You’ve probably noticed that I’ve started to make changes around here. Claire, for example, has a new website of her own and the detail pages for her books will be disappearing from this site by the end of the year. By then, the links in the end matter of my books will go to Claire’s new site. (BTW, if you have bookmarked any of Claire’s pages here, you might want to update the bookmark with the url of the new site. I’m going to guess that some of you will want to keep track of the Kindle Unlimited page, for example.)

There are a couple of reasons for this change. The first is that this site, while a useful and encyclopedic reference to all of my books, is becoming unwieldy. Those nested menus are a nightmare on a cellphone and they’ve gotten to the point that they’re even hard to navigate on a laptop. There are just too many books to display in one place. I think that a reader new to my work might not know where to start, which is fair enough, and also means that I want to streamline the presentation.

The second issue is that newsletter open rates drop as the subscriber list gets bigger. I noticed a real difference when my total number of subscribers went over 5,000 readers. It’s now more than twice that. The issue is that servers perceive batches of emails from the same source as spam and block them from delivery. Once a list gets over a certain threshold number of subscribers, there’s seems to be a critical mass of emails being delivered to any given server (gmail, yahoo, aol, etc.) So, the bigger the subscription base gets, the less effective the newsletter becomes as a means of reaching readers.

I’ve been gathering ideas for new strategies for a while and it’s time to start putting them into play. As much as I’d love to believe that every reader wants to read every book that I write, that’s just not the case. You probably have a favorite sub-genre or series. These changes will make it easier for you to keep track of new releases of your favorite type.

• I have multiple websites now and will have more in future. The idea is to give each series or subgenre its own virtual home. Claire has her own website now, and so do the Dragons of Incendium.

• on both this website and Claire’s new website, there is an updated booklist. The titles of the books that are the best place to start in any given series are in red and bold. When there are other points to enter that fictional world, the title of that book will be just in red. If you want to know where to start, go to the booklist and look for those red titles. Here’s the booklist on this site for Deborah Cooke books, and here’s the one for Claire’s books on the Delacroix site.

• On all three websites, the home page is called Next & New and displays the most recent release as well as the upcoming one. So, if you bookmark any of my sites and visit them at intervals, you’ll see what’s new.

• This site hosts my main blog, of course, but I’ve added a blog to both Claire’s website and to the Dragons of Incendium site. I’ll blog on those sites about new releases in those respective worlds or series as well as about upcoming releases, once I have covers and buy links. You can subscribe to either or both of those blogs and receive an email when I create a post. Of course, if you follow the blog on this site, you’ll see all of my posts made here. Scroll down to the bottom of the blog page for the Follow link. Here’s the blog on Claire’s site, and here’s the blog on the Dragons of Incendium site.

• When you sign up for my main newsletter, Knights, Dragons & Heroes, you can choose your news. Selecting either my contemporary romances, my paranormal romances, my historical romances or all of my books means that you’ll get a newsletter each month tailored to tell you what you most want to know. You can change these preferences any time by scrolling down to the very bottom of the newsletter and choosing Update My Preferences.

• In addition to my main newsletter, I also have series-specific newsletters. When you join these newsletters, you’ll receive a sequence of messages bringing you up to date on the series so far. After that, you’ll get a new message when there’s a new title up for pre-order and another when it publishes. These lists are maintained separately from my main newsletter list: you can belong to as many or as few as you like. The existing series-specific newsletters are:

Flatiron Five

The Dragons of Incendium

The Brides of Inverfyre
(This one hasn’t actually launched yet. The first message will go out when The Mercenary’s Bride comes out of the boxed set, The Nutcracker Reimagined, and is available for purchase on its own. You can sign up now if you don’t want to miss that.)

• There’s also a Yahoo list which is a New Release Alert. When you sign up for this, you receive a single email when I publish a new title. It includes buy links for all the portals, as well as the cover copy and the cover itself.

I’m going to be adding some new options to my newsletter list soon, too, in order to ensure that you get the news you most want to know. There are some amazing new ways to tailor information to subscribers and I want to try them out. Stay tuned for more updates!