chelsfield
SWF Writers
Posts: 700
Joined: Mar 28, 2012 3:07:24 GMT -8
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Post by chelsfield on Jan 30, 2017 1:16:39 GMT -8
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Post by Ted on Jan 30, 2017 3:32:38 GMT -8
To all aspiring writers:
Her courage, — laying by its pikes and spears, For those who merit, her scorched heart will sadden, And open, in its depth, a well of tears. (Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952))
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Post by garyweston on Jan 30, 2017 5:59:36 GMT -8
I can probably buy a whole beer a day with my "earnings". I should save it up and buy a bottle of whiskey. That said, my new book soon to be published, is a cert for best seller.
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Post by garyweston on Jan 31, 2017 14:37:23 GMT -8
Hey! Hold the front page. Just sold one in Germany. I always knew they had good taste in Germany. Chels. The dream of great wealth is alive and well. Today Germany, tomorrow...
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Post by ChrisLAdams on Feb 1, 2017 5:05:27 GMT -8
Hey! Hold the front page. Just sold one in Germany. I always knew they had good taste in Germany. Chels. The dream of great wealth is alive and well. Today Germany, tomorrow... That's awesome! Ich habe nichts in Deutschland verkauft!
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Post by garyweston on Feb 1, 2017 7:09:42 GMT -8
I worked in a nuclear power station in North Germany for a couple of months MANY years ago. I still glow in the dark.
That's the crazy thing with the connected world. We can have readers in far flung places like Estonia. Do I have dreams of fame and fortune? The fortune bit would be nice. Isn't it about time we all accepted we are one people in one world? If I had a dream at all, it would be that. Then we could stop fighting and read some books instead, (especially mine). After a couple of glasses of red, I penned the following I put on facebook.
The older I get, the harder it seems to be able to avoid the madness of the world. I try to see the beauty of this world and in my own modest way, express it with my untrained art. My stories are generally upbeat with a happy ever after. Stuff happens in them, but the un-crushable human spirit is allowed to conquer. My paintings seek beauty and the love of life. It's there, it truly is. A cherry blossom tree in full "check me out" glory, A rainbow taunting us with it's illusion. The innocent laughter of a child or the smile or kind word from a stranger. Amidst the insanity, simple beauty begs our attention. We just need to look that bit harder.
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jenniferp
SWF Writers
Posts: 111
Joined: Mar 29, 2012 6:47:30 GMT -8
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Post by jenniferp on Feb 1, 2017 7:43:03 GMT -8
Gary, do you write science fiction? There appears to be something of a solid niche market for English language science fiction in Germany - or a nearby country. I've sold a few books through Amazon.de myself.
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Post by garyweston on Feb 1, 2017 9:20:35 GMT -8
I do space opera without the singing.
On a more serious note, putting Craggy 1 free is proving to be a worthwhile tactic for sales. Interest in the individual books and the box. Anyone with a series regardless of genre should give this a go if things need a jump-start. Fame and fortune to come? Probably not but it might buy me more beer.
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Post by Ted on Feb 2, 2017 22:37:53 GMT -8
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Post by garyweston on Feb 3, 2017 12:48:59 GMT -8
Great. Another smashwords affiliate I'll never sell a book with. Good luck to those that do.
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Post by ChrisLAdams on Feb 6, 2017 5:46:47 GMT -8
I had a couple of unusual download days recently and wondered if anyone here had experienced something similar and had any idea what caused it? In in the interests of full disclosure this is what I know: AmZn96/105 downloads on Feb 1st were for On a Winter's Eve27/30 downloads on Feb 2nd were for On a Winter's EveSmash30/31 downloads on Feb 1st were for On a Winter's Eve9/14 downloads on Feb 2nd were for On a Winter's Eve
I had submitted a couple of my stories to professional reviewers in attempt to get some ratings - checking these sites shows no reviews as of yet, however. My artist friend added the latest cover he did for me under a new category on his website ( Book Covers) and generously added a link to my Smashwords author page. None of the sites (and there were only 6 of them) to which I submitted a story for review has done so, and nearly every download was for the same story, so I'm not sure if the addition of a link to my author page on Smashwords could have been responsible. It's more like someone put a link to that specific story somewhere, seeing as how it got the bulk of the downloads. Any one got any ideas or experienced a similar phenomenon? FYI I typically get a handful of downloads, 1-2 on a typical day, some times nothing for days on end, so this was phenomenal for me. Loved it. Now if some of these will leave some ratings and reviews I'll be even more tickled.
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Post by garyweston on Feb 6, 2017 6:38:11 GMT -8
It seems the more five star reviews I get a the lower my sales go. I've never gone to a professional reviewer or even asked for reviews. Zon is pretty tough these days on dodgy reviews so avoid that trap and make sure your ones are ok. Your stuff is kinda on the short side and falls into the dead zone of pricing though I know why you did it. I'd be tempted to have one freebie and box the rest at 2.99. After boxing the Craggy series, I got a 50/50 split on those buying the individual books (2.99 each)and those saving a packet on the box at 3.99. It doesn't make sense to me either.
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Post by ChrisLAdams on Feb 6, 2017 7:35:38 GMT -8
It seems the more five star reviews I get a the lower my sales go. I've never gone to a professional reviewer or even asked for reviews. Zon is pretty tough these days on dodgy reviews so avoid that trap and make sure your ones are ok. Your stuff is kinda on the short side and falls into the dead zone of pricing though I know why you did it. I'd be tempted to have one freebie and box the rest at 2.99. After boxing the Craggy series, I got a 50/50 split on those buying the individual books (2.99 each)and those saving a packet on the box at 3.99. It doesn't make sense to me either. I'm not going for dodgy 5-star reviews - just good honest ones. On Smashwords I have had more downloads of my short story On a Winter's Eve than practically all the others combined - yet not one single review or rating on it. It has had some reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, however. Yes, I know my stuff I've published so far is on the short side. That's because I'm writing short, pulp-style tales at the moment - just like if Craggy pulled you into a phone-booth, time-travel device, whisked you away to 1933, and plopped you down in front of a rack of Weird Tales, Amazing Stories and Saucy Oriental Tales. I'm a huge fan of the format, always have been. I think guys like Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Nictzin Dyalhis, Edmond Hamilton, etc, famous for their short tales, have certainly left an unarguable and indelible mark on the world of literature for all the brevity of their strange fiction. Ever heard of Cthulhu? Conan? Those guys were invented and came to life from short, well-spun tales. I'm not one to take a good story idea and to then flush it out with filler to where it hits 95k novel length just to call it a 'book'. I get the genesis of an idea for a story, and I write the story - minus any fluff. It assumes the word-count required to get the story from start to finish - no more, no less. But I just finished writing 3 full-length Mars novels, sequels in ERB's Barsoom series, to the tune of over 500,000 words and having all these ideas for just simple little short stories, I decided to write them, one after the other, and publish them in an attempt to make a mark on the literary world as I try to get my full-length novels published. They've ostensibly been approved for publication and the first in the set may get published this year. I actually have a ton of ideas jotted down for a fourth volume in my Mars stories, but until I see the first three are going somewhere I didn't wish to devote possibly a year and a half to writing this fourth volume which is quite grand in scope. It's for that reason, the great unknown of what will happen with those 3 volumes, that I embarked instead on a path of getting these short stories out of my head. I hope I don't regret it and later wish I had started writing my 4th Mars book instead. That's a distinct possibility. My hopes in eliciting the aid of professional reviewers was that I feel an ePub with no reviews get glossed over, while one that's got some comments might get looked at. That might be flawed reasoning; maybe it's only that my creepy short-tale has a cooler cover than the others? I do like the eyes in the sky... I think I'll just keep writing and posting them and hoping for the best. I've tried charging for these, initially at $0.99, but really was not getting any hits. No one wants to pay a buck for a short story, even though they actually might get as much enjoyment out of it as they would from a full length novel - gads, I know I have. Read The Outsider by HPL - pure beauty in only a few pages. My latest story that I just finished, sequel to Valley of Despair, is nearly 5X longer than the initial story - 76.5k compared to 16k. The same with my sequel to Blonde Goddess of Tikka-Tikka - the sequel is already more than double the original 17k length, and it's not yet finished. I'm expecting it to hit close to 60k or longer - whatever it takes to finish the story. I already had plans for a third in my 'tomahawk' series, and whilst pondering my tales over a pint the other day got smacked between the eyes with ideas for a fourth. Can't wait to write them. Ansen is going to be a busy guy...
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Post by garyweston on Feb 6, 2017 7:52:46 GMT -8
I wasn't inferring you went in for dodgy reviews but just saying be wary of those jokers. I appreciate the sprat to catch mackrel (I still can't spell) approach and see nothing wrong with that. But people need to gobble up the sprats to work up an appetite for the bigger fish. The sprats need to be as juicy and tempting as possible. With the attention span of a one eyed chicken, I used to love those old anthologies of horror stories and have written a few short horrors myself. The collections of shorts aren't as popular as they used to be. Maybe consider the on-line magazines of that genre to promote and perhaps even wattpad. There's another short story online site I did well with to promote but the name escapes me. If I find it I'll post it on here. Here's one I found. Plenty out there. I might even put a couple on here myself. www.short-story.net
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Post by ChrisLAdams on Feb 6, 2017 8:32:07 GMT -8
I wasn't inferring you went in for dodgy reviews but just saying be wary of those jokers. I appreciate the sprat to catch mackrel (I still can't spell) approach and see nothing wrong with that. But people need to gobble up the sprats to work up an appetite for the bigger fish. The sprats need to be as juicy and tempting as possible. With the attention span of a one eyed chicken, I used to love those old anthologies of horror stories and have written a few short horrors myself. The collections of shorts aren't as popular as they used to be. Maybe consider the on-line magazines of that genre to promote and perhaps even wattpad. There's another short story online site I did well with to promote but the name escapes me. If I find it I'll post it on here. Here's one I found. Plenty out there. I might even put a couple on here myself. www.short-story.net Good idea - as I said in another post, the marketing side of things is not what I'm all about. I struggle just coming up with the 'back of the book' type blurbs. The super short blurb Smashwords requires are really difficult and I have revised my settings trying to find a better short description tons of times. I'm checking out that short-story site now.
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