State of the Author – What’s Up, and What’s Next?

Hey everyone, it’s been a little while!  I thought, given everything that’s happened this year, as well as the influx of new readers, it’d be a good idea to let you all know what’s going on, and what’s coming :)

What’s Happening Now

Recently, I held my first Goodreads giveaway, and as of today, 100 lucky winners have received free copies of the Kindle edition of Legacy – Chronicles of the Sentinels Book 1!  I’ve always been told that getting reviews is key to helping generate more new readers, and that the Goodreads giveaways are a great way to do that.

And let’s face it – I’m a relatively unknown writer still, and this is my first published urban fantasy novel, so I can understand people’s hesitancy to give my book a shot.

It…didn’t help that the very first rating Legacy received (within hours of going live) was a 2 star, on both Goodreads and Amazon, from the same person.

I was devastated to see that.

I still am.  Since then, I’ve received several more ratings on Amazon, mostly 5 stars with I think only one 4 star, but the Goodreads listing still shows just that one 2-star rating.

If you didn’t know if an author was worth reading or not and saw that, would you give them a shot?

It has been a difficult, emotional roller coaster since Legacy released.  I had a very good feeling about it, and the trilogy as a whole, from the moment I started writing it, and beta reader reactions were extremely encouraging.  Then came release day, in which I had pre-sold more copies than I have ever done before.  The hype was real!

And, then…

…..

Needless to say, I’ve been feeling down.  I’ve felt like the energy has just been sucked right out of me, and now I’m worried about the future.  Very worried.  For whatever reason, getting folks to rate books, let alone review them is a grueling struggle.

Recently I read a study about people’s willingness to buy a new book based on reviews.  In the example, the study indicated that a book with about 20 five-star reviews is far less likely to attract new readers than a book with over 1000 reviews averaging between 3 and 4 stars.  So between such a negative first rating and a continued lack of ratings, I was thinking, “What can I possibly do to fix this?”

Step 1 has been the Goodreads giveaway.  According to multiple sources, a large percentage (numbers vary, but average 40%) of recipients of a Goodreads giveaway give ratings and write reviews.  I gave away 100, so even if the average of 40% of recipients write a review, that’s 40 reviews.

Now the question is…will those be good reviews or bad?

The Future – What’s Next?

Despite the disappointment and the depression, I’m pushing forward with my current plans for the trilogy, and that is releasing book 2 of Sentinels six months after book 1, which puts it around February 2022.  And then book 3 in August 2022.

The next step in preparing book 2 is to commission the artwork.  The artist I commissioned last time is still taking commissions, so I will contact him again, but that’ll be in a few weeks.  Right now, I’m more concerned about Whimsycon, the only convention I’ll have a table at this year.

In addition, I’ve begun writing a story that has demanded to be told for years (I remember developing it actively in the middle of my wedding preparations!)  It’s a YA Sci-Fi that starts out in what appears to be a fantasy realm, but very quickly the reader finds out it’s Sci-Fi.  (I’ll talk more about that in future blogs.)

Finally, I have committed to finishing the Sword of Dragons book 4 this November, which means you can expect it to be released in 2022, probably after Chronicles of the Sentinels book 3 is released.

Three books in one year O_o  Yup, I’m crazy!  ;)

And…this will be a bit of a test.  I need to see positive movement in my writing career by the end of 2022, income-wise.  And at this very moment in time, I’m not sure what to expect.  I thought Sentinels would push me in the right direction, but as of right now…I’m scared.

I’m scared because I’ve made a lot of sacrifices to write this much, to publish this much, to get this far.  I’m scared those sacrifices will end up being for naught.  I’m scared that I’ve spent my life, over 25 years of it anyway, working towards something only to end up wondering…am I any good?  Have I gotten better like I thought, or am I just a crap writer?  Will I ever ‘make it’?  A few months ago, I was sure I would.  Now, I don’t know.

Maybe I shouldn’t be writing that on my blog.  Maybe it’s not good marketing.  I never was good at marketing.  But this blog has been dedicated to chronicling my journey as a writer.  If all I do is write about the good stuff and leave out the bad, then this blog becomes a lie of omission.

So, what do I do if, at the end of 2022, I’m not making any more income from writing than I was in 2020?  Do I stop?  NO.

I can’t stop.  Writing is too much a part of who I am.

But working a day job full time and putting damn-near equivalent of full-time hours into writing, publishing, and marketing is exhausting.  Unsustainable.  So I’ll have to re-evaluate how I’m doing this and come up with a new game plan.

I wish I could say “Oh just switch back to trying to go traditional,” but based on everything I’ve been reading in the past five years, that market has shifted so much that even if I did get a traditional publisher, a lot of the work would still fall on my shoulders.  Reportedly, most publishers only put a lot of marketing effort towards already well-known authors.  In other words, safe bets, safe investments, guaranteed ROI.

So…I don’t know.  I don’t know what I’ll do.

The only thing I know for sure is that I won’t stop.  I won’t quit.

Maybe it’s because I love writing.  Maybe it’s because I’m stubborn.

Maybe I’ll just make myself succeed to spite all of those doubters out there.  Including that nagging voice in my head that says “You’ll never be anyone’s favorite.  You’ll never be successful.”  I’d love to shut that voice up forever (spoiler alert – even if I become a best-seller, it’s unlikely to ever stop :p )

Either way, I’m going to keep going.

Thanks for reading,
-Jon Wasik

The Most Successful Book Launch Yet!

Hey everyone,

Photo by Beck Wasik

We did it!!!  You did it!  Chronicles of the Sentinels book 1 – Legacy launched today, with more pre-orders than any other book I’ve launched, by a massive margin!

I’ve honestly been a bit of a nervous wreck about this – I’ve felt from the moment I started developing CotS that it was something special, and the build-up to finally releasing book 1 has been a marathon and an exercise in patience.  So as the day approached, I grew more and more anxious, nervous, scared…

When I got on this morning, I was so nervous I didn’t even look at the numbers.  I had no idea how the pre-order was going, because neither Amazon KDP nor IngramSpark show you pre-orders until day-of-release (I suppose in case people cancel their pre-orders.)  I immediately went to editing my website with updates (http://jonwasik.com), struggling with WordPress’s Block Editor (I seriously hate it…I’m writing this post in ‘classic editor’ now.)

Finally, I took a deep breath, and started at Amazon KDP.  I was…disappointed.  The number was very low.  But then I remembered that was just for the Kindle edition – print pre-orders were through IngramSpark.  So I headed over there.

My wife was downstairs, I was up in the office.  All she heard was a stunned “HOLY S***!!!!!”  I heard her reply in a panic, “WHAT?!”

And then I told her how many pre-orders.  And I honestly started happy crying.  There were hugs and more happy tears…

It’s not as much as a well-known author.  Maybe not a lot to many authors.  But it left all of my previous books in the dust.

And it’s renewed my hope.  And my determination.  Maybe, just maybe…I can make it someday.

But I can only do that with your help, dear readers.  You’ve helped me make this the most successful launch of my career, now let’s keep the momentum going forward!  Tell your friends and family, tell everyone you can, and when you’ve finished reading Legacy, it would mean the world to me if you could leave a review, on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, wherever you wish.  Anything helps.

Let’s build momentum together, so that when book 2 comes out (in six months!) it’ll be an even bigger launch event!

Having said that, I want to say this:

Thank you.

Thank you, all of you.  For your support.  Your patience, your understanding.

Thank you for believing in me.

-Jon Wasik

Adventures in Self-Publishing – Chronicles of the Sentinels

If anyone ever tells you “It’s so easy to publish a book these days!” They’re lying.

But if they tell you “It’s worth it,” that bit is true!

I mean, sure, you can just slap a text cover on it, submit it to KDP for Kindle only (maaaaybe print if you want,) and call it good.  That’s easy, true.  But chances are, you aren’t going to sell a lot of copies.  You aren’t going to reach your audience.  Especially in this market.

But if you want to make a quality product?  Something that catches the eye and draws in your audience?  That’s hard.

The most frustrating part is that it’s never the same experience twice.  Something always changes.  New challenges arise.  “Opportunities” some folks might call them.

Here’s the (somewhat abbreviated, but somewhat technical) tale of the adventures in preparing Chronicles of the Sentinels – Legacy for self-publishing.

Beyond the Cover Art

I previously wrote about my adventures in commissioning cover art, and the success I had in that adventure.  The question I had after that was – do I help fund this book with a Kickstarter campaign?

The answer ended up being “No,” mostly because I was already running low on spoons, so to speak.  I was already a bit overwhelmed…and boy, did that end up being the right answer.  Because very little went right after that.  Every inch forward felt like a mile, and so many things went wrong.

Creating the print cover was step one, and I’d never created one for art that wasn’t a full wraparound.  I looked to the copious urban fantasy book examples my wife and I have at home, and I’m quite happy with the results!  But the first challenge I ran into with that?  Paint Shop Pro 2019 doesn’t play well with 4k resolution desktop settings on Windows 10, and all of my interfaces were impossible to use or read.  So anytime I opened up PSP to work on the cover, I had to change my resolution back to 1080p, reboot (because PSP would still be messed up if I didn’t) and work, then change the resolution back to 4k and reboot if I wanted to do anything else.

As tweaks became necessary down the road, this has become an exercise in patience.  “But why not just switch to Photoshop?”  Adobe is ridiculously expensive, and I hate their subscription model (I also despise Office 365 for the same reason.)

Enabling Print Pre-Orders

The next challenge came from a strong desire to allow print pre-orders.  Amazon KDP doesn’t have any method to allow this, they only have it setup for Kindle.  The best answer I found was IngramSpark, which I’ve never used before.  So there being a challenge was inevitable, but little did I know that it would all come back to the cover again.

To give a bit of background, for all print on demand services I’ve used, they require your cover to be in .PDF format when you upload.  eBook services will allow other formats, just as JPG, TIFF, or PNG, but not for the physical print edition.  That meant converting my PSP-created file into PDF.

In the past, I used a free online converter to do so, that worked well.  I’d tried multiple of them, and all of the free ones, except this one, changed the dimensions of the cover.

So my first attempts at the cover upload on all of the venues was successful.  I started with the Amazon POD and ordered a proof copy.  When that came in, I saw some issues that needed correcting.  This was also about the time that IngramSpark, who take several days to review and approve covers, came back and said the dimensions on my cover didn’t match what they needed.  The resolution they gave me in the rejection email was NOT the same that their guide gave me for the size of my book.

I tweaked the cover, created a version that was the appropriate size for Ingram, and used that online free converter.  I uploaded to Ingram first, hit ‘submit for review,’ and then went to KDP and uploaded.

And the cover was oversized.  I blinked in surprise.  Went and looked at the PDF.  The converter had doubled the size/resolution of the final file.  Just four days before, it hadn’t.  But now it did.  And every time I’ve tried to use that converter since, it does the same thing.

I’ve used this converter since 2018 without issue, and now, all of a sudden, it starts doing this…  So that meant only one thing.

The Search for a Good PDF Converter

I had to go looking for a converter again.  But every single free one out there (other than Adobe) changed the resolution, or added a border, or did who knows what else.  I also had once, long ago, subscribed to Adobe Acrobat Pro to see how it did with converting.  It compressed it sooooo much that it was blurry as hell.

Same with their online converter, which I tried this time.  It took what was normally a 20MB file down to 600KB or so.  Still, running out of options, I decided to try it with a proof copy.  When the proof arrived, the drop in quality was completely unacceptable, and their converter doesn’t allow any tweaking of the compression.

Frustrated, I thought, “Why TF can’t I use Paintshop Pro?  Is there an add-on I can buy for it to directly convert the source files to PDF?”  The answer is no, but the company that owns PSP, Corel, had a dedicated conversion software, PDF Fusion.

I paid the money for it, hoping it was a good long-term investment.  It was…frustrating at first.  It’s interface is not intuitive.  But eventually, I was able to disable all compression.

But the challenges (aka frustrations) didn’t stop there.  The conversion of the KDP cover was fine.  But the IngramSpark cover?  See, Ingram uses a slightly thinner paper, which means the spine is thinner.  So I had to shrink the overall cover by a small amount.  So I’d shrink the canvas size on the original cover source, save it to PNG, and convert it to PDF using Fusion……..and suddenly there’s a white border on both sides.

And it wouldn’t.  Stop.  Doing that.

My wife had an idea to see if her free art software, GIMP, could convert to PDF.  It did, but the same exact issue happened – a white border once converted to PDF.  It made no freaking sense, and nothing online could explain it.

Finally, Beck decided to try to take the source image itself and shrink it in GIMP directly, in case PSP was causing issues…and that’s when she brought up a need to change both the canvas size and image size.  This confused me – I never needed to do that in the past when changing canvas size – changing canvas size usually changes the image size, too.

Apparently, not so.  And PSP was retaining data for the image outside of the modified canvas size.

What I ended up doing was opening the source image, then creating a NEW image file with the IngramSpark dimensions, and copy/pasting the source image into it.  The parts of it that were bigger than the Ingram dimensions ‘went away.’  And then I converted to PDF, and no white line.

Whew.  Freaking finally.

The cover worked out after that.  Proof copies from KDP looked good, and as of this weekend, copies from Ingram look amazing!  The worst was over.

Or was it?

Building a New Author Website

The next challenge came with building a new author’s website.  By the time I’d decided to do so, I was deep in the middle of frustrations with the cover and PDF conversion, and my energy was running low.  So I thought I’d go with the proven web provider, GoDaddy.com.  That’s where http://www.theswordofdragons.com/ was built, and I liked their builder interface.

So I went onto my account, created a new domain, and paid for a year in advance.

And…the builder wasn’t a builder.  I input my name, site purpose, and some other stuff, and it ‘auto built’ my website.  And didn’t allow me to customize anything in layout, shape, etc.  I could choose pre-built themes, but that was it.  It was known as the ‘block editor.’

I was frustrated.  And I ended up spending hours on support chat over it.  The guy I was chatting with insisted it was the same builder as the one I was used to.  I told him “no, it’s completely different, I can’t custom-build my site!”  Finally, we got down to it, and I told him “Just convert my account on the new site to the same builder as the old site!”  “I can’t do that, we no longer have that builder.  Only block editors are available now.”  “Then I want a refund!  I mean, for crying out loud, WordPress has a better editor than your new editor!”

That apparently sparked an idea in the guy, and he said, “Oh, we can convert your site to wordpress!”  Well, since this very blog is hosted by wordpress, I was like “Alright, I can at least somewhat custom build a site in WordPress.”  So he converted it, refunded my old account, and got me on a new subscription.

Except…it wasn’t the same.  The wordpress editor through GoDaddy is not at all the same as this one’s, and further frustrations ensued, but at least it was better than the old one.

Hence, jonwasik.com was finally born.  It’s not perfect, there’s gaps I can’t get rid of on the site because their editing interface sucks, but…I don’t have any more energy or patience to spend on it.

The Finish Line Is In Sight!

So, pre-orders are available.  Jonwasik.com is online.  The release date is set.  In less than a month, Chronicles of the Sentinels kicks off with book 1.  I have 20 author copies in hand already for the release party, and planning to order more today.

The frustration is over, right?

*sigh*  Nope.  One last frustration.

I created an event on Facebook for the release party.  I’ve hosted countless parties through Facebook events over the years.  But this time – people weren’t seeing the invites I sent them.  And some who did, tried to mark themselves as going, and it wouldn’t let them.  And they’ve changed how it works, how to create an event – there’s apparently no way to set a co-host anymore.

But at least that so far has been the end of the frustrations.

Hopefully book 2 won’t be nearly as frustrating.  And this effort has been worth it, because in just 4 short weeks, Legacy launches, and I am so proud of what I’ve produced and can’t wait to share it with all of you!

Thanks for reading – if you made it this far, you’re a dedicated reader :D

-Jon Wasik

The Great Reveal: Chronicles of the Sentinels – Legacy!

Hi everyone,

Today’s the day!  And what a journey it has been to get here…but as of a couple of hours ago, across my social media presence, I revealed the full cover for Chronicles of the Sentinels – Legacy!

And I would be remiss not to present it here, so here ya go! :D

I was so afraid when I commissioned this artwork, because Sentinels has been a passion project of mine for so many years, and I wanted it done right.  I’d seen some negative reviews for Fiverr and was worried about that.  And yet, the artist I worked with, and the artwork he created, was absolutely fantastic, and compared to so many other things I’ve had trouble with in the past month, it was such a smooth and collaborative project!

In fact, if you’ve a few minutes and are interested, click here to see Shupeipa’s Fiverr profile!  (No, he didn’t ask me or pay me to do that, I’m just so in love with his artwork that I wanted you all to see more of it!)

In fact, compared to preparing everything for KDP and Ingramspark, it was probably the ONLY thing that went smoothly in this whole process O_o  But that’s a story for another blog in the near future.

In any case, for those curious about the print edition, here’s the full cover wrap :D  (Click the image to see the larger version.)

Creating the print cover was an interesting exercise.  At first, when I commissioned the artist, I wanted his artwork to fully wrap around.  Except…the lesson I learned from the Sword of Dragons series was ‘don’t re-invent the cover.’  Urban fantasy books very, very rarely (based on about 40 urban fantasy books that my wife and I own) have full wrap cover art.  Usually it’s just the front art, and then something stylized for the rest of it.

So far I’ve only got blemished (thanks, KDP, for your interfering banner on proof copies) physical copies, but when I have a clean copy to show off, I’ll be sure to get a photo to show you all :D

Release Date and Pre-order!

What would a cover reveal be without the announcement of a release date and pre-order?!  Well, it’d be exciting still, but I digress ;)  I’m excited to share with you the final release date for CotS – Legacy:

August 7th, 2021

That’s right, in just over a month, book 1 will be yours for the taking!  What’s more, if you want to get in on the ground floor, book 1 is already available for pre-order on Kindle!

Click here to pre-order your Kindle edition today!

I’m trying to get something to work for pre-orders on the print edition, but Ingramspark has been fighting me…more to come on that, but stay tuned!  :D

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again soon!  :D
-Jon Wasik