For a business owner, one of the hardest goals to achieve is to duplicate your income. For brick and mortar stores, like fast food restaurants or furniture stores, the only way to double your income is to duplicate your location somewhere else. Like franchising. The great thing about being a writer is every book you […]
Independent publishing is substantially cheaper than its ever been. With Amazon and other distributors offering to distribute your ebook for a small fee and print your print book on-demand with nearly zero up front costs, publishing your book on your own has never been easier. However, to be taken seriously in the market and compete […]
Now that we’re turning the novellas into novels, we’ll have to change some of the titles. Here’s why. The original titles of the five books included an ampersand. The first two are Water & Blood and Shadows & Lies. For marketing purposes, we’d want to make all of the titles consistent, so we’re going to […]
I finished the first draft of Lost & Found this week and the writing process for this novel allowed me to finally find the correct voice and tone for all of the Gabby Wells novels. It was weird to me that it took two novels (that have since been trashed) and three novellas to find […]
Whether you are independently published or traditionally published, the majority of the ownership for your success falls on your shoulders. It is up to the author to write good stuff, build a fan base, establish beta readers and street teams and marketing plans. It’s why real writers treat writing as a business. It’s where the […]
The completion of the Gabby Wells storyline will take me some time. A couple of years. Not including the time it took to convert screenplays into novels that have since been tossed, just getting the novellas written, edited and published will probably take a year in total. We’ll release the novellas, one at at time, […]
Been very efficient this past week, typing out over 12,000 words. I’m nearing the end of the first draft of Lost & Found and I must say I’ve really enjoyed putting Gabby through hell. Writers have an odd relationship with the characters they love. They create them, cherish them, give them hopes, dreams, goals, loves […]
Writing is a lot like golf. It only takes one good swing to keep you hacking away for another 18 holes. While working on the first draft of Lost & Found I inadvertently setup a really awesome situation. The options were limitless. With that came pressure not to screw it up. So, I tentatively started […]
Plotting out Lost & Found has really come in handy. In a week I’ve written nearly 8,000 words. The story is humming along. I’m about half-way through, so it should end up in the 30,000 – 40,000 range, like the rest. I have been amazed how changes in the market, or new information I have […]
I’ve been chugging along slowly, but surely. Mostly slowly. I was able to draft almost 7500 words on the Lost & Found novella before I slowed things down. I realized that I knew the end of the story, but some of the middle parts were fuzzy. And, since I was diving head first into writing […]
Something important occurred to me this weekend. Something that placed a crap ton of pressure on me. As I fleshed out the plot for the second novella, Lost & Found, I realized it is the single most important book in the entire series. Why? Because, we intend to give the first novella The Homecoming Incident […]
One of my continuing challenges I have is my impatience. I am impatient with my career. I am impatient when I read. And I am impatient when I write. One of the things I have tried to temper when I began writing novels were my expectations. Ignorance is a bad guide and I have learned […]
I would like to take a moment to thank my wife, Dea, for her unending support, not just in art, but in life. I’ve had Crohns disease for over half my life and, sadly for her, our entire marriage. This week I had to have yet another procedure and, as I lie in the hospital […]
I hate wasting my time. It’s a pet peeve. Just ask my kids. The two main lines they knew not to cross were: don’t disrespect my wife (their mother) don’t waste my time. I’m not saying all of the time with my kids had to be focused and serious. Of course not. Spending an hour […]
I finally finished the first draft of Skyway, one of the novellas of our five novella series. It’s placement in the series has shifted, as I mentioned before, moving from novella #2, to novella #4. The current word count is just over 40,000 and will probably need another 2,000-3,000 when all is said and done. […]
Book covers are one of the most important components to getting a potential reader to check out your book. Especially in the online, thumbnail world of perusing ebooks, people really do judge the book by its cover. One of the things that has made self-publishing a success has been the ability for authors to outsource […]
I finished up the first draft of the novella Skyway this weekend. It ran long, as I expected, and will probably be even longer when I get it through the Beta Readers. But it’s a fun ride that starts out with a kick and throws in cool plot twists at the end of nearly every […]
One Day in Budapest is the fourth book in the ARKANE novel series by author J.F. Penn. Penn crafts a powerful story about the tenuous nature of society when deep seeded hatred flows beneath the surface. One Day in Budapest follows ARKANE Agent Morgan Sierra as she teams up with Zoltan Fischer to uncover the […]
It’s time to dump the term “self-publishing.” Lets call it what it really is, independent publishing. A decade ago, the only legitimate way to get your book to the masses was through the traditional publishing houses. Sure, there were some print-on-demand options available, but the quality of those books suffered in comparison. The marketplace also […]
Getting over the hump sure has helped. In a little over a week I was able to write 10,000 words and probably have another 3,000 ahead of me before putting Skyway aside. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, the scope and placement of Skyway has changed and the ripple effect of those changes […]