November

Well, hello there, November. You kind of snuck up on me. Seems like just yesterday it was summer and I’d kicked the writing of First Step into high gear. Now we’re down to the last two months of 2024 and I still have a lot to do. This week I’ve knocked several items off my task list, including the rearranging of my website. It looks a lot cleaner now and also provides room for easy expansion when new books come out. On the pages for my most recent books I put in some nice blurbs from reviews that I think enhance the look and feel. Also, I updated the BookBub ad for Next Time. The previous ad did just fine, but I had a great quote from a review that I think will produce more clicks and hopefully purchases: “The Time-Traveler’s Wife meets Outlander…a gorgeous, affecting read.” That ad went live this morning. Now I need to update my author’s pages and profiles and make sure everything is current. My plan is to start editing Assignment Day next week. Like I said, still a lot to do this year.

Tasks

The first few days this week involved making a list and starting to check off tasks. Yesterday I entered Next Time into three contests and today I’m going to start streamlining this website. I also need to mail copies of my books, one to a contest and others to the book fair I believe I mentioned previously. I kind of like it that one of the contests I entered requires a physical copy of the book rather a .epub or .pdf file. There’s nothing wrong with electronic copies, but I think the actual book is a better presentation to a judge. Anyway, as I work through my task list this week, I have to start thinking beyond that. Last night I pondered going back to writing the first book in the series I’d started earlier this year, but Assignment Day needs to be taken care of before that. Then maybe in December I’ll work on that series. By then, though, I might also decide to start the long editing process for First Step. Seems that I have options.

Interim

As I noted last time, I finished the draft for First Step, which means I’m now between projects. What to do, what to do…I have a few things on my to-do list. I think it’s time to rearrange this website. The list of links under First and Next Time has become too long and would be better suited on their own pages instead of cluttering up the main page. That’ll make the landing page a lot cleaner. I need to do some posts on social media for the PenCraft awards. I also need to evaluate other contests, since there are some with due dates in a few days. I need to email copies of First to the Readers’ Favorite book show that takes place around the time of their awards ceremony, which I won’t be attending, but they sell donated books with the proceeds for charity. I need to finalize my plans for holiday promotions and re-pricing, if that’s the route I decide to go. Lots of little things to do that should keep me busy before I start my final pass through Assignment Day. I have a feeling that’s going to take a little more work than expected. I say that to mean I like the story, but I have a feeling I can tighten it up and better communicate what’s at stake. All that to say, I have a lot to do in the interim between writing books.

Done

Hot off the presses! Just now finished the first draft of the sequel to First. I began in late June, according to when I created the folder on my computer. That’s four months to write 75k words, which seems like a long time to me, especially since I cannibalized parts of it from previous attempts at the story. I’m not sure of the whole timeline, since it looks like I continued brainstorming and changing things up into the later stages of summer. Oh, well, no matter when I actually started it, it’s done. (Edit: I actually went back and looked at previous posts - late July is when I took the 50k words I’d already written and threw most of them in the trash, starting the new and much improved version of the story) My tentative title is First Step. It’s been an interesting journey to get this wrapped up, with false starts, wrong directions, and changes up ‘til the end in the climax. I’ve already started a list of edits that I know I need to make, but for now the draft is going into the virtual drawer for a while before I even look at it again. I’m pleased with the story overall, and I like the POVs I ended up using to tell the tale. It’s interesting to have an AI as one of the narrators, presenting some challenges but also a lot of opportunities I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Since I already have another book in the queue to publish, First Step probably won’t see the light of day for 12-18 months. In the meantime, I need to get Assignment Day out the door in 2025. My immediate plans are to catch up on marketing and contests and other stuff that I’ve put off while writing the draft, as well as taking another pass through Assignment Day and making it the best I can. In the meantime, I’m going to celebrate the completion of another book with some frosty beverages.

Double Win

Woke up to a couple of good emails yesterday morning from PenCraft Book Awards. Both of my recent books, First and Next Time, won 1st Place in their respective categories! The former in Science Fiction and the latter in Romance - Fantasy/Sci-Fi. If you’re keeping track at home, Next Time won the PenCraft seasonal contest for 2024 Summer, but these new awards are for all of 2024. If you’re interested in checking them out, they’re linked from the main page of this site. I was surprised at winning for First, since it didn’t win when I entered the Fall 2023 portion of the contest. The emails said they host an awards ceremony next year, and as much fun as it would be to go to Vegas again (I loathe Las Vegas), I’ll probably have to pass. Also, they said that a large number of people entered but they didn’t have winners in some categories because the books didn’t meet their criteria for excellence. I was glad to see they listed 2nd and Runner-Up winners in both of my categories. That means I didn’t win by default but actually took the prizes for being the best. That maybe sounds a bit arrogant, but my point is that it’s better than winning by forfeit. Anyway, I’m incredibly humbled to win with both books I released in the last year. The competition in the marketplace is high and I’m grateful that my efforts have been recognized with these awards.

Neighborly

It’s time to wrap up my walk through the libraries and bookstores of my life and we’re going out in style. I’m pleased that a new bookstore opened in downtown McKinney a few months ago. It’s a great addition to the scene in our city square and so far it’s been crazy busy almost every time I’ve stopped in. Neighbor Books is the name and the owners have done a great job putting a bookstore into an old building that doesn’t seem like a great configuration for a bookstore. When we moved here, the space was one of those antique/knickknack/junk spaces. To their credit, the bookstore owners have kept the space open, partly because a row of columns runs down the middle of the store. That relegates the books to the side walls, with some on display around the columns, but they didn’t feel the need to cram racks of books in every space, instead opting for a place where people can walk around and not bump into the fixtures. It’s more relaxing that way and allows people to wander. I’ve already bought several books I probably wouldn’t have otherwise by browsing through the shelves. It’s a far cry from online shopping and it’s a nice, unexpected addition to the area. I hope they stick around a long time and I’ll do my part.

Bigger

After moving from my hometown to Tulsa to Kansas City, the rule of the game for bookstores seemed to be BIGGER. In the former we had B&N nearby and a short-lived store called Media Play that sold books, music, and movies. It probably lasted four or five years and I mostly bought things other than books there. The B&N is still there across the street from Woodland Hills Mall, which had its own bookstore or two back in the day. B. Dalton or Borders or Waldenbooks, maybe? Once we moved to KC, I went through a period of getting more books from the library than buying them. For those years as well as until recently in Texas, our bookstore of choice has mostly been Amazon. The KC libraries were really good and allowed me to sample a lot of books I probably wouldn’t have tried otherwise. The Zona Rosa shopping area in the far north of Kansas City hosted a B&N, which I’d check out on occasion but really didn’t buy much there. More like window shopping. During that time I donated a lot of books, trying to trim down the number of boxes we had to deal with every time we moved. Many hardcovers and trade paperbacks made their way into the donation bins, which was probably a good thing. I kept favorites and others that had meaning and still have them.

Elsewhere

What about book stores outside my hometown? I remember a few. When my grandparents lived in Las Cruces, we’d spend time there every summer and usually go to the mall at some point. In my early teen years, that meant the Loretto Mall, a single-story blah edifice that I think later became a center for offices of various kinds. I remember a bookstore there, name lost to history, kind of quaint and with a wooden bridge as decor in the middle of the store. I don’t recall any particular books I purchased there, but I’m sure I did. Later, the shiny new Mesilla Valley Mall came along with two - two! - bookstores. I think one was a Waldenbooks (remember those?), but I don’t remember the other. I don’t think it was a Borders but I could be mistaken, if Borders was around back then. Again, I only visited them on occasion and later when I went to New Mexico State, so my memories aren’t as vivid as some of the other stores I remember. The campus bookstore was always a disappointment since they only carried textbooks and the required reading for English lit classes. Now the campus has a Barnes & Noble with “real” books and I’ve visited there are few times over the past couple of decades when I’m in town. It makes me completely jealous and wishful it’d been around when I went to school there. Probably for the best, though, since I didn’t exactly have a lot of disposable income.

Others

Beyond the Hastings Books and Records in town, we had another store at some point at the new mall. I can’t remember the name of it - Book Nook? Or maybe I’m confusing it with another name. Regardless, when the sparkling new White Sands Mall opened, I think in the early 1980s, it included a bookstore. I don’t recall that it lasted long there, maybe a few years, eventually replaced by a t-shirt store or something. It was fine, but just not as well-stocked as Hastings. I looked for books everywhere, from convenience stores to grocery stores to museums. We even had a store called Yucca News Stand on the main street in town. The back wall was covered with magazine racks, while paperbacks sat in free-standing racks in part of the store. I never bought much there, though, since the owners were quite intolerant of kids, especially those who came in to browse. If you took down a magazine it better go back on the rack in thirty seconds or you’d be told “this isn’t a library.” I went in once in a long while, but mostly patronized the Hastings. I also recall a dime store, Mott’s, that went bust at some point, and I think I bought one of the pre-ST:TMP novels there. Let’s just say I tried to find books wherever I could in the Dark Ages pre-Amazon. Looking back, it seems hit and miss with finding something worth buying, but now feels a little like an ongoing scavenger hunt.

Hastings

I don’t remember when, exactly, that Hastings Books and Records opened in my hometown. It seems like it was around the time I was in sixth or seventh grade, but don’t quote me on that. It started out as a narrow store in what used to be called a shopping center but now is referred to as a strip mall. I remember riding my bike the couple of miles to the store, mainly looking for new Star Trek books, or at least new to me. Back around the time of ST:TMP, the list of books related to the 1960’s show was a pretty short one. The catalog consisted of twelve books by James Blish that chronicled the episodes from the TV show, several in each; ten books that did the same with the episodes of the Animated Series; a short series of photonovels, basically breaking an original episode into stills and using dialogue boxes for the story, kind of like a realistic comic book, and they were pricey; and finally, about a dozen novels of varying length and quality. I read them all, and in the dark ages before the Internet, scoured magazines and even the bookseller’s order form to see if something new was coming out. The store didn’t stock everything, but I could order a book and it’d come in 2-3 weeks later, if I was lucky. I also remember several Star Wars novels that came out around the same time, such as Splinter of the Mind’s Eye by Alan Dean Foster, rumored to be the basis for the next movie. Spoiler alert - it wasn’t. I haunted that little store, spending money earned from mowing lawns to buy $1.50 or $1.75 paperbacks. At some point, the store expanded by a lot, but that’s a story for another day.

School Libraries

I know I said we’d look at bookstores, but I don’t want to bypass the school libraries from when I was growing up. They were an important source of books for young Me and I’d hate to skip over them. I don’t much remember the library from my first two years of elementary school, but I do recall the one at the school where I went for four years from third grade through sixth. Our librarian was a wonderful lady named Mrs. Griggs, who also had the distinction of substitute teaching for my dad at the junior high on the day he was out for an important event (my birth). The library seemed big to me at the time, but I’d bet it wasn’t much bigger than two classrooms put together. I was a wean (the Irish term for child seems appropriate here) with a lot of energy. I remember checking out books on presidents, football, and baseball, reading the same books multiple times. When I moved to junior high, the size of the library expanded dramatically. This is probably where I started reading a little more fiction, and got a dose of science fiction from there as well as the public library. Our city had a mid-high, covering ninth and tenth grades, which is where I really dove into my Louis L’Amour phase (still going on, by the way). I checked out all his books over the course of those two years, most of them at least three times. By the time I reached senior high, I bought more books than I checked out and the library at my school during junior and senior years remained mostly a place for research during classes. I continued to frequent the city library and found SF books there that I couldn’t at school or the bookstores. I guess you could say that wherever there were books, there was I. School libraries were essential to my access to books, especially in a small town. I’m grateful to the people who worked there and shared their love for books with me.

Memories

I thought it’d be interesting, at least for me, to take a trip down Memory Lane. This particular trip involves books and where I found them along the way. This idea came to mind since a new bookstore opened in downtown McKinney and it’s made me realize how much libraries and bookstores have been part of my life. The story starts when I wasn’t even old enough to start Kindergarten, which is age 5 in the U.S. I’d learned to read already, though, thanks no doubt to my Grandma Brown, an elementary school teacher. She took me to the Alamogordo Public Library but they wouldn’t issue me a library card because I hadn’t yet started school. Family legend has it that Grandma was quite mad about that. I did end up getting a card at a young age, an orange ticket to other worlds that I stowed in my fake leather wallet. I checked out a LOT of books from that library, as well as from the smaller libraries at the schools I attended. All these libraries would remove a card from inside the cover, write your name or your library card number on it, and stamp the due date on a flimsy sheet glued inside the cover. That’s it, that was the contract. I remember when our city’s library modernized and issued new cards in the form of a manila square that had a small piece of metal attached to it, the metal having your card number embossed so that it could be run through a slick, modern (at the time) little machine that stamped the number onto the checkout card. Seems quaint now in the world of RFID and self-checkouts. Next time we’ll take a look at bookstores.

Summer

I got my monthly statement from the publisher yesterday, which lags a few months behind in accounting and paying for sales. The summer was good to me. It’s interesting in that the marketplace reports differently. By that, I mean the sales I’m getting paid for are from July for Amazon and B&N, while the timeframe is August for iBooks (Apple). I’m not sure why it takes so long to push everything through the system. After all, I thought computers were supposed to make everything easier and faster. Anyway, this is by far my biggest month, but it took an awful lot of advertising to do it. Let’s just say I’m not quitting my day job. We’re talking hundreds of dollars, not thousands. I’ve said this before, but if you took a look at what I’ve spent on publishing and advertising vs. income, you’d question my sanity. There’s a reason people who self-published went through what used to be called a “vanity press” although you don’t hear that term so much anymore. I suppose spending a lot of your own money to put out a book could be considered vain, although the alternative is to never publish unless it’s through a big house publisher. I like that we have the ability to self-publish, no matter what you call it.

Third Act

I’m moving into the third act of my draft of the sequel to First. Even though last week I talked about working without a net, I realized yesterday I do need to do just a skosh of planning on how this ends up. I pretty much need to know the destination, but how I get there is the part without a net. I have some ideas, of course, but solidifying a few twists will aid my efforts, because other twists will show up along the way as I write the characters. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m pleased with how this book is going and already thinking of ways to shore it up with some revisions early in the story. What’ll actually happen is that once I finish the draft, it’s going into a virtual drawer for a few months while I work on something else. I think my next project will be to edit Assignment Day once more and get it ready for publication in the first half of 2025, assuming all the economics work out.

Length

My target for the book I’m writing is 75,000 words. or thereabouts. The two books I published in the last year, First and Next Time, came in at 125k and 85k, respectively. Which brings up a couple of questions: why so wordy on the first two? Why come in at such a low word count on the new one? When I finished the draft for First, it came in somewhere in the 117-118k range, if I remember correctly. I actually had to add more to the story to explain a couple of things, increasing its word count. Could I have pared it down by 40-50k words? Probably, if I really, really tried, but it would’ve lost a lot of character development. I know, I know, writing teachers are rolling their eyes at that one. I haven’t heard anyone complain that it’s too long. As for Next Time, it came in at just the right length, at least to my thinking. Again, I probably could’ve pared 10k words, but I like how it ended up. Given that I think those are good word counts, why try for lower? Well, it’s easy. With my self-publishing company, 75k is the standard novel length. Anything above that incurs in extra charge for formatting and increases the cost of producing a paperback book. It all boils down to economics.

No Net

I’d mapped out a storyline for the sequel to First, but I’m now writing without a net. As sometimes happens, the story and characters take over and what I had planned at a very high level has kind of been pushed aside. Writers who work from an outline and plan the whole story would lose their grip on reality if they had to do what I’m doing right now. Like I mentioned last week, I’ve kind of lost track of time during my writing sessions and to me that’s a good sign. It means the story is flowing and ideas are, too. There’s nothing wrong with outlining and writing from that. I did a rough outline of bullet points I wanted to follow, but guess what? I’m not following them anymore. Given the multiple false starts with this story, it’s nice to be in the zone, so to speak. All that said, it’s not just fun and games. I already know I’m going to have to go back and change a few major plot points. The more I write, the more I’ll probably have to revise earlier in the book. That’s the danger of writing like this, but right now I wouldn’t trade it, not even for an outline.

Q4

We’re fast approaching the end of September, which means we’re in Q4. For people not in the corporate world of revenue and sales and deadlines, that means we’re in the fourth quarter, the last of the year. What does that mean to this blog writer? It means time is running out to accomplish the goals I set forth at the beginning of 2024. Looks like I’m going to miss about half of them. I’ll come out of this year having written only one book when the goal was two in a new series, but instead I decided to spin up the sequel to First. Overall, I probably wrote the equivalent of 2.5 books, what with starting the first book in a series along with several aborted attempts at the aforementioned sequel. On the bright side, I released Next Time and it sold nicely as well as winning a few awards. I’m not ready to review the whole year in detail yet and there’s one or two goals I could still meet. My focus in Q4 will be to finish this sequel and then evaluate Assignment Day one more time and make necessary edits so I can publish it next year. Three months is still plenty of time to get things done.

Reading Two

My last post told you what I just finished reading, and now I’ll answer the question of what I’m reading currently. Actually, I’m reading two books at the moment. That’s not always the best way to do it, but they’re such wildly different stories that it’s no problem at all to keep the stories and characters straight. The first is Sayonara, a James Michener novel about an Air Force pilot transferred to Japan during the Korean War. I bought this one at a discount for the eBook from a BookBub ad I saw. See, I’m not just an advertiser, I’m also a customer! I’ve read a lot of Michener books over the years, and this might be the shortest. IYKYK. The narrator of the story falls in love with a Japanese woman and the story tells of the incredible racial and cultural prejudice directed at the Japanese. After all, the narrator is told, we defeated them in the war, so why would we want to fall in love with their women? There’s a lot of the culture on both sides that seems dated, which is a good thing to know how far we’ve progressed in seven decades, and I see it as a moment in history, a tale of humanity against the backdrop of a war that changed the world and ultimately the imperial culture of Japan. It’s different from Michener’s other epic tomes, an intensely personal story. The other story I’m reading I picked up at the bookstore on Friday. I was going to get another historical tale, but when I saw American Gods by Neil Gaiman I figured I’d go for it. I know it became a TV show, but beyond that I’m really not familiar with what it’s about. I mean, I can read the ad copy on the back cover just like everyone else, but I suppose I’ll learn more about it and what the book means in the larger scale of our culture at some point. Fow now, I’m coming into this one as a blank slate. It’s not often that happens.

Reading

One of the questions I’m frequently asked is, “What are you reading?” It’s a good question, because writers should read. A lot. I always have at least one book I’m reading, and often two or three. Yesterday I finished Hampton Sides’s newest book, The Wide Wide Sea, about Captain James Cook, the 18th century explorer who is most famous for dying at the hands of the natives on a beach in Hawaii. It’s a fascinating story about a great man whose character reportedly changed in his third and final voyage. During his first two journeys he was known as a fair but firm captain. On the third, those who’d sailed with him before reported a man who was more prone to anger and doling out harsh punishments than he’d been previously. Even though it has a sad ending, it’s a good read and tells a story about exploring the islands around Tahiti and Hawaii as well as trying to find the mythical Northwest Passage. I enjoy history and learning from it, especially when the tales are so incredible they almost seem like fiction.

Trends

It’s been several weeks since I raised the price on First and Next Time, and let’s take a look at how they’re doing. In conjunction with the price change, I’m also advertising on BookBub only on weekends. Overall, the trend on sales this month is downward, which is not a surprise when you take the price and advertising frequency into account. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be, though. For instance, this morning when I checked the Amazon rankings, both books were up from yesterday, which means someone must be buying them without having seen an ad since Sunday. When that happens it’s a bit of a surprise, albeit a welcome one. The books haven’t made it to that self-sustaining sales level, whatever that is. It’d be really nice to get some word-of-mouth sales, but I tend to think that’s going to require more hard-won sales through advertising and promotions first. Let’s just say I’d like to be wrong about that. In the meantime, I’m fine with spending less on ads for a bit and getting higher royalties on fewer books. Once we get to the holiday season, that’ll be the signal to pump up the advertising and do some wheeling and dealing.