....we called it, We got up at 4 in the morning to see THIS? Because the moon, as all shiny as it was, just didn't quite measure up to "super" in our minds. We stumbled back to bed, unimpressed.
 
Speaking of over-hyped events brings us to this week's blog. Or, as we're calling it, the Superblog. Truth is, unless you're interested in online photo services, we don't have much to share with you this week except for this:  the train diorama in the Clemenceau Heritage Museum in Cottonwood, Arizona. If we'd taken a better photo, you've have seen the complete layout, with all of the tiny mountains, the wee train tracks, the itsy saloon (complete with bordello), and the T. Rex with a cow in its mouth. In case you're wondering, the T. Rex is not to scale. 
 
A dinosaur dining on a cow isn't, strictly speaking, historically accurate but the good people at the museum know the best train dioramas all feature a T. Rex munching on something. The Heritage Museum is small but sincere, the staff is dedicated, and the admission price is whatever its visitors care to donate. The train diorama was created by volunteers. It took five people a full five and a half years to build the thing. Sometimes it takes awhile to do something right. The diorama is pretty much the highlight of the C.H.M.
 
You might be thinking to yourself, Well, glad you enjoyed the visit, but why did you put such a lousy cellphone shot on the blog? and we'll tell you why: The museum people told us we could take the picture. The picture was free. We didn't have to pay anyone to use it.
 
Plus, we kind of like the photo. Because it's gently out of focus, it almost seems like we're looking down on a real little town there.

Y'see, we're used to paying for our photos at various royalty-free photo sites. "Royalty-free" doesn't mean the picture is free. It means, customers pay a flat sum to use shot and then they don't have to worry about paying additional fees for an individual license on the image. (Unless the customers sells 250,000+ copies of their item or ebook, at which point the photo sites want them to pull out the credit card again. So far, that particular nagging worry hasn't kept a lot of self-publishers up at night.)
 
For the most part, three sites have been ringing up our sales. Those sites are fotolia, Shutterstock, and Bigstock. There's dozens of other such outfits but those are the ones we stumbled across first and we've been too lazy to investigate the others. As it happened, when Renee pulled two photos for the Something Wicked cover, she was on Bigstock.

She required two images to create the one cover. To get the largest possible number of pixels on each piece -- a good graphic designer usually wants the largest possible number of pixels -- meant that Bigstock could charge more since bigger = pricier. Since credit "bundles" come ten credits for $35...and you can't buy a partial bundle...she was prepared to drop $70 just to buy enough credits to change our cover.
 
Then she noticed that Bigstock had a subscription plan. We hate subscription plans but this seemed like a decent deal. For $69, customers can download five largest-possible images a day for a full month. In case you're wondering, fotolia charges the same; Shutterstock will give you 25 images a day but you'll be out $249 for a single month's charge ($199 a month if you sign up for a year).
 
Bigstock doesn't roll over images so if you don't download your five, that day is gone. Also, customers have to  contact the company to cancel the subscription plan or they're automatically re-enrolled each month. Neither of these stipulations were deal-breakers so she whipped out the credit card and took the plunge.
 
Today, there are 125 royalty-free images in Renee's work file. Flip through the folder, and you'll see zombies and fairies; couples in love and couples in lust; cowboys and horses; and on and on. And on. The subscription plan ends on 06/30 -- she cancelled the roll-over on Day Two so this is pretty much a one-shot -- and, when the whole thing is complete, each image will have cost us 46 cents.
 
Plus, this has given her a chance to start working on the new cover for our next novel. Which is being plotted but still hasn't been written.
 
Hey, we've been busy looking at train dioramas. What's your excuse?
 
Quote o' the day: "When fear shows up and threatens your curiosity and enlightenment, look it square in the eye, acknowledge it, own it and move on. Don't let it hold you back from greatness. The greatest thing to fear about fear is the inaction that often accompanies it" -- Amy C. Cosper

...K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
 
Yep, we're about to go and do the anniversary thing again -- it seems like it happens every year around this time -- so we're going to focus just a teeny bit less on writing this week. After all, there are presents to be exchanged, and smooches to be shared, and married fun to be had.
 
Married fun is a lot like single fun except it's with someone who recognizes your flaws and is happy to take you home, anyway.
 
Before we get to any of that, we thought we'd share the latest cover for our YA novel, Something Wicked. Renee pulled the previous cover because she thought it appeared a little too horror-genre; truly, the story is much more of a YA mystery-thriller. Although there are horror elements. Oh, and more than a touch of  romance.
 
No wonder Amazon can't categorize the thing.
 
To create this new cover, Renee went to her favorite stock photo site, played with the photos and textures there, and pulled the look together. If you've ever read the book (and, no, you haven't, we've seen the sales figures), you'll know this very scene occurs toward the end of the story. Just before...well, if you'd read the thing, you'd know. Then we added some new dialogue, some new scenes, bumped the novel up by about twenty pages, and we loaded the story onto KDP Select. It is currently an Amazon exclusive.
 
We made this move because we're hoping the "Free to Amazon Prime members!" sales pitch will cause some somebodies somewhere to download the novel. If people "borrow" enough downloads, or we sell enough copies, we'll be encouraged to write the sequel (Something Evil) and can live happily ever after. 
 
There's another plus to KDP Select: In exchange for exclusivity, Amazon allows us to give the book away as an e-download. For $0.00. It's only for a limited number of days, granted, but free is free. If the rest of the world is grabbing a copy for gratis, there's no reason why you, dear friends, should have to pay for our pages. Once we have the first free date locked in (it will be sometime near the end of July), we'll share full scoop.
 
For now, it's back to K-I-S-S-I-N-G....

…and then, there’s the way the world does work. In a just world, all evil would be punished, ANGEL would have been renewed for a sixth season, and talented authors could write what inspired them and still make a living.
 
As you know, the world doesn’t work that way.

We’ve never once heard a successful scribe say, “Write what you love, the money will follow.” If you pressed one of the big dollar novelists for the key to a happy career, we’re betting they’d say this: “Write what other people love and the money will follow.” At least, that’s what we think they’d tell you.

This comes to mind because, as we mentioned last week, we had a surge of success a little while ago. For us, a “surge” counts as 300 copies of a single title sold in 14 days (and the story has continued to sell at a steady clip since then so life is good.). For a title that had no push, collected no internet buzz, and came out under an unknown name.

Why did this piece sell? It had a good cover, a nice edit, and it was in a popular genre. A genre we’d never written until now. Then we found a post on successful self-publishing at Absolute Write. The author, the mysterious shelleyo, advised her fellow writers to pick a popular genre and stick with it. She wrote (among many good things), “The bigger the genre audience, the more self-publishers who're doing well, the better your odds. That's just a business truth (and once you decide to self-publish, you're running a business in a whole different way than when you're writing and submitting).”

Since we agreed with what she'd written, we thought we’d found the key to riches. Find a popular genre, write a novel in the popular genre, collect fans, sales, and a summer house in Maine. Even though we’ve never been to Maine.

Just to reassure ourselves, we thought we’d contact another writer and see if she agreed with us. Not just any writer but a writer who had a giant spike in sales when she changed genres for her novel, Slow Burn. (And you ought to check out the reviews for the story, too. Seriously.) So we wrote VJ Chambers and we said, “Hey, we think we’ve found the secret to becoming super-successful writers and that’s to pick a popular genre and then write that genre and we know you think so, too, don’t you, since we’re so wizardly smart” – or something along those lines. Because Valerie is a lovely woman, she interrupted her writing schedule to write back.

Very nicely, she disagreed with us. “I think Slow Burn took off because I compared it to Beautiful Disaster in the description. Also because a writer named A. Meredith Walters, who’s had several NA books in the Top 100, mentioned me on her Facebook page. (Thank you, A. Meredith!) And luck. I’ve been really, really lucky.”

 Which wasn’t what we wanted to hear at all. We can pick a popular genre but we can’t control luck. (If we could, other people would soon quit playing the mega-lottery.) Also, there’s the whole “A. Meredith Walters” factor. We’ve heard A. Meredith only promotes novels that she actually likes – ones that display creativity and talent and imagination – and what are the odds we’ll write one of those?

Drat. Now what do we do?

Quote o’ the day: “I am a writer, but I love sex more than I love writing. And I am not getting paid for sex. But I don’t sit up at night thinking, should I do writing or sex? Because career decisions are not decisions about ‘what do I love most?’ Career decisions are about what kind of life do I want to set up for myself?” – Penelope Trunk

…just days ago and we had a great time. (No, there's no reason you should care. Just know that we care when you are out and about.)
 
Although, you should know, Jerome, Arizona isn’t really a ghost town.  It’s an old mining town that made a lot of money out of copper and silver and gold until demand diminished and the mines fell upon hard times. When the jobs started to disappear – and houses began to be swallowed by the pillaged earth – the population dwindled. The miners left and hippies and bikers moved in. When the population of 15,000 dropped to less than 100 hardy souls, the city fathers realized they needed to make some changes.

They did some clever things to bring Jerome back to life. They had the town designated a Historical Landmark. They sponsored music festivals and car races (and provide some terrific footage of one of the races). They opened a museum.
 
And they proclaimed that their 0.7 square miles was a “ghost town”. 

Tourists love ghost towns…safe, clean, non-ghost-filled ghost towns…and the ploy worked. These days, visitors can take a Ghost Van that will give them a tour of the hottest haunts. There are Ghost Tours and Ghost Walks. One of the hotels has a ghost hunt every Thursday, with their patrons given Emf meters to help find their very own spook. Every October, the place is packed.  If you’re interested in spending Halloween in that part of Northern AZ, you need to make your reservation now.

Jerome's Main Street lives off of the tourist dollar and it shows.  Art galleries and retail shops line the walkway. Restaurants and hotels are featured prominently. There’s a touch of the old hippy/biker vibe to the area but you have to look for it. “Give the people what they want” has become the town’s unofficial philosophy and Jerome is thriving because of it.

Lately, we’ve been wondering if, as writers, we should adopt the “give the readers what they want” philosophy. Because, judging from Amazon’s Best Sellers in Kindle, not that many people are lining up for their daily dose of YA horror or YA suspense. While our book and novella sales have never been strong, they’ve remained steady but -- oh, sadness -- our monthly royalties have yet to approach a living wage.

Then, recently, we had our first "hit".

Not a Top 100 Hit, not even a Top 1000 Hit, but with enough sales to make us sit up and notice. If you didn’t realize we had a new story coming out, hey, why would you? We didn't mention it here or on Facebook, it came out under our pen name's other pen name, and we failed to do any proper promotion. Without any kind of push, this story has already sold more copies than any single title we have except for After Things Went Bad.

We puzzled over this for a bit. We think we know why sales climbed for this piece but we’re not sharing; not today, anyway. We want to reach out to a couple of our fellow writers for their thoughts, too. Once we've got our act together, we'll do a proper post and see if we've solved the mystery -- or if we just got lucky.

Until next week, then….

Quote of the day: 'If the cash is there, we do not care'. What kind of life philosophy is that, man?" (From the very fun movie, Deep Rising)