Hi, everyone! I need to write a quick update today, because I have a lot of writer business to get to, as well as a Sunday at home to enjoy with my family. 🙂

We’re now less than a week away from the beginning of the 12 Days of Christmas Reading promotion hosted by Nadja Notariani. I’ve been helping to organize the promotion, but I haven’t yet written my own post or given Nadja my links. Shame on me! Ha! I’ll get to it today. I’m super excited to see how this turns out, and get to know more about my fellow authors and their books.

I’ve had All Romance Ebooks on my radar for some time, but creating the different ebook formats had me stumped. I finally looked into it and it turned out not to be very hard — maybe because I use Apple products? I was able to download Calibre for free, then I turned my Word manuscript into an HTML document using Words’ “save only display information into HTML” feature. By pulling that document into Calibre, I was able to create the .epub and .mobi files to sell on All Romance Ebooks. Then I emailed them to myself and opened them on the iPad to check the formatting out. Since I’m writing fiction and it’s just text with minimal formatting, they came across quite nicely. Of course, now I need to find an hour to get all versions of my two books uploaded to the site. That’s going on the “it’s not urgent and it’s the holidays for goodness sake” list. 🙂

My cover artist was kind enough to put together a banner for my blog, and it is oh so pretty! I love it, and I think it gives readers a much better idea of who I am as a person and an author. The night sky, a full moon and the forest….you’ll find me there. Tishia at Paragraphic Designs is working on a profile pic for me (I have such a love/hate relationship with my current profile pic!), and business cards using the same theme. Branding is super fun!! I hope to get business cards displayed across my metro area, and since I’m in Portland, home of “Keep Portland Weird” and all things indie. We’re very independent here by culture, and I anticipate a lot of support from young Portlanders in my indie efforts. Having a pretty business card will make it easier for me to get the word out.

A final thing I want to mention today before my terrible word count update. Ha! I’ve noticed quite the increase in traffic to my blog in the past month, and I think it has to do with the types of posts I’ve been running lately. Yes, I’m getting “out there” more in general, so it’s hard to tease out exactly how people are finding my blog. I’ve expanded my reach on Goodreads, Twitter, and released another book. However, the posts that are getting the most attention (hits) are those I’m running about what other authors/writers are up to! I ran an excerpt from an indie epic fantasy by Tracy Falbe one month ago that is now my most viewed post of all time. Maybe that says something about Tracy’s reach, but the hits have kept on coming all month. I also did an interview with Reina Stowe, who will soon release her second erotica short story. And I had Alexia Chamberlynn do a guest post about newsletters and the author platform this week. Those two posts are now also among my top four posts of all time in terms of page views. I’m excited by this, because I think it speaks to indies’ potential when we help each other get the word out. These posts weren’t hard for me to run. They took a little more organization and coordination with other authors than my usual “what I’m up to” posts, but they were also apparently more interesting to my readers and potential readers. Even if it wasn’t my books drawing people to my blog, I got much more exposure than if I was playing an “I need to do everything myself and look out for number one” sorta game. That’s exciting and invigorating, and I look forward to doing more of it.

Word count wasn’t awesome this week…my dedicated writing time has been virtually nonexistent the past couple of weeks with publishing a book and the holiday season upon us. I also needed to get back in the groove on my WIP since I hadn’t worked on it in a couple of weeks and left at a pivotal point in the manuscript. So I did a bunch of reading through, light editing, and thinking back to my storyline and the purpose of different scenes, where I need to do more work, etc. And my word count was 1,300 words written yesterday. So I feel like I’m on track to hammer through the rest of this manuscript (word count presently 35,500). My goal is still to finish the first draft of this book this Round, and by golly, I’m gonna do it!

Hope everyone else is doing great, unwinding from NaNo, and in general kicking back some in the last month of the year. We all need to give super-productive selves a break, too!! Pat yourself on the back and then go watch football, or wrestle with your kids or something. I think I’ll do a little of all of that today. 🙂