So Breakers has now spent a full day free on Amazon. How’s it doing? Well, take a look:

#8 in what, you say? Well, that would be the entire free store.

I don’t know what happens next. If you’d like to help me stick there–or take a run at greater heights–please spread the news.

That’s right. The newly becovered Breakers is free on Amazon today. Please download and enjoy.

It’s not yet noon, and it’s already been downloaded 1200 times. In the time it’s taken me to type this sentence, it’s been downloaded another 6 times. Seriously. As of the end of this sentence (which took me a little longer to fix typos), it’s had 24 more downloads. What is the root of this madness?

It’s definitely not me. It’s thanks to sites that watch and mention free ebooks. Every single one is valuable, but I’d like to single out three of the largest for special mention.

The first is Michael Gallagher’s Free Kindle Books and Tips. Michael is very personable and accessible. Lately, he’s been running a series of posts on Kindleboards to help authors get their books listed on the free book sites. The first is on making sure your book has a strong description. The second is on the importance of covers. Both have a lot of sound advice from someone who runs one of the most prominent free and bargain book blogs out there. I highly recommend giving them a look.

The second site I’d like to mention is Ereader News Today. This site is extremely prominent. If you’re listed there, you can count on a successful day. I haven’t had any direct conversations with its frontman Greg, but from everything I hear, he, like Michael, is very friendly and helpful. I’ve seen him drop in on KB a few times. Whenever he does, you can be sure he’s made some author’s day. ENT offers a really diverse selection of books, too.

Lastly, Pixel of Ink. I don’t quite know what to tell you about Pixel of Ink. They’re very mysterious! And also extremely influential in getting your book in front of readers. Like the other sites, the best way to get listed with them is to have a great cover, a strong description, and equally strong reviews. If you can get mentioned by them, it will make a world of difference. I’m kind of in love with them. So, hey, POI. Are you, uh.. seeing anyone?

There are many other free book sites out there (Freebooksy, for one, looks like it’s positioned to become a success), all of which I’d recommend keeping on your radar whether you’re a reader or a writer. They’re almost uniformly run by great people who love books.

I will return with the numbers and the analyzin’ as new results come in. Oh, and in the 15 minutes it’s taken me to put this together? Over 250 more downloads.

Wow. Thanks, everyone.

First, some numbers:

12

425

668

Now, some context. That first number is the number of books I sold on Amazon this January. The second number is the number of books I sold on Amazon this February. The third number is my Amazon sales this March. Those represent paid sales–not free giveaways–about 95% of which came from two novels priced at $2.99. To put it another way, in January, I made enough to buy a cheeseburger meal at In-N-Out. In February, I made enough to cover groceries and rent. In March, I made enough to cover rent, groceries, utilities, and expenses on my car.

What changed? I mean, besides my pathetic living conditions?* (Rhetorical trick! I won’t see these checks for months, so nothing’s changed yet. The holes in my kitchen walls are still as big as the ones in my teeth.)

In February, three things changed. First, I released my third novel, Breakers. Second, I finally got a professional cover for The White Tree (and revamped its blurb, too). Third, I wound up enrolling each novel in Amazon’s Select program, a deal where you make your ebook exclusive to Amazon for 90 days (i.e. you can’t sell electronic copies anywhere else). In exchange, your books can be borrowed by Prime members (which you’re paid for), and you can make your book free for up to 5 days during that 90-day period.

The Select program is controversial. One of the major complaints is a philosophical/ethical one: authors don’t want to limit their readers to purchases through Amazon. Some see it as a predatory practice, where Amazon is attempting to further dominate ebook sales by dominating ebook content, too. Those complaints are fair enough. Definitely worth thinking about.

Other authors criticize Select for being a short-term strategy that neglects or harms your long-term sales plans. Earlier this week, Dean Wesley Smith made that very charge in an interesting post about all the ways to build your publishing/indie author business. In the post itself, Smith doesn’t address the specifics of why giving your book away/participating in Select is a narrow, short-term strategy, but elsewhere, I’ve seen it boil down to two major criticisms: a) a giveaway may result in a short-term burst of sales next week, but that won’t help you sell any copies next month or next year, and b) making your work exclusive to Amazon denies you sales and growth on every other ebook market on the planet.

I can’t argue with b). It is literally and undeniably true that if you make your books available exclusively on Amazon, you will not be able to sell them through Barnes & Noble, the Apple store, Sony, Kobo, etc. That’s a perfectly valid point.

But what about a)? Are free giveaways nothing more than a short-term boost to sales that will fade away within days, leaving you with a couple hundred extra bucks, maybe, but nothing in the way of additional readers, fans, and ongoing sales presence?

Phoenix Sullivan looks at that question here. It’s a post well worth reading. In it, she questions the definition of “long-term” in “long-term sales.” Instead, she looks at specific goals. Say you want to sell 50,000 copies of a book, she says. In her words, “If I can make inroads into that number faster by using ‘free’ [giveaways], how is that not a good thing for business?”

It’s not a rhetorical question. It’s a very pointed one. She’s got other questions, too, as well as some nifty graphs indicating free book giveaways may have actually helped her achieve and sustain steady sales over the course of months.

To return to my numbers–12, 425, 668–it would be stupid for me to claim these are all the result of signing up with Select and flinging my books at anyone who cares to click a download. Breakers was selling a few copies before I ever made it free. The White Tree saw an uptick as soon as I upgraded its appearance. My February numbers would have been larger than 12 if I never made any of my books free.

But I did make them free. Weeks after I’ve last done so, they continue to sell more in a day than they had been in a week. If you give away thousands of books, some fraction of those will be read by real people. Some fraction of those real people will turn into real fans. Even with my modest numbers, I’m seeing this already. I can hardly give away The Roar of the Spheres–seriously–but it sold more copies in March than it did in the 8 or 9 months prior to that. Combined. One of its top results for “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” is Breakers. Making one book free caused people to buy one of my other books.

Meanwhile, the money I’m about to start seeing in my bank account is going to allow me to cut back on the freelance work I do. The less time I spend freelancing, the more time I spend writing more novels. (Like the sequel to The White Tree, which I think I have a title for: The Great Rift.)

So I have more readers. I have more fans. Long after I made a book free, more people are buying it than they were before. I have more resources to devote to writing new projects. Oh yeah–and I finally have some proof and confidence this might be a viable career for me.

Select’s still a new program, and it’s not without its faults. I don’t imagine I can continue to give away a few thousand books in exchange for a few hundred sales whenever I please forever and ever. Even if it continues to work like gangbusters for me, I think I will eventually want to start making some or all of my books available in other markets. Diversifying your revenue streams just makes too much sense to rule out for eternity.

But I’m not sure what makes Select or free giveaways a short-term, illusory strategy. Right now, it’s the driving force behind this phase of my long-term plans. A force that is beginning to build my career in a very real way. If Amazon cancels the program tomorrow, that won’t cancel the money I’ve made–or the readers who came with it.

My newpaper review of The Darkest Hour available here.

Oh man, this movie is bad. I said most of the really relevant stuff in the main review–The Darkest Hour is basically a SyFy Channel original that somehow made it to the big screen–but one thing I forgot to add/didn’t have room for is that a whole lot of the movie just feels like it’s missing. Basically every time a scene transitions to a new time, it’s like something critical has been glossed over or cut for time.

And it’s totally maddening. I don’t have a formal education in this stuff, but over the last few years (goodness, I’ve been doing this for nearly five years), I’ve learned I place a lot of importance on editing. And The Darkest Hour‘s sucks. We’re constantly seeing stuff we don’t need to see and skipping past what we do. Most of the scenes just fade artlessly to the next, draining what little momentum it manages to establish. With some bad movies, you have to give them some thought before concluding they’re bad. With The Darkest Hour, it’s obvious within minutes.

Incidentally, at the theater, I mistakenly asked for a ticked to “The Darkest Night.” If we’re really lucky, that will be the sequel to the upcoming Batman flick.

So right, I just finished a new novel. My fifth. By “finished,” of course, I mean “finished the first draft.” Writing a first draft is like wrapping up a super-cool Halloween party: everyone had a few laughs, a few drinks, and somebody took off the wrong part of their Spider-Man costume when they were dancing on the table. Everyone’s happy and ready to go home and sleep it off. But then you wake up and there are beer bottles and chicken bones everywhere and somebody appears to have unsuccessfully scrubbed their vomit from the bathroom with one of the hand towels. In other words: there is a lot of cleanup to be done.

I typically do moderate to heavy revision of my first drafts, taking them through a couple drafts: one to clean up sentences, fix things that don’t make sense, etc., then another pass to chop out everything I possibly can. It’s easier work, in its way, because I normally don’t have to come up with new plots and ideas and all that, but it’s hard labor nonetheless. If writing can be backbreaking, which it can’t (unless you write something nasty about Christian Bale), revision is that.

Second…I don’t really know what the fuck to do with my finished manuscript at this point. In the bygone days of 2007, it used to be you gathered up a hefty list of agents and their addresses, be they physical or electronic, draft up a query letter, redraft that query, redraft the redraft, then send it around in batches to everyone on your list. Then you went into the complicated mating dance of rejections, requests for partial manuscripts, and if you’re very lucky/good, requests to see the whole thing, and finally, if you’re really, really lucky, an offer of representation, which you take right after the conclusion of your merry jig.

That option’s still out there, more or less. But there’s also the self-publishing route. Due to the rise of the Kindle, the Nook, and ebook apps around the world, self-publishing hasn’t been shameful in nigh-on a year. Some people make hundreds of thousands of dollars doing it. Some do well enough to attract offers from agents who may have rejected them the year before. Some are doing so nicely for themselves they turn down these chances at success in traditional publishing in order to keep on collecting fat royalties for themselves. There’s no one way to do it anymore.

I’m leaning toward flogging this one around to agents again. I’ve self-pubbed some works and made a few bucks, but we’re talking enough to pay the water bill, not enough to change my life. I’d like an actual couch one of these days. I’d like an advance. But I suppose I have a month or three of revisions to decide.

Lastly–Christ, it’s nice to be finished. Despite being much more straightforward in many ways, this one was a little tougher than my last two books, involving a months-long layoff and a return in which I punted several chapters in favor of a new direction. I am very happy and relieved to be able to set it aside to cool down and move on to something else.

Which means…starting a new novel tomorrow. Yeah. I don’t normally do that, but I’m participating in NaNoWriMo for the first time this month. It only took me 14,000 words to finish off this book. That means I owe another 36,000 more words of book before the month is out.

Amazingly, I think it’s doable. Just don’t expect much else out of me until then.

Full review, as usual, available over at ye Herald.

Why do I say Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is a Guillermo Del Toro hand-me-down? Because it is. The inspiration for it has got to be that scene in Hellboy 2 with the pixie-sized monsters who also eat teeth. Grafting that idea onto the concept from Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (an unusually effective TV movie from 1973) is a good fit, and raiding/expanding your own ideas is hardly a high crime, but it makes the whole thing feel a little tossed-off.

Especially because the story is just all wrong. I don’t know if it’s Troy Nixey’s direction or Del Toro’s cowritten script–wait, yes I do, it’s both–but it seems like the same goddamn scene repeats itself fifty goddamn times: Bailee Madison, the little girl, is attacked by tiny monsters, does nothing, then gets rescued by a grownup in the nick of time. Why is this repeated over and over and over? Well, you can’t just have her get eaten 30 minutes in, dummy. That’s why. That would be a TV episode and not a movie.

Still, in practice, it’s a boring story structure that slowly disengages you from the material until you don’t really give a shit about what’s happening in this kooky old house. What was the deal with Guy Pearce, too? His acting was all stiff–he’s normally great–and his character’s motivations seemed to be “whatever is dramatically convenient to the current scene” rather than anything consistent. There were just way too many seams visible in Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark to lose yourself in it. There was nothing terrible about it. Just nothing all that fresh, either.

They kind of got hosed on the R-rating, incidentally. I read it was for something like “heavy and persistent fear,” which is a BS rating. There’s certainly not any language, violence, nudity, drug use, thematic content, or any of the other usual suspects at play here. I think they got tagged with the R-rating (which reduces profits on just about any horror movie) because they opened the movie with a fairly grisly (but not that graphic) scene of dental trauma. That shit will make anyone squirm.

My great uncle died earlier this year. I was named after him. I have pictures of him grinning as he held a two-month-old me in his arms. I wasn’t that said when he died.

Give me a second. I knew I would never see him again. He wouldn’t fly up from California to Washington for Christmas ever again; his last batch of home-brewed champagne was his last. His sharp eyes and trim mustache were gone.

But he was 96 years old. He’d been married to the same woman for over 50 of those years. He’d held down a job with McDonnell for decades; he’d traveled to India and Turkey and the Galapagos and everywhere; he loved to read, to make that champagne, to take photos of his home and all those places he saw around the world, and to write–especially doggerel poetry. He was a brilliant, healthy man into his late 80s, but eventually every time I saw him, he seemed to have lost another step. Five years ago, he broke his hip and I flew down to clean up his house to where he could navigate the clutter of slides and furniture and magazines from a wheelchair or a walker. He had no chronic illnesses, but every year, I heard about some new malady or injury. This year, he came down with pneumonia in both lobes of both lungs. Eventually, he decided to stop treatment. My mom, his niece, was there with him when he went out on his own terms.

I’ll miss him. But it’s hard to feel too sad when you know he had the kind of life you can only hope for yourself.

Even though, being an amateur writer himself, he was especially sympathetic towards his grand-nephew who idiotically wanted to make it a career; he encouraged me to keep a notebook, seemed delighted when I flew down to L.A. for writing courses in middle school, eventually helped pay my way through a fiction degree at a ridiculously-priced East Coast New Ivy university.

He made my life better, and now he’s gone.

But he’s still helping me. I recently moved to his house in a beach town south of L.A. I could never afford this place on my own, but an hour after sunset, I went out on the rickety deck to feel the 68-degree weather and try to convince the backyard squirrel to come up the stairs and eat some cashews. A few blocks down the hill, I heard sirens. Police hollered into bullhorns for someone to come outside.

Strange–this is an affluent community in the South Bay. From the deck, I can see houses worth $10 million. But a few minutes later, I saw lights cutting through my curtains, bullhorns calling people outside. I thought we must have a criminal in the brushes, some wife-beating, liquor-store-robbing fugitive, but the same way we all show up to watch somebody’s house burn down, I went outside.

A minute later, a cop car rolled down the block at five miles per hour, demanding we all step outside. His car towed a man in a Santa costume behind it.

No government’s that good. It’s absurd to blow what–$10,000?–on some stupid, silly annual stunt, especially in the throes of a recession that’s given rise to a whole party of people who think government spending should be slashed to the bone.

But I’ve never trusted the police. Who knows, I could end up arrested some day, possibly for crimes I don’t believe in. I’ve been drunk in public a few times. I commit some traffic violation every day I’m on the road. I’ve had a few friends arrested for possession of weed over the years; it’s not something I’m into, but I know these people, and I know a stupid green drug isn’t enough to make them a criminal. Unless enjoying bad movies is a crime. Just by associating with them I might end up cuffed.

If I am, for whatever reason, someday arrested, I’ll lean forward and peer through the grille from the back seat. It probably won’t be worth the $10,000 it cost the city every year. But it’ll mean something to see the man who arrested me once also rolled down my block, demanded I come outside, and showed me Santa Claus.

In my obsession with perfectly duplicating the Shangri-laesque environment of the far-off time of the early ’90s, I don’t have an internet connection at home. For emergencies, i.e. when I mail in my columns three times a week, I’m able to wander out into the backyard and steal my neighbor’s connection with my laptop, but other than that, it’s work-only.

Running a blog, then, is a pretty stupid idea, but then again I don’t plan to do very much with it. In fact I’m so dedicated to doing nothing here I’ve already gone back and deleted a couple dozen old posts. You think the remaining material is unnecessary and drossy, you should have seen what got cut.

So I’m restarting this here thing, if only so when I drunkenly boast to girls that I’m a writer and they politely ask if I’ve been published, I can write down this address for them and they can politely never visit it. It’s a win for both sides.

Expect updates when I actually have news to report.