First order of business: Happy New Year! I wish you all health, happiness and success in 2021. May it be one whole heck of a lot better than 2020!
A bit of an update on A Time and a Place before I get on with this exciting and hopefully infinitely better new year.
I woke up to see that Barnes & Noble finally has the softcover version of A Time and a Place on sale. It’s deliberately as inexpensive as my esteemed publisher Donovan Street Press can sell if for: $12.99 US.
I’m quite pleased to have this version out and at such a reasonable price point. The text is slightly updated. It is as typo free as possible (I really hate typos!) and I also updated a paragraph in chapter three to clarify a little plot point. (This is the kind of devotion to perfection that normally you would only find in somebody like George Lucas. Still, rest assured that everybody who shot first in the original edition still shoots first in this second edition.)
A Time and a Place is now available in the following formats: e-book, softcover, hardcover, and audiobook (on both Audible and via Findaway Voices). It’s also available via many different online retailers as Donovan Street Press is reluctant to deal with Amazon exclusively. You can find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, Scribd, Tolino, 24 Symbols, Vivlio, Baker & Taylor, Google Play, Smashwords, and many more throughout the world, including several bookstores (it can always be ordered via a bookstore even if they’re not stocking it on their shelves).
This coming year I will focus on finishing the follow-up to A Time and a Place (tentatively titled Captain’s Away), which takes place in the same universe as A Time and a Place, a thousand years later with at least one of the same characters (and the descendants of others). I will also do my best to finish a memoir I’m working on.
In the meantime, best of luck to all of you and all the terrific projects you might have in your own pipelines.
A consequence of my publisher, Five Rivers Publishing, shutting down operations this year was that the novel I had published with them, A Time and a Place (which I will henceforth refer to as ATAAP in this post), was delisted from most book sellers. It therefore became imperative that I get it back out there lest it become well and truly out of print.
My experience with Five Rivers has been a uniformly positive one all the way through and this proved true at the end as well. I say Five Rivers but really I mean Lorina Stephens, the soul, essence, and driving force of Five Rivers. Lorina ensured that the transition of rights was as painless as possible, transforming all the rights for ATAAP back to me (and the rest of her authors) without any fuss or bother. The situation with Audible proved a little problematic for some of Lorina’s other authors as Audible was a bit of a stickler with third party producers involved, but it turned out to be easier for me as I was the sole performer and producer on the audiobook version of ATAAP. Three or four emails with Audible and we got that all sorted out.
Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Indigo and so on was a little more time consuming. I decided to release what turned out to be a second edition of ATAAP under my own publishing house, Donovan Street Press. I took the opportunity to scour the manuscript and eliminate about eight typos that had driven me crazy since the original publication. Even though I had gone over the manuscript umpteen times after we finished editing it back in 2017, I’d still managed to miss those eight. It is unbelievably difficult to catch every typo in a novel. Your eye scans right past them. Every time I read a book from one of the major publishers I delight in spotting typos as they make me feel better about mine. Typose exist in just about every book you will ever read (and if they don’t, I don’t want to hear about it).
Typos in the original version of ATAAP included (in no particular order):
P 186 the only way could think of (missing the “I”)
P180 passenger street (should be passenger seat)
P363 excess spaces in sentence
P291 made a mess of it (should be make a mess of it)
P289 eying (should be eyeing)
Diane Savident (should be Diana Savident) (this was rather embarrassing for me as Diana was a family friend)
P28: should be “the two of them vanished…” (Not the two of them had vanished)
P181 print version: should be Nissan Rogue (not Nissan Rouge) (invariably over the last three years I’d be out running errands and I’d find myself behind a Nissan Rogue, and I’d think of that typo. I’d grit my teeth and think, “I’m following a typo.”)
P375 “You’re here, where ever here is, allowing people to use you (to) wipe out entire civilizations” (missing “to”)
Rereading the manuscript, I was also horrified to discover a story glitch, a missing bit of narrative hand-holding regarding the nature of Sebastian. Probably not a big deal to the average reader, as Sebastian’s nature eventually becomes crystal clear, but it really needed to be made explicit early on. So this was an opportunity to correct that with the addition of a bit of extra dialogue in Chapter Five.
Finally, one reader had pointed out in private correspondence that I had exhibited a particular fondness for the word particularly. You will find far fewer instances of this word in the Second Edition of A Time and a Place (and in any future novels I write).
Despite the over abundance of the word particularly, ATAAP has managed to receive some pretty good reviews since its original publication in 2017. Releasing a second edition was an opportunity to include some of those reviews off the top of the book. I’m grateful to the following authors for their kind words in support of the book: Andrew Weston (author of the internationally bestselling IX series), A.B. Funkhauser (author of Shell Game: A Black Cat Novel), Brian Wyvill (author of The Second Gate), and comedian, actor and writer Matt Watts (Newsroom, Michael: Tuesdays and Thursdays).
All these updates required getting a new ISBN and hiring Eric Desmarais to produce a new layout (Eric had done an excellent job on the original layout). I’ve also contracted an updated cover from original cover artist Jeff Minkevics which I hope to make a part of ATAAP‘s Second Edition sometime in the next month or so.
Because it was important to get ATAAP back out there, I’ve already released the ebook and Kindle version on the sly through Draft2Digital. You will find it at every major online book retailer. Physical copies are still available but they will be second hand. I’m waiting to publish the second edition of A Time and a Place in physical form once I have the new cover in hand which, as I mentioned, will hopefully be in the next month or so.
I should also point out that the version of ATAAP up on Audible is the original version. Maybe I’ll update that version too one day, but to be honest I’m not in a rush to do so. Too many other important things to do, like finish my second novel, Captain’s Away. More on that later.
So, long story short, there’s a new, updated version of A Time and a Place out there, folks. Feel free to check it out.
People often ask me how the writing’s going. I interpret the question pretty broadly. As in, how’s the new writing going? Fairly well, thanks.
And: how’s my first novel doing?
There’s no short answer to that question. At least, no
short accurate answer.
A Time and a Place has been available just over two years now. I usually tell people that I’m not quite in Stephen King territory yet but it’s going reasonably well, and that my excellent publisher tells me that the book has paid for itself, which I hope leaves the impression that it’s achieved some measure of success.
Whether the book truly can be considered successful depends on who you’re asking, I think. I suspect that any big-time publisher might condemn the book as a complete and utter failure. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code sold eighty million copies. Compared to that, A Time and a Place has not exactly taken the world by storm.
The aforementioned big-time publisher might—I say might—concede that the critical reception for A Time and a Place (professional and otherwise) has been reasonably favourable, but they would probably also feel compelled to point out the rather small sample size.
Some novelists, I suspect, might suggest that merely completing and publishing a novel constitutes success because doing so is goddamned hard. While I accept that, most novelists would also admit that that’s not enough. Almost all of us (if we’re being honest with ourselves) would admit that we define real success as massive book sales and wide critical acclaim. On those scores, A Time and a Place can not exactly be considered an unmitigated success.
Still, to be fair (especially to those who helped me with the book), it’s probably performing perfectly fine considering it’s a first novel by an unknown author published by an independent press. I assume all responsibility for any lack of greater success. And I am well aware that the freakish success of an author like Dan Brown is pretty much a complete fluke.
But I’ll let you be the judge. Here are the facts. Let’s start with sales.
As
of my most recent Royalty statement, for the first quarter of this year, covering
up to March 31st 2019, A Time and a Place has sold a total of 454
books.
Of
those, my publisher sold 333 print editions, 98 e-books, 1 e-library edition,
and 22 audio books.
Of the 333 physical copies my publisher sold, I sold 134
of those myself after purchasing them from my publisher (at a discount). I gave
away 13 books as gifts, another 2 were kinda gifts (I thought the people would
pay but they never did), and 1 copy was stolen after a reading at a library (she
picked it up off the table when I was across the room. I didn’t confront her. I
dunno, maybe she thought it was free). I
have another 18 copies sitting in my basement to have available for readings
and book fairs and so on.
I earn 50% of net on any e-books sold, 10% on print (possibly more if I sell them myself, depending how much I charge), 50% on e-library copies, and 50% on audio books. A Time and a Place has earned me a total of $5989.68 since July 2017 when it first came out. Factor in the cost of purchasing books at a discount from the publisher to resell, all the marketing and promotion I do to supplement what my publisher does, along with treating myself to attending one writer’s convention per year, and I’m not exactly getting rich. Actually, technically I’m in the red, if I’m honest about how much I’ve spent on writing related activities since I began all this.
So yeah, I don’t think I could call A Time and a Place a huge success financially so far.
It’s fared better on the critical front. Reviews have been mostly positive.
On Goodreads, it has been rated 42 times, accompanied by 23 reviews. It currently averages 4.35 out of 5, consisting of twenty-four 5 star reviews, thirteen 4 star reviews, four 3 star reviews, one 2 star review and one 1 star review. It’s been added to 100 bookshelves, including 45 To-Read shelves.
23 of those 45 ratings have been accompanied by reviews. The reviews range from positive: “Mahoney writes with a practised wit,” “I loved this mesmerising audiobook with its non stop action and adventure,” and “A brilliant, often hilarious, thoughtful and amazing read,” to not so positive: “The second half of the book got a bit muddled for me.” “I think that the author was a bit too ambitious,” and “…one of the least likeable protagonists I’ve read in some time.”
On Amazon.ca it has been reviewed four times. All of those have been 5 star reviews.
On Amazon.com it has been reviewed twelve times (one 3 star review, two 4 star reviews, and nine 5 star reviews).
On Amazon.co.uk, it has been reviewed two times (both 5 star reviews)
On Library Thing it has garnered six reviews (two 5 star, two 4 star, one 3 star and one 2 star, averaging 3.57 stars).
There are a few other reviews out there as well, mostly positive, a couple less so, on blogs and Audible. Some are replicated on Goodreads.
Out of the approximately eighty people who have rated the
book, I personally know, am related to, or have met (at least once) around
twenty. The rest are complete strangers to me. Personally knowing or having met
those who have rated the book has been no guarantee of a positive review; three
acquaintances have given A Time and a Place three star reviews.
A Time and a Place has also been reviewed professionally by Publishers Weekly, who gave it a largely positive review when it first came out employing such words as “skillfully,” “entertaining,” and “great” to describe the writing, but the reviewer also discouraged me from getting too fat a head by suggesting that “occasional segments… distract or feel a little overdone.”
The book is currently being carried in seventeen libraries around the world according to WorldCat, in libraries ranging from Austin, Texas to Madison, Wisconsin to Rangiora, New Zealand, and at least three Canadian libraries that I know of, possibly more (despite having only sold one e-library edition; most libraries appear to have purchased print editions).
Does any of this matter? Of course! Otherwise I wouldn’t have written about it. 🙂 Also, I just thought some folks, especially fellow writers just starting out, might find it interesting.
Does it REALLY matter?
Of course not.
But it sure is a great way to procrastinate.
One final thought. Here’s a great Ted Talk from Albert-László Barabási on how to increase your chances of success in any field, writing included.
This coming Tuesday, Sept 25th, I’ve been invited to participate in an open mic at the Parliament Street Library branch in Toronto.
The event starts at 6:30pm and goes until 8pm
I’ll be reading from my novel A Time and a Place. It looks like I’ll have time to read up to an entire chapter. I’ll try to pick a particularly interesting one…
And if that isn’t enough to entice you, fellow writer (and editor of the newly re-launched Amazing Stories magazine) Ira Nayman will also be present. His material is very funny, so if you don’t show up for me, at least show up for him!
I do believe there’ll be some other writers present to read as well.
In other terrifically exciting news, A Time and a Place is now available for your listening pleasure on Audible. But you know that already because of my last post. (Two posts in one day… haven’t done that in a while!)
I should also mention that my recent interview with Christine Cowley of Storylines on Hunters Bay Radio is now available online. You can check it out here.
Probably worth mentioning as well that my interview with Jessica Sanders of Jessie’s Coffee Shop is still available online here.
I cannot tell you how pleased, relieved and excited I am that A Time and a Place is finally available on Audible.
Those of you who have read about my adventures turning ATAAP into an audiobook know that it was a lengthy, educational experience that took a lot longer than I expected.
But now it’s done, my publisher Five Rivers is pleased with it, and Audible’s giving it prominent billing in their SF/Time Travel New Releases.
