Goodbye 2020

Happy New Year! We’re three weeks into 2021 and we’re both feeling optimistic about this new year. We have some big plans going forward. 2020 was amazing for us professionally, but it was a learning year and now the training wheels are coming off.

Looking Back

Our first release, Redemption, had its first book birthday on December 23rd and that got me thinking about how much we’ve changed since then. Redemption truly changed everything for us. Those who’ve been with us since the beginning know that we finished the first draft of The Cabin Girl back in 2018. It took us fourteen months to write. Except we made poor decisions while writing that left it a mess, and then we got stuck in this horrible editing hell. It was starting to feel like we were never going to get a book published. Then in the fall of 2019, Danielle had the idea for us to write something fresh. Something short, since one of the many problems with Cabin was that it was too long. Something to just get us moving. And Redemption was born.

After Redemption was polished and ready to go, we used that steam and wrote My Unexpected Valentine, which of course released on Valentine’s Day. We had these misguided plans for the rest of the year and… nothing else was released until October when we published Redemption’s sequel, My Latest Mistake. I will say that the pandemic was partly to blame. Danielle and I live in different states (we work together online) and I was visiting her after Valentine’s release when everything started to get serious in the US. Then there were all those months of uncertainty. We lost our momentum and it was difficult to get it back.

Despite it taking us seven months to write Mistake, we were doing other things throughout the year. We worked on our social media presence, and now we’re on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest (if you want to be awesome and follow). We got a mailing list up and running, which is something I wanted to do from the start but put off because I didn’t feel confident in us having enough content at the time. Now we’re finally established enough for one and I’m happy to have it going (and you can join if you like, wink wink).

There’s so much that goes into self-publishing. The editing, the covers, the formatting, the marketing. Ugh, the marketing. Self-publishing takes more work than I think many people realize. Thankfully, Danielle and I are a team and we mostly practice the divide and conquer method. She’s been doing a wonderful job with our Pinterest (seriously, you need to check it out) and she handles the Facebook groups, while I maintain our Instagram and Twitter. We work together on our book covers, one doing the imagery and the other doing the text. One of us deals with Amazon KDP while the other writes up intriguing summaries for our sales page. (It’s Danielle. She writes amazing summaries. I re-read one of them the other day and it made me want to read the book.) I deal with the headache that is Word to format our books, while Danielle is fighting the battle that is Amazon keywords and ads. We just work amazingly together at dividing our work, which helps so much. It’s still a lot of work. It’s a full time job even when it’s split between us.

We experimented with a lot this past year for publishing and marketing. I mentioned already that we’ve started Amazon ads, and we also tried different Fiverr promotions. We got our BookFunnel set up and learned how to prepare different book file versions. We had our first ARC reader experience with Mistake. We did our first joint promotion with other romance authors over Christmas. We were invited to participate in our first release party (which was awesome @authorbarbaralally!). We even got interviewed for the first time! (Thanks @dianamariewrites!) It was a year of firsts, and I’m sure there’s more I’m not even thinking of now.

We’re not the same authors now that we were a year ago. We gained so much experience this past year. The kind of experience that can only be gained from firsthand trial and error. Sure, we did tons of research. About everything. (And I mean everything.) But research only takes you so far. So, even though 2020 was a terrible year in many other ways, it was the year that transformed us from naive newbies to experienced authors.

Lessons Learned

• For Amazon Kindle, submit your book at least a week out from your release date if you want to set a specific date. (Redemption was supposed to have a Christmas release but it came out on the 23rd because we learned this the hard way.)
• Kindle Unlimited is your friend. Our books were on and off KU all year because we wanted to release our books on other platforms, but we kept coming back because KU is actually great for romance authors. In the long run, we earn just as much from KU reads as we do from direct sales. We decided to just keep our titles on KU now.
• Take a break between finishing your draft and editing. You need those fresh eyes.
• Some readers really don’t like the spelling “hott” (and we won’t be using it in future books).
• Fiverr has a lot of scammers. Many of those promoters promise to advertise your book to a huge audience, but check out the audience for yourself. Some of them are just posting onto Facebook groups, where the posts aren’t even getting likes. If nobody’s caring to look at the ads, you’re wasting your money hiring someone to post there. We’re had the best success with a seller who runs www.digitalbookspot.com (check it out for daily free and discount books).
• Find ARC readers who enjoy your genre. We had some who took Mistake but then said they don’t even normally read romance. (Yeah, doesn’t make sense to us either.)
• A little tip for Word users. If the formatting to your book is coming out wonky, reset the entire document to the Normal style and re-apply all the styles fresh. Had this problem recently while trying to prepare the paperback version of Valentine and was about to pull my hair out before someone gave me that advice on a Facebook group. It worked, so I have to include the advice here.
• The rest of our lessons learned are personal, relating to the way we write and the way we work together. Maybe I’ll go into detail about our co-author process someday.

Looking Forward

With all this new knowledge under our belt, we have a better idea of what we can accomplish in 2021. Our goal is to release more books than we did this past year. The first in line will be the unnamed panther shifter romance. The sequel, the unnamed Doberman shifter romance, will be released later this year. The Cabin Girl is high on our priority list and we’re going to get back to its editing soon, so you can expect to finally see that release this year! (Finally!) The third book in the Heart’s Peak series is also on our list, as well as a surprise Heart’s Peak novella.

Those five books are the main titles we want to get out in 2021. If you follow us on Instagram, you know we’ve been working on secret side projects. We have two of those we’ve been chipping away at, so we’ll see how they go.

With our four previous books, we wrote them using a different process and routine each time. We believe we’ve finally determined what works best for us, and we have an ambitious writing schedule planned for ourselves. Writing is no longer a hobby for us. We want to be professional authors and that’s how we’re going to write. It’s working out well so far. The Doberman shifter book is almost finished, the panther one is somewhere between a third and halfway done, and we have those two side projects started. I’ve been posting weekly word count updates on Instagram and I plan to keep that up, so yay for accountability.

Alongside that, we plan to get all of our books released in paperback. You can expect to see My Unexpected Valentine in paperback this Valentine’s Day with a shiny new cover! We’re working on getting a better image for our author profile, so we’ll share that when we have it. We want to expand on our online presence and we hope to share more of our writing samples as well.

2021 is looking bright for us and we hope you all have a wonderful year too!

-Amber