Giving Smashwords one more try

I decided I may have been unfair to Smashwords, writing them off as too much work for too little return. I have several books with them but not as many as I have with Amazon; much easier, with formatting etc and besides they just sell a lot more books!

Still, the books I’ve had problems formatting with Smashwords have been mostly those I wrote some time back, when my own Word formatting was pretty rough; also I hadn’t put any of my top sellers on there, partly because of formatting issues and partly because I thought I just might want to make use of Amazon’s KDP Select, which requires exclusive rights.

I’ve now put my outback romance, Stony Creek, on Smashwords, which I think is giving them as good a chance as I can. It’s doing very well on Amazon and apart from a few minor hiccups I had no problems with the formatting, so we’ll see how it goes. Since I have absolutely no intentions of giving any away I decided there was no reason for it to be exclusive with Amazon–haven’t seen any results yet though and I have to say Amazon absolutely rules! One thing I like about Smashwords is that I can make books free whenever I want and I have a small ebook on grammar, What Did You Say? and a short story free. There’s also an interview with yours truly and if you have any suggestions as to what I might add to that I can do that at any time.

Is there a particular type of book that does well there, I wonder? I’ve found with Amazon my non-fiction, Not Guilty, has done very well as has my outback romance. The others have all sold a few but no-where near the numbers of those two. I’d quite like to put Not Guilty on Smashwords but I think the formatting would be too hard, because it contains different fonts and different spacing for newspaper reports and public records etc. It’s all easy on Amazon, although I must admit Createspace was tricky. I have most of my books on Createspace for PODs and it’s taken me a while to get the hang of it but it’s not too bad now. Amazon ebooks are very simple but if you go through Createspace they can send it over to Amazon and convert it for you.

I have one freebie this week on Amazon, Beast of War, a fantasy about three teens in a land called Breeland. There are three different tribes–different kinds of ‘people’, farmers, cave-dwellers and those who live off the sea, and they are all at risk.  According to prophecy only Terrus, Cener and Airien can save Breeland; they must put aside tribal differences and prejudices and journey together to fight the beast in his lair. I did write this for kids but I’m finding adults enjoy it as well–I know I loved writing it and was rather sad when I finished it and had to say goodbye to the characters! It’s free from the 16th to the 18th of June, so check it out.

Going Home. And coming back home again.

I’ve just been back to my home town, a trip I’ve been doing at least once a year for my mother’s birthday. She turned 94 and is well, but I’m always very conscious of the fact it could be the last time I see her. Of course I could die tomorrow myself but you know what I mean. Mum has already outlived her parents but her grandfather was 98 when he died, so we have good genes.

It always feels a little odd going home, because of course it’s not my home anymore. I’ve lived in Bendigo now for over 20 years and this is home but Mildura is where I spent most of my childhood and those teenage years I remember so well. It’s curious how places I’ve lived and people I knew pop up in my stories, almost of their own accord. Not that I would deliberately use any actual person in any of my fiction stories, but they are all influenced in some way by real people. At least the best ones are.

Place is something I’ve certainly made use of in stories and experiences of my own, like hitch-hiking to the river on a hot day and running across burning bitumen with bare feet, both of which I’m using in the story I’m working on now, ‘Dark Innocence‘. My last book, ‘Stony Creek’, is a rural romance and I used my own memories of living in Melbourne as well as attending a wool-shed dance in the outback as a child. I did grow up in a country town, but I had to research for that one, my knowledge of life in the outback being minimal. Quite a lot came from the recesses of my memory locker though! I suspect writing in 1st person makes it easier to access those memories and I chose to do that, as doubtful as I was at how that would be received. It’s actually doing very well on Amazon so there are clearly plenty of readers who are happy to read in 1st person.

So after driving around Mildura and visiting some of the old haunts with my sister, as well as a very nice new art gallery, and seeing my other siblings and a couple of nephews and nieces, I’m back home and happy to be here.

Details on all my books at Amazon.com and Amazon UK. Happy reading.

True Crime

 

 

Who reads Young Adult novels?

What is a young adult, really? In my state 18 has taken over as the official age of adulthood, which used to be 21. That means you have to vote (yes, it’s compulsory, whether you know or care anything about politics or not) and you are allowed to apply for a driver’s licence. It also means you can legally drink alcohol, so on the same day you get your licence you can get drunk. That doesn’t seem such a great idea to me but of course most ‘young adults’ drink well before it’s legal.

Of course when you apply for insurance for your car you might, as an 18 year old, be shocked to find your premiums considerably higher than those of a 25 year old. Insurance companies, like parents, know adulthood doesn’t start at 18. I’m not a psychologist and I’m not going to discuss the differences between men and women as far as maturity goes but everyone’s different. I think somewhere in the twenties is probably a more realistic figure for adulthood; anyway I digress. I want to discuss Young Adult books and who actually reads them. Clearly the term ‘young adult’ doesn’t refer to any legal definition of adulthood.

I studied Writing for Young Adults and many of us in the class felt that most YA novels were read by either other writers or kids at school who had to read them as part of the curriculum! That was when Harry Potter had just been discovered and before the Twilight series. A lot of YA novels tended to be a bit on the ‘preachy’ side and not what anyone really wanted to read. J.K Rowling found a great way of bridging that gap between children’s books and books for teens, by having her characters grow up with her readers, and I don’t know of anyone else who managed that so well.

There does seem to be a gap there–I filled that gap with comics and then teen magazines before I found adult novels I enjoyed. My sons mostly leapt from children’s books to huge fantasy books such as Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, apart from the youngest, who was just the right age to grow up with Harry Potter.

So somehow, someone tried to fill in this gap with YA novels and there’s no doubt some of them have been very successful, both as books and as movies, like the Twilight series and The Hunger Games.

But at what age are children reading YA novels? There seems to be a disparity of age suitability within the YA group–some of them are more for pre-teens and early teens while others, such as those I just mentioned, are more for the older teens.

Would you be happy for your eleven year old to read the Twilight series or is this more for 15 and up? I don’t have any teenagers and would be interested to hear what age groups are reading YA fiction. I’ve written books for all age groups and have, on Amazon, two that I consider suitable for pre-teens and one for teens, called Sanctuary. I have that free on Amazon for one day only and would love to know what age you think it suits; it’s a science fiction novel set in the 25th century and the inspiration for it was a group of young homeless people I saw on a documentary years ago, living in an underground subway system. One of the girls was carrying a baby and I started thinking about what life would be like for that child if he actually grew up there–what if a whole generation grew up underground? Going on the basis that kids generally prefer to read books about people who are a couple of years older than they are I think it’s suitable for 14 to 16, and adults of course, who aren’t so fussy about age!

Happy reading.