Auto-Buy Authors

22 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in Marketing and promotion, Personal, Self-publishing, Zelda

≈ 20 Comments

I wrote a blog post last week and didn’t post it, because it was sad, and also because it stopped being true. I spent much of a day saying good-bye to Zelda, torn between rushing her to a strange vet and letting nature take its course, eventually deciding through many tears that the most loving thing to do was to just be with her, letting her know how much I loved her.

Nature decided that it was a bad day, but not the last bad day. A couple days later she ate a little chicken and by yesterday she was walking again. Not with any speed, and I’m still pretty sure that the baddest of bad days is coming soon… but it’s not going to be today, and that’s sufficient unto the day.

Meanwhile, I am puppy-sitting and working my way through that scary to-do list. I made definite progress — I think I’ve whittled it down to about twenty items, but of course, the twenty items left are some of the worst and scariest. One of them is so tiny — fix the Subscribe button on the sign-up widget — but the fact is, I have absolutely no idea how to do that and am probably going to easily spend a full day working on it, feeling frustrated and annoyed the whole time.

Is that a good use of my time? Obviously not. Does anyone really care if the subscribe button doesn’t look like a button? Well, I do, so yeah, probably there are some other obsessive people who would be bothered as well. Mostly, though, I think it feels like a symptom of my life being outside my control. So many things I can’t fix, can’t make better, but here’s a thing I could/should be able to fix. I wonder if I could convince myself that leaving it alone would be a signal of acceptance? And signal is not the word I want, but I can’t find the right one.

Speaking of things I can’t control, I’ve been experimenting with ads this weekend. I’d really like to get book sales back to where they were before I tried putting Ghosts into Kindle Unlimited. I was never earning enough money to live on, but I was steadily managing to push off the day when I’d have to start filling out job applications. That day is now zooming toward me. Is it ironic or just sad that one of the big reasons I’ve been avoiding a 9-5 is my reluctance to leave Zelda alone all day?

Anyway, ads. I had fun making them, but so far, they’ve been a pointless waste of money. My clickthrough rate is 0.13%, which is roughly equivalent to 0.

ad for A Gift of Ghosts with gray background and lots of text
The long blurb
ad for A Gift of Ghosts with gray background and lots of text
The simple blurb
ad for A Gift of Ghosts with gray background and lots of text
The fancy ad

I might do better with more comparable authors — the authors I chose were almost at random, just people I liked, with audiences sizable enough to give me a big, reasonably inexpensive pool. (Robin McKinley, Sarina Bowen, Ilona Andrews.) So here’s a question for you: who are your auto-buy authors? Oh, and comments on the ads also welcome. Feel free to make suggestions!

Defying expectations

15 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in Cover design, Grace, Self-publishing

≈ 2 Comments

If you read my last two posts, you might reasonably expect today’s post to include the new cover for A Gift of Time. Alas, I don’t have it yet. I do, however, have the new cover for A Gift of Grace, which feels like an appropriate substitute.

I didn’t ask the designer to add freckles to Grace, but we did get all fancy with both models’ clothing. Any second now they’ll be running into a bear. And I really like their expressions.

Alas, responding to comments on the last post reminded me that the point of new covers was to expand my audience and appeal to the many, many, many book-buying romance readers in the world, and those expressions are probably all wrong for that audience. I should have made him half-naked and had both of them looking sultry. Covers like that might not have been to my personal taste (or yours!), but the point of a cover is to appeal to a specific audience and I’m not my own audience. Or at least I am my own audience, but I’m not the part of my audience that can buy enough books to let me go on eating and paying vet bills.

Oh, well. I still like their expressions.

I’ve been working on lots of marketing type things. Some of it is very fun. Much of it is not. But on the fun side has been trying out keywords to include on my book listings. “Ghost romance paranormal suspense mystery” should be a terrible set — according to Kindle Rocket, there are 6046 books found with that search. But, at least yesterday, A Gift of Ghosts was at the very top of that list, which means it’s a terrible set for some other 6000 books, but not a terrible set for my book. That was fun to discover.

Speaking of Amazon, today is Amazon Prime Day and I had $10 of Amazon money from spending $10 at Whole Foods, plus the $5 Prime Day deal on printed books, so I spent a very pleasant 45 minutes looking at all the items on my wish list and deciding what not to buy. But I finally went for Salt Fire Acid Heat, a cookbook I’ve been debating forever. I’m probably not going to carry it around in the van with me, but I’m at my brother’s so I can store it with my Christmas ornaments and scrapbooks when I drive away. And I’m excited to read it.

I’m suspecting that this week isn’t going to be a terribly productive week for me, though. I’m dog-sitting, so I’ll have three dogs to take care of, and the puppy is energetic and always trying to convince the two older dogs to play. This does not go over well with the two older dogs, so dog-sitting the puppy is a lot more like dog-sitting a toddler than it is house-sitting. But it should be fun, even if it means that I don’t finish all the many miscellaneous things that I’m working on.

To-do list

12 Friday Jul 2019

Posted by in Cover design, Self-publishing, Thought

≈ 11 Comments

I created a To-Do list this morning with well over 80 items on it. Not a single one of those items was “create a to-do list”.

Also, not a single one of those items was “spend twenty minutes browsing to-do list apps on the app store, hoping to find one that’s better than plain text before giving up in frustration.” If you’ve got a recommendation for a to-do list app, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Actually, my to-do list is kind of a work of art. But it does not include “write a blog post,” so I’m going to make this quick.

Pennsylvania continues to be lovely but I am spending far too much time sitting on the guest bed banging away on my computer. I’m taking advantage of the internet to try to get lots of internet-related business tasks done — updating my mailing list software, setting up an automation sequence, working on the websites, that kind of thing. I’d rather be outside playing with my niece and the dogs, but honestly, it’s about time I took the work side of life a little more seriously.

Speaking of which… a more serious cover.

book cover for A Gift of Thought
Guys in stock photos never shave.

Cover reveal for a familiar book

08 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in Cover design, Ghosts, Self-publishing

≈ 9 Comments

As of today, I have written approximately 762,000 words of fiction. That sounds like a lot unless you know that my goal in October of 2011 — before I even finished writing A Gift of Ghosts — was to write a million words, then decide if I wanted to be a writer. Having written approximately 200,000 words of fanfiction in the preceding twelve months, it didn’t seem unrealistic.

Oh, well.

As I said several months ago, I don’t need to finish those words to know that I’m going to be a writer.

But I’m not just a writer: I’m also a publisher.

And one of the best parts of being a publisher is getting to look at the covers of your books and say, “Hmm, I think I’m ready for something new.” I tried updating the typography on the Tassamara series, thinking that would satisfy me, but it didn’t, so last month, I hired Kelley York of Sleepy Fox Studio and described my dream cover of A Gift of Ghosts to her.

Without further ado, my ‘something new’.

cover to A Gift of Ghosts with couple

What do you think? Does it match your ideas of the characters? Would it be your dream cover? I haven’t updated the book yet, because I’m waiting until I have new covers for all the books in the series, but I couldn’t wait to share it!

Scribbles and blueberries

05 Friday Jul 2019

Posted by in Food, Pennsylvania, Randomness

≈ 5 Comments

Blueberries, covering a kitchen island counter.
This morning’s harvest of blueberries.

I arrived at my brother’s house a week ago. Since then, I have picked a great many blueberries. Nowhere close to picking them all, though! We could easily spend three or four times as long and still come nowhere close. The blueberries are prolific this year. Also delicious. Even some of the bushes I haven’t liked in past years — too bland or too small — are good this summer. Maybe it’s because of all the rain? And my favorite bush, which in years past has only had scattered handfuls of berries, has hundreds of them this year. It’s blueberry heaven.

Every time we go pick, though, usually reasonably early in the morning, I both enjoy myself and am incredibly thankful that my life doesn’t actually require me to pick berries for a living. It’s a peaceful, pleasantly monotonous chore for about twenty minutes. And then I start to get hot and sweaty and the mosquitoes begin to attack or I put my knee down on a thistle or my hand into a spiderweb and I’m really grateful that I can stop whenever I want to. We walk away with our full tubs of berries and leave plenty on the bushes for the birds or for the next day’s picking.

Ironically, I woke up this morning with stiff neck and shoulder muscles that had nothing to do with berries. I’ve been spending a lot of time on my computer: working on a marketing plan, a mailing list strategy, some website updates, edits to A Lonely Magic, and words on its sequel. The last has been the least successful of those endeavors, but I spent hours on my laptop yesterday, trying to get back into the swing of it.

Along the way, I updated the Scribbles page with a couple of my favorite fanfiction stories, some unfinished stories that I like, and a scene that I cut from A Gift of Time long ago. It felt like a very productive day at the time, but this morning it felt like I’d been doing heavy labor. But having real internet feels like such a luxury — I want to take advantage of it while I can. One of the unfinished stories is so tempting, too — it’s always the way of the words: the story I’m writing feels like work, the story I’m not writing feels like temptation. (I was going to tell you which one, but I will wait and see if anyone wants to guess first. 🙂 )

And speaking of temptation, I think it’s time for lunch. Breakfast this morning was yogurt, blueberries, and granola. I think lunch is going to be a spinach salad with goat cheese, blueberries, and pumpkin seeds. Dinner will probably include some blueberries, too, in one form or another. Yay for summertime!

Best of June 2019

01 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by in Best of

≈ 2 Comments

The last days of June 2019 were a whirlwind. Well, a whirlwind followed by a couple days of the kind of complete and utter laziness where even taking the computer down from the overhead compartment seemed too much like work.

The month started in Yellowstone, and included stays in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. There was a national park, a state park, the Far West Fishing Access campground, boondocking outside a national park, an Army Corps of Engineers campground, a city park, three national forest campgrounds, four county parks, a KOA and two driveways. Not in that order.

And I will pause for a moment to mention Wolf Creek Park, the only campground that I did not write about during the month as it happened. It was… weird. It was a county park in Ohio, where I spent one night while I was on the road from Michigan to Pennsylvania, and it was perfectly nice but completely empty. Most campgrounds have a host, so there’s always at least one other camper, but Sandusky County had an online payment system and not a single person at the campground. I was totally alone. The campsite I chose was in a loop around an open green space and I’m pretty sure that it would have been pleasant even if it was crowded. As it was… it was pleasant, yes, but also spooky. There was a lot of traffic noise from the nearby highway, but I somehow felt like I was trespassing, even though I had paid my $15.

A vast expanse of green grass with a tiny silver van in the distance, in front of some trees and a blue sky.
Alone at Wolf Creek Park, Sandusky County, Ohio.

Moving on — it was such a busy month that there are plenty of options for the best moment of the month, but as I have learned in my almost three years of full-time van life, the best moments are almost always about the people. In June 2019, it was the mini-reunion with college friends in Rochester, MI. Sitting on the front porch and laughing about our yearbooks; reading letters I wrote when I was 18 (my handwriting was so much more legible back then!); walking to the farmer’s market; enjoying the Motown museum and the pedalpub boat ride; and especially playing SongPop Party, the most ridiculous “Name That Tune” game, which was so very entertaining, despite the fact that I was horrifically bad at it. (A week later, I am still amused that in about fifty rounds of the game, the only times I budged from the bottom of the chart were when I chose the Taylor Swift and One Direction categories. Yay for modern pop!)

Picking a best campground, though, is impossible. I stayed in so many beautiful places. But I’ve definitely moved national forests up on my list of campgrounds to consider. They don’t usually have electricity, so they’re not great for me in the heat when I need AC for Zelda, and their campsites tend to be smaller and not necessarily level, but those three campgrounds were true highlights of my trip east. I was moving fast to make the reunion and blueberry season, but they would have been beautiful places to spend a relaxed couple of weeks appreciating nature. Maybe next year!

And meanwhile, it’s time to get back to writing a book. My own adventures were fun, but I’m eager to get back to enjoying Fen’s adventures instead!

Trout Lake & Wagner Lake

23 Sunday Jun 2019

Posted by in Campground, Travel

≈ 1 Comment

My campsite at Trout Lake

I could blame the weather or the bugs, but I think I should have thought twice about staying at Trout Lake Campground when the campground host casually mentioned that they were expecting a full house on the weekend because they were hosting a big off-road vehicle rally. I’d already handed him my credit card for two nights, however, and I really wanted a shower. If I’d known that the showers were the type were you have no control of the water temp and that the mosquitoes were sharing their meals with the black flies, I would have snatched my credit card back out of his hand. It was, however, only for two nights, so I will stop complaining now. And I’d had a long day before getting there so I really was ready to stop driving.

I hadn’t gone all that far, but I’d been driving through Pictured Rocks National Park and stopping regularly. Lots of scenic views. Also lots of bugs. I saw one guy wearing a mosquito net hat — clearly the apparel of the experienced northern Michigan hiker!

waterfall
Waterfalls and rushing streams!
trees and lake view
Admiring the distant views — the deep blue in the background is the lake.
forget-me-nots in green grasses
Admiring the close-up views — the forget-me-nots are an invasive species apparently, but they’re really beautiful.

After a quiet (and grumpy) rest day at Trout Lake, I got back on the road again on Thursday with relief, but no real destination in mind. It turned into a day of minor errands — Aldi and Walmart and gas — followed by a somewhat ridiculous, but rewarding persistence.

I only had one night to spend wherever I decided to stop, so there was no reason to look for someplace special. A parking lot would have made sense. Maybe a night in a motel, so I could actually have that really nice shower? I was so indecisive. But it stays light really late in Michigan so instead of stopping, I just kept looking. I rejected one campground — too hilly. I rejected a second campground — nice for tent campers, but a parking lot for a van. (But while I was in the parking lot, I ran the generator and cooked some InstantPot chicken and rice for dinner.) I got lost while looking for a third campground and missed it entirely. Apple Maps sent me in a ridiculous direction for the next campground and I wound up in a dead end dirt road with minimal room to turn around. I still didn’t find myself a nice Walmart for the night. I don’t know why I was so determined, but at that point, I’d been looking for someplace nice for so long that I wasn’t going to stop until I was happy. Or exhausted, I suppose.

Fortunately, happy came first. At about 7PM, I found myself at Wagner Lake Campground in the Huron-Manistee National Forests.

Private, quiet, peaceful, beautiful. I could have stayed there for days (despite the mosquitoes, which were pervasive but not insane). Instead, I enjoyed a completely relaxing morning, and got back on the road around noon. For once, I knew exactly where I was headed — a weekend with friends that I hadn’t seen since college!

Bay Furnace Campground

17 Monday Jun 2019

Posted by in Adventures, Campground, Travel

≈ 4 Comments

Foggy water and green grass
The morning fog on the water, as seen from the back of my campsite

I failed to call my dad on Father’s Day, because I had no cell service. I feel like that was bad planning on my part, but by the time I realized that my phone was lying to me — that the 1 bar of Verizon service really meant responses like “message failed to send” and “call failed” — I’d already paid $40 for two nights at Bay Furnace Campground. And not just that, I’d gotten one of the four nicest sites, the ones on the lake with water views and their own tiny private beaches. I was not minded to walk away for the sake of an internet connection.  (Sorry, Dad. I hope you had a Happy Father’s Day!)

Even if I hadn’t gotten such a nice site, I would have loved this campground. All the sites are reasonably spacious, with good separation between them. I can see my neighbors — and actually overhear some of their conversations — but my site still feels private. I left the shades up to watch the night sky when I went to sleep last night, which I don’t always do, if it feels like people might be driving or walking by. 

Although speaking of night skies… Michigan is very far north. I know this not because I can read a map or know anything about American geography (although I actually can and do) but because it stays light ridiculously late and gets light ridiculously early. My instincts are to stay awake for a couple hours after it gets dark and then wake up with the sunrise. That’s not giving me nearly enough sleep in Michigan. If I lived in Alaska, I don’t think I’d get any sleep all summer long. 

A pair of mallard ducks.
The ducks didn’t seem to mind the cold.

Back to the campground — it’s dry camping, no electricity or water hook-ups, but there are bathrooms and a dump station and places to get fresh water. Also unexpected ruins and fog on the water in the morning. Also, I am fairly sure, forget-me-nots growing wild in the forest. Seriously, forget-me-nots and fog together make me feel like I’m living in L. M. Montgomery novel. 

The writing is still not going well (translation: not going at all), but Amazon finally gave the Kindle app a useful organizational tool: the ability to mark books as Read, and then filter by Unread and Read. I’ve been working my way through my Kindle library, finding the books that I downloaded on impulse, when they were on sale or free, and then never got around to reading. I currently have 302 unread books, which is probably enough to keep me reading for quite a while, although I suspect that plenty of them will eventually wind up in my DNF collection. I was surprised to discover, though, that of the 800+ books on my Kindle that I have already read (or tried to read), only 104 were in the DNF collection. I would have thought that number would be much higher because I give up on books easily these days. If my interest hasn’t clicked by the 10% mark, I move on to the next book. 

There are some exceptions, though, usually the ones that I think will be good for me in some way. The virtuous reading. Most of those are about writing, marketing, or self-publishing. The current one that I’m working on is about newsletters. It’s entertainingly written, the author has a great voice, and reading it makes me feel like Sisyphus. The fundamental concept is using your newsletter as a way to connect with people — you don’t want to simply inform people when you have a new book for sale because that’s asking them to buy something, instead you want to charm them and turn them into your friends. Be authentic, be real. Send kitten pictures! … So that they will then buy something from you.  

I get the concept. I even understand that if I ever hope to earn a real living at writing books, it’s part of the job. It doesn’t even make sense that I think of it as pretending to be a nice person, because my authentic self is, in fact, nice. But it feels so fake. I might have to pick one of you and write you an email every month and then send it to the rest of my mailing list as well. That might work better for me. Ha. 

An old stone wall with a pigeon flying in front of it and trees growing out of the top.
The unexpected ruins: an iron furnace that burned down in the 1800s. Many, many pigeons make their homes on top, so in the early evening it was loud with cooing and twittering. The white spot is a pigeon flying off.

Moving on, I’m currently writing this on my phone while sitting outside, using a tiny Bluetooth keyboard and a lap-desk that I bought a year ago, and my newly beloved camping chair. I love this chair. It was so worth the quest. I’ve been thinking about a post — or maybe a FB post to the Travato group — about what I’ve learned in my almost three years of van living. There’s an industrial concept about the virtues of constant incremental optimization. It’s got a Japanese name — kaizen, maybe? Anyway, it applies to life in a van, too. Three years and I’m still discovering ways to be more comfortable, to make life easier or more pleasurable.  Being able to sit outside in the sunshine while I write is lovely. Lovely enough that I think I will now try to work on Fen for a while. Maybe I can break through my travel-inspired inertia and actually make some progress.  

Oh, but one final note about Michigan’s upper peninsula — it was 38 degrees this morning. 38! I should absolutely not have packed my winter clothes away when I left Arcata. 

Ontonagon County Park

15 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by in Campground, Travel

≈ 2 Comments

a beach on a gray day with the van in the very far distance
The tiny silver speck in the background is Serenity. I’m not the only camper at this campground, but it’s a lot emptier than I expected it to be. Maybe that has something to do with the weather.

I am looking out my window at a beautiful, turbulent lake — white-capped waves hitting a sandy beach, distant hills so far away that they’re a deep blue line against the horizon. It’s gorgeous, but my faint hope of kayaking on it disappeared with the weather: according to my weather app, it’s currently 58 degrees outside, but I am quite sure they’re not taking the cold wind into account, because it feels a lot more like 48.

Z keeps trying to convince me that we should be outside, so we’ve been in and out — lots of beach walks, a couple of forest walks, some sitting in my comfy chair and admiring the view — but it’s cold enough that I keep retreating inside. If this were Florida, it would be mid-winter, probably February. Apparently, that’s what June in the upper peninsula of Michigan feels like.

But it’s a great view.

sunset over a lake
Sunset

(I don’t have much more to say about the campground than that: it’s $28/night for water, electric, and a fantastic view. The sites are close enough together that if it was crowded, I wouldn’t love it, but it’s reasonably empty for this time of year. But it’s camping literally on the beach, so, you know, not complaining. 🙂 )

Prentice Park

14 Friday Jun 2019

Posted by in Birds, Campground, Photography, Travel

≈ 2 Comments

A small black bird sitting on a bare branch
A cute little blackbird from North Dakota
A robin sitting on a bare branch
A chirpy robin, also in North Dakota
A brown bird with a long beak
A mysterious and very noisy brown bird. Maybe a sandpiper? In Wisconsin.
A brown bird with a long break, sitting in the grass and looking directly at the camera
Not as great a view of the sandpiper, but a more interesting picture of it.
Serenity, tucked into the trees, with loads of grass in front of her
My campsite at Prentice Park

If I didn’t have a schedule to keep, I might have settled into Prentice Park in Ashland, WI, for weeks. I’m not sure how many sites it has, because most of them were tent sites, but there were 6 RV sites, nicely spaced, with lots of grass, trees, and paved driveways. Water, electricity, excellent walking paths, clean showers that didn’t require quarters, (although no control of the water temp), and friendly neighbors.

Paradise.

But I’ve understated the “water” part. I know I claimed not to be a water snob, and I’m really not, but Ashland has artesian wells. People apparently come from miles around to get water at the local beach. I had only the vaguest idea what an artesian well was, or why it mattered, but on my first morning at the campground, I set out to look for it. Turns out, it was all over the place. The park had at least half a dozen spigots in the ground with water free-flowing out of them. I had a strong desire to look for the off valve every time I saw one, because I’ve spent so long being careful about water. But there were no off valves, the water is just pouring forth from the ground. It felt like such abundance, such wealth from nature.

The artesian water. Cold, fresh, refreshing. I filled up all my water jugs.

I’ve understated the friendly neighbors, too. The showers require a combination code, so when I saw the campground host outside his camper, I went over to get my code. That led to tours of the van, conversations about van life and children, an invitation to a delicious jambalaya dinner, and eventually s’mores around their fire.

I really did debate staying at the campground for a few more days, especially because the hosts were out in the morning, so I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye. (And if you’re reading my blog, LaDonna or Sharon, it was so nice to meet you, thanks so much for your hospitality!) But I wanted to check out the Apostle Islands, as well as visit Pictured Rocks National Seashore. Plus the whole reason for hurrying across Montana was to be able to spend some time in the upper peninsula of Michigan, which people have been telling me about ever since I started traveling. And I do have a deadline — scheduled plans with friends and relatives at the end of June. So after two nights at Prentice Park, I got back on the road.