The difficult second

How often do we hear 'oh well that was the difficult second album?' It seems if you have the talent and the perseverance to make an album or write a book the second one is never quite as easy.

It seems that the first time we do something that is good enough to be shown to the public at large we have been working on it for the whole of our lives up until that point.
Then either through personal or peer pressure the second album or book is required before the furore of the first has died down. So often the second is a disappointment and the star wains until five years later they reappear with a third that is reminiscent of the first.

I looked today and I published my first novel a little over three years ago. I had written it as part of the 2012 NANOWRIMO and had then taken two years to tidy it up and eventually get it to a state that I was happy with and able to publish it.
As part of NANO 2013 I wrote my second novel. Then I got ill. Once I was better and ready to write again I turned my pen to writing about my illness and produced what I consider to be a passable non fiction book about my health struggles and the British NHS.
Then I started to go back to my second novel. It lacked something but it was okay I had an idea. I have sat down twice in the last six months to write that idea and started with all good intentions to  find the following day that I need to go to work and I am too busy to carry on.

Yesterday I saw an article about a fellow writer who has just won an award with Amazon. In it he talks about how he would write at night after the kids had gone to bed and how he discovered self publishing through KDP. Eventually he 'discovers' he has earned enough money to give up his job and write full time.
I read that article and was immediately overcome with jealousy. Wouldn't it be amazing to just discover that the account where your royalties are paid into suddenly has enough money for you to give up work. Why does that never happen to me? Why do I not have an army of fans buying my books? Why can't I write full time?

The reason I can't is because I have published one novel in the last five years. How are people supposed to become fans if I can't give them more things to read? I'm not Harper Lee.

So now is the time to start writing. Time to put aside that 30 minutes each day and get out that old manuscript and turn it into something that will generate fans.
James Patterson has millions of fans but then he has written and co-written hundreds of books.

Time to stop waiting to be discovered.

And so to my difficult second book. Is it worth finishing? Of course it is. Will it take hard work and perseverance? Of course it will. But I've done it once and I sure as hell can do it again.

Where did the first half go?

I can't believe that on Wednesday we will start the second half of the year. Where has the first half gone?
I appreciate I have been a little off the radar as far as writing has been concerned so here's an update of what's been happening and what I hope to achieve in the second half of the year, assuming it doesn't go as  quickly as the first half.
As many of you know I have been having a lot of surgery for my throat and I won't go into that in detail, but needless to say the recuperation has curtailed my writing some what.
In an attempt to get my writing kick started I have set up a weekend writing challenge on Scribophile. This challenge involves an object being left and then a story has to be written which includes the object. This is going great except I am one of the few people failing to write the story. Motivation seems to have left me along with my thyroid and vocal chords.
I have also set up a group on facebook to promote any books which are available free through Kindle Owners Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited. I am happy to say a number of people have signed up to this and hopefully they have seen their books being borrowed thanks to the exposure.
Finally for me I have decided to split my novel 'Stripper of the Yard' into two parts. Part 1 is free and part 2 is the same price as the full book (only £1.99 or $2.99). The idea is that hopefully people will download part 1, enjoy it, and wanting to know what happens next, buy part 2. So far I have had 307 downloads of part 1 and 7 sales of part 2 or the entire book. This is all in the last 2 weeks which considering I had had no sales in the last 6 months is brilliant.
The hardest part of the whole thing was getting Amazon to list the book for free. With Smashwords and Barnes & Noble you can chose to list a book for free. However with Amazon you have to list a book for at least 99p. In order to list a book for free you have to get Amazon to price match the book in line with Smashwords and Barnes & Nobel. This means listing the book with those other sites and then writing to Amazon to request that they price match. Amazon then email saying they will think about it and take a week to decide. In my case they price matched in the USA and then I had to request that they did the same in the UK, which took another week.
But the books are now listed and if you want to check them out they're here....
Part 1 - http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00ZAQOT2O/
Part 2 - http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00ZAQOHIK/

Going forwards I have 2 projects on the go at the moment, both of which need more attention than I have given them recently.
I have my 2013 NaNoWriMo winner to edit and then publish. This is the story of an East-end gangster whose wife can get pregnant and pretends she is to keep him, while at the same time his girlfriend is pregnant and pretends not to be to keep him. When his brother introduces the two women the consequences could be dire. I am hoping to have this ready to publish by the end of the year.
My second project is to write my story. In the last 7 months I have had intensive surgery and been in most of the departments in the local hospital (except the maternity ward and the mortuary) and Guy's Hospital in London. I knew nothing about my condition and have learnt as I have gone a long and I thought it would be interesting to get everything down on paper to reflect on the journey I have been through. As my treatment has not yet finished I don't know when it will be available but hopefully some time next year.

So lots has happened and lots still has to happen.
How have you coped with the first half of the year?
Do you have big plans for the second half?

KDP – How I became a bestselling author

Sales for the Stripper of the Yard had gone well for the first three weeks but having run out of family and friends, I needed to find other ways to get the news of my book out to the world at large.

First I advertised on a number of free author platforms. Unfortunately there is no way of knowing if anyone is viewing these. Still no new sales.

Then up pops a request for me to support another author’s thunderclap promotion. I had never heard of thunderclap and for those who haven’t, it is a crowd sourcing platform. Rather than asking people to give you their money, it asks people to give you access to their social media platform. You need to get a minimum of 100 people to offer you their support and if your target is achieved at an appointed time a tweet or Facebook advert is sent out to all the connections of your supporters. I was amazed that my book was being tweeted to over 217,000 people.

My book was tweeted and while I am still hopeful, I have yet to see any new sales.

Looking for new ideas I was quite pleased to see my monthly newsletter from KDP pop up into my in box.

There at the top of the email was a link to a YouTube video of a KDP bestselling author. These appear each month and unfortunately this one was exactly the same as all the others. In the video an author sits and tells of her journey to bestselling authorship through using KDP and createspace. Yet again when it gets to the point as to how the author attracted readers she says she did nothing and that the readers came to her.

How can this be?

How does this help those of us who need to attract readers?

Why does KDP feel the need to only share the stories of people who magically sold thousands of books over night?

I do not begrudge the success of other authors but can’t we see the story of an author who struggled in the start, but has achieved greatness now. It would be great to know that one day all this hard work would pay off. If the ability to attract readers is all written in the stars is there any point pushing my book? There must be some way to let readers know I exist without being ‘traditionally’ published.

Come on KDP give those of us who are struggling some hope. Show us authors who never gave up hope and struggled to start with. Show us how the hard work is worth it.

 

Marketing – Aaaaaaaaaargh!

I have finished my Open University course and have been producing some short stories which I felt where good enough to let the reading public view. Those of you who have read this blog before will remember my previous blogs on e-publishing How to and the next steps where I talked about turning those stories into an ebook and the simplicity of using Kindle Direct Publishing.

I have now had the book on the market for two months and have so far sold fourteen copies and generated one review.

So what did I need to do? Market it!

All the guides are telling me I need more reviews so that people can find it. To generate these reviews I did a free give away day. This did generate a further thirty six sales but so far no new reviews and no new sales.

I then looked at what I was doing wrong and it is all about marketing. Set up a social platform. I have a twitter account @jojenner40 and I am connected with about 1500 people. They are all writers. This is great for advice on how to write but it doesn’t necessarily generate sales. I also now find out I need to engage on twitter and that I should only spend 10% of my time promoting my book, the rest of the time I should be just chatting, getting to know people and letting them get to know me. The problem is I keep forgetting to do this.

I enjoy writing and won’t give it up but the more I look at self promoting and self publishing the more I am convinced that if you do this as a hobby that is all it will ever be, a hobby. Promoting a book is almost a full time job in itself.

I really see the value of the old fashioned publishing route and once the novel is ready I will be looking into that far more than I thought I would before I tried to self publish.

 

Do you have tips?

Have you been able to promote effectively and do a ‘Day Job’?

Do the publishing houses take promotion away from you or do you still spend hours building a platform?

Difficulties of the Unknown Author

Having sold just eleven copies of my first book I was ruing following the self publishing route. I realised there is a lot more to this selling books lark than just putting it on Kindle and waiting.

Nothing highlighted this point more than the revelation this weekend that a book written by J K Rowling under a pseudonym had sold less than five hundred copies since its release in April.

The power of her name and her amazing back catalogue led to sales rocketing within hours of the secret being revealed even though Rowling herself wanted to ‘keep the secret a little longer’.

The second novel has obvious already been commissioned and the cynic in me wonders if the slow sales of this first novel had led to this early revelation, to ensure the full sales potential of the book was realised.

I am sure we would all love to know how to capture the massive sales that Rowling has achieved in the past, or become the e book sensation that was Fifty Shades but surely it must make us feel a little better to know that even JK herself can struggle with sales, albeit due to a name change.

Jo’s first Anthology – So the Feeling shows is available from Amazon at the links below

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00DOCK3S0

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DOCK3S0

Diary of an Aspiring Writer – How to E-publish

I have recently been considering my options when it comes to getting my work to a wider audience and like many out there the consideration to self publish is a very real one.

I have been writing short stories and publishing them on my blog for about a year and the feedback has largely been very positive. I also took part in last year’s NaNoWriMo (write a novel in a month) and managed to complete a 50,000 word novel. Since then I have been editing the novel, or rather not editing the novel, as once it is edited I will have to think about publishing and getting other people to give me feedback on my work. The editing stage is, in my opinion, the worst bit. What if as I read through I find plot holes and parts that I thought were clever hints to the murderer’s identity are actually just gobbledegook? This will all need to be changed and corrected.

I have now committed to complete my first edit by the end of July and I actual have two people who have offered to read and critique it after that. These people are relative strangers who I have met through twitter and the Open University and therefore I trust them to not sugar coat their impressions.

So in order to procrastinate a little further I decided that I would try to publish some of my short stories in an anthology to learn the art of e-publishing. I always try to prepare myself with the proper tools and about six months ago I bought a book about self publishing and how it could be done easily and quickly. I settled down and read the book, which only took about an hour but to my horror it talked about html formatting. This meant nothing to me and seriously had me reconsidering the route I had chosen. However the book, which was in e-format, had a link to a website where I could get an html file which would help.

I settled down at my desk and followed the links. Aarrrggghh! The link no longer exists. What should I do next? Well I had already signed up to Kindle Direct publishing and so decided to see what they said about publishing your book. I went on and followed the process and on there was a link to two free books called ‘Build Your Book for Kindle’ and ‘Publish on Amazon Kindle with Kindle Direct Publishing’. These books are quite frankly amazing. Within one evening’s work I had a book that was formatted and loaded onto Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and ready to be uploaded onto Amazon. From there it took Amazon twelve hours to upload the book and the very next morning I had my first sale. A friends and family sale, but none the less a sale.

For those of you looking to publish get these books. They are free and they tell you everything that you need to know. I would also suggest that you read ‘Build Your Book for Kindle’ before you start writing if you can, as there are a few formatting areas that would have saved time if I had done them from the start.

I don’t know if this would work on other formats but with the size of Amazon and the size of my book/following I don’t think I need to worry about that too much.

The one thing I would say is I did struggle with my cover. However as this was effectively a learning exercise. For the novel I will definitely be paying a professional to do that for me. Also watch out for the categories when you set up on KDP. My book was listed as non-fiction for the first two days as I had not realised there was a single category for fiction which then breaks down into different genre whilst all the non-fiction categories are there as headings from the start.

So my advice is that self publishing is definitely easy to do. However don’t forget your work still needs to be of a professional standard and the marketing is all down to you.

 

Jo’s first Anthology – So the Feeling shows is available from Amazon at the links below

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00DOCK3S0

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DOCK3S0