Vampire novels

People keep saying that nobody wants to read vampire novels - that they are so five years ago, when Twilight was all the rage.

I may have picked a bad month to buy a program called KindleSpy. It reverse engineers figures from Amazon pages; uses the number of sales and all the information about price etc. to generate sales totals. It is meant to give you an idea of what genres are selling well and which it would be hard to compete in. All useful stuff for self-published authors who are doing all of this stuff themselves.

This month the Amazon kindle charts have been OWNED by a self-published author named Bella Forrest. *eyes narrow* Is that her real name? Bella was the name of the main character in Twilight, remember? There is no author page so I assume that it is a pseudonym.

My friends on Goodreads have this in the ‘so bad its good’ category or are unimpressed. But clearly there are enough readers to be pushing a lot of sales in this series. They've got something right.

At any rate, Ms Forrest has seventeen of the top twenty titles in the Amazon category of paranormal vampire romance. There are twenty two novels in the series so far. The first ‘A shade of Vampire’ was published in 2012 and is set at 99c, the rest at $3.99. They are selling like hotcakes and Amazon literally has a big red ‘hot’ tag next to it. That can only increase sales, right? KindleSpy does the math for me and it pulls in at a total of more than two and a half million dollars. That’s just for the top twenty books and only for the month of January 2016.

And here’s the kicker - that’s only on Amazon US. It doesn't count sales on other platforms. Here in Australia we have to buy through a different kindle site and Amazon UK has its own sales tables as well.

Maybe you shouldn’t ditch that vampire novel you started? It looks like there is still plenty of life in that undead corpse.

If you don’t care about your book why would anyone else?

I’ve read a couple of articles recently where people talked about their experience as an e-book writer and self-publisher. Each had a friend who made a success of it and raked in the money and they were inspired to give it a go.

Pansexual free for all; my time as a writer of kindle erotica

Confessions of a failed romance novelist

One male, one female - each throwing up an e-book with the sole desire to make money and they attempted this because they were desperate. One chose romance, the other erotica with shape-changing dragons, and neither should have been writing in either genre. He describes it as embarrassing and an uninviting stew. His research was asking one ex-girlfriend what she read as erotica.

She spent an inordinate amount of time generating a fake persona and opening twitter accounts in that name. But she has an agent who says her book got readable after the 135th page and clearly doesn't normally represent romance novels at all given the way she said ‘she understood’ that they had simple plots.

If it only gets readable at page 135, I have serious doubts about the whole thing; or is that the whole thing? *snorts* It got readable when I could see ‘the end’ on the page.

They slap some awful cover on it and load it onto Kindle expecting the money to roll in.

And *spoiler alert* it doesn't. One sells 18 copies and the other 3 or something.

I consider my books and my stories as wordy babies. I love them. I cry with the characters. I fall in love with them. I have honestly sobbed when I have killed characters off or broken their hearts. And if the sex I write doesn't turn me on, how the heck will it turn anyone else on? Why would I be ashamed of them? Why would I shove them out poorly dressed and prepared for the world?

Is it worse that they fail after I have put my heart and soul into them? Maybe. But I will know that I did the best I could for them.

They are both so ashamed of the book they have written that they don’t put any care into marketing or releasing them. I’ll bet that they aren’t tagged correctly. I can’t imagine they put much effort into writing a summary or teaser pitch for them. Her book doesn’t sound like a romance novel at all given she says it is super angsty. Romance readers expect a HEA or HFN (happy for now) ending. There is a formula and she hasn’t researched it and she doesn’t know that because she doesn’t read the books.

Their products must reek of the desperation they exude. Unlike their friends’ efforts.

They can both clearly write. They have funny, self-deprecating articles published on webpages. And I hope they got paid for it.

So where did they go wrong? I reckon they both chose genres they didn’t understand or care about. They don’t read in the genre they chose to write in. I don’t read military fiction, why would I try to write it?

And they missed another big marketing opportunity. In each article, they don’t say what the book was or give their penname and they don’t give a link to it because they are still so ashamed of it. Thankfully, Beverly Bush is a fake penname because if it was real you’d be ruined right off the blocks for romance writing.

A few people who read the article might have gone to buy the book or read it on their Kindle account to see if it is as bad as the authors say it is. That’s some more sales and reviews they didn’t even try to get.

In the world of self-publishing right now, you have to be everything; writer, marketer, editor, agent and promoter. And if you can’t do all of that by yourself, find people who can help you, even if you have to pay them.

Because if you don’t care about what you produce, no-one else will.