I have written a book

[44minimum]

It is an e-book, a Western, and some of you guys helped me write it. In the process of writing, I had specific questions about some of the weapons that would've been used in 1875 and some of you folks answered them for me. So, I was going to let you people know that today my book is going to be available for free. I think it lasts up until midnight. All I ask in return is that if you read it and like it, how about leaving a review on Amazon. And if you read it and don't like it, how about dropping me a note and letting me know why so that I can do better next time. It's the first book I've ever written, and I'm sure that there is room for improvement. Anyway, here is the link-

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FA5PKJQ

[snuffy]

Thanks 44M, I just downloaded it to my kindle. I'll let you know how I like it. Haven't read a western for a long time.

[DCP]

Thanks so much and the very best of luck

[ph4570]

I just had it sent to my kindle. Thanks and I wish you well with sales.

[7Acres]

Downloaded!

[pincherpartner]

Thank you so much for sharing this. I look forward to reading it. Congratulations on your book!

[wch]

Got it- review to follow!

[brtelec]

Perfect timing. I just finished a book about 3 hours ago. Your book is next.

[462]

My Kindle has been begging for a new book, thanks.

Will comply with the liked/didn't like request.

[dragonrider]

Downloaded it, had to make an account with Amazon first and then had to download a Kindle App and then I was able to download your book. I have never read a western, hence I have no idea what to expect. Should be fun. Read the first chapter and it held my interest so that's something at least.

[jcameron996]

Got it downloaded to the Kindle. Now just need to find time to do a little reading. Westerns are my favorite so I am looking forward to it.

[Artful]

Good Luck

[john hayslip]

Aha, I get to make the first report. Very favorable. Left yourself very little room for a sequel though.
I have a wide variety of computer skills. A good programmer. It's the little things I don't know that frighten me. After I finished the book I went to Amazon to put in comments and had to call my wife in because there wasn't a keyboard. She punched the arrow. I got "It was a very good read" in and then things went south. I think it took it - I hope it took it. It was a very good book. I enjoyed it and hope to see more. The only factual criticism I had was it seemed as though everyone who was a witness to crimes in both instances where it was called for them to be able to read and write, could. I suspect a rather good percentage of Westerners weren't literate - though it's surprising how many of the cowboys, who had a hard, menial job were., Just a thought - certainly didn't distract from the book in any way and it was a good way to shorten that interlude.

[waksupi]

Got it! Thanks!

[Driver man]

It was a good read. I detected a touch of Louis L'amore. Looking forward to the next one

[xs11jack]

Downloaded, now to find time to read it. With 12 and 14 hr days and looking for a place in the county, it's going to take a while.
Ole Jack

[snuffy]

Whew, some of you can sure read fast! I'm at 79%, gotta get some sleep.

Very well written! I wish I didn't have an appointment tom. I'd stay up and finish it. I to hope you do write more, certainly keeps you interested.

[facetious]

Now comes the fun part. When my wife got her first book published last year she had no idea how much time she would end up spending on her computer Facebooking, Twittering, e-mailing............ to promote her book. At the same time her editor/publisher is pushing for her to finish the third part be for the end of the year. She can be on that thing eight hours or more some days.

[44minimum]

John, you are correct, about all of them being able to read and write. I considered that briefly, then I figured that probably no one would notice, and if they did notice, they wouldn't really care. And about your review, it's not there. At least when I look on Amazon, it just doesn't show up. I have heard before that it's very difficult to leave the review on Amazon. But thanks for trying.

Facetious, you are also correct, if you want to sell very many books, you need to do a lot of promoting. Probably more time promoting than writing the thing. That is one thing I am not comfortable with doing, I do not like doing, and for the most part, I do not know how to go about it. I don't have a popular blog or anything like that and I have no desire to spend eight hours a day telling people how good my book is and that they should go out and buy it. And for that reason, I am not really expecting to sell all that many books. Oh well.

[Recluse]

Now comes the fun part. When my wife got her first book published last year she had no idea how much time she would end up spending on her computer Facebooking, Twittering, e-mailing............ to promote her book. At the same time her editor/publisher is pushing for her to finish the third part be for the end of the year. She can be on that thing eight hours or more some days.

The ONLY reason I have a Twitter account, blog, Facebook page, etc and et al is for networking and communication for book sales. I spend too much time networking and not enough time writing.

But there's an old saying that is still true which goes, "Nothing sells your first book better than your second book, and nothing sells your first two books like your third book."

44 Minimum, I downloaded your book but it may be a bit before I can read it. In the meantime, though, please accept my heartiest congratulations on a huge accomplishment.

:coffee:

[brtelec]

I just finished your book and I thoroughly enjoyed it. For a first book I thought it was very good. It was busy but I never lost interest and the main character was very easy to relate to. Good job, it was a fun read.

[coloraydo]

Downloaded it last evening and started reading it. Finished it tonight. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks for a good read, and looking forward to the next one.

[44minimum]

Recluse, where is your Facebook page? Perhaps I can learn something from it. It looks like your book might be a good one and I will be getting it in the future. I kind of wondered if I should have two or three books written, and then publish them all at once, but then I figured that I would go ahead and publish the first one so that I could see what people thought about it. I would hate to get three or four books written and only then find out that they all sucked. And thanks. I was kind of proud of myself for finishing the thing. It ain't quite as easy as most people would think.

Bill, I'm afraid that there won't be a print version. After finding out everything you have to go through to get a book published the traditional way and then receiving only 6 to 7% of the price that the book sells for, I decided that an e-book was the way to go. Right now it's on Amazon and is only available on the Kindle, in a couple of months I will put it on smash words and it will be available at Barnes & Noble, iTunes, the Sony store and maybe a couple of others. The title is- Long Way to Dodge.

Thanks for the kind words everybody. Glad you liked it, kind of makes me want to write another one. I've been taking a poll, tell me which one of these you guys would be most interested in.


1. A bush pilot in Alaska, flying a Florida family of 4 to a remote fishing Lodge has engine trouble, crash lands, and has to try to keep them all alive and get them to safety.

2. 2 teenage boys watch a show about finding Bigfoot on television and suddenly decide that they are going to capture one and become rich. This would be a comedy/adventure book.

3. This one would be a Western. A reformed 50-year-old hired killer comes out of retirement when a gang of bad men invade his gold claim, then steal all of his gold, taking his grandson hostage. He follows them and in the process of rescuing his grandson, he kills the bad guys one by one.

[brtelec]

Definitely 3 then 1

[John Allen]

ok, I just bought it. Congrats I can not wait to read it.

[coloraydo]

I agree, #3 first, then 1.

[facetious]

Boy did you get that right when you said that it ain't as easy you think. My wife took three years to write her first book . The second took nine months. She is trying to get the third one finished before the end of the year. As stated, her first book sold better after the second got out there.

And it isn't writing that is the hard part. First it gos through her writing group then then her beta reader. After fixing every thing thy find wrong it go's to the editor then back to her then back to the editor and so on till every one is happy. Then you have the cover art. Thy must have spent a month e-mailing and Skyping trying to make every one happy about the cover. And don't forget it is never to soon to start learning about all the tax stuff[smilie=b:. This was the first time I have had to get help with my tax's.

As for getting a print copy Amazon has print on demand . My wife has sold a lot of print copy's but not even close to the number of e-books. As for the next book stay with what you are the best at for a few books to get your name out there before trying to change genres.

Just for fun here is a cheap plug for her book.

http://www.rubystandingdeer.com/

[wch]

Sent a favorable review: I hope that you continue to write and let us know here when you publish anew.

[dagger dog]

Thanks !

[Recluse]

And it isn't writing that is the hard part. First it gos through her writing group then then her beta reader. After fixing every thing thy find wrong it go's to the editor then back to her then back to the editor and so on till every one is happy. Then you have the cover art. Thy must have spent a month e-mailing and Skyping trying to make every one happy about the cover. And don't forget it is never to soon to start learning about all the tax stuff[smilie=b:. This was the first time I have had to get help with my tax's.

The beta readers are always my biggest challenge. I get several that know me and have read my previous material, be it the two non-fiction (business) books from back in the 90's or the recent novel, and then I get several who have never read a word I've written except for in the initial e-mails.

The absolute hardest thing about that is setting your ego in a box, locking it up, and then securing it somewhere. What makes that hard is that it is your ego that keeps you going (writing) when you're exhausted or you're out of ideas or you simply cannot think of the next scene or transition or conflict or whatever. You have a deadline looming, a thousand other things you'd much rather be doing and you start making a million excuses and compromises with yourself promising things like, "I'll take the day off and go shooting and when I get back, my mind will be all cleared out and I can keep on going with this."

So you use your ego to tell yourself that you're a damned good writer, people WANT to read what you're writing and it had better be good so you better get your behind in gear. . . and somehow, some way, you struggle and fight your way through the next scene or paragraph or conflict or transition.

The initial copy sucks, so you self-edit and do some revision. Then a little inspiration hits and you peck away some more. Finally, you've spent most of the day or night beating back the mythical "writer's block" and scored some pretty good words--only to have your beta readers comment that what you slaved over made no sense, or was "awkward" or "it doesn't fit with the rest of the story."

First inclination is to send them an e-mail back suggesting an anatomically impossible physical act that is sexual in nature. But that is your ego, and that is when you have then lock it up and stow it somewhere.

You'll repeat this process dozens of times. :killingpc

As far as taxes? Keep receipts for EVERYTHING. Anytime I go shooting, that's research. Every gallon of gas I put in my airplane gets claimed because I'm either flying for research, inspiration, to a book-signing, etc. Anything I buy for the computer, including toner cartridges, reams of paper, etc gets expensed. If I'm writing a scene that takes place in a Mexican-food restaurant and I go to a Mexican-food restaurant for lunch/supper, the receipt goes into the file for research.


As for getting a print copy Amazon has print on demand . My wife has sold a lot of print copy's but not even close to the number of e-books. As for the next book stay with what you are the best at for a few books to get your name out there before trying to change genres.

Just for fun here is a cheap plug for her book.

http://www.rubystandingdeer.com/

Print on demand has forever changed the face of publishing and opened up a huge new world to writers. There are several systems out there that work well. Actual physical books are good for being able to autograph and/or make personalized salutations to the recipient/s, they make for good presents (friends ask you to sign a copy of the book to one of their friends as a birthday or Christmas gift), and no matter what anyone says, it's still an unbelievable high to look at my solid wall of books upstairs in the loft and see those with MY name on them (even though two of them were written under pseudonyms and with a partner).

44 Minimum,

I would make the next book another western. Establish and continue to build a readership and fan base. In the second book, after the credits, you can then promote your first book that is already written and you can ALSO promote/tease your third book that may be of another genre, such as the stranded bush plane scenario.

Then likewise, in that third book, at the end after the credits, you can promote your first two westerns.

John Grisham is a good case study example to use. His first books were all legal thrillers. After a handful of them were done and out and selling well, he delved into other areas which helped expand his readership base, but he still writes for his bread and butter genre which is the legal thriller. In the past few years, he extended that out and moved into the Young Adult category, but still in the legal genre.

In the meantime, my main advice would be to simply enjoy your craft. If you enjoy writing and putting together a novel, keep doing it and revel in the fact that you have been blessed with the gift of being able to take ideas in your head and transfer them into words on a page and do so in a way that brings joy and exhilaration to readers.

ETA: A word about reviews. Ignore them.

Reviews are for the benefit of other potential readers, not the author himself or herself.

If, as an author, you altered or changed or adjusted your book/writing to meet every comment--favorable or unfavorable--you would have a book that is unreadable. The beauty of the printed word is that it is ABSOLUTE "theater of the mind." TV/movies leave zero imagination for the viewer. You see and hear what the characters look like, you see the scenery exactly how it is, etc.

Radio allows you some creative license in how you perceive characters and scenery, sights, sounds, smells, etc to be. But the voices and how the scripts are read still set some limits.

But. . . the printed word leaves the reader almost 100% in control of how he/she perceives a character to be. That is why one of the cardinal rules of writing fiction is to never OVER-describe your characters or scenes.

If you look at a lot of reviews, often times the main criticism is "the character was totally unbelievable" or "I've been to Milwaukee and I don't remember it ever being like that" or "the main hero was bigger than Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Bigfoot and Kung Fu all put together--totally unbelievable."

What those negative comments tell you is that the reader lacked the imagination to relate to your vision. If you look at reviews for accomplished writers like Tom Clancy, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, John Grisham, et al, you'll see all kinds of bad reviews and from readers that somehow have this Walter Mitty complex in which they're convinced that "if they had time, they could write a novel that would sell 100,000,000 copies its first day on the book shelves of the world."

If you also look at the reviews on Amazon or Goodreads and elsewhere, you'll see people who have written hundreds of reviews--and all in just the past few years yet have never written much more than an e-mail or memo themselves.

Write your books for the sheer joy and thrill of transferring your ideas onto paper and with the knowledge that there are going to be faithful readers out there who thoroughly relate to your writing and enjoy it immensely.

:coffee:

[44minimum]

I didn't bother with the beta reader or anything like that. As a matter of fact, I probably didn't do things right at all. I'm part of an online writing group and we do mostly short stories. So I wrote a little story about a cowboy getting shot, then waking up in the middle of the night wondering how he got there and why he was hurting so bad. My writing buddies said, this is very good. What happens next? So I wrote another chapter, with the same result. This is good, what happens next? So I wrote another chapter, and so on. Before you know it, I had 15 chapters done and I thought, why don't I just go ahead and write a book. So I did. Then I did some revisions, and then one chapter at a time, two of my writing buddies critiqued my little book, making suggestions, telling me things that needed to be clarified, that type of thing. And after I was pretty much done with the whole thing, one of the guys here on the forum read through it and made more suggestions. It was very helpful. He suggested that I rewrite it in the third person, that it would be much better. He was probably right, but by that time I was pretty much ready to get it over with. Besides, I thought that written in the first person the way it is, maybe each reader could imagine himself being in the lead role, that it might make the reading experience better. So I went through the whole thing a dozen times or so, changing bits and pieces here and there until I got the final result. I didn't start out with a master plan or outline or anything like that, it just kind of happened.

I've got to admit that it doesn't give me a thrill to sit in front of the computer and write. And I think that is opposite of what most writers do. Most writers seem to enjoy the writing process, I can't really say that I do. What I do enjoy is getting the feedback from people that read my stuff. I guess that's what motivates me.

Here is a question for you folks- I need some kind of weird, obscure, or uncommon type of highly accurate single shot rifle that I can have my 50-year-old reformed hired killer use in my next book. I don't want just a plain old Sharp's chambered in .45-90, I would like it to be something rather unique, something that would've been used in 1870s and 1880s. Got any ideas?

[462]

Two thumbs up!

A positive Amazon review has been posted.

Thank you, sir, for the quality reading time.

[Just Duke]

It is an e-book, a Western, and some of you guys helped me write it. In the process of writing, I had specific questions about some of the weapons that would've been used in 1875 and some of you folks answered them for me. So, I was going to let you people know that today my book is going to be available for free. I think it lasts up until midnight. All I ask in return is that if you read it and like it, how about leaving a review on Amazon. And if you read it and don't like it, how about dropping me a note and letting me know why so that I can do better next time. It's the first book I've ever written, and I'm sure that there is room for improvement. Anyway, here is the link-

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FA5PKJQ

Well done sir.

[Just Duke]

What's a Kindle?

[andremajic]

What's a Kindle?

It's what you crumple up underneath your tepee of sticks to help the fire get started... :kidding:

(Apparently amazon want's people to burn books.)

[Hamish]

Bought it, the beginning is good,,,, 2,3,1, in that order.

[44minimum]

Hamish, thank you for the purchase. And thanks to everyone else who either bought one, gave me some feedback or left a review.

[jcameron996]

Just finished your book last night. Thought it was a great book and once I got started I had a hard time putting it down. I will be looking forward to your next book. If I can figure out how to post a review on Amazon I will do that as well. Great job.

[facetious]

44 min. I was telling my wife about this thread and that you said that you had taken some on line classes and were part of a writing group. She asked where on line you took classes. She took her on line classes at Writers University or something like that. Now she is a forum moderator for one of there forums.

[Lead Fred]

What's a Kindle?

Duke, thems the little sticks you use to make a campfire with

[44minimum]

Facetious, I signed up for that writing class through the local vo-tech. I think the website is ed2go.com or something close. I thought that the class would be filled with people that lived in the general area around the vo-tech, but there were folks from all over the country and from Canada in my class. And they do not discriminate. They even let a Texan in there. :) As far as I know, no one in there was even in my home state. I think it cost around $70 or so for a six-week class, and over the last two or three years I have taken three or four other writing classes through them. I don't know how they compare to other online writing classes, but I sure learned a whole lot.

[snuffy]

Bryan, I finished the book last Friday. I kept expecting someone to jump out of the bushes after Tom got home. Good ending though. My main gripe is that the bank president should have made good on the lost money. He should have monitored the ledgers.

This puter was in the shop getting a virus removed, and a bigger hard-drive installed, then re-formatted. My great nephew has his own computer repair shop, he made this old Dell work like new. Found out windows XP is being set adrift by Microsoft next year around June. No new updates means it will be a magnet for viruses.

Since I'm a non-active commercial pilot, I'd like to see the bush pilot story first. But it makes sense to continue with the western theme, get another couple more books under your belt, before branching out into other adventures.

[John Allen]

I just started reading this the other day and got to say it is great. I am having a hard time putting it down.