All posts by David Todd

self-publishing, Writing

One Year of Self-Publishing

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Yesterday was the one year anniversary of my first self-publishing piece. My short story “Mom’s Letter” first went live on Amazon as a Kindle book. Since it’s just a short story, I don’t have a print version available. As follow-ups to this, Documenting America went live on May 2, 2011, and “Too Old To Play” went live on January 26, 2012. Documenting America is also available as a print book.

So what have I learned in a year?

I learned that I can’t produce new works and format them as e-books as quickly as others seem to be able to do. Dean Wesley Smith says the self-published author should try to have something new published every couple of weeks. I don’t have enough hours in the day to do that.

I learned that I have to personally sell just about every book sold. I sold a Documenting America yesterday and mailed it today. Personally sold a couple of copies in January. General marketing has so far resulted in a few sales at best. Targeted group marketing has resulted in a few sales at best. I don’t know how long this will go on and when, if ever, these catch a buzz and take off. Maybe when I hit some number or titles that result in critical mass for sales.

Requests for people to review the books have resulted in zero reviews. I gave a few copies of DA away to people who said they would read it and write reviews. So far that has resulted in no reviews and, I assume, no reads. Any reviews that now appear on Amazon are unsolicited. The few contacts I made to web sites to review DA have gone unanswered. 100% unanswered. Ah, well, no one said this business was easy. At times I think I should just stick with engineering.

I learned that I’m not hitting the best seller list any time soon. Here’s where my books currently stand on the Amazon sales list (I won’t call it the “best seller” list).

  • Documenting America – Kindle: 411,488
  • Documenting America – Print: 4,107,954
  • Mom’s Letter – Kindle: 549,047
  • Too Old to Play – Kindle: 427,066

But I do have some sales. So far, here’s what I’ve sold, electronic and print.

  • Mom’s Letter – 12
  • Documenting America – 30
  • Too Old To Play – 3
  • for a total of 45

So, I’m not giving up. I have a work-in-progress that, if I finish, I self publish. I have my first completed novel waiting only on formatting and a cover. I have my second completed novel now on its 36th day with an agent. If it’s a pass, I self publish. And the ideas still flow.

The Candy Store Generation, Writing

What writing style for “The Candy Store Generation”?

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It’s a snow day in northwest Arkansas. Only about 2 inches fell, with some sleet coming down now. But I decided not to go to work today. In any of the three directions I could go to work, I have hills and curves to negotiate. My pick-up doesn’t handle well in snow, and handles even worse in ice. One route isn’t too bad. If I park up the hill, I can get about eight miles before I have the hills and curves. And if others have gone before me and cleared the road, I can get through it okay. But I decided to stay home. If the office doesn’t count it as a legitimate snow day for salaried employees, I’ll just take it as a day of vacation.

So I’m in The Dungeon, writing away on The Candy Store Generation. I spent some time each of the last few days on it. I think it was Wednesday and Thursday that I wrote out three pages of manuscript. I typed them Friday, and on Saturday and Sunday tried to add more to it. I wasn’t able to add much, perhaps 1,000 words. That’s not a good production amount on weekend days. I was at just short of 7,000 words on a book that I want to be somewhere around 40,000.

The problem wasn’t writers block, per se. I knew what I wanted to say. I had chapters outlined and eight or nine out of fourteen chapters started. Chapter 1 was done, and chapter 2 well along but not finished. For each of the chapters, I know what I want to say. Yet, the writing is lagging.

Yesterday I think I finally figured out what the problem is. I’m not sure what tone I want to write in. I’m doing research, but certainly not enough to make this a scholarly work. No, it’s a “popular” work. If I have any footnotes they will be few. This is mainly about my opinions on how the Baby Boomers have screwed up America. I’ve thought about it a lot, and can easily write my opinions.

But what language to use? My first non-fiction book, Documenting America, is written with quite casual language. It reads more like a series of blog posts than a book. That was my original plan for TCSG: to write casually. These are my opinions, so if I use “I” a lot, so what?

But I started questioning that decision. I began to think that I should write it as a semi-scholarly work. It would still be opinion, but written more like a factual survey of the subject matter.

I struggled with this for a while. I added a few sentences and then reread to see how it sounded. I rewrote and reread to see how it now sounded. I made a little progress, sentence by sentence. But to make any kind of publication schedule, I need to be producing a minimum of 500 words a day, more on the weekend.

Thinking about the book and my target audience, and what type of language they would like to read, I finally decided last night that they won’t be offended by “blog language”. The professors won’t like it. And the professional political workers might laugh at it. But I think many people will like it. Blog language is common speech, relaxed speech.

I decided to just go with relaxed language, for better or for worse, and not try to make it semi-scholarly. So today I’ve been writing away. So far I’ve written about 1850 words, in three different chapters. I’m at a total of 8850 words, and feeling much better about the project. On to 2000 or 2500 today, and 11,000 by the end of the week.

Writing

Writing Wisdom on the Blogosphere

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I read writing blogs a lot. Agent blogs. Some editor or publisher blogs. Fellow writers blogs. Every day I read an average of five blogs, but not the same blogs each day. Over the course of any week I probably read 20 blogs.

Now, some of these I just skim. Sometimes one just refers to another. Some of them make frequent use of guest bloggers. A few of them, the ones I’ve read for a few years, are now recycling topics without giving much new information. So the time required to read these blogs really isn’t increasing even though the number of blogs I look at is slowly increasing.

Today Rachelle Gardner had a guest blogger, who talked about character flaws, something I’ve blogged about before. Our heroes must have faults. And it’s good if their faults are what cause them to get into hot water. The guest blogger used the example of Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With The Wind. She had her faults. Readers (and viewers) want to hate her for her flaws, but usually wind up sympathetic to her in spite of it.

This is something I struggle with. I wonder how much the general book-reading public really want the hero to have flaws. Do they want to see the mild-mannered become angry? The virtuous succumb to lust? The timid become obnoxiously bold? I wonder.

I’m out of words for right now. Maybe I’ll come back and edit more in, or just do a follow-up post.

Writing

More on loss of marketing mojo

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My last post was kind of short. It was prompted by something silly. On Jan. 26 I accepted a friend request on Facebook. It was someone I didn’t know, who is a member of a certain political page I’m also a member of. No problem, I thought. He must have seen a post I made and decided to friend me. I accepted his request.

Days later, on February 1, I responded to a message on Facebook from another friend. In the process, I noticed that, when you click on the word “Messages”, not on the button, underneath “Messages” is the word “Other”. Next to “Other” was the number 1. Strange, I thought. Why didn’t that 1 show up on my news feed? I clicked on “Other”, and saw the message was from January 26, from that man who friended me. He is involved with a couple of political groups, in the real world and on FB, with many followers. He wanted to review my book Documenting America and hopefully recommend it to his followers.

Now, I was happy for the interest, but terribly upset over the fact that this request for a book and offer to review had been sitting there for six days, and Facebook never notified me. That’s what we all want: a champion for our books. Someone who will supplement whatever marketing we are doing. Someone who knows people and can expand your circle of contacts. I had it, and it almost slipped away. Maybe has, for all I know. I contacted him, he was still interested in reading and reviewing it, so I shot him an e-copy of the book. It’s only been four days since I did that, so no feedback yet.

Writing is hard enough, and marketing is harder yet, that a flub such as this, minor as it was, is disheartening at best and demotivating at worst. I did a promo post that brought at least one result that came close to dying. If promotional successes are so hard, I thought, why bother?

On his influential blog, Joe Konrath wrote about how most writers way over-promote. It’s something that is drilled into wannabe authors when they first start chasing publication, especially the e-self-publishing route. You’ve gotta get out there and promote yourself. No one else is gonna, so you’d better. Be creative. Be active. Do it regularly and often.

But it’s something I have to psyche myself up to do. And right now I’m not psyched to do it. I suppose I’ll get over it, but not yet. Plus, after Mom’s Letter being featured on the short story blog, and having no sales result, I’m questioning whether any promotion will work. I guess I won’t bother looking up phone numbers for the local Kiwanis and Lions clubs and see if they need another speaker.

Writing

Loss of mojo

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Life has conspired to keep me from writing much the last few days. I think it was Sunday that I last wrote more than a paragraph. Tonight I got to look a little at In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People, mainly just to check it for what pages I need to reprint after my last round of edits.

Too much is going on in life to worry about writing and promoting what I’ve already written. With all that’s going on my mind is kind of just mush. Tonight I remembered something I need to do before February 15th. It involves several days of off-hour research. That’s besides a lot of family finances stuff, which seems to pile up faster and faster these days.

Plus, given how poorly recent promotional efforts have impacted sales, I’ve lost interest in promotion. For now, if the books sell, fine. If they don’t, fine.

The Candy Store Generation

The Beginnings of “The Candy Store Generation”

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As I’ve posted before, my next work-in-progress, after completion of In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People is The Candy Store Generation. This is a political book, telling my opinions of how the Baby Boomer generation has screwed up America. The title came from my impressions of the first of three presidential debates in 2000, Bush vs. Gore. I described the origin of the term in my friend’s political blog. I did three follow-up posts on the topic, but they aren’t all properly tagged. If you want to read them, follow the link, then go to newer posts till you get all four. And the most recent post on the blog (as of 1/30/2012) is another of my thoughts about the subject.

After letting the concept sit a couple of years, I decided it would be a good topic for a short book, maybe 30,000 to 40,000 words. Since I’m firmly within the Baby Boomer generation, I figured I could write about it. Research would be minimal; my opinions would be foremost. I decided I wanted to do research into average birth years of the House and Senate over time, to see when they flipped from one generation to the next. That’s fairly time consuming, but I’m close to half way through that.

I copied the four blog posts into one file, and discovered they only came to a little over 2,000 words. Yikes! I thought sure I had written more than that. I took a few days to think through the contents of the book. I came up with ten chapters I thought were needed. That meant 3,000 to 4,000 words per chapter. Given that the words already written were spread out over five of those chapters, I clearly had some work to do.

The first chapter came first. I took the 500 words already written and began expanding them. This chapter serves as an introduction, without much commentary, describing the genesis and purpose of the book. It explains my shock at how, during that debate, the two candidates treated a budget surplus that hadn’t happened. Over several days I added a paragraph here, corrected a sentence there, clarified something in another place. I think it was last Thursday that I counted chapter 1 complete, though of course subject to edits. The word count in the chapter: 1,200.

Well, the Introduction needs to be shorter, I thought. So I plowed into the second chapter, the one that defines what the different recent generations are in popular terms and what the most common characteristics are. I found it slow going. Thinking you can describe the dominant attributes of a generation is easy when you say in your head you are going to do it, harder to actually put the words on paper. I allowed myself to become distracted with many outside things.

On Saturday, rather than write in the book, I brainstormed what the book would contain. A couple of news stories gave me ideas, and I reworked my table of contents. It’s now up to 14 chapters, so the word count per chapter is down to something like 2200-2900. I realize that an artificial word count per chapter is not smart. Each chapter must tell its story in whatever words the story demands. But average chapter length is a good indication. If after a few chapters I’m way under or way over the range I’m looking for, that says either 1) the project is not viable in the length I’m protecting for it, or 2) it’s going to be a more significant work than I expected, and I may need to adjust some expectations and publishing schedule.

Finally, yesterday afternoon I was able to knuckle down. I drew some simple information from the Statistical Abstract of the U.S. and from a couple of websites—nothing I can link to as a reference, but they gave me some ideas and refreshed my memory as to what I already knew. I was still distracted, and still struggling for words, but I was able to work at it for a few, interrupted hours.

My writing goal for Sunday was 1,000 words. When my writing day was done, I had 1,250 words, all of them in Chapter 2. That’s not a complete chapter by any means, and I’ve barely begun discussing other generations. So it seems I ought to be able to make my word quota for the chapter with no problem. It looks like the chapter will be at least 2,500 words to contain everything I want it to, and maybe over 3,000. So far so good.

That makes me feel a lot better about the project. This is a political season, and I’d like to have to book available well before the election. I have no illusions it will be a best seller or that it would influence the political debate. But having a political book come out several months before an election can’t hurt.

Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Documenting America, self-publishing

One Book at a Time

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Today I attended a meeting at the City of Centerton, Arkansas—a simple preconstruction conference for a small project at First Baptist Church in Centerton, to add a baseball/softball field on vacant land next to the church. The contractor is a man who used to work for us; the engineer is one I’ve worked with for a long time.

As I drove to the meeting, I saw that I had two copies of Documenting America in the pick-up. When I got to City Hall I took a copy of the book. Upon seeing my contractor friend, I asked him, “You got a spare $10.90? I think you’ll like this,” and I handed him a copy of the book. He said he would take a copy, but that he didn’t have any money on him at the moment. His coworker also looked interested.

It was during the meeting that he said he didn’t have the money right then. So I took the book from him and gave it to the engineer, saying, “Maybe you’d like this.” She seemed impressed that I’d published a book, and said she wanted to buy one for her husband. When I told her it was available as an e-book for 1/5th the price, she said that’s how she’d buy it. I hope she follows through.

So I gave the book back to my contractor friend, and said he could pay me later. I kiddingly reminded him that I have to sign off on the project, and that he needed to pay me before I did the final inspection.

That’s the way book sales seem to go these days: one sale at a time, mostly at my efforts. Writing is a hard business, the sale of one’s writings harder yet. Yesterday “Too Old To Play” went live at the Kindle store. So far I have two e-sales of it, and it stands about 58,500 in the Kindle store, but will sink fast unless there are more sales. I’m okay with the start. The two sales probably came from people I know, somewhere, who bought it in response to my notices on my blogs, on Facebook, at Ozark Writers League, or at Christian Authors Book Marketing Strategies. I’d be shocked if they were bought by strangers who stumbled upon the title at Amazon.

So my sales and revenue for January 2012 stand at 7 and $6.36 respectively, with 3.5 days left in the month. I’m okay with that. I might get a boost on Monday Jan 30, when “Mom’s Letter” will be the featured short story at the Short Story Symposium. That may generate some sales, and if any of those buyers go to my Amazon page and see I have another short story in the series…who knows? I reached out to TSSS in late December, and am pleased it worked out.

One book at a time. That appears to be the rule in these early days in the brave new world of eSP—e-self-publishing. Will it ever move beyond that? I hope so.

Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Writing

And So We Watch, Again: “Too Old To Play”

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The second in the series.

Yesterday evening I finally pulled all the elements together to make “Too Old To Play” live at the Kindle store. After I did so, I realized I forgot to put the word count in the description. I like to do that so a potential buyer knows how many words they get for their money, and so there’s no charges of it being a really, really short story for the money. I’ll correct the description tonight. The Kindle instructions say it takes 12 hours for something to go live after submission. That’s down from the 48 hours it used to say. Sure enough, when I looked it up at 7 AM this morning, it was already live, about 11 hours after uploading.

Today I put a notice on my Facebook author page, as well as on my personal Facebook page. I added a promotional post to An Arrow Through the Air. I modified my books available page on this site to list it. With this post I will have completed my internal promotion—that is, those things I can do without going to an outside site. I also added it to my Kindle/Amazon author’s page and to my Author Central page, but have not yet added it to Goodreads. Maybe tonight. I also made announcements at the Ozark Writer’s League and the Christian Authors’ Book Marketing Strategies pages on Facebook. Beyond that, I’m not sure I’ll do a lot for this. In a day or two I’ll mention something that I did a month ago that will give it some publicity.

So now I watch. As of two hours ago I had one sale. Let me check now…still one. I just talked with someone about it at work, and she says she’ll buy it when she gets home and has her Kindle in hands. I’ve had a total of 12 sales of “Mom’s Letter” in the eleven months it’s been out. The “theory of multiple titles” says that the two short stories will feed sales to each other, and that together each one will have better sales than they would have apart. We’ll see if that proves true. Nothing to do but wait and watch, and try not to check the sales board every hour.

Soon, perhaps even tonight, I’ll format it for Smashwords and upload it there. Since it’s a short story that shouldn’t take too much time, and it will then be available in all major e-reader formats. So I do have that small amount of work to do before I will just be waiting and watching.

I’ll still in the waiting period for my query to an agent for In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. On the agency website it says if we don’t contact you within 30 days assume it’s a No, but the individual agent’s web site says to assume that after 60 days. Today is day 16, so there’s still quite a lot of waiting to do on that. Meanwhile, the first round of edits is complete, the mss re-printed, and waiting for one more read-through and perhaps a few more edits.

So I’m waiting and watching on two fronts. That doesn’t mean I’m idle though. My next work, The Candy Store Generation, beckons me. I did an hour of research last night, and hope to do two hours of writing tonight. I hope to present it at the next writers group meeting, which will  be either Jan 30 or Feb 6. I would love to have this done in three months, though I may be over-stating my writing capacity. We’ll see.

non-fiction, Writing

2012 Writing Plans: Non-fiction for the Christian Market

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[Because of a stupid document switch by my computer, and a stupid click by me, I was more or less finished with this post but failed to save it. Here it is the second time around, which is never as good as the first.]

Previously I wrote about my writing plans for 2012 for fiction, non-fiction articles, and non-fiction books. One area I haven’t covered yet is non-fiction works for the Christian market. This is an important part of my writing, so I’ve formulated some plans.

I have two main interests currently in the Christian non-fiction market. The first is Bible studies for Life Groups (a.k.a. adult Sunday school). As I’ve mentioned before on the blog, I have developed and taught several of these. Here they are.

  • Sacred Moments: a study of the sacraments and other sacred times
  • Life on a Yo Yo: Learning from Peter’s Ups and Downs
  • The Dynamic Duo: Lessons from the Lives of Elijah and Elisha
  • Isaiah (a 20 week study)
  • What One Thing is Strongest (a 5-week study based on 1 Esdras from the Apocrypha)
  • Lesser-Known People of the Bible
  • Good King, Bad King

These are in various states of completion for student materials and teacher materials. Some are more in outline form with my teaching notes, but no student papers and the teaching notes not in a form that another teacher could use. Others are close to finished, with snazzy student papers and good teaching notes. All of them will require some work to be in publishable shape.

For publishing, I’m thinking of PDF format and sales from my web site for a nominal fee. This is not a money-making proposition, though I’d like to get a little something for my trouble. I’m not sure how it would work. Clearly a manual system, where they e-mail me or fill out a contact form, would be easy. An automated system would be a lot harder and possibly expensive. We’ll see.

The second area of interest and activity for me is the writings of John Wesley. Last year I began an earnest study of these, and developed some ideas for publications. I actually started some essays based on his writings, though I’m not far along with this. I have begun to gather Wesley’s political writers with the aim to publish them as a compilation with a little commentary. This is a manageable task for this year. Beyond that, I’m not sure I have anything beyond the brainstorming stage.

So what to plan for in 2012? Given that I’m not real sure about the amount of time I’ll be able to spend on writing as a whole, and how much of that I can set aside for this sector. I’ll keep my plans modest. By the end of the year, I plan to have one Bible study in finished form and available for purchase through my website. Perhaps I can do more. Perhaps even this limited plan is a stretch. But it’s now in writing, and I’ll work toward it.

Writing

Thinking About Promotion

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Sales of Documenting America have stalled. In 2011 I sold 26 copies. In 2012 I’ve sold 1.

But I’ve done no promotion of it in 2012. I joined a Facebook group called Christian Authors’ Book Marketing, and have posted a link to it on a thread on that group’s FB page. That was a day or two ago, and since that time at least ten others have posted links to that thread, bumping it out of sight. At some point I’ll start a thread about DA.

But either though the CABM or elsewhere I came across two interesting Internet posts about marketing. One is The Book Marketing Snowball, a blog post by Terry Cordingley. Terry appears to be a marketing person. This is the first time I’ve come across his site, and will have to look at it some more. The post is a reminder that, since e-books are on the shelf forever, writers have no need to make a concentrated promotional push when published. In fact, he suggests this is counter-productive in the Internet era. Rather, start small and slowly with marketing efforts, like the proverbial snowball rolling downhill. Eventually, if the book is any good, the size and speed of promotion will increase without any real effort of the author. Intuitively, this is correct. Kind of hard though, with a single sale a month.

The other is Top Ten Reasons Why Your Book Marketing Strategy Is Not Working, by Deborah H. Bateman. Deborah is an author I’ve never heard of before. She writes for the Christian market, and doesn’t appear to have many titles in either print or e-book. She might be much like me, just starting out on the self-publishing route. Her ten reasons, which came from a man named Don E. McCauley, focus on visibility of the project and the author. He mentions that your book web page needs to appear in the first three pages of search engine results or else no one will find it. So he puts great emphasis on search engine optimization (despite the fact that SEO, in my opinion, was turned on its head with the two major Google algorithm changes in 2011). The author must have a brand. The author must have reasonable expectations.

Of such web sites and such advice there seems to be no end. I’m almost tired of them, and am seriously thinking of not following links to them any more. The snowball analogy seems valid, however. So I have only a sale or two per month for a while. So in all of 2011 my two titles combined had an average of about 3.33 sales per month, or 1.65 sales per title. That’s not bad. If I can add my five titles targeted for 2012, and keep my sales at that rate, for a reasonably spread out schedule for the new titles, I could easily sell 100 copies combined of all titles in 2012. Those aren’t best seller numbers, but I think I would rejoice at those many sales. If, as the eSP pundits suggest, more  published works feed sales to each other, those sales could easily go up to 200 for the year. I could live with that.

So what is my marketing plan right now? First is to keep writing and keep publishing. Second is to work slowly to find more blogs and web sites that will interview me and promote my work. At present, there is no third. This weekend is a local, real life meeting of an on-line political group I’m in. I plan on attending, and I believe they will give me a couple of minutes to tell about Documenting America. I have nine paperbacks left in inventory, and would hope to sell a few there. One other marketing item coming up is the profile on me that’s coming in the next University of Rhode Island alumni magazine, probably in March.

So I guess I have to get busy. Tonight will be tied up with church and calculations to decide on the PPO or HSA health insurance, a decision I will have to make by Friday. That might leave me a little time for editing or reading. Not sure when marketing will earn a chunk of my time again.