I already wrote in 12.1 about finishing up Make Them Pay – through the week’s end I chased that with some oddball tinkering on books 1-3, re-made the boxset and re-issued it, then dug into book 6. Also lots of ads nonsense ;).
Enemy of the People 1/4-point
I had been concerned even before this latest spate of rewrites that the Enemy of the People opener was not propulsive enough. It is all down-time reaction to the events of the last book, with some problems of Wren’s physical and mental state.
At the core though – it’s not fun to read about a Wren who’s so mentally broken. If he needs to be chivvied along and properly motivated, then I’ve not made the threat adequately immediate. So, I’ve fixed that:
- New opening sequence, that extends the escape from DC that ends book 5 and also introduces the book 6 villains right off the bat. I think it’s going to work pretty great.
- When we check in with Wren, he’s not mentally defeated – though he is physically broken. We recover him from that pretty quickly though, and get straight into the action.
- In writing the last couple of days, the scale of the story just leaped a notch. A mass violence/riot event that would have closed out one of the earlier books is now happening as standard. It shocked me a little, but until that point I’d been worried the threat wasn’t really there. Now I’m certain it is.
So I’m finally at 20,000 words! Only 60-odd k left to go. Though if it runs short like the earlier ones now do, it may close at 70k. So short.
Facebook Ads
A while back I turned off all my affiliate link ads because they weren’t getting through Facebook for some reason. Now they are, so I spent many hours setting them all up again. Now I get an extra 6% every time I make a sale, which of course is great.
I also get to see which ads/audiences are converting. Answer? So far, they’re all doing about the same… I also figured out you can send an affiliate link to a series page. Previously I was only running series links, and getting a good number of people who bought all 5 books in one click.
Then I tried sending to book 1 only. Conversion on book 1 went up, but sales of the rest of the series dropped a lot. Hopefully readthrough will take care of that, but why leave it to chance that I’ll sell books 2-5 later when I get just sell them upfront now? So I’m going back to pushing the series link.
Next week target
By this time next week it’s probably realistic to hit 30,000 words. I’d love to hit 40,000, but I’m both slow and kind of lazy at the moment. It’s also true that writing fast thriller scenes takes me way longer than the baggier kind of writing I was doing before. So much critical thinking goes into drilling down to whatever the core story is. Better for the reader, more work for me.