What I Learned from Publishing My Third Book

I recently published my third book, Under His Spell, to mixed reviews. Many readers absolutely loved it, giving it 4 and 5 stars on Goodreads and Amazon. Love that!

Others had some feedback and gave it a solid 3 stars, a rating that is perfectly good, I might add. A few readers found this really wasn’t the book for them and gave it 1 star.

Now, I’m not one to base my career as a romance author on my book reviews. I don’t even think every critique a reader could leave in a review demands my attention or any action on my part. I pay my team to do that.

But there are times when you’re trying some things out as an author or you’re working on a skill (or you just feel like it) when taking some of that feedback to heart is a good thing.

The important thing is that you get to decide.

Was your marketing a little off? Could you have used another round of editing? Are you and your beta readers well aligned?

Under His Spell was the first book I’ve written and published in quite some time, so it was a great experience to warm the writing engine back up and find my writing voice again. I did learn quite a few lessons that I want to share with you, though.

I think these are great lessons for authors who are trying to balance the writing with the marketing especially.

The last lesson I learned was the one that’s really going to help inform how I write going forward and what my author career ultimately looks like.

Reviews and Trope Marketing

The last time I published a book I wasn’t really doing much to market it. Queens of Ruin was kind of a passion project. It’s still in the paranormal romance/ romantic suspense genres that I love to live in—certainly a queer and dark-ish romance—but it’s not contemporary and is very much a dystopian story.

With Under His Spell, I wanted to experiment with trope marketing, something I’ve seen trending a lot these past years but that I’ve never really done in any big way. Now, I do have a strong freelance marketing background and owned a marketing agency for many years, so I was totally open to leaning into that, experimenting with this marketing tactic, and seeing how it went.

The results? Mixed.

The readers who went into the book expecting a dark romance, somewhat broody MMC, and morally grey characters seemed mostly pleased by the book. There were some critiques, of course, but they finished feeling satisfied, and/or their critiques were understandable.

Readers who skimmed over the dark themes and really honed in on the “Beauty and the Beast” fairytale inspiration were less so.

For those readers, they seemed to be looking more for a retelling than the inspiration it more accurately was, and they seemed disappointed by the lack of cozy vibes.

In this respect, reading the reviews gave me some great critical feedback. I can see where my marketing worked well and where it was less effective, and that’s something I can adjust going forward for future books.

However, I’m still left with mixed feelings about trope marketing in general, largely because I think it created some of the expectations where I fell short. So we’ll see how much I embrace that style of marketing for my next book.

Beta Readers

Up to now I haven’t had a dedicated team of beta readers that I work with. It’s something I’ve thought about since I do want to ramp up my publication schedule, but I haven’t pulled the trigger yet.

Publishing Under His Spell made me think I need to do that.

Overall, the beta readers I worked with for this book had fantastic feedback for me. I made a few changes, but largely the story seemed good to go. Perhaps that should’ve been a bit of a red flag.

And that’s not to say that my beta readers for this book fell short or did anything wrong at all—they were amazing! I just think I didn’t have enough of them, I wasn’t as critical of their experience level, and I didn’t allow them enough time to work with me to improve the book.

After reading through some of the feedback from my ARC readers and seeing some initial reviews, though, I do think having a dedicated team of beta readers is something I’ll put together in the future. I’ll also be leaning into my newly hired personal assistant, an experienced beta reader, as well.

For me, I think I’ll just thrive more as an author and create better stories when I have a good rapport with my beta team and can lean into professionals with experience that I can make sure aligns with my books and my audience.

ARC Timelines and Publication Dates

I wrote Under His Spell in a weekend. Literally.

My ADHD challenged me to see if I could write a good book in a weekend, and I did. It was hell, and I’ll probably never do that again. But I did it, and how cool is it to be able to say that?!

That said, the me that decided to take up this challenge and the me who was fully coherent that my August calendar would be filled with back to school chaos were two very different people.

Combine that with a few visits from Murphy (of Murphy’s Law fame), and you got yourself a timeline that was stretched to the max!

My ARC readers barely got the book before the slated publication date, and then Amazon pulled a fast one (literally) and approved the title for Kindle Unlimited in hours, not days. Because of course I had just submitted it at the last second instead of set it up enough in advance to select a date in the future.

My ARC team was super understanding, and I’d kept them in the loop every step of the way, but it didn’t feel great, and I didn’t like them even feeling like they needed to rush to read and review as quickly as possible.

In the future, I and not my excitement will plan all the calendar dates for book releases, thank you very much.

Failed POV Experiment

Contrary to a lot of dark romances, I don’t write in first person, and I don’t label each chapter with a POV heading. Call me old school or traditional, but I simply can’t stand it.

(If this is how you write or prefer to read, though, absolutely no hate! It’s just not my thing.)

Generally, though, that’s perfectly fine. My work features elements of the paranormal and dark, sure, but I’m more heavily in the romantic suspense and contemporary romance genres where third person POV is expected and chapter labels are more rare.

However, I was experimenting with POV shifts that happened mid-scene rather than at a new chapter or line break. I hadn’t heard any feedback that it wasn’t a successful experiment from my beta readers, and of course to me it read fine.

I honestly forgot I’d been trying this out until after it was published.

And apparently, it wasn’t a super successful approach for my readers.

I have seen it successfully done in some books I’ve read and enjoyed, so it could possibly be something I’ll try again in the future, but for now I’ll not be doing that again.

We can say that it was either not aligned with my skillset or with my readers’ expectations, and either is just fine with me.

Novellas and Rapid Releasing Aren’t Really My Things

When I decided to write Under His Spell as a novella, it was mainly to be able to write and publish a shorter book while I work on my larger novels. Right now, that’s When the Snow Falls, book 2 of my St. John’s Secrets series and the next story after my debut novel, Dream of Me.

I imagined it would be a nice break that would still keep me writing, and I’d get the bonus of being able to publish two books in short succession. I’ve also been interested in rapid releasing as a publication strategy.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest critiques of Under His Spell was that readers wanted more!

I mean, honestly, how can I even be mad at that?! They loved my story and my characters so much they wanted more lore, more backstory, more build up between the two of them.

In a novella, that’s often limited by just how much time and page space you don’t have. My novels are in the range of 85,000-95,000 words. Novellas are half that, sometimes slightly less than half of that. Under His Spell comes in around 35,000 words, I believe. Queens of Ruin is similar.

At the same time as I was reading that feedback in my reviews, I was also outlining a new book, Seven Days to Midnight, a vampire romance where she’s the bored 400 year old vampire and he’s the young naive human.

It’s going to be a lot of fun romping around New York City at night with these two, and I’m realizing that I want to spend more time with them. I’ve outlined a story that’s quite longer than a typical novella. Maybe it’ll end up being a full length novel. I’m sure it’s going to be longer than my other novellas.

But I think the biggest takeaway is that my readers want more, and I think I’m a better writer when I write stories that give them that.

I can take a look at the reviews for Dream of Me, a more typical romance novel, as proof of that. Maybe it’s my readers and their expectations. Maybe it’s that I’m a better writer of novels than novellas. I’m sure I’ll dig into it one day. Whatever the reason, my novels have been more critically successful than my novellas as a general rule.

What Happens with the Book Now?

When authors get a lot of really good feedback, the question we often ask ourselves is… now what?

Will we rewrite the book? Expand it into a full length novel? Heavily edit and republish?

Or leave it as is?

I don’t think there’s a wrong answer at all. When my skills and budget were bigger, I went back to my debut novel and did some light editing and proofreading that I wasn’t able to do when I first published it. Back then, I edited it several times myself, of course, and I had wonderful alpha and beta readers who also helped. I just didn’t have the time, expertise, or funds to do more than that.

I taught myself the best I could, and I’m proud of the quality I produced. But having more to invest in my books, more expertise, and a better skillset now meant that I wanted to go back and give it more oomph.

I didn’t want to change the story too much. It was my first published book, and I want it to stay that way, but I also wanted a polished book. So it got a new edition, editing, and a new cover. I’m happy with the balance I kept there.

With Under His Spell, I don’t think I’ll be doing that. Overall, I think positioning the book for the right readers can be adjusted, and the core story is sound. It’s a good book, even if I wouldn’t claim it as a literary masterpiece—but really, that’s not the kind of author I want to be anyway.

No, instead, I will likely rework it into a full length novel at some point in the future when I’m in between projects or waiting on things like covers or edits to come back for other books.

Until then, I’m happy to take away the lessons I learned, leave it as a good book in my catalog of published work, and continue on to the next!

Perfection is the enemy of progress, and if we as authors are continually reworking and rewriting our books trying to achieve it, we’ll end up miserable with far too many of our stories left untold.