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 1296:
Both my hand and my eye are definitely improved this morning. This means I’m now hitting the stage where I have to be doubly careful that I don’t push myself too fast to get back to “normal” particularly in terms of the hand. I have very tentatively started doing some things without the splint, for example, washing the dishes. But I am also being careful to have the splint on when I do things like the laundry because that's when I think I hurt the knuckle to begin with. I'm also continuing to try and dictate as much as possible because I have found that even with the splint on, doing much work on the computer does start to make it ache. But overall feeling quite optimistic.
Also, I am pleased to say that the BookBub promotion of Maids of Misfortune, the first book in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, was today (I talked about this in this previous post) and so far has been successful. The email that went out to all those BookBub subscribers who said they were interested in historical fiction, went out around eight this morning. Now a couple hours later, nearly 3000 people have downloaded the book, and it is showing up at #25 for the top 100 free Kindle books. This means that anybody who is looking for a kindle book in this free list is going to see the book on the first page. Perhaps even more importantly, this puts the book at the top of the mystery, suspense, thriller category, including historical mysteries and women sleuths.
This has also started to kick up sales in the other books in the series, starting with the second book, Uneasy Spirits. I’ve already made about four times what I normally make in a day. Even though it’s going to take a lot more sell-through for me to even break even, because this particular ad is so expensive, I still should, overtime, attract some more people who become fans of the series. I thought it was interesting that when I asked the question of you all about this issue, of those who responded, 67% said they had discovered this series by getting a free book.
Last night, fog rolled in and it was quite foggy this morning when we first got up. Since then, however it’s burned off and now, while there are still some clouds in the sky, it is mostly sunny and it’s supposed to get up to the high 60s. I’ve done my yoga, cleaning, several loads of laundry, and written a couple of long emails and now I’m about to have an hour phone conversation. If the delivery of groceries don’t get in the way, I also hope to get in a morning walk. First, I need to get this post up.
I put up a photo of this wisteria bush earlier when there were just two sets of blooms, now the bush is in all its glory.
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I just saw this congratulations!!!!! Read the book. It's great. I am glad others will get a chance to enjoy it! Thanks to for the picture. This is another one of those times when I wish the internet allowed for smells. When will they get on that ! Best Katy