I Totally Meant To Do That!

A Literal Literary Loser Pretends To Know What They're Doing

As a writer of Figure Skating Mystery novels, I know that the Winter Olympics are a once-every-four-years opportunity to promote my books to people who are only interested in figure skating… once every four years.

In 2014, I partnered with two-time Olympic champion Dick Button to produce his Twitter coverage of the Sochi Games, and promote my books alongside the one he’d just written. It was a massive success and sales went up 400%.

In 2022, I was too exhausted to be that creative.

So I did what I once said I would never do: I paid for advertising.

A video I sponsored on the greatest scandals in figure skating went up on January 7. So far, it’s gotten almost 200,000 views.

The ad that I bought on International Figure Skating Magazine is wonderfully positioned - right next to their Beijing 2022 Olympic coverage.

Sales have definitely gone up in January. But not to the level where the ads are paying for themselves.

And, even then, I can’t be sure how many of the sales are coming from the paid advertising, and how many are coming from my social media promotions on Facebook and Twitter (see the photo above of me with 1998 Olympic Champion Tara Lipinski at the 1999 Daytime Emmy Awards - I used to get around!), as well as the post I wrote for Punctured Lines about my figure skating researcher past, complete with video of me translating on the air for Irina Slutskaya… and doing a very bad Russian accent in the feature ABC Sports produced on her.

But then, something mysterious happened.

I’d been so focused on selling copies of my Figure Skating Mystery Series (5 Books in 1) Compendium, I completely blanked on the fact that each book was also available individually, and on KENP Read.

I only remembered that they were available to be read for free when I suddenly saw those page numbers going up.

And I remembered that they were available individually when Murder on Ice, the first book in the series, started selling.

Which is when I also remembered that I had deliberately priced it at $0.99 cents to entice folks to give it a try and maybe then buy the rest of the series.

I also remembered that the other four books in the series existed when Amazon took them off-sale… for some reason, without telling me, and I had to re-upload all of them again.

So now, despite my having paid to advertise the entire series, it’s the individual books which are selling better.

And, the fact is, if readers buy each book individually, I make more money than if they buy the compendium, which I deliberately priced to be the better deal.

But the customer is always right. Right?

And, oh, yeah, I totally meant to do all of it.