Category Archives: indie-publishing

When Good Advice is Bad

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picture of framed text that says when good advice is bad. generic white vases and a bronze bowl flanking the frame

There’s a lot of advice out there, some of it good, have decent covers, write an exciting blurb, and some of it’s not so good, like doing whatever you want just because you can (which is advice I actually see a lot online).

What’s disheartening is when you hear good advice that doesn’t fit you, for whatever reason, like rapid releasing/writing quickly when you don’t have the life that lets you, or writing a long series when maybe you don’t have the patience to invest in several related books. It can be good advice, and I’ve given my fair share on this blog too, like trying to afford some ads to reach new readers, but it just isn’t going to be for you. Ads can be expensive and time consuming to learn, for example. So I get it, especially when I’ve touted the advantages of Facebook ads then turned around and shut them off due to burnout.

There was a bit of advice I got from someone in one of my romance groups, and it’s advice you might have heard before too. When you want to find hooks in your books to make graphics, they say to borrow your book in KU or buy the Kindle version and look at the parts other readers have highlighted. This is the example in the book I’m reading now, Dea Poirier’s Next Girl to Die. To find the highlights in the book you’re reading, press the three dots on the upper right. I’m using a Kindle Fire, so I’m not sure if the way to find them is the same on all devices. There you’ll see the Popular Highlights. I apologize for the glare. No matter where I moved in the room I couldn’t get rid of my shadow.

screenshot of my kindle. screens indicate where you can find the highlights of a kindle book.
I’m reading Dea Poirier’s Next Girl to Die. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QDC7Y6B

I think this is great advice, as I’ve read books that have the highlights and it would be so easy to use those as hooks on graphics for Instagram and TikTok. So, I figured I would look at the book I’ve sold the most of and check out those highlights. Now, let me tell you, the book I chose was Twisted Alibis. I’ve sold 132 combined paperbacks and ebooks, had the equivalent of 821 books read in Kindle Unlimited, and gave away 3,130 copies during a promo last year. I thought those numbers would give me the best chance of giving me the most highlights, and you know how many sentences I had highlighted? None. Not one person who read Twisted Alibis thought a sentence or paragraph was worth highlighting.

At first I thought I wasn’t looking in the right place, and I Googled how to find the highlights in a Kindle book. Where the option should be wasn’t and it took me a few minutes to understand that the option wasn’t there because I didn’t have any highlights.

To say I was disappointed is an understatement and it’s easy, very easy, to take something like that personally. Even now I can feel the shame. That book is 107k words long and not one of them touched a person enough to highlight them. Then I thought maybe it was a fluke and looked up Rescue Me. That book has sold 429 ebook copies, I’ve given away 4,916, and I’ve had the equivalent of 572 books read in KU. Nope, not one highlight. I was so embarrassed after I looked that I didn’t look at any other books.

There’s a lot you can take away from that, not any of it good, if you want to be honest, and I was still stinging when I saw someone on Threads ask how they grab hooks on a newly released book and one of the responses was to wait a few days then look at the highlights. I felt compelled to tell that person that they might not get any at all and to have a thick skin just in case they don’t. I guess I don’t have to say that I bristled with the assumption that if you just wait a few days readers will love your book so much they’ll highlight the hell out of it. Some authors don’t even get readers, let alone highlights from those readers.

I don’t actively read my reviews because I’m just not up to reading why someone (or many someones) didn’t like my book, and that’s okay. After that highlighting debacle, I’m not going to look for my highlights anymore either, because obviously, I might not like what I find.

So, what can you do when stuff like this happens? When what works for someone else is just a dumpster fire for you?

What you have to do, first and foremost, is to remember that your books are good. Know that deep in your heart. My books sell, and Twisted Alibis has 87 reviews on Amazon and a 4.5 star rating. Rescue Me has 112 with a 4.4 rating on Amazon. That may not be much to some, but it means the world to me. Just because they don’t have any highlights doesn’t mean readers didn’t enjoy reading them.

Remember that you are not the only going through this. There are a lot of books out there that for some reason or other don’t have highlights (or reviews). They aren’t being read or like in my case, those authors just didn’t have the readers who were into highlights for whatever reason. It helps to know you’re not alone even if you feel like you are.

Find alternatives. If something isn’t working for you, find a different way to do things. The highlights are easy because you can just go through your book and find the ones YOU like and flash them all over. Maybe those quotes will get people excited enough to read your book. Brag. You wrote the damn thing and loved it enough to publish it! Who cares what others think? In the case of reviews, ask a friend to go through them for you, or choose an hour to scroll, pick a couple that you like, and then close out of Amazon–and look on Amazon! Stay off of Goodreads for all that’s holy. Reward yourself for not falling down the rabbit hole of bad reviews and have a piece of chocolate or a glass of wine, them remember you don’t have to do that again–at least, not for that book. I understand the value in having a review or two for social media purposes, and I noticed this review of Twisted Alibis when I was on Author Central skimming the reviews coming in for my King’s Crossing series:

Verified Purchase If you like the rockstar romances, this is one, true, BUT it is more. Lots of social issues addressed, done in a delicate way, no raging reality tv tropes, more like addressing things we all face with a nice romance tucked inside.It's heavy in places, prepare for that, but you'll come out better for it at the end.Gitcher readin glasses out and enjoy. Text on white background. Verified purchase in red

Like everyone else where bad things are concerned, I’ll probably carry that shame for a long time. Everyone makes it sound so easy to get and use highlights, and I feel like I’m missing out on something big. Maybe I do have highlights somewhere, but I think it’s best if I don’t look because if I don’t, that’s only going to make me feel worse. I don’t put up a lot of graphics anyway, so I guess in the scheme of things I’m not missing out on much. But in the future I’ll definitely be taking everyone’s advice with a grain of salt.

I suppose that’s all I have for this week. I’m 66k words into Wicked Games even though I said I would be taking it easy writing this book. I am, I don’t stress so much about it if I don’t feel like writing, but I guess it helps I’ve been thinking about this book for a long time and I know what I want to write every time I sit down. I was worried this book would be short, but after I ironed out a kink in the plot, I’m back on track and it will probably hit somewhere in the 90k range. After I reach 50k and swim through the murky middle, I really don’t care how long my books end up but I was a little worried about it when I didn’t know how to fit in what I needed without a setting change. They’re in a small town right now, but I just can’t finish it without them moving into the city where they both live, so that eased some of my worries. We’ll see how it turns out.

As far as anything else, my sales have all but slowed to a stop, even with the few Amazon ads I have going. I got my tax returns back and have a little “fun money” as my dad likes to call it, but I’m not too eager to start up my Facebook ads again. If I did that, I would only start one or two and push readers toward my King’s Crossing series as I have gotten good reviews on the books so far and the read-through would be amazing. Plus I might get a few sales here and there, especially since the first three are on sale right now. But we’ll see how that all shakes out after I pay all my bills and stash what I want to stash in savings. I could probably set aside a couple hundred and see what works, but I’d have to keep a close eye on clicks and be ready to pause if it looks like cost-per-click is greater than sales. I’m not into spending 5k to make 5k anymore. I really didn’t get anything out of it when I did that. Readers were reading but I didn’t see any evidence of an uptick in blog subscribers or read-through to other books in my backlist.

That’s all I have for now. The first day of spring is March 20th, so I’m looking forward to some warmer weather and more consistent sun. I hope wherever you are in the world the weather treating you okay, and my thoughts are with the people in the south who are dealing with tornadoes and their aftermath.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next week!

Monday Update: What a Mess

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cleaning supplies. black spray bottle and plain bottle. two white tubes of paper towels with a sprig of baby's breath (god knows why) Text says, monday author update. what a mess

There are so many things that are baffling me right now, and I just don’t know where to start or if I should even write about any of it. Let me start with what I’ve been doing and then I’ll see if I’m brave enough to write anything else or if I’ll just call it good.

First, my fifth book in my King’s Crossing series launched on the 3rd. I made a handful of pennies because there were a few people who preordered it, then I made another handful because I had a couple people read it in KU. Honestly, this is not what I was hoping for launching this series, but I’m barely doing anything to promote it, so I guess the blame falls on me. On March 5th I paid for a Fussy Librarian bargain ebook promo, and I sold 15 copies on the day and two more the next and then sales sank to nothing, which is to be expected. Here’s what the promo looked like if you’re interested:

screenshot of fussy librarian cruel fate promo entry. picture is of cruel fate's cover and the blurb that says: Six months ago, my parents were killed in a plane crash. They left behind me, my sister, and a billion-dollar company that’s my responsibility now. The only things that have gotten me through are Zarah and my best friend, Ashton Black. Until I meet Stella. Ash hates Stella as much as I love her, and as I try to uncover the reason why my parents’ plane crashed, I struggle to keep both of them in my life. When she disappears, Ash says, “I told you so,” and all I have left is our friendship built on years of family loyalty, tears, and blood. Cruel Fate is book one in the King's Crossing six-book serial and ends with a cliffhanger.

I paid 26.00 USD, so the results were fine for how much it cost. Plus there is always read-through potential to the other five books, so we’ll see what happens. Generally speaking it could have been better, but I’m glad I remembered at the end of the blurb to mention that it was a first in series and that the book ends in a cliffhanger. Not everyone likes those, so it’s good to keep that out in the open and may account for why I didn’t sell that many. I should have also put in there the series was complete as many readers won’t start a series unless they’re all available and I’ll remember that for future promos.

I started some very low cost-per-click Amazon ads again and unpaused some of the ones I turned off months ago. Those never got the traction back they had when I turned them off, and the new ones aren’t doing much because the bid is too low for Amazon to show them. Don’t know why I’m bothering if I’m going to half-ass it like that, but sometimes I think doing a very little is better than doing completely nothing, though it’s probably not true. I don’t have anything else planned besides releasing the last book in my series in April, then all I have left this year is the launch of my next book in September. (I’ve been telling people it will be live September 15th and plan to stick to that.) But that’s too far ahead to think about because I’m not rushing through summer. I hope it’s hotter than hell so I can lie on my balcony and bake. Your girl is tired and needs a break.

My Rocky Point Series giveaway went okay. I mailed out copies to the one winner who emailed me back. I should have probably chosen someone else as a second winner, but if I would have done that, the actual second winner would have emailed me (that’s how my luck goes) and I would have needed to purchase more copies which would have taken a while. So I have a paperback set the second winner didn’t claim and I’ll figure out what to do with those later. I didn’t expect huge results and mostly it gave me things to write about on my FB author page and my newsletter.

Speaking of my FB author page, since I’ve been boosting posts, I’ve gotten a deluge of followers who just want to make me book trailers and others who didn’t look like they would care about a billionaire romance author. So, I took a couple of hours and culled my followers from 270 to 210. I know it’s better to have quality instead of quantity, but it really gave me the feeling (again) that my FB author page isn’t worth the energy and I haven’t posted since I did that. It’s something I can’t get rid of because over the years I’ve shared that link in various places and I hate beyond reason broken links. I may post on it every couple of days, just so it looks somewhat active, but it’s one of those things where I can’t measure ROI, I can only measure how I feel. I really don’t know what to do with myself in that regard because the motivation to post on social media just is not there, and I’m not really sure what would inspire me to post more. Sales, probably. Not engagement. Everyone yells about how much they want engagement, but if you’ve known me for a while, you know how special you are if you DM me and I answer you back. So, I’ll figure something out. The only good part about posting at all is that Canva makes it so easy, and I have to pay for that until I die because I have a lot of assets trapped there and I’ll never stop doing my own book covers.

Right now I’m about 60% done with WICKED GAMES but at 58k words I’ve lost motivation to work on it. I’ll finish it, no doubt about that because I still love Seth and Avery and want them to have their HEA, but I’m not running a sprint or a marathon and I work on it when I feel like working on it. It’s part of the “new me” I have going on for 2025, but I also think some of it has to do with hormones and the lackluster feeling I have sometimes of just being old and still alive. I mean, it’s not serious, I don’t have depression. I used to have depression, before my son was born, so I definitely know how that feels. This is more of a “meh” feeling, and it will pass. Spring is actually kind of gloomy here right now, the snow melting uncovering all the dog poop people didn’t pick up and the air stinks like dead things. Once it gets warmer and the sun shines more consistently and starts drying things out, that will perk me up.

My despondency is actually opening me up to reading a few books, but it’s a sad thing because these authors are on social media asking readers to share and I just can’t. I want to refer people to good books, and one book I read has so many commas they could have prevented the Titanic from sinking and the other has an info dump at the beginning that’s so boring that I cut out after 5%. Luckily one I had picked up during a free promo and the other I borrowed in KU and returned it, but still. While we’re complaining about the Amazon boycott and how people feel trampled because of what’s going on in the state of the world, I think it’s important to remember that as authors who might have people listening to our opinion, we shouldn’t waste our readers’ time and money. I want to recommend books that blew me away, that made me feel something other than annoyance. So, while I’m feeling listless, I’ll be going through my TBR which is a nice change from feeling like if I’m not writing to publish I’m not moving forward.

This Amazon boycott everyone (on Threads) is talking about is a real downer, and it’s interesting how all that blows up only to eventually disappear and never to be spoken of again. A friend told me that she hasn’t seen any of it on Twitter, and I have no idea if it’s made its way to BlueSky or not as I don’t scroll there. But personally, I think it’s all just talk because even if there are a few who actually do cancel their KU subscriptions or whatever, it’s not going to make a dent in the number of readers who use Amazon to buy and read their books. It’s frustrating to have to read that when I’m on social media. If your book sales are low or non-existent, again, it’s something you need to take responsibility for. I mean, I get it. There are ebbs and flows to publishing and any author who has been publishing for a while can tell you that. The political and economic climate also is not helping, but something isolated like this isn’t going to cause the collapse of sales for hundreds or thousands of authors. My sales stopped the second I stopped running ads. My experience might not mean anything to you, but to me it means that I actually do control my sales (not to be confused with royalties). No one can buy your book if they don’t know it exists, and I think it’s easy to forget that. If you truly are concerned about something like this and its effect on your sales, take a look at what the big-time authors who write in your genre are saying. If they are taking a hit and can trace it back to something like this, then maybe it’s time to be concerned. But if they’re carrying on as business as usual, then what you are experiencing probably isn’t caused by whatever people are talking about that day. We have to keep things in perspective. As I say, there’s a big world out there and it’s always a good idea when you get to caught up in the day’s/week’s/month’s drama to step out of that bubble and touch some grass. (Just avoid the dog poop. Gross!)

I think that’s all I have for this week. Thanks again to Brandi Easterling Collins for the interview she so graciously said she’d do that I posted last week. If you missed it, you can read it here.

No clue what I’ll write about next Monday, but I’ll be here with a smile on my face!

Have a great week!

Author Interview: Brandi Easterling Collins

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I met Brandi a long time ago, over on Twitter, and over the years we managed to keep in touch. I was really happy when she said she would do an author interview as it gave me a chance to catch up with her. I hope you enjoy her interiew!

You published your first book, Caroline’s Lighthouse, in 2016. How do you think
the publishing landscape has changed since then?
With so many tools available for indie authors, I think more high-quality indie works are available than ever before. Now is the perfect time for authors to put out quality work as long as they don’t forgo the most important part—editing.

I published my first novel through Archway Publishing, which is fine for someone who
wants help. Taking on the process myself has been more fulfilling (and a lot less
expensive). After establishing my imprint for my second novel, Jordan’s Sister, I had
retained my rights to Caroline’s Lighthouse, so I republished the second edition with
Luminesce Publishing in 2018.

You write primarily Young Adult. How did you begin writing that genre? Do you
think you’ll write in a different genre, and if you do, what do you think it will be?
As a young adult, I read many novels that helped me navigate teenage angst. I write young adult because I want to provide that same enjoyment and help for readers (of any age). I wrote first drafts or notes about all of my published novels when I was between the ages of 13 and 18. The stories have been completely rewritten, but I’d like to think I accurately captured the teenage emotions I felt then. As an adult, I could flesh out the parents and other older characters.

Even now, at 43 years old, I still gravitate toward reading YA novels because they
represent a type of journey that just isn’t the same experience you get in other genres.
That being said, if I were to venture into another genre, it would be women’s
contemporary fiction. My second novel, Jordan’s Sister, and my fifth novel, When Does
Life Begin?, are New Adult novels that lean heavily into women’s fiction.

How much of the work that goes into publishing do you do yourself, like
formatting, cover design, and editing? Do you like all aspects of it? What is your
favorite part?
I am almost a one-woman show with my company, Luminesce Publishing. I handle all the writing, editing, formatting, and cover design. Fortunately, I have a day job in content marketing, so I write and edit weekly. Before that, I worked in higher education marketing for 17 years, writing, editing, and managing some graphic design projects.

I have a team of wonderful beta readers who review the second drafts of my
manuscripts. A dear friend who is a professional photographer has helped with a few of
my author headshots and offered graphic design advice. My amazing husband is a tech
guy who helps with website troubleshooting.

You read a lot. How do you balance your reading time and your writing time?
Reading is my favorite hobby and lifeline. I read in waiting rooms, during my lunch break, while walking on the treadmill (because it’s boring otherwise!), and before bed to relax. Reading a lot makes me a better writer. My writing time is separate. I typically hit my writing stride between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. weeknights and late afternoons on Sundays.

What do you think is the hardest part of publishing and what do you do to make
this part manageable/affordable/profitable?
Selling myself and my work is the hardest part for me. I can praise others’ work all day,
but I clam up when I try to tell someone how awesome my books are. I’m proud of my
work, so I plan to work harder on advertising in 2025.

This year, I plan to beef up my website, discuss my writing with colleagues and friends,
and attend more author events. Since I have very little to devote to advertising, I must
make the limited funds count.

Your books are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. How did you decide to enroll in KU
and not publish your books wide?
I love Kindle Unlimited because I have discovered so many great authors (including you, Vania!), both indie and traditionally published, through the platform. My paperbacks are published wide, but I was okay with keeping the e-books available exclusively through KU.

[My note: Brandi is the whole reason why I re-edited my Rocky Point Series. She reached out and said she was reading them, and I had a “Oh, crap!” moment. Thanks for the nudge, Brandi! The books are better for it. :)]

What’s next for you in 2025?
I plan to populate my publishing company website with writing, editing, and publishing tips for indie authors. Although I’ve owned the domain since 2018, I didn’t do much with the site until earlier this year. Eventually, I plan to open submissions for poetry and short stories to be included in an anthology. It might be 2026 before that happens!

I am also almost finished writing my sixth novel, tentatively titled Four Hearts. The
planned publication date is December 10, 2025, my mom’s birthday.

Thanks, Brandi! I really appreciate your time! It sounds like you have a lot going on in the next little while, and I wish you nothing but the best of luck!

You can follow Brandi here:

Blog: caniscareyou.com
Website: luminescepublishing.com
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B075DXYBHB
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16102161.Brandi_Easterling_Collins
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BEC.caniscareyou

Thanks for stopping by today and I hope you have a great week!

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!

Five Reasons Why You Should Proof your Proofs!

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1,080 words
6 minutes read time

picture of four book covers. they have the not for resale stripe in the middle. a rocky point wedding series
I still love the way those covers turned out!

Back in the day, I used to be excited to order my proof from KDP. It was fun to see my book look like a book, and I’d take pictures of it, proud I was a published author. That was when we published through CreateSpace and they didn’t have that ugly stripe in the middle. When Amazon merged CreateSpace and the ebook part of KDP, I didn’t mind. I liked having my book versions together on one dashboard, and when they added the NOT FOR RESALE stripe, I was okay with it. A lot of physical ARCs have some kind of warning that it’s not the finished product, and these are no different.

But, there is also other value in ordering a proof (if you can) and as the years went on, I started going over my proofs. Now I’m always shocked to learn not everyone proofs their proofs, and they are missing out on a great opportunity.

A last editing sweep, of course.
Editors and other authors say to change your font in your Word document to make typos stand out or use the read aloud feature (listening to the voice read a word that’s not spelled correctly is funny), and those are both great ways to find typos that would normally slip by. But, also reading your proof is a good way to see run-on sentences, punctuation errors like broken ellipses, spelling mistakes, and more. One of the things I have noticed is that reading your proof can actually help you see where scenes could be plumped up or if it drags. Reading your book, flipping the pages, and seeing the words on a printed page allows you to feel how your book moves, and when I was proofing my King’s Crossing series, I made a lot of scene changes right at the last minute. There’s something real about holding your book in your hands and reading it, and if you don’t proof your proof, you’re missing out on that experience.

Check your formatting.
Sometimes things look okay on your screen but not in print. When I was proofing books 4-6 of my King’s Crossing novels, there are a lot of journal entries. Max left Gage his journal that described a lot of what happened in books 1-3 and played a huge part in Gage figuring out Zarah’s past. But I wanted to format those journal entries in a way that didn’t distract the reader from the story. I finally ended up just using italics, though I tried other things like setting them in in a block quotation or an alignment block. Then, once I decided on how I wanted them formatted, I had to go through all the books and make sure I changed them all and didn’t miss any for consistency. Sometimes you’ll end up with just a word or two on a separate page that you need to fix, sometimes the pictures in your back matter need to be adjusted. You won’t know those things if you don’t proof your proof.

Check the cover.
Print on demand isn’t always accurate, and KDP is notorious for printing dark. Sometimes you might decide to go with a matte cover instead of glossy. You are never going to get the colors you see on the screen, so it’s best to order a poof copy and make sure the colors are how you want them, that your spine looks good, and the back over looks professional. A lot of times I don’t get the gradients lined up to the spine just right and I have to move it over. You won’t be able to tell that looking at a PDF of your cover. One of the last-second catches I saw when I was proofing my Rocky Point Wedding series was that I still had A Rocky Point Wedding Book One on book four. KDP might have caught it when I published, but it was better that I saw it and fixed it myself.

This is book four. Ooops.

Look for lines and scenes that you can use in graphics and reels.
This will probably be one of the last times you read your book, and you can use this read-through to highlight hooky lines, dialogue, and scenes you can use in social media graphics and TikTok videos. One of the most time-consuming things is to page through your book, looking for lines you can use, and if you do this during your last edit, you’re saving yourself time in the long run. I wish I would have thought of this a long time ago, but social media isn’t my strong suit. You can be sure that I’ll be doing it from now on.

Peace of mind.
I see so many people who want their books in bookstores and libraries, yet they never order a proof to see exactly what their readers are getting when they pay 10-20 dollars to buy a paperback. I want to see exactly what my readers are going to get. I want the cover to look good, I want my formatting to look like a traditionally published book. I want to be able to catch all the typos I can (humanly) catch. I know that cost can be a barrier for some, the cost of the book and shipping might be too much after spending on editing and cover design, but as long as you are able, I would always recommend proofing your proof.

You probably don’t want to know how many proofs I ordered of my King’s Crossing series. That series is over four years in the making, and I changed the covers, too. I spent a lot on books I ended up throwing away, not needing them after fixing what I needed to fix. I throw away a lot of proofs, actually, because I don’t need them anymore. I only have room for so many, and prefer to keep a few author copies on hand instead. If you have the space, you might keep them for nostalgic purposes, but I don’t have much room, and I don’t see the sense in keeping them. The finished product is enough for me.

Ordering a proof is exciting, but it’s also a chance for one last read, no matter how sick you are of the story by now. Enjoy the last time you’ll read it, and quietly say goodbye to characters that you worked so hard on.

Your Best Marketing Strategy–TL;DR (Write more books!)

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TEAL GREEN BACKGROUND STACK OF OLD BOOKS. TEXT SAYS. TL;DR: WRITE MORE BOOKS

We talk about marketing a lot, such as buying promos, setting up a newsletter, networking with authors in your genre to do newsletter swaps, learning an ad platform. Depending on the status of your mental health and how thin your wallet is, you should probably be doing all those things. As Meta buys everything and then enforces guidelines, (no more steamy snippets on Instagram, y’all) it’s getting more and more difficult to use free resources.

Social media could be useful, or has been, but as these company shy away from content they consider porn, or pörn, you run the risk of getting your account suspended, shadow-banned, or simply the algorithms just won’t show your stuff to anyone. TikTok is the worst in its guidelines they arbitrarily enforce, and I can’t remember the last time I even bothered to post a video. With the announcement of the new Instagram guidelines pertaining to sexual content, lots of romance authors are scrambling. Social media isn’t dependable, and hopping from platform to platform won’t do anything, and here’s why. Author problems are not reader problems. Instagram’s policies really don’t affect readers. We get caught up in the author world and forget that readers aren’t always where we are. Yeah, you might be posting hoping to catch the eye of a bookstagrammer, and if that’s part of your marketing strategy, then you’ll be dealing with the change, but for the most part, you can find readers other places.

The one best marketing thing you can do though–we hear it a lot and also ignore it–is to write the next book. There are caveats to that, and I think that’s why it gets pushed aside. If no one is reading what you’ve got, then why keep going, right? I agree to a point, and that’s when you have to make a decision. Learn how to market in other ways or accept that no one is going to read you. BUT, here’s the thing we don’t talk about. If a reader finds you an likes you, having a backlist is the best way to keep them with you.

Here are the reasons why I think it’s always important to be working on your next book despite what’s happening on social media… and your sales dashboard.

Publishing regularly keeps you relevant. There’s not a lot we can agree on when it comes to Amazon besides how frustrating it is to work with them, and this: Amazon gives you a 30-, 60-, and 90-day new release cliff. This is where they push your book, giving you a little bump that you’re supposed to run with. Once the first 90 days pass, you’re on your own, and authors frequently find out that being on your own is not a good thing. Ask any author who is pleasantly surprised by their positive ranking only to watch their rank sink. It’s why indies try to publish four times a year–they don’t want to fall off the cliff. You may not be able to publish four times a year, not unless you save up and slowly release, but the more you publish the more relevant you are to Amazon and to readers who will know you’re in it for the long haul.

You get better with every book. Writers need to write to get better. Each new book gives you the opportunity to try new things and level up your craft. Like I mentioned before in previous blogs, I plotted out A Heartache for Christmas years ago, but I couldn’t write it because I wasn’t good enough to execute the plot twist. After I wrote ten other books, I tackled the plot and the mystery with ease. Maybe the mystery isn’t a shocker, but it was more than what I was able to do when I was plotting the book in the first place.

Another great reason along these lines is you get faster with every book. All these social media posts that say books that are written in two months (or whatever) are trash are written by people who are jealous an author doesn’t need long to write something good. The more you write the faster you get and the less you need to spend on editing. You can’t get good at anything unless you practice.

More promotional opportunities. Events like Stuff Your Ereader Day and newsletter swaps are becoming more prevalent as social media becomes more unstable and more undependable. It really helps when you have more product to be able to rotate in these promos. Even when I buy a Freebooksy, I don’t always promote the same book, and you can find different readers by advertising different books because they’ll be written around different tropes/plots/characters. On the same token, you’ll have more books to put on sale. Even if you’re in KU, being able to put your books on sale is a great way to find new readers. Right now I have three of my King’s Crossing series on sale: Book one is .99, the second is 1.99, and the third is 2.99 to encourage readers to buy and try. I’ve sold 24 of book one since its release, and I don’t think I would have sold them unless they were on sale. Book one could potentially lead a reader to buy the other five, so never discount the power of putting a book on sale. Elana Johnson is a master of putting her books on sale. She talks about rapid releasing and book prices in her talk at the 20booksto50k conference a couple years ago. It can be intimidating to listen to her, but she’s motivating too. You can listen to her here:

You’ll have more to offer your readers. Readers want more from you, and while that can be scary, it can be motivating, too. You’ll have more to talk about in your newsletter (and on social media) more excerpts to share, more covers to reveal. If readers know you’re going to stick around, it makes it more likely they’ll stick around to see what you’ll be up to next.

You may motivate someone else. I’ve heard from a few people they have admired how many books I’ve been able to write in such a short amount of time. I was writing to hide how I felt, sure, but I also could have used my health as an excuse to wallow (no judgment to those who have health issues and can’t write as much as they’d like. I was fortunate. I was able to write, so I did). The fact is, I enjoy writing and it’s never a hardship to give up a few hours every day to get some words in. I hope that as a whole, my career has motivated a few people. I’ve gotten compliments on this blog, too, how I manage to stay consistent and try to help people with the topics I write about. I’ve said I really only can do that by being active in the writing community, trying new things (like my Goodreads giveaway), and be willing to spend a little money (like on ads) so I can write about my experiences. Writing and publishing your own books is difficult, and to keep doing it year after year is admirable. Willing to write about your failures is also admirable and can be a learning experience so others don’t have to go through it.

Keep a book on reserve. One thing you could do with an “extra” book is keep one on your computer and publish it at a time when things are rough and you can’t get the words down. Most authors I know wouldn’t do this because they write slowly and every book they finish they want to publish and put out into the world. But I do know one or two people who hang on to books for this very reason. They don’t know if they’re going to get sick, they don’t know if having a baby will slow them down. Life is full of uncertainties, and if you’re making any kind of money you can’t lose, having a book on reserve could be the difference between keeping your royalties up, or losing what momentum you’ve managed to create for yourself.

Use a book as a reader magnet. I’ve given away My Biggest Mistake over a thousand times since I put it up for free as a newsletter freebie in January of 2022. The downloads have slowed down a bit because I used to run an ad to my Bookfunnel link, but I don’t do that anymore. It got to be too expensive, and now I just give it away for free, casual like, and hope people will sign up for my blog instead. MailerLite did me dirty, and that’s okay. I like blogging and I’m still reaching readers, and I don’t mind giving away a taste of what readers will get if they buy one of my books.

If you’re going to be in this for a while, there’s no downside to writing the next book. It’s kind of like that running saying that I used to hear all the time back when I was running: You regret 100% of the runs you never take. Maybe it would help if you had a plan for the book before you start or while you’re writing it. Like, this will be my reader magnet, because I want to spend the second half the new year nurturing my list, or, this will be on standby because last year I was sick a lot and having something already written would easy some of the pressure. (Kinda like making saving your sick time for when you really are sick.) Maybe just working toward finishing a series is enough motivation to keep you going. At any rate, marketing can be time-consuming, creating graphics and looking for snippets, but none of that really means anything at the end of the day. A healthy backlist will look more impressive, and the more product you have the more product you can sell.

What are you goals for 2025? How many books do you want to write? How many do you know your capable of doing? I wish you the best of luck when writing!

Author Goals 2025

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Everyone is doing these and I thought I might as well. You can either look eagerly into the future or think it’s just going to be another year of writing to no one. I don’t really think that, I do have readers, but I know there are more than a few who do think it because marketing is hard and it’s harder still when you don’t have any money to buy ads or promos.

My goals for 2025 are pretty simple. I don’t have any. Of course, I have a list of things I want to get done, but when I think about goals and what I’ve seen from other authors, they aren’t the same. I don’t have a goal to make 10k with my writing or get an orange tag. I don’t have a goal to sell 100 copies of a book or even 50 copies and I’ll you why. Because I don’t have a plan to achieve those goals, and I don’t have a plan because if I knew what would work I’d be doing it. Goals are only as good as the motions you can put into place to achieve them, which is why the only things on my goals list are what I can control.

So, let’s begin:

Finish proofing the proofs of my Rocky Point series, upload, and publish new files to KDP and IngramSpark. I’m not going to get done this year. I wanted to, so I could start 2025 with a clean slate, but I won’t. Book one is a word salad of filler words and echoing that for some reason I didn’t fix the first time around (paper always reads different so it could just be I’m seeing them for the first time) and it’s going to take me probably until the end of the year just to finish book one. Even if I could finish book one before then, I have three more to go. I committed to editing these, so I’m going to finish it out to the best of my ability.

Finish editing Loss and Damages, a first person present Billionaire standalone that I started back in May of 2021. It’s finished and has already had one read-through and I added quite a few notes of what I need to fix. I want to finish those edits and get the preorder up, I don’t know when. I have no deadline, just do it as soon as possible after my Rocky Point series is squared away. My last book in my King’s Crossing series releases in the middle of April, and to give myself time to write, I decided on a September 15th, 2025 release date for Loss and Damages. Then, if I keep with the four-five month time between, I’ll have plenty of time to write more books, with an estimated release day sometime in January of 2026.

When Loss and Damages is completed and scheduled, the next book I want to write and edit will be completely from scratch and is a standalone Billionaire romantic suspense. I have it mostly plotted out in my mind (and to no one’s surprise, the cover is already done), and I’d like to write it before I forget what it’s about. Also, if I can make good use of my time and schedule it for the January 2026 release date, that will give me extra time to work on what I want to write next.

I doubt I’ll be able to get this done in 2025, but I want to finish a series I started back in 2021. I have two books written of a six books series, but after working on King’s Crossing (a six-book serial) and my Rocky Point series (four books that are connected but can be read as standalones), I don’t want to dive into another huge project. So what I need to do is rewrite parts of book one and cut out two of the characters or make it clear somehow they would be not be getting their own stories, so I only have two books to edit and two books to write. The combined writing, editing, and packaging of four books will take me a very long time, and I really don’t think I can edit a book, write a book, plus complete that series all in one year. I’ll need to figure out how much time I want to have between my January 2026 release and the series. I could maybe do six months and aim to have the series completed in enough time to put them on preorder in July of 2026, but I’m not going to think that far ahead.

I’m feeling better physically and in turn, mentally, so I’ve said I’m going to approach 2025 a little differently. I am, already veering away from series for a minute and I’m going to concentrate on editing Loss and Damages and writing Wicked Games. I need the break working on standalones will give me, and even though I could give myself a deadline, I actually haven’t sat down and written a book since August 2023 when I wrote A Heartbreak for Christmas and packaged that for its November release. All this time I’ve been editing, so it might be a bit intimidating to open a new Word document and try to pull words out of my head. Editing is a different beast, after all, and I’d like to have fun rather than just think of Wicked Games as another book I need to write and sell.

I’ve really grown as an author editing so many words this year, and the mistakes and filler words and general clutter I was using that I didn’t see are pretty blatant to me now. Loss and Damages and Wicked Games are probably going to sound better than any of the books I’ve written so far. Well, besides my King’s Crossing stuff because I went over those with a fine-tooth comb, and if some filler words managed to squeak by me, then they have earned the right to stay.

As far as other goals, my King’s Crossing series is done. The third book will release on December 9th, the fourth in January, the fifth in March, and the sixth in April. They are all loaded up and on preorder. No files need to be changed out, the covers are locked in. That series is gone in my mind, which is probably why I have such a hard time marketing. Once a book is up, it’s out, and I’m moving on to other things. I don’t have goals for sales or page reads, in fact, my expectations are quite low and will be until the last book is released. As a serial, a reader won’t know the whole story until the last book is released and since I have that information written in the blurb, readers might not even want to start the series until they are all available. I’ve kept my expectations realistic, running ads to create buzz and awareness (and bleeding into the red with clicks), and just focusing on editing my series to maybe boost my 3rd person backlist. I’ll be releasing four books in 2025, and anyone would be proud of that, other goals be damned.

I probably should try to think of some kind of plan to push book one out more, beyond the author driven promos and promos you can buy like Freebooksy, but that would require hustling and networking, and since I haven’t felt well, that just sounds exhausting. I have a rockstar promo opportunity someone sent me months ago and I just haven’t felt like reaching out to follow up, but if I want to spread the word I’m going to have to start doing the work and that can probably be one of my goals for next year. I need a mindset change because not feeling well has been a valid excuse not to do a lot of things, but I need to start being present in the present and not hiding, writing a book because my doctor didn’t know what was wrong with me. That’s all in the past, so 2025 will have to be different in that regard.

I don’t have a lot of goals and I really don’t want to make any beyond what I’ve touched on here. I’m not struggling as much as I have been, a clearer (and sober) mind has helped me come to terms with knowing that a lot of what I’m doing will (still) be on my own, ie, forgoing a beta readers/editors/proofers and cover designers. I have a few friends I touch base with, and I’m grateful to them because they keep me sane and remind me I’m not totally alone. Writing has always been something you need to do by yourself (have you ever tried to write while someone was talking to you?) so that part is understandable and something I have enjoyed even while I wasn’t feeling well. I’m just still adjusting to the loss of my fiancé who loved to talk publishing and a friend here and there who would like to brainstorm. Now that I’m doing better, I can focus more on replacing those relationships and reaching out to the romance community, which I should be doing anyway.

I’ll be approaching 2025 a little differently, trying to find the fun I lost in the writing, and trying to find the fun I lost in my life overall. It was a real miracle my doctor at Mayo knew what was wrong with me and could actually fix it (to the best of her ability) and while I’m adjusting to how things are in my writing and the writing community, I’ll be adjusting to my new way of feeling. I’ll never be “normal,” but I’m better than what I was and I’m grateful for that.

I suppose that’s all I have for this week. Four more weeks of 2024. Make them count, and maybe, maybe 2025 will actually be different for many of us!

Until next time!

Writing Billionaire Romance Novels (in these trying times)

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So someone on Threads said something interesting the other day. She said since the election and its outcome, she’s questioning even writing Billionaire romances anymore. She said the whole concept is not what it used to be, and I wondered about that.

There’s no mistake that billionaires don’t have a positive reputation, and maybe they never did. Elon Musk is kind of a slime (just my personal opinion–like him if you want), interfering with the election and caring more about space than helping people here on earth. Jeff Bezos is similar, I suppose, not letting the Washington Post endorse a presidential candidate and having his own odd fascination with reaching for the stars. I don’t know much about billionaires or their lifestyles, far from it, and when I write my own Billionaire romances, a lot of Googling is involved.

I can understand the idea. You don’t get to be a billionaire without stepping on a lot of toes, to put it mildly, and being willing to do that, some might consider you an asshole, cutthroat, unfeeling and uncaring. Female billionaires like Bezos’s ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, who has been giving a lot of her divorce settlement money to charity, Ruth Gottesman who gave $1 billion to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, ensuring free tuition for all future students, even Taylor Swift who donates heavily, have more positive reputations than any of their male counterparts.

That’s not to say that billionaires are… bad. I guess I could consider hoarding money bad, but I also admire the tenacity and intelligence of the people who are capable of earning that money on their own in the first place. Billionaires like Mark Zuckerburg and Bill Gates earned their money, even if it was through a lot of luck (hitting the market at the right time with their products). I wouldn’t know where to begin to build a social media/technological empire.

I think the point though, or at least, assuming without talking to her about it further, is the fact that no one needs that much money, no matter how much they give away. We all say tax the rich, and we should, but we also forget that where that money is supposed to go doesn’t always get there. You’ll find crooked, greedy politicians at every level of the government (and one will be our president), and just because the billionaires are taxed doesn’t mean us poor people will see a dime.

So what does this mean for Billionaire romance novels? I think it’s fair to say that readers will still read to escape… not everyone wants to read a novel that echoes real life. Sometimes someone wants to be trapped on Mars or get seduced by a handsome stranger in a rundown bar. There’s a certain fairytale feeling about Billionaire romance, a dreamlike quality readers like to get swept up in, especially, if, like myself, they’re so far removed from that kind of life there’s no possibility of even meeting a billionaire, much less one falling in love with them.

I understand the conundrum. The pull of having that much money but the repulsion of it too, how it makes people behave. As a Billionaire romance author, you can tackle that idea that a billionaire character doesn’t have to be bad. That being rich hasn’t turned him into an entitled asshole. Your conflict can come from other things, like Sam, in my novel Rescue Me. He’s a billionaire (on and off, he admits because he does give to charity), but he’s kind and worn out. His wife passed away from breast cancer, and he’s mourning her. His and Lily’s story doesn’t have much to do with money. She doesn’t fall in love with him because he’s rich, and he doesn’t not fall in love with her because she’s not. They’re just two people who are trying to live with their pain in the only way they know how.

There’s a danger in making your billionaire characters too soft, as another person on Threads noticed. She said she also writes kind billionaires, but she thinks thats why her books have never taken off. They aren’t alphaholes. I commiserated. My male characters won’t be mean to their love interests. I write instalove and I find it incredibly difficult to force my MMCs to mistreat the women they love. Sometimes they do because they simply don’t want to fall in love and they’re lashing out, but the kind of violence needed to write dark romance or some mafia, I’ll never be able to write.

That’s part of my point though. Just because you’re writing Billionaire, or any character that has more than a little money, you don’t have to make them mean and entitled. You don’t have to make them behave like children, stomping their feet and yelling at everyone. They can act grownup and go after what they want without hurting people. Does that sell books? (So far my answer is no. At least, I doubt I’ll ever find Haunting Adeline fame.) My characters hurt each other, don’t get me wrong, but they aren’t mean to each other just to be mean.

Readers want conflict and they want stakes, and they want men who will fall on their knees in front of their women begging them not to leave when they fuck up. That doesn’t have anything do with money, and maybe that’s where I’m going wrong.

A while back I posted a blurb in a Facebook group looking for help, and one person said just because my characters have money doesn’t make the book fall into the Billionaire category. She said this to me years ago, but it’s stuck with me, mainly because what she said is true. In a “real” Billionaire novel, characters’ problems come from having money. Like the two most famous Billionaires, Christian Grey (EL James) and Gideon Cross (Sylvia Day), you can blame most of their issues on the fact that they have money. People are always going after them out of jealousy. They have heavy backstories too, like Christian’s mother’s death and Gideon’s history with rape, and mixing their money and enemies with their backstories makes for some pretty anguishing novels. I use my characters’ money to help them get out of situations but their situations don’t always come from having money. The series I’m releasing now is probably the closest I’ve come to that. Zane’s and Zarah’s problems come from their father’s legacy–a multi-billion dollar company and more enemies than they can count. They don’t have backstories, all their problems are in their present, a first for me, because half the fun of writing is giving my characters a painful character arch they have to overcome to find happiness.

I doubt I’d sell more books not labeling them Billionaire. Just because their problems aren’t caused by money doesn’t mean that their money doesn’t influence how they live. I already put them in the contemporary romance categories anyway, so not much would change.

I’m not going to stop writing Billionaire romance, even though sales have slowed and I’m struggling like other authors. I’m ahead of where I was three years ago and I’m sure my pivot to first person present Billionaire is to thank. Not to mention, I just enjoy writing it, so why stop? Although, ironically enough, a lot of my royalties have come from my Rockstar trilogy I published in August last year. Maybe that’s a fluke or maybe Rockstars are where it’s at. Really hard to say, but unfortunately, I can only write what falls into my lap and I don’t have another rockstar plot in me at the moment. I do have three completed Billionaire novels waiting for my attention, one standalone plotted out (that I really should write before I forget it all), and two that I need to write that will complete an already-started series. That will keep me busy for quite a long time, unless all of a sudden I decide to pivot again, though with so much planned out, I’m not sure why I would.

I think the bottom line for me is that I’m going to keep writing Billionaire because I like to. Because whether my books are selling or not, my characters are kind and use their money for good. I don’t think as Billionaire authors we’re required to do anything different. Asshole billionaires sell books, and I wouldn’t begrudge any author if they didn’t want to change their ways. Nor should they have to just because of what’s going on in the world today. The fact is, there will always be billionaires, and there will always be billionaires who are fucking assholes, just like they will always be fucking assholes who are poor.

I’ll leave you with Zane’s thoughts in the third book of my King’s Crossing series, Cruel Dreams:

Pretending as if nothing is out of the ordinary, we mingle with the other guests. I see what Stella saw when she first started hanging out with Zarah and me. Jewels, gowns, expensive bags. So much waste trying to outdo each other and pretending to be better than everyone else. Talking tee times and country clubs, mergers and acquisitions. The meaningless words flow over me like a cold shower.

It’s a wonder Stella loves me at all.

Have a good week, everyone! Until next time!

Past Decisions and Their Consequences

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Too tired to look for a stock image. Imagine something pretty here.

Everything we do results in some kind of consequence, some kind of reward, whether we know it or not. Whether we want to admit it or not.

Last week was another crazy day on social media when I saw someone encouraging people to use KDP’s POD, but mark up their paperback prices on Amazon to $200.00 so they could sell off their website instead. This is such a bad take for so many reasons, and when I replied saying that at least IngramSpark was a better option because you can print without distributing, she went off on me saying IS wasn’t viable for everyone and that I was toxic and privileged for even suggesting it. That really hurt and I dropped out of our conversation because I’m not going to let people assume how I live. It’s not toxic to suggest a better way of doing things, it’s not privilege to suggest a platform many authors have access to. She wanted to be right, and there were plenty of people who agreed with her. That’s fine. Look like an idiot selling your paperback for $200.00. Doesn’t bother me at all.

The main issue is that IngramSpark costs money. If you live in the US, you know how expensive ISBNs are. Part of her privilege insult was because she assumed I buy my ISBNs and that I was telling people they should do the same by suggesting they use IS. She doesn’t know that yeah, I did buy a pack of 100 (costs $575 which was almost as much as my rent) but I charged them on a credit card and it took me several years to pay them off. My ex-fiancé said he would buy them for me, but you know how that turned out and I ended up paying off a massive credit card bill that he said he would take care of. Anyway, the outcome of that story is that yeah, I did buy own ISBNs, and it’s none of her business it took me years to pay them off.

Very rarely on this blog do I suggest you spend money on your book business, but on the flip side, I’m very clear that I believe you can’t start a business properly without spending some cash. If you want to sell YOUR book off YOUR website because you’re running a business YOU own, why would you want to use an ISBN that didn’t belong to you? That’s MY main reason for buying ISBNs. They belong to me, I’m registered as the publisher, and if Amazon is ever a dick and closes my account, my books are safe. For all the hating on Amazon over on the sewing platform, they’re quick enough to take what Amazon gives them.

Anyway, so when you use free ISBNs you’re taking a risk Amazon will treat you well and if you take free ISBNs from anywhere else, you’re accepting any eventual consequences.

This isn’t a post just about ISBNs. You take risks making your own covers, especially if you don’t have the skill to create a cover that will tell readers what your genre is and won’t look homemade. Just the other day someone was bemoaning the fact he couldn’t get preorders for his book. I told him to look at his cover and maybe redo it, that it looked homemade. He actually was very nice about it, and maybe he will change it, I have no idea. That kind of consequence you may never see–you could not sell any books and blame it on lack of marketing or algorithms. Unless someone you believe and trust says your cover is garbage and you change it, you could go years without knowing what kind of damage your cover caused. I mean, you know I do my own covers, and back in the day they weren’t great. I still see the free stock photo I used on 1700 Hamilton other places, and I published that book eight years ago now. Canva templates taught me a lot, and I still like how this cover came out, the first for Wherever He Goes, even though I changed it to something sexier later that’s still the cover on the book now.

I had to look for this on Goodreads

Not listening to your editor and having a book bomb after the fact can have dire consequences–a reader won’t give you another chance if they spent money on a book that had plot holes and grammatical errors every two sentences. And, you know, poor reviews last forever. I’ve been editing my own books for a while, and I know the risks, may have even suffered from some of them. God only knows who’s read my books and said they’d never read me again. I also know the risks of trusting people, and well, tired of that, so you have to choose the lesser of the two evils.

My biggest regret so far was not starting a newsletter sooner, and I wonder how far I’d be now if I had given as much attention to a newsletter as I have to this blog. Maybe because of the change in direction I decided on in 2020, it wouldn’t have mattered, or those people who signed up wouldn’t have cared either way.

After unpublishing some hardbacks and Large Print, I thought about unpublishing a couple of my first books, just because they aren’t the quality of the others, nor are they in the genre I decided to write in. Some say romance is romance, but my romantic speculative fiction could probably go, also my erotica that I decided I couldn’t write because there was just too much sex. (If you have to remind yourself to put in the sex scenes, erotica probably isn’t for you.) When you say you want to write and publish whatever, those consequences can catch up with you. Difficult to make a brand out of “whatever” and you may look back in five years at all the word salad you hoped people would buy.

The one thing all these have in common is that no one can tell you these things. I mean, yeah, the advice is out there, cover to market, hire an editor, start a newsletter, buy your ISBNs if you can. All that’s out there but it’s funny because we’ve turned being indie into defying the rules and maybe some rules are meant to be broken, but this is a business and whether we like it or not, there are best practices.

I almost didn’t write this blog post because I realize the subject is boring and repetitive, even if I’ve made similar mistakes. The bad advice out there can really take me aback, and that woman who had supporters telling people to price up their book left me speechless. What would readers think stumbling upon a book that cost $200.00? How is that author going to tell those readers she preferred to sell off her website? It all seemed so bizarre to me, yet people agreed, said they were going to try it. I don’t know, it just seems like one of those things that you could look back on later and say, “What was I thinking?” Of course, you can do that for just about anything, the cover that wasn’t right, blowing off your editor, not listening to someone who knew what they were talking about because you were determined to fail on your own. That’s how people learn, and I’ve had people tell me to hire an editor, but some things are easier said than done.

So this post is 1200 words of drivel (it’s almost Thanksgiving in the US so I’ll refer to it as turkey gravy), but honestly, my brain is fried. I’m halfway through editing my age-gap. I’m really loving the story and it’s fun to see how far my writing as come, but editing is tiring, probably more so than simply writing. I also have to proof my series proofs, and that will take a minute, but I’m hoping that I’ll get everything wrapped up by the end of the year. I want to start working on my first person stuff again, putting into practice the things I finally know that I didn’t before. I’ve come a long way working on my King’s Crossing series. Really, smoothing out over a half a million words taught me a lot, and I know it did because working on my Rocky Point series was really eye-opening. I agree that sometimes you have to fail on your own to learn, but you do have to keep working on your craft and level up on your own if you don’t want to take anyone’s advice.

That’s all I have for this week. I’ll probably post my Billionaire post next week. I think it’s still relevant, and tempers, while they haven’t cooled all the way down, aren’t so hot, at least, and even if it makes some readers crabby, I think it was wise to wait.

After that, well, it’s year-end stuff, and before you know it, it will be January. The world keeps spinning, no matter what kind of rut you’re in. Do your best to keep moving forward, and hopefully you’ll see more rewards than consequences.

Policing Other People’s Work

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Words: 1225
Time to read: 6 minutes

This isn’t as fun as it looks.

One thing that has always puzzled me about authors is their need to police other people’s work. I see it all the time, from the authors who defend their right to leave bad reviews (thinking they’ll teach that author how to write correctly) to people who are loud and proud about the books they do not finish (DNF) for whatever reason. I came across this jewel the other day, and I gave myself a cookie for not responding:

genuine question for kindle unlimited authors: does reporting typos through the content error box ding you in any way? Is there a better way to report mistakes? Picture of reporting screen on a kindle

I actually see this a lot, with authors who are asking if it’s okay to email other authors about mistakes, or direct message them to inform them of errors. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen someone ask about the actual reporting feature on a Kindle either, and it just makes me so confused as to why someone would waste the energy to do something like this while they’re supposedly reading for pleasure.

This is one of the big reasons I don’t promo my books where other authors hang out. I have never met a more judgmental or pickier group. And not only are they judgmental and picky, they are not afraid to let others know. The reporting system on a Kindle is anonymous, but just the fact that she posted that on Threads tells me she actually uses it, or wanted to use it. Maybe the responses changed her mind, but knowing she would think about it gives me the ick and I don’t want her reading my books.

I’ve given this some thought as to why authors would want to police someone’s book:

So they can feel better about their own writing. I know this is a pretty crappy reason, and maybe that tells you something about me that I mentioned it first. I think the worst of people? Maybe, but I’ve also seen it enough that I do think authors enjoy being able to report typos or call a book out for bad editing. They like to feel like their books are better than someone else’s. It’s not a terrible thing, really. I think we all have read a book that we thought was bad and said, “If this book is a bestseller, then my books have a chance.” We need the validation, but that’s not a good way to go about getting it. Putting someone else down, even in the guise of being helpful, will never lift you up. It might make you feel better for a little bit, but as most authors become aware, what goes around comes around, and someone reading your book may not take so kindly to your typos, either. And trust me, no matter how many times you go through it, you’ll publish your book with a couple.

They really do want to be helpful. I don’t jump completely to negative assumptions–there are authors out there who genuinely want to tell an author what the problems are in their books so the authors can fix them. The problem is, not everyone has access to their files. If they’re traditionally published, or if they’re published by a small press, telling them about the typos, or plot holes, or that the male main character’s eye color changed halfway through the book, won’t help. You can report it, sure, maybe eventually Amazon will alert the author of the quality issues and prompt their publisher to submit the edits (from what I know this would be very unlikely), but what good is that going to do? You can email, but if every person emailed that author about their typos and they can’t do anything, think of how defeating that would be. You get an email once a week about an issue you can’t fix….how demoralizing that is. Detrimental to that author’s mental health, even. So you being helpful can turn into anything but being helpful.

I understand that you might want to help an author fix their book, but after publication is not the time for that. If you truly want to help, help a writer beta read, or offer to proofread. That book you’re so eager to give feedback on, that book could have gone through multiple rounds of editing, or maybe that author couldn’t afford an editor at all, did the best they could, and you’re rubbing salt in their wounds by needing to mention all the typos, words used in the wrong context, and punctuation errors.

Writers and authors have a really difficult time turning off their editing brains to read for pleasure. It’s part of the reason I don’t read as much as I should. It’s difficult for me to find authors whose writing styles I mesh with. Sometimes I don’t like the author’s voice from the first page, and it takes me a chapter or two to let go of my dislikes and get into the story. I, too, am picky, and I dislike characters who don’t act their age, or dual point of view books that have too much of the female point of view and not enough of the male’s. I’ve read books where the author couldn’t decide between past and present tense, books where the author (or editor) didn’t know how to punctuate dialogue. Books that didn’t take time to flesh out characters. Never, not in my wildest dreams, have I ever wanted to report an error through my Kindle, email an author, or direct message them. I would never take the time to edit a book like that or tell them that something they were doing didn’t work for me. Chances are really good that they wouldn’t care anyway, so when you think about reaching out to an author, figure out what you want the outcome to be. Do you want them to thank you? Is gratitude what you’re after? Will you be disappointed if you don’t get a response? What would you say if they wrote back and said, “Thanks for letting me know, but I’m published with a small press and I can’t do anything.”? Apologize for saying something? Not respond? Get embarrassed and crawl into a hole? Because that’s what I would do if that happened to me. You have no idea what an author’s circumstances are, and even if you are coming from a sincere place of wanting to help, you could be doing more harm than good.

I’ve known authors who police books, giving “honest” reviews, or even editing snippets of books on Twitter, and it’s never great when it comes back to them (and Karma’s like a Boomerang–it will). I keep my nose out of people’s business. Years ago I used to write “honest” reviews, too, even some on this blog that I have since trashed because it was a hard lesson learned that no one is better than anyone else and we’re all in this together.

If you just can’t stop yourself from emailing an author, at least offer to beta read their next book or join their ARC team. Offer some help instead of just emailing them a list of typos and expecting a thank you. Be kind and realize that they may actually not want your help. They might not be able to do anything with it, anyway. I’ve seen vindictiveness and I’ve also seen it returned. Instead of focusing all that energy on someone else’s book, concentrate on yours. It will be better spent.