It’s been a long time since I posted my book sales. 2021 was my best year for sales. I guess you would call it a record year, though, with the numbers still as low as they are, record somehow seems inappropriate.
I sold 223 books, almost all sales coming from on-line sources. That beat my previous best year which was 156 way back in 2012. Also, in 2021, I passed the 1,000 lifetime sales mark, ending up with 1034.
Why the increase? Amazon ads. I began running some ads on Amazon in July 2020, added to them in 2021, and sales finally happened. Unfortunately, to this point I’ve spent more in ads than I’ve received in royalties from all sources. It’s not a big number, and the deficit is shrinking. At the end of the year, I was down only $4.52, though at worst I was behind $73.80. If the trend continues into 2022, I’ll be money ahead in a month or two. Just on ad spend, not overall. The cost to maintain this website puts me way in the red each year.
Had 19 sales of this, pulled along by the ads for the first book in the series.
I had sales of 22 different books, out of 35 books listed for sale at year end. Highest of those was the first Documenting America book, which I advertised. Second was Doctor Luke’s Assistant, which I also advertised. The other two books in the Documenting America series also had double-digit sales, as did Acts OfFaith, which I advertised.
Several of these “sales” were actually through Kindle Unlimited, the first that I had from that Amazon sales channel. I think royalties work out to less, but I’ve had a hard time rigorously tracking them.
So, here comes 2022. My ads are still running. They don’t seem to be working quite as well as early in the year. I will probably add another book to those I advertise, though I’m not in any hurry to do that.
Here’s hoping 2022 will be another best year for book sales.
October 1, falling on a Friday—a regular blogging day for me—is the perfect day for recording what I accomplished in September, and for establishing some goals for October. Here’s the progress.
Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays. Done, though one Saturday I realized I had totally forgotten to post anything on Friday, so I got a post up a day late. And one Monday post, that I wrote the previous Friday, accidentally got posted on that Friday, #usererror. But every regular blogging day was covered. To help me be a little more regular with my posting, I actually have four blog posts started as drafts.
Wrap up my research project on our church’s charter members. Done! Wednesday I made a final tweak in the list of probable charter members. I started putting my notes into usable form, which I should finish doing in October.
Finish “Foxtrot Alpha Tango”, the short story I’ve been working on for two or three months. Done! I finished this around Sept 20 and sent it by e-mail to my critique group.
Link the books in my Church History Novels series on Amazon. This is an easy process. I’ve been holding off until the new covers were done, but it’s time to just do it. No, I didn’t do this. Shame on me. It’s an easy task. I guess I was hoping to have the covers re-done first, so I kept putting it off. Back on the to-do list for this month.
I still have a few more tweaks to do on the church centennial book. I’m going to work on it after I finish this post and may finish them today (Friday afternoon). Done! Though see what I put in my October goals.
Attend my writers’ groups. At the moment all three are scheduled. Done! One was cancelled, the other two met in person and I attended. I also attended two meetings of a weekly on-line writing group. I don’t know whether I’ll be a regular there, but it was good.
Document one Bible study idea I had and put it in the queue. Done! I recorded it in my journal. At some point I’ll have to transfer it to an ideas folder, either on paper or on the computer, but at least it’s documented and I’ve been able to let my mind sort of forget it.
Alright, September was a productive month. I event added a couple of thousand words to my next work-in-progress, something I hadn’t planned on. Now, what about October? Be bold, or be cautious, in my goals. I’m just going to type and see how it comes out.
Blog twice a week on Mondays and Fridays. I have a couple of conflicts coming up, so maybe those pre-written and to-be-scheduled posts will come in handy.
Work on my work-in-progress, The Forest Throne. I can’t remember what I’ve written about that here. I may have to include a post on it. I won’t give a specific word count goal for now. Possibly I’ll edit this in a week or so.
Link the four novels in my Church History novels series. Why do I keep putting this off?
Begin formatting the church Centennial book. I received one of three outside contributions and pasted it in. I have a promise of receiving the other two very soon. Meanwhile, I’m proofreading the book, which has caused me to realize I have three blanks to be filled in. They are just names and dates, but, still, they will require a little work. I hope to have that done today or tomorrow. Then the formatting and photograph additions will begin. Possibly I will have the formatting done by the end of October and will be ready to go to print.
Attend writers groups this month. I’m not sure how many it will be. I may have conflicts with the meeting dates of two of my regular groups. Maybe I’ll be able to get in on the new group a couple of times.
Publish “Foxtrot Alpha Tango”, once I get critiques back from the Scribblers & Scribes. I have one back already. Publishing will mean cover creation, but I’m already pulling ideas together.
Take a look at, but don’t necessarily write more on, the Bible study I was working on during the spring and early summer. I’ve been so busy with other things I don’t remember where I left off. Since I might start it soon, as in two months or so, it would be good to have it swimming around in my mind even now, occupying a few gray cells.
That’s enough. As with last month, there’s always the chance that something else could pop up.
Actually, I wrote that title while it was raining. Right now the sun is shining. No, wait, it’s behind a cloud again. The rain stopped close to an hour ago. The forecast is for more rain during the day, but right now the radar doesn’t show anything close. I’m not sure what to expect.
The forecast for this blog post is also a little uncertain. I still have those three short books to review, but don’t feel like doing any of them today. I have a few book sales I could report on, but nothing earth-shattering, so I’ll pass on that. Stock trading is going ok. We aren’t killing it, but nothing really to report. Engineering has totally disappeared, as CEI no longer calls on me for anything. I guess that’s not bad, as I don’t miss it. The two years of hourly work was a good transition into retirement, but is now over.
Health is okay, maybe even good. Can’t seem to lose any weight but am not gaining any. My heart seems strong, my blood sugar is under control, I had covid19 and I have also been vaccinated for it, so I don’t fear going around without a mask. I still wear it in situations where it is posted that masks are required or requested. I may wear it a few other times as well. It was hard for me to get in the habit of mask wearing and it will be hard (maybe not as hard) to get out of the habit.
Work on the church anniversary book has slowed, but as soon as I finish this post, and maybe reach a new threshold in the book. I think I’m still on target to finish it around the end of June. I’m reading for research in the next Documenting America volume. Otherwise, I don’t have any other writing in my head that is just demanding that I get the words on paper or pixels.
So, this is a good time to work on this website. Not on the layout or the bells and whistles of a WordPress site, but the content. A writer friend recently looked at my site and suggest some improvements. Or, rather, just said it needed improvement. Then, today, a writing blog that I read had a post about improving your website. I’m always hesitant to do any changes to the website content for fear of screwing something up.
I’ve known for some time that I have things to do with this. Maybe this is the time to knuckle down and do them, while other tasks are not urgent. It’s been suggested that I move my bio from the landing page to a separate tab and have different content on the landing page, perhaps news about my books, or links to them. I’ll have to think about that.
One other thing I really should do this week is some Kindle Direct Publishing work on my book series, to turn them into true series, properly linked on KDP. I’ve been told that easy. I don’t think I’ll work on that today, but perhaps over the next couple of days I’ll look into that.
I believe the next three days will be a mix of the anniversary book and the website. After that, who knows? Just as the sun-clouds situation here today (cloudy right now but no rain) has been uncertain and changeable minute by minute, so my writing plans are.
I accomplished less writing tasks in March than I hoped for. That’s because of making two trips to West Texas, one to pick up the grandkids, bringing them here for a week, and one to bring them back.
Make one more editing pass through The Teachings, and decide if it is ready for publishing. Get my ideas for the cover to the designer and get things rolling on that. This is done! I make another full pass through the book, reading it aloud to my wife. The edits are done. I also got my ideas to the designer, Sophie, and she has made the cover, made into a theme for the series as a whole. That is no longer a hold-up.
Make major progress in the church 100th anniversary book. I’d like to be close to 15,000 words by the end of the month. That depends, however, on getting into the library for research, or having a librarian help me. I definitely made progress, though I fell short of my word goal. I’m sitting a little under 9,000 words. I did hear back from the librarian, though she didn’t have much to tell me due to the poor quality of the microfilms she had to work with.
Read for research in the next Documenting America book, including taking notes. Begin to sketch an outline of the Table Of Contents. I read for this research only one day. Too many other things to work on.
Continue with my current Bible study project and see if it’s something I should turn into a writing project with the intent on publishing. Again, I think I only worked on this one day. My goals were much larger than my capacity.
Get my personal bibliography up to date for current works. This should be doable. In fact, I may go work on it as soon as I finish this blog post. I didn’t work on this much before the mid-month time crunch came, but I think I got this done. I will have to pull up the bibliography and see. If needed, I’ll come back and edit this.
Blog twice a week. That may be interrupted if we bring the grandkids back here for spring break. I missed three regular blogging days, as I said in a post this month, due to grandparent responsibility.
So, March was a mixed bag. Time to now set some goals for April.
Publish The Teachings. All that are left are various publishing tasks, including: e-book TOC; adding two maps, one of which needs modification; writing the back cover copy; writing the Amazon page text; formatting the print book (well, the e-book too, which is far easier); and uploading to Amazon. I think this is very doable.
Republish the three earlier church history novels with new covers and list of my works. One of the covers is ready. Hopefully the other two will be soon.
Expand the church anniversary book to at least 15,000 words and hopefully 20,000 words.
Blog twice a week. It’s doable. No travel planned this month.
Do some research on the next Documenting America volume. I won’t commit to how much, but I have to get going on it.
Look again at the Bible study I was working on in February and early March, and decide if that is going to be my next book or if something else is.
That’s all I can see to add right now. I’ll check back in on April 30 or May 3 and let you know how I did.
First of the month, a day to discuss progress last months and goals for this month.
Perfect.
So how did I do last month relative to the goals I set? I’ll paste the goals in and say what progress I made, and we’ll see.
Continue to work on The Teachings. At the rate I’m writing now, I should write “the end” somewhere around Feb 15. I got this done. I finished it somewhere around Feb 10. I already have full comments from one beta reader and partial comments from another. I’ve been through it all the way once and made edits and my wife has been most of the way through it and given her edits. I also made contact with a cover designer who says she will take on the project
Continue to work on the 100th Anniversary book for my church. I’ve made a start with the book somewhat planned out and the writing started, now sitting at 1,675 word heading towards 20,000 words, maybe a little longer. Another goal I was able to meet. I did a lot of research this month into our charter members, and was able to learn much and write much. I’m now at about 6,000 words and feeling good about how the book is going. I think, however, the hard parts are ahead.
Get back to research into my next Documenting America book. I call this Run-up To Revolution. It’s about the period before the outbreak of fighting in 1775, so say from 1761-1775. I didn’t do very much on this. I pulled out the one main reference book I have at the house and looked over, but didn’t read, the documents in it. I satisfied myself that, between them and the ones they will lead me to, I should have no problem getting enough source material to make this a viable book. Time to knuckle down and research in earnest.
Continue to blog twice a week. Very doable. Yes, did this, including a couple of posts that I’d held off on due to the difficulty.
Continue to work on my bibliography. I started this some time ago, maybe three or four years, after I found joy working on a chronological bibliography for Thomas Carlyle’s writings. Every now and then I open it and add a few more things to it. I did some work on this, but not a lot. I’ve fallen a bit behind keeping up with what I’m currently writing. I think today, before getting on to other writing tasks, I’ll work on this.
This is more publishing than writing related: Begin to improve my books to try to 1) get more reviews and 2) improve the click through and purchasing rates on my ads. ….For February, I will plan on doing the ones advertised. Nope, didn’t do any of this.
Advertise one more book. I’m thinking it will be Acts Of Faith, but we shall see. Again, I didn’t do this. I’m afraid advertising and promotion took a back seat this month to writing.
Not listed as a goal last month, but some writing work I did, was to start on a new Bible study. Well, not a Bible study exactly. I’ll explain more in a future post, after I get further into it. I’m not sure yet if it’s a viable project.
Thus, February was a mixed bag as far as progress was concerned. Now, what’s on for March?
Make one more editing pass through The Teachings, and decide if it is ready for publishing. Get my ideas for the cover to the designer and get things rolling on that.
Make major progress in the church 100th anniversary book. I’d like to be close to 15,000 words by the end of the month. That depends, however, on getting into the library for research, or having a librarian help me.
Read for research in the next Documenting America book, including taking notes. Begin to sketch an outline of the Table Of Contents.
Continue with my current Bible study project and see if it’s something I should turn into a writing project with the intent on publishing.
Get my personal bibliography up to date for current works. This should be doable. In fact, I may go work on it as soon as I finish this blog post.
Blog twice a week. That may be interrupted if we bring the grandkids back here for spring break.
I think I’ll leave it at that. I still have work to do on my already published works to make them a little more enticing for buyers, but that may have to wait.
As I said in my last post, which re-capped the writing I did in January, my next post would be about writing goals for February. On Monday I thought I might write that post the next day and have an extra post this week. Alas, that didn’t happen. But I’m here now.
What are my writing goals for February? I haven’t written them anywhere (something I sometimes do), so today I’m making this up as I go along.
Continue to work on The Teachings. At the rate I’m writing now, I should write “the end” somewhere around Feb 15. That depends a lot on life circumstances. We will be babysitting grandchildren during part of this time, and traveling two days, so that time may slip. A lot depends on how much I manage to get done today.
Continue to work on the 100th Anniversary book for my church. I’ve made a start with the book somewhat planned out and the writing started, now sitting at 1,675 word heading towards 20,000 words, maybe a little longer. Last night I did some research into one item—actually a person—that I felt needed expanding in the book. I found what I needed. I don’t have any real deadline for this book, but I would like to have it fairly well finished by July. Still much research to do, especially of photos for illustrations.
Get back to research into my next Documenting America book. I call this Run-up To Revolution. It’s about the period before the outbreak of fighting in 1775, so say from 1761-1775. I read for research before, but not a whole lot. I don’t know if this will be the next book I work on or not. A lot will depend on this research.
Continue to blog twice a week. Very doable.
Continue to work on my bibliography. I started this some time ago, maybe three or four years, after I found joy working on a chronological bibliography for Thomas Carlyle’s writings. Every now and then I open it and add a few more things to it. I did that last week and early this week. I plan on keeping up-to-date with blog posts and other writing endeavors. This is a “don’t have to do it” task, but it is becoming a labor of love. Perhaps no one will ever really care about the vast number of items I’ve written, but I plan to leave a comprehensive bibliography behind just in case someone does.
This is more publishing than writing related: Begin to improve my books to try to 1) get more reviews and 2) improve the click through and purchasing rates on my ads. I’m aware of several small-ish things I can do to make that happen. Or at least do to try to make that happen. I’ll start with the two books currently advertised, then do the others in their series, then branch out to others. For February, I will plan on doing the ones advertised.
Advertise one more book. I’m thinking it will be Acts Of Faith, but we shall see.
I think that’s it. I have no plans to work on letter transcriptions, or write any essays, or political essays. It’s getting into tax season and, right after this babysitting gig, I’ll have to take some time for that. Corresponds well with completion of the first draft of The Teachings.
Since my regular blogging day, Monday, falls on the 1st, it seems good that I give an accounting of the month just passed. My writing life, that is.
Yet another box of old correspondence pulls me away from other tasks I’d like to do, the unnecessary interrupting the important.
My main work this month was on The Teachings. I continued interest in it that had developed in late December. As that month ended the book stood at 33,455 words. I had been writing for several days to get to that point. My writing diary and saved files shows work on most days of the month, taking the occasional day off. My writing diary for today was, “Did a few more words, ending at 72,699. Very tired today.” That meant that, in the month of January, I added 39,244 words to the book, an average of over 1,250 a day. What caused the increase in production? Mainly because I got past the point in the book where I felt that I needed to rigorously needed to align with the history of the Jewish War that serves as the backdrop for the whole book. I knew the blot, so was just able to write.
Since I was shooting for the book to be 80 to 90 thousands words, I’m getting close. If I can maintain that kind of average production, I’ll be done with the first draft in just two weeks. Thinking about that, I decided to contact a couple of past beta readers to see if they were interested in doing so again for this book. Both said yes. I’m also sending chapters to my critique group, Scribblers & Scribes of Bella Vista. I’ve sent out nine chapters so far (out of 28 completed) and received at least two critiques on each chapter. I haven’t yet gone through all the critiques.
What else writing related has occupied my time? Mainly letters. Having done a lot of letter organization in 2020, including that transcription project of the letters from our Kuwait years, my mind was on letters. Early in the month I was still finding a few letters that needed to be put with letters from those periods and collated. Also, my digital letters needed work. Yes, I consider e-mails to be letters. Last year I began some work on going through e-mails in my in-box and out-box to see what needed to be saved, what could be discarded. I had also, foolishly perhaps, moved e-mails into a number of folders. My intention was to save each important e-mail to a Word document and save them in a year-by-year folder in the cloud. Well, a few unimportant e-mails as well. My goal was to start with 2020 and work backwards. First I started with the folders. I saved all those e-mails to files. Then I tacked the inbox and outbox. After saving each email from the last two, I moved them to the appropriate folder. My inbox and outbox started to look a lot better. E-mails that didn’t need saving—receipts, links, forwarded documents and photos—are simply moved to the right folder. At the moment I’m working in 2015 inbox, almost through with it. Still have the 2015 outbox to do. Then, back to 2014.
This saving of e-mails is probably a total waste of time. I’m too fascinated by letters to let mine go. The hope is that someday someone will care about my letters based on my literary career, and they will be published. I know that’s unlikely. As I get further along in life, if my career is still a pipedream, I may publish them in nice bound volumes for some of my progeny to read.
What else? I began work on a book I’ve been asked to write about our church’s 100th anniversary. The date is in July but the celebration won’t be till October. Thus, the book will have to be ready for publishing in September, probably early September. This month I: retrieved loads of documents from the church archives; went through about half of them and formed a timeline document for church history (though I have much more of that to go); made a plan for the book—a mental plan right now; and started the writing. Okay, I wrote two paragraphs. It’s a start. I shared those paragraphs with our pastor and the chair of the anniversary committee, and they both seemed to think it was a good approach. I tried to work on it a little yesterday, but found myself too mentally tired to do much.
One other thing I did in January was keep up with my blog and my correspondence. Okay, yes, that’s two things. I blogged twice a week, I think not missing a day. I wrote and received letters, mostly electronically, and saved them out to Word documents. I’m going to do my past to keep up with that all year, and not leave it to a concentrated effort sometime in the future.
Oh, just thought of something else. I did a little work on my own writing bibliography. It’s a big task that I need to do but have long delayed due to the size. I don’t necessarily plan on making a big effort on this, certainly not till my letters project is complete. But from time to time I’ll tackle this. It’s actually kind of fun though it does take me away from other things.
One other item I should note, not exactly writing related. While I have been consulting with my former firm, they wanted me to use one of their computers, for security reasons since I would have to access their network drives. This week my former boss e-mailed me that they felt I no longer needed it and would soon want me to turn it in to the office. So for the last three days I’ve been going through the files on it, seeing if I have any personal files and saving them out to the cloud. I made excellent progress on that. I should be done in about three more days. I think most of the files I need are saved, but I want to check all folders because sometimes a file gets mis-saved the first time and, if you haven’t used it in a couple of years you might now miss it.
So that’s the month. My next post may be an extra one, goals for February. Stay tuned.
Here it is Monday morning, about 8:45 a.m. I have set myself a schedule to have my blogs posts up by 7:30 a.m., so I missed it. Sometimes I write my posts ahead and schedule them to post at that time on Monday or Friday. Last night, however, I got busy doing other things and, well, here it is late Monday morning and no blog post.
I’m not quite ready with a couple of different posts, one a book review, another part 2 of a prior post. So I’ll just say I’m staying busy. Writing and marketing of my books are taking a lot of time. I’ve been trying to write 1,500 words a day on The Teachings, and, except for weekend, I’ve been successful at that. I’ve also been involved with an on-line “school” for doing Amazon ads. I blew off a lot of the classes since this is the third time I’ve taken the school, but I’m looking at some of them, including this morning. I won’t do a lot with it this time, but I’ll do some new ads on a different book.
Well, while I was typing my rheumatologist’s office called. My appointment last week was cancelled for the doc’s convenience and couldn’t schedule me until April, which was okay with me. They called now to say they had two different times today, one this morning, one this afternoon. I was about to take the afternoon one when I checked my calendar and saw I have out pest control service scheduled for today. I totally forgot about that. So, I’ll have to spend time getting ready for that.
My listings at FB Marketplace are continuing to generate interest. I had people come by to look at books several times this week, including yesterday. That doesn’t mean our clutter is greatly reduced, but it is some. In the storeroom I have cleared off one full shelf unit and almost a second. These we will give to our daughter next time we go there (possibly in February) to replace some sagging plastic ones. The small amount of de-cluttering feels really, really good. The work ahead is massive, but progress feels good.
So here I am with a post for today. It’s breakfast time. I made two stock trades, which is all I’ll do today. Small trades: low risk, not much money involved, which are the type I like. It’s time for breakfast, then to finish that class I interrupted, then get on with my writing for the day, then get ready for the bug man. All in a day’s work.
One of my usual blog posts to start a year is to post my book sales for the previous year—and for the last quarter of the year. Let’s start with the quarter, which was my best of the year. Sales were:
Oct – 6 sales of two different books
Nov – 19 sales of three different books
Dec – 24 sales of two different books
Quarter: 49 sales of five different books
Those of you who follow my blog know this was a huge quarter for me. Those of you new to the blog will no doubt say What? With 32 books for sale you sold less than 2 copies per book for a quarter? Yes, that’s true. It shows that increasing sales haven’t made a dent in my cellar-dwelling status.
The reason for increasing sales is the ads I’m running on Amazon. Most of those 49 sales were of the two books I have ads for, 10 ads total, 5 for each. It would be nice if I could report profitability, but, alas, my ad costs so far have run more than my royalties. The will be the subject of a blog post in the near future.
Then, for the year 2020, I sold 96 books. That’s my third best year, lower than last year. But last year I sold books at author events. The pandemic prevented author events this year. Of these sales, 15 were sold in person, the rest through Amazon or Smashwords (only 1 there). I had sales of 14 different books.
So not a stellar year, but much better than some. I still have money in my ad budget. Hopefully they will run a profit before long.
For the first time in many years, I start the new year with uncertainty as to what I want to accomplish in my writing. Perhaps this is a residual effect of the corona virus pandemic, which caused a general uncertainty in the world and made life difficult to plan. I didn’t get as much writing done in 2020 as I wanted to, not so much because of corona virus but because of being diverted to other things (health issue, de-cluttering work, letters transcription).
But, a writer who is publishing is running a business, which should have a business plan if it wants to be successful. So here is my plan. It’s a starting point. I will be thinking much about this over the early part of the year and may modify it based on further consideration.
These books have been waiting for the book that goes between them to be written. I’m finally back to working on it.
Finish and publish The Teachings. A little over a week ago, I got back to serious work on this novel. As of today’s effort, I have 37,000 words in the first draft. If 80,000 is the minimum size of the book, I’m closing in on halfway done. But I don’t feel that the story is halfway done, so perhaps this will be a 90,000 word novel. Either way, at my current pace I could be done in mid-February, which means I might have the book ready to publish in April. For now, those are my goals.
Write and publish one Sharon Williams story. Believe it or not the next story in my series Sharon Williams Fonseca: Unconventional CIA Agent, is starting to roll around in my brain. This is happening unsolicited. I’m not trying to think about it, yet the story is developing. That may be a sign that I should write the story this year.
Write and publish one Documenting America volume. I’m planning for this to be Run-up To Revolution, covering 1761-1775, the documents that led to our rebelling against England. I did some reading for research in 2019 and a little more last year. I need to figure out where I was and see how quickly I could do this. Writing these volumes is always pleasurable, and I’m looking forward to this.
I know which Bible study I want to write and publish next, but it’s going to take some work. Not sure I’m quite ready to do that..
Write and publish a Bible study. I’ve planned out what I want the next one to be: Entrusted To My Care: A Study of 1st and 2nd Timothy. I have a fair number of notes on this, have taught it twice, and think I could do this one with the least amount of effort among all those I’ve developed. Yet, it would still be a pretty significant effort. This would be later in the year.
Maintain a twice per week blogging schedule. The last two years have shown me I can do this. On occasion I may have to make a dummy post or even skip one, but for the most part I should be able to do this.
It’s been a long time since I wrote most of the poems in this, around 2005-6, I think.
Write some poetry. The desire to write poetry again has become active, even if the words aren’t rolling around yet as they are for the short story. I know the poetry book I want to write. My question is: do I wait for inspiration to strike or do I apply some perspiration and just get on with the writing? That’s what I’ll be thinking about the next few weeks.
As I say, this is a start. For now I’m concentrating on my novel. Once I get that done, I’ll give this plan serious re-evaluation.
