August Arrives, Experimentation Ends

This marks the longest break I've had over here, but that had nothing to do with rest and relaxation. On the contrary! 

I put this site on private mode, redirected (hopefully) visitors to my Payhip site as my new home base, but that ended up as well as I'd expected, which was badly. That store, in its second incarnation (I had it up once a couple or so years ago and deleted it), sold nothing. No amount of marketing site-specific sales did anything other than attract bot traffic to it with zero conversions.

I count that as my second strike, and I'm not going to attempt a third. I know when I'm beaten, and there's no help for it.

So I deleted that site and have sworn off direct sales at this point unless I somehow stumble across the secret to successfully attracting a massive audience of readers to my books. For a writer who barely sells over at bigger, more established and popular online stores, selling direct is just not going to work. 

Also things have gotten even busier at the day job, believe it or not, and I just don't have any gas in the tank by the end of the day. I can't maintain a store and be creative in my marketing. I've tried just about every sale method and combination Payhip offers creators, and I still failed. So! No more direct sales. I just can't anymore. 

One final attempt at experimentation was setting up a really stripped down single-page site over at Carrd.co (a platform I highly recommend, by the way), but I found I do miss blogging, regardless of consistency. I mean, I'd love to be more consistent and post at least once a week over here, but that remains to be seen, doesn't it, with my day job being the way it is? 

(Not that I'm complaining about the day job, of course -- I'd rather be run off my feet than fruitlessly looking for a job in this economy)

At any rate, after a brief stint away from this dinosaur of a platform, I'm back, and I've once again updated all of the links all over this site and reverted back to my old Books2Read links. 

I did add a new moodboard to my main Book Gallery page, and it contains a mix of images highlighting the kinds of subjects I gravitate toward in my writing (i.e., ghosts, the occult, gay romance, liminal spaces, etc.). I'll also be updating around half of the moodboards in the individual gallery pages as well. 

In fact, I already have the moodboard I plan to use for Valérian's gallery page, but all good things to those who wait. Anyway, there it is. I do have a few writing updates to post this weekend, so stay tuned for that.