TLDR:

It’s taken me a while to organize my thoughts about what I want to do about revisions for Dreigiau Book 3. Here I thought that Book 1 would be the last of the new major chapters I needed to write until I got to the end of Book 4. However, as I began revising the start of Book 3, I walked away from the first batch of chapters discontent at the lack of proper atmosphere, pacing and characterization I found there.

Revision is tough. There’s little pieces in every chapter that cause me to hesitate as I raise the cutting ax. I know that culling unneeded writing is important to keep things moving smoothly. Still, there’s always something that I really want to keep in the old chapters, or else, I would have never originally posted them.

I’ve decided to move a number of Book 3 chapters to the Deleted Scenes section. I’m trying to glean the most important parts of those chapters and spin up new, more action-oriented pieces that integrate the old into the new. The hopeful outcome will be less chapters, tighter writing and hopefully overall more interesting scenarios that all lead to the same place as the original writing did.

I started by replacing a rather fluff Introduction chapter with a new, much darker piece. This one forges the final connection for KoGuRai’s storyline, showing how he was swayed to become Zerom’s stand-in “Champion.” It also shows what happened with XaNi, which explains why you don’t see her again in the future chapters.

I plan on writing at least one more original chapter, which will take all the random discontent Zento chapters and condense them into a single piece (the original was far, far too redundant). I’m also going to consolidate a few of the Lucci/Suzume chapters to speed the pace along and get the characters where they should be, which is the Assembly.

I haven’t looked beyond these few chapters to the rest of Book 3 yet, but I hope the following sections won’t require quite as much of an overhaul as this did. I’ll be posting here as I make progress! My goal is to get Book 3 completely edited before summer rolls around.

Remember how I was talking about the need for more interactive storytelling platforms online?  I’m not 100% sure this is what I’m looking for, but it seems very promising. If it’s not too time consuming, I think I’m going to give this a try as a foundation to spread Wayrift and Dreigiau to a wider audience, especially for the mobile readers.

Nothing for sure yet. But it has my curiosity piqued.

Firstly, I’ve just dropped the price of Dreigiau Book 2, Shadowed Homelands to 99 cents, permanently. For the most part, I wasn’t trying to sell my ebook for profit. Profit was just a nice thing to have. Rather, I was just hoping to get the series out there to people who haven’t read it yet. Putting it on Kindle is a good way to do that. Sorta.

Breaking into ebooks on Kindle as an unknown writer is tough. You hear the stories about the authors who get discovered and are suddenly huge sellers. You don’t hear the stories of the thousands of other writers who struggle to get recognized, mostly through the use of Kindle’s Select program, which allows you to place your books for free for a certain number of days.

When I did that with Shadowed Homelands, I was pleased to see it shoot to the top 20 best sellers for that period of time. It was a nice boost. But the days of the quick boosts for free books may be coming to a close, mostly thanks to Amazon’s internal changes.

This month, Amazon put its foot down and changed the free ebook policy where it relates to associate advertising and purchasing. This, in turn, threatens to cut the income of blogs that promote free ebooks and made a cut of sales from the associate links they used. This is going to make getting a spot on these blogs a lot harder from here on out.

These bloggers relied on associate income for the time they put into the blogs. Authors relied on these bloggers to get the word out about free book promotions. Readers relied on these blogs to connect them to the free book promotions. All of this is going to take a big hit, which is rather sad.

In response to this change, I’ve lowered the price of Dreigiau Book 2. It’s going to be a good bit more difficult for me to promote the book on upcoming free days. I’m hoping that a lower price point will help it be more easily discovered in the future. Once I get the other two books up, I’ll probably use 99 cents as the base price from now on, too.

I’ve been creating serial web fiction since I first learned how to code my own websites, back on my old Geocities hosting server. I started with the FFIV fanfic, Coming of the Darkstar, back in 1998, the first public story I posted online. I then moved on to a larger, more ambitious writing project with Dreigiau in 2002, a more original piece of serial fantasy that I updated online for about 8 years. Currently, I’m working on the follow-up to Dreigiau, called Runne. I haven’t been updating that as regularly as I’d like to, but I’m working on fixing that.

This is just something that I’ve always done, even though I got no monetary benefit from my work. I know a number of my online writer friends are working on doing the same, mostly in the form of a modified Word Press site. I didn’t even realize that this kind of writing had a proper name until recently.

I started to do a little research on this form of online publication, the serial web fiction. That’s when it occurred to me that there’s not a really good stand alone theme or content management system (that I’ve found) that fits web fiction well. Sure, you can post it on Word Press, and that works quite well. But still, Word Press looks and feels like a blog (rather than a book) with all of it’s widgets and sidebars and a lack of pagination options.

I searched around for an alternative, or a theme that I could install that would give the Dreigiau site a more minimalist feel. Something that framed the writing and didn’t detract from it, allowing for forward and backward navigation similar to turning a page in a book, or to e-reader navigation. I haven’t found the navigation part, but I did manage to find a theme that I’ve been customizing to fit my needs.

The idea is to remove everything from around the writing itself, and utilize space in the header and footer instead. The site is still a work in progress, but I like where it’s going so far. It’s not as flashy or busy as the previous layout, but the idea is to get people into the story and let them stay there without the site’s layout invading.

Now, if someone smart out there could develop an awesome platform or theme for web fiction that makes the reader feel like they’re reading a book rather than a blog… Oh, and it needs to have a bookmarking option and a way to insert images and interactive multimedia. Yeah. I’d be on board for that.

It’s not quite the end of the first day of Dreigiau Book 2 free promo, but I still wanted to say I’m pleased with its ranking!

Thanks to everyone who has downloaded and please keep spreading the word!

Download it and spread the word! The more free books out there, the better!

 Note: Promotion starts at midnight Pacific Time! 

tl;dr:

So, like a number of people online, I do some social media. I like Tumblr for what it is and Facebook is a place I lurk to keep up with friends and family. Twitter, however, was one of those mysteries to me for the longest time (and I was there and trying it back before it became super popular). It’s only been lately, with the help of apps like TweetDeck, that I’ve actually figured out how to organize Twitter and make it work for me.

Twitter has come a long way since I signed up for my first account. They’ve added a lot of features that really help a lot in sifting through followers and friends to see the content you want to see without getting bombarded by everything else. I remember trying to struggle through keeping up with all my followers several times and just giving up. There was just too much going on, and I didn’t have the time to follow it all. I put aside Twitter for a number of years, and only came back to it recently.

Now that I’ve learned how to properly use TweetDeck and organize followers using Twitter lists, I have seriously organized my Twitter in a way that I can actually make sense of it and start holding conversations rather than just look at it with an overwhelmed and glazed eyes. I’m also quite impressed by the newer features (since I’ve come back), such as pictures, videos, and Twitter Cards that gives it all the more value to me.

I was also stoked to figure out that I could change my Twitter username on the fly without losing my followers. Why? Because years ago, I created the Aywren Twitter account, which I eventually used to stream RSS feeds from Wayrift and other projects. It basically became an update account that Tweeted only comic and writing updates on my sites. I used it as a streaming widget on my blogs, too.

So when I did have the itch to pick my account back up, I didn’t feel at liberty to just start tweeting away with it. The folks who were followers only followed thinking that this was a webcomic/fiction update stream. And anything I tweeted would also disrupt the update list on my widgets.

Today, I’ve renamed the original account @SygnusUpdates and then renamed the @SygnusStories to my normal screenname @Aywren. Much more pleased to be tweeting under my real name! But, boy, did it take me a long time to get all this sorted!

Did you just read the most amazing ebook or ebook sample? Did your favorite blogger just announce the release of their newest Kindle book? Is there an indie writer out there that you would love to see more discovered… but you just don’t know what to do to support them?

Here’s some things you can do, many of them at no cost to you, to help get your favorite indie ebook writers on the radar. Every little bit counts!

Get The Book

Obviously, this supports the writers when you purchase their book. But did you know if you pick up the book, even when it’s on a free promotion, that you’re supporting the writer, too? Anytime you download an ebook for Kindle, this gives the book a bump up Amazon’s best seller list and helps work the title into Amazon’s equations. The more copies an author can sell, the more Amazon will slip their book into the recommended sections throughout the site. And that’s a huge help!

Fun with Ratings and Reviews

There’s a number of ways you can make your voice heard on the Amazon marketplace. Most obviously, leaving a 4 or 5 star review means more than you can know to an author. Even if it’s short, as long as it’s sincere, your review encourages other people to give the book a try, even if its an unknown writer to them.

Did you know there are other ways you can help authors besides just reviews? You can:

• Click the “Like” button next to the book’s title
• Rate other reviews as helpful or unhelpful — this really has an effect on which reviews are buried and which are seen
• Comment on reviews
• Report trolling and dishonest reviews

Spread the Word

Do you use Tumblr? Facebook? Twitter? Reddit? There are a million ways to spread the word about your favorite indie author that they will thank you for. This gives the writer free exposure and fan publicity, which is priceless… and it just makes the writer feel good.

So much you can do with such a short message: Just read (Name of Book) by @(Author’s Twitter) and couldn’t put it down! #goodbook #amreading #ebook

You’d be surprised. And the author will likely reblog or retweet you, too!

One of my major goals for 2013 is to completely finish revising and publishing the whole Dreigiau series. I started down this path by finally releasing Book 2 last month. This month, Book 2 will be free for Amazon Kindle next Thursday and Friday (Feb 21-22) in hopes to spread the story to a wider audience. I’ll announce this again next week to remind folks, so no worries!

Aside from that, I’m still working on revisions in the background. I made a few minor edits to the start of Book 1 based on some newer feedback I’ve received. Those changes are already on the website and should hit the Kindle version by tomorrow at the latest.

I’m gathering up all the existing writing for Book 3 (used to be Book 4 — I know, confusing!), which amounts to 60 chapters of editing that needs completing! Luckily, I’ve had a lot of help and feedback from helpful friends and readers that I plan to sort through and implement. I know there will be at least one new chapter of content that ties KoGuRai’s storyline from the previous books into Book 3. Changes beyond that should be basic content consistency, grammar and flow. So nothing world-shaking.

I also need to work up a new cover art. Since all the previous covers have been remakes of older Dregiaiu art, I’m thinking about reworking “In The Middle.”

PS. Remember how in this post I mentioned I was afraid to use my natural style to do the artwork for my Dreigiau covers because I felt it would be too cartoony? Well, so far, I haven’t seen any negative response to the book since I have changed it. In fact, I got a complement on it from Twitter.

Whether you have your own Kindle or use the free online Kindle Cloud Reader, you may not realize the vast number of free ebooks you have access to, right in the Amazon marketplace. While these ebooks are of varying qualities, you can actually snag some really good reads and discover new indie talent that you may have never otherwise known about.

How does this work? Authors who have enrolled in the Kindle Select are allowed a certain number of free days per book where they can place their work up on the marketplace for free. This is a great way for a new or unknown author to allow potential readers to sample their work and get their name out in the online community.

You can benefit from the free promos, but only if you know where to find these free ebooks. Here’s  three places you can go to start your free book hunt:

Official Amazon Best Sellers Lists

Amazon provides a list of the top selling ebooks in each category. For example, one of the categories Dreigiau is currently listed under is Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teens > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy. On one side of this list, you can see the paid books and the other provides a list of free books. Keep in mind these are only the top selling free books based purely off of popularity.

Free Kindle Book Blogs 

There are a number of blogs that list and advertise free and discounted ebooks. Keep in mind that while these sites do accept free submissions, only authors who pay for a listing are promised a spot in blog posts. Because of this, listings may be limited and chosen based on the blogger. Still, these are excellent references for when you want to see what’s currently on sale. Many provide ways of following such as Twitter, RSS or Facebook.

Some of these blogs include:

• Pixel of Ink 
• Kindle Nation Daily 
• Free Kindle Fiction
• Bargain Ebook Hunter
• Free Ebooks Daily
• Flurries of Words 
• Freebooksy
• Goodkindles

Kindle Boards

The Kindle boards is a forum that attracts many writers and readers alike. There, you will find a forum called The Book Bazaar where authors can post blurbs and announcements for their new and free books. This is an excellent place to find hidden indie writers, especially those who don’t make it to the top ten, aren’t displayed on the above blogs or can’t afford advertising.

Writers want you to download their works for free, so don’t feel guilty. Get out there and find something new to read!