Tuesday, April 2nd

The Daily Report

Man, the beginning of the month is always dispiriting when I'm paying attention to my Amazon sales. The basic sales report follows a monthly format. During March, I had record sales... mostly on the strength of my push for reviews. April 1st comes along, and... APRIL FOOLS! No sales. I know that's only temporary. In fact, there's a sale showing up now. I also know it's not likely to match last month's sales without another push, but I know that making the same push is going to have diminishing returns... and also get obnoxious.

So I've decided to single out one of my stories and put my weight behind it. "I Do Not Fight Monsters" was the breakout hit of the month, with the most sales, the most requests, and the most reviews. It seems like the one that has the greatest chance of catching fire. That's why I've put an ad for it in the sidebar of Tales of MU. I'm going to try pushing it in other venues and channels as well.

(If you've got a buck to spend and you really want to help me out to maximum efficiency, you can buy a copy of that story and review it.)

My plans for yesterday went pretty well... I'm now "done" with both chapters for this week. I put "done" in quotes because I'm setting aside an hour on posting day to go over the chapter one more time to try to improve it.

Really, I'm trying to combine the benefits I got from spending multiple days lingering over each chapter with the benefits I get from doing a whole chapter in a day. I'm always at my best when I can get the words flowing quickly and smoothly, plus it's easier to keep up with curveballs that life throws me when I can hammer out the body of a chapter in a day.

But my best gets better when there's room for reflection, though. Sleeping on a story and then coming back to it almost always makes it better, sometimes much better. When I'm working ahead of the game, there's more than one chance for that, and if I know in advance that a story is going to take a lot of extra work I can give its whole posting day over to working it over.

The State of the Me

Slept well last night, though I had the kinds of dreams I associate with travel anxiety. Weird, since I'm not here all this month and most of the next one. I guess travel has just become an ingrained part of my psyche.

Plans For Today

I have a chapter of Tales of MU to post. I have a couple of miscellaneous tasks, too, but parts of my work environment are going to be beyond my control today, so I'm keeping it light.

Fishing for discounts.

The ad rep for some site just emailed me today to say they really want to advertise on my site and think I should offer them a discount because that would be an incentive for them to advertise with me.

No mention of what their site is (apparently, it's men's wear) or why they think my adult serial fiction is such a great match for them or why *I* would want their business so much I'd court them with a discount.

The sad thing is, I can tell that the approach works often enough for this to be a thing for them. They find smaller sites in the network (which tend to be bargain-priced to begin with) and then vaguely flatter them to get it for even cheaper. They probably send the same message out to a bunch at once and see wo bites.

Maaan, I don't have a problem finding advertisers, and most of the ones I get are more relevant to my site than that. PETA used to buy $100 worth of ads at a time until they started putting gross-out ads up there and I blocked them. $100 every couple of months isn't something to sneeze at, but if they're driving away readers then it's going to cost me more than that in the long run.

But if I can turn down that kind of money, what makes you think I'm going to chase after you for $5?