Michael R. Hicks's Blog, page 6

Time for Body Beast by Beachbody

[image error]It’s way past time for New Year’s resolutions, but I’ve got to get my silly putty body back into some semblance of shape. Everybody has their own reasons for trying to get in shape, and their own definition of what that means. I’ll be 55 in a few months, and I don’t want to fall off a cliff in terms of my health. I’ve got a much better handle on the nutrition angle than I used to (you can read more on that In The Kitchen), but the workout piece is still missing. And so, once again, I’m turning to Beachbody to help out, this time with the Body Beast program. Okay, fine, go ahead and laugh at the incongruity of me and “body beast” in the same sentence. Get it out of your system…

Farewell to Facebook

I know many people have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, and I’m no different. While I generally like the engagement on my personal Facebook page (although Facebook seems determined to find endless ways to annoy us), the “Pages,” like my author page, have become all but useless, unless you’re willing to shell out a lot of money to boost – advertise – your page posts. If you’ve liked my page, or someone else’s, there’s an increasingly small chance that you’ll actually see anything I post, because Facebook simply won’t show it to you.

I’ve tried boosting posts on a few occasions, but even with the amount of money Facebook recommended (ha!), it still only reached a fraction of the people who liked my page. Gah!

What I’ve decided to do is just post links on Facebook to posts I make here. So, if you see it on Facebook, great, but I’m hoping you’ll sign up for notifications here on the site so you can have more direct interaction.

So, what do you think about Facebook pages, or Facebook in general?

Looking Forward To The New Year

I just wanted to belatedly wish you a merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, or however else you may enjoy the holidays! My family and I had a great time, and I hope you and yours did, too. Looking back over 2017, it’s been a whirlwind of change for us: selling the house in Sarasota and moving into an apartment, living apart from my wife and the boys for several months after I had to move north to go back to my old job while my wife made sure our younger boy finished high school (“Just graduate! Arghhh!”) in Sarasota, then getting her and the rest of our household goods moved, and lots of other things.

As you can imagine, things have been a bit on the mind-bending side. Being back at work has been rejuvenating in many ways, as I love what I do there, and I’ve picked up a passion for cooking that continues to grow (especially when it comes to the Instant Pot!). Unfortunately, my writing and other author-related aspirations have really taken a beating this year, and I’ve only made crawling progress on , and almost no progress at all on the audiobook front. I know that’s been very disappointing to some, but it’s been really difficult for me to whip myself into writing mode, particularly after a hard day at work (I love it, but it’s very taxing). Of course, it used to be that I didn’t have force myself to the keyboard to write: I was pulled toward it like a tractor beam. It’s not that I have writer’s block or suffer a lack of ideas, I just need to figure out where the “on” button for the tractor beam is and punch it.

That’s one of my primary goals for next year: get my ass into writing mode again, get RED LEGION finished, then start on the next in the pile of story ideas I have sitting here. On top of that I plan to change my (and my wife’s) eating habits to live a healthier life, and run a half marathon this spring; the last one we did was in Sarasota a couple years ago.

I know we’re technically not at the New Year’s resolution point yet, but those are mine, and I figure I need to get them out of the way because my wife and I are planning to hop in the RV and head to the Big Apple this coming Saturday for the New Year’s Eve celebration.

So what are your plans for the coming year?

Reflections On My Career As An Author

The year 2017 is rapidly coming to a close as I write this, and I wanted to share a few thoughts with you as I take stock of where I am now and look back to where this all began. Come May 2018, it will have been ten years since I published my first book, In Her Name (which was subsequently divided up into , , and ). In February, seven years will have gone by since I sent Season of the Harvest, which was my “breakout book,” to press. Six months later, in August 2011, I resigned from my long-time government job to write full time, and the following April (2012), we moved from Maryland to Sarasota, Florida to enjoy some Gulf Coast sunshine and prime beaches.

I know a lot of folks think this would be the absolute dream come true, and it was for me, as well – for a time. After getting through some major ups and downs (although mostly downs) in terms of book sales – sales would never again reach the heady highs of the summer of 2011 – our finances stabilized in 2012 and we did well for a while. The boys came to really like Florida, and my wife and I loved it down there. I also had the opportunity to take long summer trips in our RV with my parents, who own their own RV, and we toured the Southwest, New England, Florida, and some of the National Parks in the Rockies, including Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons.

But then in 2015, book sales started a long, drawn out descent. I can’t attribute that to any specific cause, because there are so many spinning wheels – along with sheer luck – involved in selling a lot of books that it’s hard to point to a given thing or two and say, “There, that’s the problem!” If it was that easy, everyone would be a bestseller, but clearly that’s not the case, although I have a few more comments to make on that in a bit. In any case, despite doing everything I could think of to stop it, it was clear that my career was inexorably sliding into the slush pile, and it was clear that if we were to continue to make ends meet, I was going to have to go out and get a real job.

Unfortunately, “real jobs” with wages that would keep us afloat were in short supply in Sarasota, and while I considered myself highly skilled in certain fields after working in the Defense Department for 25 years, those skills were very niche in nature and didn’t translate easily into any of the better paying jobs I was hoping to find. I came to that conclusion pretty quickly, and decided to apply back to the Federal government. I did that in early 2016, was interviewed that summer, and was hired back early this year (2017), thankfully before we had to eat too far into our cash reserves as my book royalties fell way below what we needed to stay afloat.

As I sit here now, it’s hard to believe that I’ll have been back at work a full year come late February 2018. Talk about coming full circle! My plan at this point is to finish out my service until retirement (for which I’ll be eligible in 5-6 years), then we’ll see what we want to do. I also plan to continue writing, of course, although I’ve found that my muse isn’t nearly as energetic as she used to be, and my pace has slowed quite a bit. I clearly need to pump her up with more red wine and chocolate!

Do I have any regrets? Not really. It’s tempting to second guess oneself or to bang your head against the wall wondering “where things went wrong,” but on balance I think things turned out quite well. I had a nearly six year “vacation” where we weren’t bound by the constraints of a regular job and lived in a tropical paradise (if you’ve never been to Sarasota, you don’t know what you’re missing!). I was able to have some great times on our long summer RV trips with my parents that I probably wouldn’t have had, otherwise: if I’d worked through to retirement, my parents would have been in their mid-80s, and I don’t think they would’ve had the stamina for those sorts of adventures. When we moved to Sarasota, we bought a modest house that was perfect for us at the time, and when it came time to sell we made a gross profit of nearly double what we paid for it: that took care of all the money we’d put into the house, gave us enough money to put both boys through college, and left us enough on the side to buy new furniture for the first time in our lives, and we even had some left over to put away. And for me, personally, while I love writing, I found I didn’t really enjoy being an author as a profession (more on that shortly), and coming back to my old stomping grounds in the government was like coming home – I really love doing what I do, and I’d do it as a hobby if I didn’t need money to live on! I know not everyone can say that, which makes me appreciate it even more.

Beyond this brief tale of being normal to riches to just being normal again, I wanted to offer a few thoughts in the hopes that others looking at taking a similar path might have a more pleasant journey.

1) A lot more goes into being an author than just writing books. That seems pretty obvious when it’s stated overtly, but a lot of folks don’t understand just how much of a grind it can be to do the things you have to do every day to try and stay in the game. It takes a huge amount of discipline that’s very hard to muster when you’re the master of your own time and a potential victim of bright, shiny objects. Even just writing, as enjoyable as it was as a hobby, became a chore: I knew I had to write to continue making money, and after a while that became a real drain on my creativity. If anything, my production rate fell after I left my full-time job, and really fell after my sales started a long-term decline, because that’s when desperation set in. That’s not good muse fuel!

2) What is truly frustrating, however, is that even if you do everything right, you may not see the results you want. I’ve seen this with a number of other authors, and in a latent sense suffered it myself. Fellow author Robert Pruneda and I have spoken about this topic at great length, and I think a key ingredient an author needs is plain and simple luck. I’ve seen some very successful authors really work social media, while others have virtually no presence at all. Others have great web sites, some don’t. Some have big mailing lists and send out consistent content to their fans, while others don’t bother. Some have great book covers, others are drab, at best. And even some of the books are mediocre, at best, while others are amazing. Some do a lot of paid promotions through BookBub and other venues; others don’t bother. Yet, from that hugely mixed bag of do’s and don’ts, some authors and books will spring to the top of the sales lists, while others never make it at all. And some will vault to the top and keep one or more books in the top 100 paid, or even top 20 paid, on Amazon (which I use as a weather gauge) consistently, while others spring to the top – usually with a run in BookBub – then fall like a rock shortly thereafter, with almost zero hang time. There is no rhyme or reason to it. You need some of Harry Potter’s “liquid luck.”

4) Spread your net wide in terms of book distribution, and understand that ebook sales will be 90% or more of your sales. I say spread the net wide because, while Amazon is the 800 pound gorilla, it’s not the only game in town. At one point during the golden months of my sales, Amazon accounted for probably 80% of my royalties. Now, Amazon sales make up about 50%. Aside from Google Play, which I publish to directly, I decided some time back to just aggregate everything else (Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and others) through Smashwords for the sake of convenience. But my royalties from Google plus what I make through everything feeding through Smashwords is now almost as much as what I make from Amazon. Granted, it takes a while to build an audience in the non-Amazon book channels, but if you’re persistent, over time it can pay off. Amazon exclusivity, as a general rule, is not necessarily a good thing.

5) As I said earlier, I don’t really have any regrets, but if I could spin back the clock I would do a few things differently. For one thing, especially when the royalties were flooding in that first year (2011) – I made $30,000 a month in June, July, and August alone – I would’ve banked every penny of it and continued working for at least another year, living off my government salary alone, before resigning. That would’ve done a couple things. First, I would’ve had a very nice nest egg saved away before I left government service. Second, that would’ve given me time to gauge the movement of the book market and sales: as it happened, right after I resigned in August, my sales plunged for the next four months before finally turning around. Third, it would’ve saved me from making some really stupid “the sky’s the limit” financial decisions that turned out to be dreadful mistakes. And if you take away nothing else from reading my tale, remember this: do not ever, ever make any assumptions about your sales in the coming month, let alone the coming year(s). Today’s bestseller is on tomorrow’s backlist, and even authors that consistently crank out books don’t always stay above water. Finally, it would’ve given me a bit more of a chance to see if I really enjoyed being an author over a longer stretch of time, because enjoying writing and being an author are not the same thing.

6) Authors tend to lead solitary work lives, for obvious reasons. Sure, you may interact with fans, fellow authors, collaborate on projects, etc. – there are plenty of opportunities to socialize. But the work of writing itself is a lone wolf occupation that, especially after we moved to Sarasota, I found was just not for me. My entire career in the government revolved around teamwork, and while I’m an introvert, that is the sort of work environment in which I thrived. Being an author turned out to be an unbearable lonely occupation, and I think contributed quite a bit to my falloff in productivity. At some point I began to really hate it and grew impossibly bored, neither of which can be good! So, before you embark on a full-time career as an author, you need to have a firm understanding of yourself and your inner motivations, along with what makes you happy and satisfied in terms of work. You may hate your current job and think that being a full-time author would be the bomb, but in reality that may or may not be the case.

7) Be honest with yourself about what you want to do, and don’t be afraid to adapt. For example, as much as I hated to have to leave Sarasota and return to Maryland for work, that made the most sense from every angle. It was the right thing to do at the time, just like leaving work to become an author (although ideally I should’ve waited a year) was the right thing to do then. I would wager that most published authors have full-time jobs to keep a roof over their heads, and the money they earn through writing is dressing on the side. I “made it” for a while, and have sold or given away as promo copies over a million books and made over a million bucks in my writing journey, but didn’t quite have the escape velocity to make the big leagues like, say, Hugh Howey. Book publishing is a lot like a huge beach with ever-shifting sands: sometimes you don’t move much at all, sometimes you move a huge distance, and sometimes you move around a lot and wind up back where you started. The key thing is to not cling to something too tightly when the tide’s pulling you out: start swimming and stay afloat. And the truth is, you just never know: authors who’ve been on the backlists for years sometimes make huge comebacks. Tomorrow’s full of possibilities.

Anyway, there are a few thoughts for what they may be worth. As for me, I plan to continue writing and publishing books because I enjoy it, and making some money from it isn’t a bad thing at all. But I’ve also taking up cooking (especially with the Instant Pot) as a hobby, and of course we spend a lot of time exploring the country in our RV, so you’ll be seeing bits on those and other endeavors, as well as progress on my books, in these pages. So here’s wishing you well until next time!

Audiobook Production of FIRST CONTACT Begins

I’ll be perfectly honest here and say that I’ve taken a run at making audiobooks of the series a couple/few times before, but ran out of gas (or was totally distracted, lol) before I got too far. Nonetheless, I’m going to give it another shot starting tomorrow (Saturday, 20 May). I know a lot of folks have asked for audiobooks of this series over the years, so I’m finally going to try mighty hard to make that happen. It’s not going to happen quickly, because I know from my previous experience that making audiobooks takes a lot of work, but hopefully this time will be the charm.

In any case, is the guinea pig – wish me luck!

Get Your RED LEGION Fix – Chapter 13 Is Here

I just wanted to make a short post on here to let folks know that the latest chapter of IN HER NAME: RED LEGION is now available on Wattpad for your reading pleasure!  Hope you enjoy it!

The Draft of Chapter Twelve of RED LEGION Is Up

For those who are following RED LEGION on Wattpad, chapter twelve is now available for you to check out. I look forward to your feedback and hope you enjoy it!

Chapter 11 of RED LEGION is Now Available on Wattpad

Okay, my friend, the wait has been a lot longer than I’d like, but at last chapter 11 of RED LEGION is available for your reading pleasure, should you choose to check it out on Wattpad. Enjoy!

If You’ve Been Wondering What The Heck Happened To Me

So there I was, about a year ago now, sitting on Siesta Key beach (rated the #1 beach in America, by the way) and sipping on my tropical drink with the little umbrella – all figuratively speaking, of course – when the unthinkable happened: I decided that it was time to give up the way of the full time author and go back to my old government job. Before you accuse me of having gone stark, raving mad, let me explain the Three Reasons Why It Was A Good Idea.

First of all was book sales. Or, more accurately, monthly income from the book royalties. Very few people know this, because it’s not something I ever crowed from the rooftops (maybe I should have, but that’s just not me), but between paid sales and free promotions I’ve sent well over a million ebooks, and a far smaller quantity of print editions, out the door and into the hands of readers and made something over a million dollars (before taxes, of course!) between 2011 and now from book royalties. Alas, financial management wasn’t one of my strong suits and we’ve always had sort of a “live for today” mentality. I wish I would’ve saved more (which is not to say that I didn’t save anything), but I can’t complain: we did a lot of life-enriching things over these years, particularly our annual big summer RV trips that gave me tons of priceless time with my parents, who convoyed with us in their own RV. I don’t have any real regrets other than not buying that stupid Moose hat in Jackson, Wyoming during our RV trip to the Rockies. 

But the gold rush came to an end by around June of last year (2016) when the royalties, which had been steadily declining most of the previous year, weren’t enough to pay our bills. Believe me, I tried all the tricks I could think of to get those sales numbers back up, but nothing worked. Even promotions through BookBub, which had up to that point been a fantastic tool, dried up when they changed their policy to select almost exclusively books that were on the major book charts like the New York Times or USA Today. Now, in thinking about all this, please keep in mind that we didn’t own some ridiculously expensive house or car (even though we lived only three miles as the crow flies from Stephen King, believe it or not); our big luxury expense, as you may know and which has brought great joy to our lives despite the cost, is the RV. Other than that and the big summer trips we took, we didn’t exactly live a lifestyle of the rich and shameless. But money for the first time since I left my day job had become a serious issue, and it was obviously time to rethink our way forward. Since it was clear that I was going to have to get a job of some sort, no matter what else I did, it made the most sense for me to go back to my old job, if the fools would have me. I’d be making at least twice, and probably three times, as much as I could on the local economy, and in five years I’d qualify for both full retirement and lifetime Federal health benefits, which – if you’ve had to deal with health insurance outside of government or company plans – is worth going back just by itself.

So, money is reason number one. Number two is sort of tied into that, namely that I realized that I really hated my job as a full-time author. Don’t get me wrong: I love writing, but the rest of it just wasn’t for me. I came to hate all the things I needed to do for promotion, etc., etc., which became all the more frustrating as my book sales plunged. When you need to do things that you hate to do, you tend to not do such a great job, or stop doing them altogether, and that happened with me. I also got into sort of a vicious cycle of those things annoying or worrying me being corrosive to my muse, so my writing suffered, which then fed back into the worry loop. It was maddening. And, as I think I already mentioned, it was incredibly lonely much of the time; that totally sucked.

Reason number three came as an epiphany just before I made the decision to go back to work: my writing didn’t make me feel like I was making a difference in the world. I’d spent my entire adult life up to the point when I left Federal service working as part of a dynamic team and something larger than myself, but working as an author was just focused on little old me. Booyah. I realized that the work I’d done in government life, despite all the hassle and BS sometimes, really meant something to me. My books can entertain people, but they can’t really change someone’s life for the better (well, maybe in a handful of cases, according to folks who’ve written me, but that’s pretty rare), not the way I’d done at my old job. And that service-oriented mentality, I came to understand, is a very important part of who I am. So back I went, and I’m very happy to be there!

By now you’re probably wondering if I’m planning to continue to write. Of course I am! As I said, I love writing, and I’m already working on the next In Her Name novel (number 10 in the series, ). While yes, I plan on making some money from that and my future books, my main goal is to entertain myself – I wrote the original In Her Name for myself, after all – and share it with readers like you. My muse, lured from dormancy by promises of dark chocolate and wine, is beginning to reassert herself, so hopefully we’ll see some fun stories in the near future beyond Red Legion.

Oh, which reminds me: I guess it’s time to get some real writing done! So let me get back to what Reza Gard is doing, and I’ll catch up with you later on Facebook and Twitter, or just feel free to leave a comment here…

Hello Again, World!

Sasha (a.k.a. Alexander from The Harvest Trilogy) would like to welcome you to our updated web site! I still have a few things to get sorted out, but the main bits are put back together. Now it’s time for me to go collapse and try to get some sleep – tomorrow’s another day, but it’s FRIDAY! Hope you have a good one!