To pay or not to pay...

So this is Sunday and almost a week has past since my last post. Writing wise it wasn't my most productive week but it wasn't a total loss either. Lost & Found has seven or eight hard fought new pages and several more re-worked. I spent time (too much) working on a WIX website. I have to decide if I want to use the free service or subscribe for a fee. If you pay you don't have advertising on your page and you get a domain name. Not sure I want to spend the money but... Same thing goes for buying a review. Kirkus is probably the best but costs too much. Goodbookstoday has a service that costs about a third what Kirkus charges (about $200 Canadian) and gives you more promotion, but of course it's less professional and has less influence. Why get a review? It helps me get words to describe my books I wouldn't think of using. Plus it gives the appearance of an outside opinion beyond that of the author that the book is okay. I also put time looking into a book giveaway for Fall From Grace on the Goodreads site. I've done it before with limited success. I found the whole thing has changed. Somewhat for the better but also for the worse. Giveaways used to be free. Now it costs about $150 Canadian to run a giveaway. Good news is that you can run one for the Kindle edition and giveaway up to 100 copies. That's appealing because the cost of printing and mailing print copies to people is prohibitive. But is 100 too many? How many is enough to hopefully get some reviews (hopefully positive). One last thing that occupied writing hours was trying to get an updated front cover picture of The Meghan O'Byrne Chronicle Book One – Fall From Grace on the Amazon site. This is an artifact of having to move my self published titles on CreateSpace to the Kindle publishing platform. What a never ending schmozzle!