Today I’m here with the results of recent sales and marketing efforts, plus progress on my million other projects!

One week to go

With just one week to go, my ARC readers have been busy and I already have two five star reviews! It’s always such a relief when you find out what you’ve written isn’t utter drivel! If you fancy checking it out, the paperback is available to buy now and the ebook is on pre-order!

James can convince anyone of just about anything, but he’s seen nothing but trouble come of it, and he just wants to live a quiet, normal life. So when he and his friends are out, camping and climbing Mount Snowdon, everything seems perfect.

Then Susie, one of his friends, goes missing, and James is caught up in the ineffective police investigation that ensues. Distraught at the slow progress, he’s able to convince a higher authority to help him find Susie, but his attempt to rescue his friend soon becomes the very thing a shadowy government agency needs to hunt him down in order to harness his skills.

With an international ring of white slavers fighting their every move, James must team up with his hunter, Agent Carrie Harris, if they ever hope to save Susie and the other women who are disappearing before it’s too late. But can James put his guilt and past behind him, knowing that every time he uses his ability, someone else might end up hurt…or even dead?

Take me to Amazon so I can buy this now!

Work in Progress

Work on AFTER THE END, LESSON LEARNED and CAPITAL ACTION is progressing well, with most progress made on LESSON LEARNED, the sequel to OPERATION DAWN WOLF and my next release.

After another read-through it will be off to the copy-editor and I’ll be able to claw back some time on the other two projects. I will try and hold off from starting the edit on the next book in the queue, which is THEIR RIGHT TO VENGEANCE, the sequel to FATE’S AMBITION.

Here’s the latest on the spreadsheet tracking my progress for all you spreadsheet geeks!

Marketing & Advertising

I’m still running two campaigns on Facebook. The first is for mailing list subscribers, an investment in the future with no direct return. This is still progressing well. With £48 spent so far I’m getting a 30% conversion from my landing page, so it’s costing me around 32p per subscriber. I’ve doubled the budget for next month to see if it directly correlates to doubling the number of subscribers. I’ll let you know.

The second campaign is for sales of the first two books in my IN THE END series, with the landing page being the Amazon product page for IN THE END. I spoke at the start of the campaign last week and now the results are in!

Based on all of my sales for the one the week period of the campaign (33, including audiobooks), I made an estimated profit of £2.56. To some that might not be a big deal, but to me it’s massive. Not the value of course, but if I consider a proportion of those people will buy BEFORE THE END and then AFTER THE END (on release), plus some might buy my other books. Plus none of this has cost any money!

Buoyed by this result I’ve doubled the daily budget to test if I can double the sales. I made the change on Wednesday so I have no idea if this is working yet, however as with the last test, I’m committing to at least a week.

I’ve also been researching other best practice for Facebook ads so I may do some further test with the ad when I get some time.

So far I have learned that the ad needs to very quickly show the genre and the purpose of the ad. I think I tick both box there.

Here’s a reminder of the current advert I’m using.

Kindle Unlimited

Last week I also made the snap decision to push IN THE END back into Kindle Unlimited to maximise the effect of the advertising. This meant un-publishing from each of the other stores and then clicking a button in my KDP control panel. Page reads started coming through within a day. I’ll be adding BEFORE THE END to Unlimited on 6th February when a compulsory contact period ends with Kobo.

That’s it for this week. I seem to get less and less time for writing this post, so sorry if it feels a little rushed! Comments and questions are welcomed as always.