Yesterdays Gone: SEASON TWO (THE POST-APOCALYPTIC SERIAL THRILLER) (Yesterday's Gone)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

    Dear Reader,

    Welcome back!
    I’ve gotta admit, I was afraid this serialized fiction experiment wouldn’t work.
    I’d read countless people posting stuff on the web how serialized fiction wouldn’t sell, people don’t want their books in chunks, and there’s just no market for it. And as we pushed the publish button on Season One, I was afraid they might be right. That nobody would read our book.
    Thank God I was wrong. Actually, Thank You, for proving me wrong.
    That’ll teach me to put faith in what people predict on the internet!
    Yesterday’s Gone was a huge success for us!
    We had the Number One Free Horror eBook for the first week of November with Episode One , and sales of Season One are still going strong. And most importantly, reader response has been great! People are digging the story and the format. Which is cool, because we’ve got more serialized stories to tell!

    SEASON TWO
    We’re kicking off this season with Yesterday’s Gone: Episode Seven .  
    Season Two will consist of Episodes 7 − 13, with a new episode every Tuesday starting on January 10, 2012. After Episode Thirteen, we’ll do another compilation, offering Season Two as one eBook, just as we did with Season One , for those who prefer to buy the story in one download.

    LEARNING THE ROPES
    If last season was an experiment, we took careful notes and hope to make this season even better.
    We learned a few lessons last time around, which I’ll share here in case you like peeking behind the curtain (you pervert!)
    The first thing we learned is that people don’t like to wait a whole month between episodes. I should’ve considered that before we launched Episode One last summer. People don’t want to wait, as evidenced by early reviews, and it was one of our only early criticisms.
    So this time we’re going to go with a weekly release schedule, so you don’t have to wait nearly as long.
    Then there’s the issue of pricing episodes.
    Originally, we released single episodes at .99, far too low for us to make a profit unless we sold a bunch! Amazon’s pricing works as such — if you sell your books below $2.99, you only get a 35 percent cut of the sales. So books at one dollar work out to about .35 per book . . . split between Sean and I. You can’t survive very long as a writer on that kind of money. We would have to raise prices.
    We were hesitant to sell the single episodes at the $2.99 necessary to get a 70 percent cut, though, because we didn’t want to charge almost $18 to experience the book.  
    We were in sort of a catch-22. We want people to experience the book as it’s meant, episodically. However, we’d be unable to pay our bills doing that. And we need to keep the lights on in order to write more. So we had to come up with a compromise.  
    And this is it what we came up with:
    Episodes are .99 UNTIL we come out with the compilation of all the Season Two episodes in one book. That way, if you want to experience the book episode-by-episode, you can do so during its six-week run for just .99 per episode.  
    After that, we’re raising the single episode prices to $2.99. This rewards you, the regular reader and early adopter who ran out and got the book right away, without penalizing anyone else, as you can still buy the full Season Two compilation on the cheap, without having to fork over $18 for the whole season.
    It’s all about choice, and we believe in giving you a choice in how you want to experience Yesterday’s Gone.

    THE CHALLENGE OF COMING BACK
    Aside from the logistics of selling books, we also had to think of a way to approach the Season Two opener. Do we pick up right after events of the cliffhangers? Doing that would mean dragging out parts of the story that we wanted to move from point A to point B. We also wanted to open with a cool scene that puts you right into the action.
    Season Two picks up five months after the events of Season One.
    Things have changed, and part of the fun (I think) is the mystery of what has happened in the months after the cliffhangers. Writing it this way ratcheted up the suspense in a way that wouldn’t of been possible had we simply picked up from the second we left off.
    Additionally, it allows us to move the story along so we can deliver answers sooner. Because something else we learned last season is that YOU HAVE QUESTIONS!  

    “WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING?”
    Nothing was more fun than opening my email over the past few months from readers