Everybody said that I needed to have a blog on my author page. I had a wedding planning blog for 11 years, but I had plenty to say about weddings because I’d planned more than 500 of them. I knew what I was talking about and I could defend my positions (based on experience and proper etiquette) when people challenged the advice in the columns I wrote for BRIDES, HuffPost Weddings, WeddingWire, etc. When I was blogging for Monsters and Critics, those reviews were supposed to be my honest opinion. Plenty to share.
But what is a new fiction author going to blog about that will interest anybody? I don’t have experience self-publishing – this is my first time. The last three books I wrote were agented and printed by traditional publishers. The most important thing I’ve learned so far is that I really miss having somebody else deal with printing the damned books. That said, I write like a demon and am already writing Book 4 of the Gem of the Golden Isles series. Book 3 will get released in a few weeks. Books 1 and 2 came out last week.
If you haven’t read them yet, please check out “Escape to Jekyll Island” and “In Bloom on Jekyll” – it’s a story about a young Caribbean wedding planner who loses it all in a hurricane and goes home to Jekyll Island to start over. And it’s hilarious. I took all the insanity we saw at real weddings and fictionalized it to protect the guilty. Seriously, I couldn’t make this crazy sh*t up if I tried.
But blogging about writing is a new one for me. The writing is the easy part. I can crank out 20,000 words a day if I don’t have anything else to do. Years of writing and editing have made my drafts super clean and they don’t require much time from editors and proofreaders. The argument for self-publishing comes from the fact that I can literally write and publish as much as I want if I do it myself. I’ve set a completely unrealistic goal of publishing 12 books before the end of the year. Two are done, one is almost done, and I’m writing the fourth. The biggest time-suck of it all was learning how to master (haha) KDP and Ingram Sparks. Oh and B&N wants that damned cover done slightly differently, too. Not yet sure if it’s a plus that I don’t need anybody to do this stuff for me because it takes me a lot more time than the writing. And I want to be writing. Let’s not even talk about having to design my own website… yeah it’s my first time. I was always in the great position of being able to call for tech support for changes to that stuff in the past.
So, I’ve decided that instead of giving advice on what to do in this blog, I’ll probably focus more on WHAT NOT TO DO. At least that’s how I’m feeling today. When I get a little more confident, maybe I’ll take the next big step.
TIP OF THE DAY: Never use the “A” word (Amazon) anywhere in a pitch to a bookstore. It is not a good thing that you also have your books available there – they hate Amazon and most of them will only get books through Ingram Sparks or other printers. My books haven’t popped up on Bookstore.org yet – and so I thought I was doing a good thing by showing the bookstore owner I was pitching that they were available on Amazon. Yeah, nope.
LESSON LEARNED: Wait til you have hundreds of books on hand to deliver, or until your listing is available on Bookstore.org, before you ask local bookstores to carry your book or host a signing.
Until next time… happy reading!
Sandy