Real talk for the middle of the week. You have a limited number of spoons in a day. Energy units. And the publishing world will happily eat every one of them with drama, doom-scrolling, and arguments that change nothing. Choose where your spoons go. The author who guards her energy and quietly gets the work done will outlast the one who burns out winning internet fights. Keep your head down. Get stuff done. What is stealing your spoons this week? Name it here. Sometimes saying it out loud is how you take the energy back.

Here's a hard truth I wish someone had grabbed me by the shoulders and told me years ago. Most sales are won or lost before a reader ever reaches Chapter One. Your cover, title, series name, and blurb are doing the selling while you sleep. Quick exercise: open Amazon, pull up the Top 100 in your category, and just look. What colors repeat? What mood? What promise do those covers make in half a second? That pattern is your reader telling you exactly what they want. Drop your genre in the comments plus one thing you notice the top covers all have in common. Let's crowdsource the patterns.

https://canva.link/hdi3gnj7ictf66f Square 1:1 (1080 X 1080) https://canva.link/0oh7s6gxmkas25d 4:5 Feed (1080 X 1350) https://canva.link/fcp2uzn2yaq6bj6 9:16 Stories and Reels (1080 X 1920) Use it to check your image, move the text around, etc. Just copy this to your Canva. When you open it, you can hit duplicate image so the original sizer isn't modified directly

I tried to run my first ad and used an AI generated photo of a sheriff for a contemporary romance novel. FB rejected the ad saying it violated policy. I have no idea what policy it violated and asking for a review simply got me another bot rejection. Is it a problem to show a woman in uniform? Should I clearly label it AI or just use an image that's not of a person?

Have you tried Google's new free app, Pomelli? https://labs.google.com/pomelli It might not be as useful for advanced marketers but for those of us who need more direction, it seems pretty good. And it's free. 😁 He's a brief overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvsKFckdfE0