Day 18: How Could I Forget?

Would you believe I was forgetting to blog today?

Well, it's true. I've spent the past few hours doing some planning work - not on books, but on my life - and I paid my grandad a visit. I was getting ready to go to bed, and well, this happened.

I'm going to be brief: the only writing I did today was the flash fiction story, Love Talker. It was fun. It has sex mentioned in it. It's in the aftermath of Balor Reborn, like the others stories have thus-far been. And did I mention the sex?

It's also a fun way of looking at another Irish fairy. Irish fairies were interesting.

You know what else was interesting? Coppers Uncovered. I went to see it last night, because I'd heard good things and I knew 1/8th of the cast. I brought a friend, we laughed, we had a beer - turns out I don't dislike beer - and we laughed some more. In a shockingly accurate portrayal of Irish courting habits, the play was a delight and a wonder, and I recommend everyone go see it before the current run ends this Saturday.

You can get tickets here: http://www.eventbrite.ie/directory?q=coppers+uncovered&loc=Dublin,+Ireland

I really recommend that you do.

Anyway, last night also gave me a chance to talk to the aforementioned friend that I brought, and I forced him to have a home-made cookie. The usual look of shocked approval appeared on his face. Job done.

One of those same cookies was my breakfast this morning, with a cuppa. Sure it would be rude not to.

But I can't just leave it there, can I? I can't just tease you with a cookie and a cup of tea. So, I'll leave you with some advice that had been written onto a folder I was using in first year, and that somehow managed to fit into whatever bag I was using at the time:

Good night, ladies and gentlemen!

P.S. Here's the obligatory reminder of the free books that I have to keep pointing out to people - rude not to, etc. etc.

Balor Reborn (US/IRL):https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008S1FGFW
Balor Reborn (UK):https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B008S1FGFW

Old Gods Returned (US/IRL):https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00963VXXA
Old Gods Returned (UK): https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00963VXXA

You can also buy The Hounds of Hell at either of the links below:
US/IRL: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DYQNTZA
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00DYQNTZA

Day 17: Free Books?

For a while now, I've been contemplating doing something. Today, it finally happened: I made Balor Reborn and Old Gods Returned free for a short period of time. And that is the little extra surprise I had in mind to begin yesterday, but that didn't work out because The Hounds of Hell wasn't available.

So, yes, two free books. I'm actually kind of a delighted to have done it. It adds to the number of stories I'm making available to read for free this week, with seven flash stories in Old Gods Returned, four released through the Modern Irish Myth website, and the whole novella that is Balor Reborn. I've terribly excited.

Today's flash story was a fun one to write, because it focuses on a character who's first introduced in The Hounds of Hell, right after the events of Balor Reborn. There's about a week between the two books, so I thought it would be fun to play around with things a bit. I'm wondering who the first person will be to notice it who isn't my beta reader.

Anyway, you can find the story here: http://modernirishmyth.com/the-dancing-flames/

I also did some baking this afternoon. I've been wanting to bake for a while, and now that I have plans to see someone who hasn't tasted by cookies yet, I had the perfect excuse. I had one already, and it made me happy to have made it. Batch success!

(On a side note...I like oven gloves. Not because you can protect your hands while taking trays of cookies out of the oven, but because you can give yourself a high-five wearing them if they're the kind that are stuck together. That was fun way to pass a few seconds while I waited for the timer to go off for the cookies!)

I have to do a fair bit of writing tonight, but I'll deal with that later. I have to have dinner first, before going out, and food kind of takes priority when I'm not going to be home for a few hours. I don't want my stomach complaining later. Kind of going to a play, and that would be awkward.

Anyway, you want the links to the books, right? I'll just throw them down below for you. Peace out!

Balor Reborn (US/IRL):https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008S1FGFW
Balor Reborn (UK):https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B008S1FGFW

Old Gods Returned (US/IRL):https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00963VXXA
Old Gods Returned (UK): https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00963VXXA

You can also buy The Hounds of Hell at either of the links below:
US/IRL: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DYQNTZA
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00DYQNTZA

How Many Ebooks Does It Take?

Every day, I do two things: I check my ebook sales through Amazon, and I update a file that keeps track of my monthly earnings, and my earnings per book. But how many ebooks does it take to match my monthly earnings in work?

Let's break this down a bit:

- A $0.99 ebook earns me, approximately, €0.30.
- A $2.99 ebook earns me, approximately, €1.70.
- I earn, on weeks in which I don't have extra hours, roughly €90 from work. We'll call it €360 for the month.

With those figures in mind, I would need to see 1200 ebooks at $0.99 per month to be matching my earnings from the bookshop. You read that correctly.

I currently have three books with that price tag stuck on them: Planning Before Writing, Old Gods Returned, and Writing Gifts, on a Shoestring.

Similarly, I need to sell 212 ebooks at $2.99 to make the same €360 per month. It's considerably less, as you can see. Right now, I only have one book published at that price: Balor Reborn.

I'm under no illusion that this is an easy task. Selling even a tenth as many books as I'd need to just to match my bookshop earnings is difficult. If a writer planned on making a living from writing, they'd need to: (a) have a massive readership and/or (b) earn money from different sources.

I would recommend the latter. Ebooks, as I think I've said here before, are not the goldmine people seem to think they are. Unless you become a bestseller, you're probably not going to put food on the table three times a day every day of the month from ebooks. (Unless you can feed your whole family on €1.70 per meal and sell only 90 ebooks at $2.99... and even then, that's a challenge.)

Considering the fact that rent for most people is at least as much as I earn per month, most likely more, there are obvious obstacles to overcome financially. Believe me when I say this, I would much rather be able to earn from ebooks than mop up a shop floor on a Sunday afternoon. But that's just not possible at the moment.

Why the honesty about the figures? I guess because I want to make it clear to myself why I'm not just packing in the job every time I feel like I don't want to be there (mopping up floors with people walking on them at the same time, or carrying out rubbish bags that are torn in several places...) The reality is, I don't currently have another way of making money than working in a shop that isn't getting enough business to keep me constantly busy. I wouldn't mind if there was something to do throughout the entire day. I would prefer be nearly run off my feet in the shop keeping the till going or replacing stock on the shelves. I wouldn't feel like I was just waiting for the next person to show up with a book to buy or a complaint to make about how we don't, as a small bookshop, have the out of print book they're looking for.

Part of me had these high hopes that when college finished up, I'd be in a position to change my life drastically. That just isn't so. Sure, life is different. But I didn't make that change. Maybe I'm afraid to do something about it. That seems very likely. I'm going to try challenge that fear this week (Thursday's going to be my Face Up To Fear Day) by doing something different, by breaking out of the mould I'm in. While I'm still going to keep publishing ebooks (and I'm working on getting Planning Before Writing available through Smashwords, but the site is giving me some trouble), I'm not going to pretend that it'll be easy to even match my income from the bookshop any time soon.

It take a lot of ebooks to make a difference in a life. The best way you can help an author is to buy their books and recommend those books to friends. It can help pay food bills, or make life more meaningful, or help save for education, either their own or their children's or their partner's. How many people does it take to change an author's life?

Technical Error

Since publishing Balor Reborn in August (through my website, Smashwords, and Amazon), I haven't had any problems with its availability. Until now. Amazon let me down.

Now, I will add: this wasn't a case of Amazon sweeping in with a mighty iron fist and stamping out my rights to publish my own books. This was something much less interesting: an unexplained technical error that cleared my books from the search function of Amazon, and made them unavailable to purchase even through a direct link.

You can see my predicament.

Amazon is the site through which I sell most of my books. At the start of the month, I noticed that neither Balor Reborn nor Writing Gifts, on a Shoestring were visible. Both were still visible through Kindle Direct Publishing, and set to Live, but that meant nothing in the real world. I was down two books, one of which was fairly new, the other of which has sold more copies than any of my other books.

Not good. And worse still: I was due to publish Planning Before Writing at the end of the week.

I decided not to get disheartened or bloodthirsty. I contacted Amazon, explained the problem, and they got back to me fairly swiftly. I confirmed that though they had managed to turn the books up in searches of their own (as my friend Ian managed, too), they were not showing up for me, and when I went through KDP to access them, they weren't available.

Planning Before Writing was still published, as planned, last Sunday. It listed live and was available, though my two vanishing acts failed to showed up.

Today, things picked up. I checked KDP to see if there were any updates on sales figures. This is something I do regularly, sometimes to feel like I'm doing work, mostly out of curiosity. That was when I found out that Amazon had solved the technical error that they had gotten some people working on. I knew, because Balor Reborn had sold a copy. It's been a long time since I was so happy to sell a copy of that book!

Why am I telling you this story? To put it simply, I think Amazon did something right, and to point out that these things can happen easily. It wasn't a malicious assault by Amazon, though they sometimes pick up bad press with Indie authors, and they fixed it. It took a while, but I imagine their servers are fairly busy.

Plus, I mentioned this on a couple of social networking sites, and I think it's only fair to make it official: everything's sorted now. I'm back in action, and my author page on Amazon has never been more pleased. Four books with my name on them are now floating around the wonderful land of online publishing. Setbacks  like this aside, I think things are going quite well.