EVENTS

At the beginning of the month I had my sixth best event ever and it was at Cranleigh. This location has now gone from one of my worst events to one of my best with a three figure profit. Part of the reason could have been due to the excellent positioning of the table as I was in the foyer which meant everyone coming in had to pass me twice. I just happened to have booked there for the same time next year, and hopefully I can repeat the success.

Also at Cranleigh I had one of my all time fans pop down to say hello, which was awesome!

The second event of the month was Devizes, where in the past I’ve had two great events and one below average. This one was only just below average, but half the town centre area was closed to traffic due to a local fire in the week. The footfall was down on normal. The third event was in Thame, historically very good but I only got an average profit, which I blamed in part of the storm raging outside that put off many of the shoppers.

The final weekend of the month saw me in Salisbury for a Friday and Saturday event. My wife joined me and went off shopping for part of the day whilst I had two outstanding sales days. Both the Friday and Saturday met with expectations of this city at the time of the year. I’m back there this Friday so I hope to repeat the success! Only 4 more events until the end of the season.

Despite people praising the idea of my new ‘taster’ books I haven’t yet sold any copies. I will continue to push them and see how they get on. If I’m struggling to get rid of them I’ll drop the price.

MARKETING AND PROMOTION

At the start of the month I wasn’t ready to give up Facebook Ads, but as you can guess by my tone, that didn’t last.

At the beginning of the month I switched off the new ad image as it wasn’t working at all. Instead I decided to take a chance to test a video ad as Facebook kept recommending this option to improve the cost per click. I created a video using stock video backgrounds from Canva, there was a surprising amount available for my genre, and then I let it out into the open.

The video got lots of likes and after a couple of days the sales and page reads came slowly in. The cost per click was 9p, which is very low, but running for 10 days, only 6 of them were reasonably profitable. Refreshing the campaign for another ten days gave me 12p per click. A third time and I was getting 15p per click and I turned the ads off after 4 days because I was losing so much money.

This is were I decided to give Facebook ads a rest until the new year.

I instead decided to run a free book promotion / series promotion with one of the paid promotors. This costs about a third of the price of running the Facebook ads per month and sees them promote the first book as free and the rest of the series at full price. The promo is running as we speak, both with paid promotor and with free promo sites. The downloads are coming in as expected.

Sales of LOST AMONGST THE STARS are doing well considering that the only marketing I have been running is giving away a 2,000 free copies. Page reads and ebook sales are higher than I would have expected. I wonder if much of that is generated from interest at my events. Who knows!

Progress on getting reviews has halted, both on audio and on Amazon. The paid programme to get books to reviewers has so far yielded nothing. I will contact them three months after the date I signed up and see if they can give me any idea how many copies were downloaded.

WORK IN PROGRESS

I’m still working on ADRIFT AMONGST THE STARS. I think much of the re-write is complete and now I’m on to editing and polishing the work. The story is set and the MS is swelling a little over 2,000 words above target, but I’m cutting where I can and I know ProWritingAid will help me to cull more when I get to it. I came up with a whole thread of an explanation for one simple fact in the book and it meant adding more details to four scenes, that alone added another 1,000 words, but it was worth it.

I’ve turned my attention once again to what I’m going to write next and drew up a list of possible options, then a list of criteria that were important to me. Each criteria was a given a weighting to show which were more important than others, and then I came up with a winner, at least on paper. Here’s the matrix.

Following on from this I have come up with an idea for a dystopian novel and in my downtime I will add more meat to the bones, but it will only be when I get my current project off to the editor that I’ll make the final decision. There are other factors in play that came up after I produced the matrix.

As some of you who have been following me for a while will know I have been working on something in the background that could be massive for my work. Well this week I had a zoom call with someone relating to that and hopefully in the coming weeks, but maybe months, I will have some awesome news to share that may well lead to something that will change my life as an author, and potentially my life in general, in a major way.

I’ll leave you with that intriguing titbit with an apology that I’m being so vague. I will catch you at the end of the month with more detail if I can.