Smack Me, Pinch Me

Why did I stop taking progesterone? If I ever do that again, please come smack me. This particular cycle has been very smooth. No lumpy bumpy lurch into progesterone, very smooth transition. I don't know what I was complaining about. Maybe this means the dose is finally right.

Now let's talk about writing because I have no place else to delve into my thoughts on the topic and I'd like to be anonymous when I do it.

My writing skills have changed recently. All this writing I've been doing, I've improved. This is fantastic. However, I have a story that will be in two parts. Part one is the old me. Part two is the new me. So now when I go to combine them to publish them as a full, complete story, it's going to be very uneven for the reader.

Okay, it'll be uneven for the 1% of readers who can notice that kind of craft issue. Most readers are fairly undiscriminating and they don't even care if you spell words correctly...up to a point. (As an example, it took me two reads to realize an author had used yoke for yolk in a novel I edited as a favor.) If you can entertain them, they're happy, but this one percent of readers is a concern. They'll leave reviews that will peel egg shells clean off the egg. Scathing in other words.

Most writers I know live in fear of that 1%. We don't care if they read our books and hate them, we care about when they scare off the other readers with their vicious reviews. Because their criticisms are really only going to resonate for readers who are in that 1%, the rest of the reading world can enjoy the same story that they hated.

So that should be interesting in terms of marketing and reviews. Ideally, when you have this kind of growth spurt, you don't want to do it in the middle of a story. You want to finish a story. Go on to the next story and that's the one that shows all the growth.

And no I'm not going back to rewrite the first half. That's not going to be a productive use of my time. I'll just have to take my lumps.

As for sales I made even more money this past month. I keep waiting for the gravy train to end. I'm sure I'm about to fall off a cliff because none of my books are in the top 100 anymore, and my latest release from January didn't even sell 50 copies. Of course that book was not in my primary pseudonym and maybe there was a problem with it or something. Still, the previous book I wrote under that name sold quite well and I specifically wrote it to match that one,so very strange. (By the way, in case you haven't guessed, I am mercenary about my writing. I write what sells. No 'books of my heart' here. There are only the 'genres of my paycheck'. Period.)

And then there are all these established writers telling me that their earnings are in the toilet and people who are publishing everything they can,but they can't seem to recover their sales. This is concerning for me,obviously.

I'm working to build a brand for the one pseudonym and, to build a mailing list,to do relationship marketing with readers so that I have a core fan base to help insulate my income. Crossing fingers that this approach is the answer I believe it to be. Otherwise no one has any idea of how to fight back when things go south with their sales.(Beyond having a huge breakout hit and getting a very juicy publishing contract, but that's like .005% of authors writing.)

I'm excited about my recent growth in ability and hope it will result in even more sales. If things keep up I will out earn my last corporate gig at a Fortune 500. I can't believe it. It's crazy!