Happy New Year! I should probably wait until the 2nd to send this out, shouldn't I? Everybody sleeping off New Year's Eve. I hope all your dogs survived the scary fireworks. I have lots of polls this newsletter. All really important, world-changing stuff. To get started:
(For the record, my wife disqualified herself in a Godzilla-like fit of rage when her roof slid off.) I sent an out-of-cycle newsletter about finishing the first draft of Secrets of Deara. Since then, I've gone back and written a couple of chapters that I thought tied a few specifics together a little more cleanly, and cut a few sections, but I've mostly worked on other things to take a little break from Secrets. The story is at about 70k words right now, so a bit on the short side. But there's still one character whose story isn't fleshed out, and weaving that in will probably get me at around 80k. Maybe. I'd intended to start my second pass this morning, but instead I'm working on this newsletter. 🙃 Anyway, what else have I done instead of working on Secrets? One, I updated the covers for Guardian League. I also updated the backmatter on Mother of Trees, and somehow managed to push the update to the wrong book... I pushed the changes to Bones. So I received a rather disgruntled review. I'm glad someone told me though... it had already sat there for twelve days with the wrong content! Meh. I also created new ads for Guardian League and Mother of Trees. I'll share here and, heck, I'll put some links if you want to go upvote ("like") the ones you like--I don't think I need you to, but feel free. I'm using something on FB called a DCT (Dynamic Creative Template). It mixes up those three images with two headlines and two descriptions, so 12 combinations of ads. Since I'm only providing three links, those are just three of the variants (one for each pic). Heh, I guess that means it might actually hurt me for you to "like" an ad... it will bias the FB algorithm toward thinking that ad is the best combo and start sending it more. How about this--I'll set up a poll. You can just vote. But I'll leave the FB links there in case you want to tell FB that you'd like more fantasy ads in your feed.
Oh, I didn't want Grundle blue. As soon as I push midjourney toward the style I want, it turns Grundle blue. I haven't figured out how to get past that yet. Moving on to Mother of Trees:
I can tell you, the "Elliah on the run" pic hasn't done well at all, but the "MoT Face" is getting clicks. But I may try more variants of the "Elliah on the run" pic. All books by Steven J. Morris Indie Author ShowcasePrevious Newsletters
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Hi! If you enjoy fantasy with snarky humor, I've got some books for you. My newsletter takes you along the creative journey, and keeps you informed of what's brewing.
Click here to rejoin family content. Since release of Secrets of Deara, I'm pausing on Shepherds of Truth while I try to get my marketing game in better order. I'm considering restructuring the emails to be once a month instead of every two weeks. Let me know your thoughts. (I know I have a couple of folks who love the family updates, or at least they have in the past.) How often do you like getting newsletters? Two a month has been good Switch to once a month Just send me info about sales...
Went with my wife and oldest daughter to college orientation in Arkansas. What a beautiful place! I'm not exactly the most sporty guy in the world (my school didn't offer quidditch), so I never really learned my own school's fight song, and now I have to learn another? But it was fun, and it's great to see my daughter so excited. (I mean, sure, she's excited that she's leaving us, so grain of salt and all that.) Another interesting bit—I’m leave for England the day this is going out. For...
Life is incredibly busy, but, generally speaking, it's also a lot of fun. With three teenage daughters, and now four cars, we've always got something in the shop, always have kids darting in and out of the house, always have exasperating moments of schedule conflicts. But those kids darting about are fun and funny, and the schedule conflicts are because everyone has their interesting stuffs. So yeah, bedlam, but I'm sure I'll miss it. And my wife and I still manage to sneak away for date...