This week has been another mad one with editing, getting to know a community and a flash sale!

BEFORE THE END

My priority this week has been to finish editing BEFORE THE END, the sequel to my zombie apocalypse novel IN THE END released last November and so I’ve been busy implementing the highlighted points following a professional review of my manuscript. With much head scratching and indecision, I’m glad to say I made the updates and I’m confident it is a much better piece of work for the effort. All that’s left to do is to wipe my memory and read it all from the start so I can objectively review the book to ensure everything hangs together as intended!

It’s a real shame I can’t actually do that, but instead of plunging a hot needle in my head to achieve the desired outcome, I will be reading through and doing the best I can, but I’ve also recruited a trusted beta-reader to take a look once I’ve run through it again. It will add more time to the release schedule but I’d rather be confident it is as ready as I can make it before it heads off to the copy editor in a rush to publish.

FLASH SALE

With a growing community of Facebook connections, mailing list subscribers and other social media relationships, I decided on a whim last week to make use of the Kindle Countdown Deal services available as part of my Kindle Select enrolment and I ran a flash sale. Reliant only on free advertising using Canva produced ads, I put together some simple marketing materials and pushed it out across the channels.

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The countdown deal ran from Monday morning at 99p/99c until Thursday and is now £1.99/$1.99 until Sunday night when it returns to £2.99/$2.99. I’m pleased to say the strategy worked a treat and during the first phase of the sale I sold 28 copies. I’m not pushing the second half of the sales as I don’t want to spam the groups and my social media followers more than I already have. With no money spent on advertising I consider this a great success and hopefully I will achieve a few more readers who’ll want to read my new works, plus may be get a few reviews!

Marketing & Promotion

Aside from the sale for IN THE END, my main marketing is for the free novella SURVIVOR. The promotion talked about last week started on Monday and is bringing in new mailing list subscribers. The promotion runs to the end of the month and so far each subscriber works out at a cost of $1.34, but that will come drastically down as the weeks go on.

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I’ve also been posing more apocalypse questions to the various communities and they’re going down very well, adding more followers to my Facebook page and in turn selling books or getting subscribers.

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Events Update

Tomorrow is my first book fair event. I will be hanging around in a village hall with a load of second hand book dealers for the day. I have no idea how the event will go but it is being held in one of the richest parts of the country outside London. Let’s hope they like zombies! If not, I’ll be taking my laptop along and I’ll have loads of time for either reading through BEFORE THE END or working on the next volume of SURVIVOR!

That’s it for me for this week. If you want to know what SURVIVOR is all about, all you need to do is sign up to my mailing list and you’ll get a link to a free copy the same day. If you fancy picking up a copy of IN THE END, it’s still only £1.99/$1.99 until 15th April!