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Monday Author Update (The Grownup Version)

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Words: 2202
Time to read: 12 minutes

I’m not sure what got into me last Thursday, well, I do, but I think I need to start finding other ways to, ah, voice my displeasure and unhappiness. I’m not all gloom and doom–if I didn’t like being an author and publishing books, I wouldn’t do it. Anyway, read on if you want a more sophisticated update on what I’ve been doing lately.

I’m almost done editing my series. After a heart to heart talk with myself, I admitted I need to rewrite most of the ending. It’s not as heart-wrenching as I want it to be… what I have now isn’t worthy of half a million words. It probably won’t take too long. I’m just not happy with the last scene where they get together for good, although I thought it would be a good idea to end the whole thing with an epilogue so I’ve been writing that in my head for the past few nights while I’ve been trying to sleep. It’s not so I can add more words or tie up a very tiny loose end that I left open in book 2, but rather, I like when a book’s ending circles around to the beginning. I started the series with one couple and ended it with another couple, but I want to bring the first couple back and let them wrap it up. It will add a few days of writing and editing, but that’s okay. These books will be perfect the first time out, and I can’t say that about very many (none) of the books I’ve published.

As far as series go, I’ve talked before about having two books done of a different six book series, but I’ve been dragging my feet because writing four more books feels really daunting and I don’t want to do it. So, I thought rewriting parts of book one to eliminate the need for two of the books would be a lot easier than forcing myself to write all four. I don’t want the two I have to go to waste–they’re good stories. After I decided the amount of rewriting would be worth it, I was relieved and instead of working on my mafia books, I’m going to write a quick romantic suspense standalone and then work on those for a 2025/26 release. I want to write a standalone for something easy after all the work I’ll have put into this series. I’m burnt out, but I don’t want to not write, and since I have something partially plotted out, I thought I might as well. And also since I have a love/hate relationship scrolling through stock photos, I think I might already have a cover which will elevate some stress while I’m writing it. Things could change, but I like what I have. It was actually a little difficult to figure out a romantic suspense cover that didn’t have a couple on it (the same issue I had when I was working on A Heartache for Christmas‘s cover), but I didn’t want to deviate from the brand I have going. My covers all have a single man on them, most in suits, the only one who isn’t is Sawyer, but that’s a small-town romantic suspense as well, and sometimes my guys aren’t dressed in suits all the time.

So, I’m happy with what I’ve got scheduled for books in the coming 24 months or so, and the cover I created for the standalone is icing on the cake.

I don’t have much else going on. I mentioned my health in Thursday’s post so I won’t bother going over that again. Threads has been the filler I needed to let go of Twitter, and I haven’t been tempted to log in just to see what’s going on and I don’t miss having it on my phone. I have come to realize though, after engaging with some authors there and just generally scrolling, I’m in the minority concerning what authors believe in about 99.9% of the time. It’s not that I don’t care about my books, it’s that I don’t take my books as seriously as everyone else takes theirs.

What I don’t mind but seems like everyone else does:

I’ll give ARCs to whoever and don’t check up on them after the ARCs have been sent out. ARCs and forms confused me way before I joined Threads and I even wrote a blog post about it back in November. Authors on Threads take ARCs very seriously and I’m still kind of appallingly fascinated at some of the forms authors ask potential reviewers to fill out. I guess I’ll never be an ARC reader because I’ll never fill out a form for the privilege. I feel readers are doing me the favor, not the other way around, and I would never subject a reader to that. Ever. If you’re interested in that blog post, you can read it here: https://vaniamargene.com/2023/11/06/arc-forms-creating-a-review-team/

I don’t mind giving books away. I get a sense of loathing when we talk about giving books away, though I haven’t come across a thread that expressly addressed that subject (besides the hoops authors make their ARC reviewers go through). But the tone on Threads overall seems to suggest that authors want to be paid for each and every copy and they don’t understand or don’t want to understand the value of giving away free books. I put Faking Forever into a giant promo last December and gave away over 9,000 copies. Since the date I gave it way, that book has made $206.00 mostly in KU reads. Though that may be small potatoes, I haven’t done any other promo on it, so if someone asks me If I want 200 dollars, I say yes. Plus, I’m finding readers. Not the 9,000 people who downloaded my book because I know, just like I have started collecting free books, that a reader actually reading it is slim, but readers saw it, and I have 206 pieces of proof that they did.

Not to mention, I have a free book hanging out on my sister site, and overall, My Biggest Mistake has been downloaded over 1,000 times. I think that number may rise as a lot of my subscribers didn’t even bother to open their welcome email after they subscribed to my newsletter. Now it’s more easily accessible, so I’m thinking I’ll be giving away even more copies in the future.

I don’t care about pirates pirating my book. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not. The only crappy thing is Amazon shoots first and asks questions later, so I’m fully prepared for them to shut down my account at some point because my books are elsewhere, though not with my consent. It’s why I pay for an Alliance of Independent Authors membership. I won’t panic, I’ll just reach out to them and ask them to help me get my account back. I won’t even bother trying to take on Amazon alone. It will be futile and I’ve had enough mental health crises over my book business to last me for the rest of my life. Blasé? Maybe. But I tend not to worry about stuff I can’t control. Authors will watermark ARCs, change one word in their books to try to pinpoint where the pirated copies are coming from, blame being in KU. The fact is, your book can get pirated anywhere at anytime and pointing fingers and throwing out accusations is not the best way to handle this. You could inadvertently offend someone and honestly, it’s not worth playing Nancy Drew. It’s going to happen, so there’s point in being bitter.

I doubt I’ll ever put a PR box together. Ordering author copies, ordering bling, packaging it all up (gotta have a pretty box too) and putting it in the mail to a bookstragrammer who may or may not do anything with it sounds like something I don’t want to do even if I could afford it. I didn’t even know this was a thing–well, I knew it was a thing, but the number of bookstagrammers on Threads and that I have access to them surprised me. Like, if I asked if anyone wanted a billionaire book box there might be some that would actually say yes. You would have to enjoy that kind of thing to bother to do it because with the number of complaints on Threads, the ROI doesn’t seem to be there. Like a book that doesn’t sell but you’re proud of it anyway, you would definitely have to enjoy the process. It did make me think that now that I have more of a brand established I could order some business cards or bookmarks. Stickers, though, I’m not fan and have never put a sticker on my Mac or my Kindle cover–not even the cute Vellum flower I picked up at my last writer’s conference. Now that I have a real bookshelf, I ordered a few author copies of my books to have on hand, so business cards at least would make some sense. I’ll think on it and get back to you. Do you have business cards?

I don’t care about paper. Signings and having your books in bookstores is a big deal to a lot of authors, and I just couldn’t care less. One author was pushing her hardcover, and it was 35 dollars. I have to work two hours to afford a book like that. Readers who can afford to buy paper are not my target audience and I only offer paper as an alternative to a Kindle because some people can afford to buy paperbacks, but that is a very very small percentage of my readers. (I sold 64 paperbacks in 2023.) I think authors who push paperbacks don’t really understand that it’s a whole different audience of readers who have access to expendable cash. The economy is such that people are being priced out of their rentals, no one can afford to buy a house, and grocery prices have not dropped, even though COVID is “over.” You’ll have to decide if the glamour of having your book on a bookshelf is worth the hassle, because for me it is definitely not.

I try not to engage with posts I don’t agree with like the person who’s worried she’s losing readers because there’s 18 months between book two and three of her trilogy. Of course she’s going to lose readers. People don’t wait around that long. There’s a lot of content out there and there’s no reason for a reader to wait for you. If you push book three and let people know it’s finally published, you may be able to corral some of those readers back into the trilogy because they’ll want to see how it ends. But that takes money and a lot of social media posting, and it could have been avoided if she’d just saved up her books. I get people are impatient and no one wants to do that, so you take the pros and cons of whatever choice you make.

I don’t know if I can think of other things off the top of my head, but it’s safe to assume that I’m a square peg of an author trying to fit into a round hole of the writing community. Still, there’s a professionalism over there that I like that Twitter lacked and if you haven’t joined Threads, it’s not a bad place to scroll for book news.

I received an email the other day and the subject line was Vania Margene Rheault featured in Feedspot Top 100 Contemporary Book Blogs. I get stuff like this sometimes, especially to my other gmail accounts I don’t check very often and I usually discount it as spam. I opened it, and it was a legitimate email! It read:

Hi there,

My name is Anuj Agarwal, I’m the Founder of Feedspot.

I would like to personally congratulate you as your blog Vania Margene Rheault has been selected by our panelist as one of the Top 100 Contemporary Book Blogs on the web.

I personally give you a high-five and want to thank you for your contribution to this world. This is the most comprehensive list of Top 100 Contemporary Book Blogs on the internet and I’m honored to have you as part of this!

We’d be grateful if you can help us spread the word by briefly mentioning about the Top 100 Contemporary Book Blogs list in any of your upcoming post.

Please feel free to reach out with any questions.

Best,
Anuj

I’m flattered as this is the first recognition of my blog. If you go onto the site, https://blog.feedspot.com/contemporary_book_blogs/ you can scroll through the rest of them. I did and found some great blogs to follow… I’m in good company! So, thank you, Anuj, for the honor.

I guess that’s all I have for this week. I hope next week I can give you better progress report on my series. Things keep popping up during my days off that cut into my editing time, but I’m going to put my head down and plow through the rest of the month.

Until next time!

Finding Your Place

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This is a whining post. If you don’t want to hear it, check in on Monday for a more grown-up Author Update. 😛

Words: 985
Time to read: 5 minutes

A friend of mine, well, we haven’t been friends for a while now but we’ve remained… acquaintances?, wrote all her friends/followers/readers and told them that she was leaving the writing/author community… again. I don’t mean to pick on her, but she does this every once in a while, and every time she does, I get reflective and think about where I am and where I want to be.

I’ve been writing and publishing for about eight years now, and I have never left, have never unpublished books, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t struggled finding my place. I think we all do, on some level, looking for a community or looking for readers and building a fanbase. We write and write and work and work and we realize that no matter how hard we run on that treadmill, after you turn it off, you’re in the same place, a tired and a sweaty mess.

She’s disappeared a few times now, trying to find her own place in life and in the writing/author community, and honestly, I don’t know what she’s looking for. She probably doesn’t know either, and it’s not so difficult to say if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you can’t find it.

I hate when she does this because I always feel bad for her, though she’s not looking for sympathy. I think she wants to be a writer, wants to be an author who sells books, but I don’t know what’s standing in her way. I’ve never been the type of person whose identity depends on a label. I was never only a wife, never only a mother, never only a daughter, or a sister, or anything else I’ve been over the years, and while I don’t want to assume, it does seem she relies on other people to tell her who she is. I’ve always been my own person and maybe she struggles with that. I have no idea. You have to be selfish if you want to be a writer, work hard on something you love that others deem frivolous and unnecessary. Especially if you’re not making money yet. Maybe she bowed under the guilt of taking time for herself. You have to, or you don’t have time to write.

Whenever she makes these announcements, I wish she would be more forthcoming, not to give us any explanations because she certainly doesn’t owe us any, but so I can pick through whatever I feel whenever she does this. Though, her job isn’t to make me feel better about her leaving. That’s silly.

Sometimes I think a lot of this hollowness I (sometimes) feel is because I haven’t been well over the past three years. Health is can be taken for granted, and it’s only when you lose it do you realize how much you miss it. A memory on Facebook from four years ago popped up on my timeline yesterday, a selfie I took because I was having a good hair day.

twenty pounds, a box of dryer sheets, and almost a pandemic ago….

Of course, a lot goes into happiness than just how you feel. My ex-fiancé wasn’t an ex, so we were probably in an okay place. I hadn’t lost a couple of my cats, and the deaths of Harley and Blaze hit me hard. I might even have still been going into my workplace–though I enjoy working from home now, the transition wasn’t smooth.

While I’m not feeling as terrible as I did before my Mayo Clinic appointment in February, I’m not feeling as great as I hoped either. But, having a diagnosis has helped the mental part of it. Not knowing why you feel like crap is worse than feeling like garbage but at least understanding why–even if there really is no cure.

I can blame working on this series for so long… I’m tired, but working on something new won’t help. Same day, different document. Hoping that maybe this will be the book that will turn the tide.

I don’t feel this melancholy all the time. I’ve actually had to be in pretty good mental health to withstand three years of feeling like I have. I doubt I would even be feeling this way at all this morning if it wasn’t for her announcement, and is it selfish to wish that if she’s going to leave, that she would just stay gone? If she really doesn’t want to write anymore that she would find something else to do? Either that or if she ever does come back, that I’m in a different place so I don’t notice.

I’m not even sure what the point of this post is except I needed a place to put my feelings, and besides a handful of friends who are too busy navigating their own lives to listen to me moan about my “problems” that I admit, aren’t really problems, there really is no one else. I go through this every now and then, feeling lost, but at the same time, walking on a path I know I want to be on, heading in the direction I know I want to go. Can you be lost when you’re doing that?

I have no idea.

Anyway, so when she says she’s leaving, she usually goes all in, and I ordered her paperback just in case she unpublishes. I helped her design her cover, and I’ll just put her book with the rest of my indies on my bookshelf and she’ll turn into someone I used to know along with most of the authors there.

But I do know one thing–I should shower and open my blinds.

I have a roast in the slow cooker and a series to finish.

I know where I’m going, and I’m finding happiness in the journey.

I hope that she does too–wherever it is she’s going.

Monday Misery and Giving Up (Kind Of)

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woman wearing floral dress under water. text says: when nothing goes your way, you can feel like you're drowning

It seems whenever I manage to figure out one thing, something else pops up in its place–which is the definition of adulthood, I guess. I’ve been feeling better, so of course that means another areas of my life have to go to crap.

Ever since we had to authenticate our newsletters and align them with our websites, I have had nothing but problems. From actually taking down my website for twenty-four hours (thank God the WordPress chat was available!) to the newest disaster–broken links in my most recent newsletter I sent out on Friday, this has been one headache after the next. That SNAFU, broken links going to a scary error webpage–

webpage error message. text reads, your connection is not private. attackers might be trying to steal your information from vania.vaniamargene.com (for example, passwords, messages or credit cards) learn more.

–ended up resulting in me having to upgrade my MailerLite plan so I could contact their tech support. Because of the number of subscribers I have, that totaled a whopping 30 dollars a month, and honestly, I knew it wasn’t worth it. I had a 30% open rate, send once a month, and can’t pinpoint exact sales that have come from my newsletter.

So, I did what I tell you not to do–I made a choice based in frustration and anger and deleted my MailerLite account. I didn’t wait for the tech to get back to me, just exported my subscribers, deleted my account, and said screw it. It wasn’t completely spontaneous decision–I have a link in the back of all my books pointing them to my website where readers can sign up to my newsletter and download my free reader magnet. Luckily, the link was to my website and not a MailerLite landing page. I amended my website, said I would be blogging in place of a newsletter due to issues with my aggregator and that they can still download My Biggest Mistake. But instead of having to sign up for a newsletter to gain access, the Bookfunnel link is right there. Giving away a book like that with no strings is probably crazy, and after a while I may sell it, too. It won’t be in KU, but I can price it at .99 and have it pull double duty as a reader freebie and a book in my backlist if they want it that badly. I have choices, at least, but it will have to stay free on my website unless I want to update back matter for 20 books, and I actually do not want to do that.

I just was so tired of all this stuff–I’ve been dealing with the issues this authentication process has brought on since January, and honestly, I couldn’t take it anymore. The last straw was when I sent out that newsletter that had broken links in it. I can handle things going wrong on my end, but I do not want to look unprofessional or spammy to my subscribers. They trust me to keep their information safe, and that error message when they clicked on a link looked terrible. I never want to go through that again. I’ve been blogging on WordPress for eight years now, and nothing has ever happened like that before. All the links work, my site is secure, and I will never mess with the DNS records again.

If turning my “newsletter” into a blog loses me readers or subscribers, so be it. Dealing with MailerLite and the high monthly cost would have been very bad for my mental health long term. I don’t mind blogging, in fact, I love it, and content is content as far as I’m concerned. I was able to upload my MailerLite subscriber list to my author website and my subscribers will get an email when I blog. If they don’t want that, they can unsubscribe, though I’m not sure why they would. It really doesn’t matter where the content comes from.

A lot of them never opened my welcome email though, so that means they didn’t download My Biggest Mistake, and they can’t now unless they visit my website due to the links that probably won’t work even if they kept my newsletter emails. When I write my first blog post I’ll have to remind them to download it. I probably still will only blog for my readers once a month and that was another reason I was okay getting rid of MailerLite. I wasn’t using it very often and it makes sense to stay with a more cost effective alternative.

Of course, I’m like a lot of people and lying in bed at night will think about something humiliating and embarrassing that happened twenty years after the fact. This sting will stay with me for a long time, even though it was a MailerLite problem and not my fault. It helps I’m familiar with newsletter mixups. I’ve signed up for several, and usually once a month someone sends out a newsletter full of links and five seconds later there’s an amended newsletter sent out because the links were wrong, broken, or missing. My readers are probably used to that kind of thing too, but I was so grateful to anyone who gave me their email address that swallowing this humiliation is going to take some time. The only thing that I am happy with right now is how easy it was for me to turn my author website into a blog and that I had the wherewithal to export my list and add them to my website. I paid for a lot of those with FB ads and people signing up in the backs of my books. Those emails belong to me until they unsubscribe and they can do that if they wish. I’m not going to worry about where WordPress’s emails end up–if when I blog the updates end up in their promotions or spam. My site is safe, and I restored all the original DNS records. Maybe my updates won’t land in their inbox, but at this point, I just want to get back to writing and updating my readers when I have something fun to share and don’t care about the rest.

It was a costly lesson, energy and mental health wise, to learn some things just don’t matter as much as some people tell you it should. It was a relief to leave my newsletter groups–people are still talking and doing damage control regarding their own authentication nightmares, and I don’t need to see that anymore. I don’t need advice on what to share with my readers–I’m a writer and creating content is what I do.

I finished editing the 5th book in my series, and now I’m taking a break before I edit the last. I have a lot of admin stuff that doesn’t include newsletter clean up, such as getting my promo list I started a couple of years ago finished. I wanted a comprehensive list of promo sites that included how much it cost, if there was a minimum number of reviews required, that kind of thing. There are soooo many promo sites out there and one of my goals this year was to try the littler ones to expand my reach. I started up a Google Docs, and I’ll have to check over what I have and see if all the information is still accurate or if I need to update some entries. I also have a lot of screenshots on my phone of promo sites people have talked about in various groups and I want to add those as well. David Gaughran has a list that he updated last year, and you can see it here. https://davidgaughran.com/best-promo-sites-books/ I borrowed heavily from it, but there are a lot of promo sites that I picked up just scrolling around in my groups. Lee Hall also has one on his site, and you can look at it here: https://leehallwriter.com/2021/02/23/a-concise-list-of-book-promotion-sites/ I’ll finish it up this month and make it accessible for everyone.

I also would like to add a tab to this website for book covers that I make that don’t have anywhere to go. I like making them when I’m bored and don’t have anything to do, or if I see an author cover that sucks and I redo it just for fun. Sometimes I’ll do a cover for someone without them asking, and as you can imagine, that never turns out well, and they say thanks, but no thanks. I’d like to put them up, free of charge for authors who need something but don’t know what to do or just need a placeholder until they can afford something better. One of the prettiest covers I ever did was this one, but I’ll never use it because I don’t write women’s fiction.

promo graphic of a fake book called the forgotten bride. a blurry woman, back to camera holding a bouquet of lilies.

Anyway, so I’ll do that when my series is all done and up for preorder. I have a lot of mockups in my Canva account, but I would have to download the stock photos and clean them up enough that I would only have to change the author names and titles. They wouldn’t be high-end by any means, but if an author is just starting out and sees a cover they could use, then it would worth it for me.

I think among that, getting my series finalized, and doing my promo list, I have enough going on. I need to shake off what happened to my newsletter. I’m not the first it’s happened to, and I won’t be the last. One of the last posts I saw before I left those groups is a poor woman who lost 800 subscribers because MailerLite got rid of the free classic accounts and her account and all her subscribers were purged. She was upset, to say the least, but MailerLite told everyone over and over again. It’s why I did the migration in December of last year, though that was just first of the headaches that started.

I think that is all I have for this week, but it’s enough. 2024 has started out with a bang, that’s for sure, and though this might be inviting trouble, I just don’t know what else could go wrong. And it’s really weird, I guess because I posted on a Thursday when my subscribers aren’t used to it, but I posted about author transparency last week and no one read it. So strange. If you want to read my goose egg post, you can look here.

Thanks, and have a good week, everyone!

Author Update: I Finally Made the Leap

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Words: 1828
Time to read: 10 minutes

picture taken by moi when her hands should have been on the wheel. Sunset, Fargo, ND #nofilter

Happy Monday! I hope your week is getting off to a great start, and may that include a bottomless cup of coffee.

Today’s post is more of “what’s going on with me” than anything else. I finally left Twitter for good after a scuffle over a tweet who was calling out authors like Stephenie Meyer and Sarah J Maas (and I think Rebecca Yarros was in there too). The person who tweeted brought race into it, and I scooted my butt out of that conversation. As a white cishet woman who grew up in a middle income family, I know how privileged I am in regard to anything, not just publishing. I’m fortunate I have money to play with ads, I’m fortunate I have a college education. I’m fortunate in a lot of ways, and I have never argued that. I know publishing has a long way to go in terms of marginalized voices. There’s no debating that whatsoever, but I think there’s a difference between hating books that have done well because you think they aren’t well-written and don’t deserve it, and hating certain (white) women authors because of how the publishing industry is. I believed that tweet came from the former perspective when it was the latter, and had I known, I wouldn’t have gotten involved. I’ve always defended authors like Stephenie, EL James, and Colleen Hoover (the vacuum lady, if your nickname can be that disrespectful. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to scrub this joke about her books from my mind: Nothing sucks like a Hoover). We always say that authors aren’t what they write, but then in the next breath we call Stephenie Meyer a groomer supporter because Jacob imprinted on Renesmee when she was an infant. I get tired of the hypocrites, tired of the bitterness. I won’t debate anyone’s experience, and I sure as hell won’t tell someone how to think or feel, so I bowed out. I blanked out my banner, took my personal profile picture down and said in my bio that the account is no longer active. I don’t like that vibe, only because yes, the industry does have a lot of work to do, but screaming about it won’t make change. Attacking people won’t make change. Spewing resentment all over the internet won’t make change. And I see this from everyone. It wasn’t that long ago a white author was editing Rebecca Yarros’ first page, saying what a crap book her Fourth Wing novel is and how it didn’t deserve to be printed. I stood up to her, but right or wrong on my part, when someone is calling me a mad white lady, I’ll graciously concede.

It was a lesson to keep scrolling if you don’t like what you see, and if you’re online you’re going to be tested many times. I joined Threads with the hope that I can stop myself from commenting if something makes me angry (after a week in, there is a lot that makes me angry). I have a low tolerance for stupidity and there is a lot of it in the self-publishing industry. I saw this on FB last week! This is the stuff that makes me mad, and this is the kind of reply that gets me into trouble.

Original post: For all the author's not being paid by Amazon we need to get together and make a move and demand our money. If you are being told they are probably lying to you like thousands of other author's. To find out how many of your books have sold do Google your name plus the name of your books PLUS "in stock" Those words are important because if they are in stock they were paid for by the book store. My reply:What are you talking about? Amazon doesn't cheat authors. If you don't like how they treat you, don't publish with them. There are a ton of other platforms that will sell your book. And please learn where apostrophes go!
name and FB group blanked out to protect the intelligence-challenged.

I get tired of people saying that Amazon cheats its authors, get tired of being called a sheeple because I like to write to market. Maybe my books don’t deserve to sell either, because I write romance, use tropes, and have fun writing my books (and can write them quickly too, oh snap!). It’s just another form of gatekeeping as far as I’m concerned, but I do understand there isn’t room at the table for everyone, and I’ve been eating my meals on the floor for a long time. At least I have a piece of carpet, and I know a lot of authors don’t. So, I’m trying approach my time on Threads in a more positive way–be helpful if I can, be encouraging. But mainly, I joined to keep my thumb on the pulse of the industry–indie pub as well as romance in particular. Like Tyrion Lannister, I like knowing things, like the RWA embracing AI and hosting classes to teach writers how to use it to write romance books.

Romance Writers of America (I believe this is a Facebook screenshot) Dive into the exciting world of AI-assisted romance writing with Rachelle Ayala, a multi-published romance author working on book number 100. Rachelle has been using AI for a year, and she's happy to cut through the hype and show you insider tips--from sparking new story ideas to refining your manuscript, generating scenes or penning compelling market copy. This session is packed with live demos of how Rachelle uses AI, practical advice on how to get started, and a glimpse into the future of how AI will impact writing and storytelling. Visit https://www.rwa.org/chapterevents to lear more and view all the upcoming RWA chapter events offered. Hashtags.

I like knowing things like the cover for Gothikana was made with AI elements and the publisher is claiming “not to know.” You can read the Publisher’s Weekly article here. I just like knowing that stuff because I feel like it’s part of my job as an indie author to know what people are talking about. There was some of that on Twitter too, but there was too much bitterness to wade through to see what I really wanted to see. I could have just started blocking people, but that kind of atmosphere isn’t good for anyone’s mental health. So far, Threads seems to be more pleasant and professional, and that can be a good thing, but also maybe a not-so-good-thing. I do a lot of things that are looked down on, like editing my own books, doing my own covers. Shilling Bryan Cohen’s free ad class when a lot of people don’t think of him as anything more than a hack. You don’t want to be anything less than who you are online because that will always come back to bite you, but I’m going to be a lot more apprehensive and careful about what I share on Threads. Mostly, I just needed a new place to scroll, and I’ll follow people if I like their content without thought of gaining followers. I don’t need them–I’m not planning to try to sell my books on there in any way. If you have an account and want to connect, here’s my profile: https://www.threads.net/@vaniamargenerheault

Speaking of selling books, my Amazon ads are still on fire, and I’m having to keep a close eye on them. Unfortunately, they are doing really well impression- and click-wise, and it triggered my fear of missing out. I don’t want to turn any of them off just in case I’m pausing highly profitable ads. And you really don’t know that until you turn them off and over the course of a couple weeks your sales die. Having FOMO in this industry is terrible. I buy classes, let ads run, join author groups I probably don’t need to be a part of. I probably COULD turn off half my Amazon ads and I would be just fine, but I already compromised and turned off all the ads in the UK, so I’m just going to have to watch them like a hawk. I’ll use this blog as an accountability partner and compare royalties and ad spend on a biweekly basis. I don’t want to do so much of that in real time as I’ve said before, Amazon’s reporting isn’t that great, and a book that looks like it isn’t getting page reads could prove me wrong when the reporting catches up.

I’m on chapter nine of the 5th book in my series. I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish by the end of the month, but getting both done by the end of March seems doable. I should start playing with the covers more seriously so I don’t have a panic attack when the editing is done but the covers are still unfinished. I’m not even sure the direction I want to go in anymore, except I like the frames, and I found some gold filigree that I put together to make them that looks really nice. I still need the men, maybe the backgrounds. I bought a few font duos from Creative Fabrica the other day (thank you Stanee in the Design Resources Hub on FB for posting the sale), and the only way to know if they’ll work is to try them and see. There’s no point to that though unless I can get a template cover firmed up, but I’ve been playing so I don’t feel too lost or like I’m starting from scratch.

Scrolling through my author FB groups made me realize that my email attached to this website wasn’t accepting incoming email. Apparently, it’s an issue for anyone who was messing around with their DNS records. I already knew how to restore records from when a WordPress tech support person helped me get my website back up after I accidentally deleted my A records, so restoring my email DNS records was easy. I was cautioned and was told that my authentication wouldn’t work anymore if I did that, but I reran all the tests, and it looks like everything is still fine. I feel bad that people couldn’t email me for a whole month because I didn’t know, but I’m lucky that not many people reach out to me anyway. Now that I figured that out, I hope all the damage control that I needed to do to get my newsletter and website aligned is over. But, as I’ve said, that is one of the reasons I’m in so many groups. You need that kind of information because you don’t always know what you don’t know.

I’ve been trying to do the things I said I was going to do if I felt better and I do, and I’ve been going on more walks in the evenings. Since I’ve been on my “ovary pills” as I call them, a lot of my negative feelings about going for walks are gone, and I’ve enjoyed my time outside. I guess I was feeling hormonally depressed and those pills have elevated my mood, which is funny because the order that went with my prescription is to “take as tolerated” and I am tolerating them just fine. That’s a good thing–I haven’t felt this much like myself in a long time. I also said I wanted to watch Queen Charlotte, and I have two episodes of that left. I have to force myself to watch TV because it’s not normally something I like to do anyway, but I’m enjoying the show and I’ll be glad to be caught up. I still want to rewatch the first season of Carnival Row on Prime and watch the second/last season. I really enjoyed that too, and I was happy they finished it off as COVID delayed the filming. It will be nice to see how it ends.

I think that is all for now. I hope you all have a great week, and thanks for all your support. I’ve had a lot of people say they are happy I’m feeling better, and I appreciate it a lot. It’s been a long three years, and it’s nice to be excited again.

Until next time!

Monday Musings; Do What You’re Supposed to do Already

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Words: 1707
Time to read: 9 minutes

Happy Monday! I can honestly say that because Mondays are my Saturdays, and I’m fortunate I can work through the weekends and avoid them. I always say I don’t have much to say, but this week, it’s really true. I’m only three chapters into the fifth book in my series, and this chapter is 20k words long. It will take a bit to edit it, but getting through these is starting to burn me out, so I don’t mind going slow. It’s a big project anyway, and I should start playing with the covers when I don’t feel like editing. Mostly for now that’s just scrolling through stock photos and that’s becoming more and more disheartening. I can try a couple of different sites like dreamstime.com and 123rf.com. I don’t mind paying if I know I’ll use the photos. I’ve downloaded quite a few with my DepositPhotos packages I purchased through AppSumo, and I don’t end up using all of them. Because they were so inexpensive, it doesn’t matter, but if I’m going to go through a different site, I need to make absolutely sure I’ll use them and so far I haven’t bothered to hunt and peck through those sites.

It’s been a week and a few days since my appointment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. The good news is she seemed to know what was wrong and I left with a couple of creams and a medication that suppresses my ovaries. This was part of the best news because since I had my hysterectomy in March of 2022, my ovulation cycle has made me feel like garbage every month. She explained why and when she offered me that medication, I jumped all over it. I’ve only taken it for eight days, but I can already tell a difference in the way I feel. The other stuff I’m dealing with hasn’t lightened up, but I knew going in that since I’ve been suffering for so long, there wouldn’t be an overnight fix. My treatment at this point is more of a journey than a destination, and I have a follow up appointment at the end of May. Now that we know what to expect and how to get around, this will just be a quick overnight thing and more than likely we’ll head back after my appointment instead of staying for another night. They were very efficient and she seemed to know what was wrong with me just by talking to me and a quick exam. So, there’s that update. Nothing too new there, but life has been smoothing out for me, thank God. I went and got my teeth cleaned and my oil changed last week, so now that my bumper fiasco is over, besides getting my taxes done (which is tedious because I print out all my book spend and report my royalties to the IRS in case I ever strike it rich), most of the drudgery of adulting is finished for the next little bit.

Even social media has been quiet, not much on Twitter (though I am liking to call it X more and more simply because I feel like it’s a warning to stay away), just some reviewer shaming, some people who are complaining about their books being returned, that kind of thing that I don’t see in my author groups on FB at least. It still is surprising to me how writers think that if they’re querying they don’t have to do anything. Don’t have to edit because an agent/acquiring editor will take care of it, don’t have to market because the publisher will take care of it. Even just today I saw a woman lamenting because she queried too soon (I wonder how she figured that out?), and I mean, if you get a book deal, wouldn’t you want to work your ass off to promote your book? Shouldn’t authors feel that way no matter who publishes their book? Yet it feels like so many writers think all they have to do is crank out 350 pages of brilliance and their work is done. A huge controversy last week (cause by this now-deleted tweet)–

–was over whether querying writers should have a website–some said no, some said yes–but if you don’t want to, is this a hill you’re going to die on? It’s free to set one up. Isn’t it better to have a social media presence before you query so potential agents have something to look at? Querying/having an agent and publishing is a partnership, but it seems like writers don’t want to be a partner, they want it all done for them. Let me tell you, from doing this from the ground up and seeing some of my author friends who have given up their rights to small presses and gotten them back, it’s a hell of a lot easier to be in charge of all your stuff yourself. And this isn’t a debate between querying/trad pub vs. self-pub. This is talking about taking control of your book business in any way you can. To know how to do covers in case you ever want to be hybrid and put out some books on your own, to know how to format, to know the back end of your own website. Knowing how your newsletter provider works. Knowing how to do things for yourself will never hurt you in the long run. Because you know what sucks? Depending on people to do stuff for you. You’re at their mercy . . . if they’re busy doing something else, if your relationship with them goes south, if they simply drop out of the game. Publishing is work. It will never not be work, and I should stop being amazed at the writers and authors who think someone else should be doing that work. Honey, just because you wrote 80k words, your work is only just beginning. Suck it up, pay for a Canva Pro account, and learn how to use it.

I had some super awesome Amazon ads going, so much so I spent 100 dollars in five days. Super good! Not really, because I wasn’t getting the sales or borrows (checking your rank to see if it goes up will tell you if you’re getting borrows. There really is no other way as Amazon sees a borrow as a sale and adjusts your rank accordingly.) Fifty pounds, fifty US dollars. I paused my UK ads because I couldn’t afford it, let my US ads keep going, and they are still rocking forty dollars later. I’m having some good impressions and clicks in Canada, too, but not nearly as expensive at only seven dollars, so I left those alone. Maybe my Lost & Found trilogy covers are working after all. I’m always very very leery of turning off a well-performing ad. Mostly because of ad and royalties reporting. Nothing Amazon does is in real time, and I would hate to shut off an ad only for my sales to die. In fact, they even added this disclaimer to their dashboard: All numbers are based on the time zone of the marketplace where the purchase was made. Please note monthly KENP numbers may change and will be finalized near the 15th of the following month.

text on plain white background says: Dashboard All numbers are based on the time zone of the marketplace where the purchase was made. Please note monthly KENP numbers may change and will be finalized near the 15th of the following month.Learn more about the Dashboard.

Waiting until the following month for real page reads numbers…..yeah…..so you know not to do anything drastic or be ticked off too soon. You should never make decisions when you’re angry or disappointed. Things can change in an instant and you never want to regret anything. Pausing your ads and then restarting them can make them not turn on again at all, ruining the momentum they had before you shut them off. It’s the risk I took pausing my UK ads, but I’m going to have to be okay with it. I don’t have the cash to pay 50,000 dollars for 100,000 dollars worth of royalties. While that’s great ROI, I need to start smaller, and I’m guessing you do too.

I’m also running FB ads, so I’ll always have something going that costs money, but it sure would be nice if I could come out ahead every once in a while. Not that I’m complaining. Breaking even is fine too–I’m finding readers and that’s a good thing.

That’s about all I have going on for this week. I’m going shopping with my sister on Tuesday so I can buy some bookshelves for my living room. I live like a college student (and a poor one at that) and it would be nice to display my books. Now that we don’t have cats, I don’t have to hide them from a furbaby who wants to eat all my covers. She’s ruined plenty of spines using them as a scratching post, so while they will be displayed in a more pleasing manner, they will look well-loved indeed.

Speaking of querying and newsletters and all that, I must have gotten purged from Jane Friedman’s newsletter. I admit I don’t open my newsletters enough, and I missed hers, so I signed up again. She’s a good source of publishing news and also she hosts inexpensive classes with industry experts. If you want help with your query or first pages, take a look at this class hosted by her with guest Allison K Williams. https://janefriedman.com/get-past-gatekeepers/ (This is not an affiliate link.)

taken from Jane’s website

I’ve taken some of her classes before, and if you can’t watch it live, she makes the replay and all the handouts available after the fact, so don’t worry if you can’t fit it into your schedule. Her class with Allison is March 20th, 2024, from 1-3pm. It’s $35.00 and it will be worth every penny if landing an agent is one of your goals for 2024.

I hope you have a wonderful week ahead and good luck with all your endeavors! It’s not too late to hop on my social media calendar. I may end up making one for March. I’ve been able to stick to posting. My engagement isn’t the best, but it keeps my pages from looking so bleak. Nothing works without consistency, so we’ll see what happens in the coming months.

Until next time!

Monday Musings: Ghosted

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Ghosting someone isn’t this cute. (Judy Kao’s Images via Canva Pro)

Since my trip to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, I’ve been thinking a lot about ghosting. Being ghosted and doing the ghosting. I think we can all agree that being ghosted feels like crap. You have no idea why someone decided not to talk to you anymore, why they would drop off the face of the earth without an explanation or a goodbye. Maybe it’s easier to understand if you’ve done the ghosting in the past–we all have reasons why all of a sudden we would stop talking to someone. I have done the ghosting and have been ghosted and neither feel particularly great.

My appointment went well–all seventy minutes of it–a timeframe that I most definitely would not have been granted here in Fargo, ND. She asked me to start at the beginning of my troubles, and I did. She gave me an exam, consulted with a dermatology specialist, and we came up with a plan. It all seemed to easy, too good to be true, but it’s too early to know if it is or not. I didn’t expect a magic bullet–I’ve been suffering for three years. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if it took that long to find some normalcy, though she did assure me that I would start feeling better in the next couple of weeks. I go back for a ninety day followup at the end of May, and I thank God I have the resources to do that. I know how fortunate I am that I had the means and support to travel, but it’s pretty sad that I had to resort to that in the first place.

Anyway, so I’m not proud to say I’ve ghosted people, and not just because for the past three years I’ve been dealing with a health issue. Back when I first started writing (and unfortunately, publishing) I was really involved with Writer Twitter, and I met a lot of really nice people and made a lot of friends, some I still have today (though they’re more acquaintances now). But like anything, networking and friendships need to be kept at a moderate level, and I reached a point where all I was doing with my time was talking to people. Culling relationships to make room for the real reason why I was on social media to begin with hadn’t been on my mind, but some of those relationships made it easy. I ghosted one friend because everything was about her. Her books, her writing, her life. Friendship needs to go both ways, and frankly, after a couple of years, I got tired of supporting her with nothing in return. Looking back, I should have been grownup and told her I wasn’t getting out of our friendship what I needed. Being a grownup is difficult though, and I took the coward’s way out. She let me go easily enough and maybe she didn’t care I faded away. At the beginning of our friendship she said she had trouble keeping friends, and I had no idea why, but after a couple of years it became apparent. If someone tells you they have a hard time keeping friends, believe them. Why will come out soon enough.

I ghosted someone else because he was involved with so much drama on Twitter, I honestly thought he was going to drag me down with him. A stalker latched on to him and he ended up having to leave Twitter for good. We corresponded by email for a bit, but I didn’t want my relationships to be about drama, I wanted to talk writing and publishing. I stopped responding to his emails which was probably for the best. I think he dropped offline all together and his last book was published in 2017. He’s unpublished all of his books, which is really too bad. I own all his paperbacks. He was a good writer.

I don’t have a great track record with people in my real life, and I probably sound like a horrible person. I haven’t had the energy to keep up with anyone, like my friend I used to run races with back when I was running instead of writing. We’ve been friends for twenty years, but dealing with my stuff, I just couldn’t. I texted her recently and she gave me a short text back, but if I want to try to salvage that relationship I’m going to have to apologize and explain. I probably won’t have any energy for that until I know this treatment is going to work. There are other people who haven’t heard from me in a long time, people who have emailed me or messaged me on Facebook’s Messenger. I just get tired, and though I know I owe them responses, that’s as far as it’s gotten.

I could argue that I got carried away with my writing and let it take over, and that’s pretty truthful too. Once I started writing, almost ten years ago, I didn’t care about anything else, and still, to this day, no matter what the reason is behind it, I put in 30-40 hours into my books a week. Hiding from COVID and my health issue, yeah, but it’s also just a mental thing. I’m obsessed and not in a good way. I never found balance, and since I started my pen name, it’s gotten worse. All I care about is writing, and my relationships (and health as I’ve gained some weight) have suffered.

But, I’ve been on the receiving end, too, coworkers who have turned friends who have gone, or are going through, their own stuff, just decide to drop off. One coworker is doing that to me now–I haven’t heard from her for weeks, and she knew my Mayo appointment was important to me. Not a “good luck,” or a “tell me how it goes.” It hurts, and I know my behavior has hurt other people. If she ever decides she wants to start talking to me again, I’ll have to decide if it’s worth it. Like the people I’ve ghosted, you break trust, and she’s hurt my feelings. At this point, I doubt I’ll want to talk to her ever again, because what’s that saying…with friends like that, who needs enemies? I’ve gotten along fine without her, and it’s obvious she doesn’t need me, either.

I think the moral of this whole story is we know who we want in our lives and who is expendable. No one likes to think we aren’t important, but no matter what we’re going through, we make time for the people we want to keep close to us. Surprisingly, I haven’t alienated everyone in my life, and I would have to think if that was deliberate or if the people I have kept worked a little harder at keeping me in their lives. Not that I’m proud of that, either. Like I said, friendship goes both ways and I would never force someone to pull more weight than me in our relationship. I try to reach out as much as someone is reaching out to me. So, take from that what you will and apply it to your own life. Mediocre relationships aren’t worth the energy–sometimes it’s easier to be alone. You make that choice about people, and people make that choice about you.

Do I have amends to make? Yes. Will I make the time when I feel better? I hope so. Feeling normal seems like a pipe dream, though, and if I truly do make progress, maybe that will be the boost I need to reach out and at least explain. Then if people don’t accept my apology, it will be what I deserve and nothing less. I’m okay with that.

As far as author news, I realized I didn’t have any Amazon ads going (all the end dates came and went), so I decided to create a few new ads. The auto placement ads do really well for me (which tells me my 7 keywords that I set up when I published and my categories are on target) and I started getting impressions the next day. I also did some for Canada and the UK, but I’m going to have to watch those UK ads–they spend like crazy. I did ads for the first in my Lost & Found trilogy and the first in my rockstar trilogy. Read through really is the only way you can make any money if you’re spending money on ads.

I did the new Sponsored Brand ad for my Lost & Found trilogy, where now you have to choose a graphic to go along with your books. This is how the display looks in the ads dashboard. I don’t know how it looks in the wild, as they say, and I doubt I’ll bump into my own ad.

I was surprised they suggested comparing your books to others’ because with the Sponsored Products, you can’t mention other authors in your ad copy text (that I’m aware of, correct me if I’m wrong here). I’d already bought the graphic from DepositPhotos for a TikTok video I didn’t end up creating, but I think it fit perfectly with the background I chose for my books (I think they are both LA at night). We’ll see if they make any headway. I think the covers are working better, but I don’t read through my reviews to see if the edits are making an impact. I may not know that anyway as I never had a negative review saying my writing sucks. Here are my stats for this ad:

The left column is impressions (20,321), the 2 indicates clicks, the $1.44 is spend and the 209 is supposedly the page reads in KU that that have been attributed to the ad (though I’ve heard that’s not accurate). I’m not sure why I’m spending so much for a click–either I forgot to change the default bid, or I forgot to change the bid to dynamic down only. Either way, I’m going to have to keep an eye on it so it doesn’t get out of control. I don’t mind spending money as long as I come out even or ahead, but I’m also running FB ads and those use up a lot of money too. I like seeing the impressions though, knowing I’m getting my name out there. At the end of the day, it’s all you can really do.

As far as my February social media posts go, I need to backtrack for Saturday. I missed because I used all my time to edit after my trip. I finished book 4, but book 5 is going to need a lot of work. I wrote quickly, used a lot of garbage words, and FFS, I have a 90k book and only 11 chapters. These chapters are long, and if I remember right, one is over 20k words. I’m not going to change that during editing, that was definitely a deliberate choice on my part and it’s too late now. But I think I’ll be using up the rest of the month to get this book done. Even longer, maybe. Tedious no matter how I’m feeling.

That’s about all I have for this week, though I suppose it’s enough.

Have a great week!

Monday Author Update: Sweet Nothings.

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Words: 1757
Time to read: 9 minutes

Happy Monday! Well, I hope it’s happy for you, but if you’re not a full-time author, by the time you read this, you’ve probably guzzled a gallon of coffee and you’re sitting behind your desk at work wondering why you haven’t won the lottery. I know, I’m such a downer, but that’s life. I was scrolling Facebook yesterday and bumped into this motivational piece of perfection….

I don’t know why stupid stuff like that makes me laugh, but it does.

Anyway, not much on my plate this week besides going to Rochester, MN on Tuesday for my Mayo Clinic visit that’s scheduled on Wednesday afternoon. I’m fortunate we’re having a mild winter and I don’t have to worry about blizzards. Over the past three years I’ve talked a lot about how icky I feel, and I’m trying not to get my hopes up. This is an old subject, so I won’t waste any more time on it. I’ll be sure to update you next week, though, and hopefully I’ll have some good news to share.

I’m proud of myself and I’ve been doing the prompts that I made up for the February social media content calendar I shared with you last week. I don’t mind talking about myself, but I was at a loss of how to do it. The prompts help, and I’ll schedule posts for when I’m gone. The Canva scheduler makes that easy and I post to my FB author page and to my IG page. The algos don’t know who I am so I don’t get many likes or comments, but if I can teach them to know who I am (again), maybe that will change and I can start building my following (again).

Here it is if you missed it last week. It’s never too late to start posting.

I’m more than halfway done editing book 4 in my series. It’s slow going, taking out all the whens, whiles, and withs and some becauses. I definitely took the easy way out when I wrote these, and I’m still layering in feelings, emotions, and descriptions into the scenes. This book isn’t too bad. I’ve only added 1,000 words so far and I have 4 chapters left. I won’t get it done before my trip, as rewriting takes a long time, but I’m hoping to get all of them done by the end of March. I still have to do covers, and I wish I could afford to source my stock from a site that wasn’t DepositPhotos. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there and right now, I’m at their mercy. I think I’ve got the template ready to go–the backgrounds and possibly the title font (though I’m always on the lookout for beautiful font duets). I’m keeping the series logo I made for the other covers. There’s nothing wrong with it. Will these be the books where I start chopping heads off? Stay tuned.

I’m thisclose to joining Threads. I vowed I wouldn’t add another platform to my social media, but I see teaser posts on IG and FB enticing me to join. I’ve exceeded my limits of clicking and reading without having a profile. It’s not because I want to promote my books–IG and my FB author pages are enough for that. No, the posts Zuck’s been teasing me with are what I’ve been missing since Twitter went to the way of X. I need a place for book news. Facebook and the author groups I’ve joined fill in a lot of that, but I had to leave 20booksto50k for ethical reasons, and I left the Self Publishing Formula group that’s hosted by Mark Dawson after all that plagiarizing stuff came out. Losing those two groups hasn’t been a big deal, but I’m seeing that BookThreads could be what I need to fill in the gap. Twitter hasn’t been the same, and I got treated to more BS the other day when someone was commenting on this article:

https://www.theverge.com/c/23194235/ai-fiction-writing-amazon-kindle-sudowrite-jasper

They talk about about authors using AI to get ahead, write faster, crank out more content. I’ve often referred to self-publishing as a hamster wheel, that little furry guy running faster and faster but not getting anywhere. The industry is full of books and when you release a book that sinks the second you hit Publish, it can feel like you do a lot of work for nothing.

I keep my mouth shut a lot of the time now. I’m not popular on Twitter, my views are not well-received, much like Joanna Penn who said in the article she had to step away because she’s an AI cheerleader and she got a lot of pushback for that. I am not an AI cheerleader, but I feel out of place all the same.

I really do just want to make one thing clear–I do not blame Amazon (KDP) for the grind self-publishing had turned it. I’m not denying at all that it’s common, COMMON, for authors to publish 4-6 books a year. And not novellas, either. Full-length books. It’s common. But it’s the KNOWLEDGE that it’s common that can eat at you. You know authors are doing something you can’t. I can’t publish four books a year. Not without writing them and saving them up. Writing, editing, cover design, proofing the proof, it all takes too long. Especially if you’re dealing with a series. Especially if you want to publish something that’s got some quality to it. It’s not easy writing a book full of twists. Half the reason I sat on my series for so long is that I have 540,000 words of an intricate plot that I needed desperately to make sure held together. Only time away could give me that clarity, and it has proven to be valuable so far.

The woman featured in the article turned to AI for help. She’s living off her book money and that in itself, I’m sure, is stressful. I’m at the point where I don’t think I’ll ever be able to quit my day job, and that’s okay, but trying to find time to write after working 40 hours a week is stressful in its own way. I’m not not blaming this woman for letting AI write part of her books, that’s her choice, but the WHY she did it I don’t agree with. She said her readers would drop her if they had to wait too long between books, and I think that is complete BS. Okay, maybe not complete because I do think you need to have consistency when publishing. Even if you train your readers to only expect one book a year. Publishing is the fastest moving sloth there is, and yeah, you’re going to have your work cut out for you if you’re writing a series and need five years between books. That’s why I write my series before I publish them. People binge now, and I just go with it. But rather than turn to Al for help, there are things you can do.

Keep your readers informed. Start a newsletter or post consistently on social media. If you let your readers know what you’re doing, what you’re working on, and when the next book will come out, they will wait for you. Build a connection with your readers. Care about them, and they will care about you.

Recommend other books. Listen, when I was reading that article, I felt her desperation, but in the end you are not going to be the only author a reader reads. It’s impossible. Romance whale readers can read a book a day. There’s no humanly possible way to keep up with that pace. Instead of being scared of being replaced, embrace the idea that books are a community and you are only a piece of it. Recommend other books–you should be reading them anyway–but that’s why it’s important to create a niche. On my V’s Vixens FB page, I post books that are free and in KU and pull quotes from books that are similar to mine. I’m building a readership of the kinds of books I write. If you’re all over the map, your readers won’t know what to read. They read YOU and want to read books that are similar to yours. Make it easy for them. Recommend books that you like so when your next book is ready to go they know exactly what they’ll be getting.

Relax, but not too much. I like rules, and if you’ve read my blog for a while, you know I do. Stick to one genre, know reader expectations. Cover your book to market. Learn an ad platform. But the one rule I have never ever agreed with is to write every day. For some people it’s not possible, and beating yourself up over it won’t make things better. If you can’t write, you can’t. Thinking is writing. Plotting is writing. Sorting through stock photos is, maybe not writing, but you get the idea. Don’t lose your joy, or like woman in the article, writing will be come work and not the good kind. She said after she started using AI for a prolonged time, she didn’t feel connected to her characters anymore, would lose the theme of her books. She didn’t wake up thinking about her characters, she didn’t go to bed and they were the lost thought in her mind before she drifted off. You know what? When characters claw at you from the inside out, that is the best part of writing. When your characters need their story told so badly they don’t let you go. I felt sorry for her when I read that. If you lose your joy, there’s not much to write for anymore.

I didn’t get into with that guy, though he spouted off a few more things about how evil KDP is and how there isn’t an alternative to publishing. Maybe KDP has the biggest slice of the pie, but they gave us the pie. I truly think Amazon gave us opportunities when we wouldn’t have had them otherwise.

That is all I have for this post. I hope you all have a wonderful week ahead, and if you have time, sign up for ProWritingAid’s Romance Week. I always sign up but never watch anything. I still have all the 20booksto50k videos from their November conference. Plus two of Alex Newton’s K-lytics reports. But if you’re interested here’s a non-affiliate link to sign up. https://prowritingaid.com/romance-week/sign-up

Until next time!

Author Resources–Five Things That You Can Use Right Now

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There are a lot of resources out there, some free, a lot paid, and you can lose track of where they are and forget them if you ever need them. I thought I would put together a short list of the little out-of-the-way resources that you might want to bookmark in case you ever want to use them. (As as always, there are no affiliate links in this post.)

The first one is one that I use a lot, and it’s a site by Creativindie’s Derek Murphy (https://www.creativindie.com/). The 3D Cover Creator doesn’t need special software to use–all you have to do is upload your book’s cover, and spine, depending on the mockup you choose, download to a PNG for the transparent background, and you have a mockup for all your social media graphics. https://diybookcovers.com/3Dmockups/
What I really like about this site is during the design process, it’s a cool way to test if your book cover is going to look good. This is a graphic I made for Instagram when my Christmas novel came out.

The next resource I like to tell authors about is by Dave Chesson and his team at Kindlepreneur. I love the QR code generator. It’s absolutely free and you can add it to bookmarks and any other marketing paraphernalia you create. I love VistaPrint’s quality and their prices are decent. Add a QR code pointing potential customers to your website or Amazon author page. You can even add a logo to the middle. For lack of anything better, I added my imprint logo to this one and it points to my pen name’s author website.

Another free resource Dave and his team provides is a barcode generator. I don’t use this because I just let KDP and IngramSpark add the barcode to my books for me, but if you wanted your price embedded into the code the way Barnes and Noble requires you to do if you want your books in their stores, this is a free and not very confusing way for you to do that. Create it and add it to your book’s cover before uploading and publishing your book. Here’s a barcode I created for one of my books, but I’ll just delete it as I won’t need it. You can find the barcode generator here: https://kindlepreneur.com/isbn-bar-code-generator/

Kindlepreneur has a lot of great resources on their website. Check out all they have to offer and sign up for their newsletter. https://kindlepreneur.com/

The next resource I use quite a bit when I’m looking for comparison authors for my books is https://www.literature-map.com/. The only con about using it is it doesn’t bring up indie authors unless they are bestsellers or have been picked up be a publisher like Amazon’s Montlake. Type in the name of an author that you want comps to and watch them populate. I put in Jodi Ellen Malpas, as she’s one of my comp authors.

This is a great tool for keywords for ads, finding your target audience, or just looking for something to read in your genre.

One of the last things I use almost on a daily basis is the Unicode Text Converter. https://qaz.wtf/u/convert.cgi?text=t If you’ve ever wondered how to bold and or italicize Facebook post text or Twitter tweets or Instagram text, this is how. Enter the text you want and click SHOW. Simply copy the style you want and paste where you want it to post.

These are little things that I use a lot that I thought you would like to know about, too. I don’t have much else for this week. My personal drama has seemed to have died down, and I’m happy about that. I finally finished editing the third book in my series and started on number four. I’m still stumbling upon a few scenes where I rushed, but I’ve always liked this couple just a little bit better and reading these last three won’t feel like such a chore. I still don’t have my car back from the auto body shop, but once I do, I feel better about that, too. On Wednesday my daughter, sister, and I are going to dinner and then to watch Titanic at the theatre. My daughter is 18 and has never seen it before, so I’m excited to see what she thinks. I said at least she can see where all the memes come from.

One last thing–I made a February calendar of social media prompts. I thought I would share it and you can save it if you need something to help you post next month. I bumped up the DPI so you can print it too, if that something you do, but I think the sizing is kind of odd. I’m going to try to stick to it since I was the one who made it. My Facebook author page is nothing but tumbleweeds, and I’d like to bump up my following there and get comfortable posting. I hope you all have a good week!

Until next time.

made in Canva using one of their templates

Monday Author Update

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Words: 1627
Time to read: 9 minutes

Before I get into my post for this week, I would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has given me their time reading this blog. I just posted my 500th post, and I have over 700 subscribers. I appreciate anyone who has stopped by, even if it’s just to grab the directions on how to make a full wrap paperback cover in Canva. I’m delighted, truly, that those instructions have helped so many people, and in doing so, brought their dreams of publishing their books one step closer. I know how hard it is to publish without resources, and I am grateful to be a part of anyone’s journey.

In January alone, my updated instructions have been viewed 235 times, and almost 3,000 times since I published it in the summer of 2022. Thank you so much.

I don’t have an author update, but for lack of anything better to title my blog, there it is. I have the hardest time coming up with “clickable” subject lines. I really struggle with my newsletter, too, trying to sound cute and funny, sexy and intriguing, and everything in between so people will open my newsletter and not empty it out with the social and unwanted promotions. You would think that people would unsubscribe if they didn’t want your mail in their inbox, but at the same time, I think I have to delete something for a whole year before I get tired of it enough to open it up and find the unsubscribe link. Maybe they feel guilty they took my free book and think that unsubscribing will hurt my feelings. What I know of the backend of newsletters now, I actively encourage anyone who has subscribed to my newsletter to click that unsubscribe the second they don’t to be on my list anymore. Because you know what? An unsubscribe doesn’t hurt my feelings, but a low open rate does, haha. Okay, so that’s my intro for this post.

Editing my series is slow going, and I blame two things: I’m already so familiar with the story that it’s a drag to read it over again, and these books need work. I’m at one part now where one character is in a room talking to another character and then boom he’s somewhere else a paragraph later. I need him in both places so having to rewrite that scene is kind of a pain, though, to be fair, I’m glad I caught the inconsistency to fix it in the first place. But still. This is what I’m dealing with and being kind of, I shouldn’t say, but I will, bored, isn’t helpful. I don’t believe in belittling your content in public. I think it’s a bad omen to put derogatory comments about your books online. You never know who will be reading, and if the author him/herself isn’t confident about his or her work, then why would anyone want to read it? I love these books, and I do try remind myself that I should enjoy the editing because once I read the proofs as a final check, I won’t be reading them ever again. Though I complain now, it will be bittersweet to say goodbye to characters I will have spent three and a half years with.

So while I should be trying to get these edited as quickly as possible, it was a nice surprise when someone asked me to help her with her series covers and I jumped into the project with both feet and a big sigh of relief. It’s been a welcome break to scroll through stock and experiment with the fonts and the design. I’ll let her do the cover reveals, and maybe after they’re done we can do a collaborative post about working together and bringing an author’s ideas to fruition. I have worked with enough people by now that I know I would never want to do covers for other people as a side hustle. I’m not a perfectionist by any means, but when you’re doing something for someone else, you want to give them the best product possible. It can be stressful, especially if your skills aren’t there like mine. She knows I don’t do this professionally and was okay with that. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to do my absolute best or that I won’t try to stretch my skills. It’s why I like helping others in the first place. Whatever I do for someone else can only help me and my covers later on.

I finally heard about my car and will be driving a rental this week while my bumper is getting fixed. It will be a relief to get that out of the way. Finding the damage and having to make arrangements to have it repaired has been stressful and just when I cross something off the list and I think my life will calm down a bit, something else pops up. Lately after work I’ve been decompressing with a glass of wine and rewatching Bridgerton, but I should be using those hours to edit my series. I know I can’t give them the attention they deserve if I’m stressed out and tired, but the lack of progress is still in the back of my mind and I truly will relax and celebrate when they’re all done. This is my biggest project to date, and I don’t think I have it in me to work on something so huge again.

That’s really about all I have for this week–I know you’ll be shocked that this isn’t another 2,000 word post. Oh, wait. I had a BargainBooksy last week, and you probably want to know how that went. I probably shouldn’t even bother with posting the results because they weren’t great. I always blame the operator, not the machine, so I’m not sure what quite happened. My cover, even after redoing it, maybe didn’t hit the mark, or the blurb wasn’t that enticing. Whatever it was, I only sold 10 on the day the promo ran and 53 over all for the month of January so far because I’m also running a Facebook ad to it. At .99 that doesn’t bring in a lot of royalties, and I’m counting on read-through to the other books to make up that 35% rate on KDP. This is what my feature looked like in the BargainBooksy email. You can say the model I chose still isn’t conventionally handsome, and maybe.

I’ve seen less attractive men on covers, so, like I said, I’m not sure what happened. Written Word Media doesn’t share the click through rate, so it could be I had many clicks and readers didn’t like my whole blurb. I would hate think that these have already peaked, but if they have, I don’t know how to bump them up without spending a lot of money I probably won’t get back. The book has 90 reviews and a 4.4 rating, so it’s not that. I don’t know. I’ve heard overall that newsletter promos like this have lost their luster, but if that’s really the case, then I’m not sure what indies can do besides picking up the TikTok mantel and forging on. Newsletter promos used to be a sure way to nudge your book up the charts and into readers’ hands. I’ll dig deeper, but I can only afford to experiment so often. Facebook ads are expensive, (I’m not losing money, but you still have to budget in that expense) and I’ve been pouring all my budget into those right now. The one for Twisted Alibis has taken off and it has a lot of social proof:

That ad keeps my trilogy selling at a steady, not huge, but steady pace. I haven’t put the first book on a promo yet. I’m reluctant to do so since they’re selling okay without. Maybe at the end of next summer I can do the first one for free for their anniversary.

Anyway, I’ll report the 90 dollars I spent as a business expense to my tax guy and keep on keeping on. There’s not much else I can do. (Well, there is a lot can do but I need to get a few financial things off my plate first before I can try shoving money at a different promo.)

One of the things I was saying I missed most is going for walks and listening to podcasts. BookBub sent me an email with a list of podcasts for writers and authors, and they segmented them by marketing, craft, industry insights, and author life.

photo taken from the blogpost

Here is the link for the post: https://insights.bookbub.com/podcasts-authors-writing-publishing-book-marketing/

Starting a new podcast is difficult. If you’re like me, you like to start something new at the beginning, but in the publishing industry, old news isn’t always the best news. Plus, if the podcasts have had a long run, there could be hundreds of episodes to listen to. I think I’d like to start a podcast about industry insights, and if I sample a couple, I’ll let you know which ones I like best. As long as it’s above 0 degrees Fahrenheit, I don’t mind being outside, and walking and listening to publishing news is probably better for my mental health than drinking and watching Netflix. I know you need a break every now and then, but as I’ve said, immersing myself in books is what saved me the past few years. If I can get some answers at Mayo next month, I can enjoy all things publishing again instead of using them as a coping mechanism.

I hope you all have a good week, and let me know if you try a new podcast!

Until next time!

Monday Author Update: Newsletter/Email Guidelines

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Words: 2148
Time to read: 11 minutes

Last week was not the greatest week I’ve ever had, but as they say, things could always be worse, and since things have smoothed out a little I’ll agree . . . for now. Let me get the “real” issues out of the way first and then I can tell you about a few personal things that haven’t exactly gone my way either.

Newsletter/Email Authentication and adding SPF and DKIM records
I’m subscribed to Holly Darling’s newsletter and she’s an expert in email marketing. I bought her MailerLite tutorial a couple of years go during a Black Friday sale. I haven’t gotten around to watching it *wincing* and with the migration I completed a few weeks ago maybe it won’t help me much now anyway, but it signed me up to her newsletter. In it, she outlined what you need to do to so Gmail and Yahoo will keep delivering your newsletter to your subscribers who use them as their email service provider. Luckily, she also has a blog, and you can read the article here:

https://pages.hollydarlinghq.com/posts/what-the-heck-is-a-dmarc-and-why-you-should-care-1

I knew changes were coming, but I didn’t realize they would be coming quite so soon. Most of these changes need to be completed by February 2024 (which is poor timing if you wanted to migrate to the new MailerLite because you also have to do that by the first of February), and I do not like waiting to do things until the last minute. That just begs for things to go wrong with no time to fix it–and I had plenty go wrong.

Way back when I started blogging, I let WordPress handle my hosting even though I was warned my site wouldn’t have all the bells and whistles that it could have if I found a different host. I didn’t want to mess with GoDaddy, Bluehost, GatorHost, SiteGround or anything else and didn’t need anything fancy. I didn’t start blogging to sell books–thank goodness too, because this blog does not sell books, and that’s fine. People who read this blog want to sell their own books, and I’m happy to help if I can. So, I was a little concerned when all this news started circulating that I was going to have to authenticate my newsletter account. I wasn’t sure if I even could with WordPress, but fortunately, the answer is yes.

I decided to start a newsletter last summer, no, was the summer of 2022 since 2023 is gone now. The first thing I did was pay for an email address linked to my website. Even back then people said not to use a regular email account, and I paid for a G-Suite account. You can email me at vania@vaniamargene.com if you want. I’ll get it eventually (my apologies to Debbie who wrote me some really nice things about A Heartache for Christmas that sat in my spam folder for two weeks). WordPress made that easy to do as well, and I pay $72 dollars a year for it. I looked up all my renewal notices and I pay $187.00 a year to WordPress for this site ($96 for the Explorer plan, $72 for the G-Suite account, and $19 for my domain name), and $66 dollars for my vmrheault.com author site ($48 for the personal plan and $18 for my domain name). It’s no wonder I’ve barely been breaking even doing this author thing. I pay WordPress a decent chunk of change, but websites are necessary and the email I set up to go with my newsletter is a must (and it will be for everyone after February 1). I thought I would have some trouble because I decided to write under a pen name, but I’m not hiding who I am and even give my first name in my welcome letter, so it’s not a big deal my newsletter shows they come from vaniamargene.com. I only set up a separate author website because my 1st person books are very different than my 3rd person books and I don’t promote the books I was writing under my full name . . . though I probably still should.

Anyway, long story not-so-short, I thought I was in for some trouble, but if you also host with WordPress because you were as confused as I was, don’t worry. I can show you were to go.

Click on your profile name:

You’ll get a new menu. Click on manage domains or it might say just one domain. I have two, as I just stated above.

Click on the one you want:

Scroll down to DNS records. Click it to make it expand then click Manage.

This is where you go to enter the information that your newsletter aggregator will give you. Click add a record and that opens up a new menu where you can chose the type and that will allow you to enter the name and value. I honestly don’t want to go any further than that to capture screenshots because when I was adding the information MailerLite was telling me to enter, I messed something up and took my whole site down for over 24 hours and didn’t even realize it. I was really lucky that WordPress’s chat was available and a Happiness Engineer knew exactly what I did wrong and helped me fix it in only 10 minutes, but I missed out on over 200 hits while it was down. I apologize to anyone who was trying to find the instructions on how to make a full book cover wrap in Canva (I know it’s all you guys love me for haha).

The good news is that DNS menu is going to look similar no matter where you host your website. The information your newsletter aggregator might be a bit different, but just copy it from them and paste it where it should go in your website’s DNS records.

Here is the MailerLite DNS tutorial.

Next you’ll want to add the DMARC, and what’s really cool is that DMARC is the same for everyone. I copied what Holly put into her domain and you can copy what I put in mine: TXT is the type, _dmarc is the name, and v-DMARC1: p=none; is the value. MailerLite also has a tutorial for this, but if you did the SPF and the DKIM, then this will be more of the same.

I didn’t do it the way they did, but what I did worked and I’m not going to go back and change it.

If you want to check your DMARC and see if you pass, you can use this free site: https://dmarcian.com/dmarc-inspector/

Holly goes through this in her video that she shares in her blog article, and she tells you how you can know if what you did worked by sending yourself a test newsletter email.

This is what my content looked like before I did the authentication and the DMARC:

What all this does is tell someone’s email platform where your email is coming from and you want it to say your website, not your newsletter aggregator.

My test email came to me all right and my website is back up and doing okay now. I won’t know 100% for sure if everything is fine until this blog post posts correctly, my next campaign is sent and opened, and February comes and goes and doesn’t cause any trouble.

It’s really difficult to stay in compliance with all of these things and I’ve seen authors who have just given up having a newsletter. I can understand that, especially after tallying up all the money I put into WordPress alone. I probably don’t need more than a personal package for this site but I upgraded when I thought I needed more. Saving $50.00 a year I guess isn’t that big of a deal, but I’ll consider it if I ever get to the point where I have to pay for MailerLite. So far I’m under 1,000 subscribers and likely will stay that way since my Bookfunnel integration went down the drain with the MailerLite migration to the new platform. Though, I’m saving money not running ads to my reader magnet anymore, and that money can go toward ads to the books I’m actually selling.

This wasn’t meant to be a detailed tutorial because there are so many different website hosts out there and so many newsletter aggregators too. I feel like everyone is scrambling to get this done and hosts and newsletter support are familiar with everyone’s troubles. Reach out to your support if you need to. I don’t send many emails but I want to stay in compliance so that the emails I do send are delivered properly.

If you run a newsletter and want to test the spammy-ness of it, this is a fun website. Send a test email to it and see what your score is. https://www.mail-tester.com/

Promos
Because I downgraded my Bookfunnel account, I promptly spent the money on a BargainBooksy through Written Word Media. I’m advertising Give & Take, the first real promo I’ve done for that book and the trilogy since I redid the covers and edited the insides. I dropped the price of book one to .99 and I’ve been selling a few here and there. I’m running a Facebook ad to it, and I’ve sold 29 ebooks since the first of the year. I’ve also had 5907 page reads which equals out to about 15 books. Hopefully the BargainBooksy will kick that into gear and I can finally move my trilogy. It really is a shame I dropped the ball with the covers when I released them but I didn’t know the insides were so messy, so giving them an overhaul was the right choice. If you don’t remember what my covers were like before, here’s the comparison:

I’ll never get that first year back, but the insides weren’t my fault. I grew as a writer and spotted the flaws after the fact. That’s all you can really do, and as an indie, I have the freedom to fix the mistakes that were made. Now that I know what my tics are, I can write better books moving forward.

King’s Crossing Series Update
Not much new to report there. I’ve been distracted with newsletter changes and glitches, not feeling the best, and my son started a new job and I’ve taken on the role of unpaid taxi driver (he gets anxiety behind the wheel and doesn’t have his driver’s license). I’m working on Book 3, rewriting sentences, smoothing out scenes, adding words, deleting sentences. I think what I’ve learned in going back and redoing the trilogy and now this series is that taking time away from your WIP is very helpful. You can see more clearly what’s missing. I’m only on chapter eight of twenty-four, and I’ve already added 3k words. I’ll probably double that by the time I’m done. But it sounds richer, the scenes don’t sound as choppy. I’ve spent three years with these characters and I’m adding more emotional depth. This is slow going, but I’m pleased with how they’re sounding so far. I’m also playing with covers, but I’ll do a separate post about that later.

Personal Adventures
Last Monday I woke up to my back bumper ripped halfway off my car. I don’t know if someone hit it or tried to pull it off, but either way, they caused over 2k worth of damage. I just paid it off, literally, a month prior, so this was not the way I was hoping to celebrate. Luckily, I pay for full coverage and the car is drivable until I can get into the body shop and have it repaired. On top of the migration issues I was having then still not feeling all that great, I didn’t need this on my plate. Fortunately, I was able to get into the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN sooner than I thought, and I only have to wait three weeks to hopefully get some answers. My deductible would have paid for that trip, but it is what it is. Things happen. It could have been worse, and I’m thankful I can still at least drive it. My sister also experienced some car issues, and I had to pick her up and take her home after the tow truck towed her car to the dealership for engine trouble. 2024 hasn’t been kind, but I’m trying to keep my spirits up.

That’s all I have for this week, but at 2,100 words, I suppose that’s enough. I just hope that all I did for my newsletter compliance will suffice and that I don’t have to do anything else with my newsletter for a long time. My promo for Give & Take runs on Thursday, the 18th, and if you want to see what it looks like, you can subscribe to the BargainBooksy newsletter. They’ll drop you emails telling you what the bargain books are for the day.

I’m tired, and even a cup of coffee won’t fix it. 

Until next time!