It’s been an ad-focused week, after last week’s trials and tribulations to get Facebook Pixel conversion Optimization ads (hella mouthful!) to work. Now they’re working. But are they working? And let’s check in with word count on Wren 5 – Firestorm. I’d hoped to hit 15,000, and looks like I hit 12,000. That’s not too shabby. I almost certainly could have hit more, but I’ve been slacking. We’re through the initial intro action, and into the turn to the main rush. Wren 5 progress My target release date for Firestorm will be end of September. That’s 3 months. then book …

Last week was a painful climb-down of sales dropping away, after the previous week of getting great sales rates on the Christopher Wren books. The outcome was that my conversion dropped from 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 or lower – which is a clear difference betwen profit and loss. Painful. A rollercoaster. What the hell happened? Crushing genre/marketing discoveries Maybe it was last Wednesday that sales of the Wren books started to peter off. As far as I could tell, I hadn’t changed anything. I’d added a stronger female component to all blurbs over a week ago, and …

Starting Wren 5 Last week I planned to write 10,000 words in Wren book 5 by today – so much have I done? 2,000 words. Ha! But then, I wrote 5,000 on one track, did a lot of research, then had a long night of dreaming about it to realize it didn’t work. There are two reasons it didn’t work:† It was totally crazy, and highly unrealistic. Mission Impossible-level cool, but a bit too mad, and I’m tired of getting comments about the realism of these books. I don’t want to jump the shark! More importantly, it glossed over so …

Ghost War, book 4 of the Chris Wren thrillers, is out today! I’ve had a number of beta readers on the ARC team get back to me with comments and great fixes for minor issues. So far there are just reviews in, but I’m loving them. Here’s Julian’s review off Goodreads: I don’t like using ‘roller-coaster/page-turner’ in reviews as they are too pat descriptors, useful shorthand, maybe – but lacking some oomph. And Ghost War certainly has the OOMPH! If I wanted a brief description then ‘express train ride, barely short of a complete runaway train’ comes close. The action …

This week I got a fascinating review for Saint Justice: “Captivating, enthralling. I finished the book. Quite an amazing study of human attitudes and behaviors. However, for this reader there was just too much violence. Not at all certain I will read the next. For sure I need a bit of time before considering it.” It was a 3-star review. You wouldn’t think so from those first two lines, right? Captivating, enthralling. That’s good, no? Then, the violence let it down. God damn the damn violence!! I wrote a post on the Self-Publishing Formula Facebook page on this topic: Age …

I thought edits on Christopher Wren book 4 would only take me a week, so I would’ve been done at the end of week 21, but it has taken until today, 2 weeks later, to get this book done. Almost completely done – still one little chapter to slot in, but that shouldn’t take more than Saturday morning. I feel pretty weird. I suppose overwhelmed – for Wren, for his team, for his people. This may be one of the hardest books I ever had to write. It’s been my slowest book to write in recent years. It may be …

This week I set out to finish Wren book 4, now titled Ghosts, and I succeeded! It has left me feeling pretty shattered. There were quite a few surprises through the end. It does all kinds of unexpected things, and I have a lot of sympathy for poor old Christopher Wren. He’s more broken now than ever. Next up is book 5! Goal is to at least write that, maybe even book 6 by the end of 2020, if I can get really going. Hmm – I thought I’d have more to say, but it would all be spoilers. So, …

This last Saturday I woke up at 4:40 am to attend the Tokyo Writer’s Workshop Zoom meeting – a critique group I used to be a part of 6 years ago, when I lived in Tokyo. I was invited back by my friend Matt Finn, was psyched, and blearily got all set up for the 5am start time at the dining table. Only to find out I’d got the wrong day. D’oh! It was on Sunday. I went back to bed. Sunday morning at 4:40am I woke up, went to the dining table, and set up for the call. This …

Last week this time I was at 55,000 words on Ghosts, the 4th Chris Wren thriller. Now I’m at 69,000. That’s 14,000 words across the 7 days, 2,000 words a day- pretty nice going really. It started hard, though. I didn’t write on the weekend, and then Monday felt kind of like a lost day as I tried to figure out the precise next step. When I put the book down the Thursday before, it was with a twist I hadn’t at all expected coming. It felt right though. Making it work, however, felt like scrambling to backfilling one of …

Week in summary: I hit the promised goal of 55,000 words on Wren book 4 by Friday. Great! I got a Bookbub on The Last Mayor box set. Great! I actually made some decent sales of Saint Justice. Great! There was a nice chunk of good news this week. The biggest would probably appear to be the Bookbub – but I’m feeling the strong day of sales for Saint Justice more closely. More on each of these: Bookbub Bookbub are the #1 email newsletter promotion tool for authors. They have millions of readers on their newsletter lists, divided by genre. …