Making a tough business decision in order to survive

Back in 2014, I wrote a blog post at the advent of Kindle Unlimited, the then-new program by Amazon. And I'll be honest: I was skeptical. I was skeptical about it. I didn't think it would work, but then again, it's Amazon. Bezos had struck gold with Kindle, and I must admit that lightning struck pretty hard with KU.

Suffice it to say, I balked. Even though I had trumpeted ebooks and Kindle in particular since 2010, I personally felt that I had no right to tell readers that they needed a Kindle or a Kindle app in order to read my books. Seriously, who was I to tell anyone who read ebooks how they should read them? I felt that if you had a Nook, a Kobo reader, or an iPad with Apple iBooks already downloaded, you had enough to read me.

How wrong I was!

Over the next few years, like Mark Coker had predicted, my sales and the sales of other authors not in KU started to slip, and slip hard. I went from 4,000-plus books sold in 2012 to 336 last year; shit, I only sold 193 in 2019. I really didn't understand it: I had  all these new books, from Travel Agent to Scouring Agent and the Ricky Madison books, books with even better writing than books like Model Agent and Rogue Agent that sold really, really well, and I couldn't get a sniff of a sale, or reach the numbers that I once had before KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited entered the fray. Are readers by-passing my books because they aren't in KU? Quite possible; I've never received a single piece of email telling me to get into KU or else, though. But even though I had plenty of evidence to the contrary, I steadfastly -- read: stubbornly -- refused to go narrow... until as late as December 2020, when I considered putting Incoming Private Show into KU.

That refusal has come to an end.

As of this morning, I have started the process of de-listing all of my books on Nook, Kobo, iBooks, and all the small ebook sites. While I'm sure that Kobo, Nook, and iBooks will be instantaneous, it will take a while for Hoopla and OverDrive, etc, to de-list me and take me off their sites. Once that happens...

Once that happens, I can put all 30-something of my books and short stories into KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited.

As I've said before, I crave the success that my friends have. And when I look at the stats they post in certain Facebook groups, all from KU, and I see the amount of money they are making -- life-changing money -- and the amount of books they are pushing out the door, it makes me wonder why I can't get that.

But alas, I can get that. I can get that by succumbing to KU and finally embracing all it does for authors. My writing skills are superior to what they were. I'm doing everything right, and yet I feel that I'm losing because I'm not selling, because I'm not in KU. As a wide author, I'm not making enough to make fiction writing a full-time profession any longer, I'm not making enough from it to put food on the table, to pay my mortgage, to pay my bills; I've scaled back since 2017, and my hope is that I can make enough through my fiction by going narrow with KU to grow my audience and get back to a full-time status.

Time to do just that. Hopefully lightning will strike for me like it has so many others.

KU, here I come. See you there.

www.seansweeneyauthor.com

Looking ahead to 2021

Within the next two-plus days, the sands in 2020's hourglass will run out, an imaginary hand will twist its wrist and spin it, and the long year of 2021 will begin. For many, seeing New Year's Eve approach has to be a relief; 2020 has not been kind to them, and in the years to come they will flinch when anyone mentions the numbers associated with this horrid year in their presence.

For me, I count myself fortunate. Outside of brief scares, I have not been exposed to COVID. We thought my mom might have been exposed following a late summer outbreak here in my hometown, but she, luckily, turned up negative. Extended family members contracted it and have recovered. 

And outside of my wife's stroke back in May and my heart condition rearing its ugly head on me over the last month or so, my family has come out unscathed. We are incredibly thankful for that, and our hearts ache for those who have lost loved ones.

In looking back, we were lucky. We listened to the experts and wore a mask from the middle of March on whenever we left the house. We social distanced, we washed our hands, we sanitized. 

In short, we controlled what we could control. 

And as I look ahead to next year, I have to continue that mindset. Control what I can control, don't sweat the small stuff. Insert whichever cliché you need, but those are two that I will utilize when it comes to my writing business in 2021.

What can I control?

My writing output, for instance. I'm not setting a word count goal, per se, like I've done in the past, but when I plan to have two books out in 2021 and one is practically already scheduled to come out in the summer, it means that the book I'm about to start writing needs to take priority during my daily writing time in order to have it ready for a near Christmas 2021 release. When 10 a.m. arrives, I need to be in my office typing away until 2 or 3 p.m. Not doing this will hamper that goal.

On the flip side, I have to remind myself not to get completely angry at myself should other things -- like one of my other writing lives, or an emergency -- pop up, and subsequently hampers the writing schedule. That falls under not sweating the small stuff; emergencies happen, and in my other writing job, things happen that take me away from the fiction. I just have to remind myself to get back to the writing as soon as humanly possible. And if that means getting a page done in the overnight, so be it, or promising myself to write more the next day in an effort to make up for it.

What else can I control? Improving my marketing skills. I've said it time and again: my marketing skills are positively dreadful, but I'm working to improve them. I've done quite a bit of reading over the last quarter, and my hope is to continue to tweak my marketing, and not relying on the same tired methods that haven't necessarily worked, or have tailed off in their effectiveness.

And one of those things, unfortunately, is to possibly look into Kindle Unlimited for the release of INCOMING PRIVATE SHOW, at least at the start. I know that those who have bought my books on Nook, Kobo, and iBooks are shouting, "No!" at me, but I have to at least try it out and see if it works for me, with an incredibly well-written book. And honestly, if it doesn't, once the 90-day exclusivity period it up, I can easily take it out of KU and upload to the other markets.

Other things that I can control? My health, the maintenance on my new house and the various tools I need, and whether I'm wearing a mask.

What are the things I won't sweat about in 2021? Book sales -- I have no control over whether or not people buy my books -- the weather, the Revolution or Arsenal winning or losing, and whether or not people get vaccinated. I'm sure there will be other things that come up.

In short, I'm going into 2021 with a great deal of optimism for myself, my business, and the world at large. 

I hope you're doing the same.

Cover Reveal: INCOMING PRIVATE SHOW, coming Summer 2021

The last couple of days, outside of Christmas, I've been hard at work on making INCOMING PRIVATE SHOW a much better book. Earlier in the week, I took many hours editing and polishing the novel up, bringing it up to fourth draft status.

And now, I have a cover for you, as well as what the book is all about:

When 20-year-old Alyssa Young is murdered at work, police in her hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts have little in the way of clues. And when Detective Ricky Madison discovers what she does for a living — she’s a cam girl, an Internet stripper — and that it’s difficult for anyone to know where she is working, it’s a head scratcher that he doesn’t think he can solve without help from her friends. Two are away, and one of her co-workers is useless.

But when one of her best friends, too, is murdered in the same violent fashion, Ricky wants to prevent a third death from hitting his streets.

A public plea for help gains him critical information, and it leads him to look into Alyssa’s past to find the unscrupulous person behind it.

Coming Summer 2021, INCOMING PRIVATE SHOW is the third book in the Ricky Madison series, behind THE LONG CRIMSON LINE and PERSUADED BY THE REFLECTIONS. Unlike the first two books, which are thrillers, IPS is more of an erotic police procedural. You know how much I like to push the envelope with Ricky Madison stories, and I push the sex levels in this one to the fullest. 

I honestly cannot wait to show you the book. I hope you enjoy it.

Getting another project off the ground

Over the last couple of years, many readers have inquired as to which book I'm writing, and which books -- if my WIP happens to be part of a series -- they should re-read or catch up on in time for that WIP's release in ebook or print form.

As you already know, my book production has slowed to a crawl over most of the last two years, since the Fall of 2017. I lost a lot of time due to a pair of radio shows, and those shows really slowed my roll. You can't really get into a groove when you write for three days, take a day to drive half an hour, do an hour radio show, and then drive home and collapse, then write for two days and take another day for a show. You just can't.

At least I can't. Your mileage may vary.

And with the exception of The Jaclyn Johnson Experience's long-awaited release back in May... I can't tell you how much of a relief it was to get something out in 2019, especially not having released anything in some 15-16 months before that.

But there is more coming on the horizon. It may be in the distant horizon, but it's coming. The first book in the Glorious series is currently at my editing crew. I think there will be some work to do on it when I get it back at the end of the American soccer season, but I'm not really worrying about it until then.

The erotic thriller I penned? I truncated the thriller aspects and just made it an erotic novella. It's at a group of editors now, and I suspect that will be out in due time.

Yet... there's more.

Over the last couple of days, I've spent some time brainstorming out a new book that'll be part of my Ricky Madison series -- you know, The Long Crimson Line and Persuaded By The Reflections. I don't have a title just yet, but I have five pages, printed, of plot, character sketches, and thoughts for Ricky to encounter during this tale. Generally, Ricky novels are 90,000-100,000-word behemoths, and I think it's fair to say this one will be, too.

In reading over my outline -- which right now is jumbled and really in no particular order -- I have to say that I'm actually impressed. I really like how this story came together, all done in a few days. Moving my fingers across the keyboard like lightning as I let my thoughts flow across the screen. It was almost too easy to let things come to my mind.

I found there will be a couple of redundancies, such as characters' mothers who have no idea what's going on with their sons -- which is, when one thinks about it, realistic. It's something that Ricky might expound on in thought. We'll see. I don't think that it's a bad thing to have a redundancy such as these. You don't necessarily run into two people who are exactly alike... but sometimes you encounter similar traits and things in different people. It happens, and I think -- at least what I have written now -- that's how this novel will play out.

My hope is that I'll get started on it either this week or next, and we'll see how far I get. I'll still have soccer to cover, so the thought of plowing through this story is out -- and I doubt that I get to do something like that again. The days of 3,000 words per day are long gone. I'm not going to rush this book, and my hope is that it'll be just as gritty as Persuaded is.

Even so, the fact that I've managed to get another project off the ground -- one which I think will be so much easier to write than Glorious -- is pretty remarkable.

www.seansweeneyauthor.com