The Places of The Eden Trilogy

Now that the Eden trilogy is all wrapped up, I thought it might be fun to share a little map with the places in the book.  For some reason, when I'm writing the books, I like to be vague with the actual locations.  I've never said where Eden's (from the first half of the first book) location is.  I hated saying they went to Los Angeles but didn't see a way around that.  I know, I'm weird sometimes.

But now that it's all over and you've all read the books (right? ;) ) I thought I'd share where these places are.  If you haven't read all three books, YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN'T LOOK AT THE REST OF THIS POST, FOR IT WILL SPOIL SOME THINGS FOR YOU.

This map isn't totally 100% accurate, I am placing things generally, from locations, to the journeys, so don't feel like you have to zoom way in and track locations down where you need to visit.  Ha.

Enjoy.

Tips For Story Inspiration

I hear a lot of people say that they want to write a story/book, but they have no idea WHAT to write about.  This is an understandable predicament.  I've been there before.  Admittedly not often, but I have been there.  And it is a frustrating place to be.

So today I thought I'd talk about inspiration.  Where I get inspiration from and maybe offer some tips on how to look for inspiration in the smallest of ways.

My most popular series/book is the FALL OF ANGELS, namely with the first book, BRANDED.  I've been asked quite a bit how I got the idea for it.  Not many people look at the concept of angels in such a dark way.

I got the idea for it while re-watching the latest version of The Phantom of the Opera.  I've loved the music since I was 12, and in fact, that was the only Christmas present I asked for that year, was a CD of it.  But for some reason, 8+ years later, the lyrics to one song hit me in a different way.  Angel Of Music.  Now, Christine is singing this, talking about the Phantom.  And I thought about how odd to refer to him as an angel.  He was terrifying, he'd done terrible things.  Why would anyone ever call him an angel?  And then there is another song that talks about the Phantom being inside her mind.

Que a story about a girl who has nightmares of terrifying angels.

The inspiration for THE EDEN TRILOGY came while I was re-watching Star Wars III.  There is a shot with Anakin and his new mechanical hand and I had the idea How cool would it be if he'd somehow grown that mechanical hand?  And if it was somehow part of his DNA?

Here comes a story about technology that takes over human flesh and turns you into a robotic zombie.

WHAT I DIDN'T SAY was a bit different.  Initially the idea for a person who could not speak came from an episode of Gray's Anatomy.  There was a patient who ended up with their vocal cords damaged and after that couldn't talk.  But this one was also largely based on my own experiences growing up as a teenager.  It was also based on the island where I live, and my husbands family, and another family here on the island.

TV is good for this writer.

Let me introduce you to a tool I've been using lately.  This isn't a new concept.  This isn't unique to me.  It's simple.  And when I say lately, I'm talking only like the last few weeks have I been doing this.

I've been keeping this little notebook by my side.  I try to keep it with me at all times, though I admit I'm not always successful.  I try to make sure it is always in my purse.  It is ALWAYS by me whenever I am watching TV/movies or reading a book.

Now, this doesn't mean I'm ripping off TV shows or other people's books.  We never do that, people.

But sometimes little ideas strike you during these times.

I think my biggest thing with this post is this: Inspiration doesn't have to be huge.  It doesn't have to be full plot or world ideas.  It can be small.  Something little.

Like character traits.

The other day I was watching a show and the common line was said "You're such a bad liar."  A phrase used often.  But I thought of a character who was a fantastic liar.  The kind of person who can tell such a good lie that sometimes they even believe themselves.  And from there it went onto the thought of what if I had a narrator who admitted that everything you are about to read might not be true?  How are you the reader to ever know what is the truth behind the story?

So I wrote this down.  It isn't a full story.  It isn't really a plot.  But it's interesting.  It would be the basis for a very interesting character.

Sometimes a single word will make you ponder.  It's a word you've heard multiple times but when you have the concept of inspiration in your head and story making as a driving force in your life, you look at it differently.

Say, the word sleepwalking.  Or crucifixion.

Both words I have written in this notebook recently.

You see an image that is unique and interesting, and the blues in it are just incredible.  Suddenly you think of rings around a planet that is run on a unique energy.

See, you write down all these little, random things.  You record character traits, or concepts, or just thoughts.  And someday you might start linking them together in a new and creative way.  And suddenly, you might have an incredible story to tell.

I find inspiration in a lot of random places.  I was watching the music video for Daughtry's new song "Waiting For Superman."  And I got two new ideas.  I won't say them here because there's a chance I might actually write them someday, but LISTEN.  WATCH.  Not just with this video, I'm not talking that small.  I'm talking with everything.  Visual and musical inspiration is powerful.

Which leads me to images.  I LOVE Pintrest.  And DeviantArt.  I have a board on Pintrest called "Inspirational Pictures".  This is not what you might call your normal inspirational picture board.  Mine is filled with images of two creepy hands sticking out of the ground, reaching for each other.  It's got images of odd lockets, and owls, and floating ships.  Buffalo's walking out of the fog, monsters in the dark, and and amazing Victorian dresses.  Sometimes just the right image can create an entire world.


Don't feel like a failure if you don't yet have an idea for an entire story, or have an entirely new world built.  Keep your eyes open.  Keep your mind open.  Look at ordinary things in extraordinary ways.  Because even the most ordinary thing can be turned into something extraordinary.  And write things down.  Because you may think you would never forget that idea or concept.  But you will.  At least I do.

Stories are everywhere if you're looking.

A Writer's Space

I'll admit it: when I'm working within a few weeks of a publishing date, I tend to let small things go.  Things like cleaning.  And good cooking.  And a social life.

Here is the reality of what my office looks like on the day of publication.  This is what it looked like yesterday, the day I published THE EVE:

Stuff.  Stuff everywhere...

I just have to wonder how I always have so many boxes in my office?!

To be honest, this was AFTER I had started picking things up a bit...  Shameful.

There was even a day where it looked like this...  This is what happens when 5 packages come in one day and I have no time to deal with any of them.

I pretty much live in my office for those last few weeks.  I eat in here.  I wrap packages in here.  I make calls from here.  Pretty much all but sleep in here.

So today seemed like a good day to reclaim my office, now that THE EVE is out.  Man, it felt good, lol.  So I decided to give you a little tour of my office now that it doesn't look quite like a hurricane tore through it.

Ta-da!  There she is!  My office is an octagon shape and I love it!  It can make it tricky to set up as a room, but it gives it so much character.

I don't know that a writers office can really be complete without a couch.  Sometimes you can't think creatively unless you're laying down and closing your eyes.

This would be where I keep all of my proof copies of my books, as well as the majority of my plotting notebooks.

One of my most prized possessions: a typewriter from my great-grandmother who passed away a few years ago.  This thing has so much history to it.  It is beautiful and I treasure it.

Where the "magic happens!"

My desk.  I FINALLY have dual monitors.  Makes a writers life so much easier.

This whiteboard is critical.  And huge (4 feet x 4 feet).  And it is scary when it is blank.  This morning it was filled with leftover editing/plotting notes for THE EVE.  "What is to come next" you ask?  Awesomeness.  That's what.

Ugh.  The overflowing closet that has no door.  I keep a lot of things in here.  Someday I will organize it a bit better.  And I hope that someday I have a door on it so I don't have to look at it all the time...

And in that closet there are a lot of books.  Behold, copies of the FALL OF ANGELS, old and new covers alike.  There are even a few copies of the original EDEN peaking out back there.

What I Didn't Say...

The Eden Trilogy.  Well, almost.  Copies of THE EVE will be here soon...

And the author who inhabits this space...

This room is my sanctuary.  This room is where I create worlds.  This room is where I escape to them.

THE EVE - Available Now!

Today's the day!  You can now download the final book in The Eden Trilogy!

A plan was laid out as the Evolution crushed mankind, a plan that was right under Eden’s nose all along. And Eve is the key to everything. New Eden—mankind—they have a small chance at fixing their dismembered planet. 

But it will be a reckless sprint against time and the coming Bane to retrieve the final piece to the plot. New Eden’s worst fears have become reality. The Bane are back in the city and they’re smarter and more aggressive than ever. They know where the humans are and they’re coming to finish what they’ve nearly completed. 

Eve has been content with the family she’s found—Avian, West, Gabriel, Royce. But she’s about to discover she may have the one family Eve never thought she would: blood. With every odd stacked against her, all the lies and all the secrets of her origins will be exposed. 

The past and the future are about to come full circle.

KINDLE

NOOK

PAPERBACK

IBOOKS (coming soon!)

And don't forget to join myself, DJ DeSmyter, and Jenni Merritt tonight for #EveChat!  We'll be talking all things YA lit, dystopian, and giving away cool prizes!

The World of EDEN

I have now been in the world of EDEN for three and a half years.  I very first started writing the first draft of Eden in June of 2010.  I was struggling to make my way through FORSAKEN.  I was hitting a wall and things just weren't working, so I decided to set it aside for a while and work on something else.  That something else was Eden.  I wrote half a first draft before I returned to FORSAKEN and set it aside.

Then I published EDEN in June of 2011, almost exactly a year after I wrote the very first words.

From there I went on to publish VINDICATED and WHAT I DIDN'T SAY.

And then I returned to the world of Eden.  Things happened.  Things changed.  And I decided that Eden needed to be a trilogy.

I've been in this world for a long time now.  Far longer than I ever expected to be in it.  Eve, Avian, West, Royce, Tristan--all the characters have become so real to me.  I can almost reach out and touch their world.  I can picture a Bane crashing through my window at any moment.  I know exactly what kind of weapons I would need to fight one off.

THE EVE, the final book in the Eden trilogy releases tomorrow.  So today I thought I'd pay homage to that world and let you step inside it with me for a while.  I will use a lot of images and songs throughout this and I will disclose now that I do not hold rights to any of them.

This is Eve.  This picture of Gillian Zinser is exactly how I picture Eve.  She is not traditionally pretty.  Her features are very sharp and angular.  She doesn't really care how her hair looks.  Cloths?  As long as they cover her body and she can move in them, she doesn't care.  Eve can take care of herself.

Avian is a rock.  98% of the time he knows what to do and he keeps his cool doing it.  He has lost nearly everyone who means anything to him and he will do anything to protect those who are left.  He's a soldier.  He's an ill-trained doctor.  He's an excellent marksman.  He is selfless.

West is fire and ice, existing in the same space.  He's lived with the weight of what his family has done for years now.  West has potential and is smarter than even he realizes.  West is driven by his passions and knows what he wants in life.

Bill is one of the simplest but most complicated characters in the story.  Bill loves his life in the post-Evolution world.  He knows how to survive.  He's good at it.  He is quiet and a man of few words but this is for a reason.  But one thing is for certain: he always has your back.

Dr. Beeson.  This is a man driven by his guilt.  If it weren't for him, Eve wouldn't be what she is today.  He's brilliant, but he almost hates himself for that fact.  He's learned his lesson and thinks he knows what is best now, even if he isn't always right.  But he'll do anything to fix his mistakes.

I have a confession: Royce is one of my favorite characters I have ever written.  I can't quite say he's my favorite, because really all my main characters are my favorite.  But I LOVE Royce.  We have bonded.  He is stubborn and always thinks he's right.  He's cocky.  But his is a LEADER.  He will do anything to protect his people.  He would literally die for them.  He is strong in ways no one can ever understand.  He is the type of man I would follow.








I am a very visual person.  Thanks to Pintrest, I could literally come up with the concept and plot for an entire book via images I find through that site.  These are some of the images that have inspired me throughout the series.

And music.  This part probably won't really mean that much to most of you. But to me, I couldn't have written these books the way I did without them.  Music touches me.  It makes me FEEL.  It makes me EXPERIENCE.  These are some of the songs that played a very vital part in creating the world of Eden.

There are some spoilers below.  Read my explanations with caution.

This is very much a song about Eve.  But there is one very specific scene this will always play during in my head.  After Eden joins the group on Los Angeles and Eve is going to the transformer to hook the Pulse directly into the power supply.  This entire scene goes with this song.

Spoiler Alert (so don't read this if you haven't read THE BANE):  This is how Avian feels toward Eve in book one.

This one is for book two.  Eve gets put through some serious s*it in this book.  But in the end, Eve is still Eve.  She isn't afraid to die, and she's going to go at what she wants with everything she's got.

Again, Eve gets put through a lot in book two.  And she has her human moments.  Every once in a while we all break.

SPOILER ALERT (so skip ahead if you haven't read THE HUMAN):  This one is for West.  He feels like he's been screwed over and in reality he's been dealt some very unfair cards.  He gets infected and wakes up only to find the girl he thinks he loves has picked the other man.  Que a lot of crap happening.

 

On to book three:  After everything Eve has been through in book two and in book one, she can still come out of the darkness with a bullet in her hand...

No explanation to be given here.  You will understand.

I hope this gives you a little bigger understanding of what the world of Eden is like for me.  And I hope this is somewhat like it is for you.  As authors we do our best to show you what we see, but in the end, the story isn't ours alone.  The moment we release it it becomes yours as well.  I love Eden.  I love Eve and Avian and West and everyone else.

After three and a half years though, I am ready to kiss them goodbye and move onto other characters who are begging to have the spark of life breathed into them.

Get ready.

Tomorrow, the past and future will come full circle.

Join me November 12th for #EveChat!

Join me, DJ DeSmyter, and Jenni Merritt, Tuesday, November 12th for my first ever Twitter chat!

#EveChat

We will be discussing the third and final book in The Eden Trilogy, talking all things YA dystopian, writing, and everything in between!  If you have questions for me please feel free to jump in and use the hashtag.  There will be quite a few prizes, including chances to win books!!

I will see you then!!

How Many Books I've Sold - An Education In Numbers

There is an INSANE amount of stuff to learn in the publishing world.  Even more so if you are going to self-publish.  I discovered this the hard way.  Back at the end of 2009, beginning of 2010, I had received over 60 rejections from agents.  At the time I was trying to find a home for BRANDED.  No one wanted it, so I decided to go at it on my own.  Self-publishing was just starting to become an option then.  So I jumped in.

Boy was it a steep learning curve.

I didn't know anyone else who was doing it so I didn't have anyone to ask for advice.  I had no one else to model myself after.  So I stumbled along blindly for quite some time.

I believe in the value of being educated and knowing how those who have gone before you did things.  So I'm going to share some personal but business oriented numbers with you: my all time sales numbers.  This is odd timing to do this, normally I would do this at the beginning of a new year but well, I just found out myself.

Yes, I--well, my assistant--finally got our bums in gear and went through over 3 years worth of sales reports and compiled them into one spreadsheet.  This thing is mind boggling to look at.  It took my assistant 9 hours to pull all this together.  And then I went through and spent about 2 or 3 hours doing the monthly detailed totals and other stuff that threatened to melt my brain.

Just to give you an idea of how intense this document is, here is a VERY small screenshot of it...

But I finally know how many books I've sold and how many free downloads I've ever gotten!

And for educational purposes I thought I'd share it all with you.  I know I would have LOVED to see numbers like this early on in my writing career.

Here is my actual sales, meaning copies that were PAID for.  This does not include 2010 because there were a grand total of 324 copies sold from Feb-Dec of that year...  It took me a LONG time to figure out what the heck I was doing.  But these numbers go through August of 2013.

Forgive my crappy graph.  I've been pressed for time and skill.

Yes, if you really wanted to put in some effort and math skills, you could probably roughly figure out what my income is from this, but why spend the time?  I may post about that some other time, but that is getting a bit personal...

This graph includes sales for Kindle, Nook, and iBooks in all the worldwide territories.  This does not include my print sales because they are hardly worth tracking, OR sales that come through Smashwords because their reporting is horrendous and not enough for me to really bother with.

The two columns marked in green were my highest earning months.  Interesting to see that they weren't necessarily the months that I sold the most copies.  (Disclosure: I made this graph last month, before I actually knew last months income.  Shockingly, since my sales weren't that amazing-not that they were bad-last month, it was in fact my highest earning month ever.)

There certainly have been some ups and downs, but for the past year things have been pretty steady.

So, while looking at this graph, you also have to consider how many free downloads my books get.  Don't let anyone ever tell you that a free book is worthless.

Okay, I confess, I did these last month so the above numbers aren't quite 100% accurate.  The number of free downloads of my books is now 534,344.  Over half a million downloads.

What books do these free downloads include?

Branded mostly.  I set it for free in April 2012, took it off free for a brief time in July and August that year.  Biggest mistake.  So I put it back free and it has been free ever since.  I have no plans to change that when it has managed to maintain around 500+ downloads every day for the past year.  It also includes What I Didn't Say which I've put up for free for a total of about 15 days ringing in over 110,000 free downloads in those few days.  This also The Raid which is free currently.  The Ashes had a few free days, as did Eden, way back in the day when it was a standalone.

"So why offer books for free?  There's no value or means to make money from a free book!"

Not freaking true.

People often don't think twice about downloading a free book.  It doesn't cost them anything.  So oftentimes people hoard them.  But sometimes they actually read those books.  And sometimes they actually like those books.

And the trick is, often there are more books in that series.  For example: Branded is free, and hoards of people have downloaded it.  But then there is Forsaken, book two, which is priced at $3.99 and there is also Vindicated at $4.99 and Afterlife which is $1.99.  Those three non-free books are where I make the vast majority of my income.  Having Branded free makes me a lot of money.  Because of if just a small percent of the people who downloaded Branded go on to read the other books it adds up quickly.

But why would I offer What I Didn't Say for free?

Because I almost guarantee you 100,000 of those 110,000 people who downloaded it in those 15 days had never heard of Keary Taylor.  But now they have a Keary Taylor book on their e-reader.  And they might read it.  And they might like my writing style and they might go on to buy my other books.  This is a promotional tool to spread my brand.

This is why I offer books for free - explained very quickly and simply.

Now, you might be interested to see the overall sales numbers for all my books.  These numbers are everything, from February 2010, when I first started self-publishing, through September 2013.  Here they are:

BRANDED (Published Feb 2010)

Paid: 40,366

Free: 418,604

FORSAKEN (Published Jan 2011)

Paid: 48,417

VINDICATED (Published November 2011)

Paid: 33,554

AFTERLIFE (Published November 2011)

Paid: 13,368

FALL OF ANGELS OMNIBUS EDITION (Published December 2011)

Paid: 3,154

WHAT I DIDN'T SAY (Published May 2012)

Paid: 12,082

Free: 110,186

EDEN (Published June 2011, unpublished Feb 2013)

Paid: 12,496

Free: 3,000

THE BANE (Published March 2013)

Paid: 3,653

THE HUMAN (Published June 2013)

Paid: 1,844

THE ASHES (Published March 2013)

Paid: 751

Free: 1,322

THE RAID (Published March 2013)

Paid: 381

Free: 1,232

REBIRTH (Published Oct 2012, unpublished Feb 2013)

Paid: 867

Now, the overall total, paid and free downloads:

705,277

I believe in being informed.  While I know I have a LOT of room to grow, I could still sell a LOT more books than this, I'm not doing horrendously.  I've managed what a lot of other authors haven't: stability.

*But let's be honest about it, one of the secrets to making a good income writing and getting stable is to write a butt load of books...  

This is why I've harped that the most valuable way you can spend your time as a writer is to write, not to spend all your energy on marketing.  Yes, it is important, but it is more important for your readers to have another book for them to go buy, and then another after that.*

So, I hope you find this helpful and that you can learn something from it.  Let me know if you have any questions and I will do my best to answer them!