Lol I hear Lidiya's voice when I read her books as well!

Substack feels very user friendly to me. You lose some of the "marketing" features of other mailing lists but I was so intimidated by those anyway, like...oh well. Substack has other advantages.

Blueberry was largely based on my black cat, Oskar, who died right around the time I started the channel...but they do have some of the same traits. Blue and Oskar are both squawk-talkers though, while my orange boy Reinhard is a squeaker. I'll have to write a squeaky little wyvern next!

@@lidiyafoxgloveauthor lol yes! Reinhard has the wyvern energy, you get my vote. ps Im sorry about Oskar, its nice that you have a portrait of him in your book though.

So far Facebook ads will be a video of me tearing my hair out, LOL

The books set in my fantasy world are not reverse harem and are pretty low on the steam scale. This video is somewhat of an overview: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/nNdhhbx_q9HIomQ.html

Yes, I think if I wasn't doing KZfaq I would probably focus on a mailing list now. It feels like you can just be a lot more thoughtful with it...and yes, you can largely avoid the stress and timesuck of social media (although some networking is a good idea for finding swaps...that is still WAY less time than putting your focus on a TikTok account). The biggest downside to mailing lists is that they are more slow burn marketing.

It is SO overwhelming and I'm not sure how much I will de-overwhelm it, but I'm at least going to try!!

Yes, a lot of videos have been because of viewer suggestions, so go ahead!

​@@lidiyafoxgloveauthor So, as per your experience, you're obviously very good at teaching yourself stuff. I am as well (and I'm also too old to pretend to be modest, sorry not sorry). But what I've seen in life is most people for whatever reason are not very good at this, particularly when tackling big subjects (not the same to google "how to boil an egg" than "how to write a novel"). I'm not even sure this is a skill you can even teach, or rather is one of those you have to sorta _experience_. I remember my college classmates being astonished by the fact that the way I had made it in that difficult test was by reading more stuff than the books in the program, which neither of us could understand. But then I could understand them, because I realized what knowledge I was missing, found resources to fill in the gaps, and did the reading, which is my normal process for learning whatever "oh shiny" caughts my eye at any given point. Aaaanyway, this is too long, but I thought it could be a good/interesting idea for a video talking a bit about how you self-teach yourself stuff. I don't think even in this era of abundant access to knowledge/information this is a common skill.

@@elisabasta Fair enough. I think about this now and then. I kind of wonder if it's just how some people's brains work but it might at least make a good clickbaity sort of video at some point...

​@@lidiyafoxgloveauthor It's probably the school system, they teach you to expect guidance for acquiring knowledge. Speaking in particular of learning how to write fiction, there is a lot going on. I'm just doing the reading now (that's also how I found your channel). Smart(ass) me, the first book I picked up was "The Western Canon", by Harold Bloom. Of course, it was useless for me right now. But being able to asses “this stuff is way over my head atm” vs. “I’m going to suck forever and I’m also too dumb to learn this” is one of the skills involved in autodidactic learning, in my experience.

I have done some events in Florida and Maryland and I'd say they are things you really only do to make friends/network. So if you are really good at mingling with people and making use of connections, and particularly if you have any book or service that benefits from word of mouth (examples: a local history book, or a side business coaching other writers) then multi-author events & book festivals might be a good idea. Other reasons you might consider it: 1. Just for fun if you're an extroverted type 2. Turning a vacation into a tax write-off 3. To give off the perception of being "big" (if you actually are, or are on your way) Doing them to sell books has never been anything but a waste of time for me. And since I'm more of an introvert I would probably only consider it if the event was both local AND well targeted to my genre, if some author friends I just wanted to hang out with were also there, or I was getting paid to speak or something. Goodreads is a site for readers, so...many authors avoid it like the plague. It's a great place to see how much people hate your books and exactly why and go into a doom spiral, haha

Thank you! I worry a little bit, I think everyone does, but...as soon as you sell a book someone knows who you are and could find you. I just think this is like worrying about being mugged. It could happen, but I'm not going to never walk down the street again...

Good, because me too! It's just taken a long time to get here, phew. Basically every decision and all hard work I've done my whole life was with the ultimate goal of having enough financial freedom to write these books, and it was still dependent on having KZfaq do decently well, which is a little crazy when I think about it that way, but it seems the time has finally come.

@@lidiyafoxgloveauthor Yeah, eating and not dying of exposure is awesome, so I completly understand writing to market. I wish you all the success and luck you can handle ;)

They were my first sponsor, if you want to check it out, it's the FlexiSpot XR430. They are not sponsoring this comment, however! I was already looking for a chair and this ended up being so perfect. It's REALLY comfortable. bit.ly/3VlTkiN (Use code XR430 to save $30 + shipping)

Yes, actually one of my videos this upcoming week is just going to be chatting about what I've done & where I'm going with this world since I realize it's not always clear, especially across so many videos, but the published books in the world of my heart so far are: The Broken Queen (book 1 of a planned 2) The Cursed Soul Trilogy (complete) Doll Girl Meets Dead Guy (standalone)

@@lidiyafoxgloveauthorthank you so much for addressing that. I’ll look forward to this next one!