Hello, lovely readers!

It’s been an interesting year as a writer. I’ve learned a lot over the past 12 months, and I know there’s still so much more to learn in the next 12. Here’s what I’ve discovered:

I self-published the first three books in my Raven Seal series and made my novella Lily free on most major platforms. Giving away a free novella (via BookFunnel) was definitely a good move—I believe it helped generate sales for my paid books.

I chose to publish everything through Draft2Digital initially, both to test the waters and to better understand the various platforms. As a debut self-published author, I priced my books at USD $2.99. I’m aware I lost some profit due to platform fees, and I plan to publish directly to individual retailers in the future. I found out I can publish directly to Amazon while still publishing wide. That would allow me to pay for AWS adverts, which should boost my sales.

As of today, I’ve sold 170 books this year. A significant portion of those sales came in the last 30 days, after I launched my first Meta ad campaign. While I still need better conversions to break even and turn a profit, I’m getting a lot of clicks, which is exactly what I was hoping for. Beyond sales, the goal of the campaign was to build name recognition and start establishing myself as a romance author.

Marketing can be time-consuming if you let it take over. I tried batching my marketing tasks in one day and scheduling content throughout the week, but it’s still a learning curve. For now, I’ve decided to dedicate the first hour or two of my mornings to marketing—when my brain is still waking up and soaking in the nutrients (read: caffeine) from my coffee before I dive into writing.

I’m nearly finished drafting Book D and aiming for 70K words, so I’ll be sending it to beta readers mid-January. I hope to get it out in the world by Valentine's Day. 

A few newsletters ago, I mentioned that I needed to adjust my heat level and decided to go with “sensual.” That change means I now need to revise the storyline for Book E. If you read my draft on Wattpad, you'll know it's NSFW! I think I can use my first draft in some of the chapters, though, so not all is lost. I could release an alternative version for spicy fans. 

I want to publish up to Book H and have an outline for what Books F-H will be about. I'll be traveling in January, so I hope it gives me the motivation and focus to write. I'll let you know next month how it's going.

Until next time…

MNP xx

Until next time…MNP xx