The Abyss Series

For all those who are interested in numbers. I’m going to talk about a few interesting facts. But, first, a little context.

When I began writing the Abyss series (Escape from the Abyss), I had planned on up to 20 books. I’m sure there are a bunch of readers out there reading this, thinking, “Thank god he cut it back.” Anyway, I wrote the first book and put it up on Amazon for sale. At the time, I was selling wide, which means that I was not exclusive to Amazon, and the book was available on other sites for sale (including libraries). Then, I ran some Ads and evaluated the income, and after a month, I shut off the Ads because it’s almost impossible to make money on one book of an unfinished series. But I put out book two about three months later and started up the Ads again. The same problem occurs when a series has only a couple of books, but I had more data to see how this was going to go. By the time I put out book 4 (The Encounter), I was at the end of 2023, and I had sold quite a few of The Archons. After The Encounter, I put the series on hold for a bit because I had another series that didn’t get any love (The Traveler series, which only had one book at the time). I did some analysis on the sales of each series and decided that I needed to cut them back so I could wrap up both series by the end of 2024.

I analyzed The Traveler series (which starts with Desperate Action) and decided that I could wrap this up with a trilogy (two books wouldn’t cut it). I cut out a serious amount of story, but I was able to get the series done, and I have material for a follow-on trilogy if I want to do it in the future. When I came back to the Abyss series, I analyzed the story ideas I had jotted down and chose the best of them. Then I played a “What if” game of “What if I wrote only nine books?” then “What if I wrote seven?” I fell into seven total books for the series just so I could complete it by the end of the year. Nathanael was a no-brainer. I had to have that book because The Tome was already published, and the Revelations section was already put in place to make sure there was that story. The final book was also a no-brainer. There has to be a conflict between good and evil. That’s the whole premise of the story. Hopeless was a combination of a few stories for which I had ideas. That was used to bridge Nathanael to Final Match.

Back to the metrics for a moment…

Now that I’ve had all seven books completed and have run Ads for a month (Final Match was published back in September), I have some stats. Unfortunately, the read-through rates are really messed up. The problem is due to the fact that some of the readers came back (Yeah, like that’s a problem) to read the next book they had not read before. To make matters more complicated for myself, I switched back to Amazon exclusive so I could use Kindle Unlimited. Some readers had originally purchased the eBook before, then read the next book in line under KU (the smartest thing to do).

So, if I only go by the purchases and KU reads of the past month, I have more sales of Nathanael than I do of Secrets of the Tome. The KU reads are out of whack too. If I take the life-time stats, I have almost 500 sales of Archons (These are eBook sales), and only 81 sales of Secrets of the Tome. Which is an 18% read-through rate. If I only look at KU reads of the past month, the read-through is 32%, which is pretty good. The read-through of the remaining books is 53% and up. Some show 115% because people bought one book on Kindle and read the next on KU, which is OK.

The only solution to get an accurate accounting is to let the Ads run for months and allow the KU reads and sales to level out. The Archons purchases are going to be beyond Secrets for at least a year. Maybe Secrets will catch up, maybe 18% is the real read-through (I don’t think that’s the case, because the current KUs keep increasing).

Anyway, here are a few story ideas that did not make it into the series (warning: could be minor spoilers):

• Parts. The crew of the Dark Wolf needs ammo and parts. They get into a stand-off between the crew of the Resolute over the industrial 3D printer. This was incorporated into Hopeless.
• On Strike. The engineering department decides to go on strike. Captain Alastor has a choice: give in to their demands or find volunteers to do their job. This was going to get ugly, and I was going to have a really old civilian ship swap their engineers with the Dark Wolf. The Dark Wolf engineers would not be happy about their situation and the civilian engineers would not be trained up to the more advanced systems on the Dark Wolf. This story was dropped from the series.
• Starvation. A food shortage causes the crew of the Dark Wolf to get creative. I did a lot of research on growing crops in space and what it would take to engineer special ships to do this. Maybe using grow lights and other methods of growing food in cramped spaces. For example, if you go to Utah natural meat’s website and scroll down, they show how they grow slabs of grass for their cows: https://www.utahnaturalmeat.com. This story was reduced and incorporated a little with Hopeless.
• Abandoned. The crew of the Dark Wolf stumbled onto an abandoned ship from the original Exodus colonists. This ship would be well preserved and contain secrets that were not revealed in the Tome. The story ended up being combined inside of Nathanael.
• Peace. The Archons send an envoy to beg for peace. The senators fall over themselves to accept, but Captain Alastor and Commander Evans are skeptical. The senators override them and set up a peace agreement, but the Archons have set a trap at the peace signing.
• Lost. The fleet is lost. The previous temple didn’t lead them to the next temple, and now they must backtrack and investigate where the real temple is located (They assume that the previous temple was one of the fake temples set up by the Archons as foretold in the Tome). This was incorporated into Nathanael.
• Spy. Someone (probably Commander Evans or Lieutenant Justina Brown) is sent on a mission to infiltrate an Archon mother ship. Some of the ideas for this book were incorporated in Hopeless and Final Match.

The names of these stories were working titles that I set up when I mapped out the series. I’m never sure of what I’ll use for a book title until I start writing it and come up with a cover. Also, the descriptions are just a broad idea. When I get closer to doing a book, I’ll jot down all kinds of ideas I can use inside the story to make it a full novel. Then I work on a rough outline to write from.

As you can tell by the number of stories I combined, I needed some of those themes to make the series whole. I also combined several temple discoveries into Nathanael. I had originally planned to have a book for each temple discovery, and other books placed in-between. When I compressed them down to seven books, I had already written four of them and still had about three temples to discover.

Overall, I think the series came out well. My favorite out of that series is probably Nathanael, although The Encounter was an interesting story to tell.

Future stories in the Archon universe

I don’t currently have any plans to write another set of books in this series, though I do have ideas rattling around in my head (most of the ideas I’ve jotted down). For a follow-on series, I would start with book 1, which involves the invasion of the ancient colonies. But, of course, you know how that will go. Can’t just move right in and take over in one book. Nope, gonna be a big disaster. That would put them in a defensive situation where they would have to struggle to overcome the Archons. What stories would be in the books? Not sure. There are so many ways to write that story. I’d have to throw down a bunch of ideas and see which ones have the best hooks.

There is also a possible story involving the original ancients. I could write a series about the Exodus and what REALLY happened. Ha! That could be a multi-book set on its own with their desperate struggle to escape from the Archons. It would have to be completely different from Escape from the Abyss. Their tech would be different, as would their culture. If you pay attention to the Prologues in each book, there’s a mini-story going on there. I would definitely incorporate those characters and those stories into a much deeper series. If I only wanted to write a companion book for this, it would probably end up being 200,000 words or bigger.

There is also room for other man-on-the-street types of stories. You know, the ones where the focus is very narrow. Someone’s life on an ancient world and how they are hiding from people that have been taken over by the Archons.

Well, back to my writing…