Dead Weight has been available for a few weeks now and it’s already profitable. That’s something a lot of authors, let alone first-time ones, cannot state, ever, and so I’m obviously ridiculously grateful. I figure this puts me in a select group of debut writers, especially self-published ones, who make any money at all. I’m really lucky, particularly since I’ve gone about this business all wrong from the start. Case in point, who the eff releases their book and then copyedits it retroactively? A moron, that’s who.

Luck doesn’t begin to cover it, though. What made all the difference for me was a blessing from the gods. Apple iBooks picked up Dead Weight and featured it on the front page of their store in the ‘popular fiction’ section. When that happened, my sales spiked, and they have continued steadily. I won’t be sailing the seas alongside King Trump in my newly-purchased yacht any time soon, but I have a steady stream of incidental income, and more important, people are reading and reviewing the book. Mostly positive reviews, too, and I’m going to dedicate another post to that.

Without going into sales specifics, take a look at these two charts. One, iBooks, is a relatively healthy graphic showing normal decline and growth. The other, Amazon, with only word of mouth in support, is all over the place, but the overall performance hugs zero. So far, my iBooks sales have outperformed Amazon by a margin of ten-to-one.

iBooks:

Amazon: 

In the Amazon chart, the red line represents eBook and the black paperback sales. The biggest surprise here is that people buy more paperbacks than I figured they might.

I think I’m rapidly headed toward a future in which Dead Weight rotates out of iBooks featuring, and then these charts will probably look similar and my sales will plummet. At that point, I will actually have to do some real marketing and consider price drops for future opportunities. But I’m relishing the interim.

It feels as though I have reread Dead Weight one-gajillion times, and every time I do, I catch that last, nagging typo and the copy is finally, blessedly cleansed. That is, until I read it again and happen upon one more mistake. Some trivial thing — an extra period at the end of a sentence that I can’t stop obsessing about all night as I toss and turn in bed.

I really didn’t want to pay somebody to copyedit the book. My friends read it. My family read it. Agents read it. They all helped me rid the pages of any persistent error. I wouldn’t need an editor, after all.

So after a lifetime of self-editing, I published it. And now this — oh, spoiler if you haven’t read the book yet:

Do you see that shit? Do you see that motherfucking shit? Do you! Yes, someone is reading my book on an iPhone — and more power to them — but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m referring to that yellow highlight. That’s a gods-blasted typo! And it’s not the only lingering, tainted asshole of an oversight in the book, either. By some accounts, there are at least four others. Which means there are probably lots more.

This irks me more than anything. More than people who destroy the word ‘literally’ in daily conversations. More than people who say that they ‘could’ care less. More than people who repeat sentence structures to make their points.

Anyway, I hired a copyeditor to retroactively beat the shit out of Dead Weight. Fingers crossed she’ll be able to pound it into shape without murdering it. I’ll know for sure in about two weeks, and then all the versions of the book — Kindle, iBooks, Paperback, Nook (Lolz) — will need to be reformatted and republished. Which, you know, is pretty much as bad as it sounds.

I think I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but since I’ve gotten a few questions about it from readers, the answer is yes. Dead Weight was conceived as multiple books. I’m not sure if that means two, three or four, so I’ll just say there are more pages to come if enough people care to read them. I love the world and (most) of the characters and remain excited to return and hang out with them again. I want to know what’s up in New York, anyway, and I’m sure some of you do, too.

If you scroll through this little blog, however, you will soon learn that I have two other books to write first. Sorry. Sophistication is up next. The Deep, Dark, Down after that. The good news is that I really am in the final stretch of the former. I’ve conservatively set a July release date, which factors in read-throughs by friends and family, several rounds of overzealous copyedits, and an audiobook version. My third novel — that might take a little longer. I’ve started it and it’s calling to me, but there’s plenty yet to be written. I told my wife that I want to finish up by the end of the year, but I also said that I’d take out the trash tonight and there it sits. That’s actually not at all true, but I lied to make a point, which is that my resolution means jack shit.

If ever my inbox is flooded with requests for more Dead Weight, I will dutifully put The Deep, Dark, Down on a (virtual) shelf and catch up with Zephyr and crew instead. If not, full steam ahead on these other novels. I promise that, although they couldn’t be more different from Dead Weight, they’re every bit as horrible.

Some writers will say that the best music is silence, but they can go fuck themselves. That’s right. You heard me, writers.

This is the part where I lose my shit and launch a scathing attack on the writing preferences of other authors for no apparent reason.

But no. I really don’t care that much. I actually write when it’s quiet and there are no distractions, too — I was just being an ass because it’s Sunday, and it’s raining, and my dumb dog commandeered my favorite spot on the couch. If I can escape into an area of seclusion where nothing but the words seek my attention, wonderful. Most of the time, however, no such luck. For example, as I’m writing this, three screaming kids are running around the living room, and the house is on fire or something. I dunno.

Point is, sometimes you need a good soundtrack to take you out of the present and also recalibrate your mood. Here are some of my go-tos:

Aphex Twin — Drukqs

Interstellar 

Nine Inch Nails — Ghosts

Contagion

Marilyn Manson — The Pale Emperor

If you check any of these out, you will soon realize, as I have, that most of this music is sad and dark. Definitely a theme here. Anyway, it fits the narratives of my books, which are not typically (read: ever) happy and light.

The headline says it all.

Here’s a direct link for you Nook users. 

Anybody?

Take that, Barnes & Noble! That’s what you get for carrying my book!

There she is. The cover to the Dead Weight audiobook, coming soon to an Audible and iTunes near you. Really soon.

It’s done.

The audio version, narrated by Joshua Nicholson — and he does a fine job of it — weighs in at 10 hours in length. That’s based on the 360-something-paged, 103,000-something-worded novel. (Should’ve been 135,000 words, and actually it was, but then an agency got to me and wham, bam, thank you — wait, damn!)

So here’s a detail I always noticed but never really thought about. Books are rectangular. Audiobooks are square. I think that’s because people used to do all of their listening on CDs — remember those? — and books on CD always came in square jackets. It’s been years since anybody picked up a CD and yet the industry never bothered to bring visual parity between book and audiobook. Customers couldn’t give a shit, of course, but authors — well, that’s just one more thing I didn’t think about. So, if you compare the cover of Dead Weight in its original novel form to the audiobook, you’ll see that a few changes have been made in order to square everything away.

Anyway, it’ll be available in a couple days, and then I’ll update with links to buy / download it, as well as some thoughts about the process.

There’s a service called Wattpad. It’s popular. Lots of authors use it to give their books away for free and then pray that somebody cares. (That’s kind of the state of the books industry, by the way.) I guess it works because some of these free books are rated by millions of readers.

One night, I used the service to write the beginning of new novel, After World, that sadly has fallen lower on the priority list compared to Sophistication and The Deep, Dark, Down. But I do, eventually, one day, want to return to it.

If you’re bored, have a read, and don’t forget to send me hate mail afterward.

Well, 2016 is finally over, which supposedly means that celebrities will stop dying. That’s good. Of course, it also means that 2017 has arrived in its place and that some racist, sexist, Twitter troll ass-clown is going to do his best to roll back the country to the 1950s. Can’t say I’m looking forward to that, America.

I was going to do great, wonderful things over the holidays. Legendary things. Things that future generations would commemorate with scholarly books and countrywide parades, perhaps. Instead, I battled the Worst Motherfucking Cold Ever, capitalized because it deserves my gods-damned respect, as I became one with the couch and the couch became one with me. For nearly two weeks. Two weeks, this cold! I say again, two weeks!

\

That ain’t right. That’s too long for any cold to hang around, especially one with the power to render its subject useless. I basically looked like the Two-Weeks Girl from Total Recall seconds before she exploded all over the place, hashtag spoiler. The result is that I didn’t do any of the following legendary things: finish Sophistication; work on Sophistication; write anything meaningful; play video games; consume any media worth consumption. I did, however, consume an endless surplus of fatty foods. Does that count? I was one with the chocolate chip cookies, and the chocolate chip cookies were one with me.

Does this update have a point? Listen, you’re asking the wrong guy. I just write this shit.

Right. So all of this to say, I think, that with 2017 here and a Trump-led cannibalistic nuclear fallout apocalypse all but confirmed for the first half of the year, I need to start in. People, that clock, it is a-tickin’. It’s hard to know how many more words I’ll need to tell the story of Sophistication. I have no idea what’s yet to come, to be honest. These characters are deplorable assholes. But I’ll shoot for 100,000 words and I’ll probably hit it, give (and then take) 50,000 words. The plan is to wrap the book by the end of February, but I should note that I hate plans and often plan against them.

Oh, Dead Weight is nearly profitable after two weeks. Well, depending on my measurement. If I simply account for the money I sunk into it, which includes the cost of the cover, the audiobook, and what limited marketing I’ve done so far, yes, I’m in good shape. Of course, this doesn’t account for the years spent creating it, so there’s that. Years that really should’ve been months, except Game of Thrones was on, or somebody brought over a bottle of Booker’s, or The Last Guardian finally came out. That’s not true — The Last Guardian came out well after I finished the book, but you get the point.

Anyway, I think that’s it.

This is my second book, totally unrelated to the Dead Weight series. Sophistication is set roughly 10 years in the future and follows struggling video game journalist Miyuki Mitsuraga, who finds herself enveloped in all sorts of cutting-edge fuckery and surrounded by lots of jackasses with their own agendas.

For the record, this isn’t the official synopsis, nor will it be used to sell anyone, but if you’ve landed on this blog, it’ll serve.

The book explores what might happen if a group of so-called terrorists possessed a seemingly unstoppable technology. I will note that compared to Dead Weight, Sophistication is loads more cynical, violent, and despicable, so that’s, uh, good.

The takeaway here is that it’s almost done. Final master is set to be delivered end of next week, and it’ll be on Audible shortly thereafter. Which will be great for several reasons, specifically:

1. It’s really the last thing I need to do for this book — other than, that is,  promote it.
2. Lots of people prefer to listen to their books, and now they’ll have that option.
3. I will be finally able to focus most of my efforts on Sophistication, which is in the final stretch.

Working on the audiobook has been an interesting experience — one that I’ll detail in a separate blog post. I’ve learned a lot during the process and some of those learnings will benefit the audio version of Sophistication, too. Which, by the way, should be finished by the end of February and available in the first half of 2017.