Ordered
After my minor rant in the last post, I contacted the publishing company yesterday and ordered a cover for First Step. This also forced me, in a good way, to start setting up the book on KDP so I could get an ISBN, which was needed for the barcode on the back cover of the book. When it came time for previous covers for First and Next Time, I had an idea of what I wanted them to look like. I input my ideas into the online questionnaire and both covers came back better than I’d imagined. One of the sections in the questionnaire asks about similar covers as examples for ideas, color schemes, lettering, etc. This time I didn’t have anything to input. The only thing I requested was that the font be similar to First so it’s apparent the books are related. Other than that, anything goes. I’m excited to see what they come up with.
Wait
Minor complaint here: I input a request about getting a book cover made for First Time and haven’t heard back from the company yet. That was last Friday, and almost a week has passed since then. Seems to me that’s plenty of time to respond in these days of automated systems. I realize it’s the first part of the year and post-holiday catch-ups are common. Still, I didn’t even get an email acknowledging my request. It’s not enough at this point to make me want to go somewhere else for a cover since the company has been good to me in the past. Still, I’d think the fact I’m a repeat customer bringing more business would be worth something. Is this minor inconvenience worthy of a post on my blog? Probably not, but tbh I didn’t really have any other topics for today. I’ll let you know how things turn out with the cover.
Tracking
One of the issues with books like those in my series The Drop is that there are a lot of characters. Each book starts with twelve players, plus at least another half-dozen behind the scenes. How do I expect readers to keep track of them? How do I do it when I’m writing the book? Two questions, two answers. Let’s start with you, dear reader. When I wrote the first season of The Drop, I headed each section with the name of the corresponding player or character. I also tried to tie back the first several paragraphs to their previous appearance. That was all well and good, but not as good as it could be. With a cast that big, it was still easy to forget who was who. Because I’m a sadistic madman, I eliminated a couple of players from the game early, meaning the reader only had to care about eight or nine people trying to survive on the unexplored planet Alpha. Still too many, though. I realized when the book was ready to publish and as I formatted it that there was an easy solution: characters came from all over the world, so why not just add (in parentheses) their country of origin to their name at the top of each appearance? As well as their location, whether it be on Alpha or back on Earth. That worked well and allowed readers to have a better sense of the character by identifying them with a country. As for me, how did I track them all, as well as their storylines? I kept a document that listed all the chapters, the number of days (Day 1, Day 13, etc.) into the contest, and a couple of brief sentences summarizing the chapter. Not rocket science, is it? Simple things, though, that helped both of us maintain our sanity.
Drop Ads
Advertisements that I’ve been running for The Drop thus far have not been - well, let’s say they haven’t been successful. The ads aren’t getting clicks, and if I remember right, only got one click over all of last weekend. This could be due to a couple of factors. The first would be that the ad doesn’t make an impression on the viewer. I’ve changed it up a couple of times, but the only change in response seems to be worse. The other factor could be the target audience. With BookBub, I get to target readers who’ve expressed interest in particular authors, meaning that those readers theoretically would be disposed to interest in my ad and therefore my book. My goal today is to do more research on similar authors, the Amazon categories their books inhabit, and come up with a better ad. The good thing is instant feedback when the ads run. Way better than putting out an ad campaign and waiting for statistics to come back weeks or months later from a marketing team.
Currently
After year-end reviews and upcoming goals, what am I actually doing these days? I’ve resumed writing Season Three of The Drop. It’s going very well and the story is moving right along. By the end of this week I should be approximately half-done with the draft. The storylines are taking some interesting turns and even though the contest in the world of the book is a marathon, I try to remember to make it have the urgency of a sprint. At the current writing pace, followed by editing and proofreading, maybe I can have the book out by March. In other news, on New Year’s Day I completed the formatting of First Step. It takes a bit of labor to do so, let me just say. I’m sure the professionals have tools that are easier to use and I wish I had those. Instead, I’m at the mercy of MS Word, but I’ll say that once I figured out how to do page numbering and footers, it came out looking great. Some of the things that should be easiest turn out to be the most difficult, of course. Anyway, that book is ready to publish other than having a cover. I should know by next week regarding the timing of getting a cover made. There’s the update - not much else to report beyond that right now. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.
2026 Goals
It’s the first day of the year and it still has that bright, shiny new year smell to it. This also means that 2025 has now been relegated to the dustbin of history. You can see my recap in my previous post of the year and how I did compared to my goals. Now we’re looking ahead and let’s just say it’s stacking up to be a busy year for writing and publishing. In fact, yesterday I started formatting First Step for the print version. Let’s take a look at the list of goals, shall we?
Publish First Step
Publish Assignment Day
Write three seasons of The Drop
Publish three more seasons of The Drop
Enter First Step and Assignment Day into at least three contests each
Pretty simple, right? And achievable. I tried to think of a stretch goal but if I achieve all these it’s going to be a full year. I mean, I could try and write four seasons of The Drop instead of three, but I know each book takes about three months to write and then a good month of editing, both developmental as well as copy and line, and multiple passes for proofreading. At least I have story ideas in mind for the series through the next several seasons. Anyway, that last item on the list is to add in something for marketing and advertising. I don’t think I entered any contests in 2025 and I’m too lazy to go back and check. With major new books coming out I’ll need to get them in front of the bookreading public and hopefully win some awards. I’m optimistic for what I can accomplish in 2026 and looking forward to all the joys of writing.
2025 Review
It’s the last post of the year! If you are new to this site, thank you for checking in and I hope you keep coming back in 2026. If you’ve stuck with me all or part of this year, many thanks to you as well. It’s been a good year overall from the writing perspective, with a little bit of an interruption when I broke my collarbone at the end of October. I was a third of the way into writing the third season of The Drop and the injury ended up meaning less typing for a while and more editing, allowing me to polish Next Step. I’ll talk more about my goals for the new year in the next post; in the meantime, let’s list those 2025 goals one more time and see where I landed:
Publish First as an audio book - Year-End Status: Sadly, this never happened. Professionally-narrated audiobooks are not cheap and I just didn’t have the funding this year. I don’t know if this’ll happen in 2026, either. We’ll see how it goes but I don’t think I’m going to list this as a goal next year. If it happens, it’ll be a nice bonus.
Publish Assignment Day - YE Status: That’s another whiff and that makes me 0 for 2 on the goals so far. The book is in a publishable state and it’s just been sitting in the drawer due to lack of funding. WIth my experiences publishing The Drop, I think all I need is a cover for Assignment Day and I can publish it on Amazon KDP. This should happen in the first half of 2026.
Edit First Step and prep for publishing - YE Status: Yes! One that’s done as of last week. The book is ready for the world and all it needs is formatting and a cover. Expect this in the first few months of 2026.
Finish writing the first book in the new series - YE Status: Done and published. It’s good to see people reading and enjoying the series. Now I just need to come up with an effective advertising approach since the ads I run every weekend aren’t as successful as those I run for my other books.
Write the second book in the new series - YE Status: Also done and published. I’m not sure yet how to make sure people keep reading the series. I say this because the page count in my Kindle reporting view shows more pages read for Season One than for Season Two. I hope this will change as I release more books in the series.
Set a publishing date for First Step - YE Status: Done. As soon as I get confirmation in January about a few financial things, I’ll commission a cover and publish the book faster than Usain Bolt racing for a bathroom. As of now, the publishing date is January 2026.
Set a publishing date for first book in the new series - YE Status: See #4 above. Done. The Drop: Season One debuted at the beginning of September, followed closely by Season Two in October. The audiobook versions for both went live in November.
I set out to do a lot this year, and I did do a lot. 2025 overall was a successful year and the first time I had more book income than expenses. Not by a lot since we’re talking small numbers here, but enough to make sure the IRS doesn’t consider my writing a hobby for tax purposes. That was a nice surprise and let’s hope the trend continues next year. It’s not about money for me; it’s about writing stuff that people enjoy. Based on the ratings and reviews that came in during 2025, I’d say I was successful in that as well. Both First and Next Time maintain an average of 4.4 stars on Amazon, which I feel good about. I went beyond my goals in the publishing of The Drop and I want that momentum to continue. Thank you for your support of my writing endeavors!
Christmas Message
Merry Christmas from Texas! We’re headed for a lovely high of 79 degrees today, which I personally think is awesome. White Christmases are so overrated. We did our celebration yesterday since one of the offspring has to work today. I feel very blessed to have family around to celebrate and feast with. My reading-related haul from the gift-giving included a spiffy bookmark of a cardinal (my favorite baseball team) and a few gift cards. I’m very excited to use all of the above. Moving the celebration a day earlier means that today is agenda-free. Seems like a good day to relax with some coffee and cigars. Let us not forget the reason for this day. May you have a wonderful Christmas, wherever you are!
800
First reached the 800-ranking club over the weekend. That’s a little less than two months from making the 700 club. Over that time reviewers have left some nice write-ups, and I’m thinking I’ll use at least one of the quotes for a new version of the BookBub ad I’ve been running for the book over the past year. Time for a refresh. Sales have ebbed a little the last few weeks, which I’m attributing to lower sales in general for books in December, as well as people spending their money on gifts and not books. If the trend of ratings continues, I should hit a thousand sometime in spring, which will be an exceptional milestone for someone who put the book out there and wondered if people would buy it, much less enjoy it. In other good news, I finished-finished First Step yesterday. No more revisions, no more editing. I’ve taken care of all the things I needed to and now it’s ready to go. I have to get a cover commissioned (that sounds so official!) and publish the book. I think it turned out great and I’m looking forward to getting ratings and reviews in abundance.
Dark
If you’ve read my posts at all over the past several years, you might know that I get up early each morning to write and do writing things. I do that for about 75 minutes before closing my personal laptop, usually for the day since I separate writing from the job that pays the bills. No doing writing stuff on company time. What people don’t tell you is how tough it is this time of year to get motivated when it’s dark. Let’s be honest, it’s a lot easier during summer when the sun comes up early, often around the time my alarm goes off. Here in December, it’s dark until I’ve been sitting at my desk almost an hour. I’m a sunshine guy and love the heat of summer. Not a fan of extra-long nights. The local high school seems to get started about the time the sun comes up. Even though we don’t have kids that age anymore, out the window I see students walking in the dark or approaching dawn, heads down, plodding along. Can’t be fun for them either. Anyway, this isn’t really a complaint and I hope it doesn’t seem so. More of an observation that getting up and writing can be more difficult than it looks.
Forward
We’re nearing the end of the year and in the next few weeks I’ll revisit my 2025 goals and come up with a final score. This also means that it’s time to start setting goals for 2026. I suppose some of them are rather obvious, like publishing First Step and Assignment Day. The latter has been ready, or near-ready, for a few years. I need to get it out into the world. Beyond those two events? Writing and publishing more seasons of The Drop are also high on the list. If I can get out three book in sequence in 2026, that’ll go a long way toward making it a real series that people can binge. Beyond these ideas, what else? Not sure yet. Probably stuff like entering First Step into some contests and for reviews and same with Assignment Day. I’m sure I can brainstorm more things to keep me occupied in the new year. Looks like it’s going to be pretty busy. And beware if another idea comes along and grabs hold of me. We’ve seen that happen before.
Done Again
I’ve completed my edits on First Step and I know I’ve said this before, but I’m now done with the book. I fixed some of the nagging thoughts I had when re-reading the manuscript, added background and depth to several of the characters, and even cut out some stuff. I’m going to read through it one more time for continuity and to catch any errors I introduced along the way. I don’t think there will be any major edits and now I have to decide how and when to publish it. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I don’t think it’s a good idea to make my own cover, which means I need to pay someone else to do it. Holiday season is not usually the time to fork out a chunk of dough for something that’s not a present for someone else. Unless something changes, I’ll see how the finances look after the first of the year and come up with some better idea of when I can actually publish the book.
Cover Charge
In spite of my prior advice regarding the creation of your own book covers, which I talked about ignoring in a previous post, I think the covers for The Drop came out looking pretty sharp. So, yesterday I had an idea of a cover for First Step. I thought, why not give it a shot? I gave detailed descriptions on what I imagined to the publisher for First and Next Time, so in this case why not take my prompts and see how it came out? Spoiler alert: it looked horrible. Seriously. It was like someone took a white piece of paper and ran it through a laser printer with my name and the title in nice, black print, with tiny image in the middle. It’s what I’d thought of, but the execution looked horrendous. This morning I had a completely different idea and used Grok to create a picture and then put that on a cover. It looked like a non-fiction book on nature. The ideas themselves aren’t bad. In fact, if I’d tried this exercise with the two aforementioned books, my output would’ve looked nothing like what the publisher created. Why am I telling you this? Because I need to tell myself again that the cover creation needs to be done by the professionals. Could I tinker with the idea and come up with something passable? Maybe. More likely, I’d end up with a cover that looks exactly like how it was made: by an amateur.
Misc
How’s it going with one arm, you ask? Getting better. I’m back to typing with two hands, albeit for short spurts. Not quite ready to sit for an hour or more and type on a manuscript draft. This situation lends itself better to editing and that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve tightened up some scenes and plot points in First Step. I have probably another week of that, at least, at which time I’ll need to give it another complete read to make sure I didn’t mess up anything. I’m still pondering whether I should commission a cover and then go ahead and publish the book to Amazon, or if I should use my prior publisher to do all the formatting and distribution far and wide. The first option is definitely cheaper. And 99% of my book sales have been on Amazon. Still, it’s nice to have the book available everywhere, especially since it’s a sequel to First, which is distributed through all the major and minor booksellers. I still have time to decide. I thought about just doing it now since the holidays are coming up, but I don’t want that artificial deadline to put pressure on me to make a decision I might regret later. For now, I’ll just keep working on making the book better and decide later.
Questions
As I mentioned previously, I’m working through First Step and tightening it up. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks editing, other than when I put out The Drop in audio format. Can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but the chapters alternate POVs between Eve and Ray, the narrators of their respective stories. Parts of Eve’s story lagged or seemed repetitive when I did my look at it from a higher level. I’ve fixed a lot of that and am changing an entire chapter today to show more action as well as foreshadowing of later events. I’ve told people before that it’s okay to scrape and patch the story - nobody who reads it knows when you wrote each word, so there’s no flashing light when people read a paragraph added in the last round of editing. Beyond that, I’m reading through Eve’s chapters and asking the following questions about each:
Is this a set piece? Like a vivid scene from a movie
Does it advance the plot? In other words, did something change between the first sentence and the last?
Is it repetitive?
Does each character feel developed?
If I can’t answer each question with full confidence, then it means the chapter needs some work. That last question includes development of “off-screen” characters. You can flesh out a character with what people say about them just like you can with what they say and do. I’m sure there are author sites with better questions and approaches, but this is what works for me. The first two questions help make the story and each chapter stand on their own and give the reader something to remember. If I have a chapter where I want to show the character doing something routine, I’m probably going to bore you. But if I show the character in a routine that is interrupted and places the character in danger, that becomes interesting. Anyway, that’s what I’m doing these days. I hope to be finished by next week so I can return to my draft of The Drop: Season Three.
Audio, Too
The audiobook versions of the first two seasons The Drop are live. I took the time the last few days to listen, add pauses where needed, and change pronunciations. I think they both turned out well. Not as good as a voice actor, obviously, but you get what you pay for. In this case, I paid nothing. I know people who prefer audio to print or electronic, so I’ll be interested to hear what they have to say. Honestly, there’s more inflection than I expected when I first started listening. I still heard some instances where the AI doesn’t pronounce the same word consistently, or pronounces it differently based on context. For example, it pronounces the word “contestants” a bit stilted when narrating. When I highlight that word and check the pronunciation, it’s correct. It only does it oddly when in the flow of reading, but there’s no cure for that. I suppose I could have edited that word’s pronunciation, although I don’t know if that would’ve made a difference. Anyway, that little annoyance means it’s not 100% perfect yet. You know, like a regular person.
Audio
While I’m off work and have extra time this week, beyond fiddling with First Step I’m also revisiting audiobooks for the The Drop. I had to revise the ebooks to only include names of the remaining players. When players dropped out, I had them in the list with their name stricken through. Apparently the Amazon algorithm treated those like regular text and read them anyway. I uploaded the new versions yesterday, which means that today they’re available for me to convert to audio. That will entail further editing of how words are pronounced and many hours of listening. Not sure how long that will take but I do want to get a good chunk done this week if possible. I’ll let you know how it goes, particularly the editing part.
Higher Level
I’ve been taking a look at First Step from a higher level view. I’ve done a few things to tighten the story, add depth to the characters, and so on. Now I’m trying to step back and look at the plot and pacing from an elevated view. What does that mean? It means I want to treat it like a movie, where I’m assessing each scene (chapter), making sure it moves the plot forward, isn’t repetitive, and has an impact. One of the things I’ve mentioned before, I think, is that originally I wanted Eve’s journey on the raft to be similar to the one in Laura Hildebrand’s outstanding Unbroken. I quickly found out that while her narrative was compelling and never boring, adapting that scenario to a book was definitely boring, especially when shoehorning it into a bigger story. In an earlier draft, Eve floated alone on the ocean and that became a story adrift. With the next draft, I added in the company of her AI, which gave Eve someone to talk to other than herself. Better. Now I’m taking another look and intend to do some of the things I mentioned above. I’d thought the book was in shape and ready to publish, but coming back to it after several months certainly gives me the chance to make it better.
Death
Death is a big deal. Not only does it impact the person dying, but also the people around. Why so philosophical all of a sudden, you ask? Because we authors have the power of life and death over our creations and sometimes we overuse it, especially the latter. What do I mean by that? Let me give you some examples. When I’d finished the draft of First, I sent it to a consulting editor and received a ton of helpful comments on the manuscript. I’m thinking now of one in particular relating to the epilogue of the book. It’s a scene where Lewis, the narrator, is older and receiving an award with his wife, Eve, and friend, Colt. Lewis mentions that his parents died several years ago and his brother took over the family property and also says Colt is alone since his own wife died recently. My editor asked, “Why so much death?” Great question. Why? I wanted a bittersweet scene, but filling it with dead people came across as too much. I changed it so that Colt’s wife had been injured in a fall off a horse and that everyone wished her well. Small change, less death. Another example is the editing I’m doing on the sequel, First Step. i wrote a few paragraphs yesterday to fill in the background on one of the bad guys in the story. Most of it was fine, but after I finished I thought there was too much death. I’d basically made the guy into an unsubstantiated murderer, which gives the character a lot more of an evil edge than I wanted. If he’s into slitting people’s throats and hiding the bodies, he’s a psychopath and a character trying to stay out of sight from the law. It doesn’t fit. Too much death. What am I going to do? Take out all the death and put some life back into the story.
Momentum
This broken bone thing is not great timing. I’m not sure there ever is a good time for a broken bone, but in this case I had built up momentum on The Drop, having released the first two books in the series and about a third of the way through writing the next. As I’ve mentioned in the last week, I put it aside to work on editing First Step since that’s easier to do with one hand. I’d thought about getting a cover made and putting it out before the end of the year, but this unexpected medical expense kind of ruins that. We’ll see how it goes after the surgery. I’m supposed to get a little more mobility back, but I’m also supposed to wear a sling for the next 2-4 weeks so the collarbone can heal. In the meantime, I’ll keep editing First Step so it’s ready when my bank account is.