Cancer Updates and Blog

This is just a taste of the gorgeous, expanding art gallery for The Tale of Eaglefriend Books that you’ll find for free, open to the public, on facebook.com/AuthorCLMurray and instagram.com/authorclmurray

It’s been 3 years now since this photo was taken, when I let my cancer complications pile up to almost the very last minute. Since that day, I spent a total of 10 weeks in the hospital, trained myself to walk miles a day after the blood clot in my left leg initially made me bunnyhop from the couch to the kitchen, and the brain tumor plus radiation played some sneaky tricks with the right half of my body. I typed up a will for my Cuz-bro here to execute (including the publication of a Book 4 outline on my FB page so none of you kind people would be left hanging). Happy to say that document will keep collecting cyber dust on my hard drive. I published Books 2 & 3, have majorly improved my book selling game, and have got the completion of my Epic Fantasy series well underway. In fact, it looks like I don’t even have cancer anymore, just the aftermath of those 2 cycles of brain tumor radiation—a situation which will continue to improve. Thanks big time to everyone for your warm support.

CLM

So you just finished Eaglebreaker.

Excited to see the promise of new epic adventures in the third cover like you got in the first two?

Maybe even want to read the first few chapters early?

CLICK HERE for your first look!

Where were we? In my last big personal post a few months after my 11/1/18 diagnosis, I wrote that I suspected I might need a few more rounds of easy outpatient chemo and then I’d be done with treatment. Fuck I was cute back then.

I ended up being transferred to a doctor who heads the entire oncology bone marrow transplant program in San Diego, and damn lucky for me, because this guy tackles the disease way harder than the teams I dealt with previously. The week-long treatment he started me on back in April required me to stay in the hospital, and when I got out I couldn’t stop puking through the debut of Game of Thrones’ final season (still not sure the chemo was to blame though, hohomaan).

Anyway … after a couple rounds of that, they told me the cancer was reduced enough that they could start the process that really obliterates all the malignant leftovers. To do this, they’d have to hook me up to a machine that extracts millions of stem cells from my blood, enough for two transplants that would occur during two separate months in the hospital, to rebuild my bone marrow after high-dose chemo destroys it.

In the weeks of preparation that stretched from late July to early August, I started to feel like I was finally beating this bastard, training my bloodclot-filled leg to push through a couple miles a day, then five, then seven. Then, for the four days leading up to my date with the extraction machine, they gave me shots that boost your bone marrow’s production of white cells so they’d be sure to collect the amount they needed for my future transplants. They told me these shots might cause bone discomfort, so I just wrote off the tingly throbbing throughout my upper body that hit me a few hours after each injection.

Finally, I went on the machine for a planned four-hour session, and the first three hours were uneventful while this medical marvel rapidly circulated all the blood in my body, taking only what it needed and giving the rest back to me. During the home stretch, though, a light tickle in the right side of my forehead quickly became what felt like an electric current pulsing through the entire right half of my body, which throbbed uncontrollably with that same tingly sensation the shots had given me, only with 100x intensity. After the nurse slowed down the machine, the throbbing eventually stopped, and I shrugged it off while the process resumed. A half-hour later, the same problem hit me again, and this time it felt like I was going to lose my ability to breathe, until they turned off the machine and I came to feel mostly normal again. They gave me an MRI and kept me in the hospital that night, and the doctor told me the following day that I had two cancerous tumors in the left side of my brain, which impacts the right side of the body.

A few days later, I finally finished writing Chapter 16 (out of 18) of Book 2, the biggest and most climactic of the book. It was the chapter I’d started nine months earlier when I’d been coughing up blood and having fevers for three weeks, just before my initial cancer diagnosis. A few hours after putting the final touches on this chapter that I’d made so dauntingly spectacular in my mind for years, I met with a neurosurgeon who told me that what I’d experienced on the machine were seizures, and that our best course of action was to hit both the tumors with radiation. This was put on hold a day later, though, when I had another seizure at home, followed by two more at the ER. I came out of the hospital two days later up to my eyeballs in seizure meds and steroids for brain swelling, and found out those latest seizures were due to one of the brain tumors hemorrhaging to twice its original size.

After waiting a few tense days for the neurosurgeon to draw up a new radiation plan that could contain the ticking time bomb in my head, I finished Chapter 17. The next day, I started the final chapter and got my radiation, which surprisingly felt like nothing (seems to have seared a permanent bald strip onto me though). One more seizure hit me the next day (8/22), and after upping my seizure meds, I’m happy to say almost three months later that it was my last one. The day after that, just about three years from the date I’d started it, I finished Book 2.

Giving the book to my trusted beta readers and getting their constructive feedback really helped me pass the time from that point on, especially when my doctor had me on so many steroids I could only sleep from around 6pm-10pm. There’s something really magical about watching the movie Rounders in the middle of the night for like a solid two weeks, but I digress. During the month I spent in the hospital recently, I kept my mind occupied mainly by outlining Books 3 and 4 of my series, and have the first six (and last four) chapters of Book 3 pretty solidly developed. The high-dose chemo, which somewhat melted the plastic tubing that transferred it into my body, knocked out my energy for a few weeks, but I’m close to my normal self again and ready to face my next (hopefully final) chemo around Xmas, which happens to be when Book 2 comes out 🙂 I may end up needing physical brain surgery to permanently eliminate those bitchy tumors and the seizure risks they pose, but that’s down the road quite a bit, and I have a lot of happy stops along the way.

One of my biggest fears in all of this came from following the progress of a few other authors who cranked out their whole series way faster than I ever could, and so many reviews for their second books read something like: “I loved the first book and couldn’t wait for the sequel, and I was so disappointed …” I’m happy to say that my beta readers and a few lovely fans are unanimous that people who liked Book 1 will enjoy the hell out of Book 2, and I’m very optimistic that I can deliver Book 3 much more quickly now that my obstacles are starting to fall away.

I want to thank all the readers out there who picked up my first book, even the handful who told me to go eff myself afterward. No hard feelings. Plenty more where that came from. Btw, if anyone needs to get a hold of me in the next few weeks, I’ll be watching and re-watching the new season of Rick and Morty. Like you weren’t gonna do the same…

Say hi on my Facebook pg

I started coughing up blood every day last October. It began as just an annoying dry cough right after I’d slightly choked on a wasabi-slathered dumpling. I was sure my little culinary mishap had caused some kind of inflammation that led to bronchitis, and, having no insurance, I tried to just tough it out even as regular fevers accompanied the problem. The knifing pains that grew worse in my lower abdomen and back were just a result of the strain the cough was putting on my muscles, I kept telling myself.

Finally, after three weeks of wishing this would clear up on its own, I went to Urgent Care on Nov 1 and was swiftly diagnosed with testicular cancer that had spread to my liver and lungs. The doctor was quick to reassure me that this type of cancer is very treatable with an extremely high survival rate, and I drove home accepting the completed puzzle whose little pieces I’d been ignoring since long before that bitch of a cough set in.

I spent the next few days discovering my luck was so much better than I’d realized, getting insurance through Covered California (Thanks Obama!) and persuading the fine people who work for San Diego County to expedite my coverage so I wouldn’t have to wait till the New Year to start treatment. Turns out their timing was excellent as my left leg started feeling like it had a 30-pound weight strapped to it when I walked, then quickly became sore, swollen, purplish, and barely able to get me around the house.

One week after my diagnosis, I was finally able to see the oncologist I’d been referred to, who breezed through our consultation and sent me for an ultrasound that revealed the cancer had caused a major blood clot extending through my leg into my abdomen. The oncologist didn’t feel like talking about it afterward, but he left some cute pills at the front desk.

Anyway, while seeing few alternatives to weeks of waiting for this or that scan before treatment could begin thanks to this fuckduster fellow, I was again super fortunate to be seen by a urologist who took all of two minutes to assess my situation and tell me, “You need to be in the hospital right now, Asshole.” To which I replied, “All right, Clammy Hands.”

He called his connections at the adjacent ER, where I was promptly admitted and hospitalized for six days. The staff at Scripps Memorial Encinitas were wonderful, and during a week when I would have otherwise been twiddling my thumbs waiting for one minor step toward treatment, they wasted no time knocking out every barrier between me and the lifesaving care I needed. An MRI showed that my brain was clear of tumors, and other procedures found that the blood clot had traveled through my heart and set up shop in my lungs with the cancer. I ditched that first oncologist and went with the team at cCare whose expertise AND compassion are abundantly clear. The hospital administered my first week of chemo, and it was way easier to tolerate than I’d anticipated.

It’s been three months now since I got out of the hospital, and I’ve been giving myself two shots in the stomach a day ever since to keep my blood from turning to cottage cheese. The leg is much easier to walk on but still balloons up with little provocation, and I won’t be reliving my glory days of running miles on the beach anytime soon. Chemo Cycle 4 is near the end (I think somewhere around the start of Cycle 2 is when I woke up with my hair falling out and decided to Walter White that shit). Just about every time I go for treatment I’m reminded that my situation is a damn walk in the park compared to other patients’ hellish illnesses and side effects that I’ve managed to avoid. My mom, cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends have all provided unique antidotes to the poison, and I hope to give back many times over.

A CT Scan in mid December showed that the cancer and clots in my lungs and abdomen are significantly reduced, and another on March 1 will determine whether I still need chemo. I suspect a few more cycles will be in order, which will be a breeze like the last couple. I’m looking at another two or three slightly inconvenient months, and then I’ll turn 30 at the beginning of my new normal–when I publish my second book and see life-improving profits from my successful advertising strategy born from several failed ones.

This next part will probably be more relevant to those in the publishing game trying to improve their sales, but might still be a fun read for everyone. Don’t be a dick.

I published my first novel, an epic fantasy, three years ago, and became obsessed with the idea of selling enough copies of it to pay my bills every month. Holy shit did that not work out, but it led me to find that it actually could with just two books in a series. I started by paying some “social media guru” to blast my book’s link to thousands of Twitter followers several times a day, which is a really obnoxious and ineffective way to market. A sizable portion of these people are likely not even interested in the genre you’ve written, and most of those who are might look at the post a second longer than others, while the select few who click it probably won’t buy it.

Then, over the ensuing couple years, I focused more time and money than I care to admit on Amazon Ads, Facebook Ads, and BookBub Ads. You need to be careful with these, because they can easily draw you into a state that’s essentially gambling addiction. They each provide this magic machine at your fingertips into which you can put x dollars and sometimes get back more than x, which brings on an intoxicating endorphin buzz that makes you disregard the more frequent cases where you lose your fucking shirt because you really don’t know what you’re doing.

That was the negative overall experience I had with pay-per-click advertising on Amazon and Facebook. Despite a few rare days or even weeks where my return on investment came near enough to my ad spend that sequel sales could theoretically overtake that margin, there was no combination of sales price, pitch, and audience that produced a scaleable, reliable business model built on just two books. I did however collect enough positive results to do well on those platforms when my series is at least three books strong. BookBub, in my experience, is the gold mine that can bring in consequential monthly profits with just two books.

BookBub is the biggest book advertising platform in the world, with millions of subscribers who have signed up to receive a daily e-mail about discounted ebooks in their preferred genres. One significant thing that sets it apart from Amazon and Facebook is that 100% of the people on that platform already want to be sold books. That’s the only reason they’re there, so they’re not nearly as “cold” as the customers you’ve tried to entice on other sites. Most authors and publishers know about the coveted BookBub Featured Deal, for which hundreds apply every day and only a handful get selected. If you’re fortunate enough to have your book selected for this promotion, which I was once, you’ll see a few months’ worth of sales over the span of just a couple glorious days.

Authors who’ve written a series will often promote their first book this way at a price of 99c-$2.99, and then make serious bank from hundreds of full-priced sequel sales. BUT, you can only do this for a particular book once every six months, and there’s no guarantee it’ll be selected a second time. As exhilarating as it was to see my debut epic fantasy rank above A Game of Thrones on Amazon’s Epic Fantasy Bestseller list for a few hours, I’d happily settle for a more permanent spot a few dozen rungs down the ladder.

Here’s what today’s BookBub e-mail for Fantasy looks like on my iPhone:

 

Front and center is Masks and Shadows, today’s Featured Deal, a promo that cost the publisher $1,200 to hit the inboxes of 1.8 million subscribers interested in Fantasy (would cost about $700 if the book were 99c). Beneath all the platform links for that, you’ll see another ad for a different book from a different author. THIS chunk of real estate is the gold mine I’m talking about if you’re an author looking to earn a profit that actually makes a difference in your life consistently every month. It’s a spot you can grab not once every six months, but every single day.

The way the bidding system works, you can attach your ad to the bottom of a Featured Deal e-mail for around $6-8 per every 1,000 unique recipients, and do it on a large enough daily scale to spend easily $100 a day and see enough sales to make it worth that investment, if you target and pitch proficiently. I was surprised to see that this book advertised at the lower half is selling really well, because my data shows that such a vague pitch made to the entire Fantasy audience fares poorly. I doubt this ad could bring in a positive return on investment with just one or even two sequels to sell. This book is however the first in a series of five, and maybe the publisher’s got several other marketing avenues in play.

You’ll get the best results by being surgical in your audience targeting, and BookBub lets you do just that by providing the option to select fans of specific authors rather than broad genres. Find semi-popular authors of books comparable to yours, use Photoshop or canva.com to tailor your ads to convince those readers that if they love that writer, then your book is precisely their cup of tea, sell your book for 99c, and you’ll acquire dozens of new customers per day at a reasonable cost.

I don’t love selling a book I put my heart and soul into for 99c, but I’m ecstatic about the opportunity to make a grand or two a month off of my art, and this is the only approach I’ve found that allows for a meaningful profit margin from just two books to offer. Repeatedly seeing that no such margin remained after the cost of pitching my $5.99 Book 1 to those few willing to pay that (fair) price, I realized that if I could sell Book 1 at 99c for a customer acquisition cost around $2, and 65-70% of those people bought Book 2 for $4.99 or $5.99, then I was in the money.

Say I spent $100 on a day’s ads to sell 50 copies of Book 1 at 99c a pop. My cut of each sale is 35c, which amounts to $17.50. But then say 35 of those 50 customers go on to buy Book 2 for $5.99, for which my cut is $4.10. That amounts to $143.50, and added to $17.50 I’ve made $161 off of one day’s investment of $100. It sure as hell isn’t much, but I’d be over the moon to just press a few keys and collect $60 a day or $1,800 a month from two books that are done while I write the third.

On the cold, unforgiving landscape of Goodreads, Book 1’s 415 ratings show that 90% of readers at least “liked it,” and 70% either “really liked it” or “loved it,” so I don’t think it’s aiming too high to think that if Book 2 were available today, 70% of those buying Book 1 would eventually move on to the sequel. With that reasoning in mind, I found five popular authors with large fan bases on BookBub and was successful in making 1 99c sale for about every $2 spent, easily getting between 40 and 50 sales per day with extra gravy trickling in from subscribers to Kindle Unlimited (basically Netflix for books).

After focusing the better part of two years on building a well-oiled book-selling machine that I can run like clockwork every day while I write more books, I’m as close as I think I’ll ever get. I’ve tested it thoroughly enough to know that it’s reliable on any given day, and now all the equation needs to be complete is Book 2. I was just starting the final three chapters when I got my diagnosis, and trading a hospital bed for the writer’s chair feels a bit daunting, but good.

I spent my 20s turning away from several paths I was urged to take, ones that could have offered much-needed comfort and stability, trying instead to figure out how to build a life on work that shares the best and brightest of me with the world. I can’t believe how fast my 30s have come along, but if I can start them in that bright patch I always envisioned just over that next hill, maybe I won’t let them go by so quickly.

I spent half my life writing one book. Got the idea for it at thirteen, published it at twenty-six. Sure, a couple distractions got in the way during that time: puberty, high school, a bit of college, a day job doing manual labor that put hair on my chest, an obsessive routine of HIGHLY amateur dumbbell curling, booze, 2 years spent querying literary agents, booze. And now after finally unleashing my debut Fantasy on the world, with the release of its sequel a few months out, I’m so glad that I broke my way into indie publishing and have seen data-based potential for the sustainable career I’ve always wanted. Here are some little nuggets of wisdom and experience I’ve gathered on my journey so far.

Invest in a high quality editor and cover designer to make the best possible first impression

No matter how long you spent finishing that first draft or how many dozens of times you’ve polished it on your own, front to back, IT’S NOT READY! Most of those rejections I accumulated occurred when my manuscript was 40,000 words heavier than the final product that I published. After doing a Writer’s Digest workshop with one literary agent, I realized I could substantially trim the book down and still keep it all intact. I went line by line to chisel the substance out of the murk, and after a few months had it down from 130,000 words to around 89,000, and still it was far from done.

Beta readers are an invaluable resource to help you make your work consumable, but that’s still not enough. After all those brave souls have sunk their teeth into your under-cooked work, hire a professional editor and a cover designer who can help you publish the best version of your work right from the start; don’t try to sell a salad of grammatical awkwardness wrapped in a middle school collage project. Even if you plan to publish a majorly improved 2nd Edition later on when you have more funds, you will have fed a sour apple to so many prospective fans that you’ll lose credibility and appeal. I found my editor, Karen Conlin, through some very well-respected indie authors on Google Plus writing communities. It turns out that she edits for a couple other authors who signed with the award-winning audiobook publisher that picked up my series, too. And the book designers at Damonza have produced beautiful covers for my series that have been worth every penny.

If you only have one book out, KDP Select is probably the way to go

Selling exclusively through Amazon has been much more profitable than my brief stint with wider distribution, because in addition to sales, subscribers to Kindle Unlimited have read more than half a million pages of my book over the last 6 months. What Amazon pays you for that varies a bit each month, but it usually appears close to half a cent per page.

Join online communities and enter your book in a few contests

It’s common for newbie authors to bombard every social media community they find with daily pleas to GET MY BOOK NOW. Free advertising is tempting for sure, but that kind of shameless self-promotion usually disgruntles A LOT more people than it attracts. I was certainly guilty of it for the first several months that my book was live, and sometimes I’ll do a scaled-down version of it if my book is free or highly discounted for a few days. There’s a lot more value in building a friendly relationship with the readers in those communities, and giving as much as you hope to get in return.

If you’re an Indie Fantasy author, check out Mark Lawrence’s annual Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off. This year’s contest is near its end, and the link will take you to the 10 finalists that have gotten a lot of well-deserved publicity. Being involved in that contest was a great experience for me, and I got a nice review plus some badass author friends out of it. Get the announcement about this year’s winner and next year’s application period on Twitter: #SPFBO

Hiring “social media gurus” to plaster your book link all over Twitter/Facebook is like paying someone to hurl a basketball from the opposite end of the court

There are paid services that do the dirty work for you, and send out the same tweet ten times a day to their “hundred-thousand followers.” I blew a decent amount of money on one of those at first, and even though the staff were highly courteous and responsive, I’m convinced that I never came close to getting a return on my investment. A fraction of the people who see those social media posts are interested in your genre; a fraction of those in your genre will be motivated by your post to look at your book on Amazon, and a fraction of those that you’ve just spent money to attract will care enough to shell out their own cash. But if you’re advertising your book directly on Amazon, almost everyone who sees your ad is already looking to buy something; they’re not as “cold” as potential customers on Twitter or FB.

Amazon ads can be extremely effective, but can also drain your bank account with lightning speed if you’re not careful. Low Cost/High Yield is achievable through trial and error

I invested about $4,000 testing 4 different ad pitches against 5 audience targets over the course of a couple months, and was able to isolate several specific combinations of pitch and target that are profitable. It’s challenging enough just to create ads that break even, but through trial and error you can really elevate your sales and income with Amazon marketing. My Product Display ads with a Cost Per Click Bid of around 20c and a monthly budget of $400 often result in an actual Cost Per Click of 2c-5c and monthly expenditure of far less than the maximum I set. They’ve been way more successful for me than Sponsored ads, which have always been a competitive cash drain in my experience.

It took about 4 months to recoup my investment and start making a profit, and even though it was a long haul I now have a handful of ads that consistently bring in more revenue than they consume. I go more in depth about my advertising experiments in a couple other posts that you’ll see in the margin, but here are a few pro tips that could have saved me a lot of dough when I was starting out:

• Create several pitches that concisely capture the essence of your book’s appeal so that you can test them on relevant audience targets
• Pick just 1 audience target per ad to determine which specific pairings of pitch and target are most successful, and weed out the ones that attract people who are interested enough to click (at your expense) but won’t close the deal
• Start with a CPC bid of 20c and a monthly budget of $200-$400 per ad, and be sure to select the “Spread Campaign Evenly” option instead of “Run As Quickly As Possible.” This approach I’ve found spends less per day than the max you allow
• Check your stats and Billing History every day so you know how much you’re spending, but remember that it often takes several days for stats to start showing up. While your spreadsheet may look bleak, your ads are likely running and your Billing History will show your accumulating tab. I’ve terminated ads and then kicked myself hard after seeing great sales stats show up a week later, which is why you should always Pause instead of Terminate if you’re nervous

I recently did a free giveaway and didn’t have any ads running for several weeks, and my sales took a dive as a result. Now I’ve just started a new set of ads that promote my ebook and audiobook with one pitch that mentions three of the bestselling Fantasy titles by the same audio publisher. The pitch is essentially:

Hey, you know these three Fantasy books that everyone and their mother are reading? Well my book got picked up by the same audiobook publisher that picked those up. It’s the hottest new thing! 

The most promising of those ads is one that only appears on the Amazon pages of the other Fantasy titles that my audiobook publisher picked up. It brought in 2 sales with just the first 3 clicks, which I’ve never seen before. With my most successful ads before now, the ratio of click to buy was about 40 or 50 to 1, so I’m hoping that trend continues past Week 1.

Beware of Data Pollution

I first heard that term in a great interview that author Chris Fox gave on the Self Publishing Podcast, another wonderful resource for authors, and he warned that shouting about your new book from the rooftops and getting all your friends and family to buy it right away might actually hurt you more than it helps. Amazon analyzes all your customers to find what other purchases they have in common, so that it can then recommend your book to lots of other people who also bought those same titles. But if all your customers have nothing in common but you, then Amazon gets confused and leaves you stranded to find customers on your own. This is why specifically targeted advertising is so valuable, because it can gain you hundreds of customers who buy many of the same books and give Amazon the data it needs to help more of the right people discover your work.

Your sales might skyrocket unexpectedly. It will be confusing and awesome, and can be soul-crushingly temporary

After several months of increasing success with Amazon ads, my sales abruptly shot through the roof in mid January of this year, and the marketing on my end accounted for less than half of that. For the ensuing three weeks, my one book was bringing in more than enough money for me to live on, and I was planning which city I should relocate to so my new life as a full time author could begin. Then, after those 3 glorious weeks, sales dipped down to their normal level and left me scratching my head about just what the hell had happened.

All the people who got new Kindles for Christmas could have contributed a bit to that surge, and perhaps Amazon in all its wisdom threw my book into one of its popular mailers. Though it definitely stung to find out that it wasn’t a long term situation, the fact that it happened at all and could happen again is very encouraging. The most important thing I can do is continue my well-targeted, low cost/high yield advertising, build a mailing list (yeah, that cool box that popped up and asked for your e-mail address gets you a front row seat to all the wonders I have in store for the reading public), and of course…

Take some key advice from the great publishing minds at Sterling and Stone: WRITE, PUBLISH, REPEAT

I’ll be releasing the sequel to A Facet for the Gem this September, and if just my two books bring in the average amount of revenue that Book 1 has made over the last few months, I’ll be earning as much from them as I’ve ever made at my day job. Then I can support myself doing what brings out the best I have to offer, which has been the dream all along. And all the kind readers who continue to come forward help me keep that dream alive.