I can’t believe this is my last blog post until Christmas! Wow this year has gone quick. Hopefully during the few days off I’ll have time to produce a round up of what has happened this year and see where I am compared to where I wanted to be.

WORK IN PROGRESS

The Purple Rain Series – Book 1 – I’m in touching distance of finishing the current revision of the book, with 2,500 words to go out of a total of 111,000. The ending is going to be one of the hardest parts as always, despite all of my planning. I’m excited to see the book coming together.

The Gemini Assignment – Audiobook – Production has started and I’ve signed off the samples of all of the new character’s voices. I can’t wait to hear it come together.

MARKETING & PROMOTION

Things have improved a little on the sales front, but when I say a little I mean a very small amount. It’s unlikely I’ll make a loss and hopefully I’m getting a slow build up seen from the advertising. For the first time ever, paperback sales have overtaken sales for ebooks, certainly for IN THE END and I think this is people who have read the novella and have bought the first in the series ready for the holiday.

Sales have improved on the Agent Carrie Harris series as well, now I have daily pages reads on each three of the books, plus the odd purchase here and there too. I think these are from my fans, after being blasted with my marketing campaigns. Hopefully I can keep the momentum up and get more reviews out of it. It’s making me more positive about potentially writing another in the series, when I can find a suitable slot.

In my continued search for ways to connect to new readers for this series I’ve been finding more authors in similar genres, BookFunnel promos has really helped with this. That’s where I found Steven Moore, who I interviewed only the other day. I added the special offer for his book to my newsletter and he’ll be doing the same to his 13,000 email subscribers. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of that.

My latest read in the search for books like Carrie’s series was Codename Villanelle. It was a great listen despite knowing the TV series well as some of the plot is the same but some so very different and you get much more of an insight into the character. There’s a whole different site to Villanelle that isn’t really suitable for most TV viewers! The book itself is certainly comparable to Carrie’s series.

The next I’m trying is Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews. This is another that made it to the screen, this time in a film with the lead played by Jennifer Lawrence.

MAILING LIST

I sent out my first email campaign yesterday using MailerLite and I must say one of the best things I like about the software is their email design tool. I think I created a very professional looking email, but I guess time will tell based on the response from the readers. The only thing left to do now in the transition is to downgrade my Mailchimp account so I won’t be charged anymore. I need to keep the software live so I can track new subscribers who click on legacy emails, and hopefully there is a way to track people who want to unsubscribe based on my old newsletters / emails. I haven’t quite figured that out yet.

If you want to grab yourself a free account on MailerLite to check it out (free up to 1,000 subscribers), then here’s the link.

I think that’s about it for me this week, other than to say thank you to everyone who reads this brain dump each week, it still remains a great way for me to keep my focus, and from what I hear, it might even help a few people out. Happy holidays!