Honestly, I’m not. But I am busy, and other things keep getting in the way of writing. One of these days we’ll settle some of the challenges facing us and I’ll have more time to write and world-build. In the meantime…here’s a small update.
Don and Laila discuss what they learned attending the 20Books Vegas conference in November 2022, as well as some updates in setting up their business.
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Well, wowee! It’s been a month. Well, not completely. Today’s the 15th, last newsletter issue went out on the 16th, yeah. Anyway, it’s been a very busy month, but first I want to tell you about what we learned at a conference we attended in November.
In the middle of all the chaos we talked about last time, with moving and our AirBnB guests causing lots of damage, well… we had signed up for a conference in February. When we moved we decided not to change our plans to go ahead and we went to Las Vegas to attend the conference.
So there is there’s a Facebook group that I discovered a couple of years ago. It’s a pretty big group called 20booksto50K. The notion is from one of the founding members of the group. As an independent author one day he looked at his royalties and on this particular day he made about $7.00. He started doing some math and he’s like, okay, if I had twenty of these, twenty books producing $7/day, then I could make $50,000/year. Modest, but it’s livable in much of the country.
So this Facebook group is dedicated to making indie authoring livable. It’s all about how to how to do the craft of making your book, putting it all together and marketing it, and strategies to make it work. We would love to do that, so we went to their conference, 20Books Vegas. It was awesome. I came away fired up and feeling optimistic and full of even more ideas.
Laila said that one of the main things that she came away with was how you don’t have to polish the thing so much. Like, just make a thing. Don’t worry about the details at first. When you’re writing, you’re always trying to hone everything along the way you want it to be, beautiful and soulful, but you have to let that go and just create. Don’t think about it so much and just put it out and make something. Just crank it out; that’s the first step. Laila was really surprised that a lot of people at the conference seemed to think, “I don’t worry about it too much and I’ll just send it to the editor.” She said: “I was always worried before. I needed to have it more polished. I thought the editor was just a backup for things that I didn’t catch. But now I understand it’s more of kind of a partnership.”
I remember one guy in particular. I read his post a year or two ago, and he was talking about how he does his business. Now he makes a pretty good living as an independent author, and he cranks his books out. He’ll spend a week or two writing a book. Friday afternoon, writes “the end,” sends it to his editor. And the following week, he starts writing another book. Meanwhile, the first book gets edited. And so he has this rotation, where each book takes a few weeks to produce, but he only spends a week or two to create each one. I don’t remember exactly how long. He only spends one cycle per book writing it. He pays somebody to edit it, he pays somebody to do the cover. All that.
Obviously you want it to be cohesive and have a good storyline. It’s not like you want to just put out whatever unpolished product, but you can learn how to produce good content quickly.
I’m actually applying these principles to this very update right now, to the newsletter and podcasts. I’m just trying to get it out there and make sure it happens. I’m aware that the audio isn’t perfect, the video isn’t the most aesthetic, but if every podcast episode were perfectly polished, there would be no podcast episodes.
Also, as far as publishing – “self-published” might be outdated terminology. It used to be you could pay a vanity press a large chunk of your savings, then you’d have all these physical copies that you’d have to peddle everywhere.
Yeah, it’s not like that anymore. Instead, you can publish directly to Kindle or to Google Play Books. If you can’t afford a professional editor, now there’s spell-check and Grammarly and Pro Writing Aid. If you can afford it you should still use a professional editor, but these tools can certainly help as well.
So I feel like there is a way ahead and we can see the way and I want to make it happen. I have drawn up a phased timeline.
To apply the conference to us, for stories: if there’s a guy out there who can crank out a book in a week, I can probably do one in 12 weeks, so I’m going to try to write a book per quarter this year. And so with with the Grendhill Chronicles, I have written about 34,000 words of it so far. One of the things at the conference I learned about Kendall Vella, which is a platform for serialized content. I kind of look where I am with Grendhill, and I would like to take advantage of Kindle Vella. For Kindle Vella, it has to be new content, though never available somewhere for free prior to that. So I think I’m going to take what I have so far of the Grendhill Chronicles and call that a novella.
So there’s the introductory novella and I could go ahead and publish that now I suppose, and I mean begin the process. It definitely needs editing. But yeah, for the Grendhill Chronicles intro novella and then book 1, I want to have it hashed out by the end of March. Update: I care too much about Grendhill and getting it right in order to write it so fast. I’m pushing GOHOMUSP first instead.
But maybe we should calm down. We’ve had to move, including partial moves, some 8 times in the last 3 years. Our lives are still in upheaval. So please be forgiving if we miss a deadline!
Also, in a perfect world, we will create original music to accompany our writing.
You know what? I’m going to cut myself off here. It’s late and I really need to sleep.
Listen to the podcast format or watch it on YouTube!
Since publishing our last newsletter issue, we:
What’s going on in our lives? Well, moving and AirBnB, along with a lot of other stuff.
Today we discuss a bit of what’s been going on in our lives: moving (again!), renting out our house on AirBnB, renting an AirBnB ourselves, getting damages to our house remedied from AirBnB, and … still moving. Next episode will be a continuation of this conversation, shifting to a broad view of what has been developing in our story writing, and hopeful business preparation.
Here is the text version, just as it appeared in the newsletter today:
Happy 2023!
First off, you can listen to this newsletter wherever you get your podcasts, including as a video on YouTube. In fact, this particular episode has images in the video that amplify what we talk about – in this case, the ramifications of a bad experience with AirBnB guests. 🙁
Watch/listen on: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on thorn.link/Grendhill.
Now, I last recorded a video in February of 2022 which I published in March – what has been going on since then?
Well mostly, we’ve been moving.
Back in the spring of last year I was at a decision point of whether or not to continue with my current day job. In the end we decided to continue, but that did mean that we had to move again, all the way across the country. So starting in July we started packing, and in August we executed the move.
In July, my wife, Laila (hear her voice or see her in the audio/video versions of this update!), and the kids went to Utah and spent a few weeks there, taking care of my late mother-in-law’s house. They did not return to the west coast. Then in August, I packed up everything else in our house, loaded a Uhaul truck, and moved it all across the country to the East Coast.
We’ve previously lived in this part of the country before so we already owned our house out here. When we moved away we thought it likely that we would come back and we left some things in the house as furnishings to be used by guests on Airbnb. When we came back, our guests at the time were under a lease of six months for HOA reasons, so we could not boot them out without cause in order to make way for us to move back into our own house. That meant that we had some overlap, and to cover the gap we rented an Airbnb ourselves and lived in somebody else’s basement for a month and a half until we could officially move in.
Easiest move ever, right? We already knew where everything would go when we put it away.
Well. When the house reverted back to us, it turned out that our esteemed guests had been smoking in our house for the last six months. Not just smoking but smoking rather heavily. There were cigarettes left in ashtrays, a film of tar anywhere the cleaners missed, and there is still a smell of cigarettes all over the house. They also caused other damages. They had a dog that chewed rugs, they broke some things and made some things go missing, and they left a wooden table and chairs on the back patio for months, ruining them.
Fortunately, Airbnb advertises their air cover insurance which is supposed to cover the damages. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of time overhead. This required a lot of time from us documenting damages and getting quotes. First, we had our regular cleaning team do a lot of cleaning in the house. When they let us know they were done, we went in there. We used baking soda on the carpets, we had the carpets professionally cleaned, we ran an ozonator for several days, which is supposed to chemically break down odorous compounds. We also got quotes to professionally clean the interior of the house, to professionally clean all the contents of the house, to replace the carpet, and to repaint the walls to remedy the cigarette smell. Here we are three months later, and Airbnb has not yet come through for us. Initially they were waiting on our documentation and that took us some time because I’m working a full time job and we’re living out of suitcases and the kids were going to school. Then they sent an adjuster from an independent company, and…we wait.
We also went to a conference in the middle of all this, but we’ll talk about that in the next episode.
But here we are, and since we could not move back into our own house unless we wanted all of our stuff to smell of cigarettes. So, we bought a new house instead and we’ve been spending all our time moving. If you watch the video form of this podcast, you’ll see in the background in the introduction. Lots of boxes behind me. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, birthdays, all in the middle of so much upheaval.
I cannot wait to be done moving.
I also can’t wait for Airbnb to pay us for the damages so we can pull the trigger on these quotes to remediate the cigarette smell, and then we can either sell the house or rent it out. But we just bought a house that we closed on in December, at 2022 price and interest rates, so we definitely can’t afford to have the other house sitting there, empty.
That’s pretty much where we are now as far as what has been happening recently in our lives. Be sure to catch our next newsletter/podcast and you will see what we’ve been developing as far as on the creative side of things. Inventing stories and developing stories and making plans to write stories. In fact, even to hopefully build a successful business Based on these stories.
Be sure to go here and subscribe to the newsletter so you don’t miss future updates!
-Don
