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.