January 26, 2022
Week 68
Emotional State: Feeling Accomplished… Mostly
Books & Writing
It’s done! Revision 1 to Book 2 is complete. I woke up at an ungodly hour this morning (5 am) for some stupid reason (it’s cold, my heat kicked on and it’s not quiet), and finished revising the last two chapters. To be fair, the last chapters are normally the easiest as they are wraps (with teasers!) and not very meaty.
But still. It’s done before my self-imposed deadline of Jan. 31st.
And it’s mostly good. The storyline is tighter, I’ve added the details I needed, and figured out a few things as well. But I also pantsed a new scene or two that were unexpected, and I am wobbling all over the place on world building info dumps, previous book reminders, and general red herrings that still need to be sorted.
For example, somewhere at the end of Act 2 (chapter 26, I think), I share some information about the phyla (species trees in my book). It makes sense for the plot for it to happen then, but shouldn’t I move it up a bit? And shouldn’t she know this already? Maybe. And yes and no. So a few things to figure out there.
I realized when writing the Big Bad scene that my description of the room she’s in wouldn’t work, so I’ve addressed that in Chapter two… sort of. Again, I need to nail down exactly what the room looks like, what the turns and bends in the hallway it takes to get there and be more specific so that the readers can see it like I see it (technically not, because I don’t see it. I had to remind myself what windows I was talking about.
The dates are a bit messed up as well. I had it ending before Thanksgiving, but not enough time will pass for it to work for Christmas… but that’s something that happens in Book three. I’ll figure that out when I tackle that draft later.
But it is done. I can take a few days off of it and then read it out loud in one long go and start editing it again in February. The goal is to get it line editor ready by March, but that means I need to line up my line editor (ha!) so that I have somewhere to send it and most editors get booked pretty quickly. Eh, I’ll add it to the pile of tasks.
Because next up….
READER MAGNET PROCRASTINATION BITES BACK
Okay. I’ve known since at least July of last year that I was going to need what is called a reader magnet. It’s usually a free story within the world of the book that is used to entice people to not only read the published book, but also sign up for the newsletter.
I’ve waffled over it for months. Months.
What stories to use? What angle to take? What’s my best option? If I include any of Angwyndith, I ruin the big surprise in Chapter four (which is one of my favorite chapters) of the current book. But if I don’t use the pre-Book 1 materials, what am I using? I wanted to use the secondary character backstories and chapter perspectives for a novella to publish between Books 3 and 4. One, to give me a break from writing the main books, but two, to build up my backlist.
Anyway, here we are. I’ve also known since December at least that the TikTok fantasy author group I’m apart of were going to be doing a BookFunnel promotion in February. BookFunnel is used by many to distribute either books or, you guessed it, reader magnets. I wanted to do it to see if it helped generate sales (there haven’t been any) and to build my newsletter list.
Because here’s the thing – newsletters are still very much a BIG DEAL to authors. I know, I know, how very early 2000s of us, but it’s the truth. A strong email list of superfans who care about what you’re rambling on about every month in your newsletter (or more frequently depending on the author) is gold, according to every single successful author and author marketing strategy out there.
Back to my drama. A week or so ago, I decided to go for it – do the reader magnet promotion in February. I’d use the Tiktok promotion to get my ass in gear and get it done. After signing up (and paying for – so many things to pay for!) BookFunnel, my heart dropped when I read the promotion details. I had to have a magnet ready to go by January 22nd. Not February 1st, which was a comfortable 19 days away, but January 22nd, which was a week away.
Um, yeah.
I spent most of last week – almost all my free time – working on my reader magnet. I decided to use the early material from Seraphina’s life, because I had it mostly drafted and had had editor feedback on it, so it wasn’t completely rough. I wrote, revised, wrote some more, changed my mind on one chapter and flipped it to Seraphina’s perspective. It was not bad. Not great, but not bad. Okay.
But then I realized I needed to format it for epub delivery. Now, I knew I needed to learn how to do this for the next books I’m putting out, but it was on my schedule for June or something. Three days. THREE DAYS of figuring out which programs to use, fixing the format in Word, playing around with the Reedsy Free Editor, and watching a lot of Youtube tutorials. I finally got there – I had a mostly good formatted epub that I could use as my reader magnet.
Is it perfect? No, but it’ll be as good as I can get to perfect by the time it’s launched on the first.
But what about the cover? It needs to be in genre, eye catching, similar to my first book, and something I can create with my limited skillset to do so. I thought I had it down. I purchased an image and put it in Canva, created a cover and felt pretty good about it. Until I took a look at one of the group promotions running on BookFunnel right now and saw that all their covers looked like proper covers and not something I mashed together in Canva.
Screech. Back to the drawing board. Next idea – take one one of the design concepts I didn’t use for my first book and repurpose it. Can I do that? I don’t know. I’m not selling the magnet, it’s a freebie, so I hope so… A full day’s work later and my cover looks okay. It’s better than the original try, but not as good as Book One’s cover, but it’s done.
AUTOMATED EMAIL HELL
Next challenge (oh yeah, it just keeps going). If I’m delivering a reader magnet, I need to make sure my email onboarding sequence is solid. Cue speed reading the book I bought – you guessed it – last year as part of my need to get this done moment. Luckily, it’s short. Also luckily, it’s targeted to my email platform and is very informative.
Onboarding emails require at least one welcome email, a check in, and then (but preferably four) introductory emails to you the author and your books/inspiration/life… I’m not totally sure what goes in those to be honest, but I’ve written them. Three or four days work later and I’ve got my onboarding sequence created in MailerLite. It follows the book to a T.
But I still don’t know how I get the people from my website signup and the people from the BookFunnel sign up to get into the onboarding sequence because it starts with a trigger – join group onboarding – and then branches off based on other group inclusion – get cookie or don’t get cookie. After spending at least two hours writing it down, in detail and in multiple ways (because the pretty image on my screen wasn’t cutting it), the light bulb went on and I figured it out.
The groups populate from the landing pages you create to get the information you need. For my website, it’s an embedded form. For anything else I do, it’s a quick/easy/short landing page with all the details you need to send a reader to for sign up. Okay. Four or five fairly easy landing page setups later, I think I’m ready.
But wait, there’s more.
I still need to revise the reader magnet (I can update it on BookFunnel whenever I need to) a few more times so that it’s as polished as I can make it. I also need to add the new embedded form and the reader magnet itself to my website. Yeah… I haven’t done any of that yet. I’ll get it done in time. I hope.
First, though, I’m going to bask in the glory of a finished revision 1 of book two.
For today only.