Monthly Archives: April 2018

by | April 30, 2018 · 2:30 am

The one I almost threw away

I have been super busy. Interestingly, it’s easy to work hard when you love what you’re doing and all you get is positive feedback and nobody yet giving your work a one-star review, publicly wishing that they could burn it. However, I am also learning just how frustrating art could be. So frustrating, in fact, that I wanted to throw my last painting into the garbage bin:

Persistence 11

Yep, this one almost did not happen, because at some point I’d decided that I just can’t. Freaking. Blend. Acrylics:

Persistence 3

It was late at night. Josh went to bed, after trying to cajole me for an hour to give it a rest, which is not something I do often. I finally gave up and decided that this one was not to be. Some famous painter said that he was happy if one out of ten paintings was good, so the next morning I started playing with it. Then an amazing thing happened – because I had already written this particular piece of canvas off, I was no longer scared to try bold colors and fearless highlights. And somehow, (I am once again completely puzzled at how this happened), I made a painting at which I just. Can’t. Stop. Staring.

This is my number four and the first one that has a name. Persistence. Because she taught me not to stop and now that I know, I will continue no matter how ugly the progress stages get. I didn’t even take the most shocking one, where I scraped back her cheeks. Here are the ones I did take:

Thank you Persistence. I won’t forget.

 

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by | April 26, 2018 · 1:00 am

In other news: it turns out I can paint

Somehow, I have managed through over 45 years not knowing this. Then as previously moaned, I hit a deep well of dark depression and decided to try my hand at  painting with acrylics. It’s now three weeks later and I have just finished my third ever portrait on canvas:

My family is in a state of what I can describe as a “proud shock.” I am shocked too, because in fact my whole life I was convinced that I’m absolute rubbish at painting. I can now remember a mandatory art class in high school that may have prompted this self-belief – my old-school Soviet teacher yelling at me, because I just couldn’t get the point that the shadows are supposed to be purple. Once I got that, he stopped yelling, but I guess the damage was done. I have made sculptures before, but my artistic efforts have so far been limited to drawing princesses and unicorns on request. Even choosing a colour for walls was a drawn-out, painfull process of buying and painting on samples of no less than 11 shades of grey. When I started painting three weeks ago, I was hoping to just get my mind off the stress and the recent series of unfortunate events. My first painting was crap:

However, one magical thing did happen – I loved painting it. And I wanted to paint more. And true to myself, I wanted the next one to be better. So I watched a bunch of YouTube tutorials, bought some more paint and the next one was indeed a bit better:

So I watched more tutorials, bought more supplies, and the result surprised me. If you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen the painstakingly slow progress shots, if not – here they are. Cause progress is fun!

Speaking of progress, I now have my husband’s agreement to indefinitely delay converting one of the two living rooms in the new old house into an awesome master bedroom. Because it is already awesome as my studio:

That’s all for now. I didn’t get a chance to write a post about Amazon ads, but will do so when I get temporarily sick of painting, which could happen. Hope it would be only temporary, if it does.

I also hope that if you suddenly remember someone yelling at you as a kid, something about how you could never do X, that you would immediately make plans to try X at the earliest opportunity. You never know what may happen.

 

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by | April 12, 2018 · 1:00 am

Once again, BookBub delivers

If only I could have a BookBub every week…I could have a free lunch. It’s been seven hours and eight days since the International Feature promo ran in UK, Canada, Australia and India, and I’m still getting $10-15 of sales and reads per day. It has long since earned the $38 fee and even covered the $50 I wasted on running a simultaneous BookBub ad (don’t do those, but more on that later).

Here is the pretty graph:

BookBub results April 2018

While I’m very happy with the result, the number of free downloads is less than it was the first time around. Last year I got 5,094 downloads in the first three days, and this time it was 3,501 over the same time. Unfortunately, I did not include in the last year’s post the buy through, or basically what I sold as a result. Not to make the same mistake, here are the results over the last 8 days:

  1. Shizzle, Inc: 9 copies sold at $2.99 and just under 8,000 KENP. Approximate return of $58.
  2. Indiot: 2 copies sold at $2.99 and 2,900 KENP. Approximate return of $18.50.

I have also ran the BookBub ad for full-priced Indiot, spent $50 and sold 9 additional copies, at a loss of $32. So after all of that and $38 for the BookBub, I have made a total of $6.50! In the black, baby!

I could still make more, if KENP continues to move along. With the last BookBub I was wide, which did not pay, since I got hardly any sales through Smashwords. I also did not get to enjoy the sustained spike in KENP, as you can see above. I’m continuing to run an AMS (Amazon Marketing Services) ad and so some of KENP could be due to that, but the ad has been running for several months, and there were hardly any pages read before, an equivalent of maybe a copy per week. That’s one problem with AMS – you can’t tell when your ad and click results in a borrow.

I do have a theory – the book was $0.99 during the last few months and maybe, just maybe, not deemed “worthy” by KU owners. Now that it’s $2.99, maybe it looks like a better value to borrow on a KU plan? The only way to confirm that would be to check the stats a month from now, when there’s no chance that any sales or borrows are generated by the BookBub afterglow.

I have promised to write a post about AMS and will do so next – I’m on annual leave right now but not going anywhere, only painting walls and canvasses.  Writers need hobbies too.

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