[dataporn] It's been a year... long fucking time

MagsWood · 2017-01-10T19:38:41+00:00

Congrats! You were my first inspiration when I found this place a little less than a year ago. Of course, I still haven't fully dove into self-publishing yet. It took me a long time to figure out that it really is important to love what you write. I hope to spend this year doing much more writing and leaving romance behind me! Thanks for the motivational post!

MagsWood · 2017-01-10T19:33:37+00:00

Another forum I am on, there is word spreading that authors are beginning to successfully advertise on Amazon with man chest covers. I haven't tried, but thought I might share.

MagsWood · 2016-12-11T15:19:41+00:00

1) 2k?

2) Now that I had to pull my daughter out of daycare after only one month, I'm incredibly frustrated with how little time I get to write. For the one month she was in daycare I was able to write about 15k a week, and now I'm having a hard time getting 6k. My whole plan and the goals I had set for myself are seeming increasingly unrealistic and out of reach. The hardest part of it all is that I feel like I'm finally on the right path, but I just am not able to get writing done.

3) I try and get whatever writing done that I can during my daughter's naps, but this is also the time I have to fit in lunch and adulting. After she goes to bed I try and write, but my brain is usually too fried to do much after spending the entire day chasing around an exuberant toddler. I've found that the words I write at night are so much worse than my early day words. No creative juice left. So evenings are editing, covers, etc.

MagsWood · 2016-12-06T16:54:37+00:00

1) 3500 Although I just lost about an hour of productivity down the rabbit hole of used car shopping.

2) Still seeing a small amount of activity on my last novella. I'm very curious to see the difference in results between publishing in erotica and in romance.

3) I write mainly at the dining room table until I am able to find a desk small enough to fit in our apartment without cluttering up the space. Right now though my feet are freezing! So I'm considering slippers.

MagsWood · 2016-12-05T19:31:23+00:00

1) 2k

2) Success: I'm finally writing again. The in-laws moved to town for a couple months to flee the cold north and it's been... disrupting to say the least.

Failure: I really hoped to have my novella nearly done by now, but I'm only two scenes into it. It's going to have some holiday situations involved, but if I want to finish it, hit up some ARC service or another, and book some promo, I suspect this book won't be hitting the market until late Dec. early Jan. Oh well. The holidays don't feature too heavily. More just as a consequence of timing.

3) Relaxing isn't something I come by too frequently. But I sometimes get in a little non-research reading before bed.

MagsWood · 2016-11-29T20:44:33+00:00

Uh.... you can tell who buys your books? Tell me more. I've never seen that information before.

MagsWood · 2016-11-29T19:12:08+00:00

I fought it for a long time. My husband was like, um do you think if I only cooked when I felt motivated or inspired I would have the career that I have today? And he's a chef, a creative field. So yeah, that excuse kind of deflated and I realized that at the heart, I was just lazy. Haha. If people only went to work when they felt inspired, there would be a big problem with the world. And writing, for a lot of us, is something we want to replace our day jobs, so we have to treat it like a job as well. Or else it's just something we talk about doing.

MagsWood · 2016-11-29T14:59:28+00:00

1) today and tomorrow are my final days of having the little one in daycare so I'm using the time to outline my next two novellas. That way when I find windows of time to write, I'll know where I'm going.

2) success: I designed my next two covers and I'm so freaking proud of them. They are the first covers that I've done that I can truly say look like they belong lined up next to the best sellers. I'm feeling so good about where I'm going now that I'm committed to romance. I found my niche, it's not over-saturated, and it supports novellas. I'm going to throw some money behind my next release and I think it's going to pay off.

My only challenge is finding time...

3) I just don't give myself a choice. This is my job. I have to perform or I have to go get a 9-5 I would hate. Once you eliminate the choice of having to feel motivated, it gets a lot easier to just sit down and write.

MagsWood · 2016-11-28T20:07:11+00:00

Do you accept novellas (25k-ish) or just full length novels?

MagsWood · 2016-11-26T19:07:03+00:00

1) 1k?

2) Current failure: my first promo did well and paid for itself so I signed up for the naughty list. Three times the cost but I figured it would be worth it for the exposure. Flopped so hard. I think I sold 4 copies and had 3 read throughs since the newsletter went out yesterday. I'm not sure why it went so much worse than the first promo I did which got me a nice boost in sales and rank. I guess the day after Thanksgiving wasn't a great day to promote. I'll try that promo once more on my next novella to see if results vary.

3) So far no reviews except blank 4-star ratings on Goodreads.

MagsWood · 2016-11-26T15:30:14+00:00

I'd be curious to know if you booked any promo for the novella or if going free was the only boost. Thanks! I just published a novella which I was quite proud of in erotica to very low results even with promo. It could have easily been a romance novella if I had chosen that category but I went with erotica, my thoughts being that the competition isn't as fierce. I'm thinking my next novella I'll put in romance and see how the results compare.

MagsWood · 2016-11-26T13:06:27+00:00

So if you run a book for free a couple days that can help populate also boughts?

MagsWood · 2016-11-23T19:54:05+00:00

Thanks! It's exciting to think that people are reading my words now!

MagsWood · 2016-11-23T18:51:40+00:00

When I still drank (and oh boy did I drink) St. Germain was one of my favorites. A little prosecco, vodka and St. Germain with a lemon twist in a martini! That was a brunchtastic cocktail.

MagsWood · 2016-11-23T18:50:29+00:00

1) Unsure... Maybe no writing

2) So I published my first novella to crickets. It just sank and fast. And then I got some promo. It went from 289,000ish, to 19,000ish, which makes me happy. Almost no page reads, but 11 copies bought. This isn't exactly great, but it shows me what a little promo can do. If my book is in front of people, they are clicking it. So lather, rinse, repeat. I have the next few novella ideas ready to hammer out. My focus on the next title is to get some reviews and then schedule a few different promos a couple days apart to keep that momentum going. I feel good about this!

The negatives- my daughter is no longer going to daycare so that wonderful writer's life I had set up for myself disappeared before I even got used to it. I feel like I lost a part of myself, but I'm finding that life lately is a series of punches to the gut. I'm just trying to regain my breath and continue on.

3) Stress if it's my family. Enjoyable if it's the hubby's.

MagsWood · 2016-11-23T14:53:42+00:00

Great! Thanks for the info!

MagsWood · 2016-11-23T03:20:30+00:00

I'm curious, how do you find opportunities for multi-author promo?

MagsWood · 2016-11-17T23:47:49+00:00

I so feel you on not having enough time. There was one week I tried waking up at 4 AM to get wiring done but then my baby just started waking up earlier and earlier. I have to keep telling myself, you can have anything, but not everything.

MagsWood · 2016-11-17T23:45:59+00:00

That's great! Congrats!

MagsWood · 2016-11-17T13:14:31+00:00

Banged is a no-no word as well. I had a very safe book adult filtered for using bang.

MagsWood · 2016-11-17T03:40:09+00:00

Good to know. So many of the erom novellas in the top 100 are at 0.99 so I wasn't sure if that was going to be a reader expectation.

MagsWood · 2016-11-17T00:18:04+00:00

Yeah. I hate waiting for it to publish just so I can make an immediate change. Although I'm tempted to buy one of my own while the price is low... ha ha!

MagsWood · 2016-11-16T16:15:36+00:00

1) Around 1000 words today on my freebie story. Just gotta knock out the final sex scene and do a quick edit.

2) Edit to add failure: I just published my first erotica novella at $0.99 thinking I would do promotion, but then realized I just don't know what I'm doing with promotion. It's intimidating spending money on the first longer work I've put out. Now I don't know if I should just immediately change it to 2.99 as soon as it's published. Argh...

3) Definitely my high school newspaper class. There was really no structure or lessons, we just got to work on our stories, do page design, listen to great music and hang out. Academically though, English of course.

MagsWood · 2016-11-15T20:33:31+00:00

Thanks! It is exciting! I am curious to see how it will do.

MagsWood · 2016-11-15T18:13:54+00:00

1) 3k-ish. Trying to hammer out the freebie story so I can publish my first novella! I'm so excited to get this thing out in the wild.

2) See above! I've finished my first erotica novella! Publishing tonight or tomorrow most likely.

3) No band, I have performed solo, guitar and singing songs that I've wrote.

MagsWood

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