my circle

The results are in: for the poll about whether or not to have the doll on the cover of Dollshops & Deathmages, 64% voted for the cover with the doll and 36% voted for the cover without the doll. So I'm keeping the doll, and I feel better about that decision than I did previously. I love the ability to make decisions on everything that comes with being indie, but while actually executing that ability I'm sometimes indecisive.

Trying to settle on an author newsletter was similarly difficult for me to decide. I finally caved and moved to MailerLite. A fellow participant in the cozy fantasy anthology who is tracking reader downloads said 200 people signed up for it so far, so by the time the anthology runs its course there's a good chance that with the new subscribers I'll still be below MailerLite's free threshold of 500 subscribers. I have indie author friends who use MailerLite so even if MailerLite makes it difficult to get ahold of a human for support, I know humans of my own who might have suggestions.

I've written 10k words of Dragons & Debutantes, which is the point at which I feel like "this is getting real" about a book. I'm also writing a secret project... actually you know what, you're all in on the secret. It's an angsty sapphic romantasy called A Princess Bewitched. Since Mynah Clement is now a cozy pen name and this project isn't cozy at all, it's got to have different publishing plans, and I think it's for the best that I write it first and figure that out later. I've got around 20k words down which I'm rewriting from the beginning, and a method vriddy talked about recently (type the sentences from scratch with your edits, with the old sentences side by side, instead of typing/deleting/shuffling things in the existing sentences) is working really well with this one.