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 1419:
After a relatively quiet Sunday, today looks to be pretty quiet as well. The tile guy is doing the grout, which isn’t noisy, and I only have one scheduled on call, late in the afternoon. Already, I’ve thoroughly cleaned the bathroom, and since there’s only one of them working right now, that went pretty quickly. I’ve also done my morning walk, which was till cool enough not to be unpleasant, and I have just soaked my eye like a responsible person. Yesterday actually got warm enough that we turned on the air conditioning, but as usual, by late afternoon, the temperature began to go down quickly so we were able to open up by dinner time. We also pulled out the dvd of one of our favorite movies, Cookies Fortune, a Robert Altman movie. If you ever get a chance to watch (I don’t know if it is streaming anywhere, do give it a try. Lots of laughs, wonderful acting.
When I checked my sales for yesterday, I found a nice little surprise because there was 125 downloads of Maids of Misfortune. I do know that a fellow author had mentioned that she was planning on featuring this book in her July newsletter, and I wondered whether or not that’s why I got the sudden bump in sales. Normally, I seldom get more than 20 downloads of this book a day.
The most recent promotion of this book has garnered me three new five star written eviews, which is always lovely. If you are ever wondering what you can do to support a favorite author particularly an indie author, leaving reviews places like Amazon, Goodreads, or other bookstores, where you may have gotten the e-book, is really appreciated. I don’t know about you, but I do notice if a book that has been out for some time has a decent number of 4 and 5 star reviews.
Interestingly, Amazon has started using AI to go through reviews and come up with a short paragraph supposedly summarizing these reviews. Unfortunately a number of authors have found that the result often doesn’t make sense or takes something that is really not relevant to the book. I went to look at what the AI came up with for Maids of Misfortune, and by and large, it was not too bad, except for one sentence. However that sentence gives you an example of how an AI versus a human could come up with something at least odd if not inaccurate.
A sentence in the middle of the paragraph said: “They praise the writing quality as very well written, detailed, and despicable.” I can only assume that the AI took some review that called the villain despicable and put this in. It made me laugh, but I can see how a different adjective that might sound like a criticism of my writing style could leave a much more unfortunate impression.
These flowers are from one yard I passed today. So bright and perky!
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I am not impressed with the summaries, and maybe AI is the reason. I skim the subject lines first and then pick out reviews to read.
AI compositions are, by and large, the most vacuous readings going. As soon as I sense I'm in one, I'm out. I use it to search where I can control the parameters at least.