I’ve blogged at least once every week for more than eight years. The Crotchety Old Man was my first blog. I added The Adventures of Tico and Toodles when my Chihuahuas were puppies (links below). Banging out a post took maybe an hour. A small but loyal following seemed to enjoy my little essays. Some said I should write a book.
So I did.
Publishing my first novel forced some changes. The blog morphed into a web site for Michael Rupured, author. Instead of blogging for fun, I have a job to do: sell books. The bar is higher too. Every post has to be brilliant, error free, and beautifully composed. I spend hours perfecting each and every one.
A demanding day job and other responsibilities limit the time I can devote to my writing career. The past year has been especially difficult. Vision issues, Toodles’s diabetes, preparing for three releases (Whippersnapper in January, No Good Deed in April, and Happy Independence Day in July), and helping my best friend through a hard time didn’t leave much time for anything else.
Do the posts I spend hours and hours writing sell books? Sales figures in quarterly royalty statements are all I have to go on, and they shed no light on the subject. Books readers bought directly from the publisher that quarter are included, but sales from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other outlets may not show up for months. Without real-time sales data, I’ll never know.
One obvious trend — sales for all my books go up in the weeks after a new release. Blog tours that I do, promotion the publisher does, and the flurry of reviews that follow a new release reach fans and people who’ve never heard of me. Something — the cover, the blurb, a review, or a post along the blog tour — motivates some to buy the book. A few brilliant, urbane, and highly selective readers like the story well enough to buy all my books.
I have a deadline for my next novel (Cold Revenge) and am more than 15,000 words behind the schedule I need to follow to meet it. Getting back on track is still possible, but I really need to focus. So I’m taking a break from blogging until I finish.
Thanks for stopping by. I’ll be back sometime in 2017. If you need a fix, here are links to my old blogs: