Lesson in eBook marketing

When I published the five-volumes of The Emily Updates about a year ago, I made them $2.99 each.  Not smart.

They sold at a slow clip and, at one point, they all got in the middle of the top 100 for Caregiving within Physician and Patient within Medicine within NonFiction.  They never scored in the 100 within Medical within Professionals & Academics within Biographies and Memoirs within NonFiction.

So my brother Andrew, he the librarian and self-publisher of several eBooks (but also an upcoming version of General George Barnett's memoirs for the Naval Institute Press), finally advises me to cut the price down to 99 cents for vols 2-5 and make vol. 1 free (to do this on Amazon you need to sell it for free somewhere else so they price match and I did this on SmashWords).

Suddenly we're seeing a lot move movement and our first review!

Which I have to say, is the perfect review for the endeavor.

The proof:

• Vol I is now the #1 free book in Caregiving (out of only 2, so let's say the competition is limited), but III is now #2 on the paying list, II is #3, V is #9 and IV is #10.
• Going up a level to Physician and Patient (all first time hits), vol. I is #10 (of 11 on Free), but III is #14 on paying, II is #15, V is #44 and IV is #46.
• Going up to Medicine (nose bleed territory for us), vol. I is 44th on the Free Top 100.

Alternately, the volumes appear for the first time in the Biographies and Memoirs track:

• Vol I is #2 in Medical Top 100 Free, III is #44 on the paying list, II is #45, V is #82 and IV is #85.
• Going up to Professionals and Academics, vol. I  is #10 on the Free Top 100.
• Going up to Biographies & Memoirs, vol. I is #73 on the Free Top 100.

Admittedly, a "hill of beans," but fun stuff to the three of us: my spouse Vonne, daughter Em (now studying in Japan), and me.

Emily Updates, Vol. 4, available online

Find the Kindle version here.

Find the Nook version here.

Find the iBook version here.

To remind on the series:

Seventeen years ago, authors Tom and Vonne Barnett were suddenly confronted with every parent’s worst medical “bolt from the blue”: their only child, 30-month-old Emily, was diagnosed with an advanced – meaning metastasized – pediatric cancer. At the time, the thirty-something couple was living in northern Virginia. 

What followed was the defining crisis of their now 25-year union: an intense 20-month battle to keep their first-born alive. About six months into the struggle, Tom started writing a weekly update on Emily’s progress (or lack thereof) for interested parties. Vonne contributed to this blog-like diary, and it was sent out by email, fax and regular mail to several hundred relatives and friends who spontaneously organized themselves into their family’s extended support network. Over time, the couple came to view the updates as something more important: a real-time memoir that would someday prove crucial to Emily’s understanding of how she became whom Tom and Vonne hoped she would become. 

The journey from blog diary to this eBook serial is worth recounting. The original diary ran about 400,000 words, or somewhere in the range of an 800-page book. In the late 1990s, Tom edited the text down to approximately 200,000 words and posted the 45 updates online at a website he created specifically for that purpose. Having received a lot of positive feedback from readers, they sought publication as a regular book, but then fate intervened in the form of a new job for Tom in Rhode Island and the project was – pun intended – shelved. 

But the recent meteoric rise of eBooks has convinced Tom and Vonne that now is the time to give publication another try (Vonne, for example, is a Kindle fanatic!). After all, the Emily Updates basically constituted a blog before there were blogs, so eBooks struck the authors as an entirely appropriate venue for the material, especially since they’re interested in making it easily available and they know - from first-hand experience - how parents and relatives of patients experiencing medical crises typically turn to the Internet to locate sources of information, comfort and inspiration in their time of need. 

What you now have the privilege to read in this series of eBooks are the original weekly updates as Tom wrote them – with Vonne’s continuous inputs – across all of 1995 and into early 1996, a period encompassing the last 14 months of Emily’s treatment protocol. Those 45 updates constitute Chapters 3 through 9 in the series: Chapter 3, which concludes with the birth of their second child, in included in this volume; Chapters 4 and 5, which cover the difficult summer of 1995, make up Volume II; Chapters 6 and 7, which chronicle the family's final push on the chemotherapy, fill out Volume III; and Chapters 8 and 9, which encompass the post-treatment diagnostics – and Make-a-Wish trip to Disney World, constitute Volume IV. 

The first two chapters presented in this Volume I are actually recreations of the events surrounding the initial diagnoses (Chapter 1) and the beginning of in-hospital treatment (Chapter 2) in July of 1994. Tom put these diary-like remembrances together in June of 1995 to mark the one-year anniversary of the diagnosis, and they are based on the voluminous medical records from that time period. 

The concluding fifth volume in the series is written from today's perspective, to include that of a grown-up Emily - the girl who lived!

The authors haven’t made an effort to “improve” the updates from today’s perspective. Tom and Vonne now claim to be wiser on a host of subjects that arise in this family memoir, but a lot of that wisdom stems directly from these experiences, so they felt it made most sense to share them with you, the reader, in this unaltered format. 

If this eBook serial helps you better understand an analogous past experience or ongoing crisis in your life, then Tom, Vonne and Emily have accomplished what they set out to do by sharing their intense story.

Fifth and final volume will appear 12 December.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.  Look for us at the Pack-Lions game!  It'll be Joel Zamel and I and my six kids.

Emily Updates Volume 3 photos online

Pretty normal thing for little girls - the fascination with horses, but Em had it bad - real bad.  Later, in Rhode Island, she did years of show riding and jumping.

But for the purposes of our story, what's key to know is how her stable of horses got her through all manner of very bad times. They were her totems, talismans, whatever you want to call them.

Find all the pix from Chapters 5-6 (summer of 1995 and deep into the chemotherapy protocol) here.

Volume 3 of "Emily Updates" now available for purchase

Find the Kindle edition here.

Find the iBook edition here.

Find the Nook edition here.

Esquire's endorsement for "The Emily Updates"

November Issue, p. 34, just under the masthead where I'm listed as Contributing Editor:

THIS MONTH IN CONTRIBUTOR BOOKS

Over the next couple of months, one of Esquire's smartest contributing editors, Thomas P.M. Barnett, is releasing a serialized eBook, The Emily Updates: One Year in the Life of the Girl Who Lived. It's an eloquent and moving journal of the struggles Barnett's family faced when his first child was diagnosed with aggressively metastasized cancer. The five volumes (each about 50,000 words, released every three weeks) are $2.99 each and can be purchased through Amazon.com, the iTunes bookstore, and Barnes & Noble.

Emily Updates Volume 2 videos online

Find the rest here.

The Emily Updates, Volume 2, hits the eBook stores

Find the Amazon edition here.

Find the Barnes and Noble edition here.

Find the Apple iBookstore version here.

Emily Updates Volume 2 photos page up on the book site

Find the page here.

Believe it or not, this was our first family portrait.  Vonne had bought some package earlier in the year, from Sears I think, and we had this one portrait sitting left that we had to use up before the end of 1994. Em was falling apart at this point from the nonstop chemo of the "induction phase" lasting 13 weeks post-diagnosis in July, so we figured, this might be the only family portrait we'd ever have that included her.

I really love this photo.  My raccoony eyes from fatigue give me away (I was drinking heavily at the time too), and Vonne, starting her second trimester with son Kevin, is looking wan, but she musters something like a smile. Emily is happy enough, if a bit ghostly with her complete lack of hair (notice the missing eyebrows). We are barely holding it together in the fall of 94.

Then again, we held it together enough to write the Vol. 5 retrospective this last August.

The portrait was shot during the "missing" time of Volume 1 (after the first two chapters but before I started the diary), so we include it here because I described the picture in Chapter 4 of Volume 2.

Getting better on Amazon Kindle

And we really haven't had much publicity yet (working on that).

Steady as she goes . . ..

Welcome Hugh Hewitt listeners

For regular readers, the live stream on Hewitt is here. I'm on in the next hour (8-9pm EST).

Once that airs, welcome to the listeners!

Regardingly the eBook serial, The Emily Updates: One Year in the LIfe of the Girl Who Lived, please go to The Emily Updates.net for all the details and purchasing links.

Volume 1 of The Emily Updates now available on Amazon and B&N

Volume 1 now live on Amazon and B&N. When I started uploading both today, wasn't sure how long it would take to appear (B&N said, for example, it could run 72 hours!). So I plunged ahead to make sure I'd keep the pub date.

Go to The Emily Updates site for links.

iBookstore version not yet up.

"Emily Updates" Photo Gallery: Emily during the first nine months of chemo

Emily makes it to her third birthday

Photo gallery of almost 60 pix chronicling the discovery of her cancer (while on a short vacation in Wisconsin in July 1994) through the first nine months of her treatment, culminating in the birth of our second child - now 16-year-old Kevin - in March of 1995. We had coincidentally conceived Kevin just days prior to the diagnosis (when you're hot, you're hot).

Emily came home yesterday from college for the weekend. Someting to think about: our being so ecstatic that she made it to her third birthday and now we're talking about her junior year abroad in Japan.

Good things come to those who fight.

Find the complete gallery of photos here, all annotated.

Got the Volume 1 files for Kindle, iBook & Nook (The Emily Updates)

Came from the company Ebook Architects.  Will be loading this weekend to B&N, Amazon, and the iBookstore for launch on Monday.

Book website pretty much prepared for Volume 1, with photos and videos from that time period.

Below is a video my sister shot of me "changing" Emily's Broviac chest catheter in Novemeber 1994.

Find this and other media at theemilyupdates.net.

TheEmilyUpdates.net is up and running

Got the basics up and filling in blanks furiously.  Plenty of photos already posted, video to come.

Comments and suggestions welcomed.

Meanwhile, the de rigueur 10th anniversary commentary comes in tomorrow's WPR column.

Landed an interview with Hugh Hewitt to talk Vol. 1 of "The Emily Updates"

Emily in late fall 1994, the first time she went completely hairlessI'll tape a segment with him on the 19th that will air later.

First interview landed.

Emily Updates Vol. 5 off to Ebook Architects

7/03/1994 shot of Em at Grandma's house several hours after I discovered the lump that, days later, was diagnosed as her Stage-IV kidney cancer, which for Em meant one kidney already consumed and metastasized tumors in both lungs. The misdiagnosis we got that day was umbilical hernia, but we didn't trust that and decided to fly back to VA from WI the next morn. This is Em eating some ice cream in the living room while Grandma, in the background, looks on. When Em had her kidney out six days later, she lost about 10% of her total body weight.

Spent the weekend doing a final edit of the retrospective volume co-written with wife Vonne and Emily herself. It was an amazing experience to write this 48,000-word volume with the two of them - something I'll treasure for the rest of my life. I really think it's the best volume of the lot. As powerful as the original Emily Updates were in their immediacy, it is stunning to have the three of us, writing separate "Mom/Dad/Emily looks back" chapters, to come to many of the same conclusion about how Emily's cancer altered our lives permanently and profoundly.

The volume also contains three other chapters: one that tracks our family's path from the end of the Updates to now, another that is a sort of "director's commentary" (by me) on the Updates, and a third by me that is an explicit and detailed "lessons learned" for parents of pediatric oncology patients.

It's been a lesson on setting this whole thing up. Went out and bought ISBN numbers, plus did the copyright submission with the US Copyright Office. Got signed up at Barnes & Noble's eBook site as publisher, and then likewise at Amazon and Apple. Just purchased TheEmilyUpdates.com custom domain and started putting together a new Squarespace site to that end (my next focus).  And then there's the PR work that Steve Oppenheim is doing, which includes lengthy interviewing of me to generate materials to be used. We are planning to target a wide range of media to the best of our collective ability.

A couple of years back, this would have seemed crazy, but now with Amazon selling more eBooks than paperbacks and hardcovers combined, it's a new world - and a much better royalty rate. So, given that the production costs are minimal (add it all up and even with the professional formatting, we're barely escaping 3 figures), this personal dream becomes not only possible but a legitimate endeavor.

I have no idea of how successful the Updates will be. I just know I wanted to share the story on our terms, and eBooks make that possible now - roughly a decade and a half later.

I'm already working with the Lombardi Cancer Center at Georgetown regarding promotion, and without getting into our plans for targeting the widest possible array of media, I want to ask people if they had any ideas and/or experience in trying something like this.

So please comment if you do.

Landed publicist for "The Emily Updates" - now with new subtitle

While still working out the arrangements with my literary agency (Zachary Shuster Harmsworth) since this is a proof-of-concept effort for them, I did manage to land my publicist from "The New Map" series, Steve Oppenheim (Oppenheim Communications, based in Manhattan). It will be a first-time process for Steve too, doing a straight eBook with no hard-copy version, but both of us agree that we like the non-rush of trying to make all the PR happen in a two-week period.

Steve is a great guy and I deeply enjoyed working with him on the three previous books, plus we feel honored he likes the material enough - and believes in it enough - to go down this new path with Vonne, Emily and I.

Other positive news: looks like Esquire will give us a nice plug in the magazine.

Vonne, Emily and I, having all three spent the last couple of weeks taking notes on the first four volumes, held a production meeting today in my office to pitch our ideas to each other concerning the fifth volume retrospective. Emily is working about 15 themes, while Vonne has 18 in hand. Me? I have 26 pages of notes. Between us I am certain we have the 50,000 words for the volume.  No doubts about my ability to write on demand, and Vonne is highly incentivized to finish before she starts a Masters in Social Work program at IUPUI (Indiana U/Purdue U @ Indianapolis - home to the oldest MSW program in the country). Em, of course, must finish up before heading back to IU in Bloomington for her sophomore year. Vonne has been writing for a bit now, and Em I know can crank, since she routinely generates fan fiction pieces in the tens-of-thousands range.

The goal is to have the first draft done in 2-3 weeks and a final draft by the end of August or mid-September at the latest.  We then get the four volumes back from Ebook Architects (in their various file formats) NLT mid-September to make the 9/19 publication of the first volume on the major sites (Amazon, B&N, iBookstore). I'm hoping to have the fifth volume polished by Labor Day so I can spend the rest of my free time in September blowing up the Emily Updates site-within-this-site (photos, videos, etc.)

All an experiment for me, but a fun one.

On the subtitle: just enough pushback from the agency on linking "three-year-old" with "cancer" that I rethought the approach. "The Girl Who Lived" has been a theme of ours for years, as Emily has long identified with the Harry Potter character's backstory (near-death experience as toddler, the telltale scars, the questions, and the weird fame within our circles for something she barely remembers . . . oh, and the ever-present fear of the return of the disease that no one likes to mention! Is it still inside her on some hidden level?). I wanted to keep "One Year in the Life" bit because of my years of working Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's many books, and we thought the two riffs went well together. The Emily Updates are full of fan-fictiony-like references to books and films; it's just who we are - a family of fanboys and fangirls.

So it stays "The Emily Updates" because that's what I called all the weekly summary emails I sent out (numbering them as well), and we say "One Year in the Life" because we're not asking you to read the life story of a 19-year-old, just about this one amazing year (actually about 14 months but basically her third year of life), and we wanted to put out there in the title that she is "The Girl Who Lived" so as to not scare people off too much. This was a crucible experience but one that our family, our marriage and our child patient survived. We figure the three themes (The Emily Updates seems to be a diary, One Year in the Life says this was some extraordinary period, and The Girl Who Lived dispels any cliffhanger fears while insinuating that, like Harry Potter, Emily survived a very deadly set of circumstances/events) and the picture will convey the right mix of themes.

The covers as I've put them together now:

Why the black and red motif? You can't tell from the black and white photo, but she was wearing a red shirt over her Spandage vest (which is why her neck looks kinda fuzzy), plus her hat was blood red with black trim. So when I see that picture (we just refound the black-and-white negative in the memorabilia box we unpacked and perused today), I see red and black - simple as that.

Tentative publishing dates for the eBook serial "The Emily Updates: A Year in the Life of a Three-Year-Old Battling Cancer"

Wanted to lay down my marker on The Emily Updates eBook serial, so I set up a page on the site.  Have started registering myself and Vonne as authors on various selling sites (Amazon, B&N, etc.) in anticipation of getting the eBook files back from the US company that is currently architecting them in all of the major formats (this is being arranged by my literary agency Zachary Shuster Harmsworth in a first-ever move by the firm).

For now, it seems like I can't reserve a space at Amazon for pre-orders, because you can't formalize the page until you upload the book file.  I'm expecting to get the files back mid-September, so we target 19 Sept for the first volume, with the other four coming in a sequence of three-week intervals, finishing in mid-December. Emily, Vonne and I are writing the retrospective Vol. V this summer.  It's a family affair.

So for now, we just have this starter page that I will expand over the coming weeks.

The Emily Updates: A Year in the Life of a Three-Year-Old Battling Cancer

by THOMAS P.M. BARNETT,  with VONNE M. MEUSSLING-BARNETT

A five-volume eBook serial to be published in all major venues (Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook, Apple's iBookstore, etc.) starting in late September 2011.

Tentative publishing schedule (subject to change):

• 19 September 2011 (Vol. I: 52,000 words)
• 10 October 2011 (Vol. II: 57,000)
• 31 October 2011 (Vol. III; 48,000)
• 21 November 2011 (Vol. IV: 50,000)
• 12 December 2011 (Vol. V: estimated 50,000).

All books will be priced @ $2.99.

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION:

Seventeen years ago, authors Tom and Vonne Barnett were suddenly confronted with every parent’s worst medical “bolt from the blue”: their only child, 30-month-old Emily, was diagnosed with an advanced – meaning metastasized – pediatric cancer. At the time, the thirtysomething couple were living in northern Virginia.

What followed was the defining crisis of their union: an intense 20-month battle to keep their first-born alive. About six months into the struggle, Tom started writing a weekly update on Emily’s progress (or lack thereof) for interested parties. Vonne contributed to this blog-like diary, and it was sent out by email, fax and regular mail to several hundred relatives and friends who spontaneously organized themselves into their family’s extended support network. Over time, the couple came to view the updates as something more important: a real-time memoir that would someday prove crucial to Emily’s understanding of how she became whom Tom and Vonne hoped she would become. 

The journey from blog diary to this eBook serial is worth recounting. The original diary ran about 400,000 words, or somewhere in the range of an 800-page book. In the late 1990s, Tom edited the text down to approximately 200,000 words and posted the 45 updates online at a website he created specifically for that purpose. Having received a lot of positive feedback from readers, they sought publication as a regular book, but then fate intervened in the form of a new job for Tom in Rhode Island and the project was – pun intended – shelved. 

But the recent meteoric rise of eBooks has convinced Tom and Vonne that now is the time to give publication another try (Vonne, for example, is a Kindle fanatic!). After all, the Emily Updates basically constituted a blog before there were blogs, so eBooks struck the authors as an entirely appropriate venue for the material, especially since they’re interested in making it easily available and they know - from first-hand experience - how parents and relatives of patients experiencing medical crises typically turn to the Internet to locate sources of information, comfort and inspiration in their time of need. 

What you now have the privilege to read in this series of eBooks are the original weekly updates as Tom wrote them – with Vonne’s continuous inputs – across all of 1995 and into early 1996, a period encompassing the last 14 months of Emily’s treatment protocol. Those 45 updates constitute Chapters 3 through 9 in the series: Chapter 3, which concludes with the birth of their second child, in included in this volume; Chapters 4 and 5, which cover the difficult summer of 1995, make up Volume II; Chapters 6 and 7, which chronicle the family's final push on the chemotherapy, fill out Volume III; and Chapters 8 and 9, which encompass the post-treatment diagnostics – and Make-a-Wish trip to Disney World, constitute Volume IV. 

The first two chapters presented in this Volume I are actually recreations of the events surrounding the initial diagnoses (Chapter 1) and the beginning of in-hospital treatment (Chapter 2) in July of 1994. Tom put these diary-like remembrances together in June of 1995 to mark the one-year anniversary of the diagnosis, and they are based on the voluminous medical records from that time period.

The authors haven’t made an effort to “improve” the updates from today’s perspective. Tom and Vonne now claim to be wiser on a host of subjects that arise in this family memoir, but a lot of that wisdom stems directly from these experiences, so they felt it made most sense to share them with you, the reader, in this unaltered format.

The concluding fifth volume in the series is written from today's perspective, to include that of a grown-up Emily - the girl who lived!

If this series of eBooks helps you better understand an analogous past experience or ongoing crisis in your life, then Tom, Vonne and Emily have accomplished what they set out to do by sharing their intense story.

Wrapping up the spring speech tour

Gave a speech to a big conference of Navy supply corps reservists, the second such time I've done their huge, every-other-year event (I did one in Baltimore in 07, if I remember correctly).  Big audience of close to one thousand crammed into a wide ballroom.  Three huge screens, though, with great projectors.  Sound was also great (nothing like a great lapel mike to put me at ease).  The speech was broadcast globally throughout the Navy's supply corps community.  

Simplified the brief a bit by making the "map" sequence" less cluttered, and got through the 29 slides in about 65 mins. Answered questions for about 5 mins, and then held court outside for about 30 more, where I met a lot of great people.  It was a very lively audience that got a great performance out of me (the audience gets what it gives, as always). I came off the stage decidedly buzzed, despite the allergies (this place is blooming). Having now spoken in Atlanta, Chicago and Pittsburgh, I consider my post-Super Bowl speaking tour complete.

The hidden benefit of reservist conferences:  all have civilian jobs and a surprising number are in all sorts of industries that like to have me in for speeches, so it's a double-win. 

Off now til the fall schedule kicks in - come September, and that's looking good, with big speeches already lined up to a financial group in Chicago, a bankers group in Pensacola, and some big strategy gathering at Disney World (Grand Floridian) in early December.

Big treat on this trip was getting to spend a lot of face time with my long-time manager, Jennifer Posda, who is a close friend of our family.  One intriguing topic was how to exploit the Emily Updates' eBooks to launch an orthogonal speaking career on that subject.  Goal there would be to tap the wide medical market, motivational, etc.  I just know there would be a great brief coming out of the Updates, and it would definitely be the one I'd try in Keynote, since I'd be building from scratch and looking to use a lot of photos, video, etc.  More fun is considering the possibility of getting either my spouse Vonne or daughter Emily involved in certain venues.

But first, of course, we've got to get the eBook series out (4 volumes) and write the from-today's-perspective fifth volume before Em heads back to college.  On that front, the edited four volumes of Emily Updates (each about 50,000 words) now sit with my literary agency, which is using the project to launch a new eBook service within the agency.  First they take the Word docs and create special eBook-friendly PDFs, and then a German company is brought in to crank the eBook versions in the various formats desired by the iBookstore (iPad), Amazon (Kindle) and Barnes and Noble (Nook, I believe).  All in all, the schedule suggest we get out Vol I in Sept or Oct and then release the subsequent volumes in sequence (maybe one a month).  Then we just need to get enough word out to trigger the first speaking engagement, and boom!  The new "brief" will be born.

I can't wait.