Sunday, January 12, 2025: Ta da! List

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 1593:

Celebrating a successful BookBub promotion:

On January 8^th, the book promotion site, BookBub sent out an email to subscribers telling people who had indicated that they were interested in the science fiction category or had at some point followed me as an author, that Between Mountain and Sea, the first book in my Caelestis series was free

For an author, a “featured deal,” ad from BookBub is sort of the gold star of advertising, costly, but often quite effective in getting new readers. There was a time when I had no trouble getting one of these ads, since I was one of the first indie authors who advertised with them (and when the ads briefly didn’t cost anything!) Once traditional publishers finally figured out how effective the ads were, particularly for their back-lists of authors’ books, it became quite competitive to get one of these ads (and increasingly expensive.) For example, despite asking for one of these deals for Between Mountain and Sea every year once it was published, it was only accepted once, back in May of 2020.

However, I hoped that between the length of time that had passed since that promotion and the fact that I had just completed the series with the publication of Where the Glassflowers Grow, that they would accept the book this time. And they did.

While I didn’t get near the downloads of the book as I did with that first promotion in 2020 (probably both because it wasn’t the first time it was offered when 40,000 people downloaded it and because the competition has increased so steadily for readers over the years), I still have been very happy with its success just in these first four days since the email went out.

Between 1/8, and yesterday, 1/11, 10,820 people have downloaded the book, and I have sold another 168 books in the series, which has made me slightly over what the ad cost me. While there was a time when getting a promotion on BookBub ensured I got a large profit in sell-through, I was content with breaking even, and trust that in time may even make a small profit. From experience, I know that over time a proportion of those 10,000 or more people who took a chance on the book will turn out to like it, and they will go on to buy the other books in the series or perhaps give my historical mysteries a try

Honestly, at this stage in my life, what motivates me as an author isn’t how much money I make, the pleasure I get knowing that people have gotten a chance to discover my stories and enjoy them as much as I enjoy telling them.

Certainly, a reason to celebrate! What are you celebrating today?

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