Giveaway Winners!
The Chasing McCree giveaway has ended!! I want to thank everyone who participated, and I appreciate all the support you have given me. I love you guys!!!
Here are the winners!
Jordan Noonan
Cathy De Los Santos
Jhoanna Ong.
Congrats you guys!!! I’ll be emailing you shortly
You can find the paperback copy of Chasing McCree, with short stories, the McCree’s Star Spangled 4th, and A McCree Christmas, on sale at Amazon
Chasing McCree Giveaway!!!
To celebrate Chasing McCree’s one year anniversary, I’m giving away three signed copies! I”m super excited about this. The contest starts tonight at midnight, and ends April 14th.
Enter raffle here : Chasing Giveaway
To embed the raffle widget on your site-
http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/share-code/NzM3MzJmNTA3N2Q3NWRlOGZmMGY5NjZlNWYzMjMxOjE=/
The Curse of the Evil Gallbladder
Once upon a time, there was a gallbladder. It was happy, and then one day, decided it would revolt.
This sounds like a very promising story!
Right?
Wrong.
It’s not a fun story at all.
I’ve been absent for a little while, hard to get a hold of, and basically offline. Not great, but I’ve not been feeling good. Also, I’ve been distracted by a German scientist with a great head of hair and a very sweet accent! So I’ve had a lot of on my plate, but it’s been a wonderfully full plate, until the gallbladder revolted.
Yes, my gallbladder hates me.
No, I don’t know why.
I haven’t tried to have a conversation with Mr. Gall. Frankly, I’d feel crazy if I stared talking to my stomach. But he’s been getting in the way of life, including having a nice dinner with my German honey. And I would love nothing more than to nosh on hummus with my honey, but I can’t. Most of the time I’m in some sort of pain, and it’s getting in the way of my life. sometimes I feel like I can’t drive! And I love Prim, my Prius, so much!!!
So because of Mr. Gall and his revolting actions, I am not going to take this any more. I’m hiring someone to evict him.
Yes, Mr. Gall is no longer allowed to reside in my tummy, and I’m going to serve his notice via surgeon, in a week or two.
So here is to an eviction and speedy recovery, and back to work!!!
The Ebook Experiment
So I’m a big fan of JA Konrath. The man is smart. If he says something works when it comes to books, I’m not going to question him. I’ll usually give it a try. SO his latest recommendation is to use Amazon’s KDP Select. I have never used this before. But with the information he has recently given out, I’ve decided I’m going to do a little experiment. Yes, you heard me right. I’m going to exclusively publish a shortish story with KDP Select, set it for free, tell everyone and their brother, and then see what happens. Apparently this can work amazingly, or it can’t. Either way, my reason for doing this with a new story, is because I didn’t want to take any of my books out of the running on other sites. That’s isn’t nice to readers when they may not have a Kindle. A lot of my readers have Nooks and iPads.
So by doing this experiment, I hope to accomplish a few things:
1. Gaining more readers.
2. Getting readers excited. Everyone likes free stuff!
3. Boost sales. I hear that it can help your other books . (I’m one of those if it ain’t broke don’t fix it types. But this time, I’m willing to step out of my comfort zone with a new book by making it exclusively for Amazon.)
So here is to my new experiment! *Raises invisible glass for toast* I’m excited to see what happens!
One Year Anniversary as an Indie writer, and I’m Going to Tell All
It’s my one year anniversary as an indie writer. November 14, 2011 was the day I put The Unofficial Zack Warren Fan Club online for the world to see. It was on a whim, and I didn’t think anything would come of it. I wasn’t one of the people who set out to be an indie writer. I had no hopes for any kind of career, and to be honest, I had no idea people did this for a living.
The only thing I knew: I had a book, I thought it was good, and other people might like it.
I was in for a wild ride over the next twelve months that I never, ever, in my wildest dreams would have imagined.
My mother has a friend. He told my mom to tell me I should try self-publishing. So, I put Zack Warren up and forgot about it. I just left it. It was on Amazon with it’s little blue and pink cover. I made that sucker on PowerPoint, and I thought I’d be lucky if one person read it.
Fast forward a couple months later….
I was at home, surfing the Internet. I read an article about a girl that was now making a good living putting her books up on Amazon, and I remembered I had a book, and maybe I should check on it. I may have sold a couple copies. So after trying to remember the password to KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), I hadn’t logged in since I put up the book, I eventually found my way to the page detailing how many books I’d sold.
Over 500.
I was in shock.
I stared at the computer screen for a few minutes, trying to make sense of things.
“Oh, that must be views….my page has been viewed that many times….”
After convincing myself that I was seeing things, dreaming, or that I somehow had magically logged into another person’s KDP with my email–I mean, what are the odds of that?–I realized that I’d actually sold 500 copies of a book that I thought would never get any kind of recognition whatsoever.
So I screamed, scared the dog poo out of the cat, called my mother at work, who thought I was having some sort of crisis, and then proceeded to call and message anyone willing to listen. I’m not sure who was on the receiving end of my excitement, but no one was safe. Not even the mailman.
At one point I remember staring at my phone, bummed that I’d run out of people to call.
And my journey as an indie author started. I had no plan. No formula. Nothing. This wasn’t something I set out to do. I still thought the only way to have a career as a writer was to get an agent and muddle through it like the rest of them. After all, I wanted to be legit. I thought that I wasn’t a real novelist or author until there was a publisher who told me I was.
Hell, I was half sure there was a ceremony with a little diploma stating you are a real author!
But no.
No one can tell you if you are an author or not. I think it’s something you earn as people buy your books.
If you’ve penned anything at all that resembles a book, you’re an author, just not a professional one.
(I could argue the professional side too. Most of the time I’m writing in my jammies, not a suit and heels. I don’t go to board meetings or young professionals groups, and I’ve never been late to my job as an author. Yeah, I could argue both sides till I was blue in the face, but we’d be here all day.)
Knowing that I had potentially stumbled onto something, since my book was selling, but not quite sure what it was, I held on for dear life, hoping the choices I made were the right ones. But there really is no right or wrong, just what works. If it works, great! If it doesn’t, you hop on the next idea train.
The only idea I had at that point was Google.
I read blogs and articles and kindle books, all about indie writing and self-publishing. I was like a newborn. I had no idea what I was doing. No marketing, no twitter. NOTHING. All I knew how to do was sit at the computer and make up fun stories.
I’m going to tell you right now, half of everything I ended up with, I got from sheer dumb luck. That’s all. I’ve put work into it, yes. In the beginning though, I had no business plan. I had no idea what I was doing. I just thought something looked good and went with it! There are authors who have gone into what I do with research and planning, carefully, meticulously. they have marketing plans and ideas to gain readers….I had none of that, and I’m doing okay. So if can do it, I think anyone can.
The key is being able to write.
If you can do that, and keep writing things people like to read, then I don’t see how you could fail.
So that’s it for this blog post. In my next, I’ll talk about something a little more meaty.
Like steak!
Just kidding.
In my next one I’ll delve a little deeper into life as an indie author, and exactly what I do.



