AKW Books Insider

The big news of the week here at AKW is the release of the 4th eBook in John Bower's Fighter Queen saga, Star Marine. If you're familiar with the series, the new book fits between A Vow to Sophia and The Fighter Queen time-wise.

So, how did this series happen?

When John came to us, he'd been working on the series for a number of years while seeking a publisher. Like many new writers, he didn't have the connections, name recognition, or track record necessary to attract offers from the big New York publishing houses. He didn't even have an agent (a hard thing to come by these days).

What John did have was an intriguing plot, a lot of raw writing talent which he'd polished over a number of years, and a huge manuscript. The manuscript was really too long for a first book, but his story and writing style were compelling. I still don't know why another publisher (or at least an agent) hadn't snatched it up.

He'd produced a huge book which he split in two. Fortunately, the timeline in the book had a 20-year gap in the middle and the split was a natural. Then our editor and John got down to business and started "doctoring" the first book. Extraneous material was ruthlessly discarded and the story was pared down to only the necessary scenes to make it work.

The result was A Vow to Sophia and it was well received by the science fiction community. The second half of the story went through the same process and emerged as The Fighter Queen which pretty well wrapped up the Sirian war, the unifying theme of the entire series.

Well, we thought we had a pretty good pair there and so did the reading public. But John had a surprise. He presented us with a "prequel", The Fighter King which was about half again as large as either of the first two books, so it was inconvenient to split it up. Not only that, but the story didn't lend itself to division, so we took a chance and published it in its entirety. It turned out to be a good decision. His fans were delighted and so were we. By the time he wrote "FK", John's writing had improved considerably. He started out "good" and graduated to "great".

We did have one problem: We'd numbered the books. Vow was the "first book" and Fighter Queen was the "sequel". But here's The Fighter King which was the 3rd book published, but actually the first book chronologically. Worse, the cover (still) says "Book three of the Fighter Queen saga".

We gave up and quit numbering them. When John proposed ("insisted") on a new cover for Vow, we finally got smart and left the number off.

[By the way, John thinks they should be read in the order of publication in spite of the time flow factor. We disagree, but readers can do it any way they want.]

Just to make matters worse, John sprang another child on us. One about the size of an elephant's offspring and with no convenient "break" point. Star Marine is a "side story" in the saga which slightly overlaps the last part of Vow and the first part of Fighter Queen; and it's about half the size of War and Peace. It's also the best yarn in the series (at least in my opinion). Fortunately, eBooks can be produced in just about any size, so we went with the manuscript as it is. It was released on April 26th and the first copy was snatched up within an hour of the announcement.

However, the covers on two of the works still bear the scars of the problem.

John has not promised this is the end. He admits that he's toying with another side story, but won't commit to anything. We can only hope.

Hint: If you haven't started the series, wait for all of them to be bundled together at a great discount. I promise it'll be worth the wait.

When the Sirian Confederacy attacked the Federation, six star systems became embroiled in a 22-year galactic war. Six years after the attack, the Federation is finally ready to go on the offensive. The plan - retake the Outer Worlds, liberate Altair and Alpha Centauri, then slam it down the enemy's throat, invading Beta Centauri, Vega 3, and Sirius.

It takes all kinds to fight a war.

Rico Martinez: A Star Marine, a grunt. Almost killed in the Titan operation, he is one of six who survives, but his war has only begun. Unheralded and unheroic, he fights for his life and his buddies as they invade Alpha Centauri, and saves the Fighter Queen from certain death when she is shot down in a blizzard. But his fate and destiny merge in the invasion of Beta Centauri, when he locks and loads in the deadly bloodbath of Periscope Harbor.

Regina Wells: The only child of Federation Senator Henry Wells, Regina promises her dad she won't join the military. But when she is recruited by the FIA for a black op to discover who is dealing battle plans to the enemy, she may prefer the sting of battle instead - her mission takes her to the enemy's home world. Can she learn the identity of the spy in time to save the Star Marines at Periscope Harbor?

Wade Palmer: A graduate student and a jock. When his father is killed in battle against the Sirians, Wade joins the Space Force, but his degree in statistical analysis lands him in the Polygon planning the war instead of fighting it. Wade feels trapped - he wants to be fighting. Even his girlfriend is a combat gunner, while he remains safe at home. Then he sees the plan to capture Periscope Harbor and knows it won't work. Is there any way he can rescue the plan before the Star Marines are slaughtered?

An eBook of 227,400 words (equivalent to 853 pages in mass market paperback form)

Rated "R" .

We just started production on a cookbook by Pete Christensen, an accomplished stand-up comic. He calls it The Roughcut Cookbook and it's subtitled "Recipes so simple even your spouse can make them". This will be a first for us. We've never done a cook book, let along one with this unusual format.

The biggest problem we have around here is to get the editor to quit laughing long enough to do his job.

So, what is his job?

Well, he's SUPPOSED to be examining it for grammar, spelling, and all that usual boring stuff; plus he's supposed to be checking out the recipes to make sure the directions will make sense to the average knuckle-dragging husband (that's why we gave the job to him). But all he does is sit there and chortle.

I think a cattle prod is in order, don't you?

Update:

Well, it's finally done. A cattle prod wasn't necessary. The threat was sufficient.

And a nice job it was. I got a chance to read it and some of the recipes look like something even I might be able to handle. I'm not too sure about the biscuit recipe though. He's got some strange stuff in there. I think I'll stick to plain ol' Bisquick. Now the chili recipe looks great!

You can preview the book and a couple of recipes in pdf format. Try them out if you can quit laughing at his subtle jokes.

A promise is a promise and here it is.

If you like science fiction. If you like your action hot and heavy. The Fighter Queen saga is for you.

We've bundled all 4 books in the saga together, a $50.84 value (srp), for only $24. And if you're a member of our free Book Club (no purchase necessary, you don't have to "refuse" anything), you can get the whole series for well under $21 with your Club discount.

*WA residents add state sales tax

Update
With the addition of The Sword of Sophia", the Fighter Queen saga now numbers 5 books and all are bundled together for those who want to get the complete set all at once.

We've actually tried several methods of pricing, and quite frankly none of them seems to be perfect.

We Started with a Wild Guess

What if we priced our books at around 1/2 of what the other publishers were doing? An intriguing idea.

So, we tried to aim for just under $5 a book for "large" books and lower for smaller ones. Sales were decent, but not spectacular.

We Went for Super Cheap

What we would really like to do is sell books dirt cheap, but sell lots of them. So, we priced John Bower's Fighter King, a larger than normal book and the best book (in our opinion) of the series at that time, to sell for $2 after the Book Club discount.

It was a disaster.

Sales were veeerrrryyy ssslllooowww.

This told us something about human nature. If it's inexpensive, then people think it's poor quality and not worth their time. It's not a logical reaction, but it is indeed a human one.

So, we gave up on super-cheap and repriced John's book to a price that was more in line with it's value. Sales picked up.

Amazon Rears it's Head

Up until now, Amazon has had a ruinous revenue sharing policy. They keep 65% of the sale on Kindle books. So, we've pretty much ignored Amazon as an outlet for our eBooks.

Well, they're reacting to competition from the iPad and others and revising their schedule drastically. That makes them more attractive as an outlet.

Now, to play in the Amazon sandbox, we have to deal with the competition from other Kindle books being sold by both large New York publishers, smaller houses like ours, and independent authors who publish their own work (vanity publishing?).

Well, we learned our lesson about "cheap", so we're staying away from that model. Let the "indies" play in that wading pool.

We still think eBooks should be a bargain (and so does Amazon), so we'll play by Amazon's "rule" that penalizes books sold above $9.99. In addition, we'll try to price our books in line with the average prices charged by other legitimate presses -- but we'll shave off 15% to give you, the customer, a better deal. That should keep us competitive in the Amazon world and give you and other customers a good price.

And for a better price you can still purchase the books on our site for additional savings if you join our free Book Club (no obligations except to allow us to send you an e-mail newsletter no more than once a month).

Hopefully, this "guess" is the right one.

Well, we lost a manuscript this morning.

After spending over a month trying to work with the writer, he took his marbles elsewhere.

The story editor is actually relieved. It seems that this guy won't agree to any of the changes she tried to make to improve a slow start and often didn't acknowledge her missives. The attitude she got was that he considered himself to be "Mr. Perfect". She's finished her edit in spite of his constant stonewalling and was sending it to the copy editor when we got the "good news".

He's not.

He had a good story, but it did need some improvement to make it great and he seems to want to remain 2nd rate.

Even while we were working on his manuscript, the boob was secretly negotiating with other digital publishers. In spite of the fact that he has an exclusive contract with us (we keep e-rights for 6 months)! Not only that, but his "new" publisher was actively working on his manuscript also which is a gross disservice to that house because they have no legal right to the manuscript.

Normally, we'd enforce our rights in a situation like this, but in this case, we're actually happy to be rid of him.

Of course, our friends in the industry will eventually know about his bad habits and he'll never be welcome back here.

We wish him luck. With his attitude, he'll need it.

Here's our latest science fiction ad. How can we improve it? What, if anything, is wrong with it? Use the comment form at the top of this lens if you have a comment.

As much as many in the industry seem to loath Amazon, we still have to play ball with them.

Well, actually, we don't HAVE to, but there's money to be made with them and it's hard to turn down. When Amazon was only paying 35% of sales price for royalties, it was a bit easier to stay away and keep all the sales receipts to split between us and our authors. But when competition reared its beautiful head and Amazon was forced to up the anti to 70%, it became harder to turn up our nose and ignore them.

Well, it became impossible to ignore them.

So, we embarked on "the Amazon Odyssey".

I'll say this for Amazon, they do everything they can to make the job easy as possible. Of course, you have to have a pretty clean file to convert and the contents have to be worth selling, but Amazon will let you upload and convert crud if you want. The result may not look like what you want and the customer may vow never to buy anything by that author/publisher again if the writing sucks, but the actual conversion was fairly easy since our files are already pretty clean (had to make SOME changes to satisfy Amazon's eclectic converter) and the contents are top notch due to our high standards.

[My arm hurts. Can that be from too much patting myself on the back?]

One problem we encountered was the fact that Amazon manually reviews all new books. One of the things they're trying to do is catch plagiarizers before they start selling on their site. I applaud them for that, but it's a bit annoying for us since a few of our books have been published in paper format. We had to convince Amazon that we had the right to publish the digital version. We succeeded in all but one case and I suspect Amazon's people lost our reply in the shuffle. So, we're chasing the problem (the author is a bit bummed out over the situation since our digital version is much cleaner and better than the paper version and she'd rather her fans see our version).

So, for now, all but three books are available on Amazon (one for the problem mentioned above and two anthologies we chose not to include since a version that includes both exists -- The Complete Alpha Dreamer). We also didn't offer the "4-book Fighter Queen special" because there's no convenient way to do that on Amazon.

All is great! Right?

Well, not everything. The new 70% "cut" only applies to U.S. sales. Amazon still grabs the lion's share (without doing anything to create the value) and only pays 35% on foreign sales.

Will we be advertising our books for Amazon? No. Our authors make more money (and so do we) from direct sales, especially foreign sales. So all our promotional efforts will continue to be aimed at our own digital "bookshelf". Amazon sales will be "found money".

Would I recommend Amazon to others in the business or independent authors? Emphatically, yes.

After 3 weeks doing business with Amazon, I'd like to report that our sales doubled.

Well, they almost did!

Not everything is selling to the Amazon folks who are "browsing" the "shelves", but those that do sell are doing very well.

Our Number one Amazon seller is John Bower's Fighter Queen saga. Kriss Erickson's Sky Eyes is running second and KGB in High Heels (sold 600,000 copies in Russia & Israel) is in third place.

Needless to say, we're quite pleased with the Amazon experience so far.

We're putting the final touches on John Bower's newest novel. This one is entirely different from his Fighter Queen saga.

Joseph Lexxus is a teenager who, with his buddy, P.C., find themselves knee deep in a drug running operation on Altair 2. Think "Hardy Boys in space". Unlike the FQ series, this book is quite suitable for pre-teens as well as adults.

You can read the first part of the eBook (still a bit rough) by downloading an Adobe PDF version [no longer available].

You can read it with Adobe Reader, or for a better experience, download Adobe's Digital Edition (free). Of course, if your eBook reader handles pdf, that might be the best experience.

Update

Joseph Lexxus and the Drug Runners of Altair is available for sale. Go to the sales page for more information and links to free samples.

John says there are more coming in the series if this one does well.

We've published two new science fiction novels just last 2 weeks.

Joseph Lexxus and the Drug Runners of Altair is finally available. See the discussion above.

Commodore Farmer, by newcomer Gene N. McMurtry (a really easy guy to work with) also made its launch this Monday. "CF", as we've tagged it around here, is quite unique as science fiction goes. It features two monarchies on two planets at odds with each other, egged on by a scheming Archbishop hungry for his own power. Add a Federation navy charged with keeping peace and another, well-armed group trying to take control of that government and you've got quite a challenge.

All these problems revolve around a resourceful terraformer in the Federation Navy, denigrated as "Commodore Farmer" by his detractors.

McMurtry makes it all come together in a thoroughly entertaining story, without confusing the reader.

* * *

We're also suffering from an avalanche of new manuscripts being submitted by hopeful authors.

Now, normally, we could reject most of them out of hand. But we're up against a delightful problem: a large number of them are really good stories that are well-written. There seems to be a pent-up pool of frustrated authors who have honed their craft, produced a good product, and are looking for a legitimate publisher. There's no way we can publish every acceptable work in this flood. We just don't have the staff to handle it. So what are we to do?

The obvious choice is to reject anything that falls into the category of "marginal sales". For instance, children's books (the ones you read to your crumb crunchers) don't do well in eBook format (so far). Some other stories are slow sellers and the temptation is to not bother with those categories.

But . . . one of the advantages of eBooks (which we tout in our promotion) is the ability to take on marginal or unique projects. What do we do without looking like hypocrites? Also, the media tastes of the reading public is changing as better, cheaper eReaders become available. They day is coming when Mom will plop junior in her lap, grab her iPad, and read a picture book to him (while trying to keep his fingers off the screen).

Every year, AKW Books awards a "Fiction Novel of the Year", and a "Non Fiction Book of the Year" award for the best new eBook published that year. This year, we've set up a poll on GoodReads which allows you to nominate and vote for your choice in both categories.

As usual, no porn or erotica.

Vote here: http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/7478.AKW_Books_Best_eBook_of_2010

-----------------------------------
Update:
The final winners are:
Fiction: Destiny's Designs by Regina Andrews. Published by Desert Breeze Publishing
Non-fiction: The Roughcut Cookbook by Pete Christensen. Published by AKW Books

We've always suspected that most people DO judge a book by its cover. Well, the sales figures seem to bear that out -- to an extent. You still need a good story behind the cover, but it probably won't be found if the cover sucks.

So, we're starting to "up" the requirements for our covers and we're going to retrofit some of the poorer covers of some really good books that should be best sellers (probably starting with "Queen Mab Courtesy" by Bruce Davis -- which may also get a new title).

An example of a really great cover is John Bower's latest book. The cover was done by Howard Milligan, who did all of John's Fighter Queen series covers.

We've engaged Dan Saunders to do the covers of our next two books and hopefully the Queen Mab retrofit. Then we'll go from there, depending upon how well QM sells with the new look.

Well, we've published Sam White's AGF: The Gathering with one of Dan's covers. I think it's great!

This is the first book in "The Anything Goes Fighters" series. Sam says there will be 3 books total. I love the orange skin he managed to Photoshop onto the woman. I was afraid it would come off looking like a cartoon.

Secret: There are parts of 6 or 7 tigers in her costume, all assembled and modified in Dan's computer. All of the weaponry was added in his electronic lab and most of the people started out as file photos he had from previous model "shoots". For instance, the blind guy ("Don" in the book) in the fight scene was originally swinging a hatchet in a mess of brush and tree limbs.

It's the first cover Dan's done for an AKW book and he's already working on one for So Tender, So Fair. I can't wait to see it. He says the photo shoot is scheduled for this weekend.