A couple of days ago I changed the sub-category of “Just Like Daddy” from Erotica>Suspense/Mystery to Literature>Transgressional. I was at 419 downloads. I stopped at 421.
The power of marketing or the minds of readers? Which do you think it is?
Hmm! Very Interesting! A Smashwords Experiment follow-up.
December 17, 2011 at 11:27 am (Writing)
Tags: e-publishing, marketing, self-publishing, Smashwords
A Smashwords Experiment
December 13, 2011 at 7:06 pm (self-publishing, Writing)
Tags: e-publishing, marketing, self-publishing, Smashwords
This past year, my primary goals have been editing viable material and expanding my networking. To that end, I have gotten involved with Twitter, Linkedin, and Klout. I have published two collections of poetry on Lulu and continued to promote my existing catalog on Smashwords.
The world of e-publishing is expanding at an amazing exponential degree and Gordon Kessler, president of the KWA, has strongly advocated a focus on it. I decided to offer two short stories on Smashwords for free as a small way of generating buzz.
The first story was “Just Like Daddy” concerning an unnamed prostitute who dresses up for her clients to help them fulfill their fantasy. It ends with a violent crime.
The second story was “How to Kill Your Boss and Get Away With It”, a tongue in cheek crime story inspired by my wife’s comment after a particularly difficult day at work.
I placed the first one under the category Fiction>Erotica>Suspense/Mystery. The second one was filed under Fiction>Literature>Transgressional. I uploaded them one day part, the first one eight days ago and the second a week ago.
As of today, “Just Like Daddy” has had 406 downloads. “How to Kill Your Boss and Get Away With It” has had 25.
Title? Category? Expectations? Don’t get me wrong; I’m grateful for the reads. But I’m beginning to understand more fully the power of successful marketing in the digital age.
My Digital Progress — A Follow-Up
October 5, 2011 at 7:56 pm (Personal, self-publishing, Writing)
Tags: digital, Facebook, KWA, marketing, networking, self-publishing, web site
Per Dictionary.com, the definition of PLATFORM (item #7) was
a body of principles on which a person or group takes a stand in appealing to the public
So, we as writers and artists are intent upon building our platform for the sole purpose of appealing to the public, identifying ourselves, our character and personality as well as our work. We hope you will purchase said work because, if we weren’t interested in selling it, we wouldn’t be building our platform.
I’ve been doing this blog for four years, have been on Facebook, have signed up for LinkedIn and Twitter, hand out business cards, talk as much to non-writers (you know, The Public) as much as I discuss writing with those that suffer the same affliction as myself. I’ve uploaded works for sale in both printed and electronic formats on Lulu, Amazon’s Kindle Page, Smashwords, and others. Until now, the only thing I lacked was a website.
Until now.
I am pleased to announce the unveiling of hbberlow.com and hope that there will be visitors as well as purchases of books.
I am indebted to my brother-in-law Greg for getting the thing started. We’ve both been talking for years about each of us needing our own websites for different reasons. Every time I would agree and it would just stop there. Until he just went out and secured my name as a domain (thank goodness) and set up the initial skeleton and instructed me as to how to build up the rest of the body.
Thanks should also go to Gordon Kessler, the founder and current president of the Kansas Writers Association who, for this past year has been strongly advocating the membership to embrace the Digital world and heavily research and explore e-publishing.
Special mention should be made to Samantha Lafantasie, a woman who balances being a wife and mother and writer and adds a great passion to the KWA meetings. She has established a critique group and she is passionate about the craft. It is people like her (who are so utterly different from me) that motivate me in stepping into these new fields.
After all, I’m just an old analog dude living in a digital world.
Please visit my website and come along for the ride.
My Digital Progress
September 21, 2011 at 7:35 pm (Personal, Writing)
Tags: digital, KWA, marketing, platform, self-publishing, Writing
Here’s a scorecard:
WRITING: I’ve started editing two novels, giving them the full revision treatment. I’ve worked out a synopsis for a new novel based in part on the life of a retired Wichita, KS police detective. I’ve thought about a story line for NaNoWriMo.
On the writing front, pretty abysmal.
PLATFORM: I’ve continued to blog, Facebook, recently signed up for Twitter, stayed abreast of e-publishing options, attended KWA meetings, and am this close to getting a web site set up.
Platform vs. writing. Gotta have something to promote. Gotta have someplace to promote it. Sometimes the efforts are side by side and sometimes one takes a lead in the race while the other catches up.
And in between and all around this carnival is regular good old Life. You know, the full-time job and homeowner thing and the husband. It’s all an incredible magic act, not really juggling, because we are creating an illusion with every hat we wear, a performance of wonder.
I wonder what I’ll do next.
Skating on Ice versus Swimming in the Lake
February 9, 2011 at 2:39 pm (Personal, self-publishing, Writing)
Tags: digital, literary agents, marketing, NaNoWriMo, networking, novels, poetry, self-publishing, submissions, time, Writing
Since 2007, there has been a flurry of writing activity for me.
I have participated in NaNoWriMo, that madcap literary dash to the finish, writing (scribing, transcribing, composing, etc.) 50,000 words on a “novel” within the month of November. And I have successfully completed this event in each of the last four years. I put it aside for the month of December and then begin the new year with a rewrite, editing, polish, etc. But not really.
After a profoundly interesting meeting of the Kansas Writer’s Association in May 2009, I realized many things that I did not know about networking and blogging and self-publishing with POD services, etc. So, I got business cards, started this blog, found two short novels of mine ripe for publication and set to the task of networking. But not really.
With my wife’s help, I reorganized the office, separated personal from writing, and got myself in a position to take care of household needs separate from literary ones. But not really.
Since 2007, I’ve been only touching the surface of these things, skating on a thin layer of ice, polishing the impressions while fearful of falling and losing ground. I should have been diving into the warmth of a lake in summer, splashing around, unafraid of getting wet or staying out too late.
I wrote recently of having lost notes regarding a novel I was still working on in first draft. It occurred to me that perhaps this was a wake up call to go slower, refocus the efforts on work that needs more attention. I need to take some pieces that are good but not great, interesting but not fascinating, entertaining but not must-read and flesh them out and bring them to a truer point of completion.
So, whereas my 2011 Writing Goals shows that I wanted to work on two new pieces, I am revising even that. My focus will be on three works (perhaps a fourth) that will undergo extreme scrutiny and finer revision. I will slow down the train of the agent search before I derail myself. I will place unwavering attention on the skill and the craft and the art.
I will finalize two poetry collection manuscripts for publication on Lulu only because, well, they’re poetry and the whole idea of Lulu for poetry reminds me of when everyone was putting out their work in chapbooks.
It’s winter time. we just had a snowstorm here in the Wichita, KS area and we got about 7-9 inches of snow. That’s the real world. As far as my writing is concerned, I’m going to go swimming in the lake for a while.
A Contemporary Writer Explores the Mathematics of Time
September 29, 2010 at 12:41 pm (Personal, Writing)
Tags: Camille, Ernest Hemingway, expatriate writers, F Scott Fitzgerald, Facebook, marketing, Mongo, networking, Rupert, time, Writing
I have this absurd notion that being an expatriate writer in Europe after the First World War was part writing and part drinking and that each one supported the other. Relationships were tenuous; there weren’t that many happily married couples. Very few were homeowners. There weren’t 401(k) or money markets or retirement funds to worry about. Therefore they MUST have had all the time in the world to write and develop their craft.
That’s when I look at my contemporary life and begin to wonder where the time goes. We start with 24 hours in a day. There are 168 hours in a week. I get by on 6 and a half hours of sleep roughly. Any more and I would be frittering away the time; any less and I would be sickly. I work (or am at work) 42.5 hours a week. But between sleep and work there is morning time: shower, coffee, breakfast, maybe the newspaper. That equates to 7.5 hours per week. And we take into account commuting to and from work which equals 4.16 hours.
I am more health conscious than before so I do work out. Between the gym at work and at home that comes to 5.5 hours total for the week. I do all the cooking at home so calculating making and eating dinner that’s 9 hours. And I usually go grocery shopping once per week; I’m using 2 hours total for shopping and putting everything away.
Now, these are all the “have-tos”. I suppose, as stated earlier I COULD sleep less and not work out. Then I’d possibly be like those struggling writers of the 1920′s. But I AM contemporary.
The math for the have-tos is 116.16 hours leaving me a total of 51.84 hours per week to write or an average of 7.4 hours a day. I should be able to write encyclopedias, right?
Well, there are other things. For example, even though I work the weekends (Tuesday and Wednesday are my “weekend”) I still spend the evening with my wife. Maybe there’s a movie and/or commiserating that married couples are known to do. So let’s say seven hours of a Friday and Saturday are our social time.
My new job is better than my old job so I’m a lot less stressed out and want to write more. BUT let’s say I feel like kicking back and watching a couple of episodes of “Criminal Minds” on ION Television. And let’s say I do this two times during the week. Four more hours.
So now I’m down to 40.84 hours left which brings my per day average to slightly over 5.8 hours per day. Still a lot of time. But there are errands to run on my day off and homeowner things that have to be done because my wife and I are not Ernest and Hadley or Scott and Zelda and we can’t afford to hang around drinking all day. So throw in another four hours for errands and an equal amount for household things. Eight more hours into the mix.
I’ve got 32.84 hours left in the week to write. But writing also includes blogging, reading blogs, updating Facebook, responding to Facebook comments and entries, researching agents, updating the query letter, sending out the query letter. Writing is no longer simply one letter after another to make a word, one word after another to make a sentence, one sentence after another to make a paragraph, one paragraph after another to make a chapter, and several succinct and well-organized chapters to make a novel. it is all the extraneous components of networking and research that are fundamental.
I’m not even counting the time it is taking to write this missive or the calculations that went into the details herein included.
Perhaps this is a diatribe at getting older and having more personal responsibilities, none of which I resent because they are elements that enhance and, in essence, define my life as a Human Being. But what defines me as a writer? Youth has a greater capacity for freedom because of fewer restrictions. Age has fashioned a schedule and a set of parameters.
In the end, it becomes an issue of the quality of time spent doing anything as opposed to the quantity of time. It would be nice to have more time to write more often. Yet writing well in the time afforded to me is more significant.
And, on top of all that, as I was composing this, Mongo jumped up on my desk and laid down exposing his belly and reminded me that time HAS to be spent paying attention to him. And Camille. And Rupert. Cats are so demanding. But then, several of you already knew that.
“Unemployed and Dangerous: A Trilogy of Transgressive Novellas”
September 9, 2010 at 9:34 pm (Personal, self-publishing, Writing)
Tags: marketing, networking, novels, publishing, self-publishing, transgressive fiction, Writing
I’ve just put up my latest collection onto Lulu.com
These stories are much darker than any piece of crime fiction I’ve ever written. That said, I’m not making excuses or justifying anything. They were written at a time of turmoil and change in my life. Thank goodness for a creative outlet otherwise I don’t know what my mood may have become.
The three tales tell separate stories of men undergoing their own changes during a job loss. They deal with the situations in their own unique manner.
A stockbroker actually fired for sleeping with the CEO’s mistress winds up getting a job on the maintenance crew that services his old building. From that vantage point he is able to exact a deep measure of revenge.
A laid-off television sales executive starts day trading to bring in income while contemplating his next move. But boredom sets in and sends him on a path toward serial rape and murder.
A man with a strange and funny name can no longer be the brunt of insensitive humor. He uses his termination as a stepping stone toward violent revenge.
It would be easy to pass these off as the ravings of an emotional strain on the part of the author. But these were always serious writing efforts. First of all, each piece is written in a different voice (first, second, and third person). I had done quite a bit of first person writing in my crime fiction and done a few pieces in third person. But second person narrative was a real challenge and required extra attention. It succeeded in so far as second person narrative can succeed. Second, there was a conscious effort to have a different style, different motivations, and a different outcome for each. I did not want anyone to say that all three were the same. It would have made the entire collection boring.
My wife was my editor once again and she confessed to me that she was disturbed at some of the writing. She had not seen the style nor the content from me before. But she knows me well as a person and as a writer and understood the depths that I had to reach in order to create these works. My personal situation has taken a turn for the better; I have released the pent-up aggressions that were created; I know I can write like this. I hope I never have to again.
I was more conscientious about formatting and cover art than in my previous efforts. I am pleased with the results. I was desperately wanting to finish this project so I could proceed with the YA novella I am working on in honor of my niece. After all, the 10-year old needs SOMETHING she can read by her uncle.
Book Sales in Unexpected Places
July 18, 2010 at 5:32 pm (Writing)
Tags: marketing, networking, publishing, self-publishing, Writing
A couple of weeks ago my wife and I visited her aunt and uncle down in Arkansas City, KS where her aunt runs Daisy Mae’s Cafe. It is the typical old school restaurant with great food (I could rave about the chicken fried steak) and good prices and real down-to-earth people.
The primary reason for the visit was to give Dixie (my wife’s aunt) a copy of my books Kansas Two-Step and Quick. I had kept forgetting to give her the copies every time we’d seen them and I felt like a damned fool. So, we took a day, went down to visit family, had some good eats and good chat. Dixie has this display case in the front foyer where people put stuff to sell. I had my box of books and figured “What the heck?” I signed each title page, put some cheap-o stickers on that said “Autographed copy”, and set them up in the display case.
That was a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t expect anything. Period.
I got a box in the mail yesterday. Besides a really cool Three Stooges t-shirt (because Dixie knows I’m a fan) was an envelope. On the outside were two of the price stickers and the handwritten note “We sold two. It’s a start.” Inside was a twenty-dollar bill.
If that don’t beat all.
