In the past 6 months I reworked Saint Justice, No Mercy and Make Them Pay to make them the best they could be for audio re-records with WF Howes (narrated by Jeff Harding), with the major goal of increasing read and listen-through. If I can increase readthrough, I both entertain more readers with more books, improve my own storytelling skills and also increase profitability, which takes me closer to making writing these books my full-time gig. So now I just finished the rewrite of False Flag. Here’s the changelog of everything I altered, followed by the latest Readthrough report. Reduce …
New Wren series blurb & analysis!!
On Amazon as authors we’re afforded a series page for our books – for years I’ve been sending my FB ad clicks to the series page for Wren, and on that page I had a series blurb that was identical to the blurb for book 1 – https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07TFBG5XD ‘They stole his truck. Big mistake yadda yadda…’ In the earliest days of March 2021, this new blurb combined with new covers, new opening chapters and altered body text, led people to one-click buy the whole series (then about 4 books long). That led to a lovely influx of sudden cash, as …
Realism in the Chris Wren books
Anyone who reads this blog knows I take on board reader feedback and use it to improve my writing. I have no qualms about changing books that have already been published, and have written about this plenty before – I changed the Wren series in many ways both small and large: taking out political elements, removing swearing, reducing the graphic horror, removing the time spent in the heads of creepy people, speeding up slow sections and adding more descriptive parts at times. I’ve done all that. The Wren books started to sell because I did it – but for a …
2023 Writing Plans!!
The last two years have been transformational in my author career. For the first time I actually made decent money from my books – after learning some important lessons about writing to market and giving the audience more of what they want. Both years I comfortably earned ‘replacement’ money – enough to trade out my job and go full time as an author. I held back, since my job’s pretty good about allowing me time to write anyway, and because I expected it was better to save and get some runway. Boy, am I glad I did. In this last …
Alt covers for Saint Justice
I’ve been reading and analyzing a lot of thrillers recently – mostly Michael Connelly but also Jeffery Deaver, and that includes looking at their covers. Here’s a few: Granted, this selection is limited, but reasonably representative. Let’s compare to the Saint Justice cover: Let’s break down a quick analysis by area. Author name & Title – The other books all have the author name first, mostly at the top and above the title, taking up approx a quarter to a third of the cover. They largely seem to use the same font for the title. Saint Justice by contrast has …
Don’t Write from the Heart
‘Write from the heart.’ This may be one of the most misguided pieces of advice out there for authors. It’s everywhere, and I believe it’s wrong. Let me qualify that – it’s wrong to do it more than once, if what you’re looking to do is sell books (unless that first time is an epic success, which it won’t be). Writing from the heart is a lottery ticket with incredibly long odds. There is a near-infinitesimal chance that a book born from the virgin writer’s heart is going to sell. It’s like walking into a university and saying your first …
Bookbub for Wren, The Lash edits & stellar email – Writing Update 2019 Week 45
Lots of writerly action this week – with income contuining to hold at around $160 a day, 50% ACOS at around $80 a day on FB, AMS and BB ads. I have since squashed the BB ads (ineffective), trimmed the sails of the AMS ads (too expensive), and cut the Anna-image FB ads (they got very many cheap clicks due to the slight sexiness but very few sales). Indie Authors London I also had the Indie Authors London group Meetup which I run – we had some 14 people attend – including a big guy who looked like Idris Elba …
Writing Update 2019 week 13 & 14
It’s been an overwhelming week with the launch of Soul Jacker. I’ve sold more books faster than ever before, got influencer testimonials like never before, and heard back from readers like never before. Yesterday I hit 1,000 sales 2 major influencer plus 2 medium influencer testimonials Reports from all readers that they couldn’t put the book down SALES I looked back at my track record to get some sense of perspective here – The Saint’s Rise, which was my next most successful launch and itself also a relaunch of an earlier title, sold 800 books in the first 4 weeks. …
Soul Jacker review from Michael Marshall Smith!
This is immense news for my author career, as well as being an amazing personal accomplishment that I probably was distantly dreaming of 20-odd years back, when actually writing and publishing novels seemed very far away. I gulped down Michael Marshall Smith’s novels back then: Only Forward, Spares and One of Us. I loved them. Re-reading them recently, I’ve come to realize how much his work has influenced my own writing. Soul Jacker definitely owes a debt to Only Forward. There are certainly similarities – in tone at times, in world, in the concept of hacking into a mind/dreams. So …
Writing Update 2019 week 11 & 12
Another 2 weeks gone, and I’ve been hard at work setting up my: website book pages newsletter automation and special offers for backmatter signups. I was also lucky enough to get that awesome blurb from Lisa and Pat Mills. So what else has been going on? I’m in the run up to tomorrow’s US 99c Bookbub on The Saint’s Rise. Today it’s a BargainBooksy promotion. For the past few days I’ve been ramping up my Facebook ads- $70 today. I also set up AMS and Bookbub ads, but they don’t spend… I hope today it sells 100 copies. Well below …