Updates and Stuff

Yeah, I know it's not a day when I usually post here, but hey, it's good to shake things up a little every now and then. 

Anyway, I finished the edit-note phase of Duke Noble: Rumor Has It.  (Still not sure about that title.)  I ended up with thirteen college-rule, notebook pages chocked full of notes.  Typically, it takes me about an hour to input a page of notes.  I'll start that today.  If I can squeeze three hours out of each day to edit, I'll be done by the end of the week.  However, the chances of me editing for three hours a day is slim.  I hate editing.

The saving grace of editing is that it's a step toward having this book published.  I love the thought of that.  Having this book out into your hands is the goal.  Editing moves me toward that goal.  Thus, I will edit.  

Let me amend that slightly.  Having this book out - and worthy of being read by you - is the goal.  I could write THE END and shoot this sucker into space right now.  But it would suck and I can't do that to you.  You deserve better.  This book deserves better.  So, I edit.

And I bitch about editing.  Heh.  It's my process.

In case you're new here and haven't seen the process before, it goes like this: 

1) Write the book.
2) Send the book to my Kindle and read through the whole thing while making notes in a notebook.
3) Input the notes
3) Repeat steps 2 & 3 until I feel it's ready to send to readers
4) Send to readers
5) Input notes from readers
6) Read through entire manuscript again, making notes if there are any
7) Input notes
8) Format for publication
9) Publish

The other day I had a gal who read Dying Embers ask me how long it takes me to get a book all the way through from start to publication.  If all goes well, I can complete steps 1-9 in three months.  Things rarely go as planned.  Lord knows, this book has taken longer.  I started writing DN in August.  In August and September, I got about 8000 words down and then the wheels fell off.  I restarted this in December, finished it 6 weeks later.  It took me two and half weeks to actually do this edit round.  It should roll faster now.  Good lord willin' and the creek don't rise.

I hope to have this into the hands of readers by the end of the month.  They'll take however long they take.  Once they're done, publication won't be too long after that.  End of March maybe?  

I still have to make a cover.  Blerg.

So, Duke Noble will be born into the hands of readers soon.  Well, soon-ish... for varying definitions of soon.  Sooner than traditional publishing could make it happen.  =o)

Wrapping up 2020

Whew, I made it out of 2020 alive and with my sanity intact... mostly.  Time to wrap that puppy up and shove it into storage.  Here's how my writerly year shook out...

I wrote 73044 new words last year.  For the most part, that was finishing Cinder Ugly and writing Duke Noble .  I also laid some words down on several other books - another SCIU novel, the Arthurian UF thing, a quirky thing, and an attempt to start a sequel series to the model books.

I edited and published two books last year - Ugly and the Beast and Cinder Ugly.  That brought my total number of published novels to 15.

In sales, it was not a good year.  I sold a grand total of 65.39 books for a whopping $79.89 - an average of $1.49 a book. The only book I didn't sell any copies of was Project Hermes.  :sigh:  Of course, I didn't do any paid advertising last year for the nine free or sale things I did.  It was all on me and I didn't have the heart to do much marketing.  

I had five freebies.  I moved 359 books that way. 

Goals for the new year?  Well, I'm trying to take it day by day.  Lord knows my goals for last year didn't pan out.  And I quote: "If I can swing that, I'd like to see Ugly and the Beast and Cinder Ugly hit your ereaders in 2020.  I'd also like to get another SCIU and another Dennis Haggarty at least written, if not out there in public."  I did get UatB and CU out to the world.  As for the other two... umm, no.

This year, I will get Duke Noble's first book finished and out there.  Yes, I hope he will be a series.  No, I have no clue where I'll go after this one is in the can.  I still want to get another SCIU and another Dennis Haggarty out there.  Then there's the idea I had for more from Jeni Braxxon.  We'll see what happens.  I'm not promising anything but Duke at this point in time.

Other than that, the hope is to just keep plodding along and not let whatever happens this year derail me as much as last year's events derailed me.  

How was your 2020?  Do you have plans and goals for this year?  What are they?

Well, Wouldja Look at That

So, I've been trying to get Amazon to put the books for A Model Curse into a frickin' series, like they have with all my other books. Cuz, ya know, it's nice for readers to see that a book is part of a series and what order the books are in and junk.  Three days later, Amazon in its infinite wisdom presented me with this whole new thing they're doing.

Now, writers can manage their own series with this nifty new thingie-bob:

Umm... yeah.

Anyway, it was kinda buggy at first, but after several tries, I managed to create A Model Curse and add the three books to it.  It should be visible on the site within 72 hrs.  

Thank goodness all my other series books are still where they're supposed to be and I don't have to go through the trouble of creating and adding for them.  Whew.

One benefit I see is that this allows the author to come up with verbiage for the series, so when a reader goes to the series page, they can read about the series instead of getting the blurb for the first book in the series.  Unfortunately, this means some extra work for us - coming up with series blurbs and all that junk.  Goodreads had this ability for years, but I haven't really taken advantage of it.  Shame on me.  

I'll be working on this stuff over the next week or so.  Right now, I have four series available:

Serial Crimes Investigation Unit (Dying Embers, Fertile Ground, Early Grave)
A Dennis Haggarty Mystery (Accidental Death, Natural Causes)
Once Upon a Djinn (Wish in One Hand, In Deep Wish, Up Wish Creek, Wish Hits the Fan)
A Model Curse (Sleeping Ugly, Ugly and the Beast, Cinder Ugly)

Anyway, if you're writing in series and you need help with how to make those books be part of a series on Amazon, here's the linkie-loo to those instructions.

Good luck.  And may the sales be ever in your favor.  Or something. 

Don't Get Fleeced

Because I've been at this writing / publishing thing since 2004, I sometimes forget that there are people out there who are new to it all. 

On FB this morning, a woman was looking for help on one of the book pages I follow.  She's trying to get her daughter's novel published and had recently been contacted by a firm wanting to represent the book.  They were asking like 600-1000 pounds for different publication packages.  She'd tried to look them up online, but she could only find their site and links they'd put out about themselves.

Ding ding ding.  There are three reasons right there to walk away.

1)  Reputable companies do not contact writers out of the blue.  Real agents and publishers have too much going on to send letters out to unknown and untested and unpublished authors. 

2)  Reputable companies to not charge to 'represent' you.  You may see charges if you're self-publishing through a vanity press, but they're not representing you.  They're doing the work to make your book a book - editing, covers, etc.  And even then, you have to watch them like a hawk.  Research the hell out of them to make sure you're not getting taken.  If this is a literary agent, which I suspect it is, you NEVER pay them.  They make money by getting a cut of your royalties after the book is published. 

3)  Reputable companies have a wide web presence with loads of people saying good things about them.  Disreputable companies may have a wide web presence as well, but generally people are saying bad things about them.  This one, not having much of a web presence at all?  Well, they must be a pop-up that hasn't been caught by the scam hunters yet.

Someone in comments posted a link to Writer Beware. There's a good source for finding out about scammers.  And if you don't see the company on their site, I think you can contact them about it. 

I commented with a shortened version of the above.  I hope she walks away.  She was smart enough to do some research and to ask about it online, so there's hope.  So many authors don't do the work and get taken for loads of money.  It always makes me sad to hear about another new author getting scammed. 

I used to get crap like that in my inbox regularly.  I still get it, but it's fewer and farther between now.  Mark it as spam, go to the spam box, and delete it.  Do not engage.  Walk away.

Publishing is a long, hard road, fraught with potholes.  There is no easier path you can take.  No yellow brick road you can skip along to reach the Emerald City of publication.  And anyone who tells you they have a shortcut is a conman trying to fleece you. 

Flying Solo is Scary

Around this time sixteen years ago, I began writing what would become my first finished novel.  Back then, I did it all myself.  All the writing, the editing, the research - for the writing and for the submitting, the querying, the crying...  

Last week, I celebrated the 5th anniversary of the first novel I published and sent out into the world.  I still did most of it myself, but I realized I needed other people.  I needed a cover artist and an editor.  Which meant I needed money.  And Hubs willingly agreed to spend some of our savings to get my books out into the world.

I had expected for this venture to start paying for itself within the first year.  It didn't.  I had great hopes for the next year.  Not then either.  None of them have.  But I got tired of sucking off the savings tit, so I started funding this myself and stopped dipping into our nest egg.

With this in mind, I do most of the covers myself and what I couldn't do myself went to a less expensive artist.  And when it came time to edit, I still paid someone. 

As sales have dwindled and the money dried up, I was faced with a decision - stop trying to publish and watch my career swirl the drain, or stop paying an editor.  (I have two covers I've already paid for, so I'm set there for now.) 

It's a scary thing, thinking about flying solo.  For the past 13 books, I've had an editor.  One gal did the first two books.  Since then, I've had AWE (Awesome Wonderful Editor) as my co-pilot.  (She also walked in and saved my second book, which was really helpful.)  Taking off on my own without her in a seat beside me scares the crap out of me.

But she's been super-supportive of my flying alone.  She's praised me for my clean drafts before and now tells me I can do this.  With her blessing. 

Still, super scary. 

However, stopping publishing anything, which last year meant not writing either, is a scarier idea.  (It's close as to which is scarier, but not writing wins by a hair.)   Since it's scary, it's been super hard to move forward with the idea.  To think that maybe next month or the month after, I will put a book into the world without my AWE... :shudder: 

What if I get bad reviews?  What if I actually can't do this by myself? 

It's enough to make a gal crawl back into her hole and pull the dirt in over her.

But it's time.  I can do this.  I can edit on my own.  I know people who do it, so why shouldn't I be able to do it, too?  I can and I will.  And I will make every effort to insure my readers get the same quality manuscripts they've always gotten.  

I hope you'll stick with me.  There's no co-pilot on this flight, but I promise not to crash and burn.

Happy Valentine's Day to You! Happy Anniversary to Me!

Happy Valentine's Day to all of you.  But it's Happy Anniversary to me.  Not wedding.  That's not for a few months yet.  Nope, it's the 5th anniversary of the day I published Dying Embers and really began this self-publishing thing.  (Okay, I actually hit publish on the 13th, but I'm celebrating today.)  Five whole years of having my books available for sale.  

And this is around the time when I started what would become my first finished novel back in 2004, so that's what... sixteen years.  Ugh.  :shakes self: 

If I'd been savvy about this, I would've had a big to-do with prezzies and stuff for my readers.  But I wasn't.  Oh, the genie books are on sale and junk, but that wasn't planned with the anniversary in mind.  It didn't even occur to me until this past Tuesday that it was even something to take note of.  (Which is really too late to plan anything special.)  I could've had a contest or something. 

Five years, thirteen books, and 3016 sales later, here I am.  After all the highs and all the lows, I'm still plugging away.  I really am.  Seriously.  I'm working on getting Ugly and the Beast to a place where I can send it out for proofreading and then eventual publication.  And I'm trying to work on writing Cinder Ugly.  (Not going so well, but I'm trying.) 

Anyway, I hope you have a great Valentine's Day with whoever you love.  I'll be here with my loving Hubs and my geriatric cat.  We don't really celebrate the day, other than wishing each other a happy day and doing the hugs/smoochies thing.  I probably won't really celebrate the anniversary either, but it'll be on my mind. 

Five years.  Whoda thunk it?  Not me.

Do you celebrate Valentine's Day?  Or do you only celebrate the day after when all the chocolate goes on sale?  Do you have any big anniversaries coming up? 

Publishing Goals for 2019

As you all know, I've been having a tough time looking ahead to this year.  I'm in kind of a limbo about it all.  But time and publishing waits for no man, so here I am trying to set some publishing goals for the new year.

1)  Finish Ugly and the Beast and get it published.
2)  Write SCIU #4.
3)  Write Dennis Haggarty #3.
4)  Write Cinder-Ugly.
5)  Get at least one of those three other books published.

I'm leery about setting sales goals for the year.  But I'd like to see if I can sell at least as many books this year as I did last year with like a 10% increase.  So, like 616 books. That sounds kind of sad, but setting attainable goals is what it's all about.  I'd love to sell thousands of books, but history has shown that's not realistic.  So...

6) Sell at least 616 books.

I should probably try to resurrect my newsletter, but I'm not promising anything.

7)  Have a sale with advertising at least once a month.

That's a big one because sales take a lot of out of me - time and energy and money.  But they work, so I should just bite my lip and do it.

I should also try to network more.  But the thought of that gives me intestinal issues.  It's like walking into a party that's been going on for a long long time, where everyone knows each other, and saying
'hey, hi, you don't know me at all, but I'd like to dance and no, I'm not a newbie'.  Plus, I hate social interaction for the sake of social interaction.  It feels forced and unnatural to me.  :shrug:

I'd also like to finish re-editing my first book, Fear Itself, this year.  I'm not even sure it's still a viable storyline, but if I can get it publish-worthy, maybe I can just put it out there and see what happens. Not a goal, just a hope.

So, there they are.  My 2019 publishing goals.  I think they're doable.  We'll see how I did when I wrap things up this time in 2020.

Have you set any goals for the new year?  How'd you do on your 2018 goals? 

Twenty-Eighteen in Retrospect

What can I say about 2018?  It's a blur?  It was busy?  :shrug:  It was what it was.  And now it's time to wrap it up.

I'm still plugging along out here in Self-Publishing Land.  And I met my publication goal.  This past year saw 4 new books published, which brings me to a grand total of 13.  The books in 2018 were Blink of an I, Early Grave, Sleeping Ugly, and Unequal.  One suspense, one paranormal, and two dystopians.

Sales this year were better than last year, but I threw a lot more money at advertising.  I spent $330 on ads in 2018 and made about $470 directly linkable to those ads.  Sales overall went over $600 for the year.  (Yeah, that's the right amount of zeroes.) That was about $300 more than I made in 2017, so I'm calling it a win.  I also went over $3K total sales for the whole shebang and have sold over 2500 books in the four years I've been publishing.  No clue how many books I've given away.  I don't track that.  It depresses me.

Of course, with all the discounts I had this year, my average $ per book went down to $1.12 from my overall average of $1.22.  I didn't hand sell a single book in 2018, though, so I don't have those tugging my averages up.  Gave away a few, but didn't sell any.

A while back, I raised the prices on a majority of my books to make them more in line with other books of the same genres and quality.  It didn't really make a difference in how many books I was selling but when a book did sell at regular price, I made a bit more scratch.

The books didn't gain that many more reviews this year.  I treasure the ones I did get, but I wish there were more.  Then again, who doesn't?

If you're interested, here are the 'copies sold' numbers as of last night:

DE - Overall: 1003.82 / 2018: 152.15
AD - Overall: 572.63 / 2018: 87.12
WIOH - Overall: 363.89 / 2018: 100.76
PH - Overall: 88.06 / 2018: 15.46
IDW - Overall: 124.14 / 2018: 25.54
FG - Overall: 136.89 / 2018: 54.60
UWC - Overall: 81.69 / 15.89
NC - Overall: 28.22 / 2018: 14.57
WHTF - Overall: 53.04 / 2018: 14.87
BOIA - Overall/2018: 11.36
EG - Overall/2018: 49.23
SU - Overall/2018: 12.19
UEQ - Overall/2018: 4.40

Umm, yeah.  Kind of depressing.  Makes my brain hurt.

But I'm still plugging away.  They haven't beaten me into submission yet.  However, I'm at a loss to figure out what I'll be doing in the year to come.  Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  Something has to change, I guess.  Not sure what.  With the slow start I'm looking at, I can be fairly certain I won't be publishing 4 books again.  If I can get two or three out, I'll be pleased. 

On the upside, my books are out there and people are reading them.  Not as many people as I had envisioned when I started this mad ride, but more than it could've been.

All in all, 2018 wasn't horrible.  Still, here's to a better 2019 for us all.

Here's the Thing...

The other day a friend of mine posted a snippet on FB from one of her old stories.  I loved it when I first read it years ago and I love it today.  So, I did what I do and encouraged her to self-publish.  And afterwards, it occurred to me that she's been with me through all this, so I'm not exactly the poster child for a smooth and easy self-publishing experience.  Hell, pretty much everything about my experience would make any rational person run screaming from the idea.

But here's the thing...

Despite all of the woes and the headaches, I wouldn't change my decision to self-publish.  Sure, right now, I'm having a rough go of it.  My gumption tank is on E.  My sales are tanking.  Everything I wrote feels like crap to me right now.  Umm, what was I saying? 

Oh, yeah, this self-publishing thing is great.  Seriously. 

The trials I face aren't really that different from the stuff trad pub and hybrid authors are facing.  And I don't have to worry about whether my publisher will go belly up, or whether my editor will get fired or change houses, or whether the cover art they pick for my books will be wrong, or whether they'll just suddenly decide to drop me because my last book didn't perform to their expectations.  I also don't have to worry whether some person in their ivory tower thinks my book is suitable to be published.  I never have to query and get shot down.  I never have to change my book to meet someone else's standards. 

So, sales are down.  Well, duh.  And maybe if I had a 'publisher', they'd be better.  And the publisher would graciously give me 15% of each sale (which I would have to then split with an agent), so I might end up making the same amount of money.  I make 70% now (minus a small file-size fee... between 5c for Sleeping Ugly and 8c for Project Hermes).  It's not much, but it's mine.

So, my gumption sucks.  At least I don't have a publisher hanging over my shoulder, breathing down my neck.  Hell, even my editor isn't breathing down my neck.  And if she's busy with other clients by the time I finally get off my dead ass and send it to her, well, then the publication date will get pushed back a little and I'll deal with it.

The pluses outweigh the minuses here.  Complete control.  I say what, I say when, and I keep most of the moolah.  And the ultimate plus = people can read my books whenever they want to.  They're no longer wasting away on my harddrive, unread and unloved.  Even if only a few people read them, it's more than any would've read them if I hadn't self-published them.

So, yeah, I would still recommend self-publishing to my friend.  Even if she only ever publishes the books she's already written, because they're worthy stories and they deserve to be read.  

And now I really should get my buns in gear and get this 13th book finished so readers can read it.

An Even Dozen

With the publication of Sleeping Ugly on Saturday, I'm at an even dozen published novels now. 

Five years ago, I couldn't even conceive of having that many book published, let alone publishing them all myself.  Of course, about five years ago was when I sat myself down and did some serious thinking about where my career was headed and how I was going to achieve my goal of being published when I kept running into the traditional publishing brick wall. 

About this time, fourteen years ago, I finished the first draft of my first novel.  Back then, I had been so certain I'd snag an agent and a publisher lickety-split.  (Waits for laughter to subside.)  Nine years of writing books and querying later and I'd had quite enough, thank you very much.  I decided to quit beating myself into a bloody pulp and do all of it my own damn self.

It was scary as hell. 

It's still scary as hell sometimes.

But I wouldn't go back.  I can't even imagine what going back would be like. 

Anyway, it's been a wild ride.  Twelve books.  My first book just rolled over $1K in sales.  I'm hoping to make it to $3K overall by the end of the year.  And I've spent - with the last payments made for Sleeping Ugly - just over $10K.  That's about $833 spent per book on average.

Umm, yeah, following the dream ain't cheap.  But the hope is always there that a book or two (or all of them... heh) will take off and turn my 'in the red' to 'in the black'. 

I keep plodding forward.  Book #13 - Unequal - should be out by the end of the year.  Thirteen books over the course of four years.  Not a bad bit of production there.  And not one I'd likely see if I was traditionally published.  From the time I first send a book to my editor to the time it's available for you to read takes about three months.  Tradpub takes way longer, from what I understand.  Nope, not going back.

I'll keep publishing books as long I have money to pay my editor and cover artist.  And as long as I still have fingers to type.  Good lord willin' and the crick don't rise.

Planning Ahead (Even When You Kinda Suck At It)

Okay, so I am the worst planner-aheader ever.  I don't like making doctor's appointments more than a few days out (but I do ever since I missed making an important one).  I don't like making hair appointments at all (which is part of the reason I cut my own hair).  I want to do stuff when I get the notion to do stuff.  And not before.

However, being a self-published author means planning ahead, even when you kinda suck at it. 

There's planning a publication schedule so you know when you're going to need to have things done so you can, you know, get a book in an editor's hands.  And so you know what the hell you're going to do so you can fit yourself into a cover artist's schedule. 

Ran into that one again this week.  Ack.  It's taken care of, but it meant planning ahead when I wasn't ready to even start thinking about the next book and the next.  (Yes, I am now on my artist's schedule for October AND February. :panics a little:  So, not ready.)

There's planning a marketing campaign.  Umm, yeah, so not good at thinking ahead far enough to do that, but I'm trying.  I'm trying to think about next month's release and have marketing around that to draw people in.  We'll see if I get it right.

Planning anything is so outside my comfort zone.  But I have to step outside my comfort zone if I want to make this self-publishing thing work.  And I really do want to. 

Heh, maybe I should've called the blog Outside the Comfort Zone instead of Outside the Box.  Yeah, no. 

Anyway, I've made some good inroads into being a planner.  I have a date book!  And a calendar!  And I even remember - most of the time - to write stuff on them.  (I'm better than I used to be.)  But I'm still kind of sucky at it. 

Hell, if I wasn't, I wouldn't have needed to panic when my artist said she was almost booked through the end of the year.  I would've already had space in her calendar because I would've been planning.  And if I was really planning, she'd be working on the next cover in December or January instead of February (which will push a release date back to March instead of a Feb release like I would've had planned, if I was, you know, a planner.)

It's all good.  And I'm working on it.

How are you at planning? 

The Making of a Cover

When I was thinking about redoing the cover of Blink of an I (which wasn't an easy thing to decide, having put so much effort into the original cover and all), I began by trying to find a cover image that sparked me.  I scanned through hundreds of photos and what I finally decided to do was use a woman's face.  I downloaded about a dozen.  Tried some different things and finally settled on this one:

But it wasn't quite right, so I flipped it and cropped it and played with the brightness/contrast until I had this:

Added text and tweaked the image some more to get this:

but it still wasn't right.  It looked too 'women's fiction'.  I needed something more.  So I started playing with the image using the 'effects' available in my photo manipulation program.  I hit on an effect called Bas Relief and used a background color as close to indigo as I could.  (If you're read the book, you know why I went with indigo.)  And I came up with this:

Cool, but still not quite right, so I found a stairwell...

...did the bas relief thing to it, too, and then added it into the other image.  And voila!

Anyway, that's how it's done over here in 'self-published author making her own covers' land.  It takes time and patience, but on the upside, it doesn't cost me any money.

All on Me.

Just so you don't think self-publishing is all happy faces and balloons, because it's not, let's talk about a less than stellar aspect of it...

It's all on you.

There's no one else to motivate your butt.  If you get up in the morning feeling like something someone scraped off their shoe, you can take the day off, but the work still needs to be done.  If other commitments crop up, the deadlines are still there.  Sure, they're self-imposed deadlines, but once you mention them out loud and in public, they're set in stone deadlines.  Mostly readers don't give two hoots in hell whether you had a rough time of it.  They care that you moved your publication date and now they'll have to wait however long to get the book you promised would be available to them on X date.

If your editing is poor, you can't point to a publisher and say 'they did this to me'.  (Same goes with cover art.)  You did it.  Or didn't do it, as the case may be.  All of the shit is, and should be, heaped upon your shoulders.

With all the control comes all the responsibilities of making sure all of this works.  And sometimes it sucks.

Way back in 2015, I had a craptastic cover.  I was kind of backed into a corner because I'd paid all that money and I had already promised the book would be out on a certain day so no time to put together a new cover.  (I really would've been better off with a brown paper bag than what I had.)  But as much as I am wont to whine about it, I chose the artist, I chose to pay him upfront, and I chose not to delay the book's release until I could give it a cover that didn't suck.  All on me.

Sometimes I wish I could hand all this off to someone else and say 'here, you be responsible for it', but that's only when I'm really tired*.  And there are days when I feel like a charcoal briquet I'm so burned out.

But there really isn't time for that either.  It's all on me - success or failure, hitting a deadline or missing a deadline, thrilling readers or disappointing them.  Personally, I prefer the former to all of those, so I quit whining and keep working.


*I am not really tired right now.  I wrote this post this morning as a balance to Monday's post. Okay, so I'm a little tired.  But there's always coffee.  I will hit this deadline if I have to stay up nights doing it.

Another Good Thing About Self-Publishing

There are loads of good things about self-publishing.  Sure, I'll admit it probably isn't for everyone.  And if it's for you, you're probably already aware of the good things.  If you're on the fence, though, here's another thing to sway you to the Dark Side.  (Yes, we have cookies.  We just have to make them ourselves.)

What am I talking about today?  The joy of updating your own books in pretty-much real time. 

Find a typo after the book is already published?  Worse yet, a reader finds one and emails you?  Egads.  If you're traditionally published, I'm guessing you're screwed.  (I wouldn't know for certain.  Maybe a traditionally published author will stop by and confirm or deny my assertion.)  I can't imagine the hoops you'd have to jump through to get the publisher to fix a typo - if they even bother for such a minor mistake.  If you're self-published, you can root out the flaw, fix it, and upload your book again.  It might take twelve hours.  (Amazon says up to 72 hours, but it's never taken that long for me.)  Usually, the corrected version is available for readers by the next morning at the latest. 

Now, over the weekend, I was updating back matter in my other books to reflect the addition of Blink of an I to my stable of novels.  Every time I uploaded one of my backlist to Amazon, it found a few errors.  Sure, some of them weren't really misspellings - for instance, in the phrase 'tox screen', tox is not spelled wrong.  And meth is meth is meth... unless you want to spell out methamphetamine which is a pain and characters rarely use the whole word when speaking anyway.  But it did find a couple boo-boos worth fixing and re-uploading.  Like for some reason I have a brainfart when it comes to spelling disdain.  I want it to be distain.  Derp.  (I have distain on my shirt that won't come out.  LOL)  (Yes, JC, we missed one.)

In this case, Amazon is providing an extra set of eyes.  My editor and I catch most everything, but we're not infallible.   In a 65,000 to 100,000+ word manuscript, stuff happens.  The big 'Zon caught, at most 16 errors in one book.  (Again, most of which weren't really errors, but it let me choose to ignore the issue on those things I verified weren't actual errors.)  Everything in every book got fixed or ignored and life is good.  And the experience is better for the readers.  Yay!

And yes, there's another other good thing about self-publishing.  You can update your back matter at the drop of a tissue.  (I haven't done them all yet, but I CAN, which is something you have to beg the gods of traditional publishing for on your backlist and hope they grant your prayer.  AD, NC, and BF are done.  I'll get the others today.)  Publish a new book?  Put a link to it in all your other books.  On several occasions, I've had people read one book after the other - I assume because I made it easy for them to find all my other books at the back.  It takes a few minutes for each book, but it's so worth it.

So, there's my thought for the day.  Still on the fence?  That's okay.  You can still make your own cookies.  ;o)

A Few Things

1)  I had my dates wrong for getting Early Grave back from the editor.  She said the 28th.  I had it written in my date book as the 26th, I assume because I had originally planned to have it to her on the 26th of January and so the return would be one month later.  Derp.  Anyway, we're still all on track for a late April / early May release.  It all depends on how much work there is to be done and whether life intervenes.  :fingers crossed:

2)  I posted a little snip of Sleeping Ugly over at Silver James' blog this morning.  (Edited to add: In the comment section.)  And reading it this morning reminds me that I still love it.  Look for it to be published by the end of summer, good lord willin' and the crick don't rise.

3)  If you don't remember, Sleeping Ugly is about a supermodel who gets cursed so she becomes ugly when she sleeps and then gets prettier throughout the day until she looks like herself right about the time she's ready to go to sleep again.  Oh, and there's a dude who got the curse, too, only he's normal throughout the day and ugly at night.  So they're working together to figure our who cursed them and fix this crap.  Then the cops show up to question her about the murder of her estranged brother...  It's weird and wild and fun.

4) But first, Early Grave.  Agent Ned Washington of the SCIU has been sent to Toledo to figure out if they have a serial killer who's murdering old people in nursing homes and then catch the heinous bitch.  If you read Fertile Ground, you might remember Ned from the scene when Teri first gets to the Detroit office.  If you've read either of the SCIU novels, you'll remember Lynn - the tech gal.  She plays an important role in this book.

That's about it for me this morning.  If I think of anything else, I'll let you know. 

Milestones

If you've friended me on FB (and still bother to follow along), you might've seen that I officially rolled over 2000 books sold this morning.  So, I'm celebrating.  Woohoo.

Yeah, it took 3 years of publishing to sell that many copies.  Yeah, it's good in a way.  It depends on the perspective.  If you're a traditionally published author, maybe that's not so woohoo for you.  :shrug:  I am not now, nor will I ever be, traditionally published.  If you've had a lot of money to throw at advertising, maybe 2K is a low number in your world.  I haven't had that option thus far, so I'm feeling pretty good about it. 

Sure, I wish it was more.  I sold a thousand books my first year.  By that projection, one might think I'd bw passing the 3K mark right now.  Actually, I had hoped it would be exponential and something more along the lines of 1K the first year, 2K the second, 3K the third, so I'd be at the 6K milestone right now.  Hopes and expectations are good, but they're not reality. 

Still, it's a milestone.  And worthy of a minor celebration.  If I drank, I'd toast myself.  Instead, I'll just have some coffee and get ready to get back to work after my week off. 

How do you celebrate the milestones in life? 

The Publishing Schedule... Or Part of It Anyway

An kind of serendipity occurred this week.  My deadline got pushed back by a few days. And I felt bad celebrating.  You see, Early Grave is almost ready to go to the editor, so when she told me she might have to delay getting the edits for Blink of an I to me today, I was happy dancing.  Because if the edits had come in today, I would've felt bad putting them off until I was done with EG.  But if I worked on them and not EG, I would've felt bad because I know me and I know it's hard to get back into a project after I set it down to work on something else. 

Yeah, it gives me a headache, too.

No worries, though.  She'll get the edits to me by Monday and I'll have EG ready for her by Monday.  Win win.  And I have space built into the schedule, so Blink won't actually be delayed.  Then again, I never did quite give y'all a firm date for Blink.  Sometime in February is a large enough target I'll have a hard time missing it. 

So, here's how it'll go.  She'll get me Blink on Monday (or I'll start working on it Monday if she gets it to me sooner).  Two weeks for me to input all her edits and to read-through one last time.  One week for formatting.  That should put Blink of an I available for upload the week of the 19st... say the 20th or the 21st.  Barring any major snafus or the Apocalypse, that is.

AND, having just worked stuff out in my datebook, if all goes according to plan, Early Grave could be out late April/early May instead of May or June.  Still doesn't make Sleeping Ugly come out any sooner, though.  I'm still looking at an August release for that.  I won't get a chance to start beating the stuffings out of that first draft until sometime in March.  And my editor usually takes a vacay sometime in there.  And spring fishing.  And... Well, you get the gist.

So, here's how the 2018 production schedule is looking right now:

Blink of an I - February 21st (at the latest)
Early Grave - Late April / EarlyMay
Sleeping Ugly - August
DH3 or Unequal - November

DH3 hasn't actually been written yet, so I would need to cobble out about 6 weeks to do that.  If I get it done, then it'll be the one that goes live in November.  If not, then Unequal goes.  And if DH3 is the winner, Unequal will be published in 2019.  Beyond that, I have no clue.

Whew.  I'm tired just thinking about all that.  Is it too early for naptime? 

It's a Juggling Act

Right now, I have two books I'm working on.  Blink of an I and Early Grave.  Two totally different books - different tones, different genres, different ideas.  Most likely, two totally different markets. 

I've said it before - I'm an eclectic reader.  At any given time, I'm as likely to pick up a suspense novel as a dystopian or a mystery or a... whatever... to read.  And that reflects in my writing / publishing.  Just as it would kill me to read one genre in succession, I think it would kill me to write one novel after another in one genre.  I think I'd be bored to tears.

But it's not necessarily the best marketing plan.  To be successful - i.e. to sell loads of books - I probably should've written and published one series all the way through before jumping to the next.  Instead, Dying Embers came out in February of 2015, then Fertile Ground in May of 2016, and Early Grave will be out in May or June of 2018.  Accidental Death came out in May of 2015, Natural Causes in February of 2017, and Untitled #3 might be out at the end of this year.  I didn't do much better with my genie series: Wish in One Hand (August 2015), In Deep Wish (February 2016), Up Wish Creek (August 2016), and finally Wish Hits the Fan arrived in September of 2017.  With other books in between each of the successive series title's drop. 

There was no plan.  Not even a best laid plan worthy of a mouse.  It was more like 'this one looks good, let's do that', lather rinse repeat.  Which is why readers are looking at getting a dystopian, a suspense, a paranormal, and perhaps a mystery from me this year.  And why I'm currently driving myself nuts editing a suspense while I'm waiting for the dystopian to come back from my editor.  (Who is a saint that can edit all those different things without going batshit crazy.  I like to think I'm keeping her on her toes.)  It's definitely a juggling act - the one where the guy is keeping a chainsaw, a bowling ball, and a carton of eggs in the air at the same time. 

Anyway, call me crazy, but that's the way I have to do things.  And on the bright side, I'm never bored.  I hope my readers aren't either.  And I hope my crazypantsness encourages readers to step outside their comfortable reading box. 

Outside the Box... get it?

Things at OTB

First, the contest is still open on my Pick a Cover post.  Thus far, I have two votes for A on the blog, one private vote for C, and one private vote for either C or D.  (Yes, I will take private votes - especially if you're not interested in entering the contest.)  I'll most likely close it up on Friday and announce a winner on Monday. 

Next, I'm 29% done on the read-through, note-making stage of Early Grave.  And I got with my editor, who will take the first round of EG when I'm ready to send it.  I'm hoping to get thru this phase by Saturday and then use the next two weeks to make all the changes, so I can have this to her after she finished up with Blink and the end of the month. 

This year is on track.  So far.  Fingers crossed it stays this way.

My big sales extravaganza at the end of 2017 wrapped up the end of the year nicely.  Surprising since I didn't put any advertising in place for that one and only did some stuff on FB and Twitter.  That blog review really helped, although it wasn't planned or even expected until it happened.  Unfortunately, that's where the sales ended - last year.  I had kinda hoped for some residual stuff.  :sigh: 

Anyway, I'm going to try not to worry about that stuff.  I mean, I'm still going to advertise when I can and junk, but I'm working on not sweating the lack of sales.  My books are out there.  More will be out there this year.  Different stuff, similar stuff.  Blink is definitely different stuff.  Early Grave is the third book in the SCIU series, but with Ned Washington as the main character.  Then I plan on publishing Sleeping Ugly - which is a paranormal but not djinn.  And if I can manage to get some inspiration somewhere and finish it, the third book in the Dennis Haggarty series should round out 2018.  If not, I might go ahead with another dystopian - Unequal.   Time will tell.

Those are about all the things I can think of at the moment.  Any questions? 

Advertising, Marketing, Etc.

Time again for a discussion on marketing, advertising, marketing venues, etc., ya know, since I haven't done one in a while.  And since I haven't done one in a while, I'm going to start over rather than add to the previous one.  The slate is clean.

Okay, so looking back, I wasn't a good monkey in keeping track of what advertising dollars went to which book.  :eyeroll:  I should fire my marketing manager, but that's me, so...  I've given myself a good talking to and put a note in my file about dereliction of duty.

Here's a basic overview of what information I did put into the spreadsheet and the budget.

Reading Deals - $29.  I paid for an ad in February.  I assume for Dying Embers, since there's a sales uptick for that book in that month.  And I have one coming out this week, also for Dying Embers. 

Booktastik - $10.  I paid for an ad in February.  Ditto for the book, not ditto for an ad this week. I recall not seeing a lot from this ad, but it could be my memory.

Paranormal & Urban Fantasy Bargains - $3/$12.  I paid for an ad in June. I assume for Wish in One Hand, since it was on a free promo.  I saw some sales of the other two books in the series.  And I paid for 4 ads in September.  The 4 ads went much better than the single ad - probably because the single ad was for one book only and the 4 ads were for the whole series.  This really seemed to get me some nice sales for the series.

Author Billboard - $6.  I paid for an ad in September.  Also seemed to see an uptick in sales.  And I have two coming out this week - Dying Embers and Fertile Ground.  Fingers crossed.

ebookdealsdaily - $10.  I paid for an ad in September.  I'm not sure how well this one did, since I was already rolling along from the other advertising when this ad went live.

eReaderNewsToday (ENT) - I tried for an ad in September, but they turned me down.  They did say it was because their newsletter was full for the dates I needed, so that's on me.  I should've planned better.

Which brings me around to this week's ads.  Dying Embers and Fertile Ground will both be on sale starting tomorrow and running through Sunday night - here and in the UK.  Hence, advertising.  I did a sale for AD and NC over Halloween and didn't advertise anywhere but on FB and Twitter (posts only, no paid ads).  I sold a few copies.  I should've advertised, but I put the sale together at the last minute and didn't have time to advertise.  Derp. 

As for Facebook and Twitter.  I've paid for ads with Facebook and really didn't see a return on my investment.  I haven't paid for ads on Twitter.  In FB's case, I see more activity from posting to various groups than anything else.  And I occasionally see activity from posting about a sale to Twitter.  Not huge numbers, but still.

In any case, the more I put my books out there, the more I see page reads in Kindle Unlimited. I think more people are willing to take a chance on a book when they don't have to buy the whole book - like when it's included in their monthly subscription.  Then they start to read and more often than not, they read through the whole series.  I had one person start with Wish in One Hand, read through the series, and then read all my other books one after the other.  It was awesome to watch the page counts roll along in a wave.

A final note to this post.  Recently, Elizabeth Spann Craig did a post on advertising I think y'all should read.  And in it is a link to a list someone else put together of advertising venues.  It's not comprehensive - good lord, there are so many venues, I don't think it could be comprehensive - but it's damn good and it'll save time when you're looking to advertise your books.  Or, hey, if you're looking for books to read, those lists are a gold mine.  Seriously.

Anyway, if you're out there self-publishing your work and wondering how to get noticed and get sales, I highly recommend doing some advertising.  It doesn't have to be expensive.  Of course, the more you spend, the more you can potentially make.  Still, getting the word out there helps.  Maybe Wednesday I'll list the various FB groups I post to for advertising.  And perhaps, if I remember, next week I'll post something about how this week's advertising and sale went.

Hope that helps.  If you have any questions, let me know.