Today I want to talk about the importance of a good book cover. News flash! Readers buy books based on the cover. If the cover appears photo-shopped and amateur, readers will assume the story inside is also amateur. I've had the benefit of my publishers coming up with beautiful and brilliant covers for me in the past, but with my self-published titles, I've struggled with the concept of paying for cover art. It really shouldn't be an issue for me because I'm no artist and I know how important a cover can be. Yet, I'm still resisting biting the bullet and actually shelling out the cash. WHY!? No idea. But, when I do finally cave, I'm doing the smart thing and going straight to Fiverr.com. This website provides artists and designers a place to show off what they can do and allows authors to choose how much they want to spend on cover design. I'll post the professionally designed cover for The Christmas Plague hopefully soon.

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

I thought I'd blogged about this before, but I can't find that blog in the past six months of posts, so if I've already complained about this please forgive me. I'm having serious angst about my current project which is a memoir about my time in vet school. At first I was going to leave out all names and not even mention which vet school I attended, but more experience writer friends said, "No! You must name names!"

Maybe making everything anonymous made it seem more like a fictional story, but now I'm kinda freaking out about putting my actual, real life experiences out there for all to see. How could readers not judge me and my life decisions? In the book I often refer to myself during this time of my life as a "proto-human," but even so. I'm afraid that instead of the closure I wanted from this book, I'll get new scars (spoiler alert: vet school was emotionally scarring).

I'm also concerned about fallout from people and events mentioned in a less than rosy light, even with the preface that all events are to my personal recollection only and tainted by the corrupting influences of emotions and time. Oh well, maybe I should just stop whining and finish editing the thing. Who knows if it'll even get published anyway.

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

First things first. What is KENP? KENP stands for Kindle Edition Normalized Pages. Okay, so what are Kindle Edition Normalized Pages? These are free pages of your self-published, KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) book read by Amazon Prime customers through KindleUnlimited. Why should you care about it? Even though these pages are free for those prime members to read, you still get a tiny slice of royalty from it! Why did I use an exclamation mark? Well, this means that people don't even have to BUY your book for you to receive a PROFIT from your book! That's pretty darn exciting. How exciting? Exciting to the tune of about $20 a month for me, not including actual book sales. That might not seem like a lot, but if you consider the near billion (with a B) kindle books currently available on Amazon, I'm absolutely thrilled with my slice. It's better than readers  buying 3 paperback copies of my book every month. This is where the real royalties are with KDP.

Now, this is all new to me, but I'll tell you how I figured it out. Prior to this month when I self-published The Christmas Plague, I had one self-published title on Amazon, Miles From Manistique. Starting in March of this year I received a royalty check from KDP that was much higher than the usual $3 payments. I thought maybe I'd made a bunch of sales, but when I checked on Author Central, nope, not a single book sale. So then I checked my reports in KDP and WOW! People were reading Miles From Manistique like crazy through KindleUnlimited. Since August 2019, someone, somewhere has read at least 1 page of this book every single month, with a high of over 4,500 pages in April 2020. Not only that, but since March 28th, someone has read at least 1 page of my book every single day except one. Every single day!

Needless to say I'm thrilled and gobsmacked. MFM has been on Amazon for about 4 years, so I can't say it hasn't been a little bit of a wait to see it this popular, but then again, I'm now making a profit on work I did 4 years ago, so woohoo! I think this renewed interest in MFM must be cross-readers from my newly released sci-fi trilogy, WHISPs, through Scarsdale Publishing, so I've said it before and I'll say it again, keep writing! The more books you have, the more opportunities you have to catch a reader's eye, and the more pages you have available to read on KENP ;) $.

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

Exciting news! The WHISPs trilogy is going to be translated into Spanish! This is my first novel translation and I am absolutely thrilled with Scarsdale Publishing's decision. I'll keep you updated. For now, here's a sneak peek.

Susurros de un Asesino
WHISPS
Libro Uno
 
En cada sombra, una sombra de muerte...
"Nosotros, el jurado, declaramos culpable a la acusada, Rachel Iris Chester." Con esas  palabras, la vida de Sylvia Harbinger como detective del departamento de policía de Nueva York ha terminado.
Sylvia ha terminado con asesinos en serie, ha terminado con terapia, y ha terminado con una ciudad de Nueva York que ahora a sido plagada de WHISPs—las sombras escalofriantes y grises de sus pesadillas. Ella y su esposo Ben tienen un trato. Ella se retira y ambos se mudan a Montana para escapar del fenómeno WHISP. Es la única manera de salvar su matrimonio después del caso Chester, aunque deje atrás a su hijo Lincoln que fue afectado por WHISP.

Luego suena el teléfono. Chester está en la cárcel, pero ha habido un asesinato imitador, y Sylvia no puede dejar ir el caso. Si ella se perdió algo la primera vez, esta sangre nueva está en sus manos. Ben le da un mes para trabajar en el caso, pero ¿puede su matrimonio sobrevivir tanto tiempo? Y mientras Sylvia investiga más profundo la fuente de su fobia, ¿cuánto tiempo sobrevivirá su cordura?

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

Dragon's Roost Press has agreed to publish the reprint of the Moonlight Medicine trilogy! This second edition will feature brand new cover art and additional editing.

Check out the Dragon's Roost Press Website for more information: www.thedragonsroost.net/blog-2/.

I also have a short story in their anthology Monsters in Spaaaaaace!

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

Okay, so I know it's not Wednesday...I'm pretty sure...But anyway this brings me to my blog post topic: Timelines. Even in a novel that doesn't involve time travel, keeping your timelines accurate is important to keep your reader in the story. If you say something happened three months ago in January in Michigan, make sure your flashback to that event includes appropriate weather conditions and doesn't have your reader asking themselves why the main character doesn't have a coat on. The same rule applies, maybe even more stringently, for shorter time frames. It was recently pointed out to me that I had a character finishing an entire 350 page book in 2 hours. Okay, so maybe she's a speed-reader, but most people would just notice this as an obvious goof. It can be a pain in the butt to keep track of what day it is in your story, but it's worth it to keep up with consistency and not throw your reader out into the cold over whether it's Sunday or Monday morning. (Why is she going to work? What happened to Sunday?)

I Want to Know What Day it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH4TVYT1OYQ

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

So, since my lasts post was kind of a downer, I wanted to post a really inspirational post today. But then some a-hole hacked my Instagram account. I haven't even posted on it for over 2 years, so it wouldn't be such a big deal except this comes just about 2 weeks after my FB and Amazon accounts got hacked. Seems like some people have found something productive to do during the pandemic! :P And I just read this morning about more a-holes using this pandemic as political leverage. I'm just done with people this morning, really I am. So my sincere thanks to all those rotten apples out there spoiling the world for the rest of us. I hope karma really is a B@#$%! To everyone else, have a great weekend!

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

Soul of my soul,
Where will you go,
When we are all home,
Out into the snow?
Are you all alone?
No house and no home,
No one would know.
Heart full of woe,
Nowhere to go.
Days are so slow,
And still no one knows,
What did we sow?
When will we grow?
Our lives laid low,
And still the winds blows,
Still people are cold,
Still children grow old,
Though some are still bold.
Lives bought and sold.
Stories are told,
Wars fought for gold,
And the numbers still grow,
Row after row,
But what do they show?
When nothing is known.
Soul of my soul,
Where will we go?
When no one is home,
Out into the snow?
And no one would know.

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

If there is any silver lining to the current situation, it may be getting our time back. No errands to run, no events to go to, and for some, not even their day job. Now you have what you always claim to have too little of to devote to writing, time. And what a writing prompt. Did any of us ever think we would live in times with "social distancing?" Maybe this is mother nature's way of telling the world to slow down, stop being busy, and remember what's important.

Need more inspiration?: nanowrimo.org/what-is-camp-nanowrimo

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

In January, I was on a panel at Confusion entitled "Promoting Your Book-What Works and What Doesn't." I was excited to be on this panel because I had a lot to share about poorly planned and executed marketing materials and guerrilla marketing schemes, as well as an interesting side note on a partially successful geocaching campaign. However, we really didn't get into any of that. What the audience was chiefly interested in was how to game Amazon and Google searches and ads in order to promote/boost their books. And the answer is...

You don't.

Once upon a time, before there were close to a billion kindle books and everybody and their sister decided to try to make these algorithms work for them, you may have been able to game the system, but those days are long past. Now the algorithms to promote works are absolutely inscrutable and the only way to possibly get any traction through these monster sites is through expensive ads, and probably not even then. Sorry to disappoint.

More bad news is that everyone now has a blog and a Twitter account too and most authors get lost in the constant stream and buzz that is the world wide web. Unless you already have an online audience, it's tough to get one.

But it's not all doom and gloom. There are still plenty of things you can do to get your book in front of readers:
1. Contact your local library and see if they will host a book signing or other author event.
2. Volunteer to be on writing panels at local conventions (if you're a genre writer) or go to writing conferences and meet other writers and readers there.
3. Meet new people and be social. Inevitably you will get asked about yourself and your interests.
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY!!!
4. Write more!!!

Write short stories and flash fiction and post them online, or see if you can find an anthology to be a part of. Or, here's a novel idea (pun intended), write another book. And then another. And then another. One of the worst things as an author is to have readers love your work, but have nothing else to offer them. Having more than one title also proves to publishers that you're not a one hit wonder.

So my advice, in short, don't worry about marketing your book. A large catalog markets itself.

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.