So yesterday MHN held another successful Book Bomb. We got John Brown’s whole trilogy up into the top of some genre lists, sold a whole mess of books, and most importantly that means the author GETS PAID (remember, all authors should have GET PAID in their mission statement).
But John pointed out something interesting to me from the time we Book Bombed the novel Bad Penny. We sold several hundred copies that day, but the added attention meant that over the rest of the month John moved a total of 12k copies. Twelve thousand copies in a month for an independent book is really impressive. Something John said about that stuck with me. One of the reasons was because he got a bunch of enthusiastic reviews from the people who participated in the Book Bomb, and that helped him get continued attention.
I don’t really think of reviews as a sales component too often. Usually when I think of reviews it is to read through them for the self esteem boost or to relentlessly mock the really dumb ones. 🙂  (because Hard Magic is literally filled with talking animals!) But apparently reviews do actually matter.
So I’d ask you guys, if you are so inclined, after participating in the Book Bombs, would you post some honest reviews on Amazon and other places? My goal with the BBs is to give worthy authors an attention boost, so if that helps, then I’m all in favor of it.
Today is the day. We are Book Bombing John Brown’s awesome Servant series.
I’m doing this because I’ve Book Bombed #1 before (which from the results and reviews, you guys loved) and #2 and #3 just came out. Â For those of you who missed out on the last one, I’ve put a link to book 1 also. John has also put them all on sale for this also. This is a historical first because I’ve never bombed a whole trilogy before!
For those of you new to Book Bombs, this is how it works. I do them to give a deserving author a much needed boost. You can buy the books wherever makes you happy, because the important thing is that the author GETS PAID. However, I try to steer as many people as possible to Amazon because they have a sales ranking system that updates hourly. The more people who buy a book in a short period of time, the higher the book gets in those rankings. The higher it gets, the more new people see it, the more it shows up in searches, etc. Once we get a book onto a bestseller list for its genre, then lots of new people see it. Success breeds success.
To give you an example, I Book Bombed John Brown’s Bad Penny and this is what he had to say about it:
I just want you to know that your readers are not only a pleasure because of their enthusiasm, but they also set me up for the huge run Bad Penny had in July. We moved more than 12,000 books. I broke the top 30 in Amazon for a few days. In Nook, I was a best seller the whole freaking month. How did this happen? I got a BookBub promotion. How did I get that? Well, one thing they look at are the reviews. And your folks who enjoyed Bad Penny came out in spades. When you post the book bomb, you need to tell them this author loves the Monster Hunter Nation.
So please tell your friends. As the day goes on I will post the sales ranks of the various books to see if we’re making a difference. Having done a lot of these I know there is a delay in how Amazon calculates so we usually start seeing a real difference in the afternoon, and then it will climb through the evening.
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Why did I pick John Brown for another Book Bomb? Well, John is a friend of mine. We started out about the same time. His first novel, Servant of a Dark God came out about the same time as Monster Hunter International. So being two relative nobodies we decided to go on a book tour on our own dime. We set up signings (basically whoever would have us) and then we went on a series of gigantic road trips across the western US. We went to San Diego, Phoenix, and Denver. And the Denver trip  across Wyoming was like an adventure novel. Long story, but it involved burning trucks, poached elk, car wrecks, a crazy guy on the run from the reptoids of the Hollow Earth, and a 12 hour drive through a blizzard.
So I have spent a lot of time in a Ford Focus with John Brown.
John is really talented writer. Since we started at the same time, and he works just as hard, and hustles just as much, he should be where I am, EXCEPT John got hosed. He had a contract with one of the biggest publishing houses, and then he had a professional conflict with his editor. After his first book came out, John turned in the sequel. I’m probably getting the timeline/details wrong, but this is just to give you an idea. After months of sitting on it, the editor told him to make a bunch of drastic changes. Okay, not a problem. That’s what editors do. My second book came out. John turned in his revised version. The editor sat on it for a while, and then ordered him to make a bunch of other drastic changes. My third book came out. John turned it in again. Now it was too long. Cut a third of the book. My fourth book came out. John changed everything around, now put back in the stuff you cut. My fifth book came out. Etc.
And the thing is, I read one of those drafts, and it was awesome. Steve and the guys at EBR read all of those drafts, and they loved them. And those guys know the fantasy market better than anyone. So it wasn’t like John was turning in crap books. Sometimes you just get an editor and an author who should not be working together, and in this case John got screwed. Â If his second book was ever going to come out from this major publisher, the market had already forgotten about number one, and for a new author, that is the kiss of death. That is a career killer. So John asked to get his rights back and go indy.
One happy bonus to that, all of the negative reviews John got about Servant of a Dark God mentioned the same couple of issues, mostly related to the order of the chapters and the intro. Which is funny, because those changes were mandated by his editor. So when John got his rights back and published it himself, it is the “author’s cut” where he p
ut everything back the way he originally had it. Thanks to his friends and fans, the new Servant is doing well, and now the rest of the series (as he intended it to be written, and not mangled for 5 years) is out, and available to Book Bomb the hell out of today for cheap.
So please tell your friends. Let’s get John Brown some exposure! Let’s once again demonstrate that the Monster Hunter Nation and friends is more effective than a major publisher’s entire marketing department. 🙂
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So here are the stats as of 8:00 MST
The 1st book in paperback Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #366,069Â
EDIT: Â So let’s take a little break from wrapping up this fantasy novel rough draft I’m working on today and check to see how our little Book Bomb is progressing so far:
Morning Edit: The numbers continued to climb through the night, but this bit is particularly cool: We didn’t just bump up John’s books. We bumped up John.Â
I haven’t heard if it is official or not, but if Salt Lake City wasn’t bigger than San Diego’s Comic Con, then it was really, really close. On Saturday the word was that we’d broken 120,000 people. The entire state of Utah only has 2.8 million people. That’s 4% of the state’s population in one building. This was only the 3rd time we’ve done this.
That is one powerful nerdy state.
This was a really different con for me. Normally I like to just go and wander around, be on some panels, maybe do a book signing for an hour or two, that’s it. I’ve never been tied down to a table before, but Kevin J. Anderson and Peter Wacks invited me to have a spot at the WordFire Press booth. So I went for it. KJA had a brilliant idea, and he’s been trying to put together this sort of author “super booth”. I spent most of the con sitting between Peter Beagle (Last Unicorn) and Brandon Sanderson (Way of Kings).
There were more books stashed. It still wasn’t nearly enough.
It was like a good book signing, that was non-stop for three days. By the end I’d been cleaned out of nearly every title. All I had left was some MHN and Warbound hard covers. By Saturday morning I was out of book 1 of every series. And that’s not counting the ones people brought in, or the hundreds—not a typo—of people who just wanted to come by and say hi.
I’m not kidding when I say that I probably shook a thousand hands. My hand is sore. Now I understand why celebrities use the fist bump (to be fair, some of my fans are really STRONG). Protip to authors, if you see a guy with tree trunk arms and tactical beard standing in line, go for the fist bump. If you are me, and half of your fan base looks like that, suck it up. Ace wrap that shit and get back to typing. 🙂
Because there was over 500 guests they capped the number of panels that we were on to four. All of mine went well, but my favorites were the one in the big room on Friday. Brandon Sanderson was the moderator, and it was me, Brandon Mull, Tracy Hickman, Margaret Weiss, and Dave Wolverton.
One HALF of the room…
To put this in perspective, this panel was about How to Write Good Magic Systems. That is a geeky writing topic panel. That is a 1,500 person room and we filled it. I found out after that there were more people outside who couldn’t get in. Where else can you get 1,500 people to come and listen to geeky, nuts and bolts, writing topics?
The other half. And yes, ComicCon wants to make sure the guests remain properly hydrated.
And that room is a tiny fraction of how many people were there. The green room overlooks the floor, and I’m kicking myself for not getting some pictures from up there of the crowds. This year, because I had an actual booth, I didn’t hang out in the green room as much, so I didn’t see as many celebrities and didn’t get to meet any of them. I missed Patrick Warburton by a couple of minutes, which is a bummer, because Brock Sampson is the greatest character ever. I was hoping to suck up and get him to record my voice mail as Brock Sampson. “You’ve reached Correia. LEAVE A MESSAGE… AT THE BEEP.” Come on. You know that would be awesome. I didn’t see Ron Perlman or Bruce Campbell either, which is a bummer.
I had another fun panel on Friday. I was the moderator and the topic was How to Write Awesome SciFi and Fantasy. Good bunch of writers, I was sitting on the end so I could see down the table, “small” room with only 200 people in the audience, so I’m really looking forward to it. Right off the bat I asked the audience by show of hands how many of them want to be professional authors, and 90% of the hands go up. Good. Now I know what way to take the questions. So I tell everybody that we’re not going to waste time with college professor bullshit like defining genre or any of that nonsense, but let’s get down to business, nuts and bolts, tips and tricks, what do we actually do to make this stuff work.
The panel is going great except for one tiny little thing. It turns out that we are next door to something that I would find out later was Zombie Laser Tag, and the folding partition between the rooms isn’t sufficiently sound proof to stop the Screecher Zombie, whose riveting dialog consisted of HRAAAR HRAAAAAAAA HrEEEEEEEEECH HreEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH HrEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH over and over again. Â
So it was funny at first… A few minutes in, starting to get annoying. So I signal one of the volunteers at the back and they disappear, hopefully to get Screeches to take it down a notch. Nothing. It keeps going. Apparently the moderator is starting to look annoyed because people I recognize in the audience as Monster Hunter Nation fans are giggling. Then when Screeches drowned out John Brown (who has perfect radio announcer voice, so I know if I couldn’t hear him, the audience probably didn’t either) I’d had enough.
So I hopped off the stage, pounded on the wall and ordered them to KEEP IT DOWN IN THERE! I used my firearm’s instructor voice (you’ve got to speak from the chest) so that whole section of the convention center heard it. That worked. The zombies shut up. In fact, I didn’t hear them again until the 5 minute warning. The audience enjoyed it. If the moderator had been anybody other than the guy who makes his living off of zombie killing, it wouldn’t have been nearly as funny.
Now SLC ComicCon wasn’t without its glitches. On day 1 there was a huge bottleneck. The people who’d registered early and paid extra for Gold or VIP passes ended up in the same line as general admission, so people who’d already paid were stuck out there for 3 or 4 hours trying to get inside. That killed half their Thursday. The Con had set up satellite locations where people could pick up their badges early, but you can’t expect people to go out of their way and change their behaviors in sufficient numbers to make a dent. Hopefully next year they’ll do what other big cons do and mail those badges in advance or something.
On Friday I brought my three oldest kids with me, and I let them wander ComicCon unsupervised. The deal was they had to come and check in with dad every hour, which they sort of, almost did, if you consider two hours like one. One nice thing about SLC ComicCon is that it has an atmosphere where I could let my teenagers wander around and not be too worried about them. Serious props to the volunteers and security for working their butts off to keep it that way.
Since this is ComicCon even the working professionals still have our geeky fan boy moments. My geeky highlight was when I got Margaret Weiss and Larry Elmore to sign the 1985 Dragonlance trilogy I’ve had since I was 10 years old. I already had Tracy’s signature, so that’s both authors and the artist, and I could honestly tell all three of them at once that it was those novels that got me writing in the first place.
It was 120,000 fans flying their geek flags
high. I had a blast.
Just a reminder for everyone to mark their calenders because we will be book bombing John Brown’s series tomorrow on Amazon. I’ll post more details and links in the morning.Â
I figured I needed a reminder post because the last one was stuck beneath two fiskings of the Village Idiot, and those take up a lot of space just from the magnitude of nonsense.Â
Anyways, John will be putting all 3 books of the series on sale for this too, so for those who didn’t get in on the first one when I plugged it last time you’re not missing out.
If you are curious what a Book Bomb can do for an author check out this message I got from John while setting this one up:Â I just want you to know that your readers are not only a pleasure because of their enthusiasm, but they also set me up for the huge run Bad Penny had in July. We moved more than 12,000 books. I broke the top 30 in Amazon for a few days. In Nook, I was a best seller the whole freaking month. How did this happen? I got a BookBub promotion. How did I get that? Well, one thing they look at are the reviews. And your folks who enjoyed Bad Penny came out in spades. When you post the book bomb, you need to tell them this author loves the Monster Hunter Nation.
So there you go. Tomorrow I’ll post up all the links and details.Â
For the next few days I’ll be hanging out with a hundred thousand of my closest friends at the Salt Lake City ComicCon.
Throughout the show I’ll be hanging out and signing at the WordFire Press booth with Brandon Sanderson, Kevin J. Anderson, Brad Torgersen, Peter Beagle, and a bunch of other authors. It is booth #728.Â
We will also be selling MHI t-shirts, challenge coins, buttons, and patches there. Â
Once I have an official schedule from Kevin of times I know for sure I’ll be there, I’ll post it here, but otherwise just swing by and I’ll probably be there, unless I’m hanging out in the green room, getting a massage, eating free food, and hanging out with movie stars. Yeah, ComicCon is pretty sweet. 🙂
I will be on the following panels.Â
Thursday September 4, 3:00 pm Building Plot: How to Implement Rising Action, the Try/ Fail Cycle and Character Arcs into Your Stories Room 151G ::
Thursday September 4, 7:00 pm Writing Suspense Room 355D ::
Friday September 5, 5:00 pm Credible Magic Systems: Method to Madness North Ballroom ::
Saturday September 6, 11:00 am How to Write Great Science Fiction and Fantasy Room 255B ::
