Is it time to discontinue your romance series?

I did a presentation to the Ottawa Romance Writers’ group earlier this month about The Dos and Don’ts of Being a Romance Novelist, and one of the participants asked a great question at the end (and one that I’ve been meaning to write something about for a long time!).

The question was: How do you know when you should stop writing a series that doesn’t seem to be getting any traction?

I’m sure as readers or consumers of media, we’ve all experienced the frustration of not getting the end of a series. We can all name a TV show that we loved that ended on a perpetual cliffhanger, never to be resolved, or perhaps less often, a book series that a trad publisher decided not to continue to put money into. But what about if you’re on the other side of that as an indie author?

So here are some considerations to help you decide what to do:

1) Why is it that the series hasn’t gotten enough traction?

Be very, very honest with yourself here and analyze what’s going on. Are the covers not giving the reader a good first impression? (Are they on trend with other covers in your subgenre?) Are your blurbs and marketing materials not intriguing or unique or clear enough to get the reader to buy? Are the books priced too high? Have you put in the work to market them and get them in front of your target audience? Is the quality of the writing and editing not as good as it could be?

Do your research, ask your readers and impartial observers, and be very real with yourself. Are you willing or able to put in the work to fix these problems? That might get expensive—i.e. recovering all the books so far in the series, re-editing, doing additional marketing, etc. Which begs the question…

2) Is it worth it to continue to put the time and money towards this series?

Not only to revamp the previously published books in the series, but also for the ones to come. More books in this series means more money put towards editing, cover design, and promotion, and it takes you away from books that you could write that might be more successful. And if the books you’ve already written in the series aren’t helping to fund much of the next books still to come, do you have the budget to continue? The books in this current series may be the books of your heart right now, but if they’re not selling, it might be time to consider how you can rework the larger ideas of this series and eventually repurpose them for a different series that might do better for you down the line.

3) Do you have a full series already?

A complete series is a great thing to have in your backlist. If a new reader falls in love with your writing and goes back to read all your old stuff, they might buy the full series immediately to consume, rather than one standalone book at a time. And if all your books are linked in the same extended universe (which I do usually recommend doing!), a full series is even more of an easy sell. So, is it worth it to finish off the series in this case?

4) How do you feel about this series?

When you’re an indie author, it’s all on you to decide if it’s worth it to continue the series. Are you happy with the quality of the writing? Have you had good feedback from readers, or has it been crickets? Are you still excited to continue the series or get to that final book? Especially if you haven’t had a ton of great feedback from readers about the series, you may have lost enthusiasm for it—that’s normal. It’s time for some soul-searching about whether you should keep going with it.

Even if you do decide to discontinue a series, I do not want you to feel like it was a waste of time or that you didn’t get anything out of it. I especially do not want you to see this as a failure AT ALL. Every single writer, even the most popular or successful, has books that just don’t hit. And every book is a learning experience. Writing those books has improved your writing skills, has made you more aware of the things in your author career that you might have to spend more time/energy/money on, and is going to make your next book and/or series stronger. As much as I’ve asked here “is it worth it?” to help you decide whether to continue the series or not, I think there is always something worthwhile in the experience of getting these books out into the world.

Have you ever discontinued a series? What made you decide to? (I genuinely want to hear! Respond to this email, and let me know!)

What you need to make a great author website

If one of your plans this year was to make an author website (or get your current author website in shape), today’s newsletter is for you!

Why do you need an author website? You need a place that holds all the information that your readers would want to know. Social media sites are often used as replacements for author websites, but you don’t own your Facebook page or your TikTok handle, and if any of those platforms go under or get hacked, you can lose access to those sites and to your readers. And those platforms are designed for specific purposes (i.e. to be social) rather than to transmit information. One central place that you can direct readers to and that you own will make your life so much easier.

If your goal is just to get your site up and running, I’m going to cover the tech basics and the pages you’ll need for your site here, and keep it super simple so you can quickly get it online. Then I’ll get into ways that you can make the content really pop so that readers can get the most out of your site.

Tech basics

If this is the part that’s making you not want to even put a website together, fair. I get it. The term “tech basics” scares me too. So let’s break it down step by step.

First, you should get your own domain name, e.g. authorname.com. Make it super easy for people to find you on the internet, rather than having to type an unnecessarily long website address with dots and backslashes. And this will also get you your own email address with your domain name (e.g. author@authorname.com), rather than just a gmail address (not required, but looks a bit more professional). You do have to pay for a domain, but I think it’s a necessary cost of doing business as an author.

You do NOT need to hire someone to design you a whole custom website right now, especially if you’re just starting out. That’s expensive and fancy, and you can make a website on your own without spending much money. We’re going to keep everything super simple at the moment, and then you can build up to higher levels of fanciness later if you want to. So get a website builder like Squarespace, Wix, or WordPress (I use Squarespace), and they will walk you through the process of putting a site together.

If you want to get a logo and brand colours and fonts, go for it, but if this is not your thing (it is so not mine), just keep things black and white with a pop of colour, and choose a easy-to-read font for the bulk of the writing on the site. For your logo, you can choose another font just for your author name. We want to keep this readable and easy to use. If you want to use photos, use your own or choose royalty-free ones from sites like Unsplash or Canva.

What do you actually need to include on your author website?

A bio: Just a short paragraph about who you are, what you write, and maybe some fun little tidbits about your life. I also suggest including a picture, but totally understand if you’d rather be faceless (an illustration/cartoon also works). A bio helps readers relate to you, get to know you, and get on your side so that you can make a connection with them and not just be the writer behind the curtain.

Books: Tell readers about your work by including blurbs for all the books you have out (it can be the back cover blurb copy/pasted there, that’s fine). Most importantly, make sure you have buy links directly to the bookseller of their choice. Use universal links for Amazon so that you can easily send them to their own country’s Amazon. As a Canadian, I find it so frustrating  when only American Amazon links are included, and if I’m feeling lukewarm about the book, it may stop me from seeking it out on Canadian Amazon (yes, I am that lazy sometimes). Don’t give readers a chance to talk themselves out of buying the book! The blurb should sell them on it, and then you need to give them the clearest path to go buy it.

Contact info: Sure, this might open you up to awkward fan interactions or unwanted criticism or pressure (“when’s the next book coming out?!”), but it also gives grateful readers the opportunity to tell you how much they loved your book and what it means to them, which: worth it. Also include your social media links so that readers can follow you and stay up-to-date with what’s going on with your work.

Newsletter link: Make sure you include multiple places on your site where readers can sign up for your newsletter. I’ve talked at length before about why newsletters are SO important, and if starting or reviving your newsletter is one of your goals for this year, I would say that the newsletter is perhaps even more important than the website. It took me a year or two before I started a newsletter, and I still regret that I didn’t do it sooner.

You can add more pages to your website, but these ones above are the absolute musts. If you want to have a page about events you’re going to or press you’ve done, or if you have a blog, you can include them as well. (If you don’t want to blog, you don’t need to, promise.)

How to make your website work for you

Here are a few tricks to help your readers find what they need on your site and understand you better.

We want readers to connect with you on an emotional level, so inject some personality into your site. Have a tagline that explains what you and your books are about (check out other writers’ sites to see the little one-liners they use to give readers a sense of who they are). What kind of romance do you write? What themes do you explore in your work? What kind of experience do you provide for the reader? What kind of tone/voice do you use—are you funny, angsty, wry? This will help set readers’ expectations so they know what they’re getting from you.

If you’ve written a lot of books already, give your readers good entry points into your oeuvre. What’s the best place for them to start? If they love X trope, guide them to specific titles. What’s the ideal reading order for your books and/or series? If they’re on your site, they’re already interested in you, so get them invested in your work and reading it!

Going back to that newsletter: tell readers why they want to get on your list. Usually you include a free lead magnet with your newsletter—most often it’s a story of some sort, whether it’s full-length or a novella or a deleted scene, a prequel or sequel to one of your previous books, or a standalone, or it could also be something book-related but not a story, like colouring pages, a game, etc. Whatever it is, make sure you tell the reader why they want that lead magnet and/or why they want to get on your newsletter list. Does the magnet provide deeper insight into the story that they’ve already read and loved? If you can’t convince the reader why they NEED this lead magnet, then maybe it’s time for a new one. (Change them out frequently—at least once a year.)

Or maybe it’s your newsletter itself that's the draw, in which case you’ll want to highlight what’s special about it. Do you do giveaways and sneak peeks? Do you spill the tea about what’s going on in your world? Do you write fanfic about your own characters and what they’re doing? Again, convince them that it's the best thing for them if they get on your list.

Finally: keep your site updated! Make sure all your information is current, especially if you have a book that’s just released—it shouldn’t say “coming soon” on your site anymore.

I hope this has convinced you to get working on or updating your author website. It’s such a valuable resource that’s often neglected, and it can really help you drive sales if you’re using it well.

Fast publishing is here—but are we fooling ourselves in thinking that it's new?

I don’t know about you, but it seems like quality in everything is tanking these days. (God, I feel so old in saying that—“back in my day,” etc. etc.). Granted, I’m not shopping at high-end places most of the time, but things that used to be decent are either more cheaply made (clothes), sneakily smaller (food packaging), or built to fall apart quickly (electronics).

So how do books fit into this? Or do they?

Buckle in, because we’re talking about fast publishing today!

Probably everyone and their mom has read Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing and its sequel Iron Flame this year. The unexpected success of Fourth Wing, released in May, sold the book out in hardcover—it was impossible to find on bookstore shelves this summer—and caused a frenzy for more. But when Iron Flame was released in early November, fans were quickly up in arms about the quality of the book, both in aesthetics and in the writing—there were misprints, pages missing, typos, and poor writing and editing alleged. (The latter two are subjective—personally, the writing doesn’t blow me away and she crams every romantasy trope and cliché in there, but I did find it propulsive as hell and I flew through it; the editing…was rushed, let’s say, and it probably didn’t have as many passes as it should have for one of the most anticipated books of the year). But this has led to the rise of discussion around “fast publishing.”

Fast publishing makes the comparison to fast fashion, where fashion trends are quickly identified, produced, and rushed to market to capitalize on them while they’re still hot, but the quality of the garments is sacrificed, and the end product is essentially disposable once the trend fizzles out or once the garment falls apart, whichever happens first. 

The pearl-clutching about fast publishing has really only come about because the intense popularity and anticipation for Iron Flame and the trad marketing machine behind it has brought the issue to the fore. (Fashion historian Abby Cox talks in this video why this comparison doesn’t actually hold.)

But the writing to market, racing to release to keep up momentum, and cutting corners in quality is nothing new. We’ve been seeing this for years in indie publishing, especially in indie romance, with rapid release schedules that have some romance writers churning out multiple books a year, sometimes employing ghostwriters to keep that breakneck pace and doing everything they can to keep readers’ attention and game the KU system to continue earning big bucks (remember when a romance writer was giving away diamonds??). This practice goes way back to pulp writers in the ’50s who had to write books fast to make a living as a writer, and even further back to Victorian dime novels (see the Abby Cox video above for more on this), but we’ve been doing it in modern indie romance for a long time.

And if you’ve been with me for a while, you know I’ve been raising the cry for many years that this system is dangerous for romance writers and for the romance industry as a whole. Rapid release is almost a necessary evil in romance if you want to make a living as a full-time indie romance writer, especially when you’re just starting out and building a backlist—but it can lead to serious author burnout and mental health issues, declining quality in the work, and less innovation in the stories (which mean they’re not as often recommended and won’t earn you as much).

A lot of the time, I think that readers don’t really care about quality—if you’ve marketed yourself well that readers know exactly what to expect from you and/or you’ve established yourself well with a solid reputation for putting out good stuff, lots of people will read whatever you write. Note that I put the marketing first, because frankly that’s what will get you in front of the most people and get them to buy. But that’s the short game. If you want longevity as a romance writer, you need to be able to continually build on your craft and produce quality work to keep those readers long-term without them dropping off.

So what do we do when we’re being forced to rush but still want produce quality work?

We are seriously torn between capitalism and what actually makes sense for us on an individual level—you want to make money (especially in this economy), but you also have to prioritize your mental health and creativity and your own standards. I know you don’t want to put out crap—these books have your name on it! So you really have to take this at your own pace. If you can put out three to four books a year, great—I literally sell Series Architecture based on this premise (but full transparency, this is just a marketing tactic; if you can’t do three books a year, I’m absolutely not going to force you to!)—but I want you to put out books you can be proud of and that readers will want to read AND recommend. And listen, I read a ton, and there are very few books that are actually memorable to me because lots of romances are following a formula (which is totally fine!) but not doing anything interesting with it. The ones that stick out are the ones that do something innovative, i.e. an unexpected twist, an unusual setting, etc.

It's very, very easy to stint on quality, especially right now when we’re in a cost-of-living crisis and don’t want to spend money, and when it seems like the fast pace at which romance readers consume makes quality inconsequential. But I can’t tell you how many romance books I’ve read lately (mostly indie, but also trad) that I think “this could’ve used a good line edit.” And I think most books benefit from a developmental edit as well—there are very few that I’ve seen that have been in good enough shape to go straight to a line edit. You need quality from the writing to the editing to put out a great book.

And you need an actual person to edit, not an AI. I’m on the record as very anti-AI for lots of reasons, particularly generative AI for creative pursuits. I don’t use Grammarly or ProWritingAid, both of which I believe have an AI component to them—if generative AI is made up of the patterns that the AI is fed and people more often than not are making the same mistake, the AI takes that aggregate as normal enough to be considered right, making the mistake acceptable to its checks.

Also, AI can’t tell you why the errors it flags as errors are wrong—any good editor worth their salt should be able to give you a reason why they made any change they did. AI also misses on the art of editing because it's not a human that understands human nuances. Following a style guide to be technically correct is fine, but if AI put commas exactly where they’re supposed to go in a frantically paced sex scene, but it would slow down the action that way, and the cadence of the scene would be off. As an editor, I’ll run Word’s spelling and grammar check once because the squiggly lines bug me (and I usually reject most of their suggestions because it misunderstands the context), but I’m mostly relying on my trusty Chicago style guide and my own knowledge of language to edit.

All this to say:

• Fast publishing ain’t new, and indie’s been doing this for quite a long time.

• It actually sucks that we’re still doing this and running great romance talent into the ground by encouraging an unsustainable pace of production.

• Prioritize your own mental health and creativity first and go at your own pace—if it means you can’t go full-time writer sooner, that’s okay!

• Quality is ultimately going to be what you’ll fall back on, so it’s worth paying for, whether it’s in editing or in education and training to build your craft.

So what do you think of fast publishing? How else can we manage the capitalist hellscape that is modern publishing? Truly, I think about this so much, and I would love to hear your thoughts!

This post first appeared in my monthly newsletter. If you want to get these posts first, you can subscribe and get my free romance tropes workbook! Sign up here!

Would you spend $35K to publish your book?

So, would you spend $35K to indie-publish your book? 

Listen, I know the answer to that question already.

But someone DID, and I nearly keeled over when I heard about it.

Here’s the video that breaks down how exactly this woman spent $35K (projected to eventually be more) on getting her book independently published.

My DMs exploded when I posted this on my Instagram a while back, so I thought it was worth talking about here.

So, let me say upfront, if you’ve published a book before and are thinking “but I didn’t spend that much!” or you’ve never published a book and are thinking “I don’t WANT to spend that much,” you should not be worrying—this is not a typical amount to spend on producing a book.

Chelsea has a much bigger platform than most debut writers start with—she has a built-in audience, albeit in a totally different field, but one that wants to support her, so she could aim high and know that her people are there for her. (I do wonder if this messed up her also-bought algorithm on Amazon, though, if her audience is not typically romance readers—the also-boughts are determined by what the people buying her book read, and you want those recommendations to be in the same genre so that they come up when people are looking for similar books.)

She also clearly has a lot of money to spend up front, which most new (or even established) romance writers don’t. It is normal to NOT spend $35K on a book—I would wager that most writers are putting in maybe a thousand or two TOTAL, and that’s still a lot of money to put into an investment that you might not recoup, especially for a debut book. But it’s an investment in future you and your ability to continue to write and get better and get more visibility that you hope will pay off in the future.

There are lots of things that she says in here that I agree with, specifically around genre fiction not getting its flowers—and its money—when it does keep the lights on in publishing, and her very healthy understanding of criticism, confidence, and fear.

Dos and Don’ts to Take Away from This Video

I agree with her spending the bulk of her money on editing and promotion. (I’m not sure what category her cover art ended up, but I’d also spend money on that.) Obviously, as an editor, I’m going to tell you to spend your money on editing, but OMG, $10K??? Like, I think I’m a great editor, but I’ve never approached anywhere near charging $10K for one book. All my romance editor friends were similarly befuddled. (There is something to say here one day about how romance as a genre devalues itself in so many ways, including how much money writers spend on producing their books and on pricing their books—a post for another time). If someone is trying to get you to pay that for a romance edit, something weird is going on there.

Do spend the money on getting your book into the hands of people who will talk about it. Organic discovery is great, but it’s incredibly hard when there are so many books vying for attention. You don’t have to necessarily send out physical copies if that’s not something you can afford, but you can send out eARCs to book influencers and on NetGalley or other ARC distribution platforms as a way to get your book out there.

And obviously don’t worry about physical book tours yet. Again, Chelsea has a substantial audience already—results not typical.

I’m very confused about the $6K she spent on production. It sounds like it was mostly labour, but most people order an author copy from Amazon before publishing, and that’s it. Don’t stress too much about paper thickness and ink colour and all of that.

I’m assuming Chelsea’s cover art cost a pretty penny because it was an oil painting she commissioned. Oil painting isn’t the typical style for romance novels right now, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. But we all know we judge a book by its cover and we've all bought books because of their covers, right? So it’s worth putting a sizeable amount of budget towards a beautiful cover that’s on-trend and designed by someone who knows what romance readers are looking for in order to attract the right kind of attention.

Be realistic in your goals. Chelsea said she needed 7000 books sold to break even on her 35K, but for most debuts, that’s probably not happening. Even with her huge platform, I don’t know if she will be able to meet her admittedly ambitious goal of 100K(!) books sold. Social media and viral sensations make it look easy—but the reality behind that is that it’s often not their first book by the time they go viral so they’ve got experience and a backlist helping them along, and you don’t know the kind of money they (or their publisher if they're trad) are putting into promotion. Some of them are genuinely organic word-of-mouth via TikTok or Insta, but many are manufactured and spending thousands of dollars to get there.

Spend within your means. Indie publishing is not a get-rich-quick scheme—it takes a lot of time and money and strategy to start earning out regularly on your books. Don’t spend all your money at once, hoping you’ll be able to earn it back and put it into the next book.

Moral of the story: you do not have to spend $35K to have a successful book (and please don't!)—but it is going to require a ton of hard work, no matter how much you do end up spending. Spend that money and time and effort wisely.

What was your reaction to this video (beyond “oh HELL no”)? Let me know!