Had no idea how much my Amazon ads were getting served to readers of vampire and shifter fantasy romance. Gods, I should have gotten to throwing out all those marketing keywords much sooner.

Some people must have been very confused when they clicked on my book expecting sizzling romance and erotica from cover to cover.

Let's talk about the argument that life has diversity without a narrative reason, so it's obvious that all fiction should have diversity of race, sex, and gender.

The problem here is the assumption that good fiction reflects reality–all fiction needs in order to be effective is to be more stimulating and fun than everyday life. Ever recorded a conversation at a dining room table? It would be full of repetitions, mumbling, and pointless agreement. Good dialog is confrontational, succinct, and indirect. Ever tried to record your Tuesday and make it into a novel?

The writer's job is to distill something commonplace into an experience for the reader. And to do this, the writer needs to have a reason for every word they put on the page.

There are four types of fiction books as far their usefulness for my writing goes.

There are books that I am perfectly comfortable with. They don’t challenge me in any way, hit all the necessary tropes, and pass through my head and into oblivion without catching on anything. A Talent for War by Jack McDevit was the most recent one I read: comfortable science-fiction that has just enough spice to it to keep things exciting. These books are fun but useless: they don’t add anything to my style or stories.

Then there are books that I find boring. They aren’t always bad books, sometimes they are objectively genius: for example, A Song of Ice and Fire. I like two characters (Arya and Tyrion), but the rest can go to hell or take a vacation on Dragon Rock or go dance with the White Walkers. I simply don’t care, so I don’t read their chapters (sacrilege, I know). From the first day of school, everyone knows that boring learning materials are the worst if you want to take away something from the lessons. So those books are useless too.

Turns out that Beware of Light doesn't sell many copies not because it sucks (which it doesn't–I have it on good authority), but because everything I've done during and since launch was wrong. Huge thanks to Mark Dawson for teaching newbie authors like me what's what in this business.

So I have until May (when I can escape KDP Select) to fix all the marketing stuff surrounding the book and myself, and hopefully I'll be able to pick up more readers by then. Anyway, starting with June I should have options available that will let me use unholy magic to summon a couple thousand readers. We'll see how it goes.

When you rewrite something important, like the executive summary of your paper or the first page of my book, my advice is not to look at the version you have.

Give yourself a week, forget what you have there, and just start from scratch. Otherwise you will subconsciously pull your new text to what you already have, and it can make it a waste of time.