Day 268: Knitting for marketing; series premise problems

I had originally intended to take a week to finish as much of the marketing stuff for book 3 as I could, but I finished all of it in a few days.

I’ve been working on the marketing and self-publishing for other projects, mostly the marketing and promotion for the multi-author anthology I’m participating in. Since we don’t want to spend a lot of money, we’re doing more social media promotions, and my contribution has been blog posts and knitting projects to promote the book.

The knitting projects have been fun, but time consuming. I’m knitting items that are featured in the novellas in the anthology, and I’ll be posting them on my blog along with author interviews and excerpts.

I spent a lot of time today doing those knitting projects, but I didn’t start my Toggl timer because it didn’t really seem like writing-related work, to be working on knitting in anticipation of a blog post. Even though the blog posts will promote my writing and sales, it still seemed strange, so I didn’t record my time.

Of course, now I’m regretting it since I ended up spending a lot of time doing that today, but my Toggl timer says I didn’t do much work.

Next I’ll work on the Hawaii series. I have actually been brainstorming the series premise on and off for the past week, and it’s been tough going because I essentially can’t make up my mind about what genre I want to write.

At first I thought it might be fun to do a humorous romantic suspense like my Protection for Hire series, but unlike that series, this series would have a different couple for each book.

So far, I haven’t been able to come up with a good series premise that would explain why all these different couples had to encounter danger at some point. Protection for Hire was easy because it was the same heroine, and she was niece to a mob boss, so, you know—automatic conflict!

But for Christian Romantic Suspense with different main characters for each book, I just can’t seem to pull it off. Maybe I’m not creative enough, but none of the ideas I tried is working so far.

I thought about making this a standard Christian Contemporary Romance series. I actually already have a fleshed-out storyline idea for one of the books, and some other storyline ideas for some of the others.

But the majority of my newsletter subscribers and readers came because of my Love Inspired Suspense books or Protection for Hire series, both of which are romantic suspense. Very few of them have signed up for my newsletter because they read my contemporary romance Sushi series. I want to aim my new series at those readers who enjoyed Protection for Hire and my LIS stories.

So today I’ll do more brainstorming for the series premise. I had hoped to have the premise nailed down by now (since I had finished so much of the marketing for book 3 within a few days), but I’m still spinning my wheels.

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I did some work, but not enough since I had spent so much time earlier doing my knitting.

I decided to add Outlining to my time record since I’m not writing on the book just yet.

Outlining: time spent: 2 hours, 50 minutes

Blocking: time spent: 0

Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour, 47 minutes