Yup, you read that right - Amazon Kindle Royalties!
I've got the check sitting right here beside me right now.
It's not an amazing amount, only $12.95 for the period February-April of this year, but it's my first royalty check ever for my fiction work. Someone out there's paid to read my stuff.
That is exciting and exhilarating and scary all at the same time.
It means that I have to create more stories for people to read because I can't make a living on this.
But maybe, just maybe, I've got a chance at this after all.
I started this endeavor earlier this year with a 5-year plan. I'm slightly behind schedule on that plan almost 8 months into it, but receiving this check today has bolstered my hopes and dreams once again. I'm a long way from the finish line of this plan and there's a lot of work, and a lot of learning, left to do yet.
Bit you know what they say - "Money talks, and bullshit walks."
Well, here's money talking. Amazon's been paid for my stories and now they're paying me as promised. I've made more sales since April so I know I'll be receiving more checks in the future.
This is no longer an experiment, no longer a plan, now it's a business.
It's time to get to work.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
HATCHINGS Now $0.99 for Limited Time Only
For anyone who's interested, I just dropped the price of my SF novel HATCHINGS to $0.99 for a very limited time period only (till the end of the month at the latest). It'll be available from Kindle by this time tomorrow (gotta' republish & review every time you change pricing for Amazon for some reason) and is available for all other platforms via Smashwords.
Friday, July 08, 2011
FOTS Website Back Up
My old gaming website for Fire On The Suns (FOTS) is back up after a multi-year absence thanks to some good friends who secured the domain name and held onto it until I could get back to it.
You can find the site at www.fire-on-the-suns.com
I've also secured the domain name for GWELLIS.com and will soon make that my primary author site.
I'm looking forward to republishing a large number of items from the old days when my game was going strong and new items that never got off the drawing board. I've got at least 2 novels and a couple of standalone indie games designed by friends from way back too that might actually see the light of day in the future.
It may be that my old desktop publishing company Ellis & Company Piblishing could be raised from the dead due to Smashwords and Kindle.
All hail indie publishing!
You can find the site at www.fire-on-the-suns.com
I've also secured the domain name for GWELLIS.com and will soon make that my primary author site.
I'm looking forward to republishing a large number of items from the old days when my game was going strong and new items that never got off the drawing board. I've got at least 2 novels and a couple of standalone indie games designed by friends from way back too that might actually see the light of day in the future.
It may be that my old desktop publishing company Ellis & Company Piblishing could be raised from the dead due to Smashwords and Kindle.
All hail indie publishing!
Friday, July 01, 2011
HATCHINGS Is Live On Amazon
Actually the book went live on Amazon for the Kindle last month on the fifth.
I just delayed posting a blog here because I was busy elsewhere.
Mainly at my day job, where I work as a department manager in electronics. Anything to pay the bills. There've been quite a few changes in my life since April including a new apartment, putting my mother in a nursing home, and all the attendant bills that that requires. The last couple of weeks I've been plagued by a swollen right hand causes by an infection in the joint in my right index finger. Needless to say, this has made writing much of anything really difficult the last two weeks.
But enough about me even though it's all about me, let's talk about my book.
Or not.
I seem to have gotten Dragon NaturallySpeaking working adequately and I'm using it to write this blog post. I'll also be using it to write my story "Porters Way" which is a western horror fantasy mixed genre intended to be a short, but will probably end up somewhere above 10,000 words. Right now it's standing about 3500 words, but it's really kind of a fun story to write. The genre mix is something that I did back in the days when I played RPG's, but it's never something that I really intended to try to write until now.
Actually, considering everything that's going on in epublishing right now it's looking more and more like RPG publishing might be an economic opportunity. I used to write some killer adventures. At one point in time I even had my own RPG. Of course I also had the game Fire On The Suns (FOTS) and wrote half a dozen rulebooks and supplements for it as well as a couple of spinoff games. FOTS is still going strong in some limited areas on Yahoo! Groups, but it's definitely a fringe market. There are a number of opportunities that someone familiar with the publishing could utilize to break into the RPG market using Kindle, Smashwords, and PubIt!. Most recently I have been asked to assist a fellow writer in formatting her work so she can get it up on Kindle. I'm going to do this at no charge, of course.
Yog's Law: Money flows to the writer.
I've also learned what the problems were with putting some of my stuff up on Smashwords which prevented it getting into the premium catalog. Turns out was a formatting error which was difficult to find or track down in OpenOffice. Once I was able to track it down and kill it, everything went up fine. I spent 15 years doing epublishing, or what was called desktop publishing back then, so I often know a little bit about formatting some of this stuff. My format for Hatchings for CreateSpace went through flawlessly except for my cover which I need to do a minor correction for. Hopefully by next month, I'll have a POD version of Hatchings available.
Well, that's about it for this post. I really do intend to post more frequently, but the demands of my other jobs like writing, finishing up some stuff, and of course paying the bills, tend to prohibit me from getting here as often as I would like.
I just delayed posting a blog here because I was busy elsewhere.
Mainly at my day job, where I work as a department manager in electronics. Anything to pay the bills. There've been quite a few changes in my life since April including a new apartment, putting my mother in a nursing home, and all the attendant bills that that requires. The last couple of weeks I've been plagued by a swollen right hand causes by an infection in the joint in my right index finger. Needless to say, this has made writing much of anything really difficult the last two weeks.
But enough about me even though it's all about me, let's talk about my book.
Or not.
I seem to have gotten Dragon NaturallySpeaking working adequately and I'm using it to write this blog post. I'll also be using it to write my story "Porters Way" which is a western horror fantasy mixed genre intended to be a short, but will probably end up somewhere above 10,000 words. Right now it's standing about 3500 words, but it's really kind of a fun story to write. The genre mix is something that I did back in the days when I played RPG's, but it's never something that I really intended to try to write until now.
Actually, considering everything that's going on in epublishing right now it's looking more and more like RPG publishing might be an economic opportunity. I used to write some killer adventures. At one point in time I even had my own RPG. Of course I also had the game Fire On The Suns (FOTS) and wrote half a dozen rulebooks and supplements for it as well as a couple of spinoff games. FOTS is still going strong in some limited areas on Yahoo! Groups, but it's definitely a fringe market. There are a number of opportunities that someone familiar with the publishing could utilize to break into the RPG market using Kindle, Smashwords, and PubIt!. Most recently I have been asked to assist a fellow writer in formatting her work so she can get it up on Kindle. I'm going to do this at no charge, of course.
Yog's Law: Money flows to the writer.
I've also learned what the problems were with putting some of my stuff up on Smashwords which prevented it getting into the premium catalog. Turns out was a formatting error which was difficult to find or track down in OpenOffice. Once I was able to track it down and kill it, everything went up fine. I spent 15 years doing epublishing, or what was called desktop publishing back then, so I often know a little bit about formatting some of this stuff. My format for Hatchings for CreateSpace went through flawlessly except for my cover which I need to do a minor correction for. Hopefully by next month, I'll have a POD version of Hatchings available.
Well, that's about it for this post. I really do intend to post more frequently, but the demands of my other jobs like writing, finishing up some stuff, and of course paying the bills, tend to prohibit me from getting here as often as I would like.
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