Treading Water in a Maelstrom – Day 143

Ever have one of those days (weeks/months/lives) where you feel that you’re treading water well enough, but it just doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things? That maybe the water you’re treading water in is about to be sucked down itself?

That’s certainly the way I feel right now. Work has been crazy busy, which is obviously great on the one hand. On the other, I haven’t been able to focus nearly enough time on my novel.

To compound matters, the second draft is proving to be trickier than previously thought. With the first draft, I could pretty much just pick up where I left off, because cohesiveness wasn’t necessarily a big concern.

It’s a little different for this draft though. I’m writing deliberately now, and that I’m finding takes more time and focus. I don’t know why I’m surprised by that, but there you go.

Upshot of this is I haven’t strung many words together in the novel as of late, although it is always percolating in my mind. I suspect the next couple of days will be rough as well, but I am pretty sure I can block out some time on Saturday morning. Usually that’s my sleep-in day but… the sacrifices we make as writers, I guess.

In other news… found an interesting blog by Derek J. Canyon called “Adventures in ePublishing”. Lately Derek has been looking at how well his recent marketing efforts have helped sell — or not sell — his self-published books. Not surprisingly (if you are a marketer), banner ads don’t work so well, but blogging does seem to help, as he shows in his latest post: http://derekjcanyon.blogspot.com/2011/01/do-author-blogs-cause-book-sales.html Derek is a genre writer (sci-fi) and also has an ebook on how to format your ebook for Kindle (looks like a great resource actually, if I ever decide to go that route).

The interesting thing to me is his numbers: according to the graph, he’s selling 2-20 books per day, with the average falling around 7. That’s about 210 books per month, which doesn’t put him with the authors JA Konrath lists with 2,000+ books per month (some are here: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/01/guest-post-by-robin-sullivan.html). But they are pretty decent numbers for a self-published ebook. Not to mention, his costs and work load are both much lower to attain those numbers than a self-published paper book.

The takeaway here? If you’re going to self-publish, ebooks seem to be the way to go. (At the very least, it doesn’t hurt to make it available electronically as well…)

I shall investigate further…

~Graham