Friday, May 9, 2025

Short stuff!

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 1710:

This morning when we got up it was misty, but the sun is already out, and it is supposed to get at least to the mid 70s today. I’ve done yoga, cleaned, ordered groceries, and provided support to my husband as he published the book he has been working on for over 4 years (and in some ways has been researching and writing about in articles and blog posts for thirty years). It is a long (over 400 pages) detailed examination of the preservation of government documents (he is a retired librarian). So exciting that is is ready to send out to the world, and once it is live, I will show pictures and links. A very important subject, particularly now when government documents and the systems to preserve them are more greater assault than ever before.

After he clicked publish, I took my walk, and I’m waiting for the groceries to be delivered so I can put them away, and wash all my vegies and put out to dry.

Then…maybe I will get to writing. I did make a lot of progress on both reading Neuromancer and writing my novella yesterday. Again, hit my 500 word goal and some, and the total word count is now over 20,000.

During the day, today, I will keep track of the downloads of Maids of Misfortune, which I promoted with FreeBooksy—an email promotion site. While it is not nearly as large a market as Bookbub, is still fairly effective. There are already over 150 downloads and the rank in the Kindle store has gone up enough that it is now showing in the top 100 free lists under the categories historical fiction, historical mysteries, and women sleuths. I am hoping this promotion will win enough new readers so that sell-through will bump up a bit. While I sell a few books every day, the over-all sales for the past two months (with no promotions) has been very anemic.

But now for some more of those red and white hybrids, these I found in a different yard, and they are even more striking!

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