Day 153: Drip sequences

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Another day of no editing! Ugh!

To be honest, I did a lot of work today. I had to catch up on messages from one of the box sets I’m in, as well as check email, all of which took about an hour.

Then I had to text back and forth with my cover designer about buying the licenses for the stock photos for the covers in my Lady Wynwood’s Spies series. I wanted to make sure we were getting the right photos, plus I ended up changing one photo last minute.

Then I realized I should create my drip sequence because I have a BookFunnel promo starting tomorrow. (If you don’t know what a drip sequence is, check out this podcast by Thomas Umstattd at Author Media.) I know, it’s really last minute and to be honest, I had not been intending to update my welcome email at all since it’s adequate, and it’s a lot of work to create a drip sequence.

But I’ve been reading Elana Johnson’s book, Writing and Marketing Systems (Indie Inspiration for Self-Publishers Book 3), and decided to do my drip sequence anyway. It will filter out anyone who doesn’t really want to be on my newsletter list, and it would be a waste not to take advantage of the increased newsletter signups from the BookFunnel promotion.

The problem is that I had to do two drip sequences for both my pen names. The Camy Tang drip sequence was pretty easy to write, thanks to Thomas’s podcast, but when I started writing the Camille Elliot drip sequence, I realized it lacked a couple things I had in the Camy Tang drip sequence.

One thing that Camy Tang has is a permafree book, but I substituted that email with one about my upcoming book, which was probably more appropriate anyway.

But the other thing that Camy Tang has is a second freebie short story that I offer to my newsletter subscribers after they’ve subscribed. It’s a little short story that readers of my Sushi series enjoy since it’s set right after Sushi for One? ends.

So I putzed and thought about what I could write instead in my Camille drip sequence, or if there might be some Regency short story I could offer. I found a little Regency microfiction I wrote years ago, just before I wrote Prelude for a Lord.

So I just coped my Scrivener file with the Sushi series short story, substituted the text and updated the metadata, and uploaded a new generic cover I made in Canva. I was able to compile into an epub and PDF pretty fast, then uploaded it into BookFunnnel to deliver the short story, just like the short story for my Camy drip sequence.

Creating the drip sequence in Mailchimp wasn’t bad. They have a tutorial on their website that was easy to follow.

Marketing is so much work! I don’t really like it, but it might also be because I’m just not used to doing it. It might get easier the more I do it.

But now that everything is done, it’s late at night and I haven’t done my editing at all!!!

I think I will stay up a little later to try to get some writing done tonight.

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I tried getting more done but only lasted a little longer than an hour. I was just too tired, I suppose from needing to learn something new and create the drip sequence. I think I’ll go to bed.

Editing: Time spent: 1 hour, 10 minutes
Writing: Time spent: 0 minutes
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 9 hours, 43 minutes

My takeaway for today: Marketing is so much work! I don’t really like it, but it might also be because I’m just not used to doing it. It might get easier the more I do it.

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