I finished my NaNo novel in mid-December and put it away for now, so I could jump back into Recovery House, which is a standalone/sequel to Risk Management (both are about women working in the substance use disorder field, but there are no overlapping characters between the two). It took me longer than normal to give the second draft a good read-through because of the holidays, but I finished that and came up with a plan for the third and fourth drafts.
The third draft issues are large and require some major scene movement. For example, quite a bit of Chapter 11 is going to move closer to the end of the book so I can slow things down where it felt rushed to me. The fourth draft will be about making sure all the scenes start and end at the right places for dramatic tension, making sure the characters have conflicting objectives, the dialogue is character specific, the language carries the mood, etc. I’ll catch some of that as I write draft three, probably, too, so it won’t be as overwhelming as it sounds to me right now lol.
Getting into marketing of my backlist is slowing down the progress of Recovery House, but something needed to happen to get my work “out there.” I purchased access to a seminar called Inkers Con with lots of marketing and advertising classes, and most of the ones I’ve watched so far have said TikTok is the place to be, and I should be posting every day (along with other advice, of course).
So I’ve been posting every day and doing updates on Goodreads, too. I plan to add other marketing tactics and to keep doing more classes, but so far my time has been eaten by all the writing and marketing I’ve been doing. I’m working on the motivation to cut some of my time wasters and get more aggressive about this as a career soon. Two or three hours per day isn’t enough!
My publisher and I will be talking soon about other marketing strategies, and there may be a rerelease of the Worth It trilogy in the works! I’ve been looking at box sets with longing, so I’ll be asking about that at our meeting.
Do you have any marketing strategies that you swear by? And if so, how can I learn all about your favorites? I want to know more!
Beth Wilson | Author 