Michael R. Hicks's Blog, page 25

Did You Know?

I think this is something that everyone should see, particularly those with children. I blog periodically about what it means - and takes - to be successful as an author, but those same principles extend to just about any endeavor, including life in general.

But this is simply fascinating, and is even more motivation for my wife and I to prepare ourselves and our children to be successful.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY

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Stop Worrying About Book Sales Stats

Book sales. For those of us trying to make a living as authors, that's sort of an important thing, isn't it? If our books sell, we make money we can use to buy peanut butter for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If they don't, we'd actually have to go back to working for a living. It's hard for me to imagine anything worse, except maybe getting a courtesy water-boarding treatment.

The technology available today lets us know in near-real time (in some cases) how many books we've sold in a day, or an hour. Or in the last thirty seconds since we checked.

And therein lies the danger. Stats addiction. The irresistible impulse to constantly see how many books you're selling. RIGHT NOW, DAMMIT!

This leads to three things: 1) euphoric highs when your sales are climbing; 2) depressing lows when your sales are moving down, with a proportional increase in your stress levels; and 3) the effective loss of a boatload of time that you could have been writing new stuff.

It really can be an addiction, and the tragedy of it is that knowing those numbers is, by and large, absolutely useless to you on anything more than a daily basis. And even that's probably unnecessary.

Yes, you read that right: absolutely useless. Poof.

Why would I say such an outrageous thing? Simply put, the sales, good or bad, are gonna be what they're gonna be. There's absolutely nothing you can do to directly control those numbers.

Now, there are things you have control over that may help influence your sales, and that's where you should be focusing your attention. For example, you could reach out to more folks on Twitter and engage them, or talk to X-number of new folks on Facebook, or run an ad, or whatever else that you have direct control over.

Sales, alas, isn't one of them.

"But I'm running a targeted ad campaign on Facebook and need to know if my sales are going up!"

Well, maybe. But the real metric of the success of an ad campaign is the click through rate to your target page, right? And chances are your target page isn't a direct sales page, it's information to get the reader in the mood to buy. Information. A juicy sample of your novel. Whatever.

From there, they might buy right away. Or they might wait a while. Again, though, I have yet to see a direct impact on sales right away. Over the course of a few days maybe. Or not.

Another one is promotions and giveaways. While I personally have found them useful for helping to build fan loyalty, none of the ones I've tried thus far have had any immediate impact on sales. My checking sales stats every five minutes while those promotions were running was nothing but wasted time.

I've resolved to not check my sales stats and book ranks more often than once a day, and I only do that because I put together a spreadsheet calculator that gives me a pretty accurate projection of my royalties and sales figures for the month. So I plug in those numbers once a day and forget about it. I can use the time I gain to work on my next book.

If you've got a different experience, I'd love to hear it!

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Using Twitter Effectively (Part 4): Basic Tweet Adder Queries

In this installment, we're going to zoom in a bit more on the TweetAdder app I told you about in Part 3, focusing on query strategies and syntax (oooOOOooo!) for reaching out to tweeps who hopefully will want to reach back.

The search function you'll probably use most is the Tweet Search. As the name implies, this will take the query terms you enter (more on that shortly) and search the Twitter stream for them on a continuous basis if you have automation on (which you should!). When it finds results that match the terms, it adds those users into the "To Follow" list, and TweetAdder will automatically follow those folks (again, as long as you have the automation turned on for that function). Following back, of course, will be up to them.

Now, before we get into more of the nitty gritty of these searches, let me say right up front that I'm not going to tell you exactly what I put into my searches.

Before you start calling me dirty names, let me say why: my intent here is to try and teach you how to sculpt a block of marble into something more than just a bunch of rock chips. I'll show you how to smack the chisel with the hammer, but I want it to be your creative energy that shapes the marble. If I tell you exactly what I'm doing and a whole bunch of people do that exact same thing, then we'll wind up annoying a lot of potential readers (or would-have-been potential readers!).

So: in your Twitter kit you'll soon have a hammer, a chisel, some band-aids for when you smack your thumb, and the basic knowledge of how to use those tools. Then you can go out and practice making your very own Winged Victory of Samothrace. Or Spongebob Squarepants. Whatever turns you on.

Let's take a quick look at the Tweet Search screen (click on the image for an enlarged view where you can actually see something). The first thing we need to do is set a parameter or two. The first is Language. In most (but not all) cases, you're probably going to want to focus on whatever your native language is, which I sort of/kinda assume is drawn from whatever people put in their Twitter profiles, but I'm not sure. I usually just keep mine on English, because that's supposedly my native language, no matter what my mom says, and that's the only language in which my books are currently available.

The next is Recency. This helps you limit the search to tweets that occurred in certain number of days, as determined by the dropdown menu. To be honest, I only limit the recency when I'm experimenting with a query and before I load it into the Automated Searches list, just to help it run faster. Once I've pinned down what I want, though, I change the recency to "Any" (searches Twitter for however long) and add it to the Automated Searches list. It may take the query a while to run the first time, but after that it generally runs pretty fast, because it will automatically dedupe the tweeps you're already following.

I normally don't use the location option, but you could. The only one that I know of that works is zip codes. Again, however, I'll have to claim ignorance on this one because I haven't found it very useful for myself personally. And, as you know, it's all about me, right?

Now to the good stuff: QUERY SYNTAX! That's a fancy term for words you use to help find tweeps you'd like to follow, and who hopefully will want to follow you back.

The first thing to understand is that there are two general types of query terms: ones that you want, and ones that you don't want (which I'll call "defeats"). You can search on just about anything in the content of a tweet, including a single word or part of a word, a set of words, a hashtag (one of those terms preceded by a # sign, like "#kindle"), etc.

Let's say you run a search for kindle. That will bring back any tweet that has the string of letters "kindle" in it. Most of them, of course, are about Amazon's Kindle, but you could get anything. If you searched for "man," you'd get "man," "woman," "human," "humane," etc.

Note: When I originally put this together, there was a 1500 item return limit on tweet queries. Twitter has since cut this down to 20. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just means that your automated tweets, which will get into later, will run more frequently.

Now, looking at the results, there are clearly some promising tweets by people talking about loving to read on their Kindles, Kindle vs. Nook, etc., along with a lot of junk. Most of the "junk" are tweets that contain URLs. Why are those junk? Because most of them are going to be posted by authors like you! While linking up with other authors is fine, they're not you're primary audience. So we use a defeat, typing our query in like so: kindle -http (note that there's a space between the two).

The results for this search look much better! Most of those obnoxious author types have been zapped, MWUAHAHAHA! But scrolling through the results, this actually looks like a pretty good search in and of itself.

One thing that I like to do to check the results is to click on the "Tweet" column, which will sort the tweets in order. Then I scroll down and look for any that have a bunch of duplicates: sometimes those are broadcasters, sometimes not. But if it's something that looks like I don't want it, like tweets from that dorky @kreelanwarrior guy (er, me!), I find a term in the tweet and add it to the query as a defeat, like this: kindle -http -kreelanwarrior (remember that defeating "kreelanwarrior" will also filter out "@kreelanwarrior").

Okay, I told you I wasn't going to give you any specific queries, but that's one that you can fiddle with that – assuming you're published on the Kindle (and you'd better be!) – you can use. Just don't be obnoxious about it or I'll send Cousin Vinnie to bust your kneecaps, 'kay?

You can also search for terms like season of the harvest, but that you need to put in quotes: "season of the harvest". If you don't, it'll just look for tweets that have all the individual words in them, which in some cases can yield rather entertaining results.

If you want it to find terms in an either/or fashion, you can do something like this using the OR operator: "michael r. hicks" OR "in her name". That will pick up any tweet that has either michael r. hicks or in her name in it. Then you could put in one or more defeats: "michael r. hicks" OR "in her name" -"rv living is awesome".

Once you've tweaked your search to how you like it, make sure to click on the Add Automated Search button, which will put it into the queue that will run continuously when you have the Automation On button clicked. You can add as many searches as you like, and I encourage you to continuously experiment.

And on a side note, if you click on the "Followers" tab on the left of the main interface (which will bring up a list of the people – surprise! – who are your followers) and look at the Source column, you can see how many followers you have from your searches. This gives you a good indication of how much of a return on investment you're getting from each one in terms of the number of followers you're getting.

Again, I want to emphasize that TweetAdder is one of the very few things that I decided to spend money on for promotional purposes, and it was an investment that's paid for itself many times over. But like all powerful tools, you have to take the time to learn to use it effectively. Hopefully this post will help.

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In Her Name: Empire Podcast, Chapter 1 Scene 1

This is the first of a series of podcasts in which I'll be reading the novel IN HER NAME: EMPIRE for your listening pleasure. I plan to put out one of these each week on Monday, and once I get a little more comfortable with the idea, I'll publish it to iTunes, as well.

Keep in mind, this is my first attempt at a podcast, so don't expect a studio reading by Morgan Freeman, okay? Comments and feedback (including constructive criticism!) are welcome!

And with that, let's get started, shall we?

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Are You Asleep Yet?

Having two Siberian cats in the house, this is an all too common situation at night. No wonder I never get any sleep! Purrr…

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Get Your Kids Started Early On The Road To Success

"If you do this, you'll be a millionaire by the time you want to retire, and quite possibly a lot earlier."

That's what I told our oldest son the other day. He's just starting high school, and my wife and I are determined that he's going to have the best possible education to help him through life. For us, that doesn't mean an exclusive school, although he happens to be attending a really good public school.

No, it means giving him the knowledge that schools don't generally teach, but that will prepare him to be successful financially and in life as whole.

Most people don't realize this, but being financially successful isn't luck or something that only super geniuses can aspire to. It's a learned skill. The tragedy is that the knowledge to develop that skill isn't taught in our schools, particularly in high school where our kids can get the most leverage out of it. It's also one of the things I address first in my book on my success as an author, because it's something almost everyone overlooks.

In this case, what I was talking to our son about was a book called The Automatic Millionaire by David Bach. This book is one of the ones that I have on our "fundamental to success reading list" that our boys are going to have to read a bit each day before they can watch Spongebob Squarepants on the boob tube.

I can see the skepticism in your eyes (yes, I'm watching you right now through your web cam!), but The Automatic Millionaire is NOT about any get-rich quick scheme. In fact, it's the very opposite. It's a very down to earth approach to financial success that emphasizes a few fundamentals: pay yourself first, start saving early, pay cash for everything you possibly can (even if you have to save up for a while), and that the "little stuff" you spend money on every day is a lost fortune over time.

"Oh, come on, really?" You roll your eyes.

Yeah, really. Get this: if you're like a lot of people, you probably spend $5 to $10 (or more) a day on coffee, junk food, etc. If you invested $5 a day, or about $150 a month, at 10% interest, you'd have around $950,000 in forty years. Okay, sure, you might not be able to get an average of 10%, but the point remains: that Starbucks you chug down every morning is literally costing you a fortune (and no, I'm not trying to pick on Starbucks, even though I don't really like their coffee).

It's the miracle of compound interest and letting your money work for you over time.

That got my son's attention. He can relate to five bucks a day. He doesn't make that much from his allowance, of course (I'm a cheapo and only give him $5 a week unless he earns more by doing other stuff), but it's an amount he can see in his head. And he could *definitely* relate to that amounting to almost a cool million over time.

Another chart in the book grabbed him even more. Starting at age 15, which is what he is now, if he was able to save $3,000 a year for five years and never put in another dime, at 10% interest that would be $1.6 million in 40 years. Again, even at a lower interest rate, it's still going to be a fortune.

Right now, that $3,000 a year is a steep figure for him to get his head around. But this summer he'll be working, and he's now planning on saving a good chunk of that. And he wants to to start putting at least five bucks of his allowance away every month right now. Smart boy.

And what would happen if he saved $3,000 a year every year for the next 40 years? It's sort of mind-boggling.

Anyway, those are the sorts of "common sense" principles that are in The Automatic Millionaire. A lot of what Bach says is "Well, duh!" sort of stuff, but how many of us actually follow those simple principles? How much money do we throw away every day without even realizing it, money that could be building our fortunes right now?

So, there's my gift to you today. Check out The Automatic Millionaire by David Bach and start building your own success. Even if high school is a rapidly fading memory, it's never too late to start. And do your kids the biggest favor ever, by passing on that knowledge to them and getting them started early on the road to success.

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My Crystal Ball Look At The Publishing Industry

Unlike folks like Joe Konrath, I don't have any background in the publishing industry other than my fistful of rejection notices and what I've learned on my own little self-publishing journey. But a number of folks have asked me what I think, and I suppose I can speculate like everybody else.

This is no big surprise, but I think we're going to see an implosion of the traditional publishing industry. You don't have to be an industry insider or super genius to figure that out. Just look at how many of the big booksellers are closing their doors, and how many of the top 100 of any given category in Amazon's Kindle store are from independent authors or small press publishers. And why do I pick out the Kindle store rather than look at Amazon's book sales as a whole? Because Kindle sales make up the majority of the books sold now on Amazon, and Amazon's the biggest single bookseller.

Maybe one or two of the Big 6 publishers might mutate their way out of the Great Extinction by offering innovative and attractive options to authors and reasonable prices on digital books to readers. They're going to have to star promoting what value they can really add into the process, and offer authors contracts that aren't outrageous.

But in the end, I suspect most of the Big 6 are going to go the way of the dinosaurs.

In the meantime, more and more traditionally published authors are going to buy up their rights and publish on their own, offering good to great quality books at great prices. The publishers will (and are, from what I've read) trying to combat this by having even more restricting rights arrangements on contracts, but they're only shooting themselves in the foot in the long run. If they're persistent enough, good authors are going to find an audience, and self-publishing isn't just a fad or a fluke. Anybody heard of J.K. Rowling? Hey, if self-publishing ebooks is good enough for her, it's good enough for me, too.

Brick and mortar bookstores? Barnes and Noble might survive because of the Nook, and because there will continue to be a market for print books at and least one large retailer to provide them. Independent bookstores that can integrate digital books into their business process will also survive. Independent, niche, and second-hand stores will also survive, but that's going to depend as much on their ability to provide superior customer service as anything else.

I'll also interject a little note here: I'm not happy about any of this. I love books and bookstores. But there's no avoiding the reality of the changes that are underway. It's literally a revolution, and those businesses that can't adapt to the digital era and find a profitable niche aren't going to survive.

As for print in general, it'll still be around for the foreseeable future, but will represent an increasingly small percentage of the reading medium. Looking at my own sales figures, while I'm making thousands of ebook sales per month, I might sell sixty or so print copies.

But the real kicker is that I make more per unit from ebooks than I do from print. For the IN HER NAME omnibus, for example, the retail price for the print version is $16.95, and the Kindle book is $5.99 (and it's that much because it's three $2.99 novels wrapped into one, so it's actually a steal at that price). I make $1.00 from each print copy, and $3.99 for every Kindle book. Even for my other books that are priced at $2.99, I make around $2.00 for the Kindle books, while I only make $1.00 for the print books that are priced at $9.95.

At this point, I'm wondering if I should even bother making print versions of my future books.

Then we get to the big question: what's the future of the "indie publishing movement." Will it survive, can people make real money, yada, yada. I've read a lot of opinions on the whole thing, but this is what I think it boils down to: authors who write good quality books, who learn how to effectively connect with readers, and who have set goals and are willing to work their butts off to achieve them will eventually succeed. That success may take time – years, in some cases – but I believe that victory goes to the skilled and persistent. And that isn't anything unique to publishing. If you look at any type of endeavor, the people who succeed tend to have similar traits.

In the end, the readers are the ones who really benefit. While a lot of folks natter about how readers won't be able to find good books from among the garbage, they still do. And they find a lot of gems that they never would have read otherwise, because those books never would have been published by the Big 6.

But the best part of the digital reading revolution, both for the reader and the author, is that readers can get great books at bargain basement prices, while at the same time the authors make a MUCH better royalty than they would have under the Dinosaur Publishing System. Sure, some self-published books, maybe even a lot of them, are crap. But there are a lot of good ones out there, and some amazingly talented authors.

The Big 6 dinosaurs have been laughing at self-published authors, considering them little more than a bunch of furry little mammals that get squished between a proper dino's toes. But when the dust and ash from the Kindle asteroid finally clears and the sun comes out again, the mammals are going to be the ones left standing.

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Using Twitter Effectively (Part 3): The Magic of Tweet Adder

Okay, now we come to what's probably the single most important bit of technology that can help you use Twitter as effectively as possible in terms of reaching readers: it's a program called Tweet Adder.

Note: While I'm gearing these articles to self-published authors, all this information on Twitter can be applied to any endeavor, and Tweet Adder has been at the heart of it for me. Not to put too fine a point on it, had it not been for Tweet Adder, you probably wouldn't be reading this right now.

While I'll discuss my abhorrence of spending money for promotional gimmicks in a later post, Tweet Adder is a glaring exception to the rule. At $55 for a single profile (Twitter ID) license, it's an absolute steal for what it allows you to do. I'll say this loud and clear so there's no misunderstanding: if you get Tweet Adder and learn how to use it effectively, you will kick Twitter butt. If you don't use it, or learn how to use it properly (and it does take a bit of time), you're walking right past a potential gold mine.

Now, I'm not going to go into a bunch of buttonology here on exactly how to use the app, because the Tweet Adder folks have a pile of tutorials to step you through all that (although I plan to put together some video tutorials on using it from an author's perspective). But let me give you a brief rundown on the features that I like most, then in later posts we'll look at some of them in more detail.

1. It helps you automate the process of finding followers who might be interested in your book

"Hey," you say, "isn't that cheating? Shouldn't I be slaving over my Twitter account, adding people one by one?"

Listen, my love, the Earth is round, not flat. You need to spend as much of your time as you can writing, and if you can find technology to help you make better use of your time, you're a dingbat for not using it. Where you get personal is in your interaction on a daily basis with the folks you follow/who follow you.

How does it follow people? There are several ways. One of the biggies is that you can set up automated searches for key terms inside tweets. Let's say your genre is romance. You could set up a recurring, automated search that looks for things like "romance novel" or "romance story" (or, heck, take the plunge and look for "bodice ripper"!) that appear in tweets out there in the Twitterverse that your potential readers might use.

You're going to have to do some research and tweaking to find out what those terms are, but let's assume right now that you have a general idea. Tweet Adder can automatically add those folks to your "to follow" list and will automatically follow them.

You can also add in what are called defeats to your queries to help weed out junk. For example, when I run most of my searches, I usually put in -http, which eliminates any tweets that have hyperlinks in them, and -"social media" (note: the quotes make Tweet Adder look for that exact phrase, otherwise it would look just for those two words in any order in a tweet) to weed out the self-proclaimed social media gurus.

Or try searching for terms in profiles, by location (zip code is typical), by the followers of another Twitter user (let's say you want to reach out to all of Jim Cameron's followers – you can do that), people who are followed by a given user, and also by terms found in open (publicly accessible) twitter lists that are part of the list name.

You can use combinations of those different searches to keep your "to follow" list full, and Tweet Adder will just chug right along, following people. If you do things right, many, if not most, of those people follow you back. For those who don't…

2. It will automatically unfollow people who don't follow you back

While you'll still need to periodically prune your follower/following lists manually (Tweet Adder doesn't catch everything), this feature is great because you can tell Tweet Adder to unfollow anyone who hasn't responded to your follow request.

You can set several options for this, the most important of which is the number of days to give them before you unfollow. The default is three days, which is pretty good. I wouldn't set it lower than two, and probably no higher than five – let's face it, if someone's a regular Twitter user and they haven't responded in five days, they're not gonna follow you back.

And remember, unfollowing people who aren't reciprocating is very important once you hit the two-thousand mark for people you're following, when Twitter imposes the 1.2 to 1 ratio that I mentioned in an earlier post.

Tweet Adder will also let you add users to a "white list" who are exempt from being unfollowed. So in case you want to follow celebrities or whatever, just for your own entertainment, Tweet Adder won't zap them from your follow list.

3. You can automatically post tweets

This is one of Tweet Adder's most powerful features, but also one that is very easily abused. You can add a bunch of tweets (pretty much as many as you want, either manually one by one, or imported from a text file) to the automatic tweet list, and then tell Tweet Adder how often you want them to go out; you can also set some other variables. I use this for sending out my promo tweets, and based on my experience, I have a few recommendations:

Don't send out promo tweets more often than about once an hour. I have my settings at 65 to 90 minute intervals. That tends to let them blend into the timelines of your tweeps and generally isn't too overwhelming or annoying. Otherwise you'll be rightly accused of spamming and people will unfollow you.
Mix in some "useful" tweets with your promos. For example, I send out links to the various free ebook reader apps out there, so people who don't own a Kindle or Nook, etc., can still take advantage of my ebooks if they want. You can also mix in some quotes or other inspirational things – whatever trips your trigger.
I'll cover this in more depth in a later post, but don't scream "BUY MY BOOK!!!" Nobody responds to that except maybe by hitting the unfollow button. Don't try to sell – try to inform. Tell them something interesting about your book. The only thing that you should consider putting in all caps is the title. I do that when I mention the title, or maybe to highlight a word (usually when I'm being a smartass), but that's it. Some people don't like that, but I've gotten maybe two actual complaints about it in the course of thousands of tweets exchanged with thousands of tweeps.
Make sure to add tweets for any book reviews you've gotten from bloggers, the press, etc. Again, though, inform, don't push. "My thriller SEASON OF THE HARVEST just got a great review – check it out at http://ow.ly/50A6O", for example.

4. Automatically tweet your blog posts via RSS

This is a really handy feature that gets around a lot of the shenanigans involved in getting your blog posts fed to Twitter: Tweet Adder will just pop out the title and a link from your site's RSS feed when you make a post. Done. You can even add multiple RSS feeds if you like.

5. Send out an automatic "thank you" DM

If you don't know, a "DM" is a direct message that only you and the intended recipient sees; it doesn't appear for anybody else. Even thought it's automated, this is a VERY important aspect of Tweet Adder if you take advantage of it properly.

If you haven't already, you want to prepare some sort of content that you can give away free to your readers. If you only have one book out, you could offer them the first few chapters in ebook format(s) or a character study, or maybe link them to a YouTube video or an audio podcast thanking them for joining (Hmm. That's the first time I'd thought of that! Might have to try it!). Just give them *something* to make them feel welcome and give them a warm fuzzy. In my case, since I've got several books out in the IN HER NAME series, I give folks a free copy of the complete novel of IN HER NAME: EMPIRE to whet their appetites.

This lets you do it without having to do it by hand – save yourself time. Somebody follows you, Tweet Adder sends them a welcome DM message, which of course should contain a link to your welcome freebie.

"But there are people out there who hate automated DMs!" Yes, there are. There are also people out there who hate poodles, hamsters, and chocolate cake. You can't please everybody all the time, but using this you can please a lot of people by giving something worthwhile as a thank-you for following you.

6. Send out "broadcast" DMs

I'll admit that I haven't actually used this feature yet, but now that I'm going through Tweet Adder's functions in more detail, I see that I may have to start. This feature allows you to send DMs to all your followers, sort of like a broadcast. But rather than having the information potentially lost in their timeline, it'll appear in the DM inbox, which is generally not nearly as full of junk.

Beware, however, that this is another feature that could easily be mis-used by loading it up with a bunch of spam. Don't do dat.

However, if you just put a book on sale and want to let people know, or you're starting a promo contest or some other event, this might be a good tool to reach out to folks on an occasional basis. Again, however, be very judicious, save this for special occasions, and DO NOT overdo it!

In Conclusion…

There are some other features that are worth exploring, but the above are the main ones that I've found useful. But the bottom line is that if you're not using Tweet Adder, you're not getting anywhere near the potential traction with Twitter that you could be. And, as Yoda might say, "Powwwerful traction it is!"

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IN HER NAME: EMPIRE, Now Free At Smashwords

You know, I've been asked before by people who think I'm crazy by trying to give away the first novel of the IN HER NAME series, . They don't understand why I'd want to fling a hundred thousand words of sci-fi, fantasy, and romance goodness at people without expecting anything in return.

But I do expect something in return, or at least I hope for it: your enjoyment. I want make you happy, or mad (as one friend on Twitter told me the other day!), make you hoot and holler at what's happening to the characters, and even make you cry. I've also been accused on more than one occasion of making people lose sleep or even miss work. Somebody even missed their bus to work once.

Those are the things I hope to get back from you by giving away this book.

I also hope this will entice you to take your first step to what I really want: having you as a fan. I hope you'll enjoy EMPIRE so much that you'll want to read the other books in the series, and even try some of my other novels, like SEASON OF THE HARVEST.

You can already get EMPIRE free here on my site by signing up for my newsletter. That also gives you access to some things that other folks won't have, like the first sneak peeks at upcoming books and special prize giveaways.

But if you don't feel like coughing up your email address (which I understand), you can also get the novel free now at Smashwords for any ebook format: Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iBooks, Sony Reader, whatever. I'm also going to try and get the book free again on Amazon and the other major ebook retailers (it was a while back, but, well, it's a long story).

So, if you haven't tried any of my books yet, give EMPIRE a whirl. If you don't like it, the only thing you've lost is a bit of time and you can toss it onto the digital trash heap. And if you do like it, there's a whole universe that's still being written for your enjoyment…and loss of sleep!

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A Personal Recollection Of 9/11

I realized, of course, that today was 9/11, but it hadn't struck me that it was the tenth anniversary of that awful day. Like many others, I can still remember much of it like it was yesterday.

Ten years ago, 9/11 began like any other day for us. The only thing that was different was that my parents happened to be here for a week to visit.

Early in the morning, my wife Jan and I headed off to work, while my parents planned to head into Washington, D.C. a bit later on.

As we did every work day, we passed through the visitor control post on Samford Road, which leads into the National Security Agency campus at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, where we'd both been working since the mid-1980s (and from which my wife resigned in 2005, with me following suit in August of this year).

We went about our morning work routine as normal until sometime just before 9 a.m., when one of our coworkers came through the office, saying that something had happened at the World Trade Center.

A bunch of us piled into the division office to watch CNN. We saw the smoke coming from the north tower, and listened to the commentary indicating that a plane had hit the building. At the time, however, no one seemed to know anything about the plane. A lot of us figured it was probably just a small plane, as it was hard to get any sense of scale at that point of the damage to the tower.

Then, as we stood there watching, the camera picked up something heading toward the center. I remember thinking, "Jesus, that looks like a jet!" just before it slammed into the south tower.

The sight left us all stunned for a moment.

At that point, our management ushered us back to work. My wife and I worked on the seventh floor of the old headquarters building, which is adjacent to Route 32. I wasn't the only one preoccupied not only with what was clearly an orchestrated attack, but was wondering if it was really over.

That's when the report of the Pentagon being hit came in.

Call me a chicken, call me whatever you want, but that's when I told Jan, "We're leaving." NSA is a stone's throw away from Baltimore Washington International Airport, and if someone was following up the attacks on the World Trade Center with high visibility military targets like the Pentagon, NSA couldn't be too far down the list. All I knew at that point was that I wanted to make sure Jan was safe.

Fortunately, what we worked on wasn't what's considered "mission critical," so it wasn't a huge deal for us to leave. If we had been in mission critical missions, we would have stayed, but I'm glad we had the option. My skin was crawling, and when we got out to the parking lot, I found myself glancing to the north toward BWI. I wasn't the only one.

A short time later, non-essential personnel were released to head home.

When we got home, the first thing we did, of course, was turn on CNN.

Then came the task of trying to figure out what had happened to my parents, who had gone downtown. The Pentagon wasn't on their agenda, but with them, you never know.

Unfortunately, the cellular network was saturated and we couldn't get through. We kept trying to reach them through the day, without any luck.

Around 3 p.m., the front door opened and my parents appeared.

"Where the devil have you been?" I asked. "We've been trying to reach you all day!"

They looked at each other, then at me, totally confused. "Why? Is something going on?"

Leave it to my parents, whom I love dearly, to be completely oblivious to the second Day of Infamy, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, to be suffered by the United States.

Ten years ago today. My heartfelt condolences to all those who lost someone that day, and my prayers to those who have since labored tirelessly in an effort to ensure it doesn't happen again.

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