August | 2022 | Drinking Cafe Latte at 1pm

Ah, summer. The season when eggs can fry on sidewalks, iguanas lounge wherever the heck they want by one in the afternoon, and readers flock to the beach to read their latest page-turners. Such a departure from the cold heart of winter.

It also seems to be the season when I forget I still have a blog here to update.

Well, I haven’t forgotten about this place, even if I do seem to spend more time posting on my own author site these days. But because it’s been a while, I think it’s still worth updating readers of Drinking Café Latte at 1pm with what I’ve been up to this summer.

My New Smart Page

These days, anyone who has a business card likely carries around a few physical copies in their wallets to pass on to potential clients, or customers, or dates, either out of tradition, savvy, or those inevitable just-in-case moments that seem to plague us all when we’re at our least prepared.

But because we’re officially in the future now (if you’ve ever watched an ‘80s future action movie, then you’ll know that we’re officially neck-deep in it, though it’s still not quite the scene we can expect once the events of cat-centered cyberpunk adventure Stray become reality), the even savvier traditional business card carrier will also have a digital version that he or she can pass along via QR code.

That digital business card, often referred to as a biolink or a smart page, can show off much more than just a photo and a call-to-action. It can also display key articles, invite mailing list signups, and more.

As it turns out, I’ve finally created one last weekend. Although I probably need to update it already (it’s a week old!!!), you can certainly get your fill of my latest content and important links by saving it to your bookmarks or smartphone.

Once you visit, you’ll get important navigational links to my official author site, Amazon book page, Goodreads and BookBub author pages, newsletter signup page, top books, latest blog articles, and more (well, not really—we’re always trained to say that, even when “more” technically means my author photo and something else I’ve already forgotten about).

If you’re curious, or just want to keep in touch, be sure to check it out and visit each respective site it connects you to, to make sure you’re not missing out on anything.

**Kindle Vella Series The Hybrid City Entrepreneur Is Back in Production**

Last summer (in 2021 if you’ve already forgotten what year it is), Amazon launched its latest reader fad, the Kindle Vella. The idea behind Kindle Vella is that American readers (because Vella still hasn’t gone international after a year on the market) can read series fiction one short episode at a time on their phones and pay for each episode with tokens.

It’s marketed to ravenous readers who love bite-sized fiction that evolves over time. If you’ve ever visited Medium, Radish, or Substack, you sort of know how this works. Or, if you’ve ever used Wattpad, imagine that, but with only the first three episodes of each story free.

When Amazon announced the beta launch of Kindle Vella last April (again, in 2021), I decided I wanted to try it out. After self-publishing three anthologies in the mid-2000s and watching each one fail miserably, I’d assumed publishing independently was a waste of time and resources, so I’d completely missed the self-published e-book boom of 2008-2012 once it came around. And given that the boom was happening while I was still hot in writing my A Modern-day Fantasy series (Cannonball City, Superheroes Anonymous, Alpha Red, and Hardcore Journeymen respectively), I’d dropped a rather large ball.

I still have no idea what my ignorance may have cost me.

Because I was running into the same problem with the audiobook boom still running today, I didn’t want to waste another opportunity should Kindle Vella actually become something special.

So I dropped everything I was working on in April 2021 (including building my website) and started writing a story I’d publish for Kindle Vella, based on a computer game I’ve been dabbling at making since May 2009. This story, The Hybrid City Entrepreneur, about a boy from 1985 seeking revenge on the bully who’s stolen his girlfriend by beating him at a high-stakes bet, became my focus for much of that summer. And when Kindle Vella ninja-launched in mid-July of that year, I had ten episodes of the story ready for audiences.

Well, thanks to the horrible launch strategy of requiring authors to bring in their own audience, which I didn’t really have since I was counting on Amazon to use this new platform to help me build an audience, I’d gotten fewer than a dozen readers for that first episode, and only a few of those reading the remaining freebies and just one moving on to a paid-by-tokens episode.

With each week that passed without new readers, even though I’d scheduled new episodes to drop every Friday, I’d become disheartened by the whole thing and eventually stopped producing new episodes by the time Episode 14: “The Ad Guy” had dropped in early August.

I’d wanted to finish the story, but because no one was giving it a chance, I’d decided I would take my time with it, publish new episodes only when other important things were finished, and then unpublish the whole thing once the story was finished so that I could turn it into a book and maybe find new readers through more conventional methods.

This new plan meant I’d publish just one additional episode in 2021. Episode 15: “Shop Down the Street” went live on December 31st.

But I’d gotten no new readers, even with that modest kick back to life, so I continued to let it linger for another season.

Then, like a pregnant cat unexpectedly showing up at my back door, the new batch came along.

On June 17, 2022, I’d published Episode 16: “The Security Question” and followed it with a new episode every Friday since. As of this writing, I’ve got 23 episodes live and up to Episode 26: “Fourth of July” queued (and releasing on August 26th). I’m also finishing up the mega-draft that will contain the next three episodes after that, taking us into September.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m determined to finish this thing up this year. Not because I expect new readers to suddenly flock to this old, forgotten story that’s competing with werewolf romances and other genres I don’t understand (or want to), but because I need to get it out of my system so that I can finish my newsletter exclusive novel, Paperweight, which I’ll talk more about soon, but you can get for free once I release it by signing up for my newsletter.

Hopefully, I’ll reach the end of the story before Christmas.

That said, if you like classic 1980s teen angst comedies about nerds versus preppy jocks, and if you’re a fan of movies like The Karate Kid, Better Off Dead, and Wall Street, then you should check it out. Or, at the very least, subscribe to my newsletter so you can find out whenever I turn it into a series of novels, which probably won’t be too soon (for reasons I’ll explain in the next section).

The Hybrid City Entrepreneur. Yep, it’s still a thing.

Status Update on Books-in-Production

Note: This will be a general overview. To get the best picture of what’s going on with my books, please visit my Coming Soon and Book Triage pages on my official author site.

If you’ve monitored my release history these last few years, you’ve probably figured out that I’m slow at creating new work. Sure, I had a publishing hot streak in 2015 and early 2016, but that was because those books were already written (save for The Computer Nerd and half of Cards in the Cloak and Gutter Child), and I just needed a few updates to make them release-worthy. By the time I’d started work on my sequel to The Fountain of Truth, a new collection of holiday-themed parables called Snow in Miami, as well as my still-unfinished comedic teen novel, Teenage American Dream, I’d burnt out, and I’d found it difficult to finish anything since.

Fortunately, my groove has returned in spurts over the years, but not in the way I needed it to. Thanks to NaNoWriMo and a wealth of new ideas, I have about eight new works-in-progress, with a couple of them more than halfway finished, but that means nothing if I can’t get to the end of any of them.

To remedy this problem, I’d made a decision a few weeks ago that I should’ve made in 2016.

Last month, I signed up for an online writers’ conference called Inkers Con. Last weekend, the live roundtables wrapped up, and after having attended as many as I could, as well as watching as many of the recorded live sessions from the in-person conference in June as I could, I’d walked away with some new insights.

Including one important one.

I’m a multi-genre author. If you look at my bibliography, you’ll see that I like writing thrillers, coming-of-age comedies, adventure stories, and holiday fables. I also like subgenres dealing with superheroes, high school stupidity, and unrequited love. I also enjoy quirky and/or ridiculous events in fiction. It makes me laugh. And if it makes me laugh, I hope it’ll do the same for you.

But writing in multiple genres hasn’t helped my sales in the slightest, nor has it helped me to build a following. If I expect to attract readers to any new book I finish, then I need to make sure they’re looking forward to it first. And that’s hard to do if I don’t have a returning audience.

What I’ve learned from Inkers Con is that writing in multiple genres does a great job at splitting reading audiences.

Sure, some readers will read any book an author writes. But others insist on staying within their preferred genres or series. And Amazon’s “Also Boughts” apparently go belly-up when a reader buys a thriller and a coming-of-age novel from the same author.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about “my brand” and “my writing lane.” What audience am I trying to attract? Who wants to read my next release? Do I need several pen names to keep it all together?

The reason I haven’t finished more than a couple of books in the last six years is because I’m demotivated by the lack of new readership my titles have attracted. In my quest to find the topic readers want to devour, I hop from one story to another without finishing the previous story. This all comes from a desperate attempt to sell enough books to break the way too low financial ceiling my day job has put upon me. If I can’t afford to fix my car, I panic.

Obviously, leaving a book unfinished doesn’t get me closer to resolving the problem with this ceiling height. So, I have to start finishing books. That means I have to start identifying which books need finishing first.

That means writing within a specific lane for a while.

Two-thirds of my published books haven’t sold a dime in seven years. The rest have sold very little. Even though I’m bringing a few of them through the Book Triage to update their content and hopefully give them a better shelf life (along with a new attractive title), I don’t know if it’s worth it to re-release them if they fall outside of “the lane” I need to focus on. And if it’s not worth re-releasing them yet, then I wonder if they’re worth updating now in the first place.

I also don’t know that it’s worth it to keep the unsold books live on Amazon or any of the major retailers. Because they’re already considered “Archived” on my site, I figure it’s about time to take them down and leave them readable on my website or on the Smashwords store only.

Maybe doing so will increase my author attractiveness, but I don’t know. I just know I have to do something. Sales suck right now. Really, really suck.

And there’s no reason to self-sabotage my career by leaving a bunch of stories on Amazon that no one wants to read.

So, to recap:

My sales suck.
I need to pick a lane.
Some books I’ve been touting for years may be delayed even longer as I try to write the ones that will actually give me a readership.

Now, I don’t mean to drive you all crazy with these fluctuating plans. But I need to figure out what works for my career and then run with it when I find it.

I also need to finish my newsletter-exclusive novel, Paperweight, a story about a retiring treasure hunter entering the corporate world and making a mess of it. You can find out more about it here.

That said, you can help me figure out my upcoming slate of books by taking my five-minute Summer 2022 Reader Survey. If you want to go a step further, you could also sign up to my newsletter, as well as leave me feedback or votes on my roadmaps for any book you’re interested in, including the All Books Roadmap.

So, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading. Don’t forget that you can keep up with the latest news by signing up for my author newsletter. (You can find out more about that here.) And remember that while I’ll continue to post here on occasion, you’ll get the most benefit out of also checking out the latest news on my author site.

Hope all is well. Stay tuned for the latest news.