WORK IN PROGRESS

LOST AMONGST THE STARS has reached 63,000 words and I’m four chapters into the current editing pass which has the aims of continuing to polish the prose but also to update many of the scenes with changes following my decision to add more depth to one of the characters.

One of the things that’s a bit of a struggle at the moment is that I’m trying to find an alternative swear word. It’s not because I want the book to be family friendly, it’s because I want to use it as another way of showing that the characters don’t have entirely the same history.

The Red Dwarf writers did an amazing job with smeg, and I’m trying to find something as equally versatile but what I’ve come up with is not quite there yet.

The new swear word aside, if I had to estimate how long it will be until the completed manuscript is off for editing, I would say early May. That would then give me a July / August release date, although I want to shop this around to agents so I may only release it in print (for my events) and not via KDP as agents / publishers do not want work to have been released to the mass market if they’re going to take it on

EVENTS

I’m in Thame tomorrow and, as always, I’m super excited for the day. On average it ranks fourth out of eighteen venues for profit. I’ve never been to Thame so early on in the year but a 2022 event in April matched that of Witney last week.

MARKETING AND PROMOTION

I ran a price promotion (kindle countdown deal) with OPERATION DAWN WOLF this week, it’s still running at the moment if you want to take a look. I used free third party book promotion email lists and my newsletter, that’s it. So for zero outlay, other than my time, I sold nine books. That may not sound a lot but I got a boost in page reads for many of my other books and someone appeared to buy pretty much every one of my books, including my short work. I’d call that a success. I hope I may get a few more ratings and reviews into the deal as well.

The only other first in series book I have available to do a price promotion on now is STOPPING POWER Season One, but I don’t want to drop the price on that until the release of Season Two. I’ve already given away free copies of episode one to my list, but am yet to see an up turn in sales or page reads.

That’s it for this week. Next stop Thame! Comments and suggestions welcomed as always.