Rhett Bigler's Blog, page 6

Goodreads Giveaway Book Signing

Sunday, January 26th 12:00 PM to 12:30 PM EST.

Event Link.

Those of you who follow me have probably been wondering when I was going to post this. Well . . .  I had to work through a few technical glitches the past several evenings in order to figure out how to schedule it (I haven’t tested it yet, so the first one might be a bit of a rodeo). Anyway, I finally got it all figured out and on the official schedule. Yay me!

Okay, the idea is simple — I’m giving away 30 signed copies of my debut novel (you can still enter until midnight January 25th). On Saturday, I’ll get a list of the 30 winners, then I’ll need to sign and mail the books.

So I thought, why not have a little signing hangout? Anyone can drop by for a chat or to watch me work through signing 30 books! Of course if you’re a winner, it would be great for you to stop in, so that I can personalize signing the book to you!

Point of procedure — I will be signing the books in alphabetical order, so show up early if you’re on the list and particularly if you’re in the front half of the alphabet.

I’m excited and looking forward to seeing you, well someone I hope, at the event.

My Twitter Experiment Day 14

It has been interesting. I woke up to find my Twitter account suspended today, but more on that later.

As I said when I started this, I’m basically using the method Joel Friedlander suggested. I find writers I like and scroll through their followers looking for people to follow. I skip eggs. If accounts have a picture, but don’t have a profile description I click to see if they’re being used and if it looks like the person is not active, I skip them. I skip business accounts, most with a “social media” description. I skip authors, although I do follow people with “Writer” if it looks like that is an interest as opposed to an aspiration or profession. Also, I have a double exception if I see a writer’s profile that somehow appeals to me. So I am pretty closely following his method, which is so supposed to add 30 people to my following list in about 6 minutes. Here is my average daily increase in how many people I’m following:

Week 1 – 26
Week 2 – 31

For followers, Joel said that people will follow you back (that’s proper edict) and you’ll pick up 15-20 per 30 that you follow. So far, not quite, although there was a distinct difference from Week 1 to Week 2:

Week 1 – 4
Week 2 – 11

The other interesting thing as I moved into Week 2 was that I began to get a couple of people each day initiating a follow with me instead of visa-versa. Also, I started to get some retweets and inquiries about my novel. Just a few each, but that’s still greater than the zero I had been getting. Also, Twitter is now becoming a meaningful contributor of traffic to my blog (keeping in mind that all numbers are low).

In terms of my interactions, I send a direct message to everyone who follows me with a Thank you. I respond to all direct messages (I’ve even been interviewed for a school project – how cool is that!). I pick one new person to send a tweet to each day (something I picked up from the comments in Joel’s article), usually when something jumps out or amuses me in someone’s profile description. And I tweet on occasion, but still not daily.

Which leads me to my surprise and dismay at my account being suspended. They sent me a link to the rules, but I was still mystified after reading them. The only thing that I can figure is that adding 180 followings in a week is too many, which seems odd since one of the objectives is to follow and be followed. The only other thought I had was that maybe someone thought that I was spamming, but that’s almost comical. I’ve tweeted 21 times in the last week. Of those, 3 are about my book/book giveaway, 1 is my standard link to a new blog entry, and one is a retweet of a Hugh Howey article on Indie publishing. The rest were to actual people. Not exactly a spamfest.

Anyway, I took today off from adding new followings, but I do intend to keep the experiment going for a while to see what it yields.

Unboxing and Book Giveaways

I am totally stoked about my Goodreads Giveaway and so I wanted to share the unboxing of the actual books! Also, I’ve got a couple of fun things to announce.

1st Draft of Beowulf Chronicles 2 is Done!

I just finished it about 15 minutes ago!

It was a long hard day of fighting some early procrastination and fighting to keep my butt in the chair. Then with the help of the Scorpions World Wide Live (the right music is always essential), I hit a groove. I think I listened to it five straight times!

Anyway, with sore butt, back, and arms, I powered my way to the end of the book and I feel good. I wrote a couple of good scenes today and I like its ending. I know I’ve got a lot of work to do yet, but it feels pretty damned good to bring it to an end.

Now I can eat dinner!

Then I need to find my digital recorder so that I can finally transfer that chapter I dictated last April into the book. I might wait ’til tomorrow on that!

My Twitter Experiment

I’ve been on the fence about Twitter for a while. I think it’s a valuable tool and I’ve read enough about it to have a sense for how to use it/what it can do for you, but I haven’t felt strongly that it was a worthwhile time investment for me.

You see, between the day job, my son, writing, coaching soccer, dishes, etc., I’m not exactly overflowing with free time or adequate rest. So I tend to evaluate strongly any extra time commitment and Twitter hasn’t quite made the cut. To this point, I’ve dabbled. I have an account, mostly my blog updates go to it. Sometimes I read a little of what others are doing, sometimes I promote my work or update my progress, and sometimes I just ignore it.

So that brings me to this morning. I went to Joel Friedlander’s site to see if he had posted the Cover Design Awards for December yet. Even though I think his style preferences contrast somewhat with the book cover for Murder & Mochas both my designer, Abel Valdivia, and I think it’s a kick ass cover. In fact, that’s the general feedback we’ve gotten. I’ve even had some inquiries on who did my cover. So, I’m anxious to see if Joel likes it and I popped onto his site first thing this morning.

Unfortunately, he hasn’t posted the results yet.  But this interesting article on how to build an awesome twitter following in 6 minutes a day jumped out at me. I thought, “hmm, that’s about the right time commitment for me.” And I’ve seen with my book release how even a meager twitter following can have an impact, so I thought an awesome following could be really cool.

I read it and it made sense. So I thought, “I’m going to try that.” And as with most things, I want to start immediately, so I did. I also thought that it would be interesting to track my results over time, by capturing them in blog posts  – this has the added bonus of forcing me to stick with the experiment.

Okay, on day 1 I started with the following stats:

Following 104

Followers 44

I invested 6 minutes in finding new people to follow and I ended the day with:

Following 119

Followers 46

My actual total time investment was 23 minutes because I goofed around for a few minutes looking for some people I had been meaning to follow, but hadn’t yet (such as Joel Friedlander) and I looked at the new people I was following to find one tweet I liked. When I found it, I responded to the person letting her know that I liked it and she actually favorited it. Not bad.

Okay, that’s day 1. Tomorrow, I really am going to spend only 6-10 minutes on it.

2014 First Quarter Goals

Hard to believe that it is already a year since I did this for the first time. I feel like I accomplished a lot during 2013 and stating my goals and blogging about my progress was a big part of that. So here I go again.

Finish 2nd Draft of BC2.  There is actually a lot to this one: Finish the 1st draft (not quite there), read it through, determine the changes, and overhaul. But all in all it should be pretty do-able. You can follow BC2′s progress here.
Write 1st Draft of BC3. Okay, this one feels tough because it A. requires that I actually finish the 2nd draft of BC2 and B. I do A. with enough time left in the quarter to do this. But I have a goal of getting both of those books out this year, so if I’m going to do that I need to get off to a fast start. You can follow BC3′s progress here.
Address Heel Issue.  The PT for the tendinitis in my Achilles went nowhere for two plus months. Unfortunately, I have now completely dropped my exercise routine and have lost confidence that I was even addressing the right issue. Time to switch to address it.
Restart Exercise Routine. The goal for the quarter is 3 days a week.

Those all seem pretty clear and measurable.

Goodreads Giveaway

My Giveaway is live on Goodreads!

Basically, for the next 30 days you can hit the “Enter to Win” button and  you’re in. How easy is that? Then on Jan. 25th, Goodreads randomly selects 30 people to receive a signed copy of my debut novel. You can enter here.

Here’s the most exciting part for me — the giveaway went live at midnight last night and when I checked it at 9 am this morning (yeah, I slept in, sue me, it was the day after Christmas) I already had 48 people entered!! So join them and maybe in 30 days, you can look like this:

That’s me holding my first actual physical copy of Murder & Mochas. The first of  you who ordered off Amazon or CreateSpace, already received your books. I know. But you’ve got more pull than the author (as it should be). My book wasn’t scheduled to arrive until tomorrow. BUT, it came early! I unexpectedly got it on Christmas Eve. That was a fun little early present.

So in a month, I’ll be signing 30 of these books to send out to people, you might be one of them, and I hope you’ll be smiling just as big!

Coffee Mugs Are Here!

http://rhettbigler.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013.12.20-Coffee-Mug.mp4

2013 holiday book buying guide to regional science fiction and fantasy

Lack of Fanfare Is Good

One nice thing about being an Indie writer is the lack of fanfare.

Don’t get me wrong I wouldn’t at all mind a little splash and I did very much enjoy all of the congratulations, fb posts, and texts when I published Murder & Mochas. It was fun. And it was good to hangout with my writer friends last night and talk about it and receive some kudos.

That said, it all seems to be over already and I’m good with that.

You see Sunday evening, the steady stream of congratulations had ebbed and then disappeared around dinner time. My apartment was remarkably quiet and I had a “Now What?” type of feeling.

There wasn’t anything else to do for Murder & Mochas, ebook and print versions were in the can. There were a couple of technical issues pending, but they were in someone else’s queue. So I decided the only thing that really made sense was to have a nice dinner, then get up the next morning and pick back up with Beowulf Chronicles 2 ( BC2).

And that’s exactly what I did. So far this week I’ve added about 3300 words and it is entirely realistic that I will finish it by the end of the year. Yes, Kevin, I know the year ends in thirteen days and I think that’s really achievable. In fact, that’s the official goal now.