Wow, so much for upping my marketing game!

OK, so New Year’s resolutions don’t always work. Seeing I planned back in January to up my marketing game and I couldn’t even get  blog post written before November, I think we can call that one a fail.

On a positive note my third book, Diamond in the Rough is finished and available on Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, I-tunes books and many, many other sites. And yesterday I finally hit the publish button for print on demand copies of Double Diamond and Jesse’s Place on Amazon.com.

I’m hoping to have Diamond in the Rough ready by next week for Kindle direct publishing print on demand (Amazon.com) so those fans who prefer a paper copy can order one. The site is still a beta test site so it’ll be interesting to see how it works, and it’s the US site so my Canadian friends have to pay exchange and shipping to order it which does kind of suck. They are supposed to be offering the service through some other sites soon, so hopefully Canada will be in there. They are also supposed to be offering copies available to authors for wholesale purposes in the next few weeks.  I’m looking forward to that. It’ll make my Christmas shopping really easy this year 🙂

I also have Diamond in the rough listed on Inkitt.com  to try to win a publishing contract. So if you’re looking for a free copy, that’s the place to grab it and read. Their algorithms are based on the amount of the book that’s read and how it catches the attention. I’m up to 200 chapter reads, not sure what that means, but it sounds good.

I’m also up to a minimum of 10 downloads a day of my free copy of Double Diamond on Smashwords, etc. And have actually even sold a couple of my other books. Marketing is definitely not my strong suit.

I’m going to try to really up my marketing game this winter, I mean it this time!….I’ll keep you updated on how it’s going. Hopefully you’ll hear from me sooner than next fall.

Happy Reading!

Tanya Hess.

 

 

 

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Happy New Year!

I can’t believe another year has come and gone. I also can’t believe how long it’s been since my last blog post! The good thing is that instead of blogging I’ve actually been writing 🙂 And last night, just before heading out to celebrate the entrance of the New Year, I finished the last page of the first draft of my third book: ‘Diamond in the Rough’. I still have a few more months of reading, re-reading, editing, re-editing, formatting, cover designing, and marketing, but I am happy to say I should have this one out and ready for publication by Valentine’s day.

I have high hopes for 2017 and am planning to really up my marketing game, start seriously looking into hiring a professional editor, and focus more on my writing. In my annual computer clean out and backup I found 4 more books I’d started in the last few years and hadn’t completed. I’m excited to get back into them and see where they end up.

Don’t forget to sign up for my mailing list to be the first to receive information on my newest releases and great discount codes and other exciting extras. Just click on the home link to take you back to the main page of my website and then sign up.

Happy New Year, and all the best in 2017!

Tanya

 

 

Jesse’s Place is ready to order

Wow, I can’t believe it! My second book is finished. I wrote, re-wrote, read, re-read, re-re-read, edited and made it available to buy. It’s exciting, and scary, and I’m sure I missed some stuff I should have fixed before I hit the submit button, but it’s out there and now I can start working on book 3!! Book three is 90% complete and should be ready for a summer release. this is kind of fun. 🙂 Check me out at Smashwords, Kobo books, Amazon, I-books and Barnes and Noble.

If you have a chance I’d love to hear comments, critiques, or constructive feedback. It’s all still a learning process for me and any and all input is welcomed. If you get a chance please feel free to leave a review at your favourite online book retailer. Good, bad or indifferent. Reviews help drive traffic to my books and will help me get the word out, which should help me write more which ultimately should help me become a better writer.

Happy Reading and a very happy holiday season!

Tanya

 

A New Day

It feels a bit odd today, after spending so much time working on my website and MailChimp campaigns and Facebook posts and setting up pre-sales for Jesse’s Place, re-reading Jesse’s Place for content and final edits, and all the other stuff that goes into trying to sell a book…..I might actually now be able to focus on writing the next book. I still have a few tweaks to do and additional promotions, that won’t end, but I really do think I can  start spending time actually writing. What a concept 🙂

Another step complete

One more step has been completed in my goal of being able to write full time.  Today I finished my website and figured out how to put in a link back to the site on my blog – check out the ‘website’ link on the right hand side of the screen. I set up and tested the link to register for my mailing list; updated Double Diamond with a new cover and fixed a few typos my readers kindly pointed out to me and re-published the book on Smashwords;  finished the cover of my second book Jesse’s place, and set it up for pre-orders. Phew!  Now I think I can focus on the actual craft of writing!

Sign up to my e-mail list at Tanyahessbooks.com and I’ll send you a 50% off coupon code to use on Smashwords when you order a copy of Jesse’s place, available December 15th. AND for a limited time Double Diamond is absolutely FREE, you can find the order link on my webpage. Please share, like,  comment, tweet,  and help me get the word out.

Happy Reading!

The long and winding road

Wow. I’ve finally found a bit of time to work on my book marketing, website development, updating covers, setting up a Mailchimp account so I can start a mail list to advise my 4 fans that my new book is coming out. Setting up a pre-order form for Jesse’s place coming out in December, updating my Facebook page, my blog and researching all other parts of book promotion that I had no idea existed.  Maybe someday I’ll even get to do some more writing.  I thought I’d get a lot more done in the summer, but I just can’t stay inside when the sun is shining, the birds are singing and my horses are calling me to come and play 🙂 Dark gloomy winter days seem to be my writing time, unfortunately then it’s tax time and my paid work pulls me away again…Just more incentive to promote, update and market now. Maybe someday I’ll be able to say I’m a full time author. No point in aiming low 🙂

I’ll be back shortly once I figure out how to add a link back to my website and have all of the background details working properly.  This is actually kind of fun, and if I’m lucky I might even double my e-mail contact list….to 6. 🙂

The wait

Well my book has been loaded, published and added to the premium catalogue. The Facebook page is up, my blog is being updated a bit more consistently, and I updated my Linked-In profile. So far I have sold 2 copies and 10 people have downloaded the free sample. It’s a start, but I’ve quickly realized that marketing the book is definitely going to be more work, and take more time, that the actual writing. With a half million other authors to compete with for readers I guess I can’t expect miracles. 🙂 I’m definitely not going to make any best seller lists this month, but I’ll just keep plugging away with the promotional material while I finish up book 2.

So far the most frustrating thing about having published the book is that I have some great ideas for improvements. I just thought of a whole new chapter I could add to add a bit more emotional impact, and some tweaks I could make to dialogue to make it more realistic and move some of the slower parts of the book along, and….which is probably why it took me so long to get the darn thing published in the first place. I kept editing, re-editing, adding and deleting…It’s time to let it go. The next time I re-edit will be when I’m famous, have 100 best sellers published, and have finally found a voice that attracts the masses. That when I’ll go back one last time to do just a little tweak. Just a tiny one. 🙂

I’m in the Premium Catalogue

Woohoo! I was accepted to the Premium Catalogue on smashwords today and my e-book will be uploaded to the following sellers in the next few days: Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple, Inktera, Baker and Taylor Blio/axis 350, Txtr, Overdrive, flipkart, Oyster, Scribd (already shipped), and Gardners extended retail. To get distributed to Amazon through smashwords I need to get my sales up to $2,000 first. I’m working on it!

To help me promote my book I’m offering a 100% off coupon to use when you purchase Double Diamond on Smashwords. It’s good until March 2. Use code KX57A when you check out to receive the discount. In exchange all I ask is that you leave me a nice review. Feel free to share the code with all of your friends!

I finally hit the publish button

Today was a very exciting, albeit stressful day for me. I read over my first romance novel for the 300th time, logged into my Smashwords site and officially uploaded the book and the awesome cover that was designed for me by Leslie Van Patter graphics designer featuring my brother Michael Hauver and his beautiful wife Jenn, as the sexy cover models. A big shout out thank you to Tayden and Addison, Mike and Jenn’s children who acted as their camera crew. I see a bright future in production in the future, although first they might want to concentrate on finishing elementary school 🙂

Check it out on http://www.smashwords.com to purchase the book. It’s right there on the first page!!! If you don’t see it go to my author page:https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/tanyahess13

I’m Baaaaack :) and a I’ve given myself a DEADLINE

Good morning all of my loyal followers. All 5 of you :). I took a bit of a break from my writing and posting in order to do the work that currently pays my bills. I’m a Chartered Professional Accountant by trade so you might as well just pretend  I don’t exist between February and oh, sometime around now. It really puts a dent in the time I have available to write! But I guess it’s just more incentive to get the darn books finished and out there so I can start selling them.

This week I started my…. 26th revision of Double Diamond….OK maybe not exactly 26th but it feels like it. I want to add another 10 to 20,000 words to the book overall with more dialogue and less of me just rambling on about what’s going on. My characters need to interact more, they seem to do a lot of talking to themselves and that makes for a boring conversation…and makes me a bit concerned they are developing a bit of schizophrenia. And I’ve got to make sure I’m showing and not telling. Sometimes I’m in such a rush to get the idea of the scene down that I don’t let it play out between the characters, I just say what happened. Oh, and the ending is too abrupt. That seems to be one of my biggest problems, I run out of steam and realistic conflicts after about 50,000 words and just end it. I’m working on that.  And yes, I know it doesn’t have to be perfect, in fact it will never be perfect, it just has to not be totally boring and actually out there so I can start marketing it. Letting go is not easy!

So I should have that 26th revision done in the next week or so. I’ll be getting my cover model to send a few pictures to pick from by the middle of July, and I have my graphic designer friend on standby for when I finally get my shit together enough to send her the details for the cover art, OK not exactly on standby, but she’s agreed to help me and will fit it in when she can, it’s almost standby.

I have chosen August first as my publish date deadline. Which means to say that I hope to have everything in order by then so I’m not writing my blog August 1st talking about the new deadline of September 1st, because when that happens all of a sudden we’re back in tax season and I’m looking at next August again.

So check out the Double Diamond link and let me know what you think of the latest round of revisions. I’m up to chapter 10, but I’m not averse to starting on revision number 27 if you find something that needs more tweaking 😉