Monday, January 21, 2019

Going AFJ for a bit...

No, not a typo. Away From... Japan. Traveling abroad for the next 11 days.

Will post here when it seems right to do so during the jaunt.

I'll be back in February.

Oh, and since you are all waiting for the new novel: I made great progress the last week or so, but will not be working on it while on travel. So... maybe one and half more chapters to go to wrap up the rough draft, when I return.

See you soon!

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Keys to Kindle Sales, revisited: Free Day

As posted recently here, and all over the Social Media outlets I maintain to promote Remember When, I scheduled a One Day FREE promotion on the 16th of January this year.

Remember When was four months past publication, and had hit the long tail of low or no sales which commonly happens to a lesser-known author's works.


The idea of the promotion was to do three things:

To get more copies out to people far removed from the author, to generate more Reviews and spread word-of-mouth.

To get some hype going in the sub-genres that matter for both Remember When and the new novel. The particular target was the Espionage sub-genre for e-books on Amazon Kindle.

and, in a gamble...

To see if a high FREE sales rank translated into more exposure and more organic sales after the promotion ended. To "re-start the long tail", if not actually break through.


How'd we do on those?

Good volume for a new author. There will be some benefits, especially if it becomes more reviewed in places like Goodreads.

Yeah, looks like we did good on this. Here are the Peak (best) Rankings, which we hit after hour 22!
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,088 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)
#14 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers > Espionage
#33 in Kindle Store > Kindle Short Reads > 90 minutes (44-64 pages) > Literature & Fiction
#45 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Action & Adventure > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thriller

It's possible we got into the Top Ten for Espionage sub-genre briefly at hour 24, but then the promotion ended. To show you what being in the Top 48 or so gets you... it's Page One of the promotion:



The overall Rank looked like this, to put it in perspective:
 
 
Now, does that give us the gamble? Will people now see and seek out Remember When? Well... We'll find out about that tomorrow or the next day. THANK YOU, EVERYONE for helping make this happen!




Monday, January 14, 2019

Upcoming Promotion for Remember When on Amazon.

I'm busy writing on the new novel (Yay, Chap 19 start!), but I wanted to explain a moment about an upcoming promotion on Amazon for Remember When:

January 16th, 2019, for 24 hours midnight to midnight (PDT), Remember When will be FREE.

So what? All of you who already have it are the people reading this 'blog.

Amazon Kindle allows you to gift copies of an e-book within your geographic (copyright) region. This opportunity lets you do so for free. Seriously, you can just "hand someone a copy" and it costs you nothing but the time to click. It costs them nothing, too. They can choose to accept it or not.

I'll use this opportunity to pass along copies to friends who I know don't usually touch the Thrillers genre, but who delight in reading as a pastime.

It's a way to encourage more reviews, too. Remember When could use more and more recent ones.

And...

L. Douglas Garrett as an author.
Remember When as an e-book.

are both listed on Goodreads now! Some of you are ahead of the game there, but now it's a complete package. You can Review, Rate, and most importantly List Remember When there!

Hope this is a fun thing for you all. It really helps me when you speak up about Remember When!

Thank you, All!

Friday, January 11, 2019

New Novel Progress: Highly professional editing team, hard at work!

Writing proceeds apace... I'm deep in Chapter 18, and into the part where things go to hell.

Editing has advanced, with the first pass done up to the end of Chapter 16.

This screenshot captures the highly professional editing team in action:


Alcohol was not involved. We really do have this much fun working.

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Characters in Remember When: A Bonus Short Story.

Written as a special thank you to friends who support the Remember When Book page on Facebook, here is a brief look at one of the characters' back story. Enjoy!

Somebody got punched.

Somebody got punched for saying “Dago” in response to “Kike”, down at the other end of the bar. Barry just pushed his stool back far enough that if a beer bottle or body came sailing his way, at least he’d see it coming. The Jewish kid should have swung first instead of mouthing off. “Holy Hell, assholes”, he thought loudly. “Knock it off. It’s not like this is the neighborhoods.” Okay, maybe he didn’t just think it. Most everyone in the joint was looking at him, even the two morons who’d been throwing punches.

The bartender leaned over to Barry. “Thanks”, he said and looked down toward the troublemakers. “You done now?” Yeah, they were done. Backing away from each other and not even talking. The bartender didn’t say anything more to Barry, but a minute or so later he put another drink in front of him. Barry smiled a little about that. Always nice to be appreciated.

It was his last night in town this month. Nothing wrong with getting on an airplane tired, but he’d try to avoid adding hungover to that. National to Miami, then down to Caracas. Again. There never seemed to be enough time back here. He missed a lot of things happening. He wasn’t even here when she got sick. By the time he got back and someone told him, she was gone. Which was why he was in the bar that night, drinking alone, on their anniversary. His voice was very soft when he said, “Miss you, Cecile…” and finished his fresh drink. He thought it was time to go home, then. When a man had nothing left in his life but his career, it was better not to drink too much.

Monday, January 7, 2019

A Writer's Device: Flexible thinking about Chapters.

In the early stages of a writing plan for anything of any size, you are going to have an outline. If you are formally trained in Creative Writing, you've probably had a scheme for outlining beaten into you at some point. There's a reason besides just keeping track of what happens in what order; it really does give you targets for what to write in each chapter.

Because, come on, the GOAL is to write each Chapter. Get them down in words and have something to work with, rather than blue-skying a thousand rewrites in your head. You have to get the damn thing written. But if you are too closely wedded to an outline you created before starting to produce chapters, you might panic when something seems to run too long or too short.

Don't.

There is nothing to panic about. Unless you are a writer that sets and locks in a single point of view in each chapter, and that chapter is a single continuous flow, you have lots of flexibility. If you do lock in single POV in a chapter, then you sure as hell shouldn't worry about a chapter running long or short. You're committed to writing what is needed in that plan, no more and no less.

In any other chapter structure, like continuous time-flow multiple perspectives, every two or three paragraphs are likely a structural unit. You can treat those as modular constructs. Not in sequence, but in where you break the chapters. If one chapter runs too long, in your thinking, look back and find a natural break between modules. Then start the next chapter with the paragraph that starts the next module.

Worst case, split a big chapter in two at some obvious modular break in the middle. Push your Chapter numbering up one, and get back to writing.

Don't let anything keep you from getting that first draft down in words. You can't publish, you can't solicit test-readers, you can't even properly edit, what you haven't written down.

Which means... I need to get back to writing. Here's to your success!

Wednesday, January 2, 2019

Our business is the past, but welcome to the future.

2019 is underway. I hope it's a good year for all of you.

There will be a new novel coming soon, serial to Remember When. The new book is set in '84, slightly more than a year after those weeks when Sherri and The Roomie crossed paths.

There will be more books after that. Several ideas are being forced to sit in a corner and wait until the current work is done.

There will be some interruptions to 'blogging here late in January. Don't worry, I'll be back.

If you are on Facebook, there is a Book page for Remember When. Like and Follow there for earlier access to some special things that come along.

Coincidentally, there is a new vignette about a character from Remember When posted there. I'll bring it over here in a week or so, but as the original offer to write it was announced there, they get it as a exclusive for a little while.

Stay tuned here for more writing-focused and new-work-progress posts.

And, to all of you, who helped turn 2018 from a year of disasters for my friends and family into a year of miracles and wonders, Thank You.