Oh, there I go again. So many damn projects. So little damn discipline.

I spent two hours of prime writing time last night perusing Reddit, followed by a half hour of falling down a YouTube hole and then opted to read instead of write before going to bed.  Ugh.

And I have not only the current novel to work on, but a YA novel to rework for a deadline that’s TOMORROW for creep’s sake, and another non-fiction book under another moniker to piece together. Oh, and let’s not forget next week’s blogs (I have two per day on two different platforms to figure out) and 4 freelance articles on top of that.

All around my full-time day job and the rest of my life. So many balls in the air.

Shit. No wonder I’m not dating.

So today’s blog is going to be short because, quite frankly, I have to grab my balls. And I need to stop playing with my balls and get serious about my balls so I can grab life by the balls and grow some balls and get shit done.

I’m sure you understand. When I talk about balls, I mean.

I’ll check in with you tomorrow, hopefully with a keyboard full of balls.

As I previously mentioned, I’m getting a lot more traction off the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Lending Library Fund for the two books I have exclusively on Amazon vs the sales I’m getting off of Smashwords (even though it feeds out to multiple platforms). The problem is, unless you agree to go exclusive with Kindle, you can’t take advantage of Kindle Countdown Deals, Free Book promotions, etc. and those things have generated some serious flow for me.

So if you’re a Nook user, head over to Smashwords and download today and get them because they’re going away there after today. If you prefer to read online or via iPad, Kindle has a reader app you can use to read via those platforms.

I’ll still be publishing novellas on Smashwords, and you’ll still be able to access my free reads (and I’ll be posting more of those, I promise).

I really appreciate everyone who’s supported me on that platform, I really do. I just have to do what works best for now. Unfortunately. Amazon is changing the royalty structure on July 1 (and are being a bit vague about how that’s all shaking out, money-wise) so this is kind of an experiment. I’m giving them 60 days and if it’s not doing me any good to make this move, I’ll bring everything back. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Till then, I’ll just get back to writing, if it’s all the same to you.

In case you missed it last week, Amazon is restructuring the way it calculates royalties for its authors in the Kindle Select program. The long and short of if it is that Amazon is losing money on Kindle Unlimited, so they’ve changed the structure to make it more lucrative – for them, anyway- beginning July 1.

In the old program, if your book was part of the Kindle Select program and a reader downloaded and read past 10% of the book, you got a share of the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Lending Library Fund, which is calculated in some funky way that I don’t exactly understand because…math. But anyway, you get paid the rate for the full book, as long as they read past that 10%.

In the new program, even if they read past 10%, you’re only going to be paid for the amount of pages they read. So if they stop in the middle, or they decide to skip your “About the Author” page, you’re not going to get as much as you would before.

Which is, of course, crap. If they bought your paperback at the bookstore, you’d get paid whether they read it all the way through or not. But this ain’t paperback land, and Amazon is unfortunately the big, bad gunslinger in this shootout. They’re holding all the cards.

The biggest problem (or so I thought) about the Kindle Select program is that they require 90 days of exclusivity. You cannot publish and sell that title anywhere else – not Smashwords, not your own website/platform, nada. It’s Amazon and only Amazon, and that kind of sucks.

Or so I thought.

Continue reading →

When I was nine years old, my older brother had quite the collection of Sci-Fi paperback novels. His favorite writers were Heinlein and Asimov, and he used to get ballistic if I tried to sneak a book off the shelf. Finally, he got tired of constantly coming in my room to retrieve them (I swear, I stole “Tunnel in the Sky” every other day) and he offered me a book that he just so happened to have two copies of.

“Keep this one,” he said. “You’re going to want to, anyway.” Continue reading →

From time to time I clean out my bookmark file and go back through some of the writing resources that I’ve found particularly helpful. I’m going to share these today and maybe you’ll find some use for them, too.

I’ll start with this marvelous item I found in the writing community on Reddit – It’s a list of current writing deadlines for various publications. Special thanks to redditor u/motopoeta, who got these originally from the monthly email that’s sent out at Literistic. If you want to see this on a monthly basis, go to Literistic and subscribe!

Ray Bradbury (one of my all-time favorite authors) on how list making can improve your creativity.

5 Ways To Stretch Your Word Count

The Free Visual Online Dictionary – for when you need to find the right word. Continue reading →

So here’s what’s going on in my writerbrain right now.

I have not one, but two projects to finish under my other pen name. One is a rework of my YA novel (which is itself part of a larger trilogy), and the other is a semi-memoir kind of thing that’s one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” kind of stories. Those have deadlines in the immediate future. They are a priority.

And along with those priorities, comes my hashing out the over-arcing story and plot points of my Elemental Novels, a fantasy romance series in four parts based on Earth, Air, Fire and Water. This thing is epic in its scope, and I’m working hard to intertwine the stories before I really start fleshing it out and filling it in. Continue reading →