Keeping You All Abreast

(Get it? 'Cuz I write erotica, and society conditions us to find boobs sexy, so... fuuuuuck, maybe I do need sleep.)

Just checking in to let you know how things are going. I planned a movie review but I don't want to do two reviews in a row, also I'd have to watch The Black Room again and I'm not sure my soul is properly fortified. (Drinking movie of 2017, folks.) If you'd like to see a movie taken down a peg, I watched a fantastic takedown of Joel Schumacher's Phantom of the Opera movie from Lindsay Ellis this morning.

Right now I'm doing final edits and making a cover for my next book, which will be out by the end of the month. It's contemporary erotica which just might have a happy ending, so: well outside my comfort zone! But I'm proud of what I've done with it so far.

And don't fret, I'm also working on some spooky sexy stuff for October. Not going to go into details yet, but watch this space! Autumn and Halloween are some of my favorite times of the year, and I want to make this one special.

In my spare time, I've been tweaking the keywords for my current books with KDP Rocket. I don't think I'm quite competent to review it yet, since I've only used it for three books so far, but I will say the interface is easy to use and intuitive, which is a big plus right off the bat. Also, it's still available for a one-time payment. Given the number of subscription-only keyword tools online, I'm very pleased.

And keywords aren't the only thing I'm tweaking! The image up top is the new cover for my Temple of the Seducer series, available on Kindle Unlimited. I wasn't entirely happy with the image reuse on my original cover, and I'm very pleased with how this one turned out. If you give it a read, be sure to leave a review!

Until next time,

-Lea

Review Corner: Hex, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Welcome to Review Corner! This will be where I review books, movies, etc. that I feel like talking about, because what else would I do?

Hex, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, is a horror book that was originally published in Dutch, but translated into English and released here because it is, frankly, a pretty awesome book. The translation is excellent, and I didn't notice anything wrong or jarring in the text.

The book centers on the town of Black Spring, a small town in the Hudson Valley that is cursed by a witch. Literally, there is an immortal witch wandering around town, wrapped in chains and with her eyes and mouth sewn shut. You mess with the Black Rock Witch? Ya dead. You let her loose? Ya dead. And if you happen to live in Black Spring and you leave? Ya dead.

Because of the potential body count, the town's leaders keep a tight lock on Black Spring, including preventing anyone from leaking information about the witch outside the town limits. Naturally the younger generation, who are into YouTube and the Tweeters, don't take this well, and the let's say medieval punishments the town council metes out get things escalating to a really bloody conclusion.

There's a long tradition of witch panic stories in American literature, and this definitely falls within that tradition, even though the book is Dutch. While it's set in the modern day, the isolation of Black Spring under its curse effectively sends it back to the time of old Salem, with all the paranoia and trapped hopelessness one would expect. Otherwise intelligent, compassionate people become panicked and make bad decisions, making things worse and causing more mistakes. Cruel people are empowered, and everything goes to hell.

What makes Hex stand out, though, is the Black Rock Witch herself. While it becomes clear very quickly that the witch is dangerous, she's also an old woman who's been bound and left to wander in horrifically pitiful conditions. Heuvelt never allows the reader to become entirely certain of her, alternating between moments where she's sympathetic, sometimes ridiculous, and sudden bouts of violence and malice. And we never get an objective description of her, as she's always seen through the eyes of characters who very much assign their own ideas to her actions.

"If you like Stephen King books..." might as well be a cliche, but if you do, or you're just a fan of horror or witches in general, Hex is definitely worth checking out. And if you ever find out Heuvelt's little secret, do let me know?

Also, tell me if there's any books or movies you'd like me to review here, and if you liked this review, maybe give one of my books a quick read!

-Lea

Project Management For Smut Writers, Part 3: Basic Project Management Concepts

I'm going to switch gears for this post and talk about some actual project management concepts and how they pertain to writers. I know you're all super hyped to hear more about how I'm micromanaging Trello, right? Well, sorry, I've got some knowledge to unpack for y'all.

First off, what is a project? It's one of those terms that seems obvious until you start thinking about it, right?

A project is defined as "a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result".¹

The key words there are "temporary" and "unique". A project does one thing, it has a specific beginning, and it has a specific end. So, publishing a book, writing a blog post, or doing a podcast episode are all forms of projects. For that matter, so are getting set up on Amazon to publish, migrating your blog to a new web host, and trying to figure out why the audio was so screwed up on your last podcast. All projects! Even if they're simple enough that you don't think of them that way.

Every project is aimed at fulfilling a specific objective by producing one or more deliverables. An objective is defined as "an outcome toward which work is to be directed, a strategic position to be attained, a purpose to be achieved, a result to be obtained, a product to be produced, or a service to be performed"². A deliverable is defined as "any unique and verifiable product, result, or capability to perform a service that is required to be produced to complete a process, phase, or project"³.

You just skimmed that, so here's an example: a project to publish a book (the objective) will result in  a finished manuscript, a cover, and a set of keywords (the deliverables). Deliverables can, obviously, last beyond the scope of a project: your book doesn't just vanish because you succeeded in publishing it (although it might feel like that sometimes).

From the capitalist busy business standpoint, projects drive change and enable business value creation. Each project moves a business from one state to another. If you publish a book, you now have an additional book on the market that requires care and feeding (marketing). If you fix the audio problems on your podcast, your next podcast maybe won't sound so bad. And, each project returns some benefit to its stakeholders (usually you), in the form of time, money, or goods. So that book on Amazon generates revenue, or your improved audio quality might convince a new sponsor to advertise on your podcast.

Obviously you're not going to just stop at one project, unless it's like a miracle unicorn project that meets all your life goals in one fell swoop. (If it does, share.) That's where programs and portfolios come in.

A program is "a group of related projects, subsidiary programs, and program activities managed in a coordinated manner to obtain benefits not available from managing them individually."⁴ For example, if you're writing a series, each book in that series is a project, and the marketing for that series is a project, but the work for the series as a whole could be considered a program.

A portfolio, on the other hand, is "projects, programs, subsidiary portfolios, and operations managed as a group to achieve strategic objectives."⁵ In other words, your entire writing business could probably be considered a portfolio, encompassing all your published work, your blog, your podcast, what have you. If an editor at a big publishing house talks about her portfolio, she probably means the set of authors that she's working with.

The benefit of understanding these concepts is to change the way you think about your writing. Every book is a unique crystal formed under titanic pressures no one else could conceive of, but it's also a project you'll be working on for a fixed amount of time. And if every book is a project, you can start to develop ways to plan for them that you can reuse from one book to the next. That's time saved, and time saved is more time to write in.

Thinking about your portfolio isn't a bad idea, either. If you consider everything you do as part of an overall strategy to earn you fame/money/your great-aunt's love, you can consider how each part is working to benefit that strategy, and ultimately you. It may not mean you change what you write, but it might affect how you present yourself and your writing. Or, it might actually change what you write. You do you.

That's just an introduction to a wide range of concepts that are all contained within The Project Management Body Of Knowledge, or PMBOK. Years ago, project managers being the sort of people project managers are, a bunch of them decided to form a collection of standard terms, concepts, recommendations, and rules that would guide the field of project management, forever and ever, amen. If you've ever heard of the PMP, which stands for Project Management Professional, then understand it's a certification for people who understand the PMBOK, put it into practice, and contribute to building the lore.

Anyway, I think we'll stop here for now. Let me know if you like this sort of thing, because I'm happy to keep going. And don't forget to check out my books!

-Lea

1. A Guide To The Project Management Body Of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide), Sixth Edition. (Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute, 2017), 4.
2. PMBOK Guide, 4.
3. PMBOK Guide, 4.
4. PMBOK Guide, 11.
5. PMBOK Guide, 11.

A New Look,and Thoughts On Going Wide

Hello, and welcome to the brand new blog! Well, it's the same blog, but I've redecorated a bit, including by purchasing a shiny new domain at http://www.leabravo.com. So long, .blogspot URL!

At time of writing things around here are still in flux, but the important bits are that I've set up a bibliography page listing all of my books, and a handy form to sign up for my mailing list. Check the navigation bar between the lovely undead lady and this post! I expect I'll add a few more pages before I'm done, so be sure to check back every once in a while.

*  *  *

I've been thinking lately about "going wide", which when it comes to self-publishing these days means getting off of Amazon as your sole marketplace and selling books through other distributors, like Barnes & Noble's Nook store or Smashwords. Amazingly yes, Amazon doesn't dominate every aspect of eBook sales (yet)!

The advantages and disadvantages are pretty obvious. Going wide puts your book on more shelves, virtually speaking, which means a better chance it gets in front of more readers, which leads to more sales! On the other hand, it means formatting and managing your book on three different storefronts, which is a not-insignificant amount of work.

The other disadvantage, in my case, comes from Kindle Select.

If you're not familiar, putting your book in Kindle Select puts you in the Kindle Unlimited program, which lets people read your book for free if they're signed up. And you get paid! Not much these days, because people scammed the page system without mercy, but still something. The disadvantage is that Kindle Select books have to be exclusive to Amazon, and breaking that agreement gets them reeeally upset.

So as I consider going wide, I have to consider if it's worth leaving Kindle Select. Which, obviously, means checking how much I'm actually making with Kindle Select. So I have to dig into some spreadsheets.

How To Figure Out How Much You're Making With Kindle Select 

This is what a typical KDP payment report looks like. You will note there are a lot of numbers that aren't at all helpful for what I want. (Right-click and View Image if you're curious, but the figures aren't all that interesting.) So I have to massage the data to figure out how much I'm making from Kindle Unlimited page reads, compared to actual book sales.

The first thing I do is add two new columns: one tracking what percentage of each payment comes from Kindle Unlimited, and one for sales. To get the numbers, for each payment I divide the listed earnings for Kindle Unlimited reads by the total earnings. That number goes in the Kindle Unlimited column, to two decimal places. I subtract that number from 100 to get the percentage of my earnings from book sales. I'm sure there's an Excel function to do all this easily, but I hand-jammed the numbers for these columns.

So now I know the ratios for each payment, but I need to know my actual earnings. Again, I add two new columns, one for Kindle Unlimited earnings and one for sale earnings. This time I just go to the top column and use the PRODUCT function:

=PRODUCT($P2,$R2)

That multiplies the total earnings value in column P with the percentage of earnings from book sales in column R, which gives me the earnings from book sales. Then I click on the lower-right part of the cell in the spreadsheet and drag down, which auto-fills the rest of the column with the same formula, adjusted for the row it's on. Much easier than hand-calculating! I do the same thing for the column for Kindle Unlimited read earnings and end up with this:

Now I just total up the sales, and I've got my answer!

In my case, it turns out a little over 20% of my earnings this year have come from Kindle Unlimited. That is not an insignificant amount of money to give up, even though I still need to review a few details and see if that's because of actual reads or a few glitches that seemed to add 500-page chunks to my earnings. But, at this point, it's also little enough that even getting one or two sales a month on another platform would probably make up for the loss of page reads.

Kindle Select makes you sign up for 90-day periods, so I don't exactly need to rush to decide what I'm going to do. I'm still definitely tempted to support other platforms, though. Maybe let me know in the comments if you'd be interested?

-Lea

New header image courtesy of Depositphotos.

Temple of the Seducer, Now In Bundle Form!

Happy New Book Day to me! *confetti*

Actually this isn't so much New Book Day as New Bundle Day. That's right, I've bundled up the entire Temple of the Seducer series into one easy-to-digest Kindle book for your consumption, at a delightfully reduced price.

You like gorgon sex? There's some of that in there, and yes a blindfold is involved. Like the idea of getting squeezed by a busty lamia? That's in there too. Getting oral from a hungry spider-woman? Yep, there's some of that. Size queen witches, horny ghosts, sex magic-happy mummies, and well-endowed Frankensteins with the serial numbers filed off... they all make an appearance.

If any of that sounds like a fun time, go check the book out! It's only $4.99 for seven sexy stories, and if you've got Kindle Unlimited, it's still free to read.

And hopefully all that will tide you over until my next naughty story is ready. Because folks, it's going to be a juicy one.

-Lea

New Book Day! Heat of the Harpy

Well it's been longer than I would have liked, but I finally have a new book out! Heat of the Harpy is my latest fantasy monster story, although not necessarily tied to my Temple of the Seducer books (feel free to make up your own mind about that). It's about what happens when a young man, Kev, finds himself entranced by a beautiful creature, one that's far more dangerous and lustful than she lets on. Here's an excerpt:

At last the fair man spotted Kev in the crowd and gestured for him to come forward. "And this last creature, gentles, is a true rarity, taken from the peaks of the Shattered Mountains. If you will but draw the curtain back, good lad, and keep your distance!"

Kev grinned, sure he was in no danger, and drew the curtain back. He jumped anyway when a piercing shriek sounded, and something slammed into the bars of the revealed cage with great force. Kev stumbled, and ended up falling on his backside to the amusement of the fair man. The rest of the crowd didn't seem to notice, riveted by the cage's occupant.

Kev looked at the cage, and his eyes widened. The being within appeared to be a woman, taller than any man Kev had ever met, but her skin was a bright, fiery red. She wore a sackcloth that preserved her modesty, but her bare limbs were long and well-muscled, and displayed her unnatural character fully. Her human-like legs ended just below the knee, becoming black, bird-like talons with three toes. Her hands were clenched fists gripping the bars, and the nail of each finger was a thick onyx talon, wickedly curved. 

Red and dark orange feathers sprouted from her forearms, matching the feathers that crowned her skull, giving the appearance of a thick mane of hair, and she had a pair of large wings that sprouted from her back, bound in leather straps and pinned behind her. But it was her face that drew Kev's attention.

It was human, and yet not. Her eyes were large and a luminous yellow, with inky black pupils that darted from side to side, taking in the crowd. The bones of her face were sharp, and she had a long nose that didn't quite hook at the end. Her teeth were bared in a fierce scowl, and Kev saw that her canines were long and sharply pointed.

"Behold the harpy!" the fair man shouted, raising his arms high.

The harpy's eyes fixed on Kev, and he felt his heart seize in his chest, barely hearing the fair man's patter, or the rising applause and shouts of the audience. Those luminous eyes were the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, and they seemed to draw him in, showing him a depth of suffering and sorrow that he'd never imagined. He thought of soaring through the sky, the beautiful sky he'd toiled under for so many years, and then felt the weight of chains and nets dragging him down, down onto the cold, unfeeling rock.

And there's a taste! I had a lot of fun writing this one. Aside from being a stand-alone story, it was nice to stretch a little bit in a new setting with a new creature.

Heat of the Harpy is free to read on Kindle Unlimited. If  you like it, please leave a review! Reviews gooooood. And hopefully my next story, a contemporary piece for a change, will be out sooner rather than later. Happy reading!

-Lea

Project Management for Smut Writers, Part 2

Welcome back, all! Last time I was here I talked about project management. I've been modifying my writing process to optimize it a bit more than not at all, using Trello to keep myself organized. Since then I've refined things quite a bit, so I figured I'd give you an update.

First of all, I've created a dedicated Writing board to track my different projects. Previously I had them listed in a list on my personal To-Do board, but that wasn't cutting it for me. Now I have things broken out into books in progress and ideas I haven't started yet. I also have a list of published books, which includes Amazon links for each book so I can do my advertising posts quickly. And I have a list of reference links in case I get time to, y'know, improve my craft.

The in progress entries are important, because that's how I'm tracking my work. Any time I manage to get some writing done or any other work, I just throw down a comment listing what I did. Easy!

So that's my writing board. I'm also still maintaining boards for each project I'm actively working on.

Disclaimer: 19+ year old farm boy.

Here I keep track of what tasks I need to do, but I also generate what is basically a scene block-out. Each card is a scene, and I write down what I want to happen in the details for each one. I'm still massaging this a bit - I can probably move to labeling scenes instead of moving them between lists. Also, I was tracking my work here, but it was too much trouble to break up my word counts between scenes, so I moved that to the Writing board.

So far I'm okay with this setup. I am getting a bit frustrated with Trello's interface - it's not as responsive as I'd like and the click-through to do what I want is a bit high. Still better than Project! (Ask me about my Project 2016 license if we ever meet in a bar. Then duck.) Once I get my system stabilized I might go looking for another solution, but for now I'm staying with it.

For the record I've completed a full 7,000 word short story draft since I got going with this system two weeks ago, and have written about 2,000 words on my next project. Some of you might think that's slow, but not me! Seriously, this is pretty speedy for me. Stop... stop laughing.

Ahem. Aside from writing I've been taking a PMP class - think I mentioned that - and it turned out to be an exam cram - didn't mention that - so basically worthless in terms of mastering the project management craft. But I am learning of a lot of things and I hope to share more with you all as I go.

Oh and once the Amazon Prime Day strike is over, remember to check out my smut. I'm hoping to get my harpy story out by the end of the month and then I've got a really steamy contemporary story in the works. Ciao!

-Lea