I Did It

 

This is the fastest book action I've ever taken. I only decided yesterday to publish a collection of my novellas, and today I did it. I'm still waiting for my book to go live (and, dangit, I need to tweak my cover), but it happened just like Michael Scott said ~ "snip snap, snip snap".

Since I'm notoriously bad with titles, I turned to Bing's AI for some suggestions, even knowing that its answers are always tedious and long-winded, but I figured it would give me something to play off. (Curious ~ When you use AI, do you thank it for its answers? I've thought about not doing so, but it seems rude, even though I realize it's not an actual person.) Anyway, its suggestions were about ten words long, and when I asked for no more than three words, it came back with a string of cliches. So I ended up using a derivative of my original title, "Finding Her Way" (worse than AI, really) and called it, "Finding Me". I figure readers like to see "me" in a title. 

Compared to how cover creation has gone for me in the past, this one was quick to whip up (as I said, I need to tweak it ~ I don't like one of the font colors when viewed as a thumbnail.)

I tapped out a concise blurb, plugged in the usual keywords, which I suspect have no bearing whatsoever on someone choosing a book, and now I wait.

Pricing? Well, I recently lowered the price of my novellas to $1.99 (it didn't help), and I know that even if a book of mine is free, no one wants it, so I went with $2.99. A bargain!

This morning I searched Google for "does a collection of novellas sell". I've done it before, only leaving off the "collection" part. An interesting thread I found began with someone positing that yes, in fact, novellas do sell, because "lots of authors have done it". A person responded by saying, "Uh, which authors?" Someone weighed in to say that she sells a lot, but the general consensus was, no, not really, unless you're Stephen King. 

I kind of knew this, but what am I to do? I have six novellas ~ good ones ~ I'm not going to go back and try to rework any of them into full-length novels, Number one, I never go back. How boring! And two, what would I do to make them longer? Add a stupid subplot? I added a subplot to my novel, The Apple, and I hated doing it. It felt fake. I was frankly only interested in my main character's story, and all a subplot did was allow me to achieve book-length. If I had it to do over, The Apple, too, would be a novella. 

So now my collection is live. But I just uploaded the tweaked cover, so it'll be another bit before I'm ready to promote it.

As usual, you will see it here first!