Category Archives: book marketing

Monday Author Update

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Being that I’ve been taking a break, I don’t have a lot to report this week. I managed to haul ten bags of clothes to the local thrift store, but that is only a fraction of what I wanted to get done. I still have a lot of books to go through and donate to the library for their book sales, both trad and indie books I’ll never get around to reading or never read again. I pay for a storage unit since I live in a tiny two-bedroom apartment that doesn’t have a garage, and weeding that out before it snows has somehow become a priority, if only to get rid of clothes I’ll never be thin enough to wear ever again and go through totes of books that I either need to donate or put on bookshelves once I get them purchased and my son puts them together for me. When I was out there last, I noticed I had a HUGE tote full of Harlequin Desires. Collecting them is a different activity than actually reading them, but running into a thrift store sale is too much of a temptation to avoid. I don’t have many vices, but buying old Harlequins at twenty-five cents a piece is, for better or worse, one of them.

September is slipping away from me, though, and I’ve read three out of four of the Lisa Marie Rice books I ordered. The post office lost one, so I ended up ordering it and reading it on my Kindle, which I should do for books anyway since it’s easier on my eyes and my carpal tunnel. I have one left, and then the other books that are related, but first we have a Hunger Games marathon and I have to read the prequel before the movie comes out. My sister, daughter, and I are going to a corn maze next month, so I’ll need to work on A Heartache for Christmas when I can so I can get it to my proofer by the middle of October. A November 1st publishing date is probably doable if I can get the book listened to this week. Formatting it will be a snap as I don’t think I’ll do the fancy insides like I did for my trilogy. The main thing is getting the cover done, since after some feedback in a cover group on Facebook, I decided to go in a completely different direction. This was the old one I was pretty much set on:

made with Canva using stock photos from DepositPhotos.com

It’s not terrible, but I think I was focusing more on the mystery part of the story instead of the romance part of it and my brand. So, with a lot of scrolling through DepositPhotos, I came up with a couple of different concepts:

The guy with the tie fits in with my books a lot better, and while it’s evident that’s a Christmas novel, the background doesn’t scream holiday, which is okay. The only problem I’m having at the moment is the font for the title, and maybe even the title itself, though I keep going back to it even after listening to suggesions from others. My default font choice when I have nothing else to use is Playfair Display, either plain or italicized and maybe all caps or not. My one problem with this guy is that the stock photo is only half of him, and it’s difficult (for me and my limited skills) to fill in the rest of the cover. The one with his whole upper body takes care of that issue, but then I don’t like how the title is off to the side. Here’s the stock photo I found:

found on DepositPhotos.com

I like him (love his watch) and he fits in with all my other billionaires, but he doesn’t come in a full-body pose where he’s doing the thing with his tie (why??). I don’t know if the cover that only has half of him works…I usually do have my titles over some kind of gradient to help them pop, but the men’s waists show, if only faintly. I know I said I would never cut off a man’s head, either, but here we are. DepositPhotos is getting really picked over when it comes to handsome stock photo men, and one of the things I do when I’m tired and feel like doing nothing but needing to do something is listening to music, scrolling through photos, and bookmarking them as potential cover models. The men in suits who are good looking and haven’t been used before (or very little) are getting few and far between so I may end up doing what Melanie Harlow does, and put men wearing t-shirts on her covers whether they are billionaires or not. What do you think?

I have time to decide since listening to my manuscript takes a few days and I won’t be done with that until I have to write another blog post next week.

I’m having fun on TikTok, or trying to, anyway. It still can take me over an hour to make a video simply because it takes so long to find a photo that fits in with what others are doing and to find a snippet. I posted one today and I forgot to take out one of the c*cks, so one of these days I’lll probably get suspended for going against community guidelines. Though, posting a snippet without the dirty words is rather annoying, and when I read a snippet from another author I feel like I’m playing fill in the blanks, sorry for the pun. I’m using more photos from DepositPhotos than ever before, not because I’m afraid of using what Canva has to offer, but the romance TikToks have a very gritty look to them, and while I don’t write dark romance, I still don’t want to look too out of place. I’ll probably buy another DepositPhotos pack from AppSumo as they go on sale around Black Friday. Anyway, I need to get into the habit of making them, since if I have time to make one, I probably have time to make two. It’s just choosing a book and finding a snippet that’s hooky enough to share.

I also find myself falling into different algos, and all of a sudden my feed is full of rescue horses. TikTok is very responsive to what you tell it you like, and #rescuehorsetok is not going to sell my books. I need to maybe unfollow some of the accounts and go back through the #booktok hashtag or #contemporaryromancereaders and push the algos back toward books. I hate seeing rescue vids anyway. They always make me so sad. I can’t wrap my mind around how cruel people can be.

I’m seeing on Twitter and in FB author groups some mild confusion about the new AI question on KDP when you publish a book. That wasn’t implemented when I published my rockstar trilogy, and I’m reluctant to go into a book’s content when I don’t have to, so I haven’t seen it for myself. There’s been a rumor that books will lose their discoverability if you don’t go through your backlist and check the boxes (for yes, your book was AI generated, or no, it wasn’t) but I don’t believe that. I’m not going through 20 books to check that box when I don’t have evidence (from Amazon) that I need to. Book sales ebb and flow, not to mention the sales dashboard lags, so if you’re having a slump, I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. Just like with the KU payout that somewhat snapped back, I’m going to keep on keeping on and only make changes if I have to. You can read an article about it here, but if I hear anything about discoverability of backlist titles, I will let you all know. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/11/self-publishers-must-declare-if-content-sold-on-amazons-site-is-ai-generated

That is going to be it for me this week. I’d like to congratulate Brandie Easterling Collins on publishing her newest book! You can check it out here–available in Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and Paperback. A new release is always so exciting! Good luck, Brandi, and Congratulations!

The Secret to Leveling Up?

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Words: 1291
Time to read: 7 minutes

Like any author publishing today, be it indie or trad, I’m always looking for ways to level up. Take your career to the next level. We hear a lot of advice, some I’ve repeated here: learn an ad platform, network with authors in your genre for promo opportunities and newsletter swaps, write and publish a lot, that kind of thing. It can be frustrating when you think you’re doing everything right, and the success you’re hoping for is still out of reach.

I can personally attest to how frustrating that is, to the point where I think that maybe this whole writing career thing isn’t meant to be, and it will always be considered a hobby by the people in my life and the IRS.

I read some advice about leveling and it was enlightening as well as confusing. She said, and this is an author who makes six to seven figures a year, to focus on writing the next best book you can.

It made me a bit crabby (no offense to the advice-giver because I love her and she does a lot for the indie community), because when you’re writing a book you intend to publish, you’re always thinking it’s going to be your best book ever. Back when I wrote All of Nothing, I thought it was an 85k word masterpiece. (Little did I know it would take several edits after initial publication for me to be happy with it, and one that I actually did not long ago.)

This is akin to the question, how do you know what you don’t know? But, if your books aren’t selling, and you’ve tried ads and newsletter swaps and you’ve bought a Freebooksy promo that didn’t move books, there is unfortunately, room for improvement.

Craft is difficult to tackle mostly because it takes so long to make any kind of positive progress–depending on how you already write, it could take months or even years and hundreds of thousands of words. You have to write a lot to get better at it, and not only do you have to write a lot, you need constant feedback on that writing so you know what’s working and what’s not. How do you level up your craft?

*Join a critique group or work with an alpha reader who reads as you write.

*Get lets of beta reader feedback. And find people who are honest. If your characters are flat, you want, and need, to know about it.

*Read the kinds of books you want to write. One of the very first “complicated” series I read when I was thinking of writing my own books was a romantic suspense series by Lisa Marie Rice. She’s since expanded on those books, but the four I read have stuck with me for years. In fact, I want to read them again just to see if they are as good as I remember.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087CN1LNB?

*Just swallow it and admit series sell and read-through is what will make you money. I love writing standalones, I do. The Christmas novel I just finished is a standalone and I fixed it so I couldn’t write any sequels from it. But the fact is, series sell because readers love reading them. But, from a writer’s standpoint, they’re difficult and stressful. They take planning, something a lot of pantsers aren’t willing to do too much of, but you need to have some details fit together from every book. If you’re a new writer, that’s hard to do. There’s a lot of details to remember, breadcrumbs to drop. You can start “small” and write a duet, then as you get more experienced, add books.

Writing a book, and a good one, is a group effort until you can get the hang of it. But what if you already think you have? When I read that advice, it didn’t know what to think. I feel like my writing is pretty good, I get positive feedback from reviews, readers reach out to me to say how much they enjoy my books. I have the skills, ability, (talent?) to write a long series–my six books I have coming out next year–and the beta feedback I’ve already received–is proof of that. So, I mean, what can you do if you think your work is already there?

If I had an answer, I’d probably be a six-figure author myself. You can study the market and see if what you’re writing is not hitting the target. Romantic suspense, psychological and domestic thrillers, and several other genres and subgenres will always be popular, but if you’re writing something mainstream and still not selling, maybe you aren’t including enough to meet reader expectations. Maybe your mystery plot isn’t twisty enough, or your characters are flat–meaning their backstories are bland and you haven’t given them enough to fight through.

Be that as it may, you can write the most perfect book in the world, and no one will be able to read it if no one knows it exists. There is the idea of word of mouth, and that does work if your book blows people away. It’s not like you can ask every reader who reads your book to spread it around like an STD, they have to want to do it, be passionate enough about your book to do it. If a booktoker doesn’t get a hold of it though, you’ll have to run ads or buy a newsletter promo spot. Those don’t work unless your cover is good, so part of leveling up may be refreshing book covers or doing better than you have in the past.

It helps to have a hook too, something I didn’t have with my first billionaire trilogy. I have decided for their book birthdays in January that I’m going to redo their covers and come up with better hooks for ad copy. Obviously, doing what I should have done a year after the fact was part of that commenter’s point. You lose a lot of time and opportunity if you don’t do what you should have done at the start. Still though, you can get some marketing juice from a relaunch–especially if you actually make improvements and the changes you make aren’t lateral moves. Maybe that means hiring someone like GetCovers to redo them, or learning new techniques on your own. Maybe that means letting go of what you want and putting a cover on your book that will sell.

As for me, we’ll see what my series does next year. I’m rethinking the covers since I made them last year and my tastes have changed. I also need to read through them one more time and make sure the writing is there. My beta/proofer found a few things, too, so I’m glad I sat on these books and waited to publish. Before I do that, though, I need to get my Christmas novel ready to go, finalize the cover (I changed the man again) write the blurb, listen to my manuscript, and get the paperback proof to my beta/proofer. Then the new covers for the trilogy, and then my series. I’m already thinking of what I’m going to write next while those release, six books at two months apart will give me all of 2024 to write something else.

Anyway, leveling up can take different forms, but there is always room for improvement. If people have read you and are willing to give you feedback, take their advice to heart. It’s okay to listen and realize that what you thought was good isn’t. It’s what you do with that and were you go from there that will help you really level up.

Have a good week, everyone!

Author Update and how I’m liking TikTok

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bed flat: tray with coffee and wallet, a bouquet of roses, watch, and laptop on a navy blue pin-striped throw. Text says: author update

Things are about the same here, and as usual, I don’t have much news. I’m still not done with my Christmas novel despite saying I wanted to be done by the end of August, but I only have about ten thousand words left to finish it up. I helped a friend edit her book and that set me back, but my feet have always dragged toward the end of a book anyway. I want to get the ending just right, and while I’m always looking forward to the next project, it’s difficult to say goodbye.

I’ve been having mixed feelings about being on TikTok, mostly because I’m still learning and I’m resentful it takes time to learn things. I don’t know the platform well yet, and I’m more comfortable on my laptop than I am on my phone, which I discovered prohibits me from using some of creating tools like templates. I am 100% about keeping things simple, my greatest takeaway from my HR classes was when my instructor said, “Don’t reinvent the wheel” so of course this probably means I should start using my phone to post and hope it doesn’t aggravate my carpal tunnel any more than it already is. Once I turned on the sound while I was scrolling and I felt like I was listening to someone on crack click through TV channels. I was overwhelmed with music, voices, and noise, and I don’t think I will scroll through TikTok with my sound up again. I like flipping through the book snippets and getting ideas for how to create my own. My first attempts at videos were poor, and anyone who watches them will see that, but I’m getting better and it helps that my friend Sami-Jo and I trade tips. It’s always easier to try things out with someone, and instead of being perfect, I’m just going to try to have fun.

Creating tiktoks aside, I need to get more familiar with some of the newer music, and it seems like Taylor Swift is a good place to start. But, I also need to watch more videos by authors who write more like me, because I’m not sure what hole I fell into (haha, no pun intended), but TikTok likes to show me snippets of female characters losing their virginity, forced pregnancy, threesomes, and plot points that are just not in my books (I don’t know if I’ll ever write a kidnapping book, but it seems like an interesting trope to try). This isn’t a judgment, of course, but picking up tips from authors who write about 18 year olds who are married off by their fathers and losing their “v-cards” in dubious consent sex scenes won’t have the same kinds of videos I want to make. So while indie romance is broken into subgenres, so is indie marketing… at least on TikTok, and that is a lane I do not want to stray from.

I launched Twisted Alibis on August 28th, and the feedback I’ve been hearing is good. Booksprout reviews are not coming in the way they should be, and I’m thinking that maybe the books were too long for certain readers and they bailed after all (which does not bode well for my Christmas novel which will come in around 100k). I’ve found some great fans using Booksprout, but as it’s a business expense, I have to weigh the cost with the return on investment. I did veer off from my billionaire stuff, subgenre hopping like I said I wouldn’t do, so maybe the audience I’ve been cultivating since I published Rescue Me last year wasn’t interested. I’ll be going slightly off-brand again when I publish my Christmas novel, as I know not everyone likes holiday romance. Honestly, I can only write what I want to write, and my rockstars will find readers somewhere even if all the readers who claimed copies don’t review.

I broke even last month with royalties vs. ad spend, my Amazon ads taking off in a way they usually don’t, much to my wallet’s regret. But, I turned off the more expensive ones, and my spend won’t be as much this month. My FB ads are doing pretty good, especially the one that’s advertising my reader magnet (at a whopping .11 per click, that ad is cheaper than any Amazon ad I’ve ever ran). I gave that book away 246 times and gained 151 new subscribers. Due to ads and links in the backs of my books (I grab about 5 organic signups a month) I have 647 subscribers. My open rate hangs in at about 35% so we’ll see how they like being on my list in the coming months. I’ll have a lot of news to share.

Twisted Alibis didn’t have a strong launch despite running Amazon and FB ads, but a first in series, in my experience, never does well until all the books are out, so the true test will be how sales are after the third book releases on the 11th. I didn’t plan my release dates well–Labor Day and the anniversary of 9/11–but I’m hoping neither of those things interferes much with how the books do.

I’ve been trying to post more on IG and my FB author page in general, and I have no idea if that is helping sales, but people know I’m alive at least, which is more than I can say in prior months, or years for that matter. I never realized how little I posted, but it does help I don’t spend any time on Twitter anymore. My time has to go somewhere, and surprisingly, I do enjoy scrolling through silent TikTok and Instagram looking at ways I can create videos and graphics for my own books.

The one thing I have learned not being on Twitter anymore is that it is still difficult for me not to mix my writing with my books–assembly vs. finished product, I guess you can say. I’m thankful I have this blog post to share nonfiction ideas like marketing strategies, how my ads do, and what’s going on when it comes to indie news. It’s easy to want to talk about writing on TikTok, but I have to keep reminding myself that readers don’t care how you write your books, what your weekly word count goal is, what your latest marketing strategy is, or how many hours of scrolling you did to find a man for your cover. (Cover reveals and unboxings, yes, how many times Mr. Five O’Clock Shadow has been on a book cover, no.) It’s a mindshift, for sure, but one I’m enjoying. I think it’s made me slow down a little and have more of an appreciation for my books, at least, I like posting about my rockstar trilogy. Finding new ways to write ad copy and digging for snippets and hooks to share is something I’ve never taken time to do because once a book is published, I don’t tend to think about it anymore. That’s not a great way to sell backlist titles, and I’m still struggling with a “schedule” so I can organize how to create content and when to share it.

But things are moving along–at least, I don’t feel like I did two years ago before I started publishing 1st person POV and niching down. I still think that was a good move and even if I am breaking even with ads, I’m selling books. Building a readership takes time, but I think I finally found the right path.

I hope you all have a wonderful Labor Day! Have a good week!

Until next time!

Ethics in Indie Publishing

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photo taken from Canva

Independent publishing has opened up a whole new world for scammers who want to make a quick buck, and we all know those kinds of people don’t have morals or scruples. But we don’t hear a lot about ethical behavior of the “kind of” innocent kind, at least not until recently with the rise of AI. I have a lot of opinions on AI, many I keep to myself because for the most part, it’s none of my business what other people do. I’m not going to take part in the witch hunts I see happening online, authors guilty until proven innocent. People can make mistakes, can be misled, or, can actually make the choice to use AI for whatever reason, and I’m not interested in being judge and jury for those people. I’m too busy with my own stuff going on, and honestly, unethical behavior happens everywhere, every day. You can’t take it all on (and for the sake of your mental health, why would you want to?).

I have spoken out about some of it, though, beta readers who take your money to beta read but actually don’t put in the work, “cover designers” selling Canva templates and calling them their own designs, editors who are paid to edit, when they shouldn’t be anywhere near a red pen. I don’t like when I hear about people getting ripped off, mainly because I don’t believe in paying people to do something you can do yourself. You can create your own cover using a Canva template for free–there’s no need to pay someone 50 to 100 dollars. You can do the bulk of your editing for free too, if you take the time to listen to your manuscript before sending it off, and there are a free resources for formatting, Draft2Digital and Reedsy to name two off the top of my head.

Like almost everyone in the indie space, I’ve been a victim of some unethical behavior, and I have been for as long as I’ve published. Editors who sit on manuscripts for months and then when they finally get to your work, they don’t give you the experience (*cough* time and effort *cough*) you gave them money for. They say you get what you pay for, but that’s not necessarily true–some people don’t actually know they shouldn’t be charging for the services they are. They don’t know they’re poor editors, they don’t know it’s an ethical grey area to sell Canva templates. Once on Twitter I saw a freelance editor bragging about some kind of award ProWritingAid gave her, and I was dumbfounded. I knew she was putting her clients’ manuscripts through it. Perhaps that’s part of her “editing process” but her clients are paying for that–it’s definitely nothing she should have been admitting in public. After seeing that, I never would have hired her for anything. I can run my own manuscripts through PWA if I wanted to use it (the Hemingway Editor is a free version of this). I don’t need to pay for someone else to do it.

The question, I guess, is how do you know what you don’t know? You have to be honest with yourself for one thing. A “cover designer” I called out starting her business selling Canva templates said she liked “simple designs.” No. She just admitted she has no skills. If you’re an author and you can’t edit your own books, you shouldn’t think you can edit for other people and get paid for it. If you don’t have time or the inclination to beta read, don’t offer or don’t accept a job. Honesty and integrity begin with yourself and it will extend to your clients. If you need the money that badly, get a second job. Ripping people off, no matter how unintentionally, is still ripping people off.

On the author side, is it ethical to use AI? I’m not going to poke that bear. I think in some instances it is okay to use AI. I chat with Al, brainstorm with him, and it’s fun to bounce ideas off him when I’m stuck with a plot issue or need sparks for ad copy. I don’t feel it’s any different than searching for a plot generator and sorting through the prompts, or making a huge list of tropes and pulling one out of a fishbowl when it’s time to write a new novel. Of course, that’s very different than asking him to write a short story and then turning around and submitting it to an online journal. I would never do that, and all my books are written by me and only me. I don’t copy and paste. Never have and never will. I like to write; I wouldn’t outsource that. If there ever comes a time when I think I might, I’m tired of writing in general and should quit altogether. In connection, I would never use a ghostwriter to publish a book then claim I’m an author, but people do that. I saw on Twitter one “author” who queried a ghostwritten book and landed an agent. I think that’s kind of disgusting, especially since books go through extensive editing and likely that person won’t have the skills to do that.

Dealing with people who don’t have any ethics, or who don’t know they are being unethical, is what makes indie publishing difficult. It’s a minefield and it would be a lot easier for everyone involved if people stopped trying to make a quick buck out of everything. Life is hard, though, and I don’t see that happening. Authors can’t afford to hire a professional at every turn, so we do what we can, cut corners, or try to, and sometimes we get burned.

But, when we do that, as authors, sometimes it’s our readers who get burned, too. When you’re trading a product for cash, your product needs to be the best it can be, and not everyone can do that alone. I’m not fond of gatekeeping–it’s one of the pillars of this blog. To give you resources to do things for yourself, be it editing, cover design, or formatting. But I’m well aware that even with all the resources in the world, not everyone can do all the things on their own, and the unfortunate fact is, if you can’t put out a decent product by yourself, you can’t find someone to help you for free, and you can’t afford to pay for a service, then maybe it’s just not your time to publish. I don’t say that with a light heart, either, but your customers and you readers deserve more.

I have a short list of things I see authors do that I would never do when it comes to my own business. I would never put book one of a series in KU but publish the others wide in an attempt to force readers to buy them to keep reading. People try to have it both ways, and I blogged about that here: KU vs. Wide (Can you have your cake and eat it too?) I would never enroll my books in KU and still put them wide, hoping to take advantage of Amazon, but authors do, and even brag when they aren’t caught. I would never not finish a series. I think starting a series and abandoning it is terrible for your readers and you look untrustworthy and like you have no follow-through. I would never post on social media that I’m writing a book and then not actually write it. I have changed my mind once or twice when blogging here, but any books I’ve committed to where my readers are, I have finished and published. (Let’s just say that fantasy series I blogged about will never see the light of day. I’ve put it away for good, and I am really really okay with that now.)

This whole thing started with a Facebook post accusing GetCovers/MiblArt of unethical behavior, notably plagiarizing covers of bestselling books. I won’t point to the post or the person who wrote it because most of the Facebook groups I’m in are private and it’s against group guidelines to share. I took the post with a grain of salt because while you can accuse anyone of copying a book cover, the fact is, it’s done all the time. Maybe not purposefully, but it is done. One of the best practices of covers is to blend in with your genre while having one or two elements that stand out. Anyone will tell you to go through the top 100 in your genre and see what other authors are doing. That’s standard advice. If an author asks GetCovers to do their cover like the latest LJ Shen’s billionaire romance, that’s what they’re going to get. That’s hardly GetCovers or MiblArt’s fault. It’s not even the author’s fault because they’re following advice that’s pretty common. Designers have their own code of ethics that prevents them from stepping on each other’s toes, and that’s great. We should all support each other, but some of those guidelines are hazy and grey, and sometimes it just comes down to common sense and courtesy–like a lot of ethical subjects. I didn’t talk about the ethics part of copying a cover, but I do talk about the “sameness” of billionaire covers here. If you see ten covers with the same background stock photo, maybe it wouldn’t be that hard to avoid that photo. If you see the same font used for titles, use something else? I don’t know the right answer because I do the same things. Your books need to look like they belong, but using the same background, font for your tile, and color scheme may not do what you want it to do. You’re not Nicole Snow, and the only person who is, is her. Build your own brand instead of trying to piggyback off of someone else’s–that’s probably the best advice you can follow. Plus, it’s more ethical and will serve you well in the long run.

As always, this post went longer than I wanted. If you want to read more about ethics in publishing, look here:

Ethics Tips for Self-Published Authors BY ANDREA MORAN

The Ethics of Self-Publishing: Staying Honest and Fair

Author Ethics and Utilitarianism (Or, “Why Authors are Bad People”) by Derek Murphy

Thanks for reading, and drop me a comment if have any thoughts! I’d love to hear them!

Author Update (not much going on)

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orange flowers tied with brown and white polka dotted ribbon. text says author update, end of the summer news, and what i'm doing for the rest of the year

Words: 1217
Time to read: 6 minutes

I really don’t have too much to say this week. I’m at 77k on my Christmas novel, close to being done, but not quite wrapping it up. If I had to guess, I think I still have about 15k-20k, but I’m not sure. Since I already have so many words, it can be as long as it needs to be to finish. At this point, I don’t care–it will just be nice to be done so I can breathe. I was playing around with the cover again, and I’m happy with what I have. That takes some pressure off since covers are my nemesis and I never feel good about a project until I can pin one down.

I don’t have any plans to write anything more this year, instead I’ll be using September and October to edit and package this book and do some things around the apartment that I should have done years ago, and in November and December, celebrate birthdays and the holidays and spend time with family. After that break, I’ll be diving headlong into my 6 book series–the first first-person books I wrote during lockdown in 2020 when I decided to pivot and write under a pen name. I haven’t read through them in a long time, and I haven’t looked over feedback from my proofer, so there might be a little work involved getting them out. There’s no publishing schedule for those yet, but I’ll have published 8 books this year, so I think I deserve a little time off.

Reviews for my rockstar trilogy are coming in from Booksprout and the few I have are favorable. It’s always a gamble writing something a little off genre, a little off trope (say, oh, I don’t know, a baby-for-the-billionaire trope with no baby) and that’s what my rockstars are. I have a difficult time incorporating what my characters’ occupations are with the main story, the romance the main focus of any of my books. Once when I was getting feedback for a blurb and cover in an FB group, one person said, just because you call them billionaires doesn’t mean they’re billionaire books, and well, guilty as charged. My rockstars are rockstars, but I have no idea how much their stories would have changed had I made them something else. I didn’t read any in the genre before I wrote them, so how they measure up to other rockstar novels is anyone’s guess. The book I’m writing now, the main male character who’s a billionaire, could be anybody. In fact, when I plotted this book years ago, he was a private investigator, and honestly, the story hasn’t changed that much. I don’t know if veering off hurts or helps–I certainly don’t look at my reviews to find out.

I’m on TikTok–not posting enough to get anywhere, but having fun and learning new things in Canva. Making videos is different, that’s for sure, time consuming figuring things out. I’m slowly learning, though, my videos are far from perfect. Between Canva and the tools TikTok has, I’ve posted a few to get the feel of it. I don’t mind showing my face, and the author copies I ordered for page flipping videos came a couple weeks ago. My main project when I finish this book is to set up bookshelves to have a more professional background behind me and to buy a cell phone stand for things like unboxing videos. I’ll be able to film one when my rockstars are completely live and I order author copies of the trilogy in a couple of weeks.

Here is a video I made, and I can see why people like TikTok–it has 246 views. I know that’s nothing on that platform, but with all the time I’ve spent on FB, Twitter, and IG, it’s pretty amazing to me.

@vaniarheault

Rescue Me, a standalone, one night stand, billionaire romance. #billionaireromance #romancenovels #onenightstandtrope #onenightstandromance

♬ Angel – Sarah McLachlan

One thing I’m not going to film is an empty KDP sales dashboard. I was scrolling TikTok, they have a For You tab and a Following tab like Twitter, and someone posted a video of their empty dashboard. I thought not being on Twitter anymore would stop me from having to see stuff like that, but I guess authors like bragging they have no sales. I really wish I could tell authors that it does the exact opposite of what you want it to do. When I see an empty dashboard, the last thing I want to do is check out that author. To me, if you’re not selling books, I think it’s because your books are bad or you’re not doing enough to market them, and that’s not a reader’s responsibility. In the amount of time it took that author to create that video, they could have made something positive. There are so many examples of videos that you never have to run out of ideas. It’s no one’s business if you’re not selling books, and if you’re not, do something about it. Yuck.

That’s really about all I have. I started my Facebook ad for newsletter sign ups again and in two days I’ve given away 35 copies of my reader magnet and have had 18 newsletter signups (you don’t have to sign up to download my reader magnet because I hate the hard sell), and I started my Facebook ad for Rescue Me again after my own sales slump (see I did something about it!) and my books are selling again. I think after this book is done and I take a break, I’ll dive deeper into Facebook ads. They might spend my money just a little faster, but the cost per click is lower, and I seem to grab more sales there than Amazon ads. To be fair, all my Amazon ads are old, and I know ads can grow stale. Killing some and creating more would probably help. But what I should really do is write some good ad copy for my trilogies, put the first ones on sale for .99 and see what kind of royalties that read-through will bring in. Selling Rescue Me for .99 has given me some traction, but I only earn 35% royalties on it, and after paying for a click, I don’t bring in much. I know it’s not all about the sales all the time, and I hope I’m finding readers and they’re subscribing to my newsletter when they’re done reading the book.

The marketing game is long, but I’m still doing better this year than I ever have before, and that gives me hope I’m on the right track.

This week my daughter starts her senior year in high school, and I’ll be getting used to a new routine, again. Summer went by in a flash, and I don’t feel like there was much summer at all. I rarely sat on my balcony and baked my brains out, and besides a road trip to Bismarck, ND, and a trip to the zoo last week, we didn’t do anything. My daughter is turning 18 on November 18th, so we’re going down to the Twin Cities for a couple days to celebrate. I’ll have had plenty of ups this year, so I’m going to use the time to celebrate my own wins in 2023. I may not be making enough to quit my job, (or even drop my hours) but you need to celebrate the little things or it’s easy to get burnt out. I’m sure I’ll post again next Monday, but until then, have a great rest of your month!

Mid-Year Check In and Author News

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Words: 1901
Time to read: 10 minutes

open journal with rose petals and pencil. text says midyear check in and author news

It’s not exactly mid-year–we’re two months past that, but I thought I would write a check in, look back and what I’ve accomplished this year, and try to drag myself out of the self-pitying hole I fell into these past few weeks due to circumstance beyond my control.

January started with a bang, as that is the month I published my Lost & Found Trilogy. By no means did I have a strong launch, and while Give & Take, the first book in the trilogy, has sold better than a lot of my books, the trilogy in total has earned less than a thousand dollars since release. Depending on where you are in your career, that may sound pretty good to you, but I’ve put money into ads and promos and actual take-home from that total is less than five hundred dollars. Still though, despite my ongoing doubt about the covers, readers seemed to have liked them so far, and I’m going to put the first one in a promo in September and see how it does.

February, March, and April were slow months, only because I was busy writing my rockstar trilogy. I thought the first book was going to be a standalone but it turned out, like most side characters do, they wanted their own stories told, and I spent December of 2022 to May of this year writing them. Editing took some time, more adding and rewriting than I’ve done in the past to make them cohesive since the two others weren’t planned until I was almost done writing book one. I did the usual Amazon ads for my backlist, struggled with if I wanted to be on Twitter anymore, helped a friend edit and format one of her books, and mostly kept my head down.

In May, I published Faking Forever, a fake fiancée standalone I wasn’t sure about. I haven’t checked the reviews to see if anyone liked it or not. The reviews from Booksprout were favorable, but it’s not often, in my experience, people will really tell you what they think. Since I published it, it’s made less than a hundred dollars, and I really don’t know what to do about it. My other standalone, Rescue Me, has made around five hundred since I published it in October of 2022, but that’s also been on sale for a while now and I ran Facebook ads to it. That five hundred is not take-home, but if I look at how much I spent on ads to push that book, I just get depressed, so I won’t do that here. I’ve been thinking about pulling it off sale and putting Faking Forever at .99 to see what that does. I have a hooky hook for the ad copy, so I may do that at the end of the month and see what happens. I won’t do that until my SNAFU with KDP and the last book in my rockstar trilogy has worked itself out, but more on that later.

June and July were for getting my rockstar trilogy ready to release. Lost a beta reader and a friend, so that was disheartening, not only because I was counting on her feedback, but you know, it’s tough when people move out of your life for whatever reason. My other beta/friend/co-worker is still plodding along even though my books are (kind of) up. I told her I need to get them going for marketing purposes and if she finds anything I didn’t, I can change out the files later. She found only a couple things in book one, nothing major, so I’m confident that books two and three are just as clean. It’s not like I haven’t released books without feedback before, but I was trying something different that didn’t end up working completely in my favor. Such is life.

This month, August, I had a free book promotion opportunity fall into my lap. I had passed it by and then it opened up again, so I decided to take that as an omen and enter my book. I put Captivated by Her for free from August 4-6, and I’ve been moving some books–528 at the time of this writing, but we’re only half way through the promotion. Not a lot of people read free books, though, and so far that movement hasn’t gone on to the other books in my backlist. I guess we’ll see in the coming weeks if anyone reads it and goes on to buy/borrow Addicted to Her. I think the cover changed helped, but that duet has earned only a little over three hundred dollars since I published them in June of 2022.

I also lost a cat this month. Blaze was sick when we got her (we didn’t know that though), and we’ve had nothing but ongoing medical issues with her for the past five years. It was a relief to make the decision after some bloodwork, but I miss her dearly and it’s been such a blow to my mental health as this is the first time in over twenty years we haven’t had a cat in our apartment. We can’t get another unless my financial situation changes because we were grandfathered in when this property management took over our apartment building. We’ll be starting from scratch with them, and I can’t afford the pet deposit or pet rent they’ll charge us if we wanted another. I’m still missing Harley, too, so I’m just not going down that path right now, and maybe never will again.

So to recap the year so far:

Books published: 6.5-7
Royalties: $1,711.49 as of this writing. (I write my posts in advance so add, oh, I don’t know, ten bucks to that total unless for some reason I got extremely lucky.)
Ad spend: I don’t feel like doing the math, but I’ve spent $569.00 on Amazon ads, ran an FB ad to Rescue Me off and on for a couple of months and bought a Freebooksy promo through Written Word Media for Give & Take at $120.00. So obviously, the total royalties are not all take-home, but rarely is any author’s.

I haven’t found a way to get “sticky” with Amazon, struggling to “level up.” Each book I write has the “will this be the golden ticket?” feel about it, and then each book has a lackluster turn. I cleaned out my newsletter subscriber list–I got rid of 103 inactive email accounts. MailerLite is making me move over to their new platform so once my trilogy is out and I’m done sending newsletters for that for a bit, I’ll do the migration. Apparently it’s not smooth, and I’m worried about the setup I have with BookFunnel. I learned just enough to put in place what I needed for them to collect email addresses for me when I give out the link to my reader magnet. If that gets messed up, I’ll have to learn it all over again, and that will be painful since, for the most part, I’ve given up drinking for my physical health.

Ghost Town’s Fate:

So, I was able to publish book one and two without an issue, but I was one of the (un)lucky ones and KDP asked me for copyright proof for the cover images for book three. I sent them what I had from DepositPhotos–screenshots of the licensing agreement that they give you when you download/purchase. I also gave them a screenshot of my DepositPhoto’s account profile. I’m lucky that my email address and my physical/mailing address match what I use for KDP as well, so they know it’s me. The first rep approved my proof and told me to go into my account and resubmit the books for publication. I did that, but then got another email from their content team and was asked for proof again. So I sent what I had before, plus the screenshot of the first rep’s email that said my books were okay. It didn’t take them long to get back to me and say my books were approved and would take up to 48 hours to publish. So, that is where I am now–this morning when I got up, they were still in review, but while I was writing this, I checked my dashboard and they have moved into “Publishing.”

So I’m going to assume that the third book is going to go through after all, and maybe by the time you read this, it will be live. (At the time of this writing, it’s only been 15 hours since the last email correspondence.)

As far as reviews, I put the books on Booksprout, and this trilogy is the slowest to get picked up since I started offering books. Only 16 of 35 copies have been claimed for each book, and either it’s because they’re long (I did warn readers of that in my note to readers section) or because no one cares about aging, depressed rockstars. Maybe both. Whatever the case may be, I hope this isn’t going to be more of the same when the books move out of preorder and are live. Once the third book is actually published and accessible, I can start ads to the trilogy, but I hope these do better than my gut is telling me they will.

I have to be honest, all this put me in a real downward spiral last night, and just an FYI, crying in the grocery store is not a good look. It also gave me a really queasy feeling for the past two days and I have not felt well. You’re probably thinking I sound burnt out, and I probably am. When that book goes through I’ll have published 7 this year, 8 if I get my Christmas novel done and published by November like I hope. I haven’t made much progress on it, as I went through my Ghost Town paperback proofs myself (glad I did) but that took an extra little bit of time. When I finish the first draft, I need to put it aside and take a real break while it breathes. Watch the shows I want to watch, read through some of the books on my Kindle (I still need to read the Hunger Games sequel before November). Network with some authors in my FB groups, experiment with making videos for TikTok. I need to find my joy because it has been sucked right out of me, and never did I want to throw my laptop over my balcony as much I did last night.

I don’t have any books planned for the next little while. I have that King’s Crossing 6-book series I need to polish up and publish starting in January. I’m having second thoughts about the covers, and my proofer/coworker went through them some time ago, and I haven’t looked at her feedback yet. That will be a project and I will love to get those off my plate. I also haven’t read them myself in a long time, so it will be fun to read them one last time before I publish.

Anyway, so stats here show that this blog post will take 10 minutes to read, so I’m going to wrap it up for now and get going on my Christmas novel. Have a great week, everyone, and thanks for listening!

Author News and Short Update

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I’m not really in the mood to blog today. We put our kitty, Blaze, to sleep last week. After some testing, it was determined there was more wrong with her than just the bladder stones we were going to have removed. It was a really tough choice because we didn’t want to keep her alive for us. Her quality of life has been declining since we got her, and mentally I just couldn’t see her suffer anymore. The tests, euthanasia, and then the cremation still took a huge bite out of my finances, and my GoFundMe is still active. Any little bit would help, but at this point, I’m just glad her suffering is over and I can let my heart heal. After losing Harley not so long ago, not having any pets is a shock, and a situation that will take some getting used to.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/blazes-bladder-surgery

In other news, Captivated by Her is in a promo August 4th through the 6th and will be free on Amazon. This event will have over 200 free books available, and if you want to keep on the lookout for this promo for your own reading device, or if you want to share the link with your readers, you can direct them to https://naleighnakai.com/. They can sign up for the newsletter before the weekend, or they can look there starting on Friday the 4th. I’ll send this out in my newsletter, and I’ll probably be pretty annoying on social media this week. I need to do better promoting my books and more active when I’m joining in promotions like this. We all have to do our part to drive traffic to the site, but it’s a real change in mindset to post and be active. I don’t want to have a reputation in romance circles that I’m not a team player. There’s no better way to kill your career than for other authors to think you won’t put in your share of the work. So I’m going to put on some music and enjoy myself. I love my books and I want people to read them. They can’t do that if they don’t know they exist. I just gotta put on my pretty big-girl panties and get it done.

I’ve been reading through the proofs of my rockstar trilogy and I haven’t found much. My proofer is still working on them too, but I’ll be putting them up on Booksprout in the next week or so. I’ve only found a couple of true typos, the rest are just nit-picky things I don’t need to change but will because that’s how authors are. A reader wouldn’t care, but this will be the final time I read these. If my proofer finds anything wrong that I didn’t, I can change the files one last time before they go live, but I did a really good job listening to these, and I don’t think it’s likely she’s going to find anything I haven’t.

Anyway, so that’s all my news, and I’m going to try to keep pushing forward though Blaze’s toys scattered around still makes me sad, and my daughter was crying because she accidentally gave her fresh water the other night before we went to bed. It will be an adjustment–we’ve had cats for the past 20 years. But I need a break. My mind and heart are so tired of being worried about animals. As much as I miss them, I just need to breathe. I have a lot going on with my books in the next few weeks, and my daughter is getting ready for her last year of high school. Things will be okay. We move on.

I hope you all have a great week, and don’t forget to share that promo with your readers–not just even because my book is included–there’s a lot of good books of all genres in there.

Until next time!

Monday Musings and Quick Author Update

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Words: 1100
Time to read: 6 minutes

Happy Monday, if you like that kind of thing. Today, incidentally, is the first day of May, as well, which means everyone should probably check to see how their ads are doing and compare ad spend with royalties earned. Because my Amazon ads were running away with clicks but my royalties didn’t seem to be keeping up, I paused some of them. Sometimes that’s not the best idea, but until royalties catch up, I can only spend so much. I’ve made $219.62 this month in sales, spent $108.00 on Amazon Ads (my fault I wasn’t keeping track of them) and $39.96 on my Facebook ad for Rescue Me. Of course, that’s not great (an ROI of $71.66), and I take all the blame for my Amazon ads. I had one going for Rescue Me that didn’t make any sense, because those clicks were .34 which is what I earn on a .99 book. My FB ad is .13/click so I make a tiny something. Mostly I’m using it as a gateway to my other books, and just from Rescue Me this month I made $72.22 so at least the FB ad is paying for itself.

Over the weekend I put Faking Forever on Bookfunnel to offer a few ARCs to my newsletter subscribers and later this month I’ll need to put it on Booksprout for reviews. That is going to go live around the 17th sometime, and I need to book another promo for Give & Take. I wanted to for Captivated but that duet isn’t selling and as I have lamented before, there’s no point in trying to throw money at that duet anymore. If people find it with my low click bid ads, that’s cool, but as my backlist grows, it may just get lost in the shuffle.

Today I wanted to talk a little bit about why I give away a full novel as my reader magnet for my newsletter subscribers. You hear a lot of opinions on it. No one wants to put in that amount of work into something for nothing, or they want to make money off selling it instead. Maybe they can write something shorter that still gets the job done (but how you would measure that is debatable–maybe if no one signs up would be a hint). I can understand the reluctance, and I tried writing short for my reader magnet too. But when I realized it would be easier to just give away something longer, the idea wasn’t so painful. Mostly, I heard advice a long time ago that made sense: you want to give your readers a taste of what you write. I will never write a novella, nor do I write short stories. My Biggest Mistake is the perfect example of what I’m writing under my pen name. It’s 78k words long, is about a billionaire who finds love (and family), and it’s steamy. There really is nothing better I could give away, and if the readers who picked it up don’t like that, they sure as hell aren’t going to like what’s in my backlist I’m selling.

Someone in one of my writing groups said she read that people think their email is worth ten to twenty dollars. I tried to find the source, but after snooping around online for a bit, I gave up. What’s important here is that people don’t give their email addresses to just anyone and for just anything. Authors who don’t like newsletters and haven’t started one because of their own personal biases will probably believe this more than anyone. They protect their email and will only give it away if they know it’s worth it. A $4.99 ebook more than likely isn’t worth it unless the cover and blurb really pull them in, but perhaps the books you’ve already written add to the value, the books you’ll write, and the special offers you’ll only give newsletter subscribers might be enough to tip them over the edge. Since I started my newsletter last year around this time, I’ve given my reader magnet away 952 times. I collect email addresses through Bookfunnel and Bookfunnel sends them directly to my MailerLite account. I don’t force people to give me their address, so I’m 300 email addresses short in my MailerLite account. I was hoping to add people who really wanted to be there by giving them the choice.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is, you need to make sure you’re giving value to your subscribers, and not think you’re entitled to emails just because you have a newsletter. A little short story may not do it, though there are plenty of ways to entice readers, one way being writing bonus content for newsletter subscribers only. I’m too lazy to do this– and once a story’s done in my mind, it’s done. I had one reviewer for Rescue Me say she appreciated I didn’t dangle bonus content in front of her in the form of a newsletter sign up, and I don’t do that because I’m already giving away a book and don’t feel the need to give away anything more than that. It frees up a lot of headspace.

My novel took 3 months to write and I can use it for years to build my list. I think that’s a great return on investment. I can understand if it takes you longer to write a book, but you will have to decide what you want to offer instead. It may not be good enough to entice subscribers and it will take you a lot longer to build your list.

This is all I have for his week. I’m just trying like mad to get the last book of this trilogy written, and it’s been one of those books that are more fun to read than to write. I’m going to have to make a serious effort to finish up in the next couple of weeks. I’ve already went back and read this book from the beginning twice, so I don’t need to do it again. I know exactly what I need to get it done, I just need to stop letting things get in the way. I’ve enjoyed writing this trilogy very much, and like all the other books I’ve written, I’ll be sad when their stories are done and it’s time to move on. After these are good to go, I may be able to squeeze in a Christmas novel. I really want to write one and have some kind of holiday auction plot simmering in the back of my mind, but we’ll see. I need to finish the book I AM writing first and take it from there.

Have a great first week of May everyone! Make every day count!

Formulaic writing: What does that mean?

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I’m lurking in writing groups and on social media way more than I should be, but there are days where you just need to sit with a cup of coffee and scroll. I admit, I like a little discourse with my coffee along with my chocolate creamer, and like the engagement questions thrown about on that bird app all the time, I like to ruffle feathers, too. My most recent, and I think most successful as it garnered more engagement than most of my tweets in the past was this one:

One of the most surprising things people said was that studying the market that way leads for formulaic writing. You can scroll through the replies yourself if you want: I’m not interested in calling anyone out because this actually is a common way of thinking.

So what is formulaic writing:

In popular culture, formula fiction is literature in which the storylines and plots have been reused to the extent that the narratives are predictable. It is similar to genre fiction, which identifies a number of specific settings that are frequently reused. Formula fiction - Wikipedia

Personally, I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. We all know there are only seven plots out there, and we reuse those plots over and over.

Many academics, most notably author Christopher Booker, believe there are only seven basic narrative plots in all of storytelling – frameworks that are recycled again and again in fiction but populated by different settings, characters, and conflicts. Those seven types of story are: Overcoming the Monster Rags to Riches The Quest Voyage and Return Rebirth Comedy Tragedy
https://www.autocrit.com/blog/7-stories-world/

Obviously there is a lot of room to twist these plots into your own story, and we all do as thousands of books are published every month. Having seven plots is very much like writing romance using tropes. There is no right or wrong way to do it, and as a writer, you are free to twist them in any way you want. Why Ali Hazelwood got so much flak for revealing in a Goodreads interview that she wrote one of her books with the tropes her agent suggested will never not make me speechless. If you want to read the article, you can look here.

Regardless of what her agent suggested, it’s still her book, her characters, her writing style, her voice. It’s not any different than a romance author digging into a fishbowl full of little slips of paper and pulling out a trope that they want to write their next book around. (I really should get on that only one bed.)

So why is there so much dislike when it comes to writing this kind of thing? Authors want to think of themselves as artists first–their books are works of art, and writing to market is like a painter using a paint-by-numbers kit. There’s no originality, no creative exploration at play. Which I think is a load of crap. People crotchet use patterns, so do people who sew quilts. People who make clothing can use patterns too–are they any less talented than the designers who create fashions and dress models who strut the catwalk?

We fear writing books that are predictable (read: boring), but if every romance author had that fear, we would never write anything. There is nothing more predictable than a 3rd act break up and a happily ever after. But in the romance genre, that’s the point. Romance readers want that and expect that, and there is hell to pay in nasty reviews if an author says their book is a romance but it doesn’t end happily (that’s a love story, by the way).

There’s a snobbishness about all of it, but there is value in not reinventing the wheel. Why build a graphic from scratch when you can use a Canva template? We see book covers all the time using a Canva template. We search newsletter and blog prompts for things to write about. We even ask ChatGPT for his ideas. There is no true originality out there anymore, and I guess that’s the point. Authors who think they are being original like to lord it over those who aren’t, but let me tell you. I’m lazy. You work your ass off for your mixed genre book with your ten points of view, and I’ll be over here having fun playing with tropes I know readers are going to want to read.

I tweeted that because it never will never cease to amaze me how much authors want their work read, how much authors want sales to show up on their sales dashboards, but whenever they ask how other authors do it, they shun the answer! The answer is right there, and it gets completely ignored, or worse, authors are written off as selling their souls or writing subpar work.

There’s a science in writing to market, to writing books with beats. That’s why there are books out there that tell you how to do it. Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes is popular, so is Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. You can read more about what makes a book a bestseller The Bestseller Code by Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers. Books written in this way give readers what they want: a feel good read. That’s why “they” say you shouldn’t genre hop when you’re trying to build an audience. You want to consistently deliver books your readers want, and what they know they’ll like.

For more on formulaic writing, you can look at this article–they did a better job explaining it than I did. Formulaic Books: Faulty or Fabulous? https://gosparkpress.com/formulaic-books-faulty-or-fabulous/

I don’t think I’ll be spending much time on Twitter anymore if the changes Musk threatened us with takes place. I don’t have the money to pay for a checkmark–I’d rather save that money for ads and promos. My life will probably be better for it, and I’m slowly following more people on Instagram so I don’t entirely lose touch with all my friends. Maybe my blood pressure will go down when I’m not constantly bombarded with idiotic ideas or not-so-subtle insults about my writing.

Anyway, this third book is going well, but I’m not going to finish by the end of the month like I hoped. I’m not feeling good again. For just a little while I had a time where my girlie issues weren’t such a big deal, but I had a flare up last week that sent me to the clinic. All my test results came back negative, so it’s just my body not cooperating and there’s not much I can about it except try to ease the symptoms as there doesn’t seem to be a cure. I sympathize with anyone trying to write with a chronic issue, but it does give me something else to think about. I’ll just have to be a little more liberal with the pain meds–I try not to take them if I can help it, but there’s no point in playing the martyr either.

That is all I have for this post. I hope you had a good holiday if you celebrated and have a wonderful week!

The surprising ways signing up for a newsletter isn’t as helpful as you think.

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Words: 1028
Time to read: 5 minutes

I see it a lot on social media in the writing community–people sign up for each other’s newsletters to be supportive, thinking they are doing a good thing. I would never want to discourage anyone from trying to help out another author. Support and encouragement are so important, and sometimes just a simple, “I’m here for you if you need me” can be the difference between an author opening their laptop and writing that next chapter or walking away from everything for good.

So when someone mentioned they sign up for newsletters to show support and I said unless you’re engaging with that content it’s not really that helpful, I felt bad. I felt bad for making her feel bad because she genuinely thought what she was doing was a good thing. She, and a few others, were surprised signing up for a newsletter wasn’t as supportive as they thought it was, but here’s why signing up for a newsletter and not opening that email and enjoying and engaging in that content can be a real downer for the author sending out that newsletter.

Most email aggregators are pay to play. Unless you send out your own newsletter, you probably don’t realize that authors usually pay for their newsletter aggregators. Some of them have a free threshold, such as MailChimp at 500 email subscribers, or MailerLite who will let you have 1,000 under their free plan. Some you pay for the second you sign up, so every email they collect counts. Successful indie authors can afford their lists, and having some dead weight probably doesn’t hurt them as much as smaller authors who stretch their marketing pennies. So keep in mind that the author you’re supporting might very well be paying for you to be on their list.

We know if you’re not opening our newsletters. With the built-in stats our aggregator provides, we know if you’re opening our newsletters or not. Maybe not YOU specifically, but MailerLite tells me my open rate for each newsletter I send out. You can sign up for a newsletter from every author friend you have, but how supportive are you if you’re not opening the emails sent to you? If you just automatically toss them into the trash? Like people who promote their books for no sales, authors get discouraged when they send out newsletters and no one bothers to look at them. Here are the stats from my newsletter I sent out in March:

A picture of my stats. The subject like of that newsletter was Blizzards, Sales, and Rockstars. The stats are 570 recipients, 33.69% open rate, and 1.23% of those clicked on the link inside the newsletter.

I have 570 email subscribers and only 33.69% of them opened my email. I included a link to something, I can’t remember what to now, but only 1.23% of that 33.69% bothered to click. Authors can cull their lists when they get too expensive and there’s not enough engagement for the cost, but it’s better all around if you’re signing up for newsletters from content creators that you’ll enjoy hearing from.

A low open-rate can affect our ability to join promotions. Authors who use newsletter builder sites and promotional sites such as StoryOrigin and Bookfunnel want to know what your open rate is before they’ll join in promos with you or ask you to join in theirs. That’s another reason why signing up for a newsletter but not opening and engaging with that content is hurtful. Tammi Labrecque who wrote Newsletter Ninja and runs the Newsletter Ninja: Author Think Tank Facebook group says a good open rate is about 40%. If you’re not opening the newsletters you sign up for, you’re hurting our chances of getting into these promotions. That’s the opposite of being supportive.

We start and offer newsletters to sell our product. The main reason we start a newsletter is to reach our customers. If you’re an author, you start a newsletter to hopefully sell your books to your subscribers. We want to build a community of readers who want to read our books and are willing to buy them. If you’re just signing up for a newsletter and not engaging with the content, you’re not going to want to buy our books. If you won’t give us your time, you definitely aren’t going to give us your money. Newsletters are an author’s strongest marketing tool–but only if their subscribers want to be on it and are happy to hear from us.

If you really want to support your author friends, the best thing you can do is read their books and talk about them. If they write in genres you don’t read, that’s not your fault and being truthful can go a long way. It’s an author’s job to promote their books, not yours, and sometimes there’s nothing you can do. I’ve turned down three people in the past couple of weeks who have asked me to read and review their books. I don’t read in those genres and I said no. With running this blog, sending out my newsletter, writing my books, and working full-time, I’m stretched thin, and that’s okay.

This wasn’t a blog post to tell you never to sign up for a newsletter, but be selective and sign up for newsletters from people you want to hear from because you enjoy their work. Of course we love it when we see new subscribers, but we want those subscribers to open our emails, enjoy the content, click on the links, and look forward to new releases. It’s difficult starting a newsletter and feeling like you’re not writing to anyone. It’s difficult to write a blog to no one, and it’s difficult to write a book when you have no readers. We all start somewhere, and little by little we grow our community. The writing community isn’t necessarily going to be your reading community, and that’s fine. We all write different genres and it’s one of the reasons I don’t share my newsletter link on Twitter–or on the blog for that matter. If anyone wants to sign up–they know how. The link is at the end of my books, and that’s the best way to gain subscribers.

How do you support your fellow authors and friends who write? Let me know, and have a great week!