There is a Movement in Stillness

I saw a sunflower bow to a bee without moving. It arched its stem, its petals already stretched wide and willing. There it waited for the wind to whistle the way it does when it pushes the flower forward, and here, the flower bowed. Beautiful and with grace, this sunflower let itself go in the wind’s direction, its sweet liquid substance sending the scent of fresh Nectar floating into the air. I couldn’t smell it but it wasn’t for me to smell so I looked down in my notebook and wrote a reminder: “what’s for you is for you.”

I looked up and noticed a bumblebee was already singing its way to our area and the whole time the flower did not move; it waited. The flower was only moved by the wind, the invisible force that guides it, and so this I wrote in my notebook: “do not chase, attract. What is yours will come to you. Put out the right scent and let the invisible force guide you.”

I looked up, and the bee seemed much more anxious and excited, but I knew better than to kill it. This creature was on a mission, so I didn’t swap him away because this wasn’t my business. I was here only as a witness to the meditative buzz of togetherness. I saw a sunflower bow to a bee without moving, so I bowed my head too and wrote: “there is a movement even in stillness.”

Helping Indie Authors Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

I’ve been spending my social distance-time staying at home as much as possible, reading books, writing books, catching up on some scriptures, enjoying time with my family and binging my favorite TV shows. Earlier last week I got an email from someone whose email I don’t remember subscribing to, but, it mentioned the point that Self-Publishers are small businesses too.

And I concur.

Small businesses are taking a big hit amid the COVID-19 crisis and I thought I’d share a way we can help Self-Publishers in this time of uncertainty.

Buy the author’s book directly from them if you can.

If the author has a website, purchase a paperback or digital version of the book from the author’s website. If you are an author and you don’t have a website or you’re not selling through your website, Joanna Penn’s article here goes into detail on how to set up a store.

Something to keep in mind:

Amazon pays authors royalties for print and ebook sales. A royalty is a percentage of a sale. An ebook going for $2.99 at 70% according to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing will make the author $2.09. This means the author will have to sell at least 10 ebooks to make $20 and still have to wait a month to see that.

“If you publish through traditional publishing, royalties can take many months to arrive. You can’t control the schedule of payment and you don’t get any details of the customers.

If you publish independently through online publishers like Amazon, Kobo, Apple, Google, and other distributors, you will get your money sooner — but it will still be 30-60 days later and once again, you don’t get any details of the customers.”

Authors who sell direct can buy author copies of their books in bulk at a discount, sell those books from their website and fulfill the order themselves. The author also gets to see who their customers are which helps them to build a stronger relationship with them.

I wouldn’t be keeping it authentic if I didn’t also mention authors will have to account for shipping, state tax, and whatever website fees are associated with their platform of choice. The benefit, however, to selling direct is that the author doesn’t have to wait 30-60 days to get paid.

If the author got ten print book sales at $20 through their author website, they’ve already made $200 and $200 in the age of COVID-19 can be very helpful to families. Consider that most Indie Authors with day and night jobs are either working from home or not working at all. People are being fired, furloughed, and layed off left and right. Besides this, if we are being honest, some Indie Authors don’t even see $200 in royalty checks from Amazon from their Self-Published books.

Of course, there are pros and cons to everything. The major pros have already been stated, you are helping a small business to keep going at a time when money is scarce for everyone. The cons for authors include:

  • Not having the sale go toward your Amazon sales or ranking.

 

  • You must have the right to sell through your website first. You can’t, for example, sell your digital book anywhere outside of Amazon while enrolled in the KDP Select program and if you are signed with a publisher (includes Indie Publishers) you might be restricted from selling your print book through your own website depending on the details of your contract. You will have to check this and see.

“Many authors are so obsessed with chart rankings on Amazon that they forget the point is to reach readers who love our books — and for many of us, make a living with our writing. Selling direct enables readers to support us and money to arrive in our bank accounts quickly — but you will not see a spike in your Amazon rankings. So what do you really want?” – Joanna Penn

Here are ways to help Indies Amid the COVID_19 Pandemic:

  • Buy Directly From the Author (from their Website) If You Can.
  • Those ebook sales do add up. If you can’t afford the print book, buy the digital book.
  • Be sure to leave a review on Amazon so the author can attract more readers and get more sales.

Read Joanna Penn’s entire article “How To Sell Your Books Directly To Readers And Get Paid Immediately” here.

Book 2 is on the way! Get started on Book One.

Order a Signed Paperback* Here

Get it in ebook here.

*Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, stay-at-home, and shelter in place policies I am shipping books in shifts so I don’t have to keep going out. If you want to be included in this week’s shipment, be sure to place your print book order today so you don’t miss it! Paperbacks are signed and includes my author seal.

Want more Indie Author Tips? I’ve written over 50 articles sharing my tips, process, and publishing journey as an Indie Author. You can find them on this page. Enjoy!

Writers Wednesday – Chapter 6: The Women with Blue Eyes

Chapter 6: “Jason Who?”

“Higher daddy, higher! Push me higher!”

The four-year-old swung her legs back and forth, feeling the wind on her face. Jason smiled. Amarie was a fun junkie like her daddy.

“I don’t think you ready for this though Marie baby. You ready for this?”

“I’m ready, I’m ready. Higher daddy!”

Jason stopped the swing and placed his hands on each side. He stepped back, pulling Amarie back, high into the air, his hands still holding on tightly to the swing. Amarie laughed and giggled. Jason let go, letting the swing fly through the air as Marie screamed. Jason laughed.

“Told you, you weren’t ready!”

As the swing came back to him, he stopped it, helping Amarie to climb down.

“Come on baby, let’s go feed daddy.”

“That was amazing!” shrieked Amarie, still feeling giddy.

Jason smiled. Kids were something else. One minute they are asking you a million questions and the next they little geniuses.

“Amazing huh? Spell it for daddy.”

Amarie twisted her lip and Jason couldn’t get over the cuteness. She was his little chocolate drop, her skin taking on her mother’s dark complexion instead of his lighter one. Her brown, course, hair was in ponytails with yellow barrettes adorning the braided ends. Jason and his baby mama didn’t always get along, but he admired how she always kept his daughter fresh and looking like a little lady. Not too many little girls still wore pigtails these days. While moms kept her cute, Jason kept her smart. He taught her beauty on the outside meant nothing without beauty on the inside. “And beauty,” he taught her, “come with brains. Don’t just be a cutie, be smart too.”

“A-M-A…” began Amarie.

Jason tried hard to listen, but his spirit was still disturbed from the events of the other day. He wouldn’t teach his daughter the importance of thinking if he wasn’t a thinking man. I know for a fact her ass was sitting right next to me. How the hell did she end up on the other side of the room, standing up? He couldn’t remember what happened between the time he was about to tongue the woman down to when she put him out. It was weird and had him feeling uneasy. It was hot as hell in there too though. Could that have been the reason? Did I blackout from the heat?

“N-G,” recited Amarie as they made it to the car. Jason helped her into the back seat and strapped her into the booster seat.

“Did I do it right daddy?”

“Yea, baby. Good job.”

He closed her door and felt a wave of heat on his neck. Frowning, Jason turned around before opening his car door and saw no one.

“J man you are tripping,” he said outloud to himself.

“Tripping. T-R-I..” began Amarie.

Jason laughed and took out his cell.

“I’m not gonna make it out that way any time soon bro,” boomed Jason’s deep, melodic voice. He laughed into the phone. Tony was always saying something crazy.

“Naw, nothing like that. Got the little one with me. Yea. Ya’ll go ahead though. Imma stop by Moms, I can leave her there and catch ya’ll later. The steakhouse? Bet. I ain’t eating though. Jason paused as his friend chided him on the other end.

“You know moms ain’t gonna let me stop by and not eat! If Imma choose a meal it’s gonna be moms fa sho.”

He hung up and dialed another number.

“Sup old man. You at the crib? Oh yea? What she cook? Bet. I’m on my way. I got Marie with me. Yea. Aiight. See you soon.”

Jason hung up and then strapped on his seat belt. Whatever it was he was feeling, he didn’t trust it. He always talked things over with his dad. He felt fortunate to still have him in his life. Not many black men he knew could say they grew up with both parents in the home. Jason’s parents had been married for twenty-five years. That meant something to him. It also made him ashamed that he couldn’t hold onto a relationship himself. As Jason pulled out of his parking space and began to drive down the street, he prayed his mother’s cooking could help to shake the cold chill that trickled down his spine and the knot that lingered in the pit of his stomach.

***

“Internet stalking your boyfriend? Sweetie, if you think he’s cheating, he’s cheating.”

Amy laughed as she walked past Tina’s cubicle where a photo of Jason was pulled up on her computer screen. Quickly, Tina opened another tab.

“It’s not like that.”

She shook her head and crossed out the word Email on her notepad. The man was invisible online, no email and no record. He had been working for the U.S. Postal Service for three years. Before that, he attended a community college but then dropped out. Anything before that is a mystery.

Tina tapped her pencil on the desk, still unsure if she should intervene and because she had taken her prescription, there was no sign of Az to help. If she was going to help, she only had a few hours to do it and she had no idea where this Jason dude was.

“Hey Fred?”

“Yep?”

“Look up this name for me.”

Fred took the post-it from Tina and frowned. “Jason King?”

Amy laughed, shaking her head.

“Who’s he?”

“With a name like Jason King, shid,” laughed Amy.

Freddy laughed too. Tina shook her head.

“Ya’ll play too much. I don’t even know the guy. I think he may be connected to the Byron case.”

“In what way?” asked Freddy.

“I don’t know but I think he’s involved,” she lied. Trying to stop a blue-eyed fallen angel disguised as a beautiful black woman from killing him, wouldn’t exactly make her look sane.

In the new browser she typed in her company password, and pulled up Byron’s file. She looked up to find Amy staring at her. The woman cut her eyes, frowned, and looked away.

Chapter 7 “Angel of Vision”

Revising The Stella Trilogy: Book Two – Beyond the Colored Line

Book one is out and we are on to book two!

My main challenge for book two is making sure that it stays consistent with book one. This is important for any series, but for Historical Fiction, it is even more critical.

Since writing Historical Fiction is writing set in a time that has already occurred, the details of the past must be realistic to what was going on. A good Historical Fiction book places fictional characters somewhere in a world that has already existed in a way that reads authentic. Readers should be able to reimagine what that world was like by immersing themselves in the life of the characters and the world around them. I like to think of it as a time machine, which is also what makes writing #Histfic fun to me.

Style, Language, Dialogue

Like book one, book two opens in 1996 and picks up where we left off at Mama Sidney’s house in book one. But book two also takes us back into the life of Mama Sidney, and we revisit history from the 1920s through the 60s. My focus for book two was to make sure the dialogue, language, racial and political events occurring during this time were realistic to what was happening in the world. We talk about The Great Depression and touch on the reoccurring lynchings taking place in both the north and south. We look at the brutal murder of Emmett Till, the shooting of Dr. King, Jim Crow Laws, and The Black Panther Party. While I immerse Stella in her own world, there is still the larger world to deal with and we watch how she navigates both. How does Stella’s personal identity crises correlate to the identity crises plaguing her larger community?

Racial Terminology

The biggest thing to deal with for book two is the racial classifications of blacks during this period. African Americans are the only people whose racial terminology has changed with the census. We have been “Niggers,” Negros, Coloreds, Blacks, and African Americans, and this can get confusing when trying to use the right term for the right year. This is also not to mention other racial “nicknames” we called ourselves, such as Afro-American and The New Negro.

The challenge of using the right term for the right years is because there were terms that blacks preferred to call themselves and terms used discriminately by the wider society. Although by the 60s Black Americans were preferring to be called blacks or Afro-Americans (as Malcolm X used a lot after leaving the Nation of Islam) white separatist signage still referred to us as coloreds. “Whites Only / Coloreds Only,” or “Welcome to the Colored Zone,” banners and store signs could have read.

Credited to W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington, blacks advocated for a switch from Colored to Negro in the early 1920s. As blacks redefined themselves, terms like “The New Negro,” became popular and sparked a movement that later became known as The Harlem Renaissance.

By the 1960s, though, African Americans had transitioned from being “Negros,” to “Blacks.” (Malcolm X specifically didn’t like the term Negro).

During the Black Power movement when sayings such as “I’m Black and I’m Proud,” were popular (think James Brown “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!”) blacks wore their hair natural, read and published black literature and did what they thought would reconnect them with their lost heritage. In this process, many black political leaders of the time, such as Kwame Ture or Stokely Carmichael, helped to shift the terminology away from Negro and toward Black. Black publications like Ebony followed by switching from Negro to Black.

While a large majority of people still preferred Negro, “Black“ was becoming the preferred term with the New York Times and Associated Press abandoning “Negro” in the 1970s.

By the 1980s, Jesse Jackson called for a shift from Black to African American and while the change is still not as accepted or monumental as black was during the 60s, it is the term most socially acceptable when referring to black Americans.

I had to consider these changes when referring to blacks throughout this part of the book. What did they call themselves? What did society call them? How do I integrate this into the dialogue and setting realistically?

Setting, language, and dialogue is the backbone of Historical Fiction because the setting makes the story seem real and determines the character’s beliefs and actions. Not only do I strive to make the characters stand out but the culture of the time in which they live.

About Book Two:

In book two, we dig deeper into the McNair family’s legacy. Named after her great-grandmother, Stella has a very light complexion causing her to be the tease of her classmates. Unable to find solace among her African American contemporaries, Stella finds it challenging to adjust to a world where she is too light to be black.

After The Great Depression of the 1930s forces Stella’s family to move to Chicago, a conversation with Aunt Sara provokes Stella to do something that will dramatically affect not just her life but the life of her children and grandchildren.

Stella: Beyond the Colored Line will be available through my website and back up on Amazon in digital and print by April 24th. I am not putting the rest of the books up for preorder, so you’ll be able to order it immediately on 4/24.

If you have not already read book one, click one of the links below.

Amazon Kindle

Signed paperback

https://www.yecheilyahysrayl.com/bookstore/stella-between-slavery-and-freedom

People Will Never Forget How You Made them Feel

If there is one thing I have learned in both my personal and professional life (to include blogging) is that change is inevitable. One day you will look up and the people who were rooting for you, in the beginning, are not rooting for you any longer. As I’ve said on this blog once before, you can look up and see an entirely new group of supporters/readers.

Just as quickly as COVID-19 has swept over the world, people will pack up their support and leave you dumbfounded. What happened? What changed? Am I no longer interesting? Is the content no longer quality?

It’s easy to blame ourselves. It’s our blog, our book, our product. And while we are conscious enough to know that sometimes our circle will decrease in size, we must remind ourselves that while the support might decrease in size that doesn’t mean it doesn’t increase in quality. A lack of interest sometimes has nothing to do with us. Although it may feel like it, it’s not personal.

But as I’ve said, we are human with feelings and thoughts and emotions. We cannot help but wonder. These are the times where we will need to pick up our faith, hold on to those gifts and hold our heads higher than we’ve ever held it before. I can’t tell you why some people leave, why they unsubscribe from your life or what you did to influence this decision. What I can echo are the words from one of our favorite poets and one of my favorite quotes:

“People will forget what you did, people will forget what you said, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

These are such powerful words to me because it’s a two-edged sword. Whether you make people feel inspired and empowered or whether you make them feel discouraged and disheartened, people will remember it.

People will leave when they’ve served the purpose in your life it meant them to serve and some of them will even forget what you’ve done. What they won’t forget is the impact you’ve had on their life, the imprint you left there and how you made them feel.

Entrepreneurship, authorship specifically, is hard and I know that in this climate “hard” doesn’t seem like a strong enough word to describe what it’s like to endure this, but I hope this message and Angelou’s words were not only encouraging for you today but that they help you persist in the troublesome areas.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned was understanding the state of my mental health is much more important than my career because my level of self-worth and self-love is what will drive the work.

A text I received from Ms. Edwards (pictured) inspired this post; how good it felt to know someone was thinking about me. So whether it’s a text, phone call, email or DM, it doesn’t take much to be kind. Since we are all in the same boat right now, with the time you have, be sure to reach out to someone who has made an impression on you and show them you appreciate them.

Let us remember that support is a verb.

It’s National Poetry Month!

It’s National Poetry Month!
I am Soul is 99cents on Kindle and $8 in paperback through the end of April.

Signed Paperback

www.yecheilyahysrayl.com/bookstore/i-am-soul-poetry

Amazon Kindle

www.amazon.com/I-am-Soul-Yecheilyah-Ysrayl-ebook/dp/B078FS2ZJT

What are you reading or re-reading for National Poetry Month? Here’s my list so far!
  • The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni (1968 – 1998)

 

  • Maya Angelou Poems: Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Diiie, Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well, And Still I Rise, Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?

 

  • If Only There Was Music : The Poetry of Forbidden Love by Nonnie Jules