Welcome, new folks!

Hi, there. If you've joined the mailing list recently, I want to make sure you get your free Frosthelm book, Traitors Unseen. If you haven't gotten it, you can get it free here (the site will ask you to sign up for this newsletter, which you're already getting) or here from Smashwords. It's also on Apple Books, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. Please, enjoy with my compliments.

Get Daros and Flames Over Frosthelm for free

As part of Indie April, Tessa Hastjarjanto has set up an immense sale and giveaway for indie fantasy, sci-fi, and horror books. There are over 170 books in this event. You can get two of mine, Daros and Flames Over Frosthelm, for free. Check out the sale for a tremendous number of free and discounted books. She's got notes (and full blurbs if you click through) for all the books here.

News and Writing

I have had a busy March, but I haven't gotten as much writing done as I wanted. Most of my writing was for a video game, actually - based on Daros, I got asked to do some freelance story work on a roguelike sci-fi game. The game is a lot of fun, and I've been having a great time working with the creators on story elements.

I also got my shipment of puzzle games from India, so I've been working out how best to ship them overseas. If you're curious, here's what 1120 games in your garage looks like:

Here's what they look like inside:

Some of my coming week or two will be getting them sent out all over the world to the folks who backed my game on Kickstarter. Pretty exciting! But I hope also to put the final touches on Kenai while that's happening. Can't be folding and taping my whole day, right?

Reaching new readers

This past month, I finally got selected to do a BookBub featured deal (after trying for one since 2019). BookBub is a big independent site for readers, and they put out newsletters with discounted and free books pretty regularly. They are very selective when choosing books for these featured deals, and they tend not to choose books that are in Kindle Unlimited, which mine are, so I wasn't sure I'd ever get there. But this past month, they selected my box set of Inquisitors' Guild stories to run for a 99-cent deal. I was really excited, because other indie authors have said this is a great way to reach new readers.

The deals are expensive to book (over $700), and I had to drop my price and royalty rate a great deal to get selected. The three-book set was at $0.99 or the equivalent worldwide, and that meant I only got about $0.33 per sale (or $0.11 per book). But I ended up selling a lot of books over the few days of the sale, and even more important, the books hit it big on Kindle Unlimited in a surge that lasted for a couple weeks. Here's what the sales and page reads looked like, if you're curious:

That's about 1540 sales of the box set (teal), which netted me a little over $500.

Here are the page reads:

For reference, my total page reads over four years of publishing is about 640,000, so this one month represents a big fraction of that. I get a little under a half cent per page read, so this comes out to another $500 or so.

I paid to advertise the discounted sale in some other ways, so I ended up only making a small profit on the whole thing, but the big reward is reaching so many new readers. I'm really happy to have gotten this opportunity, and I hope I can get another chance soon.

A great review of Got Trouble

Got Trouble has been getting some eyeballs on it too thanks to a couple of book blog tours I have been part of. There have been a good number of positive reviews arising from the tours, but my favorite is this really nice one from Meigan (@dreaminginpages) on Instagram.

Read the full review (and see a bigger version of her really cool picture of the book) here.

Some stories to try

I'm part of several author collectives, and we share each other's work to try to help all of us reach more readers. In many cases, the books we share are are free or discounted. Sometimes, they ask that you sign up for a newsletter like this one. Here are some new books I have to share this month:

First, I have The Beating Heart of a Mind, the latest in a series of psychological techno-mysteries. This one is about a mysterious suicide which might not be a suicide at all. Available for pre-order.

Second, I have Rise of the Blood Phoenix by E.L. Strife, which is a free prequel to her Infinite Spark series. This is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller with military and family themes. The whole series is quite well-reviewed.

Third, I have Oceana by E.J. Randolph, the story of an alien warrior on the run, looking for help from a cargo pilot. Lots of great elements here - greedy corporations bent on genocide for profit, aliens, resistance, and underwater alien cities.

Finally, I have Berikatanyan Dawn by John Beresford. This is a free prequel novella that sets the stage for the later series, so you can give it a try. It's sci-fi (planetary colonization) and fantasy (elemental magic) combined.

Thanks!

Thanks so much for being part of my little literary world. I'm excited to get Kenai out to you soon - more on that in the next newsletter. Be sure to grab a free copy of Daros and Flames Over Frosthelm if you haven't already read them, and I'd love it if you'd share a link with anybody you think would enjoy them.

I hope you and your friends and family are having a safe and rewarding 2023!

May the Bloodmother watch over you - 

Dave