Personal Update

We’re going on holiday!

Last October we booked to go to Spain as a family and when the pandemic hit it became very apparent we weren’t going to be able go. Now everything has calmed down, we’re able to jet off into the sun! The only thing that can stop us now is a resurgence of the virus. So fingers crossed.

The casualty of the trip is now I won’t be able to attend the Online Zombie Conference as it falls right in the middle of the trip, ironically I put forward those dates because they were in the middle of the leave I’d already booked. There is no way I could do that to my family, being locked up in the accommodation whilst everyone else goes off for the day. I’m still going to help organise where I can and I’ll be getting some exposure for the event.

Sales & Marketing

Not able to leave my testing of marketing strategies alone, I’ve started a trial of selling IN THE END on kindle for a price of £/$0.99 around the world. The aim of the test is to see if the new price is more attractive. I need to sell double number of books to make it worth it as the royalty is halved. I’m targeting 14 books a day on average across the week. So far I’ve hit 16 books a day over 3 days and I’m hoping with more books sold it will mean a greater potential for read-through sales, so if I make the same level of sales income it should still be beneficial.

I have also put up the price of BEFORE THE END to £/$3.99. So far this has cut off those sales, but I’ll give it another week before I revert to make sure it’s just not a natural lull.

My main thoughts have still been how to upscale the Ads. I’m currently running the same profit level as I was despite doubling the budget. All that has happened so far with doubling the budget is I’ve doubled the anxiety of achieving sales each day. I’m going to potentially test duplicating the adverts as they are, so running two exactly similar campaigns and seeing how that works. I know the advice from Facebook is not to do that as you will be directly competing for audience with yourself, but the audience is millions and I get reach of under 10K per day. I can monitor this by keeping an eye on the cost per click.

The free giveaway of OPERATION DAWN WOLF is still on. There have been 600 downloads this month alone, but it’s early days as to whether this is a wise method. I’ve so far had 4 sales of LESSON LEARNED which is slightly down on my target of 75 per month. However people need chance to read the book and then decide if they want to put their hand in their pocket for the next one. It’s a low cost experiment and more than paid for by the sales of the IN THE END series, so I intend to evaluate at the end of September.

WORK IN PROGRESS

All work is now focused back on AFTER THE END with two thirds of the beta read complete it’s clear I need to do some work on the novel, especially ensuring consistency on characterisation. I’ve started this yesterday and plan to work on most of the day as I am on leave from work. Assuming Laura doesn’t find any additional significant issues with the last third of the book I should still be able to make a November release date. However, I keep saying to myself that it’s not the end of the world if I delay release as long as the book is the best it can be!

In between editing, I’ve come up with the concept for the cover for the BEGINNING OF THE END, so in the next few days I hope my cover designer can do his magic!

That’s about it for me this week. I must get on with editing!