A Cozy Fantasy

 Miss Amelia’s List by Mercedes Lackey (to be published Dec 24 2024, DAW)

I received a free copy on NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Set in 1815 London, the language of the opening captures the tone of Regency romances and novels of manners with wit and humor. Mercedes Lackey’s mastery with character does not disappoint. Two merchant-class elemental mages from America seek husbands, one of them secretly a shifter. I doubted the existence of the seven-story Belgravia mansion described until I found it for sale on mansionglobal dot com. The period terms are so well researched and archaic that you may need to Google a few like warping a ship into dock using ropes rather than FTL drive. For the first half of the novel, the challenges are distant, off-camera, and mild: Napoleon escaping exile and a volcanic eruption leading to two summerless years on the horizon. Nobody is ever really in danger, and most things are just handed to the main character. Indeed, the possible love interest and intense conflict doesn’t manifest until about 90 percent of the way through the novel. I give it 4 out of 5 only because the conflict is wrapped up so fast and conveniently.

Ten Things I Learned Doing Facebook Ads for my Books

The past couple of weeks, I tried Facebook ads to boost my book sales for several of my novels. I learned several facts other authors don't bother to tell you that can cost a lot of money fast. I thought I would write up my experience for my cohort at the 2024 Taos Toolbox Writers' Workshop.

1. Facebook doesn't always sell your backlist effectively, but it does tell you how marketable something is, be it pitch or cover. If you're trying to decide between a set of covers, A-B testing will tell you fast which one people flock to. For example, book two of my Oni series gets clicks seven times more often than book one. Of my 34 novels, I can tell within a day and $5 to $20 of investment per experiment which ones will sell best, even if FB might not be the platform for long-term marketing. I knew this fact before, but these experiments underscored the lesson and allowed me to let go of a few of my orphan projects while encouraging me about others I had given up on. Make marketing decisions based on numbers not which darlings you love the most.

2. To verify which sales are due to FB ads or a specific ad rather than driver-by Amazon bargain hunters, you need to give each ad a different Amazon tracking URL, available for free for each campaign in your Amazon Advertising platform. Otherwise, you can't tell cause and effect reliably.

3. The possible high price per click means this is not a good vehicle for promoting free books. For an initial boost to an event, it can be great. For $50, I got 250 downloads in a couple days to put my new fantasy thriller Future-Proof at the top in each of its categories. However, this is not sustainable. Facebook was charging about 13 cents a click, but I was paying about 26 cents per download. Even if I used my cover photo and pitch verbatim, only half the clickers bothered to take my new book for free. FB optimizes for people who click LEARN MORE, not people who actually buy.

4. People surfing Facebook are cheap. Unless you have tens of thousands of rave reviews, nobody on the platform will buy for full price. Even then, it will be rare. Ninety percent of the ads are for 99 cent books. For a series, this means lowering the price for the first book or bundling the entire series for a just under a dollar a volume. For example, a five-book series would typically be $4.99. How do I know this? Because when you advertise on FB, you become a primary target for ads. Every third story on my feed is now a fantasy or sci-fi ad.  If you can stick it out for a week, the FB algorithm can optimize the price per click downward. However, this means you only earn 30 cents a copy on Amazon for book one of a series.

5. Schedule ads ahead of time to be certain. I used KDP countdowns to lower prices for most experiments. You need to do this a couple days in advance. Once it's hot, FB has to be delivering the same hour, or you've wasted the perk for 90 more days. Especially over the weekend or overnight, approvals for new FB ads can have long delays. Have everything queued up in the missile silo ahead of time, ready to launch.

6. Facebook ads are only profitable if you're selling a series. My Jezebel series has five books and a high read-thru rate. That means for every Jez sale I make at 30 cents, I sell an average of 1.2 others at 3.99 each. So for that first week, I can spend a ruinous $5.10 a download and still break even while the algorithm finds my audience. On my two-book Oni series, I only sell an additional .25 of the lone sequel, limiting my budget to .3 + .25*3.99 = $1.30. This can work. For two days, I sold a copy of It Takes an Oni, every hour for a cost that dropped from $1.5 each to $1.25. 

7. Once the targeting AI does down an ineffective rabbit hole, you can never change its direction. It equates clicks with success, no matter what return you see on the Amazon board. It could accelerate very fast in the wrong direction. On the Oni ads, I turned my back while I ate dinner, and FB spent the rest of my daily budget $8 for no return. I had to kill the ad immediately. On the flip side, I've had fully-funded ads stall out with no exposures for days because the AI gets stuck in navel-staring mode, even after I toggled it off and changed something trivial to restart the same ad.

8. When marketing book one of a series, use only the cover for that book. A carousel ad for my Gigaparec series using every cover in the series garnered 30 clicks in the first hour, but only one sale, wasting $8 fast. I saw this effect again and again. Be painfully honest with people about what they are getting. You want to attract the right audience for your product, not any rando off the street. If you get a loyal customer, they read other books in your portfolio, too. 

9. It doesn't hurt to add an overlay on the ad to tell people you are available on KU. This helps the FB AI target people with Kindles who participate. However, people who add the phrase Free on Kindle Unlimited hack me off because I clicked based on the word "free" and feel cheated. Be honest.

10. AI generation of your pitch gets clicks, but seldom resembles your actual product. People who compare it to your actual Amazon page or sample content will be disappointed. Every time I experimented, I'd literally get ten clicks with zero conversion. It would claim my story was primarily a romance or be misleading in other way. You don't have to market your sushi as cold dead fish, but don't claim it's tenderloin with a side of fries. However, you can look at how it rewrites your pitch five ways and learn from it.

AD&D Party Like It's 1999

 A friend from Ukraine wanted to try this D&D game he's heard so much about, so I decided to run him in a tournament I developed back in the nineties for the ancient second edition of AD&D. To round out the group, I invited my wife and daughter who were veterans of Champions RPG and my son and his friend Andrew who play Fifth edition rules. Everyone liked the snacks, but the boys hated the old style rules. The thing people liked the best, as I remember from college days, were my maps. This is a sample of the opening of the adventure where they visit a Greek city near a wizard academy.

This is a topographical map after landing on the academy island. Since I'm never going to use the adventure again, I snapped a few key photos for the sake of nostalgia to share with people I've adventured with. I'm recycling the paper, reusing the folders, and probably selling the stack of manuals online.

Level one of the fortress.

Level two of the fortress.

And the ever-popular wandering monster table. The rust monsters and giant chicken were hilarious to play. The shadows guarding the iron plates in the dining hall (it's a rare supermetal in the Golden-Age Greece campaign) either drained someone or gave them white hair every time.

Paging through the stack of modules I made, I found "The Impossible Pyramid" from an Egyptian tomb adventure, which occupies both the ethereal and prime material. This engineering marvel looks like it is floating and is almost impossible to pillage. One of the fighters in this adventure found a magic ring that convinced him that he was the reincarnation of the king buried here. 

The Island of Misfit clerics, an oriental D&D adventure, was one of my favorite campaigns. Everyone loved fighting the pirate ship and finding the map to his treasure. This brings the party together and leads them to an island where several things are amiss, including a cult with a crystal city on a mountain top. 

My favorite part of this adventure was an artifact the samurai found in the trove, a willow-iron dragon mask that could grant powers when you feed it coins or gems. Yes, everyone knew it was cursed with side effects, but the player didn't care--which is why my wife makes me wear devil's horns when I dungeon master. It doesn't affect the outcome at all, but it did give me a cool opening for my magic novel "Foundation for the Lost." 

As you can tell, this creativity shifted into writing after the nineties. The papers brought back a lot of fond memories, only a few of which involved the wailing and lamentation of the players.

Should I try Kindle Vella as an Author?

As an author, I try to keep up with current trends, topics, and marketing methods. One of the newest is Kindle Vella a way to engage younger readers and those on cellular devices. My (now adult) children are voracious readers but prefer free serials and fanfiction available on numerous aggregator sites. My son lamented the demise of his phone because he lost the thousand browser tabs he had up to catch updates on all his favorite stories.

Three Reasons I Tried Vella

1. Direct Connection with Fans

Many people comment on the ongoing threads. I liked the idea of real-time feedback on a story as I write. Even Brandon Sanderson and Lawrence Watt-Evans have enacted similar mechanisms with their fans. Marketing only through e-mail feels cold and distant.

2. Lower Upfront Cost

To collect the 5-10,000 email addresses I need to build and communicate to a core audience would run me around $1200 a year. Editing prices have shot up to $1200 a novel and cover costs are about $275 each, even if I didn't like the results. Copyright is not $65 a novel. With advertising for the releases, he grand total comes to about $2100 a book. The price to post on Vella is about $25 for a cover image on Etc.

3. Getting in on the Ground Floor of the Next Big Thing

I succeeded in e-books when they first came out. This could be a great opportunity. Two years should have been enough time to work the kinks out of the platform. Right? In theory, the author gets 1 cent per 200 words of story sold, plus bonuses.

Reasons I Dropped Vella after a Month

1. As of January 2023, Amazon Doesn't Pay Authors for Free Tokens

Hundreds of people could read your story, but if they used their initial 200 free tokens, you don't see a cent. My counts of episode unlocked would be up one day and retroactively zeroed out the next. Here's the trick: authors can't prove which reads were free. You have to trust Amazon. I don't after funny business with audible and an audiobook. Even if you manage to get the unicorn bonuses, they won't pay for two months.

2. Vella only usable through Kindle Devices

The Kindle app on my phone can't actually read Vella stories, and none of my 600 e-book fans were interested in the Vella. What about reaching new readers? The "discover" button for Vella will only recommend 25 stories, plus a list of their big money makers and a few new/trending. The scrolling search is difficult on a phone or other small device. Only two covers are visible at a time. If you read it on a PC, the episodes appear in a popup limited to 2.5" wide, not conducive to binge reading.

3. No Good Way for Readers to Find You

Since you can't do Amazon ads for Vella, Facebook groups are the only viable was to advertise. The groups that aren't closed are composed almost entirely of new authors. The idea is that each day, you join events to read and like/follow other people's episodes in hopes that someone will do the same for you. To do so honestly takes a lot of time. In a week of effort on one group, I accrued 21 likes. Most successful authors belong to 6 such groups. Given that members of the recommended list average 10,000 likes, you would need to spend full time accumulating these for 80 weeks to show up on those reliably. However, this is completely artificial, not organic reader response. For uncrowned sagas, the ratio of likes to actual reviews is abysmal, on the order of one in 500. With e-books, the ratio between read and reviewed is closer to 1 in 25. You also have to spend real money to gain these likes, while other authors might not. Also, you are not allowed to criticize other authors' work in any way, even to tell them they have missing/duplicate punctuation or other typos in episode one.

How could readers find you organically? The initial categories like frequently updated only show two covers/titles at a time with no text. Each of the 16 categories have around 1000 entries displayed in the browsing, with the addition of 2 of the 7 tags you chose. However, the most popular categories I wrote in have far more competition. 

Fantasy   11,525

Romance 15,500

These aren't ordered by any rhyme or reason I could find.

4. Poor Quality for the Money

The presentation could be the same as the Kindle e-reader, but they use a cheaper, clunkier interface with no indentation that ruins scene breaks. The import function doesn't check spelling like the e-book upload either. The average quality of the 100+ episodes I sampled was low, filled with grammar errors and repetition. I only liked about one story in ten. Just one story so far merited a review. In that case, the author stretched a single scene over four 600-word episodes--agonizing. Even with the crowned suggestions, the cream of the crop, the most frequent rating is 3 stars. In the rare instance they complete a season, say 100 episodes 1000 words each, a reader would spend $9.70 for the raw unedited product. For the same e-book, polished, they would spend from 99 cents to $3.99.

Conclusion

While Vella may become a viable platform for new authors some day, it's not soup yet. I added updates every other day for a month and then stopped. By May 28th, I'll be ready to post the e-book. 

Addendum

A month later, I still have $0 in royalties (despite several days where the dashboard briefly showed sales). However, I did get an email from Amazon saying that I have a $25 bonus which will be paid out in a couple months for my high March sales. Huh?

Alicante, Beautiful from Mountains to Beaches

The second phase of our summer vacation, we visited Irene's hometown of Alicante, and her parents showed us around. Several of the nights, we took a train into town to watch the fireworks festival at night, and celebrate her grandmother's birthday with their extended family. Still photos don't do it justice. We took hundreds of photos and movies during our stay. Here are just a few. 

We start with paella--rabbit, seafood, spice, and rice. They make the best, with a wonderful view in the backdrop.

A short drive into the mountains to see ancient fortresses where Christian kings clashed with the Moors.

We laughed and sang 80s pop tunes a lot. Her folks spoke fluent English, unlike my high-school Spanish, which was just enough to know which lane we should be in on the highway or to pay for gas and fast food.

The beach walk was full of shops, ice cream, fountains, splendid architecture, and palm trees, but I think our favorite was the playground in the shade. Here Emily caught Irene in a photo op on the stairs to a gazebo overlooking the port.

Then we drove up to a scenic overlook captured a few of my two beautiful ladies.

At night, we ate in a pizzeria in the all-white stone city of Altea. Here we are in the church square.

No album would be complete without a candid of her parents many cats. Her mother fosters them while awaiting homes.

Valencia post lockdown

Two years ago, we had a wonderful exchange student from Spain, Irene, who was forced to return during the COVID outbreak. This summer, for the first time, we were able to visit her and her family. Our first stop was to see Valencia for a few days, the town where she was attending university. She is fluent in English and a wonderful tour guide.

The first day, we drove the three hours from Barcelona (only one train runs on Sunday) and found the Libere, our hotel in with an ancient exterior but modern, spacious interior. Street art was popular, but we only captured it on Pokemon Go postcards. After a brief nap to recover from 35 hours of wakefulness and waiting in line, we had a variety of tapas for dinner at a refurbished central market.

The next day, we saw the town, starting with the Queen's plaza, the mayor's palace, and the cathedral with the Holy Chalice. The flagstones could have dated back to the days of Columbus, but you couldn't swing a churro without hitting some renovation project. At the fruit stands we saw a flat peachlike fruit unavailable in the US, called a Paraguaya.

Cheap, close parking is an issue, but you can walk or take low-cost public transport anywhere.

However, the true crown jewel of the Valencia was the City of Arts and Sciences. They diverted a river
basin prone to flooding and filled it with an elegant park and latest in architecture. The walk in the park helped to cool us in the 95 degree heat. Even the tree-shaped arches and tile work were reminiscent of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia.

It felt like we were walking around on the set of Logan's Run or a Star Trek series.

This structure reminded me of an Avengers movie.

I actually used this dome on the cover of the second book in my Jezebel's Ladder series.

They also had a well-known sculpture garden that I've seen featured on covers. 

That night, we celebrated Tammy's birthday at a Prohibition-era New York themed restaurant, Voltereta.

Hawaii in the Time of COVID

This summer, after over a year of helping people as a health-care professional during a pandemic, my wife needed a break, so I took her and our daughter on a vacation. Since my wife will be retiring soon, we wanted to see if Hawaii could be our new home. Because of the universities, modern conveniences, and plentiful restaurants, I selected various locations around Oahu for 18 days, not just the touristy places. I didn't plan too much. We decided to wing it.

Health

The rules for what we needed for the trip changed weekly, but two things held constant while there. 

1) Once we uploaded our COVID results to https://travel.hawaii.gov/, everyone wanted to see it before we could get off the plane, rent a room, or get into a car. Nobody cares about the paper card they stamp at the airport. The big green check mark on your phone is a requirement. It doesn't matter how long ago you took it. Don't let your phone battery die!

2) Mask anytime you set foot inside or on the bus. Even bodega managers will chase you off if you're waiting for your group in their front archway. Pack a spare mask with your sunscreen and water bottles just in case.

Most if your activities should be outdoors, so this won't matter often. On the left a shot from the top of Diamond Head on day two.

Transportation

Transportation is the biggest expense an hassle on the island. Fresh off the plane on the Fourth of July, the 8 mile trip to Waikiki Beach spiked from $50 to over $100 on Uber. Screw that. We paid $1.25 a person to ride the public bus. Once in town, stop at any ABC store, and you can travel anywhere on the island for $2.50 a day. Download the free Moovit app onto your phone to see what route to use, where the stops are, and when the buses arrive. While we waited, natives drove by with Hawaiian flags or upside-down US flags on the back, honking in protest to statehood. The stop for our hotel was a princess statue in a well-groomed park, where they polish the stone walkways daily.

For the last four days on the island, we rented a car. Hertz closed two hours before their website said and then yelled at us for half an hour, complain about entitled haolies and how our visits are driving up real-estate prices for them so they have to work two jobs. The bargain car of about $150 a day we reserved didn't matter. They jacked the price by $70 a day before they would let us have *any* vehicle. A car there runs more than a good hotel room, plus $35 a day to park it inside Honolulu. Avoid this. Even on the North Shore, with only one road, traffic moves at 5 mph, and there's nowhere to park.

Food

To make the trip cost-effective and more like what it would be living there, we decided to only eat one big meal out a day. Even the food trucks in Honolulu are pricy. For $15, you can have mystery meat in Styrofoam and a can of Coke, but for $30 each, you can have bread, linen, and unlimited refills at Cheesecake Factory. The rest of meals would be snacks from the grocery store and leftovers, so all our rooms have a fridge/microwave. Our first stop was Walmart, where we filled our backpacks with granola bars, lunch meat, tortillas, and drinks. Target has better prices on some things. In general, the farther you get from the beach, the less the same item will cost.

Our favorite places were a make-your-own enchilada place on the beach and the second-floor restaurant in a hotel. Both had great views while you dine if you do so before dark. Most people wait until nightfall to dress for dinner. Avoid the waits and go early. That launch place with the line wrapped around the corner isn't worth an hour in the sun. Even McDonalds can have a long queue.

Housing

Don't pick the cheapest place you can find. Ours was made of cinderblock, nestled in a construction zone, surrounded by homeless camps and echoing of domestic violence that leak in the louver blinds if you don't have the deafening jet-engine AC cranked. Seriously, we had ear damage. At $96 a night, the owning hotel a block away added $25 a night in resort fees because we could walk over and get a cup of coffee, change our towels out, borrow a $2 floaty, or get a local newspaper. See left for the view out our window. 

The midrange hotel has a view of the beach from a mile a away over the park. However, it was centrally located for walking. Breakfast always burned the whole voucher, even if you only ordered a muffin.

The high-end hotel had a great view but only two elevators for 30 floors and a limit of one family to a car. So the lines were always long to return to the room or leave. Also, a lot of amenities just didn't exist due to COVID (like the hot tub) or were limited due to understaffing (one ice machine hidden in the parking garage beside the laundry machines.)

The best hotel turned out to be the one on the west side of the island at the corner of a mall. It was spacious, only three stories, with easy access to everything, great parking, and fantastic variety for reasonable food. I ate at Cinnabon and Five Guys a lot that stay. They were also 10 minutes away from the Disney beach. This was our home-base when we did our real exploration. We literally drove around the entire island (except where blocked by military bases). I tried to take a photo of mother and daughter on every beach.

Fun Things to Do

My favorite activities were free. Since we walked many places, we admired the flowers and tiny birds. While touring the university, the imported mongeese were awesome. The prettiest stop was Manoa Falls. Not only was the rainforest gorgeous, but people was covered in mud afterward. 

My wife went to every fabric store and Ross Dress for Less on the island. She also stood by tourist spots and offered to take photos of people with their families.

My daughter got to learn stand-up paddle boarding and test-drive a Tesla around the city. We experienced a moment of "white privilege" at the mall when they saw my wife's "Dr" e-mail (she has a PhD in counseling) and bent over backwards trying to put us into a sportscar. The acceleration even to 30 was enough to strain my neck. I climbed out of the cockpit as soon as I could and played Pokemon Go while they had fun. The induction chargers built-in to the dash were sweet, though.

The historical tour at Pearl Harbor was stark and a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but I think the .most startling events were the rainbows--unexpected and spectacular.

Things I Didn't Enjoy

Every corner of Oahu had some hidden beauty. However, when summing up the extended stay, there were things we didn't like so much--deal-breakers for my migration.

1) How long the flight takes. It costs a lot of endurance to take that volume crammed in like sardines, and we wouldn't be able to visit friends and family on the mainland much.

2) The ever-present homeless. They're near every park or beach. In Honolulu, you can't walk anywhere without encountering a camp of them sprawled over a sidewalk. Behind our hotel, one had a dumping ground where they got rid of things they didn't want from stolen tourist bags. At sundown, you didn't dare encroach on someone's regular territory.

3) The smell of weed. We steered our daughter around the aroma an average of eight times a day. We were approached about a purchase in line at the ice cream store. The local cops have enough on their hands that this doesn't even show up on the radar.

4) Lack of beach access. All beaches are public, but getting there can be difficult. No parking and a three-foot path that's trash-strewn and a little dangerous. Adjacent property owners can be unfriendly. Some beaches have lots that fill up at 7 a.m. Others treat your rental car like an ATV. Often, you'll find vehicles that have been abandoned for years, but nobody tows them.

5) Inconsistency of zoning. You can see a million-dollar mansion with barred windows right next to a trailer park, with cops putting on tactical gear to the strains of Bad Boys.

6) A general feeling of resentment against outsiders. After talking to some people on the bus, unless I could tell the locals which high school I attended, they would never accept me.