As promised, I will share with you (a VIP Reader List member) the results of the survey that was included at the end of the serial posts of Lust, Money & Murder 6 on my blog.  If you were one of the 117 readers who completed the survey, I want to thank you for that, as the information was invaluable to me.

First let me briefly tick off the benefits I see of serially publishing Advance Review Copies (ARCs) of my novels:

• It gets the books into your hands faster.
• It causes readers to visit my blog every day, which helps you not forget about me in between books (some of you do, believe me--more about this below).
• It puts me on a tighter writing and publishing schedule and makes me more efficient.  Once I had the outline for LM&M 6 done (mostly in my head), it took less than three months to write and publish the 100,000 word book, start to finish.  I think I could write three books a year this way, taking one month "breaks" in between them to brainstorm and create the new outlines.
• This approach gives me an edge over traditionally published authors who have contracts with the largest publishing houses.  Due to their relatively slow publishing schedules (one book per year) and the associated bureaucracies, most of them would find this way of working extremely challenging.
• Readers of the serial blog posts help catch typos and continuity errors (thank you for that!)
• Last but not least, as an author, this approach gets me more involved with readers, causes more interaction between us.  Readers are everything to me--without you, I really have no reason to write.

What about the negatives? you may ask.  Isn't this literary "hire wire act" stressful?  Aren't you afraid of writing yourself into a corner?  And won't you lose a lot of sales publishing books on your blog for free?

First, I was also afraid it would be stressful, but this didn't turn out to be the case.  Having now written more than 25 books, I find that I make very few significant changes to my manuscripts between the first and final drafts these days (aside from correcting typos, etc., of course).  Also, I don't believe in this notion of "writing yourself into a corner."  Think about real life--you must solve all your problems when they occur, using the resources you have at hand--none of us can go back in time and change anything.  So, if you, as an author, feel like you have written yourself into a corner, I don't think you are being creative enough.  Readers are always impressed if you can get your hero out of an impossible-seeming jam.

Finally, about the question of lost sales--I will discuss this below with the relevant data.

Here are the survey results:



This proves my point - more than half of the readers who read Lust, Money & Murder Book 6 on my blog have just finished Book 5 ("Was directed there at the end of Book 5" at top).  This implies most are new readers of mine, meaning that they probably just started reading the series a few weeks or months ago.  Since the series has been published and selling well for almost five years, you would think a lot more old readers would be lapping up a free copy of Lust, Money & Murder 6.  Many of them simply don't know it's available.  Unless they have signed up to my VIP Reader List, I have no way of contacting them (Amazon nor any other ebook retailer will share their contact information with authors--we have no idea who buys our books unless you, the reader, contacts us).  I am constantly amazed when, at least once a week, someone contacts me on the social networks and says, "Hey, Mike, LM&M Book 4 is out?  Wow.  I didn't even know!"



This was also a little surprising, especially a couple of rather--how shall we say?--aggressive commenters who said they would not buy my books anymore if I publish an ARC serially again.  I found this a little odd, as all they have to do is simply ignore the serial posts and buy the book the normal way when it comes out.  Maybe they don't have the required willpower, which I suppose is a compliment to me.  But it seems like they could practice a little more self-control, knowing that this approach results in me putting out more books, faster, which is ultimately what they want.

The comments that readers made in response to all these questions are pasted in below.

Thanks again to all of you who took the time to complete this survey and of course a huge thanks to all of your who buy and read my books!

Mike

P.S.  A huge thanks to my Forbidden coauthor Devika Fernando, who "pre-proofread" my serial posts every day and caught tons of errors.