x0 will die

Posted on October 14, 2018 by Sherrie Cronin

What prompts an author to kill her own book?

On December 1, 2018 my firstborn novel will die. I admit the prospect makes me sad. This book has been part of my life for a while.

I wrote the first draft in just six months in 2011. After several rewrites, professional editing, and more feedback and corrections, x0 became available on Kindle in 2012. The paperback version followed.

I’ve never totaled up the sales, because it’s not easy to separate a sale from a give-away. I guess I’ve been paid for about four hundred copies, and gifted at least as many more. I’d hope for more sales, of course, but every time a stranger liked my book and let me know, it delighted me. No regrets.

Times change. Sales of x0 have gone from small to nearly zero.

A few months ago, I attended a conference of science fiction writers, and signed up for a mentor. It may have been one of my more useful decisions. This guy pointed out that I could still have a marketable product in this particular story, but I needed a more genre-appropriate cover, a much better title, and an updated and aggressive marketing plan.

I can change the title of my book? Apparently I can. I do need a new ISBN number (no problem). I also need to acknowledge to the new reader what has been done (just in case he or she is one of the 800 humans who already read this story.)

And …. I need to kill x0. That is, I must take it off the market completely. No electronic versions for sale, although those who have it obviously always will. No new paperbacks printed and sold, although nothing can prevent current owners from reselling their copies on Amazon and elsewhere.

Over the years, I’ve eliminated all the hyperlinks in the book, and the text that went with them. I’ve made corrections and done minor clean-up. Why not. But I’ve refrained from doing anything major.

Because this will be a new book, I have the chance to do some serious editing. So I have. The original x0 came in at just under 119,000 words. The leaner new version is under 96,000. I’ve broken the chapters into smaller chunks. I’ve given more attention to point of view. I’ve taken the techniques I’ve learned over the past six years, at conferences, from other writers, and simply from practicing my craft for hours every week, and I’ve done my best to fold those learnings into telling my story better.

I’m pleased with the result.

So while x0 will soon cease to exist, it will give birth to a new and better novel. I’ll be blogging all about it soon.

What’s the Point?

Posted on June 7, 2018 by Sherrie Cronin

If you spend too much time analyzing why you do things, you end up doing nothing.

That’s my conclusion after forcing myself to spend a few weeks considering why, I mean really why, I spent the better part of seven years writing novels. The question is reasonable, but enough is enough. I’m cutting myself off at seven reasons.

Reason #7 is? It is my most audacious yet, that’s for sure. I want to change the world.

What exactly do you want to do with the world, you might ask? That is a reasonable question, too.

And here’s the thing. I do know. It’s sort of a problem, isn’t it, when you think you know how the world should be?

Yet, I’m certain. We need more more empathy. More kindness. More gratitude for what most of us do have, and more generosity with it. I want each of us to behave as though we are going to live every single other person’s life, and soon. I have this theory that if we behaved in such a way, we would be entirely capable of turning this planet into a paradise.

If I’m going to reform something, shouldn’t I start with myself? Yes, of course I should, and I’m working on that. Be the change you want to see and all that. Some days it goes pretty well, other days not so much so. I am trying.

It doesn’t alter the fact that I’ve got this burning desire to tell the stories in my head, and soon as I get started telling them, this desire to make the world better while I’m at it kicks in. If I wrote for no other reason, I would write because it is my way of trying to improve things.

I’ve answered two questions for myself. Thanks to all this analysis, I know I need to keep writing. I understand that I need to write my way, for my reasons, but that I also need to give care and effort to reach more readers, because being read is integral to several of my key motivations.

Thanks to this understanding, and some excellent advice I have received recently, over the next few months I will be revamping the 46. Ascending collection one last time. Then, my books will get new, more market-friendly titles. I will pay a little of my own hard-earned treasure to buy them genre-appropriate covers more likely to catch the eye of new readers. I will do what modest amount of advertising I can, but only after I’ve researched the most effective ways to use my limited funds. It will be a final push to make the most of what I’ve created.

Then, I will move on and create something new. And yes, I’ll probably be hoping to make the world better with it, too.

(The above photos are of three of the six displays I made and hung on the wall of my writing room to motivate me and keep me going over the past seven years. They got the job done. I’ll be posting the other three on my other blogs soon.)

Wearing many hats well

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Sherrie Cronin

We all balance a lot of identities as we make our way through an ordinary day. I’ve managed girl, nerd, daughter, cook, wife, manager, mother, PTA president (seriously) and irritable neighbor all in the course of single afternoon. Adding an extra persona like “writer” into my normal mix has challenged me, even more so because it seems to require several distinct pieces of head gear.

There is the wild creative hat that yields stories at traffic lights and helps me type with a manic fury when the ideas just won’t stop coming long after I should have gone to bed. I love that hat, and I wear it whenever I can.

Then there is the careful, tidy little headpiece that I wear when I proofread, edit, rewrite, add links, check everything and check it twice again. What? The font for the chapter five title is twelve not fourteen point? How did this happen? It is a nit picky little hat, but I have to admit that there is a lot of satisfaction to getting something perfect. At least I think it is perfect until the next time I proofread it.

It’s the third writer’s hat that just doesn’t seem to fit me very well. It feels to me like a loud gaudy thing and I hate to put it on. It is the hat of sales. Writers of all sorts, whether they produce self-published works, short stories, or trade novels found in the front racks of brick bookstores, all have to get out there and sell their wares. Fiction is a product. If you want to be read, and I do, then you need to convince people to read your work.

Now that d4 is off to my real editor and I have promised my family and myself that I will pause and breathe before starting the next book, I decided to play with this awkward hat for awhile. I returned to scouring writer’s forums for ideas to increase purchases and I finally let myself take a long hard look at my sales statistics. Yes, this area could use a little more work..

Click to get x0 for free at Kobo

Turns out I sell books in places I have never heard of. Thanks to my opting in for everything at Smashwords, the ebook distributor I use, I can be found at a cool new online store called Inktera. You can also find me at Scribd, this great new service where for only $8.99/month you can read all the ebooks you want. I have got to get out more.

Even better, I made a list of thirteen new ideas to try to increase the visibility of my books. The first was to do an interview at Smashwords. Please check it out, I think it turned out pretty well. The second was to make my first novel free for awhile, ideally to generate sales of my other books. I decided to give this a try, and you can now grab x0 FOR FREE at Smashwords, or at another surprising site called Kobo.

How is this free thing working out for me? Well, when I posted on my Facebook page that x0 would be free for a short time, 915 people liked it. 915! That is probably a record for me for number of people ever liking anything I have ever done. However, how many have downloaded it? Zero. That’s right. Not one, so far.

As I look at this post, I think I see the problem. If I was better at wearing that sales hat, this post would have started off with FREE BOOK in big bold letters at the top. Instead I started it out by writing what I thought was more interesting. Oh well, I’ve still got eleven more ideas to go. I’ll try to do better with the next one.