A Story About Snow

 I went with the random prompt generator today, and after a few tries, it told me to write a story about snow. We all know how well I follow directions, so what follows is actually something that happened when it didn't snow.

My father was in the US Air Force when I was growing up, so we tended to move hundreds of miles every few years. By the time I came along, my parents had already been to New Mexico, and then Texas, but I was born in Northern California. After that we moved to Southern California, and then to Missouri, where my dad did his masters. I was six when we got to Rolla (which had 13,000 people at the time) and eight when we left. It was the first time I'd ever seen snow, but the winters we were there ended up being pretty mild and there was never more than a few inches on the ground at any time. (Two weeks after we left, they had almost two feet of snow. At the time I thought it was unfair, but I'm sure my parents -- with five kids, one under 4 months -- were quite happy we left when we did.) One of those Christmases, we got a sled. And then we got a saucer because it turns out that a saucer is much easier to slide around on.

Anyhow, we moved back to (snowless) Southern California, but the thing about moving in the military is that they pay for moving costs, so the movers showed up and packed all our stuff, and then dumped it in storage until we found a place to live in the next place. There's no real incentive to get rid of anything, and who knows, you might need it again in a couple years when you went to the next place. So we ended up with a sled (though somehow not the saucer -- I suspect it was plastic and broke somewhere along the way) in Southern California.

So there we were in Southern California, in the five bedroom ranch house (tiny, tiny bedrooms) with the perfect lawn. My parents' lawn was a thing of beauty. Some people have the smell of baking spices bring them back to their childhood. I have flashbacks when I smell pesticides in the hardware store. The grass was a uniform 2" tall, at least until my brother Jeff got old enough to be expected to cut it.  (He saved time on the corners by banking the lawn mower.) There were no invasive insects or animals in that grass because there was nothing alive in that grass. But it looked great from a distance.

Then one year... it hailed. It hailed so much that the ice balls stayed on the ground. Not only did it stay, but there was over an inch on the lawn. All of us kids were ecstatic, and also bored since this was pre-internet days, so we dug out the sled. Sliding along the hail sort of worked if you held the sled to your chest and ran forward and jumped. You could slide four or five feet until it sank through the ice and ground to a halt.

Anyhow, we were out there for a while sliding and grinding into the ground, and then the ice finally finished melting, at which point all you could see was dozens of parallel slices running through the now much-less-perfect grass, exposing the mud below.

I don't remember any fall-out from that, so I'm guessing it had partially repaired itself before my dad saw the lawn in the daylight again.

So there you go. That's my story of snow, or the lack thereof.

That Just-Got-Out-Of-Bed Hair

I walked into the room and woke the little dog, and her hair was going everywhere.

Unhappy Dogs

 Today it is raining (which is my fault, according to the dogs) and we did not have our regular popcorn drop (which is also my fault, according to the dogs). The dogs are just having a bad day. The lack of popcorn is my fault, of course, but the Roomba was running at 3:30PM because I forgot to run it earlier, and I didn't want the Roomba to try to vacuum up the popcorn while the dogs were eating it. Eh. They'll get over it.

I spent most of the day writing one of two missing scenes for the novella, and making candied lemon & orange. I'm planning on using it in the stollen this year instead of the stuff you buy in the store. I may have to adjust the recipe a bit because mine isn't quite as dry. As with everything I bake, it will be an adventure.

I also added a few chunks of ginger to wake it up a bit. It's quite good.

No popcorn?

Imagine this face, except everywhere I turned for an hour. That was today.

Popcorn Drop!

New York City may have an annual ball drop at midnight on New Year's Eve, but that's boring. Here at Chez Nebulopathy, we have the 3:30 PM daily popcorn drop!

I've mentioned my terrible photography skills before -- no surprise that those skills failed the challenge here. I didn't manage to actually get the dogs in most of the video. Still, it's kind of funny.

 [Video: popcorn raining down onto two dogs]

My favorite is the audio, which makes each kernel of corn sound like a boulder. My other favorite is watching it bounce off the little dog's head.

Maybe it's the fact that I haven't left the house in nine months, but this sort of thing amuses me.

Coping Strategies

 It's a little late for Thanksgiving, I guess, though I have finally finished the leftovers. (Note to self: if you live alone, and you have to get out the gigantic bowl you've never used before, it might be a good time to take a look at how many servings a recipe makes and possibly cut it down a bit.) I do still have most of the bottle of Jack Daniels that I bought for the tofu roast -- it only needed two tablespoons and it turns out that whiskey is a taste I haven't yet acquired. But give it a few more months and maybe I'll change my mind.

Anyhow, here is a smattering of things that have helped me get through this year. And, to be honest, the last four years. Fingers crossed we've hit the low point and everything improves from this point onward.

• The Murderbot series by Martha Wells. Just the right amount of snark and sincerity and trying to cope while doing your job the best way you can. I have the audiobooks (read by Kevin R. Free) and I've listened to them so many times that if they had been on physical media, I would have had to buy a new copy.
  
  
• Non-work Discord and Slack -- all of my writing groups have Discord or Slack channels. It's great because I can chat with my friends when they're available.
  
  
• This Tumblr blog: https://hedgehog-moss.tumblr.com/
  Run by a young woman (I can say that now that I've tipped past 50) in rural France who has a lovely dog and a naughty llama. This is one of those soothing blogs that I can read right before I go to bed and not be worried about getting too angry to sleep.
  
  
• NaNoWriMo -- They redid their website a couple of years ago and I can't figure it out, but the National Novel Writing Month organization has led to me finding a great group of people, both in my area and farther away.

It's an incomplete list, but it's a start. Feel free to add your items in the comments!

Goofy Legs Returns!

How can that possibly be comfortable?

The little dog looks angry about the paparazzi

Newsletters

 So I started listening to this podcast yesterday which is an interview with author & book coach Ella Barnard. I'm still only about halfway through the show, but there's a lot of good information about one of the paths to launch a book series.

As a book coach, she has her clients schedule a BookFunnel promo before they've written the novella. (This is a brilliant idea, especially if you are a procrastinator, but I can't even imagine doing so. Or rather, I may try this as a challenge at some point, but it's going to be a time when I'm on vacation from my day job.)

The Basics

The idea, which seems to be the more or less accepted wisdom for indie authors, is to use the first book in the series as a freebie to encourage people to sign up for your newsletter. Then you have a newsletter of people who like to read the sort of thing you're writing, and you can send out notifications when something new is available. With any luck, a lot of those people will spend money on the next book.

I talked about Amazon ads a few days ago, and how you need to have about one person in ten who clicks on the ad actually buy the book (depending on the ad and book prices) to break even, but a newsletter is even better than that. Not only is it free (or almost free if your mailing list is very large) to send out an announcement of a new book, but that announcement is targeted specifically at the people who are your audience. None of the hassle of guessing appropriate keywords or categories on Amazon -- you already have a list of the exact people who are interested.

The bigger draw, in my opinion, is that you're no longer chained to Amazon, or at least not as tightly. I've read too many horror stories about Amazon removing books from their store and then not answering support email. If 95% of your author income stream is coming from Amazon, that might be a huge, house-foreclosing problem. But a newsletter allows you to advertise other places a book is available and partially removes that single point of failure.

I do have a cozy mystery novella that I was hoping to publish by the end of the month, but I think I'll hold off on the BookFunnel madness for a bit. I can always do the promo when I have the second one in the series ready, and that way I don't have to worry about having something ready on a specific date.

Obligatory Terrible Photo

It probably would be good if I improved my photography skills at some point. After all, what's better to put in a fun newsletter than pet pictures? But it doesn't work as well when your dog looks as dubious about the book as mine does...

"If I sit still, will I get a treat soon?"

Special Diet

Puppy!

I had one of those morning where I had meetings non-stop until nearly 1pm, and none of those meetings actually gave me any feeling of getting anything done. Then my boss asked if I had a couple of minutes for something, and I was ready to just put my foot down and say no more meetings, but it turned out he wanted to show me his new Golden Retriever puppy. That made everything better, but now I'm a little jealous.

I've never had a puppy. I adopted the big dog as a 4 year-old, and that's the youngest dog I've ever had. Realistically I know I don't have the time or energy for a puppy, but I still kind of want one. Oh well.

But not for me...

To remind me that I do not need any more animals, I had to contact the vet hospital four times today. 

1. To set up a refill for the elderly cats' steroids (the cats, in their late teens, are in the lymphoma years), 
2. To make sure I didn't have a boarding reservation for the dogs for the week after Christmas (which I thought I had set up last year since I always end up on the waiting list), This would have been the same call, but not with the new telephone system.
3. To find out if they had any extra bags of the elderly cats' special diet (which is usually shipped to my house, but I got an email today saying they'd cancelled the shipment since there's a manufacturer backorder). This diet is the difference between Ripley having normal-ish poop and Ripley having poop that requires me to wipe down the walls. 
4. To let them know I was in the parking lot to pick up the cat food.

In Case You Didn't Know

December of a normal year is already hard in the veterinary profession. The clients have extra stress which they pass along, the patient volume rises because people have time off and have time to deal with that problem that has been going on for two months, and people with elderly pets either realize how bad their pets actually are, or are trying to get the pets to hang on for just one more holiday and then euthanizing them. It's depressing, even in a normal year.

This is not a normal year. Between everyone getting new puppies to keep them company at home, and everything taking twice as long and needing twice as many staff in order to keep people safe, everyone in the hospital has been severely overworked for nine months. And now the holiday euthanasias are starting. Everyone in the field, from the receptionists to the veterinarians, are ready to quit.

All this is to say that you should be extra-kind to your veterinarian and their staff, especially now. Appointments are going to take a really long time, both the schedule and to get through. Plan for it. If your pet is being seen quickly, it means someone thinks they are dying, possibly in the next ten minutes. Plan your regular appointments far in advance if you can, and let them treat the actually-truly-dying-right-now pets on an emergency basis. If you have an actual emergency, you will appreciate this.

Special Diet

Ripley, of course, has his expensive, hard to get diet, but what he really wants to eat is plastic. So I'm pretty sure I know who chewed a hole in the door blanket. This is why we can't have nice things...

The little dog, seen through the hole that Ripley built

The Ad Divide

How's that advertising going? 

A couple of months ago, I dipped my toe into the process of advertising my book on Amazon. It was an interesting experiment, and I let the ads keep running. Why wouldn't I? Hardly anyone ever clicks on them, so I don't get charged much. I've spent less than $2 in the last two months.

That would be fine, I guess, but I also haven't sold any copies through the Amazon ads either. Maybe. It seems like it should be an easy thing to figure out -- Amazon keeps track of who clicks and what they do afterward -- but it's not so simple. What happens if someone clicks on the ad and then downloads a sample, but doesn't get around to reading it for a few weeks? Even if they buy it at that point, I think that doesn't count as a sale attributed to the ads.

If your book is in the Kindle Unlimited program (where you are paid for the number of pages read by KU subscribers), it gets even murkier.

All this is to say that I think my Amazon ads are probably not doing anything, but maybe they are, and since they're costing me $1/month, it's probably worth letting them ride. But the graphs always make me laugh. Look! Someone clicked on my ad a few days ago!

The brown bars are the number of times Amazon showed the ad, the blue spiky line shows the three times someone clicked on it. Thankfully I only pay for clicks.

Surely there must be a better way!

Assuming you have accurate information on how many sales are coming from the ads, the basic math is simple. Let's say you have a stand-alone book and that you make a profit of $3 on every ebook that is sold. If an ad costs $0.30 per click, you need to have at least one person out of every ten that clicks on the ad buy the book just in order to break even. And one in ten is actually pretty good.

If, on the other hand, you have a 5-book series, and one person in every ten buys the first book, but some of those buyers also buy the next books in the series, it's a lot easier for the ad to become profitable because you're not making just $3 -- you can easily be making twice that depending on how many people keep reading past the first book.

That previous paragraph is why pretty much every independently published author who is making money from their writing is writing one or more series. Uh, yes, I just published a standalone book. I wanted to work out some of the kinks in the process first. At least, that's my story and I'm sticking with it!

I'm writing on the treadmill so I can't take a picture of Sir Goofy Legs

Here, have this one instead:

Such a noble beast when he's standing up

Hey, I warned everyone at the beginning of the month that this blog might have a lot of independent publishing info. Maybe tomorrow there will be something funny. (Funnier than my pathetic ad performance, I mean.)