War of Souls

The Cola Wars. The Burger Wars. Team Edward vs. Team Jacob. Great Taste. Less Filling. History is littered with unimaginable conflicts that leave disaster in their wake. Now comes the War of Souls. Is Sverre less annoying and finally getting that legendary power that everyone keeps talking about but never happens? Maybe. Are there beds and hot tubs full of frolicking beauties? Of course. Does this end the story arc? Yes.

How did it begin? In 2012 I worked at a pretty menial job in a cubicle and life seemed pretty humdrum. I found out that one of the people I worked with and another young woman were writing books and publishing them on Amazon. I was amazed such a thing was possible. I asked her how it worked and looked at her books, covers, etc., and said, "Time for lunch." But later I decided I would give it a shot. I sat down at my computer and typed for nearly an entire day straight. Was I on the clock? Yes. Did that make it sweeter? Also, yes. I wrote maybe a quarter of Curse of Souls in the following weeks and let my wife read it. Now, my wife is not into science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc. She typically watches reality shows and reads normal people books like "How to Declutter Your Closet". After reading it, she said it was really weird, like the X-Men, icky poo, etc. She said the writing was fine, but the story was just NO GOOD (okay, she didn't say those exact words, but that's how I took them). So, my dreams of being a writer were shattered and I shelved the book.

Years went by and in 2016, something happened that made me say, "You know what? I'm going to finish that book." What was that thing? I forget. Once done, I went on Fiverr and paid two people to be beta readers. Both of them said it was the best book they'd ever read (not really, but I get the feeling they give everyone good feedback because...they are getting paid for it and they want return customers). My hopes bolstered, I paid for editing, proofreading, etc. Yes, I actually spent a lot of money on Curse of Souls, and I am not someone with a lot of money. Many first-time authors do this. They want their first book to be spectacular because they are going to hit it out of the park and Stephen King is going to be calling them up for tips. So, they start off their "career" (or hobby) deep in the red because they spent so much on services.

Now, in 2016-2017, self-publishing was a different world. It was definitely getting more congested (because even fools like me can do it), but it hadn't hit that point where the markets were getting flooded with content farms, ghost writers, low-content books. AI had not begun spewing out green, lumpy word vomit that smells like pus and curdled milk. A small-fry writer had an actual chance to be noticed at the time. My first book did not sell like gangbusters, but it actually did pretty darn well for a nobody. I mean, it sold enough that I thought, "If I put a few more books like this out, I might be able to leave this menial job in a cubicle!" To boot, people actually seemed to like it! The vast majority left it 4-5 star reviews, and there were not thousands of 1 and 2 star like most self-published authors have nightmares about when releasing a book (we basically have two recurring dreams. One is that a book takes off and you become an instant millionaire overnight. The other is you are flooded with bad reviews). 

Anyhow, Curse of Souls did pretty well and I decided to hurry and get on the next book. Now, most people would write the sequel. But I'm not a smart man, so I wrote the prequel, Sword of Order. Why? Because so many people absolutely hated Jessica, and I liked her as a character, but that's because I knew her background (in my head). These people saying she ruined the book didn't know her like I did! I rushed out Sword of Order to keep my book streak hot. The problem was...it was just an okay book, and people didn't like it as much as I did. The rushing showed in the story. Readers noticed. 

So, I began working on Curse of Wolf. Sales were dying down by this point, and the middling reviews on Sword chipped away at my confidence. But I still got Wolf out the next year, and to my delight, readers seemed to like it quite a bit, with a slightly higher average review than Souls (I mean, I hoped I improved my writing *slightly* between my first book and 3rd). Sales picked up again, and I again thought maybe this could be a career.

However, disaster struck at this point. I got a bot notification from Amazon that I was "illegally manipulating page reads". I had no idea what that even meant. It took a lot of research to find out, but other authors were getting hit with this as well. What was going on - some bigger name authors would pay click farms to "read" their books to give them page reads. If you put your books into Kindle Unlimited, you get paid by the page read. Don't get excited...it's like half a penny per page. Of course, Amazon would notice if certain people just got millions of page reads overnight, so the click farms would have to randomize their reads by selecting other authors to spread out the reads. If your book was randomly chosen by these farms, you'd get a few thousand extra paid reads (nothing to even get excited about). But Amazon would notice suspicious activity and warn you. The problem is there wasn't really any appeal process. You could explain you aren't doing anything and you don't know how to fix it and you'd get canned bot answers. If you fail to remedy the problem (which you couldn't do, because you weren't in control of the click farms and had nothing to do with it), Amazon would ban your account after a few weeks. Now, an Amazon ban is basically a death knell. It is nearly impossible to get it back (at least back then), and you will be in an endless loop with bot responses. Even if you get a human, they'll say there's nothing they can do for you. You also can't just make another account and put your books in there because of copyright, taxes, etc. (and it's against Amazon's ToS). They are banning YOU, not your pen name.

I pulled all of my books out of Kindle Unlimited (where most of my puny money came from) and sales tanked (Amazon really pushes books in Kindle Unlimited). I put my books wide (which means putting them on as many services as you can, like Google Play, Barnes and Noble, KOBO, etc.) but sales never recovered and basically flatlined. All momentum lost. I was pretty depressed by this.

Time passed and Amazon seemed to finally realize they were banning innocent authors who had nothing to do with the click farms. Authors reported a more friendly approach from the 'Zon. People weren't losing their accounts. I trepidatiously put my books back in Kindle Unlimited and...still flatlined (momentum is really big in publishing). Frankly, the sales for that series never recovered after that. Competition shot up, I think people got a bit burned out on paranormal/supernatural books (I swear nearly every book out for a period was in that genre).

But I kept plugging along with the books and story because I'm not in this just to make enough money to buy a half pound beef and cheddar combo from Arby's once a month, but also to tell stories. There were thousands of people who had read the first books, and they deserve a finished story by the original author before I kick the bucket in fifty years. My original intent was to make this into two books, sort of focusing one on the resolution with one big bad guy, and the other book with the other big bad guy. However, I realized this would likely just require padding the writing by a massive amount and the story would suffer. So instead, I just wrote a really long book (well, for me...this is the longest book I've ever written). I'm sure major fantasy authors who write 600K word books chuckle, but 115K words is a lot for my tiny pea brain that can't remember what a major character looks like or what their last name is.

Now, my mind did wander. I began the Dead Dungeon series, and that one was pretty well-received as well. I had a whole new world to play with, new characters, and I wasn't even limited by the modern world. It was great. My original intent was to write a book in that series every 4-6 months, but shorter books (around 50-60K words, vs the 75-100K+ for Warrior of Souls). And that sort of worked for a year, but man that schedule is hard to keep up, especially with working 45-50 hours a week, health problems, etc. Then COVID, a new job, moving...all kinds of crazy things happened.

Anyhow, even though Dead Dungeon has been plugging along pretty good on sales vs the nearly nil sales of Warrior of Souls, I decided to finish the story. Meaning I probably spent a lot of money on a cover, editing, etc. just to take a loss, but that story needed to be finished. My characters live in my head, and they clamored for resolution. Even when I don't write, when I'm on the treadmill, lying awake at night, my head dances with story ideas, fictional conversations, etc. Frankly, it's a curse! I wish I could just transport them all instantly into the computer without sitting down to write.

That’s more than you ever wanted to know about this series and the process of writing it. To the one person who read all of that...what is wrong with you?