Friday, April 10, 2025

Sort of short stuff (smile.)

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. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1682:

Took a bit of a break yesterday. I did do usual sweep and clean, and eventually got in my first walk, and got the newsletter ready to go and published. But then I decided I was finding myself reluctant to start writing or getting in a second walk, which usually is a sign I need a break in routine. So, before my noon zoom meeting, I decided to do one of the tasks that has been on the bottom of my to-do list for some days, which was to go through and uploaded the data on sales and revenue for February (all the data for March isn’t out yet and I had already done January).

I sell ebooks on Amazon, Kobo, Google and then distribute through Draft2Digital to Apple, Barnes and Noble, and a whole lot of foreign stores.) I also sell a German translation of Maids of Misfortunein the German Amazon. I sell print copies through Amazon and Draft2Digital, and I sell audiobooks through Audible and the distributor Findaways (to a whole list of stores including all the ebook stores, and Chirp, Libro.fm etc.)

This means I needed to go through and add together all the sales and revenue data from these various stores, for all the formats, as well as total the number of free copies of books that were downloaded (Maids of Misfortune and Between Mountain and Sea are my main free books at this point.)

I then looked at what promotions I did in February and came up with some conclusions about what promotions worked and what didn’t. I got very behind doing this data collection and analysis last year, and I am committed to not getting behind this year.

Then, after my mid-day meeting and phone call, I sat outside enjoying the sun and reading. Haven’t done that in a long time.

This morning when I got up early for yoga, the almost-full moon was setting, and it was a lovely pink color. I tried taking a photo, but too fuzzy, so just watched it slide below horizon. But by the time I had come down from yoga,everything was obscured by fog. But now, after my 30 minutes of dusting and sweeping, the fog has again retreated to the west. I really do get enjoyment out of seeing the fog come in and out.

My husband is waiting for a call from the Nissan dealer about our 2019 Leaf. We had our catalytic converter stolen in our very old Prius a couple of years ago, and bought this used EV (it was early enough in covid years when supply was really limited and it was literally the only used Leaf available in the entire city.) Anyway, yesterday when he went to drive it to get some vegetables from nearby market, it showed error message and wouldn’t drive. We had to get it towed (the tow truck operator got it started by jumping the small battery that sort of primes the pump of the rest of the system) and the initial diagnostic was we just needed to replaced this 12 v battery. But yesterday afternoon they rang and said they were getting inconsistent readings—it sounded like from the main rechargeable battery and needed to keep it over night. That I am afraid sounds much more serious and expensive. But it also made us glad we didn’t just go with the smaller battery being charged.

Meanwhile, he’s done the first walk of the dog, and I will head out after publishing this. I have just one phone call today, probably in the afternoon, and I plan on getting in both of my walks today and get back to writing.

More and more spring flowers in bloom with each walk.

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