Category: The Blog

Queen Takes Triune is finally done!

This was a tough book to write. First of all, she’s a long puppy, clocking in at over 90K, making it one of the longest books I’ve written. (That first draft of Rose ages ago at 154,000 doesn’t count). But I had a lot of small threads to tie up.

I wanted some private one-on-one time with as many Blood as I could cram in, that made sense and moved the plot or characterization in some way. There are more tidbits about their past lives that are slowly revealed.

Questions that you had from as far back as the very beginning have now been answered.

It still is awesomely terrifying when the magic happens. Something that I wrote over a year ago as a side-item without much thought is suddenly important and makes sense. Even though I had no idea at the time – I just knew it was true. That it had to happen, or had to be mentioned. It always amazes me when that seemingly careless detail suddenly MEANS something, and I swear I’m not a genius. I had no idea!

Plus life happens, and so a book that I had hoped to release last December suddenly takes me 3 extra months to write. I’m sorry about that, sincerely. Personal life complications plus traveling to Australia, which was incredible, by the way, all interfered with my momentum. I’m a momentum, or exponential writer. I write faster the longer I go and I have to find my stride. So every interruption, or days where I couldn’t write, meant I had to basically start over at the 500 words/day speed.

Sometimes a book can dump out of me in a month. This one needed that extra time.

Deep down, it was hard because I wanted to do Shara full, complete, perfect justice. This is her last book as I know her story now, in this moment. Her series is complete. Yeah, I know. I didn’t want to see her finish either, and I wrote about that in the Author’s Note at the end.

This isn’t the last we’ll see from her, I promise. She will have more to say after she takes a much needed rest. Please remember that she’s still VERY YOUNG, only 22. Her youngest Blood is already 69! She deserves some down time and fun. It might have taken me over a year to finish her story, but if you look at the calendar… Only 3 months has passed between Knights and Triune.

THREE MONTHS.

She went from a nobody on the run, to Shara fucking Isador, last daughter of Isis. She conquered not just the queen of New York City but also Ra, the god of light, and that’s before you even see all the shit-kicking and name-taking she does in Triune.

In three. Fucking. Months.

So she has big plans. Huge. There are things I know you’ll all want to learn more about and you’ll still have NEW questions at the end of Triune. There is so much more to come! But Shara is taking a break for now. Let her live and love and grow and rest, for just a little while.

And brace yourself for the incredible showdown she’s going to reveal in this book.

We’re in final edits now. Look for the release in the next few days!

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about when you can expect the next Their Vampire Queen book. I hate to be vague, but SOON is the best I can say.

She’s my #1 Priority. The only project I’m working on. And I am making really good progress. The end is in sight. I know how the book ends and I know most of the showdown. It’s just a matter of getting there, but not skipping any of the good stuff.

However, I leave for Sydney, Australia on Monday, and I have a million things to do over the weekend, both to prepare for the trip as well as some Evil Day Job things that I couldn’t finish this week. They really really need to be done by Monday, so… it’s weekend work or it doesn’t get done.

I wanted to be finished by Monday, but with EDJ needs this weekend, I don’t know that I’ll get enough hours in the chair to finish. And it is HOURS. I write exponentially more at the end of the book in a shorter amount of time. That means when I get the final goal line in sight, I start writing 8-10K a day, sacrificing sleep as needed LOL. I don’t think I’m going to be able to write 8-10K a day *and* prepare for the trip *and* work. But we’ll see.

She is coming. Soon. I’m doing the best I can given all the pieces in motion. I won’t do a pre-order – she’ll go live immediately as soon as edits are finished and my team has already seen the first third. I’ll get the them the next chunk before I leave for Australia, even if I don’t finish, and I will be writing on the trip too.

Long live House Isador!

Over the next few weeks, things may look wonky as we work to implement a store on the site where you can buy signed print copies and other merchandise. Please be patient! I’ll be writing like a mad person during this time too since I have 3 stories due 10/1, AND will be traveling to St. Louis next weekend. 

But it’s going to look great once everything’s up!

This is an update to this Process post.

Stephanie Christine asked if I was still using a bujo for writing and the short answer is YES.

I actually filled up an entire notebook!  Okay, this might seem like a dumb thing to be proud of — unless you saw how many notebooks I have with 10% (or less) of the pages used and then it’s stuck on a shelf, never to be used again.

Here’s proof that I filled up an entire notebook! You can see the word count stickers I continued to use all the way to the end, plus random notes to myself as I needed it.

My only complaint with this method was cutting out the word count stickers. They were just a hair too long to fit into my notebook without hanging out, and it annoyed me when it hung off the side or got crooked.

The Etsy shop where I bought the Tomoe River notebooks (Paper Penguin Co) had a new notebook they intended to be used as a monthly calendar/planner. It was so colorful and artsy with the watercolor splashes that it inspired me to give it a try, even though it’s not the super nice paper I like. I got the grid version, and now instead of having to cut out the word count stickers, I just color in the grids under each day’s totals. It’s not dated, so if I want to skip days, or need to go over to another day, it works perfectly.

(You can see those massive weekend counts I had in order to finish!)

My only slight gripe is that it bugs me that each day isn’t symmetrical. But I’m trying to just go with the flow and not be anal about one day having more space than another. It’s actually great (if I’d just get over my appreciation for symmetry) because I can’t write as much during the week as I can on the weekend, assuming That Man stays out of my hair.

I’m still using my other Tomoe River notebook that I customized a bit. For example, when doing my first pass edits, I make a scene list, a timeline, and a fresh character list, along with a master list of any questions or things I want to consider changing that involve more thought. It also has all my research notes in it. I know a ton of Maya mythology after the Bloodgate series – but did not know quite as much Aztec mythology as I needed for Queen and I had to look a bunch of things up.  There are *many* similarities, but unique items too that I had to document.

I’m also using a combination of several planners at the moment – but I haven’t settled into a routine with them yet.  I picked up both the New Release Planner and the Book World Domination planner from Nicole.  There are pieces of each one that I like a lot and have printed out, but I keep forgetting to use as much as I need to.  These are especially helpful for planning out release schedules.  I need a calendar to do that – and I don’t want to have to draw one in my bujo.

That’s one thing I’m still adjusting to:  lead time.  I have pre-order dates to set, coordination with the formatter, cover artist, editor, beta readers, etc.  It’s not just MY date I need to keep track of. I’ve already had one release go out with my crap temporary cover and it was my lack of enough cushion in the schedule to get other people’s things in place.  I’m also struggling with the best way to keep track of the various promotions I try, for which book, how much it cost, and what the ROI was.  I’m getting better at this with the New Release Planner though the sheets provided are for a single book – not across all my spending each month.

AND yes, I bought a different downloadable planner that is focused on tarot: The Biddy Tarot Planner. This one is more weekly and monthly focused with spreads to help you tap into your intuition. I’m behind on it already, but I’ve been trying to pull a card each day and think about what it may mean. It came with a cool printable tarot card set that’s the perfect size to stick into the planner for the card of the week. I printed them on sticker paper!  However now I’m back to having to cut things out, which yeah, I find annoying (I can’t cut straight and back to the symmetry thing again).

For each of these downloadable planners, I printed out the pages I liked and used an ARC system to make my own pseudo 3-ring binder. I’m reusing the cover I made ages ago because I love how it looks – even though I get annoyed because things slip around.

 

So what has all this tracking accomplished, you ask?  The numbers speak for themselves and you can see exactly when I started to shake things up and get some traction after a disappointing 2016.

• May: 2,324 words
• June: 49,281 words
• July: 19,888 words
• August: 3,589 words (a bit of a hiccup here with school starting, Princess went to college)
• September: 29,851 words
• October: 38,265 words
• November: 41,194 words
• December: 17,711 words (this would have been way larger if That Man hadn’t planned an Eureka Springs trip on my week I’d taken off from the Evil Day Job to write)
• January: 61,434 and the month isn’t over yet.

2017 was a stinking pile of burning trash in a giant Dumpster for many reasons that I’m not going to rehash or get into here. I’m going to concentrate on only WRITING and mostly GOOD stuff. 

Between Samhain drama and my Carina series getting canned, I wasn’t in a good place. In 2016, the only new material I’d managed to finish was a short novella. I felt stuck in many ways. Then I had surgery at the end of the year. Up until May of this year, I wasn’t writing in 2017 either (at least not with my normal drive and determination). It was looking like another really bad year and I thought about walking away from publishing for good. Who would notice, honestly? (That’s what my brain was telling me. I hadn’t had a new release in so long I might as well have dropped off the face of the planet.)

But a few things happened in 2017 that set the wheels in motion for bigger and better things.

• Samhain finally officially closed and I got all my rights back.
• I took Becca Syme’s Write Better Faster workshop in May. (I talked about it here)
• I joined Love Kissed Author Promotions Facebook group in June/July.
• I bought a premade cover from Cover Me Darling on June 16th (I talked about finding it here).

I could write paragraphs about how each of these bullets cascaded into new opportunities and challenges but I don’t want to write a book in this post! So I’m going to let the numbers speak for themselves.

Achievements/New Challenges in 2017

• Set up my first pre-order in KDP (and met it).
• Set up my first print book with CreateSpace.
• Set up my first boxed set.
• Re-released 4 of my old Samhain titles as an indie.
• Re-released 3 of my old Samhain titles with Entangled.
• Finished 3 new books (just under 200,000 words) and started a 4th.
• Submitted a different proposal (3 chapters + synopsis) to Carina. Ultimately it was rejected but I’m still glad I went through the motions and I fulfilled a promise I’d made.
• FINALLY hit #1 bestseller in an Amazon category!
• Tracked all my sales across all channels and all books that I have control over for the entire year.
• Created 3 graphs to plot out the optimum release schedule for the rest of the QUEEN books.

Here’s the GOOD STUFF – the numbers.

• I’ve given away 11,072 FREE books to increase my newsletter and KU pages read.
• Jan – Aug I had 2,318 page reads (very few books in KU).
• Sept – 12,208 page reads (when I moved everything into KU).
• Jan – Sept I sold 664 books.
• Oct was the game changer with QUEEN TAKES KNIGHTS release.
  • Gave away 3567 downloads the week after release
  • Still had 125 sales
  • With 201,757 page reads
• Then QUEEN TAKES KING continued to push the numbers up in Dec.
• Bringing my 2017 totals (through today) to
  • 1987 sales
  • 554,097 page reads

These are not huge numbers for the big-time indie sellers. I’m not hitting any lists with these numbers!  But for ME, this is huge and means I can easily continue to fund new covers and books and even pay some other bills without depending on my Evil Day Job bonus to seed a new series. Comparing July sales (163, when Mal’s book released) to December (774, when King released) is a 375% increase.

It came down to THREE THINGS.

*   Not giving up when I really wanted to.

*   Not being afraid to give away free books to build my readership.

*   And stumbling across the premade cover that I fell so hard for, which went on to be QUEEN TAKES KNIGHTS.

That cover inspired the entire series that turned the numbers around in a huge way.

So here’s to a bigger, better 2018!  My pie in the sky goals:

• 1 million words written
• 1 million page reads
• 5,000 sales.