Who am I?

Today I'm posting from the RT Booklover's convention in Dallas, Texas. In the past couple of days I've danced at a number of parties, dressed in costumes, and attended several seminars on independent publishing. In general I've had a great time.

I've also introduced myself to a number of people I've never met before, which means I try to tell people who I am. They know I'm a writer because my badge says "published author" and I hand out promo cards that mention what books I've written. But is that all I am?

I am also:

A software engineer who works at a large company in Silicon Valley.

A wife and mother of two children who are now grown up.

An avid gamer who plays social games with people all over the world, many of whom are much younger than I am.

I love movies, good television, and books. Lots of books in lots of genres as I am a very wide reader. 

And that is only a part of who I am. I put a lot of me in all my books. My characters have been known to watch movies (albeit on a "holovid" rather than a DVD) and they make things that I have made myself. They play games and garden... I even have one character who is a romance author.

So that who I am. 

Who are you?

Cheers,

Janet Miller/Cricket Starr

Are conventions worth it?

Having returned last month from the RT Book Lovers convention in New Orleans, and finished entering my costs for the convention into my expense tracking software, I’m evaluating if and how much the convention has affected my sales.

The answer isn’t heartening.

I love conventions, particularly RT Book Lovers which is so much fun. I got to wear costumes, interact with readers, bond with my fellow authors, and in general have a great time. When you consider that I even missed one day of the convention due to illness (I picked up a nasty bug and ended up in bed all day Friday, only returning to the convention the next day for the book signing) and still consider the time I spent there a success in many ways.

But the cold hard facts are that going to a convention does not automatically result in the sale of additional books, at least not of books that have been released for some time.

I have a diagram here that demonstrates this:

This is hard data, the sales graph off of Kindle Digital Publishing for one of the titles that I promoted the most at the convention. About a third of the items I gave out had a business card of this book, and it's cover was the poster I used for my bin on promo lane which I suspect most of the attendees of the convention passed by at one time or another. So if any book should show a rise in sales due to exposure at the convention, it should be this one.

The convention period is shown as a rectangle placed over the graph. If conventioneers were so entranced by my cover or promotional material to buy the book you would expect to see a rise of sales during the convention or at least in the two to three weeks following... and it is true that Saturday was a pretty good day. But overall number of sales before and after the convention for that one title remains fairly flat. If my giveaways were generating additional sales, you would expect to see some change and there is none. The rest of my titles show the same thing... exposure at the convention shows no effect on sales.

Which is why I don’t look to this kind of convention to sell existing books. I might possibly do better by putting the money into Facebook ads where the immediacy of sales is possible. Viewer sees title, cover, and blurb that interest them... they click a button and the book downloads onto their phone. 

That’s the real way books sell these days.

So I don't really go to RT Book Lovers to sell books. I go because I have fun and if I didn’t when would I have a chance to wear a halo? And at these conventions I get a chance to interact with fellow authors in ways I rarely can online. People will tell you to your face things they won't say in an email and a lot of what I've learned has done me well later on.

As for sales? I do what I feel comfortable doing for give-aways and hope for the best. For those who went to the convention, did you see any rise in sales as a result? If so, what did you do at the convention that I didn't?

Cheers,

Janet

The Importance Of Being Cricket

Today’s blog post is about pen names and why people use them. Or at least it is why I use a pen name since I’m sure there are almost as many reasons for using pen names as there are people who have them. One reason might be that you don’t like your own name and want something snazzier, or maybe the name you have doesn’t fit in with what you write. For example if your name is Suzy Sunshine, you might not be taken seriously as a hard-core thriller writer. Much better to use a pen name like Susan Banyon.

By the way, I am making these names up. I don’t know a Suzy Sunshine or Susan Banyon, although I’m sure both these names exist and likely belong to lovely people. But I digress.

My honest-to-goodness real-life name is Janet Miller. I wasn’t born Janet Miller but since I took my husband’s name when I married a great number of years ago, most of my adult life I’ve been known by that name. And when I first started writing my nice little romance novels about people on space ships and vampires who kept companions as blood donors, I put my real name on the books. They had sex in them but not too much and I wanted everyone to know I was a writer.

And then I got laid off from my day job and after a worrying search, took a new job at a larger and potentially more conservative company. A few months after starting my new job I sold my first book to Ellora’s Cave, a prominent erotic romance publisher, where the small press authors were actually making money. And that led me to a dilemma. Did I dare put my easily findable name on erotic romance novels and risk my job?

Cricket's latest Hollywood
After Dark book

The answer was to pick a new name, something that would at least give me plausible deniability to anyone who felt I might be risking the reputation of the company with my sexier stories. And thus Cricket Starr was born. Cricket was the name we had for a pet guinea pig when I was a teenager, and Starr was from Brenda Starr, who was a comic page character, a glamorous and intrepid reporter. The name seemed to be right for my books, humorous and I hoped a little classy, and for a long time I sold very well under that name. I had a good audience, solid reviews, and more than a few awards for my Cricket Starr books. But outside of Ellora’s Cave, my name wasn’t as well known and when the bulk of sales moved from the publisher’s website to the online stores like Amazon and Barnes and Noble, my sales dropped off.

Recent books published under the Cricket Starr name haven’t done well at all. And this leaves me with a new dilemma. Do I continue to write erotic romance as Cricket Starr and hope that the name will eventually catch the public eye, or do I switch to a new erotic name? Do I even think that continuing to write erotic romance is a good idea since my non-erotic work is selling so much better?

But even if I do stop writing erotic romance, what do I do about the twenty-plus titles that currently have Cricket Starr’s name on them? Some actually are Janet Miller-style books, some sex but not erotic, that I never intended to be erotic romance novels. All Night Inn, Tasting Nightwalker Wine, and Christmas With Sarah are three examples. The author name was changed when the Cerridwen imprint was folded back into Ellora’s Cave. Those books I could switch back to Janet Miller books, and will if I ever get the rights back to them.

But the rest I did write as erotic books and to change the sex level would require rewriting the entire book. Not only do I not want to do that, I’m proud of those books as they are. They have sex, but they also have character development, unexpected plot twists, and a lot of humor, for all that they are erotic books. They’ve won awards, including two PRISM trophies as well as pins, plus Golden Angels, review site Top Picks, and a coveted four and a half star Top Pick from RT Book Lovers. There isn’t anything wrong with the books as they are. They are hot, sexy, fun-to-read erotic shorts, novellas, and novels.

So is it the name Cricket that is turning off prospective buyers? How does one figure something like that out and what to do if that is the case? 

Anyone have any ideas?

Cheers,

Janet Miller/Cricket Starr

Awards and free books

Today's post may seem a little disjointed but I have several cool things to talk about.

Now FREE at Amazon!

The first is that I have a book that's free today (Sunday, June 16). This is one of my older titles, Fangs For The Memories, which is part of my Hollywood After Dark vampire series. It's about a female vampire whose been in hiding for years until she's spotted by a man who not only knows who she is but has had a crush on her for years. When she runs out on him after a single night of near bliss, he chases her down and kidnaps her so that she's forced to listen to him.

It was a lot of fun to write and well received by the critics back when I wrote it, garnering several four and five star reviews, as well as being a Romantic Times Magazine Top Pick and nominee for their reviewers choice award. So if you haven't read it, pick it up for FREE.

Or if you are reading this on Monday you can still get it for the seriously low price of $1.49. How can you lose?

PRISM nominee for
Best Futuristic 2013

The other thing I wanted to talk about is my Samhain title Beloved Stranger, which is up for an award at this upcoming RWA Convention. I entered it into the FF&P PRISM contest (no relationship to the NSA program!) and it finalled about a month ago. I'm up against two other great books, The Marann by Christie Meierz, and Heart Secret by the amazing Robin Owens. This is terrific because even if I lose, I lost to one of these great writers, and there is no shame in that.

Plus I get a new pin for my badge and I love my little PRISM pins. I have nine of them already, and they are the coolest, shiniest things.

I'll be signing Beloved Stranger at the RWA convention as well, actual print copies! Samhain sent a few copies to me already and they are so nice looking, full trade-paperback sized books.

Free July 1st
for two weeks

The final thing I wanted to mention was that July 1st I have another story that will be free at ebook retailers everywhere. That is my story Darkpilot's Bride which is one of the six stories in the Ellora's Cavemen anthology: Legendary Tails 1.

As you can see from the cover, this book has some other great authors in it as well as me: Elizabeth Lapthorne, Lynn LaFleur, B.J. McCall, Callista Arman, and Charlotte Boyett-Compo. The stories were all great and we got a number of good reviews and awards.

My story was based on a joke I once made when the anthology was first announced. They said they particularly wanted stories with heavyset heroines, vampires, futuristic, and bondage, so I said I would write a story about a futuristic vampire who lands on a planet and finds the heavyset heroine tied to a tree.

I wrote it and it was accepted into the anthology. So now everyone can pick up a copy of this book when it goes free on Amazon, and all those other electronic book sellers. Be sure to check out the adventures of Dimitri, Josia, and Arthur, Dimitri's fussy computer.

That's all from me for this month. See you in July where I'll be posting from the RWA convention.

Cheers,

Janet Miller aka Cricket Starr

Series are an author’s best friend

I’ve written a number of series so far, four to be exact, and I love all of them. There are some that are more popular than others like the Gaian Story series which is science fiction romance about men who are looking for the woman that matches them to marry, and Hollywood After Dark, which is vampires and werewolves looking for their mates. But I’ve never been sorry to write a series.

The Girl In The Box - Free!

For one thing readers like series. If they like the world and the characters of a book, they want to read more about them. Even if the characters of the first book only show up as minor characters in a second one, I find that readers like to see how things are going for them. And sometimes a minor character in a book is so charismatic that they end up staring in a future book.

Why do I know this? Well, for one thing, I love to read series books myself. There are a number of authors whose books I read because I picked up a copy of one of them, and then proceeded to buy all of the books in the series before and after the book I read. I’ve also found that I tend to hear from readers about the books I write, particularly things like “when is so-and-so going to get their book?”

When you hear something like that, it is very hard to decide to write something else. After all, I want to make my readers happy.

However, there are some challenges to writing a series. For one thing when you are writing a series set in a particular world with continuing characters you have to keep the world constant. If you establish that someone is blond and blue-eyed in one book, they have to stay blond and blue-eyed in the next... unless you want to fit them with contacts and dye their hair. Age is harder to work around. A 100-year-old vampire can’t turn out to be 200 years old in the next book. This can lead to challenges when you have a series with as many books as I have. I bought a copy of Scrivener to see if I couldn’t keep track of things that way and in writing this last Gaian story it helped a lot. Now I have a common nomenclature for the electronic gismos in my world that I didn't have before.

How does everyone else track details of a world? Spreadsheets, word documents, or are there other writing tools people use? That’s a good topic for discussion. What do the other writers here use to keep their world details straight?

Cheers,

Janet Miller/Cricket Starr

NaNoWriMo update

It is the middle of November which means that I should be just about hitting the 25K mark on my WIP over at NaNoWriMo. And I am... just under 22 thousand words. Actually 21760 to be exact. So as you can see from the below graph I'm a bit behind.



The reason I'm behind is that for the past couple of days I've had some interrupts to my writing time (those are the red days). For example last night we went to the opera in San Francisco and that meant no writing in the evening after work. The day job keeps me from working on my manuscript during the day, and I'm also in rehearsal for The Nutcracker in which I'm playing both Grandmother in the first act and Mother Ginger in the second, so I have two sets of rehearsals to be at during the week and weekend. Tonight is Party Scene rehearsal so today may also be red. That's life during NaNoWriMo.

But this weekend I'm going to crack the whip and get caught back up again. I'm just about two days behind at this point but I've done this three times before and was able to come up from behind each time. The whole point of NaNo is to remind the writer that creating a novel isn't a sprint, it is a marathon and a bad day shouldn't take you out of the race.

I'm going to see if I can't get 500K words done before I head into work this morning and write some more this evening after rehearsal, and then write extra Saturday and Sunday to not only get to where I should have been, but even ahead so that when the Thanksgiving holiday hits I've got some breathing room.

If you want to follow my progress, my NaNo handle is janetmfoo and you can see my stats here:
The Girl Unboxed

The big question will be not when I get this book done but when I'll get it on the bookshelves over at Amazon, edited, formatted, and for sale. I'm hoping for just after Christmas so keep your fingers crossed. Mine will by typing madly away.

Cheers,
Janet/Cricket
WIP The Girl Unboxed
Falling in love was just the beginning of the story.

And the subject is Editors

It is Valentine’s Day and I get to demonstrate my love for some of the best people in my writing life... My editors!

I love editors. Maybe it is because I’ve had the privilege of working with some really great editors, and maybe it is because I know what happens when you don’t have an editor working with you, but the fact remains, I love editors.

An editor is often the first person to read something I’ve written. I don’t have critique buddies anymore, and when I submit something to one of my usual publishing houses, that is often the first time I get feedback on something I’ve been working my butt off on. So when they say they really like my work, I get that validation I’ve been looking for.

The other reason I love editors is that editors make my work better. I’m a better storyteller than I am a grammarian. I think I know where the commas go but I don’t always get them in the right place. Editors frequently do know these mysterious things. They also can point out things like your hero has neglected to tell the heroine how he feels about her anywhere in the book. Or in chapter five the heroine tells the hero she loves him, and then two chapters later is still questioning her feelings. Editors catch the boo-boos I tend to make.

Now don’t get me wrong. A good knowledgeable critique buddy can do the same thing, but it is the editor’s job to make your work as good as possible.

Also editors can advise on covers and on titles. Here we have the cover for my upcoming Gaian book, Beloved Stranger. This is the third version of the cover because while I liked the first version, there were changes my editor and I felt were needed. I love how they even got the wristbands my characters wear when they are married into the cover.

I have another editor who I just sold a new Hollywood After Dark book to, and she’s advised me to shorten the title to make it snappier. In thinking about it, that’s a good idea so I went with it.

By the time Beloved Stranger is out the door it will be a well-edited book with a great cover and should find an appreciative audience. And it will be because I had an editor on my side.

How about the rest of you? Can I get some more love for editors here? What do you love about editors?

My Latest Obsession

Not quite a month ago I got an email from one of my older publishers asking me what kind of promotion I was doing. Promotion? Not much at the moment. Why? I asked.

Well, because some of my old titles over at Amazon were selling quite a few more copies than they’d expected given how old the titles were.

I said, okay, that’s interesting and I checked it out and sure enough Promises To Keep, my first book in the Gaian series, was ranked around 1,200 over at Amazon. Even more, I was on a couple of best seller lists, including at number 11 on the Space Opera, just under one of Orson Scott Card’s Ender books, and above the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Okay, that’s just plain weird because I had no idea why a book I wrote in 2004 would be burning up the charts like that. It had good reviews, it had finaled in a published author’s contest but at its peak it never sold that well.

So I investigated a little more. First of all, it is the entry book to a series of four titles about a future time when a colony of Earth has gained its independence. Some of the titles take place during the war, some just after it ended. The premise is that some of the men from Gaia, the former colony, are desperate for wives so they start kidnapping women from Earth. You see unless a Gaian man finds a woman he matches he can’t have sex with anyone, so being guys they are pretty motivated to make that happen.

Add to it that Gaia has a shortage of women due to the destruction of one of their girl’s schools at the beginning of the war, so they have to look to Earth, even if the Earth’s military was responsible for the destruction.

This provides me with goals, motivations, and a lot of conflict for my characters since it is usually a guy from Gaia falling for a woman from Earth he might not otherwise want to be involved with. Also the guys tend to get very hot and bothered as soon as they meet the women, so it isn’t hard to add a sexual component, although I don’t write these books as sex romps the way I do some of my other books.

But these books have been out there for quite a while. The book Promises To Keep was published in 2004. Even with good, albeit older reviews on Amazon, it shouldn’t be outselling Hitchhiker’s guide.
So I have to make some guesses as to why that might be.

First there is the price of the first book: $2.99. That’s an interesting price point. Cheap enough so that people are tempted into looking at the book. The premise is interesting. Since most of the action takes place on the Gaian flagship “The Promise” I’ve sometimes referred to the book as “Mars Needs Women meets the Love Boat”. The cover is pretty good, a nice blue color and a half-naked hunk on the front. I think people are picking it up because there isn’t a lot of science fiction romance out there, the price is right, and the book shows as a recommendation when someone buys a similar book.

Which brings me to my latest obsession: Novelrank. Novelrank is a website that takes Amazon data and tracks it for different books, translating the data into approximate sales. If you are selling more than one book an hour, then their algorithm can miss some sales, but for books like mine, they claim to be pretty accurate. They update the data hourly as it comes in from the Amazon sales sites.

I’ve been following Promises To Keep for the past couple of weeks using Novelrank: http://www.novelrank.com/asin/B003XYEVIW as well as the other books in the Gaian world. Sales of the other books aren’t as good as the first book but for older titles they are respectable. Some of that might be that they are a dollar or two more than $2.99 and also some people will read the first book of a series and then not bother picking up the second or third or even fourth book.

But then there are the times I’ll see that there was a sale of all four titles in the same hour, and I just wonder. Did someone like my world so much they bought all four at the same time?

This makes me smile. You see, it isn’t really the money although when I get my next check I expect I’ll smile then as well. It is the thought that somewhere someone is reading my words and enjoying the world I built out of my head.

Next week on Wednesday I have chat to discuss the Gaian world on the NCP Network at 7PM EST. I'm looking forward to talking to people about my books.

RWA wants to know what I consider success? That’s success.

Janet Miller/Cricket Starr
http://www.cricketstarr.com

Too much TV, too little time.

A problem has arisen in recent years at my house that can be described as DVR disease. The problem is this:

1. I like to watch TV and have several shows that I follow.

2. I have a digital video recorder that I use to collect episodes of these shows so I can watch them when convenient.

3. Every once in a while I end up on vacation for more than a few days. While I'm gone my faithful DVR continues to collect the shows I like to watch.

The result is that I will come home to a DVR full of backed up shows... and now I'm two weeks or so out of sync with as many as two or three episodes of each series recorded. And of course I can't watch the most recent show until I'm caught up so by the time I finish off episodes of one series I can have as many as four episodes of another one queued up.

Hence the problem. How to deal with this and still get anything else done.

It isn't easy.

Sometimes I will make the decision that I don't like a show all that much. This is often when a show will slip off my "must watch" list, when I'm four episodes behind and can't find the time to catch up. I have to ask myself, just how much do I care about this program?

The good news is that eventually I will finish all outstanding episodes and have a nice clear DVR with only the most recent week's episodes waiting to be watched. And this state usually will last for quite a while...

Or until the next time I go out of town.

Cheers,
Janet/Cricket

Working through the writing doldrums

Lately it has been hard to get to work on my writing. Some of that is a matter of it being summer and feeling lazy. Some has been that sense of depression all writers get from time to time, that no one really cares about their work and it isn't going to sell anyway, or if it does find a publisher, no one will buy it, so why bother... and so on.

I'm pretty sure everyone reading this has felt this way from time to time. Oddly enough knowing that almost everyone goes through the same feelings doesn't really help that much. In most cases it is an irrational reaction and by definition that makes it hard to get rid of. But we have to get rid of it as soon as possible.

We can't let the doldrums bog us down and keep us from writing. If you need a break, take one, but remember it is just that, a break, and not a matter of quitting writing. 

I will get this latest WIP finished and sent off to my editor, and I will put together an outline for a new project for NaNoWriMo before the end of October. These are my goals for the next six weeks.

It will be done, one way or another.

What do other people do to drive themselves back to writing?

Celebrating a win

This month my blog entry is a celebration. For the second time I've won the FF&P Prism award for best Erotic paranormal book. My book Bad Dog and the Babe, a take-off on Lady and the Tramp, where a lady shifter teams up with a "bad dog" werewolf in Los Angeles to investigate the disappearance of her young sister and her boyfriend.

This is a picture of the award which is an engraved crystal pyramid. Because it is transparent it takes some doing to get a good image of it, but my hubby managed to get this one.

Obviously I'm very proud of the win, but really I was just happy to final in this contest. It is always nice to have your work recognized by your peers.

Of course coming home with a shiny trophy is also pretty cool. 

Cheers!
Janet Miller/Cricket Starr

Names, Branding, and Who The Heck Am I?

I was tempted by a number of different titles for this post. One of my favorites was “The Importance of being Cricket.” Another was “Janet doesn’t live here anymore.” A few weeks ago I had to make a decision about my writing name and whether I was going to continue to try to use my real name, Janet Miller, on my covers instead of my erotic penname Cricket Starr. With the change my erotic alter ego would become my main alter ego leaving the question: who am I anyway?

Jasmine-Jade Enterprises, under whose corporate umbrella Ellora’s Cave operates, decided last fall to no longer continue the Cerridwen imprint and instead fold all the non-erotic Cerridwen books into Ellora’s Cave as a line called Ellora’s Cave Blush. As a part of all this they wanted to consolidate my Hollywood after Dark series, some of which were Cricket books and others were Janet books so that there wouldn’t need to be two pages of books associated with that series.

So they asked me to move those books to the same writing name, that name being Cricket Starr. I decided I wanted to keep the Hollywood After Dark stories together, and since that would only leave one book, Christmas With Sarah, under the Janet name, re-authoring that story to be a Cricket book made sense. So now all but my books at New Concepts Publishing would be labeled Cricket Starr, and there would be some Cricket books that weren’t hot erotic romance.

So what to do? If Cricket books could also be non-erotic, did it make sense to continue using the name Janet Miller?

I decided the answer was to rebrand Cricket to be my main writing name regardless of the heat level of the book and gradually close out using Janet Miller on my covers. But how best to do this?

I started this by revamping my website, www.cricketstarr.com and redirecting all traffic from my other sites there. I had to convert Cricket from her hot and spicy persona to include books that were mild and even occasionally sweet. My husband had already decided that a short tag line under the name Cricket Starr was needed. This needed to be something that described my writing, mild, hot, and everything in between. Using the word Hot or Erotic would not work and since I write in so many genres it couldn’t be as specific as the “Visit the stars with SF Romance” tagline I’ve used in the past.

Often sexy, always bright, is what I came up with. Sexy works because it is a lighthearted word that can mean erotic or hot, but also works for books with less prolific sex. Bright is a play on my writing last name, the shooting star as my logo, and the fact that my books are a lighter kind of erotic work. There is a lot of humor in my stories, even the ones that have serious subject matter in them. I think the tagline reflects my writing better than anything I’ve come up with before.

With a new clean look that emphasizes my books and featuring a wonderful sorting and search mechanism, the new website’s branding is now appropriate for erotic and non-erotic Cricket books as well as the few books still under the Janet name. Instead of using half-naked men on the site, I use the book covers and blurbs to carry the message of what kind of story the book is.

So at the next RT and RWA conventions I’ll be handing out new business cards that simply say Cricket Starr, and gives my tagline and one and only website. It will be a little weird answering to the name Cricket but bigger authors than I have done that for years. 

Cheers,

Cricket Starr (aka Janet Miller)