Monday’s Author Update

Posted on August 12, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

I don’t have much to say this week. I was able to finish proofing my proofs and I tweaked their covers. They looked plain, like they were missing something. I had made a series logo when I had the other covers, but with the colored lights, the logo didn’t fit anymore and I had to figure out something else. I really like the bokeh city background. I think it fits in with my other covers and the brand I’ve been able to create with all my books so I didn’t want to change it once I found it.

The tagline doesn’t add much, but I think it fills in the emptiness and balances out all the text at the bottom. I bolded the font (in Canva, if there’s not a choice to bold a font, you can duplicate it and lay it on top of the first which is what I had to do here) and it actually doesn’t look too bad in person. I won’t bother to take a picture of it because it wouldn’t look right anyway, but I’m pleased with how they look and besides moving the guy up on the sixth book, the covers are good. Here are all my covers together, besides my series, if you wanted to see them side by side:

Some might say not being able to read the tagline is a concern, especially at thumbnail size, but it will be bolded on the Amazon product page in the blurb section, so it’s mostly for decoration at this point.

I still have a lot to do–I haven’t even paged through the proofs yet, just opened the box to see how the tagline looked on the covers. I need to make sure the interiors are okay, that I added and took out everything I wanted, change the chapter headers because the paperback and ebook chapter headers have to be different, and then create the ebook files, for both Amazon and Bookfunnel. For six books, that will likely take me all day, and then I still have to create download pages for Bookfunnel and upload the files. I decided that I’m going to put all the ARCs up first before putting my preorders up on Amazon. I just want to do things one step at a time, and I’ll put my ARCs up for a couple of weeks first. I plan to run a Facebook ad to my website to encourage readers to download and I’m also going to use Booksprout since I’ve been nurturing a following there. I was a little hesitant putting the ARCs up while they were on preorder because I don’t want to upset the Amazon gods in any way, and I’d prefer links not being up in other places if they’re on Amazon, even if they’re only available for preorder.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t dug into any of that yet, it’s because I was stupid. On Saturday I had the entire day ahead of me, and instead of reading a book that I didn’t write or making graphics for social media, I opened my reader magnet and started reading My Biggest Mistake.

I didn’t have any intention of editing it, but once I started reading, I started changing things here and there, getting rid of some echoing, that kind of thing. My Vellum file says I last edited it in January of 2023, and while I did a good job, I’m finding things to fix to make it sound better. The story is still solid–I’m only changing things on a paragraph and sentence basis, and not even much of that. I started reading it because I really enjoy the story, and since I’ve been lightly editing it, I’m almost sorry I’m giving this book away. Despite the changes I’ve made so far, it’s one of my better books, deep and angsty, my characters saving each other from the choices they’ve made.

I don’t know how I could sell it and not feel bad since it’s free on my website, and I don’t want to put it for free anywhere since it does encourage visitors to my blog. I’m still giving away copies, about one every two days, though I’m not sure if I’ve been getting new subscribers. I exported my list from MailerLite and fed my list into my website, but since then the numbers have remained steady, though WordPress gives me a notification now and then I have a new subscriber. I’ve been blogging more, trying to get the word out, so I guess if people are getting sick of that, they’ve unsubscribed.

I don’t pay attention to those kinds of numbers, but I would feel bad if I took down my free book. I’ve been giving it away since practically I wrote it–it’s basically part of my brand now.

Anyway, so I enjoyed reading that and it will be better for it besides.

I have a Mayo Clinic appointment on the 23rd, and my sister is taking advantage of the trip to see a dermatologist for her eczema. I’ll be gone August 21-23 and I’ll try to get as much done as I can before then. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get my ARCs up. It would be nice if I could, because once those go up, I’ll be able to take another break. I haven’t been feeling lousy, and it would be fun to actually enjoy this trip down to the Cities–maybe eat at a place we never have before and I want to hit up Half Price Books in Apple Valley, if time allows. I haven’t been in there for a long time, and they may have some craft books I haven’t read yet.

Otherwise, that’s about all I have going on. I’m having an MRI done at one of my appointments, and I think she’s going to tell me I have endometriosis. This isn’t the blog for that, but I’ve been going down there every three months since February and if she wants to see me again, I’m going to put her off until December, or even January. I’d like to enjoy the holidays this year since even though I’m not cured, I’m feeling better, AND my 50th birthday falls on US’s Thanksgiving Day. That has got to be some kind of omen, you’d think. Better things coming for 2025, maybe? Not sure. I’m too hesitant after everything that’s happened to hope.

One thing at a time, at any rate, and getting those ARCs up is what I’m going to be working on this week. My sister and I are dragging my daughter (who is eighteen) to see Twisters (the second time for my sister and me) and I’m looking forward to that. When the original Twister came out, I saw it in the movie theatre thirteen times. There’s just something about seeing a movie like that on the big screen as often as you can. Probably the only good thing I can say about COVID is that the theatres were forced to regurgitate old movies, and my sister and I were able to see Titanic a couple of times in the theatre. She’s young enough she never saw it on the big screen. We made my daughter go to that one too, and I was pleased she sniffled through the entire thing, even though she gave us a hard time for forcing her to go.

Sales are slow at the moment, and there’s nothing to report there. The only thing that will breathe life into my sales now, I’m afraid, is publishing again, and I’ll get on that soon enough. I’ve heard lots of reports of August being a slow month (which I don’t really believe because the world is a big place), and I almost regret putting out my series during an election year. Stupid politics. I have a bad feeling that fiasco is going to ruin my launch and I can only hope the series hangs in there until after the New Year because I’ll be releasing into summer of 2025. But, never fear, it’s the first year my daughter can vote and I’m running her little butt up to the polling place because we both understand the assignment. Besides, I’ve benefited from living in Minnesota. Tim Walz is great, and I would love for the rest of the country to benefit from all he’s done for us, too.

I don’t get political often, and I hope if you’re publishing around that time, too, that you have a great launch!

That’s all I have for today. Good luck this week, keep your chin up if you’re going through the usual garbage. Take care of yourselves.

Until next time!

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.

Author Update and Writing What You Love

Posted on April 1, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

wooden background colorful cut out bunnies hanging from a ribbon by clothespins

text says. author update and writing what you love

If you celebrated Easter, I hope you had a lovely holiday. We’re celebrating today, in fact, because I work on Sundays and there’s no reason to use PTO to take the day off. We’ll dye eggs and I’ll cook a chicken casserole. A coworker gave me the recipe she found on TikTok. It sounded yummy and easy and I’m all about easy. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

I finished editing the last book of my series. I had to revise parts of the last two chapters and I wrote a 1900 word Epilogue that I think ends things beautifully, if I do say so for myself. Of course, I couldn’t just let that be it, and I went back to the beginning and I’m rereading the first book. I think it was around book 4 where I noticed I had a “with” problem, and that’s why I went back. I won’t need to read the series in it’s entirety again (I’ll save that for the paperback proofs and look for typos only), but I think I’ll do the first three, since book one is proving that to be a sound choice. It’s not taking as long as when I started them before, and that’s good. I’m very aware that I could be over-editing them as well, so I’m taking it easy and only editing out blatant over-use I didn’t catch the first time. I know these won’t be perfect and I’m keeping in mind books that have echoing and proofing errors sell like crazy all the time, so I can be gentle with myself and give myself grace. After all, I don’t want to work on these forever. I’m excited to start my standalone, though between setting these up on preorder and putting all the ARCs on Bookfunnel, it will be a while before I can open a new Word document.

When I was finished editing them, I decided against fancy formatting, but then I stumbled upon a vector of a city skyline that worked perfectly.

The photo was already faded at the bottom, but I brought it up a little more in GIMP so the chapter and number would stand out more. What I liked best was that even though it’s in black and white, I feel it meshed with the new background I chose for the covers.

I’m still playing with the models, but I have them chosen. They both come in lots of poses, so I’m in the process of finalizing them and don’t want to show you what I have just yet. Cover reveals don’t do much and I’ve never been interested, but I’d like to at least post them on my author website first. I’ll probably blog here about how I changed my mind because I have proofs that have a different background and models.

Because ebooks don’t have “pages” a set chapter photo like this isn’t possible, though something smaller under the chapter number is. I don’t know if I’m going to look through stock photos to find something. I’ll sell a lot more ebooks so it would be nice to offer those readers a little something. I have time to look but I don’t know for what yet. Usually when I find something that’s just right, it’s by accident, so I’ll just keep scrolling and see what pops up.

These feel like they’ll never be done, but then, I finished the initial edits before the deadline I gave myself, so if I can keep going, I’d love to be able to order a new set of proofs by the middle of April. Unfortunately, these things always take longer than expected, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the first one isn’t published until July. Way longer than I’d hoped, especially since I published A Heartache for Christmas in November, and that’s a lot more time between releases than I’d like. But this project is huge, any author would agree, and it’s better to take my time instead of rush and have regrets later. I may surprise myself, because I’m not starting from scratch, at least. All the blurbs have been written (and I’ve read them all and still like them, so that’s a relief), all the ISBNs have been assigned. All the keywords and categories have been selected on KDP, it’s just a matter of uploading new files, both interior and covers, and reading through new proofs. That might not take as long as I anticipate, but who knows what could happen.

I still haven’t posted a blog on my author site explaining what happened to my newsletter or given my readers an update there. I’ve been kind of waiting for things to cool down, and there isn’t any news that’s different from the last newsletter I sent out. Since I canceled my MailerLite account, I don’t even know what my open rate was for that last newsletter, though for once I hope it was close to nothing. I’m still humiliated a glitch like that would make me look so sketchy, and I’m bitter MailerLite handled it so terribly. I was upgraded for about five minutes before I deactivated my account, and unlike so many author services who will prorate your fees, MailerLite didn’t refund me one penny. An expensive lesson, indeed.

I heard something interesting the other day–I finally watched one of the free webinars I like to sign up for, and the first thing he said was, “If you write the book you love, don’t be surprised if readers don’t like it. You wrote the book you love, not a book others will love.” I’m paraphrasing, but I usually agree with advice like that. That kind of thinking is called writing to market, meeting genre expectations, meeting reader expectations. Writing first and then trying to market later is always a bad idea, but authors don’t understand that what you choose to write, what genre, what POV, if it will be part of a series, and if it is how far apart your books will be, the cover, the title, the series title, all that is part of the marketing process before you even write one word.

When I started my pen name, I was going to do everything right. I chose my subgenre, chose the POV (dual first person present), decided what kind of covers I was going to create to build my brand, all of it. I wrote most of my books around tropes, like a baby-for-the-billionaire, one-night-stand-with-my-boss, a fake fiancé, and a second chance. Some books I didn’t have any trope in mind, like the second book of my Lost & Found Trilogy or A Heartache for Christmas. Even my Cedar Hill Duet wasn’t written around tropes, but I’ve come to realize that if I’m writing a book that has romantic suspense themes, I’m meshing two subgenres, and I let the mystery part of the book fill in for the missing trope.

So this is the part where I admit that while I think I’m writing to market, I’m not actively writing to market, only hoping for the best. I’ve never sat down and started a book I wasn’t going to enjoy writing all for the sake of marketability or sellability. But, I am doing better than I have in the past, before I decided to at least stick to billionaires and package my books in a way that finally builds a brand.

I’ve also realized I don’t read enough to even know what’s selling–and that could be a big mistake on my part. You can’t fulfill reader expectations if you’re not reading to see what kinds of books readers are enjoying. Is it enough to say, “Well, I’m writing billionaire romance, I chose this trope, and I’ll give them a happily ever after?” I mean, writing a romance isn’t complicated (and romance authors will probably hate me for saying it). There are few rules to break, and I would like to think that my readers are getting well-rounded characters and in-depth backstories–that my books aren’t 90k words full of fluff. But, you need to read to compare, and I have plenty of books on my Kindle at the moment so when I do take a bit of time to fill my creative well once my series is up and there’s nothing I have to do for them anymore, I’ll do my own study and see if what I’ve been writing measures up.

So the TL;DR gist of it is, I used to think I was writing what readers love to read, but what I’m really doing is still writing what I want first and then hoping for the best. Which is what we’re all doing. I’m a little amused by this, since I’m such a write to market devotee, but I just have to admit that niching down, changing my POV, and packaging my books properly did more to bring readers in, and then what I’m writing will hopefully keep them coming back.

Speaking of tropes, since I had a little extra money after doing my income taxes, I bought a couple of books that I’ve had my eye on. I like to buy my nonfiction in paperback, even though they’re getting harder to read every day. But, I bought Jennifer Hilt’s Romance Trope Thesaurus. I haven’t had time to page through it yet, but I think it’s a great for market research or for brainstorming your next book. She has a generic Trope Thesaurus too, and one for horror. Give them a look on her author page on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Jennifer-Hilt/author/B01GETN4LM

Trope Thesaurus book cover. red and white text. author name Jennifer Hilt — photo taken from Amazon

In case you missed it, my blog was mentioned in the Feedspot 100 Best Contemporary Book Blogs and Websites. This is a great list of blogs and I’m honored to have been chosen. If you’d like to take a look at the list and find other blogs to subscribe to, look here: https://books.feedspot.com/contemporary_book_blogs/?feedid=5675940

I was going to write more, but I’m already at 1700 words and so I might as well call it. I have other things to do today, and I would imagine, so do you.

Have a great week ahead!

Owning vs Renting: An Author’s Dilemma

Posted on March 11, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

Is anything completely ours in this business? Maybe only our books.

Good morning! I hope you all had a good weekend! I worked more on my last book–getting ever so closer to finishing up. I’ll still have to take a break and read the proofs to look for typos I might have edited into my books, but the end is in sight, and I can’t wait! I might treat myself to a new Mac–my T is still driving me crazy, and it would be a nice little present for myself after working on this series for so long.

So, a week ago, on Monday, March 5th, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger all went down. They were down for a couple of hours, but to say it spread panic across the author universe would be putting it mildly. I know a lot of authors happened to have releases that day, and I’m sure not being able to post was upsetting to a lot of people.

It was kind of eye-opening for me as well, because this was my first outage while on Threads instead of Twitter. Outages never bothered me because I was always able to flip from one platform to the other, but since Meta owns all of them, there was nowhere for me to go. A friend and I went to email for a quick exchange (just to assure each other we hadn’t been hacked), so all wasn’t completely lost, but not having any social media felt strange… scrolling is just habit. I finally was able to kick my Twitter addiction only because I found a substitute on Threads.

Anyway, so this gave way to some thought about how authors are always told never to build on someone else’s grass. I agree with that wholeheartedly–especially since TikTok gave me such a hard time, always accusing me of violating community guidelines. I’m glad I never got invested because it ticked me off and a ding on one of your videos like that affects your entire account and how they show your content.

But after my hassle with MailerLite, I realized that even a list you cultivate on your own doesn’t really belong to you. If your account, for whatever reason, goes down or glitches and you don’t regularly export your list as a backup, those emails you worked so hard for can disappear in a puff of smoke. Sometimes tech support can help, depending on your aggregator. MailerLite charges too much for their tech support and plenty of authors take their chances and stay on the free plan (that does not give you access to tech support) for as long as possible.

My WordPress site feels like it belongs to me. I pay for the domain and for the plan. I have access to tech support if something goes wrong (like when I accidentally deleted DNS records I needed), but the fact is, anything online can go down so even selling direct to avoid dealing with Amazon isn’t always a sure thing.

I guess this post is kind of a warning to pick and choose carefully. Last night I was thinking about all the author things I’m “stuck” with, and it’s kind of scary in a looking-into-the-future-and-adding-up-spend kind of way. Every single one of my books has a link to my author website and a call to action (CTA) to subscribe to my newsletter. Every single book. Over 20, which is over 60 files I would have to change if my author website ever went kaput (the ebooks and paperbacks on Amazon, and then all my paperbacks on IngramSpark). I mean, it wouldn’t be the end of the world to amend all that back matter, but if I didn’t have an IngramSpark code for free revisions, it would add up quickly. I was lucky I directed my readers to go to my website instead of a MailerLite landing signup page, probably one of the few things I did correctly from the start. My homebase, has been, and now with my newsletter gone, always will be, my author website.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m locked into other things too–things I want to keep at the very least because I like how they work. Like Bookfunnel. I may have gotten rid of my expensive plan that supported MailerLite integration after my migration to the new MailerLite platform screwed everything up (saving me 150 dollars a year), but I like how they deliver my free book and readers are used to that platform. The easter egg that I hid in Addicted to Her is delivered that way too. At least the team at Bookfunnel doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and it helps that thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of authors, use them.

I’m also locked into my Canva account. I have so many designs there, and without it, I could never make changes to any of my book covers. I’ll always need my account, but luckily their business and reputation seem solid and hopefully won’t be disappearing anytime soon.

Maybe it will make you feel better to think that being locked into certain services isn’t only an author thing. I think Amazon is so integrated into our lives now that getting rid of it would cost–I have purchased several movies and TV shows on Prime. I would lose a lot of money if all of a sudden Prime Video disappeared. The same with my Kindle account. I’ve purchased many books that would disappear if something happened to my Kindle account. Several years ago I bought books on Nook, and when I dropped it into the tub, I lost all that content. I could have bought another Nook, but I preferred being on a Kindle anyway, so I swallowed the loss.

When you’re a baby author, as they like to say, you just don’t understand what you’re locking yourself into signing up for all these things. That would be the time to weigh what you’re willing to pay for, for pretty much all of your indie career. You get used to having access to those things and you tie up a lot of your IP into an account like Canva. But, when you’re new, you don’t know what you don’t know, and if you’re proud of your newsletter and start putting the landing page link everywhere, if something happens, you have no idea the damage control it takes to fix it.

I’m very fortunate that I linked to my website everywhere, and I’m very fortunate that I chose Bookfunnel as a way to distribute my reader magnet. I didn’t have to scramble to update any links–I don’t think I can portray in writing how relieved I was that I could just shut down my newsletter and not look back.

Building on someone else’s grass is definitely inconvenient at best (career damaging at worst), but sometimes you just can’t avoid it. We subscribe to products and services every day with the hope that those products and services have the longevity we need to keep our business afloat.

Only time will tell if the things we sign up for have staying power–in terms of the business itself and how we need to use them. I had thought MailerLite was a good fit and I recommended them several times, but they proved to be just as sketchy as any other business has the possibility to be, and some people just learn that the hard way. Lots of scammers in this business, and you’d like to think a steady business like that won’t turn, but like my daughter says, the risk is low but never zero.

I was lying in bed last night thinking about my blogs and how to make them seem more professional, if only on my author blog now, so it comes off as more newslettery and less bloggy, and I decided to create a “footer” of sorts for the ends of my posts. For eight years I’ve struggled with how to end my posts, and I’ve gone through various footers, like creating a graphic that has all my books on it and attaching my Amazon author page to it. This isn’t the right audience for that, but I would still like to end my blogs with some kind of signature so I came up with this. It’s especially important on my author blog now so no one misses the link to download their free book which I will add to every post.

Tell me what you think, and I hope you all 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!

Monday Author Update: Newsletter/Email Guidelines

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

Last week was not the greatest week I’ve ever had, but as they say, things could always be worse, and since things have smoothed out a little I’ll agree . . . for now. Let me get the “real” issues out of the way first and then I can tell you about a few personal things that haven’t exactly gone my way either.

Newsletter/Email Authentication and adding SPF and DKIM records
I’m subscribed to Holly Darling’s newsletter and she’s an expert in email marketing. I bought her MailerLite tutorial a couple of years go during a Black Friday sale. I haven’t gotten around to watching it *wincing* and with the migration I completed a few weeks ago maybe it won’t help me much now anyway, but it signed me up to her newsletter. In it, she outlined what you need to do to so Gmail and Yahoo will keep delivering your newsletter to your subscribers who use them as their email service provider. Luckily, she also has a blog, and you can read the article here:

https://pages.hollydarlinghq.com/posts/what-the-heck-is-a-dmarc-and-why-you-should-care-1

I knew changes were coming, but I didn’t realize they would be coming quite so soon. Most of these changes need to be completed by February 2024 (which is poor timing if you wanted to migrate to the new MailerLite because you also have to do that by the first of February), and I do not like waiting to do things until the last minute. That just begs for things to go wrong with no time to fix it–and I had plenty go wrong.

Way back when I started blogging, I let WordPress handle my hosting even though I was warned my site wouldn’t have all the bells and whistles that it could have if I found a different host. I didn’t want to mess with GoDaddy, Bluehost, GatorHost, SiteGround or anything else and didn’t need anything fancy. I didn’t start blogging to sell books–thank goodness too, because this blog does not sell books, and that’s fine. People who read this blog want to sell their own books, and I’m happy to help if I can. So, I was a little concerned when all this news started circulating that I was going to have to authenticate my newsletter account. I wasn’t sure if I even could with WordPress, but fortunately, the answer is yes.

I decided to start a newsletter last summer, no, was the summer of 2022 since 2023 is gone now. The first thing I did was pay for an email address linked to my website. Even back then people said not to use a regular email account, and I paid for a G-Suite account. You can email me at vania@vaniamargene.com if you want. I’ll get it eventually (my apologies to Debbie who wrote me some really nice things about A Heartache for Christmas that sat in my spam folder for two weeks). WordPress made that easy to do as well, and I pay $72 dollars a year for it. I looked up all my renewal notices and I pay $187.00 a year to WordPress for this site ($96 for the Explorer plan, $72 for the G-Suite account, and $19 for my domain name), and $66 dollars for my vmrheault.com author site ($48 for the personal plan and $18 for my domain name). It’s no wonder I’ve barely been breaking even doing this author thing. I pay WordPress a decent chunk of change, but websites are necessary and the email I set up to go with my newsletter is a must (and it will be for everyone after February 1). I thought I would have some trouble because I decided to write under a pen name, but I’m not hiding who I am and even give my first name in my welcome letter, so it’s not a big deal my newsletter shows they come from vaniamargene.com. I only set up a separate author website because my 1st person books are very different than my 3rd person books and I don’t promote the books I was writing under my full name . . . though I probably still should.

Anyway, long story not-so-short, I thought I was in for some trouble, but if you also host with WordPress because you were as confused as I was, don’t worry. I can show you were to go.

Click on your profile name:

You’ll get a new menu. Click on manage domains or it might say just one domain. I have two, as I just stated above.

Click on the one you want:

Scroll down to DNS records. Click it to make it expand then click Manage.

This is where you go to enter the information that your newsletter aggregator will give you. Click add a record and that opens up a new menu where you can chose the type and that will allow you to enter the name and value. I honestly don’t want to go any further than that to capture screenshots because when I was adding the information MailerLite was telling me to enter, I messed something up and took my whole site down for over 24 hours and didn’t even realize it. I was really lucky that WordPress’s chat was available and a Happiness Engineer knew exactly what I did wrong and helped me fix it in only 10 minutes, but I missed out on over 200 hits while it was down. I apologize to anyone who was trying to find the instructions on how to make a full book cover wrap in Canva (I know it’s all you guys love me for haha).

The good news is that DNS menu is going to look similar no matter where you host your website. The information your newsletter aggregator might be a bit different, but just copy it from them and paste it where it should go in your website’s DNS records.

Here is the MailerLite DNS tutorial.

Next you’ll want to add the DMARC, and what’s really cool is that DMARC is the same for everyone. I copied what Holly put into her domain and you can copy what I put in mine: TXT is the type, _dmarc is the name, and v-DMARC1: p=none; is the value. MailerLite also has a tutorial for this, but if you did the SPF and the DKIM, then this will be more of the same.

I didn’t do it the way they did, but what I did worked and I’m not going to go back and change it.

If you want to check your DMARC and see if you pass, you can use this free site: https://dmarcian.com/dmarc-inspector/

Holly goes through this in her video that she shares in her blog article, and she tells you how you can know if what you did worked by sending yourself a test newsletter email.

This is what my content looked like before I did the authentication and the DMARC:

What all this does is tell someone’s email platform where your email is coming from and you want it to say your website, not your newsletter aggregator.

My test email came to me all right and my website is back up and doing okay now. I won’t know 100% for sure if everything is fine until this blog post posts correctly, my next campaign is sent and opened, and February comes and goes and doesn’t cause any trouble.

It’s really difficult to stay in compliance with all of these things and I’ve seen authors who have just given up having a newsletter. I can understand that, especially after tallying up all the money I put into WordPress alone. I probably don’t need more than a personal package for this site but I upgraded when I thought I needed more. Saving $50.00 a year I guess isn’t that big of a deal, but I’ll consider it if I ever get to the point where I have to pay for MailerLite. So far I’m under 1,000 subscribers and likely will stay that way since my Bookfunnel integration went down the drain with the MailerLite migration to the new platform. Though, I’m saving money not running ads to my reader magnet anymore, and that money can go toward ads to the books I’m actually selling.

This wasn’t meant to be a detailed tutorial because there are so many different website hosts out there and so many newsletter aggregators too. I feel like everyone is scrambling to get this done and hosts and newsletter support are familiar with everyone’s troubles. Reach out to your support if you need to. I don’t send many emails but I want to stay in compliance so that the emails I do send are delivered properly.

If you run a newsletter and want to test the spammy-ness of it, this is a fun website. Send a test email to it and see what your score is. https://www.mail-tester.com/

Promos
Because I downgraded my Bookfunnel account, I promptly spent the money on a BargainBooksy through Written Word Media. I’m advertising Give & Take, the first real promo I’ve done for that book and the trilogy since I redid the covers and edited the insides. I dropped the price of book one to .99 and I’ve been selling a few here and there. I’m running a Facebook ad to it, and I’ve sold 29 ebooks since the first of the year. I’ve also had 5907 page reads which equals out to about 15 books. Hopefully the BargainBooksy will kick that into gear and I can finally move my trilogy. It really is a shame I dropped the ball with the covers when I released them but I didn’t know the insides were so messy, so giving them an overhaul was the right choice. If you don’t remember what my covers were like before, here’s the comparison:

I’ll never get that first year back, but the insides weren’t my fault. I grew as a writer and spotted the flaws after the fact. That’s all you can really do, and as an indie, I have the freedom to fix the mistakes that were made. Now that I know what my tics are, I can write better books moving forward.

King’s Crossing Series Update
Not much new to report there. I’ve been distracted with newsletter changes and glitches, not feeling the best, and my son started a new job and I’ve taken on the role of unpaid taxi driver (he gets anxiety behind the wheel and doesn’t have his driver’s license). I’m working on Book 3, rewriting sentences, smoothing out scenes, adding words, deleting sentences. I think what I’ve learned in going back and redoing the trilogy and now this series is that taking time away from your WIP is very helpful. You can see more clearly what’s missing. I’m only on chapter eight of twenty-four, and I’ve already added 3k words. I’ll probably double that by the time I’m done. But it sounds richer, the scenes don’t sound as choppy. I’ve spent three years with these characters and I’m adding more emotional depth. This is slow going, but I’m pleased with how they’re sounding so far. I’m also playing with covers, but I’ll do a separate post about that later.

Personal Adventures
Last Monday I woke up to my back bumper ripped halfway off my car. I don’t know if someone hit it or tried to pull it off, but either way, they caused over 2k worth of damage. I just paid it off, literally, a month prior, so this was not the way I was hoping to celebrate. Luckily, I pay for full coverage and the car is drivable until I can get into the body shop and have it repaired. On top of the migration issues I was having then still not feeling all that great, I didn’t need this on my plate. Fortunately, I was able to get into the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN sooner than I thought, and I only have to wait three weeks to hopefully get some answers. My deductible would have paid for that trip, but it is what it is. Things happen. It could have been worse, and I’m thankful I can still at least drive it. My sister also experienced some car issues, and I had to pick her up and take her home after the tow truck towed her car to the dealership for engine trouble. 2024 hasn’t been kind, but I’m trying to keep my spirits up.

That’s all I have for this week, but at 2,100 words, I suppose that’s enough. I just hope that all I did for my newsletter compliance will suffice and that I don’t have to do anything else with my newsletter for a long time. My promo for Give & Take runs on Thursday, the 18th, and if you want to see what it looks like, you can subscribe to the BargainBooksy newsletter. They’ll drop you emails telling you what the bargain books are for the day.

I’m tired, and even a cup of coffee won’t fix it.

Until next time!

Author Update…Happy December!

Posted on December 4, 2023 by Vania Margene Rheault

There isn’t much going on in the land of indie these days…no controversial issue that I have to weigh in on. That’s a good thing, but it does leave me little to talk about every week. I used to listen to a weekly talk on Clubhouse about marketing romance books. It lasted for a bit, but the hosts took a summer off and never came back. Though I missed the Wednesday morning chats, I understood why. There are only so many things you can tell an author about marketing before you’re just repeating yourself because true marketing lies within the books you’re writing (tropes, reader expectation, and craft don’t get talked about nearly as much as they should) and how you package them. It’s something of a no-brainer to write to market, to cover to market, to make sure your blurb is clear and intriguing. You can’t give out many tips about that–and especially to those who don’t want to follow that advice. In relation to that little story that sounded as if it were going nowhere, there’s not much going on that I need to rehash but rather than not blog, I’ll give a quick recap of the past two months and what I’m going to be doing for the month of December.

I’m done with TikTok. I enjoyed it while I was on it, got into the groove of making videos on Canva without it taking all day, and thought maybe I could actually turn it into a marketing tool like so many other authors have. But like with most things, a few bad apples spoiled the barrel, and my innocent videos kept getting take down because they were supposedly violating community guidelines (and like KDP/Amazon Ads, they won’t tell you what you did so you can avoid doing it again). When I blame bad apples, I’m blaming the dark romance authors who used it to post explicit content. And I don’t even really blame them for that–marketing on TikTok is a goldmine if you can get it to work–it’s that TikTok doesn’t want that kind of thing on their platform and dark romance authors had to find new ways to outsmart the bots that would take those videos down. Now words like “hurt” and “death” and “die” and a long list of other words (a lot having to do with sex like “come”) will get your video pulled, and sometimes not even pulled. They won’t let you post it at all, which is what happened to my last video… I used the word “hurt” in a way that I didn’t think warranted that kind of consequence. There are so many dirty snippets that authors can still get away with posting, I just gave up. I don’t like dealing with the unfairness of it all, and you can call me a whiner because we all know life isn’t fair, that’s okay, but one of my biggest pet peeves is when people are not treated equally. I don’t like the way they arbitrarily enforce their guidelines and I’m not going to put up with it anymore. My books are angsty, not dark or dirty, and when I see other snippets getting away with it when mine don’t, it’s frustrating and I’m not going to play that game. Maybe the occasional blocked video wouldn’t bother me but when that happens, your whole account is suppressed and other videos aren’t shown as often as they normally would, and I don’t have time for it. I still have my profile up, and maybe I’ll still scroll now and then because I was finding books I wanted to read (yeah, because of the dirty snippets) but I’m done posting videos. My last appeal took over a week to go through and I’ll try finding other ways to market my books.

I started reading the first book in my series to get them ready to be published. I did a good job on the last editing sweep I did, and four chapters in, I’m not finding too much too fix. If I can easily edit out a “when” or a “while” or take out an “as” phrase (she did this as he did this) I do it, but I am keeping in mind I don’t want them to sound too edited, and if the words flow well, I leave them be. I want to say I want to be done reading this book by the end of December, but I need to be done a lot sooner than that if I want to start publishing by March. In the weird way that I am, I need to have them all done and ready and final files uploaded to KDP to put them on preorder. It’s just the way I am and I’ve stopped trying to fight it, but it will free up brain space to move on and work on something else.

I have an author interview set up for later this month, and I’m looking forward to posting that. I’ve been having a difficult time finding people who are a) actively writing and publishing and have something to share, and b) willing to give me their time, which is why I don’t think I’ve had a guest post or author interview since last spring when I had my hysterectomy and scheduled almost two months of guest posts to cover my time recovering. Guests posts and author interviews aren’t a staple of this blog, but I like offering other viewpoints and experiences. I believe we all have something to share and learn from each other.

You guys know I use ads and lately I’ve been using FB ads more than ever before. I’m starting to dislike sharing sales numbers (just this morning I saw a thread on Twitter asking people what their earnings were last month), but I also want to prove that my FB ads are working and that I’m earning more than I’m spending. That puts me in a tough spot because how else am I supposed to prove to you that I’m selling books if I can’t be transparent? I realize what a conundrum that is, but let me pull the numbers and see what I can do.

October had the best sales month I’ve had selling this pen name, but I can’t say for sure overall. I’m not going back to my 3rd person books because that would be time consuming and irrelevant anyway since I wasn’t playing with FB ads then. I didn’t quite make 4 figures, October coming in at $735.20. Those were primarily my rockstars, and that’s mostly because I was running the most ads to those books. But they’re selling because the covers and titles are good and the blurbs are strong. I don’t care how fancy your ad is or if you have the hookiest hook…you’re not gonna sell if your cover doesn’t look good and match your genre and if your blurb isn’t strong. I told you about my read-through for my trilogy last week, so I know all the books are getting read. I sold some of my other books too, but my trilogy makes up the lion’s share of that figure. For ad spend, I spent $77.52 on Amazon ads, which is a little more per month than I’m used to spending, but I have an auto ad for Rescue Me that goes gangbusters every month. My sales aren’t gangbusters for that book, but I let the ad go because it brings awareness to my name and the books I have, and the clicks aren’t that expensive. For Facebook ads, I spent $87.00 for one ad and $8.77 for a different ad, and that brings my royalties for the month to $561.91. I don’t think anyone would complain about that. (Unless you’re a 5- 6- or 7-figure author. Then you’d probably die. Haha!)

November was almost the same. Before ad spend I had royalties of $593.45, which was a bit lower, but I think I also slacked on keeping my FB ads running. I schedule them for 2-week blocks, but really if I’m getting low cost per click and people are liking and engaging with the ad, I should just let it go and check in periodically instead of having to remember to extend the end date. Anyway, so with how Facebook bills out, I paid the same amount–$87.00. I didn’t boost a post, so I didn’t have the $8.77 I spend last month as I did in October. I also didn’t spend as much on Amazon ads, that total coming in at $41.09. After those two ad spends, I brought in $465.36 in royalties, which I am not going to argue about. I think most of that is my rockstars too, but now that my other trilogy is edited and re-covered, after Christmas I’ll start running ads to them too. I think with the number of books I have out, if I ran my FB ads properly, I could hopefully make $1,000/month. The steady income would take some pressure off but I would have to make double that for any real impact to be made. (For example, if I did make a steady 2k a month, I could drop down to part-time at my job and write more.) Perhaps after my series is out I’ll have a chance of doing that. I’ll have 17 books published under my initials–that has to move the needle, you’d think.

Anyway, so I’m not screenshotting my dashboard–you’ll have to take my at my word that’s what my royalties are, but there’s no reason to lie. If I wanted to lie, I would tell you my numbers were a lot better than that. Haha.

I finally migrated from the old MailerLite to the new one, and it doesn’t look much different. It wasn’t too difficult though it took a few minutes for the signup link on my author website to click in and I tried to sign up a few times before it worked. Linking my Bookfunnel account and migration to MailerLite was a bit trickier, but all I had to do there was generate a new API code and replace it with the old one on my landing page settings for my reader magnet. After I figured that out, it was okay. Luckily, and surprisingly, I remembered how I set it up last time, and I didn’t need to ask for any help. My signups and landing pages are very barebones and I only send one welcome email so my welcome sequence is very short. I haven’t segmented any of my subscribers, and it seems all my subscribers migrated over, but I saved them all first before I did anything. I haven’t sent out a newsletter since I did that so we’ll see how that goes. As far as I know, no one has signed up to my newsletter either, but I’m hoping with all the tests I ran everything works out.

I may not be completely taking time off from my books, but I did make time to read a book I found on TikTok–200 pages of pretty much just sex. Not that I minded, as I said above, the sexy snippets are what helps me find the books in the first place, but what you see, at least with that particular book, is what you get. There was no character development, hardly any backstory for either character. They didn’t even tell each other I love you, which was a real let down after all that…physical connecting. They didn’t break up and get back together, which is my favorite part of a romance book. So, I plowed through it in just a couple of hours, but it’s nothing I could ever write. I need more substance to my books, need my characters to grow and change and realize without a shadow of a doubt, if they lost the other person, their lives would never be the same. I need tender moments in the dark and gut-wrenching, down-on-his-knees proposals. To me, that’s what makes a romance novel. But there are many different types of books and many different types of authors and of course, many different types of readers. We all will find our audience, and that’s okay. I gave her .95 in KU page reads and I read something that wasn’t mine. We both win.

Later in the month I’ll do my year-end summary. It’s too early to do that now–there are still four weeks left of the year I’m not going to brush aside. Looking ahead too far means you miss what’s right in front of you, and there are still good things to come with the remaining weeks of 2023.

How are you going to spend the rest of the year? Any big projects you’re going to wrap up? If you won NaNoWriMo last month, congratulations! I will talk to you all next week. 🙂

Until next time!

Author Update and how I’m liking TikTok

Posted on September 4, 2023 by Vania Margene Rheault

bed flat: tray with coffee and wallet, a bouquet of roses, watch, and laptop on a navy blue pin-striped throw. Text says: author update

Things are about the same here, and as usual, I don’t have much news. I’m still not done with my Christmas novel despite saying I wanted to be done by the end of August, but I only have about ten thousand words left to finish it up. I helped a friend edit her book and that set me back, but my feet have always dragged toward the end of a book anyway. I want to get the ending just right, and while I’m always looking forward to the next project, it’s difficult to say goodbye.

I’ve been having mixed feelings about being on TikTok, mostly because I’m still learning and I’m resentful it takes time to learn things. I don’t know the platform well yet, and I’m more comfortable on my laptop than I am on my phone, which I discovered prohibits me from using some of creating tools like templates. I am 100% about keeping things simple, my greatest takeaway from my HR classes was when my instructor said, “Don’t reinvent the wheel” so of course this probably means I should start using my phone to post and hope it doesn’t aggravate my carpal tunnel any more than it already is. Once I turned on the sound while I was scrolling and I felt like I was listening to someone on crack click through TV channels. I was overwhelmed with music, voices, and noise, and I don’t think I will scroll through TikTok with my sound up again. I like flipping through the book snippets and getting ideas for how to create my own. My first attempts at videos were poor, and anyone who watches them will see that, but I’m getting better and it helps that my friend Sami-Jo and I trade tips. It’s always easier to try things out with someone, and instead of being perfect, I’m just going to try to have fun.

Creating tiktoks aside, I need to get more familiar with some of the newer music, and it seems like Taylor Swift is a good place to start. But, I also need to watch more videos by authors who write more like me, because I’m not sure what hole I fell into (haha, no pun intended), but TikTok likes to show me snippets of female characters losing their virginity, forced pregnancy, threesomes, and plot points that are just not in my books (I don’t know if I’ll ever write a kidnapping book, but it seems like an interesting trope to try). This isn’t a judgment, of course, but picking up tips from authors who write about 18 year olds who are married off by their fathers and losing their “v-cards” in dubious consent sex scenes won’t have the same kinds of videos I want to make. So while indie romance is broken into subgenres, so is indie marketing… at least on TikTok, and that is a lane I do not want to stray from.

I launched Twisted Alibis on August 28th, and the feedback I’ve been hearing is good. Booksprout reviews are not coming in the way they should be, and I’m thinking that maybe the books were too long for certain readers and they bailed after all (which does not bode well for my Christmas novel which will come in around 100k). I’ve found some great fans using Booksprout, but as it’s a business expense, I have to weigh the cost with the return on investment. I did veer off from my billionaire stuff, subgenre hopping like I said I wouldn’t do, so maybe the audience I’ve been cultivating since I published Rescue Me last year wasn’t interested. I’ll be going slightly off-brand again when I publish my Christmas novel, as I know not everyone likes holiday romance. Honestly, I can only write what I want to write, and my rockstars will find readers somewhere even if all the readers who claimed copies don’t review.

I broke even last month with royalties vs. ad spend, my Amazon ads taking off in a way they usually don’t, much to my wallet’s regret. But, I turned off the more expensive ones, and my spend won’t be as much this month. My FB ads are doing pretty good, especially the one that’s advertising my reader magnet (at a whopping .11 per click, that ad is cheaper than any Amazon ad I’ve ever ran). I gave that book away 246 times and gained 151 new subscribers. Due to ads and links in the backs of my books (I grab about 5 organic signups a month) I have 647 subscribers. My open rate hangs in at about 35% so we’ll see how they like being on my list in the coming months. I’ll have a lot of news to share.

Twisted Alibis didn’t have a strong launch despite running Amazon and FB ads, but a first in series, in my experience, never does well until all the books are out, so the true test will be how sales are after the third book releases on the 11th. I didn’t plan my release dates well–Labor Day and the anniversary of 9/11–but I’m hoping neither of those things interferes much with how the books do.

I’ve been trying to post more on IG and my FB author page in general, and I have no idea if that is helping sales, but people know I’m alive at least, which is more than I can say in prior months, or years for that matter. I never realized how little I posted, but it does help I don’t spend any time on Twitter anymore. My time has to go somewhere, and surprisingly, I do enjoy scrolling through silent TikTok and Instagram looking at ways I can create videos and graphics for my own books.

The one thing I have learned not being on Twitter anymore is that it is still difficult for me not to mix my writing with my books–assembly vs. finished product, I guess you can say. I’m thankful I have this blog post to share nonfiction ideas like marketing strategies, how my ads do, and what’s going on when it comes to indie news. It’s easy to want to talk about writing on TikTok, but I have to keep reminding myself that readers don’t care how you write your books, what your weekly word count goal is, what your latest marketing strategy is, or how many hours of scrolling you did to find a man for your cover. (Cover reveals and unboxings, yes, how many times Mr. Five O’Clock Shadow has been on a book cover, no.) It’s a mindshift, for sure, but one I’m enjoying. I think it’s made me slow down a little and have more of an appreciation for my books, at least, I like posting about my rockstar trilogy. Finding new ways to write ad copy and digging for snippets and hooks to share is something I’ve never taken time to do because once a book is published, I don’t tend to think about it anymore. That’s not a great way to sell backlist titles, and I’m still struggling with a “schedule” so I can organize how to create content and when to share it.

But things are moving along–at least, I don’t feel like I did two years ago before I started publishing 1st person POV and niching down. I still think that was a good move and even if I am breaking even with ads, I’m selling books. Building a readership takes time, but I think I finally found the right path.

I hope you all have a wonderful Labor Day! Have a good week!

Until next time!

Monday Musings and Quick Author Update

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Vania Margene Rheault

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The surprising ways signing up for a newsletter isn’t as helpful as you think.

Posted on April 17, 2023 by Vania Margene Rheault

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!

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Vania Margene Rheault

Independent Contemporary Romance Author & Blogger

Tag Archives: newsletters

Monday’s Author Update

Author Update and Why I Skip #IndieApril

Author Update and Writing What You Love

Monday Misery and Giving Up (Kind Of)

Monday Author Update: Newsletter/Email Guidelines

Author Update…Happy December!

Author Update and how I’m liking TikTok

Monday Musings and Quick Author Update

The surprising ways signing up for a newsletter isn’t as helpful as you think.

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