From July 1s until July 31st we're once again participating in the Smashwords Summer/Winter sale!

Because it's summer up here and winter down under, you see. I'd imagine it made sense at the time. And let's face it: For most people, July is either too hot or too cold to go out anyway, so you might as well read a good book.

It's the ultimate beach read! Don't get water on it.

This is indie author territory, and indie authors could always use the help (and reviews!) So please, check it out and share the promo with your friends and family, and anyone looking for their next favorite book.

• Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
• Barnes & Noble:  https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"
• Goodreads:  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter
• Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/
• Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter
• Substack:  https://substack.com/@markrhunter
• Tumblr:  https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

Remember: Remember, every time you buy a book, a cash register gets its rings. But not this time.

A few years ago we got the publishing rights back to our Storm Chaser series of books: Storm Chaser, Storm Chaser Shorts, and The Notorious Ian Grant. Our plan was to independently publish all three.

Sales had been flat, and the publisher that bought the publisher that bought the books (!) left their pricing (in my opinion) too high for a little known author. $3.99 is a great Kindle buy for a Steven King novel, but few people had heard of Mark R. Hunter.

(Many of those who did thought I was the CEO of Molson Coors Brewing Company. I once got a nasty e-mail from someone who didn't like how I was running my baseball team.)

Well, COVID happened, along with a bunch of other unforeseen problems of various kinds, but here it is!

We made a few edits, but basically it's the same story (a little R-rated in a couple of places) at a much lower price: The e-book version is $1.50 instead of $3.99, and the print version $14 instead of $16.99. (Printing costs are killing everyone.) Check it out here:

https://www.amazon.com/Storm-Chaser-Mark-Hunter-ebook/dp/B0C7MB95NH

Storm Chaser is a romantic comedy pairing a Californian disaster photographer with an Indiana State Trooper who hates photographers—and Californians. I have a feeling he’ll come around … but meanwhile, who’s causing emergencies in his home area, just in time for her to photograph them?

There are still original editions of the book wandering around out there, with the same character on the cover. It seemed best to make the new cover different, but not too different.

We did get Storm Chaser Shorts, now titled Storm Squalls, out last year.

It can be found here, https://www.amazon.com/Storm-Squalls-Mark-R-Hunter-ebook/dp/B09YGJ1XR6, also at a lower cost.

I haven't been advertising Storm Squalls because most of the stories take place after the events of Storm Chaser--but now Storm Chaser is officially on the virtual bookshelves, so I can promote the heck out of both in between working on new projects. We're going to get The Notorious Ian Grant back up too, but it might have to wait until autumn.

But wait ... there's more!

Coming Attractions will be FREE on ebook in July, part of the Smashwords July summer/winter sale.

More about that later, but I wanted to give everyone a heads up. Now even the dog knows.

 He's a little upset I didn't ask his help in editing, though. Don't tell him, but Emily's much better at it.

By the way, my YA novel The No-Campfire Girls is also in the Storm Chaser universe, as it shares some of the same characters.

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

If we sell a hundred books by the end of summer, I'll recite one of my humor poems online. If we sell a thousand by the end of summer, I promise I WON'T recite poetry online.

Like many writers, I like it when people read my stuff. I like it even more when they buy my stuff, because that gets me one step closer to retiring to the life of Gentleman Author.

(There used to be a thing called Gentleman Farmer. I suspect that means sitting on your front porch while someone else does the actual work.)

My goal, coming into 2022, was to sell an average of one book a day. It doesn't seem like much: Just 365 books in a year. But according to the experts, the average book sells a grand total of 300-500 books, depending on circumstances such as whether they're self or traditionally published. It takes only 3,000 sales to get on the Wall Street Journal best-seller list, if that gives you an idea. And yet, according to my research, over eight billion new books are published every year.

I might be a little off on that number. But it's a lot. (The actual number is estimated to be between 2-4 million a year.)

That average of a book a day seemed like a good goal, and I succeeded. But that's not the whole story. I have four books on Amazon Ads, which takes a great deal of work to balance out sales and costs, and in that I did not succeed. In other words, I spent more money than I made. Anyone will tell you that's not a sustainable business model, unless you're the government.

The other thing is that it's hard for an author to tell how many copies they've actually sold. Confusing authors seems to be a dearly loved tradition in the publishing industry. I spent quite some time totaling mine up, and in the end I came up with 539 sales in 2022.

But.

First, that's not the final number, because I still haven't gotten quarterly and biannual royalty reports from a few of my publishers.

 Second, while that's pretty good for one book, my sales were divided over eleven books. My biggest single seller was the romantic comedy Coming Attractions. Some of those weren't sales at all, but a giveaway over the holidays.

My second biggest seller was the humorous history book Hoosier Hysterical: How the West Became the Midwest Without Moving At All. Everybody seems to love this book, and that came as a surprise because, although I have three history books, I consider myself more of a fiction writer.

But now I'm wondering if I shouldn't write something else of the same nature. Humor, history, trivia ... but about what? Hopefully something that gives me an excuse to travel around, like Hoosier Hysterical did.

Oh, you didn't know the writing business was work? Well, there you go.

You can find the aforementioned books here:

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

Remember: Every time you don't buy a book, the Plain States get another blizzard. Spare the plows.

 Who wants a free e-book for Christmas? That's right: You do!

And that's some good news this month, because starting December 15th and going on until January 1st (of what I'm sure will be as better year) you can get my novel Coming Attractions on e-book for free! Zero. Zilch. No cost. And that's a 99 percent price cut!

 

I think 99%. I became a writer because I hate math.

 

The catch: It's part of the Smashwords 2022 End of Year Sale, which means, let's face it, that you have to get it on Smashwords. That would follow, wouldn't it?

 

You can find the promo here: https://smashwords.com/shelves/promos starting, as mentioned, on December 15th. This is also a great chance to get the books of other authors, for free or at a promotional discount (after you get mine).

If you want to go directly to my account, it's at:

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

 

 

 

 You can get Coming Attractions (or the two anthologies I'm in) on epub, mobi, and pdf formats, or as an original document, so it should be readable to anyone with an e-reader, cell phone, or computer. The print version, sadly, is not part of the promotion.

This is indie author paradise, and indie authors could always use the help. So please, check it out and share the promo with your friends and family, and anyone looking for their next favorite book.

 

Happy reading! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As usual, all our books can be found at:

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

 I embarked on a fun experiment at the end of November, and by fun I mean it wasn't much fun, and by experiment I mean I had no idea what I was doing.

One of my goals has been to increase book sales, a goal for most authors. The problem is, when it comes to sales an author is competing with--well, almost all those other authors. Writers don't like to think of themselves as being in competition. Writing can be tough, and selling--well, that's way worse. So we support other writers, because we know just how hard it can be.

That doesn't change the fact that there are only so many readers, seemingly fewer all the time ... and a lot of those readers are writers. They can read only so many books--I only managed about a dozen or so last year. So, while we'd like all authors to succeed, we all have to fight to be heard ... I mean, read.

Social media, once a great way to get the word out, has in the last few years bombed. Why? Because the people who run social media sites have realized they can get money from people who are trying to get the word out. As a result, they've changed things around so that an author finds it almost impossible to reach people on the internet, unless they pony up some cash, first.

And most of us can't afford a pony.

"Wait ... no ponies?"

So I tried promotion websites, and I tried Facebook Ads. Both gave me a few more sales, but not enough to justify the money I spent. Here's a fun fact, kids: If you spend more on advertising than you make in sales, it's bad. (It does sometimes work in the short term, like those "loss leaders" offered in stores.)

And so I turned to Amazon Ads.

Honestly, I'd rather sell direct, through our website or an independent bookstore. I'd also rather eat chocolate for all meals and be 25 years old again, forever. But never mind that--in this case we're talking about Amazon, the Godzilla of online selling. (I've heard Apple is the second biggest online bookseller.)

Figuring out how to run an Amazon ad is hard.

I mean, driving in a NASCAR race when you've never actually driven at all hard.

I had to learn about impressions, clicks, targeting, keywords, and, most important of all, ACOS.

That means Advertising Cost of Sales. In other words, how much does it cost you to sell a book? If ACOS is over 100, you're spending more money on ads than the book itself sells for. This is bad. If your ACOS is right at 100 you're still in trouble, because Amazon takes a cut--you're still spending more than your' making. The best number is right around 30, give or take, so you're making at least a little money.

I decided to experiment with my latest published novel, Coming Attractions. I set up an Amazon ad for the book, which hasn't sold a single copy through Amazon since November--of 2020.

On November 27 of 2021, my Coming Attractions e-book Amazon rating was 2,931,646. That's almost three million books selling better than mine. On November 28, the rating was 264,568.   It peaked on New Year's Eve at 63,798. That was the book's highest Amazon ranking ever, including when it was first published--when I labored long hours to publicize it.

 My goal for last year was to sell an average of one copy of our books every day. It didn't happen. In December it did: 37 e-book copies and two print copies of Coming Attractions, and one copy of The No-Campfire Girls sold in a little over thirty days. Here's what it looked like:

After a few weeks of joy and celebration I checked my numbers, and what I found made me very unhappy.

I was indeed selling a lot of books, but when I checked the ACOS, I learned that for every 99 cent e-book I sold, I was spending almost nine dollars to advertise it. This, for those of you who don't care to do the math, is unsustainable, unless you're a millionaire who's not concerned about spending money. I'm not a millionaire. I don't think I'm even a thousandaire.

So, like any sharp businessman, I panicked.

I spent the next several days tweaking all the details, including the list of terms I mentioned earlier. My sales dropped, but as of the first full weekend of January I've gotten my ACOS down to 56%. For me that's about breaking even, so still not great, but at least I'm not bleeding money. They don't make bandages for that.

I'm going to try again, of course, this time going in a little wiser. I haven't decided whether to try one of my other published books, or wait until the next new one comes along, but for once in my life I haven't been cowed by math. Much. I should add that most people who use Amazon ads say it's pretty common to have high ACOS ... ACOS's? ... at first, although I suspect my early numbers would have made them faint.

If you decide to try it, my best advise is to learn everything you possibly can about the process, first. The homework might save you some cash. How have you other authors been doing in your sales attempts? Any tips?

This one is a bit odd for me, considering The Flying Girl was published all the way back in 1911. Still, it came highly recommended, and I found it easier to read than a lot of other writing at the time was.

It's also far more feminist than you'd imagine, at least for its time. The Flying Girl tells the story of Orissa Kane, a 17-year-old in California who's holding down a job to support her blind mother and her brother, an inventor who's working on his own flying machine. To say airplanes were still new at the time puts it mildly; in fact, the author gives credit for help on the book from Glenn C Curtis, a founder of the U.S. aircraft industry and winner of the first international air meet, and Wilbur Wright, who with his brother did something even more spectacular just eight years before publication.

Orissa's brother Steve is a genius in mechanical design, but the Kane family finds itself in the middle of a dispute with two former business partners, who want to invest in the Kane airplane for different reasons. Here Van Dyne cleverly describes one partner in heroic terms and the other like one might describe a silent movie villain--then flips the script.

Oh, no, surely not a girl. How indecent!

To say the book's approach to a female protagonist was advanced for the time is putting it mildly. Orissa Kane jumps into the role of airplane pilot fearlessly, and meets all the many challenges that come along with it. Yes, there's a boy, and Orissa never loses her "maidenly virtues", but she's also competent and way braver than I would have been.

But what would you expect, from the same author who invented Dorothy Gale and Ozma of Oz?

Because Edith Van Dyne was really L. Frank Baum, who wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels. That shouldn't come as a surprise for those who read the Oz books, which were full of strong, smart, competent female characters. (And it's how The Flying Girl came into my reading orbit. I've been reading up on Baum as I prepared to tackle writing my own Oz book.)

By today's standards The Flying Girl would be considered a young adult book, and it also works pretty well, a century later, as an historical novel. In context it's surprisingly advanced not only in its treatment of women, but in its technical aspects--it turns out Baum, who wrote science fiction and invented an early robot and miniature submarines, had an interest in the mechanical.

There's a sequel, The Flying Girl and Her Chum, and I liked this one enough to look forward to trying the second one.

 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53386/53386-h/53386-h.htm

 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1929527241

 The City of Mirrors is the finish of a thousand year story begun in The Passage. As we open enough time has passed since the second book, The Twelve, that younger members of an apocalypse-surviving human community have come to think the deadly "virals" they've heard of are just scary stories. The last outpost of humanity, Kerrville, Texas, is bursting at the seems in a spreading civilization that harkens back to the Old West.

Both the rest of humanity and the virals seem to be extict, although one small group of survivors have been trying to repair a ship that might take them exploring, and a few others are scattered here and there.

 But all is, naturally, not what it seems. At about the same time the survivors learn they may, indeed, be the last humans on Earth, the final Big Bad makes his appearance: Zero, the one who came before The Twelve. And he's got surprises waiting.

There's enough backstory here that you could read The City of Mirrors as a standalone, but I wouldn't recommend it. Justin Cronin brings all the strings together, including the ones you didn't even know were there, and his final act is immensely satisfying to those who've seen the story all the way through. Spreadsheets? Markable walls all over his house, covered with family trees and notes? I don't know how he does it. But I submit that he's actually better at these sprawling sagas than George R.R. Martin, who sometimes seems to enjoy mystifying his readers about who the heck these people are, and where they heck they've been.

My only issue is that there's one huge--and I mean HUGE--flashback involving Zero, the sort-of-villain who's been ahead of everyone else from the beginning. We find out in detail exactly why he ends up where he is, and what drives him. It's not that it's not interesting. The story of Zero's life, and how he ends up at the epicenter of a civilization-ending epidemic, is fascinating. It's just that it goes into an amazing amount of detail that the reader doesn't really need to know, in a book that's already so long that Chuck Norris could stand on it to punch out Godzilla. You could skip a lot of it ... but you won't know which parts, until you reach the end of the story.

Oh, and what is The City of Mirrors? Well, that's revealed, but to give it away would be ... giving it away.

And then, to satisfy the "thousand year" thing I mentioned earlier, we go far, far into the future, to find out the results of our heroes' actions. It's the ultimate epilogue--and it works.

 I highly recommend the whole trilogy, and I'm impressed that Cronin clearly wasn't winging it--he knew where all the characters, and his vast story, were going all along.

 https://www.amazon.com/City-Mirrors-Novel-Passage-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B015BCWZWW

The e-book version of my new novel, Radio Red, is now up and available for pre-order! I know, I was surprised too: Nobody told me it was happening, I just stumbled across it. I thought pre-order was what the big-time authors did. (The actual release date is March 7.)

I was also surprised to find my name listed as R. Mark Hunter. That's now been corrected, and we're up and running in such places as:

          http://www.simonandschuster.com/search/books/_/N-/Ntt-Mark+R+Hunter

(That's Simon and Schuster, one of the big name publishers, listing four of my titles!)

https://www.amazon.com/Radio-Red-R-Mark-Hunter-ebook/dp/B01MRZ52DM
(You've heard of Amazon? Probably.)

           https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/radio-red
(Kobo. You know, Kobo.)

           https://play.google.com/store/books/details/R_Mark_Hunter_Radio_Red?id=ObK_DQAAQBAJ
(Google Play. Yeah, you've heard of Google.)

           http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/radio-red-r-mark-hunter/1125362462?ean=9781682992234
(Barnes and Noble. It's nice to see my books up there, even if they can't be found (yet) in their brick and mortar stores.)

Those are the places I'm aware of so far. It's being priced at $3.99, which is pretty good for a full-length novel. Getting enough pre-orders might result in a bit more promotion, and those things tend to feed on themselves; so please consider checking it out! Also, look for the print version coming soon.

Amazon now has the print version of The No-Campfire Girls available, as well as the e-book!

            And at 25 cents off the list price, for Prime members. I have no explanation: My understanding is they reduce the price automatically to match any other price on the same product—but there are no other prices on this product! I can only suggest you take advantage and save yourselves a quarter. The Amazon page for all my books, including The No-Campfire Girls, is:

http://www.amazon.com/Mark-R-Hunter/e/B0058CL6OO/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1399246431&sr=8-1