Cris Game

I'm feeling a little giddy because I've finally reached the point where I can put out a boxed set. It's for the three full-length novels in my Kid Sensation Series : It feels a little surreal to me. A year ago I hadn't even started writing the first book in the series, Sensation , and now I've got three of them. (Not to mention a stand-alone short story, Extraction , that's a companion to the series.) Of course, Amazon is treating it as a "new" ebook and listing me as having an additional work on my Author Page. Needless to say, I'll accept the designation, even though its "newness" is actually artificial. Like most authors with series, I already knew that at some point I'd do a boxed set. The only question was when: do I do it at three books? Four? Five? Whenever the series is complete (which may be never if readers continue to show enthusiasm for it)? It's the type question for which there is no easy answer. Still, three books ...

In a previous post , I described books as perpetual motion machines with respect to earnings, because once you publish them - especially ebooks - they have the potential to keep garnering sales forever. Furthermore, it's truly amazing how much (or rather, how little ) your books have to accomplish in order to help you be successful financially. Let's say, for instance, that you consider $50,000/year a comfortable income and would like to earn that from writing. That means you have to earn roughly $137/day from your books.  Using KDP as the standard, if you sell your books for $2.99 you'll earn a 70% royalty (that's $2.093) from each sale.  Thus, you need to sell 65.45 books per day to get to that $50K you want. Now, if you only publish one book, 65 copies per day is probably a lot to ask of a single tome. Moreover, even if it does come out swinging and can hit that target initially, it may not be able to sustain that pace. However, if you publish two books, each only ha...

Happy New Year everyone! We're excited for the big push we'll be making for these next few months for the projected release of XING: The Land Beyond by the end of this year! Yeah! Steam Dev Days This week John and James will be representing White Lotus Interactive at Steam Dev Days, hosted by Valve. They'll be checking out the Steam Machine and Controller, as well as the latest Oculus Rift! Woo hoo! Steam Dev Days Info *If any of you guys are in the Seattle, WA area Today (Tuesday) through Thursday, we'd love to hang out and talk to you about the game and more. You can just respond to our twitter or to this blog :) Pics For all of you artists and game art lovers out there, check out some of the cool models we've made over the past month! Pieces from Agnirok: The Volcano And here's a peak at some of the models from The Desert of Naar

Last night I called my parents and gave them a gentle reminder that I had released a new book. My Mom was excited, as always (and promised to tell all her friends to look me up), but when she put my Dad on the phone, the old man got down to brass tacks almost immediately. "How many are you selling these days?" he asked. I told him. "And at what price?" I told him the price ranges of my books, what the average roughly was (based on current sales), and the royalty rate. He did some quick math, and said, "So you're making about $_____ per week." "To be honest," I said, "it's a little more, since I actually sell seven days per week." My Dad laughed at that. He had actually calculated his estimate of what I was earning based on a 5-day work week - as if my books were only available Monday-Friday. I had to remind him that my books are actually out there hustling seven days a week (not to mention 24 hours per day). Which is really kin...

When I published the first Warden and Sensation novels around May of 2013, I was more than a little nervous. I really didn't know what to expect and was completely unsure of the reception my books would receive. Fortunately, audiences seemed to like my work (which was very encouraging, to say the least), and I was blessed to have a moderate amount of success early on. Moreover, that success continued through the release of additional books - six in all - through the end of 2013. In retrospect, releasing 6 books (3 novels, 2 novellas and one short story) over an 8-month span sounds fairly productive on the surface. However, I can't help but notice that it's taking me longer and longer to write books. Prior to releasing Infiltration in late December, my previous release was the second book in the Warden series in early October. That's almost three months between releases. For me, that's just way too long. Of course, I'm not saying that every author has to cran...