Dichroic Reflections

Still working on website.

Had a successful (I think she is, anyway) author kindly offer to answer questions and provide some insight into Amazon tools – problem is, Amazon will only tell you how successful a book is right this second. So there’s no way to know if, say, an author has written a beloved series whose last book came out a year ago, with fans waiting breathlessly for the next installment. Of course you can still see how many new fans are entering the series and buying existing books at least. I tend to think the numbers of ratings / comments are a bit more useful in that respect – at least, I’d assume that anything with thousands of high ratings is well-beloved. At least the instantaneous ratings do tell you how many new readers are embarking on a series and buying existing books.

For the record, AHiP currently has 5 times as many ratings (86 vs 15) and more than ten times as many reviews as my first book. It’s not 5 times as good, I don’t think, just much less of a niche audience.

Also, it’s head race season; I’m not racing this fall, but Ted’s done one regatta already and is signed up for 3 more, so that travel takes time. Though the next one is in Seattle and it’s possible I might be able to watch it from a hotel window; if so and if the weather’s awful, I might just stay there and watch and write!

I can’t even blame self-publishing for this – even when I traditionally published my first book, the publisher didn’t do all that much promotion. So all the stuff I’m doing now, I should probably have done. (For comparison, the current book, after a month, has roughly 4 times as many Amazon ratings as that first one does 11 yers after publication.)

What I’ve been working on is two things: a “Paula Berman author” FaceBook page and an author webpage. Both are more complicated because all the AI “help” and templates are geared for people who want to be more commercial and use them as ways to sell, whereas I just want to provide connection and let Amazon and IngramSpark handle the actual selling.

Why do I need a new FB page? Because I use FaceBook quite a lot, to stay in touch with people I know from infancy upward. I’m not going to stop talking about my personal life or politics there., but there’s a limit with how much I want to share with people who are more interested in Macrina’s life than mine. (Side note: she does have a last name, though I think it’s actually mentioned only once. Macrina Magid: it’s an actual Jewish name as well as being perfect for a magic user.)

Why do I need a new blog instead of just linking to this one? Similar reasons – this blog has a considerable history, from the ten years when I blogged every weekday and the increasingly sporadic entries since. Do readers really want to be able to go back and read my whinging about my rowing coach in 2001? Probably not.

I’m not hiding anything; it’s ridiculously easy to get from the author FB page to the personal one and it’s not that hard to find this blog (the guy I sat next to in second grade popped up to say hello once. Hi, Andy!) So it’s more about…I guess, curating information.

If only I could get the new blog to work!

I was going to write, “My book has reached its first milestone,” but it’s not really that, is it? There were so many: enough words written to know I’d be able to do this book thing; halfway through; first draft completed; first opinions saying “yes, this is good enough to polish and publish”; beta reader feedback and revision, editor feedback and revision; publication on Amazon; first sales; first reviews there and on Goodreads; publication on IngramSpark (that finally happened just last week!). So this isn’t that.

It is a big one, though: My book has paid for itself! That’s counting editor, cover design, ISBN number, and registration of copyright. I’m not counting purchases that contribute to multiple books, like Scrivener, and definitely not counting the laptop I bought when I retired – that gets used for other stuff too. I’m also not tracking incidentals like buying copies to hand-sell or buying bookplate stickers to sign and send to friends, though those are probably covered too. (Or self-indulgences – it’s pretty tempting to buy a nice new pen for autographs. I have some nice fountain pens, but don’t want to lug along ink, and my best rollerball is in our wine logbook, since that’s the place I do most handwriting.) But it paid for itself, and literally hundreds, as in more hundreds than one hundred, people have read my book! (I figured that by adding orders plus the number of KU pages read, divided by the number of pages in the book.)

Also, Kindle Unlimited is the gift that keeps giving, to an author. Only pennies per page read but they do mount up.

I have some decisions to make now. I’ve already started working on a webpage (paulabermanauthor.com), but it’s still in work. I do not think the addition of AI has made webpage creation much faster! More like, more to argue with. At what point do I set up a separate Author profile on Facebook? When (if ever) should I set up a FB group? Do I need a blog on the author webpage? (Probably, at least for status news and announcements.) I don’t think I’ll ever link this blog to that page, though it’s not particularly hard to find.

Oh, and I have one reading scheduled at the local library, with the possibility of one in Eugene!!

I had the most exciting thing happen today. I woke up, checked my Amazon book sales page the way I used to check work email in the morning back before I retired, and found I’d sold something like 12 books overnight! (After the initial publishing excitement died down, it was one or two on a good day. Still happy with that.)

When I got around to looking at Facebook, it turned out that someone had posted about my book on Linzi Day’s “Voracious Readers” group on FaceBook. I’d mentioned her Gretna Green series as something that my MC Macrina would want to add to her library’s shelf of books with sentient house tropes. (The hilarious thing is that she’d written “I’m so chuffed for Linzi!” as if I were a big deal. 🙂 I wrote a comment making it clear that it’s very much the other way around – while I was writing I happened to reread her series and learned a lot from those as well as her website and newsletter, on how the books interlock, the way she interacts with her readers, her publishing process and so on. )

I’d already got some sales and very nice comments from Linzi’s group because right after I published she had a thread over UK Bank Holiday weekend for her fans who are also writers to post their own books but this makes today my highest day of sales ever. And to put the icing on the cake, Linzi herself commented:

!!!

At Home in Percival (henceforth, AHIP): 23 ratings on Amazon so far! I don’t know why, but somehow 20 felt like a threshold. I don’t know if there’s a tipping point where Amazon starts to recommend your book to readers of similar ones.

Book 2 (currently working title is George II, because the working title of AHiP was George is My Friend): About 25k words so far. I have not yet had any 2000-word days yet; it feels like I was mostly able to make that goal I the first book, but I ran some quick statistics. There were 48 days when I was seriously working on the first draft of AHiP; of those, I had 7 days under 100 words, 16 days over 2000 words, and the rest between 1k-2k. So if I’m only writing 1000-1500 most days on this one, I guess it’s OK. Hopefully I will speed up as I get farther along. One problem is that it feels like I’m halfway through the story when I should be only about a third done, but I think that happened last time too. Stories unpack themselves in a semi fractal way; “semi” because sometimes they’re linear, and then you realize you’ve got to go back and unpack a lot of missed detail. It’s a much more magical process than I had expected it to be.

It turns out, the first week after you self-publish a book on Amazon is basically about checking (with ridiculous frequency) to see if you’ve gotten any new comments, then slipping to Amazon’s reporting page to see if you’ve sold any more books.

So I can say that now, after just over a week since the book went up for sale, I’ve sold enough to cover roughly half of the cost of my editor and cover designer. (Both were cheaper than expected; in the case of the designer, he is both up-and-coming and a resident of a region where labor costs tend to be lower and I’m very pleased. Still not sure about the editor; on the one hand she charged less than I expected by an order of magnitude but on the other I found fifteen or twenty small errors in my final read-through after it got past her. I don’t really know how perfect I should have expected her to be, though – after all, she did find stuff I and all my previous readers had missed.)

Before I published, I had defined levels of success in my own mind. If I make enough to cover costs, I’ll be content. Sales have slowed from the initial spike, but I think I still should reach that, over time. If I make enough in addition to cover, say one extra wine club or to replace my Kindle Scribe (which has a slightly cracked screen), I’ll be very happy. Anything beyond that, I’ll be ecstatic.

I am also very pleased that the book now has 16 ratings, with an average of 4.6 out of 5 stars on Amazon. Hopefully this will be enough for it to show up as a recommendation when similar books are purchased. Ted and I discussed it and decided not to buy paid advertising at this time; I will do so once I have a sequel or two published. I have the ability to do promotions where the book price is lowered for a day or so, but I’m not sure there’s a point to that until there are more books in the series.

For comparison, my previous book was traditionally published in 2014, and I received an advance for it. With that plus royalties over the years, I estimate it’s earned about a month’s pay at my day job, total. I don’t know if this book will ever even match that, and that’s OK. At the least I’d hope it will pay for itself, and eventually lead to a little extra fun money.

I hadn’t expected how much I’d enjoy the writing process, though! So it’s been an utter success in that respect. 🙂

Someone asked me about the process of writing this book, and once I wrote it out for her, I realized I wanted to save this for future reference (I should really make a flowchart!)

Amazon US | Amazon UK

• 1. Write first draft.
• 2. Edit draft.
• 3. Send to 3 alpha readers, plus my husband Ted
• 4. Incorporate feedback.
• 5. Send to 5 beta readers, including you.
• 6. Repeat step 4. (There was some overlap between steps 3-6, as people read and respond at different speeds)
• 7. Buy ISBN numbers.
• 8. Send to professional editor, who took just under two weeks.
• 9. Repeat Step 4. 
• 10. Figure out how many pages were in final version (needed to create paperback cover)
• 11. Figure out how to get book into Kindle Create Editor.
• 12. Fix formatting in Kindle Create.
• 13. Upload to Kindle Direct Press.
• 14. (in parallel with 10-12) Commission cover
• 15. Review cover and get revisions made
• 16. Export .epub from Kindle Create and do one final careful close reading on my own Kindle, making comments as needed
• 17. Repeat step 4.
• 18. Publish!!!
• 19. Promote <= I am here

I think I may have the blog fixed. I doubt I’ve any readers at all left, but just in case, I need to make an announcement: my first novel, A Home in Percival, will be available on Amazon within the next day or two. (Insert much happy flailing here.)

I probably need to set up an author page in the next week or so, so I will keep this one for technical details for my own reference. But first: the cover!

And also the full paperback cover:

I hit “Publish” yesterday, so within 72 hours (or 48 from about now) the e-book and paperback will be available at Amazon. The e-book will be exclusive to Amazon, and will be available on Kindle Unlimited. I’m working on self-publishing the paperback via Ingram Spark as well, so it can be sold from other venues.

It’s roughly 280 pages, a very gentle cozy fantasy. (An aside: it has a bit of a slow start, since it begins in the autumn of 2021 and the main character, Macrina Magid, literally has done no in-person socializing for about a year and a half. Remember the pandemic?) Many of the incidents are based on real life, though no characters are – except Macrina’s two cats. And there’s a lot of me in Macrina, but I gave my consent to that 🙂 But everything is just a bit better when you have a) magic and b) an author. As an example, in real life the city of Eugene finally got a good high-end steakhouse in 2024; in my book, it has one back in 2022 – and it betters the real thing by having a river view.

As you might guess, I am not enjoying the wait until this thing is officially up and for sale!

The date is August 10, 2025, which makes it six years since my last update. Life has changed greatly; Ted and I have both retired, we now live at our lake house full-time, and I’ve completed writing my first novel and it’s with an editor now.

This blog has been broken for at least five years, and it’s taken me this long to get around to trying to fix it. Apparently it’s still possible to access individual entries; I think possibly the main issue is that the index page was hacked.

Because whatever other blog-writing I let fall, I will not skip the annual light-in-darkness Chanukah poem. This one is bleaker than usual. My life is OK, if a little lonely and circumscribed by pandemic, etc, but I have an online acquaintance, quite young (30s?) whose husband is dying of cancer. This is for her.

This year’s Chanukah candles
may be next year’s Yahrzeit.
Either way,
the candles of memory
are not enough
to hold back the encroaching dark.

Let other years have their festivities.
This year’s candles are a clew –
a thread of light to hold to
through a dark maze
whose end is past my sight.