Brian Jackson's Blog, page 3

Book of Dreams

My wife and I have just released a new fantasy series that we're both excited about.  The series is called "Book of Dreams" and follows a dream retrieval expert into the dreamscape.  We collaborated on the books which was a fun process.  The covers for the books are quite cool.  We bought them from iStockPhoto.

Kindle: Amazon, Nook: Barnes & Noble, All Formats: Smashwords.



Anyway, if you get a chance, check out the new series.  Meantime, I'm back to writing a new M/M Romance for release sometime next month.

Kindle: Amazon, Nook: Barnes & Noble, All Formats: Smashwords.

Computers New and Old

Well, my wife just received her new computer today.  It's a Dell portable and she's very excited.  However, we've had to spend the entire day configuring it and trying to transfer files from the old computer and I'm sick of it.  Besides that, it runs Windows 7 with which I'm less than impressed.

Meanwhile, I continue to trundle along on my 6 year old Dell portable running Windows XP.  The computer is so old that I've worn most of the letters off the keyboard.  Now my wife can't use it because ...

Web Pages and Such

I just spent the last several days performing a massive design update to my wife's home page.  This is pretty amusing considering that I don't even have my own home page.  Anyway, I'm pretty proud of it.  You can checkout the results at:

Melanie Jackson's Home Page

I got the inspiration from a sample of a friends home page and then took it to the n'th degree.  I'm particularly proud of the embedded blog at the end of the page that took me days to get right.  Of course, my wife likes the mouse i...

The First Negative Review

Well, I woke this morning to find that there was a new review on Goodreads.  And it was a bad one.  A 1 star review that pointed out typos, thought my book silly, the sex scenes were nothing but purple prose, ...  In short, the person hated First Son.

My initial reaction to the review was feeling sick to my stomach after which a black cloud fell over me.  It's the first time I've received a truly scathing review.  I wanted to climb back into bed and pull the covers over my head.  Then I decide...

Birth of a Novel (First Son)

We'll take one as an example, although all five of them (currently available) have taken similar paths.

I wrote First Son specifically for Loose-Id. This is a popular publisher of erotic ebooks. Instead of writing M/F Erotica, I decided to try M/M Erotica since I had already written several M/F Romances.

Examples of my previous romances include Drained, my latest which sat on an editor's desk and never got read, but dammit I like it, Travel Logged, a great idea for a novel and my biggest sell...

On Having a Runaway Smash Bestseller

Well, I've hit the big time today by posting my best statistics ever on Amazon for my book First Son:

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,172 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)#7 in  Books > Gay & Lesbian > Literature & Fiction > Erotica > Gay #32 in  Kindle Store > Kindle Books > Fiction > Erotica #14 in  Kindle Store > Kindle Books > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Gay & Lesbian       



It's fun watching my ranking get better on these lists. I still can't believe that my little book is so...

The View from the Publisher's Seat

The last few weeks have been strange.  While I've begun experimenting with self publishing ebooks written by me and my wife, watching our numbers and planning for price increases, advertising, and promotional discounts to put into place next month, I've been watching from the sidelines as my wife's current paperback publisher, Dorchester, slowly crumbles.

First Dorchester announced that they were discontinuing producing paperbacks.  They're going to do ebooks and POD trade paperbacks only.  To...

Winning Friends and Influencing People

Well, the promotion continues to go on via several book discussion groups.  I've been trying to drum up a buddy read in the Cozy Mystery group on Goodreads but people are hesitant to participate.  In the meantime I'm getting a head start on Moving Violation and finding several typos that I've corrected.  I think I like editing even less self promotion.

Well, we crossed our first major publishing milestone last night and may pass the next one by the end of the month at the pace that things are ...

Meeting the Nicest People

I've spent quite a lot of time the last couple of days trying to figure out all the ins and outs of the Goodreads reading groups site.  Along the way I encountered some of the nicest people.

In the M/M Romance and Paranormal Romance groups people have engaged me in active discussions.  As opposed to being embarrassed about having to plug my books, people have been corgile and engaged me in conversation.  People have provided a lot of advice on posting and setting up an author page.  Rather tha...

Shameless Self Promotion

Well, the books have all been written and published.  Now it's that time again for shameless self promotion.  I am so bad at this.  Of course there's the usual dread of having to brag about yourself in public and beg people to sample your work, but there's also the tedious, time consuming process of having to find message boards and discussion groups in which to interact with people.  I'm not very good at this.  I prefer to sit alone at my computer and write, or work on cover art, or even upd...