Tag Archives: author update

Mid-Year Check In and Author News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So to recap the year so far:

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

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

Ghost Town’s Fate:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author News and Short Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time!

Author Update and Personal Organization

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Words: 928
Time to read: 5 minutes

My Christmas WIP is coming along. I’m 45k into it, and I’m actually kind of surprised I’m as far as I am. It could be it’s because in some way, this plot has been rolling around in my brain for years, or it could be I’m having a lot of fun writing the two. I don’t know, but I started writing Sawyer and Evianna on July 6th with a deadline of August 31st. I’ll be done before then, and I’ll have a few extra days to let it breathe. Last night I went back to the beginning, read from the first page, and made notes of all the breadcrumbs. This isn’t my first twisty book, and I’m getting better at writing them, but it’s helpful for me to keep track so I know what scenes I need going forward.

My proofer is plodding along with my rockstar trilogy, but I just bought my own set of proofs today. Unfortunately, giving up any kind of control just isn’t going to be in the cards for me, so I’ll proof them too, and together I hope we can spot all the typos. Listening to them is the best way to fix missing words, syntax issues, and misspellings (the voice sounds funny if you misspell a word) but it doesn’t catch everything. I always find stuff to fix when my books look like books, So that will be my main priority once they come in the mail.

I’ve been thinking of ways to set a schedule for some social media posts, and I would like to get into TikTok. Not even just because I think it’s a sure-fire way to sell books (like the Kindle Gold Rush, I think the TikTok Gold Rush has passed for everyone but a lucky few) but because creating content is fun, can be used multiple ways, and does eventually find readers. It wasn’t so much what to create (though pulling quotes and writing copy is an arduous task), but focusing on which books. I posted my question in a group on FB and one mistook my scheduling as a want to get an edge over the TikTok algorithms, which is not my intent, and impossible to do anyway. No, when I say schedule, what I basically mean is organization for my own mind (her question prompted the word ‘organization’ which was the correct word I was looking for). I have a duet, two standalones, a trilogy, a forthcoming trilogy, and soon, a holiday novel. I don’t want to create videos and post all crazy, but focus on one book for a week or so, then focus on a different book, etc. I know you can’t push a book for too long or readers will get tired of the same old same old. When you only have one book out, that gets dicey. You run the risk of people saying, “That book again? Doesn’t she have something new coming out?” So I was thinking a month at a time, but that’s too long. Especially if you’re posting multiple times every day. Maybe even go down to a week for each book before starting the cycle over again. Someone in the group did say not to be scared of recycling content–if a video gets few views, post it again. And that’s great advice–especially if you post at different times of the day.

One of the biggest reasons that gave me pause isn’t the idea of showing my face, but something a little sillier: The kind of music to attach to the videos. I’m not on TikTok yet, but I’m under the assumption there are a lot of different artists and songs to choose from. I did a reel on Instagram, and IG gives you a lot of choices too. I’m not a music connoisseur at all. I have certain songs I like and play them over and over again. I don’t listen to Taylor Swift and she seems to be a top choice. Like a book you want to sell, you have to look at the title, the cover, the blurb. I guess for a video to hit, you have to look at the content (the actual video) the tagline/ad copy, and then the song/music you choose. I’m getting better at ad copy, writing one sentence hooks, etc, and a lot of the reels and TikToks I’ve seen aren’t made with complicated videos. The packaging, I guess you can call it, will be important, and eventually the kinds of videos I create will build a brand.

Some people say to jump right in, don’t overthink it. I’ve never overthought anything a day in my life. I’m lazy and overthinking is too much work. But I’m a planster, and with any project, I would like to have an idea of what I’m doing before I start. I grew up around lakes, and I never jumped in feet first. I hate the mud at the bottom.

That’s about all I have for today. Summer is two-thirds over, and I hope you’re getting to relax, get some things done, and enjoy the weather. My sister and I are going to see Oppenheimer on Tuesday, so that will be fun, and in August, my daughter wants to see Barbie. Later in August, I’ll be busy launching my trilogy, and when I start up my TikTok account, I’ll blog about it. Now that I’m not on Twitter anymore, I have a little bit of time to spend on that platform.

Anyway, I hope you all have a great week!

Author Update, Monday Musings, and Why I’m Not Joining Threads

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Happy Monday to you all! That looks a lot chirpier than I feel, but that’s nothing new. Actually, I’m in decent spirits despite having to pretty much swear off social media for my mental health. Not tweeting anymore has been nice, though after a three day break I went on to see if I was missing anything. Apparently a querying writer made waves when she tweeted her disappointment and disgust that an agent would reject her manuscript because she already had a client working on something similar. I don’t know why that writer thought she should blast that agent on social media (no names were given, but still) when it seemed perfectly reasonable to me. If I had an agent, I would want them to protect my interests first. Then there was more discourse when an agent said she had to love a story and know it would sell before she signed that author. Also, seems like a no-brainer to me, but apparently that almost started the next world war. Honestly, it’s not a great time to be an agent, and if I were one, I wouldn’t be on Twitter. My mental health couldn’t take it, not that I really can these days anyway, and it’s a relief to push that aside and accept I don’t fit in there, never have and I never will. Wouldn’t want to fit in there anyway with the behavior people are displaying. Maybe I’m just not angry, I don’t know, but I definitely don’t have the rage simmering under my skin a lot of people seem to have.

That’s why I’m not joining Threads, the new social media platform by Mark Zuckerberg. I just don’t see it being an answer to the social media void that I’m experiencing right now. People are downright hostile, and in this climate of fewer books being published, how difficult it is to find an agent, how difficult it is to self-publish and find an ounce of discoverability, it’s just another place for people to spew their annoyance, frustration, and sometimes downright hate. I don’t have a thick enough skin to handle it and I would rather just write my books, pay for ads, nurture my newsletter and forget social media all together.

I’ve been spending a little more time in my author Facebook groups, and I helped a couple of people with their covers, troubleshot Amazon Ads for one author who couldn’t understand why they were rejecting her ads (her book covers had blood on them and that’s against their guidelines) and that felt good. Got jumped in a romance group for giving my opinion on a plot because all he really wanted was validation (my mistake), and I suppose you’re never going to get away from people who only want to be agreed with. People can’t seem to scroll by if they disagree, but my tolerance for being bullied has reached an all-time low and I left that group. For now I hang out in the 20booksto50k group where if you disagree, that can actually turn into a thoughtful discussion amongst authors, and two other romance groups I’ve been apart of for years. Mark Dawson’s SPF group is okay, but there tends to be a lot of rumors that circulate there and even though Mark is a huge Amazon supporter, people like to dump on Amazon and I don’t have the patience for that.

So, as much as I know a reader should be able to find me online somewhere, I struggle. I was trying to make Instagram my “hub,” so to speak (I even posted a reel!), but deciding on the kind of content I want to post there keeps me from posting anything. I could/should start posting more on my Facebook Author page. There are several successful authors who keep up their Facebook pages, and considering my ads are clicked on the most by women ages 65+, Facebook is where a lot of my readers are. But I still can’t get past the “people know me there” dread because of the 100 some followers I have, mostly they’re my friends and family. I have a lot easier time posting about my books to strangers, but the only way I’m going to attract strangers readers to my page is if I post, so there’s a conundrum I’m not ready to figure out yet.

In other news, my proofs for my trilogy came, and they are so gorgeous. These are probably the prettiest books I’ve made, and the spines and covers are perfect. Here’s the video I made for IG. It shows the front cover of book one, and the beautiful formatting inside. The video isn’t the best (I need practice!) and I put it on YouTube since it would be easier sharing.

And here are the three of them together:

They are all with my proofer now and I gave her a gift card to her favorite grocery store for her time.

While she’s doing that, I’m 25k in to a Christmas novel I’m going to release hopefully in November, if things go right. I have most of the story plotted out and I know how things are supposed to go, so I don’t think it will take me any longer than it normally does to write 80k words. Standalones are fun, and there won’t be any surprise sequels to this book. All the secondary characters are already matched up or unattached for a reason, and I did that on purpose. It seems my downfall is when my characters have single friends, so I made sure I didn’t tempt myself.

Things are going okay, personally, too, though I do have to fight off the writer lonelies every once in a while. I have very few friends anymore to talk writing with, one of the sad outcomes about my split with my ex-fiancé. We would constantly talk books, marketing, publishing, and the silly things we’d see online. A year later and that’s still a hole I just haven’t managed to fill, and probably never will. Now if I see something outrageous or I have a comment on something, I keep it to myself or sometimes message a friend. But I can’t tell her every little thing and being that our lives are different, she probably doesn’t care, either, haha. It’s not really a secret that I live and breathe writing, publishing, and marketing because I don’t have much of a life beyond that, my kids, and my job. Finding somewhere to fit in is difficult for a lot of people, so I’m not embarrassed sharing my struggles.

That’s all I have this week. Bryan Cohen is hosting his 5 Day Amazon Ads Profit Challenge starting on Wednesday the 19th. He taught me all I know about Amazon Ads and besides my newsletter, it’s the only way I sell books. There are days where I don’t make much– a sale and a handful of page reads, but it’s better than having an empty sales dashboard. 2023 is the first year I’ve had zero no-sale or no-page read days. Zero, and I attribute that to niching down to billionaire romance, being more serious about my covers, and knowing how to run ads. I’m not saying I’ve never lost money, but that’s pretty much a given when you’re experimenting and testing. BUT Bryan helps you control that, so if you’ve been meaning to learn Amazon Ads, this a great free way to do it. Here are the links, and they are not affiliates. I don’t get anything when you sign up–I just share the info because I think his free class is a great place to start if you want to learn.

Sign up: https://learn.bestpageforward.net/jul23/

Facebook group for the challenge: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2230194167089012

Have a great week!

Monday Author Update

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Happy Monday! As much as it pains me to admit, summer is a third over. I wouldn’t say our weather has been particularly great–not a lot of warm days and lots of rain–but I appreciate the slower feel to the days even if my job hasn’t gotten the memo and my work hours are just as busy as any other time of the year.

I finished with my rockstar trilogy. I formatted them with Vellum, assigned the ISBNs in Bowker (I live in the States), finished my covers, and ordered the proofs. Once they come, I’ll hand them over to my proofreader and hopefully get them up on Booksprout for reviews by the middle of August. It was a lot of work, but I’m happy with how they turned out. I tried something new with the formatting since I updated Vellum and I wanted to see how easy it was. I added a chapter header graphic that I found on DepositPhotos. Finding it was surprisingly fast, but I did have to use GIMP to flip it and crop the white out. Here is the original, the cropped version, and how it looks inside the book:

abstract musical background with notes–original from DepositPhotos
flipped and cropped
Screenshot taken from Vellum

This is will be for the paperbacks only. Ereaders don’t support chapter headers so I’ll do the simple chapter images like I have in the past. It’s a little more work, but not much, and I think the paperbacks will be worth it, even if I don’t sell many. I had to up my prices too, because these are so long, and they’re going to be 14.99 instead of 12.99. I try to keep my prices low, and they’re 12.99 in countries like the UK and France, 14.99 in Canada, and 17.99 in Australia. I didn’t want to put them that high there, but considering I only make .50 off each purchase, it’s as low as I could go. My ebooks are still 4.99, and I think that’s the way they will stay. Rescue Me is still .99 and I might take that off sale soon. It’s been on sale for a few months now, so it might be fun to run a sale on Faking Forever.

I feel more confident about the covers, too, than for the ones I did for my Lost & Found Trilogy. I like the models better, even if they still don’t quite look 50. That’s okay. I found a background that I liked and added smoke to the bottom to help the title and my name pop. I didn’t workshop these, though I asked a friend what she thought. I looked through a lot of rockstar romance covers, and there wasn’t one set way authors were doing them. A few had an audience at the bottom with male model blended into the top, but I think the stage in the background suits, and I want to thank one of the members in the Indie Cover Project for her recommendation of the title font. I workshopped Rescue Me, and she suggested it. I didn’t end up using it, but I kept it in mind and it works here.

Maybe it’s a little premature to post them here, since I want to do a cover reveal to my newsletter subscribers later this week, but I wanted to show you how they look like they belong together. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in my years of indie publishing is to make your series look like they belong. It’s especially important as you build your backlist and your series will be listed on your Amazon author page. You want them easily identifiable at a quick glance–and I see authors struggling with this in some of my author groups. Sometimes I think it’s because they publish as they go–they are thinking about one book and one book only. Since I wait and publish together, I think of my trilogies and series as one large project, not each book on an individual basis. That might spill over into how I write them, too, as I have a review on Safe & Sound, the third book in my Lost & Found trilogy, that said she didn’t consider these books standalones within the series. When I write them, I think of them as one long, continual story, even if they are centered around different couples. I can’t start a series without reading them in order, and I guess I think most readers are like me.

I want to do better promoting these on social media–and I’ll start posting on IG and FB soon. I don’t think my proofreader is going to find anything serious–no large, gaping plot holes that will take days to fix–but I don’t want to post dates until I know for sure. While I do that, I’m going to dive into writing the Christmas novel I wanted to write. I need something quick and easy to put together after releasing two trilogies this year. I found the notes of the novel I want to write–but after skimming them, it’s no wonder I couldn’t put the pieces together. I have an idea and nothing more, so I’ll have to figure out what I was trying to do. I have a few notebook pages of story, and I don’t like what I where I was going with her, so I’ll need to rethink that character. Still, it has potential, and most times that can be enough to write something good. I just need to sit with a pen and notebook and brainstorm.

That’s about all I have for this week. It’s odd being between projects. I may never get used to the feeling of not actively writing something, but I’m trying to enjoy the short break. I should use the time to make up some social media graphics in Canva, too, and once again, after seeing a fellow romance author who went viral on TikTok post in a group she bought a car with her royalties, circling around to that platform, too.

For now, I’ve dumped Twitter. I’m not going to tweet much of anything and won’t post my new releases on there. I pared down my bio and put up a generic header. If I do post, it will be through sharing and I won’t check notifications. I want to focus what energy I wasted there on IG where I think I may get a better return on investment. I’m also trying to participate more in my romance FB groups. Like I said in my last blog post, I’ve been networking with the wrong people, and that is one of the mistakes I need to rectify. The friends I have made on Twitter know where to find me elsewhere, and can say adios without remorse.

I hope you had a good holiday if you were in Canada or the US, and find little ways to enjoy the rest of your summer.

Author Update: Knowing your limits and what I’m working on now.

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flat desk. mac laptop, paperclips. pink flowers. text: author update: knowing your limits and what I'm working on now.

Happy Monday! This week holds the first day of Summer, though we have felt the hotter temperatures for a while now. I don’t mind, and I frequently lie out on my apartment’s balcony with a podcast and soak up all the sun. This week is my sister’s birthday and we’re taking a road trip to Bismarck, North Dakota to eat at Cracker Barrel, bum around, and look at a different boring city with nothing to do there, either. But there are plenty of fields and plenty of cows, and I need a break.

I’ve been giving my trilogy a rest (to the best of my ability) and reading The Hunger Games books because I promised my daughter I would read the prequel before the movie comes out in November. Soon I’ll start listening to them (my books, not Suzanne’s), and I’ll have to divide my time or else I won’t them read and my books won’t get done for my proofer. I want to give her most of July so I have time to enter in the typo fixes and any cover changes I need. I only set an August deadline because if I don’t, I won’t work on my books in any meaningful timeline. But once I do set a deadline, and I announce to my newsletter that I have books coming out on a certain date, I’ll honor that. My publishing schedule is important to me; my integrity is important to me. Readers won’t trust you if you tell them one thing and then do another, and that’s why I got ticked off when one of my betas backed out of reading for me. (In the back of my mind I must not have trusted her because I still worked on them while she had them. I would have been even angrier had I waited thinking she was going to honor our agreement. It’s sad, but my lack of trust in people has served me well, and I don’t think I’ll ever change.)

Every week that passes, I see behavior like this in the writing community, and I don’t question why people are doing more and more on their own. If you want something done (and done right) you have to do yourself, and that’s evident in the uprising of sneaky AI covers, scammers charging for services they don’t have the right or experience to provide, and people unwilling or unable to keep their end of any bargain or contract they enter into. I’m always amazed when I look up the stats for my blog post on how to do a paperback wrap in Canva:

stats: 5.4k views, 13 likes, and 21 comments

I really shouldn’t be though because book cover designers aren’t cheap and with AI and scammers creating their own book cover design businesses who don’t understand you need to find your stock photos from a reputable (read: Amazon accepted) source, authors are just needing clear instructions on how to do it themselves because they’re the only ones they can trust to do it correctly.

I’m at the point where I have one online friend who will help me with blurbs and some shorter beta reading and a real life friend/co-worker who’s willing to help me proof my books. I’m tired of trying to weed through people who like the idea of helping but when it comes time to actually put in the work, they balk. It’s especially infuriating when you see them later tweeting about the time they are spending on their own work since they dumped yours. I’m bitter and refuse to put myself in that position again. So, when you offer to help someone, please follow through. It really hurts to get dumped. I’ve helped many authors since I’ve started this indie stuff. I’ve done everything from editing to blurb feedback to formatting, even some simple cover design work, and I have never, not once, backed out of a project. I do all of it for free (unless someone insists on throwing me a bone, but it’s not required) simply because I know how difficult trustworthy and affordable help is to come by. I couldn’t imagine getting halfway through a project and telling someone I couldn’t help them anymore. Even the idea makes me sick. Of course, like I said, life happens, and if my kids had an emergency, or my health was suddenly in peril (my mom and her mom both died from breast cancer) then that’s something else, but realistically, if you’re backing out because you bit off more than you can chew, that’s your own problem. What’s the saying? Don’t make your problem my emergency? Know your limitations and don’t offer to help anyone if you really don’t want to. Honestly, it’s a lot easier to say no than it is to back out of a project when someone is depending on you to finish. I’m not one for predictions, though I enjoy reading them at the beginning of every New Year, but I will say this: I think more and more indies will put out their work without any help. It’s just getting way too hard to pick through the scammers to find the dependable people, and indies are going to forgo the whole thing and just put their books out themselves. Whether or not they can put out a quality product is one thing, but the community is driving us to to do everything ourselves because it either costs too much or it’s too much of a headache to find someone who won’t screw you over.

Anyway, while my friend has my paperback proofs, I’m going to start writing my holiday novel. I found a notebook with the first chapter of a book and some plotting. I wasn’t experienced enough to connect the dots, and I tabled it. This was before COVID, maybe even a couple to three years before, so this shaky outline is old, but the plot has stayed with me. I’m going to turn it into a Christmas standalone. When I was plotting it, I hadn’t started my pen name yet, so I wasn’t writing strictly billionaire. When I go back, I’m going to have to figure out how to keep him in the situation he’s in because the original character didn’t have money and was essentially trapped where he is. But, I’m excited to use this plot, and I’m aiming for a November release. Even though it’s a Christmas novel, it will be dark, and I’m going to shoot for about 80k words. This will keep me busy during the remainder of the summer and into the Fall. I’m helping someone with formatting and editing, and I told her yesterday that Novembers can be busy for me. Decembers with Christmas can be too, but November will be particularly busy with my daughter’s golden birthday on the 18th, and my birthday on the 28th, and Thanksgiving I usually cook for. I wanted her to be able to plan accordingly but I won’t be working on any of my stuff by then. A standalone should be easy-peasy considering the two trilogies I’ve put together this year, and meeting my self-imposed deadline should be a snap.

I earned out my Fussy Librarian fee ($75.00), so that’s nice. (It was on the 9th of June.) I haven’t done the math to see what my read through is for the trilogy, but since my free promo wasn’t that long ago, my numbers would be way off anyway. It seems like I get decent read through, at least, book three is making money, so that’s something. We hear a lot about saturation. Is the market saturated? Too many books, not enough readers. Too many promos and not enough readers. I’ve read where these newsletter promos like Freebooksy, Fussy Librarian, and E-Reader News Today aren’t working as well as they used to. Being that I never used them FL or ENT, I can’t say one way or the other. I’ve used Freebooksy in the past, and I have proof a lot depends on your cover, if you write in a series, and how good your book is. I did a Freebooksy for the first book in my very first trilogy and it didn’t do well. My writing just wasn’t there and it didn’t earn back my fee. Same with All of Nothing. The writing was better, but that’s a standalone. Paying $120 dollars to give away a standalone doesn’t make any sense, and I didn’t have read through to other books because that’s an enemies to lovers and the only one in my 3rd person backlist. I’m going to keep an eye on how well my promos do for my 1st person brand. So far, the ones I’ve done have earned their fee back and then some, which is how you want it. But I made a conscious effort to niche down, change POVs, and write in more series. We’ll see if it pays off.

That’s about all I have for this week. I have plenty to keep me busy for the next little while, and I am really really excited to put out my rockstar trilogy. I thought my Lost & Found Trilogy was some of the best work I’ve ever done, but I’m really eager to see how readers like my rockstar stuff. I’m very proud of them, and I hope my readers love them as much as I do.

I hope you all have a good week, and if you ask, I can regale you with all the cow pictures I take on the road.

Until next time!

Authors in Reader Spaces, Monday Musings, and Author Update

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I actually had a different blog post planned for today. I had it all written out, but I was rereading it and after thinking about it, I decided not to publish it after all. We’ve had so much talk lately about authors who can’t handle their reviews, and we see evidence of it all the time. I’m not on TikTok, but I’ve watched reaction videos of authors who publicly go after reviewers for their honest reviews, (though some would say negative, even vindictive) and I really started to think about the kinds of information authors share.

Not just me, but any author who shares their numbers, their empty sales dashboards, their private messages, publicly. I’ve shared numbers in the past–how many books sold, how much it cost me, how many page reads after a promo and how long it took. That kind of thing. Authors who drift into the non-fiction space almost have to post some kind of proof of success or failure if they’re giving marketing advice. If I’m going to share my ups and downs publishing my books, then it’s almost a given to say, well, I paid $200 for ads between FB and Amazon in the month of May and I made $235, so really, I made $35 bucks. That’s the transparency we need as authors looking for marketing advice, and that’s the honesty we should be putting out there if we’ve chosen to share our journeys.

But then I think, authors are public figures and what we do and say on social media is put out there to be scrutinized, but not just scrutinized, scrutinized by readers who could find what we’re saying. This blog and the information I share is definitely different than what I put in my newsletters, and honestly, I don’t know how I would feel if any of my readers stumbled upon this website. We like to think readers and authors are separate, but with social media, they aren’t. (And we keep saying that authors are readers too, so…) They really aren’t. My numbers (or lack thereof) concerns them. It concerns the money and time they spend on my books, and mixing my readership with the contents of this blog doesn’t sit well with me.

I was going to share my numbers after my Fussy Librarian promo last Friday, and to be honest, I was disappointed in the results. But as I started to reread it to proof it for mistakes before I posted it today, I was ashamed. I had no right to be disappointed because in that disappointment, I discounted every reader who downloaded the book during the promo and every reader who will go on to buy books two and three. No, it didn’t pull the bigger numbers a Freebooksy does when I buy a promo from Written Word Media, but that only tells me their newsletter subscriber list is bigger. And we pay for that with a higher fee when we book with them.

I want readers to be proud they’re reading me. Proud to say, “Yeah, that VM, she’s classy. She doesn’t crap on other authors, she doesn’t splash a bad review everywhere and complain about it. She doesn’t post private messages everywhere making fun of people who reach out to her. She has a cute cat, drinks watermelon wine like me, and likes to read sexy romances in the tub. She’s my people.” That’s what I want readers to feel when they buy one of my books. That’s what I want readers to feel when they stumble upon my IG or sign up for my newsletter, or even God forbid read this blog.

I obviously don’t write for the money. If I pulled all my numbers for my lifetime of publishing, I would be in the red. Bottom line, I have put more time and money into my books than I have ever gotten back in royalties, but maybe that’s no one’s business but mine. Do I have dreams of speaking at 20books or NINC? I used to. (No, not really, I don’t EVER want to get into public speaking.) I wanted to be able to say, this is how I did it. I wanted to be able to encourage other authors and say, “If I can do it, so you can you.” But maybe I don’t want that anymore. Social media has become this dumpster fire of entitled authors who have such a thin skin they get pissed off when they get three star reviews. It’s terrible. I don’t want to inadvertently get meshed in with them, either. “Oh, that Vania, she’s complaining about how her promo did again. Ugh.” And the more you put yourself out there, the more of a chance there is of that happening.

So, that was what I was thinking when I reread my blog post that was supposed to be up for today. Was my Fussy Librarian successful? Sure. I had 1,257 downloads of Give & Take when it was free. I wouldn’t have had any if the cover was crap or my one sentence ad copy line was terrible. Have I sold anything? I sold 9 Give & Takes, 4 Lost & Founds, and 3 Safe & Sounds. If you count every sale, every reader, a success, then yes. My Fussy Librarian promo succeeded. Did I earn my fee back? No. Will I? I have faith in my books. I will eventually. I know I will, just not at the speed that I hoped. I can give myself permission to be disappointed, but my disappointment isn’t for public consumption. Readers and Authors mix on social media on a daily basis. My disappointment may not be for public consumption ever again.

So, where is this blog headed? I’m not sure. I’ve posted Monday and some Thursdays every week without fail for 7 years. I’m not a quitter and even if I don’t post hard numbers, I still feel I have a lot to share. I’m dipping my toes back into the non-fiction side, listening to podcasts, reading more non-fiction books. I want to share resources, but that’s hard to do when I’m not consuming them to pass along. I’ve been in a bubble with my own writing, and maybe blame my reclusiveness after COVID or my drive to get my pen name going (I published my first book in May of last year), but I haven’t let my attention go anywhere else and I know I need to, if anything, to grow as an author.

So, I will leave you with this: a chat between Kevin Tumlinson of Draft2Digital and Jane Friedman, on D2D’s Facebook page. I’ve tried to find it on YouTube as they post their videos there, but I couldn’t find it, so I apologize in advance if you’re not on Facebook to watch it. I’ll keep an eye out for it and if I find it, I’ll post it ASAP. Here is the link, and the screenshot is from D2D’s FB page: https://fb.watch/l4wVa0M6rS/

I hope you have a good week, everyone!

Monday Musings and an Author Update!

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Words: 1364
Time to read: 7 minutes

It’s another Monday, but not manic, sorry, Susanna Hoffs. I’m just tired AF. By way of author updates, I don’t have too much. A proof job fell into my lap last week, and I started and finished that before working on my own manuscript. I’m 91k into the last book of my rockstar trilogy, and I’m hoping to finish it ASAP. I want to dive into editing them and polishing them up for an August release. The week between books went really well for my other trilogy, so there’s no reason not to do that again if I work hard enough over the summer. It’s crazy how I’m already thinking about a Christmas novel, but we’ll see how much time I have when school starts. My daughter will be in her last year of high school this year, and September is always a little busy as we try to shake off the summer months. I am grateful I write clean first drafts, but my co-worker who read my series and proofed them for typos would like to read the rockstar trilogy before release, so if I take her up on that, I need to make time for it.

I have a book coming out on the 17th, and the first review on Booksprout put my mind at ease. I really wasn’t sure about Fox and Posey’s story, but I was honest in my author note to my reviewers and said as much. I have ARC copies available until it goes into KU on Wednesday, and you can download a copy from Bookfunnel if you’d like. There are eight left, but don’t download one unless you want to read it and leave a review: https://BookHip.com/PPSTKQF

I’ve been trying to shake off some doldrums and with the rain and my girl-stuff flaring up, it’s been difficult. I honestly wasn’t feeling a book launch, and it shows. I need to start Amazon ads to the preorder so they’re up and running when the ebook goes live, and I was going to schedule a promo for Give & Take on either ENT or Fussy Librarian to keep the ball rolling on my books. I haven’t done that either, and they book about a month out, so we’re looking at the middle of June before I can do anything now.

I guess this all kind of feeds into the discussions online lately about writers and their worth. I wrote a blog post about it a while back, which goes to show we’ll always have conversations about things like this. I sound bitter, frantic, almost, and what’s funny is my situation has changed very little. I’m selling more books because of the 1st person POV change, so that’s turning into a good move, but my fiancé and I broke up so I no longer have that “stream of income” I amusingly called it. (I did work for it, so it may be appropriate after all.) The blogpost I wrote in 2020 I could be writing now, except I’ve learned a lot over lockdown and actually put into practice those things as I started releasing new books last year. At any rate, it just goes to show some things will never change, and writers’ pay is one of them.

The conversation this time started over a tweet from an agent who said her agenting was a career and our writing was a passion. Let me dig it up so you can see it.

https://twitter.com/SBLitAgent/status/1656429611645906945?s=20

I honestly understand where she’s coming from (don’t come at me with pitchforks, please), and I often think of something similar myself when I see all the writers querying and complaining about all their rejection emails. Savannah probably could have been a little nicer about it, but agents have bills to pay and they can only pick up what they know will sell. It’s not rocket science. On the flip side, which is where my old blog post comes in, no one pays a writer for all the work that goes into writing a novel. All the months and years that we spend writing, there’s no pay for that, and sometimes, after we find an agent, get that book deal or self-publish, there’s still no pay for that. Certainly not a living wage.

It can be disheartening to keep writing, to keep producing for no little to no gain. And when we complain there’s no money in it, everyone piles on and says you shouldn’t be writing for the money. Which… is what Savannah did. It’s quite the conundrum, especially if you break down all the hours you work on your books for free. I work maybe 20-30 hours a week on my books. I have to if I want to write as quickly as I do. Part time wages compared to what I make full-time at my job would work out to be about 15k a year from just writing. I’ve said before how much easier my life would be if that were a reality. Of course I love it. Of course I love helping my friends publish their books. Of course I love the readership I’m building with my first person books. I don’t know how you can’t be a writer if writing calls to you. How do you shut it off simply because you’re not earning an income?

I listened to the latest Six-Figure Author podcast episode and could really feel Jo’s plight. He revealed he was getting a job for the first time in a long time, and that brought on a lot of emotions for him and the people listening. I doubt I will ever be able to quit some kind of a day job. I need the stability of a paycheck, and I would have to be earning a lot from my books to even think about it, even if my work barely pays me a living wage. If you want to listen to the episode, you can here. He starts talking about that 8:00 minutes into the video.

I guess I don’t know where I’m going with this post, except I can see both sides. There are ways to make your book enticing to agents before you query, just like there are ways to make your book more enticing to readers if you self-publish. Know what’s going on in your genre. Know who your comp authors are. Know what shelf your book is going to be in a bookstore. (It really is amazing how many authors say they wouldn’t know.) Work on your craft. Whenever I see a tweet that says they queried the perfect agent and still got a rejection, I just think the writing isn’t there. It’s a tough industry and you have no idea who’s right. Should you get an editor before you query? I don’t know. How strong is your writing? Should you get one before you self-publish? I don’t know. How strong is your writing? Either way, you have to know the industry. Read Publisher’s Weekly. Read Publisher’s Marketplace if you can afford it. Read Jane Friedman’s The Hot Sheet if you can afford it. Publishing is a business. Learn about the business you’re in. Someone DM’d me and asked me a question because she said I knew more about indie publishing than anyone else she knew. That’s not just from publishing books. That’s from listening to podcasts. Reading blog articles. That’s from listening to talks on YouTube like the 20books50k conference last year in Vegas. That’s from knowing the heavy-hitters in the industry and signing up for their newsletters. Sign up for workshops if you can. Anytime Melanie Harlow speaks, I’m on it. What do you do to stay on top of your industry? When you’re querying, what can you bring to the table? Everyone keeps saying the agent/writer relationship is a partnership. Okay, what’s in your half besides your book?

I don’t understand the helpless mentality online. You are not helpless. Your career is in your hands. You just have to decide how long you want to work for free, because it’s a lot longer than any of us realized it would be.

This is the first year ever that I have sold a book or had page reads every day since January 1st. My craft is better, my brand stronger, and my focus clearer. I didn’t know what I wanted when I first started publishing. I do now. And until I have to be like Jo and cut back to find something else that will pay the bills, I’ll never stop trying.

Hopefully, you don’t either.

Have a great week!

Monday Musings and Quick Author Update

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Words: 1100
Time to read: 6 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Musings–when your book won’t sell–and Author Update

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Words: 1792
Time to read: 9 minutes

I’ll try to keep my musing short this week. I’m tired. I finished the second book in my rockstar trilogy. It came in at 92,633 which is shorter than the first one, but I didn’t expect them to be equal in length–not when the first turned out to be 107k. I created the file on February first, which makes no sense why I felt like I was working on this book forever, but I did.

Anyway, I’m proud of it and proud of the twists and turns that developed while I was writing it. I’ll have to take a break because while I know some of the backstory to both characters of the last book, I don’t know much else. I need to plot more before I start writing. In the meantime, I have a book coming out in May, and I’ll read that one more time and fix the back matter as I probably have the old covers to my duet there and maybe I’ll put the trilogy link there instead. They are better sellers no matter how much I push my duet, and there’s no point in beating a dead horse.

That’s part of my musings for today. Why some books sell practically by themselves and why some don’t. It seems every author has this issue. In fact, Joanna Penn said as much when I (finally) listened to her interview with Jane Friedman back in December. She said:

Because it explains why — like, I’ve got 35 books now, and most of my income comes from a handful of them. And, obviously, every single one I thought was going to sell, but it’s only a few.

JOanna Penn https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2022/12/19/changes-in-publishing-with-jane-friedman/

It’s disheartening, in a way. Not because books are our babies and we love them all equally, but I put a lot of time into each and every book. I watched hours of construction accidents on YouTube to write Captivated by Her. Yes, I might have fudged on a few things because it’s a romance and not a crane operating manual, but I did a lot of research to write Rick’s accident and what caused it as realistically as possible.

Of course, I made two mistakes when I put them out: I didn’t offer them to Booksprout first for reviews, and I published them with covers I changed–wasting the bump Amazon gives new releases. With almost no reviews on either book, that time is nothing I’ll get back. What also didn’t help was that I waited two months between books, when really what I should have done is just released them together or a week apart like I did my trilogy. At the very least, I should have put the second one on pre-order so readers who read the first book would know the second is coming in a decent amount of time.

I can look back at those mistakes, but there’s no way to know that even if I had done those things it would have made a difference. I can always pull them out of KU and offer them to Booksprout reviewers, or take a chance with Amazon and put them on there anyway (I am definitely not comfortable doing that) or keep pushing them with promos and ads. Or, I can just let them go, which isn’t what I want to do, for obvious reasons. It doesn’t hurt to run low cost-per-click Amazon ads, impressions are free so you’re not necessarily wasting money setting them up, but looking at what a small backlist I have so far, it is a bummer that they aren’t doing better. Since their release last summer, they’ve made $214.62 together. To put that in perceptive, because I’m sure there are some of you who are saying that’s good, Rescue Me has made that on its own since its release in September.

I’ve moaned about this before, but actually, this is common. What’s depressing about it is when you have a very small backlist or if you only have one or two books out that aren’t doing well, you’ll have no sales or traction and you’ll have no idea why. Your book could have all the right things–good cover, good blurb, but just for some unknown reason it’s not “hitting” and the longer it’s out without sales, the faster it will sink. You can try to bump it up with a new cover, but if you’ve already spent money on a cover you’ll probably be reluctant to spend more–especially when positive results aren’t a sure thing.

When I re-edited Wherever He Goes, I thought about putting an illustrated cover on it instead of what it is now (it’s funnier than my other books and the content would have supported that change). I don’t have any experience with illustrated covers and I would have had to hire out. It’s not a gamble I took, one because the book is old, but two, an illustrated cover wouldn’t have fit in with the rest of the books in my backlist. I like the cover that’s on it now, and I think the blurb is a good one, but despite it being my favorite, no matter how many ads I set up, I can’t sell it.

What can you do when this happens to you?

*Realize that it happens to everyone. Not every author’s books are going to sell like gang-busters–probably not even Colleen Hoover sells all her books equally.

*Focus on the books that do sell–even if it hurts. The ad gurus tell you to throw your money at your books that do sell, and that’s good advice if you don’t have a money to gamble with. If your books already have a natural momentum or easily find traction with a little bit of help, no point in trying to push a rock up a mountain when it can tumble down on its own.

*In that vein, you can try different advertising strategies if you have a little money to play with. Maybe you can’t get any impressions or clicks on with Amazon ads, but with the freedom of a graphic, being able to choose a target audience, and being able to use as many words as you want in the description, maybe you get more interested eyes using FB ads.

*Another thing you can do is write and publish more. I don’t want to say eventually you’ll write something that will sell, because that just sounds dreary and after a while you’re writing for money and sales instead of writing what you love. Wherever He Goes is a road trip/close proximity contemporary romance. There’s nothing unconventional about it. I loved writing it, and that will have to be satisfaction on its own.

*Think about the risks you want to take. Series are great for read-through, if your book one is solid and hits the market in the right way. A book one that sinks won’t get read-through to the other books. It’s a conundrum I see on Twitter a lot. Authors love to release books as they write them (find some patience, y’all), and then they’re faced with the question of, Is my book not selling because it’s not hitting the market in the right way, or is it not selling because it’s a book in a series and the series isn’t done yet. Then they have to decide if they want to keep going. It’s difficult to find motivation to keep writing a series when the evidence, misleading or not, points to the fact no one wants to read it. That’s a lot of work for no foreseeable gain. For better or for worse, I write all the books at once and only release when they’re done. I put my trilogy up on Booksprout and let reviewers download all of them so they could read the books separately but also review the trilogy as a whole (many did in the review of the last book). You can say that I take my risk ahead of time, and I do. Wasted time is wasted time, but at least I’m not constantly worried about finishing a series if I’m not finding any readers. Had I done that, I would have been in the same predicament many are. Captivated by Her is half of a duet, but I could never let myself not finish the story. Even if you only have one or two readers, I feel you owe it to them to give them closure. Don’t make them waste their time…or their money.

What am I going to do next? I haven’t run a promo on Captivated by Her, and I’ll plan one soon. I wanted to run a couple of free days when I paid for my Freebooksy for Give & Take, hoping to piggyback off that sale (and promo fee), but its time in Kindle Select was about to renew and KDP wouldn’t let me. So I can buy a promo somewhere I haven’t before if they don’t take the number of reviews into consideration when they vet the books for approval. Otherwise, I’ll just have to keep running ads and hope for the best. I can throw myself at my readers’ mercy and beg for reviews in the back matter, but this where you have decide where you want to put your energy. It’s not that I want to let those go, exactly, but the trilogy I’m working on now needs my attention or I”ll never get them done by the time I want to publish them.

That’s all I have for this week. Besides writing and watching my Freebooksy sale results fade on my trilogy, I’m not doing much else. My coworker finished hunting for typos with my King’s Crossing series, and she loved it! That’s a relief, but even bigger is she didn’t find any plot holes, which would have been a bear to fix at this point. After my rockstar trilogy is finished, I’ll be getting those ready for release–I need to fix what she found and tweak the covers. I have a standalone plotted out that I’ll write next as kind of a palette cleanser, and then on to another 6 books series. I have two written and don’t want them to go to waste, so I’ll work on those for a 2025 release. That is too far into the future for me, and I can only focus on getting through each day and hoping it doesn’t freaking snow anymore. By the middle of March in Minnesota, we are all waiting for spring to come.

Anyway, have a great week, and if you have a book that’s not selling or ideas on how to fix that, let me know in the comments! Until next time!