Looking Back at My Week

Hey! What's happening? 

Me? Not that much, to be honest. I'm sort of at a crossroads in my "career", so while I still do a couple of little things, I'm not feeling very inspired.

1. The big thing I did this week was add a dedicated page to my website for Running From Herself. Getting prepared to structure it was a long process. I fell into the trap of creating tons of character art using Whisk, simply because it was so much fun. But now I've got way more images on my hard drive than I'll never use. Oh, I did use about 16 of them, but I found when I went to create my collages (aka mood boards) that most of the AI depictions I'd created only had relevance to me. It was still fun, though.

Following Thomas Umstattd's direction required a lot of research. Example: what the hell does BISAC mean? And I had no clear idea of what tropes are featured in my novel. I guess I just don't think that way; I don't deliberately set out to write tropes. AI turned out to be a decent starting point. I plugged in two of my blurbs (yes, I have several) to get its feedback, then weeded out the dumb ones until I could create yet another image with Canva demonstrating the main tropes. I also made a flipbook preview with Publuu.

Overall, the page turned out fine, and "fine" is really all I can expect. My analytics, however, have been disappointing. Umstattd stresses discoverability, which is the reason I followed all his instructions, but that page has barely been discovered. (I suspect that the few clicks it got were from me checking to see how it looked.) Maybe it takes time.

2. While working on that webpage, I realized I really hated the AI-written blurb I'd begun using (out of desperation). It was supposedly written to capture all the novel's tropes, which, you know, leads to reader interest, but the blurb never actually said anything. It was an airplane view, devoid of personality. Umstattd advises posting a blurb on the dedicated page that differs from Amazon's, so I thought, heck, I can write anything I want; it won't be "official", per se. That freed me up to compose something more honest and less contrived. I'm not claiming it's any better than the other twenty or fifty blurbs I used in the past, but I liked it enough to use it for the Amazon page, too. (I know; that's defeating Umstattd's purpose.)

In collecting character names for my Character Compendium, I realized I'd used the same name for two different minor characters. How had I missed that? Maybe because they were just names snatched out of midair and didn't matter to the story. One of the characters has one stinkin' line in the whole book and the other doesn't say anything. (They're both named Kyle, by the way.) Slightly embarrassed by my oversight, I considered changing one of the names in the manuscript, but know what? That would be more than a minor task. The paperback version isn't going to change ~ I had enough trouble formatting the #%%! thing the first time. And it's not worth the trouble to re-upload a new version of the ebook. So in my compendium, the characters are listed as Kyle 1 and Kyle 2. Don't care.

3. The "PR firm" that contacted me via email was kind of fun to mess with for a while, but then it just got boring. I'm here to report that they've given up on me. They're in fact exasperated.

My response to their response:

I appreciate your pitch, but I'm still confused as to why my book has any potential that would cause me to spend more marketing dollars promoting it.

As I noted in my first response, the novel isn't selling. How would you ensure that my book would reach the right audience? What is my audience? What about it caught your attention?

You're telling me that it came up in a staff meeting. How? Why? I don't think you or your staff has even read it, to be frank.

If you can't explain to me what makes my book unique and most of all, interesting to readers,I just can't lay out any more money trying to promote it.

 

Their final word: 

I have no answer to offer without a discussion, and since you don’t seem open to that, let’s pass and allow me to wish you well.

 

I can't claim to have done much this week, and I'm running out of things to do. Once it devolves into answering hypothetical interview questions, that's a sure sign things are wrapping up. 

It might be time to 💋this novel goodbye.