July 2020 – M.L. Humphrey

Good Advice from PCW

It’s been a while since I reminded people that they should be following Patricia C. Wrede’s blog because she gives some excellent writing advice every Wednesday. This week’s post is, in my opinion, a must-read for any author who has ever found themselves stuck or dissatisfied with what they were writing:

Making It Harder Than It Needs To Be

Basically the advice is trust your gut and write what you want to write in the way you want to write it.

I spent a year writing short stories early on because some agent told me they could never sell my novel to the Big 5 if I didn’t have short story credits first. I’m not one for reading short stories and am more naturally inclined towards novel-length ideas and character development so it was a complete change for me.

I didn’t do bad at it (I ended up with some nice personal rejections from some big markets) but man I wish I’d just kept writing novels instead.

Every author probably has something like that. Being told you should plot when you’re a pantser. Or pants when you’re a plotter. Or being told what to write, when to write, or how to write it.

The truth is you need to follow your gut and do what moves you forward and makes it enjoyable for you. Life is too short to not live it in the best way for you.

Also, if you’re looking for a good book about being a writer or living a creative life, I just finished and really liked Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. It was excellent in a number of ways, but I think each writer will probably take very different things from it depending on their own experiences. Well worth the $10 Amazon is currently charging for the paperback.

The Chicken or The Egg

I’m sitting here listening to a playlist of mine called Fave Thoughtful which essentially consists of slower songs that aren’t as easy to sing along with as my Fave Sing Along playlist.

(I have a ridiculous number of song playlists. My original Faves playlist has 150 songs on it so I decided to break it down a bit more since moving from Thugman by Tweet to The Only Time by Nine Inch Nails to Another Suitcase in Another Hall by Evita is a bit jarring.)

(Below that Fave list I have a total of 43 “like” playlists that combined include 2992 songs at the moment. I have a bit of a thing for music obviously. Anyway.)

It made me realize something odd.

I have a large number of songs on my favorites playlists that I’ve loved for ages. Since I was maybe even a pre-teen. (Kenny Rogers was my favorite singer when I was eight. I remember crying while repeatedly replaying Islands in the Stream during my first big breakup in 3rd grade.)

Long before I had any life experiences that would make me choose those kinds of songs, I loved songs like Spilled Perfume by Pam Tillis and We’ve Got Tonight by Kenny Rogers. Songs about failed love and yearning for lost relationships and choosing the wrong person and loss.

I can now, later in life, tie actual life experiences to some of those songs. And I’ve definitely come to like newer songs because they remind me of a past experience, but for me it was often the songs that came first, not the experience.

And it makes me wonder whether it was some weird sort of predisposition of mine that made me gravitate towards those types of songs and then those types of life experiences. Or whether those songs created some kind of emotional groove in my mind that then led me to seek out those experiences in my life. Like if all I’d ever been exposed to were happy songs about getting married and living happily ever after for fifty years if that’s what I would’ve been drawn towards instead of hitting the road and moving on.

I don’t know. It’s an interesting thought.

And I think this does tie back to writing in some sense, too.

I’ve been reading a lot of new-to-me authors recently and some fit comfortably because the main characters react in a way that makes sense for me whereas others make me almost itchy to read because I keep thinking, “No. Why would you do that? That’s stupid.”

Or wrong. (I’m still angry years later about the character who could see the future and saw their friend being destroyed by drug use who then started using drugs with the friend. Like, what? What are you thinking? You can see this person will destroy their life this way and you…help them do it? Huh?)

I know going forward that I’ll end up reading more from the authors whose characters’ values and decisions fit with what makes sense to me and less of those who don’t which then ends up reinforcing the whole circle of values and beliefs and perspective that I already had.

This is also why I don’t think every author is for every reader and that to succeed with fiction you ultimately have to find “your” readers who are those who align enough with what you write that they stay with and return to your stories. The key is finding those readers, of course.

And now I’m going to stop writing this because while I’ve been writing it Smoke Rings in the Dark by Gary Allan, A Couple More Years by Dr. Hook, I Don’t Need You by Kenny Rogers, and now Not Gon’ Cry by Mary J. Blige have played and I think maybe I need therapy based on my song choices. Seriously.

New Release: Microsoft Office for Beginners

Just a quick note that buyers can now get Excel for Beginners, Word for Beginners, and PowerPoint for Beginners in one book, Microsoft Office for Beginners. This one is geared towards those who are looking to get a basis in all three program at once. It gives a bit of a price discount compared to buying the individual titles by themselves.

The ebook version ($9.99 USD) is already available everywhere. The paperback version ($29.95 USD) will be available within the next day or so. Click on the image below to choose the store you want or on one of the store tabs on the right-hand side.

Amazon Taketh, Amazon Giveth

I logged onto my AMS dashboard today to find that I now have the option to show Kindle Unlimited page reads attributed to an ad, something people have been asking for for ages and ages. You can add it by customizing your columns and going to the very bottom of the list, assuming it’s available to you. I mentioned it on Kboards and someone said they didn’t see it, so it may be rolling out.

I don’t know how well it works or how timely it is because I’m not currently advertising any books that are in KU and it doesn’t look to be retroactive. I had ads running in the past on books that were in KU but activating that option didn’t display results for those old ads.

Nice that they added that since they took away displaying any associated sales that weren’t for the formats specifically listed in an ad. I get that a lot of people complained to them about that, but it would’ve been nice to leave the information available in a separate column somewhere.

(Maybe they’re trying to discourage people from using ad copy? Because the only way to list multiple formats, I believe, is to have an ad with no ad copy, but I could be wrong and am too lazy to go check right now.)

On one hand I’m glad that Amazon keeps trying to improve AMS. On the other hand, this is exactly why I ended up unpublishing my books on AMS ads. Because all of the practical, here’s how it works sections became outdated almost as soon as I wrote them.

One guarantee in this business: it is constantly changing.

Type I vs Type II Errors

I often think about life situations as Type I versus Type II errors. I’m sure how I apply this is probably not consistent with how true statistics uses it, but oh well. Wikipedia has an entry on it if you want to go there. (It uses words like null hyphothesis though so be forewarned.)

For me how I think about this is that for every choice I make there are two risks. One is that I act on something I think is true and it turns out to be false. The other is that I don’t act on something because I think it is false and it turns out to be true.

In the current COVID-19 crisis, mask wearing is an example of this. Early on there was discussion that virus particles were so small that mask wearing wasn’t really effective. Now pretty much all of the experts are recommending it and saying it helps. I can definitely see that having a cloth barrier between me and others will prevent some spread but I’m still curious about the small particles issue.

However, despite my ongoing skepticism, ever since they started recommending masks, I’ve been wearing one. Because to me I’d rather take on the risk of wearing a mask and finding out I didn’t need to than the risk of not wearing one and realizing later I should have.

If I wear a mask and it has absolutely no impact and does nothing to protect me from getting sick, it also doesn’t do me any harm. It’s uncomfortable and annoying to wear a mask, especially now that I ordered a more robust one online instead of hand-crocheting one that had some breathing holes built into it, but all that does is reminds me that I really shouldn’t be out and about more than is necessary anyway.

I have no ego about my appearance these days, so there’s no vanity issue for me. And I’m not out a lot, so it’s a minor inconvenience to address a potentially significant risk.

If I don’t wear a mask and it turns out a mask could have protected me, then I’ll likely get sick. Maybe I’ll be one of the lucky ones and it goes away fast and there’s no lasting damage. But maybe I spend 90 days in the hospital, lose a leg, need a double lung transplant, and still end up dying like just happened to a perfectly healthy man who was younger than I am. Or maybe I don’t even need to go to the hospital but I have long-term breathing complications that I struggle with for years.

In this scenario–do I wear a mask or don’t I–I’m going to wear a mask. Because I do not want to get this shit. Both of my parents have dealt with long-term health complications. (My brother as well although not in the “how many times are you going to be rushed to the hospital this year?” sense that both of my parents have.)

Mask wearing is a good example of this, but when you look around you’ll see that life is full of Type I vs. Type II error choices. Asking someone out or telling them you love them. Taking a job. Quitting a job. Going on a vacation. Devoting time to writing a book. There are risks on both sides of those decisions.

It all comes down to which type of error you’d rather make. The error of acting and being wrong or the error of not acting when you could’ve been right.

Some of the risks are easy to see so easy to choose between. Others, not so much. But in my opinion it’s always a good idea when confronted with a choice to weigh the potential cost of acting against the potential cost of not acting.

Nine Years

Nine years ago today I decided to try to write my first novel and get it published. My goal at the time was to be traditionally published, so I wrote that novel and queried it and found out I should write short stories so did that for a bit and submitted those and got some “send more”/”almost there” type of rejections before I turned back to novels which is what I really wanted to write. And I attended some conferences here or there.

And then I wrote a non-fiction book that I had no hope of getting published through a publisher because I had no platform and no reason that I had written that book other than having a very strong opinion about the matter. So I self-published it. And I self-published some of those rejected short stories.

My results were…underwhelming.

My covers were horrible, SFF short stories are not where the money is in self-publishing, and then I got derailed by taking a consulting project that kept me from writing for eight months. (But did pay very well and let me qualify for the mortgage on my current house.)

After that project, I gave it another try.

I got sucked into the “just write a bunch of short sexy stories” thing that was going around at the time. Those did sell better. The billionaire story I wrote in one day on a whim sold the best. So I went ahead and threw the romance novel I’d written as therapy up and it sold well (for me at the time), too.

But I didn’t follow-up well on those little nibbles of success. It took me three more years to write a follow-up to the romance novel.

I kept throwing whatever I thought of at the wall. Lots of it failed because I was still writing short stories and non-fiction not many people wanted.

Then I realized I didn’t want to go back to consulting so I finally published one of my fantasy novels with a gorgeous cover and real advertising spend behind it.

The results were…not so good. It was depressing. I’d finally done what everyone said to do and no one wanted my book. (I did launch at full price which didn’t help, but still. I’d bought a pretty cover! I’d paid for ads!)

I kept pushing, though. I kept trying.

I eventually finished the trilogy, but it took me a year to get out each of the other two titles which was not good.

Then I went to a writing workshop and let it get in my head. Was my writing too emotional? Too angsty? Was it too cliched? Me and my European settings and white people. (Although the first series was actually neither of those things. But when you let the doubt creep in…)

So I turned to non-fiction. And saw some success. Not immediately. Four months after publication a couple of those titles took off. And they’ve sold steadily for three-plus years now.

I added what I could to extend that success. Some of it worked, some of it didn’t.

Rather than go back to fantasy, I branched out into cozy mystery. I still wanted to do well with fiction and I had a contemporary story idea I thought would work. I also promoted the fantasy trilogy that hadn’t done well initially and finally got it profitable. Ironically the year I priced it at $7.99 per title was my best year profit-wise for that title. But that could be in part thanks to a Bookbub feature.

And so now here I am. Thirteen novels later, eleven of those still published. Too many short stories to count. Too many non-fiction titles to count. Nine years in. 2.65 million words written. 2,800 hours spent writing/editing. Over $150K in revenue. Over $70K in profit.

I’m proud of where I am, but I’m still a hot mess.

Do the math on those numbers and you’ll find that I only spend about six hours a week on writing/editing, which is pathetically low for someone who does this full-time. (And probably a good part of the reason I’m not further along with this whole thing. That and splitting my efforts in so many different directions.)

My top-earning pen name has almost 600K words of published material out and it’s 20x as profitable as the next-highest-earning pen name which only has 270K words published. For my top three pen names, profit and word count are in the exact same order. The one with the most published material is the one that’s made the most. The one with the second-most number of words has made the second-most, etc.

Number four breaks that pattern, but it’s also my only written-to-market pen name.

I know what I need to do. I need to focus better and produce more work. More cozies, more fantasy novels. New material that leads back to what I’ve already done. Without a deep enough bench of material it’s hard to advertise effectively.

I’ve never done a 99 cent promo on the boxset of my fantasy trilogy because there’s nowhere for those readers to go after that. Also, I know that the more related titles someone has, the better able they are to make a profit off of ads on a first book. Assuming they write well enough to pull people through the entire series that is.

I looked a few years ago and figured it would take 8-12 novels to really be firmly established in a genre. I have 3 fantasies and 6 cozies. I need at least double what I already have for both.

That’s what Year 10 is going to be about for me. Trying to fill that in. Trying to push myself to write enough that I can add a new fantasy trilogy and at least four more cozies to my catalog.

I have a few non-fiction titles I might add as well. Non-fiction writes easier for me than fiction because it’s just a data dump for the most part and not creation of something brand new. So non-fiction fits well between drafts or fiction projects. But my focus will be on the fiction.

I want to write/edit for 10 hours a week instead of 6. Or even 20 hours a week. Imagine that…

It’s not going to be easy. Internal motivation is not as easy to generate as the responsibility that comes with an external deadline. I can easily work sixty-plus hours for someone else, but not for myself.

I figure I have one more year to make this sustainable. I’m close. But I’m not there yet. Not unless I want to live in a dingy apartment with a bunch of weird roommates and eat canned tuna fish for every meal.

So. One more year. 500K more words. With focus.

Here we go. Wish me luck. Haha.