Don't worry, I won't. I mean, I do have an old YouTube channel where I did some baking, so I suppose I could post that, but I'm not an instagram girl either, or valley girl or whatever they call those "let's take a selfie" kinda girls. 🤣
I did post a pic of the Costco hotdogs first time I had one as it was the size of my husbands forearm, but that was a measurement thing, not a food thing 🤣
Costco hot dogs. 🤣
If it's not lattes or pastries or expensive main courses, you'll be fine!
Hey, by the way, do you have a literary agent?
Well, if I were to ever drink a latte, that is any kind of coffee drink, I'm pretty sure my husband would post that and tag me as proof of it having happened, as I don't like coffee 🤣 and if I posted a pic of an expensive meal, it would probably be to make fun of it. 😎
No, I self publish and do all the editing, cover design, and all of it myself. My husband helped s bit but I more so help him go from Kindle cover to Paperback and Hardback. How come you're wondering?
I self-published my first full novel this summer but don't have time to market it. I'm now working on the second one, and wonder if it's worth it if I can't get it out there for people to read.
Are you having success selling your books?
Well done! I've published 2 novels, 2 planners, and one translation of my first novel. I've sold a total of 19 copies from when I first published at the end of August 2022.
My husband is also an author and he's sold way more, like over 200.
He tried Fb ads for a bit and got a few more sales on one book, and then put the link to his books on Amazon when he did food delivery in Flagstaff and got multiple sales seemingly from that.
We've concluded that we're authors no matter what, and when someone does come across our books, if there are lots of options, it's way more likely that they'll see one they're willing to buy. So I'd say keep writing!!
I'm in a fb group for writers where one guy just shared how he sold 5500 books in 2024, but he went to trade shows for part of it. Not book shows because the competition is too high.
I'd like to order some and sell in person but I haven't gotten around to that yet.
I only just for my green card so I felt a bit weird not quite knowing their rules for how they count "working". But now I'm all clear on that front.
This is an interesting perspective: writers no matter what. I'm not really on Facebook, but I feel a bit alone in this whole thing.
I've been struggling with writing the next one. The first one required some much energy (I'll DM you the listing so I don't dox myself). Why put all of that work into it when I can't even get my family to read it?
Thing is, I have these stories in my head, so I sort of write to get them out.
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 🤣
