Bye, July
Normally I’m a little wistful at the end of July for a variety of reasons. This year, however, I’m feeling a combination of relief and utter joy.
The relief is because the temps are dropping slightly around here. And I mean slightly, but they’ll going to be in the upper 90s as of 8/5/22 and I for one am grateful for temperatures that aren’t in the triple digits week after week. Supposedly we’re going to have a hot August as well here in the clavicle of Texas, but as long as I’m not seeing 108°F I’m good.
The utter joy is because I took Bryan Cohen’s free Author Ad Profit Challenge and learned some freaking important things about how to make Amazon ads work properly for me, how to write attention-grabbing ad copy, and why it’s important to update your book covers and make sure they’re appropriate for their respective market. I wrote a LOT of ad copy this month. I also recovered A Most Malicious Murder, Shifter Woods: Howl, Shifter Woods: Roar, Shifter Woods: Snarl, and Degree of Resistance, and I made some minor but important tweaks to the cover of Shadow of the Swan.
As a result, I’ve made $204.59 from Amazon sales this month, with an ad spend of $53. Granted, $90 of the sales income is from Crystal Shard, but $114 is from my existing backlist. I never, EVER see numbers like that for my backlist. And this is only after about two weeks of tweaking and improving ads. I’m really looking forward to seeing how I’m doing after a full month of having ads up and running for all of my books.
That being said, I am looking down the barrel of a dilemma. By rights, I should recover all of the Two Thrones books as well because their current covers aren’t in line with the fantasy romance market, which tend to feature royal/magical objects. But—people who buy print books like to have all of their print books from a series match, and there will be four more books in this series. If I switch covers in mid-stream, so to speak, I’m going to be pissing off OG fans and collectors. I do have the option of creating additional print editions of each book so that I can update the ebooks with the new cover, create a print version with the new cover and keep the old print version with the old cover. That being said, I’m not sure how that can all stay organized on Amazon.
Or I could update the ebooks, keep the trade paperbacks with their current covers, and create hardbacks with the updated ebook covers until I finish the series, then update all the trade paperback covers. It’s a bit complicated, but it’s doable.
Oh, well. That’s an issue for August.
Learning, learning, learning
Back in April or so I was supposed to participate in Bryan Cohen‘s 5-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge, which would give me tips on how to improve my Amazon Ads game for my books. As you may remember, Bob, that was also the month I had my knee replacement surgery so unfortunately I missed out on the challenge.
To my surprise, I received an email two days ago inviting me to the next challenge. Since I really do want to improve my ad game I signed up, and two days in I’m already learning stuff about Amazon ads that I never knew before (like, you can have an ad target an entire category instead of keywords. That’s a game-changer).
So I’ve been busily creating new ads for Shadow of the Swan to test which ad copy works the best, which category is most profitable, how auto ads might work for it, etc. The nicest thing is that a slew of people complimented the cover, and I just refurbed the blurb last month so I’m hoping I can get some more traction on that book and read-thru to The Crimson and the Black. Plus, anything I learn will be immediately applied to the Paladins of Crystal books since I’ll be running ads on Crystal Shard once Crystal Blade is out and I can de-RH Shard‘s blurb and keywords.
I saw that quizzical eyebrow go up. Amazon won’t let you run ads on anything that promotes an unusual sexual lifestyle (frex, I can’t run ads on Behind the Iron Cross because it got classified as erotica due to the BDSM content). Since the ‘Zon considers reverse harem to be an unusual sexual lifestyle, you can’t run ads on any book that is obviously RH. Which means that once Blade is out, I can de-RH Shard, run ads on it, and heap the RH references on the rest of the books in the series).
I know, you’re fascinated. Not. But earning promotion and effective advertising is just as much a part of being an indie author as writing, and since I would like Ramón to be able to retire at some point I need to step up my selling game.
In other news Crystal Blade is progressing nicely and will be out on July 31st, 2022, so mark your calendars!
Crystal Shard is live!
Yes, it finally happened! Despite unexpected family events, shingles, and a total knee replacement, Crystal Shard is finally out in the world! I’m describing it as Shadow and Bone meets The Nevers with five tall, hot, protective Big Cat shifters, a small town girl with an unexpected magical talent, and the destiny (and ditzy muse) that throws them together. It’s on sale at Amazon for $0.99 until July 7, 2022, or you can get it from KU.
Here’s the release schedule for the rest of the series:
Crystal Blade (July 31, 2022)
Crystal Reflection (August 31, 2022)
Crystal Citadel (September 30, 2022)
Crystal Empress (October 31, 2022)
There’s a sneak peek of Crystal Blade at the end of Crystal Shard. And if this series does well, I’m planning on at least two and possibly three sequel series. I am never going to sleep again at this rate…
Well, this has been a fun weekend
T
he plan for this weekend was to finish up the last of the second draft edits to Crystal Shard so that I could ship it off to the editor tomorrow when she gets back from NYC. Ha. Hahahaha.
Best laid plans and all that. First, we had a GFCI outlet in our garage go out on Friday. This is kinda important because it not only controls all the exterior outlets but all the outlets in the bathrooms (don’t ask me why, I didn’t build this house). Had to go get a new outlet, then reassure Ramón that I wasn’t going to fry myself replacing it, then not try to roast myself with north Texas heat in the replacing of the outlet. Whee.
Saturday morning, we noticed when we woke up that it was rather toasty in our bedroom. It quickly became apparent that the upstairs AC unit had stopped working. This was the last straw on an immense and unwieldy pile of issues I’d been dealing with for the last month or so and I promptly had a meltdown of my own. Ramón, bless him, stopped me from throwing breakable things at other breakable things and got me calmed down (and frankly, I think I needed the meltdown. I felt immensely better, albeit embarrassed as hell, afterwards) and we worked the problem.
As this unit has been known to blow capacitors, we watched videos on how to replace AC unit capacitors, looked up the capacitor rating in our house repair file, located a localish hardware store that sold replacements, made plans to pick one up Sunday morning, and slept in the downstairs guest room which was cool and comfortable. This morning we took out the unit’s capacitor and tested it, discovered that it was indeed an ex-capacitor that had joined the Choir Eternal, drove out to Celina and the ACE Hardware that carried replacements (they had literally just gotten them in this week so we lucked out big time), came home, installed it, hit the test button to make sure that the unit did indeed run…
…and discovered that while it ran if I was holding down the test button, it wasn’t accepting signals from the inside thermostat that would turn it on and cool off the upstairs. While I spent some increasingly hot time outside fiddling with the unit, Ramón did some research and found out that this model of base unit has a safety switch that shuts it off if its coolant drops below a certain level. We haven’t had it serviced since 2019 (I mean, COVID) so that could well be the issue here. Luckily I had already scheduled an A/C tech to come out tomorrow and give the system a tune-up, so I’ll call them in the morning and give them a heads-up that they may need to do some diagnostics as well (if it isn’t the coolant it may be an issue with a control board in the furnace).
Once we buttoned the unit back up I took a long cool shower and slept the sleep of the extremely hot and tired. And now at 5:07 PM I am finally sitting down to continue editing and, please God, get Shard ready to send to the editor tomorrow.
How’s your Father’s Day (or Sunday for everyone outside of the US) been?
Any hate mail I get is going to be TOTALLY justified…
Gentle Reader (yes, I’m totally hearing Julie Andrews’s voice in my head as I write this), I fear that I must bring you some unpleasant news. As many of you know, I have been struggling somewhat this year to get Crystal Shard, the first book in my new reverse harem paranormal romance series, out and into your hands. It seemed like every time I turned around some new life event exploded in my face and I was forced to push the release date back. I mean, this happened three times. I was starting to think that the book was cursed.
The latest life event to cause a delay was my knee surgery. While I knew that recovery would take at least a good month, I didn’t count on the sheer amount of exhaustion I would experience while my body was busily putting my knee back together. I truly thought that I’d be able to work on Shard from the bed, if necessary, and get it ready for a May 24, 2022 release.
Ho, ho, ho. As it turns out, it’s rather hard to write coherently when you’re on opioid painkillers, muscle relaxants, and the other meds necessary to keep you from wanting to cut your brand-new knee joint off. Who knew? By the time I reached the second week of May I only had about 30,000 words done out of a projected 80,000 words, and I would have to have the file ready for upload to Amazon by 6:00 PM CST on May 20th.
That’s today, by the way.
I did my best to finish the book, I swear to God I did. And when it became very clear that there was no way I’d hit 80K and be able to get it edited in time for the release date I took a good look at the plot and figured that, well, I could cut it in half around the midway point of 45,000 words, release the completed part as a Japanese-style light novel on May 24, then finish the second half and release that as a second book in July.
Yeah. Except that I finally reached that 45,000 point last night at 10 PM. Needless to say, the manuscript is bleeding ink from the margins and is in desperate need of the Editorial Machete, a good scrubbing by the beta readers, and a whole lot of polishing. So as much as I hate to do this, I’m letting the pre-order lapse so that I can give the story all the editing love and attention that it deserves (and possibly bumping it up to 60K in the process) with an eye towards releasing it in early June.
I’m sorry. I am so sorry. You have no idea how sorry I am because I loathe disappointing people and I know there were readers who really, really wanted to read this. But I’m not about to serve you crap, and right now this book … is crap. It needs to be bathed, shampooed, conditioned, blown dry, trimmed, and have its wee toesies painted before it loses the stench it currently emits, and for that I need about two more weeks.
Please forgive me. I will make the wait worth your while, I promise.
So, I have some news…
Those of you who follow me on social media will already know about this but on April 20th I received a Total Knee Replacement for ShitKnee. I kept this quiet until after the surgery because, well, I was nervous and I didn’t want to make anyone else nervous. I’m giving that way.
But it was all surprisingly … well, easy isn’t the right word, especially seeing as I threw up in recovery, then twice in my room from the opioids in the anesthesia. Let’s call it routine. Ramón got me to the hospital at 6 AM, we were shown to a pre-op room where I got gowned and bonneted up and they got my IV started. I was pleasantly surprised when my surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the internist who would be monitoring my recovery, and the charge nurse all stopped in to say hello and answer any questions I had.
I then handed my glasses over to Ramón and they wheeled me off to the OR (which was way more brightly lit than any OR on a medical TV show) and I sat up while they gave me an epidural block. The procedure now is to give a spinal block and a couple of locals in the knee in addition to the general anesthesia, all of which help greatly with pain mitigation. I laid back down, blinked, and the next thing I knew I was in a hallway and my mouth felt like the Sahara.
A nurse came along and gave me a cup of ice chips, which I slowly sucked on until my stomach decided that it was not having with that and promptly regurgitated a gush of fluid that felt way more voluminous than a handful of ice chips would have produced. One nurse said, “Oops, there she goes,” so they took me back to the pre-op room and got me cleaned up, bless them. A little while after that I was transferred to my own room.
And holy crap but hospitals have improved since my last knee surgery 38 years ago. I had a private room with a bit of a view, a nice big bathroom that was easy to hobble into, and a pair of awesome nurses named Gail and Abe who took splendid care of me. My thigh muscle felt a bit crampy from the tourniquet used during the surgery and the muscles along the back of my knee were burning from being manually straightened on the operating table, but the pain meds kept everything down to a dull roar.
Unfortunately I threw up two more times, but this time they had emesis bags nearby and I was able to hurl into those (Gail said that she was impressed I was able to hold it in until she could get me a bag. After I stopped throwing up I explained that I didn’t like making unnecessary work for people). After they gave me Zofran in my IV and my stomach calmed down I got a nice chicken sandwich for dinner and all the water, ginger ale, and jello I fancied, along with a PT session and an OT session. The PT walked in during my second hurling and he told me later that he felt so sorry for me because I looked like I was throwing up my toenails.
The next day was spent having a bagel for breakfast, walking the length of a hallway and back to my room, and learning how to use the ice machine I would be taking home with me. This is a genius little dingus that is essentially a modified cooler with a pump in the lid that pumps ice water (or in my case water that has been chilled by the addition of frozen water bottles) through a hose to a bubbled pad that you can velcro around your knee or other joints. This kind of cold compression therapy reduces blood flow, nerve activity, swelling, and inflammation in the joint, and helps a lot with pain. I had the pad wrapped around my surgical dressing and ACE bandage while I was in my hospital bed, and the nurses would disconnect me when I needed to pee.
By that afternoon my early morning bloodwork had come back all clear, I’d dressed myself and gotten ready to go, and my surgeon blessed my departure. Ramón drove me home and poured me into the guest room bed, where I was supposed to spend two weeks recovering. That being said, I was well ahead on the curve due to my pre-hab exercises (the hospital therapist was surprised that I could lift my leg without assistance and shocked that I’d walked the length of the hallway the day after surgery). When I couldn’t get comfortable Saturday night I decided to very carefully climb the stairs to our bedroom, where I’ve been sleeping every since. I now set up a routine where I sleep up there and spend the day downstairs so I’m only going up and down stairs once a day. I use the guest room for resting, napping, doing my home PT exercises, and reading when Ramón wants to watch anime.
As for the last ten days, I’ve spent them relaxing and letting my knee heal but getting in enough activity to encourage said healing and stop the joint from developing any adhesions or other issues. My surgical dressing is now off and the incision looks extremely good and should heal beautifully as long as I keep it clean and tend to it. I still have a fair amount of bruising around the knee and down the leg, but that’s to be expected, what with the ends of two bones being carefully cut off and replaced with titanium bits.
More importantly, I’ve had two outpatient PT sessions so far at the therapy place connected to my surgeon’s offices and they’ve been extremely pleased with my progress so far. My surgeon was a little concerned about me straightening out the knee and keeping it straight, but I have this hard foam cushion with a U cut out of it that I insert my heel into when I’m lying down and let gravity pull my knee straight. Yes, it’s unpleasant as it sounds, but it works.
I was even kind of naughty this morning. Technically I’m not supposed to drive for at least two weeks and preferably six weeks, but that’s mainly to make sure that 1) you’re not driving with opioid painkillers in your system (I haven’t had any since 4/24) and 2) you can bend your knee adequately and put enough pressure on the brake and gas pedal to operate the car. Well, Ramón was still asleep and we were out of wet cat food for the J Crew, so I went out to the car to see if I could get in and work the pedals without pain. When I found out that I could, I drove to the pet food store and brought back a week’s worth of food. Ramón just grinned and shook his head when I told him about it later on. Mind you, that one little trip wiped me out for the day so I’m not going to be doing the food shopping any time soon, but it’s nice to know that if I do have to drive, I can.
So that’s where I’ve been for the last two weeks. I have to say, I am so happy I got this done. I can already feel the difference in the knee, and once it’s fully rehabilitated I’m going to be more mobile than I’ve been for 38 years. After that, look out.
Shaking Things Up a Bit
So I decided to stripe my bangs last night with Overtone semi-permanent colors for brown hair because I’m Gen X, I no longer care about people’s opinions, and I’ve always wanted to try a multicolored striped look.
Yes, I know it’s kind of hard to see but you can’t get really obvious tints with brown hair unless you bleach it first. I suppose I could go into the dining room where the light is super bright and take another pic there but every joint in my body is complaining about the oncoming bad weather tomorrow so I’m not in the mood.
I used purple, blue, red, and green, and basically just slathered the color onto various sections before letting them sit for about two hours. You can see the purple on the left and the red on the right in this pic, with hints of the green and blue at the top. It’s subtle, but I like it. I may hit the sideburns up with a bit of purple tomorrow night because my wisdom sprinkles are becoming really obvious there and I’d like to see how they look if they’re covered with purple.
Ramón hasn’t seen it yet. It will be interesting to see how long it takes him to notice. I may put this into permanent rotation, who knows, or I may try doing all of my hair in two colors (the blue is actually really flattering so I think doing half of my head red and half blue would be fun).
I also love Overtone because they use mint in their ingredients and my hair is soft and smells bloody marvelous for days afterwards. Jasmine, the mint fiend in the house, keeps following me around and trying to chew on my bangs, bless her fuzzy little heart.
Oh, and I worked on Crystal Shard today. So there’s that.
Varia
I have a subfolder folder on my email inbox that’s called Varia. It’s where I put the email that I want to keep for some reason but doesn’t fit anywhere else. It’s why I’m titling this blog post Varia, because it contains stuff that’s important to me but doesn’t really fit anywhere else. So without further ado:
I have to do the taxes today. And by do the taxes, I mean collate all the numbers that we then submit to our accountant (yes, we have an accountant. What with Ramón’s former 1099 contractor status and me with my multiple streams of income, I’d much rather pay a professional to find any tax breaks we may be eligible for than swear my way through TurboTax, plus their fee is a write-off on next year’s taxes). It’s a task I never look forward to and always feel immensely relieved about once it’s done. Writing this blog post is a way of putting it off for another couple of minutes, but once I hit Publish it’s time to take the laptop upstairs and do battle with the paperwork.
WRT The Slap: it’s a complicated situation that contains many layers to parse, some of which I am not qualified to do so because I am not Black. So I’ll leave that to people better suited to do so. Nonetheless, I’m happy that Will Smith won his Oscar.
I’m struggling to find joy in writing. I don’t know if this is due to the pandemic, the fact that I’m still having problems with Crystal Shard (I really wish I could jump to Crystal Blade, but that’s simply not an option), various hormonal problems that are still plaguing me, or what. But when I think about my schedule for the rest of the year it’s not bringing any pleasure. Rather, I can’t help but think that I’m rushing through time without stopping to enjoy anything and I’m going to regret it at the end. I need to find some way to pause and find some happy moments.
To that end, I’ve just learned that Florence + The Machine will be touring North America this summer and one appearance will be in Irving. Seeing as I use a lot of F+TM tracks in my writing soundtracks I think I’m going to get tickets for Ramón and myself, especially since I’ve already pre-ordered Dance Fever and I’m loving the three tracks that have been released (“My Love” is especially delicious).
I just finished bingeing Bridgerton S2, and while I may catch flack for this I think it was better than the book (the MacGuffin that led to the marriage was period-appropriate, yes, but still awfully contrived. Plus there had already been a hasty marriage to avoid scandal in Book 1 so something different would have been nice).
I need to vacuum the living room, but JJ is asleep and I don’t want to disturb him because he’s twenty years old and has earned his rest. Maybe later when he’s up and eating.
Okay, that’s it for me. Time to head off and wrassle with the taxes. Think good thoughts for me, please.
Crystal Shard has been delayed to April 26, 2022
So I’ve made an executive decision. I’ve moved the release date for Crystal Shard out to April 26th. An explanation:
The initial plan was to have finished the book in February so that I could get it edited and up in time for March 15th, the original release date (which meant that I would have to upload it to Amazon by 6 PM my time on Friday, March 11th).
This fell by the wayside for a complicated set of Reasons, some of which were beyond my control. So I pushed the release date two weeks out to March 29th. Which was, in retrospect, stupid. It still didn’t give me a lot of time to finish the book, and every time I sat down at the keyboard all I could feel was pressure and the looming knowledge that I would have to knock out multiple 10K days.
I can do a 10K day when necessary. Multiples in a row, however, would not have a good effect on my health. For me, a deadline is usually good, but this time it was more suffocating than inspiring. Plus I’ve only just found the RH groups on Facebook and it’s nice to establish yourself as a reasonable individual before you start posting ads for your book.
TL;dr—last night, I decided enough was enough and pushed the deadline back a second time to a full month (and I apologize to my twelve pre-orders, but trust me, you’ll be much happier with the book you’ll get in April). The immediate sense of relief I felt was astounding, and I sat down at the keyboard and knocked out 1K of a smoking hot love scene.
So, yeah, clearly this was the right choice. The rapid release schedule will now be adjusted to April through August, which means that RH fans will have a new series to look forward to over the summer, and I’ll have enough time to write a really spicy reader magnet before Shard gets out there.
Who knows, I may even have time to finish the final novella in my Esposito County Shifters series, whee!
So, about THE CRIMSON AND THE BLACK…
The release has been delayed due to Circumstances Beyond My Control™, and I am heartily sorry about that. But thanks to KDP’s understanding, I have been allowed to push the release back to February 15, 2022 instead of just flushing it, so if you pre-ordered the book you will receive it, just three weeks later than you expected.
Moreover, I still retain my ability to create pre-orders, so that is a huge relief.
And no, I don’t have COVID, although I’m pretty damn sure that I have a sinus infection and will be speaking to a telehealth doctor tomorrow about getting some antibiotics. I have had zero energy this week, and the green snot made an appearance last night—I know from experience that those two symptoms are the starting gun for “Yeah, you need ABX right now.”
And hopefully I will not have COVID next week either, but Ramón had two dental procedures this week and is not feeling all that great right now so who the hell knows (yes, I’ve had my booster, so don’t fret about that). I just want to get this book through the editing process and uploaded to Amazon, and I want everyone to enjoy the big, juicy melon of a romance that is going to land in your eager hands come Tuesday, February 15th, come hell or high water.
Yay 2022…
Nicola Cameron Writes 