I was going to write about Indie April in a different post, but I don’t have to much to say regarding my author update, so I thought I would squish them together.
I wrote out my first blog post on my author website last week. I gave a brief update on my King’s Crossing series and let everyone know that I’m going to put Give & Take back to the normal price. It’s been .99 for a long time and I need to put it back before the summer promotions begin and my series launches. I can update you on how many views/visits it received once it’s been up for a bit longer. I hope this will be a successful alternative to my newsletter because I don’t know when or if I’ll ever go back to a newsletter aggregator. I’ll give blogging a try for a few months and see how it does. Readers are clicking on the link in my books’ back matter, going to my site, and still downloading my reader magnet. According to my Bookfunnel stats, I’ve given away 4 copies of My Biggest Mistake this month, and 6 copies in the last 30 days. So, even if they aren’t subscribing to the blog, my back matter is doing its job at least, and readers will know if they want updates to look on my website. Do I mind giving away a book for what seems to be no reason? Not really. I’ve been giving away My Biggest Mistake since about 2022 when I first launched my pen name and I’ve given away over 1,000 copies. I love the book and the characters, and I kind of look at it as a loss leader and an introduction to the kinds of books I write hoping to hook readers and entice them to read my other books.
I started reading my series over again, and it’s going faster this time. Each book is only taking a week, as opposed to when I was adding more to the scenes and each chapter was taking 4-7 days to get through. I’m liking the changes I made and some of the things I added surprise me, but in a good way (because I forgot I added them). I was only going to read the first three and then save the entire read through when I ordered the paperback proofs, but I can take a look at the other books and see how they sound. The more work I put into them now before I order the proofs, the more work I save myself later. I hate how long this is taking, but it’s such a big project that I’m probably smart not to rush even though I am getting impatient and want to write something new.
I don’t have much else in terms of an author update. I need to drag out my calendar and look at promo dates and figure out what books I want to put up for what months. I haven’t pushed a book since December, and I want to do one this spring, possibly in May before my series starts to launch, and then in the fall. I’m tired of Written Word Media promos like Freebooksy and BargainBooksy. Even their Red Feather Romance has the same audience. I tried a Fussy Librarian and I would have to log into my profile and see which book I did and figure out the ROI, but being that I can’t remember, the results probably weren’t that great. I think I’m going to try a site I haven’t tried before like Love Kissed or Robin Reads. I might do Rescue Me, since I haven’t pushed that book in a while. It’s got 79 reviews, so it might do okay. I have never done a free promo on Twisted Alibis and since my King’s Crossing series will have started to drop by then, I might put that one for free in say, September. Then of course, I have A Heartache for Christmas that will need some promo October through December, but instead of putting it for free, I might just start up my Facebook ads again. Besides running FB ads to Twisted Alibis and Give & Take, I haven’t done promo for any of books in a while, I need to get something new going.
I think that’s really I have on the author front this week. So let’s talk about #IndieApril.
I hadn’t heard about #IndieApril until a few years ago scrolling on Twitter, something about supporting indie authors, lifting up fellow writers, and promoting your own work without shame.
It sounds great and probably why it’s been around for so long. I appreciate the concept, I really do, but it’s nothing I want to participate in. I support my friends in other ways, like editing and formatting, doing covers if my skill is up to the challenge. Not that I don’t support my friends online too, by sharing their posts and commenting, but we all know social media is a blackhole, and for every 20 minutes I spend making a graphic to promote one of my books somewhere, I earn fewer than 100 views, sometimes even a lot fewer than that, and it’s not worth the time.
But here are the real reasons I don’t participate in Indie April:
It’s mostly other authors hyping up their work and their friends’ books. Like I just said, I think that’s great, but while you can say until your face is blue that authors are readers too, authors (your friends and acquaintances and authors who pop up on your “for you” page) will never buy your books in the numbers you would need to make the sales you want for any kind of real traction or career. Indie April is nothing but preaching to the choir, and what’s the point of that?
I will say this until I die: Readers don’t care who publishes your books. If you’re indie, or small press, or trad, they don’t look, and as long as you’re giving them a good read for their time and money, they will never care. Shouting from the rooftops that you’re an indie author won’t get you anywhere. Indies are always complaining about the line between Trad and Indie, I see it on Threads, and it was a big topic on Twitter too, but you know who draws that line? Indies do! It wouldn’t even exist if indies weren’t calling themselves that all the time. We’re writers, we’re authors. Indie April gives you no traction as an author. What gives you traction as an author is finding readers, who, once again, don’t care how your book is published. This indie reputation was started and cultivated by us. Maybe one or two readers will care if they get seriously burned by an author, but in all honestly, readers will more than likely not read that author again. It has no effect on you or your books.
Indies have a difficult time breaking out of the writing community bubble and then they wonder why they aren’t selling books. I did the same thing–it’s tough, but that’s the line you should pay attention to. Not every author friend is going to buy and read your book. You have a better chance finding a larger number of readers marketing your book to people who read and don’t write. It really doesn’t help when all your author friends follow you on all the social media platforms. I have the same followers on Twitter to Instagram. I’m being introduced to new people on Threads, though most are writers and authors. I didn’t join Threads with the idea to promote my books, but I’m not a surprised others are. They see the platform as another free platform in which to promote their books, and free, unfortunately, doesn’t get you very far anymore.
I understand the concept of us banding together and supporting each other, but we need to let go of the idea our author friends need or will want to read and review our books. There’s a whole world of readers out there, and my ideal reader is a mom who hides from her kids in the tub with a glass of wine and wants to dip into a good story that has a little spice. She doesn’t write her own books. She’s a reader who reads romance, has a KU subscription, and she’ll either binge my trilogies or a quickly read a standalone, and she’s off reading something–someone–else.
Supporting our friends is great, and I love my friends who support me too, but I don’t ask them to, and it’s never an expectation.
Anyway, so I don’t promote my books on Threads, or even on social media at all anymore. I had a good run using a February content calendar but March passed by without a single post from me, and we’re already into the middle of April. Should I be posting more, yes, at the very least so my accounts don’t look abandoned, and maybe after my series is on preorder and I don’t have to think about them much anymore I’ll have the headspace. I’m so caught up in these books (and how I’m feeling) nothing else matters. I know that’s not healthy, either, but it’s how I work and now that I’ve posted my first blog post on my author site, I’ll keep that going. I have no problems blogging every Monday, so I’ll get into a routine over there, as well. I really just wanted to let the MailerLite debacle die down. I’m still embarrassed, but it wasn’t my fault and I rectified the situation in the only way I knew how. Hopefully it works out.
That’s all I have for this week! Have a lovely Monday!
This photo has nothing to do with anything. I just really liked the colors.
Most of the marketing we hear about is how, what, and how often to post on social media. Snippets and book trailers, TikTok videos and reels. Be yourself, don’t talk about your book all the time, support others.
Like I mentioned in a previous post, we think about marketing after we’ve written our books. That’s… not a great time to think about it, to be honest. Yes, we should all love what we’re writing and I’m not even talking about that, necessarily. One of the lessons I learned too late was how important your cover and title are. Each book you put out ends up in your backlist and your backlist is your brand. Each book is a brick in your author career’s foundation, and you want your bricks to look the same, be made of the same material, and be able to hold the same weight as the other bricks. I’m not saying you can never deviate, but having a solid foundation makes it a lot easier to experiment.
I’ve changed five of my books’ covers. My duet got an update I think only 6 months after publication, my Lost & Found trilogy, a year. By then I’d settled into a brand, and I knew that they were okay, but not the best they could be.
When I was writing Rescue Me, I knew it was high-angst, and both characters had some pretty crappy backstories. I wrote a poignant scene between them where they were sitting in the park. They were sharing stories, and he says to her,
“I saw a woman sitting alone in a booth, staring so forlornly into her wineglass she could have been a mirror image of how I was feeling. I sat down with her, and something happened. I can’t describe it. I thought, this woman understands me. I haven’t spoken one word to her, but she understands. When she gathered her purse to leave, I had never felt panic so debilitating. I had to ask her to be with me, and miraculously, she said yes. I was a stupid son of a bitch and didn’t get her name. Don’t ask Samantha what I was like the week afterward.” He blows out a breath, his chest expanding against my back. “You’re not the only one who’s been trampled on. You’re not the only one who feels unfit for someone else because of your pain. If you take my secondhand heart, I’ll take yours.”
REscue me, Vm rheault
Right away, I thought, what a great title. Secondhand Heart. I even started on a book cover for it. I lucked into the perfect couple, as Sam is older and Lily is a redhead, and the scene above happens to take place in the autumn in a park. I couldn’t have been happier.
But by then, I’d already published my duet, and if you remember, I had several books on my computer waiting to be published. I had to make a decision–where did I wanted my brand to go? Billionaires have a specific feel. They’re in suits, they’re wearing “the watch,” they’re meticulous, sometimes they’re coldhearted. They’re untouchable until they meet the right woman. And all that needs to be conveyed in the cover, the title, the font, and the blurb.
The cover above is perfect, but it wasn’t going to meet the vibe of the genre I chose, and while the title fits perfectly, it’s not as hard and as edgy as it needed to be. The cover above is great for a contemporary romance novel, and while Billionaire is contemporary romance, the main category I put all my books into is, well, Billionaire.
And this is the lesson I kind of want you take away from this blog post. Even if the cover and title are perfect, it may still miss the mark and give readers the wrong message.
This is the cover I made that I went with. You’ll notice he’s in a Billionaire suit, and I think he’s wearing a watch. He’s stoic. When I chose him, I didn’t realize that I’d see him everywhere all the time (this model is very popular among indies), but he fits the way Sam looked in my head, and even knowing he’s been used, I would still choose him. Also, the title is a lot stronger–they did rescue each other the way couples who fall in love do. This is a one-night-stand-with-my-boss trope, and I was very happy with the tagline I came up with.
If you compare the two covers, they look really different, don’t they? The titles make them sound like different books, too.
You can start thinking about this stuff when you’re writing your book. Study other books in your genre, the bestsellers, the covers that are reeling readers in. How do the blurb, title, and cover work together to convey the genre? What kind of tagline or hook is on the cover, or the top of the blurb on the Amazon page?
This is part of marketing that we don’t talk about nearly enough. We always say that the cover is your biggest marketing tool, but we don’t say what kind of cover. You could have paid 1,000 dollars for the best cover ever, but if it doesn’t hit the mark with what your book is about and what category it’s in, it won’t matter how much you paid or how professional it is. It won’t entice readers. Or it will, but they’ll be the wrong kind of readers and you’ll pay for it with poor reviews.
Chances are the cover I made with the couple would have been okay–but they wouldn’t have fit in with my overall brand anyway, so an author has a lot to think about when it comes to cover design and title.
I have a terrible terrible time thinking up titles. I’m crap at it, and it took a couple of hours of brainstorming with my ex-fiancé to title my duet. I’m proud of their titles, and I like their covers now too. I need to push them more, but what I’ll do is a different blog post.
I like the direction my brand is going. Even though I slipped off the path for a second and did some rockstar romance, the covers blend in to what I have and they still sell better than all my other books (but I’m not taking the hint. I have no more rockstar plots in me, I’m afraid. Shep and Olivia landed in my lap, and maybe that will happen again one day, but I’m not going to look for it.)
How your books look on Amazon is important. A reader clicks on you, and they can see most of your covers at once. If they’ve already liked one of your books, knowing you’re going to deliver more may make them a fan. Maybe they’ll give you a follow. (This is the top half of my author page on Amazon.) https://www.amazon.com/stores/VM-Rheault/author/B0B1QSXVK4
I’m all for consistency and lots of people say that genre-hopping isn’t that bad, but even if you know an author who is doing well at it, you have no idea how much they’re spending on ads and promos and other marketing activities. Without that transparency, their monthly royalties may look good but they could be pushing all their money back into their business leaving them breaking even at the end of every month.
Now that I have a brand, I want to keep it going, and I have to think of what kind of titles and covers I want for my books going forward. My six-book series is going to fit right in, and I’ve already made the cover for the standalone I’m going to write afterward. I won’t share my series covers yet, but here are the 11 books I have under my pen name right now, plus my reader magnet that is still free on my sister site. I’m proud of how they look. (And the guy on Faking Forever, I think is Eddie on Twisted Lullabies–don’t tell anyone!)
I’m not going to turn this post into a do-it-my-way-because-it’s-the-right-way post. It took me a long time to change my mindset around and start packaging my books in a way that would target the genre and in ways that would sell. It’s also something you need to learn, a lot through trial and error, researching genre and book covers, and in some instances, ignoring trends and staying true to your brand. Just because illustrated covers are still in, or because discreet covers haven’t gone away, that doesn’t mean you have to do it. Your covers are for your readers. Maybe one day down the line because of the lack of variety on DepositPhotos, I may have to start cutting off heads or doing item covers or text covers, but I’ll be really deep into my backlist then and hopefully have more of a readership that will borrow/buy anything I write.
I see covers all the time that don’t look very good, don’t fit the genre their authors say their books are in. It really doesn’t help when other people say their covers are lovely. Yes, they might be, but we already know, and maybe from personal experience like mine, that just because it’s lovely doesn’t mean it’s going to fit. Fit the genre, fit your story, fit your brand. And I think this is a lot of why we don’t talk about it–because negative, or constructive, feedback feels a lot like an attack on what you like. I still believe after all my time writing and publishing you can find a happy medium between what you like and what you need to do to sell your books.
If writing and publishing is really your way or the highway, there’s not much room for improvement. Flexibility got me where I am right now and I’ve already made half of what I did for the whole year last year. I hope finally releasing my series will keep that going.
I know it also took me a long time to get to where I am. Thousands of hours of writing and planning. Organizing and fixing mistakes. There’s always going to be mistakes, but if you can look ahead maybe you won’t make so many. I’m making fewer and fewer. I’m not going to re-edit A Heartache for Christmas because I was aware of my tics when I was writing it. I’m not going to re-edit my rockstars either, though I know I had a “when” problem. They still sound good and readers aren’t counting. This six-book series will probably be the first books where I was aware of everything before I published, but it only took 12 books. We all still learn every day, and the best news is, covers can be changed. Blurbs can be changed.
If you celebrated Easter, I hope you had a lovely holiday. We’re celebrating today, in fact, because I work on Sundays and there’s no reason to use PTO to take the day off. We’ll dye eggs and I’ll cook a chicken casserole. A coworker gave me the recipe she found on TikTok. It sounded yummy and easy and I’m all about easy. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
I finished editing the last book of my series. I had to revise parts of the last two chapters and I wrote a 1900 word Epilogue that I think ends things beautifully, if I do say so for myself. Of course, I couldn’t just let that be it, and I went back to the beginning and I’m rereading the first book. I think it was around book 4 where I noticed I had a “with” problem, and that’s why I went back. I won’t need to read the series in it’s entirety again (I’ll save that for the paperback proofs and look for typos only), but I think I’ll do the first three, since book one is proving that to be a sound choice. It’s not taking as long as when I started them before, and that’s good. I’m very aware that I could be over-editing them as well, so I’m taking it easy and only editing out blatant over-use I didn’t catch the first time. I know these won’t be perfect and I’m keeping in mind books that have echoing and proofing errors sell like crazy all the time, so I can be gentle with myself and give myself grace. After all, I don’t want to work on these forever. I’m excited to start my standalone, though between setting these up on preorder and putting all the ARCs on Bookfunnel, it will be a while before I can open a new Word document.
When I was finished editing them, I decided against fancy formatting, but then I stumbled upon a vector of a city skyline that worked perfectly.
The photo was already faded at the bottom, but I brought it up a little more in GIMP so the chapter and number would stand out more. What I liked best was that even though it’s in black and white, I feel it meshed with the new background I chose for the covers.
I’m still playing with the models, but I have them chosen. They both come in lots of poses, so I’m in the process of finalizing them and don’t want to show you what I have just yet. Cover reveals don’t do much and I’ve never been interested, but I’d like to at least post them on my author website first. I’ll probably blog here about how I changed my mind because I have proofs that have a different background and models.
Because ebooks don’t have “pages” a set chapter photo like this isn’t possible, though something smaller under the chapter number is. I don’t know if I’m going to look through stock photos to find something. I’ll sell a lot more ebooks so it would be nice to offer those readers a little something. I have time to look but I don’t know for what yet. Usually when I find something that’s just right, it’s by accident, so I’ll just keep scrolling and see what pops up.
These feel like they’ll never be done, but then, I finished the initial edits before the deadline I gave myself, so if I can keep going, I’d love to be able to order a new set of proofs by the middle of April. Unfortunately, these things always take longer than expected, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the first one isn’t published until July. Way longer than I’d hoped, especially since I published A Heartache for Christmas in November, and that’s a lot more time between releases than I’d like. But this project is huge, any author would agree, and it’s better to take my time instead of rush and have regrets later. I may surprise myself, because I’m not starting from scratch, at least. All the blurbs have been written (and I’ve read them all and still like them, so that’s a relief), all the ISBNs have been assigned. All the keywords and categories have been selected on KDP, it’s just a matter of uploading new files, both interior and covers, and reading through new proofs. That might not take as long as I anticipate, but who knows what could happen.
I still haven’t posted a blog on my author site explaining what happened to my newsletter or given my readers an update there. I’ve been kind of waiting for things to cool down, and there isn’t any news that’s different from the last newsletter I sent out. Since I canceled my MailerLite account, I don’t even know what my open rate was for that last newsletter, though for once I hope it was close to nothing. I’m still humiliated a glitch like that would make me look so sketchy, and I’m bitter MailerLite handled it so terribly. I was upgraded for about five minutes before I deactivated my account, and unlike so many author services who will prorate your fees, MailerLite didn’t refund me one penny. An expensive lesson, indeed.
I heard something interesting the other day–I finally watched one of the free webinars I like to sign up for, and the first thing he said was, “If you write the book you love, don’t be surprised if readers don’t like it. You wrote the book you love, not a book others will love.” I’m paraphrasing, but I usually agree with advice like that. That kind of thinking is called writing to market, meeting genre expectations, meeting reader expectations. Writing first and then trying to market later is always a bad idea, but authors don’t understand that what you choose to write, what genre, what POV, if it will be part of a series, and if it is how far apart your books will be, the cover, the title, the series title, all that is part of the marketing process before you even write one word.
When I started my pen name, I was going to do everything right. I chose my subgenre, chose the POV (dual first person present), decided what kind of covers I was going to create to build my brand, all of it. I wrote most of my books around tropes, like a baby-for-the-billionaire, one-night-stand-with-my-boss, a fake fiancé, and a second chance. Some books I didn’t have any trope in mind, like the second book of my Lost & Found Trilogy or A Heartache for Christmas. Even my Cedar Hill Duet wasn’t written around tropes, but I’ve come to realize that if I’m writing a book that has romantic suspense themes, I’m meshing two subgenres, and I let the mystery part of the book fill in for the missing trope.
So this is the part where I admit that while I think I’m writing to market, I’m not actively writing to market, only hoping for the best. I’ve never sat down and started a book I wasn’t going to enjoy writing all for the sake of marketability or sellability. But, I am doing better than I have in the past, before I decided to at least stick to billionaires and package my books in a way that finally builds a brand.
I’ve also realized I don’t read enough to even know what’s selling–and that could be a big mistake on my part. You can’t fulfill reader expectations if you’re not reading to see what kinds of books readers are enjoying. Is it enough to say, “Well, I’m writing billionaire romance, I chose this trope, and I’ll give them a happily ever after?” I mean, writing a romance isn’t complicated (and romance authors will probably hate me for saying it). There are few rules to break, and I would like to think that my readers are getting well-rounded characters and in-depth backstories–that my books aren’t 90k words full of fluff. But, you need to read to compare, and I have plenty of books on my Kindle at the moment so when I do take a bit of time to fill my creative well once my series is up and there’s nothing I have to do for them anymore, I’ll do my own study and see if what I’ve been writing measures up.
So the TL;DR gist of it is, I used to think I was writing what readers love to read, but what I’m really doing is still writing what I want first and then hoping for the best. Which is what we’re all doing. I’m a little amused by this, since I’m such a write to market devotee, but I just have to admit that niching down, changing my POV, and packaging my books properly did more to bring readers in, and then what I’m writing will hopefully keep them coming back.
Speaking of tropes, since I had a little extra money after doing my income taxes, I bought a couple of books that I’ve had my eye on. I like to buy my nonfiction in paperback, even though they’re getting harder to read every day. But, I bought Jennifer Hilt’s Romance Trope Thesaurus. I haven’t had time to page through it yet, but I think it’s a great for market research or for brainstorming your next book. She has a generic Trope Thesaurus too, and one for horror. Give them a look on her author page on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Jennifer-Hilt/author/B01GETN4LM
photo taken from Amazon
In case you missed it, my blog was mentioned in the Feedspot 100 Best Contemporary Book Blogs and Websites. This is a great list of blogs and I’m honored to have been chosen. If you’d like to take a look at the list and find other blogs to subscribe to, look here: https://books.feedspot.com/contemporary_book_blogs/?feedid=5675940
I was going to write more, but I’m already at 1700 words and so I might as well call it. I have other things to do today, and I would imagine, so do you.
I’m not sure what got into me last Thursday, well, I do, but I think I need to start finding other ways to, ah, voice my displeasure and unhappiness. I’m not all gloom and doom–if I didn’t like being an author and publishing books, I wouldn’t do it. Anyway, read on if you want a more sophisticated update on what I’ve been doing lately.
I’m almost done editing my series. After a heart to heart talk with myself, I admitted I need to rewrite most of the ending. It’s not as heart-wrenching as I want it to be… what I have now isn’t worthy of half a million words. It probably won’t take too long. I’m just not happy with the last scene where they get together for good, although I thought it would be a good idea to end the whole thing with an epilogue so I’ve been writing that in my head for the past few nights while I’ve been trying to sleep. It’s not so I can add more words or tie up a very tiny loose end that I left open in book 2, but rather, I like when a book’s ending circles around to the beginning. I started the series with one couple and ended it with another couple, but I want to bring the first couple back and let them wrap it up. It will add a few days of writing and editing, but that’s okay. These books will be perfect the first time out, and I can’t say that about very many (none) of the books I’ve published.
As far as series go, I’ve talked before about having two books done of a different six book series, but I’ve been dragging my feet because writing four more books feels really daunting and I don’t want to do it. So, I thought rewriting parts of book one to eliminate the need for two of the books would be a lot easier than forcing myself to write all four. I don’t want the two I have to go to waste–they’re good stories. After I decided the amount of rewriting would be worth it, I was relieved and instead of working on my mafia books, I’m going to write a quick romantic suspense standalone and then work on those for a 2025/26 release. I want to write a standalone for something easy after all the work I’ll have put into this series. I’m burnt out, but I don’t want to not write, and since I have something partially plotted out, I thought I might as well. And also since I have a love/hate relationship scrolling through stock photos, I think I might already have a cover which will elevate some stress while I’m writing it. Things could change, but I like what I have. It was actually a little difficult to figure out a romantic suspense cover that didn’t have a couple on it (the same issue I had when I was working on A Heartache for Christmas‘s cover), but I didn’t want to deviate from the brand I have going. My covers all have a single man on them, most in suits, the only one who isn’t is Sawyer, but that’s a small-town romantic suspense as well, and sometimes my guys aren’t dressed in suits all the time.
So, I’m happy with what I’ve got scheduled for books in the coming 24 months or so, and the cover I created for the standalone is icing on the cake.
I don’t have much else going on. I mentioned my health in Thursday’s post so I won’t bother going over that again. Threads has been the filler I needed to let go of Twitter, and I haven’t been tempted to log in just to see what’s going on and I don’t miss having it on my phone. I have come to realize though, after engaging with some authors there and just generally scrolling, I’m in the minority concerning what authors believe in about 99.9% of the time. It’s not that I don’t care about my books, it’s that I don’t take my books as seriously as everyone else takes theirs.
What I don’t mind but seems like everyone else does:
I’ll give ARCs to whoever and don’t check up on them after the ARCs have been sent out. ARCs and forms confused me way before I joined Threads and I even wrote a blog post about it back in November. Authors on Threads take ARCs very seriously and I’m still kind of appallingly fascinated at some of the forms authors ask potential reviewers to fill out. I guess I’ll never be an ARC reader because I’ll never fill out a form for the privilege. I feel readers are doing me the favor, not the other way around, and I would never subject a reader to that. Ever. If you’re interested in that blog post, you can read it here: https://vaniamargene.com/2023/11/06/arc-forms-creating-a-review-team/
I don’t mind giving books away. I get a sense of loathing when we talk about giving books away, though I haven’t come across a thread that expressly addressed that subject (besides the hoops authors make their ARC reviewers go through). But the tone on Threads overall seems to suggest that authors want to be paid for each and every copy and they don’t understand or don’t want to understand the value of giving away free books. I put Faking Forever into a giant promo last December and gave away over 9,000 copies. Since the date I gave it way, that book has made $206.00 mostly in KU reads. Though that may be small potatoes, I haven’t done any other promo on it, so if someone asks me If I want 200 dollars, I say yes. Plus, I’m finding readers. Not the 9,000 people who downloaded my book because I know, just like I have started collecting free books, that a reader actually reading it is slim, but readers saw it, and I have 206 pieces of proof that they did.
Not to mention, I have a free book hanging out on my sister site, and overall, My Biggest Mistake has been downloaded over 1,000 times. I think that number may rise as a lot of my subscribers didn’t even bother to open their welcome email after they subscribed to my newsletter. Now it’s more easily accessible, so I’m thinking I’ll be giving away even more copies in the future.
I don’t care about pirates pirating my book. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not. The only crappy thing is Amazon shoots first and asks questions later, so I’m fully prepared for them to shut down my account at some point because my books are elsewhere, though not with my consent. It’s why I pay for an Alliance of Independent Authors membership. I won’t panic, I’ll just reach out to them and ask them to help me get my account back. I won’t even bother trying to take on Amazon alone. It will be futile and I’ve had enough mental health crises over my book business to last me for the rest of my life. Blasé? Maybe. But I tend not to worry about stuff I can’t control. Authors will watermark ARCs, change one word in their books to try to pinpoint where the pirated copies are coming from, blame being in KU. The fact is, your book can get pirated anywhere at anytime and pointing fingers and throwing out accusations is not the best way to handle this. You could inadvertently offend someone and honestly, it’s not worth playing Nancy Drew. It’s going to happen, so there’s point in being bitter.
I doubt I’ll ever put a PR box together. Ordering author copies, ordering bling, packaging it all up (gotta have a pretty box too) and putting it in the mail to a bookstragrammer who may or may not do anything with it sounds like something I don’t want to do even if I could afford it. I didn’t even know this was a thing–well, I knew it was a thing, but the number of bookstagrammers on Threads and that I have access to them surprised me. Like, if I asked if anyone wanted a billionaire book box there might be some that would actually say yes. You would have to enjoy that kind of thing to bother to do it because with the number of complaints on Threads, the ROI doesn’t seem to be there. Like a book that doesn’t sell but you’re proud of it anyway, you would definitely have to enjoy the process. It did make me think that now that I have more of a brand established I could order some business cards or bookmarks. Stickers, though, I’m not fan and have never put a sticker on my Mac or my Kindle cover–not even the cute Vellum flower I picked up at my last writer’s conference. Now that I have a real bookshelf, I ordered a few author copies of my books to have on hand, so business cards at least would make some sense. I’ll think on it and get back to you. Do you have business cards?
I don’t care about paper. Signings and having your books in bookstores is a big deal to a lot of authors, and I just couldn’t care less. One author was pushing her hardcover, and it was 35 dollars. I have to work two hours to afford a book like that. Readers who can afford to buy paper are not my target audience and I only offer paper as an alternative to a Kindle because some people can afford to buy paperbacks, but that is a very very small percentage of my readers. (I sold 64 paperbacks in 2023.) I think authors who push paperbacks don’t really understand that it’s a whole different audience of readers who have access to expendable cash. The economy is such that people are being priced out of their rentals, no one can afford to buy a house, and grocery prices have not dropped, even though COVID is “over.” You’ll have to decide if the glamour of having your book on a bookshelf is worth the hassle, because for me it is definitely not.
I try not to engage with posts I don’t agree with like the person who’s worried she’s losing readers because there’s 18 months between book two and three of her trilogy. Of course she’s going to lose readers. People don’t wait around that long. There’s a lot of content out there and there’s no reason for a reader to wait for you. If you push book three and let people know it’s finally published, you may be able to corral some of those readers back into the trilogy because they’ll want to see how it ends. But that takes money and a lot of social media posting, and it could have been avoided if she’d just saved up her books. I get people are impatient and no one wants to do that, so you take the pros and cons of whatever choice you make.
I don’t know if I can think of other things off the top of my head, but it’s safe to assume that I’m a square peg of an author trying to fit into a round hole of the writing community. Still, there’s a professionalism over there that I like that Twitter lacked and if you haven’t joined Threads, it’s not a bad place to scroll for book news.
I received an email the other day and the subject line was Vania Margene Rheault featured in Feedspot Top 100 Contemporary Book Blogs. I get stuff like this sometimes, especially to my other gmail accounts I don’t check very often and I usually discount it as spam. I opened it, and it was a legitimate email! It read:
Hi there,
My name is Anuj Agarwal, I’m the Founder of Feedspot.
I would like to personally congratulate you as your blog Vania Margene Rheault has been selected by our panelist as one of the Top 100 Contemporary Book Blogs on the web.
I personally give you a high-five and want to thank you for your contribution to this world. This is the most comprehensive list of Top 100 Contemporary Book Blogs on the internet and I’m honored to have you as part of this!
We’d be grateful if you can help us spread the word by briefly mentioning about the Top 100 Contemporary Book Blogs list in any of your upcoming post.
Please feel free to reach out with any questions.
Best, Anuj
I’m flattered as this is the first recognition of my blog. If you go onto the site, https://blog.feedspot.com/contemporary_book_blogs/ you can scroll through the rest of them. I did and found some great blogs to follow… I’m in good company! So, thank you, Anuj, for the honor.
I guess that’s all I have for this week. I hope next week I can give you better progress report on my series. Things keep popping up during my days off that cut into my editing time, but I’m going to put my head down and plow through the rest of the month.
This is a whining post. If you don’t want to hear it, check in on Monday for a more grown-up Author Update. 😛
Words: 985 Time to read: 5 minutes
A friend of mine, well, we haven’t been friends for a while now but we’ve remained… acquaintances?, wrote all her friends/followers/readers and told them that she was leaving the writing/author community… again. I don’t mean to pick on her, but she does this every once in a while, and every time she does, I get reflective and think about where I am and where I want to be.
I’ve been writing and publishing for about eight years now, and I have never left, have never unpublished books, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t struggled finding my place. I think we all do, on some level, looking for a community or looking for readers and building a fanbase. We write and write and work and work and we realize that no matter how hard we run on that treadmill, after you turn it off, you’re in the same place, a tired and a sweaty mess.
She’s disappeared a few times now, trying to find her own place in life and in the writing/author community, and honestly, I don’t know what she’s looking for. She probably doesn’t know either, and it’s not so difficult to say if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you can’t find it.
I hate when she does this because I always feel bad for her, though she’s not looking for sympathy. I think she wants to be a writer, wants to be an author who sells books, but I don’t know what’s standing in her way. I’ve never been the type of person whose identity depends on a label. I was never only a wife, never only a mother, never only a daughter, or a sister, or anything else I’ve been over the years, and while I don’t want to assume, it does seem she relies on other people to tell her who she is. I’ve always been my own person and maybe she struggles with that. I have no idea. You have to be selfish if you want to be a writer, work hard on something you love that others deem frivolous and unnecessary. Especially if you’re not making money yet. Maybe she bowed under the guilt of taking time for herself. You have to, or you don’t have time to write.
Whenever she makes these announcements, I wish she would be more forthcoming, not to give us any explanations because she certainly doesn’t owe us any, but so I can pick through whatever I feel whenever she does this. Though, her job isn’t to make me feel better about her leaving. That’s silly.
Sometimes I think a lot of this hollowness I (sometimes) feel is because I haven’t been well over the past three years. Health is can be taken for granted, and it’s only when you lose it do you realize how much you miss it. A memory on Facebook from four years ago popped up on my timeline yesterday, a selfie I took because I was having a good hair day.
twenty pounds, a box of dryer sheets, and almost a pandemic ago….
Of course, a lot goes into happiness than just how you feel. My ex-fiancé wasn’t an ex, so we were probably in an okay place. I hadn’t lost a couple of my cats, and the deaths of Harley and Blaze hit me hard. I might even have still been going into my workplace–though I enjoy working from home now, the transition wasn’t smooth.
While I’m not feeling as terrible as I did before my Mayo Clinic appointment in February, I’m not feeling as great as I hoped either. But, having a diagnosis has helped the mental part of it. Not knowing why you feel like crap is worse than feeling like garbage but at least understanding why–even if there really is no cure.
I can blame working on this series for so long… I’m tired, but working on something new won’t help. Same day, different document. Hoping that maybe this will be the book that will turn the tide.
I don’t feel this melancholy all the time. I’ve actually had to be in pretty good mental health to withstand three years of feeling like I have. I doubt I would even be feeling this way at all this morning if it wasn’t for her announcement, and is it selfish to wish that if she’s going to leave, that she would just stay gone? If she really doesn’t want to write anymore that she would find something else to do? Either that or if she ever does come back, that I’m in a different place so I don’t notice.
I’m not even sure what the point of this post is except I needed a place to put my feelings, and besides a handful of friends who are too busy navigating their own lives to listen to me moan about my “problems” that I admit, aren’t really problems, there really is no one else. I go through this every now and then, feeling lost, but at the same time, walking on a path I know I want to be on, heading in the direction I know I want to go. Can you be lost when you’re doing that?
I have no idea.
Anyway, so when she says she’s leaving, she usually goes all in, and I ordered her paperback just in case she unpublishes. I helped her design her cover, and I’ll just put her book with the rest of my indies on my bookshelf and she’ll turn into someone I used to know along with most of the authors there.
But I do know one thing–I should shower and open my blinds.
I have a roast in the slow cooker and a series to finish.
I know where I’m going, and I’m finding happiness in the journey.
I hope that she does too–wherever it is she’s going.
I’ve heard from more than one person that they are kind of intimidated by IS, usually because they’ve heard horror stories of other people using it, or more accurately, trying to use it. Honestly, yeah, the platform can be a bit glitchy, but it’s nothing so scary that I would stop putting my books on it. I realized Faking Forever isn’t up on IngramSpark, though I did publish it last summer, I think, so I can use that title as a tutorial. I’ll screenshot my process and hopefully it will take some of the mystery out of the platform.
There are a couple of things I want to tell you before we get started, and these really aren’t anything I would expect a new author to know.
The first is ISBNs. You need one of your own to publish on IngramSpark IF you are also going to publish separately on KDP, and you should publish direct whenever you can. Amazon won’t take an ISBN issued by IngramSpark, and the same is true vice versa. If you’re in the States and buy from Bowker, you can use the same ISBN both places.
Second. Now, some people have said that you CAN’T use the same ISBN both places because either one place or the other will tell you the ISBN is already in use and you can’t use it. I get around this by publishing to KDP first using an ISBN I buy from Bowker, and then I wait for a couple of months for that ISBN to “click in.” Then when I publish on IngramSpark, they’ll skip Amazon because my book is already listed there. I don’t know where I heard this from, but I have done it this way for over 10 books and I have never gotten an error from either platform saying my ISBN is in use. You’ll have to decide if you want to wait those couple of months. Paperback sales aren’t a big deal to me so I don’t mind having my paperbacks only on Amazon for a while if it’s going to make the process smoother. Long story short: your paperback book should only have one ISBN attached to it.
In the first point, I said go direct whenever you can, and you should do that for a few reasons. The first is that Amazon doesn’t play well with others, so if you use IngramSpark to distribute to Amazon, Amazon can (and will) mark your book out of stock, which is a pain to fix. I would rather be writing my next book than policing my buy-page. Another is an author was complaining because she let IngramSpark distribute to Amazon, and she lost her buy-button, which means she’s not the primary choice for the sale. That’s bad because it looks like you’re not the seller. You can’t stop third-party sellers from buying your book and reselling it, but you always want to be the primary seller. The last point is you don’t want to pay IngramSpark to distribute and then pay Amazon for selling it. There is very little by way of royalties as it is, so just cut out the middleman and publish to KDP directly.
One last thing–your cover will be different than the one you use to upload to KDP. IngramSpark uses a different weight of paper which makes the spines thinner. If you use something like Canva, this is easy–just duplicate your KDP cover, download the IngramSpark template, and adjust spine text size and re-center your title and author name on the front cover. I go over this in my full paperback wrap tutorial. Those will need to be adjusted because due to the thinner spine, your front cover is “bigger” if that makes sense. If you’re using a cover designer, they should already know this, and if they don’t… [insert grimacing emoji here].
Draft2Digital uses IngramSpark’s POD to print. I helped a friend not long ago and one tip I learned is that D2D doesn’t like the barcode box on the back of a paperback cover, and you can, in fact, skip putting the white box on all three platforms. They’ll add the barcode for you, or use a barcode generator like Dave Chesson’s and add it yourself. But that was a handy tip we learned, and if you don’t want to supply your own barcode, leave the white box off completely and let them add it for you… unless you want Barnes and Noble to carry your book. Then you have to embed the price into your barcode. If you do that, you can’t change the price of your book unless you change the barcode too. IngramSpark wants the price on your cover to match what you’re selling your book for. If you want/need to increase the price, keep that in mind. I have stopped putting the price on my books and let both KDP and IngramSpark supply my barcodes. Much easier that way, but I don’t care about Barnes and Noble stocking my book, either. That’s a choice you’re going to have to make.
Here is the cover to Faking Forever that I’m going to be using:
And if you’re curious, this is how it looks with the IS template on top of it:
You’ll notice that the template has a barcode already included, but I never use it. It’s too big of a pain to cut it out and add it to the cover. I build over it and call it a day.
Once you have your formatted interior file, your cover sorted, and you know what you’re going to do with your ISBN and where and when you’re going to publish your book, you’re ready to upload to IngramSpark.
The first thing you have to do is create an account if you don’t have one. Go to www.ingramspark.com and click create account. It’s been a very long time since I’ve done that, but it’s more than just being able to upload your book. You have to have your banking information ready so you can have your royalties deposited and any fees deducted. If I remember correctly, they may ask you for a tax ID number or an EIN but I don’t have an LLC and just used my SSN. I’m in the States, so I don’t know how it works in other countries. I’m not going to give business advice, so beyond showing you how to upload your book, all the other choices that you have to make you’ll need to research on your own.
Once you’ve created an account, your home screen should look like this:
Click on Titles on the left hand side in the menu.
Then click on Add Title.
Some people use IngramSpark to distribute their ebooks and their print books. I wouldn’t use them for ebooks–if you’re going wide, Draft2Digital is probably the better choice, and as always, with print and ebooks, go direct whenever you can. You’ll always earn more royalties. Click whichever one you want, but for this blog post I clicked on Print Book Only.
Are all your files ready? You’ll need your interior and your cover that was adjusted/made using the IngramSpark template. But you’ll also need your ISBN, your blurb, and your categories and keywords. If you’re ready, Click Yes, all my files are ready.
They really wanna make sure you have what you need, so click the boxes that confirm you have your paperback cover wrap and your formatted interior file.
Then click on what you want to do. I do want to print, distribute, and sell my book. Click it to highlight it and then press Continue.
This is where you start filling out your book’s information. Put in your title, the language, which for me is always English, add your ISBN number or take the free one. Click that you own your copyright, and that you’re not trying to publish public domain work. When you click that you own your copyright, a warning box pops up:
They started adding this box a couple of years ago, and if you click Yes, that your book includes names of famous people or brands, IngramSpark won’t let you publish. I don’t know why they implemented this because we all know it’s okay to say your characters ate lunch at Dairy Queen, or that your male character’s favorite brand of shoes is Nike. It’s pretty much understood that as long as you’re not saying anything derogatory about a brand, it’s fine to mention them. My characters, for whatever reason, love Apple products, and they’re always using their iPhones. So, I’m not saying to lie, but I am saying that if you check the box that you do mention McDonald’s or that your characters go shopping at Walmart, IngramSpark will tell you to amend your book and resubmit. I’ll let you make the choice. I don’t remember what Faking Forever has in it. My characters live in a fake Minnesota city and I think for the most part everything I mentioned brand-wise was made up. But, you do you, and I’ll do me, and for the sake of this blogpost, I’m going to click No and keep going.
The last question in this section is about AI, and I never use it. I do my own covers using stock that’s not AI generated, and I write my own books. If you use AI in any way, you’ll have to fill out what they ask. I’m not even going to bother to click on Yes and find out what they want. I’ll never us AI and don’t care.
In this next section, you fill out your author name. I don’t have any other contributors, like maybe if you were a children’s author and needed to list an illustrator.
You’ll also see here that my imprint, Coffee & Kisses Press popped up. That’s because when you buy ISBNs from Bowker, you’re able to create an imprint for yourself. Back when I first started publishing, I created my imprint, and my ex-fiancé and my son designed the logo for it. I’ve been publishing under Coffee & Kisses Press for years and years but I don’t have any plans to publish anyone else at this time. I help a lot of people but never for money or a share of their royalties. Jane Friedman has a good article about creating your own imprint if you’re interested in the pros and cons. https://janefriedman.com/why-self-publishing-authors-should-consider-establishing-their-own-imprint/ Also when you create your own imprint, your imprint will be the publisher on Amazon and other product pages. Here is the information on Amazon for Faking Forever:
My ranking is bad. I guess I better up my marketing game.
This is my product information for Rescue Me on Walmart.com.
You can read and research all day about imprints, but I’ll stop there and continue on.
Subjects are your categories. Mine are usually Contemporary Romance and Billionaire, but they have a Rockstar category too, which I used when I published my last trilogy. Click on Find Subjects and search for your category/genre. I recommend using the search bar and typing in what you want. If you only scroll, sometimes you can miss what you’re looking for.
Click and highlight what you want and click Add Subjects.
Select Audience is next, and if you’re writing genre fiction for adults, that’s Trade/Adult General.
The next field is where your blurb goes. I usually just copy and paste it from my Amazon product page.
The keywords are similar to the seven fields on KDP you fill out when you publish on Amazon. The ones I fill out on KDP are a little different because I add KU/ Kindle Unlimited to some of the fields for discoverability, and you don’t need that for paperbacks on IngramSpark. When you’re done, scroll down and click Continue.
The next section is Print Information. You should already know the trim size of your book since you have your formatted interior file and your cover. If you’ve already published on KDP, all this information should match what you put on that platform. Things like trim size and color of the pages are attached to your ISBN, so make the same selections you did on KDP.
Colored pages are only for things like cookbooks or children’s books. There’s a higher cost to printing color, and I was even seeing some talk the other day that IngramSpark is going to start charging you more if your book has black pages. Beautifully formatted books are having a moment, but all that ink… even if you’re printing in black and white it’s going to cost you money. I don’t get too crazy with my interiors. I’m just not excited about paperbacks in general, so the last thing I really care about is black pages that have white text. As I’ve said, that’s your personal choice, but everything costs so be prepared to up your price to have even the slightest royalty per book.
This is part of what can trip up some authors who upload their books. I chose black and white pages, and cream because I also print my fiction books on cream paper. I don’t know if Amazon gives you a choice to print on Groundwood, but if you can’t over there, you can’t here because remember, the color of your pages is attached to the ISBN and you can’t change unless you unpublish.
I chose paperback here, but do you see the Perfect Bound option? Even if it’s the only option there, you still have to click on it and turn it green. Some authors get tripped up by that, so be sure to click on it.
I always choose a matte cover. I’ve seen glossy covers that peel and I don’t like them. Covers can be changed and upon a quick Google search I’m confident to say that if you want to change from glossy to matte or vice versa, you can as the type of cover isn’t attached to the ISBN.
I don’t know what Duplex Enabled means, and since there’s not an asterisk by it, I’ll skip it. Number of pages–you can look at your interior file (you should already know this because either you or your cover designer needed this information) or I snag mine off my Amazon product page.
Print pricing is next, and there’s a lot to say on topic, but on the same token, nothing at all. What you choose for pricing, discounts, and if you’re going to allow returns is going to be a personal choice based on what you want for your business and how much you want to make per copy per sale.
I don’t offer paperbacks to make money, and I don’t even print through IngramSpark to be in bookstores. Honestly, I have no idea why I print through IngramSpark. Faking Forever is $12.99, and I do a 35-40% discount and I don’t allow returns. That’s what I do, but you’ll have to research for yourself. I choose a 35% in the countries I can because that’s what Robin Cutler (who created the indie side of IngramSpark many years ago) recommended, and I never stopped. Here are my fields filled out. You can see I dropped Australia’s price as low as I could. Actually, I could have made one cent if I chose to sell my book for $15.99 instead of $16.99. Book prices there are crazy, and I’m happy for the .55 if it means someone there can afford to buy my book.
Go ahead and click that you agree on all the little asterisks and then go down to Printing Options. For those options, I only click on the Enable Look Inside feature. I figure since a reader can read 10% of your book on Amazon, I might as well give readers the same opportunity elsewhere. You can do large print, but KDP blocked my attempts as duplicate content so the only way I would do Large Print now is if I printed only to sell off my website. I would like to, some day, but I won’t be doing it any time soon. The right-to-left content is self-explanatory, so skip that, too.
The last on this page is the Print Release Date. If you waited, this could have been a few months ago, so if you don’t remember, grab the date off your product page on Amazon.
When you’re done filling all that out, click Continue. It’s hidden here by the Support icon.
This is where you upload your files. You can either Drag and Drop, or Upload. This is also where the glitches happen, and we can see if IngramSpark is going to give me a hard time today. I don’t have a preference either way, drag and drop vs. uploading, and I’ve done it both ways.
It looks like today they decided to be glitch-free, and you can see the dates and times of the uploads. I know from experience that if it doesn’t show dates and times, your files haven’t uploaded properly. You can try logging out and logging back in (save and exit first), clearing your cookies/cache, trying a different browser (Chrome vs. Safari, for example) or using an incognito window. I’ve tried all of those when IngramSpark has been a bear to work with and usually one of those will push the process along. I almost wish IngramSpark would have given me a hard time so you could see what it’s like, but then again, I shouldn’t be asking for trouble.
The email upload link at the bottom is for a cover designer or your formatter if they have your files. You don’t want to give them access to your whole account since you put your banking information into your profile, so use the email link if you had help putting your book together. Click Continue (that’s hidden under the Support icon).
The next page verifies your information. This can actually take a few minutes, so don’t panic if it makes you wait.
Click Continue.
Confirm your book’s information and click the little square in the upper right.
Then you want to click on Complete Submission. This will also make you wait for a couple of seconds.
I haven’t submitted to IngramSpark for a bit, so this congratulations screen is new to me. Once you’ve submitted your book, they’ll email you as to whether you need to fix anything or if the eproof they send you can be approved. Because I always publish on KDP first and put my books through a rigorous proofing-the-proof process, I don’t order a physical proof through IngramSpark. Once the eproof (PDF) comes, I might scroll through it just to check out the cover, but honestly, I just approve it and move on.
There aren’t many times I submit a book where I don’t have to fix the cover in some way. Sometimes I don’t make the text on the spine small enough, or I don’t move the title and author name over, or whatever. If I’m dealing with a gradient, sometimes I don’t have it moved over enough so that’s flush with the spine. They’ll tell you in the email they send you what needs to be fixed, and then you just do what they say and resubmit the file. I’ll probably look over the eproof when I get it just to be sure I didn’t screw up somehow because I was distracted writing this blog post while I was filling everything out and submitting.
But that’s really all you need to do to publish with IngramSpark. The ISBN stuff is a hassle, and waiting for a couple of months after you publish to KDP first is annoying, but I use my ISBN both places and have never had an issue so I’m not going to fix what isn’t broken.
I hope this post was helpful and waylaid some of the fear. Like anything once you do it, the easier it becomes.
I wrote out this post long enough in advance that IngramSpark approved my files and they sent me an email saying I can approve the proof. This took about three days.
On Threads, someone was saying they were waiting weeks, but what can happen is you don’t get an email and your title needs to be fixed somehow. I’ll show you where you go to see the actual status of your book if you don’t get an email after a week of waiting.
Once you get your email, click Approve EProof.
IngramSpark will make you log in, so do that.
They’ll direct you to this screen:
Click on the title of your book.
Scroll down until you see the green bar that says Download Proof for your ISBN.
I save it using the title so I can find it later if I want it.
Open it up, and you’ll see they sent you the entire book. This certainly doesn’t take the place of looking at a paperback copy of a KDP proof, and if you do want to order a paperback proof, you should. I never do, and before I published this book to KDP, I think I ordered a proof about four times. IngramSpark’s printing isn’t that much different, and if it passed the IngramSpark submission process, then I know it will be okay.
You can also see here that they did add the barcode for me, and they placed it where KDP puts theirs.
I scrolled through, and I notice I could have updated my Also By in the back of my book. I think fixing that and resubmitting will be too much hassle, and I’ll let it slide.
Once you know you’re happy with the proof, scroll down the page more.
This where you approve or your title. If you decide to make changes, click the appropriate selection. I clicked the first because my book is okay to distribute. Scroll down more and click Continue.
They’ll ask you if you want to promote your book. There’s a fee there, and I think the last I clicked it was $250.00. Apparently they’ll promote your book in the bookseller’s catalogue, and I did this for All of Nothing and didn’t see any ROI. But like all business decisions, it’s up to you. I’m going to click No.
When you click No, you’ll be sent this this screen:
But in my experience, processing doesn’t take long–at least, not on the dashboard part of it. It can take a few days for your book to start popping up in the marketplaces. Since (again) I don’t care about that stuff, I don’t look, so don’t quote me on how long it takes.
If you click on Titles on the left, you can see that Faking Forever is already available.
Titles and Titles Pending is also where you can look to find out your book’s status if you’re waiting for an email after you’ve submitted your book. A while back I resubmitted covers for my duet, and I messed up Addicted to Her. I didn’t get an email saying that I needed to fix anything, but I didn’t get an email saying that my book was ready for approval, either. If you’ve been waiting for email after submission and it didn’t land in your spam, always go to your dashboard and check on the title in question. That will give you the most up-to-date information. If your cover needs tweaking, it will tell you there. There are always ways around waiting–information is usually available if you know where to look.
Part of the reason I don’t order an author copy first is because I never see the option. I have no idea where to click to find a proof before publication. I must miss it every time, but for the life of me, I never see it. But, like I said, I’ve already seen a KDP proof a million times, so I’m okay not ordering one from IngramSpark. If you really want to see the quality, you can order an author copy for yourself, but I’m hearing IS has the same problems as KDP. Their printers are overworked and underpaid, and covers can be messed up, or your cover may be right, but there’s a completely different book inside. Some boxes have a mix of books–one erotica author, I think on Threads, said she got a box full of Bibles. All can I really think when it comes to this kind of thing is that the indie publishing industry is bursting, and POD–machines and workers–can’t keep up. So, if you’re ordering stock for an event, do it months and months in advance, not only to give the printers time to print and shippers time to ship, but also to give yourself enough time to reorder if your shipment’s damaged in any way. I know you have to be super organized to plan that far ahead, but it will save you a lot of headaches in the long run, I promise you that.
Since I was able to walk you through the approval process too, I think that concludes the IngramSpark tutorial. I hope it was helpful, and as always, there are no affiliate links in this post.
Is anything completely ours in this business? Maybe only our books.
Good morning! I hope you all had a good weekend! I worked more on my last book–getting ever so closer to finishing up. I’ll still have to take a break and read the proofs to look for typos I might have edited into my books, but the end is in sight, and I can’t wait! I might treat myself to a new Mac–my T is still driving me crazy, and it would be a nice little present for myself after working on this series for so long.
So, a week ago, on Monday, March 5th, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger all went down. They were down for a couple of hours, but to say it spread panic across the author universe would be putting it mildly. I know a lot of authors happened to have releases that day, and I’m sure not being able to post was upsetting to a lot of people.
It was kind of eye-opening for me as well, because this was my first outage while on Threads instead of Twitter. Outages never bothered me because I was always able to flip from one platform to the other, but since Meta owns all of them, there was nowhere for me to go. A friend and I went to email for a quick exchange (just to assure each other we hadn’t been hacked), so all wasn’t completely lost, but not having any social media felt strange… scrolling is just habit. I finally was able to kick my Twitter addiction only because I found a substitute on Threads.
Anyway, so this gave way to some thought about how authors are always told never to build on someone else’s grass. I agree with that wholeheartedly–especially since TikTok gave me such a hard time, always accusing me of violating community guidelines. I’m glad I never got invested because it ticked me off and a ding on one of your videos like that affects your entire account and how they show your content.
But after my hassle with MailerLite, I realized that even a list you cultivate on your own doesn’t really belong to you. If your account, for whatever reason, goes down or glitches and you don’t regularly export your list as a backup, those emails you worked so hard for can disappear in a puff of smoke. Sometimes tech support can help, depending on your aggregator. MailerLite charges too much for their tech support and plenty of authors take their chances and stay on the free plan (that does not give you access to tech support) for as long as possible.
My WordPress site feels like it belongs to me. I pay for the domain and for the plan. I have access to tech support if something goes wrong (like when I accidentally deleted DNS records I needed), but the fact is, anything online can go down so even selling direct to avoid dealing with Amazon isn’t always a sure thing.
I guess this post is kind of a warning to pick and choose carefully. Last night I was thinking about all the author things I’m “stuck” with, and it’s kind of scary in a looking-into-the-future-and-adding-up-spend kind of way. Every single one of my books has a link to my author website and a call to action (CTA) to subscribe to my newsletter. Every single book. Over 20, which is over 60 files I would have to change if my author website ever went kaput (the ebooks and paperbacks on Amazon, and then all my paperbacks on IngramSpark). I mean, it wouldn’t be the end of the world to amend all that back matter, but if I didn’t have an IngramSpark code for free revisions, it would add up quickly. I was lucky I directed my readers to go to my website instead of a MailerLite landing signup page, probably one of the few things I did correctly from the start. My homebase, has been, and now with my newsletter gone, always will be, my author website.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m locked into other things too–things I want to keep at the very least because I like how they work. Like Bookfunnel. I may have gotten rid of my expensive plan that supported MailerLite integration after my migration to the new MailerLite platform screwed everything up (saving me 150 dollars a year), but I like how they deliver my free book and readers are used to that platform. The easter egg that I hid in Addicted to Her is delivered that way too. At least the team at Bookfunnel doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and it helps that thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of authors, use them.
I’m also locked into my Canva account. I have so many designs there, and without it, I could never make changes to any of my book covers. I’ll always need my account, but luckily their business and reputation seem solid and hopefully won’t be disappearing anytime soon.
Maybe it will make you feel better to think that being locked into certain services isn’t only an author thing. I think Amazon is so integrated into our lives now that getting rid of it would cost–I have purchased several movies and TV shows on Prime. I would lose a lot of money if all of a sudden Prime Video disappeared. The same with my Kindle account. I’ve purchased many books that would disappear if something happened to my Kindle account. Several years ago I bought books on Nook, and when I dropped it into the tub, I lost all that content. I could have bought another Nook, but I preferred being on a Kindle anyway, so I swallowed the loss.
When you’re a baby author, as they like to say, you just don’t understand what you’re locking yourself into signing up for all these things. That would be the time to weigh what you’re willing to pay for, for pretty much all of your indie career. You get used to having access to those things and you tie up a lot of your IP into an account like Canva. But, when you’re new, you don’t know what you don’t know, and if you’re proud of your newsletter and start putting the landing page link everywhere, if something happens, you have no idea the damage control it takes to fix it.
I’m very fortunate that I linked to my website everywhere, and I’m very fortunate that I chose Bookfunnel as a way to distribute my reader magnet. I didn’t have to scramble to update any links–I don’t think I can portray in writing how relieved I was that I could just shut down my newsletter and not look back.
Building on someone else’s grass is definitely inconvenient at best (career damaging at worst), but sometimes you just can’t avoid it. We subscribe to products and services every day with the hope that those products and services have the longevity we need to keep our business afloat.
Only time will tell if the things we sign up for have staying power–in terms of the business itself and how we need to use them. I had thought MailerLite was a good fit and I recommended them several times, but they proved to be just as sketchy as any other business has the possibility to be, and some people just learn that the hard way. Lots of scammers in this business, and you’d like to think a steady business like that won’t turn, but like my daughter says, the risk is low but never zero.
I was lying in bed last night thinking about my blogs and how to make them seem more professional, if only on my author blog now, so it comes off as more newslettery and less bloggy, and I decided to create a “footer” of sorts for the ends of my posts. For eight years I’ve struggled with how to end my posts, and I’ve gone through various footers, like creating a graphic that has all my books on it and attaching my Amazon author page to it. This isn’t the right audience for that, but I would still like to end my blogs with some kind of signature so I came up with this. It’s especially important on my author blog now so no one misses the link to download their free book which I will add to every post.
Tell me what you think, and I hope you all have a great week!
It seems whenever I manage to figure out one thing, something else pops up in its place–which is the definition of adulthood, I guess. I’ve been feeling better, so of course that means another areas of my life have to go to crap.
Ever since we had to authenticate our newsletters and align them with our websites, I have had nothing but problems. From actually taking down my website for twenty-four hours (thank God the WordPress chat was available!) to the newest disaster–broken links in my most recent newsletter I sent out on Friday, this has been one headache after the next. That SNAFU, broken links going to a scary error webpage–
–ended up resulting in me having to upgrade my MailerLite plan so I could contact their tech support. Because of the number of subscribers I have, that totaled a whopping 30 dollars a month, and honestly, I knew it wasn’t worth it. I had a 30% open rate, send once a month, and can’t pinpoint exact sales that have come from my newsletter.
So, I did what I tell you not to do–I made a choice based in frustration and anger and deleted my MailerLite account. I didn’t wait for the tech to get back to me, just exported my subscribers, deleted my account, and said screw it. It wasn’t completely spontaneous decision–I have a link in the back of all my books pointing them to my website where readers can sign up to my newsletter and download my free reader magnet. Luckily, the link was to my website and not a MailerLite landing page. I amended my website, said I would be blogging in place of a newsletter due to issues with my aggregator and that they can still download My Biggest Mistake. But instead of having to sign up for a newsletter to gain access, the Bookfunnel link is right there. Giving away a book like that with no strings is probably crazy, and after a while I may sell it, too. It won’t be in KU, but I can price it at .99 and have it pull double duty as a reader freebie and a book in my backlist if they want it that badly. I have choices, at least, but it will have to stay free on my website unless I want to update back matter for 20 books, and I actually do not want to do that.
I just was so tired of all this stuff–I’ve been dealing with the issues this authentication process has brought on since January, and honestly, I couldn’t take it anymore. The last straw was when I sent out that newsletter that had broken links in it. I can handle things going wrong on my end, but I do not want to look unprofessional or spammy to my subscribers. They trust me to keep their information safe, and that error message when they clicked on a link looked terrible. I never want to go through that again. I’ve been blogging on WordPress for eight years now, and nothing has ever happened like that before. All the links work, my site is secure, and I will never mess with the DNS records again.
If turning my “newsletter” into a blog loses me readers or subscribers, so be it. Dealing with MailerLite and the high monthly cost would have been very bad for my mental health long term. I don’t mind blogging, in fact, I love it, and content is content as far as I’m concerned. I was able to upload my MailerLite subscriber list to my author website and my subscribers will get an email when I blog. If they don’t want that, they can unsubscribe, though I’m not sure why they would. It really doesn’t matter where the content comes from.
A lot of them never opened my welcome email though, so that means they didn’t download My Biggest Mistake, and they can’t now unless they visit my website due to the links that probably won’t work even if they kept my newsletter emails. When I write my first blog post I’ll have to remind them to download it. I probably still will only blog for my readers once a month and that was another reason I was okay getting rid of MailerLite. I wasn’t using it very often and it makes sense to stay with a more cost effective alternative.
Of course, I’m like a lot of people and lying in bed at night will think about something humiliating and embarrassing that happened twenty years after the fact. This sting will stay with me for a long time, even though it was a MailerLite problem and not my fault. It helps I’m familiar with newsletter mixups. I’ve signed up for several, and usually once a month someone sends out a newsletter full of links and five seconds later there’s an amended newsletter sent out because the links were wrong, broken, or missing. My readers are probably used to that kind of thing too, but I was so grateful to anyone who gave me their email address that swallowing this humiliation is going to take some time. The only thing that I am happy with right now is how easy it was for me to turn my author website into a blog and that I had the wherewithal to export my list and add them to my website. I paid for a lot of those with FB ads and people signing up in the backs of my books. Those emails belong to me until they unsubscribe and they can do that if they wish. I’m not going to worry about where WordPress’s emails end up–if when I blog the updates end up in their promotions or spam. My site is safe, and I restored all the original DNS records. Maybe my updates won’t land in their inbox, but at this point, I just want to get back to writing and updating my readers when I have something fun to share and don’t care about the rest.
It was a costly lesson, energy and mental health wise, to learn some things just don’t matter as much as some people tell you it should. It was a relief to leave my newsletter groups–people are still talking and doing damage control regarding their own authentication nightmares, and I don’t need to see that anymore. I don’t need advice on what to share with my readers–I’m a writer and creating content is what I do.
I finished editing the 5th book in my series, and now I’m taking a break before I edit the last. I have a lot of admin stuff that doesn’t include newsletter clean up, such as getting my promo list I started a couple of years ago finished. I wanted a comprehensive list of promo sites that included how much it cost, if there was a minimum number of reviews required, that kind of thing. There are soooo many promo sites out there and one of my goals this year was to try the littler ones to expand my reach. I started up a Google Docs, and I’ll have to check over what I have and see if all the information is still accurate or if I need to update some entries. I also have a lot of screenshots on my phone of promo sites people have talked about in various groups and I want to add those as well. David Gaughran has a list that he updated last year, and you can see it here. https://davidgaughran.com/best-promo-sites-books/ I borrowed heavily from it, but there are a lot of promo sites that I picked up just scrolling around in my groups. Lee Hall also has one on his site, and you can look at it here: https://leehallwriter.com/2021/02/23/a-concise-list-of-book-promotion-sites/ I’ll finish it up this month and make it accessible for everyone.
I also would like to add a tab to this website for book covers that I make that don’t have anywhere to go. I like making them when I’m bored and don’t have anything to do, or if I see an author cover that sucks and I redo it just for fun. Sometimes I’ll do a cover for someone without them asking, and as you can imagine, that never turns out well, and they say thanks, but no thanks. I’d like to put them up, free of charge for authors who need something but don’t know what to do or just need a placeholder until they can afford something better. One of the prettiest covers I ever did was this one, but I’ll never use it because I don’t write women’s fiction.
Anyway, so I’ll do that when my series is all done and up for preorder. I have a lot of mockups in my Canva account, but I would have to download the stock photos and clean them up enough that I would only have to change the author names and titles. They wouldn’t be high-end by any means, but if an author is just starting out and sees a cover they could use, then it would worth it for me.
I think among that, getting my series finalized, and doing my promo list, I have enough going on. I need to shake off what happened to my newsletter. I’m not the first it’s happened to, and I won’t be the last. One of the last posts I saw before I left those groups is a poor woman who lost 800 subscribers because MailerLite got rid of the free classic accounts and her account and all her subscribers were purged. She was upset, to say the least, but MailerLite told everyone over and over again. It’s why I did the migration in December of last year, though that was just first of the headaches that started.
I think that is all I have for this week, but it’s enough. 2024 has started out with a bang, that’s for sure, and though this might be inviting trouble, I just don’t know what else could go wrong. And it’s really weird, I guess because I posted on a Thursday when my subscribers aren’t used to it, but I posted about author transparency last week and no one read it. So strange. If you want to read my goose egg post, you can look here.
When I was little, I grew up on Rainy Lake. Like, right on the shore. My dad would plow a skating rink on the ice for my birthday (which is in November) and I would have skating parties on the little inlet we lived on. Sometimes there would be winters when we didn’t get much snow, but the lake would still freeze over, and there was this one particular spot that froze solid, but was crystal clear. You could see all the way down to the bottom, the rocks and sand and weeds, and as you can imagine, if you stared long enough it could make you a little sick inside. You knew you were safe, but that didn’t stop your stomach from rolling, from telling your brain that you weren’t where you were supposed to be. The inlet wasn’t very deep, and I would feel almost the same in the boat, the water so clear you could see the fish swimming beneath you. The ice though, there was something almost unnatural about lying on it and staring to the bottom, and I’ll never forget how it felt.
Those authors and numbers are out of my league, but indie authors still share–I’ve blogged before about all the goose egg tweets on Twitter at the beginning of every month, authors lamenting that their sales dashboards flip to zero on the first. I have my own feelings on why this is kind of icky, mostly because author and reader spaces are merging closer and closer together and you really don’t need readers seeing your numbers. As my author platform grows, even I wonder how to keep this blog professional and unoffensive to any reader who happens to stumble upon it (grinding sausage that appears on a yummy breakfast platter is kind of disgusting, after all). Not to mention, when we talk royalties, or lack thereof, readers get sucked into that and it’s not their place.
I was actually kind of hoping that moving to Threads would solve that issue, of seeing goose egg posts, anyway, but authors are still sharing, even if it’s more of an informational post vs. the complaining I would see on Twitter.
I don’t mean to call her out, and I can’t anyway. I don’t follow her, don’t remember what her handle is, but I do disagree with a couple of things–one, for sure, is her saying most authors do not make a living. This is far from my experience, being that most of the romance authors I do know make a living, and telling authors that does them a great disservice. Just because you are not making a living doesn’t mean others can’t. And that leads me to the question of why she posted at all. To “warn” authors this is hard game? For sympathy? I can’t find the post now, which is probably just as well, so I’m not even sure if she got the responses she was looking for. I can’t look at her backlist either and I wish I would have paid more attention to who this poster was, but I screenshot it for a friend and as most timelines do now, it refreshed and the post was lost. I didn’t respond, though I wanted to. That was me turning over a new leaf, so I guess I’m showing you all my backside instead.
I messaged my friend and asked her, why do you think she posted it? And she speculated that she was just putting the information out there, as some sort of transparency play. Okay, but–and this is where I have the hard time–we’re missing half the conversation here, are we not? Because you’re not selling books, there’s a reason, and I feel that deserves some conversation. If you’re willing to put out your goose egg posts, I think you should be prepared to explain why. Why if you have what sounds like a solid backlist, why are you not selling books? I don’t think we talk about this enough. It’s one thing for a debut author to publish to crickets, because that happens. You have one book, rely on free social media, and unless you get lucky, that will only take you so far. But if you’ve been in the business for any length of time, you should have a handle on promoting your books and you should have figured out by now how to sell them.
But no one wants to ask why, and that missing half of the conversation is really important. It’s where the real learning starts. No one wants to admit mistakes though, or no one wants to admit that maybe they don’t know what they’re doing and haven’t bothered to learn. Maybe no one wants to admit that their covers aren’t hitting the mark or they aren’t promoting their books. That they haven’t started a newsletter and don’t want to learn how to run ads, if even just a few dollars a month to expand your reach. No one wants to admit that maybe they aren’t networking with authors in their genres, looking for cross-promotional opportunities (not that you can participate if you don’t have a newsletter anyway), or no one wants to admit they loathe Facebook and don’t have an author page.
I really think that if you’re going to post goose egg numbers, then you should be prepared to explain why. It’s not exactly taking culpability, but obviously, if you’re writing and publishing you want your books to sell. She may have seen this as educational, but after 10+ years in the industry with “many” books under her name, she doesn’t find it a little embarrassing too? Or she writes publishing off as “difficult” and the lack of sales isn’t her fault.
Sometimes you can look at an author’s books and see why they don’t sell. They don’t have many, or publish with years between books. They only write standalones which can be a hard sell since we all know read-through is where the real money comes in. Maybe they can’t afford a good cover and make do with what they can make for themselves in Canva (or they turn down better and free help because they want to do it alone). But if that’s the case, any of those, isn’t it worth mentioning? I’ve made plenty of mistakes–and I admit them on this blog all day long. I wasted a whole year on my Lost & Found trilogy because I didn’t like the covers and didn’t push them as hard as I could have. It’s just as well, because a year later I reedited them and I’m much more confident promoting them. Sometimes you need to revamp a book and maybe she needs to take some time to redo some of hers. Even a fresh blurb can make a world of difference. https://selfpublishingadvice.org/a-new-book-blurb-could-revolutionize-your-sales/
It would have been nice to have known what she thought of her low sales, what she thought she could do to fix it. There’s always something you can do–it’s not up to Fate or there wouldn’t be people making a living off their books. You have all the control in the world, but acting like you don’t doesn’t make it so.
It’s just interesting to me, and I like thinking about stuff like that. Be transparent, sure, but tell the whole story, otherwise, you’re just lying on a clear sheet of ice feeling sick inside.
picture taken by moi when her hands should have been on the wheel. Sunset, Fargo, ND #nofilter
Happy Monday! I hope your week is getting off to a great start, and may that include a bottomless cup of coffee.
Today’s post is more of “what’s going on with me” than anything else. I finally left Twitter for good after a scuffle over a tweet who was calling out authors like Stephenie Meyer and Sarah J Maas (and I think Rebecca Yarros was in there too). The person who tweeted brought race into it, and I scooted my butt out of that conversation. As a white cishet woman who grew up in a middle income family, I know how privileged I am in regard to anything, not just publishing. I’m fortunate I have money to play with ads, I’m fortunate I have a college education. I’m fortunate in a lot of ways, and I have never argued that. I know publishing has a long way to go in terms of marginalized voices. There’s no debating that whatsoever, but I think there’s a difference between hating books that have done well because you think they aren’t well-written and don’t deserve it, and hating certain (white) women authors because of how the publishing industry is. I believed that tweet came from the former perspective when it was the latter, and had I known, I wouldn’t have gotten involved. I’ve always defended authors like Stephenie, EL James, and Colleen Hoover (the vacuum lady, if your nickname can be that disrespectful. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to scrub this joke about her books from my mind: Nothing sucks like a Hoover). We always say that authors aren’t what they write, but then in the next breath we call Stephenie Meyer a groomer supporter because Jacob imprinted on Renesmee when she was an infant. I get tired of the hypocrites, tired of the bitterness. I won’t debate anyone’s experience, and I sure as hell won’t tell someone how to think or feel, so I bowed out. I blanked out my banner, took my personal profile picture down and said in my bio that the account is no longer active. I don’t like that vibe, only because yes, the industry does have a lot of work to do, but screaming about it won’t make change. Attacking people won’t make change. Spewing resentment all over the internet won’t make change. And I see this from everyone. It wasn’t that long ago a white author was editing Rebecca Yarros’ first page, saying what a crap book her Fourth Wing novel is and how it didn’t deserve to be printed. I stood up to her, but right or wrong on my part, when someone is calling me a mad white lady, I’ll graciously concede.
It was a lesson to keep scrolling if you don’t like what you see, and if you’re online you’re going to be tested many times. I joined Threads with the hope that I can stop myself from commenting if something makes me angry (after a week in, there is a lot that makes me angry). I have a low tolerance for stupidity and there is a lot of it in the self-publishing industry. I saw this on FB last week! This is the stuff that makes me mad, and this is the kind of reply that gets me into trouble.
name and FB group blanked out to protect the intelligence-challenged.
I get tired of people saying that Amazon cheats its authors, get tired of being called a sheeple because I like to write to market. Maybe my books don’t deserve to sell either, because I write romance, use tropes, and have fun writing my books (and can write them quickly too, oh snap!). It’s just another form of gatekeeping as far as I’m concerned, but I do understand there isn’t room at the table for everyone, and I’ve been eating my meals on the floor for a long time. At least I have a piece of carpet, and I know a lot of authors don’t. So, I’m trying approach my time on Threads in a more positive way–be helpful if I can, be encouraging. But mainly, I joined to keep my thumb on the pulse of the industry–indie pub as well as romance in particular. Like Tyrion Lannister, I like knowing things, like the RWA embracing AI and hosting classes to teach writers how to use it to write romance books.
I like knowing things like the cover for Gothikana was made with AI elements and the publisher is claiming “not to know.” You can read the Publisher’s Weekly article here. I just like knowing that stuff because I feel like it’s part of my job as an indie author to know what people are talking about. There was some of that on Twitter too, but there was too much bitterness to wade through to see what I really wanted to see. I could have just started blocking people, but that kind of atmosphere isn’t good for anyone’s mental health. So far, Threads seems to be more pleasant and professional, and that can be a good thing, but also maybe a not-so-good-thing. I do a lot of things that are looked down on, like editing my own books, doing my own covers. Shilling Bryan Cohen’s free ad class when a lot of people don’t think of him as anything more than a hack. You don’t want to be anything less than who you are online because that will always come back to bite you, but I’m going to be a lot more apprehensive and careful about what I share on Threads. Mostly, I just needed a new place to scroll, and I’ll follow people if I like their content without thought of gaining followers. I don’t need them–I’m not planning to try to sell my books on there in any way. If you have an account and want to connect, here’s my profile: https://www.threads.net/@vaniamargenerheault
Speaking of selling books, my Amazon ads are still on fire, and I’m having to keep a close eye on them. Unfortunately, they are doing really well impression- and click-wise, and it triggered my fear of missing out. I don’t want to turn any of them off just in case I’m pausing highly profitable ads. And you really don’t know that until you turn them off and over the course of a couple weeks your sales die. Having FOMO in this industry is terrible. I buy classes, let ads run, join author groups I probably don’t need to be a part of. I probably COULD turn off half my Amazon ads and I would be just fine, but I already compromised and turned off all the ads in the UK, so I’m just going to have to watch them like a hawk. I’ll use this blog as an accountability partner and compare royalties and ad spend on a biweekly basis. I don’t want to do so much of that in real time as I’ve said before, Amazon’s reporting isn’t that great, and a book that looks like it isn’t getting page reads could prove me wrong when the reporting catches up.
I’m on chapter nine of the 5th book in my series. I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish by the end of the month, but getting both done by the end of March seems doable. I should start playing with the covers more seriously so I don’t have a panic attack when the editing is done but the covers are still unfinished. I’m not even sure the direction I want to go in anymore, except I like the frames, and I found some gold filigree that I put together to make them that looks really nice. I still need the men, maybe the backgrounds. I bought a few font duos from Creative Fabrica the other day (thank you Stanee in the Design Resources Hub on FB for posting the sale), and the only way to know if they’ll work is to try them and see. There’s no point to that though unless I can get a template cover firmed up, but I’ve been playing so I don’t feel too lost or like I’m starting from scratch.
Scrolling through my author FB groups made me realize that my email attached to this website wasn’t accepting incoming email. Apparently, it’s an issue for anyone who was messing around with their DNS records. I already knew how to restore records from when a WordPress tech support person helped me get my website back up after I accidentally deleted my A records, so restoring my email DNS records was easy. I was cautioned and was told that my authentication wouldn’t work anymore if I did that, but I reran all the tests, and it looks like everything is still fine. I feel bad that people couldn’t email me for a whole month because I didn’t know, but I’m lucky that not many people reach out to me anyway. Now that I figured that out, I hope all the damage control that I needed to do to get my newsletter and website aligned is over. But, as I’ve said, that is one of the reasons I’m in so many groups. You need that kind of information because you don’t always know what you don’t know.
I’ve been trying to do the things I said I was going to do if I felt better and I do, and I’ve been going on more walks in the evenings. Since I’ve been on my “ovary pills” as I call them, a lot of my negative feelings about going for walks are gone, and I’ve enjoyed my time outside. I guess I was feeling hormonally depressed and those pills have elevated my mood, which is funny because the order that went with my prescription is to “take as tolerated” and I am tolerating them justfine. That’s a good thing–I haven’t felt this much like myself in a long time. I also said I wanted to watch Queen Charlotte, and I have two episodes of that left. I have to force myself to watch TV because it’s not normally something I like to do anyway, but I’m enjoying the show and I’ll be glad to be caught up. I still want to rewatch the first season of Carnival Row on Prime and watch the second/last season. I really enjoyed that too, and I was happy they finished it off as COVID delayed the filming. It will be nice to see how it ends.
I think that is all for now. I hope you all have a great week, and thanks for all your support. I’ve had a lot of people say they are happy I’m feeling better, and I appreciate it a lot. It’s been a long three years, and it’s nice to be excited again.
Vania Margene Rheault 