Ryan Spires

I have two scenarios for you. Both involve self-published books within the fantasy adventure genre. In the first scenario, it's the author's first book. It has not been read by anyone else. No writing group. No editor. No copy editor. Nothing. Boom! He self publishes it; eBook only. And yes, it is just as bad as you imagine. In the second scenario, it's this author's third completed novel length manuscript. It has been read by a number of people prior to publishing. It has seen the benefits of a writing group, an editor, and a copy editor. He self-publishes it and makes it available in both paperback and eBook. Guess which one sells better in the first six months? Since we love irony, or its close relatives, you're probably thinking that the first book sold more. You would be correct. What's interesting, is that it is not even close. As I am a visual person, I have some charts to illustrate the disparity. The first one isn't so horrific, it shows how man...

First, a quick NaNo update before I blab about my next manuscript. Well, this was my second attempt at conquering the leviathan (50,000 words in one month!) and I hit the 20k mark. Not where I wanted to end up, but I did reestablish a couple of writing habits that proved to improve my daily word count by a couple of hundred words, so I will take it. I must admit that my weekend free time was dominated by this: In my defense that game is fraking awesome! Anyway, I wanted to briefly talk about my next manuscript. ALCHEMIST is my next fantasy adventure story. I should be getting it back from my editor soon. In some ways this was a reaction against my last book RISE OF RAULET  which had three rotating point of views and some brave characters. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of how the last book turned out, but I wanted to do two things differently: 1. I wanted to focus primarily from one perspective. 2. The protagonist had to be a total nerd. Alright, so the protag, Nichol...