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.

First Step

I’ll finish my read-aloud of First Step today, meaning it’s done and ready to publish. Like I said in my previous post, the finances need to be available for that to happen and I’m not sure when that’ll be. Rest assured, Dedicated Reader, that I’ll get it out there as soon as I can. Yes, I’ll likely do one or two more proofreads at publishing time, but I can safely say this one’s in the can. No further changes to story, plot, or details. I like it and think it turned out quite well, especially after so many false starts. Writing half the story from the narrative POV of an AI was a change of pace and fun, and the other half from a female POV was new and different for me to write. A different challenge popped up in the fact that the reader knows all the characters survive for several decades due to the epilogue of First, so any life-threatening danger isn’t really that life-threatening. I feel like I still made it engaging enough. Overall, it’s a good story for both narrators and engaging, at times funny, and plenty of action. Looking forward to getting it into readers’ hands when the opportunity arrives.

Q1

We’re already a quarter of a way into 2025 and my, hasn’t it gone by fast? That means it’s time to take stock, to evaluate the state of the union, track my progress, and so on. Going into the year, you might remember that I made a list of goals, like I’ve done the past couple of years. This time I deliberately set achievable goals, knowing it might be tough to get a few things done due to the money required. One thing I wanted to do was publish First as an audiobook, but that looks unlikely in 2025. Between lower bonuses and helping to fund an upcoming wedding, finances are tighter than expected. I also wanted to publish Assignment Day, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen, either. It’s not all bad news, though. I finished the first book in my new series and will start writing the second one within a week. Once that’s done, I’ll publish both to Kindle Unlimited and the only expenses will be for professional cover design. Heck, given the state of funding for publishing my other books, I might end up putting out three in the series before the end of the year. Ninety days in so far, and it’s looking like this is going to be the year of writing, writing, writing.

Aloud

I’m currently in the midst of my read-aloud for First Step. Other than the usual typos or missing words, I’m also finding instances of word repeats. Those are the cases where I use a word and then within a sentence or two, use it again. You’d think something like that would be obvious, but in reality it’s only when I read the story aloud that I find those. Why? Because they break the flow of the spoken word more than the written. Saying the words aloud should mean a nice narrative rhythm. It’s when there’s a break or even a falter that I find something that needs to be reworded or rephrased. The flow of the language should be natural. I’m about a quarter of the way through the book, and as always, it’s a very useful and instructive exercise.

Habit

I thought I’d outgrown this habit. Especially with the rise of eBooks or being able to order a book at a time online and have it delivered the next day. But no, when I go into the local bookstore on Sunday, intending to just look around, I walked out with three more books than zero. And it’s not like I need more at the moment. I have another book ready to go when I finish my current read, although I’ll probably go back and read a Dickens novel before I read that. So, that’s two books in waiting. Plus, the series I’m reading on my Kindle at the same time, but that doesn’t really count since I always have something else going concurrently. Adding three from my recent purchase brings the total of books up to five. I know, there are plenty of people out there with a lot more TBR stacks than mine. It’s just funny that I haven’t experienced this in quite some time. It’s a good problem to have.

Second Step

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I disagreed with some of the suggestions Grok made about my draft of First Step. Specifically, that one of the narrators uses an avatar when communicating with others, one character in particular. It’s part of what makes their relationship interesting. Grok said that having the narrator use an avatar in some of the later encounters in the book is distracting and doesn’t work. Remember that? Well, I thought about it over the course of a couple of days and decided to give it a try. After all, it’s not like a movie set for eternity in its current form on film. I can delete, add, and move stuff around to my heart’s content until the book is published. Wouldn’t you know? It turns out Grok was right. The avatar inclusion in those scenes didn’t really do much in the way of advancing the story or adding to the characters’ interaction. Taking it out intensified the back-and-forth between the two characters without that trivial distraction and now I think those couple of scenes were good enough without the attempted humor. It’s interesting how the Grok feedback made me think about it, and even though I didn’t agree, just putting the thought in my head was enough for me to eventually consider trying the edits. And in the end, that made the book better.

Ready

I’m about to run into a problem. A good problem, I think, but a problem nonetheless. Assignment Day is polished and ready to publish. First Step is almost there, just needing a read-aloud and final proofreading. And I’ll be done by early next week with the edits on the first book in the series I’m writing. If you’re counting along at home, that means three books ready or darn-near-ready to publish. And by summer it’ll be four because I’ll have the second book in the series finished. That’s a lot of books. So, what’s the problem, you ask? It’s the age-old problem of money. Putting out books takes money, whether you’re one of the big publishing houses or a solitary dude sitting in his home office at 6:30 a.m. pounding away on the laptop keyboard. I plan on releasing the first two books in the series at the same time on Kindle Unlimited, so those books won’t take a lot of investment, just some professional covers. Assignment Day and First Step? They’ll take a bit more cash to get out the door. I just have to budget ahead and be ready to go when I have the chance. I know, you’re wondering if this is a veiled fundraising request. It’s not. I don’t want investors and I don’t want to crowdfund. These books might be ready to go, but they’ll come out when the time is right.