B.E. Sanderson's Blog, page 18

New Release from Silver James

If you've been around here long enough, you know how much I love Silver and her books.  (Actually, part of the reason I love her is her books.  Not sure how I could like a person when I don't like their books, but that's another blog post.) 

Anyway...
Silver had a new book release yesterday - FIGHTING FOR ELENA.  Of course, I one-clicked it over at Amazon and then started reading it.  (Pushing another book aside which I will get back to after I finish FFE.)   I'm only a chapter in (because life, not because of the book), but it's darn good so far.  Natch.

It's a romantic suspense with some ties into her other books and ties into this series with ties into another series.  It's pretty tied in there. 

I'm really looking forward to inhaling this.  Silver's books usually only take me a day, if I'm not having life stuff and the creek don't rise.  Yesterday, I spent so much time working on clearing the woods that my hands were claws and holding my Kindle was problematic.  Anyway...

If you're into romantic suspense, snag a copy of this book, read it and love it, then leave a review.  Then, if you've got the fundage, read the rest of the series and then Silver's other books.  You won't be sorry.  I'll post my review on Saturday's Reading Wrap-up because it would take a major event for me to not finish this by then. 

Oh, and I just remembered that when I read the Acknowledgements in this book, she mentioned me!  Yay!  :blushes:

Okay, back to your regularly scheduled lives... And don't forget to go one-click this book.  Seriously. 

WTF Amazon?

Okay, so I started noticing this about a month ago, but Amazon has started letting people leave 'ratings' without leaving reviews.

And it sucks.

Wish in One Hand now has two single star ratings that drag down the overall star average without any explanation or user ID or anything.  No clue as to why they left a bad rating.  No clue if they even bought the damn book.  (Which I suspect they might not have since I hadn't sold any copies of WIOH this year prior to last week, and the rating came before the sales.)  No reasons, just slammed with shitty stars.

Goodreads, of course, has been doing this all along.  It sucks there, too.  I suspect, though, that people don't pay as much attention to the rating average on Goodreads when buying a book.  On Amazon, stars are critical to sales.  You see all five little yellow stars filled or partially filled and you're more likely to click through.  You see only four stars and the fourth star isn't even filled in, and you might just move on to something with more star power.

I mean, let's face it - people are lazy.  You have to grab them immediately and encourage them to put forth the effort to click through and read the blurb.  Stars do that.  More stars = more click-throughs = more chances to make a sale.  And the reverse of that is also true.

Gah, as if selling books wasn't hard enough.

And it's not like people won't abuse that rating thing.  Noooooo.  At least when someone had a bone to pick with you before, you could maybe contest the bad review they left.  This?  I'm not sure how anyone does anything about a random anonymous bad rating.

Not sure what the fuck Amazon thinks it's doing there.  I just hopes it goes away before it does too much more damage.  

Happy Valentine's Day to You! Happy Anniversary to Me!

Happy Valentine's Day to all of you.  But it's Happy Anniversary to me.  Not wedding.  That's not for a few months yet.  Nope, it's the 5th anniversary of the day I published Dying Embers and really began this self-publishing thing.  (Okay, I actually hit publish on the 13th, but I'm celebrating today.)  Five whole years of having my books available for sale.  

And this is around the time when I started what would become my first finished novel back in 2004, so that's what... sixteen years.  Ugh.  :shakes self: 

If I'd been savvy about this, I would've had a big to-do with prezzies and stuff for my readers.  But I wasn't.  Oh, the genie books are on sale and junk, but that wasn't planned with the anniversary in mind.  It didn't even occur to me until this past Tuesday that it was even something to take note of.  (Which is really too late to plan anything special.)  I could've had a contest or something. 

Five years, thirteen books, and 3016 sales later, here I am.  After all the highs and all the lows, I'm still plugging away.  I really am.  Seriously.  I'm working on getting Ugly and the Beast to a place where I can send it out for proofreading and then eventual publication.  And I'm trying to work on writing Cinder Ugly.  (Not going so well, but I'm trying.) 

Anyway, I hope you have a great Valentine's Day with whoever you love.  I'll be here with my loving Hubs and my geriatric cat.  We don't really celebrate the day, other than wishing each other a happy day and doing the hugs/smoochies thing.  I probably won't really celebrate the anniversary either, but it'll be on my mind. 

Five years.  Whoda thunk it?  Not me.

Do you celebrate Valentine's Day?  Or do you only celebrate the day after when all the chocolate goes on sale?  Do you have any big anniversaries coming up? 

Sale Time Again

Staring today all of the books in the Once Upon a Djinn series are on sale for 99c/99p each through next Tuesday night.  Get the whole damn series for less than $4.  (Always free with Kindle Unlimited.)  See where Jo starts out and where she ends up, with many twists and turns and snarks along the way. 

There's no paid advertising for this sale, so any sales are strictly reliant on how much interest I can drum up here and on FB.  As we all know, having a sale without having advertising is pretty much crickets, so I'm not expecting great things.  If I sell a couple of each, that would be awesome.  And if I get page reads, too, that would be more awesome.

I'll be trying to have a sale on the SCIU books again next month.  We'll see how that goes and whether the advertising budget can cough up enough for a paid ad.  You know the drill... you have to spend money to make money to spend money to make money... ad infinitum.  Since I haven't spent any money I haven't made any money to spend.  Bleh.

Anyway, I know most of the people who stop by here have already picked up their copies of OUAD and enjoyed them.  Thank you again for all your support.  It means the world to me. 

And if you haven't yet read the genie books, now is your chance to get them cheap.  I hope you give them a try and enjoy the hell out of them.  =o)

All Up In My Face

I had to give myself a good talking to again.  I really hate to have to do it, but sometimes I let things slide to the point where the only answer is getting all up in my face and basically shouting at myself.  (On paper, of course.)

After I die, the things written in my notebooks should be an interesting find for my heir.  Sort of an 'oh, look, Mom's yelling at herself' kind of thing.  (She already knows I do it, I think, so it shouldn't be a surprise.)  If fans ever get a hold of those notebooks, they're going to think I'm batshit crazy, but I'll be dead, so I won't care.  Maybe the crazy will make me famous.  Again, won't matter then, but maybe the Kid will make some money off my books.

Anyway, these talking-to sessions usually works.  Not especially well this time, so maybe I'm not done giving myself a dressing down.  But I did get some editing done yesterday, so it partially worked.  And I did sit down to write last night.

Unfortunately...  Crickets.  I read through the last couple chapters I'd written and then drew a blank as to where the story was headed.  I think my story generator is on the fritz.  Sometime today I'll kick it's ass, pound on it like we used to pound on the old black and white TV to get the picture to come in better, and try again.

Now, I realize my little talking-tos are not the kind of positive self-talk stuff we're all supposed to adhere to these days.  I grew up when pulling yourself up by your bookstraps met the other end of the spectrum - Leo Buscaglia.  (If you're not familiar with Leo, he was all about hugs.)  Both are effective motivators if used in moderation.  Right now, I need less hugs and more ass-kicking.

So, I'm kicking my own ass. 

Of course, the things I say to myself as such that if anyone else said them to me, I'd punch them in the mouth.  I'm the only one who can get away with it.  It usually starts with 'Okay, Meissner, what the hell is your major maladjustment?' and goes south from there.  But it gets the job done.

And lest you think I'm nothing but mean to myself, there are usually some 'you can do this' and 'you've got this' thrown in alongside the 'you whiny baby' bits and the parts that sound a lot like Bluto's motivational speech in 'Animal House'.  "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?  No!"

So, today, I'll so a little bit more of this mental ass-kicking and then get some actual words down, along with editing at least 20 pages.  Or I'm gonna answer for why I didn't.  To myself. 

The Smell of Meth

Yesterday, I learned what meth smells like.

I was on my way from my car up to the feed store when a red SUV whips into the parking lot, nearly running me over.  She parked stupid and I walked past her into the store.  I'm in the store, explaining the near death experience to my friend the cashier when the gal comes in.  I step aside because she's obviously in a hurry, but she's only looking for the bathroom.

Once she's in the ladies' room, my friend tells me she thinks the gal is on meth.  (Apparently, my friend sees a lot of meth heads at the feed store, coming in to use the bathroom.)  Anyway, we go back to chatting and then the gal comes out of the bathroom, grabs a jumbo bag of 'for people'* sunflower seeds and slaps them on the counter in front of me.  As my friend is ringing her up, I start smelling this gag-worthy chemical odor.  And then the super-twitchy gal starts talking about this accident her husband was in just up the road when all I want her to do it leave.  (Although I did ask her where 'up the road' the accident was because I was headed in that direction, but it was off on a side road.  Yay.)

Anyway, she finally tears out of there and I ask my friend "is that what meth smells like?'  She nods.  Gross.  It was like 'bad home perm' mixed with nail polish remover mixed with 'I haven't bathed'.  The sad thing was this gal was dressed nice and looked nice, she drove a nice car... You never know, I guess.

By the time I got up the highway, I could see the blue lights flashing up the side road where the accident occurred.  If I could smell her, the cops should be able to smell her and do something.  But probably not.

From what I've been told, meth is a big problem around here.  I did encounter a meth head once before.  She looked like she'd crawled up out of the depths of Middle Earth.  But she didn't stink of chemicals.  Maybe that meant she was a user and the gal yesterday was a manufacturer.  Who knows.

I'm continually confused about people doing drugs.  I mean, I understand that once you're hooked, you're hooked, but who the hell would do meth the first time?  Is it like 'oh, please, let me try some of that highly addictive shit with the weird ass mix of chemicals in it you cooked up in your trailer'?  Might as well just shoot yourself in the head, the results are the same in the long run.  Feh.

Your brain is your only means of survival.  Why would you mess with that?

Jus' sayin'.

*Not to be confused with the 40 lb bag of sunflower seeds they sell as bird feed.

I Know It Sounds Anti-Intuitive

The other day I was talking with my in-person BFF and I told her about putting Blink of an I up for free.  She was aghast.  "Free?" she asked in disbelief.  As in 'why would anyone ever offer their stuff for free?'  And I said "Well, I know it sounds anti-intuitive, but sometimes it helps with sales."  Then I explained about Page Reads, and the potential for people buying others of my books, etc.  All good things to be sure.

But there's on other potential goodie from having a FREE that I neglected to mention because it so rarely ever happens for me - that it will be boosted in the rankings and perhaps gain sales that way.

I had scheduled Blink to be free from January 29st through January 31st.  Some time on Friday, I checked the rankings and Blink had made it into the free top 100s in Post Apocalyptic and in Dystopian.  And I remembered something I'd read a while ago about 4 days being the magic number for getting a book noticed in Kindle Unlimited.  I went right back into my Amazon Bookshelf and added two more days to the freebie.

And it stayed in the top 100s during those two days.  (Without any extra FB push, I might add.) 

This morning, I woke up and checked the rankings - hoping it would at least be in the hundred thousands on overall Paid in Amazon.  (Which is better than the 7 figure ranking it had.)  Except it almost never happens that a free push does anything with the rankings in Paid. 

Imagine my surprise when I saw this...
That's paid ranking, folks.  #6895 overall and #119 and #126 respectively in Paid.  :jaw drops:  I can only assume I picked up a bunch KU downloads to make that happen because there are no actual sales associated with that.  Just 89 free books downloaded. 

I still haven't seen any money from any of this, but there's hope.  And it's nice to see one of my books rise so far up in the rankings.  I hope the people who downloaded my book enjoy it.

In other noteworthy news, I sold a paperback yesterday for the first time in over a year.  And for the first time sans Createspace.  So that was pretty neat for me. 

Now to convert that positive news into gumption to get some writing done.  :fingers crossed:

When Work and Creativity Collide (aka My Work Side is a Bully)

I have a problem.  The part of my brain that deals with work stuff - finances, marketing, spreadsheets, etc. - is a bully.  When it's on, it grabs hold of the part of my brain that deals with creative stuff, smacks it around, and shoves it into a locker. 

I hadn't really thought about it before, but I suppose, looking back at it now, it's been a problem for a while.  I try to separate the two by doing work stuff in the daytime and creative stuff at night, but it doesn't always keep the bully in check.  Sometimes if I spend a lot of time on the work stuff during the day, I'm too beat up to let my creativity side play at night.

Not sure how to fix this.  I mean, I probably need to put my creative side on a regimented exercise plan ala Jack Lalanne, so when the bully side gets uppity, the creative can hold its own. 

I don't want to shut down the work side completely.  It's the side that makes me money.  But if all I have is the work side, I don't produce more product to make money with.  I'd love it if I could find a balance somewhere, make the two sides play nice for a while.  They need each other, after all.

I suppose I should just shut up and get 'er done.  Pull the creative side out of the locker and push it to stand up for itself. 

How about you?  Does your work side bully your creative side?  Vice versa? 

Make it Easy

The other day I was scrolling down my FB feed when I saw a link to the review of a book that sounded really interesting.  I clicked over, scanned the review, and found it more interesting.  At the bottom of the review, there were links going to various ways to access the author.  But no link to the book.

That was the first mistake.

Okay, still interested in the book, I clicked the link to the author's Amazon page.  Umm, it went to my author page.  I checked the URL and it was the general 'author page' link, not a link to that particular author.

And that was mistake #2.

So, I clicked the link that would take me to the author's Facebook page, still hoping I'd find a place where I could actually access the book in question.  And it sat there, trying to load but not actually loading.  I waited and waited...

Mistake #3 and I gave up.

While none of these mistakes are necessarily the author's fault, they lost the author a sale.  (Or at the very least a future sale because I would've at least wishlisted it.)

All of this brought something to mind, though.  I see a lot of posts where the link is broken or there is no link at all or it takes forever to load or... something.  My point is that authors need to make it easy for readers.  You put all that work into marketing your book, from creating a really grabby blurb to writing the marketing copy to creating pretty graphics that encourage readers to click through, don't waste it.  Post a link that goes directly to the place where they can buy.  OR at the very least to a page where there are additional links that go directly to a place where they can buy.

As for the reviewer thing... if you have someone reviewing your book, make sure they have all the right links.  Check their links and let them know if they're broken.  Say 'hey, thanks for the awesome review, but the link to my author page should be X' or something.  Anything.  (Of course, this only works if you know they reviewed your book.)  If you are a reviewer, check your links so you're not putting up that awesome review and then frustrating the readers.

Just sayin'.  And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go check all my links and make sure I'm not being a damn hypocrite.

Oh, and I updated the photo on my About Me page here.  Gotta remember to do that stuff every now and then.

Writer Brain

The writer brain is a strange, strange place.  I think, usually, the term 'writer brain' is used for times when writers can't necessarily connect with what's going on around them.  Stuff happens and we're all like 'huh, what?' 

But there's another thing writer brains do... at least mine does... and that's to come up with endless possibilities for any given thing all the time.  To see not just both sides of an issue, but every possible side to the issue.  To wonder 'what if' about everything.

For me, this comes in really handy watching true crime shows and reading mysteries.  I can usually figure out the whodunnit or if not the exact killer, then several possibilities of who did it. 

It also leads me to a wide array of conspiracy theories.  This came in pretty handy when writing Project Hermes.  (On sale now... see what I did there?)  I thought about microchips for animals and wondered 'what if a microchip carried more than just information?'  And then 'what if there was something in there that could kill?'  And then 'what if someone bad in the government got a hold of the ability to use that?'  Bingo bango bongo... a book. 

I also think about smaller conspiracies...  like 'what if she left her car running because she was actually trying to fill my house with CO2 and kill me?' (Accidental Death)  Or 'what if an elderly person's death wasn't because they were old?' (Early Grave)

My conspiracy theories also come in handy for a laugh around the house.  This morning, I posited a theory to Hubs and he suggested that perhaps he needed to look into buying me a tinfoil hat.  And we laughed. 

I don't really need a tinfoil hat. Just because I posit a theory doesn't mean I believe it's true.  I'm just putting it out there.  Because it was just in here (points to head.)   If it never comes to light that it's true, it's just one of my weird theories.  And if it does turn out to be true, I can say 'I told you so'.   If nothing else, it's good fodder for the writing.

Do you have any conspiracy theories?  Or is it just me?