Missed doing this yesterday. Whoops.
Last Week
Back at the coalface last week. Gradually built up a head of steam, first attacking the edits for FALSE START, then by doing a read-edit. In Scrivener, you can set your word target for the book, your deadline, your writing days, and it’ll count backwards:
It’s swollen up. This was supposed to be a free novella to incentivise people who read THE TURNING OF OUR BONES to sign up to the mailing list. Now, it’s longer than the first three Cullen and Bain novellas and the first Vicky Dodds book. I think some people have had difficulty getting the books on Bookfunnel, so maybe sticking it on Amazon at £1.99 not in Kindle Unlimited might be a good halfway house.
Anyway, it’s off for copy editing so it’ll be ready to read before too long. I really like how it’s come out. It was a throwaway daft thing, but it’s now got some really good character stuff across three or four characters who appear in THE TURNING OF OUR BONES, and does some stuff I’m really proud of.
Who are you? Why am I getting this email?
I’m Ed James. I write crime novels set in various locations – Edinburgh, Dundee, London, Seattle, Galashiels. You signed up to this to read what I’m up to on a weekly basis. That’s on you – I am definitely a bit insane. If you don’t like them, unsubscribe, it’s no big deal.
Next Week
I’m outlining the second and third Rob Marshall books, which will be out next year. I’m thinking Feb/Apr/Jun releases for the first three, with a longer gap for the fourth (and potentially final book). If it takes off, I’ll do more! It’s really good having done the Series Bible for these as I’ve got the big brushstrokes for the books in place and it’s just a case of breaking out the story. Book 2, SHADOW ON THE DOOR, has a long-ish prologue set ten years ago, and the first pass of it came through as eleven chapters, which is way too long. I reviewed it all yesterday and it’s come out as nine lean chapters, with minimal fluff and lots of tension while setting up the story. In the actual novel itself, I’ve outlined another 5.5 chapters, which are pretty tight, and it sets up the central mystery of the novel. Books one and two are definitely of a piece, so I could see that I needed to vary things for three and four. This one is definitely backstory heavy and rich in professional guilt, whereas book one is more personal trauma – book three will be all about professional incompetence. Fish out of water stuff. Anyway, the plan this week is to at least get book 2’s outline done and dusted, with hopefully a big chunk of book 3 too.
Amazon Attribution is finally in beta. Finally. What is this? Well, it lets you track your advertising efforts from non-Amazon sources through to sales (or not) on Amazon itself. I do a fair chunk of advertising on Facebook, which has been frustrating as you can only get a loose idea that it’s been successful. Your spend and clicks correlate to increased sales, but you don’t know know that it’s from that source. The data seems a bit beta so far, but I can see that Sunday had 11 sales of Lost Cause, which is in the 99p deal directly attributable to the Facebook ads. This was against 29 total sales, so there’s 18 coming from Amazon – three of them were from Amazon ads, so that’s looking like 15 came from Amazon’s algorithm. That’s really interesting to see. I’ve got a few ads to update with the new links, but it’s interesting to start to see this data coming through. Sorry if that’s boring, but such is the nature of being a self-published/indie author in 2022. Hopefully the data will become more accurate over time. And I suspect there are a lot of people clicking on ads for Fenchurch 1, but buying book 2-8 (or preordering book 9), so I’ll see if there’s a way of tracking those.
Have a great week! I’ll be back at the usual time on Monday evening next week.
Cheers,
Ed