change of direction

I have always had the luxury of being able to write whatever I've wanted to write. That's because I worked for over thirty years as as teacher, and my wife was chair of two different university departments, so we had plenty of reliable income.

But times change. Well into retirement, we have found that the last of our ten children have required more than the usual push and we're sitting on the precipice where what we worked for is rapidly shrinking. So I may have to change the direction of my writing toward making money. And this, as writers know, could mean trouble.

Fortunately I can see, from my rapidly-gained perspective on the indie book world, what works and what doesn't. The main question is whether I can bring myself to do it. I have other ways of making money which I will use, and I could just keep my retirement hobby as a hobby and continue to write what i want.

I look at my ratings, which are much better in the kindle column than the paperback column, and I realize that most of what I've got has come through the hard work of read-marketing. I read yours, somebody reads mine. I've learned a lot that way and gptten as my main audience other writers who want to be read the same way. But now I've become impatient with that - too slow. Life is too short to read anything unless you really want to in the first place. But I'm continuing with it for a while just because of habit and because basically, it's a fun way to spend time when you can so easily be distracted, and I have plenty of that time. I am, basically, retired. I have to face the reality that it could be all over at any minute.

But it's not, and as long as I'm around, you'll be seeing something.

Finding Your Audience

Laura Lyndhurst. Finding Your Audience, Books that make you think blog.

I love Laura Lyndhurst's novels, and now she has a blog that is for indie writers like us. I can guarantee all her work but this one is one of my favorites; it made me laugh and I remember it days afterward.

In a way I recommend it because she has made a blog that I originally intended this one to be like. I wanted an edgy way to communicate to indie writers and I wanted to be on top of the trends and things that are happening in the world of self-publishing. But I have to limit my scope and do what I can do and I've realized that what she's doing, and what I intended to do, is a huge amount of work. I'm not sure I'm up to it in this stage of my life.

Another reason I highlight this post is that it speaks to my biggest problem. If you think about it globally, being a successful writer is finding the people who will get the most out of your writing and pass the word along to others. This post offers an interesting take on the dilemma. I think you have to look at a problem from many different angles in order to truly find the best way of tackling it. This post is an inspirational way of tackling the problem.

For us indie writers, it's not easy to get out there in the faces of people who might read our work. We are not like the big publishers who seem to have a built-in handle on where those people are. But actually I don't even believe my own stereotypes here, because in my heart I think that we can find them, and that to some degree the publishing industry is as much in the dark as we are when it comes to going to the places (tiktok? reddit?) where our potential audiences might be hanging around.

I highly recommend Laura Lyndhurst's blog and anything she writes. I have found her to be highly professional and her blog is an example of high quality in general. It's something for me to aspire to, as well as admire.

Promotion

`Here are some interesting facts from my own perspective. I've been seriously marketing my books (~30 of them) for a couple of years now.

Recently I dropped a book promo on every single facebook site I could find that would allow it. My book, Harvardinates, looks different from most of the books out there, but may have a limited audience: people who like history, religion, or education, or some combination of these. Results were dismal. Mostly what I got was about a dozen women shooting me a dm that said, "Hello, how are you?" Most of these probably were marketers. In fact, when I looked into their profiles (often they were pretty), they were marketers. Apparently marketers no longer present themselves as marketers, at least not right away.

There was an unusual proliferation of sites, which led me to believe that I hadn't even found them all. Last time, I'd found about 30; this time, more than 70. Often I had to join them and wait for admins to check me out. These sites, I think, are experiencing a lot of spam these days. I think there are bots out there that simply drop a shoe ad on every single site that opens. But the point is, no shortage of places to advertise. Still, results were dismal.

What's up with that? My conclusion is that book readers are not looking at these sites for new things to read. I don't know where they are looking, but some "Readers and Writers" is not the place. As far as I can tell, I was virtually wasting my effort.

I am similarly prolific on Twitter - and it's similarly pointless. I've bombarded Twitter with ads, and every possible hashtag - #harvard, #harvardalumni, #history, #biography, etc. Nothing. I've dropped them on sometimes four or five writers lifts in a night - nothing.

Some people say Amazon ads work, or that Facebook ads work. Maybe so. The kinds of free places I go don't work, and it makes me wonder what a "promoter" does that does any good. Do they know something I don't? Would they lead me and my money toward one of these places where the readers do hang out? I doubt it. I think they're just like me, out there flailing around, kicking up piles of dust, all for virtually nothing.

I don't want to sound too discouraged. I have a good book - it's not my fault if nobody knows that yet, or if people who care about Harvard/Puritans/Colonial times are just not out there scrolling through promo sites. It's already, by the way, very late in the season. Most of the book sales were back in late November, and I actually got a few. My peppering all these sites was probably too little too late, in terms of the real money that's out there for books sitting there waiting for people to buy them. The best thing I can do is learn my lesson, and do better next time!

Harvardinates

John Leverett, first secular President of Harvard (1708-1724), used Harvardinates (sons of Harvard), instead of Sons of the Prophets, to refer to Harvard alumni. That was his way of saying, we educate all men, not just divinity students (yes it was boys only at that time). This is the story of opening up Harvard, and all higher education in North America, to a wider audience - which is still a trend in progress.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CND89PZS

Authors' Read-Only Trains - no reviews

A new site, https://www.facebook.com/groups/1294959771183741, is my contribution to the Authors' Trains network. I have five trains on there. I started each one with one of my own books. Some of these books may not be incredibly popular, but hopefully with some publicity I'll get these trains off the ground.

In general I have found reading trains and review trains very useful and it has been a good place to meet people. Most of my best friends are indie authors like myself who have to struggle to get any readers at all. In an abstract sense, another author is not the kind of reader you really want; it's better to have someone who will pay cash on the barrelhead for whatever you write. But you have to start somewhere. And if some authors out there know who I am and what I write, that's better than nobody.

Some people find it depressing to be out there trying to rustle up "better than nobody" when they know that what they really want is out there but hard to find. Well, we're all kind of feeling around in the dark here. I could spend money on Amazon ads but I've found even that to be difficult, an art I have to master in order to be successful, whereas if I can get one reader anywhere to read and comment, that's one, and I've made some progress.

Come join me. Hopefully someone besides myself will be on there soon enough.

Amazon ad advice

I'm enjoying recent forays into Self-Publishing Support Group, a useful facebook site, and I picked up some advice that I thought was interesting so I thought I'd document it here. I went back to try to find it, who said it, when, etc., and couldn't find it, so it'll have to just go as undocumented. It stuck in my mind, though, so I thought it would be best to just write it down.

What the guy was saying, and he said it in a comment, was that when you run Amazon ads, you have to just shell out for a lot of money over a long period of time. The reason for this is that you have to give Amazon a chance to see who your ads work with and who they don't. It can only do this if it has plenty of time to work with. So, according to his advice, any ad buys for less than a few weeks are just wasted money. Amazon has the computers and the data to figure out what it's doing, right as it's doing it, which is impressive to me. But it makes sense, if you think about it. Amazon wants you to succeed too. But it can't do it if you only give it a few clicks to work with.

I like hanging around with people who use this stuff. I've been shy. I'm waiting for my next book, and hopefully I'll have some cash on hand, and will be able to fling it around a little.

A little break

Ordinarily I spend a lot of time reading indie work, hoping to in return get people to read mine. It has worked in a limited way, but most of my readers, and reviewers, are other authors. I still haven't really succeeded in cracking the wider audience that I need to sustain myself.

But then recently a series of calamities at home - grown son taking off with family cars - caused great anguish and great expense. All of a sudden reading some indie fantasy seemed to be a ridculous enterprise, so I took a break. There was a while when all I could do was play online boggle, since it allowed a dead angry mind to swim in the world of words. My indie books just kind of sat there. I had actually done pretty well for myself in terms of kindle ratings - people are reading them, even if they are all other authors. I sometimes stare at my little chart of ratings, because I can do that also with a dead angry mind.

In the interim time, when I literally had trouble reading, and got no enjoyment out of it, I began checking in again with an excellent site, Self Publishing Support Group. This site is very well admin-ed (a requirement), and has all kinds of people asking advice and giving good advice, on a wide range of topics. I began to really appreciate it and learned a lot just from a few days checking in. I was a little amused by the beginners who would write in and say, I just wrote my book, what do I do to market it? I had to chuckle at the naivete. Three quarters of these people will be gone in a year, I imagine.

But, in not reading, I got to reflect a little on my own progress or lack of it. I'm actually somewhat inclined to start my own read-only site, having had enough exposure to these facebook sites to know what a good one could do for me and what the market will bear. People are actually clamoring for them, but they have to be well admin-ed and often they are not. It sounds like a huge amount of hassle to run the site, but I have enough books that constant exposure would actually do me good and I'm on Facebook almost every minute anyway. I'm reaching the point where I'd rather have something in my own hands than carry around frustration with some other poor person who has taken on a site but really doesn't have the time for it. The question is, do I really have the time for it? Because I'm not sure, I've stalled.

In writing, I'm mainly stalled by the lack of charger. Sometime back during the fuss of car-theft, my main charger walked away, for the dinosaur computer I use that has Word and that compiles my books. I can still write short stories, on this, my small macbook air, but I don't have Word, so I've been compiling and writing my main book, Harvardinates, on that one. And it's dead, as long as the charger is gone. It could have walked away into one of the other rooms of the house, but I've searched pretty thoroughly, and finally I just went and bought another one.

Sorry to give such a long and probably pointless report of a struggling writer. I will say that I have twenty-eight books, hundred percent indie, hanging in there, not paying for Amazon ads or anything else at the moment, doing my own graphics, doing my own proofreading, and checking in on fewer and fewer sites as I've kind of gotten tired of pointless facebook traveling. If they don't generate, and aren't productive, then I'm just checking in for no real reason. So I might as well find my favorite ones and stick with those. And make them, if need be.

I've always suspected that making for myself is better than waiting around, hoping something will come along that will just help me do it.