1:45 in the Morning

So, yeah, like the title says. Apparently, I don't sleep anymore.

Oh, it's not insomnia. No, right now I'm at that place where there's just the wiggle of a headache happening and if I hit the pillow, I'd be out. When I hit the pillow. It's just that roughly a month ago I attended an online seminar on marketing, and ever since I have been extremely excited about product creation. I've been experimenting with different ideas that the seminar presented. I want to see what works and what doesn't.

I've created a line of notebooks with hot hunks and gorgeous couples on the covers. Some of these are available at Blurb.com, some at Amazon.ca. Some are blank inside and some are lined. And I love them! For me, they are inspiration and hope all bundled in one cute little paperback package. They retail for under five dollars on Amazon and for roughly $5.50 on Blurb. All the promos which have arrived so far look amazing!

I have to credit author Gena Showalter for the idea. I follow her on Instagram, and saw that she'd created a journal with her characters on the cover, and I was blown away but how smart that was. Gena, in my opinion, is a brilliant marketer. She also is a lot more well known than I am, and her series are a lot more established, and I had to concede that as much as I personally love my heroes, they might not yet be well known enough to sell notebooks. So, I adapted her concept to something I thought could work for me. Thank you, Gena!

My other idea, though, was all me. I have this adorable little Jack Russel / Pomeranian bark-a-holic dog whose world revolves around me. In the colder months when I move my yoga practice into the living room, Lily thinks the moment I sit on my mat is her que to play. She makes yoga hopeless. She also, ironically, is the stretching-est dog I've ever owned. Lily loves to downward dog.

I was doing yoga one morning and snapped a photograph of my toes pressed together and the dog dropping her soggy chewy toy on top of them until I played tug of war with her. It made me laugh. I was "doing yoga with Lily." Not much yoga was getting done. As I sat there, I suddenly thought, oh, now, there's a great title for a book. "Doing Yoga With Lily." And from there I thought, and a great merch line. Which is why last night I didn't get to sleep until 4:30 am, and tonight the clock has struck 2 am. Oops. Zero on the self-control scale. But I've created in those wee early morning hours, an entire product line featuring Lily as the model.

Check out the newly created Merch page on my website, and watch this space for invitations to enter free for giveaways. Over the next months, I will be sponsoring several.

This may not be my usual style blog post, but marketing is what is on my mind at present. I'd love to give you all the details of what I learned, but honestly, that will have to wait for another day. Right now, it's bed for me.

Thanks so much for reading. Let me know what you think of the new products and if there are any which you really love or hate. (Please, don't let it be hate!)