Back from the editing trenches

Of book sales, author delusions and other happenings in the world of Diana

Long time, no see - but I‘ve been busy. A lot happened since my last newsletter, a lot of exciting stuff actually - from book sales to theme songs and book trailers, plus daring social media adventures.

But first things first - the status of Heimkehr nach Greenvale Park, because I‘m delusionally believing that you‘re all dying to get your hands on my latest masterpiece. Look, you can‘t survive in this business if you‘re not delusional from time to time (always?), or reality crushes your soul into a million pieces. So. Greenvale Park. I finished the developmental edits and have now moved on to fine-tuning, also known as line edits. The part where you meticulously hunt and kill filler words, reevaluate word choices and slowly reach the point of madness where you question your command of language. All I have to do is print it and read it again, because you see even more once you change the medium, and send it to a dear friend who graciously agreed to proof-read it for grammar and the inevitable typos.

July showed me that all of this is not in vain, because Mistress Fortuna graced me with three sales - the very first one of Wettstreit der Herzen, too! My foolish little heart of course believes that someone found the Ramen Diaries (available for free), moved on to Zarte Bande and then Wettstreit. Which would be a sign that my strategy is working - sometimes. The Ramen Diaries are at 183 downloads, which is pretty amazing in itself, although I have no idea how many of these 183 people actually read it.

To challenge my reluctance when it comes to marketing, I declared Mondays are for Marketing and I try to use at least one of the channels available to me to post something - either about me, or my books. Naturally, the stuff about me is wildly more successful in terms of reach than the book stuff, but - any person I do reach has the potential to become a new reader, so I have to keep on trucking forwards. I was very glad that I found a guy named Johnny B. Truant through Draft2digital’s podcast, who’s proposing to bring back the fun that self-publishing used to be, meaning not doing rapid releases and not catering to Amazon’s ruthless algorithm. He states that in the age of AI, being unique is the only asset we human writers have, and we need to take advantage of that. Let the bots write for the bots. I preordered his book “The Artisan Author” which will be released in November and am looking forward to learn more strategies of doing this book selling thing without losing my mind doing social media. A thing that was extremely sobering: This guy has over a 100 books up on Amazon, and he’s only making 200$ a month there. Obviously, he’s found other ways to sell, because he’s a full-time writer, but this just confirms to me that Amazon is an ocean tiny fishes like me are just destined to drown in.

I also put up the opening of each of my books on my website, to give people a taste of what is waiting for them, should they stumble across my little corner. I am so glad that I decided to try a page builder and to move away from Wordpress (after 20 years!), because it’s so much easier to have a pretty website and keep it up to date without having to worry about the tech in the background. And it has been a long time since I was actually excited to create content for my website, and now I have so many ideas I want to do. Magic!

Speaking of bots and AI - I love all the creative outlets this technology is giving me without breaking the bank. I made a Greenvale Park theme song, and lets be real - this would’ve never happened otherwise, because I don’t have the funds to hire a song writer, a composer, an orchestra and a singer, a recording studio and a producer, and pay for the rehearsals, the recording and post-production as well. Suno has made leaps and bounds regarding the quality and if you don’t know, you wouldn’t even think that it’s not a human singing. I used a part of the song for another thing I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise, because paying an illustrator to do a bunch of images is also not an option: I made a book trailer, which is up on my Youtube channel. And I did both not just for marketing purposes, but rather because I simply enjoy doing it and expressing my ideas and the world in my head not just through words but other media as well, and I hope this shines through even if I didn’t compose the song or painted the images. It took me a day to make the song, and half a day to cut the video, so there’s definitely still human effort in there. Contrary to popular believe, if you want a great result, even with AI it’s not just pressing a button and you’re done. Far from it.

I also learned an important thing: I cannot edit one book and write the next one at the same time. I don’t think that this influences my planned release of Der Innere Kompass next year, as I wisely haven’t set a publication date yet, and because I write the bulk of my books during my vacations anyway. And there are plenty of vacation days left to make it happen. For now I’m enjoying Greenvale Park living in my head for a while longer, as it’s such a happy place to be mentally stuck in, before I throw Adelie and Nate back into academy life and give them other problems to solve.