Monday Marketing, Etc.

It's morning and I've already been hard at Marketing.  It's the first of the freebie days for WISH HITS THE FAN, and I'm actually up early, so there you are.  I posted to 20 different Facebook Groups and to my three pages.  Now, we wait and see if any of this garnered any interest.  (The post verbiage is below the image down there.)

It's probably not the best way to market, but it's free.  All it takes is my time.  This morning, I spent about a half hour posting.  If I sell one book, that would mean I made about $2 an hour. 

But writers can't look at our time to earnings that way.  I mean, if we did, we'd drive ourselves crazy.  If any writer goes into this thinking their time is worth way more than that, they would have to price their books so high no one would buy one.  Think about it...

When I'm in my stride, a first draft takes me about 6 weeks to write.  If it's a clean copy, another 6 weeks to edit and polish.  (At about 2-3 hours a day, 6-7 days a week.  If I edit more hours than that a day, I start to froth at the mouth and twitch a lot.  If I write more, my hands fall off.)  Add another week for formatting, etc. and you're looking at 13 weeks from the start to publication.  

A conservative estimate for my time is 156 hours.  At the federal minimum wage of $7.25 a hour, I'm due $1131.00 when the book hits the store. At the cost of the below ebook ($3.99), I would need to sell about 283 books to pay for my time.  (Not including what that cover cost me or any marketing I do - or my 'wage' for the time spent marketing.)  

Since 2020, I've sold 233 copies of ALL my books. See?  That's crazy making.  Sure, our time is valuable, but we aren't normal workers.  We work for ourselves.  Sure, some writers are making enough to recoup the time/money thing.  Most aren't.  We writes the books, we publishes the books, we get paid what we get paid when we get paid, and we're damn happy.  (Or we're whiny.  Your mileage may vary.  Sometimes it depends on the day.)

I mean, I have run across writers who think readers should pay them what they think they're entitled to.  :shrug:  Umm... sorry... it don't work that way.  The market tells you what you're worth, not the other way around.  Years ago, I tried jacking the price of my books up.  I got zero sales.  I dropped the price, and the books started selling again.  I don't make much, but not much is better than nothing.  That's the load we self-published fools must bear. :shrug:

Anyway... Here's the marketing I did this morning:

For the first time ever, get the final book in the Once Upon a Djinn series - WISH HITS THE FAN - absolutely FREE. (The whole series is always free with a KU subscription.)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075C7FCXG

You’d think life as a genie would be easy-peasy. But when you’re Jo Mayweather, ain’t nothing so simple.

If you're interested, snag yourself a copy.  I know there are a bunch of people out there who read books 1-3 but not this one, so now's your chance to see how the whole story ends.  

Have a great day out there, folks.

Sunday Update 10/13/24

What a week, eh?

Let's see... I didn't do any writing again.  I did work on edits.  I'm up to like 60% of the books that now has edit notes.  I also did some marketing.  Unequal was free Sunday - Thursday but I only moved 18 books. Not sure what the dealy-bob was there.  Perhaps Sunday is not the best day to start these marketing blasts.  Maybe I'm reaching saturation.  I guess we'll find out.  I have Wish Hits the Fan set up to go free tomorrow.  None of the other books are on sale.  Well, Wish in One Hand is set at 99c, so there's that.  Get the whole 4-book series for less than $9.  It's a pretty good deal, if I do say so myself.

Once again, I didn't do any reading.

In baking news, I made a chocolate oil cake.  This time I used corn oil rather than vegetable oil.  I'm not sure if that made a difference.  Maybe it was a little more moist.  I also made a pizza.

On the activity front, it was a wild week of cleaning, cleaning, and more cleaning.  The house looks lovely.  I also did one walk.  Mileage for the year: 51.25. Weight: 173.8

The reason for the cleaning... I mean, other than it needed to be done?  We had visitors yesterday.  Just low impact, casual chatting.  We had pizza for lunch and ate cake.  It was all good.  Well, except for the cats.  We never have visitors, so they were both totally freaked out and hid under the bed.  After a while of them not coming out, we transferred their food and water, and their litter box, into the bedroom and closed the door.  Poor things.  They finally got back to normal last night.  Little xenophobes.

Today should be back to normal all the way around.  The plan is to not do anything active and just veg.  I'll probably work on the editing notes.  Maybe I'll take a little walk.  Tomorrow, I'll be back to marketing so I should probably spend some time today working on marketing materials.  We'll see.  

How are things in your world?

It's Not Saturday

For some reason this morning, I keep thinking it's Saturday.  It's so not Saturday.  Which is good.  I have company coming on Saturday and I haven't finished cleaning the house yet.

Not working a day job really messes up one's schedule.  I'm sure this happens to everyone who doesn't work outside the home, but being a writer means working 7 days a week, so that makes it worse.  Each day slides into the next.  There is no two-day-off weekend.  It's just work every day. 

Sometimes it's writing.  Sometimes it's editing.  Sometimes it's marketing.  Often it's all three on the same day.  Occasionally, marketing will tell me what day it is because I have a sale going on.  Unfortunately, the sales are always scheduled for the same days of the week.  Often, I do a Monday - Friday sale.  This last sale ran Sunday - Thursday, which kind of messed me up because I thought I had one more day to market - Friday.  Nope.  

If it weren't for scheduled TV programs, I'd be totally lost. Unfortunately, the only scheduled TV programs I watch are on Sunday night.  After that, I'm screwed.  

I also need to remember which day is Wednesday because I still do work for the family business and I need to get my timesheet to them Wednesday night so they can cut my check Thursday morning.  But I don't get paid every week, so I can't count on that to tell me what day it is.  This past week was one of those weeks where I didn't have anything to get paid for, so no timesheet to send.  I'm all messed up now.

And even as I was typing this, it popped into my head again that it was Saturday.  Derp.  

My calendar doesn't even help because the one I'm using is a page-a-day calendar with lovely pictures of birds on each day.  I love it so much, I would buy one every year, but the last year they printed one was 2017.  The one I'm using this year is from 2016 (I switch back and forth between the two I have) and October 11, 2016 was a Tuesday.  I had a wall calendar, but The Boyz wouldn't leave it alone, so I didn't bother putting one up this year.  

So, I'm stuck in this time hole where I can't figure out what day it is.  In the whole scheme of things, it doesn't really matter what day it is.  Every day is like the day before.  I don't have any real schedule that depends on the day of the week.  Rarely does it even come up.  Except for weeks like this where I am actually doing something on a specific day.  

Ah, well.  I'll keep thinking it's Saturday and then reminding myself it isn't.  What does today feel like to you?  Are you one of those people who can keep track of the days or are you like me and adrift on the time currents?  

Thursday This n That

We're trying the whole 'let the cats have free run of the house at night' thing again.  After ten days of sleep deprivation, I gave in and put the cats in the office last night.  Ahhh, sleep.  Finn is a perfect little gentleman and he just wants to cuddle.  Why Sawyer feels the need to scratch the walls in the middle of the night, I'll never know.  It sounds like nails on a chalkboard.  Ah, well.  We knew what we were getting into when we adopted a kitten they had named Chili Pepper.

I still haven't cleaned the house.  

Today is grocery shopping day.  I expect this to be a large load.  Ugh.

Months ago, I bought some PERT shampoo.  Yep, they still make it.  It's okay, but it's not thrilling me as a shampoo.  Every time I use it, I feel like I can never rinse it all out of my hair.  I'm tempted to throw it out, but I have this aversion to throwing out things I paid for that might still have some useful purpose.  

I'm debating on making brownies today.  We'll see.  I might do cake instead.  Or maybe an apple-cranberry crisp.  Perhaps cookies.  We'll see.

Pumpkin pie bread...

Ahem, I really don't need baked goods.  My ass is expanding and it doesn't need any more assistance.

All the fawns have lost their spots.  This gives me a sad every year.  

Okay, I'm pretty much out of things to say this morning.  Fly and be free.

Rambling About Sales & Marketing

So, here I am... awake at 3 A.M.  I have Sawyer to thank for it.  I guess I can look at it as a positive because this early awakening means I have plenty of time for a blog post.  Not that I didn't have time the past two days, it's just that the time I did have was past the optimal time for posting.  

For the past few mornings, I've been trying to do marketing first thing.  I was up early on Sunday and got my marketing done around 5-5:30.  Monday was an hour later because even though I'd gotten up early enough to post, I forgot.  Those posts were around 6:30.  Yesterday, I woke up late and didn't get my posts done until after I called Mom.  (I call Mom every morning at 7 and we talk for an hour.)  Which means this morning's posts wouldn't be until after 8:30.  Frankly, later morning posts don't garner much attention, so I will probably skip marketing today and hit it hard tomorrow morning.  

Unfortunately, UNEQUAL is not doing as well as BLINK OF AN I.  Kinda sucks.  They're both pretty awesome, IMO.  Personally, I think people really need to read those two books, and not just because I would like to get paid.  They're both looks at what I believe could happen if the world degenerates due to circumstances.  Kind of cautionary tales, but with entertainment value.  

Unequal, if you weren't aware, is free through tomorrow night.  Blink was free last week.  

If they're free, how am I expecting to get paid?  Well, page reads would be lovely.  Unfortunately, I don't expect those for UEQ this time around because the damn 'top free' lists are not showing for that book at this time.  Turds.  BOAI's weren't showing a while back, but I got that fixed.  I thought I fixed UEQ, too, but apparently not.  I'm also hoping that the free readers would tell people about the book and then those people would buy a copy.  And then those readers would tell people... and so on, and so on.  

A gal can dream.

What's next marketing-wise?  I don't know.  Maybe I'll go a little crazy and make a last book free, to see if I can generate interested in the first books.  I offered Natural Causes for free last month and I saw some movement of Accidental Death.  Maybe offering a freebie on Wish Hits the Fan will encourage people to buy books 1-3.  Can't hurt, eh?  Except whenever I snag a later book for free, I just get irritated that I hadn't paid attention to the fact it wasn't a first book in the series and I am rarely inclined to even read it or buy the earlier books.  I could be an anomaly, but I doubt it.

Anyway, I'm just rambling.  I tend to do that when I'm up way too early like this.  Thanks for reading this far.  Feel free to offer a comment, if you're so inclined.  If I don't approve it right away, I probably went back to bed.

Sunday Update 10/6/24

Well, here we are again at Sunday morning.  The start of a new week, no matter what you're heard about the week starting on Monday.  I'll die on this hill.  Yeah, I'm kinda feisty today.  You wanna make somethin' of it?  ;o)

This past week... Hmm... Let's see...

I didn't write anything again.  I did reach 50% of the book on edit notes, though.  Still loving it.  Yay.  I also finished the project wherein I updated all my books (17 ebooks and 17 paperbacks) with Amazon.  So I got that going for me.  Today starts a freebie offering of UNEQUAL, and I've already been hard at work marketing this morning.  It'll be free today through the end of Thursday.  If you haven't already done so, snag yourself a copy.

Since I'm still editing, I'm still not reading.  I really need to rectify that.

In baking news, I made homemade cinnamon raisin rolls.  Bought some cream cheese frosting to slather all over them, too.  Yummers.  

I did five days worth of activity this week.  This included two walks for just under 2 miles, which brings me to over 50 miles walked this year.  I also did some cleaning, some furniture moving and book shifting, and some gardening.  I also ate a ton, so... Weight: 174.2

We're back to trying to let The Boyz have free run of the house at night.  They're older now, so there's hope.  Friday night was better than the last time we tried this, but Sawyer was still annoying.  Last night was better than Friday.  This may work this time.  Until it does, though, I'm sleep deprived.  Yay.

I have an idea floating around in my head for a new story.  Kind of a crime noir but with fairies.  And not your typical fairies, more like grungy, ill-tempered creatures with less than palatable jobs.  I don't know if I'll write it, but it's there in my head.

Anyway, I should probably go do something constructive.  Or maybe I'll just go veg in front of the TV until the sun comes up and it's light enough to actually do anything.  Have a great day wherever you are and whatever you do.  Feel free to drop a comment and let me know how your week went.

Gettin' Dirty

No, not like that.  I'm talking about dirty drafts and the aftermath.  

First off, a dirty draft, if you aren't familiar with the term, is one you write without giving any thought to editing along the way.  Just slap those words down and let the missed commas and the poor word choices and the typos lay there.  The point is to get the draft out and worry about it later.

Well, that's what I did back in July and August.  I wrote a dirty draft... well, filthy really.  (Get your mind out of the gutter.  It's not that kind of a book.)  As I'm going through the book now, making edits notes, I'm discovering how dirty it really is.  What a mess.  

I mean, it's still a damn good story.  It's just all over the place and covered in muck.  Like an outdoor wrestling match after a heavy rain.  And now I'm left trying to clean up afterwards.  

I sat down with my handy-dandy notebook and my red pen, and started making notes.  About six pages of those got me to the end of that notebook, so I picked up a new one and kept going.  I'm averaging a page - one-side, college rule, single space - of notes for every 2% of the book.  Yesterday, I swear I made a page of notes off just two or three paragraphs of manuscript.  

Some of the notes are as simple as ">she was in the wau (way", while others reference the time period and the need to make sure what I'm writing fits with the 1950s here in America.  I also have a note to go back through the whole damn thing and make sure I don't swear.  There's no cursing in the Duke Noble books and I have a potty mouth, so it ain't easy.

I reached 40% yesterday.  It's not a fast road but then again, it's covered in crud.  Once I get all these notes created, I still have to enter them into the manuscript.  Then it's lather, rinse, repeat.  I'm not sure when this thing will be ready for even my readers to see.  :shrug:  It'd be nice to offer to readers in time for Christmas, but I'm not making any promises I can't keep.  Hang in there.  It'll be done eventually.  

Of course, if it turns out that this is actually Book 3, I still have to write Book 2 before this one goes out into the world.  Ah, the trials and tribulations of writing a series.  Thank goodness I'm indie.  I doubt any publisher would tolerate this.  

Have a great weekend, folks.