Good day today. I’m still easing back into my regular word count quota, but I’m getting there. Today was a good R.A.M.P. day.
For reading, I finished Vol. 1 of IDW’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comic series, which was great. I enjoyed it immensely, especially this incarnation of Master Splinter. He’s worth the price of admission alone. I also liked how the Volume had a micro-series within it—each turtle & Splinter got their own proper introduction and character development within the bigger story, a mini-story within the bigger story. Each one was a self-contained short story. It gave me an idea for The Good Necromancer series as well as a technique I might try in future series.
I’ll probably start Vol. 2 tomorrow. The series has great character development, pacing, and really, really cool character tags. It also calls back to the 1987 cartoon and 1990 movie, which is also a plus in my book.
For data analysis, I reviewed my Facebook ads for The Last Dragon Lord and they appear to be working. I’m targeting an audience that ended up being a winner, but it’s small, so this current ad will likely be a short run. That’s the one thing I don’t like about Facebook ads—you have to keep hunting for audiences, and there’s always this sense of “this thing is going to end soon” that I just don’t get with Amazon ads. When you find good audiences, you have to give your ads a break after a while. While the process of creating ads is not too time-consuming, the hardest part is the maintenance in my opinion. This is the opposite of Amazon Ads, which you can leave on forever once you create good ads. You still have to keep hunting for new targets, but it’s not as onerous. In any case, my ads are doing very well right now. I’m making a profit every day, and I’m spending quite a bit, so that’s promising. Depending on how things go, I may turn on ads for another series in the next week or two.
That said, I still think Facebook ads are much easier to teach to an heir/spouse/child to maintain when you die. They’re far more estate-friendly than Amazon ads. Your heirs have a fighting chance of using Facebook ads to keep making money after you’re gone, if you teach them and if they’re tech-savvy enough.
For marketing, I finished up preparation for my huge ad campaign for The Good Necromancer, which begins tomorrow. I made sure the price dropped to $0.99 everywhere and then double-checked it. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. You can download Book 1 for $0.99 at https://www.michaellaronn.com/shadowdeal. I also put a nice counter on that page that hopefully instills some urgency and sells a few extra organic sales.
I also did some link work on The Author Estate Handbook and The Author Heir Handbook. I also further optimized the Books2Read links by finding the books on some of the smaller retailers. I also took the time to optimize the sales pages for both estate books on my website in anticipation of increased traffic. I added OverDrive, Audiobooks.com, BN, and links to the large print editions. Half of marketing is just letting people know that something exists.
I noticed a small issue with the audiobook that I had to correct. It’s fixed on Findaway and on my direct sales channels, but I’m still waiting on ACX/Audible. If I can get this resolved before my interview with Joanna Penn goes live, that will be helpful, but we’ll see. It’s not a huge error.
For production, I continued working on Year of the Rat, Chicago Rat Shifter Book 3. I am making progress, and progress is a good thing. I was able to “glimpse” a potential plot twist later in the book, so the story seems to be working in that direction now. I’m still aiming to finish it before Beast Mode starts on Aug 1, but we’ll see. This will likely be a 60,000-word novel and I’m not quite halfway done yet. My progress this week will ultimately determine the final deadline. If I have a really good week this week, I can potentially end over 40,000. Then, the final 20K is just a formality. The last parts of Books 1 and 2 wrote themselves pretty quickly. This one hopefully won’t be an exception.
That’s what I did to R.A.M.P. up my writing today. Not a bad day, all things considered.
Also folks, Inkers Con Digital is live today. You can watch my talk on Crafting Great Characters as well as other amazing talks from successful authors. All of the talks were professionally produced, and wow did the audio/visual team do an amazing job capturing my presentation. I had beers with the guys that filmed me and they were telling me that they travel all over the world and record speakers. I knew I was going to be in good hands, and they didn’t disappoint.
In case you’re interested, you can sign up for Inkers Con today and get access to all the talks. This is one of the best writing conferences I’ve been to, and I’m not just saying that because I was a speaker. Sign up at https://www.inkerscon.com and use the code LARONN22 to get $50 off your ticket. You won’t be disappointed.
Have a great night.
