I’m off on a six hour round trip on Saturday taking my eldest daughter to an open day at Exeter University. At the last minute I decided to take the train as it would be a great opportunity to get loads of writing or editing done, only to find out we wouldn’t be able to get there in time, despite getting the earliest train. Instead I have to run the gauntlet of getting fuel on the way. If you don’t live in the UK then you’ll probably have little idea of the stupid crisis we’re going though here!

WORK IN PROGRESS

New Carrie Harris Novel – You’ll notice I’ve not referred to this book as From the Dead and that’s because I’ve been spending a lot of my spare moments thinking of a new title. Generally the process has been searching on the internet for title generators and finding out they are crap, then searching through Amazon for inspiration, then searching through the novel for cool keywords to use. I had a few flashes of inspiration whilst running and then searched for synonyms to play around with them.

So far I’ve run through 49 different titles. I hope it’s in there somewhere. Yesterday I put a collection of four titles and FROM THE DEAD into my fan club and a few reader groups to see what they think. I haven’t checked out the results yet but hopefully their opinion will help.

My editor has confirmed a delivery deadline for the copy edit of the novel by the end of October. I’ve also managed to find a proof-reading in my fan club who is quite a bit cheaper than the editing service I use. I’ve checked out her credentials and all seems in order. She’s cued up as soon as I’m ready.

Purple Rain Series Book One – It’s steadily coming along and I’m at around 40,000 words into the revison.

James Fisher Book Two – This is coming along slowly as it needs a lot of work. A single printed page is taking about an hour to read through and edit. I remember with this novel I wrote it with three timelines all mixed up. Now I’m reading it after such a long time it’s clear that aspect needs a lot of work to save confusing the reader. I need to figure out how to define the three sections with titles at the beginning to guide the reader.

SALES & MARKETING

Despite sales slowly right down at the end of the month, and even with page reads dwindling, I’ve matched my best month for profit. This has been helped with four big direct orders of signed books, plus the handful of t-shirt sales and a flurry of sales last night.

I’m getting concerned about the slowing of ebook sales and page reads and am toying with the idea of going back to ads on Amazon in the US and UK. We’ll have to wait and see how the figures fair in the first week of October before I make a decision.

I’m still marketing on a one to one basis and it’s certainly getting the novellas out there but the avalanche of converts to buying the novels hasn’t yet come.

I sent a newsletter out last week and somehow managed to get at 60% open rate. That’s 3 times the industry standard. It was a round up of what has happened in the last couple of months, along with showing off my new merch range. Despite the open rate I didn’t get any sales for the merch as a result.

I had the fun of preparing my author accounts last weekend and this year I’ve promised myself to properly log my income and expenditure on a monthly basis from now on. We’ll see if that happens! This last tax year my losses are significantly down on the previous two years, so everything is going in the right direction.

That’s if for this week. I’ll be back next week hopefully with a title and lots more news!