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!
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.
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!
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 Authenticationand 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:
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.
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 re-read the blog post I wrote at the end of 2022, and it’s interesting to see how things changed with what I thought I was going to do. My main change was my publishing schedule–back then I thought my rockstar romance was only going to be one book and then out of nowhere it turned into a trilogy. That was a stroke of luck on my part (and for Eddie and Brock who had their stories told and ended up with HEAs I hadn’t planned on) and actually made up the bulk of my sales this year. I have that blog post pulled up–let’s compare.
Books/Novels/WIPs
Number of books written: 3.5 I wrote three and a half books last year, too. I finished Twisted Alibis (I had 58k of it done and the total number of words in that book are 107k) and wrote Twisted Lullabies and Twisted Lies and also, at the last second, wrote A Heartache for Christmas I was able to edit and cover in time for the holidays. Last year, in 2022, I wrote 286,000 words. This year I wrote 340,000. My rockstars are long (the shortest coming in at 92k) and my Christmas romance added to those at 97k. All in all, I had a good writing year.
Number of books published: 4. Wait, no. 8. I forgot I published my Lost & Found Trilogy in January. That’s three. Then I published Faking Forever in May. I published that as filler while I was writing my rockstars and published those in August, and also my Christmas romance in November for a total of eight books. Sounds impressive, but my Lost & Found Trilogy was written in 2022 and I only pushed Publish. Faking Forever was also previously written and all I did was order a fresh proof and proofread that. My rockstars were the biggest project I completed since pivoting to first person present and I’m really proud of them.
Year-End Royalties: $4,404.19 (This figure will be off by 7 days as I am writing this a week before the end of the year.)
taken from the Chrome extension BookReport
As always, forget about the total number of books there. BookReport crams all the formats together. That is definitely up from the $670.55 that I made last year, and I owe half that to my rockstars and the other half to Facebook ads. Like last year and my disappointment with my Cedar Hill Duet, I’m sad my Lost & Found Trilogy didn’t do better, but that was my own fault–with covers, and more recently, my dismay at having found a writing tic I edited out not long ago. Now that the covers are how I want and the insides are going to be the best they can ever be, I’m going to start running ads to them after the New Year. I’ll report back if I can get them to sell.
As for Amazon ads, I didn’t throw the money at them I have in the past. Last year I spent $112.55 and this year I spent . . . $835.67. Just kidding. As my character, Agatha, in Twisted Lies says, Jesus Christ on a bicycle. I didn’t know I spent that much. I spent $200.00 in June alone, so I guess I better add watching my freaking ads more closely to my 2024 goals. FML.
I knew Facebook ads going in would be expensive (but so can Amazon ads if you’re not keeping an eye on them, sigh) and I spent $1,238.60 (I had to go through my emails and tally the invoices they sent me that I set aside for my accountant, so no screenshots available, I’m afraid.) I actually thought I spent more than that, but I didn’t start running ads until May of this year, and I didn’t crank them up until August when my rockstars came out. I didn’t buy a Freebooksy this year, so Amazon ads and Facebook ads are the only ad spend I had, for a total of $2,074.27.
I had other yearly expenditures like my WordPress fees, my Alliance of Independent Authors membership, BookSprout, my Office 365 renewal, and Canva. I did more than break even this year, and surprisingly I’m ahead by about $1600.00. I’m not going to add up Canva and the rest. That’s just extra fluff I pay for that I would regardless if I was making money or not. I get so much out of Canva (not just covers) that paying is a necessary evil, and I need my Office 365. My Alli membership is just insurance for my author career as far as I’m concerned because I need someone to help me if Amazon decides to think I’m doing something I shouldn’t be doing and suspends my KDP account. I throw money at other things like fonts and my KU subscription, but I behaved myself when the AppSumo deal for DepositPhotos came out last month–somehow I convinced myself the 300 images I still have in my DepositPhotos account is enough. I bought a marketing book and a couple of Alex Newton’s K-Lytics reports, but I’m not going to nickel and dime myself. Like any other *cough* hobby *cough* you spend money. That’s just what happens if you enjoy doing something.
So, my numbers aren’t bad, and I’m finding readers. I think Facebook ads can be profitable if your hook, ad copy, graphic, and your actual book can mesh together into something that your target audience wants. I need to do more research on FB ads and see if I can level up. I have the books to sell.
Website/Blog Stats
My views went up a smidge but my visitors went down, also by a smidge, compared to last year, and I don’t know what the difference is.
I also posted one post fewer and eight thousand words fewer, too. I was so busy writing my rockstars, I think, that I didn’t bother commenting on any of the book drama. I can’t remember what any of it was now, but I’m sure there must have been some. I really just don’t care anymore about authors behaving badly and maybe that’s just a byproduct of dealing with my health issue. I don’t waste time with people who can’t follow through, I stop reaching out to people who can’t be bothered to message me first once in a while. Twitter is still just a pit of people whining because they can’t sell books or get a book deal, but if I don’t keep my ear to the ground, I just do not have much to say. My blog has turned into more of an online journal than an informational blog, but it is what it is. I don’t care if someone is trying to copyright the sun or if a big-time indie is being accused of plagiarism. I just am really tired of people who expect things without giving, but retreating into my books doesn’t give me a whole lot to share, and I would imagine this trend will keep going into later years.
People are still sharing my blog which is great to see. These are all-time stats . . . WordPress changed their platform layout so I had a harder time finding the information and it won’t completely match up with how I gave you my stats last year.
all-time stats from december 2016 to december 2023january to december 2023
It’s not a surprise that my Canva how-to posts have the top billing . . . again.
I’m glad that post is so useful, and I appreciate everyone who has commented, liked, and shared my blog posts. It means a lot that while I’m struggling I’ve been able to help people too.
Health Update
I still feel like garbage, but I’ve done all I can do on my own and I have to call after the New Year to make an appointment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. I figure I have access to it, I might as well go to the best of the best and see what’s what. They may not be able to cure me but at least they’ll know how to treat my symptoms so I feel better more regularly. I’m going in March while my daughter is on Spring Break and I have a few days I can be gone without motherly responsibilities. I’ll need to save a little for hotel and gas money as the clinic is six hours away from me, but I’m tired of dealing with the doctors in Fargo who don’t care if they can’t throw some antibiotics at you and call it a day. I’ve been dealing with this for a very long time, and I hope this coming year I’ll see the last of it.
What’s next for 2024?
I’ll be editing my King’s Crossing series until I get them done and ready to publish. That’s my goal–getting them edited, creating covers I won’t have to change, and setting them up on BookSprout for reviews and putting them all on preorder. I plan to schedule them two months apart to give me twelve months to write more books. I was deleting some screenshots off my desktop and I remembered a standalone I wanted to write. I should maybe do that before I forget the plot. So, after I get my King’s Crossing books squared away, I’ll be taking two months to write that out. It will be nice to work on a simple project after six books anyway. I’ll need to go slow, it’s twisty, maybe one of the twistier books I’ll do, and I need to make sure I lay the breadcrumbs correctly. After I write that, then I plan to move into Mafia–I even have a plot rooting in my brain–but after my Mayo appointment, if I can get to feeling better, well, even if I can’t I just hope I don’t have to do this feeling the way I do, I need to look for a different job. I’ve been pretty transparent with my financial situation and only my ex-husband’s alimony and child support are keeping me afloat. That will run out at the end of 2024 and I am grown up enough to know I cannot make it on what my work pays me. My royalties are not steady enough nor enough enough (especially after ad spend) to fill in that financial gap. Once I get a different job, I really don’t know how I’ll feel about writing or how fast I’ll be able to still write books. I’m not a seven-, six-, or five-figure author. I’m a four-figure author who shoved 75% of her earnings back into her business. Instead of being scared of it, I’m trying to look forward to it. I’ve been with my job for twenty-three years and I need the change.
But, if we don’t add a career change to the mix, I’d like to publish my series, write my standalone, and write my Mafia books which may be a duet or a trilogy, we’ll see how the plotting ends up. Those won’t be released until 2025. I have one more standalone on my computer that I wrote in 2020, so if I clean that up and package it, that’s four/five books I have on the docket in 2025. After that, I really don’t know what will happen. I would love for my series to take off and I could drop down to a part-time job somewhere (or even keep my current job), but in terms of more books and ideas, after I write my Mafia duet/trilogy, I have two books written of a six-book series that I would like to finish. They aren’t as complicated as the series I’m working on now, and I don’t think they would take me long, I just need to plan out the four remaining books. I’m not excited about the project, though I would really hate to have those two books go to waste. I haven’t heard of the concept before and I think they could sell well. I just need the motivation to finish them. I like thinking ahead, but 2026 is just a little bit too far, even for me. In the meantime I’m going to deep dive into Facebook ads. TikTok did nothing for me short of just making me mad, but I may give it another try. I don’t spend enough time on there networking and commenting, nor am I reading the books that have blown up, and I need to do that if I want to have anything meaningful to contribute.
I always share this quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger: I will always stay hungry, never satisfied with current accomplishments. It’s a lot easier to stay hungry when you’ve had a taste of what’s possible.
Write books people want to read. Figure out an advertising platform that you like, that you’re willing to invest some time and money into learning. Save for a bit if you have to, be honest and make sure your book is advertising-ready. If it’s not, you’ll waste money and all you’ll do is blame the ad platform instead of yourself where the blame would really belong. You are always in control and you do yourself and your books a disservice when you act like you aren’t. Choices can be made and unmade. Mistakes can be fixed. Learn your craft, meet readers’ expectations of the genre you’re writing in, learn how to make covers if you can’t afford to hire out. People are so concerned about being different, but there is value in sameness. People are comfortable with what they know. Saying your book is “unique” or “different” isn’t the marketing spark you think it is. People shy away from change and they won’t try you if they think your book will be too far off from what they already like. Where would your book go in a bookstore? Write for that audience, find a way to push your book in front of that audience once your book is written. Their readers are yours–there’s no point reinventing the wheel. Someone already did that, so why make more work for yourself?
It’s possible to turn this into a career. What steps can you take in 2024 to do that? Stay hungry. Never give up. One day you’ll reap the rewards. You just have to hang on there long enough.
Happy 2024!
books i’ve written and published (so far) since 2020
I thought I would write quick update being that this will be the last one of 2023. Next Monday on Christmas Day I’ll post my year-end recap and on New Year’s Day, I’ve decided to take the day off. After that, I’ll post what I want to accomplish in 2024 and fall back into my usual posting schedule.
Mainly all I’ve been doing is editing my King’s Crossing series. I got through number one and added almost two thousand words. Some of the scenes were sparse and I filled them in. That is what is happening with book two–I’m only halfway through and have already added 1500 words. It’s really interesting reading these since they were the first books I wrote when I switched to first person, but not only that, I can tell I pantsed a lot of the plot (she just said what?!). I’m going slower than I’d like, but I have to make sure these are the way I want them to be before I publish. Like my rockstars, I’m not going back to edit them ever again, and though I know perfection isn’t obtainable, I want to make sure they are done to the best of my ability. So even though I said I would like to start publishing them in March, I might not be able to do that. I was hoping to get through each book in two weeks’ time, but there are some chapters that are so long that it takes me days to get through them.
Which leads me to this question: How long should a chapter be?
My most recent chapter I edited was 14,000 words long. There is one chapter in one of the later books that is 21,000 words long, and no, I didn’t accidentally add a zero.
When I started with the idea of dual POV, I didn’t think much beyond that I simply knew what it was, that’s how contemporary romances were being written and that they were selling. I had read books in dual POV like Sylvia Day’s Crossfire Series, and I never thought much about length of chapters. As long as there is stuff going on that moves the plot along, and the chapters are fast-paced and don’t drag, why should it matter how long a chapter is? I’ve read a couple books where the book is “dual” but we don’t hear from the male POV for chapters into the book. There was one book I read that took so long to get to his, I wasn’t even sure if his POV was included and I almost did not finish (DNF). I like the man’s POV more than the woman’s and I always have. I think that reflects in my writing too, where I wouldn’t be surprised if there is more male POV in my books than female. Writing that made me curious, and here’s the breakdown of A Heartache for Christmas:
As you can see, I started writing long chapters and never stopped. I gave Sawyer 11,064 more words, but in this case, it makes sense because he was solving a mystery and needed the page time. This also goes along with how I used to write my 3rd person books. I never wrote in chapters, only scene breaks, and then I would chop up my book in editing. I couldn’t think in chapters and maybe I still don’t. I end a POV when it needs to be ended and not any sooner to stay in line with some arbitrary chapter-length rule. Because if you have a POV that needs five chapters to be told, why are you cutting up that POV? It doesn’t make any sense, but then, I guess you don’t have a 95k word book with only sixteen chapters in it. Is there a wrong way? I think the only wrong way cutting up something into such small parts is if the reader doesn’t have time to get invested. Your readers have to care about your characters–that’s nonnegotiable. They can’t do that if they’re not given the time to do so.
Anyway, so when I’m dealing with a 14,000 word chapter where parts need to be beefed up a bit here and there and then I have to go back and read, not only to make sure I didn’t add any typos but to make sure that what I added blends into what was previously there and what came before it, then yeah, the editing process slows way down. Unfortunately. But, on the bright side, I am still loving these books, and I’m enjoying the process. These will probably be the biggest project I’ll ever tackle. I’m not really interested in writing this big of a project again, and I have no idea how these are going to be received. I hope these sell well, even boost-my-career-to-the-next-level well, but these will take a time and money commitment from a potential reader and you just never know. No one wants to write books that no one will read, and there are no guarantees.
As for what else I’m doing, that series will consume all my attention, my every free second, until they’re done. I’m still aware I need to redo their covers too, as the more I read these books the more convinced I am that the covers they have now don’t and won’t do them justice. I’ve been playing with hiring GetCovers to do them. They are inexpensive and after I get my tax refund in February could afford to cover six books, but I’ve heard you get the best results if you find the elements (stock photos) you want them to use. Finding the male models is what takes the longest and if I’m going to do that on my own, I might as well do the whole thing myself. But I have plenty of time to play with that–I just need to remind myself that experimenting with cover concepts is just as important as the editing. Thank God the blurbs are done, though I’ll go over them one more to be sure they sound okay.
Be sure to check next week for my year-end recap. My rockstars boosted me up a bit, so hopefully I’ll have more to report. I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas if you celebrate! I’m having my sister and ex-husband over and I’m cooking turkey, cheesy hashbrowns (we had mashed potatoes and gravy for Thanksgiving), green bean casserole, and the yummy cheddar biscuits from Red Lobster you can buy as a mix. It will be a small meal, but difficult to orchestrate as everything needs oven time and I only have one. Oh well. It will work out. I managed on Thanksgiving.
One last thing before I sign off for this week…there has been lots said about Bryan Cohen and his free Amazon ads course that he hosts. Some call him a scammer and only wants to recruit people into his Amazon Ads School, some say he doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to Amazon ads, (calling his method throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks) some say if he’s not selling books not to listen to him (something I don’t believe because a lot more goes into selling books than knowing how to use an ad platform) but I’ve joined in with the challenge many times, and if you want a free way to learn Amazon ads, Bryan is the one to teach you to do it. There are many strategies to experiment with when it comes to Amazon ads, or any ad platform for that matter, and Bryan teaches you one way. For free. He goes into a lot more than just how to set up an ad. He goes through and makes sure you understand if your book is ready to throw money at it (and a lot of times people find out the answer is no) and teaches you how to write hooks and more. I’m not saying his way is the end-all, be-all way. There are plenty of people out there who do ads like Robert Ryan, Janet Margo, and Ricardo Fayet (from Reedsy), but if you join in with the challenge, you have a ton of help and people to bounce ideas off of in the Facebook group. You can use Bryan’s free course as a springboard for getting your feet wet, and then move on to other strategies by other people. Anyway, so I just wanted to throw that out there, and if you were planning to learn Amazon Ads in 2024, then you can sign up for Bryan’s course that’s starting on January 17th and decide for yourself if his spaghetti deserves a plate at your table. You can sign up here. https://learn.bestpageforward.net/jan24/ (These are not affiliate links.)
Enjoy the rest of the week and have a restful weekend!
After a chat with a friend, I realized how little I read for pleasure (well, I knew that, but she makes time to read and I…don’t). I used to love to read–I think most writers have been (or still are) voracious readers at some point, but like a lot of writers too, the moment I sat down to write my own books, reading for pleasure took a backseat.
There are a couple of reasons for this but the biggest one is that there isn’t a lot of time. Once you hop on the indie merry-go-round, it takes incredible willpower jump off. I’ve been running on it since 2016 chasing after that elusive brass ring that seems farther and farther away with every rotation. Doing anything that’s not working on my books feels like a waste of time (and needless to say, it’s what I enjoy doing most when I’m not working) and I know what a dangerous mindset that can be. Deep in my heart I know as a writer (and as a person, really) you need to experience new things, new ideas, meet new people. What is that saying?
This isn’t exactly an argument for writing what you know, but it kind of is, too. I went to Santa Barbara, California, for a writing conference… five years ago I think now. I’ve seen the ocean many times, in Florida and I once went to Cancún for spring break, but until you see the coasts in person, you don’t realize how different they are. It surprised the hell out of me that the Atlantic Ocean was cold. I’ve swam in the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico, but in June, in Santa Barbara, there was no way I would have jumped in (and this is from a woman who’s swam in Minnesota lakes). I was also surprised by how chilly it got in the evenings. I was expecting the Floridian heat and humidity, and I was pleasantly surprised. Fast forward to this year when I wrote my rockstars and Olivia moved to Malibu for the summer to help Sheppard. She was from Minnesota and had never been to California before. It was so much fun to push my experiences into her life. I never would have been able to do that had I not traveled to California for that conference. I met a lot of nice people, scooted out of my comfort zone, and learned a few things too. But, I took the time to do it, something that seems unfathomable now.
Reading has fallen to the faraway wayside, and I need to get back to it. Not only because I enjoy reading, but because you can learn from another person’s writing style, vocabulary, and their own experiences they put into their books. It’s important as a writer to read, especially in your genre so you understand reader expectations, tropes, and what readers are enjoying. I think taking this approach will help me read more. I’ve always been a sucker for research, diving into hours of YouTube videos to write Captivated by Her and looking up plane crashes like JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s, when I wrote the series I’m editing now. I can still get sucked into looking at photos of them and reading about their crash. Even when I wrote my rockstars, I watched Lady Gaga’s documentary on Netflix and read Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six and watch the series on Prime. I probably should have read more rockstar romances before writing my trilogy–I’m lucky they’re meeting reader expectations for that subgenre (At least, I think they are. I haven’t heard otherwise). Do you know the book I fell back on when the plot of Twisted Alibis landed in my lap? An old Nora Roberts standalone about a rock band called Public Secrets. Copyrighted in 1998, I read it many years ago, and no, I didn’t reread it when I was plotting my books.
I probably shouldn’t feel like I need to look at reading as research, but I think I’m going to have to. I want to read, I used to enjoy it, and I had no trouble reading the book I mentioned in a previous blog post, or the one that came after that. It’s a mind thing, thinking that if I’m not working on my own books (or making graphics for them) I’m wasting time.
There are a ton of other things I want to do–shows to watch, cleaning, putting together bookshelves and weeding out books like the publishing books I bought years ago that are obsolete now. I said I was going to take December off, but I have no idea where that delusion came from–I want to get this series put up because I am really looking forward to writing new books. BUT, I need to research them so I can do the mafia subgenre justice. I need balance, but I feel like there’s lava on one side and a pool full of piranha on the other. I know working only on my own books isn’t good for me, or even my books, but damned if I can slow down for even a minute.
And to make matters worse, I’m not even all that fast. Most of the books I published this year I’d held back, so I wasn’t even really writing for a lot of 2023. Then you hear of the indies who do this full-time who say, “Oh, well, I published 8 books this year, but it was a slow year for me. I usually do 10-12,” and you don’t want to get left behind. What’s funny though, is I’m already behind, so the idea of being left there is just a figment of my imagination.
The bottom line is, I like working on my own stuff too much. All things should be enjoyed in moderation, but unfortunately, I started working on my series, and I honestly won’t stop to do anything else now until they’re ready to go. Tenacity and dedication can help you succeed, but I think you can appreciate it more fully if you take time out.
Not to mention, it’s nice to know what everyone is talking about on social media when it comes to the hottest new thing. It helps you join in the conversation, which is why I started watching Bridgerton in the first place. I wanted to know what all of Romancelandia was talking about. If you don’t know, that’s a different way to get left behind. Also, knowing who does what when will help you build your brand. If you’re an author, promoting books like yours can help build your platform. That’s where breaking out of the #writingcommunity can come in handy. You don’t want to only recommend your friends’ books. You might like reading other genres, but readers can be set in their ways and only read one thing. You can teach them to go to you for book recs and then when you have a new book out, you already have an audience who reads it.
Being this is the end of the year, I can put reading and “experiencing life” on my 2024 New Year’s Resolutions. There are also a lot of speakers I want to watch on YouTube from the 20Booksto50k conference last month. One of my resolutions is to get better with FB ads, and Mallory and Jill Cooper were there. As far as resolutions go, I’m paying off my car this week (YAY!!!), and instead of absorbing the payment into my monthly budget, I’m going to keep taking it out and save up for a BookBub featured deal. I think it’s time I start applying for those, but a Contemporary Romance spot is 665 dollars. I’ll have to save up for four months, but I think my backlist and my pen name are ready for that kind of boost. I have no doubt that my rockstars would give me the read through I need to recoup my fee. But all my resolutions would make for a good post next month, so I’ll stop there.
Next week I have my guest author interview. My year-end wrapup will fall on Christmas Day, but I’ll write it the weekend prior and schedule it. I can’t believe how fast December is going, but I’m hoping to get through book two before the New Year. It’s taking me a bit longer than I had anticipated to get through book one. I’ve read these so many times by now, and yeah, book one is a little slow because it’s setting up the next five books. There’s still stuff going on, but nothing is new to me and I’m dragging my feet. I’ve added 2,000 words already and I have 5 chapters left to go. Mainly just filling in some scenes that read too stark. I’m happy with the changes, and I’ll be very confident putting these out.
That’s all I have for this week. Read something that doesn’t have your name on it, haha.
There isn’t much going on in the land of indie these days…no controversial issue that I have to weigh in on. That’s a good thing, but it does leave me little to talk about every week. I used to listen to a weekly talk on Clubhouse about marketing romance books. It lasted for a bit, but the hosts took a summer off and never came back. Though I missed the Wednesday morning chats, I understood why. There are only so many things you can tell an author about marketing before you’re just repeating yourself because true marketing lies within the books you’re writing (tropes, reader expectation, and craft don’t get talked about nearly as much as they should) and how you package them. It’s something of a no-brainer to write to market, to cover to market, to make sure your blurb is clear and intriguing. You can’t give out many tips about that–and especially to those who don’t want to follow that advice. In relation to that little story that sounded as if it were going nowhere, there’s not much going on that I need to rehash but rather than not blog, I’ll give a quick recap of the past two months and what I’m going to be doing for the month of December.
I’m done with TikTok. I enjoyed it while I was on it, got into the groove of making videos on Canva without it taking all day, and thought maybe I could actually turn it into a marketing tool like so many other authors have. But like with most things, a few bad apples spoiled the barrel, and my innocent videos kept getting take down because they were supposedly violating community guidelines (and like KDP/Amazon Ads, they won’t tell you what you did so you can avoid doing it again). When I blame bad apples, I’m blaming the dark romance authors who used it to post explicit content. And I don’t even really blame them for that–marketing on TikTok is a goldmine if you can get it to work–it’s that TikTok doesn’t want that kind of thing on their platform and dark romance authors had to find new ways to outsmart the bots that would take those videos down. Now words like “hurt” and “death” and “die” and a long list of other words (a lot having to do with sex like “come”) will get your video pulled, and sometimes not even pulled. They won’t let you post it at all, which is what happened to my last video… I used the word “hurt” in a way that I didn’t think warranted that kind of consequence. There are so many dirty snippets that authors can still get away with posting, I just gave up. I don’t like dealing with the unfairness of it all, and you can call me a whiner because we all know life isn’t fair, that’s okay, but one of my biggest pet peeves is when people are not treated equally. I don’t like the way they arbitrarily enforce their guidelines and I’m not going to put up with it anymore. My books are angsty, not dark or dirty, and when I see other snippets getting away with it when mine don’t, it’s frustrating and I’m not going to play that game. Maybe the occasional blocked video wouldn’t bother me but when that happens, your whole account is suppressed and other videos aren’t shown as often as they normally would, and I don’t have time for it. I still have my profile up, and maybe I’ll still scroll now and then because I was finding books I wanted to read (yeah, because of the dirty snippets) but I’m done posting videos. My last appeal took over a week to go through and I’ll try finding other ways to market my books.
I started reading the first book in my series to get them ready to be published. I did a good job on the last editing sweep I did, and four chapters in, I’m not finding too much too fix. If I can easily edit out a “when” or a “while” or take out an “as” phrase (she did this as he did this) I do it, but I am keeping in mind I don’t want them to sound too edited, and if the words flow well, I leave them be. I want to say I want to be done reading this book by the end of December, but I need to be done a lot sooner than that if I want to start publishing by March. In the weird way that I am, I need to have them all done and ready and final files uploaded to KDP to put them on preorder. It’s just the way I am and I’ve stopped trying to fight it, but it will free up brain space to move on and work on something else.
I have an author interview set up for later this month, and I’m looking forward to posting that. I’ve been having a difficult time finding people who are a) actively writing and publishing and have something to share, and b) willing to give me their time, which is why I don’t think I’ve had a guest post or author interview since last spring when I had my hysterectomy and scheduled almost two months of guest posts to cover my time recovering. Guests posts and author interviews aren’t a staple of this blog, but I like offering other viewpoints and experiences. I believe we all have something to share and learn from each other.
You guys know I use ads and lately I’ve been using FB ads more than ever before. I’m starting to dislike sharing sales numbers (just this morning I saw a thread on Twitter asking people what their earnings were last month), but I also want to prove that my FB ads are working and that I’m earning more than I’m spending. That puts me in a tough spot because how else am I supposed to prove to you that I’m selling books if I can’t be transparent? I realize what a conundrum that is, but let me pull the numbers and see what I can do.
October had the best sales month I’ve had selling this pen name, but I can’t say for sure overall. I’m not going back to my 3rd person books because that would be time consuming and irrelevant anyway since I wasn’t playing with FB ads then. I didn’t quite make 4 figures, October coming in at $735.20. Those were primarily my rockstars, and that’s mostly because I was running the most ads to those books. But they’re selling because the covers and titles are good and the blurbs are strong. I don’t care how fancy your ad is or if you have the hookiest hook…you’re not gonna sell if your cover doesn’t look good and match your genre and if your blurb isn’t strong. I told you about my read-through for my trilogy last week, so I know all the books are getting read. I sold some of my other books too, but my trilogy makes up the lion’s share of that figure. For ad spend, I spent $77.52 on Amazon ads, which is a little more per month than I’m used to spending, but I have an auto ad for Rescue Me that goes gangbusters every month. My sales aren’t gangbusters for that book, but I let the ad go because it brings awareness to my name and the books I have, and the clicks aren’t that expensive. For Facebook ads, I spent $87.00 for one ad and $8.77 for a different ad, and that brings my royalties for the month to $561.91. I don’t think anyone would complain about that. (Unless you’re a 5- 6- or 7-figure author. Then you’d probably die. Haha!)
November was almost the same. Before ad spend I had royalties of $593.45, which was a bit lower, but I think I also slacked on keeping my FB ads running. I schedule them for 2-week blocks, but really if I’m getting low cost per click and people are liking and engaging with the ad, I should just let it go and check in periodically instead of having to remember to extend the end date. Anyway, so with how Facebook bills out, I paid the same amount–$87.00. I didn’t boost a post, so I didn’t have the $8.77 I spend last month as I did in October. I also didn’t spend as much on Amazon ads, that total coming in at $41.09. After those two ad spends, I brought in $465.36 in royalties, which I am not going to argue about. I think most of that is my rockstars too, but now that my other trilogy is edited and re-covered, after Christmas I’ll start running ads to them too. I think with the number of books I have out, if I ran my FB ads properly, I could hopefully make $1,000/month. The steady income would take some pressure off but I would have to make double that for any real impact to be made. (For example, if I did make a steady 2k a month, I could drop down to part-time at my job and write more.) Perhaps after my series is out I’ll have a chance of doing that. I’ll have 17 books published under my initials–that has to move the needle, you’d think.
Anyway, so I’m not screenshotting my dashboard–you’ll have to take my at my word that’s what my royalties are, but there’s no reason to lie. If I wanted to lie, I would tell you my numbers were a lot better than that. Haha.
I finally migrated from the old MailerLite to the new one, and it doesn’t look much different. It wasn’t too difficult though it took a few minutes for the signup link on my author website to click in and I tried to sign up a few times before it worked. Linking my Bookfunnel account and migration to MailerLite was a bit trickier, but all I had to do there was generate a new API code and replace it with the old one on my landing page settings for my reader magnet. After I figured that out, it was okay. Luckily, and surprisingly, I remembered how I set it up last time, and I didn’t need to ask for any help. My signups and landing pages are very barebones and I only send one welcome email so my welcome sequence is very short. I haven’t segmented any of my subscribers, and it seems all my subscribers migrated over, but I saved them all first before I did anything. I haven’t sent out a newsletter since I did that so we’ll see how that goes. As far as I know, no one has signed up to my newsletter either, but I’m hoping with all the tests I ran everything works out.
I may not be completely taking time off from my books, but I did make time to read a book I found on TikTok–200 pages of pretty much just sex. Not that I minded, as I said above, the sexy snippets are what helps me find the books in the first place, but what you see, at least with that particular book, is what you get. There was no character development, hardly any backstory for either character. They didn’t even tell each other I love you, which was a real let down after all that…physical connecting. They didn’t break up and get back together, which is my favorite part of a romance book. So, I plowed through it in just a couple of hours, but it’s nothing I could ever write. I need more substance to my books, need my characters to grow and change and realize without a shadow of a doubt, if they lost the other person, their lives would never be the same. I need tender moments in the dark and gut-wrenching, down-on-his-knees proposals. To me, that’s what makes a romance novel. But there are many different types of books and many different types of authors and of course, many different types of readers. We all will find our audience, and that’s okay. I gave her .95 in KU page reads and I read something that wasn’t mine. We both win.
Later in the month I’ll do my year-end summary. It’s too early to do that now–there are still four weeks left of the year I’m not going to brush aside. Looking ahead too far means you miss what’s right in front of you, and there are still good things to come with the remaining weeks of 2023.
How are you going to spend the rest of the year? Any big projects you’re going to wrap up? If you won NaNoWriMo last month, congratulations! I will talk to you all next week. 🙂
Happy Monday! I don’t share many pics of myself, but this one was taken at the hotel in Minneapolis while we were decompressing after a day of shopping at the Mall of America. I literally have bedhead, haha. I hope the Thanksgiving weekend treated all of you to good food, fun family times, and some quiet relaxation for yourselves before the frenzied weeks of Christmas kick in.
Despite how busy my November has been, I’ve been able to get a few things done. My Lost & Found trilogy has been reedited and the covers have been updated (that was a lot of work and I’m glad it’s over). I haven’t taken the time to run ads to it yet, so I don’t have any data to share as to how the covers made a difference in sales. People actually have to know of a novel’s existence before they can buy it and right now the only way I do that is with ads. I can share now more on social media because I’m proud of the covers and before I didn’t really want anyone to see them. It’s difficult to market a book you’re not proud of and at least now I know the covers are the best they can be.
Ad cost over the next four weeks during the holiday season won’t be that great, and I won’t start any new ads until after the holidays. Everyone is going to be running ads to their products. I’ll keep the ads I have now going (keeping an eye on the cost-per-click), but I’ve heard CPC goes up around this time of year, and I don’t need to contribute to that.
I was a little curious as to how my rockstars were doing read-through wise, so I did some math to calculate. I’m not going to say how much they’ve made since their release (and with the numbers I share, please don’t try. So much varies with KU and sales, not to mention countries). I struggle between wanting to help fledging authors feel better about lower sales and showing my readers all that I have talked about and implemented over the years really did help me find readers and level up without flashing numbers. When you write a nonfiction blog it’s important you know what you’re doing, or at least if you’re going to experiment you’re honest that you’re experimenting and willing to share the results, but you can’t say “do this” without proof it works. No one would listen to me if I did that, and my blog would be worthless and meaningless. I’m not one of those smarmy marketing gurus that lands in your inbox, and I’m not trying to sell anything, but I do give advice and it is nice without taking screenshots of my KDP sales dashboard to be able to prove that my advice has a little weight behind it.
So, I took a few minutes to look up my stats. Twisted Alibis, in total, has sold 252 books. That’s with KENP page reads turned into full “books,” ebooks, and print sales. Twisted Lullabies has sold a total of 147 books, and that is with all the formats. Twisted Lies has sold 119 books, and that includes all the formats. I did the math and if you divide Twisted Lullabies’ sales (147) by Twisted Alibis’ sales (252) you get 58.3%. That means 58.3% of readers who read book one of my trilogy went on to read book two. I did more math and calculated that 80.9% of readers who read book two went on to read book three (119 divided by 147), and I was really really happy with those numbers. Especially since I’ve been told book two’s characters were hard to connect with and it wasn’t a classic, “boy meets girl, they fall in love, they break up, get back together, and get married” kind of romance. It’s not, really, but I believe there is room for all different types of tropes and stories and characters. I’m glad book two, despite the negative feedback, is enough for people to go on to book three, and I really hope book three nails the ending and gives my readers the closure they deserve after investing time to read 300,000 of my words. If you want to read more about read-through, how to calculate it, and why it’s important, you can read an article here by Mallory Cooper for Kindlepreneur.
What’s next for me? Right now I’m pleasure-reading/editing book two of my duet. I fell into a weird cadence overusing “while” “before” “after” and “when.” I don’t know why, and I don’t know how, unless I read a book while writing those that did the same thing. I don’t particularly like it, and there was one paragraph where I used five “whens” and it sounded like crap. I love the stories, though, so I’m pleasure-reading as much as I am fixing the sentences. It’s not a huge, anxiety-inducing priority to edit these books as my trilogy was, so I’m taking my time and still doing other non-writing things while I’m doing that. Mostly that has to do with the trip I was on for my daughter’s birthday, Thanksgiving I cooked for, and this week, tree-trimming and celebrating my birthday. I also want to spend more time on social media promoting my Christmas novel (I have five weeks to push it until no one cares), and I’ll do that while casually finishing reading book two and replacing all those files once it’s done. It’s not a big deal, and editing those books gives me a chance to update my Also By pages–I’ve written a lot more books since publishing my duet.
Otherwise I don’t have much else. I was going to take December off, but you all know me and I couldn’t take time off my books without feeling listless and, let’s face it, sad. I wouldn’t have much else to do, but I am going to read while I get my series ready because I want to start my research and plan/plot what I’m going to write next. I can’t write what I want if I don’t read and make notes of tropes and reader expectations (skipping from billionaire to rockstars to mafia), and honestly, some of these I picked up on TikTok and I want to know if they deserve all the hype. But, one thing at a time, and I want to delve into my series first, see how much work they need. I haven’t read them in a long time, and now that I’m aware of my writing tics and my new favorite garbage words, I can edit them with a fresh eye and publish them knowing I did the best I could. I need to take a deep breath and go slowly. We’re looking at a half a million words and that won’t be easy, even if they are, by my guess, 75% ready to be published. I’ve been talking about these for so long, many of you probably think they’re a myth and they aren’t really written at all. They are very real, and it will be a relief to get them polished and on preorder. I’ve held them back long enough.
Oh, and I did manage change out my Lost & Found trilogy files on IngramSpark, and I put my rockstars on there, too. I don’t use expanded distribution on KDP, preferring to use Ingram on the off chance I’m asked to do a signing and they want to order their own stock rather than me bringing in author copies. I always thought it was tacky anyway, asking bookstores to sell Amazon copies when Amazon is a bookstore’s biggest competitor. Have a little class and use Ingram for their distribution. I do both. Amazon doesn’t play well with others, so I publish there first, wait for the books and ISBN to “settle” for a few months (three or four), and then when Ingram publishes, they skip Amazon because my books are already there. It’s a system that has worked for me for 20 books, and if it’s not broken, I’m not going to try to fix it or do something else. I only messed up one of the six covers I submitted, and that by far is my best record yet. I must be getting used to how picky they are. Also, I recouped my Alli membership fee. One of the benefits of being a member is free IS file replacement. You can upload new titles for free, but if you make changes to existing books (I think it’s more than 60 days after publication) you still have to pay the fee for file replacement. That’s $25 for the interior and $25 for the cover ($50 for both). Being that I replaced both for all three books, my membership paid for itself and then some. Membership is $119 dollars and replacing all my files in my billionaire trilogy would have cost me $150. That alone was worth it, but I like being a member for peace of mind. You never know when you’re going to need an advocate to reach out to Amazon on your behalf. Anyway, so I was glad to get that done, and now my rockstar paperbacks are available everywhere. I don’t sell many, like I said, it’s mostly in case I’m ever invited to a book signing and they want to order their own copies. I do a 40% wholesale discount and don’t allow returns. I’ve heard some horror stories about dealing with IS, but I have never had an issue with getting hit with a huge return bill. There’s a first time for everything, so read up on what is best practice and make decisions for yourself and what’s good for your book business.
That’s all I have for this week. I hope you all have a fantastic one!
I haven’t been doing much except re-editing my Lost & Found trilogy and redoing the covers. I said in a previous blogpost that book one didn’t have the problems books two and three had, but I was mistaken. I went back and edited it more thoroughly which took time, and then I read all three of them again just to make sure I didn’t edit in any typos. My proofs come today, but I’m not reading them–okay I might spot-check them, but that’s all–I’ll page through them to look for formatting errors and make sure the back matter is how I want it, and then I need to move on. They are going to be as good as they’re going to be and I’ll have to be happy with that. I’m pleased with cover changes, and I hope that it will bump up sales. I haven’t been pushing them because I didn’t like the covers, but now I can promote them with confidence. I’ve said I don’t have imposter syndrome, but maybe I do. I’ve never been fully confident thinking my books are any good to read, but my trilogy is good, and I remembered that editing them. It’s a good story arch, and I want people to read them.
Just because I like the story, I’m reading my duet over again. Not with the express desire to edit them, though I am making changes and editing out the “when” sentence structure if I come across it. I also like “because” and with a quick sentence rewrite, I can usually edit it out. These aren’t bad–I hadn’t fallen into a writing tic while I was writing these, and I’m reading more for pleasure than to edit them. After those are done, I have a lot of admin stuff to do, and I’ll spend most, if not all of my free time in in the second half of November and all of December getting them done:
*Changing from the MailerLite Classic to the updated and newer version of MailerLite. We need to do that by February and I’ve heard stories ranging from it’s super simple to horror stories of lost email addresses. There’s a tutorial somewhere, so I need to watch it. Luckily, I don’t have anything complicated there, just one landing page and one welcome email that is sent to everyone regardless of how the sign up. It should be cut and dried, if not, dare I say, easy, but we’ll see. I’m going to set aside a whole day for it because I don’t want to stress myself out. This is a good time to redo my welcome email anyway, make it prettier, but I think I’ll have to redo the integration I have set up with Bookfunnel. I have 771 subscribers right now. I’m not running an FB ad to my freebie at the moment, so the past few subscribers I’ve managed to gain have been through the back matter of my books only. I’ll send an email letting my subscribers know that my Christmas novel is live, then I won’t send one out until I’ve moved my account over. That’s the top item on my to-do list for now.
*Publish my rockstar trilogy to IngramSpark. I always let a couple of months go by between publishing on KDP and publishing on IngramSpark. I’ve heard it’s good to let them settle, and it’s what I’ve always done. I’ve never had an issue publishing to IS after KDP, so I’ll keep doing it that way. The interiors are the same, but I’ll have to tweak the covers. IS uses different paper and the spines are thinner, which means I usually have to adjust the font to avoid it lapping over to the front or back covers. I can’t do that until my trilogy is done and published with new covers. I want to put the Lost & Found covers back there pushing readers who like trilogies to buy my other one. This is a back matter page of Safe & Sound telling readers I have my rockstars available:
I made the graphic in Canva. One of the best things you can do is use your back matter wisely! I do the same things with all three of my standalones–if you like this standalone, I have another available, and you can find it here.
*Make hardcovers for the rest of my books. I offer hardcovers of my Cedar Hill Duet and Rescue Me. That was all the further I got with my hardcovers, but now that my books will be 100% finished, I can make hardcovers of the rest. I’ve never sold a hardcover (only a handful of Large Print I can’t offer anymore because KDP blocks them as duplicate content) but I like how the buy-page shows more than one buying option and it shows readers that I’ve invested in my book to make other versions available.
*Try to enjoy the downtime and the holidays. That list will take me more than a few days, and while I’m not writing, I’m going to try to enjoy the holidays. I have a tooth that’s going to need to come out soon (I have PTSD from a root canal gone bad and I will never subject myself to another one) but I’m going out of town from November 15-18th and I would like to have it done after I come back. There’s no good time to have an extraction, and my November is busier than it’s ever been, but having an achy tooth in my mouth ups my anxiety, and I would like it out the sooner the better.
*Plan my next books. I’m thinking of another duet, but bigger ones, 150k per book or so. I want to incorporate the underground king concept I blogged about here, with the kidnapping/psychic element that’s been knocking around in my head. To write these as well as I want, I’m going to need to read some dark mafia books. I want these dark too, but not in the sex kind of way, well, not only the sex kind of way. Drugs, crime. Violence. The vibe I was looking for when I wrote All of Nothing. I don’t have a plot yet, and I still have to put my series up, but it’s never to late to plan.
*Try to enjoy walking more. I have a lot of negative feelings associated with going for walks, and I’m trying to sever those ties. When my ex-fiancé and I would talk, I would go outside for privacy. As our relationship deteriorated, I didn’t go outside just for privacy, I would go outside because we were fighting and I needed to walk off the nervous energy (and the fear but let’s not get into that). Walking now brings back a lot of those memories and feelings. We’ve been split up for a long time, and I’m used to him not being in my life anymore. Our five years together were more tumultuous than happy and splitting up was better for both of us. Still, those feelings are still there, and I need to push them aside to enjoy walking again. I also walked to get air at the beginning of the pandemic to try to quell my anxiety. I wasn’t anxious because of COVID though I know many were. I was anxious because unbeknownst to me at the time, I picked up a box of Snuggle dryer sheets, and they were wreaking havoc on my girlie parts (more specifically, they gave me bacterial vaginosis). Three years later, I’m still having issues my gynecologist doesn’t seem to understand, and now walking brings back those feelings too–of sucking air into my lungs, trying to calm down because while those dryer sheets were screwing up my body, they were also screwing up my mind. I’m still dealing with the side effects of that unfortunate purchase, but at least I know the cause of my health issues. There’s nothing keeping me from going for a walk and enjoying what that time outdoors used to mean to me–plotting my next book, listening to music, listening to publishing podcasts, and enjoying the health benefits that come with moving your body. I’m already doing better for myself recognizing those ties, I just need to do better with making time to do something about it.
I should probably make this a different blog post, especially since I don’t know if I’ll have time to post anything next week, but I wanted to chat about some of the new features KDP has been rolling out.
The first one is KDP will allow you to schedule when your paperback goes live. This isn’t the golden ticket people think it is though. While it’s nice you can schedule a release date, that doesn’t mean it’s on preorder. The only way you can schedule a preorder of a paperback is to publish it through IngramSpark, and I really discourage you from using IS to fulfill Amazon orders. You’ll end up with a bunch of problems, that, unfortunately, will be difficult to fix with the way I’ve heard IS’s customer service is since the pandemic and Robin Cutler’s exit. I’ve also heard that you need to have your files available before you choose a date (this was in an FB group and I have no idea if it’s true or if placeholder files can be used), but that actually makes sense, because the only nice thing I can see about pre-scheduling is that you can order author copies before your book goes live, and they won’t have the ugly stripe over the front. Paperbacks aren’t a big consideration when it comes to my books–most of my sales come from KU. I like to offer paperbacks, and Vellum makes it easy to format them and make them pretty. Lots of people were excited about this new development, but they still need the 72 hours to review your book and you can’t order author copies until your book has passed that review. As far as I can see, nothing much has changed there, except you can schedule and check it off your launch list.
The other thing KDP is playing with now is opening up audiobook creation using AI. So far, it’s by invitation only and in the beta stages. Beta in KDP language can take years (look a how long the new reports were in beta and how long the old reports hung around) and how long it will take to open to all of us (or at all) will be something to keep an eye on.
Of course this caused an uproar in the writing and author communities. Some are really against AI anything, and some totally embrace whatever AI has to offer. I like to be in the middle–there are good and bad aspects of it, and I think if you totally brush it aside because of the bad, you can miss out on the good. I don’t like using AI art for covers, and it’s becoming prevalent with romance authors because hot men who haven’t been used to death are becoming harder and harder to find–especially for authors on a budget who can’t afford to look beyond DepositPhotos. The only problem is, I can spot these a mile a way and all the covers that use AI to generate a man standing in a suit with a blurry background behind him are starting to look the same. No matter how long or how hard I have to dig, I will always buy stock. I believe in paying the photographer and I believe in paying the model. I don’t think creating an audiobook is entirely in the same category as using art. AI in this regard, I believe, is just technology moving forward. There is already text-to-voice options on devices, and using AI in this way is just opening up accessibility for readers who want to listen to the books they consume and for authors who can’t afford to pay a narrator. I don’t like gatekeeping and telling someone they shouldn’t create an audiobook because they can’t afford it is in its own way. There could be drawbacks to using text-to-voice, and we won’t know what those are until authors start reporting back. There needs to be way to correct the voice if it pronounces something incorrectly. The voice has to sound natural, but those voices are getting better day by day. On the author side, you have to take the time to listen and edit if that option is available. You can’t just upload your book, let AI spit out an audio version and put it up. There was one woman on Twitter who was using AI to translate her books into German, but she wasn’t using someone who knew German to double-check the translation. That’s irresponsible and scary. God only knows what it was coming up with. The last thing I want is to be a laughingstock in Germany. Good luck to her, I guess.
When it becomes available, I’ll give it a try. Apple already has given its authors a chance to create audiobooks with AI, (and people were excited about that, so I don’t know why KDP is getting flack) so it will be interesting to see how this goes. Just because I try it doesn’t mean I’ll publish with it. I might not like the voice choices, or because I write dual first person POV, I may not be able to publish using a female voice for the female POV and a male voice for the male POV. I’m definitely not going to shun something before I can even experiment with it. Ethics aside, you have to think of what you want for your business. I don’t listen to audiobooks–my mind drifts too much for me to concentrate–but I’m hearing now that listening to an audiobook is experience. It’s doubtful something that KDP offers will compete, but it’s nice to have to the option.
That’s about all I have for this week. I’ll be out of town November 15-18th. We’re driving down to the Twin Cities and we’ll be going to Mall of America, looking at a few museums, and going to the zoo if the weather permits us to be outside. I may take a pass at blogging or just put up a quick post I’ll write Sunday. Things won’t be calming down much after that either–we have The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes to watch that following Tuesday, then Thanksgiving. We’ll be at the end of the month after that, and I have my birthday to celebrate. We’re going to Napoleon and out for a fancy dinner so I’m really looking forward to that. All in all a very busy month and I think I’m going to sleep all of December.
For my last piece of news, A Heartache for Christmas is available right now–it went live today! The reviews have been coming in through Booksprout, and readers are really touched by the story (and I am really really in love with the cover!). You can find it here:https://www.amazon.com/Heartache-Christmas-VM-Rheault-ebook/dp/B0CM2BLRPF/
Being that I’ve been taking a break, I don’t have a lot to report this week. I managed to haul ten bags of clothes to the local thrift store, but that is only a fraction of what I wanted to get done. I still have a lot of books to go through and donate to the library for their book sales, both trad and indie books I’ll never get around to reading or never read again. I pay for a storage unit since I live in a tiny two-bedroom apartment that doesn’t have a garage, and weeding that out before it snows has somehow become a priority, if only to get rid of clothes I’ll never be thin enough to wear ever again and go through totes of books that I either need to donate or put on bookshelves once I get them purchased and my son puts them together for me. When I was out there last, I noticed I had a HUGE tote full of Harlequin Desires. Collecting them is a different activity than actually reading them, but running into a thrift store sale is too much of a temptation to avoid. I don’t have many vices, but buying old Harlequins at twenty-five cents a piece is, for better or worse, one of them.
September is slipping away from me, though, and I’ve read three out of four of the Lisa Marie Rice books I ordered. The post office lost one, so I ended up ordering it and reading it on my Kindle, which I should do for books anyway since it’s easier on my eyes and my carpal tunnel. I have one left, and then the other books that are related, but first we have a Hunger Games marathon and I have to read the prequel before the movie comes out. My sister, daughter, and I are going to a corn maze next month, so I’ll need to work on A Heartache for Christmas when I can so I can get it to my proofer by the middle of October. A November 1st publishing date is probably doable if I can get the book listened to this week. Formatting it will be a snap as I don’t think I’ll do the fancy insides like I did for my trilogy. The main thing is getting the cover done, since after some feedback in a cover group on Facebook, I decided to go in a completely different direction. This was the old one I was pretty much set on:
made with Canva using stock photos from DepositPhotos.com
It’s not terrible, but I think I was focusing more on the mystery part of the story instead of the romance part of it and my brand. So, with a lot of scrolling through DepositPhotos, I came up with a couple of different concepts:
The guy with the tie fits in with my books a lot better, and while it’s evident that’s a Christmas novel, the background doesn’t scream holiday, which is okay. The only problem I’m having at the moment is the font for the title, and maybe even the title itself, though I keep going back to it even after listening to suggesions from others. My default font choice when I have nothing else to use is Playfair Display, either plain or italicized and maybe all caps or not. My one problem with this guy is that the stock photo is only half of him, and it’s difficult (for me and my limited skills) to fill in the rest of the cover. The one with his whole upper body takes care of that issue, but then I don’t like how the title is off to the side. Here’s the stock photo I found:
found on DepositPhotos.com
I like him (love his watch) and he fits in with all my other billionaires, but he doesn’t come in a full-body pose where he’s doing the thing with his tie (why??). I don’t know if the cover that only has half of him works…I usually do have my titles over some kind of gradient to help them pop, but the men’s waists show, if only faintly. I know I said I would never cut off a man’s head, either, but here we are. DepositPhotos is getting really picked over when it comes to handsome stock photo men, and one of the things I do when I’m tired and feel like doing nothing but needing to do something is listening to music, scrolling through photos, and bookmarking them as potential cover models. The men in suits who are good looking and haven’t been used before (or very little) are getting few and far between so I may end up doing what Melanie Harlow does, and put men wearing t-shirts on her covers whether they are billionaires or not. What do you think?
I have time to decide since listening to my manuscript takes a few days and I won’t be done with that until I have to write another blog post next week.
I’m having fun on TikTok, or trying to, anyway. It still can take me over an hour to make a video simply because it takes so long to find a photo that fits in with what others are doing and to find a snippet. I posted one today and I forgot to take out one of the c*cks, so one of these days I’lll probably get suspended for going against community guidelines. Though, posting a snippet without the dirty words is rather annoying, and when I read a snippet from another author I feel like I’m playing fill in the blanks, sorry for the pun. I’m using more photos from DepositPhotos than ever before, not because I’m afraid of using what Canva has to offer, but the romance TikToks have a very gritty look to them, and while I don’t write dark romance, I still don’t want to look too out of place. I’ll probably buy another DepositPhotos pack from AppSumo as they go on sale around Black Friday. Anyway, I need to get into the habit of making them, since if I have time to make one, I probably have time to make two. It’s just choosing a book and finding a snippet that’s hooky enough to share.
I also find myself falling into different algos, and all of a sudden my feed is full of rescue horses. TikTok is very responsive to what you tell it you like, and #rescuehorsetok is not going to sell my books. I need to maybe unfollow some of the accounts and go back through the #booktok hashtag or #contemporaryromancereaders and push the algos back toward books. I hate seeing rescue vids anyway. They always make me so sad. I can’t wrap my mind around how cruel people can be.
I’m seeing on Twitter and in FB author groups some mild confusion about the new AI question on KDP when you publish a book. That wasn’t implemented when I published my rockstar trilogy, and I’m reluctant to go into a book’s content when I don’t have to, so I haven’t seen it for myself. There’s been a rumor that books will lose their discoverability if you don’t go through your backlist and check the boxes (for yes, your book was AI generated, or no, it wasn’t) but I don’t believe that. I’m not going through 20 books to check that box when I don’t have evidence (from Amazon) that I need to. Book sales ebb and flow, not to mention the sales dashboard lags, so if you’re having a slump, I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. Just like with the KU payout that somewhat snapped back, I’m going to keep on keeping on and only make changes if I have to. You can read an article about it here, but if I hear anything about discoverability of backlist titles, I will let you all know. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/11/self-publishers-must-declare-if-content-sold-on-amazons-site-is-ai-generated
That is going to be it for me this week. I’d like to congratulate Brandie Easterling Collins on publishing her newest book! You can check it out here–available in Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and Paperback. A new release is always so exciting! Good luck, Brandi, and Congratulations!
Vania Margene Rheault 