A WHOLE HEAP OF SF ACTION coming your way this Tuesday!
That’s the date Gun Runner, my collaboration with Larry Correia, will be released.
In conjunction with that Baen recently interviewed us about the book.
Catch the interview here.
Political TV ads can be fun. And annoying.
Debates can be fun. And maddening.
You can indeed learn things about the candidates from watching the ads and debates. But fifteen and thirty second snippets of information really don’t give you the full picture. And sometimes they actually hide the facts, producing nothing more than informational smog.
Recently, I decided I wanted to really know what Mitt Romney thought. What he was about. What he hopes to accomplish if he wins the presidency. If Mitt was someone in my neighborhood, I’d go visit the man, and we’d have a chat.
I’d ask him about his ideas and past. I’d ask him to give me examples. Because of the nature of the issues at stake and the number of them, I imagine our chat would probably last a few hours. It might stretch over a number of evenings.
Of course, I’d want time to consider our chat and determine where I did and didn’t agree with him. I’d want to hear what others thought. And I’d want to look into his history, his successes and failures.
But the first step would be to go to the man himself and hear him out.
I hate it when people put words in my mouth. I’m sure Romney, or anyone else running, hates that same thing. If I were running, I’d would hope folks would take the time to hear me out. They may ultimately disagree with me on many or a few things. But I’d hope, as they are gathering information, that they would take the time to actually go to the source and listen to what I myself had to say.
Unfortunately, I can’t walk around the corner and knock on Mitt’s door. But he did write a book that was published in 2010, and it’s probably the next best thing to talking to Romney at his kitchen table. The book is called No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.
I’ll admit I thought it was going to be a dry guide book explaining his position on every hot political issue. It’s not a guide book. In fact, he leaves a number of topics out. Nor was it dry.
I also suspected it might be a scathing attack piece on the Obama administration. It’s not that either. Not even close. He does criticize some things where he and Obama differ, but he also commends him on a few things. Either way, Obama is a very small part of the book.
So what IS this book?
Romney states its purpose in the introduction: it’s “about what I believe should be our primary national objective: to keep America strong and to preserve its place as the world’s leading nation” and “the course I believe we must take to strengthen the nation in order to remain prosperous, secure, and free” (2). It’s about his ideas on how to make sure America does not falter as so many nations have, but remains wealthy, happy, and productive.
I finished the book yesterday. I found it interesting, personable, sometimes surprising, and insightful.
I found Mitt Romney to be a man self-deprecating humor. He’s also a thinking man, one who likes to look at data to see what it shows. It’s clear he’s a man who does NOT think he knows everything or has a monopoly on every good idea, but he’s also a man who demands evidence. I also saw a man who is kind. He doesn’t talk much about his 14 years of service as a lay minister in his church in this book, but you can see how those years changed him as he discusses helping the unemployed, out-of-wedlock births, and single-parent families. Finally, I saw a man who loves, LOVES, America and is convinced she can remain the hope of the earth, but only if we do things that foster our strength.
This book outlines what he thinks those things are.
The book is written in a conversational and easy style with many examples from his personal experience, studies, and history. Romney’s record of accomplishments demonstrates his skills and hard work ethic. This book explains to what end he would apply that skill and work.
If you’re planning on voting this November for the president of the United States, I think you’ll find this book very useful. You may end up agreeing with many things he says. You may end up disagreeing with him on many points. But before you can do either, you need to understand what Romney’s position actually is. And the first step in doing so is to fully hear the man out, in his own words, from his own lips.
As a result, whether you end up deciding he’s your candidate or not, you WILL come away with important insights into the issues discussed.
I want you to know that I do not worship George, Ben, Tom, Adam or any of the other guys who formed our constitution and started this nation.
They put their lives and fortunes on the line for what they believed in. And I am immensely grateful for what they did. I enjoy tremendous freedoms because of their courage, determination, and sacrifice. Those guys, by-and-large, rock!
But I do NOT believe that their words are scripture nor that their ideas are sacrosanct—merely to be accepted and not to be considered and questioned and disagreed with.
Even so, these guys were gutsy and brilliant. They attempted something everyone thought would fail. Something that HAD failed every time it had been attempted in their recorded history. But they pulled it off and changed the world.
These guys believed in the common man. They believed that the educated common man was the best person to hold the reins of government. Thomas Jefferson thought up a rhyme to make the idea easy to remember. He said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
I can’t argue with that.
Of course, we’re not going to become experts on every policy issue. But we certainly can become informed on the broad principles and issues. And we can certainly become informed about the candidates.
Because I found No Apology so useful, over the next few days I’m going to summarize Romney’s main points, chapter by chapter, here. I’ll also point out interesting ideas and facts he shares as well as share any questions, quibbles, or disagreements I have.
I hope you find it useful. More importantly, I hope you read the book and join in the conversation.
What’s the first step to becoming an entertaining storyteller?
In a recent ZOE Nutrition podcast, James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, suggests the key to starting a new behavior, like telling entertaining stories, is doing four things:
But what’s the FIRST step?
It’s mastering the art of showing up.
That’s it.
What does that look like?
He shared an interesting story in the section where they were talking about making the behavior easy.
START
Let me give you two examples that’ll probably help clarify. So the first one this is just a really simple tactic, a very actionable thing, that you can use for building better habits. I call it the two-minute rule, and it just says take whatever habit you’re trying to build and you scale it down to something that takes 2 minutes or less to do.
So read 30 books a year becomes read one page. Do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat.
Now sometimes people resist that a little bit because they’re like, okay buddy, you know I know the real goal is not to just take my yoga mat out. I know I’m actually trying to do the workout, so this is some kind of trick, and if I know it’s a trick, then why would I fall for it?
I have this reader his name is Mitch. I mentioned him in Atomic Habits. He lost over 100 pounds. So what is that? 40 or 50 kilos? And he kept it off for more than a decade. And he had this strange little rule for himself where he first started going to the gym, and for the first like 6 weeks he wasn’t allowed to stay for longer than 5 minutes.
So he would get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, and drive home, and it sounds ridiculous. You know? It sounds silly. It’s obviously not going to get the guy the results that he wants, but what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up.
He was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week even if it was only for 5 minutes, and this is a pretty deep truth about habits. Which is that a habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and turn it into something more. You need to standardize before you optimize.
And so the two-minute rule kind of helps push back against that perfectionist tendency that we have sometimes, or against that tendency to try to do too much, and encourages you to master the art of just showing up.
END
That’s the answer!
If we want to be entertaining storytellers, the first, most powerful identity we can adopt is being the creative who shows up every day to work on his or her entertainment. Or maybe it’s five days a week. Or six days, four days, whatever your number is.
The first identity is that I’m the kind of creative that shows up to work. This awesome work of entertainment.
So what’s a two-minute behavior that might go along with that?
Here’s mine. After I come back from weighing myself in the morning, I set my writing session timer, open my writing document, read a bit of what I wrote in the previous session, and identify the task for this session.
That’s it. Nothing more.
That’s showing up.
If I show up and do that, I’ve shown up.
If, for some reason, I miss showing up. I identify the next slot in that day to get it done.
I can master all the other parts of writing entertainment later. But I must master the art of SHOWING UP first.
So tell yourself you’re the kind of creative who shows up to write entertainment every day.
Make that your identity. You can expand that identity later. But let’s start here.
Write your two-minute behavior. Get specific on the time and action.
Then be like Mitch. Show up and celebrate showing up.
And if, like Mitch, it takes you six weeks to master the art of showing up, then it takes six weeks. Big whoop.
Writing fiction is a long-haul game. That means the name of this game is playing the game until you win the game. And to do that you first have to master the art of showing up.
This is the key. When you master this, everything else is possible.
“I am the kind of creative who shows up every day to create.”
Tell yourself that. Repeat it when brushing your teeth. Make that your identity. Be that guy.
If you have a two-minute action for showing up, share it.
If you don’t have one yet, identify one and share it. And if your action doesn’t work? No biggie. Act like a scientist and tweak it until it does.
NOTES
ZOE Nutrition podcast with James Clear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcdzK8BOfBY or https://zoe.com/learn/podcast-how-to-master-healthy-eating
Readers, for the last year or so I’ve set the blog to show a summary of each post which you then click into as shown below.
For the years before that I just showed the full text like you see now.
I personally engage more with full text displays because I read as I scroll, so even if I’m skipping, I do at least pick up the gist of the post.
Do you have a preference? Does one view “feel easier” to you?
Let me know.
Back in 2011 I wrote a post titled “Since when did young adult fiction become the cure for cancer?” It was a response to all the YASaves hysteria. The main point of my amazing post (grin) was that the people complaining about some YA content wanted not to ban books, but to simply have a way to more easily evaluate if they wanted to buy a particular book in the first place.
They want to avoid purchasing what they thought was a box of Marshmallow Mateys only to open it and find a bunch of bicycle sprockets.
Last year I decided to work on a solution. I have some ideas. But before I get ahead of myself and build something, I want to really understand if it’s a problem worth solving. I want to chat with others who do care about content to see what aspects of this are important to them and what they’re doing now to find this information.
So, if you wish books had ratings for sex, violence, and language, then I want to talk to you. It will take about 20 minutes. If you’re open to chatting, leave a comment, or click Contact above and fill in the form.
Because I live up in the middle of nowhere, we’ll have to chat via a web meeting. But never fear: I’ll host that. All you’ll have to do is show up and answer my questions 🙂
On November 24th last year, a little over 13 months ago, I released my first indie title—Servant: The Dark God Book 1. That release was the official rise from the sideways swamp crash I had with Tor Books.
BTW, sideways swamp crashes in publishing, which can be caused by all sorts of reasons, are not uncommon. Most writers will take a hit or three in their career. That’s just part of the writing business. The question is what happens after the swamp crash?
In my case, I got to work. And, boy, was it a lot of work.
The results have been positive. It was not a phoenixian rise from ashes to glory; it was more like a damp crew patching the ship in the jungle with whatever they had at hand and then launching with nothing but a few birds making any noise. We are by no means past the many perils and obstacles on the path–right now a solid hit from just about anything could knock us out of the sky.
But we are airborne.
We are flying.
And by that I mean the business is delighting readers and generating income.
I’ll probably hit close to 23,000 paid sales since that launch. The large majority of them were for Bad Penny. To give you some perspective, a single title will make the official Publishers Weekly bestsellers lists (of traditionally published authors) hardback and paperback categories when the title has sold around 100,000 copies in the year. The top dogs report sales of a few million.
It’s clear the John D. Brown crew has got a ways to go.
But we don’t have to reach that lofty level to be viable. It would be awesome. At the same time, it’s helpful to be realistic. There are somewhere between 300-400 titles on the adult hardback and paperback list combined. The same on the children’s lists. So I estimate there are around 700 traditionally published books, fiction and non-fiction, that sell at those bestseller levels. That’s out of the millions of trade titles available on Amazon.
The good news is that the majority of writers making a living don’t appear there. The fact is that you don’t have to sell 100,000+ copies of a single title in a year to make a living. In the indie world, you can do just fine with what Russell Blake calls base hits and doubles.
So are we making a living?
Those sales have generated enough net profit to purchase us a nice used vehicle and a few other things. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick (as my neighbor Mike Carr used to say), but making $10-20k can’t replace the day job. Not even close. Still, it’s a beginning.
Will our crew make it?
Can they survive the ferocious flying monkeys?
Stay tuned.
In the meantime, I want to summarize a few things I’ve learned about indie publishing and give a few shout-outs.
First, I want to thank all the readers who decided to give one of my books a shot. From the reviews and sales, it appears the majority found just what they were looking for (and there was much rejoicing).
Second, a big thanks goes to Larry Correia. Not only is he generous and enthusiastic, but his audience is as well. The Monster Hunter Nation made a definite difference for me this year.
I want to thank LL Muir and Diane Darcy, two romance writers who have been incredibly generous in sharing their indie insights and support.
Devon Dorrity and Dixon Leavitt spent hours, HOURS, of their time helping me with covers. I can’t thank them enough.
I also need to thank the Codex Writers. There’s a small group of us indies there, and they’ve all be very helpful in sharing insights about what’s worked for them and what hasn’t.
I’ve found other resources helpful as well. The Passive Voice kept me current on the industry. Russell Blake’s blogs gave me a clear-eyed opinion of what it takes to succeed. The Calibre ebook editor has saved me many times. And Anne-Marie Concepcion’s online course on using InDesign to publish ebooks was a very good introduction, as were Dean Wesley Smith’s online courses on interior and cover formatting. I list other resources I found useful in my Resources for Indie Writers post.
Okay, so what have I learned?
This is retail. If your product is not somewhere that people can see it, they won’t buy it.
I was in Wal-Mart the other day. My sister calls it the Evil Empire, but she’s a Tarzjay snob. I myself am a value shopper. I want what I want, and I want to pay as little for it as possible. At the same time, I’m not going to go out of my way to get it because searching around costs time and money. So if I’m looking for something in Wal-Mart and I don’t see it on the shelves, guess what? I buy something similar that will do the job.
Wal-Mart used to stock Marzetti’s Ranch Dip. The best vegetable dip EVAR. But then sometime this year, they stopped stocking it.
Why?! Why do they stop stocking stuff the moment I find it?!
(Hey, maybe that’s why they’re the Evil Empire . . .)
I mourned for a few seconds. And then I purchased the Lighthouse dip. It’s good. If they put Marzetti’s back on the shelves, I’ll switch back immediately. But the point is that if it’s not in front of my eyeballs when I go shopping, I ain’t gonna buy it.
And I’m finding retail is the same with ebooks as it is with everything else. You can have the best product in the world, but you aren’t going anywhere with it until you are visible to your buyers.
The way to make my stuff visible was not by publishing on Amazon, Nook, and the rest.
Publishing means nothing.
Think about it. There are, right now, 3,079,561 books in the Kindle bookstore.
Yes, three million!
If those were physical books, and we lined them up spine-out like we do on a bookshelf, and we assumed the spines average about an inch in width, they would make a line 48.6 miles long.
For us Utahans, that’s a line of books that stretches from the Mormon temple in downtown Salt Lake City, past Provo, and ends in Springville! (Look up your own local distances to get an idea.)
That’s the kind of visibility you get by publishing your book, which is nada.
So if getting it in the store that’s 50 miles long didn’t help, what did?
Getting on a bestseller list.
I sold thousands of copies of Bad Penny on Nook when I was on the Nook’s top 100 list. I rose to #3, in the entire Nook store, then hung out around #50 for about a month. And when that burst of sales that made me #3 fell out of the algorithm (30 days later), I fell off the list. My sales dropped like a stone. Not to nothing. But they were a fraction of what they had been.
How did I get that #3 slot to begin with? The same way I rose to #30 for a few hours in the Kindle store, then slowly dropped to the 1,200s for a few days. I got it by placing an ad with the king of book advertising services, aka BookBub.
How did I get onto BookBub? Here’s their requirements and tips. Please note that the reviews of Bad Penny were part of what made the book appealing to BookBub.
How did I get reviews? By using other ad services to make my book visible and getting mentions on blogs like Larry Correia’s and a few others. And by following recommendations in the book Let’s Get Visible and Your First 1,000 Copies and the suggestions of others who are selling well. And that’s a key thing too–looking to see what folks who are selling well are doing, not those who aren’t.
Of course, readers also liked the books enough create word of mouth. And I can track some of my sales spikes to specific posts or people. The ultimate goal is to have so much word of mouth that everyone’s talking about you. But until that time, I ain’t going to rely on word of mouth alone.
Why not?
Because I’d like to increase my odds of success. I’d like to accelerate them. And thinking that word of mouth alone is going to do that flies in the face of everything I’ve learned about retail. Read what I had to say about books and lemonade and tending your garden for more. Consistent efforts with methods that actually have some track record of success seem to have helped a great deal.
BTW, Bad Penny is currently in the top 10 of three of Amazon’s thriller lists. I guaran-dang-tee you that being on those lists is a big factor in me selling somewhere around 60 copies a day. I saw that with Nook. Being visible starts a virtuous cycle–more people give you a try; if they like the book, they spread the word, which leads to more sales, which keeps you visible, which prompts more new readers to give you a try. Yeah, you’ve got to be good. But you’ve got to be visible first.
When readers purchase a book, they are looking for a certain type of experience. And my book’s experience isn’t so singular that readers can’t get something roughly similar from another book.
I love Lee Child. But Robert Crais provides an experience that’s basically inside the same ballpark. So does Nelson Demille and a whole host of others, including me.
If Lee Child stops writing or slows down his production to one book every four years, I’m not going to stop reading thrillers. There are plenty of other authors that give me the general adrenaline, surprise, action experience I’m looking for. I’ll be sad, but there are a lot of good authors out there. And I’m sure a few will become my new Lee Child.
Of course, we aren’t all exactly the same. I provide a noticeably different tale than Lee Child does even though we’re in the same Lone-Ranger-vigilante-justice action genre. And so, if I produce the best tale I can, I will find some readers will come to prefer me to Child because I line up more with their tastes than he does.
In addition to continue to work on visibility and craft, this means I’ve got to up my production. I’m going to try for 2.5 brand new books in 2015. That’s nothing for some folks. But that’s a good stretch goal for me.
Even though visibility and studying your craft helps, nobody I know who is doing well has a replicable step-by-step program that guarantees success. There are some activities that seem to make the odds better, but there is no guarantee.
For example, from what I wrote above about BookBub, you’d think that’s the brass ring. Nope. I know other authors who have run promos with them and didn’t have near the success Bad Penny did.
Russell Blake’s advice on this seems to square best with my experience. See the links to his blogs here to see what I’m talking about.
The basic concept behind lean startup is that when you’re in a market without a lot of info on what works, the company that wins is the one that learns what works the fastest. And you do that by conducting experiments.
You experiment to see if you’re offering any value to the intended audience. You experiment to see if you’re promo methods are actually feeding your engine of growth. You experiment to see if your audience really is big enough.
The experimental approach taught in the lean startup stuff has freed me from a lot of anxiety. Success or failure is not about me personally. It’s about my techniques. It’s about my craft and business skills. It’s about me learning how to learn quicker.
I’m approaching my thriller and epic fantasy properties as experiments. I’m approaching various visibility methods as experiments. My current state of craft is an experiment. If what I’m doing with my current properties doesn’t work, I can pivot and experiment with something new.
The question is whether I can learn what works–to find an opportunity to add value and provide that value–before I run out of runway.
If you’re interested in these ideas, let me recommend The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, which explains the general principles, and Running Lean: Iterate From Plan A to a Plan That Works by Ash Mayura, which shows you how to start to implement them. These two books have changed how I approach the writing business.
The bottom line is that I love developing stories and sharing them with readers.
I knew this already, of course. But having the ship up and flying again made it hit home in a big way. I enjoy the process of developing a story. I love the research, the story generation, the surprises that come along the way. And I love the emails I get and the discussions I have with readers who have read my books and enjoyed the heck out of them.
So that’s the big summary.
Year two stands before us. Let’s hope John D. Brown and company can learn and produce at higher levels than we ever have before.
Have a wonderful 2015!
Edit 1/14/2015: Here’s John Ellsworth, another indie author, with a similar tale. Although I’m jealous of his seven books in a year. I need to get cracking!
Sometimes I think some of us indies get this weird attachment syndrome and start thinking we’re Amazon.
Joe Konrath recently hosted a blog-conversation with Lee Child about the whole Amazon vs. traditional publishers thing. The Passive Voice had an active discussion about it as well. Kudos to Lee Child for yet again showing up and injecting a new perspective into the conversation. It can indeed become something of an echo chamber in the main indie blogs, which I love, but which nevertheless do still tend to sometimes echo. Having someone with his experience come engage and share his two cents was helpful.
One thing his comments reiterated to me is that neither Amazon nor the publishers are in this as the author’s let’s-get-pinky-rings BFF.
I’m not going to carry an ounce of water for Amazon in their fight with Hachette. I’m not going to carry an ounce for the trad publishers either.
I think it’s helpful for all of us to try to understand the truth about the business, and spread that to other authors, but that’s very different from this knee-jerk Defender of Amazon thing that goes on, which seems so very much like Republicans and Democrats turning a blind eye to their own candidates and fixating a hyper-critical one the others.
Case in point: here’s a link to a description of Amazon’s Gazelle Project.
Why do indie authors care? Because we’re Amazon vendors as well.
Look, I love what Amazon has enabled me to do. I love that Nook and Apple are helping enable it as well. But was this Gazelle Project a good thing? A bad thing? If we stand by and cheer Amazon in such tactics, are we essentially standing by and cheering as Germany takes Austria, France, and Poland? Or are we like England cheering the USA coming in with their troops and bombers?
I’m NOT a traditional publisher. And I’m NOT Amazon, or any other retailer. Even when I contract with them. None of us are. I sometimes wonder if some of us have gotten a bit confused about this.
Konrath says don’t worry about the tiger (Amazon) when a wolf (traditional publishers) is gnawing on your leg. But if you’re an indie writer, you have no wolf gnawing on your leg. That’s someone else’s problem. But we are indeed in bed with the tiger.
Why haven’t we seen more posts about the Gazelle Project on the big indie blogs? Lee Child, darling of the traditional publishers, has to point me in its direction? Why haven’t we been more curious about this tiger’s behavior?
Let’s make hay while the sun shines. The tiger seems to be fairly decent right now. He’s not perfect. For example, eBay strangely enough only charges 15% to sell via their site while Amazon charges 30%. But let’s not forget that as decent as he is, he’s still a tiger. And he’s probably not like those poor guys being made to do tricks by Ringling Brothers.
