02 Feb 2012, Posted by caburkes in Amazon,Barnes and Noble,Butta,CommonSense Series,eBooks,Random Crap,Smashwords,The Vault, 4 Comments. Tagged Gertz Macy, HSBC, Leslie Banks, NOTHING

eBook Hustle

Purchases of Butta‘ have improved since the promotion on Amazon a week ago. Not in ‘BULK’ when it was free, but as of yesterday, Butta‘ hovered in and around the rank of 19,000 and 24,000. Oh, your laughing at me? That’s still out of 750,000!

Then one hour it will dip down (or up) to 14,000. It’s strange.

Well, it’s activity and there is life in this career after all and it tells me … I need to put some more stuff out there right away! I can’t afford to suffer what happened with Skyelight and lose, like FOUR YEARS, of trying to get where I’m at now. So, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the hustle. It’s not about posting a book and chillin’. It’s about having that ‘next thing’ to answer the ‘your only as good as‘ question.

I wish it was CommonSense, but I didn’t even start the novel yet. People are liking the short stories, though. I think that was a good idea to do fan fiction with original characters that will spin off into my own novel. It’s a rapper’s mix-tape concept. Like a rapper will take an existing artists music and re-mix it with his own rap in order to get his flow out there.

Same thing with Mildred Common and Nick Sense in The Blair Witch and Friday the 13th. Copyright infringement??? Who said that??? How dare you! LOL….

It’s fan fiction. It’s free. I’m respectful of the original characters and plots … it’s all good fun and eventually my attached characters will be doing their own thing. That’s working nicely. Once again, all about conversion.

The same people who picked up Butta‘ for free, I think, are passing it around or telling people. Keep this very important number in mind of my marketing budget allocated from my loans from Bank of America, Chase, HSBC and Vinny the KneeCap:

$0

Zip, zilch, nadda, bumpkiss. A marketing budget of NOTHING. No banners. No begging, no borrowing. Hell, not even a Kickstarter campaign.  The most I do is post in a few Facebook groups/pages but NEVER do I post randomly on peoples personal pages. I want people to like me, not delete me! I hate it when I get ‘sneakers’ on my page from some marketeer. So I try not to do that either.

Part of my hustle is understanding the internet. I’ve been on this bad boy since AOL 1.0 and I was trying to load windows 98 from 10 discs. I kid you NOT … I found something I wrote in some BBS (Bulletin Board Service. What you would call a ‘Forum’ today) from like 1995. With my name an ‘easy’ Google, everything attached to me (right or wrong/good or bad) is a quick connect. I say it all the time: want to succeed on the internet, understand ‘staying power’. Don’t put up a site today and drop it tomorrow and change domain names. I’ve had DesktopEPics.com since 2004 so when you google it I get about 10 pages of searches and more.

That doesn’t do it all, but it helps to be an open book and transparent after all these years. In fact, it’s cool that even Klout.com sent me a free gift for being rather connected. A cool pencil and paper set. Talk about people who KNOW you. LOl

Smashwords is about to be on the outs with me. I gave them the same book and Amazon is proving why they are the tops in the business. It’s so bad, I’m willing to just issue the free stuff from my own site and just do everything through Amazon.

HOWEVER, look to the East. Check Barnes and Nobles out. They’re trying to show some balls and proclaim they’re not going to sell Amazon stuff. They, too, have an ebook direct publishing thing and making you do things exclusive also. I can’t hate that at all. Since I’m brand new to the eBook world, I can leave Butta‘ on Amazon and put something else on Barnes and Noble. Mix match and see where the cash flows. Probably both of them. Amazon and Barnes and Noble are turning out to be the Gertz/Macy’s war of the 21st century (too old for you youngins. See Miracle on 34th street if you want to know).

Smashwords is going to get dusted soon. I’m already porting over my free short stories to a shopping cart setup I’m building with opencart. I was tired of people downloading my stuff and me not knowing who they are. So, the ebooks are still free, but you have to register to get ‘em.

You know, I really work very hard to just get my name out there with no money. Things don’t work out often, but it’s that small percentage that does work out that keeps me going. Like back in 2007, if Butta‘ didn’t get the reviews it did and if I basically received a ‘you suck’ as a writer vibe, I would have been doing something else. But since that wasn’t the case, I owe it to myself to explore what it means to pay my dues and get my piece of the pie.

Now, I NEVER say I want to be rich right away. I don’t want fame or even be that one that wants to go hollywood. I do want enough consistently to take care of my children. The end. the late and great Leslie Banks clued me into the knowledge that you can make a living as an author not even breaking 40 grand a year. Talk about ‘real talk’, Leslie proved to me that you don’t have to have JK Rowling level cash to be consider a success. I’m just trying to make writing my next novel equal to a regular paycheck. Catch me still driving my Jetta, too … but it’s on my terms.

That’s where I think I get into odds with people. My terms means the world to me. And yes, my terms change and evolve, but if I were to die today, I hope people knew I didn’t believe I was supposed to live just to pay bills. My mother did it and I watched that form of cancer eat her alive, playing the lotto every week hoping for that big break and going to work third shift and sleeping all day at 60-something.

She’s still doing it. I hate it. She takes  the bus to work too.

I want more for her than that. I always have and when I saw Butta‘ reach #13 in Amazon … You probably can see my focused, ‘game on’ smirk. I’m taking my piece of this game this year and I have the content to do it.

Speaking of which, this is the picture of the ‘Vault‘ – it’s actually two of three plastic bins that I will store my stories in. All of that are story ideas, scripts, synopsis’, treatments ideas I had over the years. I could be at a restaurant, writing an idea on some paper … into the vault it goes. Loads of notepads, printer paper, toilet tissue!!! … name it … it’s stuff  accumulated since as early as 1985-1986 and some earlier.

Butta‘ was pulled out of this in 2006. Written years earlier.

CommonSense came out of this last month. Written about four years earlier. The characters and what will be the first novel, but the idea to mix them into fan fiction is new.

Writers block is no longer an issue since I just grab something old, re-work it in case someone else did it already. What I do get stumped over is converting some of them from script to novel. Not everything is easy.