I have a number of promotional deals to tell you about for the month of April (see below), but first I would like to discuss my new experiment with a more efficient and effective method of communicating with other authors and fans of my work—by setting up a newsletter I’ve called An Aging Author’s Daily Diversions on substack (you might be familiar with this as the site hosting Letters from an American by historian, Heather Cox Richardson.)

Currently, I have three primary methods of communicating with people—this blog, monthly promotional newsletters, and daily posts on my Author FaceBook page. There have been problems with all three.

For example, this blog has become less and less effective. I used to post 2-3 articles per month, and many of my subscribers were other authors who were interested in hearing about my journey as an indie author and fans of my mystery series who were interested in the historical research I had done for each book. However, in the past few years, most of the entries have been posts about promotions (and my infrequent new publications.) Not surprisingly, fewer and fewer of you comment or even open the email that goes out.

Recently, I have been finding a real connection with readers and other authors has been my facebook author page. When Covid started, and I was looking for a greater sense of connection with people, I started doing a daily diary post that talked about my days, the research I was doing, the progress I was making on the latest book. That daily post has been immensely satisfying. The problem with this method of communication, however, is that FaceBook only shows these posts in the daily newsfeed of 10% of my two-thousand and more followers.

So, after being inspired by the newsletters of authors who had shifted from blogging or single purpose promotional emails, I decided to see if a similar shift on my part would satisfy both me and my various constituencies. To do so, last week I started sending out An Aging Author’s Daily Diversions, which is a free newsletter that shows up in subscribers’ emails daily.

In these emails, I will continue to describe how I am working on aging gracefully, report on my writing progress, and make recommendations of books I am reading/listening to or tv shows I am watching. Once a month, I will also provide details on promotional discounts on my books and audiobooks, and weekly, I will have newsletters that focus my experiences as an indie author, and report on interesting facts I’ve discovered in my research. Subscribers who are primarily interested in these topics will know to open those emails entitled specifically–New Deals, My Indie Author Journey, and Historical Tidbits.

What I hope you all will do after reading this post is go and check out An Aging Author’s Daily Diversions, subscribe for a month or two to see if you enjoy it. That way I won’t lose contact with you when I stop posting these blogs (and instead devote more time to writing!)

M. Louisa Locke

***********

April Audiobook Discounts

$.99 on Chirp, $1.99 on AppleBooks

 $1.99 on Chirp, AppleBooks, B&N, GooglePlay

,

$2.99 on Chirp, AppleBooks, and GooglePlay

Find a new Victorian Novel to read HERE

or

Enter to Win a Bundle of Science Fiction/Fantasy Novels HERE