Todd D. Utley's Blog

I have been very silent and absent from my writing efforts over the last year. It was a rough one in my business and my personal life. Family issues and then the rather unexpected death of my Father was a real knock down. My Dad came to my shop nearly every day during the summer months and helped me with accounting and sometimes even packing up parts. We ate lunch together, had coffee in the morning together. Sometimes we would take off early on a Friday to play golf. It was a good time. He and my Mother went south for the winters over the last five years so I'm glad for that and I am certainly blessed among all five of the siblings to have had so much quality time with him before he passed. Glioblastoma brain tumor got him in about 2-1/2 months. Way to fast to say goodbye. So I'm finally back to writing again and should have the second book in the series wrapped up soon.

The last few months I have been so busy with my daily life and my small business that I have not had any time to read or write. I don't like that but the fact is us wanna be big time authors must make a living while we wait and dream for our big break in this tough business. I will get back to it when I can but sometimes our need to make a living takes the drivers seat by storm. Stay tuned for more insight on my progress or possibly lack there of. Either way hopefully there will eventually be some content here in this blog that will be somewhat useful to others.

My most recent efforts are in the marketing area again. I have now added Smashwords to my efforts. This is because Smashwords like Goodreads puts a lot of focus on helping new authors and authors that don't mind making their works free. It's important to get your name out there in order to build your brand. Smashwords has some nice programs to do that. Another one is bookbub. I believe Smashwords will distribute my book to several other entities like that but I will have to do some checking to see if that actually happens. The next big advantage of using Smashwords and Goodreads and Bookbub, is that they will allow you to list it as free. Amazon doesn't mind you doing this so long as you are not enrolled in KDP Select. That program requires you to agree to Amazons exclusivity rules so that you can't sell int anywhere else for less. So I removed my original Restoration from the KDP Select program after it's last 90 day cycle. Now it's still on Amazon but just not in that particular program. I also have the Patriotic version of the book up on Amazon still so that covers my presence there pretty well and I can still do the 5 days free on Amazon for that version of the book. The Partriotic version only has a few differences in the text and it has some teaser chapters for book 2 Revenge in the back. It also sports a collectors edition Patriotic cover. So now that my book Restoration is free on smashwords and will soon be free on Goodreads and others like Kobo and Bookbub, Amazon will most likely allow a price match on their site to free as well. That is my goal, Permafree of the first book in the series. If I can give away a million free copies of book 1 then maybe if I'm lucky about twenty percent of those readers will come back at some point and pay anywhere from 0.99 to 3.99 for book two. At least that's the idea. Happy reading!

I have begun the price pulsing technique outlined in the book "Let's Get Visible". The idea is to make your book that you are promoting very low priced. This helps to get sales but you don't make much on your royalties at 99 cents. However you are giving up profit for exposure. Increased sales drives your book up in the rankings and so you get higher up in search results within your genre. Once you are higher up your sales should increase more moving you even higher. Once this happens you must try to calculate the exact right time to increase your price. Hopefully you do so at the peak in your rankings with lots of good reviews and now you have increased your book price to lets say 2.99. So now your sales start to slump a little do to the price increase but your making a nice profit margin in the mean time. Again you must strategically know when to decrease the price back down. The ideal time is when your book ranking has been slipping down for a few weeks but still selling some. It will take a few cycles of this to get the hang of it but anyway that's the general idea.

I am a new author and I thought it would be nice if an author started a blog when he or she was a complete no-body (such as myself) and attempted a run at being quite sucessful. It would be nice to have someone show you the path they took to the top (or hopefully somewhere near there). Any way I am starting this blog so that people can watch either my progression or my failure to progress, whichever is my fate. I currently have two books on amazon and they are... "Plain Truth" and "Restoration". If you are an author or want to be, then follow me and see where this goes. I had help from Author Matthew Mather and so I am paying it forward to others. Feel free to ask questions about how I got this far and where I intend to go from here.