Cris Game

For some time now, I've been hearing about the many benefits of creating audio versions of one's books: a chance at greater revenues, reaching a wider audience, etc. Up until now I've avoided doing so - basically because it meant having to learn an entirely new area of indie book-publishing. (What can I say? It's hard to teach an old dog new tricks.) Nevertheless, as I was finishing up the most recent novel in my Kid Sensation series, it occurred to me that I really needed to be pursuing all of my publishing options, including audiobooks.  With that in mind, I set about learning as much as I could about the subject (and believe me, there's a lot to learn). The 800-pound gorilla in audiobooks appears to be Audio Creation Exchange (ACX), which sells audiobooks on Amazon, iTunes, and  Audible  and - big surprise - turns out to be owned by Amazon. ACX has done a great job of streamlining the process of publishing audiobooks, creating a platform that connects authors an...

It is with great pleasure that I announce that Coronation (Kid Sensation #5) is now available!  It took a little longer than expected in terms of getting it ready, but I will say that Amazon appears to have made the book available in record time. (Seems like it was up within 2 hours or so of me hitting the "publish" button.) I've never had a book published that swiftly.  Honestly, I didn't expect the book to be up that fast, so they kind of caught me unawares in terms of my marketing. (I was still putting together the message for my mail list, among other things.)  I'm thinking maybe there's an automated process on weekends - as opposed to human reviewers - so it got published a lot faster.  (Hmmm.  Making a mental note to only publish on weekends in the future...) Regardless, I'm extremely happy with the speed of the process, as I know that readers have been eagerly anticipating the next book in the series.  I had a lot of fun writing it, so I hope fans ...

At this juncture, most indie authors know about the Author Earnings Report - the brainchild of indie authors Hugh Howey and Data Guy. The reports dive deep into the issue of (drumroll please)...author earnings, and does an excellent job of presenting information on that subject.  In the February 2016 edition , the downloadable spreadsheets - containing the raw data on which the report was based - appear at the bottom of the report itself. That data contained the following sales rank chart (which I have since incorporated into my Kindle Sales Rank page): Now, suppose that you, as an author, wanted your book to break into the Top 100 on Amazon. Per the chart above, you'd need to notch 994 sales in a single day (almost 1000 books!) to achieve that. Maintaining said ranking would appear to be much easier, as you'd only need 497 (just under 500) sales per day to keep that spot.  In short, it appears that selling a particular number of books will help you obtain a certain ranking ...

I was tempted to post another excerpt from Coronation , but figured that fans might want a different version of a sneak peek.  So, with that in mind, I decided to go ahead and do a cover reveal: As usual, this cover was done by Isikol (who, in my opinion, has once again done a,great job).   With respect to publication, I'm still shooting to get it done as soon as possible - hopefully around mid-April.  At the moment, though, I'm struggling to get met my test copy of the print version to load properly. However, I think I've finally figured out what the problem is, so hopefully that will go off without a hitch. Anyway, I'm excited about this next installment in the series, and I hope readers are looking forward to it as well.