Goodness me, what a week! For those of you in the UK you’ll appreciate how hot it’s been, and it’s only just cooling down. I know all around the world it regularly gets hotter than 40C, but here we’re just not geared up for it. Not only don’t we have air conditioning at home, so much of our infrastructure started melting. In the evening I could barely use my laptop because I thought the internal fan would bust a gut!

Anyway, that’s done with now and tomorrow I fly off with friends and family to Spain, where they know how to deal with the heat. The cold beers and swimming pool are a great help!

Despite all of this it’s been a productive week. Along with making progress with writing, I’ve created ads and banners for the next STOPPING POWER episodes, shown below, and added them to my website and socials.

EVENTS

I was at Marlborough on Saturday and the heat was building early in the day, with the event organiser saying they expected the morning to be busy and then for it to die down as we got into the heat of the afternoon. They were right. The footfall was about half of what they would normally expect, but I broke even very quickly and apart from a couple hours of no people, the trickle that did come in were buyers.

I ended up with just under average sales, which was very pleasing. As always, ODW was the star of the show, selling only one IN THE END and a copy of SURVIVOR. I sold a good number of the short story bundles and two copies of THE GEMINI ASSIGNMENT, both to people who liked the idea of the series but didn’t fancy trying the unusual format of DAWN WOLF.

I met a couple of readers who I’d sold to before, one from last year who bought ODW and gave it to her husband (who read it but said it was a challenge), and another who bought FATE’S AMBITION at Devizes, just down the road, and was enjoying it, even taking the time to tell me what had happened up to the point she’d read to!

It’s always a bit of a worry when someone says they’ve read your book, and the moment before they say whether the liked it or not, or perhaps don’t give their opinion at all!

The new addition to my sales display were plastic book page holders. They’re simple 3D printed items which hold the pages of the book open with one hand. Although I sold none, they were a talking point for a few people and I need to have a think how I can better promote then at the next events.

Talking of the next events, they have all been confirmed for 2023, and I’ll list them out in a future blog post. There’s a few new ones I haven’t been to yet, so they should be interesting to see how I do.

SALES AND PROMOTION

Promoting free copies of STOPPING POWER gave me a temporary boost in page reads, and I’m getting lots of messages from people as their copies arrive in the post. I’m going to periodically keep offering more copies, starting again when I get back from my break.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Stopping Power – An Agent Carrie Harris Undead Story – I’m about halfway through drafting episode seven and I had to take a pause as the plot was getting quite complicated to track. I ended up drawing out a diagram to highlight the key points I want to get through on every episode. I’ve shown it below, but with most of the details removed so as not to spoil it for anyone.

Once I’m back from holiday I need to knuckle down with writing these episodes, perhaps taking a writing day or two off work so I can make up from the time off. I doubt I’ll do much writing by the pool.

I’ve been thinking about the best way to sell the episodes after talking to one of my fans. I asked him the question and he said he wanted the A6 copies and would happily pay up front! I know that’s not how most people will want to buy, so I put a poll in my fan club with the following options:

• Kindle Unlimited (free to the reader, I get about 8p per episode)
• Kindle ebook via Amazon (£1.50 to the reader, I get about 45p per episode)
• Ebook subscription via ko-fi (£1 per month to the reader, £1 per month to me)
• A6 signed copy (£2ish plus postage, £1.50ish to me per episode

After a day, 76% of readers chose Kindle Unlimited which does quite ruin my investment in giving away free copies of the first episode as I won’t even cover half the costs if they read the entire series on kindle. However, it will help for reviews and getting the books higher in Amazon. If I didn’t place the books on Kindle Unlimited then I’d be missing out on a massive amount of audience.

Right. That’s it for this week, and the next couple. I’ll be back in August when I have something to show you other than holiday photos! Comments and suggestions welcomed as always.