K. R. Hill's Blog, page 2

New Detective Book

My new book is out. I wanted to let everyone know. Buckle your seat belts and get a copy!

Check Out the Book!

Bigger Bowl, new book!

I want to let readers know that I will be closing the blog. Please visit my site that you see above. Many of the posts contained here will be moved to the site. krh www.authorkevinrhill.com

NEW BOOK:

My new book is out! It is a collection of short stories taken from the time I lived in Yucatan and other parts of the world.

Spearfish on the reef, chase romance at a town dance, and feel the magic of each story.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076TBQ3PN

Skyrocket your Back list Sales!!!!

Would you like to have your dead old books making money again?

I would, and I have a plan that I hope will skyrocket my sales.

The Gamble: I'm going to spend over $1,500 that I barely have on editing, cover, and ads. I may loan money for more ads. I'm all in. I'm rolling the dice.

I have two suspense novels on Amazon, and they've been belly-up for a long time.

I refuse to let them die.

The plan:  I am going to re-release each book. But each will get a rewrite, a new setting, new cover and title.  And then comes tricky part.

The first book I'll be repackaging.There are eight extremely important aspects to publishing a Kindle book that determine whether it lives or dies. If you want to be read, if you want sales and success, then study each aspect and make it perfect.

Practice them. Take a couple of hours for EACH!  Get it to pop, to snap, and set that hook in the reader. Hook, hook, hook in the description.

The eight aspects are: Key Words, Categories, Title, Cover, Description, Sample, Reviews, and Price.

Follow along on with my facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1629761570389866/  I will be itemizing each one of the aspects, and you can laugh at all the mistakes I made along the way.

This is an experiment for me. After months of classes and webinars and books on the subject, I am going to find out if it works. Can I take the book above, now belly-up, rotting in the sea of Amazon, and thump on its chest until a pulse awakens, until sales begin again? Can I turn it into a money-making endeavor? You can watch and learn. Join the group. Drop me a note.

STOP EBOOK THEFT

I work hard to produce marketable books. Some produce a trickle of sales. Others float belly up in the fish bowl that is my Amazon Kindle account.

One little book has always been the train that could. I wrote it in two weeks! It is an automotive how-to. Tinkering on old cars relaxes me after writing. So, I turned that hobby to my advantage. I put it to work.

To my great surprise it just kept selling; not a lot, but a steady trickle. My book about 'hillbilly fuel injection' just kept trucking along. I chuckled every time I saw the sales report.

But then sales stopped! What happened? They never stopped before.

Authors, I can't stress this enough: You have to monitor your work. Every once in a while google your title. I did, and to my horror it was listed all over YouTube for free in pdf form.

But I owned the copyright. How could that be? This has been a problem since print was invented. I recently read about Dickens struggle with this issue!

What could I do? I scrolled to the bottom of the YouTube page and found a link for copyright information. There I filled out a form and reported all the pages that were selling my work. It was easy.

Within a couple of days they notified that the sites had been removed. They were easy to work with.

And, days after that the sales of my my little book began again. You have to monitor your work.

Share with me your experience. FB @kevinhillwriter

New Memoir, Action, Adventure, Romance

Want Free Books?
I wanted to share this image from my site because it sums up so many emotions involved in travel. And travel, the adventure, the romance, is the theme of my new book.

In the late nineteen-eighties I sold everything and moved into an abandoned house on the Caribbean. I spear fished for meat. I will let the book and the writing speak for itself. Here is the introduction:

From 1979 to 1987 I was a vagabond in Europe. I hitchhiked from Scandinavia to Spain several times and camped along the way. During that time I bailed hay, harvested apples, worked construction and taught English. My dream of becoming a writer pushed me to sell travel articles. At night I worked on a novel. I also married a European woman. However, in 1987, after a divorce, I returned to California.

The culture shock, compounded by the pain of divorce, was overwhelming. I sought professional help. The therapist I found changed my life by introducing me to meditation. While working with the therapist, I was startled when a radical idea popped into my head: I needed a time-out from the demands of daily life in the US. I needed to escape schedules, work, stress, traffic, sirens and noise.

Could I find a simple village where I could rebuild my life? Could I manage that for three months? As my escape plan formulated, and it seemed I might actually move to a foreign country, I found the most difficult part of the preparation was giving myself permission. I constantly had to
confront a nagging voice that was saying: What will the neighbors think? I counteracted that voice with: ‘This is a needed process. I am allowing myself to do this.'

My cover story to friends and relatives was: I'm going abroad to work on a novel. That didn't meet with quite so much mockery as, ‘I'm leaving the US to meditate for a few months.' But where would I go? I focused on Mexico because it was close and inexpensive. I began reading all I could find about that country.

If you begin inner work and ask for guidance, you have to stay open to direction from the universe. It may come in a way you never suspected. For example, if your normal route to work is shut down, don't think: Nothing goes my way. No, relax and stay open. Maybe your detour will take you past a billboard that sparks a new idea, or supplies the direction you need.

My own guidance came about in a similar fashion. I got the idea that it would be great to go for a walk along the beach. I don't usually walk on the beach, but I followed the prompt. While walking, I was intrigued by a dive shop window that displayed snorkeling equipment. Inside the shop I met a Mexican man. We chatted for over an hour. When I mentioned a coming trip to Mexico he told me about a village on the Caribbean where he lived. His description made me curious and I made plans to visit. The rest is history.

***
The village was two sandy streets between the Caribbean and the swamp. Morning and evening, when the sun was kind, Mayan women in flower-embroidered dresses, walked to the tin roof market. Children dropped bicycles at the broken curb, shooed away the town dogs, and disappeared inside. Moments later they returned, clutching plastic bags filled with cola, and shouted to friends playing basketball on the square.

In that forgotten village I felt the weight of big city life drop from my shoulders. I knew it was home. Within days I found an abandoned house, shoveled out the sand, strung up a hammock, built a table of driftwood, barnacles here and there.

There I began a routine of meditation, affirmations, and writing. It was my way transitioning from married life to living as a single man, preparing myself for a new future, imagining what my life would be without my mate. When I wasn't doing my inner work or writing, I was spearfishing in the warm Caribbean. Fish of every color swarmed around the coral as I floated past. Words did not exist in that under water jungle. My mind was free to process the inner work. Day by day the waves, the sea water, dissolved the memories. The arguments washed away.

My time beside the Caribbean came about because I had been open to the idea of going for a walk. Because I acted on that idea the universe delivered what I needed. I took the time to listen and the answers came. I hope your way is equally fulfilling. I hope you enjoy these stories.

I will soon be releasing Bigger Bowl soon. If you would like a free copy for joining my review group, or Free copies of my other books, visit Want Free Books?

My mistress--Writing!

 ANYONE CAN BE A WRITER....

A writer with solid book idea I wrote in SudanI recently had that conversation with a man. I think he needed to
convince himself of that. I think Kindle has convinced us all of that.

I thought about my own journey to be a writer.

From the time I was seven or eight I used to wake up and write down stories. In class I wrote frantically with a pencil to finish writing assignments. I wrote several novels that have mercifully been burned.

Joy reading for childrenHow many lovers have gotten jealous due to time I spent with my writing? At some point in my life, after untold women had left me, I realized that no matter how sweet the loving was, no matter how deeply I stared into their eyes, not the hottest of sex could replace the joy I experienced when creating worlds, creating a novel. Maybe that was why they left. They sensed they were second on my list.

Oh, I should mention the untold number of conferences I've attended, the offered seductions from NY
Writing in Yucatanagents in exchange for a reading, the thousands of short story and novel and article rejections. Should I mention how a newspaper in Florida sat on one of my articles for six months so they could send their own writer to the location of my article? No, I probably shouldn't mention that. I did, however, send that travel editor a letter, saying they had won my a-hole editor of the year award!

Wrote for newspapersThere have been years of struggle, untold classes concerning point of view, structure, voice, query letters, marketing, and on and on. There have been decades of rewrites and crap first drafts, promises from huge literary agencies, personal calls from London, editors raving about how wonderful the manuscript was, only to be followed by harsh rejections.

Zero sales, but two books stolen!I've written in closets, garages, abandoned houses in Yucatan (photo), on the back of trucks in Africa, living rooms, libraries, and Starbucks. I wrote through the rejections. I continued to write as the women in my life shouted and screamed about my work not producing money, and how I was crazy to continue doing it. But, they didn't know how sweet the mental copulation is with my mistress!

Now I write with Dude, a rescue surf catYes, hell, anyone can write a book. It is a formula taught
everywhere. But, I ask, do you have something to say? Is there art, joy, revelation, insight in your
words? Or, do you throw out a dead body in the beginning and follow the formula? Are you an illustrator of scenes, or a painter of them, an artist? Are your books quickly tossed aside, or placed on a shelf and touched lovingly each time the owner passes?

Oh hell yes, anyone can be a writer.

My hot hot mistress--Writing!

Writer, Yucatan. ANYONE CAN BE A WRITER....

I had that conversation with a man recently. I think he needed to convince himself of that. I think Kindle has convinced us all of that.

I thought about my own journey to be a writer.

From the time I was seven or eight I used to wake up and write down stories. In class I wrote frantically with a pencil to finish writing assignments. I wrote several novels that have mercifully been burned.

How many lovers have gotten jealous due to time I spent with my writing? At some point in my life, after untold women had left me, I realized that no matter how sweet the loving was, no matter how deeply I stared into their eyes, not the hottest of sex could replace the joy I experienced when creating worlds, creating a novel. Maybe that was why they left. They sensed they were second on my list.

Oh, I should mention the untold number of conferences I've attended, the offered seductions from NY agents in exchange for a reading, the thousands of short story and novel and article rejections. Should I mention how a newspaper in Florida sat on one of my articles for six fricking months so they could send their own writer to the location of my article? No, I probably shouldn't mention that. I did, however, send that travel editor a letter, saying they had won my a-hole editor of the year award!

There have been years of struggle, untold classes concerning point of view, structure, voice, query letters, marketing, and on and on. There have been decades of rewrites and crap first drafts, promises from huge literary agencies, personal calls from London, editors raving about how wonderful the manuscript was, only to be followed by harsh rejections.

I've written in closets, garages, abandoned houses in Yucatan (photo), on the back of trucks in Africa, living rooms, libraries, and Starbucks. I wrote through the rejections. I continued to write as the women in my life shouted and screamed about my work not producing money, and how I was crazy to continue doing it. But, they didn't know how sweet the mental copulation is with my mistress!

Yes, hell, anyone can be a writer. Anyone can write a novel. It is a formula taught everywhere. But, I ask, do you have something to say? Is there art, joy, revelation, insight in your words? Or, do you throw out a dead body in the beginning and follow the formula? Are you an illustrator of scenes, or a painter of them, an artist?

Oh hell yes, anyone can be a writer.

My New Website!

To all my readers: I'm moving to www.authorkevinrhill.com. The site should be up and running in a couple of days.

I have enjoyed blogger, but the limitations of this framework have made it necessary to relocate. I hope you will come and visit once the site is up and running.

Free suspense novel and a free short story.As a grand opening gift, I will be giving away a couple of titles.









 I hope you will come and enjoy my soon to be released book, Escape from Mexico as well. Do you dream of selling everything and moving to a simple Caribbean village? If so, I did it for real, and I have included a memoir about it.

Or, would you like to be footloose in Europe, roaming from country to country, soaking up the history and the culture, the food, the fascinating people? Well, you guessed it: I did that for ten years! And in the book I have a memoir about life in Europe, as well as several short works of fiction set in Europe. You get a glimpse of the author with the memoirs, followed by works of fiction from the same locale.

Don't miss it! If you'd like to get a free copy to review on Amazon, leave me a note on my facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/people/Kevin...

In Love--day two!

Find Love. Day two.I found it painful to hold my thoughts in the positive. At work everyone wants to talk about how terrible the job is, how rude our retail customers are, etc. And usually I contribute my negativity to those conversations.Part of me really wants to shovel the crude with coworkers. Now I had to change the conversation to a joyful topic. And for that I learned a trick: Just interrupt the person with a compliment. It works. I just jump in with, “wow, what’d you do to your hair?” or, “Dude, have you been working out?”That flatters the person and they are thrown for a loop. I see a sudden change come over their face, a smile.
Feeling Love ... on Bornholm, DenmarkThe practice of just sitting silent in the morning and saying thank you, really feeling it, started making me high. I found a trick for this too. I’m a trickster. First, I begin with a list of things I’m grateful for: my car, wife, heater, fat rescue cat named Dude, and my health. One by one I mention them to the silence. At first I don’t want to be there, right. But it is mental exercise. And that exercise is just like a physical exercise. My muscles won’t grow unless I lift the weights, or unless I pursue Love. So, to get things rolling of a morning, my hair messed up, not really wanting to do the work of sitting on the pillow and speaking gratitudes, I used this trick: I think about the time in my life when I was crazy in love. I mean ‘walking on air, can’t eat’ in love. Just thinking about it brings back the elation, the joy, the amazing happiness, and that’s what I used to get me into the mindset of doing my gratitudes. We decide what enters our minds. We are the gatekeepers. What a change it was for me to feel amazingly in love, full of joy and bliss, instead of filling my mind with all the woe and troubles of the world spewing from a radio or the net or television. Those news sources only filled me with fear. Give me Love any time. Memories arouse LoveThen I realized something life changing. I didn’t need the experience to allow myself Love. I didn’t need to relive being with that beautiful blonde I knew in Paris. Ha! I control my thoughts. I chose, right there, to give that Love and joy and bliss that I had experienced while being with that woman, each morning. All I had to do was imagine it. Was it really that simple? It seemed to be. That morning I sat there with tears of joy running down my cheeks.
Yes, I did see a change when I got behind the wheel. One moment I was full of Love, mentally blessing my fellow man. The next moment some driver cut me off and anger erupted out of my mouth. That made me laugh.I saw the mistake, the habit. I couldn’t control that driver, but I could control how I reacted to him. I had a choice. Ha! I learned another life changing lesson. At every moment I decide how to be, how to react. And I wanted to be in love, to spread that Love. What a responsibility.
Nope, I didn’t reach enlightenment on my second day of love, but I believe I learned some life changing truths. I was looking forward sitting on my pillow the third morning.
And during the day I felt like a kid in grade school that has a wonderful candy in his pocket that none of the other kids know about. That candy was the memory of Love. During my shift I took it out chose to feel the joy, the bliss and happiness. For eight hours I was walking on clouds. Maybe that was levitation. 

How To Make an Ebook

My goal is to make a living with my books. After years of study and practice, that goal is slowly coming into focus.

If you follow my pointers, you too will begin to see an income arriving each month from Amazon.

First of all, let me say: Quality is the key. Get your manuscript edited. Polish the thing until it shines. If you have a poorly written novel, it is poison to your sales.

Another vital aspect for success is the Cover. Study the best sellers. Emulate them. Google premade book covers if you're on a budget. Get an amazing cover. It is your first flirt with readers. Spend what you need to on the cover. Make it professional.

Title is also paramount to sales. You want it to grab the readers, make them pause while scanning other thumbnail cover images on Amazon. That's another clue. Thumbnail size. Design accordingly.


To the right is a sample of a cover, for a soon-to-be-released book, that my designer is still working on. Changes are being made. Often, when working with a cover designer, they require an image they can work, change, add to. I use Dreamstime.

I show this image because it stopped me while I was shopping images for the cover. It made me laugh. It said what I wanted to say in a new, amusing way. If it stops readers long enough to make them read my amazing description ... job well done.

The process of publishing an ebook is a marathon, if you want lasting sales. Prepare for it.

Next: Description. Each of the items I have mentioned are absolutely critical to sales,as is description.
If cover and title are your first flirt, then the description is the cleaver, quick, amusing, exciting first words to a passerby that makes them stop and take another look.

Spend a week on this. Yes! A week. Grab the reader with your words. Amaze them. Hook them. They want to be hooked. They are in the single's bar of the Kindle book store. You got one shot to take them home. Plan your seduction.

If you need to learn all the amazing details and strategies, look up Adam Houge, a best-selling author who teaches an eye-opening online course.
http://thefanbaseformulaforauthors.teachable.com/p/thefanbaseformulaforauthors

One thing I should mention is that you must have a fairly new Kindle to be an ebook author. You need to see how your book looks to readers, BEFORE it goes out to the world.

Keywords that you fill in on the publication form for Kindle, should be planned and well thought out. There are ebooks devoted to this. Read one. If you want sales after your new release promos are finished, and your book drops off the 'Hot New Release' list on Amazon, you get them via keywords, or you fall into no sales oblivion.

Categories is another part of the kindle form. As stated above, Again, read about them. Spend $0.99 on an ebook covering the subject. If you don't, you are falling off the pace of the other marathon runners. Do it.