Writing

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that publishing was never on my bucket list. Going the self-publishing route has fit me in many ways, but there’s a couple real problems involved in the process that I’m going to discuss in some of my upcoming posts. I get asked a lot of questions about what I do and I want to try to be open about some of it. What I like and what I hate. Today is about the concept of self-promotion for the purpose of selling your book.

Let’s not have any misunderstandings here – I suck at it.

Protecting Parker was published a little over a year ago. We put Parker out on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and started the website. There was no advertising beyond my friends and family. At the time, I think I had fewer than seventy personal friends on Facebook. I don’t have many more now. My attitude has always been that it didn’t matter if it sold or not – it was about the writing.

But even though book sales have never been a real priority to me, it is the question I’m asked most often. How many copies have you sold? How’s the book doing? Is the book selling well?

The truth is that asking those questions is simply asking someone how much money they make. I’d never thought much about it until I was speaking to a friend who runs a few head of cattle. He told me that the rudest question you could ask was, “How many cows do you have?” Cows equal cash on the hoof in his world, so it was like asking how much money he had in the bank. You could ask about acreage, because that’s public knowledge (county land records) and many ranchers lease from BLM, so it’s less intrusive, but cash on the hoof is rude.

How many copies have I sold?
I’m not likely to say how many books I’ve sold. It’s not a matter of shame or pride – it’s simply a matter of cash on the hoof, and that’s not anyone’s business. I will tell you that I am not even able to pay my monthly electric bill with the earnings.

How’s the book doing? Is it selling well?
When asked this, I want to ask my own question – Compared to what? I don’t really have anything to compare myself to. Protecting Parker has to be my benchmark. Every copy she sold was an exciting surprise. The simple truth is that it’s still exciting. I remember giggling uncontrollably when I got the first check for royalties. It didn’t matter that it would have barely covered a pedicure, it was still the coolest thing that has ever happened. I’m not sure that getting a royalty check for Protecting Parker will ever get old for me. Now every book I publish is a comparison against Parker. Some move as well – some don’t. But each sale is just as cool as the first!

Am I concerned about how my books sell?
Yes and no. I would like them to sell better, but once again, selling books was never the priority for me. Writing stories for my friends and family to enjoy remains the priority.

I am vain enough to want to sell more books.

But, just how do you sell a book? How do you get noticed among the millions of other books? How do you get anyone to give “you” a try?

All the things I’ve read on the subject of self-publishing list the following things:
An active author website
A page on a social network
Reviews
Guest blogging
Give a few away to get sales
Be willing to sell yourself

I’ll be talking about each of these things over the next couple of weeks. What I’ve tried, what I’ve learned, what I’m willing or unwilling to do, and why writing, not sales, will remain the priority for me. I hope you find it useful.

Am I allowed to use emotional tags in my blog? If so, then the tag today would be: *le sigh*

There are days when I wonder just how foolish I was to challenge myself to this. The challenge to write a novel in two months, start to finish with nothing more than an opening idea, might have been a bit of a stretch. I’m pretty sure there won’t be a line of people waiting to point fingers or fault me if I don’t make it. But I’m not about to find out if I can possibly help it. Trust me, I’ve always been much harder on myself than anyone else would be.

But please allow me a minute of self-pity here. As I’ve been working on this book, I’ve also been completing rewrites and edits on The Civilian – Blood Link III, putting out Stuck in Korea Time, and leading a fairly busy personal life. I’ve been distracted.

Also – what the hell was I thinking by choosing to write about this particular subject? The research has been… difficult. I’ve been asking questions that sometimes can’t be answered and the learning curve has been steep as well as painful at times. 99% of the things I need to know in order to write convincingly will never appear in the book. That seems unfair to the people who have so willingly shared their information.

Okay – enough whining. Moving on.

Where am I at in The Embassy Guards? I’m still not sold on this title by the way – my beta readers should plan on providing input and options. 33,000 words into the project and I’m numerically on track to finish on schedule. Sadly, while I know what happens next, I still have no idea how this one ends. Once again: *le sigh*

With the help of some wonderful friends, I feel like I finally have a handle on the bomb. I’ve already mentioned several times that things go boom, so saying it’s a bomb isn’t giving anything away. Knowing what the bomb is made of, and how the bomb behaves, has given me the confidence to move on with certain other elements of the book.

Now I have to get on with the nitty-gritty middle of the book and hope that the story resolves itself in my head. A surprise ending for the reader might be acceptable, but it’s damn hard on the author.

Author Heather Rae Scott informs me that you can’t edit a blank page—you have to get the words on the paper. It sounds like such a simple thing. Put the words on the paper. But there are days when the words simply won’t stick to the page. I stare at that blank screen in front of me and accomplish nothing. My two brain cells refuse to collide and create a spark, leaving me in the dark and feeling like a complete loser. Days like that, I try to go do something else since time in front of the computer is wasted.

However, I have found that writing begets writing. The more you do, the more you are able to do. Some days are better than others, but the words seem to come easier if I write more rather than less. It’s odd though that there are days when my head is full of “what comes next,” and yet, those are some of the days that cause me the most trouble. I seem to get hung up on how to open the chapter or where exactly to start the narrative. Then there are days when the story simply unfolds before my eyes and I can hardly keep up with what’s happening. It becomes a mad rush to get the basics down before the next part of the story pushes it’s way to the front of my brain.

When this happens, I wind up with things like this:

Nate looks to where the remnants of the event tent had been. Smoldering heaps, etc. Sees C.J. well ahead of others. She grabs a weapon. Sees the bad guys struggling to drag away Mathie and Nate runs in their direction. Sees the weapon in the bad guys hand. C.J. sees it too and shoots first one and then the other. First man isn’t dead and comes up shooting. What happened to the security patrols? The rest of the Marines arrive.

This is only a tiny part of what I got down as the scene unfolded in my head initially. It turned out to be more than half a page of bad sentences and jumbled things. But at least I had gotten down the gist of the scene. The next day, I was a little more clear-headed and constructed a reasonable scene from those notes:

Only then did Nate turn toward where the large event tent had once stood. The metal framework and canvas had landed well behind where it had been erected and was nothing more than smoldering heaps. The ice sculpture in the center of the tent was gone and appeared to be where the blast had come from. C.J. was well ahead of the other Marines running toward the last place Nate had seen the ambassador. The security detail lay unmoving on the floor. Looking past them, Nate saw what appeared to be some type of struggle going on between Mathie and two waiters. The two white-jacketed men were forcing the stumbling Mathie across the burning remnants of the tent toward the wooded area at the back of the property.

“There has to be more shooters.” Nate checked his weapon. “Someone took out at least ten men on the perimeter.”

Bad sentences and bad grammar, but Heather’s absolutely correct, words on paper give you something to work with and edit. Even now, I can see at least a dozen things wrong in this one small scene. This section will be re-worked ten to fifteen times before it even makes it to the beta readers.

The bottom line is – words on pages become sentences. Multiple sentences become paragraphs, then pages, then chapters, and eventually (if everything goes well) a novel.

Thirty days into my new project, tentatively titled The Embassy Guards, and I think I may have a handle on things – or not. At a little over 25,000 words, I’m somewhere around one third of the way into this thing. My main characters are already well established and the trouble that started on page one – continues. There will be much more trouble to come as my team of personnel try to figure out who the enemy is and take them out. This one is turning into a lot of fun.

Dean has created a draft cover for The Civilian – Blood Link III and I’m in the final edits. I expect to publish this one about 1 June. Saving Emily is in final beta reads and will be off to face Marcia’s eagle eye by the end of next month. Finally, The Damaged – Book IV of the Blood Link series is in progress. I expect it to be ready for edits soon. Busy, busy, busy!

Did you know that when you loosen the bolts to drop the transmission pan, you should leave the bolt over your head for last and then pry on the corner farthest away from your face? Unless your actual goal is to cause your husband to choke with laughter while pointing at your tranny fluid covered face and body, the above procedure should be followed. If you can’t learn from the actual experience (as I did when I spent several hours trying to get old tranny fluid out of my hair) then you will need to learn from those who have the appropriate experience.

This is about figuring out how something works so you don’t sound like a complete idiot when someone reads your book. I know that all my friends think I’m brilliant (otherwise they aren’t my friends) but the simple truth is that I’m often lacking in the necessary knowledge to write about certain technical things. I’ve always been okay with admitting when I don’t know something, and over the years, I’ve learned to ask those questions sooner rather than later.

“So, finger tight is not an extra quarter turn with a 3/8” ratchet?” The failure to ask that particular question resulted in my splitting the pan gasket and having to remove the transmission pan a second time. Mr. Scott was not as amused by this failure to ask the right question. Although by then, I knew the secret of which corner of the pan to drop.

The point of this is that you have to know your limitations about the subject. I’m a firm believer in asking for help when I need it. I can “wing it” on certain things, but I can’t and won’t do that when it comes to the technical material. I can’t ask the reader to suspend their belief on everything. Ninety percent of what I write about can and has happened to someone, somewhere. I try to weave the story around certain realities so that the reader is comfortable coming along for the ride. But if you screw up basic stuff, then you’ll cause the reader to step out of your world and say bad things. We’ve all had this happen when reading.

Several years ago, I had a terrible experience with a novel in which the heroine was some bada**, super-dooper FBI agent. About half way through the book, the heroine drew her weapon, previously described as a nine-millimeter semi-automatic, cocked it, and fired two rounds, dropping the villain in his tracks. She did not share with us where the rounds hit the villain. Being a good agent, she immediately reloaded her weapon by taking two bullets from her purse (I guess they were just laying around in the bottom with her lipstick), placed them in the cylinder, and gave the cylinder a spin before closing it and putting her weapon in her holster. Then she went over to make sure the villain was actually dead.

WHAT??? Are you kidding me? (If you don’t know why this is wrong – email me and I’ll explain it.) I ranted to everyone who would listen for about two days on this one. I was so torqued, that I took the time to write a review, send a letter to the author, the editor, and the publisher telling them why I firmly believed they were idiots. I couldn’t even finish the book, which up to that point hadn’t been all that bad.

But, this particular author had provided a valuable service to me and in the long run, my $7.99 for that paperback was well spent. “If you can’t be a good example for everyone, than you’ll just have to serve as a horrible warning.”

I started work on my current book and hit a spot where I didn’t have a working knowledge of something and the all-knowing, all-powerful Internet wasn’t going to fill the void. Well, it would have, but I don’t need Homeland Security showing up because I’m trying to do research on bomb making. Anyway, I wrote past it for the moment simply by writing, “She says something intelligent here about the IED/Bomb. Paragraph break – add bomb detail crap here,” paragraph break, and went on with the story. I then put out a request to my friends asking for help and knowledge concerning IEDs and mortars, and my friends responded. Prior to completing this book, I will ask some of my friends in law enforcement to get me in touch with someone on a bomb squad (I have interesting friends), and I will send them the chapter and ask them if I got it right. My goal is not to tell someone how to build a bomb (you can learn this for yourself on the Internet) but to make sure the things my characters are discussing, as well as the effects of the bomb and blast, are things that they would and could know and are as correct as I can get them.

It’s all about asking someone who has the knowledge to share it. Most of your friends will.

I am very excited and proud to announce my latest release Stuck In Korea Time.

Air Force First Sergeant Brenda Livingstone may have returned from her assignment in South Korea, but that doesn’t mean she has been able to leave her tour behind. It’s been five years, but the memories of one violent weekend still represent the best and worst of her life – a time when love and honor faced off against fear, pain, and loss.

Editor: Marcia Lindley. Cover Design: Liquid Reality Studios

Stuck In Korea Time is now available on Amazon – the large button on the left will take you there. Also available from Barnes and Noble for the Nook. Thanks so much to all the folks that help me make this happen. Please share the link with your friends and family.