Facebook, New Work and Reviews – An Update On Many Things

Facebook promotions.

Ok, so I posted my advert for all three books on Facebook on Sunday morning. Posted it in 60 different Facebook groups, all of them dedicated to Kindles, books, authors and so on. The end result of all that posting? Nothing, nada, zilch, zero, not a dickie-bird. So after multiple postings to all those groups over the course of a month or so I got a total of 5 sales. 5. And I’m pretty sure one of those was to my brother. Time for a new marketing strategy!

I think I am going to actually have to pay for some advertising, I just cannot do it myself. Maybe it is just that my books are selling as many copies as they are going to or maybe it is that they just aren’t prominent enough, until I try something serious I won’t really know. Most of the “Writer’s Cafe” members on Kboards.com seem to believe Bknights promos are the best value, cheap but with a reasonable return, so I think I might try one of them.

I have had a brief look at their fiverr profile and it looks like I can get something for about $20, pretty cheap really.
Apparently they work best when your book is free, due to the way the Kindle Select system works I do not have any free days until 20th September (on Sovereign Nation and Second Time Lucky) or 14th October (on Chasing The Future). My next work is almost ready to begin publishing so maybe I will try it for that?

New work.

I’ve decided to do something different with my next work. Different in a lot of ways. First of all it is not a thriller or a mystery, much though I enjoyed writing them I wanted a change of pace. I’ve had a science-fiction idea rolling around in my head for a long while and I’ve tried writing it several times, only to give up after a few thousand words because it hasn’t really worked, now I think I have a handle on it. The end result has no gun fights, car chases, murders or ancient artefacts in booby-trap filled tombs – instead it has ended up with a fair amount of romance and musings on how faith affects people. There is still plenty of story their, it is not a lot of characters sitting around navel-gazing, but it is very different from what I have written before.

The other major difference is that I think I am going to release it as a serial. I’ve got a first part that is around 25,000 words and I’m already starting on follow up parts that will be anything from short stories to novelettes to novellas (check the wikipedia article on ‘Word Counts’ for definitions of these). The parts would probably be released monthly and maybe eventually I would put together omnibus editions. It just seems like the right format for the story as I have got a lot of POV characters so the story seems to naturally split into parts.

A Romantic-Christian-Science-Fiction serial from an almost unknown writer of thrillers, that should be an easy sell, right?

Reviews.

One piece of really good news, another positive review for Sovereign Nation! From one of Amazon’s top reviewers too, brilliant! I love to read reviews of my books that are honest and it really sounds like he’s enjoyed the book and my style of writing so I’m very glad to have the new review, go to Amazon and give it a read.