Notice Me: Phase 2

Last week I moved on to another area of my writing career--Medium. This is still a relatively new addition to my portfolio, so I wasn't expected a lot to change with this situation. I didn't write any new pieces to promote, so I selected a few previously published works to promote online. I did manage to get more eyes on my articles, poems, and stories. I promoted four pieces and received six views--and sadly, that's a significant increase from me doing absolutely no promotion. Out of those six views, I only received four reads (and I think it goes without saying, no earnings from the partner program). What's the difference and how does Medium distinguish the two? I don't know. A read could be time spent on the page. A read could mean scrolling all the way to the bottom of the article. It's not clear to me how they determine whether a piece has been read or not.

Another key piece of data that I don't have access to was insights into the type of person looking at my work. On my article details pages, there is a place for these insights, but Medium has declared that my readers' interests can't be determined until I get more views. I do get traffic sources of clicks, but without getting more insight into the readers that browse my work for free, how can I start to create a picture of those who pay for a subscription and would be interested in my work?

I also know because none of my pieces have been published into or curated for a Medium publication, it doesn't get a lot of views without taking the time to promote it. It doesn't end up in the daily emails Medium sends out, and the stats page has informed me on every piece that:

"Our curators were not able to review this story for distribution in topics due to high volume."

Which I interpret to mean "Get a truckload of reviews, then we'll take a look." Not really beneficial when I haven't cracked 35 views a month yet. But this doesn't phase me. I'm going to keep my work here, add more work, and try to craft the right pieces I can submit to the publications I've technically already signed up for, but have yet to submit. 

Now I'm off to the last task of the month--getting new patrons on Patreon. This will be the biggest challenge out of the three, but I'll figure it out.

Hold the Whine

I meant to post this last week. I really did. But at some point, it simply slipped my mind--and apparently my to-do list. But all is well now, and we're back on track for lots of things to get done in October. 

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Most of the past week has been wasted on writing.

Hold on--this will make sense in a moment.

I've been doing a lot of writing this week. It seems like thousands of words just came pouring out. The problem? I'm not sure how much of it can be used. I've been in a mood. This happens to everyone, of course, but my mood has been seeping into my writing. Everything that's been written has a whiny tinge to it--including the fiction, which was surprising because many of those characters wouldn't be whiners. I know that I'm starting to come out of it, but not before everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I'm taking today to turn that around. Now I have the unfortunate uphill battle of rewriting everything so that I can get back to focusing on what I want to say without being an eye-rolling fifteen-year-old about it.

That, and I have another issue. I have to settle on a project to actually see through to the end. I've been skipping back and forth, with nothing really giving me that drive to see it through to completion. I have to find something, because I need one more finished product before the end of the year (I hit number three with my first-on-Medium piece: "The Ideal Reader Doesn't Exist").

The positive spin on all of this? I've had plenty of time to read while avoiding my indecisiveness, so I just may hit my reading goal for the year. It's the little things...

Awkward...

The Professional Awkward

Yesterday was one of those odd days. First, I received a rejection letter for a job application. Huh?

I had already assumed that the company was not interested in me because more than two weeks had passed. That's the standard. It seems weird to get one, especially since the wording was that the job position had been closed, rather than saying it had been filled. Don't get me wrong, I'm used to rejection letters. I just didn't know that companies ever notified you when you didn't make it through the initial application process.

There was also encouragement to apply for positions at the company's other imprints -- this was for an editorial assistant position at an imprint in one of the large publishing companies. But I doubt that will get me anywhere. Though because of applying, I have been left with weekly emails for similar job listings. Maybe I'll try again, but if my resume doesn't change, I'm not too sure interest in my resume will change. I'm thinking even for an entry level job, there's going to be a who-you-know element. Time to network...

The Surprising Awkward

I've been spending what free time I have trying to finish up Here's Lucy because Hulu is going to expire it in a few days. It's been helpful in my research for my latest project, especially when it comes to fashion, but then I had to sit through this episode yesterday (awkward...)

The Not Awkward

The writing. The writing is fully grown and wildly confident--she left that awkward stage long ago. I've signed up for Medium and have started to upload some of my previously published pieces. "Second Shadow" is up right now, along with "Tuesday Morning Hangover." I'll be adding more in the coming weeks. Hopefully I will be able to get new pieces up soon.

I know I sing the Patreon song a lot, but if you are interested in getting a new poem from Pieces tomorrow, go ahead and sign up to get exclusive access.There will be a new piece up tomorrow, and more to come soon on Wattpad.

That's all for now. I'll be over here, working away and hoping the next great idea doesn't strike me just yet... I've got too much piled up for that!

The Story of a Writer

The online writing community is amazing. Lately there has been a whole new crop of writers that want to know the ins and the outs of the business, who want validation, and who want to know how to break through without letting a rejection or two (or ten) break their spirit. So here's my contribution to the conversation—rejections, acceptances, and everything in between. 

 

The first time a piece of mine was published, I was eight years old. I was published again in the same publication at ten. This set the bar high for me from the beginning.  It was a publication that didn't really exist outside of elementary school libraries, but it did have a wide distribution to proud parents (and a bad habit of publishing plagiarized poems that kids somehow were able to get past the editorial staff). 

My next acceptance didn't come until my senior year of college when two of my short scripts were accepted into a collaborative project. Unfortunately, less scripts were needed than originally thought, so one was dropped, but the second one was used for the project. This happened at the same time multiple poems and short stories of mine were being rejected by the school's undergraduate literary magazine. A short story was accepted into a senior-level literary class project with a small number of print copies distributed, but so was everyone else's work from that class. It was a requirement to pass the class. 

One of my first pieces to be accepted outside of a school setting was “Life Obscured” for the Poetry of Yoga collection. It was rejected twice before that. It was a great moment, but I needed more once I got a taste of the idea that others could find my work as interesting as I did.

As with any part of life, there are those moments that seem unreal. I submitted “Second Shadow” to only one literary journal, and it was accepted. I don't know if this will ever happen again, but it's always a shocker to get a hole in one. 

 

Time went by and the rejections kept rolling in. But I had a way to feed my need for publication without all the rejection. I started using some now-defunct websites to publish all of my lesser works, those ones I wrote in high school or the ones that simply weren't right for high-caliber literary snobbery you can run into in this business. This was easy, getting by without being rejected, but there are many pieces I've lost because I thought they would exist on the world wide web forever.

“Tuesday Morning Hangover” was rejected twice. “Our Conversation in the Garden” was rejected six times before it found a home. These may seem like small numbers, but I have a handful of works that have been submitted and rejected a dozen times each and still haven't found the right match for publication, but I love them, so I think the effort is still worth it. 

 

I admit that at the beginning, independent publishing was just another way of getting by that inevitable rejection. Haiku is not something people seek out at a bookstore often, so I could justify putting Unfolding Life out there on my own. So why did I continue on the independent route for Seeing What Develops? I don't know if it was ego or simply the fact that I couldn't wait the potential years it could have taken to query agents, find one that believed in my work, then wait to see if any publisher gave it a second glance. And if no agent was interested? I don't know if I would have been able to write anything else for a long while.

I thought I was getting back on track, finding a way in that wasn't purely independent with my Kindle Worlds novellas. After all, these works had to be accepted before being published, and they were being published by the all-mighty Amazon. Reality set in when the first novella was initially rejected—the only reason it didn't make the cut was because the specific word “Callaway” was not included in the book's description. After that, I could see through the program, knowing that acceptance really just meant meeting word counts and having required keywords for the synopsis. Acceptance didn't guarantee that a real person had read it or thought that it was of a specific caliber. It wasn't a deal breaker though, because I did write and publish two more after that.

The latest poetry collection probably could have been selected for publication by a small poetry press. Although I'm the completely biased writer of said collection, I think it was good enough. There's just something about having total control of your own work that appeals to me. I know there are areas of the publishing process that I could be doing much better or be handing off to experts. What I don't like doing the most is giving myself the time to really take a look at my options. Out of everything I could have done differently for this collection, the only regret was not giving myself enough time to submit individual pieces to literary journals before I put it out there.

That leaves me with the here and now. I'm writing more consistently, with new pieces at least on a weekly basis. I'm riding the waves of the submission cycles, hoping that some of my oldest pieces will eventually be published, maybe even alongside the newer ones. I'm finally happy with the way I react to rejections—at the beginning of all this a rejection took me out for a week. I wouldn't write, edit, or submit because I was too defeated by the whole process. Eventually the gap closed. Five years ago a rejection would ruin the day. After the writing nightmare that was 2017 where nothing seemed to go right, a rejection may get as far as ruining my morning coffee or my afternoon writing session, but it takes only a little time now to recover from what is just a part of the process. A stinging one, but only a part.

Writing, especially the vein of creative writing, is not a straight line. Nor should it be. It is every cliché you can think of: roller coasters, off those beaten paths, hills and valleys, ups and downs, vicissitudes —you get the point. It takes a suit of armor that in every other aspect of my life I simply do not have, but when it comes to pouring myself onto the paper, I can stand up to anyone who's bold enough to say it's not for them and take it elsewhere. This is what it is like to be a writer. No journey looks the same, but we all get there eventually, wherever our “there” happens to be.

Lessons on What Could Have Been

Sometimes you think when an opportunity presents itself, it's the universe telling you that you need to make a move, take a chance. I had that sort of moment two weeks ago when I found an ad for a press looking for chapbook manuscripts. Since I had just come off of a month of putting together a poetry manuscript, I thought I would make the most of it—pick out the best of the original to create a chapbook. And it seemed like a good, cohesive collection. I felt proud to have made it.

But I flaked. Over the past week I kept going, “oh, I'll submit it later tonight.” I convinced myself I had one more day, one more day, wait, just one more day—then I ran out of days. On the last day before the deadline, I decided to reread the submission call. It wanted stuff that was experimental, surreal. And I quickly decided that my poetry didn't fit within those parameters, and convinced myself it wouldn't be the right fit.

I should have submitted anyway. 

It wasn't the fear of rejection. I think I need a recent rejection under my belt to get me back in the swing of things. It was the fear that I may actually succeed. I thought about all that may entail, and I was worried about a lot of things. I have anxiety about sharing my work, which has really only developed over the past six months. I will let absolute strangers pour over my every written word, but there are maybe ten people on this earth that I don't want near my work—I don't want them to even know what I write. And it's the fear that this tiny group of people could get their hands on my work, could confront me about it, could potentially ridicule me that's done more that keep me from submitting my work. It's inhibited my ability to promote the stuff that's already out there for fear they may come across it. It's prevented me from completing as many posts on this blog as I would like. In my mind, the threat is circling and I feel like if I make the slightest move, everything could crumble. It's stupid, but it's hard to argue with anxiety because it's irrational. And you know it's irrational. But you buy into it just the same.

I used to freely be able to talk to people face-to-face about writing, even going as far as talking about projects I have in mind. I used to be able to immerse myself in new submissions. I've been putting together a list of publications for my own use, cobbled together from some of my monthly writer newsletters, and I'm starting to see some publications I've already submitted to. Then my mind wanders back to five, six years ago. That's when I wasn't afraid to submit my work to place far and wide. I wasn't afraid of the rejection. I also had the mindset that everything I sent out had a real potential of making it.

Obstacles to publishing don't phase me. It's just the irrational fear that's left. Even if no one wanted it, I could get work out there and take no pay. But I'm still convinced that the best of my work hasn't touched the light of day and still has earning potential. I can't give it all away just to prove something to my own anxiety. My anxiety doesn't really care. If I get over this obstacle my anxiety will just find something else to latch on to—it always does.

Each morning I get to start over. I get to face whatever hangups I seem to have, and I get to try and work towards a better situation where I don't have to feel as anxious about every little decision I make (or fail to make). If this post is published, it must mean that I've been able to conquer the first of many battles to get back to the full-fledged writing career I'm meant to have.

What's Left

It's the end of Camp NaNoWriMo and I have a poetry manuscript. It's certainly not complete. Some of the poems at the end haven't been edited, I haven't started putting them in order, and I didn't hit the page count I really wanted. But there's something there.

It's not what I expected. Don't get me wrong--I like what I've accomplished. I think I wrote some good pieces. The thing is, I understand the current trend in poetry. I know all the nuances of this particular style. I've read half a dozen authors who have been faithful to the trend. It consists a lot of focusing on the I, You, Me and We with an emphasis on removing all flowery language that often turns people away from poetry in the first place. It speaks like a conversation, and it ends with a full explanation. There's no way you come away from it without understanding the poet's intended meaning. It also mimics what a good haiku should be: focusing on the ordinary, but making it surprisingly extraordinary.

And none of this work fits that mold.

It made me want to chuck it all out the window, if only for a moment. I come from a background of being forced to read poets that made no sense, poets that seemed to have secret meanings behind every twist of phrase, dozens of super-archaic Shakespearean sonnets. That's what influences my work, and that means I have hidden meanings. I make obscure references. I play with metaphors and use all the colors in the crayon box. I'm in no way traditional, but there are hints of tradition in it. And that's not what the current market dictates. You would think a poet wouldn't concern themselves with market trends because poetry, overall, doesn't sell very well on its best day. But I've learned with both indie and traditional publishing, you're working with a ten percent effort on writing and a ninety percent effort on marketing if you want to be successful.

The issue I really have with the current trend is that the trend itself is being diluted with every new book that comes on the market. In my experience, Milk and Honey is the Holy Grail. It can do no wrong. It began the trend that you see. But those other poets, the ones who followed the trend? It doesn't quite hit the same notes when you read it. It doesn't contain the contemplative moments, and there's no sense of urgency when needed.

Because we live in a society where we can get whatever we want when we want, some of us don't want to put in the work to read poetry. Some of us don't want to have to work that hard to feel something. And this trend makes it easy to feel something without feeling stupid for not understand some deeper meaning. The meaning is on the surface, and it's not trying to hide behind anything. I don't write like that. The poets before me made me do the work, so I'm trying to hand down the same skill set to the next generation. I just don't think the next generation has the attention span for it.

I'll still polish it up and get it ready to send out into the world. It deserves that much.

Scouting Kindle Scout, Phase 2: December is the Time to... Study?

While everyone may be getting time off from work and school in the last few weeks of 2015, I'll be diving into a bit of studying. It's all in the pursuit to examine the Kindle Scout process as thoroughly as I can. The best way I thought I could do that is to read one winner of a Kindle Scout contract and one that didn't win.

The Titles

The Standout by Laurel Osterkamp was the first nomination I made on Kindle Scout, and it was also the first one that received a contract. This one stood out to me because of its well-designed cover (it's hard to find those on Kindle Scout, unfortunately) and the synopsis seemed like an interesting plot. Who doesn't love a good psychological thriller? Though I did find out recently that it's not the first Robin Bricker novel (looks like the third, unless I missed one...) and getting into the middle of a series is not my favorite thing to do. However, if it's good, it will be able to stand on its own aside from the series.



My nomination for Autumn's End by Curtis Moser was submitted only a few weeks ago. While it didn't win a contract with Kindle Scout, I just couldn't resist seeing what happens to two teenage grave robbers and their quest to find a secret gold mine. What's misadventures will these two stir up?

What I'll Be Looking For

First and foremost, what I want to see from these titles is quality. I can excuse a typo here and there (trust me, plenty of traditionally published title have them too), but things like huge holes in the plot, too many static characters, or a really predictable ending are things that I can't always forgive.

I'll be posting my book reviews soon, and I hope that with this phase of my learning process, I'll be able to understand just what makes a book on this program stand out from the rest. Want to read along with me? If you find these books interesting and pick one (or both) up, I would love to hear your thoughts.

You can also check out my other Kindle Scout related posts, Kindle Scout and Write On -- Can These Programs Help Indie Authors? and Scouting Kindle Scout, Phase 1: The Nominations for more information on the program and my pursuit to understand it's intricacies.

Death to (Most) Deadlines

Deadlines are a great tool for getting things done. But do they really help when they are picked at random? I've been talking for a few weeks about the writing calendar I put together for the end of the year. I had scheduled work for five different writing projects on it. I set firm deadlines for revising and even releasing some of the projects. But what did these deadlines mean when it came to the day it was to be something great and it just wasn't there yet?

Arbitrary deadlines don't help writing. I know that traditionally published authors probably have firm deadlines that can't be changed, but these people have a team backing them up. Indie authors don't always have that kind of support for each project (but kudos to the ones who do!). I know that my team of people I lean on is quite small, and they are not always available for every project. That just means I have to work harder to survive in the indie landscape. And that's why I'm declaring death to those deadlines I set. My five projects are not to the point where I would want them to be, and I'm not going to rush the process.

I did promise a novella written, revised and published by the end of October. That's not happening. I tried my best, but now I realized every project has it's own growth and development. Melody of Love was my success story--a novella written, revised and published within three weeks. Looking at that pace now, it seems crazy. For this followup novella, that pace just couldn't be kept. And since it is Halloween-themed, this novella won't see the light of day for another year. And that's totally okay.

I'm all for putting the pressure on to get a good product, but if a deadline doesn't feel right, don't force yourself to release something that just isn't ready. It won't help your writing career or the reputation of indie authors.

The Secret Project Revealed: Are You Ready for a Little ❤ Romance ❤?

I can finally reveal the secret project I've been working on for the past month. I wrote a novella for Kindle Worlds. My contribution is Melody of Love and it belongs to The Callaways World based on the romance series by Barbara Freethy.



You don't have to have read The Callaways series to enjoy my novella--though if you like a little suspense with your romance, I definitely recommend reading them. All you have to know is this: Sean Callaway is a musician and owns Ashbury Studios. The ground floor is a music studio, and the top floor is a dance studio where the love of his life Jessica runs the dance studio. And that's where my novella takes place.

The process frayed a few of my nerves, but it's finally completed. I'm so excited that it was published tonight, because if it was kicked back to me again for some tiny little oversight I was about ready to give up. I actually had a pretty good rant about Kindle Worlds ready to go if I didn't end up publishing it... but it's best if we forget all that and just celebrate another completed project.

And a little heads up: I wasn't sure this would be published today, so I scheduled the ebook version of Unfolding Life to be available for free tomorrow. Sorry in advance for all of the promo social media posts for both books coming up. 😉

Publishing Year One: Marketing Mayhem

Once you write a book, you have to take off your writer hat and put on your business hat. This is true of any creative profession. It’s not enough to just write, revise and edit. It’s not enough to put the paint to canvas. You must go and sell yourself to get anything that resembles success.

Like I’ve said before, I wanted to create this project without spending money—at least not a lot of it. There are so many free options for advertising out there that I knew I could find success without having a marketing budget. I was confident in that. But what I didn’t expect was for free advertising options to have a little bit of class and some standards for what they advertise.

Advertising Options

The main options I looked at were the free/bargain priced ebook newsletters I subscribed to. Most of them had the option to submit your book for free and they would choose whether they wanted to promote it or not. Fair enough. The problem with these newsletters is that they wanted to make sure they were providing quality products to their subscribers (nothing wrong with that). Most of these advertising outlets have a review minimum that you have to meet before they will consider your book. Usually it is 5-10 reviews with a four- or five-star rating on Amazon, or a combination of Amazon and Goodreads. To this day I still don’t have 5 reviews on Amazon and Goodreads combined (considering some reviews are cross posted). And you have to throw out the one less-than-stellar review the book received because it didn’t reach the 4-star minimum.

So this advertising option was out. I then decided to check out my own newsletter option. But there is a big problem with starting your own newsletter. If you go through a service like MailChimp, you are required to provide a physical address that appears on each newsletter. I didn’t want to give out where I lived and I didn’t want to rent a P.O. box where I lived (because, as we all well know, I still don’t want to live here). So I had to toss that option too. 

Social media is free, it’s great and you can utilize it in a hundred different ways. So that ended up being one of my main ways of advertising Unfolding Life. Conversion numbers are really hard to get from this, so I’m not sure how well it actually worked, but I did get new followers who happen to enjoy haiku. Whether they bought the book or not is another story…

Goodreads: Offerings to the Book Gods

The last advertising avenue I put effort into was Goodreads. After all, that’s where I first discovered some of the better self-published authors, and they were doing great on the site. I already had a large number of friends/connections on Goodreads, so I took a personal approach and sent site messages out about my launch day ebook giveaway. Surprisingly, a number of people wrote back telling me good luck… but they were also telling me that they don’t read ebooks, so they didn’t enter the giveaway. 

That’s when I put into place Goodreads Advertising Phase Two: hitting up the groups. I belong to at least a dozen groups, many of which allow shameless self-promotion, providing you post the message in the right category. I went through all of these, posting messages and trying to connect with others. I got a few bites, some people telling me it wasn’t the worst they had ever read after checking out Amazon’s preview (uh, thanks?) and others telling me they would definitely put it on their reading list. I offered a number of free review copies, and some readers surprised me by saying they preferred to buy it so they could support indie authors. But let’s be honest—if their reading lists are half as long as mine, I’ll be waiting a few more years for those reviews to come in. 

Without spending any money (other than on the copy for the giveaway), I managed to get a few people interested in what I had to offer. Would money have changed that? With a niche like haiku, I’m not so sure anything would have changed. Except I would be slightly poorer than I am right now. 

Tomorrow, we’ll take on the hard numbers.

Publishing Year One: Launching the Haiku Rocket

If there is ever a single moment in the publishing process that strikes fear into an author, it’s the thought of launching the project. This is where you put everything you have in front of the world and you can’t be shy about it (even if you want to be). I knew that Unfolding Life was ready—it my eyes, it was the absolute best I could do. It was ready to be out in the world. 

Launching a book though is more about marketing than it is about feeling accomplished. Without a strong marketing presence behind the work, who will know about what you’ve done? I tried to start the marketing buzz early with this book. I posted on my Facebook page regularly even though I had an audience of less than a dozen people. I tweeted to my heart’s content with all those relevant hashtags. I also started participating in daily haiku writing on Twitter to help boost my presence with the haiku crowd. But I didn’t beat anyone over the head with it. I restricted myself to three promo posts a day because when you are trying to launch a book, it’s not advantageous to lose followers by being spammy. 

Once the week came where launch was imminent, I braced myself. I secretly wanted to be overwhelmed with book sales, reviews coming in on Amazon and on Goodreads, and let’s be honest, my ego wanted bloggers and those in the literary media to be requesting interviews. I have a very healthy imagination, don’t I? 

To get more word-of-mouth advertising, I also ran a giveaway contest for the ebook version (at this point, there was no physical book version). Things were going stellar—and then March 17^th came.

I wanted to launch the book on the 18^th, but with Amazon’s review period and this being my first work published with them, I was afraid that it would take longer than 24 hours to approve. So I jumped the gun a bit and it was available about 12 hours earlier than expected—which didn’t make one miniscule bit of difference, but I certainly fretted over it for awhile. 

The giveaway ended and I awarded the book. I celebrated the launch all day long on social media. I easily sold books to a few friends. The ball was finally rolling. 

Tomorrow, it’s all about the money—and how I didn’t spend a dime on marketing.