1,831 words, 10 minutes read time

Happy March! 🌸 🌼 🌺

February was probably one of the longest months of my life. When I decided to re-edit and re-cover my Cedar Hill Duet, I was really excited. They were the first books I published when I started my new pen name (though not the first books I wrote in first person POV–that honor belongs to my King’s Crossing serial) and I was really proud of the stories. I watched hours of construction site accidents on YouTube so I could write Rick’s accident accurately. I even tweeted about them when I was on Twitter, something I rarely did, and sold a few copies.

Re-editing book one was fine. There were grammar mistakes and the normal typo, a couple of missing Ts because my Mac’s keyboard was bad. A few missing words here and there because like most writers, I think faster than I type. I edited it in a couple of weeks. Then I went on to the second book. I don’t know what happened, but I ended up taking out about 3,000 words and practically rewrote the stupid thing sentence by sentence. Pretty similar to what I did with Faking Forever when I re-edited that last summer. It was agonizing. So much over-writing and “big” words that sucked you right out of the story. So, it took me a really long time, and I was really glad when I was done with it. I updated all the front and back matter, and updated my author bio in the backs. Updated my blog information since I still was running a newsletter back then. (Just the wording, though, not the links. Don’t ever put an aggregator’s landing page in your back matter! Direct everyone to your website. It will save a lot of headaches later.) Re-did the covers and uploaded those too. When I was inside my KDP dashboard, I updated my keywords, though I couldn’t do much with my categories. Contemporary romance and billionaire romance is pretty accurate, so nothing needed changing there.

Sadly, I came to a realization. Those books weren’t very well-written. Not on a macro-level like story or character arcs, but on a micro, line-level basis. And after re-editing Faking Forever, Rescue Me, and A Heartache for Christmas, I don’t have to wonder why I wasn’t selling books. You can sell one bad book. Maybe even get readers to read it. But they won’t go on to read your backlist. And this is true for any author, not just me. There’s too much content out there for readers to put up with anything they don’t like. Purple prose. Nope. Words they don’t understand. Nope. Over-explaining or over-describing. Nope. I’m not saying my books had all those things. I don’t write long, meandering prose–I just get wordy in areas where less is better.

I didn’t do any New Year predictions on the blog this year, mostly because one year is the same as the next, but I can put this out there: with how much content there is, first impressions are going to be more important than ever. Your cover, title, and blurb have always been important, but if the Look Inside is flat, doesn’t introduce characters, doesn’t have anything happening, readers won’t buy. And if the rest of the book doesn’t meet expectations, they won’t read any more of your books. Maybe it’s always been that way, but it seems like ten years ago a reader would be willing to give you a second chance. Not so much today. You can tell me if I’m wrong.

It’s taken me a long time to figure out why I haven’t been able to scale. And that’s why. I can sell a standalone or a trilogy but I’m not turning those readers into fans. And I don’t even mean fans foaming at the mouth, rabid for my next release. I mean people who see I have a new book out and say, “Cool. Let me pick it up.” Because I wasn’t meeting expectations.

The why doesn’t matter because I’ll just beat myself up. I wasn’t feeling good, couldn’t afford an editor, and the beta readers that I used didn’t help that much, blah blah blah. I was blind to my own writing flaws, which is common. I wrote a lot and grew a lot (and I also feel better, thank goodness!), so obviously, I’m not the same person I was in 2022 when I published my duet. What matters now is taking time to go back and fixing those books while still writing books that sound better.

It’s like walking on a tightrope–making my books sound more casual and conversational without sacrificing my voice and style. Even now, I’m reading my proof of Wicked Games, and the “bigger” words, like “suffice,” slip by me because they’re natural to use. So I don’t want to change how I write, I just want to sound like a better version of what I’ve been writing all this time. The more accessible your writing, the more people who can and will read it. But that means being conscious of the choices I’m making when I decide to change something. Can I use “difficult” or should I use “hard?” They mean the same thing in certain contexts, but how does my character speak? How do I speak in real life? How do I put how I am and how I write together with what’s selling and what readers are comfortable reading? It’s something I’ve thought a lot about in the past year or so, especially when I was editing A Heartache for Christmas. I blogged a bit about it here: When Dumbing Down Your Writing Isn’t Dumb.

I’d like to stay on a forward path, even while I’m cleaning up my backlist, so the next few months are going to look like this:

*Get Wicked Games ready to go (reading the proof, entering changes, ordering another proof, and putting up ARCs) for its May release.
*Read the proofs for my Cedar Hill Duet. They’ll be here soon and I want to make sure all the changes I made sound good. I’m hoping it will only take a week per book, but we’ll see.
*Write my hockey duet. I’m really excited to get going on those, especially since I announced to my readers that hockey was coming.
*While those breathe before the first editing pass, I’ll re-edit my Lost & Found Trilogy. Those don’t need new covers, but I’d like to swap out the man on the first book. I like his suit, but I don’t feel he’s very handsome in a conventional way, so I’d like to change him. Those books have been re-edited before, but this sweep would focus on language (lofty prose vs. conversational) just so they don’t sound so snooty. There’s a small chance they don’t sound that bad, and that editing them won’t be as hard as Faking Forever or Addicted to Her.
*Do an editing sweep of my hockey duet.
*Get Bitter Love ready to publish.

I think it’s safe to say that will put me into the middle of 2027, if not the end of the year because writing my hockey duet will take me a while, and if my Lost & Found Trilogy sounds bad, each book will take me weeks. I’m not sure when I’ll publish after Wicked Games comes out in May. Maybe I won’t publish anything else until 2027, or I might get antsy and publish Bitter Love in November or December, even if it’s not a holiday romance. I’d like to try to publish two books a year, but I’m still trying to push back the idea my books are a business. I break even every year and that’s the best I hope to do. Writing and publishing is a hobby I enjoy doing. While I’ll still take this seriously because if you expect people to give you money for something you made, you should, but things are different, times are different, and if I want to binge the new season of Bridgerton, I don’t want to feel guilty or think the time is wasted. I still fight the compulsion to work as hard and as fast as I can–I get twitchy when real life interferes with too much of my free time–but there’s nothing to gain and it’s just something I have to remind myself of often.

Anyway, I left a Facebook group the other day because someone was posting about how awesome it was they asked Al to create a graphic for a book blast. They posted the graphic too. It was nothing spectacular, and I just thought, “Come on.” I could have made that in five minutes in Canva with a real photo. I understand the working smarter bit, I really do, but is that working smarter or pushing off a task you can do yourself? I put energy, effort, and integrity into what I care about, and I thought if that’s what that group is going to be promoting now, I’ll leave. I’m in Canva every day. Making posts for Pinterest or a graphic for IG, and with their templates, making a book blast promo takes no time at all. I don’t think I’m going to miss much not being in that group, but I may need to look for other publishing groups where I can find out industry news. I like knowing what’s going on. It’s always helpful so you’re not blindsided by something that affects you later. (And I don’t think it needs to be said, but please check with book blast organizers before offering AI content. Some organizers don’t want to be associated with it in any way. So please be respectful of their time in putting the blast together.)

Maybe this is the year I pare back, because when I was on Facebook being annoyed that people can’t make their own graphics, I also blocked all my day-job coworkers. Working with them didn’t make them friends, and I felt a lot lighter after I was done. I took their numbers out of my phone too, and that felt just as good. Next on my list is some serious spring cleaning. I’ve slowly been getting rid of clothes and odds and ends as I have felt better, but I need to move some things out of the apartment and into our storage unit. The clutter, especially now that we have Pim and the apartment has turned her playground, is really getting me down. It will be nice to have some closet space.

That’s all from me today. I hope you have an amazing Monday! Happy March. 🍀 The first day of spring is in eighteen days, and I need the sun. ☀️

Take care, and talk to you next week!