It’s difficult to believe but it’s already been a month since In The End released! Sales are going pretty much as expected, with the majority of the modest total revenue coming from Kindle Unlimited. It’s the long game and my concentration is fixed firmly the distance. Below I’ve got a quick roundup of all the updates since my last. I look forward to any comments from you lovely people.

Book 2 has a title!

Whilst I busy away with the edits, it’s hard going but I’m trying to make it my key focus, one way to help it seem more real is to come up with a title. I wanted it to be similar to book 1’s title but also portray that how it relates to the timeframe of the first and I think I’ve done it! Drum Roll…

Before The End

Feel free to let me know what you think, but I guess without reading the book it would be difficult to comment.

Promotion

After the relative success of the cover competition, finishing 21st out of 250 covers, I signed up to an AllAuthor professional account. If you take a look at their site you will see both my face and cover on the front page of their site. Along with the heightened exposure on the site for a month, I also get various other services which include automated tweets from a various accounts promoting the book. I don’t expect any direct sales, and I haven’t seen any major upturn yet, but it’s another contact point for people to come across the book.

Here’s a quick shot of the dashboard they provide.

Bookgoodies.com

I completed a self-serve interview application for this site and today the interview went live, adding another possible contact point for people to get to know me. You can view the interview or sign up for your own here.

The Blurb

After reading Adam Croft’s Indie Author Mindset I followed it with skimming a recommended read which specifically talks about the power of blurbs. How to Write a Sizzling Synopsis by Bryan Cohen. As soon as I saw he writes all the blurbs for the mega successful Mark Dawson (of Ads for Authors fame) I decided to sign up to his service to rewrite my blurb.

After I provided all of the details, it takes a month to produce the blurb, along with the wording for ten Amazon Ads and one for Facebook. It’s another hefty expenditure but I think it is well worth the investment.

Amazon Promotion

Yesterday I was offered the chance to take part in a KDP promotion and I signed up despite the fact that they intend to discount the kindle book by 75%. This is because I believe it will not be run through the main marketplace stores which will leave the kindle edition for me to sell at the full price. I’ll be very interested to see how that goes.

Advertising

Along with continuing with Ads course I’ve started working on researching keywords for Amazon ads. I’m doing this by using the KDP advertising services to test out a whole range of keywords and settings for the ads to see what success I get. Whilst I wait for my UK advertising account to be approved, it’s the only service I can use and only advertises in the US. Using very low budget per day I’m testing out a whole range of keywords to see what kind of interest I can generate. It also gives me a great baseline to test the effect of the new blurb when it comes back, plus I can test with my own short term price promotions. Here’s a quick look at one of the campaigns after a day of running.

So far I’ve gathered great data which is telling me that targeting using ad copy referencing The Walking Dead is more popular than other copy and targeting specific author names gives me a similar click through to the more generic keyword phrases shown above, but at a much lower cost. More testing and fine-tuning on the way. I have yet however to sell a single novel this way, despite 12 click-throughs. Hence the need for work on the blurb and getting more reviews.

That’s about it for me for now. All this time is taking away from what I should be doing, which is finishing the edit of Before The End. Let me know your thoughts or questions and I’ll be back next week with more interviews. I’ll just leave you with one of the adverts I’ve been running on AMS. If you click it, you can buy the book and it doesn’t cost me a penny. It’s a shame it doesn’t show my .co.uk reviews as those are racking up, whilst .com is stagnant.