Hazel Is A Hit! Please Help Keep the Momentum Going!

A while back I did a post on this huge goal of getting 60 sales in a month. The idea was that if I could hit that mark, I’d start seeing a profit. At that time, I was selling maybe eight titles a month. My record since then rose to 15 sales in a month. I need you to understand that was a blessing. God’s grace provided even then. At that time, I thought 60 sales a month was something like two years from now.

Before you get mislead, I did not sell 60 copies of any title in October.

I sold 52!

To say that Hazel had a great start is a horrific understatement from my point of view.

The things to celebrate:

Hazel (all by herself) sold 39 copies and had 989 pages read. The best part is that she debuted about halfway through the month (October 14).

She reached as high as #37 in the Top 100 for Science Fiction Graphic Novels. She more or less stayed in the Top 100 throughout October. As I type this she’s at #208 in that category, but she bounces up to the Top 100 every now and then.

These are all easily the best numbers I’ve ever seen. I’m not positive I’ve sold 52 books in a convention, and if I did, I don’t know if that number of sales was enough to make back what I spent on the table (I just honestly don’t remember).

That means I sold another 13 copies of my other books (which brought me to that ridiculous new record).

Hazel has four ratings and three reviews, all four-star or higher.

Thank you. Those words aren’t very sufficient for this, but they’re the ones I have. I thank God first above all, and I am thankful to you all who supported this graphic novel and this silly little dream of mine.

Now for the context (things to remember):

First, I can’t stress enough how significant it is to sell that many copies and get that high in the Top 100. Caught spent a little bit there on opening day, but that’s about it. To hold in that category (more or less) for weeks is just amazing.

The context is that that many of those sales is a surge that many new releases have, and Collin, who created Hazel and was kind enough to let me tag along, has a better following than me. Our two followings together helped get the word out. Hazel started out strong with a few double-digit sales, and again, we can’t thank you enough.

The challenge now is to keep the momentum going. Since Hazel’s last “big” day of sales (she sold seven copies Nov. 1, she’s tapered off a bit. Sure, we’d like Hazel to increase from week to week, but the fear was she’d just fall off a cliff. That hasn’t happened. She’s steadily sold two copies a day so far. We need to keep that momentum going for a number of reasons. Of course we want to sell more per day. Collin and I both dream of doing more stories with Hazel. We’d both love to quit the day job and be storytellers full time, but to do any of those things, we need to put in the work to keep this arc going.

The marketing is slowly moving in the right direction. I’ve just finished a pass of all my titles. I have to keep a close eye on Hazel because she’s a very unique title in terms of sales and royalties. I’ll be monitoring all of my campaigns for the next three months to let things develop.

Even now, things are going better than ever. I’ve already sold 15 titles this month! (Remember when 15 was a huge new record for me?) Fourteen of those are Hazel of course. This means that Hazel is just doing a lot of amazing things. I hope she continues to do this well, and I hope those who try Hazel out decide to give more of my work a try.

This is honestly a big step in the right direction. I have a realistic shot of hitting 60 sales this month. Now things are a little weird. As great as that is (it’s still a goal met), the marketing for Hazel costs money; the royalties for Hazel take a big hit from Amazon, and Collin gets his well-deserved and rightful portion of those royalties. So while I have hit a major benchmark, one that will definitely help, I still need to work more on the other titles, and I will.

I’m working on The 1,200 right now, I’m pretty close to finishing the read through I’m doing, and then I’ll get to work on the first draft of Discovered, Book 3 of the Oneiros Log. Don’t let that panic those of you who don’t follow me a lot. I have a draft of Discovered done. It’s just a (very) rough draft, and the first draft is where I iron out all those issues before I send it out to Alpha Readers. Discovered is still my main project; I just want to keep the coals warm on other projects, too.

Again, please let me offer you my most sincere appreciation as well as that of Collin’s.

Please help us keep this momentum going. If you haven’t picked up your copy of Hazel, please give it a try. If you have, please leave a review and ask your friends to try it out as well.

Thank you so much for reading,

Matt

The Rubber Tree Plant: The True Challenge of Being an Author Businessman

I play cards with my wife’s grandparents every Thursday. Today, the wife’s cousin (who lives there) asked m how the business was going. I told him I was happy at how it was growing. Then he asked me a question that stumped me, and I’d like to share my thoughts with those of you who wish to become authors.

He asked me what the hardest part was.

Is it the writing? I don’t think so. It certainly isn’t the hard part for me. Whatever I’m doing from day to day, I have to think I type somewhere between 1-3 thousand words a day. Now only a portion of those words are for my career as an author, but I don’t think it’s hard to write (at least not the way that I think of it). Now I don’t want to go off on a tangent about why some people may struggle with writing, but I want to establish that writing isn’t actually that difficult.

Is it the editing? Well, I hate it, but it’s not actually hard. It’s tedious. It always feels like I’m just looking at evidence of how bad a writer I actually am. However, when I sit down and get to it (after I’m done moping), it works out.

It’s not the designing. It’s not the marketing (though I still have a long way to go).

So what, then, is the hardest part.

I realized the hardest part is the grind. I affirm I could take any hopeful writer and help that person get a book published on Amazon in less than a calendar year. I would only require that individual promise to spend at least two hours a day on said book. Outside of that, I could help anyone. But hidden in there is another example of the grind.

I’m aware of at least a dozen people who started a book. What happens though is people start out with a burst of inspiration and ambition. It’s like a person who just chugged a Red Bull. Sure, you start off hot, but you eventually burn out, and that’s my point.

The people who start a book and the people who finish writing a book are only separated by one factor: They keep going.

The people who finish a book and the people who get published are only separated by one factor: They keep going.

The people who don’t sell any books and the people who sell hundreds of books (or more) per month are again only separated by that same factor: They keep going.

I can personally attest to the first two above assertions. Several people started writing books when I had started writing my books. I kept writing, and they stopped. They had their reasons and excuses, and I’m not here judging them for those decisions. I’m only stating that, with the blessings and by permission of God, I finished my book because I kept working on it. I got it published because I kept looking for ways to make that happen.

Now, I currently only average about eight sales a month, so I’ll understand if you don’t think much of this little motivation blog I’m writing. However, when I first started selling books, I was amazed whenever I sold a book. I’d go months without selling a single copy of anything. Then I started working on my marketing. I started studying and acting on what I learned. This has lad to a small, but steady, increase of my sales per month average.

The tough part about being a writer doesn’t actually have anything to do with the difficulty of any one task. Even if one argues editing, writing, or designing is hard (even if I respectfully disagree), it’s still not that difficult. But writing every day, day after day, for years. That’s hard. The commitment it takes is ludicrous.

I’m here to tell you it still works. The effort usually reaps equivalent rewards in time. Now I’m still limited to the time God allows me to be on this Earth, but while I’m here, if I keep working toward a goal, it usually happens.

Determination, I propose, is the only real distinction between people who accomplish a goal and people who don’t. This isn’t an absolute. I can train every day for the rest of my life, and I’m not making the 49ers roster. Talent and genetics plays a role in some areas, but not writing. Over the long haul, almost anyone can do almost anything with enough time and effort.

This is my message to you all today. You can choose to give in to despair or disappointment, or you can choose to keep going. You can accept that what you were doing is no longer intrinsically motivating and decide you don’t want to do it anymore. You have that right, and I won’t mock you for it. I just don’t want you to feel like you will continue to fail just because you have failed. Indeed, you will fail if you stop trying simply because you succeeded once.

I have to finish the Oneiros Log. I have to finish Images of Truth and revise and publish a whole bunch of other novels. They can’t be purchased if I never make them available for sale. So if you’re discouraged, please consider this motivation I offer to you. If you still want that goal, keep pushing. Keep working. If you stop, you’re guaranteed to fail. But you might succeed if you just try one more time.

Thanks for reading,

Matt

Book Review: Entrepurpose by Rusty Pang and Brian Laprath

(NOTE:  This is a nonfiction book, so I’ll be reacting to it much like I did with The Problem of Pain.)

I found this book immensely reaffirming. For me, I held a lot of the concepts in this book true without any terms or explanations.

The first thing I read that really resonated with was the concept that time is a valued currency. I’ve said for a long time (I even wrote it in my own personal Code) that the only two true forms of currency are love and time. This book speaks to that belief and supports it with both relevant anecdotal evidence as well as research.  If you only buy this book to read Chapter 8, it would be worth the money.

This isn’t just true of someone who likes self-help, non-fiction books.  This chapter is specifically for all those people who “say” they want to be an author.  This chapter forces a person to look at their life and truly understand what they do establishes their priorities.

This book speaks to sticking to your purpose and pushing, never giving up. That’s pretty much me in a nutshell.

There were parts that truly got me thinking. The big conundrum to authors is the idea of supply and demand. Great businesses tap into what’s going to happen. They jump the market. They give people what they want. This is very hard to do as an author. At the end of the day, people want to read good stories. So how does one of a huge number of authors prove his stories are good or better than the other books out there?  How does an author earn the time of readers? This is a mystery I’m trying to solve, and the answer will make whatever author learns it very successful.

This book speaks to mentorship. It challenges people to seek out people more successful than you.  I’ve done that over the last year or so, finding the Slush Brain and other people that I can speak to and learn from. Writers WANT to be part of a group of successful authors. Just look at history and you’ll see what tends to happen to talented individuals who share that sort of energy.

This book challenges readers to look at what they’re doing and why. It gives readers courses of action that can help them drive in on what they want. I’d have like a bit more time in terms of identifying purpose. While I have my purpose, I find that most people don’t, and I felt if any part could have more, or rather if I wanted any more of one segment, that would be what I’d wish. I tell my students pretty much daily that I don’t care what they want; I just want them to WANT SOMETHING. So more information on finding that, and if I’m being honest, helping others find that, would have made this product even stronger.

Entrepurpose isn’t good because a friend of mine wrote it; it’s good because it’s useful. It’s good because it does what I think non-fiction should do. It calls you out, offers you tools, and forces you to admit you’re the one who has to move. I’m so very glad for Rusty and Brian. I recommend this book most specifically for people who know what they want, but are afraid or unsure if they should go for it.