Friday Book Review, Halftime

Halftime, by Bob P. Buford

“The real test of a man is not when he plays the role that he wants for himself, but when he plays the role destiny has for him."

~Vaclav Havel

What if the second half of your life could be more effective and successful than the first? Bob Buford explores how we can assess, regroup and direct our lives from success to significance. No matter our financial condition or cultural stature, we can possibly become more of what God intended us to be in the second half of our life than the first.

Halftime is that period just like during a sporting event where we can stop, appraise where we've been, but more importantly, plan and steer ourselves into an effective second half.

Buford poses questions, uncomfortable ones, that if we ask and answer them carefully can perhaps find that sweet spot in our lives. Questions like, 'What do I want to be remembered for?' As an example, he indicated that he would like his epitaph to read:

100X.

Other questions he asked: Am I comfortable with my job? Would I be willing to take a less stressful (and lower-paying) job to be happier — to be closer to my true self? What is it about my job that makes me feel trapped? To clarify, he isn't just talking about changing our job. In fact, keeping our job could be a possibility. Yet after a lifetime of working for the car, house and boat, getting the kids through school and independent, what next? Halftime provides that focus we may need. 

Personally, I found the book compelling. After thirty-six years of self employment, my company evaporated in the Great Recession. Fortunately we saved and invested well, thank God. However Buford helped me to think about where I've been, what I've done (both well and poorly) and what I can do to make the next run more effective than the first. 

He quotes George Bernard Shaw as an example:  “This is the true joy in life — the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got ahold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations”

I like books, whether fiction or non, that provoke emotion, but also make me think. Halftime does this well.

What would your epitaph read? 

 

Indie Pub Part 4

We're continuing in our look at Independent Publishing. So far we've covered the changes in the publishing world, how to format your book for print and for e-publishing, and how to make an eye-catching cover. Today we're going to look at where to sell what you write.

Where to Sell What You Write

If you were publishing through the traditional, legacy publishers, this would be less of an issue. The advantage that the legacy publishers have typically had over the independent author is the issue of distribution and marketing. That being said, many legacy and boutique publishers, facing rising costs, have trimmed down on precisely these two areas, leaving many of the marketing and even distribution challenges to the authors themselves. Thus, they have effectively shot themselves in their collective feet.

Along with the internet revolution has come the ability to sell online from anywhere in the world to virtually anywhere in the world, and as reader’s buying habits have shifted away from brick and mortar stores to online, this has opened up opportunities for the independent author.

Electronic Retailers

So what are these electronic retailers? There are many. First among them is Amazon.com. Amazon is the single largest e-retailer in the world, selling anything and everything—though their primary emphasis is books.

The second largest e-book seller is, surprisingly, Apple. They are Amazon’s chief competition, capitalizing on the strength of their iTunes store to sell similar content to users of Apple’s iPad and iPhone. Following that is Barnes and Noble. Like Amazon they also have their own e-Reader and electronic content. But they differ in being a primarily brick and mortar outfit. Their online presence has a sliver of market share, barely in the double digits.

After that, we have the smaller fish: Sony, who sells e-books for its various e-readers, Kobo books, trying to find their place, Diesel, making negligible headway, and Smashwords.

Smashwords is different because, though they do sell directly from their site, their primary business model is in distribution to as many e-selling markets as possible. This makes them a player, even though they don’t sell that many books themselves. Smashwords can convert a single Word Document into multiple e-reader formats at the click of a mouse, and distributes to numerous sellers as well. Thus, they play a pivotal role for the author.

In addition to these primary sellers, we also have numerous foreign markets that are just now opening up to the American author. Amazon distributes to Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, India, and now Japan as well.

Physical Retail Options

Selling online will be the primary way an independent author distributes his or her books. But it isn’t the only way. Secondary to it is selling via brick and mortar stores. There are two types of brick and mortar stores where you might be able to sell your book. Local, privately owned stores (including, but not limited to, bookstores), and retail chains (bookstores, department stores, grocery stores, pharmacies and other places where books are sold).

When it comes to selling in these places, you will need to approach the store owner or manager with a professional product and agree to sell your book, typically on consignment, whereby the seller takes anywhere from twenty to fifty percent of the cover price. Larger box stores are very hard to break into. You have to be able to demonstrate a pattern of sales before you’ll be able to entice many retail chains into taking on your material. Some retail chains will stock a local author, so that can get you a foot in the door.

Be prepared to come to the store with several books available, a sell sheet that explains your book and marketing strategy, with contact information so they can get back in touch with you. The more professionally you present yourself, the better chance you have. Business cards and so forth should be professionally printed, rather than produced at home on an inkjet printer.

You can also distribute your book to local libraries by donating a copy or two, and by playing up on the fact that you’re a local author. Many libraries have “author days,” where you can sell your book, do sample readings, and meet prospective readers.

Selling Your Own Material

And we should not overlook the sales you can generate on your own. You can sell your materials through your own website, often by providing direct links to either Amazon or to your own sale page (I prefer to use an image of the book’s cover as the primary link on my website).

If you are unfamiliar with HTML, I recommend starting with a blog (which you should have anyway). Blog pages often let you sell through third party widgets that you can insert into posts or in sidebars. The two most common blog platforms are Blogger, owned by Google (also redirects from Blogspot), and Wordpress. I’ve used both, though I’m currently using the Wordpress platform.

Both let you design a fully functional blog/website that can either be hosted on their domains, or on a third party site. The platforms come with templates you can install that make designing your site a breeze, and the blog platform has the advantage of always giving you a ready excuse and means of updating your content, thus getting readers to come back again and again.

In addition to selling online, you can also sell through craft fairs, community yard sales, public markets, as well as various classes and seminars (this is especially helpful if your book is either non-fiction, or if it touches on a non-fiction subject of which you are knowledgeable.). You might have to pay a small, upfront fee for the table space. It could be anywhere from twenty to five hundred dollars. I wouldn’t pay more than a hundred bucks for a table space, and you have to factor that cost into what you hope to sell so that you don’t lose money in the process.

Pricing

Besides figuring out where to sell what you write, we also have the challenge of figuring out the selling price. Cost is not the only consideration in setting a price, believe it or not (though it is significant).

When it comes to e-books, the cost per book is effectively nil. Once the book itself is produced, it can be reproduced endlessly with no additional cost to you or the distributer besides the pennies required to keep the file intact and available on its servers.

This does not mean, however, that e-books should cost nothing. You must factor into the cost the value the product has for you as an author. After all, your time and talent went into producing the work in the first place. It may have taken you months to years to produce the book, and that time is significant. The goal is to recoup the losses you incurred in terms of the time invested, and even turn a profit, over the lifetime of the book.

The price of your book also says something significant to the reader about the value they are getting for the words they are reading. You want the reader to believe they are getting something worth investing their time into, and the best way to do that is to require them to pay for it up front. Your book should be priced high enough to communicate quality, high enough to allow you to discount it for sales (and still make money at it) and yet low enough to actually sell.

In addition, Amazon has a “sweet spot,” a price range that will allow you to take advantage of a higher royalty rate. The standard royalty rate for Amazon is 35%. Books that are priced below $2.99 and above $9.99 earn the 35% rate. But books priced within this range qualify for a 70% royalty rate.

Other retailers, such as Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Diesel typically offer a 60% royalty rate. Smashwords pays 85%.

For a full length book, the sweet spot is right around $4.99, though some books sell for as much as $9.99. Believe it or not, you can actually sell more books pricing higher than lower, because people expect to pay for their books.

Free will always sell, but that doesn’t necessarily add up to readers. You can always use free as a giveaway to entice new readers or reward people for signing up for your newsletter, for leaving a review, etc.

Smashwords allows you to set coupon codes that you can give away or email to people so they can get a discount. At the present time, Amazon doesn’t have this feature (you’d have to send the mobi file to the customer directly.).

When it comes to print, you now have to factor in two additional considerations before determining the price. Printed books have costs built into them that e-books simply do not have.

The first cost is the actual printing of the book. You have to factor in the price of the paper and ink and the process used to develop the book. The printer or on-demand printer you utilize will tell you this cost at the outset.

Createspace, for example calculates its prices this way:

Calculating Our Share
Sales Channel Percentage
+ Fixed Charge
+ Per-Page Charge
= Our Share

 The Sales Channel Percentage is 40% of the list price for Amazon, 20% for Createspace, and 60% for expanded distribution (which is a package you can purchase through Createspace).

Fixed Charges are as follows:

Amazon.com, CreateSpace eStore, and Expanded Distribution
Black and white books with 24-108 pages	$2.15 per book
Black and white books with 110-828 pages	$0.85 per book
Full-color books with 24-40 pages	$3.65 per book
Full-color books with 42-500 pages	$0.85 per book

 

Amazon Europe
Books printed in Great Britain	£0.70 per book
Books printed in continental Europe	€0.60 per book

 

And then there is the Per Page Charge:

Amazon.com, CreateSpace eStore, and Expanded Distribution
Black and white books with 24-108 pages	None
Black and white books with 110-828 pages	$0.012 per page
Full-color books with 24-40 pages	None
Full-color books with 42-500 pages	$0.07 per page

 

Amazon Europe
Black and white books printed in Great Britain	£0.01 per page
Full-color books printed in Great Britain	£0.045 per page
Black and white books printed in continental Europe	€0.012 per page
Full-color books printed in continental Europe	€0.06 per page

 

All of this factors into the cost of the book. So for example: for a 184 page black and white book, you set your USD list price at $8.99. A customer purchases your book on Amazon.com and a book is printed to fulfill that order.

Sales Channel % = $3.60

Fixed Charge =      $0.85

Per Page Charge = $2.20

Your Royalty =     $2.34

The second cost, and one that is often not factored in on the front end, is the cost to actually ship the book. This cost may vary due to quantity and desired delivery date, but it is a cost your readers will incur beyond the purchase price.

With Createspace, you can purchase your book at cost and delivery, and have it shipped to you for your own sales efforts. If you factor in how much the book and shipping costs are, it will give you an idea of how much you should charge in order to make a profit and not lose money (especially if you have to then give 40% of the list price to a store for carrying the book).  

NEXT UP: HOW TO PROMOTE YOUR BOOK

Autocrit - My Bestest Buddy, by April Gardner

Welcome to our guest!

By April Gardner

 

Someone on the John 3:16 Marketing Network recommended the website AutoCrit.com. I looked into it, and so far, it has all the appearance of being useful tool for writers.

 

In the company's own words, “The AutoCrit Editing Wizard is an instant book editor. With the click of a button it shows you the problems in your manuscript.”

Copy, paste, click “analyze.” That simple.

The free version analyzes 1,500 words each day. It will check for overused words, sentence length variation, and clichés and redundancies.

The paid version increases word count to 3,000 per day and adds on repeated words and phrases, phrases summary, pacing, dialog tags, initial pronouns, readability, and homonyms. The repeated words and phrases alone is worth the $47/year!

I put the first scene of my latest novel through the wizard. Mind you, it had already undergone four critiques, but I was still shocked at what the wizard caught. It’s mostly nit-picky stuff, but since I’m a nit-picky author, AutoCrit has potential to become by bestest buddy.

With a 30-day money back guarantee, it was a no-brainer to fork over $47, but I plan to test-drive it hard over the next month!

Swing by there now and pop 500 of your latest words into the wizard. Just for fun. Then come back and let me know what you think!

 

–April W Gardner is an award-winning author, an editor,

and the founder of the literary contest site, Clash of the Titles

 

Note: this post originally appeared in November 2012 on Reflections in Hindsight

AN UNHOLY COMMUNION

by Donna Fletcher Crow

            In this third novel of The Monastery Murders Series, Donna Fletcher Crow turns to well-researched consideration of the occult.

            Felicity Howard wakes from dreaming of a black-clad figure plummeting to death from a tower, only to see the actual event happen and the body roll to a stop at her feet. The apparent suicide is Hwyl Pendry, a former student of Felicity’s fiancé, Father Antony. In the hand of the deceased is a paper bearing the emblem of a double-headed snake, and the paper bursts spontaneously into flame as Felicity watches. Research reveals that Pendry was the “deliverance minister” for his diocese in Wales, meaning that he was the priest who dealt with suspected demonic phenomena. And questions arise whether the apparent suicide was actually murder.

            Without notice, Antony is forced to substitute as leader of a Youth Walk pilgrimage that traces the route of a popular Middle Ages pilgrimage. Felicity joins him for the walk, though unimpressed with the motley and often troublesome group of young people involved. Neither Antony nor Felicity intends to follow up on Pendry’s death, yet that and other unexplained events dog them throughout the pilgrimage: 

The double-headed snake emblem keeps turning up, the youngest pilgrim tells of conversations with a lady none of the others can see, one pilgrim is injured because of a push from an unseen hand, two pilgrims are mesmerized and unable to tear themselves away from two pagan graves until Antony persuades them to speak the name of Jesus, and Antony himself, in an apparent trance, almost walks off a cliff. These incidents continue and magnify until the author weaves them coherently into a thrilling climax harking back to the original precipitating incident.

            In this novel, Donna Fletcher Crow again shows her intimate knowledge of the English countryside and her mastery of English cultural history back to Roman times. As in her other novels, these fascinating details raise the narrative above mere suspense and visions of the occult. The novel is well researched: In an afterword, the author states that all of the novel’s paranormal occurrences are “fictionalized accounts of events” reported in the nonfiction books that are her sources.

            Readers of this excellent novel will find much more to enjoy than an entertaining story of suspense and romance. They will emerge with an enhanced knowledge of the rich spiritual heritage of English cultural history. 

Donna Fletcher Crow Researches The Monastery Mysteries

 Reviewed by Donn Taylor, author of The Lazarus File, Deadly Additive, Rhapsody in Red, etc.

www.donntaylor.com

The Much-Maligned Adverb

Adverbs Are Our Frenemies

 

There is a perfect moment in the comedy In and Out with Joan Cusak and Kevin Kline where Kevin lets his hand drop – a classic limp-wrist move.

Adverbs get the same reputation.

I like adverbs; nay, I enjoy them. Since researching for this article and trying desperately to point out parts of literature I’m currently reading where they’re used well, I’ve changed my mind.

Used sparingly they’re the garlic to spaghetti sauce, they’re the tahini to hummus, they’re the Queen Latifah to Emma Thompson in Stranger Than Fiction.

Used effusively they’re Styrofoam packing peanuts, they’re Belatrix’s multiplying curse, they’re thistle fluff from your neighbor’s yard.

What are they?

Adverbs, as a part of speech, are words that describe a verb or another adverb, or an adjective. They tell us where, when, and how.

They don’t always end in “ly.”

They are formatted like adjectives in that they are positive, comparative, and superlative (well, better, best).

Come here right now. (the adverb is now; another adverb is right; the verb is come; the noun is here)

The sentence could simply be one word: Come.

Does this simple subject sentence work? Sure, it does. It can work very (adverb) well in certain (adverb) circumstances.

Come here.

This complete subject sentence is made up of the simple subject, in this case a directive word with an understood subject of you, (come), and the words that describe the action, an abstract noun (here) that is an implied place.

Come here now.

At this point, I am describing how I want the subject (you) to perform the action.

 

Come here right now. (I could substitute immediately for right now.)

With the extra adverb, or the one word that does end in “ly” I add a sense of urgency.

It’s up to you (and your editors) to decide what works best in your story at any given place.

Do a global search in your document to highlight overused words.

Commonly overused adverbs include the following.

Not

Never

Very

Always

Often

Just

Well

Most

They follow a verb (an action word), they may make comparisons (will generally follow “than”), they may describe another adverb or announce their superiority with words like “best” (words that end in est), like “worst,” “most,” and “least.” (Adjectives can often be found before the thing described.)

They are needed to describe an action when the sentence won’t have the same meaning without it.

When I say “go” run fast.

They are not needed when the verb is strong enough, unique enough, or can stand on its own.

Hurry. (This simple implied subject sentence both directs and describes the action. I want you [subject] to move [verb] faster [adverb].)

Hurry up!

She strode to the bus stop.

The students flocked to see Big Bird.

One way to have fun with them in fiction is to allow a character his or her own voice: one person uses them outrageously; another, seldom if at all.

Make sense? Let’s share some examples from our reading and/or our current work in progress about how a sentence can be stronger without the adverb.

For help, one online resource to check is: http://www.visuwords.com

Or see this post for others: http://authorculture.blogspot.com/2012/12/resource-roundup-word-geek-sites-to.html