Authors Electric

At the start of December 2019, I gave myself a gift of learning. I'd seen numerous ads for MasterClass while searching for interesting gifts for the holiday season.  If you're unfamiliar with MasterClass, it's a streaming platform of online courses that started in 2015 with a simple pitch: Famous people teach you about the thing that made them famous. At the time, the courses that interested me most were from writers: Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, Malcolm Gladwell, Joyce Carol Oates, just to name a few. MasterClass, however, includes instructors from all walks of life—from Dr. Jane Goodall who teaches Conservation to Helen Mirren who teaches Acting to Annie Leibovitz who teaches Photography.  You can either purchase a specific course along with its instructional videos and workbooks, or buy an annual membership which gives you unlimited access to all the classes, including new ones that are added during the year.  I decided to pick up an annual subscription and a second ...

After two successful Bookbub promotions for The Survival of Thomas Ford earlier this year, which resulted in 70000 free downloads, and a combined profit of $2300 from 1300 Amazon sales/borrows when the book returned to its $2.99 price (followed up by 100 new Amazon reviews), I decided to reinvest a little of this profit in a third Bookbub promotion. The third promotion, which ran from October 26-30, was not for The Survival of Thomas Ford, though, but for its “little brother”, my story collection, Storm Damage. Storm Damage had won the award for Best Short Story Collection in the eFestival of Words Best of the Independent eBooks Awards 2013, and, ever since, I had been looking for an opportunity to get the ebook out to more readers. Storm Damage was sent out to the Bookbub literary fiction subscription list on 26 October. There were only 6 or 7 books selected by Bookbub to be sent out to that subscription list that day, and Storm Damage was the only one of the bo...