Ramblings

My Contract With My Book

Dear Book,

I love you, I truly do even though I, as of yet, do not know you fully. I love your curves as you move through time, I love your heart as you show me the humanity of the most despicable characters, I love your brain as you teach me about Ancient Rome and the origins of wool.

But we need to talk.

I’ve been through this with some of your siblings before, five of them to be exact, and each of the books that came before you broke my fucking head apart once the honeymoon part of the relationship had ended.

I know you want this to be the whirlwind romance that is needed to write those giddy, mind-blowing scenes that we both sense are coming…but I’m sorry. As an older, wiser, author, I have to insist on some things up front.

1. When I am not working on you, as in not sitting directly at my desk with your Word document open, you are not allowed to gnaw at my brain. When not at my desk I will happily push ideas back and forth with you, or take in landscapes that I drive past and dialogue that I overhear and file them away for you to feast on later. But you do not get to drive my brain while I am off-duty. That is my time. If I want to play video games and drink beer, I will do that and not feel bad about it. You will always be with me, but that does not mean that you get to always haunt me.

2. You do not get to sit on my shoulders, compressing them with stress, yelling at me that you’re not finished yet and why aren’t you finished yet and you should be finished by now!!!! I have started five books in my life. Do you know how many I have finished? Five.

You will get done. I promise you that. I will work on you until you are done. But you are not allowed to put arbitrary time-frames into my head as to when “done” will be. That’s like trying to predict who will be standing next to me a year from now on the bus. It’s just impossible. You have my vow, though: you are officially a Joseph Devon product. You will get finished. But get off of my fucking shoulders.

3. You will be a good book. I’m not even going to acknowledge your sinkhole of doubt regarding whether people will like you or not. You will be good. You will have the fullest devotion of my talent and head and heart while I am at work on you. Your knots will be unravelled. Your mysteries will be revealed. Your problems will be solved.

And, you know what? I have a new tool that I am ready to acknowledge as a major part of the process now: rewriting. You will remember that I am a rewriting machine. You will not freak out because your first draft is a mess.

Don’t believe me? Here. I can show you the first printed version of Persistent Illusions. I had actually ordered a proof copy already because the process was so close to being finished. See the ending? See there? See how it’s still a clusterfuck of a mess even at that late date? But guess what? I rewrote it. And I rewrote it well. And it is now one of my proudest acheivements and one loved by my readers.

I will not quit on you. I will not let you be second-rate. What I mess up the first time through I will work out with sweat and toil during my rewrites. You will be good.

Those are the rules. That is the deal. You have my all, but you do not get to own me.

Agreed?

Shake on it?

Okay.

Good.

Now let’s get to work…

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Flash Fiction Contest: Sewing Climax

Short Version: Write a short story in 750 words or less in which the final climactic scene involves…SEWING!!!! Mail it to thiswhiterabbit@gmail.com. Next Friday-ish a winner will be announced and they will win signed copies of Probability Angels and Persistent Illusions. And if you have a blog or site where you want to post your story, feel free to link to it in the comments.

Longer Version: After discussing my research on Wednesday a conversation started on Twitter with @xperegrine about how, since I had this weird information about threads drying near a fire, I should use that. Actually, not only should I use it, but I should introduce it early, Chekhov’s gun style, and then in Act Three, BAMN!! Sewing climax!!!

I immediately said that was insane. Then it evolved into throwing the idea to you, the reader, and seeing what you could do with it.

So go! Sew! Sew like the wind!!

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I Think It’s Time to Start Book Three

Oh god I can’t believe I just wrote that blog title. I have so much more research I need to do. Currently I’m halfway through a book on the history of textiles and sewing methods. I have no idea when the book was published, I grabbed it for my Kindle without checking, but it discusses at length how you shouldn’t store your thread next to a fire or heating stove because that can make your thread brittle. So I don’t think it’s the most modern book ever. Nor is it the most exciting. But it’s helped a lot and given me some sense of clothing and its creation that I didn’t have before.

Before that I read a few books about Roman history.

And after I’m done with clothes I want to read about Australian history.

And then something about Romania.

And…on and on and on.

It’d be great if I could read everything about everything before I started writing but, for obvious reasons, I can’t.

And to be honest that really doesn’t matter. Truth is I don’t need to be an expert in a subject in order to write fiction incorporating said subject. I just need to know enough to fake it.

Plus there’s the fact that writing a book isn’t like telling a story.

Telling a story implies that the story is already written. You just have to add your tone, your angles, maybe give the evil witch a spooky voice so that your audience shrieks with delight, but with storytelling you know where you’re going and how you’re getting there.

Writing a book is more like excavating an ancient ruin. You have no idea what you’re going to find. You start digging and when you hit something interesting you slow down and treat it delicately and try to let it lead you to the larger picture that’s still buried.

Or sculpting. I imagine sculpting is pretty similar, too. Every sculptor I’ve read about has mentioned that they don’t turn a piece of stone into a statue, they expose the statue that already existed inside the stone.

Anyway, all the research in the world can’t prepare me for the first, “Woah, where did THAT come from,” moment that I’ll hit in book three. And after that first moment hits, all my best laid plans get tossed and it’s hard to say who is in charge anymore, me or the story.

A lot of writers express joy when they get an idea for a new work. But this is my fifth or so book and I know that this isn’t a relationship which will remain in its halcyon honeymoon stage forever.

No. Writing a book is more like shackling myself to a madman for a year in an agreement to follow wherever he goes. Except my agreement doesn’t mean anything because, you know, the shackles are in place regardless.

I am worried about the amount of story that I want to get into this book. It hit me in the shower the other morning how much I’m going to try and tell and I grew afraid.

We won’t be staying in the present, not for the whole thing, that’s for sure. I didn’t read up on Roman history to add background flavor.

And we’ll be revisiting some of the more brushed over bits of tester history. Gregor, for instance, will have his story told in more detail.

And then I have to, you know, close out the entire trilogy in a suitable fashion all the while continuing with my marketing work in a field where there’s no prior models which don’t resemble roulette wheels to me.

Sooooo…yeah.

I’m utterly terrified.

How’s your Wednesday going?

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Prague Film School and My Creative Commons License

Earlier this week I received an email from my new friend in Prague, Roma Raju. I mentioned her a few months ago. She attends a film school in Prague and wanted to know if she could adapt my short story, Private Showing, into a film for her final project.

My response was something along the lines of, “F*&! YES YOU CAN THAT’S SO F&*&#$G COOL OHMYGOD!”

She wrote me to let me know that progress was being made, she was looking into casting and that, “There is a whole lotta talk going on in school about a certain american writer who wrote a short story called ‘Private Showing.’ This year, the students from our school are making films based on short stories by Franz Kafka,George Orwell, Karel Capek and Joseph Devon.”

I’ll just die of happiness while you reread that.

Anyway, she also said she was writing because her school required express written permission from me to allow her to base her film on my work. Which…I’m not sure is right.

See, all my short stories are licensed under a Creative Commons license. Some of my books used to be under CC licenses too but I’ve since backed off of those. Though I don’t entirely know why. They get tricky.

Not because Creative Commons is tricky. They are a straightforward, non-profit organization with pretty interesting goals. Essentially they’re trying to make copyright law take a few steps forward so it catches up with the internet. They are not insistent that everything be free and nobody owns anything or other various extreme notions I’ve heard attributed to them.

The simplest example is an educator who uploads something to the internet with the desire of allowing anyone to use it, be it a list of math questions or a video about frogs mating. Whatever. The thing is, under traditional copyright law, in order for anyone to actually take that video and replay it, they need express written permission from the creator. That feels a bit old-fashioned when sharing at the speed of light is involved.

So Creative Commons set out to build a new set of licences, well within current copyright standards, that the previously mentioned educator could apply to their work so that others could quickly and easily disseminate it and show eighth-graders how frogs mate.

Creative Commons has a number of different licenses available. The most common allow one’s work to be shared based on three decisions:

1. Whether the sharing party must credit the original source

2. Whether the sharing party may profit from their sharing

3. Whether adaptations can be made, like turning a short story into a film.

And then you can mix and match among these things. Some people just share entirely and enter work directly into the public domain, some share but don’t want adaptations, etc. And of course you are free to contact the original creator directly and work out a whole new deal. You aren’t locked into the CC licence exclusively.

For me it gets tricky. My books, as I said, were open for sharing provided no profit was made and I was sourced. I get a lot of referrals from Free Online Novels where some of my books are available, which is nice. The overall concept in this day and age is that more dissemination means more readers means more fans means more people coming back here and spreading the word.

Except, Free Online Novels also sells ad space on their site. So…are they making a profit by sharing my work? They’re not selling it directly for profit, but my content is driving clicks to their ads which they’re profiting from.

Confusing.

So I’ve backed off of CC licences for my larger works.

For my short stories, though? Well those are always kind of loss leaders in my mind. I love short stories and I love writing them but there’s like, two, authors in the world who can actually turn a profit off of a short story. For me they’re more valuable as tools to give new readers a taste of my voice and draw them in to reading my larger works. I’m happy to have short stories out there under the CC licence. And if someone does want to publish one for profit, well, again, I hold those rights still and they can contact me.

Which brings me back to Roma in Prague.

The story she wants to use is licensed under a Creative Commons license. Or it was…to be honest this might all be my fault because the CC badges get lost sometimes during the many shufflings I’ve done to my site’s organization.

Not that anyone is at fault, it’s just strange that despite my giving permission to use my work under a CC licence and giving permission to Roma in an email to use my work, her school is still requiring her to get express written permission from me. Like I’m going to be mailing a sheet of paper in an envelope to Prague.

Laws are funny things.

Some people think they get written down and then they are iron-clad, as if the ink that is pressed onto the paper during their writing is imbued with magic, and once set down everything falls under its sway.

But that’s not how it works. Once written down, they’re just written down, that’s all. They’re malleable, open to interpretation, arguable, up to the whim of whoever is chosen to judge the words if they are actually dragged into a courtroom for clarification. And they’re fallible, which is why I think maybe Roma’s school wants a firmer agreement from me.

I have no idea how well known Creative Commons is in Prague, but my hunch tells me that they’re not very. And if they seem like just some nobodies without much knowledge of the law, then Roma’s school is probably not going to pay them, or their licences, much mind and prefer to outline things their own way.

What does all this mean?

I have no idea. CC licences, as I said, are non-exclusive, so anyone else is free to approach me, the copyright holder, to work out another, seperate, non-exclusive deal. Which is what Roma’s school is doing.

It’s just interesting to me that openly sharing my work can prove so difficult and that laws are only strong if they are generally understood and accepted.

At some point in French history, so it goes, the current king decided to fill his coffers by imposing an absurd tax on salt. This king is widely credited with, overnight, creating the largest black market in history and turning his entire population into salt smugglers.

The people simply didn’t go along with it.

What’s more powerful, the will of the people or court of law?

Don’t answer that.

Just stay tuned…MY STORY IS GOING TO BE MADE INTO A FREAKING MOVE!!!!

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The Pins are Out of the Grenades: More Thoughts on Self-Publishing

I haven’t been sleeping real well lately and my eyes are all kinds of blurry this morning. That’s partly because of allergies and partly because I’ve been pretty stressed out this past week.

As I mentioned last Wednesday, I’ve started seeing signs of my self-promotion paying off. It’s clumsy but, for the first time ever, I have a marketing machine that makes some sort of sense to me.

Everything I’ve tried over the past few years, outside of releasing a new book, has had a murky effect on my sales. My readership has been growing, there’s no doubt there, and I continue to get new fans, but it’s been…well to call it confusing doesn’t quite fit because that implies that I at least understood some of what’s been going on.

I haven’t. Good reviews on well-read blogs have done nothing, bad reviews on blogs with three readers have boosted sales. Giveaways have done nothing, Tweeting “1…2…3…READ MY BOOK!” got me introduced to the publishing house that brought The Hunger Games to Latin America and Spain.

It hasn’t been merely confusing, it’s been like a Dali painting on acid. I might as well have woken up every morning, drank a bottle of NyQuil, and sat down for my marketing time for all the logic that has been involved.

Now though? Now there’s actual sense here. I apply force X to lever Y and Z goes up. I adjust my marketing budget (X) in the two ad campaigns I’m running right now on Facebook and Goodreads (Y) and sales (Z) rise.

It’s clumsy and I have to believe that I can get a larger rise in sales per dollar put in by tweaking ads, page layout, which quotes from reviewers I lead with, etc. Currently the cost in advertising per sale is a dismal number, and when I talk about sales I’m talking low double-digits for April.

But it’s a functional machine. And it’s real. And that’s why I haven’t been sleeping.

Money goes in, sales go up…but that’s not the end goal.

That’s a means to an end.

The end goal is to have Amazon eventually say, “Why hello there, Probability Angels, you’ve been selling well recently. How about I introduce you to more of my customers?”

That’s been my goal since day one, though I’ve lost track of it plenty of times. That’s been my bedrock concept. And now here I am, putting real money in and creating real sales on Amazon and having hourly panic attacks that my core goal, the attention of the Amazon algorithm, is a myth. Or that the money I’d have to spend to garner that attention is so high that all I’m doing is throwing my money away to see a brief rise in sales and then, once the money, Force X, is gone, things will slow back down to a crawl and Amazon will not have taken notice. It’s stressful.

I do have two concrete facts that I’ve come away with this week, though.

One is that, with the rise in sales of Probability Angels there has been a rise in sales of the sequel, Persistent Illusions. And I’m not advertising Persistent Illusions. At all. There’s mention of it at the end of the current edition of Probability Angels and it is the first book that Amazon recommends if you liked Probability Angels, but no direct marketing by me. So to see the numbers of the sequel also go up is comforting. I’m buying fans not sales.

The second concrete fact is minor and specific entirely to the Goodreads ad campaign, but I found it fascinating.

Goodreads recommends that you create two ads for every ad you make. One to target a set of authors, and one to target a set of genres.

Here are my two ads based on a quote from Nyx. Note the difference in click-through rate:

For those of you not familiar with CTR, that’s your click-through rate, the percentage of times the ad has been clicked out of the total number of times it has been displayed. CTR’s generally range from 0.05% to 0.50%, so o.11% is a big number in this world, the highest in my ad campaign, in fact.

And yet, the second ad, the one targeting specific authors, has a 0.0% click-through rate. I could see some discrepancy between the two because one targets genres and the other authors, but for an ad worded exactly the same to range from the highest CTR in my campaign to the lowest? No. That was a red flag.

And yet I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was going on…until today. Can you see it? You probably caught it already.

When I created the author ad, the one with no clicks, I forgot to toggle the box on the ad creation form that puts a link to your reviews at the bottom of the ad.

Three words: “View 85 reviews.” A change from 0.0% to 0.11%.

No wonder I haven’t been sleeping well. I forgot to check off one box and a swing in numbers that large occurred.

I miss the days of pure theory. Those were comforting. It’s so nice to say, “Well this happens because of that and I know it’s true because in my head it sounds right.”

I still do plenty of that and, granted, that mindset came about because nothing I did seemed to matter anyway. But now there’s this jarring sense of cause and effect. And, along with that, a very real sense that I’ve moved out of dress rehearsal, that I’m no longer practicing, that I’ve switched from learning to juggle with duds to juggling with live grenades…and all the pins are out.

Theory no longer; sleep is scarce.

More next week.

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A Few Words About Advertising Your Books

Last week I chatted a bit about marketing my books, what has worked, and how revisiting my core strategy required some shifts in my current methods (that sounded  like jargon-speak).

At one point I mentioned that advertising was a pretty lousy way to sell books. That may have been a bit of an overstatement. The phrase “advertising” is broad and I don’t think one blanket judgment sums up my thoughts on the subject very well.

When I said that advertising is a lousy way to sell books, I was referring to the ads that most people think about whenever this project comes up in conversation. Big ads. Showy ads. Expensive, one-time ads. For instance, a lot of people have suggested that I price out a billboard in Times Square. I doubt highly that I could afford something like that, but, living in New York, most people throw that idea out. I mean, why not at least get a price quote?

Well, because I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t do anything. For one, the signal to noise ratio down there is absurd. But, more importantly, the advertisements in Times Square are parts of much larger marketing campaigns. Those billboards are not sole attempts to have those products interact with the masses in midtown. Those billboards are usually marquis ads for large brands that also have lord knows how many other ads, signs, catalogues, etc. where they can catch a hold of someone’s eyeballs, if only for a moment. And if you can catch someone’s attention with your product a few times in a few different ways, well then you’ve got something

The other types of ads in Times Squares are ads for musicals. These ads are much easier for me to relate to. Why? Well, why are there musicals advertising in Times Square? Because that’s where the theaters are in New York. It’s Broadway. You’ve got the ads, then you’ve got the theaters themselves with copy all over them, you’ve got tickets for sale right there in any number of formats, it’s just a great place for musicals to advertise. That sort of overlap is, as I said, easier for me to relate to than the mega-campaigns of GAP or Apple. And, more importantly, that sort of overlap is achievable by me on the web.

There are four basic methods I have tried for advertising my books online. Here are my thoughts and conclusions on each.

1. Designing an ad and buying ad space on a specific website, such as a popular book blog.

This has not worked and I don’t recommend it…for me. I think this method would work wonderfully for a book whose genre is easily accessible. If you write Urban Fantasy as that genre is perceived by the current market,  sexy vampire/werewolf/ghost/human who is out hunting/being hunted by a sexy ghost/werewolf/vampire/human, then I think buying an ad on an Urban Fantasy blog could be great. The audience is primed for you, they came there looking for exactly what you’re offering, and, though it can be costly time-wise or money-wise to put a good design together, you’d just have to hit the proper notes to get clicks.

Me? My books? I have no idea what genre they are. They’ve been eviscerated by urban fantasy fans and adored by urban fantasy fans. I ask people what genre I write in and I get a complete hodgepodge of responses. Fantasy? Thriller? Literary? I mean there’s a scene in my book where an undead ronin saves a two-thousand year old Roman slave from being incinerated by his combined efforts with Isaac Newton to come up with a unified theory of gravity.

What the fuck genre is that?

So, no. This method has not been good to me.

2. Google Ads

Google ads were where I first started experimenting with advertising and I highly recommend you do so if you’re an indie author. It’s cheap, as low as a dollar a day, and you should treat the experience as a crash course in marketing. Don’t just set it and forget it, really dig deep into the data. That’s where this method had its merits. I started thinking about genres (yes, I know I just said I was genre-less but I still have to try to target something), what other authors my readers enjoy, and I definitely learned a lot about simple hooks and call to actions to put into an ad in order to get a higher response. “Click now!” sounds like a stupidly annoying thing to put into your ad, but, seriously, it works.

So Google is a great place to hone, or discover, a wide number of tools that are needed for advertising and bigger picture marketing.

The problem? It’s just too damn big. And the space you’re given to write an ad is laughable. Honestly. It’s like writing haiku.

If I was selling vacuums, okay.  ”Vacuums on sale. Low prices. Click now.” I mean, it’s easy to get to the point with some products. With books though? It’s hard enough to get across that you’re selling your specific book, not just books in general. You have to cram in your personality and flavor and a sense of your genre. And that’s not so bad, but unfortunately Google awards you when the words in your ad match up with the words you choose to trigger your ad during searches.

So I had to try to get all of the above stuff in while fitting in words like “books,” “urban fantasy,” “thriller,” “zombies.” It’s rough.

And it’s made rougher by the fact that Google doesn’t understand English. If I write, “Probability Angels by Joseph Devon,” well that’s quite obviously a book. The tiny word “by” in there conveys that concept. But for Google this phrase has nothing to do with books because the word book doesn’t appear.

Short answer? It’s cheap and a great place to get your feet wet. But I found composing ads that got clicks, showed up for the searches I wanted to, and weren’t slowly tuned out by Google more difficult than writing a freaking book.

3. Facebook Ads

Now we’re on to something. Equally cheap, which is nice. You can start with a few dollars a day and experiment with their interface and what they like to see in ads. More importantly, they have great targeting. I know that my writing gets compared to Neil Gaiman, for example.

How do I know this? I’ve asked people, and researched what key words have brought people to my site, and taken note of what books amazon pairs me up with. And on Facebook I can write an ad, have my book cover up there, and then target it only to people who have “Liked” Neil Gaiman. This is wonderful stuff.

Furthermore, I can create a larger campaign. Instead of one ad, I have a series of ads. They all  run under the same budget, so I’m not adding dollars here. They all have the same basic info, but they all are offer new angles into my books. Most of them are memorable quotes from my characters. Catching, jarring quotes. Someones sees one, okay, they do a double take and they move on. But that person will see various quotes over time and, again, engaging a target in different ways helps your product sink in. This isn’t quite as varied as the mega-campaigns I mentioned earlier, but it is variation within my ads. The reader is exposed to different characters and their tones while the basic ad image remains the same. It feels much more like a marketing campaign instead of just ads.

And, most importantly, it’s working. Sales are up. Can’t argue with that.

4. Goodreads Ads

I have high hopes for this. Remember the musicals advertising in Times Square from earlier? Well this is the same concept. Goodreads is one of the largest social book networks out there. Eventually I’ll poke around Shelfari and Librarything too but for now I’m learning the ropes at Goodreads.

One thing I like here is that my ads click through to my book’s Goodreads page. My visitor has no sense of leaving one site and landing at my site, which can be jarring. They’re in familiar territory the whole way and they know perfectly well how to ad my book to their “To-Read” pile. You can also choose to have a tally of your reviews included in your ad. That’s great data to throw in there and, again, it’s data that Goodreads users understand.

Plus, you can create multiple ads under one budget so you can come at people from a few different angles just as with my Facebook ads, which I love.

The downside? Currently there’s a massive site-wide bug in their advertising code that is causing zero ads to show. So I have no idea if this idea will pan out. But I think it will. It seems like a good system.

So those are my thoughts and experiences from the trenches. I’ve got a lot of online ad campaigns under my belt and I really hope that my blunders can help others find a quicker and easier path to their audience.

Now…who wants to fund my billboard in Times Square?

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Marketing as an Indie Publisher, the Amazon Algorithm, and Why My Books Are No Longer Free

I was talking to a friend of mine once about what I’m trying to accomplish in the world of independent publishing and he commented with a quickly astute, “Huh. Sounds like a lot of chicken and egg stuff.”

Every time I try to gather my thoughts and plan my next move for my books, I come back to that comment and it has continued to ring true.

I put out a new story? Great, so I want to get readers for it. So I tweet and post on Facebook and write about it on here…but that only reaches the readers I already have. Some of them are die-hards and they go on to tweet and write about it (if they like it), but then it fizzles out pretty quickly.

Which is to say that when I want to grow my fan base, I turn to people who already read my work and tell them about it. It makes sense sort of…in the proper light. But when you think about it, it’s…well it’s chicken and egg work.

The annual art contest is another great example. I love the art contest and have loved every entry I’ve received over the past three years, but all I know to do to promote it is to tell my readers about it and encourage them to pass it forward. And that’s effective to some degree, but it doesn’t exactly “go viral” ever.

My initial thoughts, years ago, on how this would work would be that one person would read a short story, enjoy it, then tell two other people about it and my words would spread ever outward. But social connections and influences don’t work like that. It isn’t a clean pyramid of 1 influences 2, then 2 influence 4, then 4 influence 16 and so on.

No. No, social networks tend to look something more like this:

You’re the dot on the left.

Which is to say that some random reader could influence dozens of people simply because they have an upbeat attitude while a huge fan who is more of a thinker might not even share my work with someone else, preferring instead to digest it slowly in their own way.

I think about this quite a bit and the notion of “going viral” is a rather intricate phenomenon.

That being said, I do think the best way of getting there is to not over-analyze it and to find new readers wherever you can, make them aware of your work, and represent yourself professionally but with your own attitude thrown in. Shake every tree but focus on those most likely to bear fruit, like groups you seem to have a high reader-to-fan conversion rate in. Then? Lather, rinse, repeat.

I have definitely been growing my fan base using these methods over the years, but it hasn’t exploded. Which brings me to the very weird question of, “How do I find new readers?”

I mean, again, when I put out a new work I mainly tell my current readers, but that doesn’t get new readers, does it?

Sadly I have no answers. I just know what hasn’t worked, and I know what I’ve had to tweak.

Advertising, for example, has proven to be a pretty lousy way to spread the word. I’m now of the opinion that advertising needs to be just one part of a larger marketing strategy, not a stand alone investment thrown into the world with no real connections to anything else.

There’s a notion in marketing, a sort of “Rule of Three,” when it comes to ads. Think about the first time you see an ad for a new product that pertains to you. You look it over, nod, and then immediately forget about it. Once isn’t enough. But if you see an ad, then read an article, and then it comes up in conversation with friends? Well then that product sticks. It takes about three different entry points into the cranium before an idea will lodge there firmly.

So advertising alone never made much sense or impact. Campaigns would see a rise in hits on the site and then nothing more would happen.

Recently though, I’ve started thinking about this project as a whole again, something I haven’t done in awhile. And some core ideas had to be revisited.

One of the larger tools I always knew I had at my disposal was the Amazon algorithm. Simply put, when Amazon gets a feel for your shopping style it starts to recommend books based on similar shoppers’ previous purchases. If a book, any book, starts getting linked up in Amazon’s big ol’ brain to a popular book, then that other book starts getting pushed on consumers in the world’s largest book store.

That’s a powerful tool, but it’s one that fell by the wayside in my plan over time.

Why?

Because when I first started this site the Kindle didn’t exist. The iPhone didn’t exist. Hell, I didn’t even have a laptop. The thinking was to put all my work up online for free. I figured that if someone was going to read an entire book off of a computer, well then that was a FAN, all caps, and I’d gladly give up the royalty for that reader just to have them on my side. Most other readers who became hooked would get sick of reading on a screen and then go purchase a book. And most of them would purchase from Amazon.

Over the years, though, so much has changed. I now happily read books on my phone. People can download PDF’s into any number of devices designed for easy reading. People have more choices than, “Read my entire book off of their computer monitor or buy a paperback.”

So in order to bring my overall plan back into focus, a slowly built audience with a large percentage of them purchasing me on Amazon, I’ve done something I never expected myself to do. I’ve stopped offering my books on my site for free.

This is annoying because I firmly believe that, in five or ten years, books for free on authors’ websites will be the norm. I think new tools for monetizing readers will continue to come along and income for authors will be made based on web visitors. Or at least a larger portion of it than occurs today.

Hell, I think that would work for any already broken-in author with a core fan base.

But for an author trying to find that fan base, when the Amazon algorithm is a major tool being used, well…I need those damned sales. Not for the royalties, but for the PR.

Again, this is a complete turn around from my plan of five years ago, but, again, so much has changed that my plan needed to be revisited.

Plus I can take comfort knowing that my books cost NINETY-NINE FREAKING CENTS for their e-versions and that this isn’t a suicidal price point, but one at which I earn a healthy royalty.

The world has changed.

Somehow I forgot that such things happen.

Time to change with it.

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Recent Photographs

So I’ve been taking a lot more photographs than usual lately. I made a New Year’s Resolution to take my camera out with me more and I’ve actually been doing a pretty good job of keeping up with that. I also go to a lot of bars. So the end result is a lot of pictures from bars…well and some other places.

At any rate, I always find it amazing how easy it is to share my work on the internet, and yet how difficult it is to share my work. Most people know to come here for my words but I have my photographs up at Tumblr and Flickr (I just noticed the use of “r” with no vowels before it to end both those words…I don’t understand how the internet names things). Actually some of my pics have been pretty popular in those circles but I don’t know if those people looking at them there are the same people looking at them here and, well, whatever I figure every once and awhile posting some popular pics here isn’t a bad idea.

Plus, I’ll remind you that you can either check out my Flickr photostream here.

Or you can check them out on Tumblr here.

So according to the will of the people here are the most popular pics. Please click through for larger views.

Here is a beer (cider actually):

Here is a bar sign:

Here is a three olive martini:

Here is the 59th Street Bridge:

Here is a vodka tonic:

Here are some Gray’s Papaya hot dogs:

Here is a bird’s nest in a traffic light:

And here is some traffic on Park Avenue:

Tons more stuff up at the sites I mentioned above and, if I can keep up with my New Year’s resolution, more to come.

Popularity: 1% [?]

3rd Annual Joseph Devon Art Contest

Just wanted to drop a quick word this week to start plugging the 3rd Annual Joseph Devon Art Contest. Technically it’s been open since the last one ended but the deadline is now officially a few months out so it’s time to chat it up. The winner can choose from a handful of great prizes including an iPad or a Wacom tablet. It’s open to the world (which I love) and I encourage anyone and everyone to send in entries.

You all are, collectively, the most awesome fans anywhere and it always amazes me what people send in. It’s probably one of the more rewarding times of the year when I get to see your creations that my creations brought to light.

So send in your art! I want it! All of it! I demand that you let my books inspire you! Go gogogogogogogo……

Popularity: 1% [?]

10 Things Overheard on the Set of Luck

A few weeks ago HBO announced the cancellation of the show Luck before the first season had even finished airing. The show, an interwoven story line of multiple characters centering on a horse track in California, had a slow start but picked up drastically towards the end and could have really been a show to watch.

The reason it was cancelled was utterly baffling to me; it seemed too many horses were dying on set. Considering the show’s central theme was how all of the characters were made more human by their contact with horses, and that their love of these creatures were often their roads to salvation, I had to wonder what on earth was going on at that set.

Some light was shed on this question when I came across a tape from a hidden microphone capturing some pretty surprising things that were overheard on the set of Luck:

1. “Now, in this moment Mister Hoffman’s character’s gruff exterior is stripped away while we close the scene out with him nuzzling the horse’s neck and the horse responds with gentle reciprocation. So somebody chain that fucking horse down so it can’t move.”
2.  ”Hey, they really do taste like chicken!”
3. “Okay, as they round the final turn I want to see that, you know, ‘Oomph,’ of speed and pure animal power.”
   “Got it. At the final turn, release the tigers.”
4. “Will you stop reenacting Ben-Hur and get the horses to set!”
5. “Mister Nolte’s character had everything taken away from him when his horse was killed all those years ago for insurance money, his connection with that horse is integral to all of his scenes with that horse’s offspring, who he is currently training in an attempt at redeeming himself. That pain must be present, so before every one of his scenes I want a horse shot to death in front of Mister Nolte.”
6. “Will you stop reenacting The Godfather and get the horses to set! No…no not the one without the head. Just throw him on the pile with the others.”
7. “Here we have a synergy produced between Rosie and her horse as they cross the finish line, they must appear as one. Pretty sure our best bet is to lop off the horses legs, slap it on a table, and green-screen the racetrack background in later.”
8. “I’m sorry, Mister Nolte, but your contract clearly limits you to three pints of horse blood per day.
9. “Will you stop reenacting Braveheart and get the horses to oh fuck it.”
10. “They eat what?!”

 

 

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