Writing: July 17, 2015, Friday

9:14 am

I’m a little late getting started, slept badly, went to sleep late even after trying not to, and breakfast took about 35 minutes.

I want to finish my short story today, start the next, and get some words done on my novels. Getting started as soon I can get myself into the short story. I’ll be shutting off WIFI.

11:46 am

I seem to be writing much more slowly today than yesterday. I’m am getting closer to the end finally. I did succeed in fitting in a section I thought I might have to delete. Now I just need a certain scene changed up a bit, and the final scene. I think that will wrap it up, a couple thousand words longer than I meant it to be, but I’ll be done, so yay! Again today I’m not ready for my break yet, so I think I’ll write until 1 instead of 12.

12:37 pm

Somehow I’ve wasted 50 minutes of writing time, not even sure how. I think it was because I slipped a look at my Kindle when I took a quick break. Big mistake during writing time. I have a plan to read in the mornings from 7 to 9, but I should think about coming up with a way to leave my Kindle upstairs until after 4. If I don’t have my Kindle down here, I just read on my phone instead though so there doesn’t seem to be a lot of point to that. Maybe I should try the no forums/blogs/reports until 4 again. It just felt so … uncomfortable. But weak willpower will happen again, even though I feel right now like I could just stick to not visiting those sites during writing time. Okay, anyway, back to work. I want to write 3000 words today and have a normal lunch at 1 pm and watch an episode of NCIS or something while I do it.

12:55 pm

Forget it. I’m stopping for lunch now. I’m just too tired. I need a rest and a mental readjustment before I get started again. Besides, my laptop needs to charge.

1:16 pm

Okay, never mind that. I wrote a bit more and the scene issues are being worked out. Going to lunch now and will be back to work by 2:16 sharp.

5:43 pm

I didn’t restart at 2:16. I felt like I needed a nap and the computer wasn’t charged yet so I took one. Then I did that post on this site about the new pen name. Then my daughter came home and I spent time talking to her.

Since I do want to reach 3000 again, I’m going to put in some extra writing time so I can. I’m only at 888 for the day and I’m really not satisfied with that.

Now I’m getting back to work. I can break through to a new level of daily word counts if I just keep trying and today’s 3000 word goal is part of that effort.

11:06 pm

I really just seemed to run out of time this evening with obligations of one kind and another. I wrote 1,459 words total, but I also deleted 651, so I ended up with only 808 on my daily log, which is significantly short of where I wanted to end up. The 1,459 was half way there, though, and the 651 I deleted was a scene meant for late in the story that I wrote very early on, and it just didn’t work with the story as it developed and approached the end. Tomorrow I will finish this story and move on to the next.

I’d like to be asleep by 11:30 so I can be fresh for tomorrow’s writing, so I’m calling it done. I’m feeling a bit dissatisfied with the day I had today, but all I can do is try harder tomorrow not to let it happen again.

How I’m building my new pen name: Two weeks in

Here I’m going to lay out my plan for building my second pen name without doing any kind of active promotion. Active promotion generally means most of the kinds of promotional activities you’ve heard of.

This post is the first I’m going to do for the new pen name. It’s part of my plan to build an empire, so that’s where these posts will go. (Yay! I’ve finally figured out something to put in that category.)

The truth is, I feel like a beginner still, but I’ve been publishing my books since July 2012, three years now. I’ve been a writer since I was a young teenager—a very young teenager. Maybe it’s impostor syndrome or just that I know there’s so much I don’t know (that I might never know) about this business, but it’s hard for me to talk to other writers without feeling like the one standing on the outside of success and looking in.

This post is an exercise in getting past all that.

I’ve learned a few things in the last three years and accomplished a lot, and I think I can make a success out of this new pen name even though it’s getting off to a slow start.

So here goes. I’m not planning to give away my new pen name for this experiment. Seriously. If you figure it out, please do not tell me you’ve figured it out. If I didn’t want to be anonymous, I would have chosen to reveal my pen name(s) right from the get go. I would never out you and I would appreciate it if you didn’t out me. ;)

Thank you in advance for being understanding about that! :D

I first published the new book a few days into July. I published at $3.99 because I had heard from a lot of other authors that that was the best price at the moment, and because experimenting with different prices was the entire reason I wanted to do a new pen name. I looked into the market and saw that this was a popular price point in the genre the new book fits into. I’m not used to pricing this low. It felt really weird.

I sold 8 copies at 3.99 in 3 days, then 0 copies for 2 days. I posted the book on my author site, but since there’s never been any activity there because, hey, no books, I don’t consider my pen name to have any kind of a platform. No twitter, no facebook, no G+ profile. I plan to keep it that way for as long as possible. I have a website for the pen name and a mailing list that readers can sign up to. That’s it.

After the 2 days of no sales, I raised the price up to 6.99. I mean, if I’m not going to get lucky with an unexpected hit right off and sales are going to be slow until the second book is done, then I might as well, right? When I use the countdown deal before my 90 days in KDP Select is over, at least the discount will look better.

I sold 3 books at 6.99 in the next 3 days and then back to 0.

At about the one week mark, I put the book into KDP Select and moved on.

It’s a 328 page book as far as KENPC goes, and there’ve been 3006 pages read as of today.

So somebody’s reading it.

Now the wait is on until I get a second book written and published.

I’ll post first month results when they’re available, but the fact is, I don’t expect much. New pen name, no promo, high price, etc. There’s just no real chance that anything of note will happen until the next book comes out.

My goal is to put out the next book in the series for the new pen name within 90 days. I’d go for 60, but a lot of stuff is going to have to fall into place to make that happen, including me cracking through to a higher level of daily word count. I’m working on it, but I’m certainly not ready to count on it. :)