Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 89

Four Lessons From Eleven Years Of Self-Publishing

Someone asked for the absolute most basic writing advice I could give. Since this week I reached eleven years of self-publishing, it seems a good time to share it. So, here are four pieces of advice that I think all writers should keep in mind.

1.) Learn to finish things. Novels, short stories, whatever. You can’t do anything else until you learn to finish. Like Steve Jobs said (or quoted from someone else, accounts vary), real artists ship.

Learning to finish things can be a real psychological hurdle because the mid-book (or-mid story) slump is real. Like, you’ve got the interesting opening, and you’ve got the exciting conclusion in your head, but now you’ve got to slog through the middle to reach the end. CLOAK OF SHARDS will be my 130th novel, and I still feel the mid-book slog. There’s nothing to do but to grit your teeth and push on through to the end.

Because finishing your book/story is the foundation to everything else. You can’t sell anything until it’s finished. Even if you don’t want to sell it, no one’s really interested in reading unfinished stories.

If finishing a novel is too daunting of a thought, start with short stories and work your way up. And once you have enough short stories, you can bundle them together and sell them that way.

2.) Cultivate indifference to the opinions of others about your work.

This doesn’t come naturally to people, but it’s important for writers. If you do anything creative, you have to accept that not everyone is going to like your stuff, and indeed, some people will actively hate it. The Rudyard Kipling poem “If” has a great line – “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same…” Much the same way, writers should treat both praise and criticism as impostors.

People like what they like, and no amount of arguing or persuasion will change their minds about their tastes. You could write the best mystery novel the world has ever seen, a sublime work of genius that could define the mystery genre for the rest of the 21st century, but if you ask someone who prefers Contemporary Western Romance to read it, they likely won’t like the book no matter how good it is, and might even flip to the back chapter first to see who the killer is. (That, incidentally, is the reason for marketing books – to match the books you have written with the readers who will enjoy them.)

The key is to understand that just as you have the right to write anything you want, people have the right to think whatever they want about it.

3.) Avoid comparison-itis.

“Comparison-itis” is the common term for constantly comparing yourself to other people and denigrating your achievements in light of their own. Of course, that’s just a fancy modern way of describing a very old concept – envy – and envy is very bad for people. Cain basically murdered Abel over envy. There’s a reason that medieval Catholicism described envy as one of the Seven Deadly Sins, because it really is very bad for you. Like crystal meth of the soul.

So don’t compare yourself as a writer to other writers, because other people’s success or failure doesn’t effect you, and you can’t know all the circumstances happening to other people. Like, a writer could have a book at #1 on Amazon US, and you could actually be making more because the #1 writer is spending everything on ads. Or the writer could be dealing with a bad family situation or a sick relative and just barely keeping it together.

No matter how good you are, there’s always going to be someone better.

And, no matter how bad you have it, there’s always going to be someone worse off.

4.) A little bit every day accumulates over time.

Letting the perfect be the enemy of the possible is a common fallacy that afflicts people in all areas of life. Like, you want to lose thirty pounds and you can’t, so you give up, overlooking the fact that with a bit of effort you could lose ten pounds and keep it off with the attendant benefits to blood pressure and joint strain. Or in writing, you want to write a thousand words a day but can’t fit in the time, so you give up entirely.

But a few hundred words a day adds up over time. And as you practice more, you get better and can write faster.

That’s the hardest part of starting out, I think – realizing that time and practice accumulate. But keep grinding away, and suddenly you’ll look back and you’re eleven years in and on novel #130.

So, I think those are four useful pieces of advice for any writer, regardless of experience.

-JM

Eleven Years Of Self-Publishing

It crept up on me, but as of this week I have now been self-publishing for eleven years.

Eleven years! That’s the longest I’ve ever done anything continuously in my life. And in that time, I’ve self-published 129 novels (130 coming soon), and 39 audio titles.

I always quote this Bible verse at Thanksgiving, but it seems appropriate for this post:

“You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors, as it is today.”

So, I am thankful that I’ve had the ability to keep going for so long. Because I’ve realized that isn’t at all the normal case among writers. Like, for every writer who wrote a couple hundred novels over the course of their careers, there are many, many more who just write a few books and then burn out or fizzle away. In the old days, that was because their publisher dropped them, though nowadays they’re more likely to realize that indie publishing just isn’t for them.

But, through the grace of God and sheer stubbornness, I’m still going. Also, I really enjoy it.

Thanks for reading and listening, everyone, and I hope to have new books out soon!

-JM

THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE sale!

THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE is on sale this week! You can get the ebook for just $0.99 USD at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, Smashwords, and Payhip.

You can also get the audiobook of THE GHOSTS OMNIBUS ONE (over 39 hours long!) for just one credit at Audible.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 116: An Advertising Experiment

In this week’s episode, I discuss my results for advertising my SEVENFOLD SWORD series in the month of March. I also answer questions about the DRAGONSKULL series.

As always, you can listen to the show on Libsyn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music.

-JM

CLOAK OF SHARDS Table of Contents!

Various things including but not limited to leaky plumbing and fallen tree branches have slowed me down, but I am far enough along that I can share the Table of Contents for CLOAK OF SHARDS, which you can see below.

If all goes well and nothing else goes wrong, the book should be out next week, which is still technically in April.

-JM

Sevenfold Ad

I talk a fair bit about advertising, and so I thought I would use some actual numbers to prove some things I’ve been talking about. Practice what I preach, so to speak.

Namely, 1.) That having a free first book in series helps with sales, 2.) it is possible to profitably advertise a long series, and 3.) you really shouldn’t advertise until you have a long series or a lot of books.

For the experiment, I decided to use SEVENFOLD SWORD. It fit several useful criteria for the experiment. First, it’s one of my older series. I started writing it in 2017, and finished it in 2019. Second, it’s twelve books long, so there was room for a lot of read-through that would hopefully pay for the ads. Third, advertising it would have some incidental benefits – the entire series is in audio, so ads might increase audiobook sales, and it might also lead to increased sales for DRAGONTIARNA, the sequel series to SEVENFOLD SWORD. It was also helpful that I didn’t advertise it in February and hadn’t advertised it for several months before that. So if I started advertising it on March 1st, I could compare the results with February without any major outside factors skewing the results.

I should also note that I only advertised on Amazon, and for the sake of this experiment, I only tracked the numbers on Amazon, even though the SEVENFOLD SWORD books are available on all platforms. I’ve found that I get the best results advertising for Amazon, Apple, and Google, though it’s less useful to advertise to Apple because the recent privacy changes in iOS 14 make all manner of targeted ads to iPads and iPhones less effective, and (obviously) Apple readers do most of their reading on Apple devices.

Let’s move on to results.

In February, before I started advertising, the SEVENFOLD SWORD series sold 296 copies on Amazon. I think this demonstrates my first point above, that just having a free book can help sell a long series. SEVENFOLD SWORD: CHAMPION has been free since March 2020, and that helps drive sales.

Now on to March and advertising. I did some advertising on Facebook, and some on Bookbub as well. It had good results. For every $1 of ad money I spent, I got back $2.95, which is pretty good. Additionally, the total units increased, with 482 copies sold on Amazon during the month of March. So that is an increase of 61% in terms of copies sold.

But, you might ask, what about the net profit? I sold more copies, but I spent more on advertising. Was the increased gross profit for March minus the cost of the ads actually less money than I made in February without advertising at all?

It was not. I am pleased to report that net profit for SEVENFOLD SWORD on Amazon was $70 higher in March than in February, even with the costs of the ads included. Now, an additional $70 might not seem like all that much, but it’s still an increase, and there’s an additional benefit to it. Because of my business structure, advertising is a deductible business expenses, so that helps significantly with the tax bill at the end of the year. If you’ve even been involved in the accounting with a small or mid-sized business, you know that deductible business expenses are absolutely vital. (I should point out that I am neither a CPA nor a financial planner, and if you want tax advice, you should hire an accountant familiar with the tax laws of your nation, state/province, and municipal region.)

Additionally, there were likely other benefits that are difficult to quantify. Readers who enjoyed SEVENFOLD SWORD might go on to read some of my other series. I saw a slight increase in newsletter subscribers, which means more readers to read my future books.

However, it would have been nearly impossible to turn a profit without a long series. The so-called “long tail” is where the profit is, and so I think this shows that it’s a much better idea to advertise a long series instead of a single book.

Finally, there’s something else to consider. It’s an axiom in business that it’s easier to sell to existing customers than it is to acquire new customers. The related adage for self-publishing is that it’s easier to sell new books to your existing readers than it is to sell old books to new readers.

This was proven true in March, because DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES, my new book, brought in 3.69 times as much money as the entire SEVENFOLD SWORD series. Additionally, DRAGONSKULL is now three books long, and BLADE OF THE ELVES had a halo effect for the first two books. The three DRAGONSKULL books combined brought in 6.75 times as much as the entire SEVENFOLD SWORD series in March.

Among writers, a common saying is Would I Be Better Off Writing? The idea is that your time is best spent writing new material, and that should be the priority. I think that my results for March show this to be largely the case.

However, there is still clearly value in advertising old books. So, on balance, I think it’s best for the focus to be on writing new material…but it’s still a good idea to spare a thought towards advertising your old books.

-JM

CLOAK OF SHARDS excerpt

Still editing CLOAK OF SHARDS. Let’s close out the week with a short excerpt:

“Do you think Nora Chandler will be with them?”

“I know that she is.” I had heard Nora in the background of some of the calls.

“Will she have a problem that I shot her in the stomach last year?”

I looked at Neil. “Are you planning on doing it again?”

“I’d rather avoid that if at all possible.”

“She’ll give you a hard time about it,” I said. “And she’ll give you a clever little nickname that sounds innocuous but is probably insulting if you think about it long enough.”

“Oh, yeah? What does she call you?”

I sighed and tapped the orange stripes on the sleeve of my black jacket. “I was wearing this the day we met. So I’m the tigress.”

Neil snorted out a laugh.

“It’s not that funny.”

“A tigress could rip someone’s face off,” said Neil. “And I have literally seen you burn a hole in someone’s head.”

-JM

CLOAK OF IRON now in audiobook!

I am pleased to report that CLOAK OF IRON is now in audiobook, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy.

You can get it at Audible, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon AU, Apple, Kobo, Chirp, and Payhip.

CLOAK OF IRON was the longest Nadia book I’ve written to date, which means it’s also the longest Nadia audiobook at over 12 hours.

-JM

 

Episode 115: How To Generate Names For Fantasy Novels & Characters

In this week’s episode, I discuss my methods for finding names for fantasy characters, places, and novels.

I also answer questions about the CLOAK MAGE and DRAGONSKULL series.

As always, you can listen to the show on , Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music.

-JM

Sign up for my newsletter and get a free short story!

Be sure to sign up for my new-release newsletter, and you’ll get a free short story when CLOAK OF SHARDS comes out later this month!

The short story this time is called DRAGON SONG.

What’s it about? Nadia has finally run out of excuses, and so she gets dragged to one of Delaxsicoria’s concerts. Mayhem naturally ensues.

My last two short stories, PROPHECY OF THE HIGH QUEEN and THE FIRST WARLOCK, were both pretty dark (especially THE FIRST WARLOCK), so I wanted to write a funnier short story this time.

Subscribe to my newsletter, and you can get DRAGON SONG for free when CLOAK OF SHARDS comes out!

-JM