Dominique Gibson

Hello! Dominique Gibson is back with another post. On May 5th, 2024, I decided that I wanted to go back into doing Ads for the Truson S.E.T. Series. So, I decided to use one of the videos that I had previously promoted on TikTok on my Instagram page. It had officially been nine days since I had this last promotion and I was curious to see if I had had any results from my ad so far. So, here is the breakdown from my Ad insights on Instagram.

Before I move forward with this information, I just wanted to let people become aware that in order to run any ads’ on Instagram or Facebook, you have to have a professional account to make this happen. I will do a breakdown of this in a future post but for right now, here is a quick overview of my ad:

Overview:

Reach: 2,338 people

Reel Interactions: N/A

Profile Activity: N/A

Website visits: 114

Reach

Plays: 2,688

Initial Plays: 2,382

Replays: 306

Reel Interactions

Likes: 30

Saves: 2

Comments: 0

Shares: N/A

Ad

Website visits: 114

Initial Plays: 2,371

Profile Visits: N/A

Amount Spent: $43.48

Daily budget: $5.00

Cost per website visit: $0.38

Status: 9 days elasped – Runs into paused

Audience: Automatic

Please keep in mind that I decided to set my audience to automatic only because I wasn’t aware of who my audience is at the moment. Once this happens, I will eventually adjust the ad to cater to my audience and see if I was able to obtain better results when it goes from my automatic audience to my custom audience. Out of the 2,376 accounts reached on this ad, I had a total of 19 followers and 39 non-followers from this ad. I so far have 34 people engage with the ad but couldn’t get enough data since there are still fewer than 100 accounts that interacted with the page (which means I need people with at least 100 different accounts to get a more accurate picture of who accounts interacted with the ad itself).

Even though I didn’t see any results from this one ad yet, I’m still holding on to the hope that I will be able to beat my record that I made last year by selling twelve books on Amazon. Even though I haven’t made any sales yet, I am still not giving up on this right away since it’s still early in the game when it comes to this ad. I will be sure to keep you informed.

See you soon.

Dominique Gibson

It’s here. If you read my last post, I talked about the Romance Includes You contest where contestants who are interested in writing romance for their category romance imprints (Harlequin romance, Harlequin Presents, Harlequin Heartwarming, and even the infamous Afterglow books). The contest opened on May 1st, 2024 but will only remain open until May 31st, 2024.

Interested in learning more about this contest?

Make sure you check out their website here for more information about the contest. If you have always been wanting to pursue the dream of becoming a romance author, or even if you have been a fan of Harlequin novels for years and finally decided that this year will be the year to pursue your dreams of writing a Harlequin novel, then let me be the first to encourage you to pursue your dreams and give it a try! After all, you never know unless you try right?

Giving myself the chance despite my past rejections

If you need more encouragement, here it is: I will be entering the contest as well. I have entered the Romance Includes You contest since it started (which was in 2019 I think). Besides me entering into the contest, I have also entered manuscripts that were rejected by Harlequin throughout the years, including the first book of the now self-published book in the Truson S.E.T. series, An Orman’s Revenge. I knew that I had a story to tell when it came to the book and wanted both the literary agents and publishers to see it. .

Unfortunately, that was not the case.

Well, you guys should know the end of the story by now. I went on to self-publish two more books in the series and am working on the fourth one right now (Hoping that I will be finished within another month or so). In the meantime, I have been working hard on the first 5,000 words of my novel for the contest. I know that I need to get a move on when it comes to writing my synopsis and query letter of the submission as well.

So, don’t be surprised if you don’t see or hear from me for a little while. It’s me trying my best to get ready to send out my work out to Harlequin during the contest. I may continue to keep you guys updated on my overall progress of this contest so keep coming back here for more info!

Good luck to all the contestants entering the contest. See you soon.

Dominique Gibson

It’s that time of the year again.

They have been announcing it for a while now (I think they announced it back in January or February) and I am just now coming around to this news. Harlequin has announced that they will be doing the Romance Includes You once again this year. I don’t know if any of you have been paying attention to my blog over the last few years, but I have entered the Romance Includes You Mentorship Program since it started. Even though I wasn’t successful when it came to winning the actual prize, that never stopped me from trying. Will I try again this year? Absolutely.

I know what you are thinking: Why would I want to sign up for this when time and time again, I keep getting rejected.

One: I love reading Harlequin Novels. Right now, I am reading a Harlequin Presents book called Breaking the Playboy’s Rules by Melanie Milburne. As of right now, this book doesn’t suit me at all (I will be doing a review of this book as well in the near future) but I am now thinking that the only reason why is because I have been leaning more towards Harlequin Heartwarming vs. Harlequin Presents (Although I still haven’t given their new romance imprint, Afterglow books a chance yet).

See? I love reading Harlequin Books

Two: It has been my dream since I read my first romance novel to write for Harlequin. I will never forget the first book I read in romance. It was a Harlequin Novel (Silhouette Desire to be exact) and I remember how much I wanted to write a romance novel ever since. My self-published novels features either the romance as a main plot of the book (with light sci-fi as a secondary plot) or vice versa (The sci-fi plot takes over but still has a romance subplot which ends in a happily ever after). In my self-published novels, they have a huge sci-fi element to the series. In this contest, I would be writing in a different genre (category contemporary romance) to stretch my creative writing muscles.

Three: This will finally give me the opportunity to become a hybrid author (If I win). This will in return give me the opportunity to slowly save my money as a second source of income while working full-time as an infant teacher and writing my self-published books on the side. Once I am able to do it, I will make the transition from being a full-time infant teacher to being a full-time writer, writing in the Truson S.E.T. Series (Self-publishing) and writing for Harlequin (traditional publishing).

Considering I am still working on the latest draft of Courtney’s Redemption, the fourth book in the Truson S.E.T. Series (I am in the final stages of the self-editing process), I will be starting this new project for the contest very soon (probably sooner than you and I can imagine) and will have it ready before the May 31st deadline.

If you want more information about this contest, Click on the link here and here for more.

That’s all for now. See you soon.

Dominique Gibson

Hello! Dominique Gibson is back with another post. So, the one question that has been on my mind for a couple of months now is how to market my books. What other ways can I market my books besides me doing free book giveaways on Tiktok? Some of the things I tried doing in the past was outsourcing this part to other people via Fiverr (Which I have to admit was somewhat a success most of the time). But I wanted to explore more things that I may try in the future when it comes to getting the word out there for my self-published books.

So, I searched the internet and found another article titled ‘How to Market Your Book in Ten Simple Steps’. I think that this was mostly geared towards nonfiction writers but I think that it could potentially be pretty handy when it comes to fiction writers as well. One of the advice that they give out is to drop everything and do an author website. As someone who has been creating all sorts of content on my own website for years, I cannot emphasize this enough when it comes this point. If you want to stand out from the competition, you are going to need an author website to do so (This rule is a necessity for self-published authors but couldn’t hurt for traditionally published authors as well.)

But then the article gets interesting by talking about Google Search Console and Google Search Analytics account (They recommend that you use both) to figure out who your target audience is. This way, you will be able to promote to that audience and figure out if your keywords and SEO are working. Another thing that I do agree with is choosing your social media platform to grow your audience. Out of all the social media I have done over the years, I have posted more and more video content on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. At one point, I used to post all the time on Youtube which I plan on getting back to later this year.

If you want to check out this article, you can click on the link down below for more information.

How to Market a Book in Ten Simple Steps

That’s all for now. See you soon.

Dominique Gibson

Oh boy, oh, boy, oh boy.

I couldn’t wait to jump on this one.

I had a feeling about this ever since I started seeing a lot of hybrid publishers pop up on my Instagram and Facebook Feeds as ‘paid ads’. But now, my prediction is slowly but surely coming to life.

Hello, My name is Dominique Gibson, self-published author of The Truson S.E.T. series and two nonfiction books The Gibson Newsletter: A Year in Review. So, I just so happen to wake up this morning to a Youtube video created by Alyssa Matesic about this huge publishing news about a new publishing company forming around the publishing space called Author’s Equity.

To dig a little further when it came to this issue, I went introduced to an article about this particular subject and decided to share this with all of you:

Click here for the article.

Both the video and the article talks about how some of the biggest names in the publishing (Aka the publishing veterans) are forming a new publishing house titled ‘Author’s Equity’. Some of these big names that are forming this new publishing company is Madeline Mclntosh and Don Weisburg, who served as the CEO of Penguin Random House and Macmillian and Nina Van Moltke, president and director of development at PHR US (Whatever that means). Anyway, The article states that it would abandon the traditional publishing models by offering no advances but will offer a higher percentage of the book profits–a model that is used by most hybrid publishers.

WAIT, WHAT?

You read that right.

They basically said that they are going to be a hybrid publisher that offers authors no advance but a higher percentage of royalties to the authors. Now, don’t get me wrong, if the royalties are as high as the Amazon royalties that self-published authors get whenever they publish a book on Amazon (70%), then that would be great. But I am not sure I would agree when it comes to giving out no advances on this. How many years would it take for an author to publish with them without an advance (One year, two years?).

For authors who dreamed of living off of the advance to supplement their bills, this would be a huge game changer and not for the better. After everything that I have seen and heard over the last year or two when it came to traditional publishing, this is just giving me vibes that traditional publishing is going down a slippery slope when it comes to both debut and established authors who are so used to the ‘old-fashioned way of doing things that this new model would either turn them off to traditional publishing completely or look for other alternatives (Self-publishing).

What do you guys think?

See you soon.

Dominique Gibson