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 1286:
Brief check-in: I am afraid that I lost a couple hours sleep because of the change to daylight savings time ,but otherwise I had a good night’s sleep. My eye is about the same, as is my sore finger, but they are certainly no worse which I count as a win. I’ve done my regular Sunday cleaning in bits and pieces so I’m not going to do a morning walk but I will attempt to get my Pilates and my second walk in today. But now on to my celebrations.
Celebrations:
My first reason for celebrating this week is that I’ve made peace with the fact that the health setbacks I am currently experiencing are not going to go away quickly.
One sign that I have made peace or at least I am making peace with what appears to be the temporary new normal is the fact that I haven’t been trying to write this week, and I will consider whether to try working on the novel one day at a time.
The second sign is that yesterday I started reading a book on my kindle. I had been saving this book to read as a reward for when I got the first draft completed., but decided that it would be a good distraction now. My experience with recreational reading has always been that once I get into a book I really enjoy, it is very difficult for me to stop reading until I’ve completed it. During my career and even going back to my graduate school days, this meant that I tended to do my recreational reading either during school breaks or the summer or I would start a book Friday night if I knew I had enough time during the weekend to complete it before Monday morning.
This habit is one of the reasons I have been enjoying listening to audiobooks because I seem to be more patient with listening to them in bits and pieces during the day and over a week or so. This also may be a function of the fact that in most cases I am listening to books I have already read or seen in their adaptations on TV for example, Slow Horses, so I am less impatient to get to the end.
However, yesterday afternoon, realizing that my finger was still aching, and getting tired of just listening to my audiobook, I decided to start Ivory Trees, the newest book in Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Diving Universe series.
My second reason to celebrate is that I got a featured deal from BookBub, which I hope will kickstart increased sales for this series over the next few months.
The main reason BookBub’s feature email ads are such a big deal for authors is that their subscriber base is so large. For example, in historical fiction, which is the category they have chosen for to put Maids of Misfortune in, there are over 1,850,000 people subscribed. That’s a lot of potential readers. In comparison, Free Booksy, another respected promotion site, only has 100,000 people subscribed to see emails in the historical fiction category.
This means that even if only a small proportion of the people who get the email from Bookbub actually go ahead and download it, this is still potentially a significant number of new readers. And if they read and enjoy the book (and the fact that there are over 6000 5-star reviews on Amazon means there’s a good chance this will happen), then there’s also a chance that they will go on and buy some, if not all) of the other books in the series. And that’s where sales revenue comes from. And even though the cost of this promotion is significant (and thanks to those of you support me through paid subscriptions a cost that is easier for me to handle) it is worth it to gain new fans.
Back when BookBub first came on the scene and most traditional publishers refused to use it. I not only could count on getting a featured deal once a year, but the number of downloads was quite remarkable. For example, in 2016 I had 73,000 downloads with one Bookbub promotion. It is much harder to get even half that number now that there are so many books, most of them traditionally published, being promoted in my categories. However, it is certainly still one of the few effective strategies for attracting new readers. So, after trying to get a deal for 2 years, needless to say, getting a deal for March 20 is a reason to celebrate.
Oh, it just occurred to me that I can ask you all how many of you discovered either my mystery or my science fiction series by getting one of the books for free? I would love to see the answer!
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Keep reading and writing for all of us!
I found out about the Caelestis series because you mentioned it. Went searching and read all I could find.