Whenever I’m on social media, there’s always someone who doesn’t want to talk about their book’s plot details. They say, “Sorry, I can’t talk about that….SPOILERS,” like it’s life or death and they have to keep such information to themselves. We’re not talking nuke codes here, but authors who are asked what their book is about act as if we were.
I have a completely different take when it comes to spoilers. I don’t care about revealing them, and here’s why. Even if you let a plot twist slip, a reader still has the entire book to read, if they want to read it. I think a lot of authors overestimate just how interesting their books are, and honestly, I don’t have that problem. Romance books are a dime a dozen, and the ending is already spoiled: the couple gets together at the end. I can’t think of a worse spoiler than that. So, I don’t mind talking about my books’ details, fights and makeups, breakups, and secret babies. Sometimes spoilers can even be a good thing, like when you’re querying. I saw an agent on Twitter say exactly that. She said, please don’t hide your spoilers in the query letter. I need to know what your book is about.
I mean, can you really spoil a 80,000 word book with a sentence or two? That seems very unlikely, especially if your book has depth, deep character arcs, and a plot that moves. Personally, I think you if you can spoil a book giving away a few details, your book is in trouble. You need more than one or two interesting things about it.
I started thinking about this last night when I was watching a free Teachable lesson about TikTok. He was saying how you need to find the hooks in your book, and a well-written book should have, I can’t remember now, fifty or so hooks that you can pull out to suck a reader in to buying it. Hooks aren’t exactly spoilers, but they’re close. Couples fighting or hurting each other, telling each other secrets. Emotional scenes that force a reader to get invested in quickly. Romance hooks on TikTok aren’t going to be all sexy scenes. My romances aren’t dark, and while I have spicy scenes, I only have three or four per 80,000 words. That’s not a lot when you think about it, and while I have used sex scenes on TikTok (and just got my first ban for violating community guidelines), I also search for scenes where there is high angst–that I may have to stick with because I don’t want my account suspended.
You almost have to use spoilers because how else are you going to captivate a reader in such a short amount of time? A reader isn’t going to want to buy your book if all you offer is bland excerpts because you’re afraid of giving away the good stuff.
I don’t have a problem with giving my work away. I give out a free full-length novel for newsletter signups, buy a Freebooksy regularly, and participated in Zoe York’s free promo last month. I think there is value in giving away content, and if the free content is good, it will entice readers and customers to buy more content, which hopefully is as good as or better than what you’ve been giving away. I’ve actually had fights with people who have said giving away content is useless (the one woman who blocked me on Twitter for it later turned around and gave away ARCs, so I guess she found value in giving away books after all), but there is a lot of evidence to the contrary, especially if you’re giving away a first in a series and that book is so good it propels readers to buy the others.
Now that my publishing has slowed down for the rest of the year (I formatted my Christmas novel and ordered the proof) I’m going to go through my rockstar proofs and bookmark hooks that I can use in videos and in social media. It’s interesting that I can post the same content on IG, FB, and TT, and the only place I have to worry about saying the word ASS is on TT. It’s kind of ridiculous, especially since you see accounts that have all sorts of raunchy things in them that aren’t being hit with a violation. But I will tone it down because surprisingly, I’ve been having fun on there, and looking for hooks and short scenes for the videos helps me find ad copy for FB ads and FB and IG posts. Like book covers, you need an eye to find excerpts that will resonate with readers, and something that you might think is intriguing is actually kinda boring. Remember that you have your whole book memorized and understand the context, a new-to-you reader won’t, and you can’t confuse anyone. Like your blurb on your Amazon’s buy-page, if it’s confusing, that won’t convert a browser to a buyer.
I’ve seen authors complain that sometimes a book review will reveal spoilers, and I have seen them with my books–one reviewer pointing out that there is no baby in Give & Take, a baby-for-the-billionaire trope. I wasn’t mad about it, in fact, it will encourage readers who want an actual baby (and not just the baby-making fun) in their books to steer clear. And it’s really important not to respond to reviews–reviews are for readers and you won’t gain any points with either reviewers or other readers if you comment or challenge. I never say anything–it was my choice not to make Emma pregnant in the story, and I’ll suffer whatever consequences come from that. But honestly, I don’t mind spoilers in any capacity–there’s a lot that goes into my books, and a spoiler isn’t going to ruin the experience for anyone if the rest of your book is as good as the plot twist that’s been “spoiled.”
Authors can be so precious about their books, but I see them as a product after they’re released and customers can say whatever they want about something they spent money on. Also, you need to put aside your feelings when it comes to reveals and spoilers because the one thing you’re hiding may be the very thing that draws in new readers.
Now, I’m going to go look for more spoilers, I mean, hooks, for TikTok videos that hopefully will not get me banned. It’s just another thing that made me crabby–this publishing can’t be easy, can it?
Words: 2725 Time to read: 14 minutes (FML, I’m sorry!)
When I go through and read threads and posts about marketing, I’m surprised sometimes by the misunderstanding. I shouldn’t be because I had the same misunderstandings long ago. I don’t think authors really grasp the concept of what a long game writing and publishing is. We’re still hopeful that we’ll be an overnight success and that marketing will be taken care of for us by a viral TikTok or a random influencer who happens to love our book. The problem with that though, is that even if something like that were to happen, a lot of us don’t have our ducks in a row to keep that tail going.
During my first five or six years of publishing, I didn’t get what marketing was because I was thinking of each book singly as I published it. I also didn’t understand the magnitude of putting my work out there for strangers to enjoy (or not)…the responsibility I had as an author who is asking for readers to pay for a product. I was caught in an indie Twitter bubble, and honestly, it took me many many years to get out of it, or to realize I was in it, to be honest. Looking back at the first three books I published that I had no right to publish at all, and then the first trilogy I published that is still not good but better than what I had published before, I’m a little embarrassed I was so clueless. Sometimes you can’t learn unless you do it and fuck it up while you’re at it, but when you’re selling something, you’re also playing with people’s money.
When we talk about advertising vs. marketing, we’re going to assume your book is as good as it can be inside. If you’re getting any type of poor review that indicates the editing isn’t there, your character arcs aren’t fully formed, or there’s just an overall discontent with your book, you may need to revisit and revise. No amount of advertising or marketing is going to sell your subpar book and you can’t build an author brand on a shaky foundation. That’s what took me six years to learn, and maybe you need six years too, but six years is a long time to waste if you just believe what I say instead.
So this is what I’ve parsed out in my years publishing, especially the past three when I started writing for my pen name:
Advertising: Deciding what book you want to write next! Yay! Marketing: Choosing a standalone or a series and which genre, knowing if you’re going to meet reader expectations, if you’re going to write to market, how long the book(s) are going to be, and if you’re going to write a series, if you’re going to write them all at once and rapid release them or if you’re going to publish as you go and how long that’s going to take. Publishing, as we say, is a very long game, and you have to be honest with yourself. If you’re planning a five book series but you work full-time and have children, how long is that five books going to take you to write? Five years? If you do that and want to publish as you go, how are you going to keep your audience interested so they don’t forget about you while you’re writing the next one? I’ve spoken a lot about series on this blog, and I’m not going to rehash my pros and cons here, but advertising one book because it’s done and published is a lot different than creating a marketing and publishing plan for an entire series–especially if it’s long and won’t be completed for several years.
Advertising: You’re creating a cover for your book that you’ll use in ads like Amazon Ads and Bookbub CPC ads and social media graphics. Marketing: You’re creating a cover for your book that will fit in with the image you want to project as an author, build your brand, and be recognizable to readers the instant they see a cover that belongs to one of your books. Not to mention convey the genre your book is written in (because you chose a genre, right?). I think this is one of the hardest lessons I learned. I was pretty adamant that I was going to make my own covers when I first started writing and publishing, teaching myself with the help from a book that is now 100% obsolete how to make a PDF in Word. Because of that, you can thank me for the Canva how-to blog posts I have here on the website, which gets hits every day. I never would have been able to do that for others if I hadn’t learned it for myself first. That’s not to say it was the smartest thing I ever did, considering I made a lot of mistakes I still see indies make today–using a free photo from Pixabay, et al, not having any idea of a consistency stretching across other books in their catalogue, and having zero idea that the cover should actually match the spice-level my book was written in (people will tell you to browse the top 100 in your genre for a reason). I guess because my book had no specific genre, that made it kind of difficult to do any research had I even known to do it. (Romantic Speculative fiction, anyone? Blah.) One of my favorite examples of what I mean is Melanie Harlow. She has the cutest font for her name, her covers all have the same vibe, and with the sweeping font she uses for a lot of her titles, I know right away if it’s a Melanie Harlow book. I love everything she does and she knows her brand like nobody’s business. If you want to see what I mean, look at her website: https://www.melanieharlow.com/ If you work with the same designer (or do them for yourself) you’ll eventually end up with a cohesive vibe. We all have our own styles, and that will show. Choose a nice font for your name that you won’t get tired of. Decide if you’re going to do single men, couples, lighthouses, streets, what have you, depending on your genre. You want your Amazon author page to look TOGETHER. I’ve seen some author pages that look like I’m digging through a giveaway book box at a rummage sale, and that’s not a way to grab a reader . . . or their loyalty.
Advertising: You’re buying a promo spot like Freebooksy, Bargainbooksy, E-Reader News Today, Fussy Librarian, or something similar for one of your books to see if you can generate some buzz. Marketing: You’re mapping out your promos for the next 12 months based on what you have coming down your publishing pipeline. I heard a big-time author say you should be doing something every quarter–that’s four times a year. (It comes in handy if you’re in Kindle Select because they give you 5 free days per title, you guessed it, four times a year.) If you don’t have the backlist (or the front list) to continually run sales, you have to sit down and decide how fast you can write and what the next three to five years are going to hold for you. You don’t have much to market or advertise if you’re not writing and publishing, and what you’re writing and publishing will be important. You can do a sale or do a free promo, but unless you’re in KU where you might get some page reads during your promo, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to give away a standalone novel, especially if it’s your only book. If all you have are standalone novels, make sure your back matter is pointing your reader to the next standalone (if you like this book, check out this book) and/or to your newsletter. You may be thinking you can’t afford to do something like that four times a year, and I understand that completely. In time you’ll start to earn out your fee or get ahead, and if you never do, then the conversation turns back to quality (book covers and blurbs) and craft (how well are the insides written). So, grab a wall calendar and map out the next 12 months. I can mark up my new releases from now until the beginning of 2025. Can you?
Advertising: You decide to write XX genre for your next release, but you’ve written and published XX genre under the same name so your backlist is going to look a bit wonky. That’s okay though because you’re going to focus all your social media efforts and advertising promo dollars on your new release. Marketing: You’ve decided on Small Town Romance, that is where you will stay, and that is what you want to be known for. Everyone tells you not to genre-hop, and a lot of indies don’t listen, saying that it boxes them in or stifles their creativity. I get it. I went from Billionaires to Rockstars because I wanted to write my Rockstar trilogy and that’s what I did. I had an amazing idea for a trilogy and I wasn’t going to not write it–that would be dumb, right? I mean, rockstars are rich too, and as I’ve pointed out in the past, my books are still more contemporary romance than true Billionaire romances. Just because I make them rich doesn’t exactly mean they’re going to meet reader expectations, but so far I haven’t gotten any feedback to indicate readers are unhappy. Romance is neat in that you can choose a genre like small town romance, but the sky’s the limit when it comes to tropes. Most romances are written with a trope for a foundation, and it doesn’t matter which genre or subgenre you choose. So far, I haven’t found that writing Billionaire is stifling–there are many many tropes and you can twist them your own way to keep them fresh. Here’s a blog post I did on consistency: https://vaniamargene.com/2021/12/20/buzzword-consistency/
Advertising: I’m going to post on Social Media every chance I get. All my followers are other writers, but that’s okay–authors are readers too. Marketing: Starting a reader group or author page on FB and joining reader groups for the genre you write in. Using author groups for publishing information and networking to find beta readers, editors, and making friends for newsletter swaps. Bursting out of the writing community bubble was hard, but I think I’m finally doing it. It helps that Twitter imploded and I don’t waste time there anymore and besides all the authors whom I follow and who follow me back on IG where I rarely post, all my social media (besides this blog) now is for readers. I’m slowly building up a readership on my FB author page, VM Rheault, and my V’s Vixens Read Romance FB page, mostly because I run ads from it and I post so it doesn’t look empty. When I started my TikTok account, the smartest thing I did was not label myself as an author. I didn’t think it was necessary as I’m not posting non-fiction (like writing updates) there, and I’m keeping my author following to a minimum, too. I understand that social media is free and falling into the writing community is easy, especially on Twitter and Instagram, but there really is no cheap way to find readers that’s effective. Surprisingly, I’ve had better cost per click using Facebook ads, and when I paused my Amazon ads during Zoe York’s Stuff Your eReader day, I didn’t turn them back on. My sales haven’t suffered, so I’ll wait and see. I have two ads running on FB right now, one for Twisted Alibis and one for Rescue Me. I don’t want to say free social media is useless–established authors still have great success and engagement with reader groups, but filling your social media following with other writers or family and friends won’t get you the sales you’ll want long-term.
Advertising: You start a newsletter but don’t offer anything as an incentive to sign up and don’t push the link anywhere but on social media where the same people hang out. Marketing: You start a newsletter and have a reader magnet that is a great sample of the kinds of things you’ll be writing or reflect what’s in your backlist. You add the sign up link to the back matter of all your books, you add the link wherever you can–Amazon Author Page bio, your BookBub Author Page bio, FB reader groups (if it’s allowed) and anywhere else you can get signups like BookFunnel or StoryOrigin promotions. You also push the link and your reader magnet with FB ads and promos like Fussy Librarian and Bookdoggy. Probably the number one reason I hear for not starting a newsletter is that authors don’t like them so therefore don’t want to offer them, and the second is that they don’t know what to write. Like publishing, building a newsletter list a long game, but the longer you wait, the harder it is and the more urgent it will feel. I should have started one a long time ago, but I can genuinely say the first six years I’ve been doing this was all just one big learning curve. Maybe you aren’t ready for the information in this blogpost–and that’s okay. We do have to write the books of our hearts and in our own time, learn for ourselves that shilling books on Twitter will only go so far, and realize that if you try, you can actually make some money at this publishing thing.
If you don’t think I know what I’m talking about, I pulled up the graph from my lifetime of publishing. As you can see, I had some spikes, anomalies, but the slight upward trajectory since June of 2022 when I first released Captivated by Her and Addicted to Her means more to me than the unexplained sale spikes. Consistency will win the race, and one day my sales will make me a small, if not steady, profit.
I could be sad that it took me so long to figure things out, but I met some great people along the way and learned a lot. I wasn’t prepared for success to come any earlier, but if I wrote something and a TikTok influence loved it now, I would know what to do with the attention and that’s really important. I’m still small potatoes, and I know that, especially since I’ve joined some TikTok for Author groups on FB, and holy hell, can those billionaire/mafia/dark romance authors rake it in. But after all the books I’ve written, I think I found where my heart truly lies–with rich guys written in angsty first person. Finding my niche may have been the biggest accomplishment from the past six years. Now I can write happily in a genre while building my audience.
You can look at advertising as something you do in the present, something that builds buzz short term, but marketing is something you do over months and years, pushing yourself as an author, what your brand is, as well as your books and what they’re about. But, you do need content, and that’s what trips people up, I think. You need be writing, need to have something for people to read, be it books or newsletter content. Time can be a huge factor and that’s why I suggested buying a wall calendar and mapping out what you think you can do for the next year or two.
It’s tiring, believe me, I know. If I didn’t love writing so much, I would have quit long ago, but I do love it, already thinking of what I’m going to write next, even if that won’t be published until the spring of 2025. God knows if I’ll even be alive then with the way I feel some days, but I never want people to think I’m floating on this cloud tapping away at my keyboard, when you probably would never believe the number of down days I have. My sexy men keep me going, and I hope your characters, when you’re down, keep you going too.
Like any author publishing today, be it indie or trad, I’m always looking for ways to level up. Take your career to the next level. We hear a lot of advice, some I’ve repeated here: learn an ad platform, network with authors in your genre for promo opportunities and newsletter swaps, write and publish a lot, that kind of thing. It can be frustrating when you think you’re doing everything right, and the success you’re hoping for is still out of reach.
I can personally attest to how frustrating that is, to the point where I think that maybe this whole writing career thing isn’t meant to be, and it will always be considered a hobby by the people in my life and the IRS.
I read some advice about leveling and it was enlightening as well as confusing. She said, and this is an author who makes six to seven figures a year, to focus on writing the next best book you can.
It made me a bit crabby (no offense to the advice-giver because I love her and she does a lot for the indie community), because when you’re writing a book you intend to publish, you’re always thinking it’s going to be your best book ever. Back when I wrote All of Nothing, I thought it was an 85k word masterpiece. (Little did I know it would take several edits after initial publication for me to be happy with it, and one that I actually did not long ago.)
This is akin to the question, how do you know what you don’t know? But, if your books aren’t selling, and you’ve tried ads and newsletter swaps and you’ve bought a Freebooksy promo that didn’t move books, there is unfortunately, room for improvement.
Craft is difficult to tackle mostly because it takes so long to make any kind of positive progress–depending on how you already write, it could take months or even years and hundreds of thousands of words. You have to write a lot to get better at it, and not only do you have to write a lot, you need constant feedback on that writing so you know what’s working and what’s not. How do you level up your craft?
*Join a critique group or work with an alpha reader who reads as you write.
*Get lets of beta reader feedback. And find people who are honest. If your characters are flat, you want, and need, to know about it.
*Read the kinds of books you want to write. One of the very first “complicated” series I read when I was thinking of writing my own books was a romantic suspense series by Lisa Marie Rice. She’s since expanded on those books, but the four I read have stuck with me for years. In fact, I want to read them again just to see if they are as good as I remember.
*Just swallow it and admit series sell and read-through is what will make you money. I love writing standalones, I do. The Christmas novel I just finished is a standalone and I fixed it so I couldn’t write any sequels from it. But the fact is, series sell because readers love reading them. But, from a writer’s standpoint, they’re difficult and stressful. They take planning, something a lot of pantsers aren’t willing to do too much of, but you need to have some details fit together from every book. If you’re a new writer, that’s hard to do. There’s a lot of details to remember, breadcrumbs to drop. You can start “small” and write a duet, then as you get more experienced, add books.
Writing a book, and a good one, is a group effort until you can get the hang of it. But what if you already think you have? When I read that advice, it didn’t know what to think. I feel like my writing is pretty good, I get positive feedback from reviews, readers reach out to me to say how much they enjoy my books. I have the skills, ability, (talent?) to write a long series–my six books I have coming out next year–and the beta feedback I’ve already received–is proof of that. So, I mean, what can you do if you think your work is already there?
If I had an answer, I’d probably be a six-figure author myself. You can study the market and see if what you’re writing is not hitting the target. Romantic suspense, psychological and domestic thrillers, and several other genres and subgenres will always be popular, but if you’re writing something mainstream and still not selling, maybe you aren’t including enough to meet reader expectations. Maybe your mystery plot isn’t twisty enough, or your characters are flat–meaning their backstories are bland and you haven’t given them enough to fight through.
Be that as it may, you can write the most perfect book in the world, and no one will be able to read it if no one knows it exists. There is the idea of word of mouth, and that does work if your book blows people away. It’s not like you can ask every reader who reads your book to spread it around like an STD, they have to want to do it, be passionate enough about your book to do it. If a booktoker doesn’t get a hold of it though, you’ll have to run ads or buy a newsletter promo spot. Those don’t work unless your cover is good, so part of leveling up may be refreshing book covers or doing better than you have in the past.
It helps to have a hook too, something I didn’t have with my first billionaire trilogy. I have decided for their book birthdays in January that I’m going to redo their covers and come up with better hooks for ad copy. Obviously, doing what I should have done a year after the fact was part of that commenter’s point. You lose a lot of time and opportunity if you don’t do what you should have done at the start. Still though, you can get some marketing juice from a relaunch–especially if you actually make improvements and the changes you make aren’t lateral moves. Maybe that means hiring someone like GetCovers to redo them, or learning new techniques on your own. Maybe that means letting go of what you want and putting a cover on your book that will sell.
As for me, we’ll see what my series does next year. I’m rethinking the covers since I made them last year and my tastes have changed. I also need to read through them one more time and make sure the writing is there. My beta/proofer found a few things, too, so I’m glad I sat on these books and waited to publish. Before I do that, though, I need to get my Christmas novel ready to go, finalize the cover (I changed the man again) write the blurb, listen to my manuscript, and get the paperback proof to my beta/proofer. Then the new covers for the trilogy, and then my series. I’m already thinking of what I’m going to write next while those release, six books at two months apart will give me all of 2024 to write something else.
Anyway, leveling up can take different forms, but there is always room for improvement. If people have read you and are willing to give you feedback, take their advice to heart. It’s okay to listen and realize that what you thought was good isn’t. It’s what you do with that and were you go from there that will help you really level up.
You know when you buy a new (or new to you) car? You’ve never seen it on the road before, but once you drive yours off the lot, it’s everywhere? That actually has a name and it’s called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. That happened to me when I bought my Ford Escape a few years ago. I never noticed one in my life, but after I bought mine, they were everywhere. Not just the make and model, either, but the color.
Screenshot taken from the first results page of a Google search
I think that can happen when we look for stock photos when we create covers for our books. You’re searching for the perfect man (haha, aren’t we all) who will accurately depict what your character looks like. He’s got the vibe, the dangerous glint in his eyes, and you think, Yes! He’s the one! And like what happens in real life, maybe he’s not the one after all.
A lot of romance authors and cover designers use DepositPhotos for stock images for our covers. Not only because I’ve heard Amazon will accept their copyright contract if KDP asks you for proof you own the licensing to use the photo without argument, but because with deals like AppSumo around Black Friday and one or two other times during the year, you can get a package of 100 photos for $39.00. It’s a cost-effective way to buy images safe to use.
But it also limits the selection, and as more and more authors publish books, we’re going to see the same models on romance covers. I, of course, haven’t been immune to the selection (as you will see below). And I can’t even call it a meagre selection because DepositPhotos offers hundreds of thousands of photos.
But what I do wonder is if using a stock photo that’s been used a hundred times before confuses readers, lowers discoverability, and maybe, in terms of Amazon since they only use your cover photo for their ads, suppresses the ad lowering impressions and clicks.
Covers found in a Google search, graphic made in Canva
I’m not posting these book covers to shame the authors–in fact, I have used the same stock photos many do, so I’m in the same situation. The male model I used for Rescue Me is everywhere, and I honestly didn’t even know he was everywhere until after I published.
Images found on Google and Amazon, made with Canva
It’s even to the point where similar backgrounds are being used by some authors. I saw this one by Nicole Snow first, and now different variations are used by other authors. Maybe not all the time, but we know as trends heat up, indie publishing is quick enough to follow them before they fizzle.
Images found on Google and Amazon, made with Canva
You can find your own by doing a search for business city window backgrounds.
When I did my covers for my Lost & Found Trilogy, one of the reasons I took so long was because didn’t, DID NOT want to use the same models other authors and book cover designers have. I wanted to be original but still fit in–the secret sauce for selling books. Of course, that didn’t work so well. I scrolled through pages and pages and pages of men. It didn’t help I write a bit older, and the good-looking models are in their 20s and 30s. I got so frustrated I finally just closed my eyes, said whatever, and poked at my screen with the DepositPhotos website up. That’s not exactly what I did, but it felt like it. I’m still not happy with the covers, but I’m getting reads and sales. The models have been on other books, but they aren’t the best. The first guy is too smarmy, the second is fine, and the third has an odd look about him that I ignored.
I chose a darker background because everyone at the time was going light (like the city window backgrounds above) and I wanted something different. Does it work? Probably not. I tried really hard though to get the covers, the titles, the trilogy name, and the backgrounds as tight as I could so marketing them would be easy. There is no mistake they are a trilogy, but I still think that I could do better with the models if I had time and wherewithal to hunt. Time is relative, and I do have it, at the cost of something else. Like this blog post, or my Christmas novel. It it worth it to go back? That’s where the energy part comes in, and I don’t know. Maybe if I had a different place to source photos it wouldn’t be so difficult.
My rockstar trilogy was easier, but the models have still been used before.
I am really really happy with these though, so the few covers I have seen with the same models don’t bother me.
When it comes to covers and models that have been used relentlessly, I don’t know if staying away from them is helpful. There’s not a lot written on the subject, and from what I can see in groups, not a lot of reader feedback, either. There was talk a couple of years ago that some authors were choosing to do the illustrated covers for something different, but that had consequences. The cutsie covers don’t depict the right level of spice in some of the steamier books and either readers don’t pick up those books because they want sexytimes, or they picked up those books because they didn’t and got a nasty surprise with the open-door sex scenes.
It’s difficult too, finding sexy guys who are dressed because Amazon ads won’t let you advertise manchest covers. That was hard because when I was doing my rockstar romances, I found several shirtless models who would have looked great. Unfortunately, I need ads to sell my books and using a model that would get me suspended wouldn’t work.
I’m not sure what the solution is, but I plan to try to stay away from the men who come up first when you search for “handsome man in a suit.” Which really is funny, because when I search for it, the first guy that comes up is the one I chose when I redid my covers for my duet.
You can try your best to give them a different background or flip them so they appear different, but that’s not always going to work.
When I was looking for my man for the Christmas novel I’m going to publish in November, I was really excited to find a guy I had never seen on a cover before. My novel is kind of a romantic suspense that takes place over the Christmas holiday, and I needed someone who looks dangerous but protective. I starred him so I wouldn’t lose him and downloaded the composite the second I scrolled into him:
But, you know, nothing can be easy, and while I was scrolling Instagram, I came across this book cover on an account that posts new releases. If you’re on Instagram, you should follow them. I love looking at their new book release compilations. https://www.instagram.com/sebrero_sisters/
Anyway, so this is my working book cover, and this is the cover I saw on IG:
I like the guy and finding him on a different cover won’t deter me for keeping him. He looks different enough that I had doubts it was even him, but the tiny spot under his lower lip without any whiskers gives him away. This is the only cover I’ve seen him on so far, but now that I spotted him, that will probably change.
I like studying covers and looking out for the trends. Illustrated covers seem here to stay–I could barely find any real models on romance Christmas books when I was doing research for my own. I’m not interested in those and wouldn’t fit the story I’m writing anyway. Since I’ve done my own covers since I started publishing and probably will never stop, researching and taking note of the models and font choices is fun homework.
Are there repercussions for using the same models over and over again? I don’t know. I have noticed that there are levels of professionalism that doesn’t always coincide with sales. Some of the drabbest covers I’ve seen on Amazon have reviews in the thousands, so I wouldn’t always discount a middle-class cover. It gives me hope as I’ve often wondered if my books would sell better if my covers were more professional, but at this point, I really don’t know. That would have to be an experiment that I’m not quite ready to run. At any rate, tell me what you think! If you read romance does a recognizable model turn you off or doesn’t it matter?
Until next time!
All photos screenshot from DepositPhotos.com. Compilation made with Canva
It’s not exactly mid-year–we’re two months past that, but I thought I would write a check in, look back and what I’ve accomplished this year, and try to drag myself out of the self-pitying hole I fell into these past few weeks due to circumstance beyond my control.
January started with a bang, as that is the month I published my Lost & Found Trilogy. By no means did I have a strong launch, and while Give & Take, the first book in the trilogy, has sold better than a lot of my books, the trilogy in total has earned less than a thousand dollars since release. Depending on where you are in your career, that may sound pretty good to you, but I’ve put money into ads and promos and actual take-home from that total is less than five hundred dollars. Still though, despite my ongoing doubt about the covers, readers seemed to have liked them so far, and I’m going to put the first one in a promo in September and see how it does.
February, March, and April were slow months, only because I was busy writing my rockstar trilogy. I thought the first book was going to be a standalone but it turned out, like most side characters do, they wanted their own stories told, and I spent December of 2022 to May of this year writing them. Editing took some time, more adding and rewriting than I’ve done in the past to make them cohesive since the two others weren’t planned until I was almost done writing book one. I did the usual Amazon ads for my backlist, struggled with if I wanted to be on Twitter anymore, helped a friend edit and format one of her books, and mostly kept my head down.
In May, I published Faking Forever, a fake fiancée standalone I wasn’t sure about. I haven’t checked the reviews to see if anyone liked it or not. The reviews from Booksprout were favorable, but it’s not often, in my experience, people will really tell you what they think. Since I published it, it’s made less than a hundred dollars, and I really don’t know what to do about it. My other standalone, Rescue Me, has made around five hundred since I published it in October of 2022, but that’s also been on sale for a while now and I ran Facebook ads to it. That five hundred is not take-home, but if I look at how much I spent on ads to push that book, I just get depressed, so I won’t do that here. I’ve been thinking about pulling it off sale and putting Faking Forever at .99 to see what that does. I have a hooky hook for the ad copy, so I may do that at the end of the month and see what happens. I won’t do that until my SNAFU with KDP and the last book in my rockstar trilogy has worked itself out, but more on that later.
June and July were for getting my rockstar trilogy ready to release. Lost a beta reader and a friend, so that was disheartening, not only because I was counting on her feedback, but you know, it’s tough when people move out of your life for whatever reason. My other beta/friend/co-worker is still plodding along even though my books are (kind of) up. I told her I need to get them going for marketing purposes and if she finds anything I didn’t, I can change out the files later. She found only a couple things in book one, nothing major, so I’m confident that books two and three are just as clean. It’s not like I haven’t released books without feedback before, but I was trying something different that didn’t end up working completely in my favor. Such is life.
This month, August, I had a free book promotion opportunity fall into my lap. I had passed it by and then it opened up again, so I decided to take that as an omen and enter my book. I put Captivated by Her for free from August 4-6, and I’ve been moving some books–528 at the time of this writing, but we’re only half way through the promotion. Not a lot of people read free books, though, and so far that movement hasn’t gone on to the other books in my backlist. I guess we’ll see in the coming weeks if anyone reads it and goes on to buy/borrow Addicted to Her. I think the cover changed helped, but that duet has earned only a little over three hundred dollars since I published them in June of 2022.
I also lost a cat this month. Blaze was sick when we got her (we didn’t know that though), and we’ve had nothing but ongoing medical issues with her for the past five years. It was a relief to make the decision after some bloodwork, but I miss her dearly and it’s been such a blow to my mental health as this is the first time in over twenty years we haven’t had a cat in our apartment. We can’t get another unless my financial situation changes because we were grandfathered in when this property management took over our apartment building. We’ll be starting from scratch with them, and I can’t afford the pet deposit or pet rent they’ll charge us if we wanted another. I’m still missing Harley, too, so I’m just not going down that path right now, and maybe never will again.
So to recap the year so far:
Books published: 6.5-7 Royalties: $1,711.49 as of this writing. (I write my posts in advance so add, oh, I don’t know, ten bucks to that total unless for some reason I got extremely lucky.) Ad spend: I don’t feel like doing the math, but I’ve spent $569.00 on Amazon ads, ran an FB ad to Rescue Me off and on for a couple of months and bought a Freebooksy promo through Written Word Media for Give & Take at $120.00. So obviously, the total royalties are not all take-home, but rarely is any author’s.
I haven’t found a way to get “sticky” with Amazon, struggling to “level up.” Each book I write has the “will this be the golden ticket?” feel about it, and then each book has a lackluster turn. I cleaned out my newsletter subscriber list–I got rid of 103 inactive email accounts. MailerLite is making me move over to their new platform so once my trilogy is out and I’m done sending newsletters for that for a bit, I’ll do the migration. Apparently it’s not smooth, and I’m worried about the setup I have with BookFunnel. I learned just enough to put in place what I needed for them to collect email addresses for me when I give out the link to my reader magnet. If that gets messed up, I’ll have to learn it all over again, and that will be painful since, for the most part, I’ve given up drinking for my physical health.
Ghost Town’s Fate:
So, I was able to publish book one and two without an issue, but I was one of the (un)lucky ones and KDP asked me for copyright proof for the cover images for book three. I sent them what I had from DepositPhotos–screenshots of the licensing agreement that they give you when you download/purchase. I also gave them a screenshot of my DepositPhoto’s account profile. I’m lucky that my email address and my physical/mailing address match what I use for KDP as well, so they know it’s me. The first rep approved my proof and told me to go into my account and resubmit the books for publication. I did that, but then got another email from their content team and was asked for proof again. So I sent what I had before, plus the screenshot of the first rep’s email that said my books were okay. It didn’t take them long to get back to me and say my books were approved and would take up to 48 hours to publish. So, that is where I am now–this morning when I got up, they were still in review, but while I was writing this, I checked my dashboard and they have moved into “Publishing.”
So I’m going to assume that the third book is going to go through after all, and maybe by the time you read this, it will be live. (At the time of this writing, it’s only been 15 hours since the last email correspondence.)
As far as reviews, I put the books on Booksprout, and this trilogy is the slowest to get picked up since I started offering books. Only 16 of 35 copies have been claimed for each book, and either it’s because they’re long (I did warn readers of that in my note to readers section) or because no one cares about aging, depressed rockstars. Maybe both. Whatever the case may be, I hope this isn’t going to be more of the same when the books move out of preorder and are live. Once the third book is actually published and accessible, I can start ads to the trilogy, but I hope these do better than my gut is telling me they will.
I have to be honest, all this put me in a real downward spiral last night, and just an FYI, crying in the grocery store is not a good look. It also gave me a really queasy feeling for the past two days and I have not felt well. You’re probably thinking I sound burnt out, and I probably am. When that book goes through I’ll have published 7 this year, 8 if I get my Christmas novel done and published by November like I hope. I haven’t made much progress on it, as I went through my Ghost Town paperback proofs myself (glad I did) but that took an extra little bit of time. When I finish the first draft, I need to put it aside and take a real break while it breathes. Watch the shows I want to watch, read through some of the books on my Kindle (I still need to read the Hunger Games sequel before November). Network with some authors in my FB groups, experiment with making videos for TikTok. I need to find my joy because it has been sucked right out of me, and never did I want to throw my laptop over my balcony as much I did last night.
I don’t have any books planned for the next little while. I have that King’s Crossing 6-book series I need to polish up and publish starting in January. I’m having second thoughts about the covers, and my proofer/coworker went through them some time ago, and I haven’t looked at her feedback yet. That will be a project and I will love to get those off my plate. I also haven’t read them myself in a long time, so it will be fun to read them one last time before I publish.
Anyway, so stats here show that this blog post will take 10 minutes to read, so I’m going to wrap it up for now and get going on my Christmas novel. Have a great week, everyone, and thanks for listening!
Happy Monday! This week holds the first day of Summer, though we have felt the hotter temperatures for a while now. I don’t mind, and I frequently lie out on my apartment’s balcony with a podcast and soak up all the sun. This week is my sister’s birthday and we’re taking a road trip to Bismarck, North Dakota to eat at Cracker Barrel, bum around, and look at a different boring city with nothing to do there, either. But there are plenty of fields and plenty of cows, and I need a break.
I’ve been giving my trilogy a rest (to the best of my ability) and reading The Hunger Games books because I promised my daughter I would read the prequel before the movie comes out in November. Soon I’ll start listening to them (my books, not Suzanne’s), and I’ll have to divide my time or else I won’t them read and my books won’t get done for my proofer. I want to give her most of July so I have time to enter in the typo fixes and any cover changes I need. I only set an August deadline because if I don’t, I won’t work on my books in any meaningful timeline. But once I do set a deadline, and I announce to my newsletter that I have books coming out on a certain date, I’ll honor that. My publishing schedule is important to me; my integrity is important to me. Readers won’t trust you if you tell them one thing and then do another, and that’s why I got ticked off when one of my betas backed out of reading for me. (In the back of my mind I must not have trusted her because I still worked on them while she had them. I would have been even angrier had I waited thinking she was going to honor our agreement. It’s sad, but my lack of trust in people has served me well, and I don’t think I’ll ever change.)
Every week that passes, I see behavior like this in the writing community, and I don’t question why people are doing more and more on their own. If you want something done (and done right) you have to do yourself, and that’s evident in the uprising of sneaky AI covers, scammers charging for services they don’t have the right or experience to provide, and people unwilling or unable to keep their end of any bargain or contract they enter into. I’m always amazed when I look up the stats for my blog post on how to do a paperback wrap in Canva:
I really shouldn’t be though because book cover designers aren’t cheap and with AI and scammers creating their own book cover design businesses who don’t understand you need to find your stock photos from a reputable (read: Amazon accepted) source, authors are just needing clear instructions on how to do it themselves because they’re the only ones they can trust to do it correctly.
I’m at the point where I have one online friend who will help me with blurbs and some shorter beta reading and a real life friend/co-worker who’s willing to help me proof my books. I’m tired of trying to weed through people who like the idea of helping but when it comes time to actually put in the work, they balk. It’s especially infuriating when you see them later tweeting about the time they are spending on their own work since they dumped yours. I’m bitter and refuse to put myself in that position again. So, when you offer to help someone, please follow through. It really hurts to get dumped. I’ve helped many authors since I’ve started this indie stuff. I’ve done everything from editing to blurb feedback to formatting, even some simple cover design work, and I have never, not once, backed out of a project. I do all of it for free (unless someone insists on throwing me a bone, but it’s not required) simply because I know how difficult trustworthy and affordable help is to come by. I couldn’t imagine getting halfway through a project and telling someone I couldn’t help them anymore. Even the idea makes me sick. Of course, like I said, life happens, and if my kids had an emergency, or my health was suddenly in peril (my mom and her mom both died from breast cancer) then that’s something else, but realistically, if you’re backing out because you bit off more than you can chew, that’s your own problem. What’s the saying? Don’t make your problem my emergency? Know your limitations and don’t offer to help anyone if you really don’t want to. Honestly, it’s a lot easier to say no than it is to back out of a project when someone is depending on you to finish. I’m not one for predictions, though I enjoy reading them at the beginning of every New Year, but I will say this: I think more and more indies will put out their work without any help. It’s just getting way too hard to pick through the scammers to find the dependable people, and indies are going to forgo the whole thing and just put their books out themselves. Whether or not they can put out a quality product is one thing, but the community is driving us to to do everything ourselves because it either costs too much or it’s too much of a headache to find someone who won’t screw you over.
Anyway, while my friend has my paperback proofs, I’m going to start writing my holiday novel. I found a notebook with the first chapter of a book and some plotting. I wasn’t experienced enough to connect the dots, and I tabled it. This was before COVID, maybe even a couple to three years before, so this shaky outline is old, but the plot has stayed with me. I’m going to turn it into a Christmas standalone. When I was plotting it, I hadn’t started my pen name yet, so I wasn’t writing strictly billionaire. When I go back, I’m going to have to figure out how to keep him in the situation he’s in because the original character didn’t have money and was essentially trapped where he is. But, I’m excited to use this plot, and I’m aiming for a November release. Even though it’s a Christmas novel, it will be dark, and I’m going to shoot for about 80k words. This will keep me busy during the remainder of the summer and into the Fall. I’m helping someone with formatting and editing, and I told her yesterday that Novembers can be busy for me. Decembers with Christmas can be too, but November will be particularly busy with my daughter’s golden birthday on the 18th, and my birthday on the 28th, and Thanksgiving I usually cook for. I wanted her to be able to plan accordingly but I won’t be working on any of my stuff by then. A standalone should be easy-peasy considering the two trilogies I’ve put together this year, and meeting my self-imposed deadline should be a snap.
I earned out my Fussy Librarian fee ($75.00), so that’s nice. (It was on the 9th of June.) I haven’t done the math to see what my read through is for the trilogy, but since my free promo wasn’t that long ago, my numbers would be way off anyway. It seems like I get decent read through, at least, book three is making money, so that’s something. We hear a lot about saturation. Is the market saturated? Too many books, not enough readers. Too many promos and not enough readers. I’ve read where these newsletter promos like Freebooksy, Fussy Librarian, and E-Reader News Today aren’t working as well as they used to. Being that I never used them FL or ENT, I can’t say one way or the other. I’ve used Freebooksy in the past, and I have proof a lot depends on your cover, if you write in a series, and how good your book is. I did a Freebooksy for the first book in my very first trilogy and it didn’t do well. My writing just wasn’t there and it didn’t earn back my fee. Same with All of Nothing. The writing was better, but that’s a standalone. Paying $120 dollars to give away a standalone doesn’t make any sense, and I didn’t have read through to other books because that’s an enemies to lovers and the only one in my 3rd person backlist. I’m going to keep an eye on how well my promos do for my 1st person brand. So far, the ones I’ve done have earned their fee back and then some, which is how you want it. But I made a conscious effort to niche down, change POVs, and write in more series. We’ll see if it pays off.
That’s about all I have for this week. I have plenty to keep me busy for the next little while, and I am really really excited to put out my rockstar trilogy. I thought my Lost & Found Trilogy was some of the best work I’ve ever done, but I’m really eager to see how readers like my rockstar stuff. I’m very proud of them, and I hope my readers love them as much as I do.
I hope you all have a good week, and if you ask, I can regale you with all the cow pictures I take on the road.
When I decided to publish my first person POV under a pen name, I was torn between starting a whole new website, or simply adding a page and listing my books on this one. I already knew my way around WordPress (this theme, anyway) and starting another and letting WordPress host my domain would be easy, if I chose to go that route. I don’t pay for an outside host, WordPress takes care of that for me, and I bought both of my domain names through them too. I’ve blogged for seven and a half years, I think, and I have never had a problem logging in, hackers taking over, or spam comments dirtying up my posts. I’ve always been very happy with WordPress and I like being part of the WordPress Reader. I think over the past seven and a half years I’ve found a lot of readers showing up in WordPress community, and that traffic is invaluable.
The main issue for me was keeping my nonfiction and writing community separate from my readers and my books. For a long time I put a graphic of my books and author page at the end of posts, and I realized that my audience isn’t here. You guys come to me for publishing news, indie information, and how-to posts like my how to do a full wrap in Canva instructions. You come here to read about my experiences, and I love sharing them. If I ever sold any books from having them at the end of my blogposts, it was few, and I decided instead of trying to cram two readerships together, I took my graphic down and stopped. It didn’t do anything to my sales, such as they were, and well, I think I made the right choice.
But, readers like somewhere to go, a place to look at your stuff, even if you don’t think they do. So, I decided to put up a website just for my first person books.
One of the first things I realized is that I needed a brand. My books are about Billionaires (kind of. I have a rockstar trilogy coming out at the end of the summer, and they’re rich, but in a different way LOL). Sexy men with gobs of money, wanting, needing, things money can’t buy. I needed graphics, fonts, that would carry across the website, my newsletter, and any other social media posts. Starting my website was a way to put everything I learned from five years of doing it wrong into practice, and I still made a lot of mistakes along the way.
The first thing I did was think about the font for my author name on my books. I got some flack in some feedback groups on FB for using Cinzel Decorative for my name.
This is the cover for the first in my rockstar trilogy I’m playing with. My name will look like this on all my first person POV books. Always. I wanted it to look similar to my name on the third person books, but with a little twist. I may go back to writing in third person. I don’t know. I still sell a few here and there, and I don’t want to completely write that name off.
That was the first thing I had to decide. Next I had to figure out what would denote sophistication, elegance, and money, but also sex as I have open-door sex scenes and I thought I should hint at that. The brand of a billionaire. I chose this photo as a header for my FB reader group page, my FB author page I rebranded instead of starting a new one, and it’s the header for my newsletter sign up landing page. It’s important to be consistent all over the web.
My home page header and tagline.My landing page for my newsletter signup through MailerLite
I went through a lot of graphics and I changed a lot of things before settling on him.
The reason why I’m telling you all this is because when you decide to create and pay for a website, it’s more than just putting up a list of your books. It’s part of your marketing strategy. You’re giving your readers a look at what they’re going to be be getting buying and reading your books and signing up for your newsletter.
So, after I got all that up and running, I decided I didn’t want to blog. I wanted to do things differently than what I was doing for my non-fiction part of writing. Instead of blogging, I started a newsletter to reach readers, and it’s a lot easier writing a newsletter once or twice a month than it is thinking about relevant topics for this blog once a week. This is like a journal about my publishing journey, and readers don’t care about that. It’s fun to think of little things to tell my readers about my books, and now that I’ve gotten used to the MailerLite platform, it doesn’t take any time at all to knock out a newsletter and send it off.
My author website doesn’t have much to it. An about me page, how to contact me, my books, and a subscribe link to my newsletter. The only thing I keep up to date is the list of my books, and that doesn’t take much time at all. There are other things I could add, like a list of trigger warnings, or when I have more books published, I could list them by trope. There is always something to add, but for now my website is very simple.
I got the idea to write this blog post is because I wanted to give you some numbers. I don’t promote my website anywhere. I have the link on my Twitter bio (along with this one, too) and my subscribe link is at the back of all my books (www.vmrheault.com/subscribe). You would think I wouldn’t get any views, but I do. You may not believe readers will find you, that a website isn’t relevant, but it readers will find you. They really will.
I started my author website in September of 2021 and I published my first 1st person POV book in June of 2022. I already had a reader magnet written, and I started up my newsletter a few months after I published my website.
In 2021 I only had 33 views:
In 2022 I had 213 views.
So far, this year, I’ve had 266 views.
I don’t use attribution links, so I can’t tell you how many people have bought books using my Books page, but all those views could be readers, and I never would have had them if I hadn’t had a website.
I’ve had 44 newsletter signups that came from my landing page I have connected to my website. That may not seem like much, but that’s 44 people who may not have signed up. Every little bit helps when it comes to building your mailing list.
I call it my No Freebie List because I have a different way to collect email addresses through Bookfunnel when I have a little money to play with to run FB ads to my Bookfunnel link. They are still able to download a copy of my reader magnet–that was just how I differentiated them in my mind.
For as little time as keeping up website updated costs me, I think it is worth it to have one. When you’re building a readership, each reader counts and they want a consistent way to be able to find you. I don’t do much with any of my Facebook pages. Sometimes I’ll take a couple hours and schedule posts for a few weeks in advance, but I’m terrible at keeping those up to date. I like my newsletter for that, because I don’t send it out often, and I don’t have that much to share. I write a lot. That’s where my time goes.
If you’re on the fence about an author website, ask yourself why you wouldn’t want one. Would the lack of views get you down? You do have to write and put the links in the back and not be afraid to share it on social media. I admit, having a reader magnet goes a long way. I’ve given my reader magnet away 1,004 times, and that probably has brought traffic to my website, too. It all works together, and that’s part of your marketing strategy. All the wheels need to turn, and a vehicle stops moving if you have a flat tire. I’m happy with the stats of my website, and I’m glad I put one up.
Do you have any other reasons why you would have an author website? Let me know!
I’m lurking in writing groups and on social media way more than I should be, but there are days where you just need to sit with a cup of coffee and scroll. I admit, I like a little discourse with my coffee along with my chocolate creamer, and like the engagement questions thrown about on that bird app all the time, I like to ruffle feathers, too. My most recent, and I think most successful as it garnered more engagement than most of my tweets in the past was this one:
I love when an author posts good sales numbers and everyone is like, how did you do that? And the author says, well, I studied the market and wrote something that fit in that market and put a good cover on it and got help with the blurb. Then people are like….nah. pic.twitter.com/hgppqNW2ej
One of the most surprising things people said was that studying the market that way leads for formulaic writing. You can scroll through the replies yourself if you want: I’m not interested in calling anyone out because this actually is a common way of thinking.
So what is formulaic writing:
Personally, I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. We all know there are only seven plots out there, and we reuse those plots over and over.
Obviously there is a lot of room to twist these plots into your own story, and we all do as thousands of books are published every month. Having seven plots is very much like writing romance using tropes. There is no right or wrong way to do it, and as a writer, you are free to twist them in any way you want. Why Ali Hazelwood got so much flak for revealing in a Goodreads interview that she wrote one of her books with the tropes her agent suggested will never not make me speechless. If you want to read the article, you can look here.
Regardless of what her agent suggested, it’s still her book, her characters, her writing style, her voice. It’s not any different than a romance author digging into a fishbowl full of little slips of paper and pulling out a trope that they want to write their next book around. (I really should get on that only one bed.)
So why is there so much dislike when it comes to writing this kind of thing? Authors want to think of themselves as artists first–their books are works of art, and writing to market is like a painter using a paint-by-numbers kit. There’s no originality, no creative exploration at play. Which I think is a load of crap. People crotchet use patterns, so do people who sew quilts. People who make clothing can use patterns too–are they any less talented than the designers who create fashions and dress models who strut the catwalk?
We fear writing books that are predictable (read: boring), but if every romance author had that fear, we would never write anything. There is nothing more predictable than a 3rd act break up and a happily ever after. But in the romance genre, that’s the point. Romance readers want that and expect that, and there is hell to pay in nasty reviews if an author says their book is a romance but it doesn’t end happily (that’s a love story, by the way).
There’s a snobbishness about all of it, but there is value in not reinventing the wheel. Why build a graphic from scratch when you can use a Canva template? We see book covers all the time using a Canva template. We search newsletter and blog prompts for things to write about. We even ask ChatGPT for his ideas. There is no true originality out there anymore, and I guess that’s the point. Authors who think they are being original like to lord it over those who aren’t, but let me tell you. I’m lazy. You work your ass off for your mixed genre book with your ten points of view, and I’ll be over here having fun playing with tropes I know readers are going to want to read.
I tweeted that because it never will never cease to amaze me how much authors want their work read, how much authors want sales to show up on their sales dashboards, but whenever they ask how other authors do it, they shun the answer! The answer is right there, and it gets completely ignored, or worse, authors are written off as selling their souls or writing subpar work.
There’s a science in writing to market, to writing books with beats. That’s why there are books out there that tell you how to do it. Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes is popular, so isSave the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. You can read more about what makes a book a bestseller The Bestseller Code by Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers. Books written in this way give readers what they want: a feel good read. That’s why “they” say you shouldn’t genre hop when you’re trying to build an audience. You want to consistently deliver books your readers want, and what they know they’ll like.
I don’t think I’ll be spending much time on Twitter anymore if the changes Musk threatened us with takes place. I don’t have the money to pay for a checkmark–I’d rather save that money for ads and promos. My life will probably be better for it, and I’m slowly following more people on Instagram so I don’t entirely lose touch with all my friends. Maybe my blood pressure will go down when I’m not constantly bombarded with idiotic ideas or not-so-subtle insults about my writing.
Anyway, this third book is going well, but I’m not going to finish by the end of the month like I hoped. I’m not feeling good again. For just a little while I had a time where my girlie issues weren’t such a big deal, but I had a flare up last week that sent me to the clinic. All my test results came back negative, so it’s just my body not cooperating and there’s not much I can about it except try to ease the symptoms as there doesn’t seem to be a cure. I sympathize with anyone trying to write with a chronic issue, but it does give me something else to think about. I’ll just have to be a little more liberal with the pain meds–I try not to take them if I can help it, but there’s no point in playing the martyr either.
That is all I have for this post. I hope you had a good holiday if you celebrated and have a wonderful week!
I see it a lot on social media in the writing community–people sign up for each other’s newsletters to be supportive, thinking they are doing a good thing. I would never want to discourage anyone from trying to help out another author. Support and encouragement are so important, and sometimes just a simple, “I’m here for you if you need me” can be the difference between an author opening their laptop and writing that next chapter or walking away from everything for good.
So when someone mentioned they sign up for newsletters to show support and I said unless you’re engaging with that content it’s not really that helpful, I felt bad. I felt bad for making her feel bad because she genuinely thought what she was doing was a good thing. She, and a few others, were surprised signing up for a newsletter wasn’t as supportive as they thought it was, but here’s why signing up for a newsletter and not opening that email and enjoying and engaging in that content can be a real downer for the author sending out that newsletter.
Most email aggregators are pay to play. Unless you send out your own newsletter, you probably don’t realize that authors usually pay for their newsletter aggregators. Some of them have a free threshold, such as MailChimp at 500 email subscribers, or MailerLite who will let you have 1,000 under their free plan. Some you pay for the second you sign up, so every email they collect counts. Successful indie authors can afford their lists, and having some dead weight probably doesn’t hurt them as much as smaller authors who stretch their marketing pennies. So keep in mind that the author you’re supporting might very well be paying for you to be on their list.
We know if you’re not opening our newsletters. With the built-in stats our aggregator provides, we know if you’re opening our newsletters or not. Maybe not YOU specifically, but MailerLite tells me my open rate for each newsletter I send out. You can sign up for a newsletter from every author friend you have, but how supportive are you if you’re not opening the emails sent to you? If you just automatically toss them into the trash? Like people who promote their books for no sales, authors get discouraged when they send out newsletters and no one bothers to look at them. Here are the stats from my newsletter I sent out in March:
I have 570 email subscribers and only 33.69% of them opened my email. I included a link to something, I can’t remember what to now, but only 1.23% of that 33.69% bothered to click. Authors can cull their lists when they get too expensive and there’s not enough engagement for the cost, but it’s better all around if you’re signing up for newsletters from content creators that you’ll enjoy hearing from.
A low open-rate can affect our ability to join promotions. Authors who use newsletter builder sites and promotional sites such as StoryOrigin and Bookfunnel want to know what your open rate is before they’ll join in promos with you or ask you to join in theirs. That’s another reason why signing up for a newsletter but not opening and engaging with that content is hurtful. Tammi Labrecque who wrote Newsletter Ninja and runs the Newsletter Ninja: Author Think Tank Facebook group says a good open rate is about 40%. If you’re not opening the newsletters you sign up for, you’re hurting our chances of getting into these promotions. That’s the opposite of being supportive.
We start and offer newsletters to sell our product. The main reason we start a newsletter is to reach our customers. If you’re an author, you start a newsletter to hopefully sell your books to your subscribers. We want to build a community of readers who want to read our books and are willing to buy them. If you’re just signing up for a newsletter and not engaging with the content, you’re not going to want to buy our books. If you won’t give us your time, you definitely aren’t going to give us your money. Newsletters are an author’s strongest marketing tool–but only if their subscribers want to be on it and are happy to hear from us.
If you really want to support your author friends, the best thing you can do is read their books and talk about them. If they write in genres you don’t read, that’s not your fault and being truthful can go a long way. It’s an author’s job to promote their books, not yours, and sometimes there’s nothing you can do. I’ve turned down three people in the past couple of weeks who have asked me to read and review their books. I don’t read in those genres and I said no. With running this blog, sending out my newsletter, writing my books, and working full-time, I’m stretched thin, and that’s okay.
This wasn’t a blog post to tell you never to sign up for a newsletter, but be selective and sign up for newsletters from people you want to hear from because you enjoy their work. Of course we love it when we see new subscribers, but we want those subscribers to open our emails, enjoy the content, click on the links, and look forward to new releases. It’s difficult starting a newsletter and feeling like you’re not writing to anyone. It’s difficult to write a blog to no one, and it’s difficult to write a book when you have no readers. We all start somewhere, and little by little we grow our community. The writing community isn’t necessarily going to be your reading community, and that’s fine. We all write different genres and it’s one of the reasons I don’t share my newsletter link on Twitter–or on the blog for that matter. If anyone wants to sign up–they know how. The link is at the end of my books, and that’s the best way to gain subscribers.
How do you support your fellow authors and friends who write? Let me know, and have a great week!
Happy New Year! I hope all of you can look back at 2022 with few regrets. I’m sure there are things we all wish we would have done differently, but we can either let that hold us back or use it for inspiration for the coming year. We have 365 new days at our disposal–let’s make them count.
I started off the new year publishing my trilogy paperback to Amazon. I did them a little ahead of time only because KDP’s approval system is so arbitrary and I had no idea how long it would take for them to approve my paperbacks. It took them less than 12 hours, so the publication dates for them are officially December 28th, 2022, but that’s okay. Better early than late. I’m sticking to the ebook publication dates of January 16th, 23rd, and 30th. I usually don’t put my books on preorder, only because I don’t have an audience waiting for them, and since they’re going into KU, they won’t be available for a while yet, but this time I did and everything is ready to go. I published the paperbacks so they would be available on Booksprout for reviews, and I’m happy to say that in the first three hours half of all three were claimed. With the new plan I can post three books at a time for reviews, and I put up all three of them. I wanted honest reviews for the whole trilogy, so hopefully when/if they get to book three, their last review will reflect they liked the trilogy as a whole, as well as enjoying each individual book.
In preparation for some promos I plan to buy when my trilogy is officially released, I re-edited my duet. I was looking for snippets for Instagram and found a couple of typos here and there. Maybe not many but annoying ones like DYI for Do It Yourself instead of DIY, so I reread both of them and made a few changes. They aren’t that old and I had the time to do it, so it is what it is. But I also decided that if I was going to do the insides, I was going to redo outsides. I have a problem with choosing male models, and I have terrible buyer’s remorse when it comes to that kind of thing. One of the great things about being indie is that we can change things that don’t work, but that’s also one of the terrible things. We’re constantly plagued by the idea that what we’re putting out there isn’t as good as it can be. Anyway, I my covers went from this:
to this:
Not a significant change, especially the first one since it’s the same guy, only a crisper photo with a better pose and coloring. I decided I didn’t like the second guy at all and went for a model that’s been used before, but I like the dangerous glint in his eyes and the undone tie speaks to his partying nature in the book. I’m hoping that this change will help with sales. It was a pain the ass to change the ebook, paperback, and hardcovers on KDP as well as update them on IngramSpark. Ingram is giving me a hard time with spine width again, but I think I have it figured out now, and with the fee I paid to join the Alliance of Independent Authors and discounts that go with it, my revision costs were nothing. It took me the better part of a day, and I hope all that work pans out.
Whenever I put together a cover and publish it, I always think I can do better. I think the only cover so far where I haven’t thought that was for Rescue Me. I still love it and I’ve never been able to see anything wrong with it. The guy is perfect, the fonts are perfect. Of course, this means I’m having doubts about the trilogy, even though they haven’t been published for even day. I went around and around and around with those stupid things. It would be easy to say to just hire out–Getcovers makes it incredibly affordable–but I think I would have the same problem. In fact, I might even be worse and never be happy with what they come up with.
The good news is I can stop messing around with my duet. The insides are as perfect as they are ever going to be, and the covers are fine now. I don’t know what I would do with my trilogy covers even if I did want to change them. I searched for hours for the background and the models I finally chose, and the covers went through several drafts. As I’ve said before, my characters are older–Jack is 45 and Roman is 50, and finding models to portray that realistically is difficult. I can always start cutting their heads off, but I’m not that desperate yet.
For now, as the trilogy releases, I’m going to focus on finishing up Twisted Lies and Alibis. The holidays have kind of slowed me down, and now that New Year’s is over, I don’t have anything standing in my way. When I started it, I said I would like to be done with it by the end of January, but I’d really like to get it done within the next two weeks. I’m 67k into it now, and I have no idea how much longer it needs. There is still a lot that needs to go into it, and I want to take my time with the ending and nail it just right.
Luckily, when indies have buyer’s remorse, we can act on it, but obsessing about something and wondering if it can be better can drag you down and hold you back. We always want to do better, and it’s tough when we think changes could somehow elevate sales. I loved my covers until I published, and now I’m not sure. That’s probably common. I can’t say I didn’t follow my heart with my duet, because I did. The covers I published at first weren’t a last resort scenario at all. I was thinking about my brand overall, how they would fit in with other covers, all of it. I haven’t been publishing for 7 years for nothing. I was determined to use all the lessons I’ve learned and start my pen name on the best foot I could. But I guess it doesn’t matter if you’ve been publishing for 7 years or 70, you’ll make judgments in error. You can hang in there and see how things turn out, panic at the first feeling something isn’t right and change immediately, or know that you might need to adjust and take your time with that adjustment so you don’t have to do it again. What’s funny is I love my covers for all my 3rd person books (though all of them are on their second covers except for my Rocky Point Wedding series). I wouldn’t change any of them. I was thinking an illustrated cover for Wherever He Goes would be a good fit since they’re popular now, but ultimately I decided to keep what I have. No, I think I’m putting pressure on myself because I really want this pen name to work out. I know one thing–if I’m going to change my covers, I’ll do it before I publish the hardcovers, and before I publish to IngramSpark, and before I push any promo dollars at them.
Anyway, so that’s all I have for this first blog post of 2023. I hope you all have a wonderful start to this new year!
Vania Margene Rheault 