I'm extremely pleased to hand the blog reins over to fellow indie author A.B. Funkhauser, this week!  She's the author of the Unapologetic Lives series: I reviewed the first two books a couple of years ago.  Recently, we got to chatting on Twitter, and realized that we were both in the midst of a similar process with our work.  It occurred to me that a blog swap was in order!  So without further ado ... take it awaaaaay, A.B! 

I’m stoked, not just because the snow’s gone and I’ll soon be swimming in an ever-cleaner Lake Ontario, but also because I’m giving my old books—my companions, my darlings—the facelift they deserve.
 
It’s been almost a decade since I took up the digital pen and started writing things down. I journaled, I made up words that existed nowhere else on the planet, and I mucked around with blended genres in a way that drove my writing teachers crazy.
 
Somewhere in all the lessons—formal and informal—I got hints of where I needed to go with this thing called writing.
 
Was I writing a series? Was I a horror author? Was I a true gonzo? Did my covers make sense?
 
The answer was “yes” and “no” to all the above. A frustrating place to be some days, kinda cool on others. I jumped in “boots first” all those years ago, never giving a thought to commercially viable fiction writing or monetary success. If I loved the book, it was good enough, wasn’t it?
 
“Yes” and “no.”
 
TRY AND BE ACCESSIBLE, STUPID.

It’s now 2019 and I have three books “out there” and four more in production. After a six-month hiatus where I repainted the house and crocheted an afghan while binging Sons of Anarchy and Ray Donovan, it hit me that some of the old ideas had to go. “100% Certified Zombie-Free Paranormal Romance with Happy Ending” read one of my more craftier tweets, but did it get at the core of what I was doing?
 
My covers said otherwise:

​While it was true that the first novels centered on a funeral home where paranormal walked in lockstep with the normal day-to-day doings of living beings, Heuer’s ghostly door—so compelling to me ten years ago—really didn’t do the contents justice. Reviewers consistently talked about the main protagonist and his rather unique predicament: being stuck in a room with his own moldering dead body and no one on the outside caring to look for him. Some reviewers found the set up dark and funny, one going as far as comparing the work to Carl Hiaasen; others described it as heart-breaking, haunting and horrific.
 
I thought I was writing comedy.
 
My favorite comment was “poignant, smart and wunderbar.” Was it true for the other books? Did readers have a different take on what I thought I was saying, and did that impact the way the books were being presented?
 
Absolutely!
 
Scooter Nation, my follow up to Heuer Lost and Found, also has a door on its cover. At the time I thought it was a clever pairing with the first book, but then the reviewers said things like “Chilling”, “Irreverant” and “Visceral.” The package didn’t match the contents. A remodel was needed.

I love the new Heuer cover. It is dark and mysterious and features the strange protagonist who longed to be loved while hating everybody at the same time. To me, it is a more honest and authentic representation of what the story is about. More importantly, it is worlds away from that sad little door that said nothing at all.
 
Sometimes a photo doesn’t do the contents justice. Sometimes you just have to go to the drawing board and with Scooter, I got inspiration from Hunter Thompson’s cover artist Ralph Steadman. Quirky, simple and suggestive comes to mind. The digital artist “gets it” and with extreme longing, I wait for the new cover to arrive sometime in early May 2019.
 
In addition to being described as funny and gory gross, Scooter Nation has also been tagged as mysterious with twists and turns a plenty. Blended genre again. Years ago, I was warned about blending and mashing. “No one will know where to put you,” was the prevailing wisdom. No kidding. 

My third release, Shell Game, jumped on the scene with tags like:
 
When a black cat appears on the swinger’s front lawn, neighbors die in search of meaning.

When a cantankerous know-it-all falls into a pile of sheep manure, a clueless neighbor wakes up.

When a secret society takes her cat and her man, a grieving widow fights back.
 
When my then-publisher asked me to select a genre, I went with “humor” and “satire,” labels more befitting a “psycho-social cat dramedy with death and laughs.”

It held up. A reviewer called this one “dark and excellent” which told me one very important thing, that I was getting closer to figuring out what my books—past and present—are actually about.

I am an indie author now with my own imprint which means I have the power of choice over cover, fonts, layout and genre delineation. But as I reformat and repackage what already exists and make plans for future work, I will apply what took almost ten years to figure out: 

​ To that end, I will dedicate whatever time and energy is required to getting it right.
 
Adult, unapologetic, and wholly cognizant, I am
 
A. B. Funkhauser

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Dark humor and satire fiction author A. B. Funkhauser is currently prepping her back catalog for release under the Out of My Head Publishing imprint. Her first mystery novel, Self Defense: A Kirsti Bruner Mortuary Mystery is expected this summer. Look for all her titles on Amazon.... Coming Soon. 

In the meantime, you can find her on her website, on Twitter at @iamfunkhauser, where she runs the weekly Indie Author game #Thurds, and on Facebook.

Longtime readers of this blog may remember that I am a fan of Boston singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer, and that her book The Art of Asking inspired me to start my Patreon, and made me feel a lot more comfortable with several aspects of my creative life.   I feel like getting into her music and her creations dovetailed with the period in time where I finally started to consider myself A Real Creative Professional, and not just someone who was trying to become one.  Then, of course, I realized that the only one who can assign you those coveted capital letters is yourself, in the creative world.  Art and writing are so relative, and subject to so many other different forms of validation than, say, someone who opens a shop to sell watches or golf carts or antique Pez dispensers.   

One of the things I struggle with the most is also one of the most common questions people ask when I tell them I'm a self-published author: "How are your sales?"   I instantly become Mrs. White from that infamous scene in Clue: ​

The more I think about how visceral and immediate my anger is at that question, the more I feel it needs unpacking.  While my sales at the moment are very small, that speaks to a number of factors.  I just caught myself beginning to list them, and made myself stop, because that isn't the point.  For creative people, it is not first and foremost about the money.  (Sure, we like it.  We have bills to pay just like everyone else, and any creation costs money to produce.)    The heart of why most people create - books, music, art, film, you name it - is because they are inspired, and they feel a deep-seated need to share that inspiration with the rest of the world.  Not for the sake of our own aggrandization, but because we feel that what we are making has something to say.   When someone asks a creator about the monetary value of their work as an icebreaker. it hurts.  It sends the message that they are only interested in our social and economic standing, not in what made us want to do these things in the first place.    The problem is ... I got this question a lot.

It began to make me think that my work would only be legitimate to other people if I could say "Oh, it's in the top whatever, on Amazon", or "I made enough money  on my books last week to pay one of my bills", or something similar.  I started thinking I needed to market better.   Then I had to job hunt, and took a position that at first seemed ideal for an author.  Unfortunately, all it turned out to be was demoralizing and draining, and on top of that - as you may recall - a number of stressful and unfortunate things happened over the course of late 2017 and the first half of 2018.  Then the summer of 2018 became another struggle similar to the last job hunt.  I found a position which is supporting me rather well, though it has its flaws, and I find myself once again thinking about What I Really Want.  Which brings me back to Amanda Palmer.

As a "We Survived" sort of thank-you present to my wife and two close friends, I bought us tickets to Amanda's upcoming There Will Be No Intermission tour.  One of these friends is only passingly familiar with her music, so I curated a YouTube playlist for her.  When I did, I found myself listening to one particular song over and over, because of how much it resonates with me:​

I started thinking of all the people I'd convinced myself I wanted to be: the maybe-not-best-selling-but-definitely-recognizable-author,  and then maybe just the locally-recognizable-famous-in-a-small-town-sort-of-way-author ... and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that those were both things other people had seemed to want for me or aspired to for me.  The sort of people who would joke, "Oh, I'd better hang on to this receipt, it'll be worth something when you're famous".  But I don't ​want to be famous.  I don't even really think I want to be rich.  Financially comfortable, sure, but rich just seems a bit too much.  All I want ... is to write books, and make art, and create things that will make people's lives just that little bit nicer.   Am I still going to compare myself to other authors or crafters or artists, and be jealous of their success?  Of course.  I'm only human.  But I'm also going to be proud of them, and happy for them, because they have something which I am realizing is incredibly rare.    

Don't get me wrong: this isn't me making an excuse to not try as hard, or to work as hard.  I still intend to work at consistently improving my writing, at getting this self-marketing thing down, at building a decent Etsy store for Hazel's Moving Cottage, and whatever else may come along with all of that.  But I'm reminding myself that I don't have to be that super-woman who holds a 40-hour job (with frequent overtime), helps keep an apartment in shape, spends quality time with her wife and friends, still has hobbies, AND somehow manages to crank out a novel a year and market it with panache, precision, and a constant stream of brilliant and witty social media across multiple platforms.

Maybe every other year.   Maybe I'll become the next George R. R. Martin - no, who am I kidding, I wouldn't be able to stand waiting that long between books, myself.  I don't know when Adjustments is going to be ready.  All I know is, I'm still working on it as often as I can, along with a lot of other things, and I will always let you know where I'm at.  You'll have plenty of advance notice.  And I'm going to fill this blog with lots of other fun stuff in the meantime - like more What A Character entries, and things about the background of the books, the places, and other neat things - so that you have plenty of reasons to stick around.  

In short, the next time someone asks me how well my books are selling, I'll respond, "You know, I haven't looked at my metrics in a while.  I'm just happy that they're out there."   And that'll be the truth.  Because that's the kind of author I want to be. 

What kind of You do you want to be?  Is it the same answer now as it would have been a few years ago?  I'd love to hear your thoughts.  Drop me a comment below.   

Until next week, I remain your hostess,

Over the last five years, I've tried just about every form of author-to-reader interaction available to me, to see which ones work the best: not just in terms of self-publishing, but for me, personally.  At first, I felt inundated by the amount of options ... and by the price tags which came with some of them.  Out of necessity, I limited myself to those which were free ... and even then, there were a great deal.  Those of you who've been with me for the long haul know the laundry list ranges from Facebook to LinkedIn to Google Plus and back again.   But at the top of them all was the Mount Everest, the Mecca, and dare I say, the albatross of the self-published author: The Newsletter.  

"Every author has to have a mailing list".  It's the author's equivalent of a commandment: we see it everywhere online, in blogs, on websites about How To Self-Publish, emblazoned across colleagues' websites.  Join a mailing list, and be treated to updates, freebies, and exclusive content ... and for a while, I tried it.  Friday at Charlie's was my attempt at a mailing list, and the Friends of Aviario got art, photos, news, and the occasional short story.  Really freakin' good content, if I do say so myself.   But even when I offered a free e-book to subscribers, I never got that Golden Giant List of Subscribers.    And that was a problem.   Everyone touted the usefulness of newletters because of that giant list: in theory, everyone on your mailing list was a guaranteed customer in one way or another.   The trouble was, I only had a handful.  And they started to drop after a few months.   So I signed up for other authors' newsletters in search of a common thread, some magic elixir that might help me crack the code of The Newsletter.  Several subscriptions and newsletters later, I realized the secret keeping me from doing well with my own: 

I didn't like newsletters.  I found them tedious.  I had to open my email to read them, and was confronted by the leagues of spam from other sources - which were often also newsletters, but from retailers that had added me from online purchases and services.  My brain had equated newsletters with unwanted marketing, with the sort of spam you get and tolerate in order to get an occasionally useful benefit (Michaels and JoAnn Fabrics, I am looking at you and your coveted 60% coupons.  You have furnished my creative supply stash more times than I can count).  And most people - at least, the few who'd unsubscribed from Friday At Charlie's - probably were beginning to feel the same way.    So where did I go to find the things I wanted to engage with?

Twitter.  Facebook.  Instagram.  Pinterest.  And those led me to the sites and blogs of people I came to regularly enjoy.  Easy-peasy.  In a world where people want quick impressions before they click, time is an investment, and reading a blog (or a newsletter) takes time.  So ... I realized I need to go to the short-format marketing and look for my readers there.  

Before you say "how dare you accuse people of having no attention spans, is this another rant about millenials or whatever we're calling people nowadays when we don't like them" ... hold up.  Technically, I'm a millenial, myself (though I'm on the VERY VERY tail end of the spectrum, which is so weird, but another ramble entirely).  And I have a theory about creative people online, and how we're starting to view media through the lens of the internet.   

The internet is an amazing place for creative people!  It makes creating and sharing so much more accessible than it was in the 80s and 90s.  Even today's internet is better for creatives than the dial-up, AOL-and-Bravenet-and-ICQ internet of my high school days: which, incidentally, is when I decided that I wanted to write.  Hmmmmm.   But I'm coming dangerously close to veering off topic.  Focus, Ang.  Focus.  And that's the thing about the internet.   People don't have too much focus for it, because there are so many things everywhere.  We have a phrase for it, for Godsakes: FOMO.  Fear Of Missing Out.  So we make our impressions of things as small as possible, so we can devour more.  We call a show that needs our attention for longer than an episode or two a "binge".... but the great thing is, we still do it.   But how do we decide what to binge?   From seeing enough of those bite-sized peeks at a thing to realize that we're interested.   And that is not something that a newsletter can do.   That is the territory of the tweet, of the Facebook post, of the Pin, of the omnipresent hashtag and keyword.

So, to make a long story short (too late!), I'm not writing a newsletter, because I'm not writing you a circular ad.  I'm writing you postcards, hoping that they'll intrigue you enough that you'll want to take this journey, yourselves. 

Happy travels, and I'll see you next time...

It took me a few days to get around to looking DartFrog up.  Something about the interaction gave me a strange vibe, and I was right, but I'll come back to that.  Here's their mission statement: "Every year there are an estimated 450,000 self-published titles released into an overcrowded literary marketplace. Unfortunately, most of those books will live forever in total obscurity. But, there are within that mass of self-published books, some real gems. DartFrog finds those gems and distributes them to our partner bookstores."

O-kay.  So, sounds good, but how does it work?  I clicked on every link that looked as though it'd give me a straight answer. "About Us"?  Mission Statement and glamour shots of the staff.  "Why Dartfrog"?  Buzzwords and all the stuff that sounds too good to be true, no numbers or details.  "Our Standards"?  Some stuff about quality control that's just a little bit condescending, if you ask yours truly... and it had typos.  (I laughed.  A lot.)   

Oh, wait.  "Author Agreement".   Finally, I thought, something that  should lay it out in black and white.  Click: "The author agreement is a straight forward document that seeks to remove all the legalese that most of us don't read or understand anyway! But there are a few highlights that you should know."  Not only is that on the edge of condescension ... but the full, actual text of that agreement isn't anywhere I could find on the website.  Presumably, you only get it after you've started the sign-up process.

So I made a mock order for In The Cards.   It asks some straight-forward questions about your book: did you edit/format it yourself, how long is it, what's the ISBN/genre, etc.  But it doesn't even tell you what your order form is doing.  Or how much it'll cost.   I hit "proceed to payment" and was hit with the sticker shock: $350.   

Let me reiterate: I still don't know what, exactly, I'm paying for, here.

I clicked back out of the cart - or, in the vernacular, "noped out like nobody's business" - and tried to dig a little deeper to see what that price tag entailed.  The closest thing I could find to ANY detail about what my money would buy was on "Why DartFrog":

DartFrog evaluates your book to ensure that it meets a standard-of-excellence bookstores require. Those books that do, we make available for distribution to our network of partner bookstores. If your book is not ready for distribution, we will tell you what needs to be fixed and allow you to re-submit when the changes have been made. We do not charge an additional fee for a second evaluation.

Oh.  So I'd be paying DartFrog $350 to pat me on the head and tell me my book is good, and then add it to a catalog they give to a (so far) very small list of indie stores.  How is that any different than an agent or a publisher?  I don't really think it is.  Sure, that 70/30 split afterwards is pretty nice, but I'd have to spend an initially HUGE chunk of money that I don't have.  There's very little about their evaluation team, so I don't even know if the people I'm paying to vet my book would be fair or unbiased.  

Given that I had to do a half hour's worth of web surfing to find all this, I'm pretty unimpressed.  If you're a web-based service, you're catering intrinsically to people who are used to very fast service: go to the site, find what you need, get it, get out, move on with your day.  I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but self-published authors' time is precious enough without having to constantly verify and vet their potential allies and business collaborators.   I could have spent that half hour connecting with my peers, making marketing graphics, preparing for my new collaboration release, or - oh, hey! actually writing more.    Instead, I'm here.   Because I get the increasing feeling that I need to share these experiences with you all, to save you the time and make your life as fellow authors a little easier.  

We're all in this together.  I've never felt that it's about the money - but saving it where and when we can is crucial.  Being transparent and communicating about what works, what's fair, and what things really are is even more important.  

In the end, I passed on BookFrog because I just can't spare that kind of money for a random person's validation.  If you can, I don't judge: in fact, I'd love to know what you think.  If you've had experiences with BookFrog, yourself, please leave me a comment or shoot me an email.  I want to be proven wrong: I want to believe that there really are people out there who genuinely want to help find the good indie books, give them the love they deserve, and build a mutual relationship ... not just take our money and laugh all the way to the bank.

Until next time, dream on, write on, and stay amazing!

Story time!  Are you sitting comfortably?  Good.  Then we'll begin.

Once upon a time, there was a young(ish) girl who had loved books since kindergarten. An only child, she made some of her earliest and oldest friends between their pages: precocious girls like Pippi Longstocking and Anne Shirley were her favorites, but she soon grew just as fond of super-sleuths Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden, and went on adventures with the brave mice of Redwall and discovered the creeping, delightful horrors of Edgar Allen Poe and Christopher Pike.  Around that time, she was also beginning to discover the prospects of responsibility, as her teenage years loomed on the horizon, and her parents, wanting to coax her into it in the best way possible, suggested she get a job at a bookstore.

The bookstore was tiny, tucked away on the shores of a nearby lake, and catered mostly to tourists looking for summer beach reads, but our heroine loved it nonetheless.  She learned how to open up shop, run a register, and create workshops for the kids who came in to amuse themselves on lazy summer afternoons.  (One particularly memorable afternoon was spent teaching them how to draw Mushu from Mulan... which might tell you how long ago this was, if you're very clever and know how to use IMDB.) She discovered the joys of coffee, classic literature, and mystery novels, but more importantly ... she discovered the concept of book signings.  
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She was only able to work at one of them, but one was enough.  The author, though no one she had previously heard of, was a mystery author, just like the books she was starting to love so much, and was willing to talk to her at length about her craft.  Not only that, but she signed a book for her:  

The advent of the internet (yes, this IS an old story, isn't it?) meant that she began to meet other people who wrote their stories in secret, same as she did, and one of them, a little older and a little braver, convinced her to share her own stories with the rest of the world.  The wide anonymity of the internet made this all seem so much safer, and she began to gain a little following, which made her think that maybe her writing wasn't so terrible after all.  College and the so-called "real world" took their turns at her confidence, but eventually, she began to share stories which were entirely her own, and discovered self-publishing, and all the freedom and challenges that came with it.  
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There's no neat dovetail to the end of her story - of course, she's sitting here typing it to you.  ;)  I will say that things have managed to come full circle: later this month, I will have my second-ever book signing at the store that started it all.   I invite those of you who are able to come and join me ... it's not quite a Happily Ever After, but as far as I'm concerned, it's damn near close enough.