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!

A new focus

Wow, March was some month.  Some interesting things have happened that I would have loved to comment on before:

Amanda Hocking's 2 million dollar deal:  Good for her.  Far be it for me to disagree with all the naysayers out there, but after considering it, I think it was a genius stroke.  At the rate she writes, four books will soon represent a very small portion of her writing, and she'll benefit immensely from the attention that professional backing will get her.

The Greek Seaman:  What an idiot.  I am a cynical person who can't help wondering whether the whole thing was a stunt to draw attention to the book review blog; interesting, nevertheless.

I had a good month for sales--more than last month, and just this morning I got an email from Amazon notifying me about the impending deposit from January's sales.  Best twelve bucks EVER!  :)

I remember reading an old post of Aaron Niz's in which he referred to getting out of bed early every day, his head just buzzing with ideas, and that's how I feel now.  I've spent the last month trying to focus less on the day-to-day numbers (which is why I removed the counter from the blog) and more on production, with a really long view.  I have a great job right now, but the frequent travel is a ginormous pain in the ass, my family and I would love to stop moving around every two years.  Thus my goal is to keep working on my writing with an eye toward making a career switch down the road.  Obviously that could be a while--if I can do it in five years, that would be ideal, so that's what I'm aiming for. 

In March I made one percent of what I would need to make the switch.  Gotta start somewhere.

Hubris

Well, maybe hubris is a bit too strong a word, but still.  So my novella has not been selling well, and by that I'm being kind.  It's easily my weakest seller, and I finally caved last week to the truth:  the title was just not working for me.  I had saddled it with what I thought was a clever play on words, even though it really revealed nothing about the book at all, since I was convinced that my genius would shine through and pull readers in.  Well, last week I renamed it, giving it a plainer but more descriptive title, and while I wouldn't say I've had a flood of sales, it's definitely improved, pulling up alongside my others.  I heard a phrase once--"murder your darlings"--and I should have done that in the first place with my too-cute title.

I also took heed of JA Konrath's posting recently about monetizing your intellectual property.  I stripped out three stories from my collections that shared a similar theme and repackaged them, slapped on a new cover and set them free as a brand new collection (so to speak; I was very careful to label them as previously published).  I wasn't expecting a lot from it, but it did increase my space on the virtual bookshelf, and strangely enough that has been my best seller on Amazon this month.

Trouble for Barnes and Noble?

So this blog entry from Time magazine is very annoying.  The entire thing tries to connect Borders' bankruptcy to Barnes and Noble, implying that because one large chain went belly-up, B/N is next.  Funniest lines, in my opinion:

For now, Barnes & Noble seems to be far from its final chapter. The company still has about $900 million more in assets than debt.

Nevertheless, the writer tries to find shadows lurking everywhere, mentioning that B/N has had to close "a handful of stores in the past few years".  Yikes!

Gmail scare and February update

So, I was one of those 150,000 people affected by the Google glitch that you may have heard about; my Gmail account first appeared entirely empty and then my Google account itself became disabled on Sunday, meaning that I had not only lost access to my e-mail, but my blogs, photos, etc.  Fortunately things are already better and Google appears to have put back almost everything so far, so in the end it looks like no harm was done.

February, my first full month publishing, turned out to be a much better month than I'd anticipated, with 131 sales.  I am still unsure why things are so sluggish on Amazon compared to Barnes and Noble--for the entire month I only had 11 sales on Amazon, a handful on Smashwords, and the vast majority on B/N.

For March, I plan to release another novella in a different genre; more about that later, but in a nutshell I'm curious to see what effect--if any--there is on my sales when releasing work that is not strongly identifiable as "mine".  I know that many writers do quite well working in a variety of genres, but I have to imagine that the bar is set quite a bit higher for self-publishers.  We'll see...