I’ve been on leave this week, and despite all of the fun things my wife and I have done, I’ve managed to make some decent progress on the time travelling sci-fi adventure. I find it much harder to settle down to write when I’m not in my work routine, and I also feel a deep guilt when I’m able to write but cannot motivate myself to tap at the keys.

The work currently stands at around 9,000 words and has around eleven chapters, all of which our outlined. I think eventually it will be around 12,000 words which puts it into the novelete terrortory.

I have a few issues to solve and I need to make it funnier, but seven of the chapters are now well polished and won’t take much more editing. It’s been great to be writing again, but it’s also a reminder of how much hard work it is. However the rewards when I come up with a great idea or prose I’m proud of are immense.

I plan to send this one out to alpha readers before it’s professionally edited to see if it works and hits the points I’d hoped.

Also in a bit of downtime I played around with a cover for the work, which, if the readers enjoy the book, and I think there is a market for a novel version, will form the first part.

The cover was fun to make and I also came up with a tentative title. Feel free to take a look.

I grabbed both the spaceship and the earth picture from Shutterstock then used Canva to put it all together. The only thing I would want to change is to make the ship more battered as it is in the book, but that’s beyond my capabilities.

I’ve seen the cover for James Fisher book 3, SHATTERED DESTINY, and it’s looking great, especially after the few tweaks I requested. I will share it in a couple of weeks.

MARKETING & PROMOTION

I’ve also been cracking on with the Amazon Ads for Authors course and have pretty much covered everything but optimisation. I have around seven ads running across the US and UK marketplaces and have so far not had a single sale. I keep experimenting, so I’ve not given up yet, but it does seem that Amazon is just not the place where people search for my type of books. I’m running ads on both the Zombie and the Agent Carrie Harris series, and getting any clicks on the latter seems impossible. I put this down to being such a crowded market.

The good thing is that it’s not costing me a huge amount of money for this experiment as hardly anyone is clicking on the damn ads.

[Last minute edit: I got my first sale last night so perhaps this is the crack in the matrix that gives me a waterfall of sales… We’ll see.]

EVENTS

Today marks the start of a crazy four weekends as all but one has an event on both the Friday and the Saturday. Christmas is traditionally when I make the most profit, so let’s see if that carries forward this year.

That’s it for this week. Next week I will have a round up of the today (Guildford) and tomorrow’s (Henley) events.