I’ve recently started a 4th novel. No, I haven’t yet finished my 3rd novel. This will be historical fiction from 1846 to present day in the Texas Hill Country. Let me know what you think of my prologue in the comments either on this blog or on Facebook. Be honest. I can take it. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, despite my last name, I’m over 80% German, mostly from Bavaria and the Black Forest per 23andme and Ancestry.com.

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Guten tag.  I’m Ellie-Kate.  My formal name is Katherine Elizabeth and I’ll get to how my name came to be, but this story on how my grandma, my mother and I exposed the most loathsome Mexican border crime in Texas begins much earlier than my prep school years.  This story spans generations.  

My fourth great grandparents gave birth to ten daughters in the 19^th century spa town of Baden-Baden, in the Schwarzwald region of Germany.  What you might know as the Black Forest.  I’m here now visiting, expecting to meet up with long-lost ancestors.  My great grandparents were Johann Eduard Jordan and Marguerite Rose Jordan.  A popular Christian baptismal name throughout Europe after the Crusades, Jordan is Hebrew for “to flow down”, or “to descend”, as in the Jordan River.  Johann’s surname did not descend beyond his daughters’ generation as he had no sons.  And that’s okay, because this is a story of the strength, resilience and determination of the descendants of those Jordan women.

Eduard and Marguerite joined the Adelsverein, the Noble Society of German Immigrants, on a ship to America in 1846.  Before landing at Indianola, Texas, a coastal town long-ago wiped off the map by a hurricane, their daughter, my third great grandmother, Anna Maria was married by the ship’s captain to Peter Schandua.  It’s possible she fell in love during the transit, despite bathing in nothing but sea water and sharing a communal bucket for the privy for three months at sea.  I prefer to think she excelled at numbers, knowing that she could double her fortune as her mate would be awarded twice the property stake once arriving in the Fisher-Miller land grant in the Llano Estacado upon arrival, if they were married.  If it didn’t work out, the average age of an American male in that decade was about twenty-five years. Doubtful she’d of had access to those stats in the 19th century, but anecdotally, she’d have known. She wouldn’t have to suffer him for long.  She did the math.

I learned all this from my Oma, my grandmother, Constance Louise Freitag Mountbatten.  When you grow up in the Hill Country, they teach you much about the early German immigrants who settled the region of Texas that reminded them of Schwarzwald in grade school as local culture and history.  Oma shared with me the past that they don’t teach to children.

Her story starts with the legacy of James P. Waldrip and his murderous hanging band of outlaws during the Civil War.  Die Hangebande as they were known in the German-speaking, Texas Hill Country in 1864.  J.P. wasn’t the ring leader, but he was very likely the most vicious of the gang of Confederate irregulars that terrorized Gillespie county during that time.

Understand that the early German settlers of the Hill Country voted overwhelmingly against succession from the Union.  Like Sam Houston, the first president of Texas and its governor before the war, well over ninety percent of Fredericksburg residents were pro-Union abolitionists.  Although this was less a philosophical and political statement.  It was more pragmatic.  There were only a handful of slaves in all of Gillespie county.  Townsfolk felt the military focus should be on defending against Indian attacks more than on fighting the Union. The Hill Country was the frontier. For his disloyalty, Houston was booted out of office and retired to Huntsville.  The Hill Country was placed under martial law by Governor Lubbock and suffered horrific depredations at the hands of the depraved outlaws among the Confederate troops.  

The night Waldrip arrived with his gang at the house of the Fredericksburg school teacher and outspoken critic of the war, Louis Schuetze became one of the victims of the Hill Country violence.  The Sons of the South who directed J.P.’s lynchings were well aware there was no greater threat to their aspirations than a school teacher.  Schuetze was found the next morning hanging from a live oak three miles outside of town along Palo Alto Creek.

I should be thankful that Putin’s special military operation in Ukraine is driving sales of my Full Spectrum Cyberwar novel.  Not that the sales are meaningful but they are better than zero.  I initially considered the war to be life imitating art, my book being the “art”.  I blogged about it partly because I found that interesting and, to be honest, partly to further drive sales with some self-promotion.  But now this actualization of my story is leading to character assassination.  Like something out of the Twilight Zone, the characters in my story are being killed in real life.

Allow me to provide more context.  Every novel contains an obligatory disclaimer about events and characters described within as not actually describing real events or persons.  Clearly, that is meaningless for the historical fiction genre.  And I can tell you that it’s just basically bullshit for all novels.  There’s nothing made up about key characters.

My General Alexander (Sasha) Volkov in Full Spectrum Cyberwar was patterned after the real-life General Valery Gerasimov, a major general in the Russian military.  His relevancy was that he published the Gerasimov Doctrine, an essay on hybrid warfare and essentially what my book was all about.

Gerasimov’s essay detailed asymmetrical actions that combine the use of special forces and information warfare that create “a permanently operating front through the entire territory of the enemy state.”  Russia’s interference in our 2016 elections was a component of such hybrid warfare, making it relevant for my story.

Long story, short, I freaked out a little when I read about General Vitaly Gerasimov being killed in the battle over Kharkiv.  Turns out that Vitaly and Valery are two different major generals, but I initially assumed the first name was a typo and had to perform some research to confirm that.

So maybe this is a non-issue, but a key character in my Cyber War I novel, Sam Sumner, was patterned after Sheldon Adelson, and he died a year ago.  Of course, he was 86 years old, but still.  Spooky. Also, Andrei in Full Spectrum Cyberwar is patterned after the Ukrainian hacker, Maksym Igor Popov – still living as far as I know. I intend to monitor the content in my ebook versions to make sure the characters’ storylines don’t disappear as they die in real life.

I don’t often read women authors. Except when I do and according to my Goodreads’ history, my last five books have been authored by women. Some of my preferred genres lend themselves to men and perhaps my current trend is coincidence. I suspect I read Rachel Maddow’s Blowout to satisfy my confirmation bias after having weaved Putin’s oil oligarchy into my last novel, Full Spectrum Cyberwar. Her story did in fact support my fictional account. I was surprised when she dedicated part of a chapter to the president of Shell, for whom I served as an usher in his wedding.

I read Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider as part of a writing assignment for my writers critique club. It’s a collection of classic stories from 1939. We take turns in my small group of five male writers to assign exercises to each other on a monthly basis. Sometimes, the exercise requires research, which for me is what makes it fun. Research has always been necessary for my novels and I enjoy that. It’s also essential in my day job as a product manager, and one of the roles I most enjoy.

Ruth Ware’s The Lying Game reminded me somewhat of Where The Crawdads Sing. I think because of the setting; even though it was in the U.K. rather than America, as it was on the coast. There are other similarities in the mystery format. The main characters were all women and it caused me to consider if, on average, women are better at creating female antagonists and men are better at creating male characters. Seems safe to agree to that, but of course some writers are so good they aren’t challenged by gender.

Lucy Foly’s The Guest List is the very first audio book I’ve listened to. Karen and I listened on our long drive to Ouray. It was a great whodunnit for a drive. Each character was voiced by a different actor. That might have been jarring as a read as I suspect Lucy changed the point of view per scene in the text as well as the audio.

Jen Louden is a friend and I’d been wanting to read one of her best-selling books, but I’ve never been interested in the motivational self-help genre. Her latest book Why Bother? was perfect because it’s as much memoir as self-help. I thought once she steamed up the narrative with real-life stories in section two, the book became fascinating. It reminded me of Stephen King’s On Writing, which was as much memoir as instructional. I find the sharing of personal vignettes a successful approach to storytelling. It helps to have lived an interesting life but I don’t think one necessarily has to be Hemingway.

After writing this, it has occurred to me my interest in reading women authors stemmed from making the antagonist in my current novel a woman. Call it research. My first novel was strongly male dominated. My wife gave me grief, and that’s putting it mildly, over the sexist undertones in my story. I was trying to convey a sense of men who travel extensively for their careers. She wasn’t a fan. I corrected that somewhat with my second novel by having the wife of the antagonist tag along during his adventures. I’m comfortable writing from a woman’s point of view. Doesn’t mean I’m good at it. If I pull it off, I credit having grown up with five sisters.

I’m using the three-day weekend to submit my taxes.  I expect to get a return and will need it to buy Ellie Rose a laptop before she heads off to college.  I think back in the day, parents used to buy their kids a car for graduating high school.  Now we buy them a three thousand dollar MacBook Pro.  I really hope I get a nice return this year.

I find joy in doing my taxes when I sum up all my book royalties from Amazon.com.   I’ve made royalties almost every month of the year.  The coolest part is seeing book sales from other countries.  Mostly the UK, but also Germany, Australia, Japan, China, Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and 26.77 rupees from India.  That’s 39¢ I wouldn’t have if I weren’t an international author.

Other writers might find this interesting.  I published a second book in 2019, but almost all my sales were from my first book.  I suspect this is because I handed out a hundred copies of my book at a tech conference in Austin and those techies followed up by purchasing my first book.  That’s exactly what they tell you will happen, and it did.  This is why you will make more money the more books you publish; readers who like your latest book will buy from your entire collection.  There’s a multiplier effect.

Knowing that, I really should work towards completing my third novel.  I’m twenty-five thousand words into it, but paused it to rewrite a second edition of my first book instead.  I believe I had multiple reasons for changing directions.  One was that, with the surge in sales of the first book, I wanted it to be better.  I didn’t have a copy editor for it, not that there were many typos, but I’m a better writer now and wanted to make some improvements.

The major edit, the reason I believe the rewrite qualifies as a second edition, is I changed it from present tense to past tense.  Most novels are written in past tense.  Present tense is rare enough that it can be a bit jarring sometimes to read it.  The book I’m currently reading, The Lying Game by Ruth Ware, is in present tense.  She does an okay job of it but it’s been my experience that past tense allows for more latitude in sentence structure.  It’s easier to write past tense.

That exercise took me a couple of months.  I spent the previous two weekends publishing it on Amazon.  I find formatting text and designing a book cover extremely tedious and I don’t enjoy it, but I’m too cheap to outsource it.  There are always problems.  It took me a week to fix my cover and another to get the formatting to show paragraph indents correctly on the InsideLook feature.

It’s good to go now though, so go out and download a copy.  As part of this second edition, the hardcover is no longer available.  Amazon might try to sell you one anyway.  They like to play this trick where they say it’s out-of-stock.  Trust me, it’s out-of-print.  If you already own a first edition hardcover, consider it a collector’s item.

These are my facebook ad stats for a single campaign that contains six ad sets targeting six cities.  I have many more stats but the screen capture would be too small if I copy/pasted all the columns to the right.  I’ll share with you some of my Facebook ads experience here, along with other book marketing steps I’ve taken.

First, I chose to target these cities because they represent some of the highest reading cities in America.  Seattle is #1, Portland #2, DC #3.  Austin and Denver represent places where I have a strong influence, and are also in the top ten.  Atlanta joins Austin, Denver, and DC as places with a large number of cybersecurity professionals.  Targetting these cities is what we term in product marketing as a Go-to-Market plan (GTM).

Notice this dashboard allows me to enable or disable the target cities.  I could have created a single campaign that included all these cities in a single ad set.  Separating them allows me to review their performance and make adjustments.  Some stats aren’t shown here but while Seattle has the best Click-Through-Rate (CTR), for whatever reason DC is the cheapest per click.  I’ve had all them running at once but have currently disabled all cities except DC – which actually captures the entire DC to Baltimore corridor.

The Facebook ads dashboard would not show how many clicks eventually lead to a sale, but it could if I leveraged the method of adding pixels from my Amazon seller’s page to my ad settings.  I can’t do that because it requires me to control the code on my selling website.  The Amazon dashboard is robust enough though that I can easily correlate results from the two.

Further marketing efforts involve mailing books to influencers.  I have yet to receive the books to mail because Amazon is super slow at printing and shipping authors’ books – copies that are invoiced at cost, which for my novel is $3.03 each.  Once I receive them, I already have a list of mail-to addresses.

I finally received my first online review – 4 out of 5 stars – which made me happy.  I’m told I need a good ten reviews to sway readers to make the purchase.  It’s a process.  Some friends promoted my book on LinkedIn for me.  I also have links to my book on this blog.  You probably can’t see them if you’re reading this on a mobile device – not enough screen real estate.

And I just added links on another blog of mine that I wrote to share my experience with cancer a few years back.  I haven’t produced content there in five years, and normally it only gets three hits a day on average.  Readership tripled though back in July, and tripled again in January.  It almost receives as many views now as this blog, and I do nothing to promote it.  From my stats, I know three things.  Readers are randomly global, all are going to my blog post titled “Cystoscopy“, and most of them are coming from Pinterest.  I went to Pinterest and searched on the term cystoscopy and noticed a photo and link to my blog shows up near the top.

No idea what made cystoscopies suddenly so popular.  If it leads to me selling more books, I’ll take it.  There are two camps of writers, those for and against blogging.  Blogging is writing and I don’t understand why some authors don’t get that.  They say it’s important for a writer to maintain an email list of readers.  That’s so nineties.  I have my blogs as my digital presence.