Melissa Maygrove

  This is my   Insecure Writers Support Group   post for November 2025. Alex's awesome co-hosts this month  are:  Jennifer Lane, Jenni Enzor, Renee Scattergood, Rebecca Douglass, Lynn Bradshaw,  & Me! Please stop by their blogs and say thank you .  💻💻💻💻💻 Before I dive into my IWSG post, I want to link a post I made a few days ago , in case you missed it. It's an update on reformatting book 1 and the effect it had on series read-through. #datajunkienirvana November 5 question - When you began writing, what did you imagine your life as a writer would be like? Were you right, or has this experience presented you with some surprises along the way? I love this question! I look forward to blog-hopping around and reading other people's answers. As a kid, I jotted a few short stories for fun. Then I set writing aside for decades. Flash forward to my 40's. A popular series got me hooked, and I became a voracious reader. That made me decide I wo...

Last month, I posted about reformatting my debut novel, Come Back .  As part of the glow-up, I added a series link in the back matter, plus a QR code for the paperback, and a couple of sentences that told the reader which books contained stories of supporting characters (books 2 & 4). My goal was to improve series read-through. The e-book interior was updated September 12th and the paperback September 16th, so, the backmatter changed roughly half way through the month. I compared both Kindle e-book sales and Kindle Unlimited page reads by looking at total sales and page reads for each of books 2-4 and calculating what percentage they each were of the sales/reads of book 1. Ex: If I sold twenty copies of book 1 for the month and ten copies of book 2, read-through for book 2 would be 50%.  Of course, I have no way of knowing whether the same reader bought all four books - or in the case of KU, whether customers were reading the entire series or even the entire book - but th...