Slightly Off the Mark

Free E-Book, Again

Read An E-book Week is here! While I know it's no Arbor Day, it does afford us an opportunity to ... well, read an e-book. I don't know who invents these things, but on Smashwords a free e-book sale runs from March 2nd to March 8th.

I don't know if reading a print book is banned during this period. It's not a legal holiday, so probably not. However, the advantage is that you could get a free e-book from me and a whole lot of other people, from this Smashwords link:

https://www.smashwords.com/shelves/promos

This is the third time in a year Smashwords has had a similar promotion, but it's never a bad time to fill up the reading device of your choice--especially if you fill it with Coming Attractions, the only book of mine that's up on Smashwords. (Other than the two anthologies I have stories in.) The link to Coming Attractions, which you can get on various formats, is here:

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

The links to the two anthologies, also free, are here:

The Very True Legends of Ol' Man Wickleberry and his Demise - Ink Slingers' Anthlogy

Strange Portals - Ink Slingers' Fantasy/Horror Anthology

There's still plenty of bad weather yet to come, so grab the beverage of your choice, build a nest on the couch, and read on! It's way cheaper than most other hobbies.

Then you can read our other books:

· Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

· Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

· Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

· Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

· Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

· Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

· Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

· Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

· Substack: https://substack.com/@markrhunter

· Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

· Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

· Audible: https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

Remember: When it comes to books, there's very little bad that can be said about "free".

Book Sale Report, 2024, or: Don't Give Up My Day Job

Well, it's time for a look at how I did in publishing last year or, as I like to put it, it's Black February.

Back in 2023, in an attempt to prime the pump, so to speak, I invested some money in advertising. You have to spend money to make money, the experts say.

There's a British term for what the experts say: bollocks.

Okay, maybe not fair. In 2022, including the anthologies I have short stories in, we sold 539 copies. This is give or take: Sales numbers are guarded by the publishing industry the way I guard my hoard of chocolate.

In 2023, the year of the great advertising experiment, we racked up 624 sales, again including the anthologies. Great, right? Except I also racked up great expenditures, which Emily would have stopped if I hadn't been so obsessed with the numbers that I didn't think to talk it over with her. (She found out. Boy, did she find out, and by the way our couch is very comfortable.)

The chair's nice, too.

Ahem. Long story short, I spent $11 for every dollar the book sales earned.

This is not a sustainable business model, except in Washington, D.C., and they have 341 million investors.

So in 2024 I worked on reducing our advertising costs, while not reducing book sales. This didn't work. According to my calculations, I did indeed manage to reduce advertising costs by 2,180 percent, but ....

Wait a minute. That can't be right. Let me hit the calculator again.

Okay, for every five dollars I spent in 2023, I spent 3 dollars in 2024. I really need to apologize to my math teacher for telling him I'd never use this stuff. Once, around 1990, I even needed algebra. Of course, I'd forgotten it.

On the one hand, total sales from last year were 492, down from 539 copies in 2023. On the other hand, I no long have access to sales numbers for the two anthologies. (Long story.) If the same number of those were sold in both years, our total numbers for 2024 would be 651, a slight increase. Yay?

Except I still spent more than we took in last year.

Business takes a lot of the fun out of writing.

Our biggest seller for 2024 was Coming Attractions, including one copy that went to Australia, and one to the UK. This is partially due to a really weird spike in sales through Amazon, which reported it was from searches using the keyword "ebooks". That makes as much sense as my math skills.

The second biggest seller was Hoosier Hysterical, including one copy that went to Germany, followed by Storm Chaser and The No-Campfire Girls. That pretty much matches the year before.

Still following the numbers? Me, neither. Here's the upshot: For every book sold, I still spent four and a half dollars. That doesn't include internet costs, or the fact that we had to buy a new laptop.

But now I've cut way down on my advertising, which so far this year led to a corresponding decrease in sales. We'll see if the release of The Notorious Ian Grant makes a difference, since we didn't put out any new product in 2024 or, as I like to call it, Year 4: Decade Of Hell.

My original plan for 2025 was to sell at least 1,000 copies. I've changed that: now the plan is to make more money then I spend. Otherwise, I might as well just be a Congressman.

You can help pad my numbers by buying our books here:

· Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

· Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

· Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

· Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

· Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

· Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

· Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

· Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

· Substack: https://substack.com/@markrhunter

· Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

· Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

· Audible: https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

Remember: Sometimes the term “starving artist” is a little too close to literal.

Colon Check Brought Blood Pressure Surprise

I planned to work on a new blog during my colonoscopy prep day, but the day went, shall we say, badly. Okay, it went very badly, although the procedure the next day was a breeze (they tell me). One small polyp removed, and I only made one bad joke. ("If you find any change in there, it's mine--not a tip.")

Anyway, it seemed the most appropriate thing to do would be to reprint a blog from a little over five years ago--which was about my last colonoscopy. I'm adding one new photo, which I took this morning: The IV for the anesthetic left a mark.

I don't mind the bruise one bit, because that needle allowed me to sleep through the whole procedure.

Routine medical tests often bring nasty surprises ... not always related to the test being done.

I had a colonoscopy last week. You know what that means: No need to go into details. Honestly, I don't feel bad for people getting them as much as I do for people who do them.

Lots of twelve year olds probably say they want to be a doctor when they grow up. I can't imagine any of them adding, "And I want to spend all day sticking tubes up butts to check for polyps!"

For patients, the fun stuff comes a day or two before, when they first go on a clear diet, then on meds that, um, clear that diet. But there's more to it, and therein lies this tale. It's about the only thing that stayed therein.

A week before I had to stop taking supplements, including vitamin D (a lack of which contributed to my wintertime depression). Also aspirin, or any kind of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, which I never knew is what NSAID is short for.

Soon after that I developed a sinus headache, which I didn't worry about because if I have a sinus headache, it must be Tuesday. By the end of the next day someone was driving a railroad spike through the top of my skull, from the inside. It was every bit as bad as a migraine.

But what caused it? Sinuses? Stress? Lack of vitamin D? Withdrawal from caffeine? The thought of highly trained specialists bringing in the same machine used to open up my sewer?

Then, just before the procedure, a strange thing happened.

One of the techs took my blood pressure, paused, then took it again. Then she called the doctor in. He took it, then he put the BP cuff on my other arm and took it again. Then they all looked at each other.

There's no typical blood pressure for everyone, but it's generally acknowledged that the bottom number--the diastolic--should be in the double digits, like around 70. My diastolic was in the triple digits. And not just barely, either. The first number, systolic, was also reaching for the stars.

There's your headache.

This is what the inside of my head felt like.

My blood pressure was so high, in fact, that they almost canceled the procedure. And I did not want to go through the prep again.

When I woke, the new problem hadn't changed. The next day Doctor Donna sat in the waiting room, waiting for me. "We were wondering how soon this would happen," she said (I'd been her patient for many years). She refused to tell me who won the betting pool, but she did confirm the diagnosis. She also gave me a good once over, and found it hurt whenever she tapped on the areas near my nose.

I had high blood pressure and another massive sinus infection.

Doctor Donna told me to reduce my stress levels. A lot. I thought about my job and laughed. Then I laughed again. Then I cried. It seems my idea to retire, and support myself by writing full time, had become a matter of life and death. But what the heck--I'm always looking for ways to guilt readers into buying books. Meanwhile I'm on two new meds, one of which makes me pee almost as much as I was doing the other thing, the day before the colonoscopy.

Oh, and the results of the actual procedure? Clean as a whistle (figuratively), with nary a polyp in sight. But if they hadn't done it, my head may have exploded a week later. It seems I'm entering a new phase of my mid-life.

I'll call it ... the Ailment Years.

You can find good books to read during prep here:

· Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

· Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

· Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

· Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

· Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

· Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

· Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

· Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

· Substack: https://substack.com/@markrhunter

· Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/ozma914

· Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

· Audible: https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

Remember: Reading can help lower your blood pressure. No, it’s true.

Bald Eagles at Salamonie Reservoir

Just a photo blog today. After we got my glasses repaired a few weeks ago (long story), we headed down to the Salamonie reservoir near Huntington, where we proceeded to drive around aimlessly for awhile. Well, not completely aimless--we were looking for bald eagles.

When I was a kid, a bald eagle was something you'd just heard of, and maybe seen on TV. But this time of year the Salamonie area is now teaming with them, if you're willing to go out into the cold to see. We were willing ... reluctantly.

We weren't sure exactly where they were being seen, until we stopped at an overlook near the top of the dam. Were those folks down there hauling around huge cameras for some mystical reason?

Yes. Yes, they were, and way better cameras than we had. But never mind that: There are lots of photos of bald eagles at Salamonie--we had binoculars too, and just wanted to see them for ourselves.

The place you want to go is where there's open water, because an eagle's gotta eat. Of course, a lot of water in the area was frozen, even waterfalls. Indiana's larges icicle. That brought us to the other side of the dam and the Salamonie River.

"Hey, Mark--what's that directly over your head?"

We walked past three ice fishermen who were ingesting some pretty good antifreeze, and I ventured over some frozen sandbars and ice to get a shot of this fellow, who couldn't care less. It was only when we came back that one of the fishermen pointed out there was another eagle directly across the river from them, no hazardous travel involved.

I think this is the best shot we got of any of them. We saw at least five bald eagles, one of them a juvenile who flew directly over our heads. Maybe more, or maybe we saw the same ones more than once as we tromped around the area.

It was a great day despite the weather. We didn't worry too much about disturbing the birds, because the three fishermen were being pretty vocal, and the bald eagle closest to them just didn't care. Maybe if they actually caught something he'd be more interested.

And finally, because we do like a little adventure, everywhere we went we encountered these signs:

We were right below the dam, after all. Luckily, no siren sounded. If one had, it would have been when I as inching my way across the ice, trying to get a clear shot of that waterfall. I'd imagine I would have looked hilarious, slipping and scrambling my way back, but those things are only funny if they aren't followed up by the words, "And they never found his body".

The eagle-eyed can find our books here:

· Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

· Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

· Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

· Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

· Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

· Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

· Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

· Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

· Substack: https://substack.com/@markrhunter