Category Archives: Publishing

A Month in the Garden

Posted on by under My Books, Publishing, Writing Life

This is a big year for me in terms of milestones. I had a big birthday, though we won’t specify which one. 🙂 I also celebrated thirty years since selling my first book to a publisher and ten years since going indie and becoming my own publisher. I usually rearrange my office and sort my research books in these moments of reassessment, but I knew this reset had to be bigger.

Some of these changes began last year. I enrolled all of my historical romances in KDP Select last fall, and then my paranormal romances earlier this year. I have mixed feelings about having all those eggs in one basket, so to speak, but there are benefits. When I have an update (like the change to my newsletter service) I only have to upload revised files to one portal instead of seven. That saves an enormous amount of time.

Going forward, the plan is to gradually move both suites of work to wide distribution again. Now that I’ve had a few months to catch my breath, I’ll update the interiors as they’re republished at the other portals. My historical romance backlist will start to go wide in September and my PNR will begin to leave KU at the end of October.

I’ve also amalgamated my websites and changed newsletter services this year. Once that was done, I took a hard look at my plans and began to prune them back. I love to do all of the things, but there was just too much on my plate. I cancelled some pre-orders and some contracts for subsidiary rights then headed out to the garden for the month of May. I still had publishing and promotion tasks to finish but I didn’t write for that month.

I needed to make a new plan.

I love my garden and it is extensive. In recent years, I’ve neglected it a bit, because I’ve been working so many hours. It was a delight to focus upon it for an entire month and just think. I made lists, because that’s what I do, of what I was happy about and unhappy about, what gave me stress and what triggered my stress. I listed what I cherished in my life and what I missed, what I wanted to do and accomplish, what was in need of more attention. I began to identify places where I could make changes about all of those things. I also weeded and moved plants, reorganizing the garden as I sorted my thoughts. It was a wonderful break, and one that was overdue.

As a result of my month in the garden, a lot of things are changing in my life right now and for the better. The garden looks better, too!

I made some choices about my work schedule. I want to enjoy my garden and my house. I want to have space in my schedule to craft and to cook. I won’t bore you with the personal choices I made, but I’m feeling much better and more positive than I was earlier this year. Again, as much as I want to write all the things, it makes sense to focus – algorithms favor strong branding and regular publication.

It was time to think like a publisher. If I’m going to write books, I should choose to write books that will perform best in the market and deliver the strongest results. Which of my brands would be the current best choice? A hard look at the market reveals that I’m not delivering content that fits what’s hot in any of my three favored subgenres. Contemporary romance is skewing to darker sexier romances, with the alternative being the other end of the spectrum, sweet often-small-town romances and/or romantic comedies. I don’t particularly want to write either, so it made no sense to launch a new contemporary romance series right now. (Sorry, Aidan.) Paranormal romance is also darker right now with more fantasy elements and a lot more sex. As much as I love my dragon shifter heroes, that isn’t where I want to take them. Arach and even Sebastian will have to wait.

Markets change all the time and the trick is to choose the project most likely to succeed in the foreseeable future. I’m lucky to be able to write in multiple sub-genres, but I knew I needed to choose one brand instead of trying to do it all.

The curious thing is that my historical romance alter-ego has the strongest SEO. This always surprises me since Claire Delacroix’s career ended in 2005 in traditional publishing (which was why I moved on to other sub-genres) but she was reborn with a vengeance in indie and digital just six years later. I decided several years ago to create a new medieval romance series, Blood Brothers, that I hoped would appeal to the current market of historical romance readers. Histrom has always skewed to sexy Regency romances and to Scottish settings – my first love is the Middle Ages but I’ve sent my knights to Scotland before and I knew I could do it again. That series is performing well, the best of all my current series. So, by the time I came out of the garden, I had decided to focus on Delacroix historical romances for the next year. That also gave me the room in my schedule to add a new Regency romance series so that Claire has new releases more often. We’ll see where a more consistent publication schedule takes that brand.

I’ll revisit all of this next May in the garden, but histrom for a year is the current plan. That means things will be quieter on this site.

I’ll post a partial schedule on Claire’s blog tomorrow. 🙂

Managing A Big List – 2

Posted on by under author resources, Indie Publishing

This spreadsheet tracks All. The. Things. I’ve used a variation of it for a while, then attended a workshop by Carrie Ann Ryan that added additional possibilities. (She calls hers a “swipe list”, because she can copy and paste the information she needs from it for marketing campaigns. I use mine more for metadata.) The concept is that everything you need to know about every book in your list is in one spreadsheet. Yes, it gets to be a big workbook, but it’s so very VERY useful.

This tool will be infinitely easier to build if you start when you publish your first book. I’m ready to guess, though, that most of you didn’t 🙂 and that, like me, you’re doing some backtracking to fill it all in.

So, what will you track here and how?

Create a new workbook and call it something that makes sense to you. MyBooks_2021 works for me. I set mine up that each series is on one sheet, but you can give each book its own sheet if you like. My workbook has twenty tabs and anywhere from two to six books on each page. There are about 200 lines on the sheets that have been completely filled out, like the Jewels of Kinfairlie, although some of them are blank to make it easier to read. It contains a lot of data!

I made Column B and onward wider. Starting in Column B, list the titles of all the books in the series across the top. You can also add a column for the series information and links.

In Column A, list the items included. My first item is the website url for the book’s landing page on my website. If you use shortened urls, you can include them here, or you can include both the long and short urls. (Give them separate lines.) Below that are the links for that book at the major portals: Amazon.com, Apple, GooglePlay, Nook, Kobo, etc. I also break out the identifier for the portal (like the ASIN and the Apple ID) on its own line because sometimes that’s all I need for the form at a promotional portal. I track the book link at promotion sites, like GoodReads and BookBub, and also include the ISBN for the ebook.

All the Things metadata spreadsheet by Deborah Cooke

Below the ebook details, I track the print editions of the book the same way. In this case, it’s a trade paperback POD. If there are more print editions, I track them below.

Below that and a horizontal line are the tropes for the book, and then the keywords. It’s really handy to have this at your fingertips when uploading books. (I find this invaluable for translations, too.)

Below another horizontal line are the BISAC codes for the book, as well as the BIC, WISneu and CLIL codes. When BISAC updates their listings, I can see pretty quickly what books will need their metadata updated.

Next are review quotes for the book in question, all ready to cut and paste. If the book has any credentials (USAToday Bestseller, industry award, etc.) I list that, too.

All the things metadata spreadsheet #2 by Deborah Cooke

Below another horizontal line is the tagline, then the book copy.

Below another horizontal line are the slogans and hooks I’ve used successfully in marketing the book. I have such a hard time with those one sentence (or 50 character) summaries, so once I work one out, I want to save it.

Below another horizontal line are the other formats for the book, including audio and translations. This varies by series and by brand for me. These are some of the translations for The Beauty Bride that are currently available (the list goes on!). Remember to add these ISBN#s as alternate versions at GooglePlay.

All the things metadata spreadsheet by Deborah Cooke

One of the rows I need to add to the German section is the link for LovelyBooks, which is a German reader site.

Every one of my series has its own sheet in this workbook. You can see the tabs across the bottom of the workbook.

All the things metadata spreadsheet by Deborah Cooke

I set up the first page without titles then copied and pasted Column A on each new sheet I added. Once I had all the pages, then I started to fill everything in. It takes a while and I have older series that aren’t updated on my spreadsheet yet. All the more reason to start early!

You can use this compilation for any updates that you do – I created it initially as a reference for updating my website when I changed to a new template. It’s great when I upload books, when I book promotions and when I schedule posts on my Facebook pages. I also have details at my fingertips when I get a new translation. It’s a lot of work to compile, but I use mine all the time.

Start with your bestselling series first and see whether you find it useful, too.

Managing A Big List – 1

Posted on by under author resources, Indie Publishing

One of the tasks that becomes increasingly more time-consuming as an indie author publishes more books is managing his or her backlist. Today, we’ll talk about tracking the ebook files that reside at the various portals. Books might require corrections or new information – like the addition of new titles to the series – or they might have new covers or changes to the front or end matter. A newsletter link or website url might need to be changed or updated. A new version of the book might be available (like audio) and you might want the link in the ebook. All of these options require the files to be uploaded to the portals again. Some authors update their ebook files on a regular schedule. I’m not nearly that organized anymore: I tend to update all books in a series when there’s a new release in that series. I try to update the end matter in completed series every one to two years. That’s a slippery objective which doesn’t always happen.

One thing I do is track my uploads and (you guessed it) I use a spreadsheet.

No matter how you generate your ebook files, it’s good to practice version control. This means that when you update the file, it has some info in its name to identify which version of the book it is. The easiest way to do this, IMO, is to add the date to the file name. I use Vellum to generate my ebook files, and it does not show the version automatically in the name. Once the files have been generated, I change the file names like this:

Just_One_Silver_Fox_Kindle_July2021.epub

Vellum generated this file name without the date and I added the part in bold. (And yes, I create portal-specific editions with my English books, and yes, I upload an epub to Amazon. If you want to learn more about that, check out this blog post from Vellum.)

Some of the portals will preserve the file name, so that when you look at the book’s metadata on your dashboard, you can see it. Others don’t – GooglePlay, for example, always changes the file name to the ISBN, although it does list the upload date.

When you upload a new version of a book file, it will be handled differently at different portals. All portals will deliver the current book file for new purchases. Some portals will push out the updated version to existing customers or (Apple) offer them the choice of updating their version. Amazon defaults to not delivering the new version to existing customers. You can ask them to push out the new version to all customers, but they may not agree to do as much. There’s only a chance of their agreement if the new file is 10% different from the old file or more. This can be frustrating if you’re only uploading a new version because you received a quality warning from Amazon about half a dozen typos: while fixing them isn’t perceived as a major update or one worth delivering to readers, that quality flag could result in the book being removed from sale if left unaddressed. The other wrinkle is Kindle Unlimited – when a KU reader adds a book to their library, I’m not sure the version can ever be updated.

To keep track of uploads without needing to click into the metadata for each book on each dashboard, I have a spreadsheet. To create a similar one, create a new workbook. You can call it Uploads or EbookVersions or something that makes sense to you. Add the year to the file name.

Call Column A “Title”. Make that column as wide as necessary to display your titles completely. Then, across the top and starting with Column B, name the columns with all the portals you use. I put the ebook portals first, then the aggregators. I have a column for BookFunnel, so I know the date of the version loaded there. It’s often an ARC, so having the date here is a good reminder to update it whenever I’m going to sell directly or give a book away in a BF promo. Last, but not least, I list the portals that serialize fiction, mostly because these are newer to me. List the portals in an order that makes sense to you.

I have a vertical line before the POD portals. In that section, I track the covers separately from the book interiors, so each format at each portal has two columns. I list all the various format options there, too, since many of my books are available in multiple print formats.

After another vertical line, I list the audio editions of the books. ACX is first, then Findaway Voices, then KOBO and BookFunnel – because I upload my non-exclusive audio at those portals.

There may be other outlets that make sense for you to add. If you have a Patreon and provide content there, for example, it might make sense to list it there.

Then, fill Column A with the titles of your books. I list them by author brand (which is sub-genre) and by series. Add horizontal dividing lines where it makes sense to you. I have them between author brands, then to delineate translations – which are listed by language.

Once you have all the books and portals listed, you can start to fill the form.

Here’s a peek at the top of mine:

Deborah Cooke's spreadsheet for tracking ebook version uploads

Just looking at these dates makes me want to update all of those files! (Although actually, this is the 2020 spreadsheet and most of these files have been updated this year.)

Whenever I know that a specific version needs to be updated, I use the highlight option and make that cell highlighter yellow. That way, I won’t forget to go back and update it. This can happen if I’m uploading a new version and one of the portals is having server issues. (That happens more often than might be ideal.) The yellow cell reminds me that I haven’t done that bit yet. You can add extra fields or columns for things that you tend to forget. I have a price column, for example, because I sometimes change prices at the end of the year, up or down, and this column reminds me to do every book at every portal.

Overdrive has a column because I used to upload directly to that portal. Now I use Draft2Digital to deliver to them, which is why it says “via D2D” in that column. I could remove it completely now, but it lingered while I made sure I changed the distribution on every single book. If you could see way over to the right, I have a similar column for NookPress POD’s – I had uploaded a few there, but now the bulk of those files get to B&N from Ingrams. The POD’s are available for sale at B&N but they go “via Ingrams”. This year, I decided to use D2D for distribution of all my translations (part of my ongoing quest to simplify) so there are a lot of “via D2D” entries further down the spreadsheet.

Since you’re going to fill dates into the spreadsheet, this can also be a good way to track exclusivity. I tend to take my audiobooks out of exclusivity after a year at ACX. This way, I can see the publication dates on them at a glance. Similarly, I have a column for KU in my Amazon section where I can list the date a book will finish its current term in KU. You see there’s a column for removing the books from wide distribution, too, as that can take some time before the KU enrollment. My translations that are published through Babelcube are licensed there for five years. There are a lot of reasons why you might want to know the date a book was uploaded.

Although this is a perpetual spreadsheet, I do create a duplicate each January and rename it with the current year. That way, I have an archival version in my files. That can be helpful for looking at the timing of previous enrollments in Kindle Unlimited or past pricing strategies.

Next time, we’ll talk about another handy spreadsheet to keep updated on your desktop. Happy publishing!

Building a World Guide

Posted on by under author resources, Writing

This past week, I’ve been talking in my reader group on Facebook about keeping track of fictional worlds. Since compiling the world guide for Dragonfire – which was a seemingly endless job – I knew I needed a better system. I’ve been using a new tool this past year, mostly for DragonFate, and am pleased with it. Since people were interested, I thought I’d share that here, as well.

I’ve tried a lot of methods for keeping track of my worldbuilding and character lists. The tried and true is a stack of index cards. Each character gets a card with his or her pertinent details. Locations that recur get a card, again with any mentioned details. I still use index cards for Flatiron Five Fitness and Flatiron Five Tattoo. I use a highlighter to mark the side of each card with that character or place’s first appearance in the series. (The index cards are lined. On the right edge, I colour between the first and second line for anything in book one. Between the second and third line means that element or character is introduced in book two, etc.) This means I can easily grab all pertinent cards, and also helps me find the first written description of any given element in the book manuscript.

This works well for contemporary romances but I find that paranormal romances have too many elements. This index card system gets overwhelmed quickly and doesn’t offer me enough ways to search for details.

I’ve tried other systems like Scrivener but have settled on this one, called Plottr, for the moment. I don’t want to create in the software, as I’m perfectly happy to use Word for that — actually, I’d be happy with a typewriter or writing longhand. I prefer as little interference from tech as possible when I’m writing.

Plottr is intended for plotting a new work, but I don’t plot in such detail in advance. I use it as a worldguide. I compile the timeline for each book after it’s written. This is kind of backwards, but it works for me. Let’s have a look.

Here’s the series page from Plottr for DragonFate. I need to update the covers since the second two now have gold type instead of grey, but here you can see the series at a glance. Each book has its own detail page but I like being able to see the series. (And yes, there are more books below this, but you can’t see them yet!)

The DragonFate Novels tracked in Plottr by Deborah Cooke

Here’s the plotting page for Dragon’s Mate.

Dragon's Mate by Deborah Cooke, timeline in Plottr compiled by Deborah Cooke

The timeline is a grid, almost like a spreadsheet. You can add as many columns to the right as you want and as many rows at the bottom as you like. The default is for each column to be a chapter, and the scenes to cascade below that, presumably in order. I have more than one plotline in the series, and want to track them in order of events. I also don’t plot by chapter. There are a number of templates included in the software for plotting, but for me this is more about tracking the series once each book is written than plotting in advance.

The timeline is more important to me, so I put it in the top line. The chapter line is a reference to the book manuscript, in case I want to double check any detail. The green line is the main plot: in this case, Hadrian and Rania’s firestorm and romance. There are two longer slow-burn story arcs in this series, and they’re tracked below: Sebastian and Sylvia, then Theo and Mel. There are a lot of magickal elements and items in this series and I track them on the next line. Finally, I track mentions of the rest of the Pyr. (Ignore that box with the dotted outline on the last line: it thought I wanted to add an item when I was taking the screen shot.)

Each box is a scene, and I list them in order from left to right. I end up with 70 columns or so for each book, but I can find anything later and quickly.

If I click on one of those scenes, like the very first Fae Attack, that opens a detail card:

Opening scene of Dragon's Mate by Deborah Cooke in Plottr

Here I can add a more detailed description of events, plus I can choose the characters in the scene from my character list, and choose the location from my list of places. This means that later, I can filter the timeline by character or location. This is hugely useful when cross-checking what secondary characters have witnessed or heard. (I don’t use the tags as yet.)

Of course, I can look at characters or places and get a similar card for details. Here’s the card for Arach.

Arach Knights, one of the Pyr in DragonFate by Deborah Cooke, tracked in Plottr

The character list is sorted into groups – this is the list of main characters, but there are secondary and other characters. I’ve added a field for “kind” so I can keep track of my shifters. On the Character page, I can filter by kind or by specific words, which helps me track (for example) the selkies that I’ve specifically named already in the series. I put unnamed characters here as well – “Nameless Wolf Shifter” – and they often get names later.

I like the sort and filter functions. If I forget the names of Rania’s twelve brothers, for example, I can just sort by name and scroll down to “Rania’s brother”.

Rania's brothers in Dragon's Mate by Deborah Cooke, documented in Plottr

There are other options to display your plot as well. I use the timeline, but here’s the outline that can be compiled from the timeline.

Dragon's Mate by Deborah Cooke outlined in Plottr.

The colored boxes indicate which storyline the scene is from.

You can see on the menu bar that there’s a display for Places, which is similar to the one for Characters that I showed you above with Arach’s listing.

Bones from the DragonFate novels by Deborah Cooke, documented in the places list in Plottr

In my version of the software (which is older) the book list isn’t automatically populated for each location. It seems this feature could be easily added and it may have been since I updated my version.

When I set up a new book in Plottr, the next one in the series, I copy the plotlines – they’re the same for each book. In the first column, I list the outstanding items or status of each and also the goal for that line in the next book. So for the next book on the Magick line, I’ve noted that the gem of the hoard is destroyed and that Maeve is a lizard, Fae is no longer a separate realm, the Fae weapons that slice between realms are destroyed, and the Regalian magick is gone. One question is how earth magick has reasserted itself. Another is what happened to Bryant. A third is what happened to the earth magick charms mentioned in Dragon’s Heart that were given to species of Others. And on and on. This will be modified when the book is done and I create the final timeline for it, but gives me a snapshot of what I need to address (or can consider) in the next book.

One of the great things is that as I move deeper into the series I can easily locate all previous mentions of the two longer arc stories. I’m compiling a timeline for Sylvia and Sebastian, for example, which includes all mentions of their interactions so far – and the gaps – with dates and locations. That will make it easier for me to see where I can fill gaps and list questions that are outstanding. I’ll do the same for Mel and Theo, as well.

Plottr also has an export function to Word which I haven’t tried yet. That would make it simpler to compile an actual world guide when that time comes.

I’m sure that I’m only using a small percentage of this software’s capabilities, but it’s working well for me. I find that many applications are almost overwhelming and tend to focus on what I need to get done instead of exploring all the options. Because it is essentially a spreadsheet, this one makes the most sense to me. (I always want to lose myself in the story, not in the tool.)

There’s a peek behind the scenes for this week! I hope you found it interesting, or, if you’re a writer yourself, that it gave you food for thought.

An Upside Down Month

Posted on by under 99 Cent Sales, Coming Soon, Contemporary Romance, Indie Publishing, Medieval romance

Things have been a little quiet around here lately, so this morning, I thought I’d explain why.

Four weeks ago, my laptop booted up, then the screen went black. That woke me up faster than a strong cup of coffee! I had everything backed up (twice) and I did manage to coax it back to life intermittently, but its untimely demise forced some changes on my daily routine.

Fortunately, there’s nothing wrong with my last laptop that a battery recharge wouldn’t fix – I’d upgraded because I wanted a lighter laptop for traveling. So, I loaded the old one up with the files for everything that’s happened in the past seven years. Its modem was never configured, because that used to be my trick to staying offline and getting more writing done. Now, it would need a lot of software updates to go online, and I’m not sure its OS would support them all. I really don’t have time to sort it out. Instead, it’s acting like a glorified typewriter, and I’m using Mr. Math’s computer when I need to go online.

Just One Silver Fox, book six in the Flatiron Five Fitness series of contemporary romances by Deborah Cooke

We’ve both discovered that I go online a lot more than suspected!

As a result, I’m behind on social media stuff, and have been quiet. I do my publishing and research work in those moments online when I get the chance. The upside is that I’ve been writing a lot, which is a good thing – and I’m loving Jacquie and Pierce’s book. Sonia has a cameo in Just One Silver Fox that has convinced me that her book will be next. (More about that in March.)

I’ve also published some new translations this month—The Crusader’s Bride was published in Spanish at the end of December, then The Crusader’s Heart followed in January. The Rose Red Bride was published in German in January and my first contemporary romance translation, Just One Snowbound Night, was also published in Spanish in January. Some of the books are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.

Just One Snowbound Night, book one of the Flatiron Five Tattoo series of contemporary romances by Deborah Cooke, Spanish edition

I have two Spanish translations—one Delacroix and one Cooke—and a German one for Delacroix due in February, plus am waiting on two Portuguese translations of Delacroix books. Publishing these editions means getting the cover translated by the designer, formatting the interior, then publishing the book and putting up pre-orders when possible. I’ve also set up new website pages and newsletters for each language, with the help of the respective translators, so I send a newsletter when there’s a new release. And I’ve contracted with some new translation teams for more foreign editions. Phew! It’s a lot of work but exciting too—Mr. Math thinks it’s cool to look at the locations of the various members of my team.

You can see the current translations (and some of the upcoming ones) on each of my websites:


Translations of my contemporary romances

Translations of my paranormal romances

Translations of my historical romances

Stolen Brides, a digital boxed set featuring four full-length medieval romances by Claire Delacroix

Claire has a new boxed set coming out this week, a themed bundle of Beauty-and-the-Beast medieval romances called Stolen Brides. It’ll be 99-cents through February 15 and includes four full-length novels.

I published some of my books on Radish this month, and need to upload more content there.

And I’m participating in three BookFunnel promotions this month, too – these are the ones where readers sign up for an author’s mailing list in exchange for downloading a free book. Here’s one for contemporary romances – there will be a second one in the middle of the month. Here’s a paranormal romance one.

I’m running behind on creating memes and blog posts and getting newsletters prepped, and I haven’t created my monthly features on this blog or the Delacroix blog for trope of the month. At this point, I’ll wait until March to feature another one. I plan to be back on track by the end of the month, after Jacquie and Pierce’s book is all set up for publication in digital and print. Then it’ll be on to Max and Alys, then Sonia and….(?)

I hope your January was a little less challenging than mine!