Mired in the process of a new release, I'm somewhat depressed. If it had gone right, I'd be kicking back, watching the sales roll in. As it is I still get zeroes haunting me - this morning, I got them out of there, but if I don't act, they come back, like ants when you sit down beside a tree.
I never quite finished proofreading my book. One result of this is that when it's all totally done, I'll have a slightly different product than what I have now. And that will mean that ultimately there will be different books out there. It's kind of fascinating, actually, that I could track my books based on who got the first ones, who got the second batch, etc., so that, sometime when I just encountered one of my books in a store or someplace, I would know when it was sold. Amazon has a way of keeping track of changes it approves - so on one level they know when there is a second, third or fourth edition - but what I'm saying is that I could be doing my own tracking.
Back to a depression I'm fighting off. My short story reputation is very important to me. Yet that's a place where I have made very few inroads into the true audience for them. If I had made those inroads, people would be simply buying them now. They're not. This might change by tonight, but don't count on it. Don't hold your breath.
A sale here, a sale there, at least I have numbers now which is important when people all over click on the amazon link. I'm in it for the long haul so if people don't know about it yet that's not especially the end of the world. My next stories may be about Disney, going along with advice I was given to "have a theme" or something that sets my book of stories apart from others; just a collection of short stories alone relies on the author's name which in some cases is not enough.
Many of the sites I'm posting on are scam magnets. This I'm not crazy about. I'm still dealing with lots of scammers, here, there, on my phone even. Why should I pick up scammers just because I'm publicizing the book?
On the other hand, I've barely scratched the surface of sites I could possibly be on. They're all over the place. Just remember the laws: It's total number of eyes that see your ad (divided by two) that translate into clicks, that ultimately translate into buys or downloads. Have to go for the long haul. I will consider an Amazon campaign - something will have to work.
Meanwhile my book is below (next post). It's good. Enjoy!
Thursday, September 15, 2022
Tuesday, September 13, 2022
Devour That Spaghetti
Monday, September 12, 2022
new book
I just finished a tenth collection of short stories, and I want to gripe about the process a little before it's either approved or rejected on kindle and paperback. Most likely they will simply fix the few things that went wrong and send it down the line, and I'll have two books tomorrow, one kindle, one paperback.
In the end there were times that I didn't know how to fix the formatting problem that their machinery set up, so I simply approved it I figured they would fix those formatting glitches probably having seen such things before and knowing that I really want title page information centered within the title page. I had no idea why it wasn't, and no clue about how to go about fixing it.
Some things like this reflect my dwindling patience. It has been after all about five moonths since my last book, way too long for me, and this has made my marketing kind of stale and I've lost my patience with that too. Because I've lost my patience I let a few things go that I shouldn't have. My covers are not quite perfect. My table of contents does not have the page number for each story, and on the kindle version it's poorly formatted. They will either fix this or not. In kindle they can link the chapters (stories) in the T of C to the stories in the main book, and they'll probably do that, so page numbers there are superfluous anyway. In paperback I end up submitting a pdf and there's where I should probably have page numbers in my T of C.
I get all wound up in the production and thus become somewhat useless in the house where I'm totally distracted and don't even notice whether people are home or not. It's good, though, that I broke the ice on my inability to produce - sure, for several months I was preoccupied with moving - but still I was beginning to feel stale myself and I needed to just see something of mine out on the market. I will work on those covers, I promise. I think you will see a bath of publicity here pretty soon, all sites, all places, all over. It'll be "all guns firing" as I like to say, for a little while, until I figure out what to finish next.
In the end there were times that I didn't know how to fix the formatting problem that their machinery set up, so I simply approved it I figured they would fix those formatting glitches probably having seen such things before and knowing that I really want title page information centered within the title page. I had no idea why it wasn't, and no clue about how to go about fixing it.
Some things like this reflect my dwindling patience. It has been after all about five moonths since my last book, way too long for me, and this has made my marketing kind of stale and I've lost my patience with that too. Because I've lost my patience I let a few things go that I shouldn't have. My covers are not quite perfect. My table of contents does not have the page number for each story, and on the kindle version it's poorly formatted. They will either fix this or not. In kindle they can link the chapters (stories) in the T of C to the stories in the main book, and they'll probably do that, so page numbers there are superfluous anyway. In paperback I end up submitting a pdf and there's where I should probably have page numbers in my T of C.
I get all wound up in the production and thus become somewhat useless in the house where I'm totally distracted and don't even notice whether people are home or not. It's good, though, that I broke the ice on my inability to produce - sure, for several months I was preoccupied with moving - but still I was beginning to feel stale myself and I needed to just see something of mine out on the market. I will work on those covers, I promise. I think you will see a bath of publicity here pretty soon, all sites, all places, all over. It'll be "all guns firing" as I like to say, for a little while, until I figure out what to finish next.
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