Category Archives: self-publishing

miscellaneous, self-publishing, stock market

Back to Normal?

March 20, 2016 David Todd Leave a comment

Yesterday we took our three grandchildren back to their parents in Oklahoma City. We took them to our house to spend Spring Break, intending to bring them back today. However, having a 7 year old, 5 year old, and almost 3 year old proved to be a bit much on the nerves and constitution. So back they went, a day early. That means today we were back to normal.

But what is normal? Is there such a thing? My “normal” I mean usual routines. I am a creature of routine, I must admit. Yet, for the last year or more I have not been able to find or establish a routine. My work at the office is somewhat routine. Leave the house the same time each day; work till lunch; eat lunch at my desk; walk a mile if weather and energy permit; work the afternoon; leave each day about the same time and drive home. The activities on any individual day could shift, but they rotate among predictable tasks.

Evening has become a little routine. I’m hot and heavy into stock trading right now, trying to come upon a winning formula that will allow us to recover from prior losses. Alas, that takes up all of the evening. Or, more correctly, it takes up all the remaining brain energy. By the time I spend an hour or two figuring out what to do with stock trading, I have no mental energy left for much else. I might be able to file papers or update the family budget records. But creative writing? No, won’t happen.

So, I’ve written nothing since October last, other than the Blizzard of 1948 story for the Meade County Historical Society webpage (which they have yet to post; not sure why). Things continue to float through my head, and I continue to suppress them. I have three works that need revision. On is a very minor revision on one page, and applies only to a print version and Kindle version. That should be easy. The other two require a number of typos to be fixed in each, and each having two different e-book versions and no print version. Those are three discreet tasks. They aren’t exactly creative writing, but they will further my writing “career,” so I should knuckle down and do them.

Perhaps I will this week. Before starting this blog post I finished my income taxes. I had them almost all done two weeks ago, or maybe three, but then the non-routine got in the way of the non-routine, and I had to lay tax preparation aside. But I just got them done, now needing only printing, signing, copying, and mailing. That’s the last non-routine item out of the way, which should allow me to concentrate more on writing.

May it be so.

books, Daddy Daughter Day, self-publishing

2015 Book Sales Report

January 12, 2016 David Todd Leave a comment

Well, let me start right off with the 2015 sales table, then I’ll break it down. You might have to click on the table and view it full size to read it.

So in 2015 I sold 83 books. That’s one more than I sold in 2014. A few outlets I sell at via Smashwords haven’t reported all of 2015, so it’s theoretically possible I’ll have a couple of more sales. However, I never sell any books at those outlets, so I feel okay posting results now. Here’s some breakdown

Titles published in 2015: 51 sales
Previously published titles: 32 sales
Print books: 63
E-books: 20
Personal sales: 24
Sales through retailers: 59
Items with at least one sale: 13
Items with no sales: 8

So, I had a better year with print books than with e-books, a complete turnaround from prior years. But that’s not an accurate picture. Two of my news books, Daddy Daughter Day and Seth Boynton Cheney: Mystery Man of the West , I published only as print books. Since they were my two best sellers, naturally that would skew my results toward print books.

The Seth Cheney book was my best seller, at 29 copies. This was a book for members of my wife’s family, prepared prior to a family reunion in Dodge City in the summer. It had about 100 pages of narrative with photos and maps, and 200 pages of genealogical data, also with photos and maps. I completed it a month ahead, had time to market it to the family, and they bought it. I have only one unaccounted for sale that may have been from a non-family member. Sales of this will not be repeated in 2016.

So, was it a good year, or a dismal year? I suppose any time your sales increase, even if the increase was less than 2 percent, you should consider it a good year. On the other hand, selling only 4.17 copies per book published is rather dismal.

Oh, well, onward into 2016. Next post will be goals for the year.

And, I’ll link a smaller image of the table for linking at Absolute Write.

family, self-publishing, Writing

Still Not Writing

November 18, 2015 David Todd Leave a comment

I read a post the other day, over at The Passive Voice, about a writer who self-published five years ago, and has sold over 3,000,000 copies of her books since, most of those of her self-published books. While I rejoice at her success, it’s hard to read that and think “Why not me?” Very bad, I know, to compare oneself to another writer. She says her first break-through came without any publicity effort on her part, though actually her publisher (some of her books are with trade publishers) had a promo of one of her books that happened to coincide with her self-publishing release. Hence, she did have what turned out to be an effective publicity campaign.

In another post, a writer who went from trade publishing to self-publishing in a similar, or perhaps later, time frame, made a post about how dangerous it is to check your sales numbers. Dangerous in the sense that it’s useless, doesn’t get you to writing more, and in fact can turn you away from writing. Well, it’s true that I check my sales numbers every day, and it’s also true that seeing those zeroes pile up discourages me from wanting to write.

I was going to write Monday night, but came home and was diverted. My mother-in-law, who now lives with us, needed help with her finances. My wife was helping, but it was a situation where it was better if one person searched through check registers and another wrote. So I helped with that. After we had the data concisely on paper, I went to The Dungeon to put it in a spreadsheet in order to compute the magic number. I had to do a work-around for a couple of missing statements. Sometime close to 10 p.m. I had the number, went upstairs, and gave it to her.

That was too late to go back downstairs and try to shift my brain’s focus from numbers to words, so I wasted the hour before going to bed with mindless Facebook reading.

Yesterday evening was filled with going through a week’s worth of accumulated mail, then watching two television programs and some news. Tuesday is the only evening that has programs on that I want to watch.

So here it is Wednesday morning. This is the first bit of writing I’ve done all week, except for my blog post on Sunday. I realize that, should any fan happen to drop by this page, or even should a casual visitor somehow surf here, or—heaven forbid—a family member come upon this, this will seem like whining. I suppose it is.

Perhaps life will turn around. Or perhaps I’ll learn to be productive in 15 minute chunks of writing time, or learn how to write in manuscript with significant distractions. And then, perhaps someday, I’ll have a reason to check sales numbers.

Doctor Luke's Assistant, Documenting America, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, Headshots, Preserve The Revelation, self-publishing, Short Stories, The Gutter Chronicles, Writing

Unfinished Writing Projects

September 30, 2015 David Todd Leave a comment

My intention for today was to write a lengthy post on the status of several writing projects. However, two things intervene. First, I’m in New Orleans on a business trip. I’m not sure I feel like taking time to do a detailed analysis of my writing-in-progress. Second, since around Sunday my gumption for writing has tanked. At present I don’t know that I care much if I write any more or not. The reasons for that are complicated and I won’t go into them here. Suffice to say these are not the days for me to be making bold plans for adding to my published titles.

I will say a few words about my projects. The easiest one should be to publish my last short story, “Sierra Kilo Bravo“, at Smashwords, making it available to Nook, Apple, etc. That means pulling up the file for the Kindle publication, making a few simple changes, and hitting Publish. Along with that I want to republish the other stories in the series to add a link to this one to it. Also fairly simple. But I haven’t felt like doing it, now a month since it went live for Kindle.

Another fairly easy project will be to correct typos in my two baseball novels, In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People and Headshots. I re-read them some time ago on my Nook, found enough typos in each to warrant fixing them. This is a one-day project for each book. So far, I just haven’t felt like it.

Then, I have some typos to fix and new data to add to my family history book, Seth Boynton Cheney: Mystery Man of the West. This is a little more complicated. It’s a print book, so unless I want to have the cover redone due to pages added I’ll need to add the new data without too much lengthening. The good news is I sort of planned for this, putting a couple of blank pages at the end of the book. So long as the new data doesn’t take up more than them, I should be okay. I have some of these marked, and one of my wife’s cousins also marked some. She didn’t give them to me, but will when I ask her. This should be my priority, I suppose, but so far—you guessed it—I just haven’t felt like it. A related project, some cousins have asked me to publish a color edition of this. That will require rework of the cover, since the page thickness is different when you print in color, but otherwise is a simple thing. I need to do that right after making the corrections to the black & white edition.

So what does that leave as far as w-I-p go? I have three books started:

Preserve The Revelation. This is a sequel to my first church history novel, Doctor Luke’s Assistant. A couple of years ago, when in a period of uncertainty as to what my next project should be, I wrote the first chapter of this. Since then ideas for the book continue to find their way into my conscious thinking.
Documenting America: Civil War Edition. This would be the next in my Documenting America series. I got well into this last year and early this year. I’d guess it’s 40 percent done. I have pushed this far from my current thoughts.
The Gutter Chronicles, Volume 2. The first volume was a reasonable success at the office. I’ve completed three chapters in that, and am well along with the fourth. It’s been over a year since I’ve worked on it, but I’d say I’m about 20 percent done. Ideas for remaining chapters of this have been bubbling up of late.

That leaves my two Thomas Carlyle projects, wanting to join their brother on my virtual bookshelf. These are the two I’m actively working on. At the office I use my free time to work on Thomas Carlyle Chronological Composition Bibliography. At home I use free time to work on Thomas Carlyle’s “Chartism” Through the Ages. Both are well along, though neither is close to being done. They are perhaps silly things to work on, as neither would be a commercial success. However, at least these two are holding my interest.

Well, this post ran longer than I expected. Still, it’s the short version. I write it not so much as to inform you, my loyal readers, about what’s coming, as to help me bring order to the chaos that’s happening in my head and finding it’s way to paper and pixels. May the order come soon.

books, self-publishing

Book Sales through August 2015

September 3, 2015 David Todd Leave a comment

Oops! I’m a day late making a blog post. I had planned on something else, but instead I think I’ll give a book sales report. Excuse me a moment while I check my posts and see when is the last time I did that…

…I’m back. It looks as if I’ve not made a formal sales report at all in 2015. If that’s the case, the easiest way is for me to simply post a table from my spreadsheet. There it is above, through the end of August.

I’m on track to sell more books than last year. Sitting now at 71 sales, which equates to a yearly rate of 106. However, my sales this year are mostly driven by my issuing Daddy Daughter Day in April and Seth Boynton Cheney in September. Both of these are print-only books, and have sold mostly hand to hand. Without those, I’d have less than 20 sales this year. But, then, I’m up to over 400 sales all together in 4 1/2 years. I’ll take them.

Of course, that’s with almost zero publicity or promotion. I still don’t know what type of promotion would be effective for the books I publish. Perhaps next year I’ll do more promotion. Or perhaps not. Osmosis isn’t very effective I’m finding out, despite what some of the self-publishing gurus say.

self-publishing, Short Stories, travel, Writing

A Short Story Completed

August 16, 2015 David Todd Leave a comment

This summer, writing has taken a backseat in my life. I haven’t completely abandoned creative writing, but time to give it much focus simply hasn’t been there.

What have I been doing instead? Well, in early June we babysat our three grandchildren for almost two weeks, then their parents arrived and stayed with us a few days. They went on a ten day road trip, coming back in early July for a couple of days. That has a way of taking up a lot of your time.

Then there was my wife’s family reunion the last weekend in July/first of August. I was reunion planner. I know, that sounds strange, doesn’t it? But I was, and it took a fair amount of work. Part of that was completing a formal edition of my family history book. Seth Boynton Cheney: Mystery Man of the West, focuses on the patriarch of the family, but it’s much more than that. 292 pages of biography, photos, maps, document images, and pages and pages of data I’ve collected on a number of ancestors in the family. My goal was to have it published by June 15, to give people plenty of time to order it before the reunion. I came very close to making it. The book was done by the 15th and a proof copy ordered. It then took me to June 27th to have all the corrections made and have it published.

Then there’s stock trading. That took a back seat to the reunion, but since that I’ve hit it in a big way again, trying to make some money to augment the retirement funds. I’m actually not doing too badly for the year. I have losses, but almost none since April, with a string of winners since then helping to recover from other losses. Unfortunately that work isn’t going to change very soon.

Work at CEI has been about normal. I submitted abstracts for presentation of two technical papers, one of which was due Friday. I came within about two paragraphs of completing it then. I printed it out and have it at home with me. Hopefully tonight I’ll be able to read and edit it and figure out those couple of paragraphs I lack. Tomorrow I’ll be able to type the changes and upload it sometime in the morning. I advised the organization that I’d be on that schedule, and they said that was fine.

So, back to the short story. It is the last in the Danny Tompkins series that explores teenage grief at the loss of a parent. The subject for this story eluded me for half a year. Finally around May I knew what it would be, and I wrote a few paragraphs. The hindrance of the “blank page” having been overcome, I came back to it from time to time, as I could carve out a little time for it. Slowly it came to being.

On Friday I worked on it a little on my noon hour, and realized I wasn’t sure how to end it. This one ends the series of five stories, so the ending needed to be both for the story itself and for the series. This afternoon I sat down to work on it, first editing what I had. As I did that the idea for the ending came, it being a little different than I’d thought it would be. It reads more as a memoir than a story, but it’s done, and it’s as good as I can make it, so I’m going with it. I did the Kindle version formatting this afternoon. I was about to work on a simple cover for it, but realized I can’t get to the photo I was going to use. So I’ll have to take another photo, which I’ll do when I go upstairs. I know exactly what I want with it.

My goal is to have this available on both Amazon and Smashwords by Wednesday, August 19. It will be close, but I think I can do it. Smashwords doesn’t take much more formatting than does Kindle, and the same cover works for both. With luck I’ll have it all done tomorrow evening, and the books will be out in time. I also need to go back and add links to all five stories to the ones already published. That I’ll do before the week is out. Then, next weekend I’ll begin promotion of the new story and the set.

After that, I have another story started in a different series. I need to finish and publish that. Then, I’ll see. I know which two novels I’ll work on next, and which book-length non-fiction. We’ll see which of those bubbles up to the top. The busyness doesn’t appear to abate in the months ahead. Another reunion that includes a long road trip awaits. A business trip will take me away for a couple of days in September, and another might do the same in October. But I’ll be writing. I’ll keep my few fans updated here.

self-publishing

Foolishness from Authors Continues

June 9, 2015 David Todd Leave a comment

An author whom I’ve never read, Ursula Le Guin, had a blog post at the Book View Café Blog. Titled “Up the Amazon with the BS Machine”, the title is an obvious play on words, BS in this case not meaning what everyone would first think, but rather “bestseller.” The post is interesting to read, and not terribly long. The gist of it: She doesn’t like the way bestseller lists are developed, thinks the books that make it on the bestseller list are garbage, and blames Amazon for the situation while at the same time exonerating the publishers.

She seems to forget that Amazon is primarily a bookstore, not a publisher. Sure, they do some publishing functions, such as Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace for self-publishing, and they have a couple of publishing imprints that currently are small. Le Guin doesn’t like any of it. Read the article and you’ll leave thinking she says “bring back the good old days.”

There must be a logical fallacy in this. A behaves. Environmental conditions change and A behaves differently. B doesn’t like A’s new behavior, and blames C for it—C being not the environmental conditions but another entity who is also behaving based on changing environmental conditions but who has no effect on A’s behavior.

I suspect Le Guin is having trouble selling books. I’ve never read anything she’s written, and don’t know what she writes. I’ve heard her name, but her books haven’t popped up on my radar. I take it she’s fairly popular. She’s probably been on bestseller lists multiple times.

So what’s her beef? It’s that the books that make the bestseller lists aren’t of very good quality. Yet these books make the list, not because people want to read them, but because Amazon is pushing them, and because of this push they get even more sales and climb even higher on the bestseller list. Meanwhile, books of better quality (which I presume includes her books, though she doesn’t say that) languish farther down the lists or don’t appear at all.

This push that she bemoans is what the Big 5 publishers do all the time. They call it “velocity,” and woe to the book that doesn’t have it. They buy “co-op” from bookstores to get a couple of titles on featured displays at the front of bookstores. They buy ads to push the books they think will sell best. They sponsor links on search engines, links that masquerade as search results and fool people. Thus, the publishers, in cahoots with bookstores, are manufacturing bestseller lists by pushing books to create velocity. Personally, I don’t know there’s anything wrong with that. It’s a business practice, not a conspiracy.

So the evil she bemoans really isn’t Amazon. It’s the very publishers she champions. Just another example of top-tier authors not liking the changes in bookselling, and blaming Amazon instead of the party that is really at fault. The madness continues, madness that has been called Amazon Derangement Syndrome.

Danny Tompkins Short Stories, Doctor Luke's Assistant, Documenting America, self-publishing, Writing

Four Years of Self-Publishing

February 13, 2015 David Todd Leave a comment

February 13, 2011, my first self-published item went up for sale. It’s a short story, “Mom’s Letter”, a fictional piece which has autobiographical elements to it. It was a practice piece. When I made the decision to self-publish, I figured my first novel, Doctor Luke’s Assistant, would be first. But it wasn’t quite ready, I wanted to get something published, I had the short story ready from work-shopping and a contest submittal, so I self-published it to practice the mechanics of the self-publishing platforms at Amazon and Smashwords. It went live on Amazon four years ago today.

Then I thought it would be good to do a book-length item, but I still wasn’t quite ready to put up my novel. What else to do? I decided I could put together fairly quickly my historical-political book, Documenting America: Lessons from the United States’ Historical Documents. So I did that, and it went live for sale in May 2011. Later in the year I managed to get out a paperback version of it.

Eventually I published that novel. Then another. Then another. Then a novella. Then another novel. Along the way I added more short stories, and an essay, and three more non-fiction books. By the middle of 2014 I had 17 items published, six of which were print and e-books, the rest e-books only.

I won’t say it’s been a wild ride, but it has resembled a roller coaster at times. Get a day with a sale and my spirits rise. A week with two sales and I’m really high. The come the months with one or two sales, or none, and I’m in the dumps. Just when sales seem to be increasing, Amazon changes something, and what few sales I have dry up like a tumbleweed.

Several things I’ve learned through this. I discovered I really don’t feel comfortable tooting my own horn and promoting myself. This is a disaster for a self-published author. Then, I really hate the process of making covers, doing the graphic arts work. I have no talent in the graphic arts. I’ve done some of my covers. They probably aren’t very good and should be replaced with ones professionally done. But then, I really enjoy the formatting process, both of e-books and print books. Except for the cover, I think I do okay with formatting. And, I enjoy editing my own work, something that most writers say they don’t enjoy.

Last, I have no idea what the future holds, but I know the busyness of life can sure sap what little writing time a person has. I have one completed project—a poetry book from years ago. An artist is working on a cover for it now. If she finishes it, I’ll publish the book within a month. It was done in 2006 and has been sitting, waiting for the right time. I have four other works started, all temporarily abandoned, waiting to see if life will turn in my favor any time soon. I’m purposely suppressing ideas as they come to be. No point in aggregating ideas for works that most likely will never be written.

Hopefully, this will all turn around in a year. Life will grant me time to write again, and I’ll get those four works done and many more. Meanwhile, I seem to be stuck on 345 sales of 17 items over 48 months.

self-publishing, Writing

Working Through Discouragement

December 22, 2014 David Todd 2 Comments

I rarely read the posts at The Kill Zone blog, but went to one today, by James Scott Bell. I met him in 2004 at the Write to Publish conference in Wheaton, Il, though I haven’t seen him since or corresponded with him. The gist of his post was: Yes, sales for self-published authors seem to have hit a wall, or even dropped; but, no, we can’t be sure this is due to the launch of Kindle Unlimited or saturation in the marketplace.

His post is good, though not necessarily convincing. He might be right that KU had nothing to do with the widely-reported, sudden, dramatic drop in self-publishing sales exactly corresponding with the launch of KU. Or he might be wrong. Publisher Mark Coker from Smashwords disagrees. Jim’s post is uplifting, encouraging self-publishers to power on through this, keep writing, keep publishing, don’t give up, don’t be discouraged, work for the long-tail effects of e-books.

I appreciate those sentiments. However, in the comments, I see this posted:

If someone even considers quitting, it’s time to hang it up. Your heart isn’t really in it for the long haul.

This hit me square in the face. If you are ever discouraged to the point of considering quitting, you don’t have what it takes to be a success. In response to her, Bell agrees:

Thanks, [XXXXX]. You’re right. The heart has to be on fire for writing because the publishing world can get awfully cold.

Based on these two, I don’t have what it takes, because I am often discouraged about writing. I don’t know, but that sounds like an awfully elitist attitude to me. I’m frequently discouraged and consider quitting, wondering if the little bit of precious time I spend on writing could be better spent elsewhere. So since I’ve considered quitting, it’s time for me to hang it up?

I know I have a couple of writers who read this. What about it? Do you agree? If you even consider quitting, is it a sign that you should hang it up? Or do you agree that this is an elitist attitude?

self-publishing

The News From Author Central

November 12, 2014 David Todd Leave a comment

I had this post ready to go yesterday, my scheduled day for this blog, but forgot about it. Here it is a day late.

Author Central is an Amazon website that provides information to authors. Actually, it may also provide info to readers about authors. Despite being registered there for three years I haven’t explored it much. The main reasons I go there is to check book sales and author rank. In fact, normally I just check author rank. If my rank hasn’t budged from the previous day, or if it just continues to drop, I know I have no sales.

The figure above was my author rank at about 7:30 a.m. on November 11, 2014. That means I was the 502,648th most popular author on Amazon, considering both print books and e-books. So 502,647 authors who have their books listed on Amazon were, as of that moment, more successful at selling books than I was. I’ve spent my life as a second-stringer, but this is ridiculous.

The reason I bring this up is because I have sunk to new depths. Here’s a graph of my ranking since Amazon instituted this service.

As you can see from that, my rank has occasionally topped 100,000, but not often. And, my rank as of Nov 11th had hit a new low. It was the first time I was below 500,000. The rank listed for each day, except for the current day, is where you were at the end of the day, probably Pacific Time. You can see the effect a single book sale will have on an author ranking as low as mine.

I’m not doing any promotion right now, since life gives me no time to write I’m not going to carve out time to promote. Not to mention that I hate promotion of myself. Also, the print books I buy from them to sell personally don’t count. I have another 40 or so of those that would have helped my ranking.

So, we’ll see what the future brings. For right now I drag along the bottom. I know there are others lower ranked than I am, but I can only account for me.

David A Todd