Life, books, and lack of luck - An update

We haven’t written a blog post in a while, but I’d like to give you all some updates about us and our work. We were quite occupied with life lately, and that distracted us from writing and even more from marketing our books, which is clearly shows on our sales reports. :D But good things are happening so I guess once in a while it’s fine that we live more in the real world than in our fictional ones. 

The first good news is that now we are officially married! It was a very sudden decision and we made everything work within a month. We had a very little ceremony in the office with our parents, Dar’s sisters and with two of our friends and their partners being best man and maid of honor, but my mother’s conviction is that one of the secrets of long marriage is to have a very little wedding. I don’t think that’s true, but we are not sad that we didn’t have a big celebration with 100+ people there. 

We also found our new home! We live in the heart of Budapest in a little flat, and I loved that everything was close, there was always something happening somewhere, music, people doing the weirdest things, but the air pollution and dust took its toll on my health. I missed nature and green trees so we were searching for a place outside of the city, and we finally found our dream home! A little work is needed on the heating system, so I think we can move there late winter/early spring, but I’m very excited already. 

But the main thing that halted our work on Gate of the Sea – this is the first time I wrote down the title publicly! –, the 3rd book in the Spirits of Seiran series, was the fact that Dar started his last year in medical school. It’s good because in less than nine month he will be a certified doctor, and he can start his resident years at a psychiatric clinic, but he has a lot of exams and so much pages to learn that even my head hurts just by looking at them. So translating GotS is very slow, it is fully written and edited developmentally at least in Hungarian but tranlating it to English is a huge work. We will write our next series in English immediately, but for now I was afraid that Zaira would have a different voice if I write her in English, as opposed to Dar’s translation. This is the main reason that I won’t take over this work from him, I don’t think it would have the same qualtiy. 

In the mean time, I started drafting the 4th book, that will be the last of Spirits of Seiran. I’m a bit sad that we have to say goodbye to our characters, but I know we will pour every remaining idea we had for this world into this last book, and try to make it as epic as possible. It will be a chonky one – but I thought Gate of the Sea will also be a chunk, and it turned out to be the same length as Shacles and Caravan, so we will see. I was sick and couldn’t work (my covid test was negative, but I had the same symptoms my coworkers and boss had when they had the ’rona few weeks ago so I’m quite sure, that I had it too), but somehow I could write ~14000 words in a few days, so we might not have to wait long to find out how big this book will be.

I know I should have spent that energy and enthusiasm on marketing the first 2 books but I’m stuck with that. Marketing is hell I can tell you that. The only thing that worked so far was Amazon ads, but we didn’t earn the money we spent on it back, and now with everything going on we just couldn’t afford it any longer. There isn’t that much money in the whole world that I couldn’t spend on marketing really. I read a lot of advice about how to do it free, or with a very little budget, but after all these years (two years) I’m convinced that most of it is pure luck. I think when I was spending my stat-points at birth I forgot that luck exists and I haven’t put any points on that, and I thought I can do everything with enough intelligence, some charisma and a bit of strength. Dexterity was also a forgotten trait, and the bad thing is, that Dar followed the same strategy, so here we are. But I think we will make it eventually as authors! If not with this series then the next. I know that I also should focus more on instagram and facebook, but I don’t see the point of the latter. It sometimes says that we had visits on our page, but no follows (I would be very suprised because I don’t really write anything there). On Instagram we had follows, likes, actually more engagement than on twitter, but I’m so frustrated about the bots that want us to pay for them to promote our work. We also got many DMs, about reviewing our work, I got excited, then they tell us how much I should pay them above the free copy to review. It is very disheartening, since everyone says we should never pay for the reviews, and I agree with this. Amazon’s policy doesn’t allow paid reviews, and I also have no way to know if those reviews are honest or they will give us 5 star for our money. But I guess someone really pays for them – even I’m tempted to do so – otherwise they wouldn’t reach out. I even get DMs like this on twitter but much less. I know TikTok is hot right now, and my sister-in-laws are also love TikTok, but I just can’t imagine myself making those little videos so we are still hesitant about downloading itt o make our appearence there. 

We will focus on writing now – as much as life lets us – and do some marketing in the remaining time and hope that very little luck we have sometimes kicks in. :D We are still doing all this for fun.

Serious question: we planned that our next series will be the „Decurser” series, which is like „The Magicians” but greek/roman and with magical doctors, but last week I had an inspiration burst that resulted in a half-baked world about soul-sucking fairy/elf species with dark themes and fully adult characters. We will write both eventually, but what should be the next one?