EVENTS

After a break for the summer and having to cancel one in September, this Saturday I’m back on the road with a return the Henley on Thames Town Hall Craft Fair. The last event at this location was pretty successful and I’m optimistic I will have repeat.

In addition to my books, I’ll have t-shirts and mugs for sale and I’m excited to gauge opinion on the new items. I’ve also decided for this event I’m only going to be displaying my own works as I need the table space for the additional items.

Here’s a look the stock ready to go on the stall. I’ll be wearing one of the t-shirts, showing everyone how not to wear it!

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WORK IN PROGRESS

Purple Rain Series – Book 1 – With 55,000 words through the edit and the MS standing at 95,000, I’m well over half way through. I seem to be running at a rate of 5,000 words per week so it will be another 8 weeks or thereabouts for this edit. I have some time off in November and I plan to do at least one writing day which that might pull it forward a bit. However I’m not stressing about the pace as I have so much going on and I’m not adding an artificial deadline to remove the fun from what I’m doing.

The MS itself is coming along nicely and the plot is solidifying as I go along, which is managing to keep my attention.

If I get this revision phase done by Christmas, then I’ll be looking at finishing the major works by March for a summer 2022 release.

The Gemini Assignment – Agent Carrie Harris Book 3 – The eagle-eyed amongst you will have seen I’ve finally decided on the title and the feedback has been great from my fan group. Along with the title I’ve been looking over the words used to describe the series. I’ve produced a slightly more compact version of the blurb for Operation Dawn Wolf and decided on the following tagline for each book, removing previous which describe the series order.

Each novel will soon carry the tagline, An Agent Carrie Harris Action Thriller (although I might drop the Agent part). This is part of an overhaul of how the books appear on Amazon. Including the words ‘Action Thriller’ will help the potential reader determine what genre the books sit in.

I’ve had the blurb back from evaluation by my editor and made the revisions yesterday. I’m letting it settle for a day or so and then I’ll release it to my fan club and to my newsletter subscribers.

There’s no news on when the cover designer will start yet but it should be soon.

MARKETING & PROMOTION

I’m still labouring on with AMS brand advertising despite not seeing any upturn in sales, however if I wasn’t spending on advertising I’d still be having a low month. I’ve added more keywords to the test and when you type in any of them into Amazon the brand advert comes up more often than not. The next steps in the process is to work out what I’m going to do with the A+ content.

For those of you who don’t know what A+ content is, it’s a new service from Amazon whereby you can add more to a book’s marketplace page other than just text.

New membership to The Ops Centre facebook group has been slow but I’ve been joining similar groups in order to make some new acquaintances and I’m also interviewing authors in the action thriller genres, with an aim to bolster the membership. The first interview will be very soon.

I have a new third-party mailing list promotion happening from today for CAPITAL ACTION, but this was all setup before I’d decided to change the covers of the series. In hindsight I would have waited until all of that work was done. Still it will be interesting to see how it goes.

For the mailing list I have now set up two additional automations. One week after a subscriber joins they get an email checking in they got the books, and a second suggests what they can do once they’ve read the books. It includes links to the first two novels, a fan club link and a link to buy signed copies.

Last night in the shower I worked out I dedicate around 250 hours a year to writing & editing. In that time I can produce one novel. If we’re working full time then I would realistically write for about half the working day, giving the other half over to marketing and research etc. That would give me 1,000 hours a year, or 4 novels. So does that mean if only I can find another hour every week day, I can write two novels a year? Hmmm. Who needs sleep…?

That’s about it for me for this week. As ever, please feel free to comment or ask questions.