Cover Reveal - Wish in One Hand

Okay, so I did this informal FB poll yesterday of whether I should release the cover of Wish in One Hand out to the world online now or wait, and give my newsletter readers a first taste before the rest of the world sees it.  After high-level, closed-door consultation with my top advisers, I have decided to release the ebook cover online today, and then show the print cover and a snippet of the book to my newsletter subscribers on the 1st.  Plus, the newsletter subscribers will get a chance at an exclusive contest. 

So without further ado...

Careful what you wish for.

 Wish in One Hand is the first in a paranormal series* I haven't named yet.  If you've been following along over the past however-many years, this book was previously called Djinnocide.

And here's what the book's about:

Careful what you wish for.

In hindsight, Jo Mayweather should've taken those words seriously back in her flapper-girl days.  Of course, being the gal she is, she probably would’ve made the not-so-clever wish that turned her into a genie anyway. Not that throwing wishes around doesn’t have its perks, but for the most part, life's been a pain in the tiny-hiney ever since.  

Especially since she made it her mission to rescue her fellow djinn from their Masters and those three little wishes. Running into a supernatural lowlife who delights in murdering the genies she's vowed to save doesn’t help.  

And some say immortality lasts forever.  What do they know?

Now, instead of freeing djinn-kind, Jo has a killer to neutralize.  If only she'd kept her mouth shut years ago, she might not be in this mess.  But she's got a job to do, despite some reject from a bad B-movie trying to ruin everything she's worked so hard for.

Even if this time her job might get her killed.  Or worse-enslaved again.

I expect a release date somewhere in mid-August.  Should be doable as long as the final editing phases don't take too awfully long. 

I'm so totally excited.

Oh, and if you're not a newsletter subscribers, no probs - it's easy-peasy.  Just got back to the tab line above this post and click on where it says "NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP FORM".  Fill out the deets and submit.  Then reply to the email where it asks if you really did sign up.  (If you don't see the email, check your spam folder.  If you don't reply to the email, you don't get the newsletter.)

*Books 2 and 3 are written, but unedited.  I expect to release them both next year - probably spring and fall of 2016.

Hashtags

Okay, so I admit to not being the most Twitter-savvy person on the planet.  Hell, I'm probably not the most Twitter-savvy person in the Ozarks, and that's saying something.  Still, I think I might have a little insight and I'd like to share it.  As always with online advice - especially from a non-expert - take what works for you and throw the rest out.

Anyway, there are these things called hashtags.  For the less-initiated than me, it's pound-sign and you put it in front of other words or phrases to bring wider attention to your tweets.

Say you have 500 followers.  They'll see what you tweet.  But there are millions of twitter users.  If one of those millions do a search for tweets about a specific hashtag, they'll see your tweet whether they follow you or not.  I think.  Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure.  The reason I think this is because when I started using hashtags, I started seeing more follows and more sales, and people started re-tweeting things I'd said, even though I know they weren't following me.

Not exactly scientific, but it seems logical to me.

What hashtags did I use?  Well, for Dying Embers (which I tweet about as #DyingEmbers), I added #suspense.  Now anyone who searches Twitter for #suspense will find my tweets about my book.  (Amongst the many thousand others, so it's still needle in a haystack, but at least my needle is in there.)  For Accidental Death (#AccidentalDeath), I did #mystery.

And when those books were on sale for 99 cents, there's a handy hashtag already in use - #99cents.

Now, you can make any hashtag you want.  A friend of mine regularly hastags whole sentences like #Imhavingawesomeday or #cannotbelievewhatisawtoday.  But I suspect those will only very rarely draw someone to your feed.  Good thing for us all that as soon as you start to type #, Twitter offers you suggestions.  They aren't always what you're looking for, but they can give you an idea of the different things people are looking for out there.

Use the search box to help you find buzz words, too.  If you're lucky and your book is about something that's already trending, you're in like Flynn.  If not, you just have to hope that someone looking for #booksaboutmurder will find your mystery or suspense or thriller.  And your #mysterywithcats has a following.

I think it's all about finding what works for you, trying different things, and staying on top of how people might find your books.  And really, that's all we can ever do.

Any hashtags you use regularly to help people find you?  If you're not a writer, and you use Twitter, what hashtags do you search for?  I used to have a saved search that helped me look for agents accepting twitter queries. 

I Swear

Yep.  I swear.  I curse like a sailor some days.  Depends on how pissed off I am or how relaxed I'm feeling.  And I don't think about it when I do it.

Some people curse for effect.  You can tell.  They swear and then glance around to see who might be listening and reacting.  Usually this is reserved for young people - testing out their naughty-wings.  You can also tell when a writer is trying to naughty up their manuscript.  The curse words are scattered like feed for the chickens.  It doesn't fit and it doesn't flow.

Some people only curse under extreme duress.  Whack your thumb with a hammer and !@#$%!  Get pushed beyond your threshold and the words come tumbling out: "OMbleepingG, you bleepity-bleep-bleep, you almost bleeping killed me!"

Some people curse because the words are just part of their lexicon.  I suspect this is where I fall.  I grew up around swear words being dropped in normal conversation.  It was 100% Dad.  (Mom didn't curse and still doesn't for the most part.)  And Dad's friends cursed.  There was one friend of the family who would make your ears turn blue.  He was just a colorful old guy, and the nicest man ever, and I loved him dearly - but man, could he swear.  We just knew to never repeat his words - at least not where any adult could hear us.  And we learned they were just part of life.

Recently, I posted a review to Goodreads and to Amazon.  Goodreads let it go through.  Amazon kicked it back because it was outside their guidelines.  Color me confused.  I went back and read the review, and sure enough, I'd dropped 'asshole' in the review without even realizing it.  "The villain was just the right amount of asshole."  I changed it to 'just the right amount of evil', but it's not the same.  This dude was more asshole than evil, if you know what I mean.  Hannibal Lecter = evil.  This dude was no Lecter.

Anyway, over the years, I've stumbled across people who are shocked and dismayed by my colorful language.  Mom, for one.  I try not to swear around her and when I can't help it, I apologize.  But it makes me wonder.  They're words - like any other - with no power of their own.  If a used a different word - a more socially acceptable word - but meant the same thing, how is that really different?  :shrug:

When I was in college, we used a campus wide chat system on the mainframe (yes, ancient chatting did exist in 1989.)  We were forbidden from using cursewords on the chat, and could lose our chat privileges if we were sussed out.  Since none of us wanted to lose chat (although looking back at my grades, I would've been better off), we devised a lexicon of our own.  Farging iceholes that we were.

Of course, there are different rules for different people.  Some people won't accept any of the big 7 (if you aren't familiar, George Carlin came up with The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television - and no, that link is NOT safe for sensitive ears, work, or Sunday dinner).  None of the big 7, plus no darn, dang, fart, etc.  Some people can't refer to their deity of choice by name, and others can, but only if it's not in a bad way.

I'm pretty liberal when it comes to words.  About the only one I won't say and cringe when I hear is the C word.  I don't know why, but that word has always bothered me.

I do try to be sensitive to other people out there in the world.  I cut back on the number of f-bombs in my books before they went to publication.  Seriously.  I did.  I can't cut them all out, or it wouldn't be natural to the characters.

What do you think? To swear or not to swear?

Wicked Wednesday - Wicked Awesome Dog

Today I decided to post some good news for a change. 

Back at the end of June a lady decided to take her dogs for a nature hike in some hard to pronounce canyon in California. They'd been there before, so she didn't really think much about letting them off the leash.  And that's how Georgia - an 8-yr-old shar-pei mix - got lost. 

Apparently, the woman searched for the dog.  Park rangers looked for the dog.  To no avail.  The rangers told her, most likely, her dog was lost for good.  Lots of snakes and coyotes out there.

Flash forward nine days.  She's in her home 35 miles from where the dog went missing when she hears the doggie door slap open.  And Georgia jumps up on the couch as if to announce "I'm back.  Did ya miss me?"

Other than being a little low on groceries, the dog appears to be fine.

Wicked awesome, dog.  Good for you. 

But I bet your mama won't be letting you run free any time soon. 

So, here's a question for you:  Leash or no leash?  I'm a leash person myself, but growing up, our dog was rarely on a leash.  Of course, he was super smart and knew where he was allowed to be.  Call him and he'd come right home.  Until that last time - which is why I'm a leash person now.  Hell, I even walk the cat on a leash.  Lots of snakes and coyotes here, too.  Plus bobcats.

Advertising Update

Because I said I would talk more about the weekend's advertising, here goes:

Friday at 10am Central my Kindle Countdown Deal started.  The price went to $.99.  I tweeted.  I facebooked.

crickets

Friday at 1pm Central by ad went live in the Ereader New Today newsletter.

And the sales started racking up.

By midnight, I had reached 197 orders*.  At 10am on Saturday when the price rose to $1.99, I sold another 15 books.  And I had reached #8 on the Amazon hard-boiled mystery list, #10 on the Kindle hard-boiled mystery list, and #24 on the crime thriller list.  I also broke the top 1000 of all books at Amazon.

At the $1.99 price point, I sold 19 books on Saturday and none before the price went up to $2.99 on Sunday.

I sold two books in the late afternoon on Sunday at the $2.99 price point.

I also had people read at least 2800 pages in the KU program or about 5.5 books - which I kind of attribute to people reading the ENT ad, borrowing the book, and reading it.  I don't know if that was actually 6 people reading five and a half books or 11 people reading half the book or 100 people reading a small portion of the book.  I prefer to think the first scenario.

I also sold two Dying Embers yesterday - after not selling any in the prior days of July - so I could count those as residual sales from people snagging AD and looking for other books I've written.  Could just be a coincidence, though. 

I picked up one new Amazon review.  5-stars.  Thanks for that, whoever you are.  I also got an awesome Goodreads review.  You know who you are and you totally rock. 

Since ENT has a policy that they won't take another ad for the same book for 90 days, I can't repeat this experiment for a while.  I know when Wish in One Hand is ready, I will place an ad there for that book, too.  The ad did what I wanted it to - pay for itself, get me some nice sales, and push my book into the rankings so more people might discover it.  That's really all one can ask from advertising, really.

I hope that helps put things in perspective.  And as always, this is my journey.  What happens here might not be indicative of what will happen with your advertising and your books.  You could sell tons more. Or maybe less.  That's your journey.  Write the best book you know how, put together some snazzy cover copy and a good cover, and see what happens for you.

And good luck!  None of this is easy, but it's been worth it for me. Even if watching the sales data has become somewhat addictive.  ;o)

*technically all of my mentions of 'sales' in the above post are really 'orders'.  Some of them still have to clear the buyer's bank before they count in my royalty report, and I didn't feel like parsing all that out before this post went live.  Suffice it to say, most orders turn into sales within a few days, so it all comes out on the good side. 

The Big Scary Kindle Unlimited Change - Week One

It's probably not all that well-known outside writing circles, but Amazon recently changed the way it's going to pay authors for books enrolled in its Kindle Unlimited subscription service.  Instead of paying every author the same for their books - after 10% of said book is read - they're going to pay authors by the number of pages read.  Seems reasonable to me - if a little harder to work with in my spreadsheets.

So, if you 'borrow' Accidental Death (on sale today for non-KU people, btw), and you read the whole thing, I get page x-amount for each of the 520 pages Amazon has calculated my book to be.  If you only read halfway through, I still get paid for 260 pages.  Only read 10 pages?  I feel sick to my stomach that I wasted your time but get paid for those 10 pages.

I think this all came about because some people were getting their panties in a wad because the big book they wrote was getting the same amount of fundage as the measly novella someone else wrote.  :shrug:  Conversely, the novella writers are now getting the proverbial wedgie because they probably won't be making what they used to on the shorter books while the behemoth doorstops will be raking in the dough.  And the short story writers are probably having a cow write about now.

Don't even get me started about the people who are complaining about readers who don't finish their books, and how now they aren't going to get paid. :eyeroll:  If I write a book people don't want to finish reading, I failed somewhere.  That's on me.  It would make me really sad, but it won't break me.

For me, personally?  It's not a big deal. I write full-size books, and it seems like people are reading them all the way to the end.  Plus, the only book I have in the KU program right now is Accidental Death.  Besides, whatever the dollar amount, I figure KU sales are still sales.  Those are sales I might not have gotten otherwise.  Therefore, I'm happy with whatever monies float my way.  You don't see me kvetching about the 61 cents I get when one of my paperbacks sells through 'Expanded Distribution' at Createspace.  It sucks that it's so small, but hey, someone found my book, paid for it, and they're reading it.  YAY!  (Do I still want to kick some of those other distribution channels in the gnads for pilfering away my profits?  Well, kinda, but them's the breaks.  A sale is a sale, after all.)

A couple of the positives for me so far is that

1) The first day of this program - July 1st - I got to watch someone read my book is what I would guess is real time.  When I woke up, it showed someone had read 70 pages.  Mid-afternoon, it showed that certain someone had read as far as 252.  Early evening, they'd read to 483.  And I was all SQUEE!  I know it may not sound exciting, but it was for me.  Actually, it could have been more than one someone - several people all reading at the same time - but for me, it was one person and they were tearing through the book in one day.  (Which is kinda what my first reviewer said in her review.  And that makes me inordinately happy.) by the next morning, they'd read another 34 pages - which I assume is to THE END without reading the About the Author. Works for me.

2) My book, which my Word program shows as being like 282 pages and is 372 pages for the print copy, is weighing in at 520 pages for the purposes of getting paid by Amazon.  More pages = more money, so yay.

A negative aspect of this is that it kinda screws up my accounting in terms of books sold.  I dealt with it buy creating a simple formula - pages read divided by total pages - to give me an idea of 'whole book'.

Having said all that, though, I'm probably going to discontinue Accidental Death from the KU program in August.  My decision was made long before the news of this change.  I want to open the distribution up to a wider audience.  True, I haven't really seen much from my expanded channels of Dying Embers through Draft2Digital yet, but I think people still need time to find me at B&N and Apple and Kobo.  Additionally, I plan on launching Wish in One Hand across the board and see how that goes.  If sales are strong, I'll stay out of KU. On the other hand, if I think I'm losing KU readers that aren't being replaced by other readers, then I'll come back.  Simple as that.  The idea is to get as many people to buy and read my books as possible.

Still, if this change ends up really increasing my sales dollars, then I might just have to think about staying in the KU.  Time will tell.

Are you a Kindle Unlimited subscriber?  Do you subscribe to another service - like Scribd or Oyster?  How's that working out for you? If you're an author, what are your thoughts on the process?  (And no negative stuff or Amazon bashing, please.  No one needs that kind of negativity - especially not right before a holiday weekend.)

Advertising to The Non-Kindle World

I don't know if all y'all realize that Dying Embers is now available pretty much everywhere* books are sold online.  Using Draft2Digital, the electronic version has been uploaded to all the big, non-Amazon names, as well as a few I've never heard of:

Barnes & Noble
Kobo
Apple

Page Foundry (Inktera)
Tolino
Oyster

Which is all well and good.  I like everyone to be able to snag a copy of my book if they so choose.

The problem, of course, is letting everyone know they can now get Dying Embers through whatever outlet they choose to use.  I mean, I can put it here and on FB, and tweet about it.  But that only reaches those people who already know about me. :waves:

So, I went searching for ways to advertise to those other markets.  When I go looking for ways to advertise to Kindle users, Google is chock-full of places.  The others?  Not so much. 

Oh, I can get some non-Amazon advertising piggybacked on those sites geared for Kindle people.  Some of them allow for links to other vendors.  But since the site is focused on Kindle readers, not a lot of others head over there to look for books.  The plethora of book sites for other devices just isn't there.

Amazon holds about 60% of the ebook market (depending on where you're getting your numbers) and it's not hard to see why based on this search I've been doing.  There's just more ways for people to find your books when you're published through Kindle.  Which is kind of sad.  Of course, Amazon also makes it way easier to actually publish a book, make your book visible, get you sales data...  But that's a post for another day.  Perhaps if B&N tried some of the things that make Amazon so popular, they'd have a bigger marketshare and more books would be published through them.  :shrug:

So, anyway, I'm still looking.  If I find anything, I'll let y'all know.

Now it's your turn.  Do you have some other device besides Kindle that you read books on?  How do you find new books?  And if you're a Kindle user, what's your go-to place to find new books?

*I recently chose to delist the book from Scribd. Not really keen on some of the things I've heard about them. I hadn't gained any sales from them anyway, so no measurable loss on my part. If you're a Scribd subscriber, I apologize for any inconvenience.