It has been an interesting couple of weeks. My book has now been out for just under three months. This means that I’m starting to get my first royalty payments. In a typically convenient moment, during a span of two hours today, I ran into two things related to the top of my mind issue I’m dealing with right now. (Reviews – Please Review On Swift Wings)
- The first relates to a favourite cartoonist of mine, Brian Gordon, who is releasing his third book shortly. If you’re a parent, I guarantee that you’ll find his work funny. I’d definitely recommend his books. He posted about the importance of pre-orders for a struggling author. Getting pre-orders helps deal with my second related event.
- The second came while I was working on a data science course as part of my other job, the one that keeps me from struggling. It was talking about recommender systems like those used on Netflix and Amazon, and the “Cold Start” problem, where until an item has a certain number of reviews, and a sufficient number of people have commented, recommender systems are generally incapable of recommending an item.
Anyway, I’m trying to figure out an incentive to get reviews online that doesn’t fall foul of the rules and regulations put forward by Amazon and co. I’m not allowed to buy reviews or have family review it, and I don’t intend to risk it.
The other cool thing as mentioned previously is that I got my first royalty payments this week. This is for the few pre-orders that I did receive. Since I didn’t really try to drive pre-orders on my first book, I didn’t expect or get many, but it is pretty cool to get a little money. Now I get to watch the money trickle in.
A little update on the Immortals – book #2. I’m now working again on the plan for the book. I had put it down for a couple weeks to focus on other things, but I’m back at it. I currently have about twenty pages of notes. I think I might show how data science-y I am in a subsequent post, demonstrating my tabular approach to planning, making sure that I am handling all of the themes, characters, and plotlines appropriately throughout the novel. I’ll also show some of the natural language analysis I did of the first book when it was getting close to completion, as compared to Gulliver’s Travels, particularly around sentiment analysis.
Coming Soon: Data Science and Novel Writing
Brett Wiens 
Looking forward to the data science post.
I often wonder how some epic authors keep track of their world spanning adventures and characters. Keeping a consistent timeline as well as making sure to build in character ignorance of narrative that took place elsewhere. I’m sure data science and project management would be good for that.
Congratulations on starting book #2 and learning lessons. I’m certain it won’t be a cold start next round and you’ll be prepared with advance reviews.
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