Tag Archives: Losses

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Month Eleven as a Full-Time Author

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This month was a combination of “What just happened?” and “I should have known better.”

 

 

Strike 1:

Going to conferences is one of my favorite parts of being an author. I skipped a couple that I usually go to this year and decided to branch out and head to Vegas for a conference I’d never been to but had heard amazing things about. If you follow my blog, you’ll know that I came back from this conference quite disappointed. My expectations were, apparently, way off, and even though I tried really hard to make it worth it in my mind, I’m still not sure it was worth the time or the expense for me.

Strike 2:

I’ve been full-time as an author since the beginning of the year. My old job has called me back to help them out a couple of times. They called at the end of October and asked for any help I could give them in November. I agreed to come in for three days the week after the conference I mentioned above.

Bad idea. While the extra money is always nice, it threw off my groove. I was supposed to write the second story in my Academy series that week. I thought I could do both, but it didn’t work out.

Strike 3:

The super-awful stomach flu of November 2018 struck 8 hours after I finished up working for my old day-job. Was it a simple 24 hours and done flu? Oh no, I had to get that Norovirus thing that was going around. I was completely down for 36 hours, and felt icky for 10 days total. Including Thanksgiving.

So that week I was supposed to write the second story in my Academy? The week I worked and then got sick? Yeah, I got nothing done. The next week was Thanksgiving, so three days of that got blown out of the water, and the other three days I was still too sick to really get into writing.

Those three strikes blew up my schedule so bad that I had to re-layout my Academy stories. I briefly thought about trying to catch up, but dismissed the idea. Why kill myself over it?

Also, a third romance book is in the works, so I had to rearrange my schedule for that anyway. The new and improved layout includes a few days of wiggle room between each story. Hopefully I can stay on track!

 

 

 

 

 


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Month Ten as a Full-Time Author

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October turned out to be a wild and crazy month.

Last month I mentioned a new project I was working on. For that project, I wrote two novels in October. Two 50k word novels. One is back from my editor and the other is just back from my beta readers.

I’ll tell you a little secret. They’re sweet, uplifting romance novels that I’m going to release under a pen name. If you get my newsletter you already know this, so I guess it’s not that big of a secret. I’ll be announcing the release of both books here before the end of the year.

If you’re wondering what they’re about, let’s just say that they could pretty much be Hallmark Christmas movies, but I couldn’t bring myself to cram quite that many cheesy lines into one novel. And believe me, I really tried with the second one.

I was considering writing another romance novel, but instead decided to start on my Academy series. I’ve now got outlines for stories about The Beast and a Frog Princess. You’ll love the take on the Beast, and I was seriously laughing when I was working on the Frog Princess. I also have the other five characters picked and their stories loosely laid out. Watch for these starting at the end of January.

I try to focus on the positives, but I feel like I should share some of my less than stellar experiences from this past quarter.

Marketing gives me anxiety. Well, after an hour of thinking about it and/or learning about it I want to punch people in the face. I guess that’s a form of anxiety, yes? Or maybe just stress. Or maybe I just need to take a chill pill.

Anyway, I haven’t met my monetary goal this year because I haven’t been marketing. I do have a newsletter with about 2500 subscribers, and that’s been fun. And I’ve put out a two novels and three novellas along with a boxed set for Jagged Scars.

However, I’ve failed miserably in my half-hearted attempts to learn Amazon and Facebooks ads. Everything I’ve read points to the fact that you must advertise so your books get in front of the right readers so then the readers can buy them, love them and then buy all of your books. This is the plan. My execution has been lacking.

So things aren’t all roses and rainbows, but things are going forward. Forward in a surprising direction, mind you, but forward all the same.

Check back next month for my first sweet romance novel, along with an update about my Academy stories!

 

 

 

 


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Month Seven as a Full-Time Author

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Ah, July, my old nemesis. You did not get the best of me! Well, mostly not. I mean, I got a few things accomplished. Despite all your efforts to thwart me.

 

 

Wins:

  • Released Spoiled Gambit, the very last novella in my Jagged Scars series
  • I blogged every week
  • I finished New Vision (New Sight book 3) and sent it to my editor.
  • I put quite a bit of time into my next series. YA Space Opera. You’re going to love it!
  • I helped three friends out by reading their books/novellas as a beta reader
  • It was my birthday, and for my birthday I asked for 43 reviews on Fractured Memories by the end of the month. That worked out! (Unless Amazon takes some of them down, which it does sometimes.)
  • I hit triple digits in sales for the second month in a row!

Not so much wins:

  • I will be at FanX (the event formally known as Salt Lake City ComiCon) in September. In order to receive hard copies of the last book of my New Sight series, I had to have it out to the editor this past weekend. This whole process—coupled with several other things going on—left me with a two week long migraine that still hasn’t quit.
  • Marketing flew out the window. Like a bird.
  • I broke my Flash Fiction Friday streak last week, because I was spending 10 hours a day working on New Vision.

I knew July was going to be tough going in. Between family stuff, holidays, vacations and some community service that I do every July, I only had something like fourteen writing days to work with. Considering twenty or so is the usual amount, I started out in a bad spot.

Still, I got some things done. I didn’t get other things done. Thus it is in the life of Author Jo.

 

Stay tuned this month (or early next month) for a few things:

  • New covers for New Sight and New Powers
  • The release of New Vision—the third and final book in my New Sight series
  • The release of Fractured Sea, a collection of five Little Mermaid retellings in which I have a super fun one-part high school anime and one-part Harry Potter story called The Academy. Several people that have read it have already have asked when the next one will be out. My lips are sealed…

Don’t forget, Fractured Sea is on pre-order for $0.99 until the release date of August 31st.


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Progress Made – Month Six of Being a Full-Time Author

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I had such high hopes for June. I had a great plan. I even gave myself extra time for everything, but in the end, it didn’t matter. Life blew up a few times and I barely got through the musts of the month and left many of the would-be-nice things in the dust.

A writer at a conference I went to once said that you should pad all of your time by 20%. I’m starting to believe him, and I’m also starting to believe that my number should be 30%. Because, life happens.

This past month my hubby’s family has all been in town. It’s been five years since that happened, so we’ve been spending a lot of time with them. In the middle of that, my dad ended up in the hospital for five days. My mother is incapable of taking care of  herself for more than a few hours, so my two sisters (one of which is recovering from an infection in her leg on top of a recent knee replacement) and I tag-teamed taking care of them. Seriously, the schedule was a thing of beauty. And I may have got my mom hooked on fancy sodas from Sips. Oops.

Like I said, life happens and we all get to roll with the punches. Am I right?

That being said, I’m going to list my wins:

The Jagged Scars Box Set is out! All five e-books books available on Amazon at a great price, if I do say so myself. I’m still really excited about having a completed series.

New Sight 3 (the final book of the trilogy) is with beta readers.This was two weeks behind, but I did get it out before the end of the month. Which, trust me, was nothing short of a miracle.

I managed to keep up with both my blog and my Flash Fiction Friday. Although I did end up writing one Flash Fiction on the Friday it was due. I really try to avoid that.

I ran a couple of promotions that ended up being quite lucrative. I sold the most books that I have ever sold in a single month. So that was awesome!

 

Most of my quarterly goals got juggled, but I managed to pull most of the big ones out at the end.

As usual, I wanted to get more done, but life did not permit. Not without losing sleep, which isn’t a great idea for me. Not if the people around me want to live.


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