Yeah, I’m not going to make the 50K word target for NaNoWriMo. Between a due date just before the beginning of November, one just after, one at the end, two chronic illness flareups, and Thanksgiving Break starting for the kids before my office hours were actually up, I lost a lot of productive writing time. I am, however, happy with what I’ve accomplished. I’ve finished a long-unfinished project, and am almost finished with a second one. But I am going to come in something like 20K words short.
I have determined that it’s dang near impossible to write when the kids are home, so I’ve figured out a game plan for that: I’ll break tail writing while they’re actually in school, then edit and revise what I’d planned for the scheduled publishing dates while they’re not.
So. Finished works: I’ve finished Detritus. It’s novella length. I’m planning on setting that aside until my children’s Christmas Break starts, then Kindle-only publishing it in January. It’s non-genre drama. Bit more fitting for the same readers that liked my Survivors than those that read my urban fantasy.
I’ve also nearly finished Normalcy Bias. I’ve got one more story to go in that one. Currently, it’s sitting at a bit longer than Survivors, so I will do a paper copy of that one. I’m talking to my current cover artist about what might work for it. She does some incredible work, and I think her normal style will work really well for it. I’m planning on releasing it in March.
Yes, you read that right: March. I’m planning on attempting to do an every-other-month release on my work. Key word here is attempting. I don’t know if I’ll be able to manage, but I do have enough ideas for it to work. I think, if I can’t manage every other month, I can at least do quarterly releases (every third month).
I will be also doing reading on how to figure out the self-promotion thing without an actual budget for advertising. I tried doing a separate page on FB for an author page, but FB wanted me to pay them to boost the posts. And I couldn’t figure out a lot of what I was supposed to do to get it out there in the first place.* Clear as mud. They do the same with the links I post from Amazon: if I don’t pay them, they bury the posts.
I’ve looked into advertising with Amazon: “You don’t pay unless someone clicks on your link.” But I don’t have the budget to do that, either. And it’s been so long since I’ve been active between learning to manage health issues and teaching that my stuff isn’t showing up in the “people who purchased this also purchased that,” either. And I’ve got six reviews on one of my works. And that’s the most I have on any.
So, if anyone who reads this has any recommendations on books for me to read about how to do this whole self-pub/self-promo thing successfully,** I’m all ears.
*I had a professional writing teacher that had us building a mock website for a pretend charity as an assignment. She reminded us “Keep it simple. Anything you do to help the user can hinder the user if they can’t figure out how to use it.” Something that web designers keep forgetting in their “improvements.”
**”Successfully” is relative. My income was low enough that my standards are very low for my definition of “success.”