I don't know what other striving writers do in their spare time; maybe marketing? Well, I don't have anything to market right now; at least nothing worth devoting time to. Yet this amateur life I've stumbled across rarely leaves my mind. I'm constantly thinking about things I should do when I'm not editing. (After all, how much editing can someone stand?)
1. I did create a free book promotion for Shadow Song; no reason, really; just for something to do. After four days, I managed to get one download. I'm shocked that I got one. My chain of zero sales has been broken! Of course, it wasn't a "sale", but still.
2. Yesterday I searched for free book title generators. I found one once that was pretty good. It asked for basically an elevator pitch of my novel and proceeded to generate titles from that. But I never thought to bookmark it, and now I can't find it. Most of these generators are goofy. The Reedsy one asks for nothing. It simply spews out titles willy-nilly, which makes zero sense to me. I could pick random words out of the dictionary, too, which would be just as relevant as Reedsy's suggestions.
The generators are all AI, of course, so you've gotta take that for what it's worth. AI might be great for some things, but it definitely possesses no imagination; no creative flair. It's like the office drone who shows up for work every day because she has no choice, but her job consists of filing, which requires nothing except knowing the letters of the alphabet. Filing has to be done, though, so she might as well get on with it.
The one I ended up using wasn't horrible. It produced about ten half-screens of titles before it said, "I'm tired now" (actually it just ran out of results). I will note that many of the suggestions were almost identical. A generator like this is only a tool for an author to build on. Its bland ideas might include one word that has potential if configured differently. And I could feed it a different elevator pitch and be presented with more ideas. From those ten half-screens I isolated a few:
Unsung Goodbyes
Unfinished Song
Chasing Echoes
Chasing Melodies
Broken Strings
Notes of Goodbye
The Melody of Goodbye
Leah's New Song
Granted, I wouldn't use any of them, but it's akin to brainstorming. Just throw everything out there and maybe something will spark. Building off that list, I also came up with, Running From Herself (which I kind of actually like, but I bet has already been used for someone's novel).
3. I took another look at my saved images on iStock. I'd foolishly saved some horizontal pics, which won't work for a book cover, and that leaves me with maybe a half dozen potentials, but I'm not crazy about any of them; certainly not crazy enough to purchase any right now. A closer examination reveals that a few leave no room to add a title and author name, plus none of the rest really knock me out. I'm pretty certain I'll be rejecting the latest trend in women's fiction, the second grade art project cover. I like having a woman on my cover, specifically because all my books' main characters are women, and I prefer a more emotional representation. I've never checked into any of the other stock photo sites, like Getty Images, Shutterstock, Depositphotos, Unsplash, etc., but I need to. I've already ruled out the free sites like Pixabay (which I love using for other projects) and Pexels. Their offerings are completely random, but what does one expect for free?
All this stuff is premature. (Forget the free book promotion; I have.) But it'll all need to be decided upon, if and when I prepare to publish. It doesn't hurt to start thinking about those things. It beats editing, but what doesn't?
It's almost as if I prefer thinking about publishing more than actually doing it.
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