Category Archives: book marketing

Monday Musings: Editing, Book Launches, and the Rest of 2025

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Editing Update
For the past few months I’ve been trapped in editing hell. A hell of my own making, but hell nonetheless. Anyway, I’m happy with the choices I’ve made, especially since I’ve sold a couple copies of Rescue Me since I updated the files. At the time of this writing, I’m waiting for another proof of Faking Forever to come because I forgot to add the “About the Book” section to the front. I also made a couple additional edits, but because you can edit a book forever and ever, after this second proof comes, I’ll just page through it and mark it done. Even if I happen to miss something, it will still sound 1000% times better than what it did, so I’ll consider that a win.

I’m still going through my Christmas novel and I’m hoping to be done with it by the end of the month. It’s a little slow going because I’m trying to avoid having to read through it again, but I guess I’ll skim the paperback proof when I order one. Of course there’s always a risk of editing in mistakes, but I’m not the only one that happens to, so I’ll just make peace with the fact that all the books I’ve edited in the past several weeks sound better than they did. I did a blog post on some of my changes for A Heartache for Christmas and you can read it here: https://vaniamargene.com/2025/08/18/when-dumbing-down-your-writing-isnt-dumb/

Loss and Damages Launch Activity
I haven’t been doing much for it except buy a Goodreads giveaway and run an Amazon ad to the preorder. At first I felt bad I spent the $99 dollars on the giveaway because other than exposure, like when I bought one for Cruel Fate, I won’t get much out of it. Comparing the two books might be worthless since Cruel Fate is the first in a six book serial and Loss and Damages is a standalone which (in my mind) makes it much more likely to be read, so chances are outcomes will be completely different anyway. But, I get paid three times in September, so after realizing that, I shrugged and moved the Goodreads receipt into my 2025 Book Spend folder to give to my accountant next April. All that being said, I’m at 832 entries and the giveaway ends the day the book is live, on September 15th. Since those free books are added to my sales dashboard, maybe they’ll count as “sales” and they’ll give me a little push that day. Who knows. If you want to enter, you can here: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/419642-loss-and-damages

Book Giveaway For Loss and Damages Loss and Damages by V.M. RheaultLoss and Damages by V.M. Rheault (Goodreads Author) Release date: Sep 15, 2025 Thank you so much for entering the giveaway for Loss and Damages! I appreciate your interest and look forward to hearing from you! I'll never be the man she needs me to be . . . Dominic I’m the most hated man in the city. In business with my father, I do his dirty work to make him ha ...more Enter Giveaway Format: Kindle book Giveaway ends in: 23 days and 16:01:03 Availability: 100 copies available, 832 people requesting Giveaway dates: Aug 16 - Sep 15, 2025 Countries available: U.S.

The Amazon ad isn’t doing too much but it’s just another way to push my book out there, and for now, it’s low-cost. My ads going to other books are doing well, but my sales aren’t keeping up with ad spend so I may have to reassess them at the end of the month. For now, the ad has resulted in one pre-order. I usually get none, so that’s a small win all around.

snapshot of Amazon ads stats for Loss and Damages. 6422 impressions, three clicks, cost per click is .35 cents.

I have four paperback copies I ordered since my paperback is scheduled and I can order them without the proof stripe on the cover. I was thinking about maybe offering them on IG to a few bookstagrammers or something, but time is slipping away if I want to do that because half the appeal is getting the book and reading it before it releases. I have less than a month to do that now, and with shipping, even to the United States, I’m cutting it close. Still, it never hurts to put up a post, so I might be doing that sooner than later.

Overall, I don’t have other plans for it. Most times I forget I even wrote it and that I should be pushing it. I have a terrible habit of moving on before I really should be moving on, but I’m always thinking about the next thing, and being stuck in editing makes me antsy to write something new.

What subgenre in romance is hot right now:
If you get the K-Lytic’s marketing trends research newsletter, you’ll know that Cowboy and Western Romance is on the upswing. I never was one to care about cowboys, even if Glen Powell portrayed a pretty sexy one in Twisters (that I have seen approximately 100 times). Ranch and farm life is a bear to get right if you’ve never lived on a ranch or a farm. Tacking a horse incorrectly will get you skewered by readers who actually know how to ride, and that is a level of research that I just don’t care to do. Especially since the last, and only, time I rode a horse was back when I was ten and went to summer camp. The last time even I saw a horse in person was two winters ago when we went on a sleigh ride (“sleigh” being used loosely as there wasn’t much snow that year and we were actually on wheels) and I got to pet one before we set off. That, unfortunately, does not qualify me to write a cowboy romance, and neither does living in the middle of farm country. But, it’s interesting to note that Cowboy and Western Romance is having a moment. This is the snapshot that Alex Newton shared in his K-Lytics email.

graph on left showing uptick between 2020 and 2025 of cowboy romance. on the right, a sexy cowgirl and sexy cowboy both wearing cowboy hats

If you want to buy Alex’s newest report, you can find it here. In the past they were $37 and now they’re $57, I believe, but he offers a lot of information. This is not an affiliate link: https://k-lytics.lpages.co/western-romance/. I like watching them but I have a Mafia report from two years ago that I haven’t watched, so it’s pretty obvious I don’t make the time and shouldn’t waste the money.

Authors Guild Webinar
There’s a free Authors Guild webinar that looks interesting that also popped up in my email. It’s called How and Where to Find Your Readers and it’s on Wednesday, August 27th, at 2pm EST. Someone on Threads asked me if there would be a replay, and though the information doesn’t say that there will be (that I could see), they usually put a lot of their content on their YouTube channel. Here is the registration link if you’re interested in attending the webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_z9jduvBMTL-wsm77dcFMjg#/registration You don’t have to be an Authors Guild member to attend.

You can also subscribe to their YouTube channel as they have a lot of content there as well: https://www.youtube.com/@AuthorsGuild

The Anthropic AI Lawsuit
You all might have heard that Anthropic was found to have legally obtained thousands of books and other work from pirate sites such as LibGen and Library Mirror. There was information going around that if your books were included that you could join the class action lawsuit. If. If you had filed a copyright for your work with the Copyright Office. That little piece of information was hidden in the Threads posts and other bits and pieces I read about it, but Craig Martelle was very upfront about it in his Facebook group, Successful Indie Author. I realized it’s because it’s just one of those things people assume an indie author will do. [Cue the Chrissy Teigen meme where she’s grimacing in the audience.]

Applying for copyright was something I planned on doing when I started my pen name and then, I guess you can call them excuses, I lost focus because of COVID, my health, and other things going on at the time. Not to mention price. After paying for what we have to pay for, adding another expense, and one that didn’t seem imperative, was a lot, and I just . . . didn’t. Now I’ll be paying for that along with many, many, many other authors who don’t bother because if whoever is behind this class action lawsuit wins and damages are paid out, they won’t be paid out to us. It’s really a “coulda woulda shoulda” moment, and you can’t go back to retroactively submit your copyright because you have to do it within three months of your book being published. And I don’t even mean that in a skeezy way of trying to become a part of the lawsuit, just simply going back to fix your mistakes. Along with having a membership to the Alliance of Independent Authors, paying for your copyright is probably a good idea. There are so many scammers and thieves out there now. Authors need all the protection they can get. If you want to read more about that, you can find it on the Authors Guild website here: https://authorsguild.org/news/anthropic-ai-class-action-important-information-for-authors/

What’s next for the rest of 2025?
It’s a little early to be thinking about the end of the year, but September is just around the corner, and once the holidays hit, it’s game over. So, in recognizing that, I’d like to try to write another book. I have Bitter Love pretty much plotted out in my head. I’ll have to fill in some blanks as being a “planster” that’s expected, but I know the major plot points. How it ends right now could go either way, not the HEA part, but where they end up, you know. When I write my small town romances, sometimes they stay and sometimes they don’t.

If I can start on Bitter Love September first, I’d have to write 5300 words a week to write a 90k word book. That actually sounds pretty doable, considering in the past I’ve been able to write 5000 words a day, but now with changes at my work, I’m not sure what kind of word count I’ll be able to produce. I have a really difficult time writing on the days I work–my ten hour shifts don’t leave me a lot of time and by the end I’m exhausted anyway–and the days I don’t are filled with chores, errands, and other pesky things that make up life. So, while that 5300 word count cheers me because it doesn’t sound that bad, I’ll have to see what reality lets me do. But that is the goal so we’ll see what happens. Especially since this book might not be that long. There’s no mystery in it, just a bunch of garbage my characters have to deal with, so maybe it would be a nice change if my book came in at 75k words or so. I won’t know until I write it, but I’m not put off by the idea.

I guess that’s all I have for this week. Overall things are good. Health is hanging in there, nothing bad is happening with my car. Pim is a little jerk (I mean that very affectionately) and she hates being alone, but I think we’re all still getting used to each other and there’s a chance yet she could quiet down. I hope she does because having to feed her breakfast around 4am isn’t awesome, and sometimes, like on the days I know I have to get up for work, I can’t always fall back asleep. My son has been good with getting up with her, too, and sometimes when I finally get up, he’s asleep on the couch. Not great, but I love having a cat again, so you just have to deal.

Here’s Pim for the pet tax. She loves that piece of packing paper.

Enjoy the last little bit of August, and I will talk to you next week!

Three Things I’ve Stopped Doing (and Three Things I Always Will)

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brown scale on brown background. low part says, three things I stopped doing (ampersand) and high part says, three things I always will black text

Things change in indie publishing. Some quickly, like Amazon guidelines, and some take years to shift, like marketing trends. I’ve been in this game for a bit now, longer than a lot of people I met when I first started out, but shorter than some of the tried and trues I knew who were doing this for years already when I first created my Twitter account.

I have found the longer you stay in the game, the more data you’re going to collect (if you’re smart and keep track). What works, what doesn’t. What did but doesn’t anymore. There are some basic things that will always have merit like publishing consistently, having a website, and, in most cases, not genre-hopping if you want to build an audience. But there are some things that just don’t work anymore, like just simply publishing and watching the royalties roll in as they did during the Kindle goldrush days.

So, I thought I’d share the three things I’ll always do and three things I stopped doing. As the years go by and I hang in there, this list might change, but these are the conclusions I’ve drawn so far since I published my first book in 2016.

Three things I’ll always do in my publishing business:

Finish a duet/trilogy/series before release. I’ve blogged about this a few times, as for most authors this is a Catch-22. Some readers now won’t read until a series is done and they can binge, but an author is reluctant to write more unless they see interest in the first book. What will always convince to me to finish is the fact that if your series is never done, it will never get the readers it could if it was finished. Books don’t expire. In the digital landscape they can sit on a virtual bookshelf for decades. Indies make money on older titles all the time, but you are ensuring that you won’t if you don’t finish. My reasons go beyond the money, even beyond author courtesy and reader habits. I finish out of a sense of integrity for myself and my work. I mean, I don’t publish as I go because I have anxiety over consistency issues that I couldn’t fix if my books were already out in the world. I’m not that good of a writer, so I need to be able to go back and double-check until I’m satisfied. But I also just couldn’t walk away from a world and characters I created. I loved them or wouldn’t have created them in the first place. I’ll always stay true to that creative spark and finish what I start.

Marketing in a way that’s sustainable to me without feeling guilty. That means letting go of the idea I need to be on social media. I don’t like thinking of a hook or a theme and making a graphic and posting. I don’t want to make videos for TikTok even if I have gotten better at it and it doesn’t take me that long. I still post every once in a while so if a reader stumbles upon my FB author page or my IG profile I look like I’m still alive, but otherwise, the constant advice that I need to be posting all the time I will happily ignore. The fact is, a lot of authors don’t have the money or don’t want to spend the money on marketing. I understand that, but paying for ads and for newsletters like Freebooksy and Fussy Librarian is my way of reaching readers without worrying about algorithms or coming up with content and the best way to present it. If I run an FB ad, that’s my limit, since you do need a hook and a graphic that will make people click.

I understand that in a perfect world, an author will use both paid and free tools to market effectively. But when mental health comes in, not to mention time and finances, each author has to make the best choices for them. Even if that’s not posting on socials, not paying for marketing tools, and only joining in a free, author-driven book blast once a year. You have to take a look at what results those methods are bringing in and if you’re okay with that. After a lot of soul-searching, I am okay with breaking even or losing money. I didn’t start publishing to become rich and famous, and that’s okay because I never will be. (I still play the PowerBall sometimes though.)

I will always buy my own ISBNs. This is kind of a cheat, because I already made this decision, and four years ago I bought a pack of 100–after I had already bought a pack of ten and went through them. It cost as much as my rent (at the time–my rent has gone up considerably since then) and I was sweating bullets, but I charged it and paid it off after a few months. I have been called privileged for being able to do that, and you might think I’m privileged to be able to afford ads and paid promos, too. I don’t feel privileged, living paycheck to paycheck, depending on the rent money my kids give me every month, and I still have to charge bigger purchases, like the new mattress I had to buy a few months ago for my back pain. I have a small budget for ads and don’t pay myself a wage out of my royalties. Every penny I make on book sales gets put back into my business hobby. I think that’s another reason authors are hesitant to pay for things like ISBNs and ads. They don’t always make their money back because they don’t write to market or their covers are bad, but I have never seen any industry besides indie publishing where people think they can start a business and not spend any money.

Not everyone will agree that buying ISBNs is a valid expense, and that’s okay. Amazon may not be around forever and neither may IngramSpark, though chances are good they’ll still be here in my lifetime at least. But, I wanted to protect my work under numbers that I paid for and now I’m the publisher on record for my titles. That means a lot to me. I protect both my ebooks and my paperbacks, even when the general consensus is you don’t need an ISBN for your ebooks. I still have quite a few numbers left, even using two a title, and well, I don’t think I’ll need to buy anymore. Obviously, buying ISBNs is a personal business decision but I have never regretted mine.

Bonus Entry:

I will always be a member of ALLi. This is something that I thought of last minute, but I’ll always be a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors. As someone running a business, I think it’s important to be part of an organization that will have your back. I mostly joined so I would have help if Amazon ever closed my account. There are a lot of other benefits too, like discount codes on formatting and publishing services, and I save a little every now and then if I have to update a file at IngramSpark. While it seems like a waste of money on the outside, paying for something that you don’t use (like an old gym membership that’s on autopay) it will be there whenever I need it and in these days of scammers and thieves, having some who’s in your corner is worth more than what they charge for a yearly membership.

Three things I have stopped doing since I started publishing:

Building and sending out a newsletter. Last year when MailerLite screwed me over when I was trying to make my newsletter compliant, I said “fuck it” and shut my newsletter down. I didn’t want to search for another newsletter aggregator and I exported my listed and imported it into my author website. I decide I would turn my newsletter into a public blog, and so far, things have been going okay.

There are a lot of disadvantages to this, to be sure. I can’t offer “bonus content” because what I post goes to everyone. Segregation of an email list isn’t possible on WordPress, nor is culling my subscribers. They have to opt out or my list is stuck with them. I can still force people to give me their emails if they want my reader magnet, but I would have to pay for that privilege on Bookfunnel and that’s not where I want to put my money right now.

So, as far as newsletters go, my blog is still sent out in email form but posted on my site and it will show up in the WordPress reader. People might think I’m crazy for giving away a book without strings, but what’s a book? I can always write another one. Kind of like when your hair stylist does a crappy job. Your hair will grow back. Eventually. Books are a dime a dozen and My Biggest Mistake has served me well. I’ve given away over a thousand copies, and because the back matter in all my books advertises this free book on my website, I’m afraid I’ve trapped myself into giving it away forever. My only ask is you subscribe to my blog, but that rarely happens. Still, I prefer the laid-back approach I’ve adopted since I’ve been working on not taking my books so seriously. I’ve given myself permission to relax, especially in the evenings after a full day. I’ve started watching Lucifer, because, you know. Tom Ellis.

This is one of those things that may change, but I’m not sure what would prompt me to move my list again. I like what I’m doing, and because I’m comfortable with WordPress, maintaining it isn’t a nightmare. In fact, I just refreshed the header, colors, and font on my author page. I hadn’t since I set it up and it looks nice. If you want to take a look around, you can find it here: vmrheault.com.

I’m getting rid of the hard back matter sell. A long time ago in a romance marketing room on Clubhouse, I heard the advice to do the “hard sell” right after the last paragraph of your book. There were all these little caveats, like you couldn’t even use a spacer or a hard enter because that would “force” the content on to the next “page” on an ereader. It was advised to put your call to action (CTA) practically right after the last period, and I did start doing that along with many many many authors. When I look back at my older books now, I hate it. I hate it, hate it, hate it, and I’ve been going through and getting rid of it. Why? Because after I have just read an amazing book, I want to sit with the happy ending, I want to sit with the characters who touched my heart. I don’t want to be yelled at to join a mailing list or to buy another book. So, while I was re-editing Rescue Me, I got rid the immediate CTA to go to my website. (I’ve always pointed people to my website and not a landing page, and that saved me a ton of headache when I stopped using MailerLite.) I didn’t get rid of it completely, but it’s on its own page now. Ebooks are flowable and don’t have pages, but I think a reader has to “flip” to see what else is in the back of the book after the content ends. I’m doing Faking Forever now, and along with updating my list of books, I’m also getting rid of the hard sell. I didn’t it do it on my new releases and that is a trend I’ll stick with. If readers loved your books they will find a way to stay in touch. Like moving my newsletter to my blog and cutting back on the number of books I’m publishing every year, I’m just going to ease up and stop trying so hard. Because you know what? It didn’t do that much anyway.

I’m not adding subtitles on my ebooks. That was another really popular thing to do, and I even wrote a blog post about it. I guess this goes along with the hard sell, and I’m not going to add subtitles to my ebooks anymore. I’m going to start letting my cover, title, and blurb speak for itself, and make sure my categories and keywords I choose when publishing do the heavy lifting. Adding a subtitle to your books was a very trendy thing to do to drive discoverability, and you may think that with market saturation that not doing it anymore might be going backward. But, Amazon doesn’t like it, either, and honestly, now I think shoving mini-tropes into a subtitle just looks desperate and ridiculous. So, as I update my books, along with taking out the hard CTA at the end, I’m going to be taking off the subtitles. It will make my buy-pages look cleaner. Am I telling you not to do it? No. Unless you really do want to be careful around Amazon, then maybe I would rethink that, but if you like to take chances and want to pack your subtitle full of mini-tropes, then you should still do what you want to do. This is the new and improved relaxed version, remember?

Bonus Entry:

I won’t ever use an illustrated cover. Obviously I was thinking about my hockey novels and the kind of covers I wanted to put on them. I don’t fault anyone for using an illustrated cover but I have just come to realize those are not for me. I understand the reasons why authors turn to them. There’s more of a selection when scrolling through vector art than there is real stock models and if you’re one to go with the trends, you don’t want to feel left out and think you could be leaving readers on the table. But at this point, illustrated covers would be at odds with the brand I’ve built for myself over the years, and if I can find what I need and there are still real people on the kinds of books I’m writing, then I don’t see any reason to change. I also have never, and probably will never, write a story light-hearted enough where an illustrated cover would fit, so instead of moaning about that, I’ll lean into my strengths and keep putting hot, sexy men on my covers.

When it comes to indie publishing, or just publishing in general, the ability to pivot and be flexible is probably one of the biggest assets you can have. Things change at a snail’s pace until all of a sudden everyone is talking about it and doing it a different way. What’s especially interesting is when things used to be the standard (like subtitles on ebooks) and that changes to something that no one does anymore.

I have extreme FOMO, I really do, but this year I have managed to brush a lot of that aside, for the most part because I think I know everything there is to know and there isn’t going to be a magic piece of advice that will push me to the next level. And that’s okay. Accepting that is actually freeing. I can do what I want, write what I want, and be happy with it. After the few years I’ve had, that is a really great place to be.

Next week I’ll give you a rundown on what I’ve been doing. July is almost gone, y’all. I hope you’re making the best of what’s left of summer.

See you next week!

The Evolution of the Romance Genre

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beige background. a flower in its growing cycle dirt, sprout, stem, bloom. red flowers, green stem, white pot. text says, The Evolution of the Romance Genre

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a kid.

That’s probably not a surprise to anyone who is also a writer, and many of us can say we’ve been writing stories since we learned how to hold a crayon. When I was in high school, I devoured Harlequin Temptations and Desires, finding them at garage sales, the library, and shoplifting them from Pamida. I got caught and my dad made me talk to the manager about how stealing was bad, but I was a kid who loved to read and was a kleptomaniac at heart and well, it didn’t stop me. That’s neither here nor there, but one night, I remember holding a book and thinking, I want to be in charge of it all. The cover, the blurb. All of it. What I didn’t realize back then is I was describing what would eventually become indie publishing. So, yeah. I am in charge of all of it. Down to where the numbers appear on the page.

That was thirty-five years ago or so, and I didn’t understand tropes. I chose books based off the blurb, if I thought I would enjoy the story. In fact, I don’t think I really understood tropes at all until I was assigned the difficult task of marketing my own books. It was through listening to romance marketing talks, webinars, and podcasts where I learned tropes are what sell your books. That was also a difficult realization for me because, like most writers, I just wrote what I wanted to write. My first trilogy was written without tropes in mind–I just made up a group of friends who lived in a fake town, gave them some trouble, and forced them to fall in love while navigating those troubles.

I don’t remember the precise “Ah-ha” moment I had regarding tropes, but I must have had it at some point because my next three standalones were all trope-specific–enemies to lovers, age-gap, and close proximity. Then I veered off again with my Rocky Point series and just wrote whatever I wanted, and if a trope was baked in, like second chance, yay for me.

So you can imagine my confusion when, after seven years of publishing, I realized, yet again, romance was becoming even further divided than just tropes and that I would never be a successful indie author writing “contemporary romance” because romance didn’t work like that anymore.

Indies were changing the game.

There’s an interesting interview that Nora Roberts did not long ago with the Associated Press, and she was talking about her career in romance. She’s written over 250 books and has seen firsthand how the romance genre has evolved, going so far to even say, “My roots are in romance and I have a lot of respect. But I don’t write romance anymore. I do write relationships.”

AP: Speaking of the sex, that’s a good transition to romance as a genre. It has evolved a lot in the last couple of years. Where do you see yourself in the pantheon of that genre?

Roberts: I don’t at all. My roots are in romance and I have a lot of respect. But I don’t write romance anymore. I do write relationships.

I’ve been writing for a really long time now, and the romance genre evolves and it changes. And it did when I was working in it, and it just got to a point where I didn’t want to go where it was evolving. I wanted to go in a different direction. So my roots and foundation are there, and gratitude. But that’s not what I’m doing now.

That’s a great way to look at it . . . if you’re Nora Roberts and not a nameless, faceless author trying to find readers in market so saturated it’s tempting to close your laptop and never look back. She has her audience and has built it over years of publishing. So where does that leave the rest of us?

There are indie publishing “rules” and one of the biggest rules of them all is to never genre-hop. There’s some logic in that–it’s hard enough to market your books when you’re writing in just one genre, never mind trying to reach readers in two or three. But when you decide to write romance, that rule is split down even further. Choose a subgenre, and there are plenty:

screenshot of KDP's romance subcategories and subgenres subcategories include historical romance, holidays, LGBTQ+, paranormal and romantic suspense subgenres include: Action & Adventure Adaptations Alpha Male Amish Billionaires & Millionaires Black & African American Clean & WholesomeLater in Life Love Triangle Mafia Romance Medical History Multicultural and Interracial New Adult and College Romance Police Polymory Rockstar Romance Romantasy Romantic Comedy Science Fiction Small Town Romance Sports Time Trave Western and Frontier Workplace Romance Collections & Anthologies Contemporary
Enemies to Lovers Erotica Firefighters General Gothic Hispanic & Latino Indigenous

This is the screenshot of romance subgenres you can choose when you publish on KDP. They have narrowed them down so much you can pick something like Love Triangle or Workplace Romance. Ten years ago we didn’t have those choices, and it makes me wonder if they’re helping or hurting.

How niching down into a subgenre can help:

You have a built-in audience. You know before you write you’re going to have readers who want to read your books.
You can build your brand easier. Instead of saying you’re a “multi-genre author” and trying to turn your brand into something for everyone (which never works well and is expensive to market, too) you can say “Mafia romance author” and those readers will know they can plow through your entire backlist and be happy.
It’s easier to market. Just being able to choose your subgenre category and using the appropriate keywords will help immensely when it comes to creating ads. You can also partner with other authors who write that subgenre and share audiences.
Better discoverability. It’s a lot easier for a reader to recommend a hot new Small Town romance series than a general romance.

Cons to only writing one thing:

You might get bored. So far, I haven’t felt too burnt out writing Billionaire Romance, but what saved me was playing with tropes and adding in a dash of Romantic Suspense. Still, there’s not a lot of wiggle room when you choose something like Motorcycle Club. There’s a solid set of exceptions you have to meet to keep readers of that subgenre happy and not a lot of leeway to mix things up.
Your loyal readers won’t follow you. I’m fully aware that readers who liked my Billionaire stuff might not have read my Rockstar trilogy, and the readers who stumbled upon my Rockstars may not have wanted to read anything else in my backlist.
Your chosen niche might get saturated. Hockey is hot right now, and those who got in on the ground floor might be annoyed that suddenly the market is flooded. A while back Reverse Harem, or Why Choose as we have to call it now, went through the same popularity contest. You may have to pivot when that happens, and it might be too much work to start over.
Branding fatigue. All my covers look the same, though I actually don’t mind because with my limited skill set when it comes to graphic design and software, it’s easy for me to meet genre expectations but still keep my books and series separate and distinguishable from one another. But, I’m also trapped now because I put single men on the covers of my books and after sixteen books, a couple all of a sudden would look very out of place. Also, unless you can afford to be flexible, eventually you might use up all the hot men that are available on a stock site like DepositPhotos, trapping you even more.

So, what does all this even mean? Subgenres aren’t going to go away, in fact, chances are good KDP will add even more as time goes on, but I know from just my limited experience that niching down does help whether we want to admit it or not. It helps marketing and branding, for sure, and in turn it doesn’t take so much work to find readers. Anyone who looks at my Amazon author page knows exactly what they’re going to get, even if I do happen to throw in a rockstar or hockey player.

That doesn’t mean I’m always going to want to write billionaires, if even, you know, I’ve downgraded my billionaire status to simply, “Men with money.”

And what does that mean for romance? Readers aren’t picking romances off the Pamida shelves and deciding on which ones to stuff into their purses. They search online marketplaces like Amazon and Kobo by the tropes or subgenres they like, hope the cover catches their eye, then skim the blurb, looking to see if the description lives up to the cover. Subgenres have changed the way readers find books and I don’t know what we can do to combat that.

Writing what you want when you want in a time where indies niche down and produce six books a year is a tough act to follow and not everyone wants to. Some are steadfast in the idea that they’ll do their own thing, and it’s an idea that I keep circling around now that I’ve tried the other way and failed. I mean, to be clear, pivoting and writing Billionaire romance did boost my visibility and sales. Yes, it really did, but it wasn’t a magic bullet to a large readership, either, and in my case, I’m exploring other options to keep my joy.

I don’t know what the answer is. Maybe there is no answer because there’s not really a question. I just find it interesting how indies have shaped romance, even to the point where Nora Roberts has said, “Good luck.”

I can tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to keep writing the books I want. I like writing “Men with money” or I wouldn’t keep doing it, but I can play with tropes and different subgenres like Romantic Suspense. I can explore themes of mental health, friendships, and found family. Because the market is going to keep evolving and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

I’m going to write relationships, and if you want to grab one off a pirate site, go for it. But be careful. Pamida’s manager wasn’t very nice.

Pity Isn’t a Good Marketing Plan

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box of tissues, with one coming out of the top. pink background. text says pity isn't a good marketing plan

It’s valid to talk about our struggles as authors. It’s something I do almost every Monday. We like to know that we’re not alone, that we can relate to people and what they’re going through with writing, marketing, and publishing.

But sometimes it gets out of hand. In the past week or so, there’s been a big TikTok account that has taken the concept of sharing our struggles just a little too far, and what started out as “I really need some support” has turned into a huge marketing strategy constructed pretty much on just . . . pity. I don’t want to go into all that, the article I linked to actually does a really good job, and honestly, I’m not interested enough in that person to do a deep dive to write my own post about it.

Actually, I see a rendition of it on social media all time. Little posts like, “I haven’t sold a book this week/month/year,” or “My husband just got laid off, any sales will help!” or, “I just had a death in the family. I’ll donate proceeds to their funeral if you buy my book,” or “I can’t afford my cat’s vet bills, please, any reads in KU will help a lot.” I sympathize with each and every one of those people. I really, really do. I’ve had financial trouble. I lost three cats in five years, and let me tell you, the vet costs were astronomical. I’m not a stranger to needing money, but what I didn’t do was ask my readers to help me by buying my books. Why? Because:

One: Book royalties don’t work like that. Amazon doesn’t pay us for today’s sales for three months, so even if I managed to guilt-trip a few people into buying my books, it wouldn’t help. Three months is a long time to wait when you need the money now.

Two: My financial situation isn’t my readers’ business nor is it their responsibility. Asking them to buy my book so I can have some cash to pay bills or whatever else grossly oversteps the author/reader relationship.

Three: It erodes reader trust. After a while, they won’t want to see your social media posts because they’ll be afraid you’re going to ask them to do something they can’t do. Not all readers have a ton of disposable income, and if you have a short backlist, maybe they already supported you and will feel bad now if they’ve already bought your book and don’t want to buy it again.

Four: It takes attention away from your books. As an author trying to create a professional reputation and a credible and enjoyable backlist, that diverted attention could cost you. Not only for just that day, or that week, or that month you’re begging for help, but . . . forever. Followers can mute you without unfollowing, so you may never know the true damage you cause. Out of sight is out of mind, and in this time of content saturation and short attention spans, it doesn’t take much for a reader to forget she ever read anything you wrote.

The only time you should be asking readers if they’d like to read your books is when you know that what you’re offering them is something you think they would enjoy, either because you know they’ve read similar books to yours or they asked for a recommendation and you have something they’re looking for. That’s it.

But, I can hear a lot of you saying, I share my bleak numbers and empty sales dashboards to have support and so others don’t feel alone. That’s understandable and you’re not alone thinking that, but unfortunately, the reader/author line blurs more every day. I know this and take the risk keeping this blog up. Maybe a reader would find my indie talk not to their liking and skip out, either from this blog or my books too, and that’s okay. It’s unrealistic to think that we can keep our roles completely separate, so let’s just say begging for sales in most ways is unappealing wherever you happen to be hanging out online.

Besides, and I wrote a whole blog post about this before: transparency means diddle squat if you’re not prepared to have a conversation about why your sales are in the toilet and how to fix it. Saying you had zero sales so far for the month of June means little. That’s pity marketing if I ever heard it. You can frame it any way you want: “Just letting people know how tough it is out there. No sales this month.” “Being transparent today. No sales for this month. Keep on keeping on.” “No KU page reads this month and we only have a couple days left. Fingers crossed next month is better.” Those all sound familiar because we hear them all the time, but what I really want to ask is, What are you doing marketing-wise to combat this? Are you only posting on Facebook? Only Threads? Pinterest? How’s your cover, how’s your blurb? Is your book first in a series that won’t be done until 2030?

If you’re not ready for the hard conversations, then you have no business sharing. Some people will ask, out of a want to help you, and mostly I hear, I don’t have money for ads, or ads didn’t work for me. There are a lot of reasons why ads don’t work, the top one being your book isn’t advertising-ready. The cover is off, the blurb is confusing. You didn’t choose the right keywords or categories and the ad platform is confused and doesn’t know who your readers are. Those things are fixable. The money thing, not so much, but indie publishing is the only business venture I know of where people think they can start a business with no start-up cash. It’s completely unrealistic to think you can publish a book and have it be successful completely for free. People get really mad at me when I say stuff like that and call me privileged, but it’s true. Even a simple artist who wants to sell paintings on Etsy needs money to buy canvas and paint. It’s really crazy and probably why Kickstarter has had another surge in popularity recently. Authors need money to produce books. It’s always been that way.

So, the biggest takeaway from this post today is, should you be sharing that online? Do you really want your readers to see it? Do you really want your peers to be feeling sorry for you? I have a lot of sympathy for my “co-workers” such as they are, but whenever I take a look at their books, I can usually find a hundred ways to fix what they’re complaining about. New cover, new blurb. Get that series done. Fix your formatting, your title is confusing. Your ads won’t waste money if you’re selling a book people want to read. You may need to experiment a bit with your audience–Facebook wants to shove your ad in front of everyone which we all know rarely works–but even though I’ve complained about my own ads, I’ve never lost money. Simply broken even which I don’t consider a failure, I was just having mental health issues and decided to step back from the grind.

Anyway, so 2025 is half over. We’ve got six more months to get stuff done. Can you go through your backlist and make a list of things to fix?
*Cover–just because you like it doesn’t mean it’s working
*Blurb–too confusing or too vague because you don’t want to give away spoilers may turn readers off
*Look Inside: the first 10% is important. If nothing is happening or you start off your book with an info dump, you won’t hook readers.
*Make sure your categories and keywords are solid
*Price competitively

Then you can:
*Do a couple of free days and join an author-driven promo
*Learn Amazon ads
*Buy a promo from Written Word Media or places like Fussy Librarian and Robin Reads

Let’s stop the pity marketing and take matters into our own hands. We have the power to fix things and acting like you don’t just makes you look bad.

One more thing before I head off to get my errands done for the day: Angela James is offering a deep POV workshop on July 8th for $30.00. Improving craft is another way to increase sales. No one wants to read a book that sounds like crap and is full of telling. Angela’s a fabulous editor who used to work for Harlequin’s Carina Press. Take a look at her workshop, and if you haven’t invested in your author business so far this year, this money will be well spent. This is not an affiliate link: https://angelajames.co/deep-pov-workshop/

Have a good week everyone, and if you live in an area that’s been hit by storms, stay safe!

Author Update|Mid-April Check-In

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You may not be used to this level of positivity from me, but I am excited to say that I’m doing pretty good. It probably helps that I’m feeling not too bad today, physically, and that always helps. Even on my “good” days I don’t feel great, but on my “bad” days I feel even worse, so you have to celebrate the little things.

Last week I finished Wicked Games. It came in at 97,606 words, and I’m really happy that I was able to finish it. I had given myself until the end of April, thinking that my funk would last longer than it did, but I got past a slow part, came up with the last little plot point I needed to push to the end, and that was it. It helped that for the past couple of weekends I had really great word counts, and it just snowballed. I hadn’t expected it since the days I felt down I felt really down, but I should realize by now that hormones play a huge part in how I’m feeling and that how I feel at that time won’t stay. I’ve already read through it once, but I’ll set it aside now and let it breathe while I work on Loss and Damages. I have a lot to do to get the ARCs ready for July, but looking at the cover gives me motivation to get the last edits done, format it, and write the blurb.

That’s not to say that the blog post I wrote a couple weeks ago was a waste, because I actually did have a pretty big epiphany that I think I realized but didn’t understand the full meaning of until I was emailing with a friend. Back when I pivoted to first person present POV in 2020, I was actively looking for ways to build a readership and to turn my writing from what was then a hobby into a career. I did a few things they say you should do, like write a reader magnet and start a newsletter. I’ve always had a website for this blog, but I created a new one that was for my author business only. I started taking my titles and my covers more seriously and instead of putting what I liked on my books, compromised and started doing research on what belonged on commercial genre covers. I started thinking about my brand and my books as a product to sell.

Maybe I never thought that I would become a millionaire author like some of my fellow romance authors such as Elana Johnson, Lucy Score, Melanie Harlow, Sadie Kincaid, or LJ Shen, but there are plenty of mid-list romance authors who write full time and are able to live off their royalties. I wanted to at least be a mid- mid-list author, making part time wages to supplement my day job. That came to a halt this year after I did my 2024 taxes. So it wasn’t that long ago actually when I decided that I was done trying to build a career. I have all that in place–the reader magnet, the blog/newsletter, the website. My brand is pretty well established if you scroll through my books on Amazon, at least for my pen name. I’m not going to be taking any of that down, and I’ve gone into why before and don’t want to repeat myself. But, I am going to change how I come at my writing. I’ve set myself up so that I’m ahead. I’m spacing my books out to give myself time to write, but I’m back to where I was in 2017 when I was writing because it was fun and publishing was exciting. (Though I don’t think after pressing Publish the night before I’m going to wake up rich and famous anymore.)

The longer you’re in the writing community, the longer you’re exposed to possibilities, and I think that’s what trips a lot of us up. We have no idea that money can be made until we start talking to authors who are making it. We have no idea we can build a newsletter subscriber list to the tens of thousands until we start hearing about authors who are doing it. And we think, Well, if they can do it, so can I, but the problem is, just because they’ve done it doesn’t actually mean you can. Some things are possible, just not for you, and it’s a blow to realize that, you know?

It puts you in a place that you’re not sure about. I’ve given 20-40 hours a week to my writing since at least 2020, possibly earlier than that. I bought into the belief that you can’t make it as an author if you don’t treat your writing like a job, something I really hounded you guys on over the years on this blog. I scheduled time to write and cranked out books like you wouldn’t believe. Of course I had fun, you can’t do something like that if you don’t like it, but looking back now, there was an underlying sense of, I don’t know, unhinged and deranged work ethic that demanded I spend every waking second I could writing because I wouldn’t get anywhere if I didn’t. Guess what? I didn’t get anywhere anyway. I’m proud of my backlist, of course I am. But no one is reading (and the zeros on my sales dashboard over the last few days are proof of that), so there wasn’t a point in working that hard and missing all the things I missed. A habit like that isn’t something I’ll be able to shake off so easily, and I wrote Wicked Games in two months. I started on February 5th and finished April 8th. I didn’t need to write that fast except that I had the plot in my head so it was easy to get it down on paper, and I enjoyed it. I love Seth and Avery, like the twisty plot. But it is kinda crazy to be writing with this resignation that I’m writing for myself and will only be writing for myself.

I’m still doing “fun” things that indie authors do, like I just made mugs that use my King’s Crossing chapter headers and I used the font in one of the title words on the covers:

I used a promo code on Snapfish and ordered two. They’re big (20 ounces) and sturdy, and came about to be about $15.00 a piece because of shipping. I can’t sell them because I didn’t buy the extended license for the vector, but I might do another giveaway at some point or I was playing around with doing a couple book boxes and seeing if I can build a little buzz, though with the last book out today, that might be too late.

I also made some cards (the size is 6 x 4 inches) that have the QR code to my website’s subscribe page where people can download my reader magnet.

I ordered them from VistaPrint, and I paid $25.00 dollars for 25. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them, keep them in my purse and pin them to community bulletin boards and whatever. Maybe buy some author copies of a standalone and tuck them into Little Free Libraries this summer while I’m out walking. I can do these things knowing that they won’t really do anything. I’m back to where I was, many years ago.

I started reading the first book in the next series I’m going to finish, and I must have gone through it a few times already because it’s pretty clean. That’s kind of depressing because it sets up five more books and I wasn’t really in the mood to write another long series. So my thought was it would have been easier to tear up a book that needed work. It’s a cool concept though, a woman’s father creates a list of men he thinks would be acceptable for her to marry, and each book is for a man on the list. Maybe I will just write them all. The second one is already written and the third is set up in it. I have the MMCs for the fourth, fifth, and sixth, but not any plots for any of them. No backstories or love interests, so I’ll be doing a lot of brainstorming if I’m going to go through with it. I don’t know. I’m glad I started reading the first one though, because I used the same last name in Wicked Games for one of my secondary characters as I did for the main female character in the first book, and it will be a lot easier to change it in one book instead of two. I’m starting to look at cover concepts though, because I’m running out of ideas on how to brand a series, so I’m hoping that will get me excited, too.

I know this blog post sounds a lot like what I’ve been writing about before, but it really was an “Ah-ha!” moment for me when I decided to stop chasing that career dream. It was like when I went to school for human resources and decided I didn’t want a job in HR after all. All that schooling, all that tuition. Just kidding! Right? Education is never a waste, just like the books I’ve written in the past few years aren’t a waste either, but it is a shock, a let down, a broken dream. (Though, to be fair, no one dreams about a career in HR, and if you thought writers drink, you’ve never seen a group of HR reps during happy hour.)

Where am I going from here? I’ll be doing the same I’ve always done. Work on my books, publish them. But I’ll take more time for myself during the day, during the week, only write when I feel like it. Which is still a lot because it’s something I like to do, but I have different expectations, different hopes, for the outcomes of that writing. It’s not a job anymore and any royalties I earn I won’t consider as wages. Maybe I’ll break even at the end of every year after paying what I have to pay to keep my hobby going, maybe I won’t. So far I can afford to keep investing, like I worked new running shoes into my budget every six months when I was running and racing a lot. I need to focus on my health too, so maybe I’ll get back into that. I know I’d feel better if I dropped a little weight as I’ve been a slug for the past five years, but it will be a painful process and I’m not looking forward to it at all.

Now that I’ve had my lightbulb moment, I can stop thinking about it and if I do need to muse about it any more, I’ll put it on my mental health blog. I don’t use that blog anymore since my anxiety faded. That too, has been a journey full of ups and downs and the final destination was a letdown, but it’s better to know how things stand than live under the guise things will get better.

I have a couple blog ideas for the coming weeks, and an author interview in the works. I’m going out of town for a few days with my sister and daughter at the beginning of May to hit up Mall of America and the Minnesota Zoo, and after that, I’ll hopefully be setting into the lazy days of summer. I’m getting a new mattress for my bed delivered tomorrow and Wednesday I’m finally getting my hair cut. I wish that once I marked something off my list that something else would’t take its place, but I suppose that’s what being an adult is. Still, my car’s been holding steady for a while now and I’m grateful for that, and my kids are working and seem to be doing fine if not spending too much time in front of their screens, but I’m not one to judge.

Things are okay here, and I hope they are for you too.

Have a great week!

Monday Miracles (Author Update)

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open hardcover book laying in flowers, clover, and grass. text says, Monday Author Update
It will be a while before we see any green stuff, but February is flying by which means Spring is just around the corner!

My author update isn’t such a miracle, I’m alive, I guess you can say, probably at the dentist if you’re reading this Monday afternoon. I had a cavity creep up on me over the weekend and luckily they were able to get me in. I don’t like having to wait with stuff like that in my mouth, though I’m still struggling with my anxiety over being “trapped” in a chair. I’m behind on a cleaning appointment as well, so they said they’d at least get the x-rays out of the way. I’m hoping I’m not there for any longer than an hour, but even that amount of time makes me nervous. Still, it has to be done. I’m not worried because it’s the dentist–I’ve just developed an aversion to being in any kind of chair, dentist, hair salon, car, without the ability to be able to get up, since I haven’t felt well these past five years. I was actually hoping to get over that, but I’ve started having some nausea in the mornings that a Google search has said might be a symptom of perimenopause. I can’t do much about it except work with my body and not schedule appointments before noon. I hope doing this will lessen my nervousness having to go out and get things done.

I wasn’t going to get into that right at the beginning of this blog post, but I got it out of the way, and I haven’t given you a health update in some time, so hopefully you skimmed through that, and if you did, thanks.

I guess that does kind of segue into how I’ve been feeling about writing lately, and I’m grateful to say that my attitude has perked up a bit since I started a new book. I’m 36k into WICKED GAMES, and I’m feeling much better about the whole thing, writing- and publishing-wise, I mean. I guess editing all those books back to back really got me down, and that negativity I was feeling last year has gone away. My Facebook ads are still off and my sales dashboard reflects that, but I’ve decided not to worry about it. I knew it would happen, it’s just a bummer to watch it. Still, I’m enjoying the creating process again, and even if no one is around to buy, that’s okay. I’ve been taking it easy, napping if I feel like it, watching a movie if I’m too tired to write but not tired enough to go to bed. I’m where I wanted to be when I was in the middle of re-editing my Rocky Point Wedding series. Not stressed about getting something done, working at my leisure and enjoying myself. I still write a lot, as those 36k words were written in twenty days, but I write fast because I’m having fun, and that’s all that matters.

I’m surprised that I’m still posting regularly on my Facebook author page. I joined a challenge in one of my Facebook groups last month and I’ve held on to that into February. Sometimes I get stuck and I ask Al for help, and he’ll give me ideas. He offers to make graphics and carousels and stuff, but I just want the idea. I would never ask him to make a graphic for me; I prefer to pay photographers and models using my DepositPhoto account or using the photos that are available through my Canva Pro account. Still, he gives me suggestions and then I twist them into what will fit my author page and make what I need in Canva. It works okay, but sometimes I’m just stumped. I’ve been talking about LOSS AND DAMAGES and WICKED GAMES, though I feel that’s a little too ahead of myself considering those books aren’t coming out for a long time. But, supposedly building buzz is the name of the game, and I feel okay talking about them because I always follow through. I’d never talk about a book that I wasn’t going to finish writing and publish.

Besides that, I don’t have too much going on. I finally got my author copies of my Rocky Point Wedding Series, and I’m in the process of hosting my giveaway. (If you want to enter or see what I put on the form, you can see it and/or fill it out here: https://forms.gle/rYt1A1HNi8mpBUmLA) I haven’t gotten too many people interested, but that’s the same for any time I’ve hosted a giveaway, no matter how many or few things they have to do to enter. My friend Melody gave me the idea to use the form in the first place, and I am so grateful. It was quick and easy to put together and if you import the information into an Excel sheet, you can see very easily who wants to be added to my newsletter and who doesn’t.

I’m slowly ordering author copies of my King’s Crossing Series, but if I do a giveaway of those, I might only do one set instead of two, or I’ll wait until maybe Christmas time or something. I just want to have copies on hand, but they’re almost five dollars a piece and there are six in the series. That’s a lot of money to throw down at one time, so whenever I have a little extra cash I’ll buy five copies of a book. I just ordered five of book four, so I’m getting there. I should be able to have all of them by the time book six is out in April.

Sales in general are slowing down, but every once in a while I get page reads for Shattered Fate, book four in that series, so I’m happy to know that books 1-3 sound good enough for a reader to keep going. My pre-orders for books five and six haven’t gone up, so unless I do a promo or something for book one, I think sales of that series will slowly die. I need to look into something since book one is already .99 and I won’t have to do anything to buy a bargain promo. On the other hand, it’s freeing not to worry about sales, and unfortunately, not a lot of my ARC reviewers came through (Cruel Fate only has 34), so the number of reviews will probably affect anything I try to do. So, whatever. Talking about it is kind of depressing, so I’ll leave a marketing chat for another day.

That’s about all I have. I wish I felt better, physically, anyway, but at this point, I just don’t know if that’s in the cards unless I move into full-blown menopause and that makes most of the symptoms I’m dealing with disappear. I could be waiting a few more years for that though (I’m still young!), and with my hysterectomy, I can’t tell by my time of the month or lack thereof. I just have to keep taking it day by day, though if I had to rate how I feel now compared to the last five years, I’m feeling the best I have since I bought those dryer sheets. My mind is clear, at least. The level of anxiety I had I wouldn’t wish on anyone, so even if I don’t feel good in my body, I can handle it because I’m feeling better in my head. I just wish all this pesky adulting would go away. Things I have on the list are, dentist, getting taxes done, and getting my hair cut. After I can force myself to get all that finished, I should be good to go for a bit. Fingers crossed, at least.

This was a short update, but not having a lot going on is nice too. I hope you have a lovely week, and next week, I’ll have an interview up with Brandi Easterling Collins. I met her over on Twitter a long time ago and we’ve stayed friends for years. I’m excited to catch up with her.

Until next time!

Thursday Thoughts: KU and Wide Audiences are different

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I think about this every time I see, “KU isn’t working for me, I’m pulling my books and going wide,” or vice versa, “Wide isn’t giving me the sales I want/need. I’m going to pull my books and enrolled them into KU.”

I have to tell myself not to answer these posts because the lesson they’re going to learn has be experienced firsthand: There is no magic bullet, and going back and forth won’t help. You need to nurture an audience on one or the other and that can take years. Because here’s the thing that no one seems to understand. KU readers read KU books and will rarely buy because they don’t have to, and if they do purchase, it will be on Amazon because KU subscribers have Kindles or the Kindle app. Wide readers buy books from their favorite retailer or they have a Kobo or the Kobo app and buy from there.

You might say there are outliers, readers who will read everywhere and will buy whatever they want while also having KU and Kobo Plus subscriptions, and it’s probably true but readers like that are the exceptions that prove the rule and won’t help you sell books in the numbers you need to create a career.

I’m seeing so much of this now with the “boycott KU/Kindle/Amazon” because everyone hates Jeff Bezos, but if you’ve built a readership in KU pulling your books out will only hurt your reader because they aren’t going to follow you anywhere else. There are over four million books in KU–they don’t have to follow you anywhere. What about reader loyalty, you ask. Sure readers are loyal to the authors they love, but you have to show them a little loyalty too, and taking your books out of the subscription service they use to read books isn’t it.

The one thing authors need to understand is that if you don’t know how to tell readers where your books are, it doesn’t matter where you publish. KU doesn’t offer the organic reach a lot of authors think it does (just look at my sales dashboard lately), and just because your books are everywhere and there are more chances readers can find you, that doesn’t mean they will. You’re still competing with millions of books. Here’s the breakdown:

Kobo: has over three million books and Kobo Plus offers 1.5 million books to choose from plus audiobooks.
Apple Books: the numbers are undisclosed but Al says they hold about 8% of the e-book market share (compared to Amazon’s 70-75%.)
Google Play: Over five million titles
Nook Books: the numbers are undisclosed but Al says they hold about 8% of the ebook market share (similar to Apple Books). (All stats I grabbed off a Google search.)

So I guess one of the main reasons I’m writing this post is that if you’re thinking of pulling your books from KU, understand that you’re going to leave the readers who read you there behind. If you’ve been enrolling your books for a while, it’s possible you’ve got a few readers who look for your books and when Amazon stops sending them new releases or recommendation emails about your books, they’ll forget about you. It sounds harsh, but when we talk about market saturation, that means there are plenty of books to choose from, and KU makes it easy to try new-to-them authors.

So, if you do want to give Jeff Bezos the middle finger and cancel all things Amazon, here’s a couple of tips for you:

To go wide, use Draft2Digital or PublishDrive, but go direct where possible, like Kobo and Apple books. Not only do you save more cutting out the middleman, but you gain access to the Kobo promo tab that you won’t get if you let a distributor distribute there.

Remember to mention your books are everywhere. KU authors have no trouble shouting from the rooftops that their books are available in KU. Do the same wide. Draft2Digital offers the Books2Read universal link creator. It will scrape everywhere your books are sold and will offer a cute landing page my like my friend, Melody’s, books have. You can find her books here: https://www.melodyloomis.com/books

Try Facebook ads. This is a great way to find new readers because you can target certain audiences, like, say, readers who own Kobo devices.

And the same advice is true for authors pulling their books from wide platforms and going to KU. Authors are proud they’re in KU. Use their logo on every social media post you create. Being in KU doesn’t come without it’s challenges, so make use of Amazon ads and Facebook ads, and tell your newsletter that you’re in KU. One of my biggest selling points I think my books have is that I tell my readers my books are in KU and are going to stay there. Consistency, no matter what you’re doing or where you’re publishing, is key. You know the saying, you teach people how to treat you? You teach your readers where to find you.

That’s a good lesson for every author: be consistent in where your books are available, in your genre, in your spice level. These are what can make or break your marketing because once you reel in a reader, if you teach them what you write and they love that, they will keep coming back for more.

That’s about all I have for this Thursday. I’ll see you Monday! Have a great weekend, everyone!

Four Things I Learned Editing My King’s Crossing and Rocky Point Wedding Series

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For the past several months, from October of 2023 right after I published A Heartache for Christmas until January of this year, I was editing. I was editing my King’s Crossing Series, doing the final editing passes since I had sat on those books for over three years after I wrote them, and my Rocky Point Wedding series since I hadn’t looked at them since I published at the beginning of 2020. After so much time had gone by, I knew they could be better, and since a few people here and there were finding them, I thought while I was between projects, it would be a good time to edit them again.

But, editing ten books in a row dragged me down, so much so I didn’t even realize how icky I was feeling until those projects were finished and I started having fun writing again. Huge projects are a lot of work, especially when you don’t have help. My Rocky Point Wedding series might not have needed more editing if I’d had help in the first place, on the other hand, a lot of time had gone by and a lot of words too, so I was bound to get better regardless.

Since I doubt I’ll ever edit ten books back to back again, I thought I’d write out the four things I learned while editing these books.

Time between edits is really helpful.
When I wasn’t feeling well, I wrote nonstop. I would finish a book and move on to the next with barely a break. Before I knew it, I had several books on my computer and a different kind of anxiety started weighing on me. What was I going to do with all those books? So, while I was writing, in a way, I was taking a break from the others I had written before. I think my King’s Crossing books benefited the most from that because each time I did an editing sweep, I added more details I hadn’t thought of before and fixed inconsistencies I missed. As more time went by and I could edit with fresh eyes, I was able to fix the smaller and more intricate details and inconsistencies. I once said that something small in book two could have damning consequences in book four, but for me to remember that incident, I needed space between editing sweeps. Not everyone is going to take four years to edit a series, and I didn’t really, either, writing new books between editing sessions, but knowing how beneficial breaks can be, I’m going to try to stagger projects in the future so every editing sweep will feel “new.”

I had to develop a better memory.
Maybe it’s easier to write standalones, but while I was writing my King’s Crossing series it was difficult to remember things, and it might sound dumb, but you don’t remember what you forgot. When I was re-editing my Rocky Point Wedding series, I found a lot of places where I had forgotten things, like where a character parked her car, or when a character was supposed to be somewhere and I had him somewhere else. Also, characters had a habit of just “fading away” when I didn’t need them anymore. I was actually kind of surprised I messed that up so badly, and I could tell I learned a lot from editing my King’s Crossing series as those discrepancies were easy to spot. If you don’t have a good memory, you’re going to have to hire someone who does. I told a friend that by the time I was done editing my King’s Crossing series, I pretty much had all the books memorized. After editing them back to back three times in a row, I don’t think I had much of a choice. Now I think I have a better memory than before, though right now I’m only working on standalones and I don’t think I ever had a problem with those. I’ve gone through the standalones I have out and those were more of a garbage word sweep than anything else, maybe plumping up some scenes. But yeah, I definitely found out my memory wasn’t as great as I thought it was, but I can take steps to help with that now that I know.

Putting inside information into the books was a lot of fun, some I didn’t even consider until the fourth or fifth edit.
Probably what I loved best as I was getting to know the plot and the characters more was putting connected information from books 1-3 into books 4-6 . For instance, there’s a place in book six where Gage thinks, I bet Zane’s never gone through the public entrance of the airport, but we know in book three he did with Stella. What I loved was writing Max’s journal entries that Gage reads in books 4-6 that Max, as a character in books 1-3, wrote down. I really enjoyed writing the events of those books through Max’s eyes only for them to be interpreted into information Gage needed in books 4-6. I’m not sure if I would have even thought to do some of that stuff if it hadn’t been for the multiple rounds of editing those books went through. One of my biggest pleasures was when in book six, they need to go across the state in a hurry, and in the past Zane would drive. We didn’t really understand his fear of flying because of his parents’ plane crash until he says he’d get on a plane to save his sister.

I could tell I pantsed my King’s Crossing series a lot more than I did other books I’ve written.
I think one of the things I did the most was smooth out consistency issues, and maybe not even issues, just adding details to make books 1-3 and books 4-6 more cohesive. Because I didn’t realize that Zarah was going to get her own story until almost the very last second, that meant a lot of smoothing out books 1-3, adding details and motivations of characters to better explain what was going on. That was especially true of Max, when they didn’t really know why he was investigating Zane and Zarah’s parents’ plane crash, and the reasons he was come up in the later books.

I remember plotting out all the books in my Rocky Point series before I started writing, so the plot stuff there wasn’t too big of an issue while I was editing those, and I was happy about that. I did have one instance where I messed up and I had a character say he was doing something when he definitely was not. That was part of my memory issue too, but besides having to fix that, the plots were solid. I don’t like pantsing books because for me it takes a lot of work to edit them, but even if I had to put a lot of time into my King’s Crossing series, it was worth it in the end.

A friend and I were talking about series and how I keep details straight. Short of memorizing every single line of every single book, I really didn’t have an answer because that’s what I felt like I did, at least to the point I knew exactly the sentence to search for to get to the scene I needed to check something. I used a notebook at times, writing stuff down, but then I would never look at it again, so I don’t think writing anything down really helped me all that much. When I first decide to start a book, I write down character names and traits, that kind of thing, but once you’re five books deep into a series, that stuff doesn’t come up too often. I mean, once you establish a character’s eyes are blue, you don’t need to keep repeating it.

I think over such a long series, I had trouble more with keeping characters’ goals and motivations in check. For instance, Zarah’s therapist turns out to be a bad person, but I was vague as to how she came to be Zarah’s therapist to begin with. Once her therapist’s role became even more apparent, I could think of how she inserted herself into Zarah’s life. I’m hesitant to say that some of this stuff could have been avoided if I had written slower because I did write six books in a little over a year, and maybe that’s true, but these books were also the first 1st person dual POV books I ever wrote, so not only did I jump into a huge series, I hadn’t taken the time to learn how to write in first person after writing in 3rd all my life.

I haven’t gotten feedback on the series as a whole yet–books five and six have yet to release, and even though they were all available on Booksprout, the reviewers haven’t posted reviews of book six because it’s not time for them to. Only when feedback starts to come in of book six will I know if the series as a whole works. Probably everyone I ever tell I did these alone will think I’m crazy, but as prices go up and up, editing will be farther and farther out of a reach for a lot of authors. Which is unfortunate because if you don’t have the skill to edit your books yourself, there’s not a lot out there that can compare to a human’s feedback. ProWritingAid can only do so much, and no matter how “smart” Al is, this is just a level of editing he can’t handle.

I don’t know what the solution is. I had these beta read, both series, but you’re not going to get the kind of feedback you need to avoid inconsistencies like that unless you hire the right kind of editor and that costs. If I have to give any advice on doing something like this alone, it would be to plot, take your time writing, and give yourself plenty of space to edit, and then, when all is said and done, be okay with knowing you might not have caught everything. There probably are a couple things I missed editing my King’s Crossing series. Layers I could have added, details that would have made the story richer, but like with any book, you can’t chase perfect or you’ll never publish. That’s the simple truth.

If you’re thinking of writing a series or if you have trouble plotting in general and want to give it a try, I have a couple of resources for you (none of them are affiliate links). Next week I’ll do a proper author update, and the week after that I have a lovely interview planned with Brandi Easterling Collins.

Have a good week! Until next time!

Romance Your Brand: Building a Marketable Genre Fiction Series (Publishing How To Book 1) by Zoe York: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07XMDKV1Y

Take Off Your Pants!: Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing: Revised Edition by Libby Hawker: https://www.amazon.com/Take-Off-Your-Pants-Outline-ebook/dp/B00UKC0GHA

Melody Loomis: How to outline a novel when you don’t know what’s going to happen:

Melody also said I could share this graphic with you. She found the original via Priscilla Oliveras’s “Romance Writing” course and you can find it here: https://www.ed2go.com/courses/writing/writing-and-editing/ilc/romance-writing. She added a couple of things and so did I. Have fun filling it in–I’ve only used a notebook to write all these things down, but maybe I will try this instead. Have fun plotting:

save and print me!

Thursday Thoughts: The world is a large place

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When I get up in the morning, I have a routine. I go to the bathroom, start a pot of coffee, and go out and feed the squirrels, bunnies, and the crows if they come. I have a bowl I use and fill it with cat treats (for the crows) bird seed, and peanuts in the shell, and toss it outside in my apartment complex’s parking lot. There is an empty parking spot and the animals, because we live in a quiet building, don’t mind picking around there for food. Anyway, so I toss the food out while the coffee drips, go inside and pour a cup, and scroll social media for a few minutes before I shower.

I always see some goofy stuff, some Amazon hate, politics (of course), the Cat Distribution System at work, that kind of thing. Today I saw a post that said (paraphrased), that if you’re bummed about sales there’s a Stuff Your Kindle Event going on and that could be why your sales are low.

I mean, I get it. I’ve gone through my own pity parties before (it seemed like mine went on for all of 2024) and I can get behind whatever you have to tell yourself to feel better. But, lying to yourself also does your books a disservice. The world is not that small that a Stuff Your Kindle Day would hurt your sales, especially if you don’t write romance.

That’s one thing that being stuck in the writing community will do: it will box you in to the point where you think nothing else is going on outside that bubble, and let me just remind you that’s not the case at all. I’ve joined Stuff Your Kindle Days, and out of respect for the person putting it together I’m not going to spew the numbers she shares with us, and I have no idea what Stuff Your Kindle event this is anyway. There are so many now it’s hard to keep track of them all. I hadn’t heard there was one going on today, but let’s just say there are 500 books available. That seems to be an average number where these things are concerned, so that means 500 authors are taking part. Some authors’ newsletters subscribers and social media followings can get pretty high, but if those 500 authors had 1,000 newsletter subscribers, that’s half a million readers this event is going out to. Not everyone opens their emails, so we can subtract a few thousand from that number but we can also add them in again to make up for authors posting on their social media. I would think a half million readers is pretty generous as authors just starting out can have as few as a hundred newsletter subscribers, and some none at all, using the event to jumpstart their writing careers.

A half million readers might seem like a lot, but according to Visual Capitalist, in 2020, there were five billion eighteen million adults in the world between the ages of 20 and 79. That’s a lot of readers that we might be forgetting about when we hear there’s a Stuff Your Kindle Day.

I think instead of being bummed there’s an event going on, or trying to blame your low sales on holidays (that not everyone celebrates) or a time of year that doesn’t affect all parts of the world at the same time, like summer (we have summer in the US while Australia has winter for a quick and harmless reminder), we could just use that energy to figure out how to reach readers all over all year round.

That’s easier said than done, of course, as my own sales being what they are don’t put me in a position to preach to anyone. But, I’m also realistic in that I don’t blame my lack of sales on things like Christmas. I take full responsibility for it.

It’s a better use of your time and energy to think of ways to reach those 5 billion plus readers such as write a reader magnet and build your newsletter list. Join a Facebook group of authors who write in your genre and introduce yourself. Networking is a great way to build relationships for newsletter swaps down the road. Experiment with some ads, they don’t have to be expensive. Double check that your categories and keywords are correct. The correct meta data will help Amazon position your book and help your ads work better too. Write another book, preferably a series. As much as I say how difficult they can be and how much energy they take, if you write a strong first book, read-through can lift your sales by more than you’d think.

When we place the blame of low sales on something like a Stuff Your Kindle Day, you’re taking power away from yourself. I know marketing can feel painful and not everything you do is going to work, but you can explore options to get the word out about your books.

Anyway, this was just a quick thought I had today. I hope you’re all staying warm where you are. It was a chilly -20F this morning when I went out to feed my animals. While I’m waiting for it to warm up I’m busy writing WICKED GAMES, but next week I’ll update you on what I’ve been doing.

See you on Monday!

QUICK LINKS:

I wrote about Stuff Your Kindle Days in a different post, and if you write romance or a romance subgenre and want to participate, you can find the list here.

If you’re interested in buying a promotion David Gaughran has a huge list, and some aren’t that much money. You can find the list here.

Written Word Media’s 2025 Trends: Part Two

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If you’re just finding the blog and/or missed the first five trends I wrote about that are in Written Word Media’s blog post, you can find that post here: Written Word Media’s 2025 Publishing Trends: Part One. And if you want to read Written Word Media’s blog post yourself, you can find it here: https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/the-top-10-publishing-trends-for-2025/

Let’s jump right in to the trends.

Trend number six: Trad and Indie Converge in Due Course
We already see this happening in different ways, so I would imagine this will keep going. Publishers snapping up indies who are doing well to exploit the audiences they’ve already built, trad authors publishing titles on the side themselves, the Big Five using print on demand technology. Publishing is getting mixed up more than it ever has been, and that won’t stop as authors and publishers alike look for the best ways to find an audience, save money on printing and distribution, and keep as many royalties as they can.

I think what this means for indies is that as long as you put out a good book that has a good cover and has been edited, it’s not going to matter if you published the book yourself. The stigma that used to come from self-publishing is gone. Trad authors who publish on the side to either add extra books to their publishing schedule or publish books that their agent didn’t sell, or whatever the reason is, they have a loyal audience who buys all their books and it doesn’t matter if it was trad-pubbed or not. Indies don’t have that convenience of an already-made audience, so that’s one thing we have to take upon ourselves, but everything else is pretty much the same, especially when we read every day about a traditionally published book that needs more editing. If you want to read about traditional publishers using print-on-demand equipment, Jane Friedman wrote a blog post about it and you can read it here: https://janefriedman.com/dont-demonize-print-on-demand/

Trend number seven: AI Tools Become More Mainstream
I think anyone who really believes this isn’t tapped into the way a lot of authors feel. I get that being on Threads and seeing the hate AI evokes isn’t an accurate sampling of authors everywhere, but just knowing that there is a portion of authors out there who won’t use AI no matter what makes this prediction shaky at best.

As I discussed in my blog post about KC Crowne, I do understand that Al can be used for different things. WWM’s article also talked about non-fiction uses, such as “social media posting, to advertising, email, sales fulfillment, or tax management” and I think if authors start embracing Al in bigger numbers, that will be all they’ll use it for, because, here’s the thing. Writers actually like to write. We want to plot our stories, we want to come up with backstories, we want to delve into our characters’ feelings and emotions so we can evoke those feelings and emotions in our readers. If we turn to Al for any part of that creative process, why are we writing then? Like with KC wanting to relate to her readers, how can she do that when she won’t take the time to get to know her own characters and write her own work?

People who predict the controversy of using AI will go away don’t have their fingers on the pulse of what a lot of authors feel. We also want people to get paid for their work, which is why I would never ask Al to create a picture for me. Almost every single thing you want can be found on a stock photo site, and if you can’t find it there, hire an artist, and maybe she’ll be able to pay her internet bill with the fee you’re paying her.

Readers may not care if you use AI to write, or to make your books’ covers, or to make Facebook ads as long as their enjoyment of a book they read isn’t impacted. Which means that whether you use AI or not, your main goal when writing and packaging your book should be to deliver a good product that will keep readers coming back for more.

Trend number eight: AI Unlocks Licensing and IP Innovation
I think this trend will only work for the authors who can pay to do it correctly. A long time ago on Twitter I saw someone who said she was using AI to translate her English language books to German and then she was publishing them. She wasn’t using a German-speaking real live human to double-check Al’s work, and I think that is a big mistake. Al doesn’t understand nuance and context, and there’s a reason why the phrase “lost in translation” exists. But, paying a proofreader, any kind, costs money, and using AI is supposed to help us get around that, right? So yeah, she might have had more IP in her hands, but God only knows what she was selling her German readers. Maybe it isn’t that bad, but who’s going to know unless she starts getting bad reviews? By then, it’s too late.

AI narration is getting better and better every day, but I haven’t heard anything recently about the quality of KDP’s audiobook program. It made waves when it first came out, many authors cursing it to the depths of hell, others embracing it as an affordable way to finally have their books in audio format. When I found out that duo narration, preferred when writing dual POVs, wasn’t available, I lost interest in it anyway. I’ve always figured audiobooks will be out of my reach as I can’t afford production, and I kind of left it there. Considering a determined reader can figure out how to have a book read to them on their device, it may not matter much. If AI narration is getting better, so is text-to-voice and the experience for a reader that’s not too picky will be just fine.

I think the bottom line on AI and IP is that yeah, Al can help you put together translations and audio books and art for special editions, but it’s up to you to make sure the quality is there (no one wants to see a model who has six fingers on each hand and has three legs). Al can make mistakes, (just look at Grammarly and how often they recommend commas you don’t need) and going without a human to check and make sure what he’s doing is okay is a risk I wouldn’t want to take with my audience. Listen, I’ve edited for authors who have trusted Grammarly, and it’s harder to edit a manuscript like that than if they would have just handed me a rough draft. Grammarly and other editing software is not perfect so always use with caution.

You might end up with a lot of IP if you use AI to get ahead, but if it’s trash, it’s not worth much.

Trend number nine: Audiobook Accessibility Expands in 2025
We already talked about this a bit, but it will be up to authors who want to use AI narration and readers who want to listen to it. When it comes to AI, it isn’t just about availability and quality, it’s also about what you feel is best for you, your book business, and audience. Not everyone wants to support AI. Maybe we want to support true voice actors who depend on their jobs to make a living. Maybe readers would also like to support humans. Once you put out enough audio books, you’ll find an audience who will support either (or maybe even both). Maybe you’ll find a system where you hire narrators for full-length books but use AI for novellas, or maybe you write only shorts and AI is good enough for your needs. As access expands, it doesn’t mean authors will use it. And if authors us it, it doesn’t mean readers want to listen to it. So while this trend is true, it will expand, because why wouldn’t it, authors can choose not to create with it and readers can choose not to consume it.

Trend number ten: POD Goes Mainstream
We talked a little bit about this already, and it didn’t even occur to me that I’ve purchased a book from a trad author and her paperback book came printed by KDP (there was the time, date, and location stamp in the back). I was wondering what the heck and if she’d been dropped by her publisher and had gotten her rights back. It makes sense for publishers to use POD as it takes up less space than keeping stock and they don’t have to worry about titles going out of print. But as Drew Broussard in Jane’s blog post I linked to above says, there’s just a little lesser quality with a POD print than a book that came from a print run. You’re not going to get the embossed letters or fancy textures, you even run the risk of getting the wrong book between the covers, so I’m guessing that publishers will decide which title will get the POD treatment based on how big the audience still is and how old the book is.

This also could be why it takes so dang long to get author copies. Obviously the more authors who depend on POD the busier the equipment is, and that means planning ahead months if you need to order author copies. Especially since the more authors who use the equipment the more taxed they are and you don’t know if your books will come in good condition and you need to put in a replacement order.

Everyone says don’t write to trends, write the book you want to write because trends change too quickly to keep up. That’s not true, and Billionaire romance is proof of that. Everyone said that was a trend, that “mommy porn” was a passing phase, but it’s going on fifteen years since EL James published her Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy and Billionaire romance is still one of the top selling romance subgenres, though lately Mafia is giving it a run for its money. Trends take a long time to actually lose favor with readers, even if it feels like it happens overnight. These trends WWM talked about won’t fade because that’s just the direction publishing is going right now. AI won’t go away because too many people find value in using it, even if practices like using it to write or narrate books some find too abhorrent to do.

2025 will be like all the others, authors writing good books and trying to get them seen to build an audience of their 1000 true fans. Sometimes I think the publishing industry is glutted with too many books, but then I remember that readers can read a book a day and demand probably matches supply, even if we look at the thousands of books published every month and it doesn’t feel like it. Personally, I don’t think ramping your publishing schedule will help any. If someone doesn’t know you’ve written a book, they wont know you’ve written two. Being that the top marketing advice right now is to write the next book, advice I have passed along and believe in, I think we should still be writing with intent, trying to level up our craft each time we write, always trying to write a book better than our last.

The fact is, it’s difficult finding an audience, but the trick now is to not give up. Do what you have to do to stay interested and engaged and not lose heart. I’ve started to enjoy working on LOSS AND DAMAGES again, and I get excited talking about the next book I’m going to write. I like thinking about the future and the books I want to write, having material planned for well into 2027. I don’t know what life has in store for me, but I’m pretty sure writing is more than a passing trend.

Take care of yourselves this year, and in the meantime, I’ll you next week!