It's wild for someone like me to complain about having too many ARC readers, but it's beginning to get out of hand. At this point I may as well make my book free on Amazon, since I've given away so many copies already. When I signed up for the "evergreen" plan with Voracious Readers Only, I was dubious that more than a few people would claim my book, but boy, was I wrong. It's turned out to be too many. Sure, a nice aspect of the process is that these people agree to subscribe to my newsletter, but I've never had much newsletter engagement, so that's pretty much a wash.
Though I'm a big fan of VRO, the site doesn't prominently display a contact email address (I finally found one under its privacy policy) for author questions. I've now emailed to ask how to stop advertising Inn Dreams as an ARC. I'm fully aware that maybe 1 to 2 per cent of readers actually leave reviews, but that quest has turned out to be less important to me than I initially thought. (No, I haven't scanned my Amazon author page to find out if I even have any reviews yet ~ and I won't.)
Just to keep everyone updated, I also now have five BookSprout ARC readers. Since I only figured out how the stupid place works over the weekend, I'm not going to cease offering my book through them yet. I have two whole weeks of inactivity to make up for.
With regard to the important stuff, writing, I made some progress at last on my reworking of Second Chance. My facetious post yesterday about the MC going on a bender actually kind of worked. She didn't do that, exactly, but she and her visiting cousin stayed up late one night drinking tequila, and she spilled a lot of her guts to him. That dialogue was the key to advancing the story. Everything can't be introspection; that would be too boring.
Plus, I now kind of know where I'm heading with it. She has some truly big news that so far only her cousin knows about, and she's hesitant to tell her mother and most of all, her band members about it. I don't think she's ever going to tell them, because I feel that in the end, she doesn't really want to go ahead with this life change. She's on a deadline and thus she takes a stab at informing the band, but she chickens out in the end and has to make up something stupid on the fly to explain why she'd called a meeting with them. I could have played that out for a few laughs, which I should have done. Maybe I'll go back. The funny parts (at least funny to me) are one of my favorite aspects of writing. As is, I turned her cousin into kind of a witty smart aleck, so he now has an actual personality. We last ran into him near the start of the story, at which time he was sort of just "there".
I also kept the original subplot of MC's mother kindling a romantic relationship with the much younger bartender, but I made it so much better. I wrote a very uncomfortable scene about the three of them sharing breakfast the next day where MC is trying hard to act like everything is normal, and failing miserably. So, my preferred writing style boils down to "funny" and "uncomfortable". Good to know.
There are some definitely important loose ends that I'll need to figure out, but at least the story is now interesting enough to me to work on pinning them down.
Whereas I was previously certain this rework was going nowhere, I'm now optimistic that I'll be able to make the story much better. I might even play around with designing a new cover today.
It feels good to be excited about a story. I wasn't sure I ever would be again.
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