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I've written plenty before but decided to finally publish something. I played around with it and got some good advice here that I tried to put to good use. I emailed free copies to my friends and family, put it up on twitter and FB, etc... promotion is ongoing. A good friend did the cover art, which is pretty decent I think. It's .99 cents. If you are too cheap to buy it, message me your email and I will send you a PDF.  Also, thank you to OP for this great thread, and thanks to the CC forum users! MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Jun 22, 2013 |
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Apr 25, 2011 02:45
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FingerbangMisfire posted:That cover is WONDERFUL. I am quite envious. And I bought. Thank you very much for your purchase and comments. It is my sincerest hope that you enjoy your read!
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Apr 25, 2011 12:41
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Two Head Knight posted:GORGEOUS cover, Matt! I bought, liked, and added a couple of tags for you. You are also awesome. Thank you.
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Apr 26, 2011 02:27
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tarepanda posted:Yes. It's often more than that too. I mean, why should it take a solid week for them to implement a change in the book description when Lulu does it instantly and B&N tends to do it within 24 hours. The worst is reading your book through about a dozen times, finally announcing, "It's ready!" and publishing it, only to read through it again while you are waiting and find a grammatical error you accidentally added on the first. loving. line. Cue the wait for another 24-48 hours just to update the thing for that one simple correction.
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Apr 26, 2011 06:15
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Maybe I missed it somewhere, but is there any way to publish your books on Amazon as free? Other authors have stuff up there for free, so I was wondering how they did it. I added a new title yesterday that I wanted to give away to stir up interest in a series of related short books but the minimum price it would let me choose is .99 cents.
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Apr 27, 2011 14:07
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Hmmm...I uploaded my newest e-book yesterday and the KDP is still showing it as publishing but I've already sold a copy? Weird. I could find the book on Amazon too, lol. Well, here it is: Hope you like zombie survival horror! As usual, if you don't want to purchase it, I'd be glad to offer it to you for free for a while as a PDF or whatever. This one is 15k or so words and 6 chapters. I self-designed the cover as something plain and easy to recolor for each new book that comes out, so readers could easily see that they are all connected and part of the same series. I have a feeling this might become popular
MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Jun 22, 2013 |
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Apr 27, 2011 15:23
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clockworkjoe posted:"Zombies of the World" Amazing. Sure to be a hit, well done! Keep us posted when you get it up on Kindle and I will fer sure buy a copy!
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May 7, 2011 02:23
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I don't know if everyone got one, but Facebook sent me an email that contained a $50 coupon for basically "AdWords" style advertising the other day. Narrowed it down to people that like reading and zombie stuff and ebooks, set the max bid to $1.00 a click and let er' rip. Today I got like 24,000 impressions of my books cover and advert and 8 clicks of which 6 converted to sales. Of course, this technique would probably work better and actually make me money if I was selling the ebook for more than 99 cents - but the technique here is to get as many people as possible with the "free" advertising money I was given to see that ad over and over and over again till it sticks. Worth a shot if you are trying to reach as many people as possible I guess. MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Jun 22, 2013 |
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May 17, 2011 01:44
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FingerbangMisfire posted:That's a hell of coupon. The campaign for the day ran out at my set maximum $10/ per day just a minute ago. Totals for today: 35,038 impressions 10 Ad Clicks, 6 sales on Amazon. MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Jun 26, 2013 |
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May 17, 2011 02:15
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FingerbangMisfire posted:And that's just through that little 'create an ad' thinger on the right hand side of Facebook? Indeed.
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May 17, 2011 02:53
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Myrddin Emrys posted:Just a friendly reminder, if Google sees you posting stats they might poo poo a brick and ban your rear end from adwords. I was banned for "fraud" on my old site, The Writers-Circle, because I said something generic like "support the site" somewhere in the text and they considered that me encouraging click fraud. Banned, no appeal, took all my money. Heh. I already got banned from adwords a while back, anyway! Fuckers banned me with no warning or questions asked because I promoted someone else's product that they felt violated their policy. (It was some dog training thing on Clickbank)
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May 17, 2011 16:34
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85,256 impressions and 19 clicks so far since yesterday. 12 sales. Not bad.
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May 18, 2011 02:17
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I would recommend it only if: 1) you got a free voucher to use. OR 2) you had a book that was selling for at least $2.99 that could easily target a niche audience. It costs about $1.25 per click to get the ad shown -a lot- So far in two days the ad has been shown nearly 100,000 times for $20.00 and 20 people have clicked it. Those clicks have "possibly" generated 12 sales. I say this because I am marketing the book in several forums and sales could have come from there. It's a risk you take but exposure is always good.
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May 18, 2011 03:28
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The Incredible Ed posted:I'd like to start a discussion about promotion. Where do you guys generally push your book? Can you describe how Craigslist ebook marketing works for you? The only thing I've ever had success with is having a yard sale or selling a guitar, stuff like that.
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May 26, 2011 16:01
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Thanks, Incredible Ed. I will look into CL. Facebook adverts seemed nice but I don't think it brought much money in at all. Just to get your ads seen with any regularity usually costs you basically the price of the ebook per click. My campaign was $50 of free voucher money and I got 50 clicks[$1 per click], 16 sales (some of which may have not even been from the FB ads) and 250,000 impressions. If I had actually paid for that, I would have been out a decent amount of coin. One of the things that I think have helped me the most with sales has been posting a link on related forums with a short blurb of the book and perhaps the first chapter. I offer free copies to the first three folks to comment on the thread and Email them the PDF of the entire book for them to enjoy. I only ask that they rate & review it (most people never do this, but occasionally some do. Make sure to put something at the very end of your book, asking them to go to Amazon.com and review it...this helps I think.) Good luck to everyone and keep writing! MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Jun 22, 2013 |
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May 26, 2011 20:18
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Mortanis posted:What sort of related forums do you post on to drum up those sort of sales? And is the Facebook pay per click, or do you also have to pay by impression? Haven't really looked deep into it yet, since I'm still a bit off from selling, but it pays to be aware early. Well, for zombies, it was pretty simple - I just went to Google and searched for Zombie Forums, found some actually very cool sites, joined up, and posted. If you were doing something along the lines of crime, horror, or whatever just look for the niche that suits your book best - like for serial killers, search for "serial killer" forums. Theres a forum out there for anything and thousands of people are interested in talking about whatever the heck it is, no matter how dull or off-beat you might think. They are great resources for information and opinion on the subject matter you are writing as well. You can do Facebook adverts either pay per click or pay per view (impression) - I am unsure of the PPV cost, but you set the "bid" on clicks to whatever you want. The higher the bid, the more often your ad gets shown. Be aware that you can burn through $50 in minutes if you don't set your daily limit and use a reasonable bid amount.
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May 26, 2011 21:39
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Mortanis posted:Ah, related to content, not related to self-publishing. Interesting idea, though I'm not sure where "Victorian-era-style-fantasy" winds up (not steampunk!). The world I'm working with has late 19th/early 20th technology for plot reasons, but none of the fantastical gears-everywhere or steam powered mechs stomping about. Find a fanfic forum, devoted to victorian stuff or other books/characters. It might be a good start.
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May 26, 2011 22:39
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I handed out free copies like candy for the first few weeks only asking for reviews and only one guy actually took the time out to review the book. Thank you, random dude! I would like to take a moment to thank Fingerbangmisfire for being generally awesome and creating this thread and doing so much to promote the indie writing community here on SA. Thank you as well to all the writers and readers on here. You are also awesome. As far as reviewing the work of others...I feel that only honest reviews that are critical (at least in regards to the general genre) will help a writer and point the readers towards something that they will enjoy. If someone doesn't like my work and posts a negative review on Amazon, I will not just pass over that review and toss it; rather, I will gleam as much information as I can from it and try to improve as much as I can. I truly appreciate any criticism, good or bad, as a way to further my writing and make my work easier for people to understand and enjoy. Thank you again to all the writers and readers out there that make what I do an enjoyable expression of creativity. (in my spare time when I have it!) MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Jun 22, 2013 |
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Jun 13, 2011 04:22
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Myrddin Emrys posted:Sent you a PM. Ditto.
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Jun 14, 2011 19:37
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leb388 posted:Replied to both. [ MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Jun 22, 2013 |
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Jun 15, 2011 22:46
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I'm down.
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Jun 17, 2011 12:39
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Mine is going to be called, "I Make People's Brains Explode". (r) A sublime and heart-warming story about a young man whose latent telekinetic power causes people's heads to explode every time he achieves orgasm. And he's 15 years old. With an internet connection.
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Jun 18, 2011 02:10
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FingerbangMisfire posted:You can write what you want. If it contains explicit sex, we can just include a warning in the description. The real question is: under whose account should we entrust this? And how do we handle payments? I will say that I have no interest in handling the $$$ - Hell, I'm still waiting to get my first payment from Amazon! (What the freak takes so long anyways?) I think the best way to share the earnings would be to simply split it up evenly. 10 people = everyone gets 10% of the profits. Or we can donate it all to charity. Whatevs.
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Jun 18, 2011 04:37
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FingerbangMisfire posted:Thank you kindly I'm feeling a "Twilight Zone/Outer Limits" motif here for some reason. Can everyone do that? I mean, you are not bound to a particular genre if you go that route. Sci-fi, fantasy, it all could work, as long as it's got a weird vibe. I dunno. I can write anything except for non-fiction (blow my brains out). Length will depend on how many contributors, but I would say no more than 75-90k or so words for the whole thing, set the price at $2.99 and be done with it. I don't mind editing and proofreading the works of others. I'm not perfect, but another set of eyes is always a good thing. I checked out your brother's charity - pretty neat. I really like the idea of donating video games to hospitalized children and just generally providing the sick and disabled with fun poo poo to do. It's got my vote, if that means anything. MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Jun 18, 2011 |
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Jun 18, 2011 16:12
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freebooter posted:I've got a zombie story that I've been publishing online for free for ages now - not through any official format, it's a journal story so I just stuck it up on LiveJournal, as was the style at the time. It's pushing 500,000 words and it was relatively popular in its day, maybe 20 or 30 regular commenters, but I got bored with it more than a year ago and put it on indefinite hiatus. Now I'm thinking Kindle publishing, if it could earn me even the measliest amount of cash, would be a good way to give me the drive to actually finish it. Split it up into 6 or so smaller ebooks. Get a good cover design that can be tweaked just a bit for each book but still looks nice. Edit what you have to and make it cohesive (so each book feels like a complete tale, but not the whole larger story). Sell those for .99 cents each. Sell the entire collection for $2.99 - $5.99. Publish it on Kindle. Advertise the gently caress out of it. Profit.
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Jun 19, 2011 11:09
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Fenarisk posted:I don't know if it's the people from this thread or what (because my friends don't read Pulp Fantasy), but just today I sold another 6 copies of my book. I feel so legitimate I think it's communication in general. Not only is a place like the forums here a good place to tell people about your work, the writers here are immensely talented people. Every ebook I have purchased thus far has been entertaining and some are just dynamite. Several are just as good as some of the best paperbacks I have read off the store shelves and deserve to be mass published. A few are mediocre, but none have been total poo poo or anywhere close to it. The advice here is priceless. MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Jun 22, 2013 |
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Jun 20, 2011 04:54
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Ok, gang, help me decide on my next cover. I am trying to keep the design simple and close to the first title enough for people browsing to easily understand it is part of the same series. I know people are not idiots, but I want it to be blatantly obvious. I played around with the background color on two of them, and the first one is just a change of the second letter to red. Which do you like best and why? [IMG]http://i609.photobucket.[/IMG] MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Jun 22, 2013 |
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Jun 21, 2011 02:22
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tarepanda posted:They're all kind of crap because they scream "MS Paint" -- standard fonts, flat colors. Typically, a series distinction is made by standardizing the layout -- top banner, bottom banner, fonts, and using the art somewhere else. Go look at some covers in series and see how they do it; doing something like that will make your cover look much better. Hey, I used GIMP! Lol! I know they are plain and lovely. I am going to redo the original cover and make something snazzy. Your suggestion just cemented it for me. Thank you. Is there a good place I can get FREE art/photos etc. that can be used as a book cover without getting my pants sued off? I mean, I could take a photograph or something but I want to browse around and maybe find something awesome. Bonus points if the artwork/photographs a scary or reflect something "zombieish". Edit - uploaded new alternate cover art Maybe this is better? 
MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 05:57 on Jun 21, 2011 |
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Jun 21, 2011 04:34
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Ok, here we go again, lol. I definitely do not have money to spend on an artist. My good friend did the cover for one of mine so if this just doesn't work I can probably get her to do one. MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Jun 26, 2013 |
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Jun 21, 2011 15:31
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FingerbangMisfire posted:This is true. We don't need a jerkoff thread. Criticism is good. Believe me, I love the honest feedback I get here. It feels good for someone to blow smoke up your rear end (well, actually, I have no idea how actual smoke being blowed up the rear end feels) but when it comes right down to it, you just gotta "poll the audience". FBMF, here's a direct link to the DNA Helix model I used above and the blank "angry face" cover as well. If anyone else wants to take a crack at it, I have no problem whatsoever including a credit to them as illustrator on cover / within the Kindle sales page on Amazon. MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Jun 22, 2013 |
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Jun 22, 2011 05:36
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tarepanda posted:One of the problems with the angry face is that it's so grainy. Judging by your cover of "Shaken and Stirred", I have no doubt you could produce a fine cover. However, I don't wish to spend any more money than is absolutely required to publish my works. Sure, I could probably hire some wizard artist to whip up an incredible cover with poo poo flying at you in 3-D for several hundred dollars. It would likely sell more copies. Perhaps you could do the same for  But, I have decided to rely upon myself and anyone that wants to pitch in with advice, criticism, or even help design artwork. To me, it's sort of like planting your own garden or building a house. If I learn something along the way and improve as an artist then - great! Thank you for your offer, though.
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Jun 22, 2011 05:50
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FingerbangMisfire posted:What about something like this. Dude, how the poo poo did you do that so fast? I really like it. The zombie/monster on the front is quite frightening. I think it captures a lot of the elements that tarepanda was talking about as well.
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Jun 22, 2011 06:01
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FingerbangMisfire posted:
Thanks Vitka. You da man. I'm anxious to see if anyone else comes up with anything. I'm going to try my hand using some of your art advice from above. If I decide to go with your artwork, you'll receive a full credit as illustrator on all the books that make use of your design. This is why having a community that you can come to and ask questions and get answers, collaborate, and learn is so great.
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Jun 22, 2011 06:17
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blabbedy blah blah blah
MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Jun 22, 2013 |
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Jun 25, 2011 02:01
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Alright, I demand to know when the deadline is for a short story to get this goon anthology off the f&*king ground I need an excuse to write more, as a break from writing what I'm writing. The world imploded.
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Jun 29, 2011 01:49
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FingerbangMisfire posted:So the Boneyard just got featured on DailyCheapReads (you just need to send the folks an email) and I moved a bunch of copies in response: http://dailycheapreads.com/2011/06/27/the-boneyard-a-novelette/ Very cool. How do they select authors? Do you have to go to them and ask or what? -edit Jesus I need to start reading better. I'd swear you didn't put that part about the emailing them in there before I posted -double edit I just looked at their site, it appears they don't want anything with gratuitous violence. Oh well. -triple edit of fantasticness: make that rank #64 WTH. MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Jun 22, 2013 |
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Jun 29, 2011 04:14
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Soulcleaver posted:I just uploaded my first novel, Anchored to the Flesh, the first of a planned trilogy of violent fantasy novels for teenagers. I'm a college near-graduate and and I'm confident in my ability to craft a captivating story. I've been through several thorough edits and a professional revision; this is a tightly paced and entertaining pulp novel. I like the cover art. Price seems a tad high if you are a new author. Start yourself an author page on Amazon. Make your blurb a bit more descriptive. If this book is the first in a series, elaborate on what you cover in this book. Overall, good, but it's tough to get attention for $4.99
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Jun 29, 2011 22:45
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Sedgr posted:This may be something you dont want to discuss but Im wondering what kind of sales numbers you're doing to hit that ranking? Im assuming that the rankings are based on sales. If you dont want to say thats fine, Im just interested in what that kind ranking translates to. If you want to keep it private could you give a general number rather than a specific? It looks like the bestseller rank varies according to the time of day and how well everyone else is doing. Today has been at anywhere between #62 and #97. It's crazy. As for sales - NO! IT'S A TIGHTLY GUARDED SECRET! I have sold something like 300 total copies of all my books over the last 2 1/2 months. The first 1/2 month I sold like 8 copies. #1 is the most popular by far. Also, B&N suck. I've sold like 5 copies of all my ebooks on there total. WTF, Nook? MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Jun 26, 2013 |
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Jun 30, 2011 02:51
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FingerbangMisfire posted:Yeah, Nook market kind of blows but Thank you. I was giddy last night as I kept updating and I'd get another sale every few minutes. This was for the horror/occult genre. The lowest (or highest, whatever) it got was around #8,000 out of all ebooks. If I was in place #64 for all ebooks in the Kindle store I doubt I would be scrambling for money to get my car fixed before my inspection runs out ... tomorrow. I've made about 100 bucks on this so far, and have yet to be paid. Amazon is so slow with that first payment! By the way, the leftover money from that payment will be going mostly to buying any ebooks from this thread that I haven't purchased yet, because it all looks cool and I want to support indie writers. You have supported me and I want to buy more of your work. And I'm starting my short story for the anthology tomorrow. It's now going to be called, "Mind Bullets". Yes, it is about a fapping 15 year old that accidentally kills people when he orgasms. Straight to NUMBER ONE! My wife thinks I'm insane. MattDaddy fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Jun 26, 2013 |
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Jun 30, 2011 03:47
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That is fantastic.
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First two chapters of "Mind Bullets" is done. Whoo boy. I think most goons will freak out over it. Whats a good way to share what I've done so far? I'd like to get some input, but I don't really want to put the whole thing up here in a post or email it out to everyone. I can't even imagine what the cover art to this one is gonna look like.
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Jun 30, 2011 19:14
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