Rick Soper's Blog, page 3

Paid Advertising? A Self-Published Authors Quandary...

Writing is not my full time gig. I still have to work another job to eat, and at that job I work with numbers. One day I made the mistake of mixing my numbers job with my writing ambitions. You see right now the numbers just don't make sense because I'm spending way more than I'm making. The biggest cost by far is editing, but one look at a few of my blog posts and you'll understand that's a necessity. But just behind editing my next biggest cost has been advertising. Now please understand my third gig is doing video commercials, so coming from that background I just thought doing a little advertising was something that everyone should do as they are starting out, but now I really wonder.

There are so many free avenues to wander down to advertise your book that actually paying for it might not make sense. But I go back and forth. My first ads were on Goodreads, I mean that is the target audience, and with like 10 million members, you're getting a huge audience. But for my cheaper books the ads were costing me more than I was making. Yes, the ads might have been directly responsible for some of my sales, but not everyone who clicks on an ad buys your book, so you end up paying for "clicks" that don't get you anything. According to the numbers my ads were seen by millions of Goodreads users, but only a small percentage of those actually "clicked" on the ad, which in turn took them to Amazon, and then not all of those were sales. So I've back off on the Goodreads ads, and my sales have dropped, so it makes me wonder if I should start doing them again.

I've tried other advertising venues that go mostly through Twitter, but Twitter isn't a target audience, and many people are there just to be entertained and have no interest in following links to go buy books. Especially if those links are repetitious, because people tend to not even pay attention to those. Then again Twitter is a stream of consciousness and if you don't keep re-entering the stream your message will get lost in the barrage of Tweets coming out every few seconds, so you end up having to repeat yourself just to be seen.

Doing a Free Day at Amazon seems like a cost free way of attracting people to your books, but at one point you have to realize that those were potential customers, who will in the future just wait until your next free day to pick up your next book because that's what they expect from you. Still it's a good way of getting your book read, and if people like it, they should go looking for your other books, but there's no guarantee they read it, or they like it, or they want anything other than free books.

Doing a Free Giveaway at Goodreads gets your name out to a whole bunch of potential book buyers, but by the time you pay for the books and the shipping, it ends up being what you might have spent on doing ads at Goodreads in the first place, so once again free isn't exactly free.

YouTube is Free, if you have the ability to produce your own commercials, which I do, and I really haven't taken full advantage of yet, but once you do get a commercial done, you can stick it on Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Goodreads, and anywhere else you can think to put it up. But I'm kind of getting the sense that the typical graphics driven commercial, with ominous music has been a little overdone, and has become white noise to most people. So i think the next step is trotting out my happy little face to entertain people and hope that they think I'm not so offensive looking and sounding that they might want to purchase something that's come out of my head, but you never know.

Facebook is free, but most of the time your friends and family have already gotten the pitch.

Twitter is Free, but like I said most people are there to be entertained, and you still need to build up followers to get the message out, and if you repeat yourself too many time Twitter will send you to Twitter jail and maybe drop you all together, which means you have to start building your Twitter account back up from scratch, and no one wants to do that more once..

Indie Book Promoter at http://indiepromotor.com/rick-soper/ is something I think is well worth the money. It's economically priced. They give you a very nice author page with buy links, and they do a lot of Twitter posts.

But these are only the venues I've tried so far and I've got an open mind, but I haven't explored everything the internet has to offer. Like the title says I'm in a quandary about what I should do next, so if you've found something that works well, please share it here. Having a blog is yet another venue to advertise your books and your thoughts, but it's also a forum through which we can all share our thoughts on what works, so please feel free to post your responses, I'm really looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

Amazon Prime - One Authors View

I like being on Amazon Prime. I've read other authors who can't stand the idea of having their books exclusively on Amazon for the required ninety days, but I tried Smashwords, which sent my books to all the other outlets, and I found that my Amazon sales dwarfed everything else by a huge margin, so I really question why another author wouldn't want to be on Amazon exclusively. I know that's not going to make some people happy, but it works for me. As a self published author you need to do whatever you can to get your name out there, and Amazon is one of the best outlets for doing that. Amazon Prime allows readers to "borrow" your books if your signed up for it. But you as the author still get paid when your book is borrowed, and sometimes dependent on the KDP numbers for the month, and the current price of your book, you sometime get paid more money if someone "borrows" your book than if they buy it. But money isn't the only issue here, theres also exposure. Selling books is a numbers game, and it works the same way any other sales product does, people will buy it if their friends say they like it. No amount of advertising will drive your sales more than actual readers who tell other readers they enjoyed your book. So the key here is write good books, and then get them in the hands of as many people as you can so they can tell everyone they know to buy it, or borrow it, whichever the case may be.

I'm just happy whenever anybody reads my books, whether they get them free during free days, borrow them on Amazon Prime, or actually but them. The point of writing books is to get people to read them and if borrowing my book gets them to read it, I'm totally ok with that.

Besides Amazon Prime is a pretty good deal. It's $79 a year, which for the math impaired is $6.58 a month. By comparison my Netfilx streaming account costs $7.99 a month. And what do I get for my $6.58 a month? According to the website at:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/custome...

You get numerous FREE shipping options on items you buy. Access to the Kindle Owners Library (Which includes all four of my books). And Streaming Videos. Sure there is overlap with Netflix on what's available to stream, but HBO, Showtime, and Stars all have overlap too, and that's not going to stop me from having those three too. It's always good to have options. Especially if you know that when you "borrow" a book through Amazon Prime that the author is still getting compensated for it. As an author I'd like to say that I really like it when you "borrow" my book, I get paid, you read my book, and maybe you write a nice review, which leads to others buying copies of my books, which in my mind is a good deal for everyone involved.

So please check out Amazon Prime and if you sign up, please "borrow" any one of my four books!

Blogs I Like To Read

No one writes in a vacuum. We all do research. Most of us are either reading a lot of books, or googling everything under the sun, or reading other authors blogs. You can't help but want to know other people opinions on things, which is why I hope you're reading my blog, I mean just before you click on the links to buy my books, which is why all us writers do blogs in the first place. So if your wondering what blogs I look at here are a few.

http://sharonstevenson.moonfruit.com

Sharon Stevens blog features information on her books, reviews of other books, and author interviews. Sharon was one of the first of my fellow authors that I met on-line. She was the first to review my books and the first to post an interview with me, so there is a little bit of loyalty here. But it's not all about loyalty because I've really enjoyed Sharon's books and she writes a lot of reviews. Sharon's tastes are a bit different from mine, but that's why I like reading her reviews because it opens me up to a whole list of books that I wouldn't pay attention to unless I read her reviews. Then I like her author interviews because they're with writers like me, people who are just starting out, self publishing their own books, and need help getting their name out to the world. I know I can use all the help I can get and am willing to give other authors that same support. BUT do not get me wrong on this, Neither Sharon nor I are doing the one hand washes the other routine here, if either one of us doesn't like a book we will be the first one to say so. I'm of the firm opinion, and I think that she would agree, that you review books honestly, and if you have problems you say so, because if you don't then we as writers won't get better, so it's in everyone's best interest to be critical when necessary. With that point made, please check out Sharon's blog because I think there are a lot of good things there.

http://russellblake.com

Russell Blake's blog is a must for any self-published author. If you missed his post on How To Sell Loads of Books at http://russellblake.com/how-to-sell-l... you missed out on one of the best set of instructions for self published authors I've read so far. Russell might not be for everyone, he's a bit gruff, has a dry sense of humor, and is very opinionated. But once you get past all that he's pretty damn funny. A lot of his blog posts start with, "So I was drinking tequila that other day and…". and you know when any post starts that way it can only go down a few humorous avenues, which he usually does. But beyond the blog Russell Blake is a really good author. If you haven't read his Jet books yet, you should, they're like action movies, with adrenaline level pacing, and wonderful descriptions. Blake has written twenty plus books, and according to him, they're selling very well, or at least well enough for him to live comfortably down in Mexico and be able to afford a sufficient amount of tequila. Blake's Blog is a blueprint of how an self-published author can promote his book in a wildly entertaining fashion. He rants, he raves, he talks about drinking, and somewhere in there he promotes his books. And we should all take notes because far too often I see a constant onslaught of repetition in promotion that lacks creativity, Russell Blake not only shows creativity, but also a good amount if humor, which I think more of us should have.

http://www.redwoodsmedicaledge.com

This is a great blog. The woman behind it, Jordyn Redwood, works as an emergency room RN, and has for over twenty years. She calls herself a medical geek because she reads medical textbooks for fun. Her blog seeks to answer other authors questions about the medical accuracy of what they're writing about. Ok maybe this blog would be no help to someone writing romance novels, but to someone like me who's writing thrillers, it's just great. Where else are you going to find the answers to questions like "What kind of pathogens could cause someone to become a zombie?" "How long does it take to recover from Traumatic Brian injuries?" "In what dosage can certain Hallucinogens be fatal?" or "what are the typical injuries you see from an assault in an emergency room?". There is just post after post that answer questions like this and many more. You never want to plagiarize anyone, ever, but it's hard not to have a few ideas float through your head after reading this blog. And if you already have an idea in your head and your wondering if it's anywhere close to reality, just ask, I get the impression that the weirder the question is the more that Jordyn will enjoy answering it, so don't hold back. This blog just has great stuff, so check it out.

http://paper.li/KnightTrilogy

I came across the Knight Trilogy Daily the other day because I got a Tweet on Twitter that said that I'd been mentioned. I always like when that happens because any publicity is usually good publicity. so I flipped over to the Knight Trilogy Daily and found not only me listed, but a whole lot of other stuff. there are stories, updates, links, photos and videos, most of which pertain to writing, but some of which are just interesting little tidbits in the mass of information available in blogs and on the web. I find something interesting every time I go there and you might to, so check it out.

http://ginger-read.blogspot.com

I really like the way this blog looks and the way it arranges it's content. They do reviews, interviews with authors, giveaways and a few contests and challenges. Now I have to say that the books they review are not exactly what I like to read, but that doesn't keep me from really appreciating how they put their blog together. They have really nice graphics, they have cool pictures, their links are right up front and easy to find, and they have a nice directory for past reviews, which make finding a book you might be interested in that much easier. Like I said before you never want to copy anybody, ever, but you can look at well put together sites like this one to get ideas to help launch or improve your own.

So there you have it! Those are a few of the blogs I enjoy reading. Please check them out, but don't forget to come back here to my blog, because you really never know what I might say next.

The Joy of Control

Everybody would love to control their own lives…but we don't. You can say you do…but you don't. No matter how much you think you do, you have to know that you really don't. Let me give you a few examples. When you drive to the store you think your in control of your own car, but what if the stupid Wal-Mart down the street is under construction and one of the crew trucks going to the site hits a bump and spills nails on the street, then you drive over the nail, it blows out the tire and you hit a power pole. You thought you were in control, but outside forces took away that control. You think your in charge of your taxes, you think you pay that one time a year, but all around you your getting hit with taxes you have no control over, gas taxes, freeway taxes, sales taxes, state taxes, and county taxes, there are taxes just everywhere you look, and you have no control over them. You think your in control of a conversation because you know that what your saying makes all the sense in the world, but that other person you're talking to can choose to not hear anything your saying and just argue for the sake of arguing. Your think your in control over what you eat, or what you drink, but there are so many steps that food and water go through long before they get to you that you have no idea what's been done to them by the time it gets to you.

No matter how much you want to control yourself and everything that goes on around you, there is a point at which you just have to accept that you can't…

Unless your a writer…

Writing is the one place where you as an author are in complete control over what you put on that blank piece of paper. If you want your character to be black sitting in the rain on the west coast of Washington waiting for the Tsunami to wash in and destroy everything he's ever know, then that's what'll happen. If you want your character to be young and full of life, only to be struck down by some horrifying creature from a different dimension that's hell bent on destroying the world, until a Captain Kirk/William Shatner type character sweeps in with a mirror that deflects the ray gun that kills the creature, then that is what will happen.

The point is writing is the one thing you can do where you're completely in charge. You create the environment, you create the players, and you make all the rules.

So if there are time when things feel like they are spiraling out of control and you need to recapture the feeling of being any where close to being in control, stop, take a deep breath, pick up a pen, find a piece of paper and start writing. You never know that character your writing about could seem real similar to yourself, but you can make sure all their troubles have a solution…I find killing them all off works for me…

The Importance of Coffee In Writing

I went to make coffee this morning, grinding the beans from the big ole bag of Starbucks I got from Costco, putting in the ten or eleven cups of water, which equates to four cups in my big ole cup, and hit brew. Then I went in and started checking my computer for my real job, calling the people I needed to talk to, doing the tasks I needed to, until I figured the coffee was done and I couldn't function any more. To my absolute horror there was no coffee in the pot!!! Then I did what any rational person would do, I shook it back and forth, checked that there was water in there, and then I pulled the plug, waited thirty seconds, and then turned it back on and waited to see if all that worked.

Nope. Nothing. I'm coffee-less…uhg!

In reality I can go two miles in almost any direction and get to an actual Starbucks. But I like my coffee, with my vanilla flavored creme, in my cup, which gets filled repeatedly. And paying 4-5 buck a few times a day to buy a coffee you can make at home for about .10 cents is complete insanity to me.

I don't need coffee, I mean except for the pounding headaches when I quit drinking it, but really it's my last vice. I used to drink a whole bunch of beer, quite often, which led to large amounts of coke the next morning, the drink, not the powder. But those vices got taken away from me. Not because I got in trouble, or someone had an intervention with me, or anything like that. I went to the hospital with stomach pains after too much fun in Las Vegas over the weekend, and they told me I had Pancreatitis, which they said I could die from if I continued to drink. The day before they told me that is the last drop of alcohol I've had since. That's a really hard transition to go through. Not that I had the DTs with hallucinations or anything like that, because I never drank That much. Its more that I used to go out with my friends lose a little control, be loud, and generally have fun. That's a hard transition to go through, from being the fun guy, to being the stone cold sober one. I tried to keep going out just to hang with my friends, and I was never tempted to drink, because the threat of death will do that to you, but everything was different. Being sober around drunk people allows you to see so many things that should and will make you nervous, that if you were drinking just as much, you'd never even give a second thought. My friends saw the looks on my face and my invitations to go out started to fall away, even with my offers to be the sober driver. I wasn't that guy anymore. I'm not going to tell you that didn't hurt more than a little bit.

Since that happened I've written and self-published four books. My only remaining vice being coffee. What about the coke you ask? Do you know how much sugar is in a coke? I'm not sure either, but its a lot. Too much if you don't have alcohol to dampen the sugar rush so you can sleep. Turns out I'm also highly reactive to sugar. Any sugar product after 12 noon and I'll be up till four or five in the morning. So no coke, means only coffee, and only in the morning. But not this morning. I probably shouldn't drink it at all, but darn it I want to be at least a little bad.

You might ask if I regret my hard partying hellion years, since I've been so productive as a writer since. I'd tell you No, without even hesitating. I greatly enjoyed my prolonged adolescent stupidity. I think going through everything I did gives me a great wealth of experience to draw upon as I move forward in my writing career. You might at this point say, but you don't write about partying too hard, you write thrillers, to which I would respond that the people that populate those thrillers are based in large part on all of the people I met in bars and at parties over all of those years. Thrillers are what I like to read, and the shows I like to watch, so it's what I like to write about, but for those who've know my over an extended amount of time, they'll occasionally spot a description, or a way a person acts, and they'll say to me, 'Hey isn't that so and so?'… and I'll just smile

Of course coffee might help me smile a little more!

The Grind

So your going to write a book, sell a whole bunch of copies, and move to an island to live forever in happiness. Cool, good for you, have fun. But if that's your expectation going in, it might be just slightly less painful to step back a few feet and ram your head into a brick wall, and keep doing that over and over again until blood is flowing profusely, your eyes are about to pop out of your skull, and your knees finally give way to the stupidity of your actions. The reality of writing is success isn't something that happens overnight. For every JK Rowling or Stephen King, who themselves were not overnight successes, there are millions of people with names like Bob or Sue that jump into the writing profession with huge dreams, only to have them crushed.

Am I saying stop, don't write that book, move on to a different dream? Absolutely not! But what I am saying is go in with your eyes wide open. Amazon, Smashwords, and many other outlets give everyone the opportunity to self-publish an e-book, or through Creatspace a physical book. I know, I've self published four books so far. And I did that because I'm not a very patient person, I sent out 30 or 40 query letters to various agents and was roundly rejected across the board. Honestly I can understand why, because I was sending out The Rock Star and it's a complex book that takes a second to get into, and most agents are either thrilled inimically or they move on, so they moved on, and so did I.

But self publishing costs money! If you didn't know that, you should! If you research you'll argue with me that Amazon and Smashwords don't cost a thing to publish books, and you'd be right. The costs are in editing, in cover art, and in formatting, all of which are an absolutely necessary to get your book to market in a professional manner. Skip those steps and everyone who reads your book, if they read it at all, will know. So those are built in costs you need to budget for.

Then you publish your book and the real grind starts. There are hundreds of thousands of books that are published every year, and to get your books sold at all you need to get your book in front of readers. To do this you go through the options that are available to you, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube or Goodreads, all of which you can access for free. But heres the grind. Getting followers on each of the sites takes time. You don't throw up a profile and get thousands of followers over night. You get them one follower at a time, and most times it's not as easy as following someone and they'll just automatically follow you back, most times they need a reason to follow you. So that means you have to start providing them with content that they want to see. And content takes time. You never know who is going to respond to which content, so you have to do a lot of it. And here's a little piece of advice…if you say the same thing over and over again, most people will just ignore you, and some will just drop you all together. So if you want to keep your followers you need to switch things up and keep people interested. Which takes time.

You can do a blog, like this one, but guess what, that takes time too.

My point in all this is I want you to realize that if you want to be a successful self-published author you need to manage your expectations, realize it's going to take some money, and know that there is an awful lot of work that goes into it. It's a grind. You get readers one at a time. Followers one at a time. Appreciate every one of them and go out of your way to keep them entertained. You never know who's going to say what, to who, or for what reason, and what might spiral out of control, become viral, and send your sales through the stratosphere. That might never happen, but what will happen is that if you keep at it, you keep writing, you keep promoting, you keep gathering followers you should get to the point that when you publish a book you have fans who will buy it without question.

I'm working towards that now… and I can't wait to get there.

The Stage-Update

So… Instead of writing, which I should be doing a lot more of, I was playing with a few cover ideas for The Stage. It sometimes helps light a fire under my butt to actually have the cover in advance of finishing the actual book. It's kind of like visualizing the goal line in a football game. If you know where your going you can map out a way of getting there. The hardest part of any book for me is getting the outline done. I tried writing without an outline in the past, you know the whole Stephan King "Just Write and you'll figure it out along the way" approach. But that really didn't work for me, because it was too random and scattered and allowed me to go off in tangents that really didn't advance the story very much. A prime example of this was when I was writing The Rock Star I went off on a tangent on the first chapter and sixty five thousand words later had a completely different story. Which is my round about way of saying I need to have the outline to keep me centered and focused on the story at hand. I spend hours and days in Apple's Numbers moving lines up, back, and over, while adding, and subtracting ideas as I work out the outline of a story. But once it's done I can really pound through writing the book because I know exactly where I'm going and how to get there.

The outline for The Singer is done. I'm currently pounding through it. It's going to take me a few months. If I didn't have to work, or spend time with my lovely girlfriend, or play with my rambunctious dogs, or eat or sleep I would get it done a whole lot quicker. But sometimes life just gets in the way of writing.

If you're waiting for the next installment in the Rock Series…Thanks! That means you read the other two books and I really appreciate that. Trust me this next book will be worth the wait. It'll tie everything together and throw in some heavy duty twists along the way.

In the meantime head over to rockhardpress.com and leave me a comment about which cover you like...I'll be looking forward to your replies

The King!

Today I'm publishing my fourth book called The King. I'm excited about this. Every author should be excited about every book they put out, but I'm especially excited about this one because I think it came together really well. It's another Jon Stevens story like The Bainbridge Killings, but it's very different in a few ways. Bainbridge was a first person, single view throughout the story, but The King adds in the views of the various backstories of the other people involved in the case and I think it adds a whole different level of depth to the story that brings the reader a lot closer to the individual characters. And that emotional connection serves to heighten the gut punch of where the story goes. I hope readers will enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it, because I really did have a lot of fun writing it.

Blogging

You know sometimes it's just easier to churn out a blog than it is think in the coherent lines that you need to to write an actual book. Blogs can be about those random events that make up your day. Like playing with your puppy, eating bacon, or letting Twitter monopolize the majority of your conscious thoughts to the point that you need to blog to make the transition to actually writing sentences that are over 140 characters long. Sometimes just running your fingers across the keyboard of your computer to slap out sentences is just the exercise that you need to do to just get back into the groove of writing on a daily basis. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I think that I'm suffering from a bit of writers block. As you can tell by this missive I don't really have a problem communicating or writing. In fact if you were in the room with me there is a good chance I would talk your ear clean off. I'm not shy. So the fact that I'm sitting in front of a computer without the ability to work out the thoughts in my head that make up the book that I'm about to write is beyond frustrating. Maybe it's the fact that this book is the one that ties my Rock Series together and there's a built in pressure to perform that has me tied up. Maybe it's the fact that I have too many ideas and just don't know where to start. Maybe I'm just lazy and would rather go play out in the warm California sunshine on a carefree three day weekend. Maybe I just needed to take this little sojourn so I could reconnect with my ability to process thoughts into understandable sentences. Maybe I just like to rant. I think my girlfriend would probably agree most with the last statement. Whatever is going on I have been looking at the same beginning and the same end on an outline with a whole bunch of blank space in the middle for weeks now. Actually writing chapters is not hard for me. Coming up with the outline that ties everything together beforehand is a painful process. Why in the world would I share any of this with anyone else? Well, in conversations I've had with other authors I find that I'm not alone in my struggles. And maybe sharing those struggles with others might help those others to know that we all have the same problems. It's just part of the process. Then again maybe it's just me and I'm just a freak lost in his own random thought trying make sense of things that will always be nonsensical.

Soperama...what was I thinking?

I have to start up front by saying that every time I say "Soperama" out loud I laugh. It's just so over the top it just cracks me up. But really as an independent author who is self publishing his own books you have to be a little over the top, because there is just so many people doing exactly the same thing, self-publishing, that you find any way of establishing yourself over the sea of books constantly coming out. "Soperama" in concept seemed like a good idea, I have written three books, I was going to give one a away free each day for three days. I've written about free books before, and as I stated there, I consider "free" books to be a very good advertisement, because it puts books in peoples hands, and if your any good at all those same people are going to seek out your other books, and tell people that they liked your books. At least that's what you hope happens. So with that in mind I set out on my three day "Sopereama" set of free days. What I didn't take into account was how much effort goes into each of those three days. You have to Tweet, you have to Facebook, You have to "YouTube", and you have to do "Events" on Goodreads, all of which takes time, effort, and runs the risk of making you an irritation to your followers at each of the sites. The Free days work individually, because you can put all that effort into them, but when you try to do it over multiple books on successive days, you just burn people out on hearing your name and seeing your messages and Tweets. So when you get to the new book that you were trying to promote in the first place, well... you've overstayed your promotional welcome, and your "free" sales suffer. OK, message received, we live, we learn, and then we move forward, hopefully a little smarter for our pain. Then we blog and tell others to learn from our mistakes. So your takeaway from this should be "Free Days" should be just that, single days, not successive days, not multiple books, just one book on one day. That way both you and your potential consumers can concentrate on that single book, and all be happier because you are. But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.