1,641 words
9 minutes read time

There are so many things that are baffling me right now, and I just don’t know where to start or if I should even write about any of it. Let me start with what I’ve been doing and then I’ll see if I’m brave enough to write anything else or if I’ll just call it good.

First, my fifth book in my King’s Crossing series launched on the 3rd. I made a handful of pennies because there were a few people who preordered it, then I made another handful because I had a couple people read it in KU. Honestly, this is not what I was hoping for launching this series, but I’m barely doing anything to promote it, so I guess the blame falls on me. On March 5th I paid for a Fussy Librarian bargain ebook promo, and I sold 15 copies on the day and two more the next and then sales sank to nothing, which is to be expected. Here’s what the promo looked like if you’re interested:

I paid 26.00 USD, so the results were fine for how much it cost. Plus there is always read-through potential to the other five books, so we’ll see what happens. Generally speaking it could have been better, but I’m glad I remembered at the end of the blurb to mention that it was a first in series and that the book ends in a cliffhanger. Not everyone likes those, so it’s good to keep that out in the open and may account for why I didn’t sell that many. I should have also put in there the series was complete as many readers won’t start a series unless they’re all available and I’ll remember that for future promos.

I started some very low cost-per-click Amazon ads again and unpaused some of the ones I turned off months ago. Those never got the traction back they had when I turned them off, and the new ones aren’t doing much because the bid is too low for Amazon to show them. Don’t know why I’m bothering if I’m going to half-ass it like that, but sometimes I think doing a very little is better than doing completely nothing, though it’s probably not true. I don’t have anything else planned besides releasing the last book in my series in April, then all I have left this year is the launch of my next book in September. (I’ve been telling people it will be live September 15th and plan to stick to that.) But that’s too far ahead to think about because I’m not rushing through summer. I hope it’s hotter than hell so I can lie on my balcony and bake. Your girl is tired and needs a break.

My Rocky Point Series giveaway went okay. I mailed out copies to the one winner who emailed me back. I should have probably chosen someone else as a second winner, but if I would have done that, the actual second winner would have emailed me (that’s how my luck goes) and I would have needed to purchase more copies which would have taken a while. So I have a paperback set the second winner didn’t claim and I’ll figure out what to do with those later. I didn’t expect huge results and mostly it gave me things to write about on my FB author page and my newsletter.

Speaking of my FB author page, since I’ve been boosting posts, I’ve gotten a deluge of followers who just want to make me book trailers and others who didn’t look like they would care about a billionaire romance author. So, I took a couple of hours and culled my followers from 270 to 210. I know it’s better to have quality instead of quantity, but it really gave me the feeling (again) that my FB author page isn’t worth the energy and I haven’t posted since I did that. It’s something I can’t get rid of because over the years I’ve shared that link in various places and I hate beyond reason broken links. I may post on it every couple of days, just so it looks somewhat active, but it’s one of those things where I can’t measure ROI, I can only measure how I feel. I really don’t know what to do with myself in that regard because the motivation to post on social media just is not there, and I’m not really sure what would inspire me to post more. Sales, probably. Not engagement. Everyone yells about how much they want engagement, but if you’ve known me for a while, you know how special you are if you DM me and I answer you back. So, I’ll figure something out. The only good part about posting at all is that Canva makes it so easy, and I have to pay for that until I die because I have a lot of assets trapped there and I’ll never stop doing my own book covers.

Right now I’m about 60% done with WICKED GAMES but at 58k words I’ve lost motivation to work on it. I’ll finish it, no doubt about that because I still love Seth and Avery and want them to have their HEA, but I’m not running a sprint or a marathon and I work on it when I feel like working on it. It’s part of the “new me” I have going on for 2025, but I also think some of it has to do with hormones and the lackluster feeling I have sometimes of just being old and still alive. I mean, it’s not serious, I don’t have depression. I used to have depression, before my son was born, so I definitely know how that feels. This is more of a “meh” feeling, and it will pass. Spring is actually kind of gloomy here right now, the snow melting uncovering all the dog poop people didn’t pick up and the air stinks like dead things. Once it gets warmer and the sun shines more consistently and starts drying things out, that will perk me up.

My despondency is actually opening me up to reading a few books, but it’s a sad thing because these authors are on social media asking readers to share and I just can’t. I want to refer people to good books, and one book I read has so many commas they could have prevented the Titanic from sinking and the other has an info dump at the beginning that’s so boring that I cut out after 5%. Luckily one I had picked up during a free promo and the other I borrowed in KU and returned it, but still. While we’re complaining about the Amazon boycott and how people feel trampled because of what’s going on in the state of the world, I think it’s important to remember that as authors who might have people listening to our opinion, we shouldn’t waste our readers’ time and money. I want to recommend books that blew me away, that made me feel something other than annoyance. So, while I’m feeling listless, I’ll be going through my TBR which is a nice change from feeling like if I’m not writing to publish I’m not moving forward.

This Amazon boycott everyone (on Threads) is talking about is a real downer, and it’s interesting how all that blows up only to eventually disappear and never to be spoken of again. A friend told me that she hasn’t seen any of it on Twitter, and I have no idea if it’s made its way to BlueSky or not as I don’t scroll there. But personally, I think it’s all just talk because even if there are a few who actually do cancel their KU subscriptions or whatever, it’s not going to make a dent in the number of readers who use Amazon to buy and read their books. It’s frustrating to have to read that when I’m on social media. If your book sales are low or non-existent, again, it’s something you need to take responsibility for. I mean, I get it. There are ebbs and flows to publishing and any author who has been publishing for a while can tell you that. The political and economic climate also is not helping, but something isolated like this isn’t going to cause the collapse of sales for hundreds or thousands of authors. My sales stopped the second I stopped running ads. My experience might not mean anything to you, but to me it means that I actually do control my sales (not to be confused with royalties). No one can buy your book if they don’t know it exists, and I think it’s easy to forget that. If you truly are concerned about something like this and its effect on your sales, take a look at what the big-time authors who write in your genre are saying. If they are taking a hit and can trace it back to something like this, then maybe it’s time to be concerned. But if they’re carrying on as business as usual, then what you are experiencing probably isn’t caused by whatever people are talking about that day. We have to keep things in perspective. As I say, there’s a big world out there and it’s always a good idea when you get to caught up in the day’s/week’s/month’s drama to step out of that bubble and touch some grass. (Just avoid the dog poop. Gross!)

I think that’s all I have for this week. Thanks again to Brandi Easterling Collins for the interview she so graciously said she’d do that I posted last week. If you missed it, you can read it here.

No clue what I’ll write about next Monday, but I’ll be here with a smile on my face!

Have a great week!