Monday, April 9, 2012

Monday Miscellany: Vacation, Speculation, Coming Soon

My husband signs out on leave tonight at midnight. We're not going anywhere big, but he needed some time off work. This will be the first time in the nearly two years of her life that he will get to spend "normal" time with our daughter. No grandparents, no reverse work schedule, just the three of us. It's going to be... interesting. We have plans to visit a city on the French-German border and maybe take a camping trip to the Black Forest, but for the most part, I think we're just going to stick around here and enjoy being a family.

I've been toying with the idea of raising the prices on my books. I suspect I've tapped out the target audience willing to pay $0.99 for my short ebooks, so I raised the price of my oldest one--the anthology--to $1.99 just to see what happens. I have the feeling I'll be playing with prices a lot in the next few weeks. It can't hurt. As I mentioned to the husband, this will be a lean month (sales have dropped dramatically over the last few weeks), so I might as well take advantage of the leanness and experiment. As usual, I'm sure you can expect to read about my findings.

Over the weekend, I finished drafting the next short story. I think I even have a title for it: Right This Time. I was able to find a lovely photograph at Dreamstime for the cover and downloaded a comp image (which means it's not full size and has watermarks) in order to play around with cover design. I've mentioned that I take a lot of inspiration from my favorite and other popular book covers, right? If I start to flounder, it's good to know where to go for guidance. Honestly, I can say I hope to have the story finished by the end of the week. I'm not sure that will happen, but I can try. I'm sure there are readers among you shaking your head and tsking me for such a quick turnaround. Four months is a ridiculous length of time, for me, to spend on anything under 10,000 words. At most, I should have spent two months on the last story. Short stories are kind of my Thing. And this one, Right This Time, I've had it in the works (for real--outlined, action-drafted, and a draft 1.5) for a little over six weeks.

I think a lot of confidence and comfort with writing comes from knowing your strengths and playing to those as you strengthen your weaknesses.

This week, expect at least one blog post on February's sales figures. I'm still trying to figure out which other posts I'd like to do, too.

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