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.
Daily Diary, Day 1285:
Yesterday, I spent most of my time doing some marketing that I have been putting off and addressing the problem with my eye and knuckle. In short, taking care of business.
The marketing was looking into signing up for some small promotions for both of my permanently-free books. These are Maids of Misfortune, the first book in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, and Between Mountain and Sea, the first book in my science-fiction Caelestis series.
The last three weeks, because I haven’t been feeling well, I hadn’t done much to prepare for March in terms of marketing, and I can see the effect in the quick drop in sales. My free first-in-series books are what I call my loss leaders. While some readers will run into them simply by cruising certain categories like historical mysteries or science fiction-space opera (where these books are in the top 50 free books) a major way to get new readers to the series is to spend some money on promotional sites like Freebooksy and Fussy Librarian, which send emails, hopefully the people who have expressed interest in the category, but haven’t run across your book yet.
What I was looking at was how to coordinate some of these smaller promotions with the more substantial promotions I have gotten for later in this month, one is a featured deal on Maids of Misfortune from BookBub, (the coved behemoth of marketing), the other is a discounted audiobook deal on Chirp for Entangled Threads, the most recent full-length novel in my mystery series.
This morning I started to do some research for a post on the changing effectiveness of the Bookbub promotions, and why they are still useful to use, even though they have become an increasingly expensive form of marketing.
As for my health-related issues, the Physician’s Assistant who was supposed to do drain my stye in the afternoon, had an emergency and called to see if I could get in earlier. My husband was out walking our dog, but as soon as he got back, he took me to the clinic and I was taken in pretty quickly before lunch.
I won’t say the procedure was pleasant. In fact, it was relatively painful, and the rest of the day I spent taking it easy, but I am hoping it will have solved the problem. Right now, nearly 24 hours later, that right eyelid is still swollen, but I trust this is simply from the manipulation of the lid in order to clean out the stye. It certainly looks better and isn’t painful. The prescribed follow up for the next two weeks is for me to do at least two if not three, 15 to 20 minute sessions with hot compresses and put on an antibiotic cream twice a day.
As for the sore hand, while the splint has made the injured index finger much more comfortable, after cleaning this morning, it is back aching, so I’ve started using ice again, and I will be very careful with it for the rest of the day.
When I finish the draft of this post, which I’m dictating, I will then take my morning walk, and I don’t have anything else in particular scheduled.
It is a beautiful sunny day, and so once again, a lot of gratitude for both the weather we had last week, which leant variety to our weather, and the return to lovely sunny weather this week. On last afternoon’s walk, I found myself noticing statues and lawn ornaments again, so I’m including a couple I found.
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