The Blog I Should Be Writing

The blog I should be writing was written in 2014

I should be writing a blog. A blog that allows me to link to my books in some way or adds to the greater good (IMHO) with a commentary on passing affairs.

Yesterday, I had an idea about writing one describing the reasons why I have given up playing golf – perhaps another day.

I could add more on a whole variety of subjects that I would like to write about, Scottish Independence, the NSA, more on the hacking trial, even the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight. Lots of things to talk about. Instead what have I done? Editing of my sequel to An Agent’s Demise (managed to get a link in somewhere). I have lost track of how many times I have read and re-read sections, trying to hone the plot, justify character’s actions and get rid of the allowed for aloud stupid mistakes. I of course have written about this before, here, but, now I have an editor. I hope I have also learned some rules even though some go against what I was taught years ago.

For example starting sentences with conjunctions like and and but is apparently allowed (not aloud). I was always taught to use two spaces after a full stop (not a period – sorry USA it’s called English for a reason) but apparently that means I am a dinosaur left over from the typewriter age. Professional publishing with its typefaces never used two spaces anyway, allegedly. Now we have serif and sans serif fonts to worry about. With an ebook the publisher has no control over what font the reader uses on whatever screen resolution, in whatever colour (It has a u in it WordPress, Goodreads, et al) or not is used. The quick brown fox Microsoft Word test is always fun in different fonts.

I’m rambling again, I still have another five chapters to edit in An Agent’s Rise before a Beta Reader test then an edit or three. I’m also waiting the return of To The Survivors from a professional edit of the MS. Then I have The Persuasive Man to send off and The World of Fives. I think it’s ready, having incorporated some Beta reader feedback. Maybe one more read through, then I’ll have to start Part Two of the series. I was again asked if I would write a sequel to To The Survivors. I am still not sure, I have to have an idea for the sequel, where does it go? The story I mean, I’m in need of inspiration.

Then maybe in a month or so I may be ready to publish my fourth and fifth books, different genres once more. Cover design, formatting, uploading (Smashwords I’m looking at you) then marketing. I was not going to do any links but here I am. A page of non-blog rambles with links to all my current and next two books neatly embedded. Anyone would think I had done that deliberately. Now where’s those badly used discarded golf clubs, I hear there are good prices for scrap metal!

A Year of Writing

A year of writing was first posted in 2014
My first year of writing and publishing is complete, as I  have now completed my first year as an author. My first book An Agent’s Demise was not actually published on Kindle until the end of January 2013. Paperback and hardback versions followed via Lulu.  Even writing the words I am an author still seems strange. I prefer the term writer but that also seems pretentious. Not as pretentious as I felt when friends and family asked me to sign my first editions!
 

 

Demise webAuthor first book Web2
The author and number 1 in Amazon!
I currently have three books published and available. To The Survivors and A Persuasive Man followed in May and August respectively. To say they were all written in 2013 would be misleading. An Agent’s Demise was originally started in 2006 then disappeared until November 2012, when a change in work circumstance led to what was supposed to have been a three to six month break but turned into nearly a year. Writing filled my time, and frequently took over all my time outside of hunting for work. That is another story and not the purpose of this blog.  Then there is the joy of that first review (good) the despair at the first bad which meant that someone other than friends or family had actually ready my scribble.  Of course making number one in free downloads was fantastic however short-lived!

I wrote back in September in a blog called Advertising for the Self-Published Author of my experiences in trying to sell my books; I thought it would be worthwhile to share my sales figures, not as a way of boasting (there is little to boast about and I don’t want to discuss A Persuasive Man) but as information to my fellow new authors, I have excluded all physical copy sales (nearly all directly to me) – they don’t change anything and SmashWords sales which total less than 10 – so here goes.

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I have cut off the first couple of months of An Agent’s Demise as this distorts the charts due to the number of Free Downloads and my brief number one position, using KDP Select so here it is on its own.

Demise sales

The impact of various advertising campaigns I have run has been disappointing to say the least. I have not been able to attribute any increase in sale to promotions through:

  • Book Daily
  • Project Wonderful
  • GoodReads

These campaigns have cost hard earned money, which can only be recovered through higher sales. So far I would have to say they are a pointless waste of time and money.  I cannot even be bothered to list the actual statistics, number of views (allegedly hundreds of thousands) the number of clicks (tens) then the number of attributable purchases (0)

I did save money initially, by not Professionally Editing (in progress as I write) nor did I pay for cover design, promo video (I only have one) web site design or formatting. I purchased Scrivener and Aeon Timeline software after trying others.  Add in costs for ISBNs, review copies to approve physical output, then there are the library copies British library and the others.  I may never publish a physical copy again simply because of the cost.  In other words, I have to purchase 7 copies of each book version just to fulfil these requirements.

I have set up two blogs, this one and one for the forthcoming Sci-Fi series The Interplanetary Geographic Service, a Facebook page and tried Twitter as guided by my betters. For book two I created a YouTube video. I have attended one writer’s workshop but personal selling has been non-existent much like my paperback and hardback sales. I did not join GoodReads until March. I updated my LinkedIn profile to include my new status.

So after my first year what are my conclusions?

KDP Select worked (for the downloaders) for An Agent’s Demise but of course free means nothing for the author.  I am not convinced free actually leads to any reviews or even readers. Amazon knows whether someone downloaded for free but do they know if they have read it?  Does a free download lead to a greater likelihood of a review?  I left KDP Select alone for To The Survivors it has never been free except for a couple of Review Copies but remains my best seller.  For A Persuasive Man it has been very difficult.  It has had more advertising then any of the others, and KDP Select Free promotions and recently a KDP Countdown.  I recently received some personal feedback on the book, which may explain its lack of sales or at least partially explain the reason.  I shall be addressing that over the next few months.

I have several new projects underway:

  • The first part of my proposed Sci-Fi tale The Observer Series – The World of Fives has had a couple of Beta readers
  • An Agent’s Rise the sequel to An Agents Demise is nearly done.
  • New editions of An Agent’s Demise and To The Survivors after editing will be out soon
  • Adjustments on The Persuasive Man
  • My collection of short stories
  • A thriller on revolution
  • More ideas in outline or just paragraphs
  • More ideas about other genres
What have I learned:
  • Building an audience takes time – if I wanted patience I’d be a doctor
  • Advertising has little if any effect – If an advertiser disagrees then put your money where your mouth is.
  • Marketing in any form, including writing this blog, significantly reduces available writing time
  • I’ll never understand how the algorithms that Amazon uses to rank sales actually work
  • Nor which Amazon search expression should be used to describe the books
  • We need more books in more varied categories
  • Too many writers, not enough readers, and even fewer reviewers
  • I have interacted with hundreds of new people around the world making friends with many – may that continue and expand
  • I love writing!
  • That being ranked in the hundred thousands is OK when it’s out of several million!
  • Pushing Publish is always going to be scary.
What would I do differently?
  • Professional editing before launch – if only it was financially feasible for many new authors.  Payback could take several years.
  • Think about a marketing plan, but don’t expect any return
  • Don’t check sales everyday, write more instead
  • Learn from fellow authors – thanks GoodReads – but not all advice will work and don’t pay for the advice.
  • Get more Beta Readers – contact me if you would like a Kindle copy for private review.
  • Blogging and commentating is OK but that is not writing
  • Keep writing!

Writing The Sequel

keyboard

Thanks to several kind reviews I have been asked if I will write sequels for my first two books, An Agent’s Demise and To the Survivors. My third book The Persuasive Man doesn’t support a sequel for fairly obvious reasons. If you check out my forthcoming books you will know that I am writing a sequel to An Agent’s Demise called An Agent’s Rise. So what’s the problem then? Well apart from the ever present risk of writers block, which this article is great about by the way, my real problem is plot.

I had never intended that either of the books would have sequels when they were written. At one stage I was contemplating splitting To The Survivors into two books simply because it’s a big story and there was a lot to write about. The scenario there does allow further stories about the world I have imagined either following the main characters or with new points of view, or even new locations set during the same timeline. My problem here was not lack of potential for a sequel but the willingness to disappear for the months needed to write it. To The Survivors was totally absorbing when I was writing it. Even at 150,000 words I dropped several chapters and plot areas. Now back in full time employment, my writing time is limited. My fourth book The Observer Series – Book One – The World of Fives has been sitting resting unlooked at for weeks. As you can tell from it’s title it has been planned from the start to be a series set in its own future time and place. It’s a space opera and I have started to create a whole world around it with potentially a very large cast. I hope to get some time to work on it over the winter but just now I’m back to the purpose of this article – a proper sequel. So putting my other books aside what is my problem with writing the sequel?

Plot

I haven’t lost it completely, but I created several problems in An Agent’s Demise and in retrospect I wish I had finished the book a couple of chapters earlier or at least left out a few components. I tried to tidy up too much. Consequently, even the start of An Agent’s Rise has proved difficult. Where do I start, who do I start with? The political context was also important. The current timeline for An Agent’s Demise was 2005/6 with the news full of London bombings, and the ongoing rows about dodgy dossiers. If I continue the story what is the political background; more of the same or are there some other incidents I can use to blend in fact with my fiction. I had several starting points and incidents before I settled on one start only to change it completely last weekend. Now I need to follow the plot through and unlike the original when I wrote it I still do not know how it will end.

Characters

An Agent’s Demise was criticised because of it’s large cast and extensive use of aliases for the lead character. Some of this was deliberate, the lead character accidentally creates a name, Mike, which is inadvertently shared with other Mikes, Michaels, and Micks in the story. The large cast prompted me to include a cast list at the start of the book. So starting the new book and wanting to introduce new characters, how do I remove others and narrow the cast to reasonable proportions? This is further complicated by the need to include back story elements. If I kill off a character, well remove them from the story, can I legitimately bring them back. Would the reader want a back story on that part to explain where they had been. No Dallas shower dreams to render huge chunks of storyline irrelevant but the Bourne films managed to bring the lead back from his escape as the main story – nice technique but not one easy to replicate or amend. Of course that process can influence. Police procedural series always have a new case, a new killer because that is the nature of police work, some of these series have led to plenty of books featuring the lead protagonist from Poirot to Morse to Rebus. The Jack Reacher series has several thrillers, but these heroes never seem to get older, slower and don’t forget Bond, the films change the lead character to refresh and has spawned whole new plots that Ian Fleming never envisaged. The plot links are tenuous, suddenly old friends or past incidents that were never mentioned in the first books appear as back story in the new book. Travel never takes time, daily routine never interferes, apartments are always immaculate or sparse, no clothes are washed. Life doesn’t exist in these stories. I appreciate people don’t want reality in a story but that leaves a sequel in more trouble. At the end of every Bond film (not the Daniel Craig series interestingly), Bond is left with a girl but in the next film the girl is gone. The only exception is the killed wife who is occasionally mentioned. Still those sequels have had huge success as books and derived films.

Back Story and References To The First Book

How much back story should be included? At one point it felt like I was re-writing the first book in précis form which was even more confusing due to the large cast. I have backed off from this but it will need further revision. I want the book to follow on, but I also want a new reader to enjoy the book on it’s own. Is that an impossible ask? Are my only readers going to be people who have read Demise? Lots of authors have had to solve this problem even JKR doesn’t try to make the Harry Potter Series as stand alone books. Neither does Tolkien with Lord of The Rings. Some authors do, some more successfully than others, but I have also read works where the book is impossible without having read earlier parts – I just wish I knew that before I purchased the book I tried to read. I have resorted to making some references to the previous story with a quick explanation back story sentence. Whether this technique will be successful or not I’ll have to wait and see.

The Writing Bug

Will this story be it or will it again lead to a new story? A Book Three, at the moment I simply do not know as I do not have an ending. I barely have a middle! The other question is of course should I even write this sequel. It’s too late for that now, I have to write it, it’s now an itch I have to scratch but it’s more than that a need that must be fulfilled, just like writing in general. During my unemployment I wrote a lot three/four books and the starts of several others, now I’m working again I have much less time to write, but I need to, I just have to. I don’t mean blogs or tweets I mean disappearing into an imaginary world, however close to reality, and letting characters that run around in my brain at inconvenient moments put down their thoughts onto my computer’s paper. I was on the tube the other day and a man opposite looked around the carriage immediately my head was full of my lead character doing the same action. Last weekend that incident transformed into a piece of counter surveillance technique on a New York Metro, thanks whoever you were. I explained this compulsion and the characters taking over to a friend at dinner the other night, she had just flicked her hair in a particular way and I said that a little thing like that would appear as a tiny half sentence in a character and she would effectively be in the book, it is already. The dinner was on Friday night, by Saturday afternoon that tiny inconsequential gesture was part of a character. Nothing like my friend but the gesture was there. Is this what psychosis is therefore do all writers suffer from schizophrenia with their multiple personalities as their characters. When I am absorbed in writing whether a sequel or not I disappear, but when the book is finished I want to leave the characters behind, going back to some of them isn’t always like visiting old friends you haven’t seen for ages, sometimes it’s like visiting a school reunion, yes you might want to see how people turned out but do you really want to meet the school bully who made your life hell, or see that old girl/boy who you had a crush on. Visiting my favourite characters for the sequel is a mixed blessing. Still enough blogging more writing, there was another incident I watched that I want to write about, just a police car speeding down Marylebone Street… blue lights flashing as Mike walked by with barely a glance at the noise of the blues and twos…

HTML in Amazon’s Author Central

HTML in Amazon’s Author Central from 2013 and some guidance settings are now different

As I briefly blogged yesterday I have been playing or more accurately trying to play with my book descriptions on Amazon. This follows several GoodReads forum discussions on marketing and how we as authors, can persuade you as readers, to buy our books. The flat nature of a typical Amazon book description does not help to catch the eye of a passing potential buyer. On one particular forum, here, it lead to the author of a new book on the subject both promoting his book but also talking about how it was done. I even became a test case for him and he has kindly shown on his blog where I ran into trouble, which we both then spent some detective work trying to sort out.

My experience shows up in screen shots on Marcus’ blog here. You can get the full down and dirty in his book here (no longer available) which discusses the how to and gives practical examples. This though is about the problems we overcame initially.

Problem One

I didn’t have the same lay out on my Amazon Author Central account as discussed in the book. Following an exchange of Goodreads messages with Marcus I approached Amazon support and received a completely unhelpful response which told me what I already knew. I had an Amazon.co.uk Author Central Account not an Amazon.com one. What they didn’t tell me was that I could get a .com one just as easily. Marcus told me that follwing an alternative suggestion, which I also couldn’t do, about noms de plume.

Problem One was then solved by creating an Amazon.com Author Central Account and claiming my books on sale in Amazon.com.

Problem Two

Each version of the book has its own details section, which are not pre-populated. I was horrified to see for example that the hardback description for my first book An Agent’s Demise had no description despite the editions being linked. Likewise my author profile for each edition was missing. Several frustrating hours later all were populated. There is also another section to fill in for Shelfari which also needs to be filled in but only on their site and again it doesn’t copy from editions so I haven’t finished doing that yet. The screen shot below show the unfilled in sections but you have to go to Shelfari and open an account (you can use your Amazon author account) to fill this in and then it backfills – what a pain.

shelfProblem solved with a lot of copying and pasting

Problem Three

Now I can actually get round to doing the thing I went on Author Central to do, namely use some of the clever stuff to enhance my book description. Now I’m not an HTML genius and my eyes aren’t as good as I wished they were, especially when I forget to wear my reading glasses. Some parts seemed to work fine. The formatting of text is fine. My main problem was the more advanced elements like video and Amazon widgets. I managed to get both working at one point but not formatted position wise. When I adjusted they all stopped. After some further action I have managed to get it all working, but you do have to be very careful and precise. If you visit To The Survivors on Amazon.com, you can see all the elements working.

Problem solved after some fiddling and correcting my errors

Problem Four

Not really a problem but the process does take a lot of time, copying, editing, pasting, checking and then waiting for Amazon’s servers to deliver the new code because the Author Central platform doesn’t show you what it actually looks like. You have to wait about 30 minutes for it to upgrade, then find out that something isn’t right, then check the sales site, then re-edit and start again. If you think this will be a quick process then think again especially to do several books then get all the descriptions sorted. Then there is the author profile which can also be adjusted…

Verdict

The techniques do work although they could be overdone if you are not careful. From my personal design perspective the Amazon page is already crowded with Amazon stuff like recommendations OneClick and so on. I’ll be experimenting further if I have time to get other changes made like font colours and so on. I know it’s my errors, but I’m supposed to be working, or writing my next book, not playing with HTML code. If Amazon were a little more forthcoming on the formatting of Product Descriptions then maybe we wouldn’t have to bother in the meantime give it a try. Marcus’ book is not cheap but it is worth it.

Advertising for the Self-Published Author

According to some sources there are 9,000 new books being published each month, thus making advertising for the Self-Published author a key requirement. Most of these are new books from self-publish authors like me. Sometimes we get called indi’ authors as in independent, but whatever the tag line we all face a huge challenge in getting out masterpiece noticed.  Lots of other companies vie for our trade to take our promotions further.  From blog sites like WordPress offering named domains to Publishing companies offering to promote the new tome for a fee.

For this blog I wanted to review my own experiences of several of these services in relation to my different books.  Like all reviews it’s my own opinion.

An Agent’s Demise

My first book received no publicity at all on launch as frankly I didn’t know how. I did create a Facebook page and set up my website, but there were no Ads. It was enrolled in KDP Select and had over 3,000 downloads on its free days. It even got to number one in its genre in the USA for a couple of days. After it was no longer free it disappeared from the rankings, currently number 272,000 in the rankings on Amazon.com. More recently it did share advertising space via Project Wonderful.

Result – No publicity worked, no change in sales with Project Wonderful – I put this down to beginners luck and a popular genre. I am now looking to re-edit professionally, if I can justify the fee.

To The Survivors

When my second book launched I was on Goodreads and I joined Bookdaily.  The book has sold steadily.  It has featured on the Project Wonderful Ads and I even did a You Tube Trailer.  Sales have been steady, currently ranked #12,935 the UK Kindle Store and #43 in it’s genre.  It has never been in KDP Select although it did launch at the 99c price point.  The only formal push through advertising was Bookdaily, although it was featured with accompanying articles on two blog sites, which prompted the creation of this site.

Result – Despite a more realistic price and no further advertising, the book continues to sell.  I am now looking to re-edit professionally, if I can justify the fee.

The Persuasive Man

For my third book I have tried, Project Wonderful, Ask David (Twitter), and it has even featured on Goodreads.  It is in KDP Select but sales have been exceptionally disappointing, even with free days on KDP.  Given the amount of publicity I hoped to at least get several hundred free downloads, but no less than 100 worldwide.  It’s now at 99c on KDP.  I have joined Twitter, blogged and talked about it. If I had done nothing there would be no change.  It has one 4-star review, not from anyone I know, and that’s it.

Result – Unclear, it may be the genre that makes it a difficult pick up, perhaps the cover, who knows.

The Methods

KDP and KDP Select –

The jury is out, yes I had a lot of downloads with An Agent’s Demise but virtually nothing with The Persuasive Man despite the publicity.  In the end what is the point of free downloads if it doesn’t generate future non-free sales or lead to reviews.

Project Wonderful

Budget set and controlled by me – 232,000 views of my ads, 81,000 unique, 51 clicks – no attributable sales

BookDaily

Fixed price per month – Featured book in emails, two months of cover to 23,000 emails.  1,500 allegedly read my exert – no attributable sales

Ask David

Cheapest method – 10 tweets to 19,000 followers each Tweet, – no attributable sales

Goodreads

Most expensive per day – 56,000 views of ads, 20 clicks, no increase on to-read lists, no more reviews – no attributable sales

Others

I have looked at vanity publishing houses, paid reviews, author exchanges and most look like scams with no solid results.  Lot’s of blog review sites all fighting for the same audience.

For one of my new books, I am trying a different approach with a story background blog already in place.  Just got to get some people to look at it let alone buy the book when it comes out.

Conclusion

It appears that advertising is a waste of money with these services.  Your advert cannot compete with the expensive adverts from the publishing houses on Goodreads let alone Amazon.  The list of services for Self Pub authors is expanding but getting a reader of a web site to actually purchase is not something any of the advertisers want to talk about.  For the Author it’s very much buyer beware.  The services mesmerise you with statistics on followers, viewers, page impressions, but don’t tell you the results.  The only information needed is how many people buy the book as a result of the advert.  On my evidence it’s virtually none.  Save your money.