Tag: book promotion

Coming Soon (Sorta) and Other Miscellany

Published by Crawford on June 2, 2024

ITEM! It’s official! Work has begun on the sequel to Fester. Granted, it’s not a lot of work, and there is no title as of yet. As I am a pantser when it comes to writing, I don’t even have a clear idea of exactly what’s going to happen. There are a number of things I can share of which I am fairly certain:

The timeline of the new story is set 20 years after Fester, which puts it around 2014.
Martin Prieboy is still Chief Constable of Fester, but is struggling with the recent loss of his spouse.
Billy Snyder is out of prison and living in a secluded house in the hills, where he spends his time plotting revenge.
Michael “Bolly” Bollinger has taken over his dad’s automotive repair shop and is a respected local businessman -but his business is in trouble.
The Schmidt family now teeters on the brink of destruction, their huge mansion looming over the town of Fester like something really, really symbolic.
Cynthia Hoegenbloeven is still running around somewhere with the remnants of the money she ran off with. Presumably she has now gotten some clothes.

There are other characters who we probably won’t see: the Plummer family moved out of town shortly after the events of Fester, and haven’t been heard from, ditto Janie Simpson. Roscoe Dirkschneider has died in prison, and Randall “Cowboy Bob” Warnke never recovered from his injuries sustained at the hands of the parishioners of Calvary Lutheran. Of course, the Top Hat families are still around, although most of the characters from Fester have gone to that Great Country Club in the Sky.

That’s what I’ve got for now. I’ll keep you posted as the story develops, although it usually takes me several years to actually write, edit and publish these books. You patience will be rewarded.

ITEM! In the course of marketing Laughingstock, I had the fortune to encounter a new book promo site called Shepherd. It’s a fascinating premise: authors are asked to list their five favorite books related to a theme of their choosing – which is presumably related to one of their own books. Then they write a short review of those books.

The theme I chose was “hilarious high weirdness,” which is a fairly regular theme in my writing. This allowed my literary eclecticism to really stretch – it was a great deal of fun! Here are the books I chose:

Wilt by Tom Sharpe
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
The Book of the SubGenius by the SubGenius Foundation
Noir by Christopher Moore
The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

My reviews can be found at THIS LINK. Give the page – and the whole site – a good going-over – it’s a lot of fun!

ITEM! There will be an eBook promo for Fester, starting this Wednesday, June 5, running through Sunday, June 9. For this time, the eBook version of Fester will be available for a measly $0.99. Of course, it’s still too early to promote the sequel (coming Summer 2027 if I really work at it), but I wanted to take another run at the Amazon Bestseller ranking as I did with Laughingstock. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that these promos are the best way to get people to read what I’ve written, and that investing heavily in advertising profits nobody but the advertising platform. We’ll see how it goes!

We’re (Almost) Number 1!

Published by Crawford on May 4, 2024

I almost called this post “We’re Number 2!” but decided that the wording was a little too ambiguous. I want to tell you of my adventures with a run at bestseller status.

Keep in mind that I’m referring to Amazon bestseller status. This is quite different from, say, New York Times bestseller status. To put it into an athletic context, getting your book on the NYT bestseller list is like winning a gold medal in the Olympics. Getting a book on the Amazon bestseller list is like beating a marginally athletic second-grader in a foot race. Sure, you might not make it, but it wouldn’t be that hard to achieve.

In retrospect, the second-grader gave me a run for the money.

The NYT has ten slots for fiction in its bestseller list, which is updated weekly. Amazon literally has thousands of slots – or categories – under which a book might be considered a bestseller, and these results are updated hourly. For Amazon Kindle, there are several thousand categories of fiction, and with updates 24 times a day, there are close to 100,000 opportunities to make a bestseller list every single day.

Of course, choosing a category is key to success here. One needs to choose a category that doesn’t have a lot of competition. However, the category also has to be relevant to the content of the book. If you list a book under a completely inappropriate category to boost your ranking, the Amazon Police will be banging on your door soon enough, or so it is said. However, I found an appropriate category (you get to choose three) called Humorous Dark Comedy that was a great fit for Laughingstock, and low-competition.

Back when Fester came out, I’d gotten my mitts on a document called the “Bestseller Launch Blueprint.” I was rushed at the time, and didn’t have the time or inclination to follow through on the instructions, which seemed a little hokey to me at the time.

After Fester was published, I spent a fair amount of time and effort attempting to promote the book, with not a lot to show for it. As Laughingstock was ramping up for publication. I had a little more time and a little more inclination to see what came of applying this formula.

The formula itself is pretty simple: wait a few weeks after publication, then drop the price of the eBook to $0.99 and advertise the hell out of it. There are a number of websites and services that have subscribers who are on the prod for cheap-as-free eBooks, and they will gallantly allow authors to pay to advertise their book specials. The 800-pound gorilla of these services is BookBub, which has a huge subscriber base and is definitely an important outlet for indie authors looking to get the word out about their books.

So I went all-in on BookBub and a number of other similar services, and scheduled an advertising blitz for two weeks after the book was published. I had followed all the steps in the Blueprint, and was ready to see what would happen.

Damned if it didn’t work! Sales shot up immediately, and it wasn’t long before Laughingstock had cracked the top ten in the Humorous Dark Comedy category. I was pretty chuffed when the book first landed at #7, although I was still several slots behind a book of Great Memes of 2023, by a “Mr. DANK DANK.”

In a day I had climbed even higher, and on the afternoon of the second day, I had reached #2 in the category. “Suck it, Mr. DANK DANK,” I told the wall. Surely, I would soon crack the number one spot and brag my ass off.

Then I took a look at the book occupying the #1 slot, and knew I was boned. The book was called Shorts, by Caimh McDonnell. A closer look showed that the book had been published on the same day I had launched my ad blitz. Further, a quick look at Goodreads indicated that Mr. McDonnell had upwards of thirty titles, each of which had thousands of 4- and 5-star ratings. There’s no way I could compete with a brand-new book from this author. The guy absolutely dominates the Humorous Dark fiction category for Kindle: of the top 50 books in that category, McDonnell’s books currently occupy 12 of those slots. (Mr. DANK DANK’s meme book is #50; Laughingstock is #129. DAMN YOU MR. DANK DANK!)

Well, it was a good run, and my takeaway is to check your competition’s publishing schedule before starting your launch This overall worked out well in that I sold more copies of Laughingstock in a week than I did for Fester in the three years since it was published! I will wait a month or two and try the same Formula with Fester to see if I can claim the top spot.

I think I can still claim bragging rights. I’ve a friend in publishing who considers making the Top 10 good enough to put “Amazon bestseller” on the resume. Plus, I had this little recognition of being the #1 New Release in Comedy. For about an hour, true – but I’ll take it! It’s a dog-eat-dog world in indie publishing, and you have to grab whatever accolades you can.

Laughingstock — Help me make another run at #1 – buy a copy today!

Countdown to Publication

Published by Crawford on March 24, 2024

Counting down now – just seven days until the release of Laughingstock. For once, I’m not spending the weekend re-reading a hard-copy proof, so I thought I’d give a quick update/preview.

For the last four weeks, I’d been following pretty much the same routine: receive a copy of the proof from KDP on Friday, spend Friday night, all of Saturday and Sunday morning reviewing the MS for issues, and entering the changes on Sunday afternoon. This would allow just enough time to order a new proof in time for it to arrive the following Friday.

Most of the changes were for clarity: avoiding repeated words or finding more elegant ways of expressing ideas. However, I did (and continue to) find plenty of typos. This chafed my ass worse than snowpants with the seat cut out, since I paid both an editor and a proofreader to review the text. They both totally phoned it in, and I will not be working with either again. The kicker is that the editor I’d really wanted to work with originally contacted me several weeks ago to let me know that she was freelancing again. So it goes…

I’ve been trying to front-load my promotional efforts more than I have in the past. I’ve been trying to get some advance readers to generate early reviews. I’ve used the traditional method of pestering friends, family members and my not-particularly-extensive email list to read and review Advance Reader Copies (ARCs).

I’ve also been using a service called BookSirens. This is a service that provides ARCs to readers for free, with the notion that they will leave reviews for the books they have read. It’s free for the readers, and fairly reasonable for authors. Setup fee is $10, and for each reader who downloads a copy, the author is charged $2. So, for $20 you could end up getting 10 reviews. Compare that to sending out hard copies and badgering your friends and family to actually read it and provide a review. So, far, I’ve gotten three four-star or higher reviews. A pretty good deal, overall.

I’m also getting ready for an Amazon advertising blitz – provided I have any money left over after the tax bill is due. I’m brushing off the painfully-won knowledge of this incredibly complex advertising platform to boost sales as soon as it’s available. Which, by the way, it will be on

Sunday, March 31 – Laughingstock Release Date!

I’m also thinking about a promotional “launch” a few weeks after the official publication date. I’ll be running promos on BookBub at least, and maybe one or two other platforms. (PRO TIP: I’ll be dropping the price of the Laughingstock ebook to $0.99 for about a week starting ~April 15.)

I’m sure there will be other frantic, last-minute, chicken-with-its-head-cut-off activity in the next week as well. I’ll be sure to let you know all about it soon! In the meantime, I’ve still tried to keep producing words with my serial Dungeon & Dragon – be sure to check it out.

Time for Some Fall Cleaning

Published by Crawford on November 20, 2022

Fall came late to Portland, but when it finally appeared it hit like a ton of bricks. Cold, wet, windy bricks. After a summer of amazing authorial indolence, I’m finally get up off of my keister and getting some things squared away.

New Book Cover

First, I have a new cover for Fester. I was conflicted about replacing the original, as I really liked it. My good friend Ken Huey did a superlative job on the cover. He gave me exactly what I asked for. The problem was that I didn’t really know what I should be asking for.

Right out of the gate, it was attracting flak along the lines of “you’d better hope than no lawyers from Warner/DC see that cover.” Apparently some felt that one of the figures on the cover resembled a character owned by a litigious multimedia conglomerate.

I shrugged that off, but the real hassles began when I started advertising on Amazon. The Amazon Ads content moderators felt that the cover was “gory,” for reasons I couldn’t discern and they wouldn’t explain. So, I yanked the ads and saved my advertising pennies to pay pro cover designer Stuart Bache to come up with a new design. I’m pleased with the new cover, even though I’ll miss the old one.

(And if you have a copy with the original cover, encase it in Mylar immediately and buy yourself a copy with the new cover. The original is sure to be a collector’s item in some alternate universes.)

New Novel Manuscript

I’m still moving ahead on the second draft of Laughingstock. I hoped to kick it into overdrive during NaNoWriMo this month, but alas it was not to be. First, a cross-country trip took the wind out of my sails right at the beginning of the month. Then, the ructions surrounding the cover redesign took up a lot of time that I otherwise could have spent writing. Finally, I’m a lazy bastard with dozens of excuses for doing other things when I could or should be writing.

So, what I will try to do is to have my own mini-NaNoWriMo in December. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to produce 50,000 words in a month. I know that that’s still a steep order, but I think I can crank out at least 30,000 words during December. I think it’s possible to do 1,000 words a day. Currently, I am re-writing the second act of the story arc, so those 30K words are going to have to be original stuff. Absolutely doable!

New Social Media

Given the poop-show that Twitter has become, what with the invasion of billionaire buttheads whose daddies didn’t love them, I’ve decided to bail on Twitter entirely. It is unlikely that many people will be upset or even notice. Seeing as how the plat form was little more than a timesuck (just like all social media), I doubt I’m going to miss it.

Instead, I will now be not-really-doing-much-posting to Instagram instead. The URL there is instagram.com/crawfordsmithauthor/

Keeping with the theme of moving away from the Sweet Weasel Words “brand” (shudder), and sticking to my own name, I will also shift to a new FB page: facebook.com/CrawfordSmithAuthor. I will continue posting on the SWW page for now, but intend to phase that out entirely by the end of the year.

Everybody have a great Thanksgiving, and I will be back soon with an update on all these marvelous doings!

Adventures in Modern Book Advertising

Published by Crawford on June 18, 2022

First Draft Completed at Last

Before I get on to the main whinging, some good news: I finally finished the first draft of a new novel, tentatively titled Laughingstock. I started writing it in February 2020 (before Covid – remember that?) I’m pretty happy with what I got out of the “shitty first draft,” primarily since I pantsed the whole thing. With some sage advice, I managed to put together a pretty decent ending, which can sometimes be a challenge. As part of my pantsing strategy, I typically drive all of the characters to some oddball locale and see what they do. It worked (kinda) for Fester, and seemed to work pretty well for this story, too.

Now I just have to convert the SFD into a decent manuscript. The problem is that with pantsing, the first draft pretty much amounts to a super-detailed outline. There are major timeline issues and new characters that emerged during the latter part of the SFD that will need to be addressed. So for the second draft, I will essentially re-write the whole MS, occasionally adding pithy sentences or paragraphs from the SFD.

Book Advertising for Dummies Named Crawford

Now on to my main grouse-fest: advertising woes. At the beginning of the year, I decided I really wanted to go all-in on advertising for Fester. I had dabbled with Amazon Advertising in the past, and it seemed like the most likely way to get the book into readers’ hands. To that end, I coughed up big bucks for an “advertising for authors” course by a bloke named Mark Dawson.

Dawson is a successful author, with 20 titles published and sales of more than 2 million. In the course of his career, he figured out the best way to navigate the arcane system of self-service advertising on such platforms such as Amazon Ads and Facebook. I’d tried to work with these platforms before, and had limited success. They are very complicated and confusing.

So I ponied up the money and began diligently working through the modules. The course is very well-constructed, and Dawson continually updates the material, so it is always current with the vagaries of the advertising platforms. The lessons are clear and well-explained, and there are a lot of supplemental materials like checklists and cheat sheets. It’s really quite impressive. (Between his books, the courses and his podcasts, I have to wonder when Mr. Dawson finds time to sleep.) The course is solid.

The problem is, it didn’t work – at least not for Fester.

The main issue is that the course works best for authors who write book series and in very well-defined genres with avid readerships, e.g. romance or thriller. I am 0 for 2 in that regard. (To be fair, Dawson is upfront about these limitations.)

First, Fester doesn’t really fit into a neat genre: is it dark humor? Mystery? Paranormal? Young adult? Detective? Suspense? It really has elements of all of these, so it’s not easy to slot into a single genre, which makes identifying a cohesive target market exceedingly difficult.

Also, I can’t really produce a series in the normal sense of the term. I write really slowly (remember: over two years for the SFD of Laughingstock). Granted, there was a prequel to Fester of sorts in Powwows, and I have notes for a sequel but that doesn’t really qualify it as a series, per se.

The Cover of Doom

Then there was the cover. I had all manner of problems with the cover. This is not the fault of the artist; he gave me exactly what I asked for, and made it look awesome. The problem was that I had no idea what I really needed as a cover to help potential readers understand the myriad goofy aspects of the story.

Also, Amazon Advertising had issues with the book cover (see below), which they said was too violent. I’ve been over this in a previous post, so I won’t flog that horse but so much longer. One of the issues may have been that the people who review ads for conformance to advertising standards are in India, so there may have been a cultural issue at play. They may also have interpreted the shadows around the cops and the guy on the ground as pools of blood – although it sure doesn’t look that way to me. After repeated attempts to get someone at Amazon Ads to explain to me exactly what part of the cover constituted “excessive violence or gore, including, characters that have open wounds, are in the act of being attacked with weapons, dismemberment, [or] depictions of cadavers,” I got no response. After five attempts and no clarification, I decided to quit while I was behind and pulled the ads.

At that point, I had spent over $200 on advertising and sold exactly one (1) book. I probably would have been better off just using that money to buy copies of my own book and boosting the sales rank, which may have boosted other sales, via Amazon’s voodooesque algorithms.

All in all, it was an expensive lesson learned. I’ve got enough faith in Dawson’s system to give it a try with Jackrabbit – but not until I’ve retooled the cover. I guess the takeaway is Let the Buyer Beware. There are a lot of scams out there that prey on self-published authors. Mark Dawson’s course is definitely not one of these, but do your homework and make sure the system is right for what you write.

New Deal Year

Published by Crawford on January 2, 2022

Well, 2022 kinda looks like it’s gonna bite pretty hard; here’s to a hoping for a repeat of 2015 – a much more propitious year!

Happy New Year, and here’s to hoping for a speedy recovery from the holiday season and maybe a glimmer of hope in the new year. This is a time of reflection and aspiration, where we look back at the mistakes of the past year, and look forward to the mistakes of the upcoming one.

As the Primary Scribe of Sweet Weasel Words, there were many things to celebrate in 2021. Well, by “many,” I mean two: publication of Powwows and the publication of Fester. Being a sole-prop APE (author, publisher, entrepreneur), every new title is an adventure and a learning experience.

Powwows was originally a story line from the monster first draft (~150K words) of Fester that was excised to bring the manuscript down to a tolerable size. I still liked the story quite a bit, so I hit on the idea of editing Powwows as a separate novella that would be released a few months prior to act as an “appetizer” by introducing the reader to the built world of Fester, Pennsylvania and make them eager to read the full-length novel.

In theory.

In practice, I suspect I used up all of the goodwill in my friends-and-family fan base with Powwows. I got a fairly decent response from the gang about the ~18K word novella, but when the 90K word Fester hit the shelves, the response was, to coin a word, sub-monktastic. The attitude seemed to be “Oh, Christ, he’s published another one?” Plus, college football season was just starting up, so there was very little time for people to bother reading something I had spent 13 years crafting. OK, well “writing” might be a better word than “crafting,” but still…

So, take that as an object lesson: be careful of how you time your publications, so as to avoid reader burnout.

Looking ahead, what is in store for 2022? Or 2015? Well, I’m about 50K words into a draft of a novel called Laughingstock. It’s about two stand-up comics who get started in show business together as teenagers. As they grow apart, one experiences success in the laugh business while one continues to toil in small-time comedy backwater. As the successful one reaches the apogee of his success, he suddenly disappears. His friend embarks on a quest to find his friend – and take on the sinister Wolff Network.

I’m still not sure where the story is going to go, but I did get in the habit during National Novel Writing Month of seat-of-the-pants writing, which often takes the story in amazing and unexpected directions. I’d like to get the first draft of Laughingstock finished before mid-year.

Waiting in the wings is a sequel to Fester. During a trip to the unusual and interesting town of Astoria, Oregon, I came upon a fascinating story that would serve as a framework for a sequel. I came back from that trip with a 75% complete outline for the story. I was quite eager to get started on it when I returned from Astoria, but decided instead to forge ahead with the Laughingstock MS. I think this will allow the Astoria story to age on the shelf, as it were – and make for a more compelling story when I get down to writing it.

It’s been an interesting 2021; it promises to be an equally interesting 2022. That’s why I’m looking forward to 2015. Have a great year!

How to Make Big Money in Self-Publishing

Published by Crawford on November 26, 2021

NaNoWriMo Update

I’m still plugging away with my scaled-back version of National Novel Writing Month. So far, I have been able to keep my goal of 500 words per day (with one exception, which was more of a math error). Big thanks to the Willamette Writers writing cohort for keeping me on task. Just cleared 50,000 words on my latest MS.

Sour Grapes for Breakfast

One of the things I like about NaNoWriMo is that it gives me an excuse not to work on sales and marketing my existing titles Jackrabbit, Powwows, and Fester. I may be no great shakes as a writer, but my writing’s positively stunning compared to my salesmanship and marketing skills. I just don’t like it. Yet, I want people to read what I’ve written, of course. I’m not really looking to make a ton of money here, I’d be happy to break even on my out-of-pocket costs for the editor, the cover artist, and other fixed expenses.

So I have succumbed, at what I hope is a tolerable level, to the self-publishing industry’s legion of people, businesses and services who will make your book a “best seller” for the right price. Being naturally suspicious and tight-fisted, I always do a little research before shelling out any money. Scammers abound, and I’ve always know that the quickest way to make big money is to sell other people “secrets” of how to make big money. I recently read an article about a woman who charges $1,111 per hour to “channel” “Jesus” to Hollywood celebs and other rich idjits. If I only had a smidge less morality, I’d be on that action like Paula Deen on a plate of deep-fried Twinkies.

So I always look a little askance at the myriad of opportunities for self-published authors to make a bundle by forking over some program or another. At the same time, I’m completely cognizant of the fact that I need help marketing and selling, so I’m just going to have to suck it hope and hope for the best.

Recently, this has taken the form of paid advertising, which is pretty much a given for any self-published author. I’m a kinda techie guy – or at least I used to be – but the online advertising systems used by the likes of Facebook or Amazon are really complex and not at all intuitive. Early attempts at advertising on these platforms had been unsuccessful, so I started hunting around for some reasonably-priced advice.

In the course of my searches, I stumbled upon a plan that is so simple in its efficacy and audacity that I have to tip my hat to the author. There was a teaser article about this person’s formula for advertising success. The piece of advice given in the article was to essentially ignore the Average Cost of Sale (ACoS) metric on the Amazon Advertising dashboard. I could do this easily, as my ACoS figures are downright depressing. This guy seemed to be on the right track; the hook was set.

Of course, he had plenty more useful advice to offer, and was, in fact, going to write a whole book about his Amazon advertising secrets. The book was still in the process of being written, but if anybody wanted to get in at the ground floor, he had established a Kickstarter campaign. Out of morbid curiosity, I checked out the Kickstarter page and was amazed to see that of his $5,000 goal, he had raised a whopping $16,547!

I was awestruck. He had already cleared five figures and he hadn’t even written the book! I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, and came up with the number 3,100. Based on the price point of similar book of his, and the typical 80/20 ratio of paperback to eBook sales, along with Amazon’s cut – his Kickstarter campaign had raised the equivalent of the sales of 3,100 copies of his book, which, I hasten to repeat, hasn’t even been written yet. Of course, he’s going to have to come through on the promises he made to the Kickstarter funders, and that’s not peanuts. Still, he’s basically got the equivalent of 3,100 copies of the unwritten book out the door. Sure, that’s chickenfeed to a lot of authors – but not me. I’d be over the moon to sell 3,100 copies of a book.

Truly, this guy has it dialed in when it comes to selling self-published books about self-publishing. And as sour-grapesy as this post sounds, I will buy a copy of the book when it’s finally released, just out of respect for this guy’s sales acumen.

Makes me think I should go into writing books about self-publishing. However, on the whole, I think I’d rather just be a spiritual adviser to the rich and unfulfilled. I will call myself “Brother Mysterioso,” and charge rich idjits $1,112 an hour to channel the spirit of Rip Taylor.

More Gruel, Please!

Published by Crawford on July 28, 2021

“Please, sir, may I have an Amazon review?”

Well, my latest novel, Fester, is as published as it’s going to get. That means that I now have to go out and actually sell the sumbitch.

This, for me, is not fun. Some people love being a sales-entity*, but not me. For me, it’s like pulling teeth. However, as a one-entity operation, I have to be the author, the publisher and the sales-entity. As the philosopher Meatloaf pointed out, two outta three ain’t bad. Regardless, slacking on marketing is not going to get my book in front of readers, which is the object of the exercise.

I have been researching how to maximize book sales for indie authors**, and the bottom line is that you can’t really get anywhere with sales without spending on advertising. OK, I can get behind that; it takes money to make money. But here’s the rub: you shouldn’t really be spending money on ads unless you have a minimum number of Amazon reviews in place (~10). There’s no point in driving people to a point of sale without them seeing a number of (presumably positive) reviews once they get there.

Now I am in the uncomfortable position of trying to wheedle Amazon reviews out of my friends and family. This is, to me, odious – I feel like Oliver Twist asking for more gruel. I had some issues with this when I was promoting the Fester prequel, Powwows. I offered free copies of the eBook ( Powwows was eBook only) in return for an honest Amazon review. This met with limited success. I think the issue in this case was that people downloaded the book and then forgot about it. Or maybe I’m just an impatient asshat. Probably both.

Regardless, I thought I’d try the same thing with Fester. At first, I offered a free digital copy for an Amazon review. Then, when my author copies finally arrived, I began offering a free hard copy for a review. When I made that offer, a relative who has also self-published books via Amazon suggested that I crank it up a notch, in order to make sure these were verified purchase reviews.

To that end, I decided to offer a $10 Amazon gift card to anyone who bought the book on Amazon, left a review and sent a screen shot confirming this. This seemed a little ethically mushy, but it’s a cutthroat environment out there for self-published and indie authors. I figured what was the harm? I’d get my number of reviews up to double digits, discontinue the offer and proceed with my advertising campaign.

The problems started when I unwisely cross-posted the offer to a FB indie author group that I had signed on with. The moderator of this group is a harridan – y’know the type: they’ve got a tiny chunk of the web they control, so they control it with an iron fist. This moderator saw my offer and went ballistic. Soon, I was getting nastygrams about how people like me were why the indie publishing world had a “bad reputation.” (This was news to me.) The moderator and a number of like-minded pedants were stalking my Twitter feed, and leaving nasty comments on unrelated posts on FB, etc. One of them even ratted me out to Amazon, claiming that I was “…abusing [the] system by offering incentivized reviews, incentivized purchases, sales manipulation, ranks manipulation, etc.”

This abuse seemed a little over-the-top for what I regard as a noob mistake. So I deleted the posts that had so offended the indie author pedants. Then, I checked the official rules*** and discovered that “incentivized reviews” used to be kosher, but they changed the rules a few years back. That’s the problem with Amazon: indie authors are pretty much at Amazon’s mercy if they want to sell book one, so they get to change the rules whenever they like. Also, it seems like there are underhanded ways to abuse the system on a large scale, which was a far cry from what I was attempting to do. Certainly, it seemed like overkill for my misguided attempt at book promotion to compel a complete stranger to act as a corporate snitch for Jeff Bezos.

I looked at some of the other rules regarding book promotion and Amazon reviews. They’ve got all sorts of rules, some of which border on the ridiculous. For example, it is OK to offer a free copy in exchange for an unbiased review – which is absolutely what I was doing. However, the reviewer is supposed to divulge that fact in the review.

Other rules regarding submission of Amazon reviews are a little more Orwellian. Technically, you are not supposed to get reviews from any friends or family. OK, I can (barely) understand rejecting reviews from the same household, but the whole friends and family group? Fuck that noise. Are we supposed to submit a list to Amazon or something? Bullshit. That company has too much of our personal information as it is.

So that’s where I’m at now – still pissy and frustrated. I’ll try to be cognizant of Amazon’s ever-shifting rules going forward, and avoid indie author groups in general. Fthang!

* I started to go with “salesman,” but realized that was sexist. I then thought about “salesperson,” but realized that term was prejudicial against non-humans and ghosts. “Sales-entity” seemed like the most inclusive term for this situation. Also, if anyone knows of a ghost who is looking for a sales position, please let me know.

**There are yea number of places that will , for the proper fee, provide instruction on how to maximize indie book sales. In fact, I was all ready to put my cash down on one of the more reputable courses, but then the radiator in the car blew up, so that was that. So it’s just muggins here who gets to work it out on his own.

*** Which, in retrospect, I should have done first. Eh, I’ve always leaned towards the “salt before tasting” philosophy., anyway

Slouching Towards Publication

Slouching Towards Publication

Published by Crawford on May 27, 2021

I’m one month and a few days away from the putative publication date for Fester. It’s exhilarating, exasperating and also a little frightening.

Exhilarating in the sense that I actually started this project in 2008, and it’s amazing to actually hold a proof copy of the book in my hot little hand. I put a lot of work into over the years, and then essentially shelved it to work on other projects. After the publication of Jackrabbit, I went on to a number of short(ish) stories, and another novel manuscript, which I will discuss in much detail at a later time.

Right now, I’m waiting for the second proof to arrive from Amazon KDP. It seems like the turnaround time is a little slower than when I was getting the proofs for Jackrabbit, but maybe that’s a reflection of my own angst and impatience. Because part of this process is actually damn uncomfortable for me.

For example, impatient though I may be to get the next proof in my hot little hand, the thought of re-reading this story again is a bit daunting. I’ve been working this tale over for the past thirteen years, and I’m looking forward to being done with it. Of course, the devil is in the details, and in my opinion, it’s using the fine-grade sand paper that really make the finished piece shine. So, once more into the breach, dear readers, once more.

Also exhilarating is the cover art, which is once again been handled by artiste par excellence Ken Huey. He’s been super patient and gracious with me during this process, and the results have been outstanding. So much so that I’m beginning to worry that the content of the novel. Not that anything that will attract the attention of potential readers or boost sales is anything to be shunned.

Think this looks good? It’s only a draft!

Which brings us to exasperating–which for me is promoting and selling the product. Marketing time – a time I always dread, because I am a terrible salesman. Hate it, hate it, hate it. But it’s got to be done, especially with a self-published novel that’s competing against seas of slush. I promised myself that I would begin promoting the novel well in advance of the publication date. Hasn’t really happened. I did engage with a marketing guy to put together a marketing plan, but due to a missed meeting (by me), that effort is going to have to be pushed out to or past the target publication date of June 30.

Maybe I can just push out the pub date, too – in order to stave off the frightening bit, which is to put out this important piece of myself for all the world to see. Because Fester is a much more personal book than Jackrabbit. The latter was essentially a real-world story that I was just retelling – and embellishing, especially towards the end. Fester, however, is all mine, and if someone doesn’t like this or that plot point, I can’t fob it off to historical accuracy. I gotta own it.

It seems that social media has given license to a fair amount of cruelty, especially when it comes to assessing the works of others. Kids these days, with their hair and their YouTube comments! On the other hand, was dead-nuts on when he said “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” I’d rather have a bad review than none at all. And that’s a difficult enough task, given how troublesome it was to get folks to review Powwows.

Which brings us full-circle (OK, half-circle) back to marketing and sales. This indicates to me that I really ought to wrap this screed up and get on to figuring our how to sell this sumbitch, at least until that proof shows up.

Get the skinny on *Fester* with this prequel!

Are You Local?

Published by Crawford on February 1, 2020

*Jackrabbit* on the shelf at Belmont Books

It’s the small victories that sometimes keep you going. After a long and lackluster effort to get Jackrabbit in a brick and mortar store – I finally did! At first, I had been put off with the lack of success I’d had at local bigshot indie bookstores like Powell’s and Annie Blooms…uh, Arnie Bang’s, I finally started looking at other places closer to home.

So I bopped on into my most local of bookstores, Belmont Books. Joe, the proprietor, was extremely friendly and bought a copy on the spot. I groused about some of the difficulties I’d had and he scoffed that he could undercut Amazon AND Powell’s. That’s the attitude!

Better yet, he paid 60% up front, in cash – which lasted me all of four blocks, where I spent it in the Plaid Pantry on lottery tickets and junk food. So kudos to Joe and Belmont Books for walking the walk when it comes to supporting local authors. If you’re in Portland, pay ’em a visit at 3415 SE Belmont St., PDX.

Cover of Jackrabbit, new John Dillinger novel