Devil’s Hand sales numbers: Dec 2011

Posted: 18th December 2011 by M. E. Patterson in Self-Publishing, Writing
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A quick glimpse at my December, 2011 sales figures for Devil’s Hand:

  • approx. 1500+ copies sold since August 1 release
  • I almost never have a 0-sales day. Usually sell at least 2 copies each day, some days a bunch more, especially when someone does a blog post mentioning me or whatever.
  • 45 reviews on Amazon, mostly five stars
  • something like 80% Kindle, 10% Nook, 10% paperback (guessing because I’m too lazy to go count the actual figures)
  • DH was in the top 50 of Kindle Occult/Horror for about 3 months, dropped off recently as I’ve been doing less promoting while finishing up book two
  • recently have started seeing more and more multi-copy orders showing up on BookScan from random indie bookstores/online sellers in various parts of the country. i get a tiny royalty on those ‘extended channels’ but it seems to indicate people out there are interested enough to ask their local store to get some copies. (Bookpeople in Austin, TX is already carrying it on both Local Author and Horror shelves)

From what I hear, this is all pretty damn good compared to most self-pubbed books, but it’s certainly not quitting-your-day-job revenue. But then, it’s also less than 6 months on market.

I’m hoping to see a significant sales bump when the second book releases in the spring.

Devil’s Hand is on Blog Tour!

Posted: 22nd October 2011 by M. E. Patterson in Coding
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Just a reminder to all my fans and interested folks that my supernatural thriller, Devil’s Hand, is currently on blog tour through November. What the heck does that mean, you ask? Well, it means that various reading/writing blogs, book review blogs, and blogs supporting the world of literature will be hosting reviews, interviews, and a couple giveaways!

Check out my tour schedule here.

Listening to the Man in Black

Posted: 8th October 2011 by M. E. Patterson in Writing
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JohnnyCash1969In another blog post, I talk about looking for your next door muse – finding that activity or source that inspires and seeds and stretches your brain with new and fascinating ideas. But, in my writing experience, there’s lots more that you can do to put your head in the right space to generate badass fiction. And one of the big things for me has been music.

Now, I’ll admit that some days I find music distracting and have to turn it off and write in silence. For whatever reason, this often seems more conducive to generating the quiet, carefully-plotted creepy scenes. It’s hard to concoct a moment where the protagonist is beset upon by silent, lurking shadows when you’ve got Lady Gaga blasting in the background.

But when the moment’s right and the scene is right, the perfect music accompaniment can draw out more nuanced emotion, more complicated behavior, and sometimes a surprise left turn when you were expecting the character to go right. It’s almost as though the characters themselves can hear the soundtrack, and respond accordingly.

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How I Sold 100 eBooks in 13 Days

Posted: 17th September 2011 by M. E. Patterson in Self-Publishing, Writing
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On August 1st, I officially launched my debut supernatural thriller, Devil’s Hand, on Kindle, Nook, and in paperback. First month sales were consistent, but small, maybe 1 or 2 a day, sometimes 3 on a good day. That was before I really did any serious promoting outside of an email sent to my mailing list of friends and interested folk, and some Facebook-ing.

In the month of September, I have now sold well over 100 copies of the e-book this month alone. I crossed the 100 mark on the 13th. For the month of September, Devil’s Hand’s worst Amazon rank was #20,910 for one day…it’s been better than 20k for every other day, and it cracked #10,000 for 3 days, once reaching #38 in Horror/Occult. All with a book that’s less than 2 full months on the market.

I know a lot of you are probably asking, “How?”

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Self-publishing is business. Act like an entrepreneur.

Posted: 31st August 2011 by M. E. Patterson in Writing
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If you’re thinking about taking the exit off the Bigpublisher Highway and heading into Selfpublishingville, I have a couple of tips that I’ve picked up from my visit so far. In general, I think these are fairly universal, but hey, your mileage may vary.

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Writing, Marketing, Programming, Designing

Posted: 22nd August 2011 by M. E. Patterson in Coding, Writing
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So I have a confession to make: I do more than just write software. I know! Gasp, right? I’ll bet no one was expecting that! Yeah, well it’s true. Per my previous post, I’m also a (now published) author, a marketer-of-sorts, and in addition to programming, I’m also reasonably well-versed in design. I’ve designed more websites than I can count, I did all the cover art for my book, did the PDF layout for the actual printed book cover, did the interior book typography and layout, all the way down to deciding how to format the chapter headings and whether or not to put italics on the page numbers at the top right/left of each page. Ta da!

Lest this turn into a self-promoting, self-congratulating garbage post, I should probably get to the point why I’m listing all this: To succeed in today’s digital world, I believe you need to learn to do more than one thing. Hit the jump for more…

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Check out my supernatural thriller!

Posted: 28th July 2011 by M. E. Patterson in Coding
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Devil's Hand : a supernatural thrillerIt’s a bit of a departure from my normal subjects on this blog, but I wrote a book and would love if it readers gave it a try (and passed the word along!)

It’s a supernatural thriller about demons, angels, poker, and armageddon, set in Las Vegas. If you like Tim Powers or Dean Koontz, you’ll probably dig this.

It’s only $2.99 for e-readers. $11.95 if you want a for-reals paperback.

ebook for Kindle/Kindle App: http://amzn.to/dhkindle
ebook for Nook: http://bit.ly/dhnook
paperback: http://amzn.to/qxQEgw

And if you buy it, read it, and like it, please drop by Amazon and give it a quick review. Every review helps get it more exposure to readers that might not otherwise ever hear about the novel. Thanks!

SQL/NoSQL Debate? Why?

Posted: 27th May 2011 by M. E. Patterson in Coding
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Short post here. I’m tired of hearing about the SQL/NoSQL “debate.” Seriously. I don’t really understand why there’s a need to stake out territory and then start a war over techno-ideologies.

In my opinion, this debate is like having a debate about cars vs. pickup trucks. There are valid pros/cons to buying cars and valid pros/cons to buying pickup trucks. In fact, it’s totally valid for one person to own both a car and a pickup truck! Gasp! I know, it’s mind-blowing!

I’ll add that, as a proponent of MongoDB, I definitely think the right NoSQL database is a better solution in many ways for much of the web-app databasing that was previously handled by relational DBs. But my saying that in no way indicates that I think SQL is dead, relational is dead, or anything of that sort. This is a classic ‘right tools for the job’ discussion.

If there’s any debate at all, maybe it’s around what, specifically, the best use cases are for each type of database, but I’d prefer that we stop referring to that as a debate and instead just see it as an ongoing evolution and discussion. Creating conflict where there doesn’t need to be any solves nothing and makes us all look bad.

Basic Linux Server Hardening

Posted: 18th February 2011 by M. E. Patterson in Coding
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Some excellent tools and tricks to consider when hardening the security on your Linux server, mostly listed here for my own benefit later:

  • Linux Malware Detector on a daily scan
  • mod_security for Apache
  • moving /tmp to a non-executable partition
  • daily scan with ClamAV’s clamscan utility
  • moving SSH to a nonstandard port
  • removing the ability for root to login through SSH
  • (even better) making SSH auth-key-based only, so no user/password logins at all!

This setup will at the very least harden your server against the bulk of irritating script-based assaults.  There’s lots more that can (and should) be done, but I’m starting to think that most of the things I’ve just listed are required nowadays (certainly the SSH ones are).

Mongoid + Carrierwave + Virus scanning!

Posted: 30th December 2010 by M. E. Patterson in Coding
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Ever wanted to have your app virus-scan uploads BEFORE you attach them to a model?  My app needed to do exactly that — I didn’t want some bozo uploading a virus-laden Word doc and then distributing to all the agents that log in to the site.  So I set to work… I thought this was a fun little implementation that I pulled off with relatively little code.

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