Mother’s Day is hard when you’ve lost your mom and your sole chick is the entire distance of the country away. I should have bought myself flowers. But I made a lovely dinner. This steelhead trout is the first recipe I think I have ever invented completely from scratch and it was just as good the second time as it was the first. Food that comes with a “you thought this up” badge makes me happy. And I ate strawberries that were delicious, so yay!
I spent this morning cleaning out my RSS feed. Obviously, I did this because I have about 20 more useful things to do, including fold the laundry, call the insurance agent, clean out the paper files, organize some tax paperwork, start writing my next book, and so on… but I was glad I did it when I was done. My RSS reader had gotten so full of sites that I’d stopped reading most of it. The slimmed-down version is going to be a lot more usable.
But it made me think about blogging and how it’s changed. So many sites are dead now. And so many sites have turned into simple announcement pages. People who used to tell stories about their lives in their blogs now just announce their books or post book covers. I suppose I understand it, but I still feel like my blog is more of a scrapbook for me–a very long-running easy-to-use journal, maybe. It might be an unprofessional decision, but I suspect I’ll keep posting my random thoughts here. Maybe I’ll make the link in the books link to the business site instead, and that can be the place that I post non-conversational announcements and such. Maybe.
Ran my first paid ad over the weekend. Thirty dollars and… well, I may or may not earn it back. It definitely didn’t cause any great swing in sales. I’m running another–the big one, Bookbub–next Monday. It cost $130, so it’ll be interesting to see if that one’s worth it. Thirty dollars requires some thought, but break into the hundreds and I spend endless mental hours debating.
Hmm, I feel like I’m rambling. I think I’ll go eat some lunch and then get some exercise. Maybe it’ll motivate me to start writing this afternoon. Or at least call the insurance company!
I am the ultimate procrastinator. And once they fixed it so I can’t blog in spare minutes at work, my blogging efforts went way down. Hard to spend time in front of the computer at home. Of course that’s all just excuses for procrastinating, though.
My brother handed off a bunch of poems I’ve written in years past to a wonderful illustrator who also creates books in amazon’s create space. I have been procrastinating giving her the info so it can go for sale. Partly because she is willing to not get any money for her illustrations and I want her to be compensated. Amazon will only pay out to one person.
Meanwhile, I stumbled across your snail mail address the other day and if I can locate it again, I plan on sending you a copy of the book. I was blown away. It was his xmas present to me.
Wow, that was so nice of him! And how lovely for you. Poetry books don’t make a lot of money generally, but you could offer to share any royalties with your illustrator, maybe for a set period of time, say the first year or two? It won’t be a lot of money either way–illustrated paper books are expensive to produce and distribute so the royalties authors get are low, and there’s not a big market for poetry. You’d probably wind up making at most a few hundred dollars from it and your illustrator probably knows that. I’d love to get a copy. (You should have my snail mail address in the email that went with the Welcome to Tassamara short story. If you can’t find it, I can email it to you.) What a thoughtful brother you have!