Tag: Amazon

On Not Meeting a Word Count

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

75,629 / 90,000 words written.

That was not my goal, so what to do now?

Well, here’s what actually happened:

I wrote a majority of my words over three days, which was about 22,000 per day. One day I wrote 600 words, another only about 3,000.

Friday night (technically Saturday as it was 2am) I finished the rough draft at about 67,000 words. A rough draft is rough because you then make changes.

It was halfway through my second day of heavy writing that I realized I hadn’t been doing descriptions. Not of the characters or rooms, or really any emotional attachment to anything. It was mainly dialogue and barebones.

So, I went back to the beginning and started adding it all in. I’ve only reached chapter nine in this endeavour, not even halfway through the book.

Reaching that 90,000 word count for this book is possible, I just have to backfill the stuff I skipped over because I knew it would slow me down. If I had done it, I would only be about 40,000 words and not know the end or the thread of plot through the book. I would have lost it.

Now that I’ve got it, I’m almost good to go. Yay.

Long nights and regular mornings can wear you out. If you want to try this yourself, you will need to figure out what writing method works best for you, and practice meeting the word count.

This was a stretch for me, I knew that. I did it to fill a staycation where I couldn’t afford to do anything or go anywhere. It was my break from reality, one that I planned so that when I woke up this morning for my day job, I didn’t feel dejected because I did nothing but play video games and drink.

Don’t get me wrong, those things still happened…

Halfway through the week, I realized that I had no plan in place to edit it. But I think I can place it in the edit spot for Seed as I’m not certain that will be done on time.

I should be working on that now, but two hours of sleep and a long day ahead of me. I need my wits, because I need my day job and there’s not much room for error today.

During my week off, yes, I was pretty well holed up with no contact with ‘real’ people. All I had, for the most part, was a writer chat that kept me company. They knew what I was planning, and called me crazy, but then cheered me on and participated in sprints when I was struggling to meet my word goal for the day.

Once I made that goal, I was pretty well set. I’d end up staying up another four to six hours and adding between six and ten thousand more words to the book.

I don’t think I could have managed it without that chat.

Anywho. Heading back to the day job today. Not enough sleep because of a combination of my sleep schedule for the past week and being a little manic of plans for marketing and such.

The one plus side of the late night is that I might have and line on the next D.o.t.A. book. Apparently Morgan is content without telling his story, so I’m not about to push him.

New Alphas, new city, with only one of the old crew making a brief appearance. It promises to be fun.

On Finding a Name

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

Ugh, so I might have messed up the setup of the site and made posts instead of pages. It should be a simple fix of switching them over with some copy and pasting but it’s the time that it’ll take and how stupid I feel right now.

I’m still debating what to call the site. Smart thing is some combination of my name, but ayadeaniege.com just sounds narcissistic to me. I’m trying to come up with something that I won’t want to strangle myself over.

In the meantime, I’m hoping my brain holds out and I can do a writing sprint this weekend. After two days of struggle, I finished chapter fifteen of Death Mask, which will likely end up being chapter seventeen, after I go back and refresh the first couple of chapters and fix up the first little arc.

I’m hoping this weekend to complete His Grace and begin the editing of that. Beth needs some help with a side project that I promised I’d work on for her. It could take ten days to four months.

Urgh, why, Beth? Why must you taunt me with your books and blackmail me with your cooking?

I have a full plate, basically. Lots to do.

Today I checked up on the Storyteller Competition and discovered that they are preparing the short list. I haven’t been disqualified yet, so I can’t just stop checking on it. Or I could… I mean, I’m not going to win.

I’m always told to be more confident, but the people talking are really never happy with me when the next thing to come out of my mouth is, “I’m confident I’m not going to win.”

It’s not that I absolutely could not win a competition, but the short list is comprised of things chosen by Amazon’s algorithm. Which doesn’t quite like me but likes Contract Taken for one day, then the next likes At Death’s Door on fewer sales? I just… I don’t know how to read that thing and it’s partly responsible for creating the short list.

Oh, and I might be about to go through another one of my episodes, so if none of that made any sense to you, it’s okay. It’s the partly broken brain I have in its death throes. It’ll be back next week and my hypergraphia will be back on full blast.

Marketing is Repetitive

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

I’m marketing At Death’s Door more today. I’m going to say this, but only because I’m bored: Ugh.

If there are any marketers reading this and I’ve accidentally submitted to your site twice, I apologize. Beth’s had me do this for her, so I thought the site looked familiar because I was there for her, but no.

Ugh.

Marketing is repetitive. You can pay other services to submit to other pages, however you pay them to submit your book to the free services of other sites which doesn’t guarantee you promotion. This means that… well, do it yourself! If you submit to 45 sites the chances of being picked up by one are pretty slim unless you are some sort of best seller with six million reviews. For all you or I know, those sites are automatically ignored because they’re basically spam bots.

Now if it’s a network, that’s a different story.

So paying such and such a price to do that when there’s a Fiverr option (of five bucks) to do the same thing is pretty well pointless. But beware Fiverr, there are some who say they’ll post your book to Facebook pages, ect, then send you doctored photos. Beth caught someone last year doing that. She’s very focused on anything Fiverr. If she can’t track what you did, then you did nothing and she wants her money back.

And if you send her images of “open” Facebook groups and she can’t find them on Facebook, she’s going to demand her money back, then report you to Fiverr, and give you a one star rating because stop ripping indie authors off you mean people.

Submitting to sites goes by fairly quickly, after an hour I had about twenty sites. Maybe a few less, I’ve been wandering in between submissions because it’s such repetitive work. I don’t mind repetitive work if it’s with my hands. Sorting blueberries, removing paper bits from fiddleheads, that kind of thing. The copy and paste and switch windows in a different pattern every time, that’s what’s getting to me.

I like patterns, they make my job easier.

Here’s the thing with marketing (for those brand new at it) you want all your links open in tabs in behind. Open a new tab for each site you visit, then close it once everything is complete.

I visit sites often which have the go forward then back thing going on, but marketing, I often close the tab I’m working on. It’ll also help you trace back and forward. So at the moment I have the original search through Google (good ol’Google) then the first result I opened, and from there I actually found another site with many links and that’s the site I’m working on. Once I’m done I can just close the tab and go backwards, or keep it open and use it to compare the links between sites and maybe save myself a few clicks.

Some people ask for ASIN, then they ask for the link to your Amazon book, do not go to Amazon and look up your book. Go to your bookshelf in KDP and click on the US site from there, this will give you a clean link. If you look it up on Amazon, there’s a bunch of numbers at the end.

Want reviews? If six people click that link with the numbers and try to review, you’re going to have a bad time. It’s some kind of referral number. Use a clean link. And in that clean link, the ASIN is present. I think that might be the most frustrating, yet easiest part. I just keep the Amazon link on the clipboard and then delete the webpage and leave only the ASIN when they request it.

If you find yourself getting bored, take a break. Wander the internet, check social media, write a little bit. Boredom makes it a laborious process.

Some sites require a certain number of reviews. The magic numbers seem to be 3, 5, or 18. Nothing outside of that, which I find odd. But hey…

So those who pay for reviews get a head start. Annoying, nope, I will not pay for reviews, not if I can help it.

At Death’s Door currently has four reviews, bringing it to 4.7 Stars on Amazon. Yesterday morning, it had two. I’m dancing, but now I’m just one off of meeting about two thirds of the sites’ requirements. I used to itch for that third review, now I’m itching for the fifth.

Some sites require family friendly books, or no erotica. Most of the sites I chose accept erotica because I’m now keeping a list for later reference. Just a list, not the links themselves. For my next free day I will search each one, which will take me to a new page, in case they move it.

Some sites require you to sign up for free account. For the most part I avoid these. For starters, I never remember the log in and I’ve never heard of these sites.

Many require you sign up for their author newsletters and/or the newsletters sending out the free books. So look at it this way: a site says they have 40,000 readers of their email. They also have a lot of different authors who have advertised on their site. How many of those 40,000 are actually readers, and how many are just authors who are sitting on the newsletter and not paying attention to the emails?

In order to tell if you’ve been advertised, though, you have to sign up for the email and check the days that you requested. The last time I did this, the sites I applied to all sent me an email saying, “Your book will be promoted the days you requested” except it wasn’t. If it’s not guaranteed promotion, just say so! Most sites do.

Don’t tell me you’re going to do something, then don’t.

There are ever a very few that don’t tell you anything at all. They want you to submit an inquiry for more information. I take that as I do jewelry that has no price. Either I can’t afford it, or the seller is snooty and thinks I can’t afford it, either way they aren’t getting my money. I prefer to give my money to those who are transparent and up front about everything.

One site kind of threatened you with the possibility of being drawn for reviews, and that those reviews may not be kind, if you don’t do the paid option. That was a little odd, I’m not certain if I should take that as they will find everything wrong with your book, or if it was just friendly advice. I’m hoping it’s friendly advice…

On Paying Attention

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

When you publish through KDP, your books default in the list to the most recently changed at the top. You can change that, but I don’t know if it sticks between visits. I’ve never played with that, as the most recently modified is usually what I’m looking for.

Two days ago, Contract Broken appeared at the top of the list. I foolishly thought it was in preparation for it being removed from KDP Select, but no. 

That was it being removed from KDP Select.

Shoot.

Me doing arts and crafts, and Contract Broken could have been through the Smashword’s vetting process by now. I’ve now got that on my list of things to do at work today (on my breaks) so there goes my fifteen minutes of wandering the Internet and just taking a freaking break from all the things.

If I had been paying attention, like I should have been doing, I would have actually investigated the change instead of making an assumption. Know what I’m constantly trying to get people at work to do? That. Exactly what I didn’t do for my own book.

I feel like a bloody moron!

Ugh.

Last night as I was trying to fall asleep, the next chapter for Death Mask started playing through my head. That’s great news, fantastic news.

How does chapter ten end, exactly, brain? You know, the one we’re currently writing?

Still haven’t heard from the betas. Super uncomfortable about that. I’ll just be curled in the corner, rocking back and forth and muttering to myself about how it’s not a completely terrible book, someone will like it.

Difficulty Focusing

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

 

I’m trying to focus for Contract Signed, but I’m outside of the plot I had written down so I’m kind of in my own marsh style area. Seven more chapters to go, I kind of have a gist of an idea of what and how. Because the what and how of before didn’t really change all too much.

On the vampire front, I’m on chapter six of Death Mask now and that’s going fairly well. Again, I’ve broken outside of my plot just a little bit. But this break was by mashing two chapters together because it worked better as one rather than separated.

What I should do, is when I get home start edits on At Death’s Door.

Or work on edits while at work on break and before my shift starts. I could do that too. Except I need to have laser focus for this edit and there are people who talk to me while I’m sitting there. I think they think I’m joking when I say I’m working?

I also have to take the time to set up the… I don’t have a clever name for it yet. The book where I’m going to put all my worlds in one place so that I stop whining about all the ideas I’m chasing and the possibility of losing them. This way I can add and snippets of plot to the book. When I’m done writing Wraith’s Rebellion and the new Contracted trilogy, I can just open the book, grab a page and off I go.

In theory.

I’ve been starting to think of what I’d do if I quite my day job, how would the writing run. Just sleeping until I wake up doesn’t do it for me, not if I want to be productive. So I was thinking if I can manage it, I’d have a seven am start, maybe earlier some days, with coffee. That’d give me a couple of hours to do some writing before a majority of people are even up.

Or stores open, because I’d still have to go out and buy groceries and stuff.

I’d probably work a set schedule, like Monday to Friday, seven to whenever I went to bed. I’d probably end up wheeling that back to like five and then taking the rest of the night “off” to pursue whatever projected I wanted to or to just play video games. Take weekends, holidays, and festival days off.

I know I sound like a crazy person. I know my first book just went up in September. I know that I don’t have a firm date for the next book to come out, or a real plan to get the others out at this moment. I know I’m writing every day instead of editing.

I also know I’m not marketing, but everyone wants 15+ reviews on Amazon, I don’t meet that requirement yet and I’m not going to pay for reviews. So I have to actually wait on that.

But at the end of the day, I am a planner. I want to plan for the eventuality of not working a day job so that when I get off the job, when I get home that first night, then the next morning? I can get up and I know what I’m going to do and I know how I’m going to do it. Without planning now, getting it thought out and the kinks figured out as much as I can, I’ll spend weeks, or even months caught in a bog of trying to figure it out as I go.

So I’m planning and thinking now. How can I do this, what is the best use of my time?

Oh gosh, I’d be able to eat meals at a table instead of at the computer as I typed one handed…

Updates

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

What have I been up to?

Well, Prototype in a month was a bust. I seem to be missing something to tell the story, even though I know how it all ends. That kind of sucks, but I’ll keep working on it and maybe do a re-write. That seems to work well for me recently.

I’ve almost written another book, At Death’s Door is part of a trilogy called Wraith’s Rebellion. All the writing is done on my phone. Isn’t that a nifty thing? More like crazy as could be, but I have long commutes and haven’t wanted to read anything. It doesn’t even feel like work because it’s doing a great job at distracting me from hours on a bus.

The Contracted trilogy is up for pre-order on Amazon, and I’ve reached out to the cover artist to do the wraps she had promised. Coming up with other options well, I know she’s very busy and might not have the time to put them together.

I’m considering getting Indesign as I’ve heard you can do the ebook formatting on there and have Amazon accept the fonts. I’ll believe it when I see it, but it’s kind of expensive. Its subscription based and would cost me the same to hire out for the work, and that’s a problem. So I’ll keep looking around.

My laptop was failing to the point where it couldn’t work with some web pages, WordPress included. It works on my phone, but I’ve been writing At Death’s Door on there. So that’s kind of why I’ve been absent.

I won’t accept large gifts from people. It’s never ended well for me even to accept gifts in general. Dorian knew that, and one day showed up with his brother’s old computer. He set it up before I arrived and absconded with my laptop. The act of it led to our first fight in months, because there were things on that laptop I needed.

Apparently, his brother upgraded to a full on gaming rig, and Dorian told his brother he’d recycle the old computer. His brother isn’t the sort to ask if Dorian recycled it or not.

So my computer issue was fixed, though the monitor is driving me batty. I may have to save up and buy a new one, but those are a great deal cheaper than getting the entire rig.

I’m thinking about working on an angel and demon story. Woooo scary.

Because it’s just not possible, and I should know better.

But then… I also said no vampires.

My list for October is simple. Finish Prototype, finish At Death’s Door, do the first edit for Masked Intentions, and get the final copies of Contract Broken and Contract Renewed up. Preferably, get the hard copies of the Contracted Trilogy settled so I can do a giveaway.

I am planning on resisting the urge to write. However, as I can now write on my phone, most bets are off.

I also have this nifty world building app, which I put At Death’s Door into before I started writing. It has helped immensely. I barely follow the plot I wrote up, but the few times I’ve gotten stuck, I’ve been able to refer to it. The chapters are broken up, and I’ve found it much easier to dart all over. No extra pulls or anything, all the chapters linked together and at my fingertips.

If there’s mention of Hitler or random insanity that’s inappropriate, that’s because I caught the person sitting beside me reading my screen. Most of them moved pretty quickly.

Except for the one woman, who is on the bus every day with me. The next day she also sat beside me.

People are weird.

Working and Working More

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

I had Tuesday off my day job and worked sixteen hours to get Contract Taken up on Amazon. I did a preorder in case anything went amiss … it did.

Now, I could have simply pulled the book and started again but I’m worried if I tried that, it’s never go up. So yes, I’m doing a preorder on my first book. This is not usually suggested. 

But at least the book will go up.

When Dorian found out what I had done, he scolded me.

About the long work day on my day off, not the preorder. 

I was up at 9am and didn’t get to bed until 2am. I did take probably 15mins every four hours to do chores, feed myself, and feed the cats. The last hour was spent trying to find a way to use fonts in a book on Amazon.

It looks so … unfinished without them. Unpolished, like I just don’t care. I’ve seen others use them, but I just can’t seem to figure it out myself.

Using a free epub converter (I discovered this morning) does the same thing! 

When I told Dorian that he scolded me again! 

Because I told him I wasn’t going back to work until next week. I will start writing today (get between me and writing, and I’m likely to bite you. In his case, literally) but I swore I wouldn’t do anything else.

It’s a long weekend, meaning Dorian and I are both off. I get the feeling I’m going to be … er … tied up most of the weekend and at this point I’m not sure it’ll be in a naughty fashion. I’m in so much trouble, he couldn’t even bring himself to threaten to smack me.

Someone asked a valid question though, and she’s willing to do a review on the book, but can’t use Amazon. So I was just trying to do a fulfillment now rather than next week when I’m running around like a crazy person before heading on “vacation” to a wedding across the country.

I don’t know what to do about the font and formatting thing. I don’t want to have to pay someone to format for me. I should be able to do it myself, but no one wants to tell me how.

I have just over a month to figure it out.

Dear ‘Zon… Just no.

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

I spent fifteen hours yesterday working over Contract Taken until the editing was done. Only to realize the whole thing was corrupted and I had to basically start over. Then I got it all nicely done up and found out that Amazon strips basically all the formatting out.

I know it’s not because your Kindles are incapable of displaying fonts. I’m looking right at them on my kindle, to which I placed a .pdf. It looks fantastic. It looks like I spend hours working on it (let’s face it, I spent almost a year on this).

So I’m a little peeved. Just a little. Okay, maybe I threatened to light my office on fire, but I was at the end of a sixteen hour work day and it was two in the morning. My Google-fu was also failing me.

I know others have used fonts in their kindle books. Beth was all, “of course it works!” so I grabbed her first book and now she’s also threatening to light her office on fire.

So it is up for pre-order with no inside visible because I desperately want to sort out the fonts before I do that. When it comes time, every other retailer will have the awesome copy and Amazon will have the one that looks like it’s a text book on boring topics.

 

On Planning

Posted on by Aya DeAniege

My original plan was to set up preorders for the Contract trilogy three months apart. Of course, I’m being guided by Beth, who is a planner. She makes me research everything. Or… nearly everything. 

When it first came to the preorder she was completely on board with the idea. Three months would give me a ton of time to market and build a readership. 

But the other day she stumbled on a discussion between authors. One of them was in a situation similar to mine. A trilogy was at the ready and this person was debating between doing preorders or launching all three books at the same time.

The author was advised to launch the first immediately, then do a preorder for three weeks for the next, and three weeks for the one after. The idea is to drive readership. And this will help you start off strong. 

Except I’m not certain three weeks is enough. What if something comes up, what if I need to make an alteration to the second or third books? How is three weeks going to help me, as a new author, to build readership? 

I, of course, went to Beth with these questions. So she sat me down and we had a discussion of our own.

See, Beth views writing as a type of business. It is still a hobby for her, she is not making enough to live off of it, but she hopes to one day. 

The way you would treat a customer in retail is how you should treat your fans. Or, if you can, treat readers better than you would customers. Now, she works in retail so that imagery works very well for her, and I can see where she’s coming from.

Businesses who treat their customers well, do well. If you were going to buy a suit and the salesperson was rude, would you still buy the suit? Most cities have multiple fine clothing stores, you don’t have to be limited.

Most people would go to another store. The same is true for indie authors. You aren’t the only one writing stories like that.

Of course, I adore my readers so for me that part isn’t really a problem. 

The part that deflated my ego was the next bit: it takes five years to build a business and about a minute to destroy it.

Beth, when she first published, wasn’t even close to popular. After two years she’s finally seeing some traction, but has to take a break because she can’t afford editing costs at the moment. That means her… cloud? Is slowly going to get smaller unless she gets the next book written  and finds the money for editing. 

Being a new author, she told me, I need all the help I can get. That means that if three weeks will help me build my foundation, I need to swallow my pride and just do it.

It also would mean that I’d have two months or so before I was back where I am now. Growling about editing. In two months I could probably finish writing the Daughters of the Alphas trilogy. 

Or I could finish the first and finish its edits, putting it up for a three months and basically buying myself time to write and edit the second, then do the same to get to the third. If I really focus I could work another writing project in the background. 

Because I’m keeping up a free story somewhere, so it’s not entirely impossible. If I could get the freaking tablet cord, I could write at work and edit at home. Which is what I was doing before. 

On the Contract Renewed front, I discovered why I only had four chapters left when I swore I had five chapters worth of stuff. That was because in the first draft, I somehow created two Chapter Fourteens. 

Go me. I can’t believe I missed that in the first two reads. Checking that the chapters read appropriately is one of the first things I do before I start editing.

So now I have twenty-one chapters with the possibility of rewriting the introduction to be more of an introduction instead of just a short chapter. I can take the old introduction and probably mire it into Chapter One, I think.

Before I left the house today, I went through Chapter Seventeen (I think) and started Eighteen before I got listless. Had to get ready for work. It’s still possible that I’ll finish Eighteen tonight.

Who knows, with tomorrow off and only three chapters left, I could finish with Contract Renewed tomorrow.