News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #90….
Item. 99 Cent Sale! These will occur periodically through the rest of 2015. The first deal occurs for Angels Need Not Apply, #2 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series”; it will be on sale for $0.99 on Amazon June 1-June 7. That leaves you only a few days to take advantage of this reduced price—this ebook reverts to its original price is $2.99 at the end of this period. The elevator pitch: Al Qaeda, a drug cartel, and neo-Nazis combine forces to create mayhem!
Item. Facebook ads. After my experience examining what Bookbub offers (a lot of nothing for an expensive price), I decided I’d promote my Kindle Countdown Deal (see above) on Facebook (it’s an order of magnitude less than Bookbub and supposedly FB targets potential readers). Wrote a comment describing the deal on my FB page, clicked on the boost button, filled out the usual crap, and submitted. The acknowledgment email arrives welcoming me as an FB advertiser (oh joy!), telling me that their gurus (computers?) will censor me (you can’t use FB for Facebook and other evil things, for example), and informing me they’ll tell me what they think in 15 minutes.
I never received the results of their censorship study, but FB started boosting that post from my FB page. This is a big experiment for me. Even though FB is an order of magnitude more reasonable than Bookbub, I’ll still need to sell many ebooks to pay for that little campaign. You can help me out here: $0.99 for an ebook is the same price as a dollar meal at McDonald’s and a lot healthier for you (I’m surprised that got through the FB censors, by the way).
I just hope I didn’t annoy people with yet another online ad! According to FB, 40,728 people saw it. Better still, the number of visits to my website jumped by a factor of six, so maybe they saw my other ebooks too. Of course, this could also mean I managed to annoy more than forty thousand people. That wouldn’t be a new record for me. When I first started putting my stories out there, I published Full Medical with Xlibris and bought into their marketing campaign—they managed to spam a lot more people. You live and learn. (BTW, Full Medical already has an ebook second edition.)
Item. A. G. Riddle. I just finished reading A. G. Riddle’s Atlantis Plague, #2 in his Atlantis trilogy. I’d read Atlantis Gene some time ago, bought Plague, and finally got around to read it. The third ebook, Atlantis World, is now available (a bit pricey, though). Plague was a bit of a cliffhanger. Although I don’t like series that do that, this is good sci-fi. Like my new sci-fi stand-alone, a lot of research went into Mr. Riddle’s stories, but they’re more thrillers set in the future with few dull moments. I guess that’s a short review. Maybe I’ll just copy this and paste into Amazon. Recommended for sci-fi and thriller addicts for sure.
Item. Steve’s rules. People blast out PR and book marketing tips all over the internet and in how-to and self-help ebooks. My rules exist on a higher tier above all of that. Readers can read and smile at them; writers should live by them. They’re contained in yesterday’s blog post. Let me know if you agree and whether I missed anything. I think they’re good rules to live by in this rowdy internet world that’s now dominating the publishing business.
Item. Rejection awards? I had to laugh at Beth Bartlett’s “Rejection Traditions for the Committed Writer” in Writer’s Digest, July/August 2015. She states fifty (50) rejections receives the gold award for perseverance. If I’d stopped at fifty, I’d probably have at least ten more ebooks than I do right now!
Of course, Ms. Bartlett is assuming an author is running that gauntlet of begging agents to consider their manuscript (MS), SOP for traditional publishing. Like many writers from days of yore, I tried traditional publishing first and probably received over 1000 rejections (to be fair, I’m counting agents and publishers who responded via form letters or emails—call it self-flagellation). After a few agents requested the MS and then sat on it for six months or more in some cases, saying something to the effect “Sorry, I HAVE DECIDED this MS has no future” (I HAVE DECIDED = I AM THE ALL-KNOWING GATEKEEPER), I experimented with POD and then that new media, ebooks, as I became an indie author.
Authors, please don’t wait until you have fifty rejections to go indie if you’re confident about your storytelling abilities. Determine your own future as a writer. Don’t let other people do it. The disadvantages of the traditional publishing route go far beyond the prospect of WD’s gold award!
Item. Creativity. The whole July/August issue of Writer’s Digest is dedicated to creativity. Again laughable and a wee bit sad that WD has to tell writers to be creative. My May 28th blog post “Creativity or Skill?” can be summarized briefly as follows: a writer needs both. Period. Skills can be taught and learned, but creativity can’t be taught—creative writing programs should be called writing skills programs.
You can be creative in almost any activity—science, math, music, art, writing, sports, and so forth. That creativity can be molded, refined, and channeled using skills developed and learned, but you aren’t going to develop creativity using a few WD articles. Too many people want to write a book; many people shouldn’t bother. Is that elitist? No, it’s just a recognition that different people have different strengths. Mozart was a child prodigy and creative musical genius, but he couldn’t manage his finances—he needed a creative financial genius (some people would say he needed an agent—that would have just sent him to a pauper’s grave even sooner!).
Item. Connections. Reviewers usually don’t review series for many reasons, most of them logistical. But readers like to see connections between an author’s ebooks, whether they’re explicit as in a series, or otherwise. You have my series spelled out for you on my “Books and Short Stories” webpage, so here’s the first secret connection between ebooks. Odri the ET “appears” in many stories, both novels and short stories. Here’s a list of the novels: Full Medical, Evil Agenda, Soldiers of God, Survivors of the Chaos, Sing a Samba Galactica, and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! That spans two series and one stand-alone. Of course, there’s more than one Odri, his genealogy going all the way from the time of the dinosaurs to the distant future! How would ancestry.com handle him?
[99 Cent Promo for readers of this blog: Angels Need Not Apply, #2 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” is on sale for $0.99 on Amazon, June 1-7. Al Qaeda, a drug cartel, and neo-Nazis combine forces to create mayhem!]
In elibris libertas….
