Tag: advertising

About Me, About Writing

Whining

Autumn

The air conditioner broke. ‘Tis the season of dead appliances, apparently…

And the weather forecast is promising a heat wave for the next few days. This matters because we have to order the part in for repair. Ha ha.

It might be better for me to spend the afternoons out on the patio, where I can turn on the misters to cool down. I have terrible heat tolerance.

Anyway, that’s enough whining for now.

…

Actually, no, it isn’t!

I don’t have any sort of aptitude for marketing. In fact, it’s such a foreign way of thinking for me, that it leaves me so drained and cranky that I end up completely nonfunctional for the rest of the day, then lose all ability to “follow through” afterwards.

I made some queries about how to effectively advertise over the past couple of days, and currently I have e-mails sitting in my inbox that I just don’t have the energy to open. I badly want to retreat to the kitchen to bake something sugary, and forget about the whole subject.

So I’m going to pull back for now. I learned one important lesson about Kindle keywords (use phrases instead of words) that will henceforth be applied to everything I publish, but I’m not going to sacrifice my soul for this. Heck, part of my long term “marketing” strategy was to publish a novel every year, and that ain’t gonna happen if I kill my creative energy.

Not to mention, no one enjoys a cranky mama.

I’ll probably make no-bake cookies to avoid turning on the oven while the air conditioner is broken. Seems prudent.

Anyway, I haven’t finished polishing up Alice and the Warden for official publication yet, and I particularly wanted to fix up the final few chapters where I was *obviously* fatigued when I wrote them.

And I’m working on The Scion Suit MULTIVERSE edition, lol.

I need to stick with what works for me emotionally, since I’m kind of a finicky hyper-sensitive sort that burns out easily. Patience is a virtue, and all that.

About Me

The Program

Autumn

I’ve spent the last month or so probing around, and I’m starting to suspect that I’m going to have to let go of my little malfunction.

So that’s it, I guess. It’s probably time for me to get with the program.

Though honestly, with the way everything is going, charging $3 for a book might as well be giving it away for free.

And we did spend 2020 together.

Anyway, I’m not going to make any moves this week. Still processing ‘n stuff.

And the nice thing about books is that they don’t have expiration dates. I could spend the next five years sulking if I wanted.

The thing is, I will write in a vacuum. I will write for one other person. But there’s still a part of me that wants to know what my full potential is, and that’s not going to happen without making some changes. This isn’t 2010 anymore.

Vague griping, lawl.

I guess I can’t help but feel a little bitter about pulling myself together too late to achieve what I wanted. Ten years ago, sure. But not today.

About Me

Too Late?

Autumn

Sometimes I worry that I decided to jump into the whole ‘author’ thing a bit too late. Blogs are, like, totally old hat by now, and everyone has literally switched over to YouTube. Most of ’em haven’t read anything since Fifty Shades of Grey anyway.

The funny thing is, I was planning on retreating for the first half of this year, given that I’m expecting our fifth baby (omg that’s a lot of kids). Instead, the characters in my head have gotten louder, to the point that it’s meaningless to argue that I’ve got my own major life events going on. So, here I am, writing another story.

And I wonder: is there going to be an audience for novelettes posted on some random person’s blog? Even if I put tons of effort into marketing in my own way, will it ever amount to anything? It’s been ages since blogs were the hot new shiny item, and as much as I love fantasizing about being a crazy trend-breaker, I’m not sure if anyone else wants to go along with it.

Am I too late?

In a way, it’s also exciting to discover who’s still out there.

Hello, we’re the weirdos who stubbornly do our own thing, irregardless of where the masses have gone.

The Black Magus

Real Love

Autumn

I’m a hopeless romantic, through and through.

This was perhaps a bit silly of me, but after “The Scion Suit” gained a smidgen of attention on Reddit, I wondered if I should downplay the romance aspect of The Black Magus to make it sound more appealing to the sort of people who would actually read it — after all, I don’t think that I’d gain much traction with Twilight fans. But, I decided that would be rather disingenuous, considering that it’s right there in the very first chapter.

So there you have it: The Black Magus is the ultimate Mary-Sue fanfic, where the main character is a shy nobody who through sheer coincidence gains the attention of the most powerful magus on the planet. He competes against another magus to win her affection in a saucy love triangle, and ultimately pulls ahead by gifting her the most expensive car ever built. The girl, on the other hand, maintains an emotional affair with the other guy, just to prove how strong and independent she is after she’s married …

…

LOL JK

I’m totally not awesome enough to write that.

It’s not the sort of crap that’s always portrayed in popular romance novels. It’s also not the sort of “singles together” crap that we’re told to settle for because “romance doesn’t exist”. You won’t find any Taylor Swift songs that fit it.

It’s about devotion and compassion. It’s about two people joining together to become a family, and learning how to be there for each other. It’s about real love.

There’s also some stuff about magic and the world they live in, and a few other characters who have some dialogue and whatnot. You know, that necessary story-type stuff, to flesh it out into an actual novel and set up the sequel.

So, I have decided against downplaying the romance aspect of The Black Magus, because it is the entire foundation and structure of the novel. Please, don’t dismiss it because of a few bad stereotypes — I assure you that this story is different.

The Black Magus

The Black Magus characters

Autumn

 

I know.

I spent over a year working on the first draft for this novel, and these are the only notes I made on the two main characters.

Lawl.

I confess, I’m terrible with notes, so I often find it easier and more organized to keep all of the information in my head. I don’t create character charts, or worksheets, or blah blah blah, because I make a point of locking everything in my mind.

Which is probably one of the reasons why I don’t fit in with writing communities.

Besides. Most of the time, I just listen to what they have to say anyway.

So, here we are: introducing the two main characters from The Black Magus, my upcoming fantasy romance novel.

Are you as excited as I am?

About Me

To photo or not to photo

Autumn

The book I’m currently reading (Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock) has a great big picture of the author on the back cover. I showed it to my husband and commented, “It would be absolutely mortifying to see a picture of my face displayed like that.”

One of the things that I really like about writing is the anonymity of it. I can hide behind characters, and reveal my innermost thoughts without revealing anything at all. I strive to be, as the author, completely invisible in my novels.

Of course, with setting up an author’s page on Amazon, they ask for a bio and photos.

I wonder, do readers really care what the author looks like?

Personally, I don’t.

Personally, sometimes I wish that I didn’t know what an author looked like.

I’m contemplating whether or not I ought to include that particular bit of info, and hide safely in my anonymity.

About Writing

Learning how to advertise

Autumn

I asked myself, how do *I* find new books to read?

By crapshoot, more or less.

Which is rather hard to market toward for advertising.

You see, I don’t turn to blogs or Facebook when I’m in search of the next novel. I browse around at random, sometimes on Amazon, othertimes on Google, until I find something that sounds exciting.

I don’t use Facebook at all, and blogs are something I peruse after I’ve become interested in an author. I highly doubt that I’ll connect with readers on websites that I personally dislike.

I write for myself and people like me: the kind of geeky, anime watching, reclusive introvert, fantasy loving, vaguely hippy-ish, super sappy, sort.

So, I’ve been working very hard on thinking of which sorts of things make me excited about books. I like intriguing descriptions that give a sense of depth and complexity. I skip books that share umpteen reviews and claim to be best-sellers — if a book is desperately trying to tell us how good it is without actually saying anything about itself, then it probably isn’t good at all.

The really hard part is, I haven’t read a book that I’ve truly enjoyed in years.