Taryn East Writes

If you didn't know, November is NaNoWriMo a month of hectic writing fun in an attempt to reach 50,000 words by the end of the month, and I participated, and "won" (I made the 50K... just barely) :D I haven't quite reached "the end" yet, so I might keep at it for part of December too, in the hopes of finishing up the prequel I've been working on. I've also finished and launched The Conjunction in paperback on amazon! So go get it, if you like dead-tree format! :) In due time (ie the next couple of weeks) I'll eventually get the author copies I ordered, and I plan to sell signed copies through my main website. Note: if you buy them direct from me, I'll make a slightly larger royalty than if you buy them from amazon. Also if you buy them from amazon, I get a slightly larger royalty than if you buy them from other distributors. Finally, despite the huge difference in price, I don't make any more off paperbacks than I do off ebooks...

I'm so excited, the paperback version is nearly done! Here's a quick sneak-peek at the cover. I'm hoping to have it all sorted before Black Friday, though that might be a stretch.

I had a good month full of busyness. I got myself back in the habit of regular writing by working up a backstory for Tink. Dunno if I'll write it up and make it available to others. It's interesting as a story, but not sure it's a very gripping tale. Maybe if I have some spare time. But it served its purpose and got me into writing every day again for next month's plans. I've been working out how to use Amazon Ads by participating in the 5-day amazon ad challenge. Ads are essential tools for authors, because otherwise how do people find out about your book? Amazon ads are the ones that occur next to searches, and you can target them so that eg only people that are already interested in your genre get ads for your book - which means people get annoyed less by ads for books they aren't likely to be interested in, and this is what I was learning how to do. I've just begun, so there's not many people coming in to look at my stuff yet, but hopefully th...

Biggest month evar!!! This month was launch month and The Conjunction finally went live. All my pre-orders went through, and I've seen a few individual others picked up as well as plenty of page-reads in KDP, which tells me that at least some people are pretty happy reading it through. I also got my first pre-order for book 2 (which I suspect may be my dad - thanks dad!) :D Speaking of, my cover artist ( Burning phoenix covers ) put the finishing touches on the cover for book 2, as well as giving me some A+ content that I have yet to upload, which means that my book 2 King Tide went live for pre-order. I've updated my author website (through Nerdly) here: Taryn East Writes to add both my new books, as well as moved a few pages from the blog there, eg my Reading List I officially joined IASFA because now I am officially a SF/F author! I've started getting back into writing (after a couple of months of solid editing only) and have picked up Tink's backstor...

Another big month, mostly editing in preparation for publishing The Conjunction , which will finally go live in 3 week's time (so much excitement!) :D Until then The Conjunction is still available for pre-order on amazon The Conjunction has gone to my copy-editor, and I've been integrating their edits as I go (I'm about halfway there). It then just requires a proof-read and it'll be ready to go by my 21st of September target. I had fun with the amazon 5-day ad-challenge, and learned a little bit about how to get my book in front of the people who will hopefully enjoy it the most. I'm getting plenty of impressions (around 5000 total), and about the right amount of clicks (4) - but no sales that way so far. I wasn't actually expecting any sales, my book is a singleton from an unknown author and not even available for reading yet. But it was a great exercise, and cost me a grand total of 84c, so I may keep the ads up for a while and see if anything changes w...

Wow! What a month! I did a full read-through of The Conjunction , editing as I went - adding in some more snappy lines and a few extra fixups based on some beta-reader commentary. I then did a hard edit using ProWritingAid . Goodness, that is a really useful app! Well worth the lifetime subscription! It pointed out a lot more things than I’d have thought, and by the last few chapters I was editing a lot of the things as I went, rather than waiting for ProWritingAid to point it out to me. I also played around a lot with Scrivener to produce a final-ish copy of the document - with table-of-contents, front and back matter, etc. I’ve now handed the complete novel off to the copy-editor/proof-reader and am eagerly awaiting their results (and the next round of editing) 😃 In the meantime, I signed up for the “5 day amazon ad challenge” (cos it was free). I set up a few ads - totally not expecting anything at all to happen, because: first novel AND only in pre-order. I got a few hu...