Neil D. Ostroff's Blog, page 6

November 12, 2014

Emotion, emotion!

Being a writer means experiencing dizzying highs and terrifying lows as a novel transforms from mere idea bubbling in the brain into reality on the page. There are times when you believe that everything you’ve written is total crap and there are times when a character reveals something or does something that you hadn’t expected and you find yourself on this emotional high.

Emotions can swing greatly from one day to the next (sometimes hourly). Today is a good day however, because people have purchased copies of my 12 published books, which for me, is the reason I write.

Sure, I’m happy for a big fat royalty check, but I think for many artists and musicians having an audience for your work is as soul-satisfying as hitting it big. If I never write another word, I’ll always be happy in the knowledge that all the time I’ve spent alone writing has been worth it.

I wish I could appropriately express how it feels to not only entertain readers with stories that I love writing, but for readers to think highly enough of my work to shell out their hard earned cash to retain a copy for themselves. Thanks to all my readers for making this possible.

To read more about myself and my books please check out my blog: ALWAYS WRITING. Much appreciated.
http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com
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Published on November 12, 2014 12:23 Tags: books, fiction-books, literary-fiction-books, romance-novel

November 6, 2014

Retrospective

Since I started my blog ALWAYS WRITING nearly four years ago, I never in my dreams thought that it would receive several hundred thousand views. My base of followers has grown steadily and my page views per day are increasing nearly every week. I would like to thank all of my followers and interested readers for that.

Looking back years ago at my first few posts, I can clearly see an old-soul writer trying to understand a twenty-first century technological world. Many of those first articles dealt with my discovery of indie publishing and lamenting about how I had spent decades trying to make it in the regular publishing community. I wrote about my former NY agent and the many close calls we had together. I discussed my writing past and my obsession with the craft. But mostly, what is fascinating about reading my old posts is experiencing my journey from first indie published book up to my latest novel, which will be my thirteenth.

There have been a lot of rollercoaster up’s and down’s along the way to readership. The lowest was the day after I parted with my agent and the heartbreaking decision I made then to give up the writing dream and spend my time doing other things. The highest, the day I checked my Amazon stats and saw that I had sold my first book as an independent author; that book soon becoming dozens sold, and then hundreds, until eventually several of my books briefly reaching below the 100 rank in the entire Amazon store.

This blog has chronicled my frustrations and elations as each of my books (those I’d written in the past and those I wrote after discovering indie publishing) has been published and unleashed into the cyberworld. It is an electronic diary from extreme novice to current book-selling author. A nearly forty year adventure writing stories and finding an audience to enjoy them currently packed into 421 posts. Since my first blog post about my new author’s website (now defunct) to my latest post about an awesome new five-star review, this blog chronicles a writer’s life in the current world. If you’re already a follower then thank you for listening, and if you’re a curious reader stumbling upon me or writer just checking me out, I invite to join this blog and journey with me through the new author indie revolution.

Please check out my blog ALWAYS WRITING to learn more about my books and myself.

http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com
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Published on November 06, 2014 11:30 Tags: books, fiction-books, literary-fiction-books, romance-novel

October 24, 2014

Great review!!

Nice new review for DROP OUT. The book is really affecting lives!

Read what Kindle Nation Daily called "the sleeper hit of the year" what Kindle Fire Department called, "riveting, touching, and deeply heartwarming, a book that will stay with you forever"; an Indie Book of the Day winner in 2012.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005FX0K7U


5.0 out of 5 stars An extraordinary, moving story of loss and rebirth., October 23, 2014
By
Pete Barber (Lake Lure, NC) - See all my reviews
Verified Purchase (What's this?)
This review is from: Drop Out (Kindle Edition)

This novel was a real roller-coaster ride. Opening at the moment on 9/11 when the planes hit the twin towers, the author takes us inside those buildings, and the action sequence, the fear and chaos and emotions had me turning pages well past my bedtime. The loss suffered by the main character during that terrible day plunges him and us into a desperate unforgiving dip from which he can only be rescued by a second disaster (natural this time). I don't want to put any spoilers in, but I highly recommend that you read this story--it will move you and also renew your faith in human resilience.
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Published on October 24, 2014 12:08 Tags: books, fiction-books, literary-fiction-books, romance-novel

October 20, 2014

Results!!

A few days have passed since my Kindle Books and Tips promotion for DROP OUT http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005FX0K7U has finished and I must say the results weren’t that bad. Though I have said in the past that I don’t believe paid promotion on websites has a return on investment and are good for exposure purposes only, this one seems to have paid out.

DROP OUT sold several dozen more copies on that day than it usually does so I must attribute that to the sponsorship. With so many writers and book sites on the internet, readers are being bombarded by suggestions, and with the explosion of the indie movement there are an infinite number of titles to choose. To find a reasonably priced promotional opportunity that actually got me results is like finding a tiny diamond in a desert of sand.

Of course, good secrets don’t last long when there is a worldwide audience at your fingertips and I’m guessing that the more exposure the site gets the more competition to get in; hence, the prices may rise. I will say I am a bit disappointed in one of my other ‘go to’ sites for visible results; Ereader News Today. They went from a commission based advertising platform to charging a flat rate. Instead of being selective in their titles, now anyone can purchase. I did extremely well advertising with ENT before the format change and even got DROP OUT below the 500 rank in the entire Kindle store for a few days. Now, they don’t even have an open spot for months.

All in all, I may change my opinion on the paid advertising websites front and put a little money in more advertising. There are still a few sites out there that are more interested in highlighting quality books over the quantity of authors willing to pay to see their books on websites. At least for the moment, Kindle Books and Tips appear to be one of them.

To learn more about my books and myself, please check out my blog: ALWAYS WRITING.

http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com
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Published on October 20, 2014 11:49 Tags: books, fiction-books, literary-fiction-books, romance-novel

October 6, 2014

Winter writing

Woke up this morning to the first frost of the year. It’s winter writing time. I always look forward to the cold and snow and the isolation they bring. Though I do enjoy the sun, swimming, and warmth of summer it is not my best season for being creative. I found there’s nothing more stimulating than punching out a story while a snowstorm rages outside.

Winter is also the time when I do my best and most prolific marketing and promotion of my books. It’s always hard to spend hours plugging descriptions and links onto writer sites when it’s a balmy eighty degrees, but seeing frost on the window keeps me focused. My best sellers, DROP OUT, DEGENERATES, and FROSTPROOF were all written during the winter months. There’s just something about the grayness of the season that makes me more colorful on the page.

So, as I sit here writing this, wrapped in a sweat suit, sweatshirt, and blanket, I can’t help but wonder what creativity this winter season will bring. My latest novella AS IT IS IN HEAVEN is nearly complete and I have four months coming of chilly isolation to fill. Will I write a thriller, science fiction novel, or another literary? I guess I’ll have to see what the muse offers.

To learn more about my books and myself, please check out my blog: ALWAYS WRITING.

http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com
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Published on October 06, 2014 11:49 Tags: books, fiction-books, literary-fiction-books, romance-novel

September 29, 2014

Author’s Legacy

When you buy a book in a bookstore, what do you look for? Is it the cover that attracts you? The fiery description on the back? The author’s profile picture? With ebooks, consumers can’t take it off the shelf and feel its texture, skim through the pages, or get a sense of the thickness and how long it will take to read. They must rely on the ‘look inside’ feature, good unbiased reviews, a blurb that excites and entices, and the promise of a captivating story to make their decision.


Ebooks are forever. Think about this sentence for a moment. You write a novel, get it formatted, design a nice cover, obtain an ISBN, and then download it onto Kindle, or Smashwords, or any of the hundreds of ebook distributors, and it’s available globally to anyone with an ereader. Not only that, it will be available until the end of time. Fifty years from now I’ll be able to show my great grandchildren my books; they’ll type in the title or my name and poof, there they will be. Talk about immortalizing yourself for all eternity. Isn’t that what art is all about?


I am very lucky to be living in an age where I can imprint myself onto the world and be remembered forever through my books. I do feel for all the paperback writers throughout the last decades whose hard work and effort only got them a six-week shelf life for their masterpiece to hit it and if it didn’t it would disappear forever, going out of print and into the paper shredder.


With ebooks I may still be getting royalties when I’m a hundred. I can write and publish what I want and let the worldwide public decide if the book is good or deserving of the litter box. All without worry that the story is being evaluated for the amount of profit it might generate rather than the mind-blowing experience of the story, as is the case with how the big publishing houses (those that still remain) do business.


My novels won’t sit stacked on some shelf in the back of a dusty old bookstore (if bookstores exist in the future), they will always be fresh and ready for download, ready to draw new readers into noir, eccentric, and illusionary worlds. It’s an incredibly comforting thought knowing my stories will be around forever like the mythology of ancient Greece or fables and folklore of olden times. Ebooks will define me as a novelist until the end of humanity. I can live peacefully knowing my legacy.


To read more about myself and my books please check out my blog: ALWAYS WRITING

http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com
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Published on September 29, 2014 12:37 Tags: books, fiction-books, literary-fiction-books, romance-novel

September 25, 2014

I just want to write!

If you follow my blog you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been posting about many promotions these days. Except for a few websites that have posted my books without informing me first, I haven’t been too visible for a while. Here’s why.

I’ve been writing ferociously for the last 35 out of my 45 years on this planet. Yep, that officially makes me a middle-aged man. You learn a lot about yourself and your needs and what makes you happiest as you get older. Things become clearer and sharper with age. You find yourself having deep, personal self-revelations about how much time you’ve got left on this planet and what you want to accomplish.

When I was a young author, I certainly wanted to be as rich and famous as Stephen King (doesn’t every writer). I spent tens of thousands of hours alone, writing, in pursuit of that dream. When I wasn’t writing I was querying agents and promoting myself any way I could. My twenties were spent entirely on my writing career.

In my early thirties I was lucky (or talented) enough to land a powerful New York agent. My agent was so well known he had his bio written about in the WD Guide to Literary Agents. He was always in the magazines posting recent sales. I thought I had it made and was relieved of the time spent looking for an agent and now could spend nearly all my time writing. I churned out several novels in the nearly four years we were together, but alas, none of them sold and my dream agent and I parted ways.

I was shattered and thought my dreams of fame and author’s riches were over. Then a miracle in technology, Kindle Direct Publishing opened up their worldwide distribution to any author who had a properly formatted book to sell through their site. To me, this was the phoenix rising from the ashes. I hired a formatter, editor, and cover artist to turn my seven completed novels into saleable merchandise. And I did, along with another three that I’d written in the last two years.

I jumped fully into the indie publishing revolution, joined every writer’s site imaginable, spent weeks downloading my material to anyone who would feature me, and did interview after interview on blogs, in print newspapers, and in magazines. My books sold, not in the millions that I’d hoped, but enough for me to hit the Amazon bestseller lists for a few days here and there. My name gained some recognition and I was invited to participate in prestigious groups and speak at book clubs. You would think this would have made me very happy.

As I said earlier, as you get older your perspectives become clearer. I’m beginning to realize the incredible joy I get out of writing fiction is seriously negated by the toils of marketing and promoting. I now dread the hours it takes to achieve notoriety and find it almost torture to spend hours downloading files, and my biography, and my book summaries, and their links. I just want to write.

I know many of you who are reading this will simply say that’s what it takes to hit it big, you must sacrifice, and sacrifice, and if it were easy to do than everyone would be a famous author. The problem is… I don’t know if I really want that anymore. In the height of my marketing efforts I was selling a lot of books and getting a lot of great feedback. It made me feel good that so many readers liked my material and that my old high school and college friends, and family were proud of what I’d achieved. I’ve even been recognized a few times from having my picture in local media. And after all this, I’ve discovered that what still makes me the happiest is sitting alone in front of my computer and living in the worlds I create inside my mind.

In conclusion, you may not be seeing my name so much on the hundreds of new writer’s and reader’s sites that are popping up every day. I just don’t have the energy to keep up. I’m still writing feverishly, I always will, but the hours a day of marketing torture are going to slow considerably. You’ll still read about me here and there, but I refuse to be a slave to the oversaturated global promoting machine if it’s taking away my joy in creating. I just want to write.

To learn more about my books and myself, please check out my blog: ALWAYS WRITING.

http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com
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Published on September 25, 2014 09:39 Tags: books, fiction-books, literary-fiction-books, romance-novel

August 27, 2014

Great reviews!

I’m involved in a review program with Choosy Bookworm.com where DROP OUT was sent to @35 top Amazon reviewers who post their reviews on a number of websites reaching a huge audience. So far, so good. Here are just a few of the headers. Check out the rest at –
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005FX0K7U
Thanks.
5.0 out of 5 stars BELIEVE!!! Amazing!!, August 25, 2014
By
deb B (Middleboro, Ma. USA)

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is fantastic! I could not put it down, August 23, 2014
By
sprice

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfection, August 17, 2014
By
Janice E. Brown

Also, my latest inspirational fantasy AS IT IS IN HEAVEN is nearing the next stage of evolution, which is… reading the completed first draft. The book is coming along nicely and I am nearing the point where I start to become obsessed with the material. The unfortunate result is that I slow down or nearly stop marketing my other books.

I know that an author must spend a large portion of their time promoting, but I always find it very difficult to halt my writing. I just hope my near disappearance from the forums for the next few weeks won’t affect sales of my other books. But, what’s a writer to do? I’m addicted to the craft.

To learn more about my books and myself, please check out my blog: ALWAYS WRITING.

http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com
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Published on August 27, 2014 12:39 Tags: books, fiction-books, literary-fiction-books, romance-novel

August 24, 2014

Last Chance!

Today is the last day of my Kindle countdown promotion for my two omnibus. Now you can get a whole season worth of reading for only $1.99 each.

Check out my four book thriller collection here - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KY57LY4

Check out my five book sci-fi/fantasy collection here - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L0K5FWW

Thanks so much and enjoy the experiences.
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Published on August 24, 2014 10:44 Tags: books, fiction-books, literary-fiction-books, romance-novel

August 21, 2014

Interesting Week!

It’s been an interesting week for me and my books. First, I’m involved in a review program with Choosy Bookworm.com. So far nearly thirty copies of DROP OUT and about ten copies of THE END TIME have been sent to anonymous reviews who promise to post an honest review on Amazon and Goodreads in exchange for a free copy of the book. The reviews are just now coming in and all I can say is “Wow”. It’s nice to know that and read how much people like the stories. Check out the new 5-stars for yourselves.

Also, I’m involved in two countdown deals right now on Amazon for both of my omnibus. They are on sale now 8/20 until 8/25. If you haven’t had a chance, grab a copy today. It’s a whole season worth of reading.

I’d also like to mention my involvement with my online writers group Enovel Authors at Work. http://www.Enovelauthorsatwork.com. We are a group of writers dedicated to helping one another finds success in the indie author world. We have a great site with lots of helpful hints and descriptions of our books. Check it out!

One more thing. I’ve been busy with my latest inspirational fantasy. AS IT IS IN HEAVEN. If you liked DROP OUT, this one will blow you away. Grab a tissue and settle in for an experience that may change your life. The book should be available by December 2014.

Please check out my blog ALWAYS WRITING to learn more about my books and myself.
http://www.neilostroff.blogspot.com
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Published on August 21, 2014 11:42 Tags: books, fiction-books, literary-fiction-books, romance-novel