Writer's Block and Blogging

I'm am currently in the middle of a heart wrenching, pulse pounding, f'ing writer's block from hell. Halfway through my latest M/M Romance novel and I've stalled. I've tried going back and editing, I've tried power writing through it, I've even allowed myself to take a break -- nothing.

But then, when you've hit the wall, there's always your blog waiting to be updated.

The motivating factor to having a blog is that I hate updating my blog even more than I hate working on the middle of a novel. Does anybody even read these things? Is there anybody out there?

I tell you what, the first person to send an email to brianjjaxn@yahoo.com saying that they read this blog post gets a free eBook of their choice (one of mine ;-).

There. I've done it. I updated my blog. Now, back to my writer's block (Sigh).

Self-Publishing and Getting Paid

Well, I finally get paid this week. With Amazon paying 60 days after the close of each month, it's been 90 days that I've been publishing without getting paid. Smashwords is ever worse. With Smashwords paying 30 days after the close of the quarter, and distributors taking their time to post sales, it won't be until early February that I receive any money from my Apple or Sony sales.

Add to that the fact that First Son seems to have run its course causing October to be a less than stellar month.

It's time to get product out there. Fortunately, Melanie is almost finished with the fourth Chloe Boston book, I'm halfway through my next M/M Romance book, and Melanie sent and official letter to Dorchester asking for a reversion of rights on three of her early books. That means we should have some material coming out soon.

In addition, we're still waiting for The Book of Dreams Series to catch on. We've sold very few books in the series. Once/If it catches on, we should see it and the Chloe Boston Series carry us for a few months.

Happy Halloween all.

Book of Dreams

My wife and I have just released a new fantasy series that we're both excited about.  The series is called "Book of Dreams" and follows a dream retrieval expert into the dreamscape.  We collaborated on the books which was a fun process.  The covers for the books are quite cool.  We bought them from iStockPhoto.

Kindle: Amazon, Nook: Barnes & Noble, All Formats: Smashwords.



Anyway, if you get a chance, check out the new series.  Meantime, I'm back to writing a new M/M Romance for release sometime next month.

Kindle: Amazon, Nook: Barnes & Noble, All Formats: Smashwords.

Computers New and Old

Well, my wife just received her new computer today.  It's a Dell portable and she's very excited.  However, we've had to spend the entire day configuring it and trying to transfer files from the old computer and I'm sick of it.  Besides that, it runs Windows 7 with which I'm less than impressed.

Meanwhile, I continue to trundle along on my 6 year old Dell portable running Windows XP.  The computer is so old that I've worn most of the letters off the keyboard.  Now my wife can't use it because she doesn't touch type.  I don't care since I'm in trouble if I try to think out where a key is.  It's either in my hand or it's nowhere.  Who needs to look?

Funny the way that we've become such a disposable society.  I like to hang on to things.  They become comfortable.  I don't like change.  But at the pace that technology keeps changing around us we're almost required to throw away all our existing technology and upgrade every few years.  Me, I'm sticking with my old computer.  My wife keeps threatening me with an upgrade, complaining that I don't value myself.  But that's not true.  I just like my old comfortable world and will fight to hold onto it until my poor little portable is a smoking puddle on my desk.

By the way, my computer has one of those pencil erasers in the center of the keyboard for controlling the mouse.  I love the thing.  I've become so good with it that I can use it to do artwork on my computer.  This form of mouse control has gone out of style.  I don't want to lose my little nub.

Anyone else with me on this?

Web Pages and Such

I just spent the last several days performing a massive design update to my wife's home page.  This is pretty amusing considering that I don't even have my own home page.  Anyway, I'm pretty proud of it.  You can checkout the results at:

Melanie Jackson's Home Page

I got the inspiration from a sample of a friends home page and then took it to the n'th degree.  I'm particularly proud of the embedded blog at the end of the page that took me days to get right.  Of course, my wife likes the mouse in the baseboard at the bottom of the page.

One could spend a lot of time working on web pages.  Of course, with the number of people I know in need of a serious web page uplift, one could also make a series amount of money doing this work.

I  leave it to you, should I continue to write poor selling books or switch over to selling my web services?  Post your opinion as a comment to this blog (after all, I have no comments yet).

Thanks

The First Negative Review

Well, I woke this morning to find that there was a new review on Goodreads.  And it was a bad one.  A 1 star review that pointed out typos, thought my book silly, the sex scenes were nothing but purple prose, ...  In short, the person hated First Son.

My initial reaction to the review was feeling sick to my stomach after which a black cloud fell over me.  It's the first time I've received a truly scathing review.  I wanted to climb back into bed and pull the covers over my head.  Then I decided to suck it up.

After further thought I realized that you can learn a lot more from a negative review than from a positive one.  The review provided a lot of things to consider, which I will in future writing.  Besides, taking one to the chops now and then is all part of being a writer.

Still, now I need to write again but I find that I do so with a little less spring in the old key press.

More to follow...

Birth of a Novel (First Son)

We'll take one as an example, although all five of them (currently available) have taken similar paths.

I wrote First Son specifically for Loose-Id. This is a popular publisher of erotic ebooks. Instead of writing M/F Erotica, I decided to try M/M Erotica since I had already written several M/F Romances.

Examples of my previous romances include Drained, my latest which sat on an editor's desk and never got read, but dammit I like it, Travel Logged, a great idea for a novel and my biggest seller until my recent publishing blitzkrieg, and Remote Control, another clever idea that is probably a weak romance since it was rejected by Dorchester Publishing after waiting months for a friend/editor to read it.

Several months after submitting a query letter and sample for First Son to Loose-Id, I received an email indicating that the editor loved it and I should submit the entire manuscript.  I was off and running... until I received another email indicating that the manuscript was rejected by upper management.  Too silly and improbable they said.  After bragging to everyone that I was about to be published, I was heart broken at the receipt of the rejection email.  This was the closest I had come to being published.  First Son went onto the heap along with the rest of my rejected manuscripts.

At the beginning of August 2010, I was bored and thought I'd try publishing all the detritus littering my computer.  One by one I submitted my manuscripts to Amazon and Smashwords, along with several rejected manuscripts by my wife, published author Melanie Jackson.  Then I waited, kinda.

A post somewhere led me to Goodreads. There my wife and I promoted our books and First Son started to sell on Amazon.  Initial indications, as with Blood Reich, my horror novel that lost Dorechester's First Blood competition, was that the book contained a lot of typo's.  Of course it did, it had never really gone through the editing phase.  It was published at the whim of a bored and frustrated computer software developer.

I read First Son and found many typos.  I've since corrected them and committed new revisions of the book to Amazon and Smashwords.  As I read the book, I found that I liked it.  It may actually be my strongest work.  Silly and improbable, definitely.  But it's a decent book.  I plan on writing future M/M Romances (in fact I've already started one which should be a stunner).

I'm thankful to those who have supported First Son.  I'm grateful to those who have bought it.  The greatest thing that can ever happen for an author is to have someone read their work.  This has finally happened for me.  At least to one extent, I can now die content.  Now for the rest of my confusing life ;-).

Good night, all.

On Having a Runaway Smash Bestseller

Well, I've hit the big time today by posting my best statistics ever on Amazon for my book First Son:

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,172 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

#7 in	Books > Gay & Lesbian > Literature & Fiction > Erotica > Gay
#32 in	Kindle Store > Kindle Books > Fiction > Erotica
#14 in	Kindle Store > Kindle Books > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Gay & Lesbian

It's fun watching my ranking get better on these lists. I still can't believe that my little book is so popular. Yeah.

I'll post more if my statistics improve.

The View from the Publisher's Seat

The last few weeks have been strange.  While I've begun experimenting with self publishing ebooks written by me and my wife, watching our numbers and planning for price increases, advertising, and promotional discounts to put into place next month, I've been watching from the sidelines as my wife's current paperback publisher, Dorchester, slowly crumbles.

First Dorchester announced that they were discontinuing producing paperbacks.  They're going to do ebooks and POD trade paperbacks only.  Today they let two of their editors go and only have one left, my wife's editor who she loves.  Writers are fleeing the house like rats from a sinking ship.

Meanwhile, my self-publishing numbers have been good, considering it's the first three weeks.  I think they'll be even better next month when I include advertising and promotional deals.  Right now, the books are so cheap that we're barely making any money off them and couldn't possibly consider ads or discounts.  If this thing takes off, who knows what kind of services a small company could offer.

So, as the big house that I once tried to get published under (Dorchester) appears to be going the way of so many failed companies these days, a new, small, independent publishing house may be sprouting.

Keep in touch.  Much more to come in the future...

Winning Friends and Influencing People

Well, the promotion continues to go on via several book discussion groups.  I've been trying to drum up a buddy read in the Cozy Mystery group on Goodreads but people are hesitant to participate.  In the meantime I'm getting a head start on Moving Violation and finding several typos that I've corrected.  I think I like editing even less self promotion.

Well, we crossed our first major publishing milestone last night and may pass the next one by the end of the month at the pace that things are going.  I think that next month the prices of our books are all going up.  I'll be combining the increase in prices with some Goodreads and Amazon advertising.  Hope it all adds up to increased sales and revenue.

I'm scheduled to join in my first M/M Romance chat next Monday.  Should be fun; I'm looking forward to it.

Meeting the Nicest People

I've spent quite a lot of time the last couple of days trying to figure out all the ins and outs of the Goodreads reading groups site.  Along the way I encountered some of the nicest people.

In the M/M Romance and Paranormal Romance groups people have engaged me in active discussions.  As opposed to being embarrassed about having to plug my books, people have been corgile and engaged me in conversation.  People have provided a lot of advice on posting and setting up an author page.  Rather than being drudgery, the experience has been quite nice and made me wonder why I hadn't been to this site before (like when I actually had time to read ;-).

Anyway, I just thought I'd pass along the encouraging news that these groups can be fun and, so far, there's no reason to be afraid.

Shameless Self Promotion

Well, the books have all been written and published.  Now it's that time again for shameless self promotion.  I am so bad at this.  Of course there's the usual dread of having to brag about yourself in public and beg people to sample your work, but there's also the tedious, time consuming process of having to find message boards and discussion groups in which to interact with people.  I'm not very good at this.  I prefer to sit alone at my computer and write, or work on cover art, or even update a web page.

Well, for those of you looking for places to promote your writing, I found at least one good site.  Go search for the appropriate groups at www.goodreads.com.  It's a fairly active location to get people interested and hopefully get them to review your work.  Also plug the lists on Amazon itself by searching for the appropriate discussion groups.

Well, I'm off to google to see if I can search up any more sites.  Shameless self promotion is definitely a big downside to the writing life.  Sigh...

On Being Reviewed

Yesterday I received my first book review, ever, on Smashwords from Mike O'Conner in Ireland.  He praised the book Blood Reich thoroughly and concluded with his only complaint which was that the book contained a lot of spelling errors.

Hmmm....

My wife had just read the first six chapter and I of course read the whole book and didn't find any spelling errors, but Mike had.  The Word spell checker hadn't found them either.  Now I'm dreading having to sift through the book with a fine toothed comb looking for spelling errors.  I guess I know how I'll be spending the next few days.

On the flip side, it was incredibly exciting actually hearing from someone who had read one of my books and liked it.  All these years of silence has been stressful.  Not hearing from anyone about your work makes you wonder whether you're any good.  Anyway, I definitely appreciate the review more than the couple of bucks that I made off the sale.  Think of it, I made a connection with someone thousands of miles away through my little baby.  I'm still reveling in the glow.

Enough for today (glow, glow, glow...).

Enter the World of Blogging

This is my first blog entry... ever.  I now have a Facebook account and am blogging; however, I absolutely refuse to twitter (what ever that is).

I thought that I would use this blog to track the progress of my writing.  I just completed posting all of my works to Amazon and Smashwords yesterday for eReader download (see http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/brianjjaxn).  Today I hope to start writing again on my new horror novel, Meat Hook.

Meat Hook is going to be one of those classic, short horror novels alla The Fog.  A mythical character, Meat Hook, begins killing people in a town that is getting ready for it's harvest celebration.  Of course, Meat Hook runs rampant at said celebration.  I hope it will be fun to write and read.  Should be short (e.g. 60k words).

That's it for now.  I'll try to post more later this weekend.