Great review

for Prairie Leveretts
from a blog I love and trust!
https://booksthatmakeyouthink2.co.uk/2024/09/11/prairie-leveretts-thomas-leverett/

I rely heavily on pictures - I'm a pop artist - but I am presently unable to upload pictures onto blogger.

As I usually do, I go to google to find out what other people do when they are in the same situation. I get a blank pop-up when I try to upload a picture. There's nothing I can do with that pop-up. I have a computer full of pictures and no way to put them up there.

The first advice is to clear your cache and cookies. Well, I did that, that always feels good, but, no effect. Still get a blank. I also downloaded Chrome (needed to do that anyway) and tried to do it on Chrome. Still no luck.

One person said it went away after a few days. Is that what I have to do? Just wait and be patient?

On Facebook, I'm scattering my pop art all over the place. One site after another. I kind of enjoy it because, whether I sell books or not, at least I've spread art around a little. In this case I'm actually giving books away; they're free. I'm hoping to get a few takers. If you're reading this, try e pluribus haiku 2018, 2017, and 2016. They're free until Tuesday.

But I can't put any of the pictures here. Blogger has blocked me, for some reason. Words are ok. Pictures, no.

read marketing

In the past I've been an advocate of read marketing. Go out and read lots of indie work and get lots of random other indie writers to read yours, I would say. For one thing, as writers, they're fairly discriminating readers, and can give good advice when you ask. For another, any reader is a good reader who will ultimately, or may ultimately, tell other readers you're there and point people in your direction.

But here are the downsides of it, which have been weighing quite heavily on me. It's not that I'm ready to drop $50 or $100 on Amazon ads, though I might; I've just lost my enthusiasm for reading thoroughly through all these indie books. First, you don't get enough in terms of other readers to make it worthwhile. Your book sits in this site as a comment, and lots of people see it, like a free ad, but only one person reads it and that person may actually cheat or not care a whit about it. Readers who want to read your book are much better than readers who, like me, are just doing it to pick up a few readers themselves.

In general the world of authors is not a world of on-the-up honest dealers. I've found that I have a number of reviews that were written by people who most likely didn't read my book, because if they did they would have found something better to say than a conglomeration of everything else anyone said, or a rewriting of the blurb in their own words. I don't need either of those things, though of course I appreciate the 5. And if all of my reviews are like that that not only casts into doubt the 5 average, but simply makes it appear that nobody in the reading audience actually took the time to read it; that doesn't help me at all. The other side, I guess, is those who say, "it's ok but it's not my genre," which is a kind of pointless comment though most likely true, in most cases. Who needs to go out working for such reviews? LIfe is short, and I'd rather people just fall upon my books, read what they want, and review when and what they want. It's a little more random that way, but far more genuine.

Because time has become precious, I've backed off considerably on this system. We authors can and should support each other because we are careful, discriminating readers and we know the craft. If we say things right (and that is, after all, our jobs) we can be very helpful. What we need, I think, is to always consistently do it on our own terms. I'm not quite sure what I mean by that. But one should be able to develop a market in some better way than page by page. It's got to be possible.

Indiest of indie

I'm not the best of indie. If I was, my books would be selling off the shelves even as I've sat here, distracted by other life matters, and unable to keep up my relentless self-marketing, pounding my own drum. No, I get distracted, I have ten kids and three more kind of hanging on, and I have to do other stuff, and my ratings reach their little plateau, the one they hit when nothing has been happening, and I get a truer idea of my self-worth.

I do, however, have a lot to be proud of. I have thirty titles on the market (about to remove three), with more coming, albeit gradually. I have done everything myself: proofreading, covers, marketing, dealing with Amazon. That's why I call myself 100% indie. I literally pay nobody to do any of this crap for me. And it wears on me a little. Times like now, I'm a little tired. I haven't published anything since fall. The other work I've been doing has sapped my creativity and attention span to the point that I'm not sure I can sit and write a novel like I used to be able to. I'm determined not to do it until I have a solid plan anyway, and I have about five started without a solid plan, but that's what happens when you don't have a plan. You get into it, you have characters, they do stuff, it gets interesting, then it gets mired in lack of plan. Or at least that's what happens to me.

For a while I was chatting with marketers. They are absolutely relentless, wanting to be your friend and collaborate with you to make sure your books reach the worldwide market they are intended for. For all I know, some of these folks could be effective. One of them promised me a whole crew of at least twelve "GoFundMe" experts; from Nigeria, their whole focus is to use their internet skills to somehow siphon some real money off unsuspecting victims back here in the land of milk and honey. This is what I'm sure they'd do for me in the marketing realm too. I'm not biting. My computer keyboard broke and I had trouble making a, s, 1, ! and a few others. I used it as an excuse to stop talking to them. I just don't need it. They didn't really want to be 'friends' anyway.

Broken keyboard and all, I took a break. But now, I'm coming back, in some form or another. More soon!

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!