Shawn Inmon's Blog, page 7

To Free or not to Free

     First, I have a little announcement:  If you've been interested in reading Feels Like the First Time but haven't wanted to pay for it, well today is your lucky day! Tomorrow too, actually.  And Saturday.  For the next three days, you can download the book for your Kindle for free. You don't have to be part of Amazon Prime, or "borrow" it, you can have it for keeps, for your very own. 
     At this point, you might be asking why in the world I would want to give my book away for free. I spent five years writing it, a fair amount of money on editing, proofreading, cover design and interior layout, so why would I want to give people a chance to get it gratis? The truth is, I didn't make the decision to make the book free without a lot of thought. The short answer why I decided to do it is: exposure.
     Feels Like the First Time has been out for six weeks now, and I am really, really happy with how things have gone with it. I've been lucky enough to get 17 Five Star reviews on Amazon, and I've sold more copies than I ever thought I would in this short period of time. Still... I have to face facts.  Right now, my book is invisible to 99.9% of the book buying population. Somehow, I've got to find a way to get my book in front of lots of eyes.
     And, oddly enough, the best way to sell a large number of books is to give away a larger amount first.  It works in several ways.  One, if it's a book people like, they will write more reviews (which helps) and tell their friends about the book (which also helps.) Two, and more importantly, if you give away a large amount of books (read: thousands and thousands) you make Amazon's Free Bestseller List, which translates to Amazon's Popularity lists and ultimately brings your book a lot more exposure even after you're not free anymore. 
     If you're like me, you might be thinking "How tough can it be to make a bestseller list when your book is free?"  The answer is, pretty tough.  Every day, there are between four and five thousand (or more) free books available on Amazon.  So, making the Top 100 of that list is no easy task.
     The thing that makes that easier is if you get listed by the big sites that tell people about free books every day, like Pixel of Ink or Free Kindle Books and Tips. Michael Gallagher from that website was kind enough to contact me to let me know that he'll be featuring the book today, which is an awesome start. 
      So, although I have some mixed feelings about giving something away that I have worked so hard on, I think it's necessary.  If you'd like, please download it, or tell your friends so they can download it.  It will be free through Saturday night. 
     If you own a Nook or other e-reader, or no e-reader at all but would still like to get the book for free, you can. The Kindle software is a free download here. Once you download that software, you can read any Kindle book on your PC. There's also Kindle for smart phones and the iPad, and the software is free for all of them. 
     Because I enjoy being transparent about these things, I'll post back here with how it all turns out over the next few days.
     

This is my love

     Today is the second anniversary of the day I married my best friend and the love of my life. As milestones go, your second anniversary is not a big one.  According to tradition, the proper gift for a second anniversary is cotton, which kind of pales next to wood (5th) ivory (14th) or silver (25th.)  Still, I am looking forward to next year, where the appropriate gift is leather. I can envision all kinds of possibilities.     I intend to celebrate this special day with my bride like it was our 50th. Or maybe our 33rd. If Dawn and I had managed to get married when I first asked her, we would have been celebrating our 33rd anniversary this year. Of course, that's assuming that at some point over that span I didn't make one too many sarcastic remarks, resulting in a fatal frying pan accident.     I woke up this morning thinking about love, and life, and how different things are today than they ever were before. These are the gifts Dawn Adele gives me every day:     She lets me be who I am. Then, she not only accepts me for it, but loves me more for it.  This creates a new dynamic I've never experienced before, where I am having every opportunity to let my inner and outer self come into sharp focus. I had lived a guarded life for so long that I had forgotten there was an existence without self-made walls. I can't say that Dawn tore those walls down, but it was her unwavering acceptance of me that let me remove them, brick by brick.      She shows me who she is. Dawn has never been a subtle girl. You either know where you stand with her, or you're not paying attention. But here, inside our own world we create together, she has shown me nuances and colors I never knew were inside her. She still has plenty of strong opinions, and I love her for them, but it is the soft vulnerabilities that mean the most.      I see forever in her eyes. Nothing eats away at the core of a relationship more than uncertainty. All my life, I was in relationships that felt tenuous, built on shifting sands. Admittedly, much of that came from me, but it is impossible to build something that lasts without that strong foundation of commitment. It doesn't matter where we are, or how things are going for us or between us, when I look in her eyes, I know. We're not for now, we're for always, no matter what, and there is so much comfort in that.     In January of 2009, I was dying a little every day, and I was fine with that. When someone asked me to describe my inner life in one word, my answer was "melancholy." My interior life bore almost no relation to what I showed the world. 
     Today, I am a happy boy, and what you see is what you get. I've finally found the creative outlets I've craved all my life.      Happy Anniversary, baby. Thank you for all the gifts.

Bully

     Life is a fight, but not everyone's a fighter. Otherwise, bullies would be an endangered species."  Andrew Vachss        By now, you've probably seen or heard about the bullying of Amanda Todd.  She was a young Canadian girl who made the kind of mistake that young people sometimes do: She was enticed by a stranger to flash her breasts on a webcam. This haunted her for the rest of her life and ultimately destroyed her, as those photos followed her wherever she went. She changed schools, she moved, and eventually she posted this video which told her whole sad story.  She's gone now, dead by suicide before her life ever got started.     When I read her hopeful words she posted along with the video - "I hope I can show you guys that everyone has a story and everyone's future will be bright one day, you just gotta pull through. I'm still here aren't I? - it almost breaks my heart.      Now, there are calls for the predator who stalked her to be tracked down and punished, and I hope that happens. It might lend some sense of closure to the people who loved Amanda. But... of course... it won't bring Amanda back. Her race is run.     This is just the latest case that has made headlines over the last few years where bullied young people took their own lives. I have to wonder, is bullying getting worse, are more young people giving up and killing themselves, or did we just not hear about it as much previously?     Bullying has been around forever. The larger and broken have been picking on the smaller and soon-to-be-broken since history began.     I was small all my life, until a growth spurt when I was 15. Even then, I went from short and skinny to tall and skinny.  Also, I was fairly smart, I wore glasses (think: Buddy Holly) I liked to read, and I got along well with my teachers. In other words, I couldn't have had a larger target on me if I had painted one by hand.     And... I was bullied. There were bigger, stronger, older kids at Mossyrock Junior High and High School that were more than happy to try and adjust their own low self-image by scaring the crap out of me or occasionally resorting to actual physical violence.      I never spoke to anyone about it, because 1) I didn't think it would help and 2) I thought it would make things worse.       I was lucky, though. It wasn't like what I read about where kids are harassed to the point of suicide. I never felt alone. I had friends like Jerry Weible and Harold Crook and Mark Panter that I could hang out with, and there was safety in numbers.     Some people say that living well is the best revenge, but we had other ideas. On the last day of school of our freshman year, Harold and I walked into the boys restroom in the high school and found one of those bullies while he was... contemplating the universe on his throne.  He was a senior, and wouldn't be around any more after that day. Without taking time to think about the consequences, we took a bucket full of water, stood on the toilet of the stall next to his and dumped it all over him. And then we ran. And ran. And ran. We were small, but we were motivated by fear for our lives. If our lives were a movie, he would have caught up with us eventually, but he didn't. In fact, I don't remember ever seeing him again.     Life got better, and easier, as it almost always does.  And that is the message that I wish I could send to every picked-on kid: Hold on. Be who you are, and be proud of it. The people who want to belittle you are sick, broken people that will never have any true happiness in their life unless they change and grow. You, on the other hand, can find happiness just by being yourself, if you don't let them strip everything away from you.      The last message that Amanda Todd flashed in her video was "I have nobody. I need someone." Of course, that wasn't true. There were many people that would have loved to have helped her.  Her video was a cry for help, but she didn't wait for it to be answered and didn't stay alive long enough to find the people that would have loved to help her.  Rest in Peace. 

Winners!

     First of all, thanks to everyone that entered the contest to win the two free signed copies of Feels Like the First Time.  We had lots of entries, and that makes me happy.
     So, our winners are...


     Lisa Harmon and Al Kunz!


    I am sending an email off to both of them to see where they'd like their book sent.
     I've got another contest rattling around in my head, so I'll have an announcement about that soon. 
     In the meantime, if you wanted a signed copy of the book and didn't win one, I've made it easy to order on of your very own.  Just click on the link above on the left that says "Buy a signed copy of Feels Like the First Time" and follow the easy instructions.  
     Thanks again to everyone who entered!

Last day to enter

     Today is the last day to enter to win a signed copy of Feels Like the First Time. The contest ends at 9:00 Pacific Time tonight.  I'll announce the winners tomorrow and ship them out on Monday! a Rafflecopter giveaway

This is dedicated...

    If you've read Feels Like the First Time, you might remember that it was dedicated to my sister Terri.  Today would have been her 70th birthday.  I like to think about what we would have done to celebrate this milestone with her.   Dawn and I would have picked her up in the morning and taken her to lunch at H.D. Hotspurs and gone to see a movie, because that's what she loved to do. Instead, she's been gone for almost four years now and I am just missing her.
     When I wrote the first half dozen drafts of the book, the story was framed by emails between Terri and I.  Several beta readers questioned the tone of those emails, saying they didn't feel "real," and that brothers and sisters generally didn't talk that lovingly to each other. The truth is, we did.  
     Have you had someone in your life who is your greatest promoter or defender?  Someone who is in front of you protecting you, or standing behind you pushing you, depending on the situation? I am lucky that I do with Dawn Adele, but for many years before we found each other again, I had Terri.
     When I was nine years old, I wanted to fly in an airplane more than anything, so she arranged for me to fly on a little commuter jet to where she was doing a consulting job.  While I spent a few days with her on the road, she started teaching me things she thought I would need to know to be a good man, like opening doors for her, pulling out her chair, and even how to tip a Maitre D' to get a good table.
     She was a busy executive, smashing through the glass ceiling that existed for women in business in the 60s and 70s, but she wasn't as tough as she liked to portray herself. For many years, her business cards read "Terri Lucero, Barracuda Bitch" but I knew the person she really was.
     For a little more than a decade, she owned Jayhawks Department Store in Enumclaw and Yelm Washington. During those years, I saw her make decision after decision that benefited others, but not herself. I remember a Hardware Department Head whose father passed away in the Midwest. He had been with the store for less than a month, so didn't think he would get the time off to go to his father's funeral.  Terri not only gave him the time off, she bought him the round trip plane ticket because he didn't have any money.
     Jayhawks closed in 1998, and I thought that would be the end of Terri.  So much of her identity was tied up in that store that when it didn't exist any more, she felt like she didn't either. She dug the deepest hole I've ever seen, then climbed in and pulled the hole in after her. She stayed there for quite awhile.
     Eventually, she poked her head out again and told me she wanted to start doing something with her life. I had been selling music and movies on Amazon for a few years, so I trained her in how to do that.  Her natural retailer's instincts kicked in and she soon had another successful business up and running.
     By 2008, she was pretty much back to her old self, and I felt so lucky to have my sister and best friend back again. We talked on the phone every day, and emailed each other at least that often. She took to signing off her emails with "Beep Beep" because she felt like the Roadrunner again, happily moving through life. She was wealthy for much of her life, but at the end she wasn't. Still, she was happier and more relaxed in that last year of her life than I could ever remember.
     In December 2008, she called and asked me to promise her that I would publish Feels Like the First Time. I promised her, then promptly forgot about it.  Two weeks later, she died. I published the book to fulfill that promise to her, and that's why it is dedicated to her. 
     While she was alive, she was my mentor, best friend, advisor, sister and constant source of support. There are many days I would give anything to just sit down and have one last conversation with her, to let her know how wonderfully everything has turned out in my life. 
     I used to dream of her regularly after she died. About six months ago, I dreamed we were at an airport. She was late for a flight and we were running to her gate. As we got closer, she started to move ahead of me. She said "I've got to go on ahead. You catch up when you can." She disappeared around a corner and was gone. I don't think I'll dream about her again, but I miss her every day.      
     

National Coming Out Day

        "I'm a supporter of gay rights. And not a closet supporter either. From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community. There are so many qualities that make up a human being... by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant."      Paul Newman
     I've never been discriminated against. I was born white and straight in a place and time where those things put me in the majority. I may have caught some bad breaks in my life, but they were all of my own making. 
     We are moving away from making decisions about people because of their culture, or skin color or sexual orientation, but we have a long ways to go. 
     Where I grew up, and in the family I grew up in,  prejudice was commonplace. Making fun of people who were different was standard. The  truth is, I did my own fair share of extending stereotypes and making fun of black people, gay people, Asian people, etc. I never intended it as evil, I just thought it was funny. 
     I was wrong. 
     Today is National Coming Out Day. It's a day designed to encourage people to be honest about who they are with friends and family. It's a good, supportive idea. 
     I can't wait until it's no longer necessary.
     I'm lucky. I've never had to hide a key part of who I am just to be "accepted" by my family and friends. My heart breaks for people who do. I can't imagine the pain and psychological trauma that would accompany the disparity of being one person on the inside and another on the outside. 
     I understand that some people object to gay marriage on religious grounds. Fine. I have no interest in trying to change their mind about that. It would inevitably devolve into the old discussions, and there's nothing to be gained there. I will just say this: I believe that people who stand against gay marriage are on the wrong side of the issue, and time will bear that out. I'm willing to wait.
     There was a time when it was widely accepted that discrimination against blacks was OK. See the Jim Crow Laws. Those legal abominations still existed in my lifetime. Today, it's tough to find anyone who thinks they would be a good idea.  That's progress. I believe 50 years from now, my grandchildren will look back at the idea that people couldn't marry who they wanted with the same sense of disbelief. 
     That's a debate for another time, though.  Today I just want to ask for compassion, understanding and acceptance of people. All people. I'm not asking that we all like everybody. I admit there are people I don't care for, but, I don't dislike or think less of anyone because they are gay or lesbian or transgendered. 
     In Feels Like the First Time, I often repeated the mantra Perspective is everything. I think it applies so clearly to this situation. If we could all place ourselves in the perspective of someone who has a different sexuality and is afraid to tell the people they love for fear of rejection, we could appreciate their pain.      I believe that through love and understanding we can work together to make a world where National Coming Out Day won't be necessary because people will be free to be who they are.
     Whether you agree or disagree with me, thank you for reading. Tomorrow we'll return to our regularly scheduled blog.

Four more days to enter!

      OK, technically it's like 4 days and 5 hours, but you get the picture.  If you'd like to enter to win one of two signed copies of Feels Like the First Time, use the buttons below. If you want to enter by leaving a blog comment, for instance, click on the button below that says "2 Points for a blog comment." If you just leave a comment without doing that, Rafflecopter doesn't recognize it, and I want to make sure everyone gets the entries they should.
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To Indie or not to Indie

     My friend J.K. Kelley published a blog entry called Some cold realities about getting published, for your information yesterday. In it, he outlined the options a hopeful writer has if they want to publish a book. In a nutshell, those options are "The Big Six" publishers in New York, the "small press" publishers and self-publishing.     Until very recently, self-publishing was looked down upon, tainted by the concept of the "vanity press." The idea was that if you weren't good enough to get by the Gatekeepers of the publishing world, then you were probably just publishing for the ego of the whole thing. You had a book, but you weren't "really" published.      When I started writing my book I was calling A Perfect Fit in 2006, I was completely intent on landing an agent and waiting by the mailbox for the inevitable  rejection letters to start piling up. I studied the art of writing a query letter, polishing and re-polishing my first few chapters in the hope someone in the publishing industry would be willing to read them.     Then, the Kindle came along and changed the world. Companies had been pushing various e-readers for years, but nothing captured the marketplace until the Kindle. Did you know that there are now more e-books sold than there are printed books?     By the time I had typed "The End" on the last page of what I was now calling Feels Like the First Time, I had no interest in publishing the conventional route. I am an Indie through and through.     Why? J.K. did a good job of covering the reasons in his blog, but here are my own:      If I had sought a conventional publisher, my manuscript would *maybe* (if I was lucky) be sitting on some agent's desk, who might or might not ever get around to reading it. No publisher, and no person outside my friends and family would even be aware it existed.  Instead, it's out in the world, and guess what?  It's selling!  People are buying copies of it every day, which thrills me and makes me feel so grateful. And, people are enjoying it, which is the most gratifying thing of all - it has an average five star rating with 15 reviews on Amazon.     If I had managed to have a publisher take a look at the book, they almost certainly wouldn't have been interested. "It's a memoir, and you don't have a platform" they would have sniffed. "What bestseller is your book like?" they would have asked. None, really, would have been my answer. I don't know of any bestselling books that tell a gentle, innocent true love story.     Also, if they had offered me a contract, the terms would have been onerous at best. I would have signed all my rights away, and even if they decided they didn't want to print any more copies, it would have been very difficult for me to get those rights back. Then there's the financial aspect. As an unknown author, I would have received a very small up-front payment, and the chances are exceptionally high that I never would have seen another cent. Instead, I take all the risk and claim the rewards if there are any. I like that.     In exchange for all that, they would have theoretically given me some "promotion" to help me get my book off the ground. The reI talk to other writers who are published every day, and I'm going to tell you, that ain't gonna happen. They expect authors (or at least lesser-known authors) to do their own promotions and publicity.     So, what do you get if you sign a contract with a big publisher?  You get to say "My book is published by Penguin." Or McMillan, or whoever. From my perspective, that's all you get, and the ego-stroke of that just isn't enough, not even close.     Instead, when I typed "The End," I got busy. I contacted a great editor, cover artist and proofreader.  We worked on the book together for four more months before it was ready to be put out in the world. It was a collaborative effort, and it was fun. Since I hit "publish" on September 4th, I've been my own publicist, and that's been fun too.     If I ever sell enough to attract the attention of a publisher, they would honestly have to change their whole business model before I would be interested in talking to them. I'm aware that's not going to happen, and I'm good with that.  I love everything about being an Indie.

Get it right next time

      Where were you on January 4th, 2011? For most folks, it was just another workday, maybe trying to recover from the excesses of celebration that marked another new year. It was a work day for me as well. I had to be at an appraisal of a house I had listed and sold in West Seattle that day. Dawn and I had been married two and a half months. She hadn't started her new job yet, so she came with me to Seattle. We were sitting in the driveway of the house, waiting for the appraiser to show when the DJ on KJR FM announced that Gerry Rafferty had died, and then played Baker Street. 
     On the one hand, I wasn't completely shocked. Rafferty's life had been spinning out of control for some time. He had famously told friends that he had been an alcoholic "since childhood." In 2008, he had checked into rehab, checked himself back out shortly thereafter, and went to stay in the luxurious Westbury Hotel. Sometime after that, he disappeared, and his whereabouts after that were a mystery. I had kept up with him as much as possible during this tumultuous time, and that's why his death wasn't completely unexpected.
     Still... losing Gerry Rafferty, and knowing there would never be another song written by him hit me hard. His music had as much impact on me as anyone not named Lennon, McCartney or Paul Simon. 
     I know that when many people think of him, they think of Baker Street, or maybe Right Down the Line, or Home and Dry. Music aficionados may remember that he was also the driving force behind Stealer's Wheel, which produced the immortal, Dylan-esque  Stuck in the Middle with You.
     For me, there was so much more to this brilliant, conflicted artist.  I love his well-known songs (particularly Baker Street) but he put out so many other, brilliant songs. In Feels Like the First Time, I used his song Whatever's Written in Your Heart as the title of my afterword. I would have preferred to print the lyrics to the song in total, but getting the rights was prohibitively expensive, so I contented myself with the title. Rather than just post a link, I want to share the video here. I think it's one of the most beautiful, touching songs ever written.       If you've got time for one more, please check out this one:       Gerry Rafferty was a conflicted man. His musical talent brought him riches and fame. The tough part was, he was never comfortable with that fame.  He wanted to create his songs and express his ideas, but he hated being on stage performing them. His most famous creation, Baker Street  actually addressed this. I've always believed the second verse of the song was talking about the music industry and its trappings:
     This city desert makes you feel so cold
     It's got so many people, but it's got no soul
     And it's taken you so long to find out you were wrong
     When you thought it held everything.
     One last irony about Gerry Rafferty. His most famous piece of music is almost certainly the sax solo from Baker Street. That solo was played by Rafael Ravenscroft, who later claimed credit for creating it. He said that when he was brought in to play on the song, there were just gaps there, and he created the solo based on an old blues riff. This was ultimately proved to be false when an earlier take of the song was produced with an electric guitar subbing for the sax, playing the exact same riff.
     I know Gerry Rafferty will never hold a place in the ultimate Mt. Olympus of rock gods. That ship sailed long ago. To me, though, he achieved immortality through the music he created. Even though I hear his voice nearly every day as I listen to that music, I miss him, knowing he is gone.