No More Marketing

After reading a discussion on Kindleboards about marketing, I have decided that I am not going to go all out on it anymore, not that I ever did that much to begin with. My time is better spent on writing. Having said that, I will probably only update my Twitter and Facebook whenever there is going to be a free promo on some other exciting event. I'm not fond of either one to begin with.

In other book related news, I probably won't get much time to work on Sunset High for the rest of this weekend, considering that tonight I have to do an author interview and tomorrow my mother decided that she wants to come and stay the night. That will likely push back the release of the next Sunset High book to the 3rd weekend in April. There are no guarantees of a specific release date at this time.

I really need to get on that interview since it has a ton of questions, so this is it for tonight. At midnight tonight, Sunset High Under Construction will be going free on the Kindle. Unfortunately I won't be around my computer much tomorrow to monitor the promo. However, after it is over I will post back with the results, just for shits and giggles.

Doctor's Appointments and Book Writing

I've decided to divide my blog posts up a bit so that if you are interested in reading my personal stuff, you can check it out, but if you're only interested in reading about my book writing progress then you can skip through my personal stuff and check that out instead. It's going to look something like this:

Personal

I've decided to make a conscious effort to infuse more of my personality into my blog by writing about my life and my thoughts on various subjects. It will probably be a hodgepodge of both, since my life isn't particularly interesting.

I had another wonderfully soul sucking day at work. The only thing that keeps me there are my awesome co-workers, the fact that they let you use the internet, don't care if you miss days or come in late, and the fresh organic cafeteria food. Okay, okay, so it obviously has a lot of perks . . . but the fact of the matter is that the job itself, as in what I'm actually doing, sucks.

In other news, I finally reached the point of pain where if I have to live with it much longer I'll be jumping off of the Security Service parking garage and plumetting to my death gleefully, so I called the doctor and made an appointment for Monday, at which time I will be taking care of about 3 different medical issues in one visit. Isn't that always the case with poorish people? We wait until everything falls apart before we head to the doctor.

So, hopefully I can get on some pain meds, find out what's bothering my cyst and my back, and get on the proper thyroid medication. When you have thyroid problems . . . you're a bitch . . . and you don't lose weight . . . and then you're even more of a bitch because you can't lose weight . . . so then you get all depressed and eat a bunch and then bitch about how you ate a bunch because you were depressed because you can't lose weight. LOL Sounds fun, right?

Well, that's enough personal stuff and complaining for one afternoon.

Book Info

Today I will hopefully be getting a chance to add a few more pages to the next book in the Sunset High series, which is still on schedule for a mid-April release. I actually imagine that I will finish it up over the weekend and it will be going into editing phase sometime next week.

I still haven't abandoned the idea of redoing the covers on the series. There is obviously no coherency right now. But I'm thinking that I may wait and redo all of the covers after the series is complete. Whether I will do them myself or pay someone else to do them is still unseen, but I'm fairly sure I will end up spending a weekend learning Paint.net and do them myself. I've seen a lot of indie authors with super professional looking book covers. Unfortunately I haven't mastered GIMP enough yet to take it to that level. . . and I'm too cheap to buy Photoshop (which I actually know how to use because when I took graphic design in college that was the program I learned on).

So, that's that. The big news of the week however, is that:

Sunset High (Under Construction) will be having a FREE promo on the Kindle this Sunday on April 1st, 2012.

Sleepy Time

I have a confession to make. Last night I only ended up getting 5 pages written before I went to bed. No book promotions or anything. I think I only lasted about an hour. Why?

Yesterday I busted ass. I cleaned my apartment, changed the water in my 10 gallon aquarium, cleaned my rabbit's extra large rabbit cage and my parakeet's huge flight cage. On top of that, I cooked and did an hour and seventeen minutes of P90X. lol So precise. Needless to say, I was wiped out. To think that I would even be able to force myself to stay up until midnight was a pipe dream. On the plus side, I did get about 11 hours of sleep, making up for a lot of the sleep that I lost during the week.

Today I changed the titles of the two Sunset High books in Amazon to include "Book 1" and Book 2" so that people know it's a series. Hopefully that won't screw up Amazon working on the page number update for Under Construction. I'm actually going to edit both books, once they are approved in my KDP dashboard again to include links to all of the books in the series as well as to my Facebook fan page and this blog. I've noticed that pretty much all books include something like this at either the beginning or the end, so it makes sense to add it to my own.

On today's agenda, write for the next two and a half hours and then make dinner and do P90X StretchX. After that, hopefully I can get some promotion work done for Sunset High. So far the third book is off to a strong start, I think. Exciting things to come.

And as a heads up, I will be running a free promotion for all of my work on Easter. There's about a 98% chance that the third book will not be published by then, but if it is then it will also be included in the promo.

No Longer on Smashwords

Some of you may have noticed that Sunset High is no longer on Smashwords. I took it down in order to comply with the KDP Select program which states that my books have to remain exclusive to them if I want to use their free promotions. The truth of the matter is that the free promotions on Amazon do far more for my book sales and publicity than Smashwords does, even with its extended distribution.

I have been spending a bit of time on Kindleboards lately, and it seems that the Kindle is still the dominating ereader. From what I have gathered (this may not be fact, so don't quote me on it, more like an observation) it seems that ebooks are purchased and downloaded from Amazon more than any other place online.

In other news, I've managed to free up a bit of my time so I will begin writing again starting tonight. For the next few days I'll be dividing my time between working on the 3rd part of Sunset High and marketing the series. I busted ass today to get a whole weekends worth of work done in one day, so I should have a lot of time tomorrow to get stuff done. On a good day, I can write 1/3rd of a book in one sitting. I think right now the estimated deadline will be to finish the 3rd book in the series by the middle of April and have it off to the Amazon digital printing press.

I am going to try and start writing some personal posts on this blog as well so it's not all about the books. Like everyone else, I have a life, and I thought it might be nice if I shared some of it with my readers so that I'm not just a name on the cover of a book.

On any note, it's time to quit yammering and get to work.

Quick Post

Sunset High (Musical Chairs) will be available for free download at Smashwords until 03/22/2012. You can check it out here: Sunset High Smashwords

I will probably not be uploading Under Construction to Smashwords until this weekend due to time constraints, at which point it will also have a free 5 day promotion. This will be the one and only free promotion of Under Construction on Smashwords. As soon as Amazon gets the estimated page numbers issue fixed, I will also be running a one and only time 5 day promotion on there. I will create a blog post on here and also send out an email to my list whenever that happens.

My goal there afterwards is to align the Amazon and Smashwords promos so that they are in sync. It's a bit hard to do that at this time since I've been having so many issues with uploading to Amazon, but eventually everything will fall into place.

Hopefully I can begin production on the third book of the series by the end of this month. Well, hopefully before then, but I'm going to be a realist about it since my schedule is so busy right now.

Publishing on Smashwords

My days have been exhaustively hectic lately. I feel lucky to get any work done since this last week. But enough with the complaining already.

Today I published Sunset High (Musical Chairs) on Smashwords. Surprisingly, the editing process to convert it from Kindle to Smashwords was fairly easy. It's all about keeping your book formatting simple. Hopefully everything converted over well as I have yet to check some of the files.

On any note, I'm hoping to get Under Construction published on Smashwords tomorrow.

Sorry this post is so short. As I've already mentioned, I'm absolutely exhausted and it's time for me to hit the hay.

More Amazon Problems

Apologies if this post is a jumbled mess. I've got a lot of things going on right now, 4 different tabs open with various things occupying space and my mind, and other personal stuff weighing me down on top of that. Having said that, I'm going to try to go over everything as best as I can.

Sunset High: Under Construction is officially published and available for purchase on the Amazon Kindle. For those who of you who are on my mailing list, you may have noticed that you didn't receive an announcement about this. Why? Because Amazon is glitching again and, as expected, has not yet updated the estimated page numbers. I contact Amazon but the original person who responded seems to have just blown it off. That was on 3/13. I sent another email to them again to let them know it needs to get fixed before I start promoting the book.

I am now truly grateful that the next book in the series won't be a second edit version. It will be a full and complete version so I shouldn't have to worry about this happening again.

In other Amazon news, I also noticed that my Author's page is being funky today . . . as in it's only displaying one of my books and not both of them. For some reason, Amazon has been super glitchy for me the last few months . . . not just on the KDP side, but also from the affiliate marketing side of things and their market place. There have been some days where I haven't been able to log into my affiliate account at all, and other days where the search function on Amazon for some categories seemed to be broken. It usually doesn't take them long to straighten out these problems, a day or two tops, but it's still annoying.

I have decided to also start publishing my work on Smashwords so that I can have access to a larger distribution network. This is my first time using Smashwords so I guess it will be a feel and go process. I'm intrigued by their coupon system though, so I might be testing it out sometime in the near future. It seems a bit more convenient than Amazon's 5 free days of promotion for every 90 days that your book remains exclusive to them.

I read on the Smashwords website today that they are currently working with Amazon on integrating their systems so that people can publish their books on Smashwords and have them distributed to all of the main ebook networks, Amazon included. This option currently isn't available to everyone yet. It will be super convenient when it is though, considering that Smashwords covers everyone except Amazon.

In other news, I will shortly be launching a much larger promotion campaign for my work. I plan on submitting a few press releases and exploring some other inexpensive promotion channels.

That's about it for now. I've been super busy lately so I haven't had time to get any work done. Hopefully tomorrow will be a more productive day.

Under Construction No Longer Under Construction

For the short time that I had to work on Under Construction today, it was pretty productive. Idk why that sounded like it rhymed in my head when it really doesn't. lol

Anyways, today I threw together a cover for Under Construction with my mad (or urm . . . lame) GIMP skills, ironed out the kinks in the upload of the manuscript, and sent it off to the Amazon Kindle printing press.

Hopefully everything will go through alright as I submitted it through the page that the original second part of the book was on. Since the original second part got combined with the first part, this is a 100% brand new book. I'm hoping that Amazon doesn't glitch and publish all of the stuff from the previous book with the new upload. *crosses fingers* Here's to hoping.

With any luck, Sunset High: Under Construction, will be available to the public within the next 12 hours.

Rules of Editing Your Own Stuff

Let's face it, not everyone can afford to hire an editor to read through their work before it's published, especially broke ass indie authors like myself. On that note, I tend to take editing from a marketing stand point. At one time I wrote an info product on choosing Amazon products that convert. On that note, I should probably drag that book from the sales page and go ahead and post it on Amazon as well since it's already finished.

Anyways, one rule to writing info products is to not sweat the small stuff. This basically means to give it one good edit and then let it go. Why only one? Because people have a tendency of getting caught on imperfections. Almost undoubtedly, if you edit your work more than once, you will change something every single time that you edit. In essence, even if it is good enough for most of the general public, it will never be perfect to you. So, the simple rule is . . . edit once and then let it go.

Of course, this probably shouldn't really apply to fiction literature or other literature for entertainment purposes. Most people who read a lot know the rules of English, and there are at least a handful of them that can spot a mistake a mile away. It's a lot easier to spot mistakes in literature if you're not the one writing it.

Anyways, enough of that topic. What this leads to is the fact that I finished editing Under Construction today. . . which means that it's done, finite. Hopefully tomorrow I will have time to design a cover for it and then it will be off to the Amazon cyber printing press. lol

Starting tomorrow my time will be a lot more limited, so it's highly likely that it will take me at least another month to write the third book in the series. At any rate, Under Construction should get published before the end of this week. Here's to hoping that everything goes well. I already have the cover elements picked out, I just need to put them all together.

Facebook Fan Page

I finally created a Facebook Fan page. You can access it here: Marla Braziel's Official Facebook Fan Page. I will also be putting a link in the sidebar of this blog. Everyone seems to love Facebook so hopefully if I keep up with it it will be an easier way to keep up with updates and what not, though I will probably only post when I'm running a free promo or if something particularly interesting is going on. I'm not a big fan of status updates, even on my own personal Facebook account. Facebook is just not something that I'm really that into.

In other news, it feels like my retinas are bleeding. I've been editing Under Construction for the last two hours. I have about an hours more editing to go. I'm currently 2/3rds of the way through it. If my eyes don't fall out of my head, there's a slim possibility that I might finish it tonight, though I'm not going to hold my breath. All of the stuff I'm going through right now is pretty well written the first time around . . . but I know that the last chapter of the book is a bloody mess because I was so tired when I wrote it that I totally ignored all grammar and punctuation rules and completely made it fluff free (basically all dialogue with nothing in between). So yeah, the last chapter will definitely take me longer to edit than the rest of the book has thus far.

On any note, I'm starting to have a feeling that it might end up getting published tomorrow as long as I don't flub around too much during the day. It would be nice to get it out there so I can start working on book #3.

After getting multiple estimates from cover illustrators and checking out what I could get done on Fiverr, I have decided to continue with my own cover design ideas. I can do as good of a job as the people on Fiverr, and I just can't afford to hock out $300 - $500 for unique cover illustration right now. Maybe someday if the books gain enough popularity. As of right now though, my mad GIMP skills will do just fine. LOL

Well, that's it for the update today. Back to work with me. *cracks whip on myself*

A Slow Process

Today I'm writing a post before the work begins again. This time it's because I'm supposed to go out with a friend so I wanted to make sure that I got the blog post done before she called. I don't work well on alcohol which means that, if she calls me before I start working in the book today, I probably won't work on it at all.

I managed to finish writing the second book of Sunset High on Wednesday. It's definitely in rough mode as of right now though and needs quite a bit of tweaking before it will be ready to go into cover design mode. I have decided for the subheading to be Under Construction, due to finding some awesome graphic art for the cover. XP Don't worry, it does actually make sense to events in the book.

I'm still playing with the idea of whether or not to revamp the Musical Chairs cover. I got quotes from various artists, most of which were ridiculously high. I thought about going on Fiverr, but I'm pretty sure that most of the people on there won't do a much better job than I did. On any note, I'm thinking of submitting a handful of gigs for cover art for Musical Chairs to see what comes back.

My time, starting on Monday, will be pretty limited as to how long I can work on the books every other day. I doubt there will be any 4 hour writing days for a while. Having said that, it's probably going to take another week or two to finish up Under Construction, especially since I won't be devoting much time to it today.

Well, that's it on that front. Let's see how much work I can get done today before I go out.

Success!

This is the first time that I'm not writing a post at some crazy hour of the night. lol In fact, I'm actually writing this post before I start working on, hopefully finishing up, the next book in the Sunset High series . . . which is still lacking a subtitle. I usually don't decide those things until I'm done writing a book.

Even though the first promo for Sunset High is still ongoing until midnight tonight, I am happy to report that I consider it a complete success. As of right now it has had 685 downloads and has climbed the rankings of the Amazon Best Sellers list for free ebooks. It currently occupies spot #10 on the Occult Horror Best Sellers list and spot number #9 in Children's Science Fiction & Fantasy. It has also received 3 Facebook likes but unfortunately no reviews as of yet. The promotion will last until midnight tonight.

With this new found success, I have decided to spend the money on get a professional cover designed for the book. The cover that it has now, which was designed by me (mad Photoshop skills, I know), looks super unprofessional in the midst of all of the other Best Sellers. Seriously, I only saw one book cover on the first page of the Best Sellers list that looked worse than mine, and that was a default cover that Kindle provides to people who don't upload their own covers.

On any note, it would be nice to give the series a cohesive look. I know that if I continue to design the covers myself, that will not happen.

Hopefully I can complete the second book in the Sunset High series by this weekend. If I end up waiting for cover design, it might take a little bit longer to get it published and available to the public. I guess I'll have to wait and see how much I get done tonight. I have about 5 hours of work that I can do on it. That should be enough to finish it and then start fleshing it out and editing it at the same time. I feel, at the moment, that it needs quite a bit of fleshing out so that people who haven't read the first book will be able to pick up the second book without feeling too confused.

First Free Promotion

I was supposed to have posted this last night, but I stayed up past midnight and the free promotion seemed to be running late so I didn't want to announce it until I was 100% sure that it was in full swing. Well, it's finally happened.

For the rest of the day, and tomorrow until midnight, Sunset High: Musical Chairs will be free on the Amazon Kindle. I've decided to only run a two day promotion this time to see how it goes.

What am I hoping to get out of this? To be honest, I would like a few reviews of the book, thought from what I've read in author's forums, that typically doesn't happen with these free promotion events. Here's to hoping though.

Sunset High: Musical Chairs
Read it Free 03/06/2012 - 03/8/2012

A Slow Day

Today I wasn't planning to work on my book, but the thing that I was originally planning to work on had a set back so it ended up being a book day. The funny thing is that I was so excited about it because I had next to no obligations today so I had, quite literally, all day to work on the book. For some odd reason, writers block kicked in like a mofo. Not only writer's block, but I was strangely tired all day long. I couldn't stare at the screen for more than a few minutes without getting sleepy.

I got up at 7am, did somethings around the house and worked on the book for a little bit, and then went back to sleep at 10am. Then I woke back up at noon, just in time to fix lunch for my mother before she came over. She stayed until 4:30pm. . . and after she left I promptly went back to bed and slept until 6pm. Idk what was wrong with me today. I then got up and worked on the book for a short time more, quickly feeling sleepy again so I stopped. All in all, in the day the day that I probably could have used to both finish the book, completely edit it, create a cover, and have it uploaded . . . I got about 2 pages written. :( I'm so disappointed in myself.

In other news, it looks like Amazon took the estimated pages feature off of my product page for Sunset High: Musical Chairs, which means that as long as nothing changes between now and Monday, there will be a free promotion for the book starting on Monday. Who knows what Amazon will do between now and then though.

On any note, I'm still estimating that the second book in the series will probably be finished and published by the end of next week, which should line up nicely with the promotion of the first book. As I've said before though, things could always change before then. Right now, however, everything appears to be on track.

Problems with Kindle Product Page Updating

It's 11:46 p.m. Another post around midnight. I actually almost forgot that I had to write this one.

So, I just had another 4 hour writing session and accomplished quite a bit. I imagine that I will finish the 2nd book on Saturday and begin the editing process. Having said that, there's a pretty good possibility that it will end up getting published sometime next week. Don't quote me on that though. Things can always come up that could prevent me from working on it.

I contacted Amazon today about an issue that I've been having with the first book. I republished it but the number of estimated pages didn't update. It went from 22 to 24. They're looking into it right now and will have an answer for me by March 7th as to what's going on with that.

After that's all cleared up with I'll be doing the first free promotion for the book. So, if you want to know exactly when that's going to happen then now would be a good time to jump on my mailing list. I haven't decided yet if it will be a one day promotion or last for 5 days. If you don't feel like signing up to my mailing list then I will also be posting an announcement on this blog the day of the promotion.

I can't think of much else to write right now. I just ate a bunch of dark chocolate and have been listening to Civilian by Wye Oak for the last 30 minutes on repeat so I'm feeling a bit out of it (the song has nothing to do with my feeling out of it, btw).