WORK IN PROGRESS

Purple Rain Series – Book 1 – I’m 90,000 words, or 90%, through the revision having had a couple of days off to work on it. Setting an alarm to I write for an hour and then have a timed break has really helped me stick to the goal of writing rather than faffing around with all the ancillary stuff. It basically helps me recreate the environment like I’m writing before works.

The book is coming along well, it still needs a lot of work with the next round of revision but the plot is clarifying, as are the characters.

EVENTS

On Wednesday I had a stall with my author friend Suzanne Rogerson and although it was nowhere as successful as the last year it was held, a last minute flourish meant I did a little better than break even, but not by much.

I’ll be in Guildford today and I can’t wait to see if it lives up to they hype of it being a great event!

THE GEMINI ASSIGNMENT

With only one week to go, the ARC Angels have had the book for seven days and I’ve had two come back to say they’ve finished it and loved it, which is always a relief. The manuscript has also gone over to the audiobook narrator who has also given it a positive review, although I’m paying her so I don’t take that as strongly as feedback from the ARC Angels. She also complemented me on the quality of the MS, and only picked up a couple of issues. Not bad for over 100,000 words.

Production is a little delayed as she’s getting over a cold. An occupational inconvenience for her I can imagine!

NEW COVERS

I now have in my possession paperback copies with the new jackets and they look amazing. It’s so nice to hold them in my hands! I can’t wait to see how they go down in Guildford.

MARKETING & PROMOTION

I now have Amazon ads running for both series. The zombie ones are doing okay with sales ramping up, although not being reported on the advertising dashboard. It’s early days and I’m not going to question the performance after such a short time. The only thing I’m doing is cutting off expensive keywords that suck up the day’s budget with only a handful of clicks, especially if they are not the crux of the genre. As an example, I’ve turned off Apocalypse Fiction, as that does not necessarily mean books, and is not specific to zombie books.

The ads for the Carrie Harris series have been running for a few days and with no sales reported on the dashboard, no audio sales and no page reads, I’m trying desperately to keep my nerve. Again, it’s early days and I expect there is a lag as people may add to their wish lists or download the books but not read them straight away (in the case of KU).

I have created some ads for use on Facebook (unpaid manual ads for now). So I’ll be touting them around from time to time as I continue to search out FB groups where the specific readers hang out.

I am thinking about doing a blog tour for The Gemini Assignment for both reviews and exposure, the only problem is the person I’m working with seems to take about 7 days between replies. That doesn’t fit my impatience to get things organised so I may look elsewhere. If you have any recommendations for good people who run blog tours, please let me know.

MAILING LIST

A note on my mailing list. It looks like Mailchimp is going to start costing me big now my list is growing. They’ll be billing me £41 for December and I really don’t think I get that level of value, I definitely don’t get that many sales from it per month, so it’s time to look around for something cheaper, and soon! I’ve signed up for a free account for Mailerlite and when I move my list over it’s half the price, plus the interface looks like it’s much the same as the market leader. It’s going to be a bit of a faff changing everything, but it shouldn’t be a problem.

I think that’s it for this week. Comments and suggestions always welcomed.