I haven’t been away, as such, but I’ve neglected the blog. It’s been around four months since I last posted and although I’ve been busying myself with writing and events, I have missed telling you what I’ve been up to and the latest dilemmas with publishing and trying to get my indie author career to a sustainable level.

Late last year my wife and I decided that in around three years time, unless there are major changes at the company we both work, we’d leave and semi-retire. I’d focus on writing, along with perhaps a part-time job, or doing paid work to support other authors, and she should we also change career to something more interesting. The plan will also be to eventually move away from the south east of England to reduce our cost of living whilst improving our lifestyle. We’d concentrate more on things that bought us joy rather than what meant we could have nice things.

I was already working to sell books, but since then I’ve focused my laser, so to speak.

My efforts to sell books are focused on two approaches. The first is online sales, which is arguably the most difficult to achieve but has the most potential for quantity of sales, if done right. The second is in-person sales, such as events, which I find easier and enjoyable but are time intensive and you can only sell so many books at these events.

For online sales I’ve previously explored the potential for my first zombie series with Amazon and Facebook ads but have never been able to get them to scale. I came to the conclusion that it could be the genre. Zombies are not everyone’s cup of tea apparently! However, with a minimal amount of posting I can get the sales / page reads to tick over. The scaling issue led me to the idea the my crime thrillers and sci-fi books may not have the same issue due to their wider potential audience. So that’s what I’m preparing for.

From experience of advertising the zombie series I know that to have any chance of the ads being profitable you have to have a decent haul of reviews and have a good amount of books available, all in paperback, Kindle, Kindle Unlimited and Audio.

For the sci-fi series it’s about producing the books and so by the end of April I have two new novels out on rapid release. It’s two books because they are two parts of a single adventure. I decided to publish in two parts as the total word count is around 135,000, whereas both the previous two novels were around 70,000 each. The overall story fits neatly into two separate parts, naturally.

The first two books are already on audio, so once the final two are released I’ll hand them over to the same narrator, swallowing down the significant production cost as an investment. For my crime thriller series I have commissioned the audio books and the first one is now on release with the second in active production.

I’m yet to decide if I want to actively promote my spy thriller series as it is a spin-off of the crime series, however it does already tick all the boxes!

The problem I have with both of the series I want to promote is the lack of reviews on the first books. This is therefore my current focus.

Fate’s Ambition, the crime thriller first in series had about 19 reviews in the US and Lost Amongst the Stars, the first in the sci-fi series had about 30 reviews in the US. I’m counting US reviews as this is the biggest market.

Over the last few months I’ve been trying loads of strategies to get the reviews up. This includes asking people who buy the books at my events to review the books if they like them and giving away free electronic copies to reviewers online. This has helped a little but is pretty slow. This month I’ve started using a service I come across on Instagram to help and it’s been very successful. It’s a paid service, but it’s not paying for reviews as such, and it is Amazon compliant (there’s no point doing it if it wasn’t.) In a nutshell, the platform connects you to readers who you pay around $8 (it’s a US service), to read the book and then they leave a review. They are not obliged to leave a review, but so far they have all done so. I trialled the service with a small amount and finding success, I have put more into the scheme. So far, across the two books I have 20 new 4 or 5 star reviews with another 15 in the pipeline.

The service is called BookReverb and you can check it out here. For transparency, this is an affiliate link and I earn extra credits should you sign up to the service.

Events this year have gone surprisingly well for the start of the year. It all started with a Comic Con in Brighton on a very foggy day in February where I made the same level of profit as a very good craft fair. I’ve attended two craft fairs in March, both of which achieved above average profits.

At my Witney event I met a very nice chap who I chatted to for a little while and he bought a book, but was actually an Audiobook listener primarily as his job meant he could listen at work. In the two weeks since I met him he’s listened to ten of my audiobooks which I have given him for free in exchange for reviews. I also make a small amount from the audio codes issued before Audible changed their free code author payment policy, so that’s a bonus. He’s now a real cheerleader of mine. Although a sci-fi fan primarily, his favourite book has been Operation Dawn Wolf, and he loved Lesson Learned!

Due to the success of the Comic Cons I’m hoping to do many more this year, but this is limited because there are only a certain amount within a distance I can travel, and some of those that are close enough conflict with the dates of craft fairs already booked. When it comes to booking the craft fairs next year I may hold off until I know the Comic Con dates.

In other news I’ve developed the fourth iteration of my bookmark which will be coming out in a few months when I run low on my existing stock. The new bookmark is designed to advertise all my books, rather than specific series, which I do now.

If you’re not familiar with how I sell at craft fairs then you may not understand why this is so important to me. I use it as my primary tool at events to draw people to my table. When people take the bookmark around 30% will then talk to me and give me the opportunity to discuss my books, whilst the rest of them will take the bookmark and give it a scan before they pop it into their bag. A small proportion of those people will come back having seen something on the bookmark that is of interest. The redesign is to improve those comebacks. It will also act as my business card so I don’t also need to pay for new business cards.

I think that’s about everything that’s going on. I plan to post a bit more but it will be adhoc, as and when I have something to say. I will definitely let you all know how my first presentation goes in June. It’s based around Your Book Won’t Sell Itself, which is a concise version of everything I have learned since I started publishing and selling books.

Comments and questions are alway welcomed!