I’ve made a decision—I’m going to get at least five chapters of Crystal Blade tuned up and loaded to Vella at some point this weekend.

Why? Because it’s halfway finished and is surprisingly clean, my sales have absolutely tanked (more on that later), and I need to make money somehow. I’ll make sure the chapters are edited and all shiny before I upload, don’t worry about that. And when the book is all done I can take down the chapters and publish it. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.

And yes, I’m gonna keep doing the other two Vella series I have planned. But I need income now and this is the best way to achieve that.

So, my sales tanking. That appears to be a three-fold issue. Issue #1: KU payouts are at a historical low. This may be due to a KU strike fomented on TikTok back in February that was meant to punish Amazon for letting people buy books, read them, and return them. Unfortunately, it just hurt indie authors who have seen our page reads dwindle over the past eight weeks/

Issue #2: I don’t have details about this so I can’t say anything for certain but it’s been bruited about in certain quarters that some romance heavy hitters have been allowed into KU. Without being required to be exclusive to the ‘Zon, I may add, but hey, rules are for little people. That kind of a book influx from authors with a big following essentially swamps KU and makes it even more difficult for people to find indie titles, thus sales droop even further.

Issue #3: This one has been confirmed by the ‘Zon itself—there’s some kind of problem on their side that is preventing AMS ads with custom text to be served to potential customers. They’re working on it but we don’t have an ETA for a fix. In the meantime my AMS dashboard is flat as a rock since 4/12 and that lack of advertising has an effect on my sales, hence my decision to start uploading Crystal Blade to Vella. As soon as I have links for that, I’ll let you know.

I’m at that point in a book where I’m looking at it and wondering whatever made me think I was literate in the first place. This is perfectly normal and happens to about 95% of writers—we’re known to have highs and lows in our confidence (thanks to she-who-fights-and-writes for this visual explanation of the insanity that goes on in a writer’s brain).

Right now I’m at “No on will ever read this book because it sucks and is the absolute worst.” But the interesting thing is that there is also a tiny part of my brain that is saying, “Well, no, this is actually pretty cool. You just need to finish and edit it.” That’s the part that I’m desperately encouraging at the moment.

I think part of the problem is that I worry that I’m adding too much worldbuilding and non-romance stuff to my romances. But that’s the way my brain works—I want to know the background of my MCs, I want to know what problems are lurking in the background and how their world got to that point in addition to the spine-tingling, toe-curling romance. But I’m always afraid that readers are thinking, “Ugh, why is she bothering with all this political crap—get to the smexy times!”

Mrgh. Enough people buy my stuff that there must be readers out there who want worldbuilding along with sex. So I’ll write for them and try to add more of them to my audience.