Tag Archives: book marketing

Pivoting Backward: Starting from the Beginning

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A sheet of paper in an old-fashioned typewriter displaying the words "Starting from the beginning," with the ruler and type bars visible at the top and bottom of the image.

When I was an indie author back in 2016, branding and marketing weren’t really “big things” yet. Amazon had been letting authors publish since 2007 and it geared up around 2010 when they rebranded into what we know now as Kindle Direct Publishing. That set the foundation for the Kindle Gold Rush that took place between 2011 and 2013 when, as legend says, you could just publish a book and print your own money. I missed that by a couple of years and things were harder. There was more competition and the authors who had been publishing all that time understood things like putting good covers on your books and writing in a series and did things differently than us newbies to keep their readers and find new ones. They were on K-Boards sharing best practices while everyone else fumbled around in the dark.

I was staggering around on Twitter like a drunk along with thousands of other authors and we were divided into two camps: those of us who wanted to improve and do things the “right” way and those who chose indie to do things their way and only their way.

You can guess which camp I spread out my sleeping bag in. (Just kidding. I don’t camp. My idea of camping is staying at a hotel that doesn’t offer 24/7 coffee access.) I wanted to succeed, and after doing what I wanted when I wrote On the Corner of 1700 Hamilton and my Summer Secrets erotica novellas, that meant starting to follow the “rules.” Write to market, cover to market, make your book’s insides look their best. Even following best practices on what to put on your copyright page. I was the ultimate “Do it right or don’t do it at all” preacher, and if you look back at my blog posts from around that time, I was pretty nauseating. This isn’t the exact blog post I was thinking of, it’s old and I can’t find it now, but I have many that sound similar: https://vaniamargene.com/2021/10/18/you-dont-have-to-do-it-if-you-dont-want-to-how-true-is-that-statement/ And after a while they all said the same thing. Follow the rules or you won’t sell books. Or you’ll sell books but you won’t make your readers happy.

When things go to shit, one of the first things you’ll hear authors who have weathered the storms say, “You have to be able to pivot,” and then you get all the authors who have been at this a while say, “Yes! Pivoting saved my career.” With the way things are in publishing presently, I’ve been hearing a little bit of this now. Be flexible, mix things up. Take a chance. Evolve. It’s the only way to stay relevant.

They aren’t wrong, and I’ve done some pivoting myself. Did it make me money? No. Did it keep me relevant? Well, I wasn’t relevant when I pivoted. I was hoping that starting a pen name and doing everything intentionally would help put me on the map. Choose a genre and stick to it (billionaire). Follow the trends (writing in first person present). Fit in with other books in your genre (putting sexy men in suits on the covers). Create your brand (billionaires in sexy suits). For many many books, I did that and only slipped up once when I wrote my rockstars. (Still sexy, still rich, so I told myself I’d allow it).

It didn’t put me on the map. It . . . didn’t do anything. Pivoting was like walking down a street I had never been on before in a town that I lived in all my life. It was new but didn’t bring me anywhere that I hadn’t been before.

So, this is year ten of publishing and I’m where I was when I published my first book. That’s not totally true–the knowledge I’ve gained would probably be enough to teach a class on self-publishing and I know a lot about marketing now. But I’m making the same amount of money I did then, which to say not very much, and with nineteen books under this pen name and ten under the other, going to bed with zeroes on my dashboard would seem almost impossible, but I do it.

Given all of that, I’m thinking about pivoting again.

The thing is, I’m not going to pivot into something that’s even tighter than what I’m doing, if that makes sense. When I was writing in third person, I thought I couldn’t get anywhere writing contemporary romance. Romance is so narrowed into subgenres that “contemporary romance” is just too wide of an umbrella for any traction. When I pivoted, I niched down hoping that tightening up what I was doing (subgenre and covers) would help, so rather than twist the screw again, I’m going to loosen it up and maybe even toss it aside.

One of the biggest changes I think will be just putting whatever I want on the covers of my books and saying to hell with how they look. I’m tired of the guy in the suit. When I publish Bitter Love, maybe I’ll put a couple on the cover. It’s a small town romance, and I think a couple would be a good fit anyway. And I’m exploring what I want to put on my hockey duet. I was looking at hockey arenas and hot guys and none of that looks appealing anymore. All my covers, all my hot guys in suits, they look like they could be on any billionaire book, and maybe that isn’t a compliment. Branding is one thing. Boring is another. Maybe I’ll do an object cover. I’m still not sure if an illustrated cover would work, especially since my hockey duet is a bit unconventional. (Beckett retired at 21 because of a family tragedy and at 40 inherited the team his grandpa owned.)

I don’t want to be held prisoner by my own backlist, but that means I have to let go of the fear that if I veer off or pivot away from what I’ve been doing since 2020 that I’m not suddenly going to miss my chance to be a bestselling author. I’ve been doing the same thing for many years now and it has always been met with the same result.

I get needing to know what the package is going to look like, and I get that romance is tropey. I like tropes and I’m not talking about throwing away the things that make a romance work. I want to go back to when I was creating for me first and readers second, but marketing and the “rules” have sunk their teeth into me and it won’t be so easy to let them go. I’m going to try though, because things aren’t working and when things aren’t working, there’s no point in doing them anymore.

I’m scared of change, only because I’ve had FOMO since I started publishing and that probably won’t lighten up anytime soon. But these days I might be more afraid of what I’m going to miss if I don’t try something new rather than the opportunities I’ll miss if I keep doing the same thing. I’ve done the same thing since 2020, and I have to get over the idea that “one more book” will change things for me.

I want to be 2015 me, with a good cup of coffee, my cat, and two hours of writing time. Because what I’ve learned over the past ten years along with Canva and Vellum and WordPress and Bookfunnel and KDP and IngramSpark is that everything else is just noise.

And noise doesn’t write books.

If you want to read more about why I first pivoted, you can read it here: https://vaniamargene.com/2022/02/21/knowing-when-to-pivot-what-does-that-mean/

Along with pivoting with my fiction, I may be pivoting with my blog and cutting back to only twice a month. After ten years, there’s not a lot to say about writing and publishing anymore and I’m really reluctant to keep writing weekly if I don’t have anything to contribute. I won’t shut down though–I’m paid up for a couple of years and people are still loving and needing that paperback cover Canva tutorial–so follow me and you’ll get notified when I have a new post up!

Thanks for reading and enjoy your week!

Author Update: Mid-Year Check In

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Flat lay blog header image featuring a pink-and-gold workspace. A spiral notebook in the center reads “Mid-Year Author Update 2026” in elegant script. Surrounding the notebook are a pink computer mouse, keyboard, gold pen, paper clips, decorative tape, flowers, earbuds, and a fuzzy pink pouch, creating a feminine and organized writing-themed aesthetic.

It’s that time of time of week when I say I don’t have anything to talk about but then end up writing 2,000 words on how much I love to write while pretending I don’t care about my sales dashboard. I still love to write, and I’m trying to care less about my dashboard. I need to find my inner Gen X, stop giving a fuck, and go drink some water out of a garden hose.

Last week we had a heat wave and spent five consecutive days sunny and in the nineties. I didn’t mind this so much–because of my mother I’m a Floridian at heart–but Thursday night I had a terrible time sleeping and spent Friday in a heat-induced zombie state. That broke with a weekend of cloudy days and rain, but my car battery decided to lose charge and that was just a stress I didn’t need in the middle of it all. Luckily, it was under warranty from when I had it replaced in January, so it didn’t cost anything except some worry and time.

Friday morning Pim decided to chew on a sticker she peeled off the bottom of one of the dining room chairs, and I was lucky that years ago we had a cat who had what amounted to feline pica and knew right away she was trying to eat something she shouldn’t. I pulled two inches of paper out of her throat and she sauntered away like nothing happened while I laid down on the kitchen floor and peeled all the rest of the stickers off the chairs before I even had a cup of coffee. Picture of Pim for the cat tax:

Picture of tuxedo cat sitting on counter near the sink and strainer
Pim doing whatever she wants. Not thankful at all.

All that to say I had an eventful week last week.

I didn’t realize when I was thinking of post for this week that it would land on June first, and that’s perfect because now I can do a mid-year check in. Things have been pretty quiet around here. Wicked Games‘s launch did poorly, even with Amazon ads, hardly anyone reviewed out of the fifty or so ARC copies I gave away, and it’s just going to be another book added to a backlist that nobody’s reading. And that’s fine. It really is. I’m going to take a different route publishing Bitter Love next year, and for the rest of this year, I’m going to focus on writing my hockey duet. Since this is a check-in, let’s talk numbers. I’ll keep to my author side this time.

Number of words written this month
I’m really happy to say I’m 46,000 words into the first book of my hockey duet, Frozen Assets. I jumped the gun and announced it last summer, but then I decided to re-edit a couple of books and wrote Bitter Love instead. So I’ve been thinking about these books for a long time and have them mostly plotted out. I hate that it’s gotten to the point where authors have to defend their word count so they’re not accused of using AI to write, even though 46k in a month (I created the Word file and started writing on May 3rd) isn’t terribly fast. It’s not even NaNoWriMo standards fast. I’m not trying to get this book done as quickly as I can like I have in the past . . . I’m just having a lot of fun writing Beckett and Sloane and write whenever I have free time, which, even with the shenanigans my work is having with my schedule, is still a lot. I’m not going to speculate when this book will be done, or when I can start Cold Mercy or when those books will be published. I will put them up somehow and eventually they’ll get to Amazon, but I have very little caring about anything right now except watching hockey documentaries in the evening and writing Beckett falling in love with his fake wife.

Author Website Numbers
I still keep seeing authors ask if having a website is something they should do, because of cost or time or whatever, and even for as quiet as my hobby has become, I think it is. This year so far I’ve had 707 views of blog posts and 540 visitors. Maybe I still have the sun shining in my face, but I take that as a good thing. That’s 707 people who know who I am. Does it make a difference? Maybe not. But that’s more than I would have had without a website at all. My blog is connected to my old list of MailerLite newsletter subscribers, but I don’t send them every post because I don’t get the open rates to justify it. I’ve actually been tempted to delete my whole list, but the email addresses can sit there. I’m not going to bother to send if no one opens, but I like posting updates on my blog, and doing cover reveals and snippets and all the rest keeps me excited about my projects. I pay about 100 dollars a year (I pay for two years at a time for the discount) and if we’re talking measurable ROI, it might not be worth the cost to some, but I can afford it and I’ll keep it going.

Bar chart showing website traffic from January–May 2026. The site received 707 views and 540 visitors during the period, up 21% and 36% respectively compared to the previous period. Engagement also increased, with 20 likes (up 233%) and 7 comments (up 100%). April had the highest traffic month.
Screenshot of my WordPress Author Site Dashboard

My Biggest Mistake
Not like the biggest mistake I’ve made in publishing this year, but my reader magnet is still getting downloads. I don’t check the stats that often, but someone on Threads the other day was saying how discouraged she was because books sales weren’t there and she wasn’t getting any traction with the free stuff she was giving away on her website, either. My website page (vmrheault.com/subcribe) where my reader magnet lives, is in all my back matter and in all my bios across social media, like IG, Goodreads, and BookBub. In May I gave away 34 copies. There was a spike at one point, and the link must have been shared somewhere because I usually give away around 15 month. That’s still pretty good for a free book that’s just sitting on my website without much active promo. I think it helps that it’s a standalone and that I’m not asking for an email in return. I re-edited it not long ago, but it could probably use another sweep since I’ve been making my books sound more conversational and I re-edited that one before I started doing that intentionally. I have Rescue Me in the back matter for readers who like standalones, but I haven’t gotten many sales of that so I don’t think the link is doing anything. Still, I’m proud of My Biggest Mistake, and sometimes I wish I could give it a new cover, but the cover is in all my back matter as well and that’s too much work to change it when the cover I have on it now is just fine. I’m locked into giving it away for the rest of my life because I’m not editing back matter for 20+ books. If I ever feel like I’m missing out and need another book, I’ll just write one.

Wicked Games launch
I published Wicked Games on May 15th, 2026, and I am sorry to say the launch did even more poorly than Loss and Damages back in September. I feel like every book I publish does less than the book before it. Only 11 people out of the 18 who took copies on Booksprout have reviewed, and I have the same number of reviews on Goodreads, which is pretty sad considering I gave away 35 copies to people on IG and my website. I wasn’t going to do Booksprout this time, but I caved. I won’t be doing it again. Because out of the 11 who have reviewed, not even half wrote a review a potential reader could use to decide to read my book. I’d rather have zero reviews than ten that say, “Good book. Would recommend.” That’s not a review. To me it’s just someone phoning it in because I asked them not to use AI. Harsh, maybe, but I’m also paying for the service, and readers are willingly downloading a copy of my book to read and review. Anyway, Wicked Games has made less than twenty dollars this month, 8.28 in sales, and 10.59 in KU page reads. I spent 11.81 on Amazon ads before I turned them off because lately my ads have been doing really good impressions- and click-wise but the clicks don’t turn into sales and I can’t let them get out of control like they did last month. I don’t have any plans to do anything else with it. I’m terribly proud of Seth and Avery, and the “real” reviews I’ve gotten have said it’s good and makes sense (which was one of my worries because no beta readers and no editor besides Pim and me) so like Rose dropping her necklace in the ocean, I’m just going to let it go and move on. Though, I’m not going to go to my stateroom and pass away. I don’t plan on going on any boats anytime soon.

Backlist Sales
I don’t check yearly sales unless I’m writing a post like this, but across all my books this year, I’ve made $306.00. With Canva, WordPress, etc, I’m not ahead or even breaking even, and I don’t expect to ever again. I got really excited when I finished editing my Cedar Hill Duet and gave them new covers, and I spent $85.52 on Amazon ads trying to promote them. The ads went gangbusters, resulting in 436,861 impressions and 91 clicks while I had them running, but even at a lower click-rate, I couldn’t keep them going. Those books didn’t take off with their new covers like I thought they would, and maybe I’ll give them away later this month during a free promo. This year they’ve only made me 35 dollars together, and unfortunately, they aren’t worth spending money on.

Screenshot of Amazon Ads statistics for the Cedar Hill Duet campaign. The campaign spent $37.49 and generated 436,861 impressions and 91 clicks. Readers borrowed 255 Kindle Unlimited pages. The campaign is still delivering and has no budget cap.

It’s been a while now since my King’s Crossing Serial has been published and out in the world. Since I’m only doing a recap of 2026 so far, I’ll just give you those numbers. All six books together have sold in royalties $172.86, but I was running Amazon ads to those as well. Those ads also went crazy and I turned them off. I spent over 200 dollars on ads to that serial this year, resulting in a small loss.

Screenshot of Amazon Ads statistics for the King's Crossing campaign. The campaign spent $209.05 and generated 853,610 impressions and 514 clicks. Readers borrowed 10,492 Kindle Unlimited pages. The campaign is still delivering and has no budget cap.

This just circles back to what I’ve been having problems with for the past couple of years. I can get ads to work, but I operate on a small loss or break even. I can never get them to do more than that, and it requires me to keep a constant watch on them so I don’t wake up hundreds of dollars in the red.

Right now I don’t have any ads going to any of my books, and I don’t have any promos planned. I always think I should do this or I should do that, but then I think I’d rather write my book or something else and never do anything beyond the thought.

What’s ahead for the rest of 2026
What’s ahead is just writing Beckett and Sloane and Sloane’s sister Celina and her love interest who has yet to be named. All my research has been paying off and I can drop cap talk and contracts into dialogue like nobody’s business. It’s also helpful to know that most of a hockey team’s management is still paid out their contract fees even if you fire them, and sometimes no matter how much a player sucks, you can’t cut them. A lot of what I know I learned from watching Faceoff: Inside the NHL on Amazon Prime and reading sports articles (who knew free agents could be so interesting!). I’m lucky I love watching documentaries and right now I’m watching NHL Hall of Fame stuff on Prime to get a feel for the career Beckett lost walking away from the sport. The worst is coming up with team names that haven’t been used before by an “important” or “real” team, but you still want the name to be powerful and befitting of a hockey team. So you can get silly, like the Idaho Gum Chewers, but it’s just in fun until you can think of something passable.

I have Bitter Love in reserve until I feel like editing and publishing it, which I doubt will be this year, to be honest because while I love Jesse and Jordan, I’m just not feeling it, and maybe next year I’ll re-edit my rockstar trilogy. I love the characters and their stories, so it won’t be a chore like Faking Forever was (I never want to read that book again), but I’ll do it when my hockey duet needs to breathe, and I can settle in and enjoy a couple months of that. They don’t need new covers, I’m very happy with how they look, but those books are a couple of years old now and could use a proofread.

I have things on the table to keep me busy, and summer is just starting. My sister, daughter, and I have a couple of roadtrips planned, and I think we’re postponing Florida until September when school starts and fewer families will be traveling to Disney. I’m feeling okay, every once in a while a bad day will knock me over, usually when the night before I didn’t get much sleep. I’d still like to lose a little weight, but I’d have to get off my butt a lot more than what I have been. I’ll be getting new author pictures done too, since the ones on social media are a good five years old now. I need some new clothes before that happens, and my sister and I will just drive to a city park near my apartment. I might even sit in the same place. The flowers the city plants make a nice background.

That’s it from me this week. Next week is another editor Q & A. I hope you’ve been enjoying them! I don’t have many left to post.

Take care, and have a great summer! See you next week! ☀️ 🌸

Monday Musings: Publishing Whiplash

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Graphic for a blog post titled “Publishing Whiplash,” featuring a snowy mountain road and a lone car driving through a winter forest at dusk.

I’ve only had whiplash once in my life. When I was thirteen or so, I was taking the van home from church. I did this a lot even when my parents had also gone to church, because it was fun and one of my friends didn’t live that far from me and we rode the whole way together. The roads were slippery, and at an intersection, a school bus hit us from behind. I didn’t feel it for a couple of days, but when I did, I was miserable for weeks. Luckily, I have never been in a car accident where I have suffered like that again, but being online these days gives me a different kind of whiplash.

Everyone is talking about sales, KDP reporting, and what you can or can’t do to sell books.

On the one hand, there are people who say there’s nothing you can do. Good books are buried every day, and it doesn’t matter how well your book is written or how wonderful your cover is. The algorithms are against you, and it does feel like that. You publish a book and it joins the ranks of the thousand other books that are published that day. There is no organic discovery, it feels like Amazon no longer pushes your books (is the 30-day cliff even a thing anymore?), and word of mouth is bestowed among a fortunate few.

But on the other hand, I am seeing a lot of, If your books aren’t selling have you…?

started a newsletter
posted on socials consistently?
asked beged for reviews?
optimized metadata?
picked the right tropes?
run ads?
rapid released?
made or bought the right cover?
written the perfect blurb?
built an ARC team?

And anyone who has been publishing for a while will say they’ve done all those things, and it can get annoying and frustrating hearing that same chorus over and over again.

Because we can dissect that list and find many reasons why they don’t work anymore. It’s harder than ever to entice, persuade, or cajole someone to sign up for your newsletter, and when they do, good luck getting them to regularly open it and engage with what’s inside. Social media is a time suck and you’re fighting a different kind of algorithm war. Reviews can be hit or miss, but my experience with BookSprout, PenPinery, and giving ARCs away on my FB author page and through my newsletter has been less than stellar. Optimizing metadata isn’t a secret anymore and everyone knows how important categories and keywords are. Running ads is a gamble, especially with Facebook making it increasingly harder with their AI and interest targeting changes. Not having the right cover is so 2016 and it’s easier than ever to make something yourself in Canva or buy a premade, and maybe people still struggle with blurbs, but they’re doing their best. We know how important it is to build an ARC team, but everyone is trying to build one, and while publishing is a marathon, you may die before you reach that finish line.

So, what’s left?

I know this post sounds like a lot of what I’ve been talking about for the past six months, maybe even the past year, but it’s only lately that I’ve been seeing the tug of war online . . . or maybe it’s always been there and I haven’t been sensitive to it until now.

Perhaps one thing that made me go, “Hey….” is Becca Syme’s recent Substack article. In it, she says to stop worrying about saturation and start writing better books. In a lot of areas, I agree with her. For the past fifteen years we’ve been swept up in the culture that faster is better and that more books will earn you more money. She mentions authors publishing their Minimum Viable Products, and that truly did used to be a thing–just get it done and out. I think authors still think faster is better, just for the sake of feeding the algorithm and building a backlist, or if not that, then they publish the second their book is done because they’re excited. I mean, I just saw someone post on Threads that they put the first two books of a new series on preorder, but now they have writer’s block and were panicking because they barely had anything written. I get being excited, I even understand needing a deadline to work toward to keep motivation up, but that sounded like unnecessary sabotage to me.

So, in some ways, Becca is absolutely right. Stop thinking you’re going to fade away into obscurity if you’re not publishing three times a year, focus on enjoying the process, and give your readers an experience that they won’t regret paying for.

But I also disagreed with her. Not because I think authors shouldn’t focus on craft–we should all be trying to level up every time we write a new book–but because the authors who write good books have the same problem that everyone else has: discoverability. In fact, some could argue that poorly-written books seem to do better, but that’s a discussion that leads to nowhere so we probably shouldn’t do that here.

The truth is both sides are right, and that’s what gives me whiplash. Yes, authors should focus on craft and giving a reader something they’ll love to read. Yes, we should package our books professionally, write the best blurbs we can, and understand the basics of marketing. But there comes a point where “Have you tried…?” stops being helpful and starts sounding rather accusatory and condescending, like if you had just posted one more reel or spent five more dollars on ads, you would have made it.

And you know the people who keep telling you to keep writing, those are the people who have made it, and they have the “Just Do It” mentality because it worked for them. That doesn’t make them wrong (maybe annoying, though), but people who have found success sometimes wear rose-colored glasses, and it’s difficult for them to take them off.

So we can look at publishing and focus on what we can control. We can level up our craft in a way that our time and expenses allow, we can put good covers on our books and write good blurbs. But I also think we need to be honest about what control actually looks like. Not everyone has the money for developmental edits, professional copywriting, or custom covers. Not everyone has an army of beta readers, honest author friends who will tell you the truth if your cover sucks, or an ARC team that will actually read and leave a coherent review. A lot of publishing advice assumes access to resources that a person working two jobs, parenting, and running a household may simply not have.

Over the past ten years I’ve learned a lot. I’ve leveled up my craft, and I know I have. I never could have written Wicked Games five years ago, and I have said in the past that I tabled A Heartache for Christmas because I didn’t have the skill to write the book I wanted to write. I’ve learned a lot about covers, not just making nice ones in Canva, but making ones that specifically fit the genre and vibe of the book. And yeah, I do it alone. But even though I do it alone, I don’t stagnate because I love doing what I do, and getting better is a part of having a passion.

In my last blog post, I said that this post would be about finding discoverability if you don’t like posting on socials and if ads don’t work for you. I’m not sure what I thought I was going to offer, since my books’ discoverability is pretty much nonexistent. I make pennies a day, even with nineteen books in my backlist. And because of that, I decided to stop writing to publish and write because I love it. I don’t know when I’ll publish again and that’s okay. I’ve done everything on that list and it’s time to move on.

I’m tired of thinking I could have done more, and I’m tired of being told I could have done more.

I don’t have whiplash anymore. I don’t go to church anymore, either, and the friend I used to sit with, she’s been in my past for a long time.

But five months out of the year the roads are still slippery, so I’ve learned to slow down and enjoy the view.

Author Update: Where are all the May Flowers? 🌸

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Decorative blog header featuring pale blue baby’s breath flowers along the left side against a white background, with blue script text reading: “Author Update: Where are all the May flowers?”

Don’t get me wrong. The title of this post is a little deceiving. There are some flowers here and there and the grass of our apartment complex is dotted with yellow dandelions that look cheerful. But, sparing you the Minnesota weather forecast, it’s still cold outside, and well, after dealing with the doom and gloom, it would just be nice to be able to go outside without a coat on.

Wicked Games will be out this Friday, May 15th, and I’m not really doing anything extra for it. The book has just kind of slipped out of my brain, and it will be a struggle to shove it back in, so maybe I won’t. I’m not running ads and I feel like I’ve exhausted how much people on social media care (even if the truth is no one has seen the posts in order to get tired of them). It used to be that releasing a book was a big deal, and it still is, in some ways. I’ve gotten good feedback about it, some nice reviewers posting on Instagram, but going through the publishing motions isn’t as exciting as it used to be. I don’t want to be a killjoy, and I’ve been trying very hard not to be on this blog because you don’t come here to listen to me whine.

But I think it’s safe to say that I don’t have the time, energy, or money to do what it takes to move books, and I’m not alone. I’m willing to do a lot of things, or, I was. Like sending out a newsletter, a real one, not just on my author blog, consistently releasing three to four books a year, and posting on socials. It used to be fun, and that’s the crux of it. The hustle isn’t fun anymore, and at fifty-one, I’m understanding what my limits are and don’t want to waste energy on things that consistently produce very little in return.

What still is fun? The writing, of course. I’d walk away completely if that stopped being fun. Cover design. Scrolling through stock photos is tedious and getting up there with being not fun, but for now, putting together a cover I can be proud of that accurately depicts the story is fun. Formatting, to some extent, is fun. I like deciding how pretty I want to get with the insides, but a lot of the time I think simple is best and at the last minute throw out any plans to get fancy/complicated and just do a clean formatting job instead.

Uploading files and entering metadata is not fun, and having to do it over and over again on different platforms is really not fun. Bookfunnel, Booksprout, Amazon, IngramSpark when the timing is right. It’s tedious, really, especially when you pair that with the stress of hoping that what you’re doing will help just a little bit and you might actually sell a few copies during your launch.

So, I think any sane person would say, just do the fun stuff then, and forget the rest. And honestly, I’m really close to doing that. I’ve been thinking about what I want publishing to be going forward, and with my personality in general, having fun means trying new things. That means doing something I haven’t done before, like only making my book available on my site for a while, or going wide with it instead (I know those are completely opposite ideas LOL). But publishing the way I always have is getting stale, and I’m hoping for different results doing the same thing every time. Because when I look at what I’ve done over the past couple of years, doing promos, book blasts, and running ads, I don’t get different results, and I don’t get different feelings either. So, I’m not thinking about things the way I used to. We’ll see. The easiest thing I can think of would be to do something like, put Bitter Love on Bookfunnel and give it away as a freebie for a couple of months. No thinking about sales, no hoping for reviews, just giving it away and seeing what happens. I wouldn’t even bother to collect email addresses because I would have to change my Bookfunnel plan and I don’t want to do that. It’s interesting to think about. I’m not selling much now, so giving away a book wouldn’t cannibalize any sales, and I doubt that will change within the next year or so because I’m not convinced the publishing landscape will get easier anytime soon.

In other news, I got a preorder reminder today, and it’s interesting that KDP is now locking your book down five days before your publishing date, not 72 hours. So, with that change I would suggest that you have your final files uploaded and ready for your preorder/scheduled date at least a week in advance. The warning doesn’t bother me at all because I never put my book on preorder until my book is 100% ready to go, but I know a lot of authors edit right up until the last minute, so I would keep this in mind if you like to live dangerously. I have both the print and the ebook scheduled, so this could only apply to the paperback, but it never hurts to be safe and just have both of them ready at the same time.

Screenshot of a Kindle Direct Publishing email reminding the author that Wicked Games, scheduled for release on May 15, 2026, will be locked for updates beginning May 10.

As of this writing, I’m 12,000 words into Frozen Assets, and I’m really liking my progress so far. Of course, you know I get the “This book is going to be so short!” fear while I’m writing, but then I look over my outline and think there is no way this book will be under 80k words. All the research I’m doing seems to be paying off, and my characters can talk about hockey naturally without sounding like I’m injecting facts just for the sake of sounding like a sports romance. I’ll still have to research as I go along because when we get to team dynamics, player positions, and contracts, I don’t know much about those things and I want to sound realistic and believable. Just in case a hardcore hockey fan happens to read my books. There are things you can fudge in the name of artistic freedom, but I want the important aspects correct at least.

Alex Newton of K-Lytics just came out with his annual sports report, and in the email, he says:

Romance > Sports is currently the #2 highest-ranking bestseller list out of 69 main Romance sub-categories on Kindle.

Even more striking: 11 out of the Top 100 highest-selling Kindle books of 2026 thus far are sports or hockey romance titles. Eleven!

Google search interest in sports romance and hockey romance surged to an all-time high at the end of 2025, just as the TV adaptation of Rachel Reid’s hockey romance Heated Rivalry became the biggest original series debut on record for Canada’s streaming platform Crave.

And the next publicity boost is already around the corner: Elle Kennedy’s Off Campus will premiere on Prime Video next week, on May 13.

if Alex’s numbers are anything to go by, hockey romance is an extremely popular subgenre right now and if you were thinking of sliding onto the ice, there’s probably never been a better time. If you want to purchase the report (that also covers football and other sports), I’ll give you the link (not an affiliate link). I used to buy them every once in a while, but I can’t afford to now. I’m sad, too, because his reports are very informative and I miss his data (and sense of humor). There’s a little more information about his seminar, and you can buy it here: https://k-lytics.com/sports-romance

That’s all I have for you this week. Next week I have an editor Q & A from the lovely Megan Harris, and after that, I’m going to talk about discoverability if you hate social media and ads don’t work.

Have a good week, everyone, and take time to smell the flowers! 🌺

Author Update: Spring Reset

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Pink flat-lay graphic with a clock, notebook, glasses, pens, and desk accessories surrounding white text that reads: “Author Update: Spring Reset.”

Hello, hello, from the frozen north where it actually got to 85F the other day and it made us all think that summer might once again be possible!

I have been very busy for the past few days, and I got a lot done. I finally finished edits for my Cedar Hill Duet, and got all the files uploaded to KDP and IngramSpark with their new covers. This will be the last time I edit them or redo their covers. What will be with them will be, but I was very excited to get that off my plate once and for all. If you want to see how the covers have changed since I published them four years ago, I dredged them up on Canva:

Graphic comparing cover evolution for the Cedar Hill duet. Top row shows three versions of Captivated by Her from 2022 release cover, 2023 redesign, and 2026 final cover featuring a lighthouse background. Bottom row shows three versions of Addicted to Her from 2022 release cover, 2023 redesign, and 2026 final cover featuring a city skyline background.

I don’t think my skill necessarily changed that much, but my taste did. The covers I just changed them to are more indicative of what’s inside, Rick with his lighthouse and Beau with the city behind him, rather than the generic background that a lot of billionaire novels have even today. I did end up changing the model for Addicted to Her, just because the guy didn’t match the vibe I had in mind for the character. I had to find a different pose for the other model because his arms were cropped and I needed all of him so I could show more of the city buildings. I really like how they turned out, and since I edited these within an inch of their lives, there’s no reason to revisit them ever again. It’s a good feeling. After KDP approved the paperbacks, I started some low cost-per-click Amazon ads and I’ll be thinking about what I can do for the “relaunch party” I want to have. I’d like to use my free days and run a Facebook ad to them or something because I think with the new covers they’ll sell better. Anyway, I’ll let you know what I decide and what the outcome is. If anything, it’s more content for social media because I always have trouble coming up with things to post.

While I was messing around in IngramSpark, I updated all of my prices (something they told us to do months ago), and I upped all my paperbacks to $16.99 which just seems so high considering I had some of my older books priced at $9.99. I don’t sell many paperback off there anyway–I only have my books listed in case a miracle happens and suddenly bookstores need access. So I adjusted my prices, made sure the discount was the same across the board, and turned off returns on the books that still had that on. Getting that pricing maintenance out of the way was a nice thing to check off my list, as was catching up and publishing my King’s Crossing serial, A Heartache for Christmas, and Loss and Damages. I was behind because I don’t like having to tweak the covers, but it will be a while before I have to do any more. I won’t be able to publish Wicked Games there until that title and ISBN “settle” on Amazon so I’ll get around to it this summer. It’s just a lot of busy work what with the covers and filling out all the meta data and uploading files.

I was going to wait to put Wicked Games on preorder since I had been messing around so much with my KDP account, but I ended up submitting the ebook for preorder anyway, and that went through just fine. I’m not sure what I was expecting, them to flag my account for unusual activity, I guess, but they didn’t bother me. I had an ARC reader message me on IG and told me about a typo that I fixed, but it will be there in all the ARC copies that were claimed and in the nine author copies that I have. It’s fine. I had typed “here” instead of “her” but honestly, if that’s all she caught because that’s all there is, I’m pretty happy. And I got this review on BookSprout and it makes me happy that this book has the potential to be a good read. That sounds doomsday, but you really don’t know how a book is going to hit until people start reading it.

A great suspense story that includes finding love at a difficult time and all that it involves.
What a lovely personality Avery has. Considering the pain she has gone through she is very generous to Seth when he is so cruel with his words to her. I know Seth has his demons too but I felt that didn’t give him the right to be so vicious early on in the story.
He redeems himself though and Avery gives him a second chance. What comes across is two people who have both suffered immense losses and whilst grieving are trying to find a way to live their lives.
There’s lots of intrigue and suspense throughout the whole story. I felt it was well written and it was intriguing with so many avenues to go down. Seth’s long standing friendship with his business partner Violet was an added dimension that Avery quickly understood.
Definitely worth reading, even if I did end up with a tear in my eye.

–BookSprout Reviewer

Eighteen out of twenty-five copies went on that site, and most of them were familiar usernames, meaning, they’ve stuck with me for several books. I was going to mention in the “Note to Readers” section that this would the last book, but I didn’t. I won’t be publishing anything else for a while, so I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. I suppose it will depend on what kind of reviews I get this time. Not good or bad, I mean, quality. For Loss and Damages, I got one that was written with AI, and a lot of plot summaries. So, even though I don’t pay much, those aren’t the kind of reviews I want attached to my books anyway. If the reviews are better this time, I’ll reevaluate next year.

I gave away 35 out of the 50 I made available on Bookfunnel, I think mostly through Instagram since I boosted a post over there for a week. Here are my open stats for my “newsletter”–the subscribers I have from when I was building a list on MailerLite.

Screenshot titled “Email opens” showing campaign metrics: 594 total emails sent, 180 unique opens, 275 total opens, and a 30% open rate.
Latest emails Opens Clicks Wicked Games ARCs are now available! 30.3% 1.85%

Out of a decent open percentage, only 1.85% clicked, which ends up being about 11 people. Of those, all of them could have downloaded, I’m not sure, but between BookSprout and my Bookfunnel link, I’m hoping Wicked Games can go live with around 50 reviews. Not because I think it’s a magical or number or anything, I just think the more reviews your book has, the better it looks and the better it will sell.

I said I was going to try a site called PenPinery for book reviews, and I’m glad I only paid ten dollars because that bombed. I don’t know if it’s still too new and they don’t have readers, or if I did something wrong. According to the site, I had one person apply, but I never got an email and when I tried to click on the notification to approve them, it didn’t do anything. That was after the campaign closed, because again, I didn’t get an email to know anyone applied, so I’m not sure if that had anything to do with it. Because it could have been an operator error and not the machine, I’m not going to ask for a refund, but it will be the only time I try them. Because if was my fault, then it shouldn’t be that hard to list a book, as I’m a fairly educated and intelligent person. Either way, my experience is what you come here for so I would find a better, perhaps a more straightforward, way to get reviews, and where maybe ten dollars will get you something more than confusion and disappointment.

I don’t have much more to do on my list, which I am really grateful for. I was getting really burnt out and I needed the break. Not that doing ten hours of admin is a break, but uploading files while listening to music and drinking lime Perrier is a lot different than editing two books that are five years old. If I wanted to, I could upload all my books into Draft2Digital and put them into libraries, but it would take a lot of work and I’m not sure if it’s worth it. Like every other place that has books, libraries are saturated. People finding any of my books and borrowing one are slim so I’m not sure if it’s worth the time. I’m not concerned about the fees they implemented. Twelve dollars a year for distribution services and account maintenance sounds pretty fair to me, and I’m not going to say much beyond that because anything that could be said already has been . . . last week. I will leave this hypothesis here that someone left in a comment on James Blatch’s Substack article about the subject. You can read what he has to say here: https://jamesrblatch.substack.com/p/the-reaction-to-the-draft2digital

screenshot of comment. text reads: John Irby 10:23 AM If D2D is able to successfully pull off charging authors up-front, expect KDP to do likewise in the near future. The days of Big Tech handing out freebies is over. I'm a musician and Apple recently switched my digital audio workstation software, Logic Pro, to be part of a "creator's bundle" subscription costing $13 a month, even though I already paid them $200 for the basic software years ago. But I digress.

I think in the next few years, John is going to be right. Everything will be going to paid eventually, and what remains free will be so pared back it won’t be usable in any long-term way. So if you were one of the people who had a problem with how Draft2Digital decided to combat AI books and scammer accounts, I would ask that you look at your business and consider where you’re going to be in five years. You’ll always get back what you put into something, so it’s worth thinking about.

Now that I’m done with most of my admin list, I’ve been watching Faceoff: Inside the NHL on Prime and just mulling over plots and characters for my hockey duet. I think I’ll give myself another week of rest and then jump in at the beginning of next month. I haven’t decided what or when I’ll publish next, and it’s kind of freeing just to be writing to write. I finally got around to watching the new season of Bridgerton, and that was fine. I don’t think Benedict’s story is my favorite–that honor might always belong to Anthony unless Eloise’s story blows me away–but it was fine. I also watched Heated Rivalry to see what all the fuss was about–it was hockey so I considered it research–and that was okay. I didn’t freak out over it like most of Romancelandia, but I can at least say I watched it now so my FOMO can STFU, LOL.

Anyway, I think that’s all I have for this week. I’m in a really good place mental health-wise with my writing. I’m excited to start writing my hockey books and just have fun with the world- and team-building. It will be a lot of work, but I’m looking forward to it. 🏒

Enjoy the last week of the month!

Monday Author Update (April Showers Edition)

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picture of mug of coffee and an open book next to a window that has rain on it

Last week was kind of a bummer. I was down, not really because of book sales, which have actually sprung up lately since it seems like Amazon has gotten their reporting back under control, but mostly the weather has been dragging me down. We got a lot of snow and it hasn’t warmed up enough to melt off completely yet. Along with all the brown grass and mud, it’s depressing to look at. I haven’t been hit by SAD in a long time, but I really hope that the sun starts coming out regularly and everything dries up. I think it will make me feel better.

I also had a painful carpal tunnel flare up that took me out for a couple of days. They happened to be my days off work which, fine, I didn’t feel terrible while I was working, but it did ruin my time off. That happens every couple of months where my elbows feel like they’re softballs on fire, and the pain goes up into my neck and back. Stretching helps a little, but mostly I just have to suffer until it goes away. I was taking a lot of Tylenol since it seems like with my health issues my body has a harder time tolerating ibuprofen. The Tylenol took the edge off, but really all I could do was wait it out. I feel okay now, besides a little puffiness in my hands that will never go away because I type forty hours a week for my job (I’m a relay operator for the deaf and hard of hearing which requires a lot of fast typing), and then on my days off and after my shifts I’m working on my books in some way.

If you’re reading this on the Monday it posted, I’m almost done going over my proof. I only have about the twenty-five percent left, thank goodness. I’m still fighting to make my prose and dialogue sound more conversational, and in this proof pass I’m still getting rid of a lot of words, though not so many that I should have to adjust my cover. It will be a heavy weight taken off my shoulders when this project is done. I promised myself I’d take a break, and I’m going to finish watching the second season of Faceoff: Inside the NHL on Prime as part of my research for when I start writing my hockey duet. I also saw the trailer for Finding Her Edge on Netflix, and between the hints of a love triangle I thought I saw and all the ice, I figured I could add this to my list of . . . research. If I’m going to take a break, I might as well make it worth my time, haha.

I don’t have much else going on at the moment. I’ve been scrolling Substack more and more and I came across this article by Zoe Lea about newsletters. You can read it here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-191487138

Like with a lot of things indies are “supposed” to do, I had a really difficult time deciding not to offer a “real” newsletter anymore and just blog on my author website. I know that blogging doesn’t offer the same benefits, like compelling readers to sign up with bonus content they can’t get anywhere else. If I write something, it will be for everyone. The free book on my website also doesn’t seem “special” when it’s available to anyone who happens to land on my subscribe page. I get all that. So reading Zoe’s Substack article about what she found out when she asked readers what they really wanted out of an author’s newsletter made me feel better about my choices.

We’re told to send out a newsletter once a month. To remind readers of who you are when you’re not releasing books. That’s hard to do when you’re a slow writer, maybe releasing a book a year, which is the rhythm I’m going to fall into now that my day job has changed things and I have less time to write. What do you write about when you’re not launching a book? More importantly, what do you write about that doesn’t waste a reader’s time and make them click the unsubscribe button, or worse yet, mark your newsletter as spam?

Zoe’s findings aren’t going to be representative of every reader out there, but when readers say they don’t want: cover reveals, slice of life posts, and newsletter swaps, I think we can listen and at least consider what those things are giving, or not giving, our readers. A cover reveal doesn’t do much without a CTA like a preorder link or a buy link. Slice of life posts don’t have much weight either. How many times can you say you like reading during a thunderstorm? But what surprised me was when they said they didn’t care when you featured a book by an author who writes in the same genre that you do. Newsletters swaps are one of the biggest marketing opportunities that indies have. You share your audience and I’ll share mine. So when readers say they don’t want book recommendations? That’s surprising and maybe a little unsettling.

I feel like I’ve reached a happy medium on my blog. I do the cover reveals and slice of life posts, but they don’t go out to my newsletter subscribers. They hang out on my website where they’re open to the public and will show up in the WordPress Reader. I also have those posts connected to my LinkedIn profile. I used to have it connected to my Facebook author page, but I stopped that since I usually do a condensed version of my blog post over there anyway. Then when I do have something huge to say, like a new release or a free book promo, I send that out to my newsletter subscribers as well as put it on my website. I haven’t gotten many new subscribers since moving my MailerLite newsletter to a blog, and I understood that going in. Why give me your email address for something you can read for free. Sometimes I’ll get a couple people sign up if I’m doing a huge push like a book launch and I’m boosting a lot of posts on Instagram. I think the only way I can “force” someone to sign up now is if I add email collection to my reader magnet, but Bookfunnel announced recently that they were upping their prices, so I doubt I’ll ever pay to do that again. That just starts a cycle of trying to build my newsletter list so I’m not wasting money, and I’ve been happier not getting caught up in that hustle. According to my Bookfunnel stats, I give away about fifteen copies of My Biggest Mistake every thirty days. That readers are coming to my site and downloading is enough for me.

Zoe’s article did offer a couple of things that readers did want, which is just as valuable, or even more so: bonus content related to a series they loved or behind the scenes research. While I was mulling this article over and trying to come up with what I could offer as bonus content, I realized that if I were to offer “extras” like a chapter written in the opposite POV from the one that’s in the book, I need to write that stuff while I’m drafting, or I don’t care about it. For example, in Wicked Games, the book opens with Seth’s POV. He drives into Lakehaven Falls and finds the house he rented for the summer. A fun bonus would be if I had written when Avery had also arrived in Lakehaven Falls and checked out the house she had rented. I can’t write that now because she has her HEA and I wouldn’t be able to get back into her head before she was fully formed in mine. I need to get all the extras that I want to offer written so when I move on, I don’t have to worry going back when I’m no longer interested. That does mean planning ahead and figuring out what I want to give my readers while I’m drafting or even plotting out the book so I know ahead of time what I want or need to write.

I think the information that readers shared with Zoe about their likes and dislikes is important–rarely do we get to hear what readers really want. But then my first question was, what do you write to your readers to keep them warm between releases? It’s something slow writers will always struggle with. You can’t send your readers eleven months’ worth of fluff, and bonus content will only go so far. And if they don’t want to hear about what you’ve been reading, the shows you’ve been watching, or what your cat is doing when she thinks you aren’t around, there’s very little else to say.

This will be something I’ll need to tackle after the release of Wicked Games in May because I’m not going to publish anything else until next year. I have Bitter Love written, but I’m sitting on it to have something to publish twelve months from now while I write my hockey duet and get them ready to go. That might not take me twelve months, but I can’t only talk about Bitter Love for six months or however long. I’ve been hyping up Wicked Games for the past two months and most days I feel like a broken record whenever I post to social media.

Anyway, I just found it interesting because what worked in the past might not be working now (for example, people’s tastes obviously changing and shorter attention spans) and it’s always better to be aware than be taken by surprise later.

That’s all I have for this week. Short and sweet, which normally I don’t do, haha, but the past few days have kicked my butt and I’m still trying to bounce back. I think I really will feel better after I get this duet re-published, and I’m looking forward to relaunching them with *cough* cover reveals and promos.

As a PS, I have seen some really terrible behavior online with authors sharing their chats with KDP support. Some authors have gotten downright nasty with those poor reps and then they think it’s cool to put the screenshot of the actual chat up in a public space. They get a lot of people agreeing with them or sympathizing with them, but all it does is make them look . . . You know, it’s kind of like how you don’t wanna date anyone who’s going to treat a server like garbage. I don’t wanna read a book written by anyone who’s going to treat KDP support staff like crap and be proud of themselves enough to splash it around. I’m sure I’m not the only reader who feels that way, nor do I want to work with anyone who would do that.

It makes me sad that people are doing this and I just hope the KDP support staff is treated well on the employer’s side of things and are compensated for dealing with . . . what they deal with. They’re just working a job that helps them take care of their families. I hope if you need ever need to contact KDP support you treat the reps with kindness. The Amazon’s issues are not their fault.

Special thanks to Zoe Lea for sharing what she learned in her reader groups and other places online. If you’re on Substack, give her a follow! Next week I’m going to post another lovely editor who is participating in my editing series. Lennon K. Riley was very nice and happily answered all of my questions. I’m looking forward to sharing them with you. Have a great week, and I hope the sun is shining where you are! ☀️

Monday Musings and the POV Debate. Again.

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flatlay of camera, cup of black coffee, pencils, pens and a mac laptop pink flowers. red lipstick. text says, monday musings and the POV debate. again

Hello, and happy Monday! It’s not that happy as I am working, but I am a relieved puddle in my chair because I finished proofing Wicked Games’ proof, got all the changes put into my Vellum file, and ordered a new proof. For some reason, reading this proof and putting the changes in kicked my ass. It was a constant tug-of-war between keeping my style and my characters’ voices, yet keeping my writing conversational enough that it’s easy to read. Making changes like: “A yes or a no will suffice” to “A yes or a no will work” made my head pound and I really truly hope that I found a happy medium between how I wanted to sound and how I wanted to sound after edits, if you know what I mean.

It was also tedious because I was double-checking everything my characters said against the timeline, and I tore my book apart again day by day just to be sure things matched up with a character disappearing. This was one of those books where a beta probably would have made me feel a little better about the whole thing but people are busy and unfortunately, you don’t always get what you pay for either. I hope between giving time between my editing passes and the kind of editing that I do, screen, audio, then proofing the proof, that I caught all there is to catch. But let me tell you, this is going to be the last twisty book I write for a while. I didn’t even mean for it to be as twisty as it turned out. There was just a lot going on in a very short amount–the entire book takes place over two weeks–and when chapters and chapters can cover just one day, there’s a lot to keep track of. It was easier to do it with the paperback so I could flip back and forth to double-check details, but it was all time-consuming anyway. After all that, I am very much looking forward to my gritty hockey duet, even with all the research I’m going to have to go back over to write them.

Anyway, I am happy to say that I got it done, and I made a few changes to the cover like swapping out the tagline on the front and repositioning the blurb on the back–it was too close to the edges and didn’t look good. I also tinkered with the formatting inside since there were a few things like an interview and a blog post that looked better set apart from the normal text. Hopefully everything looks good as I’ve had some interest in the ARCs already, and I’d like to offer a few paperbacks this time around. This one isn’t as slow and as heavy as Loss and Damages, so maybe it will do a little better, meaning, people will actually read their copies and review. You never know.

I got my taxes done last week and I was able to bring my credit card balance back to zero. But I didn’t have any kids to claim this year, so I may be debt-free, but I wasn’t able to put any money into my book spending account. I’ll have to be more careful with what I spend on promotions, so I’ll probably skip the Goodreads giveaway for Wicked Games. It’s too bad, but not much came out of me giving away Loss and Damages either, so likely it’s just my FOMO coming out. I can always do Freebooksy and BargainBooksy, and Fussy Librarian, but there are so many author-led promos out there right now that it seems a little silly to even pay for a blast like that. I’ll have to keep better track of who is hosting them and when they are so I can decide if I want to participate and which book to put in. There’s still a lot of debate when it comes to giving books away, how useful it is, but I figure it can’t be your only way to market. Book sales are like the middle of a wheel, and like spokes, there are many ways to market that can lead to those sales. Book blasts are only one way, but they’re free besides a little time you have to spend helping push the blast out. We’ll see what I end up doing as I really don’t have too much energy for things like that and marketing right now just feels like swimming upstream in a river I don’t want to be in anyway.

People on Threads were talking about POV again because of the article I Before She that appeared in Slate last week. The POV conversation comes around every few months, and every few months there’s just another layer to add to the debate. In this article, they were talking about how first person is easier to read and readers prefer it because it lets them self-insert. I understand that, but it makes third person writers feel defensive. From what I’ve seen, third person authors have been, maybe not defensive, but wondering, at least, if not changing to first person would keep them from finding readers since, I don’t know, 2019 or so. In these times of market-saturation, we want to do everything we can to find readers, right? All the while not selling our soul to the Devil.

It was in 2019 that I wrote a blog post saying that first person in romance didn’t make any sense, that the “I” naturally followed one person. Or should, anyway. But romance authors were writing in dual first person POV which took care of the “I” argument I was ready to die for. I do see some authors still struggling with that–questioning if readers would read a book with no male point of view, or wondering if readers would DNF if there was more female point of view than male. (I DNF those books because the male POV is my favorite part and you can tell that reading my books.) Those conversations never came up when most adult fiction was written in third person because we assumed there was more than one character’s POV, or it didn’t matter depending on the genre, like Women’s Fiction. But now we get authors who market their books as “dual third person POV” which doesn’t sound quite right. I grew up reading third person past, and romance authors like Nora Roberts, Robyn Carr, Brenda Novak, and Susan Mallery never had to make declarations like that. It was just understood. I don’t think current third person writers need to do it either, simply put a couple on the cover and give the male POV space in the blurb.

I guess writers are always going to chase readers and hope what they’re writing is good enough. When I switched to first person present, it wasn’t to chase readers, per se, but the number one rule to writing to market is to fit in. When 75% of the top 100 in your genre is written a certain way, you want to be a part of that 75%, not behind in the 25%. I don’t think if I wouldn’t have come to enjoy writing in first person present I would have forced myself to keep writing it. Luckily, I never minded first person to begin with, reading books like The Hunger Games and Twilight without an issue.

So where does this leave writers and authors now? Is first person easier to read? Not necessarily. I’ve read boring third person and I’ve read boring first person. You can have crappy craft in either POV, and if you’re not leveling up, you’ll lose readers. That’s just a given and why I can’t compare my third person sales to my first person sales. My third person books weren’t great–I was still learning and finding my voice. Then my first person books weren’t written that great just because my prose wasn’t conversational enough to “disappear” and give the reader a good experience. It’s only been in the past two years that I’ve been going back through my backlist and re-editing those books with the knowledge I’ve gained over the years. I have re-edited some 3rd person, doing my Rocky Point series and The Years Between Us last year. I would like to do Wherever He Goes at some point, just because I took a look at the Look Inside not long ago and the beginning sounds awful. And you all know I’ve been slowly going through my first person books as well. So, I can’t say one way or the other which readers prefer, and honestly, I really think if the writing is good, readers don’t care.

One thing that did bother me about that Slate article, though, is the assumption that all third person has a “narrator” or is written in omniscient voice, and that’s not true (and that’s called “close” or “deep” 3rd person POV, if you didn’t know). Not all third person books have head-hopping in them, either. So if you’re going to write about POV and craft, then at least understand the fundamentals. If you want a couple of examples of third person omniscient, pick up any Stephen King book. If he’s not your jam, Nora Roberts, in some of her books, has gone from head-hopping to full omniscient voice, and you can try her Chronicles of The One trilogy for that.

There isn’t a war between third person and first person. There are readers for both. Maybe first person readers skew a little younger, and readers my age who grew up reading third person still prefer it. I’m not in any reader groups to know that for sure. But if it’s true, it does leave my books in a weird in-between. I write older characters and a lot of romantic suspense, and I have wondered more than once if I would have been better off staying in third person. It’s really difficult to know, but I think I made a mistake when I switched to first person. I should have written younger characters and chased those younger readers. Now my books are in first person and I have older characters–thirty-five and up. I can’t do much about it now. I enjoy writing in first person and don’t plan to stop. Or, you know, I could be over-thinking it, since Fifty Shades of Grey was read by all age groups, and maybe that was enough to convert older readers into reading first person. It would be an interesting study, but the only information I have about that pertaining to my books are the age groups that click on my Facebook ads, and interestingly enough, the top age groups that clicked on my last one were the 35-65+ age ranges. This is from the ad I ran last summer when I was giving away ARCs of Loss and Damages. The link went to my Bookfunnel download page:

screenshot of meta ad for loss and damages ARC giveaway. it's a bar graph of ages of people who clicked on my ad. the highest is the 65+ age range

Anyway, I’m kind of a writing craft nerd, and I like talking about writing and what’s selling. Especially these days when it seems like for every reader there are ten authors who have enormous backlists. It’s fun to speculate, but what it all boils down to is writing what you enjoy. If that’s third person, great, if not, write first until your little heart’s content. But always always keep learning. That’s the difference between a debut and your tenth book. You want to get better as you go along, or you might get stuck in habits that are killing your read-through. Readers want to pay for a good book. That’s it. They have a lot to choose from, so do your best, keep learning, and oh, I was going to say never give up, but that’s old Vania-speak. Give up if you want. Or at the very least, take a break. Read some books.

Or watch a show. Right now I’m watching The Hunting Party on Netflix and it’s really good. No wonder I like writing twisty books. There’s just something delicious about a man in a suit who isn’t what he appears to be.

Thanks for reading! Oh, and no one has said they want Joe’s book. Come on, guys. I know giveaways aren’t super fun anymore, but you could pop over to my last post and comment. Reviews are good. Joe tells you how to get them. Free books are good. I have one for you.

Have a great week, everyone, and I’ll see you next Monday!

Book Review: The Truth About Book Reviews by Joe Walters

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the truth about book reviews book cover on tablet. background is purple and gold. white letters. additional text on graphic says book review! plus giveaway.

When Joe Walters, editor-in-chief of Independent Book Review, told me he bumped into one of my blog posts scrolling the WordPress reader and asked if I would be willing to review his book, I said sure. Why not? If you know me, you probably know if you ask me to do something, I’ll do it. Whether that’s a flaw or an attribute, who knows, but I downloaded his book that was free when he contacted me, and during slow times at my work (not many which is why it took me so long–he emailed me back in September!) I read it. Even though it took me a while, I wanted to finish since I said I would, and besides, I wrote about reviews not long ago and thought maybe there would be some advice I could follow in my own book business.

Did Joe’s book deliver? Yes.

Is getting reviews a lot of work? Yes.

Did he offer to do that work for you? Unfortunately, that answer is no, though writing the book in the first place is a big help all on its own.

There are lots of different kinds of reviews, and I think the kind indies think about the most are from readers who put their reviews on platforms like Amazon and Goodreads. You can’t do much about those–all you can do is sell a lot of books and hope readers review when they’re done reading, or pay for a review service like Booksprout and hope the readers who pick up your book follow through. Joe focused a lot on editorial and trade and media reviews and gave you several examples of what to say when you reach out to them.

That was probably one of the best parts of the book. Unless you’re having Al write your requests for you–and I would advise against that being all the AI spam that authors have been getting lately–it’s difficult to figure out what to say that doesn’t sound smarmy, like you’re begging for a favor, or flat because you’re scared to reach out. He gives you plenty of examples of what to say, taking the guesswork out of it.

Not only does he tell you what to say, he tells you how to find people who review in the first place, which is a godsend if you have no idea where to start looking.

But, I’m not going to lie, and he doesn’t either. Finding people to read and review your book is a lot of work. You have to make a list of the reviewers who read your genre, write the email (follow their submission guidelines!), and wait. Do that over and over again, and be prepared to follow up if they don’t answer you. He even says in his book that the majority of his reviews come from the followup email, and that’s how it was with me too. I forgot I said I was going to read his book and he nudged me a couple months later. I emailed back and apologized, showed him a picture of his book on my Kindle Fire as proof of life and intention, and even left his email in my inbox to remind myself that I said I would review. (Even that has been a while, so he’ll probably be shocked I followed through.)

Another thing I liked about reading his book is that he speaks indie, and that helps a lot. He knows what Bookfunnel is, knows about sites like Booksprout, and understands Kindle Unlimited limitations if your book is enrolled. He has a sense of humor that keeps the material from becoming too dry, and I appreciated that very much. He also has a thing for ghosts, and though he says dead people can’t review your book, the next time you go to Barnes and Noble, grab a ouija board out of their games section. Every little bit helps!

One last thing that I really liked was not only does he tell you where and how to get reviews, he includes a short section on what to do with them once you have them. He explains how to access your book’s editorial reviews section on Author Central, how to use Canva to create A+ content for your book’s Amazon product page, and how to make graphics to feature reviews on social media and in your newsletter.

Overall, if you’re at a loss as to where to look for reviews and how to go about getting them, this book is very useful, but also keep in mind that there is a lot of content out there and chances are good you won’t be the only one asking. Tenacity and patience are key, like a lot of areas of indie publishing.

With my release of Wicked Games coming up soon, I’m going to try a different review service and also, I take back what I said about Booksprout. I wasn’t going to use them anymore, but I felt bad not giving the readers I have there a warning that I was leaving. I do have a few people who enjoy my books and leave real reviews, not just plot summaries or generic AI commentary, and I would hate to disappear without telling them how to find me in the future. So, in the “Notes to the Reader” section, I’m going to tell them this will be the last book I put up and if they want access to other ARCs, to follow my social media or blog. With Loss and Damages, I just got so disheartened, and it doesn’t seem like something I need to keep paying for.

Anyway, I’ll keep Joe’s book as reference if one day I decide I want to chase reviews written by other people than just readers, like Joe and his review team over at the Independent Book Review. If you want to read Joe’s book, The Truth About Book Reviews: An Insider’s Guide to Getting and Using Reviews to Grow Your Readership, you can find it on Amazon. It’s available on Kindle, in Kindle Unlimited, and Paperback. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F7C3WFM5

I also purchased a paperback copy as a giveaway to go along with this blog post–and in true Amazon fashion, it came a little banged up. I know giveaways aren’t popular anymore, but if you’re in the United States, comment below and I will draw a name next week.

picture of the truth about book reviews book lying on the amazon bubble mailer. black background.
I love my nonfiction resources in hardcopy.

If you want to follow Joe online, you can look for him his website here: https://independentbookreview.com/ and sign up for his newsletter here: https://subscribepage.io/45z9I4

I hope you all had a great weekend, and I will talk to you next week!

Thanks for reading and entering! 📚 🍀

How to make a quick and easy floral romance cover (with screenshots)

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**This is a short tutorial on how to make a simple floral cover, full paperback wrap in Canva.

I have Canva Pro and use elements from that plan. I’m not sure what’s available in the free plan, but I’m hoping you can find comparable elements so you can also make your own covers if you ever want or need to. I also source my stock photos from DepositPhotos. You can use photos from wherever you want, but because they’ll be going on a book cover, I wouldn’t use free stock photos from places like Unsplash or Pexels. If KDP happen to ask you for copyright proof, they do not accept Canva’s copyright agreement if you use their stock photos, so always be safe and buy the stock photos you’re going to use on your books. Elements are fine to use as long as you’re not attempting to use one element for the entire cover. Here’s Canva’s licensing agreement FAQs if you want to look them over: https://www.canva.com/licensing-explained/ There’s a lot of incorrect information out there. Don’t be afraid to use Canva. Just be smart when you do.

I’m a broke and impatient author. And when it comes to publishing, I know many authors are just as broke and impatient as I am. Meaning they can’t afford to hire out but don’t want to wait to publish while they save. Maybe they don’t even have money to save, if they live paycheck to paycheck like I do.

I’ve done my own covers, for good or for ill, for many, many years. Every year I get a little better, or maybe stock photo choices get better, or maybe I stumble upon a male model that hasn’t been used to death. I’m especially proud of the covers for Wicked Games and A Heartache for Christmas. Loss and Damages is fine too, but I didn’t need nearly the luck that helped me put Wicked Games and A Heartache for Christmas together.

But I know that not every romance author wants to use men on their covers. What’s popular will come and go, and if I do come across a male model on a published book these days, a lot of the time he’s AI generated. I don’t want to use AI to make my covers. I want to pay photographers and models. Maybe they’re living paycheck to paycheck too. Anyway, right now I see a lot of illustrated covers, but I don’t plan on using one for my books anytime soon. Florals or object covers seem pretty versatile, and not even just for dark romance. I think some authors still use them for discreet paperbacks while using a shirtless male model for the ebook, but I’m actually seeing less and less of that. I’m not sure if it’s cost or if it’s just a trend that’s fading, but I’m glad. I never liked it and never did it myself. (Be proud of your men! LOL)

If you don’t have a lot of skill, you have to keep two things in mind when doing your own covers: choosing the right stock photo and what font you use. Those two things will make or break your cover because you won’t be able to use the skill you don’t have to make the stock photo better than it is or twist it to suit your needs, and font is the finishing touch, like a pretty bow on a present. So it’s really important that you know what you want and that what you want matches your skill level or you’ll just end up frustrated. It’s not much different from crafting the perfect scene in your head and then sitting down to write and forgetting the alphabet.

The first thing I would do is clock your genre. What your genre is and what kinds of covers are selling right now. It doesn’t hurt to take a look at the top 100 on Amazon in your genre not only for inspiration but to remember their readers will be your readers and you want to blend in. Then look at the author. If it’s a big name author like Colleen Hoover, looking at her covers probably won’t do you too much good. She sells with her name, not her covers. Same with some of the bigger indies, or indies who have picked up book deals. They already have a fan base and can get thousands of pre-orders without even having a cover yet. The midlist author who’s making a good living but not well-known enough to have name recognition will be your best bet.

That said, let’s figure out what the book is about. Maybe an enemies to lovers. Something that would fit a simple floral cover. We aren’t going to get too crazy because the purpose of a “simple” cover is to a) still be good enough to keep because you’re stubborn like I am and want to do it yourself or b) stay as a placeholder until you can afford something better if that’s what you want. You may always do your own covers and swap this one out as your skills get better. So, maybe a romance that would fit a dark floral cover. A standalone, possibly, but if you’re writing a series, finding similar stock photos for other books wouldn’t be too hard. Once you get into the right search, you can find a lot of similar pictures on DepositPhotos.

Let’s start with a blank template. We’ll do the full wrap since it’s easier to design the whole thing at once. I’m using Canva Pro, but because you’ll be using stock from a site like DepositPhotos and a font from somewhere like Creative Fabrica or a free source like 1001 Fonts, you can probably do your cover just fine with the free plan. If you don’t know how to get here, I have the instructions in a different post.

canva screenshot of empty kdp template for 5.5x8.5 paperback book

Next, go through photos on your stock photo site. I buy packages from App Sumo for DepositPhotos so that’s where I’ll always source my stock photos. What you’re looking for is something that will give you room for a title, maybe a series logo if you want. Also your author name. If you take a look at other floral covers, you can pick them apart and see what they have that’s similar. Before spending the money or credits on the photos, you can download the sample or use a screenshot of the picture first to try it. Then if you know for sure that you’re going to use it, you can buy it.

canva screenshot with purple flower photo on top of kdp template

I chose some dark purple flowers. (I’ll link the photos below so you can find them easily if you want.) I like how they’re positioned. I don’t have to worry about making room in the middle for the title. They are a little dark though, so play with the brightness of your photos. You should bring out the color a little bit because when you print through KDP, their paperbacks are always darker than what you see on your screen.

canva screenshot of front cover with floral graphic on top of kdp template. the flowers are lighter compared to the previous photo

Okay, I brightened it up. You might not be able to tell I did much, but always do enough so you like it, and always order a proof. You’ll probably need to adjust the colors again once you see it in person.

If you wanted to add texture like broken glass to the middle now would be the time. I’m not quite sure if it really needs it, but let me play and see what I can come up with. I wouldn’t bother using more stock for this. Canva will have something that will work and using their elements on your book cover is okay. It will barely be detectable, but it’s the little things like that that separate something that looks DIY from something that borders on professional.

I was able to find some broken glass in Elements that fit nicely since they were already on a transparent background:

floral cover with shattered glass in elements with arrow that author chose to go on the cover

Position the glass where you want it. Remember you can play with photo by making it bigger or moving it around so you can put the glass shards where you want them to go.

canva screenshot of floral graphic on top of kdp template

Now that we have a “base,” if you wanted to add things that pertain to your book, you can discreetly put those in. Rings or strings of pearls. Ribbons. Whatever. I’ve seen a lot of covers with butterflies, though I have no idea what they represent. Innocence, maybe. I found one style I liked in Elements and messed with their color a bit to make them blend in.

canva screenshot of front cover on top of the kdp template with partial butterfly placement. also to the left is the element selection featuring the butterfly chosen for the cover.

I don’t want to add too much, so the glass and the butterflies will do for me. Part of learning how to design covers is experimenting, so just keep at it until you find what you like. When you don’t know what you’re doing or haven’t developed your eye yet, simpler is always best. It’s really easy to add too much then it looks like Canva threw up all over your cover.

canva screenshot of KDP template. only the front cover with the graphic plus butterflies and glass is shown

Now we can have fun with font. A bad font can ruin your cover. I’ve seen beautiful art, and a cover just isn’t the same if you can’t find something that will complement the illustration or stock photo and the book as a whole. I think for this one, rather than edgy, we’ll go with elegant. There aren’t any skulls or anything here, so let’s stick with something pretty. I get my fonts from a combination of places. Sometimes I use Canva’s, sometimes I buy from Creative Fabrica. Sometimes I use 1001 Fonts depending on if what I like is available for commercial use (sometimes they’re tagged as personal only). There are lots of places to get fonts. It doesn’t matter where you get them as long as they’re available for commercial use.

For this one, I went through a few before I found one I liked. It’s called Luxca Italica and it came with a bundle I downloaded from Creative Fabrica. The font for the tagline and Penny’s name is Cinzel. I think you can get that anywhere. I’ve read that you shouldn’t use more than three different fonts on your cover. I like to stick with two if at all possible. But I can understand if you need a clear font for the tagline, then your pretty font for the title, and then whatever you use your author name. I use the same font on all my books for brand awareness.

canva screenshot with front cover text for tagline, title, and author name back cover and spine show KDP template

What this means, though, is that since we’re doing simple, that if you found the fonts you like, then you’re done with the front cover. Now we can do the spine and the back.

The back cover graphic will mirror your front, but you probably don’t need to copy it exactly. Especially since you want people to be able to read the blurb you’re going to put back there. What I did was duplicate the flower picture but then cropped it and made it fit the rest of the template. That way there will be plenty of black space for the words.

canva screenshot of completed front cover but blank spine and back cover. only the floral graphic is shown

Lower the transparency so you can fit the title and author name on the spine. The orange lines are the bleed lines. Don’t get too close to those. I also chose a dove just as a filler in case you have an imprint logo that you use.

canva screenshot of full wrap with transparency lowered on spine and back cover

Keep the transparency low so you can center your blurb. You don’t have to put the white rectangle over the yellow one if you don’t want to. KDP and Ingram Spark will fill that space in with the barcode. If you’re using your Ingram cover for Draft2Digital, they don’t like the white rectangle and will kick your cover back to you anyway.

I never know what to put in the lower left, so most of the time now I just add my author website. It seems to work okay. For this one, I added a butterfly that matched the front cover.

canva screenshot of full wrap of forsaken vows but with back and spine transparency to show font placement

Now you can remove the transparency and look at the cover as whole.

canva screenshot of the full wrap for forsaken vows

If you’re not sure how it will look as an ebook cover or in promos, take a screenshot of the front cover and use a site like this one: https://diybookcovers.com/3Dmockups/#

“Dark romance book cover mockup for Forsaken Vows featuring deep purple florals, butterflies, and cracked glass over a black background.”

I think it looks really good, actually. Not bad for something I put together in a few minutes for not much money. The title font is clean and what we added to the flowers (glass and butterflies) doesn’t clutter.

Now that you have a template of sorts, you can make covers for a series if that’s what you’re planning. I write all my books in a series first and design their covers at the same time.

This could be a trilogy:

Mockup of The Broken Vows Trilogy by Penny Maxwell featuring Forsaken Vows, Fractured Vows, and Forbidden Vows displayed on tablets and paperback books.

And here they are up close if you want to study them:

Forsaken Vows (full wrap): Dark romance book cover mockup for Forsaken Vows featuring deep purple florals, butterflies, and cracked glass over a black background.
Fractured Vows (full wrap): Dark floral romance cover for Fractured Vows with red roses, fractured glass texture, and butterfly accents.
Forbidden Vows (full wrap): Moody black and teal romance cover for Forbidden Vows featuring white florals, butterflies, and a spiderweb motif.

Here is the TL;DR of the post:

1. Look for flower graphics that have an empty middle for extra elements and title. You can start here if you purchase on DepositPhotos: https://depositphotos.com/similar-images/794277310.html

And here are the links for the individual photos:
Purple: https://depositphotos.com/photo/luxurious-blooming-garden-flowers-black-background-beautiful-peonies-bouquet-plum-799937840.html
Orange and red: https://depositphotos.com/photo/vintage-floral-card-garden-flowers-peonies-roses-tulips-rhododendron-leaves-521122292.html
Navy blue and white: https://depositphotos.com/photo/navy-blue-white-peonies-assorted-flowers-full-bloom-floral-gothic-797688972.html

2. If you’re doing a series, plan your theme. The middle elements for these books are: broken glass, shattered ice, and spider web. Keep extra elements the same as well. I chose butterflies but picked colors that blended in with the flowers. If you want to go creepier, you can do moths, insects, or birds.

3. Don’t be afraid to experiment and adjust your stock photos. Move the flower pictures around to position them in the way you want. You can even crop and just add only sections of the pictures. With the black backgrounds, as long as you’re not cutting off flowers mid-petal, you won’t be able to tell. Also colors. I changed the colors of all three butterflies. To make the black spider web pop against the already black background, I inverted the colors (an option in the edit menu when the photo is selected) and turned the black web white. Voilà.

4. Take your time choosing the font. I went through about twenty fonts before I chose. Just click down your list to see which one looks best. If you don’t have very many, 1001 Fonts that I linked to above lets you try out your title before you download it. Colitez Serif looks like it would be a nice fit too, and it’s free for commercial use.

screenshot of 1001 fonts website. three different fonts in this view

5. Remember to look at what’s selling in your genre now. Covers with men on them are really easy to create too, easier than floral covers. So even though cover trends change, it helps to know what’s selling at the moment.

6. Test and get feedback. Adjust if you have to. Maybe the photo isn’t right. Maybe you need to pick a different element for the middle.

7. Keep it simple. One or two elements and three fonts maximum. If you haven’t developed your eye, it’s easy to bog down your cover.

I hope this blog post helped you a little, or at least inspires you to try your own floral covers.

Good luck!

Quick Links:

My Canva full paperback wrap tutorial: https://vaniamargene.com/2022/06/13/updated-creating-a-full-wrap-paperback-book-cover-using-canva-plus-more-screenshots/

How to make an ebook cover from your full paperback wrap: https://vaniamargene.com/2024/09/09/how-to-turn-your-books-cover-full-wrap-pdf-into-an-ebook-cover/

Creative Fabrica for fonts: https://www.creativefabrica.com/

1001 Fonts: https://www.1001fonts.com/free-for-commercial-use-fonts.html

The DIY book cover mock up generator by Derek Murphy: https://diybookcovers.com/3Dmockups/

Not So Hardcore Anymore

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male-presenting shirtless weightlifter holding dumbbell. kneeling with one knee on a weight bench. text reads: not so hardcore anymore.
This isn’t exactly what I meant, but he’s yummy to look at.

There are a lot of things that I just don’t care about anymore, and maybe with what I’ve seen and what I’ve been through, how I’ve been treated and where I am now compared to where I wish I was, that you would consider that statement as apathy. But I don’t think I’ve fallen that far. It’s more like, I’ve lost the will to put out all the dumpster fires I see every day and would rather just step back and roast marshmallows with the flames.

As we get older, it’s common that what used to be important no longer is, and I can tell every day when I see fights online that I’ve softened. There are a lot of indies out there who speak with their whole chest about things that matter to them, and their version of facts can either be right or wrong or somewhere in between.

I’ve written this blog for ten years now, and when I dare scroll backward that far, I can feel the heat on my face from my own flames. I was very “This is how you do it if you want to do it correctly” and I didn’t leave a lot of grey area. It was my way or the highway, and man, I don’t even have a highway anymore. I have a path, through the woods, that goes to a lake, where I sit and watch the ducks.

Going back and reading my older blog posts is almost cringe in a way. That you had conviction is supposed to make you proud, that you had the nerve to stand up for yourself, or in my case, the industry/readers, but usually all I sounded like was a pompous idiot who hadn’t been in the trenches long enough to realize that I’m not going to be right all the time. Not even some of the time. I only thought that I was.

Here are some of the things I’ve stopped fighting about.

Craft is a personal choice: I’m not going to argue with you (anymore).
Probably one of the biggest things I don’t care about anymore is how people write. Especially romance. In 2019, I was pretty against writing romance in first person. Not because I didn’t like reading it–I enjoyed Hunger Games and Twilight like everybody else–but from a craft point of view, I didn’t like the dual first person idea of a romance. The “I” belonged to one person, not two. Which, fine. I can see where I was coming from, but then what the fuck was I thinking when I started Zane and Stella and what would become my King’s Crossing serial in December of that year? I couldn’t have been that appalled by it.

Now days, I don’t care who writes what. Write a chapter in first, then the next in third, then the next in first if you want. Some authors actually do that. I don’t care anymore when the idea before would have made me throw up in my mouth a little. The thing is, I don’t have to pay for it. I don’t have to read it, and I don’t have to write like that. So live and let live. If you want read that stunning piece of craft critique, you can do so here: https://vaniamargene.com/2019/07/22/changing-your-point-of-view-how-you-write-and-thoughts-on-1st-3rd-past-and-present-tense/

Trigger Warnings: To add them or not to add them.
Another thing I don’t care about anymore is trigger warnings. You may be surprised to know that I was against them, or at least, I wasn’t for them, and I’m not sure when I changed my mind. This year? Last? I used to say stupid shit like, “Life is triggering.” I was callous and agreed with people who said to “Just get over it.” I didn’t consider them spoilers–I have never thought spoilers ruined books–only that books about life can be hard. But that’s the whole point. Life is hard, and if a warning can help a reader avoid more hard, why not add it?

The only thing with adding triggers anywhere to your book now is that Amazon takes that to mean it’s full of naughty, filthy things, and they’ll bury it. Or so some authors say. Publishing a book on KDP is like playing Russian roulette, so I never wanted to take my chances adding something to the blurb or author’s note in the front matter that could get my book locked in the dungeon or taken down completely. I should make up a list and put it on my website, but the only list I have there so far is for my King’s Crossing serial because yeah, those books are full of some shit.

Do I think you should add trigger warnings to your books? I think they should be somewhere accessible for your reader to find so people can choose if they want to read your books or not. It’s okay for people to self-select out. It’s the best way to keep readers happy and avoid bad reviews.

When should you redo a book? Whenever you want.
Back when I first started writing, I would get frustrated when I saw authors redoing their books after they were already published. I had this kind of purity rule that I followed and believed that once you published a book you shouldn’t go back and re-edit it or change the cover because people had already spent money on that edition. It was kind of a strange stance, especially since I’ve re-edited and re-covered many books since I’ve been publishing. In fact, re-editing and updating the cover and blurb is encouraged these days to give older titles a little breath of fresh air. It’s smart marketing when you have time to circle back to older work. I’m re-editing my Cedar Hill duet now, and I have new covers made that look fabulous. And of course I’m going to do the whole cover reveals and ads and treat them like new releases because these are good stories and mediocre covers and so-so writing was holding them back.

My blog post, When Should You Redo a Book, https://vaniamargene.com/2017/08/08/when-should-you-redo-a-book/, goes a little deeper and discusses old books completely redone with new titles, covers, and ISBN numbers. I’ve known indie authors who have done this too, trying to give their debuts a better second chance. I always figured that was too much work–to pull a book, waste an ISBN, get a new cover and title. I figure, let that one go and just write a better book next time. The blog I linked to was written back in 2017, a year after I jumped into the indie trenches with both feet. I should probably just unpublish it because I talk about trad authors like Robyn Carr, and when their backlist gets revamped and re-released, they probably don’t even get a say, or if they do, they agree because who wouldn’t want to breathe new life into a thirty-year-old book? New cover and title could mean thousands of new readers who weren’t familiar with that particular story.

So, yeah. My viewpoint has definitely changed. Do I think you should go back and redo a book from top to bottom? You do you, boo, because one day ten years from now, I might wanna do it too.

Should you write a series? If you can handle the commitment.
Because I started publishing back in 2016, I repeated, and believed, a lot of the advice that was thrown around back then. There was no reason not to when you could listen to any six-figure author tell you how they built a readership and made all their moola. But, as Exposé sings, seasons change, and 2026 isn’t the same as it was back in 2016. When I wrote this blog post– https://vaniamargene.com/2019/09/02/why-i-wrote-a-series-and-why-you-should-write-one-too/— back in 2019, I was very much in favor of writing a series, and a lot of what I believed is still somewhat true. Read-through is good, if you can get it. More ways to market–free/discounted first in series, boxed sets.

But since then, I’ve changed my mind (you can read why here: https://vaniamargene.com/2025/09/22/is-writing-a-long-series-worth-it/). I put a lot of time into my King’s Crossing serial. Five years, to be exact, and while I love love love Zane and Stella and Gage and Zarah, it’s really nothing I want to do again. Even if there is nothing to support my theory that short attention spans and second-screen syndrome are keeping readers from wanting to read a long series, with the way my life is now, that level of commitment doesn’t even seem possible.

Do I think you should write a long series? It depends. Do you want instant gratification? If you do, a series is not the way to go. It takes time to complete a series, and with the number of complaints I see online about readers waiting until a whole series is available to start (which is completely understandable, in my opinion), if you don’t want to write the entire thing first, definitely adjust your expectations. You might find it’s not worth it. You have to go into writing a series for yourself–because you love the world and love the characters. If you think you’re not going to have the motivation to finish, don’t start. A six book series could be six standalones, two trilogies, three duets, or a four-book series plus two standalones, etc. Easier to chew through, yeah? As for me, it will be a long time, if ever, before I decide to do another long series. I still have two out of six of an interconnect series that I wrote during COVIID on my computer, so, we’ll see. I’m not dead yet.

You can be consistently inconsistent, and it’s perfectly fine.
I still think if you want to get anywhere, content is king and consistency is queen. Showing people you’re in the game to stay is pretty important with so much content out there now. Lots of authors are flash-in-the pan. Their debut sinks, they lose heart and disappear. I talk a lot about where I am in this industry and how sometimes it feels like it’s not far enough, but I wouldn’t have all that I do if I hadn’t built it on ten years of consistent work–this blog and my books. But. But, you can be consistent in lots of different ways. Consistency isn’t the same for everyone, nor should it be. Maybe in this blog post I wrote back in 2021 I was just a little too hardcore about making sure readers know what to expect from you (https://vaniamargene.com/2021/12/20/buzzword-consistency/), especially since I’ve stopped being that consistent too. I’ve done billionaire for a bit, but I’ve been kind of moving into romantic suspense and small town. I’m going to write hockey next. The important thing is you don’t lose your joy. Stay happy. That’s the only consistency that matters.

I’m not really sure what other hills I was ready to die on nine, ten years ago. There are some things I still believe, maybe not super hardcore like I used to, but there are still things that make sense to me, like not cross-posting the same content everywhere. Twitter isn’t Threads, Threads isn’t Facebook, Facebook isn’t Instagram, Instagram isn’t Lemon8, and Lemon8 isn’t Pinterest. There are different ways those audiences consume content and certain content does better than others. Don’t give the algorithms even more reason to ignore you. Besides, if you have the same people following you everywhere, give them something different to look at.

I still think books should be formatted properly, but with tools like Vellum and Atticus and free software on sites like Reedsy and Draft2Digital, that’s not so much of an issue anymore. I just bypassed one book the other day because he put spaces between every paragraph. That’s okay for nonfiction, but his book was a thriller. I wanted to buy it to support him, but I wasn’t going to read it formatted like that, so there was no point in spending the money. I would have said something, but he didn’t ask and I’m not that person anymore who gives out unsolicited advice. Maybe someone else will tell him. Otherwise, he’s probably going to miss more sales than just mine.

I suppose the only other thing is that I still believe in buying stock photos. There are a lot of authors putting free stock on their books, from sites like Unsplash or Pexels, or using stock from Canva if the have Pro, but I just would never chance it. I use Canva Pro photos on here sometimes, for the graphics, but I’m not trying to sell anything using them. Book covers are different, and it’s part of the “do things professionally and cover your butt” philosophy I’ve always had. Selling books is a business, and Amazon gets a bad rap for trying to cover their own butts and regulating the authors who publish there. Honestly, I can’t even imagine what a headache it would be, policing hundreds of thousands of authors. So yeah, I still think it’s better to buy your stock from a reputable source. It never hurts because you never know when KDP will ask for copyright proof.

As time goes on, I’m sure more of my beliefs will change. Sometimes there’s a better, or best way, to do things, and sometimes . . . there just isn’t. Or if there is, that “best way” varies from person to person. I think in the end, we all want the same thing: happy readers. It’s the way we get there that can be different, and I’m happy minding my own business and doing things the way I want them done.

Do you have any hardcore beliefs? Let me know!

I’ll see you next week!