Weekly Writing Intentions: June 17, 2023

Good progress on exercise and short story, so-so success on marketing.

Daily Diary, Day 1020:

First, my week in review. I did achieve my goals in terms of getting two more scenes of the short story written, although I only got one of the two scenes actually posted. I should be able to get the second scene (9), which is quite long, up tomorrow.

Exercise continued to go quite well, and I averaged slightly over 90 minutes of exercise a day, with only one day that I didn’t walk (last Sunday, when I spend a good deal of time on my feet cleaning.)

I also did the various tasks that accompanied my BookBub featured deal on the science fiction boxed set, which was on Monday, with the discount lasting until yesterday. The attempt to run a regular ad to target my mystery series fans during this week was a complete bust, which just confirmed that it is difficult for me to get the readers who like my mysteries to try my science fiction. A second promotional newsletter, Bargain Booksy also did very little in terms of sales. This group’s FreeBooksy newsletter has been pretty successful for me, but this is the second time a BargainBooksy (discounted books, not free) newsletter has had no discernible impact.

The actual Feature Deal did ok - getting the the book up to 200 in the whole Kindle Store, and getting the book to #1 three smaller categories, and the top ten of the whole science fiction/fantasy bestseller category. What would have been even better is if it had achieved the top 100 Kindle bestseller list, which I have achieved in the past, but over all my Featured Deals have been less and less effective the past couple of years. This appears to be happening to other authors, and in my case is probably a combination of growing competition with traditionally published books (there was a time when we indies were the only ones taking advantage of these promotions) and the fact that my good fortune in having had so many Featured Deals now means that a growing number of the readers who get the emails have either already read the books or decided they don’t want to read them, to the overall promotion doesn’t do as well.

Anyway, I sold slightly more than 1700 copies of the boxed set, and saw a slight uptick already in sell-through to Tides of Acerba. This is a good thing, and I am grateful.

My goal this coming week it to continue to keep up the exercise and finish the short story, which at 15,000 words is getting very close to the length of Dandy Delivers, which I categorized and sold as a novella. The cut-offs are sort of arbitrary. Dandy Delivers is less than a thousand words longer than Mrs. O’Malley’s Midnight Mystery, which I called a short story. I’ll decide which category to put Dandy and the Dognappers in when it is in its very final version.

Otherwise, my key task, besides the usual phone calls, zoom meeting, and such, is to start to outline my talk for the workshop I will be giving the beginning of July on self-publishing. I will also be working on the handout I will make available to the people who sign up for the workshop. That way they won’t feel they need to be madly taking notes, which is difficult to do on a Zoom meeting. All very much in the achievable realm.

Here is a bloom from my walk today, seems almost like a very tiny iris.