On Writing : My Fusion Novel makes #3 on Amazon. by William Parker

Having recently suffered a personal loss, I really needed to get my head back into the game. It all started when I adapted one of my favorite novels, FUSION, into a screenplay. To someone used to writing 60,000-word novels, writing a screenplay was like learning to speak Klingon. The audiobook itself runs 6 ½ hours. That had to all be reduced to a tight 110-page script. But that was all behind me now. My FUSION screenplay was then analyzed and commented in detail a number of times by some excellent coaches until the screenplay was in commercial shape.

In fact, the end product of all those comments and suggestions turned out to be a better, more organized story than the novel it was adapted from. Hm. Go figure. The screenplay story is tight and moves right along. The first ten pages are full of action. The story is well structured. But I loved that novel. It’s full of some very original ideas and a whole opposite theory of time to what had been presented in Arrival. But the screenplay characters were fuller now and more emotional. Hm.

But look at all that wonderful feedback… throw out the novel and start from scratch? Hell no! May that never be! Instead, I did a Vulcan mind meld on the novel using the screenplay as the new outline. It was like reverse engineering the novel. For the longest time, my head swam in the details, but now I had become a juggernaut with a goal – rewrite the novel.

The first draft went to my audiobook narrator for comment. His return email was one word – WOW. The story then went out to my small reader group and got very similar reviews. Okay then, I wasn’t wrong. It was a better story. So, then it all had to be copyedited. Oh, please. Just shoot me. That is a hugely tedious and expensive part of the whole thing but must be done. While that was underway, I reworked the cover design to tighten that up. Oh? Nobody told you that cover design is a crucial factor in book sales. And, oh yes, people do judge a book by its cover.

So, I put on my graphics designer hat and finished that about the same time the editors finished the copyedit. That left one job. I then had to redesign the ebook interior to make it a proper ‘book.’

We were good to go. I got into my account at Amazon and republished FUSION.

But no good deed goes unpunished.

I took a deep breath and was thinking about what to do next when I discovered that my updated republished FUSION was now selling so well that Amazon was actively selling it. That would sound like a good thing? Right?

Strike when the opportunity presents itself.

“Strike when the opportunity presents itself” is a basic tenet in the Martial Arts. So, then the battle had just begun. To maximize what was happening organically, I picked a target date and put FUSION on sale. That made Amazon advertise it even more, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. The next few days were full of an advertising blitz, going from one site to the next. I got ten front-page ads, each one costing me hours of work. I got Facebook posts and Twitter tweets, and Instagram messages. The advertising blitz was on, and all on a nothing shoestring budget. After all, I am an aspiring screenwriter, so I don’t have a lot of money. I sometimes feel like Oliver in Only Murders in the Building. Martin Shorts plays the ass off that part. (I digress)

That left me waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Other shoe? Oh, yeah. Did I fail to mention that FUSION has a paperback and a hard cover version as well as an audiobook? My narrator took the copyedited version and worked directly from that, but audiobook narration is a long, time-consuming process and is very close but not yet complete.

With physical books, the interiors had to be totally redesigned first to get a page count. From that, book cover templates are generated. I put my cover designer hat back on. And, oh, while I was at it, I redesigned the audiobook cover, too.

Then all that had to be republished and approved by Amazon… and all happen before the advertising blitz start date.

Day Zero – Nothing.

So, you take a deep breath and wait for what? Day Zero hits. All I could do was to check that all my advertising pages were in play. They were. But leave it to Amazon to make me suffer. I had to wait for day two. That’s when the marketing hit home. Fusion Made #3.

Time to scramble! Take screen shots. Amazon does not give an author any other way to document this achievement so you better get it while you can.

Final cleanup put me back on my web page, http://www.fivemoons.org/ , and clean up all those files and pointers. Oh, did I mention that I have to do all of my own webpage work myself, too?

Like I said, no good deed goes unpunished, but it worked out pretty good this time. No. The novel won’t hold at #3. In fact, it was down to #4 the next day. Seems that all the other authors rise to challenge of a competitor ascending into this position and ran their own advertising, but we made it. On our day. We made it. We made it on a shoestring budget in a market full of well-funded corporate publishing houses. We beat the big guys at their own game.

Lesson learned.

• Take a long hard look at the detailed notes that you get back on your screenplay.

• Use a highlighter to mark them up as you go along and make the corrections to your own screenplay. Try to see beyond the immediate correction to where the same comment should apply.

• Story structure means a lot. You won’t get past the readers until you get that right and you won’t get to the buyers until you get past the readers.

• Pace, timing and hitting the beats also turned out to be very important in the novel as well. It got me a lot more readers.

In all of this, don’t lose your unique voice. You don’t want to sound just like somebody. You want to sound like you. For better or worse, I still sound like me.

And, most importantly, those script notes can be damned helpful. This is what they did for me.