Snow is gone

Okay I was doing okay writing a Christmasy story while there was snow on the ground.  I could put on the carols and sing along as I wrote happily my odd little tale but it rained all day today.  Yes I got some writing done. but the rain has put a damper on it.  I should settle down and scribble more notes, really I should.  Not sure if it is the wetness or the ache that it brings that is making it hard to write.  I have ideas and heck a new character added to Harry’s world.  Yeah I know I am slowly filling in this world which makes it a bit more interesting I hope to my readers.  When I get this and hopefully a sixth story done they will have a full world to read in a paperback form.  Yes I said paperback!  I figure if you want them as ebooks you can keep getting them as they come out but as a complete collection paperback will be the way to go.  Interconnected shorts are probably the best way to read my work.  After all I am a short story writing.  I don’t see any reason I should be ashamed of my worlds and how they connect.

I have had some movement on Endings since it went up as the BOTM.  Not huge but heck four copies in about three days is good movement for a book that had no notice over on Amazon before.  With the 9 copies sold on Kobo, it is quickly catching up to Ice as my best selling story.  What surprised me is people have started actually noticing Naughty interludes!  I have no idea how many but it has a nice relatively low number.  Now the lower the number the better it is doing.  Right as I type this is it listed as 234,291 on paid kindle and Endings is 295,785.  Not too bad for me really.  Gates is at 511,594.  Now yes i know not the highest numbers but we are talking at out of I believe 7 million books on amazon.  That isn’t too bad for a totally unknown author right?  Heck even Distance is holding at 763,488.  I hope someday to have better rankings but right now I just want to see sales and reviews.

I did get asked to be part of a blog thingie.  Basically I join their group and give them access to review copies and they will read, review and discuss.  Now that is something to think about.  After all a few copies of my ebook out there and maybe they can get others to read and pay for it.  Not sure at the moment but today I am not sure about a lot of things.  So I will think about it over night.

 

Happy Civic holiday or what the heck is this?

After two years in Canada you think I would be used to the holidays but well?  Today is a civic holiday called Civic holiday.  Basically it is a day off for those who work in offices I think.  I know my hubby has to work today as do his friends, so is it really a holiday?  I don’t know.

Well the free promo of One More All Hallows Eve did really well.  One day promo had 173 downloads and one review.  That story now has five total reviews, all four and five stars.  The new one wanted more Harry…which of course is what the other free promo was.  Hope Everlasting is the second story in the Guardians of the Gate City series and it isn’t dong too bad either.  So far 92 downloads and I gave it a full week so by the end of the week I expect to see more downloads and hopefully a review or three.

I decided that August is going to be my free month for sure.  Obviously had Hallows up and have Hope up but next week I plan on putting Partings up for two more days, then well have Sacrifice up for three days and finally that attempt at breaking into a different genre with Distance (my erotica) going up for free the 20th through the 24th.  Here is hoping it will get some notice and maybe some actual sales.

Been working on the Chaos war like a good doobie.  This is definitely going to be a longer tale.  The first part is all ready past 30 pages in word.  Now I found out that the page length in word does not translate to an exact amount of pages on Kindle.  8 pages at 14 point font is 14 pages on the kindle.

I usually type at 10 point and then adjust when I go to publish.  I do want to finish this story.  I started it back at the turn of the century!  Yeah that was a while ago.  Not the longest it has taken me to write a story, we know that but it needs to get written.  After all I have so many other stories to write, publish and sell.  Well hopefully sell.

I love the encouragement I get over on the amazon MOA discussions.  The men and women over there are really a great resource for an indie writer.  Most of us have been writing for a long time but actually putting those stories up for sale?  It is harder than people think.  In this world of instant gratification it is still hard to wait to see a sale come in. With Amazon you get a nice little report you can pull up any time to see how the downloads are going.  Yes they are slow but it has been only been since April right?

My traditional published book, Gates, I sent an email to my publisher to find out how I could get a report to see how well my efforts were working.  Well you don’t get to find out for a YEAR.  Yes I said a YEAR!  Okay I wont get upset.  After all Gates is just one of the books I put out.  People have bought it yes.  After all it has a ranking in both ebook and paperback.  So I just have to be nice and patient.  I will just focus on writing and promoting and hoping I actually sell enough to pay one bill sometime this year.

Okay I should probably type up my notes on Chaos from last night and then figure out how to get the next important scene set up.  When writing a short you can really just dump the reader right into the scene but a longer story needs set up and that takes time.  I don’t think I will ever write something over 200 pages but you never know.

Endings are us…or justa few more pages

Yup got through the battle now to wrap up the story and start the final edits.  I know a lot of writers do all the writing and then edit but I tend to edit every time I open up the file.  Yeah I do miss a thing here or there but I find if I over edit I screw something up and then it is annoying.  Staying in the right tense and person is what i do when I write my way.  too many cooks really do spoil the soup in my way of writing.

I put Sacrifice up for free for today and tomorrow and before I even let people know there were some downloads.  That is nice.  Hopefully I will get some reviews.  Seems like these free downloads get me about 150 downloads on average, which is pretty good.  Yeah I am still struggling on the actual paid for downloads but they will come.  After all gotta get my name out there right?

It is too bad in a way that I can’t do a free download on Knight Protector, Endings and Gates but those are real books.  Getting them read is what I am hoping for.  Knight Protector has been downloaded at least once as has Gates.  Yeah I don’t make a ton of money but a reader is a reader.

I put up the trailer for Sacrifice which I will add under the other page of my blogs.  I like the way it came out, definitely more a teaser than anything else, which is what you want right?  It is hard to not give anything away when you do shorts but i think I pulled it off.

Now I have figured out the first batch of erotica that I will release for publication.  Playing with a title, something like “Distance doesn’t matter” though that doesn’t sound quite right.  Guess I will have to play with it more.  I will have to do little bits to connect the stories of Anne and Charlie to each other and well edit them so they are less porny and more erotica.

But that will have to wait till after I finish the writing and editing of A Watery Grave.  Nice to have Harry’s third story almost finished.  It does pick up nicely after Hope Everlasting, okay a few months after but that is how these things work.  Get that finished up, do up a cover and a trailer and post it up..hopefully by the middle of this week…or beginning of next week.  I hope I am not flooding the market with stuff really.

I could so easily put up the two other Death Walks Through stories and then the six Echoes of Elder Times and five more Worlds Apart, never mind the second of the Saga of Loralil Greyfox books.  I have a lot finished and ready to go…well story wise.  They all need covers and trailers but what can I say right?

Okay back to work.

Sales and downloads

I am not sure which I should be happier about.  The fact that my stuff is getting downloaded and very occasionally reviewed or the fact the very very nice people have bought and paid for my work.  I was surprised to see Knight Protector finally sold a copy.  Makes me do the silly hamster dance of course.  After all the whole point of putting my work on a for sale site is to see sales.  Yeah I may have only sold under a handful of stuff so far but it is a start.

The weird one is that Gates, the kindle copy, also sold a copy or so but I can’t see how many because while it is a kindle copy it isn’t one I posted up, the publisher did.  So I don’t know if it was one copy or more.  Need to get my publisher to let me have some type of report.

Now I need to figure out how to get Endings on the radar of readers.  It isn’t on Amazon so I don’t have the same boards to play with.  I don’t see discussion boards on Kobo so far.  I know I could have put it on Amazon and will probably put it up there in the fall but I wanted to have it in other places so it didn’t seem I was flooding amazon with my work.
Here is the link to the Kobo

http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Endings/book-lrkvXtsAfk-dzKRK3uBuJA/page1.html?s=jdovH3-ThEWCGwpdIicxTw&r=2

I worked so long on this book that I hope the readers from over on fictionpress will look for it.  I guess maybe if I go over to fictionpress and put in the link it would work.  After all there are still the in process Loralil stories over there.

Now yesterday a friend of mine has convinced me to pull down from the various places I have erotica up and to bundle them into a book (or four) and post them.  After all erotica is selling like hotcakes thanks to the Fifty Shades book.  I hate to jump on a bandwagon but well…we need the money.
And well I can write pretty much any type.  Okay yeah I havent done cowboy stories…I should with my step dad finally cracking open books and reading them fast.  And for anyone who knows him this is a milestone.  The man NEVER read when I was young.  He hated reading and now thanks to old age…and yes 73 qualifies and his medical condition he has discovered a love of books!

Well I need to work and work and work.  So much editing to do on those stories and then covers and deciding where I can post these for sale.  The erotica actually worries me more than my fantasies have.  Erotica can be done so badly and I don’t want to turn off possible buyers of my nonerotic stories.  Because those are my hearts children and I love them like I love my body’s children.

 

Bright sun shiny morning there is work to be done

Well this morning I went to the “other” Amazon sites to try and find places to flog my work.  Yeah I know but it has to be done.  Managed to find discussions on the French, British and German sites.  They had ones listed in good old english so it helped.  But When i tried on the Italian and the one for Spain…I don’t think they do discussions the same way.  They didn’t have any listed!  Now that was different.  I expected to have to go through a long list in the language but there were none?

Okay so it was expecting too much.  Heck I have surfed through the sites over in China and Japan, you know to see if I was listed over there.  As far as I can tell no but then it isn’t like they w9ould be interested in short stories in english right?  Course I tried to search discussions over at the Canada site since I am officially living here.  Zippo…now that just isnt right.  They make Canadians buy kindle stories from the US and discuss on the US site.  Now we know I am a born US cit but I live here now and I would like my new country men to have a chance to read and comment too.  Oh well.

Yesterday got Harry through the first battle with the Mari-morgens.  Went abut how I wanted it too but now he has ten hours to come up with a way to bind them or destroy them.  Which way to go which way to go?  I will work it out, after all I want to get this finished up in time to post on Lammas.  See how many of you know what that day is.  I need to get the story written and edited, then do a cover and a trailer.  I think I can pull it off.  If I do I will put Hope Everlasting up for a day on the free list as lead in.

And speaking of freebies Paritngs is moving along.  Looks like I might have 150 or more downloads by this evening.  Got the first review up.  Now I have had a couple people comment they loved it on the boards but they didn’t post the reviews darn it all on the page.  But it is nice that the reviews I have showing on my stories are all four and five stars and nice comments.  Makes me proud.  Now if I can just get comments (and readers) for Gates, Knight Protector and Hope.

Debating putting up Ice this weekend.  I have a trailer, a cover and of course the story all finished and ready to go but should I?  Oh yeah coolness someone over and Youtube sent me a comment about Ice..yeah a silly one but I wasn’t expecting a comment from the Youtube world so it was nice.

Still waiting on the Kobo people to explain why Endings isn’t showing the table of content on the left side of the file.  The layout is fine but hat little thing would probably throw off readers and I don’t want Loralil getting dissed for formating issues.
Okay time to get back to plotting out A Watery Grave and getting the kid moving so we can get groceries before the heat settles in.

 

I’m back!

Okay I never really left but I have a working desktop with word and other stuff on it now.  Which is important.  I didn’t waste time while was down either.  I have pages of notes to type into the computer and edit.  The new Guardian of the City story is really moving along.  Harry is going to have to deal with a wet and angry pair of sisters.  Should be interesting they let me know their story.

Now I don’t have Adobe quite ready for me to make covers yet.  Should have it by Tuesday or Wednesday and then I can make covers for the stories I need to post.  I have enough that I think I may just go ahead and post them one story at a time.  Of course they are all parts of series.  And we have the name of the series worked out.  They are of course, Guardians of the City, those are Harry’s stories.  Then there will be Death Walks Through.  Death’s stories.  Those are a little darker, more of light horror or ghost stories really.  Thirdly there will be Worlds Apart.  My more science fiction stories.  And then there is Echoes of Elder Times.  Stories that have a more mythic feel to them.  Be they retold myths or something I came up on my own they will have a theme.  Just like Gates did.

Now I added up the downloads so far.  With only three downloaded sales and one paperback sale I guess I should look at how well the free downloads went.

Night and Day 179 downloads

Passing the Torch 137 downloads

One More All Hallows Eve 116 downloads

I could look at those numbers and whimper, after all each consecutive story had less downloads than the one before BUT Hallows actually got four reviews versus the one each of the other two.  And well Gates just doesn’t seem to be going anywhere at all.  With it being all over and the ebook being only 99 cents you would think it would do better.  Six collected stories, which the people who have read my copy loved…who knows?

I will just have to keep plugging along.  I have plans to put more poetry to photo and music, and once photoshop is up and running I can make covers for Sins and Shadows and Loralil.  Get the two fanfics up over on wattpad and Goodreads, give people a taste of my style.  Hopefully hook them in for the original stuff.  Loralil will see the light of day finally.  After all two complete books of work and at least three more in the works?  I have to publish her somehow.

Okay I have babbled enough over here.  Tomorrow I will go over to my other blogs and do reviews of games and movies and tv show.  Stuff I haven’t been up to date on.  At least while the machines were down I got some book reviewing done.  All I can hope is after all the reviewing I did for the past week that the karma faerie gives me some reviews back.  Who knows, they could be good.  Anyone think I should offer more freebees?

Finding yourself on the web

Okay this is so weird and cool at the same time.  I am now all over the web, again.  In the old days it was the silly websites I put together for fanfiction and poetry and my drawings.  Now it is my actual published work.  I enjoyed it in the old days but now…now it fills in a part of yourself that you didn’t know you had.

I am showing up on places like ITunes, Versent Books, Inktera and of course my publishers site.  Now the more places I show up the more chance that someone will actually decide to buy my work.  While the paperback over on Amazon is pretty pricy, the Ebook copy on Itunes is very affordable at 99 cents.  So I am hoping…really really hoping that soon I will see some movement.

I have even posted Gates up on Craig s list and Kijiji.  Now it felt weird putting my book up on those sites but it needs to be done right?  I am right now just sitting here trying to decide if I should put Knight Protector up on those two sites.  It is a novella and a fun one in my opinion.  Course I wrote it so my opinion isn’t necessarily unbiased right?

Okay back to writing and reading and trying to think of other ways to get the nice people out there to actually pick up my words and reading them.