I thought I'd try something a little different -- barfing up my learnings on writing! I only sent this to a few folks who I know are writers, plus my mom, who always at least pretends to want to know what I'm working on. Frankly, though I said writing, I suspect I will rant about all the things associated with writing rather than the writing itself.

I mentioned a couple of newsletters ago that I'm constantly losing money on writing. I thought it was interesting data, and several folks agreed, but I also had the largest number of unsubscribes in one newsletter. So I thought I'd try a segmented group (you're special).

I've put zero thought into organizing this, but I'll fumble forward anyway.

Let me start with this - I set a somewhat arbitrary goal of having 300,000 pages read on KDP this year. The number wasn't completely out of nowhere, but it was a much higher number than anything I'd achieved. Up through 2022, I'd had a lifetime total of about 55k pages read. Then in 2023, I had 108k pages read. I looked at the last couple of months of 2023 and set my target based on them. So I set a goal of 300k KU pages read for 2024. I'm happy to say I'm trending toward 400k. What's interesting is that jump up and slight increase in slope looks like it is from when I released Mother of Trees. I was dead on for 300k, and the new book bumped up the sales. Right? Wellll... no. Take a look at the next chart. (For those who want to know HOW I created this chart, it is from Google Sheets, pulling data from KDP one day at a time. I update the data about once a week, and it takes a few minutes each week to collect that data. Is it worth it? Dunno. It forces me to pay attention, and we only improve things we pay attention to. Generally.)

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The dark blue is Mother of Trees. You can see that it hasn't sold well at all, and is NOT the reason KU sales increased this year. While that's sad, it tells me a couple of things. One, it is marketing of the first series that has increased my sales, not the addition of a new book, so I need to lean into that. Two, I've got something entirely wrong with Mother of Trees. My cover or blurb isn't attractive enough, or it is attracting the wrong folks, who give up on it. Since I've had no bad reviews or ratings, I suspect it is the former - my cover and blurb aren't pulling people in. But that means there is potential for greater sales.

I've decided to pay someone else to redo my cover for MoT. I found a place with middle-of-the-road-pricing: http://www.derangeddoctordesign.com/. I am fairly sure I found them through an article on BookBub about book covers. Deranged Doctor Design manipulates stock photos, but they do an excellent job of it, and it costs about half what I was finding on Reedsy for full-on artists who want to create your covers from scratch.

That's it for now. I don't have a planned pace for these writing-related emails. Let's just see where they go. Let me know if there's anything you'd like me to explain in greater detail or topics of interest.

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Stebe