With less than a week to go until the final book in the James Fisher series of crime thrillers with a twist are out, I’ve been thinking about marketing the series for the first time in anger. I’ve decided the best approach is to try offering book one, Fate’s Ambition, for free.

Free is not one of my favourite strategies as a lot of people who collect free books don’t end up reading them and certainly not buying the next in the series. However, Fate’s Ambition doesn’t have even ten reviews, although the ones it has are very good, so a 99p/99c strategy is not likely to work.

Along with sending out the deal on my socials and mailing list, I will be signing up for free promotion sites and hope that it gets selected for some of their mailers. I’ve so far signed up for seven but if time allows I’ll sign up to some more.

When setting up the newsletter I was reminded by MailerLite that there has been a change made by Google and Yahoo in their anti-spam system. In order to ensure deliverability of my mailing list emails I had to make some changes to the domain settings.

After googling ‘adding a DMARC record’ I found a couple of websites that were reported as being some of the simplest explanations and guides to making the necessary changes. Now, I’m a technical guy and I’m pretty handy with IT, but these guides were not simple! In the end after reading the whole thing all I needed was to add a simple entry into the Domain settings on my WordPress console as everything else was set up.

Phew. That was time I won’t get back!

WORK IN PROGRESS

I put a poll up on the main Facebook group I’m involved in about how I should release STOPPING POWER Season Two, with the options of either releasing an episode every other week, or just as a complete volume when it’s finished. The results were almost unanimous and so I will be putting it out as a single volume when it’s completed. That makes my life a lot easier and stops my author page getting more cluttered!

After drafting the first episode of the second season I’m back writing LOST IN THE STARS because the three alpha readers who have so far fed back have given me five star reviews! They loved the characters, the setting and the intrigue of the plot and are desperate to read the next part. I couldn’t ask for more. I’ve now outlined the rest of the story, along with the ending and I’m two chapters into the draft.

Translations

As a possible way of increasing the reach of my books, I’m exploring getting the IN THE END series translated into different languages. Apparently German is one of the best markets to hit first. I’ve seen some very low costs ($200) but I need to look in more detail because I have to keep the quality at the same level as the English version.

MARKETING & PROMOTION

Although I’m a very positive person, earlier in the week I spotted a post from one of my peers within the zombie group and they were talking about some phenomenal sales they’d achieved in the previous month. I couldn’t help but feel a little down.

It got me thinking that despite all I do, all the effort I put in, I still have to work hard (or spend hard) for every sale and page read. However, the moment passed and I’m doing best to use that negative energy as fuel to my desire, and re-doubling my efforts. I also reminded myself that I’m doing the right thing by focusing mainly on writing new content. I’m lucky that although the mega sales (big enough to earn a living from) would be nice, it’s the creative side that I get the most enjoyment out of.

AMAZON ADS

I’ve taken a look at my Amazon ads and it was clear that my US ads are just not working, so I’ve turned them off. Although the UK ads are not yet profitable, the losses are much lower and I’m going to focus my efforts on getting them to the right place before I look again at the US. This weekend just gone I made a few changes to the settings, mainly decreasing bid levels for keywords that are getting clicks but not converting, to see if I can increase the profitability. I will take another look this weekend.

I’m not adverse to turning the whole thing off if I’m consistently losing money and the experiment has failed.

That’s it for this week. I’m off the day job today and off into London to celebrate my best mate’s birthday!