Another Year

Looking back at this year that is quickly coming to an end, I'm trying to stay focused and positive about the things we've accomplished on our big list of goals. I've had a rough time getting as many of my own ideas rolling as I'd hoped this year but we have done more than I realize, and especially for Megan's goals with her books. For personal reference, here is a list of things we did do in 2014.


We visited Moloka'i:
We stayed about 4 days if my memory is correct. We were on the West coast of the island and while it was pretty and serene, it wasn't as beautiful as the East coast of the island. If we ever go back, we'd like to stay on the other side.

The island is tiny. I think the actual population of the island as of 2014 was < 5,000 people. You could drive for 15 minutes and not even see another car. The hills were green and rolling on both sides and through the middle.

It was a place we'd like to visit again, and we'd love to live there to completely relax for 3 to 6 months but we both agree it wouldn't be a place we'd want to live forever. There's only a couple of stores, a handful of restaurants and two gas stations on the whole island. Prices were even higher there than O'ahu and they only had delivery to the island once a week. If you were out of something and the store was out - you were just gonna have to wait and hope you ran out the day before delivery.


Visited Hawai'i (Big Island):
We got to stay here for 7 days in Kailua-Kona, on the West coast. We were surprised at how big this island really is compared to O'ahu. There was something about this island to me that was actually extremely interesting. Maybe the idea of being on an active volcano is just fun.

Megan wasn't crazy about this island... she was okay with a few spots in the Northern area around Wiamea and on the East coast in Hilo.

We did go to the actual Volcano and check it out but I was disappointed that they keep you so far away. There was apparently lava flow during our visit that was causing the ground to be unstable and many of the trails and paths around the crater were closed. Maybe if we go back some day it would be open and allow us a bit closer. I also read you could find local people to give you access but that it was still illegal.

We climbed up on a waterfall here. This was fun. Kind of scary but exciting at the same time. Spent a fair amount of time driving around and just sight-seeing. Crawled through a lava tube and got some interesting pictures.

We drove up to the observatory store/base point but didn't go prepared (in either time or gear) to do the walk to the top where the actual telescope and such lives. It was something like a 10 hour round trip hike - but definitely something to do next time.

I went deep sea fishing with Frank and Steve. We were out on the water at I think 5 am, and stayed until around noon. We didn't catch anything, except a couple of little bait fish. Skipjack Tuna and a little baby Yellowfin Tuna. It was interesting being out there fishing and seeing the island from afar along with all the other fishing boats. Kinda made me want to quit computers and just live a simple fisherman's life. haha. We cooked the fish that night and made some fresh Poke. Both of them were awesome good.

I'd definitely live on this island for an extended period of time if I could convince the Wife to give it a shot. But from everything we've heard I have a feeling we're much more likely to end up on Mau'i or Kaua'i.

Books Completed
We did make a fair amount of progress on our books and publishing. While I gave up on the full service publishing company idea, I've decided to use it more for specific book related needs such as Cover Design. Editing, Proofreading, eBook Formatting and other such tasks. Here's a list of eBooks we've created or help publish in some way in 2014 under J&M Publishing:

Creepy Little Dolls (Parrish Gore)
The Harvest Moon Feast (Parrish Gore) - Also available in Paperback.

Temptation Vacation (Elizabeth Red)
Stranger on Aisle Four (Elizabeth Red)
Bus Stop Stranger (Elizabeth Red)
The Girl in the Woods (Elizabeth Red)

Ellie & Eli: Be Yourself (Megan Moxon) - Also available in Paperback.

The Ellie & Eli series is finally underway. It was ready to go exactly one year to the day from when we first had the original idea. Both Megan and I, as well as Eric, feel this has strong potential to become successful if we keep pushing and releasing the books we have planned. We have a list of at least 18 book titles to go and hope to have two more finished by the end of December (Ellie & Eli: Bedtime) and beginning of January (Ellie & Eli: Differences). The last two are already available for pre-order on Amazon.com.

On a somewhat related but random note: Nearly three years after I released my first eBook, Slumber Bucket, I had a random purchase of the book and got a 5-star review. The book itself was really just a learning experiment for me to get the hang of things with the eBook publishing process. I put the book together in about a week using my personal blog of dreams that I'd written down over the past year or two prior. I'm not gonna lie, it did give me a bit of a warm and fuzzy feeling to have the one silly review and it actually kept me from deleting the book from Amazon. Is it time for Slumber Bucket 2? It might just be...

Websites and Social Media

Over the course of the whole year, I spent a fair amount of time preparing many of the other aspects of this while book publishing thing. It's easy to forget the little changes here and there and this list isn't comprehensive but as a personal note, here are some of the things we did get going:

Ellie & Eli Website
Ellie & Eli Facebook
Ellie & Eli Twitter
The thing we're most excited about this year is the Ellie & Eli series getting underway. I spent some time putting together the foundation for the series. I went back and fourth for months about the art style to use, but in the end I decided to go with a dead simple approach. It seems to be preferred over the other styles I worked with by both Eric and Megan so I hope it works out in the long run.
There isn't much to show on the Twitter so far but the Facebook page has a little bit of information on the current book and the upcoming titles. The website is a basic site and needs a lot of work, but it is at least up and running. Have lots of plans for this series and the website so by the end of this year there should be more progress.

Elizabeth Red Website
Elizabeth Red Facebook 
Elizabeth Red Twitter
Elizabeth Red GoodReads
I spent quite a bit of time creating these four outlets for marketing and promotion of the books. There is also some marketing in place within each of the eBooks and the website that links through to Affiliate Marketing to generate some residual income.

Abused, Broken & Healed Website*
Abused, Broken & Healed Facebook*
This idea never really saw the actual light of day, but we did put some time and energy into getting it started. The original idea was to create a book of stories from people who have gone through domestic violence and found a way to break free of the bad situation and are now thriving. It was meant to encourage others and motivate them to make a positive change in their lives.
In an effort to give value to the Facebook page beyond just trying to get book sales, I spent a great deal of time creating motivational image/quotes. I created something around 50 or 60 of them and setting them up to post at various times. We still get a couple of new pages likes each week, but we haven't posted in quite some time.
The reason we dropped the idea is that we couldn't get any traction with people sending in the stories. We tried the same approach as we had with Paranormal America, where we posted hundreds of ads in cities all over the United States asking for contributions to the book. We had so many responses to Craigslist ads posted in this same manner for Paranormal America that we were sure this would fill a 200-300 page book nearly overnight. The problem was in a change to Craigslist that caused nearly every ad we posted to be flagged as spam. We couldn't figure out the issue and only received a handful of responses. We tried to promote the Facebook and get interest that way, but it also failed. People were either unwilling to share or Facebook isn't the way to go for that sort of content.

*The website will expire sometime in 2015 and unless something magic happens that brings us interest, we'll just let it go. However, the Facebook page will remain since there are 540+ followers of the page and I spent a fair amount of time taking pictures and editing together the motivational quotes for the page. 

Paranormal America Facebook Marketing
For the record, I spent a lot of time with the now-expired website, tweaking it and such. I also redid the cover of the book twice over the year to try and get better results. It does seem that the updated eBook cover (which is currently different from the Paperback) has helped generate a few sales here and there. However, the final cover of the Paperback version hasn't made any difference in sales (we haven't sold a Paperback copy in probably 6+ months) but personally I think it looks a lot better and fits the theme of the book. :)
We've decided that this book will remain online forever and generate whatever it may, but we've officially decided to stop putting any more effort into promoting it further. However, we didn't come to this conclusion until nearly October of 2014. After much time and some more advertising money, we've just been unable to get this book to really take off like we'd hoped.
At some point we may drop the price to $0.99 but after all the time and energy spent we might just leave it as it is to get what we can from the effort.


Miscellaneous Notes
Over the last year I did setup a few odds and ends toward my own goals. I got a developer account setup for both the Google Play Store and Amazon Developers. Earlier in the year I did some reading and learning about the SDK's for achievements, though to be honest I'll have to learn it all over once I really get going.

I have also written down many of my game ideas in Google Drive and tried to be more organized with my thoughts in that regard. I've taken the time to scan in quite a few images of concepts I've had and add them to this same collection for future reference.

I did start working on a game for Android called "Ghost Tap" which was for learning the Android SDK and LibGDX Framework. A simple version of this is currently installed on my phone and was working but other projects and life (namely the trip to Big Island) got in the way. Once we returned, I had to focus on other day-to-day things and this fell through the cracks.

Hopefully with brother Slice here now, 2015 will be The Year of the Game.

Writing Advice

Really interesting information here.

Story Starts

Here's a list of ideas I've had lately about book ideas... some of them might be more non-fiction than fiction starting points, but figured I'd add them all here for future reference:

"The Day We Met Earth"
Story written from the perspective of another life form finding Earth, meeting us and what they learn from us; what we learn from them. Similarities and differences.

"Purpose"
The idea with this one is to have a first person narrative explaining each of their past lives in retrospect. The twist and ultimate point being that they lived multiple times, each time accomplishing different things in life but never feeling they accomplished their true purpose. The end result being that they learned many things, many cultures, many ideas but always missed the simple purpose: Have fun and enjoy life.

"Ghost Kids"
The basic idea is to have a group of kids that are mischievously haunting their parents. Thinking this would be more comical than serious, of course. Maybe sneak in some sappy love beyond the grave stuff.

"Insight Into Insanity"
The basic idea here is to have all the thoughts of a psychopath documented over a lifetime. The twist is that these thoughts actually come from regular everyday people who happen to think the same things but never act on them. The insight is that we're all a little insane.

"Dark Paradise"
Write about the real vs. perceived problems with living in Hawaii. The pros and cons and things we've learned along the way.

"Negative Jesus"
Write about the things religious people tend to do that now drive me crazy. Why so much negativity and judgement, etc.

"Simple Life in Paradise"
Write about all the things people use in their daily lives that can easily be discarded to simplify life and make it possible to live in a place like Hawaii.

"Today, Tomorrow"
Write about the best way to prioritize your daily goals that mixes in long term goals for long term success.

"Big Goals: Little Steps"
Write about how to combine many different small ideas to create a larger picture of financial success over time -- ultimately leading to freedom to explore the world and not work at all.

Random Thoughts
"Life is the ongoing memory of what just happened."
"Religion is fear disguised as love."
"Never ignore an interesting thought... if it piques your interest it's worth writing down."

Brainstorm and Record

Let's record a bunch of ideas... just quick thoughts to expand on later. Stories for anything.

Marketing

Plan to learn as much marketing and advertising as I can in 2014. Must be able to spread the word on books and get sales for customers in a predictable way to encourage them to use the services.

The ability to send out weekly or at least monthly tips for spreading their book around and build up a list of emails will be vital.

Big Objectives

The big picture for me is getting some businesses running and pushing toward having more books and other digital products for sale. I want to create sustainable income, passively.

I want to create a game before the end of 2014 - which is a long, broad goal, but something I'm very disappointed with in myself from 2013.

I want to push forward with J&M Publishing as well as Web development until it is possible to focus less and less on programming.

I want to create the Ellie and Eli series and website - products, items, etc. Create as much of a splash as we can over the year and see this turn into a brand of its own.