The biggest news for this month is that I have a rare solo outing coming up!

*I don’t math well, so don’t come at me about these percentages.

If you live in the area and haven’t been by the Bookish Boutique yet, you should definitely make the trip! While the merchandising and, to some extent, the decor and marketing seem to lean pretty heavily toward romance readers, they sell a wide variety of books, including both new releases and used books. They also hold events, like author signings, pretty frequently, and the staff are super friendly and passionate about books.

I usually do at least a couple of events every year, but they’re almost always conventions or local indie author events where I’m part of a larger group. Doing a solo event is both exciting and nerve-wracking, as there’s always the fear that no one will show up. I’m trying to keep this anecdote from Neil Gaiman in mind for comfort:

If you follow me on the socials, though, be prepared to get sick of hearing/seeing me post about it as we get closer to the event.

As I was thinking of ways to promote the event (and the book, of course), I realized I didn’t have any good “product” shots of Bloodlands. Canva has some neat tools to make mock-ups, but they’re fairly generic, like so:

Some of the mock-up templates I found for purchase weren’t much better. Blank surfaces, flowers, and white candles seemed to be the most common aesthetic pieces, which don’t exactly fit the personality of me or my book at all.

It just so happened that I’d scheduled a few days off to burn vacation and get some writing/book-related projects done, so I took the opportunity to set up a little photoshoot in our house. We have plenty of unusual props lying around, after all.

This is one of the shots I ended up being pretty satisfied with, but in order to get to that, I had to clear space to move my side table into the living room (better lighting), set up my ring light for additional lighting, find an extension cord so that said ring light could reach an outlet, dig out bookmarks and the table runner from my event set-up box, find and experiment with props, experiment with more lighting, and experiment with angles.

Our living room isn’t normally this messy (honestly!), but we have a bunch of crafting supplies out as we’re getting an early start on Halloween costumes. We made duct tape dummies of ourselves so that we can easily create fitted patterns for foam armor sets. My weights and weight bench are pretty much always out in the living room, though, because that’s how I get my gains.

Long story short, the indie author hustle is real and time-consuming and sometimes exhausting. I’d probably make it easier on myself by using tools that are already out there, but sometimes I just can’t bring myself to compromise on my vision.

Speaking of the indie author hustle, I have been working on putting a monthly email newsletter together. I signed up for a service, went through the surprisingly technical tasks of authentication and alignment to prevent my future newsletters from ending up in your spam folder, and played around with the editor. Now I just have to figure out the content of these newsletters and how to get subscribers.

There will be some inevitable overlap between the monthly blog post and the monthly newsletter, or maybe the newsletter will include a link to the monthly blog post as part of its content. Either way, I don’t want them to be exact copies of each other, so I’d really love some feedback on what readers would like to see. Maybe a “Currently Reading” feature or other types of book recommendations? Opinion pieces? Or maybe some really silly stuff like character interviews or “Which Bloodlands Character Would Murder You and Why?” quizzes? I’m all ears for ideas!

As far as starting to collect subscriptions, however, that’s another technical problem to solve. Creating a subscription collection form through my email campaign service is easy. Integrating said form into WordPress is also easy… if you have access to plugins. And having access to plugins is easy… if you pay $300 annually for a domain plan.

Suffice it to say, I can’t justify that type of expense just to pester people digitally with my monthly brain dumpings. The email service does give you a javascript and html code to use, but it’s not a straight forward process. YouTube to the rescue… I hope. As soon as I have some kind of accessible sign-up form, I’ll be sure to update the site.

Finally, this month’s Nightlands progress has been a little slow, partially because I hit another extra long chapter in serious need of trimming and partly because Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth came out and ate my free time. I’ve generally avoided lengthy video games while working on the book, but this was a must-play for me on nostalgia factor alone.

(Once, a distressingly long time ago, I really got my start with writing via Final Fantasy fanfics, but that’s an origin story that really doesn’t need to be told.)

I did, however, get two chapters closer to closing out another revision pass, so that puts us on chapter 22 of 25.

Aside from working through the gun fights, stabbings, and difficult reckonings with past traumas that make up chapters 20 & 21, I also started documented some fairly extensive revision notes for the earlier parts of the book. Now we’re starting to get into some fine tuning.

That’s pretty much it for the month of March! By the next post, I hope to have that newsletter up and running!