It was back to the day job this week and I’ve mostly kept my writing productivity up. I’ve continued to battle with my attempt at a sci-fi time travelling comedy. It’s not funny, at least not yet and I’m already thinking about dropping the comedy part but leaving the bits in that are amusing as I don’t want it to become a farce. I’m also struggling to decide what tense to put it in and have written in several so that will needs tidying up. It’s certainly not a thriller, so I’m not quite sure how I will present it yet. I have however had some ideas to make it more thrilling, if that’s the direction I choose to go with.

Despite all this, it stands at around 15,000 words and I expect it might hit the 20,000 mark before I’m done, but if I think I can get more out of it, I will keep going.

Just for fun I’ve been improving my cover attempt after some requested feedback from readers.

EVENTS

Last week I attended two events and, put together, they averaged out to be reasonable. Guildford was lower than normal but Henley made up for it, plus I had quite a decent number of after-sales through Amazon as a result.

Tomorrow is Abingdon, which went so well last time and, as always, I’m excited to see how it goes. I’m really enjoying the events this year and I will be sad to see them end until March.

The highlight of Guildford was when someone who’d bought FATE’S AMBITION a while ago came in and looked at me with a shocked expression. He then went on to say that I’d made his day because he desperately wanted to read the second book in the series, having enjoyed the first book so much. For some reason he was unable to find it on Amazon, although he might have been searching when it wasn’t out. Also the guy was such a big reader and read lots of high brow books, he said it was a further compliment that he enjoyed my work so much.

Sales of FATE’S AMBITION have gone so well at the two events that I managed to run out of stock. Having realised this in Henley I decided to focus on OPERATION DAWN WOLF and I’m pleased to say that because of this I don’t think I missed out on any sales. I have fifty copies of FA due today, so as long as they arrive in time I’ll be good to go.

I also managed to sell a copy of SHATTERED DESTINY at Guildford, which isn’t due out until Jan / Feb next year. The lady wanted both the books that were out and I offered her all three in return for me paying the postage on release.

Apple and Square have now launched the ability for taking credit card payments without using the square device (although it will still be needed for chip and pin payments), and that is of course just typical because I’ve just replaced my square reader and bought a spare. I guess it means I have two backups now!

MARKETING & PROMOTION

I’m still getting through the Amazon Ads for Authors course and spending quite a bit of time on updating my campaigns. I’ve learnt a lot over the recent sessions, lots of tips and tricks and I’ve put together a tracking spreadsheet which I thought would be fun to show you. This one is much more complex than the one they use on the course but I find it helps to show how the ads are performing.

With all that said, the yellow line at the bottom is the key figure and shows I’m still running at a loss. However, it’s early days and I haven’t completed the course yet. The ads are sparking more kindle and audiobook sales plus page reads have gone way up too.

That’s it for this week. Hopefully the figures on the spreadsheet will start to improve. I have next week off again and with not too much planned, I expect I can keep my good progress up.

Comments and suggestions welcomed as always.