Forgetful In My Old Age?

I must be getting forgetful in my old age (all 33 years of it… no comments there please).  I realized that The Dysfunctional Chronicles omnibus (all four books) is on sale this week for $0.99.  I meant to run an advert for it.  I forgot.  As a matter of fact, I forget I had even set it up to run on sale this week.

It dawned on me this morning when a handful of copies sold… rapidly.  It’s only been a month since I set it up to go on sale using KDP Select’s new promotional tool.

I occasionally wonder if I will have any memory at all when I’m in my 50’s.  I’m thinking probably not…

PS:  This post was originally about something else, I thought of it last night.  This morning it was gone.

Let Mortal Combat Begin!

Occasionally the theme song from the Mortal Kombat movies run through my head.  This is usually precipitated by knowing that I have to go to work on a new book very soon.

Today, as I sit down to write my blog post, the theme song once again begins to play.  My job today, tackle Dark Legacies.  There are moments when I find shifting from character to character to be nothing short of a deadly game of swordsmanship.  And going from the paranoid sociopathic Aislinn to the clueless pessimistic Brenna is a shift that I do not make easily.

Then again shifting to the hapless fatalist Nadine is also a challenge.

I know my good friends and family, always hear “me” when they read any of the female leads (heaven help me… I’m a clumsy, sociopathic demon in this version of reality), none of them are “me”.  And that means I have to work very hard to think like “them”.  Frighteningly, I find Aislinn the easiest to write and Brenna the hardest.  I’m just not as clueless or pessimistic as Brenna.  To be completely honest (and this horrifies me to no end), I am probably most like Nadine… A hapless (and sometimes helpless) optimistic fatalist bumbling and stumbling my way through the world and trying not to stress.

Being both an optimist and a fatalist is challenging, but one does not exclude the other, although I sometimes believe it should.  Let the Fates do what they will, in the end, it will work out, is kind of my philosophy.

So as I sit, trying to force the sound of Aislinn’s voice from my head (she doesn’t sound like “me” to me, just FYI) and replace it with Brenna’s, I find the theme song once again playing in the background.  And somewhere further away, I hear the words “Let Mortal Combat Being!”

 

Reviews – Another Post

With my oops firmly in place, reviews have been on my mind.  My book tour continues to clip along, picking up sales here and there, but with three reviews on Amazon and two on B&N, it is pretty much hit or miss.

My “oops” was not waiting until I had more reviews to do the book tour.  Lesson learned, I’ll wait before booking Tortured Dreams since it currently has a big fat zero in the reviews section.

The reason they are so important?  The bloggers are giving it 4 out 5 every time, telling how much they enjoyed it and how they proceeded to buy The Dysfunctional Valentine – A Nadine Daniels’ Novella immediately afterwards.  Yet, the sales have been coming not from Life & Dysfunction, but from Dysfunctional Valentine.  A sort of sequel to the book, it is priced $0.99 and the book is $2.99.

And I get it, why pay the extra $2 for a book that has almost no reviews, where a blogger has given you their opinion, when you can test the waters with just $0.99?  Or by downloading Dark Cotillion for free?

However, if I had ten reviews at 4 stars or better for Life & Dysfunction and a blogger telling people how much they enjoyed the book, it would be a different story.

Liz Schulte keeps telling me that the reviews will come, they just take time.  I believe that.  They will come, eventually.  I’m just not known for my ability to sit on my hands and wait.

Ah well, we’ll get there, kicking and screaming and tearing out our hair, but we’ll get there.  In the mean time, go review that indie author you picked up the free book from the other day…

Before I was a Writer…

It dawned on my yesterday, as I switched from website to website, that my browsing history has significantly changed.

Before I was writing almost full time, I was surfing the web for video games, cheat codes, add-ons, free ebooks that caught my attention, movies that were coming out on DVD (so I could add them to my Netflix list), checking out band websites, etc.

Now, I don’t.  The ebooks tend to get emailed to me as I join more and more places that promote indy authors.  I don’t have much time for video games – so the searches for cheat codes and add-ons are pointless, I have almost no clue what my favorite bands are planning unless they post the to Facebook and most of movies come from recommendations made by others.

Why?  Simple, I don’t have that sort of time on my hands anymore.  I use Chrome to navigate and the “home page” is eight mini-windows with my most common websites.  They are “Facebook, KDP, Smashwords, PubIt!, CreateSpace, WordPress, Goodreads and Google.”

Since examples are better than just saying it.  I’ll give you my week:

Monday – blog post written, 9,000 words added to Dark Resurrections, followed by coming home, fixing dinner, doing laundry, checking on reviews and spending about an hour looking for places to advertise that wouldn’t cost me an arm and a leg, then bedtime.

Tuesday – Blog post, the creation of a book tour comparison database, 2,000 words added to Dark Resurrections, ordering proofs of Tortured Dreams, looking for swag items for Tortured Dreams, dinner, the realization that I could do a Nadine Daniels’ Novella if I got my butt in gear.

Wednesday – Cover created for The Dysfunctional Valentine, blog post, 8,000 words put on The Dysfunctional Valentine, dinner at Arby’s, dart league, when I got home, I added another 1,000 words to the novella, then I went to bed.

Thursday – Blog post, 4,000 words added to The Dysfunctional Valentine which sparked some thoughts on Elysium Dreams, so I took some time and added 5,000 words to Elysium Dreams, dinner, my SO watched TV, I went back to writing and added another 2,000 words to The Dysfunctional Valentine.

Friday – Blog post, 7,000 words added to The Dysfunctional Valentine BEFORE LUNCH (Yes, I typed my fingers off to get there).  Lunch with editor who took it home.  Afternoon spent looking for cheap advertising and working on Dark Resurrections. Went out for dinner with an old friend I hadn’t seen in ages.  Came home, back to work on Dark Resurrections.

Saturday – Blog post, 30 minute conversation with editor, some rewriting on The Dysfunctional Valentine, added 4,000 words to Dark Resurrections, ebook formatting for Tortured Dreams, cover reveal on Facebook for TDV, dinner, watched a movie, went to bed.

Today – Blog post, meeting with editor in a couple of hours, meeting with the Columbia Novelists’ Group, dinner will be after that, lunch will be shoved in somewhere and if I’m lucky, I’ll get some more writing done.

I know that doesn’t seem like a lot, but in reality, it is, this also doesn’t take into account the time I spend talking to people on Facebook or WordPress or Goodreads or answering emails about my inquiries into advertising and book tours.  It also doesn’t take into account the fact that I check my sales daily, sometimes multiple times per day.

And people wonder why I tell them they have to have passion to be a writer.