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

Last night close to 11pm, I finished the first draft of the third full-length Axiom-man novel, City of Ruin. This now brings his book total to five. First draft clocked in at approx. 61,000 words. I started getting back into it on August 16 and maybe put in around 3,000 words over the following three days, so last Monday, when I decided to get hardcore into it and finish the thing, the amount of work already done on the book was around 15-16,000 words, which means that since last Monday to last night–with last Tuesday and Sunday off–I was able to pull off roughly 45,000 words in 5 days. Not bad. My math could be slightly off, but it’s over 40,000 for sure.

Anyway, the point is, this is the shortest amount of time I’ve taken to write a book, the runner-up now being April under my pseudonym Peter Fox. If memory serves, I did that book in about a week back in 2002. I think A Red Dark Night is the next shortest. 2 weeks to write that one sounds about right.

Doesn’t matter. It’s not about speed and at no time over the past week did I go, “Okay, I have to write so I’ll just writing something because I have to write something.” Instead, I was fully immersed in the story, lost in Axiom-man’s world of Good vs Evil and superpowers. Inspired by Brian Keene and Carlton Mellick III in terms of just going hardcore and banging the book out, I got the job done without sacrificing quality. All that’s left to do is drafts 2 and 3 then the book goes off to my editor for stuff I missed.

Besides, I read in an issue in Alan Moore’s Dodgem Logic that back in the pulp age of fiction, it was not uncommon for writers to pound out a 40,000-word book in a week to keep up with a crazy publishing schedule of getting stories to readers frequently.

I’m taking today off in terms of writing and am handling business duties. Tomorrow I go head first into finishing Redemption of the Dead, which I believe sits at around 3-4,000 words at the moment. It’ll be 75-80,000 when done. I have about two weeks to crank that one out, or 12 days as I don’t work Sundays.

Let the madness continue!

This weekend I created the Blood of my World Boxed Set for Amazon Kindle, a collection of my paranormal romance series containing Discovery of Death, Memories of Death and Life of Death. It is Volume Two of the A.P. Fuchs Library, with Volume One being books from The Axiom-man Saga (coming this week). These boxed sets are a great way to grab a bunch of my titles and/or complete your collection for a great price. It is also on Smashwords, Drivethru Fiction, and should start showing up on the Nook and iPad shortly.

I wrote an introduction to the Blood of my World Boxed Set and want to share it here.

Hope you check the collected book sets out.

The intro:

Blood of my World Boxed Set Introduction
by
A.P. Fuchs

It seems to me that there is a direct correlation between love and horror, the both of which are two sides of the proverbial coin. They are extremes, where one is light and bliss, filled with goodness, hope, stability–physical, emotional, mental. The other is darkness, danger, pain and untold suffering. They also have a tendency to gel, namely in the arena of romantic relationships.
One can’t help but wonder how much different our world would be if these two elements–arguably one element–were not present. I suspect life would look more like a simulation than an actual experience, with folks walking around conducting business mechanically, without nuance–robotic.
Is it not true that human life as you and I know it are birthed and lived from either horror or love or a mix of both? Is not every other human emotion rooted in one of these?
Love is an especially dangerous thing. Beautiful, yes, but dangerous. While ascending to new heights with your lover, when during those early stages all is well in the world and inner peace is achieved–the fear of it all slipping away always lingers a little or a lot until, perhaps, that fateful day comes and your fear becomes reality. The darkness descends, hope is abandoned, and searing pain rips through your chest until you can barely stand. Once you collapse, you think it’s won and the hot coils of loss’s embrace will finally leave you, but instead, it continues to ravage you in waves, bringing you to the brink of apathy and beyond, into self-destruction and mental chaos. Life is looked at through fogged glass. All other emotions are felt through the jagged pieces of a broken heart. Cynicism sets in, walls go up and survival kicks in full gear and you do all you can to fill the void and repair the damage your loved one has done.
Love and horror. Life and death. It’s what defines us. It’s what’s defined my fiction since I wrote my first book twelve years ago. In fact, my entire career was born out of this bizarre relationship between love and horror, and if you’re a reader of my work, you would have noticed that everything I’ve written touches on this in some way, whether a little or a lot.
There’s my novel April, written under the pen name Peter Fox, which is a firm statement about how people get to you and you fall in love because they touch that secret part of you no one else has.
There’s A Red Dark Night, a tribute to B-horror summer camp movies in which the main villain is a creature comprised of blood and evil–the blood you shed when your heart is broken and knife is brought to skin. For some this is metaphorical, for others, it is not.
The Axiom-man Saga, my superhero opus about a man without self-esteem who, as one of the motives for donning a pair of tights, is simply to prove to himself and others that he is indeed something of value after a lifetime of always feeling rejected and second best.
My zombie fiction–books like Blood of the Dead and Zombie Fight Night–utter indulgences into the world of the walking dead. Is this not what we become after love has crushed us? Is not survival our primary concern? Do we not find folks who are fighting just like us, whether in our relationships or even through the music we listen to so we can feel better?
These are more, but let’s move on to what you hold in your hands.
This boxed set, Blood of my World. Three novellas. Three aspects of love and horror–Discovery, memory, life.
Vampires are the horror world’s romantic hero. They are the regular world’s romantic villain. They embody life and death, love and horror unlike any other creature in fiction.
I set out to tell a story about two romantics whose love for each other was thicker than blood and just as red with passion and devotion. The reader must know, I decided, that there are others out there who live in love’s stream, who have gotten burned yet who also have lived and are living because of it.
Who have grown.
The vampires in the novellas you’re about to read are ruthless. There is blood and pain and indifference to human life. They are monsters.
The people in these novellas are you and me, folks living in two worlds: the past and present; light and darkness; love and horror.
I want to thank you for reading these as you join Zach and Rose on their journey of love’s joy, love’s pain–
–love’s horror.

- A.P. Fuchs
Winnipeg, MB
February 25, 2012

Now and then music has a huge influence on my work. I recently blogged about the song that seemed to be the anthem for my Blood of my World series.

Back in 2003, when I wrote my love story, April (under the name Peter Fox), there was one album that I listened to over and over while writing it: Hard Candy by Counting Crows.

Below are a couple tracks/music videos for the songs that stand out most to me.

(Not recommended if you’re undergoing a breakup at the moment. Unless you find melancholy music soothing.)

“Hard Candy”:

“Up All Night”:

So on a whim today I decided to offer the following deal for anyone who purchases a copy of one or more of my just-released vampire love story series, Blood of my World.
The deal:
Grab any one of the Blood of my World books–in paperback or eBook–and I’ll send you a free short love story, My Angel and Me (written as Peter Fox) in PDF. Buy all three, and I’ll send you a free full zombie novel in PDF. Just shoot me an email with proof of purchase(s). Email address is coscomentertainment(at)gmail(dot)com. Thanks.
All books can be accessed at this link here: http://amzn.to/mvHc9Q
Hope you check it out.

On Monday I launched the first three books of my Blood of my World series.

If you want to give it a technical genre label, it’s a paranormal romance. Personally, for me, it’s a vampire love story, and there is a difference between the two because, like I’ve said elsewhere on the Web, romance is more about the fantasy of love, and a love story is typically more true to life and bittersweet as it showcases both the joys and pains of love.

Why did I write these books?

Two reasons:

1) I’ve never written a vampire book before, so it was something I wanted to do and I’ve always like the monster
2) It’s an experiment on how much an impact genre makes on book sales.

As anyone reading this knows, I have my fair share of gripes about the so-called “indie revolution” and “Kindle lottery” and all that stuff. Yet, when I look at those having crazy good success and/or getting lucky, I’ve noticed they all write in very popular genres: thrillers, mysteries, traditional romance, erotica, romantica. After loads of perusing the Kindle charts, genres outside that don’t have nearly the same amount of success unless you’re a name-brand author to begin with.

Since I’ve been self-publishing so long and have made every mistake you could along the way, it really bothers me that newbie writers are buying into the hype created by those who’ve fluked into success and/or are doing very well thanks to writing in a popular genre.

To be clear: this isn’t sour grapes. Truthfully, my fear is newbies will stake their all on self-publishing without really understanding what they’re getting into and then will find out the hard–and disappointing–way that publishing on the whole is a giant crapshoot. (It really is; ask any publisher; if we knew what would sell huge, we’d publish that all the time. There are only trends that help us out, that’s it.)

Anyway, because I’m also hard-headed sometimes, I went out of my way and wrote three touching love stories featuring a romance between a vampire and a human. Even more specific, between a vampire and a human who are 16 years old. I really want to see how much my books will move because I deliberately wrote something in a popular genre. I know from the past that my sales really picked up when I added the ever-popular zombie to my catalog. I know that my love story, April, written as Peter Fox, moves very well because love stories are pretty popular. So let’s see what happens when one goes out of their way to write a popular-genred book.

Keep in mind, I’m well aware this whole thing could blow up in my face. But if I’m right, then I think I would have made a pretty significant point about this “revolution” (which it isn’t, but that’s a topic for another time.)

I’ll keep you posted on how the books are doing, and my hope is you’ll glean some useful info as we go along on this journey together. And thank you in advance if you support one or more of the titles on either side of this screen.

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.

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.

So here we are, just over two weeks into the April: A Love Story (written as Peter Fox) new cover experiment. So far, things are on track for my estimation last post, but I’ve been in this game long enough to know things can turn on a dime in an instant.

Regardless, here’s where we stand, Kindle sales only, as of 2:40PM CST today: 78 copies sold.

Not bad over all, considering it’s at a $5.99 price point, so at 70% royalties (not including a 6-7 cents transaction fee per sale), I’m at around $326.82US earned on April this month. For me, that’s $7 shy of one of my biweekly mortgage payment. (Granted, I’m in Canada and right now I’m not getting the “extra” I’d normally get on the dollar because our dollar is dominating the US right now.)

I’m pleased. If all goes as well or better this month, the roof over my head is paid for.

I’m eager to see the finally tally on the 28th and compare it to the past few months. Let’s see if indeed a new cover makes a huge difference, or just a small one.

As per my previous blog entry on keeping you up-to-date on April‘s (written as Peter Fox) performance on Kindle and if having a new cover affects sales numbers, here’s what’s happening so far with the title this month.

Last month with the old cover, April sold a total of 101 copies via Kindle.

This month, April has sold 35 copies as of this writing. We’re presently 8 days into March. To keep things equal, I’m running it to the 28th (as Feb. had 28 days). Thus far, I’m averaging 4.375 copies a day. If things remain steady, by the 28th of March, 122.5 copies will have sold. Obviously, I’m being technical with the decimals to be precide about this, but you get the idea.

I’ve been around long enough to know sales flucuate month to month, even wildly. For me, at present, a 21.5-copy difference (if nothing changes) isn’t enough to convince me the new and improved cover has been the cause of the increase. A jump of 50 or 100 copies will definitely make me give credibility to the theory, and a jump of, say, 200 will make it plausible, even prove it.

I’ll keep you posted as more data comes in.

As part of my publishing plan for this year, I’m going to be revisiting both my and Coscom Entertainment’s older titles and updating the covers of those I feel need a facelift. The first to undergo a change this year was my supernatural thriller, Undeniable.
The second was my love story, April, which I wrote under the pen name Peter Fox to set it apart from my usual superhero and monster stories. I released it in paperback and eBook way back in 2004.
April has been a strong seller on the Kindle for me over the past several months, with 101 sales in February at a $5.99 price point. I’m being transparent with the sales for this particular title because I want to see the impact a new cover has on an older book and, in general, the importance of a good cover. Now this is where you go, “Duh! An awesome cover will move copies way better than a bad one.” Sure, that’s what commonsense says, however, I’ve been around this business long enough to know that even books with terrible covers do quite well. Likewise, I’ve seen the same through personal experience. Hey, look at April‘s first cover below to see what I mean. Over a 100 sales on just one platform (never mind others) is nothing to sneeze at.
Check back weekly to see how April is doing compared to last month, and remember the only thing that’s changed is the cover.
My hope is also that my transperency for this experiment can help writers reading this blog. I’ll be doing another experiment later this month (hopefully) that some might find controversial, but it’s definitely worth documenting.
The old cover and new one for April are below, and beneath that is the book’s plot synopsis. If you like reading love stories by Nicholas Sparks, James Patterson or Erich Segal, then this book will be right up your alley.
Thanks.

Old APRIL Cover

New APRIL Cover

Synopsis:

Some moments come along and your world—your life—changes. Something shifts inside and everything’s the same yet somehow different. Sometimes someone comes into your life and helps you to breathe for the first time, to think with clarity and to give you truth and joy.

Often, we never see it coming. But it also happens when we need it the most and, usually, when we don’t realize we need it.

For Joseph Bailey, life has come to a standstill; existence, living, call it what you will, have stopped moving, stopped flowing, stopped growing. Those he knew while growing up seemed to have gone down the right path, creating a so-called normal life. He’s not sure if he followed.

Spending lonely nights writing comic book scripts and hazy afternoons watching cartoons brings him to his knees, and he needs something—maybe even someone—more. One Friday, while at a coffee shop working on a new comic script, Joseph is interrupted when a quirky girl with long black hair and smooth-as-marble gray eyes sits down across from him, seeking sanctuary from her controlling boyfriend, Dan.

Her name is April.

All seems under control even when Dan follows her in to the coffee shop, looking to patch things up. At least, that’s what was supposed to have happened. Once Dan leaves, Joseph figures his work is done and April will be on her way, never to be seen again. Instead, she stays, removes her sweater and orders an apple cider. Just then something slips inside Joseph, something good, right and pure.

Their weekend begins.

From a quiet night in an old railway car to seeking the undertones of humanity at the art gallery, to bringing to light the tender commonalities that we as humans share, April is a story of how a simple chance meeting can hold you and protect you, and give you what the human heart is continuously after—

Hope.