Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Health, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction | Tags: Alzheimer's, Amazon, blogging, care-giving, direct publishing, free, health, hospice, jim downey, John Bourke, Kindle, memoir, Science Fiction
Quick recap of yesterday’s Kindle promotion…
Again, Her Final Year beat out Communion of Dreams, but this time the difference wasn’t as great.
There were a total of 2,757 downloads of Her Final Year, and the best ranking I saw in the course of the day was it hitting #41 overall in the free Kindle store. In addition, it sat at #1 in a number of categories related to aging and care-giving. Excellent!
Communion of Dreams also had a good day. A total of 1,993 downloads, hitting #144 in the overall ranking as well as #4 in “High Tech Science Fiction”. I’m going to have to go back and get a total count, but I think that puts us within spitting distance of 19,000 copies of this edition of the book being out there. Combine that with approximately 35,000 downloads of the earlier .pdf, and I think it is quite impressive. What’s really cool is that the 35,000 number was reached in about 5 years, whereas the Kindle edition number is for just 5 months.
I’m currently planning on doing another promotional weekend soon — details will be forthcoming. But in the meantime, please feel free to go ahead and promote the book to friends and forums — at $4.95, it’s still a real bargain.
As always, thanks to one and all who helped make this another successful promotion!
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the HFY blog.)
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Hospice, Kindle, Marketing, Music, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, YouTube | Tags: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Beatles, care-giving, direct publishing, free, health, hospice, jim downey, John Bourke, Kindle, literature, memoir, Science Fiction, writing, www youtube
Kindle edition promotion today! Communion of Dreams and Her Final Year are both *FREE* to download!
Also be sure to enter a drawing to get a signed paperback copy of either book. To enter your name for each book, post a comment on the appropriate blog, Facebook Page, or send a Tweet to the correct account between now and Sunday morning when I check each. You can enter once per book per venue (a total of 6 entries if you entered for both books at all three locations.)
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Health, Hospice, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction | Tags: Alzheimer's, Amazon, care-giving, direct publishing, free, health, hospice, jim downey, John Bourke, Kindle, memoir, Science Fiction
Yesterday I posted something of an infomercial-length piece about tomorrow’s big promotion. Here’s the 30-second ad version:
The Kindle edition of both Her Final Year and Communion of dreams will be free all day.
There will be a drawing for a signed paperback copy of each book (two separate drawings). To enter your name for each book, post a comment on the appropriate blog, Facebook Page, or send a Tweet to the correct account between now and Sunday morning when I check each. You can enter once per book per venue (a total of 6 entries if you entered for both books at all three locations.)
There, that’s it. At 1,095 words shorter than yesterday.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the HFY blog.)
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Bipolar, Connections, Diane Rehm, Failure, Feedback, Health, Hospice, Humor, Kindle, Marketing, Music, NPR, Promotion, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Writing stuff | Tags: Alzheimer's, Amazon, blogging, care-giving, Diane Rehm, direct publishing, free, health, hospice, humor, jim downey, John Bourke, literature, memoir, music, NPR, science, Science Fiction, Scott O'Neill, Shawn Colvin, writing
“Now, you would normally expect to pay $16.95 for a book of this size and quality! Just look at it! 420 pages full of the touching story of caring for a loved one! And those aren’t little trade paperback pages, either, but memoir-sized pages, each one charged with honest emotion and providing insight into one of the most challenging — and rewarding — experiences in life!”
“That’s right – you would expect to pay $16.95 for such a book – and it would be a fair deal. A modest price in exchange for access to the innermost thoughts and feelings of four people, each on a personal journey of love and self-discovery.”
“But you don’t have to pay $16.95. No you don’t. Why you can get the whole book — containing every single word, every single lesson learned — in Kindle format for the low, low price of JUST $8.99. That’s right — a huge savings, including no shipping or handling fees!”
“But Wait! There’s More!”
* * * * * * *
Shawn Colvin has a new book out, and has been doing the promotional circuit. I had the pleasure of hearing most of an hour-long interview with her this morning on the Diane Rehm show.
Colvin is just a couple of years older than I am. I can’t say that I have been a huge fan of hers, but I have been aware of her for a long time, and have always appreciated her talents. And Diane Rehm is one of the best in the business. As noted, I’d love to have a chance to have her interview me. The interview was engaging, and touching.
Because Colvin’s book is a memoir. No, not of care-giving. Not care-giving for someone else, anyway. Rather, it was about her own path to deal with her own demons. Depression. Substance abuse. Bad relationships. Anorexia. Toss in the usual professional stresses and failures, and it makes for a compelling story.
* * * * * * *
“That’s right, friend, there’s more: a *LOT* more.”
“Because not only can you get Her Final Year for the low, low price of just $8.99, but you can ALSO get this incredible companion volume: Communion of Dreams! That’s right — James Downey, one of the co-authors of Her Final Year, has also written a novel. And not just any novel — a work of speculative fiction which has fired the imagination of thousands, and prompted dozens of 5-star reviews on Amazon!”
“For such a work you would expect to pay at least $11.95 for the 350 page paperback! But it is available in the Kindle edition for just $4.95. That’s fight, LESS THAN one thin five-dollar bill. Such A Deal!!”
“But Wait! There’s More!”
* * * * * * *
Fascinating story this morning about efforts to stop the spread of Dengue Fever on NPR. The basic idea was to use a known effect where mosquitoes infected with a naturally-occurring bacteria are unable to transmit the virus which causes Dengue Fever. The science in the story was good, but what really caught my attention was how the effort to get this idea to work had been a *very* long and frustrating quest for the scientist behind it.
See, Scott O’Neill had been working on this project for some 20 years. The biggest problem was technical — it is phenomenally difficult to infect living mosquitoes with the bacteria. It takes thousands and thousands of attempts, working at a microscopic level, to inject the necessary bacteria into a mosquito egg, and then having said egg develop to adulthood and actually *have* the disease. Failure is a constant companion.
And so this is what caught my ear when I heard it:
Take the day in 2006, when one of Scott’s graduate students told him he thought he’d finally succeed in infecting a dengue mosquito with Wolbachia.
I figured this must have been a red-letter day for Scott, a day of sheer elation. Scott told me looking back on it, it was. But at the time it didn’t seem that way.
“Because you’re so used to failure that you don’t believe anything when you see it,” he says. “And so you can think back to when there was a Eureka moment, but at the time, you’re probably, ‘this looks good but I’ve been burnt thousands of times before. Let’s go and do it again, and the do it another time, and check and check and make sure it’s actually real.’ “
* * * * * * *
“That’s right, friend, there’s more: a *LOT* more.”
“Because while you would think that just $8.99 for Her Final Year or only $4.95 for Communion of Dreams would be a STEAL — and you would be correct to think that! — you can get *BOTH* of these books for FREE this Saturday!”
“That’s right, I said FREE, friend. As in beer! The Kindle edition of each book will be completely and totally FREE all day Saturday! All you have to do is just go and download it. Why, you do not even need to own a Kindle in order to take advantage of this phenomenal offer! That’s right, you can get a FREE Kindle app for almost every computer, tablet, or mobile device known to man!”
“But Wait! There’s More!”
* * * * * * *
I sometimes wonder whether I shouldn’t play up my own “demons” more.
Now, I haven’t been shy about talking about them. Anyone who has read my stuff for any length of time knows this. I’m honest about my background (orphaned at 13), my failures (both recent and older ones), and my own struggles with mild bipolar disorder and health problems. Talking about these aspects of my life helps to provide some context for the things I think and do — it is all part of who I am and why I see the world as I do.
But I try not to dwell on such things. I have never considered myself a tragic figure or particularly burdened. Whether or not it was Plato who actually said “be kind, everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” that aphorism is still very true, and my own battle hasn’t been especially more difficult than the one many people fight. In very many ways I have been extremely fortunate, and I know that. And I’m thankful for it.
But still, there is no denying that tragedy sells.
* * * * * * *
“More? How can there be More? The Kindle edition of both books are already FREE — what more could any reasonable person ask for???”
“Well, I’ll tell you what. How about a *signed* copy of the paperback edition of each book? For FREE!”
“That’s right. FREE!”
“All you gotta do is post a comment here. Or on our Facebook page. Or send a Tweet. Do any of these things between now and Sunday morning, and your name will be entered into a drawing for a FREE signed copy of the paperback! You can enter once for each book at each venue — a possibility of 6 chances in total! What more could you possible ask for?”
“So, don’t delay — enter your name, today! And remember to download your FREE copy of the Kindle edition of Her Final Year and Communion of Dreams this coming Saturday!”
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the Her Final Year blog.)
Filed under: Amazon, Connections, Feedback, Health, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, blogging, direct publishing, Habaneros, health, jim downey, Kindle, literature, lucid dreaming, Science Fiction, writing
There’s a new review up on Amazon.
* * * * * * *
I woke from a *very* strange dream about 2:00 this morning. It was a partially lucid dream, where the awake part of my brain kept trying to re-arrange the dream components to solve a problem.
The problem? How to coordinate and communicate with a very large workforce in the basement of a huge construction site. For whatever reason, the foundation of the building had been put into place, but there were huge piles of random junk all throughout the various compartments of the basement. Each time I tried to come up with a way to make sure that everyone did what they needed to do, and was accounted for (in terms of safety and actually working), the size of the basement grew, as did the piles of junk to be dealt with.
* * * * * * *
I’ve posted a fair number of items to the blog this week, but all of it has been quick links to videos I found of interest, or the sort of simple status updates I like to share about how the book is doing. There are all kinds of reasons why I post this stuff. It’s good to have these benchmarks noted on the blog for archive purposes, and people enjoy the oddball vids I come across. But these sorts of posts don’t require a lot of mental effort on my part, and when I post a string of them it usually indicates that something else is going on.
Sometimes I’m aware of what that “something else” is, sometimes it is only obvious in hindsight.
* * * * * * *
I’ve been fighting a sore throat for more than a week. Nothing too bad, started out as just an ache. I figured at first it was probably just due to allergies and a little drainage. Then I figured I had a mild virus (there’s always something going around). But it persisted. Yesterday morning I took a look in the mirror, and saw that my uvula was just about the size, shape, and color of a very ripe habanero.
Charming.
I had planned to ride out the weekend, then if my throat was still bugging me to see my usual doc sometime. Instead, I popped over to the clinic. Saw the doc on call. She took one look at my throat, prescribed antibiotics, told me to take it easy.
* * * * * * *
I knew that I was just spinning my wheels last week. I didn’t feel all that well. But I was getting some good work done in the bindery, and more or less kept forward momentum going on marketing & promotion, other things.
More importantly, I’ve been doing a *lot* of thinking about St. Cybi’s Well, the prequel to Communion of Dreams which I have mentioned often, but for which I have very little to show at this point.
It is hard to explain how this process works sometimes. But the conscious part of my brain recognized what was happening in my dream last night. How even though the foundation of the book may be laid, it is still necessary to get a handle on all the many different elements I need to work together to complete the thing. Oh, some of the details will sort themselves out as you go along — characters will take on ‘life’ and become real, a metaphor will become clear, that sort of thing — but you have to at least get the major elements in place, or you can never hope to build the book.
And just when you think you have things sorted out, you realize that the task before you is even larger than you realized. There are more factors to consider. More characters to understand.
It’s frustrating. And exciting. And exhausting.
* * * * * * *
There’s a new review up on Amazon. Here’s part of it:
I highly recommend this book. It’s exciting, thought provoking, and entertaining. I hope Mr. Downey continues to produce science fiction of such high caliber.
That helps. Thanks.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Feedback, Kindle, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction | Tags: Amazon, blogging, direct publishing, free, jim downey, Kindle, reviews, Science Fiction
Well, let’s look back at April…
All in all, it was a good month for Communion of Dreams. Perhaps the least impressive statistic is the number of visitors to the website for the book: only about 1,000. But that’s OK, because a lot more people went directly to the Amazon pages for the book (Kindle and paperback), and actual sales were right at 275 over the course of the month.
I just checked the numbers for May, and guess what? A total of 553 sales/loans. Didn’t break the 600 level as I hoped, but this is still twice the total sales/loans as April. Excellent! Thanks, everyone, for your support & reviews!
In terms of visits to the site, that number was just a tad under 1,200. A similar number of visitors to this blog over the course of the month.
I’m still sorting out the details, but there will be at least one promotional day this month — when anyone can download the Kindle edition of Communion of Dreams for free. In addition, I will hold some kind of drawing to send out a signed copy of the paperback edition — watch for details!
Happy June, everyone!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Feedback, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction | Tags: Amazon, blogging, direct publishing, free, jim downey, Kindle, literature, reviews, Science Fiction
No, not that 538. Though this does have to do with statistics of a sort: that’s the number of total sales & loans of Communion of Dreams so far this month. (Loans are included, since under the Amazon Prime system I get paid almost as much royalty for a loan as I do for an outright sale of the book).
Everything was plugging along just grand until the end of last week, when sales decided to slow down considerably. Went from about 25 a day to under 10, and the ranking slipped from about 2,000 overall to the current 12,427.
These kinds of fluctuations happen, and I’m not worried about the overall trend — but it would still be nice if we could break 600 total sales for the entire month. So I’m asking for a little help: if you know someone who might enjoy Communion of Dreams, but isn’t usually a science-fiction reader, give the book a plug. Reviews have consistently shown that it has appeal beyond just the genre, and in fact the formal review I linked to earlier this month summed up his recommendation this way: “A solid read that may have greater appeal to individuals who are not fans of the genre than by aficionados.”
Now, if someone’s in a bit of a cash bind, don’t bug them about buying the book. I’ll be running another “free promotion day” for the Kindle edition here in June, and they can get it then. But otherwise, please help spread the word.
Thanks!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Kindle, Marketing, movies, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, direct publishing, game theory, jim downey, Kindle, literature, reviews, Science Fiction, writing
Dear Agent-person,
Earlier this year I self-published a book. Said book sold about 100 copies in the first month. About 200 copies the second month. 300 copies last month. It broke that number in the first two weeks of this month. And the rate of increase is still growing. And that’s just with my feeble efforts to promote the book.
People love the thing. The reviews are excellent. Don’t take my word for it – see for yourself.
I’d love to get this book in the hands of a large publisher. With even a half-way decent promotional campaign this book could be a mega-seller. And I’m not talking within the confines of genre-fiction. Please note in those reviews that a number of people have said that they don’t usually read Science Fiction. This has mass-market appeal. This could easily be turned into a blockbuster movie.
There’s nothing that needs to be done to the book – it is finished, popular, and ready to be handed over to a large publisher. If they move fast, they can have the damned thing in stores before the holiday season.
Further, I have at least two more books in this series I want to write, and that people want to read. I can have the first manuscript done in 18 months, perhaps sooner. If I have a decent advance to live on so I can concentrate on writing it.
I’ve thought about doing a Kickstarter to accomplish that. And there’s a chance that sales will just continue to grow on their own accord. But I’d rather not have to mess with all of this, and concentrate on my writing.
Do you see where I’m going with this? I need an agent. Not just any agent. One with the right connections. One who can cut through the crap and land a package deal to turn this book, and then the others in the series, into best-sellers. So I’m contacting you. You’re not the only one I’m contacting. The first one who gets back to me and shows me what they can do for me gets to take their cut of the proceeds.
Don’t delay.
Jim Downey
* * * * * * * *
I must admit, that I’m seriously tempted to send that kind of a query letter out. No, it is not at all my personality to say or do such a thing, but I sold artwork long enough to know that sometimes, it’s all about attitude. Having the hutzpah, the brashness, to claim success long before the race starts.
And what the hell, it’s not like my previous efforts to get the attention of a decent agent were any more successful.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Blade Runner, Failure, Feedback, Health, Hospice, Kindle, Marketing, movies, Promotion, Publishing, Ridley Scott, Science Fiction, Society, XCOR | Tags: Alzheimer's, Amazon, banking, blogging, care-giving, direct publishing, free, health, hospice, jim downey, John Bourke, Kindle, literature, memoir, Mother's Day, reviews, Science Fiction, TSA, writing
A couple weeks ago I quipped that I was thankful for the TSA, because they are always good fodder for a blog post when things were otherwise slow. Well, likewise, I’m glad that the big multinational banks are around to put my own mistakes in some perspective:
A billion here, a billion there
JPMORGAN, widely considered the best run of all the large banks in America, if not the world, on May 10th provided the kind of news that has become all too common in the financial industry: a $2 billion charge for errant trades. The markets responded within seconds of the opening on May 11th, sending Morgan’s share price down 9%, and its value by $14 billion. Late on May 11th, Standard & Poor’s announced it was downgrading the outlook for the company, and Fitch knocked down its ratings.
* * *
The bluntest criticism of Morgan’s failure came from the bank’s own chief executive, Jamie Dimon. He said the losses were the result of self-inflicted “sloppiness”, “poor judgment” and “stupidity”, for which “we are accountable”.
And the news this morning is that a number of the executives involved in the losses have ‘retired’. No, not in the Blade Runner sense. But in the sense that they’ll not be drawing a salary of more than a million bucks a month. Though I imagine that these people have more than a bit of savings and contractual retirement income to cushion the blow.
Anyway.
Yesterday’s Kindle promotion for Communion of Dreams wasn’t a huge mistake, but it also wasn’t a stunning success. A total of 1,571 copies of the book were downloaded. Chances are it wasn’t what was needed to kick us up to the next orbital level, but neither did it crash & burn.
What *was* surprising was that our care-giving memoir Her Final Year proved to be very successful, with a total of 3,112 downloads. Wow.
I find it hard to explain just how happy this makes me. As I had noted previously, I was very disappointed with the response to Her Final Year. Only recently have I come to understand that it was about more than just simple sales.
See, I have been very pleased with the response to Communion of Dreams. The sales are nice, and the income helps. The reviews and ratings are rewarding. But what really makes me happy is that the book has found an audience, a home in people’s lives, a place in their imaginations.
That Her Final Year hadn’t found such a home was what bugged me. Because I have a lot of faith in the book. Faith that it can help others, if they would just read the damned thing. But that faith had been betrayed by my inability to get any attention for the book. Or, rather, I felt like I had betrayed my faith – and the book – by my inability to promote it.
Now, just because 3,112 people downloaded the book yesterday that doesn’t mean that the book will be read. But it sure as hell is a lot more likely that it’ll be read than just having the thing sit forgotten on Amazon’s servers. We’ll just have to see.
But no longer do I feel like I have betrayed the promise of the book. That gives me a happiness, and a hope, which I haven’t felt for a long time.
Thanks, everyone.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the HFY blog.)
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Ballistics, Guns, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, RKBA, Science Fiction, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, ballistics, BBTI, blogging, direct publishing, firearms, free, guns, jim downey, Kindle, literature, Science Fiction, writing
There’s a reason I’m self-employed.
It’s because while I can work fine with others, by and large I prefer to do things my own way, on my own schedule. This comes with trade-offs, of course, and it doesn’t mean that I can completely eliminate the need to conform to societal or even corporate rules. But I can minimize that crap and get on with my life.
One of the things I’ve enjoyed doing for the last year or so has been writing for Guns.com. For the most part I’ve just picked a topic, ran the idea past my editors, and then produced a piece of writing within the appropriate word-count range. Usually the changes they made to my writing were minimal, and everyone was happy. It didn’t generate a lot of money (free-lance writing in this day and age doesn’t), but during some of the lean times it was money which came in very handy.
Well, Guns.com has seen a remarkable growth in the time I’ve been writing for them (I got started with them very early on), and they’re now one of the biggest firearms-related sites out there. They’ve been very aggressive in gathering together a lot of talented people, and seeing that they have kept their content fresh & interesting. It’s been a lot of fun for me to be a part of that. It’s also taught me a lot (doing the necessary research to write a review or article is always a good education), and it has allowed me to keep my writing skills sharp.
Well, the other day I mentioned that I was making some changes in my usual routine, because of limitations of time and energy. And I’m giving serious consideration to making another such change – curtailing or even stopping altogether how much writing I do for Guns.com.
Now, partly this is just due to the natural pacing of things. I had set out to do reviews of most of the firearms we’ve tested for BBTI, and I have now submitted reviews for all those which Guns.com had not previously covered – there still some 30 or 40 such reviews pending publication (they like to spread them out). I also did a bunch of other reviews of guns which I had a chance to try recently which are a little more unusual than what most people ever try, and that was fun.
But there’s another factor here. With the substantial growth of the site, as well as the expansion of the number of contributing writers, Guns.com had to come up with some formal style guides for people to use. This is a common thing for any large site, and it is a mark of their professionalism that they put together a very good style manual more than 30 pages in length, complete with links of a lot of example articles. I was flattered to see that quite a few of those articles were ones I had written.
I find, however, that it presents a certain quandary for me: having to write to certain style rules.
That’s not my writing . . . style. I like to play around. Innovate. Feel my way through an idea, a topic, a story. If you’ve read my novel, or even this blog, you’ll have a pretty good sense of what I mean. While I am perfectly capable of writing within conventional rules, I’m much more interested in playing with the expectations of the reader a bit, challenging them by subverting those rules now and then.
In short, I don’t want the rules to apply to me.
In other words, I’m a prima donna.
But maybe that’s not a bad thing.
Anyway, we’ll see what happens. I like the guys at Guns.com, and I respect what they have accomplished. But I’m not interested in doing cookie-cutter writing – leastwise, not as a regular course of affairs. And besides, if I take the hour or two I spend on each article/review I write for them, and put it towards another novel, well I think that might be a better use of my time & energy. Particularly so, given the response so far to Communion of Dreams.
Speaking of which, remember that the Kindle edition is free today!
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 