All right, I’ve hit the reset button. Now I’m back to my R.A.M.P. ways now that I’ve got Year of the Rat done and shipped off to my editor.
For reading, I started reading Vol. 7 of IDW’s TMNT. Looking forward to seeing where things go.
For data analysis, I started reviewing some of my Facebook ad data. I got slaughtered with The Dream Mage, but I got a lot of good data. My results rate (clickthrough) wasn’t horrible at 6%, but the conversion ratio was pretty horrendous at less than 1%. That tells me that my sales copy needs a big overhaul. In fact, one of the Facebook readers said that there seemed to be a disconnect between the Facebook image and the sales copy. This is another one of the downsides with putting people of color on book covers that no one talks about—I have a black woman on my cover, but when I search for good images to use on the Facebook ad, there are very few black people. That causes an automatic disconnect and it severely limits my marketing options. This is one reason I’m strongly considering moving away from putting people on my covers long term. Anyway, I suspected this would be an issue, so I’ll work on my sales copy and see if I can at least get the ads breaking even.
For marketing, I received a challenge from a mentor to consider submitting some of my unpublished short stories to magazines again for publication. I took an inventory of my old stories and reviewed them for potential candidates. I found a potential market for one of my stories. I’ve got about a dozen unpublished (but finished) stories, and they are all over five years old. I cringed when I read them, but hey, you never know what could happen. I submitted the story.
For production, I actually did a little more than my quota last night. I wrapped at about 2500 words.
Today, I am sitting a few words short of 5,000 words. Today is a really weird day—I straddled three different projects.
I wrote the afterword for Year of the Rat (about 1700 words).
I wrote about 2200 words toward my top secret project.
I wrote another 1100 words toward Indie Author Confidential Vol. 10.
Wow. Crazy. I almost never do this, but it had to be done. Year of the Rat is officially done. I need to clean up the outline but that’s minor.
I’m going to be straddling my top secret project and Indie Author Confidential Vol. 10 for the short term, but it’ll be worth it. I’ll probably be able to share more sometime next month (I know it’s killing some of you). It is a nonfiction book—that’s all I’ll share today…Maybe I’ll do a fun fact about this book every day leading up to the reveal. 🙂
Anyway, Beast Mode is in full swing.
Have a good night.
Words Written This Year: 341,500 / 850,000 Goal
