Well well well, I spent the week (week 22) immediately after finishing writing Wren 6 Enemy of the People feeling super pleased with myself. Just totally fulfilled without needing to do much by way of work. Honestly, it was pretty great.
Wren 6 edits
Not that I go through life always thinking about things I should be doing or the contribution I should be making. Those are useful drives to have, of course. If I felt like I did last week all the time, I’d get literally nothing done. So while I surfed that sense of accomplishment gladly, in week 23 I got back on the ball and started editing book 6.
There is plenty to do! Ironing, I always call it. Going back and taking out dangling bits of the story engine’s structure that I never ended up needing. Making what remains look wholly purposeful rather than partly speculative. Planting a bit more shadowing. Reducing the over-writing, which is something I will probably always do.
Eg – In one 3-chapter stretch of car chases, every turn Wren made was ‘hard’, every acceleration was ‘hard’, etc… Pretty tiring to read at that level of intensity. In the moment of writing I’m really into it, but the reader’s experience takes literally minutes, while I will have written those sections days apart. Every time I had to re-intensify the mood just to get it written – but on the edit I’m looking for flow.
I’m at chapter 25, the midpoint. It should speed up now. It’ll be great to finish edits in a week, give i to beta readers for a week, then launch.
Sales and Marketing
Sales of the Wren series continue really well. Having 5 ad images that I rotate between, served to really 1 target audience group in UK and US, keeps the ads fresher and the cost per click manageable. It remains profitable. I’m in a steady cashflow situation now where I’m reinvesting everything that comes back from Amazon.
Facebook is my bread and butter, as ever, but I’m looking at Amazon ads again. It would be wonderful to crack them. I never yet have, but if it’s ever possible, it must be with this highly-ranked, strongly-converting series. If this can’t make money on Amazon ads, what will?
Tokyo Bicycle Bakery
I was working on Su’s blurb some in week 22, which culminated in putting it forward for my London Indie Author group critique. They all had similar thoughts, which was really helpful – they said there was no jeopardy. I hadn’t thought there needed to be – mostly because I don’t really understand romance or women’s fic. But they were adamant.
So, I wrote a new blurb with more jeopardy. Then I looked at the Eat Pray Love blurb, took inspiration, and after that the book has been selling at around break-even rates ever since. Only $5 ads every day, and 2-3 sales average, but this is the best it’s ever done. It’s very hard to ever make money off a single book, so this is already good.
To get to this point we also made changes to the body text. Several whole chapters and plot threads went. When we get a minute (and I finish Wren 6 edits), we will also look through the book, in particular the first few chapters from Amazon’s Look Inside, and rim them right to the plot.
Less floaty description. More movement. That’s what the LIA group also said. A really useful session. I hope we do more of these ‘Book Labs’ going forward, but folks have to submit, so we’ll see.
Reviews & Pre-orders
In a couple of cool bits of stat news, I’m getting close to hitting 1,000 total reviews on a single book for the first time ever. Saint Justice has 950 or so currently. Hitting 1,000 doesn’t mean anything in particular, but it’s a cool milestone. Even better that the books downstream are picking up more, and positive, reviews too. All but book 5 have 100+ reviews now, all at 4.5 stars. That’s great for whole-series purchasers to see.
In pre-orders, I’m almost to 400 for Enemy of the People. That’s the most I’ve ever had by a long stretch. I put up book 7, order date a year away, for pre-order, and it already has 20 purchasers. Thank you, readers!
Some reviews have pointed out some mistakes I made, additionally. There were a few complaining about typos – I did some reading and squashed a few of those. Someone caught a mistake where I wrote Teddy and Abdul instead of Henry and Abdul, so I fixed that. Someone said there are no military ranks in the CIA, so calling Wren ‘Corporal’ is wrong. Fine, now he is just ‘Officer’.
All these little fixes help. Oh, I also settled on Wren’s nickname – I had taken to calling him the ‘Executioner’, only a few times, but it’s not very imaginative, and apparently some famous thriller author has a character named that already. So, only 2-odd years after settling on the title for book 1, I finally realized Wren’s nickname should be ‘Saint Justice’.
lol. Obvious, right? It works perfectly. His introduction. Prior to this, that title just meant, getting justice against the Saints. Now it also means that, but mostly it’s just Wren’s name. Works for me.
By this time next week
Recently on the weekends we’ve been going out a lot, to see family or friends. We went to Greenwich 3 times in the last month, and we love it. Maybe this weekend we will stay home and chill here and write. So, by his time next week, I should be fully done with Wren 6 edits, and sending it out to beta readers. Then it will be launch.
I don’t have any special launch plans. Send a newsletter email, maybe boost a Facebook post, and that is probably it. With nearly 400 on pre-order, and knowing the funnel from book 1 through to 6 already works, I don’t need to do anything special, I figure.
Then to work on book 7! I have a deadline of June 4 2022!! Aim to get it done by Dec 2021 though, but give myself some leeway 😉