Month of 100 Books

Here we are at the beginning of December. The air is crisp and cool, the season for giving is coming into full swing, and I am feeling a bit...I don't know...feisty.

I'm not sure what happened, but as soon as I hit the 100,000 word NaNoWriMo goal I set for myself last month, I've been feeling a bit amped up. Almost as if I can do anything. I'm invincible, ready to break down walls, ready to take down the sky.

It's definitely a strange feeling. I guess reaching that ginormous goal really got my blood going and taught me that I can do anything if I put a little more effort into my goals. I say that because I have a very bad habit of procrastinating on things, or worse, falling victim to thoughts that my projects won't really pan out the way I imagine they will. This causes me to give up in the middle of projects, throwing away the beginnings of great things. Well, potentially great things.

Yesterday I finally sat down and updated all of my sales records, a task I've been procrastinating on for the last - oh since July. Really bad, I know. But looking at my numbers yesterday really opened my eyes to the fact that I'm not even close to where I want to be as a published writer. I want to sell a million books. I want to be able to pay some bills with money my own writing brings in each month. I'm not even close to being there. But then again, I'm not really doing my best to get there either.

Before you say how much great work I really do accomplish - including the 100,000 word goal for November - I have to stop you and point out that even if you think I'm doing great, doesn't mean I feel like I'm doing my best. There's more potential in me, way more, and it needs to be unleashed. If you think the 100,000 word goal was amazing...just wait.

To help prompt the little writer's flame that is still burning within me, starting this month I'm going to be setting sales goals for myself. I've always despised the salesman mindset, but I figure if I can set outrageous word count goals for myself and reach them in half the time, I think I can set some easy sales goals and achieve them without issue. Well, too much issue anyway.

In December I want to sell 100 books, a mix of both paperback and ebook. For almost eight months now I've sold an average of fifty to sixty books total for each month, most of those being Kindle ebooks. That's spread across the five ebooks I have available. I want to break that fifty threshold and reach a higher level though, and continue reaching new levels each month.

I'm asking all of my readers and followers to help me reach this goal. Help spread the word by telling your friends and family and others in your social networking circles about my stories. If you've enjoyed something of mine, please make sure you have posted a review on Amazon, Goodreads, Smashwords, Barnes and Noble, etc, etc, etc. Reviews are much more valuable than I think people know.

If you haven't read any of my work yet, please head over to my website - www.davidnalderman.com - where you can pick up my novella, Picture Perfect, for free through the month of December. A little treat to whet your appetite for my bigger literary pieces. There you will find the rest of my works as well, including my Christian spec fiction series, Black Earth, and my young adult series, Expired Reality.

This month my goal is 100. Next month it will be 200. And each month I will continue to push myself harder and do my best to reach my goal of a million sales overall. I will of course keep everyone updated, and I'll post a counter on my website in the next few days so everyone can check my status in regards to each of my monthly goals.

Welcome to December people, the month of a hundred books!

Thanksgiving and the End of Nano

Well, I managed to finish my 100,000 word goal for NaNoWriMo on the 16th of this month. That's double the word count challenge (50,000 words) in half the time! And I have two brand new drafts under my belt, both of which I'll be working hard on once December comes around.

On that note, I will be offline until after Thanksgiving weekend. I want to wish all my followers/readers a great Thanksgiving. I am very grateful for all of you who have followed my path through self-publishing and my life as a writer, and I look forward to sharing some great projects with you as we wrap up 2011 and enter a brand new year.

Head over to Smashwords and grab a free copy of my novella, Picture Perfect, for your Kindle, Nook, etc. Just use coupon code - JZ47S - when checking out. Just a little way of me saying thanks for following this humble writer's blog.

40,000 and Still Going Strong

Last night I hit 40,000 words in my NaNoWriMo novel. I can't believe I'm burning through this thing this fast, especially since most of my weekdays are taken up watching my two month old son. Regardless, I'm still heading strong toward my 100,000 word goal for the month. And after I blow out another 10,000 words, I'm going to flip over to the second book I'm working on in my November writing craze.

All I have to say is I wish every month was this productive!

Double the Nano, Double the Insanity

Well, we're just hours away from November 1st and the start of NanoWrimo - or National Novel Writing Month for those of you who think I'm speaking an alien language. I wait all year for this wonderful writing season and this year has been no exception. I am squeeing - whatever that means - with excitement! (Like the Nano pumpkin carving I did this year?)

Last year I dived into NanoWrimo with a brand new project - a new novel - that sort of fell into my other series but didn't. I wanted a fresh slate to work from and so I embarked on writing something completely from scratch - new world, new characters, new setting. It made Nano a pain for me. I struggled through the November of 2010 wondering if it would be the first year I failed Nano. I'm happy to say I made it through to the 50,000 word goal, but this year I decided to take a different approach.

To kill two - or three - birds with one stone, I decided to do two Nano books this year - the last two books in my Black Earth series, closing the series off so I can then devote all my time and attention to the Expired Reality series. That's a goal of 100,000 words by the end of the month. A lofty achievement, considering I watch our newborn son full time during the day. Regardless, I will reach the finish line and in the end will have two more novels to add to my repertoire.

Time to start the caffeine-crazed, sleep-deprived, out of control, totally insane month of writing! To all of you other NanoWrimos out there, good luck and great writing. ;) Find me at http://www.nanowrimo.org/en/participants/davidcorbin.
 

Endangered Memories Proof Revision

There's a lot that goes into paperback production of a book. A lot more than most people give self-published authors credit for. There are many factors involved with book design - font, text size, cover design, paper color and quality, cover formatting, etc, etc, etc. If even one little setting is off in your word processing program, or one minor detail isn't caught the hundredth time through, it can leave a nasty scar on an otherwise beautiful creation, not to mention a bad taste in a reader's mouth.

I have a number of paperbacks to my name and I seem to learn something new each time I go through the process of turning my blood and sweat drenched manuscript into a physical form for my readers to enjoy. I'm by no means an expert - I realize that every time I go through this process - but I seem to be getting the hang of what to watch for before finalizing the physical editions of my fiction.

Just recently I ordered the proof copy of my latest work, Endangered Memories. Surprisingly, it turned out with minimal issues. The cover came out the way I wanted it to - including the spine and back cover w/barcode. The internal components came out pretty good:

Font is big enough ( Times New Roman -11)...

the hyphenation came out good...

the chapter headings are decorative, but not too fancy...


















The only real issue I've come across is the giant space at the bottom of each page, between the page number and the bottom edge of the page.


















This mistake is one I made in a paperback I created years back. In those days, I was so excited just to have my work in print that I refused to go through multiple proof copies to get things down perfect and my books suffered for it.

This time, within minutes I realized my footer size was set at .7" instead of the .5" I meant for it to be at. Although it seems like a minor correction, resetting my footer from .7" to .5" threw off all of my spacing, hyphens and page layout. After fixing everything, I managed to get the page numbers down another line and closed some of that gap at the bottom.

Now that the book is in the process of populating to Amazon, I'm off to get edits done on the second book in the series - Lost Birth - so I can start formatting that. For anyone who's interested, here's a link to the paperback on Amazon - http://tinyurl.com/42w6kye.

NanoWrimo 2011

We're almost halfway through October, meaning it's almost time for NanoWrimo - or National Novel Writing Month! Each year, the worldwide contest requires those daring enough to complete a 50,000 word draft in 30 days. There's no monetary reward - just a certificate you get to print out and hang on your wall, and most importantly, the rough draft to a complete novel.

I've participated in NanoWrimo for the last 6 years now, completing it each year. During most years I end up completing the 50,000 word count by the middle of the month, so this year I decided to turn things up a notch. I'm going to use NanoWrimo to complete the final two books in my Black Earth series. So by the end of the challenge this year, I will have a pair of 50,000 word manuscripts ready to be embellished, polished, and sent off to my editor.

If you're participating, or you just want to check out my progress in November, head over to my profile at the official NanoWrimo website and friend me. ;)

The End of Black Earth

For months now, I've been working on my current WIP (Work in Progress): Dark Horizons, the third novel in my Expired Reality series. My original intention was to release the first three books in the series in a row, one a month, this last summer. The first, Endangered Memories, has been released, with the second, Lost Birth, coming out of the gates hopefully next month.

Even though I'm about 75% through a rough draft of Dark Horizons, I can't shake the feeling that it's not the project I should be working on at the moment. Once my son was born at the end of August, my writing time vanished for a while. With weeks of no writing, I've had a creative build-up of sorts, and I have a HUGE desire to finish up the Black Earth series.

My original intention was to bounce between the Expired Reality series and the Black Earth series while alternating book releases within each series. As good as that idea seemed a while ago, it doesn't seem to be panning out too well now. I have fans who want to see what happens with Black Earth and for them to have to wait while I finish books in another series is kind of lame. Besides, my Expired Reality series is going to run almost a dozen novels, if not more, so I'd like to give that series 100% of my time and effort instead of bouncing between it and the Black Earth series.

All this said, I've decided to finish off the Black Earth series. My original intention was for the series to run about 4-5 novels and in keeping with that, I'm going to do two more books and close the series off.

Coincidentally, next month is National Novel Writing Month, or NanoWrimo. (Check out www.nanowrimo.org to see what it's all about.) Seeing how I have a lot of writing to do with two books, I'm going to use NanoWrimo to do so. I usually complete the 50,000 word limit early on in the month of November anyway, so I'm just going to do my best to complete two, 50,000 word manuscripts for the contest this year. Then I'll polish them up and hand them off to my editor after the new year.

Keep tabs on this blog to find out more about the next two Black Earth novels. I'll be posting plot ideas, writing samples, and some character profiles as I get into the thick of it. 

Baby Nolan

I know I've been out of the game for almost a month now, but on August 23rd, my son, Nolan Bailey Alderman, was born. Since then it's been a bit of a whirlwind. All my expectations of what I thought fatherhood would feel like went right down the drain the moment my baby boy was in my arms. What an incredible blessing!

That being said, it's been a challenging couple of weeks. My wife went back to work last week and this has left me home with Nolan most of the day. Last week I mistakenly tried to balance work and baby and it blew up in my face. This week seems to be going a little bit smoother.

I'm glad to be getting back into the swing of things. In the next couple weeks I am going to be reevaluating my project lists and some of my marketing strategies, so news of those changes will come through here. After today though I'll be moving a lot of my talk of baby Nolan to my other blog - http://www.ofdreamsandfaith.blogspot.com - to keep this one focused on writing and self-publishing.

Awakening Evarun and the Appeal of Short Story Series

I recently had the honor of reading the first installment in Tom Barczak's new short story series, Awakening Evarun. If you've never heard of Tom Barczak, I can understand. Awakening Evarun is his first 'published' piece of work, but I found this debut piece of fantasy to be quite entertaining.

I had the opportunity to speak with Tom on the phone a while ago and we had a chat - author to author - about how we found the idea of short story series to be quite compelling. I think in this age of self-publishing, with authors having control over every aspect of their work, it's neat to think in terms outside just writing novels.

I've always been a huge fan of the Star Wars universe. Although I love the writing of most of the authors that are given the privilege to write books in the series, I have always been more enamored with the simple aspect of diversity. The Star Wars universe started with a group of main characters and has branched off into a whole universe of fictional goodies. Novellas, short stories, cookbooks, merchandise, novels, movies...the list goes on and on. It's easy to pick up a book and read it, understand what's going on, and want to dive into other parts of the universe.

This delightful appeal is one I have aimed for in my own series

I've had plans in the works for a couple years now to start an episodic short story series called the LZR Project. I have five or six drafts of episodes done already and am hoping to resurrect this project and start writing on it again this next year. I did the episode thing with my novella, Picture Perfect, before I combined the episodes into book format. I just like the idea of readers being able to bite off little chunks of a grander story here and there, weeks or months at a time. It's a nice diversion to keep my readers entertained while I continue to carve away at the novels, which take considerably more time and effort.

In that regard, when Tom told me he was wanting to try out this short story episode idea, I was excited. Especially considering he is also a talented artist who is illustrating parts of these stories.

Check out the first installment of Awakening Evarun if you get a chance. It's well worth the $2.99. Below is my review.

Awakening Evarun is a great start to what Tom plans on being a six-part short story series. The pace of the story is easy and intriguing, making it a quick read that feels satisfying, yet leaves you wanting more when you're finished. Tom's writing style is definitely a gift and I look forward to more from the author.

On top of that I have to praise the illustrations. It's not that often you come across an author who can also illustrate his stories with such great detail. It's also not that often you come across an illustrated story as this. What a treat. For the price, you get great artwork and an intriguing storyline. Tom Barczak is definitely an author to check out. 

Purchase Awakening Evarun on Amazon -  http://tinyurl.com/4x3th44
Tom's website - http://www.tombarczak.com 
Tom's blog - http://www.tombarczak.com/blog
 

Chronicling A Legacy

As I write this post, my wife and I are still patiently waiting for our son, Nolan Bailey Alderman, to be born. He's actually not due until August 26th, but it feels like we've been waiting for years for him to come out of there.

In the meantime, I've found something productive to do that will hopefully benefit my coming son, and me. I've started a handwritten journal where I am going to detail the walk that my wife and I have taken with God these last few years - along with the adventures I've experienced during my lifetime. Hopefully I can drop some gems of wisdom throughout the journal and help my son to learn from some of my mistakes. Hopefully he can marvel at the outrageous things I did in my youth, and appreciate the incredible steps of faith I've taken as an adult. Hopefully he can benefit from the one story I haven't fabricated - couldn't have as big as my imagination is.

Someday, this journal will be considered a relic. I figure the art of hand writing anything seems to be getting more and more lost as we enter the digital age. I'll admit, I'm succumbing to the convenience that computers and smartphones offer. But there's just something ten times better about getting something handwritten rather than getting something typed out or preconceived. A poem, rather than a pre-typed greeting card. A letter, rather than an email. Heck, my grandfather and I write each other and he even keeps to the old tradition of sealing some of the envelopes with wax.

A bygone art that needs to be appreciated more.

I'll give this journal to Nolan someday in the future when he's grown enough to understand - and hopefully appreciate - all that's written in it. In the meantime, I have an adventure to write.Or rather, record.