Bookaversary

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of Next Time’s publishing date. As usual, hard to believe a year has passed already. It was a quick, eventful year for my second professionally published book. Let’s tally up the events, shall we? Next Time garnered 5-star reviews from Reader Views, Readers’ Favorite, Literary Titan, and the Bookish Elf, and was on must-read lists from Independent Book Review and Reedsy Discovery. Awards? Yeah, multiples of those, too. Literary Titan, PenCraft, and International Impact Award, all gave Next Time first prize as the best book in its category. Heck, the book even received a great review from a website reviewer I didn’t even know I’d sent it to. Just for fun, I went back and read all the reader comments on Amazon. Several of them said the book was hard to put down and at least one said they read it in one day. I’m so glad that people have enjoyed the book and even more so that they liked it that much. As you know, I run ads on BookBub each weekend, and the quote I use for the Next Time ad is from The Bookish Elf which calls it “a gorgeous, affecting read.” Not only is it great ad copy, it’s also great praise. Happy anniversary, Next Time. It’s been quite the ride and we’re just getting started.

Barnes & Noble

I have a Barnes & Noble problem and it kind of struck me out of the blue a few days ago. As you know, I normally run ads on BookBub every week for three days, Friday through Sunday. For some reason, I was checking the stats on the ad for First, the same ad I’ve been using since last August. Hey, it’s been effective and the few times I’ve changed the ad, the click-through rate has gone down. But using the same ad for so long gives me a good sample size to evaluate. People set their preferences, e.g,. Amazon, Apple, etc., and when they click on an ad it takes them to the bookseller they prefer. What I noticed in the statistics was that the click-throughs for B&N account for a full THIRD of total clicks, but when I compare clicks versus sales, the actual ratio of First purchases from B&N readers is about 5% of the total sales. I may not be a rocket scientist but even I can tell that’s a big discrepancy. And it makes me wonder. Why? Do people set their preference on those ads to B&N but then end up buying the book on Kindle? Or am I missing a huge chunk of readers who click but don’t buy, and if they don’t buy, why not? I have to say the B&N book page isn’t the most well-constructed. And no readers have rated or reviewed it there, which also seems odd given that I’ve sold enough that there should be at least a few. That could be off-putting to other potential readers. Maybe this is a question for AI to investigate. I certainly don’t have the answers at this point.

Fun Reviews

Reviews are different than ratings. If you go to Amazon, you’ll see five stars which are shaded according to the ratings people have given your book. The shading approximately reflects the average rating. Currently, both First and Next Time are at 4.4 stars. The number of ratings is quite a bit higher than the number of actual reviews, mainly because ratings require clicking a star on your Kindle, while reviews require writing a few sentences or more. In the past week, First received a couple of fun Amazon reviews. Well, more than that, but these two I particularly enjoyed. The first was a five-star review by a gentleman with the moniker Joe Chambliss:

The EMD technology enabled a private venture to do what only NASA had done before (and I'm a NASA retiree). The development of the technology then using it for exploration was well written and the course of history was believable and engaging. The main character was down to Earth and relatable. Good hard science fiction!

Why did I enjoy that one so much? As you’ve read in recent posts here, several people have called the EMD unbelievable and slighted the book for it. In the review above, a real-life NASA retiree said the technology was just fine. Granted, he could be a rocket scientist or he could be the guy who empties the ashtrays in Mission Control. Do they still have those? He worked for NASA so I’m going with the former. Thank you, Mr. Chambliss, that made my day.

The other one that tickled my fancy landed squarely in the negative with a two-star rating from an Amazon customer who goes by TEF. The title of their review was “A descent story but reads like a trashy dime store novel”. Yes, they wrote “descent” instead of “decent”, but let’s not get petty. The body of the review reads as follows:

If you are a serious sci- fi reader you most likely won’t enjoy reading this. I had to skip a lot of lame filler to finish this. The characters were not very interesting and it just felt like the same characters you’d find in any modern day kindle thriller.

Did that ruin my day? Not at all. In fact, I wanted to respond but Amazon doesn’t provide a way to do that. My response? “I had to use small words in the book so you could get through it without moving your lips while you read.” Seriously, though, I’ve said before that I understand not everyone will like my books. Maybe TEF was having a bad day. Maybe TEF is a pseudonym for a well-established SF writer in their own right. Whatever the case, a SF book that’s character-driven won’t hit the same chord with every reader. Between Mr. Chambliss and TEF, I appreciate that both took the time to write their opinions. I always do, regardless of the message.

Progress Update

As the kids say, it’s been a hot minute since I provided an update on the book I’m currently writing. April 24th, if my quick scan through recent posts is accurate. I wouldn’t say my writing pace is setting the world on fire, but I’ve had a few interruptions along the way with some travel. Right now the book clocks in at 37k words, which means it’s about half complete. I should complete it, if all goes well, by the end of July or early August. I’ll have a few more interruptions and maybe that timeline is a bit optimistic. How is the story itself? I think it’s coming along fine. It’s different from the first book in the series, which I would expect. It also continues some of the storylines from the initial volume, and that’s also how I expect things to go. There’s a small development in the first book that now I’m not sure I want to keep since I haven’t figured out how to deal with it. And that’s why I wanted to write the second book before publishing the first. Heck, I might even write the third. That way I can make sure I’m not developing storylines that might be better on the editing room floor, to use a film reference. Overall, though, I’m happy with the story and the progress I’ve made. Another update in a few weeks, I’m sure.

Tech

In my afterword to First, I made a comment about how I’m not a scientist and any failings in the science of the book are my fault. Which is true on both counts. Some of the online comments about the book make note of how the electromagnetic drive (EMD) in the story stretches belief, which I find funny. The hyperspace drive in Star Wars is believable? Warp drive in Star Trek makes sense? I could go on with a list of other SF examples, but those two are fantastic yet seem to be accepted as plausible. Sure, scientists have written papers on how warp drive might be possible. Well, I got my idea for the EMD from a science article. Not being defensive here, I just think it’s amusing how some things are perceived as believable and others, not so much. When I wrote First, I wanted the space travel to be almost instantaneous. Why? Because I wanted the story to focus on the characters without them having to endure weeks, months, or years, of interstellar travel. Depending on the book you want to write, those stretches of time can be a momentum-killer. If your book is about people forced to live together in the enclosed, extremely limited world of a spaceship and how the characters cope with the boredom of space travel, then yes, put that in your book. That’s not what I was going for, so I took the spark of an idea from an article (linked on the First page on this site) and said yes, let’s use this idea to propel the story. I’m not arguing with the people who make online comments about the believability since, as I said, I’m not a scientist. I don’t expect people to comb my website for a link on how the tech could be feasible, I just want them to remember that the second word in SF is fiction. If an author can’t dream up crazy ideas and has to conform to our current understanding of the universe, then it just becomes S without the F.

Extra

I’ve been running ads on BookBub for more than a year now. I started out running them every day, but that got to be a bit costly. For quite a while I’ve been putting the ads out there every weekend, running Friday-Sunday. The great thing about BookBub is you can set your budget and stay within it while still getting good results. My daily budget is quite low and it’s always used up each day by mid-afternoon. This past weekend included a holiday in the United States, so I added a little extra to the budget each day as people kick off their summer reading season. Did increasing the money for ads result in a noticeable change in sales? Hard to say. Both First and Next Time seemed to do well in the Amazon rankings, the latter probably more so than has been the case recently. Lately, though, both have been consistent in how they do on the weekends as well as during the week, probably due to some of the factors I covered a few weeks ago about how the number of ratings seems to affect the Amazon recommendation algorithms. Anyway, it seemed like a good chance to increase the ad budget temporarily, and now it’ll be back to normal.

Donations

I’ve been doing this blog thing for a couple of years now and I can’t remember if I’ve covered this topic or not, so bear with me if some of this is a repeat. There’s a new part of the story that I’ll get to after the background. Readers of my books might be able to tell that I grew up in southern New Mexico. How can they tell? Because four of my first five published books are set there. It’s a great place to use as a backdrop for a story and becomes another character in the book because of the area’s variety. My hometown, Alamogordo, sits in the desert at the base of a mountain range. New Mexico State University has a branch perched on the side of one of the foothills rising from the city, and this instance of the college system has a writing center, which is named in honor of my grandmother, Mary Virginia Brown. She taught at the school for many years and played such a vital role that the powers that be put her name on the building. What does this have to do with me, other than I had an awesome grandmother who passed down her love of reading and writing to her grandchildren? My parents are headed that way this weekend and my dad has been in contact with the school. My sister has written two non-fiction books and I’ve published five (so far), and Dad asked the library there if they’d be interested in receiving donated copies of our books for the library. They are. So, Dad is taking the donations and will give them to the librarian. I think having books in the library written by her grandchildren would make her happy. I hope that more than a couple of patrons at the NMSU-A library discover the books and enjoy them. That would make me happy.

Stars

At the risk of repeating myself, I’m grateful to everyone who leaves a rating for one of my books. Whether you do it on Amazon, B&N, Apple Books, Kobo, Goodreads, Reedsy, or wherever, I really do appreciate it. And I add additional thanks to everyone who leaves a written review. Taking a few minutes to write what you think about my books really helps. Why do I rehash this topic? Because it actually means a lot. Not just to me, but any author. Next Time just topped 200 ratings on Amazon, and as I’ve said before, I think that’s a big milestone. And First is at 299 ratings, poised to surpass the 300 mark today or tomorrow, I hope. Those totals don’t count other sites, but since most of the sales are through Amazon, that’s where most of the ratings go. Since a depressingly low percentage of people leave a rating, those numbers are milestones that are nice to reach. I know, there are authors with tens of thousands of ratings and I’d love to join them someday. For now, this self-publishing dude is glad to see people reading and enjoying his books and responding with overall good ratings.

250 Revisited

Go read that last post on the number of books a self-published author can expect to sell. Given that, would I advise someone to self-publish? If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, then you know my answer is an unequivocal yes. Why? Aren’t I advising people to do something bound to fail? Not if you do it right. Getting a fiverr cover, avoiding paying for any editing or consulting, and just uploading your book to Amazon is guaranteed to put your book in the category of <250 sold. I’m not saying you’ve got to spend a ton of money because there are plenty of publishers who will be glad to take it. I’m saying that you need to find a happy medium, something you can afford that will result in a professional-looking and -reading project. I’ve covered this before, I think. Where was I going with this? Oh, yes, self-publishing. We live in a strange world where a lot of us don’t fit the profile of what an agent or big-house publisher is looking for. What does that mean? It means our chance for the world to experience our book lies in our own hands. And that’s a good thing. It’s a lot more work, but again, that’s a good thing. Nobody can tell you what you should or shouldn’t say, you have control over your own release dates and timelines, and you control the expense and frequency of advertising. That last one is the tough part to figure out and it definitely can be costly. You just have to set boundaries and limits for yourself, but to me, that’s better than letting someone else figure it out for you unless they’re giving you plenty of dough up front. And let’s not kid ourselves - unless you fit that profile they want, it’s not going to happen. Now go forth, and self-publish and be happy.

250

That’s the number of books most self-published authors sell, or less. At least that’s what Google tells us. They also say that 90% of self-published authors sell less than 100 copies. I suppose that makes sense, at least based on my experience. When I first published my Desert Sun series in the early to mid-2010s, they definitely sold fewer than 100 copies. I think, like most people at the time, the digital publishing landscape was brand-new, with that new-digital platform smell to it. And like most people who gave it a whirl, I sold a few copies to friends and family and my advertising was limited to Facebook posts. Not exactly a recipe for success, but as I said at the time, I just want to put the books out there and if people find them and enjoy the stories, good. Fast-forward to today and my two recent books, each of which have sold much more than 250 copies. Amazing what a little advertising can do. Clearly, I’m not making a ton of money off them. In fact, my regular paycheck from work laughs at the total amount I’ve made from almost two years’ worth of royalties. But again, it’s not about the money, or even the number of copies sold. I’m gratified by the reviews people leave, things people say in person, and awards the books have won. I may be above average, at least in this regard, and I’m thankful for each person who reads my books.

Missed

Something happened yesterday which has only happened the last several years when I’ve been out of town: I missed a day of writing. Since November of 2021, I get up at 6 a.m. every weekday and am sitting in front of the computer a half-hour later. On Saturdays the timing slides a little later, but I still get there. That’s how I’ve written six books in (uses fingers and toes to count) three and a half years. Trust me, the temptation to sleep later has been there many times and I’ve gone to bed thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to sleep a little later tomorrow? I resist, because once that thinking starts, it’s like hitting the snooze button on my writing. Anyway, all that to say, at least this miss came about for a valid, non-lazy reason. I was sick. I haven’t been sick since September 2022. I’ve been fortunate to be very healthy and have used an incredibly small amount of sick days in my professional career. It was odd yesterday to get up later than normal, but going to bed early the night before and sleeping late combined to help me get over my sickness by early afternoon. Today I’m back at it. Let’s get going.

Music

Hello, Intrepid Blog Reader, I’m here today to answer one of the burning questions about writing: music or no music? In other words, should I listen to music when I write, or not? The personal answer for me is a simple no. I don’t want my storytelling to be influenced by what I’m listening to, and I know myself and that I would definitely be influenced. I love music and its many forms. From classical to rock to country to alternative, I’m down for it. I also know that having Wagner’s Charge of the Valkyries blasting while I’m writing a tender emotional moment would not work well. Maybe it would for you. I’ve read interviews with people who talk about selecting music appropriate to what they’re writing that day. I admire their effort to create an atmosphere that’s comfortable for them to write. Me? Sounds like too much work. Plus, in some cases I don’t know what I’m going to write during a session and I’d prefer to find the path myself, not through another listen to London Calling. Can music be inspirational when you’re writing? Of course! Just like so many other things you have to decide for yourself (outline vs. no outline, Word vs. Google Docs, morning vs. evening, etc.), you can add music to the list. If you’re undecided, try it both ways. I used to listen to music when studying and I still do when reading, but not when banging away at the keyboard. And if you need inspiration when you’re writing that first draft of the final war between good and evil, you could do a lot worse than Wagner.

Reads

The last few posts we’ve talked about what I’m writing. Now let’s talk about what I’m reading. For my birthday a few months ago, I received Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, among other books. No, that’s not the one I’m currently reading. It’s apparently based on David Copperfield, and I thought, hey, I haven’t read David Copperfield in a few years, so let’s do that first. Which I’m more than happy to do because it’s a great book and I’m a fan of Dickens. I’m a little over halfway through and reading it at an enjoyably slow pace. A few days ago I read the chapter where David has Uriah Heep over for dinner and the whole thing was a master class on writing. Dickens made me feel the snakelike character of Uriah through descriptions of his physical writhing and constant yammering about being ‘umble. No wonder Dickens was so popular and still is. I have a long way to go with the book and I’m not going to rush it. The other book I’m reading is part of a series on Kindle Unlimited about a post-apocalyptic war and one man’s reluctant journey to restore order, from local lowlifes to leading an army to take back the USA. It’s not the most intellectual of pursuits, but it’s entertaining enough to where I’m on the tenth book. No idea how many are in the series so far. Guess I’ll find out when I get there. Those are my current reads. What are you reading?

Books

I’ve had a few people ask me recently if I’ve finished a new book (or two) and when will it be published? My usual response is that yes, I have three books ready to release into the wild and a fourth on the way, but they likely won’t be out this year due to other issues. I can’t remember if I’ve gone into them here previously, but let’s just say we’ve had some unexpected expenses in the first three months of 2025. Since publishing costs money, I likely won’t have the resources to put out anything other than a few books in my new series on Kindle Unlimited, which costs nothing. Other than covers, but that’s not much compared to the whole publishing package. My response to the question asked at the beginning of this post is usually met with the nod of a head and some sympathy when it comes to the aforementioned expenses. This is the Year of Writing, as I call it. Given that there are eight months left in the year, I could conceivably finish three more books, including the one in progress. That’d leave me with a half-dozen ready to unleash on the world. In theory, that would mean 2026 becomes the Year of Publishing. Let’s hope.

Progress

How is the new book progressing, you ask? I’m right at 14k words in, which means it’s almost 20% done. I’m aiming for 75k words again, which seems a good length for books of this type. I’ve already noted a few things I’ll need to go back and change in the first book of the series, but that’s expected. It’s why I’m not publishing these books until I have at least three done. That way I can make sure the series arcs stay consistent and don’t go off track. At least too far. I would say that this one isn’t going as fast as the first one, mainly because I’m making up a lot of stuff as I go. But isn’t that what writers do? Yes, but this time I have even less thought out beforehand and the characters are undefined until they appear in the story and I flesh them out. It’s probably a horrible way to do it and anybody who teaches writing is shaking their head. I should be doing character sketches up front instead of building them on the fly. I should have at least some sort of outline. I’m not going to argue those points. I’m just saying that the creative process with these books is a bit different than my others and we’ll see if they turn out okay or end up as a big, flaming mess.

Signing

Did a signing event at the fabulous Neighbor Books in Downtown McKinney this past weekend. It’s funny being on this side of the table and watching people try to avoid eye contact. Hey, I’ve been there. Fortunately, a few extroverts also showed up that day to the store and I sold a few copies of both First and Next Time. For the latter, I only had two copies left from the original box I received last summer when it was published, and sold both of them. I gave away plenty of bookmarks as well. I was there for a couple of hours and was afraid it’d rain and foot traffic would be impacted, but instead it remained nice and plenty of people came through. It ended up being a good outing and I’m grateful the owners support local authors and I’m glad for the opportunity to support them as well. If you’re in the McKinney area, go check them out.

More Covers

I concluded my last post with a thought about how authors should follow the monumental effort of writing a book with a good cover. This is an area that can be a little sensitive, and I get it. Self-publishing is not cheap. Even the cost of having a professional produce a book cover is enough to be more than a blip on the budget. As I was talking about in the previous post, people can tell when a cover looks cheap. If a writer is on a shoestring budget and only publishing on Amazon since anybody can do it at no cost, then it doesn’t make sense to spend hundreds of dollars on a cover. I published my first three books that way and two of the covers were made from photographs I’d taken of the New Mexico desert. Were they good covers? Gosh, no. Did I have money to pay for an actual artist to design them? An even more emphatic no. I guess that brings up the question some of us face: is it better to publish a book with a second-rate cover or to wait until I have the money to pay for a good one? You know how I answered that one with those three novels. Will I go back and get better packaging on those books? Maybe. When I wrote First and wanted to publish it, I’d put a lot of effort into making it as good as possible, much more so than the first three books. I felt the effort deserved professional packaging and distribution and fortunately, I was in a place where I could afford to do so. Even though it’s my fourth published book, I refer to First as my first professionally-printed book. The cover looks great when I pull up the page for the book on Amazon and B&N and Apple. It looks good on review sites. And it looks fantastic when I hold the book in my hands. All this to say that it’s clear when someone pays for a $60 fiverr gig for their cover as opposed to investing in their book’s success with a professional. And trust me, people do judge a book by its cover.

Covers

I was trying to think of a topic for today’s post and came up with covers. No, not the kind where your band plays a song from another band. Book covers. This is a book blog. Maybe someday I’ll have a music blog, too, but for now we’re going to talk about book covers. There’s a fantasy writer who has their own site and is also a contributing blogger on another site. Weekly they’ll tout new SF&F books and I scroll through the list to see what’s new and exciting. I made the remark to someone the other day that I don’t like most of the covers in those weekly posts. Granted, I try to be flexible when it comes to self-publishing. I know it costs money to make a professional-looking cover. And then I thought to myself, self, why don’t you like those covers? What is it about them? A couple of things. First, the fonts are horrible. In many cases, the fonts don’t match the style of the book or even the picture on the cover. It’s like when Microsoft Word first came out and people could format their cover sheets and documents with any font in the world and it was chaos. That’s what these covers look like. The second reason I don’t like them is the art. Let’s be clear, I’m not an artist or an expert on art, but as with most people, even though I can’t define what art I like, I know what I don’t. Many of the covers just look…amateurish. No depth, or looks like someone cobbled together bits and pieces to make a cover that reminds me of trying to make a car out of spare parts. It might work, but it sure ain’t going to be pretty. I don’t want to pick on just SF&F books, either. I’ve looked through sites for Romance books, the category for Next Time, and there are plenty of horrendous covers there as well. I’ll talk about this more in my next post, but really, if we as authors put all that effort and time into writing a book, we should put the additional effort into making it look good.

Beginning

I’m off and running with the beginning of the second book in my new series. I recorded a few notes about plot points I intentionally left open from the first book, as well as a couple of general ideas about the new one. It’s funny, because I’ve not scoped out the characters or their journeys yet, but I’ve written a couple of chapters already and so far the characters are developing themselves. Is it the best way to write a book with over a dozen characters? Maybe, maybe not. It’s similar to how I wrote the first book in the series and that turned out okay. One thing I learned from that first book is giving more personable, relatable traits to the characters earlier. In books like this you end up getting to know three or four characters well, but that doesn’t mean the others can’t have something that clicks with the reader. It doesn’t have to be much and anything is better than putting an automaton in the book for a chapter or two. It also doesn’t mean that I can’t create a character sketch with details I want to use before I write about him or her. That’s the beauty of writing. I can use several different methods of creating characters within the same universe. And on that note, it’s time to write.

Algorithms

The past four weeks my book sales have been consistent and slightly higher than in previous months, unless of course I happened to be running promotions in said time periods. That must mean the books have been selling during the weeks as well as the weekends, the latter of which is when I advertise. I run ads on BookBub Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and that’s been it for a while now. It made me wonder if the higher volume is a result of reaching some threshold on Amazon for number of ratings, mainly since the change occurred around the time First crossed the 200-rating mark. If you do a search about the topic, people say the ratings don’t matter to the Amazon algorithms. But who really knows? Amazon isn’t saying. All I can go by is my own experience, and something seems to have changed. Don’t know if it’s our computer overlords running things behind the scenes, if the occasional weekend ads are cumulatively having an effect, or if something else is going on. Regardless, as always I’m grateful to everyone who buys my books, however they find out about them.