Category Archives: Writing

So … here’s my new cover

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In the world of indie-publishing, cover reveals are supposed to be a big deal. Authors take great pains to count down to their cover reveals, go on blog tours to announce them, etc., etc.

Not me. Not this time.

Personally, I’m embarrassed that I didn’t go for a more professional cover in the first place. I thought mine did a good enough job. I entered it in The Book Designer’s monthly cover contest and no less an authority than book designer Joel Friedlander said there was “absolutely nothing wrong” with it. He complimented the typography. However, he also pointed out that there was nothing particularly compelling about the cover, either. And noted that rocks didn’t exactly suggest a love story.

But since the book is not really a pure romance, that didn’t concern me too much.

(You see where I’m going with this, right?)

I’m trying to start this publishing career without wasting too much money. To me, my cover was good enough for a first foray into publishing (I think the stock shot cost me about $14 and I designed it on GIMP, which is free design software). I set type back in the bad old days of Compugraphic (no WYSIWYG back then), and I’ve been the product manager or acquisitions editor in a fair number of book cover meetings. So I figured that no, it was not a GREAT cover …but it was good enough.

I was crazy if I expected to hit gold with a debut novel, anyway. I was just going to live with it, and do some marketing now and then, and hope the addition of new titles eventually got me to the kind of critical mass of stuff that allows the kind of cross-selling that will eventually make this a profitable enterprise.

However, having such a great run on my free days and getting such a nice crop of reviews from them has made me a little more ambitious for this first title.

Also, once I made the decision to come out with the paper edition of this book — because too many people just don’t read Kindle and swear they will read it if they can please just have it in paper (we’ll see if that’s true) — I calculated thus:

  1. It really needs to come out well before Christmas (ideally at the beginning of  November, but it’s too late for that).
  2. I’m teaching four composition classes. Four! With research papers!
  3. There’s no way I can format the book and create a decent-looking full cover for it and actually get it done before Christmas.

Ergo, I needed to hire some help. And at least this semester I have some money to pay for it. (I wasn’t expecting two of those four classes when I started out this summer.) So as long as I had to pay for help anyway, I went to the guy whose cover instincts I’ve been admiring for months — Damon Za. It took me awhile just to write up everything I needed for him, but once I did I sent it off and paid my deposit, and after a week or so I got three designs back, including the fixed up version of my own cover that I asked him to do as an option. (I was a little reluctant to throw out ALL my branding to date if I could find a way to make it work.)

One was an honorable attempt to cope with the busy rocks that screamed “this is probably stodgy literary fiction by a woman of a certain age,” so that one I never even showed anybody.

The other was a much improved version of the feet on the rocks with a better focal point and professional type treatment. But those rocks — oh, those rocks. They just make a terrible background for type.

And the third one was striking and sexy and just WOW.

I loved that third one right away — though it also made me a little nervous — but I ran it past my gang because you’re crazy if you don’t seek honest feedback from others in this business.

And of course the gang split.

Turns out a lot of them LIKE bare feet on rocks. Especially the guys, but not just the guys. However, the readers who are probably a little closer to my target demographic tended to go for the one I loved. And told me not to be nervous. Though I still asked Damon if he could do a little strategic blurring, which he did, so now I love it even more.

Of course, whether I love it is irrelevant. (And when I was an acquisitions editor, how dearly I wished my authors understood that.)  The question is: Will it work?

Here’s the deal. Other than the text of the book itself, which is what it is at this point, I see everything I’m doing right now as an experiment. I put out a cover that worked pretty well, especially when the book was free, but not well enough to sustain full-price sales even with a lot of nice reviews racked up and a good ride on Amazon after my free days. Ads of the book at full price seldom got any clicks, no matter what the copy said. Which meant no curiosity was being excited by that cover.

So now I’ll try this one. It will either increase clicks and sales, or it won’t. If it doesn’t, I guess I’ll have learned something valuable.

But speaking as the product manager for my own book, I just think it’s a much better cover. It has excellent, uncluttered use of color and typography, and it has a focal point. As a reader you might wonder why this woman looks so tightly wound — which doesn’t actually literally fit the scene of the book from which this could be taken — but it captures the heroine’s problem at the beginning of this book perfectly. I also think this cover is an excellent, flexible design basis for the books yet to come.

Next time I’ll go straight to Damon Za right from the beginning (if I can afford him, anyway). So, here it is.

Displaying TheAwfulMess3b.jpg

The paperback pages are getting final corrections right now, and I dearly hope it will be available on Amazon before the month is out.

Hate it? Prefer the rocks?

Go buy the e-book quickly and never delete it and reload it from your Amazon account, and you’ll have the old version!

Or, buy the PG-13 edition. (You can only get to that version with a precise search by title, or a link. Confusingly, the sales copy for that edition is exactly the same and warns you about the sex, but if it says PG-13 on the cover it ought to be the clean version. I do not understand the mysterious workings of Amazon in this matter, but with a grand total of three or four sales to date on that edition, I’m not going to worry about it either. That’s also why I don’t plan to change that PG-13 Edition cover. So if you want, get that one. You’ll have to give up a little sex, but that way you can, um, keep your rocks on. Yeah, I actually went there. Sorry.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Authenticity vs. not being a hack … or a bitch

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Some of the unwritten rules for authors that I’ve read: Help each other out, never give a bad review, and avoid getting into hot button issues that might lose you potential  readers.

This is harder than I ever imagined.

First of all, while my first book The Awful Mess is about how people can come together despite having very different religious and political ideas, any reasonably capable reader is going to come to some conclusions about my own beliefs by reading it.

So do I really need to hide them in my social marketing?

I’ve tried picking my battles, but the book is clearly in favor of gay rights and marriage equality and concerned with issues of hunger and poverty, so those I’ll tweet and post. I try to avoid the more overtly partisan stuff, but it’s probably creeping in more and more over time. It’s just really, really hard to not be my authentic (opinionated!) self.

Two, when it comes to helping other authors, I’m happy to help by sharing tips or advice, and I’ll retweet that kind of thing from others very happily, as well as new or free or bargain books if I’ve at least heard they’re good from people I trust. This is especially true if they are coming from people in similar genres, or have come from a site that appears to practice some quality control.

But I’m not going to fill my relatively sparse twitter feed with tweets for stuff I haven’t read, may never read, and have no reason to believe my own readers would read. If this means I’m not playing the game right, I guess there’s some hope I may yet learn the rules. (I’m still new to this.) But right now I just don’t see the point.

Three, I have a really hard time leaving glowing reviews for books that I think have issues. What can I say? I grade students all day. I can’t just be nice — I want reviews to mean something. But me leaving a less-than-glowing review for your book isn’t good for either of us, because then you’re not happy … and I look like a bitch.

This is why I just won’t accept free indie books for review anymore unless an author swears that an honest review or honest private feedback instead is okay, and seems to really mean it. And even then, I think I really shouldn’t. There’s just too much pressure.

If you’re an author, I’d be  curious  to hear how you handle these issues. I also invite you to let me know where I’m going wrong!

Sincere blasphemy

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My book The Awful Mess: A Love Story is a contemporary twist on The Scarlet Letter that naturally features a priest who gets himself into a very bad spot.

Hawthorne didn’t inspire this book, and I didn’t set out to model mine after his. I think I was nearly done with the first draft when I suddenly realized I was echoing The Scarlet Letter in some major ways. I hadn’t read it since high school, though, so I promptly reread it — this time with much more appreciation than I’d had at 17.

My errant cleric is an Episcopal priest because this book was actually inspired by the sad  coincidence of knowing three separate married Episcopal priests who had cheated on their spouses in the course of their duties and thereby wrecked their careers.

(They had not cheated with me, I hasten to add!)

These were three men who were dynamic in the pulpit and beloved of their congregations. Why would they risk all that for an affair? But I also knew they were hardly alone in this.

That’s how I eventually arrived at Arthur, who wasn’t Arthur at all in the very first draft. I changed his name when I realized how much he had in common with Arthur Dimmesdale. (Roger’s name changed at that point, too.)

Anyway, why would a man do this? I decided that Arthur needed to be feeling trapped and stale to go so wrong, so I gave him a miserable marriage, as well as the problem of knowing a lot more provocative Biblical scholarship than the average congregation would ever want to hear. (Not that I’m entirely convinced he wouldn’t have cheated anyway, mind you.)

Then I needed someone for my errant priest to mess with. And that was another puzzle. What self-respecting woman would want to sleep with a married priest? And who would be stupid enough to get pregnant in the process?

My husband and I had dealt with infertility issues ourselves, so I had my answer to the second question. If you think you’re infertile, you never bother with birth control (except, ironically, during infertility treatments).

So I made Mary someone who had been cast off, and was just lonely and isolated enough to indulge in the immediate physical comfort of something she herself didn’t think was right. (I just couldn’t rename her Hester. NOBODY is named Hester.)

Anyway, for the priest, I figured Mary could represent a welcome break from having to be a spiritual leader all the time. But oddly enough, every time I tried to write Arthur seeking solace in Mary’s lack of religion (and/or her pants), he kept trying to save her soul anyway. And that’s because the man is still a sincere Christian, if a rather flagrant sinner. He’s a Christian, even though he clearly has wrestled with doubt, and doesn’t put much store in purity – or his own vows – and his theology is about as progressive as it can get and still be called Christian.

Religiously, I actually have a lot in common with Arthur. I don’t share his disregard for marital fidelity, but I do share his theology. I used to find his ideas – for example, about the virgin birth – absolutely appalling. I even left a church once because the priest was espousing them. But since then I’ve learned more, and changed my opinion about that and many other aspects of my belief.

I can still vividly remember what it was like to be so appalled, though. I can fully understand having that kind of belief, being viscerally attached to that kind of belief, while still being a perfectly intelligent person.(Atheists just don’t get how this is possible, in my experience.)

So I can value Bert’s Evangelical faith, for example. Most of all, though, I appreciate that even though he feels strongly that many things in the world are an abomination to God, he still finds it in his heart to love rather than to condemn when it really matters.

And sometimes that love is expressed in very practical ways: With food. With a coat. With shelter. With comfort to to the sick, or to those in prison.

With forgiveness.

It’s all there in the gospels, multiple times, attributed to Jesus. And that is a Jesus whose fan club I can happily remain a member of, even after I have come to doubt many aspects of the creed. Not because I expect to burn in hellfire if I don’t believe, but because I respect His teachings and want to follow them.

Anyway, as I expected, I’ve gotten some occasional grief from religious reviewers. I kept my book out of the Christian category to avoid the worst of it, but I didn’t feel I should be chased out of “religion and spirituality” completely, and so at the moment I’m drafting this, if you type in “women’s religion and spirituality” my book still shows up on the front page.

I expected some condemnation, but I’m actually impressed by the kindness shown by some people who clearly don’t share all the book’s beliefs.

(I’m also still new enough at this to be tickled to have any reviews, period.)

This blog post is, however, my rather long-winded attempt to refute the reviewer who says that the book feels insincere. She writes:

I liked the characters, and I thought the story interesting enough for 4 stars. However, I downgraded it to 3 because I felt it had a quasi-religious agenda that came across forced. The religious agenda was also somewhat blasphemous. If you have to force feed a position, it doesn’t resonate with truth. This book had undertones of man twisting God to be whatever man wants him to be so as not to have to change our behavior. It just felt insincere. Good plot though. And well paced writing.

She was generous enough to give me credit where she felt credit was due, so I can’t  complain. But I’d like her and anyone who thinks that way to know that my “religious agenda” is entirely sincere.

Because I firmly believe that if you are a Christian, or even just a human, then giving and accepting love should be more important to you than anything else.

 

Stories as low-tech GPS

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Between kind reviews given freely and lots of other favors, I’ve been the object of quite a bit of charity lately. My heroine Mary in The Awful Mess: A Love Story is not at all graceful at accepting help from others, but she’s gotten better at it by the end of the novel.

Which is good. Because we all need help sometimes.

I got some this week from Jenny Milchman, the talented and persistent author of the debut suspense novel Cover of Snow. She featured me in one of her “Made It Moment” blog posts this weekend (at http://www.jennymilchman.com/blog/2013/09/27/made-it-moment-sandra-hutchison/comment-page-1/#comment-163660.) Fellow indie author Lisa Arrington did this for me, too, earlier this month.

It’s been really nice hearing back from some other authors who also devote a portion of their book earnings to good causes. But I also believe that most people who read and write fiction find ways to help others, somehow … if only because reading fiction builds empathy for others (while also providing some of the health advantages of feeling part of a social group).

I was reading a book yesterday (okay, skimming it — it was overdue at the library!) called Wired for Story that uses pop neurology to review the rules of good fiction writing. And one of the rules was that a protagonist’s life has to get messed up — by the protagonist.  And then it needs to keep getting even more messed up before any resolution is reached. And that is indeed the basic plot of just about any good novel you pick up.

Audrey Hepburn, 'Perils of Pauline' - Imgur

Audrey Hepburn, ‘Perils of Pauline’ – Imgur

Don’t you wish you could just jump into the book and save your favorite characters? You want to shake them when they’re being stupid, tell them not to go through that door, beg them not to trust that shady character, suggest they finally bare their hearts instead of hiding their feelings … whatever it is that’s keeping them from happiness. You also want to reassure them when they’re at their lowest that it will all work out in the end.

Of course, in some books it doesn’t all work out in the end, and I find that those cautionary tales often stay with me the longest — House of Mirth kept me up for hours just brooding about how it had ended.1984 was another one. If I’m remembering correctly, Wired for Story said that’s part of why we humans share stories, too: we’re teaching each other how to avoid disaster … literally, we’re teaching each other how to survive.

In other words, literature is a kind of high-level mutual GPS that we developed centuries before we got any satellites into the atmosphere.

(Of course, sometimes even a high-tech GPS can lead you wrong. And I wouldn’t suggest you read Fifty Shades of Grey for relationship advice.)

Anyway, it’s all food for thought on a day when we’re coming to the end of Hunger Action Month. I have in no way made enough in royalties to reach my goal of $1,000 for Feeding America. (Talk about sheer hubris!) I haven’t even made enough to cover my advertising costs. However, the $100 I put in at the beginning will do for now, and I’ll keep adding 10% month by month (plus whatever I have to add in order to not be embarrassed). So one of these decades it will get there.

I think about this failure as I consider that I was included in a “Made It Moment” when I so obviously haven’t yet made it as an author. But that was Jenny helping me, as she has helped so many other authors, and as others have helped her. Sometimes we just need to accept that hand up, and then remember to pay it forward.

Safe travels!

 

 
 

Lessons from a garage sale

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Saturday my town held a town-wide garage sale. We participated, since we once again expect to put the house on the market this spring. (That’s a story for another time.)

Photo: Garage Sale Day

Saturday dawned damp and chilly and it occurred to me too late that we could have made a lot more money selling hot cocoa. We did manage to make almost a hundred bucks, though. More importantly, we cleared out a lot of stuff, including a weight bench and weights nobody wanted to have to drag back into the house.

Just before noon my next-door neighbor Chris brought her toddler granddaughter over to say hi and do a little shopping. After checking on our cats up in the house (always a high priority), Lily made it her mission to make sure the scant supply of toy cars and trucks on offer was successfully sold.

In fact, she didn’t want to leave until the very last one was gone. Every person who walked up our driveway she immediately accosted with, “Wouldn’t you like to buy a truck?”

Under that uniquely adorable sales pressure, quite a number of shoppers happily shelled out the required 25 cents, even those who really didn’t need a toy at all. Finally there was only one little truck left, and her grandmother and I agreed it would make an excellent present for her older brother. (Anything to help our ace sales girl and Nana get some lunch!)

Lily put me to shame. In fact, after I saw her in action, I realized I should have had my little postcards for my book out, ready to hand sell to anyone who looked interested in the books we were selling used.

So I went and got them and handed them to a couple of folks who were clearly readers. This may not have resulted in any sales, but the conversations were fun.

Now, I suspect that darling toddlers can get away with more salesmanship than middle-aged authors. Some of my friends are no doubt getting weary of my marketing at this point, though a few will even pitch in, bless them.

But there were other lessons, too. One is that when you really want to get rid of stuff, you price it lower or just give it away. A lot of our crap just disappeared from the end of the driveway in our free pile, even that rusty outdoor table and umbrella set.

Oddly enough, after I took down the “garage sale” sign and piled free stuff at the end of our (long) driveway and started putting other stuff away, we suddenly got more customers than before. And they were actually buying.

Maybe the weather had just improved, or maybe advertising isn’t as straightforward as you’d think. Did the pile suggest there was a lot more available down the driveway? Did it suggest the prices would be good? I don’t know. All I know is that it seemed to make a big difference.

A lot of successful self-published authors say the number one thing they had to do – other than writing good books and making sure they looked professional – was get to a critical mass of published titles. Once they achieved that, one title could sell the others. Sometimes putting one free for a while was the best way to goose sales for the others.

But a free solo title can’t sell anything unless it really goes viral, which clearly hasn’t happened to my book at this point. Otherwise, once it’s been given away, there’s nothing to sell. (I certainly could have tried harder to get a mailing list out of it, though — oh well.)

Giving my book away free earlier this month wasn’t a total bust. I netted seven lovely new Amazon reviews from strangers (okay, make that eight lovely ones and one moderately cranky one — and this figure may change regularly) — plus a tiny little burst of sales. I also had some fun conversations. Hopefully more reviews will come, and sales will be at least slightly better than they were before.

But I won’t be feeding as many Americans as I’d hoped. Unless something radical changes, Feeding America is going to have to make do with the $100 bucks I put in when I started this month’s campaign. Hopefully it will grow over time when I add their 10% each month. But I now doubt that will happen in any way that is the least bit impressive until I hit that critical mass of titles.

Then, with any luck, the books can sell each other. Because selling on Amazon when you’re nobody is sort of like having a garage sale at the end of a long, heavily-treed driveway. Sometimes you just have to put out that pile of free stuff to get some buyers to come down and check it out.

So I need more books up. Now if I can just figure out how to fit all this in with the four comp classes, a garden full of produce that needs preserving, and a house that needs to be readied for sale, I’ll be all set.

If you’re interested, here’s my September postcard (I’m mostly proud of finally figuring out what the heck QR codes are and how to use them!):

postcard330resfrontAnd the back (hurriedly revised after my free days appeared to be going kerplooey):

AwfulMesspostcardbwHungerSeptember

Learn from my newbie mistakes in self publishing

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Or don’t. Sometimes you just have to make your own mistakes. But in case you might want to avoid a few…here are some of mine, transformed into words to the wise.

1. Don’t publish before you’ve established a platform.

I didn’t start blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, or Goodreading as an author until I published my book. While this is a fairly unforgivable lapse with a new traditionally-published book (which is likely to disappear along with your writing career if it doesn’t sell in its first season out), you’ll just have to play catch-up if you’ve published it yourself. Self-publishing is very forgiving of this particular newbie mistake. (Yay.)

I also didn’t start because I couldn’t imagine what the heck I would blog about before my book was published. Most novelists seem to end up blogging about writing or writers or books or their genre, or something that might conceivably be of interest to their future readers. It seemed to me there was a glut of that already available. So I waited until, well, I really had to do it.

Newbie mistake, but in my case I think it was fairly unavoidable unless I could come up with some niche I could become an expert in that was related to my fiction. And, frankly, I’m all over the place in my interests, and I’m still not really ready to be pinned down.

At least now my mistakes are providing plenty of material.

2. Don’t get demoralized by your rankings.

If you made the first newbie mistake, you’re likely to see your book rank somewhere in the tens of thousands in the first rush of family and friends (this is at Amazon – other retail sites may have smaller numbers to begin with). This first rush is never as big as you thought it would be based on what people told you to your face. (Shocking, I know!)

After that, you’ll be mired down in the hundred thousandths somewhere. And no one will ever see your book again unless you somehow point it out to them.  That’s just the deal.  Don’t brood about it. Start marketing, or focus on the next book — for which you will finally have a platform. Ideally, do both.

Pssst … need a pick-me-up even more than you need sales? One thing that makes me feel good, even though it’s utterly useless as a marketing tool, is having “Episcopal” as one of my precious seven keywords. This is a tiny category and that means it’s easy to float to the top of the first page with a search term like “Episcopal fiction” when I’m selling anything at all. It means I’m actually keeping company with favorite authors like Gail Godwin and Julia Spencer Fleming! It won’t do my sales a damned bit of good – might even hurt them, as opposed to a more popular keyword – but it has helped my morale immeasurably. In this gig, you take whatever little victories you can!

3. Don’t assume all your friends and family will rush to review it.

They just won’t, just as real readers generally only include a tiny percentage of reviewers. Most people are not comfortable reviewing, especially if they feel they can’t say anything negative at all because they know you. Some people are particularly uncomfortable about it specifically because they DO know you (you can help with both of these by assuring them that you really don’t mind a four-star review or a disclaimer about your relationship – assuming you really mean that, and won’t sulk about it – and be honest with yourself, or you’re not being fair to them).

The reviews you do get may not help in exactly the way you had envisioned. Get over it. Realize that you are blessed by ANY positive review. A lot of mine mention beach reading, which was great in June. Now it’s September. This just means I need to get more reviews.

4. Go out and beat the bushes for impartial reviews from thorough reviewers.

You’re self-published. This is your job. Traditional book reviewers are not going to waste their time on you unless you become a phenomenon, nor should they. Maybe your local paper will take on the local interest angle, but consider yourself lucky if that happens. Kirkus and PW and so forth will happily take your money, and maybe you’ll be one of the rare self-published souls to earn a starred review or some recognition. However, they often don’t star even my all-time favorite traditionally-published books, so I don’t like my chances.

That doesn’t mean you can’t get reviews. There are dozens of groups and web sites and blogs where you can request reviews on Facebook. I think it may be more effective, though, to trawl among the reviewers on Amazon and Goodreads, especially people who have written interesting, thorough reviews of books you love (or hate the same way they do). Not counting my friend Nandini, who compared my book to Charlotte Bronte’s (swoon!), the person who gave me my favorite review so far at Goodreads was someone I asked just because I so enjoyed her review of someone else’s book. (She compared my writing to Iris Murdoch’s, which is funny because I’ve picked up lots of Irish Murdoch novels over the years and always decided nah, not right now. Guess I’d better try again.)

By the way, avoid “trading” reviews. How can you be certain you’ll like the other author’s book? There’s a reason self-published “five-star” books are often regarded with suspicion, and it’s because of this organized review trading.

If you have the budget for it, use NetGalley to save yourself a lot of trouble. I’m definitely going that route next time. I didn’t this time around and I’ve done okay, but it was a hard slog. (Also, next time I expect my book to be a bit controversial, so I’m going to need a higher volume of reviews to make up for the people who hate it.)

Hopefully, Amazon will allow pre-ordering for indie publishers one of these days, since that makes all the difference as you gather pre-publication reviews. If they don’t by the time I publish another title, I may go with Smashwords first.

5. Don’t fail to read all the fine print. Then read it again and imagine the worst case scenario.

This applies in all your dealings with giant impersonal commercial entities that shall not be named. Don’t expect flexibility, kindness, humanity, or clear answers that don’t simply repeat the boilerplate language you already tried to parse the first time around and got wrong. Just know that even if there’s a possibility you made an honest mistake, there will probably be no mercy shown.

Try to get a clear answer before you do anything if only to document that you didn’t get a clear answer, not that it will matter. You could still get squashed by a giant foot at the worst possible time. If so, forgive yourself for getting it wrong, apologize to anyone who deserves an apology, and move on.

6. Keep track of every single marketing effort.

Did you submit your book to this web site or that Facebook page? When? Do you need to notify them because you changed a price or did something else that changed the deal? (Perhaps a giant foot suddenly came down and squashed you?) How do you contact them?

Put together a spreadsheet and take careful notes. You think you’ll remember, or you’ll find it in your sent mail, but you might not, especially when you’re in the panicked state of having-just-been-squashed-by-a-giant-foot.

7. Don’t freak out because you didn’t take advantage of some amazing strategy!

The internet and the bookstores are full of advice about all the various opportunities self-published authors are failing to take advantage of every day. Things you didn’t put in your book. Things you didn’t put on your web site.  Things you didn’t put on your cover, or stupidly DID put on your cover. Your purchase of this versus your purchase of that. Failure to network here or friend there. The keyword strategy that would have immediately shot you to the top of the bestseller’s list! The hot new SEO program that would have guaranteed you a thousand new sales in one week! Passive income that pours in without you lifting a finger!

Does something sound like it might be worth trying without requiring a big investment? Okay, so take a deep breath, think about it, maybe try it out. Just test it, if you can. One thing at a time. If you can figure out how, try doing an A/B split (test one version versus another). Try the winner with different slices of the audiences. When you find something that clearly works, roll it out, but keep testing. That is the simple secret of all direct marketing success in the real world. Traditional authors can do this with their own marketing efforts, but they don’t get to play with price or change covers or copy at will. Indie authors can do whatever they want, within reason. (Better keep good records, though, so you can figure out what it means when you’re done. And watch out for those giant feet!)

Is something ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEED TO WORK? That’s a huckster claim made by someone who understands effective (if not entirely legal) copywriting. Even if there might be a few kernels of truth being offered, never lay out good money for “guaranteed” riches and you will avoid a lot of pain in this world. On the other hand, sensible advertising for which you can see results may be necessary if you want your book to succeed. Start small and test to see if it works. Do the math and see if it really works in a sustainable way, unless you have money to burn.

I got to see first-hand in my first free promotion what a difference it made to do some modest advertising, because most of it didn’t kick in for awhile: it made a huge difference. Whether that will pay off in actual sales down the road is another question. I have already gained new reviews, so I consider that a win of some kind.

8. Don’t stop writing.

Actually, I’m making this mistake right now, but I knew that would happen when I signed up to teach four classes instead of two this semester. Sometimes financial reality trumps writing time. But a nice cold winter without any garden to care for and the usual reduction in courses that comes  with spring semester may mean more free time. I’ll catch up then by setting ambitious deadlines for myself. I have to, or I’ll pay a hefty price for this inactivity.

If you believe in your work, you have to find a way to keep doing it. That’s why you’re going through all this hassle in the first place, right? That’s the most basic rule of all. (Not that it’s anyone’s business but your own, really.)

9. Don’t make it ALL about your writing.

Those four classes I’m teaching also happen to be the balm of my existence right now. My friends have been so kind, but it’s actually when I’m teaching that I completely forget about any giant feet that might have recently come down to squash me. I get to just focus on my students as writers and forget about myself as one.

Find something that allows you to focus completely on someone other than yourself for at least some part of the day. It’s just good for you.

Do you have any advice to share from your own newbie mistakes?

Author makes awful mess of a promotion for a novel called “The Awful Mess”

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It’s so much more fun to write irony than to live it.

I poured considerable energy and money into a free promotion for my book I scheduled for Sept. 2-6, but it turns out that I screwed up in a very basic way by not realizing the Kindle Select program would consider the PG-13 edition of my book too similar to the adult version.

So, although I tried to fix the issue immediately, yanking that [utterly non-selling] title from other retail sites takes time, and that means I’m barred from that free promotion for now.

This after sending out at least a dozen press releases, plus some notes to former congregations.

And after getting a lovely, now inaccurate article in the Monadnock Ledger (maybe it’s still there, or maybe they pulled it). Which my college marketing department noticed and wanted to celebrate, of course, just when I was comforting myself that at least THEY didn’t know about my screw-up.

And after investing in advertising that in most cases I will just have to swallow a loss on.

This is where I take a deep breath. Someday I’m sure I’ll laugh about this. Just not yet. For one thing, I have way too many revised press releases to get out.

Anyway, adjusting in the only way I can, here’s the new plan: I’ll reduce the price to 99 cents for the entire month of September, and still donate any earnings to Feeding America at my virtual campaign page here. And I’ll continue to donate 10% of earnings going forward, because not having a free promotion probably means my fund will be pretty pathetic. (I was planning to do that anyway, though.)

To put things in perspective, at least I’m not pregnant by a married priest I don’t even love and unable to tell the guy I really like what happened.

Also, I’m not going to bed hungry, or wondering how to keep my family fed. Too many people in this country can’t say that.

Anyway, my apologies if I’ve put you in an embarrassing spot with any of this. The rest of you have permission to laugh. (Though to be completely honest, I wouldn’t mind a “there, there.”)

Onward.

The Affordable Care Act and my writing life

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There’s a little scene in my book between my heroine, Mary, and Winslow, a town cop who’s made his interest in her pretty clear. She has just been laid off and isn’t feeling terribly well (for reasons many readers will have guessed) as they await Sunday dinner at Winslow’s dad’s farm:

The cracker was helping, and she reached for another with genuine appetite.
“There, you look better. You might want to get your blood sugar checked.”
“I haven’t gotten a doctor here yet. I probably just need to eat a better breakfast.”
“Potter is good; you met him when Father Arthur was sick.”
“I suppose I probably should get a check-up before the insurance runs out.”
“What do you mean?”
“It ends when my severance ends.”
“No COBRA?”
She shook her head. “It’s very expensive.”
“You could get in a jam if you drop it. I’ve seen it happen.”
“And I might lose the house if I have to pay COBRA. I think that would qualify as more of a jam.”
He leaned back. “Lawson Police Department employees have excellent family health coverage.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Is there a job opening I should know about?”
“I just thought you should know.” He smiled.
Was this what passed for flirting nowadays? Look, baby, I’ve got great health insurance.

It’s not exactly the stuff of romance, is it? COBRA?  Fear of getting in a jam without health insurance? I’m dating my book! This scene should be completely obsolete soon. If by some miracle it’s still being read in fifty years, those readers will be wondering what the hell I’m talking about.

God, I hope so.

But I don’t feel bad about dating it. What would Jane Austen be without her attention to what various incomes — or lack thereof — meant to our heroines? Their economic reality informed every major choice they made.

As you might have guessed, I’m a big fan of meeting people’s basic human need for access to affordable health care. So I’m a fan of the ACA even though it put a serious wrench in my life this year – and will probably do so again next year.

Last spring I learned that the college where I’ve taught for four years wasn’t going to allow adjuncts to teach more than two classes this fall. Usually I’ve had twice that, although it’s  not anything I can truly depend on.

For some of my most talented teaching friends, this was salutary. They got the hell out. The adjunct life is demoralizing enough without losing any hope of scraping a living out of it. While in the past, this college had hired mostly from its adjunct pool, that hadn’t happened for four years and wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon. And while the college has faced serious challenges, like most of the rest of American higher education and quite a lot of American business, it has gotten far too comfortable with its vast supply of cheap, part-time, non-benefited workers.

For me, though, this presented an opportunity. I wanted more time to devote to my writing, I wanted to try to make a go of self-publishing, and I also wanted to stay in the classroom. Plus, these days my husband has the primary job and benefits in our family, and the tax man would actually penalize us if I got a good full-time job.

So I decided this summer was the perfect time to start Sheer Hubris Press. (Okay, so I also tried for a teaching gig at UAlbany, but I correctly guessed that I had little chance of getting it.)

Then the provision in the Affordable Care Act that caused all this havoc was delayed for a year. I dithered for a little while before I volunteered for more courses. Now I’m back up to my normal load of four.

So …now life gets crazy. I’ve had a full summer getting Sheer Hubris Press underway, but next week approximately 96 students become my top priority.

But it’s okay. One, I really do love teaching. A successful class recharges me in ways nothing else can. I love my students.

Two, it doesn’t hurt to get a little more money in the bank. The Awful Mess: A Love Story isn’t going to be paying our mortgage any time soon. I have high hopes that a promotion I have planned for next month will at least get it some recognition (check back next Monday!), but I’m going to be giving away the earnings it might bring in, at least for the month of September.

One, it’s for a good cause (Feeding America — because I’m also a big fan of the basic human right to not go hungry.). Two, as author friend Jenny Milchman put it only recently, this writing business is a very long game. That’s even more the case when you’re indie-publishing and nobody knows who you are. And that’s why I chose this route, actually. I suspect that my books are going to require a very long game, longer than a traditional publisher can afford.

So if you don’t see me flapping about marketing my book a whole lot after next month, you’ll know why. I’ll still be carrying on in the background, between student essays. Next up: A paperback edition (because I’ve gotten a book group request), and getting the next book ready for publication. And I have to fit in the premier of that one-act play, too, somehow!

I do plan to keep this blog up. I usually make my students write the equivalent of a paper a week, so it’s the least I can do.

Thanks so much for being here with me at the beginning!

The shakedown cruise is over — time to head out

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Having finally successfully updated my book file on Amazon, and feeling satisfied that I have some good reviews in place (even a couple in the UK), I just spent too much of this lovely weekend holed up with my computer, plotting my publicity campaign.

Last week’s pessimism is gone under control. I got a good scolding/pep talk from a couple of readers (thank you!), but I also find that whenever I get involved in advertising something I tend to get excited about it. (I’m not just talking about my own stuff, either – I’ve been known to get excited about life insurance.)

Fair warning, poor friends: I start hitting up my contacts on Facebook and beyond again this week. You’ll be asked to “like” my static author page and book page (just to make FB even more confusing than it already is with a Sandy and a Sandra). I’ll be mining my scary email contact list (it goes back years and is probably full of dead addresses). I’ll hit up my LinkedIn connections, too.

And I’ll be trying to create an opt-in email list that isn’t just a subscription to the blog, so you can expect something about that.

Since my brother Drew happens to be an experienced videographer, I asked him if he’d like to make a book trailer for me. He is interested, so I wrote up a rough draft of a script for that this weekend and we’ll see what we can come up with to publicize both my book and his video capabilities for the author market.

And I’ll be sending out press releases to every news organization even remotely connected to the novel or to me, and even notifying a few of my old churches.

This whole push is timed to the book going Kindle Select so that I can offer it free for five days at the beginning of September. I’m going to urge folks who get it free to donate whatever they think it’s worth in food or funds to their local food bank or to a virtual campaign I’m setting up for Feeding America. Any subsequent royalties I earn on that title at Kindle during September will go into that campaign, too.

I got a fourth class to teach next semester, so we can do this without financial pain, and I’ve decided that the best way to deal with the horror of publicizing myself is to put the proceeds towards a good cause.

Since part of my publicity campaign involves hitting up some churches or church-related enterprises, I’m glad I still have a PG13 version around, although I expect absolutely nothing from it at this point. On the plus side, it does mean I can go Kindle Select with the adult version and still offer the PG13 version at the other retailers. Unless something changes, though, I won’t be bothering with this strategy on the next book.

Once the semester really gets going, I’ll be too busy teaching to do much more marketing. But my short play “Nude with Bearded Irises” is being performed in October, so that will give me another little shot of local publicity.

I might time another free period or a new short story collection to go out right after Christmas, for another little bump.

And that’s probably it until we start all over again with The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire next summer. We plan to sell the house next spring so we can downsize a bit. Along with getting a book ready to publish and coursework, I think I’ll be busy enough.

That’s the plan, anyway. Do you have any suggestions?

Analyzing a really bad at-bat

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Here’s a tidbit: The PG13 edition of The Awful Mess: A Love Story — which is the only one up there — has 22 sample downloads at Smashwords and zero sales. This means that 22 people who probably didn’t know me at all (since I’ve never mentioned or linked to that version) were interested enough to try it, but not interested enough to buy.

Now, this little data point doesn’t necessarily mean a whole lot. Smashwords readers may be an odd subset of people. There’s an awful lot of erotica there, for example. (But would those readers click on PG13 in the first place?) There’s also an awful lot of Christian romance (they might try PG13, but they’d probably be turned off by this book pretty quickly).

I could also try lowering the price and seeing if that makes any difference. Believe it or not, $3.99 is on the high side for indie-published e-books these days.

Still, batting 0 for 22 sucks.

Can I get anything out of this tidbit?

For one, it suggests that the cover and sales blurb can’t be too awful, but what these folks read just isn’t grabbing them.

I wish Amazon would let me know how many people have clicked “Preview this book,” but it doesn’t. Of course, at Amazon it’s unlikely anyone would ever see it in the first place, unless they’re browsing Episcopal fiction, the one category tiny enough that my book sometimes appears on the first page.

I’m beginning to realize exactly why so many agents felt this was a good book but a hard sell.

Because it IS a hard sell. (Doh!)

Even some of my kindest reviews point out that the first chapter suggests Mary’s life is going to be about nothing but cats and isolation.

To me that’s a clear signal that it will be anything but — which obviously doesn’t work as well I’d hoped. I’m still not sure how I could avoid that and still set up what I want to set up there.

(You can be sure I’m thinking a lot harder about how to make sure the first chapter of the NEXT book grabs any reader I can get in a choke-hold.)

So my expectations for this novel have been usefully lowered even further than they were when I started this experiment.

But onward and upward. Maybe one of these books one of these days will break out, and then the others might find their audiences, too. Or maybe the next novel will offend enough people that it will attract more attention. (I’m afraid I’m not joking about that.) Or maybe I’ll just continue to sell to a very, very small group.

And that’s fine, too.

Thank you for being part of my very, very small group!