PERSONAL UPDATE

Along with getting reading for our holiday in August, I’ve found out I will be stopping working from home, but to protect ourselves from the virus I will be working in a serviced office on my own for the next six month. The office is a fifteen minute walk away which means I get a little exercise every day to help get rid of the lockdown belly and I’ll be back to my daily dose of audiobooks again. Can’t wait as it will be great to separate home and work again!

WORK IN PROGRESS

This week, and for the foreseeable future, I’ve been making lots of beta edits following the feedback from Laura. Despite the feedback, I don’t see fundamental issues but they certainly need to be fixed and involve a lot of work.

I have the day off from work tomorrow so I will have my head down dealing with the specific issues identified then working through the entire novel, or starting to at least.

Once all that’s done, I’ll be printing it out one last time and reading again to catch any last issues, then it’s off to the copy editor. I have a deadline of 15 days left before I go away and I really want it to be finished by then but I’m not rushing. It has to be right. I’ve decided I won’t be editing on holiday so if I don’t get it done before then the release date might slip a little.

Once the book is off for copy edit I will know the date. The next thing to work on will be the blurb and pre-order.

That’s pretty much all that’s been going on.

I have seen the first concepts of the cover for BEGINNING OF THE END, so hopefully it will come to life soon.

MARKET RESEARCH

Here’s an interesting poll I ran in the Facebook group, Written Undead. I asked the members how they commonly found new authors / books and I was a little surprised by the responses. Despite only running for a day there were 322 selections. The respondents could click as many options as they wanted so they were not individual. I would note that because this was an online poll on Facebook, there would be a natural bias of those responding to favour both the online space and specifically Facebook.

The results so far show:

• 23% – Recommendations from friends made in book groups
• 22% – Browsing Amazon or other online store
• 17% – Recommendations in your Facebook feed
• 9% – By receiving the first book in a series for free

At the very least this shows the power of Amazon and that it makes sense to work to get your Amazon placement right, including using Amazon advertising. Great food for thought!

SALES AND MARKETING

For promotion of IN THE END, I’m back to a £20 a day spend with one ad and the profit is up and down, but still in the positive.

I wasn’t sure if I should stop the ad for August as I think it is normally a slow month, but I will continue and if it starts making a consistent loss then I can cut it in real time. There are no plans to make any changes to the budget etc in August.

I’ve now given away nearly a thousand copies of OPERATION DAWN WOLF with an advertising budget of just over £115 to date. The sales of LESSON LEARNED have been very low. I know this type of campaign is very slow as people value free books less than if they have paid so are often slower to pick them up to read. If they ever do, then they have to enjoy it enough to buy the next one. By the end of the month I will have decided whether to persist with the campaign or cut the budget and wait to see if follow up sales come without racking up massive costs. The downside is if it is a winning strategy then I’m cutting off the feed stream of free books.

I have not made a decision on this yet.

That’s it for me. I must get on! Comments and suggestions welcomed as always!