Join us as we reflect on Months 8+9 of Going Wide and look at the progress made, the challenges encountered along the way, and discuss solutions to the obstacles we faced this past month.
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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 062: Going Wide Progress Report #6: August+September 2021
Crystal Hunt: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. Welcome to episode 62 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. I’m Crystal Hunt.
Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani and we are here to help you save time, money, and energy as you level up your writing career.
If you find this show helpful, you can help us keep the episodes coming by clicking to the buy us a coffee button on the website and the show notes.
Crystal Hunt: So today we’re reflecting back over the past couple of months of our adventures and wide publishing and sharing some of our challenges and triumphs, but first things first time for a wee update on what’s new since we were haunting your airwaves a couple of weeks ago, Michele, what’s new in Italy?
What has happened since the last episode?
Michele Amitrani: So any in Italy is going great. And I have to say I’ve been doing in the past a couple of weeks, something I didn’t do in a long time, which is a plain brainstorming.
So it’s basically me with a lot of silence, just a notebook and just writing stuff. And the reason why I’m doing this Crystal is because I’m trying to branch out and possibly in the future start outlining a new series. I don’t want to say too much for now because I’m not sure exactly what’s going to be, but possibly is going to be science fiction and possibly it might be something that complement another series that I started a few years ago, but again, I’m not putting too much pressure on me at this time. This moment is just dedicated on brainstorming.Ā
I also been, I’ve been done with the last round of edits for Scion of Gaia in Italian. That’s my mythological fantasy number four. And this will be out by the end of October. So a couple of weeks from the moment that you listen to this episode. I’m also organizing the relaunching and rebranding of a series in Italian.
And this will be probably one of my biggest project for 2022. Both financially and time-wise. I will have to really sit down and kind of assess costs before I can start embarking in this journey, but I’m mentally preparing myself for this thing, which is going to be big. I also, on the marketer side, I’m going to talk about this a bit more, but for now suffice to say that I started running some Amazon automatic ads on two of my non-fiction books.
And my intention is to keep them up for at least some weeks to see if they can help those books perform better. And now how is my Canadian friend fairing on the other side of the world?Ā
Crystal Hunt: Well, I am weirdly in Christmas mode because I’m writing Elfed, which is the holiday release for the Rivers End series.
And it’s a little bit easier to get into Christmas mode right now than it was a few weeks ago because we do have the rainy weather it’s gotten cold enough to actually sit in front of the fire maybe even with a blanket or slippers and a cozy beverage. So I’m enjoying that shift in tone. It makes it a lot easier.
I have a really hard time writing the Christmas books when it’s, you know, August it’s always a challenge. So I am having some fun with that, and itās kind of romantic comedy-ish. And I’ve also been working on some craft stuff. So digging into the idea of story embryos, which is a way of outlining in, on kind of a visual, circular sort of fashion using the hero’s journey as a rough framework.
But I’ve been watching videos by Rachael Stephen about it. Although the original concept comes from Dan Harmon. Rachael Stephen uses the concept of the plot embryo along with some bullet journal outlining stuff, which was really interesting. And also I found some stuff from editor lists M which is talking about how to apply that structure to romance specifically.
So that has been an interesting little crafty exploration and I’ve been reading, or I did read also the Three Story Method by J. Thorn and Zach Bohannon. So that was an interesting just compilation of a whole bunch of different thoughts about writing and how they work and going all the way back to, I think it’s Aristotle that he’s talking about as a source of story.
And that was an interesting read. So lots of, apparently, I’m using the word āinteresting all the timesā today because it is interesting. It’s been fascinating. I’ll try and see what other words I can come up with for that. Also the day, this goes live is Canadian Thanksgiving. So happy Thanksgiving to all of you from Canada.
And we’ll be eating tasty things probably while you’re listening to this and enjoying some of our family traditions in miniature format, we won’t have the giant family gathering with 40, 50 people that we usually used to have, but we will do that on a really mini scale, which means no fighting over the Turkey leftovers.
We’ll get all the Turkey sandwiches we could possibly handle and to celebrate Thanksgiving, we are releasing the The MacAllisters books from Rivers End in all the wide formats on this day. So it is also an exciting wide book birthday, as we reissued all of those, they have new covers and new front- back matter and a new subscribe page for people, if they’re signing up for the represent book club, all the things are shiny and new, and I can finally start sharing some of what I’ve been working on for the last year with everybody. So I’m really, really excited about that. And on the non-fiction side, we’re just working through final copy edits on the Create With Coauthors books.
So that is the pre-orders going to go live any day now and we’re going to be able to start rolling out that book as well. And that is our six book in our Creative Academy guides for writers series, which we are super stoked about. It’s going to drop on December 1st. So if you haven’t yet, pre-ordered your copy, that is your best way to get the launch pricing. So get in there and get that ordered. If you are a print book person, there is a print book coming as well. So you can hold out. There’s a paperback and a hard cover version since we are part of the Amazon, her give her print beta and we are having some fun with that.
They do, they look great. I’m really enjoying the quality of the books that have been coming out of there. And they feel very satisfying to hold in your hand. It’s like a library book you’re allowed to write in when you own your own copy. So that is very satisfying. And I actually, it’s kind of funny how often I find myself referring back to our own books, but it is helpful to have all that information gathered up in one handy place.
So that has been also an exciting thing to see come into the world after working on it for a good chunk of the past year actually. Okay, so now we are doing a progress report episode. So we’re checking in and doing some reflection on how the last couple of months have gone. We’ve been actively tweaking different bits and pieces about what we’re working on.
So Michele, what has yourā¦ put your creator hat on now? Your creative person has, the artist, as opposed to the business person. And what has your creator self been working on over the past two months? And maybe just what has been particularly challenging and/or rewarding that you’ve come.
Creator hat updates and goals
Michele Amitrani: Yeah, absolutely. This has been a couple of months dedicating on both creating content writing wise, but also translating. It started again, my season of translation since October is going to be my first mythological fantasy release in some months. So I’m going to tell you exactly how many hours I put into that.
Before I would just like to remind the context, my core objective for August and September in the past two months. So I really wanted to publish the Amazon Ads book in Italian, in paperback and ebook and I managed to do that. Hat tip to Crystal because she helped and I also wanted to publish the Scion of Gaia, which is mythological fantasy number four.
In September, I also, that one achieved them. I did not achieve the power goal of publishing another novella permafree in English wide, probably three books in a month was a stretch so basically I’m going to do that the next month, but I was happy with the results.
This has been a good month for my creator side of things and for generating content. It went above expectation because as you might know, 40 hours of writing per month is a decent number if I can hit that Iām happy. And on August I managed to write 85 hours and my previous record was 77 in July. On September I wrote way less, just 47 hours for a total of 132 hours in the past two months. And the reason was exactly because of the translation. So I started the translating Crystal in September for Scion of Gaia in Italian and that took a huge sum of time especially in September. So I used 32 hours for translating the Scion of Gaia, but also a novella from Italian into English. And this is a challenge that I have. It might be an opportunity that I can write and release content in two languages, but definitely to go back to the metaphor of you in a soccer field, and having to beat different kinds of bowls. If you have three or four before you, you don’t have enough strength to let them go very far away, which is my problem now. The problem that I had in the past month and Iām guessing the problem that I will have for the rest of my career, but we can also think of it as an opportunity as we like to think of opportunity and possibilities. So one of the challenges is this: as the Spiderman said, as the acute of Spiderman said, with great powers, come great responsibilities. I believe that was the phrase. And this is definitely something that I have to account on August and September splitting myself up into two, to follow the English, Michele Amitrani and Italian Michele Amitrani.
And this is meaningful. It makes me who I am, but at the same time, I have to realize that I have 24 hours per day as every single human being on the planet. And so I need to decide which project comes first. And this is not always easy. So since most of the revenue that I’m getting from my fiction comes from a series, for example, it just seems smart at this point to focus on that direction.
And I want to take at least October to keep brainstorming as I was mentioning to you before and try to see if I can outline a resemblance of plot at least for the first book of this new series that I’m planning and then from November, hopefully, I will have enough material enough something that I can work on and start actually writing a story.
This was definitely the challenge, me having to split myself into two version of myself. I’m using myself a lot, but that’s fine. So the last reflection that I want to make on my creator side is that if you remember. The last two months, I openly admitted that what really bothers me as an author, as a creator is that I cannot immediately know which of my project that I’m working on now will make more sense in the long run and that forces me to work on several projects and basically hoping, because I don’t have really enough data in the past to say, okay, this project for sure is going to be more successful, Iām just guessing at this stage. So hoping that one of them will pay out in time and effort and I can now see why that is so upsetting.
Because after launching two books in September, and not really seeing the results that I expected, even though I had low expectations for these books this makes me really understand how selling books is a very particular endeavor that must be really, really approached with an open mind and lots of patients.
And Iām happy that I now understand that this is a long game and we repeated this, Crystal, in the podcast many times, and we learn new things from each launch and hopefully grow wise writing-wise so that we can make a better launch afterward. But for now I just have to recognize that I’m happy that I was able to release those books and IāmĀ thrilled that, you know, I’ve put more things with my name out in the world, and that actually managed to, you know, publish this works which Iāve never accomplished before to do two things, two books in one month, and now I just need to focus more of my energies on things that will pay for my bills and build brick by brick you know, a stronger foundation of my authorpreneur business. So this is what Iāve learned in the past two months. And I will be very thrilled to know what you think of my reflection, but at the same time, I want to know what happened in your creator world.Ā
Crystal Hunt: Yes. The long game is a challenge and the patience is a key piece. And that is, I think, always a struggle, especially when, as the creator, you’re also wearing these other hats, like your manager hat and your marketer hat, and you’re looking for results and, you know, it’s easy for those results or lack of, to impact your sort of desire to do the writing and the motivation that you feel to do that. And so keeping those separate is really interesting and that’s actually what I’ve been focused on over the last couple of months is getting back into writing for the sake of writing.
And that has been a really interesting shift. And the other piece I’ve been really focused on shifting is the daily routines and changing those so that the structure of the day is really supporting, getting into the writing the stories first and getting into writing mode every day. And I am, that is not how I have historically written.
I’ve always been what we call a binge writer in that I, you know, dive right in, go all hardcore on the writing. I write really quickly once I get into the drafting phase. So one of the things I’m working on is shifting my mindset around what is writing, because the story development and the character development, and actually putting together the plot and doing that analysis piece, that all is critical and crucial to writing. It’s still writing time. It’s not putting the words on the paper, but part of trying to kind of reconnect with the joy of creation as an artist is really finding that love for story itself. And so I’ve been really focused on craft and on time, over word count as the way to measure my engagement with story and with that creation process. So I have one of my big, big wins over this past two months is I have managed to get into a regular morning creation routine where I have spent between three and four hours every weekday morning, for sure. I’m working on whatever the current story is and developing that fiction piece.
And I I’m loving that it is working. And I am really finding the enjoyment at to the point where I am, I’m writing on weekends, I’m writing in the evening, I’m doing that stuff just because I want to, because I’m into the story that I’m telling and that is such a huge shift after, you know, I’ve been writing now for money for 18 years, I guess.
And it is easy to kind of forget that it was a fun playground at first. And so reconnecting with the reason to do it in the first place, the fun and having the activity be fun is extremely rewarding. It doesn’t come without challenges. So, it’s still taking me some effort to not feel guilty that this is my job and that my job is awesome.
So not feeling bad about that is definitely a piece that I’m working on and also being comfortable with the pay cut because that transition phase of going from full-time consulting income, plus writing income to solely dependent on writing and household income is a shift. So that is, you know, learning new routines in the spending side of things is also really important because we can cut our need for dollars by cutting back on how we operate our lives as well.
Another challenge is I think just developing a consistent process. I’m all about experimentation when I write and I, every story kind of starts in a slightly different place or with a different idea or piece of things and so I’ve been working on sort of standardizing that process a little bit so that no matter where a story spark comes from, I have a consistent development process so that I don’t get sucked too far into the world building to the point where I don’t actually start the story or where I don’t plan out too much and then get bored with it because I know how it ends. And I know what happens in the middle and then I don’t need to write it. I already had that story in my head. So I think that’s really important.
It’s just nailing that down so that I know what the steps are in the outlining. And so that I know exactly what pieces of the process and when I’m done that it’s writing time. And then I can dive right in. So, you know, in my development, because these are things I’ve been working on conceptually for a very long time, the actual outlining and development process that I have now, I can do inside of a week at the most. And so that is much more efficient in terms of keeping things moving and moving on to the next story. And, you know, I am writing genre length so closer to the shorter side of things that the longer side of things. And somewhere usually between 40 and 50,000 words is the target these days, which means not quite as complicated as a plot as you’re going to get in like a hundred thousand word space opera or something.
So. You know, results may vary in terms of outlining speed, but that is what I find is working for me at the moment. The other challenges working in both romance and cozy mystery, which have, you know, some overlapping elements, but really are two very different beasts when it comes to the shape of the story and they expected beats.
And so I developed over the last couple of months, a templates for developing stories in both of those genres. So that now, regardless of which one I’m working on, I have a template I can pull out and jump right into and that really is speeding things along in terms of the creation. So I am at the point now where I am solidly spending about 30 hours a week on product development and actual creating content. Which is really satisfying.Ā
And on the non-fiction side, we over the last two months outlined the next three collaboratively written non-fiction titles, as well as finishing the Create with Coauthors. So things were moving along swiftly there. So on the creative creator side, overall I’m feeling like that’s a whole lot of wins and I’m really excited to see how that consistent process does ripple out over the next, you know, six months to a year.
So that’s all very exciting. Now, of course we can’t wear our creator hat all the time. No matter how much we might like to that manager hat does have to go on our heads. So Michele, manager self wise what have been your big challenges this month and how have you conquered those?Ā
Manager hat updates and goals
Michele Amitrani: I always had the problems spending money and that might my seems like weird to say. There is say that saying which says, ā too many says ā but basically says that you have to spend money to make money. I never believed that, but I am realizing that it is important to have that component of the spending. So one of my problems has been to deciding if I wanted to spend the money on my manager’s side for the rebranding of a series, I was mentioning that before.
I decided on yes, Iām going to spend the money to rebrand completely the series, which this means not only to make one or two covers, it means to make four covers in two languages. So it actually come with a pretty hefty price tag. But I just sit down and I tried to understand if this was the right move in the long run. And the answer that I gave myself was āyesā because of a set of reasons. One of these was that this very series on the Italian market it took time to actually be profitable. But then now it’s my number one income source on the royalty side of my Italian front. So I sat down as a manager and I decided, okay, these are my resources.
This is how much I made from this series, can this justify the rebranding of the series that I haveāwhich covers are awfulā to put it nicely. And if I remake this cover I might maybe have more traction, more traffic, better reviews the answer was the sound. Yes. So I was like always talking to myself. So what are you waiting for?
And so I decided to go ahead and to commission these covers. I don’t know when they’re going to be done. I have to, this rebrand is going to be so significant that I will have to even change the title of the books, not only the colors, how I probably have to change pieces of the story, especially on the English front.
And so only thinking of that Crystal make me develop a very strong headed, but I think it’s a, it’s an important step. And if it doesn’t work, at least I tried it and I’ve seen that it didn’t work by just decide I can’t leave by leaving that possibility aside, at least I have to try, even though it’s going to cost me long hours of translating and long hours of editing and you know, a significant chunk of what I was able to save up, thanks to this series.
So I purchase a new cover package for the rebranding of my science fiction series and I also purchased another package for this times, just one cover, this one is going to be one mythological fantasy and it’s going to be permafree and if everything goes well, this is going to go out at the end of October, hopefully at the end of October, if it happens in November I’m not gonna shoot myself in the foot, but the thing is that I already have the story, I have the title, I have the blurb, I have everything. So I’m not concerned about that. Second thing that I have that I’ve been working on my manager’s side was to publish on preorder King of Defiance, which is mythological fantasy number five and also the second book of the Rebels of the Underworld series.
And I do this Crystal, you know me now, I love pre orders because it’s basically less admin work for me. And as a manager, I love that, that I don’t have to do that in the last 48 hours. I know that I can set that pre-order three weeks, four weeks before, and I don’t have to worry about that anymore. Lastly on my manager’s side I am I was lucky enough to get accepted by couple of Kobo promotions.
And I’m putting this on the manager side, instead of the marketer’s side, because they actually helped me realizing something very important on the manager side, which is weirdly enough now my mythological fantasy series has been wide for nine month and for some reason that I don’t understand it’s selling way better on Kobo than on Amazon, that much, that I am now officially selling double as much mythological fantasy books on Kobo then on Amazon, which is, I dunno, baffling to me, even though I’m not doing any kind of promotion by myself, except of course, putting my links on the website and making sure that every single time I send the newsletter, I have the Kobo links there. I take it as a, when I enrolled one of my books on Kobo and those books get taken customers on that platform, maybe likes the genre more?
I don’t know how I’ve not enough data to understand why, I’m just going to say yes and take them the royalty that I didn’t expect coming in. But that’s why I’m putting this point on this particular manager tag is just because it makes me realize a bit more how keeping yourself open to different kinds of channels it’s really important. And I think it’s important then also the listeners knowns that. Maybe book my flop or not be very popular on one platform but for some reason that I really don’t understand it might get attraction on Google Play on Apple, on BorrowBox and some library, you never know, you never really know.
So that’s also why I think we decided to go wide because every single story it’s a different, it’s a different location, but it’s also a different beast with different customers with different tastes. So I’m at the of that and I’m looking forward to see if this situation stays the same or changes.
As always, I will let you know. And what about your work on the manager and the marketer’s side, Crystal? How did thinks go on that regards?Ā
Crystal Hunt: Well manager side, my big challenge over the past couple of months was committing to branding directions for my different types of fiction that I’m writing and for my different pen names, because cozy mystery is one of the things there’s sweet and kind of clean romance where there’s not sex scene. There’s not a lot of swearing. Well, there’s not any swearing really. Itās the kind of thing that is, you know, pretty, pretty PG or even G rated there’s, you know, kissing, but it’s kinda like watching like a hallmark movie, you know, you’re never going to get past that steamy kiss in the last scene.
So there’s some of that stuff and that actually does really well with the cozy mysteries, but they’re very different audiences still between cozy mystery and sweet romance. And so I wanted to make sure that was differentiated. I also have the contemporary romance that has like suspense, thereās a bit of magic thethemes are a little darker stuff that doesn’t really fit with either of those other two genres. And I have agonized over this for literally years of whether or not I was going to go with just lump everything together and let people figure it out. But marketing wise, that doesn’t really make sense.
My marketer hat was like, no, no, no, we can’t do that! The algorithms! So. But I also panicking because the last thing I want to do is maintain like three complete identities for my author self, but what a lot of others do and what I am also doing is creating pen names that are, itās not a secret.
You’re not trying to keep complete separation between those things. And all of those stories are set in Rivers End. And so, what I decided was to create the Rivers End book club, which lets me then centralize my marketing efforts, but people can pick which of the genres they want to get updates from and which of the pen names they want to follow in various places.
So they only get updates about the books that appeal to their personal preferences. And it does make for a little bit more work, but it’s notā¦like, I’m not pretending to be somebody else. There’s no secret identity beyond the fact that there are just different combinations of names. And so there are three different pen names now.
And Jean Brown writes the cozy mysteries, Gene Hunt does the sweet and clean romance and CJ hunt does the contemporary romance with sexy suspense and a touch of magic. So that is the official plan and the reason why I held off on re-releasing a couple of my existing titles was because a couple of those may actually shift which author’s name is attached to them.
And I’ve gotten new covers and things like that as well, to reflect both the author name changes and the distinctness of those different genres. So that is fun. I got my first three cozy mystery covers and I absolutely adore them. So I’m really excited about that. And I’m just in the process of getting the sort of sweet and clean romance stuff covers for those as well.
So I will have those pretty quick and then I get to keep with my existing tone and branding for my CJ hunt name, which is great. Cause I was very attached to that and I like it a lot. So that has been the excitement in my manager world. On the marketing side? Well on the fiction side, that’s been pretty easy because I’ve been all focused on prep.
So I haven’t been running promos. I actually paused all my Amazon ads. Well, I rebooted everything. And so everything is just chill there which is great because we’re gearing up to busy season for that. I have a lot of holiday titles, which means that the fall and Christmas for me is the big time of the year.
And so that is going to get fairly intense through October, November, and December. Those were the big months of my year for at least for certain pen names. So I’ll be all over that. And yeah, and it was really nice actually to have that break, I have to say, it was a lot easier to refocus on the writing and the stories and get a lot of word count when I wasn’t switching hats in quite such a short timeline.
So there were many days where I didn’t switch to marketing stuff in the afternoon or managing stuff in the afternoon and I was able to do several days a week of just keep writing. If I was into what I was doing, which is extremely productive and I really enjoyed that. So that is something that I am hoping to hold onto a little bit.
And on the non-fiction side, we are delving into BookBub ads and experimenting with that over the next little while. And so the last couple months has been about prepping for that. So Growing followings, cleaning up our profiles, doing research into comp authors and keywords and all that kind of stuff for BookBub and shout out to Stephanie Candiago who is helping us out with that.
She is our go-to ads person. So we have been supporting her in this new adventure and doing the homework that she gives us. So that’s kind of fun just following along and doing what we’re told, which is great. So we don’t have to come up with what our next ask is. We just have to complete whatever shows up in the Asana task list.
So loving, having help with that. I have to say. Frees you up from having to watch every available video and do every course and whatever on and learn all of that completely ourselves. We’re able to sort of just do some fringe learning and then follow directions. So that is great. And how about you? How has been your marketing hat?
Marketing hat updates and goals
Michele Amitrani: I am happy that I kept my promise of emailing my mailing lists periodically I think it helps keeping engagement up. And this is very important to me, especially now. So I’m focusing on trying to deliver better content for my subscribers. And I also noticed something that also David Gaughran repeated more than once in his newsletter that I definitely agree with, which is knowing that your newsletter is read, changes the way you write them.
I think in a better way it just because we want to provide the better content. And I’m definitely seeing that there’s more engagement if I keep constant this practice of emailing my newsletters and if I make the time for it. And if I keep these connection with my audience on an alive, and I think since the newsletter is the second most important thing on an authorpreneur business side of things I need to understand that keeping it, it’s not only important for the marketer side of things, itās important for, you know, my career in the long run and alsoā¦ By crafting newsletter, I think you use another subset of skill, which is copywriting, which doesn’t really have a lot in common with creative writing and I’ve been reading books on copywriting, as I mentioned a few episodes before, and I do believe that writing newsletter hone those abilities. So I’ve been doing that. And I also spent some money on Facebook ads.Ā
I was willing to give some money to Facebook for the first time in a very long time, actually I think it’s been one year and a half since I used and touched that platform. And the reason was very simple and probably not particularly bright, but Facebook gave me 30 bucks of ad credits if I used 30 bucks.
So I was like, why not? And I decided to use that bonus to basically understand a bit more how Facebook ads work. I do not believe those $60 made really any difference except of getting some likes on my Facebook page and some comments. But I did understand a bit more how to run Facebook ads.
And so if I need to do that for a very limited amount of time for, maybe price promotion, which I know other authors say it works a bit better if you have like some price drop or if you are publicizing price drop. I can do that now because I know how it works. I’m not going to say that I know how it works, but I know a bit more how it works as a consequence of me spending this $60, 30 of which provided by Facebook. So thank you very much.Ā
Lastly, on my market or side I’ve been playing around with a new tool that Amazon gave us author which is the A+ content. And I’ve put them on almost all of myā¦ well actually on all of the books that I can, that are selling a bit more on the Italian front.
And it is too early to see if really this nice graphic on your product page really change anything. So definitely looks better and it’s not because I’m a good designer. But it just because I got a person which is a designer to do the designer for my A-plus content for me so the page looks good. So hat tip to Ben, my designers, to make those things happen.
And the first thing that I do, the first A-plus content was on my Omnilogos Serie and I can definitely see there are clicks more creeks than previous. I can’t really compare it before because I did the questionable decision of increasing the price of the box set from 6.99 to 8.99. So it’s not really an AB testing.
It’s just, nothing I can compare. But I promise myself that I will increase the price of the boxset, set that, and I can just say that it looks good on the pager, but since I’ve been using the A + content for a month or so, it’s really not enough for me to understand if it really moves the needles.
And apparently for other authors that have been using them, but they can’t really see if they’re, if they are moving the needle for them too. That’s for my market decide I, I can talk to you, Crystal, about the revenue side of things, or the hight of the month, or you want to add something in particular or I should just go ahead andā¦
Crystal Hunt: Show me the money, baby.
Michele Amitrani: Yes. So on the revenue side of things my authorpreneur revenue came 70% from my fiction royalty and 30% from my freelancing and the height of the month: someone on BorrowBox, which is a brand new library app that got included into Drafts to Digital just got Lord of Time, which is one of my books.
And for the first time ever, I got a royalty from a library which never happened before. So it’s a new thing that will not have been possibile if this book was exclusive somewhere else. So thank you. BorrowBox. Thank you for the person that the borrowed the book. And that was my height of the month.
My October goals are going to be very quick and painful. I am going to publish Scion of Gaia in Italian and my power goal is going to try and publish the mythological fantasy Permafree in English. And now it’s your turn to amaze us with your goals, revenue side of things, and height of the month, Crystal.
Crystal Hunt: So revenue is very consistent. We haven’t hit that exciting upswing for fall yet in the fiction world, but the nonfiction is holding steady. The percentages are a little bit different this month because we did not have an Info Stack in this past two month period, whereas the previous two reports, we had done an Info Stack both times.
So the affiliate and writing related revenue was much higher percentages the last couple of reports, but this time it’s 58% non-fiction from direct book sales and royalties, 33% is writing related stuff, so teaching and affiliating, and 9% is fiction right now. So I’m super curious to see how that will change at the next one, because today is the day that that wide income starts being added into the mix for all of the fiction again, and everything is re-released.
So hopefully the goal is to move that needle up a good chunk over the next couple of months on the fiction side of things, my ultimate goal is a balanced there. To have it be more like 50, 50. But we’ll see, I’m expecting, that’s going to take at least another year to creep up there, but if we can even get 5% each month of that fiction rising, then it will be good.Ā
However, my goals for the next two months do include we’re releasing a new non-fiction book and that’s going to up the ante in the competition in this throwdown between fiction non-fiction. So the Create with Coauthors book is going to be released.
Another goal is to finish the draft of Build Butter Settings, which is the next nonfiction book that I’m co-writing with Eileen Cook. Elfed, the pre-order, is up and the book should be released at the end of those two months and also the rest of the Rivers End books, not just the MacAllisters, but all the rest that are getting rebranded and shifted around a little bit will also be re-released by the end of that two month period in multiple formats. So lots of goals, this is where things start to get fun for me because I’ve been sitting on everything for a really long time, which has been not very fun. So now that it’s fall, I get to roll all the things out and really enjoy that. So those are my primary goals for the next two months.
Plus of course it Surrey International Writers’ conference in October. And I’m teaching a bunch of new workshops, which I’m really excited about. I get to sit on some really great panels with some wonderful people to talk about writing. And I will also be watching all the workshops I can get my hands on.
So that’s always exciting for November as well is doing a deep craft dive and being all in on the writery side of things. So looking forward to that.
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Michele Amitrani: Happy writing everyone.