Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels.
In addition, now and again I will provide some of my fiction to read, for free, on this newsletter. Everything is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for the newsletter by upgrading to paid.
Daily Diary, Day 1467:
Reasons to Celebrate:
Participation in a new audiobook promotion:
This weekend, the audiobook edition of Maids of Misfortune has included by Chirp as part of a new kind of promotion they are testing and calling Freebie Friday. They send out an email with a very limited number of books that will be free between Friday and Monday, and in my case, they also discounted the next two books in the series making Uneasy Spirits and Bloody Lessons each 99 cents.
Because they are still in the beta testing stage of this promotion, they are not charging me for this, although it is pretty clear that in the future this will be an advertising opportunity that will cost.
So far, this promotion has gone wonderfully, with data just on Friday and Saturday showing 3730 people got Maids of Misfortune for free, but another 433 bought Uneasy (earning $195) and 426 bought Bloody Lesson (earning $192.) And of course the hope is that after listening to these books, people will become fans of the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and go on and buy other books in the series.
Now this is enough to celebrate, but it also made me think about how fortunate I have been in my career as an indie author. And one of the reasons for that success has been a combination of good timing and using a little initiative.
From the start as an indie author, I was an early adopter, which means that when U read about a strategy that another author was using to publish or market their books, I would jump in and give it a try. So, for example in 2009 when I jumped into publishing ebooks on Kindle and producing print books through print-on-demand, the whole self-publishing phenomena was just beginning, and there was very little guidance or even examples of success available on how to sell books outside of traditional publishing.
But very quickly I realized that my books weren’t going to sell in books stores, but online, and trying to figure out how those books that were selling well on Amazon I immediately recognized how important getting a book in the right categories on Amazon would be. For example, at the start, there were only 82 other books in the historical mystery category, while big name traditionally published books in this genre could only be found on the generic Mystery, Thriller, Suspense category. But if I got my book into historical mystery, or US historical fiction, and did a promotion, suddenly my books were visible and would sell and get reviews.
This meant I had to also figure out how to alert readers when I did do a promotion and discounted my books. Blog posts, facebook posts, and developing a group of other writers where we could jointly promote each other’s work was a start, and I was also one of the earliest indie authors to write inexpensive (99 cents) short stories to attract new readers.
One of the effects of being an early adopter was that as companies sprang up o tapping into the market of people buying on line and authors wanting to promote their books, I was one of the small but growing number of indie authors that they would reach out and ask to beta test things.
For example, the Kindle Direct Publishing arm of Amazon asked to translate Maids of Misfortune in German, Kindle Nation Daily asked to promote my first short story in its new weekly newsletter, and BookBub, which has become the most successful email promotors of ebooks, offered to promote Maids of Misfortune, and in every case because I was a test case, I got these promotions for free. (It now costs $760 dollars for a Featured Deal on BookBub in the historical fiction category.)
I haven’t always been quite as nimble in terms of adapting to the changing climate for self-publishing, taking way too long to start putting out an email newsletter, never quite committing as I should have to the various social media I joined (pinterest, Instagram) until 4 years ago when I started the daily facebook posts. I haven’t been willing to do the A/B testing of ads on facebook or Amazon that I know would help. And I will never be the kind of writer who can put out at least 3-4 books a year—which is what is needed to maintain visibility.
However, in 2017, after attending a conference and hearing the people from Findaway.com talk about the benefits of not sticking with the exclusivity contract with Audible (where you couldn’t publish your audiobooks places like Kobo, or Apple) but going wide with them, I started the process of taking my books off Audible and publishing on Findaway. And then in 2019 at the same conference, I heard representatives from BookBub talking about a new initiative of theirs to develop a daily email newsletter called Chirp that would feature audiobooks. If you are interested, here is the long post I wrote about this process.
As an early adopter, I was quite successful at the start in getting picked up by Chirp for promotions, although, as with BookBub, this has become more difficult as other indie authors and traditional publishers discovered the effectiveness of Chirp to sell backlist audiobooks.
But I suspect that one of the reasons I was chosen to beta test this new Chirp Freebie Friday promotion is my history with them as one of those early adopters. And chances to try out a new marketing tool is one of the reasons I like to stay informed about the publishing industry in general and what other authors are doing for marketing specifically. All of which seems to be worth celebrating as I maintain my career as an aging author(smile)
Surviving the heat:
This past week in San Diego the average temperature has been considerably hotter than it has been most of the summer, and hotter the past couple of days than even is usual for early September. The week started with highs of 79 degrees, then on Wednesday, it steadily rose from 83 degrees to the peak of 98 degrees on Friday. It was only 92 degrees yesterday, which is what today is supposed to get to, and the forecast has it dropping to high 80s tomorrow, then starting to cool, with middle of week back to a reasonable low 70s.
In past years, heat like this would have made being inside during the day miserable. We would try to capture cooler air, first thing, then close everything up, draw the shades and turn on the fans—which was noisy and generally just blew hot air around. If we were fortunate, it would cool somewhat during the night, but on days with Santa Ana winds, it would be so hot at night I had been known to stand in a cold shower to try to get my temperature down enough to fall asleep.
I grew up back east where summers could get hot…and humid, and my husband is from Georgia, so he knows heat and humidity, so we would grumble, but knew that compared to a lot of the world, this was really not all that extreme and would be over shortly. However, I really started to notice that heat was getting to me more when I turned seventy. That’s why, when our nearly 30 year old furnace started to go kaput last year, we decided to expand our solar panels, install a heat pump, and get A/C. So today, sitting in my cool 75 degree house I am celebrating one of the best decisions we made to make aging more comfortable.
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You have made some great decisions fora comfortable life.