Always Learning

The Novelists Inc conference

Sep 23, 2025

Sunday evening I returned home from the Novelists Inc. conference in St. Pete Beach, a four-hour drive across the bottom of the state. My brain is still fizzing from everything I learned there.

Novelists Inc. is a group of published novelists and non-fiction writers across many genres who are friendly, open, and always willing to share information. The conference brought together about 200 members, along with representatives from all the major companies that serve our community. I spoke with people from Amazon, Kobo, Draft2Digital, Book Funnel, and many others, and my notebook is full of scribbled information on how to take advantage of best practices.

Authors shared their experiences with advertising, social media, audiobook creation, translation, and so many other aspects of the indie author world. One of the great benefits of membership is that Ninc stations reporters in each main session to create newsletter articles that share information with those who couldn’t attend.

I volunteered to serve on the membership committee to encourage more authors to join, so if you have questions visit the group’s home page or ask me.

Ninc

I never considered signing up for Kindle Unlimited, where you can read all you want from a subset of Amazon books for a month for $11.99. I get books from the library, from free-book newsletters like BookBub and The Fussy Librarian, and through review sites like NetGalley. But I was offered a free two-month subscription and they sucked me in.

I stumbled on a book called Mary Bennett and the Bingley Codex. I was immediately sucked in by the premise: Jane Austen and dragons. I devoured the book quickly and went right on to the next book, and the rest of the four-book series. Then, because Amazon knows I liked that book, it recommended Pemberley: Mr. Darcy’s Dragon by Maria Grace. There are 15 in that series, and I’m sucking them up like Slurpees. Now I understand why people like Kindle Unlimited—want to read the next book? It’s free!

I hope this is what readers are doing with my golden retriever mysteries, which are all in Kindle Unlimited, along with the Smiling Dog Café books. This experience is encouraging me to move more series into KU.

I was pretty disappointed by my experience with Kickstarter— and even more unhappy that a lot of the problems were from my lack of experience.

In the writer world, many of us are familiar with Kickstarter. Science Fiction author Brandon Sanderson raised $4 million with a Kickstarter for four books he wrote during Covid and hadn’t yet published. Many other authors large and small have had success.

Here’s what I learned. First, many people don’t understand the purpose of a Kickstarter. It’s not a multi-level marketing scam. It’s simply a mechanism for authors and other creators to share information about upcoming projects and garner support.

I wanted to know what kind of a market was out there for After the Party, my guidebook for Jewish teens. I hoped that my readers would follow the project and tell others about it, and I hoped to get broader reach through regular participants in Kickstarter projects.

I wasn’t asking for cash, but I did want to know if it was worth spending the extra money myself to fund a full-color book. Any pledges made would result in getting a “reward” — the ebook, print book, audio, etc. So it was just a pre-order mechanism.

My mistake was in not explaining this clearly enough, far enough in advance, that I could build up interest in the book.

Then I was approached by scammers promising to help me expand my reach— and I wasted too much time with them. Fortunately I didn’t give them any money, but instead of focusing on marketing the project, I thought I could outsource that work.

I couldn’t.

The Kickstarter ends tomorrow, without reaching its goal. That means that no one who participated has to pay anything, though I appreciate the emotional support. The book will come out in ebook, audio and print in mid-October, and then I can focus on what I know how to do— sell books.