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When Something Finally Starts Working… Then What?

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Dark teal blog graphic with the words “When something finally starts working… then what?” in large white text beside a smartphone displaying the Instagram Reels logo.

I almost stopped publishing.

Anyone following my blog knows that. I was doing too much work for too little in return, and for a really long time I was discouraged enough that I was thinking about walking away and not putting my books on Amazon anymore. I was still going to write–write for myself, write to give my books away–but I wasn’t going to write to publish. Ten years, 30+ books, and most days I wasn’t even making a dollar in royalties.

And the sad part was, it wasn’t because I wasn’t trying. I used Written Word Media newsletter promos, I tried ads. I tried a “real” newsletter (as opposed to my blog now), and I even gave away a full-length novel as a cookie. I did free book blasts and rapid released. I wrote the next book. Always wrote the next book because that book could be the one that changes everything. I did everything they tell you to do. No one could look back at the past ten years I’ve been publishing and say that I didn’t try.

Then I saw someone on Threads talking about Instagram Trial Reels, and I thought, meh, why not. I had already donated blood to TikTok so this wasn’t going to be much different. Eight weeks later, I’ve earned the equivalent of two of my paychecks.

Posting a Reel every day worked.

And now I’m in this strange place where after ten years I found something that moved the needle. After swearing up and down and sideways that there wasn’t a way to find traction or to level up.

It messes with your head.

I kept going back to thinking there was something I had done wrong, and when you produce books all alone, there’s plenty of room for error. Books that could have been edited better, covers that could have looked better. I’ve always edited to the best of my ability, and while your best at the time is always going to be your best at the time, it might not be the best there is, and that can hurt you. I’ve rushed releases and published covers that I didn’t like. Did any of that set me back? Maybe, but when I was advertising and pouring so much money into Facebook ads, quality is only half the problem. You have to get your books in front of readers first. Then they decide if your book is good enough to buy.

With this experiment, I’ve been really lucky. Really lucky and I’m not pretending that luck doesn’t play a huge part in this. I started doing snippets and hooks of my King’s Crossing serial. It’s darker than most of my other books, and the snippets where Zane is after Stella and he wants to kill her for betraying him do really well. I think that being on the fringes of “dark romance” has helped catch some of those readers, not to mention, the content is great for Reels. Especially since I don’t put sex in my snippets. I don’t want my account flagged, and posting murder danger and angst has worked so far. So, I feel like I had books that were geared for Reels and I have six in my serial, which is complete, so that’s another lucky thing to add to my list of lucky things. The covers are okay, most dark romance covers are object covers, but I like men and so far that hasn’t seemed to bother anyone.

I tried doing Reels of Twisted Alibis, the first book in my rockstar trilogy (mostly because I like the read-through concept), but even though I had a few Reels take off, those books didn’t sell, so I stopped. That’s another lucky thing, I guess. To know when to quit. I started doing snippets of Wicked Games instead, a standalone I call “King’s Crossing lite,” and after a couple of Reels that got really good views, that book started selling too.

But here’s an interesting thing: None of my backlist is moving. Which means readers aren’t exploring what else I’ve written. Obviously, no one has time to make videos for every book in their backlist and I have no desire to try to push a boulder up a mountain, either. I keep coming back to something Bryan Cohen said while I was doing one of his Amazon ad challenges so many years ago: advertise the books that sell. Not all of them will hit, so don’t waste your energy on the ones that don’t. And it’s true. I’ve done everything to get my Cedar Hill Duet to go, especially after I re-edited them and redid their covers. They’ve always had a lukewarm reception with anything I’ve tried to do with them and sometimes you just have to walk away.

It’s not hard to see that my King’s Crossing serial is going to be my bread and butter. The other books in my backlist don’t really compare to the fucked-up plot and those abused characters.

This leaves me in some kind of a strange limbo. I’ll keep doing Reels for those books, using the same hook and snippets (I try to mix up the b-roll and there’s plenty on Canva to choose from so it’s not too hard) over and over. I don’t do Reels for books four through six because I don’t want readers to like Gage and Zarah and then realize there are three books before them they have to read first. I’ve had readers ask if they can skip book one, and I’ve had to say no. I don’t know if that influences their buying choices or not. And I’ll keep doing Reels for Wicked Games, at least until I have another new release. I don’t know how well Bitter Love will do, and I’m hoping that if hockey is still trending next year (and I think it will be with the second season of Off Campus coming to Prime, HBO doing the second season of Heated Rivalry, and Netflix picking up Icebreaker) I’ll try Frozen Assets and Cold Mercy when they’re published.

Under all this, though, is the fear that one day this will stop giving me the results that I’ve already come to optimistically enjoy (trust me, it didn’t take long LOL). At some point, it will, right? I’m going to Florida this week and for the past three weeks, I’ve been making a “Reels stash” so I have them made to post while I’m gone. I don’t want to break the consistency that I’ve built. I started posting on July 25th and haven’t skipped a day. I know some of my “success” is posting consistently, and I see that in view bumps of older Reels when I post something new. I suppose that’s not a surprise, but I don’t think consistency is something authors take seriously enough. On the other hand, it’s difficult to consistently do something that consistently produces nothing. When I was running Amazon Ads, and to some extent, posting on TikTok and not being able to escape their 200 view prison, I saw that too.

And then you have the platform itself, and we learned that terrible lesson with TikTok. I saw creator careers crumble overnight. Over the years I have said similar things: Don’t plant your vegetables in someone else’s garden. And I still believe that, even if you can’t help it. I don’t have a “real” newsletter anymore and I haven’t gotten any new signups on my blog. I’ve gotten over 800 new followers on my Facebook Author Page, but that only gives Zuckerberg more slices of my pie. My views and visitors on my author website have gone up, though, and so has my follower count on my Amazon Author page, so that’s something at least.

A change will happen, at some point, and all you can do is hope for the best and be prepared for the worst.

To finally have an audience for (some) of my books is surreal to say the least. Interest in something I’ve written after ten years of struggling to be seen.

Where am I going to go from here? Keep doing what I’m doing. I actually like making Reels because I’m not stretching myself thin. I don’t use a service like Authorloom, and I’m not interested in posting 10-30 Reels a day. I post two every day: one for Wicked Games and one for King’s Crossing. At first I decided not to do Reels for Wicked Games while I was gone, but the bump in sales was too much to resist, so I spent most of the weekend making extras. I know how lucky I am that making Reels is easy: writing the hook, finding the snippet, and writing the caption takes time and practice if you want to snag a reader’s attention. I have the time to make them and I also know that not everyone does. There were a lot of things that came together to make this work, and I would never discount any of them.

But I think through all this, the biggest takeaway for me was that I wasn’t tired or bitter enough to try one more thing. If you’re discouraged, it’s easy to think that nothing will work so there’s no point in trying. I could have tried Reels a long time ago, but I was resentful that it was just another thing to put on my list of shit I had to do. Then after seeing so many authors say they worked, I was just like, Fuck it. I’ll try it too. There was no harm in it besides a couple of lost hours, so I wouldn’t be out much. It took me a few Reels to get into a groove that worked, now making them and posting them is part of my daily routine. Just like writing this blog on Fridays. You do it long enough and it’s a part of your business.

Things will change. They always do. I’ve seen a lot in the past ten years.

I could end with something pithy, but I’ve philosophized enough here in the past couple of years. But I can say this with all the honesty in the world. I will always keep writing. I love putting characters through hell so they reach their happily ever afters. Even if I’m the only one who will read them.

If you want to take a look at my Reels, you can find them here: https://www.instagram.com/vaniamargenerheault/reels/ Trial Reels are hidden, but I started putting the majority on my regular profile because I was getting more views there.

I will be out of office this week and I won’t have a blog post for Monday, September 21st. Behave, and I’ll tell you how my vacation went. 🐚🐬

Have a good week, everyone!

End-of-July Author Update

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It’s the end of July, which means the summer is two-thirds over. It’s going by so fast, but I’ve done a couple of things like take a road trip to Bismarck, North Dakota with my sister and daughter, and we drove to a town forty-five minutes from here to go to their zoo. We have a couple of other things we’d like to do, like go to another town forty-five minutes away in a different direction and play lake tourist there, and possibly go to the zoo here in Fargo, ND, though it’s smaller and more expensive. We didn’t go last summer, so that’s on our maybe list, and if it works out, it works out.

This week is terrible with things to do, like my daughter’s follow-appointment for her wisdom teeth surgery she had done last week, and my own dentist appointment for a cleaning Thursday afternoon. My son has a dermatology appointment that same day and adding all that to the normal grind of life, maybe you shouldn’t try to get a hold of me until Sunday because there’s a high possibility I’ll be a quivering lump of jelly on the floor come Friday morning. Which is too bad because I have to work.

But, sometimes stuff is just crammed together and there’s nothing you can do. The good news is August should be slower, and my main goal is to finish Cold Mercy. Only because my sister, daughter, and I are planning to go to Florida for a week in September, and it would be nice to get it done so I can put it aside mentally and enjoy the first vacation I’ve had in over seven years. My daughter hasn’t been on a plane since she was about ten (she’s twenty now) so she’s also looking forward to it.

Cold Mercy is coming along, and I’m happy about that. I’m enjoying writing Trevor and Celina, but as I’ve said, I don’t have any plans to publish my hockey duet (that I’ve decided to call Black Ice) as of yet. I’ve actually been hunting down couples on DepositPhotos for Bitter Love, just because I think a couple would fit better than a single guy since it’s a small town second chance. So, I’m doing a little bit of everything, and I have a hockey standalone planned after Cold Mercy because I didn’t want to let all that hockey research go to waste.

After bumping into a Threads post about trial reels on Instagram and the easy videos she was making, I decided to give it a try. After posting a few, I can tell you that I like how simple they are to put together and that there isn’t a 200 view dungeon like there is on TikTok (as far as I can tell). That alone is a motivation and confidence booster, because back when I was on TikTok, it really sucked to put an hour into a carousel for it only to get 130 views or whatever. The only thing that tripped me up was figuring out the editing tools, but watching a quick tutorial on YouTube took care of my biggest annoyance. Because I still have a lot of TikTok hooks and Kindle screenshot slides, I’m going to try to post a reel every day and see how it works.

Do I think I’ll go viral and sell lots of books? No. Do I think I’ll go viral at all? Probably not, but I’m not focusing on numbers either. Do I think I’ll sell books? That’s another “probably not” but I was a little sad when I had to get rid of my TikTok account–I felt like I was actually reaching readers with the likes and saves–and this is an easier alternative. Like TikTok, they want you to do as much in-app as possible, so I’m not assembling the whole video in Canva. Here are my quick steps if you want to try it:

Film or find a b-roll. I didn’t even know what that was last year, haha. I filmed my bookshelf and my laptop with a cup of coffee, but so far I haven’t used them. Right now I just go to Canva, choose an Instagram Reel canvas, and find a video that kind of has the snippet vibe. Like the one I posted today–it’s a snippet of Rick finding Devyn at his construction site zip-tied to a support beam. So I found a video of a snowy, city street at night. That’s all you really need. I have no plans to show my face right now, but that could change. I don’t really care either way as long as I do my hair and makeup first.

Make a Kindle screenshot of your snippet. I fake those. I use an Instagram post-sized canvas and just copy and paste the text over from an ePub. To make a “highlight” I use a Square in Elements, change the color and size, and make it transparent. I don’t have all my books on a real Kindle, so this works for me.

Book excerpt from a romantic suspense novel. After finding Devyn unconscious, the hero calls 911, struggles with not being able to carry her to safety himself, and holds her hand the entire ambulance ride to the hospital.

I still have a fear thing left over from TikTok, and I mark out the naughty words. I don’t know how Instagram likes swear words and sex, but I’ve always gone more angsty in my snippets anyway so I don’t think I need to worry too much about that.

Write your two sentence hook that will go above your snippet. I still see some authors using the X, but Y, formula, like “When he falls first, but she’s off limits” kind of thing, so you’ll have to play around with what works for you.

Write your description. I write a quick couple paragraphs that I put in my Mac’s notes app, then I can copy and paste it over on my iPhone. Don’t forget the title and where they can find the book. I use keywords instead of hashtags, since that seems to be the trend right now.

Put it all together. I go into Reels on my phone, and use the b-roll I chose from Canva, add my snippet, add the hook with their text tool, copy and paste the description, add music, and I’m done. Some authors will add a “cover” to their reel, but honestly, the woman who showed us her views in that Threads post didn’t have covers for hers, and I’m inclined to just leave it and see how a simple reel without a cover works first. I’m still in the “experimenting and having fun” stage, so I’m not going to complicate it unless I have to.

Instagram Reel showing a dark, snowy street at night with a page from a romance novel overlaid. The text reads, "She disappeared without a trace. He was terrified he'd find her too late." The excerpt shows the hero calling 911 after finding Devyn unconscious and holding her hand in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

I was missing posting on TikTok, so thanks to Jessica for the motivation!

Another thing I did was revamp my FB author page banner and my website header. Since I no longer consider myself strictly a billionaire romance author, I thought it was time to change it up. I also have never made myself an author logo, so I played around in Canva and came up with something that might be a little too pink, but I like for it now.

Soft pink watercolor background with blush flowers framing the author name "VM Rheault" inside a geometric outline. The graphic includes the tagline: "Billionaire romance, small-town love, and everything in between."

That takes care of my backlist, my small town, second chance that I’ll be publishing next year sometime, and the hockey romances that I’m writing now. Those banners can just stay there for however long since I won’t be changing it anywhere to announce a new release.

Last month I teased I would put my Cedar Hill Duet for free, and I did that. Both of them are free until Wednesday, and if you were wanting to grab them or just download them to support me (thank you!) here’s the link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B1PV65WD

Dark gray promotional graphic with subtle floral accents displaying the romance novels Captivated by Her and Addicted to Her by VM Rheault. Large text announces: "Free for a Limited Time!" with the dates "July 24–28."

I didn’t do much for them except boost a post on Instagram and send a real newsletter to the few subscribers I still have. These are older books, but since they have new covers and they’ve been re-edited, I thought I’d promote them and see how they do. They’re free until Wednesday, July 28th, so if you know of anyone who would want a billionaire romantic suspense duet, you can point them that way.

I’m also putting Rescue Me in a romance book blast next month. I’m to the point where I just want people to see my books, download them if they think they sound good, and maybe read them if they ever get around to it. That’s not me being meh–I know how long people’s TBR lists are. Mine is the same, as I’ve been downloading free hockey books lately if I see them pop up in my Freebooksy newsletters, so I understand that someone downloading one of my books might not read it for months or years, if ever. I’ve stopped thinking about sales, really, and I might do a free blast of one of my trilogies next. Do a special one-day sale of all of them and see how many downloads I get. I think it’s nice to give them all away instead of just a book one. It’s just how I’ve been feeling, at least.

That’s about all I have going on. When I have a second in the evening and I’m too tired to write but it’s too early to go to bed, I’ve been watching the new season of The House of the Dragon. If you like small-town romance shows, a new season of Ransom Canyon just released on the 23rd on Netflix, and I’m wondering if I should rewatch the first season again before diving into the second. We’ll see. There are some evenings when the day hasn’t beat the shit out of me and I still have the energy to write, so I don’t watch too much TV, but it’s nice to have something to look forward to when my brain is mush.

I hope your summer has been going well so far. Do you have anything you want to get done before spooky season starts? Let me know!

Until next time, have a great week ahead!