Wren 26,000 words
This last week I’d hoped to get 30,000 words on Wren 6, after several weeks of aiming for that same goal, and I finally came close with 26,000 words. It’s incredible how much more slowly I write now. I put these down to 2 main things:
- I’ve taken on so much feedback on my writing, that I am always second-guessing the creative process. This sounds like it would be bad, like you shouldn’t let anything get in the way of flow – but I find that in my case this is a little like adult control of emotions. Adults control their emotions, and that’s almost always the right thing to do. It’s similar with my writing – if I don’t exert more conscious control, I fall into bad habits. We all know what those are. Hopefully these conscious efforts will bend my habits into better practises, after which point flow will be smoother again.
- With this being book 6 in the series, and the series aiming to cap (or at least resolve the current threat) at book 7, we’re starting to see the Apex’s major plans in greater detail, as they escalate to an incredible level. Everything has to come together while the threat keeps on rising. Of course I’ve done this before, with the even-longer 9-book Last Mayor zombie series. But – that series gets criticized for the last 2/3 books going heavy on backstory, and leaning deep on ‘magic’ outcomes and solutions. I can’t do that here, and don’t want to. So it has to be clever, and that takes some deep thinking.
All that said, I think 6 is shaping up nicely. I wrote some, reflected hard, rewrote, and now I’ve got the main threat for the book, and the engine that makes it work, and the middle, and the end. I pretty much just need to write it now. So by Friday this week, it’d be great to hit 35,000 words, amazing to hit 40,000.
$1k day
Easter weekend was pretty incredible for my ads and sales. Click costs dropped even as I ramped up budgets, with conversion doing incredibly well. This set me up well to hit my first ever $1000 day on Tuesday. Wow, right? Not all profit, about 50/50 cost/profit, but still.
There’s been a pretty steep drop-off after that, though – click prices returned to normal as everyone went back to work, and I didn’t scale my budget back down fast enough, hoping to keep riding the wave indefinitely. That doesn’t work, and my profit ratio plummeted.
I’ve got it under better control now, and with the help of affiliate links on various audiences, I’m getting a much better idea of which are my best audiences, how much spend they can tolerate per day, and and which are the most efficient places to put budget on (profit per click).
It’s pretty cool. I also have started seeing some new comments in my Facebook ads that suggest people have started to see my books around, and consider them, and me, a brand. Somebody writes ‘This’ll be my first Mike Grist’. That’s really cool, and I’m happy to see it.