Krista Lakes's Blog, page 9

The art of Sunrise Kisses

As you may have heard, I have a new book coming out. Tomorrow.

Ava, our lovable heroine, is an art appraiser. As such, I mention several works of art that she finds in the Belrose Mansion. It is all based off of real art. Here is that art (with all the links to more information and their sources):

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895):

BATEAU ILLUMINÉ. It is the picture that Ava finds while Bastian is pestering her to hurry on to the Degas. (see below for the Degas sketch)

 

 

 

A Corner of the Rose Garden: This is Bastian’s favorite Berthe Morisot painting.

 

 

 

Edgar Degas (1834-1917)

A Degas Sketch: A sketch in Bastian’s mansion

 

 

 

 

Arman Guillaumin (1841-1927)

Arman Guillaumin Ile De France Landscape: The replica painting that Charlotte enjoys.

 

 

 

Alexander Roux (1813-1886)

Alexander Roux Furniture: Ava’s father’s favorite furniture maker.

 

 

 

Claude Monet (1840-1926)

Monet’s Water Lilies: One of the paintings that Bastian acquires and needs appraised.

Happy New Year!

Wow…

I can’t believe it’s already 2015! We are officially in the future! (I want my hoverboard, though…)

2014 was an amazing year for me. Beyond amazing. I accomplished things that I never dreamed I’d be doing and had one of the best years of my life.

1. My son turned two this year. He’s 300% boy with a dash of monkey thrown in. He makes me laugh and is the light of my life. He drives me insane (he is two, after all) but I am making sure to take lots of pictures to use as blackmail when he’s older and I can have my revenge. (bwa hahahahaha). We did get some news that will be a challenge for us with him next year, but if life didn’t give us challenges, we’d never rise to meet them.

2. I hit top 100 with Barefoot Kisses and Hurricane Kisses (and Saltwater Kisses tried to get in there again!) all in the same month. It was pretty amazing and the highlight of my career this year.

3. My mom wrote two books. And my sister just finished her first. (I’ll be helping her publish this year, but since she technically wrote it in 2014, it counts)

4. I traveled. I got to take my son to the beach for the first time (he loved throwing sand) and I learned to dance salsa (kind of.)

 

For 2015,

1. Write More.

2. Blog More.

3. Start a new series. I love my Kisses, but I have an idea for something else and I’d like to make it work.

4. Write more.

5. Spoil my kid rotten. And work on getting a second one to start spoiling just as much

 

I hope every single one of you has the best year ever!

Cover Winner

The winner of this round of covers:

Cover #2!

 

Don’t worry if your favorite cover wasn’t the most popular! I will put the pictures back in and reuse them for the next book (which is already percolating in my head) Be sure to vote for the next one too!

Help Pick the Next Kisses Cover!

I love getting fans’ input on covers. You are, after all, the ones reading the books! This time I have four covers to chose from. So, either vote here, on Facebook, or send me an email (Krista.Lakes@gmail.com)

I love to hear what you think!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Win $50 bucks for the Holidays!

Who couldn’t use $50 for the holidays? (Especially when it’s this easy!)

I’m giving away a $50 Amazon gift card and all you have to do is go to Facebook or sign up for my newsletter. (Or both!)

It’s super easy. And you could win!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Why I Love Kindle Unlimited

 

I’ve seen a lot of big name authors, and small ones too, hating on Kindle Unlimited. There are some definite concerns with the program, but I want to put my experience with Kindle Unlimited up and let readers decide for themselves.

What is Kindle Unlimited?

“Kindle Unlimited is a new service that allows you to read as much as you want, choosing from over 700,000 titles and thousands of audiobooks. Freely explore new authors, books, and genres from mysteries and romance to sci-fi and more. You can read on any device. It’s available for $9.99 a month and you can cancel anytime.”

That’s Amazon’s official answer. I picked it up myself, and I’ve really enjoyed it. For ten bucks a month, I get to read as many of their books as I want. Since I read a fair amount of books for research, this has helped out my book buying budget significantly. I’m still limited by the Kindle selection (as authors have to opt in to the service) but I’ve read more this month because I didn’t have to stop and think, “Will my husband freak out at another $2.99 book charge this week?”

So, from the reader’s side of things, you pay ten bucks and you get to check out ten books at a time. You don’t get to keep them, but you can read them as many times as you want as long as the book is enrolled in the Kindle Unlimited program. It is kind of like a paid library with the option to buy if you want.

The Author’s Side of KU

A little bit of back-story is necessary. To start, you need to know how Amazon authors are normally paid for sales.

We get 70% royalties on anything priced $2.99-$9.99, and 35% on anything below $2.99 or above $9.99. (This is why you see most books priced at 99cents or $2.99. The price point of $1.99 just isn’t viable with this pay scale.)

Thus, for a $2.99 book, the author earns about $2. Most indie books are priced here since it’s a nice sweet spot.

In order to become part of KU, authors must be exclusive to Amazon. This means they cannot have their e-books available on any other retailer (like Apple or Barnes and Noble). There are some authors that were allowed in to KU without having exclusivity due to their popularity. For the rest of us, if we make our books exclusive with Amazon, called KDP Select, we do get some benefits other than being in KU. For every 90 day enrollment period, a book gets 5 free days, Prime borrows (from Amazon Prime members), and a couple other sale opportunities.

Amazon is the largest book seller in the world, but for authors who have a strong presence on other retailers, going exclusive can be a difficult choice. Do you risk your sales on other retailers for the opportunity to get KU borrows and KDP Select benefits?

Borrows

Once an author is exclusive with Amazon and part of KU, they can earn borrows. An author gets paid when a reader selects their book and reads at least 10%. At the end of the month, Amazon tallies up how many borrows each author earned and then how many borrows there were in the entire store. This is the part that authors get squeamish about because the amount paid changes every month based on the amount of total borrows, and there is no guarantee as to how much it will be.

Amazon pays all the borrows out of one large pot. The KDP Select Global Fund usually starts out around 3 million dollars, but since KU began, they have added extra funds each month due to the popularity of the service. This is more than a little nerve racking for authors as we honestly have no clue what we are going to be paid that month. (and the fact that we don’t find out until the 15th of the NEXT month)

For example, using the 3 million dollars as the prize pool, if only 3 books are borrowed in the entire KU service, then each borrow would receive 1 million dollars. If 6 million books are borrowed, then each book only receives 50 cents. This volatility, with no set bottom or upper limit, understandably makes authors very anxious.

KU has only been around for a few months, and during that time it has paid out between $1.33-$1.80 per book. October was the most recent month and paid at $1.33.

KU For Me

I’m sure you’ve all seen the posts saying that KU pays authors peanuts. That it’s a raw deal for authors or that it just isn’t fair. And to be honest, seeing $1.33 royalty instead of $2 or even $3.50 smarted a little until I realized that KU brought me more borrows than I ever would have had of sales. KU brings volume. If you think of it as KU buying books at wholesale, and thus selling way more of them because of it, things start to look a lot better. $1.33 sold 4 times (earning $5.32) instead of one sale at $4.99 (earning $3.50) isn’t a bad deal.

There are those that say that KU is destroying the market and devaluing books. That if you’re not enrolled in KU, you won’t make it. This simply isn’t true. One of my good friends just made the NYT best seller list for the first time and she isn’t exclusive. KU has certainly changed the landscape, but it hasn’t destroyed it. The service has only been around since July, so the market and reader’s expectations are still struggling to catch up. 

I’ve been exclusive to Amazon for a long time in order to take advantage of the benefits of KDP Select. It was a no-brainer for me to enroll my books in KU, as I was already exclusive. My sales on other retailers have always been far, far lower than on Amazon. Plus, I love being able to use my free days.

I had my best month ever in October, and it was due to KU.

With two books hitting Amazon’s Top 100 list (Barefoot Kisses and Hurricane Kisses) and Saltwater Kisses getting close to breaking into the list for the third time, I was the 10th best selling author in KDP Select.

This October,

I gave away close to 100,000 free books.

61% of all my books sold were actually borrows.

Due to the lower royalty percentage on 99 cent books, 66% of my earnings actually came from borrows rather than sales.

The bottom line is, I can attribute well over half of my earnings to Kindle Unlimited. Without it, I wouldn’t have had the best sales month of my career. Did KU cannibalize my sales? I don’t think so. Maybe some, but I think KU actually introduced me to far more readers than it cannibalized. 

Final Thoughts

For authors, KU isn’t for everyone. I know that many authors don’t like giving Amazon exclusivity as they feel it puts all their eggs in one basket. If Amazon decides to only pay out 3 cents next month, we would all be hosed. Amazon has had plenty of opportunity at this point to reduce the royalty rate to “peanuts” and they’ve never done it. I don’t think they ever will. If borrows get too low, authors will drop out of the program and readers will end their subscriptions because there’s nothing to read.

For readers, however, it’s great! As a reader, I know I’ve read far more books since buying this service because I get them for “free.” I’ve read a couple of books I never would have bought at full price. I even read a series I had been holding off on purchasing because I didn’t want to have to buy that many books. That author never would have gotten a dime of my money if it hadn’t been for KU. I’m sure there are plenty of other readers out there that have experienced something similar.

People have told me that KU allowed them to read all nine Kisses books for ten dollars instead of thirty-five, and that they never would have been able to do that if it wasn’t for KU. I love that people are getting to read my work at a price they can afford. 

Every month, my husband and I sit down and look at what is happening in the publishing world and figure out a plan for what we are going to do next. Will I always be in KU? I don’t know. That will depend a lot on how Amazon continues to run things. Right now, it looks like I’ll be exclusive for a while, and I hope that you’ll continue to read my books as long as I continue to write them.

Thanks for listening to my thoughts and you can count on me working hard on my next Kisses book, due to be released in January 2015.

 

Happy Halloween!

I hope you all had a fantastic and wonderful Halloween! (I know I did!)

We took my little guy Trick-or-Treating around the neighborhood and he freaking LOVED it. There is nothing more adorable than a 2-year-old going up to a house, knocking on the door and then proudly saying, “twick-o-tweat!”

 

He made out like a bandit as people “awwed” over him (and the matching parent costumes of course!) and stuffed his little Thomas the Tank bucket full of candy. We were all dressed up as Astronauts (with orange jumpsuits) as he loves space. (You can see his space blanket here)

I promise he’ll get to eat most of his candy. Just not the Almond Joys or Crackle bars. Those are Mom Tax.

(As he’s already in the kitchen trying to climb up the fridge to get to it…)

New Deleted Scene!

A brand new deleted scene just for you!

This one takes place at Jack’s office during one of his nightly dinners with Emma

The password to view it is: Kisses

Kisses From Jack: Dinner In Jack’s Office

 

Enjoy!

Kisses From Jack

What did Jack think of his vacation?

When I wrote Saltwater Kisses, I had no idea that it would go to the Top 100 in the kindle store for a month. I mean, I hoped it would, but every book is kind of like a lottery ticket. The first day it hit the list, I sat on the computer hitting refresh every 5 minutes just to make sure it was real and not a glitch. Even then, I kept expecting an email from Amazon saying it was all a mistake. Well, over a year later and it’s still going strong!

When I was writing Saltwater, I really, really wanted to add in some things from Jack’s viewpoint, but I didn’t want to “Head hop”. There are some authors that can switch characters so flawlessly that I don’t have to even read the heading at the beginning of the chapter to know that the voice has changed, but I wasn’t sure I was one of them. Plus, I wasn’t sure that it was the right choice for Saltwater Kisses to have two voices. (I’m going to go ahead and say that Top 100 status means I made the right choice!) So, I kept the entire book in first person.

But Jack’s thoughts kept popping out at me.

So, as a bonus to fans, I re-wrote the first half of Saltwater Kisses from Jack’s point of view.

It has Brandy, the secretary that took the photos and forced Emma to move to NY. It has the party (which means I got to bring in Owen, Robbie, Noah, Logan, and Aiden!) Rachel and Dean got to get in on the fun. (Oh how I love the brother/sister/boss/assistant relationship those two have going on!) It was a BLAST to get to go through all the current Kisses books and bring it all together

Yes, in reading it, you will see a lot of repeats from other books. That’s the danger of doing the same story from another point of view (all the dialogue and actions have to match!) but hopefully, I changed it up enough that it feels familiar rather than repeated.

I hope you all enjoy this short novella from Jack. Thank you for reading!

What I do when I’m not writing…

Phew… It’s been a crazy couple of weeks!!

I just published Barefoot Kisses (which went as high as #35 in the Kindle Store!) and now Kisses From Jack is currently on its free run (ending 8/15/14). That’s a lot of book to put out. And promo. And anxiously watch the reviews pile in. And then promo some more. Whew.

Now that it’s done, I finally have some time to do some projects. After finishing those two books, my brain needed a creative, non-writing outlet. This is my most recent creation: A weighted sensory blanket (WITH SPACE!)

   

Front                                       Back

My son is nearly 2.5 years old (holy crap did time fly!) and he has some sensory issues. Most nights, he goes to bed in his Elmo bed, but around 2am he creeps into bed with me and snuggles until morning. The only downside is that he wants to be the center line in the letter H. We have a queen bed and he’s over 3 feet tall. It gets cozy real quick.

I read about these weighted blankets giving a hugging sensation to kids through the night, and it immediately sounded like something my son could use. So I went online to go buy him one only to find they were all priced in the $200 range. For a plain blue, boring blanket. I like to quilt, so I decided to make my own.

I got the inspiration for the practical parts from Mama Smiles Blog. She has a nice diagram and explanation

For my blanket, I found two space wall hangings (from fabric.com) measuring 24×57 and then got a yard of the space shuttle fabric for the sides. (Each shuttle side is 7 in wide) For the weight, I found those plastic “bead” looking things that go in flower arrangements. (Not the water absorption kind, but the ones that look like bead rejects). The blankets are supposed to weigh between 10-20% of the child’s body weight. My string bean child weighs right around 30lbs, so I used 5lbs of beads.

I sat down and spent a whole day doing nothing but sewing, filling, and sewing. It was fabulous $30 in fabric+ $15 in “beads”+ thread and some time= awesome blanket. It is nice and heavy. I like laying under it!

The kiddo LOVES it. He’s super into space right now, so every time he sees it, he lights up and does the space shuttle countdown to BLAST OFF. (Did I mention he’s only 2 years old and can count forward AND backward from 20? And knows the alphabet? No? I need to brag more… I probably just need more non-child sleep)

Tonight will be the first test to see if he will stay all night in his own bed without needing Momma snuggles in the middle of the night. Here’s hoping space blanket does the trick!