Since the ad that appeared on the Id10t podcast in January there has been bursts of interest (sales and page reads). That’s pretty fun to see. There was no cost to doing that so every single bit of attention the book has recieved from that is all a net gain.

With the 6 month anniversary coming up I’ve decided I’m going to take it off the Kindle Select program. While those page reads are somewhere in the 10,000 range at this point I think the value of it is over. Payment wise it adds up to very little and attention wise I don’t see any tangable reasons to keeping the ebook exclusive to Amazon any longer.

So the big plan for March is to use IngramSpark to greatly expand where the ebook of The Darkest Winter is available. Along with that effort I need to come up with another wave of marketing to spread once that is all ready. I’m very close to the 100 copies sold- paperback and ebook combined- and I might even be there now, I have to to a new total count this weekend. That will be a good marketing avenue to take I think. Along with ten 5 star reviews, 100 sold, and the expanded marketplaces it’ll be like a second launch.

There’s a lot to consider and work out, my main desire is to have a good roll out plan in place when the day the expansion goes live. I’m thinking the middle of March at the earliest. I think the middle of March will be ideal, I don’t think it makes sense to hold back much longer. Even the beginning of April seems like too long to me.

Expect the next update to be full of info.

Good news everybody! Weeks ago I submitted a promo the ID10T podcast for The Darkest Winter. I’ve been behind on listening to the podcast and caught up today. The January 9th, 2019 podcast with Andrea Savage has my ad in it!

This is the biggest advertising reach I’ve received for The Darkest Winter by a country mile! This is so exciting, I nearly fell over when I heard it.

Chris Hardwick read almost the entire email I sent to him word for word but he left out my last name and website! I hope that doesn’t cut out my discovery but this is mega!

You can find the ID10T podcast with Chris Hardwick on every service that hosts podcasts! Here it is on Spotify!

On Tuesday I went to the North Haledon library to talk to the book club about my novel, The Darkest Winter.

This is the first time I’ve done an appearance for my work and as far as firsts go, I couldn’t ask for a better experience. Susan, the director of the library is a fantastic host and her patrons clearly love all of her hard work. There were eight women in attendance, a great turnout considering the bad weather.

So what was it like? The first thing that jumped out to me was all of the copies of The Darkest Winter on the tables in the section of the library we used. I got a rush of adrenalin when I saw them. Tangible proof that my book is out in the public and people are reading it. I got an incredible feeling of accomplishment from that.

Better yet, everyone liked my book! If that doesn’t get your ego to perk up, nothing will! I started off by giving the background of how I came up with the story, sitting cold, in the dark, in my bedroom on the third night of Hurricane Sandy. I segued to making Tim’s route across the country and my desire to show various people and communities throughout his whole journey. They loved the scenarios, action sequences, and most importantly my characters. I got a lot of compliments for how I wrote Tim’s apartment complex coming together.

That turned into discussions about humanity, how we see, regard, and treat each other. We talked quite a bit about our nation’s infrastructure, which is a major part of the book. I think the most questions came from that (along the lines of, would help take that long to happen) and that allowed me to discuss the finer details of my research that didn’t make it into the text.

The most fascinating and pleasing part of the afternoon was that just about everyone related a part–or multiple parts–of my story to their own lives. The characters I created reminded them of people from their lives and they shared stories of their own. It was so cool and it was something I didn’t expect to happen.

The event quickly turned from me doing a speaking engagement to having a discussion. I don’t think I made that happen, it organically turned into that. Now on reflection, I can think of something I want to improve.

I need to stop myself from rambling. I know this story inside and out, I’m eager to talk about it with interested people, so I can go on and on. I need to prepare more concise answers (many old questions from my writers’ group came up) I need to open it up to discussion sooner and more frequently. I did realize what I was doing at least and stopped myself a few times. Becoming aware of others (changing) body language is a good way to gauge their interest. Also, there’s a certain feeling in the air when an audience is ready to move along. I need to be more cognizant of these things in the future.

Another great experience with The Darkest Winter and I now know I have quite a few people looking forward to a sequel or two.

Don’t give up. Books have a million lives. It doesn’t matter if no one has read it yet and it has been out a while. It’s always new to the reader encountering it for the first time. And be patient. Success doesn’t happen overnight. Expecting it to will only lead to disappointment.                  –David Gaughran

This is good advice for me to keep in mind as I look at my sales report for November. My marketing reach since launch has gotten to everyone in my immediate circle. Breaking out of that circle is incredibly difficult. My slow sales show that and I’ve learned some things in the past month that I’m going to share now.

The Darkest Winter is published through Amazon. Since the start, I never considered selling the paperback through anyone but Amazon. With their Extended Distribution channel, I thought I’d be covered well enough for any bookstores, libraries, schools to buy the book if they wanted it (and that would be a serious marketing win if I got sales through this channel. I haven’t but knowing that the book is so widely available has been reassuring). For the ebook edition, I planned on keeping it exclusive to Kindle for 3-6 months. That 3 months is getting very close and that brings me to the point of this post.

Amazon’s Extended Distribution is garbage. There is no way to tell if a book has sold through that channel until after it has shipped. Amazon’s printers may not be the one who prints the book for this channel so there is no telling what the quality is. It’s possible that your book won’t be available to the distributors in this channel (like Baker and Taylor) for some unknown glitch that Amazon is “working on.”  It’s basically impossible to find out what’s going on with this channel it’s so buried and shady. The royalties are garbage, almost to the point where it isn’t worth selling it.

I found all of this out because last month I organized a deal with the North Haledon Library for their book club. I huge sale for me and the order was placed through Baker and Taylor on Oct. 16th. Three weeks later, nothing had happened. I could not find out why. So I organized to get the book directly from Amazon using my Author Discount. So the books are coming to me next week, I’ll hand them off to the library and I’ll actually make some money in the process. It’s mindboggling stupid how this has worked.

You know what else is crazy? When you dig around the help pages on CreateSpace, there is a line that says this….I’m paraphrasing but this is the message:

ProTip: Don’t use our Extended Distribution feature. Use another company, they are way better at it.

So I’ve deselected that one in my account because it doesn’t do anything. This has led me to do research on other companies and I’m on the fence about getting the paperback available wider. A decent amount of re-setup is necessary and I’m not sure if it’s worth it. For example, if I wanted to get the book onto Barnes and Noble shelves I gotta get an appropriate price barcode and another ISBN barcode on there, and submit all sorts of stuff to B&N and wait 3 months for a yes or no.

Since I know I’m going to expand the reach of the ebook, that’s more in the forefront for me. Get it on Kobo, iBook, Nook, Google Play, etc. That’s going to happen I just need to decide when. Amazon Select (a minimum 90-day commitment) gets the ebook into their Kindle Unlimited and borrowing program which nets money on page reads. I had over 3.000 in September and about 1,000 in October and much less this month so I’m not sure if it’s worth keeping TDW exclusive for another 90 days. The royalties for this service are super weird as it’s based on the month’s allowance (I think September was around $22 million) that is divided up by all page reads. I haven’t seen any royalties from that yet.

So, come January or March, the ebook will be available basically everywhere.

So while this has been frustrating, I’m really close to 100 books sold. That’s awesome, to say the least. 9 fantastic reviews are on Amazon right now and I’d love more. I’m going to think local for now I think. With the success of the NH library sale, I’m going to check around for other book clubs. Plus I’m going to speak to the group at NH so that’ll be fun and a great way to get the word out further. I think this could be the path to greater success.

I gotta get the gears spinning on this and we’ll see what happens.

Last Thursday I did my first public speaking gig at the Hasbrouck Heights Library for my book, The Darkest Winter. There were around 20 people in attendance and I’m happy with how it went.

To my surprise, I wasn’t nervous going into it, or at the event. I attribute a lot of that to my writer’s group, where I’ve essentially been speaking to a group of people almost every week for the past 4 years. I’ve become much more confident in speaking with people in a group setting and because we talk in depth about topics, I’m also better at organizing my thoughts and preparing what I want to say. It also helped that I know this content inside and out so my confidence in what I was speaking about couldn’t have been higher.

I was the 6th presenter and while my intro was a bit sloppy (I forgot some of the smooth lines I wanted to say so things came out a bit disjointed) I think I did really well with the segment I read. I chose Chapter 22 which is my favorite section of the book. It’s one of the shortest chapters with a lof of suspense and there is a lot of dialog which made it easier to read aloud. I also think it’s one of the strongest examples of the quality of my writing so as a preview to get people interested, it checks all the boxes. It felt engaging, I got a lot of compliments, and I met some great people. I’d call it a success.

I’m most surprised at how much I enjoyed it. It was more of a community talent showcase than a focused meeting for author engagement so I didn’t get to speak as much about the book and the writing process as I would have liked to but I think it was a great initial step to do more speaking events in the future. So far it’s one of the best elements of being an author I’ve experienced so far. I wonder if it made me feel so good because it fed into my narcissistic side since it was all about me and my work, but maybe it’s not so bad to get your ego some attention once in a while.

Come see me! I expect to speak around 7:35 pm!

320 Boulevard Hasbrouck Heights, NJ 07604

The book has been out for almost 2 weeks now and it’s gone well! I’ve gotten the word out to my immediate circle effectively. Just about every sale I’ve had has come from those much-appreciated people. Now comes the hard part, getting those who don’t know me to give me a shot.

Marketing is a much different animal from the rest of the book making process. Writing is what I do. It’s what I’m most comfortable with. That’s where I feel I’m in the most control and where I can let my head and my heart guide my story. Getting to do a public signing is proving to be much more difficult than I had anticipated.

Then comes getting the book ready for the public. That is an incredible amount of work. Tons of reading and revision along with many technical hoops to jump through to get a finished product. This section has it’s up and downs. Sometimes it felt like I’d never finish but each stage of the project that got finished, felt like an accomplishment. As more gets done, the vision of the final result gets easier to see. Once the cover is done? That’s the biggest visual representation and it’s a great feeling. I don’t like all the technical aspects of this process though. Ticking all of the checkmarks Amazon requires (any publisher, really) to make sure everything is right can feel like rolling down a hill that will never bottom out.

Getting the book in hand is hard to describe. It’s a sense of accomplishment I haven’t felt since graduating college. I’ve seen it all on a screen for years. I’ve seen every chapter printed out onto standard paper size more times than I can count. But to have it all put together with all the flourishes and specs all measured out correctly in my hands is something else. I can say that his object, this work, is part of me.

So now I’m working on getting the word out even farther. Totally different job from the rest. It takes a lot of research and work. It also means engaging people in a way I’ve never had to on a personal level. I have to sell my wares, my work, me in essence. Hey, look at this! Look what I’ve made! It’s totally worth your time and money! Tell a friend! Marketing these days means spreading yourself over the internet, which is tough to do. Engagement means a lot. Just making an account on a site, making one post to sell the book, doesn’t really do anything. There’s no engagement there. It comes off as spam which does you no favors and can look bad.  Reaching out to those you know is much easier and rewarding. That’s the way I struck a deal with my local comic book store, The Joker’s Child, to carrying my book. Actual brick and mortar retail space! I’ve known Caren and Len for ages and they have been happy to help me get my work out to the public. That’s been a lot of fun and very exciting.

This second wave of marketing is what’s brought up my Iconic Image ideas. As you can see with Pennywise from IT just above, I’ve got a bunch of images in the pipeline to filter out in the next few weeks to keep things fun and interesting. This also keeps my creative mind in gear as I come up with concepts and lines for each one. I want them all to be funny/weird to get the most attention. Just plastering text of “My book is available!” gets old real fast. We’ll see how well it does in the coming weeks.

I’ve gotten great responses so far. Everyone loves the cover and every person I’ve given a business card to goes “Oh wow.” I have 4 five star reviews on Amazon right now! The most amazing part is that one of them, I have no idea who it is! I don’t know the name at all and they really liked it! Strangers picking it up is so exciting and scary at the same time. I’m still getting those weird waves of doubt and fear about the public at large being able to read it, but those moments are fleeting.

Onward and upwards!

Holy animal, the paperback edition is available right now!

Amazon processed this way faster than their timeline showed me so this is a surprise. I made the Kindle Edition a pre-order for the 17th because I didn’t think the paperback would be ready this soon. Amazon won’t let me unlock the pre-order right away, but I’ve moved it up to Monday the 10th. The page should update soonish to show that change. Once the Kindle Edition unlocks, the product pages (paperback and Kindle) should merge on their own (probably Tuesday, the 11th).

This week has flown by, everything came together so fast at the end I’m stunned.

Let’s get the word out!

It’s been a productive week and things are happening fast!

On Tuesday my business cards came in and they are awesome.

The trade paperback proof of the book came yesterday and today I approved it to Amazon. The notice said that it will be up in 3-5 days which means I will need to change the date on the Kindle Editon when it’s ready! The release is very close now, which is hard to believe. I’ll blast out the release when it’s all ready.

In the meantime, would you like to get a preview? You know the title and have read the synopsis but that’s not a taste of my writing or the book! You can download a PDF of the first two chapters HERE.

Big news!

Ok, the wheels at Amazon are spinning! All the files have been completed and submitted.

Today I got word that the proof has been shipped. I don’t expect to get it until Friday, at the earliest. This is the last main hurdle for the paperback. In all the digital previews it’s looked good but this is the ultimate test. If I see any printing problems, they’ll have to be fixed and the file resubmitted to Amazon for review. That would be a major set back but I don’t expect this to happen.

I finished the Kindle version last night and submitted it to Amazon. I just got notified that it’s through the system and you can now pre-order it!

The book will be available on Monday, September 17th!

It’s almost here, I can hardly believe it.  Now purchase options are only for the Kindle version as I haven’t approved the paperback version (waiting on that proof to get to me). Once that’s through I’ll be able to get the paperback and Kindle edition to appear together.

Two notes for the Kindle version: If you pre-order, the book will automatically appear on your Kindle on the 17th. I have it set up that if you buy the paperback, you’ll get a discount on the Kindle edition. It’ll be .99 instead of $3.99 so if you intend on buying both (making you an All Star in life), I suggest you wait until the paperback is ready and that option is available to you.

This is nuts.