The Life-Taker Book II Progress and Other Stuff...

Greetings from Wisconsin, USA! I hope everyone out there is doing well.

As for me, I’ve been spending a lot of time on my second full-length novel, The Return of The Life-Taker, and there’s almost more drama in the making of the book than in the story itself.

Clearly, the universe does not want this book to come out. That’s fine though, as we exist in a multiverse, and there must be one of these universes where it gets published. I might have to settle for that.

WRITING SOFTWARE TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS

Last time I mentioned my search for new writing software, as some of the drawbacks of my current writing program, Scrivener, were really angering me to no end.

I settled on Atticus, and ponied up the $147 for the software.

Even though it solved a major problem for me, namely cloud storage and backups, a bunch of little things kept cropping up that annoyed me.

Eventually I went back to Scrivener, head down and tail tucked between my legs. Boy, this book better be good after all this…

GHOST OF OLD MANUSCRIPT RETURNS, SEEKING VENGEANCE

So as I migrated back to Scrivener, I discovered another, much older Scrivener file that had a somehow-completely-forgotten outline of the next book in it.

According to the date on the file, this outline had been written immediately following the publication of The Life-Taker.

I was shocked, as I just didn’t remember it. I read through it and it all started coming back. There was no actual prose, just an outline and a bunch of notes.

Actually, it was a much different outline. Apparently, back then I had other ideas about what was going to happen to Kurzhon in the second book.

Some of this is good news, as there were a lot of cool ideas I straight up forgot about. Those ideas can be incorporated into the book I’m writing now.

The bad news is that unfortunately, the two outlines diverge drastically down the line.

If one was decidedly better than the other it would be a no-brainer.

The only thing is, I like the old story beats I found. Not enough that it’s clearly the winner, but enough that it deserves a shot at becoming “real”.

I can’t decide yet, so I’m just writing the beginning parts of the story until I get to the part where I must pick one or the other.

So this literary specter of vengeance is hanging over me right now.

Sometimes it ain’t easy being JG…

MARKETING POOP, PT I.

I write this email on the desktop, therefore it’s difficult to find that “poop” emoji. I wanted to put it in the heading for this section so I could more visually display my feeling toward the entire field of marketing.

It sucks.

Maybe if I was better at it I’d have a different opinion, but I’ve found marketing to be an extremely brutal and unforgiving space.

In a previous email I mentioned springing for a Kirkus Review for The Life-Taker.

Well, it set me back the $375, and they told me to expect the review by June 1st. So the time will soon be upon us.

If the review is good, it will be an invaluable tool for future marketing efforts, beginning with the second book.

If the review is bad, it will never be mentioned here, or anywhere else, ever again.

MARKETING POOP, PT II.

Another tool I recently found for book marketing is called AMMO, which stands for Author Marketing Mastery through Optimization.

This is a course that teaches you how to sell your books directly to the readers, skipping Amazon and keeping all the money to yourself.

In my experience, this is something people always say - “why don’t you just sell to the readers yourself? Why give Amazon a cut?”

Well, because setting up the infrastructure for a smooth customer experience isn’t easy and it takes time and money to maintain it.

Plus, Amazon already has all the customers going there, so it seems like that’s where you need to be.

However, I’ve likened my experience at Amazon to standing inside a mall holding your book up in the air while everyone walks right by you and no one even notices you at all, despite your frantic screaming and arm-waving (and eventual tears of failure).

So it seems to me that if the book isn’t going to sell anyway, and Amazon sure as heck isn’t going to help you sell it, then being on Amazon isn’t as much of a no-brainer as it seems.

I watched a couple of videos from the AMMO creator, Steve Pieper, and while I was impressed, I just couldn’t pull the trigger on the $1,000 course.

The truth is I’m about “coursed” out. I’m tired of these courses. I’ve bought so many over the years.

Most of them don’t work, but by now I can tell if they don’t work because:

1. it’s a scam

2. because it requires some piece of luck or other happenstance that isn’t replicable

3. it just overpromises on results.

AMMO seems on the up and up, but it does bother me when these course creators talk about wanting to help people but then they price the course so high.

Still, I was impressed enough that I’m going to endeavor to reverse-engineer some of the results from the basic outline of the methods I saw in the 45 minute video I watched.

BTW I found this course via Instagram. Speaking of marketing, they’ve pretty much got me targeted on there. It’s all book promotion ads and comic creation ads for me.

It could be worse - one time I logged into Instagram and was greeted with a video of a woman birthing a child.

Thanks, Meta!

OTHER STUFF…

I was checking out one of my Non-Outrage Comics podcasts on Apple Podcasts, just to see how it looked…

…imagine my surprise when I saw that my ENTIRE newsletter showed up in the description on Apple Podcasts (and other places, too). There was Life-Taker novel stuff and all the other things that don’t belong in a podcast description!

Man. How embarrassing.

After bringing up the issue with Substack, they say there’s no way to prevent this, so I’m going to have to split those podcasts episodes up and keep them separate.

I hope it’s not too annoying for people.

In other comics news, I ended up contracting an artist and having him begin work on one of my comic stories.

The cost was not exactly cheap, but I want to see at least one of my comic projects realized, either in this universe or the next one.

Wait… ain’t I an artist? Well, yes. But I had to face facts and realize that I keep putting other things in front of making the comic, so I’m just not going to do it.

At least I can get it out there this way. I’m guessing that may come out toward the end of the year.

WRAP UP

That’s what I have going on right now, so I’ll leave this one on a positive note.

Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any questions or comments!

-John G.