My Week...

...has been really uneventful. 

It's not as if I don't have things I want to do, but they're being held up while I wait for my new book cover. Granted, I'm being a bit too impatient. Do I really want a rush job that I'll hate? Of course not. Yet I keep checking Miblart's FAQs to confirm that I read their delivery promise correctly (seven to ten business days). That means the earliest I'll see anything is Friday, and more likely next week sometime. And that's only the initial concept. I'm not the most patient person in the world, and I've been feeling for a while that my current cover is holding me back, true or not. (probably not, but I can dream)

Also, in checking the FAQs, I just learned that Miblart is associated with GetCovers. That's not reassuring, although the designers who work for GetCovers are essentially apprentices for the big guy (Big Mib, I'll call him). I've looked at GetCovers' portfolio and hated it. The covers are all way (way!) too busy. And most are very sparkly. I'm sure I would hate any $35.00 cover they churned out. Miblart's portfolio, on the other hand, is an improvement. Some of the covers have subtlety. I won't accept a sparkly cover, and I hope that's not what they present to me.

I do want to try Amazon ads one more time, but I first need my new cover, or it'll be a complete waste of money. So, that's on hold. It also occurs to me that my novel is listed on several book-specific sites, all of which I'll never be able to remember, but for those I can, it's going to be time-consuming to go back into them (even worse to try to recall my passwords) and update my cover. I'm not sure it would even be worth it. I've not benefited from any of these sites, so why bother? 

Since I decided to give up on Instagram, I haven't been back. I'd forgotten that I'd paid two or three additional bookstagrammers for some sort of "service", so I really should be checking in from time to time. I'm just so turned off by my experience with the app that I can't bring myself to go there.

The Pen Pinery (do I have that right?) ARC service whose name I rightfully made fun of has so far garnered me four reader requests. And here I thought I wouldn't get any. This sort of thing used to excite me, but in the end, what benefit will I derive from such a thing? And that's assuming the resulting reviews will be positive. When I used BookSprouts for Inn Dreams, I don't think I landed more than four readers, either, and my reviews were only lukewarm.

This sounds insane, but when I finally get a book cover I like and go to KDP to upload it, I'm thinking of raising my ebook's price. Why? Well, all my novellas are priced at $1.99, which is apparently a bridge too far for most all shoppers; and this novel is much fatter than a novella. I'm talking about five times fatter. So, $2.99 doesn't seem appropriate to me. $3.99 sounds good; not too high and not low enough that people will assume it's crap.

By the same token, I'm going to lower my paperback price, not that it'll matter. When it came to the initial pricing, online advice was all over the place, so I researched prices on Amazon and chose a median number. David Gaughran espouses that actually selling paperback copies isn't the point ~ it's that side-by-side on Amazon, the ebook will look like a bargain compared to the physical book's price. (I don't know anymore; people say a lot of things.)

I'm in a state of inertia right now, checking my email every half hour or so, waiting for something to happen.