FEATURES
About
Works
Blog
About
By day, J.C. Staudt dons a collared button-down and works as a web developer and graphic designer. He's been writing stories since childhood (and actually finishing them since a few years ago). The folder of abandoned tales he produced as a young writer is unlikely to ever see the light of day, though.
Somewhere along the line, he took up the notion that he ought to see one of these stories through to the end. Naturally, for his first novel, he chose the biggest, fattest story he’d ever attempted, a multi-threaded post-apocalyptic fantasy epic called The Infernal Lands.
This website is intended to serve as a chronicle of his adventures in self-publishing, his thoughts on writing, and his development as an individual encumbered by the double-edged sword of creativity.
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Unnamed Project
Draft Complete
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Unannounced project (Book 1)
Draft Complete
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Mage Song (Book 4)
First Draft
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Unannounced Project (Book 2)
Outlining
Blog
Sales and Progress Update – First Half of 2017
I realized I hadn’t done a sales/progress update in six months, so I figured I’d wrap the first half of 2017 into a single post. Kindle Direct Publishing recently overhauled their author dashboard and made a lot of improvements to the way data is handled and displayed. As a result I’ve all but abandoned the[…]
Cover Reveal and New Series Announcement – The Solumancer Cycle
One of the hardest things I have to do as an author is hold back on announcing the new shiny. Being excited about a set of manuscripts you’ve been sitting on for the better part of a year and having to keep it to yourself is torture. Therefore it is with effervescent pleasure that I[…]
Awakener is Here!
At long last, Book Three in my Mage Song series is here! Awakener is available on fine ebook retailers everywhere (Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, Smashwords), and will shortly be available in paperback. Here’s the blurb and first chapter: Magic fades. Darkness rises. Darion Ulther and his family have carved out a simple life for themselves in[…]
Sales and Progress Update – November and December 2016
Things have slowed over the last two months, as expected. My Mage Song series is still selling better than any of my other stuff, so no complaints there. I sold 1,200+ books in November and somewhere between 500-600 books in December. So far January has settled a bit further, but Awakener releases at the end[…]
Sales and Progress Update – October 2016
Best. Month. Ever. Literally. After selling fewer than a hundred books per month for the first year and a half of my self-publishing career, my latest series has taken off. Lessons learned: it’s important to write well, but it’s just as important to write stuff people want to read. For the fourth month in a[…]
Sales and Progress Update – September 2016
Thank you. Just… thank you. To the thousands (yes, that’s thousands, plural, and I’m still in disbelief) of readers who have picked up one or more of my books. This month, for the first time ever, it has become unwieldy to count my exact unit sales. Suffice it to say my writing income has tripled[…]
Sales and Progress Update – August 2016
I continue to be amazed, astonished, floored, and [insert myriad other adjectival synonyms] about the direction in which things are moving. Amazon-only sales further increased from 344 units in July to 464 in August across all my titles, and now nearly halfway through September it seems sales will surpass that record yet again. In doing[…]
Sales and Progress Update – July 2016
I could not be more pleased with the way things are going. As I mentioned in my last update, Amazon-only unit sales doubled in June from my previous monthly average (143 books in June, compared with 50-80 books per month over the previous several months). Well, in July, sales doubled again. On Amazon alone, people[…]
Sales and Progress Update – May & June 2016
I have been editing for close to three weeks now, and not a day passes where I can’t wait to get back to writing. I’m outlining a new Urban Fantasy series as I edit, and as a result I’ll have the most detailed scaffolding I’ve ever created for the first three books in the series[…]
Sales and Progress Update – April 2016
I am absolutely terrible at keeping up with my blog. This is known. There’s always so much else to be done, I kind of forget about staying up on my progress posts. That’s what this is about though, so let’s dig in. Since my last sales update in December 2015, I’ve written a serial and[…]
Cover Reveal – Children of the Wastes
Children of the Wastes, Book Two in the Aionach Saga, won’t be out for a few months yet. Nevertheless, it’s time to officially reveal the cover. I had this amazing piece of artwork commissioned at around the same time as the cover for book one in the series. The artist, Peter Ortiz, has done covers[…]
Sales and Progress Update – November and December 2015
The holidays hit hard and didn’t stop this year, so it’s been a while since I’ve posted an update here. I spent almost all of my “author time” these last few months writing, and virtually none of it on editing or marketing. As a result, I now have three complete novels in three different series[…]
I’m Still Here!
I write every day. I’ve been in the habit for a couple of years now, yet I haven’t had a new release since early October. Lately I’ve been so focused on getting new stories down that I haven’t really wanted to stop and edit for any significant period of time. I’ve finished two novels and[…]
Sales and Progress Update – October 2015
I’m a little late posting this one, but October sort of flew by. It was a month of much rejoicing, as Driftmetal IV came out and provided me with a big spike from pre-order sales. Including those, I sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 books in October. I’m not sure off-hand, but I think[…]
How Not to Get Meatgrindered
I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the Smashwords ‘meatgrinder’ and the difficulty some people have had with it. I came to the self-publishing world from a web design background, but I figure the layperson might benefit from a simplified explanation. I have now published seven books through Smashwords without encountering a single formatting-related issue.[…]
Sales and Progress Update – September 2015
Things slowed down in September, sales-wise. Although my perma-free book, Driftmetal, hung out in the Top 20 of the Steampunk and Cyberpunk categories on Amazon almost all month, sales settled into a trough. On the positive side, Driftmetal IV comes out tomorrow, and the book’s pre-order sales alone will be enough to eclipse all of September’s[…]