Happy Monday! As much as it pains me to admit, summer is a third over. I wouldn’t say our weather has been particularly great–not a lot of warm days and lots of rain–but I appreciate the slower feel to the days even if my job hasn’t gotten the memo and my work hours are just as busy as any other time of the year.

I finished with my rockstar trilogy. I formatted them with Vellum, assigned the ISBNs in Bowker (I live in the States), finished my covers, and ordered the proofs. Once they come, I’ll hand them over to my proofreader and hopefully get them up on Booksprout for reviews by the middle of August. It was a lot of work, but I’m happy with how they turned out. I tried something new with the formatting since I updated Vellum and I wanted to see how easy it was. I added a chapter header graphic that I found on DepositPhotos. Finding it was surprisingly fast, but I did have to use GIMP to flip it and crop the white out. Here is the original, the cropped version, and how it looks inside the book:

This is will be for the paperbacks only. Ereaders don’t support chapter headers so I’ll do the simple chapter images like I have in the past. It’s a little more work, but not much, and I think the paperbacks will be worth it, even if I don’t sell many. I had to up my prices too, because these are so long, and they’re going to be 14.99 instead of 12.99. I try to keep my prices low, and they’re 12.99 in countries like the UK and France, 14.99 in Canada, and 17.99 in Australia. I didn’t want to put them that high there, but considering I only make .50 off each purchase, it’s as low as I could go. My ebooks are still 4.99, and I think that’s the way they will stay. Rescue Me is still .99 and I might take that off sale soon. It’s been on sale for a few months now, so it might be fun to run a sale on Faking Forever.

I feel more confident about the covers, too, than for the ones I did for my Lost & Found Trilogy. I like the models better, even if they still don’t quite look 50. That’s okay. I found a background that I liked and added smoke to the bottom to help the title and my name pop. I didn’t workshop these, though I asked a friend what she thought. I looked through a lot of rockstar romance covers, and there wasn’t one set way authors were doing them. A few had an audience at the bottom with male model blended into the top, but I think the stage in the background suits, and I want to thank one of the members in the Indie Cover Project for her recommendation of the title font. I workshopped Rescue Me, and she suggested it. I didn’t end up using it, but I kept it in mind and it works here.

Maybe it’s a little premature to post them here, since I want to do a cover reveal to my newsletter subscribers later this week, but I wanted to show you how they look like they belong together. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in my years of indie publishing is to make your series look like they belong. It’s especially important as you build your backlist and your series will be listed on your Amazon author page. You want them easily identifiable at a quick glance–and I see authors struggling with this in some of my author groups. Sometimes I think it’s because they publish as they go–they are thinking about one book and one book only. Since I wait and publish together, I think of my trilogies and series as one large project, not each book on an individual basis. That might spill over into how I write them, too, as I have a review on Safe & Sound, the third book in my Lost & Found trilogy, that said she didn’t consider these books standalones within the series. When I write them, I think of them as one long, continual story, even if they are centered around different couples. I can’t start a series without reading them in order, and I guess I think most readers are like me.

I want to do better promoting these on social media–and I’ll start posting on IG and FB soon. I don’t think my proofreader is going to find anything serious–no large, gaping plot holes that will take days to fix–but I don’t want to post dates until I know for sure. While I do that, I’m going to dive into writing the Christmas novel I wanted to write. I need something quick and easy to put together after releasing two trilogies this year. I found the notes of the novel I want to write–but after skimming them, it’s no wonder I couldn’t put the pieces together. I have an idea and nothing more, so I’ll have to figure out what I was trying to do. I have a few notebook pages of story, and I don’t like what I where I was going with her, so I’ll need to rethink that character. Still, it has potential, and most times that can be enough to write something good. I just need to sit with a pen and notebook and brainstorm.

That’s about all I have for this week. It’s odd being between projects. I may never get used to the feeling of not actively writing something, but I’m trying to enjoy the short break. I should use the time to make up some social media graphics in Canva, too, and once again, after seeing a fellow romance author who went viral on TikTok post in a group she bought a car with her royalties, circling around to that platform, too.

For now, I’ve dumped Twitter. I’m not going to tweet much of anything and won’t post my new releases on there. I pared down my bio and put up a generic header. If I do post, it will be through sharing and I won’t check notifications. I want to focus what energy I wasted there on IG where I think I may get a better return on investment. I’m also trying to participate more in my romance FB groups. Like I said in my last blog post, I’ve been networking with the wrong people, and that is one of the mistakes I need to rectify. The friends I have made on Twitter know where to find me elsewhere, and can say adios without remorse.

I hope you had a good holiday if you were in Canada or the US, and find little ways to enjoy the rest of your summer.