Hi, Everyone.

Here’s the next in that sequence of giveaways that I emailed you about:

Giveaway – Epic Fantasy

There’s a $40 gift card up for grabs. 🙂

Hello, Everyone!

I can tell already that this is going to be a tougher status update to write than most of the previous ones have been. The last few months have been incredibly busy, but most of the work has been foundational in nature, which means it doesn’t feel like I have a ton to show for all of my effort.

New Baby!

Firstly, in case you missed the last email I sent out, we had our third child in June, and while he’s been a great sleeper, a good eater, and Katie has been a trooper, there has been some unavoidable disruption to my work schedule. We’re all glad to have him, and I knew going into things that there would be a disruption there for me this summer, but I ended up being much busier than expected on the marketing side of things, which meant that the disruption (from the writing side of things) has been a lot more extensive and lasted a lot longer than I’d been planning on.

Editing:

On the editing side of things, there are a few more moving pieces than I’m used to (for reasons which will become clear as I release my next few books), which means that the editing is starting to stack up. Currently I’ve got Dystopian #3 (The Warlord) back from my editors and out to my advance readers.

I haven’t heard back from all of my advance readers yet, and I think I’ve still got a few edits from those that I have heard back from that I need to get into the current master file, but if I can shake loose a solid half day or so to dedicate to finishing off the edits and formatting the various formats that the retailers need, I’ll be able to get The Warlord off to my Launch Team, at which point it will be 6 weeks or so from going live.

The Founder (Dystopian #4) has been through the first few rounds of edits, including the edits from RJ, which means it just needs to go through the last round of edits and then it can go out to my advance readers. Under normal circumstances I would say it was 3 months from going live. With the current backlog of work on the marketing side of things (more on that below), I can’t say for sure how long we’re actually going to be looking at, but it’s a safe bet at this point that it will be more than 3 months.

The Outsider (Dystopian #5) has been through my editing pass and has been gone through by my proofer, which means that I just need to get her fixes into my master file and then it will be ready for Katie to read it. Under normal circumanstances she would be chomping at the bit for me to get through my edits so that she could get started on the book (especially given the way that The Founder ends), but things have been so busy here that I’ve heard barely a peep out of her regarding the fact that I haven’t finished editing her book. 🙂

Finally, the rough draft for The Desolation (Dystopian #6) is finished, but still needs my editing pass before it can go off to my proofer. I think I mentioned this in one of my past updates, but The Desolation is a monster. It came in at ~213k words, and is far and away the biggest book I’ve ever written. As I was writing it I kept thinking that I needed to find a stopping point and break it into more than one book, but the action was coming too fast and furious, so I just continued writing and figured that I would leave that question for post-production.

I’ll still be looking for a break point or points to split The Desolation into two or three books if possible, but it may very well end up shipping out as one book.

Marketing:

In spite of having many more books out than I had at the beginning of 2014, this year has been the lowest sells wise since we ended 2013, which has necessitated some changes with regards to how I spend my time as compared to how I was planning on spending my time.

In 2016 I’ve spent quite a bit of time and money on Facebook ads with very mixed results, and was frankly running out of ideas when a fellow author who has experienced a significant drop in sells of her own books recently figured out that her drop in sales matched up very well with the multi-author bundle she was in being pulled down.

It was like a lightbulb went on for me. I went back through my records and realized that my Facebook ads had corresponded almost perfectly with the 6 months that the first bundle I organized was free, and I’d most likely mistaken a significant percentage of my sales as being from the Facebook ads when in fact they had more than likely been because of the bundle.

I tend not to do things by half measures, and I desperately want to be able to continue writing full time into 2017 and beyond, so I’ve jumped into the process of organizing additional bundles with everything I have.

Currently I have 5 bundles that are in various stages of being organized and prepared to go live. I’ve pulled together a group of dozens of very talented authors, and I’m hand picking each book that goes into all 5 of the bundles. When those five bundles, consisting of 50 different, amazing stories go live, I’m hoping that things will jump up to the point that Katie and I can commit to another 12+ months of full-time writing.

The best part about the bundles is that while they are super time intensive to organize, the authors I’ve pulled together believe in what we’re doing so much that they’ve all committed to a 12-month term for the bundle so with any luck the bundles won’t just be a flash in the pan kind of thing, they should drive additional sales and excited new readers for a full year, which will mean that I can get back to spending less time marketing and more time writing—I would really like to finally have a year where I hit a million new words.

Writing:

Things have changed so many times in the last 10 months that I couldn’t say for sure what the original plan was, but really it’s the timing of things that has changed rather than the order of the books I’m going to work on.

Most recently I was planning on marketing and helping out with the baby in July and August and then getting back to writing in September. October was to be an editing month, followed by another book in November and another editing month in December.

Part of me still hopes to do that around organizing the multi-author bundles. I really want to write a book in November so that I can participate in NaNoWriMo, but it’s increasingly likely that September will primarily be spent finishing off bundles and catching up on editing.

Possibly if things go well I’ll try to just write in October and November both and finish off the Compelled Chronicles in one long stretch, after which (assuming that I’m still able to continue writing full time) I’ll read through all of the Reflections and Dark Reflections books and then start in on a whole slew of new books with Alec, Adri and all of the rest of the crew in both timelines.

It’s not as good on the production side as I was hoping for when I started the year, but the release of Left at the very beginning of this year means that I’m still coming through on my promise to release at least one Reflections Universe book each year in spite of all of the other projects I took on to try and ensure that we can continue writing for many years to come.

As always, thank you all for your support!

Regards,

Dean

I’ve got about a million things to do, and that doesn’t count the impending arrival of baby #3 or a ground-shaking realization that one of my fellow authors put me onto late last night, but I just had to stop for a second and show you all a bit of art that Katie made a little while ago.

We’ve been struggling to find a scene break graphic that would work for the last three series of books that we haven’t managed to get squared away in print, and this was one of the options that she came back with. I suspect that it’s not going to work because of limitations with our printer, but I think it’s absolutely stunning.

As with most of what we do, it’s stock art that she’s modified, but I say that only to give credit to whatever artist did the original bit that we purchased so that Katie could work her magic, not to discount Katie’s talent or hard work. I think that her changes have made the art even better, and it reminds me once again just how impressed I am with what she does.

Truth be told, I’m more than a little jealous sometimes that she works in a medium that can have such an immediate impact. It took me all of a tenth of a second to know that I loved these wings!

We visited my parents this fall and the girls got to play in a very big pile of leaves that their grandpa had left specifically for that purpose. If you look closely in this picture you can see Daughter #1. I don’t think Daughter #2 is in this picture, but it’s entirely possible that she’s just so buried that she can’t be seen.

The other picture that stood out for me as I was looking through my phone recently was this one. A month or so ago I was working in my office while the girls were coloring with markers in the other room. I came out and saw that Daughter #2 had gotten marker in her hair. Katie makes sure that we get the washable markers, so I wasn’t overly concerned until Daughter #2 told me that she’d done it on purpose because she thought blue hair was prettier than blonde. I thought the colored lock of hair was a teenage thing…

And that’s it for “Cute Daughter Pictures”. I’ll return you to your regularly scheduled programming. 🙂

-Dean

I’m happy to be able to announce that Stone Heart (The Compelled Chronicles Book 1) is now for sale!

The Setup:
Dani’s new home isn’t just another stopover in a long chain of places she’ll never see again, it’s the home of both Caine and Jerek, two guys like nobody she’s ever met before. One represents the best friend she’s been hungering for, and the other represents something much more.

It should be the perfect recipe for a fairytale, but Caine and Jerek live in a dark, shadowy world and one of them is hiding secrets that will change everything, secrets that relate directly to Dani.

You can find all of the links to this book on the Stone Heart Product Page.

As exciting as that is, for a limited time I’m also giving away a Kindle Paperwhite. Just purchase a copy of Stone Heart within the next two and a half days and there will be a link to the giveaway page at the very end of the book.

*No purchase necessary to win. If you would like an entry, just send a letter to the address on my mailing list emails with your name and email address.

Hello Everyone!

I’ve gotten out of the habit of doing status updates. At one point I tried to do a mini update at the end of each mailing list email, but that led to the emails getting awfully cluttered, so I’m going to try and revert back to doing semi-regular updates on my website and then I’ll just link to them from my mailing list emails for those who might have missed the update on my site.

After spending most of the summer editing and working on various marketing initiatives, it feels good to be writing again. I resumed work on The Warlord (the third A Broken World novel) (which saw 50k words written in April before I had to set it to one side) in October, and finished it up in the first week of November. It weighed in at more than 95k words so it was quite the undertaking.

November (and nearly the first 2/3rds of December) was spent working on The Founder, which ended up at more than 118k words. It’s ironic that I wondered at one point in November if there was enough material in this section of the story to justify its own book. It turns out there was a ton more taking place in this section of the saga than I’d realized.

For those of you who have been paying especially close attention, you’ll notice that I didn’t originally list The Warlord as being one of the titles for the A Broken World books. It turns out that the story ended up growing somewhere between the start and the end of Book 3, so I ended up splitting The Founder into two books, and now A Broken World will end up being 5 books rather than 4.

On the writing front, the plan is to write The Desolation (A Broken World book 5) in January so that I can conclude Skye’s story, and then I’ll go back to The Compelled Chronicles and write the final two books in that trilogy. At least I hope it’s a trilogy—I haven’t really figured out what happens after Stone Heart other than some really broad sweeping plot points.

If I’m right and there are only two more books left, then I should finish working on the rough drafts sometime in April, at which point I’m planning on picking the Reflections and Dark Reflections books back up. I suspect that I’ll end up spending the better part of a month reviewing everything that’s happened in the story so far and then get started writing with the intent of finishing up the series—however many books that ends up being.

On the book release front, Stone Heart will come out the day after Christmas, and will be followed by Left (Jess and Wyatt’s book) sometime in late January or early February. The Warlord should then come out in July/August of 2016, after which new books should roll out every month or two.

I’ve talked a bit about marketing this year. I don’t want to get into all of the gory details and numbers, but I’m happy to announce that 2016 was our best year yet in terms of both books sold and income. We’re still going to end up a long ways off from what I was making as an accountant, but for the first time in 3 years it’s looking like our savings account will go up a little rather than going down every month…which is a good thing because we’re expecting a new arrival in Jun!

For the first time, Katie and I will be outnumbered even when we’re both around, and a new arrival always seems to throw some wrenches in the works. It’s entirely possible that will have a knock on impact on my renewed work on the Reflections books, but maybe we’ll luck out and get a really good sleeper (or at least a baby that likes to sleep on my chest while I’m typing like Daughter #1 did.

So in short, 2015 was a somewhat disappointing year on the writing front, but a big step forward when it comes to pushing our book sales up to the point where I should be able to continue to write full time, and I want to thank each of you for your help getting us there.

The marketing had an impact (or I wouldn’t have kept doing it), but all the marketing in the world wouldn’t have gotten us there without the word of mouth from so many awesome readers. Hopefully 2016 will be so amazing that I can forgo the marketing altogether and just focus on getting new books completed and ready for all of you!

Wishing each of you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

-Dean

I’ve got a bigger status update post that I need to get wrapped up, but I just wanted to take a second and wish everyone a Merry Christmas or a Happy Holidays depending on your belief system.

I hope that you all have a wonderful day tomorrow surrounded by people you both love and are loved by in return.

Here’s to a 2016 that’s better than 2015 in every way that really matters!