Reflections on a Half-Complete Experiment

This blog post was published on June 28, 2014 and may be out of date. Visit starshipsmage.com for current information on the Starship’s Mage universe.

The whole Starship’s Mage project began sometime in fall of last year.  It was, from the beginning, an experiment in two things: structure and self-publishing.  Now that I’m sitting at the half-way point, with three of five Episodes published, I figure it’s a good time to look back at why we got here and how it’s succeeding so far.

1)  Structure.

My previous completed works were all novels, but I’d been suffering from failure-to-complete in recent years.  By splitting Starship’s Mage into the five episode structure, I gave myself some pretty clear end points for each stint of writing.

It also required me to think in a very clear act structure, something I’d been implicitly doing without really realizing it previously. Formalizing this structure in my outlines for my full novels may be useful, I think, as it gives me distinct ‘reaching the end of Act I is an achievement’ feel good.

2)  Self-publishing.

Now, with Starship’s Mage, finishing an Episode also has distinct ‘this must be done by this date’ and financial rewards, as it’s being self-published and I’m relatively open about my target dates on this blog.

With 1,200 units moved across all three Episodes, I can safely call this aspect of the experiment a success.  Episode 3, especially, has seen an explosion in popularity of the series that gives me all sorts of warm fuzzies.  I’m currently ranked in the top 10,000 authors on Amazon, which looks impressive to me!

Self-publishing has definitely come with its lessons, and what’s the point of public introspection if I don’t share them?

1)      New content is everything.  Each Episode has, in its first two weeks, outsold the previous three months (including the launch of the prior Episode).  New content shows up on all of the retailers’ ‘Just released’ pages, brings in all your old fans, and drives you up the rankings to show up to new readers.

2)      Back-catalog is key.  Episode 3 has not sold that many more units in its first two weeks than Episode 2 did.  A significant number of its sales, though, were new readers who bought Episode 1 and Episode 2 as well.  The multiplication effect of readers picking up the entire series to date is noticeable!

3)      Advertising is useful.  I’ve seen a lot of advice out there that advertising has no value to a self-publisher, because your returns are small.  They’re right.  At its best, my advertising was bringing in perhaps five to six new readers a day.  So long as your advertising costs are in line with your returns, however, this is not unreasonable.  I spent a lot of money experimenting on advertising (I have only broken even on Starship’s Mage with Episode 3’s release, because of that experimentation), and settled on a small, extremely targeted, campaign that cost me under two dollars a day – and consistently brought five to six new readers to the Episodes each day.

4)      Amazon is the six hundred pound gorilla.  Recently several of my friends have started self-publishing (check out Hic Sunt Dracones by G.W. Renshaw /shameless plug) and mentioned to me that they were planning on ignoring Amazon, as it seemed monopolistic and, well, evil.  Unfortunately, if you do not put your book on Amazon, you are doomed from the start.  Ninety-three percent of my sales are on Amazon.  I distribute elsewhere, Kobo, B&N, Google, etc, but without Amazon this experiment would be a complete failure.

5)      Novellas are not a good way to make money.  There are two pieces to this one:  a) I’m not comfortable selling even the longer Starship’s Mage Episodes (3 was 25% longer than 1 or 2) for more than $0.99.   This means I’m on Amazons 35% royalty scheme, so I’m not seeing a lot of money per sale.  b) There really seems to be a strong preference for novels on Amazon over novellas.  Something like 75% of my reviews (yes, I read my reviews, see the next point ;)), usually otherwise glowing, have complained about the length of the Episodes.  Because of this, once I see out the Starship’s Mage Episodes, I don’t think I’ll be doing any future novella sequences.

6)      Feedback is as valuable as gold.  I’ve read all of my Amazon, Google, and Goodreads reviews.  Even the poorly spelt two-star one that thought the series should have started back when nothing of interest was happening in poor Damien’s life ;).  Positive feedback helps me write – and constructive feedback helps me write better.  The two major criticisms I’ve taken away from the reviews are that my editing had slipped in Episode 2, which resulted in a major rethink of how I edited, and that the Episodes seem very short to most people.

Overall, I’m very pleased with how the experiment that is the Starship’s Mage Episodes is turning out.   For all that I think this will be the only novella sequence I ever do, I still wouldn’t want to have started self-publishing differently.

Starting hopefully early next year, once Starship’s Mage Episode 5 is out, I will be aiming to release at least two novels a year.  Some of that will likely be made up by editing and re-working old novels that have made the circuit of regular publishers.  Some of it will be new.  Some will be novel-length continuations of Damien Montgomery’s adventures.

Who knows?  If enough people buy those novels, I may be able to try writing full time, in which case you’ll probably see even more.

Happy writing!

Glynn Stewart