This past week or two has been a huge learning curve for me. I learned about Critique Circle, it's a group of authors and you have to read stories and critique them to earn tokens. When you have enough tokens, you can use them to post your story for critique. I read and critiqued a few stories. They were a mix of good, bad, and OMG! It was interesting doing this. The author rates your critique with stars and comments. I put up Haunted Hunting Camp first. But there's a 3500 word cut off. So it was just a third of the story. Its a worldwide site. I got a few reviews that didn't really grasp the fact that the story has more parts. But overall I got pretty good feedback.
I posted approximately 3200 words of Force of Corruption and the reviews have been weird. One guy said he wouldn't review it because of all the punctuation errors and because I said I'm a published author. It's already been edited by my editor, Word, and Writing Pro. So I inquired further with him and explained it's in editing and I'm only published because I published my short story as mostly an experiment to try out how the publishing works and marketing and all the stuff in between. Then he wrote back and said he didn't want to counter what my editor had to say so he declined again to comment. He said he is an editor. My husband thinks he was trying to get me to hire him and when I said I had an editor he dumped me. It was weird. He has never posted a story, but has 17 critiques under his name. My husband is likely correct.
I've been playing around with Canva some more, making reels and videos for Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok. It's been a lot to learn and I'm mostly still fumbling around clueless. But I have posted a few videos and reels so- go me! My FB has over 350 followers, Insta has about 450, and Tiktok is around 70. I joined Tiktok most recently, so that's why it's less. My husband says this is a fast growth of followers. It feels slow. I don't really know what my goal for followers is, which is something I should know. There's so much social media stuff to know and learn. Every time I feel like I'm gaining ground, something happens and I find out I need to add something else. I added LinkedIn and Pinterest. Apparently I need both to help spread the word. The SEO likes when you have lots of socials. SEO is Search Engine Optimization. You need this to drive traffic to your stuff. People keep messaging me saying they will handle that for me, for a fee. *eye roll*
Speaking of people messaging me, I had a totally random coincidence laden odd experience. I was contacted by an artist to see if I want them to make me a cover or something else for my books. I looked at their work, it was fantastic. There was a folder of covers in the portfolio. I noticed several of the covers had a designer name on the them. This was not who contacted me. I'm always up for a good mystery so I dug a little deeper. I found the book, with the cover, it had a publisher and cover designer listed inside the cover. There was a website so I emailed the cover design company and asked about this person and their art.
Turns out, this is the second name this person has used to steal the real artist's work and try to sell it to unsuspecting authors. The actual artist was extremely appreciative and he said there was art in the portfolio from another company too. He previously filed a report against this thief and he was going to alert the other victim. Thankfully I didn't give anyone any money. But you can't trust strangers on the internet, especially if they approach you. He wanted $300.
The interesting part of this story is that the book I looked into, that listed the publisher? It is a publisher that's in my tiny little town nobody has ever heard about. Literally, its a mile and quarter from my house. How crazy is that? At first I thought they only published fantasy. Turns out they do publish my genre. Force of Corruption doesn't meet their 80k word count minimum, it's 72k. But they are wonderful. They have a newsletter and blog filled with excellent tips for indie authors, well, any author really. If I wanted to use a traditional publisher, it would only be them. If I wanted to add 8k words to my book, that is. Maybe I will do that at some point. But it's not going to happen today.
I also found some interesting sites that you can pay to advertise. They have hundreds of thousands of readers who get free books from them and they just need to post a review. Authors can pay to place their books in front of one of those groups of readers, or more, for a fee. Some of them seem pretty legit, others seem like they're just trying to cash in on anything they can get, who knows if they follow through. The one I've heard about in reading groups on Facebook is called Netgalley.com they are legit. They definitely deliver books to readers and advertise them to the readers. I'm debating trying one round at the time of my release. Their cheapest product is like $50. They have some that go up to $900+ for publishers with multiple titles to post.
I'm on Chapter 8 in my edit of Force of Corruption. I'm on Chapter 18 in my WIP, the second book in the series. I'm over 70k words and still have quite a ways to go. I think there's going to be a blood bath when my editor takes a chainsaw to it. So I've no clue where it will end up. I'm looking forward to working on VioleNt when I'm done with Force Majeure, book two in the Forces of Nature Series. VioleNt is a stand alone as far as I know. But I thought it was a short story originally. I had to concede when I passed 200 pages. I have some new ideas too, so I see a lot of typing in my future. Hopefully when I'm that far down this road I'll have figured out the street signs and how to read the map!
The cover is here for FOC and it's available for pre-order on Amazon. Its so close with the release party on October 29th. Please keep your fingers crossed that I can get everything done in time. ARC applications are also posted. You can sign up on my website.
I hope I'm helping someone who is jumping into this raging river of swirling requirements. I need that room from HP (the room of requirement), and an assistant, and a social media specialist, and a nap!
Thanks so much for reading! NAMASTE