ROW80 Round-Up!

Won a Bronze Medal in a Jinglebell 5K...

Dear Readers... It's been much too long since my last ROW80 update, and this one finds us practically at the end of the Round... Since my last post, I've had a Marine die under tragically idiotic circumstances and led my remaining 116 Marines through a visit by an assortment of Generals and Admirals that resulted in kudos all around.

The ROW in Review - overall I scored about a 36 percent success rate, which is pretty terrible... (You can see my nerdy scoresheet below!)

So, on the writing front, which is sort of a big thing for a writer, I didn't really do too well - was touch and go with my blogging, my novel-in-progress, and my short stories. On the plus side, I wrote and finished another totally new and unexpected short story In a Yellow Wood (which came about as a result of the social/dating goals) and also finished The Warrior Ethos: One Marine Officer's Critique and Counterpoint. I also started blogging for the professional journal of the U.S. Marine Corps, The Marine Corps Gazette, and published a serious non-fiction article there.

Published a Short Story...

I got one short story published, and am getting close to releasing my first book (The Warrior Ethos) but have so far failed to get the Parasol Publishing imprint off the ground. I got about half as much yoga done as I had planned, but again, I feel I made up for that by completing an 8-week "mind-body medicine" class, where I learned meditation skills and worked through a number of self-awareness exercises. I also got a medal for 3rd place in my age group in a Jinglebell 5K!

I didn't get any language teaching done, but I attained Level 6 in the Duolingo French curriculum, passed my Indonesian language test with good enough grades to get paid at the second-highest tier, and got a third of the way through a Russian language course in the Air War College curriculum. I also registered to volunteer developing the Indonesian-English syllabus on Duolingo, so we'll see what happens there!

Dabbling with dating has been, well, interesting - and got to race NASCARs around a short track, so that can be knocked off the bucket list.... Networking and "New Economy" goals fell a bit short, but perhaps in the next Round...

Here's the breakdown, as promised...

WRITING

- Chapters of The Perfidious Mister Wickham written and posted - 4 of 11

- ROW80 updates posted - 6 of 11

- Posts on my GypsyDangerously blog - 6 of 11

- Finish The Artillerists (short story) - Fail!

- Finish Ho B-52 (short story) - Win!

- Finish Merry Christmas, Mister Washington (short story) - Fail!

PUBLISHING

- Publish Ho B-52 (short story) - Win!

- Start the Parasol Books imprint - Fail!

FITNESS

- Run two 5K races - 1 of 2

- One yoga class per week (flexibility) - 4 of 11

LANGUAGE

- Teach French for 2 hours per week - Fail!

- Teach Indonesian for 2 hours per week - Fail!

SOCIAL

- Begin dating - a bit of a beautiful disaster / work in progress...

- Go on 5 “bucket list” adventures - 1 of 5

NETWORKING

- Spend 5 hours per week on Social Media (Twitter, FB, blogs, etc...) - Fail!

- Join Lowcountry RWA - Halfway there! Joined the national organization...

NEW ECONOMIC

- Join Air B&B - Win!

- Reduce my personal carbon footprint - Fail!


So, that's it for this week... Hope you are all reaching a successful conclusion to your Round of Words, and best wishes for a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Warm regards,
Edward

Sunday Check-in from Camp Bastion...

Hmmm, you may be off to a rough start at ROW80 when you totally miss the first check-in, like I did on Wednesday! But, in my defense, I only missed it because I was so busy accomplishing all my weekly goals…

And it was an incentive for me to get my Sunday check-in done early, so here goes! A successful week in most areas:

WRITING
- Posted a new chapter of The Perfidious Mister Wickham - where we discover how Lydia and Wickham became intimately entangled…
- Wrote Chapter 2 of my Learning Indonesian book… The Indonesian alphabet!
- Did the last bit of research needed to finish up Ho B-52 .

PUBLISHING
- Did a little research into a logo and domain registration for the Parasol Books imprint.
- Brainstormed marketing ideas for the short story collection.

FITNESS
- Added 5 lbs to my Bench Press, which brought me up to 195 lbs, or 1.2 times my own bodyweight.
- Bodyfat actually went up this week, but I’m not worried, because the test for it is notoriously finicky, and I’m confident my diet/workout routines will get me where I want to be.

LANGUAGE
- Knocked my goal of 5 hours of training out of the park! Finished off the last part of an 80-hour training syllabus, and started in on another course. Je comprend l’Francais a peu plus bien maintenant!

NETWORKING
- Looking for 2 people to join my “Core Group” this week – anyone who does will get free books and advance copies of new material in exchange for reviews and critique… Are you interested? If so, leave a note here, or drop me a line directly to ehcarpenter@gmail.com

So, that’s it for my goals!

Otherwise, life goes on in the desert… A quiet week, which is always good when you live in a warzone! I hope everyone is having a similarly productive start to their ROW, and I shall look forward to perusing the results as part of my effort to expand my social networks.

Best regards!
Edward

Wednesday Blog Hop, KDP Select Results, ROW80, etc.

Welcome to everyone stopping by courtesy of the ROW80 challenge or the Beck Valley Books weekly blog hop.

January's numbers are (mostly) in, so for the benefit of other self-publishing authors (and interested readers) I'd like to recap my experiences with Happily Ever After and Seven Lives...

First, let's talk Amazon vs. The Rest (iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, etc.)

Here's where I'd like to solicit advice from other authors and readers, as January had zero sales for Seven Lives across the spectrum of non-Kindle e-readers. Thus, my question of the week - how do you market to users of Nook, I-Pad/I-Phone, and other e-readers? What has worked for you in getting your books out to this demographic?

Now, I'd like to give you my information about the Amazon KDP program and the results I experienced. This was the first month that I had a pair of books for a rough comparison, one enrolled in KDP Select, one that wasn't.

The KDP Select program is supposed to benefit indie authors by offering 2 major features; a "free promotion" (5 days of "free" status in a 90 day period) and the opportunity to get a proportional share of $700,000 when Amazon Prime members borrow their book. In exchange, the author agrees to publish solely on Amazon for 90 days.

My first question was, "is it more effective to use your 'free' promotion days consecutively, or break them up?" - and looking at the graph of free downloads, I believe the answer is that a 'free download' period should be limited to 2 days at a time. Thus a KDP Select author might introduce the book free for a weekend, and then offer a "free for Friday" or similar incentive 2-3 more times in the course of their 90-day intro period. The benefit here? 25% of all paid sales were recorded in the 4 days immediately following the 'free' promotion. Thus, one can imagine taking advantage of this "sales bump" on consecutive occasions if the promotion is segmented, rather than used in one fell swoop.

My second question was "how effective is this promotion, anyway?" - well, Happily Ever After went to #3 in Germany on Amazon.co.de's Fiction --> Fairy Tales category, and #33 here in the US. Free downloads totalled 656, with 75% of those coming from Amazon.com, and the majority of the other 25% coming from the UK and German sites. All that sturm und drang only translated into 17 paid sales and 2 "borrows", but that was about 3 times the sales for Seven Lives... So, free promotions definitely raise awareness and distribution, and do appear to have an impact on sales. The question is, do you need the KDP Select program to make this happen? I plan to try offering a "free-kend" for Seven Lives just by going into the KDP Dashboard and setting its price to zero, and then compare the results and report them here.

If anyone has questions for me regarding my experiences, feel free to ask and I'll be happy to answer them here.

Now, as for ROW80 goals, I'm definitely off-track at this point for French and fitness; I'm finding it hard to get focused on either while I'm on the road. On the other hand, I have found a new house (off to sign the papers for the mortgage today) gotten a SC driver's license, and finished a prerequisite course for my future job. I also did send off the proposal and sample chapter for The Complete Idiot's Guide to Indonesian, so fingers crossed that I'll get a positive reply in the coming months. Meanwhile, I'll start writing the book, so that if it's accepted, I'll be ahead of the curve, and if it's not, I'll still be able to self-publish it.

Last but not least, doing the research for a historical fiction novel that's not even a part of my original ROW80 goals has given me some great material for a new short story (Napoleonic War era) and has been a fun and instructive process.

That's it for me, at least for today.

Hope you've found some of this interesting, and I do look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Best regards,

Edward