Travel
Seems like the first few decades of my life I pretty much stayed in my little bubble of the American Southwest. We didn’t have much money for travel with my parents raising four kids on a schoolteacher’s salary. In my late teens we ventured further afield, all the way up to Colorado and across the Great Plains to Iowa, then down the Mississippi to Louisiana. I finally reached the East Coast a few years later for a college roommate’s wedding. I didn’t make it to the West Coast until I was in my mid-30s.
Why am I taking this trip down Travel Lane? Because traveling has affected my writing. In more recent times I’ve been able to venture further abroad, seeing the world from a different perspective. Having a vivid imagination always helped me understand there’s more to the world than my little part of it but seeing it in person made it real and not just theoretical. I’ve taken places I’ve been and incorporated them into my writing, such as Prague and Dublin in Assignment Day, and Boston in Next Time. I wonder if I tended toward writing science fiction because space is unknown and I could write whatever I wanted in whatever setting, whereas stories set on Earth are tougher to write if you haven’t been to the place you’re writing about. Tougher, but not impossible. Especially these days with Google Maps and a wealth of information. Beyond the benefits to writing, travel is fun. Five stars, would highly recommend.
Reading
So what have I been reading lately? Glad you asked. I just finished the Horatio Hornblower series by C.S. Forester. It consisted of 11 books, one of which was unfinished. For those who’ve never heard of Hornblower, he’s a sailor in the British Navy during the early 1800s and the Napoleonic Wars. He starts as a very young midshipman and through the course of the books he advances to Admiral. I don’t think that last part is a spoiler, since after all, the title of the last book in the series is Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies. Anyway, he rises in rank and renown due to his bravery in battle as well as sharp mind. The world of sailing, before steam power came along to propel ships, reliant on the wind and all the various terms for the sails and rigging is starkly different from modern times. And it’s fascinating. Forester draws a complex character who suffers from doubt, self-loathing, seasickness, and infidelity. Hornblower was more nuanced than I expected, but I shouldn’t have been surprised; after all, the series is popular and held my interest for almost a dozen volumes. Published from 1937 to 1962, I can see why the character would have influenced a young Gene Roddenberry when he created Captain James T. Kirk. I must have talked highly enough about the books since now The Wife is making her way through the series.
2024
Welcome to the new year! It’s all bright and shiny and still has that new year smell. We haven’t had a chance to smudge it or break something yet, but it’s an election year in the US. Things are going to get stupid.
Anyway, since I looked back on 2023 in my last post it seems appropriate to look ahead to my goals in 2024. Just like last year, I’ve already created a document to gather these together, and in no particular order, here they are:
Publish Next Time
Promote Next Time and First
Do a featured advertising deal with First
Do a new release advertising deal with Next Time
Finish writing the first book in the new series
Write the second book in the new series
Publish the first book in the new series
Set a publishing date for Assignment Day
Get a total of 500 reviews for all the published books across all sites where sold
Be a guest on at least three podcasts
Pretty ambitious, huh? At least that’s how it seems to me. Looks like 2024 is going to be busy. Better get started.
2023
It’s the end of the year and time to take a look back at what happened in 2023 versus what I’d planned. Believe it or not, I was actually smart enough to create a doc titled “2023 Goals” and that made it a bit easier to find. Here they are:
1. Publish two books
2. Edit two books and get in shape for publishing
3. Write one book
4. Market published books
a. Add content to author's website regularly
b. Add content to Amazon author's page
c. Update Twitter and Facebook as needed
5. Be a guest on at least one podcast
6. Get 100 reviews on Amazon and other sites where the books are sold
So how did I do? I only published one book in 2023 (#1), mainly because I decided doing two in quick succession was crazy. And it wouldn’t give the first book time to breathe, as it were. I did accomplish #2, with Next Time and Assignment Day ready to publish. I missed the mark on #3, having started writing several books but not completing any of them. That includes a couple of concepts for sequels to First as well as the first book of a new series. I should be able to get the latter done in short order. I totally did #4 and made it even better with content on LinkedIn, which I’m pretty sure got more reactions and sales than the other social media sites I tried. Also, glad to say I exceeded the goal in #5 by being on TWO podcasts. The last one in the list was one where I fell way short, with 12 reviews on Amazon as of this writing. It’s tough to get reviews, but I’ve been told 12 is actually a good number for a book that’s been out only a couple of months.
All in all, a very good year even if I missed a few of the goals. It was marked by the publication of First in October and I’m proud I got it out the door and into the hands of readers around the world. To those who bought my book, left reviews, told your friends, and generally supported me, I want to say thank you. Thank you for a great year and looking forward to what 2024 has to offer.
Interview
I did another podcast interview yesterday, this one for The Author’s Spot. Not sure yet if it’ll be out next week or in their new Season 4 lineup. I had a great conversation with Mr. Robinson and am looking forward to hearing it in its entirety. It was a nice way to round out the year and helps me realize there’s a lot more to do in the new one. Mr. Robinson asked me an interesting question about writing in a linear fashion, although that might not be the exact words he used. He picked up on my comments about writing a series of three related books, then First and following it up with two unrelated books, but still with the idea in the back of my mind of a sequel to First. His question revolved more around creating a universe or story and continuing to write in that realm. For the first three books I wrote, I had a story to tell that I knew would take longer than one book. Since then, I tend to write what piques my interest at any certain point. I have two sequels to First started, but I mainly did that to get thoughts down on paper. Will they become full-blown books? We’ll see.
Year
It’s crazy to think I’ve had this website and been writing this blog for about a year now. It’s also crazy to think about how I started out writing a blog post every weekday. That seems a little excessive now that I look back on it. I’m not ready to do a retrospective on the year yet, but it’s interesting to see how things developed over the course of twelve months. It makes me think about lessons learned and how I can take those learnings and do things better or differently in 2024. One thing I can think of already when it comes to writing is focusing on a particular book to write. I have thoughts (and several chapters written) for at least three books but I need to pick one and complete the draft. I’ve been distracted by publishing First and all the follow-up efforts. Not a bad thing, just something I need to figure out for the new year.
Ad Variety
I’m trying different ads and formats on BookBub to see what works. The site tracks impressions and CTR (click-through rate), showing what percentage of people who see the ad click on it. It’s interesting to see what’s going well and what doesn’t. For example, I have one version of the ad that has done fairly well and another I tried yesterday that has produced no clicks so far. Fortunately, they encourage you to experiment and see what produces results. Lord knows I’m not a marketing expert so this is somewhat of a painful process. At least they make it easy.
Promos
Upcoming promotions will be for last-minute gifts and post-Christmas to people who received gift cards. We’re in the home stretch for the holidays but as I’ve noted previously, a lot of book sales happen after the holidays. It makes sense as people look for ways to spend funds they unwrapped on Christmas day. What better way to spend money than on books?
Next Year
Hard to believe but it’s time to start planning next year’s activities. I know up front a few things I’d like to accomplish. I’m already in the queue for a podcast, I’m going to publish Next Time, and I want to finish and publish at least the first two books in a series I can roll out to Kindle Unlimited and keep going for several years. I’d also like to write the sequel to First, but that might be a bit of a stretch while publishing other books. I’d also like to figure out how to advertise more effectively, but wouldn’t we all? I have a few weeks still before the end of this year to accomplish some things and plan out 2024 in more detail. It’s been a good year and I have a lot do in the new one.
New Ad
The ad I used for BookBub started off decently, getting a few dozen clicks over several days, but seemed to lose momentum. I created a new version of the ad, using the free version of Canva so I could be a little more creative than the built-in ad generator of BookBub, and lo and behold! It went live yesterday and I’m already seeing a lot more clicks on it. Interestingly, it seems a good number of them are in the UK. By the way, it took me a day to come up with the ad copy that I thought worked, and looks like persistence paid off to some degree.
BookBub is an online bookstore for eBooks with quite a selection. For authors they do a lot of promotion with ads and featured deals. I’m pondering the featured deals option since they project how many downloads or purchases you can get based on the price of your book. For SF they predict ~22k downloads if you make your book free to download. If it’s 99 cents (USD) then the usual range of buyers is from 100-4200. I’m pondering this for after the first of the year, but I don’t know yet which option I’d do. Both cost money on my part, of course, and the low number of that range in the latter option wouldn’t be worth it. The possibility of 20 thousand people reading my book is pretty cool, even if it’s for free. I’ll ponder this some more.
More Ads
I’m trying ads through a new source, a site called BookBub. I’ve been running Amazon ads for a month or so with extremely low success, which means I need to try a different ad or change my bid. The problem with the bid is that if you make it too high then you lose money. I prefer not to lose money. The results through BookBub are already better than Amazon and I know they’ve resulted in at least some sales. Clicks on an ad don’t always translate to sales but with this new way of advertising I can tweak the ad and try different things to see what works.
3-Star
Right on the heels of the 5-star review of First, I got another that was mostly good in the review itself but only 3 stars for the rating. It’s interesting since the reviewer thought the first half of the book didn’t have enough excitement and the method of travel stretched her credulity. I can understand both of those, I think, although I’d disagree on both counts. I’ve heard from numerous people how they liked the emphasis on the characters instead of science and the first half of the book took the time to develop those characters. As for the science, those same people have told me they enjoyed the simplicity of the space travel and how it seemed to make sense. I read an article a few years ago that gave me the inspiration for the electromagnetic drive but didn’t save the link to it. I did some digging and was able to find it again, finally, and while my invention might not fall directly in line with the science in the article, it’s not that far a stretch, either. Anyway, nice to stay grounded - I guess not all the reviews can be 5 stars.
5-Star
Monday afternoon I received an email that a review for First had been posted on the Reader’s Favorite website. I entered their annual contest in mid-November, and the entry fee includes a posted review. I was very pleased to receive a 5-star review! I added the link to the main page of this site along with the 5-star seal they provide. Today I’ll socialize it in the usual places to share the good news.
On the same day another email notified me that First has been picked up for review on Reedsy Discovery. That’s excellent news since I’d submitted to them back in August, hoping for a review by the book’s release date. Instead, First seemed to languish in their queue. If no reviewers pick it up, then the review period expires. I think it was renewed at no extra cost a couple of times. Somewhere in the last 1-2 months I added the first chapter to the profile so potential reviewers could get a taste for the book. No idea if that’s what finally made the difference, but happy to have another review on the way.
More Chaos
I wrote several weeks ago about adding chaos to the story I’m writing. Now I think it needs even more chaos. Also, could be that I’m not getting a good sense of the overall story yet since I’m writing in bits and pieces between the marketing and other activities with First. I think that’s a feeling of lack of investment so far in writing it. When I wrote Next Time it just kind of spilled out in a hurry. It might be that the chaos so far is all in my head due to activities other than writing. This is kind of new territory for me: how do I take the uncertainty of each day and translate that into conflict within a book I’m writing? Books are a product of the time when the author writes them and right now it’s a little chaotic in my writing life. Not sure what to do about that yet other than concentrating on each piece of the pie in turn.
Friday
Finally, Friday. I haven’t done much writing this week, focusing instead on marketing plus all the other stuff going on. My podcast interview went live on Wednesday, the review from Independent Book Review went live on Monday, and I’ve been busy pushing and following up on signed gift copies. I also lowered the price on the eBook version of First and tried to figure out how to enable the ‘Look Inside’ option on Amazon. Still haven’t figured that one out and will probably have to call the publisher. Also, running the discount on the paperback on the publisher’s site with a coupon and will have to see if that’s producing any results. I’ve been researching other marketing options and sites, knowing I can’t do it all but still trying to find the most effective. So yeah, all in all a busy week.
It’s Out
My podcast interview on Hump Day Calls is out today. It’s available on Spotify and YouTube and there will be clips on some of the social media sites that I’ll share. It’s Episode 13 of the podcast, and as I’m listening to it from this side it sounds pretty good. It’s a wide-ranging conversation and it seems like I did all right. It’s funny to listen to yourself and think about different ways you could have answered a question or said something. Oh well. I’ll put the links on the main page.
Return
Here we are, post-holiday in the US and returning to the regular schedule of work and school. I know people say it all the time, but it really does seem like the past week went by fast. And not completely how I would have liked it but oh well. Overall it was good and this morning I”m back to posting here and doing other tasks, such as publicizing the coupon code for the paperback edition of First. My timing is a little off as I was going to do the same for the eBook, but I wanted to lower the price of that version overall while leaving the paperback the same, just with a discount code for this week. The coupon only works on the publisher’s site, whereas the lowered price of the eBook should reflect everywhere it’s sold. Plus, I’m still marketing signed books. Let’s see how it goes now that Thanksgiving is over.
Black Friday
I guess this is where my lack of marketing skills comes into play since I didn’t put discounts or incentives into place for Black Friday, which happens to be today. I have some promotions planned over the coming month and beyond but let’s be honest, I don’t think a lot of people are shopping for Black Friday deals on books in general, and more specifically like mine. Sounds a little like rationalization for my lack of preparation, doesn’t it? I don’t think I’m wrong, though. At least on Amazon, the biggest bookseller, they’re doing sales but also lists like best of the year, etc. Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t see a lot of upside in my putting a bunch of effort into Black Friday sales at this point.
On Air
The podcast went great on Monday, and many thanks to Ross from HDC (Hump Day Calls). We talked for over an hour and I felt like it was a great discussion. The episode will go on the air a week from today on YouTube and Spotify, and Ross will also put out some clips to social media. He said normally he’d do the clips before the launch date, but he’s traveling for the holidays. It was a wide-ranging conversation, and I even learned something new. He said he thinks of pets when writing personalities in his story and I think that’s a fabulous idea. It’s hard, at least to me, to incorporate people you know into your writing, but pets? That makes sense. They won’t recognize themselves in our book and get offended at the portrayal.
We also talked about poetry, running, and inspiration. Looking forward to the finished product.