Tuesday, August 2, 2011

I finished my book Samurai Zombie Hunter

Let me start off by saying that I was in a really bad place for a while there. I accidentally saw my book sales and it devastated me. I was banking on my writing would be able to earn me real money and when I saw my sales it felt like I had wasted all of the time I spent writing my books. It was really bad.

After that I got a few bad reviews for Run From the Reaper causing me to pull the book from shelves. It turned out that only reason for the bad reviews was because of the poor editing. Other than that the book was being praised. However, I couldn't see that at the time.

And because I was "all in" with my writing, I didn't have the money to hire an editor. That made me feel like a complete failure and like I had wasted my life. Because even through it all I thought that there was nothing else I was meant to do with my life. But it seemed that the one thing that I was supposed to do I couldn't do right.

And I don't know if you noticed this, but someone hacked my blogger.com account and Google shut my blog down. I thought it was gone for good because they didn't return control of it to me. I just happen to have thought about it today, and magically it was back.

Those were all of the dark things going through my mind. But since then I have managed to slightly stabilize my income. Not really, but kind of. I have also been able to hire a few professional editors that don't have book experience but wants to work on a book. That is allowing me to finally get my last 7 books professionally edited.

Also, after I gave up on being a writer I increased the price of my Everybody Masturbates books from 99 cents to the original price of $5.99. It turns out that not only have the sales not dropped at all, but my paperback book sales are back. They had practically disappeared after I lowered the price. Now there back to what they were at their peak.

The result of the price increase has been that July was the first month where I will be pocketing over $200 from my books. That would be my largest pay day so far.

And on top of that I have started a new business. I am doing affiliate marketing for an STD dating site called FindPositiveLove.com. Yes, that's right, it is an STD dating site. I have already created a commercial for it and I will be doing a lot more marketing for it. Did you know that 1 in 4 women in the US have genital herpes? Did you know that 1 in 5 men have it as well. Makes you think doesn't it? Anyway, if you know of anyone dealing with that or any STD and are single, point them to FindPositiveLove.com. Here is the commercial on YouTube. What do you think?




So after doing all of that I gathered myself back up and finished editing Samurai Zombie Hunter. It turns out that the book is good. When I stopped working on it I was really focused on how it wasn't your typical zombie book and hence wouldn't tap into the true zombie audience. I've come to peace with that. But what it is instead is a good read. I am now OK with that.

Oh, and the final thing is that I am back on 10,000 IU of vitamin D a day. It always make things seem not as bad.

So with all of those changes I a little bit more upbeat about life. I was in a extremely dark place for a while. But I think that I might be back. Not back far enough to restart writing 'Everybody vs. The Ferret 3', but back none the less.

2 comments:

  1. Glad to hear you are back, Cristian. Don't lose sight of the dream, man, and good luck with the editors.

    I have absolutely no plan to ever price a novel at 0.99. Even my novellas are likely to be 1.99. I've talked with a lot of readers about this, and they seem to all associate 0.99 with poor quality. And the truth is that the outliers at 0.99 are just that: outliers. So, to me at least, it makes perfect sense that your books are actually selling at the higher price and not the lower price.

    Best of luck!

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