I’ve been able to stay a little more focused on writing for the first third of the year, except for April… Let’s not talk about April. Without adding in my sales on Smashwords, B&N and all the foreign amazon.com sites, I was able to rake in quite a bit more than I did in 2011. I know, 99 bucks wasn’t hard to beat, but it was a start.

My sales peaked in March when I was putting out a short story every 5 days or so. I got my $299 payout for the month of March a few days ago and it lit a fire under my writing chair.

Here’s a tip for all of you e-pubbers out there -

Keep writing! Seriously, that’s the key. Good covers work, good blurbs work, all that social marketing helps, but more product helps the most. Don’t worry, amazon won’t run out of ASIN’s any time soon.

Starting in June, I’m going to commit to 1700 words a day. Minimum. It will be a constant NANOWRIMO session for me for six months. I don’t know how many words I’ve churned out so far this year, but by Dec 31st it will be at least 300,000. It’s not that hard for me to get 2,000 decent words in a session, but after reading Rachel Aaron‘s post, that feels anemic.

For any of you that aren’t into my alter ego’s short stories (ask if you really want to know), I have 3 longer works that are in the editing phase. I’m going to get those polished up by the end of July, even if that means I have to drink more coffee!

I’ve been working on some new projects in e-publishing and those should be coming online during the month of January. I’ve got a trio of books under a super secret pen name that will only be made public if they start to sell. Here are the titles of the ‘books’ that are for sale on amazon.com right now:
Cheap Tequila
Free Candy
Randagrams and Anagrams – Geography Edition
Randagrams and Anagrams – Food and Drink Edition

I put together the files to sell Cheap Tequila and Floating as actual paperback books, but the Randagram books wouldn’t really translate well to a hard copy.

I’m going to try to commit to keeping things lively here on the blog, and maybe even setting up another under a pseudonym I might use for some alternate genres. I didn’t really do any massive marketing in 2011 for the ebooks and I’ve been a little slower on production that I had hoped, but I’m going to be a speed demon in Twenty-Twelve!

My commissions for all ebook sales on Amazon this year were $99.48, which is more than zero dollars. With some luck and some concerted strategy about the types of stories/projects to sell, I’m going to increase that quite a bit.

Wish me luck!

Floating - A Seattle Mystery

Join a quirky cast of characters as they navigate themselves through the streets and waterways of Seattle.

Sheila Jackson works on a crab boat with her brothers in Alaska, but spends the off-season cracking jokes while she drives tourists around in an amphibious vehicle.

Steven Munchausen keeps trying to strike it rich but his schemes always seem to circle the drain.

The novel begins:

Nestled in between the cold, gray waters of Puget Sound and the dark green wrinkles in the earth, Seattle is often shrouded in mist and rain. All that moisture has a way of getting under your skin, or invading your thoughts. Some people can take it, some folks can’t. The short, dark days and long nights of the rainy season push those folks too far. The perfect summers beneath the bluest skies you’ve ever seen can even help tilt a mind past the point of no return.

Of course when you’re normal, you don’t think about the weather like that, but who’s normal anyway? With all the bluffs and high rise condo towers in the city, lots of people think that all that rain looks pretty good when it finally pools into the lakes and runs into Puget Sound. When you’re floating face down in the ship canal, you don’t get to continue the debate about where normal stops and crazy starts.

1. First I used the meatgrinder over at smashwords.com to convert it to a myriad of e-book formats. I studied the Style Guide, but I could have been helped by this list: Smashwords: How to Self-Publish an Ebook with Smashwords: 31 Authors Share Their Tips and Tricks

2. I got the paper version set up and proofed at Createspace. I find that I can spot errors more easily when I have an actual book in my hands. Some of the typos and punctuation errors that get missed on the computer screen just jump out in print. I also sent proofs to my crack proofreaders who were able to find things that I missed. (Thanks Mary and Jan!)

3. Based on the kindle version I downloaded from smashwords, I was able to really understand how to put together the file that I needed to upload to kdp.amazon.com.

4. I also uploaded the epub version to pubit.barnesandnoble.com.

I took the advice of sages around the internet and left amazon and b&n off the distribution list at Smashwords, since the commission structure varies a bit. Smashwords was great for getting the book into Kobo and the iBookstore.

Last month I jumped into the new campnanowrimo.org on a whim to spark my creativity. I’ve been participating in the November sessions of nanowrimo for four years, and I usually spend the last two weeks of October thinking about the story line for the project. I spent an hour thinking about the plot on July 31st before I committed. Now I have a first draft that clocks in at 53,000 words, but I still need two more writing sessions to wrap it up.

So, here’s my current problem. I have one book in proof form that I’m editing and another draft that needs a little massaging. That leaves me with three works in progress that I need to get whipped into shape before I dive into another project in November! I just updated the cover art for the e-book version of Cheap Tequila, which was released into the wild in March. I got a couple of nice reviews on GoodReads, but I need a couple more on amazon.

I also need some guinea pigs.

I need a few good readers that want to be the first to lay their eyes on the three new projects.

Project 1: A story set in Hoquiam, WA that involves some mystery and a sasquatch. There’s something for everyone in this book, unless you’re looking for another recipe for pozole, that’s not in here. You will find an account of a chainsaw juggling act that goes terribly wrong and you’ll find out why a bigfoot doesn’t need to yell like Chewbacca.

Project 2: The newest story, which is a vampire novel set on the Island of Hawaii. If you’ve ever wanted to explore lava tubes or hear from an 800 year old teenager, this might be for you. This is the beginning of a three book series, so put on your seat belt.

Project 3 (Floating): A quirky little mystery with some wacky characters thrown in for good measure. This story uses Seattle as a backdrop and actually has some autobiographical material stirred in. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what part of the spicy mix it is. You’ll laugh, you’ll cringe, and you might crave a Dick’s cheeseburger before the tale is done.

If you think you can stomach a few typos and want to read and advance copy of any of these books, leave me a comment or an email.

Steven Munchausen keeps rounding up odd jobs to
make ends meet. He’s a bouncer, a bartender and
would-be educator, trying to teach the children of
Seattle to be frightened of strangers offering free
candy.

Gretchen, Suzi, Marie and Sheila might be able to
catch lightning in a bottle with their fledgling all-girl
rock band, if they can keep Suzi, the dentist, from
tinkering with the lyrics.

The jokes will make you laugh, if your fear of blood
doesn’t get to you first.

What is it about all that water that drives some
people crazy?

Read on and you might figure it out.