Wednesday, April 9, 2025

Celebrating 3 years on Substack!

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 1680:

I just noticed yesterday, that Sunday was the third anniversary of publishing this daily newsletter on substack, so I thought I would take the time today to celebrate that milestone.

Many of you who started out with me in the beginning had already been following me on Facebook, which is where I started out doing this daily diary. That’s why today’s entry says Day 1680—because that is how many days in a row I have been posting, without a break. I have never done anything like this, every day, day-after-day, before in my life, and after this rather difficult year I now realize how important it has been to feel committed to, whether things are going well or not, putting out that daily post.

I also continue to be very gratified, and in fact slightly mystified, that the initial subscriber base of around 300 has now grown to be 755! The other thing that I really want to celebrate is that every day about a third of you actually open up the newsletters when they arrive. And not always the same 300 or so of you every day. Honestly I find it amazing that most of you read the newsletters even once a month! It isn’t exactly like I am writing award-winning investigative journalism or high-brow literary essays or even humorous bits.

So let me say, that open rate really impresses me, so I can only conclude that I am providing some amusement and comfort from the steadiness of my posts, my honest sharing of my struggles as an aging writer, and the photos and small moments of delight I share with you.

But whatever the motivation on your part, I am enormously grateful because knowing you are there on to receive when I click post truly comforts and motivates me as well.

Finally, a special note to the 20 paid subscribers. My goal with this newsletter has never been to make money from it, so I will never hide anything behind a paywall, available only to paid subscribers. I make money from selling my stories, and the newsletter is the way I stay engaged with those of you who read my books. But I offer the paid option because this is the way for some of you to support my marketing of those books so others can discover them.

For example, at the beginning of this year I got a BookBub promotion for Between Mountain and Sea,the first book in my Caelestis science fiction series. This is one of the most expensive forms of ebook promotion and cost me nearly $600. Yet the amount of money I made over the previous year from paid subscribers covered this cost. As a result, from that promotion, over 14,000 new readers discovered and downloaded Between Mountain and Sea, and in the three months since then, I have sold twice as many books in that series than I did in all of last year. In short, those of you who are paid subscribers helped me sell books, and your support helps me avoid some of the more time-consuming methods of promotion so I can spend more time on writing new stories. So thanks!

And now, having done yoga, my basic dust and sweep, ordered and put away groceries, taken my first walk, and written this post, I am going to go write! I got over 600 words written yesterday, and the short story (novella) is now over 5000 words long.

Everything I publish in this newsletter is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for what I am writing by clicking the button below to upgrade to paid, thereby providing me more resources so I can spend more time writing my fiction and less time marketing. In addition, please do click on the heart so I know you’ve been to visit and/or share with your friends, and I always welcome comments! Thanks!