Hi everyone! I'm Tammy. I'm a full time author and book cover designer. I write under several pen names - Ava Grace for Contemporary Romance, Amy Armstrong for paranormal romance and Lavinia Lewis for M/M. For the past few years I worked as a full time cover designer, and for the past two years, I made ai book covers almost exclusively. I've been ghostwriting part time alongside the cover design, but I've phased that out now and this year I want to focus on my own pen names again. Around June last year I discovered ScribeShadow so I've also been busy translating all my back catalogue into German, Spanish, French, and Italian. (I did some in Dutch too, but didn't see any returns from them) The results have amazing. The translations have increased my royalties so much that I'm now able to focus on writing full time again instead of having to rely on cover design to pay the bills. This year, I'm looking forward to learning how ai can help my author business grow, and I already have two new pen names planned for cozy mystery and Urban Fantasy. (Not sure how I plan on managing them all, but I've never done things by halves lol. Great to be here and to meet you all! I look forward to learning lots of new things!

@Louisa Emerson Hi Louisa! Great meet you!

I've always used Mailchimp, although I know it's not the cheapest. I'm just familiar with it and too lazy right now to learn how to use alternatives. I usually start a list as I'm starting a pen name. I don't worry about how the books will do. I feel like they'll usually do well as long as I'm writing to market and hitting all the tropes.

If I was starting a new pen name now, I would write a novella length reader magnet first. Then I'd set up a newsletter. I'd start writing and publishing the first couple of books and have a couple up on pre order. I'd put a link in the front and back of the books and offer the reader magnet as an incentive to join my list. Facebook ads are a great way to build your list quickly and of course so are the Newsletter swap sites like Bookfunnel and StoryOrigin. If you're able to write and release quickly and are active in looking for Newsletter swaps, you could build a list of a few thousand people in just a few short months.

No, I used to in the beginning, but I would take them to heart too much and a bad review would spoil my day so I stopped reading them. The first few years I was published I used to be quite active on Goodreads, but in the last ten years or so the environment grew more toxic so I stay away from there now.

Hi David, so I tried Sudowrite for a couple of months, but like Dana, I found that there was too much repetition. it wasted a lot of my credits and often I would have to scrap entire chapters because I didn't like what it gave me. I wrote a couple of books with it, but when it came to editing them, they needed so much work that I ended up just scraping them. From Sudowrite, I went on to outline in Chat GPT and write in Claude which is where I'm at now. I have no experience of Novelcrafter so like you, I'm interested to learn about it and see if it's a better fit for me than Chat/Claude.