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 😉

As of thirty minutes ago, Wren book 6, Enemy of the People, is finished!!

Hurrah!

It is closing out at 85,000 words. It’s still a month until launch, so I’ll use that time to edit it, proofread it, polish it up. I think it’s pretty much polished already, so that shouldn’t be too hard. I already have the cover, and it is epic. I’ll share that shortly. What else is there to say?

Nothing much. I’m feeling super pleased. It is often the case through the middle of a novel that I am uncertain if I will be able to land it properly. This one had me more uncertain than usual. I knew I’d land it, because that’s just writing. But land it well?

I believe I hit my marks.

Reviews

In other news, reviews of the 5-book Wren series on amazon.com have all turned to 4.5 stars (apart from book 1, which is 4.1 currently and rising). This is great. Makes it look very attractive to readers considering a series.

I also got a fantastic review of the box set on Amazon US:

Christopher Wren is so much larger than life that he should be a humorous caricature. His exploits are Marvel Universe save the country ridiculous. This cannot be a serious series. Yet, some how it is. Characters are deep, complex, flawed and awesome. The action is great. How Mr Grist rides this edge I don’t understand. But then I don’t have to, I’m here to be entertained… and I was!

I love this. Thank you CloudSmasher. I guess this is what I am going for with these books – big time special effects and action, combined with complex characters. It wasn’t overt – I wanted to write a book series like a great action movie. This is what I got 🙂

Marketing

I continue with the Facebook ads as ever, while also trying to market Su’s book the Tokyo Bicycle Bakery. It is a really beautiful and uplifting romance that we’re struggling to find the audience for. It will be down to the blurb, cover, title, opening chapters – and we’ve recently reworked all those.

Yesterday we had 5 sales. Pretty great, off a very minimal ad spend. Today fewer. It’s a puzzle at this stage, as I don’t know romance well, and don’t have either the targeting of audiences or the ad copy mastered. We need to experiment who are her best comp authors. Also double-check her blurb and first chapter to try to make them appeal the most.

I may throw what we’ve got to a wider audience of authors and see if they have any idea why it doesn’t convert more.

Life

Since lockdown has eased we’ve had some lovely busy weekends full of socializing. Last weekend we went to Greenwich to see my old high school friend Nick with his wife and their 3 kids. It was awesome. A meal from Greenwich food market, coffees and cake, chased with football and frisbee in the park. It doesn’t really get any better.

Then we went to see my Dad and Aileen in Kent, enjoyed chatting it up and eating vegan burgers, walking around the fields.

This coming bank holiday weekend we’ll go back to Greenwich just to wander, shop, eat, drink and hang out in the park, then we’ll also go see my mom, where my sister with her fam and my brother’s fam will be. We’ll take along the cornhole gear and play some garden games. Looking forward to it. Haven’t seen these kids in a year, and my mom always puts on a great spread!

I’d hoped I might close out the whole of Wren book 6, Enemy of the People, this week, but in the last couple of days progress slowed a little as I chewed the great wodge of words I’d produced in the last week. I also spent some time fooling around with ads.

Wren 6 progress

Right now we’re at 71,000 words. Everything but the finale. This time last week I was at 57,000, so that’s 14,000 words this week. 2,000 a day, not bad. Is it all great? It may get trimmed on the edit, but I think it’s all solid. Action, revelations, clues, with more to come.

Now the finale!! It’s going to be epic. I will buckle down next week and get it done.

On a side note, this pace is pretty great. 15,000 per week, if I kept that up, I’d be producing a book every 2 months. Give me a month to edit, that’s 4 books a year. Totally do-able. I should do it!

Ads

The big change I made this week was to try and introduce some old images and get them pinging over to the books. the idea is to get cheaper clicks because the image is fresh. I have all these prior covers, which always did pretty well on Facebook. They just didn’t convert books.

So I made a bunch of ads, and started serving the red/black face cover as an ad. It served really well, was getting me much cheaper clicks, but almost immediately sales flat-lined. I tried it in multiple markets, to different audiences, and the result was the same.

People clicked that image happily. When they got to the book page, they just ran. Maybe the mismatch between the ad image and the book image on the sales page put them off. Maybe they’d already bought a Wren book but didn’t realize it because the image was so different. Maybe the face image set them up for a different kind of book, and the sales page didn’t deliver.

It’s a mystery. But it’s undeniable. So from now on I will aim to only use the book covers in my ads. Least cognitive dissonance between the ad and the sales page. Just means I need more book covers in the series, to use as more ads 😉

ALSO – I thought why not try to sell some zombie books, using this new knowledge? I’d tried a few times recently, but failed to shift copies. This time I tried again, pointing at the series page and the box set both. For the series page, I dropped the price of the first 4 books to 99c each, so the whole series can be one-clicked for less than $20.

Straight away, the series page started performing better. I guess it’s just more focused. There are way fewer ads for other books on that page. No other box sets priced at 99c, that make my $9.99 look terrible. And people are clicking the one-click buy all button. I get maybe $12 every time they do that, and way more visibility for all the titles in Amazon rank.

So I move all budget to the series page. Also I turned off the UK ads, which were barely paying for themselves. Would be great to scale this series back up and get it selling again. No reason why it shouldn’t – it’s very highly rated.

Next up, Facebook ads for Su’s book!

By next week

By next week this time Wren 6 should be finished. 80k or thereabouts. Ready for editing. Wow.

It’s a big writing week this week, in line with my offensive to get book 6 done by the end of May. Last week (which was actually Sunday, because I did it late) I was at around 40,000 words. Today I reached 57,000, and I might do a few more today.

Writing

I’d hoped to hit 60,000 and close out chapters 30-40. I’ve hit chapter 38 and just need a few scenes to hit 40. Today or this weekend. Next week will be the final push. Would be amazing to close it out at 80,000 words within a week.

A lot of things have happened in this last 17,000 words. I think that’s the thriller writing style. A heck of a lot of interesting interactions, with different people, with different kids of threat, with Wren coming out on top in different ways.

Sometimes he straight-up physically beats someone, though there’s usually a chess-move component to that, and sometimes he persuades someone via threats or promises, sometimes he spots something no one else does, asks the right question. Sometimes he bulls through on a hunch just far enough to get results, sometimes he manipulates with mindgames, and sometimes he gets helped out by a member of his team.

It’s pretty great fun. It takes a lot of acts of invention. One time in this last push I took a wrong turn and floundered a bit. It was too easy, or too wacky too fast. I took a step back, rewrote from that point, and now am actually able to use most of that earlier stuff in a legit-feeling way. Needed to set it up better, was all.

We’re almost into the endgame. The beginning feels like such a long time ago. Only 60,000 words, but I wrote it in January. It’s changed so much since then. I’ve rewritten most of the books in some substantial ways during that time. Sales climbed in unexpected ways. I’ll be interested to read it through from start to finish, work on tying it all together.

Foreshadow. Echo. It’s pretty unified already, I think, and I see myself dropping echoes as I write. A few more, and we’re good.

Is it wholly realistic? Hmm. There’s a couple things so far people could take issue with. Nothing major, I think. No ‘using helicopters to open buildings like can-openers’. Plenty of action. Chases. Fights. Puzzles. Interrogations. Classic Wren.

Marketing

Amazon have asked me to enrol Saint Justice in both Prime Reading and put it forward for a Kindle Deal, in the UK and the US. I think I’ll do both. It’s a bit of a gamble, but not much to lose. I can always turn down my ads, if they stop being profitable.

The Writing Life

This past week has felt like the most accurate taste of what the writing life might feel like, if I ever go full-time. Of course if I went full time, outside of a pandemic, I’d almost certainly go into town several days a week to enjoy various coffee shops as my writing spot. It’d be a fun way to explore London. Different coffee shops every day, different restaurants. Go to the top areas. Chelsea, Mayfair, whatever. Enjoy the best views.

I’ve spent times busily writing before, but never with the marketing so on autopilot, with sales and pre-orders happening right there without much effort from me. Book 6 has 234 pre-orders now. Not breaking records other than my own. Those folks are my employers right now, and I have to get that book to them on schedule.

Maybe book 7 could come within 3 months. If I write at this pace, don’t need to mess around with rewrites, making print copies, tinkering with ads. If all that goes on auto-pilot, I could become a production machine. Someone complained in a review that the only problem with the books was that I wrote them too slow!!

Good problem to have, from my perspective.

Book on Writing

That said, I would like to write and publish a writing/marketing book I’ve been kicking around in my head for a while now. After I had that popular post on 20books about rewriting to genre, I think I’ve got something to offer. The book would be about how to meet genre expectations. It could be a doorway to coaching, courses, speaking, publishing others, if I want. If it goes well.

This would definitely slow down production on the next Wren. We will see. Now time for some exercise!

It’s been 2 weeks since my last update, and they’ve been crazy weeks. We got our first Covid jabs, AstraZeneca, and they knocked us a little sick. In the midst of that, we were first deeply contemplating big home renovations, then chased that by making moves to sell our house and move, and chased that by realizing we were actually super happy where we were, with the house as it is, and putting the FOMO days of Covid firmly in the past.

I will be so glad to have coffee shops and restaurants as a home away from home again! Cinemas are coming too, and that is great.

In the midst of all that, I’ve been writing book 6. The deadline is fast approaching, June 30, and I have more pre-orders than ever, 210 so far, so I cannot disappoint. The book stands at 43,000 words, around halfway, so there’s a lot to do, but I’ve broken so much important theory in the last 2 weeks that I’m hopeful those words will almost wrie themselves.

Wren 6

I commissioned the cover from my artist. I have no idea if it’ll be the best reflection of the book, because I haven’t finished writing it yet, but that’s where I am currently. It’ll definitely look cool, if it’s like his earlier covers, and that’s the main thing.

And the story! It’s going crazily Dan Brown. Down a puzzle-rich, symbol-laden rabbit hole of Pyramid theory. Not too deep, not massive info-dumps. Rather I’m finding it fascinating. Pretty much everything is in position. Big plot turns are happening. Moments from which there is no going back.

I need to write at least 1,000 words a day going forward to have a shot at hitting the deadline. that sounds easy. It should be. I’d like to smash it much faster than that. Close out by the end of May would be amazing. Have penty of time for self-edits, a proof-read, get it sharp.

Add to this, Amazon US has, I think for the first time for me, offered a Kindle Deal for book 1 in the month of July. This is kind of perfectly timed to my new release of book 6. They can of course do different degrees of promo on my behalf. Saint Justice may appear at the bottom of a long promoted list of 99c books. It could also be at the top of a short one. It could lead to huge numbers of sales and page reads. It may not at all.

Maybe bigger than a Bookbub. Like a Kindle Countdown deal that can last an entire month. I’m running substantial Facebook ads every day, so I’ll have to play it by ear when the amazon deal starts. Make sure I’ve got a clear baseline so I’ll know when to throttle ads back, or even ramp them up. 99c books convert much better than full price. I’ll probably make new sets of ads to press that home.

Exciting.

Today I wrote 3,000 words, and set up the next 10 or so chapters. I have the major movements. The theory. I have the next 10 chapters after that in loose form. They’ll be tricky, but I’ll figure them out. Then we’ll be done!

So this time next week, it would be great to close out chapters 30-40. Hit 60,000 words. Have 2 weeks before the end of May to write the last 10 chapters and 20,000 words.

Ads

Facebook ads are going as well as ever. I partially gave up on solely relying on the Facebook algorithm to select which ad images it’s going to run for me. Now I’ve narrowed my ad sets and audiences way back, so it’s simpler to oversee this myself. If on any day ad clicks rise, I may first reduce the budget substantially, and if that doesn’t help after a day or so, I’ll turn off the expensive ad image and rotate another one in that’s done OK before.

It keeps the offering I’m putting before the FB audience constantly fresh. When I get new book covers made, I’ll use those images too. Constantly refreshed. New blurbs/ad copy for variety, as I come up with them.

Thus far it is working. Click costs stay pretty low. If I leave it to the FB algorithm, it’ll keep pushing a dud ad image for days before maybe switching over. If I do it myself, I rescue my cost per click. It’s got so I don’t need to spend much time on analysis, especially as I’m no longer trying to ramp things up. I don’t have the budget to go bigger, right now!

When some of these amazon royalties come in, I’ll look at going bigger again. We shall see.

Reviews

Some great reviews have been coming in. I’m really pleased:

Do not start this book late at night. You won’t be able to sleep until you finish it. Wren is a hero who recognizes the need for allies, a characteristic a lot of heroes would be better off for sharing. Is the story realistic? How would I know? I certainly have never been a CIA operative. But Frost makes you believe Wren is the real deal. Great book

Frost is doing a god job! Nice one, Frost 😉

Great story…Christopher Wren is a combination of John Wick, Jack Reacher, and Jack Ryan….doing the right thing even when dangerous. I will read other books by this author…well worth my time.

Love this comparison to Wick, Reacher and Ryan. My thoughts exactly. And one more:

A horrific story, but unfortunately believable! A gripping tale which drags you along with the pace of the action. Great writing. Will find another when I have recovered from this book.

Great stuff, I’d like it to be a little less horrific, but won’t make any changes until I hear a bit more about what in particular comes off as so horrific.

The last 2 weeks have seen my ads settling into a 50% return zone, with click costs rising. I wrote a handful of new words on book 6 and mostly focused on getting books 1-5 updated and into print.

Wren 1-5 in print

I don’t usually bother with print. For my zombie books I made book 1 in print then never bothered with books 2-9. It’s a big hassle and I rarely sell any print copies, so it didn’t seem necessary. Recently with the thrillers though, people kept asking me about paperbacks.

Part of this is a corollary of my advertising. I’m hitting wider, non-ebook-only audiences, and they want print copies. I had a couple of dialogues where I was promising folks to get the print copies out within a week. I’ve said this kind of thing before then let the bother of formatting delay me unto oblivion.

This time though, perhaps because making the paperbacks went hand-in-hand with streamlining the whole series in the new, consistent style, I felt like it was an important thing to do.

So I’ve done it 😉

It is cool to have them ready like this. In order to get this far, I had to work on books 4 and 5 (about to go into print).

Book 4 needed:

• Remove all Gruber side stories. The first one was easy, the latter ones a little tough because his viewpoint overlaps with Wren. Some essential information came through Gruber, some came through Wren’s, so I had to rewrite a couple chapters to make it work. We also lose some of the in-depth indoctrination stuff, but I’m thinking few people care about that anyway.

Book 5 needed:

• Remove all Rachel Day side stories. This was pretty easy, few of them did anything more than provide interesting cult-indoctrination. I’m sad to lose this, as ever, but the main stuff comes through the Wren viewpoint already anyway. There’s a good amount of repetition.
• Remove all David Keller side stories. This required a bit more thought. The first one opens the story with the broader threat of the Apex, after which there isn’t much in the Wren story to get things going ’til maybe chapter 10. So I switched it around, put Wren at Keller’s rally, and highlighted their conversation that was only offered as a flashback before. There’s a similar challenge at the end, where the denouement matters overlap between Wren and Keller’s POV. I had to weave it together from Wren’s POV. It’s actually much simpler now, no repetition, so I’m feeling good.

Now all the books are sleek, single-POV action adventures that move ahead fast. They rarely pause to go deep on back or sidestory. A little here or there.

Click costs rising

At the same time, click costs continue to rise and my reviews on amazon are dropping. This concerns me but it’s out of my control. Now the first three books in the series have a 4-star rating, rather than 4.5. It doesn’t look great. Few of these people who are marking me down are telling me why. It’s too soon after my last round of beta readers to dig in and make editorial changes. I need to hear from a mass of readers what it is they’re disliking. Maybe that’ll come with some more time.

I’m also throttling some ads via bid cap controls. This’ll likely squash my sales, reduce my spend, and I’ll probably spend the next few days panicking and undoing the damage. lol. The reality is, expansion is hard! Maybe I need some whole new batches of ad images. I’m struggling to find new audiences that convert well.

The work goes on!

Book 5 is coming in print!

Book 6

I’m at 31,000 words on book 6. Chapter 20. That’s not very much, and the deadline is approaching, so I really need to buckle down and get this done. I used to write a book every 3 months. Now it’s more like every 6. Let’s flip that back. 40,000 words by Friday this week would be a good start!

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

This week I’ve mostly been absorbed with scaling up my FB ads while writing a couple new chapters for Wren book 3, Make Them Pay.

FB ads scale up

I’ve been serving my suite of Saint Justice ads (5 of the book covers in both square and rectangular, copy is the book blurb) to 3-4 primary audiences for the past month, but never really knowing which ones were working and which were just spinning my wheels.

Now, thanks to judicious use of affiliate links, I have a much better idea of who converts and who doesn’t. This is super valuable. It’s also kind of obvious – but when I’m managing my FB ads, it’s easy to pour more budget into the ad set that’s getting the cheapest clicks. But that way lies madness. If that was all I cared about, I’d only run video feed ads (and make no sales at all!).

So, who’s performing? Here are the ad audiences and conversion:

• TAK Thriller Authors & Kindle CVR: US 10%, UK 8%
• TAE Thriller Authors & Ebook CVR: US 5%, UK 4%
• AMK All Media (Thriller Movies/TV/Books) & Kindle CVR: US 5%, UK 5%
• LA1 Lookalike 1% CVR: US 5%, UK 4%
• LA4 Lookalike 4% CVR: US 1%, UK5%

This is invaluable data. With the TAK ads getting 1 sale in 10 clicks, compared to everything else getting 1 in 20, I should be willing to spend anything up to double the price on the TAK ads. If I’m not doing that, I’m not optimized. But to date I’ve not been doing that. I’ve been splitting my budget pretty evenly across these 4 or 5 audiences. This tells me I need to double down on TAK. Only move budget over to the others when TAK is double the price they are.

Also, the LA4 ad in the US performs terribly. 1 sale in 100 clicks is unacceptable. I can switch that off easily and only save money. Otherwise, 1 in 20 seems the order of the day. Real useful data. I’ll keep an eye on this.

Make Them Pay new chapters

I just finished edits on Make Them Pay, right? Right – but then I got a review from a guy who’s loving the series, but he said he felt short-changed by this book.

🙁 That was a downer. I don’t want to disappoint fans. It’s true it’s the shortest book right now, at 63,000 words. I made it that way by cutting out a lot of non-scene verbiage. Like, repetition of explanations, action, events happening twice. So I felt bad. I wondered what I could do. Last week I thought about adding a few additional acion opening chapters – and I still mean to do that.

But – on a brief glance at the middle, I found a spot where I can smoothly add in new chapters and a whole new setting. It’s right after Wren breaks social media. Previously he did this twice in a row, bu to sort of no avail, setting up a Black Lives Matter thing in the street. Fine politics, but unnecessary. Also, after this he gets winged off to a strike where all the detective work has been done by his hackers. He just takes their word for it and kicks ass.

Not very satisfying. How was the detective work done? Well, the hackers built a matrix, and… (yawn). I don’t wan to rely on hacker ‘magic’. So I came up with a source Wren could shake down, happily just up the road from Silicon Valley – San Quentin Prison.

It’s a cool double chapter sequence. Only adds 4,000 words, but they’re solid and worth having. Now he sets it all in motion, and his hackers only follow orders. Better.

Saint Justice concerns

I got a couple of painful Saint Justice reviews this week, and the average star rating dropped from 4.1 to 4.0 to boot. I’m not happy about that. The worst review went like this:

Not as described!

Based on the one paragraph summary, I bought the 5 book set. After reading St Justice, and learning that the serie’s plot revolved around chasing groups that abused minorities, women & children, I deleted the entire series. I read for enjoyment, and I found nothing enjoyable in this book.

That’s not good. I feel bad that someone dropped 5 books’ worth of cash then deleted them all. I don’t wan to misrepresent the book. Likewise I don’t want to put all that stuff in the blurb, because I know it’ll crush conversion. It’s a tricky problem. So what can I do?

Well – change the body text to make it fit. I’m starting off small. So far I have:

• Gone through all the books and changed the offensive term ‘Pickaninny 3’ which the Apex uses for Wren to ‘Pequeno 3’. I feel there’s nothing lost. The Apex is not racist anyway. He hates everyone equally.
• The bikers in their opening Saint Justice interaction with Wren mention racial slurs maybe 3 times. I can cut all those and we still know who they are, when they’re talking about nooses and calling him ‘Boy’. It’s enough.

That’s it so far. I don’t know that I need to get rid of it all. It’s the core plot. But if it lifts readthrough, which is currently sub-50%, I don’t mind doing it. I could:

• Change the assassin’s almost use of the N-word, and remove Wren’s response.
• Flip the whole plot from being a ‘race war’ narrative to something else. Supremacism but not based on race? Or maybe hatred of religion (by the bad guys, obviously)? That’s dangerous territory too, but less heated than race.

I could do that. But should I? And it doesn’t help me with book 2, but I’ve really moved the child abuse angle of book 2 deep into background. We hardly come near it – though we all know it’s there in the background. Hmm…

To help me decide, I’ve hired 2 more beta readers via fiverr, and asked them to assess Saint Justice and tell me what I can do to get higher ratings and better readthrough. We’ll see what they suggest. I’ve not had full feedback from anyone yet on this latest iteration of the book, so it will be interesting.

Generally, it’s getting better.

By this time next week

I absolutely must focus on book 6 now. It’s due out in 3 months, and I have 20,000 words. Gotta get it done, edited, sharpened, cover made and put out. It’ll happen. So – 30,000 words by this time next week!

Early this week I made my first major post on the 20booksto50k Facebook page. It’s the biggest group of Indie authors I think there is – almost 50,000 members, brought together by a shared ‘climb up the mountain’ toward book writing/publishing/marketing success.

On there you’ve got folks making 100k+ a month and more, and sharing how they did it. You’ve got people who run their own small presses, who write a book every two weeks, who’ve been full time indie authors for a decade and more. I’ve never written a post there before – lots of comments, no real content, until March brought me my first 10k month.

That’s a real milestone. I wanted to mark it while also sharing what I’d done to get there. I posted the below in the morning, and within an hour it had 200 likes. Now on Friday that’s up to 1000+ likes and 250+ comments. I guess I mention that because I never expected it. It’s hugely encouraging.

Here’s the link to the post: https://www.facebook.com/groups/20Booksto50k/permalink/3471122772994162/

Here’s the post, for posterity’s sake:

My first 10k month

I just reached $10,000 revenue for this month, March 2021, and would love to share how I did it and what I’ve learned in the long process to get here. A couple of quick stats first: I cleared 10k on an ad spend of approx. 66%, almost entirely on Facebook ads. That’s a 50% Return on Investment – I’ve no doubt others are doing better, but I’m blown away to be making this kind of reliable (thus far) return.

The tl;dr version of this post boils down to this – Working on your ads skill won’t matter if people don’t want to buy your book. Simple and obvious, maybe, but I’m sure there’s many folks out there who, like me, have dug deep into ads looking for the magic copy or image, when what you need to do most is make your book into something your target audience WANTS to read. 

My story (at slightly more length)

I’ve been self-publishing since 2014, starting with 2 weird epic fantasy that struggled to sell (though I did get a Podium audio deal), followed by 3 hard science fiction that really struggled to sell (though some famous authors provided blurb copy), followed by 9 zombie apocalypse thrillers that sold pretty well – especially when I rewrote them for pace and content then combo-ed them into a 9-book boxset which sold for 99c – making most of its money through KU page reads.

Nearly 3 years back I decided to make the move to writing thrillers. I wasn’t a massive fan of reading in the genre, but I loved Lee Child and Barry Eisler’s books, while watching most big action/adventure movies and TV shows – with a particular soft spot for 24.

So I wrote my first Christopher Wren thriller. I wrote three in the series, self-edited, made my own covers, wrote my blurbs, then fast released them all in June 2019. It wasn’t to crickets, but it wasn’t good either. The series responded to Facebook ads, had a Bookbub or two, but mostly lost money for a year or so.

I kept the faith, reinvesting my zombie book money (which was starting to dry up) on making the Wren audiobooks while writing books 4 and 5. There were various revelations through this time – primarily that the series had abysmal readthrough (around 10% to book 2), with reviews broadly saying that while people thought it was a good book, various off-genre features turned them off and made them not want to read on. It held a 4.1 star rating on Amazon US, but something was clearly wrong.

Investigation

I was adrift for a while, wondering if I ought not just move on to a different series. That’s a vast amount of work to write off though. 5 books and 2 years of all my energy poured in. Plus what guarantee was there that in my next series, I’d hit the market square on if I didn’t even really know why this series wasn’t selling?

I decided to dig in and keep trying to figure it out. I solicited reviews from blog tours and net galley deals, and they were all excellent. OK. So maybe those reviewers are not my target audience. I looked to get editorial help, but I’ve had bad experiences with editors in the past, and didn’t want to go big or rely on any one person’s opinions too much.

So I looked at Reedsy and Fiverr, and over a period of time hired a range of manuscript assessment deals and beta readers. Comments were generally incredibly helpful – when I asked them to focus on why people weren’t wanting to read through to book 2.

Results

What came in for me was that the book was off-genre by quite some way. This is a simple way of saying – “It’s not what people want to read”. Super simple, but pretty much the core reason I think anyone who’s struggling to sell is struggling to sell. People just don’t want to read it, and nothing you can say in your ads is going to convince them otherwise.

I’ve been learning this lesson for years. My epic fantasy books were very weird – in setting, narrative, hero, villain – kind of Victorian steampunk with invented races and a crazy kind of memory-magic. Totally my kind of thing, but not mainstream. In my hard science fiction books I just went all out crazy, with a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk mind-jacking adventure through ruins and nightmare-scapes. Again, wholly my bag, but almost impossible to find the audience.

I tried very hard to market all these. I put solid dark epic fantasy covers on the fantasies, but couldn’t reach ‘my’ readers. I put cyberpunk covers on my science fiction, but nobody really reads cyberpunk now, and the books only loosely fit that genre anyway. My zombie books however had great covers and only subverted the genre tropes reasonably late in the story (naturally, I had to flip everything), so people were reading through more.

It’s turned out to be the same story with my thrillers. Jack Reacher thriller readers want thrills that are fun and exciting, not gross-out, dense, deep, confusing, disturbing – which is what my books were. I had lots of blood and gore, lots of death of sidekicks, a hero who was violently dark and out of control thanks to mega past trauma, multiple viewpoints including from the perspective of killers (great for serial killer genre, not great for lighter thrillers), lots of swearing, real downer endings, real downer beginnings.

I basically bludgeoned the reader. In some genres this may work really well. Not in this genre.

Action

So I worked to learn the genre more – not what we see in movies and TV, which is what had largely inspired me, but in what we see in books. I am still learning it. I got those fiverr and reedsy readthroughs and acted on comments I kept hearing, changing the body text across all 5 books. I read lots of books in the genre. Things finally transformed when I realized I had to remove ALL the multiple viewpoints, straighten out the narrative, make my hero way more in control, massively reduce the violence, blood, swearing, brutality and downer vibes, and basically make my books less challenging and more FUN.

So I did all the above, including writing all new action openings for books 1 and 2. I added new slightly cliff-hangery endings. I made big cuts of downer stuff – book 1 dropped from 90,000 words to 70,000, book 2 from 100,000 to 80,000, book 3 from 90,000 to 63,000 (very short! I am currently bulking it back up).

I got new covers made by a pro on 99 designs. They are dark and on genre for terrorism thrillers. I wrote new blurbs. Things totally kicked off when I put up the new version of book 1 on Amazon, with its all-new action opener scene, and a new tagline to hook people in.

‘They stole his truck. Big mistake.’

Sales

Book 1 started selling like never before. Conversion on my low-level Facebook ads spiked. I watched readthrough to book 2 jump from around 20% which I’d coaxed it up to over the past year to around 50%. That carried over to later books in the series well. Reviews coming in on both Amazon and on the Facebook ads are so different from what they used to be.

Previously people said a lot of ‘I liked this book, but I’m going to need some time to recover before I read book 2.’ Now they were saying they leaped straight to book 2. Yes.

So, I cranked up my ads. I read the recent income report posts by Blake Hudson (thank you!) and started making more images, trialing more audiences, and expanding my spend. I made $200 in a day! Then $300! Then $500! Then it dropped because Facebook cost per click went up, so I made more images (both square and rectangle) and went back in hard.

Yesterday I made $650 in a day, off about $350 spend. That’s nearly 100% return. Wow. How far can this go? I have no idea. It might all disappear tomorrow. But the lesson I’ve learned is simple and super clean.

Lesson

Ads won’t sell a book. I’ve done nothing really different with my ads to cause this recent surge, other than scale up once they started working. I always was using my cover image as the image, always was using my blurb as the copy, always targeted a mixture of interests (Thriller authors narrowed by Kindle) and Lookalikes (built off my Facebook ad click engagement), was always sending clicks to both the series page and the first book in the series, was always targeting mostly newsfeed in both US and UK primarily.

The thing that sold my book was the new blurb, and the cover, and the opening chapters for the Look Inside, and the fact that they finally were all singing from the same hymn sheet. Fun. Exciting. On genre.

Write and package something that readers want, and they will come to you. Ads will suddenly start working like someone opened up a spigot. If your ads are not working, look to your book, and your genre, and roll up your sleeves to start syncing them up…

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.