NUMBER THIRTEEN IS OUT NOW

Today marks the release of my thirteenth book. LOST AMONGST THE STARS is my eleventh novel and the first in the new Parallel Worlds space opera series.

On an unrecognisable world far from their home, the crew of interstellar freighter, the Mary May, find themselves stranded and alone.

https://mybook.to/loststars

I’ve had some very awesome feedback from ARC and alpha readers and I hope that transforms to reviews on Amazon. I’d be happy to give away an ebook copy to anyone in exchange for an honest review. Hint. Hint. My main focus on this series is to get at many reviews as possible, over making any money.

For the release I’ve queued up some of the free third-party mailing lists and once I have sufficient reviews I intend to use some paid third party emailers as well to try and get the book in reader’s hands.

WORK IN PROGRESS

The audiobook narrator should be starting soon. I’ve gone through the narrator’s thoughts on the accents etc and he absolutely hit the nail on the head with his choices. He loved the book as well, which I’m chuffed about, even though he’s biased!

I’m currently writing the final chapters of the second book in the series and I can’t wait to get to the next stage where I can put flesh on the bone of the draft. It’s sitting at just over 53,000 words so far but I can see it hitting 65,000 easily.

I’m thinking about how I can write a short story or novella for this series which I can use as a new reader magnet, but I’m not quite sure what to write that will not ruin the start of LATS as those first few chapters are about discovering who the characters are. I will keep pondering that one! It could perhaps be a prequel story for one of the characters, but not make it too clear which one it is. Not sure yet.

EVENTS

Wallingford was a hit on Saturday which follows the trend that my books go down well in Oxfordshire. If I’m measuring against my other events then it’s top 8 of all time, and top 3 of those not held at Christmas. That’s a big result. I will be booking this one for next year, that’s for sure. Plus I was super pleased because I sold seven copies of LATS. I only took ten copies so I almost sold out! Another forty copies arrived yesterday!

The new shelf to help display the books worked well, although by adding another book in a different genre got me a bit tongue tied when I was talking to people, explaining that I had a crime thriller, sci-fi book, spy thrillers and horror series!

MARKETING AND PROMOTION

Last week I changed my Facebook budget from £10 to £5 and what a difference it has made. Since lowering the budget I’ve sold more books and get way more page reads. What’s up with that? I’m not going to even pretend that I have any clue, I just hope it continues.

Yesterday I got an email from Amazon to say that IN THE END has been selected for a Kindle deal (in the UK) and they will be doing their own advertising and promotion for the book (plus it will be half price). It will be very interesting to see what effect this has on sales, both based on my Facebook campaign and the Amazon promotion. However, I’m not getting too excited about it.

Right. That’s me done for this week. There will be no post next week as I’ll be watching very fast cars going around an old airfield.