Our last Sad Puppies 3 Book Bomb will be this Wednesday. This time we’ll be taking a look at the Campbell nominees for best new writer and the best related works.

Yesterday’s Book Bomb went much better than expected. You’ve got to understand, I’ve got a few set rules for running BBs that I’ve learned over time. Don’t do them too often. I try to never do more than one a month. Stick with plugging one book, don’t spread it out too much because it is all about putting momentum behind one object. Stick with books, because shorter works are really difficult to move up the charts.

Despite violating all of those things at once, and pushing a bunch of different short fiction things a week after we just did novellas, it still went surprisingly well. The only Amazon available item we didn’t get onto a bestseller list wasn’t even on the Sad Puppies suggestion list, and we still moved it up 1.5 million spots on Amazon. Everything else ended up somewhere on their respective lists, but most importantly the authors were exposed to new readers and Got Paid.

I posted the results in the BB thread. I’ve got to say, good work guys. Next week we’re going to do the same thing for the Campbell nominees for best new writer (the one I’m excited for is giant monster books, because I am a kaiju loving nerd) and Best Related Works.

One of the short stories yesterday was available for free, and I know that was popular. However, because it was released right at the end of the year, and the copyright date wasn’t until the beginning of January so we’re trying to figure out if Tuesdays with Molakesh the Destroyer is actually eligible this year or not. I’ll let you know before the end of the voting deadline so you don’t waste any of your slots.

But since you guys like free short stories, in addition to the Sad Puppies slate there is the even More Eviler RABID PUPPIES SLATE, prepared by Lord Voxemort the Malevolent. There are a couple of short stories on there I’d encourage you to take a look at, and here they are, FREE for your convenience:

The Parliament of Beasts and Birds by John C. Wright. http://voxday.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-parliament-of-beasts-and-birds.html  Which I have read, and it is great… But this is John C. Wright we’re talking about, who I think is one of the best wordsmiths alive.

Turncoat by Steve Rzasa http://voxday.blogspot.com/2014/08/turncoat.html which I’ve not read yet, but I’ve heard that it is really good.

And they’re both free, so check them out and I hope you enjoy them.

And finally, last but not least, one of our Sad Puppies suggested nominees for best novel is Chuck Gannon’s Trial By Fire.

One of the things which has been said about Sad Puppies is that the authors we support don’t get awards, not because they fail to appease political cliques, but because we’re all just horrible, awful, terrible, shitty writers, and the mass consumer market that pays us large sums of money for our stuff are just stupid poopy heads.

But wait… Chuck Gannon’s Trial By Fire, which was already endorsed by Sad Puppies, has just been announced as a finalist for the Nebula Awards. So before they screech about Larry Correia’s evil ballot stuffing and crowd hypnosis, this is an award which can only be nominated by the ultra enlightened, cultural, always charming and never rude, immune to my nefarious mind control powers, members of SFWA.

Holy shit! Unpossible you say! Surely this is a fluke. Sad Puppies couldn’t possibly endorse something that some SFWA members would also think is good! This must be a fluke!  It has been declared that Sad Puppies only pushes trash and pulp!

But wait. There’s more!

Now, you’ve probably heard how Sad Puppies writers are all big, mean, ugly,, and stupid, and how Larry Correia is “anti-intellectual” Sure, I went to college and got an accounting degree instead of something important like gender studies, but I hang out with rocket scientists and brain doctors and I’m teaching a creative writing class for Weber State soon, but whatever, it’s narrative, I hate education. Run with it. I don’t like SJWs, and they declare that they’re super smart because… stuff and reasons… ergo, Larry Correia hates smart people.It is hard to fault that logic.

On the contrary, Sad Puppies is not anti-intellectual. We’re anti-boring. Though to be fair I can see how they’d come up with that theory, since there is a lot of crossover, but let’s take a look at NEBULA NOMINEE Chuck Gannon’s resume for a moment.

Oh, wait. That’s Professor Chuck Gannon to you,

Distinguished Professor of English and Director of Graduate Program in English (SBU, ret.); Fulbright Senior Specialist in American Literature & Culture (2004-2009).

Four Fulbright Fellowships, three accepted (England, Czech Republic, Scotland) one declined (Moldova)

Two Fulbright Travel Grants: Slovakia, Netherlands

Six International Senior Scholar Grants, US Embassy: UK (4), Czech Republic (2)

One International Scholar Grant, U.S. Consulate: 1 (Scotland), 2004.

University Fellow (at various levels): Palacky University (Czech Republic), University of Liverpool, Fordham University, Temple University, Syracuse University,

PhD and MA, Fordham University (honors)

MS, S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, Syracuse University (honors)

BA, Brown University (magna cum laude.)

Whew… Okay, now I know that isn’t a “Concentration” in The Collective Unconscious by any means, but to this poor country auditor, all them big words make Chuck sound like one of them smart folks. I had to ask Chuck what all that stuff meant, but he said it means he knows the book learnings pretty good.

Sadly, not a single one of his many degrees is in Gender Studies, but we’ll let that slide… For now.

So, the book isn’t trash, SFWA members said so, and he’s one of them educated types, so obviously Larry Correia must be suggesting this novel because of Gannon’s politics… Except, wait a second… Hold on. Nobody knows what Gannon’s politics are. He’s an intellectual and an academic who gets along great in that community, he’ll debate policy and positions, and he has no patience for churlish posers.

Beyond that, the dude gets a big fat question mark in the politics box.

Basically, everybody who talks to Chuck comes away saying what a reasonable, intelligent, articulate, moderate person he is.Don’t take my word for it. Go talk to him and decide for yourself.

Chuck’s good and deserves the recognition, but his problem is that he’s too busying being brilliant to spend sufficient time kissing any WorldCon voting clique’s ass enough to get himself a Hugo nom. He’s a brilliant author, but he’s not a darling of the In Crowd. Wait… This sounds like the exact sort of thing that makes puppies sad!

So why did the Evil Legion of Evil promote this guy’s book?

Oh, I don’t know. Maybe we’re telling the truth and YOU SHOULD READ THE BOOK BECAUSE IT IS GOOD.

It is time to spread more awareness about Puppy Related Sadness. The following are our suggested nominees for the short fiction categories, novelette and short story.

The way a Book Bomb normally works is that we pick one good book worthy of more attention, which is available on Amazon, and then we get as many people as possible to buy it in the same day in order to boost it up through the ratings. As the the rating climbs, it gets in front of more people, until it ends up on an Amazon bestseller list, where lots of people who aren’t involved in the Book Bomb see it. Success breeds success, the author gets lots of new readers, but more importantly, the author GETS PAID.

This Book Bomb is a little different. Because the ones I’m doing right now are to get more people exposed to the works we nominated for the infamous Sad Puppies slate, we’re bombing a bunch of works at the same time. I don’t like putting this many links, but time is of the essence, and next week I’ll post about the Campbell nominees and Best Related Works.

We did three novellas last week and it was a huge success. They’re still selling well a week later. Overall we sold a couple thousands novellas, which in novellas is freaking huge.

But shorter fiction is tough, because it isn’t always available for sale by itself, but is usually bundled as part of an anthology, or in a magazine which often isn’t available on Amazon.

As you can see from the list below, luckily many of these are available on Amazon, and some are available for FREE, and for the ones that you can only get in magazines the Evil Legion of Evil Blue Care Bear of Flamethrowering (i.e. Brad) contacted them and asked for a work of theirs which was available for us to plug. So those won’t be the nominated work from the current year, but if they sound cool, check them out, that way the author GETS PAID.

Mike doesn’t actually have this novelette available for sale, but he did recommend the following item:

Rajnar came up blank. He literally has nothing original for sale. This is an unfortunate habit with some of the Analog authors who don’t publish much outside of Analog.

The specific story is not for sale, but Ed says we can go with this one:

(Requires a subscription, which costs $15/yr)
Since Gray doesn’t have a novel or other fiction available online, you can support him by checking out his album at:

Megan apologizes. She is so new she has nothing for sale, but the story is FREE at the following URL:

Appears in:

So there you go, a whole bunch of short fiction that the Evil Legion of Evil enjoyed and thought you guys might like. Sadly, because we’re not imbeciles, we didn’t check with each author to find out their race, sex, and sexual orientation to see if they’d be okay to read as part of the Social Justice Warrior Racist Reading Challenge. We’ll try to rectify that in the future… if we come down with a case of extreme brain damage.

###

Normally I try to list all the current starting sales rank numbers, and then update them through the day, but we discovered last time that Amazon has started using some massive, like eight hour delay on their hourly tracking system. We basically we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out how we did.

There are so darned many of these, that I’ll go ahead and post. Then come back and edit in the starting stats later. I’ve got a deadline, but I’ll do this because I love you guys. 🙂

EDIT: I forgot to add, please tell your friends! tweet, blog, facebook, graffiti, body art, interpretive dance, whatever works, but the more people who know, the higher the books get, the more attention the authors get.

Here are our opening stats:

Captive Dreams: Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,809,985 in Book

Time Foreclosed: Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #699,938 Paid in Kindle Store

The End is Now: Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #23,949 Paid in Kindle Store

Totaled: Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #298,088 Paid in Kindle Store

Sci Phi Journal: Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #200,635 Paid in Kindle Store

Baen Big Book of Monsters: Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #178,892 in Books

EDIT:  Let’s see what we did.

Captive Dreams: Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #285,841 in Books.
The only one to not get on a bestseller list, but we moved it up 1,524,144 spots.

Time Foreclosed:

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,470 Paid in Kindle

• #17 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Time Travel
• #23 in Kindle Store > Kindle Short Reads > Two hours or more (65-100 pages) > Science Fiction & Fantasy
• #24 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Hard Science Fiction

.The End is Now:

• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,212 Paid in Kindle Store.
  • #4 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Anthologies
  • #5 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Anthologies & Short Stories
  • #58 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Post-Apocalyptic

Totaled:

• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,313 Paid in Kindle Store,
  • #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle Short Reads > 30 minutes (12-21 pages) > Science Fiction & Fantasy
  • #3 in Kindle Store > Kindle Short Reads > 30 minutes (12-21 pages) > Literature & Fiction
  • #18 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Hard Science Fiction

Sci Phi Journal:

• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,598 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store) .
  • #26 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy

Baen Big Book of Monsters:

• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #27,147 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #14 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Horror > Anthologies
  • #31 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Anthologies

That was an interesting Book Bomb. It was the first time I’ve ever Book Bombed this many items at once, they’re short fiction, we just did this last week, and Amazon isn’t updating the numbers until after most folks are in bed, so I wasn’t expecting to do what we normally do with a single novel, but despite that we still bumped everybody on here up at least a couple hundred thousand spots, and got nearly everyone somewhere onto a list. (Looking at it, again, the only one we didn’t get onto a list was one that isn’t actually on the Sad Puppies slate, but was one of the ones posted so the author could Get Paid). Smallest overall number shift was on the last one that most of my regulars already bought months ago (that’s the one that has my Tokyo Raider story in it).

Overall, an interesting experiment that worked better than I’d hoped. Next week, Campbell and Related Works.

Good work everybody.

Mark your calenders. We will be Book Bombing the short fiction categories this Wednesday.

The Novella Category Bomb was a huge success. Thousands of copies were moved. A week later and they’re still on their respective genres bestseller lists. So basically we made sure that these will be the most widely read items in their category.

Now we’re going to do the same thing for the short stories and novelettes. Sad Puppies is all about getting people to nominate based on what they like, as opposed to what they are supposed to like.

On that note, yes. I’ve seen the latest K. Tempest Bradford article, challenging people not to read any books by heterosexual white males for a year. I’ll do a blog post about that asinine SJW bullshit if I get a chance, but I’ve got a paying deadline looming. However there is nothing quite like being lectured by someone who grew up with millionaire parents, from a rich neighborhood in Manhattan, who attended one of the most expensive universities in America, about “Privilege”. (plus, the irony of her attacking Neil Gaiman while wearing a Dr. Who shirt is pretty hilarious).

If I don’t get a chance to write about that, just be aware that she’s just another angry SJW, mad at all you people for having fun wrong. Sad Puppies is all about you guys enjoying what you want, regardless of the finger shaking scolds.

So, mark your calenders, Book Bomb this Wednesday. Where you can check out some of the awesome short fiction we’re suggesting on our Sad Puppies slate… Oh, and I think some of the authors aren’t horrible white “cismales”, and thus K. Tempest approved, but I since I don’t give a shit I haven’t bothered to check.

Yesterday’s Book Bomb was a great success:

https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/02/18/book-bomb-novellas-from-the-sad-puppies-slate/

Our goal was to get some of our Sad Puppies slate out in front of as many readers as possible. I figure most people are familiar with our suggested novels already, so I’d concentrate on the shorter works, which are a much more difficult market to reach a large audience with, and way harder to bump up very high on the overall list. We started with the novella category, and if you’re an author with a novella, you know how rare it is to get novellas ranked up there.

Plus, Amazon tweaked its rating system methodology again so that they didn’t start updating their ranking until late in the afternoon, and they didn’t hit the peak numbers until the middle of the night when most of North America was asleep rather than surfing Amazon. If they’d updated normally I know from experience we could have probably moved a couple hundred more copies. Success breeds success, and when people see that they are part of something winning, they’re more likely to spread the word. The higher they get on the rankings, the more new eyes the works get in front of, the more sales are made, repeat until you are J.K. Rowling. Theoretically. 🙂

Despite those obstacles, a bold coalition of Sad Puppies supporters and courageous manatees were able to do the following:

One Bright Star to Guide Them went from #89,731 to #421 on all of Amazon, and #4 in its extremely competitive genre losing only to Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, and Joe Abercrombie.

Big Boys Don’t Cry  went from #52,018 to #483 overall, and #1 in multiple genres.

And Arlan Andrews, keeping in mind that this isn’t even our nominated work because that one wasn’t available on Amazon BUT he will email a FREE copy of the suggested work to any Sad Puppies voter who contacts him at arlan@thingsto.com  but rather this was just a link I threw up to make sure authors GET PAID.

Other Heads went from #403,337 to #1,003, and #1 of all science fiction anthologies.

Damn straight.

I got the actual numbers from Kratman and Wright. I don’t have Arlan’s. Between those two the actual number of copies sold would be equal to about 20 good book signing events. (or what I’d consider at this stage of my career to be a good book signing, so probably 50 or 60 book book signing events worth of sales when I was starting out).

For novellas. Not books. Novellas.

The reason I’m accentuating this is because last week I was accused of trying to get you Sad Puppies volunteers to nominate without reading the actual works: https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/02/10/sad-puppies-3-update-2-1-addendum-to-prior-update/

On the contrary, with yesterday’s Book Bomb not only did we make it so more people would actually read the suggested works, the Sad Puppies suggestions will now be the most widely read things in that category. By far.

And we’re working on short stories and novelettes next.

Now, all of that is fine and dandy, and Brad really is sincerely trying to make the Hugo nominations represent all of fandom and not just one tiny, insular, politically motivated clique, but as a devout evangelical capitalist I’m all about authors Getting Paid.

Ask most Hugo nominees what their nomination was worth in terms of extra sales or increased fan base, and the honest answers usually range from “meh” to “a little… maybe?” That wasn’t always the case. Back in ye olde tymes it was a prestigious career boost, and the reason most authors give a damn about such prestigious career boosts is because it means our royalty checks get bigger. However, the preponderance of preachy award winning suck in recent decades has made getting awards a sort of disclaimer for the general consumer audience (i.e. all those nice people who pay our bills).

Accountant hat on. That’s bad.

Unlike the Social Justice Warrior contingent—who are all about telling creators what they can’t do, or what they can’t say, or which vocabulary words of the day are off limits, or how you’re doing it wrong, or other assorted forms of pushy, bossy, bullshit—I actually want authors to succeed and make a living writing what they want to write. I don’t want anybody walking on eggshells, afraid of causing outrage, and getting slandered as something-ist or something-phobic, because they crossed some invisible line.

The reason I can get away with pissing off these bullies is I GET PAID. I have enough fans that when they libel me in the Guardian or call me a wife beating rape apologist on Twitter, the lost sales don’t make a noticeable dent. The reason Neil Gaiman doesn’t give a shit about the screeching harpy brigade angry at him for calling his latest book Trigger Warnings is because Sir Neil GETS PAID.  Hell, I probably only make what Neil Gaiman’s butler makes, but that’s still enough to insulate me from the SJW’s wrath.

One nice thing about being seen as the counter-culture “fun” side of this little battle (because SJWs have their fun surgically removed to avoid causing microaggressions) is that us plugging an author doesn’t cause the mass market to think to themselves, “Award winning? Oh, no… Not more dying polar bears and thinly veiled Dick Cheneys globally warming a bold post-binary gender world!”

The thing about SJWs? They are super loud, but there really aren’t that many of them, and as far as I can tell they don’t actually read very many books.

So, growing other authors’ fan bases? Getting authors from The Slatening in front of more readers? It wasn’t an original goal of Sad Puppies, but it is certainly a wonderful side effect.

So, next week, let’s bomb some more slate!

EDIT:

The numbers are still rising. Like I said, you get high enough on there, and you get even more new eyes on you.
One Bright Star to Guide them is now at #383.

Big Boys Don’t cry is at #430

Other Heads is at #883.

EDIT: They’re still climbing.Other Heads peaked at #883 and is currently at #893, but One Bright Star to Guide them is at #359, and Big Boys Don’t Cry is at #411.

How many novellas did we move? It is not my place to give out other author’s sales numbers, but to put this in perspective, the total number of nominating ballots for all the finalists in the Novella category of the Hugos in 2014 was 857.  For just these three in 24 hours, we’ve more than doubled that.

So now that I’ve established Sad Puppies does want voters to read books, and my side actually buys books, I wonder what crazy shit they’re going to make up about us next? 🙂