Shameless Self Promotion

We live in an age of Facebook and Twitter where anyone who's anybody and most everybody who's a nobody are expected to keep people posted on everything they think, feel, touch, taste, see, or hear at all times. Well, I'm real bad at that. Why? Oh, I'm lazy. I mentioned that in another post I'm pretty sure.

You see, I'm generally too busy thinking, feeling, touching, tasting, seeing, and hearing things (like classic 80s music) and generally just laying around to be bothered posting about it. I'm mean, I used to think “Who cares what I think?”, but then I came to a realization: Nobody cares what anybody thinks.

Now, I know that's unfair generalization, but too bad. This is my blog and you probably don't care what I think anyway.

Those arguments aside, people still love to read about what other people are thinking, etc, etc, etc. Why is that? They're bored. Most of them are even close to as lazy as me. So, instead of going out and thinking, etc, things it's easier just to read about someone else doing it. Then if they just happen to accidentally think, etc, about something they can post about it and everyone will Like them. (Maybe even Favorite them.)

Don't get me wrong. I honestly think it's great as a general rule. I'm getting closer to 40 and by the time I'm done with the working day I certainly don't feel like thinking, etc. And I think it's a much healthier level of social interaction than: “How was work?” “Work sucks... Did you see the news?” “Yea, the news sucks...”

At least on Facebook you run into: “You're not going to believe what these kittens did!” I'm not that big a fan of kittens... Having an army of kids and an army of kittens and cats can do that to you... How many guys do you know with like eight kids and... I don't know eight or nine cats or something... that still likes kittens... You know a guy like that? He may be a better man than me... Either way, the kitten video is a better use of my time than watching the main stream news... So, I'm pro Facebook...

All this is getting a little far afield. On to the main point!

So, Shameless Self Promotion. This is something I really think you need if you're going to succeed as a minor celebrity now days. You have to have a social network to promote yourself. (And keep in mind that I raised 100K US on Kickstarter. So I have had some success in this area. When it comes to celebrity I'm the minor-iest.) People have to find you before they can decide whether or not your work is worth anything.

My writing is a perfect example of that. I know I can write. (All false modesty aside here, I can write. Much like I can code or network engineer. I've done it on a professional level. It's just one of the things I can do.) But if nobody else knows I can write what good does it do me? I can tell you very simply: No Good.

So, I have to promote myself. And man do I intend to. I've just got to get the ball rolling. And I've actually already started. I registered aaronjethrige.com just the other day. Soon you'll be able to go to a website that's all about me. What have I done worth putting together a web page over? Oh, lots of things. Just not everybody knows it. I've also got a new email address: me@aaronjethridge.com (How's that for self-promotion?)

I'll have to let you guys (and a lot of other people) know when I've got the website put together. It's really time to start building up my social network.

Wish me luck!

Put It In The Bank

In this post, which may well be a short one because I've been writing so much lately, I'm going to address another of my past mistakes.

Mistake #3: Throwing Away My Resources

Blackbeard: I did have a treasure. I had a big treasure. Lovely, I did. But I spent it all in one week. Among the flesh pots and gambling hells of Port Royal oh what a glorious week!

Steve Walker: Oh you know what you are? You are a total loss you're not even a respectable ghost! You're a phoney! A phoney!

Blackbeard's Ghost (1968)

So, I had a treasure once. Well, I didn't really, but I should have. I made plenty of money, I just threw it away as fast (or faster) than I got it. How? Well, mainly a dollar at a time. It was a long series of mistakes made over a long period of time. Why? I didn't know any better...

Sadly, I've got a certain amount of unhealthy pride. It's kept me from taking advice (from people that actually knew what they were talking about...) and it's kept me from studying subjects I didn't know anything about. Well, pride has lead me to poverty and I'm sick of it.

And that leads me to my next solution:

Fix #3: Saving What I Have

How do I do that? I have no idea... But I know the name of at least one guy that does: Dave Ramsey. I've decided that as soon as I can get my hands on any money I'm going to get one of his books and work through it. Once I do I'll try to come back here and let you all know how it went.

And that's it... I said it might be short...

Just Keep Typing

So, this post is going to be all about my writing career (what there is of it). I have finally decided that, though I may fail, I'm not going to just give up. And, as I've explained before, this blog is in support of that goal. It's a record of exactly what I've been doing.

Now, I tend to write these posts well in advance because I don't know what my schedule is going to be like or when I'm going to feel like doing what. However, I do plan to update them right before I post them so that my “News” is up to date.

So far, on the publishing front I've got two firm replies from literary agents. The replies? No thanks! Honestly though, it doesn't bother me. I have fifteen more queries out there and I honestly expect fifteen more “No thanks!” before I'm done.

I don't want you to think I'm being negative about my chances. I'm not. Not at all. I REALLY like my book. I don't care that I wrote it. I really, honestly, truly like it. I just don't expect to find an agent yet. Fantasy is flooded and all a publisher needs is an OK book in order to see sales. (At least imo.) The result is that there is far more supply than demand.

However, I really believe this is changing. I think self-publishing is going to change the entire dynamic between author and agent and publisher. And if I don't have an agent by the end of September I plan to self-publish and see what happens.

What am I doing in the mean time? Well, I'm writing. And I mean writing a lot. I've done a number of Facebook posts recently (long ones, all about Donald Trump of all things), I've written a few of these blog posts, and I've started my first sequel.

And I've discovered something: I LOVE writing sequels. So much of the world has already been built, your characters are already there, the overall plot is in place, you have SO MUCH to work with. You can just drop your characters in the universe with a certain aim and then watch them go do what they do. In some ways I feel more like a reader than the author. The way things unfold honestly surprises me sometimes.

Anyways, I've got the rough draft of the first four chapters “down on paper” already (and it only took eight days) and I've already started on chapter 5. If I can keep up the pace I'll finish well before the end of September.

What's the plan then? Well, I'll self-publish the first book and give it a couple of weeks to get some sales. Then I'll send out a bunch of query letters to all those people who just turned me down to let them know what kind of sales I've seen, what kind of reviews I've gotten, and that I have a sequel just looking for an agent.

Then I plan to “rinse and repeat”. Do I want to find an agent? Yes. I want to see what the difference is between going with an agent and self-publishing.

Time will tell whether or not I'll be able to do that...

Get Back To Work!

I want to open this post with a confession: I'm lazy.

It's not that I mean to be or that I know I'm being lazy when I am, it's just that I very often gravitate toward doing nothing when I'm not sure what to do.

As I mentioned in my first post, I plan to examine my past mistakes and discuss my planned solutions. So, in the spirit of that:

Mistake #2: Waiting For Something To Happen

Baldrick: I'm glad to say you won't be needing that pill, Mr. B.

Blackadder: Am I jumping the gun, Baldrick, or are the words "I have a cunning plan" marching with ill-deserved confidence in the direction of this conversation?

Baldrick: They certainly are.

Blackadder: Well, forgive me if I don't do a cartwheel of joy; your record in this department is hardly 100%. So what is it?

Baldrick: We do nothing...

Blackadder: Yup, it's another world-beater.

Baldrick: No, wait. We do nothing... until our heads have actually been cut off.

Blackadder: And then we... spring into action?

Black Adder the Third
Nob and Nobility (1987)

If my past actions (or lack thereof) are any indication then there is a good chance I would have gotten my head cut off in that episode. Baldrick's “We do nothing” suggestion would have really struck a cord with me. However, it took me a very long time to understand that about myself. Why did it take so long? Well, mainly because I'm always so busy...

You see, it's not really that I'm not doing anything, it's that I'm often not doing anything useful. I think a story would probably explain what I mean best.

Many years ago (the specifics don't really matter) I ran a very successful web-based business called Console Classix. (I still run it, in fact. However, the phrase “very successful” no longer applies.) It was making a fair amount of money and every month we made more money than we had the month before. This kept up for more than two years. At that point I decided I needed to do something to start making even more money.

So, what did I do? Did I invest in a new and improved website? Nope. Did I buy more games to build up our library? Nope. Did I start an advertising campaign to market our service to the general public? Nope. I built a house!

And I don't mean “I had a house built”. No, I mean that I (along with the other Console Classix staffers and even my Dad) built a giant house. It took roughly eleven months of often twelve hour days, but we got it built. Of course, it put me hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, but what difference did that make? I was going to make so much money building houses that the debt was actually going to make me money.

At the moment it's hard to look back at it and understand how I believed something so crazy, but I honestly did at the time. Well, the housing market collapsed and the long and short of it is that I lost my shirt. Plus, because Console Classix had been neglected for almost a year it started to go under. I had to let the staff go and could hardly make ends meet from month to month.

Although I had kept very busy working physically I hadn't been working where I should have been. At the time I thought I had learned my lesson. I hadn't finish what I had started with Console Classix. My mistake was taking my eyes off the prize. I planned not to do that again.

Sadly, that hadn't been my REAL mistake. The real mistake was not doing work where it needed to be done. I was to learn that later on...

My next project was a video game (which I've mentioned before) entitled Worlds of Magic. I was determined not to take my eyes off the prize this time. I threw myself into months of programming work and years (roughly three and a half) of designing, discussing, and generally working with the game. However, this wasn't a 40 hour a week job. Oh, some weeks I might work 60 hours. However, in the main, 2 hours was a much more normal week.

What did I do with all my “spare time”. Well, mainly I stared at the game. I kept my eyes on the prize. As month followed after month I sat there, not working, but watching. Refusing to look away. This was going to be the big one. This time I was finally going to hit it big because I had stuck with it.

So, what happened? Well, Worlds of Magic was released and did... well... we'll be nice and say “badly”. Why? Oh, a number of reasons that don't matter now. The point is that after waiting for years my hopes were not fulfilled.

Now, I readily admit that this could turn around at almost any moment. The game still has to come out on a number of different platforms and could still be a very real commercial success. In point of fact, it could still turn out to be a very lucrative use of my time! But that's not the point is it?!?!?!

The point is that I've wasted years waiting on something to happen. All this time I could have been using my skills to accomplish other things. And that is a mistake I don't plan to make again.

That leads us to:

Fix #2: Stay Busy Doing Things That Mater

When you work for yourself you have to almost pretend that you don't. (At least in my opinion.) Since I first started working for myself, over a decade ago, I have gotten up at 6AM to start the day, just as if I had a regular job. However, what I failed to do was put in a full working day, five days a week.

That's not to say that I necessarily believe you need to put in 40 hours a week every week. But if two or three days go by and you've got “nothing to do” then you better look over your assets and see which one you can put more time into.

Me for instance, I could have been building up a side business doing network engineering, or I could have been coding new Unity assets, or I could have been writing more novels. What did I choose to do instead? I filled my days with waiting for the day to end. Every day I wanted to be one day closer to my “Big success”.

Well, that was a mistake. A major mistake. It's one I'm now trying to rectify. In fact, this blog is part of that. If I don't have anything to post about it means I haven't been doing enough. So the time I spend on this blog isn't wasted at all. It gives me something I really need right now: Accountability.

And that is something almost every self employed person needs at one time or another. :)

Getting Published

So, one of the assets I have at my disposal, as I mentioned in my last post, is: I am an amateur novelist (I've written two unpublished novels).

Finally, after many years of simply sitting on my manuscripts and not doing much of anything with them, I made the decision to get them published. One way or the other. What prompted this decision? A number of factors really.

First off, my dear wife Rachel finally finished reading my second novel, a fantasy entitled The Stars of Areon (it only took her around four years to get around to it), and told me that the entire first chapter was incredibly dull, slow, uninteresting, pick-your-own-word, but once you finally plow through to chapter two it really hits the gas and that the sum total of it was that the book was great. (Minus the first chapter, of course, which will henceforth be known as “Prolog”.)

Now, for some men this might not mean much. My wife, however, is rarely impressed with anything I do. Don't get me wrong, she loves me very much and is very willing to bear me a new child every couple of years or so, she's just not overly impressed with my work on the whole. For instance, if I were to give her the moon she would likely say something like: “Couldn't move it any closer to the Earth eh? Oh well, I guess we'll just have to spend a week in a tiny little space capsule if we ever want to visit it. Still, chin up, you did your best...” (← That's an exaggeration... not a huge one... but it is an exaggeration...)

So, when she used the word “great” and told me that she “loved” my characters I knew I had something. Many of my friends and family had already told me the same, but when I knew that Rachel was sold on it I really knew I had written a book worth reading.

The second reason for setting my sights on getting published is the fact that financially I've reached a very low ebb. In point of fact, it might be the lowest ebb I've ever reached since Rachel and I got married. In my last post I mentioned that I had always been working to get rich. I also made it clear that I was now working to make a living. Why the change? Well, getting rich simply wasn't working and lately it's made even making a living difficult. I'll go into more about my business failures later, but for now it's enough to know that I'm “skint”. Because of this, even a rather small amount of money from a published book would be very welcome.

My third reason is that self publishing has become much easier and it puts the author in the driver's seat. My video game (Worlds of Magic) was published on Steam after going through the “greenlite” process. It was effectively “self-published” and, in spite of a disastrous launch, has sold around 13k copies since we put it up for sale. Now, for a video game on the scale of WoM that is a failure. However, if I sold even 10k of my first novel I would be very happy at this point. I feel certain that publishing the book on Amazon.com for $0.99 would get me that many sales. So, I can publish myself if I want to and see what happens.

That having been said, on Rachel's recommendation, I am currently looking for an agent. I bought the 2015 Novel & Short Stories Writer's Market from Amazon.com and dug through it looking for agents that might be interested in my book. I contacted seventeen different agents. Most of them will get back with you in two to six weeks. So, by the end of September I should know whether or not I'm going to get an agent. If I don't I plan to self-publish. Whichever way it falls out I should have something interesting to share.

Now, I'm certainly not counting on a single self-published novel to pull me out of the financial mess I'm in. I have a lot more irons in the fire and some of them are nice and hot. I just decided to go ahead and mention the book because I've already sent query letters to so many agents.

In the coming posts I'll discuss some of the other things I'm doing with my current assets and exactly what the results have been.

Past Mistakes

“A Buck At A Time” is a very appropriate title for this blog. That's because I've reached a point in my life where I'm just trying to make (you guessed it) a buck at a time. You see for a long time... Actually, let me back up and start at the beginning.

My name is Aaron Jeremiah Ethridge. I was born and raised in South Carolina, USA. I've been married for over eighteen years, I have seven biological children, a basically-adopted son, and another one on the way. And since I was about fifteen years old I've been working trying to get rich in a variety of ways. Why is any of this of interest to you? Well, it may not be. Then again, it just might be. It all depends on how you got here and why you've come.

You see, I intend for this blog to be a record of what I've done to try to make a living and what success (or failure) I've run into. Should I succeed it might help you do the same. Should I fail you might learn from my mistakes. In either case it could prove entertaining and I want to keep a record of all this for myself anyway. It's very important to try to learn from your past mistakes.

Actually, “Past Mistakes” may end up being one of the regular subjects on this blog. Of course, if I were to just dive in and start talking about all my past mistakes (in business alone) it could end up being a full length book, so I had better divide it up into small doses. I'll also try to tell you what I plan to do about it. Then I'll be able to compare what I've done with what I'm doing and gauge the success of each change scientifically.

And I suppose this would be as good a time as any to get on with it!

Mistake #1: Trying To Work With What You Don't Have

Bill: Ted, while I agree that, in time, our band will be most triumphant. The truth is, Wyld Stallyns will never be a super band until we have Eddie Van Halen on guitar.

Ted: Yes, Bill. But, I do not believe we will get Eddie Van Halen until we have a triumphant video.

Bill: Ted, it's pointless to have a triumphant video before we even have decent instruments.

Ted: Well, how can we have decent instruments when we don't really even know how to play?

Bill: That is why we NEED Eddie Van Halen!

Ted: And THAT is why we need a triumphant video.

Bill, Ted: EXCELLENT!

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)

Although building plans around making use of things that you don't have might seem comical, people do it all the time. I, myself, personally, do it constantly. I could give you a long list of examples, but for now I'll just ask you to trust me about it. Until very recently I incessantly said things like “Once I get BLANK I'll be able to BLANK and that will lead to BLANK.” Well, that amounts to: BLANKETY BLANK BLANK!

It is VERY important, in fact, I would say it is imperative to look at your real resources before you make plans about your future. Up until now I've almost always counted my chickens before they hatched. I've learned the hard way that you just can't do that. There's no such thing as a “sure thing”.

That leads us to:

Fix #1: List Your Available Resources So You'll Know What You Do Have To Work With

What are my resources? Well, I'm kindof a Jack-of-all-Trades. And I don't mean that in a great way. I know enough to make a living at a number of different jobs that I don't want to do. I don't know enough about any of them to end up at the top of the pile in them. Still, at the moment that's basically all I've got. So, I might as well just list it out:

My Current Worldly Resources:
I'm a video game designer (credited... and I own the IP)
I can program in C++/C#/PHP
I'm a certified Network Engineer (MCSE, CNE, CCNA, all way out of date)
I am an amateur novelist (I've written two unpublished novels)
I can code websites that other people design
I can do computer hardware diag and repair
I have contacts that can publish any game I make on Steam
I have contacts that are able to get me some freelance networking work

That's basically what I've got that I can currently make a living with. (Yep I'm down to basically no material resources. I don't have any money, any property to pawn, or anything like that. I do have a bunch of debt, but that's not really a resource and we'll get into that later.) You'll notice that I left out any spiritual resources. It's not that I don't believe that I have them (and I certainly do), it's just that when compiling a list like this I think it's important to look at it from the physical point of view. Spiritual resources will manifest themselves in ways that are hard to predict and even difficult to understand sometimes.

In any event, that's what I've got at the moment. So, what do I plan to do with it. Well, we'll get to that soon. For now the fact that I've got the list is enough. I'm planning to work with what I've got, not with what I don't got.

And that, in my mind, is step #1!