Writing is a business

Every now and then, I see someone say something like, "Oh, you silly indie writers! All you're interested in is money! What about art?"

Well, what about it? Some of us write art, and some of us are just hack writers, but hopefully we're all trying to improve our writing to the best of our ability. But what's wrong with trying to make money at it as well? No one should feel like they have to apologize for being happy about making money. Writing is a business. A lot of indies are thrilled and excited because this is the first time (perhaps in ten or twenty years) that they've ever made significant amounts of money at writing, and that's a great feeling. Why chastise them for it, and suggest that they're focusing on the wrong thing?

Personally, it seems to me that if I find myself making more and more money at writing, that's an indication that my business is becoming more successful all the time. And that's something to cheer about.

Twitter, where have you gone?

I can't get to Twitter this morning. How irritating is that???

B&N overhauls its image

From this article (link lifted from the Amazon boards): "The giant book retailer Barnes & Noble Inc. has hired Mullen, one of Boston’s biggest ad agencies, as its creative and media agency of record. Mullen will lead a $40 million marketing push to overhaul the brand....Barnes & Noble wants to capture more of the e-reader market, and much of the rebranding campaign will focus on the Nook, its e-reader device."

When traditionally brick and mortar stores start trying to reposition themselves in the public's eyes as all about e-readers, it seems to me that says a lot about the importance of ebooks in today's publishing market. Also, note that they are spending a LOT more on this advertising campaign than they spent in the past two years. I suspect they see this as a do-or-die kind of repositioning.

More new covers

Again by T.M. Roy of TERyvisions, so that my contemporaries all have a branded look:

New cover

T.M. Roy of TERyvisions just redid my All I Ever Wanted cover:

Michael J. Sullivan

Michael Sullivan's self-pubbed fantasy series has been picked up by Orbit, a division of Hachette books. You can read about it here.

He gets his writing talent from me

My six-year-old spends a lot of time writing and illustrating stories. I came across this one while cleaning up some of the papers he's strewn across my office. He has a Star Wars Leapster program, and is very into Star Wars right now. Unlike his siblings, he's not an early reader, and he's just learning to spell and read, so he uses invented spellings.

C3P0 are we beeig atackt

Yes! Wer beeig atackt

Yol nevr git away with it

I have cut it! (Editor note: not sure what this means, but there's an illustration that might be someone cutting into the ship?)

Ha ha ha Anakin Well well well if your locig for R2Ds hee is dstroy Ha ha! grevis sade. Hee chukld.

In case you can't decipher that last line, it's, "'Ha ha ha, Anakin! Well, well, well. If you're looking for R2D2, he is destroyed. Ha ha!' Grievous said. He chuckled."

Quite the masterpiece, yes?

Hero's adventures at PetSmart

Hero and I went to PetSmart today, as we do about once a week. He behaved very nicely, and mostly ignored or sniffed politely at other dogs. However, when one German shepherd barked at him, he barked back and tried to lunge forward (to play, but I wasn't taking any chances that the other dog also wanted to play). I yanked him around too sharply, and he clobbered his head against a display, rather hard.

I got him away from the German shepherd, checked to make sure he hadn't hurt himself, and we went on. A while later, I got to talking with a guy, and when he tried to pat Hero, Hero shied back, cringing a little. This is very un-Herolike behavior (ordinarily everyone is his best friend), and I was surprised. I was still more surprised a little later when the cashier offered him a hand, and the very same thing happened. (He loves the cashier, who gives him ridiculous amounts of treats every time we visit the store.)

Once I thought about it from his perspective, however, I was able to figure out why he was acting that way. The incident with the German shepherd happened quite quickly-- probably too quickly for him to understand exactly what had happened. As far as he knew, he was walking through the store, and then something or someone abruptly clobbered him upside the head. Naturally he was a little worried every time someone extended a hand to him after that.

We'll have to go to PetSmart an extra time or two this week, and try to get him over the fear of suddenly being smacked in the head. Poor dumb dog!

Milestone

I am pleased to report I've sold over 35,000 downloads under both names since last February. Thank you to all my readers!

An earnings report

I looked over my reports this morning and found that I've already earned more money in the first nineteen days of February than I made in all of January-- and January was far and away my best month ever for sales up to that point. And the month is not over yet. (Note that this is for both pen names.) I observe that my sales on Amazon are down quite a bit... I'm making the vast majority of my sales on B&N right now. I do believe I'm a PubIt fan:-).

Work, work

My oldest is still home from school (she was up half the night hacking her lungs out), but I did manage to get my latest novella up on Amazon and B&N.

Of sick kids and scared moms

I was trying to get a book up today, but my oldest, who's had a cold, developed a rather ugly cough this morning, so I kept her home from school and got her a doctor appointment. (She has bronchitis and the doctor prescribed antibiotics, which should rapidly correct the problem.) I did get a good deal of editing done despite this, but the book isn't quite finished. Hopefully tomorrow will be a quiet day, so I can get all my work finished.

In the afternoon, the kid felt better, and (having gotten her learners permit yesterday) insisted on taking the car around the neighborhood for the first time. Despite a couple of scary moments (it's harder to steer around a corner than you might think, apparently), she did very well. I tried really hard not to be one of those nervous jittering parents (I had two of them, and didn't appreciate learning to drive with them), but I'm not really sure how well I did. Letting a fifteen-year-old drive your car is honestly a bit scary.

More on Apple

There's an article here on Apple's tactics re the iPad. Most interesting is this: "Amazon, Barnes & Noble Inc. and Google have all created applications for the iPhone and iPad that allow readers to access books they've bought through the companies' websites. But Apple now says that those booksellers must also sell their books through Apple's store or risk getting their applications booted from the iPad. Apple is also requiring that any e-books a company sells outside of Apple's store must be the same price — or higher." Therefore Amazon presumably can't up its prices on its iPad app to compensate for the lost 30%. They would just have to eat the loss, which I doubt they are willing to do.

An analyst quoted in the article says, "I honestly see this as a big mistake... Apple invited its competitors to be its partners and is now changing the rules on them."

The USA Today Bestseller list

Amanda Hocking is once again all over the USA Today bestselling books list, but another self-pubbed book is also on it this week-- Victorine Lieske's Not What She Seems.

Happy birthday

My dad is 94 years old today, woot! I'll be heading over to his house later this morning and taking him out for lunch:-).

Glad I didn't buy an iPad...

...because this feels like bait and switch to me. It'd be one thing if iPad had never allowed apps, but to let people get used to the Kindle app and then try to start charging for it... huh. Basically, it appears Apple wants a 30% cut of sales by July 1, or they'll remove apps such as Kindle, Netflix, and Hulu from the iPad.

Working

I'm working on getting a new paranormal (under my pen name) finished, and I contacted a cover designer to get a nice shiny cover for it. I think I'm making enough money on those books that I can afford to buy a nice professional cover up front. I'd like to start upgrading my Ellen Fisher covers too, but... one thing at a time, I guess.

Happy birthday, little guy

We had a birthday party for the six-year-old today. His grandparents came, as did his aunt, uncle and cousins. The party theme was pirates (except I couldn't get a pirate cake, so I wound up getting SpongeBob). The oldest led all the little kids in endless games of Red Light, Green Light, Simon Says, Mother May I?, and Hide and Seek-- not to mention the cherished ritual of Beat the Living Heck Outta That Pinata. A good time was had by all, despite a few whiny moments on the part of the birthday boy.

Words I am getting tired of reading

I'm getting very, very tired of seeing words along these lines from other indie authors: "Any illiterate can write (erotica/romance/erotic romance), put a sexy stock photo on it, price it for 99 cents, and make a gazillion dollars!"

Oh, do you really think so? Well then, go ahead, write it, put a sexy stock photo on it, and make yourself a gazillion dollars. But until you give it a try, please quit deprecating romance and erotica writers and implying that a chimpanzee could sell books in those categories. Okay? Thank you.

Grrrr

Yes, yes, I know we authors are never, ever supposed to whine about reviews. But I'm getting a bit tired of readers complaining about my pen name's books being too short when every one of them is marked clearly as a short story, and the precise word count given. I got a two-star review today: It was good but should have been noted as a short story because just as it gets going, it's over.

But it IS marked!!! It's right there in the description: SHORT STORY! For crying out loud!

Okay, I'm done whining now. Thank you:-).

Indie authors in the news

Amanda Hocking, H.P. Mallory, and J.A. Konrath are mentioned in a USA Today article about indie publishing.

"Hocking is selling so well that on Thursday, the three titles in her Trylle Trilogy (Switched, Torn and Ascend, the latest) will make their debuts in the top 50 of USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list."

Buy this book!

My friend, the lovely and accomplished Jody Wallace, has a new book out, One Thousand Kisses. I love the gorgeously romantic cover:Right now, you can get it at Samhain or B&N. It will be on Amazon soon.

Childhood TV

Cindy Procter-King posted about her childhood TV addictions, and that made me think about what I watched growing up. First of all, we were the last people in America to get a color TV. I don't think we got a color TV till I was close to college age, in the mid-eighties. So I watched everything on an old black and white television. And I wasn't allowed to watch much, anyway. But here are the shows I truly loved:

M*A*S*H. There was a point when I could instantly tell what season an episode was in by listening to the first few bars of the theme song. I also had most of the dialogue memorized. I was absolutely bonkers about this show for years. I have most of the DVD sets even now.

Doctor Who (the Tom Baker series). This didn't rerun endlessly the way M*A*S*H did, and I don't even know if I saw every Tom Baker episode there was-- it ran on PBS at odd hours of the day, and I was lucky to see as much as I did. I adored Tom Baker and at one point tried to learn to knit so I could make myself a long, long striped scarf. When I tried to watch one of these episodes recently, the horrifically bad effects just about ruined my enjoyment of the show, but Tom Baker is still awesome.

Battlestar Galactica. Apollo was boring, but Starbuck was my hero. I guess I liked bad boys.

The Hardy Boys. Sean Cassidy, baby! But in retrospect I don't remember a darn thing about the show except for him, so it must not have been really memorable.

Shows I watched, but wasn't necessarily rabid about, included:

Gilligan's Island (my parents thought this show was wildly funny for some reason). It reran on the station that would later become CBN (this was in Virginia Beach, where I grew up), and the good Christians in charge of the station carefully bleeped the word "beer" so it wouldn't corrupt young minds. Seriously. I am not making this up.
The Brady Bunch
Superman (the old show from the fifties)
Leave it to Beaver
Lassie (which left me with an undying love for large fluffy herding dogs)

Time flies, don't it, baby?

My "baby" is six years old today *sobs*. All my kids are growing up so fast!

My baby, back when he WAS a baby:

*Sighs*

I'm rockin' B&N

My pen name is doing great on B&N right now; I have five books in the top thousand. This makes me very happy:-).

Loooooongwiiiiiiinnnnded

Nothing irritates me more than when I post a promo on one of the Amazon threads dedicated to that purpose, and then someone posts one of those loooooong boooooorrrring posts listing all their books, the descriptions, and the reviews right after me. I have the strong suspicion no one reads those posts (I know I don't; keep it short and interesting or I'll skim right over you), but I also think they probably cause people to skim right over the post or two above it, too. Do me a favor and don't bore my readers along with yours:-P.

My advice is, don't be one of those people. Loooooong boooorrrring posts do not encourage readers to do anything but yawn and scroll past.

"A scrawler of second- and third-rate stuff"

A quote I came across and liked from Albert Payson Terhune (now best known as the author of Lad: A Dog, but one of the bestselling authors of his day):

"I found I could make more money as a scrawler of second- and third-rate stuff. While it is a noble thing to starve in a garret and to leave to posterity a few precious volumes which all folk praise and few read, yet to me there was something better worthwhile in grinding out work which brought me plenty of cash, if no high repute.

"I had known what it was to be hungry. I did not care to risk the experience again, either for myself or for those who depended on me. Deliberately, happily, I sold my highly putative literary birthright for a very actual and bounteous mess of pottage."

Or as my mom used to say, there's nothing wrong with being a hack writer:-).

Indies don't count

The new NYT ebook list specifically excludes "self-published books including single-vendor self-published titles," according to Amanda Hocking over on Kindleboards (quoting a PW newsletter). Snort. Are they afraid there will be a bunch of indies on the list or something?

Cash flow

Dean Wesley Smith has a good article here on indie vs. traditional publishing cash flow. It's full of assumptions that may or may not be true for you, as such articles must be, but it's still worth thinking about. For me, the biggest single reason to not try traditional publishing again is the payment lag. Even assuming I could sell something to New York (and that is always a really big if), it would take me months to find a new agent, and it would take that agent months to find me a publisher, and it would take still more months for me to get a partial advance... and all that time, I could have been making money from Amazon.

Monthly totals

Last month I sold a bit over 8000 copies total, which is the most I've sold in a month thus far. Also worth noting is that for the first time, I sold over a thousand copies of an Ellen Fisher book (Unwrapped) in a month.

Borders

Looks like Borders may in fact be headed for bankruptcy protection as early as next week, according to this article. "The second-biggest U.S. bookstore chain by sales will likely close at least 150 stores, one of the sources said."

This makes me sad:-(.

Apple cracks down on apps

The NYT reports that Apple "has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store.

Apple rejected Sony’s iPhone application, which would have let people buy and read e-books bought from the Sony Reader Store...The move could affect companies like Amazon.com and others that sell e-book readers that compete with Apple’s iPad tablet and offer free mobile apps so customers can read their e-book purchases on other devices. An iPad owner, for instance, has not needed to own a Kindle to read Kindle books bought from Amazon.

That may now change."

No word yet on whether this will affect the Kindle app, but it seems ominous. Glad I didn't buy an iPad...