Category Archives: self-publishing

expatriate life, family, home improvements, letters, self-publishing

Some Projects Completed

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Transcribed in 2020-2022 and published in 2022, this was my first collection of letters to publish. Now it’s my fourth to be revised and finally completed.

Back on April 3 this year, I posted about what things I wanted to accomplish over the next months, or more likely a year.  A few times since then I’ve reported about progress toward the items I mentioned in that post. Such as getting my income taxes done and in on time.

The list was ambitious. It included not only things I was working on at the time, but also writing projects for once I completed other things. As I look back at that post and list, it’s hard to see myself ever getting all those things done. But it’s time to look back and see how I’ve done in the last few months.

The thing that prompted this was completing, yesterday afternoon, a significant revision to the book of letters from our years living in Kuwait. This included: adding recently found letters; adding in Lynda’s diary from the time she was working in Kuwait as a Red Cross nurse after the Gulf War; and, at the suggestion of our children, adding a bunch more photos to it. All of that took a lot of time, especially with interruptions. But Wednesday I added the last of the photos and began the re-pagination check, yesterday I completed the check. I found I had four blank pages where they weren’t supposed to be, so went scrambling and added more.

I adjusted the cover and uploaded everything. In checking the book online, I discovered some formatting was still off. I spent the better part of two to three hours fine-tuning the formatting and pagination. Finally it was done around lunch time. Amazon’s bot review declared all good, so I ordered my author copy. ‘Twill be here in about ten days.

So what’s next? That April 3 post included grandiose plans of new books to be written. Maybe I will shift to those. But first, I need to find locations on closet and garage shelfs for the things I got out to work on the three books of letters. And I need desperately to catch up on the family budget to see where we stand financially. I’m sure we’re in good shape, but I need to know. And I need to get back to the never-ending job of unpacking and organizing following our move.

I declare the next few days, or maybe a week, as maintenance time. Stowing, budgeting, unpacking, minor household improvements. These shall fill my time until I get to a stopping point and feel released to do some writing. This includes some organization of computer files, which I discovered in finalizing the Kuwait letters book are woefully discombobulated. Hopefully I’ll also be able to up my reading.

self-publishing

A Chasing After The Wind

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This book, timely right now, sells three or four copies a month.

That phrase, “a chasing after the wind”, appears at least a couple of times in the book of Ecclesiastes. It’s meant to imply something is folly. The folly of seeking after pleasure. The folly of seeking wealth. The folly of strong drink, of fly-by-night friends. The folly of…could be almost anything that becomes all consuming.

I suppose the thing that I pursued to the point of folly is book sales. Having written books, given up on trying to get them published and deciding to self-publish them, I then needed to figure out how to sell them. Conventional wisdom for a self-publisher goes:

  • Create social media accounts and blast out posts about your books. I did this only on Facebook, but I’m not sure the limited number I did ever qualified as blasting.
  • Start an author’s newsletter; collect e-mail addresses (using giveaways if you have to); publish a regular newsletter so readers will know about your books. I never did this. Actually, I did two giveaways, one big and one small. Total sales I could trace to them: two.
  • Place ads on mediums that readers will see, such as Amazon, Facebook, the Fussy Librarian. More on that later.
  • Attend author events and sell paperback copies of your books, remembering to collect e-mail addresses as you do. I did this as those events came at convenient places and times. But I’m sure I passed up more than a few.
  • Any other thing successful other self-publishers seem to be doing. Of course, to learn these things you need to subscribe to other authors’ newsletters, actually read them, and perhaps interact with them to pick their brains. I did a little of this, but can’t say that I really got into the newsletter loop.

About a month ago, I finally realized that trying to sell books is essentially chasing after the wind. It took up a lot of my energy. It caused me to divert time and brainpower from things I would enjoy doing more.

I’ve been running ads on Amazon—but nowhere else—for about four years. I’ve run a profit from these ads—not a big profit. I think I’m $100 or maybe $200 ahead. Every month or two the ads are set to expire, and I roll them over. A few times I’ve forgotten to do this and sales went to zero. I thought about these ads and wondered why I was using them to chase after the wind. I decided when the ads ended at the end of June, as all 17 ads did, I would not renew them. And did not.

So as of right now, I am no longer a book seller. My books are still for sale on Amazon and a few of them at other places. May I’ll sell the occasional one here and there. If any author events come up locally, I might take part until my inventory of paperback copies is reduced to a handful of books.

But as of now, I’m done chasing after the wind. I can always change my mind later, I suppose.

Now, time to go read that new C.S. Lewis biography I picked at the library this afternoon.

books, family, letters, memories, self-publishing

The World War 2 Letters of Wayne Cheney

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The Pacific was Wayne’s war theatre.

Last week, actually around June 13, I finished my latest book project. It is The World War 2 Letters of Wayne B. Cheney. He was Lynda’s dad—my father-in-law, of sorts. He and Lynda’s mom divorced long before I came into the family.

Like many soldiers, Wayne wrote letters home, and received many in return, both from family members, townsfolks, and other armed forces personnel. He wasn’t able to keep most of the incoming letters, given how his base kept changing in the South Pacific. But his parents kept most of the ones he wrote home. When Wayne died in 1996, we brought those letters to our house. There they sat in a green plastic bin, moved from Bentonville to Bella Vista in 2002.

It was about this time last year that I decided the time had come to do something with them. I decided to transcribe them, put them into book form for easier reading by family members, then donate the letters themselves to some worthy institution.

From a Kansas town to an island=hopping war. See the world from the nose of a B-24.

Wayne enlisted in the fall of 1942 at age 18. He was hoping to get on the ground crew in the Army Air Forces, but instead found himself in school to become an air gunner. He was assigned at nose gunner in B-24 Liberators and saw action in the South Pacific. He was either based on or participated in bombing missions over some of the famous islands in the war history, such as Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Truk, Tarawa. His time there was over when the war had moved on to Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

In addition to the letters, Wayne wrote a war diary. He transcribed parts of this over the years, but only the parts dealing with actual combat. He mixed that with later explanations of what his modern impressions were about what was going on in 1942-1945. I did a full transcription of the diary, interspersing the entries with the letters.

Actually, the letters are not exciting stuff. Subject to forward base censorship (and occasionally running afoul of the censors), he couldn’t write a lot about what he was doing in the war effort. So there was lots about doing laundry, rigging something in his barracks, who he received letters from, talk about what must be happening on Kansas farms.

This book is not a commercial project, and I doubt anyone except immediate family members will be interested. Maybe someday a great-grandkid will ask about what their ancestor did in that war they covered in history class and someone will pull a copy of the book off the shelf. But should anyone else be interested in this small piece of WW2 history, it’s available on Amazon.

Fair warning: I have not yet received my proof copy, so I haven’t been able to go through an actual book to make sure the photos and print came out okay. That’s because I had the proof copy sent to the wrong address. Still waiting for it to be forwarded.

 

expatriate life, History, letters, memories, self-publishing, Writing

A Project Never Seems Done

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In the full cover, the photo and text is not out of center. This Amazon photo of the cover is, though.

About a month ago, I wrote about the projects I had on my to-do list and what I might tackle next, what would come after that. I have no shortage of projects in some stage of thinking through.

So after thinking through my projects list, and after having finished my income taxes, I spent a little time at paperwork reduction, then jumped into my list. The first item that seemed best to me was revisions to my book The Saudi Years in Letters. This promised to be the shortest of my projects, and it truly did go quickly.

First, I loaded the recently found letters into the book and formatted them. That added around 16 pages to the document. Next, I proofread the book using Word’s text-to-speech read-back feature. I was able to go through the book in three or four days. I probably could have done it all in a day and a half except for the concentration fatigue. Proofreading caused me to flag four letters to check against the originals. That took only an hour to do.

That brought me up to formatting the overall book. I had to do that page by page, making sure to have text and photos in right relation to each other, eliminating excessive white space and adding white space where needed. This took a day of work and eliminated about five pages from the file. I uploaded the new text file to Amazon without re-doing the cover. Alas, the extra pages from the extra letters were a few too many for the existing cover to work, so I had to re-do the cover. Fortunately , I was able to re-size the cover and upload the book to Amazon in about an hour.

So the project is finished, right? Not quite. As I went through the on-line layout checking of the book, I saw that it would be possible to add six to eight photos without having to reformat anything. Should I do it? That would mean finding the right boxes in storage closets (not impossible), going through the photos, making selections, scanning and formatting. A day or two of work, most likely.

I decided not to do that right now. If I let the book go out to my kids and grandkids, the intended audience, with a little extra white space, I’d say no big deal. I’ll take a few weeks to work on something else, then maybe come back to this.

On to another project.

America, Bible study, books, Documenting America, family, letters, self-publishing

What’s Next?

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This will certainly be task one, making needed additions and corrections.

As I reported in my last post, my 8-volume Bible study is done. I suppose nothing is ever done for the self-published writer, because there’s always things to do (improve covers, check for formatting errors, fix the dreaded typos once found). But I can lay all that aside for a while and move on to more pressing items.

I hope I get back to this series fairly soon.

But what’s next? I’ve been thinking that through for some time and have been developing a mental to-do list. Monday evening I started writing the items down. Let me list them here. It’s a combination of revising existing works, completing long-planned works, and trying to figure out if anything that’s been keeping my brain from resting is worth pursuing. I’ll give the list as bullet points.

  • Do my income taxes. The deadline approacheth. I started on this yesterday. Looks like I owe the IRS.
  • Make additions and corrections to the book of letters from our years in Saudi Arabia. I added the recently found letters on Tuesday and re-formatted the chapter. I need to check the formatting of the entire book, then re-publish.
  • Make additions and corrections to the book of letters from our years in Kuwait. That will include adding a lot more photos.
  • Put together the book of my father-in-law’s service in WW2. This includes syncing up his war letters with his war journal, and finding enough photos to add a little spice. I started on this on Wednesday, loading the first 20-odd letters into a file. On Thursday I proofread them and made corrections. I can see that I’m going to have to do this differently.
  • Write/publish book three in The Forest Throne series, tentatively titled You Can’t Change The Past.
  • Write/publish book four in The Forest Throne series, tentatively titled Lost In Time.
  • Decide if I want to do any more books in the Documenting America series. Ideas for more books have been refusing to leave me alone, but they take a lot of research and writing.
  • Decide if I want to write a book with the tentative title Nature: The Artwork of God. That’s another thing that’s taking up brain space.
  • Get a start on a couple of essays I’d like to write and publish.

That’s enough for both short-range and medium-range planning. I’ll have to see how it goes.

 

 

Bible study, self-publishing, Writing

Book Published: “He’s Alive”

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The series is finished. Time to make a few tweaks and move on to something else.

Well, it’s done. My Bible study series A Walk Through Holy Week. On Saturday I typed a few edits from my last read-through, formatted the book for Kindle and print, created the e-book cover, and uploaded the e-book to Amazon. By the end of the day, it was approved and live for sale. This volume actually goes beyond Holy Week and covers the Easter season up to the Ascension.

I suppose I should say it’s “almost done”. I still have to create the print book cover and upload it. That’s hopefully a one-hour task today. Then there will be creating and uploading improved covers for the entire series, because the covers right now could be much better. But new covers can wait for a long time if need be.

I declare the eight-volume series done. The final word count for all eight books is somewhere between 320,000 and 330,000. Of course, total sales thus far for Volumes 1-7 is zero, so I don’t have great hopes for calling the series a success.

Now, it’s time to figure out what to do next. A plan is beginning to gel and will be the subject of a future post or two.

Bible study, expatriate life, family, Genealogy, self-publishing, The Forest Throne

Writing Hopes for 2026

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Editing completed 1/5; hope to publish not later than 1/15.

Having posted a year in review for life in general, and a year in review for my writing activities, it’s now time to post writing plans for the new year. But should I call them plans? I’m in the midst of a move from Arkansas to Texas, a major life change and disruption. Can I even make plans, giving all that’s going on? I’m not going to get a lot done for the next month, and even a couple of months after that, I’ll be busy setting up the new house, finding doctors, learning how to do without CATV, etc.

But I have to have a plan. Perhaps I call it dreams, aiming very high, but probably having to settle for something less. First, I’ll type out my projects in progress, then move on to dreams.

  • Finish editing Vol. 7 of A Walk Through Holy Week and publish it. As of today (I’m wring this Friday evening for posting on Monday), I have two chapters to edit. Then a week of formatting and doing publishing activities. Hopefully I’ll have this published by Jan 15. Update Monday 5 Jan: I just finished the last edit. Next will be publishing tasks.
  • Do the final editing and publishing tasks for Vol. 8 of A Walk Through Holy Week. That will finish the project. All eight volumes will be published, and I can look toward promoting the series.
  • Finish transcribing my father-in-law’s, Wayne’s, World War 2 letters. I’m able to do two of them a day before fatigue sets in. As of Friday, I have thirty letters to go. That means I should finish the transcribing in mid-January. Then I’ll be putting a book together, combining the letters into one file, synchronizing his war journal  with them, and publishing it as a book. I don’t know for sure how long this will take. The war journal is typed but not yet digitized. So I’m not going to put a timeline on this. Plus, this is just a project for family and the hometown museum, not with commercial intentions. So there’s no real deadline. If I find the time, I’ll try to combine the letter files into book format before the end of the month, and be ready to work in the journal once my office is set up in Texas.
  • The clean-up and organizing prior to moving has resulted finding more letters from our years as expatriates in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. So I need to republish those books. Plus my family asked me to add more photos to the Kuwait book. So I’ll do that in odd moments during the year. My loose deadline is the end of the year for these two projects.
  • At some point in the year, I want to get back to writing on The Forest Throne series. Two volumes are published, and two more are planned. These are short, middle-grade books that will be somewhat quick to write. However, I don’t think I’ll put any deadline on this.
  • One other project that is somewhat pie-in-the-sky, is the story of my maternal ancestry. I’ve made some amazing discoveries as I’ve researched my ancestry. Many people have told me I need to write it down to preserve it. So I finally made a start at it. Tentatively titled Stories, Secrets, Legends, and Lies, I’ve written 2580 words in it. Once again, this will be a book for family, not for commercial sales. It’s also a type of book to be written when the spirit moves, rather sitting down and working on it day by day.

There are other things on my writing projects list that I could mention here, but I seriously doubt I can complete everything included in this post. I’ll have to come back in a couple of months, see where I am, and modify the list accordingly.

Bible study, Documenting America, self-publishing

Writing in 2025

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Volumes 1 through 6 are now published.

Measured by books published, 2025 was a good year.

Measured by book sales, 2025 was an okay year.

Measured by new writing, 2025 was a so-so year.

As with my last post, I’ll do this by bullet points.

  • I started 2025 having just had a seizure, and not really feeling like writing—or really doing much of anything. Another seizure in April interrupted whatever progress I was making. I would wake up each morning, not feel like writing, or stock trading, or much of anything. I had a lot of what I call “file maintenance”—that is, organizing computer files to eliminate duplicates, putting the files in the right place, changing the names to descriptive names. This is a lot of what I did in in 2025.
  • I published Vol 1. in my Bible study series, A Walk Through Holy Week, in early 2024. I had volumes 2-8 written by the end of 2024. They were only awaiting final editing and publishing. I managed to do that for Vol. 2 and published it on March 22. Vol. 3 followed on March 28. Both of these required little work except formatting and final creation of the e-book and paperback. Vol. 4 came out on May 1st, Vol. 5 on Sept. 5, and Vol. 6 on Oct 31. Volume 8 is within a week or two of being published. That will finish the series.
  • The work is published, though due to finding additional letters I’ll have to edit and republish it.

    The only other book I published was The Saudi Years In Letters, the collection of letters from our time in Saudi Arabia, 1981-1983. This was mainly for family members. Alas, I have since found another dozen letters to add to it, and will have to re-do it.

  • My total book sales for the year were only 238. That was with no author events. That was my third best year, but well below 2024’s 326 sales, my best year. My historical-political series, Documenting America, continues to sell many more copies than anything else.

I have another three to five days of editing on the seventh in my Bible study series, then maybe a week of formatting and file creating. I hope it will be published by Jan 15. After that, I’ll be hot and heavy in moving from Bella Vista, Arkansas to Lake Jackson, Texas.

I’ll do one more post in this series, on my writing goals for 2026.

Bible study, self-publishing, Writing

Published: A Walk Through Holy Week – Vol. 5

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The e-book cover. I need to tweak it a little.

I had hoped to have Volume 5 of A Walk Through Holy Week published in late July, but I wasn’t able to get my act together and do the required publishing tasks. I finally put my mind to it over the last two days, and the book is now published. Final Teaching covers chapters 14-15-16-17 of the gospel of John, where Jesus gave his disciples instruction, encouragement, and cautions after they had finished eating their Passover meal. It’s a section of the Bible that is rich in words that can help us on our discipleship walk.

So Volumes 1-5 are published. They are:

Vol 1: To Jerusalem

Vol 2: Temple Teaching

Vol 3: Coming Troubles

Vol 4: A Difficult Meal

Vol 5: Final Teaching

The print book cover

Volumes 6, 7, and 8 are written, requiring only editing followed by the usual publishing tasks. Hopefully I can do all that by the end of the year, then be able to move on to other writing.

Concerning Volume 5, as of this moment the e-book is approved and for sale. Here’s the link to the Amazon listing. Just waiting for the print book to be approved and for the two listings to sync up. Hopefully that will happen today.

self-publishing, Writing

Thinking It Through

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I used to have what I considered a cute expression that described my writing. This was before my wife got on Facebook. The expression was:

When I want to hide something from my wife, I post it on Facebook.

When I want to hide something from my family, I blog about it.

When I want to hide something from the world, I write it in a book and publish it.

Cute? Perhaps so, perhaps not.  But accurate? Most assuredly.

Too much to do, no significant results.

The fact is my writing has never caught on. I could post here the number of books and stories I’ve published and the number of sales I have. But it’s depressing. If it weren’t for running a few Amazon ads, I’d have no sales at all. But at least I’ve had enough sales over the years to more than cover the cost of the ads and put me a few hundred dollars ahead.

But this blog was for the purpose of getting my name out there and hopefully drive people to want to buy my books.

Obviously, I’m doing something wrong. Writing the wrong kind of books, or not writing well, or not publicizing/advertising them correctly. It costs me close to $500 a year to maintain this website. Most of that ($440) is for a security service I put in place after the site was hacked, I think that was in 2018. I’ve had no problems since then, other than many, many spam comments to posts. It’s about 30 spam comments to each real comment.

So, do I keep the website and blog? I don’t really know at this point. It’s not serving any useful purpose, so why keep it? The world doesn’t need to know about my daily schedule or the occasional genealogical triumph. They don’t care about where I stand with my current book, what books are planned, what I’m reading and if I liked it or not.

So I’m seriously considering stopping the blog more or less immediately, and stopping the website after my security subscription runs out in January.

Stay tuned.