For the last few years, my focus has not been on my writing career. I have been more concerned with my marriage, making friends in our new city, and my part time teaching job, which actually pays my bills. However, it has come to the point when I must fish or cut bait with my writing career. So here is my game plan.
The next two months, I'm going to make a run at actually gaining some recognition for my work. I have tweaked the website to make it more user friendly. I'm going to make a mad dash to try to get book three done and published by the end of November so I can push sales for Christmas.
Today, I joined the Independent Authors Network that has hundreds of thousands of followers. They will tweet about my work daily for three weeks and then occasionally retweet my tweets to their feed if I use their hashtag. My books will be included in their book directory and I will have an author page on their website with links to my social media and purchasing links for my books.
I'm going to look for a similar Western Writers group to join in hopes of reaching my particular genre demographic. I'm going to make a few rounds here locally to bookstores and book club meetings. I've already been invited to meet with one such group.
If I can get any significant increase in interest in my books I'm going to keep going with this serial until the end. However, if I can't, I'm going to take a break after the new year and try my hand in a different genre to see if I can get any significant income coming in with my writing.
P.R. is being wonderful about all of this. P.R. has not put any pressure on me at all about which direction I should go with my career. When I ask P.R. for opinions, all I get is, "Do what makes you happy." I won the lottery when I married my better half.
So, check out the website and tell me what you think! I would love to get some feedback on the changes. For now, I've got some more research to do. Tomorrow and Monday are going to be devoted to writing book three.
If you haven't already signed up for the Members Only page, you might want to do that. It's free to join. You can cancel at any time. I will post a Sunday Sneak Peak of what I manage to written tomorrow.
I regret that I have but one social life to give for my career!
Stephen