Book 4 of The Guardian League, The Song Unsung

No Earth-shattering personal updates this week. Work continues to be a beast, and it'll keep that up for another five months. Hard to write anything energizing about that, except that the final products will be slick (and I can't talk about them, so 🤷‍♂️). We had to postpone that big trip to Italy I mentioned a couple of newsletters ago--hopefully just a postponement. We hope to do something cheaper, a trip in the states, and save our money for a year when work and International travel policies are more predictable. But the decision saddened us--the trip repeatedly moves out of our reach.

Writing Updates

I knocked out the first round of structural edits for Book 4 of The Guardian League, The Song Unsung (working title). I left myself a handful of cleanup notes, but the end result pleased me. Ironically, pinning down the title last week helped solidify how to pull the pieces together. 👍

I updated my bookmarks--the newsletter shows the front and back images to the left and below. My first bookmark had nothing on the back. I also ordered a couple of mugs to see how they would look--it'll be a month or more out before I'll see them. They'll be a nice surprise at a point when I've all but forgotten about them, I'm sure. I'll do a giveaway if the book swag looks reasonably good. If you have any favorite book swag, let me know what it is--it would be really helpful to understand what extras excite people.

As readers of my newsletter, you get sneak peeks of artwork. That's Bear, on the right, after training with Grundle, prepping for the fights they video'd and released to the public. I've got one of Rocks in the works as well. Neither was meant for inclusion in the books, but

I have not yet submitted art requests for Book 4, and I need to get on it. Trying to get all the pieces lined up in time for a release can be a real feat.

Oh, I met with one of the folks from Inkubate.com over the week, and I learned better how to use the information on similar books. I didn't use it properly--I created Ads based on keywords in the top matches, and that didn't amount to anything good. Instead, I'm supposed to go read Goodreads reviews of those books, find common keywords in the positive reviews, and use similar language in my own ads and web pages. While I can wrap my head around that idea easily enough, I find it difficult to translate that idea into action.

There's so many venues for connecting with people on writing--Goodreads, Instagram, Facebook, Amazon, BookBub, Barnes & Noble, and many others, along with so many false leads. "Become a bestseller in 1 week with this simple trick", and "Lose weight without changing your diet or exercising". Finding the right places to invest my time proves challenging. Luckily, when I'm too overwhelmed, I can simply write, and that rarely hurts.