REVOLUTION price promotion!

My action thriller Revolution is on a price promotion for a day or two at Amazon UK, £0.99!! Grab it while it lasts for a great bargain!  :)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolution-Dean-Crawford-ebook/dp/B00HET1UKO/ref=pd_sim_kinc_6?ie=UTF8&refRID=1KTBDE3M1CSTN1YJF2MF

EDEN: paperback.

I'm delighted to announce that EDEN is now available as a paperback, for those who want it. Despite my best efforts the price is too high for my liking ( £9.99 / $10.44 ) probably mainly due to the fact that I write 100,000 word novels rather than 30,000 word novellas like many self-publishing authors.

I'll produce paperback versions for my other self-published novels too, but I may experiment with the size to see if slightly larger print packages might come in a bit cheaper.

Here's the link to EDEN, however, for anybody who would like to own a physical copy of the book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eden-Dean-Crawford/dp/1494939479/ref=la_B004UO651U_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1392199250&sr=1-6

"Survivor" pre-release teaser video.

The teaser for my "Survivor" serial, which will be published in six volumes from March 2014, is now ready and is being shared across the Internet.

Hope you enjoy it - release of Volume I is scheduled for mid to late March, Vol II a couple of weeks after.

My 2014 release schedule!

Okay folks, here's my publications plan for 2014 - and cover artwork for "HAVEN: Redemption", which will be released in April.

March: "Survivor" - Volume I

May onwards: "Survivor" Vols II to IV


"Survivor" may run to nine volumes depending on how things turn out. Currently I'm deciding whether six larger volumes would be better than nine smaller ones, as some readers are apparently tiring of long-running series where they keep having to pay out for fairly short stories.

 

 

 

 

SURVIVOR!!

I'm almost ready to begin writing what I hope will become a really exciting serial, Survivor. Plotting is well underway, with the nine-part high-concept storyline packed with twists and turns that will keep readers very much on their toes.

Each "Volume" will be released on the second week of each month, with the first being a free title provided I can ensure that Amazon will price-match effectively. However, should there be any issues I will be making sure that Volume 1 will be available to download for free from my website.

This is the first time I have attempted a serial of novellas. Each will be approximately 30,000 words long, far bigger than most serialised stories available on Amazon, and with nine volumes in total it represents the equivalent of a large trilogy of full-length works. Each volume ( after the first ) will be very low priced to attract readers and keep them hooked.

Here's the final artwork - can't wait to get stuck into it and make the first episode available for my readers...



2014!!

Happy New Year!!

I hope that you all had a fabulous Christmas and New Year. Mine was fairly quiet, mostly spent with my family and dodging power cuts! I also wanted to take some time out before beginning 2014, which will be my biggest year yet as far as writing novels is concerned.

The total count is yet to be confirmed, but I am hoping to produce no less than five different titles this year. Two of them are for my literary agent, which will hopefully be picked up by major publishers. Two are sequels to Eden and Holo Sapiens, both of which will be released later this year. The fifth is a bit special, as it's not actually a single title. Instead, it will be nine novellas released as a series, hopefully starting in May and then being published one per month for the rest of the year.

I like to tease readers, so I won't tell you anything about the storyline - instead, I'll leave you with this concept artwork for the series.

I hope all my followers have a fabulous 2014!

 

 

 

 

Brand new newsletter!

I've wanted for some time to provide readers of my novels with a way of receiving updates via e-mail when new books are released or when special offers and promotions occur, but it's been hard to find a decent provider of this service that doesn't send annoying spam mails at the same time. Let's face it, nobody likes spam e-mails!

However, I've done it. My news letter will only be sent when a new book is about to be released or when something special happens like a "free" book offer on Amazon ( one is in the pipeline for next year, bargain hunters! )

If you'd like to sign up, then just click the link below. It takes only seconds, and it means you won't have to monitor my blog, Twitter feed or Facebook page to keep up to date with new releases.

http://eepurl.com/KoP8T

Merry Christmas to all my followers! :)

REVOLUTION!!

One of the greatest things about the incredible rise of e-publishing is that it allows authors to publish books that otherwise would probably never have seen the light of day. Since the enormous success of Eden I've decided to edit and release other titles that were unable to attract offers from traditional publishers, as there is no good reason not to do so as long as the content is up to standard.

So, this month, I will be releasing my thriller Revolution to Amazon for Kindle. This book was the last that I wrote before beginning work on the manuscript that became Covenant, the debut in the Ethan Warner series.

When a journalist goes missing in the wilderness of the war-torn former-Soviet state of Mordania, friend and former colleague Megan Mitchell is compelled to search for her. Thrown into the conflict between the democratic Mordanian Government and an uprising led by the ruthless General Mikhail Rameron, Megan must strive to locate her lost friend and avoid becoming a pawn in a dangerous game.

As American diplomats struggle to strike lucrative oil-deals with the Mordanian government while it remains in power, and the United Nations tries to protect the capital city Thessalia's safe-haven, a lone reporter reveals footage of the carnage within the country. In a rush to avoid American intervention, rebel forces start protecting villages and citizens inside the war zone, and a revolution begins: now, the news is not just reporting on the conflict, it is actually controlling it. With every report, the conflicting forces attempt to gain favour in the eyes of the world watching on their televisions in their millions.

Megan pushes herself to the limit in order to rescue her friend, but she is captured by rebel forces and abducted deep behind enemy lines, and there she discovers the horrific truth behind the conflict, and that nothing reported on television is ever as it seems...

Revolution will be released for publication around December 19th, 2013.

Marketing "Holo Sapiens"

So, once again I find myself about to start a promotional run for a new independent novel, and I couldn't have hoped to have been in a better position. Checking Amazon UK's stats this morning, Holo Sapiens is already #14 in the Post Apocalyptic category, with Eden just ahead of it at #7.

This is fabulous news - less than 2 weeks after its launch and Holo Sapiens is already featuring prominently on the store ( and at the 3,300 position in Kindle UK overall ). Once again, this is with no publicity other than here on the blog and on Facebook and Twitter, and a single industry blogger's review ( featured in my previous post ).

The story in the USA is different, however. With a launch at a different time of year, the remarkable set of circumstances that saw Eden rise to the top 1,000 position in just a few weeks no longer exist. Holo Sapiens moves between the 70,000 and 200,000 positions, which obviously means that the novel cannot be seen by many potential readers yet.

Fortunately, this time around I'm more savvy with the marketing and have already pre-booked my advertising campaign. This falls on the 11th, 12th and 13th of December. The first day is a one-day banner with popular e-book forum KBoards. The second and third are both one-day promotions on Kindle Nation Daily, for the Kindle Fire and ordinary Kindle respectively.

The idea of this campaign is not to propel Holo Sapiens into the Amazon Top 100 or anything ( although that would be nice! ) but merely to sell enough copies of the book to rise sufficiently in the rankings to get some visibility. From there, I'm hoping that the book's professional look and intriguing subject matter will sustain a decent ranking, generate regular sales and start the ball rolling.

Just like Eden, there's a long way to go, but I'm confident that the book is good enough to succeed even against the huge competition created by the Christmas season. I'm planning advertising for 2014 also, but I recently learned an interesting and valuable lesson over at KBoards: summer is, by and large, a low-selling period for most independent authors. This contradicts what I would have instinctively thought, that the holiday season would be a good time for people to be buying books to read on the beach etc. My only conclusion is that people do read books at the beach, but not so much on their Kindles - they buy paperbacks for their holidays.

The BIGGEST selling periods for independent authors seems to be post-Christmas, with many saying their sales spike during Boxing Day ( presumably as Kindles are received by countless people as gifts ). January and February are also big months for many self-published authors.

With this in mind, Eden's success was even more surprising during the summer of 2013, so I'm hoping that the more favourable marketing conditions of winter will help Holo Sapiens rise in the ranks over the next few months...

Awesome review for Holo Sapiens.

I was hugely excited to read this review of Holo Sapiens by respected industry blogger Kate Atherton on her blog "For Winter Nights". It really encapsulates so well the atmosphere of the novel.


For Winter Nights

EARLY RELEASE! "Holo Sapiens"

I decided over the weekend that, with the manuscript ready and the conversion complete, there seemed little point in waiting any longer. With industry bloggers keen to get hold of the book, I uploaded "Holo Sapiens" to Amazon a few days earlier than advertised.

You can get it here in the USA:

Holo Sapiens

And here in the UK:

Holo Sapiens


Although I haven't advertised the novel yet it's already pushed up into the best-seller charts for Post-Apocalyptic in the UK. Really hoping that this book takes off like Eden did before it.

Grab it fast! The book is on a promotional price for a short time only of $0.99 in the USA and £0.99 in the UK. Just like Eden, this is for a full-length, 100,000 word novel - a real bargain by any standards.

I hope that all my readers enjoy the book!!

Building a brand: Holo Sapiens

I've been hard at work ( as ever ) working on my latest novel, which is now being read by beta readers for editorial feedback. So far, one has commented that the novel is at least as good as Eden, perhaps even better. Editorials have been fairly light, with no major structural issues and the work limited to typos, clarity and general polishing of the manuscript.

I've also been busy enhancing the HTML coding for the book, ready for publication, by learning how to insert my company logo in the front in the manner of major publishers, how to remove the Table of Contents ( who uses these in fiction anyway? ) and generally sharpening up the presentation.

So far, everything's looking grand and the presentation of the e-book looks as professional now as a publication by one of the big traditional houses. I'll be updating Eden's file with the same logo and adjustments to maintain the brand appearance as soon as I can.

I'm also hard at work on the screenplay for Holo Sapiens. This may seem a bit premature, but the story concept is so unique that I want to put my stamp on it as early as possible. Having a full screenplay in place will help me to do that, and with the Knight-Hall Agency potentially able to put it in front of the Hollywood studios I'd be insane not to put it together.

I've let Eden slip down in the USA charts over the last couple of weeks, shifting my focus to Holo Sapiens in full. From all I've researched about self-publishing, the best advert for one novel is often another by the same author. I'm hoping that the release of Holo Sapiens, if all goes to plan, will push Eden back up the charts by association. That said, Eden is still in the top 1,000 or so in the UK so it's doing very well all by itself. In the USA it's around the 6,000 mark in Kindle Paid, still not bad considering the competition.

My next work will be for my literary agent, a crime-thriller with a twist that should take me until the early new year to complete. After that, it's a full year of writing for me, completing the following titles:

EDEN: Redemption.

Holo Sapiens: Homo Immortalis

Soul Seekers: Ghost Ship  ( Young adult series )

2014 is going to be as busy as 2013!

"Holo Sapiens" promotional video

My new video for "Holo Sapiens"! Just 26 days to go until publication :)

I'm also delighted to report that "Eden" has now sold over 10,000 copies and is still going strong! Very much looking forward to seeing how my growing list of titles affect each other in terms of sales and 'reach' to new potential readers...

My first book video!

Since first self-publishing a novel, I've been thinking a lot about how to further spread the word of my work. I knew a lot of authors had used videos to do so, so I decided to give it a whirl. With my company's logo sorted, I wanted to produce something that looks very professional so that I can advertise my work in the manner of a traditional publishing house.

The idea is to keep all of my self-published works under a highly visible banner, which will feature in all of them rather like a cover, so that hopefully readers will start to associate good quality books with both my name as an author and also with Fictum, my company.

The video is for "Eden", which is still selling a hundred copies a day months after it was first published. It will soon be joined by "Holo Sapiens" at the end of November.

My new company logo! :)

I've recently designed a logo for my company. As I'm self-publishing as well now, it seemed appropriate to place those publications beneath a recognisable banner. As I'm also planning to produce short videos to advertise my books it helps to create product recognition, a bit like film studios.

I had a great deal of fun creating them, and hopefully in the future they'll appear on reading devices at the start of my books  :)

For those of you wondering - the company name is Latin for fiction.

Here's the static logo:

And here's the animation:

 

 



Guest Post: Traditional versus self-publishing

I was fortunate enough recently to be offered the chance to guest post on book reviewer Jera's Jamboree blog, talking about the my experiences with both traditional and self-publishing. The link below will take you to the post.

http://jerasjamboree.com/2013/10/21/jeras-jamboree-guest-author-dean-crawford-published-vs-self-published/


In other news, Holo-Sapiens is nearing its beta-reader stage. Structural edits are almost complete and I'm now working on dialogue, character, prose and narrative, ironing out smaller errors and generally polishing the novel.

Eden remains high in Kindle's Paid rankings, despite the efforts of a "sock-puppet" reviewer in the USA ( a sock-puppet is a reviewer account operated by a rival author or somebody close to them ) who placed a negative review of Eden, false accusations and repeated links to said rival author's novels in an attempt to derail my sales and promote their own. I've reported their activity and evidence proving their link to the rival author to Amazon. In a quirk of fate and what I like to think of as justice, Eden shot up over a thousand places into the Top 700 after the review appeared, which just goes to show that crime doesn't pay.

I hadn't encountered this kind of behaviour before, and as the 'review' contained some quite offensive remarks I felt compelled to reply to it as well as report it. This led to the 'reviewer' hastily altering their comments and removing their links in an attempt to avoid any action by Amazon. If there's a next time, I'll know better.

( UPDATE: Amazon have removed the offending review as it was indeed in breach of their rules. )

HOLO SAPIENS publication date!

I've finally got a date set-in-stone for HOLO SAPIENS. It will be published direct to Kindle on Thursday November 28th, 2013. Pre-orders won't be available. I'm hard at work on my edits, and the novel is shaping up to be perhaps my favourite so far!

EDEN is still doing fabulously. It has sold close to 10,000 copies and is maintaining strong positions in the Kindle Paid charts on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm hugely excited to see what happens when HOLO SAPIENS hits the digital shelves, and how it affects EDEN's position.

I'm also guest-posting on the Fiction Addiction blog soon, writing about my experiences with digital publishing and traditional publishing and how the market place has changed so much over the past two years. I'll place links here when the post goes live..

New novel due for e-publication, November 2013: HOLO SAPIENS!

It's here! The artwork is finally done, the edits are well on their way and I can confirm that my latest novel, HOLO SAPIENS, will be published in November 2013! The exact date it will appear is to be confirmed and I'll share it here and in the usual places as soon as I can!

New First Draft completed!!

I've been hard at work for the past couple of weeks, writing to a self-imposed regime of about 4,000 words per day in order to complete the first draft of my next novel. This is an entirely new work, based upon a high-concept idea I came up with during the summer that I really felt strongly about. Sometimes, as an author, I get really excited about a new plot and start tearing along for days as ideas and storylines rush out almost as fast as I can write them down. This burst of creativity is then followed by a few weeks of developing the plot details and adding depth to the story before actually sitting down and writing it.

With the Ethan Warner series, I used to plot almost every single possible detail before writing, but I changed that approach with EDEN in order to let the characters develop more. The new approach worked well, and with the new WIP I've done something in-between, plotting about 50% of the story using key points and scenes that I knew I wanted to see, and then letting the characters kind of build themselves as the story went along.

This approach has produced some great characters who have come alive as I've written the draft, but they have changed over the course of the story in their motives etc as their characters have developed, so now I've got to go through the first structural edit and make sure that those characters become a little more consistent in their story journey, along with all the other essential plot lines being ironed out and polished. In general I'm really very happy with my new method, as it allows new ideas to pop up throughout the story, often changing it ways I hadn't imagined before writing it.

In other news, EDEN remains high in the UK Amazon Kindle chart ( in the 300s ) and in the USA chart ( 1,100 ish ), and is selling anything between 130 and 200 copies per day. I did some minor further advertising in the USA, but all in all the book seems to be selling itself without any further input from me. Given its high star-rating, especially in the UK, I'm assuming that the good sales are based on the book's merits alone - gaining sales traction as its reputation gets better as a "good read". I'm keeping an eye on it and also plotting the sequel, EDEN: REDEMPTION, which I'll publish sometime early in 2014, as for now I'm focusing on my two current WIPs.

More news as it comes in, and I'll post cover-art for the new high-concept novel soon if it becomes a self-published work instead of traditionally published.

Increasing workload and general publishing news.

I'm finally back into my routine after a week and a half spent reading the final proofs for two of my traditionally published novels. APOCALYPSE is now ready for printing in the USA, although I have not yet seen any cover artwork, while here in the UK the next Ethan Warner novel, now titled THE ETERNITY PROJECT, is also ready for printing and I've been sent the wonderful cover art, which is below:

The completion of these two proof read-throughs means that I'm now back at my desk and writing to a strict self-imposed regime. I aim to write no less than 4,000 words per day, and am working on three different projects. The first is an epic sci-fi novel that I've been plotting and writing now for over a month, the story built around a central idea that is entirely unique and immensely compelling. The novel could be a real hit if I can get it right, so it's my priority right now ( before somebody else comes up with the idea! ). The second project is a crime novel for my agent, Luigi Bonomi, which we're hoping will go to traditional publishers later this year. The third project is the sequel to EDEN, which is doing so incredibly well right now across Amazon's various sites. I'm in the basic plotting stage at the moment, but as EDEN was always planned to be the first in a trilogy of stories the basic elements are in place. It's more an issue of how to tell the story in a satisfying way for the reader that's my focus at the moment, as I don't want the sequel to be just a repeat of the debut.

EDEN remains high in the UK chart, and seems to climb by about a hundred places each passing week. Next week marks two months since the novel was launched exclusively to Amazon, during which I've sold more than 4,000 copies. The title has slipped slightly over in the USA, but this is largely due to the big leap in sales when I bought advertising there, the tail-off in sales afterward accounting for the decrease. A new price and some more advertising is in the pipeline so hopefully I'll be able to continue the book's upward climb soon.

Between now and next Spring it's my aim to have at least three self-published titles available exclusively through Amazon at low prices. This longer-term goal, and the combined sales and brand-awareness, is part of a plan to achieve wider success within the self-published world to keep me writing for a living between traditional contracts with publishing houses. With things going ever more digital in publishing, I want to make my mark there and establish a permanent presence sooner rather than later. The more people who become aware that they can buy my books at truly excellent prices in digital form, the better off I'll be when the paperback market begins to follow the already collapsing hardback market.

I'll report in next week with EDEN's two-month figures, and hopefully some good news on USA advertising...