Lydia Trinket

I’m putting some of this after a jump so as to share the front page with all the other lovely excerpts we’ll be seeing here during excerpt week, which I’m sure we can all agree was a genius idea on Marcia’s part. Naturally, I’m tacking on a little shameless self promotion. I hope you’ll all do the same, to make it easy for me to find your books.

I’m looking forward to finding some new stuff for my Kindle this week, so get posting!

Ghost in the Canteen is a modern paranormal fantasy with elements of horror, comedy, severed stuff, and supernaturally powerful dogs. As the first in the Lydia Trinket series, it’s permanently priced at 99¢ at major online retailers. Book two in the series, Peak of the Devil, is coming next month. (For anyone who’s already read Ghost, an excerpt of Peak is available at my website, but you should be warned: that one contains adult language!)

ONE

It was the Newfie that started it. It attacked me, which is not normal for a Newfoundland, much less a statue. I was sitting in the dining room of the Dodd house, giving its resident ghost a lecture. The faint scents of tobacco and vanilla were the only signs of him in a room made dim by heavy (and awful) mauve-striped curtains.

“Look Thomas, I get how hard it must have been.” I gestured down the long table. “All the Thanksgiving turkeys served here over the years, all the birthday candles blown out. Your brother at the head of your table. Spending your money. Married to your girl.”

Something growled behind me.

A life-sized wooden Newfie sat between the sideboard and a bookshelf that held china figures and teacups, but no books. The poor dog had seen better days. His paint was chipped, his body scratched. One of his ears ended abruptly in a splintered edge.

We were of a height when I knelt in front of him. “Are you Thomas’s dog?” In the interest of common ground, I hoped so. Establishing rapport and all that. “I had a Newfoundland too,” I announced for old Tom’s benefit. “White and black, just like yours. His name was Little John.”

The vanilla-and-tobacco smell grew stronger. I scratched the Newf’s worn wooden ruff. “You’re a good boy to try to protect him. But I’m here for his own good.” I felt the rumble of his second growl beneath my fingers, and took my hand away.

“I told you, Thomas, I get it. I’d be pissed off too, believe me. But a century is long enough to wallow in it. It’s not healthy for you.”

No growl this time. The silence grew thick, the air cold.

“What do you say, huh? Maybe you’re ready to go of your own free will? Save us all some trouble?” They almost never accepted this offer, but I considered it polite to ask. Apparently my good manners did nothing to impress Thomas Dodd.

The dog came at me in a flurry of snarls and barks. I jumped away a split second too late, and his teeth grazed my hand. He was still made of wood, his coat faded paint instead of fur, but his breath was hot and real.

My back slammed into the bookshelf, nearly tipping it over. I raised my arms to protect myself from its falling contents while I thrust a knee into the advancing Newf’s chest. (Although the force of my strike was tempered by the part of me, the crazy part, that didn’t want to hurt a dog.) He snapped at my leg as a china shepherdess broke across his back.

Something heavy smacked my shoulder, then bounced away. I heard it shatter against the table. The dog got hold of my forearm, drawing blood. Whatever had hit me had thrown me off balance, and my feet got tangled with the legs of a chair as I tried to pull away from those teeth that didn’t feel like wood at all.

My head hit the back of the chair, and then my cheek and nose were smashed into the musty-smelling carpet. Well great, this is it then. As usual, my inner critic sounded disappointed, but not surprised. You go down when a dog’s attacking you and you’re as good as dead.

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My term in KDP Select expires tomorrow, and I’m declining to renew it in favor of going wide. This is not a hot-button topic for me the way it is for many who’ve had to adapt their strategies because of Kindle Unlimited. I released my first (currently only) book after the program launched. I have no idea how different my sales chart might look if Kindle Unlimited were not a thing.

But my hunch is: not much. I’ve had precisely four borrows since my release. Now, I’m not taking the world by storm; my sales rank tends to fluctuate between 100k and 700k in a given week. (Funny how one sale can shoot you up 500,000.) But I can still say that four represents a pretty small percentage of my total readers to date.

And at least two of those were from people I know, versus people who found the book via browsing. Which means KDP Select, whose main benefit is supposed to be increased visibility, has increased mine by: 2. And I think that’s mainly because my book is actually really without hyperbole not visible to most KU borrowers. Not because it’s a magic stealth spy ninja book, although that would be cool. I think KU appeals most to a specific audience of very high volume readers in particular genres–mostly, I suspect, romance.

Those are not my readers. Their eyes are going to go whooshing past the thumbnail to your right without ever really seeing it. I don’t get the benefits, and there are many, of writing for that audience, but I also don’t face the same challenges. (As a side note, I think this is important to remember if you frequent forums where a lot of the indies write romance, and you don’t. What works for their genre does not necessarily work for others.) For a lot of indies, KU is a lose-lose situation. If they’re in it, they make considerably less for a borrow than a sale. If they aren’t, a not-insignificant percentage of readers will simply borrow something else and pass them by entirely.

In my case, it’s more of a whatever-whatever situation. I don’t think KU, or KDP Select, makes a big difference either way. (I also did a Kindle Countdown deal at 99 cents that did okay, but I can’t say whether I’d have had an equal number of sales at the same price point with the same promotions, without the Countdown label.) But the only way to find out for sure is to go wide and see if I can sell more than, you know, four, through other retailers over the same period of time.

And that’s really my takeaway: there’s no reason not to try stuff. KDP Select runs in three month terms. If you’re going to succeed in a small business, you have to play the long game. Three months is not the long game.

So I’ll see how it goes. I’m also knocking the price down to 99 cents at the same time, so as to have a nice low entry point into the series. (The next book comes out in about 3 months.) If those changes end up not working for me, I’ll reverse them. In, like, less than five minutes. One of the advantages I have over the traditionally published is agility. But it’s only an advantage if you use it.