Calves - Rain - Summer Preview - Book Marketing...
While the new calves keep dropping (one more yesterday), the heat has come in, so a new tiny A/C is now in our tiny home. Book marketing is streamlining to basics - finding real audience comes first..
Hi,
Intermittent rain continues. Grass is catching up with our grazing. Pasture walks have been good for podcast listening, researching while walking. And good research gives progress every day. Solving how books really get marketed in these days of the Amazon bully.
Farming News - Up to five calves now. Our first bull calf. #4 is featured.
Writing News - Research has been how to effectively market books - which isn’t what we’ve been told all these years…
Expectancy - This runs on Belief. It’s more what you think life should run instead of how you’ve been told things work. Same old, same old..
Farming News
Calf Number 4! Another heifer.
All black. From her all-black momma.
Here’s where I caught up on the tags, so “28” is out of order by a few days.
(Update: Looks like we’re up to 6 calves as of this morning! I’ll get out there to check - and tag - shortly. Stay tuned…)
And your suggestions on what to name this girl are easy this week. Truly original ones get extra points… just comment or reply to this email.
Oh, her mother is about 17 years old, which is really something - the average cow-age is 12 in this industry. Only her and her step-sister are still around from that time. Both all black. That makes this heifer valuable, as those type of genetics make the farm ever-more profitable. A cow that has a good calf every year will be kept around to have more.
The cows are keeping up with the Miscanthus. I see them move daily through several paddocks I’ve left open for them. But those tall cane plants are all chewed down on top.
I have had to trim under the polywire fence out there, and then spray the plants to keep them down. Otherwise, that cane will grow up and through the fence - again, about 10-12 feet high and very tough.
Here’s a plant spray (herbicide) you can use that’s all natural:
1 gallon 30% vinegar (most is just 5%).
1 cup salt (even rock salt is fine.)
1 cup Boraxo (boron)
1/4 cup or roughly three tablespoons of detergent soap (any type).
I had to look that recipe up. My sister long ago told me that the Amerindians in Oklahoma used salt and vinegar as weed killer. Adding in boron is another ingredient that is yet another overdose of natural stuff. The soap breaks down the plant’s coating so the other ingredients will be effective.
Spraying this mix instead of glysophate or atrazine avoids their cancer-causing side-effects.
To the left is the growth of this cane after it was burned and disked down. Then came lots of rain. To the right is an only burned-down set of miscanthus where the cow herd has been eating on it. To the left, some is nearly waist high (24 - 30”) and the right is closer to 8” on average. Last week’s photo showed it belly high. Yes, that brown stripe is where I cut down the miscanthus with a “weed-eater” and then sprayed it as above. Otherwise, those plants would smother that fence and make it impossible to maintain.
You can compare this to an earlier newsletter:
Next week - Grazing: An Art Based on Science
Tiny Home News
Gardening continues this week. Lots of stuff sprouting and growing tall. We compare our results with my Mother’s, whose garden is next door. We had some leftover potato starters, so she took them readily.
Oh - it’s gotten hot. Up into the 90’s the other day. And since the garden was done, it was time to get the new A/C installed. I cut a hole in the side of the wall, since the window unit was too large to fit in our windows. Had to frame it in carefully. We’d tried a portable unit, but it hardly kept up. So this fit in nicely. And on the first night it had us waking up to having winter blankets pulled over. We’re still working to get the temperature right. The unit is a simpler one, not all this digital stuff that says what temperature and “eco-friendly” shut offs, etc. Less expensive. Simple. (Probably won’t fry in some sort of high-atmosphere EMP.)
But since our cottage runs on one circuit, my wife is planning to prepare simpler meals and keep the heat out of the cottage. Electric cooking outside while running an A/C, etc. is tempting fate. We can grill, of course…
Writing News
Kickstarter research continues while I got more pages back to my live-in proofer for the revisions to WriterpreneurOS book.
I found a nice podcast where two comic creators compared their own Kickstarter results. The interesting point was that the three main sources for their pledges came from Kickstarter itself, Patreon, and Substack. After that the next biggest set of pledges came from their own list and their own website, while all the social media channels wound up on the bottom - where they gave a tiny percentage of the funding.
I wrote about this earlier (just yesterday, as I write this.)
Essentially, it’s confirming that the social media aren’t market places. If you want to sell your stuff, you have to offer it where people are buying things. (While the general attitude on social media is to lurk, it seems. Some 3% or less of all the people there are producing over 90% of the daily content. Vast numbers of followers are useless when the algorithms won’t let them see your links to click on them.)
Those videos I was inspired to do - they will be part of the course, but also show up on Kickstarter as daily releases to keep the community you’re forming there involved during the campaign. I’d do these earlier and release them individually on Substack, then put them behind a paywall just before I get ready to start the Kickstarter campaign.
There are other crowdfunding sites - but Kickstarter has developed for creators. And has far more documentation. (As far as censorship, my stuff isn’t political - so that’s not an issue.)
The general sequence is to run a successful Kickstarter, give away deluxe hardback editions (even signed and numbered) to the pledged supporter, and by doing this you finance all the versions of that book - including its audiobook and the video courses. Then you update the backmatter with links to these other versions and post the books on pre-release to Draft2Digital. (Posting to Amazon becomes optional at that point.) And I’d probably go the extra mile of posting these also (non-duplicative) very wide to StreetLib and PublishDrive to get their smaller outlets in Europe and even China.
This slows down the whole process of writing and publishing. You begin to then start working on higher quality material and having it pay for itself right out of the gate - instead of waiting and hoping with a fast release, while paying Amazon to feature your book on its own sales page. Sure, once it’s out of pre-release, then you can run Bookbub ads, I suppose. But practically, I have a few hundred books to update - so for the conceivable future I’ll simply be getting my backlist running through Kickstarters to pay for upgrading all of them in all their possible edition.
That’s what I’ve been saying right along. Now that I see a remunerative route to take, this becomes possible. This completely changes the Conventional Wisdom of publishing - and becomes the firewall against A.I. and greed eating into an author’s welfare. It’s the digital-age solution to starving in garrets.
Now, I have a lot more to cover on this area - and have a lot of bonuses to giveaway with this first Kickstarter, but this is already long.
Next week, tune in then for: Finding and Rewarding Your Audience
Our Writing Mission
In the planning and crafting of these five books, a mission has come clear - to bring out a series of books which cover the real working basics needed by a Writerpreneur. First is the working basics, based on what still works after 15 years of publishing. Second is to extract the core principles and devices of copywriting. Then we go through what looks to be three books which revive the W. S. Campbell materials - from his ultra-successful writer-training course of the 1940’s
And after that, I’ll be concentrating on my other original non-fiction books, and eventually work up my fiction universe of books. Seeing what fans I already have out there, and working out how to help these books find readers. Certainly audiobooks, maybe illustrated versions which become video storyboards. You can see a string of Kickstarters in my near future.
The whole point is to reveal your heart song to the world, and invite people to come along on the journey - which has been my usual operation. This time, I’m enabling Kickstarter (and Substack, and soon - Patreon) to help people contribute to the production and become part of our mission and form a movement. One that helps people communicate more effectively and live better lives.
You’re already well along for this mission, after all.
Just wanted to let you know.
The Recurring Special Offer:
MEANWHILE, the beta-readers version of Writerpreneur OS is still available. I’ve updated the tweaks from the first proofing, and then added an extra section onto its end. So these have to be uploaded. (So you can download the new and improved edition if you already have it from earlier.)
Here’s the link: https://livingsensical.gumroad.com/l/WOS01-beta-readers
See if you can find more oopsies. Leave comments, reviews. Ask questions. Be one of the first anywhere.
It’s just north of 250 pages these days, depending on format. Available are epub and PDF. No charge. (Free download, in other words.)
Nearly 20 years of writing-publishing-entrepreneuring - all rolled into a single book. And updated. Condensed.
AN ASK: if you’ve downloaded it, please give some feedback. Leave it in the comments, send me an email. Something, anything. Like it, could be better.
Expectancy and Believing
Probably the best book on living the life you really want is Claude M. Bristol’s “The Magic of Believing”. Somewhere in the middle of his book is where I distilled his philosophy down to the point that “whatever you truly believe is what the universe gives you”.
It came up this week in listening to several podcasts, notably Johnny B. Truant being interviewed by J. Kevin Tumlinson.
The three of us have been writing and publishing for about the same decade-and-change and basically each burned ourselves out on the business of writing and publishing.
Now we are each moving to re-create the world we’ve always wanted, where writing is at the heart of it.
Mine was concluding a 3+ year process of fiction writing while I concluded that any lack of results I was experiencing was due to my own insufficient expectations about what was heading my way. This then goes to my manufactured (fear-based) uncertainties on the fact that my expectations generate my own actualities.
Once I did that, I realized I needed someone to help me share everything I had discovered. So I shut down my fiction writing experiment (having married most of the heroes and heroines off) and found my own true love, married her, and built a house for us. Then started up my research into book marketing for real. (If you want to read the prescient fiction work I wrote on this, see my “Death by Marketing”.
Next week: Why “Living Sensical”?
Thanks for being there, opening this.
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Leave a comment if something strikes your fancy.
I hope your life is not too interesting to be overwhelming, but sufficiently engaging to keep you amused. (Like some of us here...)
Robert
PS. Again, you can always email me about anything.
PPS. Again, do upgrade to the paid newsletter version. That helps me keep the lights on - so I can keep all this coming to you. As much or little as you want…
PPPS. I’m considering putting my entire library up (digital versions) for the Patron (Founding Member) level. I’ve done that before in parts, as many of you know. Do let me know what you think about that idea. Reply to this email, or leave a comment on my Substack page for this.
(Meanwhile, I’ve put my archived newsletters and articles all available as free, instead of behind a paywall.)