Lost

The last couple of writing sessions I got lost in the story. I can tell because when I look at my watch to see how near I am to my normal stopping time, I’ve been surprised it’s that late. That’s a good sign, at least in my thinking. If I’m getting lost in the story as I write it, then hopefully that translates into the same for whoever reads it, whenever that is. I’ve mentioned this before, but the opposite is true. If I’m writing the story and become bored, then the reader will also be bored. What does that look like when I’m writing? I can usually tell a few different ways. One is that I feel like I don’t really want to write, which means the creativity level is low, which means the words I put on the page are like going through an exercise. Sometimes I do it anyway just to write, but it means I’ll end up throwing away some pages. Another way to detect boredom is when I fire up the laptop and don’t remember what I last wrote. If my story is that uninspiring, it’s time to make some changes. Yet another way is where I detect a situation has gone on too long without change. In other words, I’m spinning my wheels, treading water, whatever you want to call it, but there’s no forward movement in the narrative. That gets boring as a writer and definitely mind-numbing for a reader. I want to be lost in the story, forgetting the world and its craziness for a brief period of time. When I’m writing, I want to be so far into the scene and the characters that I experience those a-ha moments, the rare instances where I pause and say, “Wow, that was good,” knowing eventual readers will feel the same. That’s why I enjoy getting lost.

One Star

Every writer gets them: one-star reviews. Both First and Next Time have one-star ratings on Amazon and Goodreads. I knew going in that some people wouldn’t like my books. Heck, even I don’t like every book I’ve ever read. In fact, there are some I haven’t finished, which is not my usual way of doing things. I like to finish what I start. All that aside, the question becomes one of how I, as a writer, react to one-star reviews. I believe there are two answers to that question: how I react publicly and my private reaction.

Publicly, it’s pretty simple. I don’t react. What am I going to do, start a flame war with a stranger? Yeah, that’ll get them to change their minds. And to make a public nuisance of myself brings the wrong kind of publicity. The only thing that would be helpful is if those people left a text review and not just a rating. I’d like to know what they didn’t like and why the story didn’t work for them. Did they have different expectations than what the book delivered? For example, were they looking for a Highlander bodice-ripper time-travel story in Next Time, only to find out it’s set in modern times and the bodices are spared? I wish I knew.

The other response is how I respond privately. Look, I’m a pragmatic person, and like I said, I knew some people wouldn’t like the books. I really appreciate all the high ratings the books have received. Right now on Amazon, First sits at 4.4 stars with 140 ratings and Next Time at 4.3 with 74. On Apple Books, First is 4.5 (19 ratings) and Next Time is 4.4 (10). Goodreads shows 4.49 (71) and 4.41 (58), respectively. Overall, not too bad. Statistically speaking, the one-star ratings are outliers. I don’t let them ruin my day, just like I don’t jump over the moon at 5-star reviews. Even Tolkien has one-star ratings for Lord of the Rings, pretty much a classic. On vacation, I picked up a book called Subpar Parks, which got its origin from people who left one-star ratings for U.S. National Parks. It’s pretty funny and shows how some people are never satisfied. Which is something good to keep in mind.

Vacation

What happened while I was on vacation with my writing? Well, not as much as I’d hoped. I wanted to crank out a good amount of story and had high hopes I could make a lot of progress on the sequel to First. In reality, we stayed quite busy and I probably wrote about 500 words total. Not going to be too upset, though, since we had a great time. It just turned out to not be a time for writing and that’s okay. The break allowed me to ponder some of the nagging questions in my mind about the story, although I haven’t resolved all those issues yet. For example, one of the things people liked about First included Ray, the smart-aleck AI. I don’t have enough of that in this book and that probably needs to change. Not that this needs to be exactly like its predecessor, but I can also see it from the viewpoint of the reader and coming away from the sequel wondering why I didn’t like it as much. Anyway, not much progress over the last couple of weeks, but hoping to get back to it and complete the draft before Thanksgiving in the US.

Bronze

First won another award while I was on my brief hiatus. It was kind of funny since I found out from my sister, who also won an award for her book, Milspouse Matters. She texted me one day and congratulated me on winning a Bronze Medal from Readers’ Favorite. I checked my emails and said no, that must have been from December when they gave me a 5-star review. Fortunately, my sister is patient with my sometimes intentional stupidity and sent me the link to the awards page. Sure enough, there was First in the SF category. I admitted my wrongness but still thought it odd that I hadn’t received any notification. She said she won a Gold Medal from them a few years ago for her previous book and never received an email. In this case, a couple of days later I got an email saying I needed to log into the Authors’ Area on their site since winners had been announced. Once I did that, I found a ton of follow-up as well as the opportunity to provide my address for stickers and a medal. Sure, I thought, a cheap plastic medal, but the stickers will be nice to have for my books. When I returned from vacation, the shipment had arrived. And the medal ain’t cheap. It’s a real metal medal, substantial and like something I’ve received for running marathons. Very nice to have and once again, an honor to win another award for my book. If you’re keeping track at home, I also entered Next Time in the contest but didn’t win for that book this time around. One out of two isn’t bad.

Hiatus

It’s time to take a little break from the blogging, but not from the writing. I have some obligations over the next few weeks and rather than trying to remember to write here, I’ll just say that I’ll be back later. Unless something big happens. In which case, I’ll take a hiatus from my hiatus in order to share the update. TTFN

Inflation

After mulling it over for several weeks, I finally raised the eBook prices on First and Next Time. I could blame inflation, but in reality it’s an experiment of sorts. I’ve been selling them both for $0.99 USD since they came out. First I bumped up to $2.99 and Next Time to $1.99. Trust me, it’s not a matter of making more money, since I’ll probably sell fewer copies over the next couple of months. Why? Because people will take a chance on spending a buck and finding a diamond in the rough, which seems to be what most people have done, judging by the reviews. Won’t I make more in royalties off the increased price? Sure. In fact, a $2.99 price at Amazon jumps the royalty percentage from 35% to 70%. Which sounds great until you realize it’s still a small amount. If you’re at home doing the math, 35% of $0.99 is $0.34 per eBook sold. You have to sell a LOT of books at that price to make anything that actually impacts your bank account in a positive way. On the other side, 70% of $2.99 is $2.10. Not bad and it actually means you’re in the bracket where you make more money off a sale than Amazon does. Theoretically, though, you make less overall because the volume sold goes down with the higher price. I could be completely wrong and pleasantly surprised when I get results post-price change. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Squirrel

One of my struggles as a writer is making sure I stay focused on the story I’m writing. Whatever do you mean by that, you ask. Remember the book I worked on earlier this year, the first in a series? I found my thoughts returning to it last night while The Wife and I watched a television show. Something clicked in my brain and I started thinking about the story I’d been writing, how it seemed okay but needed that extra oomph, and a way I could improve it tremendously. Which isn’t going to happen anytime soon. I’m still working on the sequel to First and not even halfway through writing it yet. I have to keep my eyes on that goal and then I can come back to this idea for a series. I don’t know how much other writers struggle with this, but I suspect it’s more than a few. In my head, I have ideas bouncing around in there constantly. .Sometimes too many. It’s a good problem to have, I suppose. You’ve heard the phrase, “discipline of writing”? Sometimes it truly is a discipline, where routine, self-denial, and consistency, are key. And so onward I go, continuing the story I’m now telling, with more waiting in the wings.

More Sales

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last sales update, so here we go. Last week trended upward a bit after the previous week. The lower ad budget remains the same, meaning clicks were probably the same or very close, but more people ended up buying the books. It’s interesting to me how effective these ads have been after I struggled a bit to find the right composition. I played with different color backgrounds, ad copy, and placement of the book cover (does it do better on the right? or on the left?). For both First and Next Time the best results came with a plain white background and a reviewer’s quote. Who knew? And apparently it doesn’t matter which side the book cover is on. Anyway, I’ll keep running those ads until they’re not effective anymore. And as I’ve been pondering, I’ll probably raise the price at the end of August. That’ll likely throttle sales, but it’ll give me good promotional material going into the holidays.

Ad Updates

Time to check in on how the ads for my books are doing. As I mentioned in a previous post, I couldn’t sustain the expense of the ads I was running, so I slashed the budget to less than half. As expected, sales took a corresponding dip. Last week was the first full week of running the ads with reduced funding, and I actually ended up surprised how many books still sold. Granted, it’s the lowest total in a couple of months, but overall I feel like it could’ve been worse. The ads are getting clicks and the budget is drained every day. I even had quite a few sales last week and this on B&N for First. For some reason, the ads I’d run previously didn’t generate a link for people who clicked on the ad with a preference for B&N, so this might be the first time in quite awhile that audience has seen these ads. I’ve been contemplating raising the price of the books, but I also have to be prepared for lower sales. The only reason to do it is for the longer-term where I can run ads at the end of the year showing a price cut. Still gotta think about that one.

School #2

Last time I wrote about the Creative Writing course I took during my last semester before graduating with an Accounting degree, so let’s continue that tale. I recall reading short stories from our textbook, probably some of the classics and maybe even some excerpts from longer pieces. Our instructor lives in my mind as energetic and encouraging, a far cry from the professors in the business college. We’d write our stories, read them aloud to each other, offer critique, and go back to the drafting board to incorporate suggestions. I also recall the quiet surprise of the other students when my writing didn’t suck as bad as they expected. Okay, maybe they didn’t expect it to suck, but I still inhabited an aura of something different. After all, I wasn’t one of their fellow English majors, much less in literature or something involving French novelists. I got an A out of the class and as I said previously, it ended up being my favorite college course. I don’t even remember what I read or wrote, but something good must have happened since I’m still writing all these years later. Not only did I not lose my love writing by taking the class, it’s actually a good marker on my way to having the confidence to self-publish my books.

School

School’s back in session here in Texas, which I don’t have to worry about since all the kids are grown. I have this recurring dream, a variety of which invaded my sleep last night, where I’m back in college again. The highlights tend to be that I’m in a class, that I’ve got one or more that I need to go to that day, and I don’t know what time and where they are. This is usually because it’s the end of the semester and I haven’t been attending classes, plus I have no idea of where my schedule is so I can’t find it to know where I need to go.

Anyway, this post isn’t about my dreams. As the wise sage Rhett Miller says, “Nobody wants to hear about your stupid dreams. We don’t even want to hear half the shit that happens in reality. Go back to sleep.” No, what I wanted to mention regards the Creative Writing class I took my very last semester when I needed three credits to maintain full-time status. I was an accounting major, seated in long rows in large lecture rooms where none of the students talked with other or interacted beyond assigned group projects, and sometimes not even then. Creative Writing provided a whole different experience, beginning with the fifteen or so of us around a large table where we had to look at each other and talk. I provided the fish-out-of-water participant since nobody believed a business school geek could write. I have fond memories of that particular time in school and always say it’s the best course I took in college. More next time…

Retirement

I’m a long way off from retirement, but I couldn’t think of anything else to title this post. The subject came to mind as I was thinking how I’ve published a couple of books in the past year and wondering if that’s something I’ll keep doing or if at some point I close up shop. I’ve always kind of assumed I’d never stop writing. Heck, I’ve been doing it in some form or other for most of my life. And the thought of having all day, every day, to write…well, that’s just a nice thought. Maybe it’s actually a two-part question. Will I ever retire from writing? Doubtful. I don’t see how I could. Will I ever retire from publishing? That could very well happen, at least as to how I publish books in their current form. When I get to that magic retirement age and can afford to leave behind the corporate life and steady paycheck, I’ll live on a fixed budget. I mean, that’s kind of the case now, but you know what I mean. As I’ve mentioned before, publishing and marketing a book is expensive. Maybe there will come a time when I can’t afford that kind of financial outlay, in which case how I publish a book changes drastically. Fortunately, we live in a world where if I want to, I can do all the formatting and design myself and upload a finished product to Amazon. But even that still requires an investment to promote a book or else it dies in the Kindle store, lonely and unread. Again, this is all way in the future and maybe by then publishing a book will look way different than it does today. Food for thought.

Sales Update

Time for a look at how sales went last week after lowering my ad expenses. As expected, sales for both First and Next Time fell lower, but not as low as I expected. That was probably because I reduced the budget on Thursday, so sales for the first half of the week remained at the previous level. This week will be the real test and just based on the Amazon rankings so far, I’ll have more sales than I did back in the early part of the year before I discovered BookBub, but far less than a month ago when the budget was much higher. I’ve also thought about raising the price of the book, but I didn’t want to mess with both the ad budget and price at the same time. That’d probably see sales fall right off a cliff.

Chaos Theory

I might’ve written about this before, so apologies if that’s the case: in writing the sequel to First, I’m trying to embrace chaos theory. In my mind it means that if something bad can happen, it should. I know at times I tend to write safely, meaning that at various junctures I’ll make things go smoother than they should. We try to do that all the time in real life, but in a book it’s not exactly an engaging strategy. Let me give an example. I came up with a situation in the new book where a judge issues a ruling suspending activities by a certain entity. We’ve been taught in these situations to sit back and let the lawyers do their thing. That was where I started heading in the narrative as I wrote the scene, but then I realized this was an opportunity for chaos. If the characters do the exact thing they shouldn’t do, that introduces a whole new thread into the story. Plus, it’s more fun. After all, this is supposed to be near-future sci-fi. Who wants to read about a bunch of lawyers and their endless parade of court filings? Bring on the chaos.

Progress

How's it going on writing the sequel to First, you ask? After that flash of inspiration while you were running, it’s been strangely silent, you say. Great question and astute observation, Gentle Reader. The short answer: going very well. The longer answer: I’ve been busy ripping and replacing every other chapter of what I’d written. The story has two narrators, one of which I changed the situation and consequences from the end of the first chapter forward. I already like it better, which is a good sign. I wrote some brainstorming notes before beginning the revisions and once I started writing, deviated immediately. They were good deviations, though, upping the danger and tension as well as creating repercussions in the alternating chapters from the other narrator’s POV. I don’t know if that explains it very well, but all that to say, it’s progressing and I’m much happier with the story itself.

Sales

One of the questions I had when I started independent publishing with First last October was this: how many books am I going to sell? I did a little research (as can you) and found the consensus is that on average, an independently published book sells 250 copies. When I published my first three books on Amazon over ten years ago, I did it for fun and so friends and family members could read them. Since I wasn’t distributing to other booksellers, they went on Kindle Unlimited where people could read them for free with their KU subscription. I guarantee you that way less than 250 people read those books. I never advertised them and thus they languished on Amazon’s site, occasionally noticed by some solitary soul.

Fast forward to 2023-24. My aim with publishing First in late 2023 and now Next Time about seven weeks ago was to get readers. Both have sold reasonably well, considering I’m only doing ads and promotions. Way more than 250 each, which is gratifying. But as I mentioned in my previous post, that minor success comes at a pretty steep price. As I found a decade ago, it’s not enough to just put my books on Amazon and wait for people to notice them. That’s not going to happen and I never fooled myself that it would. This writing and publishing thing is a hobby, and hobbies cost money. I’d estimate that every book I’ve sold costs me about seven bucks a copy. Yes, you read that right. I’m not making that much per copy, all the expenses have added up to that much out of my pocket. Those sales are greater than 99% eBooks, so you can deduce the inflow is way less than the outflow. Let’s not consider all the time spent writing and editing. If I added in those hours at even a greatly reduced rate, the cost of this hobby would make me question my sanity. Has it been worth it? That’s a question for another day.

Ad Cost

One thing to know about independent publishing is that it’s not cheap. Beyond the cost of actual publishing, advertising and promos take up a lot of money. So much, in fact, that I’m going to dial it back for the next few months. It’s been incredibly exciting to see my books at the top of the rankings on Amazon and selling well on Apple, but it comes at a big cost that’s not sustainable. As an author, you hope that your sales snowball and become self-sustaining. Even then, I think there’s still advertising and expense. But I have a finite amount of money and since I want to do some promos and ads around the holiday season later this year, I’m going to dial it way back on the ad expense. I’m also thinking of raising the price for a few months. That would likely throttle down sales, but since I’m not going to be advertising as much, maybe it’s the right time to do it. The other benefit would be that when I do start holiday sales, I can lower the price and tout the book as lowest price in X number of days. Yes, that’s an artificial approach, but go complain to your grocery store since they do the same thing.

In this week’s dose of good news, I hit 100 ratings on Amazon for First. It maintains a 4.5 score and I’m very proud of that. Even with awards and great reviews, it’s gratifying to get the pulse of readers, the people who invested a little bit of money and a whole lot of time in reading the book. I appreciate every single person who clicks on the rating and especially those who leave a written review.

Better

As mentioned in my previous post, I came up with a better idea for the book I’m working on, the sequel to First. The past couple of days I wrote the first chapter. Or more accurately, rewrote it. I can already tell it’s going to be better, a more compelling story than what I’d previously written. I typed a few notes into my brainstorming document and then started writing. It didn’t take long for the story to branch in a different direction than the notes I’d just written, but that’s okay. The change created more chaos as well as urgency in the storyline. That’s a good thing. What I’d previously written seemed too routine, like the characters spun their wheels too much. That’s why I knew it would require a lot of editing, but this new course is hopefully going to solve those problems.

Perspiration

Yesterday afternoon I went out for a run, a habit I’ve had for going on two decades now. In Texas a run in July usually means scorching hot temperatures with a nice dose of humidity. This week, though, temperatures are unseasonably cool, ratcheting up only into the upper 80s on the Fahrenheit scale so far. Anyway, running several miles usually clears my head and at times the perspiration seems to bring inspiration. That was the case yesterday, which was nice because it seems like I’ve been so concentrated on selling and marketing First and Next Time that my well of creativity has been running a little dry. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m working on the sequel to First and have tried a few ideas with nothing to my liking so far. The current iteration is almost 50k words and it feels like it’s going okay, but I also have the sense it’ll need a lot more work. Plus, there’s that nagging feeling it’s not as good a story as I want it to be. About a mile into my run yesterday, the solution hit me. It was one of those aha moments, as well as a “why didn’t I think of this before?” moments. Yes, it means I totally have to rewrite half of what I’ve written so far. But it’s also going to be so much better. I’m glad a little sweat ended up providing the missing ingredient for this book. Okay, that sounds a little gross, but you get my point.

#1

It was a good weekend. A couple of great things happened on Saturday. That afternoon I discovered that Next Time won another award, this time the Best Book award from PenCraft. They do a seasonal awards competition and my book won for Romance - Fantasy/Sci-Fi. Interestingly enough, I still haven’t received a notification from PenCraft yet. I had a note in my tracking spreadsheet that winners would be announced July 20th, and I found out I’d won when I checked their site. Anyway, no matter how many awards my books receive, it never gets old.

The other news came that evening. I’ve been monitoring the ranking on Amazon, as most writers do. The rankings for the US and UK bookstores are easily accessible, but I have to click through my ad manager to get to the rankings for Canada. That paid off Saturday evening when First hit #1 in the rankings for Canada’s category of Science Fiction Space Exploration. As I joked to my wife, I can now say the book is an international best-seller. All joking aside, it’s actually pretty cool. I grabbed a screenshot, of course! I don’t know what that means in actual sales. It does mean the ads have been effective and going #1 along with being in the Top 20 in the UK is pretty heady stuff.