W.W.B.D.

Roughly five years ago, I released Me, Boo and the Goob: A Southern Adventure. It was my first book, and I didn’t know much about marketing it. In my research I found a template for marketing a book. It seemed to make sense to me, so I followed it. I have learned from it.

First, the template recommended offering the ebook free for a week. This, it said, will get the book out and build interest. I did so. Me, Boo and the Goob made it into Amazon’s top ten free books for that week. Something on the order of two thousand people downloaded my book for free. I got many very nice reviews. Note to self: If you give away books, do it personally. Being on Amazon’s list of Top Ten Free Books is no great accomplishment.

In the following week, I put the ebook up at $2.99 and for a good while, in any given week, 25-30 copies would sell.

Finally, I put out a hard copy book at $14 and began doing book signings all over the south. I sent the book to reviewers across the United States and got amazing reviews. Between online sales and bookstore sales, I was very pleased with the reception the hard copy got. The book business is hard, and without a publishing house pushing your book, it is really tough to get generate sales. I’m very proud of the hundreds, perhaps a thousand, of hard copy I sold.

I’m not sure how many thousands of books I sold in total. I could check all of the publishing avenues I used and generate a total. I may at some point do that. Right now, I still get email from around the world about the book. Most of them express some degree of sympathy for my parents. Some of my readers have become Facebook friends.

I have been excited about doing a sequel since I finished the first book. It’s a fun read. It’s a fun story. In the five years, I have started the sequel probably five or six times only to have the story run into a dead end, not find the voice or just not get traction. The voice I found in the first novel is the voice I want for the second, but finding that voice again has been difficult. After yet another promising start degenerated into a mess, I became somewhat discouraged last year.

Earlier this year, I had surgery on my shoulder. I hurt my shoulder when I was about 15. It’s been a problem ever since. It reached the point where I could not swim. I could not dive. I could not reach above my head, so I resolved to have it repaired.

Surgery is never a fun thing, and my post surgical experience was not too difficult. A nerve block was used, so my trip home was not too painful. We stopped on the way home and got burgers and a coke. It was roughly 5:00PM, so the burgers and coke were supper.

As I have gotten older, I have become more sensitive to caffeine. At bedtime, I took my pain meds as directed and lay down. My pain meds kicked in and I expected to drift off to sleep peacefully. Well, I didn’t. I lay there blinking at the ceiling for most of the night. The caffeine in the coke kept me awake.

I was dopey as hell, but wide awake, so I lay there just blinking and thinking. In my drug addled state, I was stuck staring at the ceiling. My mind wandered. I thought about many things. I thought about the sequence of events that brought me and my shoulder to this current state. I remembered realizing that I would never throw a football again like I had before. I thought about going to school at Heifer High and all the craziness we got away with. You could miss an astounding number of English classes and still show perfect attendance. I thought about all the worries a 16 year old kid has, and all the pressures we put on our selves. I remembered being so intimidated by pretty girls. I thought about the Hurricane Ball, and the Jr./Senior Prom. The Craighead County Fair was always fun, as were the parties at Craighead Forrest. I remembered the cars we drove, and where we used to hang out. I remembered making runs to Truman. Miller Ponies were always my choice of beer back then. I remembered the dust and the heat of summer and driving gravel roads while shooting snakes and drinking beer. I remembered falling in an out of love on a routine basis.

In the course of that night, laying there zonked out of my mind remembering our high school years, the story line of the sequel came to me. I’ve been working on it over the last couple of months. That’s why I haven’t posted in my blog. I’ve been busy. I’m seven chapters in. I have both found ‘that’ voice again, and I know where the story is going. There’s a lot of work yet to do. I have to finish the book, then go through the gut wrenching process of a thousand rewrites. I’m probably a year from publishing it, but it’s on the way.

If you read the first novel, I hope you will like the sequel. If you went to JHS in the years right after the ‘73 tornado, you will recognized some events and maybe people. No one should worry about being embarrassed by the stories. It’s a book in much the same vein as the first one.

For now, the title is “Me, Boo and The Goob: Bad Ideas”. That may, or may not change. We’ll just have to see how it goes. I will update my progress periodically. Get ready for a good read.

As my brother frequently reminds me, no one will ever say “What Would Bill Do?”