These days, I end up having to read the last blog post I wrote as it was written so long ago, I'd forgotten what I had said, and this one wasn't any different. Another three months have passed since my last blog post and a lot has happened. I will endeavour to keep this brief because I am currently waging a war with time, and a lack of it. My life consists of juggling TSW stuff, books stuff, my full-time job and also flat stuff – because I'm moving into my first home next month (touching all the wood)!!!!!! To say I'm excited is an understatement, but cautiously so, because I've heard so many horror stories about things falling through at the last minute. Nevertheless, Ikea has been visited, secret Pinterest boards have been created, and I feel ready to go. I am moving slightly out of London and looking forward to the change – it feels like the right time and a new chapter. I've had a lot of personal changes in my life over the last six months and it's like the planets have aligned to make this happen at exactly the right time.
Back to all things books, on Sunday 14th March, I wrote a brand new and updated list of everything I needed to do with my books which made me very excited to crack on with it all! With marketing, I think I've come to terms with the fact that I will never be able to (or want to) market my books how I should because it holds zero interest, and I don't want the little time I do have to not go on writing instead of all the other stuff related to it. Between balancing my job and TSW stuff, and then attempting to salvage from the wreckage some kind of social life, something has to give because I haven't been able to write in so long and I desperately miss it, and I have a fair few ideas I want to get down before they flutter away. The last few months have consisted of working towards getting my backlist up to date so I can FINALLY move on and write something new. Broken down in one of my beloved bullet point lists, since March:
- I have worked like a madwoman getting my website how I want it to look, and dividing it into sections for the different books and series. A deceptively large amount of time and work has gone into it, and I'm so happy with how it turned out. My website can be found here: www.cararward.com.
- I bought a handful of ISBNs from Nielsen's (here) and I have swapped over from using the Amazon ISBNs to the Nielson's ones for all my paperbacks. I've done this in order to publish wide. It's been very stressful and sadly (even though multiple people from Amazon assured me it wouldn't happen) in the changeover I lost half of my reviews that I'd built up over many years. Amazon's technical team are seeing if they can get them back, but I think it's unlikely. It's funny, even though of course reviews are an important part of selling books, I'm sad that they have gone mostly because it meant a lot to me what people had written – especially about my book, Curing my Incurable Eczema, as they were very personal and so kind. If they cannot be retrieved, I will have to let it go and forget about it as I don't have a choice, but I'm a little disappointed.
- I took my shiny new ISBNs over to IngramSpark and published my paperbacks on there. I am using IngramSpark (here) because their distribution channels are apparently the most extensive and on there, my books stand a chance of getting into libraries and book shops. We'll see how it goes. I'm not 100% finished setting them up on Ingram because they have different cover specifications to places like Amazon which is causing this technologically-adverse grandma a few headaches, but I'm nearly there!
- I have used the website Book Brush (here) to create the full cover designs for my paperbacks (front, back and spine) and it's excellent. They offer loads of different book promotion tools – cover creation is only a small part of what they do.
- The thing which has been taking up my time over the last week or so is my Weighting to Live series which I am excited to say has just gone live (again)! I received the final covers a few weeks ago and I'm completely in love with them. My cover designer, Bailey (here), went above and beyond and I FINALLY feel like I have covers which reflect the series. Before I bring this post to a close, I thought I'd take a trip down memory lane and share a (sometimes embarrassing) look at the progression of my covers for this series, because if you are a regular reader, you'll know this has been somewhat of a saga ...
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| Top row, left to right, then bottom row, left to right |
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| Same order as above. This isn't even all of them ... |
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| Same order as above. I'm fascinated by the covers on the far right which have the two hearts and similar colour design – not intentional. |
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| Like Sixteen Months, I'm fascinated that Bailey chose this colour when it's so similar to the previous cover I made! |
