Book?

I’ve probably said before that it’s a good thing I can’t respond to reviews on Amazon. Otherwise, I’d probably have one of those late-night incidents where I’m fortified by liquid courage and say something I shouldn’t. There’s a review from earlier this week about Next Time that isn’t bad and if I could respond, would actually be thoughtful and not a rant. The gist of the review was that Next Time was too long, could have been a short story, and didn’t need some of the characters. That part about being a short story is something I really do ask myself when it comes to writing a book: is this story worthy of being a book? Is it worth several months of my life to write, rewrite, edit, and publish? In the case of Next Time, the answer to those questions was a resounding yes. When I got the idea for the story I knew I had to write it, and it wasn’t going to be short. Besides, if I wrote a short story, how many people would end up reading it? Hundreds? It’s not like the short story market is any easier to get into than finding an agent or publishing with one of the big houses. Was the book too long? First clocked in at 125,000 words, while Next Time ended up around 85,000. Heck, I thought writing a book that concise was a major achievement. Useless characters? Again, those were deliberate choices. I used the Boston detectives in the first part of the story as an on-ramp for the later, more serious Federal investigation. It would’ve been jarring to have a Fed show up out of the blue and raised the question of why nobody else had previously investigated Miriam’s disappearances. And William’s deadbeat brother-in-law added color to the different timestreams - while William lived a stop-and-go life with Miriam, his sister Addie had the off-camera drama with Luke. Their turmoil provided contrast to the main love story with the message that other people lived a normal life and even without the challenges experienced by the main characters, sometimes that life and love weren’t pretty. William was mostly oblivious to the growing gap in his sister’s marriage, which helped illustrate his character and single-mindedness when it came to Miriam. I don’t normally respond to reviews, but I found this one interesting because the disagreements are things I consciously planned and executed, and I’d do it the same way again.

The 700 Club

First reached 700 ratings on Amazon this past weekend. If I look back at these posts on reaching certain milestones, it looks like the book is getting about a hundred reviews every four to five weeks. And it’s leveled out at 4.4 stars for quite a while now, even with the spate of lower ratings I mentioned a few weeks back. It’s amazing that the book has sold so many copies and received so many favorable ratings and reviews. Thank you so much to each person who’s read the book and provided their feedback. I started writing the book in July 2021 and finished the first draft in October of that year. Seems so long ago. What’s interesting is that after that draft, it took another two years to get the book in the hands of readers in October 2023. Lots of work went on between the first draft and the completed version. I was just looking at the files on my computer and saw one called ‘Prologue.docx’. I forgot how much I struggled with whether to include a one-page prologue to the book. Even now, I wonder if it would make a difference. It starts in the middle of the action, but then the narrative resets and takes you through the characters training to be astronauts and you don’t get to the point in the prologue until about two-thirds of the way through the book. Nah, I did the right thing by leaving it out. Anyway, 700 ratings is another milestone on the way to greatness!

Catch-22

I’m rereading my favorite book, Catch-22. I thought about picking up something new from the bookstore, but ultimately decided to pull one off the shelf. I haven’t read it in the 2020s, I don’t think, which is a shame. I should probably read it every other year, at the least. Joseph Heller wrote a masterpiece in 1961 that far predated the cynicism about military and conflict that became a built-in reaction during the Vietnam War. And the absurdity of the characters, scenes, and stories, was laid down in print almost a decade before Richard Hooker’s MASH, which in at least one published version included a blurb directly on the front cover comparing it to Catch-22. Heller’s book expertly weaves scenes and characters in a jumble of time and circumstance. For instance, early in the book Yossarian asks the question, “Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?” The next paragraph relates Snowden’s death, which isn’t described until much later in the narrative, and mentions characters involved in the incident who haven’t even been introduced into the story yet. The early mention of Snowden captures a scene out of sequence, but it works. The chapter titled “The Soldier Who Saw Everything Twice” is a masterclass in humor and makes me laugh constantly anytime I read it. Characters duck in and out of the story, a chaos that matches the setting. Catch-22 is a much-studied book and I’m not going into the deeper meaning of it all. You’ll have to discover that for yourself. The book is hysterical, irreverent, absurd, sad, and more than earns another read from me.

Goals Revisited

I should have done this a few weeks ago at the end of the third quarter, but I was busy doing other things. I thought it would be worthwhile to revisit the seven goals I made for 2025 as related to writing and publishing. Let’s take a look, shall we?

1.       Publish First as an audio book (dependent on bonuses) - not going to happen this year due to the dependency noted

2.       Publish Assignment Day - Also not going to happen for the same reason as #1

3.       Edit First Step and prep for publishing - Done. It’s ready to go, although I’ll probably give it another run-through when the time comes. I want to make sure there are no lingering things that I wish I’d changed later.

4.       Finish writing the first book in the new series - Done!

5.       Write the second book in the new series - Done! Hoping to finish writing the third book in the series by the end of the year

6.       Set a publishing date for First Step - Will be sometime in 2026. Also see #3.

7.       Set a publishing date for first book in the new series - Done! I published The Drop: Season One in September, followed by Season Two earlier this month.

All-in-all, not a bad year The three things somewhat out of my control (#s 1, 2, and 6) are due to finances. I chose to publish The Drop directly on Amazon, which meant I was able to get those two books done because it doesn’t cost anything. If I went with the publisher I used for First and Next Time, I wouldn’t have published anything this year. So, four out of seven regarding goals. That will be the final tally come December 31st unless I can somehow set a date for First Step (#6). Doubtful, but you never know. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

More on Ads

I figured I should follow up regarding my post last week on ads, clicks, and bids. As mentioned, I upped the bids for the ads, and results were marginally better. I did a brand-new ad for The Drop, with artwork showing the covers for the first two books in the series. The ad started strong on Friday, used just over half the budget on Saturday, and 30% on Sunday. Still better than the previous weeks. The ad for First declined over the weekend as well, using 100%, 75%, and 50% of budget each day. Next Time was the only ad that drained its budget all three days. Better results, for sure, but I’m also used to First using all the dollars allocated. Either I need to bump up the bid for that particular book or assess the target audience. I’ll try the former this weekend, since the target audience is hundreds of thousands of people and I’m pretty sure not all of them have seen the ad. And the more repetition the better, anyway. Also, and I might have mentioned this before, the ad budgets don’t run out as quickly during each day. Usually, the budget is gone by early afternoon, but if it all gets spent, more often than not it’s in the evenings. Why? I think it’s because I don’t link B&N in the ad anymore and those users were clicking at a much higher rate but not buying any books. In other words, a lot of wasted clicks and budget. Glad to see one of my theories has paid off.

Underway

The Drop: Season Three is off and running. I started late last week and wrote the first few chapters. I’d been working on some back story and characters, which is now all coming together in novel form. I like the first bit so far, which is a good sign. It’s also a different approach than I took to writing the first two novels, in that I came up with an idea I wanted to try. Let’s see if it works. What is that idea, you say? Maybe I’ll tell you later. Or maybe I won’t. I’m curious to see if people figure out what I’m doing and I’m a little reluctant to just straight up point it out. Ah, the mystery. Other than that, though, what are my plans and timing on this book? I’d like to say I’ll have it done by the end of the year. That’s two-and-a-half months from here, just over ten weeks. If I write every weekday and Saturday, which is unlikely given the upcoming holidays, I’ll probably come close if I get in a thousand words per day. That would put me at only 60k words, though, and my standard for these books is 75k. I don’t know, maybe I can get there. That would be nice since then I could get the book out by early February after editing (several times) and formatting. But enough blogging. Time to write a book.

Bids

I’ve been a little perplexed the last several weekends regarding the BookBub ads I’ve been running. Well, not all of them. Mainly the ads for First. As mentioned previously, you set a daily budget (if you want) and the ad runs until the budget is exhausted. How is the budget exhausted? In my case, I pay per click, which means each time someone clicks on my ad, it deducts the amount I bid from the budget. Historically, ads for First have blown through the budget by early afternoon each day they run. Lately, they’ve been lucky to use half of it. Kind of a mystery until today. This morning I drafted the ad to start tomorrow for the The Drop, a nifty little ad that shows both books, and noticed the recommendation for winning bids had gone up since I created the First ad. Not a ton of money, but certainly more than a few pennies. Those pennies clearly make a difference. I edited the ads for both First and Next Time to fall within the recommended range. If I was a betting man, I’d bet that this weekend goes back to normal and the budget drains each day. Mystery solved, I hope.

Season Two

The Drop: Season Two is now live and in the hands of readers. I did all the publishing things to Amazon last Thursday but didn’t make a general announcement on social media until Monday. Why? I didn’t want the news to get lost in the weekend shuffle. So far, so good, it seems. I’ve had a few orders and some Kindle Unlimited page accumulations. Speaking of which, this time around on KDP is a bit different from the first when I put out my Desert Sun series. I actually expect people to read these new books and the reporting from Amazon is almost live as far as copies ordered and KU pages read each day. It’s fascinating to see how the books are doing in real time. Plus, KDP tells you estimated royalties on the month to date in their dashboard, which is also nice since my other books only get reported weekly on copies sold. All of this is a lovely distraction, but it’s time to move onto the next book. I spent some time Saturday and Monday doing some thinking and taking notes about Season Three. I have the basic concept ready to go and now it’s time to execute. Meanwhile, I hope people enjoy the first couple of seasons in the series.

Finis

As predicted, I finished The Drop: Season Two yesterday. I wasn’t happy with the ending, so I changed it. Normally, I would’ve already figured it out, but for some reason I’d tried a couple of different iterations that just didn’t work. As with the first book in the series, I wanted a lead-in to the next one. I’m much happier with the change and it provides momentum for more drama. Overall, I think the book turned out well. I’ve been mulling ideas for the next two and how I want them themed and I think I’m on the right track. My current plan is to do at least ten books in the series, which will no doubt take a few years to realize. I don’t know that I’ll write them all consecutively, especially if inspiration strikes for something else that I just have to write. Which is bound to happen, given how my brain works.

Bits

Today’s post involves some bits and pieces of follow-up from previous posts. The ad I used last weekend for The Drop: Season One apparently hit the mark. It drained the budget on Friday and did a little less than that the other two days. I found a winning combination by using a quote from a customer’s Amazon review: “Do not start this book until you have HOURS of free time!” A testimonial seemed to do the trick and I’ll be running the same ad next weekend. In other news, sales of First and Next Time bounced back halfway from the big dip of the prior week. Let’s hope the trend continues upward. And finally, where am I on the final read-through of The Drop: Season Two? I should be done today or tomorrow. Then it’s time for formatting and uploading and all that stuff. I anticipate having the book out by the weekend. Won’t that be nice?

The Right Ad

I haven’t been able to find the right ad for The Drop: Season One yet. The upcoming weekend will be the fourth round of advertising and the fourth version of an ad that I hope will garner some clicks. Last weekend the ad didn’t get a single click on Sunday, and only about four or five the prior two days. That’s either because: a) the ad itself isn’t effective; or b) the target audience isn’t right. I’ve toyed with both each time around, which is really not the right way to do it. I thought I had a better target audience last time , so this weekend I’m going to leave that the same and try the new ad. This’ll give me a better read on which is the cause of the low click rate. I changed the ad to use a quote from one of the Amazon customer reviews, which I think will work better than what I had. Of course, when you get no clicks on an ad, pretty much anything else is better.

Dip

Sales of First and Next Time dipped by about a third last week, which is a little disconcerting, to be sure. Also, the ads I usually run over the weekends drained the budget slower each day. I’m not sure of the reasons, but there are several possibilities. One could be that the Amazon algorithms are not recommending my books as usual per the spate of low-rated reviews I mentioned in the last post. Maybe, but there have also been several new ones that were good, as well as continued high ratings that didn’t include reviews. I don’t know, maybe that could be part of it. It could be that my ads have been running too long and people aren’t responding to ads they’ve already seen or clicked on. However, sales usually remain steady throughout the week and there’s not really a bump on the weekends, which makes me think the ads are for awareness and not necessarily driving immediate sales. These two reasons - reviews and ad clicks - could be part of the downturn. Other reasons? American football season started. School is back in session. It was just an off week. Whatever the case, this week is starting to look similar based on the daily Amazon rankings. Let’s hope this is just a temporary dip before a big upturn in new readers.

Spate

First received a spate of low-rated written reviews the past couple of weeks on Amazon. How many in a spate? Three, in this case. Yeah, I know it’s not that many, but remember that most people don’t leave written reviews. There are times where a few weeks go by and nobody writes anything. It’s been interesting to see how why those three people don’t like the book, while others have compared it to some of the top writers in SF. I guess there’s a happy medium in there somewhere. I do realize that anything I write isn’t going to make everyone happy and there will be people who don’t like it. I guess this month, at least so far, I wondered what was happening with the dislike. I don’t know, maybe just luck of the draw. Don’t get me wrong, First and Next Time both have received dislike along the way, just not in a rapid-fire fashion. Nothing I can do about it and I try to only worry about things I can control. The good news is that the book maintains a 4.4 rating with 613 ratings as of today. I can live with that.

No Clicks

Apparently I have some work to do in my ads for The Drop: Season One. As you might recall, I’m using BookBub for advertising all my books. When you set up an ad, you can classify your book in broad categories, like thriller or mystery, you can target readers of authors you name, or both. The first week I advertised, I used the same batch of author names I’d been using for First, thinking hey, it’s a SF book, about exploration, etc. Got a modest amount of clicks on the ad that weekend, and in new development, didn’t run out of the budgeted amount. Usually I budget a certain amount of money daily for each ad, and that money runs out by early afternoon. Not the case here. So, what did I do? I created a different ad to use this past weekend, with a completely different batch of authors. I did research on Amazon regarding the top books in survival science fiction and made sure the ad would go out to readers of those particular authors. What happened next? Very few clicks Friday and Saturday, and NONE on Sunday. Not a single click. Looks like I need to go back to the drawing board before I start running ads again this coming weekend. I also have to take into account that the problem might be the ad itself. It’s been awhile, but I do remember struggling with the original ads for both First and Next Time when those books were published. It takes a bit of trial and error to see what works and causes people to click. In both cases, I ended up using quotes from professional reviews. I haven’t sent this book out for review, but maybe I should consider it if for no other reason than having something to use for ad copy.

Fun @ Work

On Tuesday I presented at a work session (won’t go into the boring details) about leadership and writing. Yes, two separate topics, although I did a little bit of relating the two. The main reason I’m commenting about it is because it was fun. This group has formed a bit of a book club and after my talk about the creative process, they had numerous questions. I’m really grateful to them for all the interactions. One question that stumped me regarded which of my books would I most like to see as a movie and who I’d want to direct it. I answered that I think First would be visually appealing and includes a story that people relate to, where astronauts are trained and there’s a buildup to the mission. (For the record, I think Next Time would also be an excellent movie choice) Where I faltered was trying to figure out who I’d like to have as a director. Still thinking about that one. The discussion shifted to a talk about how it would feel if someone came in and hacked up my story and changed it drastically for the movie. I commented that’s exactly what happened with Lord of the Rings. When that movie trilogy came out in the early 2000s, I was mad after each one because of how much they departed from the books. Seriously. Over time, I grew to realize the writers had changed elements and pacing to make them better for the medium. If they’d filmed the books exactly as written, the movies would’ve flopped. So, in answer to the question about my books being put in the cinematic blender, I understand there’d have to be differences and in the hands of a good writer, maybe they’d turn out even better than my original. Thanks to the Artemis group at work for a fun hour.

Do As I Say

Do as I say, and not as I do. This post is somewhat difficult to write, for reasons that shall become apparent. Remember some of my previous posts concerning cover art for your book? And how adamant I was about using a professional to do the design so that your book looks as good as possible? Well, I’ve ignored my own advice with the first release of The Drop series. You can see the cover on the front page of this site and form your own opinion on how it turned out. Why? Why???? I know, I’m a bad example. You probably don’t want to hear my rationalizations, but this is my blog, so I’m going to give them to you anyway. The first is that for First and Next Time, I provided my ideas to the publisher. First for an astronaut floating in space, with a color theme of black, purple, and blue, and Next Time a park bench in front of an old-style university building with four trees in various stages of growth to represent the four seasons. I had the concepts but not the ability to make those covers. For The Drop I also had a concept, but this time the ability. I wanted something more abstract that would define the series and provide the branding people can recognize. I experimented in Canva and quickly came up with the design you see. Which leads to the second reason I did this instead of contracting it out: cost. My concept involves a design that will stay the same with each book, but the color will change. My publisher charges $600 for a cover. Do I want to pay that ten times over the course of the series just to change the color of an identical design? No, thank you. The final reason is that these books are going solely on Amazon. How does that make a difference? Publishing on Amazon is a DYI project and making my own covers fell right in line with that. So, where does that leave us? I still feel passionate about having book covers designed by a professional. When I publish First Step and Assignment Day, that’s exactly what I’ll do. For now, though, I’m going to say that sometimes I’m just not the best of examples.

Out

The Drop: Season One is out. I said a few days ago I didn’t think I could get everything done in one day, but I turned out to be wrong. I did all the things and got it pushed out by early afternoon. The eBook formatting was much simpler than the print version and in reality it shouldn’t be that way. The toughest part of the eBook was the table of contents, which is required. I fiddled around with the settings for quite a bit before getting it to build correctly. For the print version, it took me a frustratingly long time to get page numbers working right. You’d think it’d be easy, but no, MS Word doesn’t have an easy-to-use capability for starting and ending page numbers at certain points in a document. You have to build sections and then de-link each one from the sections before and after. I know this now. I didn’t do page headers since that involves building a section for every chapter and this book has about fifty. Anyway, the book is now out and I’ve updated the front page of this site with pictures of the cover and links. It’s nice to get another book out the door with another coming inside a few months. I thought this was going to be the year of no publishing, but glad it worked out.

Done

I finished the final read-through of The Drop: Season One yesterday. I’m happy with how it turned out and since I’m off work this week, I’m going to start the process of getting it on Amazon. Lots of things to be done first, though. A summary for the book’s page, an Author’s Note at the end, finalizing the cover, adding the couple of pages at the beginning for the list of other books by me and copyright, formatting for eBook and print versions, copy for the back cover of the paperback, and on and on. Probably won’t get it all done in one day, but I think I can make significant progress. Then it’s on to Season Two so I can get that out in the next month or two to kick off the series in style. Enough dilly-dallying, it’s time to get stuff done.

Random

Here are a few random thoughts for you today: Next Time sits at 299 ratings on Amazon. I was going to use that for my main topic today if it’d hit 300, so maybe in the next post. As far as what I’m doing these days, I’m on the final read-through of The Drop: Season One, which means I’m reading it aloud to myself. It’s amazing how many things you find when you do it that way, like repetition of words, poor word choices, or sentences that don’t flow. In other news, I discovered something about the Amazon Author page I hadn’t noticed in the last two years. I’ve been checking on reader reviews by going to the books’ pages and scrolling through, looking for newer dates. The Amazon Author page has a handy link that takes you to a list, most recent first. How did I not know about this? What a time-saver. Along the line of random thoughts, I keep thinking about how and when to publish First Step. I’d really like to get it out soon, but I just don’t think it’s going to happen this year. Plus, the more time goes by, the more I realize it probably needs a little bit of polishing. Probably after I get the first couple of books out in the new series. That’s it for today.

Edit Loss

Just because I’ve put out five books and have several more ready to go doesn’t mean I know everything. I spent all last week editing Season One of The Drop. This time I’m editing by characters instead of straight through the book, allowing me to pick up on inconsistencies. The story is written from the POV of multiple characters, and no two chapters in a row are about the same character. Anyway, I opened my laptop last Friday morning to find that my document was in read-only mode and the edits I’d made during the week had disappeared. I attempted to find a version that contained all the changes, but alas, no joy. Here’s what I think happened: I left the document open all week in MS Word. Somewhere along the way, probably overnight Thursday into Friday, the OneDrive connection between my laptop and Microsoft’s server farm broke. Or maybe Monday, since none of my edits were saved online the rest of the week. Nevertheless, it choked and went back to Monday’s version. I tried in vain to find a version between those fateful days. What’s the lesson here? Part of it is my fault and part the vendor. I should know better than to trust an after-all-these-years-still-shaky operating system. Leaving the document open all week is, in retrospect, a bad idea. I thought I’d at least have a local copy, but somehow OneDrive messed that up. Which is not good, because that’s kind of the whole point of having your stuff backed up to the cloud. Lesson learned. I spent Friday morning and several hours on Saturday getting back to the point where I’d been on Thursday. And you better believe I’ll be more careful and less trusting.