Behind the Scenes — January 2022

Behind the scenes — January 2022

Last year I discovered that I love to snoop around and see what other authors are doing — I read their blogs, Medium or social media avidly. especially to see how they upskill. So I thought I should do my own ones as well! if you are like that too check out the past post here

These Behind-The-Scenes blog posts, are meant to summarise the month, and also keep you updated with all the random and not so random thoughts and journeys I have about writing, teaching, publishing and snippets of my personal life, like my current cooking obsession, my #ninjafoodi airfryer.

The Business of being an Author

Writing a book is the quickest way to launch a business, and ignoring your book after that is the quickest way of killing your business and your assets. So in the very first week of January, I spent a few hours researching and studying the sales patterns of my books, and then tweaking the sales pages, categories and keywords. I could do a lot more, so this year is going to be more time for business and craft.

I also did some tweaks on my website, removing the festive front page, back to the author page, and checking some pages. My author website does need a lot of work, I need the time or the virtual assistance for that. While I am sufficiently tech to do it, it does take up time.

Amazon doesn’t give away much information, but it did announce a 19% increased in royalty payments to Kindle Select authors — going up to, hold your breath, $450 million USD. That’s a huge amount, and I get a teensy fraction of that but it speaks to the health of the market. It also means I should write more books — so feel free to nag me about it.

January means the beach

In Australia, January tends to be a lazy month, everyone is on holiday, and in a food and festive aftermath from Christmas and the New Year and to tell the truth, after the frenetic push for events like Black Friday and Boxing Day, it is good to kick back a little. And even if I wanted to work, its school holidays…