Creating a Community Around Your Books

Posted on July 1, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

To no one’s surprise, I’ve been thinking a lot about my series and how people are going to discover them and how I can market them so people do.

It’s really not so much about discoverability, though that is difficult too. What I’ve come to realize is that we all want to build a community around our books. Discoverability, yes, but we also want people to stick around once they do find our books. We want people buy our books and talk about them. We want people to talk about our books to other people. We want those in our groups to talk to each other and engage in conversations about our books, but not only our books–other books in the genre you’re writing in.

Some authors do this really well–I’m a member of Susan Mallory’s and Brenda Novak’s facebook groups. They have thousands of members and they all talk to each other, get excited for the authors’ new releases, and just have a really good time talking books.

If you look at any author’s successful groups, you’ll find some similarities right away.

They post regularly and have chosen the platform that works best for them. They usually have one spot where they focus all their time. I might be showing my age, and other authors who are my age might be showing theirs, but Facebook groups still seem to be the place where authors and readers like to go. I’ll be 50 this year and I’m guessing Susan and Brenda are older than me. But that also means their readers are around the same ages they are. When I look at my Facebook Ads demographics, women 55+ are the ones who click on my ads the most. Which means that maybe since I’m an older author and my readers may be skewing older, places like IG and TikTok aren’t going to drive sales. The characters in most of my books are usually older than 30 years of age, and that’s a great marketing tool. So not only do they post regularly, they chose the platform that works well for them. It helps to know who your readers are and who you’e writing for. Not only do you want to speak to your readers who build your community, relating to them is important, too.

They encourage reader participation. When you peruse author groups, you’ll find out right away that they always encourage reader participation, be it a giveaway, a poll, or simply asking what their summer plans are. The reason I hesitate to do that is because when you encourage reader participation, especially by asking a question, to be courteous and polite, it is nice, every once in a while, to respond back. This is something I have to work on because I tend to blow off notifications and don’t really like to speak to anyone. That could be a byproduct of how I’ve been feeling and now that I’m feeling better, maybe I will be more open to chatting and engaging with people, but for the past four years, I’ve been a lurker and that’s not really great when you’re running your own group. In the past I have tried to run giveaways and such, but no one really participates because my “group” isn’t cohesive. I have 700 subscribers I moved over to my blog from MailerLite and only 28% of them open my emails. Fewer yet click on links. That’s not great participation. I have fewer than 200 likes and followers on my FB author page, when after all this time, I could have had thousands. It’s not that FB is a dud for me, it’s that I don’t post, and when I do post and people engage, it takes me days to respond back. No one wants to join a group where the host isn’t present so if I want to build my following, I need to put more work into it and be present. That’s what anyone has to do, no matter what platform they’ve chosen.

They have confidence in their work. It’s really difficult to have confidence in your book if you’re the only one who worked on it. Doing your own editing and cover design can make you feel like Wonder Woman, but it also elicits a lot of doubts because it’s rare someone can be a one-stop-shop successfully. I’ve gone through most of my books at least once more since they’ve been published (my duet and my Lost & Found trilogy both got massive scene rewrites). We get better as we go along, and you’ll always find changes you want to make in a book that’s three years old or whatever. Even my rockstars have a “with” and “when” problem, though I seemed to have caught on to that when I was editing A Heartache for Christmas and fixed it in that book. I could go back and re-edit my rockstars but even though I love the stories and wouldn’t mind reading them again, the want to do so just isn’t there, at least, not now. I could change my mind after my series is done and not hanging over my head anymore, but we’ll have to see how I feel. I promised myself a break, and re-editing 300,000 words isn’t a break. So, knowing your book is the best it can be is a big deal, and that gives you the confidence you need to push your book out into the world. If you love your book, love the cover, and are proud if it, you show it to everyone and can’t stop talking about it. If you’re excited, others will be too. It helps to know not every book is going to be perfectly published, and it helps to know that not every author has the same skills. I’ve read some books that were not to my taste that had thousands of 5-star reviews. There’s room for everyone, so grab your seat at the table and shine!

They have newsletters. Building a community takes time and consistency. I would love for all 700 of my blog/newsletter subscribers to also follow my FB page and maybe one day I can ask them to follow me there. Maybe a small percentage of the small percentage that reads my blog will do it. But if I do, then I have to commit to posting there, and I rarely post, hence the fewer than 200 followers. Since I started my newsletter, I have actually been really good about sending it out once a month. Writing is probably my biggest strength (as opposed to finding and posting memes or creating videos) and I do use that to my advantage posting here once a week and sending out a newsletter even though I didn’t have much to say because I didn’t have a new release coming out. I like creating content that way, and maybe during the time leading up to my series, I’ll post twice a month. I’ll have a lot to say, even if it’s just posting the blurbs to my books to build buzz. But if you’re creating a community, starting a newsletter is pretty common. My property management sends out a newsletter, so do my local libraries. My children’s schools sent out newsletters, so do churches and other groups. If you’re saying “I don’t want to send out a newsletter because…” You’ll have to find a substitute because no matter what you tell yourself, people really do want to know what you’re up to. I’d like to think my newsletter/blog will complement my FB author page and vice versa. When I start posting.

So what does all this mean for me and my series? In a nutshell, I don’t post enough. I was happy hiding in my books, churning them out, but that’s only half of what you need to do. Having the books and the backlist will always come first, but a close second is getting the word out, and that does mean posting and talking about my books. I don’t have the confidence to do a FB Live or similar, but I would like to start sharing more videos of myself, especially holding author copies of my books. Videos are rewarded by the algorithms after all, and if you film yourself they can be cross-posted. But like I said in my mental health blog, part of what is wearing me down is the fact that for so long I haven’t felt good, and while that adds to me not wanting to do stuff like that, the years have been hard and show on my face. I don’t really notice until someone takes my picture (like my daughter did of me and my sister during a roadtrip to Bismarck, ND last week) and I can barely recognize myself. Hopefully as things continue to improve on that front, my face will perk up too and I won’t look so rundown and downtrodden.

What are my next steps? While I’m proofing these books, I can create graphics that have quotes from the first book and I can make several at a time and either post when I want or schedule them through Canva. Like this one:

I want to put my covers out there for the next month while I proof and get my ARCs ready to go. I’ve always felt a little weird hyping books that aren’t ready yet, but some authors do it the second they decide to write the book. I have covers in place, blurbs, and plenty of words to search for quotes. I should have no problem creating the content, I just need to have the motivation to do it. But, if I’m interested in building a community, no one congregates where there aren’t people around. That’s why they’re called ghost towns, and yeah, right now, all that’s on my FB author page is tumbleweeds. Not great.

I do want community. I do want people talking about my books.

It just sucks I have to talk about them first.

Have a great holiday week, everyone. Stay safe, and if you’re drinking, stay away from those fireworks!

Finishing a Series and Author Update

Posted on June 3, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

graphic of six book covers and the title of the blog: Writing a Series. Do you publish as you go? — These are the covers I’ve chosen for my series. They just need a few more tweaks before they’ll be ready to submit when I order my proofs.

I’ve written about series a few times on this blog, mostly in favor of them because if your first book is strong there can be potential for great read-through and they have numerous marketing advantages like putting the first book free (a loss leader) or making compilation. But there are cons to writing a series too, such as how much work they are, they cost more to produce, and not everyone likes to dive into a long series, especially by an unknown author.

One thing I didn’t consider when I wrote my first trilogy, or any others after that for that matter, is never finishing once I started. To me, my duets, trilogies, and series are one long story, and like writing a standalone from the first page to the last, they aren’t done until the last book is written. I don’t consider the time or the energy it takes to write it. Once I get it into my head (and the books plotted out) I write until I’m done. I don’t even think about if readers will enjoy them or what kind of return on investment I’ll get after they’re published.

When I first joined the writing community, many years before Musk ruined Twitter, there were authors here and there who wouldn’t finish their series. Being the arrogant new writer that I was, I thought it was simply laziness on their part, but over the years, and days such as yesterday when I’m reminded of it, I’ve learned some authors don’t finish a series because the books they already have published aren’t selling.

This is a huge Catch-22. Some readers don’t read a series until all the books are out, bingeing the books like they would a Netflix show (that actually drops all at once. I’m looking at you, Bridgerton.). That does mean fewer readers of your series if you publish as you write. But since readers do this, maybe you’re not selling as many books as you want and you think finishing isn’t worth it.

I wasn’t aware authors gauged the success of their series this way, mostly because I don’t write and publish that way. In fact, it boggles my mind how you could. The thought of being unable to change details in earlier books to fit with later books gives me hives. I know not all writers need that flexibility (they’re better writers and keep meticulous track of details and/or their stories aren’t too complicated and/or their series are interconnected but true standalones that aren’t as dependent on the books before), but I think needing it also gives me the freedom to finish without worrying about consequences. Consequences such as lost time and lost resources. I’m going to take the time to write and finish because I want to take the time.

The problem with my way of thinking is that if no one reads my series from start to finish, I’ve already lost time. I don’t have the option to bail because that time is already gone. But, even if the books don’t sell, like my duet, I can’t consider it a waste–I’ve written the story I want to tell.

I understand why people don’t want to wait and write them all first. If you have limited time, you may be writing for five or six years before you can publish them all. The series I’m about to publish took me four and a half years to get to where I’m comfortable publishing, but I’ve also written, packaged, and published other books while they were breathing between edits. I’ve said I have a lot of time to write, and not everyone is afforded that luxury. So I get being impatient, wanting to put your books out there, but if you are, that does come with, in my opinion, expectations you’ll have to control. Readers who enjoy your books will want to know when the next one comes out, and that increases the pressure to write and publish quickly. On the flip side, if no one reads, you’ll feel like writing the subsequent books will be a waste of time. On the flip side of that, you’d have to decide if abandoning a series would be worth it because you have no idea how an unrelated book would do and you could find you would have been better off writing the next book in the series you put aside.

Books sell forever and you never know when something will suddenly catch. That may be a book one in a series you didn’t finish and you’re sabotaging your own success. Read through will always earn you more, and an incomplete series can elicit distrust.

It doesn’t happen with only indies… we all know about George RR Martin. I watched the Game of Thrones on HBO because I knew after all this time Martin wouldn’t finish, and I wanted some type of closure, even if it wasn’t his. Whether or not Martin had any input in how the series ended, it ended how I thought it would and I was satisfied, if not happy, though I would have been happier had I been able to read the books. Life happens and he has his fingers in a lot of pies. As an author, I’m not sure how he feels about leaving a project like that unfinished. Maybe it bothers him or maybe he feels HBO finished it for him and he doesn’t think about it. Plenty of fans want the books, and him writing and releasing them would revive the whole series.

What it comes down to is how you want to run your business and how you want to spend your time. It may not be so simple to some, but books end up being products and an incomplete series will never sell as well as one that’s finished. If anything, complete your series to say that you did? I know I wouldn’t be able to write anything else if I didn’t have intentions of finishing. I would feel like I’m letting myself down, and the time it would take to finish would be worth it to me. It’s not for me to judge if it’s not worth it to you.

As for my author update, I finally finished editing my series. The next steps are adding elements to the formatting–even though I said I wouldn’t, I’m going to add chapter headers to the paperbacks, but they’re going to be the same for all six books. I have to make sure all the front and back matter is the same and in the same order, update my copyright pages as I changed the models and backgrounds and I add that information, make sure my Also By pages are updated and rewrite my acknowledgments. I thanked my ex-fiancé and he doesn’t deserve the mention. I still have plenty to do before I can order the proofs, but it won’t take as long as the editing. Toward the end, I just kept rereading the same paragraphs over and over, mostly due to fixating on how I felt instead of the story. I haven’t had any anxiety since my Mayo Clinic appointment on the 28th, and I’m thankful for that. Anxiety attacks were also getting in the way of my editing sessions, causing me to reread more than I should have because I was scared I had missed a mistake.

If you’re reading this the day it posts, I’ll be on a clear liquid diet for a colonoscopy on the 4th. To keep my mind off how hungry I am, formatting these books will be the perfect project. I can make a cup of broth, turn on some music, and pretend I don’t have such a crummy task ahead of me. My doctor at Mayo recommended I have it, and I was very fortunate my local clinic could get me in so quickly so I didn’t have to worry or think about it over the summer. Of course, I’m hoping they don’t find anything–I’m not sure if my mental health could take anymore. I didn’t hear any bad news at Mayo. She reassured me things were okay inside my body and that my hysterectomy hadn’t messed anything up inside me. I was really relieved. I have a follow up on August 23rd, but if my colonoscopy comes back clear, I think that appointment will be the end of things for a while. I know what my issues are and I’m on a treatment plan. I may never feel “normal” again but I’ve come a long way in the four months since my first appointment, and I’m grateful.

I don’t want to bog up this post with health updates–I just mentioned it because my editing was slowed down quite a bit by panic attacks and not feeling well. I still plan on reading most if not all of the proofs, but hopefully that last and final read through will be enjoyable and I can look at it as a kind of closure in two ways: maybe not the end of my health issues, but I worked on these the whole time I was unwell and now I’m feeling better, and the end of four years of work on a six-book series that will be my pride and joy. I doubt I’ll ever be able (or want) to write anything that will compare to these. Writing kept me sane while I was dealing with all this crap, and while they may remind me of these hard years, it will be tough to say goodbye, too.

Besides telling you if my colonoscopy went okay, I don’t think I’ll need to mention my health anymore. It’s under control, and it will be interesting to see how I feel writing new books without that in the back of my mind. But I won’t stop writing on my other blog, and if you want to follow along, you can do it here: chaoscoffeeandconfessions.blogspot.com

Next week I hope to tell you my positive test results and that I was able to order my proofs. Because of the time I’ll need to read the proofs and submit the changes, I won’t be able to put my ARCs up until the beginning of July, but that’s okay. I know these are done to the best of my ability. It’s time to move on, in a lot of ways, and I’m looking forward to it. Keep your fingers crossed for me! Have a great week!

Monday Musings: writing the next book (the state of the industry)

Posted on May 27, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

I don’t listen to many podcasts anymore–I’m hoping that will change after I get more answers at my appointment on Tuesday… and after I get this blasted series done. I have four chapters left, but I know in one of the chapters there’s a scene I want to add to, just to circle back to something a character mentioned in book four that would wrap up this couple’s HEA all the better. I don’t want to rush the rewrite and I conceded a long time ago these would be done when they get done. I’ve been working more seriously on the covers, but damned if I can do better than what I have. I’ve looked at cover after cover, from dark billionaire romances to romantic suspense and the problem I keep running into is that the vibes don’t match. I don’t mean my brand, but the vibes of the stories. While these characters are a little younger than I’m used to, that’s the only difference between this series and what my backlist offers. I can’t go too dark and even if there is a lot of suspense, nothing in the romantic suspense genre grabbed me. I’m stuck with the models–one guy in a suit because he’s the billionaire, one guy (who has been used everywhere FML but I like how he’s dressed) because he’s a PI and wears a suit all of one time in the stories. You wanna see them? Here they are:

The guy on the left is Zane Maddox, billionaire. The guy on the right (who might be familiar as I played with him when I was doing my Christmas novel cover) is Gage Davenport, the PI who falls in love with Zane’s sister. They go well together and match the background I chose for them. Deviating from what I made for covers months ago feels wrong, but I’ve tried because I think the covers are on the plain side. I mean, they’re a good plain and they’ll fit in with the books in my backlist, but I really wanted these to be special, and I feel like I’m letting this series down somehow. Maybe I’m blowing my covers out of proportion. They don’t look any different than the books I’ve published before, but my sales aren’t great and it takes me a lot of telling myself it’s not because of my covers. Because in all honesty, my covers don’t look any worse than anything else that’s out there, and I still like people on my covers, no matter what the trend happens to be right now. I need elegant, not edgy, and even if they are subdued, I think ultimately they’re what I’m going for.

Anyway, so I bring this up because I listened to Craig Martelle’s State of the Industry talk in his Successful Indie Author Facebook group. I like listening to what he has to say. He’s practical and down-to-earth. Maybe in a way that only already successful authors can be because he’s making money and even “slow” periods don’t affect him that much, but he doesn’t freak out about stuff, and I can appreciate that. If you want to listen to what he has to say, he posted it on YouTube here:

I listened to it because I always like hearing speculation and trends, where people think indie publishing is going. Personally, I feel like small-time authors like me are stagnating. Nothing can help us get ahead. Right now FB ads are the only way I’m selling books, and even yesterday I had to go in and pause two of my ads. I spent 140 dollars between two ads for the first book in my duet. The clicks were only costing me .14 USD which is way cheaper than any of my Amazon ads I’ve run, but I wasn’t seeing the sales. I don’t get many sales of Captivated (I think it’s a number of reviews issue), and I would have known if those clicks were turning into buys. In fact, you can go to your Author Central page and look at the sales ranks for your books. My ad spend was going up as my book rank plummeted. That’s not a great match. I have two going for the first in my rockstar trilogy and they have ton of likes and shares. They don’t have an end date and I’ll likely never turn them off. Those two are the only things driving my sales right now. My Freeobooksy for Rescue Me did better in terms of KU reads than I thought, but I haven’t made my fee back yet. (I’ll get into numbers when I do my half-year check in.)

So if you’re a small-time author, or a baby author, you’re going to think the state of the industry is pretty crappy, and you probably aren’t liking the advice everyone throws at you: write the next book. I get the next book is important, but I can understand the conundrum. If no one is around to read it, why write it? It’s very very easy to be defeated, especially since it seems like there aren’t many people around to cheer you on. Everyone is busy with their own struggles and there just aren’t that many people who have time to hold your hand or pat you on the back. I don’t want this post to go all “woes me–” I’d like to keep it practical at least. What can a baby author do to get ahead? What can any author do to move the needle. I understand where people are going when they say write the next book. I’ve said it too. But now many will be enough? There are some authors who have written 100+ and that must feel very intimidating to a debut author whose book sinks a week after launch. The state of the industry is confusing–there has never been a better time to be writer in terms of ease and resources, but I also feel like COVID upped our competition and that competition never really went away. Al (I asked ChatGPT) said 60,000 books are published every month. I used to think that was more, but I haven’t watched a K-lytics report in a long time to know. But even 60,000 books a month is a lot. Other authors aren’t our competition, but when you start throwing numbers around, it sure feels like they are.

Craig also said a few other things, like the election not doing us any favors, and I can believe that. Trump winning wore us down, Biden winning after lifted us up. Whether Biden can win again remains to be seen, but either way, this fall tension will be high. It always is. The holidays don’t do anyone any favors unless you have a Christmas novel to put out, so you could start writing one now and hopefully have it ready to go by November. I’ll push A Heartache for Christmas because last year between November first and December 31st, I sold 31 books and had the equivalent of 96 books read in KU. I also ran ads to it, so I could have technically broke even, but these days, that feels like the best you can do.

I don’t know if Craig said much else. I don’t think he spoke with an outline in mind and he went off on some tangents every once in a while, but I still enjoyed listening to his talk. I guess you take away some negative bits from it (as it seems I have) but the real takeaway I should have gleaned from his talk is that you can’t sell a book that hasn’t been written. That’s true for any author, no matter how many books they have in their backlist, and no one knows that more than an author who has readers wanting their next book.

It’s finding those readers without growing broke or sacrificing your mental or physical health along the way.

That’s the real state of the industry.

Author Update and Monday Musings

Posted on May 13, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

desk flatlay with flowers, paper clips, white mouse and white keyboard. text says author update

I really don’t have anything to write about this week. I finished editing book five of my series, and I’m on to book six … I’ve been looking at my covers thinking they’re a little plain, wondering if I should break my brand mold and put couples on them instead, but I don’t really want to do that. I don’t hate the covers I have now, but this series is special and I feel like they need a bit more pizzazz. Something might come at me while I’m updating the formatting–it seems my best covers materialize the night before I want to upload files, but all I know for right now is they’re missing something and I’m not going to publish until I’m completely happy. I did that when I published my Lost & Found trilogy and botched their launch. I doubt the launch of this series will go perfectly, but I want to do as well as I can and I know for right now these covers aren’t it.

In a rare move, I took last Wednesday off. Wednesdays are my biggest editing/writing days because it’s my last day off of the week (Mondays I do errands and cleaning around the apartment and Tuesday nights I go to dinner and a movie with my sister) and I don’t have any chores, errands, or plans. I can edit from sun up to sun down, and I usually get a good chunk of work done. On Tuesday I had finished book five and I just was not feeling jumping into book six. So I did some admin stuff, took a nap, brought my daughter shopping for a dress to wear to her high school graduation, made dinner, watched a replay of a YouTube live from an indie author I wanted to watch, and then I went to bed. It’s not like me to waste time like that, but I have been working so hard on this series I just needed a day to relax (if I can call that relaxing–yeah, I know).

I did a free run on Captivated by Her and Rescue Me from May 9th to yesterday, the 12th, and I gave away 4616 copies of Rescue Me and 98 copies of Captivated by Her. I paid for a Freebooksy promo for Rescue Me–that’s why I gave away more copies of that book–but I’m happy I moved a few copies of Captivated, too. I’m not sure why I did the promotion except that I hadn’t done one for a while and I’m still shaky on how to get my name out there without having to pay for it. I was happy with the placement of my book in their newsletter–I was first. I had to shrink my screen to fit it all in the screenshot, but this is how it looked:

I know giving away a book is easy, and making the free top 100 list isn’t anything to brag about, but I made it to number 6 in the contemporary romance category and number 15 overall in the free kindle store.

I was getting some page reads from Rescue Mei, but since it’s a standalone I’m not hoping to earn my fee back. I’ll keep an eye on how many people go on to read Addicted to Her, but being I gave away less than 100 copies of Captivated, it may not be that many. We’ll see what happens.

Anyway, so I watched a YouTube Live replay of a romance indie author who went over her six-month marketing plan and I noticed that she heavily used cross-promotion as a way to get the word out. I’ve moaned for a while now that my networking is crap, and while it’s really difficult to think you need to meet people with the intent of using them, I don’t see it that way. I’m more than happy to swap and share. Because writing and publishing is such a solitary thing, I don’t often think about including anyone else. I didn’t tell any of my romance groups in case they were looking for free reads for their subscribers, and when I planned those free days and set up my free days in my KDP dashboard, that was the first thing I should have done so other authors had a heads up in case they were looking for content. It’s just really hard for me to think in terms of including others in my plans and I know I need to do better.

She also was saying how important new releases are, and that you can get a lot of content out of a launch. I think we all know this…snippets…cover reveals… that kind of thing, but I am terrible at doing anything with it. I’ve said before that by the time I have a new book out, I’m already writing something else, and that is a terrible way to treat your newest release. Your books deserve all the love in the world, and I wonder if I haven’t wanted to take the time to do that kind of thing because I’ve been so busy trying to bury how I’m feeling. In the four years I’ve felt like garbage, all I’ve done is try to feel better and forget about how crappy I do feel. Immersing myself in writing has been pretty much the only way I’ve been able to do that, and pressing pause to promote a book has never been on my radar. Releasing six books two months apart will be a different thing for me and it would be a waste to publish these and not freaking tell anyone. There’s no sense in that, but fighting to be seen is a struggle and it’s difficult to add that struggle when you’re already struggling with something else. I try not to go too much into my health anymore because I don’t want to tire you and I really don’t want people to stop reading my blog because they’ll think it’ll be just more of the same. It was just interesting to me when a friend last week asked me if I still get the buzz of releasing a book, and it was a surprising revelation to think that I hadn’t really enjoyed anything in the past few years and that includes starting my pen name and releasing the eleven books I have so far. I mean, I have on some level, but not to the extent a healthy person would have enjoyed it.

So now that I know what’s wrong with me, that I’m on some kind of treatment–even more so since I’ll have had a followup by the time my series is ready to go–I’d like to intentionally enjoy these books and their launches. I would like to intentionally talk them up on social media, intentionally choose snippets and create posts. Intentionally write more blog posts about them and show them off to the world. I didn’t feel like doing that before. I wanted to be distracted by the next story, and I was, to the detriment of the other books. I mean, I’m grateful I was able to build a backlist so quickly, but it makes me wonder too, how I’ll feel writing the next book. If there won’t be such an urgency to write quickly and finish it to get on to the next. Maybe it will be different to savor the drafting part of it, enjoy my characters. I don’t know. It’s just an interesting thing to think about. When your quality of life sucks, can you enjoy anything?

In an uncharacteristic move, I think that’s all I have for today. I have a couple of personal things to do this month, like go to my daughter’s high school graduation ceremony on the 24th and I’ll be gone for two days to go to Rochester, MN for my followup appointment, Memorial Day and the day afterward. I’ve been walking a bit more, even if it’s just walking around the block during my half an hour lunch break when I’m logged into my day job. I bought a new lounger for my balcony and I’m looking forward to lying in the sun. I didn’t feel good enough last year and we didn’t have that great of a summer besides.

Things are topsy-turvy, and maybe heading in a good way for the first time in a while. It’s a different feeling, one I can’t embrace fully because I haven’t had the time to acclimate, but I mused to my friend how I would feel a year from now.

Hopefully there’s only good things ahead.

Have a good week, everyone!

Fake It ’til You Make It (Or something like that.)

Posted on May 6, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

cinderella's glass slipper with text tha says fake it 'til you make it — It worked for Cinderella

A lot of people wonder, when they start the publishing game, just how long and just how much money it’s going to take until you “make it.” And without muddying the waters with things like “success is what you think of it” or “every sale counts” let’s assume that “making it” is earning a full-time wage. That will be different for different people too (I could do a lot with an extra 30k a year) but let’s go with 50k since the group 20booksto50k put the number out there.

When you’re getting your book, or books, ready to publish, you can put as little or as much money into your product as you want, and chances are unless you publish a real stinker of a novel, the quality of your book will be just fine. Maybe you’ll be shocked to hear it, but when you look at books that have taken off, they aren’t literary masterpieces by any means. So, if you’re looking at editing, do I think you need to spend $1,000 on a developmental edit, $600 on a copy edit after you’ve made changes, then $200 on a proofread? No, and the people who say that you should are probably other authors who are snobs and editors who want you to hire them. I don’t believe you should publish without some kind of feedback, even if you just ask your spouse to read it to look for plot holes, unless you’ve been at this for a long time and have found your voice and you know what your tics and weaknesses are and can edit them out on your own. If you’re patient enough, shoving your book in a drawer for a month can go a long way to reading your manuscript with fresh eyes. Make use of critique partners and beta readers, catch typos on your own by listening to your manuscript and proofing the proof (mistakes really do jump out at you when your book looks like a book). So, the bottom line is, pay for the editing you can afford or think you need and use free where you can get it.

This also applies to covers–some authors make their covers for as little as $7.00 to buy the stock photo from DepositPhotos and use the free Canva plan, some spend hundreds, even thousands on a cover from places like 99Designs and Damonza, or hire artists for one-of-a-kind art. Of course I believe people judge books by their covers, but your cover is only going to be as good as what’s inside. I knew someone who used Damonza, and his cover was beautiful. I tried to read his book in KU to support him, but it was all telling. He had an entire trilogy in 300 pages because of all the telling. If your book isn’t good, the most beautiful, expensive cover in the world won’t help it take off. Your readers will review, your star rating will tank, and even if you can sell a book, that reader won’t enjoy it, she’ll think she wasted money and never buy you again. I think you can find a happy medium when it comes to covers. GetCovers is inexpensive, they do a decent job, and you’re supporting Ukraine. Or buy a premade for $100 dollars. It’s more important to know what the trends are and what other top authors are doing in your genre than how much money you put into your cover. Do your research because being original isn’t the flex you think it is.

Formatting doesn’t have to be complicated, and while you might want the fancy chapter headers, be honest and admit it’s for yourself and not your readers. I don’t sell many paperbacks, and ebook formats can’t support the fancy stuff authors are always talking about. Ebooks don’t have “pages” and frilly extras don’t apply. So you can pay the $300 for the formatting that will have black pages or full-spread graphics, if you think you’re going to put a lot of energy into selling paperbacks to get your fee back, or you can pay $50 for a simple formatting job. Or you can do it yourself for free using Draft2Digital’s free formatting tool, or Reedsy’s, or upload a Word document. It’s all up to you. I wrote about formatting and gave a lot of resources in this blog post, and you can read it here: https://vaniamargene.com/2022/08/22/formatting-your-paperback-books-interior-tips-and-tools-that-can-help/

That’s packaging your book, and there are always more things you can spend money on like an author logo, the ISBN, or registering your book with the copyright office. When I started my pen name, I swore I would start registering my copyright, but then the fee went up from $35 to $65, and I lost my resolve. If you’re not putting out many books, maybe the $65 dollar fee isn’t that bad, but it can add up if you’re publishing six books a year. Here’s the fee list if you want to bookmark it. https://www.copyright.gov/about/fees.html

I didn’t do a very good job explaining how much it costs to get a book ready to go because depending on their choices, costs can vary from author to author. Some want to bootstrap it because they don’t know if they’ll earn their money back and some don’t care. Some have disposable income and paying for services isn’t a big deal, some can barely afford the seven dollars to buy a stock photo. Some have a huge network and don’t pay for anything because they have a lot of free help or they’ve joined something of an author’s co-op where they all trade services. If you’re like me, pretty much doing this alone, do the best you can. You might be surprised your best is better than you think it is.

Once you have your book ready, reviews are kind of important. I don’t believe in the magical number of 50, but I think if you’re writing commercial fiction, putting your book on a place like Booksprout (there’s a small fee) would give you a few to start out. I didn’t with my duet and published without any, and now Captivated by Her and Addicted to Her are my poorest sellers. I’ve tried doing free promos for Captivated, but I think I ruined any momentum I could have had not launching with a few reviews. Maybe it’s circumstantial, but my other books always had a better launch maybe because I put them on Booksprout first. You never know.

So what do you do after you publish your book? How many times do you have to do that to “make it?” How much money do you throw at marketing to make your book sticky enough to quit your job? The sad part is, I don’t know or I would be doing it. I’m at a point where baby authors would probably envy me my sales dashboard, but authors who knew what they were doing from the very beginning and have been making six figures for the past few years would be unpleasantly surprised if they woke up to my numbers.

Even going viral, in some cases, won’t help. Chelsea Banning (and I’m not picking on her or throwing her shade in any way. She’s an interesting case study because I watched in real time how that all played out and what happened afterward.) went viral on Twitter after Stephen King quote-tweeted her. Suddenly, she was everywhere, from USA Today to doing a video call on the Kelly Clarkson Show. But when something like this happens, not a lot of people are prepared to keep it going. Having a backlist helps because your sudden popularity will lift up all your books. If the timing is right and you have a new book ready to go, that will boost the algorithms too, as will throwing your unexpected royalty money at some ads (you’d have to borrow from yourself because of how Amazon pays out, but I think in this instance you’d be okay with that). But if you only have one book out, don’t have another ready to go, even if you run ads, you may not be able to keep the momentum going. You can save up a little money, maybe have a few hundred to a couple thousand depending on how viral you really went, to throw at your next book, but you need to be in the right place and be in the right mindset to make the most out of going viral. We all want it, but I don’t think we understand what the rewards and consequences of going viral can entail. At this point in my career, I would love to go viral (in a positive way). I have a few books out, trilogies that have good read through and standalones that have a number of decent reviews. I have a six-book series about to drop, and I have a newsletter (blog) in place to capture new readers. But even I would question if I have what it takes to keep that going–after a while, you get burnt out. Posting on social media to stay relevant is time consuming, and if you’re scrambling to get another book ready or to set up a newsletter because you didn’t have one, creating graphics for Instagram or your FB author page may not be on your list of priorities, especially since more than likely you have a full-time job and maybe some kids and a spouse you’d like to see every once in a while. I brought up Chelsea only because going viral didn’t seem to help her in the long run. She might have been able to put away a small nest egg, but on Threads she was asking people to buy her book because her husband had gotten laid off or some such, and she does only have one book out right now so while going viral must have been exciting, it was only a blip in her career. I wrote a little bit about her here: What I learned from an author’s literal, overnight success

And it’s really hard to say how many of those readers stay with you, or if they bought your books and interacted with you to taste your fifteen minutes of fame. Going viral is a flash in the pan, and no doubt helpful, but how can it compare to writing and publishing consistently for many years and organically attracting readers who love your work? Though I doubt anyone would turn down going viral–that’s like saying you wouldn’t take a $100,00 dollar jackpot because you were disappointed you didn’t win a million dollars.

So let’s go back to the question, how long do you have to fake it before you make it? And the honest answer is, I have no idea. Some unlucky authors fake it forever and don’t truly make it. And why they don’t make it is going to boil down to what they’re doing ~~wrong~~ on an individual basis. (I talked a little about this in my transparency post, and you can read it here: https://vaniamargene.com/2024/02/29/the-magic-of-transparency/)

I mean, obviously, there are things you can do to up your chances of consistently selling books:

Write in a popular genre and package it properly. Romance, Thrillers, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, maybe? I haven’t watched a K-Lytics report in a while, so I don’t know what the numbers are, but there are some genres that are harder to make a go at it, like horror (that’s not YA–I think Goth Cottagecore is having a moment right now) or speculative fiction, literary fiction. Like that. You’re already making it hard on yourself by choosing a genre that’s not already a bestseller.

Put up a website and start a newsletter/blog then put that link in the back matter of your books. I always have to qualify that now since I moved my newsletter to my blog, but start something where readers can find you and subscribe for updates. But do more than just start one. Keep it updated. If you’re putting out a book a year, you may think you have nothing to talk about, but doing character sheets, character interviews, talk about where and why you chose the setting you did, etc, can fill up a post a month. You can also do author interviews to keep your name out there.

Learn an ad platform. If you only have one book, it might seem repetitive after awhile, but ads are the best way to shove your book out into the world, especially if you don’t want to put it on sale or use any free days (and why would you? You want to make money.). There are millions of readers and you can run ads indefinitely so long as your spend doesn’t outrun your royalties. You can spend (waste) a lot of money if you don’t know what you’re doing. I would start with a solid list of comp authors–this will help whether you run FB ads or Amazon ads. Make sure your keywords and categories are solid and that your book’s cover, title, and blurb complements them. Figure out how much you want to set for a budget. Go slow and see what happens.

Network with authors in your genre, not just authors in the writing community. Romance is big for opportunities such as newsletter swaps, promos, anthologies, auctions, collaborations, and just genre news in general. I missed a lot of chances for exposure because I got sucked into the writing community on Twitter instead of meeting and getting to know authors who write romance. I’m getting better at it now, spending time in romance groups on Facebook, but I should have been introducing myself many many years ago.

One of the pieces of advice I hear from big indie authors is to have multiple streams of income. If you can’t do it now, that’s fine, I’m not in a position to right now either, but if you have an ebook, a paperback, and audio, that’s three ways, setting up a Patreon could be another, going wide rather than enrolling in KU could be one, starting a podcast that businesses could eventually sponsor could be another. Even adding a Ko-fi link to your social media profiles could be one, or maybe editing/beta reading on the side. If you already don’t have time to be working on what you need to be working on, absolutely none of this will sound appealing, and that’s okay. But if you look at what the big indies are doing, I’m thinking of authors like Joanna Penn and Lindsay Buroker, they have money coming in from a lot of places like translations. One day I would just like to add audio, and that’s a long ways off.

So, you can ask me the question again…. how long do I have to fake it before I make it? And does spending more increase my odds of making it? I’m just shaking my head and shrugging. No one knows. I know what to do to increase your chances and I implemented some of those things myself, but the only thing you can really do is publish your best book and publish your best book as often as you can. Build a backlist because the more product you have to sell the more you sell. Always be working on the next book. That might not get you to 50k in a year, or five, maybe not even ten. I’m on year eight, but I don’t know if not making the mistakes I made would have helped. It’s difficult to watch authors zoom ahead of you, and I have. Two that come to mind are Cara Devlin and Elizabeth Bromke. I met them on Twitter, both when maybe we are around the same level. All of sudden they took off making full-time earnings from their books. Then I see some of the authors who have been around for as long as I have, or even longer, who are still in the same place, maybe because they let their lack of sales get them down and they don’t write much anymore, or their covers and/or genres are just off the mark, or they don’t have money for ads and depend on free social media to get anywhere, or maybe life just got in the way and before they knew it, two years went by and they haven’t opened their Word document.

The problem is, we all write such different books, have different resources, have different lives, that someone like Elizabeth (who writes romance/women’s fiction) could tell me exactly what she did, and maybe I would pick up something here and there, but in the end, I’m not sure it would get me anywhere. She hires an editor and cover designer, but if she lives a life where she could afford that before she started making money from her books, that’s two strikes against me, so we could stop writing out the list already. I mean, it’s nothing to get bitter about–I’m sure there are some people who read my blog get a little annoyed when I recommend running ads. Spending ten dollars without a guarantee of ROI is a stretch and a luxury they can’t afford. I get it. So some of us, through no fault of our own, may be blocking our own paths to success.

I’ve given up the idea that I will ever make a full-time author’s wage. A lot of authors don’t–trad and indie–and not because their books aren’t good or they didn’t go viral. They weren’t at the right place at the right time, or they never wrote a book that hit the market just right. But as I always say to myself with every new release, maybe this will be the one.

It never is, but all you can do is keep faking it.

Author Update and Why I Skip #IndieApril

Posted on April 15, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

picture of yellow tulips on beach background

I was going to write about Indie April in a different post, but I don’t have to much to say regarding my author update, so I thought I would squish them together.

I wrote out my first blog post on my author website last week. I gave a brief update on my King’s Crossing series and let everyone know that I’m going to put Give & Take back to the normal price. It’s been .99 for a long time and I need to put it back before the summer promotions begin and my series launches. I can update you on how many views/visits it received once it’s been up for a bit longer. I hope this will be a successful alternative to my newsletter because I don’t know when or if I’ll ever go back to a newsletter aggregator. I’ll give blogging a try for a few months and see how it does. Readers are clicking on the link in my books’ back matter, going to my site, and still downloading my reader magnet. According to my Bookfunnel stats, I’ve given away 4 copies of My Biggest Mistake this month, and 6 copies in the last 30 days. So, even if they aren’t subscribing to the blog, my back matter is doing its job at least, and readers will know if they want updates to look on my website. Do I mind giving away a book for what seems to be no reason? Not really. I’ve been giving away My Biggest Mistake since about 2022 when I first launched my pen name and I’ve given away over 1,000 copies. I love the book and the characters, and I kind of look at it as a loss leader and an introduction to the kinds of books I write hoping to hook readers and entice them to read my other books.

I started reading my series over again, and it’s going faster this time. Each book is only taking a week, as opposed to when I was adding more to the scenes and each chapter was taking 4-7 days to get through. I’m liking the changes I made and some of the things I added surprise me, but in a good way (because I forgot I added them). I was only going to read the first three and then save the entire read through when I ordered the paperback proofs, but I can take a look at the other books and see how they sound. The more work I put into them now before I order the proofs, the more work I save myself later. I hate how long this is taking, but it’s such a big project that I’m probably smart not to rush even though I am getting impatient and want to write something new.

I don’t have much else in terms of an author update. I need to drag out my calendar and look at promo dates and figure out what books I want to put up for what months. I haven’t pushed a book since December, and I want to do one this spring, possibly in May before my series starts to launch, and then in the fall. I’m tired of Written Word Media promos like Freebooksy and BargainBooksy. Even their Red Feather Romance has the same audience. I tried a Fussy Librarian and I would have to log into my profile and see which book I did and figure out the ROI, but being that I can’t remember, the results probably weren’t that great. I think I’m going to try a site I haven’t tried before like Love Kissed or Robin Reads. I might do Rescue Me, since I haven’t pushed that book in a while. It’s got 79 reviews, so it might do okay. I have never done a free promo on Twisted Alibis and since my King’s Crossing series will have started to drop by then, I might put that one for free in say, September. Then of course, I have A Heartache for Christmas that will need some promo October through December, but instead of putting it for free, I might just start up my Facebook ads again. Besides running FB ads to Twisted Alibis and Give & Take, I haven’t done promo for any of books in a while, I need to get something new going.

I think that’s really I have on the author front this week. So let’s talk about #IndieApril.

I hadn’t heard about #IndieApril until a few years ago scrolling on Twitter, something about supporting indie authors, lifting up fellow writers, and promoting your own work without shame.

It sounds great and probably why it’s been around for so long. I appreciate the concept, I really do, but it’s nothing I want to participate in. I support my friends in other ways, like editing and formatting, doing covers if my skill is up to the challenge. Not that I don’t support my friends online too, by sharing their posts and commenting, but we all know social media is a blackhole, and for every 20 minutes I spend making a graphic to promote one of my books somewhere, I earn fewer than 100 views, sometimes even a lot fewer than that, and it’s not worth the time.

But here are the real reasons I don’t participate in Indie April:

It’s mostly other authors hyping up their work and their friends’ books. Like I just said, I think that’s great, but while you can say until your face is blue that authors are readers too, authors (your friends and acquaintances and authors who pop up on your “for you” page) will never buy your books in the numbers you would need to make the sales you want for any kind of real traction or career. Indie April is nothing but preaching to the choir, and what’s the point of that?

I will say this until I die: Readers don’t care who publishes your books. If you’re indie, or small press, or trad, they don’t look, and as long as you’re giving them a good read for their time and money, they will never care. Shouting from the rooftops that you’re an indie author won’t get you anywhere. Indies are always complaining about the line between Trad and Indie, I see it on Threads, and it was a big topic on Twitter too, but you know who draws that line? Indies do! It wouldn’t even exist if indies weren’t calling themselves that all the time. We’re writers, we’re authors. Indie April gives you no traction as an author. What gives you traction as an author is finding readers, who, once again, don’t care how your book is published. This indie reputation was started and cultivated by us. Maybe one or two readers will care if they get seriously burned by an author, but in all honestly, readers will more than likely not read that author again. It has no effect on you or your books.

Indies have a difficult time breaking out of the writing community bubble and then they wonder why they aren’t selling books. I did the same thing–it’s tough, but that’s the line you should pay attention to. Not every author friend is going to buy and read your book. You have a better chance finding a larger number of readers marketing your book to people who read and don’t write. It really doesn’t help when all your author friends follow you on all the social media platforms. I have the same followers on Twitter to Instagram. I’m being introduced to new people on Threads, though most are writers and authors. I didn’t join Threads with the idea to promote my books, but I’m not a surprised others are. They see the platform as another free platform in which to promote their books, and free, unfortunately, doesn’t get you very far anymore.

I understand the concept of us banding together and supporting each other, but we need to let go of the idea our author friends need or will want to read and review our books. There’s a whole world of readers out there, and my ideal reader is a mom who hides from her kids in the tub with a glass of wine and wants to dip into a good story that has a little spice. She doesn’t write her own books. She’s a reader who reads romance, has a KU subscription, and she’ll either binge my trilogies or a quickly read a standalone, and she’s off reading something–someone–else.

Supporting our friends is great, and I love my friends who support me too, but I don’t ask them to, and it’s never an expectation.

I wrote a blog post a while back about breaking out of the writing community. You can read it here: https://vaniamargene.com/2021/12/06/how-to-break-out-of-the-writing-community-bubble-and-sell-books-to-readers/

Anyway, so I don’t promote my books on Threads, or even on social media at all anymore. I had a good run using a February content calendar but March passed by without a single post from me, and we’re already into the middle of April. Should I be posting more, yes, at the very least so my accounts don’t look abandoned, and maybe after my series is on preorder and I don’t have to think about them much anymore I’ll have the headspace. I’m so caught up in these books (and how I’m feeling) nothing else matters. I know that’s not healthy, either, but it’s how I work and now that I’ve posted my first blog post on my author site, I’ll keep that going. I have no problems blogging every Monday, so I’ll get into a routine over there, as well. I really just wanted to let the MailerLite debacle die down. I’m still embarrassed, but it wasn’t my fault and I rectified the situation in the only way I knew how. Hopefully it works out.

That’s all I have for this week! Have a lovely Monday!

picture of author (woman wearing dress sitting on the ground in front of a garden of wildflowers) the text reads: Vania VM Rheault is a contemporary romance author who has written over 20 titles.

My Marketing Secret–Shh!

Posted on April 8, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

This photo has nothing to do with anything. I just really liked the colors.

Most of the marketing we hear about is how, what, and how often to post on social media. Snippets and book trailers, TikTok videos and reels. Be yourself, don’t talk about your book all the time, support others.

Like I mentioned in a previous post, we think about marketing after we’ve written our books. That’s… not a great time to think about it, to be honest. Yes, we should all love what we’re writing and I’m not even talking about that, necessarily. One of the lessons I learned too late was how important your cover and title are. Each book you put out ends up in your backlist and your backlist is your brand. Each book is a brick in your author career’s foundation, and you want your bricks to look the same, be made of the same material, and be able to hold the same weight as the other bricks. I’m not saying you can never deviate, but having a solid foundation makes it a lot easier to experiment.

I’ve changed five of my books’ covers. My duet got an update I think only 6 months after publication, my Lost & Found trilogy, a year. By then I’d settled into a brand, and I knew that they were okay, but not the best they could be.

When I was writing Rescue Me, I knew it was high-angst, and both characters had some pretty crappy backstories. I wrote a poignant scene between them where they were sitting in the park. They were sharing stories, and he says to her,

“I saw a woman sitting alone in a booth, staring so forlornly into her wineglass she could have been a mirror image of how I was feeling. I sat down with her, and something happened. I can’t describe it. I thought, this woman understands me. I haven’t spoken one word to her, but she understands. When she gathered her purse to leave, I had never felt panic so debilitating. I had to ask her to be with me, and miraculously, she said yes. I was a stupid son of a bitch and didn’t get her name. Don’t ask Samantha what I was like the week afterward.” He blows out a breath, his chest expanding against my back. “You’re not the only one who’s been trampled on. You’re not the only one who feels unfit for someone else because of your pain. If you take my secondhand heart, I’ll take yours.”
REscue me, Vm rheault

Right away, I thought, what a great title. Secondhand Heart. I even started on a book cover for it. I lucked into the perfect couple, as Sam is older and Lily is a redhead, and the scene above happens to take place in the autumn in a park. I couldn’t have been happier.

But by then, I’d already published my duet, and if you remember, I had several books on my computer waiting to be published. I had to make a decision–where did I wanted my brand to go? Billionaires have a specific feel. They’re in suits, they’re wearing “the watch,” they’re meticulous, sometimes they’re coldhearted. They’re untouchable until they meet the right woman. And all that needs to be conveyed in the cover, the title, the font, and the blurb.

The cover above is perfect, but it wasn’t going to meet the vibe of the genre I chose, and while the title fits perfectly, it’s not as hard and as edgy as it needed to be. The cover above is great for a contemporary romance novel, and while Billionaire is contemporary romance, the main category I put all my books into is, well, Billionaire.

And this is the lesson I kind of want you take away from this blog post. Even if the cover and title are perfect, it may still miss the mark and give readers the wrong message.

This is the cover I made that I went with. You’ll notice he’s in a Billionaire suit, and I think he’s wearing a watch. He’s stoic. When I chose him, I didn’t realize that I’d see him everywhere all the time (this model is very popular among indies), but he fits the way Sam looked in my head, and even knowing he’s been used, I would still choose him. Also, the title is a lot stronger–they did rescue each other the way couples who fall in love do. This is a one-night-stand-with-my-boss trope, and I was very happy with the tagline I came up with.

If you compare the two covers, they look really different, don’t they? The titles make them sound like different books, too.

You can start thinking about this stuff when you’re writing your book. Study other books in your genre, the bestsellers, the covers that are reeling readers in. How do the blurb, title, and cover work together to convey the genre? What kind of tagline or hook is on the cover, or the top of the blurb on the Amazon page?

This is part of marketing that we don’t talk about nearly enough. We always say that the cover is your biggest marketing tool, but we don’t say what kind of cover. You could have paid 1,000 dollars for the best cover ever, but if it doesn’t hit the mark with what your book is about and what category it’s in, it won’t matter how much you paid or how professional it is. It won’t entice readers. Or it will, but they’ll be the wrong kind of readers and you’ll pay for it with poor reviews.

Chances are the cover I made with the couple would have been okay–but they wouldn’t have fit in with my overall brand anyway, so an author has a lot to think about when it comes to cover design and title.

I have a terrible terrible time thinking up titles. I’m crap at it, and it took a couple of hours of brainstorming with my ex-fiancé to title my duet. I’m proud of their titles, and I like their covers now too. I need to push them more, but what I’ll do is a different blog post.

I like the direction my brand is going. Even though I slipped off the path for a second and did some rockstar romance, the covers blend in to what I have and they still sell better than all my other books (but I’m not taking the hint. I have no more rockstar plots in me, I’m afraid. Shep and Olivia landed in my lap, and maybe that will happen again one day, but I’m not going to look for it.)

How your books look on Amazon is important. A reader clicks on you, and they can see most of your covers at once. If they’ve already liked one of your books, knowing you’re going to deliver more may make them a fan. Maybe they’ll give you a follow. (This is the top half of my author page on Amazon.) https://www.amazon.com/stores/VM-Rheault/author/B0B1QSXVK4

I’m all for consistency and lots of people say that genre-hopping isn’t that bad, but even if you know an author who is doing well at it, you have no idea how much they’re spending on ads and promos and other marketing activities. Without that transparency, their monthly royalties may look good but they could be pushing all their money back into their business leaving them breaking even at the end of every month.

Now that I have a brand, I want to keep it going, and I have to think of what kind of titles and covers I want for my books going forward. My six-book series is going to fit right in, and I’ve already made the cover for the standalone I’m going to write afterward. I won’t share my series covers yet, but here are the 11 books I have under my pen name right now, plus my reader magnet that is still free on my sister site. I’m proud of how they look. (And the guy on Faking Forever, I think is Eddie on Twisted Lullabies–don’t tell anyone!)

I’m not going to turn this post into a do-it-my-way-because-it’s-the-right-way post. It took me a long time to change my mindset around and start packaging my books in a way that would target the genre and in ways that would sell. It’s also something you need to learn, a lot through trial and error, researching genre and book covers, and in some instances, ignoring trends and staying true to your brand. Just because illustrated covers are still in, or because discreet covers haven’t gone away, that doesn’t mean you have to do it. Your covers are for your readers. Maybe one day down the line because of the lack of variety on DepositPhotos, I may have to start cutting off heads or doing item covers or text covers, but I’ll be really deep into my backlist then and hopefully have more of a readership that will borrow/buy anything I write.

I see covers all the time that don’t look very good, don’t fit the genre their authors say their books are in. It really doesn’t help when other people say their covers are lovely. Yes, they might be, but we already know, and maybe from personal experience like mine, that just because it’s lovely doesn’t mean it’s going to fit. Fit the genre, fit your story, fit your brand. And I think this is a lot of why we don’t talk about it–because negative, or constructive, feedback feels a lot like an attack on what you like. I still believe after all my time writing and publishing you can find a happy medium between what you like and what you need to do to sell your books.

If writing and publishing is really your way or the highway, there’s not much room for improvement. Flexibility got me where I am right now and I’ve already made half of what I did for the whole year last year. I hope finally releasing my series will keep that going.

I know it also took me a long time to get to where I am. Thousands of hours of writing and planning. Organizing and fixing mistakes. There’s always going to be mistakes, but if you can look ahead maybe you won’t make so many. I’m making fewer and fewer. I’m not going to re-edit A Heartache for Christmas because I was aware of my tics when I was writing it. I’m not going to re-edit my rockstars either, though I know I had a “when” problem. They still sound good and readers aren’t counting. This six-book series will probably be the first books where I was aware of everything before I published, but it only took 12 books. We all still learn every day, and the best news is, covers can be changed. Blurbs can be changed.

Put in place what you learn and keep doing it.

That’s all any of us can do.

If you want to read more about how “perfect” covers can still be wrong for your book, look at this BookBub article: https://insights.bookbub.com/gave-professional-book-covers-makeover/

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

Monday Misery and Giving Up (Kind Of)

Posted on March 4, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, and have a good week, everyone!

When Transparency Does Any Good

Posted on February 29, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

When I was little, I grew up on Rainy Lake. Like, right on the shore. My dad would plow a skating rink on the ice for my birthday (which is in November) and I would have skating parties on the little inlet we lived on. Sometimes there would be winters when we didn’t get much snow, but the lake would still freeze over, and there was this one particular spot that froze solid, but was crystal clear. You could see all the way down to the bottom, the rocks and sand and weeds, and as you can imagine, if you stared long enough it could make you a little sick inside. You knew you were safe, but that didn’t stop your stomach from rolling, from telling your brain that you weren’t where you were supposed to be. The inlet wasn’t very deep, and I would feel almost the same in the boat, the water so clear you could see the fish swimming beneath you. The ice though, there was something almost unnatural about lying on it and staring to the bottom, and I’ll never forget how it felt.

We need transparency in publishing. It’s important that we share what we know. A few years ago the hashtag #publishingpaidme on Twitter exploded and so many authors came forward to share their experiences. You can read about it here: https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/6/17/21285316/publishing-paid-me-diversity-black-authors-systemic-bias and here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/08/publishingpaidme-authors-share-advances-to-expose-racial-disparities

Those authors and numbers are out of my league, but indie authors still share–I’ve blogged before about all the goose egg tweets on Twitter at the beginning of every month, authors lamenting that their sales dashboards flip to zero on the first. I have my own feelings on why this is kind of icky, mostly because author and reader spaces are merging closer and closer together and you really don’t need readers seeing your numbers. As my author platform grows, even I wonder how to keep this blog professional and unoffensive to any reader who happens to stumble upon it (grinding sausage that appears on a yummy breakfast platter is kind of disgusting, after all). Not to mention, when we talk royalties, or lack thereof, readers get sucked into that and it’s not their place.

I was actually kind of hoping that moving to Threads would solve that issue, of seeing goose egg posts, anyway, but authors are still sharing, even if it’s more of an informational post vs. the complaining I would see on Twitter.

Threads post that says: If you're wondering what I've made today as a self-published author...And I have many books self-published. Many. And you might be thinking, "well maybe you just suck as a writer." Maybe I do. But 10+ years ago I had 5 books traditionally published, so at least 2 big publishing houses didn't thi so. No matter what route you go, (self or traditional) this career is not for the weak. And most authors do not make a living. This isn't to scare you off, but to prepare you.

Dashboard

today's royalties:

$.50

I don’t mean to call her out, and I can’t anyway. I don’t follow her, don’t remember what her handle is, but I do disagree with a couple of things–one, for sure, is her saying most authors do not make a living. This is far from my experience, being that most of the romance authors I do know make a living, and telling authors that does them a great disservice. Just because you are not making a living doesn’t mean others can’t. And that leads me to the question of why she posted at all. To “warn” authors this is hard game? For sympathy? I can’t find the post now, which is probably just as well, so I’m not even sure if she got the responses she was looking for. I can’t look at her backlist either and I wish I would have paid more attention to who this poster was, but I screenshot it for a friend and as most timelines do now, it refreshed and the post was lost. I didn’t respond, though I wanted to. That was me turning over a new leaf, so I guess I’m showing you all my backside instead.

I messaged my friend and asked her, why do you think she posted it? And she speculated that she was just putting the information out there, as some sort of transparency play. Okay, but–and this is where I have the hard time–we’re missing half the conversation here, are we not? Because you’re not selling books, there’s a reason, and I feel that deserves some conversation. If you’re willing to put out your goose egg posts, I think you should be prepared to explain why. Why if you have what sounds like a solid backlist, why are you not selling books? I don’t think we talk about this enough. It’s one thing for a debut author to publish to crickets, because that happens. You have one book, rely on free social media, and unless you get lucky, that will only take you so far. But if you’ve been in the business for any length of time, you should have a handle on promoting your books and you should have figured out by now how to sell them.

But no one wants to ask why, and that missing half of the conversation is really important. It’s where the real learning starts. No one wants to admit mistakes though, or no one wants to admit that maybe they don’t know what they’re doing and haven’t bothered to learn. Maybe no one wants to admit that their covers aren’t hitting the mark or they aren’t promoting their books. That they haven’t started a newsletter and don’t want to learn how to run ads, if even just a few dollars a month to expand your reach. No one wants to admit that maybe they aren’t networking with authors in their genres, looking for cross-promotional opportunities (not that you can participate if you don’t have a newsletter anyway), or no one wants to admit they loathe Facebook and don’t have an author page.

I really think that if you’re going to post goose egg numbers, then you should be prepared to explain why. It’s not exactly taking culpability, but obviously, if you’re writing and publishing you want your books to sell. She may have seen this as educational, but after 10+ years in the industry with “many” books under her name, she doesn’t find it a little embarrassing too? Or she writes publishing off as “difficult” and the lack of sales isn’t her fault.

Sometimes you can look at an author’s books and see why they don’t sell. They don’t have many, or publish with years between books. They only write standalones which can be a hard sell since we all know read-through is where the real money comes in. Maybe they can’t afford a good cover and make do with what they can make for themselves in Canva (or they turn down better and free help because they want to do it alone). But if that’s the case, any of those, isn’t it worth mentioning? I’ve made plenty of mistakes–and I admit them on this blog all day long. I wasted a whole year on my Lost & Found trilogy because I didn’t like the covers and didn’t push them as hard as I could have. It’s just as well, because a year later I reedited them and I’m much more confident promoting them. Sometimes you need to revamp a book and maybe she needs to take some time to redo some of hers. Even a fresh blurb can make a world of difference. https://selfpublishingadvice.org/a-new-book-blurb-could-revolutionize-your-sales/

It would have been nice to have known what she thought of her low sales, what she thought she could do to fix it. There’s always something you can do–it’s not up to Fate or there wouldn’t be people making a living off their books. You have all the control in the world, but acting like you don’t doesn’t make it so.

It’s just interesting to me, and I like thinking about stuff like that. Be transparent, sure, but tell the whole story, otherwise, you’re just lying on a clear sheet of ice feeling sick inside.

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

Posted on February 19, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

Words: 1707
Time to read: 9 minutes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until next time!

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Vania Margene Rheault

Independent Contemporary Romance Author & Blogger

Tag Archives: book marketing

Creating a Community Around Your Books

Finishing a Series and Author Update

Monday Musings: writing the next book (the state of the industry)

Author Update and Monday Musings

Fake It ’til You Make It (Or something like that.)

Author Update and Why I Skip #IndieApril

My Marketing Secret–Shh!

Monday Misery and Giving Up (Kind Of)

When Transparency Does Any Good

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

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