Sci-Fi novel covers

I love the old-school fabric cover effect.

 This is an old post about a great service named Pronoun, that is now sadly gone. I ave rewritten it into the past tense to take account of the demise of this aggregator. I was very impressed with Pronoun for self-publishing. Even after being on the platform for only a couple of days, already things were happening. It wasn't reporting to me that I had made any money yet, as of April 2017, but things were happening. A Kindle edition of Galaxy Dog was listed onGoodreads, and it already had a four star rating on Goodreads.

And the cover images that Pronoun generated for its own use on the site were absolutely gorgeous. The ebooks were pictured as if they were a hardback with a textured cover. It gave the effect of a book printed directly on the boards, a nice rough white buckram for example, giving a lovely textured feel. For more about the importance of the feel of covers, this is a nicearticle about the texture of sci-fi and fantasy books. 

Uploading the book to a new aggregator also gives the opportunity of writing a new blurb. Here's the blurb I came up with for the Pronoun edition on Amazon:

Galaxy Dog is an old-school story of robots spaceships and rebellion across a galactic empire. A small group of friends, one woman, one man, and one robot incite a revolt and take on the might of the Tarazet Deep Space Navy. They find an immensely powerful alien spaceship so, even though the rebellion is extremely outnumbered, they still stand a chance. Galaxy Dog combines the action of military sci-fi with the heart of space opera. There are robots, aliens, space battles, and all the good things that make sci-fi so enjoyable.

Of course, blurbs always feel like marketing hooey, and more of a hindrance than a help sometimes in selecting a novel, but I know I read them. There are also some peculiarities of a sci-fi blurb that make them particularly difficult to craft. In sci-fi, the setting itself usually needs to be set up even before the main character. Like any other work of fiction, there should be some non-spoliery set-up of the plot. We need to know what the heroes are fighting against and why. It's probably not a good idea to go too deeply into the science or world building, no matter how much effort went into that element of the book.

With the blurb done and the book on Amazon, I suddenly noticed there was something called the Amazon Best Sellers Rank, and Galaxy Dog was ranked at #102,570. I immediately had to find out what this means, and Make Use of has ahandyexplainer. There's a bunch of detail about how this number is calculated, then a summary of what the ranks mean in book sales.

An Amazon Best Seller Rank of 50,000 to 10,000 means a title is selling close to 1 book a day. A rank of 10,000 to 3,000 is 5 to 25 books a day. A rank of 3,000 to 500 is 25 to 70 books a day. A rank 1,500 to 350 is 70 to 500 books a day. A rank of 350 to 20 is 500 to 2,000 books a day. Being in the top twenty equates to sales of 2,000 to 4,000 books a day, while a rank 1 to 5 means shifting a whopping 4,000 books a day, or more.

Needless to say, I will be coming back to this page and pressing refresh constantly to see what happens to my rank. I'll most likely then report what happens here on the blog for the amusement of any readers who happen by.