This week has been a full-time load of editing, with fitting in some family time in the middle. I’ve been working on the secret editing project, thinking about Wren book 4, finishing up The Last Mayor book 9 rework The Light, and ALSO dreaming up a new series.

In turn:

The Light rework

With this last book in the Last Mayor series reworked, I have now completely rewritten the whole 9-book series!

It is a pretty huge thing to do. I had it down for some future date, if I had time, spread out over years. Rather, thanks to sales holding strong over the past 3 months, I’ve burned through it all now. As I’ve said multiple times already, I’ve learned a huge amount. Major lessons?

• I am capable of some really fantastic, urgent, emotion-twanging writing. Funny, sharp, witty, driven, clever.
• I am also quite capable of putting that great stuff right next to oodles of backstory, repetitive narrative summary, muddled technobabble and stake-less thrills.

The skill lies in knowing which is which, and hopefully writing only the first and not the second on first writing. Can I do that? I don’t know. Su is reading Wren book 1, and finding that the opening commits many of these same sins – albeit on a smaller, faster scale. Ideally – don’t commit any of them at all!

I am quite excited for what the zombie series might do now. For the first time, I’m getting reviews of the whole set, because people are reading it all the way through. The most recent review said something about how fantastic it all was, but the last book was too esoteric.

That’d be the book I’m editing now. So the changes I made to clear out the underbrush from books 1-8 have worked. They forgive me for book 9. But now book 9 blisters along. I’m actually going back to book 1 to have another edit. It’s the entry point, and now the longest in the series. The others have all dropped to around 50,000 words. It’s 70,000. I can surely drop it by 10 or 20k and speed things up.

Don’t let anyone get away. Don’t give anyone an excuse to put it down.

I’m pleased.

New series?

In the last few days, and largely off the success of the zombie series, I started thinking about writing some more books set in the apocalypse. Lots of zombie authors do this. They do their zombies, then their aliens, then their EMP, then whatever.

So what will mine be.

Well, I have a loose idea. I may have a character. I started thinking through plot threads. The big challenge when sitting down to write something new is, for me, figuring out what the bad guy wants. What the bad guy is. What the conflict and opposition is.

I used to want to delay the appearance of the main bad thing until a quarter into the book. That’s all those writing books on structure talking. But then you need bridging conflict, and why bother with that when there is an actual story to tell?

Start with the story. Right? And the story is the moment something goes wrong. Without something going wrong, it’s a diary entry.

With apocalypse, it’s the apocalypse. What does it look like. How do we escape it. How do we rebuild. My new idea, still floating, does something that I think is very new. It’ll take advantage of what I’ve learned writing thrillers, and apply it to the apocalypse. A new Wild West. Let’s see. I’m tentatively excited. It’d be a whole new landscape. Lots to explore. Questions I certainly don’t know the answer to yet.

Yeah, that’s exciting.

When would I write it? Who knows. If I was full-time, I could write thrillers in the morning and apocalypse in the afternoon.

6 books a year? People do far more. As is, with a new full-time job starting in Jan, I expect I’ll manage 3 thrillers. Maybe one of those could be a new apocalypse.

I’ll do my year in review shortly, and plans for 2020 too.

The last week (almost last week of 2019!) I’ve been working on 5 things:

• Battling the intro and concept for Wren book 4
• Reworking Last Mayor book 9
• Editing a secret project (not mine – more some point later)
• Listening to audiobook auditions for Saint Justice
• Finishing up 5 years at my old job, On Campus London teaching English.

I’ve also done my taxes and taken stock of ad success in the last few months. Thanks to affiliate links attached to various Facebook ads, I’ve known for some time that those ads didn’t seem to be connected very much to sales.

Uh, what?

I’ve been spending 50 pounds a day or so on FB ads, and making a handful of sales, according to the tracking links. Like, 3 or 4 books. But that couldn’t be for real, could it? How else was I ranking so well? Why else were books selling? At the same time, I didn’t dare stop the ads in case I broke the spell.

Well, now I stopped the FB ads, and –

Nothing happened! Page reads didn’t stop. Sales didn’t drop off. So what the heck? Was I paying 50 pounds a day to Zuckerburg for no reason at all, for months? Ha, maybe. What’s that – about 3000? God, how ridiculous!

Well, let’s say I raised my profile 😉

So I stop FB ads and up my profit margin. At the same time, I put some of the daily 50 into Amazon ads. Up my budgets, start some new ads, and –

Sales increase. Page reads increase. Well. That’s pretty clear. Forget Facebook.

Editing Book 9

Like all the other books in this series, I am probably going to end up cutting the word count in half. From 90,000 down to maybe 50,000. What am I cutting?

• All Lara’s stories. I did this for book 7 and 8 so had to follow through. Lara is back home in the USA, facing an enemy that Amo already defeated in book 6. Witzgenstein. None of it has any relevance to the major story arc. It feels lie retreading old ground – kind of like how Lara’s INTERLUDE story did in Book 1. I cut her out then. I cut her now, and suddenly we’re charging ahead at pace. Sorry, Lara…
• Depth of technobabble. As ever, I offered multiple possible explanations for how the line worked. I overcomplicated it. Now it is getting very simple.
• Dreams. Lara’s sections had a lot of dreams, but so did Anna and Amo. Amo’s opening three chapters were primarily dreams. He talked to Cerulean, Drake, his dead parents, etc… Why? I think probably just to pad out my opening. I cut it all, make his opening rush up to the mid-point, and end his section on a big kicker. Much better.
• Rachel Heron’s doubts. I’m trimming this way back, keep her uncertain as to what she’s going to do until we get there. Keep it a surprise, make it faster.

Writing Wren Book 4

It’s always tricky getting started on a new book. I wrote a few opening chapters a few months back, reflected on them, rewrote them, and now I’m back to the original. It doesn’t exactly make sense. I will have to make it make sense.

And how will Wren get out of jail? A CIA black site. Not easily done. Part of the joy of writing is to solve these problems.

Finishing old job

When I arrived back in the UK 5 years ago, I found a job after three months as a teacher at an EAP Foundation school, based in Birkbeck College in central London. I did that for 5 years!

Now I have a new role starting in Jan, providing Academic Support direct to a university – the University of East London. I’m excited. It’s a great step up, one I’d hoped to hit 5 years ago, but I am just glad to hit it now.

Audiobook auditions

I put Saint Justice up for audiobook auditions on ACX, the Amazon/Audible narraotr/author site, and have so far received about 30. I offered $100-200 pfh, or per finished hour. In total that’s between $1000-2000, given the book is about 10 hours long.

Listening and trying to choose is exhausting! It’s hard to know what criteria to use. I listen to narrators for other thriller books. I check all the reviews of the narrator auditions I have. I look if they’re ACX-approved and at their pfh rate. I check out their blogs.

One easy trimming criteria is the age of the voice. Old guys have particularly deep voices. My guy is young, 36, so a 70-year-old voice, while often incredibly authoritative, just doesn’t sound right. Another easy trim is voices that are a little nasal. Maybe this is one kind of American accent. I want gravelly.

I have it honed down to one guy. Like quite a few of these narrators, he seems to be starting out. He’s done mostly romance to date. He gets great reviews from romance readers saying he’s sexy. That’s gotta be good, right? He reads Wren well.

I’ll wait one more week, get the next month’s Amazon payment in, pay my taxes for the year, then commission him. Hopefully we’ll whizz out books 1-3 in the next 3 months, by which time book 4 will be ready.

At the same time, I’m looking into getting my Last Mayor books remade. I was very happy with the first guy’s work, but I’ve trimmed the book so much since then that it doesn’t make sense to keep using that version. Get all 9 made in one go. That’ll be thousands. Ouch. Can I eat the cost? Maybe. Probably we’ll see if the Wren books make any money in audio first. That’d be a help.

Secret editing project

It’s a secret! It’s fun, though, and intensive.

Well – one more of these and we’ll close out the year! I’ll do a proper review of my writing progress in 2019, and spend some time making goals for 2020. In some ways, I could almost be on replacement money already. As in, if I wasn’t worried about earnings tanking, I could quit my job and live off writing now.

Full time writer!! Guess what 2020s goal is?

Merry Christmas!!

The Lies – For 2 weeks I’ve been struggling with my zombie book 8, The Lies – trying to figure out how to cut it so it makes sense, goes faster and captures what I wanted to do originally.

Challenges standing in the way are the usuals, but in complex ways – repetition of past material, proliferation of deep tech explanations – plus something less problematic in previous books: low-stakes but high energy conflict.

The central story is Amo learning who he needs to kill, setting up book 9 and the climax. There’s a lot of backstory, told live in a way that I believe is pretty exciting. A detective story that Amo tags along for. I don’t think this is the problem, though it certainly needs trimming.

The problem is what’s happening around that story – Anna and Lara’s stories. They both face a series of conflicts in their own worlds. Anna has about three different coup moments as she fights for control of Istanbul. Lara bounces off Witzgenstein maybe three times as they rise toward climax.

The problem is, neither of these catch my interest much. We’re coming to the end. At the end of book 7 Anna basically conquered Istanbul. Lara and Amo basically dominated Witzgenstein. Now we have to have those fights again? It’s kind of boring, even though both stories are full of action. It’s not action we care about.

At this stage we want to see the stakes rising. Anna and Lara need to power up and get ready to play a real role.

So – for Anna I reduce to coup attempt to one chapter, over very rapidly, then pivot directly to a very relevant threat – the lepers. They get a proper introduction here. They are an increased stake.

With Lara, I’ll accelerate through the Witzgenstein stuff to the moment Lara is burning on the stake. Just cut right to it, as a spur for Lara to take her power back.

Reviews – I’ve been getting more reviews saying the books are slow! Some people thnk books 1-3 are slow. Others think the later books are slow. I believe they are probably all slow. When I finish book 9, I’ll probably go back and have another look at book 1! Crazy, but I am certainly learning with every pass I do.

Wren reviews – The same is true for Saint Justice. Despite multiple edits, I’m still getting the comments about goriness and super-powered Wren. Clearer reviews spell this out for me a little more, for which I’m grateful.

Torture – There are numerous instances where torture is grotesque. They were kind of throwaway moments in the writing, but they have clearly had a bad effect. Henry, Wren’s cult-member, has one eye removed. Abdul has his hearing destroyed by close-up gunshots. OK, both are horrible. In the Order, the Core are made up of extreme acolytes who have all had eyes, ears, etc removed. Also extreme. A tortured body had been skinned earlier.

So I change these. I don’t want to sicken people. It’s too graphic. I don’t lose anything to make the torture more conventional.

Superheroics – One instance was clarified for me, which has probably contributed to people complaining Wren is too invulnerable. In an escape, he gets shot in the thigh. A woman wrote in a review that her son was shot in the thigh and it shattered his femur. Completely incapacitating. Now, I thought I’d put something in there about the bullet being a ricochet, not full powerful, and therefore a flesh wound.

I checked. I did put that information – but only on reflection, several pages later. People could be forgiven for overlooking it. So I add it immediately. Wren is smart – he knows if gets hit by a bullet that doesn’t do tremendous damage, it had to be a ricochet. hopefully this will assuage some of it. Maybe I also need to reduce the beating Mason gives him.

Other changes – Other changes I made are to do with Mason’s descent into the white supremacist cult. I had several pages where the Alpha really gets to outline his ideology. It’s pretty horrible, really. Why am I giving voice to this stuff? Number 1, we all get it. So why go on about it? I cut those bits right down. To the same end, I reduced some of the racialized language. It’s a part of the book, it’s obviously real, but people don’t want to read it.

Also there were some of my usual ‘catch-up’ narrative summaries, explaining how all the pieces moved behind the scenes. Nobody cares. I cut them right back. The mechanics don’t matter. People can infer it.

So I’ve been busy! Hopefully zombie book 9 is more straightforward. I think it is. Still trying to close these edits out by 2020, then start fresh on the next slate of Wren thrillers.

On Thurs Nov 28 (Thanksgiving) I had the Bookbub for book one of the Chris Wren thriller series – Saint Justice. It was free in all markets, exclusive to KU. I never thought I’d get the BB without going wide, and was in fact planning on a wide run early in 2020, but applied while exclusive anyway on a whim.

Well, they took it and ran it and now we have results – 24,000 free given away on the 28th, another 4,000 on the 29th, another 1,000 on the 30th. It held #1 position in Amazon free stores in UK, Au and Ca, but maxed out at #2 in the USA.

I was down about this briefly for a few reasons – that I wanted to hit #1, and that the BB estimate was 38,000 average giveaways. So what gives?

Well, I felt better after realizing a few things:

Firstly, the BB numbers are surely for a book that is wide. Mine was KU exclusive. If I had added other vendors like kobo and google, quite likely I’d be at 40,000 or more total.

Secondly, I looked at my stable mates at the top of the US free store, and found almost every other book in the top 100 was a romance. Maybe 10% were not romance. #1 was a romance. Every other book in the top 10 was romance. Even several other books in the thriller genre, that had their BB at the same time as me, were not even close to my rank.

So, that means for that day, I was giving away more free copies than any other thriller author. It’s pretty good. To beat out romance, when they are such big readers, and free readers, would be really amazing, but probably too much to expect. Maybe next time 😉

So – no need to feel down.

It’s been a week since then – and page reads and sales of the Wren books have been averaging about $100 a day. Of course there is some ongoing ad spend. Maybe in a week the BB will be paid off – then Wren can go back to having his ads sponsored by my zombie books :).

Audiobooks

I’m looking hard at getting audiobooks made for both Wren and the Last Mayor series. It involves buying out the rights to The Last, which I made on revenue share through ACX 3 years ago. If I can do that, then I have to remake it all.

After editing, it’s probably around 600,000 words total over 9 books. They say 1 finished hour of narration is around 10,000 words, so that’s 60 hours. Per finished hour rates range from $100 up to whatever, $400+.

If I got a narrator at $100 pfh, that would be $6000. Actually not bad, considering it is 9 books. $200 is more likely, then it is $12,000. Ouch. Will the audiobooks ever pay that off?

It is certainly possible. The big zombie audiobook box sets have thousands of reviews on them – which means they sold surely tens of thousands. My series still has problems – but the complete series is getting strong reviews. People are reading it all the way through. Some say the first 3 books are better. Others love it all the way. I’m still editing books 8 and 9. Either way, there are possibilities here.

Wren too horrific?

A review for Chris Wren just rolled in (moments ago) that crystalizes a concern that’s been niggling in the back of my mind – too much horror. Here’s the review:

Grist has a lot of talent as a writer. Most of the book was so good I couldn’t put it down. But he is too hung up on describing tortures. He fills it with so much sick stuff you no longer want to read. He over does it …way over does it! It’s sick. If he wasn’t so hung up on that he could be on of the better authors of thrillers.

That is a kind of awesome review. 3 stars out of 5. But still – ‘could be one of the better authors of thrillers’, ‘I couldn’t put down’ – even though they wanted to.

Well. I want to squash these horror moments. People are saying it constantly – dark, grim, not for the faint of heart. Fine, but a vast majority of the audience have ‘faint hearts’. Or more fairly, they don’t want their noses rubbed in grimness.

I need to address this. It is a blind spot of mine. I guess I come from horror, and even in my sf and fantasy there is plenty of horror. I don’t know why, as I can hardly stand horror myself. I don’t watch horror movies. I hate graphic violence and torture porn films like Hostel. John Wick 3 had parts that made me really queasy.

So…

I’ve already been reworking this book constantly – little things. Dumbing down the social justice warrior and racial aspects of Wren. I cut the potentially confusing perspective jumps – now each book has only Wren and a few chapters with one person getting sucked into each respective cult. I also did a search and replace on every instance of blood, mutilation and other keywords. There were a few. I toned them all down.

So what else needs fixing? Areas I didn’t yet touch up include the torture scene in Teddy’s basement (a tableau Wren discovers), the persistent branding of Mason, and the death of Henry and Abdul. I think those are the grosser bits. It doesn’t hurt anything to reduce the horror here. Leave it implied. That is the next job, after I finish the zombies. They are still the bigger meal ticket!!

Def needs to be done before I move on the audiobook, though.

If you have thoughts on the horror level, do let me know!!

This week has been consumed by editing The Lash, my Last Mayor zombie book 9. There have been some real ups and downs, crises of confidence, which I didn’t get when editing the earlier books in the series. This one took one major unusual step – flipping Amo from the good guy to the bad guy – and addressing that was a challenge.

Here’s what I did with them all:

Cerulean dreams

Naturally there were some interwoven, consistent Cerulean dreams throughout the novel, all in Amo’s POV. It happened in the Yangtze Darkness – some complex stuff about Amo getting in a packaging box on a conveyor belt, which itself was rotting and full of maggots, and get carried blind through the plastic drapes to the end, where he fell off and …

Stuff.

Why was this all here? On one hand, because I love Ceruleana nd don’t want to let him go. One the other hand, because I wanted a further way to show how mad Amo is going.

But it’s not fun. It’s drawn out, overwritten, and has no stakes. So what if he falls off the conveyor belt in a dream? It’s a dream! What does anything Cerulean says mean? He’s dead! Ooh, maggots. Gross.

So, I cut all of it. Now there are a few tiny snippets of Cerulean – hallucinations Amo sees built into the real world. They will doubtless be more powerful now.

Lara

There were some 6 chapters of Lara – after New LA blows up, she rolls across the country talking to Crow. We get a lot of Crow background, Native American stuff that’s earnestly written but probably hokey, and we get a lot of Witzgenstein from a distance.

It’s a lot of narrative threads to think about. All the others – Amo, Anna, Lucas are tied directly to what is going on with the bad guy for the book – General Marshall. So I trim it all. Now – at the very end – Marshall mentions Lara. Amo gets confused. It makes sense to have a brief catch-up with Lara then. The threat she’s facing. And those 6 chapters barely need any condensing – there’s one threat through them all that doesn’t change, so put it in one chapter.

Tech backstory & lepers

I had expected to seriously lighten the tech load. Stuff about the hydrogen line is dull. The more explanations I offer, the more confusing it gets. I trim a great deal – the line is going crazy, Amo has black light power, helmets can protect you but are imperfect.

Fine.

But then I hit the lepers at the end of the book. They play a pivotal, but very dreamy, role in the book. They confuse things enormously. Essentially, they are the awful byproduct of the efforts to make helmets that resist the hydrogen line.

They look like mummies, they are chaotic, and when they get near you you start to go mad. They turn your brain to static – and Marshal set them free. Amo takes one on in a very dreamy fight that invovled Cerulean. But I never explained them. I didn’t set it up. Amo does nothing special to survive – he just is strong enough.

I thought – why not cut it? It is cool, but without it the story suddenly streamlines. Amo, Marshall, Lucas, the helmets. Everything clarifies. So I cut it. It may cause problems in book 8! Hopefully I can intro the lepers again, if needed.

Amo goes bad

In this book, Amo decides he must become the villain to make his people survive. He has to kill all the bunkers, tens of thousands of people. But not only become the villain, he decides he has to become cruel. He has to learn how to enjoy being cruel.

That was a shark-jumping moment. I pushed it very far. Amo just becomes awful – when his signature characteristic throughout the series has been his morality. He transgresses many times – like in book 1 when he wipes out the zombie horde then kills himself out of guilt – but his morality crashes him back into line. There is just something inside him that prevents him from enjoying this kind of horror.

This book squashed it. Amo died. So – what are we reading for now?

That’s the problem. There’s no good guy left. There is too much despair. And I have Amo doing that with a crazy, laughing kind of madness. So off-putting. I found myself reading and just not caring.

So – I had to try to walk the line. The series is about saving Amo’s soul, after all. So I can push him to the edge, but not beyond. To do this, I up the influence of Drake on him. I cut out any element of enjoying cruelty. I get rid of the mad laughing – and instead I just make Amo extremely intense on protecting his people. Much like Marshall. No need to go mad. Just go intense.

I’m pretty sure it’s better. I had some uncertainty – after I make him a good guy falling into awfulness, have I lost my narrative drive? Well, then I need to clarify Marshall – and make the coming clash between these two intense men more suspenseful. Have I achieved it? I really don’t know. What I need is some more reviews that either confirm this or don’t.

Do I keep the sympathy of the reader? Do I keep the interest?

Lessons for Wren

There are definite lessons for my thrillers in all this. Wren is always dark, but in book 3 he goes darker – getting similar to Amo. He never seems to enjoy it, but he easily goes dark.

It’s hard for readers to roll with that. I think I can still have Wren be brutal, but walk the line better with a few lines to show he’s reluctant to do this. I throw him into it with gusto and no pause – that’s fine – but he doesn’t like it. I can help this by clarifying further how necessary it is. He really believes he has to do it. He’s also right.

I’ll look at Saint Justice this coming week – in advance of the big Bookbub. Streamline, speed, but minor changes at best. Quite excited to dig in.

It looks like I had a lot to say last week, as I wrote two extra blogs about the following topics:

• Massive edits to Last Mayor book 6
• Confirmatory reviews approving my Last Mayor box set progress to date

The upshot of both is that I finished editing book 6, The Laws, and moved on to Book 7, The Lash, where I faced the old challenges – simplifying complex technobabble, reducing repetition, speeding up action scenes – as well as a new one – losing sympathy for the main character when he goes too dark.

I was aware when I wrote book 7 that Amo’s turn to the darkness – essentially using the people around him to train himself to enjoy being cruel, so he can be completely thorough in destroying the bunkers – was tough. I pushed the envelope pretty far.

Too far, I think. People told me that directly. In tackling it the last few days – in particular a scene where Amo whips a helpless guy with his belt, and enjoys it – I can see how there’s no pleasure to be had in reading further. At this point our hero becomes someone else, loses his basic decency and seems unredeemable.

Going forward from that point, I found myself losing any sense of why I should care. This is always a tell-tale sign that something went wrong earlier. I lost my own sympathy. If he can do awful things with no cost, where’s the tension? The interest comes from a good person forcing themselves to do awful things, and hating it, but doing it because the other choice is worse.

So actually enjoying it? It takes that tension away. It compares to book 1, where he slaughters thousands of the ocean and hates it so much he kills himself.

It’s a tricky line to walk. Too much inner monologue about how unpleasant this all is starts to sound like whining. Too little and the character appears monstrous.

This is further relevant because I’ve had feedback on a similar scene with Christopher Wren in book 3, Reparation. Wren is in an interrogation situation, under fire, where he’s got a group of cult-followers briefly captive and needs to get something out of them in seconds.

He picks a pregnant woman, puts a gun to her head, and threatens her. It’s pushing it about as far as it can go.

Of course I’m thinking, and know, that Wren hates doing this. I know that it’s a bluff, and that he regrets the bluff because of the damage it will do, but also that he believes with absolute certainty that if he doesn’t get the information he needs, countless people will die.

It’s the torturer’s defense. But then, he is a vigilante – it’s what we sign up for when we pick up the book, frontier justice. He’s done the same thing before to varying degrees.

Maybe though I sold his bluff too well. People are turning off him because of this. There is no inner monologue throughout to soften things for the reader. It’s presented starkly. I can’t see how it would hurt to add that monologue in a little. Reassure the reader he hates this, regrets it, and that it’s a bluff. It’s all still awful, of course, but at least we’re not in the head of an evil man. Morally compromised, certainly, but agonized over it.

It’s good to think about this. Editing these zombie books is definitely giving me lessons I can apply to Wren. Fix one thing, and more interesting problems appear.

Before I go on to book 4, I’ll probably do a quick sweep through Wren 1-3 to smarten them up and file off a few sharp edges. Less horror, basically.

Facebook Ads!

On another note, I’ve been trying a new ad on Facebook. I took the image from book 5 of Anna, wrote a much sharper, shorter copy, and fired it up. It’s only been a day, and it’s getting clicks for half the price the old ad was getting. More sales though? I’m not seeing it. It’s odd, because it’s the same audience. Why would they click then not convert when it’s only 99c?

Mystery. Answers may come. Hopefully they’re all KU readers and I’ll see a massive spike in page reads coming soon. Here’s the ad:

I also made a short video version – it’s doing well so far.

The stellar performance of my Last Mayor box set books 1-9 continues unabated. This remains something I am surprised by, don’t fully understand, and have no idea how long it will go on for – therefore I am enjoying it very much while it lasts!

It is selling some 70 copies a day, with around 20,000 page reads. That’s around $100 gross a day. Of course I am paying around 40% for the privilege. On days when AMS spends my ad budget it does better. Likewise with FB ads – though somehow the FB ads have been cutting themselves out very early. Technically it is set to spend about $50 a day on FB ads, and it’s only spending $10.

Wha-? This happens more normally on AMS. So I keep making fresh FB ads targeted to new audiences to try and persuade it to spend more.

The book has been a #1 category bestseller in a couple of categories on and off all week. It is in the first or second page of also-boughts for the top box sets in the genre.

Since this box set is converting so well, I’ve fired up a few Bookbub ads as well. I have never had any success with these before. It’s too early to say if I will now – so far I’ve spent $20, $10 a day – and CTR (clickthrough rate) is maybe 0.8%, CPC (cost-per-click) is around 80cents. That’s a lot.

Will it come down? Bookbub ads say they now split your results by the authors you use for targeting. This would be excellent, if it worked. It’s only been two days, so maybe this data will populate soon. Then I can turn off any authors with awful CTR and optimize.

Here’s the Bookbub ad:

It may be my best-looking ad yet. I like having the price as a sticker on the book – I can never pick a spot in the ad that looks as good.

My hopes that the Soul Jacker box set might follow in its footsteps appear to be unfounded. Well, let’s be honest, they weren’t founded on much to begin with. It is selling a few copies, but it needs to earn pagereads to make money, and that isn’t happening yet. Fingers cross that it will.

Until that point, the zombie box set is subsidizing both Soul Jacker and Christopher Wren ads. Wren is starting to get some take-up down the series (3 books so far). Clicks cost a lot more, though. It’s all a big investment. Lots of nice reviews are coming in too, which is great.

On Wren briefly – I’ve had a fair number of reviews say he’s unlikable, but fascinating, flawed but gripping, even one person said they like to read about him but wouldn’t want to get a beer with him, whereas they would get a beer with Jack Reacher. It’s tough to hear – I obviously like him. However a review came in yesterday that said, while he was flawed and tough and vulnerable, he was also kind.

It’s what I think about him. I’m glad someone else got that.