Writing, Feelings, and Vision

Women interpreted the world through feelings. The men interpreted the world with logic. I learned how to discuss my feeling state, my feelings. I learned how to say, when thus and so happens I feel this or that. Now my fictional characters do that. If you want to capture readers and have them seeking more of your work, give your characters full inner lives. This doesn’t mean omniscient viewpoint. It means reflecting a feeling or emotional reaction to an event. Not a logical reaction, not the thoughts, but the feelings. Two totally different things.

Do’s and don’t's

avoid cognitive dissonance

do full inner life, provide full cognitive consonance

Important for new writers:

1. remember that vision and voice are the same thing, and that one is how you see the world and one is how you express what you see — but in way they’re the same thing because in both cases it’s the brain interpreting your reality as seen through your filter. Biocentrists claim that vision creates reality. Some quantum physicists say the same thing. As humans we’re nosy about our neighbors: when I see red and you see red are we seeing the same thing? When I witness the accident on 24th street and you witness the same thing, did we see the same thing? Read an accident report for the answer to this. Two people located in the exact same position will give the police officer two totally different stories and yet both will be adamant that he or she is right. Amazing. So this is vision. Voice is how I tell you about the accident. Not what I tell you—what I tell you is vision. Voice is how I tell you. 
2. For that first year, ignore profit and seek out eyes

How to sell books

If I were starting today I would publish my first book and advertise in order to get reviews so I could aim for a Bookbub. At the same time I would be writing my second book. I wouldn’t let my first book drop off the 90 day cliff before I had my second book out. For a beginning writer I would also use preorders because a preorder can get me on the hot new releases list in my genre if I’m moving the book with my FB ads. Then I get the full benefit of HNR prepublication followed by thirty days on HNR after publication. In other words, I want my name out there.

In my first 18 months BB featured me 12 times. I always opted for the freebie feature and avoided the paid features because I wanted eyes, not a few bucks. 

Advertising: ignore ROI. Expect to lose dollars on advertising at first, but always remember you’re after exposure for your books. And as your backlist grows you will be selling those books based on the advertising cost of the first book alone.

Which brings me to the most important thing a new writer —or an old writer—can do: Write books that people want to read.

There are two steps to this

1 Write to market

2 Write compelling stories - you must have in each scene a goal and a move toward that goal. At the end of the scene you will leave a comment indicating whether the goal was reached or leave a comment indicating more problems to come. A good technique is not only to thwart that goal but also increase the problem the MC is facing because he or she tried to succeed.

-Never be afraid to put your MC in more danger or more of a struggle. This conflict is the key to getting readers to turn pages. 

-Every character who we’re going to see a second time in the book must be conflicted, however small. Interest level.

Also, MC must react to conflict with inner life reveals. We need to know his or her inner life or it becomes cardboard. So us what he or she is thinking, feeling, plotting, hoping, fearing—all of it. Except never foretell strategy. Let the reader see MC meet with another character to strategize but never let the reader know what it was they planned. Only that they planned something. Keep leading them along.

How Publishing Really Works: From an Indie Writer's Point-of-View

Everyday I'm in my writing chair by seven a.m. and reading yesterday's output. I do my editing as I read, so that, by the time my book is written, it is in final draft form, not first draft. After the daily edits, I begin my writing (cup of coffee number two). I generally try to get down about 2,000 words for the day. Unlike all the "write 10,000 words an hour books," I violate one of their cardinal rules in that I also research as I write. Why? Because I have found that research so often flows into another plot twist or follow-through that I hadn't been thinking on my own.

So I Google this or that as I go, and I download eBooks that provide background I need as I go (I write legal thrillers, so there's always something new for me to be learning about forensic chemistry or DNA banking or cyberdata or some other cutting-edge manner of evidence acquisition). I can scan an ebook in about fifteen minutes to nail down the particular area I want to include in my book. Borrowing the book on my Kindle Unlimited account costs me nothing. By the time I'm ready to move from spectography to facial recognition software I have maybe thirty minutes invested and no dollars, which makes my reseach all but free. This was all impossible before Google and KU and these repositories make for much more fun and accurate writing.

My 2000 words take me all of about two to three hours and I'm done writing for the day. My books are targeted for 80,000 words so my calendar for finishing the final draft is forty days. This means that I can put out about nine novels a year. Yes, nine. Unlike tradpub's goal of a book a year for its top-drawer writers, I don't have to wait weeks and weeks for editing, re-editing, proofing, cover art, and the like. It takes me at most one week to accomplish all these things when my final draft is finished. By then I'm 20,000 words into my next book.

Editing takes my editor five days. I receive the book back in Word markup and it takes me about three hours to revise as advised. Then the book is proofed by software I'm subscribed to, and at the same time my cover artist is finalizing the cover. Covers are an incredibly important part of book sales, so I have searched around until I found the perfect artist for my novels. It takes him about four days (he works days at his FT "real" job) to get a finished product back to me. All told, moving my book from final draft to ready-to-publish inventory takes one week. My wife then reads the final item one last time and makes her suggestions, which I follow. She's a common-sense reader and gives me common-sense feedback. This is an important step. She does her read-through and makes her notes for me concomitant to the days when the cover is being done, so there's no delaying the process for my wife's read. I format the ebook for publication using Vellum; formatting takes less than the ten minutes, including the addition of front- and back-matter, which mostly is copied and pasted from earlier books. Then we're ready to put the book up for sale.

I put one copy of the book up on book funnel and send an email to my mailing list select group, which is a group of about 150 of the most active participants on my mailing list (8000 strong and counting) and I ask the 150 to please download the freebie from book funnel. If they want, they will review it on Amazon when I send them the second email in a day or two announcing publication. My participation from this group is about 70%. Which means that within a matter of a week or so from first publication my books will have anywhere from 50-100 reader reviews.

Publishing my book on KDP takes less than an hour. Publishing my book on Createspace takes even less. Now my electronic book and my paperback are both up for sale. Once they are, I announce the publication to my full mailing list. My book is not discounted during any of this. It usually will hit the Amazon Top Twenty for legal thrillers within about 24 hours and copies start moving out the door as the Amazon algos take over.

Compare this to what you know about how tradpub works. Compared to those "real" writers, we're living and writing and publishing in two different worlds. Two months after publication, Amazon pays me my first month's 70% of sales. Tradpub writers get something like 15% maybe a year after publication. Most of those brothers and sisters have day jobs. I don't--not since I started DIY on Amazon.

After I've finished up my 2-3 hours of writing every day, I spend maybe an hour a day doing marketing. This consists of checking my Facebook ads for cost-per-click values, and maybe applying for a Bookbub or buying a Bargain Booksy listing. I don't do much more marketing anymore. My name is pretty well known among my genre, my niche, and my books fly out the door accordingly.

Tradpub can't compete with me. If I don't like how a book is moving in the market, I'll rewrite the blurb or tweak the cover. Fifteen minutes tops on blurb re-dos. Cover change-ups are rare; my artist and I pretty much know what will move books and we put that into practice with each book. I don't mess much with keywords anymore; I used to; now that's refined down to what works best for me.

I have an assistant. She runs my author's Facebook pages. This consists of daily posts of this or that article about books or publishing, and consists of interacting with readers, which I also do through reader emails I get every day. Everyone's inquiry or complaint or compliment gets a response. She gets paid for two hours of effort a day and she's excellent. She also does occasional newsletters to the mailing list but I really don't paper those readers like every week or two weeks, like some writers do. I hate signing up for stuff and getting victimized by some over-the-top seller and I know my readers do too. But every now and then we'll give away a free book just to say thanks or talk about a day at the beach--something personal that I hope connects.

That's my process. The results are astonishing. At one time I was a pretty well known trial lawyer and handled some pretty impressive clients. I never, however, earned as much as I do now with my books. I sell about 10,000 books a month and gather in about 7 million page reads a month, and I'm only just starting my third year. This year I will earn in the mid-to-upper six figures.

Thank you, Amazon. Thank you, Bookbub. I got into this in January of 2014 as a way to supplement my Social Security. Even after forty years of law practice I hadn't managed to save very much for retirement. But there was also a time in there of a complete medical disability which required me to shut down my law practice for two years and basically start over in my sixties. Savings were depleted by this. So remaking myself into a thriller writer has been a godsend and I am very grateful. I try to pass this along by helping other writers with their questions about marketing, etc., keeping in mind that as JAK says this is not a zero-sum game. The fact that I sell a book doesn't mean that you won't. We will both sell if we have what readers want to read.

While my methods and run-times differ dramatically from tradpub, both those writers and I must reach the same goal: we must write books that readers want to read. There is no secret ingredient, nothing that can be learned or taught.

You either write books that readers want to read, or you don't.

What Writing Success Requires

I have a very strong presence in legal thrillers. The secret has been marketing. My two most recent books are around 8 and 10 in legal thrillers top 100. The books I can't move in order to get a better ranking are John Grisham (of course) and the rest are Thomas Mercer imprints where the author has one or more books by TM that then pull the others along and they all rank in the top five or six all of the time. So be it, there's nothing I can do about it except bank my mid-five-figures each month and look at the next shiny toy on Amazon's site.

But I was lucky and somewhat knowledgeable when I first published in January 2014. I had done SEO on Google's Adwords for ten years and was pretty up on the importance of graphics and keywords. The graphics paid off by Bookbub giving me like ten or twelve promos in my first fifteen months. This had everything to do with my cover art, I am convinced. No, the covers are not typical genre like many gurus preach, but they did all have the indicia of legal thrillers such as courthouse columns or scales of justice somewhere in the cover. But my cover artist is a genius and had done Internet branding for many years and knew what i needed/wanted. So that was a good fit--and how else did Bookbub select me so often except by my covers since I started out a total unknown writer? Now I rank about number 26 in kindle thriller writers two years later.

Branding is the name of the game for me. Which will at least get you to the Look Inside feature. After that you better have a compelling story, worldview, and voice or no matter how great your cover you won't sell books. Purchasers are very astute when it comes to authorial sophistication and I was lucky in that regard too because I had written novels for thirty years, never made a sale to tradpub, and was quite accomplished (not bragging, I hope) when it came time to producing sentences people would like. Since January 2014 I have published 14 books and sold in excess of 150,000, the majority of those in the past eight or nine months.

I believe that trying hard is admirable but it's not enough. Practice is required within the art form itself; lots of unrewarded practice. Thank goodness no one did publish my first novel, my second, or my eighth or ninth. Thank goodness the New Yorker and The Atlantic rejected the hundreds of short stories I submitted over the years. But today I would be proud for them to publish me. I think I have finally started to learn how to say what it is I envision and what it is I am trying to distill from that vision into words on the page.

It didn't come to me in full until I was 74 years old. You have to really want this more than anything.

Yes, Amazon has definitely saturated my genre and I am paying them back. I am saturating it too.

100,000 Books Sold - What Happened?

I published my first book in January of 2014. I just published my eleventh book in September 2015. Number 12 is underway with a Xmas publication date.

I write "legal thrillers." I don't know how "thrilling" my books are, but I don't make up the categories, either; Amazon does that.

Bookbub
My first month I think I sold maybe 40 or 50 books. My second month 400. My third month 1100. I was growing and selling more every month until about August of last year when I came on KBoards and found everyone talking about Bookbub. So I submitted and got accepted for a freebie on about my third try. Since then I've had eleven more Bookbubs (upcoming one is next Tuesday). Most have been freebie giveaways although a couple were promo sales. All in all Booktrakr tells me I've given away about 300,000 books, which I couldn't have done without Bookbub. And I've sold over 100,000.

So I guess BB is really the story of any success I've had. Why did they accept me so often? I think much of it has to do with my covers, which are made by Nathan Wampler. If you would like to ask him about covers he can be reached atnathanwamplerdesign@gmail.com. Please don't get him so busy he ignores my pleas for help. The guy's a genius, as far as I'm concerned and I can only say, based on BB's acceptance of my promos, they must like him too.

It's funny, but I practiced law 40 years and never earned as much as I do now by writing. I'm also an old guy so I wish (if wishes were horses...) I had started this years earlier. Whoops, actually I did. I had an agent back in the nineties when Grisham got so hot, and my agent peddled my books around NY and no one was interested. Even last January when I first self-pubbed I had just queried something like 45 agents and none of them wrote me back except for two canned, brief, brush-offs.

Hot New Releases
I like self-pub. I like writing and releasing on my own schedule. More than that, however, I've come to know that you need to play the Hot New Releases cycle and self-pub allows me to do that. For example, right now my latest book The Trial Lawyer is under thrillers > legal and it's about #4 under HNR. Also, my next book is on preorder and it's also on the first page of HNR and will remain there for the ninety days while it's being written. This is very important to me in how I move books.

KU
I'm in KU 100%. Many of my peers are wide. But I like page reads and get between 1.5 to 2.0 million per month. It would be hard to give that up for the "wide" adventure. Maybe at some point I will, but right now it works for me. Maybe not for you, but for how I'm building my backlist it works just fine. Everyone will have a different plan and use these tools to best suit their plan.

Mark and Nick
Yes, I've taken Mark Dawson's FB course and Nick Stephenson's mailing list course, with crossover between them. These guys, have taught me so much. Mark is brilliant at teaching Power Editor for FB and even a dummy like me now has it figured out. Nick was equally brilliant in teaching now to building that mailing list. My list right now has 5100 names and I can launch a book quite high in the rankings.

Can you learn from me?
This is an area where opinion seems to be all over the road. If we could replicate success from posts like this one, then why don't we all take James Patterson's course and become megasellers by following his path. But that's where it breaks down for me. I think generalities have been good for me to learn here on Kboards (write series, publish often, don't respond to the 1-stars, etc) but so far I haven't had the success others have had simply by following what someone else did. I've had to find my own way.

If I were starting out today, I would: find a small niche; write and publish no more than 90 days apart; tickle the Amazon algos by boosting sales through FB ads. When I first started out I advertised on FB in order to get sales so Amazon's algos would sit up and pay attention. My ads were money losers--but it wasn't profit I was after, it was movement. A gradual upswing in sales. I am NOT saying I acquired hundreds of sales by FB, maybe 4-6 sales per day to start. It doesn't take much. But as a long-time advertiser on Adwords I had come to know that I had to invest money up front to make money on the back end. Why wouldn't that same business tactic work with Amazon? I believe it does. And what Mark and Nick are doing is showing us how to not only get movement in our sales but, by their methods, even to turn a profit. What could be better than moving books on FB ads AND turning a profit? The one feeds the other. Just my opinion, of course. But again, I was all but broke when I started publishing and I know how hard it can be to spend money you don't have on advertising. Yikes. We all come to this differently.

Finally, those who know me know that I have asked probably the most butt-dumb questions on KBoards in a long time. I had to, because I knew absolutely zero about self-pub when I first came here. When I found KDP I was a phone call away from publishing with a company called XLibris and the guy had me talked into something like a $3,000 program guaranteed to line my garage with insulating boxes of books. Thank God for KDP. I went on their site and read it like ten times, each time looking for the part where it says how much I would have to pay to publish a book. Amazon removed the last obstacle for me: the gatekeepers. And all I have to do is keep writing, which is like a virus that wracks me and won't let go anyway. With or without Amazon, I'm writing anyway.

Never give up. I lost my first six books I wrote before my first self-pub in January 2014. Left on other people's computers or lost in printed formats. Gone. But maybe it's just as well, I don't know. But the point I want to make is that I had written continuously for thirty-some years since college until Amazon opened the door for me. Nobody bought anything from me. Nothing. But once the door opened, I had unlearned a lot of bad habits and was left with a style that more than anything aims for clarity of story. That's it, simple. Nothing matters to me but clarity of story. Sometimes I hit it, sometimes I miss it. But there's my goal.

Good luck everyone.

ETA:

I'm a strong believer in preorders because a preorder can stay on the "coming soon" pages for 90 days. Then when the book is released it gets another 30 days on the HNR page and then gets into the "New Releases/last ninety days" pages after. At this point my practice is to then establish another preorder book and climb back on the "coming soon" pages again while my latest release is HNR for thirty then "New Releases/last ninety days." This is the cycle, of course. Your mailing list will help you maintain a high level of visibility as you do this.

This model requires constant publishing, every ninety days. But in my experience, it is these lists that sell books on a regular daily basis, moving them ever higher as they go. It also requires a mailing list to keep your book churn up while the HNR algos kick in.

What is beautiful is that Amazon gives us these data filters (the lists) as tools we can (and should) use. I have been unable to find another sales portal that gives me this.

The All-Time Logical Fallacy (Or, How I Saved $99.99)

There is a logical fallacy among many writers (witness the blogs and their followers) that goes like this: You sell lots of books; if I study how you did it, I  will sell lots of books, too. This thinking doesn't, of course, take into account the factor of fortunate coincidence: in the first writer's case, certain events occurred that probably won't happen again in your case. But the second factor, and what this little blog exercise really is about, is what I call the logical fallacy of success. Here it is: Your ability to do something doesn't automatically mean I have the same ability.

Let's face it. Some people are smarter than other people. That is why they happen to succeed, because they thought their way into it. Or maybe they're more talented, so they wrote books that more people wanted to read. Just because author Jones can write unputdownable books doesn't mean author Smith can do the same. For author Smith to spend $99.99 to take author Jones' course on How to Sell Books is a foolish expenditure, if viewed in this light.

Now I'm going to tell you the secret of selling lots of books as it's come to me: write books people want to read. Can everyone do that? No. Can  you? If factor one (the fortunate coincidence of events) and factor two (the level of IQ or talent) are both present, the answer for you is "maybe." Why only maybe? Because you might throw up your hands and give up on book nine when book ten was the one that was really going to sell. Or maybe you're writing romance when it's really erotica that's your gift.

But here's the bottom line. Can you write and sell books and quit the day job? You won't know until you try. And try. And try.

That's what the rest of us did.

But save the $99.99. That's the price of admission for one day at Seaworld. (I know, Shamu is a victim of his own success. My wife is actively campaigning to set them all free, so got that covered. Which leaves me more time to write. But seriously, go to Seaworld rather than take someone's course for $99.99. If you don't yet understand how the oblique leads to the unique in your art, you might not be ready.)

National Book Awards: No Indies

It's happened again: another award another troubling result: the National Book Awards fiction longlist contains no Indie books:

Jesse Ball, “A Cure for Suicide”
Pantheon Books/Penguin Random House

Bill Clegg, “Did You Ever Have a Family”
Scout Press/Simon & Schuster

Karen E. Bender, “Refund”
Soft Skull/Counterpoint Press

Angela Flournoy, “The Turner House”
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Lauren Groff, “Fates and Furies”
Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House

Adam Johnson, “Fortune Smiles”
Random House/Penguin Random House

T. Geronimo Johnson, “Welcome to Braggsville”
William Morrow/HarperCollins

Edith Pearlman, “Honeydew”
Little, Brown/Hachette Book Group

Hanya Yanagihara, “A Little Life”
Doubleday/Penguin Random House

Nell Zink, “Mislaid”
The Ecco Press/HarperCollins

Surely some Indie writer somewhere penned a tome that should have found its way onto the list. But wait, there's a catch: Indie publishers are eligible IF they have published the works of other authors. The full eligibility text is here:

---

"WHO CAN SUBMIT BOOKS?

Each April, the Foundation sends the official National Book Awards guidelines and entry forms to the publishers in its master database. Those publishers who do not receive the materials automatically can call or email the Foundation to request a copy. Authors cannot submit their books themselves; they must have their publishers contact us directly. However, the guidelines are always available for informational purposes here:www.nationalbook.org/nbaentry.html.

In order to be eligible for the Award, a book must be written by an American citizen and published by an American publisher between December 1 of the previous year and November 30 of the current year. Self-published books are only eligible if the author/publisher publishes the work of other authors in addition to his own. Books published through services such as iUniverse are not eligible for the Award."

---

 

Did any Indie writers make it onto the long longlist? Or even the long long longlist?

Are there other Indies out there who, with me, would like to form a publishing co-op with an eye toward entering the NBA next year?

Just saying.

I Like Sci-Fi, I Like Dystopia, I Like the Idea of Law in the Future

Vortice is the name of a novel I'm writing in fits and starts. The book is set in 2055 and takes a hard look at where law will be when machines can access the quantum information inside a person's microtubules where consciousness is--it is thought by some--stored.

It is the story of a young woman whose mental images have been read and who is found to be guilty of a murder.

Except...she didn't commit it.

Her grandfather, Thaddeus Murfee, has a role.

What do you think?

New Path Maybe Taken

I have written nine novels in 14 or 15 months that now keep the bills paid. So far, so good. But for many years I have wanted to write a series of about four novels, financial/family in nature, that each would take about two years to research and write. At the end of that time I would probably give up writing and take up kite surfing (I would be 81). I would be very proud of these four novels, much prouder than I am of the ones written so far. Maybe "pleased with" is a better way of putting it. They would please me more than the ones to date have pleased me. I love my novels written thus far, but I know I can do much better, tell much wider stories with more power than what I've done. Now if I can just figure out how to stop publishing for two years while I write the first one. Will my little publishing shop go under while I don't feed the Amazon algos for two years? Or is there enough to keep things going? I really don't know. But I'm leaning toward trying.

Music Studio

All right, I better come clean. Deep down inside me is a frustrated musician. I have played guitar since high school and have been in bands on and off since then. In the past couple of years my hero has been Naudo Rodrigues and I have hoped to learn some of his style and play out, hopefully as noon music at a sandwich shop or a hotel lobby, something like that. Also, I write music and want to get my music online, here at my website, so people (you) can come here and listen to what I'm up to.

EQUIPMENT LIST

Macbook Pro
Garageband
Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 2 In/2 Out USB Audio Interface
Alhambra Guitar
Godin Multiac Guitar with MIDI & XLR outs
12 String Guitar
Yamaha Synth
Tascam Studio Monitors
2488 NEO Tascam Board (Used recording bands live)

Pretty basic stuff, all in all.

I have about four songs that I've written over the years and want to start with those.

Keep checking back. Music will magically appear here and we'll have something else in common!