PERSONAL UPDATE

After a week off the day job and a weekend camping with friends I return to the routine tanned, refreshed and ready to attack the second part of the year and my publishing goals. Now I just need to find the motivation to work off the weight I put on over August!

WORK IN PROGRESS

From The Dead – This is all I have really been working on this last week, updating the word document with my hand written edits. With only 30 pages left I put everything aside to finish it so it can go for manuscript evaluation with one of my editors. I aim to complete this by the next blog post.

Purple Rain Series – Book 1 – As per the above, there has been little work on this since the last post but once From The Dead is off I will be working full throttle on getting this finished, or at least to the line-edit stage. Over the last couple of days I’ve been thinking about how I will release it and there is a potential that I may not release it until the series is complete. I could then do a rapid release of all of the books at once, or perhaps one a month.

The advantage of this would be that no one would have to wait for the next books if they enjoyed them and it would keep the momentum up, but if people didn’t like the books because of some fundamental issues, I would have already written them all and would have little opportunity to fix them without unpublishing them first. Plus we’d be looking at a good 5 years before I would complete the series! I would definitely have to write other books in between which would make the release time even longer. However, this is a long term strategy and would fit with my plan to write full time within ten years.

Their Right to Vengeance – James Fisher Book 2 – I printed this out and took it with me camping so I could read it through, apply some edits by hand and get a feel of how much work there is to do. I’ve got through about a tenth of the book and I plan to work on this in the background for when I feel like working that way.

Marketing & Promotion

After fearing the month of August would have poor sales due to holidays and it being a traditionally slow month, I only took a 17% cut on the profit for July (which was my best ever).

I have now stopped my AMS ads so I can see if they were actually having any effect. They cost me around £80 in August and reported sales of maybe ten percent if that. What I don’t know is how many follow on sales I then achieved that weren’t recorded.

With my marketing and promotion in full swing on Facebook, my mailing list has bulged to over 2,500 subscribers and I’m currently sending out a mailshot a month. It’s about time for a new one soon so I need to think about some content!

The fan page is also going from strength to strength. The sales of my ‘other’ books are weak (but larger than before) as I use the club to softly promote. I have two more single book giveaways coming up and then I have a mega prize to giveaway which I’m really excited about. I’ve also been giving away audio-codes for Operation Dawn Wolf and hopefully soon I will start getting a few more reviews.

Reviews in general are still very strong, both on Amazon and Goodreads, so as ever, that is a massive advantage to the way I’m promoting.

I think that’s about it for me this week. I’ll be back next Friday hopefully with lots of progress to report.