PERSONAL UPDATE

Covid didn’t get me and I’ll back to pretty-much full strength. I’m left with a pain-in-the ass cough and a couples of minute to make up on my running time, but I feel normal again! This means I’m back to marketing and writing and editing and filling as much time as I can with working towards my long term goals and it’s great!

WORK IN PROGRESS

From the Dead – This ‘final’ read-through before external edit has a lot of read pen over it already and I’m just under halfway through. I’m very happy with it so far and I think it is realistic that it can be my last read for now. I’m hoping to get it out for evaluation by the end of the month.

Purple Rain Series – Book 1 – The drafting process is also now back on track and I’m about half way through the first major revision where I’m working on plot and building up the characters, finding more of their personality and generally adding in more flavour to the prose. I’m picking up general editing tasks as well but that’s not my primary aim.

MARKETING & PROMOTION

I’ve renamed this section as it’s more to do with promotion than sales, but that said, with my short holiday at the start of the year and a slowdown because of the illness, and perhaps because it is August, my sales are down by about a third on last month. This does of course mean they’re still healthy and way up on when I was advertising on Facebook.

The fan club is growing in strength and I’ve nearly got 1,000 members. I’ve so far given away three of my books as prizes which is giving me an opportunity to tell the story behind the production of each of them whist introducing new series to different people who may not have heard of them. This all helps for future sales, in particular the follow on books for IN THE END and the other two series which hardly sell.

My marketing efforts have yielded some new friends and some new featured authors in the Facebook zombie group, and some great book recommendations, in fact too many to keep on top of. Perhaps soon I’ll pop them in one of my blog entries in case anyone else is interested.

Right. That’s it for this week. I’ve really got to see if I can cram some more marketing or editing in before I have to get back to the day job!