Canister X – A.P. Fuchs: Zombie, Paranormal Romance and Superhero Novelist, Blogger, Artist, Publisher

A lot of writers listen to music while writing. I used to back in the day, but nowadays prefer the quiet. Before, it used to be that listening to a disc all the way through would equal one writing session, so somewhere around 40-45 minutes worth of words.

Anyway, as you’re probably aware if you follow me on Twitter is I just recently finished the revisions of my trilogy of vampire love story novellas called Blood of my World. And while I didn’t listen to music while writing these books, there was one song that really inspired the three books as a whole: “A Murder of One” by Counting Crows, more specifically the accoustic version of this song. I listened to it several times in my free time–of which there’s little–over the course of writing these stories.

This song truly resonates with me for numerous reasons and given that Blood of my World will be made available to readers in the next couple weeks, I wanted to share the song here with you today. That line, “How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people? How does it feel to be one of the fortunate ones?”

Below is the track from Youtube. Just click play, close your eyes, sit back and listen. Perhaps Adam Duritz and band will touch your heart like they’ve touched mine.

I love Superman. He’s my favorite superhero handsdown. The power and majesty that emanates from him gets me every time. Loved him since I was a kid. I’ll love him until I die.

A lot of people complain you can’t relate to Superman. Well, sorry to disappoint, but that’s the point of Superman: you’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to look up to him, supposed to admire and try to emulate the ideal of truth and justice in your own life. You want someone to relate to? Clark Kent, bumbling dork and all. After all, we all have a Clark Kent inside of us in some way. (Yes, even you, Bruce Willis.)

The trailer below is for the upcoming Blu-ray Superman Anthology set, including all four Christopher Reeve movies, and 2006′s Superman Returns, which wraps up the whole Reeve saga. Also has Richard Donner’s version of Superman II, 8 discs in all.

Below are the non-lettered covers to my soon-to-be-released vampire novella trilogy, Blood of my World, which is a love story with our favorite fanged-undead (nothing sparkly), and also part of a Kindle experiment I’ll be conducting. Actually, this “trilogy” is more just the first three books and first story arc, so there is a beginning, middle and end, but I’m not going to close it off by calling it a trilogy. I think I’m just going to number the books as I already have ideas for a second story arc. Who knows? Might be a long series, with each arc released in chunks of three. We’ll see. Anyway, click the pics below for the full version.

Today is the 28th, which means it’s time to compare last month’s sales numbers of numbers of my love story, April written under then pen name Peter Fox, (which had the old cover) to this month’s sales with the new, and try and determine if a good cover makes a big difference in book sales.

Here are the numbers. My conclusions are below.

February sales: 101 copies, or $418.02 earned on the Kindle.

March sales: 140 copies, or an estimated $586.60 based on the 70% royalty for the Kindle copies.

Not bad. Not huge numbers, but by the time the 31st rolls around, April will have paid my mortgage for the month.

However, does the above mean that a new cover has a huge impact on a book? On the surface, it looks like it, but there’s only a 39-copy difference between this month and last. 39 copies, though I’m happy for readers reading the book, isn’t enough of a jump to confirm that a good cover makes or breaks a book. Case in point, I updated both covers to Blood of the Dead and Possession of the Dead, as as of now, Blood of the Dead is only up by 2 from last month and Possession of the Dead is down by 1 from last month. And those two are priced a dollar cheaper than April.

At best, a good cover can help, but it isn’t a catalyst. Comparing my personal figures for the month just proves my theory that genre is everything in terms of numbers, and I’m going to prove that when I launch my vampire novella trilogy in about two weeks. It’s called Blood of my World, and is a vampire love story over three books. I have a suspicion they’ll do very well solely because it’s vampires and love stories. Watch this space for more info.

And for anyone wondering, yes, I went out of my way to write those books just to make a point about genre being the reason why some books sell like mad and why others don’t.

My publisher copies of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim by Mark Twain and W. Bill Czolgosz came in the mail today from Simon and Schuster (from their Gallery Books imprint). It is part of their Blood-enriched Classics line. They look really great and carry the same matte and gloss finish The War of the Worlds Plus Blood, Guts and Zombies has.

I took some pics to share with you. See them below, then after, please go here to pre-order the paperback at less than $10. If you have a Kindle, the book is available here.

Thanks. Click pics for a larger view.

Debuted on ET tonight.

Here you go, delivered as promised!

Really straight forward today:

- Debating on running an experimental comic here on the blog; it’s done. Just needs to be uploaded. It’s about 20 pages, I think.
- Almost done draft two of my vampire novella trilogy. Will finish today and type up changes tomorrow because…
- I’m neck deep in number crunching for the business as the taxman is coming in April and I need to be able to show him something

That’s it.

On a lighter note, the Captain America trailer hits tomorrow. You can count on me posting it here the moment I see it.

This was a story I wrote under the Peter Fox pen name some years ago for an anthology called Romancing the Soul, an anthology of short stories about soulmates. I figured since folks really seem to be snapping up copies of April, it wouldn’t hurt to have another Peter Fox love story offering out there. So, I gave this a quick revision, made a cover, and away we go.

I do hope you take a moment to check it out. Just click on the Kindle eBook image above to access it. It’s only .99 cents.

For those requiring other formats instead of the Kindle for the Nook or Sony eReader, or iPad or iPhone, My Angel and Me is also available at Smashwords in a multitude of formats.

Thanks.

The story:

Sometimes you fall in love, and she becomes your whole world. You never thought it would happen, but it did. This is a short story about an angel, a girl named Cyan, someone who brought Heaven down with her, and made Jack believe in miracles.

A few weeks ago, John Porcellino’s first King-Cat graphic novel, King-Cat Classix, was listed on this blog as a must-read book. I just finished reading his second, Map of my Heart, and I was blown away. Though the first one was very good, this one is even better. Very sharp, very bittersweet. Really felt a kinship with John as he wrote about life, love, loss, comics and more. Quite a bit of what he’s been through I’ve been through myself.

Like I mentioned elsewhere recently, until you’ve read King-Cat, you’ve never really read comics. Check this stuff ASAP. You’ll be glad you did.

Click Here to Order from Amazon.com

I’m ultra passionate about this business. I’ve spent almost 11 years of my life working my butt off, trying to make it as a writer and publisher. Truth is, I’m really on edge these days and since I have a hard time keeping my trap shut about important issues, I ended up spouting off a rant over on J.A. Konrath’s blog about the new trend amongst writers in terms of measuring success: numbers.

Read below to see what I mean.

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At the end, the artist needs to decide what’s more important to them: reader/download numbers or actual dollars earned. You can’t have both, not when you’re the publisher. The math forbids it.

In a traditional setting, the buck-a-book royalty system is more or less accurate. Sell 5000 copies, you’ve made around $5000.

Midlist writers used to rag on me for self-publishing all the time for years–gee, funny how things have changed since their market dried up; can I be one of the cool kids now? Wait, is your shoe on the other foot? Self-publishing because no one will publish you? Awwww. Yes, partly sour grapes to be sure because no midlister has admitted to this profound truth–and my aim had always been to write fulltime. When you make $7+ per sale, I only needed to sell anywhere between 500-1000 copies to match their “bigtime advances” from a mass market publisher. (i.e. Dorchester, even Tor) But they had to sell 5000+ copies, depending who they went with, to earn that advance back.

All comes down to goals, and Scott Nicholson was 100% right when he recently said the “new currency” amongst writers in terms of “success” is number of books sold versus actual dollars earned.

Can’t we just grow up and all get along? What’s with all this competing? Hey, I’m all for having a healthy competitive nature. It’s what keeps you sharp, especially if you’re a businessman (which a true self-publisher is, anyway). But, seriously, new cliques are forming now because of this whole numbers thing.

I love this business and I love my job, but some days I honestly feel like I’m in high school again.

If an author is after numbers, just put your stuff out there for free. Seriously. You’ll get rid of hundreds of thousands of books in a relatively short time (David Moody, for example, before his legacy deal).

If you want to make a living, then price your work in a way to actually manage that.

As said, because self-publishing earns you quite a bit more than the buck-a-book royalty, your numbers don’t need to be high to match the income of those under legacy contracts or those pricing their books dirt cheap.

Personally, the most devasting thing I’m seeing happen to writers’ careers right now–and I’m not alone in this as I’ve read other writers’ blogs saying the same thing–is this whole indie bandwagon, screw the traditional publisher mentality. Goes to show that no matter what business your in, people can’t march to their own drummer. They need to be part of the parade for fear of looking like the odd man out even if they’re actually making smart sense by doing what works for them and not what works for so-and-so.

End of sermon. I have publishing work to do, the business side of this job.