Tag Archives: money

Coffee…a writer’s Prozac

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Hello! How did May go for everyone? May was rough for me. Great stuff happened on the home front: there were plays, recitals, graduations… a lot of reasons to be proud of my kids.

But as far as writing went…OMG.

I finished my romance serial, which meant tons of publishing. I had to publish the last episode, the compilation of episodes 5-9 because I did a compilation of episodes 1-4 and then the compilation of all the episodes together. And, because I’m a little crazy, I decided I wanted a companion book to go with the series that was a nail design book. The story takes place around a beauty salon. I had blogged several nail designs throughout the serial, and thought it would be fun. The marketing strategy was to give it away for free to draw more interest to the series.

Surprisingly, everything came together well. Julie got the editing done quickly (I honestly can’t praise her enough), and though it was very time consuming, the nail art came together too.

But I always crash at the end of a big project. I crashed hard after finishing episode 9 before I had completed the nail design book. Foolishly, I decided to stop drinking coffee for a while too because I had had so much to get all the publications out. That’s when I realized that coffee keeps writers optimistic.

Without coffee in me, my opinion about my own writing plummets. But when I take that first sip before I start typing, I am the best writer ever. So I thought it’d be fun to put together this little poster for you:

writersprozac

The depression might not have been so bad if I had had any sales. But sales were way down. Particularly Amazon has been abysmal this month. I’m actually even at All Romance between April and May on number of sales, and I made more money because I sold the higher cost books this month more than the cheap ones. Barnes and Noble and iTunes are the other places with sales, but not nearly as many as in April. Fortunately I made enough sales this month to keep me at a sale a day average for the year because April was so good.

I wish I knew what caused the swing. So far the nail book isn’t helping me at all, but Amazon won’t put it at free and it won’t be out at iTunes and Barnes and Noble until sometime this week. Fingers crossed people love it there and buy my other books.

But the serial is done! I should really celebrate because it was a big project coming in at over 125,000 words. However, I must get on to the next book. It’s already Tuesday, but I’d like to do a word count marathon. No gift card this week since it’s a short one. Think of it as a warm up for next week.

My goal is 2000 words a day this week. It feels out of reach because I have several activities planned this first week of summer, but I have a publication schedule that needs attention!

So, ready! Set! Write!

Authors and Time

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I was talking to a friend of mine about writing last night. He’d read a blog where the author stated that the amount of time we spend writing compared to the amount of money we recieved makes our word counts worth $0.00. It’s a hard fact to acknowledge.

I’m struggling to make any sort of money from it at all. In fact, I’m way in debt  when looking at writing lessons, covers, illustrations, ISBN numbers (heads up if you go into self-publishing: ISBN numbers are a huge expense), advertising, blog and website maintanance fees and so on.

I keep waiting for it to all pay off monetarily. I think my persistence is a great asset, but every author is persistent. It doesn’t make me unique or stand out in the writing world.

As far as talent goes, I’m right in the middle. Not good enough to write a Hugo award winning story or even in the style of previous Hugo award winners, but I think I’m a better writer than the Fifty Shades of Grey author. In the middle doesn’t seem to make money either.

My husband says to keep putting books out there and name recognition will kick in. I hope he’s right because otherwise I’m running out of ideas.

My one idea I have left is to go back to submitting short stories, but not as many as I was. Getting that Honorable Mention in the Writers of the Future contest got this blog noticed for a day or two. I’d like to submit a story to Writer’s of the Future, one to Beneath Ceasless Skies and one to Unidentified Funny Objects before the end of March. It’s hard to make short stories a priorities when I’m setting deadlines for publishing novels, but maybe I can get one out of three in.