taking had some really rotten traffic at times. But, again, I solved that issue months ago by finding a better route.

So what is the problem now? I think it comes down to forming some bad habits during those first couple of months. And I’m definitely going to have to do something about that. Starting this week. Well, after tomorrow, which is going to be a hopeless case anyway.

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New Scenes

Posted in writing, tagged epublishing, fantasy, first drafts, prequel, rewrites, writing on February 8, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Well, remember that new scene I was going to write for the BECOME prequel. Yeah, turns out it’s going to be more like three–or maybe four–scenes.

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I’ve got the first one written, at least. And a pretty good handle on the second one. But it’s going to take a little longer than I hoped. At least I’ve got a three-day weekend coming up. Two, in fact–one right after the other.

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New Scene

Posted in writing, tagged epublishing, fantasy, first drafts, prequels, revisions on February 5, 2017| Leave a Comment »

So, I’ve started that new scene that I need to write for the prequel to BECOME.

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It replaces a scene that just wasn’t right but it also has to do the work of leading to the turning point at the middle of the story so I’m not rushing it.

Once this scene is written, things should go pretty quickly. While this is the first draft of the novella, most, if not all, of the remaining scenes had already been written for earlier drafts of BECOME, so they’ll mostly need to be tweaked, not rewritten.

Tentatively, the title of the prequel is “Become: Brothers.” I have cover art roughed out, but I won’t finalize it–or purchase the images–until I get some feedback on whether the novella works on its own.

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Figured it Out

Posted in writing, tagged characters, epublishing, fantasy, first drafts, novellas, prequels, writing on February 1, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Turns out that distractions weren’t the only thing keeping me from working on that next scene in the prequel novella to BECOME.

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It was wrong and somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew it.

This is a scene that was cut from an earlier version of the novel and resurrected for the novella. The results of this scene are important.

This is the story of the early relationship between the two brothers, based (loosely) on the Hercules and his near-twin Iphicles. Hercules was a demigod. Iphicles was not. Even though the Hercules figure is my main character, it had to be hard on the Iphicles character. And this is what the brothers had to initially overcome.

Now this scene is near the turning point (half-way through, just where it should be). The way the scene was originally written, the other brother came off as a bully. That’s wrong. Even though the main story is going to take these two down a sometimes difficult path, I don’t want him to be mean, just very, very frustrated.

So, now that I’ve figured out what was wrong, I can start drafting a new scene that will do a much better job.

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Progress

Posted in writing, tagged epublishing, fantasy, first drafts, novellas, revisions, writing on January 25, 2017| Leave a Comment »

The novella prequel to BECOME is coming along nicely. About half-way through.

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About half-way through, but I haven’t made any progress the last couple of days. I need tp rework the next scene–one that had been cut a couple of versions ago–so I need to think about that a little.

I also need to think about where the main story begins if I remove all of the story of the brothers’ early relationship to put it in the novella. There are at least three choices. So that needs a little more rumination before I can proceed with that.

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Sometimes the Only Thing to Do Is Try It

Posted in writing, tagged epublishing, fantasy, first drafts, novella, prequels, revisions, writing on January 22, 2017| Leave a Comment »

And this isn’t the first time I’ve said that about BECOME.

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So, since the last couple of ideas haven’t worked, I’m going to at least have a go at the latest one. I’m currently working on pulling together a novella about the early relationship between the two brothers. It actually shouldn’t take that long, since I’ve already written most of this story, in one version or another.

Then it’ll go to my beta readers and I’ll find out how well it worked this time–or didn’t. Either way, it’ll be worth the time to work this out. But, if it works, it could even be published as early as this spring.

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Epiphany (Sort of)

Posted in writing, tagged epublishing, fantasy, first drafts, indie publishing, Learning, serialization, series, story structure, Writer's Block on January 18, 2017| Leave a Comment »

I have learned through experience that when I struggle with a story as much as I have been struggling with BECOME lately, it means there’s something wrong.

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It’s time to take a step back and try to figure out what and how to fix it.

And yesterday I might have come up with an answer. Maybe. Not sure yet.

I’ve always known that the structure of BECOME was going to be odd.

I really feel I need to include the background of the brothers’ relationship as adolescents. In the latest iteration, I’ve tried to do that through flashbacks, but that just interrupts the flow of the story and forces the early part of the brothers’ story to be very episodic–only the most important events can be included that way.

Then, of course, there are some important events in the protagonists early manhood. In part, because of the weight of those extensive flashbacks, I’ve been forced to keep those somewhat episodic, too. Because it’s already taken way too long to get to the inciting incident.

And, even then, there’s still going to have to be a major skip in the story because there are a couple of important characters who haven’t even been born yet. (That part, at least, has the possibility of being somewhat fluid. I could make some changes in who those characters are, though I’m not sure I want to. I’ve intended more to use that as a cut-off between the first and second books of the series–which, unfortunately, tends to end book one on something of a cliffhanger.)

The result of all of this is that I’m not happy with the story as it’s developed so far. And if I’m not happy with it, I can’t expect anyone else to be either. So, then, the question is what to do about it.

I think, though I haven’t made a final decision yet, that one answer might be to break it up. For example, I might just reconstruct the brothers’ early story–I have a lot more written than I’ve been able to include in those flashbacks–and publish that in novella form. Maybe certain other parts of the early story, too–in a separate novella. Then start this first part of the main story line much closer to that inciting incident and move forward.

I’ve got to think about this some more before I jump in. It’s an unconventional way to publish an epic fantasy. It’s not too unusual to publish prequels, but they’re usually published after the series is complete, not before. On the other hand, that’s one of the advantages of indie publishing–it allows me to try unconventional things when I think it’s the right way to handle the story. And I can always bundle the novellas together. Even include then with that first book.

Well, we’ll see.

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Flash Sale

Posted in writing, tagged fantasy, marketing, sale, series on January 18, 2017| Leave a Comment »

The Shaman’s Curse is on sale today only (January 18th, 2017) for only 99 cents!

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Story Structure

Posted in writing, tagged fantasy, first drafts, story structure on January 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Three-day weekends really mess up my sense of time. I nearly forgot to blog today, ’cause in some ways is feels like Saturday, knowing I have tomorrow off.

I’ve mentioned before that BECOME has a somewhat unusual story structure.

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The relationship between the brothers is important and I’ve tried to show its development. But that’s given the beginning of the book a somewhat episodic structure. And some of my critique partners who are reading the early chapters have a problem with that.

Actually, I’m coming to suspect that I have more of a problem with it than I’ve realized, too. I think that’s at least part of why I haven’t been making better progress with this story. It’s disconcerting to think that I’m almost 44,000 words in and I might not have gotten to the real beginning of the story, yet.

I’m not quite sure what to do about that other than keep going, hope the pace picks up when I do get to the meat of the story, and then figure out how to fix it–what needs to be cut or moved.

As Shannon Hale said,