Slightly Off the Mark

Never mind how much a book is worth to you; how much is an author worth to you?

After all, a book is only a shaving off a tree, or a little blip of electricity. An author, on the other hand, is a living being who needs not only reviews and sales, but also coffee (or in my case tea), food, electricity, and occasionally a new laptop. My wife bought me a keyboard that feels and sounds just like a typewriter: It brings me great joy, but also cost about a month's worth of book sales.

Not that it was expensive, I just don't sell that many books.

Desks, computers, chairs, swords ... writing can be expensive.

How much a reader should pay for a book is a question that's been debated since Gutenberg bought too much ink and ran his first Black Friday sale. Among other things, it depends on your level of fame. The ebook edition of Stephen King's newest book is priced at $14.99, more than some of my print books. Our traditional publisher has our photo-heavy history book Images of America: Albion and Noble County priced at $12.99 as an ebook, and another publisher has my romantic comedy Radio Red at $3.99.

Guess how many books King sells, compared to me? Yep: The answer is "lots".

We do better with our self-published books, which run from 99 cents to $2.99 as ebooks. Fun fact: Some readers refuse to buy 99 cent books, assuming at that price they can't be any good. This assumption is both foolish and wrong. I suspect that price is often an act of desperation by good writers.

On the other end of it, Hoosier Hysterical has lots of pictures, and we can't sell it at less than $2.99 without losing money. That's the best we can do without just giving it away. Hold that thought.

No matter what the price, it's hard for lesser known authors to get into brick and mortar stores.

So, ten or twelve bucks for an electronic book. Crazy expensive, right? I mean, we don't have to pay for paper, ink, shipping ... how greedy can we be?

But how much is an author worth?

Three times I've written the rough draft of a book in thirty days. That's great, but it took a few weeks to prepare for the writing, then a month or two after to revise it before the story was decent enough for my wife to read. Then there's the revision after she returns it to me. The month of actual writing, when I push it hard, consists of working my full time job, writing, eating while writing, and nothing else. Some people can get books out the door faster, but I have to think they don't have full time jobs.

The old joke: An author can't make enough money to write full time until he's written and sold enough books, which he can't do until he writes full time.

So it goes.

So, a dollar for something it took me at least three months to produce, not including all the time spent on promotion and advertising? Writers are worth more than that. Even me.

Which brings us to giving books away for free.

Some authors swear that giving their ebooks away gets them so much attention that people come back and buy their other books, thus advancing their career in the long run. That seems to work for them, but it's not been my experience. Just the same, every July for the last few years I've entered the one novel I have up on Smashwords, Coming Attractions, into the Smashwords Summer/Winter sale.

Has it resulted in more readers for the other books? Not that I've noticed. It doesn't even lead to that many readers picking it up for free. Smashwords has a lot of authors, so my deal has to fight for attention with all those other deals. On the other hand, my sales aren't great in July to begin with, and it doesn't seem to be doing me any harm, either.

I'm curious how you, both the reader and the writer, feel on the subject. Maybe I'll try other giveaways at some point, even though I don't think authors should have to do that. I also don't think authors should have to spend so much time promoting and advertising, but welcome to the real world. How do you feel on the subject?

Oh, and Coming Attractions is free here:

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

But you already knew that.

Summer themed. Well, kinda.

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

Remember: Every time you get a book for free, it counts as a free book.

 I want to apologize again for how slow I've been with the Haunted Noble County, Indiana  project. I've collected most of the photos and written half the manuscript, but haven't been getting back to people about their individual tales as I should.

It's the same old story, to an extent: injuries, sickness, death, Covid, chores I couldn't put off. Basically everything except writer's block, and at least that hasn't been a problem. In addition, I hadn't anticipated how much time all the research would take. I've done this before, with Images of America: Albion and Noble County. But while history research gets time consuming, extra digging is required when it comes to the supernatural.

Not literally. Well, not usually.

There's also the fact that I'm an introvert, or suffer from social anxiety, or whatever the kids are calling it these days. Among other things, I hate talking on the phone. Do you know what I do for a living?

 

Yeah, I talk on the phone and radio for 12 hours a day. For thirty years.

I know what you're thinking: Why does someone who hates talking do it for a living?

It's because I used to work in factories, and also in the service industry. That's why.

I get off my night shift not only tired, but seriously stressed (which is not uncommon for dispatchers, overall). The last thing I want to do is talk on the phone, or be otherwise social. Between that and my weird schedule, I have real difficulty picking up the phone.

That's the long winded reason why I'm so far behind in calling people about this project. It's also why I much prefer talking about it by e-mail or messenger, and have difficulty finding a time to talk when either I or the other person isn't asleep.

So ... I'm sorry. My deadline is looming, so I'm back on the horse and working, and I will call the people I promised to. I hope the rest of you will contact me online, especially if I forgot about you, which after so many months is possible. I want to make this as good a book as I can, but man--it's been a slog. And that's not the fault of the material!

• 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: Keep plenty of books around for ghosts to throw off the shelves.

 I feel a little guilty for not posting about this since June, but it's now official: I have a contract to produce, for The History Press, a book titled something like Haunted Noble County. Probably with an "Indiana" added because, it turns out, there are more Noble Counties.

(I'm looking at you, Ohio and Oklahoma. I mean, did you have both a Governor Noble and a Congressman Noble? That's right--busted.)

My original title was Noble Dead Rise: Haunted Hoosiers Horrified! But the publisher talked me out of it, by saying no. The History Press is part of Arcadia Publishing, and you might remember I already wrote a book with them:

Also Indiana! Don't let Ohio steal this from me.

Anyway, the original balloon I floated was in this blog:

https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/2023/05/looking-for-local-ghost-stories.html

Immediately after posting that, I vanished. Like a ghost.

Actually, we had the summer of hell, which says a lot considering I usually love summer. I don't want to belabor it, because I don't know what belabor means, but it's been an overall horrible year for a lot of people. It derailed both me and Emily, who's an indispensable part of these projects due to my general incompetence. But in a few weeks her job will revert to weekends only and I'll be taking a little time off, so we're about ready to get rolling.

My acquisitions editor even said I could add a little humor to the book, something he may come to regret.

I do humor! I also drink tea.

I'll get back in touch with the people who've already contacted me, and of course I'd love to hear from anyone who has a ghost/spirit/haunted/weird story or place about Noble County (Indiana!) Photos, too, would be appreciated, especially historical ones. I've also cleaned up our good camera and we're going to be going around the county (Indiana!) to get pictures of everything from haunts and historic sites to cemeteries and--well, an actual picture of a ghost would be cool.

If you have a suggestion, make sure it's not in Ohio or Oklahoma. I like to travel, but come on.

Sometimes it's all about the lighting, am I right? The courthouse in Ohio is boring!

As I said earlier, in general I like to communicate through e-mail or various internet messages, only because I spend most days asleep and lots of nights awake. Just the same: phone, in person, ecto-plasmic telepathy, whatever--we want to hear stories. In the list of links at the bottom of this blog are several sites I can be contacted through. I do NOT want to hear the TV say "They're heeeeerrrrreeeee ...." so stay out of the satellite feeds.

• 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
• Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/
• 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
• Substack:  https://substack.com/@markrhunter
• Tumblr:  https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

Remember, if you don't support writers they attract more and more social media sites, and are soon so busy checking them they don't have time to write. Not that it would happen to me. Nope.

 Well, here I am, making my annual appeal for shoppers to buy our books for Christmas. Once a year isn't so bad, is it? I have yet to make a promotional post in honor of Arbor Day.

But wait--there's more!

That's something sellers have to say, I'm not sure why. Our books should speak for themselves, but they aren't available as audiobooks yet. I thought this year I'd let the books figuratively speak for themselves, so here's a brief description:

 Storm Chaser, The Notorious Ian Grant:

The second is the sequel to the first, and both follow the basic romantic comedy outline: One of the couple is a homebody who loves their little town; the other comes from the big outside world and proceeds to spread trouble. One is a cop, the other kinda/sorta works in the entertainment industry. In the first, a woman chases storms, in the second, her brother is the storm. The other thing they have in common: We're preparing to reissue them after getting the rights back from the publisher, so at the moment you'd have to contact us direct for a print copy.

Storm Squalls: 

Short stories set in that Storm Chaser universe, formerly known as Storm Chaser Shorts--but improved with more content and a better title. I haven't been talking about it much, pending the reissue of its parent novels, but it includes a new short story I'm particularly proud of.

Coming Attractions:

 Like the Storm Chaser books, this romantic comedy is set in northeast Indiana and also involves an outsider, this one trying to get the local drive-in theater shut down. Here's a secret cameo: One of the characters from Storm Chaser makes a very brief appearance, although he's never named. Well, I guess I gave away that he's a he.

The No-Campfire Girls:

Also related to Storm Chaser, but more of a spin-off. This YA adventure stars Beth Hamlin, the irrepressible teen from the other books, who plots to defeat a burn ban at her summer camp with the help of a Native America rain dance. It doesn't end well.

Radio Red is the first romantic comedy I wrote, and it's a little heavier on both the humor and the sex (!) I mean, the publisher is Torrid Books, so what does that tell you? It's about an irreverent Michigan radio station owner who hires a down on her luck air personality just before someone starts sabotaging the station.

What's that, you say? You want some non-fiction? Maybe even some humor? Okay:

People should be full of good humor: Hoosier Hysterical: How the West Became the Midwest Without Moving At All, proves my co-author (and wife) Emily and I are full of it. We traveled all over the state I love to find out all sorts of cool details about it, and then ... made fun of them all. But it's good natured fun, so ... there.

Slightly Off the Mark and More Slightly Off the Mark are collections of my newspaper columns: The first are columns that never published because the paper got bought out, and the second are edited, updated columns from around the early 90s. Interestingly, while the humor/history/trivia book Hoosier Hysterical has been my best seller this year, these two books have been my worst sellers. Guess I should have added more history and trivia.

Images of America: Albion and Noble County:

This one is part of Arcadia Publishing's Images of America book, photo-heavy volumes about local history. Despite being something you wouldn't expect anyone outside of Noble County to be interested in, it sold very well--which is good, because Emily and I worked hard to produce it. It's also the only one that made it onto the shelves of a Barnes and Noble (and a local CVS pharmacy!)

On an even narrower area of local history, Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights: A Century Or So With the Albion Fire Department covers the first century of the fire department I served on for forty years. It's got a bit more humor, but of course it's still a local history book--and it took me 25 years to research and write! (I wasn't writing daily, of course.)

Where do you find all these, you ask? 

Thank you for asking, much appreciated. They can all be found on our website and on Amazon:

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

And also on my daughter's website, White Birch Lane Boutique:

https://www.whitebirchlaneboutique.com/search?q=books

Most, but not all, can be found at other places:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

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

 https://books.apple.com/us/author/mark-r-hunter/id1025271801

You can't get all the books at all those sites for various reasons, but all in all it ain't too shabby.

Remember, every time you gift a book, an angel gets his swim trunks. It gets warm up there.

 When I was a teen I didn't exactly have the happiest home life. As a result, and being an insatiable reader, I spent as much time as I could at the Noble County Library. It was only about a four block walk from our house, and from the library's front windows was a great view of the Noble County Courthouse. It was very much my home away from home for several years.

It's gone now.

Well, the building is gone. The library moved in 1995, to a place that's a lot easier to navigate for both patrons and employees. About 35 years ago a member of the Library Board took me to the basement of the oldest part of the old library, and showed me cracks spreading through the concrete. He told me the original library was designed to have shelves around the exterior walls, with a central circulation desk. Now, with shelves all across the rooms, it held more weight then it was designed for.

Not to mention it was too small, and laid out in three different levels. When the library moved, the Noble County Prosecutor's Office took up the space, but to me it will always be a library. Well, would. Now I have a brick.

I spent hours going through old books and microfilms there, researching our book Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights: A Century or So With the Albion Fire Department. Then I returned the favor, putting the library itself into Images of America: Albion and Noble County. Between them, I fed both my reading habit and my writing ambitions with volume after volume from the place.

In the photo above you can see the original structure in back, and the 1968 addition in front. The original, built in 1917, was thanks to a $10,000 Carnegie Foundation grant--Andrew Carnegie's money built a lot of early libraries.

In the photo below, which I got from the Old Jail Museum--on the same block--is the Carnegie Library before the addition went up.

In elementary school my favorite part of the week was when the bookmobile showed up and we would file through, picking out something to read. The bookmobile also came from the Noble County Public Library, which had a garage built on the back to house it.

Just for the heck of it here's one of the bookmobiles, in a photo given to me by Ellen McBride. This one, I assume, was before my time--I recall the one we went to being more like a large van.

But I'm gonna miss what was there.

You know what I like? Fire trucks.

I also like history.

I'm also a fan of my home town, Albion.

Now, as a person who's been a volunteer firefighter for some 35 years or so, I can safely say I've been a part of all three of those things. And we've combined them all before, in a book Emily and I did called Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights: A Century Or So With the Albion Fire Department:

I'm very proud of that book, which was decades in the making. But, although it did have some photos, it didn't have as many as I'd have liked. Now, some time later we did another book about Albion and Noble County, entitled, naturally, Albion and Noble County:

It's part of Arcadia Press' Images of America series, which features images of ... well, you know. Now, that book was a load of hard work, but it was also very cool, because we searched long and hard and world wide for pictures, and got a lot of really cool ones loaned and donated to us. That got me thinking.

And here's where you come in. Yes, I'm pointing at you.

I've been having some family and medical stuff that's kept me from getting very involved with the fire department recently, so I wanted to do something, and here it is: Another book about the Albion Fire Department, but this time all about the pictures. Fires; fire trucks; firefighters; firehouses; fire history; fire dogs; whatever. Not a lot of text, just all the good photos we can get our hands on.

If you have any fire related photos involving Albion in any way, could you please loan them to us long enough for us to make a copy for the book? You'll get credit, naturally, and half the proceeds from sales of the book will go to the Albion Fire Department. I'm not asking the AFD to fund the making of the book as they did with Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights, so the other half of the proceeds will go toward actually designing, producing, advertising, and printing the book.

If it's in any way related to Albion's fire history, even slightly, we're interested; and we're especially interested in former members, since it's awfully hard to fight fires without firefighters. Seeing as how this is going on my blog, I should stress that I mean Albion, Indiana. Although, come to think of it, it would be kind of cool to have a section on Albion firehouses from across the country.

We'll collect all the best and put out a great visual record of Albion's firefighting brothers and sisters. I don't know for sure how long this will take, but I'm shooting for getting it published maybe early next summer. And as always, thanks for your support!

You can contact Emily or me on our website contact form at www.markrhunter.com, our through any of our social media, or--believe it or not--our number's actually in the phone book.

It's been kind of a rough year, and especially a rough last month or so. But as an author I have to get back on the horse, because gift giving season is coming (I don't use an actual holiday name until November), and it turns out promotion is part of an author's job.

It's helpful for that effort that Arcadia Publishing has our Images Of America book priced at $21.22 for print, a drop from the original price. It's one of three history-related books Emily and I put together ... together. Or will that be four by this time next year? Stay tuned ... news to come.

https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9781467114516

 You can get it on all those various electronic formats too, of course--even the Nook. Anybody still have a Nook? 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/albion-and-noble-county-indiana-mark-r-hunter/1121998890

Personally, for a photo-heavy book like this, I think it's better in paperback. But then there's the surprise I got when I checked our Amazon page. Take a look, and see if you can figure out what shocked me:

https://www.amazon.com/Albion-Noble-County-Images-America-ebook/dp/B014I412XW

See that there, in the middle? They have it listed at $28.99, with a price drop to $20.78. Why $20.78? Why not $20.80, or $20.99? I don't know, but it still seems like a pretty good buy for a hardcover version. The only copies of the book I have are paperback.

That's because I didn't know there was a hardcover version.

If any of you happen to have ordered the hardcover, please let me know if this is a real thing or not; I've never had one of my books turned into the version that can be used in home defense. I realize that if you don't have a connection to Noble County you probably don't have any version, and in that case check out the Arcadia Publishing website: If you live in America, they're likely to have a book out covering something in your general area.

(And, as usual, check out all our books at http://markrhunter.com/ ...)

If you're in northeast Indiana, you probably heard of the fire at the old McCray factory in Kendallville, which took half a day to control and came closer than most people realize to taking out part of the city's historic downtown. The fire burned so hot that it was actually visible on local weather radars, and eighteen fire departments were called in to fight it. (For you big city folk, that would be about five alarms.) Over the course of the night, they extinguished two other roof fires and patrolled downwind as sparks and flying brands dropped over the whole city.

I guess what I'm saying is, it was a big fire. Here's the Noble County Sheriff Department drone video from the day after:

https://www.facebook.com/171131589596429/videos/1771163106259928

And here's a report on the fire from the Fort Wayne TV station, WPTA21 (That's the same station that interviewed me twice after book releases).

http://www.wpta21.com/story/38338863/fire-crews-battle-fire-in-downtown-kendallville

And here's the Kendallville News-Sun article on it:

http://www.kpcnews.com/newssun/article_6473bad0-9bce-5059-be37-398991d7ff7a.html 

 The building was huge--much bigger than you could tell from driving down Main street--and mostly out of use for some years. That's too bad, too, because it was once a large part of the Kendallville economy, and manufactured refrigerators that went out across the world. Donations from the McCray family led to, among many other things, the local Lakeside Hospital being named after them, until it eventually became Parkview Noble Hospital. So, the company was obviously successful and influential for many years. All because of ... meat. 

I got to thinking about it after the fire, and remembered the building was represented in our book Images of America: Albion and Noble County. Just for fun, instead of finding the photo I actually took a picture of the book page itself:

 

You can buy this book at www.markrhunter.com, or on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Albion-Noble-County-Images-America-ebook/dp/B014I412XW, because: always be selling.

As you can see from the caption, the McCrays were simply selling their meat and poultry products, and got so successful at it that they were having trouble keeping their products fresh. So ... why not just invent a refrigerator of their own? They did that, getting a patent in 1882, and in 1890 founded the McCray Refrigeration Co. The result was over 300,000 square feet of manufacturing space. 

McCray was for decades the biggest manufacturer of commercial refrigerators, anywhere, and its jobs supported a third of Kendallville's population. Founder Elmer McCray's daughter married an heir to the Coca-Cola fortune, and when Elmer McCray died in 1938 his body had a police escort, with thousands attending his funeral.

All gone, now. Although ... not quite. To this day, you can still buy a Howard-McCray commercial refrigerator.

I just learned that Arcadia Publishing has discounted all their Central U.S. books until Sunday. It turns out Indiana's in the Central U.S., so my and Emily's book, Images of America: Albion and Noble County, is also discounted--by 35%, which is no slouch by discount standards. Check it out here:

https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9781467114516

It's the one with all the cool historical pictures about, you guessed it, Albion and Noble County. And it gives you a break from hearing me talk about Radio Red! I mean, for now.