It’s time to reconsider my marketing and promotion strategies. The book market is shrinking hard so I need to make some changes.

The first change is the one I told you about yesterday – October will be my last month sending my monthly Knights & Rogues newsletter. To stay up to date with me and my books, please subscribe or follow my blog here on the site.

Secondly, I’m finding free first-in-series to work less well all the time, to the point that it barely works at all this year. Once upon a time, a free series starter was like a sample, and if people liked it, they bought the subsequent books in the series. It was a reliable way to aid discoverability. Now, however, many people are just reading free books and seldom (if ever) paying for content. That doesn’t help with my expenses, so The Beauty Bride has returned to a paid product.

I also will not be discounting a title every month to 99cents, unless there are special promotional circumstances. The promotional vehicles like BookBub have become very expensive even as their results diminish, and it takes a lot of time to coordinate price changes at all of the portals.

Next, Facebook has decided to charge for posts with links – to the tune of $499 USD per month for a maximum of 12 posts to a page in a month. This is completely out of the question for me, so I will not be posting to my Author Claire Delacroix page there any longer. There’s already an issue with my blog posts appearing there automatically as they used to, so this is an easy one to abandon. I’ve removed the link from the footer here on the site and will ultimately close down the page there.

So, how will I promote my books? I’ll focus on the blog here on my site for announcements and peeks behind the scenes. I’m also going to lean into the abilities of my online store in future and its newsletter. There will be discounted and free reads there, beginning in November. If you buy anything from me at Hazel & Honeysuckle Press, you can opt into the store newsletter. Future sales there will often be by coupon codes, which will be included in the store newsletter.

And what will I do with all this time I’ve freed up? I’ll write books, of course. 🙂 I have so many stories waiting to be told and ditching all this busy-work will give me more space to dream and write. I’m so looking forward to it.

Thank you all for reading my books!