Breaking 400
I’ve mentioned before that the path to ratings for Next Time is slower than it’s been for First. Probably because Next Time doesn’t sell as many copies. Simple math, right? A couple of days ago, Next Time finally reached the 400 ratings mark on Amazon. It had been teetering on the threshold for over a week, stuck at 398 for several days, up to 399, back down to 398 (I don’t know how it loses a rating - maybe someone deleted it?), and finally reaching 400. This is significant because now I can update my weekend ad for the book with the new quantity of ratings. I’m also glad to report that the overall rating average has stayed steady at 4.4 stars. Thank you to everyone who’s rated and reviewed the book. I appreciate it more than you know.
Top Release
Good news on the release of First Step: yesterday I found that it was #1 in New Releases in its category. That category is “Androids, Robots & Artificial Intelligence,” one of the subcategories in fiction. Let’s be honest here, shall we? There probably aren’t a lot of books in that category, therefore making it easier for my book to rise to that spot. While #1 on the New Releases list, it rose to #23 in the overall category. So yes, it sold some copies Sunday and yesterday (probably thanks to the ads I mentioned last time) and getting to the top of the heap in any game is a good thing. I know I also said it’s a process and takes time to sell a new book for us independent publishers and that’s still true. I’ll take the little wins like this, though. It’s a nice feeling.
Post-Release
It always feels like a bit of a letdown after a book release. Maybe because of the unspoken expectation that everyone is going to love your book and it’s going to shoot to the top of the rankings right away. Yes, there are writers who live that scenario. The rest of us who independently publish don’t really get that kind of rush. We watch as people favorite and heart our social media posts, but then don’t buy the book itself. Sales often stagger from the starting line, weaving in a general direction down the sidewalk like a guy who’s been in the pub from open to close. It takes time to find readers and that’s what my first round of ads will be doing this coming weekend. Building momentum and awareness requires effort, time, and money. Based on my experiences with releasing a new book, to me it’s not really a letdown as much as it’s the start of a longer timeline.
Release Day!
Today is the day for the official release of First Step! This morning I did all the things for social media and starting to get the word out. This weekend I’ll run ads for the new book and I think I’ve got a good promo if I don’t run into any issues with the ad copy. Also, I got my own physical copy of the book today and I have to say it looks fantastic. Lots of nice reactions on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but now they need to translate into sales. I also entered the book into some contests and reviews yesterday, with a few more to come as they open up their contest windows. Once those start coming in I can use them to promote the book and that’ll certainly help. This book is quite different from First so I’m interested to see how it’s received. Plus, as a coda at the end I framed it as Ray’s Notes instead of Author’s Notes, letting one of the book’s narrators interview me. Yeah, a little self-indulgent, but I figure if I’m writing the book I can go off the rails a little bit. Anyway, I’m excited for the book to be officially out in the wild. I’m proud of it and worked hard to make it as good as possible.
Stealth Release
If you’re the super-snooper-sleuther type, you’ll find First Step already available on Amazon even though I’ve not officially released them. I uploaded everything yesterday so I can do final checks of the formatting and all-around quality control. I first uploaded the paperback version since it requires a lot more work to format correctly. It looked good, so I hit the ‘Publish’ button, which would then allow me to order a copy for myself for the final look. On to the eBook version and sure enough, I found an extra line break in Chapter 13. Easy enough to fix, but then I had to wait for the paperback version to make its way through Amazon’s approval process before I could fix that version. This morning, I struggled with MS Word because the page numbering was not correct, or at least didn’t start on Page 1 like I wanted. I finally gave in and uploaded the manuscript just to see how it turned out, and lo and behold, it doesn’t look the same in Amazon’s Print Previewer. In fact, it looks the way I want it to. Not sure why my version is acting the fool, but I’m not going to complain as long as it comes out all right. In the meantime, I have work to do to update this site for the New Release and to get ready to enter some contests.
Draft Cover
Yesterday, I got an email that my cover for First Step would be delivered within the next few days for me to review. I know from past experience that it means the draft would be behind the original email by an hour or two, and sure enough, another email popped into my inbox. I have to admit I had some trepidation. I’ve mentioned this before, which means that just like the unnecessary recap you can’t skip at the beginning of your streaming episode, I’m going to go over it again anyway. In setting up my previous two books with BookBaby, I had some specific prompts for them to use. That included the idea of an astronaut floating in space for the cover of First, as well as color schemes. For Next Time, I wanted the four trees in the picture to each portray a different season, and to include a bench on a college campus since that tied the beginning and ending of the book. This time? No clue, other than to make it look like First Step is related to First. Hence, my trepidation and almost not wanting to open the image, prepared to hate it or make a bunch of radical changes. All for naught, as they nailed it. It’s a gorgeous cover. Similar enough to First to get the connection, yet still enough elements to say this is a different tale. One of my sisters, also a writer, asked who’s publishing the book. I said I’m publishing it myself and I had BookBaby create the cover so it doesn’t look like I’m publishing it myself. It most definitely does not look like a half-ass job and is completely professional, able to sit right alongside every other book on your shelf or in the bookstore. I had a couple of minor corrections with the formatting of the description on the back, so I had to make a few notes and send back to the creative team. I’m hoping to do a cover reveal of the final version by the end of the week and everyone can see how awesome it looks.
Sick Day
Yesterday morning I slept late, on a work day, no less. I slept horribly Tuesday night with horrible stomach pain and was up and down every 60 to 90 minutes. The pain localized in my right lower abdomen about 4:30 a.m., which I know from experience is a bad sign. I’ve had these pains before but they seemed to be related to chronic appendicitis, or at least that’s what the previous results showed. I struggled through Wednesday morning without eating anything and only drank about a half-cup of coffee and felt worse as the hours dragged along. I kept hoping for an upturn like in the past, but no joy. About 9:30 I went to the ER and 5 1/2 hours later headed into surgery for an appendix that showed signs of perforation. That’s my roundabout way of explaining why I didn’t do any writing yesterday or today, although I might get some in this afternoon from my hospital bed. Plan is to get out tomorrow and we’ll see. We’re also supposed to get a big snowstorm this weekend, and as always, I’ll believe it when I see it. I just got cleared for clear liquids and I’m inappropriately excited for chicken broth. Hoping to get back to my regular schedule by next week.
Ordered
After my minor rant in the last post, I contacted the publishing company yesterday and ordered a cover for First Step. This also forced me, in a good way, to start setting up the book on KDP so I could get an ISBN, which was needed for the barcode on the back cover of the book. When it came time for previous covers for First and Next Time, I had an idea of what I wanted them to look like. I input my ideas into the online questionnaire and both covers came back better than I’d imagined. One of the sections in the questionnaire asks about similar covers as examples for ideas, color schemes, lettering, etc. This time I didn’t have anything to input. The only thing I requested was that the font be similar to First so it’s apparent the books are related. Other than that, anything goes. I’m excited to see what they come up with.
Wait
Minor complaint here: I input a request about getting a book cover made for First Time and haven’t heard back from the company yet. That was last Friday, and almost a week has passed since then. Seems to me that’s plenty of time to respond in these days of automated systems. I realize it’s the first part of the year and post-holiday catch-ups are common. Still, I didn’t even get an email acknowledging my request. It’s not enough at this point to make me want to go somewhere else for a cover since the company has been good to me in the past. Still, I’d think the fact I’m a repeat customer bringing more business would be worth something. Is this minor inconvenience worthy of a post on my blog? Probably not, but tbh I didn’t really have any other topics for today. I’ll let you know how things turn out with the cover.
Tracking
One of the issues with books like those in my series The Drop is that there are a lot of characters. Each book starts with twelve players, plus at least another half-dozen behind the scenes. How do I expect readers to keep track of them? How do I do it when I’m writing the book? Two questions, two answers. Let’s start with you, dear reader. When I wrote the first season of The Drop, I headed each section with the name of the corresponding player or character. I also tried to tie back the first several paragraphs to their previous appearance. That was all well and good, but not as good as it could be. With a cast that big, it was still easy to forget who was who. Because I’m a sadistic madman, I eliminated a couple of players from the game early, meaning the reader only had to care about eight or nine people trying to survive on the unexplored planet Alpha. Still too many, though. I realized when the book was ready to publish and as I formatted it that there was an easy solution: characters came from all over the world, so why not just add (in parentheses) their country of origin to their name at the top of each appearance? As well as their location, whether it be on Alpha or back on Earth. That worked well and allowed readers to have a better sense of the character by identifying them with a country. As for me, how did I track them all, as well as their storylines? I kept a document that listed all the chapters, the number of days (Day 1, Day 13, etc.) into the contest, and a couple of brief sentences summarizing the chapter. Not rocket science, is it? Simple things, though, that helped both of us maintain our sanity.
Drop Ads
Advertisements that I’ve been running for The Drop thus far have not been - well, let’s say they haven’t been successful. The ads aren’t getting clicks, and if I remember right, only got one click over all of last weekend. This could be due to a couple of factors. The first would be that the ad doesn’t make an impression on the viewer. I’ve changed it up a couple of times, but the only change in response seems to be worse. The other factor could be the target audience. With BookBub, I get to target readers who’ve expressed interest in particular authors, meaning that those readers theoretically would be disposed to interest in my ad and therefore my book. My goal today is to do more research on similar authors, the Amazon categories their books inhabit, and come up with a better ad. The good thing is instant feedback when the ads run. Way better than putting out an ad campaign and waiting for statistics to come back weeks or months later from a marketing team.
Currently
After year-end reviews and upcoming goals, what am I actually doing these days? I’ve resumed writing Season Three of The Drop. It’s going very well and the story is moving right along. By the end of this week I should be approximately half-done with the draft. The storylines are taking some interesting turns and even though the contest in the world of the book is a marathon, I try to remember to make it have the urgency of a sprint. At the current writing pace, followed by editing and proofreading, maybe I can have the book out by March. In other news, on New Year’s Day I completed the formatting of First Step. It takes a bit of labor to do so, let me just say. I’m sure the professionals have tools that are easier to use and I wish I had those. Instead, I’m at the mercy of MS Word, but I’ll say that once I figured out how to do page numbering and footers, it came out looking great. Some of the things that should be easiest turn out to be the most difficult, of course. Anyway, that book is ready to publish other than having a cover. I should know by next week regarding the timing of getting a cover made. There’s the update - not much else to report beyond that right now. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.
2026 Goals
It’s the first day of the year and it still has that bright, shiny new year smell to it. This also means that 2025 has now been relegated to the dustbin of history. You can see my recap in my previous post of the year and how I did compared to my goals. Now we’re looking ahead and let’s just say it’s stacking up to be a busy year for writing and publishing. In fact, yesterday I started formatting First Step for the print version. Let’s take a look at the list of goals, shall we?
Publish First Step
Publish Assignment Day
Write three seasons of The Drop
Publish three more seasons of The Drop
Enter First Step and Assignment Day into at least three contests each
Pretty simple, right? And achievable. I tried to think of a stretch goal but if I achieve all these it’s going to be a full year. I mean, I could try and write four seasons of The Drop instead of three, but I know each book takes about three months to write and then a good month of editing, both developmental as well as copy and line, and multiple passes for proofreading. At least I have story ideas in mind for the series through the next several seasons. Anyway, that last item on the list is to add in something for marketing and advertising. I don’t think I entered any contests in 2025 and I’m too lazy to go back and check. With major new books coming out I’ll need to get them in front of the bookreading public and hopefully win some awards. I’m optimistic for what I can accomplish in 2026 and looking forward to all the joys of writing.
2025 Review
It’s the last post of the year! If you are new to this site, thank you for checking in and I hope you keep coming back in 2026. If you’ve stuck with me all or part of this year, many thanks to you as well. It’s been a good year overall from the writing perspective, with a little bit of an interruption when I broke my collarbone at the end of October. I was a third of the way into writing the third season of The Drop and the injury ended up meaning less typing for a while and more editing, allowing me to polish Next Step. I’ll talk more about my goals for the new year in the next post; in the meantime, let’s list those 2025 goals one more time and see where I landed:
Publish First as an audio book - Year-End Status: Sadly, this never happened. Professionally-narrated audiobooks are not cheap and I just didn’t have the funding this year. I don’t know if this’ll happen in 2026, either. We’ll see how it goes but I don’t think I’m going to list this as a goal next year. If it happens, it’ll be a nice bonus.
Publish Assignment Day - YE Status: That’s another whiff and that makes me 0 for 2 on the goals so far. The book is in a publishable state and it’s just been sitting in the drawer due to lack of funding. WIth my experiences publishing The Drop, I think all I need is a cover for Assignment Day and I can publish it on Amazon KDP. This should happen in the first half of 2026.
Edit First Step and prep for publishing - YE Status: Yes! One that’s done as of last week. The book is ready for the world and all it needs is formatting and a cover. Expect this in the first few months of 2026.
Finish writing the first book in the new series - YE Status: Done and published. It’s good to see people reading and enjoying the series. Now I just need to come up with an effective advertising approach since the ads I run every weekend aren’t as successful as those I run for my other books.
Write the second book in the new series - YE Status: Also done and published. I’m not sure yet how to make sure people keep reading the series. I say this because the page count in my Kindle reporting view shows more pages read for Season One than for Season Two. I hope this will change as I release more books in the series.
Set a publishing date for First Step - YE Status: Done. As soon as I get confirmation in January about a few financial things, I’ll commission a cover and publish the book faster than Usain Bolt racing for a bathroom. As of now, the publishing date is January 2026.
Set a publishing date for first book in the new series - YE Status: See #4 above. Done. The Drop: Season One debuted at the beginning of September, followed closely by Season Two in October. The audiobook versions for both went live in November.
I set out to do a lot this year, and I did do a lot. 2025 overall was a successful year and the first time I had more book income than expenses. Not by a lot since we’re talking small numbers here, but enough to make sure the IRS doesn’t consider my writing a hobby for tax purposes. That was a nice surprise and let’s hope the trend continues next year. It’s not about money for me; it’s about writing stuff that people enjoy. Based on the ratings and reviews that came in during 2025, I’d say I was successful in that as well. Both First and Next Time maintain an average of 4.4 stars on Amazon, which I feel good about. I went beyond my goals in the publishing of The Drop and I want that momentum to continue. Thank you for your support of my writing endeavors!
Christmas Message
Merry Christmas from Texas! We’re headed for a lovely high of 79 degrees today, which I personally think is awesome. White Christmases are so overrated. We did our celebration yesterday since one of the offspring has to work today. I feel very blessed to have family around to celebrate and feast with. My reading-related haul from the gift-giving included a spiffy bookmark of a cardinal (my favorite baseball team) and a few gift cards. I’m very excited to use all of the above. Moving the celebration a day earlier means that today is agenda-free. Seems like a good day to relax with some coffee and cigars. Let us not forget the reason for this day. May you have a wonderful Christmas, wherever you are!
800
First reached the 800-ranking club over the weekend. That’s a little less than two months from making the 700 club. Over that time reviewers have left some nice write-ups, and I’m thinking I’ll use at least one of the quotes for a new version of the BookBub ad I’ve been running for the book over the past year. Time for a refresh. Sales have ebbed a little the last few weeks, which I’m attributing to lower sales in general for books in December, as well as people spending their money on gifts and not books. If the trend of ratings continues, I should hit a thousand sometime in spring, which will be an exceptional milestone for someone who put the book out there and wondered if people would buy it, much less enjoy it. In other good news, I finished-finished First Step yesterday. No more revisions, no more editing. I’ve taken care of all the things I needed to and now it’s ready to go. I have to get a cover commissioned (that sounds so official!) and publish the book. I think it turned out great and I’m looking forward to getting ratings and reviews in abundance.
Dark
If you’ve read my posts at all over the past several years, you might know that I get up early each morning to write and do writing things. I do that for about 75 minutes before closing my personal laptop, usually for the day since I separate writing from the job that pays the bills. No doing writing stuff on company time. What people don’t tell you is how tough it is this time of year to get motivated when it’s dark. Let’s be honest, it’s a lot easier during summer when the sun comes up early, often around the time my alarm goes off. Here in December, it’s dark until I’ve been sitting at my desk almost an hour. I’m a sunshine guy and love the heat of summer. Not a fan of extra-long nights. The local high school seems to get started about the time the sun comes up. Even though we don’t have kids that age anymore, out the window I see students walking in the dark or approaching dawn, heads down, plodding along. Can’t be fun for them either. Anyway, this isn’t really a complaint and I hope it doesn’t seem so. More of an observation that getting up and writing can be more difficult than it looks.
Forward
We’re nearing the end of the year and in the next few weeks I’ll revisit my 2025 goals and come up with a final score. This also means that it’s time to start setting goals for 2026. I suppose some of them are rather obvious, like publishing First Step and Assignment Day. The latter has been ready, or near-ready, for a few years. I need to get it out into the world. Beyond those two events? Writing and publishing more seasons of The Drop are also high on the list. If I can get out three book in sequence in 2026, that’ll go a long way toward making it a real series that people can binge. Beyond these ideas, what else? Not sure yet. Probably stuff like entering First Step into some contests and for reviews and same with Assignment Day. I’m sure I can brainstorm more things to keep me occupied in the new year. Looks like it’s going to be pretty busy. And beware if another idea comes along and grabs hold of me. We’ve seen that happen before.
Done Again
I’ve completed my edits on First Step and I know I’ve said this before, but I’m now done with the book. I fixed some of the nagging thoughts I had when re-reading the manuscript, added background and depth to several of the characters, and even cut out some stuff. I’m going to read through it one more time for continuity and to catch any errors I introduced along the way. I don’t think there will be any major edits and now I have to decide how and when to publish it. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I don’t think it’s a good idea to make my own cover, which means I need to pay someone else to do it. Holiday season is not usually the time to fork out a chunk of dough for something that’s not a present for someone else. Unless something changes, I’ll see how the finances look after the first of the year and come up with some better idea of when I can actually publish the book.
Cover Charge
In spite of my prior advice regarding the creation of your own book covers, which I talked about ignoring in a previous post, I think the covers for The Drop came out looking pretty sharp. So, yesterday I had an idea of a cover for First Step. I thought, why not give it a shot? I gave detailed descriptions on what I imagined to the publisher for First and Next Time, so in this case why not take my prompts and see how it came out? Spoiler alert: it looked horrible. Seriously. It was like someone took a white piece of paper and ran it through a laser printer with my name and the title in nice, black print, with tiny image in the middle. It’s what I’d thought of, but the execution looked horrendous. This morning I had a completely different idea and used Grok to create a picture and then put that on a cover. It looked like a non-fiction book on nature. The ideas themselves aren’t bad. In fact, if I’d tried this exercise with the two aforementioned books, my output would’ve looked nothing like what the publisher created. Why am I telling you this? Because I need to tell myself again that the cover creation needs to be done by the professionals. Could I tinker with the idea and come up with something passable? Maybe. More likely, I’d end up with a cover that looks exactly like how it was made: by an amateur.