News from Editor's Desk

I've published a new I. C. Talbot short story: Bozo's Catch.

It's another post-apocalyptic tale, this one about an old woman and her dog. Belle and Bozo are traveling the countryside, hoping to find other people. At first this doesn't work out very well. Then they find a high-tech rest area and Bozo makes a great catch. This might not make life easier for Belle, but it makes it a whole lot more interesting.

I'm very pleased with this one, it didn't require much editing, just a little smoothing over and some added details.

Bozo's Catch -- Amazon US

Bozo's Catch -- Amazon UK

The Works of I. C. Talbot Exclusive on Amazon

There are hundreds of short stories by I. C. Talbot in my files. So getting them published has been a large project. Including the fact that I needed to take care of my parent's estate, The Hoard that occupied their property, my farm, my animals and my family, I didn't get very far. In addition, there weren't any sales on any of our  published e-books, even though I had them distributed as widely as possible.

So last year I started moving the stories out of different vendor sites and I enrolled them a few at at time into Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program. I did some free days here and there, but never got any pages read, which is where the money currently is - each page read is worth about 1/2 of 1 cent.

That's how 2016 proceeded - a handful of freebies, no read pages until December when Digging Out got some attention as a free e-book and we got a pulse on pages read to the tune of 293 pages or $1.46.

January we got 542 pages read, for $2.71 and a couple of sales. But most of all, the short stories started climbing the charts and we got halo reads as people discovered the other stories. February was a disappointment, dropping down to fewer than 300 pages read and a couple of sales.

But this month we are already more than 1k pages read and there are quite a few sales of the newest short story "The Hide Out" which is enjoying a bump in ranking: 

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #41,503 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#57 in Kindle Store > Kindle Short Reads > 45 minutes (22-32 pages) > Literature & Fiction
#161 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary Fiction > Short Stories
#230 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories > Women's Fiction

So I've started publishing more short stories. I think I can get two or more new ones out a month, and if Kindle Unlimited continues to be successful, I'm going to leave them in Unlimited and publish paperbacks with the earnings.

This isn't the first time I've tried this, but this is the first time it's worked this well. I do have to keep in mind that this is reading season, and sales will fall as the weather gets better. But if I can continue to provide fresh stories, I think I can keep the collection visible.

The New Year - 2017

I. C. Talbot - Author

Several years ago, this was my mother's blog. She posted a few things and gathered a few readers. It was kinda cute.

Then she passed and I created a publishing company from her blog "Icy Road Publishing" and polished up a few more of her short stories and published them.

A couple years later, I changed e-book vendors from Smashwords to Draft2Digital and started a newsletter "Bookstop Central" which I hoped to use to market her work and mine. When that didn't work out, I moved her stuff over to Kindle Unlimited and deleted all of it from other markets.

Success was limited, because I was busy taking care of my stepfather, my husband, her estate, Dad's property and my farm. It was a grueling run of four years that left me completely wrung out.

So it's 2017 and I'm finding that I can breath again.

I have to say this - Smashwords was a pioneer e-book vendor, they opened doors for a whole lot of authors. Unfortunately, some of those doors have closed, or have gatekeepers who frown upon certain types of e-books.

Not for me to judge how others choose to make a living. But 'Plain Vanilla' authors like myself and my mother can't compete in a market of red hot e-books. So we had to go elsewhere.

Draft2Digital has proven to be a better vendor for little-old-us because e-books coming from them aren't automatically slapped with ratings restrictions. My e-book Impressive Bravado has risen on the iTunes site as a free e-book until it gets more than a download a day and more than 500 copies went out last year. that's pretty impressive for a small publisher.

Also found out that the Chinese have taken over the URL for this page, K. A. Jordan and a couple variations. Phooey. It would cost several grand to rebuild what we had back in 2012 when I started focusing on the publishing company.

So we'll start over with this blog and let them keep what they've taken. We need to update every single e-book to drop the old ULR, but more people hit those pages on Facebook than have ever looked at the URLs.

As things develop, we will update this blog and also the Facebook page. So please like Icy Road Publishing on Facebook.

And welcome to the New Year.