March Writing and April Goals

[osprey_archer]

It’s been a long time since I posted about writing, because it’s been a long time since I’ve written very much, but visiting skygiants and genarti and asakiyume inspired me to get back in harness. I am working very slowly on a secondary world fantasy novelette involving a princess in a tower and a magical paper bird and a sorceress’s apprentice.

If this sounds familiar, this story has been in the works for about 15 years. This time I’m going to finish it, though! I finally know what happens!

I also published Diary of a Cranky Bookworm this month, and since it’s basically not selling, I’ve decided that in the future I’ll continue to self pub m/m and m/m/f but will look for trad pub options for anything else. Or might just not write anything but m/m, at least at novel length. The m/m has made 15 times more money than all my other books combined.

I have however accrued a small stable of short stories, mostly fantasy, mostly not romantic, many possibly not publishable. (I know there are readers for a story about a tiny person who lives in a library, but are there venues?) (The one story about the grizzled warrior who falls in love with the magical coffee shop she manages is a shoe-in for publication somewhere, though.). My goal is to submit at least one story each month. May they come back with their pockets full of gold!

Comments

[asakiyume]

Just DIARY some attention on Bluesky and Mastodon. I think you fans should love it!

Here's to wind under your wings for your new writing.

[osprey_archer]

I took the morning off for some errands, but because the errands couldn't begin till the relevant shops opened I had a nice chunk of writing time beforehand, and it went well! The story might really be coming together! Let us hope and pray.

[oracne]

Yay submissions! Fingers crossed for GOLD.

[osprey_archer]

If you keep submitting, you gotta get a hit sometime, right? Every little bit of gold helps.

[passingbuzzards]

Do you have an exclusive-to-Amazon deal with Amazon, out of curiosity? I am interested in buying Diary but I haven’t picked it up because I specifically don’t buy books from them anymore ever since they ended direct downloads, so just wondering if you might ever consider publishing / be able to publish to Kobo or elsewhere. Totally understand if not, though!

Good luck with submitting the short stories! Hoping to see them in print.

[osprey_archer]

If you publish an ebook exclusively to Amazon, you can sign it up for so people can read it on their subscription service, and then get paid for the page reads. These sign-ups are renewed every 90s days, so if you ever decide you want to publish the book elsewhere, you can opt out of the subscription service at the end of the current 90-day cycle and publish elsewhere once its over.

I get a lot of money from pagereads on my m/m books, so I leave them in the subscription service. The f/f books make must less, so most of them have been published wide, and I'm planning to do the same with Diary of a Cranky Bookworm after its first three months are up.

[sholio]

Good luck with the submissions! <3 Gold indeed, I hope!

It's frustrating about Bookworm not doing well, but it is really tough right now to get traction organically for a new book without somehow raising the profile of a book, I'm finding. (Whether through advertising or social media or whatever.)

[osprey_archer]

Go little submissions go! Although I probably need to actually get some submissions out there before I say there.

It rarely feels like a GREAT time for a release, but now seems especially bad what with the world being even more on fire than it's been for the last ten years. What times we live in.