by john | Apr 18, 2011 | Writing
Never let it be said that there isn’t any benefit to procrastination – the winner of the Kindle 3 giveaway posted her review of Back in Black right under the deadline wire, and got her trivia questions in with just a week to spare!
Our winner is Cat Lail!
Cat did all the stuff you could do to get extra entries – she bought books, reviewed books and answered a bunch of trivia questions. Well, it all paid off because her lucky number was drawn and now she’ll be the proud owner of a Kindle 3G!
Congratulations Cat, and thanks to everyone who stopped by and entered! Stay tuned tomorrow (or the next day, because sometimes I’m slow) for a big announcement about an upcoming promotion event!
by john | Apr 17, 2011 | Poker, Real Life, Writing
Not for me so much, but certainly for a bunch of my friends in the poker industry. For those of you new around here, I spent several years doing tournament coverage for major poker news and play sites. Before and during that time I made a little money, and made a lot of good friends. Due to a change in leadership at my major employer, a disagreement with an editor and a shift in focus in my life, I left all that pretty much behind me a couple years ago. Last summer was the first in several that I didn’t cover the World Series of Poker, and I haven’t stayed up late to watch an internet poker tournament in at least a year.
Turns out to be good timing on my part, since Friday the US Dept. of Justice laid out indictments against key figured in the operation of Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and UltimateBet. What does this mean for yours truly? About $700 of my money is trapped in online poker accounts that I won’t be able to get to for the immediate future. I’m sure I’ll be able to get it eventually, and I’m not really sweating it.
What does it mean for some of my friends and acquaintances? Unemployment, major chunks of their life savings locked away in the poker sites’ accounts, uncertainty in their income stream for the foreseeable future, and a lot of other ugliness. I have the utmost faith that most of my friends will eventually come out okay, because they are very bright and talented people, and they also were pretty aware that they were riding a volatile vehicle and it could go KABOOM at any moment. So, with the exception of some denial that may have led some folks to leave more money in online poker accounts than they should have, they’ll be okay in the long term.
But for me, the events of the weekend did make me sit back and look around for a minute. Two years ago, I was counting on about a quarter of my income coming from writing about poker. When that went away, I tightened the belt a little (but not much, because it’s still a significant girth to go around), but I’ve never really replaced that revenue. Now I’m beginning to be in a place where that revenue is starting to trickle back in via book sales. This month will be my best month ever for sales (by a LONG shot), with over 500 e-books sold already. That’s more than triple the number of books I sold last month, and if I’m lucky, I’ll break 900 for the month. That’s a big help with the monthly finances, and with at least two more books to come this year, hopefully we can keep things on an upward trend.
But what happens in the future? Do I quit my job and try to write for a living? I could certainly be more prolific if all I had to do each day was write and promote. But will the money ever be there? I dunno. I honestly have no idea. I have hopes, and I have examples from other indie authors that I’m trying to follow, but who knows if I’ll ever get to David Dalglish numbers, or Michael Sullivan numbers, much less Joe Konrath or Amanda Hocking numbers. I’m not looking for James Patterson money, just enough to pay my bills and live comfortably (and I could be very comfortable in a yacht, BTW). Right now I have a good job and my book sales are finally approaching enough money to be considered a nice side income. For now, I’ll live with that and keep writing. Book 3 of Black Knight Chronicles will drop this summer, with another book coming in the fall. I’m not sure if it will be book 1 of Return to Eden or this odd horror novel that’s been bugging me the past few days. But my point is, I have plenty of ideas, so I can keep writing for a while. And as long as people are buying books, I’ve got something going for me.
by john | Apr 9, 2011 | Writing
I’ve got a post up on Derek’s blog and he was kind enough to trade me one for here. Go check out his blog to read my drivel after you’ve read him here.
John and I (and a dozen other indie authors) have been collaborating on a science fiction and fantasy anthology titled Twelve Worlds. It will be available very soon for $2.99. It has fourteen different stories by different authors just starting out in the epublishing arena. It’s a great way for you to find great new worlds to explore. Plus, author royalties go the Reading is Fundamental charity.
While working on Twelve Worlds, John suggested that we swap excerpts for our novels in hopes of cross-pollinating our readership. Before I agreed, I read John’s novel, Hard Day’s Knight, to make sure that our genres were compatible. After all, my gritty, action-packed cyberpunk novel wouldn’t fit too well at the end of a Victorian romance or courtroom drama. I really enjoyed HDK, and I decided that John’s sarcastic, action-packed paranormal detective stories are a great accompaniment for Dead Dwarves Don’t Dance. I think that our styles complement each other nicely, and apparently so do our readers. We now show up on each other’s Customer Also Bought lists on Amazon.
Unfortunately, there is no way to know how many sales we are creating for each other. We can only hypothesize. I’m selling around 40 copies of Dead Dwarves Don’t Dance per day. Every one of those purchases also gets the excerpt from John’s novel. Since John’s excerpt is such a great hook into his world, I have to believe that at least a few of my readers also buy his book. Even if it’s only 5%, that’s still an extra 60 books a month for John. I’ve been seeing my numbers increase since we traded excerpts, so I’m guessing I also get an extra few a day from John’s readership.
Another great thing is that I’m also showing up on the Also Bought list for John’s other ebooks. My excerpt is in Back in Black, but my books also show up on the pages for Hard Day’s Knight and The Chosen. John’s books are also showing up on my other ebook page. So, even though our excerpts appear only in one other book, we’re both getting exposure on multiple book pages. What this tells me is that authors with multiple titles are very valuable for the excerpt trading strategy.
The Also Bought lists are a great advertising tool. Actually, the Also Bought lists are prime advertising real estate. But there’s no way for writers to show up on those lists except by selling our books to the same audience. Fortunately, trading excerpts is a great way to do that. Any additional exposure is a godsend for us small indies. For no cost at all I’m getting advertised on John’s Amazon book pages, and he’s getting advertised on mine! Win win!
What this means for me
I will continue to trade excerpts with authors writing in genres compatible with mine. I see no reason not to include multiple excerpts in the back of my novels. Maybe 3? So, if anyone else would like to trade excerpts, give me a shout and let’s talk about it.
What this means for you
If you’re an aspiring author, I recommend that you locate other authors to trade excerpts. There is absolutely no downside to it. At the very worst, you spend an hour or so adding their excerpt to your book and you get no additional sales. At best, you get free advertising in the other author’s book AND on their book pages AND you sell more books.
by john | Apr 7, 2011 | Poker, Real Life, Vegas, Writing
Ok, not as young as I once was, but as the song goes, I’m as good once as I ever was. I leave tomorrow night for Vegas. I’m going out to attend the National Association of Broadcasters show for the day job, but since the show starts Monday I thought I’d take the weekend and play a bit. Then I found out that the Venetian is having their Deep Stacks Extravaganza poker tournament series this month, so I’ll definitely be playing that on Saturday. My friend Hoyazo went deep in one of those last year for a very nice score, and since I’ve cashed in the Venetian daily tournament several times I thought I’d give it a shot. I get in around 8PM Vegas time Friday, and hopefully I’ll catch a couple hours sleep on the plane so I can stay up for a while when I get there. I don’t really care if I do anything tomorrow night, but I want to be able to go to bed and sleep until at least 8AM Saturday, so my sleep schedule will get right quickly. It’s usually not an issue for me in Vegas.
So if you’re in Vegas, and want to get together, email me. I’ll be at the Venetian Saturday, and hopefully Sunday, and at the Convention Center during the day Monday thru Wednesday. I fly home on the redeye Wednesday night and am participating in a writer’s panel Thursday afternoon. That should be entertaining for everyone!
Book sales are soaring, for some reason I’ve jumped from averaging 3 books a day in February to 20 or so per day in April. Hard Day’s Knight keeps creeping up and up in the Amazon rankings, finally breaking through the 3,000 mark today. Lower is better on those rankings, and all three books had been living in the 20-30,000 level. Now HDK and Back in Black are pretty much living under 10,000, and The Chosen is hanging out around 20,000. I’m thrilled with the progress, and with some recent reviews. Obviously I hope it keeps up, I’ve got truck payments to make :).
Volume 3 of The Black Knight Chronicles is coming right along, I’m probably about 10% finished with the first draft. I hope I’ll be able to get some work done on it while in Vegas, but I’m not holding my breath. NAB is a tough show, with long hours and a huge attendance, so I’ll be working pretty much non-stop the whole time I’m there. That’s okay, I’ve got this weekend to play!
by john | Apr 6, 2011 | Poker
Best Books About Poker
Lots of poker fans love to read about the game but of the thousands of poker books on the market, 95% of them deal solely with things like poker strategy and the mechanics of the game. While everyone would love to know the optimal way to play pocket jacks from early position, it doesn’t exactly make for gripping reading, especially if you’re a more casual fan of the game (or buying a present for a poker playing friend or family member). Below you’ll find some of the best books about poker that take a broader, more writerly approach to the game and include a lot of the fascinating history that makes poker such an interesting game.
“The Biggest Game in Town” by Al Alvarez is one of the most compelling books about poker, coming from a writer that’s well-known in literary circles. Alvarez deals with poker before the online boom of the early 2000s, weaving together a variety of amazing stories, anecdotes, and interviews with poker players in the early 1980s as they made their way to Las Vegas to take on the world’s biggest poker games. Be forewarned, though, that Alvarez deals with an older generation of poker players (such as Doyle Brunson, Stu Ungar, Johnny Moss, and Nick the Greek), so you’re not going to find any ink spilled on players that weren’t even born in 1983 such as Tom Dwan or Viktor Blom.
Anthony Holden’s “Big Deal’ is another amazing poker book, which chronicles Holden’s attempt to make a go of it on the professional poker circuit for a year from 1988-1989. His book deals much more with the psychological and emotional toll that poker can exact, with players chasing a big score that often remains just out of reach. While it’s very much about poker it also appeals in a broader sense to anyone who’s found themselves chasing a dream that takes them farther and farther away from the people they care the most about in their lives — a plight that many poker players face each and every day.
Jim McManus has contributed two excellent poker books to the canon: “Posititively Fifth Street” and “Cowboys Full: the Story of Poker”. “Positively Fifth Street” includes personal poker action from McManus’ deep run in the in the 2000 WSOP Main Event, with the backdrop of the murder trial of Ted Binion (which is the story he was originally sent to Vegas to cover). “Cowboys Full” is a more historical piece on the evolution of the game of poker over the years, from its humble beginnings to the poker boom fueled by online poker rooms that has seen it grow into a multi-billion dollar global industry.
This has been a sponsored post.
