I didn't see a DM yet... sometimes I think the relays might meddle with DMs so they never show up to the other person...
Are your family the kind of people who would normally enjoy the kind of stories your first novel is about? And do they like reading? Sometimes our family are the hardest to get to read our stuff.
I've started to figure our who my ideal audience is, so if I somehow get their attention so they know my books exist, it's more likely one of them will buy it.
I'm still trying to figure out how to do that though 😅
If someone influential gets a hold of a book they really like, and share it, that's one way to get way more sales, but it can be hard to get something over to such a person so that they actually read it.
One thing I've learned though, is that if it's out there, it's way more likely that someone will find it and it will take off, even if it takes years.
So that's part of why we're just gonna keep writing and each book will be better as we grow, and eventually we'll write something people like, and then the rest of the books can take off too, if someone likes our style and sees that there are other books by the same author. I've done that myself, if I liked someone's style.
My 1st novel took 5 months to write, edit and publish, but I'd thought of the story for 7 years before that. My 2md novel took about 2 years, as I didn't like the main character and swapped her out completely and rewrote a bunch of the story to better suit her maturity level (the first one was pathetic and thus her counter parties were kinda pathetic too 😅)
Writing is hard and getting recognition really helps with the process to keep going, but it's still better to keep going as long as there are more stories to tell.
I'm having a hard time getting started on the 2nd book in my series, because I'm not sure how to organize it yet. I know the main antagonist in all 9 books, but I don't know the early ones as well as the later ones (they keep getting worse) so I have decisions to make, but I'd prefer to write something easier, so now I kind of have 3-4 projects going and maybe something more soon, but sometimes it helps me to work on something else because when I go back to the original book, it had sunk in more and I've worked out some details I didn't even realize I'd been working on during the break.
I hope some of this helps! I love sharing my thoughts on things I've picked up on or learned... hence why clearly I'm an author, if you couldn't tell my the small book I just wrote 🤣
