And I’ve been monitoring how my giveaway has compared to the others by watching it in the site’s “Most Requested” list.

I check again this morning — and this is what I found. Totally cracked me up :-)

Hiya, neighbors!

(P.S. Click here if you want to enter!)

I planned to stop after the first 5 chapters, but couldn’t put it down!

THAT’S the kind of thing that makes this writer VERY very happy :-)

From a Guardian story on Amanda Hocking — who btw is now 27 years old:

[B]y the end of high school she estimates she had written 50 short stories and started countless novels. The first that she actually completed, Dreams I Can’t Remember, was written when she was 17. She was very excited by the accomplishment, and printed it out for friends and family, as well as sending it to several publishers.

“I got rejection letters back from all of them. I don’t blame them – it wasn’t very good,” Hocking says.

Hocking went on to develop an intimate relationship with rejection letters. She has somewhere in her new house a shoebox full of them.

Yet she would not give up. She wrote unpublished book after unpublished book. “Sometimes I’d say: ‘I’m done, I’m never going to write another book,’ but then a couple of months later I’d have another idea and I’d start again. This time it was bound to work.”

And here’s Mr. Konrath himself, he-who-has-made-$3500-per-DAY this January via Kindle sales. He starts with stuff like this:

I wrote 9 novels and collected over 500 rejections during a 10 year period before I made a dime in this business. I sold my tenth novel in a three book deal for $110,000 back in 2002.

My publisher refused to tour me for my first book. They also refused to let me do any official book signings because they would have had to pay coop. So I began doing bookstore drop-ins and handselling my books. I’d stay anywhere from four to eight hours in bookstores. Have you ever sold one hundred $25 hardcovers in one place? I have. It’s hell.

And sums up the whole thing a bit later with this:

I got my first rejection letter in 1988. I’ve worked hard for 24 years, waiting for this kind of success.

I’ve got two novels pubbed and am working now to finalize a third. And it seems sometimes like it’s taking a long time for my books to get any traction. I sometimes start to feel a bit discouraged.

So finding those two stories this morning came at a good time.

I’m going to keep pushing . . .

Rolling a baby elephant might not be so hard...

You’ve heard this, I’m sure.

Q. What’s the best way to eat an elephant?

A. One bite at a time.

And that’s great advice — if the analogy happens to fit your problem. Say you want to clean out your attic. Or ride your bike from Key West to Anchorage. Or . . . write a book.

But what if what you’re trying to do is completely different?

What if you’re not trying to eat an elephant — you’re trying to roll him?

Now we’re talking about overcoming inertia.

Marketing your book is an example. You can write a book one word at a time. But marketing it — successfully marketing it — requires something different.

You need a lever.

You need a way to exert an extraordinary amount of force — when the only thing you have to work with is your own weight, your own two hands.

The question is: how do you get it started?

Where’s that lever?

I love the concept. It’s a first person novel, narrated by a woman who is an animal control officer.

And she’s got problems.

Man problems, for starters. Her ex-fiance has shown back up in her life. And here, she thought she was completely over him.

Before you know it, she also ends up with dog problems — particularly when she stumbles on evidence of a dog fighting ring that is out of her official jurisdiction but very much on her conscience.

I first drafted Loose Dog several years ago. Shopped it to exactly one agent, who requested a full, but eventually passed on it.

I should probably have kept pushing, but instead I set it aside and wrote Libby, and a bit after that Can Job.

And you know what? That was the right decision. Because what that one agent told me is that Loose Dog was well-written but needed work on pacing. So I focused on improving my plotting, and as you can see from my Amazon reviews, plotting is one of the things readers like about my novels.

So now I’m back to Loose Dog, and my first New Year’s resolution for 2012 is to tweak it until I absolutely love it.

Get ready, world :-)

A porcupine ate this sign.

So we indie authors lob tons of marketing advice at each other.

Let me know when someone answers the most important question of all:

Why is it harder to market yourself than somebody else?

Actually, now that I think about it . . . this may be just a variation on that other perplexing paradox: in general, it’s easier to solve other peoples’ problems than your own.

Ever notice that? You can tell when someone else’s relationship is a disaster waiting to happen. You know when somebody else should quit his/her soul-crushing job. It’s easy to tell when someone else’s self-destructive habits are out of control.

Meanwhile, someone dares to offer you some extremely good and  timely advice . . .

“Maybe you should dump the jerk” or

“Why don’t you just quit?” or

“Ya know, there are other foods besides Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey”

. . . and you bristle and snarl like a porcupine with PMS.

I can’t!

But how will I pay the bills?

Are you saying . . . I’m FAT?

Why would anyone want to buy my camel?

Anyway. Those of you who noticed that my Can Job book description was pretty fugly: no worries. Because if you’d mentioned it, I wouldn’t have been able to fix it anyway.

But you were right. It was too much information, and not enough tease. I see that now.

So here’s the rev. Let’s see if it helps sells books . . .

They’re launching a product that will save the company.

At the biggest trade show in the universe.

Their careers are at stake.

Heck, the future of the entire CITY is at stake.

Then they discover that the product doesn’t actually exist . . .

And it looks beautiful, don’t you think?

Only $9.99! :-)

• Don’t like the exclusivity clause. Don’t really see how that benefits Amazon, either. Just seems to me it’s their way of throwing their weight around.
• The $500,000 pot is a joke. What are the odds that some Amazon Prime member will pick my book as the one book he/she borrows that month? Vanishingly small. I’m an unknown, remember? I’ve read that an estimated 27,000 titles were enrolled in KDP Select within the first 24 hours. Explain to me how my book stands out among tens of thousands of other titles? Answer. It won’t.  The writers who are going to collect a more than a few pennies from that pot are the same writers who are making money self-publishing already.

So why enroll?

Because my sole hope, as an indie author, is that my novels are good enough that over time I’ll start generating word of mouth.

And that comes down to a numbers game. Everyone who has read my novels has told me they think they are really good. (Yes, I realize that’s a sample that self-selects — i.e. people who don’t care for it aren’t too likely to let me know.)

But “everyone” so far consists of a really small group of people. Embarrassingly small.

As a side note, there are two categories of indie author who have an easier battle.

First: genre writers, because you have a ready-made audience and all the benefits of the publishing industry’s genre-centric communications apparatus. Your books fit neatly into the categories and tags for example.

Second: the mid-listers — people who have a backlog of titles they can take over and self-pub.

Notice that in almost every indie “success story” you read, the writer fits into at least one of those two categories (and very often both).

Me? I don’t write genre, and worse yet my books incorporate elements of genre but also elements of lit fic. And I’m starting from absolute scratch — I had a couple of non-fic books published traditionally but other than that, nobody knows who I am.

I love the idea of Smashwords, but if there’s a way to leverage it to generate exposure, I haven’t figured it out. For example, I’ve participated in several of the Smashwords Facebook promos (such as Freebie Friday, where you post a coupon code for a free copy of your book). At most it’s gotten me a handful of downloads.

And here’s the thing: with KDP Select, Amazon lets you give away free books.

So I talked it over with one of my best indie author buddies, Peazy Monellon (here’s her debut horror novel, Meany) and enrolled Can Job.

Yesterday I offered a 24-hour promotion.

285 people downloaded my novel.

I don’t know how else to put a free copy of my ebook in the hands of 285 Amazon customers.

Now, how many of those people will actually read my book? Who knows.

But if even a fraction do, and if out of that fraction one or two write reviews, or decide that they want to buy When Libby or something else I publish — well, then I’ll count this experiment a success.

Stay tuned. I’ll let you know how it works out long term . . .

Gorgeous, dont you think???

So I had a perfectly fine professional cover for Can Job…

And then I got another email from my designer, Derek Murphy.

He said he’d been playing around and had something new to show me.

I downloaded the file, opened it, and was blown away.

Don’t get me wrong. I liked the last version. But this one . . .  Everything is perfect. The design is more assertive and definite — which better captures the spirit of the book. I also like what the image suggests. A bunch of cans on the shelf. Anonymous cans. It’s a nice metaphor for the kinds of cubical jobs my characters are forced to endure.

And last but hardly least, the title is now larger — which is better for viewing as a thumbnail.

So big big kudos to Derek (find him here at Creative Indie covers). He nailed it.

And stay tuned — the print version of Can Job should be available very soon now!