To Cadillac, but Not Beyond

Today I travelled to Cadillac for several reasons. Two of those were to take short hikes that I'll share over the next few days. I'm going to feature them in my next "Get Off the Couch" newspaper column.

Nothing says "Cadillac" better than Lake Mitchell.

The primary reason for the trip was that I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Rose Odette. She has a highly successful videocast, and she invited me to be one of her guests. I'll share the link when it's edited. She also writes motivational books.

On the way home I drove part of the way on the road named Mackinaw Trail. This is actually Old US-131, and more or less parallels the current expressway. Some day I'd like to drive the whole distance on it from Reed City to Petoskey, which is the portion that carries the name Mackinaw Trail. It's nothing too special, but I'm just an historic transportation junkie.

The colors along the roads are starting to brighten.

And although I didn't want to take too long to get home (I was hungry!), you know I couldn't pass up a few dirt roads. This is 4-Mile Rd in Lake County, just where it changes from 16-Mile in Osceola County.

The interview with Rose covers a lot of ground! We talked about the trail and hiking and books. The link below is to the only similar interview I've done which was in 2019 (before the second hike).

What a great day! I managed to get in a little bit of editing before I had to head north.

See Indie Reads TV Interview from 2019

Grandparents Raising Grandchildren

  The Scottville Senior Center has a regular event (I think monthly) for Grandparents Raising Grandchildren. This month they invited several local authors to come and give short presentations about books/writing/being creative.

Left to right are "moi," Brad Reed and Rachel Gaudetter, and Debbie Nellis. I have the Dubois Files mystery series for young readers, Brad and Rachel have a picture book featuring their photography called They Call Me Eagle Eyes, and Debbie has four picture books featuring a turtle named Max who tells people about things on Mackinac Istand. It was a nice selection.

The Center was disappointed because they had a number of people sign up who didn't show up. That also means they have a lot of food left over from the dinner to deal with. So it was a smallish group, but they were enthusiastic. Here Bill Kerans, the director of the center, is taking a picture of Brad and Rachel presenting their book.

This is Debbie and her husband, with her books.

The Senior Center gave each child a notebook, markers, and a pencil to help inspire them to be creative. Also, each family/kid got to choose one book from each author.

Afterwards, Debbie and I talked a while about the self-publishing business.

Other than that, I managed to walk about 1.5 miles before the dinner, and worked on various projects.

See Senior Center Program

School Day

  I am taking a course this week in learning how to use Amazon Ads and (hopefully) really make them work. I've previously run a couple, but with very little results. So far, I'm pretty happy with what I've learned, although it's way too soon to tell if anything is happening as a result.

But this is not a class in theory. We have real assignments to create ads. Today was labor intensive. If you haven't previously created Amazon keyword lists for your books (not just the 7 keyword slots they give you when you post your book) this takes a bunch of work. My brain is fried, but I have three ads running, one based on title keywords, one on authors, and one on subject-based keywords. We are supposed to focus on one book this week, so I chose The Secret Cellar. It's not a free book, and it's first in a series. All good choices.

No wonder I haven't been getting Amazon sales on the kid's books- they don't show up in searches even of categories they are listed in. The Secret Cellar doesn't even come up first on the list if you put in the exact title. Amazon is a grim mystery of its own.

Needless to say, I did not do anything else today. Have the pretty sunset. So nice of the cloud stripes to line up parallel with the electric wire!

And here is the ad with the new "hook" copy that is being run.

See That Mystery Tree