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Posts Tagged ‘frustration’

No, my frustration isn’t actually with my ROW80 goals. I’m 7864 words ahead of my goal on my current WIP. And I have Haunted Lake ready for print. All is good on that front.

This is my frustration. I never wanted to write a series. I was doing perfectly fine writing stand alone books. But then some readers emailed me and asked me for a series. So I thought I would try one. I released Dark Relic: Vampires’ Curse in June. I’m currently working on the second novella of the Libby Fox series. Here’s the problem…Dark Relic isn’t selling worth a crap. (See, I’m frustrated, because I never use that word in my blog.) Every one of my previous books is outselling it. I thought the whole purpose of making sure you’re constantly putting new material out there is to keep your sales up, and get people to also buy your backlist. But my backlist is what’s selling. No matter what I do, Guardian Vampire continues to be my best seller. What is it about that book that sells? Although, maybe I need to think about something else. Hmmm. Haunted Lake is now keeping up with Guardian Vampire. And that book took seven months to really start selling. So maybe it’s going to take time. I just don’t know. I think Dark Relic has a better cover than Guardian Vampire. Is it the title? Am I just being impatient? Grrrrr.

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I decided I wanted to put my books up on All Romance Ebooks. So I downloaded calibre so I could convert to as many formats as possible. It looked like everything was going great, but when I opened up the epub file, all my apostrophes were black rectangles. Not to mention, the first page was my cover and it was all stretched out (that might just be a viewing problem…will have to look into it further). The mobi format did the same thing with my apostrophes and it lost my page breaks. The pdb format changed my double quotes to rectangles and my apostrophes to question marks. All the formats lost my chapter heading centering. Ditto with the RB format.

This is one more reason why it’s so hard and frustrating to have a full time job and try to write. I tried to do all of this during my lunch hour, and that’s just not enough time to figure out all the problems. At this point, I’m almost tempted to forget about All Romance. But, on the other hand, an author should try to get her/his books in as many venues as possible. I thought calibre was the answer to book formatting. The easiest route would be to download the different formats of my books from Smashwords. But that’s against their terms of service, and I don’t blame them for that. They spent lots of money to get our books in all those formats. And my conscience won’t let me violate those terms that I agreed to.

So I have seven books to try to convert to several different formats, and I just don’t know when I’ll have time to do it. Not to mention, where will I find time to figure out why they aren’t converting properly? I don’t usually let things get to me. I’m a very laid back, calm person who rolls with the punches. But I feel like I’ve been punched too hard this time.

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Well, “life” has happened to me again. My husband called in a panic yesterday morning because our laptop had contracted a virus. It’s probably more like malware. It’s that stupid MS Tool that makes you think it’s really an anti-virus program and wants you to buy it because it found so many viruses on your computer. And you can’t do anything. No icons will work. The desktop background is gone. I restarted the computer in safe mode, but you can only do so much that way. You can’t save a Word document with any other name or location than the original. Luckily, I have my manuscript backed up on a flash drive. And, also luckily, I know the guys that work where I took my computer to get it fixed, and I trust them not to mess with my files. The big drawback (except for having to pay for the work) is that I’ll be without my computer for THREE DAYS. Yikes! What about my writing? My plans are to load my WIP on my work computer and spend my lunch hours the next two days writing. I hope no one messes with my plans! Grrrrrrrr! Anyway, I refuse to be beaten down by this setback.

On the bright side…I’m about 360 words over my cumulative goal of 500 words per day.

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