Category Archives: self-publishing

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.

Documenting America, self-publishing, The Forest Throne, Writing

Dreams of a Writer

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I had thought my children’s time travel books might spur sales, but, alas, not so.

After having taken the month of June off from writing—except you can’t fully take that long of a time off from writing—what you do is back off of new writing and pretty much maintain things like the blog and promotion—I’m now back at it, working on a new book in my Documenting America series.

It felt a little weird at first, to come down to The Dungeon in the morning and do things other than writing. But my routines, interrupted for a mere 30 days, have quickly re-established themselves. I have a goal as to where I want to be at the end of July, and I think that I’m either on pace of maybe even a little ahead of where I want to be.

I haven’t yet promoted the sequel. I know I should, but it just seems meaningless to do so.

That gets the long-suppressed dreams of a writer going in my mind. As I work on a new project, other projects come to mind. Even as I plod along toward daily goals, and book sales trickle in at Amazon (10 in June, so far 3 in July, plus one personal sale), other new projects come to mind. Specifically, things I could write and publish serially on Kindle Vella. Four non-fiction series are rolling around, taking up brain space that should be going to the new book. Well, one of those projects is related to the Documenting America book.

The other three potential Vella projects are pie-in-the-sky stuff, things that are more dreams than real projects. Things that would spur sales and generate a little income, get my name a little more wide-spread. Things that would take up time.

And that’s the problem. Do I want to hop over to Vella series from books? That makes no sense. I have no idea how well Vella series sell. Most that are there seem to be fiction, and my ideas are non-fiction. Last month I browsed the non-fiction titles there, and could draw no conclusions. Would my non-fiction series gain an audience there, or not?

In my dreams, they would, and not just a small audience, but a fantastic, large, and ever-expanding audience, waiting for the next in each series, almost begging for more. I won’t share the dreams of how many dollars those series would bring in, because if I did, someone would say it’s time for an intervention, to bring me back to earth.

Such are the dreams of the writer. Working on one project while dreaming of four others while watching anemic sales show up in the Amazon sales report while wondering how to better self-promote. I suspect I’m not alone in that.

Time to move on to the next daily task on the new book. Push the dreams into the background for a couple of hours, and see what I can get done.

Bible study, Christianity, Documenting America, Screwtape's Good Advice, self-publishing, Writing

Too Many Things To Write

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So, the day after posting my writing goals for July, I started to have second thoughts.

In that post, I said my main project would be the next Documenting America series, Run-Up To Revolution. I started working on it yesterday, creating the Table of Contents and cataloging the source items already in the Word document. I turns out I only have five more documents to either find and copy or type. That’s a good start.

But is it the right thing to write? The last couple of days I did some more looking into Kindle Vella. For those who don’t know, that’s an Amazon platform for stories/books brought out in serial form. I thought maybe I could publish my nascent memoir, Tales Of A Vagabond, there. I have five “episodes” as K-V calls them) written, and a little inspiration caused me to start planning the broader book.

But wait, because that new Bible study I mentioned in a previous post continues to pull at me. I did a little research reading for it yesterday in the second source document, and a proposed outline has started to come together in my mind. Nothing is on paper yet.

But it also occurred to me that maybe I should return to working on the eight-part Bible study A Walk Though Holy Week. I’ve written about that before. Parts 4, 5, 6, and 7 are written, and Parts 4, 5, and 6 have had one editorial pass. These four could be ready to publish in a couple of months, Parts 1, 2, and 3 are fully planned, and Part 8 partially planned. It occurred to me that maybe I should shift to writing Part 1, for I don’t know if it makes sense to begin publishing the series at Part 4. What to do, what to do?

Then, our adult Sunday School class has begun re-studying C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. We went through it around 2008, and I wrote four chapters covering four letters. I found them useful in teaching fifteen years later, and I feel the itch to work again on it again. But, that would be quite time consuming and energy sapping. What to do?

And that’s not all. A couple of months ago, finding myself at the time of our critique group and me with nothing to share, I dashed off the first four pages of the first book in my long-planned-but-never-started Alfred Cottage Mysteries. The crit group seemed to like it, as they had liked the series summary I had shared earlier. I’ve wanted to write that series for a long time but have hesitated since it would be yet another genre—something I don’t really need.

And one other thing occurred to me. Perhaps it’s time to get going transcribing the letters from our years in Saudi Arabia, as I did with the letters from our years in Kuwait. I want to get to that while I still have strength of mind and body. That’s not a commercial project; it would be only for family. But it’s important to me to see it done. I think, among all these things I’ve mentioned, it is the least likely to pop up to the surface at this time.

With all that, I actually have one or two other ideas floating around in my head, things that have come to me recently that haven’t gelled sufficiently to think of a title, an outline, or a purpose and scope. But they are there, consuming brain cells, and interrupting my reading on more immediately pressing projects.

Ah, the life of the writer with Genre Focus Disorder, too much immediate time, and too few years left in an already fruitful life to write everything that sits a while in my mind, never mind those ideas that flit through.

self-publishing, The Forest Throne

New Book Published: The Key To Time Travel

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The e-book cover.

So here I was on a Monday morning, minding my own business, proofreading one of the volumes of a Bible study I’ve written, watching the stock market out of the corner of my eye, when I realize I forgot to write my blog post for today.

So I guess what I’ll do is a simple notice about my newest book, The Key To Time Travel. This is Book 2 in The Forest Throne series. It’s the story of Eddie Wagner, second child of four in the family. His older brother had an adventure in time travel in Book 1. Now Eddie wants to have a bigger adventure.

He finds the forest throne and knows how to use it. Alas, the adventure doesn’t turn out quite the way he had in mind.

Yesterday, I received the covers from the cover designer. The e-book cover worked just fine, so I went ahead and published it. The print book cover, per Amazon, needs one minor tweak. Otherwise, the print book is ready to go. I tried making that tweak myself and couldn’t do it. I just don’t have the graphics skills needed. I’m hoping the print book can be available in a couple or a few days.

home improvements, letters, self-publishing, Writing

Thinking About Letters

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I made this presentation on Tuesday, but still haven’t put the stuff for it away.

When I came to The Dungeon this morning, mug of coffee in one hand and laptop computer in the other, I was greeted by a mess. Lots of writing related stuff strewn on my near worktable. A few stray income tax forms on the printer table (making me wonder if I forgot to put one in the packet I mailed to the IRS).

And also on my worktable, some things about letters. Three are notebooks that contain just a few letters, the ones I’ve been digitizing then discarding the originals. I need to consolidate them into one notebook and complete the process. Three notebooks to go to a thrift store, a little more free shelf space.

Somewhere, either on the worktable or possibly upstairs still, are the things needed for the presentation I did on Tuesday to the Northwest Arkansas Letter Writers Society. The topic was “Letter Collections: A Window on History in the Making”. The presentation went well, and we had a good number of people there. Now I need to get a number of books back on shelves and my notes somehow stored so that I can find them again should I ever need them.

Gary is gone, but the letters between us live on. A few edits to this are possible this month. Hang on, folks. It will soon be done and available.

Then, there was the book Letters Between Friends. I thought I had written about this before, but a look back on my posts indicates I haven’t. I guess that was because I wasn’t quite ready to announce this project to the world. And, actually, I’m still not. I finally have permissions from all copyright holders to publish the book, but I had a few redactions to do then reformat as needed. I also felt I should add an e-book, which takes some more formatting.

But I found my copy of it, before redactions, on my worktable. I need to find two hours of time for completing this project, then let people know it’s available. It will be of interest only to family members and classmates of the people involved. Perhaps 20 copies will be sold. I would consider that a success.

But when will I get to it? The two Bible studies I’m working on have consumed all my available writing time. And they will do so today. Somehow I have to carve out those two hours to complete that project.

And another two hours to complete what’s needed to get rid of those three notebooks. That may not take that much time. I should get to it. Right after supervising two workmen at the house today, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Right after the weekly grocery run. Right after finishing a letter to my oldest grandson. Right after…

…oh, where is my to-do list?

Oh, yes, I’m still reading that scholarly magazine article about letter collections. I should finish that today and dump the pixels back into the ether.