Author: sutherland

Hey everyone, I know it is been a very long time since the last update and all of you are wondering what happened why the preorder was canceled, and what the status of the next Alexis Carew book is.

TL; DR It’s not done and I don’t know when it will be, but I’m going to stop trying to predict when it will be an stop giving time frames for it.

the longer answer is more complex and pretty personal.

So first, you’re going to see quite a few typos in this post. That’s because a couple weeks ago, just before I thought I had the energy to make this post, I broke a finger. At first I didn’t think it was broken I thought it was just bruised it swelled up and turned purple while the very tip — just the tip — swelled up and turned purple. So I figured it was bruised went about my business — I got a splint that I wore sometimes, because it hurt if it got bumped and I just wanted to protect it.

Well, as it started feeling better I started using it, and it didn’t really hurt. But I noticed typing with it was sort of like typing with a gummy bear. It… Flexed. Very disconcerting.

So I went to the clinic, the doctor took an x-ray, although she said it was just to be safe, because if it was broken it would’ve hurt a lot and I know.

Anyway, that’s the delay in this post explaining things, and I’m using DragonDictate which introduces a few errors, but at least I’m not using the base Windows 11 dictation software, which flocking sucks.

And neither of the flocking things will let me swear. Just George Carlin’s seven dirty words you can’t say on television, results in asterisks in the Windows 11 dictation software and Dragon just says: ship test flock can’t Cox sucker mother Fokker and hits.

Anyway back to the real reason for the post.

Things have not been right with me for a while. It took me a while to realize it, accept it, and realize that I couldn’t do anything about it on my own

it started back in 2020. When Cove it happened and we went into the lockdown, I thought at least one bright side of it would be that by working from home I’d have more time to write. I went into 20/20 in the lockdown thinking I was going to get three books done that year.

Well, I didn’t.

It started getting more and more difficult for me to do anything, really. Very little energy, very little ambition, and a certain fuzzy headedness where I really couldn’t keep things straight sometimes. That got progressively worse as time went on. I front tried to fight my way out of it, and I’d succeed for a few days, but I couldn’t get any traction with sustainably doing more and feeling better.

Some people close to me when I described the symptoms I was having told me I was depressed. Which really passed me off, because I honestly have a great life I’m I’m very happy with it I have nothing to be depressed about — but that’s not what depression is.

Then in 2022, my situation at my day job change dramatically. Management decided to do a bunch of work that everybody in the development department had been saying we should do since 2005 — but they decided to do it all at once basically in six months from May to December. I wound up having to run six development projects with 12 people reporting to me nine of them being contractors who were not known quantities, meaning they needed a lot of handholding and a lot of oversight to make sure that they were doing things right… Or in a couple cases doing anything at all.

That really wiped me out. I had no energy going into the year and definitely no energy during that time.

At the same time, starting in early 2022, I had to deal with the medical issue with my wife.

So in 2022 as well as suffering from depression, I was working virtually every day. For about six months the only actual time off I had, was the days I took off to take my wife her medical care.

When we got to the end of 2022 I thought I’ll have time to write next year — and I set up the preorder to give myself a deadline because that’s worked in the past for me.

It didn’t work.

Again, I’d have a day or a weekend or a week even where I felt better start writing, and sometimes post an update that said things are on track, because I thought they’d get on track.

It wasn’t until a couple months ago that I realized and accepted that even though I could do things to get me out of this for a day or a week, it wasn’t sustainable on my own.

So now I’m on meds. 🙂

Then there working, I do feel more like my pre-2020 self. Not entirely, but they’ve definitely helped.

I’m being open about this, because what I went through with having to accept that it was a problem and that I needed help, I hope that if even one of my readers one of you, is experiencing something similar and having similar struggles, please don’t feel that it’s a failure to seek help.

The difference I felt within a week of starting the meds, was night and flocking day.

So now I’m on the path, the journey, to get fully back from where I was to where I’m supposed to be.

I don’t know how long it’s gonna take, I don’t know when I’ll be able to start writing again (although, I hope I don’t jinx it by saying that I have been writing consistently the last few days).

I apologize to all of you who’ve been waiting for the next bit of Alexis’s story, and especially to those of you who ordered the preorder and then had it canceled and have been wondering what was going on.

I’m doing my best, trying to feel better, and trying to tell the stories that I desperately want to again.

Yes, it’s been a long, unconscionable time since I posted a writing update. If I thought 2019 was a bad writing year, 2020 handed off a beer.

I’ve been told my lack of posts and unresponsiveness to queries has led some people to wonder if I’m dead … I’m really sorry about that. It’s a little new to me to have people following like this … those who aren’t friends and family, I mean … so it wasn’t something I’d considered. So I am sorry about that and I’ll try to have more frequent posts and updates.

Back around this time a year ago, covid was just a shadow on the horizon, it was out there, but we had no real idea.

It was about this time last year, maybe a couple weeks earlier, that I decided there was a chance it would be bad and stocked up on supplies: rice, beans, canned goods, etc. Basically my annual hurricane supplies a bit earlier and more. I never wait until the last minute to stock up on disaster supplies, having been through nearly half a century of Florida hurricanes. Buy early, hold through the season, donate to food banks in the Fall.

It was also about this time last year that we got two new dogs.

Kenya, the fawn one on the right, otherwise referred to as Scooby. came in as a foster through the bullmastiff rescue we work with. It was a divorce situation – husband moved out with one of their dogs, wife had to move in with her parents who were allergic.

She’s a 120# neurotic, clingy freak. Scared of thunder and wants to sit in my lap at the first rumbles … we live in Florida. We decided to go ahead and keep her to avoid her having to go through another change in housing.

Bosa’s the brindle on the left. He came in as a candidate for our service dog training. Someone gave him to a guy as a gift, but he already had an older dog and a young bullmastiff likes to play hard.

In between my last post and February of last year, we also fostered Tulie, who went to the fiance of someone we trained a service dog for.

She had a really sad story – she came into the rescue twice. First she was part of a backyard breeding thing where 20 dogs were rescued. Then she was adopted out and the guy died a few years later, which she and another dog were abandoned in the backyard for several months. Then she was rescued and fostered from that, but she killed some neighbors chickens, so had to be moved.

I, frankly, don’t believe the chicken bit. This is a very tubby dog and I find the claim she could catch a chicken somewhat dubious.

Luckily she’s got a good home now with good people and no chickens nearby.

So then March comes along, and covid really became a thing.

My day-job changed changed us to work-from-home early on. I thought one bright-side of that would be more time to write, right? No commute = more time. Lockdowns = more time.

I think a lot of writers thought that. We were wrong.

There’s time, but something’s … missing.

A lot of writers have commented that they’re having trouble writing this last year. With no, or significantly less, chance to get out, there’s no opportunity to, what we call, fill the creative well.

For me, that was always going to museums, or walking through cities, or hiking in the woods.

All Days Are the Same Now, as I say to my work colleagues.

Anyway, we’ve come through the last year better than many, I think. My friends and family are all healthy and doing well, so can’t complain. A lot of people have been facing a lot worse than being unable to write books.

Now, this isn’t to say that there’s been no progress on writing at all — there’s been some. Dribs and drabs, bits here and there. I have a good outline for Alexis Carew #7 and maybe 25% of the words, a decent start on a sequel to Of Dubious Intent, tentatively titled A Profound Realization, and a good plot idea for the next Dark Runs book, Running on Empty.

I did manage to get the site’s store working again. I had issues with Square and had to switch to a self-hosted solution. Anyway, paperback and hardcover copies are now available from the site again, so if you want autographed copies you can order here. (Shipping out of the US is ridiculous – I’m looking at options, but for now it’s probably too much.)

So the bottom line is, I’m alive, I’m still working on new books, it’s slow, but happening.

I hope you’re all well and happy, and I’ll try to keep you updated more often.

My last post on ranking garnered a great comment that deserves an answer long enough to be its own post:

I have a number of favorite authors who offer all of their books through Kindle Unlimited. How does writer compensation work with K.U. does the availability of work to loyal readers pay off? I loathe loss leader marketing schemes that offer the introductory books for free the following books for a more or less fair market price, with the final book at a ballooned pricing to make up for the free first book. When I find these schemes I put it in the review of the first book. Do you believe that loss leader marketing works for most readers or authors?

Great questions, Scott.

So KU has an interesting compensation model.

On a straight-up sale of one of my books at $4.99, I get a 70% royalty — about $3.40 (there’s a few cents Amazon charges on top for a “delivery” charge – basically for storage and bandwidth).

For KU, it’s a per-page payment, based on the pages read. A “page” is determined by how the book would render on a predetermined Kindle device. Queen’s Pardon, for instance, is considered to be 682 standard Kindle “pages”, no matter how you display it on your personal device. In general, we get about half a cent per page, so Queen’s Pardon gets me, roughly, $3 for a KU read. Very close to the full sale royalty, and an amount I’m happy with.

There’s a bit of an unknown each month, though, because KU is a sort of a split-the-pot game. The actual amount per page varies month-to-month, but stays around $0.0044 and $0.0051 per page. Even that little tiny change can make some big swings in total royalties for an author with hundreds of thousands or even over a million page reads a month. Queen’s Pardon,for instance, got just over a million page reads in its release month.

What Amazon does is setup a “pool” of money each month and then splits that pool by the total page reads for all authors to determine that month’s rate. They don’t actually say so, but I think it’s sort of a percentage of all the KU subscription dollars for a month, less their cut, then sometimes they add to it to keep the page rate up and keep author’s, if not happy, then satisfied.

Not a lot of any transparency on how that pool’s really determined though.

The thing about KU is that it makes it really easy for readers to try new authors with little or no risk. That’s what I like about it. I’ve found a number of great authors for my own reading through it, and I know it contributes to people being able to access my own work.

It’s the same with my use of a loss leader on Into the Dark by making it free. It lowers the barrier to entry for a new series considerably.

Both KU and the first book being free also increase visibility, because even if someone’s just collecting free books and never reads Into the Dark, I get the “sales” ranking boost as soon as they click the download button. That gets me more visibility to other potential readers.

With regard to pricing on later books, I don’t think authors make the latest book a higher price to make up for the free one, but I do think there’s a tendency, led by publishers, that the newest book is more expensive. It’s sort of an early adopter thing — those who don’t want to wait will generally be willing to pay more.

Now, I’m of two minds on this, and I had to give it some thought to clarify even that.

Yeah, I’m all for more money, and the latest, greatest thing generally costs more, but these are books, not iPhones or even first-run movies. There’s a certain author-reader thing that makes that unpalatable to me. The readers who preorder my next release, who start reading at midnight on release day, who’ve made the last four years, honestly, the best of my life — I can’t see gouging them for a few extra dollars for the latest because they love Alexis’ story that much.

On the other hand, I can see publishers doing this sort of thing because they really don’t care about anything but the money. As evidenced by the outrageous ebook prices on traditionally published books. Personally, I won’t pay more than $9.99 for an ebook and use eReaderIQ to track and notify me when those drop to my price point.

For my own work, I think $4.99’s a fair price for both me and the reader, even for a new release. In fact, being self-published means that I see more from that $4.99 than a traditionally published author sees from a $9.99 ebook sale. To me, that’s a win-win for both author and reader.