Michael R. Hicks's Blog, page 5
January 1, 2019
2019, the new year: Looking back, Looking ahead
December 31, 2018
Happy new Year – Welcome to 2019
December 23, 2018
Chapter 19 (draft) of red legion is now on wattpad
September 9, 2018
Chapter 18 of RED LEGION is Now Available
May 6, 2018
Managing Author Expectations For Non-Paid Book Promotions
I’ve read several some author blogs where people have expressed disappointment with results from venues where the author can give
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May 5, 2018
Instant Pot Wine – Yes, It’s A Thing!
I suppose to many the title of this post sounds like it must be rhetorical: after all, why wouldn’t you try to make Instant Pot wine? Seems like a silly question, right?
Beyond the obvious (and humorous) reasons, my attempt to make wine in the Instant Pot – or at least use it to help get the wine started – is because my wife gets really bad headaches from many store bought wines, and particularly red wines, presumably from the tannins. So, we decided to give Instant Pot wine a go to see if she has the same sort of reaction. After all, we only stand to lose $4 or $5 in ingredients and a little time.
Before I go any further, let me state loudly and clearly that while I (among many others!) have pondered how to make Instant Pot wine, the inspiration for this endeavor is David Murphy, who should be immortalized in the Instant Pot Hall Of Fame for coming up with this idea and posting it on his blog, FoodNService! We love you, man!
So, using David’s easy to follow directions, I gathered up the whopping list of three ingredients*, mixed them up, and dumped the resulting grape slurry into my 6 quart Instant Pot Duo. I wasn’t worried about not having my Instant Pot available for the lengthy time the wine has to sit, because I also have an Ultra that’s my main pot.
And now we wait! I’ll keep you posted on the progress of the experiment…
* If you have trouble finding yeast for making wine, you can find it on Amazon for making both red wine and white wine.
FYI, I used to make wine quite a few years ago, and my wife didn’t seem to have issues with headaches then. So, we’ll see if Instant Pot wine will be the same.
Are There Still Real People On Twitter?
I’ve been away from Twitter, at least as a regular user, for a long time, probably a couple/few years. After becoming annoyed with Facebook, I decided to return to the Twitterverse for a little social interaction. Let’s just say that I was a bit shocked by how things are now versus how they were back then (whenever that was).
Let me start off by saying that back in 2011 when my books, led by Season of the Harvest, finally “broke out” and started selling oodles of copies (grossing over well over $150,000 that year), I had focused on building up a big Twitter following prior to the release of Season of the Harvest that February, and I feel like the platform played a significant – nay, major – role in boosting sales.
I also invested in TweetAdder, a program to automatically follow/unfollow users according to a variety of filters, and that really helped build up my following to over 80,000 users before that and other programs like it were banned by Twitter. The nice thing about TweetAdder was that I could focus on people who, at least based on their profiles, were interested in reading and books.
Despite using the automated approach, I still tried to directly engage with as many people as possible, particularly with those who tweeted to me or DM’d me (excluding spam, of course!). I made a number of really good friends on Twitter during that period, and wasn’t just blasting out a bunch of promo crap without engaging with real people, which is what made things fun and rewarding.
But then, as with most things, people went totally crazy. Authors (looking at my particular niche) went ga-ga with marketing on Twitter, with many, if not most, just sending out endless streams of promo tweets and little else. It was at that point that Twitter’s value to me, at least as a promotional platform, fell off to near zero. I’m guessing that was maybe in 2015 or so, give or take a year, and that’s when I stopped using Twitter on a regular basis.
Sasha after looking over my Twitter feed…So, just a week or so ago, I decided to jump back into the Twitter pool, hoping to rekindle some of the fun social media interactions I used to have back in the day. I started going through my feed, really looking at the posts people were making, rather than just skimming through, and was aghast. What the hell was I thinking when I followed so many of these accounts?
Of course, the answer was “follow-backs.” I don’t know what the convention is now, but it used to be that if someone followed you – particularly if it was any sort of business concern – they wanted you to follow them back. That way you can get oodles more followers! They’ll retweet your stuff and you’ll retweet theirs! Your sales will explode! Gaaaaaah!
That sounded fine on the surface, but in retrospect was a really idiotic approach, especially if, like me, you also wanted to use Twitter as a venue for actual personal interaction. Looking back on it, why in Hell would I want to follow anyone whose feed was packed with tweets that I wasn’t interested in? Was I ever going to retweet their stuff? Hell, no. Were they ever going to retweet mine? Hell, no! And doubly so, why would I follow someone who didn’t tweet in a language I could understand? Aside from a user who maybe posted images I found fascinating (which is certainly possible), what’s the point of following when I can’t even understand what they’re saying? Duuuuuuuh!
And then we get to the retweets. Okay, yeah, RT’s have been a thing since forever. But now it seems like a huge amount of the Twitterverse is just a massive echo chamber of accounts (many of which I’m sure aren’t even used by living, breathing people anymore, if they ever were) retweeting crap. Some, I swear, seem like retweets of retweets of retweets! I mean, sure, if you want to share something you found that you like and think your followers might like, that’s great. But if you look at your stream and the only things you’ve tweeted the last half dozen to a dozen times are RTs, you’re likely going to find yourself on my growing list of accounts to unfollow.
So, speaking just for myself here (well, obviously, since it’s my damn blog), I’m interested in what you have to say. I can get news direct from the news sites if I want. I can scope out products I may be interested in by following the brand or company accounts. I don’t need to follow anybody to get that stuff. Heck, I can even get loads of cat pictures – which, of course, was the whole reason for the invention of the Internet – all on my own. But I probably wouldn’t see a picture of your cat, or know the funny (to your followers) story about how he tore down the drapes while chasing after a fly. I won’t know from anyone else if you scored a great new job, or if you got hit by some sort of crap and could use some words of encouragement, or something you cooked in the Instant Pot today that I’d love to snag the recipe for. While some folks may not think so, everyone has unique and interesting interests and things going on in their life to share.
Anyway, I hope that gives you some food for thought. Make your social media presence – whether on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. – about you. You don’t have to make yourself “more interesting” by retweeting tons of stuff from someone else. And if you want to say hi to me on Twitter, just click here and give me a shout!
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Some Advice For New Or Aspiring Authors
A lot of folks who want to publish a book (typically a novel, but non-fiction, as well) have asked me, “Hey, do you have any advice on how to get published?” Here are a few general observations from my perspective, for what they may be worth:
1. First and foremost, you need to sit your butt down and write. Today. “Oh, I want to write a novel some day…” Stop wanting and start doing. Like everything else, it’s easy to make excuses to not do it. I have to combat that myself every day, even doing this for a living now: there are all kinds of things (like blogging!) that creep in to steal away my writing time, but if you’re not writing, you’ll never be an author. So stop putting it off and write as much as you can, even if it’s only a little bit, every day.
2. Decide how you want to be published. By that, I mean that you have to decide if you’re going to self-publish or go the traditionally published (trad pub) route. I’m going to be blunt on this one: if you’re not going the self-published route, you’re screwing yourself. I’m not going to go into gory detail here, but the bottom line is that if your book is good enough to be picked up by a trad pub house, assuming you won the lottery to get a contract in the first place, you’ll almost certainly make a LOT more money self-publishing. And I emphasize the money aspect because for me, writing started out as a hobby, but it’s now the means by which I put bread on the table for my family. So if you want to go with a Big 6 publisher for the prestige or whatever, power to you. But while your book is sitting with your agent (whom you have to pay) for a couple years, and then sitting in the production queue with the publisher for another year or two, after revisions, I’ll have put out about a dozen new books, each of which will earn me at least some (and in a few cases, a lot) of money right away. Good luck.
3. Exploit all the media possibilities you can: ebooks, print, and audiobooks immediately come to mind. You may not be able to do them all at once, but over time try to cover all those bases, because they represent different market segments (i.e., more readers) and additional potential income. The time investment, particularly for audiobook production, can be pretty steep, but once it’s done, it’s done, and aside from the promotional angle, you don’t have to do any additional work to generate money from your sales. Can you say residual income, boys and girls? I knew you could!
4. If you go the self-publishing route, do it right. Here’s what I mean by that:
– First, find a fiendishly picky editorial team. You want people who are going to tell you what sucks about your work so you can make it better. Learn to embrace the red ink – your readers will thank you for it. People do things different ways, but the editorial system I use has three major stages. First, my wife reads each chapter as I finish the draft to make sure I’m not taking the story down a blind alley or doing something outrageously stupid. Once the manuscript is done, I go over it, then send it on to my editorial team, which is stage 2. My team currently comprises three people (two of whom are Norwegian!), and they go after the manuscript with butcher knives. Once they’re done hacking and chopping, I go back over the story and incorporate the changes. Stage 3 is for the beta readers. Their job is really just to read the book and see if anything irritating leaps out at them. If they pick up any stray typos, that’s great, but their main job is just to test-read the story and make sure it comes off well. When they’re done, I incorporate any changes, then hit the publish button. Poof.
– Second, get some decent cover art. This is one of the few places that I recommend you spend some money if you can’t do a decent job yourself. There are lots of folks who offer this service now, and you can also find artists on DeviantART, for example, who are amazingly talented and can do custom work, often at extremely reasonable prices. And please remember the sole purpose of the cover: to catch the eye of potential readers and get them to read the blurb. That’s really all it’s for, but it’s a very critical function that you don’t want to screw up with lousy cover art.
– Third, make sure you have a decent blurb for your book. This is actually one of the most difficult things to do, and is something I still struggle with. You want something that’s catchy, fairly brief, and – most important – gets the reader curious about your book, enough so that they’ll at least check out a sample or read some of the reviews.
Doing those three things won’t guarantee you’ll have a bestseller, but it’ll make your book competitive.
5. Get involved with writing/reading communities. This is something I didn’t do until after I’d published my first book back in 2008, and the quality of the book suffered for it. Why? Because these places – forums, Facebook, Twitter, etc. – is where you’ll likely find your editors and beta readers, as well as a lot of good information on, well, just about everything. HOWEVER, approach this with one thing in mind: it’s incredibly easy to get sucked into spending tons of times on forums, etc., talking about the issues related to publishing and being an author, when you should be writing your books. I’ve seen authors make multiple posts on threads that added up to thousands of words in a single day, then they complain about not making much progress on their current book. Well, yeah…
6. BE PATIENT. This is the hardest thing to get across to a lot of folks. So many people think that just because they wrote and self-published The Next Great American Novel that it should be an overnight bestseller. While there are some “quantum leap” authors like Amanda Hocking who leap onto the charts out of nowhere, she’s the exception, not the rule. It’s akin to trying to win the lottery versus an intelligent long-term investment strategy. You can spend your life’s savings on lottery tickets and never win it big, but if you invest the same money intelligently over time, you’re going to make money. Will you make millions? Probably not, but you can probably make enough to make a living at it…given time. It took me a total of seven years working like a dog between my full-time job and squeezing in enough time to write seven books before I was making enough to consider quitting my day job. Patience and perseverance, grasshopper.
7. Learn all you can about marketing, book promotion, and – most important (from my perspective) – social media. You can write the greatest story ever told, but if you can’t let people know about it, entice them to read it, and build a fan base interested in buying your next book, you’re never going to succeed. It’s not rocket science, but it takes a willingness to learn, experiment, and, most important, that perseverance thing. You’ve got to work promotion every single day over a long period of time to build up your fan base, and that process should never stop.
8. Lastly, keep writing more books. Even if you have a bestseller, don’t make the mistake that I did and assume that it’s always going to be a bestseller. Sooner or later, that top-ten book is going to fall off the charts into your backlist. Accept it. Get over it. Just be working on the next book, with the understanding that not every book you write is going to be a bestseller. It dosen’t matter, just keep building up your list. The nice thing is that books in your backlist will continue to earn money forever (assuming you’re self-published; if not, you’re at the mercy of the publisher). Even if each book is just earning a trickle, that’s okay, because by the time you have a bunch of books out, those trickles can combine into a river of money. Again, though, that’s going to take time (see #6).
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May 1, 2018
Amazing Instant Pot Chicken Biryani
My wife and I love Indian cuisine, and one of our favorites is Chicken Biryani. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a dish that combines chicken, basmati rice, onions, and a variety of spices into a “one pot meal” that is absolutely delectable and gluten free.
Now, as with most of the things that I cook in the Instant Pot, the original recipe is not my own, but was created by the wonderful Archana of MinistryOfCurry.com. She’s come up with some really amazing Indian cuisine recipes tailored for the Instant Pot, so make sure you check out her site!
Archana’s original Chicken Biryani recipe is here, and below are the specific modifications I made (with links to some of the ingredients I use):
Marinade Modifications:
3 tsp garam masala (instead of the recommended 2 tsp)
1 tsp ground ginger (instead of 1 tbsp of ground ginger)
1 tsp dried mint leaves (instead of 1/4 cup mint leaves)
¾ cup heavy whipping cream (instead of 3/4 cup of yogurt)
I’d like to make a note here about the chili powder used in the recipe. I recommend that you do as Archana recommends and get some Kashmiri chili powder (like this from Amazon, which is what I used). Using the same chili powder as you might for a BBQ recipe is definitely not going to taste the same!
Chicken Modifications:
3 lb boneless skiness thighs (instead of 2 lbs bone-in skinless)
Note that you can get even better flavor if you get bone-in skin-on thighs, then debone them and pull just the skin off, not the fat that clings to the muscle. Yes, this is definitely extra work, but I believe the resulting enhancement in the taste was worth it.
Rice Mixture Modifications:
2 cups Basmati rice (instead of 3 cups)
2 cups water (instead of 3 cups)
1 cup raisins (not in the original recipe)
Cutting back on the rice further intensifies the flavor of the spices and the chicken, especially if you modify the chicken as I outlined above.
As for the raisins, every restaurant I’ve been to serves Chicken Biryani with raisins, so I was actually a bit surprised it wasn’t in Archana’s. Someone once commented to me that in India it’s typically prepared without raisins, unless it’s for a special occasion like a wedding. But since having Chicken Biryani is always a special occasion for us, I add raisins every time I make it!
Following The Recipe
To prepare the Chicken Biryani, follow Archana’s recipe as you normally would after substituting the ingredients, with the following exceptions:
After cooking the onions and setting them aside, once the chicken is done sautéing I add the onions in a layer on top. But feel free to save some to use as garnish if you like!
After pouring the rice over the chicken and onions, DO NOT mix it in. Just leave the rice as a layer on top, then add the water.
Add the raisins on the very top. Then you’re ready to cook under pressure!
April 30, 2018
Tips For Making Instant Pot Popcorn
If you’ve been having trouble making Instant Pot popcorn (yes, it can do that, too!), this video will show you how I do it and hopefully will give you some good tips so you can be a successful popcorn popper!
The recipe I use is very simple:
3 tbsp of olive oil (you could probably use any high heat oil)
1/4 cup of popcorn kernels (I happen to be using America’s Best White Popcorn, but any kind should do)
3 tbsp of butter and 1/2 tsp of salt for flavoring (substitute whatever you like, or none at all)
I use an Instant Pot Ultra, but the results should be the same across the different models, and I suspect across the different sizes, as well.
Note: While I used an Instant Pot glass lid in the video, you don’t need one…but you do need some sort of lid, or you’ll have popcorn flying all over your kitchen!
