BIG Book Sale, Bellevere Reloaded, and Killing the Bots

Hi!
I’m excited to announce that my entire collection of books is available as part of the Smashwords 2022 End of Year Sale! This is a chance to get my book, along with books from many other great authors, at a promotional discount. Each author chooses the discount level--mine is at 50%. That's 50% off every one of my books. Prices now range from free to $1.99!
You can find the promo here:

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/SarahScheele1998

This sale runs from December 15th through January 1st. Smashwords is a huge indie publishing site. For years it was the primary alternative to Amazon for self-publishers, and this year-end sale will be advertised to about 1 million readers! Since the merge between Smashwords and Draft2Digital, D2D authors like me are now part of Smashwords. I had made an account with them before, but they use a complicated file conversion method and I could not get it to work. Now D2D does the conversions for me, so except for some tweaks to Ryan and Essie, where a small area of front matter needed its own separate heading, every one of my files converted nicely. My books are on a new account created this month when Smashwords opened to D2D authors.

Making an account at Smashwords is very easy. It was the file conversion step that got me. As readers you will find the site lovely to use because you can download books in non-Kindle formats and read them on your computer or phone. They also stay in your account on Smashwords so you can always access them. And if you wouldn't mind lending a hand to me and the other indie authors taking part in this sale, you can share this promo with your friends and family. Just copy the book link I put above and send it to anyone who would love a chance to find their next favorite book!
Thank you for your help and support!

This weekend I'm traveling into the Texas panhandle, a 14-hour trip driving both ways, to the wedding of an old family friend. I'll stay overnight with my sister for three nights over the weekend to cut the driving into stages because we have to be at the wedding at a certain time. (Duh.) I haven't traveled much at all for many years, so it feels quite different. I have to remind myself that the natives (gasp) speak English! Even Texas English. Really, it's not that far from home. But if you look at a Google map of where I've been recently, there are like 5 dots pointing to places I went last year to visit my sister in Oklahoma and then about 200 dots all clustered in 4 towns close together. This will be a much-needed change of pace.

Similarly, I am looking into a much-needed change of pace with my published works. I've traveled the same ground with them many times by now. The idea I last pitched to you, of writing a story that linked all of them together, grew in my mind into separate stories, one about each of the books. So really, it's like a reloaded version of the original book. Why is this necessary? Because I've taken to looking at these books in the same way and my readers have done the same.

In fact, a lot of readers have become like robots when they read any book, with predictable reactions that show a lack of real involvement. They praise every book the same way based on their having liked the cover, been assured it was their kind of story, and then skimmed through to find a few plot points they wanted to be there. Their negative reviews are also hack--they dislike every story for identical reasons, don't like the cover, skim through and find it missing those few plot points they like, and then complain it's poorly written!

They also can't accept rewrites or changes. Once they've skimmed the book, they go on robotically treating it the same way because their actions are not dictated by observation of the book, more by habit. If they find they can't get away with the same opinions because the book has changed too much, they just huff and ignore it because they certainly can't be bothered to read the book again, which is odd for self-proclaimed bibliophiles who say they love reading. People often joke anxiously that there are real predictions AI could write the next bestseller because the formulas are becoming so uncreative. But readers can act like droids too.

First book I'm going to tackle is Bellevere House, because it was treated in a linear way over the years even though the book has been changed in important respects. A lot of reactions are just imitative of initial BETA readers. These beta readers published reviews of how they felt about the pre-publication manuscript. I am quite suspicious that one such reviewer, based on her comments to me, didn't even get past the third chapter! But she felt that was not important since she was not really reading, just skimming to look for elements to appear at set intervals. Once they did not appear when she wanted, sometime in the first three chapters, she just gave up, but that didn't stop her from being critical and many others from imitating her with assembly-line produced reviews for years. No matter what changes I made to the book, the underlying attitude in reviews never changed. It was like they were encoded with a computer virus.

There is no mandate that any particular elements must appear in a good story--just that the story uses some of the many possible elements for correct storytelling and no incorrect elements. That's not the point though, as Bellevere was quite a bad story. You'd think they would feel much fondness for something as flawed as this book (I can hear Emperor Palpatine chuckling "good, good. You are writing this in my voice!") because they are very flawed people. But for some reason they didn't and unlike other books, they've continued to give this one a lot of robotic attention. One reviewer of this type could be forgiven since we've all had immature moments. But after almost 6 years it has gotten quite stale. So I am going to write a little reboot of Bellevere that gives it a few twists, takes place about 10 years after the end of the book we have now, and focuses on Ed's internal struggle. And yes, it will be neatly edited without typos.

I do intend to use just a newsletter template in future! I know this is still a blog post, but setting up a newsletter direct from my provider instead of the blog format I've been doing takes a little time. I need to make the header and other elements match the one my newsletter subscribers have been receiving. I will get onto that soon.

So do please check out the Smashwords sale! You won't regret it as this is a great chance to explore a bunch of authors discounted from 25% to 100% off!

And there will be more updates.