Ah, Spring. A time for growth, renewal, and positive change. And spring cleaning.
My personal web presence at www.ejohnlove.com has been in play since 1998, and over the years, it has been the home of all of my online personal shrines and pet projects, not the least of these is “True Life”, my personal family memoirs project.
Creating Characters, and a world…
In 2002, during a particularly bleak period of unemployment, I reacted to my frustration and lack of control with a familiar and comfortable escape into fiction. However, instead of reading spy novels, comics or graphic novels, I began my first attempts at writing fiction. Scribbling in my notebook on the edge of my bed during the late nights and early morning hours, I created a cast of characters and a world through which I could tell stories that spoke about the events and values of my personal life.
I created a mythical family and friends – composites based upon real people. Jack Owen and his family, friends, his motel home, and his fictionalized Vancouver-Kingsway neighbourhood all resulted from this. After seven years, countless Starbucks runs, and seemingly endless paragraph-by-paragraph writing and editing sessions, my first novel, Owe Nothing, finally came into being in April 2009.
September through October of 2002 turned out to be an incredibly productive time for me. Not only then did I begin writing the first scenes of Owe Nothing, but I also developed basic outlines for many of the characters who appear in the novel, and a few who don’t. This burst of activity, seemingly automatic in nature, spurred further ideas for related stories, all of which could occur at different times within the same world as Owe Nothing. I was sketching out a new world inside my dog-eared, spiral-bound notebook.
My second novel, The Two Sisters (currently in progress towards a first draft), was originally sketched out as a short story outline in 2002. Not long after Owe Nothing launched online with Trafford in April 2009, I revisited my notes for Two Sisters and started trying to flesh out the story. It was around this time that I realized that I might actually have a second novel in me, and maybe even a third one after that. I realized that this fiction writing thing was starting to become a major preoccupation, and that perhaps I should consider developing it into more of an occupation.
Taking my book marketing to a new level…
In the first year since the publication of Owe Nothing, I’ve confined my marketing and sales efforts to anything I can accomplish online, particularly in some sort of semi-automatic manner. From this came a Facebook page, AdWords ads, one hundred Twitter tweets, and promoting and linking my old fiction page (http://fiction.ejohnlove.com) in directories, blogs and message boards all over the web. I tried a number of tactics. While these may have helped somewhat to get me web visitors, none of them seemed to result in any actual sales (if Trafford’s records are to be believed, anyway). I began to feel as if I were flailing around ineffectually, so I decided to find myself some good advice.
Nowadays, I’m taking counsel from a book marketing pro, and thinking more about the future of Jack Owen, the character, and of E. John Love, his official biographer. It has become the right time to move Jack and the “Owe Nothing Universe” off of my personal hobby site, and to develop a separate new web presence – one that gives Owe Nothing and any related stories the focuses they need and deserve.
It’s time…
