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The Trouble With Multiple Platforms:

Posted by dougdandridge on January 3, 2018
Posted in: eBooks, Fantasy, Far Future, Kindle, Movies, Near Future, science Fiction, self publishing, Websites, Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , . 2 Comments

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A couple of months ago I bought a website on Wix, mostly because they had an easy way to set up the site so it would look good on all display platforms, PC browsers, tablets and phones. In fact, it had dual editing features, so your display for computer still looks good and takes advantage of the whole screen while the one for phone is set up for the smaller screen. It works really well, for the small percentage of people I assumed actually looked up websites on phones. I set up a sales page, hoping that people who buy my books, or at least some of them, would buy from the website, where I have code on each link that would make the sale through my Amazon Associate account. Eventually I was going to add some of my favorite books from other authors. It’s a great deal, since the author or publisher still gets their full payment.

Then I decided to put a sales page on my WordPress site, the one my blog runs out of. I had gotten the domain names for both, dougdandridge.net for the website, and dougdandridge.com for the blog site. Actually, I could get dougdandridge with just about every dot whatever that I want, since there are no other authors or internet public figures with my name. I already had all the links on a Notepad document for the Wix site, though I had to do some resizing of the images for book covers. I made the book covers all the same size, and all the sales links the same width as the books, so everything would line up perfectly, A couple of days work, a few hours a day, and the Exodus and Deep Dark Well page were done. One more day and I had the sales page for every other book I had ever written. I posted it online, since it had a blog link on every page. It looked beautiful, four covers side to side, sales links beneath each for Amazon.US, Amazon.UK, and Audible where appropriate. Then a fan commented on one of my Facebook posts, and stated that it looked screwed up on his phone. I looked it up, and sure enough, on a phone it had every cover that had been lined up next to each other in a column from top to bottom, followed by a column of five sales links for Amazon.us, then five sales links for Amazon.uk, then the five sales links to Audible. Very confusing to someone browsing on their phone. They might think they are clicking on one sales link, only to go to another book page, and finally be driven to give up. So it was totally screwed up. Then I read online that sixty percent of web browsing and sales take place on mobile devices like tablets and phones. Whoops. It seems like I am behind the times. I prefer the computer and the TV to get my content and entertainment. Yeah, IP providers advertise how you can watch movies on your smart phone, but  I want to watch mine on wide screen UHD TVs with sound systems. I want to play my games on my thirty two inch curved monitor. I want to shop on my office computer. Well, it seems like I’m not like the majority, and if I want to get the contacts, I need to set it up so people can easily browse on their smart phones while they ignore their friends at the bar or restaurant.

Now I am working on trying to get a page up that will not only look good on a PC browser, but also be useful on a phone. Which is not easy. And the WordPress editor is not the easiest thing to use to manipulate images and text together. A lot of cussing going on in my office, the cats avoiding me. I asked for help on Facebook, which, yes, I also look at on one of the three large screen monitors of my computer, dinosaur that I am. And I got several answers. Now I am going to try out Divi, which is supposed to allow you to fill up the screens of both computers and phones, and even tablets in between. You have to keep up with the world if you want to make it. I started out by learning everything I could about marketing books online, and it paid off in becoming a full time writer, and in selling over two hundred thousand books. Then I got lazy, since everything seemed to be going so well on its own. Still putting out the books, but cutting back on the marketing. I found to my horror that I had sites, my Amazon author’s page, my Goodread’s page, even the about page on my blog, that hadn’t been touched in four years. So here I go, rolling up the sleeves and digging in with the marketing once again.

How I sold 100,000 Books On Amazon

Posted by dougdandridge on September 17, 2014
Posted in: Agents, Conferences, eBooks, Fantasy, History, Kindle, science Fiction, self publishing, Titles, Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

HowISold100K2

It’s been a busy week.  First, on Saturday I actually went past the 100,000 sales mark, mostly ebooks, but also some paperbacks and audiobooks.  That afternoon I signed a contract for my Exodus: Empires at War short story Goliath to appear in Volume Three of Kevin J Anderson’s Five By Five Military Anthology.  Did a blog post on Sunday about reaching that 100,000 book milestone, then a character interview with Cornelius Walborski on Monday as part of a blog tour.  Then finished this book yesterday and posted in on Amazon.  Add to that the blog post I will be sending to David Farland for his Kick In The Pants blog, and trying to close on a house (which is causing all kinds of problems) this had been a hectic week, made even more so by one of my cats getting an infection from an injury.  He’s a little jerk, but guess who gets to pay for his behavior?

So, about this book.  People ask me all the time about how I sell so many books.  This is at the same time when I am complaining to myself that I’m not selling enough.  I guess part of that drive to do more, get more, has led to my success.  When I started self-publishing, after over a decade of sending in manuscripts to garner rejection letters, I was really hoping to make enough money and sell enough books to get out of the financial hole I was in (over time) and gain the attention of some editors and publishers.  While that second part has worked out as I had wanted, the first part, getting out of the financial hole, has worked so well that I quit my day job in March of 2013.  And have never looked back.  But it did not start out so well.  I sold about sixty books in the first eight months I was self-published, making at most twenty or thirty dollars in a month.  I read every book I could about how to sell books on Amazon.  Most had a couple of techniques, some that seemed kind of flighty, like getting on the good side of readers with one blog post to gain their attention.  Some were pretty good.  I also read blogs.  I took all of the techniques and strategies and found the ones that worked for me.  Some didn’t, but I learned which they were and stopped putting effort there.  And here, in this book, is just about everything I have done to gain a positive net presence and sell lots of books.  I say just about, because there may be some things I did early on that I can no longer remember.  But everything of importance is in here, including hints on what not to do.  If you want to know what I did, get this book.

Now it’s on to completing the fourth book of the Refuge series (Doppleganger, though set in that world, does not count as a series book for most purposes).  After that will be a book title Exodus: Tales of the Empire: Supernova, which has nothing to do with the stellar explosion in Book 7, but which will introduce an alien race that will be very important to the war effort.   And asks the question, ‘while in the middle of a war of extinction, how many resources can you spare to save an alien species that is not even part of your society?’

So How I Sold 100,000 Books On Amazon is available.  If you want to know what I did, get the book.

 

The End of Civilized Civilization

Posted by dougdandridge on March 10, 2014
Posted in: Barbarians, Conferences, eBooks, Fantasy, Far Future, Kindle, Military, Near Future, science Fiction, Tropes, Typos, Websites, Writing. Tagged: , , , , . 10 Comments

I have been noticing a lot of invective on the internet recently.  Well, maybe not all that recently, it has been going on for some time.  Some people do not engage in polite conversation on the internet.  Or at least both parties do not.  Sometime during the discussion, when one party decides they are not getting their point across, they resort to cussing, put downs and threats.  I have experienced this myself, though I usually just back out of the conversation and block all notices of it.  Recently, in a discussion of concealed carry, a young man from Russia, who couldn’t keep from crowing about his mastery of ‘self defense techniques’, threatened to push my gun up my ass.  Of course, my gun was no threat to him at the range of thousands of miles, as his ‘self defense techniques’ were no threat to me at the same range.  In another post by a friend, again about firearms, the anti-gun supporter voiced his wish that the government would kill the pro-gun poster and all his ilk, in no uncertain terms or language.  I seem to remember things being a little more civil when I was growing up, a time before the internet and personal computers.  That may just be my faulty memory, but I think not.  There were societal controls on public comments at that time that no longer exist.  If you wanted to post a review or a comment that people would see you had to go through the newspaper or some other publication.  They would not print some of the words that make up the majority of internet replies these days.  And your name was attached to the comment, so everyone knew who you were.

Robert E Howard said, in his famous Conan series, “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”  Anonymity makes people brave enough to say things online that they wouldn’t say to the local drug dealer or street fighter down at the local bar.  People post their names, or at least what they want us to think are their names.   They’re still protected by the fact that most of us don’t want to spend to time and effort to find out who they really are.  Or they are separated from us by enough distance that, like the young man in Russia, they have no fear that we are going to track them down and do violence to them.  Of course most of us wouldn’t really do violence to them even if they lived across the street from us, though there are people in the world who would travel those thousands of miles to do just that.  But mostly they post with impunity.

The biggest problem with these trolls is that they seem to have unlimited time to post, unlike those of us actually doing something productive.  I have found the best strategy to deal with them is to make one final post telling them what you think of them, without resorting to their level of invective, ending the message with a statement that you are getting off that thread or blocking them, and ending with a goodbye.  After that I simply leave the thread, after making sure that I no longer receive notification of their comments, or blocking them.  Then, they are welcome to post as much as they want.  It makes no difference to me what they have to say after that, and I am sure it pisses them off that I am no longer reading their posts.

Last Day

Posted by dougdandridge on March 28, 2013
Posted in: Comics, Conferences, Dragons, eBooks, Fantasy, Far Future, Fusion, Future Prediciton, Future Warfare, Genetic Engineering, Genetics, History, Kindle, Magic, Military, Movie Critics, Movies, Nanotechnology, Near Future, Past, Plotting, Proofreading, science Fiction, self publishing, steampunk, Sword and Sorcery, Titles, Tropes, Typos, Websites, Writing. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

I remember watching the movie Logan’s Run back in the 70s. Also read the book and saw the not so good TV series. In Logan’s Run people were only allowed to live to 30 (in the book it was even younger). Then they faced Last Day, the day they were killed in a ritual, from which the people were told their souls would ascend and then reenter the body of a newborn.
Today was my Last Day at the State of Florida, though I didn’t have to attend a ritual that killed me. No, I walked out the door with my belongings, walked to my car, and drove away from what was a very difficult period of my life. Department of Children and Families Abuse Hotline was not an easy master. We did some good, but I also believe we hassled some people who really didn’t need us in their lives. Add to that low pay, no raises for five years, and directives that seemed to have been written by a thousand monkeys on typewriters, and made as much sense, and I am very happy to have walked out of that place of employment alive. Along the way I learned a lot, about people, about bureaucracy, about the evil that people do to their own. And about the craft of writing. I left some good people there, friends that I had seen every week for the last seven plus years.
Like the people in Logan’s Run, I entered Last Day expecting a rebirth. In my case it came true, and I leave this day as my own boss. I am now a full time author, able to make use of my time as I wish. If I want to be a successful author I will use that time wisely, to produce as much as I can, while I can. This weekend I will be completing the purchase of a motorcycle, and will be back on two wheels after a two year hiatus. That is part of this lifestyle as well, to get some enjoyment from each day that is not work related. I will also be setting up a work computer at home that should keep me near the cutting edge for the next couple of years.
I see big things for this blog in the near future as well. I have let it fall off a bit as other tasks took up my time. In the future I would like to have four entries a week. One will be about movies I have seen, and not just new releases, but also old classics. Another will be a blog on books, mostly in the realm of the fantastic, though maybe also something to do with history or science. The third entry will be about tropes, or science fallacies, or anything else that strikes my fancy, enrages me, amuses me, whatever. The last will be a shameless promotion of my own writing. It really is funny how I hated that kind of promotion when I started the self publishing thing in December of 2011. Writer friends of mine think it had a huge part to play in successfully selling lots of ebooks, and I can’t say that they’re wrong. Now I enjoy promoting, to a point. As long as it doesn’t interfere with all the other tasks required to put out a good science fiction or fantasy book.
Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my writing career. Follow me on this blog and see how I do.

Celebrating Authors.

Posted by dougdandridge on January 5, 2013
Posted in: eBooks, Fantasy, Far Future, Fusion, Future Prediciton, Future Warfare, History, Kindle, Magic, Military, Movies, Plotting, Proofreading, science Fiction, self publishing, Titles, Typos, Writing. Tagged: , . 2 Comments

I have to admit that I forgot all about this one. A couple of weeks ago I filled out a short questionnaire for a Blog/Facebook Page called Celebrating Authors. I’m always for a bit of good publicity, feeling it can only help people to discover my books, which in my opinion is a good thing. From most of my reviews a good number of the people buying my books agree, though there are some who wish they had never heard of me. Oh well, I guess you can’t satisfy everyone. But Celebrating Authors seemed like a good idea, and I was very pleased to receive a tweet from Carolyn Arnold (@Carolyn) about the blog entry I was featured in, http://celebratingauthors.blogspot.com/2013/01/i-own-five-cats-or-do-they-own-me-mini.html. I also noticed that a bunch more people retweeted it across the Twitterverse. A well organized effort. I love doing things like this, and would be willing to guest other writers who want to put something out on my blog. Celebrating Authors also has a Facebook Page, and is open to all who engage in this very bizarre practice of putting words on paper, or today electrons on hard drives.
Another cool thing that happened today was a post on an earlier blog entry about my success in 2012 as a self published author. A fan of my Exodus series of books wanted to tell me how much he enjoyed the series, finishing the first two books in two and a half days. Wow. That is very sweet music to a writer’s ears. I responded to his post. Unfortunately, I don’t have the next installment of the series ready to post on Amazon, but I will try my best to get one out there by Spring. That said, this and other posts, both email and reviews, has also put great responsibility on my shoulders. I have to put out something good, something that will satisfy those who have invested their time in my characters and the story. I have always been a fast writer, and do some things a little bit differently than most writers. I know that all the pundits say to cut cut cut, but I always like my first draft. After a good time hidden away on the hard drive I normally like what I read. And I add, add, add. It still takes time to write a novel, even for a speedy story teller like myself. When I switch to full time, hopefully by this summer, I can do more. The goal is six to eight novels a year. To some people that may seem like too much, but it has been done before by many writers. Until then I will do what I can, and try my best for those who have chosen to call themselves my fans.

My 100th Blog Entry

Posted by dougdandridge on November 9, 2012
Posted in: Barbarians, eBooks, Fantasy, Far Future, Future Prediciton, Future Warfare, History, Kindle, Magic, Military, Near Future, Past, Plotting, science Fiction, self publishing, Titles, Tropes, Writing. Tagged: , , , , . 3 Comments

Today marks a historic event, at least for me, though it may be ignored by most of the rest of the world. Today I am posting the one hundredth entry of my Doug BrotherofCats Blog. When I started this thing I really didn’t know where it was going. I know there are thousands of blogs out there with many more followers. That’s OK. This thing has grown over time and gotten bigger and better than I had dreamed. I have this blog on two blog directories, Amazon, several Facebook pages, tweeted by many friends at the Independent Authors Network, and is now on Goodreads. I wanted the blog to be a platform for my writing, but decided early on to not only promote my writing, but to also write about all the subjects of fantasy and science fiction that interest me. I had taken on some of the tropes of the genres that really do not make sense, and covered topics as diverse as black holes and vampires. Discussed future warfare and past, how fleets of spaceships will battle in the future, and how barbarians were defeated by the Romans. I really have no idea how many people read this blog. It gets sent to 49 followers I believe, and then is posted where thousands more can read it if they wish. I do know that this blogs is one of the most enjoyable things I do in the promotion of my writing. It stretches my imagination and helps immensely in my worldbuilding and plot development. I plan to continue and possibly expand this blog in the future, with the possible inclusion of reviews of other books as well as articles on science and history. I thank all of those who follow, and all of those who read the semi-random ramblings of a sick mind. And I look forward to hearing from you in the future, please feel free to post comments, as dialogue makes the thing much more interesting.