Tag: My Fiction

Various Public Relations

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So, Tuesday I have a meeting with my marketer to see how I can achieve more of my goals for the launch.  The book seems to be sustaining sales but I’m not satisfied with the visibility with respect to reviews and general profile.  As I’ve mentioned I’m going to find out just how large a giveaway I can expect to perform.  Now, I have no idea whether this makes any sense at all.  After all, as a tactic giving something away for free seems to be defeating the purpose of sales.  But my whole reason for writing this book, is to get other people to read it too.  And if you’re competing with literally millions of other books and some of them have multi-billion-dollar companies marketing them then it may take extreme methods to break out of obscurity and catch the public’s eye.  And then again, I may just be kidding myself.  But I think I’m very close to making a decision on the path forward.

And there’s not much time left before I’ll be overtaken by other responsibilities and projects.  First Selectman Cthulhu has selected me as his personal spokesman with responsibilities for communicating his agenda to both the human population of Dunwich and also the trans-dimensional realm of the Great Old Ones.  That’s right I’ll be updating his LinkedIn and TikTok pages.  Currently he’s asked me to edit out the use of words like crush, dismember, maim and devour in his recent communications.  He’s up for re-election and he needs to finesse his image quite a bit.  I’ve suggested he watch several of the recent Godzilla movies and figure out how to mimic the joie de vivre of that radioactive reptile who has managed to cultivate a laid back and avuncular style in the last few years.  I told him he might want to think about a facelift.  But then he reminded me that technically he really doesn’t have a face.  It’s more of a foot with eyes, mouth and tentacles.  Well, a rose by any other name.

On the home front, Mr. and Mrs. Mallard have returned to dismal puddle and seemed very satisfied with whatever slop has run into the swamp.  Also, a pair of wood ducks have also appeared but I notice they are much more skittish than the mallards.  Well, it takes all kinds.  So far, we haven’t seen any ducklings.  Time will tell.

And I’ve cut down all of the raspberry canes and put about five pounds of 10-10-10 fertilizer on the bed in anticipation of a bumper crop this year.  I’m hoping it will expand significantly beyond the current patch and eventually triple into the whole garden.  This is a matter of turning necessity into a virtue since nothing else seems to flourish besides raspberries in that soggy area.

The southern ice sheet has retreated back to the massive driveway pile which is now only three feet high.  At the current rate of retreat, I calculate it will disappear completely by Memorial Day.  At which point the last of it will end up in my drink cooler for that barbecue event.

Well, things are moving apace.  Excelsior!

OCF E-Book Giveaway of “The Sniper”

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Today I sold my 150th copy of “The Sniper” on Amazon and I’m looking to get more reviews and ratings.  So to increase the availability of the book I’m looking to send complimentary (free) e-book copies to folks here on the website who want one.

Just e-mail me here and I’ll send one back to that e-mail address.  Feel free to be honest with your review.  It’s better to get honest criticism than fake praise.

It Could Be Huge

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Just as I planned, we ate a late and leisurely breakfast today.  It was as warm and sunny as forecast.  Walking out in the sun by a frozen lake was very enjoyable and I even took a few photos just to prove I still remember how.  Then Camera Girl and I drove over to the big city (ha!) and had some Thai food.  Splendiferous.

I went over the communication I received from my book marketer and set up what I hope is a productive post-launch meeting where I can finalize a plan to finish off the launch with a large number of readers getting their hands on the book in the next week or so.

Apparently, there is a website called BookFunnel that will allow me to run a giveaway in exchange for the customer’s e-mail address.  This will facilitate follow-on advertising of my sequel books and other writing projects.  In conjunction with this the marketer thinks I should produce a follow-on epilog or teaser to entice the readers to sign up for some program of material that I will produce in the future.  All very interesting, but what I’m also interested in finding out is whether the traction I created with the launch is indicative of a book and sequels that will be popular or not very popular.  I basically don’t have any real knowledge about what a popular book start-up looks like.

I’ve sold a little over a hundred and twenty copies to date and that doesn’t seem to be an overwhelming response by the book buying public.  I was hoping for more like a hundred and twenty million copies or even a hundred and twenty thousand copies.  I’ve had to cancel my rental of MetLife Stadium for my book signing event.  Instead, I’ve taped together three or four of the boxes that Camera Girl gets her dog food bags delivered in and set them up in the lower driveway.  I hope it doesn’t rain soon.  That tape’s not so strong.  I’ll be giving away free key chains with the name of my local mechanic on them.  He had them out on the counter and I thought he wouldn’t mind if I took a few (or all) of them.  I don’t think he bought one of my books so I think it’ll be alright.

For my next book, maybe I’ll attempt to reach viral status using a best-seller adjacent name.  In other words, I’ll make it sound like some other popular work.  For instance, “Reacher” is a very commercially lucrative series.  So maybe I could have a series with a character named “Reached.”  He could be like Reacher only in the past tense.  So instead of being enormously large and strong I’ll make my character big but kind of old and worn out.  Sort of like Reacher in thirty years.  And he could fight crime but only in retirement villages and old age homes.  And his tag line will be, “What did you say?  Speak up you young punk!”  I think it could be huge.

A Big Crazy Idea

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I have this crazy idea.  I want to get my book into the hands of an enormous number of people.  I heard of a guy whose book was given out to a hundred thousand people by some corporation for some reason unknown to me.  And after that it became very popular and sold millions of copies.  Now obviously that’s a crazy thing.  I think this was a hundred thousand physical copies not e-books.  Why a corporation would pay for a hundred thousand copies of a book to then give them away doesn’t make any sense unless it’s the Gideons giving away the Bible at hotels.

But for whatever reason it intrigues me.  Now theoretically I can give away a hundred thousand copies of my e-book by emailing them.  Of course, an e-mail provider will charge some fee for that much bandwidth.  But in terms of the files they’re free.  The trick would be to interest a hundred thousand people to request the book and actually read it.  There are book sale sites (e.g., Smashwords) that allow you to lower the sale price to zero.  But the trick would be to attract the right audience for the book.

I admit it’s kind of a goofy idea.  The whole reason for writing a book is to get people to pay you money for the privilege of reading it.  This stands that concept on its head.  But I think it’d get more satisfaction from knowing that a huge number of people had read my story than having a few hundred pay me for buying it.

I have a lot more research to do to figure out all the details of how doing something like this would work.  I want to target a right-leaning audience and so I’m looking at advertising on one of the right-leaning sites like Red State or something like it.  But one of the things is making sure it doesn’t cost me too much money.  After all I’m not a trillionaire.  I’m just a regular old multi-billionaire you know.

My book sales on Amazon reached one hundred tonight.  Maybe that was what triggered this megalomania.  After all it’s only a few orders of magnitude between a hundred and a hundred thousand.  What’s that between friends after all?  But I have learned a little bit about how difficult it is to reach across the “digital barrier” and communicate with the mass of humanity out there.  It requires you to master the secrets of the “algorithm” and “search engine optimization.”  Either that or you have to shell out a lot of dough.

But I’ll have to say it must have been more fun in the old days when a writer could sell a short story to Analog for a few hundred bucks and have a hundred thousand people read that story and give their feedback in just days or weeks.  I know there are now digital equivalents.  There’s a site called Royal Road where free content is uploaded and people vote with their eyeballs.  And maybe I’ll go that route.  Of course, I understand that most of the content is sort of video game fan fiction which is completely impenetrable to me.  And maybe an audience for my stuff would never show up there.  But I should look into it.  Well anyway, enough about this.  I’ll figure it out and see if it can be done and if it’s worth it to me or not.  Ah, the trials and tribulations of a great literary artist.  Oh, the pain, the pain.

03MAR2026 – Sales Update and Begathon

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Update:

Yesterday’s total was 18 books and my book ranking has also improved markedly.  Overall rank now close to 20,000 and categories in the top 100s!  Look out Tom Clancy (or whoever the new alive guy is).

Well, things are looking up.  So far today, I’ve sold ten copies and pretty soon I’ll reach a hundred sales.  Cool!

And I broke through the 40,000 overall rank in Kindle Store and the 200’s in some major categories (see below)

And so now that some momentum is building up I’d like to make one last plea (on bended knee mind you) for anyone who liked the book to put a good review up on Amazon.  You can use any name you like and you don’t even need to have bought the book.  Just tell the world why you liked it and help me become independently wealthy ( or at least cheer up a poor hard-working author.

Thank you for your attention.

Jake Barter

More Marketing Stuff

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So, I spent some time yesterday and today sending a few complimentary copies of the book to reviewers and adjusting the Amazon Ads to concentrate on the “targets” that have produced sales.  So far it looks like the ads that work best are where Amazon selects viewers that have done a search for another product that is either “similar” to my book or “complementary” to it and place my ad somewhere on that search result page.  How Amazon gauges similarity and complementarity is of course the black box.

These targets that they decide on work better than matching my book to searches that contain keywords that my book has been matched with like “techno-thriller” or “vigilante justice” or “suspense thriller.”  These also work but at a lower rate.  So, what seems to be the case is that Amazon seems to know what they’re doing better than anybody else.  And I guess that makes sense.  The algorithm is the wizard behind the curtain but apparently, he’s not some medicine show tramp whose balloon was blown off course.  He’s the real deal.

So now that I’m running the marketing show I’m excited again and waiting for that magic moment when the algorithm decides that I’m ready for prime time and blankets the Amazon universe with free advertisements for my magnum opus.  And every time you open up an email from Amazon, my book will stare back at you in all its black and white splendor.  And once the ten millionth copy is sold, President Trump will invite me to the Oval Office and present me with the Trump/Kennedy Center Medal for the Most Beautiful Literature.  And I’ll autograph a copy of the book for him.  It’ll read, “To DJT, from one native New Yorker, to another.  You, kooky nut, you.  Don’t ever change.  Jake Barter”

But I digress (or hallucinate).  Of late I’ve read just how much AI novel writing has become sort of a catastrophe.  Apparently, there is a sizable segment of the book reading audience that is perfectly satisfied with AI slop.  And I don’t think this is shocking.  Think of what now passes for entertainment on broadcast television.  It’s already down to the level of mindless machine output.  I guess the question will be whether there will be a reaction to this, with a flight to quality occurring.  Even leaving my own personal writing out of this, I’d hate to think that literature will completely disappear from the face of the Earth in favor of subhuman cargo-cult knock-offs.

Well, I guess there can be all kinds of entertainment products out there.  After all, a big part of marketing is identifying a niche that isn’t being serviced optimally.  But it does make me wonder what that niche is for me.  Disgruntled right-wing old guys?  Well, why not.  Talk about a despised minority.  We’re positively reviled by everyone out there.  But I am hoping for a larger audience.  I have a small test audience of women who won the Goodreads giveaway.  I’m hoping for some feedback from them pretty soon.  I’ll compare them to the few women that have already read the book in my circle of friends.  It might be interesting

One Month In

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So today was the last day of my marketer’s book launch service.  And as of now we sold sixty books.  Thirty-four were e-books and twenty-six were paperbacks.  And today I noticed that one sale (an e-book) was sold in Germany.  Well, well.

Owing to the fact that book sales have not topped one million copies, as of yet, I’ve decided to turn the whole thing into a network marketing exercise.  I intend to find ten people and have each of them buy ten copies and then each force ten people to each buy ten copies and then so on and so forth until by level ten we have ten billion copies sold!  By the way that math may be off a little but you get the idea.  After all if it worked for Amway and Communism how can it possibly fail?  Why didn’t I think of this earlier?  All I have to do is buy a white board and some dry erase products and maybe combine this with a Tupperware item or two and before you know it I’ll be a huge success.

All in all, it’s been very educational.  I guess the takeaway is that price-point and ads on Amazon are what sell books.  As soon as I dropped the price of the e-book from $5.99 to $2.99 there was an immediate surge in sales.  Since I have very few reviews, I’ve decided to drop the price of the e-book to $0.99 and try to get a bunch of sales right away in the hopes that it will generate some reviews.  Of course, that’s just my idea but it seems to make sense to me.

The marketer has additional services to extend the launch but I’ve decided to try it myself.  Now that I’m running the campaign on my own, I’ll depend on Amazon’s automatic key word selection to attract the attention of the techno-thriller/vigilante justice readers out there.  It should be very interesting to see how this change affects sales.

I will say that becoming a “best selling author” is harder than I imagined.  I assumed that with my incredible writing skills the publishers and the reading public would beat a path to my door and shower me with riches.  So far, no path.  So far, more like a trickle of riches.  But I am undismayed.  My acquaintances who’ve read the book report enjoying it a lot.  Now of course they may be just saying nice things because they like me.  But I will say it is very nice to receive accolades even from friends.  If instead they had told me, it was awful I think I’d be pretty discouraged.  So currently I’m buoyed by the minor success I’ve enjoyed and hopeful that with further exposure the book will find an audience (possibly in Germany!).

So, let’s just see how the next stage in this odyssey goes.  As always feel free to add a review to Amazon and hopefully the word will get out that a new classic has appeared on the horizon for discerning readers.

The Sniper Marketing Campaign is Live!

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Keywords have been added, categories have been refined and Amazon Ads are garnering thousands of impressions and dozens of clicks. Even a few sales have been registered! Now it’s time for anyone who has bought a book to give their opinion on its entertainment value as a review on that mega-information portal; Amazon.com.

So for anyone who has bought the book please give it a great review as soon as possible to enhance the effect of the advertising.  Amazon only credits people who have bought the book into their review algorithm.

The link below will bring you to the Amazon sales page.  Near the end is the review section.  Clicking on this link will not cause you to buy the book, just bring you to the sales page.

Thank you.

Now Where is That Hammock

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It’s ten a.m. on Sunday morning and the much-vaunted snow-pocalypse has begun its reign of terror. A steady fall of small snow flakes are descending out of a gray sky.  The temperature has soared from a low last night of two degrees Fahrenheit to a current balmy twenty degrees.  I’ve announced to Camera Girl that I intend to skip snow removal altogether today and save my efforts for Monday when the lion’s share of the snow will be on the ground.  The current predicted accumulation for Sunday through Monday is ten to fifteen inches of the white stuff.  All in all, that’s not horrible.  The snow blower is 24 inches high.  Now, even fifteen inches will slow the work way down but you have to look at these things in the right way.  I’ll abandon the bottom driveway for the next few days and start off with a path for my car to get out on the top.  Then I’ll clear the entire top driveway and adjacencies and slowly work on the bottom driveway in a strategic fashion.  And the wind will play an important part in that operation.  Fifteen inches of snow isn’t a monstrous height but if wind forces me to dump off the snow right next to the row I’m clearing, it will quickly end up as three feet before very long.

And this is the sad reality of life in New England.  Aspects of snow removal become the focus of your every waking hour.  Equipment maintenance and repair, severity of the weather, work and chore scheduling, current health and injuries.  It’s all very, very tedious and boring.  But completely unavoidable.  That is unless there is some plan for escape!  But I know that will never be.  I’m bound by the heavy chains of family responsibility.  They’ve got me.

And that’s why Jake Barter is such a comfort to me in these times of tribulation.  Jake resides on an island paradise somewhere in the South Pacific.  Lying in a hammock beneath coconut palms he sips a cool drink while balmy zephyrs maintain a perfect seventy-eight degrees.  And if by some miracle the temperature reaches eighty-two, he need only spring from his berth and swim about in the warm clear ocean for a few minutes before returning to his rest where he awaits the mellow sound of a dinner gong announcing the beginning of a feast concocted of pork, coconut, honey and spices, fit for the king that he is.

Oh, well.  Maybe in my next life.  But for now, I’ll count my blessings.  The roof hasn’t collapsed under the weight of the snow.  The propane tanks are full enough for even a two-week power outage.  I have plenty of DVDs to keep me amused during the “weather crisis” and Camera Girl assures me we have enough food for the next few days at least.  And tomorrow, my marketer has informed me begins the efforts to advertise “The Sniper.”  I had assumed it would happen when the publication occurred on Wednesday.  But you know what they say about assuming.

Well, we shall see.  Today Amazon has it listed as:

Best Sellers Rank: #144,617 in Books

#599 in Technothrillers (Books)

#14,261 in Science Fiction (Books)

It would be nice if each of those numbers was shortened by a zero or two.

 

Now where is that hammock?

Theories of Story Structure

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I was watching a video about the correct way to structure a story.  And the guy had eight or ten different versions that people have formulated over the years.  And they go from a three-act model to a (I kid you not) twenty-seven stage version.  The latter is based on the hero’s quest model that Joseph Campbell formulated based on what he observed in various western myths and legends.

From what I could tell, more is better.  He had the three-act version down as the worst version.  Now he did qualify that it was probably a good model for a movie or a short story but for a novel it was too slight.  For the most part they all seemed to be variations on a theme.  Basically, you have a series of setbacks and victories leading up to a climax and then a conclusion.

I guess that’s probably more or less what a story is.  And there were some good ideas for what some of these setbacks should look like.  In particular, the hero’s quest had a bunch of stages that seemed to echo many of the incidents in such classic adventure stories as “The Lord of the Rings.”  There’s the initial refusal to accept the quest, there’s a temptation at a low point to renounce the struggle.  We have a scene where a minor character saves the day.  We might have a mentor helping the hero mature into his role.  Maybe there’s a betrayal.  Etcetera, etcetera.

In his defense the video guy did say that a good writer wouldn’t have to follow any of these models slavishly.  Like a good cook he can use his own judgement and add and subtract things from this recipe according to personal taste.  And I think that’s the point.  Really there is no perfect recipe.  Every story should be different.  If it’s not, why would anyone want to read the second one?  Why would someone want to write a second story that’s exactly the same as the first one?  That’s a rhetorical question.  The obvious answer is that if people liked it the first time, many of them will want more of the same.  So, the answer is money.  But I hope that anyone who is writing a series can plot out the events for the saga with enough intelligence to make the story varied and interesting and not repeat all the same events with only small variations.

I will confess that when I was getting close to the end of my book, I was tempted to make the story quite a bit longer.  I thought the ending was a bit abrupt and there wasn’t a more gradual slope to the end of the story.  But the more I thought about it the less I liked the idea of dragging it out.  My character had gone to war for revenge.  When that was done his part of the history was effectively over.  What came afterward would be another story and I still haven’t decided what the next thread I want to pull on in my make-believe world should be.  So hopefully I’ll have the sense to read Joseph Campbell’s book and then do the opposite!