R.J. Price's Blog

Time to Get Back on the Horse

It’s not like I’ve been doing nothing over the past year, but I suppose it’s pretty close to it.

Affording an editor is difficult. It also sucks for me that I can only afford it so rarely, but I’m not going to not edit.

So I need to get back on the marketing and conversation and hop right in there. Yeah, because that’s simple, right? It’s only been a year, there’s only like a sixty percent chance that everything has changed and I’m back to square one again.

For those who have been reading along, hullo.

For those who haven’t, welcome. My name is R.J. Price and I am the author of the Seat of Magic series, which follows Aren in her journey from a young woman to a queen the likes of which her world hasn’t seen in over a thousand years.

I’m not perfect and don’t believe for a second that I am, which causes problems when I’m supposed to get on a soap box and tell others to buy my product. It’s something that I need to work on, inflate that ego a little more.

I know there are people who enjoy my books, I just don’t know where they are.

Except for that one odd thing that happened in Australia. But I suppose I’ve already had my fifteen minutes there, and I do hope the series was enjoyed as much as it appeared.

In the mean time, I’m going to poke my fingers together and stand in the corner muttering to myself.

…

Oh, I will be publishing a book in early 2018. It will be the fifth book of the Seat of Magic series. I’m also hoping to publish a book in 2019, a new world for a duo of books called Hellfire and Brimstone.

If you’d like to support my work, please purchase a book and then leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads. Tell your friends, post on Facebook.

I’m Not a Great Conversationalist…

It’s been a long time, like a really long time. Turns out, helping someone get started is a full-time job.

That’s believable, right?

Trying to do the re-write just hasn’t moved, so whenever I’ve had the urge to write, I’ve gone to Aya and helped her a bit with her stuff. She’s finally getting ready to launch her first book, has three more written, has four more planned, and is currently ripping her hair out over a couple of characters who won’t listen to her.

Aya likes to repay help whenever she can, she doesn’t like being in debt to people. At least, not to people she physically knows.

So she’s helped me set up an office, is trying to coach me on social media, and kindly only asks after the next book every couple of months.

A few days ago, I received a message from a new reader. Said something like, “found you on iTunes because your books were on the front page.”

… I… may have called Aya and yelled at her.

I don’t have iTunes, all I can do is find the page for Trouble and see that there are links to other books, and no reviews yet. I went through quite a bit of my contact list to find an Apple user. Kind of surprised how few people have Apple that I know, I figured it’d be like one in three, but apparently, it’s more like one in ten.

That’s not to say it’s not as popular as you might think, so much as I have an odd collection of contacts.

They told me it was still on the front page. Number nine, I think it was when they found it.

Now the call to Aya does take a little more explanation.

I haven’t been doing social media. I haven’t set up advertisement. I’m not actually certain I’ve put a link to iTunes anywhere in any of the previous advertisements.

Basically: I didn’t do it.

Whenever there’s something unpredictable and untraceable, I panic. Blame my parents or years or predictable living, or even genetics, but my first instinct when I see a surge I can’t explain is widespread panic.

So I talked to Aya and she said she hadn’t done it. Then she said.

“Well, that’s a shame.”

“Because you wanted to claim it?”

“No, it’s a shame that you haven’t been working on the fifth book like you’ve been telling me you have. You can’t just start a pre-order for it on top of this wave.”

I would have made a strangling motion, but we were texting.

Have you ever texted an author? Just blocks of conversation bubbles, miles long.

Anyhow, this is probably the universe telling me that I need to get back to work. I can’t quite afford an editor yet, but I should do the re-write and have it ready to go for when I do. Then I should write the sixth so that it’s ready, and so on and so forth.

I wish I could write at Aya’s pace. A book that would have taken me three months, she does in a month, sometimes a week if she’s having a good time of it.

Teaching is a Learning Process

Someone asked me for help publishing from the ground up. I gave her the research I had, a link to my blog posts and asked if there was anything specific she needed help with. She now has more followers than me and no book, so I asked what she was doing…

“What you told me to!”

To which I groaned and dropped my head on my desk.

The two of us have been talking back and forth. She’s been coaching me on the social media things, including (but not limited to) calling me stupid for my resistance to post on Twitter. It’s all right though, I don’t take it personally.

I dare say I made an online friend.

She’s more outgoing than I am, is what I believe it is. She has no problem getting up in the morning and saying hello to everyone she sees. Good for her, great for getting people to see that you exist.

I can teach her about marketing and research, how everything works. She can teach me how to use Twitter. I feel like a doddering fool on there and don’t want to say anything at all.

New To-Do List

Read through Highest Lord and get off the pot. There’s nothing wrong with the book, it’s my ego telling me to burn everything to the ground
Finish the edits for Five Years Dead, which is the more detailed ones, that may require altering facts. Polishing some things off.
Finish writing Blank Slate trilogy.
Think about, and work on, a pen name. Romance and Erotica sell well, but I don’t want my family, or my co-workers, finding those books easily. If they do, I won’t deny writing the books.
Author bio pic, still.
Different marketing for Trouble. Unless one of the people who have gotten back to me will make it explode, this needs to be seen to.

My long term list is more about writing. I want to get to writing, but there’s a slight problem wherein my apartment needs a thorough cleaning.

The past couple of days I’ve been reading through Sit Pretty to check for problems in the hard copy. Think I got them all. Thanks to my editor pointing it out, I finally noticed that my quotes are off. Some are the curly kind, some are the flat kind. It changes throughout the book.

I’m betting the flat ones are in the sections I wrote on my laptop and the curly ones are the ones I wrote on the tablet. That’s fun. So the entire thing has to be reformatted and I will forever see the apostrophes and quotation marks.

It’s a good thing it was pointed out to me.

So Many Things

So tired… stupid clocks changing.

Actually, I’ve done the same thing for years, worked late and then up at this time for work the next morning. The real thing that disturbed my sleep was the heat in the apartment because I don’t have control over the radiators. That’s controlled by the landlord, who I contacted several days ago about the heat.

Normally opening the windows would solve that problem, but when you get home and have to go straight to bed, you can’t exactly air out the apartment. Which means I didn’t exactly sleep, which means I’m not focused.

Reading through Sit Pretty, I’ve only found three possible errors. For the first half of the book or so. I’m so glad this one is reading better than Trouble. Or maybe I’m just more critical of Trouble because it’s the first in a series.

I am still considering the cover for Highest Lord, I’m not sure I agree with it yet. For the fifth book, I’ve decided to do some re-writes before I send it to the editor. This is the book where it begins to shift away from Aren and Av. I have the next couple chosen, have for months. After them, I know who else gets attention.

Because the point of the series is the changes that Aren brings to her world, it doesn’t have to follow Aren that closely. After the fifth book, we probably won’t ever see from Aren’s perspective.

Oh, but I now have two possible covers for the fifth book…so I’ve got that going for me, at least. If I can decide on a name for the fifth book, I may purchase the cover before the book goes to the editor.

Writing is starting to nag at me. Which is annoying because I’m trying to do all the other things to get two books off the ground.

Maybe if I were a bit more organized I could devote an hour a day or something to just writing.

Updates on Plans

So it’s been almost two weeks. I haven’t forgotten my list from the first of March. So how far have I gotten?

1 – New author pic: the cold… ugh. But at least, I have an idea of what I want, I just have to figure out the how.

2 – Update author bio: Nope, not even started. That’s what happens when I have to write about myself.

3 – Create a new author interview for Goodreads and Smashwords. Both give premade questions. I redid Smashwords’ interview and added a couple of questions. I just keep staring at the Goodreads ones, not wanting to answer.

4 – Update book page on WordPress. Done. The series were separated into their pages. Some updates were done, such as where to find them, their review status (which was well over a year old) and a cover. Goodreads offers an “author widget” which could do about the same thing, but I’ve been unable to get it to work yet.

5 – Create book pages on GoodReads for Highest Lord and Five Years Dead, if they’ll allow me to without the cover pages. Nope, not yet. 

6 – Finish edits on Highest Lord, maybe cover that sucker and get its hard copy formatted. Edits are done, went through grammatical edits of Five Years Dead, kinda feel like burning the whole project to the ground. Ego, or is it actually bad? I won’t know until I publish it. 

7 – Continue trying to market Trouble. Oh, definitely done. I still take a look about nearly every day. Once I have Highest Lord ready to go it’ll be a lot easier to jump up and down and say “look at me!”

Last night I also posted about hours. Now, I keep obsessive track of things like this. I’m good with metrics, at least, I think I am. Once I discover an area that is a ‘time suck’ I can make changes to behaviour patterns to get more time. Thankfully it’s just me who has to make the changes so there shouldn’t be much fighting.

A couple of weeks ago I booked the first week of April off from the day job. Every winter is a blackout for vacations and depending on the support I get from everyone else, I want to start biting people, or crying, in December. The longest I had ever made it before was January. This year it was the end of February.

The vacation is a staycation. At home, not much money and no friends. Mr. Friend is going out of town for work for two weeks. So it will quite literally be me and my cat, and possibly Mr. Friend’s cat as well.

The plan isn’t to take the full week off of writing. That would be insanity. I can’t even take the full week off actual work. By the third day, I’ll want to go back, by the time I do go back I’ll be excited to get back to work.

I do want to restrict the writing as much as possible. So barring a spike in sales, I won’t really be doing marketing that week unless something really comes up. For the writing side of things, I might work on the third book of the Blank Slate trilogy. Though after seeing Five Years Dead edited, I’m not sure I want to see anything besides the Seat of Magic series come back.

I think that means it’s ego. I’m also pretty certain I cried when I say Trouble come back. Just need to breathe and get through it.

So besides finishing the trilogy, which is only part of a book left to write, I have little in the way of plans.

Actually, what I’d really like is to set up the office properly with what furniture I’ve got. Instead of having chunks of it all over the apartment. To organize my books and journals, update the accounting system.

All work for the writing, though.

I’m also going to look into any festivals or events going on, maybe walk down to the castle and have a picnic on the lawn. Maybe take the long walk on my own this year. Which would be longer this year…

The long walk involves leaving the apartment, walking to downtown, then up the escarpment and to a Value Village. Which is a little odd, because we’ve never bought anything there… Then from there to a park that’s over the escarpment, looking out over the city.

From there the walk goes back to where we came up the escarpment, and down into downtown. Stop for either store bought ice cream, or to the ice cream parlor if it’s open, and then on to home.

When living downtown that walk would take three or four hours. Now I’m half an hour away from downtown (walking) so it’d be four to five hours.

The long walk is a new tradition, but it’s also… a statement, I suppose. Couldn’t do that in my old city. There were some places you could walk, but you couldn’t be bold about it. You’d drive to parks and go in pairs.

I never understood that there was simply a feeling in the air until I stepped out of my downtown apartment in the new city and actually looked around.

So every year I take the long walk. I tempt myself with Value Village trinkets, check out their clothing, then go and have lunch before returning home utterly exhausted. To ice cream, wine, and some video games.

I’ve never actually checked to see how far I walk, maybe this year I should.

Anyhow, those are my starting plans for my week off of the day job. Anything to keep from writing, so that I have an actual break from everything. As much as I love writing, everyone needs a break, lest they crumble one day.

Tax Time Again

Every year I get a little better, that’s what I keep telling myself. Just a little better.

Last year I didn’t account for having a home office set up because I barely understood what I was doing, the local tax specialists were going to charge me an exorbitant sum to do my taxes because I count as an indie business.

This year I sat for well over an hour, mulling over my taxes because something didn’t seem right. Still don’t have it right, but at least, I got the whole thing working and I’m on the right track.

I will not hire this out, I will not hire this out, I will not…

In order to claim a home based office you need to know how many hours your “business” is open for, how many days, how large the office is compared to your home, and what you use in your business.

Authors and artists don’t exactly have set hours… well, not really.

Even when not on social media, I work for an hour before I leave for the day job, on the commute to the day job (more often than not) and before I clock in for my day job, then when I clock out for my lunch. Then of course, the commute home, and when I get home, I begin working while preparing dinner and doing chores around that.

I should seriously look into whether or not that would mean the meals could be counted in some fashion. If you work a day job (in Canada at least) and you work during a meal period, you have to be paid for that period. So… same thought applies.

It was as I sat down to do all my math that I realized just how many hours I devote to this ‘hobby’ of mine. I don’t have a proper office set up, but I do use quite a bit of space. I should bring in an actual desk and an actual computer and then keep the laptop, or get a new one, and start setting up actual hours.

I haven’t had a day off in forever and since January 19th. I was only off then because Buster passed away and that day was taking care of him.

Today I took a partial day off. Taxes counts under accounting which counts as doing the work. My own taxes would be done in half an hour, it’s just been the accounting for the writing that’s had me near tears.

For my partial day off, I prodded a friend of mine off my couch and we took a walk to downtown.

While he complained about his boyfriend, but I got him off the topic. Except, all I had to talk about was the writing. Didn’t want to talk about the day job.

Because I’m not worried about it burning down if I take a day off.

Once downtown we went to the grocery store, picked out a few items, then walked to the bayfront. Living right on a Great Lake is fabulous. Living in a city with actual clean, safe parks makes me all atwitter.

So we had a nice lunch, except the goose that came upon me and was begging for my sandwich. It was cold, it’s always colder down by the bayfront, so we ended up leaving before I wanted to leave simply because I was cold.

Then we walked back downtown, picked up a few more items from a store and came back to my place.

Where I immediately began looking at my taxes again.

I need to set time aside to do things. even while sick I market or do social media. It’s time to set boundaries, to start drawing up actual hours.

You know, take a day off once a week to play a video game or go on a date. Or anything besides writing. So that I have something to talk about besides writing.

So. I need a planner, but can’t afford to buy one. Or more of, it’s not an absolute necessity, I can get free planner apps or even do it in excel or some sort of spreadsheet. With the planner, I’m going to record my hours for both the day job and the writing along with what those hours for the writing were devoted to.

By doing that I’m hoping to isolate any problem areas to make some things more efficient. Maybe even figure out any habits and use that to my advantage.

Oh, and, of course, take time off. At least one day a month, preferably once a week, where I do nothing writing oriented.

Twitter is Your Friend

Get comfortable with Twitter, even if what you think you’re saying is the stupidest thing ever. Trust me, other people are saying stupider things than you can come up with.

Twitter is like when my job told me I had to engage other people. I gaped at them, said it wasn’t possible, then I went ahead and did it. You get used to the idea over time. It’s not a change that’s going to really hurt you unless you would destroy yourself in general. Twitter just…

Speeds things up a bit.

I’ve been told for years that Twitter is helpful for authors. I know hashtags are important, but they always irritate me. Possibly because anytime I see the hashtag sign in front of a word a high pitched, teenage voice then says the word in a far too excited tone.

I wish I knew where it came from.

When writing tweets, the rules of grammar don’t matter as much. You can drop a hashtag in front of a word in the middle of a sentence. Tell your inner editor to calm down, you won’t be doing it outside of Twitter.

You do have to react in real time. Which for those of us with full-time jobs, is a little complicated.

So, for example:

Wednesday morning I woke up to Twitter informing me of someone mentioning me in a tweet. I responded, followed them, and then went to check Amazon. Where suddenly I had a spike.

… so I reacted. Ask David gave me links to make instantaneous tweets, so I used one. It was mid-morning probably.

From there I really just cheerleaded on Facebook and Twitter for the rise in the ranks that Trouble was seeing. Trouble at #11 is seeing the most distance travelled. That’s what I’m calling it, distance travelled. Trouble at #8 was pretty well ignored.

The next day I tried Ask David again, early morning with different hashtags. I did get a re-tweet from someone.

The trouble with the next day is that I as full on sick and … don’t really remember what I did. I think I was on Twitter most of the morning because I woke to like four new followers and one of those followers had retweeted Trouble‘s tweet from Ask David to his … some tens of thousands of followers.

Trouble did some that day, but not as much as the day before.

I still have no idea what happened the day before. Did one tweet do that? Really? I searched through everything I could… nadda.

I submitted to between fifteen and thirty different sites for advertising while Trouble was up in the ranks. I was accepted into one that, upon reading the submission guidelines, I have no idea why I applied. They required ten to twenty reviews on Amazon. Trouble has six.

So far I’ve been accepted to three (that have notified me) and Bknights again with the addition of a “viral Facebook post.” Upon review, I was a little silly and chose to be submitted to fifteen Amazon sites instead of what I had done before. But they promise screenshots of the before and after. Awesome, that means I don’t have to take the pictures.

I work the full-time job tomorrow when the advertising hits. On the plus side, I’m working with people who I told about Trouble, and about it’s recent rise in the ranks. If I squeal like a girl half my age who has spotted a member of One Direction, at least they’ll understand.

My next goal (there’s always the next goal) is to bring Trouble to the top five or hit the top 100 of overall books.

Sit Pretty and Dark Spirits are still in the six digits, but even on the best day with a price attached, Trouble only ever made the high five digits.

All right, it’s back to bed for me. Nap time, to help my body fight the sickness.

 

One Lost Brain. If Found, Please Return.

Ugh.

Let me just start by saying that I had every intention of sleeping the day away. My mind had different plans. I’ve got three different times going through my head and I’ve finally figured out how to get everyone where they need to go.

Hopefully, I don’t get smacked for that.

It’s… uh… what would that be… book eight’s start.

Book nine will be off on the side, outside of the series and I might launch that as I launch book ten.

Yeah, Seat of Magic is kind of an epic series, but not epic books.

That’s what’s been going through my head. As I tried to sleep last night and this morning, even during my attempted nap. At some point, my brain just shut down and I started watching the movies and doing nothing else except the occasional link check.

What got me out of bed this morning was part Izzy, part the voices in my head.

Amazon, Amazon, Amazon.

Trouble was #8 in the Romance/Fantasy genre this morning when I woke up. It’s since been dropping, which is unfortunate for me. It was bound to happen, and I did get an image of the #8 spot.

Then… I did some marketing and took a fifteen-minute nap. Not because I’m silly, but because that’s all I managed. After that, I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep again. So I got up and did some more marketing, going through a list of sites I found. It didn’t take long.

Once that was done, I crashed on the couch with blankets, a stuffie, and Izzy. The only real reason I’m upright now is because I had to shower for work tomorrow so my hair is wet. No hair dryer in this house, so I have to sit up until my hair is relatively dry, otherwise I’ll have a rat’s nest instead of hair tomorrow.

Izzy, meanwhile, has slept most of the day away. I wish I had her laziness, if only for a day.

Poking Random Things is Suggested (sometimes)

This morning I woke up to Twitter notifying me of someone having tweeted at me. I went on, considered what to do and liked the tweet, then tweeted a thank you back at them. I don’t know Twitter etiquette, but it was the polite thing to do, to thank them.

I have no idea who this person is, or why they tweeted about me. Seemed a little out of place. The tweet also had my Smashwords link on it, so the tweet may have something to do with my poking a button on Smashwords to see what it did.

I checked my links, there was a spike on Amazon. Not technically explained by the tweet and I can’t find any other link to it. But I’m also bone weary tired.

The cold has taken full hold, but I have to be upright for the day job (day six of six) so there’s no rest for me. If I can still do online marketing, I have to go to the day job.

The bone weary just means that I stared at my laptop for probably an hour before I remembered Ask David.

When I asked them to do a five day spell, I was sent an email with five Twitter links. Today I filled one out, figuring that would take place tomorrow, but still help me out some.

It was instantaneous.

Right now, I’m sitting on a bus struggling to recall how to market (stupid cold) so that I can give Trouble whatever boost I can manage. It’s not that hard, I keep telling myself.

Then I notice something out the window and stare off for about five minutes. Of course, by the time I come back to myself, I’ve forgotten what I was thinking about.

Tomorrow I have the day off my day job, but marketing will call to me. But I’ll probably only work at it for an hour or so before going back to bed.

Sweet, blessed sleep is calling me, but it’ll have to wait another ten hours.