Well on the first question, I am not sure yet. I just don’t have enough information but on the second half, yes we should. They are fun, easy to make and they can peak the interest of a potential buyer. They work great on things like Twitter and other social networks. So why not right? I have a bunch of examples to show you here.
Like the book trailer, these little things attract attention to your novels or collections. So why not try one?
Well things are moving right along. Having posted a short story on Linkedin for a contest, a poem on Goodreads for a contest, on facebook for a contest and submitted another flash story for the SS Wordsmyth love contest, I have just one more to get out to the right place. A sorta poem for a contest on Sons…yeah that thing i don’t have! So my brother and his son and grandson inspired me.
Yup been a tad busy. Then I read in a discussion group about an urbanish legend out in the wild west of the US about camels and a camel soldier in the 1800s who tied himself to his camel after being wounded and dying still tied there..and the camel wandering with him still attached. Does that sound like a story idea or what! I mean it would work great for my Death Walks Through series of stories. Now i just need a little research and I can write it. Yeah for some reason this month I am FULL of ideas and stories and poems. I am not complaining for sure. I love feeling energized to write.
I have recieved and given reviews in the past week too. You can check them out over on my webiste.
http://themadwitersden.weebly.com/
Lots of fun stuff there if you look around. Got poem videos, book trailers, reviews of my work, my reviews of other people’s work. Got reviews of movies and tv shows, poetry and links of course to my BOOKS!
Okay time to decide what to work on next.
Well I can tell I am feeling better. I managed to finish up two short stories for different contests and a poem for a third. Posted up another on yet another contest. Now I just have to think about what to do next.
Been thinking of diving back into one of my longer works. After all even if I have no readers I have stories to tell. There are characters who are pounding on the door wanting to have their stories told to someone right?
Sales are still slow but heck A Watery Grave got downloaded by someone. That is a good thing in my book. As did Christmas Snow. Now if someone will download Halloween Pranks I bet I could have reviews on the whole of the Guardian Tales that are all ready out! I don’t have a clue on what to write for Harry next but he can wait for a bit right? Though one or two more and he will be ready for a collected book.
I put the Guardians of the Gate city stories over on Smashwords and three of them have passed through the premium catalog all ready. For some reason the first two are still pending. Weird but it happens. Once they are through then they will be up on places like Barnes and Noble and ITunes. Would be nice if someone somewhere would buy them and review them. Okay so I have a goal of at least one sale per story and one review per story right now. Yes when I get there then I will move my goal up to something like 10 sales per story.
My poetry book is nearly ready. Just have to figure out a cover for it. The photos don’t necessarily go with the poems but they set a mood. The poems are mostly darker than not but well they are me. If this one does well I will think about another collection. Course I would need a ton more good photos to do it justice. Right now I am just not inspired to go out in the cold and snow to take photos even if they could be really good. Maybe later in the week.
So much to do and so little idea of what I should do!
Okay so that doesn’t work as well as Monday Monday but hey I never said I was a song writer.
Last day of the free promo for Hope Everlasting. I am hoping it will top 200 downloads which would be cool. That and hoping for a few reviews. Haven’t gotten any new ones in a while. It would be nice to have a couple on each of my books. After all there are readers who actually read reviews before they buy the books, so having a review or ten would help right? So far on Hallows has five reviews. Everything else is in the one or four. Well those that have reviews. Tomorrow Partings will start a two day promo that will finish up its five days. KDP does 5 days of promo for a 90 day period, if you enroll the work in KDP. I obviously have two books that can’t be exclusive to KDP. The Knight Protector is Smashwords and I think the coupon on that one is over and of Course Endings is over on Kobo..but I am thinking of delisting it over there since it isn’t really coming up in the searches over there. I will have to think about it for a while.
I have quite a bit of notes to type up on Chaos War and more bouncing around my head. Be good to get them all typed up and maybe get to the needed step to rounding up that section of the story. Where it is going will make me have to do a bit of rewriting on the second book, No Matter the Distance. I am trying to decide whether or not to change the actual timeline a bit. I started this story at the end of the 90s so the millennium had not taken off. Now 12 years later I am not sure referring to the end of the millennium is a good idea. Dates the story but it is also part of it. I will decide sometime this month obviously. It would be a really good thing to actually put this story to bed by the long holiday weekend. And I mean Labor day. I still haven’t remembered the Canadian version name.
Doing a read through what I have and I realized that I haven’t really described my three main characters. The villain, Avendale I have pretty much covered but I have only lightly alluded to my three heroes. I will have to expand that in the story I think. Just so people have a visual idea the differences in them. Once the first book is done and we move to the new one that is set 15 years later it helps to understand the changes in the characters. The second book is darker with the coming final battle and all. But the things that are coming out about Jeffery has changed a few things. Getting him to tell me his back story is hard. A very difficult thing with a man who doesn’t know his true self. A very deep character I think. And yes by the end of the series he will remember who he really is. Not who Avendale told him he was but who he was before she found him.
Okay time to type, to take pics of the birds in the backyard and feed the brat
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.
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.
Yeah it really is. I think I am going to have to take the writing into the basement if I plan on getting anything done. I did make another poem video which is posted on my other page. Now I could probably make a few more but I just want to sit back and snooze. So humid all you want to do is ignore the world.
I made sure to do my baking early this morning. While I love cooking for my family baking is just not meant to be done when it is hot and humid. So brownies made by 9am…and they stuck to the darn pan! Not something I have had an issue with in ages. Gotta go back and figured out what was the problem there.
Well as for actual writing. Moving harry through this tale is a bit slow. He is currently face to face with the Mari-morgens. Now Mari-morgens for those of you who don’t know are a version of a welsh water fae. They like there Irish Pooka cousins like to drown people. The two I have in the tale are sisters and not happy ones. Yeah I reuse legends and faerie stories but I change them up a bit. So they may seem like the legends but they aren’t really. Sorta like the troll cousins in Hope Everlasting. Now if you read that story you would find the trolls, the spider demon, the crow shapeshifters and even my version of the Japanese Kappa. Just so much fun.
I have been debating a lot about posting up A Bargain with fur. That story is based on a filk song that I had on a cassette from way back when. So offically that is a song fic. Now I could just post it up on a place like GoodReads or Wattpad. Either of those have a place for no cost stories. So it might be worth it. But of course like Loralil and my Suteko fanfiction it needs a good cover and even a little book trailer to move it along with the audience. So we will see once my honey gets Adobe up and running. Here is hoping it will be ready for me to go hog wild with covers tomorrow. We can hope. It is currently the cover issue holding me back from putting up more work.
And speaking of putting up work I am now signed up to publish over on Kobo. While my Knight Protector story is up there that is taken from the Smashwords page. This would allow me to put something directly over on Kobo. This could be good if it is like Amazon. It does ask for how I want to be paid so I think it is like Kindle publishing. We will see of course.
I just worry that once I get this stuff up I will find that no one really wants to pay for my words. I write stuff that does intrigue people but getting them to pay for it now that is the issue. I don’t want to be the next Stephen King or Sherrilyn Kenyon but I would like to be able to contribute to the household budget this way. We will see. After all I have only been online in the publishing world for two months right? Takes longer than that for most authors. So we will see.
Okay I need something cold. It is soooo hot. Enjoy the day folks!
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?
Last night as I tried to deal with the heat I got struck with a new idea. The hot weather that is effecting the whole of North America with lack of rain and hovering humidity has people doing things they shouldn’t. Reading the online stories from back home gave me the beginning of another story. Now to decide just how Harry will have to deal with a hot and angry water spirit. Now if I can get past the first few pages I can hopefully finish this by the end of the month. Would love to be able to post a story a month.
Once the new updated work computer finally works I can get to making covers for Loralil and the other tales. Three sales in three months isn’t so good but well just getting them out is a good idea. Do up the covers and make up trailers. It is fun if nothing else and gives me things to do that isnt cooking, cleaning and mommifying
Yesterday wasn’t a good day. Should have been writing and working on my novella right? Well just didn’t couldn’t get into Harry’s mindset. Was just too positive. So I sat down with a notebook and a pen and did the whole flow of consciousness thing. Now reading back on it it is obvious that I am missing my daughters. When your children grow up and don’t need you anymore you go through stages of grief just like any other loss in your life. I miss my girls. Now I might someday write it all down and even more possible I just might publish it. Books written about actual life to sell but in a way it feels like pandering to my own insecurities to do that. And yeah I have a ton of those.
Like any writer I crave some feedback, some prove that my words are reaching someone. I know that the erotic stuff I wrote has found an audience. Heck a few of those stories have been downloaded over 100,000 times. And my fanfiction seems popular. I am still getting people liking Sins of the Father. I wrote that 15 odd years ago. Why is it that my totally original stuff seems to get ignored? Well gets ignored if I charge for it? I know people downloaded my freebies but did they read them? Almost 200 downloads on the first book and around 150 on the second. Which is nice. But the only review I have had so far is Kaylan’s teacher telling me she wanted more when she borrowed my copy of my paperback.
So the question is should I write nonfiction? I have had a life that would probably make good reading for some but well…doesn’t feel right. I could fictionalize it but we all know how hard relieving memories can be. I have a good life now, even with my occasional deep blue days. I swear if my head would stop the aching I would have an almost perfect life. Okay enough crazy babbling. Anyone know an artist who would like to take my image of Loralil and make it cover worthy?
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