Are you doing okay? Are you hanging in there?

In my last email, I told you more about my YouTube channel, and how I'm using it to beta test some of the content from Romance Your Plan (coming in October). 

Here's my channel: www.youtube.com/ZoeYorkWrites

Below is the first video in a new mini series I'm doing called, When Book Marketing Feels Like Shouting Into a Void. I think that's something a lot of us can relate to!

And GREAT news, the audiobook for Romance Your Brand is finally out of the review process at Audible!!!! So if that's where you like to listen to audiobooks, RYB is available here: https://www.audible.com/pd/Romance-Your-Brand-Audiobook/B088KRZRXW

Finally, I have a new Q&A I want to share with you!!!

Q: Why do you recommend writing a bit longer? I can write two shorter books in the same length of time it takes me to write one long book.

A: ME TOO! This is a real dilemma, and it highlights that very good advice doesn’t apply to everyone, or at every stage in our career.

It's also about how long a book takes to read. A 30k book is a single night - and digital reading facilitates this, by providing an estimate of how long until you finish. Keep turning those pages! (Side note: A 30k book roughly gives you 1% increase with each page turn at standard ebook settings)

But to a voracious reader, a 50k book can be a single day read, too.

If your work takes a bit longer to read, if you can consume 2-3 days of someone's life, they're more likely to remember you down the road - so 70k is probably more memorable. And five years from now, which is more valuable to you: two shorter books that made you money on release, but were forgotten, or a single novel that had a more conservative launch, but people remember and still recommend?

There is a place for both short and long books in a catalogue, but this is at the heart of my argument for writing longer at least some of the time. Remember, though, that longer books should be in their own series! Same world is fine, but you want series to be consistent lengths (ideally).

And of course, the book is also available in ebook and paperback.

Get it in ebook at Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Google Play! Or if you prefer paperback, get Romance Your Brand in print from Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and BookDepository.com!

My goal for this newsletter is to share a bit of monthly writing or publishing or marketing advice for writers of genre fiction. First and foremost, I am a writer myself. I'm not cut out for coaching or teaching long-running courses, but I love doing in-person workshops, and I see publishing these How To books as an extension of that. The best part of any workshop is the Q&A at the end, so please feel free to reply to this or any of my emails with your questions. If they're relevant to the group at large, I'll share highlights in subsequent newsletters.

~ Zoe York / Ainsley Booth