I've been writing, on and off, (and mostly off) for most of my life.
Two decades in offices killed the creative side of my brain and it took dropping out of the mainstream workforce twelve years ago and starting my own business to really clear my head.
I began with a cleaning biz, which I still operate today, and along the way I've written six books and published five of them.
2008 - Get Organized Stay Organized
2010 - War's End: The Storm - a dystopian novel set in the day after tomorrow
2012 - The War on Drugs: An Old Wives Tale - part memoir, part treatise on the War on Drugs
2014 - War's End: A Brave New World - the sequel to The Storm
2016 - Gliese 581: The Departure - my first sci-fi novel
And I've another book that needs work but is mostly done - Schicksal Turnpike - a twilight-zone 'esque piece set in the 1950s
And the other day I was reading Write, Publish, Repeat and rather blindly nodding along. Write more books, create more book funnels, I thought to myself and then it hit me like a brick.
I had already written five books. Exactly how many books was it going to take?
And then the second brick hit me in the head. I've written them, but I haven't done anything to market them.
I had literally spent the last nine years of my life obsessing over one book or another, cultivating them, culling the words, fixing mistakes, picking out (lousy) book covers, and spent thousands of hours of my time just to put a book up on a shelf and then walk away.
My reaction to this was wise and well thought out..."Huh, well duh."
And I got to work. It was the first few days of November when I put the first book, with a newly updated professional looking cover up. ![G581- Departure 2017 - Front Cover.jpg]
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This was followed by a flurry of activity and I re-did ALL of my book covers then.
After that I started pulling out my Excel spreadsheet with all of my links to book promo groups on Facebook. There were, ahem, 350 of them.
I began posting and posting and posting.
And then I was thrown in Facebook jail for six days for posting too much.
Oops.
Meanwhile, my five day book giveaway and given away 1,141 copies of Gliese 581: The Departure AND I had figured out halfway through (and before FB tossed me in FB jail and prevented me from posting in groups for those six days) to make sure and reference the fact that my books were all part of Kindle Unlimited.
The page reads began to grow, and GROW.
At the beginning of the month I had set myself a small goal of just $1 per day in earnings. Could I do it? I was pretty sure I could, but I knew I needed a "win" - and considering my totals for 2016 ebook sales on Amazon were $3.32 to date for the year - that was a huge change.
I got to work Tweeting, making changes, sending out emails, FB posts and more.
It is now the 29th and I'm at over $101 in earnings. Not enough to quit my day job over, but enough to inspire me to greater heights. It certainly blew my "secondary" goal of $3 a day right out of the water.
My goal for December is to make $200 on my writing, by April I plan on making at least $500 per month, and by 2021 I plan on earning $350 PER DAY.
Sound crazy? Maybe it is. But crazy or not, I'm going for it.
I will be posting my progress in the days that follow, along with my ever-changing and evolving goals in going from cleaning toilets to writing full-time.
I know I can do it. I've written SIX books and they have had some excellent reviews on Amazon. It's time I got serious about writing. Here, there, and everywhere.
So that's my back story, folks. I look forward to interacting with you in the days ahead!
