First, I’ve decided to move the release month for Heiress of Misfortune.

It’ll now be out in January. I’d rather not publish anything so close to an election that is making a lot of people crazy here in the US. Books tend not to do well when published during a hectic time. December has always been a black hole month for me, so there’s no point it in doing it then, either. Probably because people need to focus on buying gifts for others. January has historically been better. I guess people are more relaxed and ready to read. Who knows? Anyway, that’s why I’m going with January as my new release month for this book.

I put Secret Admirer on hold.

I’m not convinced this is my “best” work, so I am tucking it away for now. I’ll be putting the other books in this series on hold, too. I haven’t written these other books yet.

I need time away from writing so I can focus on the other projects I’ve been behind on for the past year. This is why authors resort to ghostwriters or letting AI do the writing for them. The duties of an indie author can pile up to the point where an author feels like they’ll never get these other things done. If you get an author assistant, you need one who knows what they’re doing, and those will be pretty expensive. I don’t make enough to pay out for one who is qualified. I also don’t feel like training someone. So I’m just going to take the rest of the year to get to the non-writing related tasks that have been hanging over my head for a long time.

So here is what I’ll be doing:

1. I will finish putting my stories up on Radish. Believe it or not, separating books out into episodes takes up a decent amount of time. Sometimes I have to adjust the thumbnail images, too, or search for a new picture to fit the requirements over there.

2. I will finish putting AI audiobooks up on Kobo. This is the most time-consuming of all the tasks, and about 25% of the time, the file doesn’t “save”, so I have to log out of Kobo and then log back in to re-upload it. I have to upload this chapter by chapter for every book. It’s worth it when it’s done. I’m sure as other retailers open up to AI, I’ll have to upload books there, too. It would be nice if Findaway World would open this up, but so far they won’t. This is just like how ebooks were back before Smashwords came along. Of course, back then, the only option an author had was publishing the book on their site or with Amazon. I figure it’s a matter of time before Findaway, or a suitable alternative, will open the door to distributing AI audiobooks to multiple retailers. This ends up saving authors a lot of time.

3. I need to take inventory of what paperbacks I have and making new ones. I plan to start unpublishing paperbacks I have in my KDP (Amazon) dashboard. KDP’s quality has gone way down after they merged CreateSpace into their system. Draft2Digital (D2D) is way better. But it will take me a significant amount of time to create the full wraparound paperback covers for some books that need them. I’ll use the D2D templates for the others. Considering I have almost 100 books, this will be quite the project to go through. I’ll have to decide if some books are not worth redoing. It depends on how well each book has historically sold in paperback. It’ll take me some time to figure out that, too.

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So that’s the stuff I’ll be doing, and I’ll be surprised if I can finish these projects by December 31. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you have as many books as I do, it is. I think at last count, I have 96 romances done. I just went to my list to check. Yes, it’s 96. With Heiress of Misfortune, it’s 97. Fortunately, I’m mostly done with Radish. The other two projects are overwhelming, but I’ll just take it one day at a time. Eventually, I’ll get there. 😀