Yesterday, I did another book appearance. This one was at an apartment complex in Caldwell, just down the road from the library I did a few months ago. Thanks to Frances at the Caldwell library, I got this one set up (networking!).

And it was another success! It was expecting at most 12 people at the Marian Manor and it turned out to be closer to 30! I did my intro as I normally do but added what the book was about as there were people in attendance who weren’t part of their book club so they didn’t read The Darkest Winter. From there went into the genesis of the story and how I wrote it and the goals I wanted to accomplish in the story. Then I opened it up to questions.

I received a ton of great questions! Many of them made me think much further than just surface-level “how did you come up with X” responses. I’ve found that a lot of people are very interested in the writing process: how a story comes together, if my characters surprised me, what parts of writing I do and don’t like, my process, other authors I turn to for inspiration.

I still tend to ramble on with my answers. I simple question can lead me to many anecdotes and I actually found myself forgetting what the question was and then asking, “Did I answer your question?” That’s much better than a yes or no answer, I think. Plus I’m keeping much better eye contact with the audience so I can see when I’m losing people. I consciously caught myself going on too long so I don’t think I went too overboard. I’d say I kept half the answers short and sweet, so that’s good. That gives me some wiggle room.

I’m definitely able to read my audiences better. I kept it entertaining, I walked around, was animated in my answers, and kept their attention for an hour. That time went really fast and that’s in large part because they were so good. I got a few laughs in too which is an amazing feeling. Turns out I’m great with crowd work! I wonder if watching all that stand-up comedy over the years has rubbed off on me.

Many came up to me to ask more questions, a lot of thanks for coming, a ton of compliments on not only the book but my presentation. One woman even told me that she stayed up past midnight multiple times to keep reading! That’s probably the best compliment an author can get. That and when is the next one coming out, which I was also asked!

I like doing these a lot, they’re so much fun. I’ve also noticed that going into these, I am not nervous at all. Speaking in front of my writers’ group for all these years had upped my public speaking game so well. I also attribute it to knowing the material backward and forwards, inside and out, that I can easily answer anything.

The Darkest Winter has been out for a year now. With that, this will be the final update. The whole experience has been cataloged here and it’s been enlightening, to say the least. The next project is stewing in the pot and I hope you’ll join me on that journey as well.

I’m very excited to do another speaking engagement! The event will be an hour long and I’m looking forward to it.

During the ebook expansion process, as I was setting things up for Kobo, Nook, and iBooks, I looked into Google Books. Their sign ups were closed and you had to apply to get in, with no indicator of when it would open again. So I forgot about it as I moved to the other platforms.

Right after the Kobo, Nook, and iBook editions went live, I got an email acceptance letter from Google. To answer your immediate question, yes, that’s a really cool email to get. Feels good, man.

So The Darkest Winter is on every platform I wanted. The availability is now pretty crazy, so let everyone know about it! The “work” on this novel is now complete and now I’m doing small burst promotions (riding those Game of Thrones coat tails on Instagram) and gearing up for my library appearance in June.

And just for the record, Apple iBooks was the most annoying platform to get on due to stupid software.

Now I can focus on new material which is long over due.

First page search results!

It’s time to expand!

The last major step for The Darkest Winter is here. Starting tomorrow March 26th, the ebook will be available on Nook, iBooks, and Kobo. This greatly expands availability and I’m happy to reach this stage.

Making EPUB files work with different retailers has a shocking amount of hoops you need to jump through. EPUB is called a standard format but getting it there for each retailer isn’t exactly standard.

In other good news, I’m working on doing another speaking engagement in June. When that all comes together I’ll announce it right here.

Check it out and spread the word!

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