Category: Learning curve

Not being interested in the feedback of critics is almost a necessity for long-term mental health when it comes to putting out books. I’m very lucky I’m already in a place where I can set aside the comments of others about my work. I’m a perfectionist who’s learned that it’s okay to suck. Sure, it’s embarrassing when I mess up, but at least I try. Brené Brown’s insights are worth a listen if you have the time to watch a 22 minute video at YouTube.

I’m currently writing in 1.5 hour blocks. The plan is 3 a day, starting at 7, 9, and 11. In actuality, that’s not what’s happening. I started today’s at 9, and I’ll be starting the next two at 11 and 2.

I’m more concerned with word counts than time, but I’m using this to help me gauge where I should be as the morning (or day) progresses. So far, my word counts per hour are worse than ever, but I’m not going to jump to conclusions since I’m working on that novella and my speed could very well be because of the project I’m working on.

At least the novella is moving along. It’s more like a short novel at this point, at a hair under 35,000 words and no end in sight. I’d say it’ll reach novel status before it’s over. Ah well. Can’t win them all. :)

But it’s time to get back to work now, so see ya!

Oh no! I’m thinking this morning. :D

I saw a post on The Passive Voice blog today when I should’ve been writing this morning.

The excerpted post quotes Craig Nybo as saying “always sell it — never give it away” about self-published books because “if you give it away, it cheapens the self-publishing scene.”

I have no idea if it does or not. I don’t give my books away because I’m not sure they’ll generate enough sales to make it worth it (I write in a very small niche with what appears to be a very finite customer base) and I’m in the situation where I need all the money I’m bringing in so I don’t have room to experiment with that. I think someday I will just because I want to see if it makes a difference, but at the moment I have people to feed and a house to pay for and kids who’ll be in college in less than 600 days. Agh!

However, it was one of the comments that made thoughts pop into my head this early in the morning, and here I am responding to it.

“Free samples are a good thing.” (Jim Self — note to Jim, if you ever see this, please, for the love of whatever you love, put links to your books on your website. I found a cute sample/excerpt for a story and tried to find a way to click through to Amazon but found no links to your books anywhere on your site. By the time I was done, I was so annoyed that I said f*ck it and closed the window without bothering. I’m just not going to go to Amazon and manually type in a search for a book when I’m annoyed. I’m very sorry.)

But what is a free sample?

Wouldn’t a free sample be like trying a bite of a pie (Kindle sample), then going on to buy the full pie (the whole book) versus eating the whole pie (free book) and going on to buy all the other pies by the same pie maker (the backlist).

Now, series books, if the series is tightly connected, would probably still qualify as a sample as far as I’m concerned, because a series book isn’t going to satisfy you the way a standalone book will. I mean, when I read a really great series book, I’m often left with questions I want answered, such as “Is Mary’s friend Jane going to find love with that asshole Bill?”

But for a freebie that’s not closely tied to any other books, I don’t know. I just can’t see them as samples. They’re not samples. They’re complete products that satisfy the consumer’s need, and how does that benefit an author?

I know, I know… You’re going to tell me that the reader will be so taken with the author’s writing style that they’ll run out and buy the backlist.

But if I want a coconut pie, getting one for free doesn’t really make me want all the other pies. It satisfies my desire for the specific pie I wanted, without me having to outlay any money. :) It’s a great deal for me, but really not so great for the pie maker.

So maybe a lot of people are giving away the pie thinking they’re creating a repeat customer, when in reality, that customer left fully satisfied and won’t be back until there’s another coconut pie.

I kind of want to go find a coconut pie now. ;)

Dean Wesley Smith had a section in his latest blog post about (not) celebrating writing achievements such as finishing a book and I started to post a response, but I remembered my post about content on other people’s sites and I cut the response before I posted and pasted it here instead. :D I almost forgot about that little decision… and yeah I know, I’m really not surprised. I forget lots of things five minutes after I decide them.

I didn’t really see what the big deal was with celebrating until…

“You are telling your brain it is better to not be writing, to be finished, than to be writing.”

At which point my brain gave the inside of my skull a little kick and said “Ah! It’s a trap!”

And maybe it’s a trap I’ve fallen into more than once. I think I’ll skip the “oh how great it is to be done” talk when I finish this time. Maybe I’ll just say “yay! I get to start another book today” instead.

I’ve discovered over the years that self-talk is powerful stuff, and I wouldn’t put it past my brain to think that my excitement in finishing a project means that finishing, reaching the end, being done, is the reward for writing. And if that’s the reward, what does it making continued writing? Yeah. Punishment. Something incomplete. Something to be avoided.

I sure don’t want to internalize that attitude! (Although it’s possible it’s too late and now I’m just going to have to work on excising that attitude.) But I love it when I have these little sparks of realization. I just wish I could remember them all when I need to. ;)

Must stop reading forums…

Especially forums that are inhospitable to writers (after quite happily benefiting from all the content many of those writers have put up on the forum over the years). Unfortunately, I have limited self-control (none) and train wrecks are riveting. Besides which, I so want to post an “I’m leaving and never coming back” post but I’d probably be lying. The truth is I’m a passive conflict junkie, because I’m mostly a lurker who doesn’t post on these kinds of threads and I certainly don’t post “I’m leaving and never coming back” posts. :)

The last forum I left, I just decided it was time to go, changed my username, deleted the posts that were a bit more personal in nature, and then deleted my account. It’s better that way, easier, more permanent. I can’t waffle on the decision. Just, poof. I’m gone. :D

Maybe it’s time I did something similar here. I really don’t want to support a site that takes advantage of writers like that, knowing how hard it would be for most people to delete all the content they’d put on the site over the years and taking away the few benefits participation on the forum provides them. It just reinforces the idea that a person should keep most of their writings somewhere within their direct control, not hosted on a forum or blog that someone else owns.

Yep. I do believe it’s time to do some injudicious deleting. In the future, if I feel compelled to comment on something at one of these places, I’ll just quote it here and post my thoughts. :)

Now, how’m I going to do this without it being just another way to procrastinate?

Quickly, I hope! :D

Update—

Holy crap. Two and a half hours later I have finished deleting every post I ever wrote on that particular forum (just over 500 that hadn’t been deleted already—I seriously doubt it was more than 600 ever, but yikes, that was a lot of deleting). I felt a bit like I had OCD while I was doing it. I … just … couldn’t … stop, until everything was gone.

Yay?

Now, time for fresh tea and writing!

I’ve just been doing some analysis on that spreadsheet I’ve been putting together. I’ve managed to combine all the Amazon spreadsheets for the period from July 2012 to August 2014. I really wish I knew how to record macros that worked because I know there’s an easier way, but since I didn’t want to take the time to learn how to do it, I just plowed through copy and pasting all that data into one big sheet.

I still need to add Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, Createspace, and all the others, but since the vast majority of my sales come from Amazon, I wanted to run some preliminary analysis because I don’t plan to use any more time tonight adding the other data. I’ll do it another day.

Until I had the data split out by title, I had no idea how much money I’ve been passing up by rotating between my series so equally.

It’s actually kind of ridiculous. I can no longer justify taking so much time between the release of books in my best selling series to make time for books and stories in all my other series. I knew it, but I didn’t know it in a way I couldn’t deny. Now there’s no denying. Ouch.

Still, it shouldn’t be a hardship to spend more time on one series than another, since I love all my books. :D And it might make the next few months really interesting when it comes to income growth. I’d certainly like to see that!

I’m ready to try something different. Starting tomorrow morning, I’m setting myself the goal of finishing my regular writing (about 2,000 words) each day by lunch time.

In fact, I’d like to reach and maintain a 2,000 words a day average starting this month.

For more than two years now, I’ve found it almost impossible for me to get more than a couple of hours of concentrated writing time in each day. I’m prepared to accept that limit for now. In all honestly, if I can reach and maintain a 2,000 words a day average, I’m going to be ecstatic!

A lunch time deadline for my writing is hopefully going to push me to get busy writing sooner in the mornings and keep busy. In an effort to make this real, I’m not going to let myself write after lunch for the first few weeks unless I’ve met my minimum goal by lunch. In that case, if I want to try to hit a higher word count for any particular day, I’m free to try.

Otherwise, if I don’t get something written by lunch, I don’t get to write. And that includes the 50 word minimum I need to keep my daily streak alive.

This could be a disaster, or it could be my most productive month since February 2013 when I averaged 1,836 words per day and ended the month with 51,396 words.

I’m going to try to avoid the disaster outcome, because I have books I need to be writing this month!

What I hope to get out of this besides the increased daily word count is more reading time, time for some extra physical activity (writing is not an active pursuit and I can certainly use a bit more physical activity in my days!), and earlier bed times so I can get my other experiment off the ground (getting up early every day).

I just found that I’ve sold seven copies of a $19.99 book through the expanded distribution at Createspace and five copies of two $17.99 books this month. I don’t sell a lot of paperbacks in general, and I’m sure my pricing doesn’t help that, but I like expanded distribution, and because of that, I won’t under price my books.

If I had it to do over again, I would have chosen to size my books at 5.5 x 8.5 instead of 5 x 8 so I could cut the price a bit and keep my profit, but I didn’t, and I don’t intend to redo my entire catalog’s paperback formatting any time soon so I’m stuck for the time being.

When I start a new series, though, I will definitely be going for the slightly larger books. It cuts down on pages and makes the books cost less to produce. (I refuse to cut my font size, leading, or margins, which would also cut the number of pages, but that’s a sacrifice I won’t make.)

I chose the smaller size because my first books were quite short. But then I got stuck in that size, because I don’t want different books in the same series to be different sizes. It just doesn’t seem as professional to me to change that mid-series. Of course, maybe it’s silly to worry about that, but I do. I want my books to be pretty! ;)

So here’s my advice for anyone trying to decide on paperback book sizes.

Page count matters. Createspace creates trade sized paperbacks. Don’t try to pretend they’re mass market and go for the smallest size you can, because you’ll still have to charge trade prices and the book will look less valuable as a small book. And if you have a long book, that small book is going to be much too fat to be any more comfortable to hold than a larger book.

But… if your book is short, a small book will help pad the pages. ;) But again… if you do the font right and use an attractive leading and attractive but generous margins, you can accomplish the same thing and have a very professional looking book.

No one likes itty bitty fonts in a print book. Just don’t do it, no matter how tempted you are or how much you swear you like itty bitty fonts best. It’ll make your book shorter, but if you need a shorter book, chose a bigger book.

But the publishers use little bitty fonts, you say. So what? Aren’t there enough people complaining about how publishers have made fonts too small to cut their costs? Why would you want to emulate that?

I’m actually in the middle of formatting my last book for Createspace and yes, I’m stuck formatting it for an 5 x 8 sized book. But hey! I have a very practical reason to keep my books from turning into doorstoppers. :D

I’m a bit frustrated with the 15 minute sessions, because although I should be able to make them work, they’re not working. Could be the part I’m writing in my book, or just the usual I can’t quite hold my attention on my writing for the required length of time thing.

I’m willing to bet hot chocolate on the latter, and popsicles on the former. :D

Whatever the cause, the outcome is the same. Few words, and not enough progress.

So, it’s back to the 5 minute sessions for the rest of the book and maybe a trial run with the 15 minute sessions when I’m back at work on one of my other books.

I might update later with a comparison of my output with the two session lengths.

UPDATE:

I can’t really tell a difference in speed, although there is a difference in output between the two days I switched. I averaged 677 wph the day I used 15 minute sessions and 816 the day I used 5 minute sessions, which seems like a difference, but when I look several days back, I have slow days using the 5 minute sessions too, where my speed is anywhere from 300 to 600 wph. The biggest difference is that I wrote for a longer period of time with the 5 minute sessions and definitely ended with a better word count for the day. But truly, I don’t know if that’s because of session length or some other reason, because I’m on a deadline and I’m feeling the pressure to spend more time writing.

What I do know is that my ideal work day would be to sit and write because it’s just something I do each morning until I hit my word count and not have to track these metrics. If I could be confident I could sit down and write my word count every day in a reasonable amount of time, I really wouldn’t care what my words per hour and my daily average amounted to.

(Rare days off would be okay, but they tend to balloon into more off days than on if I don’t monitor like a hawk. Even after 87-ish days of writing every day, I still have that moment where I think, Oh crap. Did I write yesterday? I noticed it most when I was working on publishing my last book, but when my attention’s on something, I can become single-minded to the nth degree.)

I could easily set production goals based around daily word count goals and ignore time altogether, with the basic assumption that this or that word count goal is reasonable for me.

Ah well. I’ll figure something out. :o I don’t give up easily when I really want something and that’s the kind of writers’ life I want.

Well, I have to say this book started out with a lot more promise. :D At the moment, I’m feeling iffy about the through-plot—not sure I have one—and I’m also very worried about what the five minute sessions are going to do to my writing as a whole.

I’ve done several experiments lately where I’ve tried setting the timer for longer periods of time (forty minutes and fifty minutes specifically, because they match the amount of time I usually end up with when I do the five minute sessions for an hour) but I can’t reach the same speeds, not even close. The best I’ve done was 477 words in fifty minutes. That’s about half the speed I often reach when I’m writing in the five minute sessions.

I think it comes down to focus and how I’m able to stay better focused with a five minute timer versus a longer timer. I just can’t seem to hold my attention to one specific task for much longer than the five minutes. And if that isn’t the reason, then I’m stumped. I have no idea what else could make such a difference.

This all matters because I haven’t had a chance to just sit down and read what I’ve written lately and I have no idea how the pacing of this book is going. My scenes have shortened. I didn’t mean for that to happen, and it might not be a difference in my writing but a difference in this specific story, so I’m not going to judge that just yet. Still worrying about it though.

I need a title for this book; I need to figure out where I’m going; and I need to figure out if there’s a decent story here.

Yikes!

One thing I’ve absolutely learned with all this is that even five minutes is more than enough time to sit down and write something.

Whether or not that something is any good is yet to be determined. :D

So I’m staring at a passage in one of my books that I need to get right so I can figure out where the hell to go next with this thing and I’ve just realized that I’ve spent about 3 hours on it.

It’s a passage of only about 1,600 words and I’ve cycled through it, rewriting, more times than I want to think about.

I keep reworking it, mainly I think to give myself a jumping off spot for what happens next, but I still don’t know what that might be.

I’m now trying to decide if anything I’ve done has made any difference whatsoever to the passage, but I can’t tell. There’s a part of me that’s very afraid I’ve screwed this up. But there’s a part of me that knew last night that I needed to soften one of my characters and the only other choice was to scrap what I had and just rewrite the scene from scratch.

Which is exactly what I should have done, and I don’t know why I keep forgetting that. Rewriting is time consuming and rarely does more than make me crazy. The story needs to be written fresh, not pieced together from scraps already on the page. And yet that’s exactly what I’ve just done. And I can tell you now, those 3 hours of writing would have gotten me at least the 1,600 words I have now, so chopping the 1,600 wouldn’t have been a big deal in the end. In fact, I would probably have more done now than I have if I’d just chopped the passage and started fresh.

I need to remember this. I NEED TO REMEMBER THIS.

Maybe that’ll help. ;)

So, my planning for a higher daily word count post is a good idea. Only problem? I’ve had a few thoughts since then—I mean, that was like, what, six whole days ago? ;)

It’s a good plan, to be honest. I’ve just made a few tweaks and I thought I’m bring it up here again to help solidify the plan in my head before the week starts over tomorrow.

I’m behind my August goal, which is simply to maintain a 3,000 word a day average for the month. I haven’t made it to 3k words once since the 1st. Bummer, that. But that’s also part of the change, so let me just get to the re-planned plan here.

Instead of a goal of 3,000 a day, I’ve revised my goal to 2,464 words per day until the end of the year, which is the word count I actually need to average daily to write the books I’d like to write before December 31.

What was the point in pushing for a word count higher than what I really need? I decided there wasn’t one.

On the other hand, I would actually like to try to get ahead this month by averaging slightly higher than that minimum, but I decided there was no point forcing myself to do more than I have to on the days when writing isn’t going so well. Why add stress for no real reason?

I’m still going to stick to trying to get in four blocks of 725 words each and use the 5 minute sessions to do it. That should give me some leeway to reach slightly higher word counts this month, or at least allow for some slow sessions without it meaning I have to squeeze in more sessions.

Now, I’ve got to get to writing today, because so far, I’ve been doing everything I can NOT to write. :D Just one of those days where nothing is good enough and everything is a distraction!