Okay so there may not be a free lunch, but there is a free book! Today is the day of my fourth publication release and I’m giving it away for FREE!!! Hear all about it in today’s post, plus catch up with everything else I’ve been up to this week.

Cover Competition

Something I forgot to mention last week is that I have entered BEFORE THE END in the AllAuthor cover of the month competition! The competition helps the book get exposure so I would be crazy grateful if you could cast your vote for me.

I’m currently in the second round and it’s the top 50 that go through to the next. At time of writing I’m at around #38 which seems safe, but I still need your votes as they carry through to the next round where I need to be #25 or higher!!

Please can you take a moment to vote here!

A quick disclaimer, I will also be entering Operation Dawn Wolf in a future contest so I hope you don’t get voting fatigue, especially those in the UK 😉

Operation Dawn Wolf

Since deciding to publish in time for my first WHSmith event since the summer (tomorrow!), I have been frantically getting the OPERATION DAWN WOLF ready to give away for free to everyone on my mailing list.

Why are you doing this, you might ask. Well, it’s because marketing paid books is SOOOO HARD. However giving away FREE books is so much easier. It still costs a load of money in preparing the book and advertising and it’s difficult to just give away something that I have worked on for so long and am so proud of, but it’s all in the hope that people not only like the characters and want to pay for my subsequent work, they may even like my style of writing and pick up something from my back catalogue. We’ll have to wait and see.

The biggest job I’ve been dealing with is formatting the ebook ready for distribution. The book is written in the style of a transcript so it is laid out with loads of tabs and funky paragraph creativity. This all looks really cool in the PDF and in the paperback, but process it as an ebook and it looks terrible!

However after a load of research I found I could recreate exactly what I wanted by putting everything in a table with two columns. The name tags appear on the left and then the dialogue on the right. Most of the book is two and fro between two characters in short sentences, so that means loads of tags and loads of sentences and I had to copy and paste each one by hand. It took me more than TEN HOURS…..!

But it’s ready now! If you want to take a look then just sign up to my mailing list here and you’ll get an email delivering your links! It you’re already subscribed then keep an eye out for the email around 12:30PM GMT today!

On Saturday I start the Facebook ad campaign. For the first time I’m going to be doing a load of split testing so I can hone the ad to see if I can get it producing. The first test is all about the image. I have three images to test to see which creates the best results. Once I have the best image I’ll then look at the text and then the targeting. I’m prepared to spend on this despite my poor results from Facebook ads in the past. All the advice is to test, test, test until you get it right.

Here’s the three images and I’ll let you know next week which one works best.

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Everything Else

It feels like I’ve been flat out on ODW but somehow I’ve also managed to get over halfway through listening and reviewing the audiobook for BEFORE THE END and I’m just about wrapping up the third act for AFTER THE END. I’m still not super happy with the draft, it hasn’t found it’s mojo yet, but I’m going with the process. Hopefully I will find it before the end of act 4.

I’ve had a small upturn in sales this week, selling both books in the series in equal measure despite not having been doing anything too different other than using a review for my posts in the genre Facebook groups.

I think that’s about it for me, such a short post but it’s been a full week of publishing work! Catch you next time for my latest update, including how the WMSmith event went and remember, if you want to check out my FREE book then just click here.