Learning | Meredith Mansfield, Author

Posts Tagged ‘Learning’

Page Reads

Posted in writing, tagged epublishing, fantasy, Learning, marketing, revisions, writing on March 15, 2017| Leave a Comment »

My page reads (on books borrowed through Kindle Unlimited) were definitely down for the month of February. Not just in absolute terms, but also in relation to sales. I can’t tell, at this point, whether that was due to the one-day free promotions that I ran on several of my books. Or to a reported glitch Amazon introduced with its page flip feature. Or both.

Page reads have rebounded somewhat in March, but not to where I think they should be.

Therefore:

No new promotions for this month, at least.
And I will be doing revisions on several of my books–some of which I’d intended to do anyway–and attempting one possible fix to the problem. Including figuring out some new software.

Sometimes, being an indie author is all about experimenting to see what works–and, occasionally, what doesn’t.

First up for revisions, THE SHAMAN’S CURSE.

I didn’t have the map done when I published the first book in the series. I’ve been meaning to go back and put it in, anyway.

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Future Promotion Plans

Posted in writing, tagged epublishing, fantasy, Learning, marketing, writing on March 5, 2017| 2 Comments »

Okay, so in my last post, I promised to continue this subject with my future plans now that I’ve tested this one-day-free promotion strategy. Here goes.

First, since the last time I checked on Friday (you can seriously drive yourself crazy checking these things too often), all but one of the books I’ve tried this on are still at least a little higher in the Amazon rankings than they were before I started. Even the one that needed a complete revision of its metadata and blurb, DAUGHTER OF THE DISGRACED KING.

But, my page reads still have not recovered. However, I’m still not convinced that the drop in page reads had anything to do with the promotions.

So, future plans for this promotion:

Because of my catalog, discussed at length here, I’ve decided that a weekly promotion is probably not the best idea. I simply don’t have enough stand-alone or first-in-series full-length books to make that worthwhile at this point. So, I’m probably going to try this monthly rather than weekly. And yes, I skipped the first of this month. I’ve already promoted all but one of those books. They need to rest a bit before I give them a second (or, in the case of DAUGHTER OF THE DISGRACED KING, third) run.
I’ll probably only promote one book at a time, not two, for the same reason as above.
I also need to experiment a little on the best day of the week to run the promotion. I’ve only done Saturdays so far and it’s possible that not as many people are actually looking for new books to read on that day, especially as we move into spring and summer. Other things to do and all that. I may use that one book that I hadn’t promoted in this way yet–because it was ineligible for the promotion until the end of last month–for one of these experiments in the next week or two. That’s THE SHAMAN’S CURSE, first of the DUAL MAGIC series.

However, I will also be watching those page reads. And if they stay where they have been the last couple of weeks, I might just decide to pull at least some of these books out of Kindle Select and go back to wide distribution. If I do that, then they’ll no longer be eligible for this kind of free promotion.

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Lessons Learned from Marketing

Posted in writing, tagged epublishing, fantasy, Learning, marketing, writing, Young Adult on February 25, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Tomorrow’s going to be busy, so I’ll go ahead and blog a little early.

My last post was mostly about a new promotional technique I’m trying out. At the end, I mentioned one particular book that wasn’t benefiting from it at all–DAUGHTER OF THE DIGRACED KING.

That prompted me to take a closer look at that book in particular, paying special attention to how I’d set it up on Amazon–the categories, keywords, and the blurb.

Categories:

DAUGHTER OF THE DISGRACED KING was initially in the Fantasy->General and Romance->Fantasy categories. While there is a strong romantic element (in fact, I usually describe it as a fantasy romance), that really is more of a subplot, so the book doesn’t belong in the (overcrowded) Romance category at all. I’ve moved it into Young Adult Fantasy instead. Young Adult isn’t actually a category on Amazon, but a combination of category (Juvenile Fiction->Fantasy), age range (minimum 13 years) and key words (Young Adult) will get it there. (Actually, I’m not certain the key word is necessary any more, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.)

Keywords:

The original key words were: Coming of Age, Magic, Love, Princess, Prince, Forest, and Magic University

Those last three were horrible choices.

After some consideration and consultation with others (Thank you Victorine Lieske), the new key words are: Coming of Age, Magic, Love, Princess, Fantasy, Young Adult, and Rebellion.

Coming of Age is a subgenre of fantasy only available by using that keyword. It denotes a (usually) young character moving out into a wider world and especially learning to accept and channel whatever it is that makes them special. In fantasy, of course, this is often magic.

Magic, though central to the plot, unfortunately gets it thrown into Sword and Sorcery, which, while not totally off base, is not entirely accurate, either. For one thing, none of my major characters ever touch a sword, though a couple of side characters do.

Love should get it into Romantic Fantasy, but that hasn’t shown up as one of its categories, yet.

Princess, well, I’m advised that some readers do search for princess stories and Ailsa is a princess, so I left it.

Fantasy is probably a waste, here, actually. It has some usefulness in the Young Adult category, but likely not for this genre. Perhaps I’ll think of something better later on.

Young Adult may be useful in getting it squarely into Young Adult, rather than Childrens. Though the age range may have done that just as well.

Rebellion, while accurate for this story, may or may not do it any good.

Next time, I’ll blog about changes to the blurb.

After making these changes, I went ahead and tried a repeat of the free promotion to test them out. That was probably a mistake. It hadn’t been long enough (two weeks) since the last promotion. It’s gotten barely a fraction of the downloads it got the first time. I need to be more patient.

Also, something I need to take into consideration as I plan this out for the future. While the rankings of all the other books have improved and, so far, stayed in better position than their starting points, my page reads have tanked over the last week.

page-reads

That may have nothing at all to do with this promotion scheme, but you can bet it’s something I’ll be keeping an eye on going forward.

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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.

becomeblue

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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2017 Writing Goals

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged critiques, e-publishing, fantasy, first drafts, Goals, Learning, marketing, revisions, rewrites, series, writing on December 31, 2016| 1 Comment »

Since I was a day late earlier in the week, I suppose I should make up for it by posting a day early.

It’s time to decide on my writing goals for 2017.

Publish BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING. This means:
- Finish the first draft.
- Figure out how many books there actually are in this series and where the break points are.
- Let it rest for about a month.
- Run through a couple of revisions.
- Get it critiqued.
- Another round of revisions.
- Polishing edit.
- Format for publication.
That first goal may be close to enough. But I also want to get restarted on the rewrite of MAGE STORM. (No cover, yet, though I have a couple of ideas.)
I doubt very much that there’ll be a lot of writing time left over. But that doesn’t mean I won’t be jotting down ideas on some of the other stories I have simmering on the back burners.
- MAGIC AND POWER: Another story in the same world as DAUGHTER OF THE DISGRACED KING, but centering on another set of protagonists. (MAGIC AND POWER might end up being the series title.)
- A couple of fairy-tale retellings buzzing around the back of my mind. One of them might end up in the MAGIC AND POWER world.
- My weird Oz story is always out there. I actually wrote about ten chapters of it, but it wasn’t working. Partly because I’d left my protagonist completely alone for too long. I need to figure out how to give her an unhelpful, but talkative sidekick that will fit in this more dangerous version of Oz.
- The prequels to the DUAL MAGICS series, though I don’t think I’m quite ready to go back to that world yet.
- Someday, I’m going to have to go back and write the third book in the Chimeria series. That is a fun world to play in.
Get better at marketing. The only way that’s going to happen is if I make a plan and devote some attention to it at least every month, not just around book launches. It’s just not nearly as much fun as writing. But it has to be done.

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Musings on What Makes a Story

Posted in writing, tagged characters, e-publishing, fantasy, Learning, sequels, series, writing, Young Adult on November 13, 2016| Leave a Comment »

This topic is brought up by a reader’s comment/question about DAUGHTER OF THE DISGRACED KING.

The reader wanted to know when the next book was coming out because they wanted to know what was coming next.

The problem is: there is no next book. This is not a series–at least not in the conventional sense. I might have other stories to tell in the same world as DAUGHTER OF THE DISGRACED KING, but they won’t be centered around the same characters. (Though the main characters might very well turn up as side characters or possibly mentors to the new central characters.)

Anyway, those other stories, if they ever happen, are presently on hold for BECOME.

becomeblue

(Unless one of them jumps up and refuses to let me go until I write it. It has happened before.)

But the comment led me to think about why I feel this story is finished. The main characters are just starting out, after all, even at the end of the novel. There are certainly more adventures in store for them. But those adventures aren’t–quite–stories. Or, more precisely, not compelling stories. So what do they lack that a story should have?

Character arcs. In overcoming the external story problem, these characters have already also grown beyond the internal issues that were holding them back, the things that made them feel inadequate to really follow their dreams. Their arcs are complete.

Unless, of course, another story occurs to me in which they have another internal conflict to overcome. Always possible, but there’s nothing on the horizon right now.

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Flowing

Posted in writing, tagged e-publishing, fantasy, first drafts, Learning, series, writing on July 3, 2016| Leave a Comment »

BECOME is flowing much better now with the new structure.

Become 5

I’ve completed three new chapters and started a fourth since coming back to this one with a new structure. I’m really liking it a lot better, too. This time, I really believe the story is going to work.

Now, you’ll have to excuse me while I get back to this slightly awkward scene–awkward for my characters that is.

Happy Independence Day

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Change of Plans

Posted in writing, tagged e-publishing, fantasy, first drafts, inspiration, Learning, Multiple Projects, series, Young Adult on June 22, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Well, by my carefully laid plans, I’m supposed to be working on MAGE STORM. But, now that I’ve (mostly) figured out the story structure for BECOME, it’s clear that’s the only sandbox my subconscious wants to play in right now.

Become4

I could try to flog my brain onto the planned track, but it likely wouldn’t be too successful. So, here’s to seeing what I can do with BECOME.

Flexibility. As my (dog) agility instructor used to say, “Be rigid about being flexible.”

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Unconventional Story Structure

Posted in writing, tagged characters, conflict, e-publishing, fantasy, first drafts, inspiration, Learning, Multiple Projects, series, story structure, writing on June 19, 2016| 3 Comments »

Thanks to some comments in a writer’s forum I belong to (Hatrack River Writers Workshop) about what is–and is not–a flashback and other kinds of story structures that are not linear, I think I finally have a good idea how BELONG needs to flow.

Become4

As I’ve said before, BECOME is loosely based on the Hercules myth/legend cycle–turned upside-down. What has intrigued me most about that story is that Herc, at the end, ascends and becomes a god.

Now, exciting as his story is, it’s undeniable that outside of killing monsters and similar feats, Hercules’s life was a disaster. Admittedly, Hera was responsible for most of that, but still . . . what about his life prepared him to be a god of anything (except possibly killing monsters)?

So, Become is mostly about what happens when my character, who has led a blessed and very successful life (upside-down Hercules, remember) is suddenly confronted with the first thing he can’t do easily–become a god. That’s when the story really gets moving. But there’s a lot of story before that, too. Both about the hero and about his near-twin half brother (very like Hercules) who is his sometimes ally-friend, sometimes opponent and who will be the one to try to take advantage of that failure.

I now think I know how to start the story much closer to that key event and then let the earlier story come in, hopefully organically. We’ll see how well I succeed at that.

I have a reading list of a couple of books that have done something similar to look into, too.

Of course, what I really should be working on is MAGE STORM. I guess my muse just doesn’t agree with my plans.

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