This was actually helpful at the time, but looking back at it the next day, I was struck by how ridiculously primitive it is. You know actual authors use specialized software to construct their intricate and airtight timelines, right?

(I have had horrible handwriting since I was a child. This is particularly bad, as it was quickly jotted down. “Res Fest” = Feast of the Resurrection of Darano, yes, we have another guilt-ridden Daranite on our hands, get ready; Rola = short for a town name; 5/5 – 6/21 is the timeframe this section of the book takes place in, between RoD and Summer Solstice. A character was originally going to travel between two towns by a slow method that took 5 days each way, and then secures one that only takes two days. So I had to get the original / actual itineraries right.)

It’s alarming to me that somehow we ended up with a Third Act Road Trip again. One where the MC meets his partner’s family for the first time, which we’ve also done before! But hey. I’m enjoying this one. It’s running long, but that’s what editing is for.

…and I did sign up for Cozy the Day Away this fall, for Healers’ Road, under “Cozy-Adjacent.” I still don’t know what that term means to other people, but I think it’s appropriate. The sale this time is slated to be huge, and scheduled on the heels of a cozy fantasy con – so I’m sure they will have a great time with it.

The actual sale is Oct. 14, but I add padding around it on my sale dates so I’m not late. THR will be 0.99 / local equivalent in ebook, and I’ll see how low I can get the paperback too. (Probably just a dollar or two lower. Print costs are a big factor.)

An Amazon-data-mining software I use called Publisher Rocket just added another feature: reverse search, or seeing which search terms will turn up a given book. Between this and my foray into Amazon ads, I’m finding that the algorithm doesn’t turn up any of my books for much of anything. Their literal titles, my pen names, basic searches that contain their literal titles (“healer fantasy”). Meaning that people aren’t going to find it by searching, ex., “fantasy with strong female lead” (which no one’s searching, pretty much; just an example). They’re only going to find it if they already know what it is and look for it specifically.

This is… illuminating and discouraging all at once. It makes me think that I should stop bothering with ads and just focus on word of mouth, which is a completely unpredictable force. But I’ll take any excuse to have one less thing to worry about!

The other thing about the reverse search is that you’re unofficially supposed to use it to spy: you look up other people’s books and steal their keywords. But the thing is, a) I feel gross about doing that, and b) other people’s keywords aren’t necessarily relevant to my book. We’re back to comps again: finding other books that are the-same-but-different to mine. Which has been a problem since day one.

As for Therapist, I found that nobody* wants feminist isekai, which was both unsurprising and kind of funny to see in black and white. (Listed at an average of $3 income per month. Which suggests I am the only person on the entirety of Amazon who’s writing it. lolsob) I took out that keyword. I mean, it’s still true, but it’s not helping anything to include it.

*”nobody” colloquially. The software bottoms out at “less than 100 searches per month.”

And look, I’m not slagging the reader base for what they do want to read. Life’s too short to be a snob. Let a million harem litRPG whatevers bloom. I’m just not going to be the one writing them, unfortunately for my bank account.