What I say below won’t help you sell 60,000 books in a month, but it’s just my account of what I’ve done and where I’m heading. I know most of you are writers that read other writers blogs. I mean you are professional writers. You follow the rules. You majored in English lit. I didn’t. I majored in life. Nobody has ever called me a traditional writer – nobody ever will. I could give half-a-shite about correct punctuation, and if it’s breakfast time as you read this you’ll notice your cornflake milk turning a curious shade of yellow the more you read.
Background and What I’ve Done in the Past
I’m 45, from the USA and now living in Thailand for the past 7 years. My main site is Mike Fook Fiction eBooks (www.mikefook.com). After high school graduation I was in the Air Force in Honolulu for four years; New York City for 3; and Clearwater, Florida for ten years, then back to Maui and Oahu for another two years. I’m interested in many topics. I’ve been a mailman, paparazzi photographer, computer network technician for GTE, and an internet marketing consultant. I’m a generalist. I know a lot, and I’m a specialist at nothing. I have 40+ websites, and have made a living entirely online for the last 5 years. Just writing ebooks I make about as much as the average college graduate would in their first job. But, that isn’t enough. With the release of the new low-priced Kindles I’ve decided to go full-time into writing and drop almost everything else.
While in Florida I got a graduate degree and was accepted into a decent school for my doctorate. But by then, I was done with university education. I wanted more real life experience. I worked a year with people with traumatic brain injury after graduation and then jumped into computers. I earned heaps of computer certifications from Microsoft, Cisco, Sun, and filled a drawer with hardware certifications. Finally I settled into creating websites and mastering the lucrative Google search engine game.
In 2004 I moved to Thailand. I relaxed the first two years, blowing off accumulated stress built up in the USA after trying year after yaer to make more money and buy bigger toys. After two years in Thailand I was out of cash. I began by creating many websites I could use for links to any other website. I wrote thousands of posts on these sites about Thailand, and other topics important to me. I wrote for fun. Most of the sites are doing well in Google because I’ve done SEO – Search Engine Optimization for the last dozen years, and it hasn’t changed that much.
My life has been pretty interesting and I wanted someone else to appreciate it. I started hammering out an autobiography. After 150,000 words I thought it was done – a masterpiece. When I gave it to my brother he said, “Uhm, Vern, it’s exciting and interesting… but, what is the story?” I told him, “The story of my LIFE, Dave…” He didn’t get it. He was looking for some redemption of character or some such nonsense. I realized, I didn’t know squat about writing. I canned the book.
Not long afterwards I came to the shocking conclusion that I had written over a million words that year – easily.
I thought – who the hell writes a million words, except a writer?
Was I a writer?
Not yet I wasn’t, that much was obvious, but I thought I’d give it a more serious effort. With my brother’s blessing I chose the pen name “Mike Fook” because it is short, memorable, and stronger than my real name.
I began by writing books I was emotionally driven to write. Initially I had written portions of about eight books. These were books about topics that were gnawing at my brain. I worked for three years with kids as a “Big Brother” in Clearwater, Florida. These children had been traumatized by physically and sexually abusive parents and relatives. I had this vigilante revenge plot going on very strongly in my mind. But I wasn’t sure – was it real life, or was it just a story to write?
I wrote “Thailand’s Sickest” about a therapist from the USA that comes to Thailand and finds a network of pedophiles in Patong Beach and goes about extinguishing it. The cathartic release was tremendous. I immediately sent it to hundreds of publishers. Some enjoyed the first 3 chapters but it wasn’t what they were looking for. I found out later that no publisher in their right mind wanted to touch anything with the word pedophile. My book was entirely focused on destroying them. It didn’t matter. Lesson learned. It was a harsh lesson, I had written 140,000 words and whittled it down to 120,000 for the final book. It was a book I definitely needed to write, and I’m glad I did. It showed me that despite having profound ADD/ADHD, I could pull it together and write a fiction book.
Over the next few years I cranked out another 21 books. Most of them are short (30 – 100 pages) and provide some helpful info, like “Moving to Hawaii – 2011” or “Moving to Thailand – Your 2nd Life Begins!” Others I wrote because I’d like to change the world, “Kicking Life’s Ass!” is the most important book I’ve written, and yet it has sold very little at Amazon.
I published all my books through Amazon KDP first and then some of them at SmashWords.com later. I might have ten books at SmashWords. I jumped through the hoops to get them in the premium program so they are distributed at Apple, Sony, Barnes & Noble, etc. SmashWords handles all that. It’s just easier than submitting them to those places individually. SmashWords just recently picked up for me and I’m doing over $100 a month there, but it pales in comparison with Amazon sales.
I’ve created my own book covers and revised them multiple times. I have yet to order professional covers, but I will be doing that in the near future. Compare my two best covers above to the professional covers Joe has – and you’ll see I am seriously lacking in this area. I won’t continue that trend for the future.
I put my ebooks in PDF format and sell them at my own sites for the same prices at Amazon. I also offer the Kindle, Sony Reader, and other ebook formats to people buying at my sites because after publishing at SmashWords.com they offer your ebook in many formats for downloading.
What Am I Doing Presently?
Currently I’m occupied with the most monumental question of my life.
What exactly do I need to do to find success in fiction writing in the short-term future?
What I have figured out so far is that I need to write fiction with one main character that will be the subject for another half-dozen books. Write one good book with a great character and you can sell up to a dozen more books with the same character, selling over and over to the same people and new ones as they find books in the series. Tom Clancy did it with Jack Ryan. Lee Child does it with Reacher. Joe does it with Jack Daniels. It’s just one recipe for success, but one that I will also follow.
My chosen niche is thrillers. Not sure exactly which type of thriller, but I do like the twisted psychological tales with serial killers involved. It has become obvious to me that I’ll need to learn more about police procedure… FBI procedure… how cops talk to one another, how they think, what they think is important… I know little about that group. I know the psychological side and the average human perspective, and can write easily from those viewpoints. One thing that I’m not looking forward to is the researching facts so my books sound real – but are in fact, all fiction. I’ve toyed with the idea of fudging everything – just making up everything. Is anyone else doing this or is does it go well beyond taboo?
It was summer after my last semester in graduate school when I got a call from one of the tenured and distinguished professors in my program. She said, she was sure I had plagiarized portions of a paper I did for her class. She was going to call a meeting of the entire staff and recommend I be kicked out of the program before earning my master’s degree.
After giving her 3 earfuls of some of the most creative cussing I’ve ever spewed, I encouraged her to call a meeting as fast as possible after hanging up with me. I promptly called John Rasch, the head of our department, and demanded we have a meeting that night at the office. After calming me down some, he said he’d look into it. He said, if it was true I’d plagiarized something – my ass would be canned. Fair enough, I thought – it was grad school, not Romper Room.
I got a call that night, and Dr. Rasch had sorted everything out. The professor, Dr. Susan Kelly, was known for acting on her instinct and the words whispered into her ear by her long since dead husband.
What really happened was… for one of our assignments in “Research Methods” class, Dr. Kelly told us to create a research paper – a fake one. We had to make everything up – the results of an imaginary experiment, all written out as if it was real. All Dr. Kelly knew of me was that I came to class in beach volleyball shorts and sleeveless shirts and listened quietly and doodled. I didn’t laugh at her ridiculous jokes, and i didn’t participate in her class beyond what was absolutely necessary.
When she read my paper – it was beyond her. She thought it wasn’t even making sense. She thought it was disjointed and didn’t flow. Thing was – I wrote it above her head. I wrote it at a level she didn’t “get”. The head of the department was a super-bright guy, and he got it completely. He said it was brilliant. I laughed out loud on the phone when he said that.
“Yeah, I KNOW IT WAS!” I said, cocky as ever.
He told me they spent the last few hours searching databases of published papers and found nothing I plagiarized. He told me not to worry about Dr. Kelly, and that she’d not be pursuing anything further.
So naturally, as I consider writing fiction, I wonder – can it be done like this too? Isn’t that the ultimate fiction book – where everything is made up – false, and not a shred of truth in it? Or, isn’t that good fiction at all? Does that go against what good fiction is?
Why does Tom Clancy spend a year or so researching everything that goes into one of his technical books? Can’t some of it be fudged? Can’t we make stuff up in fiction books? It is fiction for C’s sake. If I fudge the physical layout of Macon, Georgia for instance – is that something that’s going to bend so many of my readers out of shape that my book will get suck reviews?
Don’t get me wrong, what made Tom Clancy’s books so amazing was that they seemed to be perfectly plausible. The reason was, Tom researched every damn thing he could. Understandably, it would be impossible to fake a book that required that much technical detail, but, for a book that didn’t?
I may yet try it and see what happens. If it’s doable, I’ll be able to crank out some great books with a minimum of effort. Research in any form is the un-fun side of book writing for me, even if it’s just to find street names in a city or the layout of a city. I want to create fantasy… not fantasy based on facts. Maybe I need to go into sci-fi where I can create my own reality, my own world? Anyway, just throwing that out there.
Future Focus?
As far as I can see – which is not far – I’ll write fiction thrillers with a main character that can do interesting things for a half-dozen books or so. Then I’ll create another main character. I’ll use professional graphic designers for my book covers. I’ll submit my books to Amazon KDP and SmashWords as usual. I’ll make a couple of YouTube ads for each book. I’ll constantly be looking for ways to market my books and myself – my persona… the Mike Fook persona. I’ll continue commenting on popular writing sites and weird sites where I might find readers for my books. I’ll continue writing interesting stories at MikeFook.com. Though I haven’t yet, I’ll start swapping links with other writers writing in similar, parallel genres so we might share readers. I’ve had a number of writers contact me and want to chat about all sorts of things – and I just haven’t had time. I know I need to find time. I have come to understand I need to know what others are doing. I am so self-directed that often I isolate myself. I’ll open up more.
I’ll stop almost everything related to the other websites I have. They take a lot of time to maintain. ThailandeBooks.com, MikeFook.com, AimforAwesome.com, and Thaipulse.com/blog/ – these I’ll keep going, along with my wife’s JoysThaiFood.com. The rest can crash and burn. Writing is a full-time occupation, not part-time. I’ve tried in the past – and it’s impossible for me to focus my ADD/ADHD plagued mind unless I’ve wrapped myself in a cocoon of silence for five to ten hour blocks of time daily.
I like to price most of my books within reach of the masses, so most are at $2.99. Some of the shorter works are $.99. Kicking Life’s Ass! is $3.99 at the moment. On my own sites I have priced my wife’s Thai food cooking books at $39 and sold them, though not flying off the virtual shelf – they sold. We’ll not be doing any more recipe books. I’ll not be doing any more fiction books focused on Thailand – the market is too small.
One thing I’d like to be able to do is find a niche that I can own. It might be psychological thrillers, or it might be a new niche I create – so, nobody is there yet. This is where the big money can be had. Not Harry Potter money, but, great money and long-term income.
I hope you figure out what works for you and how you’re going to make it as a writer, and only a writer. Writing for a living can be tremendously rewarding. I know because I’m about one-third of the way there. I think within one year I’ll be two-thirds. Within two years I want to be making sick money writing sick things for sick readers.
Remember, this is me – a non-writer, writing and making a living from it. If you are just starting out – know that you can also make it work by jumping into the ebook game now while it is just getting started. If you are already an established writer – with or without published works, get going!
Cheers,
MF
MikeFook [{at]}gmail*com
www.MikeFook.com
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