Well, I have not bothered to update this blog in far too long. I fell out of the habit – so now I will have to work to recreate that habit.
The big book news: I finished the third book, and got it published just before Christmas. I wanted to finish them all in 2022, so this was a success for me (even if I neglected to tell anyone about it, since I was busy with holiday preparations.)
The blog news: I’ve obviously neglected this blog, but I did spend some time during the holiday break from work migrating the site from its temporary domain to this one (katerosenberg.net.) It was a bit of a hassle, and all styling has been lost – things are very straight black-text-on-white-background just now. But it’s up and in the right place.
The migration process had some ups and downs. My hosting company had significant false confidence that their changes would move the blog, but they showed so little knowledge I was pretty sure I’d have to do this manually – which is what happened. They switched the domain, but not the content, so I did this part myself. It worked out okay, although I didn’t automatically move the pictures (I think this was an error on my part) and as noted the styling theme is currently “boring.” The other thing is that I’d scrubbed out a bunch of spam comments and mailing requests on the old site, and they all popped back up when I restored. Oops.
The bots trying to sell cryptocurrency now outnumber the bots trying to sell porn, which was interesting in a vague sort of way.
Other than that, I’m doing a free book promotion on my second book today. The fact that it’s the second book (even though it can stand on its own, and doesn’t require the first book) is likely to impact my numbers, but I wanted to test the waters with this before putting the first book up. The way Amazon has set up their promotions, you only can list a book for free for 5 days out of each 90 day period when you’re enrolled in Kindle Unlimited (which I am.) So I wanted to try something on book two before using my free days on book one.
It is fun to see that people are downloading it, though. Since I haven’t been promoting my books, they are essentially exclusively read by people who know me and it’s neat to see strangers downloading. Flipside, I bet a lot of people just stack up the free books on their Kindle, so it doesn’t mean anyone is reading it. I have done this myself – I’ll see a book listed for free that seems interesting, download and forget it. But maybe I’ll read it eventually.
In the meantime, I have started my fourth book but it’s been a slow start. I was managing my writing habit well until December – now I’m apparently lazy. Some of it is the rush around the holiday season; some of it is that my job is much improved since I started my writing habit, so I’m not craving the stimulation like I was over the summer; and some of it is just the the broken habit.
It’s interesting how much of it is just keeping up my routine – once I broke it, it was pretty easy to keep it broken. I have watched a lot more TV this month than I did in the previous several months.
So today I committed to writing a blog post (done!) and doing something on book four. Our furnace has been broken for more than a week, though, so I’m very much hoping to be interrupted by furnace repairs… My optimism probably isn’t warranted, though, since the furnace people don’t appear to have received the required part delivery yet. 🙁