Another two weeks gone by, and it’s looking like that’s my natural rhythm for these updates. Lots of things going on as ever these days:
- I got 2 Bookbubs!
- I finished up my Facebook ads experiment (unsuccessfully 🙁 )
- I wrote about my Soul Jacker promo plan
In overview, I’m still buzzing with the Bookbub promotions. I haven’t done any pre-promo for The Saint’s Rise yet, which is in 2 weeks, so I will get on that tomorrow.
Rather, I’ve been busy setting up the Soul Jacker promo – and putting final touches to the text of book 1. It now stands at around 70,000 words in length – I trimmed a lot in response to editorial feedback. It now blazes along.
I also came to conclusions about my month-long Facebook ad experiment, the reported on that to my Indie Author group last Tuesday. It was received well – I wish I’d had better news to share, with a big success of ROI, but there’s no shortcut to success. I’ve since turned off most of the ads, leaving only the Saint’s Rise one to run at $5 a day.
I turned a few AMS ads on again to see if I could make that work.
Keywords
One passive marketing thing I’ve done with the Soul Jacker launch is to add keywords using KDP Rocket. I knew ages ago that you could add lots of keywords to a book, but mostly couldn’t be bothered.
With a big launch coming though, it makes sense to try and get visibility on more searches – so I added lots more, as well as requesting KDP add me to 5 additional categories. I should be able to rank #1 in at least one of them, which always looks good. Hopefully Hot New Releases, great pre-orders for book 2, and the whole thing keeps rolling nicely. Spillover to past books would be good too, but I don’t especially expect that.
Timetable
All this Soul Jacker stuff should be done by the end of March. I want to focus on writing thriller 3, for a launch around June/July, though it’s likely I’ll get bogged down in April with monitoring and fine-tuning ads for Soul Jacker, what with books 2 & 3 following on soon after.
It’s exciting. It gets in the way of writing fresh stuff, of course. Here’s my To Do list before launch:
- Finish final readthrough and polish of books 2 & 3
- Make paperbacks of books 2 & 3 (takes ages!!)
- Set up pre-promos for The Saint’s Rise
- Maybe put out Last Mayor books 7-9 as a boxset. It really won’t take long.
London Book Fair
This week is London Book Fair! I’m not going though, really. I’ve never been to the daytime Book Fair – I’m not convinced it’ll be a profitable use of my time. 2 years back I went to the drinks at the Alli/SPF party, and that was great – loads of fun networking to be done, meeting loads of interesting people.
Last year I went to the SPF separate party, and it was pretty meh. I met all the same people I’d met previously, doing the same things, and was left wondering what I was doing there. It’s a bit like the First Monday Crime thing – when we go to the pub afterward, the obvious target is to try and get some facetime with the more successful authors, though I’m never really sure to what end.
They’re not going to help me. I’m not going to help them. They don’t know about marketing. I don’t know about their books. Everyone’s looking out for the next more interesting person to talk to.
I don’t feel this way at all about our Indie Author meetups, or the Society of Authors Novelists meetup. Maybe those are just a bit better balanced, with everyone looking to both share what they’re doing and hear about what other people are up to.
Well, I’m going to the ALLI drinks on Thursday. We shall see! Jerome and I will chat about what we can do to further develop the Indie Author group. I’m not sure what there is we can do (ALLI already exists), but I like the idea. Hopefully can also meet some interesting new people and have good chats.