All-Purpose Writing Thread!

Congratulations Miramon! Please post when it goes live.

Itā€™s not like self-publishing is new. Blake self-published his stuff, and so did Whitman with Leaves of Grass.

I donā€™t see one way being inherently better than the other, since ultimately itā€™s the work itself that speaks to readers.

This is the beautiful ideal, at least. Traditional publishing has a leg up as far as resources and marketing goesā€”easier to get your work in front of more readers when itā€™s on bookstore shelves across the country. (Although the easy counter-argument goes like this: ā€œThe filtering process built into getting traditionally published serves the same paring-down ends as does the difficulty of building a customer base as a self-publisher.ā€)

tylertoo, I went and bought an e-copy of your book in anticipation of my flight today. Looking forward to getting into it.

It would be interesting to see sales figures from bookstores. I almost never visit them anymore. Amazon has a better selection, often better pricing, and is so much easier. So if online stores like Amazon are the future, it will be interesting to see what advantages the traditional publishers will have. My guess is they will pay for visibility on Amazon and other sites. I think they already do to some extent.

I donā€™t see bookstores vanishing, but I wouldnā€™t be surprised to see more close and see more space in the remaining bookstores devoted to non-book items.

Mark, I bookmarked an article about that very thing on my laptop. Iā€™ll link it for you later.

Thanks, and I hope you enjoy it.

Iā€™m seventy pages in and hooked. :-D

Funny, but later today I saw an article about B&N opening four pilot bookstores that have a built-in restaurant that will serve wine and beer. They are trying to figure out something that works.

About their only hope at this point is to open up in-store shooting ranges.

I see how it might seem as though I was trying to be cute, but I did actually read an interesting article on the consequences of a Barnes and Noble demise. It made the point that the end of big-box bookstores would be bad for the traditional publishing modelā€”the large majority of print edition pre-purchases come from B&N, which orders into the five figures for expected bestsellers. That few hundred grand leads to launch parties, big advances, book tours, and the like.

The article explains it better, but neither I nor the friend I sent it to on Wednesday can find it now.

Iā€™m going to do Camp NaNoWriMo that starts in July. The camp version allows you to create a cabin, which sounds creepy but is really just a mini-forum in which you can post about your progress, or lack thereof, and support one another, and share a virtual pint of ale.

Let me know here or by PM if you want in.

If youā€™re not familiar with NaNoWriMo, youā€™re committing to writing 50K words in a month, in this case, July. Which starts Friday.

Iā€™ll be cross-posting this at Broken Forum in order to garner more cabin-mates.

uh, shouldnā€™t that be NaJuWriMo?

Good luck!

Heheh. But the No in NaNoWriMo is for novel, not November.

Lol, that makes sense. I had no idea the No was for novel!

Having never done CaNaNoWriMo before (Iā€™ll just assume Iā€™ve semi-acronymized that properly), I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter. And by that, I mean join your ā€œcabin.ā€ That sounds a little kinky!

Iā€™m TheWordspinner on NaNo, and Iā€™m fiddling w/ my profile and ā€œcabin preferencesā€ as we speak!

Great, thanks Armando. Invite sent!

Any other takers? Its a good way to get a jump start on that new novel!

Sales of my novel have dropped to basically zero, so I scheduled a special promo: I dropped the price of the ebook from $4.99 to 99 cents for three days this week, timed to coincide with the MLB All-Star game (it is a baseball-themed book). I scheduled a series of Facebook ads, with the ā€Ŗ#ā€Žallstargameā€¬ hashtag and targeted a fans of baseball and steampunk.

The result: two new sales. Period. Sigh.

But today I went back to the forum for Out of the Park Baseball, where Iā€™d earlier started a thread to tout my book. I found that last week someone had posted that heā€™d purchased the book and was enjoying it. And he wrote this: ā€œThe chapter of the meeting on Leoran Lake was sensational. I exhaled too!ā€

Those simple sentences, that very specific bit of praise, made my day, and washed away my disappointment over the lousy sales. Iā€™d written at least one chapter that someone found sensational.

Yeah, itā€™s nice to see the positive comments. What youā€™re saying is very familiar. I deal with it by working on the next book or trying to figure out the next new thing about publishing.

The next hurdle for you will be the dreaded 1 star review. The bastards, lol. Everyone gets 'em. Youā€™ll get past it.

Have any of you guys messed with Bookbub at all?

Itā€™s so expensive! Have you gotten good results? Have you gone for international? What category did you use? If you did go for international, did you get a return to justify the extra expense? Iā€™m assuming weā€™re all writing in English only.

I started a videogame blog.

Carry on!