I’m sorry, but something has come up that means I have to to get on the road NOW. I’ll try to be back with a post but it will be this afternoon before I can. Yes, it is an emergency but my family and I are all right. It’s just something that has to be taken care of ASAP. Sorry guys.
So I’m leaving the blog in your hands right now. Tell me what you want me to post about when I get back and I’ll do my best to cover it.
Thanks and, again, my apologies.
Mad Genius Club 
23 responses to “Apologies”
Be careful.
Do what you have to, we will be right here when you get back.
And, can we talk about the dry spell (is everyone having it?) marketing, and what we can or can’t do to make our stories sell? I’m going to be shameless, *shameless!* and tell you all I’m giving away a story at Amazon until Friday, in my own attempt to get through the dry spell (and maybe with a review or three).
Do what you have to, we will be right here when you get back.
And, can we talk about the dry spell (is everyone having it?) marketing, and what we can or can’t do to make our stories sell? I’m going to be shameless, *shameless!* and tell all you commentors I’m giving away a story at Amazon until Friday, in my own attempt to get through the dry spell (and maybe with a review or three).
I can’t post the link here, but if you click on my name to the blog,The Dwarf’s Dryad is there.
Yeah. I like shameless.
Here’s the start of my series. It’s _almost_ MilSF. Especially this first one. Then it wanders into pseudo scientific fantasy with ESP and cross-dimensional travel to parallel Earths.
It’s out in Kindle e-book now, paper version in a couple of weeks, then I’ll start with the Kobo, Nook, iThing versions.
For those of you who are series adverse, I try to make each book free standing, but there are some that come in pairs. I’m currently working on book eleven.
Impromptu book plugs! Rural fantasy with a military cast. First in a series. Working on number two now.
Pay no attention to the imcompetence behind the curtain.
Baptism By Fire is the previously mentioned story.
On that note, what is the code to make the pretty pictures link to the Amazon page?
For the link, I just grabbed the link to the book in amazon – not an associates link, the straight to the book one.
And how do you get that nice tidy title link, without splatting a big picture all over someone else’s bandwidth?
Insert HTML code in my comment. Forex, My Blog (sans underscoring) turns “My Blog” into a hyperlink to – of all places – my blog.
Cedar: “And, can we talk about the dry spell (is everyone having it?) marketing, and what we can or can’t do to make our stories sell?”
I published in May, am unknown, and not a marketing whiz. I can’t call September a dry spell, I don’t think, because I wouldn’t say I’ve broken out. However, when I got plugs late July I was selling, for me, rather nicely (thank you, Sarah and Rand!) for about a week. This month, I’ve sold 2 books on Kindle, but have been watching daily sample downloads on the Smashwords dashboard for other ereaders. I can look at my ranking on Nook and Kobo to tell if anything sold, so I know that the downloads haven’t turned into sales yet. It’s fascinating what just being mentioned by someone people like did for sales. Otherwise, they’re going to do what I do, get a sample, and see for themselves.
Pretty similar, two novels, one published last May, other a month later, some sales during the summer, one of each this month so far. I’m only on Kindle. I put the worse selling novel on 0.99 dollars as an experiment some days ago, it sold one, after a few days the other sold one, so maybe somebody liked the first well enough to buy the second even at a higher price. Who knows. I haven’t done any real marketing, apart from being in the Human Wave Garage Sale last month.
When I checked the author rank page on Amazon Author Central, well, there is a bump, drop, bump, drop, and so on, but if you squint a bit there seems to be a slight upward trend. Hopefully that will keep, but I suppose I’ll need to keep getting new ones out without too large dry spells between them or even the people who liked what they read will forget me.
I forgot. I also did Book Plug Friday at the end of that week and that helped, too.
Just FYI — over here, there’s a whole page about how to get WordPress to post at a given date/time. This would let you (or others) write postings ahead of time and schedule their public appearance — and not be quite so tied to posting on the day? I know, I know, you want it to be timely, but… might help sometimes?
http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/schedule-a-post/
I do this with my blog all the time. It does help, especially with “filler” content like links & photos, since mine is a solo blog and I have to come up with things to talk about almost every day.
Mike, we know that — but I sort of know Amanda’s schedule right now and she’s deep in book and there JUST hasn’t been time. If we ever catch our breath we’ll put up some filler posts. she, like me, has been under the gun for a while, and filler posts take time too.
I figure this will take more than a few hours, but the copyright considerations of this bit of fanfic might be worth a post – https://www.facebook.com/CalvinAndCompany
(and BTW I strongly recommend clicking through every image, copyright or no copyright)
Filing off serial numbers might not be a bad topic. And yes, I have a vested interest in the idea, because the next part of my series required heavy filing, repainting, extra accessories, and changing history, and even then I’m not sure if I’ve modified things far enough.
How to successfully run a literary chop shop, without getting caught?
I wouldn’t mind a post explaining 1. Smashwords’ dashboard, specifically with regards to timing, and 2. Kobo’s rating system, which is deeply mysterious.
This is if you need topics. Take care.
Another topic might be a list of sites like Writer Beware, so we can get an idea of where to go for “background checks” on potential indie publishers or a la cart service providers, as it were.
How about a post about tagging, and how it can be used for marketing?
Yes! And with an explanation of where to find the list of tag topics. I’ve only been able to glean them by seeing the tags on other people’s books.
In Kindle, that is. There’s a whole list on Smashwords.