Project Upgrade: AVENGING FIRE
It’s been a month since I published AVENGING FIRE, my bonus 11th writing goal for 2021, so let’s see how it did.
The idea came from regular reader William, who asked:
“I just read Share the Pain and I enjoyed it. It seems like a shame that it is left orphaned on Kindle with no link on your website. Anyway, I was curious if you have ever considered incorporating it into your greater body of fantasy novels by using it as the basis for a prequel to Cloak Games? It struck me early on that the year and the tone of the story would fit the tidbits about the last days of the US government and the elven invasion that were revealed in Last Judge. Also the familiar-sounding Irish names like Cormac.”
First, what was SHARE THE PAIN?
SHARE THE PAIN was originally a mystery novel I wrote fifteen or sixteen years ago. I self-published it back in 2011 when I started with self-publishing, but it never really took off because I didn’t know how to market it. (To be fair, when I started in 2011, I didn’t know how to market anything.) Eventually I made DEMONSOULED permafree, and that took off, so fantasy became my focus. SHARE THE PAIN just sort of sat there while I wrote other things, and my focus was on fantasy. The cover of SHARE THE PAIN, as you can see from the graphic above, was pretty weak, and I never bothered to do anything to upgrade and market it. It sold one or two copies a year, and that was that.
In answer to William’s question about CLOAK GAMES, I don’t really like doing prequels. It feels a bit like procrastinating instead of getting on with the main story, you know? Like, imagine that you have to mow the lawn, and you set out to do it, but first you decide to organize the contents of your garage, and the lawn remains unmowed. Writing prequels feels a bit like organizing the garage when the lawn needs mowing. I suppose some of my short stories are prequels, but I view those more like “bonus scenes” on the DVD, extra material that my newsletter subscribers get for free.
But one of the positive things to come out of 2020 (there were some!) was that I really upped my cover design skills. I started to wonder how SHARE THE PAIN would do if I renamed it and republished it with a new cover and modern formatting. It seemed like a worthwhile experiment, so I unpublished SHARE THE PAIN, renamed it AVENGING FIRE, and made the cover you can see in the graphic above. On February 1st, I republished it and sent it out to my newsletter.
How did it do?
I am pleased to report that in one month, AVENGING FIRE sold two and a half times as many copies as it did over the previous ten years. Here’s how it broke down by platform:
Amazon: 75%
Barnes & Noble: 5.9%
Kobo: 8%
Apple: 4.2%
Google Play: 4.5%
Smashwords: 2.1%
So what conclusions can we draw from this adventure?
I am definitely going to write a sequel, probably sometime this summer. I think after I finish the DRAGONTIARNA and GHOST NIGHT series, a mystery novel would be just the thing to clear my head after writing two conclusions to long and complex epic fantasy series like DRAGONTIARNA and GHOST NIGHT.
This might also finally solve my Kindle Unlimited problem. I’ve taken almost all my books out of Kindle Unlimited, and WRAITHSHARD: SWORD & FLAME should come out of Kindle Unlimited on March 21st-ish, which the rest of the series following soon thereafter. Usually my books sell around 60 to 65% of their copies on Amazon, not 75%. (And for older books like CLOAK GAMES: FROST FEVER or SILENT ORDER: WRAITH HAND, sometimes they only sell like 45% of their monthly copies on Amazon.) If the ratio for AVENGING FIRE continues through March, I might in the future keep all my fantasy and science fiction available on all platforms but sell mysteries through Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. But we’ll see what the March numbers are actually like before I make up my mind.
Finally, thank you all for reading! AVENGING FIRE was outside of my usual genres, so I’m glad so many people read and enjoyed it.
-JM