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6 August 2015

Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP)

16:24 | | Edit Post

...and what more I've learnt.

The first thing I've found out since my last post is what page count Amazon are using for purposes of calculating my pages read.

To find this value out you log into Kind Direct Publishing and select the Bookshelf.


Click on the Ellipses (...) button and select Promote and Advertise.



You'll find the page count at the bottom left hand corner of the screen.

For George and the Dragon this reads: 

Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC) v1.0: 563

So now I know that my page count is 563 and that helps a lot.

According to Morris Rosenthal's back of the envelope calculation:

"An estimate for the Kindle Select royalty system that starts today is $0.0058, or 0.58 cents per page read. This is based on Amazon’s announcement that the global pool for July will be at least $11 million, and that last month, the number of pages read was almost 1.9 billion."

I believe the pot has been increased since this calculation but it does give us a good value to work with and that's 1/2 cent/page,


So here's my latest rather erratic chart showing the number of pages read/day for George and the Dragon.

Armed with the above I can start to make some sense of it.

Firstly what are they paying me per book?

563 x 0.5c = $2.815

So each book completely read pays me $2.81 that's a reasonable amount higher than the $2.04 I would get paid from a Kindle eBook sale on a $2.99 eBook.

Next what do my stats tell me?

Total pages read so far:          1255
Number of books equivilent:  2.23
Expected royalty payment:     $6.28

What it still doesn't tell me is the number of people who have loaned a copy of the book or the percentage of the book that is being read per person. I'm sure there are other stats that I would like to have at my disposal that I haven't thought of yet.

I also now understand why Amazon HAD to make this change. Too many people were releasing too many short stories, serialising novels etc. If I serialised George and the Dragon into say 5 parts and these all got rented via KDP Selected I'd get 5 payments whether the book was read or not. This would have been of financial benefit to the author but must have been breaking Amazon's bank.

So there you have it; everything I have discovered about the new payment system in a nutshell.

I still think I'm going to switch back to not being Amazon exclusive.

Phil



4 August 2015

GoGoDragons

23:23 | | Edit Post

...and what I did this last weekend.

The weekend just gone I took the family off up to Norwich.  It's not a bad drive but it's still a good 3 hour drive, luckily I'm blessed with kids who sleep in the car.

The reason for this trip was two-fold:

1. I was doing my first ever reading of George and the Dragon

2. Norwich has been the host of GoGoDragons. Which is a two month long interactive arts sculpture trail bringing 84 large dragon sculptures and 120 school dragons to the City of Norwich.

I have to confess I was little disappointed with the turn out for the reading.  However I did love the park in which it took place. It's got a fantastic little amphitheater built in to it. Also the owners of the opticians who had arranged the reading had also arranged for an amazing piece of artwork to be included on the wall over-looking the park.




I have to say I was nervous so it's maybe a blessing the audience was small. I'll know what to expect next time.

Before then and for a large part of the weekend we spent time look at all of the dragons on display in the city centre. We didn't get to see all of them but those we did see were fantastic.

Here are some of my personal favorites:


 Draco


Patch                                                          Morgan



Sherlock                                                            Biggles


Hoard


Rosie



Argon


The Mother of Dragons


Twilight

So there you go, even my weekends are taken up with dragons!

Phil

17 July 2015

KENP

13:18 | | Edit Post

...and what I dislike about it already.


For those out of the loop if people now if people borrow George and the Dragon via Kindle Unlimited the way I get recompensed for this is via the number of pages red.

Here's a look at the chart I'm presented with that shows my Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP) Read.



There are two huge spike, one over 500 and the most recent is 149. In between this there is a tiny blip of 5 pages on 13 July.

Now I'll be the first to admit sales of George and the Dragon aren't huge but this data is so incomplete I find it hard to be able to extrapolate anything from it.

It doesn't tell me how many pages it considers George to be. On the Amazon website it shows:

Length: 248 pages



So let's go with that.

How many people have borrowed George and the Dragon? I have no idea the data isn't available to me.

How many people have read the book in its entirety? Again I have no idea.

Does this data represent pages read that day or pages read over any kind of time or, as I suspect, pages read since the reader's Kindle device last connected to the internet.

Does this represent 60 people having read 10 pages each who then read no more of the book or 3 people who have all finished it but the data hasn't quite caught up with one or more of them.

Another issue I have is that I still have no idea how to consolidate this data along with my standard sales figures so I can get some idea of how well the book is doing when I look back over time.

All-in-all I can't use this data and have no idea how many people this is reaching.

George and the Dragon will be Free for all on Kindle on 1-3 August.

Once this promotion has completed and my 3 months initial subscription to Kindle Unlimited expires I don't think I will be continuing with it.

It was something I had to try for myself and it was unfortunate that Amazon changed things while I was doing it but I have learnt from it and that was important.

Phil
6 July 2015

"Said & Asked..."

23:56 | | Edit Post

...or use an alternative?" he queried.



This weekend just gone I was scrolling through Facebook and came across a group where someone had posted something like this:

The reaction it sparked I thought was both eye opening and hugely divisive. On one hand you had people arguing that these alternatives were perfectly acceptable. On the other were the group that would state any editor worth their salt would suggest replacing them with said, or asked in the case of a question.

There was even one comment where the poster said they would not read a book where the author used anything other than said or asked.

This evening I've just finished reading The Long War by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter - the first book I've finished in ages.  These are a pair of best selling authors working on a collaborative project. I'd like to think they and their editor/s know what they are about.

I have to admit they don't use said, asked or any of the alternatives that often. They are happy to leave speech to stand on it's own as part of the dialogue.

However there are plenty of times when they do.

There are examples of asked and said like:

Roberta asked, "Birds, or Dinosaurs?"

"There are other sorts here too," Yue-Sai said softly.

They also often write sentences like:

Joshua grunted. "Makes you proud."

But they also write sentences such as this:

"Are you sure?" Captain Chen murmured.

or elsewhere:

"Here, Captain," the engineer replied promptly.

So they are happy mixing up the way they handle their dialogues depending on the narrative. I'd like to think I treat my works similarly. Although I have to say I'm more aware of not over using alternatives to said and asked just for the sake of it especially as a lot of my dialog is telepathic and not spoken.

I would be more than interested to here people's thoughts on this.

Phil

23 June 2015

Who is George Atkins?

15:07 | | Edit Post


...does anyone really know?


George Atkins is the eponymous hero of my novel George and the Dragon. Throughout the early stages of the narrative we get little clues as to what he looks like

Obviously I, as the author and creator of George, have my own idea of what he should look like. 

And I am sure people who have read the book each have their own idea of what he might look like. Many times I have found my idea of a given character challenged when I watch a film of a book or see a drawing of a character in that book.

Here I present to you the first ever drawing, that I am aware of, of George himself.
I actually think the artist has done a great job from my brief, although I think his head could be a stronger shade of ginger. That apart I'm so chuffed expect to see images of many of the other characters from George and the Dragon appear on my blog in the future.

What do you think? Have you attempted to draw him yourself? Fancy a go yourself let me know I may even let you have a copy of the novel for free! 

Phil


16 June 2015

Size matters...

00:03 | | Edit Post


...or how big is your dragon?


I recently posted this picture of a series of dragons onto the Facebook group Dragons are not just for Christmas.


If you're curious the link comes from here: 


This got me thinking. I've always maintained that Spitfire is a little bit bigger than Draco (No 9. above). With the regal dragons being a bit smaller.  I've also often though that Spitfire should have a wingspan of about twice that of a Spitfire.

The author of the blog post linked above puts Draco at about 5m tall when stood on all fours. But that didn't help me to size him that easily.  I needed more data and that came from here: 


I'm respecting the wish for the images not to be copied so pop on over have a look and come back.

What it tells me is that Draco has a wingspan of 73 ft and that converts to 22.25 m.

Here are the three main fighters from the Battle of Britain (as close to scale as I can get them) for comparison:
Spitfire - wingspan 11m

 Hurricane - wingspan 12m
Messerschmidt BF-109 - wingspan 9.9m

I was quite astonished by this revelation. Draco from Dragonheart has almost exactly twice the wingspan of a Spitfire fighter plane.

Spitfire the dragon is a little bigger than that and, drawn to scale, would look something like this:

If you compare him to the two allied fighters (Spitfire on the left, Hurricane on the right) they look something like this:


At least this is how I imagine him to be in my head.  It also gives me a good start when I try to figure out how big some of the characters in the second book in the Knights of the Sky series are.

Hope you found that enlightening.

Phil

1 June 2015

Channeling your inner author...

23:09 | | Edit Post

...or getting the words onto the page.


Stephen King makes a valid point in this quote.  I prefer to try and think of it as write a 1000 words a day and in 3 months you'll have written a novel.

At moment the still unnamed sequel to George and the Dragon has a word count of 71,879. George and the Dragon is around 105,000 words. I found these great info-graphics and just had to share them with you.






Back on subject my plan is to finish the first draft of the sequel before the end of the month. I expect it to be about the same length as my first novel so I've got about 35,000 words to write or about a 1000 a day.

I've come to the conclusion it's almost impossible for me to write at the weekends. I simply don't get a break from the family. It makes it impossible to get into the story and start to type it in to Scrivener.
So my usual time to write is on the train to and from work, that's about 40 minutes each way or 1hr 20 in total. I can hit 800 words on a good day in 40 minutes. However, as I've discussed before in this blog I find it really hard to write when I'm tired.

This evening I managed 148 words and then fell asleep on the train. Not a good way to start the month and to hit my target. So if you take out the weekends

I've got about twenty days and 1,500 words a day to complete. It's like a mini NaNoWriMo :)

Wish me luck.

 Phil
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