30 Days of Hell - The Road to Winning Kindle Scout and Getting Published, Part Four

My campaign closed on Sunday night, March 7th. I was notified by email that a review board would be reading my manuscript to determine whether if they felt it was something they could sell and that I would hear back within five business days.

In practical terms this means a person participating in the Kindle Scout program may wait a full week after their campaign is over to be told whether they will be published. In practice, my email came on Tuesday. The results?

Congraulations. You are being published.

A series of emails follows the initial contact email. A series of 'milestones' are set for you to accomplish before you get to talk to anyone at Amazon, and the first is getting your account setup, across multiple countries in the world, so that purchases of your book will be deposited to your account. It's a relatively straightforward process as information entered for the United States can be copied directly to forms involving other countries without an issue. Following the completion of this tax information, you are notified that you will receive an advance within 30 days. That was certainly the case for me, as my money was deposited by the first week of April.

After your tax information has been completed and a few days have been passed, you're finally presented the opportunity to speak with those running the Scout program at Amazon. While I won't divulge specific names here, all Kindle Scout winners (to this point) become well acquainted with the same names. The phone call itself, which takes place roughly within a week of your email notification, is to determine your plans, give some insight into Amazon's position, and to notify you of the rough timeline your book will follow before publication.

Of course, by the time of this phone call it's been a month since your Scout program began and an additional three weeks of email tag. That makes the waiting frustrating but in the end, quite worth it. Among some of the key information you're given is the fact that your book will be edited. While Amazon remains unsure as of now whether they will continue providing copy edit services to Scout winners, so far it seems they've been pleased with the results and the positive media that's resulted. One of the initial concerns with Amazon's Scout program was the lack of copy editing despite the massive retailer acting like a publishing label; the use of copy edit services helps dismiss that concern. Of course the edit won't begin until roughly two weeks after your phone conversation, and then will take somewhere in the area of a month and a half to complete. That means, from beginning to end, that the Scout program will take four to five months of your life before it's finally out of the door for publication. My current date is set for the first week of June, six months after I wrote Floor 21 and four months since I submitted it for consideration.

In writing this four part series, I've touched on everything from my writing process, the development of my book and finally, the obvious details of the Scout program. So what key points of advice could I leave for anyone considering submitting to the Kindle Scout program?

• Be in it for the long haul. After writing your book and submitting it, it can be close to half a year before you're able to finally see your book out of the door and being read by buyers.
• Be able to market yourself. A consistent trend among winners is their ability to get onto the Hot list for at least two weeks, and almost every winner I've talked to either has a following from past published works or has been able to effectively sell their current work to prospective readers. I myself generated a fandom by relentlessly lobbying my work to fans of the genre, taking out small advertisements and encouraging my readers to share the book and its general story with others.
• Marketing is partly the ability to pitch your work and partly the ability to draw random viewers coming to the Scout website. What's the easiest way to do this? Create or contract compelling, high quality cover art that draws a reader's attention. Sales start with someone noticing your book. This goes for both traditional retailers and ebooks. Make your cover shine. 
• On the same note, any good cover needs a good pitch. Cut and refine your two or three sentence elevator pitch until it's so good that you can sell the concept to someone in less than 30 seconds. If you have to take more than a minute to sell your book, you've lost the buyer.
• Once again picking up off the last two points, a good cover and pitch won't help you win buyers and voters if your work is sloppy. I personally edit a book four times and sometimes five times before I feel it's complete, and did so with Floor 21. Amazon doesn't provide editing services until after you win, so if your readers are turned off by your terrible writing, the blame is on you.
• Network. Social media is powerful if you use it wisely. Tweets thrown into the wind and Facebook posts that garner no responses are worthless. Post to places and writing groups with your idea first to see if you can garner a following. Cultivate that following by updating your fans frequently and engaging them in the voting  process. If they don't give you word of mouth, your book won't win and it certainly wouldn't sell. So make a compelling story people want to talk about.
• You're not as good as you think you are. Listen when people voice concerns about your manuscript or campaign.

Over the years I've dealt with editors, publishers, agents and middlemen involved in the writing industry.  The common thread, from my time at Blizzard Entertainment, to my time as a sport journalists and my time in the Scout program, is that you have to write well and be aggressive in pitching your material. There are a thousand writers out there. Don't be the one that gets rejected, learns nothing, never improves and gives up. Maybe it's your writing that needs improving, or maybe it's your marketing, but either way get better and keep pushing.

Time's gonna' pass either way, whether you're working at it or not. So work.

I hope this series of posts has been helpful to all of you aspiring writers.

"You're gonna carry that weight."

30 Days of Hell - The Road to Winning Kindle Scout and Getting Published, Part Three

Kindle Scout took quite a bit of flack for posing as a hybrid publishing outfit. While claiming it was seeking to be reader powered publishing that would allow it to market indie authors whose works would go completely unedited, it was also posing partly as publishing outfit that would put its advertising power behind the books that were chosen (complete with a cash advance to published authors). This put Amazon into what was an awkward position in the press; it claimed its authors were independent yet they had the Amazon advertising budget behind them. That meant Amazon's brand was on the line, and that meant the sales giant felt the need to step in and provide editing assistance with manuscripts.

Not that the winners had badly written manuscripts. A brief survey of the winning authors revealed a number of previously published authors as well as novices with a fair amount of experience in other writing venues. In other words, almost all knew the rigors of self-editing and the value of a copy edit. It also became apparent that the winners were helped by previously established fan bases, since many were able to appeal to readers of their previously published books. In my case, having developed a fan base for Floor 21 through my various writing groups, I was able to multiply my votes by making simple requests to supporters who in turn passed those requests to others that were interested in the genre. I also benefited from taking out select advertisements. In this case I used Facebook to target friends of people that had already supported my author page; in other words, my ads were going to friends of supporters, and specifically they were targeted at fans of young-adult science fiction with a dystopian twist. This guaranteed the correct audience was being found and my click through rate was fairly decent. I never felt disappointed in my ad selection and responses.

The thirty days of voting was nerve wracking and I found myself checking my standing every hour of every day up until the final week. Over that time frame I never saw Floor 21 fall off the Hot List for more than hour before rebounding.

Books placed for selection on Kindle Scout are sorted into a variety of categories including Science Fiction & Fantasy, Mystery, and Romance. However, those books with the most votes on an hourly basis move into Amazon's 'Hot List'. The Hot List is important because it is the first set of books a visitor sees when they arrive on the Kindle Scout splash page. This is consistent with sales and marketing in general; be first, be loud and be present. People like winners and think they're sitting at the top for a justifiable reason. If a book's on the hot list, it must be because lots of people like it. This inclines them to vote for yours first. Even during periods when I wasn't advertising or wrangling my supporters into votes, I was constantly shuffling through the Hot List.

It's worth mentioning that the Hot List doesn't seem to be a 'ranked' list; books with the most votes aren't necessarily at the top of the Hot List. The sorting seems randomized, so generally it's just important to be on there. Being on the list shows you're getting votes, and if you're on the list even when you're not marketing it means that people are arriving at the Kindle Scout page, seeing your book and voting for you even if they've never previously seen your work.

You also don't need to be on the list every day of the week or even the entire month. While my book remained on the list for 30 days, other books that were on the list for perhaps two weeks were selected. This is because a flood of votes only fast tracks your book for consideration by Amazon's editorial board, which then makes decisions on whether to choose your book or not. Several books on the Hot List consistently for the majority of their time in the program were not chosen while other books that vanished after two and a half weeks were selected. The decision by Amazon's selection team is not only based on votes but also based on whether Amazon thinks it can sell your book.

At any rate, after 30 days you're notified that your book has finished its campaign and that now it's in the hands of the selection team. That began the next few days of waiting... days that created even more hell for me. 

An Englishman from Mexico

"I met you on the 13th of October, a date I shall remember forever but that you will never remember. If there were ever a more fitting metaphor for a relationship then I cannot imagine it. You were smiling beneath the crimson lights of the bar, washing away memories I would later find out were of your ex-fiancee and the relationship you'd left behind. I was there reluctantly, dragged at the pestering of my friends for an evening of revelry I neither craved nor desired. My heart had already been broken ten times over in the course of the past few years and my desire for marriage and a lasting relationship was thoroughly buried. Yours was just beggining. I was older. You were younger. I was remembering. You were forgetting.

We were, from the start, ships drifting in opposite directions.

So of course it was to my great surprise when a friend of mine dragged you to our table. In the ensuing hours the alcohol would flow, far greater for you than me, and we'd fill the evening with tales and confessions of lost loves and broken hearts. Somehow, in the midst of beer drenched conversations and tear filled admissions, we'd find a moment in which our two hearts were joined by our hurts. Which in retrospect was perhaps not the greatest way of beginning a relationship and yet, there it was.

You could barely remember me the next day while I remembered you all too well. You barely wanted to venture a date with me given the grounds of our first meeting. And yet we found ourselves having drinks and meals, sharing laughs and joys, yet our ships still sailed by two different winds. I was tired of trying to marry. You were still, unexpectedly to me, seeking it with passion.

How ironic that in the end you were the one person I wanted to be with more than I'd wanted to be with anyone in years and yet I could not give you the one thing you wanted. Our destinations were far too different, our journeys taking us into different waters. And so, one day, our ships lost communications. That day you were gone, and my first true happiness gone with the whisper of the wind.

Which is why I find it so strange now to sit here, my journey having come full circle. I've returned to the port I departed all those years ago. Of course you have long found your destination and vanished over the horizon while I linger, alone once more. And yet I find that, somehow and perhaps miraculously, I have found the will to again commit. It is likely on account of you. If I hadn't known the pleasure of your company and the warmth of your voice, I might never have found the desire to give myself to a person, utterly and completely, again. Such a shame it took the loss of someone so incredible to make me realize that."

James Pemberton paused as he lifted his thumb from the recording button on his phone. For a long moment he stared at its screen, his eyes pinned to the file shining at him from behind the illuminated glass: To Christina. Finally his finger slid over the file, illuminating it in red before striking a final button at the side.

"Deleted," he grumbled as the file was lost into the ether. "If only memory was so easy to discard."

30 Days of Hell - The Road to Winning Kindle Scout and Getting Published, Part Two

I originally heard about the Kindle Scout program in early November and at that time decided to submit my book, The Dream Map, to see if it would get a shot. Unfortunately I'd already set it to sell through the standard Kindle system and so it was ineligible. Of course rejection wasn't a new phenomenon in the world of writing. Though I'd found success in academia and doing short stints for Blizzard Entertainment, a fully published novel still eluded me. As far as my experience with Kindle Scout, I assumed at the time that my relationship with it was over. Brief, experimental and completely nondescript, it was much like an unmemorable movie or inoffensive book. Simply state, it was not something that would stay in my mind either way.

I flirted in the halls of NaNoWriMo groups that November month, engaging with others in discussions of technique and style. I had more experience than some others, including time negotiating with agents, dealing with editors and the like. At its worst I was bored by repetetive questions and authors unwilling to understand the rules before attempting to break them. At its best I was intrigued by story concepts and found myself in lengthy discussions of 'why' we write.

However, it's important to remember that I never actually started writing a novel for NaNoWriMo. I had no reason to. After all, I'd never had any difficulties motivating myself to write and I already had books I'd completed, though they lingered unpublished. I had no reason that simply write another novel just for the purpose of saying I 'won' NaNoWriMo. No, Floor 21 started for completely different reasons.

It was a late Sunday and I was catching up on episodes of The Walking Dead when I saw a young woman rappelling down an elevator shaft. At its bottom awaited hordes of zombies but if she could only make it through, she'd find her way to freedom. The girl had been imprisoned by hospital authorities for weeks and this was her moment to flee. As I saw her working her way down into a pile of broken and zombified bodies, I wondered to myself: What if she had always lived in that building? What if this wasn't her returning to her group? Instead, what if she'd always lived at the top and had no idea what awaited on ground floor?

That was the initial inspiration of an idea, and I quickly typed out a 1,200 word 'recording' of Jackie. This writing exercise was experimental for me since I'd never attempted to write in first person, never attempted to write a female protagonist and was attempting to write it as if she was leaving recordings behind. That idea, of leaving recordings behind, was taken from a staple of horror conventions used in horror video games from Bioshock to Dead Space. But somehow it just worked and the premise was intriguing. I posted the sample to several writing groups, including my NaNoWriMo group. And you know what?

It exploded.

Just about everyone who read it had an overwhelmingly positive response to the material and the character. Inspired by the response, I worked furiously that week. It was Thanksgiving week and my workload was light since students were not holding classes (I run a small tutoring agency). Within the week I was done; I'd written 50,000 words in a week, finished the first draft of Floor 21 and inadvertently won NaNoWriMo.

Now all I had to do was get it published. Enter Kindle Scout.

30 Days of Hell - The Road to Winning Kindle Scout and Getting Published, Part One

A bit about me. 

My name is Jason Luthor and I am a former writer for Blizzard Entertainment. During my time as what was essentially outsourced writing talent, I worked with the writing team to develop Protoss storylines that at the time were going to be part of the Protoss campaign for Starcraft 2. I'm not saying I was the greatest writer, but I was good enough to get paid working for a really well established entertainment company, and I had fairly solid mastery of the short story writing form.

In 2012 I was completing my Masters Degree. During what I can only call a hectic hell on earth situation, I was splitting time as a full time Masters student and a high school teacher. It wasn't glamorous and I was exhausted all the time, but one thing I did learn along the way was the importance of editing. For a few years, since my time with Blizzard, I'd been trying to get a book out the door. However I, like many short story writers, did not 'get' what it took to take a short story and keep it interesting over the length of a novel. A lot of my problems would have been solved with just some decent editing.

The major problem was that the graduate program was so writing heavy that somewhere I lost my passion. That summer, with my Masters degree in hand, I was sparked by the movie Man of Steel to start writing some Superman fanfiction. I had great reviews and decided to try Batman fanfiction and again, great reviews. One of the constant comments was that they loved my characterizations and that I'd nail the personalities.

That part's important, because it's exactly what I didn't do when I tried my hand at writing a book again. My next novel, The Dream Map, had an intriguing plot that got interest from agents. In fact I went through a lengthy process, and still maintain a close relationship with, an agent in Los Angeles. One of the greatest pieces of feedback he gave me during the editing process was this: "I can't tell your characters apart."

Something he mentioned to me that always stuck was that he could flip to any page in a Harry Potter book and tell who was speaking without having to be told by the author. That, he said, was why my book wasn't sticking. I started to think about that and realized that the successes I'd had in fanfiction were assisted by the fact that my characters had been per-developed for me. It was easy for them to each have their own voices because I'd been hearing those voices on tv, in movies, or reading them in comics for years.

Giving characters their own voice is, in my opinion, one of the greatest problems amateur writers face. So many people come up with intriguing concepts or plots, and put so much into world building, that they forget to make their characters really come alive as individuals. As one fellow writer told me, "Disney doesn't sell original stories, it sells characters." This was exactly what I'd been missing for years. I'd nailed it in short story form where you didn't need to pay so much attention for such a long span of time to characterization, and my novel length fan fictions came naturally because the comic world was hammered into my subconcious. But me? Coming up with my own characters with their own voice? Even going back to rewrite The Dream Map, I was discouraged because I realized I'd have to tear it apart root and branch to really invest it with snappy dialogue and character moments. I just didn't have it in me.

So from the verge of abandoning my individual writing entirely, how did I end up here, with people praising the character of Jackie and with my book, Floor 21, on the verge of publication?

Let's just say thank God for NaNoWriMo and the digital age of book publication. But more on that soon.