Make Money to Have Money to Spend Money to Make Money

By now, I'm probably boring the shit out of you, but since I have marketing on the brain - and very little will to do any of it - I thought I'd ramble here a little more about it.

A few days ago, I read a blog post asking what kinds of services indie authors might be interested in paying to receive.  Just a sort of informal survey, I guess.  This morning, I read the comments.  Pretty much most of the commenters seemed to be in the same boat I am.  I'd pay for services like tweaking my marketing plan, getting better keywords, targeting where to advertise and how to do it effectively, etc. - over and above paying for cover art and editing - but I don't have the funding to do it.  AND I can't afford to pay for something that I'm not reasonably certain will work. 

I know I have to spend money to make money.  That's sort of a 'Duh'.  I also know that advertising works.  It just brings me back around to how much money I have in the budget, and I'm much really wowser advertising costs.  Suggesting a marketing consultancy service - where you pay them and you pay for the ads, too - at around $500-$1000 makes my miserly heart weep.  I just can't see it happening in the near future. 

But I know I'm not cutting the mustard as it is now.  I'm terminally lazy.  I'm also dancing along the fine line of 'effective marketing' and 'annoying the shit out of customers' - totally in fear I've fallen on the bad side of the tightrope with every tweet I post.  My sales are suffering because of it.  I know. 

You have to spend money to make money.  But you have to have money to spend money to make money.  Which means you have to make money to have money to spend money to make money. 

Dizzy yet?  I know I am.

But here's another wrinkle.  You have no way of knowing if the money you're spending is actually making you money in the long term.  Sure, if you shell out money for an ad, you might see a spike in sales.  That's pretty obvious.  If you shell out money for a better marketing plan... Will there be a spike?  Will it dribble in over time (which wouldn't bother me either, frankly) and how will you know it has to do with the marketing plan?  It could be coincidental because one reader told all her friends about your book over coffee on the same morning a piece of the plan went into effect. 

It's the not knowing that kind of makes me crazypants, ya know? 

Anyway, I'll keep chugging along - marketing where and when I can.  I will force myself to get back into the swing of cheerleading.  I mean, I kinda have to since I have another book coming out in less than a month. 

Speaking of which, the newsletter is about 75% ready and there'll be some exclusive things, free stuff you can win, and something to read (a little WIOH appetizer, if you will).  If you aren't signed up yet, the linky-loo is up there under the header pic. 

Yeah, that's about the speed of my marketing today.  Didn't cost me a dime.

Wicked Wednesday - Abuse

You talked back again.  You didn't wear the right dress.  You looked foolish in front of his friends.  You made him look foolish in front of his friends.  You were too slow.  You weren't slow enough.  Dinner wasn't cooked enough... or too much... it was overseasoned or underseasoned... it was late... or it was on-time but he was late and now it's cold.  And it's all your fault.  Whatever it was that pissed him off, frustrated him, or just generally put a crimp in his day.  So he hit you, knocked you down, yelled, shouted, screamed, made you feel ashamed, stupid, ugly... worthless...

And you deserved it.  So you took whatever he dished out and accepted that it was your due.  And you'll take it again tomorrow because he did apologize for hurting you and he promised he won't do it again.  Or he didn't apologize, but you know he's sorry deep down.  It wasn't him talking.  He had a bad day.  It was the booze or the drugs or the chemical imbalance caused by whatever.  He didn't mean it.  He was just playing around.  He's really a nice guy.  And he loves you.

Sound familiar?  It's either happening to you right now, has happened to you in the past, or you know someone it's happening/happened to.

Physical abuse. Mental abuse. Emotional abuse.  One of them or another, or a combination of all three.

The first time I remember hearing about it was 1987 - I was in high school and everyone knew R's boyfriend was whoopin' on her. And I knew then no man would ever be allowed to whoop on me.  And they didn't.  I didn't take that kind of abuse. 

I had a boyfriend once who slapped me across the face... but he was kidding around.  I was 18.  Took me about a year - and our engagement - before I broke up with him.  I ran into his next girlfriend years later.  He broke her arm.

I had another boyfriend in college who was joking around with me one day, acting like he was going to hit me.  I told him "If you ever hit me, it'll be the last thing you do."  To which he replied, "What are you going to do about it?"  A smiled slowly and said "I don't have to do a damn thing." then proceeded to name off all my really large male friends who would happily pound him into something resembling porridge.  We broke up a couple weeks later.

No, I never endured the physical abuse, and I thought I was wise.  I never saw the mental abuse coming except in retrospect.  Sometimes, looking back, I think it would've been better if Mr. X had pounded on me.  Then I would've had an excuse to leave him long before I did.  Perhaps someone would've seen the bruises and stopped him, or made me see that I didn't deserve that kind of abuse.  Perhaps if I'd still had my really large male friends, they would've crushed him into paste for me.  Except he made sure I didn't have any friends, so I'm not sure how that would've worked.  I tried to end it once, but he sucked me back with promises of counseling and therapy and love.  I finally did end it 8 months later.  And I learned.

Not well enough, apparently, because he wasn't the last to make me feel like shit for just being me, but eventually, I got the point.  I didn't deserve that.  No one does.

No one has the right to hurt you.  Most especially, the people who claim to love you do NOT have the right to hurt you.  Not physically, not mentally, and not emotionally. 

Get out.  Get away.  Remove yourself from the situation, and if you can't, find someone who can help you.  And if you're staying 'for the kids', think about what the abuse is doing to them.  They see, they hear, they know.  Your kids will grow up thinking that kind of behavior is acceptable.  Your girls will allow it to happen to them, and your boys will do it to their women.  Because if it was okay with Mom, it's okay. 

Get out.  Don't endure years of it until you're finally so fed up you're this close to either killing him or killing yourself.  Don't endure it so long that when you finally get away, you spend years afterwards with a kind of PTSD - so that twenty years later, you still have occasional nightmares about it (even though you're safe and happy with a real man who knows what love is and shows it daily).

Get out.  Because you deserve better.  You always did. 

Amazon Love, a mini-Rant, and Some News

I know there's a section of the populace that can't stand Amazon.  I honestly don't understand it, but I get that people have preferences and I respect their choice to hate Amazon. 

For me, Amazon is my happy place.  Has been for years.  Whatever I want, whenever I want it, Amazon.  I want a book - I can get one in a flash.  I want new pots and pans - I can order the exact set I want right now and have it delivered to my door in like two weeks. 

I detest driving around looking for stuff.  And even if I find Widget A at Ace, how do I know their price is better than further up the road at Sears or Walmart or Meeks that indie store across the way?  Stop at every place and then find out the widget was only at the first place?  And forget calling all those places.  Half the time they don't know whether something's actually in stock at any given time.  Oh, when you call, the computer says they have 4, but when you get there, they really only had two and you needed three, or some such thing.  But hey, they're pretty sure their location in the next town over and an hour away has 4 in stock - do I want to order them and have them shipped to the location I'm currently standing in so I can pick it up in three days??

Umm, yeah, I'm not bitter.  Ri-ight.

Anyway, I don't run into that problem with Amazon.  They generally have what I want, and if they don't, it's right there on the product page - 'out of stock' - with suggestions on other products that might do me just as well as the one I can't order right now.  Yay.

But setting aside the buyer portion of Amazon, I love Amazon for the fact that without them, I would not be published - or, if I was, it wouldn't have been so easy and I wouldn't have nearly the number of sales I have today.  Case in point, for roughly 2 months, I had Dying Embers up everywhere ebooks are sold.  In that time, I sold 5 books outside Amazon - and those were one day back in May when I ran the ENT ad.  Meanwhile, Accidental Death was only at Amazon, and enrolled in their Select program.  I wasn't making huge sales there either, but they were steady, and the borrows alone outstripped Dying Embers at other sales venues. 

So, yeah, I love Amazon.  And it totally pisses me off that some people calling themselves 'Authors United' - as if they speak for us all - are attacking Amazon.  Well, screw them.  They don't speak for me.  I'm making 70% commission compared to their 15% (minus 15% to their agent), and I'm loving it.  You know, I hope to hell they don't get their way, because then authors like me will be screwed hard and ain't no one even going to leave a dime on the dresser. Of course, they don't care about me - and I don't want them to - but they shouldn't act like they do either. 

Basically, I made the decision over the weekend to stick with Amazon exclusively from here until things change more favorably outside Amazon.  Dying Ember is no longer at any other sales venue and I won't be putting Accidental Death out there either.  I had thought I would send Wish in One Hand out into the world across the board to see what happens, and then take WIOH through the KDP Select program, but delisting books at those other venues is such a pain, I think I'll just save myself the hassle.

To those of you who are staunch Amazon haters, I apologize.  Let your venue of choice know that because of their policies, you're losing out on some quality work (not just mine, but other authors who've also made the same decision).  To those of you who don't hate Amazon, but still have some other ereader, Amazon has apps for pretty much everything.  And a recent informal poll shows that other ereader owners typically buy through Amazon when the books are only available there, so no biggie for them.  If this causes any of you distress, I apologize.  I have to do what makes sense for me in the long run.  And hey, the books will still be available in hardcopy through multiple non-Amazon sellers. 

I hope you'll stick around and buy some books.  Once I'm sure Dying Embers is free of encumbrances at those other sales sites, I'll be putting it into the KU program to see what this new 'pay per pages read' thing can do for me there.  (Accidental Death has 13984 pages read so far this month.  Pretty cool stuff to watch, and I recently heard that we might be paid something like .006 per word, which would totally work for me.)

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.