I'd like to start out this week by saying how much your emails mean to me. I answer every single one, personally. You are not getting a response from an assistant, that's me. James and I have a hard rule on if a person took the time to write to us then we must take the time to write back ourselves, even if it's short.
There's so much that goes into an author business that is beyond writing words and hitting publish. Marketing, promotion, coordinating for editing, covers, making sure all the book links are right. The list goes on and on.
Earlier this year a parishioner at our Church needed a place to live and some help to get on her feet. We took her in letting her live in an extra bedroom in our basement. She was interested in writing and has great grammar skills so after a trial run, she became our editor.
That wasn't enough to get her on her feet, but she loved working with us, and we loved working with her. Over time she's taken on “assistant” duties. I thought maybe you'd like a glimpse in what that entails, for us at least.
On Kindles you can report book errors, and we get regular emails from readers too. Sometimes these are typos or grammar or whatever mistake slips out into the world. Before our assistant, we'd pile these up and get to them as fast as we could but usually it was around once per month.
The links in books have to be updated every so often. It's not “hard” to do, but it's time consuming. We recently changed the way we do what's called “front and back matter" of the books. Reworked the ‘free book’ for signing to this newsletter and a few other details. That meant that 140+ books had to be updated and not only on Amazon but on every site. This was over two weeks of work for her that would have taken us months.
Launching this new website was a huge project. James put 75 hours of work to get it all setup and designed in the first place. That was for the base but then there are a lot of nuts and bolts he didn't have done. Things that plug into it in order to make it work the way it's supposed to. She’s taken that over for us and is hard at work refining all those details.
We're always coming up with bright new ideas on things to do for readers and fans, but almost never have time to execute them and keep up with the writing and basics that make this business work. That's where our assistant comes in.
Every author has their own way of working with an assistant and normally they aren't living in their basement. Most commonly they are “virtual”. It's an author adjacent career for someone who is trying to be an author themselves or just wants to contribute to helping an artist.
Ours hopes to publish her own books eventually. As such she is soaking up all the non-writing aspects. She's commented that she really wants to write, but she doesn't want to have to do all the other things for herself. It quickly became real to her how much “non-writing” stuff there is involved in going from “author” to business owner.
For us she's a godsend. We've been able to get projects done that have been on our “to-do” list for, well some for a couple of years. We've begun brainstorming new ideas too.
When we started, partly because we did everything “in-house” you could break into self-publishing for almost no money. James former business was in bankruptcy, and we had nothing when he and I sat down and talked. We'd both wanted to be authors all our lives but had never figured it out. James looked at me and said, “Well, we've got three months, let's do it.”
That's literally how we started. He sat down and wrote the first three books in a week. Two non-fiction books he wrote about us and our relationship (which didn't sell well, lol) and then he wrote a story idea he'd had rattling around his head for years, Predator & Prey.
That book sold so we followed the money. He wrote more and they kept selling. Getting attention as we went. We were marketing them as romance because we didn't really know better but in truth they'd fit better under Urban Fantasy. Then he accidentally wrote an actual romance. He'd wanted to write one story since he was a kid. The return of King Arthur.
And from that idea came Loving Two Dragons. That was our first big selling series and the one that solidified our career. Last year James and I reworked Predator & Prey for the Patreon and we're looking at re-releasing the series after some more polish. That's the kind of thing that's on the agenda this year.
We've got a lot of plans in motion this year and with our assistant’s support and help I feel confident we can get them all done. This not only includes lots of new books (little secret I'm working on a new Tajss adjacent spin-off) but plenty of non-book stuff too.
For James and me the last two years have been less than stellar. His health, changes in the business and markets, and different life events have left us more than a bit in the dirt. But as I said at the outset of this week's ramblings this is 2025 and we're both absolutely excited and both of us love you, dear reader, more than we could ever put into words. Without you nothing we do on this side matters.
So please, please know how much you're appreciated. How much you mean to us and our entire family here. We do this for you and in return you let us have the most amazing career and job that anyone could ever dream of. Thank you!
xoxo
Miranda