Category Archives: self-publishing

Church History Novels, Doctor Luke's Assistant, Documenting America, self-publishing, Sharon Williams short stories, Short Stories

Hoopla “Sales”

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Three borrows in two months: it’s nice to have new readers for this oldie.

When I first started self-publishing, back in 2011, two organizations competed for authors: Amazon, which distributed e-books and print books to its own store; and Smashwords, which distributed e-books to a lot of retailers. I began by uploading my books to Amazon, but before many months passed I also uploaded to Smashwords.

Over the years, other services popped up. Barnes & Noble made it possible to uploads your books directly to them, bypassing the middle men. Another service distributing to retailers was Draft 2 Digital. I made the decision that it was hard enough keeping up with Amazon and Smashwords that I wouldn’t mess with D2D too.

In fact, I had very few sales through Smashwords, and didn’t bother to upload most of my latest books.

Then, a year or two ago, D2D bought out Smashwords. I waited a long time to transfer my books, but finally did early this year. I spent almost no time learning the D2D system. I had too much on my plate, between writing and household and health, to read up on how D2D did things.

In September, I received an e-mail from D2D saying my August sales report was available. That surprised me. I opened the report and found I found I’d sold 1 copy of Dr. Luke’s Assistant and one of my short story “Charlie Delta Delta”. The royalty for each was 32¢! That couldn’t be. I contacted D2D and learned that Hoopla was a different type of retailer. It’s more of a library service, and a “sale” is really a borrow.

Then, Wednesday I received an email from D2D saying my September sales report was available. I downloaded it, and learned I had five sales, all through Hoopla (so really five borrows. One of Documenting America Vol 1, two of Documenting America Home School edition, and two more of Doctor Luke’s Assistant. The problem is: how do I account for these borrows in terms or recording sales. Is a borrow a sale? or something less than a sale?

A borrow means a reader. A sale means a reader—or so you hope. So in terms of readership, a borrow is the same as a sale, maybe even more likely to result in a reader. So, at least for now, I’m counting each borrow as a sale. If that skews my sales number, I may have to rethink that.

Of course, with the delay in D2D reporting, I won’t know each month’s sales until almost a month after the last day of the month. But that’s okay. I’m glad for the additional readers.

Danny Tompkins Short Stories, expatriate life, letters, self-publishing, Short Stories, Writing

August Progress, September Goals

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Vol. 2 may be published this month—if I can make my goal.

Well, August was another strange month, as I continued to recover from the two freak household accidents I had in July. While my output was certainly affected, I wasn’t shut down from some progress. Here’s how I did relative to my goals.

  • Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. Did this. I had lots to write about.
  • I’m not making a goal of attending any writers meetings, partly from not knowing how my surgery and illnesses will lay me up, and partly because one meeting may be cancelled due to lack of a venue. I went to one meeting.
  • Complete two editorial passes through A Walk Through Holy Week, Vol 2. I managed to do this. Actually, I made three editorial passes through and have declared it “Done”. Publishing tasks to follow.
  • Figure out any final changes to the latest Danny Tompkins story, then finish and publish it. Did this, and published the short story on Aug 5. Made changes to it over the next few days.
  • Complete the commentary between letters. If I can get that done, begin selection of photos and insert them in the book. Did this. Completed commentary, Introduction, proofreading the letters and commentary, and started selecting photos.
  • And, one more for good measure: Make a start at outlining Vol 3 of A Walk Through Holy Week. Nope, did not work on this at all.
Hopefully, I’ll come very close to finishing my next book of expatriate year letters this month.

September will be an odd month. My heart surgery will be on Sept 30, and I have lots of pre-op stuff before that. So I don’t plan on any writing this month. Publishing tasks will take precedence.

  • Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays.
  • Attend three writing group meetings. I present at the one on Sept 10.
  • Complete publishing tasks for A Walk Through Holy Week, Vol. 2 and publish it to Amazon. I may have to do so with a temporary cover.
  • Complete adding photos to the Saudi years letters book. A really stretching-it goal would be to do enough formatting to order a review copy.
  • Spend at least a little time organizing Vol. 3 of A Walk Through Holy Week.

That’s it, and it may be more than I can accomplish. But it’s better to have a goal that requires you to work hard and efficiently.

Bible study, self-publishing, Short Stories, Writing

Working Two Projects

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While I’m laid up with accidents, I’m doing my best to get some writing work done. But when I say, “laid up,” I don’t mean lying flat on a bed doing nothing. I’m able to get around with a walker, to drive, attend church, pick up meds at the pharmacy. A couple of weeks ago I did a little yard work, and learned I wasn’t really ready for that. It probably set back my healing for a week.

But there are two things I enjoy doing that are easily done without putting weight on my feet: reading and writing.

I’ve done a fair amount of reading. For my morning devotional time, I read two prayers in Prayer That Avail Much. I’m a third of the way through this book, and mostly enjoying it. For enjoyment, I’m reading two books that are writing related. One is The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals by Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the famous British poet. I’m not sure I’m really enjoying this one. I’ll write more about this in a future book review. The third book I’m reading is Vol. 3 of The Letters of Virginia Woolf.  I’m enjoying this one a little more, and will surely write a review of it.

As to writing, I’m working on two projects. One is A Walk Through Holy Week, Vol. 2. I finished this one about two weeks ago. I let it sit a while, then came back and did one editorial review of it. My plans are to let it sit for a week, then do one more editorial pass. I’m hoping at that time to call it “Done” and start publishing tasks. However, it’s possible I’ll still have areas in the book that will need more attention.

The other writing project is the book of letters from our years in Saudi Arabia. This book consists of handwritten letters transcribed into print. To those I added an Introduction and a little commentary along the way. That makes the words part of the book done and ready for proofreading. On Saturday and Sunday just passed, I proofread 57 of the book’s 186 pages. I’ll finish it this week. Then I have to find photos to illustrate it. After that will come publishing tasks and having a few copies made for family members. I hope to have that done when the family gathers for Thanksgiving.

So this is keeping me busy. I have other books lined up when these are done. And I have other writing projects waiting when these two are finished.

I might learn to like this life as a semi-invalid.

Documenting America, self-publishing

Book Sales

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Selling more of this series than any other.

I believe most people think authors make a lot of money. Alas, it’s exactly the opposite. Conventional wisdom within the author community is a self-published writer is above average if they sell 50 copies of a book.

When you get to my position, with over 40 items for sale (novels, non-fiction, short stories, essays), you hope the sales start to add up. But again alas, that hasn’t happened so far.

The last in this series if doing OK in sales—better, actually, than the others did in this stage of their publishing life.

Amazon is an enigma. Several times in my 13 years of bookselling on their platform, I’ve seen sales start to increase. I get to the point where I think I may see a breakthrough, only to see them plummet after a few months of increasing sales. That’s happened three of four times over the years.

Now, I don’t want you to think that the ramping up period meant huge sales for a few months. I might have had sales go from 5 to 10 or even 15 per month, but then suddenly it dropped back to under 5. It’s frustrating. Since I started running ads on Amazon I’ve seen some increase, but not great.

The pattern seemed to repeat in 2023. After some decent sales—well, decent for me—the bottom dropped out  in September and stayed down the next few months. Last December saw a slight uptick and I was hopeful, while at the same time waiting for Amazon to change their algorithms again, Let me give you sales per month for the last year.

Or, to see it another way, here’s a graph of my lifetime book sales. The current month, May 2024, is obviously not complete yet, but is off to a good start.

Lifetime book sales. The blue line, which I keep forgetting to label, is sales per title, now at a whopping 37.3 sales per item.

So it’s not a lot of sales, but the number is growing. The recent trend upward is encouraging. And unexplained. Did Amazon change their algorithm in a way that’s favorable to me? Did they suddenly start showing my ads to people more likely to buy? Or have I reached some point of combination of past sales, ranking, and total items for sale that sales have become self-sustaining? I wish I knew.

My Documenting America series continues to sell best. It makes me anxious to get on to the next one. But I think I’ll stay with the schedule I’ve made: finish the Bible study series, write the next The Forest Throne book, then see what’s next.

 

American Colonial History, Documenting America, self-publishing

Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution

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Book 4 in the “Documenting America series—or Book 5 if you include the homeschool edition of the first one.

Saturday morning I awoke around 3:45 a.m. with a need which, unfortunately, happens about every night. When I went back to bed, I could not fall asleep. I laid there until about 4:30 a.m., then decided to just get up and start my day. I went down to The Dungeon to work on the computer.

I decided the best thing to do was the publishing tasks of Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution. The e-book I had published March 1st, but there are more steps to the print book than the e-book, so I didn’t jump right into print book tasks.

But a very quiet Saturday morning, long before daylight, seemed a good time to concentrate on that. I first took 20 minutes or so to wrap up my stock trading accounting for the week, then plunged into my Word print book file. It all went pretty easy. It helped that I had just done this for another book and thus it was fresh on my mind. I made one or two minor errors in entering headers but they were easily fixed. By 8:45 I had the book interior finished.

After breakfast, I went back to tackle the cover. Any regular reader of this blog knows I had making covers, though I haven’t posted about that for a while. This cover was easy, however. Calculate the book size based on the number of pages. Upload the e-book cover, resize it to the print book size. Add a text box to the back cover with the already-written text. Add a text box for the spine, rotate it 90°, center it two ways on the background. Export as a PDF file. Upload to Amazon.

It really as that simple. I had a little trouble aligning layers relative to the background, and accidentally moved the background a little. I thought no big deal. I clicked “publish” on the print book, and went on to another task, writing a letter to my granddaughter. Amazon needs a little time to review the files before they are published.

Yesterday, during Sunday school, an e-mail from Amazon came in. The book was not acceptable. The only problem was with the cover, something about the back of the book not being acceptable. I knew right what is was: that accidentally moved background. In the afternoon, after a good Sunday school class, worship service, Subway lunch, and pleasurable reading time in the sunroom, I went back to The Dungeon to make adjustments.

Except I found the adjustments too difficult and decided to start over. It was much easier the second time. All layers were properly created again and aligned. It took less than 30 minutes to create, check, export the PDF, and upload to Amazon.

Using the online book viewer, I checked the cover. Something appeared that I hadn’t noticed. Some of the back cover text overlapped onto the spine. That took two minutes to fix, and soon I had to book re-uploaded. This time all items on the cover were in the right place and within the guidelines. I clicked “approve” then “publish”. And now I wait.

Here’s the link. Hopefully both the print book and e-book will be available by the time you read this. Hopefully too, this is something some of you will want to read.

self-publishing

Gotta Write Something

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Dateline 25 February 2024

Here’s what I track on my spreadsheet. Click to enlarge it if you’re interested.

Blog day tomorrow, and here I am on Sunday afternoon without anything planned. I did a thoughts-along-the-way post for last Friday. This coming Friday will be end-of-month progress and goals for next month. But what about today?

Something I haven’t spoken of recently is book sales. That might be a good topic. I think many people believe authors have lots of book sales. Not true. Or at least not true for most self-published authors.

Most of my sales come from Amazon. Fortunately, Amazon has a good book sales tracking system. Alas, that means it’s easy to see just how many sales I don’t have. I transfer those sales to a spreadsheet, along with any sales from Smashwords (now merged with Draft2Digital), Barnes & Noble, or others. I just did a check of those sales last year and added them to the spreadsheet.

So, what are my sales. Here they are. Promise not to laugh.

  • 2023 – 151
  • 2024 – 23 through Feb 25
  • Lifetime – 1483

Several times over the years I saw sales ramped up, only to crash after a few months. It seems that Amazon constantly changing their algorithms. Sales start to increase a little each month, then they go down to fairly low. They were growing last summer, then plummeted to single digits in each of Sept, Oct, Nov.

Since last December, they’ve been in double digits, with February being best of those a few days before the end of the month.

I suppose I should take the advice of other writers and just ignore sales, but I’m a stat man. I have to keep on top of sales. It may be an obsession, justifying counselling.

My highest selling series is, by far, my Documenting America books. This keeps me working on them. Hopefully I’m just a couple of weeks away from having the next one finished. I should be rushing it, I guess. I’ve been running ads on Amazon, and am staying ahead on royalties vs. ad cost. Possibly I should be running a few more.

In February I’ve sold 12 books: 8 e-books, 3 paperbacks, and 1 Kindle Unlimited borrow. They are six separate titles. That’s out of 41 published titles. I know, kind of pathetic.

So there you have it. Not a great report, but better than nothing.

 

American Colonial History, Bible study, family, Health, home improvements, non-fiction, self-publishing, Writing

2023 Recap

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It may not be selling, but at least my grandkids are reading it and seem to like it.

2023 was a strange year for writing. In some ways my output doesn’t seem very significant. But, then, the year brought many other things that pried me away from writing. We made six trips for family matters, Lynda had her heart irregularities leading to a pacemaker implant, home improvements led to the discovery of water damage that is taking much time to arrange for contractors to begin repairs.

Yet, I think I made some progress. Let’s see how it stacks up against the goals I published on January 6, 2023.

  • Edit and publish The Key To Time Travel. Yes, I got this done. Publication was in June.
  • Determine the structure of the overall A Walk Through Holy Week Bible study series, and whether it will be six parts or seven. It’s being taught in six parts over six Lent/Easter seasons, but I’m thinking it’s better as seven parts in books. I completed this, sometime in late spring. I settled on eight volumes rather than six or seven. All volumes are planned out and all chapters named.
  • Finish/edit Part 4 (what may become Part 5) of AWTHW. Finished this, and it’s now on hold, waiting for earlier volumes to be finished and published.
  • Finish/edit Part 3 (what may become Part 4) of AWTHW. Finished this (didn’t actually have much left to do on it), and it’s now on hold, waiting for earlier volumes to be finished and published.
  • Write Part 5 (what may become Part 6) of AWTHW, simultaneously with teaching it. I’m pleased to say I finished this. It actually became Part 7 in the restructured series. It was done a couple of weeks before the last class.
  • Start Part 1 of AWTHW, after determining the overall structure, of course. Not only did I start it, but I finished it and made one editing pass through it. Two more passes and it will be ready to publish.
  • Depending on how work on this goes, publish some or all of the completed parts of the study. I decided to hold off publishing volumes out of sequence, so all the complete volumes are waiting for Volumes 1, 2, and 3 to be published.
  • So far this has not found an audience on Kindle Vella. All 32 episodes have been published.

    Start writing the next book in the Documenting America series. It will cover the years 1761 to 1775 and is tentatively titled Run-up To Revolution. Yes, I finished this. I decided to publish it to Kindle Vella, chapter by chapter. In hindsight that was not a good decision, as it has not attracted a readership.

  • One other item, which is non-commercial but which will be a book, is to start transcribing the letters from our years in Saudi Arabia (1981-1983). I don’t think this is something that I can finish in one year, given that it will be fill-in work when I have nothing else to do, but I’d like to at least start it. I’ll wait to start it, however, until I get a few more disaccumulation items done. No, I didn’t do this. The work of disaccumulation proved to be more time-consuming than expected. I made major progress on it, but I’m still a long way from done.

So all in all, I published only two items: one book, one book in serial format. Given the distractions, maybe that’s not too bad. And I did get a lot of writing done, even though it’s not yet published.

Time now to set some goals for 2024. That will be in my next post.

Bible study, Documenting America, Genealogy, goals, self-publishing

December Progress, January Goals

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Time to post about my progress in December and set some goals for January. I know, I know, December isn’t over yet. Maybe I should wait until January 1st to post this. But I’m doing it now, and will either edit it or provide updates in a comment.

  • Blog twice a week, on Monday and Friday. I did this, though at least once I was a day late, and another time I didn’t write it until late in the day.
  • Attend three writers meetings. I’m not sure the third one will be held, as it will be getting close to Christmas. We cancelled the third one, a combination of sickness, travel, and Christmas. I attended the other two.
  • Finish the first draft and much of the editing of A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. …If I can maintain my writing schedule, I should finish the writing by December 10. That gives me two weeks to edit, enough time to go through the whole thing once. I finished the writing Dec 13 and the edits to the Introduction on Dec 14. Editing commenced Dec 15 and…I completed it around Dec 21.
  • Type up some of the ideas for book 3 in The Forest Throne series. I don’t intend to begin actually writing this for perhaps a year, but I want to lock in the ideas generated so far. I did this, after having contacted my granddaughter for some clarifications of ideas we considered during Thanksgiving week.
  • Work some on Nature: The Artwork of God. This may be the next book I write (still trying to decide), so I need to expand the notes I’ve already taken. As of today, I did nothing on this in December.
  • Finish the new Danny Tompkins short story and decide what to do with it. I finished it and sent it to two beta readers. Still waiting to hear back from them.
  • Read for research for the next book in the Documenting America series. Actually, until I do my research, I don’t know what the next one will be.  I did a little reading on this beginning Dec 26. I’m not very far along, however.
  • Oh, one more: Finish and submit my article on a genealogical brick wall to the NWA Genealogical Society. The contest deadline is Dec 31. The article has been done for almost two months. Time to dust it off and do a final edit. I did this and submitted it on Dec 8, though I had to submit an extra couple of reference documents later. Now, I wait.

What about goals for January? I’m going to hold off on them until I post goals for the year 2024, which I’ll do on January 1. I’ll probably post specific goals for January on January 5.

Bible study, self-publishing, Writing

Editing Shows The Problems

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Anxious to move forward with this, but initial editing suggests it’s not as far along as I thought it was.

On Thursday, I began the editing process on A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1: To Jerusalem. On this editing pass, I’m doing this using Word’s Read Aloud feature. Thursday was the Introduction, Friday Chapter 1, and Saturday Chapter 2.

The more I use this feature, the more impressed I am with it. The computer-generated voice is pleasant, with few pronunciation errors. Wrong words really stand out. You can stop the reading, make the needed edit, and hop right back into the reading, all with just a few clicks. It probably takes a little more time than simply reading aloud myself, but I think it does better at catching the silly little errors we tend to read through without recognition. For example, in one sentence I meant to use “head” but instead typed “dead”. I’m not sure I would have caught that reading aloud, but did using my friendly editing lady.

Alas, what I found on Chapter 1, while listening to my computer read it, was that it seems to have a lot of repetition. I noticed the same thing in Chapter 2. In fact, Chapter 2 may be worse than Chapter 1 in the repetition department.

I say “alas” because, when I wrote these chapters back in October, they seemed really good to me. Now, not so much. Once I go through the whole book using the computer reader, I will have to go through again with slow, careful reading.

I suppose that’s to be expected. Something that goes down on paper (or pixels) fast is probably not all that good. I’m not sure what this does to my timeline for the book, but a delay to make it better is better than a rush to publish.

The first editing pass ought to be ready in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. At that time I ought to have a better idea of what my further editing and publishing schedule will be.

 

Documenting America, self-publishing

Entering The World Of Kindle Vella

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I don’t know how this will work, but I did it. The first episode went live this morning. The next will appear on Thursday. Then the episodes will come two a week, Monday and Thursday, until all are published.

Today is the day that I have become a Kindle Vella author.

But it was one day last week that I officially took the plunge. I won’t give the full story right now. Here’s the short version.

I’ve been working on Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution, since June. I did the research for this back in 2021, but other writing got in the way. But I made good progress on it in June, July, and August. I felt I was working toward a schedule that might have the book published in October if everything went right, or in November if not.

Completing the fourth book in the series would feel good. I published the last one in 2019. I can’t believe it’s been four years since then. I had enjoyed writing the series and always planned for more volumes, but other books got in the way. Finally, I made the decision that this one would be next. The fact that I have more sales in this series than any other was a strong inducement to get back to this.

But my plans were interrupted by Kindle Vella. For those who don’t know, Vella is a place where authors publish their stories/books as a series. Chapters are called “Episodes,” books are called “Season.” They can be published on any subject, at any frequency the author wants.

Volume 3 of Documenting America, on the events that bought us the Constitution, was published in 2019. I waited too long for the next volume.

Vella has a combination of fiction and nonfiction titles, but fiction dominates. I’ve browsed the nonfiction lists and haven’t been impressed with what’s there.

I’ve been watching Vella a couple of months. No one really knows if it is going to be successful. I finally decided there was no downside. I publish episodes while I’m still finishing up the final chapters. Vella allows you to publish the season as a book thirty days after the final episode appears. So I put it on Vella first. That causes me to be disciplined, to keep writing, editing, uploading, formatting, and promoting. When done, I’ll pull the episode back into a book and publish it that way.

Maybe I’ll make a little money with this volume on Vella, maybe not. But the book will be published, perhaps three or four months later than intended, but it will be published. Maybe it will join the ranks of its older brothers in the series and increase my sales later on.

Here’s the link to the series on Vella. Or maybe that’s just to the first episode. The first three episodes are free for anyone to read. Some number of free tokens are available to new readers. After that, you buy tokens and use them to read episodes. I’m not quite sure of the cost to read a book like this. But check it out.