Colony is a Hit, Guys! · 7:42pm Dec 2nd, 2016
Well, it’s been three weeks, and in that time, Colony has continued to be an absolute hit. At this point, it’s no stretch to call it my most successful title yet. since its release, it’s sold on average two copies per day!
And it keeps selling!
And that’s just sales. Colony is on Kindle Unlimited, and I’m also seeing a number of reads there. How many? Enough that I’m seeing an average of 720 pages read per day. One day hit almost 3,000 pages read.
Yeah, this blows Unusual Events out of the water. As it does One Drink and Dead Silver. None of them are even coming close to this level of success.
Of course, sales mean nothing if the readers aren’t happy, but thankfully I can report that this is not the case. So far, Colony is sitting at a glorious 4.8 Star rating on Amazon, and solid 5 Star rating on Goodreads, and with some pretty glowing reviews to match.
Colony is making a mark on Sci-Fi. A small one in the larger scheme of things, but with clear space to grow.
But there’s only one direction for Colony to go from here. And that’s UP! Which leaves us with only one final question:
Have you read Colony yet?
This post is a mirror of one on Unusual Things
That are really good news.
But hey, good work pays off, right?
My answer to that question is "Yes. Very yes."
Congratulations! The work certainly merits the success it has met with.
Great to hear and congrat!
Yes, read it. Liked it a lot.
I already left review on Amazon, can say once more - I expected something really good, but it was even better.
I liked how you started with almost slow pacing and kept increasing it during the story.
One of most unusual things there was that I actually liked most of IT-related parts, especially prologue. I am software engineer and usually when somewhere in some story they start talking IT - it's just eugh. I am not even talking about movies. In this case it was actually good&solid (except decryption related parts) and without any special terminology.
Found two typos:
1) chapter 30, page 12085: "two-thousand kilometer warsub", should be "two-thousand meter warsub"
one question btw: why in most parts of the story you/characters used imperial units but for sub lengths they used
normalhuman-readableunits which actually make sensemetric units?2) chapter 31, page 12426: "choice between breathing breathing recycled air or not dying" - did you mean "choice between breathing breathing recycled air or dying"?
As to things which felt wrong to me - there two of them:
1) decrypting and decoding – are actually totally different things.
You mixed up classical decryption of encrypted data and data structure analysis + picking encoding. That sounded very wrong to me. There is big difference between picking encoding of the data and decrypting data.
You could have file saved in billion of publicly available formats using zillion of available encodings. If I receive it as raw data without knowledge of what is the type of file – I will indeed be trying to pick encoding, and it will take some time. But if IT guy encrypts the file with intent of protection of it's contents – you will not be able to crack it without key.
As I understand what they got from section38 – was big data dump without any knowledge about data structure or encodings used. But not encrypted. The same with Rodriguez's hard drive. Using word 'decrypt' in this case is fundamentally wrong.
2) final scene with bomb when Jake sets the timer and than casually starts picking stuff while the clock is already ticking. I donno, for me personally it sounded like illogical thing to do (even if he forgot about picking ammo before setting the time – I would expect him to hurry and be a bit frantic). Other thing – 30 minutes looks like awfully short time when you do not know exactly where are you going. No reserve, possibly even too short.
Other than that - the book was perfect.
I am definitely looking forward to next one.
Congrats!
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Yes it does. I'm hoping it continues to pay off, too!
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Thank you!
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Thanks!
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Typos added to the V2 file and fixed. No telling when the official "V2" will make its appearance, but know that with thanks, your notes have been made use of and altered.
As far as decoding and decryption goes, well ... oops. It looks like I didn't quite get enough research done, though I did my best. Hopefully it's a non-issue overall (and it sounds like most wouldn't know the distinction at all, which is good to know. As far as the rest of the stuff went, I did do a lot of research. Even looked into theories and speculation about how eventual quantum computers would work. Basically, I'm glad the more IT parts held up and were even enjoyable! PHEW!
And yes, the decision to omit a lot of more technical terms was a conscious one. I wanted readers without an understanding of things to be able to follow along without much difficulty.
As far as metric and imperial units go, it's mixed for a reason, actually. Jake and Sweets are both from USA, and default to Imperial when on their own turf ... but also know metric standards. Anna tends to use metric more often. Meanwhile, Pisces uses metric and then nautical units (which are another category altogether, and the story itself lampshades the annoyance of bouncing between all three).
Basically, what got used tended to vary based on who was using it and who they were talking to. Confusing, but very much real.
As far as that sequence at the end it's summed up as the head injury and a deterministic outlook. If you notice, Jake's a little scrambled through that whole sequence, between the crash and his phobia. He's not quite thinking straight. The bomb was the most important thing, so he made sure it was going off one way or another, even if he wasn't going to make it (he's noble), then grabbed what he needed and pushed himself out the airlock. The grabbing of stuff is also psychological and subconscious: He's trying to avoid getting in the airlock until the last minute. With a clear head, it doesn't make total sense ... but he's definitely not clear-headed anymore. He's rattled. So that's got a pretty good explanation.
Anyway, glad you enjoyed it. Look for the sequel sometime next year maybe!
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Thank you!
If I ever find where I put my kindle, I'll be sure to get the book. If its anything like your other works I can't wait to read it.
I'm wondering what you did differently from your previous works this time around to make it such a success. Did it come down to having an established following, or did you advertise more/differently? What do you reckon made the sales on this one hold up where the others (I assume) died off?
Yay for you!
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Some say it's better.
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It's a bunch of things, really. First is that I do have larger, more established base of readers, which meant that there were more people going for the book from the very start. In addition, this one is Sci-Fi, which is a much more popular genre than Urban Fantasy and generally more appealing to people than straight fantasy (there are those who would debate that, but a lot of Sci-Fi is relabeled "Thriller" and does quite well, while you can't do the same with Fantasy).
Also, the inertia has been so good because of so many people buying, reading it, and leaving reviews. Sales ranks matter. Having a larger established readerbase helps the rank of Colony stay high. Which means more people see it, and some of them buy it, which again keeps the sales rank up there. It's kind of like a combustion engine. At first you're feeding the engine over and over again with a starter, but once it gets going it can be self-sustaining provided you don't stop with the fuel (books, in this case).
Having a number of books out is helpful as well. With one or two books people may look and go "Eh, it's just some nobody." It's much harder to ignore 4 large books with good reviews.
And I'm doing Twitter and Facebook marketing, but all grassroots. Not sure how much that contributes. I'd estimate less than word-of-mouth, which to date is still the best advertising for books that there is. Someone likes your book and tells someone else? That's a much better "advertisement" than any other form, because it's not from the writer, it's from a happy reader.
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Glad to hear it's going so well.