6:18pm

So, there’s a slight chance this will become one of my longer posts. You have been warned.  😁

I’ve been working on a project for about a week now that—on the whole—I’m rather excited about.

I announced this project to my newsletter subscribers yesterday, so it’s fair game to post about it here… because I like to share news with my subscribers first as one of the perks of being a subscriber. It was the second newsletter of the year, though, so it’s safe to say there hasn’t been a whole lot going on… at least from my perspective.

Right, then… the project!

What ultimately started this was a friend pointing out to me that people won’t search for “Knightsfall Press” looking for my books. They know me, so they’ll search “Rob Kerns” or “Robert M. Kerns” or something like that, since I always include my middle initial on my books. Which means they’d find my personal site first.

I thought I handled that by putting the “Worlds of Robert M. Kerns” logo on this site’s homepage, but my friend helpfully pointed out that it was “below the fold,” meaning people would have to scroll to find it.

That graphic is now gone (in case you didn’t notice), and the menu how has a “My Books” link that points to the Books page at Knightsfall Press. Pretty soon, it won’t point there anymore.

I’ve decided to simplify my life, on top of not being completely happy with the Knightsfall Press site for a while, and am re-structuring a few things. My publishing company in its current iteration is going away. Rather than pay someone to dig into the KFP site to figure out why it’s been so glitchy lately, I’m folding all the Series and Book pages plus the ecommerce functionality into my personal site… this site.

I’m planning to have this live by the middle of September, but obviously, sooner is better. If I get the core functionality working by the end of the month, I’ll flip everything (domain, links, etc.) for my books to point to this site.

The entire process is a 14-Step plan, and I’m currently on Steps 6.4 and 6.5. I’m doing them side-by-side, because they are basically opposite sides of the same coin. These are the steps that have to be finished before I can flip everything.

These steps are fixing all the links to each storefront and then updating those links for their respective book pages that I created earlier this week.

Okay… so… I knew I had been letting my publishing game slide. That part of things isn’t nearly as much fun as actually writing the story, and the past few years have been interesting enough (in the ancient Chinese sense of the word) that writing the stories was a significant achievement all on its own.

But… there’s a problem with that.

I’ve been slacking too much for too long. Yes, granted… there’s something to be said about giving oneself grace. I will admit that I’m not exactly the best with that, but at the same time, I don’t like the idea of simply sitting around (or laying around) waiting to die, either. That is (hopefully) a long time to wait, and I could be having so much more fun actually doing stuff.

So, here we are.

The deeper I’ve gotten into this project, the more I like having my books and ecommerce on the same site with my posts and such. I tried doing that for a while at Knightsfall Press, back when I first published Awakening, but it didn’t feel right. The problem was that Knightsfall Press is a publishing company. Personal posts (like these updates) have no business on that site.

Plus, it’s a little bit of a misnomer (sorta kinda) to call it a publishing company. That term implies multiple authors, and that simply will not happen. I have no interest in publishing anyone’s fiction beyond my own. Furthermore, I refuse to be responsible for anyone’s livelihood beyond my own. It’s just not something I want.

Something else that’s been on my mind is offering monthly discounts to my newsletter subscribers. Yes… I could do that anytime on Knightsfall Press. I’m not denying that. The problem is that I don’t feel like I’m writing enough at the moment to make it truly valuable.

If I wrote (and published) six or eight books per year, it’d be different. If I manage to build the writing habit I want, I’d write and publish roughly a book a month.  A writer friend suggested analyzing my writing patterns and building a habit around that. That’d probably be the easier way to go, but I have a strong suspicion that writing will be a challenge as long as my situation remains what it is right now. Could be wrong about that, but I don’t think so.

So, that’s what’s been claiming my focus and attention the past week or so. It will probably consume my focus for the next week, too… at least.

I’ll post updates here as there are meaningful updates to discuss.

If you’re reading this, thanks for sticking with me.

I hope the days treat you and yours well. Stay safe out there.