Writing & Not Writing

William Tecumseh Sherman

The next couple of days are all about MA homework (I'm taking two courses this trimester: the Civil War and the 20th century). I've decided I'll be writing my final research paper--due in August, but the proposal was due last Sunday and I'm turning it in late--for my Civil War class on technology in Sherman's March. Which should actually be pretty interesting. I'm not a big Civil War buff--I tend to be much more interested in 20th century stuff. But so far I really like my professor for the Civil War course, so that helps, and I have been interested in the way technology evolved in the Civil War for some time now. It started with muskets and ended with repeating rifles and to a small extent, Gatling guns, you know. It's like it went from the Mexican-American War to World War I in the span of four years.

I'm less enthused about my 20th century course than I anticipated, though. It's super heavily weighted toward political history, which, on the whole, I find to be a big snooze. And we're barely going to talk about WWII or Vietnam, both of which I really want to learn more about. So I may tack on a couple of courses to my MA. I only have two required courses left after these: constitutional history (ick) and media and cultural history (or something to that effect--interesting, but kind of what I've been into for years, so probably not terribly enlightening--we'll see). I checked out the graduate certificate in WWII studies, and it looks fascinating, but it's 18 units and I don't know if I can really justify that expense. I'd stay a student forever if I could, though.

I haven't been working on the WiP at all these last couple of weeks. My sleep schedule has been messy--the baby started waking up two to three time a night for a while there, and still does every so often, etc. etc. So fatigue is part of it. His erratic nap schedule is also part of it. The excitement over constructing a garden is a part, and so is just plain falling out of the habit. But school is out for summer tomorrow which means after tomorrow, my husband will be around a lot more. That means sleeping in, and maybe being able to get away for a few hours at a time a few times a week to really get some writing done. Fingers crossed.

Ack... be back soon...

Just a quick note to say, I will me MIA for the next few days (and have been already for the last few, in case you hadn't noticed). It's the end of my quarter with my MA program and that means paper-writing time. Which makes me feel like this:

...because there's no time for novel-writing, and with the baby, every minute he's napping I have to be working on the papers, and it's very stressful. In fact, I should be doing that now, so bye.

Weekly Update on Sales (or lack thereof)

This week, I sold two books, and that was on Sunday. Since then, crickets have been chirping.

I have given this some thought, and here's my theory as to why.

1. I reformatted two of the books at the beginning of the week, and sent out a lot of tweets about that. So I figure, I probably lost some customers because they were concerned about my formatting, even though the point of the tweets was to let people know that an existing problem was fixed, and that I'd comp a new copy to anyone who had an old, flawed version.
2. I raised my prices on two books: the two full-length novels. They went from $0.99 to $2.99. Although Amazon is still discounting one of them to $0.99, at least last time I checked. I did this after doing some research on prices, and I think it's the right choice. And I expected sales to slow a little but then recover. At this point, sales are beyond slow and show no signs of recovering, so we'll see. Also, the price change doesn't explain the halt in sales of "Veronica in Paris," which remains at $0.99.
3. It's possible the pre-programmed tweets I sent out were in some way unappealing. I've been puzzling over this. I know a little bit about sales, and what little I know I've been applying to the tweets. For one thing, don't ask a rhetorical question, because a person's internal response may be "I don't care." As in, "Will Veronica find out who the murder is in time to save her friend?" My own response to such tag lines is often "Who cares?" so I don't want to make that mistake. And then if you do ask a question, make it one people will say yes to. So I had a couple of tweets going out with a question at the beginning, "Got a Kindle?" figuring some people would say yes. The next thing I asked was, "Like stories about ghosts, psychics, and strong women?" figuring that after the first yes they'd be more inclined to say yes again and click the associated link. However, that seems not to be the case. So I want to go back to my drawing board and figure out a different formula for my book tweets. I had a couple of others going out with just a summary tag, like "Veronica must accept her psychic ability or someone she loves will be the next to die." Those were generally more successful, if you believe my sales of the first two weeks were in any way correlated to them, and I think they were. But they didn't work this week. So maybe people got bored of them.
4. It's possible that I've reached all the potential buyers I can within the first two weeks, among the population of followers I had on Twitter and Facebook. I've gotten new ones, but I have decided to wait at least a few days before putting out any more advertising. I figure if my tweets were in any way annoying, I'd better give people a break before starting up again.

Anyway, so this has been discouraging, but of course I'm not giving up. I'm focusing on the fact that 24 people have bought the books and presumably are reading and enjoying them. That's pretty cool. Also, on other blogs chronicling eBook sales, it seems typical to have bad weeks. I've got all three books out to reviewers, so I'm hoping those reviews will be good, and that once they are posted on Amazon and the rest, I'll see a return to regular sales. I've been getting mixed messages about the value of tagging, and in any case I can't seem to convince anyone to tag my books, so I'm not going to obsess about that. I may join the Independent Author Network, but they do charge a fee ($19.95), so I'm not sure yet. I probably will.

If you have any ideas for me about marketing, please let me know! Have you had to deal with any writing setbacks this week?