A Sprinkling of This and That

Fellow authors, how often do you visit your Amazon Author Central page? The only time I ever do is when I'm curious to see if I've received any new reviews. (I never get any.) I pulled it up this morning for no reason in particular, and found it enlightening. (Still no new reviews.) Take sales rank. Pro tip: If your book or books have no sales rank, that's not a good sign. But even as badly as my books have performed, they all have a ranking except for Leaving Home, which I only published two days ago. Not a good ranking, not even a mediocre ranking, but I guess at least one person has bought a copy of each of my books, even if that one person was me.

I chose the virtual voice audiobook option for every one of my books, save Running From Herself. (I inexplicably still have faith in that book, and I don't want to blow its potential by publishing an AI-narrated version.) Oddly, a couple of my books rank in the audiobook category. They don't rank high, but it's still astonishing to me. My very first novel, Once in a Blue Moon, is ranking #17,594 as an audiobook. Seriously? What that tells me is that audiobooks with AI voice narration are not exactly flying off the shelves. I've sold four copies of the Kindle version lifetime (and it was published in 2016). Maybe I should listen to it...

I also viewed my books' category rankings. Remember when you first published and you had to choose three categories? And there was really only one good one, but you wanted to pick three in order to give your book its best shot? I never used to keep track of the categories I chose, so it was interesting to see which category my books rank highest in. For example, Running From Herself is #306,663 in Literature and Fiction > Contemporary Fiction > American. I didn't even remember choosing that. 

Author Central also shows your follower count. I'm a bit confused by that, because there is no way I have 262 followers, so is this just an example?

 

But I can't figure out how to find the real number. Anyone?

Author Central also allows us to provide book recommendations--for our own books or others'--by selecting books in response to various questions. I did that once a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure my "262 followers" never found that to be interesting. If you've got a lot of followers, though, hey! free marketing!

Other news of note...David Gaughran is touting the perma-free download of Affinity that is now available. It's noteworthy that Canva purchased Affinity, but it would be even more noteworthy if I knew what the heck it's for. I did download it, because as you know, I love free stuff, but I was hoping for some AI video capabilities. It may have some, but I haven't found them yet. I guess one can manipulate images with it, although I can't think of where I would find that useful. If I do, I'll keep it. If not, I don't need another program hogging my RAM. Google's Gemini AI video generator does offer one month free. I haven't taken them up on it...yet...it depends on the ease of cancelling, but I'm intrigued. I'm sure it won't produce enough video to splice together as a book trailer, but I could potentially use a couple of short clips on my author site. I do love its Whisk AI product for character art, which I'm anticipating won't be free much longer.

Someone on AuthorMedia.social posted that they have a free Grok account, and she showed some awesome video clips that were made from just images. Wish I had a free Grok account--I wonder how you get one. I think I downloaded the app when Elon announced it, but I don't work from a stupid phone! Youngsters nowadays! 😜 I'd need to send my images to my phone, create a video, then send it back to myself. Ehhh.

I got to thinking today about my online follies, and remembered Readers House Magazine and the interview + every freakin' detail about my life (almost) that they requested. Still no sign of it being published, if it ever will be. That's okay; my short-term memory loss can be an advantage--I'll likely forget about it all together. I only wanted it as fodder for my author site anyway. It's kind of nice forgetting things, such as Pen Pinery. Eleven people requested my "ARC", which was actually a published novel, and not one has written a review. In my defense, though, only one of those people seems to have ever written a review for any book on the site. There's easier ways to get free books, folks. These little sites are mostly worthless, but a person's gotta try things.

Speaking of my new series (was I?), I know that Thomas Umstattd advises creating a separate website page for each of an author's books, but that's a whole lot of work, and I don't even know if Blogger can handle an additional page without crashing. I don't mind doing things that are fun, even if they do nothing to advance book sales, but Running From Herself's page wasn't fun; it was anxiety-inducing. It's really nice, though! I'll add this to my list of "things to do when I'm bored out of my mind".

And so ends another week. Some food for thought, I hope. Feel free to chime in with free tips. I'm always open to learning.