my failed attempts

As I mentioned in a previous post, I put my novelette The ElectroLive Murders up on Kindle over a year ago, and still haven't managed to sell enough copies to get paid. It's not for lack of trying, either. Just in case any other self-published authors out there are curious, I figured I'd summarize my failed promotion attempts. But before you dip into what follows, beware: this is crass business talk, and pretty long winded, and it chronicles a series of failures. You might not want to read it after all.

Failure #1: Review Blogs. The article I read that got me excited about self-publishing on Kindle was a profile of YA author Amanda Hocking. She attributed her massive success to book bloggers, saying that her sales took off once bloggers started reviewing her books. Hoping to emulate even a fraction of that success, I began researching and contacting review blogs. Early on in my research, I stumbled across the Reviewer List on Step-By-Step Self-Publishing's website, and I started working through it. In the end I probably contacted at least a dozen reviewers--and I made sure that the current information for those reviewers stated that they were open to submissions and interested in the type of book that The ElectroLive Murders is. Of those 12+ submissions, three responded, and one ended up reading and reviewing the story. No sales resulted. Statistical summary: ~6 hours of effort, 0 sales.

Failure #2: Amazon Presence. When I first opened a Kindle Direct Publishing account, Amazon sent me a welcome email with tips for newcomers. I read those tips and tried to follow them. The main one I remember now is this: put together an Amazon Author's page. So I did.. I also realized that hundreds of Kindle authors were lurking around the Amazon forums, hoping to connect with readers. The most blatant way this plays out--relating to authors flogging their books--is the creation of topic threads in the Meet Our Authors section. Basically, authors post comments mentioning their books in threads that group together books by topic--99 cent paranormal romance novels, for example. I was pretty skeptical of the likelihood of any of that sort of effort resulting in sales, but hundreds of people seem to think it's worth doing, so I figured I'd give it a shot--I posted comments on a few threads, and I started a few threads too. Guess what--my skepticism proved warranted. Statistical summary: 2 hours of effort, 0 sales.

Failure #3: Swag-bribery for reviews. Besides the writing I do as Don Broma, I also publish other projects under different names. I'm trying to create a distance between Don Broma's work and my other writing, so I won't mention it by name here (though I'm sure you could figure it out pretty easily, if you wanted to), but a few months ago I felt so eager to get the ball rolling with Kindle sales that I tried to harvest readers from my other projects. On a blog I've set up for my self-published zine, I posted an offer to give a free copy of the newest issue of the zine to anyone who was willing to read and review The ElectroLive Murders. It wasn't a very effective offer, in the end, which didn't surprise me--the audience for my zine is probably pretty different from the audience that might be interested in Don Broma's writing. Only one person took the bait (thanks Brady!). Statistical summary: 2 hours of effort and $2 invested, 1 sale.

Failure #4: Out-of-the-box promotion. Realizing that more conventional forms of ebook promotion are already pretty saturated with the efforts of desperate fools like myself, I decided to explore less traditional promotion ideas. I also figured that people who like mysteries (The ElectroLive Murders is a mystery/sci-fi story) might be receptive to and/or appreciative of "intrigue-oriented" encounters. With those thoughts in mind, I came up with two out-of-the-box promotion ideas: writing on dollar bills and placing business cards. The writing on bills idea--which consisted of writing "Who killed Franklin Moore? Kindle Search: electrolive"--made me a little nervous, though I couldn't find any specific law stating that such actions were illegal (there are laws saying you can't destroy a bill, or make it unsuitable for circulation, but bills with writing on them circulate pretty freely, so I figured it wouldn't rank as a crime). In the end, I didn't go very far with it. The other idea--of printing up business cards for a character in The ElectroLive Murders story, and then placing those cards in locations where they might be found by Kindle owners--was a bit more time consuming, and involved a minor cash investment (lots of places print cards for free, but you still have to pay shipping and handling to get the cards delivered). I went forward with it anyway, printing up 250 cards, but I sort of lost interest (notice a trend here?), and have only placed around 30 of them so far. Still, I'm guessing that a fair amount of people have seen either a marked bill or a card, and there haven't been any sales since I put them out. Statistical results: 3 hours work, $5.50 invested, 0 sales.

Failure #5: This blog. Blogging as a means of self-promotion is widely practiced, and a lot of people swear by it. Hoping to take advantage of anything with a decent chance of helping sales, I've started this blog. So far, after 5 weeks of posting, I'm getting an average of 2 hits a day. Not exactly widespread effect. My guess is that the easiest way to start increasing the size of your blog audience is by commenting on other people's blogs, but I'm not interested in just spamming people's sites, so I've been trying to find like-minded authors who've posted something I honestly want to comment on. So far, I haven't found much. Statistical results: 10 hours work, 0 sales.

Obviously, I haven't gone very far with all of the above attempts, and I'm guessing that more effort would produce more results. You haven't really failed until you've stopped trying, right? On the other hand, dumping lots of time and energy into promotion isn't especially attractive to me--I'd rather use what little free time I have for writing. So for now I'm musing about other promotion options, in hopes that something else I come up with has a better ratio of time/energy invested to sales produced. The main thing I'm thinking about doing next is temporarily making The ElectroLive Murders available for free, but I don't want to do that until I've got my next novelette Cool Blue on Kindle, too, and I'm still waiting on the cover for that. I'm also open to other suggestions, so if you're one of the 10 people who will stumble across this blog post, feel free to make a suggestion in the comments section.

MFA or nay?

Just got back from a trip to the local grocery store. The checker who rang me up is in the undergrad creative writing program at SFSU (the local college--same program I got my BA from about five years ago). We had the following conversation:

Me: How's the writing going?
Checker: Well, I've been pretty busy with school stuff, trying to finish up my bachelor's this semester, so I haven't had much time to write.
Me: This is your last semester, huh? Congratulations.
Checker: Well, my last semester as an undergrad. I'm going on to graduate school.
Me: Gonna get an MFA?
Checker: Yeah.
Me: Where you gonna go?
Checker: I'm gonna apply to USF and Mills [both private schools], but I wanna get in to the program at [SF] State, 'cause it's cheaper.
Me: What do you write? Poetry?
Checker: Nah. Fiction... about being Mexican. It's pretty boring, but nobody else is doing it.
Me: Oh. Well, good luck.

I walked out of there shaking my head, and holding my tongue.

The checker is a nice guy, and I wish him nothing but the best. Because of that, and because I've got pretty strong opinions about MFA programs, I had a powerful urge to NOT hold my tongue. But I reasoned that he sounded pretty sure of his decision, and I reasoned that he didn't want a relative stranger pissing on his parade. I mean, I hardly know the guy. If I was a close friend of his, if I knew him outside of our superficial checker-customer relationship, maybe I'd feel more of a right to tell him what I really think.

And what I think, to put it plainly, is that he's thinking like an idiot.

Let's pass over his completely clueless statement that there aren't any people writing about being Mexican (I mean come on! It's such a ridiculous idea that I don't even know how he could come up with it. Do a Google search for 'Mexican American authors' and you get 8,950,000 results in .18 seconds. The top hit is for a Wikipedia page titled 'List of Mexican American writers,' which lists more than 140 names, many of which are the names of bestselling authors. No one writing about being Mexican American? Come on!). Let's just pass over that statement completely, and focus instead on why he's thinking like an idiot for considering an MFA.

Well, shit. Getting into the MFA topic is opening up a pretty big can of worms, too, and plenty of people have already been there and done that. So let me try to boil my thoughts down to a few brief points:

1. MFA Programs are fucking expensive. (My checker friend was considering both USF [estimated cost: $50,000+] and Mills [probably even more expensive than USF], but hoping to get into SFSU [estimated cost: $22,626, and with the way the CSU system is raising tuition costs to offset reduced state support, it'll probably be a lot more than that].)

2. MFA Programs will not give you a degree that helps you earn any kind of money. (The money consideration is important mainly because of the cost of the degree itself--you're going to build up a significant debt in the pursuit of that degree. But the principle job an MFA makes you suitable for, as far as I can see, is teaching MFA courses, which doesn't earn any money for any significant number of people. On a side note, this little catch-22 actually leads us toward another idea I have: that the writing school industry is inherently cannibalistic. You want to make a career out of your writing degree, but your writing degree doesn't qualify you for any career other than teaching writing, and so you need to find students who want to take writing classes, and then those students will need to find more students to teach, so they can charge them money, so they can use that money to pay off the debt they incurred while obtaining their degree. It goes on an on, a snake eating it's tail.)

3. MFA Programs don't necessarily help you write, and likely will make it harder. (My checker friend admitted that he's been 'busy with school stuff' recently, so he 'hasn't had much time to write. I had the same experience when I was at school, and the writing I did find time for was rarely the type of writing I wanted to do--I was so busy with class exercises and projects that I hardly ever had time to work on even short projects of my own, let alone longer works. Maybe that changes once you get into the MFA program, but I doubt it.)

4. MFA Programs will stifle your creativity. (My theory about school is this: it depends upon the idea that you don't know what you're doing, that you can't figure it out on your own, and that consequently you need someone to teach you. I mean, if you can figure it out on your own, what do you need school for? And so built into the system, as a self-preserving device, is the prerogative to find fault in your efforts, in order to offer you guidance. This effect is especially sinister when it comes to writing, which is already a quixotic quest.)

I could go on, and probably will in a later blog post, but I'm going to end this one here.

P&W thinks you're an idiot

It's funny how this happens with a lot of magazines: after you decide to stop paying for a subscription, they offer you two years for $5 (or some such ridiculous deal that makes you feel like you were getting ripped off all along). That's what happened to me with Poets & Writers. I signed up for a year, lost interest and didn't renew, and then I got an offer for a two year subscription for practically free. Like a sucker, I took the bait.

Well, after reading the November/December 2011 issue, I think I've finally decided that 'practically free' isn't free enough.

What bothers me is this: P&W consistently reveals a bias for the 'established' publishing market--a market that I think is seriously flawed and imminently doomed to a shake-up reminiscent of what the music industry went through in the early 2000s--and they're so blind to that bias they often come across as pretentious idiots.

Witness, for example, the interview of Richard Nash, in which Gabriel Cohen (the interviewer) asks (and I'm paraphrasing here, since I don't have a copy of the issue in hand): How will readers know what's good if they don't have editors there to tell them?

Seriously, that's what he asks. As if readers are too stupid to know if they like something or not. As if readers only read because editors tell them something is worth reading.

Really, the attitude revealed by Cohen's question (and the level of delusion that attitude depends upon in order to persist), is ridiculous. It's a classic example of putting the cart before the horse.

The way I see it, there are two key players in writing--the reader and the writer. Everyone else is of secondary importance. I believe this is true in every industry--the most important people are the people who make the product and the people who buy it. Anyone else who finds a way to insert themselves into that transaction, to make money from a product without making the product itself, is of peripheral importance. They might provide a valuable service, their efforts might be of benefit to the producer and the consumer, but they aren't essential, and they aren't irreplaceable.

When editors forget that, when they start considering themselves more important than the readers and the writers both, their future looks grim.

And the same can be said for magazines.

writing in an airport

I've heard a lot of opinions about 'where to write.' Some people do their writing in a closed room, monk-like, hoping to minimize distraction. Some people seek out quiet public places, like cafes and libraries, where they can be amongst others but not distracted by them. And some people--though this group seems to be fairly small--say they can write anywhere, no matter the crowds, no matter the commotion.

Generally my preferences put me in amongst the second group. I like to be able to sink into what I'm doing without distractions, but I also like to be with other people doing the same thing. Having other people around me who seemed engaged in their work helps me feel engaged with my own. But it can be difficult to find a place that offers that feeling. Libraries don't let you eat or drink, which limits how long you can stay in them, and cafes get noisy. For the thousands of hours that I've spent writing, nearly all of those hours saw my attention divided between the writing itself and the distractions of the place.

With the project I've been working on recently--a horror novelette called COOL BLUE--distraction hasn't been an issue. I've found myself so drawn into the story that I become deaf and dumb to the outside world while I'm writing. Nowhere else has this proven more remarkable to me than in the SFO airport last Thursday. My flight was delayed by more than two hours, so I sat down amidst all the other pissed off passengers, pulled out my laptop, and dropped into the story. It almost felt like opening a portal to another world.

I finished the first draft of COOL BLUE just today, cranking through the coda at work--another place full of distraction, what with the phone ringing every few minutes, and clients constantly walking in the door. I suppose that means something too--me being so caught up in the story that I'll keep working on it even when my attention is diverted every 30 seconds. And now that the first draft is done, I've passed it on to some of preferred first readers. Here's hoping they find the story as engaging as I do.