Is writing a (long) series worth it?

Posted on September 22, 2025 by Vania Margene Rheault

1,715 words
9 minutes read time

graphic of my king's crossing serial. all book covers with a red x in front of them.

In a blog post a couple of months ago, I shared my series’ sales and read-through numbers with you, and it really got me thinking about whether or not it’s worth it in this reading and publishing climate to write another series. Of course, if I really wanted to write another one (and I will some day because I have 2/6 done in a series I started years ago and I won’t let those two books go to waste) I would no matter where the evidence pointed. But because I’m curious by nature, like knowing the landscape of the publishing industry, and well, I just like plain old BSing, I wonder, how worth it these days is it to write a series in the first place?

Any author with a huge series and a strong audience for those books will say it’s worth it: JD Robb (In Death 60 books), Marie Force (McCarthys Of Gansett Island Books 28 books) Robyn Carr (Virgin River 20 books), and Susan Mallery (Fool’s Gold 22 books), to name a few. There are indie authors who write long series too, like Shannon Mayer (Rylee Adamson 10 books), A.J. Rivers (Emma Griffin® FBI Mystery 37 books) and more I don’t have the energy to look up. But if there’s one thing they all have in common is that they didn’t start writing those series recently. They’ve been building their audiences for years, when things were different. So where does this leave a new indie author who’s planning to write a ten-book series?

The blog post I referenced was written back in July, and my numbers haven’t gotten much better: (FYI the person who bought my series in print was my aunt.)

Book Paid eBooks Print KENP Read Est. Paid Books (KENP ÷ KENPC) Total Paid + Print + KU
Cruel Fate 76 1 32,050 74 151
Cruel Hearts 26 1 29,027 62 89
Cruel Dreams 13 1 26,438 57 71
Shattered Fate 8 1 19,871 45 54
Shattered Hearts 9 1 16,028 36 46
Shattered Dreams 11 1 14,268 32 44

When doing series read-through, you can see how many readers are going from book one to book two and on. I don’t have big numbers to play with here, and for some reason my KDP dashboard decided not to show me all the free ebooks of book one I gave away during promos like Fussy Librarian and Freebooksy. That just makes my stats look even worse anyway, so let’s stick with paid books for now.

From Book To Book Total Units (From → To) Read-Through %
Cruel Fate Cruel Hearts 151 → 89 59%
Cruel Hearts Cruel Dreams 89 → 71 80%
Cruel Dreams Shattered Fate 71 → 54 76%
Shattered Fate Shattered Hearts 54 → 46 85%
Shattered Hearts Shattered Dreams 46 → 44 96%

You can see my biggest drop is from book one to book two, but once readers get invested they keep going. Though, these numbers look deceiving because when you do the math, read-through from book one to book six is only 29%. (Dividing 44 (sales of Shattered Dreams)/151 (sales of Cruel Fate)x100=29%.) It’s rather disheartening to know that only 29% of readers who read book one went on to finish the series.

Of course my experience isn’t indicative of what’s going on in the entire indie industry when it comes to what people are doing and what their success or lack of it is. But it does make me wonder if there is an overall shift in what authors are doing or will be doing because of the changing landscape.

What do I mean by changing landscape?

People’s attention spans are shorter than ever. According to a Microsoft study, the average human has the attention span of 8.25 seconds. That means it’s difficult to grab someone’s attention and keep it where you want it. There’s competing content everywhere–ads, reels, books, podcasts, movies, TV shows, and even if a reader enjoyed book one, that doesn’t mean they’re going to want to read the rest of your series. People get bored and may not want to follow the same set of characters for hundreds of thousands of words. In fact, Lauren Brown in an article on The Bookseller writes:

Publishers are noting a shift in industry mindset around short stories as readers embrace shorter works, with a number feeling like “something is slowly shifting” and that “there’s a real excitement around stories again.”

Getting readers excited about diving into a series that has five, six, seven or more books might be more work than an author wants to admit, or put in.

Authors may also not want to invest time to write a series. “Build it and they will come” isn’t true anymore, and there’s nothing more heartbreaking than putting years of your life into something no one wants. Writing a series is a serious time commitment and when there’s no guarantee a reader will make it all the way to the end of a series, the investment might not be worth it. When you think about it, an eight-book series could be a four-book series, a duet, and two standalones–books that are much more easier to digest and easier entry points for readers.

This also brings up the argument you can’t get away from when we talk about series. Readers may not want to start until all the books are released, but authors don’t want to write more books unless there’s proven interest in what’s already published. This creates a strange Catch-22, and the bottom line is an author would have to write, and finish, a series for their own personal fulfillment first rather than continuing based on positive reader response.

That’s not to say there isn’t advantages to writing a series, which is why the advice used to be so popular ten years ago. A series can build loyal readers. A well-written series can practically sell itself, but your first book has to be so strong that your series has actual read-through or you could end up with my 29%. Unfortunately, you don’t know how your book is going to hit the market, and what you think is a strong start could be boring to readers. But, if you have an engaging book one that leads readers to the rest, as long as your books keep reader attention, that’s money in your pocket and time well-spent writing them.

We’ve changed so much from where we were ten years ago that maybe readers and authors are moving in a different direction. Readers’ attention spans have shortened, there is a lot of content out there to compete with–from real authors and from people using AI to write their books, and authors are burning out trying to compete with all that content and getting frustrated when readers don’t want to wait for the next book.

What’s the solution? (If you think there needs to be one.)

Writer short “series.” Series that have four books in them instead of a massive list, or write trilogies or duets.

Write interconnected standalones. These types of series you can stop writing at any time if you get burned out, bored, or if readers stop reading.

Write a long series in novella length rather than full-length novels. You can still write a ten-book series, but if you cut the length of the book in half, you don’t have to put so much energy into writing them and readers don’t have to put so much time and energy into reading them. You can write them faster, save them up and do a rapid-release style launch and still get almost the same rewards. Your page reads may drop because longer books have higher KENP, but you may get more readers to settle in and binge.

Or go even shorter and write 10k-20k shorts. Sadie King has an excellent book on that if you write romance, and you can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Short-Romance-Pleasure-Profit-ebook/dp/B0CFKTRC13

I wrote this blog post as a way to feel out what’s been happening in the industry. From my own experience and the complaints I’ve been seeing online with regard to reader retention and author burnout, I think we’re going to see a shift in the coming years. Offering a selection for readers to choose from has always been solid advice anyway. Even if a series is fabulous, not ever reader wants to sign up for the time or financial commitment of reading one. Not to mention the mental and emotional requirement to get invested. Standalones, duets, and trilogies are great entry points for readers who haven’t read you yet or just want something they can read in a day or over the weekend. Offering a diverse backlist can only help you find and keep readers.

As for what I’ve got next, that series I started years ago will take more years to finish. I have Wicked Games done (standalone), working on Bitter Love (standalone), and have my hockey duet waiting in the penalty box. After those are finished, I have a Mafia duet simmering (but I could turn that into a trilogy as the premise is new for me and I’m excited to write it. I won’t be surprised if I want to stay in that world for longer than two books.), and only after that will I have the time and maybe the want to do work on something else. So it might be quite a while before I want to tackle the last four books in the series I started. But fortunately, I don’t publish until I have my series all written, so the books are trapped on my computer. Readers aren’t wondering where the rest are, and that takes a lot of pressure off me to keep going.

What do you think of the publishing landscape? Do you think it’s changing or do you see readers still getting excited for longer series? Let me know in the comments!

With the changes at my work, I think the time has come that I’ll have to cut my blog posts down to twice a month. Not only did they do a reduction in workforce, they shuffled my days off around which impacts my writing time during the week. I’ll still do my best to post weekly, but I’m not sure how easy that will be for me while still writing as many words as I want on my books during the week. When they let a lot of my coworkers go, I thought this might be coming, but then they changed my work schedule from something I had been working for years, so I need to get used to a new routine. Hopefully I can bounce back because I love writing on this blog, so we’ll see how it goes in the coming months.

I have no idea what I’m writing about next week, but I’ll try to show up and see you then.

Have a lovely day!

Amazon Ads: A Case Study

Posted on October 21, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

logo taken from https://advertising.amazon.com/

I stumbled upon something interesting on Threads the other day. Someone was asking for tips and tricks on how to make Amazon ads work for her. Of course, I looked at the book she was trying to sell, noted a few things, and told her what I thought. That never works well in the land of the public, and there were a couple of people who commented on my comment. It’s interesting to me how people can tell you their opinions without looking at what you’re trying to sell or just spew stuff based on their own poor experiences. I’m not going to call this author out, but you can apply what I’m going to say to almost any debut author.

One of the things you should do when wanting to run ads is look at your product. We think we’re pretty wonderful we’ve managed to write a book and publish it, but that doesn’t mean everyone is going to want to read it. In fact, there are so many books out there it’s actually a miracle if you can find anyone who wants to pay for what you’ve written. Thinking that you’re going to set the world on fire will only set you up for disappointment. You have to be realistic when it comes to your book and by that I mean you have to look at your book and your author career as a whole.

What did I see when I saw her book?

It was only the first in a duology and the second book wasn’t on preorder. This is a Catch-22, and we know it is. People won’t buy the first book in a series without the others available because they don’t want to wait or won’t take a chance the author will finish. Authors who don’t sell enough of their first book think there’s no interest, lose motivation, and may not want to finish. I get it, but we also need to look at it from a reader’s point of view. Not being able to start and finish a series on their timetable is unsatisfying. Bingeing is a way of life now and when we are kept from it, we hear about it. No one wants to wait for the next season of Bridgerton or The House of the Dragon. No one knows where they’re going to be in 2026. This author doesn’t have the second book even on preorder, so God only knows when it will be out. She may not have even started writing it yet. It’s a sad fact that if she’s selling a duology, the first would sell better if readers had access to the second, even if only in preorder form.

She’s wide.
Amazon ads can be used if you’re wide, but to me, it makes more sense to use Facebook ads so that you can capture readers on all devices (by targeting them in your audience list). I told her that, and someone said she uses Amazon ads to great effect even though she’s wide. I just scoffed. Okay, Karen. The person who said that has been publishing for years, has over 30 books in her backlist, and, I would imagine, a very large newsletter list. She started way back in the Kindle gold rush where it was possible to make a lot of money simply publishing books and buying ads to fuel the flames. Publishing isn’t like that today, and only running ads won’t get you very far, especially as a debut author. I wasn’t impressed with her answer since it was clear she didn’t look at this author’s book or lack of backlist to provide any real, personalized direction. There’s no reason why you can’t run Amazon ads if you’re wide, but Amazon ads are known to be spendy, can’t get any traction for less than 30 cents a click, and you’re only reaching one audience. Facebook ads can reach more than only Kindle readers, can be cheaper (there are ads where I’ve gotten my clicks down to 9 cents a piece), and just seems all around a better investment. For her.

She’s not in KU, and her book is priced at $5.99.
This goes along with the “wide” part of the case study. I’m not saying Amazon readers are cheap, I’m sure there are people on Amazon who buy books at full price. But, we’re also talking about a debut author who has one book and the other book doesn’t look to be forthcoming. I’m not sure how many readers will really take a chance on a book that’s $5.99. I’m not arguing for or against being in Kindle Unlimited, that’s a business choice and being wide can be beneficial, but you are choosing your audience and that audience has disposable cash to buy entertainment. I don’t think it’s easier or harder to reach those people, you just have to know how. She may have her book in the Kobo Plus program (Kobo’s KU) but running Amazon ads won’t help her find those readers. So, she’s using Amazon ads to find readers who are willing to pay $5.99 for a debut author who is more than likely still writing the next book. If she’s getting a lot of clicks and no sales, her price could be part of the reason.

She has few reviews.
We like to think that reviews don’t matter, but they do. My duet won’t move no matter what I do and I attribute that to not putting them on Booksprout for reviews. The first book is only at twelve, and the second book is only at ten. I didn’t look to see if those are text reviews or only star ratings, but it doesn’t really matter. I don’t know the statistics on the number of readers who read reviews or just glance at the stars, but it does stand to reason the more star ratings you have, the better your book looks. Even if you have a good cover and solid blurb, a reader could nope right out of there if you don’t have enough social proof.

The book is old.
She published a while back, about eight months ago, well past the ninety-day grace period Amazon gives you. Running ads to a book that is old and already not selling well is like pushing a boulder up a mountain. Amazon is all about relevancy, and if your book isn’t relevant, meaning, people aren’t buying it, Amazon doesn’t care about it. They may still show your ad, and you get evidence of that when you see your impressions, but who knows if Amazon is pushing down your ad when it could be doing better. She’d do better to put her second book on preorder and then create an ad that targets both of them. That may be her plan once her book is closer to completion, I don’t know, but trying to drum up buzz for an old book takes a lot of time and money. Being that I have no idea how many ads or what kind she’s running, it’s hard to say if creating more and different kinds of ads (category vs. auto placement vs. keywords for example) with a higher budget would work.

So that’s what I saw when I looked at her Amazon page. Marketing is more than just figuring out an ad platform or posting social media graphics. It’s the genre you’re writing in, what your publishing schedule is like, if you offer a newsletter. She’s just getting started, so it’s no surprise her marketing tactics will be slow to take off.

I mentioned a little bit about the ad platforms, but let’s just take a shallow dive into them (I don’t have the expertise to go deep). Amazon’s ad platform isn’t complicated, though you do have to invest in clicks if you want any traction. I can’t get anywhere if I’m not bidding 40 cents or more, and that’s for contemporary romance/billionaires/rockstars. The ad itself only consists of your book cover, a tagline if you live in a country where that’s offered, and the number of reviews your book has. You need a strong cover, and if you get clicks, your cover is doing its job. It’s after you get the click and it doesn’t convert into a sale that you need to look at your product page. If your price doesn’t attract readers or if they’re looking for KU books and your book is wide, or your blurb is confusing, or they decide you don’t have enough reviews. Those can affect other ad platforms too, but if we’re just talking clicks, having your book in solid categories so they show up in the right spots on Amazon and having a fabulous cover will go a long way.

There’s a lot that goes into Facebook ads, and the potential to get one part wrong is huge. It’s probably the reason why the guy who said my Facebook ads recommendation was garbage. He had a bad experience, didn’t know how to put the ad together and maybe lost some money, but not everyone is going to have that experience. You need a good description, a good hook (headline), a good stock photo (creative) that will draw readers in enough to click. They can take a lot of trial and error and it can be costly, but I know it can be worth it once you figure out the secret sauce. Again, though, clicks can be a waste of money if readers don’t like what they see after they click on your ad. Facebook ads allow you to target more than just one kind of reader (versus Amazon ads whose readers only read on Kindles). You can target Google Play readers, Apple readers, Nook readers, Kobo, hoping to draw in those Kobo Plus subscription holders. Facebook will spend your money faster than Amazon does, but I found overall the clicks can be cheaper which allows for a little wiggle room. The dashboard is hella complicated, and I hate clicking around in it, but like any platform, once you get used it it, it’s not so bad. She could start small and boost a post off her author page and see how it goes. She would still need to create an audience, but you’d want to do that anyway. Every author needs comps.

I saw someone who was having bad luck with BookBub ads (not the featured deal you have to approved for) saying she was getting impressions but no clicks. It’s really important to understand what kind of platform you’re using. Amazon ads can cater to regular-priced books as does Facebook, but BookBub’s audience are freebie seekers and if she was trying to sell a book at full price, she wasn’t going to get any clicks. I asked her if she was trying to sell a full-priced book and if she had the price on her creative like they encourage you to do, but she didn’t answer me. Whether she didn’t see my response or she resented me telling her a full-priced book wouldn’t sell there, I have no idea, but I’ve heard of other authors trying to sell full-priced books on BookBub and it just won’t work. They have built their entire readership on readers who want free and cheap books. Trying to go against years of that will be futile. You can use them if you put your book on sale, though I have noticed that not a lot of authors want to do that. The author who is trying to sell the first in a duology might do that when her second book comes out, but without knowing her, I would guess the chances are slim.

When you decide to run ads, you have to take a look at your product and your company, which is you. Backlist, number of reviews, how long you’ve been publishing (there’s a reason why companies love to say they were established in XXXX–it creates trust in the person who’s looking at the advertisement), and how often you publish can all influence a reader’s potential to buy. Being a debut author isn’t a bad thing–we all have to start somewhere–but you have to keep your expectations in check. When she does release the second book in her duology, how long will it take her to write another book? Will she be marketing two books for the next two years? Will she release another first in series and expect readers to wait while she writes the next? Building a backlist can take years and she may not get ads to work for her for just as long.

There’s a reason why they say writing the next book is your best marketing tool. I understand the want to push your book out into the world, and I applaud her for trying, but she seemed to think the ads were what was going wrong, and well, I think in this case, it’s the operator and not the machine.

I’m certainly not an expert and I’ve killed ads that were costing me money, not making it. Like I said, I stopped trying to run ads to my duet, and now when I get someone reading them, I just figure they found out about them some other way. I’m running Amazon ads to my King’s Crossing series, and I had to kill a very productive ad. No one was preordering and the clicks were adding up. I may turn it back on once more books are available to purchase or read in KU. I knew from the start I would be paying for exposure, and I left three of the slower-moving ads on. I created two for my rockstars but they are very slow moving right now but maybe rockstars aren’t in and the books are a year old already (relevancy).

Once I write a blurb for the whole series I’ll set up a Facebook ad for it. I need a blurb that explains what the series is about, but I’ve been busy doing other things (which isn’t great since marketing this series should be on the top of my list) and well, I hate writing blurbs.

Anyway, ads are a great marketing too, just be sure you’re in a place in your career where you can benefit from them and always make more than you spend.

I found this in my email from James Blatch–Is your book advertising ready? Could be a fun webinar to listen in on. It’s free, and you can click here to sign up:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RqcLtAxuSd-ioWbFGZiIKQ?inf_contact_key=d2952934bcb214bf7377961b3d3304084dfbc39d7283b2cb89d5189540b69330#/registration

Quick Links:

Bryan Cohen’s free five day Amazon Ads course: https://www.bestpageforward.net/getting-ready-for-the-5-day-amazon-ad-challenge/
The link at the bottom directs you to his Facebook page. Join his group to stay up to date on all the webinars he offers. https://www.facebook.com/groups/2230194167089012

Dave Chesson’s Free Amazon Ad course: https://kindlepreneur.com/free-amazon-ads-course/

Matthew J. Holmes offers a newsletter and classes on Amazon and Facebook ads: https://www.matthewjholmes.com/

David Gaughran has free tools on his YouTube channel that includes using Canva to make Facebook ads graphics: https://www.youtube.com/@DavidGaughran

There are a lot more resources out there when it comes to learning ads. Robert Ryan’s books are great, and if you want to learn BookBub ads, David Gaughran has one that will read outdated because the platform has surely changed, but the tactics described to find your audience are probably still on target. Ricardo Fayet of Reedsy also wrote one that is really informative.

Another (Manic) Monday

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

It seems odd that Mondays come around so fast. My weekends are Monday through Wednesday, then boom, I’m working the rest of the week wondering why I only got through half a chapter. Last week was different as my daughter started her first job and we were getting used to her schedule. Because I wasn’t feeling well for the past four years, she’s eighteen and doesn’t have her driver’s license yet. I take responsibility for that, never feeling good enough to drive with her, and I had to give her rides. So, being in the car on the days I have off will take some time away–I just need to use the time I do have better.

On Wednesday, I went to Best Buy and bought a new Mac. My T was driving me insane and I wanted to replace my computer before it gave out completely. Now that I don’t have to push on the keys so hard to type, I’m hoping some of my carpal tunnel pain will go away, too. My arms would ache after a long typing session, so replacing my old laptop (it was seven years old!) was a must. It’s a little smaller than the one I had before, so I regret getting another MacBook Air and not the Pro, but the images are sharper so maybe that will make up for it. I saved the receipt they emailed me under my 2024 Book Spend as I fully intend to give it to my tax guy as a writing expense.

That leaves me with only one more thing to do when it comes to adulting, and that’s to make an appointment for new glasses. I’ve been putting it off because I’m so sick of doctors, but like finally spending the money on a new computer, I think I’ll like having new glasses since they’re two years old and more scratched up than my furniture (I used to have three cats). I think once I get that taken care of I won’t have to adult for the rest of the year. I’m still trying to find some normalcy when it comes to how I feel. I rarely drink anymore, and that’s helped a lot. I still get nauseated sometimes and overall just feel “off” but that’s probably due to hormones more than anything else, and I’m already on birth control to keep my ovaries steady. Since there’s not much more I can do about that, I have to take each day as it comes and if I’m feeling good, enjoy, and if I’m feeling not so good, stay home and rest. At almost fifty, I could be worse off, so I’m trying to be grateful for what I have.

As far as writing is concerned, I’m trying to get through edits of my old third person series. I’m in the middle of book three (of four), and while I can honestly say I’m enjoying the stories, either my writing style has changed or I just got that much better, but it seems almost every sentence needs some kind of tweaking. I’m taking out a lot that slows down the pace, on a paragraph/sentence level, and then adding more words to plump up scenes here and there and finish conversations where the characters just seem to sputter out. I mean, when someone says, “Have a nice day,” someone else doesn’t just get up and walk away without saying anything back or at least acknowledging it in some way. It was a weird thing I held on to all the way until last year. But while I can say I’m enjoying the stories because I haven’t read them in so long, it’s a freaking pain in the butt and a project I honestly didn’t think would need so much time and work. So, I’m dragging my feet, but knowing it has to be done, and the only thing keeping me going is the fact that these books are going to sound SO GOOD when I’m finished. Could be for nothing–does anyone read third person anymore? I have no idea, but it will be interesting to see what they do with new covers and a little ad money thrown at them. That may be my experiment for 2025.

Book two of my King’s Crossing series will be out this month, on the 28th, I think, and I’m getting some good feedback on Booksprout already. I have a couple preorders for it, literally, two the last time I looked, but I didn’t put them up for preorders for people to actually do it, anyway, so that’s fine. Just passing along the information that my preorders are there, Amazon hasn’t messed with them (yet), and they look good on my Amazon author page.

What am I going to do for the rest of the year? Well, get my old series done ASAP. I’d like to promote it in December if at all possible, and then I’m going dive into a standalone that I wrote a couple years ago. I read through it once since I wrote it and made some notes on what needs to be fixed. Add more chemistry between the characters, fix a few inconsistencies, that kind of thing. I have him wearing jeans when he would never wear jeans–he’s just not the type. Now that I know most (hopefully all) of my writing ticks, like overusing words like “with” and “where” “for” and “from” and dialogue fading off into the sunset, I’ll be able to whip that book into shape pretty easily (as easily as 109k words can get whipped into shape). Don’t know if I’ll find a beta reader for it or not. I love my coworker and value her time but in the end she doesn’t give me the real feedback I need to make the story better. After working with someone who backed out of reading my trilogy last year (when I had given her so much of my time, too), I kind of soured on working with anyone, as detrimental to my career as that may be. I don’t think too many people really admit that they write, package, and publish their books all their own because being a one-stop-shop has a bad reputation, and rightly so. It takes a village to raise a child, and it also takes a village to publish a book. Too bad sometimes my village resembles more of a ghost town these days. Not a whole lot you can do about it either, especially since paying for services doesn’t mean you’re going to get what you pay for, or anything at all.

I sound like I’m whining, but I think it’s a reality for a lot of authors now. We can try to make connections and friends, but the sad truth is, people are too busy. Too busy with life, too busy working on their own stuff, too busy with the friends they already have. I should probably be grateful I can do so much on my own because I know there are authors who can’t and I feel sorry for anyone who has to wade through the scammers and the people who aren’t qualified to offer the services they offer to find real help. Anyway, so that’s what I’ll be doing for the last three months of the year, besides living it up on my birthday on Thanksgiving Day. My ex-husband said he’d come over and cook dinner so I wouldn’t have to, so I may just end up sitting around drinking Prosecco and eating chips and dip. I’ll definitely have stuff to celebrate, like my King’s Crossing series finally out into the world, my old series hopefully done by then, saying goodbye to all my undiagnosed health issues. 2024 was rollercoaster and I threw up a few times, but maybe I can get off this crazy ride in 2025. I would welcome solid ground under my feet.

My Goodreads giveaway is losing steam, but as the days go on and more giveaways are added to the list, that’s to be expected. An author is supposed to do their own promotion after all, but I already tapped out my FB author page, my Instagram, and my newsletter. All I can do now is boost a post here and there, so I might do that before the giveaway ends on the 25th.

I think my newsletter signups are getting sick of me as I lost ten in the past week, and I only had a 29% open rate for my most recent newsletter. That’s not great, but since I’m treating it more like a blog than a newsletter and posting more for the public consumption of it, I guess I’ll have to expect people who signed up to react to the shift in vibe and opt out. That’s fine, maybe a little counterproductive since I want people to sign up rather than unsubscribe, but my sales have also dropped which means fewer people signing up from my books’ back matter. I’m not sure what to do about it at this point because it sounds like a lot of us are struggling. The best thing for me at the moment is just to keep my eyes on the end of the year. I would be really disappointed in myself if I didn’t finish editing my series. I was the one who started it in the first place and doing the relaunch over the holidays would be perfect.

That’s about all I have for this week, but I’ll leave you with a warning. You know I keep my opinions on AI to myself. I’m careful how I use it and use it very little. I like to brainstorm with Al about blog subject lines or hooky tag lines for ads because I’m bad at that, but I’ve never used it to generate photos or write for me. I’ve never written a blog post with it, never used it to edit my books. Mostly because I’m not interested–the things Al does I can do myself, and an AI photo generator doesn’t offer anything you can’t find on DepositPhotos. But if you do use it to generate pictures for a blog post, aesthetics, ads, social media graphics, or for your book covers, or if you use ChatGPT to edit for you or write portions of your books, you need to be careful because not everyone is going to be so blasé about it. There are witch hunts online, a lot of it on Threads, some in FB groups, and there’s a list going around of authors who use it. I don’t condone this list (like my lovely governor says, Mind Your Own Damn Business) and don’t know any of the authors on it, so far, but all it takes is one person to add your name and that will never go away. (Screenshots are forever, my friend.) That’s not the kind of word of mouth you want.

I know the writing community is small, I know that in comparison the reading community is a thousand times larger and maybe you don’t care what other authors think of you so long as readers like your books. That’s okay. I don’t bow down to the author community, but I have been ganged up on on Twitter, and it’s brutal on your mental health. There’s also a list of authors going around who are against AI, but I didn’t put my name on it. I started adding a disclaimer to the copyright pages of my books saying I don’t use AI for my book creation, and I’ll continue to add that, but I do it for myself and my readers. I’ve never done something just because someone else has told me to, and I don’t expect you to stay away from AI if you like using it just because I said so. But if you keep your ear to the ground, you’ll know this subject is hot and it would be bad to land on the wrong side.

I use this blog to pass around information I hear and hopefully help you make informed choices about your own book business. I’ve been on social media for a long time and this AI hate is on a level I’ve never seen before. It’s best to stay away from it or don’t announce it if you’re using it (though that can be for naught as people are pretty good at spotting it). I personally don’t care either way, this blog is a safe place for everyone, but I would be remiss if I didn’t at least mention it because like I said, this is a level of hate I’ve never seen before and the mob mentality oftentimes leaves me speechless.

I hope you have a good week, and I’ll see what kind of progress I can make on my series. Hoping to get book three done would be asking way too much, but if I could get close, I would be very happy.

Until next time!

Author Update: King’s Crossing Series

Posted on April 29, 2024 by Vania Margene Rheault

city skyline at night. text reads: king's crossing update

I’ve talked a lot about this series, and if you’re tired of reading about it, feel free to skip this post. One day soon these books will be released into the wild and I’ll stop talking about them. 🙂 Until then, this blog may be a bit repetitive as not much is going on, but I’ll try to come up with something better next week. If you have a topic you want me to write about, let me know in the comments. Thanks!

I don’t have much to share with you this week. I’m trying like mad to get these books read, and reading them over was again, so worth it. I don’t have an editing process–it seems to vary from book to book. I barely edited A Heartache for Christmas, listening to it, and proofing the proof after writing it and perhaps going through it once or twice. That’s still four sweeps, by me and me alone. I know I should get other eyes on my work, but there are just so many scammers charging for a service they have no right saying they can provide and the ones whom you could probably trust, well, they just cost too much. I’m not at a point where I would earn back a 700 dollar copy edit, and there’s no point apologizing for it, that’s just the way it is. But I’ve been sitting on this series for a long time, and every time I read it, I find other things to change, small discrepancies that probably a reader might not notice, but I did, and I like past and future details to mesh as much as possible. So, I don’t regret this read through, but besides looking for typos in the printed proofs, it will be the last one. That’s not to say I won’t fix a mistake if I find one. When I was reading the proof of A Heartache for Christmas, I found a timeline issue that I had to fix, but I published that book knowing I did the very best I could and that’s all anyone can do, whether you pay for an editor or not. What I would like is to find a person like me who can do all the things and I could give her a hundred dollars. That probably won’t happen–no one does the amount of work I do for my friends for so little, but it would be nice to have a dev editor, copy editor, and proofer all rolled into one who would catch say, 80% of my mistakes. Though, to be fair, I wrote so many books during the pandemic I wouldn’t use a person that way even if I could. That’s a lot of work for not a lot of pay, and I would feel terrible even if she were willing to do it.

So, sitting on these books was worth it, but this last editing pass before I format and order the proofs will have to be enough. At some point, you have to move forward, and while I liken several editing passes as folding more ingredients into cake batter as you mix, eventually you want to bake the batter and eat the cake.

I’m going to be moving on to researching how to market these. This series will probably be the only one like this that I do, where there is only one entry point–book one–and books one, two, four, and five all have medium to hard cliffhangers. The last thing I need is to be accused of money grabbing or get poor reviews because readers didn’t know the books ended on a cliffhanger and they hate them. Cliffhangers, I mean. So for right now the plan is to use the blurbs to put that information at the bottom and to create A+ content that will also have that information listed as well as the release dates of the other books. I’m a reader who doesn’t like to read a series unless all the books are out, and I know others are the same. I may not get a lot of sales and KU page reads until all the books are live, and that’s okay, that’s what I expect anytime I release a trilogy which is why I dump them all in the same month. Someone on Threads I think it was, or maybe it was a while back in one of my Facebook groups, said when you do that, you waste the 30, 60, and 90 day push Amazon gives you, and that may be true, but I think I’m willing to give that up in exchange for quicker read through. My sales are slow enough that I can see that people do buy all three books in a trilogy at the same time, or do read through them all one right after the next in KU. You would have to decide if Amazon’s push of your new release is worth it, or if you would prefer getting read through right away.

I can’t release all six books at once, or even a month a part, as I need the time to write more books, so I’m going to release them two months apart, though the ebooks will be on preorder which means book 6 will be on preorder for a whole year. That’s not something I usually do, but I want readers to see the series is done, and I can add that information in my A+ content as well.

The other thing that I’m going to do that I don’t usually do is put my books on sale during the preorder phase. I’m going to mark book one at .99, book two at 1.99, book three at 2.99, and the other three books will be regular price, which right now is 4.99. I normally don’t care about preorders because readers who buy books and readers who borrow them in KU are two separate audiences, and I market to my readers in KU, but I’ve never written a six book series before and I know how expensive buying an entire series can be if people want them. I don’t think I’ll get any paperback sales because I’m going to have to put them at 14.99, maybe even 15.99 to cover printing costs and I don’t have to do the math to guess readers don’t have 100 bucks to spend on an author they might never have heard of. Still, I like to offer paperbacks because besides the cost of the ISBN numbers, there’s not a lot of money or time involved so I figure I might as well.

The second I proof the final proof and make any corrections, they’ll go up on Bookfunnel for ARCs. The ARC discussion over on Threads a couple weeks ago made me want to vomit, and I will NOT be treating my reviewers and readers the way I’ve seen some authors treat theirs (such as blaming them if their books end up on pirate sites. That happens to everyone and there’s no one to blame). It was gross, and I should have made a list of all the authors I will never ever buy books from. I’ll put my ARCs on my website, let my subscribers know they’re available, maybe throw a little cash at an ad to build buzz and put them on Booksprout. I need to do that a month in advance to give readers time to read the first book at least, so it will be a lot of work and keeping an eye on the calendar because the ARC links need to come down as my books release and drop into KU. It will be a busy 12 months, and I’m also excited to get these out and work on something fresh.

I keep changing my mind on what that will be–pulled between writing something new and jumping into editing the books I have left on my laptop. I have one standalone I could polish and release, and two books of that other series that I decided I would cut down from six to four. I’m not sure, though cleaning up that standalone sounds appealing because it would be easy, but so does writing a new standalone that I partially have plotted out, but would be a bit more work.

In other news, I started a new blog to talk about coping with my health condition. Since this wasn’t a great place for it and I don’t want to make anyone tired of reading this blog if my topics don’t stay on topic. I started it over on Blogger, just so I wouldn’t confuse myself with another blog on WordPress. I already have two and using a different platform felt right. I’m not going to post on a schedule the way I do here, use it more for an online journal to talk about how I’m feeling. It will just be a place to blow off stream, and you can read it here if you want: chaoscoffeeandconfessions.blogspot.com. It only has one entry so far, and I can only post when I’m not working on something else, which won’t be often until after my series is done.

If you want to read more about marketing a series look here:

https://www.ingramspark.com/blog/marketing-a-book-series-the-power-of-readthrough

https://www.blog.yourfirst10kreaders.com/how_to_write_and_market_your_book_series/

https://insights.bookbub.com/promoting-series-keep-readers-hooked/

A discussion about cliffhangers…..https://mdmassey.com/cliffhanger-endings-writers/

That’s about all I have for this week, and I apologize if it’s repetitive. This series has been my life for a long time, and no one will be happier that I’m done than me.

Have a good week, everyone, and I hope the sun is shining where you are!

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!

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!

Thursday Author Update

Posted on December 21, 2023 by Vania Margene Rheault

I thought I would write quick update being that this will be the last one of 2023. Next Monday on Christmas Day I’ll post my year-end recap and on New Year’s Day, I’ve decided to take the day off. After that, I’ll post what I want to accomplish in 2024 and fall back into my usual posting schedule.

Mainly all I’ve been doing is editing my King’s Crossing series. I got through number one and added almost two thousand words. Some of the scenes were sparse and I filled them in. That is what is happening with book two–I’m only halfway through and have already added 1500 words. It’s really interesting reading these since they were the first books I wrote when I switched to first person, but not only that, I can tell I pantsed a lot of the plot (she just said what?!). I’m going slower than I’d like, but I have to make sure these are the way I want them to be before I publish. Like my rockstars, I’m not going back to edit them ever again, and though I know perfection isn’t obtainable, I want to make sure they are done to the best of my ability. So even though I said I would like to start publishing them in March, I might not be able to do that. I was hoping to get through each book in two weeks’ time, but there are some chapters that are so long that it takes me days to get through them.

Which leads me to this question: How long should a chapter be?

My most recent chapter I edited was 14,000 words long. There is one chapter in one of the later books that is 21,000 words long, and no, I didn’t accidentally add a zero.

When I started with the idea of dual POV, I didn’t think much beyond that I simply knew what it was, that’s how contemporary romances were being written and that they were selling. I had read books in dual POV like Sylvia Day’s Crossfire Series, and I never thought much about length of chapters. As long as there is stuff going on that moves the plot along, and the chapters are fast-paced and don’t drag, why should it matter how long a chapter is? I’ve read a couple books where the book is “dual” but we don’t hear from the male POV for chapters into the book. There was one book I read that took so long to get to his, I wasn’t even sure if his POV was included and I almost did not finish (DNF). I like the man’s POV more than the woman’s and I always have. I think that reflects in my writing too, where I wouldn’t be surprised if there is more male POV in my books than female. Writing that made me curious, and here’s the breakdown of A Heartache for Christmas:

Sawyer’s POV: 54,114
Chapter one, 1,611
Chapter three, 3,681
Chapter five, 8,152
Chapter seven, 7,266
Chapter nine, 4,894
Chapter eleven, 10,691
Chapter thirteen, 4,354
Chapter fifteen, 10,305
Chapter seventeen, 3,160

Evie’s POV: 43,050
Chapter two, 878
Chapter four, 5,907
Chapter six, 4,355
Chapter eight, 6,302
Chapter ten, 6,772
Chapter twelve, 8,930
Chapter fourteen, 2,750
Chapter sixteen, 7,156

As you can see, I started writing long chapters and never stopped. I gave Sawyer 11,064 more words, but in this case, it makes sense because he was solving a mystery and needed the page time. This also goes along with how I used to write my 3rd person books. I never wrote in chapters, only scene breaks, and then I would chop up my book in editing. I couldn’t think in chapters and maybe I still don’t. I end a POV when it needs to be ended and not any sooner to stay in line with some arbitrary chapter-length rule. Because if you have a POV that needs five chapters to be told, why are you cutting up that POV? It doesn’t make any sense, but then, I guess you don’t have a 95k word book with only sixteen chapters in it. Is there a wrong way? I think the only wrong way cutting up something into such small parts is if the reader doesn’t have time to get invested. Your readers have to care about your characters–that’s nonnegotiable. They can’t do that if they’re not given the time to do so.

Anyway, so when I’m dealing with a 14,000 word chapter where parts need to be beefed up a bit here and there and then I have to go back and read, not only to make sure I didn’t add any typos but to make sure that what I added blends into what was previously there and what came before it, then yeah, the editing process slows way down. Unfortunately. But, on the bright side, I am still loving these books, and I’m enjoying the process. These will probably be the biggest project I’ll ever tackle. I’m not really interested in writing this big of a project again, and I have no idea how these are going to be received. I hope these sell well, even boost-my-career-to-the-next-level well, but these will take a time and money commitment from a potential reader and you just never know. No one wants to write books that no one will read, and there are no guarantees.

As for what else I’m doing, that series will consume all my attention, my every free second, until they’re done. I’m still aware I need to redo their covers too, as the more I read these books the more convinced I am that the covers they have now don’t and won’t do them justice. I’ve been playing with hiring GetCovers to do them. They are inexpensive and after I get my tax refund in February could afford to cover six books, but I’ve heard you get the best results if you find the elements (stock photos) you want them to use. Finding the male models is what takes the longest and if I’m going to do that on my own, I might as well do the whole thing myself. But I have plenty of time to play with that–I just need to remind myself that experimenting with cover concepts is just as important as the editing. Thank God the blurbs are done, though I’ll go over them one more to be sure they sound okay.

Be sure to check next week for my year-end recap. My rockstars boosted me up a bit, so hopefully I’ll have more to report. I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas if you celebrate! I’m having my sister and ex-husband over and I’m cooking turkey, cheesy hashbrowns (we had mashed potatoes and gravy for Thanksgiving), green bean casserole, and the yummy cheddar biscuits from Red Lobster you can buy as a mix. It will be a small meal, but difficult to orchestrate as everything needs oven time and I only have one. Oh well. It will work out. I managed on Thanksgiving.

One last thing before I sign off for this week…there has been lots said about Bryan Cohen and his free Amazon ads course that he hosts. Some call him a scammer and only wants to recruit people into his Amazon Ads School, some say he doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to Amazon ads, (calling his method throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks) some say if he’s not selling books not to listen to him (something I don’t believe because a lot more goes into selling books than knowing how to use an ad platform) but I’ve joined in with the challenge many times, and if you want a free way to learn Amazon ads, Bryan is the one to teach you to do it. There are many strategies to experiment with when it comes to Amazon ads, or any ad platform for that matter, and Bryan teaches you one way. For free. He goes into a lot more than just how to set up an ad. He goes through and makes sure you understand if your book is ready to throw money at it (and a lot of times people find out the answer is no) and teaches you how to write hooks and more. I’m not saying his way is the end-all, be-all way. There are plenty of people out there who do ads like Robert Ryan, Janet Margo, and Ricardo Fayet (from Reedsy), but if you join in with the challenge, you have a ton of help and people to bounce ideas off of in the Facebook group. You can use Bryan’s free course as a springboard for getting your feet wet, and then move on to other strategies by other people. Anyway, so I just wanted to throw that out there, and if you were planning to learn Amazon Ads in 2024, then you can sign up for Bryan’s course that’s starting on January 17th and decide for yourself if his spaghetti deserves a plate at your table. You can sign up here. https://learn.bestpageforward.net/jan24/ (These are not affiliate links.)

Enjoy the rest of the week and have a restful weekend!

Monday Author Update

Posted on July 10, 2023 by Vania Margene Rheault

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

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

abstract musical background with notes–original from DepositPhotos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Author Update and Plot-Driven vs. Character-Driven Novels

Posted on March 6, 2023 by Vania Margene Rheault

I have zero things to write about this week. All I’ve been focused on is getting words down for this trilogy, and as of right now I’m 62k into the second book. I am loving this couple though, and turning that standalone into more books was a good choice.

These are character-driven books, and every once in a while I get a touch of imposter syndrome. Are these books going to be boring? Is there enough going on? But I’ve come to realize that character-driven books are what I write. Probably the only book I’ve ever written where characters are actually moving around on the page is Wherever He Goes, but that’s a road trip novel. There’s not much of a road trip if they aren’t moving and things aren’t happening. I’ve described my books as “quiet”–characters exploring themselves and how they need to overcome their flaws to get what they want. There’s a fine line between a character-driven book that’s “quiet” and a book that drags. I don’t get a lot of feedback before I publish, but I’ve already had some volunteers for this trilogy. I’m going to need them, I think, if only to reassure myself that the books move forward and keep readers interested.

The biggest tip I have for anyone who wants to write a character-driven book, or think they are, is you can’t be repetitious. My books depend a great deal on dialogue, but that means when characters are speaking to each other, new information must be presented at all times or there must be some kind of internal revelation. If your characters are only rehashing what has been spoken of previously, you’re wasting your readers’ time. Always know what you want out of a scene, and if you have characters talking just for the hell of it, usually that’s a sign you don’t know what your characters need, what they want, or how they’ll go about getting it. With every conversation, information must be revealed for the first time and/or a personal discovery must be made because of that information. Most of the time, that’s not difficult, but sometimes, especially in real life, people need to hear something more than once for it to sink in, or they need to hear it from more than one person. That’s not a great thing in a novel and rehashing can slow your pace and bore your reader. Try to make each scene count.

Some people might be a little confused between what a plot-driven novel is and what a character-driven novel is. There are plenty of resources out there if you want to explore, but I like this slide by a presentation Melanie Harlow did a while back.

Surface problems are usually not that important in a character-driven romance novel. It’s the emotional wounds of the characters that keep them apart and are a bitch to overcome. The emotional wounds and the flaws they must overcome is what the 3rd act breakup is all about–if there is one. As you can see, the emotional wounds are what causes the true conflict in a romance novel, and if you don’t have those, everything that keeps your couple apart is superficial and readers won’t be invested in your couple staying together for their happily ever after.

Melanie spoke at the 20booksto50k conference last November, but her talk is incomplete and the audio for what is available is poor. But, I mention it because the slides are available, and they are a goldmine of information if you want to download them. https://drive.google.com/drive/folder… She’s also part of a steamy romance panel, which I haven’t watched yet (hello work/life balance) so I can’t comment on quality, but you can check it out here.

Also, there is an Emotional Wounds thesaurus available, and it’s great for digging and thinking up ideas for how to make your characters miserable. You can check it out here. https://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Wound-Thesaurus-Writers-Psychological/dp/0989772594

My Freebooksy for the first in my trilogy went really well. For the two days it was free, I gave away 3,797 copies. I think people are still confused how this can convert to royalties earned, and I’ve said in the past that a Freebooksy only works well if you’re giving away a first in series. Read-through is where the royalties come in. Also, if you’re in Kindle Select some readers will borrow your book instead of downloading it, and if they do that, you get paid for page reads. You have to weigh the pros on cons of paying to give your book away. It won’t give everyone the return on investment they’re looking for. In my case, between borrows and read-through, I earned back my fee ($120.00) in 4 days and so far have had a ROI of 131%. (ROI = Net income / Cost of investment x 100.) People don’t read right away and my book is sitting on 3,797 Kindles. I can only hope that as the weeks and months go by that people get to my book in their TBR piles and go on to read the other two books in the trilogy.

I admit I dropped the ball and didn’t have Amazon ads running during that time. That will probably turn into a mistake for me as I had nothing propping up that promotion. The only other thing I was doing was running an FB ad to Rescue Me, and I already said last week how that turned out. Right now I’m running an ad to Captivated by Her, but I’m watching it closely as the last time I tried, I didn’t get any sales for the clicks. I ended up pausing the ad. I have it on sale for .99 right now and I used a different graphic to go along with the ad. I’m hoping for a better outcome.

The next big push might be a Freebooksy for Captivated when my next standalone book comes out in May. Though I did want to try Fussy Librarian and Robin Reads as well. It’s hard to believe that I’ll have had 7 books come out in 11 months, but I know some authors can do that all day long for years. I think this pen name is coming along though, and I have no regrets pivoting.

The only thing I have left is what I’m loving right now. I’m excited I signed up for a TikTok class with Jane Friedman and Rebecca Regnier. It’s $25 and the slides (if there are any) and a replay is available if you can’t watch live. TikTok is probably going to be my next step in trying to get the word out there for my books, but I like to explore and learn before jumping in. If you want to sign up, you can do it here. https://www.janefriedman.com/tiktok-basics-for-writers-with-rebecca-regnier/

That’s all I have for this week. Until next time!

Marketing ideas for your books

Posted on October 10, 2022 by Vania Margene Rheault

We tend to confuse marketing and advertising when it comes to our books. Advertising is what you do when you’ve already written it and published it and you’re only looking for readers. That’s running ads, buying a promo, tweeting about it, or posting in FB groups. That’s not really marketing. That’s shoving your book under someone’s nose and hoping they like it enough to buy it.

Marketing encompasses a lot more than that, and it starts with your product, a fact many indie authors don’t like because they prefer writing the book of their heart and hoping someone likes it enough to read it. That’s fine; whatever floats your boat. And honestly, it’s what you should do when you first start out. But writing the book of your heart, or the books of your heart, won’t get you very far unless you can meet in the middle between what you want to write and what readers are looking for. As I’ve said in the past, authors who can meet in the middle find their longevity in this business. Or rather than compromising on every book, write something you love, then something you know will sell, and go back and forth. I was reading Bryan Cohen’s new Amazon Ads book Self-Publishing with Amazon Ads: The Author’s Guide to Lower Costs, Higher Royalties, and Greater Peace of Mind and in it he quoted John Cusack, who said something like, “I do one project for them and one project for me.” I can’t find attribution for that quote, but for the sake of this blog post, let’s go with it. That’s not what this blog post is about, as it is your choice what you want to write, but as Seth Godin said, and I quoted him not long ago, “Find products for your customer instead of trying to find customers for your product.”

(And if you’re interested, a really great talk by Kyla Stone is available here. She talks about writing to market, but she couldn’t get to where she is today if she wasn’t writing what she loved to write.)

I’ve spent six years publishing and learning from my mistakes. Here are some tips I picked up from other authors and what you can implement with your next books.

Make sure your series looks like a series.
If you look at any big indie’s backlist all their series look like they belong together. It doesn’t matter if they’re all standalones and readers don’t have to read them in order. If they fit together, create their covers so they look like they do. Not only does a reader glancing at your Amazon page know they belong in a series, they just look nicer when they’re all branded in the same way. That means a matching background, maybe, cover models who have the same vibe. Create a series logo and add that to the cover as another way to identify one series from the next. If you do your own covers but publish as you write, create all your covers at once. That way you’re not stuck with one cover that’s already out in the world you can’t duplicate. That shoves you into a corner you don’t want to be in. Book covers are more important than we want to believe, but trust me. Look at any of your comparison authors’ backlists and see for yourself how they brand their series. Also make sure if you’re going to run ads that they meet Amazon’s policies. I had to tweak my small town contemporary series because Amazon kept blocking my ads. I had to zoom in on their faces and it ruined the entire look. I’m much more careful now.

These are books under this name. It’s easy to see the trilogy belongs together, the three standalones and then the small town series. Amazon didn’t like they were in bed. Too bad. They did.

Write in a series, but also don’t tie things up –until the very last one.
Elana Johnson calls these loops. You can end each book with an HEA, but with the overall plot, don’t wrap things up! This encourages the reader to read through your entire series to see how things finally end. With my small town series, everyone is in town for a wedding, and there are wedding activities throughout. The last book ends with the couple’s ceremony. What’s fun, the couple getting married isn’t even one of the couples featured in the books. They are background characters that help with the subplot of each book. That’s it. That might be a flimsy piece of tape holding the books together, but it was a fun way for me to end the series–with the reason why everyone was together in the first place. When Elana talks about loops, she doesn’t mean ending books on a cliffhanger, though it is well within your right and another marketing strategy you can incorporate into your writing. Elana has a wonderful series for indie authors, and you can look at the books here. I’ve read them all, and this isn’t an affiliate link.

Use your back matter.
When you write in a series, and the books are available, your Kindle can help you out by prompting you to read the next one. That can be a boost, but also, you want to take matters into your own hands and add the link to the next book in the back matter of the one before it. If you don’t write in a series, add a different book. If a reader loves your book, they’ll want to read more from you, and you might as well make it easy for them. Too many calls to action may confuse a reader, so you don’t want pages and pages of back matter asking a reader to buy a million books, sign up for your newsletter, and follow you on Twitter and Facebook. Choose the one most important to you, add it immediately after the last word of your book while they are still experiencing that reader’s high, and ask them to buy your next book or sign up for your newsletter. I have also heard that graphics work wonders and adding the cover along with the link is a great way to prompt readers to buy.

Introduce your next book with a scene at the end of the previous book.
This is one I learned from the writers in my romance group on Facebook. Say your novel is about Travis and Amy, but the next book is going to be about Rafe and Emily. End Travis and Amy’s book with a short chapter/scene in Rafe’s POV to get them excited for the next book. I haven’t started doing this, but the writers in my group give it 10/10 stars, would recommend as a great way to get readers buying the next book. Also, if you’re writing romance, readers gravitate toward those hunky men, so if you can, write from his POV. I’m definitely doing this with the trilogy I’m publishing in January, and with the six books that are with my proofer now, the third book ends with an HEA for that couple, but I added a chapter from the heroine’s POV for the next three books. I suppose I could have done it from his POV, but hers felt more natural, and I hope it will be enough to get the readers invested in her story and how the series plays out. You can do this with any genre you write in–if he’s a detective, maybe he stumbles onto a new case, or maybe something serious happens in his personal life. Whatever the case may be, add something that will entice readers to click on the link you’re putting in the back.

Bonus scenes for newsletter subscribers only.
I haven’t started this up yet because 1) you have to write the bonus content 2) I don’t know my newsletter aggregator well enough to make something like this happen, and 3) with my newsletter signup link already in the back, I’m giving away a full-length novel. If you don’t have a reader magnet, writing a bonus scene that is only available if readers sign up for your newsletter is a great way to add to your list and hopefully, the more engaged your list is, the more readers you have.

Looking at your entire backlist as a whole–or what you’ll be writing in the future.
If you think of marketing as an umbrella for your entire career, then think of advertising on a book by book basis. Marketing involves all your books, who you are as an author, and what your message is. That’s why so many authors want a logo–but attach feelings, emotions, and what you’re giving your reader in your books to that logo so they think of those things when they see it. It’s why soda commercials are always happy. They want you to equate having a good time with drinking their product. What do you want your readers to get out of your books? If you’re a romance author, an HEA, for sure, but what else? Is your brand a damaged hero? Found family? If you write women’s fiction, do you want your readers to expect a woman on a journey, or maybe sisters repairing their relationship? Best friends who have grown apart only to be reunited for some reason? Of course, that sounds like all your books will be about the same thing, but that’s not really the case. What is your theme, what is your message you want your reader to get from your books?

Publish consistently.
Training your readers to expect a book at certain time will help you build buzz as your readers will get used to your schedule. Figure out a comfortable schedule and try to maintain it. Once every 3 months seems like a good practice if you can keep up with that as you’ll never fall off Amazon’s 90 cliff. Also, if you’re writing a series, keep in mind readers don’t like to wait and you’ll have your work cut out for you if you can only release one book a year. You might just have to be resigned to the fact you won’t get the number of readers you want until all the books are released.

It’s a bit older now, but Jamie Albright spoke at the 20books convention a few years ago. She shared some good tips if you can only write and release one book a year.

Tweeting incessantly about your books isn’t marketing. Doing research on your next book before you write it, figuring out your comp authors and comp titles, doing cover research, and writing a good blurb is marketing. Running ads and buying promos to that book once you’ve written it is advertising.

It took me a really long time to figure this out–ten failed books because I genre hopped and was only writing what came to me. I didn’t publish on a schedule, didn’t have a plan. I’m still not publishing on a schedule, though I am going to try to aim for one book a quarter after my COVID stockpile is out into the world.

I’m getting a hang of this marketing thing, but it’s nothing you can achieve over night. I spent five years making mistakes. I’ll spend the next five fixing them.

Thanks for reading!

If you want resources on planning your career, Zoe York has a wonderful series of books that talk about that. You can get them here. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082CZDK75

Sara Rosette also has a wonderful book on how to write series, and you can find it here. https://www.amazon.com/How-Write-Structure-Troubleshooting-Marketing/dp/1950054322/

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Vania Margene Rheault

Independent Contemporary Romance Author & Blogger

Tag Archives: writing in a series

Is writing a (long) series worth it?

Amazon Ads: A Case Study

Another (Manic) Monday

Author Update: King’s Crossing Series

Author Update and Writing What You Love

Monday Author Update: Newsletter/Email Guidelines

Thursday Author Update

Monday Author Update

Monday Author Update and Plot-Driven vs. Character-Driven Novels

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