My first month as a published author!

Hello, hello. It might be really cliché to say but I honestly can't believe January is over. The first month of the year is gone already and that's just wild to me. I'm trying my best to stay motivated for just about everything in my life right now but it's hard because the world is on fire and my country has turned into a real life dystopian novel. It's kind of always been this way but wow has it gotten so much worse. I'm feeling everything very heavily right now and I keep getting lost in a "what's the point" mindset.

Writing stuff

When it comes to my writing, I have not written anything new. I started one new story but quickly trashed the idea because it sucked lol. Then I also tried to return to an older idea, but for some reason it's just still not working for me. So, I don't know if I'm ever going to continue that story. Maybe I'll just try to rework some of it into another new story because I don't hate all of it. But as a whole, I'm not liking it.

Newbie publishing stuff

For the month of January, I published two books (technically three, but I'll get to that later). I did not receive any sales because I just dropped them on amazon and dipped lol. I just can't bring myself to do social media like Instagram and Tiktok. Tiktok is apparently in shambles right now anyway since it was sold to new owners. As for Instagram, I've started and deleted so many different accounts that I finally just stopped for good. These types of social media platforms are not for me. But anyway, I published two books and actually got some reads! According to my KU dashboard, I've received around 850 KENP reads and I am projected to receive $4.09 for the month of January lol! Not much of anything, really, but enough to let me know that people are indeed reading my stories which makes me happy. I'm not looking for fame, but I do hope I get more readers over time and any income from it can help me pay my bills.

Now, the reason I say I technically published three books is because Amazon tells you that your book must go through a review first before it can be made live for purchase and KU reads, and that the review can take up to 72 hours which is 3 days. My first book I released took the full 3 days. My second book took only a couple of hours. Well I uploaded my third book for publishing with the intention of it being made available by February 1st. I submitted it for publishing on January 30th. Welp, my book was approved and published in 24 hours.

So, it was technically published in January, but was only made live during the last few hours of the last day of January, which is not enough time for anyone to read it. So, I am still counting it as a February release.

Amazon struggles

I have unfortunately run into a problem already. The cover of my most recent release won't show up on the Amazon listing even though my book is live. For whatever reason, it says "no image available" but in my author and KDP dashboard the image is there just fine. When I reached out to the KDP help desk for assistance, they basically told me I have to wait the full three days for it to show up. That makes no sense to me because if the cover is not ready or approved, why make the listing live? Why not keep it in review?

So now I have a live book with no image which prevents me from getting any visibility at all, which really sucks! If the cover does not show up by tomorrow, I will be reaching out again and I hope someone can help fix it. I don't even know if I was talking to a real person or an AI chatbot which is annoying in itself.

What's next?

Anyway! For this month, I plan on publishing 2 books again. Since my first February book is already live, I only have one more to go. For March, I am only planning on publishing 1 book. That one is already written and edited and is a full novella at a little over 33,000 words.

In the meantime I need to get writing again if I am going to keep up this kind of momentum. I originally thought I wanted to publish 1 book per month, but with most of my books being so short, I no longer think that is a good idea which is why I decided on 2 per month. But I'm running out of backlog since I'm publishing 2 per month and time is flying quickly. I am also not a fast writer. And I also did not realize just how much of a time-suck editing and figuring out these various publishing platforms can be.

Oh well. I won't beat myself up over it if I can't stick to 2 per month. Right now I am only a hobby writer, but with more time and more stories, I hope that can change into something more.

That's all for today! I'll be back again soon with another update <3 

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