Sales of my novel have ceratinly slowed — only 307 copies this year — but that still allows me to donate $100, which my employeer (Dell Technologies) again generously matched. So the total is $200 for the year, which brings the total to $2,500. 

If your’re curious, the other half of the money I collect goes to marketing, advertising to be precise. I have a very modest spend of about about $6 or $7 a month for pay per click advertising with Amazon. 

Not a huge donation, but more than I thought my little book would ever do, and happy to help. 

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Sales of my novella of been good. The story is about young men in combat during the Vietnam War, and how they live with themselves and each other years later. As I promised, I am donating half of what I collect from sales to organizations that help our veterans.

With a match from my employer, today I’ve been able to donate another $500. Last time I donated $150 to the Wounded Warrior Project. This time I have donated to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Foundation.

I have now donated a total of $650.

Without the match, that is $400 from my book sales. And if I say so myself, that is pretty damn good for a first book priced at $1.49, of which I only get ~$.52 a copy.

For a detailed explanation as to why I’m doing this, read what you can see at the “Look Inside” feature of the book on Amazon.

The reviews have been strong (4.6 “stars” after 37 reviews), and it has made it into the top 10 of four of Amazon’s bestseller lists worldwide (two of which are pretty obscure, I have to admit), and the top 100 of about ten bestseller lists.

Separately, my book has also been #1 out of more than 5,000 titles when you search on “Kindle Store: Vietnam War” for many weeks. It is still in the top 20 on that list a year after I published it.

When you search on “Books: Vietnam War” at Amazon, over 81,000 titles come up. My little book is hanging on in the top 10 of this list as well.

More importantly: $650. That helps. But let’s not stop here.

You can help me raise more money for veterans organizations by buying and reviewing a copy of Youth In Asia. The review part is especially important. If you buy a copy I’ll continue to pass on about $.26 to an org that helps veterans. But a review of the book can help drive more sales because it will inspire other people to buy a copy and raise even more money.

You can also give a copy as a gift to someone who would enjoy it. When you go to the Amazon sales page, on the right-hand side you’ll see the option to do so as highlighted below. It is easy to do.

This has been a heck of a year in many ways for me and my family, many of which have nothing to do with writing. However, writing and publishing my first novel has been a life-long dream, and extremely scary.

I was terrified that it was not going to be well received. I feared that the story would be ridiculed or the writing would be criticized. Neither happened. In fact, the opposite has been true. I owe my wife and editor and my anonymous reviewers at WWW.CritiqueCircle.COM a huge thank you for all the help getting the story to where it is.

And thank you to everyone who has purchased a copy and reviewed it. The fact that this little story is generating money for veterans in need is also exciting and rewarding because it is important that we give back, and we did that together.

Separately, next week I’ll post a blog about what I learned from a publishing perspective. It has been an amazing education, and I’ve done more than a few things wrong…

The post Keeping my promise: Donating another $500 to help our Veterans appeared first on Writing Lives...lots of them...all the time...day and night...awake and asleep...I can't control it....

So this was cool… Last night one of my 12-year olds asked me what was my favorite book when I was her age. I told her Dune. The other book I thought of, though I was a bit older than 12 when I read it, was one of the few books I’ve read several times. It was Leon Uris’ Battle Cry. It is the story of Uris as a young man in the Marine Corps in some of the most vicious fighting in the Pacific during WWII. Though the book rambles a bit and is a bit choppy, I was deeply impressed by his depiction of coming of age in combat. I was also engaged by how he showed the development of the unit. A bunch of young men became an unrelenting fighting force.

My Vietnam War novella is small in size and stature compared to Battle Cry, but my story is also about young men coming of age in battle. In some ways, I’m sure, my novel is a product of Battle Cry and many other stories and life events.

For those of you who don’t remember him, Leon Uris was one of the big names of fiction in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. His books consistently hit the New York Times Bestseller lists and were made into movies.

I never imagined I’d see my first novel side-by-side with his on Amazon’s bestseller list, but it happened today.

My book has been drifting up in sales again, and I had noticed it had cracked the top 100 of military fiction. I don’t believe it has ever done that before. When I checked on it, I saw it’s position beside Battle Cry, and I took the attached screenshot. It was a heart-stopping moment seeing the two side-by-side.

So if I’m in the top 100 of a best seller list, I’m selling a lot of books, right?

Well…it’s good news, but we’re not talking thousands of books a day. In fact, we are talking about five. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy about that, and it is an improvement. To be honest, I’m not sure exactly what is driving the ramp in sales. My sales had been trending down in October after a good August and September. For those two months, I averaged sales of about four books a day. Not sure what happened in October, but it was more like two and a half books a day.

So what changed in November? A couple things, but not sure any of them were significant, and some of them should have decreased my sales. For one thing, I stopped the $1 a day advertising I had been doing via Bing. I had gotten a coupon for $100, which I had doled out over 90 days. When I exhausted the coupon, I stopped the ads. I think they were helping a little bit — maybe one book a day — but hard to say with precision. In any event, I ended the advertising at the start of November.

Another thing I did was change the price. In August and September, I had some success after increasing the price to $2.99 a few times. Unfortunately, the initial pop in sales died after a few days. I still don’t understand why I got an initial increase, but when I tried it a third time, the magic was gone; sales flatlined.

In October I tried changing the price yet again, only this time I went for $1.99. Sales died immediately. …back to $0.99.

I also tried giving it away for 3 days. About 400 copies were downloaded. I had hoped the freebies would generate some reviews. Nothing so far.

Losing confidence there was anything left to do, and my book was coming to the end of its best days of sales, I tried two more things. First, I changed the price to $1.49. Second, I tweaked the keywords a few more times. Boom! Sales ramped and have stuck at about five a day.

I’m perplexed. I’m not sure that a few keyword changes made that big of a difference in the flow of traffic (which is what keywords are about). And I’m not sure that increasing the price should have had much of a positive effect, either.

I do now have over 30 positive reviews, which is helping. However, I still don’t have a clear understanding of why sales have ramped up as they have.  No matter how I got here, it was stunning to see my novel side-by-side with one of the most treasured books from my youth. Battle Cry indeed!

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Hey everyone. Wanted to let you know that I have just released a video trailer for my novel of the Vietnam War. Titled Youth In Asia, you can read more about it here. Obviously the intent is to help market my book. So give it a  look and let me know what you think and if you think it will help promote my novel. Thanks! Allen

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