My biennial update

So, in case it’s not abundantly clear, I really only use this blog as a handy way for me to see new posts by other bloggers; my own content is scarce and probably not useful for anybody anyway.

However, it’s interesting for me to look back once in a while to see where I’ve been, so in that spirit I’m adding another entry covering the last couple of years.  Overall, 2013 was a very rough year; I ended up making less money year than I did in 2012--in fact, I only took in about half as much. This was in spite of the fact that I turned out 22 titles in 2013, much of that in the first half of the year (the vast majority of those were short stories, including several very short stories that I priced at 99 cents, in spite of what I’d said earlier about the uselessness of that price).  I shudder to think about what I would have made if I’d released fewer than that!

I did not release a novel in 2013; I’ve been working on one but Real Life threw me a lot of annoying curve balls in the last half of the year, so my production slowed dramatically.  Such is life.  The sales of the two romance novels that I had out already had become anemic, dropping more and more month by month, until my worst month ever, which was November 2013.  I sold a combined total of eight copies of my two full-length novels, if I recall correctly.  It was a far cry from the glory days in which I was selling a copy or two nearly every day; my best months gave me totals of 40 or 50, but those are long behind me and I was pretty sure that things were on a permanent downswing.

Keeping that in mind, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try something new, and I decided to go perma-free with the first of the novels.  The results were, frankly, stunning.  In December 2013 alone I gave away more than 13,000 copies of my first novel across all platforms; the vast majority of those have been at Amazon.  Has it been worth it?  Hell yeah. In the same time I sold 138 copies of the second novel.  Now I grant you, that’s a tiny percentage of those who downloaded the free one, but I’ll take it--that’s more than thirty times as many copies as I sold last month, so giving it away has made me a lot more money.  It helps that I’m writing in a popular genre--historical romance--and I’m not sure that this would work for every genre, but I can’t complain.  In addition to the raised profile--the first novel made it as high as #2 on the free list for the genre--it helped me get a lot more reviews.  In the first two years that it was out, I accumulated exactly two reviews.  Just in December I piled on ten more, so, as I said, I can’t complain. To be honest, I’m more than a bit confused and surprised at how this happened.  My first novel had been released two years before I made it free, yet it lingered in the subgenre top ten free list for about a month. I don’t know what made that particular book stand out in the crowd--it’s not as good as the second one (it was the first novel I ever wrote and it provided a real education) and the description is admittedly lackluster (something I’ve wrestled with ever since releasing it), yet there it sat. I can’t explain it and I guess I won’t question it.

For much of 2014, I continued to make good sales of the second novel based on the free downloads of the first one. During the summer, however, things slowed down to a relative trickle, and eventually I took my first romance title off perma-free since I wasn’t selling many of the second one anymore anyway. I saw no real difference in my sales that I would attribute to the pricing, but I had decided to try again with perma-free since I’ve also released several shorter titles since last summer. Unfortunately, Smashwords has not been able to get this published over at Barnes and Noble, so I lost the holiday bump that I enjoyed last year. That may have been the thing that pushes me to Draft2Digital instead; we’ll see.

In any case, I’ve been working with romance short stories under a pen name, all aimed at (apparently) grandmothers who find the language too salty in my other romances. You know, curse words like damn and hell. My new collection is doing well on Select, which is the only thing bringing in money at the moment. Sales are quiet but borrows are doing well, so I hope to continue with that for some time.

For 2015 I have several stories and a few novels planned for release. I’m also finally moving into contemporary romance this year, which is probably backwards from how I should have been doing this, but oh well. Better late than never.

Small steps

Whoa.  Blogger's interface has changed a lot since my last post.  Weird.

So my much-trumpeted success with Barnes and Noble last summer has continued to glide ever-downward like a jumbo jet which has run out of fuel.  My sales have slowed tremendously there; February was by far my slowest month in a year, and although March slightly improved, I also had two days without a sale in March.  That was the first time I've gone a day without a sale there since last July.  End of an era.

Oh well, I'm trying to not pay attention to the numbers.  Having said that, Kobo is partially making up for poorer B/N sales.  I'm definitely making more there than I was when going through Smashwords, so that's some progress.

Finally, I found a way to save myself some time, which always helps out.  One of the things I do to ease my conversion at Smashwords is to write in Word 97/2003, and I found out this morning that you can hack your computer's registry to add that as an option when you right-click to create a new document.  Thus I eliminated the step of creating a new docx file, then saving as 97/2003, then deleting the docx.  It's a small step, but it adds up.

Farewell 2012, Howdy 2013!

Well, I failed to even make a quarterly blog entry, which really raises the question of why I’m even bothering anymore.  Honestly, for me this blog is more a convenient way to keep tabs on new entries in the blogroll than anything else!  Oh well.  Perhaps I’ll keep it up for a little while longer, though I’m shortly planning to take things to the next level, as the cliché goes, and get my own domain along with my soon-to-be-formed LLC.  At that point I suspect that any time I spend on the web will be pretty much consumed by that.  Until then, however, here’s my 2012 in review!

Overall, I am very happy with how things are going now that I’ve finished my second full year of self-publishing.  I’m beginning to feel like I have things coming together more and more professionally; I have to laugh at how I started things out back in January 2011, when I uploaded my first title to KDP (I can’t remember what it was called back then, but whatever).  The errors I overlooked and didn’t even realize I was making have largely disappeared, and I’ve got the formatting/uploading process down to a near-science.  I’ve added Kobo to the retailers I’m working with directly (I’d had it on my to-do list, but it wasn’t until JE Medrick wrote about her experiences that I decided to give it a shot) and I've been fairly pleased overall; if nothing else, I’ve replaced Smashwords’ messy files with nicer-looking ones, which may explain why it seems I’m doing better with Kobo working directly.  Fall, frankly, was very slow—no different from lots of grumbling around the web, although it was still better than the first half of the year for me.

Since I never wrote my entry explaining why July was such an amazing month, allow me to fill in some details.  After a lot of research and soul-searching, I decided to make some major changes with my erotica titles.  I tried to make the covers and titles more tasteful—not that I was all that explicit in that way to begin with; I’m not one of those writers whose titles must exactly summarize the stories; e.g., “Sally F----s the Neighbor and Her Stepfather On the Porch”.  Most importantly, I raised my prices.  I’ve nearly eradicated the 99-cent price from my titles now; there are a handful left but everything else is 2.99 and higher.  That one change blew the roof off my Barnes and Noble sales, which have consistently and soundly beaten my Amazon sales.  Although I don’t discuss money often, I will say that in July I made over a thousand dollars just on B/N.  I was as surprised as anybody else, believe me.  The rest of the year was a slow decline, although as if by clockwork, December 26 started excellent sales on B/N again.  In any case, even a drop from that summer high point still had me earning significantly more than I’d been doing only a few months ago, so I can’t complain.  Strangely, my sales at Amazon have remained remarkably consistent.  In a way I guess that’s good, since I’m making the same money I had been before, but it is frustrating.  I can’t seem to crack that nut at all.  One unusual thing I’ve noticed is that my romance novels sell far, far better on Amazon than on Barnes and Noble, whereas erotica sells better on B/N.  Not that I’m burning up the charts, but I sell a novel nearly every day on Amazon, while weeks can pass between sales on B/N.

Overall, I’m still at about seven percent of what I’d need to do this full time, which has held fairly steady for several months now due to improving sales through Smashwords (Apple in particular has been warming up).  My royalties increased by over 600% this year, though I recognize that that's an artificially high number since I was starting from so little last year.  I'll have a better idea of growth after 2013, of course.  I didn’t meet every goal I set last year, but after two years of self-publishing I remain as committed to this as I was at the beginning.

So what’s in store for 2013?  I have several things planned.  First of all, I want to try and grow my Amazon business, and it appears that novels remain the way to do that.  Although I’m hoping to release three novels next year (all romance), I am going to restrain myself and only plan for two.  I also have a novella nearing completion which I’m planning to publish in January, as well as another one planned for the spring and a smattering of stories along the way as well.  In addition, I’m slowly working on a couple of nonfiction titles, though I have no specific date in mind for those.  In 2012 I released 12 titles and I doubt I’ll be able to match that this next year, but you never know.  I’m also going to take a stab at a translation and see how it sells; I’m fluent in Spanish so I feel pretty capable as far as that goes.  The hard part is deciding what would sell best to a Spanish-speaking market.  I’d also like to get off my lazy ass and publish through Omnilit/All Romance.  I’ve heard good things about the site, so it can’t hurt to try it out.  I can’t say the same about Google Play, which still looks like it would be far more trouble than it’s worth.  Finally, I’m also going to be instituting a new process for my novels which begins with getting the print version formatted before the e-book.  Of the two novels I’ve released so far, only one is in print, but I found that it was easier to catch errors in the paper copy than onscreen, so since I wanted to expand my print offerings anyway, this will kill two birds.  Overall, I expect 2013 to be very, very busy but quite satisfying as well.

Here’s to a happy, healthy and prosperous 2013 for us all!

Three things

1. I've come to the conclusion that social media--or rather, using social media to promote your writing--is about the biggest waste of time ever.  Seriously, even playing a video game would be better than Twittering or whatever; at least then you'd be giving your mind a break from your work.  When I was growing up, authors didn't have all the tools available nowadays, but that didn't keep me from reading a ton.  What kept me reading?  Good stories.

2. Google Docs, which I've just started using recently, is awesome.

3. I've quit my secure, high-paying government job for one halfway across the country which pays much less.  I did it for many reasons, but it has to be said that one of them is to make sure that I have enough time to devote to growing my business.  After making some significant changes this month, July has turned out to be amazing, but that will have to wait for another blog post.

Latest update

So, it’s been over three months since I last posted, which makes this a quarterly update, I guess!  Sales have continued well, if unevenly; I can’t seem to make any significant impression at Amazon although Barnes and Noble has continued to make up for it.  May, in fact, was by far my best month at B/N, giving me 20% higher royalties than the previous record.

Not surprisingly, the porn—I mean, erotica—still makes the most money overall, but that’s just due to the fact that I have more titles that are straight erotica (so to speak!).  The romance novels are still bringing in the most money per title, however, with one exception—last month I released an “erotic romance” which has been by far my best seller in the last several weeks.  That might be because it’s new, or it might be just because people like a spicy romance now and again, or both, most likely.  Considering it’s only a novella (about 22K words), I wasn’t sure what to charge for it, but I decided to try out 3.99, and sales have been doing well at a bit under 2 a day.  Of course I’m not going to get rich selling two copies a day, but if I had several of those all selling two copies a day (or perhaps more by benefiting from increased visibility via more titles) then it could add up nicely.  At this point I see no reason to drop the price to 2.99, and I’m certainly not going lower than that.  One thing I’ve become sure of over the last year is that the .99 price point is useless, coincidentally, 99% of the time.  Anyhoo, my thrillers/suspense are at the bottom of the ladder (not surprising since I only have a pair of stories from a yet-to-be-concluded novella), only surpassed (subpassed?) in their low sales by a paranormal novella from another series I haven’t finished.
 
The more I study what sells and what doesn’t, the surer I am that the future (for me) lies in writing romance.  I make no bones about wanting to make money writing, preferably a lot of it!  Thus it seems only common sense to concentrate on the best-selling genre.  I honestly never—and I mean NEVER—expected to write a romance, let alone a pair of them, but once I began, it turned out to be a lot of fun.  Right now I have one more historical novel that I’m planning in sort of a half-assed way which I hope to begin later this fall.  I’m just about finished with a follow-up erotic romance and have a few more in the hopper, and then finally I have a series of contemporary romances that I’ve been working on as well.  The biggest frustration is finding a decent cover artist.  If you want to find somebody who can design a thriller, paranormal or suspense cover, they crawl out of the woodwork.  I’ve found it a hell of a lot harder to find somebody who has done anything for romance—especially historical romance—that can match those from the so-called Big 6, however.
 
I’ve mentioned before my admiration for Ruth Ann Nordin, and I just have to say how wowed I was to watch the success of her first Regency romance over at Barnes and Noble.  So here was a book that was her first try at the genre, she did the cover herself, and one day I checked its ranking to see it at #16.  That’s right, SIXTEEN.  On the first page of results for Nook bestsellers.  Effing amazing.  It’s since dropped down, but last I checked it was still well below 1000.  And that’s the sort of thing I’d like to see for myself someday.

Gmail, italicized text and romance

So around a year ago Google froze my account (along with several hundred thousand other people, if memory serves) for about a week.  Last Sunday my Gmail account froze up and it's still out of order a week later.  Fortunately, last year I got smart and backed everything up on Hotmail, so this has been less of a problem than it might have been, but I think I've pretty much had enough of Gmail.  Too bad; it worked beautifully for years.

March has been fairly blah; sales are down from February although I really can't complain as I'm still headed for several hundred dollars at the end of the month.  Nowhere near many of the indie authors out there, but it's still amazing for me considering what I was pulling in a year ago.  And it's simple economics that things like this only go up, never down, right? :)

My breakthrough for the month--hell, the year--was that yesterday I found out how to set up a macro in Word to go through and replace all my italicized text with html markers.  Previously I had to go through the Word doc page by page and insert the markers myself (truth be told, until very recently I was doing so in a text document until I realized that I could do it much easier working directly in Word), but invariably I would forget to insert an end tag and thus screw up my formattting--something I wouldn't see until I was using the Kindle previewer.  So for my second novel, just this process of formatting my italicized text took hours.  Now, however, I should be able to have it done automatically, error-free, in literally seconds.  Huge improvement.

I released my second novel last month and I can see what Konrath, et al. have said: there's more money in novels than in other lengths of work.  Of course, the majority of my sales have come from my other works simply because I have more of them (I only have two novels up, versus over twenty shorts, novellas and collections), but looking at the income per title, the novels are clearly way ahead.  So far in March I've been selling two per day (not two each yet, unfortunately, but a total of two novels daily) from all channels combined.

2nd novel finished!

So at 5:59 AM, I finished the first draft of my second novel.  Things went differently for this one than the first one; for one, it took a lot less time.  The first one took around four months of actual writing, but this one I completed in under three months.  Also, I wrote this one entirely in order; on the first one I wrote whatever appealed to me at the time, which was nice in a way since if I felt blocked in a certain part I just went and wrote somewhere else.  However, it was much harder to remember where I was in the overall story, so things went more smoothly this time.

I was planning to do a formal update of how January went, but then I saw an email from Amazon this morning indicating that the "prior month" report may not be accurate.  I sure hope it was, because when I looked at it yesterday it showed that I had blown away December and that January was my best month yet by far.  Guess I'll have to wait to find out....

Partial update

So it’s frankly a real pain to try and figure out how well I did on Amazon in January; my monthly update will wait a few more days until they release the reports.  However, I can say with some confidence that January was very, very close to December, and that was my best month ever in terms of royalties.  February has started out more slowly, though still nothing to sneeze at.

Most significantly, however, I am thrilled to report that I sold 35 copies of the romance novel in January, and I’ve continued to see around one a day since then as well.  The followup should be finished in a week, so barring major misfortune I should have my second novel up for sale by March.  The two are standalone novels although they share the same location and some minor characters, so I’ll be selling them as part of a series (which eventually will have 4 books).  I’ll be extremely curious to see how the release of the second book—not to mention pushing them as books in a series—will affect sales.

More to come!

2011 in review

Well, it’s been nearly a year since I began self-publishing—I actually started in mid-January 2011, but we’ll call it a full year to make it easy.  Overall I’ve been very happy with how things have been going.  I’ve made some cash and learned a lot and I feel well-prepared to keep moving forward.  Here are some random thoughts:

My experience with KDP Select is mixed—I have one story and one story collection in the program right now.  My sales have been good, but I couldn’t say that they’re a direct result of any exposure I have in KDP Select, since it might just be holiday buying.  Also, I find it maddening that Amazon’s sales reporting is so mushy, lumping in free “sales” with paid sales.  I really prefer B/N’s system.  As I’d said in an earlier blog post, I think that for those with a wide variety of other books, Select may be a useful way to introduce a new title, so I may try it again in the future.

I’m planning to focus almost exclusively on novels in 2012.  I released my romance novel the second week in December and I’ve had 10 sales, which I am thrilled with—no marketing, no ads, nothing, and I still got 10 sales.  I fooled around with the price a bit; it’s currently at 3.29 but I’ve had it as high as 3.95 (and I actually had some sales at that price).  The followup book is well under way and I hope to release it in February or March.

I absolutely love the Kindle Fire I got for Christmas, but I have decided to buy all my new books from Barnes and Noble from now on.  Amazon doesn’t need my help, but I would like to do my part to make sure B/N sticks around for a good long while.

November was my best month all year, and just today I edged past that on Barnes and Noble (and I am guessing that I passed last month’s Amazon total earlier), so December now jumped into the number one spot.  It’s still not a huge amount of money coming in—enough to pay some bills, though, so I’m not complaining.  I’m earning about 3% of what I would need in order to write as a full time job.

My goals for 2012 (keeping in mind Dean Wesley Smith’s recent post about the difference between goals and dreams):  finish and release three more novels (thus a total of four on sale), as well as two stories and a novella I have on the back burner.  Considering that the 2^nd novel is about halfway finished, I think I’m making good time.  And as for dreams?  Well, I have plenty of those too, believe me.

Happy new year!

Today's big, huge, enormous Amazon news

So I'm not going to pretend that I know enough about self-publishing yet to say that I can fully appreciate the announcement of KDP Select this morning.  But in a nutshell, holy shit! :)  So you can put up a title exclusively at Amazon to be lent to Amazon Prime members, yet still get paid a percentage of a monthly pot of a half-million dollars.  AND you can choose 5 days every 90-day period to make that title free--thus stimulating downloads by non-Prime members?  Amazing.  Of course, this will work best for those who have other titles that the above will generate interest in, so it might be a tad early for me.  And I'm sure that even this will not sit right with some authors, based on the never-ending debate about pricing, lending and so on.  But I'm certainly going to be watching this closely, that's for sure.  Once I have a larger backlist available--I'm thinking a year from now--this could be huge.  For others, this will be huge already.

 

About the only downside I see at the moment is that it requires that the titles are not available elsewhere in the same format, though if I remember paper books are okay.  Thus you can't sell from B/N, Smashwords and so on, or even your own website.  For many authors who have books out through other available channels, I suspect it would be more trouble than it's worth to take down titles, but for somebody who's just about to put out a new one, this Christmas gift came early.

 

Very, very interesting day.

82,243

So I finished the first draft of my novel at 6:27 this morning, topping out at a bit over 82K words.  All told it took me about 4 months to write.  Now I'm going to get it to my beta reader (AKA my wife) and make some edits, hopefully finishing everything in time to get it up for sale by Christmas.

After that, I'm planning to begin work on another novel immediately.  I'm coming up on 11 months self-publishing and I've learned a lot from monkeying around with shorter works this year.  By Christmas 2012, however, I hope to have a total of four novels completed.  In other words, I'd like to write three more novels in 13 months, which should be doable given my performance on the first one.  I have one largely plotted out entirely, another roughly sketched out, and the third is still percolating a bit.

I saw a Kindle Fire at Target yesterday; although it looks kind of plain, I have to admit that it is pretty F'ing cool.  My son, of course, recognized it as yet another way to play Angry Birds, so I might skip buying it altogether since I'd never get to use it while he's around.

Getting close now...

I've made good progress on the novel; as of this morning I topped 78K words and I'm down to three chapters that remain unfinished.  I hope to have it entirely completed a week from today, which will give me not much time for editing, etc. before Christmas, but I'm hoping it can be done.

 

Happy Thanksgiving! 

Making money

The only reason I don't have Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog in my sidebar is because her husband Dean Wesley Smith recaps almost every post of hers on his blog, as far as I can tell.  And my blog list is long enough as it is.  Okay, two reasons.

Anyhoo, one of her recent entries had one line in particular which really caught my eye:

Now, consider this: Traditional publishers never expect to  make a lot of money on one book.  They expect to make a little bit of money on every book.

I doubt I'll ever be up there with Locke, Hocking and Konrath.  But that doesn't mean that I can't keep working, adding to my digital shelf space, and in the end do well, bit by tiny bit.

The novel is being a stubborn son of a bitch, by the way.  It absolutely refuses to finish up; as of today I'm just under 73K words.  When I first started, I imagined that it would be about 50K.  Then I thought it would hit 60K.  Now I'm afraid that it will surpass 80K, even after I trim it a bit during revisions. 

I guess I don't mind too much, but it's a bit surprising since I wrote my 32K novella earlier this year and at the time struggled to write that much!

OK, back to work!

October update

So after a lot of thought, I decided to release a series of short stories in October--things I had thought of doing quite a while ago, but had decided not to do.  Why not?  Because the idea was for an erotica series with a smuttily amusing title, taking some sex scenes that I'd included in my earlier works and remixing them.  Frankly, writing sex is about the most boring thing I've ever done, and I wasn't eager to spend more time doing that when my novel still isn't finished.  However, I came to the conclusion that if I'm really going to treat this as a business--which I am--then I can't afford to pass up an opportunity to publish something that will sell.  And if there's one thing I've seen this year, it's that sex sells.

So I took two weeks and whipped out seven new titles (well, "new" is not exactly correct, but I was at least rearranging what I'd previously written).  The results?  Behold the glory of my first-ever graph:

I now have 22 titles out across Amazon, B&N and Smashwords, ranging from single stories at .99 each to bundled collections of stories (2.99-3.99), novellas (2.99) and bundled novellas (5.98).  At the risk of jinxing it, I can report that November is on a pace to be my best month yet in terms of both sales and royalties.

The novel is still not completed (due in part, of course, to the two-week break I took to write smut) but as of this morning has hit over 65K.  It just won't stop!  I'm expecting it to top out at about 75K, and I still hope to have it finished by Thanksgiving, although that's a lot less sure than it was a month ago.

OK, back to work!

September update: meh

So September's sales continued the downward slope that August started (and frankly, October is starting off to be even worse than that), so no great news there.  One day I'll figure out how to do graphs and put up a fancy jpg showing my sales trend, which will no doubt look like a mountain:  up, up, up and then down, down, down.

Oh well.  The novel is going great, so it's hard to get too worked up over sales of stuff I don't really care about.  I'm at about 56K words as of today, which is kind of amazing, since the longest thing I'd written previously was a 30K novella.  It's so long that I keep coming across stuff I'd even forgotten writing, which makes for an interesting experience.  I expect to have it largely completed in two or three weeks, which will put it at about 65K and three months of work.  Allowing time to edit, rewrite anything needed and so on, I'm still hoping that I can have it up for sale by Thanksgiving.

After that, I'm hoping to resuscitate something I started almost a year ago but haven't touched since.  It would be a shame to let this 5000-word seed just sit there without seeing if it could sprout into something more, however, so ideally I'd have another novel ready to go in late winter.

Thank you Irene!

So as I sit here in New England, watching the wind and rain wreak havoc on the trees outside, I have to say that it appears that the hurricane really helped my Barnes and Noble sales!  August has been pretty slow, with only 2 or 3 sales a day on B/N, but yesterday I had five sales.  Today I had six by 11 AM; I can only assume that people were loading up the Nooks so they'd have something to read when the power went out!

June/July update

Wow, it's been a while.  I'm posting less than Aaron Niz, for God's sake!  The good news--at least I consider it good news--is that the time I used to spend blogging (occasionally) and reading the blogs of others (frequently) has dropped dramatically over the last few months because I'm trying to do as much writing as possible.

So things have been going pretty well, though August has turned out to be a very slow month so far.  Fortunately, from what I've seen it's pretty slow for everybody, so I'm not too concerned about it.  I am not to the point where I'd be able to go a full day--let alone longer--without checking my sales, but I'm also not to the point where I'm going to spend much time on that outside my morning routine.

I now have 14 titles up on Amazon, B/N and Smashwords, ranging from short stories to novella collections, and I'm now working on my first full-fledged novel.  It's a romance, and I'm totally not kidding.  Not just any type of romance, but a historical "sweet" romance.  You could look at this in a few different ways.  One, of course, would be to view this as an attempt to just cash in on the popularity of romance novels.  To that, I would say, duh.  However, after reading a few (okay, several) of them, I got an idea for one that is turning out to be a hell of a lot of fun to write.

After the horror of April's slow sales, May turned out to be pretty good, but June absolutely rocked with 498 sales.  July's number was quite a bit slower, but I sold more expensive titles and actually made more cash, so I certainly can't complain.  I'm still small potatoes, of course--even compared to authors that, frankly, nobody has ever heard of, but who claim to pull in thousands of dollars a month--but considering that I started all this in January, I'm happy with my progress.

Although I've seen that you can make (a little) money selling stories and novellas, everybody says that the money is in novels, which is why I've decided to focus on that from now on.  Aside from the romance, I have a series of middle grade novels I'm planning; ideally I'll have the romance and one of the middle grade books up and running before the holiday season.

Let's see...a couple of final thoughts.  Dean Wesley Smith's blog has turned into my favorite source of guidance, by far.  Konrath's has really sunk in my opinion not only because he so rarely posts, but because he has shown himself to be kind of an ass sometimes.  Ruth Ann Nordin is also a really interesting example of someone I think should be emulated--from what I've read, she pretty much just keeps her head down and keeps plugging away, writing what she wants to.  That has allowed her to make a pretty good salary--in a recent blog post she said that she'd take in 84K through September--which means that she's on track to make six figures this year.  Pretty cool.

Totally unrelated, but I continue to be astounded by how many indie authors pile everything into promotion for their debut novels, which almost invariably is priced at 99 cents.  I keep forgetting where I saw this first (Kathryn Rusch's site, perhaps?), but promotion is almost always one of the least effective ways to get somebody to buy your book, according to various studies.  It seems to me that the time and effort put into extensive blog tours, swag creation (am I the only one who doesn't get the idea of making promotional bookmarks for the release of an e-book?) and so on would be better served by, you know, writing the next one.

But then, even the basics seem to escape some people.  Just yesterday I read on the Pubit help board from a guy who shared his technique to make an appropriately-sized cover image for Pubit.  It involved finding the cover on Amazon, printing that on paper, then scanning the paper at the appropriate size.  I'm no Amanda Hocking--nor even Ruth Ann Nordin--but even I knew better than that.

Okay, back to work.  I don't expect to post again until the romance is finished.  That one has remarkably little content that could cause trouble on the job, so I may even be able to share the name!

Let It Be

So I'm not a Beatles fan; it probably has to do with the rabid love of all things Beatles-related that a particularly unpleasant former coworker had.  But I digress; the title works for me today.

I am finishing this novella that I've been working on for months now, and by last week I'd had it nearly completed except for one unbalanced chapter.  I'm not a very detailed planner, but by luck all the chapters had come out at essentially the same length (two, by coincidence, turned out to be exactly the same length after the first draft).  Except for the first chapter, which stubbornly refused to grow.  I can't tell you how much I tried to add some stuff to the end of that chapter, trying to fill up the space between the end and the beginning of the second chapter.  I even considered breaking up all my other chapters and redistributing things to make it more even, but nothing was working and I was left with several perfectly balanced chapters and one stunted beginning.

Well, then my mom came to visit, my son had a birthday, and we were on vacation for about a week and a half during which I did nothing at all for this story.  By the time I got back to it, I had a sudden inspiration and was able to add material to the beginning of the first chapter, instead of at the end.  Now I know it must sound silly, that my great breakthrough was to add material to the beginning instead of the end, but for some reason it hadn't struck me before.  Now, however, that material is some of my favorite stuff in the entire novella.  I'm trying to concentrate on writing something--anything--every day, but I'm convinced that I wouldn't have come up with that if I hadn't left it alone for a while.

Where in the world is Bakari Akil?

So Bakari's blog went dead quite some time ago, but I see that he has continued to publish.  Come on back, Bakari!!!

Recommendations

So I've been keeping my nose to the grindstone for the past several weeks, and I'm pleased with my efforts.  My recently set goal has been to write 1000 words a day, which is not always easy to do since I have a day job too, but more often than not I've been able to hit the goal.  Sales were very slow in April but have improved slightly in May.  Strangely enough, Amazon has now surpassed my Barnes/Noble sales for the month, which is very unusual for me.

I've read a few very interesting books on writing lately:  Stephen King's On Writing, which I had several years ago, then gave to a friend who stopped answering my emails two years ago.  Very weird, and makes me wish I'd kept my copy of the book!  In any case, I found it to be fascinating although not as much about writing as I'd expected.  Very inspirational, however!

Another great book was The Art of War for Writers by James Scott Bell.  If you haven't read it, you should.  I've read many, many books on writing over the years, and this has been the best one I've found.

Finally, a slim but entertaining and useful book was Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing.  If you read the reviews on Amazon, you'll see that many, many people are (rightfully, I'd say) incensed at having paid ten bucks for this tiny book.  If you do like I did, however, you can read it for two bucks:  Go to a Barnes and Noble, buy yourself a coffee and get the book off the bookshelf.  Easy.  Even easier (though less fun) is to go here, where you'll find a summary of all ten rules.

It was almost exactly one year ago that I started thinking about writing again.  We were posted overseas, and in the evenings I would take my son to the park across the street, where he'd play various games that usually involved throwing things at other things.  Good times.  While he was busy assaulting signs and lampposts with twigs, I would roll things around in my mind, trying to figure out the plot for the one story that I had in mind at the time.  I distinctly remember thinking "Jeez, what would I write after that?" since I only had the one idea to work with.  Now, I have a list of things that would literally take me years to finish; actually sitting down and doing the work helped me generate new ideas.  I'm still at only one percent, but I'm feeling good!