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How long did it take you to write the books? I recall you mentioned "years" for your first - did you find the second came more quickly? Did you have much writing experience before you started the first book?
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Jul 8, 2014 04:35
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Morning Bell posted:How long did it take you to write the books? I recall you mentioned "years" for your first - did you find the second came more quickly? Did you have much writing experience before you started the first book? The other books came faster because I was doing it with no day job and I suddenly realized I had to do this so I was (somewhat) less lazy. Even with a day job, I had written, whew, I'd guess at least a half-novel's worth of pages every year. It would be in different forms like screenplays and short stories and technical articles. Anyway, my new book is out, Hard Luck Hank - Prince of Suck. I spent a bit more time than I wanted and had estimated I would be done before this. One thing unusual I did was about 1/3rd of the chapters link off to an animated gif on my website that has a display of what happened in the chapter. I'm hopeful this turns out well. But between data charges and my sucky website and smaller and disparate devices, there's a lot of variables. This was also a challenge because I was supervising all the artwork in parallel with the writing. I simply couldn't wait until I was done and then sit back for months as it would extend the whole project end date. Hank has a very comic booky feel so I liked having more art associated with it. I had wanted to review the new Kindle format and see what you could do with that. It has stuff like HTML5 (though a small subset) but I didn't have time. Maybe next book. As usual, my artists were overseas. They're just simply much cheaper. I'd like to Buy American, but when I submit jobs, it's just not even close.
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Oct 19, 2014 00:10
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How is the Prince of Suck doing so far? How did Basketball of Crap do? Are you seeing a pickup of people buying the first book with the other ones out on the market now?
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Oct 19, 2014 00:19
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Well, it's only been out hours. It's sold about 20 copies. I don't have it on KDP. That's something new I'm trying. The discount from a $5.99 book is pretty high vs KDP. I'll just see how it does and maybe put it in KDP later. Basketful did better than Screw in the midterm simply because it was priced higher. This is something I just have to experiment with. I had Screw discounted for a while and realized it sold pretty much the same at higher price than lower. Amazon has a newish tool that tells you what you should price your book based on...presumably categories. They suggested $4.49 for my latest book and showed the graphs of sales at various price points. I thought that was very interesting but ultimately decided to keep it $5.99. It's becoming more annoying tracking my individual sales because the main graphic report in Amazon doesn't show subtitle. So I have a dropdown menu with seven Hard Luck Hanks (short story collections). You have to export and replace to get the real data. The audio book has really helped and it surprised me how well it did. Hopefully the next one will do close to that and I'll contact them about getting the most recent one up. It takes quite a while to put those together and ACX is horribly slow at evaluating and approving.
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Oct 19, 2014 01:20
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