September 29, 2022
Daily Diary, Day 758: I got slightly over 1000 words written yesterday, despite 4 unscheduled phone calls. And had a solid night's sleep. It did indeed get to 88 yesterday, and it is still supposed to get to the low 80s today, but it is 10 degrees cooler this morning compared to yesterday at this time than yesterday, so I do hope this does mean we are on the downward slope. However, October is one of our most dangerous months in terms of fire danger, so there is every possibility we will have another hot spell. And boy, I am sending all my good wishes to those of you in Florida and the lower east coast. I hope everyone stayed safe, without too much property damage.
This morning I scheduled some promotions for Maids of Misfortune for November (this first in series book is what you call my loss leader since it is permanently free.) The goal is to make sure that every 3 or 4 months I get the book out there to hopefully catch the eye of new readers, who then will enjoy it enough to go on and buy then rest of the series. This is one of the benefits of being self-published, I can do this for my series.
While traditional publishers are finally understanding that they can make money on their back lists with ebook sales - and actually will put the earlier books in series on sale--they only do this for their big name authors.
Until very recently, even for those authors, they focused everything on launching a book in print, and then happily let the book die away into obscurity within 6 weeks if it didn't hit it big--when the unsold books were returned from bookstores.
For the rest of traditionally published authors since they have no ability to run a discount on that first book in a series, or even have any control over its price at all, they still face the fact that after the first month or so, their books become practically invisible. I feel so sad for fellow authors, whose books I know are excellent, watching this happen to the books they devoted months if not years of their lives to write. Also makes me angry since I know that if they did have control over pricing and promotions, for as little as $30 (the cost of one of the promotions I just scheduled running) they could get at least a 100-300 people to download the book when it was free. And those are readers who would never have found their wonderful series, otherwise. And if enough download the book, the book then becomes visible in some of the categories and might be found by other readers!
OK, enough of a rant. But I will try to mention when the promotion happens in November and let you know how it worked...hopefully to demonstrate the usefulness of this strategy. And, of course for you readers, this is a reminder that subscribing to some of the promotional newsletter like BookBub, or Freebooksy, or Fussy Librarian, you may find some gem of a series.
As usual, on Thursday I have a noon zoom meeting, probably a couple of phone calls, but I should still get some writing done--if only editing what I wrote yesterday--which in retrospect seems to be a bit of an info dump (smile.)
Here are the first of my photos of pink, which is what I have been concentrating on finding in my "mindfulness walking" over the past few days. I started with the pink flamingo above, which I saw in a garden, just for laughs!