Why I Wrote Outage

It's been just over a year since I started writing Outage, and I've been getting questions from people that want to know how I came to write it.  They ask me about my inspirations and how I chose the genre and characters.  I never would have guessed that I would forget those things, but I did!

I remembered that a friend and I did NaNo together last year but I couldn't remember whose idea it was, or why we did it, so today I went back through my email to see how this whole thing started.  It's kind of funny re-reading it all because I had no idea what I was doing.  

Here are snippets of some of our conversations, shared so that next time I have to answer questions I'll remember how clueless I was and how spontaneously the whole thing started.  Also, in case I'm ever tempted to romanticize the process or my motivations maybe this will keep me honest.  :)

10/29/13

Me - I'm probably not doing nanowrimo next month.  I'm too unfocused.  My life is blurry.  :)

11/1/13

1:15 PM (fickle) Me - I have decided on the spur of the moment that I will take the november writing challenge.  Since I haven't planned for it I will probably fail, but I need to write.  Are you doing it?

1:19 PM My friend (such a great friend!  Look how she jumps in with both feet) - I will do it with you.  We will compare daily writing numbers. I need to write too.

5:19 PM Me - Now if only i knew what to write about.

8:08 Me - I'm thinking girl (15ish) on grandpa's farm while her parents are off on an exotic vacation when an EMP attack is launched over the US.  Grandpa dies of heart attack, girl has to survive on farm with no electricity, eventually turning it into a refuge for other "orphans" of the attack.

I was thinking of making her a Mormon, but not being heavy-handed with it or making it the point of the book.  It's the kind of thing I like reading.  It just doesn't have anything about it that makes me say, Wow, that sounds amazing.  Or Wow, I haven't read anything like that before.  I hate to go into it thinking it's a mediocre premise.

9:17 PM My friend - Your idea isn't mediocre. That'll come.

10:12 PM Me - The mediocrity will come?  lol

11/2/13

6:42 AM My friend (she's in an earlier time zone, so here's her response the next morning) - LOL not the mediocrity!  The 'pow' moment.

1 AM Me -  I started liking my story better as I went through the outline.  It's still all very standard apocalypse fare, but maybe my characters will make it interesting.  I didn't write any of the book-book tonight because I'm giving myself credit for coming up with the idea for the story and writing chapter summaries for the whole book in just one day.

1/3/13

11:07 AM  And here's a (not) proud moment for Me:  I'm so not a writer, lol.  I just want money.

My friend - Is it fun for you though? It must be fun, or you wouldn't do it! Painting was fun for you. This must be, too, you don't stick to things you hate. And I don't know that you're not a writer, because you write. You've written more than me!

12:45 PM I'm not a total lost cause, since I decided on a noble theme less than 2 hours later.  Me:  I am going to make the importance of family the most major theme.

This was a turning point for me.  Once I figured out that Outage would be a post-apocalyptic exploration of family relationships, I was ready to write.  I didn't know the details and I still had to get to know my characters, but once I defined that theme a lot of things really fell into place.

11/5/13

5:00 PM Me - If I finish I'm going to thank you first in the credits.  I'd never do this if I couldn't complain to you about it the whole time.

11/7/13 My friend - One day I'll actually have a book published and it'll be partly because of you because if I can't talk to you about it I'd never write!

Thank you to my very best writing friend for always having my back and talking me down from all of my ledges.  One of these days I'll put credits in the back of a book, and you'll be the first one I thank.  

And to all aspiring authors - Find a writing buddy.  Mine has made all the difference in the world to me.

June 6th -- 1,000 Copies Sold

At a little after 10am this morning California time, the 1,000th copy of Outage was sold.  Yay!!  The book has been out a little over 3 weeks, so this is a huge milestone for me, and very humbling.  I'm grateful that so many of you have chosen to pick up my book and read it.  I love hearing that you're enjoying it and that it's helping you think more about being prepared.  When I started this process last November I didn't have a clue that 8 months later, more than a thousand copies would be out in the world.  So amazing.

Today is June 6th, and I've finally caught the blog up, yay!  Now I can write about some other things besides how Outage came to be, like books I think you might like or authors I recommend.  I also want to share some neat survival products I've tried, and I'm definitely going to write a post about cooking zucchini bread in my solar oven.

If you're just joining me here, and would like to read some of the journal entries I wrote as I went through the process of writing Outage, I copied them into blog posts and you can read them in order.  Here's a link to the first entry on the blog:  Outage is Born

 

 

The Big Day: May 13th

May 13th, a little before midnight, was the day I hit publish on Amazon.  It took until the next morning before it was available.  I didn't tell anyone I'd launched the book that day because I wanted to make sure everything looked okay.  Good thing, too, because I could NOT get the formatting to look good on Barnes & Noble's site, and I couldn't figure Apple out at all that first day.  THEN, Amazon decided to combine the free preview and the full novel into one listing, so it looked like you could get it for free.  Man, what a day.  Just remember that if you think it's going to go perfectly, you are probably wrong.  Give yourself some time to recover and get things right before you send a bunch of people to buy your book.

On May 14th I wrote up an announcement and sent it out to my mailing list and told everyone on Facebook.  I have such nice and supportive friends and family, and between them and my mailing list I sold 90 copies on that first day and 59 on the second.  That was enough sales to help me reach my all-time high on Amazon's ranking:  #2,147.  So exciting!!

Sales slowed down until day 6 which was my low so far:  16 copies that day.  After that, things picked up and have been slowly, but steadily increasing.  My best day (apart from the first day) I sold 70 copies!  The other retailers have been harder to break into, but I've sold a handful on Google and BN, plus a couple on Apple.

Results of Free Preview

Once I got the cover finished I was ready to send my book out into the world.  I don't know yet who I'm writing this blog for, but right now since it's mainly for me to help me remember how Outage came about, let me share a few numbers about the free preview.  It was distributed for 5 weeks before I published the full length novel.  Here are my results from that:  

  • Free downloads after 3 weeks: 627  //  After 5 weeks:  ~1500
  • Facebook likes after 3 weeks: 1  //  After 5 weeks:  5
  • Mailing list signups after 3 weeks: 9  //  After 5 weeks:  92
  • Visitors to my website after 3 weeks: 118 unique visitors  //  After 5 weeks:  over 500 unique visitors
  • Amazon reviews after 3 weeks: 4  //  After 5 weeks: 7

A couple of notable things happened to give those numbers a boost - a link to the preview was distributed in a free book newsletter.  That generated about 700 free downloads in one day.  I didn't know what had happened at first, it was like Christmas.  :)  Second, I won a raffle for a really neat fireproof bag/cover on a popular survival blog, and both the blogger and the owner of the fireproof company mentioned my website.  This boosted my mailing list sign-ups like crazy.

I mentioned in a previous post that the lessons I learned from creating and publishing the free preview were absolutely priceless.  Even if I hadn't gotten so many mailing list sign-ups and free downloads, it would have been worth it, just for the experience I gained.

Original Cover

Just thought you might like to see the original cover for Outage (formerly known as Powerless).  I created this cover using a stock photo and editing it at www.picmonkey.com.  I really like their site and almost always use it for editing images.  However, it wasn't powerful enough to do what I wanted, so I downloaded a free editor called GIMP and watched Youtube tutorials until I knew enough to get by.

I still can't get over the difference!  I should also thank the artists and authors at kboards.com for telling me that if the book was YA I needed to put a girl on the cover.  You'd think I would know that!

March/April - Preparing for Publication

I like to write a novel in the same order it will be read, and I feel like that about this blog too.  I shared the journal entries I wrote as I was writing Outage, so I'll share here a few things I did after I finished to get it ready for publication.

I mentioned in the last post that I had family and friends read it.  This was really critical in the evolution of the book, because they all pointed out different things that I could improve.  There were a few things they all agreed on too.  I think they may have worried that their feedback would hurt my feelings, but it was super helpful!  I am really grateful to have had so many people willing to read it in its rough state and make suggestions.

I also read it over a couple of times from start to finish and experienced it as a whole.  I did this early on, and then read it twice more just before it launched.  Each time I looked for different things.  Sometimes I was looking at story and character development, sometimes I was just looking for typos.  This was also really helpful, as it was fairly obvious where I needed to flesh out an idea or character, and I still catch typos here and there.  

An inspired friend suggested that I package the first 6 chapters in a free preview and published it a few weeks before I released the novel.  Best advice ever!  Making the preview available taught me so much.  It helped me get used to the publishing process at various websites and also brought some flaws to my attention - For example, the cover I'd made just didn't look good on the Amazon page with the other covers.  It looked home-made and it didn't say YA.  Another thing I discovered was that my book title ("Powerless") was already overused, and I would be competing with not only books, but series' of books called "Powerless."  I had time to change the title before going live.  Last, I realized my book description needed work.  Fixing that has been an ongoing process that still continues.

In this same time frame I did a whole bunch of things I'd never done before:  built a website, made a Facebook page, started a mailing list, became an affiliate with Amazon, got a post office box when I realized my mailing list was giving everyone my home address (haha, that took me about 2 hours once I noticed).

I also did a lot of research on how to promote a book.  This may be helpful down the road, but I haven't done much promotion initially.  My Facebook friends and mailing list fans were a big help in getting the book to chart on its launch day, and after that it's been mostly word of mouth and favorable Amazon algorithms.

So anyway, that's a glimpse into just a few of the things I did between finishing the rough draft and hitting the Publish button.  April was an extremely busy month for me as I had to learn how to do each of these, usually from the ground up.

 

February 24, 2014

I've been working non-stop on edits and I think I'm ready to send it out to a few people for a read-through.  It's nerve-wracking to send writing to friends.  I haven't ever really done that before.  I can't really judge how good or bad it is.  I know it's not life-changing, but I wonder if I handled certain scenes the right way or if it's super boring or far-fetched.  And the romance is another thing entirely.  I never knew writing a developing relationship would be so difficult!   I could sit and tweak it for hours and days probably.  I haven't read it from start to end in one sitting since I finished, but I know I'm too close to it to be reasonable so this is the next best thing.  It's still hard though.

February 22, 2014 - 11:58pm

Final word count on the rough draft:  53560.  The final chapter is really slapped together, and it's almost entirely “telling” rather than “showing” but man I'm tired of slowing down the storytelling to add dialogue.  I am so excited to get to work on editing I'm probably go to do that for an hour tonight before I go to sleep.  But it's done!!

February 22, 2014

I have been writing a little bit every day this week.  400-800 words usually.  Today is Saturday and I woke up and have been working on it for several hours and I'm making great progress.  I reached the REAL 50,000 words mark a little while ago! 

I've got a couple thousand words to go on the climax, and maybe another for the wrap-up at the end.  If I don't get too many interruptions I could probably finish the rough draft by the end of today or tomorrow! 

I gave myself a forced deadline by entering the book in a contest that requires a 50K book by March 4th.  That doesn't give me nearly as long as I should probably take on edits, but it's giving me the motivation I need to soldier through these last chapters and get the book sent out.  I should hopefully have time for a first round of edits before the submission deadline.  I still don't know exactly how it's going to end, but by this time tomorrow night I will.  It's very exciting to be so close.  :)